General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Could a creature be made entirely, or mostly of magma or lava? Could it sustainably live in or near a volcano for an extended period of time? Rocks around the outside are optional, and encouraged. ...
A soft and vulnerable intelligent underwater species, you can consider them closely related to Earth's octopus - in the way chimps are closely related to humans. Consider that clothing is often wo...
I'm working on a setting for an RPG, and I'm trying to build my planet so it's unique and interesting, but also semi-plausible. My question is, could you have a planet in stable orbit around a mag...
Welcome to the year 2170, the predictions of our grandparents were so wrong: The human population didn't cap at 20 billion, it went far past that. The global population is now roughly 200 billion. ...
Some Science fiction stories have generations growing up on Mars would be a lot taller 7'+. How would growing up on a much lower gravity planet affect a mammals size? I understand bone density wo...
Given a world with similar size and atmospheric composition to Earth that has a commodity export, be it grain or oil etc, that has trade with other planets, what would be best way to orbit massive ...
On an Earth like planet, is it possible to have a perpetual storm surrounding an island? And if so what would cause/maintain this storm? Edit: To be a little more clear, I'm looking for a storm st...
Given tilt of about 90deg (like Uranus), with day & year like Venus (day longer than year), orbiting a purple (brown) dwarf (not tidal locked). I'm having trouble getting "seasons" & day le...
In lots of barren, deserted or otherwise destroyed landscapes, there are bones of long dead animals to be found. Sometimes, it's a skull, sometimes, these are rib-cages, or ribs alone. And somet...
Is it possible to have a planet that is both bigger than Earth and weaker in terms of gravity? I've got an idea about it being less dense, but I don't know what to do about its magnetic field. I ne...
On a world similar to Earth minus size, gravity, and a mildly different atmosphere. The weather is much more violent, causing frequent dust storms. The planet is larger than Earth and is mostly scr...
Edit: I am asking in the context of alien life, should have specifyed that to begin with. I have many ideas for fantasy/sci fi races, and one that I kept coming back to is a species with bones th...
For context, this takes place about 300 years in the future. The space city in question is located in a nebula, completely man-made (not build upon any preexisting foundations like an asteroid etc....
I have often heard/read/watched in fantasy about dwarves drinking mead and lots of it. I recently learned that mead is made from honey which requires bees and flowers which require sunlight. I doub...
I'm struggling with the physics here a bit since I'm a complete novice at this. I'm making a character who's main ability is to subvert/play around with the 3rd Law of motion (For every action, the...
There are lots of examples in fiction of lizard people, bird people or beast people, but I'd like to expand my phylogenetic horizons in conceptualizing my world. To that end, I have conceptualized ...
I'm imagining a scenario where there is a conflict between humans and intelligent octopuses. The humans' main mode of transport is the bicycle. The octopuses decide to stage a night raid whereby t...
I'm struggling with the physics here a bit since I'm a complete novice at this. I'm making a character whose main ability is to subvert/play around with the 2nd Law of motion. Somehow I understand...
Planet of hats is the name of a trope where all inhabitants of a planet share a defining characteristic, of which there are many sub-tropes like environment or economy. I'd like to focus on the cul...
In the story I created, the Kingdom of Oneirou has 3 Moons--Artemis, Rahu, and Zorya--all of which have their own independent lunar cycles. However, it's officially stated as early as Chapter 2 o...
I have a hypothetical world in the works and I have a rough idea of what it might be like. My idea is that the planet was life-supporting with a widely varied biosphere. The magnetosphere failed a...
Our planet has a surface full of silicates and a core made of iron. It's due to this that Earth is the way it mostly is - most rocks and many minerals contain some form of silica. But what about a ...
Background: An Elven nation that once thrived for thousands of years as a predominantly agricultural race was forced underground because of unexplainable occurrences of extreme weather conditions ...
I'm about to break rule seven of superpowers: don't think too hard about what it does to the air. A superhero has the ability to disappear any atoms that come within 2 cm of their skin (atoms that...
I am creating a speculative evolution project for school (and partially for leisure) and I need a planet for my organisms to live on. I have a rough idea of what it may be like but I'm no expert in...
In the movie Guardians of the Galaxy (and a few others), we meet a bipedal raccoon known as Rocket (who I am aware did not evolve to be bipedal, but I am using him as an example). I honestly love t...
Are there models, problems, and or engines for building life-sustaining worlds? I believe that my approach is backwards. I have written a lot on my world and have been slowly working at making th...
If I terraformed a moon to have enough artificial gravity/atmosphere to support life, would they end up just crashing into each other? Is there a way to not have this happen, e.g., increasing dista...
As title suggests, what is the size limit by volume for a rocky planet, if any? Some ideas are discussed here, but I'm wondering if there is more concrete, expert evidence to point either way. If p...
Let's say there's a planet with 18 times the radius of Earth, but has the same density as Earth. If so, how would it be possible for a big planet to such a density of Earth? Would it have the same ...
Suppose that I have a planet very similar to Earth. It has the same level of gravity, water-land ratio, temperature, air composition, rotation and revolution speed, tectonic activities, temperature...
How does inverting global temperatures affect climate? Here exists a fantasy world similar to earth in all important ways. Except, however, that global temperatures have been flipped; it is colde...
Can we increase life expectancy by replacing important organs for life such as the heart, kidneys, young blood, etc. (but not the brain)? Most organs can fail and, for the ones which we already hav...
I want to start by thanking everybody in this community as your posts have been instrumental in helping me to build my world. All I am asking for is a final review of the maps that I have created t...
In the mythology of the Lambas people of Zambia, there is a creature called the Ichisonga. It is a herbivore, and very rhinoceros-like in appearance. Upon hearing a hippopotamus, it allegedly sne...
Often in films and television shows when a person's brain is 'injected' with more information than it can handle, they suffer from immense pain. What would actually happen if you did supply a huma...
I have searched for a while now, but I cannot find a definite answer. A character I am writing has been captured by the antagonist, operated on and released, now completely mute. I've looked ar...
I was thinking about how an MRI uses a strong magnetic field to align the spins of hydrogen atoms in the body. What I was wondering about was if the human body experienced a magnetic field much st...
On Earth, rivers are possible because rain and snow deposit water in high places. That water then forms rivers when flowing to lower places. Would it be possible to have the phenomena of rivers fl...
I have a population living in a dome, and they have been for generations, totally sealed off from the outside world. What type of engineering would need to be in place to effectively convince the ...
In my pre-plastic world there is a killer who removes unblemished skin from their victims and replaces it with a non-human 'skin', so that one can't tell the replaced skin from the remaining human ...
In my Conworld's system, There is a porous asteroid large enough to be a dwarf planet (but it's mass is too small to pull it into a spherical shape) that has rings. How they got there, nobody knows...
Assume that average Joe dies in a zombie outbreak and is revived as a zombie pretty much immediately. How strong could that zombie be, assuming that: Zombification is done by "taking over" the br...
Let us assume that I built a dome on the moon's surface. That dome is pressurized and has nuclear-powered lights to deal with the long lunar night (or is in one of the poles). I also have water, ei...
Whenever terraforming Mars comes up, the subject of its magnetosphere inevitably arises. When that happens, someone is bound to suggest using nukes to restart the core a la "The Core". Assuming th...
What would be the most efficient text communication method for a spacecraft operating on a super low bit rate (I'm talking something like 5 bits an hour, excluding error handling)? As you want bo...
DISCLAIMER: Any resemblance to other starships (living or dead) is purely coincidental. The starship 'Exciting Undertaking' is a brand new ship about to set off on a five and a bit year mission to...
Information I am writing a fantasy sci-fi, that is almost the same as our reality, the only difference being humans in this world are capable of using drugs (serums in their world) to improve thei...
Cold and Flu, are common viruses which normally infect us in the cold of winter. Ironically, those people who always keep themselves warm, stay less out-of-the-house and office, keep their windows ...
I was recently looking at this question, which seems to argue that FTL travel within the existing laws of physics can risk resulting in the destruction of half the universe. (Specifically, bad thin...
