General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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There are various arguments on the web stating that the domestication of zebras is impossible, because zebras are bad tempered and skittish, and/or animals elsewhere are even-tempered and friendly....
I have a captured planet/moon orbiting HD 37124 c, known as HD 37124 c m XVIII, and I was wondering: since the moon has 1.7 Earth masses, 1.1 Earth radii, a density of 7.038 g/cm^3 and a gravitatio...
I'm currently working on two connected continents for the world I'm building. They've created a convergent boundary where they meet, which has given rise to an east-west mountain range, in addition...
On Earth, life took on a quadruped body plan which has lead to many different sub body plans; 4 legged, 2 legs-2 wings, 2 legs-2 arms, etc. This has made me wonder what possible sub body plans can ...
A caveat I will begin this question with is this: this system MUST be entirely organic. In fact it must be EVOLVED. Therefore Ghost in the Shell or Metal Gear-style nanocomms or cranial implants ar...
Here's the set up: in my fantasy world, there is a species of tree similar to Banyan trees. There are several giant versions of these, and smaller ones are quite common. One of the biggest of the...
The setting: Very distant future, Earth is long gone/forgotten/just not around anymore. Humanity, whatever it may consist of (people, AI, something in-between) inhabits a single vast generation shi...
Alternatively, could DNA be a language (the normal coding that exists within DNA to tell it what to build) that is capable of telling us anything. This question is based off of this article about...
So I'm working on a story based on a binary system involving two Earth sized, Earth like worlds with very eccentric orbits. In the story, one of the major coastal cities is protected by a massive r...
How could a vertebrate animal evolve for extended flight before evolving land adaptations? Is that even possible at all? By extended flight, I mean breathing air and spending most of their time in...
In Pokemon, each individual Pokemon "evolves" into a new stage of its evolution. A lot people claim that this can be explained using mere metamorphosis, but there are no mammals that go through suc...
I'm making a species which has a gas-based circulatory system. How would one go about designing such a system, in which liquid blood is replaced by some kind of gas? What kind of blood vessels wou...
For certain categories of items, namely weapons, armor and machinery (that's pretty general, I know), how well would stone fare vs metal? Assume that any complications with shaping the stone are go...
Before the first nuclear weapon was dropped, a scientist (whose name has escaped me) had a thought: could it ignite the atmosphere? But this was during World War II, when they didn't have the maths...
Now maybe this belongs in physics, but I want it here because I'm interested in the impacts on our society if the speed of light (c) were to be 2x faster since the big bang. My first thoughts were...
Let's say I have been chosen to evaluate whether or not alien worlds contain sapient life before we terraform them. Just assume that we learned to work together and live as a species in peace, trea...
Forget about how we get it there, some kind of top secret experiment on mars gone wrong in all the right ways. If somehow Mars's core was mixed with some amount of antimatter, and assuming 100% of...
Many half-human mythological creatures follow a few common anatomical schemes. Some consist of an animal with a human face, such as the sphinx, naga and manticore. Some consist of a human anterio...
Many SF stories feature faster-than-light travel as essentially a trope: Roddenberry has stated☡ that the Enterprise travels at the speed of plot. As an allegory of the south seas, or some throw...
Its the year 2050, and extraterrestrials have popped up next to the Solar System. We know they are coming our way and we know they are most likely hostile. As Steven hawking said: Such advance...
Specifically, could new planets form around a previously destroyed star? (Think of it like a phoenix.) If so, could the potential sentient life detect that their star previously exploded?
Imagine an Earth-like planet with oceans that are comprised roughly 50/50 of heavy water and normal water. My understanding is that while heavy water ice sinks in normal water, it would float on he...
The gas giant has a mass of about 2.13 Jupiter masses in the habitable zone of a Sun like star 0.981 Sol masses, all the moons will need at least >0.12 percent of Earth's mass and a Mars like de...
Let's say that planet X with a gravity similar to Earth increases its gravity by a certain amount. The increase is great enough to make living conditions difficult or impossible: for instance, the ...
It is understood that a way to prevent causality violation and time-travel while still having faster-than-light travel is to introduce a specific reference frame. This is explained in detail in th...
Let's say that a "terraformable planet" is a planet who : is in the goldilock zone of its star(s) has around the same gravity as Earth has a solid surface covered with minerals not too toxic for...
Is there a necessary relation between orbital period and the time of precession? In the case of Earth, the orbital period is one year, while a complete precession cycle takes thousands of years. Is...
Is it possible for humanity to completely annihilate itself? By that I mean there cannot be one survivor left and the annihilation must be caused by humanity itself with current technology (no craz...
In the spirit of Thanksgiving (US) let's tackle a fun one. I'm defining "intelligent" in this situation as "at least on par with hunter-gatherer humans, able to communicate" What natural, environm...
Is it reasonable for a river to be shallow enough to ford in one location, while nearby (say within 5 miles or less), be at least 12 feet (3.6m) deep? The same river can have shallow sections and d...
Let's imagine a race of Giants, with an average height three times that of a normal human being. Let's also imagine that these Giants are completely identical to humans, proportionately speaking......
What would happen to occupants of an O'Neal Cylinder if it suffered a massive hull breach on one of its ends i.e. the base of the cylinder? Specifically, those nearer to the breach. If the breach ...
"Every cloud has a silver lining." The saying is fairly well-known, but I was musing on it while staring through a cloud bank, and I started to wonder: What kind of hellhole would a planet have to ...
How much force, momentum, and energy would be needed to have an object pierce through the Earth? I've tried to research this, but I could not find results for a mathematical value. Assume the Eart...
Hear me out before you downvote; It's not as simple as it seems. On Earth, nuclear reactions produce heat energy. This is used to heat water, creating steam, powering turbines connected to generat...
Context if you're interested In the very near future, a planet teeming with alien life is discovered several light years away from our Solar System - and with a few precautions, it may be habi...
Assuming you already had sufficient money and resources to build a tower stretching from the top of Europa's ice layer down to the bottom of the seabed, could you build it on top of one of its geys...
Let's say there's a habitable planet somewhere, covered with very deep cool water ocean. By very deep I mean thousands of km, but the exact numbers don't actually matter. According to water's pha...
Mod Note: Some people may be squeamish about this subject, please keep all responses clinical rather than vulgar. So, in my world, I try to play the "immortality" trope with twists that make it su...
Suppose humans discovered a beautiful new world they wanted to inhabit, far from the political machinations and military affairs of the alien-populated universe. They established a few colonies on ...
The Mokèlé-mbèmbé (meaning "one who stops the flow of rivers") is a legendary water-dwelling creature of Congo River basin folklore, loosely analogous to the Loch Ness Monster in Western culture. ...
Let me explain further the idea. Nowadays (as thousands of years earlier) many people bound themselves in their mind to a particular nation, country, town, neighborhood etc. And very often these p...
I want to write a novel situated in a "reversed planet": there are two stars orbiting each other, and there is a little spot exactly in the middle of the two that is suitable for life. A normal pla...
I want to live in a pollution free world, where all creatures can breath clean air. I also want to live in a high-end space civilization, where its possible to travel to other planets in our sola...
This question:Why would a language be untranslatable by universal (machine) translator? inspired me to consider, if one possessed a universal translator, is it reasonable to consider that it could ...
I've seen some articles about biologically powering devices through a glucose fuel cell, but from what I can tell this would only provide power on the order of a few tenths of a watt. While it's d...
The animal I envision is very protective over its planet. It goes out into space and eats anything that gets close to it. To do this, the animal can float through space, and leave/re-enter the atmo...
My novel take place in a world where the civil war in Ukraine escalates to a Third World War after a terrorist attack (dirty nuclear warhead) in Kiev. This war is ruled by Private Military Compani...
Suppose that I have a planet very similar to Earth. It has the same level of gravity, water-land ratio, temperature, air composition, rotation and revolution speed, tectonic activities, temperature...
