General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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To help imagine it and my inspiration, it's basically similar to pictures from Abrahamic religions with burning trees like this one. They can't speak though, they are just trees or plants that are ...
I am trying to find a solution for a specific subset of the Stealth in Space Problem: dealing with waste heat without tipping off properly positioned observers. This question is scoped specifically...
Is this even remotely possible? Source Outline: Coral Polyps (along with their copious Calcium Carbonate excretions) are the individual organisms that make up the super-organism we identify as...
A type of dragon in my world, simply named the Thick-horn, has a well-known mechanism to use to defend itself despite its clumsiness. They are freakishly large, tend to be slow, and find it hard to...
In a future where Mars has been abandoned for several thousand years, and Earth has reverted to a somewhat-habitable state, why would aliens choose to live on Mars, rather than more habitable Earth...
How quickly could a bacterial colony / virus / pool-'o-prions / [whatever] digest, disintegrate, or otherwise liquefy an ordinary terrestrial biological system? Think something along the lines of ...
On a terrestrial planet with a high amount of ammonia vapor in the atmosphere, would any organism have a strong enough incentive to develop some form of autotrophic chemosynthesis that derives ener...
So, dragons here use aqua regia (an acid that dissolves even gold) as their breath weapon. This acid is made up of the dragon's stomach acid and some nitric acid, stored in a separate organ. On to...
Given current capabilities, is it possible for a missile launched from the surface of the Earth to impact the surface of the Moon? I would imagine the same "rocket" used send stuff to the ISS coul...
Background info The humanoids in my Kepler Bb story have stronger muscles at every stage. This makes it much easier for babies to go through physical milestones and thus the shortening of time bef...
Let's suppose that a homo species divides in two separate species (like H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis) and they cannot breed. Could their descendants evolve to be capable of reproducing togeth...
So we have a Super Earth of ten Earth masses, just on the threshold, and it has three Mars sized moons (so a mass ratio of 100/3, more than Saturn Vs 3 Earths). They go 40,000km, 100,000km, 250,000...
Coming from an earlier asked question, I was wondering how long it would take (potentially a range) for two human populations that are separated from each other to speciate enough that they would n...
Assume technology more advanced than current levels, let us theorise for this question that we are capable of reaching and if needed extracting material from any planet or moon / body in our solar ...
Humans have colonized the subsurface oceans of Europa - building large cities embedded in the icy crust, hanging beneath it, and resting on the rocky seafloor. These colonists mine metals for const...
For my project there is an environment with a very rapid fire regime due to the usual stuff like a dry seasonal climate and dragons. While most animals escape the flames by running, burrowing, or f...
In my book which is set in the near future (some hundreds years from today) the mankind has mastered interplanetary travel. Although the travel to let's say Pluto is possible, it still takes severa...
I like demons as they're portrayed in popular culture. I wanted to make a "anatomically correct" succubus question, but StackExchange tells me that this one already exists (even if it is not refere...
Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification are common concerns in marine environments, with natural examples like Ciguatera being a well known example caused by an algae that grows on coral that is th...
The Game Drive system, perhaps best exemplified by the "Buffalo Jump" of the North American Plains Indians is a hunting strategy in which large animals are chased into a preselected kill zone, su...
Many of the intelligent species on Earth, including us humans, are predatory. One of the reasons for this is the nutrient content of meat; a pound of meat is very calorie and nutrient rich especial...
There are several mammals that are actually venomous. Several species of shrews, Solenodon and the Platypus are all venomous. While the platypus is the largest of these, it uses it in self defense...
For a book that I'm working on I am plotting out various points in time to make sure my plot is following accordingly. I apologize in advance for the lengthy post. It is a fungus-like infection tha...
This is a follow up question to: How realistic is the Swampus? What adaptations would current octopus have to evolve, to become land based, meaning that they spend at least 1/3 of their time on la...
In a specialised organ, the Vesica Spirite, which in function and makeup resembles a cross between the Ventriculus and the Vesica Biliaris, the animal creates and stores potent spirits by the me...
We all know how rabbits and hares escape ending up being a meal to a fox or a hawk, with long ears to hear danger coming, burrowing, long and powerful hind legs for speed and also living a social l...
Okay, here's a classic situation: The countryside is plagued by a dragon, who demands tribute from the local city on the basis of them being in his territory. Now, the dragon here doesn't actuall...
Within my setting, insects, due to a rather long (millions of years) and convoluted (gods suffering from empty nest syndrome) series of events, have evolved their exoskeletons into an endoskeleton ...
I am trying to make three neighbouring countries with varying climates. One country needs to basically be Arizona (Especially like the Monument Valley area with the red sand and those iconic butte...
Question: Are there are any serious biological or evolutionary plausibility issues with separating the energy storage/production function from the production of structural/regulatory biomass? Back...
So I'm working on this new novel with a fungal-like disease that is alien in nature and I have a question pertaining to spore germination. Some background - the disease is fungal-like, but not nec...
In Hungarian, there is a new-ish folk-song sung by school-children who dislike school whenever it snows to the tune of Twinkle, twinkle, little star: Hull a pelyhes dinamit, Robbantsuk fel...
I am developing a fictional planetary system in which a large gas giant planet (slightly less than the mass of Saturn), has migrated into the habitable zone during the formational years of the syst...
In the 2002 documentary the future is wild, numerous biologists and other scientists speculated about the future evolution of various species. In the '100 million years in the future' segment, the...
Imagine a gas giant as massive as Jupiter has a enormous planetary ring which will expand and contract throughout its orbit around a main sequence star. Then there is a moon as massive as Mars an...
"They fly now?" "They fly now!?" "They fly now" One of the most iconic characteristic of dragons is their ability to fly, on top of that, my intelligent (human level) dragons also use a fu...
The Grey Alien trope almost always features a disproportionately large head, which often comes in unusual shapes to boot. There's nothing wrong with the trope, large brains are cool but what baffle...
I'm working on a first contact story set in the near future where an advanced alien species arrives at Earth and reveals itself to humanity, but is utterly baffled by the diversity of life that it ...
The Old Ones build continent-sized bunker complexes to protect themselves from the enemy, which followed through the cosmic ocean. The Hunter succeeded easily despite their efforts and their corpse...
I was thinking of creating an alien planet that orbits a star slightly past the habitable zone, but is kept warm by an extremely dense atmosphere, made primarily of a black gas, but still contains ...
If hawks or eagles (or any creature that can fly like a hawk) had the same ability to pronounce words as parrots but also had consciousness (what I mean by that is that they can scout and describe ...
The larger an animal, the harder it is to cool down. Ignoring the problem of bone/muscle strength vs size/weight and saying an animal could get to outlandish sizes, would a second cardiovascular sy...
I've been designing an an intelligent, bat-inspired avian race, and I've been struck with a question that I need answered. Now, I want to have these bats to fulfill different types of ecological n...
So, I have been a bit disappointed with the answers on how to store degenerate matter from my previous thread, and now I'm even wondering whether one can produce it at all, without invoking unreali...
This famous tapestry shows all the "modernized" traits of a unicorn--basically just a pale-colored horse with a single horn on its head. Of course, single-horned animals do and did exist: ...
Assumptions: Jupiter's moon Europa has a salty subsurface ocean in contact with a rocky mantle. The ocean is populated by hydrothermal vents produced by tidal heating. Global heat flow is similar...
In a not so different fantasy world, whose physics and thus are similar to our own how would including penguins affect the look and function of a typical arctic ecosystem. For the purposes of this...
Our estimates of our own habitable zone--a piece of space in which liquid water is possible--have varied over the years, but the current estimate is by Ramirez and Kaltenegger in 2017. Based on an ...
I've been working on a sci-fi series set about 1000 years in our future. The discovery of an alien threat leads the ruling government to conceive of a doomsday machine, which they hope will be so p...
The limpet teeth's microscopic structure is analogous to man-made short-fiber composites. Its strength depends on the direction of the force, relative to the orientation of the fibers. https://www...
