General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In my world some people can control wind, including its temperature. Would it be possible to freeze stuff solid immediately (I'm most interested in freezing people, but animals and inanimate obje...
Let's use a Mars-like as an example of a planet that interstellar travelers may settle on. Assume that the spacecraft will provide Earth gravity and atmosphere. Comparing this new planet to Earth,...
When a grenade explodes in water, the shockwave does more damage to a human than when the same grenade explodes in air. I am aware that the incompressibility of water as compared to air plays a lar...
Suppose human being evolved a special type of sensory organ that can detect Earth's magnetic field, beside discarding compass when hiking what else can we benefit from this extrasensory gift in the...
My theory is that if a moon's orbit is situated in between the exoplanet and a second satellite, tidal heating could occur and turn the moon into a sustainable heat source for the host planet. Coul...
Compact, rapidly rotating astronomical objects (like neutron stars) are often observed to emit streams of high energy particle radiation along their poles. Near supermassive black holes in galactic...
A hypothetical organism alternates between plant and animal stages over its life cycle. The organism exhibits equally extreme sexual dimorphism. The generations are diplobiontic a la some species ...
What scientifically, socially and logically plausible mechanisms allow two (or more) sapient land-based species (either closely placed on the phylogenetic tree, such as Homo sapiens and Homo neande...
Atlantropa, Herman Sörgel's proposal to turn vast swathes of the Mediterranean Sea into livable dry land by installing five hydroelectric dams (the main one across the Strait of Gibraltar), is an ...
In one world I've developed, the local surface gravity is slightly more than three times the surface gravity on Earth. Humans settled this world and were doing quite well through highly advanced te...
Consider a world where the majority of creatures behave with might-makes-right rules. How could a pacifist race adapt its biological defenses or its society over years of evolution to protect thems...
Lichen are a symbiotic organism that involves algae or cyanobacteria living inside a fungus. The algae produce energy through photosynthesis, while the fungus protect the algae from the environment...
This is the link of what I have in mind, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvnn1r-9Iw , can a planet rotate chaotically through this system and still be habitable? If it's going to collapse after a ...
Jupiter is a terrible place to be, but for a number of artistic reasons, I'd like to have my story take place there and only there. "Mining", or resource extraction by any other name, is the usual ...
In an early chapter in my book, I want to explain some of the inner workings of an experimental power plant to the reader. However, I also want to get a certain object (a smart coffee pot) in the c...
So to start, let's assume that this hypothetical life form relied on something similar to LNG (liquefied natural gas) - mainly relying on ethane - as a solvent in the same way humans rely on water....
Question The alien want to make some new virus (or editing the gene of existing virus) to increase human death rate, and they don't want human to know the virus has been edited. I have read some s...
A large, visible set of rings is the most conspicuous element that sets Saturn apart from the other planets. The whole system is 175,000 miles (280,000 km) wide but only two-thirds of a mile thi...
I'm looking for a hypothetical scientific discovery that would make both things possible. I'm just looking for the most plausible scenario.
Why certainly! We have all sorts of exotic drink. Can I excite you for a pint of Tarnesian Starköl - bitter, tart, nutty brew this stuff; or rather have shot of H'elvanian Whisky(?) - 7 years o...
I'm talking about ionized gas not the plasma in our blood. I have been reading science articles about plasma and they keep hinting at the idea of plasma based life. Here is my first example and an...
The year is 2267 A.D. Humanity has colonized Prima Centuari system. A federal government is established; the population is expected to grow at an exponential rate to reach 1 billion by 2300 A.D. A...
In the game Warframe, we have blueprints which are "consumed" during the process of making a weapon / Warframe. In some Chinese fantasy Kung Fu movies, a person caught illegally learning martial a...
How could you create a forest in a space city, like the Citadel of the Mass Effect game? Would this forest provide renewal of oxygen for the population? Is it "simple" to create an atmosphere and ...
"Group B" has acquired [Plot-device] and it is able to deliver over time infinite energy of the type needed for the story to work. They decide to place it on the most powerful space engine known t...
Don't scream zombies at this question. That is not meant to be what it is about, regardless of how it sounds. I have an interstellar war between humans and an alien race. The humans are winning, s...
The setting is Earth with the ordinary moon moving as per usual, but this planet also has a moon with stronger tidal pull that moves in an elliptical orbit and comes to its closest point to Earth e...
So I thought up this alien parasite that enters through the mouth (usually of a predator) where it attaches to the throat and simultaneously takes control of the brain and replaces the esophagus of...
Parasite are very unusual creatures, their entire livelihood relies on an unwilling host to allow them to live, some parasite even control the creature itself! Despite this, to my knowledge, there ...
A hyperparasite is "a parasite whose host is itself a parasite" and is the closest analogy to an apex predator in the ecology of parasites. Human sociability, intelligence and status as apex predat...
I am building a nocturnal humanoid race for my science-fantasy setting. They are slight, quick, sneaky and very good at being unobtrusive. They are pretty much the goblins of my setting; though not...
I had a rough idea of a species that has a tendency to blackmail other species into feeding it. The concept was a tree-dwelling species, a larger one that has few predators among the trees to worr...
I've been working on an alien species, and I wanted it to have a blood colour other than red. I was going to go with Coboglobin until I found the sites I was looking at providing diametrically oppo...
So, on a previous question of mine, someone answered that it would be feasible to build a city on a waterborne floating island using a pumice layer below the ground. That got me thinking about the...
A hypothetical species is divided into males and females that exhibit pronounced sexual dimorphism. The males are further divided into multiple morphs (e.g. α-male, β-male, γ-male, etc). This po...
Water bears are about the most impressive organism on our planet. They can withstand extreme temperatures (both hot and cold), can survive for a time in the vacuum and cold of space, are resistant ...
I have humans who live in a world filled with floating islands. These islands span all heights in the planet: from the core to the upper atmosphere. The problem I have is that most of these islands...
Assume that Amazon has set up a processing station on the Moon for whatever motive as a way to ship things out to space (Mars, etc.) faster and more efficiently. How much time today and perhaps i...
I'm imagining if we can live on a very special white dwarf which has very special characteristics: It has cooled down to a very low temperature Its rotational speed on the equator can almost canc...
Say we have an organism with the beak of a raptor (the bird type, not the dinosaur), but instead of a full beak, it only has a mandible on the upper jaw, while the lower jaw just has a jaw bone lik...
In real life constellations are stars, picked out amongst a myriad of stars. But in a fictional world, I don't have a field of stars to begin with and I'm not sure it would be worth creating one fo...
Polycythemia is where the hematocrit is above 55%. This can be divided into absolute and relative and absolute can be further divided into primary and secondary. Absolute polycythemia is where the...
After hearing about Alex the African Gray Parrot, and knowing how intelligent ravens are, just how smart could a brain of that size become? I would like to limit the responses to current known or ...
I am aware of biological constraints to our size, such as the issues presented by Vsauce in this video. However, letting the biological factors aside, what is the perfect size for a technologicall...
I built a magic system that rationalized the creation of energy, so the energy source of magic is not a problem. (How this system works is not the main point of this question.) When people keep us...
Perpetual motion doesn't exist... or does it? In space planets continuously spin around stars for trillions of years due to inertia and gravity balancing each other out. What if a race of brilliant...
Writing a story in which most alien races digest food physically, not useing any chemical stuff. Is this even possible? I know that some lizards and chickens eat rocks for similar reasons, but they...
Assuming the world in question to be of similar size to ours, same proportion of atmosphere etc. but whose surface is perfectly flat, and has a 0 degree axle tilt what sort of weather/wind current ...
I was doing research on the terraforming of planets with a solid iron core and no magnetic field and saw a few suggested ideas for starting a magnetic field on Mars that got me thinking. Most of w...
