General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Black holes are created by the gravitational collapse of massive stars. But in theory, black holes can also be created by any mass at all that is confined within a small enough volume of space, de...
I did the orbital period for a planet orbiting a mass = 1 sol with a 24-hour year, it's got a semi-major axis of 1.82 million miles - far and away beyond the Roche limit, still beyond the corona, b...
I'm building a world that has a feature that is meant to separate the world in half so civilizations on each half won't contact one another. The feature is magical in origin, but does not seem magi...
Civilization is fairly young in my setting. Thus, the sheer number of ruined buildings and abandoned structures, found throughout the wilderness, seems strange. The ruins vary a lot: has-seen-bett...
Humanoids with more than 2 pairs of arms weren't an unknown concept in human culture. From ancient mythology, there are the hundred-armed Hekatoncheires (who have their own thread here) and six-arm...
In theory, could any organism using protein folding or another biological process "assemble" the diamond allotrope of carbon, if it were at the correct pressure to do so? In other words, could some...
In my previous post, I asked about how tall trees could grow in my world. To be honest, I really need those trees to be huge for my storie, because a big part of the plot will be linked to those bi...
or, Anatomically Correct Weebles A group of behaviorally modern humans was cut off from the rest of the earth-like planet millennia ago. (Myths hold that the separation occurred four to five ka BP...
When torturing people or executing them in slow and painful ways, your victims sometimes fall unconscious, which ruins the point of the exercise. After all, if they aren't feeling the pain, then wh...
In my world, there was a man that wrote a virus in binary code - which in turn infects every computer-based system in the world, as long as it is connected to the internet. Is this even possible? ...
I have read unlimited news in which a person has knowingly laced the food items of a person with something to make him mad to fulfill an ill purpose like succession of property, frustration due to ...
One of the plotlines, I'm currently working on, is about a dragon who is forced to serve a settlement to "pay" for some of his past "crimes". For clarity's sake, we call the dragon Gyvaris. Gyvar...
For a spacecraft cruising without thrust it is my understanding that the sort of spin gravity utilized in the film 2001, for instance, would actually be debilitating to the crew due to the coriolis...
I am writing a sci fi novel in which one of the primary factions is a lost space colony sent to Proxima Centauri (Alpha Centauri C) roughly 350 years prior on a generation ship. The trip took rough...
If this hypothetical moon were to come to exist between the Earth and Moon, how long would it survive? And could it transition to the moon's orbit, as a subsatellite? To clairify, this scenario is...
Like on a scale of one to ten, how plausible are Alcubierre drives in terms of our current understanding of physics? Plausible enough to be considered "hard sci-fi", or are they just another form o...
Would it be possible to have a planet created by a God - but still obeying the known laws of physics - to have a bouncy surface that would be strong enough to bounce any large incoming matter, like...
In the 1960s we were disappointed to find that the moon is a pile of dust and rubble with no easily accessible valuable materials. Well, we kind of knew it before that, but we weren't sure. Anyway,...
I will be using solar antimatter production via Schwinger pair production like the VARIES project but I need to store it for bulk use. The containment will be a satellite orbiting the sun close eno...
So I build a city on the ocean floor out of handwavium, Bioshock style, but I want an easier way to get there besides taking a boat to the middle of nowhere and then getting into a submersible. I...
In the world that I am making there are hollows all over the planet, which are massive underground subterranean areas of the planet. Think The Hollow of the Gears Of War series. So far the going th...
Trying to work out mechanics and visuals from one of two moons orbiting a gas giant. My idea is that the moons are tidally locked so they can never see each other's backsides, but this might be ach...
So I want my planet to have six suns, but I'm not sure how far apart these stars would have to be from each other to not produce adverse effects on the planet that would prevent life from developin...
I'm working on a completely flat, underground world, where "world" means "universe" rather than the equivalent of "planet". Here's what I have so far: The world is a flat, apparently infinite (in...
I know that gas giants are much larger than terrestrial planets, but wouldn't several million or billion years allow for it to gain mass from collecting space debris and the like?
One day, you suddenly get superpowers! Whoo-hoo, you can speed up or slow down the flow of time for yourself. This means you can run faster than a jet, right? So you decide to test it out. You ...
What type of climate would I have to have to face a perpetually foggy forest at the base of a mountain range?
Assume that you have a Rogue Planet hurtling through deep space. Somehow, an alien civilization from, say, 1,000 ly away acquires astronomical data from this planet. This data is in the form of h...
I know there are examples of land vertebrates moving back into the oceans, such as in the case of whales, and marine reptiles, but in every case that I know of when a land vertebrate moves back int...
I'm looking to design one of my warring planets around organolithium chemistry with seas and precipitate primarily composed of a clear organolithium solvent liquid - possibly ammonia. I've searched...
The Akashic Records are a catalog of all events, thoughts and feelings that have happened on Earth. Supposedly its stored on the etheric plane. I'd like to have this information existing in the t...
In an alternate Earth, a mass extinction wiped out a percentage of the most successful phylum ever--Arthropoda. All that survived of the class Arachnida were the really small varieties--the ticks,...
Charge-type breath weapon: Creatures with this type shoot singular, high-damage, high-precision "charges" of (insert dragon's element here) that explode upon contact. Examples: Toothless from the m...
So in my world, the main Antagonist has the ability to drain the life from things around her, turning them to stone in the process. That made me wonder how organic material would erode if it were p...
So diamonds are the hardest natural substance, but can be broken/shattered by impacts. If a planet had a large mountain range made of diamond (maybe the size of the Rocky Mountains on Earth), wou...
My aliens want to build the heaviest chemical rocket possible: They never were much into space travel, since their planets' gravity is about 1.5 of ours. They made lots of bad experiences fighting ...
Physical transformation relies on evolution, which typically works n the scale of millions of years and in accordance with environmental needs. However, is there any plausible way maybe through th...
Would abnormally high levels of cobalt on a moon cause it to appear blue to those on the planet it orbits?
How would a planet need to be changed (gravity, air pressure, air makeup, etc) to allow for the realistic flight and take off from a small hill of a gryphon with a human rider? You can assume the ...
A bit of backstory: I'm attempting to create a militaristic alien race composed of elite warriors capable of conquering the galaxy. They posses a variety of "enhanced" abilities such as immense str...
Imagine a VR headset with built in camera & AI with object recognition & photo editing software. The camera records the image. The AI is trained to pick out 'undesirable' images, objects,...
If the Earth all of sudden was instantaneously transmuted into pure light, what would happen? How much energy would be released? How much damage would it do to surrounding space? Would it destroy...
Giant Spiders are a traditional element of fantasy worlds. They prey upon most human's primal fears, and are easy to make as evil as possible. (Note: Not to scale) But are they actually plausib...
This is not my question. In my story, I have a machine that you can connect to using electrodes. It allows one to enter a small virtual reality room where everything from gravity and electromagnet...
The mad scientist community is...mad, to put it kiddie-appropriately. Their logic has the tendency to make 0% sense 100% of the time (provided, of course, that they ever bring it up.) So you can ...
The island of Themascryia is a nation of amazons, an all-female race that spend their lives training for battle. They are currently under siege by foreign invaders. This army comes from a powerful ...
This question hopes to make a space tug crew's life tolerable. A supply pipeline links two civilizations. Due to the long travel time between the ends, cargo is "thrown" at the other side in unman...
The original, irish lore around banshees has it that they merely foretell the death of someone, but do not cause that death. American pop culture has changed this, so they do bring death and destru...
On a planet with a geostationary moon, how can I determine the position in the sky of the moon depending on the position on the planet surface? For example, Pluto's Charon. The moon wouldn't move ...
