General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I was recently looking at this question, which seems to argue that FTL travel within the existing laws of physics can risk resulting in the destruction of half the universe. (Specifically, bad thin...
Let's assume that some wealthy characters somehow find the plans for a valveless pulsejet. How is not important. Maybe there was a time travel incident, or some Atlantean book was unearthed, or som...
A newly-built base on the moon has the first two compartments of a pressurized greenhouse farm. An airlock system automatically seals one compartment off the others when pressure sensors indicate a...
I am designing a mammal living in a warm environment (like a warm desert) which has developed a switchable metabolism, so that during the day it is cold blooded and during the night (when it is col...
In my story, there is a civilization living in the Amazon rainforest. They need some time of mount that is adapted to the forest. I don't think horses can survive by themselves in there, so I was t...
Answers to this question note that human (and by extension mammal) wings would use naked skin instead of feathers, as we see on bats. However, with feathers, birds can have wings with shaped more l...
In the movie Captain Marvel, the main antagonists (at least for half the movie), the shape-shifting Skrulls, can change their appearance to perfectly match any humanoid creature, down to DNA. Scie...
Larry Niven's "Known Universe" (KU) features "The Outsiders" as one of its most prominent alien races. As per KU canon, the Outsiders evolved in a frigid moon (similar to Nereida) and they sustai...
So, in my setting, there are dwarves that make good steel. Shocker, I know. To refine the ore, they rely on the bloomery process like everyone else, using anthracite (when they can get it), charcoa...
A launch loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop is a proposed way to put lots of things into space at lower unit cost than rockets (only need to pay the energy cost in electricity for each ...
I was thinking about our history of music, came upon electronic music and started musing about all the possibilities of modulation and such. I then thought back to a previous question of mine, "Ho...
Recently I was talking with a friend of mine on fantasy stuffens. I brought up that its interesting that dwarves are rarely in the desert and he immediately listed reasons why the dwarf build is ba...
Of the six limbs of classic dragons, the forelegs always stuck out like a sore thumb. They're dead weight in flight, etc... However, since in my setting you can find any sort of armament, short of ...
So I've been thinking for a while about making a world where cats aren't as common and instead are more of a regional domesticated animal, replaced in (mostly Northwestern) Europe by foxes. How co...
In my Conworld, the inhabitants have discovered a type of star they cannot identify. I would like it to be a star made not from just hydrogen and helium, like our sun and countless others. But my q...
I'm trying to work out the parameters of my planet, using the spreadsheets that Artifexian has developed (particularly this Planet Calculator and this Atmosphere Calculator) as a guide. In order fo...
As recorded in Genesis 11:1-9, the ancients allegedly built a tower to the skies in a valley in Babylon (near present-day Baghdad), and God scattered them across the Earth as a punishment. Accordin...
I´m building a hard-sifi setting and want to use Stellasers (abbreviation for stellar laser) to provide thrust and power to interstellar vessels. This part one is only concerned with the construct...
In my world there is a village with a hot spring, the only one on the entire island. The spring emerges from a local cave which has been filled / caved in by a past civilisation, since the water i...
In my current work, I want same sex couples to be fully integrated in society. As it is set in a medieval fantasy world, survival of the human species relies on having children, so same sex couples...
Introduction For more backstory, see here and here The 438th Harmonious Congress of the People of Mars was perhaps the most anticipated since the early years of the settlement. In a rare action, ...
In my world there human-animal hybrids. My protagonist is a snow leopard-human girl (outwards looks almost completely human, except for the tail). These hybrids have been created through experiment...
In a hibernating speculative evolution project called The Speculative Dinosaur Project, the "speccers" feature a species of shark called Jasconius pelaganax, the Gigamouth, which is basically a meg...
Previous parts here: Creating a scientifically semi-valid super-soldier, part 1: Skeleton Creating a scientifically semi-valid super-soldier, part 2: nervous system Creating a scientifically semi...
I need ideas for a chemical or disease which kills the victim upon holding it in the palm for about 4 or 5 seconds. The death isn't necessarily immediate, as it might take days to kill the victim i...
How to justify evolving pointy ears that stick out from your head, on a humanoid. Like this: They can either start from the usual round-eared human(oids) with ears close to their heads, or hav...
Alright, so I've been meaning to write out a planet with golden/yellow fields and a violet / purple ocean. What I was thinking about is having the water of this world is so clean and nourishing th...
In Steven Gould's Jumper series, the main character has the ability to teleport, and he eventually realizes he automatically does frame matching when doing so - no matter where on earth his origin ...
Alright, so the primary inspiration for this is 55 Cancri e, the speculated carbon "diamond world" and to a degree, Nkllon, a planet in Star Wars that is essentially what Cancri is, but "confirmed"...
A cool thing to imagine would be a world where the land was dominated by megafaunal frog-descendants, as it is/was by mammals today, dinosaurs before the mammals, and non-mammalian synapsids and cr...
What thickness of atmosphere, and strength of magnetosphere, would I need for a planet to have a deadly daytime and a hospitable nighttime? I'm wanting a planet in which humans can survive on as l...
As part of a series on plant animals, plantimals if you will, I am now asking about ears. All surface life has them or some sort of equivalent to them and with good reason. Other than sight, hearin...
I want you to meet Gary. Gary looks like a human, walks like a human, and talks like a human. But he's not. He's a superhero, or a magician, or... something. He's not really sure. He just knows tha...
In this world, there is a land isolated by a lava line, and the only way to get in there, is across a bridge levitated by hot air balloons. I had the idea of making a wooden bridge being supported...
I'm putting together a scenario, where a "Sun" and some debris are flung so distant that 14 billion years after the big bang, it has an "Earth" (and maybe some other minor rocky/icy objects), but n...
I have a scene where an alarm is sounding in an airlock, as the pressure is lowered from normal atmospheric pressure to vacuum (takes a few minutes). How would this alarm sound to an unprotected pe...
Assuming that there is a means of increasing the spin rate of an existing black hole, what would happen to the shape of the event horizon as the spin rate was increased? In extremis what would even...
A while back, I asked this question about the plausibility of giant floating whales and received an excellent and high-scoring answer from Dubukay demonstrating that, given the assumptions that Dub...
I'm talking about this sort of liquid sand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs "Desert-as-sea-analog" is present in many media, but often they lean heavily into fantasy, and it seems not ...
(I'm new here, so I apologize in advance if I do something wrong) TL;DR of what I'm looking for: A substance (natural or artificial) that... can be suspended in an atmosphere is harmful to bre...
Storm fronts — especially surprise storm fronts — are a popular Sci-Fi trope. Ion storms and radiation storms and neutronic storms and they invariably look 2D, like ribbons in space. But then I r...
Magnetic core memory was a critical innovation in the development of computers. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory it was the most advanced form of memory from about the mid-fif...
I realize the response to this question is fairly involved but here goes. I need to have an alien spacecraft either in orbit around Uranus's moon Puck or somewhere in Puck's orbit around the planet...
Since different planets have different gravity, atmospheric pressure, air density and composition, it's obvious that a definition of operational altitude based on earth sea level is inadequate for ...
Please note: This has no relation to any real persons on this site or elsewhere and should not be taken to be such. In my world there is a human nomadic desert tribe. They have a long-standing cus...
After nearly a decade of development and public prototypes, the Mizaru company is ready to unveil the cybereye. A fully cybernetic eye that provides its user/host with high definition vision, enhan...
While similar to other questions they mostly focused on what impacts required in the past to keep airships as a popular air transport method today, this question is about how to make airships the d...
So for the story I'm writing, I'm designing is a gas dwarf with a very strong magnetic field and a planetary ring with a slightly inclined orbit. However, the rocks within the ring are very sensiti...
I'm well aware that a Sun-like star is incapable of producing a supernova at the end of its life. However, would removing the core or a fraction of it, trigger an explosion from the star collapsing...
What technology (at minimum), devices or minimum civilization development is needed, so that an individual member of this civilization would be able to detect that some star is going supernova? My...
