General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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It's a commonly known fact that whale song travels huge distances. In fact apparently before the oceans were so noisy they could communicate over 10,000km! However, whales are very big! They can c...
After asking this question, What's the worst natural disaster that could hit New York City in our lifetime, it looks like the most popular answer was a Tsunami. A tsunami, however, from the sources...
I was answering this question about how a living planet-organism could be possible, and realized I didn't know how such a planet-organism could produce a magnetic field. I postulated that it could ...
In Pokemon, there are many different creatures. Nearly all of them will, at one point, reach a level of experience where they evolve into a more advanced creature. These evolutions are much more dr...
A Civilization with semi advanced Technology should be able to start climatic changes on a earth like Planet (same land mass to water surface ratio). What would the fastest way be and How? Some...
In the universe that I'm creating, the earth has been destroyed by nuclear wars fought by human kind. Nearly 98% of the population has been wiped out. There exists a society of technologically adva...
Say another Earth orbited the Earth, instead of the Moon. What effects would that have? Would gravity change in relation to the planets slightly during their orbits? I am world building and am tryi...
We have a tiny robot, insect like, barely five millimetres long, but with an almost perfect AI. The sensory input consists on an array of chemoreceptors, vibrissae, and cameras. It can fly through ...
So, I've been considering the Norse legend of Ragnarök, I'm considering how the legend could come true in a purely scientific setting. In other words what science-based explanation would best fit ...
In this question: Where to Anchor My Space Elevator We get a new material: Thanks to the recent discovery of handwavium filaments that can in principle be extruded to any length, we will be ...
Let's say on an alien planet called Thindor, the surface gravity is 3.27 m/s2 (which is 1/3rd of Earth's). But the atmospheric pressure is only 50 kPa (which is 1/2 of Earth's). Assume the same 20/...
If it is even possible, what would the Goldilocks zone be like - in fact is such a system even possible of holding life - around a binary black hole? Could it have planets orbiting it? EDIT 1: Oh ...
One thing that a few science fiction films seem to get wrong: it is extremely unlikely for two civilizations to evolve completely independently and yet be within a few hundred years of each other t...
I first was thinking centripetal force on a circular ship, but performing external maintenance would be extremely difficult due to the force pushing the person or robot off. Would a spherical ves...
I have been told that if I slow down today from 24 hours to 30, I'd end up getting hotter days, colder nights and more intense weather. That's fine, except that Earth's diverse climate makes that ...
Let's say that tens of thousands of years pass and earth effectively becomes a giant city. What species of organisms survive our conquest? How do these species evolve to adapt? How long would huma...
Could a Manned Maneuvering Unit-type device provide a few hours of light artificial gravity* for a small person on an object with minimal gravity of its own? What sort of fuel would it need? * Com...
In a future where all cars and public services are self-driving the way, I am assuming traffic congestion would be seriously limited, if not removed completely, because the road network would also ...
It seems like nothing can move faster than light and this is quite bothersome for interstellar travel. It takes decades in the best case to get anywhere interesting in our little Milkyway (Many tho...
On Earth the planet's magnetic poles line up fairly well with the geographic poles. This makes things like navigation very straightforward as all compasses point to (roughly) the north pole. How...
If two circular portals of 2 meter (arbitrary) diameter were created allowing uninhibited flow between surface atmospheres of Venus and Mars, what would be the environmental effects on the two plan...
Suppose there's a vault secured with a numeric code and a biometric sensor. What technologies and methods could be used to open the vault if a character isn't registered on the system? Here are a ...
When doing some research for some of the resent questions proposed, I ran across an article that pointed out a danger of traveling at extreme speeds in normal space as a high percentage of c I was ...
Imagine that you lived in this world: The planet has a diameter of 5000 km. The rotation time is the same as the orbital period. And here it comes: the orbital period is 1027 years. The planet's ...
Imagine a terrestrial planet extremely close to its star (assume it's identical to the Sun to make this simpler), maybe a bit like Kepler-78b but with an orbit of only about a week, for the purpose...
As a child, I was always fascinated by the propensity of water going down a drain to form a vortex. I created a world with a global ocean where there was a narrow body of land running north-south...
This question is a little nebulous unfortunately and perhaps a bit disturbing. The evil-empire in my WIP captures Mages and breaks them down into loyal and obedient servants. The Mages aren't as d...
My world has a huge crater (4400 miles in diameter) on a world that's roughly earth equivalent (so a circumference of 25000 miles). The native population doesn't need to know how it was formed but...
Running a Steampunk campaign with some friends. The idea is that a massive a destructive plague wiped out the population of an island that was really technologically advanced. The plague needs to s...
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 ...
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...
By now, everyone is familiar with the remarkable achievements of special-purpose AIs like Deep Blue and Watson. Now, it is clear that as our accumulated knowledge of algorithmic methods and of the ...
I was looking a bit at the evolution of Stars and one thing I sometimes see floated is this idea that in the far flung future, when the sun has ballooned into a red giant and the earth burned to a ...
My protagonist, let's call her Alice, must acquire a priceless artifact, located deep inside an ancient temple. If this were a ruin, the exercise would be academic, but the Temple was protected b...
So I found out that it would under certain circumstances be economic to harvest Asteroids. Given the following: Technological level is nearly similar to todays Earth. There are transportships wh...
OK, so scientists have found a great new substance: That substance makes you think ten times as fast! The advantages are obvious. However, as every medicine, this pill will have side effects. Ther...
In a hypothetical world where multiple humanoid races develop independently of each other (such as a world that contains Elves, Dwarves, and Humans for instance) what are the conditions for half-br...
Archimedes claimed that he would lift the Earth if he could find a suitable place outside it, with his knowledge of mechanics. So, my question is: What kind of set-up (e.g. how large lever or how ...
In the real world — I am from Europe — I often hear and participate in discussions about how printing a paper 2 Euro note would have an impact on micro-economy, i.e. how it would make people less p...
Imagine an alien species arrived on Earth, to find that the nitrogen in the air was toxic to them. Imagine they wanted to terraform our planet, and decided to fix this problem by nitrifying a lot o...
Inspired by this article about the recent discovery of a subsurface ocean. So now we know it has a liquid water ocean and a magnetic field. The subsurface ocean is also protected from radiation by...
Pretty self explanatory question...can the Cube Earth described at the link below support a spherical core and a magnetic field? How would a civilization that has been living on a "cube" Earth di...
We lived through loads of questions regarding aquatic races, so buckle up, I am going to gather some ideas around insectoids. The homeworld and race This race lives on a planet which has lower g...
Aliens steal all our trees. Nothing else happened, just all the trees are gone. Everything not part of the tree was left where it was (apples are stolen, termites are not.) What would be the short...
Imagine a world in which technology we would probably call "technological singularity" is possible and already happened on few places of the galaxy. By the singularity I do not mean that anything i...
So we harness energy from the sun using beams, right? Well what if we were to harness energy coming off the moon the same way? For those long winter months when the sun is rare we could use this to...
What kind of a scenario would have to occur in order for human beings to seek survival on the sea floor? It could be man made or natural, ice age or heat apocalypse, sudden disaster or gradual coll...
Is there any feasible way to create a long-term sustainable habitat on the sun? My target region for habitation is the temperature minimum at the bottom of the solar atmosphere. Metals would have ...
Would a blind astronaut be able to sense the gravity of a nearby star/planet/moon? Would an astronaut lost somewhere inside the Sun be able to sense which way is the core and which way is the surf...
My answer to this question essentially came down to the pilot being in a sphere with anything large jutting out of it. Some of the arguments made against me I feel are true if we assume fights like...
