General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Say I have a moon orbiting a planet. Due to tidal locking, if we model the moon as a sphere, there exists an axis which passes through the center of the moon which is always pointed toward the cent...
I'm pretty much looking for an easy (or not) formula for calculating the mass and/or weight of fantasy creatures on an Earth-like planet with similar gravity. My world's dragons sometimes reach ove...
I'm going camping in two weeks and I really don't want to get bit up by mosquitoes. So I want to figure out a way to commit total genocide of all mosquitoes in at least a 20 mile (32 KM) area aroun...
We all know how fiction likes to play fast and loose with nanomachines. But really, what would they be capable of in real life, assuming you had an utterly arbitrary amount of them? What would the ...
I have a tidally locked planet on a circular orbit, with an axial tilt of 22.5° That means one side is always in the sun, the other one in the shade. The subsolar point moves along a north-south l...
I have two planets that share an orbit around a pair of stars at a distance of 2.05 Earth-AU from the Barycenter of those two stars. (I can provide more details about the two stars, if needed) Usi...
So, the United Terran Federation and the Qulian Star empire have been in really bad terms lately. Wars, skirmishes, it pretty bad. So, the UTF and QSE have made an agreement. No ships piloted by ci...
I've recently decided to revive an old project of mine involving an alien planet. Unfortunately, however, I was not as good a worldbuilder then as I am now, and that's having some consequences. Ba...
Due to the outcome of this question (Is there any way to Terraform Ceres?) I am now working on the concept of shell worlds. Docking would be done by large spires with adjoining rings where once th...
A roughly earth-size planet orbits a cool G-class star, but barely within its circumstellar habitable zone ("Goldilocks zone") allowing liquid water. It has a shallow inclination and and lackluster...
By that, I don't mean what type of structures, I mean under which part of the Earth? It's an extremely densely populated nation. As densely populated as many major cities - think Hong Kong and more...
Say for instance we had a humanoid creature. how would they achieve flight by taking in a gas then expelling it at a greater pressure from a point on their body like the feet, back, or hands?
Suppose that there is a species of dogs that are much more intelligent than humans and can speak. The humans know that the animal is smarter too. The only reason these animals can't rule over human...
If a planet has a core of super-dense material, how might that effect the geological composition of that planet? Specifically: imagine a lunar-sized planet, with earth-like geology and density. If...
Imagine a gas giant orbiting Sirius B, a hot Jupiter. 120 million years ago give or take, the star reaches its final stage as a red giant then collapses into a white dwarf, ejecting countless billi...
Far in the future, I have a bomb about to detonate in the skies above my city, a real city/province killer. A hero dramatically manages to enclose the bomb at the moment of detonation in a living c...
Some hundreds of years ago, all humanity was removed from the Americas. In fact, most humans are gone from the world altogether. In the intervening time, nature has overrun the formerly human domin...
Is it possible to have an atmosphere that is essentially fog, but still be breathable by humans? I'm basically looking to have an environment where visibility is very low (for suspense reasons) ev...
While working on my story, I just came up with this doubt. Is it possible to know or to detect something like a submarine in an ocean from an aircraft with our current technology? I mean to detect ...
In the "Warlords" Universe Ceres is the diplomatic and economic hub of the asteroid belt dominated by the rule of the 'Governor' and the 'Intercessor' (The Speaker for the Hegemon herself). Now I'...
I'm looking for a weapon a ship can carry that can disable a ship without any permanent damage to its subsystems or significant hull breaches. This will mostly be used by pirate factions (capturing...
So far as I can research, all rivers on Earth are flowing water. There are other substances that are liquid at room temperature. Are there any natural processes that could create a river of somethi...
So, on the planet Qualis, a reptilian species, known as the modern Qualians, evolved about 200,000 years. Before that, most fighting was down with claws and teeth, and the Qualian ancestor that had...
In Charles L Harness's 'The Paradox Men', a spaceship crashes on earth several years before it launches, having circumnavigated the universe faster than the speed of light. It is a good read, but ...
A secret group of environmentalist ultra-extremists has engineered a virus (or virus-like pathogen) with the purpose of making all of humanity extinct (yes, including themselves). They are aware th...
A lot of people are probably familiar with this sort of handwavium in fiction when it's asked where a shapeshifter's extra mass comes from. Most choose to ignore that question. In works that preten...
I would like to know what would happen if a new virus arose which could not be cured and which managed to escape the infected areas (and any quarantine zones). In order to scope this question I'm n...
Edit: I've written an answer of my own now, and I'd appreciate it if any of you informed on the subject of evolution could review it, then inform me of its plausibility, via the comments (Of the a...
The idea of "Flat Space", an area of space-time with minimal, preferably zero, gravitational curvature, is an important concept in many Sci-fi universes, often those with "jump-drive" based FTL tra...
Just how gravitationally flat are real Lagrange Points? Many classic "jump drives" require "flat space" in order to fire, the classic diagram of Lagrange Points as shown below suggests ridges or pl...
I'm imagining an Earth-like world with a single large continent centered on the north pole, and not reaching entirely to the equator. As ocean currents play a large role in shaping weather, I'm cur...
In my last question, How large could my sea serpents be?, I asked what length would be a) possible and b) necessary for a whale-eating sea serpent. My sea serpent is a constricting predator* in a c...
Setting A nuclear war between two superpowers happens, and nuke after nuke is fired at nearly every country on the globe. The war, which lasts for about 4 hours, kills over 3 billion people, and m...
Dyson spheres are a staple of science fiction. Solar system spanning megastructures, they represent a significant effort by whatever species chose to build them, and a significant mass moved into t...
In an alternate Earth, coral has been extinct for over 400 million years. In their place were the following: Bivalvia (clams, oysters, mussels) Cirripedia (barnacles) Canalipalpata (bristle-foot...
Can humans survive by eating only nails and hairs of their own? As they grow they consume their own hair and nails. Hair includes even body hair. What is the maximum number days a human can surviv...
I am creating a world in which a civilization has achieved advanced spaceflight and has begone colonizing other planets in their solar system that is similar to ours, but with more planets. However...
How would fire honey be useful and manageable to a beehive/bee colony? Info In this scenario, bees harvest nectar from a particular flower. The nectar is not only spicy from capsaicin, but litera...
EDIT: (Important) M. A. Golding commented that the regalecid method of locomotion would be unfit for a constricting predator, so I have completely redone the taxonomy of the sea serpent. They are n...
So, here's my issue. My setting's central conceit is that a myriad of human societies developed at relatively concurrent times across a large system separated by only a few light-hours. (There are,...
I'm trying to "build" a world in which the moon is always visible at night, and only at night, to the majority of areas on that world. I've been told that an L2 Legrange point could be a viable con...
Alright, so I'm working on a setting with dwarves in it. I've been thinking that, to make things more interesting, certain clans would have the cone cells in their eyes see infrared light instead o...
I'm wondering if it is plausible that a large asteroid (interstellar in origin? Or, perhaps launched from the Kuiper Belt by something big with a lot of gravity?) would be able to smash into Luna a...
I'm writing a story and I was wondering on the feasibilty of having a set of bio-engineered vocal chords that would have a voice modulator built in to help disguise the characters voice, would it b...
I had an idea about a lineage supposedly cursed so that the women only give birth to more women, but I'm thinking that some outside force purposefully mutated/altered their DNA to cause the effect ...
I am designing an alien civilization for a story, and I am currently in the biological part. They will be oxygen breathers, so they will need to have that oxygen delivered inside their bodies, and ...
I'm developing a silkworm that spins webs of a particular kind of "silk" and weaves thin, fragile webs. The magic part of this is that it also spins wind. The following addresses how this works and...
RIDGEFIELD PARK, NJ "“ April 2, 2019 "“ Samsung Electronics America, Inc. announced that the new, award-winning Galaxy S11 and Galaxy S11+, which have been recognized by smartphone reviewers worldw...
Why this question is different from existing questions... The closest question to mine is Anatomically Correct Cerberus. It is clear from the answers to that question and indeed it's axiomatic to ...
Imagine I have a device that can stop time for the person who holds it (similar to Bernard's Watch). This device works in a very specific way - it creates a bubble around the user (just large enoug...
