General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Still working on that world with with a 93% ocean covering. My star Xat is 1.71 LSol, and my planet Jasmi orbits at 2.14 AU. I've been warned that the resulting apparent brightness of about 37% Sol...
I have a race of carnivorous mammals (the same from this question) for whom blood plays an extremely important role in cultural rituals. For complex cultural reasons, a member of this race (call hi...
The admiral of a space fleet that belongs to a Type 3 civilization has been given orders to obliterate all planets within the habitable zone of a Sun like star. Some of the planets have been ident...
I was wondering what would happen if you dug to the center of the earth. Would you get stuck in an infinite gravitational pull loop, or would you just simply get torn in between the two pulls? Yes,...
Though my star is 1.71 LSol, my planet orbits at about 2.14 AU. Following a back-of-the-envelope equation for apparent brightness, this gives the surface of my planet approximately 30% of Sol's lig...
Can a humanoid that doesn't have ribs but instead has solid bone plates function properly ? Imagine plates starting from upper trapezius to the lower back and the obliques but leaving open the bell...
If there were a group of primates very similar to humans, and they had vomeronasal organs, what should the sensitivity or accuracy of such organs be? The race has a lengthened face to accommodate ...
Can life exist on a asteroid? If the asteroid can sustain life, when the asteroid crashes on a planet can life survive going through a atmosphere and landing and then living on a earth-like planet ...
Could a planet's axial tilt change a meaningful amount (what is needed to make inhospitable biomes even more inhospitable: hotter dry hot desert, colder north) over an extremely short period (~100 ...
Imagine a civilization developing on Planet X that is orbiting a black hole (or a similar gravitationally massive object). Given the time dilation near such a massive object, do the inhabitants of ...
QUESTION It's been established that one could invent microscopes early with a magnification of up to 1500x. It occurred to me, though I really know nothing about this, that putting metals under a...
The Parachute Cities fall endlessly, ploughing their way downwards through an infinite blue sky. The Big Blue is a universe of sorts. It certainly has no bottom, but it does have a concept of "˜do...
While something like a warp drive is a staple of ftl technology in sci-fi, I wonder how this sort of spatial warping would operate on a smaller scale on earth. The idea has occurred to me to have...
I thought that a large, close moon might help generate enough heat and stress to raise the average temperature on my world and stave off a Snowball Earth scenario. According to this article and thi...
So I'm writing a story about a crew of scientists that explore the universe searching for a hidden knowledge in embed in the fabric of the space itself. More like to the Destiny's crew from Stargat...
How would the human eye have developed differently on a planet with two suns? One sun will be a yellow star functionally the same as Sol and the other will be a red dwarf. The planet will be ea...
QUESTION Other questions have covered what the physical structure of a humanoid giant might look like. Assuming that anatomically modern humans (or something close) were dispersed into several dis...
After circumstances make the shallow water in the oceans uninhabitable, great white sharks retreat to the deeper parts of the ocean, about 600 feet down (182 meters) to survive. The sharks can not ...
The Conjoined Alliance of Space Travellers (Nope, not that one) is a generally nice completely peaceful group of heavily armed species exploratory organisation. Using ships such as the Exciting Un...
I'm building a very small homeworld (0.602 M$_e$) with a very large moon (0.0711 M$_e$) that orbit each other at a barycenter about 7.12 planetary radii (1 R = 0.870 R$_e$) from the primary's cente...
So I'm thinking about having my race of lightning wielding rabbits wear metal armour. The first one that came to mind was gold. And then a quick Google search later told me gold is one of the best ...
In the universe there are several worlds where energy harvesting is feasible without pesky wild life habitat preservers standing on your patch'o land bare breasted. So earth has set out to harves...
I am working on an alternate history where the USSR won the Moon Race (by upgrading the NK-15, starting development of the N1 earlier, and making cybernetics/computer science not a "bourgeois pseud...
Disclaimer: By human-like, I am referring mostly to limb proportions similar to ours. Would it be reasonable for the average member of a bipedal species with proportions similar to those of human...
Based on The Expanse TV series I wonder how people should build their ships to avoid spreading of highly contagious lifeform. Protomolecule's features: infectious agent with extra-terrestri...
The situation is the usual, we have lots of junk metal lying around in cities, great but not impossible difficulties with logistics (meaning that a few railroads are in operation at immense cost, b...
On a continent similar to modern-day Europe with a temperate climate, 90% of the continent's flat and hilly land was once covered by native forest. Human activity has reduced that to 10%. A relati...
Another user's answer to a recent question, specifically the way it was worded, gave me a vision I cannot shake. Our intrepid adventurer, Joe A. Venture, is making his way through a subterranean n...
Anyone who has taken high school biology know that all life on earth are divided into three different domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota. On a planet in the outer habitable zone of a K-type ...
I am making a science fiction computer game where you can travel between planets. I would like the planets all to have some kind of differing materials. Now I have no idea about which kind of "mate...
Consider a society that doesn't have modern fertilizer and practices crop rotation. This society is concerned with the short-term issues with crop rotation and is considering a modified method they...
One of the first things noted about pretty much any humanoid race with horns or antlers is that the neck would not be able to support the weight, making the idea unfeasible. However, some horns are...
How much TNT do you need to blow up Mount Everest? Is this even possible and can mankind survive a huge explosion like this? Or would the whole world be covered with dust? And if you can survive ...
Following on from this question and assuming the race in question had developed the ability to create tools how would they approach the need for mass calculation. Our early computers were used to ...
There are thousands of species of spiders on Earth. Ditto insects. And, prehistorically, there have been times when there have been several, or even half a dozen species of hominins in existence on...
I'm continuing to work on my map, and one thing that's giving me difficulty is figuring out the geology of a region that I wanted to be similar to the Ethiopian highlands and African rift valley. T...
The Serval is a fairly muscular, dog sized African wild cat. While doing research on them for other worldbuilding purposes, I began to think that these animals could make great hunting pets, if t...
Scenario: A colony of 20,000 is founded, and has no access to any further inhabitants. Assuming this colony is humans of varying traits (genetics such as skin color, eye color, etc) with no single ...
Can using blimps to hold power lines and implement laser filamentation of ablout 7 meter span from the source of power for a contact free power supply to power an electric engine (designed to run o...
Elves and human share many similarities, from body type to the ability to perform magic. However, elves retain a slim, lean build throughout their life, and are incapable of becoming obese. The big...
Imagine a planet - henceforth Planet X - that is orbiting very close to a black hole. The space-time distortion will be very high there and according to the theory of relativity, the time there wil...
As the title says, I'm wondering if a species could theoretically boost an asteroid near a planet for easier mining access. If this was to accidentally crash into the original planet could a habita...
I was thinking about people who once told me that I must feel the rain earlier than them (I'm tall). So I thought of a world where the rain falls so slowly that the humans of different size living ...
Let us develop an industrial electric motor from first principles. Alessandro Volta developed a battery whose ingredients were copper, zinc, seawater, and imagination. These ingredients have been ...
This is a pretty simple question, but initial research only seems to provide the opposite end of the spectrum. What I'm wondering is if there are any known side effects of living in an environment ...
I want to have my aliens have a culture that clashes with human modern culture and one way I want to achieve this is having some extreme sexual dimorphism. For these aliens the sexual dimorphism ...
Let's say humankind terraforms Mars aggressively, increasing the planet's mass (and gravity) to Earth-like levels and causes its core to produce a significant magnetosphere. For example, perhaps th...
My idea has been a colonized planet or moon with incredibly strong winds so that life is only possible in deep valleys protected from the wind. I recognize that wind is primarily driven by tempera...
When I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild and met the heavily redesigned Ritos, I took an immediate liking to their designs. Although the fact that they're fully bird-like helps, it's mostly because ...
The relationship between the distance, $d$, of the event horizon from a black hole's center and the tidal acceleration, $a$, experienced by an object near a black hole allows for scenarios in which...
