General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Could a planet have an orbit in the shape of a figure 8 around twin (possibly binary) stars? Mostly curious about the physical possibility of such an orbital arrangement; is it stable over a long ...
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...
Dragons are a grand classic of fantasy. For this question, let's assume we're talking about the following stereotype: hatches from an ostrich-sized egg and can grow to mountain size if nothing l...
A space colony that resembles the design of a Stanford torus generates artificial gravity by centripetal force. Discussions about benefits of such fake gravity can be easily found: no more constan...
In a story I am working on, I need a scene in which one of the main characters finds himself outside in precarious weather conditions, unable to see unaided much farther out than an armlength or so...
Related: How would a completely urbanized city-planet be maintained? How would the global environment of a completely urbanized city-planet be affected? Why would a completely urbanized city-plan...
What would be the effects of high or low gravity on human body development? How would the human body develop under a different gravity? Many science fiction stories explore the idea that people fro...
So last year I started writing a post-apocalyptic story, and then realized I had no idea what the world was really like, and quite a few things just didn't seem to make sense. One of the biggest t...
Picture, if you will, four planets sharing the exact same orbit and orbital speed, and separated by exactly same distance from each other. Each planet is the same size and roughly the same gravitat...
Magic conveniently "explains away" many things associated with shapeshifting, but in the course of some of my fiction writing, I endeavor to include some slightly more plausible explanations when p...
Imagine a world with a very wacky magnetic field, the magnetic poles are not aligned at the top of the axial tilt and the sun is active enough to cause huge northern lights each night. I know elec...
This idea comes up quite frequently in science fiction, but there has not been a question about it yet on Worldbuilding.SE. Is it possible that intelligent life was brought to Earth by an alien ci...
Those of you who have read Game Of Thrones will know that in the GOT world seasons do not have a fixed duration, e.g., a winter might last three times longer than the previous one. I find most int...
In many SF stories (or fantasy if you replace science with magic), there is one technology that is hyper advanced in one specific field, like robotics in Real Humans or in Extant, but almost nothin...
I'm building a post-apocalyptic setting where the cataclysmic event is a volcanic eruption from Yellowstone that releases a blanket of ash that reaches from California to just before the Midwest. E...
Now, taking out the cost to produce/collect it, assume somehow we perfected a formula or find a natural source (because that is currently very prohibitive), how feasible would be to use antimatter ...
I put a force field dome over my city. How would that affect the weather inside the city, and outside it? Specification of the city: 10 × 40 km on the surface 1 km in height dome would be 2 to ...
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...
This question focuses on the initial creation of landmasses. What are the processes that causes land-masses to form, and continents and islands to rise up from the sea and sink back into it? How...
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...
Suppose one constructed a Bernal sphere, similar in design to that described in this article and this article at the National Space Society. If the sphere was simply rotated on a single axis, wou...
Imagine the Earth is sucked into a wormhole powerful enough to pull it out of it's current orbit. the ones who created the wormhole wanted to move earth to protect it however didn't want their acti...
I want to create a world set on our Earth but with humans converted entirely to machines, so the population can be larger than would be possible with biological humans. In contrast to biologically...
If a planet had such a large imbalance of protons and electrons that it possessed a net negative or positive charge what would happen to it and its solar system? First, could it be stable, or woul...
I want to have an upper atmosphere composed of a gas which is lighter than "air" so that my human occupants of a planet can harvest it and use it to fill blimps and hot air balloons. I'm planning ...
One of the solution to make a cold planet habitable for us is to increase the greenhouse effect. It works with planets like Mars that are inside the habitable zone but would it be enough for a plan...
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...
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...
We are used to a world where humans are basically an apex predator; we don't really need to worry much about becoming some other animal's next meal. If that wasn't the case, and humans had to be w...
Suppose a planetary system works in such a way that there is a rotating planet in the direct centre of a binary star (the star system's centre of gravity, also known as barycenter), such that the t...
