General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In the video game Dino Crisis 3, a recurring boss that the player fights called the Australis (a bio-engineered human-Tyrannosaurus Rex hybrid) that has skin exposing the muscles of its body. An in...
This question is a bit of an outgrowth of Can you simply scale up animals?, but it does approach it from a different angle. "All else equal" (which it of course never is, but we're good at pretend...
Apart from the obvious difference that liquid ammonia needs a much colder temperature than liquid water (but ammonia-based life forms wouldn't feel that as particularly cold), what would be the mos...
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...
A quite common idea to provide "gravitation" in space stations is to make them rotate, so the centrifugal force gives an effective gravitation. A possible design is a ring-shaped space station. No...
Background I just read this question about how to get a planet to have one hemisphere with tropical climate and one with polar climate. The (not yet accepted) answer with the highest score recomm...
If I genetically modified a human to have a foxtail of roughly 1 metre length through the use of handwaved genetical engineering - would this have an effect on his diet? Of course an additional ap...
While thinking about Starfish Prime's answer to the question Algae using UV light from auroras for photosynthesis, I considered the possibility of an alternate Earth which has a normal, Earth-like ...
Venoms have evolved in certain classes of animals on Earth (notably snakes and frogs, but also fish and maybe elsewhere that I can't think of right now), sometimes for defense and sometimes (partic...
Question: Would a modern-day teen, trained in using the north star for directions when camping/hiking, notice a difference in how the "north star" (Polaris) works when transported suddenly to 1350 ...
We occasionally get questions and answers that discuss how close to each other planets can be and still meet some criteria. For example, this answer to the question ''Habitable'' planet close to a ...
I was thinking of a hypothetical species of snakes that join together for protection called Ladôni, due to their habit of mobilising in massive beds which make them resemble a large multi-headed s...
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...
Whilst not strictly relevant to this question, the questions and answers may interest the curious: this is the 4th in a series of question here - 1, 2, 3. My population (in excess of 500,000) und...
In my future setting on Earth (or an Earth-like planet; haven't decided), the fields of robotics and AI have taken off and we have intelligent, ambulatory robots. (They were initially thought of a...
There are a lot of answers on Worldbuilding about how to destroy planets - just as an example - and they seem to be the method of choice for many people intent on destroying the world. My objection...
My hypothetical gas giant has five major moons. Three of those moons are icy bodies with abundant water ice and volatiles. Any of these could provide fuel for translunar spacecraft, or for spacecra...
As recorded in Genesis 11:1-9, the ancients allegedly built a tower to the skies in a valley in Babylon (near present-day Baghdad), and God scattered them across the Earth as a punishment. Accordin...
The apocalypse has come! Everything is dead, and I do mean everything. People. Animals. Plants. Don't ask how, I'm not entirely sure. Let's assume this town is in an out-of-the way area as far as ...
This is the third in a series of 5 (at this point) questions. It's not relevant to this question, but for anyone who's curious this was the first, this the second. Conditions for this question are...
Alien AI DoomFleet has a mission: Destroy threats to their creator. They do this by detecting the signature of FTL drives, going to the system, and blowing everything up, up to and including the ho...
In my answer to another question, I suggested that the Super-Earth in question be tidally locked to its host star for a period of time while part of its surface experienced a bombardment. After tha...
In a world dominated by steppe, the warmest regions give way into parklands dominated by stands of Aspen. My research suggests that Aspen groves may tend to exclude other species of tree, but I am...
A Snowball Earth is a global condition (which may have occurred many times) in which the temperature everywhere on the surface was, for extended periods (up to tens of millions of years), below th...
My winged people just have feathers on their wings, and maybe small feathers on their back between their wings (from shoulder blades to mid back). Their bodies look generally human. Here is a lin...
The hero saves the captured giant, and as a reward, the giant presents the hero with a magic ring... However, the ring is made for giant fingers, so the hero decides to wear it as an armband instea...
Inspired by this answer and the mention of a hyperbolic plane, I've been imagining a world based on that geometry. The closest real-world example of such a geometry I can come up with is hard cora...
In my part of this (Earth-like) world, there is a stable community of completely isolated pre-industrial humans, numbering perhaps 1,800. They live at an altitude of (at least) 25,000 feet (7620 m...
About 5 billion years from now, the Sun will begin to swell into a red giant. This will cause some problems, because life on a planet orbiting a red giant is hard. Even if Earth isn't engulfed by t...
In response to a question about an asteroid filled with degenerate matter, Ender Look suggested that using matter from a black dwarf would be better than using matter from a white dwarf since black...
For story purposes, I'm trying to determine what would happen if a small moon-sized object crashed into an unmovable barrier surrounding a planet. My goal here is to eventually get a ring surroundi...
For one of my projects, I'm developing an inhabited Earth-like world, with the key visual difference being that much of the land is purple, instead of the brownish colour it is on Earth. My questio...
I am a writer. In my fictional world, I have an area that is supposedly covered with fairly thick fog during most of the night and nearly all of the morning, basically every day (it can leave a bit...
In settings with space travel we often see stories that rely on ships encountering each other, such as space piracy (which means you need to know where to wait in ambush), or distress signals that ...
Disclaimer: First off, this is not a duplicate of this question. That question deals with stopping the hurricane, or preventing it from ever forming in the first place. It was discovered that wasn'...
I am creating a fantasy world on a planet entirely separate from our own. Since it is a different world, it makes sense that the food there would be different as well. Some of our fruit is simila...
My question is in the context of a fictional super-Neptune that lies in the habitable zone of its host star system. Giant planets only form beyond the Frost Line of their protoplanetary disk, and...
Suppose humans have developed the technology to travel between star systems. This might be some science-fiction method like warp drive, jump drive, peanut butter drive, hyperspace drive or whatever...
I am working on the realism of a fictional planet which has an average temperature lower than that of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and possesses a single large supercontinent rather than distrib...
I'm current planning a story which includes a race of diminutive humanoid aliens, one of whom crash-lands on Earth. They're fully sentient, and have the same average intelligence level as humans. T...
I'm an advanced AI in far futuristic sci-fi setting. To give you the size of how advanced we are, I'll just drop here a short list of our accomplishments: We have discovered cold fission-reactor...
Starting in 541"“542 AD, the Plague of Justinian and a series of subsequent outbreaks killed between 13-26% of the world's population. The plagues were caused by Yersinia pestis, the same microorga...
With a powered-by-phlebotinum (ergo very handy, very powerful) rifle, I am able to shoot high-energy beams which, in turn, can pulverize anything in their path in a considerable radius. The beams c...
In a world I'm building - the same one as in Is space piracy orbitally practical? - there are many space stations in low Earth orbit, used as orbital spaceports, each about ten times the size of th...
Tangentially related to The evolution of neon kittens Is is possible for a star to radiate in the ultra violet spectrum but not much in the visible light spectrum? If not, is there any mechanism ...
There are many theories about how teleportation could work (warning: tvtropes). One of them is that the body is completely disassembled on a molecular level and reassembled at the target destinatio...
In my story, reasonably far in the future, an intrepid group of explorers are on the first manned mission to the Andromeda galaxy, travelling close to the speed of light. They slumbered in suspende...
I've been designing a race of humanoids with a thick chitinous arthropodal carapace resilient to small-calibre gunfire and physical trauma that would cripple a normal human being. This carapace is ...
I am writing a fantasy novel centered on an Earth-like planet with icy rings like Saturn. This question deals with certain effects of having such a ring system. Assume the planet is Earth, the r...
Related to a previous question which focused more on surviving on such a world. This presumes a significant advancement in technologies - that is, to 1940s-1950s level technology. There are some d...
