General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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So this question is about a humanoid species I was thinking of: They are semi-immortal and live long life spans, which poses the problem of not having enough space for new memories after a long t...
I know that practially all other terrestrial invertebrates are inherently limited in size, primarily by their exoskeletons, and by their respiratory systems, which impose upper thresholds on their ...
I had an idea for a race of humanoids significantly larger than normal humans, but the females would need larger breasts than humans, for feeding bigger babies, obviously. How could their bodies ad...
Will be possible in the far future to use megascale engineering to create an artificial hollow moon to give Earth a big moon in the sky like in billion years ago? Since it would be hollow, it would...
In a universe where humans can take elective surgery to render themselves ruminents, what would be the effect of that surgery in regards to weight? To keep things simple: The surgery involves th...
Eskimos in space! Let's say, just for contextual concerns, that a band of water-rich comet miners want to use water-ice found in the outer Solar System as the main structural and functional compone...
I know it looks like a lot of topics but hear me out here. I am not talking about some nonsense explanation for this ability but more of an evolutionary process. Imagine that for numerous generat...
Context In one of my stories I am having a villain try to bring back the beauty of the giant arthropods in the Carboniferous period by genetically engineering his own personal, mega-pseudo-arthrop...
Cerberus was a three headed dog, commonly depicted with a collar and tail of snakes. Such an organism is quite difficult to justify, but how can such a creature appear that way? Is there a realist...
Premise I am in the formation phase of a fictional world. I would like one of its notable characteristics to be extremely large waves. On Earth, most of our large waves are triggered by earthquake...
A flaw very often pointed out in your run of the mill genetic terror story is the instant effect of genetic changes. What would it take for a specific change in the specimen to actually appear (ne...
Okay, so I have a species of tree that's absolutely enormous, 1-5km tall when fully matured. Its immense size is supported by a large base, bark that incorporates a 2-d carbon lattice for strength ...
I have been thinking about which mutants from Marvel are most realistic and Zeitgeist comes to mind. Long story short, his power is weaponized acidic vomit. He can spew it a few meters away at will...
Could humans sustain life after a k-t like extinction event? I know that a long lasting winter was a side effect then, but humans have technology to protect against cold. What other effects of an a...
If one had three humanly habitable planets with the same gravity but different atmospheric densities due to composition, namely Earth, one with a denser atmosphere (about 1.5x as dense) one wit...
I apologise in advance for the graphic nature of this question. I guess it just had to be asked. I am looking for a way to make the feces of my alien vertebrates some color other than brown or gr...
A submission for the Anatomically Correct Series. The VodnÃk (or Vodyanoy) are very interesting water spirits from Slavic mythology.They're described to have long green hair, and a face like a ...
Geckos use the van der Waal force to stick to things, an effect that humans can replicate and make various materials that utilize such (like extra sticky gloves). My question is, would these work i...
...and while I'm at it: You've another 47 seconds to finish up and get back here before I gotta throw her in reverse... Acting Navvy on the Marube @63kph and ~4km distance from a forthcoming t...
After further development in AI, will social networking sites create fake accounts like humans using AI and make this AI's to talk/chat to real people? They might do this to get money through ads ...
Okay, following my previous core question, after the apocalypse, one of my sets of survivors in this setting, the Usnay, managed to live in a fleet of ships for over a thousand years. This is pro...
I assume whatever organs are used for the bioluminescence must be inside the baby's abdomen and specialized for bioluminescence and since the glow is gone entirely at 6 months, those organs must di...
This question comes up from Is there a man-made or natural event that can cause an abrupt climate change within hours/a day? "“ trying to get KaguraRap a functional answer to an abrupt temperature ...
So far, we see an alien life form depicted based on earth type of animal kingdom, we see an insect like Zerg, a humanoid grey alien, etc. However sometimes we see alien like Guardians of galaxy's ...
So, I have a question that focuses on a character from a show, Spongebob. Sandy Cheeks lives in a reverse aquarium under the sea in Bikini Bottom, in a dome that looks like this The Treedome is m...
We have successfully put 37 trillion nanobots the size of a red blood cell into the experimental group test subjects' willing participants' bloodstream, but without a power source, the nanobots clo...
Usually, forms of life are associated with organisms like humans, plants and animals. The probability that such can evolve in an environment is very low due to the many constraints that have to be ...
I'm building a world where all continents are Islands. Since I was interested in giving a little bit of science backup on this particular thing, I decided that the weather was mostly windy and st...
I have a race of mainly insectoid aliens known as the Erepo who have virtually bioengineered a ecosystem around themselves. Now I currently have them using either organic systems they can "grow" or...
Context On my world, there is a lot of water: sea, oceans, ... There are also firm land and islands, so it's interesting to travel on the water. The problem is that there is NO wind at all, and lo...
I've got a group of magical people living mostly incognito in an ancient society. They look and act exactly the same as regular people, but they are really magicians, and a side effect of having th...
The Hoatzin is a jungle bird whose only remarkable trait, other than looking fabulous, is that their wings have fingers. Is it possible that these wing fingers could evolve into arms? What abou...
I am creating a planet where life exists on big islands of frozen methane around the poles. I did some research: from what I understand, methane freezes around -180°C, so I wanted it to be -190°C...
I'm writing a story where there is a large mining outpost built on a moon. This mining outpost is one large building holding around a thousand people, with an extensive system of passages and mine...
I'm making a species that turns the outer layers of its skin to stone, for defense purposes. It'll also have eyes that glow yellow, due to ingesting sodium vapor or helium. Is there some way to com...
A concept I've encountered a few times is aliens with "vastly" different biology than terrestrial creatures. In this case, I'm interested in replacing the parts that use oxygen with something a bit...
It's been said that sweating is the human way of shedding off excess heat. But to do that requires a loss of water, which makes the overall sensation miserable and uncomfortable. Are there othe...
I've heard several schools of thought. From a hard science standpoint, could there be gravity on the habitable surface of a Dyson Swarm plate? I keep thinking no. But if the outer shell were to b...
In a world I am building, I would like to have the moon change color when seen from the planet's surface as it goes through its phases (e.g., the crescent after new moon is blood red, a quarter moo...
So, a visitor (whether they be from another planet or another reality) gets deposited on the face of the Earth. They find that the air's breathable, that water and suitable macronutrients are avai...
Note: an edit has been made to the main question at the bottom A couple of years ago, I had a worldbuilding project which I have recently revived. I was relatively new to worldbuilding back the...
Back home, Venus is a twin planet with serious issues. The average surface temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit, atmospheric pressure is 92 times greater than ours and carbon dioxide makes up 96%...
I've been wracking my brain about a world I'm writing in, how to make some group of regular people able to survive in space for extended periods with or without a suit. I can reduce the amount of t...
One idea I've always wanted to try writing is the concept of vampires exploiting their lack of a need to breathe and generally low-maintenance biology to escape the brunt of the sun's rays by livin...
Let's suppose a solar system: A main-sequence star similar to the Sun. G2V or so. A Hot/Warm Jupiter HJ with a semi-major axis somewhere from 0.5 AU to 0.0001 AU. An Earth-like planet EL with a s...
Assuming we never break Newton's third law, in the near future thousands of chemical/nuclear/electric powered spaceships will be flying through our solar system expelling reaction mass. Since a g...
I was amazed when I learned that Jupiter rotates on its axis once in only 9.8 Earth hours. (Yes, you can call me uneducated!) What if the rotation period was 24 Earth hours? What would change in th...
For a complex world-building scenario I want a habitable moon orbiting a habitable earth-like planet. The habitable moon should allow for flora, fauna and landscape as similar to earth as possible....
An alien species has created a weapon. The alien stands on a planet, points the weapon at the ground, and pushes a button. A large amount of matter condenses itself into a mass, creating a huge hol...
Can a rocky planet have these qualities and exist: half of earth's gravity 4/5 earth radius a magnetic field capable of retaining an atmosphere a slightly slower rotation than earth can sustai...
