General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
So, dragons are rather large (2 meters at the withers and have a nose-to-base-of-tail length of 5 meters) creatures. Pic related by: KatePfeilschiefter They look something like pic related, albe...
Imagine the ability to shoot long streams of hot fire like a USM2 flamethrower from the palms of your hands. or shooting them out of your feet so you can push yourself off of the floor. An answer w...
If a cylindrical rocket ship with a diameter of about 350 meters were spinning on its long axis, would more than just the interior surface of the outer hull have artificial gravity? The ships dec...
I once before asked a question on how to quickly submerge a large landmass/continent. The answers there basically concluded that literally ''Sinking'' (a la Atlantis) is pretty much impossible to...
First things first, a little backstory: Sometime between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, there was a mysterious, sudden, dramatic rise in global temperature. This moment in time was known as the...
On my Conworld, the oceans are purple. This is mostly for aesthetic purposes and my current explanation is an abundance of cyanobacteria. I'm not sure that this explains it correctly, so what could...
The setting is as follow. In a planet like earth, one day, 10% of the population suddenly becomes immortal. The "immortals" are not physiologically different from the "mortals" and initially it is ...
What would be the economic trade offs of building fusion powered rockets vs building laser relays across the solar system? What assumptions would you need for each one of these to be the superior o...
My character is traveling aboard a spaceship through inter-galactic space (it has left the Milky Way). The ship is traveling at the speed of light or so and has been for the last six thousand years...
So, I'm having trouble with one of my character designs. Guardian angels are former humans who died in such dumb ways that Heaven simply couldn't let them in, not before they proved they can preve...
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...
"They fly now?" "They fly now!?" "They fly now" One of the most iconic characteristic of dragons is their ability to fly, on top of that, my intelligent (human level) dragons also use a fu...
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...
Not exactly indestructible, at least after flying to certain height it may pop out. I mean something like the bubble is as hard as stone or steel but still elastic and light to float like bubble, ...
Suppose an earth-like world with roughly 500 major tectonic plates. Question What is the plausibility of such a world to sustain (large) continents? Why? Further clarifications: speed of pla...
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...
Imagine Earth was hit hard by some force so devastating that Earth now has an axial tilt of 90.0 degrees, a far cry from the usual 23.5 degree. The same force somehow eliminates the Moon. In my sto...
A bit outlandish, but here me out: I'm trying to make a villain for my story who's essentially like DC's Fallout in powers. Attribution: January 2015, dc.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout That being said...
Assuming humans remained hunter-gatherers, would it be anatomically possible for us to evolve digitigrade legs? Or, is our anatomy too specialized and are we stuck the way we are? I am not asking ...
How would it switch between if endothermic and ectothermic and in between and how would it be able to create different temperature in specific areas in the body?
This is a follow up question to my previous question: Rock/Mineral Ore Eating Organism So these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithoredo They eat limestone. So I thought, what is limestone...
I was wondering, if a planet in similar size and mass to earth would have, from its creation, been spinning at this hypothetical planet speed limit (with it somehow staying in once piece) could lif...
You are Alien McGee. For some reason ( don't ask why ) you need to hide an artifact in our solar system for roughly 20,000 years before coming back and taking it. Said artifact is a magical vase ...
So as most of you probably know, cows don't produce milk all year round for no reason, they need to be pregnant and then you gotta do something with the calves"¦ Now in my story that has an ecosys...
The species I have created, are a species of gliding reptiles. They look primarily like horned lizards and measure up to 20 feet long, 7 feet wide, and 5-6 feet tall. however, they posses wings tha...
I need to wipe out a city. Not a huge one (I won't let them grow beyond a certain limit), but big enough to need to do some pretty serious damage. Let's say something similar in size to Pompeii. (y...
In many fantasy settings, a race of mushroom creatures are often encountered. They may or may not look humanoid but still have the biology of fungi. My question is how. How can a mushroom be mo...
Humanity discovered a new energy source, virtually infinite, that can produce gigawatts of electric power using devices of few kilograms. Land and sea transport obviously will switch to electric m...
I'm creating a fictional world which includes tree dwelling octopuses that thrives in swamps and tropical rainforests. I'm wondering what evolutionary pressures could lead to the rise of such crea...
In my pre-electricity world, fast communication is achieved by means of lighthouses, each being able to direct strong and precise beams of light towards distantly visible lighthouses. However a pr...
I recently look at a question on this site that questioned if a "world tree" is feasible, Would a 'World Tree' be feasible in real life?. If i remember correctly, it stated that one way to distribu...
What would cause a nuclear power plant to break down after 2000 years, but not sooner? The setting is a society in a dark age. Their ancestors were considerably more advanced than earth currently...
what would happen if 50,000 humans were sent to a planet that has 3 times gravity, in a arid like environment.Through unknown means. The planet has a similar atmosphere to our own and the air is ...
In terms of scientific and engineering challenges, which one is closer to fruition? Specifically I am looking for the feasibility of using one of these systems for space-only travel between the orb...
I'm thinking to build an island by pouring lava into the ocean, with the advanced technology, around 40 years later, by making a special pipe connected to the ground (maybe near volcano/es) since t...
Antimatter gets used a lot in SciFi due to it's mind-bending energy density. If you can store it in a form that requires no power and is at least mildly idiot-proof then you've just solved half of ...
Conventionally, there are two ways to build mountains--direct collision (as is the case with the Himalayas) and one side sinking beneath the other (which explains why the Pacific Ring of Fire is vo...
I think it would make sense for hurricanes to be combatted using shade balls to block the evaporation of the ocean into the storm. What would we need to stop a hurricane? Info on shade balls.
This is a science fiction intelligent alien biology question. I'm imagining a race of large (around 2m in height) insect-like species on a distant planet who discovered astronomy VERY late in thei...
There lives in a desert a large nomad culture, composed of many tribes who wander about herding camels, goats and sheep, trading and offering services to cities and towns, and occasionally raiding ...
Let's say I have a bunch of pre-pubescent children (circa 8-12 years old). Let's also say I subjected them to some drug/process/whatever that caused them to stop growing. In particular: Whatever...
In a lab at Caltech Ken Libbrecht has been simulating snowflake formation and under absurdly exact laboratory conditions, they have been able to create almost identical snowflakes. Clearly, in th...
Bringing a human child to term generally takes place over a period of nine months. They are marked by different stages, from 1st to third, and are marked by different events and expectations for mo...
The MC1R gene turns pheomelanin into eumelanins but there are another kind of pehomelanin called pheochromes. So if a brunette or black person used a cosmetic gene therapy to turn off this gene how...
Time is not a constant, Albert Einstein proved that much. Time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two clocks, either due to them having a velocity relative to each other, or b...
Previous question: Proofing dragons against their acidic breath weapon 1/2: Smart Neutralizing Agent So, I decided to find an alternative breath weapon for my dragons, that maximizes destructive p...
Double or binary planets are a really cool science fiction idea. A second Earth hanging ominously in the sky. Co-orbital or trojan planets are also interesting in that you have them on more or less...
What are the most important factors in determining how fast technology progresses? And roughly how fast might that be under optimal circumstances? Innovations have to be dreamed up, but there mus...
Recently I've been imagining living on a terraformed Venus in a distant future. I've a pretty good idea of how this can be done, having gone through many articles on how to terraform venus, so my q...
Many planets out there will be water worlds. Those generally come in two flavors: either the oceans are so deep that the water turns into high-pressure ices like ice-six, -seven, -ten and -eleven o...
