General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Previous to this question, I made a post regarding many questions about the biology of the creature I had been designing. Looking back on it, I realized that I asked a LOT of questions for just one...
The TRAPPIST-1 planets are all very close to each other and thus are subjected to strong gravitational forces amongst each other and to the red dwarf they're orbiting. Would it be possible for them...
What is surface to weight ratio needed to help slow the decent onto Mars? Assembled and inflated in space could a blimp be big enough to include everything needed to jump start a colony and land...
Some areas of the evil meant lair are not for the eyes of the average minion. There is only one way in and out of this area, there is no door blocking the way, but a lava waterfall pouring from the...
Usually when a population overgrows it expands in search of new land and if the fields are virgin and empty they become farmland and cities, but if the fields are already occupied and the resources...
In my story, a portal is opened from the Earth to an alternate world. However, this world is toroidal in shape and has a surface gravity equal to that of Earth. It rotates around an axis that goes ...
Ok, I get it, me dumb, you smart. Only smart questions allowed. In any case I'm going to leave the question unaltered in case some others might get something out of the answers. Thanks to everyon...
In my book series, a space station called the T-Ray that is capable of causing explosions the size of the Chixculub impact explosion just fired at a planet that is completely covered by a massive o...
So in my story, a spaceship populated with about 250 people has reached its destination, an Earth-like planet. It's uninhabited, and consider the weather is just typical, sunny-day with a slight br...
Think of Saturn. In this book, some people travel to a gas giant with rings and find an ecosystem in the rings of a planet. It has predators and prey. It has plants and animals. Autotrophs and Het...
I'm working on this map right now. Is this map realistic/believable? The continent would be about 5 million km² and lies in the temperate climate zone. (I intended it to be smaller than Australia;...
I've studied a little about glacial melting and temperature changes in sea currents and worldwide. I couldn't find any definitive answer and since I'm no expert on this matter I'm a bit confused. ...
Before picking specs, I need to ensure feasibility. Only one of the planets need be Earth-like; in fact, I would prefer if the other planet were rather small and dead, like a moon. The orbits will ...
For the purpose of a story, I would like to imagine a system of two Earth-like planets orbiting like Earth and Moon. I imagine that these planets were created by a gigantic collision at the beginn...
I've been reading the book Nomad, and in it a binary pair of black holes is cruising into the solar system, and threatens to slingshot the earth out into deep space That's got me thinking,...
In this paper by Bains et al, an alternative to oxygenic photosynthesis is discussed. Apparently, 4 times the amount of biomass can be produced using hydrogenic over oxygenic photosynthesis. Oxyge...
The Penanggalan / Manananggal is a vampire-like creature found in Southeast Asia (the former in Malaysia, the latter in the Philippines, with some differences in behaviour). It is described as a fl...
In my previous question, I asked how much mass the Sun would have to lose in order for Saturn's orbital velocity to be its escape velocity. The answer proved to be somewhat unexpected - when the S...
For my Science fiction and Fantasy genre book, I need an energy source whose energy output should be much more than even a fully functional Dyson sphere. Can you please suggest some hypothetical co...
In its wandering through the Milky Way, the solar system is getting close to a solitary neutron star. The neutron star will "fly by" above the plane of the ecliptic and its closest distance from th...
So I'm the owner of a startup which is going to make our lives easier with custom-DNA creatures! Our few first products are selling very well and nothing was wrong until last week's events. Anothe...
In a world I'm building - the same one as in Is space piracy orbitally practical? - there are many space stations in low Earth orbit, used as orbital spaceports, each about ten times the size of th...
So, Mark Witton had a lengthy article on why paleontologists think the Quetzalcoatlus northropi could fly. One interesting thing about it is that Witton and Habib think the Quetzalcoatlus had a 90...
In my book series, a group of a few hundred explorers are sent from a planet called Ishgabangaloodoo to explore Sea World. Some things to know about Ishgabangaloodoo: Its citizens are referred t...
I saw this a while ago, and it has bothered me ever since. Imagine a world where you know everyone is going to go crazy in exactly one day. The entire world's population will try to find and kill ...
Antenna farm as seen on the USS Sulaco from Aliens (1986) We often see menacing sharp communication spikes and clusters on spacecraft in movies, shows, games, and etc. It makes the ship look...
In the setting I'm building now, then there's supposed to be a location where the natives had found three food staple crops within close proximity with one another, near a handful of rivers. Natura...
What qualities about a land-dwelling creature are absolutely necessary to maintain an effective herd of that creature for food and/or resources? Assume this is an earth-like environment.
I am imagining a planet more or less earth like. I would like it to have only one pole cap, so only the southern hemisphere has a snow-covered continent. The trick is, I don't want it to lie comple...
The Dark Warlock Susie has heard of a cave system with a lethal density of argon that is protecting a burgeoning monster population. In the interest of beefing up her security, Susie wants to recre...
This is something of a practical question more than anything else. Consider a setting in the modern world, where a large country e.g. the U.S. has collapsed and been replaced by a sort of modernize...
Inspired by this question regarding reality as simulation and this question about a continuous time line, it made me wonder: if our time were indeed like a high frame-rate simulation, how could we ...
As many of us probably know airships were one of the great forms of transportation in the 20th century but a great hindrance to their development was weight. In a world I am currently constructing ...
Instead of Earth as we know it, humans evolved on a slightly smaller, habitable earthlike planet with different geography. Due to the plot reasons, I would like to keep them confined to one (large)...
The question stems from watching a scene from ID2 and seeing the massive alien mothership landing/crashing on the North Atlantic. What mass would a starship, or any other artificial object constru...
Imagine we took earth and slowed it down so that a day lasted 100 years, could humans (or any life) survive? Let's assume that there are no ill effects of slowing it down, no massive tidal waves, n...
Here's what I've come up with: The star: A main sequence star, roughly a sol analogue Younger than Sol (say 3-3.5 billion years old) roughly the same starting mass as Sol, but has had less tim...
I'm working on building a post nuclear war society in a nuclear winter where northern countries have risen to dominance through a combination of being non-primary targets in the nuclear war and hav...
Monster Slayer Stan, we are in dire need of your help! The caves in our nearby mountain are filling up with a dense but non-toxic gas that is protecting a monster's nest. The monsters are weak but ...
There is no other way around it--Madagascar is an evolutionary uniquety. 80% of the island's species live nowhere else on Earth. Among this uniqueness is a habitat that seems to come out of scien...
I'm writing about a setting where building technology is quite advanced, but elevators have not yet been invented, so the limiting factor on height is ergonomic. What would be the maximum practica...
I'm attempting to rough-estimate potential population density of three-dimensional megastructures in space. Assume a filled spherical volume (i.e. death star, not Dyson sphere), where all internal ...
Someone showering after exercise aboard a rotating space station spinning to simulate 1 gravity. How might Coriolis affect jets of water falling within a cubicle of 2 metres in height?
Let's assume, without revoking any of today's science, that the world is a simulation. What would a bug look like? I'm assuming that "the eiffel tower suddenly being bent at 45°" is rather unlik...
How do you go about building a working Earth-like ocean ecosystem from scratch in Europa's subsurface ocean? On Earth, abyssopelagic species have evolved to live more than 6km below the surface. A...
If we could embed tiny "water" wheels into our veins and arteries, what is the maximum amount of power we could achieve? Assume that they will work and won't malfunction or clog our blood. Also, we...
I'm trying to think of what kind of cosmic event would cause an explosion powerful enough to "shake" or disrupt the whole flow of a galaxy and on that same note what other kind of super cosmic even...
I'm interested in what kind of events / processes would it take to make Titan's atmosphere more or less transparent. The year is around 2150. The technology has progressed, sure, but it's nowhere ...
There is a big, very big planet that is travelling fast, very fast. It's a rogue planet (not attached to a star system). It's going to pass close, very close to the earth. The earth is probably ...
The setting is our Earth of today (2018) with one difference: some Space Agency decided to go back the Moon and built a ship that is ready to depart, using today's technology. For reasons, the cre...
