Posts tagged society
I'm in the early stages of designing a city, and would like some advice about to structure its roads realistically for transport. The city is circular, with large roads entering the city at north...
Is it possible for an Earth-like planet to exist where the light reflected by the moon is, not as powerful, but close in intensity to daylight? And if so, what would be necessary for it? A moon mu...
This is my entry for the fortnightly topic challenge In Day of the Triffids, many people go blind and the basic summary is this: virulent plague makes most of humanity blind giant, semi-intellig...
What are the most important factors in determining how fast technology progresses? And roughly how fast might that be under optimal circumstances? Innovations have to be dreamed up, but there mus...
God had decided that humanity as a species is an overall disappointment. After wiping out all life with a flood, he decided to start from scratch. Humanity's new environment would be constantly cha...
Assuming the same rules for physics apply to this world as they do for our own, how would a humanoid race that lives at the bottom of the sea be able to walk around like humans do on land? What kin...
1350 AD. A secret society is recruiting adepts in Rome, Florence, Paris, Wien, Prague and London; well-educated people in high ranks of nobility, catholic church, engineers, professors and knights....
The setting is as follow. In a planet like earth, one day, 10% of the population suddenly becomes immortal. The "immortals" are not physiologically different from the "mortals" and initially it is ...
I've been working on this concept where a deadly new fungus starts spreading from two central locations. One in Europe and one outside of a major city in the United States. Over the course of 16 da...
Can we make a human brain and body the size of a mouse's while still retaining the same level, if not more intelligence? Like how tech has evolved to be smaller but more efficient or how cars are...
Would it be possible for life to evolve on a planet orbiting a blue giant? If so, what kinds of life forms? Could some sort of humans evolve there? How long would it take?
I've seen almost the same question here, but it was like Can a microorganism reproduce so fast, to be used as fuel?. Then, I was inspired and new question came up. Does some real microorganism in s...
Recently I've been imagining living on a terraformed Venus in a distant future. I've a pretty good idea of how this can be done, having gone through many articles on how to terraform venus, so my q...
If germs from the past was brought to the present/future on a person (or by some other means of transportation) and we have immunity to its descendants, like the modern germs for example, would we ...
Is it possible for life to evolve"” and survive"” on a planet that is regularly hit by [relatively small"” usually no more than a few feet across when they make an impact] meteorites? If so, what e...
If person A has had the genes dictating their sight/ the internal structure of their eyes, replaced by say, eagle eyes or cat eyes. What happens when they reproduce with person B who has regular h...
Exowombs have become feasible from a technological standpoint. A number of trials conducted on animal embryos have proven successful, and talk has been made about how this can be beneficial for hum...
Newborn humans are born in a very undeveloped stage compared to other mammals. This is because if they stayed any longer in the mother, their head would become too big to fit through the birth cana...
In my story, there is a large group of humanoid clones that help the city function, doing mundane tasks such as cleaning and maintaining the city. Doing all of the minimum wage jobs and 95% of the...
In fiction that tries to provide a wide diversity of cultural stances on the collectivism-individualism stances, there is often a trope that self-reliant, no-nonsense, rugged individualists (as a d...
I am still puzzled by the original The Planet of the Apes movie from the 70's. How come that sentient species invented weapons, but was unable to develop powered flight, or spacecraft. Thus, the qu...
I'm trying to find a plausible way to reduce global warming in a world past the tipping point. I recently read this article : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171127173225.htm. It su...
The Dreamlands are a vast, alternate dimension that can only be entered via dreams. They are divided up into several sections, all of which are inhabited by monsters who serve the idiot elder god A...
I'm working on setting in which a prison ship crashes on an unexplored/unknown planet, and due to infighting and environmental factors the prisoners return to tribalism at best or feral animals at ...
Modern Earth; a series of connected events (natural disasters, mass migration, drug-resistant pandemic, collapse in biodiversity, armed conflict) have led to a significant reduction in human popula...
I understand that particles such as tachyons don't really exist and are unlikely, but say for the sake of this question they do. Would these particles bond or interact with atoms? By interactions I...
I am having some trouble reasoning out some ideas, if any of you could help. So I have in mind a planet, where there are many human cultures, but one of them is more advanced then others. So they...
An un-treatable virus starts infecting and killing people. Societies are on the brink of collapse, and it is decided the best way to save the most amount of people is to move everyone who can fit i...
My current project features a contemporary scientist who is convinced that some sort of spacetime anomaly occurred in a tiny rural Yorkshire, U.K. community circa-1850; he believes a dilapidated ol...
Whilst not strictly relevant to this question, the questions and answers may interest the curious: this is the 4th in a series of question here - 1, 2, 3. My population (in excess of 500,000) und...
Throughout history, humanity has made a few scientific blunders where a scientific principle held as fact for hundreds of even thousands of years is found to be completely or mostly false. Our s...
In a world where people can feel each other's thoughts and emotions, is it possible to lie? Is it possible to think something different from what you really think? It doesn't make sense... When yo...
In my world, interstellar vessels use a drive whose design mankind learned from an extinct elder civilization. While construction of the drives is possible, the physical principles making them work...
As the title says, you know stuff like minotaur, lycanth or werewolf, cat or dog folk, etc especially for the female specimens. I want to know what happen if quadrupedal mammals which usually have...
A soft and vulnerable intelligent underwater species, you can consider them closely related to Earth's octopus - in the way chimps are closely related to humans. Consider that clothing is often wo...
So I've been thinking for a while about making a world where cats aren't as common and instead are more of a regional domesticated animal, replaced in (mostly Northwestern) Europe by foxes. How co...
One of the solutions I think is making the muscle go inside the bone, something look like an exoskeleton creature. either mechanical or organic making the artificial muscle developed inside the mar...
Is it possible to use a power plant-like machine to create small amounts of electrical (or other) energy directly inside the human body, making it such that the human has energy for activity withou...
I know a similar question was asked whether gas masks could be used to survive in space but it didn't quite focus on the parts I'm interested in. I'm building a world in which space travel is regu...
So, I was wondering if it would be possible for a race of reptilians to live in a climate similar to that of Germany or Scandinavia without having to hibernate for the winter months. They would be ...
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...
Good rulers support invention of useful things. But this question has two sides. Support of invention Prevention of fake inventing Basis: Many inventions arise as side-effects of searching for...
In this world you have access to computers powerful enough to decipher messages as long as the method used to encrypt it has at least one theoretical weakness (those computers cannot defeat an impr...
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. The world has become a barren wasteland that is inhospitable to the the human race, which has been forced to take residence in hive cities...
I've been working on a project and I'm trying to make it as scientifically plausible as I can get it to be. Since space is large, and it's physically impossible in this universe to reach the speed ...
Where should I shoot a solar flare that is at least as strong as the solar flare(s) in 2012 for the most death? What else would happen? And how much death, in percentage of world population, would ...
Set in near future. Human population is at most a hundred thousand. Everyone lives in mountainous regions to escape deadly miasma. The air is infected by nanites which can cause cardiac arrest in ...
There is a space ship, flying from planet to planet for multiple years. It is a science vessel, so, once they reach a planet, they do research. But what do they do if they are in transit between pl...
Assuming that horses went extinct early in history, what would replace the horse, and how would the change in domesticated animal affect the development of the first civilizations? Info on horse e...
Imagine a species in which the ego never developed. There is no self-direction. This species is always making noise, however, and it is through this noise that the society itself experiences the ...