General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
Start with a silverback gorilla, make it roughly three times bigger, assume it's bone and muscle structure is capable of compensating for the increased size: how fast can a thing like that reasonab...
Premise/question Hydraulic mining is the process of spraying high-pressure jets of water into the ground to dislodge sediment and rocks. The muddy water from this is directed into sluices where va...
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...
Is it possible for a planetary system to form and support life similar to earth-life inside a region of 'timespace' (which is the space within a black-hole), assuming that there is enough space/tim...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series Residing in Australia, the Yara Ma Yha Who is a creature of Aboriginal folklore being depicted commonly as: being 3-4 ft tall having re...
I have a mental image of a humanoid species with hands possessing three fingers and two thumbs, on opposite sides of the hand: *note: it could be animalistic or reptilian, it doesn't need to be ...
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?
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 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...
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...
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...
I'm building an earthlike world that has a moon orbiting a gas giant. Is it possible for the moon to always be between the planet and the sun? Also, is it possible for a moon to rotate around its o...
What would be the economic trade offs of building fusion powered rockets vs building laser relays across the solar system? What assumptions would you need for each one of these to be the superior o...
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...
The boom-bust cycle answer I took for my question: Sustainability of Regular Global Wildfires due to Oxygen Rich Atmosphere pends on the atmosphere being rich in oxygen but poor in CO2. I, however,...
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...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a spinning space habitat in the style of an O'Neill cylinder (below), but orders of magnitude larger. McKendree habitats are hundreds of kilometres in diameter a...
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 know it's not really all that exciting, but things like eating will be very prominent in the cultures and show up a lot in my story... In my world I want my race to have at least two different t...
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...
In an Earth-like planet filled with humanoid creatures (upright, two legs, two arms, head, etc.) the inhabitants have evolved to grow bowlegs. The question is why? What advantage would it bring...
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...
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...
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...
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 hypothetical scenario I'm batting around in my head is a Habitable Gas Giant system consisting of a roughly Saturn sized body orbiting a sun like star at a comfy goldilocks zone distance. Orbitin...
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...
In an alien world, due to changes in the ecosystem animals that were once mostly arboreal started having to spend more time in open plains, adapting to fill a new niche of grasslands/bush eaters an...
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 story characters can go into perfectly simulated virtual worlds where their memories have been replicated down to the individual neurons and their protien structures. In these worlds time pas...
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...
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...
Space explorers have landed on an Earth like planet and, to their surprise, the place is luscious and covered in life, to the point of resembling some earthly tropical atoll. What they don't know ...
I had posted a question a couple of days ago asking if it would be possible for an artificial satellite/cosmic body at the L1 orbit to block out the Sun, but the logistics of that is a little too e...
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...
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...
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...
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...
