General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Imagine a dragon as tall as average adult horse with a wing span of 12m long measuring from tip to tip. I wonder what evolutionary traits or techniques could allow the dragon to lift itself off the...
Basically I wanted dragons to be able to efficiently finish off armored opponents by chomping on one of their arm then batting them around and against hard surfaces until they're no more. If you n...
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...
Fairly straightforward question. Imagine a gas giant planet, like the size of Jupiter, in orbit around a massive star. The star goes supernova. What happens to the planet? Is the energy of the su...
The technical challenges for Breakthrough Starshot list the huge amount of power required for accelerating a solar sail to interstellar travel speeds and the precise targeting of laser beams of tha...
In exploring likely candidates for an alternate Earth without rodents, someone suggested multituberculates to me. Here's a little summary as to who the multituberculates were for anyone not in the ...
Imagine a generation ship heading for a distant star. Humanity had means to observe that star up to a point, that it is 99.9% sure the star has a colonizable Earth-like planet (with water and atmos...
Mostly what it says on the tin. If a spaceship, let's say about 200 meters long and 100 meters wide (made of modern materials) was approaching Earth and slowing down (say from 100 km/s to 3km/s), h...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series The orang pendek is a cryptid that reportedly inhabits remote, mountainous forests on the island of Sumatra (likely evolving from orangutan...
In your space journey your ship systems have spotted an unusual source of gamma rays: it's the size and the mass of a planet and it has a pulsating behaviour. Further observations shows that you ...
I was thinking of a creature that uses ultrasound to echolocate and infrasound to communicate with its species. The current idea is a dog-like creature that hunts in packs, due to a large avian pr...
I'm talking about place similar to the Jordan desert, where the biggest prey is similar to wild donkeys and antelopes like oryx and gazelles. My creature is 1.92 meters tall and 4 meters long, loo...
On my world there is a creature that has a 'split' in the plumage of its wings and tail. Instead of having a singular D-shaped surface (when viewed from above, the bird facing to the left), it is ...
Gargoyles are bipedal, slow-moving animals that lurk on rooftops and eat pigeons. The rumors of gargoyles being magical construct are false; in truth they're just animals that have adapted to urban...
This is a another sequel to my Plutonian questions, but I've decided to take a break from them and focus on another part of the world. Basically, my version of Pluto has five continents, each a si...
The universe described in the orthogonal series http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html is one, in which the minus sign in the space time interval is replaced with a plus sign. So this unive...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series. to celebrate the upcoming Sonic movie I've decided to ask the question of what an anatomically correct Sonic would look like? Based o...
(This is the third in a series of questions, starting with Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands? and How soon does the Earth's surf...
In my story Elves, Humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what evolutionary pressures would to a group of divergent hominids to evolve into Elve...
Magnetic white dwarfs (MWD) comprise almost 2 % of all white dwarfs and they are characterized by having a strong magnetic field, whose strength varies between 1 T and 100 kT. Compared to the Earth...
Elves in fantasy are commonly depicted as having long life spans and that applies to my story as well with Elves on average living between 250 and 270 years. The question is how would this work and...
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...
So I just got back from watching an episode of the Science Channel program Unearthed, a show focusing on archaeological discoveries. In the episode in question, the subject was on the Lighthouse o...
I have read (and answered) the question: "If true artificially intelligent robots could be built, would they be allowed human rights?". But let's explore the topic from the other direction. Let's...
Imagine a big Moon base situated under a dome. Big means under the dome there is a small city with buildings, streets and ca. 30,000 inhabitants. The best analogue in the movies would be the Ceres ...
Set in the near future, thousands of killer robots resemble those featured in the terminator film, I'm referring to the 800 series model are now marching in as we speaks. I am a sole survivor on a ...
Basically, in a sci-fi roleplaying group I am apart of, I have began to work on a long-standing human colony world. The tech-level is pretty much bog-standard sci-fi, and such, colonisation is poss...
Could a measurable amount of isopropyl alcohol occur naturally in an otherwise reasonably earth-like atmosphere? And if so, what is the highest possible concentration that a human could survive lo...
This was an idea I had for an alien life form but i thought it made so little sense for a science-based story that I didn't further it. The idea is a tree-like life form that instead of bearing fr...
In my story I have paleolithic era humans who were contacted by aliens long enough ago for them to have used space travel to spread across many planets. I want them to be able to fly and somewhat m...
In a short story I created, humanity encounters a sentient and consciousness messenger that is alien in nature and origin. Upon further examination, it turns out that there is organic tissue grown ...
Picture a setting similar to that of many fantasy works: a relatively low level of technology among the general population, lots of manual labor, agriculture or hunter/gatherer society, and that mo...
I wanted to create an extremely large space city which will be made up of many different large space habitats of ringed and cylindrical varieties. Although each habitat will contain its own city o...
So I have a concept for a habitable alien planet that has 7 suns. This planet is supposed to have a surface similar to Earth, it doesn't have to be habitable to humans but should be capable of ho...
In this futuristic setting an AI being has built an interstellar spaceship solely for itself, no humans or other life forms will be needed to maintain it or be passengers. Because of the AI being,...
In my story Halflings and Goblins have a somewhat accurate knowledge of their history, despite being spread over multiple continents. Now for the longest time humans weren't that good at keeping ac...
It's the late 2020's, and humanity has expressed an unprecedented and powerful renewal in the interest of space exploration. Sometime between then and the turn of the next century, a practical form...
In the game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, characters wear exoskeletons with an ability called "land assist", which allows them to slow down their fall using a jet of compressed air (or some speci...
I was inspired by Phylliroe molluscs which are sea slugs that have evolved into translucent fish (see image bellow). In my story most aquatic life on earth had evolved from these translucent slug...
My jet-propelled squid uses a scavenged shell for its pulse jet deflagration chamber, I am trying to determine how often he'll have to replace it. Including the shell it's a 5 kg animal using a ...
An idea I'm toying with for a sci-fi story is a species where the individual organisms are colonies of smaller eusocial organisms. The idea initially came from "hey if a bunch of single-celled orga...
If the earth's oceans were electrocuted (from the ocean floor), not worrying about how the energy is gotten to electrocute it, what would happen too everything in the ocean,( fish, algae, etc.) wha...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series some characteristics of the Manticore include: having a lion like body having wings are tetrapods having a scorpion like tail being carn...
I am creating a world for Sci Fi story in which I am trying to have two non-tidally locked earth sized planets in a binary orbit around Alpha Centauri A. The only way I can think of this happening ...
In my story Orcs, humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what evolutionary pressures would to a group of divergent hominids to evolve into Orcs?...
Is there any practical g-limit for unmanned spacecraft, or could you theoretically push a missile to significant fractions of c in hours or minutes while pulling hundreds or thousands of Gs? I need...
Picture this, a highly volcanic island sitting in the middle of a temperate or sub-arctic sea, the heat generated by the magma beneath the island and the volcano heats the air enough to generate a ...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series Gargoyles are a staple of Gothic architecture and I've decided to give these creatures the time of day. Gargoyles are closely related to Ny...
If humans have evolved from apes, what if another species have already evolved from humans but left the planet millions of years ago? If this is true, in the future, if humans are advanced enough ...
This came out of a discussion of an all female colony world, but I'm interested in the more general version of this question. Is there any function in society that requires male levels of strength ...
