General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
Many people think that in the future, all jobs will be taken by machines and AI. Why then, would anyone bother doing anything at all, such as invent things, fight in combat, etc - in other words, h...
I remember reading Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The protagonist is a an extremely strong man, capable of hand to paw combat with lions. The origin of his strength is attributed to living among g...
I have devised a semi-aquatic sapient species known as the Hexapi who until now I thought were trichromats. However, after doing my research on the evolution of the eye, I found out that colour vis...
I am hoping to create a planet with a greater rotational speed, making it oblong, thus causing differential gravitaion from the equator to the poles. I am hoping for the gravitarion to be lighter t...
How could an organization force solar energy to be bought from them? Something like: A large structure (in space presumably) fully/partly blocks sunlight reaching Earth, so anyone here wishing to ...
The consensus (1, 2) is that the reason most continents have relatively few large animals compared to Africa is that humans, even stone age humans, were able to drive them to extinction. African a...
Appearance The ''vipers'' are semi aquatic humanoids species with webbed fingers on both hands and feet, they also have 2 fins on each leg and their legs are covered in scales from the feet up to ...
This world takes place in the remains of the Eastern United States, devastated by 3000 years of neglect and climate change. The Mississipi river is pretty much a gulf now, which has caused everythi...
It is understood that a way to prevent causality violation and time-travel while still having faster-than-light travel is to introduce a specific reference frame. This is explained in detail in th...
I'm in the point of my story when two main characters meet each other, ally and start a rebellion against gods. One of my main characters is a wolf-girl (anime tendencies bruh) however she'll one o...
My race of space-going sentients want to weaponise a life form which is explosive in an oxygen-rich environment. To do so, they have access to any planet they care to use, terraforming, and the ab...
In Sci-fi, space fighters often look like exotic versions of fighter jets: wing shape is often different but the general shape is most of the time kept. However this seems unrealistic: the shape o...
I'm looking for answers that focus on changes in internal anatomy that allow humans to survive in a high-g environment. If dramatic visible change can be avoided, that'd be great. Problems Circula...
According to wiki, The speed of gravitational waves in the general theory of relativity is equal to the speed of light in a vacuum Not bad enough to send data (message or information) to ot...
Space bodies like planets, asteroids and comets are formed by the remaining materials of stars explosions. Therefore they are usually made up of several elements. There is the possibility that a p...
For my science fantasy story, I need a particular setting for my world. I need a planet (Earth or earth-like), habitable and with complex life forms like our planet. However, over time, this planet...
Belsaria is the City of Fountains. The capital of Nowheria, it's truly a civic marvel, due to the thousands of fountains that jet water into the air at every intersection and in the courtyards of a...
Two days ago I asked how we can detect a (really) small black hole. The best answer (to me) was "gamma rays". Since this black hole is relatively close to our planet (a few AUs), this could be a pr...
Recently, a planet around Proxima Centauri has been found. It is in the habitable zone, in the sense that if the planet was a black body, it would have a surface temperature of −39° Celsius. The p...
This might be a little difficult to explain, but basically: the concept of "atmospheric ocean" is a gas that is found pretty much everywhere on the planet. Probably very dense and sinks to the surf...
I am writing a book in which criminals get their hands on a polymer which resembles chewing gum , but alters their saliva. This allows them to burn holes into walls made from plastic used as buildi...
The world I am envisioning is a rocky planet with oceans, plate tectonics, atmosphere, and several other similarities to our globe. The mass and size is roughly equal, but its moon is orbiting much...
Once I heard a scientist saying the following: Imagine an ants' nest and all the ants living there perfectly organized, each one with specific duties to perform for the well being of the...
I'm brainstorming for a rocky planet with similar mass to that of Earth's, orbiting a red dwarf star. It is tidally locked with no natural satellites, yet I'm bent on having liquid water on both su...
A mad, egomaniac, scientist has developed a way of extending the natural growth of humans to create an army of 20ft (6 meter) tall soldiers. Physiologically, they are three times the size of norma...
Background Information: 252 million years ago, Siberia erupted, releasing enough lava to fill in a volume anywhere between one and four million cubic kilometers. Any time someone thinks "large ig...
The grey goo end-of-the-world scenario in which lots of little microscopic Von Neumann self-replicating machines basically eat everything to make more of themselves. Eventually everything is grey ...
We have escaped the galactic government, and now our greatest endeavour yet, life in space. How shall these gargantuan space entities move and travel through space? The whale or other in question...
I was wondering would a planetary drill be possible? The drill should go inside the planet on one side and exit on the other. Would that kind of a drill be possible on Earth and if not on what kind...
The Average Human Achieves IQ Scores 60 Standard Deviations Above The Average Person of 2016 By the time the year 3016 rolls around, the human race for the first time ever has achieved an average ...
Need ideas for the fox's tails. In case you're wondering, this is for a speculative evolution book I'm doing which is suppose to build a structure for...
Okay, so admittedly I was going for a title that was a bit more catchy than the actual question, but not by much. On a technical level, the real question is "Feasibility and challenges of why a la...
Premise In a world set 10^40 years from now, or in cosmological decade 60 (a cosmological decade is a long term measure of time such that each successive increment represents a ten-fold increase i...
The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds a...
An ideal punishment for evil scientists or geniuses would be a judicially mandated, deliberate decrease in intelligence. Let's say that a judge ordered a person's IQ to be decreased from 200 to 110...
Where would the Sun and Moon be on a flat Earth? Imagine a world similar to the flat domed depiction of the Earth with a Biblical Firmament all around it. If you don't know what that is, let me e...
A normal respiration is: $${\displaystyle C_{6}H_{12}O_{6}+6O_{2}\to 6H_{2}O+6CO_{2}+38ATP}$$ A normal cellular respiration uses O2, so my question is if it's possible to have a respiration with C...
Ok, so this is an very odd little question. I've been working out the economy of an industrial age world; figuring the major industries, trade routes, etc. I have a tropical region I was consider...
In Plague-inc the most typical strategy is trying to infect everyone, while staying hidden by not harming infected people (when a virus, bacteria, fungus is found, people start working on the cure)...
In my fantasy story, elves live high up in giant trees (or at least something similar to a tree). These trees are so massive, that entire cities can be built on their branches. The branches have fl...
I've been dreaming up what I would consider to be an "ideal" sentient being and there have been a variety of fantastic responses to some of my other questions that got me re-examining my design. F...
Blinding, amputation and other punitive mutilations have been used effectively in the past; however there are no accounts of deafening, e.g. removal of one's sense of sound, being carried out. How...
Subangea is a giantic cave that stretches below the surface through endless cavities. From oil oceans to volcanic sinkholes and even upside-down forests, the environment is ever changing from one c...
I need some help with the placement of the cities on a map of one of my continents. I'm not looking for opinions, but more for a reality check on how realistic it is in terms of where things are an...
Is it possible for a planet to have very little visible-light energy and receive enough energy to support life from ionising radiation? Dim light, including starlight and ionized-air glow is accept...
Planet - habitable, tidally locked planet orbitting red dwarf. Aim: a realistic answer (neither involving handwavium nor aliens that used it all) why a virgin planet that already experienced a wh...
Long story short, this civilization found very little oil and natural gas in their world (or maybe they ran out of both), but there are huge deposits of amber and special pine trees which produce r...
Is an alien lifeform covering itself comfortably in flames as a defense mechanism to wane off predators possible? I've heard of microbes surviving the extreme condition of outer space in complete v...
The concept of a metal poor world is one that I find deeply fascinating. In part because I fell in love with the setting that first exposed me to the concept, Dark Sun. So I want incorporate a ver...
Assume that Handwavium is a gas many times lighter than Hydrogen. Is it realistic to use this gas to make relatively heavy full-body armor (say, brass) lighter and/or more maneuverable? This seems ...
