General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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So, I'm making my first stab at worldbuilding, and I got this idea for a largely water world with only a single continental landmass, a little smaller than Africa in terms of land area, roughly c...
A plot point of my novel is that the pilot accidentally finds a planet that is being purposefully hidden (i.e. been deleted from all star maps). It starts with him arriving at a location that is j...
along time ago a group Australopithecus somehow manged to get washed ashore on let's say the Antarctic peninsula or at least an island near Antarctica now inhabiting mainland Antarctica and evolvin...
The Greek gods were sufficiently advanced aliens with access to powerful technology. In the begining of our worlds formation, Zeus created mankind from his own flesh. These mortals were made in the...
Set in a distant future, reports of alien and drug traffickings have been on the rise and there was mounting pressure for Mr User6760, president of intergalactic interpol to resign. The traffickers...
I understand an interstellar dust cloud as "an accumulation of gas, plasma, and dust in our and other galaxies. Put differently, an interstellar cloud is a denser-than-average region of the interst...
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials. Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinos...
I have a character that can produce electricity. Would he be able to stick to things and move around on walls and ceilings using his electricity power in some way? It would need to be able to suppo...
Have a creature from a dream. It's a carbon based humanoid creature partly made of the mineral olivine. Could there be any reason it might contain this mineral? Perhaps a show of health - the more ...
Could a planet with the size and characteristics of the Earth orbit a gas giant and would the earth-like moon be able to maintain its orbit if the gas giant went rogue and was launched from its hos...
Say humans found a way to exponentially increase the capability of plants to grow. Is it possible for it to cause an environment that can cause oxygen toxicity in humans?
Would it be feasible to have an interstellar vessel be constructed in flight after smaller sections are boosted up to speed? The idea here is about using laser sails which would be easier to use wi...
In a distant galaxy, there is a young, yellow-white star. Orbiting this star is a gas giant comprised almost entirely of oxygen-nitrogen, and water. In its core, there is a relatively large nickel-...
In my story Orcs, humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what sort of environment (on earth) would best suit them? so basic characteristics of m...
So in the world I'm building, I'm considering to give one of my characters the ability to quantum entangle specific particles on demand. Now although for many years we thought quantum entanglement ...
Set in the not so distant future, we find a habitable planet very much like our own. The only downside is that it's around 500 years of travel with our current technological capabilities. We have...
In the future, humanity has discovered countless worlds, some filled with life and others not. Likewise, they discover another world that is habitable, they study its various ecosystems, it's var...
Under what circumstances could an inherently individualist species become intelligent and advanced? Usually, animals require social interaction for intelligence to develope. Or at least that's wha...
Merfolk are one of the major species in my book. However, unlike in most depictions, they're fully mammalian and lack gills. Because of this, they need to breathe air, but I still wanted them to be...
I was thinking of creating an alien planet that orbits a star slightly past the habitable zone, but is kept warm by an extremely dense atmosphere, made primarily of a black gas, but still contains ...
Rivers of lava are a staple of fantasy. But in the real world, lava flows are usually very short-lived phenomenons caused by volcanic eruptions. Is there some plausible way on an otherwise earth-l...
An event has occurred several thousand kilometers from the surface of the Earth. Let's assume some sort of tear in the universe has appeared, from which extra-dimensional or exotic energy is pourin...
So, we've reached The Moon/Mars. Our band of intrepid Colonists/Lunatics will almost certainly start by working out of prefabricated facilities (ship, habitat etc) but they will eventually run out...
I'm building a world where high-density, low cost batteries are discovered far, far in advance of modern times, leading to a decentralised power grid. It has become convention for homes and buildin...
Many planets out there will be water worlds. Those generally come in two flavors: either the oceans are so deep that the water turns into high-pressure ices like ice-six, -seven, -ten and -eleven o...
It's a major step forward for humanity when they can finally live on a new planet. Maybe they went there out of desperation to survive, or maybe they simply want to explore. Either way, they sudden...
Say you have some way of seeing somewhere between a microsecond to 0.1 seconds into the future, or at least the most likely future. Is it possible,through something like a flip-book effect or some ...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series The orang pendek is a cryptid that reportedly inhabits remote, mountainous forests on the island of Sumatra (likely evolving from orangutan...
I was wondering if there is a scientific way to explain how my characters are capable of extreme levels of strength when engaging in combat. My characters are biological but have implants that all...
A familiar scenario in scifi: a bubble of space is isolated artificially from the outside world by means of time dilation: time inside the bubble moves more slowly than time outside it. Assume that...
What is a possible event${^*}$ that would cause a spike in the speed of $^{235}$U fission and reduce its average concentration in ore worldwide? As I understand the physics of the process, it is i...
I was imagining a sort of post-apocalyptic/collapse setting, where a few centuries of climate catastrophes brought on by climate change cause essentially your general end of the world as we know it...
With the potential for an impact event to trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the planet, what is the largest plateau of flood basalt physically capable of forming on Earth, post-impa...
I like the classic trope of dragons loving gold and collecting it in their lair, yet it seems poorly justified. I know that it is often used as a metaphor for greed; "dragons disease" to show how m...
Imagine a spaceship capable of achieving faster than light travel uses several transporters to allow crew members to move around its interior at the constant speed of light. What happens to the cre...
I have settings with orbital colonies around the earth. First off my idea is, if it is not profitable we would not fund it en masse. Therefore I came up with the idea that in the future we discover...
There has been materials science research on materials that can harden and soften at need. In nature, we have the example of the sea cucumber, which can go from a squishy compressible state to a r...
If the earth's oceans were electrocuted (from the ocean floor), not worrying about how the energy is gotten to electrocute it, what would happen too everything in the ocean,( fish, algae, etc.) wha...
An area of my planet is very saturated with lava. Being quite similar to the Siberian Lava Traps, it is essentially a lava sea. This lava "sea" area isn't necessarily all lava however, as there are...
I'm providing an interesting twist on the Anatomically Correct series by focusing on a single body part instead of an entire organism. The following image depicts the average range of the cones ...
I'm currently working on an alien humanoid race that lives on a planet with twice the gravity of earth. Despite this however, the humanoids are about the same size as an average human if not slight...
The Old Ones build continent-sized bunker complexes to protect themselves from the enemy, which followed through the cosmic ocean. The Hunter succeeded easily despite their efforts and their corpse...
Essentially I'm looking for a plausible way that a planet could have odd, extreme seasons. Basically I'm wondering how (or if) a planet could work that has a week long day during the summer and a w...
As conclusion of this question it seems that under a dense atmosphere it would be a good idea to place the main city in mountains. Just there is the inconvenient issue that top of mountains lack fl...
One trope seen in movies is mind control. This trope involves a person or thing taking over another person's body, whilst visual or auditory cues and friends try to help the original person regain ...
I'm wondering whether it would be possible for humanoids to evolve from bears. bears share many characteristics with primates such as being amazing tree climbers and having the ability to use too...
For some reason, all the nations in the world have banded together. Their goal? Go to the Moon. Their budget? As much as the planet and humans can throw at it. How fast could we build a reliable a...
I recently came across a few examples of a "quantum slime" entity, namely from Starfinder and Slime Rancher, that has the ability to make copies of itself via quantum superposition, and then cause ...
In Greek and Roman mythology, the Astomi, also known as the Gangines, are an ancient legendary race of people who had no need to eat or drink anything at all. They survived by smelling apples and f...
Gray skin and red eyes is a common look for Dark Elves, and I have a similar race in my own world. But what would physically cause such an appearance? Hard Requirements: Must not be the result o...
