General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In haplodiploid sex-determination system, female/diploid individuals are developed from fertilized eggs by means of sexual reproduction, while male/haploid individuals are developed from unfertili...
The Gaals are a satient humanoid race, of magic origin. They were created by the last of the dragons as a legacy of his race to the world. They are humanoid, but with no hair and scales all over th...
You're a lone immortal who's decided to breed raccoons to a human-level intelligence (over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years). To do so, you need to both feed a significant p...
Demonic possession occurs when an evil spirit hijacks the biological system of an organism, corrupting it and taking control of its functions. Although powerful, the possession eventually breaks do...
This question has its origins in the word "dendraphile" used in a YouTube comment. It was used in an insult used by dwarves towards elves. My chain of thought then was that the dwarves would use pl...
Imagine a world that works mostly like our own: it's built of atoms and quantum particles, there's gravity and conservation of energy, etc. Perhaps the physical laws aren't exactly the same as our ...
I've included more background below, but the TL;DR is that you're a lone immortal who's decided to breed some species of animal to a human-level intelligence (over the course of hundreds of thousan...
From an answer to a previous question of mine: A planet spinning fast enough to allow geostationary orbit near the surface would result in odd side effects. Any object at rest on the equator w...
I'm thinking of a planet in a Goldilocks zone similar to Earth's, with a similar atmosphere, and similar atmospheric pressure and temperature at the surface. Gravity would be variable, based on the...
I'd like to travel really really fast, and I've got some scientists proposing a novel new way of doing so. They've developed the technology to generate extremely powerful controlled gravitational ...
I don't wanna reveal too much about my world, however, the basic idea is that there is a town of people who live deep underwater (they are biologically capable of doing underwater gas exchange and ...
Suppose you have a regular old Stanford torus space station with a 'glass ceiling' rotating at 1.3 RPM. Put it in orbit around a star such that its axis of rotation intersects the star (in other wo...
OK, OK, I know, darkness is nothing but absence of light, so there can be no substantial darkness. Darkness, on its own, doesn't exist. But, can we not get pretty close to this? Can there be some...
I have seen a similar-ish question on here, but it doesn't quite match my inquiry. Suppose you have an interstellar civilization (the means of travel between stars being stable two-way wormholes o...
This one's more sociological, and it seems like a shoe-in to me, but sociology was never my strength. Given how pronounced the Coriolis effect of a smaller Von Braun wheel would be, does it seem ...
In my world, officials dealing with sensitive information have their tongues amputated. Naturally writing and a special, government-only sign-language are the main forms of communication, but crea...
Let's say that some Oriental emperor had decreed that he should move his palatial residence from China to Everest. Specifically, he wanted Mount Everest to be his palace, which means hollowing the...
Scenario: In my Evil Overlord plan, I release a poison into the wild which should kill all humans. However I made some sort of mistake in my poison design and I killed all Vertebrates bigger than 0...
I've just come here for some help drawing a map for this fictional planet where two roughly similar planets have been smushed into kind of pear shape like this: So this planet spins on an axis w...
In my next novel, there are three major powers in the solar system: Earth, Mars, and Saturn. Earth runs on a slightly modified Gregorian calendar, Mars goes with the good old Darian calendar, and S...
My answer to the question Is there a scientifically sound faster-than-light travel system for a spaceship? involved an Alcubierre-drive starship. However, that then got me thinking. What would an ...
If a three-month dark period was a normal, recurring, part of a 15-month calendar, and plants had evolved to be bio-luminescent, could they survive? Would only some survive and, if so, would it be ...
I'm thinking of having a world that has a moon that's been partially split (so not fully halved) with the debris slowly separating from it. At night you'd see the split moon mainly and lots of var...
The Coriolis effect on a ring-shaped space station gets the most attention, but disregarding that, would the rotation of the starfield be too disorienting? A 1km radius station at 1G simulated gra...
If a human is kidnapped by an alien vessel and taken to another planet - and, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the alien life-form lives in a completely different environment from Earth'...
A moon is just a natural satellite - something orbiting a planet - so I'm interested in what kind of factors influence how many moons a planet can have, and how many moons a planet will actually ha...
How could trees in an environment with 23% Oxygen (The atmosphere is identical to earth in all other respects.) grow bark with Starlite-like qualities? Starlite is a material claimed to be abl...
Assuming the power source for such acceleration places no limit on things, how quickly can a space craft be accelerated to the speed necessary to cross the distance between Jupiter and the sun in a...
As the title says, you know stuff like minotaur, lycanth or werewolf, cat or dog folk, etc especially for the female specimens. I want to know what happen if quadrupedal mammals which usually have...
This will be a companion question for How plausible is my monster?. My previous question dealt with a story treatment for a hard science and realistic take on Kaiju/ giant monsters. While that sto...
What can a country do to become self sufficient in isolation and can it improve its technology as fast as countries such as the USA, Japan, or Russia?
Heraldic Dragons Heraldic dragons are the creations of a mad god, called Anon, designed after the classical six-limbed ones. Measurements: Head+neck length: 180 cm Body length: 180 cm Height at...
Handwaving the origin of one such place, imagine a universe where every part of space is filled fully and evenly with liquid water (at, say 1 degree Celsius). What would be the experience of a soli...
In the not too distant future, mankind has established several mining bases on Ceres. There are a lot of spaceships which come and go. Large mining machines are chewing up the interior for resource...
Photosynthesis does not provide enough energy to allow animal activities on its own (see this post for example). But can we think of a species using photosynthesis as a secondary energy source? Her...
If you look at this list of potentially habitable exoplanets, very few of them actually come close to having the same size as Earth, this means most of them would have surfaces gravities significan...
Brown dwarf stars are cool. Both literally and figuratively; the temperature profile for cool brown dwarves runs somewhere between 225K and 600K. It's possible if not probable that there exist som...
What sort of fireproof liquid could be used by carbon-based life without causing harm to the organism? Whether it be absorbed from exterior sources or produced in the organism's body. I say organis...
Disclaimer: I am not a meteorologist. Snow forms when supercooled water droplets nucleate onto particles in the atmosphere. After forming, they grow further by both tumbling around within the clou...
We've all heard the on-again, off-again theories of another massive object in the vast reaches of the outer solar system. Some potential evidence to support the possibility are its affects on small...
I know that when some rivers (such as the Nile) flow out to sea, they break up into several smaller channels. But I was wondering about the necessary features of the land and water for it to occur.
I want to start with the fact that I am by no means an astronomer, or even a hobbyist in the field. I am attempting to build a fantasy world which still reflects accepted physical laws. My problem...
I am working on a world which is very dark due to an opaque gas layer in the hight atmosphere; but it is opaque mostly in the terahertz range. The creatures in this world therefore rely very little...
I am designing a creature that is quadrupedal but can run after prey on its hind legs. What kind of hip bone would allow for the excess stress to be put on it during bipedal locomotion? The animal ...
I want to have a group of space colonists get stranded on a planet where the only way they can get enough nourishment is to gather or cultivate edible plants.
What is the largest planet I can get, while still remaining within Earth-like parameters? My concern is with gravity, water pressure and atmospheric pressure. Escape velocity is less of a concern. ...
In the year 2069AD, a spaceship is transporting hundreds of people in cryogenic sleep to a distant star. The spaceship engine is a nuclear fission reactor and its thruster is based on an ion drive ...
My character is male and eighteen years of age. He has no health issues. 'Gold' can be replaced with any type of metal - silver, bronze, steel, iron, it doesn't really matter to me. The ideal type...
On another planet there is a life form that has the same level of intelligence as humans on Earth, but it has no appendage to manipulate its environment. It has similar social structures to humans...
For context, I'm currently working on a short story series centered on a young man living in a dystopian America. This U.S. government keeps its 'undesirables' in medically-induced comas (long stor...
