General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In my military sci fi story in which a squad of private contractors have to contend with hostile creatures reliant on scent and mechanoreception to hunt, I wanted to keep the sci-fi 'hard' and plau...
When Lilith was kicked out of the garden of Eden, she was forced to fend for herself in a harsh, unforgiving world. Lost and alone, she came upon a bloke named Satan. Their love produced two childr...
If humans lived on the inside of the earth's crust, what would happen if they climbed mountains? These mountains would stretch toward the burning center of the Earth. Would gravity get stronger the...
In Game of Thrones the Targaryen family had special heritage allowing them to ride their iconic beasts of war. I want to ground this in reality. Is there a way for heritable trait to allow you to b...
I have some plasma life forms that have evolved within the photosphere of a star and also capable of existing on a neutron star and the ergoshpere or accretion disk of a blackhole. This lifeform c...
So, my setting operates with some futuristic tech, which turned out to be pretty lame (especially nanomachines, they're just fancy pants medicine). Therefore, to spice things up, I encased it in a ...
I've been trying to answer this question for a premise involving a cyborg being out of touch with modern civilization for a prolonged period of time, and the roadblock I keep hitting is that counte...
The purpose of this question is to know whether or not organic tissue can be used to power and android. Compared to a nuclear cell or an ordinary battery this doesn't seem efficient, it needs food,...
This is a slight continuation of my other post where I was trying to create realistic hollows with weather due to temperature changes due to bio minerals called Hearthstones. I was wondering if pla...
The pillars are spread out about a mile apart each, and they all come straight from the ground, slowly gets just a smidge smaller in the middle, and then get bigger near the top, reaching a height ...
For my story there exists a fictitious element with special properties. In its pure form is most closely resembles metal (for its physical properties) This material is quite abundant in salt and o...
In my fantasy world, wraiths are a species of shell-less, regressed crustaceans. They lay their eggs inside animal skulls, using them as shells. The wraiths' bodies are incredibly weak and they can...
I'm working on a story where there is a crime scene where the protagonist (who has a superhuman sense of smell) notices a scent that smells like human corpses due to their abilities. I'm wondering ...
My friends and I are building a world with a 50 mile high volcano on it. The mountain is the result of some bored god deciding to play a joke on everyone. Or, some other god got angry and decided ...
In large doses, the body's ability to change cyanide into thiocyanate is overwhelmed. Large doses of cyanide prevent cells from using oxygen and eventually these cells die. The heart, respiratory s...
The exoplanet in question is Proxima Centauri b. How might the mid-to-upper-level atmosphere of that planet be dangerously radioactive and full of airborne nuclear reagents, without it being the do...
My planet is a frozen world. Roughly the size of earth and in a perpetual ice age. The planet has very cold temperatures at night and during the day its surface becomes very bright. The intense sol...
While reading this question about how non-primate mammals could develop a bipedal stance, I became curious about the broader reasons why animals could evolve to walk on two legs. I found some insi...
The "Weird" spell in my world is basically a magical version of the US government's goals with the "MK Ultra" project from the 1950s: it induces a shared hallucination in every creature within a 9....
I'm worldbuilding a story, where a famous string theorist hires a student of mathematics to try construct a new theory. For better drama, my premise of the story is that the student never learned m...
Suppose, for instance, you lived in a world filled with nasty monsters and other creatures of the night, all of whom wanted to kill you and eat you in various ways. Now, the good news here is that ...
The organisms in the oxygen based ecosystem we have today is perfectly adapted to each other. The ocean is filled with water, and on land it falls from the sky. Plants, algae and cyanobacteria spli...
Nurgle comes from the Warhammer 40K universe, he is described as being the lord of plague or the god of diseases, decay, and destruction. I will, however, take away his god like attributes, and tr...
For context, I was reading about various research groups installing implants and cameras onto insects to use them as reconnaissance drones in high risk areas. I'm wondering how feasible it would ...
A radical shift in the Earth's orbit has made the Earth much colder, with all the oceans freezing over, and the atmosphere liquifying and falling as rain. Humans live deep underground in areas of h...
An alien automatic "beacon" tries to warn us about some imminent danger. It does so with launching a succession of large "veils" in front of their star so we can detect them via the transit method....
This is a question for an alien species. Is there anyway to scientifically justify having two separate beings/creatures that depend on each other for life? In other words, two separate bodies tha...
In the anime, called Attack on Titan, the primary antagonists are these huge, humanoid creatures, called titans. Titans have sizes between 15 and 4 meters. Larger titans aren't unknown, but they s...
This linked video explains who and what Dr Manhattan is and what are his super-powers Dr. Manhattan's Superpowers EXPLAINED. Dr Manhattan character is from Watchmen Here some quotes from Wikiped...
These humans must never see the ocean and should still be able to survive. They can only get out of the land if they improve the technology level. Is it even possible? The lakes or seas should prob...
I am building a setting that is essentially steampunk,being exact it would be pneumatic punk. What electronics and electronic equivalent exists, are primitive and extremely expensive. Thus the majo...
This is the world's tallest tree--the coast redwood. It can grow as high up as 115.5 meters. Any taller, and the transportation of water in its vascular tissues would not climb all the way. Bu...
I'm working on a concept for a habitable world with venus-like atmospheric pressures, where humans have settled onto huge tabletop mountains where the atmosphere isn't as crushing. This is a terraf...
Why and how could an organism evolve to make its bones or exoskeleton out of a UTH (Ultra High Temperature) ceramic like TiB2, WC, B4C, or TaHfC? Is it even possible?
My project concerns a world "A", that is a moon of a gas giant "Jovi", in a solar system with no other planets to speak of and a host star much like our own. "A" is Earth-sized, has no magnetic fi...
As the title: I want to know what kind of organs or modifications need for plants like tree to gain energy from lightning or electricity (and still fine or safe or alive of course). Since I have a...
We have all heard what too much CO2 can lead to, but so far the biosphere have never been exposed to too low levels of CO2. But what if it did? And please, this topic has nothing to do with the ong...
In my world, a hyper-intelligent AI has struck out on their own to form a perfect, mechanized empire, populated by loyal robot citizens, devoted to the overlord as a child would be devoted to their...
I'm working on a version of wormhole-based FTL travel, and one of the side effects of passing through the wormhole is going to be instantaneous heating of every molecule of the thing passing throug...
Suppose an extra-solar object the size and mass of the Earth, travelling at a speed of $26\ \mathrm{km/s}$, the same of ʻOumuamua (the first known interstellar object crossing our solar system), h...
A federation of alien spacefaring nations is doing basically the opposite of prime directive: they are jamming the Solar System, preventing us from leaving it. They are doing so by placing some de...
The moon is made up of a substance called warpstone. This rock is solidified Mana compressed into physical form. Pieces of the moon will sometimes fall to earth, which contain magical properties an...
In the story I'm writing, three humans with stone-age technology and no knowledge of space accidentally awaken thousands of cryogenically preserved humans. These humans immediately get to work on...
Following on from this question. Question Context : Mars second moon Deimos has been converted into a generation ship. A considerable portion of its mass has been shaved off during the process &...
Mass of star: 0.75 M☉ Radius of star: 0.69 R☉ Surface temperature of star: 4,620° K Luminosity of star: 0.2 L☉ Satellites: 2 Place in solar system: 2nd Mean radius: 8,725.1 km Mass: 2...
Imagine a world that does not rotate in its axis, the planet is not tidally locked so no half is hotter or colder than other. For example the planet does not rotate because it is in a binary sistem...
What I'm looking at doing is a small game where you land on a planet, and the atmosphere is not survivable by a human being, but there is local life. Over the course of the game, terraforming has t...
I have been playing with the ideas of electricity generating/attacks for my characters using either electric organs similar to electric eels or some sort of bio battery using bacteria that produce ...
I came across this interesting weapon by H.G. Wells, from his novel, The World Set Free, about a special type of atomic bomb that will explode indefinitely. Here is a description on Wikipedia: ...
My friend and I are working on this world called Roia. It shares many terrestrial properties with the real life earth: composition, axial tilt, distance from the star, presence of water, etc. You c...
