General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In this world, there exist a race of humanoid people which, for simplicity, we'll call Rockfolk. Their skin is grey, and visually resembles stone. It is also exceptionally tough and durable, to th...
I am trying to create a planet that either has no oxygen in the air, or it has very little; i.e. not enough to sustain humans without the use of a breathing apparatus. Large portions of the planet ...
Yesterday while Green, Andy and I were recording new episodes for the podcast we stumbled upon a bit of a problem that we need someone with physics/astronomy knowledge to help out with. We want to...
I'm thinking of a plot where the Earth is taken over and literally eaten by a race of giant alien beings who use mass-energy conversions to power themselves (These guys are as big as the sun, body ...
I'm writing a scene set on a construction site where the builders notice that the cement they pour is not setting: it just remains in its liquid state or it is taking a very long time to set. This ...
My previous question was how to classify a domain (now superdomain) of duocellular life named Duotorusa. Anyone who has taken high school biology know that all life on earth are divided into th...
Many other questions, as well as a few online sources, all agree that in order for me to have multiple sapient species in my world, they need to be either separated by a natural landscape or not a ...
Starting with about 500 humans and allowing for 900 years to pass, about how many people would there be at the end? (Just asking for a rough estimate, maybe a range.) Assuming: People are general...
I've been thinking about writing a fantasy novel set on an earth-like world with Saturn-like rings. I've been doing some research here by looking up questions about worlds with rings, of which ther...
Let's say a carnivorous species loses all available food sources, and they begin to eat one another to survive. Let us also say that prion diseases are not an issue for this particular predator. As...
Many fantasy stories involve some variation of a dragon, and while there's a lot of variation in whether or not they fly, if they can breathe fire, how magical they are, etc., the strength of drago...
This is a water world with depths ranging from 2-3 kilometers deep up to vast shallows of only a few meters deep usually around volcanic islands, where there are coral islands not bigger than Hawai...
I am considering writing a fantasy novel. This novel would be set on an earth-like planet, but certain story details require that the planet have either a much larger or much closer moon than Earth...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing. We've got them in all forms, sizes & colours. They are everywhere and go everywhere else. carrying with them anything from music, over tractors, to foodstuffs a...
Current Settings Humanity could no longer access earth for some reason (it could be anything from alien invasion, third world war, ecological disaster, etc) starting at 2028, and they know about t...
I'm looking for a slower-than-light (STL) drive for fast inter-system travel. It should make trips from one planet of a system to another (e.g. Earth, Mars, Jupiter) with sublight speed possible in...
First, specifying format in this question I will be giving temperature ranges that sometimes appear backwards. This is because I am listing average temperature ranges from southern to northern lat...
How could a Faster than light drive be limited to only travelling between different solar systems, and not within a solar system? I don't really want to allow travel between planets in the same sol...
Let's assume the planet has only one half the mass of the moon and is covered by shallow ocean. To eliminate water pressure at extreme depths, assume the ocean is also quite shallow, with a maximum...
Enter the [Insert cool and awesome Latin name here] - this species is 3 times the size of a lobster from front to tail, and a powerful hunter. Operating in swarms, they are my worlds equivalent of ...
It's a few years from now, and an incredible breakthrough in medical science has occurred that allows doing an in-depth 3D analysis of a deceased person's body, allowing their brains and bodies to ...
So SpaceX and the like are well underway to colonizing the Moon, but they've hit a snag. The colonists, of course, need water--and lots of it, for drinking, preparing food, growing plants, breathin...
Writing about Fairies, the one thing I can't pin down is there reproductive cycle. My Fairies will be actual little mammals. Not just elementals who are born out of nature. I want them to have sim...
My planet Mass = 0.602 MEarth Radius = 0.870 REarth Density = 5.04 g/cm3 vesc = 9.3 km/s Temperature = 272 K My atmosphere 74.84% N2 22.04% O2 1.38% CH4 1.25% Ar 0.27% H2O 0.11% CO2 Mo...
Suppose an alternate reality where each human Society (country, clan, tribe, kingdom, or whatever) only give birth to one male per generation. That entire generation depend solely on that one male ...
Pssst! Come here! Imagine an ecosystem where animals have evolved highly developed mimicry of each other's calls (perhaps they have the universal vocal apparatus discussed in earlier question...
During the Permian and Triassic periods, all the continents had joined together to become the supercontinent Pangaea. Its size means that the majority of terrestrial life might have been confined ...
I am searching for a software capable of creating any planet ( like universe sandbox) with the ability of shaping the landscape and adding tags to any coordinates I wish to in order to represent ci...
Consider yourself a decision maker for a fledgling space infrastructure project. You've been tasked with establishing the first few extraterrestrial colonies for your species. What aspects of the...
So I decided to revive an old project which I was seeking assistance a year ago on the realism of the worldbuilding. WB links from the past: Reality of a tidally locked planet and Slowly Sculpting...
Is there anything that could change the colors of the clouds while still maintaining the sky blue? Or any other color for the clouds, except blue. You can use our solar system as a basis for this. ...
Suppose you had two intelligent species that came together and built a society or whatever. For the sake of example, we'll call them species A and species B. Species A evolved to see some subset of...
BACKGROUND I'm working on a medieval world in which homo sapiens domesticated several other species of intelligent hominids during their prehistory, at first enslaving them to take advantage of sp...
BACKGROUND The world I'm designing currently has a gas giant of the type known as a hot Jupiter orbiting close to the sun and causing solar flares. I would like the inhabitants of my Earth-like wo...
My planet Jasmi is 0.602 MEarth and, according to the wonderful u/shagomir's Planet Calculator Pro spreadsheet, I need to retain enough gas for just over 5 atm of pressure at sea level for a suitab...
Some of what I read in How could a 4D organism influence events in our world made me think in a different direction about a question I asked before. I'm trying to create a large sphere shaped fiel...
I'm building a world with almost weekly extreme windstorms, driving the residents to either live underground or in the 'wind shadow' of sealed-off valleys. To sum up the windstorms' power, "You kno...
So the Human World has fallen apart: the grid is down, governments have imploded, the economy is in shambles, people have died in the billions, global warming has made severe weather (much more) co...
Sci-fi setting where cargo is being shipped to colony worlds. If a spaceship has to land and take off again, that costs a lot of money, so that mode of transport is reserved for people and urgent, ...
1 degree of latitude = 96.57 km. Equirectangular projections. (Yes, I need to revise the polar regions to make sure they don't get squished.) Obliquity of Jasmi: +31.1 degrees. Radius of Jasm...
My world contains a race of creature that does not speak to communicate, they sing. They are humanoids, living in similar conditions as humans. They are intelligent, they have a complex langage, ...
So in my world I've got a mostly human like species but they've evolved to camouflage, specifically colour change. The world is an earth-like medieval fantasy. The different parts that appear to ch...
I need to heat my planet and I've decided that the two most plausible and controllable ways to do so are by increasing the amount of bombardment by meteoroids from a nearby asteroid belt, and by ti...
If all the rain for the next 24 hours fell in one go, say over 5 seconds, how would the world be different? We're assuming the same volume of rain falls in each place on the Earth as does now, for...
So I would like a coloured sky in my world, but I want it to be plausible. I'm not so good at science and the like but I've been doing a lot of research. If crystal-like asteroids filled with col...
I'll try to keep this question as concise as I can, but I'm not great with technical jargon, so a simplified answer would be greatly appreciated. Here's the set up: I have binary star system with...
A friend of mine was telling me about a story where a man clear cut a diverse ecosystem of plants in an area similar to size and shape of a small caldera (not necessarily a caldera itself). Eventu...
I'm writing a science fiction story based on: turning Jupiter into a star. colliding Callisto and/or Io into Ganymede to increase mass and changing the orbit to provide warmth, atmosphere, and r...
I sometimes think about the arrogant dwarf starsmiths in the question. How to blow up a star by accident? I pose the question in the voice of the dwarf, probably because I am hungry for down votes...
Is it conceivable that colonists/astronauts on a long term mission in a low gravity environment might use a low dose of an anabolic steroid (such as Equipoise) to prevent extreme atrophy in their m...
