General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Even disregarding the blatantly supernatural examples of demons and the like, some humanoid races in fantasy are depicted as having horns, or at least something similar to that, like bony protrusio...
I'm creating a planet inhabited by beings who have a body temperature that is colder than humans. What conditions on the planet would require them to have evolved this trait? Thanks
Inspired by this question: Sexual reproduction without biological sex And, to a lesser extent, this question: Would a society of simultaneous hermaphrodites have gender roles? I'm not particularl...
What are the fastest and slowest gestation rates possible in a humanoid species and/or a human sub-species? What does the gestation rate say about the species and vice versa?
Hominids lost any tails we had before we evolved away from the rest of the great apes, which is related to why you should never call an ape a monkey. What could lead to a hominid species re-evolvin...
What biochemical reactions might be employed by plants to harvest heat energy when light energy is scarce or even missing? What is the temperature range over which this biochemical reaction can wor...
Assume you have access to some very large amount of energy but there are no exceptions to currently known laws of physics (for example, you can't go faster than the speed of light). Is it possibl...
Earlier this year, a second alien saucer came to Earth and stopped 1 kilometer above the central African nation of Wakanda. The Wakandans are fine with this and refuse to let anyone investigate or ...
I'm inspired by this question and was thinking that it is nigh impossible for sun, moon and star to exist in this world and even if they do, there is no way to sun and moon to orbit and create day-...
(Warning: do not try this at home-system) Preamble Hello humans, we need advice. Let's say we have just successfully defeated and killed a Horror From Beyond Reason who happened to be multiple t...
A good friend of mine, who's a doctor, is very well traveled, and he told me he's seen skies of different worlds take all the colors of the rainbow (and the grayscale to boot). I suspect that he mi...
This probably sounds fairly ridiculous- I know, but in short I've been developing a sort of future earth. It's not extraordinarily accurate, but I've been trying to at least keep the obvious in che...
Original post: Imagine a world in which both left- and right-handed chirality appeared and evolved into a variety of complex organisms comparable to post-Cambrian Explosion Earth (both plant an...
Fantasy tends to have several races that are shorter than humans. With Dwarves, the size is explainable by the fact that they're usually depicted as subterranean-dwelling, and height would be a dis...
In my universe, humanity has learned how to open wormholes for transportation, how they are opened is irrelevant and can be hand-waved, what must be kept in mind is that when they are opened, two e...
After playing some HyperRogue, I got interested in the use of hyperbolic geometry in WorldBuilding, in particular how an area grows exponentially with respect to its radius. Let's say that the uni...
In the science fiction setting I'm working on, I had a thought on how to reduce the detection ranges in space. On a previous question, I suggested the idea of capital ships and other support ships ...
What would cause a short fantasy race, like dwarves, hobbits and/or goblins, to maintain their smaller size outside of the environment that produced it? I know that the exact height of these races ...
You may assume the rainfall will match that of a Tropical Rainforest at their wettest (304 in. annually). How would this change the landscape over time? (0-100 years)
Let's say we have a micro-gravity environment where people are staying afloat in the air because they have wings or some other means of resisting the low gravity, but then for some reason they find...
I am attempting to create fictional, stable P-Type binary system, featuring a gas giant in a stable orbit, with a habitable Earth-like moon. "Is a Jupiter-sized planet plausible in a habitable zone...
So I want to send a ship to Alpha Centauri very quickly - by this, I mean less than 5 years. This means that the ship will have to accelerate at 50-100 $g$ or even more. But we don't want to turn o...
The Rankine cycle describes the ideal thermodynamic cycle for a heat engine to produce the best performance and convert heat into mechanical work while it undergoes phase change. Is it possible for...
There are a lot of solutions for living in low gravity environments. (e.g. centripetal acceleration, linear thrust, etc.) But what about living on high gravity planets? Is there anyway to build or...
I saw this video, and I'm curious what color bark would be if the sun was in one position constantly. The video explains that birch trees are white because of stuff in their bark. The reason is be...
You know what they say, the best offense is a good defense, and with the Energized Particle Shield 9000 (patent pending) you will have the ultimate defense possible! The EPS units can be scaled up ...
Creature in question: appears humanoid, but secretes some sort of substance which befuddles humans around them. 'Befuddlement' is an inability to think properly, but not to a great enough degree th...
How could I calculate the habitable bounds, in relation to temperature, near the twilight zone of Gliese 667 Cc? Assuming an Earth-like atmosphere and no tidal working. Here are the numbers that ...
The creature I'm designing has a tail with spikes on the end of it. The material of the spikes should be strong/durable (not break easily), and very sharp (the edge as well as the sides, being able...
The platypus do it, so it can and is done, some how. It would be a waste of energy to be lactating the entire time after the egg is laid up until it hatches, so how does my alien race know when to ...
BACKGROUND I'd like my earth-like world to have a naturally formed narrow strip of land that bridges a major sea. Now, before anyone rushes off to comment about island chains and land bridges, I'l...
In my story, a colony ship has made landfall on a planet. At first there is not thought to be any sentient life there, but after a while it becomes apparent that this is not the case. The idea I ...
I have a box. It's slightly larger than a coffin. The interesting property of the box is that when I close the lid, all the of the matter inside is broken up into its subatomic particles and the pa...
Some research, and some answers from others, have suggested that a massive (planet sized?) sphere of gas in space, with no hard core, but breathable air inside some part of it, can create enough of...
Let's say there is a city, about the size of New York City, that is made only out of stone, steel, and glass. This city would be completely underwater. Assuming no humans are alive in this city, ho...
I want to have an intelligent life-form on a planet, but I want this life form to be technologically limited because of the lack of discovery of fire. What changes would have to occur in the atmo...
There is a species that is quite sentient. Its members know about the world, they have hopes and dreams and great aspirations of what they might do with their lives. They are intelligent, creative,...
I'm trying to create a massive contained zero-g environment that can sustain many life-forms including humans. The research that I'm doing doesn't make it look good. Seems like we just need gravity...
Say you have a planet and the planet has a moon: could the moon have visible satellites as well? I don't mean a gas giant planet, I mean something habitable by humanoids or humans. Will the moon'...
The world is a steamy tropical ball reminiscient of Earth in the time of the dinosaurs. There is no permanent ice cover anywhere on Earth. An arctic continent, entirely within the polar circle, is ...
Primary question If this world averages a visible light level of civil twilight (about 1000x dimmer than full daylight, or 500x brighter than full moonlight) during the day, what kind of plants ca...
I have a map for my new word but I am not sure how the climate and weather would realistically work on this map. Axis tilt and position to Sun is the same as Earth, with two moons.
I'm thinking of using this as a method of separating a planet's technological and cultural evolution, then having a sudden clash as the more advanced one becoming able to cross the storm belt. This...
Human's abilities to perceive light is quite limited. Essentially, we have three type of light sensors that each give a linear signal, and if two different light sources give the same signals they ...
Using this handy dandy graph, I estimate that by the time climate change forces a response we will need to reverse 2° Celsius of heating. The method for temperature control is described in here ...
If a star had a Dyson ring of some kind around it, such that to the naked eye the star wouldn't dim at all, how long would it take a civilization to reasonably see and understand the Dyson swarm, a...
Ten thousand random adults have been magically transported from Earth to an Earth-like planet with a surface gravity of 1.5g. The planet is otherwise completely habitable (enough sun, the right te...
I'm trying to build a world that is almost completely water, but I couldn't come up with an explanation for WHY the world was like this. The world has the same gravity and atmosphere of Earth. It a...
Linked: What would animal life on a methane world look like and how would it evolve? What would the conditions on a methane world be like? How would an intelligent race on a methane world achiev...
I want to create a gas giant planet. The parameters I would like for it to have are: It should have a large layer of gas within its atmosphere that living creatures including humans can survive an...
