General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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A train of thought is that a lot of our problems could be solved by reducing our numbers. For this question I am limiting it to environmental changes. For example: a successful species will increas...
I am building a world where most of the wildlife is capable of flight and there is an ecosystem that is almost totally isolated from the ground. Is it possible to have a mammal, roughly the size of...
Ghyesh is an Earth-like habitable moon that orbits a gas giant in a system with a sun significantly larger and hotter than Earth's. Both the gas giant and the sun emit an equal level of heat to the...
The planet has a radius of 128 kilometres and the surface gravity is the same as Earth's. My calculations have discovered that the planet would have a density of about 50 times the Earth's: $$g_P=g...
I was just wondering how would a humanoid like Ant species develop communication. I know how they communicate with each other in nature using pheromones and touch. Would it be possible that this sp...
One of the inspirations for this was Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis, where I liked their depiction of slithering, combat-worthy mermaids. I've been trying to develop mermaids who make pilgrimages t...
How powerful would a series of explosions have to be to significantly change a planet's axial tilt? In my universe they have highly energy efficient crystals, not only do they store energy but the...
Well, Luminescence really but I liked the alliteration. Would there be any reason or mechanic why plants may develop that glow in the dark? Ideally they would do so in response to stimulus such as...
Lana Lang (Because no one really gives Lana enough love) is the newest recipient of the superhero lottery. Boasting an impressive repertoire of powers, yes, but there are only a couple of ones we ...
I've hit a wall in my tale of humans attempting to escape the Singularity or a fate worse than death by running off into the depths of space. And I only have myself and my accursed hard sci-fi lean...
How can I arrange for a planet to have a much greater temperature range between the poles and the equator without it being tidally locked? Edit: By "much greater" I mean the temperature at the pol...
Does anyone have any ideas on a world with clumps of different atmospheres? Like what if a world has weather patterns that move around different atmosphere types; a mostly sulphur atmosphere, oxyge...
Last Tuesday, as every Halloween, I re-watched the Cowboy Bebop movie. For those who don't know, it is a sci-fi anime set around the solar system in an hypothetical future. This question focuses o...
In this world, a planet with very dense vegetation (earth-tropical-forest-like) and silica containing soil was attacked by spaceships which fired very high energy laser beams across the planet's en...
How do you check if a room behind a door aboard a spaceship has an atmosphere and pressure? This is so that you would not accidentally open a door to a room which is open to space. I imagine ther...
I was reading Flatland, and the thought occurred to me that interaction between an n-dimensional being and a n+1+-dimensional being may not only be difficult but dangerous, that Flatland contains e...
Okay, I have a bipedal creature around 500 to 600 pounds (226 - 272 kg), and I wanted it to lift around 2 tons (1814 kg), preferably over its head, and throw the weight about 10 feet (3 meters) on ...
I previously asked What measures might an ancient civilization take to protect itself from extreme heat? The answers gave some useful suggestions as to how cities could be adapted. For convenience...
An ancient human like civilization exists on a planet like our own but warmer, with more deserts and smaller oceans. Climate change is forcing the daytime temperature slowly upwards. What measures ...
Following on from my previous question here concerning the ancient civilization I have called the Androy and their struggle to survive terrible drought conditions on their planet. After years of s...
From pictures I've seen, all rocky planets in our solar system are some shade of grey, brown, and red. Ignoring stuff like atmosphere and oceans and plant life of course. I was thinking of a world...
Snares are anchored cable nooses set to catch wild animals. There are two types, active and passive. An active snare has the wire under tension and a trigger to cause it to snap closed, while a pas...
I am designing a fantasy setting for pen-and-paper role-playing purposes. I have decided that a continent be situated right on a Pole of some imaginary planet with axial tilt comparable to Earth. M...
A civilization is very good at bio-engineering, and I was wondering if there was any kind of chemical an organism could produce which would produce viable rocket fuel. It has to do a of couple of ...
I'm building a world which is 50% covered by the sea. For approximately half the year, the sea covers one hemisphere; for the other half it moves to the other hemisphere, leaving the first a dry se...
A lot of fictional works contain people who are well over 100 years old, some 200, some 1000s of years old. The Emperor Of Mankind for example is over 10,000 years old. Colin from Highlander is ove...
I'm thinking of adding humanoid squid into my world, as an expy of the bloodsuckers from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. These cephaloids somehow fell into our universe from a parallel one (they don't kn...
I was wondering what kind of planet would lead to aliens being significantly larger and stronger than humans. From my understanding, a planet with lighter gravity would lead to larger creatures, b...
This is my first post here, but here we go: I have been creating an alien world for a while, and the sentient species on it is very canine-like. They have a canine body, legs, and head, and the on...
I'm designing an ocean planet. I did a quick search with this question on the interwebs, but nothing that came up was helpful (I don't have any physics or scientific background). I was wondering wh...
How is Charybdis from The Odyssey powered? As odd as it seems, I'm looking for a science-based answer. She needs energy. To suck down warships, she is at least 75 ft in diameter and must suck the...
If two planets (roughly Earth sized) in a binary planet system were tidal locked with one another what would be the necessary orbital angle and degree of axial tilt of each planet to satisfy the fo...
My question is not human-specific. I found this question that mentions that a brain have more neuronal complexity; I deduce it is more efficient (in terms of neural communication and energy use) to...
Magic conveniently "explains away" many things associated with shapeshifting, but in the course of some of my fiction writing, I endeavor to include some slightly more plausible explanations when p...
In the past we humans thought that our planet was the center of the universe and everything revolved around us, due to science/math/astronomy and any other means we now believe that to not be true....
This scenario requires an alien creature with a decent chance of defeating a modern armor in a brief combat. This alien should be: At least as large as a horse, but not much larger than a semi-tr...
Let's say that something horrible has happened and a Mars-sized planet is knocked out of orbit and is hurtling towards an Earth-sized planet. How much time will they have? How will this affect the ...
Using only existing technologies, can we shoot 4-5 kg bullets into a stable, specific Low Earth Orbit (at least 1000 km)? The bullets don't contain "hardware" such as electronics, so acceleration ...
I'm working on a planet that has very similar conditions to earth. Now, I had the idea of animals having four (or even more) lungs. Would that be possible (I imagine there must be a possibility to ...
Scientists have just released details on their discovery of inter-galactic baryon material - "Dark Matter" that turns out to be regular matter, except that it is 'dark' - dispersed throughout the i...
There are seven planets, and each one has a different coloured sky. One has red, one has orange, all the way up to indigo and violet. Of course, they don't have a sky this colour all the time, but ...
Obviously the greater a planet's gravity, the stronger the material of the space elevator's cable would need to be in order to support its own weight. However, doesn't greater rotation speed reduce...
EDIT: Yup, totally misguided here: http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae429.cfm Drifting away. So, no lunar catastrophe for me (without some other handwavium) I've read somewhere tha...
Imagine a tidally locked planet that revolves around the star at just the right distance that a habitable zone can be formed in between the scorching desert side of the planet and an icy desert sid...
What would be a situation in modern times where normal, healthy people would want to get infected by a non-curable, but non-lethal, virus? A virus that would have pretty nasty symptoms. There...
So last year I started writing a post-apocalyptic story, and then realized I had no idea what the world was really like, and quite a few things just didn't seem to make sense. One of the biggest t...
I was wondering if it is plausible for a civilization to go from the end of the stone age to the space age from 6,000 years to 10,000 years. I was thinking this planet's star was starting to die, a...
The Humern Empire is a vast, well established empire that spans the galaxy. Despite having no FTL travel they have kept their empire together with a series of subluminal transport methods. Heavy c...
