General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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We all know the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk--a farmboy sells his cow for some "magic beans", which in turn grow into a mountainously tall stalk that led him to the land of a giant. Now, scienti...
Background A large star makes a relatively close approach to a solar system like our own and the orbits of many of the planets are badly perturbed. A planet similar to Earth is in the wrong place a...
One thing that nearly every multi cellular organism and complex thinking species is communicate, either it be pheromones, chemicals, chirps and sounds, symbols and shapes, to even complex sentences...
When I say all-metal airships, I'm referring to something like the above from Jakub Rozalski's artwork - the design is more akin to a naval destroyer or battleship and less like a zeppelin. We'v...
So, if you remember these two questions: What can these negative-mass-free wormholes be used for? and Scientific explanation for summoned creatures , you probably know what I'm talking about. Ba...
In the anime, called Attack on Titan, the primary antagonists are these huge, humanoid creatures, called titans. Titans have sizes between 15 and 4 meters. Larger titans aren't unknown, but they s...
Assuming that as a species, we do ourselves in, not through war but through environmental neglect and overpopulation, what species will benefit most from the effect we have had on the planet during...
How fast could run a humanoid being, how much damage could resist, how much weight could lift, how strong could hit, under the indicated evolutionary conditions? is there a limit? I have always tho...
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...
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...
I'm currently working on something where breechloading rifles and cartridge shot are developed very quickly over matchlocks and flintlocks. What major technological hurdles need to be overcome for...
I recently came across a few examples of a "quantum slime" entity, namely from Starfinder and Slime Rancher, that has the ability to make copies of itself via quantum superposition, and then cause ...
So imagine people were the size of house cats, and the world's land masses were scaled down accordingly (in volume). In comparison to the original size of the landmass, how big would England be? An...
It's become a popular speculative evolution trope for the likeliest candidate of the mythological "wyvern" to be a Cenozoic family--if not superfamily--of scansoriopterygid dinosaur. Now the first...
One of the respondents in this thread suggested a 7-sex system with the following features: An idea I came up with years ago was a variation on the male/female/carries-offspring idea. This spec...
Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and, therefore, one of the key components of life as we know it. There are many amino acids in nature, but they all stem from the same basic structur...
Well. This is for a hard sci-fi fiction. The main protagonist, an Action Girl, has just met her sidekick: an humanoid Iguana (it makes sense and it is explained why Iguana-people people exist (has...
We have, perhaps, all experienced those 'heat' packs wherein a local disturbance causes a crystal structure to rapidly dissipate through the medium, releasing heat in the process. Nothing really 'm...
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-...
I'm writing about a fictional world where reptiles evolved and became the dominant species on a planet. on this planet an extinction event never occurred and reptiles still remained the dominant sp...
Basically, the title. Trying to figure out how reasonable stealth in space would function, and while I have mitigated it, I am looking for methods to improve it. But mainly, is creating a sort of h...
I'm fairly certain such a creature is impossible, but I was curious to see if anyone could come up with an explanation for such a creature. How would a two-headed giant evolve/function if it was a ...
Eusociality, is the most sophisticated level of organization of sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care, overlapping generations within a colony of adults, a...
So, there's this guy, Null, named after his ability that allows him to send any action, a person makes, into /dev/null. Basically, he can "No, you didn't" any attack. That's okay, but then comes h...
What is a possible event${^*}$ that would cause a spike in the speed of $^{235}$U fission and reduce its average concentration in ore worldwide? As I understand the physics of the process, it is i...
Just as the title, is there a scientific or possible way to extract past memory from a person brain into some record such as video or visual player ? I know some theory say that it possible to du...
A Gelatinous Cube is a massive, slime-based jelly that haunts underground dungeons, and is composed of an acidic substance which breaks down material. These creatures are unintelligent and crawl ai...
There is a planet called Galileo with life on it. The life is getting extremely complex, in fact, with some of the life on Galileo beginning to form tribes and clans and learning language. Humans w...
Given a world where a human-like brain is synthetizable, I wonder: A human-like artificial brain would most likely crave sensorial overwhelm. Pleasure to humans is something deeply associated with...
In the story I'm creating, a major weapon type of humanity will be Antimatter based weaponry. This is a fairly new technology, as antimatter production facilities have just reached the size and cap...
So, Georgie, the paladin who's still unsure about going down the path of lawful stupid, decided not to kill the dragon. Now, this means they can finally use The Orb of Dragonkind for something afte...
With a group of friends, we are trying to build an RPG in a quite specific setup which I have a hard time to find elsewhere in order to get some inspiration/information. So what I mean by that is...
How would it switch between if endothermic and ectothermic and in between and how would it be able to create different temperature in specific areas in the body?
So I was recently inspired by the answers that I saw on this stack exchange to the following question: Feasibility of H.G. Wells' Continuously-Exploding Atomic Bombs And it occurred to me that you...
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...
So, me and the boys have decided to take a trip down to Earth for reasons that matter not be it science, leisure or fleeing persecution. It is no concern how we blend in but our spacecraft poses an...
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...
After looking at concept art of various humanoid creatures portrayed in science fiction I noticed many artists tend to make the abdominal muscles of their creatures/aliens look similar to those mus...
Quick Overview Here's the situation: your species, under directive of your friendly world government, has been informed that all "natural" (aka reproducing like your normally would and having a ch...
The purpose of this question is to get an alien race with a diffused set of organs, which makes any part of their body interchangeable. Why would a species need this? Well for one it might be becau...
How could astrophysical jets, emitting matter from black holes be used as energy sources by a space-faring nation? How could they be able to collect and use this form of energy?
There are three main languages in this world: Draconic, used by the "old" races, i.e: tengu, dragons, lizardfolk, etc... Abyssal, used by both demons and angels: Initially was a low-level languag...
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 ...
I was thinking of a story with a Werewolf as a detective, using mostly conversational skills and his sense of smell to solve crimes similar to many of the UK types of detective stories (Morse, Lewi...
In the movie Primer (2004), there are two main characters who travel back 24 hours in time using their time machine. When they arrive, both they and their past selves exist in this same town at the...
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?
Tools Tools are the most used thing known to man kind, they help us build, eat, sleep, learn, and much much more. However I've grown to be curious if insects could use tools, so far to my knowledg...
Could a planet with the size and characteristics of the Earth orbit a gas giant and would the earth-like moon be able to maintain its orbit if the gas giant went rogue and was launched from its hos...
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 ...
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 ...
