General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I am writing a story where a person suffers from a medical condition where the gut produces too much of a liquid called diphosphane. Diphosphane is pyrophoric past a certain small concentration, an...
Hello there, it's my first time posting, so I'm sorry if I'm going against formatting. I'm making a continent for a fantasy setting, and have been firstly focusing on geography. This continent s...
So, I thought I had the hunger related bioluminescence for my Keplerians figured out. That once the hunger hormone reaches a certain threshold, the hormone receptors on some cells of a bioluminesce...
This is a slight continuation of my other post where I was trying to create realistic hollows with weather due to temperature changes due to bio minerals called Hearthstones. I was wondering if pla...
We have earth at the beginning of the 15th century, and suddenly the biggest continent disappears. There is nothing left of it, no animals, people, lands, anything. I don't think the details of th...
The saying goes "a wolf in sheep's clothing", which is a biblical idiom to refer to someone pretending to be harmless. This got me thinking about if the reverse could also be true. So I came up wit...
So me and my buddy are currently working on a story that takes place on a different earth-like planet similar to when dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus inhabit the landscape. A few differences is that t...
Tzeentch, the weaver of destinies, the architect of fate, originates from the Warhammer 40K universe and is the god of knowledge, change, and evolution. However, I will take away the god like attri...
Nurgle comes from the Warhammer 40K universe, he is described as being the lord of plague or the god of diseases, decay, and destruction. I will, however, take away his god like attributes, and tr...
Hypothetically, if an animal such as a cephalopod were to become terrestrial, and walking gradually evolved from crawling, would hardened muscle be likely to evolve as support, with articulation to...
An Earth mass terran planet is orbiting a sun-like star at 2AU. I understand the limit for CO2 greenhouse effects is 1.67AU for whatever reason (giving a conventional habitable zone limit), but per...
I have a creature that is made of crystal. The problem is, crystal as I know it is structured in ways that don't allow for flexible movement as we are able to do. How could a lifeform made of cryst...
I am attempting to construct a world that is primarily lit by light filtered through and reflected off of a crystalline moon so that, at its brightest, the planet receives about the same amount of ...
This lifeform is a carbon based humanoid that uses ammonia instead of water, breathes chlorine gas, and its body uses the mineral olivine to toughen its skin. Its blood is blue; apparently an ammon...
For a story I'm writing, I'm looking for an undetectable plant based poison that if ingested in a miniscule amount, would make a ten year old boy sick: intrinsic muscle weakness, stunted growth, an...
So, if you remember these two questions: What can these negative-mass-free wormholes be used for? and Scientific explanation for summoned creatures , you probably know what I'm talking about. Ba...
Continuing from my previous questions about a swarm of millimetre-sized drones, I want them to be able to interlock or by some method form into strong functioning structures, like a gun or a baseba...
Extremely low possibility, but if life synthesizes from scratch after life has existed on a planet for a few million years, would the two separate lineages be able to co-exist?
When I say all-metal airships, I'm referring to something like the above from Jakub Rozalski's artwork - the design is more akin to a naval destroyer or battleship and less like a zeppelin. We'v...
I have a character that achieves an ability similar to scattering and reforming or elemental swarming by controlling millimetre sized surveillance drones to morph into different shapes or disperse ...
I'm writing about a fictional world where reptiles evolved and became the dominant species on a planet. on this planet an extinction event never occurred and reptiles still remained the dominant sp...
So, I decided to up the ante with dragons and make them much more destructive by giving the aqua regia as the breath weapon. The problem is that the dragon in this story is a sweet and cheeky kid,...
There might be a way to build traversable wormholes without needing negative mass. Take a gander: https://phys.org/news/2019-04-wormholes.html Now, these wormholes have a big limitation, they can...
I am a giant, intelligent, fortress-like, plant-based organism, able to forge many structures, defenses and organisms from my flesh by altering my own DNA and rapidly growing new constructs wheneve...
So, there's this guy, Null, named after his ability that allows him to send any action, a person makes, into /dev/null. Basically, he can "No, you didn't" any attack. That's okay, but then comes h...
What adaptations are needed for human-derived sea-dwellers? My people are not the classic half-fish, nor are they whale-tail-people - they wear ankle-length swimming skirts that bind their legs in...
I am an alien from outer space who is visiting a planet called Earth. The species living here, humans, have a very primitive and strange culture. They seem to spontaneously burst into dance and son...
Sort of a follow up: What change in human biology would lead to wild gestational periods? In an alternate world during the middle ages, women are regularly with child for more than a year, with th...
I'm designing a creature that is supposed to be able to eat "basically anything", within the realm of plausibility for what is essentially an organic creature. Its digestive system can be as compli...
(Note: This is a follow-up question to my previous one: Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands?) Thanks to clever stellar engineerin...
Nyarlethotep (the crawling chaos, the evil with a thousand forms, the messenger of the outer gods) originates from the literature of HP Lovecraft and is by far one of the most evil, sadistic, and i...
So I'm designing a world where the air has its own ecosystem, separate from the one on the land, because sky whales are cool. However, I'm having trouble figuring out what the plants and other prod...
A common weapon in science fiction is the Molecular Disrupting Beam, which disintegrates anything caught by the beam into basic atoms and molecules with no wound or gash, more as if a portion of th...
So I'm almost done with my draft of a story I'm writing. And I just got a random question popped into my head. Is it possible for Zues (the kaiju size dino) to survive? I already got a little bit o...
"The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal"”in fact, blacker than anything on Ea...
In prehistoric times, there used to be a dwarf elephant species in many Mediterranean islands. They were about 1.5-2 meters high, but probably became extinct before the arrival of the first human b...
I want to write a science fantasy novel about humans evolving into five new species. The five races are: the Groses and Grosettes (they are my Ogres) (their name comes from the french word gros/gro...
In the movie Primer (2004), there are two main characters who travel back 24 hours in time using their time machine. When they arrive, both they and their past selves exist in this same town at the...
Throughout the ages, The Summoners were a prominent family of mages (but technology is magic here), who possess the ability to call forth creatures from cards. Of course they can only summon creatu...
Let's say that somehow, enough Neanderthals survived after the last ice age to be able to form a centralized government, economy, etc. Would this even be possible? What events could lead to this?
I had an idea for a swarm of tiny drones, the smallest being as small as fairy flies at 0.15mm long, that could form into shapes and structures, even mimic the shapes of living creatures. They wou...
This is a question regarding my little critters that hijack of their victim. By doing so they get direct access to a steady flow of nutrients through the bloodstream and get shelter with optimal te...
first question here (but not last I think). I'm currently thinking about ideas I have to form the base of a book I'll then write, and I need some insights/knowledge about exploration. I'm looking ...
in the Cthulhu mythos, yog sothoth is depicted as a mass of splitting and fusing orbs, it is the past, present, and future and seemingly knows everything. but for the sake of trying to make it real...
My father (who is a biologist) thinks that a sapient species must be a true omnivore because if it were an obligate herbivore (like a koala or a sloth), it would not have enough nutrients to develo...
I want to make an alien species evolve without fear, or atleast not fear as we know it. Intelligent life, as I understand it, requires fear to encourage an organism to keep itself alive. What emo...
Many people are excited with the idea of super-Earths--rocky, habitable exoplanets greater in mass, density and diameter (because I'd prefer to go the whole way than stop at the halfway point) than...
Context: In a near-future version of our solar system, humans have established multiple underwater colonies on Jupiter's moon Europa. Many of these outposts are situated next to hydrothermal vents ...
I'm trying to create a scenario where the local star is "quickly" (suddenly up to thousands of years) removed, dimmed with reduced output, destroyed (maybe), or otherwise fundamentally changed as t...
