General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Imagine a single, long, straight stretch of track. On the track there is a train heading in one direction at 100 km/h and a second train heading towards it at 200 km/h. The latter train is a specia...
From my understanding shkadov thrusters, they use huge mirrors built on the scale of a dyson sphere, to reflect all the radiation of a star in one direction, accelerating the star as an enormous st...
We all know Pikachu, fuzzy, small rodent, with the ability to discharge electrical energy as an attack. But could Pikachu ever evolve in our world, and how would it do so? What's required: Rod...
Imagine there is a country in which there are all important natural resources (oil, gas, metal ores, wood, etc.) in their natural form and which lies in a temperate climate region. There may be som...
Imagine a device implanted inside the body which can detect when your heart has stopped and, in such a case, burns fat rapidly to generate enough energy to shock your heart into restarting, in a si...
Warning This question is the first of a series about specific use of teleportation. It will concern only about momemtum and speed: other subjects will be exposed later. Context The story happens...
I'm currently trying to set up an underwater race in my world"”merpeople if you will"”and I'm trying to figure out how their city would look. I'm basing their religion and lifestyle on native civil...
I am working on an extraterrestrial class of tetrapod-like organisms. To give them an evolutionary advantage, I am considering biological hydraulics to supplement the muscles in the hind legs. Ev...
The Orville has Mochlans, an (almost) all-male species. They reproduce in some unexplained method that produces a fertilized egg. The issue here is that if one of the mates lays an egg and the oth...
My mermaids have returned, and now they're dragging semi-conscious people about 700-ish meters underwater. Is it realistic for the person to still be alive at this point? (Y'know, for about ten sec...
Are there any kind of contaminants or other reasons that might be dangerous? I'd assume that as far as microbes/bacteria goes, eating off the ground on the moon is much safer than it would be on ea...
I want to create a planet with a deep gravity well, say about 12G at the surface. At first I wanted the planet to have either no atmosphere or a very thin one. But I want this to be as close to rea...
I have a spaceship which is basically a cylinder a little less then a kilometer long. Attached to the ship by pylons connected to a hub is an inhabited ring which spins to produce a gravity-like ef...
I want to create to create a ship that does NOT rely on rotational gravity to have a constant downward force on everything. The people built a g-force generator that does NOT induce gravity, just a...
In Science Fiction we often see the protagonists exploring all sorts of strange new worlds with no apparent discomfort to the variations in gravity. What factors determine how strong the gravity w...
Airships are cool, and one of the only vehicles that benefits of the square cube law as it can carry more weight if it has more volume of lifting gas. This got me thinking about what other advantag...
Basically, I want to freeze the technology of earth at a level reminiscent of pre-Industrial Revolution Europe. I'm trying to figure out what substance or material would have to be absent from the...
My alien race is supposed to have the ability to communicate a lot of information extremely fast, more akin to uploading something to your partner's mind than telling him. This should happen via si...
My planet is a 20% larger than the earth, assume a similar atmosphere, but it can be changed to fit the narrative. My ship is not so large as in the original question, a cylinder shape, about a mi...
Being an engineer and someone who hates hot summers and frigid winters, and someone who really likes the Rocky Mountain view, I can not help but wonder if we humans could get to design a whole new ...
We Eldar are a beautiful race that have a maximum life span of 500 years. We are stronger, faster, more intelligent, sexier, and frankly just superior to you humans in every way. However, we cannot...
Ok, Space Elevators have fallen out of the limelight, sorry for them, but the concept is intriguing just the same, so here it goes. One of the worst problem space elevators face is the fact that t...
What effect would having CO2 in your atmosphere in place of, on earth, Nitrogen have on the carbon cycle? would the carbon cycle even work? I'm engineering A theoretical tidally locked planet with ...
I am curious if there is a way for a disease to negatively effect the intelligence of humans;reducing them to non-sapient ferals in the end. I am curious what such a disease would need to do to eff...
Set in the late 22nd century AD, spaceship designs are becoming more streamlined and have longer bodies measuring from the tip at the front of ship to the thruster located at the back of the ship. ...
Assuming that a person has the power to manipulate all elementary particles in any way (i.e. changing them from one elementary particle to another, nuclear transmutation, moving groups of them at a...
I've been toying with the idea of a global highway that completely circles the globe. Ideally it would (on average) be as close to the equator as possible but also hit or at least come close to maj...
Trying to create a planet with sulphur dioxide (which is heavier than oxygen I think) on a lower level and oxygen above it. Is this possible? Need something that is horrible on the bottom and wan...
Set in the mid 22nd century AD, a major construction work is being carried out in the orbit of Uranus. The military is developing a cheaper fleets using precast reinforced concrete(PRC) hoping to e...
Would it be possible to have a region on a planet that is not near its poles that has below freezing temperatures most of the year, while having more temperate regions both above and below it? If s...
On Earth, we experience seasons because of our planet's axial tilt. It is a common misconception that the seasons are instead caused by our planet's distance from the sun changing as it orbits....
On a planet without axial tilt and with a roughly circular orbit, there would be no seasons. The climate on the planet would be, as far as I can tell, exactly the same at any time of year, and the...
I want this planet to be very earth-like on all aspects except for its size and the day-night cycle. The circumference is three times greater than the earth's circumference. The day-night cycle las...
You have a material that greatly enhances electric and magnetic sources or electro-magnetism in general. In this world, the material, is known to be a naturally occurring liquid found in geologic...
My magic system transfers quantities of certain properties from one object to another. For instance, electrical conductivity from metal to rubber -- the metal becomes less conductive, and the rubbe...
A wormhole (or Einstein"“Rosen bridge) is a speculative structure linking disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations solved using a Jac...
A holy man lives down a cylindrical well that is 2 metres in diameter. There is no water in the bottom and all the walls are of solid impermeable rock. He is protected from rain by a roof on suppor...
I have a moon covered in liquid water that orbits a super-Earth very closely. As you might imagine, the tides are incredibly strong on this moon. However, it is tidally locked and so does not exper...
I'm running a D&D campaign and am using a modified map of Venus for it that shows what Venus would look like with similar amounts of water to Earth. The problem I'm running into is mapping the ...
In my galaxy, I need a planet that is far enough away from its star to be relatively cold compared to Earth, but not so cold that liquid water cold not exist. The planet has 2 continents, 1 northe...
Background I have a spacecraft traveling from one planet to another, say from Earth to Venus. The journey will take at the least several weeks. During this time, the sun will emit a number of sola...
In an upcoming writing project, I will be focusing on an autonomous drone that picks through space wreckage. It has access to intermittent star light, but has no source of chemical propellant. The ...
What other kind of mouthparts might an alien (intelligent or non-intelligent) have besides the typical jaw with teeth or mandibles? To avoid being too broad a subject, let's assume the aliens need...
The Hegemony wishes to organise not only terrestrial games within the inner colonies, but has also wished to establish major sporting events for the other colonies in low gravity environments on to...
In my world, I have relatively robust humanoids as the focal human sub-species, and a number of other human subspecies that are more gracile in build. I wanted to work out roughly how much they wou...
A spaceship crew, during their interstellar travel loses control of the spaceship for a few hours due to external factors (exact factor not important). This causes the spaceship to deviate from its...
Scenario: Deadly virus wiped out 80 - 90% world population and it did it pretty quickly (in 2 months) Although it is plausible that among these 10 - 20% of survivors will be people who actually kn...
In a nutshell, I'm trying to build a world with erratic day/night cycles. To get the erratic days, I'm working with a habitable moon. It takes 3 full earth days (72 hours) for the habitable moon ...
Tech level: modern - like Atmospheric pressure at local sea level: Oxygen ~30 kPa Nitrogen ~180 kPa (So roughly counting 1.5 times more oxygen, 2.25 times more nitrogen) Technically speaking ...
In a given fantasy world, I need a deadly (yet not magical) gas that will naturally pool in low depressions and valleys. The level of magic is not high, so I'd like it to be an actual chemical tha...
