General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Suppose there's a planet in the habitable zone of a class F star, a bit smaller than Earth and about the same density, with 80% of earth's gravity. How far away from the planet would a brown dwarf ...
While considering Ancient Light Trigger Mechanism, it occurred to me that any ancient trap mechanism is unlikely to work very long without regular maintenance. It seems far too easy for dust to clo...
I'm doing research for a space opera with some hard sci-fi elements. One faction does use radiators (dusty plasma particles held in magnetic fields- which would create the effect of glowing wings o...
As discussed here: How would a Reflecting-Oven-Jay Evolve? The Reflecting-oven-Jay This is a small African predatory bird with a perfectly smooth set of wings with an area of ~100 cm2, so ...
What are realistic time-schedule expectations for far-future terraforming and developing earth-like plant and animal/fish/bird populations on distant planets, by means of robotic space probes with ...
CONTEXT/EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY A book that I'm currently writing called Surge features an enemy faction called the Degenerates that are heavily inspired by the Scythians (Indo-Iranian horse nomads t...
I am writing a story where a species undergoes devolution. Is there any scientific or plausible way to do this? The process can be instantaneous or may take ages, I do not mind which as I need to w...
So, you have the big bad race, whose extermination method is basically to force stars to go supercritical via the power of handwavium. You can assume 1 solar mass for each, but you can change it if...
In our story's universe, a solar system is hand-crafted by a deity with seven smallish bodies working in a way that I can only describe as Lagrangian Points, where all planets have the same orbital...
The basis of my story revolves around a single survivor escaping a massive colony ship gone critical above the skies of an alien world. After his escape via escape pod, the ship crashes halfway acr...
Some time ago I asked: "How long would it take until we realise that people stopped dying from natural causes?" I today realized that similar but much more interesting (and more realistic...) ques...
Could a human be genetically engineered to produce a less fatal form of the Brazilian Wandering Spider's Venom? I have been told that many things that insects can do do not function in humans for v...
How could an organism (anywhere from animal to monster to humanoid) induce and control lifelike hallucinations simulating reality in (possibly unwilling) humans? The aesthetic thought was of a mon...
This question has received a major rewrite and restructuring but is still the same original question. Please see this meta-post, where I asked for advice on how to refocus this question. While I ...
Ahh insects, such fascinating creatures with fascinating traits, but sadly as I have found out most are only available to them and not us thanks to the square cubed law. Maybe the following traits...
Let's say there's a habitable planet somewhere, covered with very deep cool water ocean. By very deep I mean thousands of km, but the exact numbers don't actually matter. According to water's pha...
I actually have a couple of questions here. My dragon is very small, just about 3 meters long from beak to tailtip, 20 kilograms, with a 5 meter wingspan. A bit like a velociraptor-sized Rahonavis...
In the book Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, Artemis is contacted by Holly through a fairy communicator, disguised as a ring. The phone was disguised as a rather ostentatious ring on Artemis's mi...
Cosmology since Einstein makes it clear that it's not quite right to say one body in space "revolves around" another, right? Einstein wrote: "The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth mo...
One of the syntactical interpretation of the famous linguistics sentence "Time flies like an arrow." is to consider "time flies" as a noun phrase. This makes "time flies" analogous to "fruit flies"...
I want to write a science fiction book on a planet mostly covered by ocean, but I also want to incorporate trains into my story. However, it seems that with advances in ship and plane technology, t...
Bear with me. I have a villain who wants to get ahold of a nuke, except I'm not sure why exactly. I think he thinks he can create a singularity that would swallow up the entire universe (which beli...
This is the sister topic to this question: What are the military pros and cons of colonizing a low gravity world vs a high gravity one? The specific question being asked here is, what specific eco...
In terms of real world science, if a necromancer was looking to raise long dead corpses for a magical horde, what region or climate or type of area would they be most likely to find bodies that wer...
I've seen this question raised in several different bits of sci fi media. In games its often that low gravity = lower construction cost or some such. But I've begun to wonder, is it really that cut...
This plant I am designing grows on earth, in locations where competition between plants is fierce, water is scarce and also nutrients in the soil are diluted. The dilution requires the plant roots ...
I'm creating an Alien race based on Silica-Quartz crystals. While their planet is inhospitable to humans, the tectonically and volcanically active surface has created an abundance of crystalline fo...
I am including some dragons in the universe I'm building. Now, I have already decided that only baby dragons will fly, but I am having some problems with breathing fire. My current design: Dragons...
A weapon is needed for a climactic battle against an otherwise invincible wolf monster. In principle it could be any random thing, like the traditional silver, but we want something based in scienc...
My story is based on a Glacial Climate setting or an Ice Age. However the transition is gradual and humanity was given some time to adapt. The transition began in our real-world technological equiv...
I'm toying with an idea to have a plague sweep across the galaxy in my story. At first I was thinking to have a plague, something similar to the Black Death, devastate populations across the galaxy...
I'm trying to figure out a concept for some sort of super-advanced space propulsion system that works by bending spacetime. As I understand it, planets' orbits are actually straight paths, but the...
Consider a post-Apocalyptic society of collective farmers that has access to a waning supply of modern farm supplies, a small, independent power grid, and a enough knowledge to keep themselves fed ...
I have a character on the surface of Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. It has an icy surface on top of what is believed to be a liquid ocean. There is no atmosphere, though near its south po...
If we had an earth like planet except it had a 50 - 100 percent bigger radius than our earth what are some ways that it could have have similar gravity when compared to our own planet? P.S. Atmos...
I'm trying to work out what the sky looks like on an Earth-like moon, in particular the length of day and apparent size of the other celestial bodies: the gas giant's size, the gas giant's other mo...
Suppose that humanity has spread out through space. Humans are exploring all kinds of environments, including some with gravity much weaker than our Moon's: Ceres (surface gravity $=0.28 m/s^2$) ...
Here's the full question: What's the most plausible way to bio-engineer an underground ecosystem, without using photosynthesis, so a mine system would not need an active air exchange system? (It w...
Okay so I get that for flexibility I need no bones. My octopeople do live on land so they do have lungs. But they are more amphibious than we are. So here is my proposed life cycle: Pregnant octo...
So dragonflies are the sky's perfect predator, and while their are many adaptations that make this one big one is their wings. And one character in my story has these along with other mammalian ver...
Asked a similar question before but didn't think it through and mangled it. Anyway would it be possible to build a structure between two star systems? Basic scenario is that you have two stars su...
The Context I have a group of genetically engineered people known as 'crows'. Their genome has been meddled with significantly enough that they are unable to successfully reproduce with humans, bu...
While researching ghouls, I came across two varieties: The traditional ghoul: a grotesque humanoid commonly featured in fantasy settings that may or may not be undead https://vignette.wikia.nocoo...
The world in question is an Earth-sized planet with a deep global ocean and core of water-ice. Given the lack of an accessible sea floor to root oneself to, how would a complex free-floating organ...
Can humans live on an Earth-like planet where the only difference is that the surface is ~50% water, instead of the ~75% of now? That is, paleolithic humans... And the new land area hosts the sam...
Here is a link to the water canopy theory. My question is: how this water could end up there, high above the surface? I was thinking about two possibilities: a comet spreading ice/water as it pa...
My reptilian aliens that lactate become adults at 20 years old. I might add a graph here of proposed shedding rates over time and maybe even a separate graph for growth. But here is what I am prop...
In exploring the xenobiology and design for an entity (Entity X) in my fictional universe, I wanted to raise the viability of an organism that is so massive, it is visible from the planet's upper a...
One of the things that affects the color of the sky is the wavelengths of light that the star emits, like the image in this question. Here is the image again: If you are standing on a circumbina...
So to keep this simple, imagine a planet much like ours, orbiting a star. For the sake of this example, let's give the planet a 24 hour rotation, and a 364 day orbit around the star. Now, this pla...
