General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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The ozone layer depleted beyond reasonable levels and life on the surface has become impossible and life migrated underground in giant caves connected together by tunnels. Some of those caves have...
In my setting, military innovation spurred by the American Civil War (1861-1865) prompts the design and construction of counterweight-driven skyhooks for the delivery of suborbital long-range munit...
In the Chronicles of the Riddick there was planet Crematoria. Temperature during the day there was 372°C and during night −182°C. There is not much information about about this planet avaiable. ...
In IRL, reactive armor is a type of armor, that is created to defend the tank from non-explosives kinetic perpetrators penetrators, by blowing away the projectile with the detonation of a high expl...
I have a world with a moon, much like Earth and the Moon, except that the planet is almost tidally locked to the moon. The moon therefore appears to move only very slowly through the sky, and take...
This is for a story line that I would prefer to be based on known science as much as possible. Is there a known compound that can phase shift from gas to solid or liquid, or the other way around, ...
For example, a half-cat half-human hybrid might have a zone partway down their tail, or a human might have one in an unusual place e.g. their scalp, shoulders, whatever. I've seen this used in fic...
Working on a bit of a story that includes the ejection of the planet Jupiter from the solar system rather suddenly with all of the planets staying generally within it. I understand this is complica...
If you can lower your mass without changing the surface area, you become 99% resistant to fall damage (like small spiders). So, why not? In order to do this, I wish to replace bones with kevlar, h...
Elephants are some of the most intellingent mammals, and they have large brain sizes compared to people. They are said to present self-awareness among other things. How could one go about raising ...
I'm aware the brain--especially the portion concerning planning and judgement--isn't matured until around the mid-20s and that the brain's structure is sensitive to environment. That said, let's as...
I'm working on a story that is set in the future where human females have evolved to have a fertile period once a year for two months. Is such an evolution scientifically feasible?
I have a world with days lasting 9 years. The inhabitants of this world have taken to migrating across the globe to avoid the deadly night, keeping themselves in a sweet spot. One of the biological...
What artificial disaster could disrupt the orbit of our planet? Not necessarily making it leave the Solar System, but maybe changing its trajectory around the sun. And by artificial, I mean that th...
Santa delivers to the homes of the 7 billion people on Christmas night, eating cookies and milk at each of the homes. Provided each home puts out a glass of milk and 3+ cookies, that's a lot of mi...
I have been working on the idea of a mammal following an evolutionary path similar to whales, which started as semiaquatic before becoming fully dependent of its underwater enviroment. So how could...
Going off of my other question here, I guessed that a cube planet could work out. BUT, would it be possible for the planet to exist and function as a (relatively) normal planet with life on it with...
I'm looking for a solution to generate a strong enough magnetic field for planets with iron-cores - in my case, Mars - to keep the atmosphere from getting blow away by the solar winds (and ignoring...
If an island in a sub-tropical region were to be unreachable because of natural phenomena, what could those phenomena be? The people trying to reach said island have 17th century seafaring technol...
I'm trying to find some type of space weather or other natural occurrences that would result in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field dropping for a few hours to maybe a week or two at most. Pola...
I love the game Inside. Like its predecessor, Limbo, it is a game where you cannot fight; only running and hiding are allowed. The game ends however, with you coming across a large ball of meat str...
This is a problem of my imaginary country Zeroth Reich. I imagined that this country is populated with literal eco-fascists. Both the people and the government care about Mother Nature a lot and de...
This post: How to increase air density on a planet? explains most of the problems I have been having, and fixes them. My current problem is as follows: On a planet with an air composed of (roughly)...
I'm designing an alien species and I want the males to have deer-like antlers. Now I also need this species to have a genetic predisposition (as in it is not just a cultural affectation) to be prim...
I'm creating a fantasy planet with an interior that has a god phasing in and out of our dimension, adding to and taking away mass in mysterious fashion while keeping everything but the influence of...
Have been building a game called Rise: The Vieneo Province. Vieneo is a terrestrial moon (all details can be found here) but we have an atmospheric composition we arrived on from another question:...
I want to design an alien species whose physiology is capable of metabolizing substances regardless of whether their chemical chirality is levorotatory or dextrorotatory. Is this scientifically pos...
In this world Humanity was wiped out, all that remains are several small groups of genetically altered human chimeras. These new "humans" have a genetic cast structure similar to that of hive insec...
So this question, Designing a Carnivorous Plant, talks about animals being attracted to a plant, at first by a sweet scent, and then being drugged by an unspecified toxin which renders them 'euphor...
The area of the earth covered by desert is more than 20%. (Sites range from 20-33%, I don't know why the wide range). With technology close to providing zero cost solar (not free, but declining e...
I am designing an semi-aquatic sapient species known as the Tetrapi. They have an appearance similar to that octopi, only with 4 tentacles comprised of 3 opposable digits. Unlike octopi, they are a...
First contact with an alien life form often goes badly. In the case of Biothanata, it always goes badly. The first glimpse of this alien blob is in the form of a falling star, a meteorite. After bu...
What kinds of abstract colors, shapes, and other compositional elements could be used to indicate various emotions? My story features an artificial intelligence that's embodied in an industrial pr...
Is it possible for an organism to evolve to biologically generate its own nuclear power? If so, how would this evolution occur?
Could a species, over centuries of evolution, evolve a special organ that stores pure energy and allows it to control its own magnetic field? What possible steps would have to happen for this to oc...
A group of scientists has been slaving away largely in obscurity for two decades, with very few publishable results. Suddenly, one of them has an epiphany, which turns out to be instrumental to ena...
So in my story/world I have a region that is straight up destroyed...demonic magic is nasty stuff. So we have rings Ring 1 (1 is in the middle) This ring has a diameter of about 200 miles. At...
If the mass came from handwaving and just increased the core's density, what would happen to the plates? If, over the course of 200 years the planet fluctuated from +50% to -50% gravity, would the...
CODE DRIVER In my story, I want to have a world in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but I also want it to feel different from any other interpretation out there. I call my monsters "Odd People" ...
In a non-magical world where homo sapiens has evolved into several races or breeds (like dogs) or even species as in Q10102 and Q12190, that can interbreed for the most part, how can one model the ...
I want to create a world where tying yourself to a single partner would be considered irresponsible because it is potentially deadly. The more often two people come together and exchange DNA throug...
Humanity is often said to have 5 senses, but this isn't entirely accurate. This is one question of several in a series I am asking regarding going beyond the 5 senses. Magetoception is one of the...
I'm making an alien race that's kinda like the Tyranids. My problem right now is that they're starting out on a planet. How would they actually leave this planet using only their biological abiliti...
I'm working on a science fiction story involving starships travelling about 95% of the speed of light. I wanted to have a reason for the starships to need to shield themselves against time dilation...
I would love to shape my planet in a way, that allows me to have an extremely cold, icy desert, next to an extremely hot, sanddesert. By "next to", I don't mean a few hundred miles apart, with gr...
I've been playing a lot of Deserts of Kharak lately, and I am wondering if landships depicted in game, which are essentially seagoing ships on tracks, would work in a Snowball Earth scenario. By Sn...
I'm building a fantasy world with a planetary core that gains and loses mass in a predictable manner. I want the gravity to increase and decrease by 50% in both directions over a period lasting 2-3...
I'm working on a space story in which an astronaut is travelling to Neptune to validate our CurrentEarth™ corporation's findings regarding our Solar System. The setting is a moving ship similar to ...
Linked What would the flora on a methane world be like? What would animal life on a methane world look like and how would it evolve? What would the conditions on a methane world be like? How wo...
If the earth gravity fluctuated between +50% and -50% over the course of 200 years, what specific adaptations would be useful to account for the change?
