General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Giants do exist. It's just that they can't be anywhere close to being as big as those in Norse mythology or the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. The best we'd ever have for a giant was Robert Wad...
It's just another average day in the life of modern day earth. Suddenly a transmission from orbit washes over the planet! Oh no! An alien race, calling themselves the "Thull", has suddenly arrived ...
Far to the north, in a slushy and storm-torn wasteland, a city stands. Massive pillars jut hundreds of feet into the sky from their anchors deep beneath the rising and falling tides below the city....
Is there a way for a moon to usually appear relatively similar to our own moon, but occasionally appear much larger from the planet's surface without causing natural disasters due to extreme gravit...
NASA has received a new employee: a dragon! His name is Firewing and he's there to help NASA with its missions. He's not an astronaut himself, mainly because of the logistical issues of launching a...
Continuing from this question: The rodents on the synthetic planet ( which I am now calling Ark ) can now walk/run erect when desired. The scientists continue with biological forging and work on t...
At the current pace of technological advancement, when would humans be able to build an interplanetary telescope array? This telescope doesn't have to be that huge; building one spanning Earth, Mo...
I am considering a human-like species that has a consciously controlled womb- like organ. These beings would be able to gestate and give birth to any smallish creature that fitted their purpose. Na...
It is well known that our working memory (in our brains) is limited to about 7 items, the magical number 7, + or - 2. This is the Miller's law. (our working memory is not at all like the RAM of a ...
I have this player with some portal based technology that wanted to build a moving base. His technology works like this: You need 2 portals connecting two spaces, both go in both ways, and conserv...
I was reading more Laundry stories and just went through Equoid. The humorous "Procurement Specification" got me thinking. In a rational SF approach (as opposed to magic), imagine a civilization d...
You have undoubtedly played them. Games with floating land and platforms, "falling out of the world", high jumping, floating and slowly revolving objects, and wingless flying enemies. Question: W...
Imagine a sentient species with these attributes: not very advanced (think primal tribes) can breathe underwater good swimmers feed on seafood (fish, algae) live in a high fantasy world with orcs...
What are some possible ways this could happen?
Lets say there's a super earth orbiting the sun at 3.00 AU, how thick would its atmosphere have to be to trap enough heat to make the planet warm enough for liquid water to flow on its surface?
In the question, Weapons for a civilisation-destroying giant robot, I asked about what weapons might be mounted on a giant snakebot over 1 km in diameter and over 9km long, equipped with six fusion...
I was thinking of a scenario in which people decide to use breeding to try to make two species more genetically related to each other. The people take genetic samples of each individual from their...
In a world with humanized (or at least tool using) reptiles, how long would a tattoo be able to last on the scales? Would the tools need to be much different than what we use today? Would it be p...
In another question, Are flying plants possible?, a point was raised that because of the square-cube law, a large, hollow, spherical plant could fly by having the air inside be a little bit hotter ...
Somewhat inspired by this question : Could a civilization as advanced as humans exist on a planet/dwarf planet like Pluto? Assume two dwarf planets in tide lock orbit around one-another. Assume ...
Exactly as asked on the title, is there a way that a human, or at least, a species that appears outwardly human, could survive being pincushioned by arrows, at least for a suitably dramatic length ...
I was watching a television program recently about Naked Mole Rats and how they are they are one of the only known Eusocial mammals. They have a single queen who produces offspring as well as warri...
I hope my question isn't too vague or broad. It's a follow-up to this one. So, we have a human (genetically modified in order to support life on another place, from previous question) on an alien ...
A space colony that resembles the design of a Stanford torus generates artificial gravity by centripetal force. Discussions about benefits of such fake gravity can be easily found: no more constan...
Could a terrestrial planet have a stable set of layers of atmospheres, and could different lifeforms evolve within those different layers? This question is inspired by the diversity found on Earth...
So I'm writing a story on a population of lizardmen who have subdued all the human population. Since lizards spend lots of their time soaking in the sun, I'm not sure how should I go for the night...
Following up the ideas given in this question, we introduce a new gas to the mix of air. Meta: Assume an Earth-like planet. The proposed change is a pre-development change (meaning it's there sinc...
I am looking to have a Tunnel drilled through a world and deal with the physics of What happens in the centre of a planet, what happens with the heat at the core and whether it is faster to travel ...
Lets assume a city exists underground, either in natural caves or synthetic tunnels. Are there any food sources underground, and what kind of population can they support?
Would it be possible for a corporeal alien with a solid physical body (it must be able to touch and interact with the world) to exist but remain invisible to humans? My understanding of optics is...
"One other thing. Never drink the water out here without boiling it." the old scavenger added, waving a hand over the bogs and hills. "You'll get rabies, and I don't like accepting payment from ...
I'm going on vacation, and browsing through my texts on the latest iPhone. Uh oh, my private airplane, which for some stupid reason has no tracking devices, crashes onto some undiscovered island. E...
The situation is bad, human kind have waited to the last minute (literally) with building the huge ship that is supposed to save man kind. The sun goes nova, nothing can stop that but the ship has ...
Related somewhat to Gravity on a Minecraftian world? say I have this infinite plane/world, then punch a circular hole through it to the other side. Say I manage to make a circular hole around 1 ki...
I want my actors in outer space but I don't want them roaming around freely. Like, if the actors were in a building, there would be walls, doors, elevators. If they were on a land, there would be ...
After doing some research to find natural resources in a swamp, I found that a swamp wasn't really able to do anything beyond it being good for fish growth, as a sort of natural water and air filte...
A generation ship was sent out a long time ago, to colonize a far away planet. However the ship failed to reach its goal due to navigational issues (which also means they didn't have any clue where...
In a couple of games, you encounter a creature or two that regrows limbs immediately after losing them, not necessarily the same kind or aesthetic of limb. You shoot the creature, it loses an arm, ...
If I take ten thousand healthy adult humans, strap them into a colony ship, and fire them off on a three-million year journey to a distant star, what will the creatures climbing out of the colony s...
I've heard a lot of people say that having two tidally locked planets close together would have adverse affects on both planets. I have two tidally locked planets at a distance of 16,550 miles apar...
In a world I'm currently building, I've devised a magical creature that sustains, indefinitely, a Class O hypergiant star. This, of course, violates conservation of mass and conservation of energy....
The leprechaun. A little ginger humanoid dressed in green, with buckled shoes and a matching hat, and a massive pot of (tax-free) gold. We all know them. Or not. For the world I'm building, I've d...
As you might know, most planets that have atmospheres are not the ideal temperature to live on. For example, Venus is a very, very, very hot planet with constant volcanic eruptions and especially t...
I have two binary planets, with technological level of about the present day. They've developed communication between the two planets, and scientists are trying to develop a method of getting peopl...
I was wondering if a full aquatic bird could exist and not be on, or return to land at any developmental stage, basically, to be completely independent of land. I already know that there are some a...
Let there be an earth-sized planet with a rotational period of just over 3 hours and 38 minutes described by David Hammen here . On this oblate spheroid, with nights lasting for an hour and 49ish m...
Imagine a terrestrial planet extremely close to its star (assume it's identical to the Sun to make this simpler), maybe a bit like Kepler-78b but with an orbit of only about a week, for the purpose...
In my earth-like world, there is one thing that separates it from Earth; this world has a single rocky ring, around 10.3 meters thick, 5(ish) miles wide. In our own world we know that without an o...
In an answer to this question Cyrus suggested that pre-technology merpeople might use shrimp or prawns in lue of maggots to eat away rotting flesh. Similar to how plants and (in some cases) anima...
This theory, what I call the world shift theory, states that the Earth's original orbit was solar stationary at one of its poles constantly facing the Sun, building, over time, the magnetic poles. ...
