General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
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...
A group of settlers from a mid-renaissance era have setup an initial settlement along a coastline. Materials for shelter exist and fishing serves as the initial food source. What are the primary ...
Okay so we have the case: My world is Earth-like(Spherical) Slight fantasy, but also some science It has a normal day-night cycle and seasons I need for a particular area to make the sky somewh...
Since earthquakes, typhoons, tsunami and many natural disasters were measured or calculated to release more energy than many H-bombs can produce every seconds, can we one day harness this powerful ...
I'm working on creating a race of humanoids with "hollow" bones like birds (they have criss-crossing struts for internal support). They are short - an individual is unlikely to top five feet. Woul...
I have a world I want to put together but I ran into a problem. Description This world is a cube infinite in all directions, exactly half of it is full of earth and half is space (where we see n...
Birds, as we currently know them, build nests and lay eggs on the ground. People and things with sharp teeth live on the ground. There are also things with claws and beaks up in the air, but fewer....
I am building a habitable, Earth like planet, but instead of it being in a solar system, it is inside a Nebula. The actual composition of the Nebula is uncertain at this point, but I am considerin...
Going off of my other question here, I guessed that a cube planet could work out. BUT, would it be possible for the planet to exist and function as a (relatively) normal planet with life on it with...
If the force of gravity at the Earth's surface suddenly became 2 times stronger, how would the environment and humans cope? I'm guessing a lot of flying creatures would suffer, but what would happe...
I remember a cartoon about some spy guy. In that cartoon they did mass media by projecting from the surface of the earth to the moon in the night sky. Would that technique be possible? Could an e...
So I'm writing a story on a population of lizardmen who have subdued all the human population. Since lizards spend lots of their time soaking in the sun, I'm not sure how should I go for the night...
Almost all of our terrestrial furniture is designed and depends on gravity. Beds to lie down in, chairs to sit down on, tables to place things on top. None of these would work in a zero-G environme...
Through extreme pollution and large-scale warfare with atomic, biological and chemical weapons Earth has become completely unable to sustain life. The atmosphere is toxic, the water undrinkable and...
By extremely high gravity, I specifically mean around 28 Gs. I recently asked this question with regards to inhabiting the sun, and surviving in the sun's gravity seems like one of the major challe...
I recently asked this question about what would happen if a fusion bomb went off in the core of a planet, and the answer was relatively uninteresting. As was aptly said in my previous answer, the e...
Important note: The orbits in the diagram are elliptical. They have low eccentricity so they appear to be off centre circles but they really are ellipses with the star at a focus. The habitable...
Airships are a hallmark of countless steampunk and dieselpunk constructed universes. Of course, in our world, they were around for a short while. I want to know what effects geographical circumstan...
How probable is it that a gas giant planet made of "air" (roughly the same composition as Earth's atmosphere) could exist? What would it be like? How would it differ from Earth?
An ancient civilization mapped wormholes when the universe was quite young and smaller. This allowed them to reach other galaxies (wormholes from our galaxy to others). They mapped it all. Humans ...
In Sci-fi, space fighters often look like exotic versions of fighter jets: wing shape is often different but the general shape is most of the time kept. However this seems unrealistic: the shape o...
Many sci-fi questions here are derailed by complaints that the proposed version of FTL breaks causality. However, relativity-safe FTL concepts do exist. What range of conditions allow FTL (movement...
What are realistic time-schedule expectations for far-future terraforming and developing earth-like plant and animal/fish/bird populations on distant planets, by means of robotic space probes with ...
On Earth humanity has taken the dominant role (excluding dolphins and mice of course). We know of conflicts in pre-history where our ancestors have overtaken other species and slowly wiped them out...
I see this in so many maps. Normally, the water flows downhill because of gravity but here it is the opposite, rivers will go above the hills. When you mention this incoherence, the authors refuse ...
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...
It's easy enough to figure out how a species might evolve a third biological gender in general (e.g. some sort of asexual drones/workers, ala insects). But what I want to build is a system where t...
Hello again :) My first questions had some wonderful answers, but brought me to the following problem: Although (in my eyes) really dull, the Cpt. Geary series (the Lost Fleet) tends to depict the...
My story revolves around a star going supernova. The 'Earth' in this story is about 100 light-years or more away (a safe distance, but not too far away). I need this supernova to somehow accelerate...
Modern mechanical EM transmitters, like radio towers and radar guns, rely on finely tuned mechanical structures. If these structures do not have the right shapes, the device fails to function. Or...
A lot of fictional works contain people who are well over 100 years old, some 200, some 1000s of years old. The Emperor Of Mankind for example is over 10,000 years old. Colin from Highlander is ove...
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...
Ice is strange, in that the solid form is less dense than the liquid water it freezes from. This causes Ice to float on top of the water. How would our planet earth be different if something chang...
We are an interplanetary human empire at war with an alien species. On the brink of defeat, this alien species designed a virus to turn the tide of war. This virus is airborne and highly contagio...
We know that humans are capable of incredible feats, as displayed by Olympic athletes. However, the superhuman heroes that appear in comic books and fantasy novels tend to not only be able to perfo...
If our atmosphere was much thinner (half as thin as we have now) how would animals and humans evolve? Would we evolve completely different? Would we have a quite barren planet? Let's just say that ...
Fits into the planetary transfer of energy category...for whatever reason and using whatever means, one planet is used to generate a massive amount of energy, ultimately as electricity. This power...
What properties of a species of plant would make it the ideal choice for taking it on a year-long trip through space as both an oxygen source and food source? We should assume that the amount of ...
On a planet where it is Earth-like, the orbit around the sun is a bit longer than 1 Earth year, and the orbit is on 2/3 eccentricity, but where only the "2" part is inside the Goldilocks zone. In ...
Other than photosynthesis being an issue, if the Earth's surface became inhospitable and humans were forced to live underground, what biological changes would they be expected to go through to adap...
Instead of trying to tether the Moon, can we somehow harness the Moon's kinetic energy, the same way we do wind? If so, how is this possible?
Got this idea from Antarctica in the Legend series by Marie Lu Imagine that we've become so technologically advanced that every person, ages 3 and up, has an implant in their head that tracks ever...
I've been wracking my brain about a world I'm writing in, how to make some group of regular people able to survive in space for extended periods with or without a suit. I can reduce the amount of t...
If somehow Mars suddenly had our exact atmosphere, could there be lots of life in a few million years? Would the temperature rise quickly? Would the ice caps melt? Could the life be as advanced as ...
This is going to take some imagination and assumptions (and knowledge about physics). Imagine gravitational mass and inertial mass would be different. In classical mechanics it seems a coincidence...
Often in films and television shows when a person's brain is 'injected' with more information than it can handle, they suffer from immense pain. What would actually happen if you did supply a huma...
The Setting: I have an idea for a universe that, in an inversion to our own, is filled for the most part with matter in solid, liquid, gaseous or plasma form, while vacuum and degenerate matter is...
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 ...
We've discovered stars that are contact binaries. This means that they orbit so close together that their photosphere reaches through their Roche lobes and links the two stars together. This sta...
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), ...
