General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The setting is a moon-sized body with solid surface, thick (but mostly transparent) atmosphere and magnetosphere. But most heat from the space is supplied with relativistic charged particles impact...
In a setting I've been working with, I sought a method of sublight travel that wasn't crazy engines or magic. I've already got FTL using a different method than the Alcubierre drive, so it wouldn't...
A spaceship of several kilometers length is accelerating to a very high fraction of $c$ (basically as close as they can possibly get). Which problems can the machinery and the crew encounter? And...
Assuming that we have a universe with four spatial dimensions plus time, within which atoms exist that can form solids, liquids, gases and plasmas, the compounds that can be formed having physical ...
I am building a world with many deserts and swamps. So a simple question: Are there any real world examples of where a desert and a swamp meet each other? Deserts and swamps are vastly different ...
How can the atmosphere rapidly change composition? Around ~2.3 Billion Years ago, the Atmosphere changed radically: Cyanobacteria started pumping out Oxygen and the atmosphere gradually became Oxy...
The following post is copy-pasted from a similar question on Reddit: Apparently, I already started work on the story and it turns out, that I have Ganymede speaking a fictional Russian dialect ca...
Could a chemical compound change a human body in a way that a regular quantity of that compound is needed to stay alive after the first dose? The short answer would be yes, there exist already suc...
The Wikipedia article on Klemperer Rosettes states that hexagonal rosettes are slightly more stable than other, non-hexagonal rosettes, due to the position of the orbital objects in the Lagrange po...
I've designed a creature for my alien world that is a large apex predator known commonly as a wraith. It lives mostly in dense jungle and forest and uses stealth and ambush to catch its prey (it ca...
In our universe energy is conserved. In a parallel universe could energy divided by distance be a conserved quantity instead of energy itself? So in this universe if two objects were to move away...
So, I'm in the process of writing a book series having to do with prehistory and the like, and I'm trying to make everything as accurate to life as I can while still making it an entertaining story...
I have an exomoon that orbits close enough to its planet that it has notable geological activity. I would like to limit active volcanoes/geysers/lava lakes/etc. to at most, a couple dozen areas on ...
In a country where the government does not collect taxes, who pays for roads/highways? A little background on the government (it's a work in progress): This government's single purpose is to elim...
In this case the person would experience 292Gs by the end of the 14 months, which should be enough to kill him/her but, considering that it would have taken 14 months for the environment to reach a...
A Dyson Sphere, being a sphere, is a uniform "equatorial" climate across the entire surface. I consider this to be a major problem. Somewhere between the Dyson Sphere and the Dyson Hyperboloid is ...
I know that by definition, a desert implies a lack of water and, as such, makes it very hard for living things to survive there. In the story I'm writing, the characters come across a planet that ...
So, I have an aquatic humanoid species that I want to be able to use echolocation. They are extremely similar to humans,with some minor differences, like gills. (The reason I include this tidbit is...
Let's say that tens of thousands of years pass and earth effectively becomes a giant city. What species of organisms survive our conquest? How do these species evolve to adapt? How long would huma...
I know that on a binary planet you would have planetary eclipses (basically like a solar or lunar eclipse but with planets instead of moons). If there also is a moon, things would be much more comp...
I've had a great idea to leap over the giant boundary of respiration when making giant insects.The largest problem is that insects rely on diffusion through exterior holes (spiracles) to breathe, a...
In my universe there is a human civilization that is advanced enough to have computers, computer networks, and robots, however they have a relatively rudimentary knowledge of medicine/biology. The...
My advanced human society understands how to search & find data on other dimensions; as well, we can travel if they're compatible. For years all we've found was data indicating dimensions wi...
Note: There is a related question about illuminating such a sphere that inspired this question. I'm going much farther, though, this is not a dupe. The Dyson sphere will be the central mass of t...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
Time period is renaissance, with the most powerful culture being in a area geographically similar to the middle east. So a cleric was trying to combat a drought in his kingdom using the power of a ...
Split out from this question since it was too large. I'm designing an exoplanetary system that was the victim of a drive-by super-Jupiter ejected from a nearby supernova that crashed into the syst...
Merfolk can be easily described as humans with the lower half of fish. On this site we have discussed; How their tails work, How they sleep, And how they hear. But there is one question that has no...
I have a terrestrial moon that I would like to have spectacular and frequent lightning storms. What atmospheric compositions and conditions could cause this? Tools The moon orbits a 21 earth-mas...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
Imagine a person who has 'passive' precognitive abilities. During sleep, they dream of random future events-these can range from events that will happen in a few hours to events that will happen in...
Many questions on Worldbuilding have posited different reproductive strategies that often result in the virtual enslavement of females (when there are females involved). On Earth, normal human biol...
I am currently focusing my worldbuilding efforts in designing a story (or, perhaps, if all goes well, a series of stories) that take place in space. In my constructed reality, there exists a mater...
I plan to make a RPG setting and I want it to be as credible as possible. By that I mean that I want to be able to explain everything with science without cheating. Statistically not likely but pos...
In a world I am working on, I have a wilderness-living, social, group-living species that for various reasons lacks access and ability to anything resembling modern medicine, including vaccinations...
Recently there have been up to two habitable planets discovered around the star TRAPPIST-1, if animal life was able to evolve on either planets how would eyesight evolve under such a dim star? How ...
I am working on the development of a humanoid species. I figured they'd have split along the evolutionary chain around the same time as humans. They'd live in a warm climate, resulting in little ha...
I'm making a world where you live in the air, as the surface is not survivable (like Venus). I'm going to leave out the story of the planet, as it's not important. Anyway, could there be a planet ...
In the animated movie Monsters Inc. the monsters which populate the universe all look very different despite the fact that they are presented as being the same species (since they can interbreed). ...
I have a planet in a solar system that is for all intents and purposes identical to ours that I want to play like a bongo drum with asteroids or other extra terrestrial rocks to destroy most of the...
Suppose you are given an armor that has this curious property: as soon as a force is applied into it, the force vector is changed by 180°. If you throw a rock against it, the corresponding energy ...
For the sake of convenience, this happens on Earth. However, in this scenario only the American continent (all of it) is inhabited. One of the countries is experimenting with extremely advanced an...
I am working on a coastal salt marsh ecosystem, and need an organism which has a large trunk. From my poking around it seems to me a large woody grass, or a Prototaxites like fungus\lichen might be...
Aka: What I am asking is: what are the basic elements a society capable of space travel needs? What key factors determine a species'capacity to become spacefaring and what cultural and societal asp...
My space colonists have found a home in the ring system of a (maybe chthonian) gas giant. The rings are based on Saturn's in terms of appearance, but can they be made of gases or liquid (maybe drop...
I'm looking for a scientific explanation as to why vampires would be incapable of entering a human's house uninvited. There have been many terrific scientific explanations for some of the most in...
It makes sense to believe life is more likely to evolve on the surface of large objects like planets, moons, and asteroids. However, a common fantasy trope is the massive space creature: some kind ...
On Earth, there are geothermal vents - heat coming from underground vents that support life at the bottom of the ocean where the sun cannot reach. My question is, would this be possible to support...
In our understanding of mass extinction and adaptive radiation, we have found that life can't and doesn't bounce back right away. They take time. It took life eight to ten million years to recove...
No, not that one. This one. I want to see the USS Enterprise fly, but I'm curious how it would be accomplished in any realistic fashion. Now, the world I'm building that needs a flying Enterpri...
