General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Background, with potential spoilers: In the Netflix show Stranger Things... ...there is an otherworldly creature known as the Mindflayer, which can telepathically control creatures in our worl...
Hal Clement's novel Needle was revolutionary in featuring a non-parasitic alien lifeform capable of inhabiting a human body. Specifically, the Hunter in its independent form is a gelatinous mass c...
I have a world I want to put together but I ran into a problem. Description This world is a cube infinite in all directions, exactly half of it is full of earth and half is space (where we see n...
In my story I have a strain of virus capable of stealing parts of or changing its hosts DNA, so it could copy the abilities in nature for its next host of choice by taking the genes which control t...
During much of the Late Pleistocene stage, the world's most widespread biome was the so-called "mammoth steppe" - a cold, dry grassland which spanned eastward all the way from Spain to Canada. It w...
Premise I was inspired by Karl Niklas who used computer modeling to simulate the ideal structure for a tree when different traits were favored. Here is a chart summarizing his work: Explanation...
It is the year 4056 (or probably later). The rocket with the last residents of Earth just took off, because global warming and pollution couldn't be stopped nor reverted and Earth became uninhabita...
As a small part of a SciFi story, a fully developed AI developed by advanced aliens (who think quantum computing is a neat, but outdated technology) happens to visit modern-day Earth. I'm talking a...
Could a creature plausibly exist with its diet consisting of consuming ice, possibly for hydration? I'm unaware if it needs a secondary diet for nutrition, but how would its metabolism feasibly w...
First of all, yes I'm Australian, and yes I am using a kangaroo to type this up. If you take a look at Australia, it's a pretty sad place geographically. Very flat, very dry, mostly desert and for...
So I'm currently working on a fan project to redesign Superman's home planet of Krypton. This new Krypton is 1.6x the size of Earth and orbits the red dwarf star known to us as LHS-2520, 27.1 ligh...
Would it be possible to replace water with hydrogen peroxide on an Earth like planet? I know water and hydrogen peroxide are similar, Also if this configuration is possible what may cause an Earth ...
I had a dream that on my alien planet, there was a large desert that had naturally occurring glass marbles in the sand. My dream logic was that the sand was melted into glass and natural weathering...
Airships are cool, and I would love to use them and see them used outside of steampunk a lot more. One key aspect of Airships is that they seem to have the square cube law reversed. For other thing...
I am creating a planet with an orange dwarf as its host star and which is at a certain distance from it in such a way that it receives 1 % of the light received by the Earth from the Sun. Obviously...
The universe so far: If charged lepton fields are eliminated from the universe, charged pions become stable (having no decay path that preserves charge), replacing electrons to form bound "atomic"...
Our universe has 3 global spatial dimensions - that much I know. I am almost sure, based on an incredibly shoddy knowledge of physics, that there couldn't possibly be a 4th spatial dimension that w...
In my story, there is a large group of humanoid clones that help the city function, doing mundane tasks such as cleaning and maintaining the city. Doing all of the minimum wage jobs and 95% of the...
Could a Dwarven society as described by Tolkien mythology actually work? Dwarves for the purposes of this question are short, stout, bearded men and women who live primarily underground. They have ...
I'm writing a story and I was thinking about the ending in advance. I posted a question about how the population would be wiped out. I have developed from that and thought about the virus having no...
Silicon carbide is a ceramic often used in vehicle and body armor, but could a living creature produce and use it the same way? Assume the creature was genetically engineered.
Writing about suspended cities within a planet's atmosphere! The story itself focuses on the air forces that fight for each of the hundreds of floating city states living in the sky, but that's her...
Suppose an earth-like world with roughly 500 major tectonic plates. Question What is the plausibility of such a world to sustain (large) continents? Why? Further clarifications: speed of pla...
A magician summons a person to the material world to be their servant. Their body is not made from true atoms per se, but is some kind of force projection. In most ways though, they act as a perso...
First of all, this website is a dream come true. I'm a total sucker for this stuff. Secondly, I love astronomy and worldbuilding, and lately, I've been thinking of a hypothetical situation, and wa...
Some of you may know my mutant thread, and guess what? It's back. I'm wondering if there is any biological means to improve muscular power without greatly increasing the volume of said muscle. My...
I like the classic trope of dragons loving gold and collecting it in their lair, yet it seems poorly justified. I know that it is often used as a metaphor for greed; "dragons disease" to show how m...
In fiction that tries to provide a wide diversity of cultural stances on the collectivism-individualism stances, there is often a trope that self-reliant, no-nonsense, rugged individualists (as a d...
My first post, I am sure I will have many more! I am so excited to have found this community! I have a game called Rise: The Vieneo Province and a very old issue that I was hoping to get help with...
Basically, I'm trying to see if a land-based creature roughly between 50-100 ft. long could exist on Earth at the moment and still be scientifically plausible. I know that whales and other creatur...
I take no credit for the image below. All artwork and information belongs to Blue-Hearts on DeviantArt: (click on image for a higher resolution) I'm personally very impressed at her level of d...
From this graph it can be seen that Water Vapour can never be held by the Martian gravity, and would escape into space. How would future terraforming processes overcome this loss?
Concept: For some twisted reason, a xenocidal space-race living somewhere in our vicinity decides that nothing deserves to exist. So they make a species. Any feasible size, any kingdom. It eat...
Let's say world is completely flat (infinite flat world, think minecraft flatworlds) for the purposes of the question. The gasses of the world started out in a grid pattern, with each square being ...
The setting I'm interested in would involve a cold planet (cold enough for most bodies of water to be frozen - I'm thinking of an average global temperature of -20C or below). The simplest way woul...
if it takes the moon 6 months to pass through the gas giants shadow? Assume it is distant enough to not be tidally locked. The gas giant is 112.5 AU from the star. The star is 55 solar masses. ...
A violent way of rendering a planet uninhabitable being the obvious: accelerate a large enough object to a sufficient velocity that everything on the planet goes the way of the dinosaurs. Put brie...
So, there are birdpeople/birdfolk in my setting. They're ~170 cm tall bipedal humanoids with a pair of functioning wings, slightly below the shoulders. They're covered with feathers, except for the...
I wonder whether the birds or other flying animals heavier than air could evolve without trees of other protruding objects?
Taken from this fascinating answer: The Sun is immensely loud. The surface generates thousands to tens of thousands of watts of sound power for every square meter. That's something like 10x...
I'm envisioning a setting in which human beings have altered themselves significantly to be able to live on alien worlds without significant terraforming. One type of transhuman needed would be on...
I had a vision of a creature that touched things, and wherever it touched, it left a mark opposite to the original colour. For example when it walked across the grass the grass had red footprints,...
I'm in some urgent need of advice about linking together biomes in a realistic manner. Can a taiga connect to an alpine tundra to the north, and a steppe to the south? Then what would branch off of...
In this world, a progenitor has created a mass of order out of chaos, with the possibility of entropic fluctuations increasing the further out from the center you get. What do I mean by entropic fl...
At 260 Fahrenheit in the Sun between Mars and Earth and -280 F in the shade could 2 large tanks rotate slowly in and out of its own shade to transfer steam backwards and forwards past a turbine?
I'm designing a small two-person spaceship for use in battles in space. It is set around the year 2100. It would be around the size of a tank (approx. 50 tons). It would need to be fast and easy ...
Steampunk!! In a world without the fine electronics that we have today, would space travel be possible? ....I'm not averse to small amounts of magic in my steampunk worlds, but I'd like to keep i...
In this question, I asked about a universe with (amongst other things) 4 large spatial dimensions. In 3 dimensions, we have the familiar periodic table with its familiar arrangement of atoms in th...
My main protagonist is going to fast-forward himself in time by 1000 years. He will simply reappear in the same place (marked by a small beacon), the process being instant for him (no hibernation e...
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 ...
