General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Scenario A civilization is living on an ancient super structure, they don't know much about it, they just live there and have lived there for as long as they know. For our current situation we can ...
I don't want my world to be infinite, that would be a pain to draw maps for. And I need it to be flat (for a slightly unrelated reason). How would I explain why no one has looked over or seen the e...
Imagine you have a weather-controlling device that you use to eliminate all lightning strikes. They're just too dangerous. What happens to the earth? Does lightning serve a necessary purpose to ...
I'm working on a roleplaying game in a medieval fantasy setting with a focus on crafting and I am having trouble visualizing how armor made from scales of creatures would be assembled; both for art...
On my Conworld, the oceans are purple. This is mostly for aesthetic purposes and my current explanation is an abundance of cyanobacteria. I'm not sure that this explains it correctly, so what could...
I am working on a planet were life (trees, plants, food, animals, humans) would be bigger/taller than Earth. I have learned that oxygen level or gravity, for example, could help change the size of ...
So I have noticed that most herbs come from the Mediterranean as confirmed by this site and those that do not often come from either actual Mediterranean climates or somewhat arid ones. So my ques...
In my world, a "perfect" robotic eyeball has been created. This eyeball is electronic, but it emulates a human eye perfectly. This does not necessarily mean that it has millions of synthetic cones...
I want to propose a new method for tree growth to exceed the max of 120 or 130 meters restricted by Earth's gravity. I propose for the tree to rely very little on its base or roots. The living part...
Advance our technology 200 years, develop very precise celestial navigation controls and very efficient nuclear reactors. Distill to ensure only the most stable elements are used in production, cos...
I'm in the process of naming some routes and roads in my medieval fantasy themed world, and I want to specify routes that could only be managed on foot. I'm tempted to say trails, but since every b...
Hopefully this isn't two separate questions - I do feel like they are interconnected enough that they can be counted as one. I'm wondering if it would be possible for primitive human ancestors. Le...
The world I'm currently writing is an alternative Earth with Space Age tech that advanced much faster than our Earth because of Ancestral Guidance: In the middle of every graveyard, there is a pa...
My world is set in ancient times on a planet similar to Earth, but with a different civilization and different geography (and lots of canals). I need to find a way of giving the inhabitants better ...
Let's say you are creating secret instructions for a new, very dangerous weapon. You have decided to encrypt the instructions. But you do not want anyone to guess that these notes are encrypted! S...
Hello I imagine this is a pretty straightforward question, perhaps already covered in another post, but I wanted to get extra perspectives and options for achieving this type of planet or moon. So ...
How would human appearance be different from what it is now if our circulatory system used Hemocyanin for oxygen transport instead of Hemoglobin? Limitations, restrictions, additional details, etc...
I've been thinking of the idea of creating and adding an alien species that's antimatter-based (being from a universe where antimatter became the majority instead of "normal matter"). However, I'm...
I'm working on a sci fi story where one of the species has batlike wings and comes from a moon around the size of Titan with roughly the same atmospheric pressure as Earth. Initially, I thought the...
How would human culture and civilisation develop if placed onto a planet permanently psychoactive, e.g. because of low (but inevitable) amount of LSD-like substance in either water or air? To simpl...
So I have this underwater echolocation using species. I'm wondering if they could have a language partly based on recreating sounds from returning echolocation waves to 'talk' images at each other....
A familiar scenario in scifi: a bubble of space is isolated artificially from the outside world by means of time dilation: time inside the bubble moves more slowly than time outside it. Assume that...
In the video game Dino Crisis 3, a recurring boss that the player fights called the Australis (a bio-engineered human-Tyrannosaurus Rex hybrid) that has skin exposing the muscles of its body. An in...
A group of scientists discover a heretofore unknown species of fungus. unbeknownst to them, let's say it is of extraterrestrial origin but it operates very much like certain fungi on Earth (e.g. op...
They are blue to gray skinned with four eyes, two of which can see in infrared, three fingers and toes on each appendage, and reptilian-like ears (eardrums are external), as well as a hair color ra...
Things like Dyson spheres need a whole lot of raw material, which is rather difficult to come by, since the elements needed for good structural steel are scattered fairly thinly into the universe u...
We know that Earth creatures can generate high-voltage electricity (your nearest electric eel can attest to that). We also know that ordinary air at Earth atmospheric pressure can be used as a las...
I need my jet-propelled squid to be an efficient glider, something similar to an albatross but he's built in the canard configuration like a real flying squid (below). His combined weight is 5 k...
If I want a home for aliens like those which invaded in Battle:Los Angeles, what would be the best fitting features? The aliens: Burn water for fuel (assume they are using deuterium for fusion) ...
Say I've got a creature with a 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher body temperature than a human. (Trying to figure out what a good temperature for this creature would be. Not good with number estim...
Some islands can survive for very long. Madagascar, for example, has been around for 80-100 million years and is likely to remain isolated for hundreds of millions of years more. Volcanic islands,...
Within our society is a mad scientist obsessed with hybridization. His specialty is canids, and he could not get enough of the canid hybrids that had happened in the past--wolfdogs, coywolves, coy...
I've been reading about viral vectors and am looking to incorporate it into my setting. From what I can see, it's possible to use viral vectors as a form of gene therapy, and retroviruses can work ...
Someone invents a machine that creates electrons. It takes in some electrically neutral matter, and produces electrons of equal mass.1 Let's consider two quantities of negative charge: $q$ is the...
I know we generally operate - or religiously operate - on the principle that fundamental things don't change over time. It's the bedrock of geology - Uniformitarianism. I also believe it is unprova...
Because the earth is round I feel that it would not be visible to people on the other side of a planet. If not, then how far away from the source would you have to be before it wasn't visible? The ...
I've had a fairly complex world built up in my head for several years and finally writing a story in it. One thing I'm struggling with is explaining the galaxy's faster-than-light traveling. It's n...
Just as in the real world where horses were tamed to travel long distances quickly across land, would it be realistic for an animal to be tamed and used as an aquatic mount for quick transport arou...
Thousands of years after a nuclear war that killed all life on the surface of earth, the descendants of the humans who fled to bunkers emerge... How deep would these bunkers have to be to prevent ...
In Larry Niven's Ringworld, the Outsiders lie with one half of their body in the shade and one half of their body in direct sunlight and use the temperature difference to generate energy. Would thi...
At a constant 1G acceleration it takes a little less than a year to reach near light speed speeds. Time would dilate locally on the ship slowing time for them. Could the time dilation be pushed t...
Let's see if I can explain my thoughts accurately with an example. Imagine that a mad scientist decides to kidnap a few men and women and decides, just for fun, to switch their sexual organs, but ...
Scenario : Due to the effects of a magical overload, there are people in my world who lose their magic. Those that don't go outright insane are left with damaged nervous systems and a high body tem...
Would it be possible for a creature to have a nervous system working at 250 volts? What kind of physiology would it need to sustain that? Could you use that creature as a power source, to power a ...
Setting: Earth, in the future, near 2060 or 2100 Technology: a bit more advanced than ours Armies and police forces are already using systems for crowd control. Some devices can generate disco...
Say humanity have the luxury to start anew. Colonizing a planet where speed of colonization is not an issue. Let's assume planet conditions and gravity pull similar to Earth. Technology relatively ...
I'm attempting to figure out the orbital physics of a system that has a habitable body that has intense periods of waxing and waning sunlight. I've come to the assumption that the best body for thi...
So. our boss is kinda... nuts. His current pet project is to create a device that can play his theme song whenever his location is revealed to someone within a 50 meter radius. Naturally, he outsou...
My story takes place on the moon of a large gas giant planet. I have been trying to decide on a way for the moon to be as Earth-like as possible, but I have now decided to ask the community for hel...
Here is Carolina Lang's interpretation of one of Britain's heraldic beasts, the enfield: For anyone not familiar with the creature, here's A Book of Creatures' basic description of it: It ha...
