General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The eyes with vertical pupils of small cats and some reptiles are very good at seeing better in the dark and avoiding being blinded thanks to their ability to regulate the amount of light that ente...
I need ten Earth years long day-night cycle on my planet. Hemera is a world I am creating as a setting for my story. Name comes from Greek deity - personification of Day. Needs of storytelling hav...
Starliners are huge colony ships. They carry enough equipment, building materials, embryos, colonists and nutrient rich rations to permanently establish a sizeable colony on a far-flung world. Alth...
Node is the last active city of the lizard people. Node was built to be a self-sufficient city and a nexus of an interconnected bunker system. It was a vanity project from the peak of the lizard em...
Ok, so this is a culmination of a few questions into one final question: am I doing this right? I am trying to figure out the gravitational difference from one end of a continent to another. There ...
I've seen Which is easier to develop: a piston prop engine or a jet engine? and my own Effects of ~10atm pressure on engine design neither of which answers this. Would different atmospheric densit...
So, I'm creating a fantasy setting, and because why not, I decided to have giants. Not giant giants, just roughly 2 times the height of a human. Now, because physics is dumb, a giant species would ...
Is my planet realistic? It doesn't need to be able to support life as it's just another planet in my solar system, but is a planet with such a high density and gravity really possible? I calculated...
The first two answers in the anatomically correct succubi question suggest a parasitic approach to the concept of succubi which snatches off human organs, either the tongue or the vagina and feed o...
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 world a moon is reached and colonised but only in space stations for a long time. They gain the ability to reach the surface and then story happens. It needs to be something that can be bypas...
Extraversion and introversion are a central dimension in the Big Five personality model (or OCEAN model). Being introverted or extraverted may not be mutually exclusive, but, when averaging out ove...
In world building it is often interesting to consider extreme landscapes "“ how tall can a mountain be on Earth for example. But what is the tallest mountain possible in any gravitational environme...
I have a spaceship which I want to have travel very quickly around a system like our own solar system -- let's say about 10 million miles per minute, which would go from Mars to Earth in ~15 minute...
Let's say that in an alternate universe, humans developed on a relatively small supercontinent, so their languages and cultures were somewhat similar. After a while, all of the nations merged into ...
Tengu are a race of upright, humanoid creatures with the ability to fly and other avian characteristics to a varying degree. Konoha-tengu (foliage tengu) are six-limbed humanoid avians. The bird s...
Let's say humanity is a type 1 civilization, ( essentially a civilization that can control there entire planet and harness its energy ), now let's also say humanity wants to make an intelligent spe...
The crafts would have to contain large farms in order to sustain the immense amount of people, and they'd obviously have to be large and spacious to have good living conditions. I did some research...
I'm not sure if this site or Astronomy would be better, but I figured I would try here instead. I am attempting to create a [semi]plausible star system in Alpha Centauri for a series. The system w...
What are two non lethal substances that will combine to create a strong poison when ingested close together? Hopefully my character would be able to drink one of the substances mixed in to a wine ...
When I say multicellular I mean it's made of more that one viruses. Basically it's a bunch of viruses that act like viruses but use the viruses made by infected cells to build a "multicellular" lif...
I want to know what kind of toilet design for mermaid is, considering they live surrounded by water and they poop through the anus (or whatever the organs name is) that located in the front rather ...
When writing a futuristic story I always try to minimise the impact of computerization. Its rather uncomfortable writig a story when technology is advanced enough that humans arent in a position to...
In the distant future a breakthrough in cryostasis technology can put healthy people into frozen state so that all metabolism halts and cells never age a bit, the spaceship is carrying them across ...
Suppose we walled off a 1000 km square. These walls would be made of unobtanium (so they don't break), and have no cracks or holes that go all the way through. They are also around 15 kilometres hi...
Early life, and many modern organisms have what we call 'blind guts'. Food enters and exits via the same opening. However, that is inefficient and has been widely replaced with 'through guts'. Fo...
I have a mountain in a story that basically needs to be taken down (inadvertently) by human action in a world with premodern (so mediëval/ early renaissance at best) tech levels. I have been thin...
I'm designing a creature which possesses a decently unusual trait: despite having a developed head, it's mouthparts are attached to a tentacle that retracts into the creature's belly when not in us...
Introduction I want my story, set in the modern day, to have a unique architectural feel. Part of my strategy - no skyscrapers. Wikipedia: The term skyscraper was first applied to buildings o...
The last time I asked something similar, I asked if it would be possible for xenarthran mammals (armadillos, sloths and anteaters) to be thrown off of South America from life-giving rafts to other ...
Could a planet be hot enough that oceans could form at the poles, but would boil at the equator? And would oceans form at all on this planet?
If you were inside of a gas that was producing its own light (for example, air at 900°C), what would it look like? Would it look foggy, or would objects that aren't the same colour as the glow sti...
In essence: I'm playing around with a few ideas relating to a post apocalyptic United States, and one of the concepts I've come up with is a world of mostly dusty deserts and other regions mostly d...
So, I'm having trouble with one of my character designs. Guardian angels are former humans who died in such dumb ways that Heaven simply couldn't let them in, not before they proved they can preve...
I'm basically designing a quadrupedal digitigrade alien, which has evolved from a predominantly arboreal animal into a predator with more cursorial adaptations, capable of running fast, but still b...
This is sort of a follow up on my question Could a "multicellular" virus exist? in which part of the consensus was that viruses simply can't hold enough DNA. In theory, could DNA form in a structur...
After the fall of the lizard empire, most of the lizard people fled to Node to avoid genocide (This is in the Lovecraft universe, racism is mandatory). In short order, this former bomb shelter beca...
I'm developing a world based on a terraformed Mars, which was cut off from interstellar society and regressed to a pre-industrial level of technology. Mars has an ocean, but most of the settled peo...
I once before asked a question on how to quickly submerge a large landmass/continent. The answers there basically concluded that literally ''Sinking'' (a la Atlantis) is pretty much impossible to...
What hypothetical scientific procedure could be used to reanimate someone who is brain dead. I am aware that it is possible to bring someone back if they are clinically dead which is where a vital ...
I'm writing a novel set in a post post-apocalyptic world, where society on Earth collapsed a long time ago and has rebuilt itself by the time the novel starts. I need a reason to keep the people ...
We know that in biology, a species evolves to better survive its planet and its various climates and geography, which is mainly a result of natural selection. But, sometimes, this natural selecti...
So I was outlining the part of the story where Gyvaris, a dragon, almost gets killed, when I realized I glanced over something. You see, Gyv had a human friend before and they used to play games to...
I'm writing a story about a town whose residents all work at a nuclear reprocessing site. Some teenagers begin to hang out near a small body of water close to the site that they call "the swamp". T...
If we could replace DNA, RNA and the ribosomes in our cells by their mirror image versions, then everything would work in the same way, except that the chirality of all molecules would have been in...
I want to write a story taking place on the natural satellite of a gas giant, with said satellite being massive enough to prevent, or at least strongly deter, space travel, such that the resources ...
I am wondering if habitable planets could form around stars in super dense dwarf galaxies. There are some super dense galaxies such as M60-UCD1 and M85-HCC1 which can have a typical distance betwee...
Given the difficulties in doing things like constructing O'Neil cylinders or habitats on places like Mars, is it at all plausible that current humans could ever really colonize anything in space? I...
lets say this island is an exact copy of the climate and ecosystem of tropical India. how might Neanderthals evolve in order to survive this environment?
Glossing over the technological implications of interstellar travel, what sort of human labor might still be required in a future where we are capable of setting up nigh-fully automated endeavors o...
