General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Filters (None)
In this world, there are certain genetically engineered creatures, that are able to tolerate the side effects of mouth breathing (like sore throat) without increasing the normal air resistance in t...
Short of strapping a giant lightning pole to someone's forehead or covering them in a suit of metal, is there anyway of making a person a susceptible target for lightning in a storm? Prerequisite...
I'm trying to work with Dermott's Law to develop a generalized "formula" for assigning major moons to gas- and ice-giant planets, but it doesn't seem to work. If I use the values specified for Jup...
In this Answer I suggested that an animal could have a tampani acting as a loudspeaker, as in Vernor Vinge's The Blabber, later featured as the race called Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep. In the ori...
In my world, there is a race of giants, with an average height of 5 meters. Let's assume that every part of their body is proportional to that of a "normal" human being. I want these giants to pul...
I'm not talking a single-biome sand-world. Of course I want the classic large sand seas, but I also want steppes, mesas and buttes, floodplains, salt pans, hamadas, and canyons, both hot and not so...
Some time ago, I imagined a world with one peculiar disease. People affected by it suddenly "fall" towards the sky, never to be seen again. What could be the scientific cause of such a disease? So...
In this world, jetpacks among the "pack" part, also have wings, where the thrusters are suited, so you don't have to buy fireproof pants. These wings are retractable when not in use, but aside fro...
On the world I am building (Let's call it Bob for simplicity's sake), the days last 9 years. As a result of this, the living beings on Bob must migrate across the planet to avoid the encroaching ni...
Let's assume we have three subjects: a giant (50 ft tall), a human (6 ft tall) and a fairy (6 inches tall). Common sense would lead you to believe that the giant would fair better in the cold, as ...
I have a story where the characters are colonists heading to a new planet. My plan is to have the native lifeforms be descended from a single celled lifeform on a comet that shares a common ancesto...
Introduction I have been looking for information on the Internet. I have discovered that the shape of the planets is due to the gravity to which they are subjected, so they are spheres (,but they ...
Within my desert landscape--in which the climate is similar to the Sonora Desert--there are many canyons, one of which sports large, clustered growths of Elbaite Tourmaline crystals, averaging out ...
Defining what is a super intelligent civilization: An industrial civilization that invest on scientific progress and that builds and manipulates computers, robots and nano-machines, has effi...
Years ago, I was tinkering around with the idea of an engineered life form which could survive the vacuum of space and be made into a starship. I have since given up on the idea, but curiosity is s...
Assuming it just spins at the same rate, the other way. Axial tilt is the same, year length is the same. Perhaps winds and ocean currents? What would the effect be on geography? Would deserts or r...
I'm quite afflicted with a specific set of conditions I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to find a way (if there is one) that someone could be unconscious for roughly twelve hours under some con...
Right now I'm writing a sci-fi story that develops in a double planet (think of Rocheworld.) The double planet (along with a couple more planets) orbit a big star and the whole system is orbited by...
As part of a series on plant animals, plantimals if you will, I am now asking about the digestive system, that is the mouth, stomach and intestines. All known animal life has some kind of digestive...
In the answers to this question I learned that some cephalopods communicate via color: Some cephalopods are capable of rapid changes in skin color and pattern through nervous control of chromat...
Within the next decade or two, Earth is attacked by an alien fleet. The various militaries have some forewarning and are able to destroy the attackers by launching most of their nuclear arsenal at ...
I want to develop a water-dwelling, intelligent species that could ultimately reach space.1 My question here is about the biology of such creatures. I want my creatures to live in the water, not ...
Basically, my current thought process is to have a virus that causes one to all vital organs to fail upon reacting to its components. It has to make contact with as many people as possible, therefo...
Climate is not my priority because I prefer to develop the culture and the languages. However, climate has a strong influence in the culture, so I need to know the basics. So, I have a country loc...
It seems to me like one of the major obstacles to terraforming a planet is to give it a magnetosphere. In our solar system, this is accomplished naturally either by a hot iron core (for example, Ea...
Sort of a jumping-off point from my last question, I speak of the "binding problem" that currently plagues neuroscience and cognitive studies, and which plays a large role in debating AI and whole ...
Zombies are reanimated corpses by definition . If so, then they decay as a normal corpse does. Without any preservatives ( for corpses ) what should be the maximum and the least amount of time peo...
Suppose a creature or human(oid) regularly underwent a metabolic stasis. Would this contribute to a longer overall lifespan? Or are there other factors at play here? ... I'm looking at using this...
Most of the AI's in films/books/series seems to turn out evil or using destructive/harmful ways of achieving what they want in critical situations because they can't understand the earth's biology....
Setting: In the future universe, with technologies based on real science that we know that theoretically can be implemented (though not feasible with today's technologies) and sub-light travel, a h...
I'm trying to think of ways that a habitable tidally locked planet could have something that resembles a day/night cycle. Shadows caused by any moons being out of the question. Hypothetically, cou...
The island of Sanctuary is a flat disc about 200 miles in diameter. Sanctuary lies within a pocket dimension, so it has an artificial sun. The artificial sun is roughly 100 miles above the island...
Just thinking if it is possible to have a Fire-Freeze Planet? A planet with permanent Ice cover on one hemisphere while a hot terrain on the other side of it. A planet that may have moder...
This is a very closely related question to my previous: Evolution of tree-dwelling species that will help predators find prey if prey species doesn't give it a bribe? The premise is the same, a t...
I have an idea: can a moon float on the atmosphere of a gas giant, just like a piece of wood floats on the water? It is based on the following situation: The density of the atmosphere increases ...
In the setting I'm building up, there are starships ranging from several meters in length to 1.6 kilometers. I'm trying to devise a means to determine what sort of manpower each ship would likely n...
For space travel: would you need to recreate earths air composition? Or could you just get by with the top 2 or 3 main components, i.e. either 78% nitrogen and 22% oxygen, or 78% nitrogen, 21% oxyg...
Let's say I'm a superhero or a magic space-wizard with the ability to change the color of any object I touch i.e. change what wavelengths of light it emits. If I want to become invisible, I could t...
I'd like an alien to be warm-blooded, but have external gills. Imagine a kind of giant crab or woodlouse (pillbug) which spends part of its time on land and part of the time in the sea. However, ex...
I want my world to be set in early to mid Industrial Age but for various reasons that I won't go into here I don't want there to be any gunpowder based weapons. Is it possible for a society to adv...
So I'm not sure this is possible but I was hoping someone might be able to figure out a way for it to work. My planet is smaller than earth. I'd say about 75% the size. However for plot reasons, I...
Suppose that there's a button at the other end of the universe, and a 'stick' that goes all the way there. If I push the stick, will the button get pushed instantly, or there is some latency that...
Imagine a planet whose surface is perfectly spherical, without any kind of obstacles anywhere. In such a world, it would be a competitive advantage for any lifeform to evolve wheels, as transport a...
The current technology around this subject is somewhat hard to gauge. For obvious ethical reasons, there is not a lot of empirical precedents. Also, given that it's subliminal, it is by nature diff...
If a typical human were shrunk down to be 3cm tall weighing 2.5 grams (ignoring all problems that would cause), would the blade of the grasslike plant described below be able to stop its fall from ...
On a tidally locked Earth-like planet a big part of long distance air routes would have to approach the hurricane eye and some may even benefit from it. On Earth aircraft are able to save time and...
EDIT: There were some great answers here, and I realize this is a kinda broad question, but I'm accepting Monty Wild answer as it provided me with the info I needed to push this forward. Now I have...
So it's plausible that any planetary civilizations (alien or human) may have landfills. It is also natural to think that many planetary civilizations would die out, or migrate away from a planet. S...
I'm drawing from Norse mythology on light and dark elves to write about an alien race and planet with one humanoid 'tribe' residing on the sunlit side and the other on the dark side. I mention bloo...
This is a follow up to the creature 'griffins' I sort of created here: Anatomically Correct Griffins The idea of the final griffin was a small tree based species that will leap down on much larger...
