General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I am working on a planet with life composed of prokaryotic cells, like bacteria from earth but which have formed large organisms. What perplexes me is that I haven't found a single example about ba...
I want to be able to graph the change in daylight hours across the year for a given latitude, to get an idea of what kind of cycle in available daylight people at that latitude would live through a...
I have heard people (quite possibly on this site) say that by the time a civilization is able to make Dyson sphere it will be useless to build one for power and energy needs. So, would a civilizati...
I want to make an atmosphere rich in carbon monoxide, but as it doesn't stick around for very long, it will need to be replenished. I'm looking for concentrations comparable to those of carbon diox...
I am interested in the idea of a moon orbiting only the southern pole of a planet. Could it theoretically be possible (though unlikely) that a moon would, for instance, orbit a planet parallel to t...
A strange concept which I came up with after realizing that vampires, werewolves and zombies are basically created by an infection from a virus. This has lead me to brainstorm how I could make a mo...
In many fantasy stories humans are capable of inter-breeding with different fantasy races. There is a precedent for this happening with neanderthal and Denisovan DNA being found in people of Eurasi...
Recently, I've grown curious about this lizard men folklore, which revolves around lizard like beings that have the frame work of humanoids. Now this got me thinking of a more human like reptile sp...
A cleaner, narrower-focused improvement of How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle, so not a duplicate. For further clarification, eccentricity is the shape of a planet's...
Over 100,000 years ago giant megafauna roamed the earth such as mammoths, gigantopithecus, and giant sloths. fast forward to today and most megafauna are extinct (with the notable exception being i...
Background I am trying to find a design for a cylindrical habitat that would allow the enclosed cylinder to radiate heat out to space as does the Earth without using mirrors and windows. Problem ...
If we moved Enceladus (not Europa) into Earth's orbit (ignoring the plausibility of it), and gave it a breathable atmosphere, what effects would it have on the Earth? How would it affect us?
Imagine an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star in the inner halo of the Milky Way. As a halo star, it will likely be somewhat metal-poor, having formed early in the life of the galaxy, but o...
Is there a way arachnids legs could have finger like appendages at their ends in a way that makes sense for their structure and wouldn't look like a cheesy design? This creature wouldn't be insect...
I'm working on an earht-like map and I'm having a hard time understanding where to put the high and low pressure zones. Here's some background info first. Axial tilt: 25 degrees Tropics latitude:...
A long time ago homo floresiensis split off into two main groups Goblins and Halflings. Now Goblins are an odd little bunch (here's a rough mock up of what a goblin might look like) and I was wonde...
So, dragons are hexapodal creatures, slightly larger than most draft horses (around 190-200 cm at the withers). Compared to the Quetzalcoatlus, dragons have twice the muscles mass in the pectoral r...
My friend and I are working on a map of a globe. The setting of this universe involve various intelligent animal species divided into 5 clades: Archo (Crocodilians), Avians (Birds), Aquatics (Fish)...
This is something that confuses me with amorphous characters, monsters, robots etc... How do they compute when their particles don't have a fixed form? They are in a sense modular robots only taken...
I was wondering what anatomy would allow a humanoid creature, where the height of the body is around 4 feet tall, to be able to fly like a hummingbird. I have read that scaling up a hummingbird ev...
It is (around here, anyway) quite well known that science does not allow the existence of kaiju, mainly because of the cube-square law. bones rip themselves out To my understanding, this boils do...
Could people with Iron Age technology possibly dig large holes in volcanic rock on the edges of a lave tube system. Would this be an effective way to run a trade business or to live in an undergro...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series. to celebrate the upcoming Sonic movie I've decided to ask the question of what an anatomically correct Sonic would look like? Based o...
Elves in fantasy are commonly depicted as having long life spans and that applies to my story as well with Elves on average living between 250 and 270 years. The question is how would this work and...
Happiness is mandatory. Unhappiness is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Are you happy, citizen? - Friend computer. Welcome to Beta Complex, the little brother of Alpha Comp...
In my story Orcs, humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what evolutionary pressures would to a group of divergent hominids to evolve into Orcs?...
I wanted to include a spider-like race in my book (not a typical drider, but more like a hairy hominid covered in tarantula-like hair and thinner and longer limbs and fingers). However, I wanted th...
I remember reading this thing somewhere about how humans born in zero gravity environments would likely be taller than Earth-bound humans but also more fragile and unable to handle Earth's gravity ...
So, one of the less know abilities of dragons here is anivoice. Anivoice allows dragons to communicate with birds, mammals, reptiles, dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Of course, the information, relayed...
In a world I'm designing, a group of Homo Habilis or even Australopithecus Afarensis migrated into a northern Scotland environment becoming Trolls. These are not D&D trolls, but something else....
My first quest on this platform was, could the Kraken monster from "Evolve" (the game) feasibly exist, which I planned to follow up with the rest of the playable monsters. Appearance The height o...
The Dyson Swarm is common in sci fi as an energy source, and sometimes also as a powerful weapon. As it is commonly understood, it harnesses the energy of the sun, which stores a vast amount of ene...
Imagine a particular species of eel that resembles the shape of a torus or donut. It is capable of generating an alternating electric current in the water as a form of communication between other d...
Shub Niggarath, the black goat of the woods and mother of the dark young, is a powerful entity that lives in a universe parallel to our own. In this universe, immortal entities exist as abstract co...
I'm writing a thriller story about a group of explorers who traveled to a distant planet in the hopes of finding intelligent life, when the explorers arrived they discovered a planet that was full...
Recently, I've taken a small break to establish a story bound universe, so that these questions can actually prove useful in the future Recently, humanity has discovered a vast earth-like planet,...
I am wondering if a species might evolve to deceive human technology - in particular, a set of night vision goggles. I imagine it is either cold blooded or it has thick fur - which doesn't trap air...
The dominant religion on my world (created by a race of dragon-like humanoids) believes that their species originates from an ancient being that sacrificed itself to defeat a great evil at the cen...
In a story I am working on there are 5 AI on a space station of varying levels of social, image recognition and general intelligence. At least one is good enough to pass a Turing test and do image ...
66 million years ago, something brought an end to the long-established dinosaur empire. The pendulum just kept shifting between an asteroid and a comet, astronomical bolides that actually have dif...
Is it possible that life could come about on land if a planet has a dense atmosphere? (This applies to non-carbon based life as well).
So imagine people were the size of house cats, and the world's land masses were scaled down accordingly (in volume). In comparison to the original size of the landmass, how big would England be? An...
What needs to be improved or added to the structure (device) of human lungs to be able to filter toxic chemical compounds in the air (for example, in mines the air may contain nitrogen, methane, ca...
(This is the third in a series of questions, starting with Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands? and How soon does the Earth's surf...
The question is in the title, but I have bolded the main details to reality-check. I hope that makes it easier to read. Details: I had the idea of a fantasy/sci-fi animal that never stops growing,...
Basically, could a gas stick together enough to be internally coherent, and act like animal cells? Or is there zero chance of that happening?
I'm working on a novel that takes place in a fictional universe which involves creatures with long forelimbs and short hind limbs. Some of these creatures includes amphibians , reptilians and mamma...
Reattaching severed limbs is a recurring theme in many monsters, but never has it been explained HOW they reattach their appendages. I doubt the neurons would magically realign and begin to functio...
I'd like to randomly generate between 1 and 20 million stars for a spiral galaxy resembling our Milky Way. This is of course far fewer than our galaxy (estimated between 150 to 300 billion), but I'...
So, I have this draft for a story. It's basically a parody(?) of the fantasy tropes originating from LOTR (the movies) with the twist that we're following the bad guy's lackeys, who he abuses more ...
