General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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There are reports of blind people being able to develop an echolocation ability, by listening to the echo of sounds emitted by them. Since this ability is pretty handy for spies and soldiers, the ...
Could an alien underground macroscopic ecosystem including human sized plant-like organisms evolve around lava as an energy source? These organisms could use heat and/or light from the lava to synt...
This cat looks like a normal Maine Coon to the unsuspecting victim. Except for one little detail: Red claws that inject a neurotoxin into the victim onpon scratching it. What would be the most app...
The Starmakers are vast. Stars are their seeds, supernovae their hatching. Unimaginable millennia pass before they even begin to blink at their neighbours, and they do not die, merely pass along th...
Astronomers place planet Earth under what they call a "Goldilocks Zone"--a spot in the solar system where conditions are ideal for liquid water to form, thus making the creation of life possible. ...
Some species which reproduce sexually will replace one sex with (or add) hermaphrodites. The coexistence of males and hermaphrodites is androdioecious, females and hermaphrodites gynodioecious, and...
I am writing a story for school about a human level AI. I want to have him be able to optimize and improve upon its own AI, but does this breach the Halting Problem? Thanks in advance.
So I'm wondering if it would be possible for humans to live healthily on a largely Earth-like planet that was covered almost entirely in salt water. Landmasses would all be islands, with only a few...
Suppose that a god has created a universe with nothing in it, except for a single, solitary celestial body. For simplicity, I'll call it a planet, although it most probably technically won't be. Fo...
I want a story with upload-based resurrective immortality, but this also makes me feel like I need to address the implications of a society that's primarily dominated by digitized human minds. Na...
I am currently working on a fantasy world setting and I had this idea about a world having a different sun every day. There could be around 3-12 suns in total, and every day, a different one would ...
We know that planets can have multiple moons, sometimes quite a few (like Jupiter). Assuming that a planet with several moons were habitable in the first place and has significant oceans (greater ...
How big of a volcano would be needed for a large (Alaska-sized) area on an Earth-Like planet to be covered in a thick shell of igneous rock? Would that volcano also destroy the world or make it un...
I want to make a powered light armor for my sci-fi setting. The candidate material is carbon, as it's lightweight and has a whole rainbow of different allotropes with different properties. I want...
It has been a really long trip since we left our home planet. We have seen so many stellar systems but no planet was over 5 on our Viabilometer©... I was desperate until today ! My Viabilometer...
Situation: a large terrestrial planet (a 'super earth', around 9 earth masses with a surface gravity roughly double earth's) with a mostly hydrogen atmosphere and ammonia oceans (pressure is high...
This question is focused on a purely chemical messaging system for humans that provides the same degree of nuance that spoken human languages convey now as well as all the information that smells c...
I was rereading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I came across an interesting passage: Flare riding is one of the most exotic a...
Short variant of question: I have few big natural caves (really big). I want to transform it into shelters capable of keeping ~2.000.000 humans in hibernation, sleep, suspended animation or othe...
This is the classic winter picture of a boreal forest, or taiga. This habitat exists only on subpolar latitudes, where the climate is too extreme for broad-leaved angiosperms to take root, thus ...
A few years from now, say 2025 or thereabouts, a technologically advanced alien civilization discovers our solar system. They study us for over a year, using small drones that launch from a vessel ...
On Earth, we use taxonomy to organize biological organisms into an identifiable hierarchy in which organisms that are evolutionarily related are placed in close proximity. This evolutionary approac...
Going off of this question, What would happen to the Earth if Gravity disappeared?, if an area of 1,000,000 cubic miles (as in, at the epicenter the area of effect will reach into the earth 50 mile...
Some of our ancestors were more robust than modern humans. Could they adapt to a 2-g world better than we might? Maybe even 3-g? Over time their bodies could evolve, i.e. only the most robust wou...
"Your children will be born in a world of two suns. They will never know a sky without them. You can tell them that you remember when there was a pitch black sky with no bright star, and people fea...
By extremely high gravity, I specifically mean around 28 Gs. I recently asked this question with regards to inhabiting the sun, and surviving in the sun's gravity seems like one of the major challe...
This is for a video game project. In a future where living in the Earth's surface has become undesirable. People are building colonies in Earth's orbit. If materials from Earth are used to build ...
I'm working on a universe which implies that humanity settled on the Moon. Knowing that we want to keep contact with the Earth (means we don't want to settle on the hidden face) and we want to avo...
In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (imdb) a single strand of Superman's hair is seen suspending a 1000lbs weight. Is is possible to build a space elevator from strands of a super strong human-h...
So, I read the question, the associated answers and comments located here, as well as some others that were more divergent than what I was hoping for. Basically, imagine two earth-like planets ve...
The other day I was watching my 8 year old grand-daughter run on the playground. She was running like a girl - like Jackie Joiner-Kersey to be precise. It appeared that her form was perfect - that...
I'd like to know if a planet without any animals except humans can exist. The cause of this absence of other species could be anything but the humans should not have any social interaction with som...
I have an idea for a short SF story, where an alien race infects a tiny village with a virus, which eventually spreads to entire Earth. And I need to know what minimum time is required to infect th...
My planet has an atmospheric density 12x that of earth with 0.8 Earth Gravity. Someone pointed out a while back that this would increase the wind strength proportionally. Now this is a problem as a...
Consider centaurs, mermaids/mermen/merfolk, driders/arachne, lamia/naga, and other half-human creatures with similar bodyplans, which I will henceforth refer to as "centauromorphs". They all have a...
Imagine a species that evolved on a planet where there was no metal (or not much) of any kind. They, of course, discovered fire and were able to start building buildings and basic machinery from ...
Is a scifi setting of constant artificial light everywhere plausible? I'm thinking to the point that the average adult person has not gone out of a city and has no experience of general darkness (o...
Well, we went and killed ourselves off with our stupid wars. But aliens come along, find our marvelous planet and the evidence that we were here and they find some human (and other) embryos in a ba...
I've created a small planet, about 90% the size of Earth, which orbits a pair of twin dwarf stars and is Earth-like in many respects. This planet's atmosphere is highly electrified, with lightning ...
Ignorance is curable, living is forever. Robert A. Heinlein1 Cutting to the hard data: Due to some or another reason2 the genetic information stored inside cells (aka DNA) of my Immortals d...
Humans don't exist, at least... not here. Instead we have [Insert non-lame animal name here:]. They're not too bright, but also could be considered vaguely self aware, about Gorilla level intellig...
I have some typical gryphons in my world. Bird head and wings, cat bottom half. Four legs and two wings. How crucial is a bird tail for flight? Could my gryphons be good flyers with just having a ...
I'm trying to provide a somewhat realistic explanation of how astronauts were able to overcome the harmful physiological effects of prolonged zero G exposure. As of 2017, issues include: bone/calci...
I want to explore the possibilities of an alien species not much unlike that of known to Earth: snakes going through evolution in a way that made them able to reach the intelligence necessary to us...
Whether life is carbon based or something else, we are presuming that the fundamental units are extremely tiny. We need metabolism where parts are made or modified (by existing parts), which (if na...
I have seen from various questions here (and from my research), that a Pangaea-like supercontinent would be very dry, with lots of deserts, since rainclouds couldn't travel a great distance inland....
I am writting a novel ( in a world where magic exists, and is evolving every second ) A lucky guy, found the notes of an ancient artificer on a training artifact. The artifact was very easy to mak...
One of my fictional planets is a lot like Venus. Tons of volcanoes, extreme air pressure, similar density. The volcanoes are active. There is 1 creature here that depends on minerals and acids. Wit...
Ok I'm not exactly sure how to tag this or where to ask, but... Could someone create living, breeding-viable wolf adults with the genes responsible for Siamese points (as found in the cat breed), a...
I have scoured through the archives here and cant exactly find what I am looking for in terms of a specific setting I am trying to render in my novel. Let's say the world has built up so much smog...
