General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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"Serina" is a popular speculative evolution project in which, apart from a long list of fish, invertebrates and plants, the only terrestrial chordate to colonize this terraformed moon is the canary...
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 ...
I'm new to this and my scientific knowledge is massively lacking in this area (so please take it easy on me!) I'm writing a historical science-fiction novel. Parts of it set in the past (1977) and ...
So, when you use a dragon for military purposes, it's probably for the best to keep them close and keep them happy. Which means building them a place they can call home. Now, housing a dragon is q...
I know theoretically the human stomach is above the centaur's stomach so the obvious answer would be no. But seeing as centaurs aren't real and we don't know what their internal biolody would look...
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...
In my story, there is a planet. The planet's name is not really important for the sake of this question, so we're going to refer to it as "dead planet". Background: Dead planet is entirely hot d...
In the deep, outer reaches of our galaxy, there is a rogue gas giant which, due to an unfortunate event, was flung from its native orbit into interstellar space. It has a mass 12 times that of Jupi...
Let's say you have a planet about the size of Earth. It has three moons, each roughly the mass of one-third of the Earth's moon. Would this cause tides of different magnitude than those on Earth? A...
My "magic" mirrors are purely technological and are only able to transmit light. More precisely, they can display the visible and infrared spectrums, and communicate via radio waves. They're basica...
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 ...
I'd like to create a land-based mammal that uses its electricity NOT for navigation or hunting, but only as a defense (enough to stun creatures approximately its own size or marginally larger, with...
In this world, people have the legal right to fight anyone to the death, for any reason, as long as the fights are done before an official whose sole job is to regulate these duels. The officials i...
Imagine an alternate universe where FTL do happens, let's just say the inhabitants discovered a hypothetical particles that allows ordinary matter to temporarily be in superposition of any amount o...
I am creating a fantasy world in which Earth has a second moon with an orbit between Earth and the current moon. The orbit of this new moon is faster because it's closer to earth. I'm not much co...
For the purposes of this post, "word" is defined as a unit of language such that Has some meaning on its own, often relating to the real world. Complex utterances can be formed simply by transmit...
So, as I understand it, the spacecraft would need to move in the opposite direction to the orbit. Are there any calculations I could make to attach a clicking-tock onto this? If the spacecraft were...
The moon is similar to earth but orbits around a gas giant, the sun has ended its life cycle and so the only energy received on the moon comes from tidal interactions heating its core. On earth an...
Basically, the title. Trying to figure out how reasonable stealth in space would function, and while I have mitigated it, I am looking for methods to improve it. But mainly, is creating a sort of h...
My low-fantasy setting features the deadly plant known as the wormberry. It produces small berries of a bright-but-overall-undecided color, all of which contain a small, edible seed. They have two...
There are several questions related to effects of different gravity levels on the human body, but none adequately answer a fundamental question: What is the maximum and minimum gravity that nearly ...
We may all have some familiarity with winged skulls - from Avenged Sevenfold's album covers to bikie shirts. However, for my science-fiction/horror story, I am curious about how these creatures wou...
My postulated creature will look something like this: or like this: Its description is as follows: it's a non-obligate carnivore its height is, on average, about two feet it lives in arid h...
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...
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 ...
I was thinking of a story with a Werewolf as a detective, using mostly conversational skills and his sense of smell to solve crimes similar to many of the UK types of detective stories (Morse, Lewi...
So how large of an organism can a diet of strictly of blood support? In a modern Earth setting it might be a bit hard for a large hematophagic organism to find a suitable group of prey that it won'...
Working on a medieval setting I thought of the idea of a biome similar to Minecraft Ice Spike Plains where this ice structures naturally occur. These structures in particular are tall and sharp tow...
Death, most if not all of us fear it. However, it may be possible to postpone death for a while, and hopefully entirely. One major way of postponing death for awhile is through the biological route...
I've been thinking about this the whole day. At first I thought it was an easy fix, given my dragon's bones have a tensile strength of 3-6.5 GPa and an elastic modulus of 50-140 GPa, depending on t...
Giant dogs aren't uncommon in works of fantasy. Sif from Dark Souls comes to mind. What I want to know is: what's the largest a canine could realistically get, what differences would they need c...
In my story an area was formerly beneath an ocean or lake. Some form of life leeched the soil of a specific mineral or substance. Technology level is that of ~1700 Spain. Now that the water has ...
My advanced human civilisation often has high-acceleration ships travelling at near lightspeed. I know that time dilation would have a significant effect on the time experienced by the crews, but I...
In many fantasy worlds, dragons are depicted with six limbs: four "legs" (two front limbs and two hind limbs) and two wings. In the real world, we don't really see vertebrates with more than four l...
Genetic chimerism is a condition in which a single organism is composed of cells with more than one distinct genotype. Elves inhabit this world, but do not possess magic in this reality. Instead, t...
Would it be feasible to have an interstellar vessel be constructed in flight after smaller sections are boosted up to speed? The idea here is about using laser sails which would be easier to use wi...
Around 5 million years ago, a group of primates diverged from early Baboon ancestors migrated into Sicily becoming Triclopes (here's a rough mock up of what a Triclops skull might look like): som...
I have a species of megafaunal carnivore that are extremely mobile with territories spanning hundreds of square miles and lifespans of 120-150 years. They lay clutches of 2-3 eggs every 20-30 years...
I recently started to wonder what a tree would be like on an alien world, and one thing that popped in mind for these trees was their color. The hosts star and environment would have a effect on sa...
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...
In Star Trek, going faster then light will take you back in time (Possibly in real life too!). But I've noticed one inconsistency. Ships, even when going faster then light, have a finite speed. By ...
As we know, bi-directional faster than light (FTL) travel can cause paradoxical situations. One possible way to resolve this would be a multiverse theory: Whenever a paradox could arise, the univer...
Most of the humans on my alternate universe's Earth have gone extinct due to a global war, leaving a handful of survivors and the buildings to serve as a reminder of how great they once were. This ...
First question on stack exchange I've been lurking and learning for years and finally decided to pose a question for a novel I'm working on. Given the appropriate advances in material sciences an...
I'm trying to speculate on manipulating things on the level of quarks for a story. What could I do with that type of technology?
It's something that's been used several times as a plot device on Star Trek, notably in the TOS episode "The Tholian Web", and the TNG episodes "The Next Phase" and "The Pegasus". I'm certain it's ...
For my middle-grade science-fiction novel, I need to come up with an invention or chemical that could rapidly create icebergs to refreeze the Arctic and slow climate change. Kurt Vonnegut's Ice-9 i...
I was wondering what the best ways for turning minerals mined in the asteroid belt into useable materials would be, so far I came up with three methods, utilizing nuclear, electromagnets, and final...
In some birds especially owls, we can observe a structure called facial disk, which is mainly composed of feathers and helps to direct sound to their ears. While being more common in owls, adding u...
as the title, my question is how big a pelican like creature with its pouch mouth need to be in order to carry grown up human and still fly. since as far as i know hollow bone is to fragile for hu...
