Posts tagged society
It's Earth, the modern day"¦and in the out there, there is a fight going on. Two vast space-empires duel for survival, locked in hateful combat. Clashes of fleets and individual spaceships are the ...
Would this type of orbit be possible to achieve without external forces being applied? Is it possible at all? I have little to no background in the sciences so please explain like I'm stupid. Thank...
Conquest and discovery has been an important part of developing the global political structure of today's Earth. After we expand and settle other planets, whether within the same solar system or n...
In my world the characters find themselves in a new land. They do not understand the locals nor do the locals understand them. How could these characters learn to understand the locals withing a mo...
This excludes metal stakes, knives etc. to the heart, it's not the bleeding out that's the issue. Just for some reason, a wooden stake to the heart ends a vampire. Why? Assume the type of vampire ...
In a world naturally formed where some magic exists but is mainly used by sentient species, I'm trying to come up with a more or less scientific way to explain how this special, rare ore (going to ...
Basically, I need one main character to be comatose and the other one trying to save him. The antagonist has to give the main character a specific time period to jump through hoops or whatever to g...
I'm working on a sci fi story with bio-punk elements in it (such as gene manipulation). This has brought up a problem with one of the sub plots, however, as I am unaware of whether or not an extrem...
How could we use our own heart which pumps our blood, to potentially charge devices such as a cell phone?
I am writing a sci-fi novel, set in a 1984-style dystopia, so a society which is obsessed with order and surveillance where non-predictable behaviour is punished. My protagonist is a person with a ...
Gonna be hard to put it to words, especially because of the rather broad scope of my question, but I think it can be a proper submission here. Here on Earth, regardless of the period and location,...
I'm aware the brain--especially the portion concerning planning and judgement--isn't matured until around the mid-20s and that the brain's structure is sensitive to environment. That said, let's as...
A group of scientists has been slaving away largely in obscurity for two decades, with very few publishable results. Suddenly, one of them has an epiphany, which turns out to be instrumental to ena...
I want to create a world where tying yourself to a single partner would be considered irresponsible because it is potentially deadly. The more often two people come together and exchange DNA throug...
Humanity is often said to have 5 senses, but this isn't entirely accurate. This is one question of several in a series I am asking regarding going beyond the 5 senses. Magetoception is one of the...
I was imagining a scenario where an 21st century engineer accidentally finds himself transported through time to early Renaissance Europe. Realizing that no help or rescue is on the way, he decides...
I see a lot of media describing large space colonies, and am curious as to how they got there. I'll admit, I'm mostly inspired by Interstellar here. So here's the scenario: A group of 600 settlers...
Is it plausible that a planet can be breathable despite the color of it's atmosphere? My story takes place in an alternate reality in which what people thought the Solar System was like in the 50s,...
I need a planet where the day cycle is short, in particular 16 hours. I read What determines the length of a day on a planet? and Is it physically possible for a planet to have seasons of different...
What are possible economic systems for use within a space-based industrial settlement? The different approaches are to be weighed by the competitve advantages they offer to their respective commun...
The time is The Future. Humanity is spreading throughout the stars, aided by the invention of Schwarzschild gates. The gates allow for FTL travel by tearing open wormholes in space. There are thre...
I want my world to be set in early to mid Industrial Age but for various reasons that I won't go into here I don't want there to be any gunpowder based weapons. Is it possible for a society to adv...
I'm writing about a small desert planet (about the size of pluto) that humans can live on. Is this possible?
Many SF stories feature faster-than-light travel as essentially a trope: Roddenberry has stated☡ that the Enterprise travels at the speed of plot. As an allegory of the south seas, or some throw...
I watched Independence Day: Resurgence the other day. In it, Earth's first line of defense is a lunar base (that gets blown up), followed by an orbital satellite network (that gets blown up). Now...
I am building a science fiction universe, and I am currently thinking of many different unique sentient alien species that would populate the galaxy. I have thought of a rocky planet with Earth le...
For what I'm working on, humans (some humans, anyway) develop the abilities to communicate telepathically, move things with thought, possible premonitions, maybe psychic projection (but that might ...
I want to build a world populated by humans descended from colonists from Earth who have traveled a long distance and time to arrive (say, 80 years.) They come to this new Earth-like planet in doz...
Setting: In a fantasy setting much like World of Warcraft (where huge liberties are taken regarding the level of technological sophistication), an evil emperor rules from a castle in which there ar...
I'm creating a world my protagonist will visit with humanoid inhabitants that have a peculiar feature: their eye sockets are in the palms of their hands, not unlike the Pale Man Pan's Labyrinth. ...
I'm reading this article on speech in animals, and it made an interesting claim: chimpanzees and other non-human great apes posses the anatomy needed to vocalize words, they just don't use it to do...
I'm writing a story set in a Middle Ages type setting (Game of Thrones, LOTR style). In the story, I have a race of people who are "faeries", based off of Celtic legend and lore. They're associa...
Traditionally we recognize 5 Senses in humans, but in building an alien race for my world I wanted to go beyond that. This is the first in a series of questions. This one is: How can a race express...
A class of organism, lithotrophs, use minerals (inorganic substrates) for energy conservation/reducing equivalents in biosynthesis. However such organisms on Earth are limited to single-celled pro...
While this is a hypothetical question, I am actually looking for a 'real-world' answer. This is my first time here, so please let me know if I should ask it somewhere else. So, let's say I am an o...
Specifically, how many 5 to 10 kilometer asteroids could you fit around the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points? Does the number change depending on which Lagrange point it is?
A scientist creates device that allows some degree of communication with the afterlife. The communication is very difficult and the dead can only pass small bits of information on, so there is a lo...
One of the big problems by manned space exploration and colonization, that it's insanely expensive. Building a colony on other celestial bodies - since it's impractical to bring back the acquired r...
What conditions are believable for a racial society majority to accept a racial minority, and those to reject them? I have two races. One is a racially pure majority and the other is a mixed breed...
This question is inspired by discussion in the comments of the question What kind of supernatural powers don't break the masquerade? TL;DR Suppose you want to create a world where beings with supe...
I was wondering if we could create science research submarines that are as large as military nuclear submarines. This is because I have not seen any large research submarines they all seem to be sm...
Can you get modern levels of health care, with no electric technology and no steam technology? Both electricity and steam are possible. Physics is the same as real life. Like... No Cavities No ...
If two planetary bodies were tidally locked to each other (e.g. pluto and charon) then could there ever be a situation where the smaller of the two bodies had the 'heavier' gravity? Could you ever ...
Horny and Hungry "You're like a father to me." "Yeah, I wish you were dead, too." "Thanks, Dad!" I have a world in my stories in which the inhabitants evolved from a race that practices s...
I was recently learning about pressure in my high school science class. I will admit that I am not extremely well educated in the subject and thus this may be an extremely stupid question. But anyw...
Conspiracy theorists love to talk about a group called the Illuminati that pull the strings of world events. While there have been several real (and many more imaginary) Illuminati groups, what wo...
Suppose a civilization in which every possible appliance is a bio-machine. There are automobiles, but each one has a human-like head under the hood. Each datacenter is a bunch of over-grown brains....
What I mean is: instead of a "rat" evolving into primates and those tree hugging primate becoming bipedal great apes, imagine a "rat" evolving into a dog-like or cat-like animal, then that animal b...
Modern education teaches citizens that the point of an individual in society is to contribute labor. In a world with limited natural resources, we use this idea to measure an individual's worth in ...
A human-like creature that doesn't have gender, can not procreate, and was engineered by humans. My story is stuck with a creature that is not possible in real life; I just went from science ficti...