General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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What is the most powerful magnetic field that could be generated by a planetary object? The measurement of 'powerful' will be field strength ($\mathbf{B}$-field) at the planet's surface, in teslas....
What would a planet's rings look like from the surface of that planet? Would the rings be perceived to be stationary or move across the sky, and would the alignment of the rings relative to the ax...
Please note that I have had some incredibly helpful and useful suggestions here that I have decided to make some major revisions as a result. I will reduce the overall atmospheric pressure and part...
Ok, so I have determined my world can keep it's planetary ring system. YAY! Now I just need to clarify once and for how it would look like from the planet surface. I think I have it worked out, but...
So I have an alien biosphere in which trisexual reproduction predominates. As far as we can tell, trisexual reproduction does not offer an advantage when it comes to shuffling genes. The biological...
I'm trying to auto-generate random solar systems, and I'm basically just allocating 2% of the total system mass to planets (and moons). It provides interesting results, I always have a few gas gian...
Consider a world in which time travel has been made viable possibility. Initially, many are ecstatic at the new technology and the knowledge it will unlock. However, biologists and other scientists...
This is a partial extension to this question: What kind of natural armor would stop bullets? I was wondering if a creature could grow armor in such a way which would allow for it to detach a porti...
So I was designing some aliens who exhale colder air that they take in and one person gave me a really great suggestion, using phase change materials in the creature's make up to absorb the heat fr...
In the Command & Conquer series of games, there is a mythical 'plant' life called Tiberium. It ends up being of alien origin through the course of the games, but its role in the game is as a ha...
I'm working on a passage of my SciFi novel where my current primary character is escaping from a highly secure, enemy military, space station. I would like him to cause some sort of catastrophe to ...
I've got a subspecies of human, Homo Volantes, that has been designed to live both in zero-G and in surface gravity. Several adaptations have been made, one of them including the replacement of fra...
So once again the world is in the Pangaea formation and the plates are moving on the same trajectory to form the continents that the world is in today (I'll refer to it as Modern). Instead of movin...
Inhabitants of another planet (their biology is yet undefined, and if helpful to solving the problem, suggestions can be included in the answer), have a spaceship in which they plan to accelerate t...
I'm an artist and I've been trying to find a comprehensive resource that would help me clearly identify likely sky colors for exoplanets that have atmospheres with a similar chemical composition to...
So, in this alternate Europe, there are some obvious differences. First off, the Baltic Sea is no longer a sea, but now the Baltic Plain. Also, the Low Countries are absent entirely. There are...
From a climatic point of view, what if Earth went through a radical polar shift that would place the geographical pole right where the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau are? (No matter if southern or n...
I would like my human colonists to settle on the high plateaus (2500-3000m above sea level) of my planet thus never meeting the civilization living in the lowlands (in a huge forest so they aren't ...
Let us suppose that we have people who for all intents and purposes are human, except for one (not so) tiny modification: they are able to exert enough muscular force and react fast enough that the...
I've asked a whole array of questions, so far, centered around an ongoing project of mine that features a world, in an alternate evolutionary timeline, where a variety of well-known mythological cr...
I'm currently designing an advanced alien race that has found a way to prevent its host star from dying. But I'm not sure how exactly would that happen. So my question is, "How could you prevent ...
In humans skin color varies slightly in shades of dark brown to a faded pink, which has the purpose of protecting the skin from sunlight. An idea used commonly by people beginning designing alien i...
The Objective Lots of questions at this site consider how humans could be enhanced with genetic engineering. But, if you are an alien, you may have the opposite priorities. These aliens are civil...
Context This creature right here is one of the decedents of placoderms that that transitioned from rivers to land. The got onto land during the Middle Devonian and remained isolated from all oth...
Earth, far future: We built multi generation ship which can get 20 000 people to another solar system in next 20 generations (600 years) For scope of this question assume that ship itself is well ...
After getting help from the members of this site with Worldbuilding an Earth-like world around an F-Type Star, I have another question. The Planet's radius is 90% of Earth's. The Planet's rotation ...
In my city, a very high skyscraper stands at the center. Somehow, a tree, in a span of [x] years integrates itself into the building. Its branches reach out from the top of the building and its sha...
So basically, a guy (criminal, fraud, con artist and generally very untrustworhy person) is involved in an accident and suffers total memory loss. He remembers absolutely nothing about his previous...
At the end of Book 6 of my book series, a magic ritual has caused a large meteorite (around 1/4 the size of the one that caused the chicxulub crater) to ram into the small planet (around the size o...
Suppose that there is a moon, orbiting a gas giant, and that gas giant is a rogue planet - it moves freely through the universe, unbound by the gravity of a star. This means that one, the moon will...
My question on refueling around stars got me thinking about the transit method of detecting planets and how it could be used to detect a ship whilst it is refueling (either by accident or on purpos...
Say that you have a medium-sized, bipedal, vertebrate-like creature. It no longer has the need to have arms, so they atrophied until they disappeared entirely. Now imagine an animal that shares s...
My human civilization is facing (much like us) the threat of anthropogenic climate change. For whatever reasons, they are unwilling to take action by reducing the use of fossil fuels and refuse to ...
Science-based answers, please. Key points: the main concern is radiation protection for sustainability of human life (and accompanying plant and animal life ecosystems, whether earth-like or n...
Assuming that the magnetic field on Earth can suddenly flip, if really bad timing were to occur, wherein some of the biggest solar flares Earth has ever experienced rained down on the planet, could...
In my book series (link here), there is a character named Rhys. Rhys is a highly mutated wasp whose mutation gave him the following benefits: His armor is immune to most of the medieval-style wea...
The Progenitors are an ancient race of almost infinite technological sophisitication, who mysteriously vanished millions of years ago for no good reason (I don't like TV Tropes, but you are welcome...
One aspect of the world I'm conceptualizing is that some employees might opt to work while in a medically induced coma, or work at night while they sleep by using brain implants that induce a type ...
I am writing a fantasy novel centered on an Earth-like planet with icy rings like Saturn. This question deals with certain effects of having such a ring system. Assume the planet is Earth, the r...
Researchers are scratching their heads, and Portland Water Bureau is furious. In Portland, Oregon, a reservoir in one of the City parks has begun spilling out a river of naturally occurring beer/a...
Background It is the near future. After a major world war and limited nuclear exchange, the nations of Earth have consolidated into a few blocs. The threat of further war and the cumulative damage...
Alright, so take your basic (not DnD or any other universe specific) mimic: an unassuming treasure chest that turns out to secretly be a monster as soon as you open it. This particular creature is ...
The orbit of mercury is different than rest of the planets. The reason for this seemed unaccounted for in Newtonian physics, and was later explained by Einstein's theory of relativity. Here is a ...
I'm writing a graphic novel on the premise of a world that has a liquid or semi-liquid atmosphere, separate from a true liquid sea. But since I don't want 'Magical Underwater Adventure!' I've decid...
In the course of designing fictional species I often find myself wishing to use exotic senses which we humans lack. This poses a unique and interesting challenge as without possessing the sense mys...
I'm looking for ideas for a highly contagious airborne biological weapon (virus, bacteria, other) that would kill its host in a matter of days to a week or so, but that, once all infected hosts are...
Beneath the sands of the Planet Dalia, their lives an abominable creature, a creature that eats beings whole and slowly, slowly digests them for years at a time. This creature is...The Tayan. Wor...
According to the Film Theorist's video on Spider-Man Peter Parker would undergo extreme g-forces during his swinging around. This is not so much of a problem, as any g-force based loss of conscious...
The scenario is based on the fact that a tight binary of two neutron stars does not hold for long: The two bodies lose energy in the form of gravitational waves and they spiral towards each other a...
Would it be possible to have a giant velvet worm? Not huge but big, like the size of a small dog, 20 kilograms?
