General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Assume we have an Earth-like environment. If a tribe with only early medieval technology were to settle in a mountain environment: What resources would be needed to deal with the elevation, co...
Recently, a robot called Philae soft-landed quite safely onto the comet 67P/Churyumov"“Gerasimenko, then shot some photos and got some other interesting information that was sent back to Earth. Thi...
Here on the stack exchange we talk about dragons... a lot. We have discussed all the factors that would allow dragons to exist and yet, there is a question we have not asked. What evolutionary pres...
There have been a number of questions focusing on mythical creatures where the logical approach to answering has been to scale up an existing animal. For example dragon's wings can be extrapolated ...
This question has two parts: Could biological processes create an organism than can see in wavelengths outside the human-visible spectrum? ("Outside" meaning some significant amount outside. Ther...
In my story, some aliens try to conquer humans by slowly copying their mind into humans heads. This copy process is called "enlightenment" by the ones who undergo the transformation. For example, b...
In my current setting, one of the main dominant species' is the Golem, former automatons made of assorted materials who gained sentience through some kind of life-giving explosion. As such, though ...
Suppose that Khufu, pharaoh of Egypt and builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, was introduced to the idea of an amusement park. More specifically, suppose that he was visited by a time traveler a...
Here, I asked if it's possible to terraform a hot planet. But now, if we have a volcanic active planet, can we use the same techniques to cool it down? Normally, the planet cool off slowly after...
Would it be possible to "inject" or tattoo chloroplasts into a human or vertebrate and have them produce energy for said organism? I feel like just injecting plant cells wouldnt work for the body...
Terraforming is the process of transforming a celestial body to become habitable by Earth-like life. Even when I try to imagine an advanced civilization, the cost, time and complexity to terrafor...
This idea comes up quite frequently in science fiction, but there has not been a question about it yet on Worldbuilding.SE. Is it possible that intelligent life was brought to Earth by an alien ci...
What environmental pressures could drive evolution of a creature that has the ability to float? How it floats isn't important.
Introduction I have a vague notion of building some sort of strategic space game. Similar to other strategic games, locations are assigned value based upon some abstract evaluation. Following in...
This post-apocalyptic environment, as narrated in the book, depicts a world where most if not all animal life has been abruptly killed, and similarly most vegetation burned out. After the disaster,...
I have a colony of humans living underground in man-made catacombs on another planet. They are, essentially, digging/blasting as they go; they did not create a complete underground city first and ...
I've posted a previous question similar to this in the way that it is of my WIP web-comic. The planet my friend and I have designed is strange as she wanted to create either a permanently dark plan...
I'd like to construct a planet where the rivers all run east to west, but I need a plausible reason for them to do so. Rivers run from high altitude to low, but also I suppose there is the corioli...
I am designing a world where humans have somehow developed or have been put onto a planet in a primitive state. This world has only been habitable for about ten thousand years and therefore only ha...
I've asked before about my polytheists with competing moon gods. I now have a better understanding of how tides -- a very visible manifestation of lunar influence -- work with multiple moons (than...
I've never been satisfied with how this has been handled in any sci-fi story I've read, watched, etc. It always seems to get handwaved away with "we have sensor packages of various powers" and "the...
In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...
Here's the setup. You have a gigantic mildly futuristic city, where construction is vertical rather than horizontal. Need a new city block? Add another few floors. Disregard for the moment any phys...
Imagine a world (or rather a solar system) where in its history there has been a war with emergent AI's There are very strict laws governing the speed and complexity of computer systems However b...
Consider a group of humans at a bronze-age to early iron-age technological level colonizing a new earthlike planet. There is just one difference - there exists on the planet something which change...
Are there models, problems, and or engines for building life-sustaining worlds? I believe that my approach is backwards. I have written a lot on my world and have been slowly working at making th...
In this hypothetical solar system the one habitable planet in question would be at center of two sun stars, one similar to our sun and the other a red dwarf. What kind of effect would this have on ...
Would a human being be able to run faster, jump high, etc. if the gravity on Earth weakened? I'm assuming a weaker gravitational pull would cause the muscle to deteriorate because the body no longe...
Obviously there are plenty of potential physics problems with this scenario, but if people lived along the inner crust of the Earth, and there was a Sun-like core at the center with nothing else in...
Every child is afraid of the darkness. For them its not simply the absence of light, its the absence of information. Even if you know that there should be a wall or a doorway right in front of y...
Steampunk!! In a world without the fine electronics that we have today, would space travel be possible? ....I'm not averse to small amounts of magic in my steampunk worlds, but I'd like to keep i...
What immediate effects would a small, short-term black hole have if it appeared in a residential backyard? How small or short-lived would it have to be to be survivable, if it is survivable at all?...
What would be the effects of high or low gravity on human body development? How would the human body develop under a different gravity? Many science fiction stories explore the idea that people fro...
In my story, I have a slower-than-light starship (traveling at 0.6 $c$) going to Alpha Centauri A. There are several planets around the star. The target planet is a terrestrial, habitable world orb...
An earlier question here concerning a cube-shaped planet got me thinking. Suppose an artificial world-sized engineering project as described in this answer The K-II civilization that built it ...
Imagine that one day in the not-too-distant future, our scientists discover that our world is dying. It doesn't matter how this is happening, maybe magic or unstable core or Gaia herself has finall...
Mankind has been always interested in making contact with another (extraterrestrial) civilization. We have launched the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes with plaques explaining where the Earth is located. ...
Let's say I have a binary star system. The planet is orbiting the smallest star similar to the Sun at 1 AU, the same Earth-Sun distance. The other star is located at around 50-100 AU from the Sun...
Would any creature ever need to evolve a second (or multiple) brain(s)? If so, under what conditions, why, and what implications would it have on the creature's intelligence? Note that while an o...
I'm starting a whole new planet for a story and would like it to have an orange sky during the day. At a basic level (I am not a smart man) what chemical composition would be most conducive to Ora...
I was reading Flatland, and the thought occurred to me that interaction between an n-dimensional being and a n+1+-dimensional being may not only be difficult but dangerous, that Flatland contains e...
Ok, so I have this planet that I am still building. It is a desert planet, its surfice is almost completely arid with a few exceptions such as snow deserts in the poles. There is sentient life in ...
Giant winged beasts such as the Roc and the western dragon feature strongly in mythology. Is there a maximum size on a biological winged flying creature? How would an atmosphere different from Ea...
Back home, one ice age during the two and a half million years of the Pleistocene lasted a total of 100,000 years, ninety thousand of intense cold followed by ten thousand of milder interglacial we...
Let's assume, without revoking any of today's science, that the world is a simulation. What would a bug look like? I'm assuming that "the eiffel tower suddenly being bent at 45°" is rather unlik...
I'm trying to create demons that aren't just raging murderers, as much as they're enslaved to their disposition they're not completely conquered by it, with a sense of humanity and reason crawling ...
According to this Reddit conversation, the detritus around a planet tends to form into a single plane located around the equator given enough time. How long does this process take? Suppose a planet...
In a story I mentioned that an AI overlord in 2036 has one of "her" bases in Ethiopia, and now I want to develop that offhand idea into its own story. My AI is equivalent to a very smart human with...
The idea of knocking a satellite out of its orbit is common in fiction, but what does it actually mean.
*By life, I mean something more complex than microorganisms. Something closer to what we have on Earth. similar to this question: Is it possible for complex life to evolve on planets without oxyg...
