General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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My question is fairly straightforward, but answering it is proving rather difficult. The scenario is on a planet with some water. The surface is dominated by deserts, both hot and cold depending o...
Say you have a galaxy, possibly ours, with a central black hole. In an instant the black hole falls through a plot hole and vanishes. What happens to the rest of the galaxy? Does everything keep ...
The title fairly well sums up the question. We all know elves have pointed ears. Whether they be LotR style with slight tapers, or full blown foot long impracticalities, all elves have pointed ears...
I bring you all to the planet Krikkit, stuck in a star system enshrouded by a large dust cloud which prevents the Krikkiters from seeing the rest of the galaxy - and, by extension, the universe. Th...
This blog post about binary-star systems points out that, rather having the stars be close together, they could be far apart and a planet might orbit just one of them. It gives the example of the ...
This question was originally posted in the Sandbox. It's set in the same world as this question, but is not related to it. I have a speedster character whose top speed is Mach 2. She holds back ...
What would the effect on Earth be if Mars, in the space of one second, disappeared from the Solar System? Just simply was gone, leaving no residue, and leaving the space where it had been like it h...
Background: I have an icy moon on a collision course with my fantasy world. Mages on this world have the ability to slow the speed of the moon gradually. I want them to use this power to lock the m...
Recent news reported the discovery of three "earth-like" planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. This is interesting because the star is a small, cool red dwarf about the size of Jupiter. The three pla...
This is in regards to the Tyranny of Rocket Fuel. Summed up: Heavier ships need more fuel which makes them heavier, etc. You end up with diminishing returns. This is compounded by higher gravity - ...
For story reasons, I need my mages to convert a moon on a collision course with their planet into a ring around the planet. The only thing they can do is hold the moon still. They can't do so indef...
A large comet is quickly approaching my fantasy world. Its impact will spell doom for all life on the planet. Fortunately, there are mages on this fantasy planet who possess a magic capable of shat...
I would like to genetically modify a human being in one concrete case like I did in other parts of my little series of How would it affect a human to suddenly... This time I would like to add a pre...
A character needs to build a computer out of raw materials in a bronze age. He has a nano scale factory, so manufacturing chips and such from silicon is possible, but I'm not sure of the best way t...
In the book He Drank and Saw the Spider, a poison is talked about in a metaphorical way: A person can be poisoned by putting a specific kind of spider into their cup, but the poison only works if ...
The Earth-like planet I'm working on is the culmination of years of labor by the galaxy's best scientists. It consists of fully artificial ecosystems, and is, for all intents and purposes, like Ear...
A concept I've encountered a few times is aliens with "vastly" different biology than terrestrial creatures. In this case, I'm interested in replacing the parts that use oxygen with something a bit...
I'm going camping in two weeks and I really don't want to get bit up by mosquitoes. So I want to figure out a way to commit total genocide of all mosquitoes in at least a 20 mile (32 KM) area aroun...
In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Thirty Days", there was a planet made completely out of water, which is the inspiration for this question. However, that planet was held together by an artificia...
This is, for the record, the same universe as in Is space piracy orbitally practical? and How can I prevent Kessler Syndrome among space stations?. In my world, circa 2100, space stations orbiting...
The title of this question is fairly self-explanatory. I am developing a fantasy world, and I want to know what factors determine what kinds of trees I can have, where I can put them, and why. I ...
Let us assume a sufficiently earth-like moon, like Europa. It orbits a gas giant. The whole setup is within the star's goldilocks zone, so the moon is theoretically habitable. 'Day' is one rotatio...
There have been countless online articles that go into painstaking detail about the implausibility of Godzilla existing in real life. But, let's just assume that a creature like Godzilla naturally ...
This is the first question in my Arctic Airships series of questions. The second one is Arctic Airships, Part 2 - Navigation. The premise: An Earth-like planet plunged into an ice age roughly 2,0...
OK, here's the problem: I want to have a spaceship that is built for transporting large machines (in particular, heavy mining equipment). It does not and is not designed to leave space; transport d...
We are used to a world where humans are basically an apex predator; we don't really need to worry much about becoming some other animal's next meal. If that wasn't the case, and humans had to be w...
Life on Earth pretty early on settled on deoxyribonucleic acid organized in chains of base pairs as the means to code for the construction of proteins which make up a lifeform. It also has the bene...
CONTEXT/EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY A book that I'm currently writing called Surge features an enemy faction called the Degenerates that are heavily inspired by the Scythians (Indo-Iranian horse nomads t...
Plants can have very different pollinators: The wind, insects, and even birds. However, is there a conceivable scenario where a plant could naturally have evolved to depend on humans as pollinators...
A book that I'm currently writing called Surge features an enemy faction called the Degenerates that are heavily inspired by the Scythians (Indo-Iranian horse nomads that ruled the Eurasian Steppe ...
Crude Oil, is a term used to describe petroleum products harvested from geological formations beneath the Earth's surface. As a fuel they maybe called hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons can be found/creat...
Prototaxites. Giant, finger-shaped mushrooms. Painting by Mary Parrish, National Museum of Natural History. These monsters existed before trees did, and while there are a few theories on whethe...
I want this world to have two things, typically on the complete opposite end of geological timescales: Land fauna is incredibly "Young" - Pretty much nothing larger than a "large" insect (Some li...
I've been thinking about writing a fantasy novel set on an earth-like world with Saturn-like rings. I've been doing some research here by looking up questions about worlds with rings, of which ther...
I am considering writing a fantasy novel. This novel would be set on an earth-like planet, but certain story details require that the planet have either a much larger or much closer moon than Earth...
Scenario: A colony of 20,000 is founded, and has no access to any further inhabitants. Assuming this colony is humans of varying traits (genetics such as skin color, eye color, etc) with no single ...
There exists a Universe in which all of outer-space is filled with some form of human-breathable air. Theoretically, you could fly a Zeppelin up there and explore other worlds, with a sufficiently ...
A few of my previous questions have mentioned that the colonists to this world will be scrambling to get whatever foods they can grow, because the planet's fauna is largely nonexistent (There's sea...
I am writing a short story in which a character is ejected out of an air lock in a space ship. He quickly re-enters (disregard how he does this) and the chamber re-pressurizes, but he is exposed to...
Many creatures - humans among them - have binocular vision, where two eyes side by side allow good depth perception. There are quite a few other advantages over one eye, including a larger field of...
For a species I am working on, there is a specific genetic trait that I want to introduce into the population. The exact nature of either is not important for the purposes of this question, but the...
Jane was different from the other kids. While all the other kids were playing with fire, Jane played with ice. Now, Jane has grown up and is an accomplished scientist or engineer in your discipline...
I was planning a short story that focuses on a rainy day in a city, and I realized that there's one interesting feature of it: Even though the weather seems bleak, and it affects the actions of tho...
In a class discussion last week, someone pointed out that a typical core collapse supernova releases $\sim10^{46}\text{ J}$ of energy in the form of (anti-)neutrinos while only radiating $\sim10^{4...
In the year 21--, a crew of 100 sets out from Earth on the good ship Tenzing Norgay, bound for Epsilon Eridani. The journey is estimated to take . . . well, quite some time, given that it was calcu...
OK, so humanity is going to space, and they are going to take farm animals into space, not only humans on earth value meat, but humans in space do, too. However, they don't want to waste precious r...
I recently came across Could pulsars really act as "lighthouses" to help in interstellar travel?, asked a week ago. The author was trying to figure out if pulsars could be useful for interstellar F...
In a previous question, I established an area that creates megastorms. Unlike a bunch of my other questions, this one is incredibly straightforward: Just how deep does a submarine (Or aquatic life...
We have already discussed how difficult it would be to blow up a planet like Earth, basically deciding that you can't do that with any reasonable amounts of energy. But what if I don't need to blow...
I am writing a fiction set in the 'dark ages', a pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder world. On Earth that would be no later than 800 AD, but this doesn't have to match Earth. There is no magic, and I won...
