General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
EDIT: Yup, totally misguided here: http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae429.cfm Drifting away. So, no lunar catastrophe for me (without some other handwavium) I've read somewhere tha...
I am currently trying to create a very low fantasy setting, with the most scientific plausibility I can, in which, with technology and "human" development being akin to those of Earth's medieval pe...
Related Question : Can we 'beam' energy from the moon? I was wondering if instead of 'beam'ing energy from the moon, could it be possible to extend a power cable from the earth to the moon? If th...
See A city to last ten million years: Construction for background. Second question: What would be the best choice of site on the planet's surface? Assume the planet is more or less Earthlike in i...
I was wondering what would happen if you attach 2 Huge ion engines(I mean really really really huge) to planet earth. They should be attached on the north and south poles. Are 2 huge ion engines ...
Newton's first law of motion states An object remains with the same velocity, or position of rest unless an external force is exerted. What if we created a hypothetical universe where A...
Could two planets be tidally locked to each other at such a small distance from one another that they share their atmosphere, and material is floating around between the two?
Hawking's radiation emits particles from a black-hole. Lets play with the idea of harnessing a mini black hole in the center of a star-ship. Let alone harnessing the gravity pull to the front and ...
My story involves everyone in the year 2015 suddenly disappearing. What would visitors to Earth find if they arrived in the year 12015, or 10,000 years after we all disappeared? Assume none of our ...
I am doing some work within the setting of the Exalted tabletop role-playing game. In broad brush strokes, the defining feature of the world is the five elemental poles: Water (west), Wood (east), ...
In the Hickhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Mostly Harmless, on the planet NowWhat there are the Boghogs, and their way of communicating is to bite each other very hard on the thigh, so my question is,...
For the longest time growing up with Peak Oil and other such dire predictions, I assumed humanity had just about peaked, in terms of industrial-technological might and capacity to influence its env...
Background story: In near future (max 10 years from now) mega-rich person suffers yet unknown disease. He obviously employs every doctor possible and spends loads from his fortune on researching, w...
For my Science-Fantasy WIP I am considering using a single artificial planet (roughly the size of a Dyson Sphere) and its moons (of which only three are large enough to exert any real influence) as...
I'm thinking of making a world where the sky is purple, or at least perceived as purple by the native species taking centre stage in my story. What gases could cause this colour? Could the colour...
I want to build a world populated by humans descended from colonists from Earth who have traveled a long distance and time to arrive (say, 80 years.) They come to this new Earth-like planet in doz...
In this setting, humanity has advanced to the technological capability of extra stellar travel via faster-than-light drives. However, due to distances between inhabited areas being extremely large,...
So, for reasons which may or may not pop up in a later question of mine, I need to light a small Moon-like moon on fire. Well, sort of. See, I need a small object capable of emitting a lot of ligh...
Disclaimer: the overall idea of the world as presented is basically lifted from Strugatsky Brothers "Inhabited Island". The details of the question are for a derivative work in that universe. Imag...
In the future, a high-tech human civilization has colonised a distant planet. The planet is basically Earthlike in gravity, climate, terrain and vegetation. They want to build Forevertown: A city w...
Based on the previous answer here, concerning hammer-proof armor, one of the easiest way to mitigate blunt force trauma, both from swinging hammers and falling off buildings, are with some sort of ...
Building from this and this, given an aquatic civilization somehow manages to forge tools and build computers, could it build space-faring devices? Also another development that would come earlier...
So I've been trying to create a world and I've been planning on the continents being drowned out almost completely in water from a terrible tsunami, storm, earthquake or an act of one the gods or s...
Let's say that somehow, Earth suddenly acquired a computer with ridiculous speed. This computer can run a program described in a language of your choice, which can be described by a readme file tha...
That is to say, could a planet be big enough to have other planets orbiting around, while not orbiting around any star? Cha 110913 seems to be close to what I'm looking for, but its classification ...
Is it scientifically plausible for reincarnation to exist? When I think of reincarnation I am thinking of the following: Memories, personality, biases, opinions and feelings carry over from one ...
Would a world be able to sustain a constant low pressure area such that there would be a constant wind from one side to the other? Imagine that on one side of the world is a desert with some rock...
Given ideal circumstances and a type 4 or 5 Kardashev scale level of technology to set the system in motion (but not to maintain the motion over time): How many planets 1/4 of the Earth's mass co...
I'm trying to design a food chain. For the sake of argument lets say it's based on flying creatures over a particular mountain range. Sun Plants/Fungus etc Tiny Insects Small Birds Hawks Large Ape...
Take a modern nuclear reactor complex. Now picture a catastrophic meltdown, not unlike Chernobyl. But this time there is nobody around to do damage control, and all control mechanisms do fail. Th...
Would a Dyson sphere make a red dwarf appear to be a Brown Dwarf? Would it disguise a star enough to misidentify it what size it is? I'm just wondering if it could be possible that some Dyson sph...
The grey goo end-of-the-world scenario in which lots of little microscopic Von Neumann self-replicating machines basically eat everything to make more of themselves. Eventually everything is grey ...
So there are these AGIs made by some ancient aliens (who are out of the picture for now). The ancient aliens were a lot more intelligent than humans, we are at a dog-like intelligence level compare...
I was reading this question and realized that I didn't actually know enough to give the answer that I wanted. Obviously in the near term, all our raw materials come from the Earth. The only oth...
I'm doing some background work for a scifi/horror piece, and it includes "orcs", who are just humans that have undergone a series of mutations - the main one being that they no longer produce myost...
How would human culture and civilisation develop if placed onto a planet permanently psychoactive, e.g. because of low (but inevitable) amount of LSD-like substance in either water or air? To simpl...
Often in science fiction, writers attribute the enormous energy capability of an advanced civilization to Dyson spheres. I've never heard of a detailed schematic of how the energy from the star is ...
Let's say you're a soldier in a science-fiction war. Everything is relatively similar to how wars are fought today, except that when you die, your likeness and memories are imprinted onto a flash-c...
Mars and Earth's moon already feature in a lot of fiction about space colonization. After these two planets, and assuming that other solar systems are too far away, what is the best place within th...
Based on my previous question here, which a helpful other person pointed out, which would make the question too broad, here comes a different question for that. Given a desert full of ore sand, wh...
From Wikipedia: By volume, dry air contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. For example, would humans be able to survive ...
Related, and in continuation to The Challenge of Controlling an Advanced AI. At this point in my story, I'm assuming a got-out-of-the-box-AI scenario, where no singleton (a single self-coherent dom...
Ornithopters are vehicles that fly by flapping their wings, rather than trough use of a propeller or jet engine. They've been proposed and built many times throughout history, and are a common elem...
I'm interested in exploring an advanced society where electronic technology and infrastructure were not developed. What plausible natural phenomenon or context would prevent, or at least strongly d...
My question is mainly related to the impact on food production if the climate changes made agriculture more difficult in the state of California but also in the other American and Mexican states fr...
One property of life is communication. In particular sound is very useful due to it's non-directional nature. An alarm call is heard by every member of the pack and warns them immediately of the da...
Introduction: I've spent some fair amount of time thinking about inventing an element to make part of my world easier for me. In this case, it is an LTA gas which I gave the WIP name LAL-gas (Leich...
I watched a youtube video on the Darwin IV probe mission to this planet has lower mass than the earth, about the size of Mars, and has a single sea. According to the movie, the microbes that reside...
I'm working on a graphic novel that deals with this particular topic but I'm unsure if something like this can happen. Some Nebulae have a luminosity 1000s of times brighter than our sun while dark...
Currently I am working on how to explain a character that can "phase" through objects in a similar manner to Martian ManHunter. His abilities are negated by certain (rare) metals. His ability cou...
