General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Say we have an intelligent species whose body plan is inspired by walking insects (ants, beetles, etc.) and reptiles (particularly lizards). More specifically, let's say they have four legs (I th...
As far as I know, summer and winter are governed by the amount of sunlight absorbed per unit area, where longer days would increase the temperature along with a higher sun angle. To elaborate on ...
Any story about an independent, self-owned tramp spaceship crew tends to implicitly or explicitly raise the question of how the crew got a spaceship, how it afforded it, and why it doesn't just sel...
I am writing a short story about an overworked planet whose civilization has achieved space elevators and orbital rings. The planet, which is earth-sized, has three complete orbital rings in stabl...
My question is, how can, say, a spacecraft have self repairing armor? It works using three layers: Delicate computers and people inside, armor repair system surrounding that, and then the armor its...
I've been looking at the altitude boosted SSTO designs from the 90s that were designed to be lifted to launch altitude by modified jetliners and thinking about bumblebees and wondering if bioships ...
I am currently creating a world for a series of fantasy short stories (and hopefully movies one day), and I need some help with the science. Ideally, I would like the story to take place on a moon ...
Mermaids are commonly depicted as mammalian, human-like creatures from the waist up and scaly fish-like creatures from the waist down. What properties (color, texture, etc) would their mammal skin...
Background: I have typical dragons: Huge, scaly, winged, and fire-breathing. I also have dragon magic, but I'd prefer answers not to draw on this too much. In my world, a planet similar to earth, ...
I have a primarily marine creature that needs to be able to move around effectively outside of water yet still be extremely flexible. My idea is having an anatomy based largely on bony disks simila...
I'm looking for an existing drug or chemical that most closely matches the following criteria, which will be listed from most to least important: lessening of social and moral inhibitions doesn't...
The world I am creating is in a swamp that contains larger than life bugs; this includes fireflies. What I ask is, could the bioluminescence of their glow somehow be harnessed or used as a light so...
So based on the question can pumice stone be use as castle material on water? I wanted to take pumice and use it to construct a floating road, so my Lava People can safely travel from one volcanic ...
In our universe, in order for a cloud of gas to collapse into a star it needs to release heat energy in the form of radiation, so that it can cool down enough to collapse into a star. I read what ...
In my late-Victorian world high-precision clockwork is highly available, but I am having trouble finding out exactly how precise their work could be. I have done some research on the subject, but ...
I have a spaceship that can get to speeds very close to the speed of light. How can this ship measure how fast it is going near the speed of light? I would think one would measure how fast other ...
A character is on an alien planet that is very much like any one of our large deserts. Sort of a Tatooine like on Star Wars. He needs to cause a diversion. There aren't any explosives on planet o...
I am referring to the situation described at the start of the movie 28 Weeks Later, where Britain had been wiped out by a zombie virus, but the rest of the world was (seemingly) fine. What would b...
I am having some trouble reasoning out some ideas, if any of you could help. So I have in mind a planet, where there are many human cultures, but one of them is more advanced then others. So they...
Superhumans in my setting work based on advanced technology (but not clarketech; no violations of physical laws, no FTL). My question is, how can a superhuman direct electricity? From my under...
I've pretty much finished the map of a world I'm building for a fantasy novel, but I've realised that on one of the continents I need there to be forest on both sides of a large mountain range. I'v...
Suppose that for some reason gravity magically changes, but only for people. While this goes on, instead of gravity pulling people down, it pushes them East. To be clear, it's just people. Not anim...
In My world of PD there are two distinct moons, Aurie is a big cream colored moon on a 32 day cycle and Chi is a smaller rust- colored moon on a 20 day cycle. Can somebody help me figure out how of...
So I asked a question before about having two moons. A wise patron suggested my moon be made out of something like blown glass, in order to have a big bright moon that isn't too dense. That has me ...
In my world, I have a dangerous virus that has evolved to subsist on Aether, which for now I will just call its secondary energy source apart from a normal infection of an animal. Yet on the planet...
I recently finished reading the novel "Seveneves" by Neil Stevenson. The central premises of the novel is that an unknown object has caused the moon to break into several large pieces, with an imme...
After seeing the film Oblivion I began wondering about what would happen if the Moon was fractured in such a way that large chunks of the Moon were ripped apart. Would the chunks of Moon stay in o...
At the climax of my story, most of the people on the planet have the way they interact with gravity magically altered. Until a week passes or they die (whichever comes first), instead of being pull...
I am trying to design a single seat fighter capable of achieving (or getting close to) hypersonic velocities at high altitude. In this universe I am assuming compact fusion is a common technology. ...
One of my characters suffers an injury where a spike pierced his lower jaw and severed his tongue. Ignoring the fact that he may not have survived this wound under normal circumstances (eldritch p...
I have a planetary system with a yellow dwarf similar to our own Sun and three habitable planets. I want to hide this system from sight and long range scans in a nebula, a giant cloud of dust and ...
In my world, law enforcement is dispatched from the capital to places around the island. The reason for them being dispatched in this fashion is due to there being few officers and the capital bei...
So what I'm looking for is some plausible idea of two human planets, orbiting each other closely, that despite having regressed to a medieval homage, were capable in this old era of powering solar ...
I'm creating a large ungulate that is likely a part of the suborder Anclyopoda. Suspension of disbelief is expected, but there's a detail with the current design that's really bugging me. The cre...
So I have a super-Earth that has 2 moons. Moon 1 is a bit smaller than our moon, and has an orbital period of 19.25 earth days. Moon 2 is larger than our moon and has an orbital period of 147.15 da...
In this answer https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/25219/50641 (to the attached question) one of their counter points was "oh, crows use tools, therefore, human advantage negated". That got ...
In one of the documentaries he's featured in, Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about the evolution of the eye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SXHMm5I-68 The part that's always intrigued me is this: ...
I've been puzzling over the logistics of orbital spaceports, and this has been the one sticking point I keep coming to: radiation control between docked, or even neighboring, ships. Mass limitation...
Some background In the movie The Wandering Earth, the rotation of Earth is slowed to a stop, and then 10000 engines are strapped to one side of the planet and used to accelerate it out of the sola...
There have been many (many) questions around here about the how, why & even when will man kind become a multi planet society... this is not one of them. This question in fact goes the other wa...
I'm writing a drama book and it's meant to be taken 100% seriously, and the main character was born with an allergy to $H_2O$. She does not have Aquagenic Urticaria, as that only affects the skin. ...
This question is based on a scenario on DeviantArt. The presented image is here: The description is as follows: By the start of the Cryocene, bamboo has become one of Serina's most successf...
An un-treatable virus starts infecting and killing people. Societies are on the brink of collapse, and it is decided the best way to save the most amount of people is to move everyone who can fit i...
I have an icy planet with temperatures that average about -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73,3 °C). The planet also has thousands if not millions of domes scattered across its completely icy surface hea...
A supernatural geological event occurred and created a huge caldera-like formation on the coast of a region similar to Scotland. Over time the caldera filled with water and became a bay surrounded ...
I want to build a habitable desert gas-giant moon and I´m not sure how little water I can give it and still get plate-tectonics instead of an Io-like lid-tectonic setup. I want plate tectonics bec...
I read some time ago about terraria (singular: terrarium), which are basically small ecosystems of plants, isolated from the outside world (they get just energy from outside, not water or oxygen). ...
The setting: A planet with two main landmasses, each one's center located more or less at each pole of the planet. Liquid water ocean in between them, wrapping fully, if not directly (due to the ...
I'm in the process of designing a creature loosely resembling a theropod dinosaur that sports a number of horns/tusks on its head and face, and I'm wondering if anyone can help me evaluate its feas...
It's a fairly common legend that trolls turn to stone when exposed to daylight, and I was thinking about using such a creature in a story. I'm searching for a plausible way of justifying such a wea...
