General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I have been toying the idea of fusing our white blood cells which search and destroy malicious foreign bodies with artificial intelligence to fight various disease causing pathogens, my worry is th...
So I'm pretty new to chemistry and all this, but my world involves superpowers, which of course involves immense energy to have the characters use these powers. However, I want to stay consistent w...
In my story there are a species of humanoid bipeds (i.e., two arms, two legs) that have a more-or-less human arm anatomy but differ in having non-retractable claws instead of nails on all five fing...
Say there's an in-universe weapon so odd looking that it is rumored to have been stained by the blood of a "holy" mortal, so much so that no amount of water can wash it away. Is there a chance hu...
This is something I'm thinking about. Now, these would be wings that are not powered by the person themself, since we do not have the strength for it (and I don't want to use legs). They'd be power...
Imagine a supercolony of bees (I'm using bees as a metaphor; they're not really bees) which are the constituents of a massive globe-spanning hive mind. The government wishes to exploit this superco...
Would it be possible for a cilliate, such as Stentor, to evolve into a large multicellular organism similar in form to the original unicellular body-plan?
Something like the above (Natural Springs by Ellie Cooper) - either where the water originates from atop the tree through regular rainfall, or is directed up and into the tree via the spring (or ...
What possible evolutionary adaptations could you foresee in the sensory organs of wildlife in an environment beset by a nigh-permanent sandstorm? e.g. in the case of vision, ways to protect the ey...
Assuming the axial tilt of the Earth was increased to roughly 30°, and the orbital eccentricity roughly doubled(0.03 as opposed to 0.016) so that the average temperature stayed the same, but the s...
Would the principles at work in the theoretical Alcubierre warp drive apply to a slower-than-light starship? I'm building a setting in which FTL communication and travel is impossible, (due to vio...
I have a planet too far away from its sun for photosynthesis to work well, so the plants use chemosynthesis. But since they don't use sunlight, would they have any reason to grow above ground? Some...
While watching Biblaridion's Alien Biosphere series, an interesting point came up: in Biblaridion's fictional world, atmospheric hydrogen sulfide is used as an energy source for chemosynthetic bact...
In my alien world life has evolved very convergently with life on Earth. Carbon-based lifeforms managed to evolve multicellularity and evolved a lineage of organisms in line with early fish, howeve...
This is yet another "literal worldbuilding" question, as in, building worlds. Inspired, in part, by this question. What if this world is a very long (effectively infinite) hollow cylindrical cavit...
In 1958 the United States Air Force considered a mission to detonate a nuclear device on the surface of the Moon. The endeavour was framed as a booster to American public morale in the wake of the ...
OK, this how it goes for my wyvern (they're called scaled howlers) in my story: my wyvern are not very large, almost the size of a Haast eagle They mate for life, forming strong monogamous pair b...
In my setting, one of the fallouts due to interstellar war between civilisations is that a planet's gravity can be removed. This capability is part of the setting's hyperspace mechanics so the exac...
Imagine a plain made of tall grass that sways in a gentle breeze. Everything is a deep green and there is a riot of life sprouting from the black ground. A few days later, the grasses turn brown an...
In most science fiction where humans are simulated or uploaded onto computers, the humans are simulated with perfect fidelity. But this seems unlikely-- humans are very expensive to run. In Robin H...
This is a mixed physics and conceptual exercise: In my story, we are aboard a multi-generational mission to resettle Humanity on a new planet in our galaxy. In the internal life of the ship inhabi...
On the earths surface, radar is pretty sweet. It apparently penetrates the atmosphere well and bounces back and can be detected. I think this has to do with the wavelengths absorbed by our atmosp...
I wonder if it is possible to install artificial equipment that would exhaust oxygen into air in otherwise CO2 atmosphere so that locally people could breath in open air without any kind of tent or...
Imagine a spacecraft travelling at very high speeds, say 0.3c. While a crew member could theoretically suit up and perform spacewalking maintenance on the outer body of the ship, will they be expos...
I am trying to make a reasonable augmentations. The settings is post cyberpunk, so the tech is little more advanced. For coolness I would like to have ability to jump around 5 meters high ground-le...
In my world a giant ship attempts to land on a planet, sadly it fails. Fortunately the top half is intact but the bottom is ripped up, holes all over it, basically destroyed except for some lucky s...
So, dragons. They're omnivores and, while they would be potentially formidable hunters, mostly scavengers. This requires them to be more sparing with their energy. Still, they fly and flight needs...
This rogue planet is a cold rocky world where liquid methane replaces water, hydrogen is used in place of oxygen, and a large moon. I was thinking the large moon would have a large tidal pull that...
In my world I want a massive region (7 million mi²) to be as flat as the Great Plains. There are no trees or hills; basically it's just a grass sea. I am trying to figure out what kind of weath...
Many planets out there will be water worlds. Those generally come in two flavors: either the oceans are so deep that the water turns into high-pressure ices like ice-six, -seven, -ten and -eleven o...
I was just bitten by a radioactive stopwatch, gaining the voluntary ability to experience time at twice the usual rate. While doing so, for every second of real time, two seconds occur within my bo...
A Gelatinous Cube is a massive, slime-based jelly that haunts underground dungeons, and is composed of an acidic substance which breaks down material. These creatures are unintelligent and crawl ai...
My question is, how do we make humans more able to resist falls(not just free falls, also normal ones and from a "medium" height, 2-10 meters) and be able to move afterwards, at least for the jumps...
I have a maglev train starting in Paris, going through Siberia, bridging over the Bering Strait, and running down the West Coast to San Francisco. There are other major lines splitting from this on...
I recently finished watching one of the Star Wars films, the one that features the sarlaac pit. When I saw it, I began to immediately think how such a thing would evolve. The sarlaac pit is essen...
In my world, I am looking for a crater formed by a meteor impact that deposited a large number of resources there. The final crater should be 200 miles in diameter. I would like to do this with min...
Many alien worlds will most likely be water worlds. I was wondering what the deepest possible global ocean dept is where land is still possible. I think that volcanic islands will still have a chan...
Postpartum depression among humans is a thing that is "normal" insofar as it happens a lot, but it is not "normal" in the sense of "a thing that we don't worry about"; it doesn't happen to absolute...
I have settings with orbital colonies around the earth. First off my idea is, if it is not profitable we would not fund it en masse. Therefore I came up with the idea that in the future we discover...
Say I have a race of obligate carnivores (for simplicity, we'll say they're felinoid). They have carnivore dentition, and must eat meat as a major component of their diet, but they can also eat fru...
The continent is split apart by a dense area of mountains, covered in glaciers. Any travelers who with to go from one part of the continent to the other would either have to cross the mountains, or...
For the fluff of my story one of the space-ships is equipped with what I hope is one of the biggest F-you weapons in ship-to-ship combat: a miniature black hole launcher. The launcher fires a whop...
How would it switch between if endothermic and ectothermic and in between and how would it be able to create different temperature in specific areas in the body?
How long would the St. Louis arch stand if humanity vanished from the earth, tomorrow? What would be the failure mechanism? Note: I'm following the directions to ask a specific question, but if ...
What is one factor or ability a creature needs to sustain infinite work? By work I mean physical activity, and to make it more specific running I want a creature that can output work, or run until...
Some 55.8 million years ago, Earth underwent a really dramatic heat wave known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. What happened, exactly? We don't know how it happened, but we do k...
Say humans found a way to exponentially increase the capability of plants to grow. Is it possible for it to cause an environment that can cause oxygen toxicity in humans?
Rock snails are giant slug like creatures living in the forest and underwater, they are not mobile in adulthood and their shell resembles a giant rock. They grow up to being 8 meters tall and the...
I'm creating a character who was born after a long period of genetic instability, which created a lot more diversity throughout the human race. I'm planning on making my character excessively small...
I'm working on a military sci-fi piece that involves a lot of exo-skeleton enhanced, well, parkour -- for lack of a better term -- and was wondering how to deal with descents from great heights. ...
