General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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so i want to create a monster that dwell or fly inside thunderstorm as their defense mechanism, though they do goes down to get food, i want to know what method or modifications need for creature t...
Background: So this Kurzgesagt video talks about quark stars, and how two of them colliding could send strangelets flying towards Earth or the Sun. Now it's been said that since, theoretically (as...
I'm working on a bioweapon created by an extraterrestrial agent. The being is 2.5 m tall, humanoid, digitigrade, intelligent and mostly predatory. However, it does not require water, food or oxygen...
The larger an animal, the harder it is to cool down. Ignoring the problem of bone/muscle strength vs size/weight and saying an animal could get to outlandish sizes, would a second cardiovascular sy...
What hypothetical scientific procedure could be used to reanimate someone who is brain dead. I am aware that it is possible to bring someone back if they are clinically dead which is where a vital ...
So, my understanding of how Alcubierre drives would theoretically work is not particularly complete. I know it involves compressing and expanding space, but I don't really have an intuitive grasp ...
I want to create a harmless snake that can spit like a spitting cobra as a defense while kills its prey by constriction. Its venom is considered harmless, but when goes to the eyes it causes tempo...
A Gelatinous Cube is a massive, slime-based jelly that haunts underground dungeons, and is composed of an acidic substance which breaks down material. These creatures are unintelligent and crawl ai...
I was wondering if there is a scientific way to explain how my characters are capable of extreme levels of strength when engaging in combat. My characters are biological but have implants that all...
In a distant future, humanity has colonized and catalogued countless worlds in their home galaxy. However one day humanity has discovered a few habitable words in the Andromeda galaxy. After a wh...
I have a species of megafaunal carnivore that are extremely mobile with territories spanning hundreds of square miles and lifespans of 120-150 years. They lay clutches of 2-3 eggs every 20-30 years...
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials. Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinos...
In the distant future, humanity has encountered, made peace and wars with countless advanced civilizations, but one civilization that still baffles them, is the race of intelligent centipedes. The...
I want to know if a planet with an atmosphere identical to that of Earth could be big enough so that from no point in the lower atmosphere it would be possible to appreciate the curvature in relati...
For a story I'm writing, I'm looking for an undetectable plant based poison that if ingested in a miniscule amount, would make a ten year old boy sick: intrinsic muscle weakness, stunted growth, an...
I'm thinking about a design like this generation ship, which obviously has spin gravity. Would the fact that the ship is rotating affect the use of a magnetic sail? The magnetic sail as a sort of...
66 million years ago, something brought an end to the long-established dinosaur empire. The pendulum just kept shifting between an asteroid and a comet, astronomical bolides that actually have dif...
In the near future, humanity has spread out across the Solar System. A new planet is discovered, let's say 30 light years away, that shows it to be Earth-like and could harbor Earth life without to...
So, dragons are rather large (2 meters at the withers and have a nose-to-base-of-tail length of 5 meters) creatures. Pic related by: KatePfeilschiefter They look something like pic related, albe...
In the "Legend" trilogy and its sequel "Rebel", author Marie Lu envisioned a far future where Antarctica is a superpower decades after the United States splintered into two separate countries. The ...
So, lizardfolk are humanoid (and, so, upright) creatures with reptilian features and are also part-time endotherms. They're well-adapted to living in water and on trees to a degree. One adaptation ...
Postpartum depression among humans is a thing that is "normal" insofar as it happens a lot, but it is not "normal" in the sense of "a thing that we don't worry about"; it doesn't happen to absolute...
There are some things I don't understand. So far I have my map pretty developed but I think I made some mistakes and there are places I am not sure about. I know I made some mistakes with ocean cur...
So, I've decided that in my fantasy fiction, I want to have Megabara riders. Massive Capybaras, being ridden into a battle. I've done some basic research and I came across this extinct species tha...
In an alien world, due to changes in the ecosystem animals that were once mostly arboreal started having to spend more time in open plains, adapting to fill a new niche of grasslands/bush eaters an...
I'm creating a fictional universe in which several races exist that are very different from each other due to long term separation. One race is specialized for archipelagos and more specifically, d...
In the story I'm writing, a group of African penguins evolved to be fully upright (instead of having their knees bent like modern penguins). Now some basic characteristics of these "erect pengu...
(or some other Lesser Canyon) I'm playing with story ideas for a videogame that takes place in the post-post-apocalyptic US. Everything is overrun with monsters and ocean horrors and whatnot, you'...
Tomorrow morning, an apocalyptic event wipes humanity off the face of the earth - except for in Antarctica. The nature of the catastrophe is unclear, but it seems that any human will die within a f...
One thing that is fairly common amongst nearly every macro-scale living thing on this planet is the brain. The brain controls when creatures breathe, move, talk, etc., but the brains of said living...
"The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal"”in fact, blacker than anything on Ea...
So, dragons here use aqua regia (an acid that dissolves even gold) as their breath weapon. This acid is made up of the dragon's stomach acid and some nitric acid, stored in a separate organ. On to...
My postulated creature will look something like this: or like this: Its description is as follows: it's a non-obligate carnivore its height is, on average, about two feet it lives in arid h...
Recently, I've grown curious about this lizard men folklore, which revolves around lizard like beings that have the frame work of humanoids. Now this got me thinking of a more human like reptile sp...
So in my world there's a creature as big as a common rodent or as big as a rabbit in size. They live in packs, usually burrowed, but occasionally come to surface to get food. The alpha male is task...
I have a really good question. Could it be possible for complex life to have existed in the Precambrian? I'm aware that only the fossilized remains of bacteria have been discovered from that time p...
I am wondering if a species might evolve to deceive human technology - in particular, a set of night vision goggles. I imagine it is either cold blooded or it has thick fur - which doesn't trap air...
So I'm almost done with my draft of a story I'm writing. And I just got a random question popped into my head. Is it possible for Zues (the kaiju size dino) to survive? I already got a little bit o...
This rogue planet is a cold rocky world where liquid methane replaces water, hydrogen is used in place of oxygen, and a large moon. I was thinking the large moon would have a large tidal pull that...
This is sort of a follow up on my question Could a "multicellular" virus exist? in which part of the consensus was that viruses simply can't hold enough DNA. In theory, could DNA form in a structur...
I'm looking to build a horror type sci-fi game based on the Alien franchise. My question comes in trying to differentiate my alien from the Xenomorphs. I want hurting it with a melee weapon to be i...
I have heard people (quite possibly on this site) say that by the time a civilization is able to make Dyson sphere it will be useless to build one for power and energy needs. So, would a civilizati...
The continent is split apart by a dense area of mountains, covered in glaciers. Any travelers who with to go from one part of the continent to the other would either have to cross the mountains, or...
To try and explain the situation the best I can imagine one of those sci-fi/fantasy situations where whenever someone is asleep they can experience new things. Whether they somehow end up in some d...
Given a world where a human-like brain is synthetizable, I wonder: A human-like artificial brain would most likely crave sensorial overwhelm. Pleasure to humans is something deeply associated with...
So, after trying to make a few different world maps and not really feeling satisfied with them, I decided to attempt making a world a bit more from scratch, by adding in plate tectonics. Now, I did...
While the intended end state is that this planet can support space-faring lifeforms, the solution under question needs a sanity check. I cannot commit to many numbers with how speculative this all ...
So, I have been a bit disappointed with the answers on how to store degenerate matter from my previous thread, and now I'm even wondering whether one can produce it at all, without invoking unreali...
In medieval times, news of dragons attacking the outskirts of the villages is flooding in. The King is losing patience. According to witnesses, these dragons can lift cows and occasionally elephant...
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...
