General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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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...
Would it be possible for the atmosphere of a planet to reach beyond its planetary ring so that earth-like biology could develop on some of the asteroids there? This question is mainly about whethe...
I was thinking about a different possibilities for habitable planets. And I was wondering what actually causes a planet to be tidally locked? I am assuming it more than chance that the bodies rot...
Brown dwarf stars are cool. Both literally and figuratively; the temperature profile for cool brown dwarves runs somewhere between 225K and 600K. It's possible if not probable that there exist som...
Space is two things: empty and (mostly) dark. This makes it really, really hard to hide in it, because to do anything in it, chances are, you'll be shining a big bright light through it. Even if ...
Imagine someone wanted to divert a specific asteroid to impact the earth. The Current Impact Risks page at nasa.gov shows a list of known impact risks based on observations. Most of these asteroi...
I am working on constructing a world which is basically (from the northern pole to the southern pole): smallish frozen over ocean huge land mass encompassing the northern hemisphere tremendous oc...
This question is about big trees that can contain an entire city. So generally speaking: What limits a plant's size, anything from a tree to a flowering plant? What environment needs to exist f...
One possible approach how to estimate extend of space colonization is to define costs of it and then estimate the investments the governments and organizations would be willing to pay. In an excell...
Imagine a race of what we would call 'giants', each of them possibly around 8 to 10 feet (2.40-3.00 meters) tall. What differences would they need compared to us regular humans in order to function...
In many Science Fiction books and games, there are worlds or planet-like objects that are rings that orbit (or float around in space) (some examples being the Halo (from Halo) or the Ringworld (fro...
Is there a way to make a planet invisible naturaly? I dont want the entire thing to be clear, but have a natural "field" or something that prevents the planet from being seen (or makes it much hard...
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...
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...
At the moment it seems we have two different types of planet We have Rocky planets with a solid core that occupies most of the mass of the planet We have Gas Giants that contain a solid core but ...
If you've read Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, you might get the reference. In that story, the protagonists, after fulfilling their duty, decide to journey over a large mountain chain to explore t...
There are plenty of threats out there that could terminate all life on our little planet in varying amounts of time (Solar flares, meteors and supernovas to name a few). Are there any disasters 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...
According to this answer to what the moon is made of, the moon's crust is, among other things, 43% oxygen. Assuming we were to go back to the moon within the next couple of years with the goal of ...
Would it be possible for a planet-wide climate be set so that the temperature even at the poles would continually stay within a narrow range between 17 and 21 degrees Celsius? (This is approximate...
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...
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...
Within the Star Wars Extended Universe, there is a science base on a small object within a near impenetrable sphere of Black Holes. Is this possible? The place referenced is called the Maw Install...
I am looking for a tool that can be used to create worlds with a realistic (= physically plausible) climate and surface given general terrain shape, or can at least assist in such a task. My ideal...
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...
What could drive a human civilization to use base-12 system? As far as I know there have been such civilizations and they probably used their phalanges to count (instead of their fingers). I have f...
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...
How would the human body be affected if oxygen levels increased by a lot? Our air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. If it increased to 30% oxygen, what would the effects be and how long would it ta...
What would happen if an extremely advanced race removed the metal (everything beyond H and He) from a star. Would the star still function? Would it change in appearance or properties at all?
Could one construct a statue out of materials that could be made to move in controlled or semi-controlled ways? The question is essentially can one make a robot without the internal mechanics? I'm ...
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...
Making things bigger or smaller is common in speculative fiction (giant ants, tiny people, planets bigger than stars, and stars smaller than light bulbs.) What general principles should be kept in...
As you see my other question What would be the major changes to our body if we were herbivores?. Instead of being herbivores, what would happen if we were obligate carnivores?
I want two populations to coexist in a world with extensive tunnels carved into the rock. One population lives in the tunnels, coming out to trade and gather food. The other is aware of the tunnels...
Maelstroms are ginormous whirlpools. They can exist continuously in an area. They're cool. The question is, how large can they get? As large as an island? Could a maelstrom have a diameter of 60 o...
In relation to this question, how could I create a force field dome over that city? Specifications of the city: 10 x 40 km on the surface 1 km in height has a city wall of 100 m all around the ...
On a planet with Earth-like attributes in every way, including physics and geography, what repercussions would there be for a relatively deep 'dent' in one quadrant of the spherical body? This is o...
I had this idea the other day just for the heck of debating about if it would be feasible to build a bridge that crosses North Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Spain. I mean from St-John's (Newfoundl...
I'm working on a simulator-type game which I want to be at least internally consistent, and which I'd like to work as close to reality as possible. That being said, it's set in space, which means t...
In series such as the Hyperion Cantos and Ender's Game, there exist fictional faster-than-light communication systems allowing either instantaneous, or near-instantaneous transmission of informatio...
Imagine we build a space station much larger than the ISS with more or less today's technology. (For example in a scenario in which price of transport to orbit per kg is significantly reduced by te...
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...
I am interested of a fictional future world where people can walk into a bar, order a drink with the flavors they want, and as that drink flows through their system, their DNA is modified. An exam...
I feel like this is the most noobish question ever. Anyway, imagine an asteroid hits Earth and the atmosphere is now full of particles, successfully blocking the Sun from Earth. There are people st...
I've hit a wall in my tale of humans attempting to escape the Singularity or a fate worse than death by running off into the depths of space. And I only have myself and my accursed hard sci-fi lean...
Defining what is a super intelligent civilization: An industrial civilization that invest on scientific progress and that builds and manipulates computers, robots and nano-machines, has effi...
A frog has already been levitated without any magnetic object attached to it. I'm wondering if it's possible to reverse this for transportation purposes, by having a vehicle levitate itself using m...
Allright, what i'm asking is how life would be like on Earth (which pretends Earth could develop life in the "short" life of a blue giant) if we had two blue giants in the sky instead of the Sun?
Several science fiction books I have read (including, IINM, Nightfall by Asimov) have featured planets with several suns. Some worlds where this happened wrought interesting effects on the inhabita...
I wanted to ask about the system described in the following scenario... A villain has built a system consisting of a telescope connected to a computer that runs some autonomous object recognition ...
