General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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I am building a city in the sky; it floats thanks to hot air balloons and hydrogen. The main issue I have is how to make it grow, as this is not some kind of giant structure to start, it is a small...
How could blue soil exist, in a realistic earth-like world. The world may even be earth. First off is it even possible - could soil like this exist given the requirements below? (if not then why?)...
On Earth, sailors would navigate the oceans at night by using the stars as guides; since there are no landmarks in the ocean like there are on land (save for the occasional island), that's pretty m...
my question is as follows: How cold temperatures can withstand a genetically modified person who has the opportunity for a long time (more than a day ) at low temperatures (below -30 ° Celsius ) t...
Time is not a constant, Albert Einstein proved that much. Time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two clocks, either due to them having a velocity relative to each other, or b...
I was creating a map of the air currents in my world, working back from the climates of the land (which I had already determined). (The world consists of one continent, similar to Pangea, with empt...
So, the X-Seed 4000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Seed_4000) is a rather large lad. The tallest building ever fully realized. Let's just say that, in five decades, they decide to actually build ...
The basic concept of this planet is that, the planet has a tilted axis (you probably guessed that already) which results in the South Pole constantly facing towards the sun. This would result in th...
In Deep, deep space, there exists a star system with a single planet. This planet, named Dewel, is a large, green gas giant with a mass of about twice Jupiter's. What could this planet's atmosphere...
I need to create a race that should be utterly older than humanity (and as such, much more powerful). My idea is to have that race originate from a rock planemo - a rogue planet, orbiting the cente...
I want my planet to be the last planet in a universe to host life forms. I expect a rough estimation as answer. Thanks.
Consider a futuristic world where space travel and colonisation of the solar system's planets is an everyday reality. In space vessels, the airlocks are used quite often to execute people. It's fai...
Earth's atmosphere, as you probably know, is divided into five layers - the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Str...
I am creating a fictional universe where humanity's evolution followed a different path that it did in ours (evolution might not be the best word, but bear with me). Long ago, in said universe's e...
From the superpower wiki I heard that vapor is a medium for heat exchange, but when I did some research on it I found that heat exchange might need a closed system. In a fictional world how would a...
Would it be possible to build a space elevator off Europa? (The space elevator would only be for the purpose of getting items out of Europa's gravity well relative to Jupiter. At that point, the...
So, centaurs are half-human, half-horse creatures that are usually portrayed in myth as wild, violent and animalistic. Now, I, Lucretius, found a good explanation why. The answer is in the growth ...
While my setting has magic, the material world acts the same way as ours. Only reason why I am mentioning magic in my question is because I'm explaining why I need to satisfy such an odd set of req...
So, gods. What are they. Gods are a race of various creatures that share a two important characteristics: They're connected to The Source. They can successfully produce offspring (though without ...
Could a creature carry its own ecosystem around with it? What traits would it need to make this viable? These self-sufficient creatures are native to planet which is for the most part frozen and ...
As you know, mythical animals like the gryphon, dragon, wyvern, roc, etc can carry things as they fly. For a big creature to fly, it either needs to massively increase the spread of their wings or...
Given the perfect environment, denser atmosphere, oxygen rich, maybe lower gravity, how large can a flying insect get and still be able to walk upside down on a surface? This question starts to ta...
In a galaxy far far away... M6760 (I made it up) is an unusually massive neutron star billions of light years away and it is surrounded by a spherical Dyson sphere painted in new improved formula v...
First question: if you melted Europa's ice, would there be any land? Second question (assuming the answer to the first question is no), how much water would you have to remove after that in order ...
If the right requirements are met, could bacteria survive on the Sun? The bacteria would spend most of their time in hibernation and reproducing, and when the time comes, they spread out on plasma...
So I'm thinking here about the sort of setting like Eclipse Phase, in which virtually all of humanity lives in a wide range of space habitats because of an apocalypse on Earth. I am imagining a var...
Would a computer using biological components as an interface be any good? Would that protect it against hacking? Or provide more complex processing? The way I'm going with this is that computers ...
I have an alien species similar to a caterpillar, the original idea was that the creature could eat different materials, digest them then combined with a very sticky liquid created in its body, it ...
Most planetary rings are rich in water in the form of ice, especially now we are running low on freshwater reserves on Earth. Imagine someone discovered a huge chunk of meteorite consisting of a wh...
I would like to destroy a Dyson Sphere so it leaves big chunks of scrap metal with no habitable zones left, but still with enough structure to hold building-sized blocks. The destruction shouldn't...
I am struggling to picture what placement of artificial lighting I should use for my O'Neill cylinder design for the daylight hours, a strip light along the centre of the cylinder would obstruct th...
My story begins with a group of colonists on a ship when something happens (spoilers) and the colonists are forced to abandon ship and land on a nearby uncharted moon of a gas giant. The good news...
its my first time posting here and i hope i do it right (watched the tour and all that). I've designed a World Map and would want to know if it looks realistic like that in terms of positioning of...
In the game Monster Hunter World, there is a place called the coral highlands. The coral highlands is one of the most spectacular things to look at in the game, having a resemblance to a ocean with...
My story has several key locations that I would like to ground in a real place in North America. It takes place 50-60 years in the future after 97% of humanity has been wiped out. I'm having a hell...
Animals on Earth have 2 or 4 legs they use for walking. On another world, however, animals have 3. I want to know how these animals will walk. How will their legs be placed and how will they move t...
I want to make my unicorns use the horn as their male genital. Is it biologically possible to put the genital on their head? I know there are many strange genital locations for animals, for example...
On planet Earth, the capital of the Earth Sphere in my universe, in the year 2127, the population has increased(in density per area) by about 410%, due to the discovery of "key" bridges- traversabl...
We all know that the universe is going to die one day: all the stars will die, all the black holes will evaporate and life will be gone. But hypothetically speaking, if a super advanced alien race ...
I recently asked a question about' "The feasibility of the coral highlands", which come from a game called "Monster Hunter World". In the game, there is another place, called, "The Rotten Vale", wh...
In Stellaris fungoids are, well, intelligent funguses; some Earth-like, two looking like intelligent species infected by funguses, and the rest looking alien. Let's get into the actually basics an...
What properties and side effects would an organism have if it were formed entirely from cancerous cells? Scientists collected a sample of a tumor from a patient for studies. Once cultivated the ce...
The song Diggy Diggy Hole makes some questionable assertions about dwarven anatomy. Specifically: Born underground Suckled from a teat of stone Raised in the dark The safety of o...
I have a ship that begins the equation traveling at 50 percent the speed of light, but decelerating constantly to finally land on a certain planet (towards which it is moving the entire time). It b...
This is for a story I'm working on. These creatures are what the Native American myth of the Wendigo originated from. Their origins are a mystery, but they need to feed on human flesh at least once...
Think of a thunderdrum from the How To Train Your Dragon movies for its large mouth, but it has a wingless centaur shaped body. It has a large head that can open its mouth wide. How would it create...
An alien creature has secretly landed on earth, seeking to propagate itself among the local species. It studies the individual sexes of a race called humans and determined that the males would be m...
Perissodactyla is an order of mammals consisting currently of the seventeen species of horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs. Usually, any clade is connected by a coupling of genetics and physical morph...
So, at its core, magic is using a swarm of tiny (50-100 micrometers), naturally occuring robots to deliver substances to a given location and initiate chemical reactions that lead towards the desir...
Imagine a tsunami of lava has flash-flooded cities. Oddly enough there weren't eruptions or earthquakes, just a sea of molten rock covering every inch of road, street pavement, what have you. Accor...
