General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The year is 2100. Internet 3.0 has arrived, with an ubiquitous Internet of Things. Even your wedding band has a fingerprint scanner to make sure it doesn't get stolen. An evil AI has been developed...
Today, dinosaurs, alligators, crocodiles, gharials and caimen are all that remains of a special group of reptiles called the archosaurs. Recently, it has been accepted by the public that birds did...
In my book series (link here), there is a blob creature (lime-green in color, has a radioactive glow, is sentient, has a bizarre and uncanny intelligence level (has the emotional intelligence and "...
A few hundred people are colonists on an erratically-supplied (temperate zone) "earthlike" planet. The company which put them there wanted to keep them alive and growing basic foodstuffs, in case i...
In my book series (link here), there is a star system at the northern edge of the galaxy called the Ryu system. I am planning for this star system to be huge, encompassing 120 planets. The vast m...
We have an Earth-like planet except the tropics around the entire planet are covered with small island chains and archipelagos. No landmasses larger than Cuba appear between 35$^\circ$ N and 35$^\c...
Inspired by: How much electromagnetic transmission noise does Earth have to emit to be noticeable? Premise: Assume that the infamous Wolf 359 star system has one habitable planet and a second, hab...
I'm trying to construct a solar system, and I'm toying with the idea that the planet capable of sustaining life was initially outside of the habitable zone, but the star's advanced age has caused t...
I would like to know if a very advanced civilisation could rule an entire galaxy without mastering teleportation or any other method that allows traveling faster than light (unless you give mathema...
In my book series (link here), Aurea (a planet based on Byzantine Anatolia) is conquered by a group called the Tatians, who have access to technology that would not be out of place in Star Wars (fa...
Would heavier clothing solve the problem of bone and muscle loss in Martian gravity? It doesn't have to be a perfect solution, I just don't want my Martian colonists to be total wimps compared to E...
A small minority (on the order of one in one million to one in ten million or so) of men and women in this world tend to suddenly manifest their supernatural heritage/psychic abilities/superpowers ...
I use the koppen-geiger climate maps a lot but I haven't found any for Pangaea. Would the climate zones be the same if the continents were in the Pangaea shape or is it something different? It woul...
Having looked at some of the questions regarding creatures with more than four limbs, I've found some useful info, like the idea that additional limbs increase stability while requiring more brain ...
So I'm making this game where the player has to launch probes into interstellar space within a 100 * 100 light years map to detect threats that could wipe out humanity in a few decades. Everything ...
This is the first of possibly several posts about the following scenario, in which Earth's sea-level rises 2 km overnight, generating a world map looking like this: Question: What would be the c...
In the near future we may find cargo ships fleeing space pirates! Given that... It's a small cargo ship carrying 10 metric tons of wheat (cargo volume, approximately 13 m3). Total volume: 100 m...
Let's start with a little backstory--our planet underwent an impact-coalescence cycle only once, 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object named Theia destroyed the infant Earth in a glancing...
My superhero generates a force field which lets him and his equipment sustain the extreme conditions found inside the Earth. He decides to travel from the Geographic North Pole to the Geographic So...
So, there is a great beast called the Tayan. It burrows itself into the ground, and eats all creatures unfortunate enough to fall in. The Tayan's throat has muscles that push food down into its sto...
Excerpt from the great Dalian Holy Book "The Dark God, the Tayan, was first formed when the gods above sent a curse down to the surface, to remind our people of our dependence on our gods. If the ...
So in this book series I'm writing (link here if you want to know more about that), there is this planet called Ryu 108. The planet is made up of two continents. The southern continent is heavily f...
You know how there are some beaches in the world where tons of sea glass or other random sea trash washes up, just because the currents and the shape of the land naturally collects it all there? I ...
In relation to a recent question of mine, this alternate Earth still has its core consisting of 84% iron, but the other 16% contains the greatest concentrations of all known species of heavy metals...
This is question is related to the medieval world from my earlier question in which several types of intelligent hominids evolved in isolation, until they were rediscovered, conquered, and bred int...
In my fictional world, we have our John Doe (main character), an ordinary man who happens to be given a drug in the initial stage of testing that gives the user super-human immunity to biological v...
Setting In a tropical shore, where a great river empties into the sea, there is a zone of very high tides. The water level rises and falls by meters every day. In this challenging ecosystem, alter...
Scansoriopterygidae was a family of theropod dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic, the most well-known member of which was Yi Qi. They are thought to have been arboreal insectivores, and conver...
Background: In my world, there are a number of species that stemmed from the 'original base' (humans) who traveled through space for years before a collapse in organized government crippled logist...
Let us assume that in the future, there is a formerly human colony on Mars that has existed there for some centuries. The people of this world have had time to adapt to the lower gravity over at le...
Related to a previous question which focused more on surviving on such a world. This presumes a significant advancement in technologies - that is, to 1940s-1950s level technology. There are some d...
So I have been doing some thinking and I now am trying to design some aliens who can exhale very cold gasses or cool the atmosphere around them as a side effect of their metabolism and also survive...
They don't posses any advanced knowledge, their knowledge is in fact irrelevant, just their possible actions (it doesn't matter how irrational those actions might be) that would cause significant e...
Imagine an Earth-like world in all respects except that the Moon is much much closer. I think I'm right to say if the Moon were very close that tidal forces would slowly rob it of momentum and it ...
My question is fairly straightforward, but answering it is proving rather difficult. The scenario is on a planet with some water. The surface is dominated by deserts, both hot and cold depending o...
As a variation to my previous question about the domestication of microbes So my question is : which animals lend themselves to domestication?
How big could a nebula be? If a spaceship were traveling 300,000 times the speed of light (assuming this were possible and had no other effects, such as time travel or time dilation) is it plausibl...
I saw this question here: Can I have wind turbines on my base? and someone else asked about how the planet can have 60-100mph winds without very much sunlight to cause the energy differential, to w...
Let's say that a character moves much faster (>100 x) than a bullet. If he is shot at, could he theoretically catch the bullet (and put it in his pocket) ? What happens when he touches the bu...
The Perspective: My story is told from the perspective of the simulated AI. In other words, The AI's world is influenced by the reason the developers chose to use a world-spanning war to test the s...
Giant dome concepts are beautiful, but I can't help but wonder how they could be so fragile. If there is even the tiniest rip, the whole thing would rapidly decompress. How would you protect agains...
Problem statement I am building a world where the flora and fauna is based on that of Gondwana, the lost supercontinent that consisted of South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia and An...
I am designing a monster that is as large as a continent. It flies across the planet very slowly and has basically a snake form. Life cannot exist on the planet's surface so the animals are drawn t...
The Bay of Fundy sees the world's highest tides, with ocean water advancing and withdrawing as much as 20 meters or more within a single day. Here is a list of the 50 tidal stations around the wo...
Some Context I'm creating a universe where humanity has reached the stars. They've colonized a few star systems and, obviously, FTL drives are a common thing. The part of the story I'm currently...
I was looking into the Dobles of years past after watching videos of Jay Leno's Doble E-20 and was trying to imagine how one could make the steam car a viable competitor to EVs and obviously one of...
So, the Mediterranean Empire has succeeded in separating the entire Mediterranean Sea from the rest of the world's oceans. See this question for background and premise. There are now dams making su...
So in my world interdimensional travel produces UV light. However, there are obviously other things which produce UV light/reflect it and look different. Being a non-physics person, can someone exp...
My planet is very Earth-like with a day length of 26.87h. The moon has a radius of about 1550km, a mass of $5.2\times10^{22}$ kg and orbit 45500 km from the center of planet. My scenario is that t...
So, I've been designing an alien species, actually a redesign of something from childhood. However, I've recently come into an issue with its limbs. The creature possesses two arms. The right arm ...
