General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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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,...
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 ...
In 2039, our company was the first to bring a safe and reliable solution to upload someone's mind to the cloud. Although it was 10 years ago, you probably remember the news, don't you? We guarantee...
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...
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...
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...
There's a a decent sized kingdom that is situated between the ocean and a gigantic dried out seabed. The Priest-King and his lackeys want to flood the useless desert because who wouldn't want more ...
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...
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...
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...
I am not a native speaker, so please forgive my errors. Our space federation A is currently in the fiftieth year of a limited war with the alliance B, and the control of the K sector will...
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,...
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...
If humans lived on the inside of the earth's crust, what would happen if they climbed mountains? These mountains would stretch toward the burning center of the Earth. Would gravity get stronger the...
The neuro strain is a virus that affects the nervous system in drastic ways. Firstly, when the host is infected, their body will grow bigger than it would have originally been but not much bigger ...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
I am working on a story about a person who was raised on an earth-like planet and later moves to our earth. The planet he is from specializes in fruit juice and alcohol making, in specific, wine. W...
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 ...
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...
Ancient Man feasted on megafauna. From mammoths to every variety of deer and flightless bird humans have made the most of large wildlife, to the point of tragic excess. So what happens when the ani...
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...
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 ...
Short version A far future catastrophe burns/melts away large chunks of the Earth and Moon. For reasons related to my story's fantasy elements, the remains of the Moon have about one fifth their or...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Conventional monsters won't cut it. They whine and cry too much when fighting, they give up and go down too easily, mostly because of malnutrition since Jimmy, The Dark Lord, forgot he can't grow p...
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 ...
Consider a race of humanoid, winged tree-dwellers. They can fly and generally spend most of their time either in the air or climbing around their tree-homes in the upper reaches of a forest. In ord...
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...
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...
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 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 ...
In a distant future, humanity has colonized and catalogued countless worlds in their home galaxy. However one day humanity has discovered a few habitable words in the Andromeda galaxy. After a wh...
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?
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov (you can hear the story here on escapepod, if you need it) postulates a planet in a multi-sun system. The orbital mechanics of the 6 suns result in all of the sides of t...
