General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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There are many organisms that sometimes reproduce asexually and sometimes reproduce sexually (even snakes and sharks!). There are also a fair number of organism that reproduce sexually but have a ...
I am creating a planet which is similar to earth (but slightly smaller), with similar climates and resource distribution. It is inhabited by 3 races, one of which are humans, and the other relevant...
I am constructing a two dimensional world, but ran into a problem with one of the fundamental forces, gravity. I first tried to see what would happen if I just used the normal law of gravity, $\fr...
So in many games you have regions that are bordered on all sides by impassible geography of some sort or another. This has always bothered me as necessary but also acts as a reminder to pull you o...
Although (as far as I've seen, I haven't done in-depth research) the original/older version(s) of the succubus legend just have them as demons who seduce you, more modern interpretations seem to ma...
I want to use a handwavium gravity field generator on my spaceships, but this has several problems. Generating gravitational fields of peculiar shapes is not a difficult thing to do in this settin...
I'm designing an intelligent alien species in which child rearing is a very labor instensive and lengthy process (their progeny take a little more than a decade and a half to mature), so much so th...
Far Future. Almost every household has a 'fabber'. You put raw materials in it (can be almost anything) and it does what you program it to do. It transmutes the raw materials into what is needed. T...
I want to kill a huge Dragon. How to do this? The only description currently available of this Dragon is very short: "It looks like a lizard with two wings of bats and he swallowed our ship witho...
Is it possible for a planet's surface to be wetlands, such that… There are no great land masses (continents). There would still be two polar caps, and I am considering a greater width of equator ...
Start with a planet just like Earth as of today (whatever today means when you are reading this). For simplicity's sake, disregard mankind's continuous spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphe...
Is it possible for a sun-like star to hold on to about 16 planets? If so, where could the habitable zone be located at?
My source of inspiration and imagination... StarGate Atlantis Tv-Series: Wraith hive-ships were mainly biological. Genesis Rising Pc-game: The game itself, storyline, human technology, etc based ar...
So Vanadium is present in fossil fuel reserves, and in present in some organics on earth, I figure that if a planet was rich enough in Vanadium a species could ingest it, then the vanadium could be...
Would a centaur eat meat? Humans do (usually) eat meat, but horses are vegetarians. Would they be omnivores, carnivores, or herbivores?
I've recently read an article (Source: https://www.livescience.com/22146-why-don-t-any-animals-have-wheels.html) explaining why animals don't have wheels for locomotion, and that legs are common be...
According to an answer to a previous question, it would be comparatively impractical to conduct mining on a rocky planet when there are moons, asteroids, comets, etc. that have smaller mass, so muc...
In my world, the main "evil" race lives in a labyrinth like rock formation. They use a method of magic that gives them a hive mind advantage, so they all know how to move around within it. My quest...
I was wondering about feasibility of small 'shell' world build around something very dense, like black hole or some 'artificial mini star' that could also be source of energy, and of course gave us...
I'm considering the mechanics of a "shock and awe" scene in my novel which could see an old dam being brought down. The era is equivalent to that of the middle Roman empire, so introducing explosiv...
So our muscles run off of oxygen, but I heard from my brother when posing this question (he's a bio major in college) that using phosphorus instead of oxygen to power our muscles would make them fa...
This is another question about PommeDeTerra: Thanks to the orientation and position of the planet, PommeDeTerra has a habitable island with a temperate climate at it's south pole that looks a l...
Having in mind a scene from "Avatar: The Last Airbender" where Aang covers his body in a block of ice to float on water I'm wondering if it was possible to get H2O solid at arbitrary temperatures (...
For my sci-fi world, which spans the entire galaxy, I was wondering if an advanced civilization would build a space probe to explore a star. Would it be necessary and have any scientific benefits, ...
In the History Channel program Clash of the Gods, some of the highlit characters have been given some interesting physical liberties. The episode "Minotaur" features King Minos with a meerkat-like...
I've been spending a lot of time developing aliens for a comic I'm working on, in the skeletal structure department I've run into a bit of a roadblock, how to design a spine for a species that is k...
Many fish have specialized organs called buoyancy bladders which allow them to control their buoyancy - effectively rising or sinking in the water. What if humans adapted this to use in the air? I...
In my world, humanity has made the ultimate invention: A machine that takes raw elements and converts them into anything one desires, like a universal 3D printer. The only thing it needs is a supp...
Would a salt flat be near a river? I have a world with a Nile River-like region and within a few miles, perhaps 10-20, I have a massive salt flat. The arable land of the river brushes up against e...
Ok, I know it sounds very far-fetched, but I'm curious. We know that Binary stars truly exist, and that binary planets are all but confirmed. Here's my insane question: can there be a TERNARY pla...
I am interested in finding out if a black hole or mass on the verge of forming a black hole with enough spin could generate enough centrifugal force to change shape into a torus? Specifically I am...
Although the fossil fuel coal had been used as a fuel since 1,000 B.C., it wasn't until the arrival of the Industrial Revolution from the mid-1700s through the 1800s that coal began to replace b...
Imagine a desertic planet, large dune seas and barren rocky wastes ... Mountains and the like suggesting a past geological activity and even water once exhisted on the surface. Now though the pla...
Let's suppose we live in different star system with two similar-sized planets (with a mass of three and a half Earths.) We live in Planet A, which is habitable. For some reason, Planet 2, our neigh...
If tiny particles of solid material (the size of sand grains, for instance) were flung into space, would they pose a danger to anything they hit? I'm no physicist, but my understanding is that obj...
This is possibly not quite the right place to ask this question but it's fundamental to the world I'm working on so here it is; if faced with a potent existential threat, in the form of an outside ...
My scenario is a civilization on a carbon-rich planet. The planet has a hydrocarbon atmosphere, oceans and clouds. Most rocks are carbides. The only flammable substance in such an atmosphere is oxy...
An alien world with a significant amount of tall metal trees allows lightning to occur at lower voltages than usual. How low could that voltage be pushed and still break apart Nitrogen molecules i...
Map is 1000 miles long and wide. In general, do these placements make sense? I'm also wondering: where volcanoes would be? why the coast is full of life and the west dead and barren? where the...
I'm looking to build a scientifically plausible mining laser for my science fiction setting. The first approach that came to mind was a high-power laser that heats the surface asteroid until it bec...
Let me clarify on that title, because this question focuses specifically on vegetables that have not been cultivated for their fruits--like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers and pumpkins--or ...
You've most likely heard that planets can exist in the shape of a donut, also known as a torus. These toroidal worlds could even support human life, as long as it spun fast enough to balance out it...
So humanity has finally overcome the economic problems with asteroid mining, not to mention setting up colonies elsewhere in the solar system. Some are dragging the low-hanging fruit into near-Eart...
Is it reasonably possible for a type of human to exist that rapidly tans in the presence of large amounts of sun/radiation and loses it again afterwards, in a matter of minutes? Also, how might suc...
Imagine a character with a healing ability similar to Wolverine or Deadpool (as in able to recover from most injuries in minutes). The ability is always "on," and works like a sped-up version of th...
I've recently been replaying Skyrim (for about the fifth time now), and I've stumbled across something I thought would make for an interesting question. The Greybeards are a group of extremely pow...
Doctor Eric Von Dufe may be a mad scientist, but he still has to work on his evil side. His latest plan? Create small versions of large animals and large versions of small animals. Assuming he has ...
Say in an alternate timeline, Earth developed with more moons. Many, many many more moons. In fact, it developed with the absolute maximum amount of moons a planet of its size and mass can physical...
A society lives on geostationary platforms at some vast height above the ground. The platforms themselves are not affected by gravity, wind, etc. Their technology has only just reached the point wh...
Can a planet (gas giant or otherwise) have rings not around the equator, but instead rings running from pole to pole? Think of Uranus' rings, except the planet isn't on it's side
