Worldbuilding Stack Exchange
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1500 questions
32
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9 answers

How can a society function if everyone could just kill anyone by just thinking it?

Background - Imagine a world where suddenly everybody has a new power - all they have to do to kill someone is to think the thought. So say if Bill wants to kill John - he just has to think "I want John to die" and then John is dead. Some rules you…
Ollka
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How can an average person prepare themselves to verify their future time-traveler self's identity?

I'm just an average person. I'm not a millionaire with thousands of dollars to spare. I don't have any kind of special power. I'm not currently affiliated with anyone working on anything grand. I'm just a 20 years old college student trying to get…
ChocolateOverflow
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6 answers

Keeping a healthy immune system on a generation-ship

An old saying goes that if you have an army, it will want to fight a war. That seems to be true also for our personal army, our immune system: there seems to be various pieces of evidence that many of the allergies and/or autoimmune diseases some of…
L.Dutch
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15 answers

Are generation ships inherently implausible?

So I've been thinking about the idea of a series that takes place on a small fleet of generation ships, traveling at around 10% of lightspeed to Proxima Centauri, which should take around half a century. So the flaws here have been pretty well laid…
Adam Reynolds
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20 answers

My mysterious "ruins" wander around and change on their own, what'd be a rational way for them to do that?

Civilization is fairly young in my setting. Thus, the sheer number of ruined buildings and abandoned structures, found throughout the wilderness, seems strange. The ruins vary a lot: has-seen-better-days forts, modern suburb houses, post-communist…
Mephistopheles
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14 answers

How to catch creatures that can predict the next few minutes?

These creatures have the ability to see all possible outcomes within their vicinity within the next 30 minutes or so. This is not the same as foreknowledge that they have no choice over. Even if they foreknew that they will die the next day, they…
brendt
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7 answers

A medieval fantasy adventurer lights a torch in a 100% pure oxygen room. What happens?

Exactly what it says on the tin. Kleeber the warrior is wearing a gambeson and carrying the standard adventurer's gear (leather backpack, 100ft of hemp rope, bedroll, spare clothes, waterskin, dry rations, and the 10 foot pole, some metal knicknacks…
Mindwin Remember Monica
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Is there a standard terminology for female equivalents of terms such as 'Kingdom' and if so, what are the most common terms?

I'm writing a political system where women hold a higher rank in society than men. Almost immediately, I ran into an issue with the naming of locations. Now, if a land ruled by a king is a kingdom, a land ruled by a queen can be a queendom.…
Andrew Fan
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11 answers

Can there be plants on the dark side of a tidally locked world?

In my story, there is an Earth-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf, tidally locked to its parent star, with large oceans like Earth, two moons similar to ours and a thick atmosphere to distribute heat around the planet. On the dark side of the planet…
Johnara
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11 answers

Punishment in pacifist society

I'm building a race of plant-like creatures that are pacifists in a pre-industrial age world. Because they live hidden in forests, caves, etc. and often blend in with the natural flora, occasionally one of them is killed either on purpose or by…
DWShore
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12 answers

What should be done with the carbon when using magic to get oxygen from carbon dioxide?

So, I'm working on a flintlock fantasy series, and my protagonist is what's called an Arcane Engineer. This is someone who makes magical devices. Among those she has made there is a mask that let her breathe both underwater and in environments…
user53529
32
votes
15 answers

Starships without computers?

Say I've got a sci-fi setting where I have one faction using relatively advanced technology (think The Expanse, or pre-Covenant war UNSC from Halo, fusion rockets and high-yield magnetic accelerator cannons), but nothing that we couldn't…
FlyingLemmingSoup
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10 answers

How can solar sailed ships be protected from space debris?

So we all know that interstellar starships that travel at high relativistic speeds, like 50% c or above, would be very susceptible to getting destroyed just by a grain of salt hitting it during travel. We know we can stop this from happening by…
Galaxy
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26 answers

Keeping a retro style to sci-fi spaceships?

In my sci-fi world, mankind has begun colonization of the large asteroid Ceres. There are several established towns on the surface, but most of the population live underground in icy/rocky caves. The major industry is mining and exporting water-ice.…
Innovine
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24 answers

Close Quarters Combat... In Space

A simple enough question, but one that Grimmsdottir and I agonized over. Basically, what would enable close-ranged fighting between space fleets/ships? We both agreed that having gargantuan ships sniping at one another from billions of miles away…
Feaurie Vladskovitz
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