General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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On a tidally locked gas giant moon (which is otherwise earth-like - see this question for pictures) how would medieval sea navigation techniques differ from Earth? I presume that compared to Eart...
My entry for the fortnightly topic challenge: You are a space explorer. You are visiting this weird habitable planet in the Alpha Centauri System as part if the first manned expedition to another ...
Space is full of radiation. When doing long stays in space, no matter whether it's a generation ship on its journey to a new colony, a research ship exploring new worlds, a freighter delivering goo...
If I have a world where all races are one-foot-tall versions of their typical fantasy counterparts, what would be the most obvious ways this would affect the building style of these cultures? Would...
Yes, this is about Dr. Evil's dream: Sharks with frickin' lasers. Except that the lasers would not be artificially attached, but be part of the animal itself (bio-lasing instead of simply biolumine...
I recently re-watched an awesome show - Diebuster. At one point in the show, one of the characters uses Jupiter as a projectile, slamming it into one of the aliens, but to no avail. I can't find a...
The theory of Late Heavy Bombardment says that approximately 4 billions of years ago, something disturbed the orbits of asteroids in the Kuiper belt, which caused extremely heavy bombardment of Ear...
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...
When you look at the history of earth, the last ice age had major impacts on the flora and fauna of the world as well as biological migration. If I am creating an earth-like world and am developin...
Imagine a tidally locked gas giant moon, which is otherwise earth-like. One side of the moon will have a huge planet constantly hovering in the sky (24 hour day/night cycle with a Jupiter-sized pri...
Is it possible to have a major trade city built on the edges of a lagoon? For a city I'm designing it is situated on a lagoon but if there is a small strait/canal so that ships can move in and out...
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 ...
So, let's assume you've cobbled together an interplanetary empire without using transportation methods that violate causality or have the power to blow up stars. You may feel pretty proud of yourse...
In this world I'm building, I need it to be possible to have enclosed spaces/worlds connected to the main one. Ideally the main world would closely resemble ours, with the same laws of energy/physi...
Chemoautotroph Flora In a world where there is not much sunlight, I still want to have life. Specifically, I want to capitalize on chemoautotrophs so much that the alien schoolchildren learn somet...
A staple of both fantasy and science fiction literature is the long-vanished Ancients, who left nothing but their buildings (or devices) behind. Somehow, these (usually) decrepit structures still ...
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...
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...
This question is inspired by book The Day of the triffids and this question Russia and USA have never been really "friends", lets admit it. So we will not be surprised, that one of them (pick your...
I have been trying to imagine a world which was also created by a Big Bang. Following is something that I have created so far: Another planet which was created also has species like us but they li...
After being told about hemianopsia (visual neglect) in an answer to another question, I started wondering if I could apply the same idea to artificial applications, such as securing information or ...
Given a world where a sentient species already populates, how would the population respond to another, unrelated species evolving into sentience? I think this can be effectively split into 3: It...
Imagine that humankind finally takes wing and reaches out into the heavens to claim its vast cosmic birthright ... ... only to find that a previous wave of dinosaurs from Earth, who left ~65 milli...
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...
This question is connected to: Fire Resistant Fauna I've been pondering a short story concept where a scientific expedition discovered a planet with a huge amount of both free hydrogen and oxygen ...
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...
How feasible would it be to use a huge electron gun to pump electrons from a solar array positioned close to the Sun back to Earth or Mars? My idea is to create a eletrical circuit by means of usi...
There are a couple of stories where humans gain chloroplasts. Here's a clip from one story: They are also infused with bacteriorhodopsin, allowing photosynthesis. It is now possible for a huma...
Assume a plant was engineered to cope with a wide range of different environments, and to have seeds that were capable of traveling through and surviving both the depths of space and re-entry into ...
Suppose it was possible to travel to inside the event horizon of a black hole safely. Also suppose said black hole is large enough that the curvature of the horizon of the surface of the central ma...
I am currently designing a world for a series of short stories and have started looking at what kind of weather patterns would be present in certain regions. For simplicity's sake, we can assume th...
Inspired by the many great questions asked for this fortnight's tag challenge, I got to thinking, could a plant develop/evolve to eventually consume an entire planet, and keep on living? What I mea...
It is well known that some organisms can produce electricity. Therefore I think it would not be too much of a stretch to assume that also some plants might have evolved that ability (after all, it ...
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 ...
I was experimenting with various star system designs with a gravity simulator, and one of the patterns I ended up with is best described as a planet with a very elongated elliptic orbit that itself...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
I've just come across a subplot in Jack McDevitt's Firebird where the earth-like planet Villanueva and the rest of its planet system was moving towards an unspecified dust cloud that made the plane...
In creating a calendar for a fictional world I'm considering the phases of the moon. I understand our moon has an orbital period of approx. 28 days. Is there room for variation if the planet and th...
This question builds off Information Exchange In Space and How would interstellar internet work?, and specifically uses the communication system I developed here because of this. In a summary of t...
Something I realized not too long ago about a spacefaring society is that while a lot of technology is going to feel advanced, a lot more is going to feel ancient just because of all the hurdles it...
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 ...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
Consider a scenario where there is an over-populated solar system (not necessarily our solar system). Several other rocky planets and moons in this solar system are inhabited by the same humanoid r...
Imagine that we live in a setting where there are a trillion humans (see linked question). A bit crowded, I know. Further imagine that at least the entire energy output of the Sun was available to ...
Let's say that I'm creating a world game that lasts for 1000 years (or more). The game involves players obtaining talented leaders, e.g. George Washington (military), Albert Einstein (science), etc...
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...
The setup: Near future (maximum 50 years in future) where "only" thing changed is, that company SpaceX together with NASA and ESA found out, how to get cargo and people to space very cheap USA dec...
This is about a fictional planet that has a solid land surface but on which the atmosphere is composed of some liquid containing hemoglobin, or some artificial blood substitute. I am not sure yet ...
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...
Assume that in the future, mankind develops Augmentations ala Deus Ex, where robot bits are strapped onto people in an attempt to improve them and their quality of life. This will eventually lead t...
