General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In an alternate timeline, Ceasar lives, forges an alliance by marriage with Egypt and dominates the entire Mediterranean. He then performs a raft of economic and political reforms that basically sk...
Everyone knows that water is necessary for life because it is such a good solvent, but could a lifeform use water vapor as a solvent instead of water, or any other gas that works a solvent instead ...
What would Germanium based life look like and what conditions would favor it. I know that it's not that common but I am going to handwave that. What would be the resulting look for such a lifeform...
Writing a science fiction where the air outside is not breathable for long periods of time. Some characters get high from the air, but large amounts of it cause the user to become paralyzed or blac...
Boats and balloons both work because of buoyancy - they are pushed up by a force equal to the weight of displaced water/air respectively. I want my (otherwise earthlike) planet to have 'seas' of a ...
What can cause water to be foam-like, in lumps, but still liquid? Something similar to goo (jelly like but liquid and opaque)? I have a planet and such kind of water, which is drinkable and the te...
Are there any such world elements that would seemingly randomly cause creatures to faint for extended periods of time, ranging from a few minutes up, but revert before they started suffering perman...
On a timescale of 1e11 years, all uranium and thorium will have decayed, but planets will still exist, orbiting red dwarf stars. Would it be possible to use lead as a nuclear fuel? In principle, t...
If a Galaxy-wide Civilization like Star Wars were to build a Jupiter brain or Matrioksha brain, would it probably cost more to build then the Death Star? In Star Wars the Darth Star was over a tri...
In a lot of media one can see moons or other planets that cover a significant portion of the sky (like the background on this page for example). This could be because the moon is actually large or ...
Vantablack is very dark, absorbing 99.965% of light. I've also heard it absorbs waves beyond the visible spectrum. Does this mean planes painted with Vantablack would be invisible to radar? If ye...
Take the Jovian moon Ganymede as a real-world example. It has an orbital period of ~7 days around Jupiter, which is effectively its day and its year simultaneously. My characters will need the wo...
What sort of life could live in a ocean with no bottom. In this scenario, there is no seafloor, no matter how far down you go. Once you exit the continental shelf, it plunges straight down into inf...
I've been playing with ways to make my world interesting, and also further justify the limited use of ferrous metals. One idea I had was that my world might undergo regular and intense geomagnetic ...
What would cause a place to be always misty? It is in a Fantasy setting, but I am looking for a feasible explanation.
If some kind of insane wizard began a ritual that would turn the inner core of the earth into gold, what would happen? Over the course of 15 days, the entirety of the core will become gold. Each ...
Believability of a fantasy creature can go so far. Case in point--the title feature. I have first seen it on a Ringwraith's winged mount... ...then on Smaug... ...and finally on the dragons...
So, I don't believe that the "angelic" type winged human can exist (y'know, the kind with the feathery wings sprouting from the back). Too many problems of anatomy, weight, etc. But I am trying to ...
Intro: I have gone some way to make airships more preferable over land-based transport in my beautiful conworld. E.g. making tunneling harder & making flying easier. Though there's plenty left ...
It's now the late 23rd century and there are now hundreds of space stations, orbiting approximately at the height of the (now deceased) ISS, give or take a few kilometers. Lately, the International...
From the dawn of fantasy fiction, dwarfs have most often been described roughly in the same way: short and stocky, long beards, can smith stuff, good fighters, can live for hundreds of years aging ...
If a hostile group wanted to render Earth or an Earth-like planet completely unfit for human life, what could they do to go about achieving that end? By uninhabitable, I mean a planet on which hum...
On my quest to make pretty much every single fantasy creature biologically feasible I have come across a hiccup. It wasn't angels, no you people helped me with that. Demons are easy, we have plenty...
As many here likely know, one of the factors that make both Mars and Venus uninhabitable to humans are their lack of a magnetosphere to keep solar winds out. In the setting I am working on, I want...
The idea is in a world with 2x the gravity (which follows from 2x the size), gravity would have less an impact in the oceans. Does that follow?
Given that the surface gravity on the Moon is a fraction of Earth and there is virtually zero atmospheric pressure but I still want to wet our beloved moon with whatever liquid that is known to sci...
Considering a civilization that was here far before everything we know of, lets say around time of Gilgamesh. Warm climate, almost no winters, near the ocean with enough rivers, and people being ab...
In this world, the continents never split off from each other. They stayed connected into the one giant landmass called Pangea. Humanity developed on this supercontinent, separated by landmarks ins...
The bonegrass fields are full of other life, despite their dangers. Lots of insects, some birds, and even a handful of reptiles have adapted to the paralytic nature of the air in order to reap the ...
I just thought of something. Carnivorous and dangerous monsters are often depicted as common and dangerous enemies in fantasy, especially things like RPGs, but in real life herbivores far outnumber...
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...
In my world, similar to our earth, a person has the ability to create gravitational "spheres". He can: modify its location vary the force move the sphere (once created) select what or ...
BACKGROUND A corruption has seized hold of the land, turning great swathes of it into a poisonous waste that humans may only enter at their peril. Perhaps all who enter the waste grow sick or go m...
A common topic in alternate history fiction works is the question what would have happened if a major war had been won by the other side. These usually focus on the events after the war, and the ch...
I am creating a board game that requires an underground cavern world, with huge pipes that pump air for the civilization living there. The underground region is at about 35-40 degrees north latitud...
Imagine that we start expanding the International Space Station until it becomes a ring encircling the whole Earth. Then we started widening the ring until it met at both poles, forming an orbital ...
I'm looking for a science based answer based on current technology. Given that we do commit some small amount of resources and time to searching for stellar objects, with our current technology, ho...
This question assumes that there is complex, intelligent life on some other world other than the kind found on Earth. Carl Sagan allowed that silicon and germanium might replace carbon, and ammon...
I'm looking into the destructive power of a 5km asteroid strike, a bit smaller than the k-Pg event. How does the angle of the strike affect the destructive capability of a land-based impact. For e...
How can I make a colonizable planet/moon that receives intense UV/x-ray radiation on parts of its surface while receiving much less on the rest of it? The most obvious way of doing this is to have...
Assuming that some future civilization of hyper-advanced humans, or aliens for that matter, had the technology to reshape the solar system so that there were several habitable planets the rough siz...
Many factors in history have contributed to society's taking a long time to accept the heliocentric (= the Earth orbits the Sun) model: the first that come to mind immediately are religion and, mor...
In this scenario, I've done the following changes to the western United States. 1) Only the Rockies stand firm, so no Sierra Nevada or Coast Range. 2) The coastline has altered as though 75 met...
BACKGROUND So I was working on a map, when I suddenly realized that despite the many helpful tutorials on this site I have very little idea what I'm doing. I thought it might be a good idea to put...
This article references breaking ice through resonance, but is not specific enough for my case: Resonance method of ice destruction I have a situation where I would like a robot character to break...
Let's suppose that there is a canyon, several hundred kilometers in length, stretching from Leipzig to Geneva and reaching the depth of 30 kilometers. It is up to 60 kilometers wide, cutting throug...
QUESTION I was thinking about ways of justifying practical balloon flight for a pre-industrial civilization, when I remembered that some microorganisms produce methane, and better yet, hydrogen. ...
I inherited a worldbuilding project, and the former authors liked some things that seem unrealistic. One of them is that one of the world's biggests rivers splits into two other rivers some 300-400...
Purely geography only. I'll break down into points. What I'm giving you below is just to narrow down the possibility, but otherwise, quite arbitrary. Assuming a large archipelago of islands exist...
Let us say that someone is 10 times faster at thinking or reacting than the quickest human, assume that they can survive these feats and their muscles can perform them and their senses detect them....
