General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Assume that a species of bigfoot-type animal/person exists. Most of this also applies to ogres or trolls, whatever big dumb giants your particular setting has. My world's specs: They range 7-10 f...
A town dating back to the late 1880s in northern Wisconsin has a dark secret that must be kept hidden by as few people as possible. How can this town keep itself isolated and off of maps during the...
And if I wanted them to appear about 10 times the size of the sun and moon, would this be possible? Should they lie inside LEO or beyond it? I would like their orbit to be considerably closer than...
I have only encountered the "Sonic Boom" a couple of times in my life, once when I was lucky enough to watch Concorde fly over my town in the late 70's. In a story I'm writing someone claims to ha...
Most stars have a continuously habitable zone (CHZ), but I'm specifically trying to think up ones that do not. Aside from pulsars and black dwarfs (theoretical, as the universe isn't old enough to ...
The direction of the force will always be perpendicular to velocity and pointing to the opposite side of the rotation direction. In plain terms, any object traveling in the rotation plane: up (t...
I'm currently designing a world for a story that I'm writing that is based on a system of magic that deals with barriers, specifically domes. To get to the point one key characteristic is that thes...
I would like a planet that's a tropical paradise on one side but covered in ice and glaciers on the opposite side, whether it be the Southern-Northern or the Western-Eastern hemisphere. I know it...
It's no secret that super-speed comes with a slew of nigh-mystical secondary powers to protect both the speedster and their surroundings. There are common exceptions when writers want the speedster...
Assuming the same rules for physics apply to this world as they do for our own, how would a humanoid race that lives at the bottom of the sea be able to walk around like humans do on land? What kin...
Since a lot of people are already asking about multiple-headed creatures, I wonder what about multiple tails? Such as kyuubi, nekomata, etc. (I know some have asked about these mythical creatures, ...
This question focuses on an artificial atmosphere on the moon and the achieved amount being the limiting factor for the size of habitats. I got a lot of beef for the suggestion to terraform the wh...
Currently I'm working on a project where there's a zombie plague going on that's transmitted through spores (for reference, it's basically like the infection from The Last of Us). I was wondering i...
I'm trying to explain a large continent-sized archipelago that doesn't run in any particular direction. As such, plate tectonics cannot possibly explain its existence. This is an Earth-like planet....
I know that DNA can be used to encode information, using ACGT as a quaternary instead of binary encoding. Could a functional genetically-modified human walk around with a lot of information store...
Is it possible for a planetary body to have a secondary axis of rotation? For example let's say there's an Earth-like body that is spinning with its North Pole facing the Sun. Imagine that the Nort...
Lots of human cells are constantly dying and being replaced. How different would a human-like creature be if most cells (excluding brain cells) had longer lifespans (5 times longer, or even more)? ...
A planet much like Earth orbits a star much like the Sun, but with one difference: the energy from the star is magically transformed into sound within the planet's atmosphere. There is no longer st...
So, my colony mothership crawls along through sub-space at a "slow" ftl as it sends out faster probes ahead of it. Once it has located a cluster (meaning an acceptably dense grouping, not necessari...
I was wondering if a moon Is in the center of two planets If the gravity will rip It In half or If a moon can rotate around both planets or if the moon manipulates the planets rotation
Mammals live in some fairly extreme environments, but the most heat-tolerant ones all seem to cheat: e.g., they dig burrows to stay cool during the day and come out at night, avoiding the heat, or ...
Once upon a time there was a world called, "The Gone, but not Forgotten Realms", ran by #GamerGate Garry and #ClintonBodyCount Anon. One day, Anon got tired of Garry taking his work for granted and...
In my world there is a race of humans who are disproportionately female. They are closely derived from and very similar to real-world humans, but are unable to interbreed with the other races as th...
[Edits added in italic] BACKGROUND A few thousand years from now the moon has become one of many habitable places in the solar system. Economy, constant growing knowledge and human will made drast...
This is really just a curiosity question: I wrote a fantasy novel in which the moon appears blue once every ten years on roughly the same date without fail. If anyone asked me why the moon of my wo...
Recently, I found this map of Africa's paleolakes in the Imaginary Maps reddit: Finding this map was mere coincidence, but this map definitely interests me. Now there have been multiple what-if...
In the far future the moon is terraformed and maintains earth-like conditions for people to walk around freely. Gravity is a 6th of earth's. We assume the atmosphere is "well-functioning for human ...
It's around the mid-2300s. Earth is, to put it simply, in trouble. Climate change has resulted in flooding of major coastal cities, displacing billions, which ultimately led to widespread conflict ...
1350 AD. A secret society is recruiting adepts in Rome, Florence, Paris, Wien, Prague and London; well-educated people in high ranks of nobility, catholic church, engineers, professors and knights....
In my alternate reality, Earth is not a planet. It is a moon and orbits a gas giant (however it has all of Earth's characteristics, it is also full of humans and life as we know it). This is the on...
One proposed type of desert planet is one in which the equator and the "tropics" are harsh, hot deserts, but the polar regions are temperate, habitable, and lush with life. You can see an example o...
If the polar cap of a tidally locked planet was all ocean, what weather patterns would emerge? The ocean couldn't be half frozen/half boiling, right? I need a weather pattern so the planet isn't ju...
I like to take inspiration for new fantasy creatures from my dreams, so I get some weird ideas sometimes. Last night I found this species. If milk gets on their skin, the creature looks as if it we...
Im working on a story about a new exoplanet discovery and its subsequent "Near Future" colonization. The planet is close to its parent star. As such, I have decided to give it a sizeable molten ir...
Assuming humans remained hunter-gatherers, would it be anatomically possible for us to evolve digitigrade legs? Or, is our anatomy too specialized and are we stuck the way we are? I am not asking ...
One common way sci-fi writers try to make their aliens seem more 'alien' is to give them an extra heart. This has been done for example in Babylon 5, Dr. Who and Alien Nation among others. But:...
In my last question, I have asked on how, once Mars has been terraformed, Terran species of plants and the insects on which the majority of them rely on would adapt to Mars's longer year. By far, ...
I'm working on an idea for a story. It takes place in the somewhat distant future, say 200-300 years. Some time between now and then, an event occurs which causes all computers to simultaneously fa...
Hypothetically there is a large-ish planet, which is extremely dense due to its high metal content. This planet has relatively high gravity as a result. The fauna and flora have adapted to the high...
I mean literally not sleeping for the rest of their life, not like giraffes that only require short rests, or dolphins that can sleep with half of their brain at a time, or like otters and sharks t...
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...
Could I, purely in quantity of material only, build a solid bridge to a star? Ignore anything like strength, relative motions of systems, that is all taken care of, using lalalaicanthearyouium - t...
Now that we know about the electric nature of the cosmos, the question arises: "How much are planets affected by electric forces while moving through the universe?" We have been taught that the mov...
Just assume we are long into the future, all other parameters have been met and we have the technology, will and money to terraform our moon and keep it so. Atmosphere, as commonly agreed on, would...
One of the races in my sci-fi universe is the Ceratons a race of bipedal (more hunched build) that look similar to triceratops. Their race is well known as skilled geneticists having a hand in dis...
So, I had a concept (a bit large for a single question). One of it's parts is nanomachines rewiring the brain of the subject. Since we don't know much about the exact workings of the human brain, ...
Added 9-15-19: Thank you all for your comments. I will be reading them through carefully. I have quickly skimmed through the answers and I do appreciate your corrections on terminology and ideas, a...
Assume an Earth-Clone, that has an axial tilt of 90°. How would the circulation of the atmosphere look like? Would there still be three convection cells?
I have a species of early primates (lemur-like but not lemurs) developing into an intelligent species like humans (and yes, there is some influence from an intelligent species, it's not 100% natura...
The fossil record indicates they evolved far back in their ancestry from something not dissimilar in appearance to a lobe finned fish, but with an extra pair of bilaterally symmetrical fins, though...
