General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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Premise/question Correct me if I'm wrong, or if humans have terraformed the planet by the time you're reading this, but Mars is mostly desert-like. It has large ice caps which contain most of its ...
The moon is similar to earth but orbits around a gas giant, the sun has ended its life cycle and so the only energy received on the moon comes from tidal interactions heating its core. On earth an...
How long would the St. Louis arch stand if humanity vanished from the earth, tomorrow? What would be the failure mechanism? Note: I'm following the directions to ask a specific question, but if ...
Is it possible that a planet/moon will have inverse direction comparing to the rest orbiting material? For example Mars would go in counter direction comparing to other planets in solar system. I...
On a distant, habitable world, humanity has observed a biological marvel. A creature that is primarily carnivorous, roaming its planet jungles and deserts, has been observed to be capable of manip...
What adaptations are needed for human-derived sea-dwellers? My people are not the classic half-fish, nor are they whale-tail-people - they wear ankle-length swimming skirts that bind their legs in...
So, in my story, there is a species called the Telenoids. They have the ability to induce auditory nerve impulses so powerful they cause intense headaches and severe pain to nearby targeted non-tel...
In my story, I have two late renaissance era cultures discovering each other for the first time and I plan for the story to develop into more of how they both understand each other. However, I don'...
A common weapon in science fiction is the Molecular Disrupting Beam, which disintegrates anything caught by the beam into basic atoms and molecules with no wound or gash, more as if a portion of th...
Basically, the title. Trying to figure out how reasonable stealth in space would function, and while I have mitigated it, I am looking for methods to improve it. But mainly, is creating a sort of h...
Working on a medieval setting I thought of the idea of a biome similar to Minecraft Ice Spike Plains where this ice structures naturally occur. These structures in particular are tall and sharp tow...
My fungus starts out as an extremely small spore, this small spore will bury and implant itself near the spinal cord and cerebellum, and will then secrete an enzyme that hijacks and later puts it i...
In my story Orcs, humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what sort of environment (on earth) would best suit them? so basic characteristics of m...
Suppose we walled off a 1000 km square. These walls would be made of unobtanium (so they don't break), and have no cracks or holes that go all the way through. They are also around 15 kilometres hi...
So, I have this draft for a story. It's basically a parody(?) of the fantasy tropes originating from LOTR (the movies) with the twist that we're following the bad guy's lackeys, who he abuses more ...
So, I want my dragon to be able to do stuff like open doors and whatnot. Using the wings is kind of awkward and takes up considerable space, and because of the coronavirus, the mouth is also a no-n...
When I was younger I came up with a creature that seemed to contradict itself. It was made of some frozen material, but it had a large back fin in order to get warmth from the sun. I'm revisiting t...
How fast could run a humanoid being, how much damage could resist, how much weight could lift, how strong could hit, under the indicated evolutionary conditions? is there a limit? I have always tho...
In my world, there are 3 astrological bodies of significance, the sun, the moon, and a 3rd, geostationary object, believed to be the home of the gods. I want all three of them to have roughly the s...
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...
Tengu are a race of upright, humanoid creatures with the ability to fly and other avian characteristics to a varying degree. Konoha-tengu (foliage tengu) are six-limbed humanoid avians. The bird s...
Let's suppose that a homo species divides in two separate species (like H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis) and they cannot breed. Could their descendants evolve to be capable of reproducing togeth...
I am making a fish folk race, and I want to figure out if tattoos/ piercings could be possible. My ideas for piercings would be on the flesh itself or on the fins. If they had piercings in these ar...
An idea I'm toying with for a sci-fi story is a species where the individual organisms are colonies of smaller eusocial organisms. The idea initially came from "hey if a bunch of single-celled orga...
Strange! this question does not seem to be on site with a search (only what to wear). I am concerned about the psychological aspect of food production and eating. Clearly tube food is out and I thi...
The praised Dutch book "Koning van Katoren" features an 18 year old who wants to become king of his country of Katoren, which had been under the regency of half a dozen evil ministers for his whole...
I'm wondering whether it would be possible for humanoids to evolve from bears. bears share many characteristics with primates such as being amazing tree climbers and having the ability to use too...
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
What needs to be improved or added to the structure (device) of human lungs to be able to filter toxic chemical compounds in the air (for example, in mines the air may contain nitrogen, methane, ca...
I was wondering, for a speculative evolution project, what could be the bare minimum amount of organisms the common housefly needs to survive? Could they just feed on grass? Or should I add a flowe...
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...
This was an idea I had for an alien life form but i thought it made so little sense for a science-based story that I didn't further it. The idea is a tree-like life form that instead of bearing fr...
so according to this website: https://haraldas.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/dragon-fire-ever-wonder-if-its-possible/ it said that it could be possible for any animals to synthesise tert-butyllithium...
In the story I'm writing, Earth gets destroyed and the few million humans that survive go to live on another Earth-like planet. Since the destruction of the planet, the humans do visit their star...
"They fly now?" "They fly now!?" "They fly now" One of the most iconic characteristic of dragons is their ability to fly, on top of that, my intelligent (human level) dragons also use a fu...
Art by Sylvain sarrailh What kind of event would we need to have 1km deep fissures spanning out across the planet. I can work with a hypothetical scenario where the planet might have had some sor...
in the Cthulhu mythos, yog sothoth is depicted as a mass of splitting and fusing orbs, it is the past, present, and future and seemingly knows everything. but for the sake of trying to make it real...
As a thought project, I wanted to make an alien species that eats without any use of the tongue, but I've run into the problem that it's almost impossible to swallow solids without choking without ...
We may all have some familiarity with winged skulls - from Avenged Sevenfold's album covers to bikie shirts. However, for my science-fiction/horror story, I am curious about how these creatures wou...
Assuming the axial tilt of the Earth was increased to roughly 30°, and the orbital eccentricity roughly doubled(0.03 as opposed to 0.016) so that the average temperature stayed the same, but the s...
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 ...
so in my world the rivers and lakes (not sure about the sea yet) are made of blood that'll never dry up. The blood maybe fresh or not (I still haven't decided yet,probably both anyway) i also haven...
You know, dragons like myself are no strangers to falling. It's a natural part of flight and I used to do it a lot when I was a tiny and very adorable wyrmling. The problem is it hurt, and sure it...
In the event of our sun suddenly becoming a black hole or wormhole of sorts. It transports the earth to another solar system similar to ours. Would it be possible for our planet to start circling...
What metal or material could be used to make super high-pressure canisters in the 1700s? It is for use as a fuel or propellant for a piston-driven engine to power vehicles, due to the fact that a g...
By "bryophitic", I mean "non-vascular land plants", being the liverworts and the mosses. (Hornworts are comparative latecomers, so we won't be talking about them.) Without vascular tissues, these...
I have a spaceship which I want to have travel very quickly around a system like our own solar system -- let's say about 10 million miles per minute, which would go from Mars to Earth in ~15 minute...
Bubble wrap is a synthetic packing material featuring small bubbles that are designed to provide cushion to the protected object and pop in place of damaging the object under excessive stress. They...
So, I was thinking about flavouring psychic damage and thought "If I'm anime > western civilization, then wouldn't it make sense for me to reflect it a bit more?" In an anime, I watched, there ...
One thing that nearly every multi cellular organism and complex thinking species is communicate, either it be pheromones, chemicals, chirps and sounds, symbols and shapes, to even complex sentences...
