General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Planets that are larger and have higher gravity tend to have thicker atmospheres, since it is easier to hold onto gases. Higher air pressure leads to a higher air density, and therefore, a greater...
So, there was this pupet show about two characters, Mazsola and Tádé. They lived in a BIG pumpkin, that had been hollowed out and repurposed as a house. It looked something like this. Now, I k...
On the Earth's surface, we look back to an ultimately high tech evolution of computer hardware and according integrated circuit manufacturing appliances. The knowledge required to build robust mod...
Around 5 million years ago, a group of primates diverged from early Baboon ancestors migrated into Sicily becoming Triclopes (here's a rough mock up of what a Triclops skull might look like): som...
What will be the view of the sky and the distances between stars, living on a planet or in a habitat in a super galaxy that has merged with all its nearby galaxies in its cluster, at a time in the ...
Body: Boron-based lifeforms that use ammonia as a solvent and respires methane & hydrogen, with an atmosphere of mostly methane, hydrogen, nitrogen and in smaller percentages, acetylene & ...
Let us assume at some time in the near future, medical science perfects a biologically safe liquid air solution. It can fill up the lungs of the adult human subject and they can breathe it potentia...
A global epidemic of H1Z2 virus has rendered 95% of the population into zombies. The zombies have lost most of their frontal and temporal lobes so the following capabilities are either severely de...
So, centaurs are half-human, half-horse creatures that are usually portrayed in myth as wild, violent and animalistic. Now, I, Lucretius, found a good explanation why. The answer is in the growth ...
I am working on a planet with life composed of prokaryotic cells, like bacteria from earth but which have formed large organisms. What perplexes me is that I haven't found a single example about ba...
Rather than creating an entire world for my worldbuilding project, I was planning on adding an additional continent to Earth. Since the largest "empty spot" is in the South Pacific and one of my go...
My augmented society of humans have managed to engineer their power-hungry cyborg components to run on a hydrogen fusion reactor. Whilst they have so far managed to fuel it by drinking lots of wate...
Now a change from dragon questions: Let's move onto aliens based on mythological creatures! Most land creatures on the planet of Antiquoloci have a strange sensory system in place of a nose, doing...
I've got this ferret shaped land creature from a dream that can make its body expand so it looks sorta like a fat sausage with limbs. It sucks in air with its big mouth to expand. It lives on a wor...
A giant pacific octopus has around 250 suckers per arm that it can use to manipulate small items. If theoretically, one of these animals was given human intelligence, and of course proper medical t...
The Grey Alien trope almost always features a disproportionately large head, which often comes in unusual shapes to boot. There's nothing wrong with the trope, large brains are cool but what baffle...
So it seems that the Nuclear Handgun, Powergun and Absorbic Bomb have all been busted, but this one might be more interesting, Larry Niven's Wunderland Treatymaker. Description of how the weapon (...
I have a species of megafaunal carnivore that are extremely mobile with territories spanning hundreds of square miles and lifespans of 120-150 years. They lay clutches of 2-3 eggs every 20-30 years...
I'd like to randomly generate between 1 and 20 million stars for a spiral galaxy resembling our Milky Way. This is of course far fewer than our galaxy (estimated between 150 to 300 billion), but I'...
One trope seen in movies is mind control. This trope involves a person or thing taking over another person's body, whilst visual or auditory cues and friends try to help the original person regain ...
I was imagining a sort of post-apocalyptic/collapse setting, where a few centuries of climate catastrophes brought on by climate change cause essentially your general end of the world as we know it...
Suppose, for instance, you lived in a world filled with nasty monsters and other creatures of the night, all of whom wanted to kill you and eat you in various ways. Now, the good news here is that ...
Ecosystems like the african savanna have lots of megafauna which to some extent compete with each other for the same prey/vegetation, but still coexist just fine. So how do I construct similarly d...
I've seen several people independently come up with the idea of three or more sexes where one sex is responsible for brooding the young (pregnancy, pouch, feeding, something along those lines) but ...
In the game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, characters wear exoskeletons with an ability called "land assist", which allows them to slow down their fall using a jet of compressed air (or some speci...
In my world slimes are intelligent creatures of various sizes which can take the shape of anything they like and change color to camouflage. A slime can camouflage as floor , as a box, a snake or...
"The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal"”in fact, blacker than anything on Ea...
The cylinder is 32 km long in total, 8 km in diameter, with 3km long endcaps, resulting in a habital area with a length of 26 km (= and an area of cirka 754 km2). The main body of the cylinder is...
What exactly are the relevant numbers for such a calculation, and can it account for the color of the sky? By sky color, I mean the day to day hue that humans (or something else with very similar ...
So I was recently inspired by the answers that I saw on this stack exchange to the following question: Feasibility of H.G. Wells' Continuously-Exploding Atomic Bombs And it occurred to me that you...
The original, irish lore around banshees has it that they merely foretell the death of someone, but do not cause that death. American pop culture has changed this, so they do bring death and destru...
In my book series, I'm worldbuilding a planet whose culture is based on Celtic mythology and history, and in order to be consistent with real life I feel like the whole planet's environment needs t...
Let's say that there are some humanoid mammals that can talk like humans, and their voices are about the same (so not really high or low pitched). Some of them have different tongues too, really th...
A colony ship headed for its new home countless light-years from Earth suffers an unfortunate malfunction on the final part of its descent phase and crashes onto the planet. Thankfully, the ship cr...
Would it be possible to put hydrogen into a vacuum chamber and use something to turn it into a smaller version of a star? I am making a scene with a simulated planet environment in space and wanted...
On a distant, habitable world, humanity has observed a biological marvel. A creature that is primarily carnivorous, roaming its planet jungles and deserts, has been observed to be capable of manip...
I want to be able to graph the change in daylight hours across the year for a given latitude, to get an idea of what kind of cycle in available daylight people at that latitude would live through a...
We are using a Morris-Throne Wormhole Metric. Let's presume the throat of this wormhole (in internal hyperspace) is short, let's say 1km. Now, as you are travelling through the entrance wormhole,...
So in my setting there is a small and exclusive group of people that have access to devices that work like computers (but which are not the same as computers. They do not use semiconductors and ele...
On the earths surface, radar is pretty sweet. It apparently penetrates the atmosphere well and bounces back and can be detected. I think this has to do with the wavelengths absorbed by our atmosp...
I was zooming around on Space Engine and came across the moon of a gas giant that was hovering well above the galactic plane. I'm admittedly not well-versed in under what conditions an Earth-like p...
I have done some research and so much contradict one another or I simply fail to understand. Do seasons occur on a tidally locked planet that isn't tilted on its axis?
It's become a popular speculative evolution trope for the likeliest candidate of the mythological "wyvern" to be a Cenozoic family--if not superfamily--of scansoriopterygid dinosaur. Now the first...
The saying goes "a wolf in sheep's clothing", which is a biblical idiom to refer to someone pretending to be harmless. This got me thinking about if the reverse could also be true. So I came up wit...
Would abnormally high levels of cobalt on a moon cause it to appear blue to those on the planet it orbits?
We know that in biology, a species evolves to better survive its planet and its various climates and geography, which is mainly a result of natural selection. But, sometimes, this natural selecti...
There is a video from "What If" that tells about (precisely) "What if Earth was a moon of Jupiter":What if the Earth Was a Moon of Jupiter And, in a short story I am writing in an alternate realit...
I recently came across a few examples of a "quantum slime" entity, namely from Starfinder and Slime Rancher, that has the ability to make copies of itself via quantum superposition, and then cause ...
Leaving aside the matter of how well would humans fare on the surface of Mercury (we only have to factor in the weight of their life support: air, water, food and spacesuits), and assuming material...
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials. Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinos...
