General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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My time traveller from the distant future is about to get stranded back in time, but realises that by travelling back a short time, maybe 100000 years, he is going to leave a trail of destruction b...
Now octopuses are quite smart already capable of camouflage and puzzle solving. given this I was wondering whether Octopuses could Convergently evolve sapience (human level intelligence) and wha...
Set in a distant future, reports of alien and drug traffickings have been on the rise and there was mounting pressure for Mr User6760, president of intergalactic interpol to resign. The traffickers...
Somewhere on DeviantArt, there is an insightful tutorial by someone named "Uzlo" on how to create anatomically believable angels. Among the instructed details is the possibility of developing a se...
At speeds near the speed of light, interstellar particles and gas may affect the movement of the ship, and microscopic particles may even badly damage the ship. Would not it make sense to make the ...
EDIT: Calculations were incorrect, the earth in my comic is not 5.8x larger, it is 2.4x larger. Its surface area is 5.8x larger but the diameter is 2.4x larger. Anyway I'm working on a comic tha...
A long time ago, the 60 foot long Megalodon roamed the oceans. Fast forward to 2.6 million years ago and they went extinct. In the story I'm writing Megalodon hasn't gone extinct surviving at least...
I don't know much about hurricane/cyclone and how to created it (nor know the difference much, so bear with me if i make mistake), so I want to know what kind of plant organs or ability need to ach...
How might an enterprising spacer, mining the rings of Saturn, go about quickly measuring/estimating the velocity of and distance to a nearby moving object (asteroid, habitat, pirate, etc)? Bonus po...
Tetrapods evolved fingers from the inner-bones of the fins of lobe-finned fish, could hands ever evolve from ray finned fishes if they were to become fully terrestrial, from a mud skipper ancestor?
For a story, I need to find a way to justify the limited cognitive capacities of an entire race that thrives on biomass, capable of eating anything that is inherently biological. This race is dri...
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Melalo, described in the Book of Creatures website as "the oldest and most feared of Ana's children." His name literally means "filthy", "dirty" or even "obscene"....
I'm working on a bioweapon created by an extraterrestrial agent. The being is 2.5 m tall, humanoid, digitigrade, intelligent and mostly predatory. However, it does not require water, food or oxygen...
Tengu are humanoid creatures with many avian features, including wings and beaks. Now, this is a problem when it comes to disguises. Disguises in this setting work by covering one's body in utilit...
There has been materials science research on materials that can harden and soften at need. In nature, we have the example of the sea cucumber, which can go from a squishy compressible state to a r...
Though this applies to lizardfolk and most creatures with a snout as well, I'm having trouble giving more facial expressions to dragons. Sure, they can wink, bare their fangs and laugh out loud and...
My fantasy setting is on a wet and humid world of innumerable islands; many of which are quite mountainous. With conditions ranging from Mediterranean to Tropical. The culture here experience onl...
I'm curious what factors a terrestrial planet impacting the Earth would require for the impact to cause negligible damage to the larger planet, while destroying the Earth.
Imagine a spaceship entering Earth's atmosphere, it has lost control of its engines and is relying on its reverse thrusters to decelerate before crashing into the Pacific ocean. So in an attempt ...
What modification would a plant "” especially tree "” develop in a world where everything is made of sugar, caramel, cake, syrup, soda, etc.? Think of something like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factor...
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was ...
The creature was originally a human, altered by an external agent that basically remade its body (carbon based). The creature is roughly 2 meters and relatively light. It is humanoid and boneless, ...
I've been told that having a thicker atmosphere would make it easier to fly, particularly of heavier-than-air designs, so I'm interested in giving my planet such conditions. I'm mainly interested t...
A magical calamity has wiped out an area about twice as big as Germany. The calamity also altered the climate in the region from one supporting forests and grasslands to a desert similar to the Am...
My creature, called the Kurbish, inhabits a wasteland-world, in my universe. Recently, I have been wondering; "How plausible is this thing, really?" A description: Large, Elephant-like creatures ...
So in my world there's a creature as big as a common rodent or as big as a rabbit in size. They live in packs, usually burrowed, but occasionally come to surface to get food. The alpha male is task...
so i want to know What organs or modifications are need for a biological creature to develop lethal force as a pooping machine gun. something like how skunk spray their stinky odor as defense mec...
Please note: I am asking about planet orbiting a star, not a moon orbiting a planet. So I've been trying to get this planet down for a long while now but there are still so many pieces of the puzz...
Scenario: Humans need to create a pull factor for people to move to and establish cities and economies in less comfortable and densely inhabited places, because they're a bit full already. The huma...
I have a solar system containing multiple planets, most having an intelligent species inhabiting it. To keep a common peace, they created a large government system to help stop territorial wars bet...
You are 70 years old but you look 50, this because you have always maintained good health, mentally and physically. After experimenting with various clones before, you decide it's time for you to ...
Ecosystems like the african savanna have lots of megafauna which to some extent compete with each other for the same prey/vegetation, but still coexist just fine. So how do I construct similarly d...
I've got my wizards, who operate by vanilla human biological laws and metabolism. They've got an organ in the pelvis which has its own mechanism - not breaking the laws of physics - which stores en...
The human brain is a jackass. Your senses are capable of processing large amounts of information to the senses. However, the brain blocks most of this out of the consciousness in order to allow thi...
While I'm working on the Magical Artillery, let's look at another common spell. Mage Light is a very handy invention. When cast, the spell creates an orb, 13 cm in diameter. The orb radiates whi...
Pegasuses in most works of media are often depicted as hexapods with four legs and two wings: The only problem is (from what I understand) no vertebrates on earth are hexapods, so I've decided ...
Don't you just hate when Euron injures your pet dragons and perforates your fleet with a ballista? Don't worry, all you need is a shipful of Wildfire and a very long fuse (or Mehdi Sadaghdar with ...
Atlantis is real. It's just that there's more than one of them, and none of them are actually called "Atlantis". Instead, they consist from the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean to Zealandia,...
We have a variety of ways of describing our location here on Earth. We can refer to a nearby landmark (eg "by the City Hall"), we can describe our location relative to an area (eg "in the South of...
I was wondering if there is a scientific way to explain how my characters are capable of extreme levels of strength when engaging in combat. My characters are biological but have implants that all...
So, in the S.S Portland (The main setting of my story) there is a variety of rooms. A lounge, a lab, etc. so, i was thinking that at some point, the lounge would be changed out for a 0-g pool. A ba...
In a scenario in which all heavenly bodies are flat including earth. How to bring the effect of day and night effect like now i.e when day in japan and night in USA . Considering nobody can live b...
Imagine your spaceship encountered a gravitational anomaly and discovered that you are lost in space, your computer tells you that you are still inside the Milky Way galaxy but it cannot find the S...
Imagine a cuboid planet with a thick atmosphere orbiting a star similar to our Sun. The inhabitants are as intelligent as humans and recently discovered the universal laws of gravitation and motion...
Consider a planet with Earth like gravity but an atmosphere that is 10x what Earth has at sea level (atmospheric composition is equivalent to Earth). If the vegetation is similar to Earth's, would ...
In my setting Dragons evolved on a n isolated continent far from where man evolved. But in the past thousand years dragons have been introduced to the human inhabited continent, which is filled wit...
in the story i'm writing there is an island of mostly Monotremes which have diversified into a variety of ecological niches from giant platypus's to megafauna larger than the largest Placental Mamm...
I'm making a series where a multi-purpose frigate travels to Jupiter in order to help in the Mars versus Jupiter war. However, I don't know what the colonies would look like. Maybe floating wit...
A major plot point for my story is the Protagonist stumbling upon a planet that was purposely hidden from the rest of the galaxy (at the edge of the galaxy) as it's being used by high level governm...
A plot point of my novel is that the pilot accidentally finds a planet that is being purposefully hidden (i.e. been deleted from all star maps). It starts with him arriving at a location that is j...
