General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In a scenario where the Soviets didn't manage to stop corium from reaching the water reservoirs underneath the plant, causing a detonation equivalent to a nuclear explosion, what would life in the ...
It is (around here, anyway) quite well known that science does not allow the existence of kaiju, mainly because of the cube-square law. bones rip themselves out To my understanding, this boils do...
I was looking for special missiles that do more than just explode or release radiation, thus I looked at some of the harder Warhammer 40k weapons, until I came across the Hellfire Missile. To desc...
Apart of the Anatomically Correct Series Vanara The Vanara is a group of people who lives in the forest in the Hindu epic "Ramayana." In there, it describes them as human-like, with reference to...
Say humans found a way to exponentially increase the capability of plants to grow. Is it possible for it to cause an environment that can cause oxygen toxicity in humans?
Though this applies to lizardfolk and most creatures with a snout as well, I'm having trouble giving more facial expressions to dragons. Sure, they can wink, bare their fangs and laugh out loud and...
In the 2002 documentary the future is wild, numerous biologists and other scientists speculated about the future evolution of various species. In the '100 million years in the future' segment, the...
In a story I am working on there are 5 AI on a space station of varying levels of social, image recognition and general intelligence. At least one is good enough to pass a Turing test and do image ...
What modification would a plant "” especially tree "” develop in a world where everything is made of sugar, caramel, cake, syrup, soda, etc.? Think of something like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factor...
This came out of a discussion of an all female colony world, but I'm interested in the more general version of this question. Is there any function in society that requires male levels of strength ...
Assume technology more advanced than current levels, let us theorise for this question that we are capable of reaching and if needed extracting material from any planet or moon / body in our solar ...
male Wyverns collect shiny objects in their dens to attract mates it quite common for Wyverns to get into territorial fight. Now Wyverns are capable of breathing fire but they are also covered in f...
Is there a way for a species to essentially become a living incubator of sorts? Not the other way around, as in Plausible ways for the alien species to be able to impregnate every and any species?,...
I have this creatures which were hiding underground for millennia. They are, from the beginning of their history, exclusively nocturnal. They emerged back on surface after moon disappeared (irrel...
In my world, I plan for an alien pathogen to cause drastic mutations in all lifeforms, reshaping animals and humans alike in a scenario of near inversion of positions, with animals achieving human-...
Lets say you have a planet called...Galileo. Galileo has a large amount of biodiversity, with bacteria, plants, fungi, and animals. The animals are what I'd like to focus on today. Unlike Earth wit...
I am working on creating a species where they have hollow horns (the horns have evolved to the point of being mostly for display and minor neck protection so they do not have to be super sturdy) so...
The MC1R gene turns pheomelanin into eumelanins but there are another kind of pehomelanin called pheochromes. So if a brunette or black person used a cosmetic gene therapy to turn off this gene how...
In the foreseeable future, a scientific community has discovered an alternate universe in which the solar system centers around a binary system of G-type suns, unlike the one G-type that ours orbit...
An intelligent creature who's natural life span is around 50 years in which they need to feed to not die of starvation after which they naturally die. But killing other beings of their own species...
In my story, set in an earth-like world, a marine species that had evolved a melon organ, much like that found in our dolphins, made its way back into the "land" (a large system of underground cave...
Background: We discover an artifact in the present day somewhere remote. This artifact is in the form of a small (approximately phone sized) sphere, and when researched, it is discovered to have th...
So, I have been a bit disappointed with the answers on how to store degenerate matter from my previous thread, and now I'm even wondering whether one can produce it at all, without invoking unreali...
The other side of this question can be found here: How to use heavier soldiers Imagine if tomorrow we find a way to create soldiers that are almost exactly the same in every single way as our curr...
Imagine a cuboid planet with a thick atmosphere orbiting a star similar to our Sun. The inhabitants are as intelligent as humans and recently discovered the universal laws of gravitation and motion...
For space-based warfare, would an orbiting satellite which was equipped with a railgun cannon be effective against a ground-based fort, or even an aeroplane, or another type of air transport? This...
Hypothetically, if an animal such as a cephalopod were to become terrestrial, and walking gradually evolved from crawling, would hardened muscle be likely to evolve as support, with articulation to...
As a follow-up to this question, what would be the effect(s) of a high-speed of super-heated plasma entering and impacting on a planet? The planet is about the size of 1.2x Earth(s), with a simila...
One problem, I think writers often overlook, is the problem of flying creatures communicating with each other. I call this the "I can't hear you over the sound of the f@cking headwind!" For my wor...
This is a follow up question to my previous question: Rock/Mineral Ore Eating Organism So these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithoredo They eat limestone. So I thought, what is limestone...
I know things like flashlight fish exist; things with luminescence and all that. But how strong could the light be? I have this cave dwelling species with three eyes except the middle one isn't ex...
Could a life form that uses superfluids as part of its biology exist? I've read in places that the issue for life outside of Earth and especially the theorised silicon lifeforms is that the existe...
Agriculture One of if not the most important factor to our survival, it allows us to feed the very animals that we eat and in general it allows us to survive. But could insects learn or evolve to ...
An area of my planet is very saturated with lava. Being quite similar to the Siberian Lava Traps, it is essentially a lava sea. This lava "sea" area isn't necessarily all lava however, as there are...
I ran across an article briefly describing a woman suffering from Urbach-Wiethe disease (UWd). UWd leaves calcification within the amygdala and in this case subject lost all sense of fear (this cas...
I was wondering what the best ways for turning minerals mined in the asteroid belt into useable materials would be, so far I came up with three methods, utilizing nuclear, electromagnets, and final...
Say we have a civilization on the verge of becoming Type II, and are in the process of building a Dyson Sphere. They are aware that in the process, and especially after completion, there will be te...
What will be the view of the sky and the distances between stars, living on a planet or in a habitat in a super galaxy that has merged with all its nearby galaxies in its cluster, at a time in the ...
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...
My character is traveling aboard a spaceship through inter-galactic space (it has left the Milky Way). The ship is traveling at the speed of light or so and has been for the last six thousand years...
I'm developing a story where humans colonize a few planets. One planet, lets call it Planet A, has similar gravity to earth, air pressure, and solar radiation. You cannot however, walk on the surf...
One of the planets I'm thinking of for my book series has all of its landmass in the northernmost half of the northern hemisphere (it is thus mostly a water world) and is completely geologically de...
Say one day humanity has found a planet that supports life. It's filled with luscious forest and barren deserts, and various ecosystems that resemble Earthly ones. After a single year of researchi...
Rivers of lava are a staple of fantasy. But in the real world, lava flows are usually very short-lived phenomenons caused by volcanic eruptions. Is there some plausible way on an otherwise earth-l...
If the earth's oceans were electrocuted (from the ocean floor), not worrying about how the energy is gotten to electrocute it, what would happen too everything in the ocean,( fish, algae, etc.) wha...
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...
In this universe, Earth had a couple orbital rings during the construction of the colony ships that were sent to Alpha Centauri. Humanity has achieved fusion power and efficient space flight (1g ac...
The core concept is a bastardized fusion of utility fogs, and the magical barriers of witches from the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Utility fogs are swarms of 100 micrometer robots, foglets, t...
I've got this ferret shaped land creature from a dream that can make its body expand so it looks sorta like a fat sausage with limbs. It sucks in air with its big mouth to expand. It lives on a wor...
I am wondering if it is possible for whales to fly. I'm considering two different cases. How could we alter earth conditions (thickness, gravity) so that whales could actively fly (without changi...
