General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Look at you all sitting here. Quite some of you have probably never ventured beyond the outskirts of this city, mayhaps not even past the wall? You've spent your whole lives in this place, but w...
Questions about how to feed a large population keep popping up on this website quite frequently. One obvious option is farming. But how many people can you feed per square-kilometer of farmland? I...
For characters with Superman-style "super breath", the amount of air being forcefully exhaled is often vastly greater than is possible to hold in human-sized lungs. However, this poses two major pr...
Say we have a group of space travelers who have been frozen inside a sleeper ship for an enormous amount of time that left when Earth was recognizable. When they thaw out and reach their destinatio...
Currently I am working on how to explain a character that can "phase" through objects in a similar manner to Martian ManHunter. His abilities are negated by certain (rare) metals. His ability cou...
I have an alien race that can emit beams of heat from their eyes. Is their any way this can be produced by means of a highly evolved organ? If so, how would this organ work?
Medusa is a legendary myth about a woman with snakes for hair that turns anything she looks at into stone. How can I achieve both of those features in an animal realistically? And how would these f...
Let's assume that our intelligent alien organism is living on an earth like planet with an atmosphere but higher gravity. Its world is on the verge of doom. Somehow it could make it to earth with a...
Dragons are often thought to have impenetrable scales. If dragons were to shed them it would obviously make them far more vulnerable for a period of time. This on the other hand would make them eas...
So I'm writing a book and need help to better explain this island that sinks, more on that in a moment as I give you the basic build of the planet... First, its a world on a very tilted angle. the...
So I'm creating a world in which humans have a close sister species very similar to the Japanese Nekomimi seen in anime and manga. Eventually, the humans turn on Nekomimis, perceiving themselves as...
Spaceships are a peculiar thing; as are the Humies - the hardy folks working and living inside these hunks of metal for weeks or months at a time. Ironically in space living-space is at a premium. ...
I have been wanting to make a carnivorous reptilian creature with the ability to speak fluently using its speech muscles and its vocal tract, it can also perform facial expressions just like how hu...
Inspired by this question, how might one determine the shape of the world given a cosmology with no cycles? The moon, sun, stars, and planets are all fixed. The Earth does not rotate. You can't ...
What kind of atmosphere would a planet need to alter the color of the sun and moon? I know this is rather broad, but I know that a certain gas in our atmosphere colors the sky blue, and gives the s...
Continuation question from this: The Biology behind a slime that uses hydrofluoric acid to disable and digest prey. I've designed a slime that has a bunch of acids and non reactive polymers in its...
To my understanding, part of the reason life is able to exist on Earth besides its ozone layer is due to its magnetic field, which protects the planet and its life against solar winds and keeps the...
My islands (in the world I'm building) were formed from a volcanic hotspot. I want to build realistic islands, so I was wondering how tall volcanic islands are generally in relation to their area. ...
Assuming a world where there were no steam engines available, would it be possible for large passenger or cargo trains to exist? Would it be possible to use horse-engines to power a locomotive? I...
I am designing a terraformed Venus, where the planet has been given an Earth-like atmosphere but keeps it's original rotation rate. Colonists are importing Earth life to Venus to add a biosphere to...
In my story there are multiple planets in a solar system. And each of them are inhabited with different species. The main inhabitants of one planet are "bird+human" things. Is it possible for th...
All hail to the Hypnotoad! I am interested in creating anatomically correct Hypnotoad, mainly known from the Futurama series. While in Futurama the toad itself is pretty big, but I am actually ...
Assuming the moon is the same size as ours and its core is generating a magnetic field, and the copper deposits are quite large, consisting of a tectonic plate containing huge deposits of native co...
Given the amazing computational power of Matrioshka Brains (M-brains), all the amazing things it can do, including but not limited to the following. Allotting space for an almost perfect simulati...
Let's say in the year 2000 we launch a ship to some distant part of the galaxy. If the ship travels with a constant 1 g acceleration for like 28 years (accelerating halfway then decelerating), then...
The snallygaster is a cryptid from Maryland. It is often described as resembling a half bird/half reptile like creature with large wings, a metal beak, tentacles like an octopus (sometimes depicted...
Drug abuse is becoming more and more serious in my (made-up) country. A researcher team is now working on a new drug called Biological VR which has the following properties: The drug is a psychoa...
Some Context I watched a generic Da-Vinci-Code-like french movie that, in a certain point, featured a secret society trying to find an item of great value that was lost in a vault built centuries ...
I'm creating a developed country in South America with its development similar to that of Canada or Australia (little behind the US) with population around 160M in 1850, growing to 346M in 1925 and...
My question is very simple, I want to know if the Martian atmosphere is too thin to hold planes up and, if it is thick enough, how high planes could reasonably go. This is considering heat manageme...
Because our moon is tidally locked with Earth, then the same half always faces the Earth regardless of where the Moon is in its orbit. As such, would a tidally locked satellite such as our moon (as...
I would like a earth-moon system like Pluto-Charon (but with earth instead of Pluto) where both will be tidally locked to each other within something like 3 billion years (before complex life appea...
I'm using Kapteyn-b for a story, which orbits its red dwarf star every 49 days. It's almost 5 times larger than Earth, though I've made a couple changes to the observed data to make it more plausib...
It's common in sci-fi for large medieval-esque populations of humans living in the ruins of a former technologically advanced civilisation. My story is one of these, with a large population of huma...
For story purposes, I am building a world where all life exists on the moon of a non-habitable planet (the moon is not tidally locked). How can I explain this in a convincing and mostly scientific ...
I am writing a fan-fiction (thus the world that my story is set in is not mine though some modifications can be done in accordance to my story's timeline and setting in relation to the canon univer...
I have a generic Earth like planet, same atmospheric composition, and the same oceanic composition. The crust of this planet is predominantly silicon based but plenty of iron, nickel and copper. ...
I am creating a world in which a society exists that is heavily inspired that ancient Sparta, specifically with a focus on Spartiates and their military education, the agoge. A character in the sto...
I found this thing source: http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Flying_Nightmare In its dormancy it folds itself and it rooted to the ground. However when it detects prey, it hovers above and engulfs i...
I am a fictional writer and need info on a poison that can be put in food and is undetectable in autopsy. Symptoms also can't be too messy, no specific time in how long it takes to take effect.
I'm working on a planet and I want to know what is the maximum amount of sunlight my planet gets in lux (for Earth It's 120000 lux). My planet orbits an M4V class red dwarf that has a mass of 0.2...
Obviously there would be a lot of small (not to mention a couple large) changes humans would need to get used to on a planet that rotates much faster than Earth. The biggest one I'm concerned about...
Designing living creatures is hard, so I came up with a generalized idea to speed up the process in the future: Biological padding is a spongy structure made of spider silk and filled with either ...
This is something that is starting to bug me, I'm creating a universe in which space travel is cheap and comfortable and space habitats can be built roomy enough that no-one actually needs to live ...
In my fantasy world, there has been a longstanding presence of underwater civilizations, both alongside and independent of surface-based kingdoms. In the style of Tolkien's Beleriand, various conti...
I've recently became curious about the moon wide super organism on Pandora known to the natives as Eywa. Eywa is theorized by human scientists to be a superorganism of all living things on Pand...
So, in this world, the future's wars are fought by drones and recruit teenagers with attitude, who control and repair drones in a temporary base near the front, and are frequently targets of surpri...
Gender roles have been historically assigned at birth. As soon as parents establish the sex of their children, they are molded into certain social categories. But what if humans didn't display sexu...
The only real advantage humans have over robots is their stamina and fine motor skills. This would make them a cheap and excellent repair drone, but there are certain problems. What biological mod...
Basically what would be the long term effect on the health of ecosystem of a lake if tons of powdered silver is mixed into a lake? This question comes from a hypothetical situation where a lake ha...
