General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Question: many SF stories (e.g. The Expanse) put living organisms in highly radioactive environments and show them consuming that energy in some way. How might organisms put into these environments...
A hypothetical species reproduces by females impregnating males a la seahorses. However, their reproductive system appears woefully ill-suited to this task. Their genitalia are outwardly similar to...
Could humanoids similar to the cubic-based beings found in Minecraft be physically plausible? The requirements are not that human can take such a shape, but rather that a being of such size and sha...
In my world, there would be a tropical region very similar to real life rain forests, though underground there's still jungle. At a point underground, there are huge caverns that are populated by ...
Premise Suppose a cult has been receiving special "visions" of doom far off into the future. Even though this prophecy of doom is not impending in the here and now, these cultists are very long-te...
Imagine we have a faster-than-light drive which costs ~$250,000 USD per drive and can propel an ISS-sized craft at 1000 times the speed of light. It is reliable and has safeguards that stop it from...
While constructing a planet, with the same mass, volume and overall composition as Earth, how do I know how many tectonic plates should it have? And what does having more or fewer tectonic plates c...
I'm looking to devise an extraterrestrial parasitic organism that perpetuates itself by infecting entire stellar biospheres before moving on to colonize other inhabited star systems. This organism ...
Note: this is not a duplicate of Anatomically correct Giants or What would be the tallest possible height for humanlike creatures in earthlike conditions? because my giants are far from humanoid. A...
I mean in the far future megascale be advanced enough to allow the construction of a ring world around Earth or around a low mass star( a red dwarf for exemple). If yes, how big Earth would look f...
This is the second question in a series about my ongoing worldbuilding project, which seeks to explain the evolution and biology of various fantasy creatures. The first one was: Is petrifying visi...
I'm creating a human race that has 3 sexes: male, female & hermaphrodite. Is there any biological rules that limits what should be the ratio between sexes or I could just pick whatever works b...
So I went and saw Rogue One recently. Wonderful movie... If you want absolutely no spoilers STOP READING NOW. The Death Star shoots up a couple planets in the movie. (Not much of a spoiler but sti...
Is it possible (either through genetic engineering or evolution) for a biological creature to be able to detect and absorb electricity from power sources like batteries or other animals? I know th...
Let's say a group of people live on icebergs. They want to shape them - e.g., let's say they want to add a pier to their iceberg, how do they "grow" the ice. Prefer a primitive answer, but if ther...
In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Thirty Days", there was a planet made completely out of water, which is the inspiration for this question. However, that planet was held together by an artificia...
Robots (intelligent machines using some form of artificial intelligence), are central to the plot in a snippet I'm working on. These robots do not have to interact with humans on a regular basis: m...
I have a world that consists of hundreds of different caverns inside an earth-sized planet. Each of these many caverns consists of many different biomes, such as plains, Jungles,deserts,etc. Howev...
My planet has an increased axial tilt, resulting in crazier winters and summers and higher temperatures. For most places, the temperature never drops below freezing - even in the winter, but the da...
I'm sure that this has been asked before, but I need floating islands for a fiction story I'm writing. It takes place 5000 years after a catastrophic event (on a vaguely earth-like planet populated...
This question would be best answered for the time period of our first colonized planet, which will most likely be Mars. With the thinner atmosphere, weaker gravity, low oxygen, and the bodily damag...
I understand that Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen are the source of a lot of great cheap chemistry and I understand why aliens could be made out of those elements. I don't understand though ...
Before we begin, two things. This question was inspired by this one. I definitely don't want this to happen. So, I have two very close tidally locked planets, each fills up about 2/3 of the sky of...
We know that as a planet increases in size, its surface gets covered by oceans (more water is captured by gravity and shape is more spherical). Therefore, a planet larger than Earth can not have a ...
I'm writing a story about someone who is going to be frozen in cryo for about 450 years. He's frozen in 2120, so the technology is certainly well-developed in his time. I'm thinking maybe the cryo ...
I'm ready to reduce a certain amount of scientific rigor for a good story. In my world, some person invents a theory of everything. Is there a way that scientists would test the theory, to prove t...
I have a character that gains a "force" power that allows him to use his mind to manipulate physics such as levitate weights, warm a space, cool a space, stop objects and transmits things by pullin...
So, on the planet Aqautas, the Aquata species is the apex species. They have cities underwater, made of an alien coral, and submarines to get around the planet. Crime is also an issue however. The ...
Spaceplanes are cool. SSTOs (Single Stage To Orbit) are even cooler. Imagine a spaceplane that is pretty much a 747. Imagine if Boeing decided to have a crazy new idea and made a space variant of ...
The title is pretty self-explanatory. How powerful does a computer have to be before it has the hardware capability to simulate and emulate a human mind in real-time? I'm leaving the question of ...
Context In the arms race of survival many animals have developed ways of evading predators, but the animal I am interested in for this question would be the tiger moth. So basically these guys jam...
I've seen bird-human hybrids before in popular fiction, where they have legs, wings, AND arms. So I was wondering if this was really plausible. Humans don't want to give up the ability to manipulat...
If humans didn't exist, what species would populate the earth? Would an animal gain human-like intelligence if humans weren't here? What animal would gain dominance?
I'm worldbuilding for a story in which a certain portion of the population relocates to a slightly habitable planet due to the complete inhabitability of Earth. It takes place several generations a...
Imagine a world full of islands. No continents, just average-sized islands. There are so many islands, that it would look a bit like this from space: Now, imagine that the sea is very, very deep...
Note: this question is not a duplicate. The accepted answer to the question "Anatomically correct Medusa" explains the petrifying vision via calcifying toxins spat from the snake hair. This a) woul...
So, in the first episode of "Phineas and Ferb", the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz tries to reverse the rotation of the earth. His plan fails in show, and there are several reasons why his plan would have...
How dense would an atmosphere (that's presumably non-toxic) need to be in order for a human being (without wings, artificial or otherwise) to achieve unassisted flight (without killing said person ...
I'm building a world where my protagonist invents a theory of quantum gravity. Since I don't want the world to be much changed than it is now. Is it possible that the theory wouldn't have any prac...
Preface: I'm worldbuilding for a story that has been in my head for ages, it's a kinda SciFi/Fantasy combo. There is one "godlike" being that can alter how physics work in a certain area, and it's...
I am currently working on a world with a "human" species. The planet is similar to ours and these "humans" would evolve in a similar environment. I know that bio-luminescence appears mainly where ...
I need a mechanism/organism similar to rust and virus, that will both impair the ship's components AND will kill crew, so the only thing left are a few lucky survivors on a crippled ship. Presumab...
I realize that creating worlds with multiple moons and/or suns is risky, but I'm toying with an idea to see where it goes. So, a planet has 3 moons. One is large like ours, the second is about half...
I am aware of being a newbie in the field I am asking my question... please be kind and explain what I did wrong if I make a mistake. The idea from where the problem bloom I love worldbuilding. W...
This is part of a series of questions about biological hydraulics, the fist one being here. My tetrapods have hydraulics in the thighs of their hind legs. To push or pull fluid from closed chambe...
Question definitions: "safely" - the metal would be strictly beneficial; there would be no health problems caused by it (perhaps at least for most, there may be "birth defects" which cause some of...
This species of humanoids has a peculiar way of reproducing. Instead of the usual physical intercourse between a male and a female, followed by the sperm cell merging with the egg cell to generat...
What feature could more feasible evolve in a humanoid race, related to humans or not, that could be mistaken at first glance and/or conflated into by word of mouth exaggerating things, wings?
In my story, the humans of Earth have finally made the trek to Venus, and have discovered a previously unknown life form on Venus. On closer inspection of the mucus creatures, they seem to have the...
Science-Fiction has tools to destroy anything: atoms, molecules, DNA, cellular organisms, multicellular organisms, buildings, streets, cities, countries, continents, planets, and even stars. Some e...
