General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I'm looking for creative people with knowledge of radio waves and space flight to help me out. I'm currently writing a screenplay about a spacecraft that is basically a radio antenna in space. The...
A lot of species on earth do not care for their offspring; they spawn thousands of eggs, that hatch into larvae, and then grow up towards full size. If a hypothetical species was sentient in the f...
Would it be at all viable for a person to have certain plant characteristics such as: Chloroplasts in their hair and skin, with the skin maybe lookmuch darker because of extra light absorbance (m...
After the WorldBuilding community helped Average Joe start his own microstate, Joe has become scientifically inclined, and uses his money to conduct somewhat dangerous research projects from...
As we all know, Santa loads his sleigh with gifts for millions of children around the world and sets about distributing them during the night of December 24/25. To make them all fit in his stylish ...
Scenario: A generation ship travels to a star system that has at least one planet that's believed to be potentially habitable and, therefore, a possible location for a colony. After sending some p...
I am imagining a temperate forested area with freshwater lakes, rivers, small mountains, and rolling grassy hills. This environment is situated within a very large explosion crater. Outside this cr...
Okay, this is unrelated to my current world building in any way whatsoever, but... I have always been a huge fan of the humongous mecha genre (bonus points to anyone who actually recognized my ava...
Food for thought from /r/worldbuilding: If the dominant race (typically human) of a given world, without any other context, has a huge cultural diversity, then is racism surely going to appear? If...
The situation is as follows: there is a city with different districts, each provided with electric power from a different power plant: Thermal power plant nuclear power plant Hydroelectric power ...
In a distant future world, people going to cinemas will not just see movies but 'experience' them. Spectators will be a part of the cast with the help of immersive virtual reality. How would these ...
I would like to have a space whale type creature that can fly through space. It would be very large and fly from planet to planet using orbital maneuvers. I want this creature to be able to do it n...
The conclusion of my question Is it possible to have a planet unsuitable for agriculture? was that the most plausible reason for preventing agriculture from developing (beside nomadic herding) was ...
On an Earthlike planet with one large moon (just like Earth's), I have a large landlocked sea with one narrow exit (like the Black Sea, but much larger, something like six or eight Mediterraneans, ...
A K2+ civilization wants to build a fission star, a huge mass of fissile material which doesn't collapse due to the radiation emitted by its fission decay. I know there are reactors like the aqueou...
I'm designing a "adaptive" humans where repeated physical contact, skin on skin or exchange of bodily fluids, over prolonged period affects the development of the individuals. The effect I want t...
In my setting the known worlds have recently begun coming out of a medieval stasis after about two thousand years; the lucky worlds at least. Prior to the event that destroyed their technology and ...
Without a doubt, the most iconic mammals of Australia are the pouch-bearing marsupials. You can find less than 250 species in that one island-continent. Marsupials have been around for 65 milli...
On the generation ship in one of my stories and possibly more, there exists a positive relationship between the egg laying humanoid aliens who have an egg pouch on their chest and the humans they a...
Antimatter annihilation is the best source of energy per weight. However, antimatter is not readily available anywhere within reachable distance, it's insanely difficult to produce and contain. Ho...
NASA received a telegram from the direction of Proxima Centauri stating that the abominable snowman are coming for a visit and they expect snow to fall everywhere even along the equator. They also ...
I'm trying to build a semi-plausible world where there is native flora and fauna, but the world is subtly not quite right for human habitation. I thought that having significant amounts of copper i...
So, let's say that through a series of strange timey wimey events, I accidentally jump-start several technological revolutions in the early 1800's. So, at any given time, technology is ~60 y...
I'm trying to design human like race where all the children are born as girls, but later in life some of them switch to male, but no sooner then 15. Usually only the most dominant women switch, so ...
In the story I'm writing, an ancient civilization once roamed the local group, traveling from galaxy to galaxy with ease. Thousands of millennia after their disappearance, humanity stumbles across ...
Background I'm doing a prehistoric nine-tails which would be believed to the common ancestor of the kitsune, the kumiho and the huli jing and five more species I made up, this early specimen lives ...
So I'm pretty sure your are all aware of what a cell is the microscopic organic units that make up all life. Well they don't have to be microscopic. An unfertilized chicken egg is a single cell. ...
I have an asteroid. I want it to hit Earth. The best way to hit Earth is from behind the Sun, which makes it harder to detect you if you're an asteroid. Now, I have a basic understanding of things ...
Needs ideas for the reason for the different sizes for ninetailed foxes i Made up. . The Korean kumiho is sexual dimorphic as the males are big as a coyote while the vixens are as big as a red fox...
A short time ago I read that life might be possible on interstellar planets (i.e. planet-like objects which aren't bound to a star by gravity.) They may be insanely cold on the surface but inside t...
Background- Writing a speculative evolution about the nine-tailed fox and had made twenty species that range in size from cat-sized species from Indonesia to wolf-sized ones in the Carpathian mount...
Cube worlds are cool and many people like them but unfortunately, they are less than feasible. Does this have to be this way though? What factors could lead to the creation of a roughly cube shape...
Specifically, will ferrofluid at the bottom or on the sides of a shot glass perturb the fluid above it to any significant degree? I want a character of mine who is a sort of Bill Nye/Neil DeGrasse ...
I have a world that has unexpected lifeforms detected. There are to-be-revealed reasons for it, but the way the ecosystem is set up is: Microbial life is abundant everywhere There is a single sp...
My world is based on the concept of afterlife, with a twist: people who died in other worlds are resurrecting in mine. Once in the afterlife world if they suffer another lethal injury or condition ...
In a world I am building, I want the primary species to be 100% peaceful. The best way I have thought of for doing this post-sapience is to remove all identifying traits (skin, eye and hair color, ...
Let's say I have a Dyson sphere roughly the same size of the earth with a very small "star" in the center. Continents, oceans, and people inside the sphere experience a reverse gravity in the oppos...
Western civilisation fell over a few centuries ago, because the Earth shifted back into a full on ice age climate. Oh and Skynet kind of happened. Ice sheets expanded, inexorably rolling over the...
So take a creature like a werewolf or a Fallout deathclaw. Either through evolution or genetic engineering has claws with a graphene edge instead of keratin. The claws work like a more organic v...
Consider a world in which instead of light coming from a single region of the sky, the sky appears close to uniformly luminescent. The intensity of this light depends on latitude such that amount ...
As anyone who has watched the Jurassic Park series knows, Hollywood likes to exaggerate a bit when it comes to dinosaurs and their scientific accuracy. Many facts are fairly easy to prove right or ...
My premise involves a habitable planet with a dual core: it has two masses similar in composition to Earth's core, which revolve around each other over the course of hundreds of thousands of years...
Suppose a mad engineer needs the world destroyed by next Tuesday. For efficiency's sake, he considers "Gray Goo," a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario in which self-replicating machines devour ...
What would happen if all dark energy (cosmological constant) instantly converted to radiation due to vacuum metastability event, while otherwise vacuum properties remain the same? Dark energy dens...
Even now, in 2016, if you take a look around in a 7-Eleven or any European counterpart of similar small shops, you can find a comparably huge selection. In fact, this applies to large counterparts ...
There is a alien species known as the Titanians. The Titanians are organic biologically, but of a alien biochemistry much more cryophilic and oily. They drink ethane, breathe oxygen (you can ha...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...
Space nets are a theoretical space organism designed by Tim B, to quote him: Imagine a life-form shaped like a giant net. It gathers space dust into itself to grow, using light from stars bot...
The Megaphragma mymaripenne is the smallest animal with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals. If by some miracle it could be still shrinked, how much smaller could it get before it st...
Question inspired by movies You only live twice and Moonraker: I am Evil Overlord at his best: I am super rich person with net worth of 32 billion US dollars. I already own island and I am making...
