General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Premise/question Correct me if I'm wrong, or if humans have terraformed the planet by the time you're reading this, but Mars is mostly desert-like. It has large ice caps which contain most of its ...
A hypothetical scenario I'm batting around in my head is a Habitable Gas Giant system consisting of a roughly Saturn sized body orbiting a sun like star at a comfy goldilocks zone distance. Orbitin...
King Solomon, founder of the Solomonian Dynasty, was the first emperor of China. After he conquered the mainland, he gave his alchemists the single command of creating an elixir that would allow hi...
What if there was a binding global resolution passed tomorrow mandating that all countries gradually close down their terrestrial resource extraction sites and instead source from asteroid mines? W...
Assuming the power and tech existed to do so (addressing the requisite heat, pressure, etc), would it be possible to draw in atmosphere, condense and heat/cool the particles, and then produce a hig...
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...
Having your radiators tactically protected from enemy fire by the armor shape of your space warship is nice, but having a regular one or double-sided radiators is still a vulnerability. Other conce...
In the universe of my story, the Earth is ridden with metahumans with uncanny powers that do all sorts of different things. Of course, to do all this, they would require a tremendous amount of ener...
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...
I am creating an RPG and I created a continent in which it is set on. I want to make sure that the climate types in it are realistic as well as the continent. This island is called Lartess. Lar...
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...
Ningens are an old internet legend/creepypasta. Supposedly living in the polar regions of the globe, these creatures are described as having white-skin, a roughly humanoid structure with clear hea...
I'm writing a steampunk/weird west story set in 1867 and I want to incorporate some form of armored battle "walkers" (aka mechs). Looking for ideas for powertrains that could conceivably run such a...
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...
Many know that the Lantern Corps of DC Comics are capable of constructing objects of any shape or size out of hard light using their power ring fueled by their emotions. However, I'm wondering what...
My non-magic fantasy world has a species of hominid that lives in a huge and wide sierra of mountains. If they had split off from the (now dominant) human species a couple million years ago, (say a...
Based on the planet from this question. The main thing that distinguishes this planet from, say, Europa, is the handwavium light-source, which I must assume is wrapped in a perpetual explosion wrap...
My world is a satellite of a gas giant. It has an atmosphere and is mostly covered by water (the percentage of water to its surface is somewhere in the high 80s-low 90s). Its rotation period is 28 ...
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...
along time ago a group Australopithecus somehow manged to get washed ashore on let's say the Antarctic peninsula or at least an island near Antarctica now inhabiting mainland Antarctica and evolvin...
This question answers the issue I was wondering about of how well an exoskeleton suit could help my characters move as normal in higher and lower gravity Could a robotic exoskeleton give humans Ear...
so i want to create a monster that dwell or fly inside thunderstorm as their defense mechanism, though they do goes down to get food, i want to know what method or modifications need for creature t...
In my fictional world, the planet has some very strong winds that regularly blow across large areas of land. In this world, however, very large, tall trees grow (the reason for the size of the tree...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series Giant seahorses are often portrayed in fiction as being ridden by merfolk or other underwater people. I'm wondering if such a creature ...
I'd like to have faster-than-light travel (and communications) be an late-game option for a video game I am working on. The extent of the playable universe is approximately 4 million light years in...
The setting I've cooked up for a D&D campaign I'm running features a fair amount of buildings that have been totally abandoned by civilization for hundreds or even a thousand years. Obviously w...
Ok, assuming a planet that's tidally locked to its sun, but is otherwise roughly similar to earth in gravity and atmosphere. Classic tidally locked planet: one side is covered in ice, the other is...
A group of English-speaking settlers travel to the Earth-like exoplanet of Rataan, which is 5 light years away. They board the generation ship Genesis that will reach Rataan in 200 years (0.25% of ...
There is a video from "What If" that tells about (precisely) "What if Earth was a moon of Jupiter":What if the Earth Was a Moon of Jupiter And, in a short story I am writing in an alternate realit...
In an alien world, due to changes in the ecosystem animals that were once mostly arboreal started having to spend more time in open plains, adapting to fill a new niche of grasslands/bush eaters an...
I'm thinking about an AI similar to The Machine from Person of Interest but in a generally more advanced setting, and with a likely more broad goal of serving as a shepherd for humanity as opposed ...
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials. Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinos...
There are some things I don't understand. So far I have my map pretty developed but I think I made some mistakes and there are places I am not sure about. I know I made some mistakes with ocean cur...
Humanity discovered a new energy source, virtually infinite, that can produce gigawatts of electric power using devices of few kilograms. Land and sea transport obviously will switch to electric m...
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...
I got motivated to write a novel after reading about ocean slugs that managed to evolve into fish. In my fictional world I'm writing how a few fish shaped slugs made their way on land and managed t...
My world is basically the surviving chunks of an exploded planet (there's a little more to it than that but that's the important part for the question, ignore any issues of gravity etc.) and while ...
Many countries, authorities and companies have the concept of a maximum weight limit for manual handling, both to protect their workers and to protect themselves from lawsuits. Interstellar Shippi...
I am creating a science fiction worldbuilding project, in which humanity has colonised distant exoplanets. One such planet is a Venus-like planet in the sense that it has a perpetual cloud cover, a...
On one hand, heavier gravity would make flying more difficult, owing to greater weight restrictions on the flying creatures' bodies. On the other hand, the greater density of the atmosphere on ...
I want to create a harmless snake that can spit like a spitting cobra as a defense while kills its prey by constriction. Its venom is considered harmless, but when goes to the eyes it causes tempo...
I'm thinking about an alien race that evolved from large terrestrial crustaceans and has developed a somewhat large brain. Like crabs on earth, these creatures have pinchers wich they use for self ...
I want to write a SF story where humans discover that a species of ET has caramel instead of blood and I need some biological information in order to develop it in a realistic way. For my story, i...
Antimatter gets used a lot in SciFi due to it's mind-bending energy density. If you can store it in a form that requires no power and is at least mildly idiot-proof then you've just solved half of ...
Double or binary planets are a really cool science fiction idea. A second Earth hanging ominously in the sky. Co-orbital or trojan planets are also interesting in that you have them on more or less...
Is there a feasible setup where the Sun has expanded enough to make the Earth uninhabitable, but some of the other rocky bodies in our solar system (past Earth) become more reasonable colonisation ...
The characters in my world use oxygen spheres like the top answer to this post (a leather balloon filled with air) to safely traverse land filled with smoke. How would you know when you are runnin...
We've found a habitable planet orbiting a red dwarf star some light years away and conditions are Earth-like enough that a colonization project was initiated. Before any humans landed on the planet...
I am working on a world where an event, like a celebration, occurs during every lunar eclipse. I would like to have lunar eclipses occurring more frequently--maybe even once a month--in order for...
From what I understand, Mount Everest grows about 2.4 inches per year. I am trying to create an area of land that grows very often, often around 1 inch per day. As I'm not very good with plate tect...
