General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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My planet has a day length of ~52 earth hours. This means storms like hurricaines and thunderstorms will be weaker. How do I combat this and generate really strong storms and winds on a slow rota...
I'm thinking about a design like this generation ship, which obviously has spin gravity. Would the fact that the ship is rotating affect the use of a magnetic sail? The magnetic sail as a sort of...
This is a post-apocalyptic setting I'm working on. The world has been overrun by invisible monsters from another parallel universe. They can be heard and smelled, and they can form claw prints on t...
So, it is relatively common to have various creatures grow crystals. This generally happens outside of the body (at least partially), but internal crystals aren't unknown either (see for example, e...
So, If you're familiar with the anime GATE (not to be confused with Stein's Gate) or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you probably know what's going on and why I have a boiling hatred t...
I want to create a glutton creature that can open its mouth wider than the prey item like snakes do, but also can bite through that big hard object and even chew it; this creature doesn't swallow p...
Is there a way for a species to essentially become a living incubator of sorts? Not the other way around, as in Plausible ways for the alien species to be able to impregnate every and any species?,...
Background I am investigating the practical utility and limitations of a procedural-generation-based naming scheme for stars and other notable or significant interstellar structures (e.g. nebulae,...
I found a previous question on using chitin from giant insects to make weapons and armor, but the answer left out something I had considered for the medieval fantasy setting I'm developing. The ans...
If you took a giant drill (~one hundred meter circumference) and bored down two kilometers into the moon, what would it look like (assuming the lighting was good)? Is there a gradient, or is it a u...
What exactly are the relevant numbers for such a calculation, and can it account for the color of the sky? By sky color, I mean the day to day hue that humans (or something else with very similar ...
In Greek and Roman mythology, the Astomi, also known as the Gangines, are an ancient legendary race of people who had no need to eat or drink anything at all. They survived by smelling apples and f...
So, vampires here are created from humans with the help of a stone mask. Now, they're supposed to be weak for two things: Having their brains destroyed Prolonged exposure to sunlight The first ...
Brief setting notes: it's a "basically earth" type situation, a spinning ball of rock in space with the same size and gravity and atmosphere and magnetic fields and everything else. The main diff...
I want to have air transport as the dominant means of public transportation in my fictional city. But how would such a system operate to handle many commuters with maximum efficiency? Specifically ...
Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and, therefore, one of the key components of life as we know it. There are many amino acids in nature, but they all stem from the same basic structur...
So, I want my dragon to be able to do stuff like open doors and whatnot. Using the wings is kind of awkward and takes up considerable space, and because of the coronavirus, the mouth is also a no-n...
Set in a distant future, every interstellar spaceship runs on antimatter propulsion which can achieve fractional speed of light travel. There is a doctrine stating that all spaceships with mass exc...
In this world, humans have a strange way of reproducing. When partners decide to conceive, A female must be inseminated at specified intervals by a male in order to pass on her genes. However, male...
The TBD are a fantasy humanity offshoot that is fully adapted to life a few kilometers beneath the surface, settling in cracked earth near vents and hot spots. Air quality ranges from stale to tox...
I've seen several people independently come up with the idea of three or more sexes where one sex is responsible for brooding the young (pregnancy, pouch, feeding, something along those lines) but ...
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...
Overlord Larmark is a scientist from the 21st century who is interested in world domination, and needs powerful generals to lead his armies. He looks to the ancient world, as only that time period ...
It's become a popular speculative evolution trope for the likeliest candidate of the mythological "wyvern" to be a Cenozoic family--if not superfamily--of scansoriopterygid dinosaur. Now the first...
I was considering Kessler syndrome, however this is not a long-enough duration and I'm unaware of a way to prolong it for the course of several millennia. I don't want Earth to be destroyed, just...
You know, dragons like myself are no strangers to falling. It's a natural part of flight and I used to do it a lot when I was a tiny and very adorable wyrmling. The problem is it hurt, and sure it...
On plain Pilar forest biome of planet X, you have mostly 3 types of vertebrates: those who burrow under the ground those who run through the widely separated trees those who live above ground le...
I originally wanted to create giant land biological life-forms but the square cube law is limiting me to sauropod body sized creatures so another element of my story is artificially enhanced biolog...
The antagonist of my story trades steel with a non-human, and non-humanoid, race, in return for a magical substance. They place great value in steel as they cannot manufacture it themselves. That i...
My temple was built near a kaolin surface mine, which is itself topping an old deep mine (where they used to mine radioactive metals, rare earths and possibly other miscellaneous, if need be). This...
In a setting where an empire establishes an island colony far to the north, what is the coldest climate such a colony could sustainably survive were that empire to collapse and stop sending supply ...
In the large pillar forests of planet x, a group of vertebrates, in order to hunt down the fast climbing creatures that inhabit their habitat, rather than developing speed as well, went on another ...
In my book series, I'm worldbuilding a planet whose culture is based on Celtic mythology and history, and in order to be consistent with real life I feel like the whole planet's environment needs t...
I got an interesting answer to one of my questions and I would like to know some additional info. A myoneme (or spasmoneme) is a contractile structure found in some eukaryotic single-celled o...
We played with technology too powerful for humans to wield and opened a gateway to a parallel universe, on a dark world with a dying sun. The dominant lifeforms on this world are semi-sentient flyi...
So let me explain the frame/world first, I actually think all of it is relevant as some details would probably have quite the impact on the outcome. I was hesitant to post the question as it's quit...
Are there any areas of space where an antimatter object, the size of a small house could survive without coming into contact with any or extremely minimal amounts of matter? I had assumed in all a...
I'm writing a story about a modern age HEMA medievalist who time travels to the Viking age. Is it possible to make a crossbow with similar performance to modern age crossbows without using modern ...
The human brain is a jackass. Your senses are capable of processing large amounts of information to the senses. However, the brain blocks most of this out of the consciousness in order to allow thi...
Earth sized planet in the goldilocks zone. Similar mineral composition and surface water. Photosynthetic life evolves and thrives on land and sea. Atmosphere and climate comparable to the beginnin...
My augmented society of humans have managed to engineer their power-hungry cyborg components to run on a hydrogen fusion reactor. Whilst they have so far managed to fuel it by drinking lots of wate...
After 150 million years, the most successful empire in the history of Planet Earth finally collapsed 66 million years ago. A five-mile-wide space bomb--there's still disagreement as to whether it ...
Let's have your typical fantasy world, with many races. During searching what I could do to make humans a little special, someone give me idea of letting them to be only race that have ability to d...
I, Rey Skywalker, am officially the greatest Jedi in existence. I successfully took down the remnants of the empire single-handedly, defeated my arch-enemy Kylo Ren, and killed Sheev Palpatine, t...
In a world that takes place during the Victorian era (1837-1901), how effective would period-accurate firearms be against something similar to a dinosaur? As a brief aside, I will accept weaponry f...
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was ...
Background: We discover an artifact in the present day somewhere remote. This artifact is in the form of a small (approximately phone sized) sphere, and when researched, it is discovered to have th...
In my story Giants, humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what might be an effective mode of transportation for 10 foot tall Giants with Ancien...
Marsupials in the majority of the world are overshadowed by their placental cousins, with the notable exception being Australia. There they have convergently evolved many similarities to their plac...
