General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Could we fire a heavy, long (e.g., 50 meters), spear-shaped object into Europa's icy-surface from space and then, when momentum stops, gravity gradually moves weights down inside copper tubes the l...
I'm writing a story that will eventually escalate from being focused on one planet to the entire star system that planet belongs to, and finally to a big story involving the two nearest star system...
The idea is that the concepts of DNA, inheritance, and micro-organisms were discovered significantly earlier in history. Roughly 50 years after the founding of Alexandria as a city state in 332 B.C...
I am curious as to what physical geographic features would be present on a plateau 10km above sea level. The Tibetan plateau is only 4km above sea level, so would more than doubling the height exag...
I am working out a future scenario in which humans begin to discover alien life; I want their discoveries to be plausible. For example, I've frequently heard that alien life will most likely be ca...
I've recently become interested in the possibility of silicon based life. Assume these creatures developed on a planet with zero carbon (don't question, just accept it), so they have no carbon in t...
My ancient golden dragon has a lot of time, since he doesn't die of old age in my world, and a lot of magical constructs that will tirelessly built a defensive mountain chain for him. This chain w...
Well, I have been having computer problems and I decided that now is as good a time as ever to continue to waste my time developing my reptilian, honor-obsessed militaristic race of lizards for a p...
To be more specific, I mean what if every wire, every power cable and transformer on the connected grids to the nuclear power plants all ruptured at once. The transformers literally exploding, the ...
I'm attempting to give my fantasy world weather/clouds, (some might be light-producing to add to other light sources, so if there's a scientific way to do that, please give it to me). There are mul...
What conditions might make a planet more likely to develop silion based life, the factors I need to kmow are listed below Temperature of the planet The solvent that they can use in their biology ...
The Eldar are a psychic species with a similar body design to humanity within a galaxy-wide empire. They are far more advanced than other races, technologically and philosophically. Eldar have a st...
I'm thinking up a Mars or Venus type planet where the poles (or one pole) has a forest growing out of it due to a device that is used to make the planet more habitable by creating a oxygen friendly...
I thought of this question when I heard Einstein's statement on WW3, and I wondered if humanity was setback, would North Americans have any mounts that would rival those of the rest of the world? (...
How can we have a world that is inhabited only by zombies and yet continues to be populated? For the purposes of this question, I envisage the type of zombie that has been infected by a virus, is...
I want to add realistic elements to a futuristic environment I am working on. Realistically, the animals we know of today will change over time and it's more likely smaller ones would survive, so I...
Based on a previous question asking about mechanical computing (Babbage engines, etc.) I wondered how a steampunk story could present the concept of a modern computer monitor in a steam-driven mech...
So I found the base of these pesky rebels on this planet and I am tasked with destroying the planet to eliminate the rebels once and for all. Unfortunately, my death star has malfunctioned and has ...
The goverment of Africa decided that it would no longer tolerate the diamond mafia, so the corporation of DeBeers was hunted down and disbanded, to put it lightly. Now, all the diamond mines have b...
There's a planet called eaglypt whose surface is 100% barren desert. However, there is a twist: the planet's core consists of liquid water, and there are a few places where this water seeps through...
Simple question that might seem odd. Not going to get too specific but I am curious, more or less, as to what it would look like for a planet that had a moon (A habital one) which was in essence ti...
I have two planets and humans live on both of them. Humans need not have developed on these planets, but the planets should support human life with the allowance that the humans have technology com...
The Humern Empire (no relation) spans the galaxy, using a variety of methods to move from place to place and planet to planet. One thing all of their modes of transport share is that they are not ...
What would birds look like if they did not have to fight gravity to fly? The question comes from the premise put forward by some that gravity is not real and that what holds us down is pressure ca...
So my world needs to be destroyed because of a variety of things. New land masses would be created and destroyed and joined till we had a single continent. In the future, people saw the possibili...
In my world there is a villain who rules over the unhappy. In fact, we recently determined that he actually absorbs their happiness and uses it as energy to make himself stronger. This world does, ...
I'm writing a speculative fiction story that includes superhumans. The focus is on individual characters and their daily lives, and I'm trying to maintain some consistency by not throwing all the l...
Let's say a human were to live most of his life in a 200 G environment but then suddenly enter a 1 g environment, What would be the effects to his body and will this give him the ability to carry l...
The Dreamer (a.k.a. The Sleepy Psychic by his teammates and enemies alike) has telepathic powers. The problem is that, while extremely useful, he can only use them whilst sleeping. My question is, ...
Death occurs in extremely high humidity and an average temperature of 23 C (~75 F), both of which continue for six weeks. At that time, temperature begins to fall over the course of eight weeks to...
I know it may be a bit of a silly question and not really something of great importance to a story, but how would you secure a spaceship when you leave? For example; when the Millennium Falcon lan...
I've got a generally earthlike planet, but my goal is to make radiation exposure in the polar regions a much larger hazard than it is on Earth, while not being an issue in other regions. Nothing im...
Our notion of recording and communicating time and date is based on very old concepts, many of them being built upon flawed assumptions (that the Sun should be at exact south at noon, that a year s...
A world idea I'm playing with for a sci-fi idea I'm working on has an atmosphere similar to the composition of Earth's atmosphere during the Carboniferous Period: Lots of oxygen, so while a human o...
Imagine an inhabitated planet like ours with a moon of the same projected size in the sky. The moon has visible structures of colors or darker and lighter areas. Every evening when the moon gets ...
A centaur as we all know is a horse with a human head (and torso). I would like to consider a reverse centaur, which, for the purposes of this question, I will define to be a human with a horse's ...
The Scenerio In the very near future a NASA probe returns to Earth with a soil sample from an asteroid containing a strange substance able to catalyze cold fusion reactions. The economic value of ...
While by no means a smoking gun, there is still a reasonable amount of empirical evidence on the notion that socialization and testosterone are negatively correlated. Archaeological Evidence Fro...
Back home, many large planktivores have ingenious ways to trap food and not water. For sharks like the basking and the megamouth, that is no problem, as they have modified their gills into rakers ...
Okay, so I have this binary planet system. The main planet a bit bigger than earth with a size appropriate moon-planet. Both are habitable and with a humanoid species that evolved there. But, I k...
I've got an intelligent humanoid species living on a planet very similar to Earth's. However, on this planet, rainstorms are more frequent and slightly... different. Each raindrop is at least an in...
Say in a post nuclear holocaust world, elephants managed to survive and adapt. It can consume and digest iron and steel and grow two rows of metallic tusks. When threatened the elephant will lift u...
I have a race of octopodes with the same intelligence distribution as humans. I want them to "colonise" land to a similar extent as we have "colonised" space; have regular transport between the oce...
Considering some of the answers given in a previous question, I would like to ask what climatic phenomenon would be necessary to generate a mega-fog, thick enough to at least reduce the intensity o...
For the purpose of this question (to make the idea more plausible) a vampire is not an undead creature. Rather: A vampire is a human, infected by a symbiotic virus; The virus is present in a vamp...
In my world I would like to have a cyborg-inspired veteran, but am not sure what kinds of prostheses would be possible, ideally without the use of electrics. My main concern is how the prostheses ...
Imagine that humanity found a rocky planet with earth like gravity, atmospheric pressure, and temperature, orbiting a sun-like star. The only problem is that the planets atmosphere is that it is co...
Research shows that some creatures in the animal kingdom manipulate the sex of their child in order to maximize the number of grandchildren. Parents in good condition, based on health, size, domina...
Say you were using a black hole as a propulsion drive á la Crane and Westmoreland http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf- so your black hole has a radius of around .9 attometers - super tiny - around ...
Sometimes old, discredited or impractical ideas come back to favor, because a new technology has evolved. Let us imagine a future Earth-like world (not early 20th century or steampunk) that would ...
