General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Imagine a space battle between two warships without inertial dampeners. Obviously the ships would be limited to perhaps 4 gravities of prolonged acceleration, and could only perform short bursts o...
I would like to have a humanoids with three pairs of eyes placed on the same horizontal plane like in Protheans not one below the other like Batarian. I was thinking of one pair being sensitive to...
This is the next piece in my question-series, you guys have been absolutely awesome in your answers to the first question: How to solve the old 'gun on a spaceship' problem? In this series, I try ...
I imagine a planet similar to ours, except for two details: The presence of everlasting clouds No yearly seasons Explanation: In this world clouds are very high and thick, so that sunlight (or...
In my 10 book series, the historical time line turns on the fact that the greatest nation in the major continent's history, disappeared overnight during a national celebration. This nation was enj...
Human have begun colonizing the solar system using the ablative laser microwave drive, our next target is Proxima Centauri and inbetween there is basically nothing except dust and occasional astero...
An alien race wants to test out its new technology that modifies the atmosphere of Earth and other terrestrial planets, they decide to center it over Central Park, NYC. One of the first things they...
I have been poking at the idea of an eventual re-emergence of the PACER concept, where energy is obtained by detonating nuclear explosions... but not exactly in the same form. After humans become s...
This question concerns this Alternative Earth. To make a certain fictional country which occupies the northern part of Russia more interesting, I want to make agriculture feasible in Siberia and t...
Suppose we scale up a human to about 10m in height and their skeletal structure have evolved to ensure they won't succumb under their own weight. Due to their unique blood circulatory system they c...
Suppose human beings have evolved markings covering the face and hairs. The cells contain a colony of bacterium capable of producing multiple arrays of visible light. Each bacteria reacts differen...
I want to have a star cluster of main-sequence stars (yellow dwarfs [like our sun], orange, and red dwarfs) that are on a distance of 1-2 light years between each other, so interstellar travel is ...
On a world I am building, I have a species of creatures that evolved from crustaceans. The problem is that while they have an exoskeleton, they also live on a world with the same gravity as Earth. ...
I'll keep it nice and simple. On a world that does not rotate is it possible to have a mountain that is high enough that when you sit at the top, you can see the divide between daylight and night t...
What adaptions would humans obtain if they lived on Mars? (eg. get taller/shorter because of gravity) In a universe where humans terraformed mars to have breathable air and house some plants, what...
Some information about their homeworld: Their homeworld, 0.34247 (M⊕) 0.54 G, 10156 km. The atmospheric pressure of their homeworld is 62% of the Earth's, and the planet has an average temper...
In a world inhabited by small grassland herbivores, night-time is a very scary time indeed. With no moon or other substantial light-source to illuminate the plains, they are in great danger of beco...
How fast does the Earth's core rotate currently, and what would happen if its speed of rotation were to increase dramatically?
Is a dystopian future with a thinner atmosphere and heavy snow feasible? Also would that mean that snow clouds formed at lower altitudes?
A mad scientist decides to hold the moon hostage for one million dollars. He accomplishes this using a tractor beam of arbitrary power to trap the moon directly between the Earth and the Sun. The t...
I've wanted my fantasy world to be as realistic and science-based as possible (aside from magic), but I also want there to be dinosaurs or creatures that are very similar to dinosaurs. So what woul...
This is connected to a previous question, found here: Realism of a setting with several sapient anthropomorphic animal species Presume that due to outside interference with evolution, a planet has...
The concept of a planet with several anthropomorphic sapient species (furries, if you will) is immensely popular. But would it actually make sense in the first place? I am aware of the issue of "...
First of all, I'd like to make a disclaimer, and that is that I'm in a brainstorming phase as of now so this question will be generally vague. This also means that any ideas you're willing to propo...
What would be the evolutionary setup for flying monkeys to evolve. They should have branched of from the same ancestors as present day monkeys.They need to be migratory like modern day migrating bi...
Think basically a Jupiter brain (a megascale computer made from a gas giant) but with a Dyson shell surrounding it to act as a threefold nutrient/waste exchange (assuming it repairs itself and adds...
So let's say that I have a world with a moon, you know kind of like we do on Earth. But with life on the planet, is it possible to find life on the moon? In the artifexian video on habitable moons,...
The second terrestrial planet orbiting the Sun is shrouded in greenhouse gases, the entire surface of Venus is always scorching hot due to the high concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide which...
From 359 to 298 million years ago, the "Carboniferous Coal Swamps" dominated the continents. It was the Carboniferous coal itself that sparked one of the greatest watersheds in human history--th...
Ok, this is take two. Hopefully this is specific enough. I have a link to the original question here. And for those of you eager to see my sources for this, I'll link two videos here from the You...
The Problem In a world I am building, the days are 9 years long, this means 4 and half years of cold darkness following 4 and a half years of blistering daylight. I have asked questions on this Ye...
In Star Trek TNG, you hear about some sort of defense back on earth that is supposed to screen out all the bad weather. In the episode "True Q," it is mentioned several times as being capable of pr...
In Star Trek TNG, you hear about some sort of defense back on earth that is supposed to screen out all the bad weather. In the episode "True Q," it is mentioned several times as being capable of pr...
If you were to hook up a human being to a sort of syringe sized water wheel to generate power using the force of their blood flow; how much power could they generate? Consider a human in a medical...
Imagine if you will..a world where humans had large black pupils that covered most of their eye like the picture below The question: What would these humans see and could they see more/better/w...
I'm thinking a quadruple stars system where a binary star system orbits another but more massive binary star system is probably fine, however so far I never encounter binary planets orbiting triple...
I've seen many iterations of this question, though they've focused on the effects entailed. Let's pretend the earth has been ripped in half, as if some colossal force grabbed the northern and sout...
I am trying to taxonomize different species of dragons i made up, but am struggling finding correct phylum's and orders and stuff like that, would i have to make a whole new phylum for my dragons? ...
I recently came up with a lizard that had a sort of crystal-gem like attachment on its back. The problem was finding a way for such a thing to have evolved to have a largish crystal on its back. ...
Implants and/or augmentations in human brain are widely shown in fiction: improving and/or enhancing certain functions of the brain by artificial means can have nearly endless possibilities. All o...
In a million years or so, descendants of humans (intelligence comparable to wolves) are driven into caves due to competition with land and resources from descendants from alligators and crocodiles....
Suppose the Wicked Witch of the West was simply an alien life form that was stranded in Oz. She comes from a race of beings that are water soluble. She would have to be able to resist a small a...
Part 1 On Earth, we have seasons due to our planet's tilt. In my last question, I proposed an alternative world where the seasons were instead caused by an eccentric orbit. Now I'm going for somet...
How to get humans that can change their skin color? Approximately 1.6 million years ago, hominids lost their hair and gained dark skin (so says the New York Times). Evidence shows several several...
What conditions might make a planet more likely to develop silion based life, the factors I need to kmow are listed below Temperature of the planet The solvent that they can use in their biology ...
So let's say that some advanced future civilization is capable of creating and manipulating wormholes, and uses a network of wormholes for their FTL transportation. If an enemy gets too close to o...
If humans hadn't lost their tails and today we had fully prehensile tails as long as 1/2 our body and stronger than an arm, how would the tail of a bodybuilder or just a buff person look? Would tai...
I am making a "structure" out of carbon nanotubes in deep space. This structure can be any shape or design, I just want it big. Big in just one direction is cheating (so no long thin structures),...
So I have a story about humans far off in the future on a different planet that have evolved to be more in tune with electromagnetism and magnetism. Their technology mostly works because of magneti...
On a certain planet, the sole continent of land is a large circumspecting ring about the equatorial regions, with a width averaging 500 miles. Rotational north and south are entirely pelagic. Var...
