General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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One premise of my current planet-in-progress is that certain locations in the universe are inherently tied to my PIP. For example, all the people and things that have vanished in the Bermuda Triang...
Medical stations and qualified doctors are few and far between within the outer colonies while most patients can be serviced at the usual medical facility (every station is required to have one), b...
A mage has created an amulet of light. It shines light from one side, and the user is capable of controlling the color and intensity of that light. In an effort to avoid abuse, the mage has limit...
I need an explanation for how one could be immortal and still age. If one was truly immortal one would remain an infant forever. How could this be explained? I'm working on a character who is supp...
I know that chemical rockets would allow for some minor loads to escape the gravity of a planet with higher gravity. My question is, what kind of technology would possibly allow a dominant specie...
I am developing a highly advanced AI, but I am paranoid about creating a super-intelligence, so everything I do is in a computer not connected to anything more except the obvious electric plug and ...
These dragons spend most of their lives in the ocean, however during the mating season they will migrate inland and gather together on a mountain top. Throughout the journey they will cease feeding...
Would it be possible to use spider silk for armour, instead of metal? I am not worried about how to obtain the silk. I know that spiders are not domesticable and that they are too aggressive to ea...
Where should I shoot a solar flare that is at least as strong as the solar flare(s) in 2012 for the most death? What else would happen? And how much death, in percentage of world population, would ...
In the stone-age world that I am building, I don't just want one-dimensional characters who are either hunters or gatherers. I want a great quantity of people including those who would have become ...
Is it conceivable to genetically engineer a moray eel large enough to hunt and eat humans in its cave like habitat? It needs to have: armored skin that can withstand gunfire good all around swim...
About 39 light years away is a lush, biodiverse planet, called Leena. It is the fourth planet from a yellow star. The planet is a prime target for human colonization, as probe bots have discovered ...
Assume in the very near future almost all rail transportation would return to steam-powered locomotives. To define it exactly, I mean solid fuel is burned inside the locomotive, which boils water, ...
I would like to have an Earth-like planet (~Earth gravity, ~Earth day, ~Earth year, and liquid water oceans) with extreme variance in its tides. I want the lowest tide to reveal about 30 miles of f...
Vampires don't die from old age; They aren't born, and all vampires were humans at some point in their life. After being bitten, a human can turn into a vampire (although the chance is very low, o...
Humans lay road to gain fast access to distant places until aeroplane is invented, I would presume the mermaids living underwater can make use of the strong water current to get around the ocean qu...
In my answer to another question, I suggested that the Super-Earth in question be tidally locked to its host star for a period of time while part of its surface experienced a bombardment. After tha...
Is a dystopian future with a thinner atmosphere and heavy snow feasible? Also would that mean that snow clouds formed at lower altitudes?
Humans like to explore and seem to have an almost instinctual need to expand. After spreading throughout the solar system and even into the Oort Cloud they decided that humanity should follow the r...
I have some research I want to do about a planet for a novel I'm writing. It is a fiction/science fiction novel, but I do wish to actually have some parts of the world correct in the scenes I depic...
Set in near future. Human population is at most a hundred thousand. Everyone lives in mountainous regions to escape deadly miasma. The air is infected by nanites which can cause cardiac arrest in ...
In my world, there is a chain of offshore volcanoes which are the result of a smaller plate hitting a larger one. There are two to three active volcanoes. My question is: two of these volcanoes a...
So I'm incubating a few alternate histories in my head. Many of them will butterfly away the Wright Brothers and many other familiar parts of history, and at least one has aircraft development as a...
Here is the scenario: A Paleo/Mesozoic mass extinction wiped out 96% of all terrestrial species, and the only plants that survived were as follows: One genus of conifer One genus of cycad One ge...
I has this idea for quite a while. I searched for information on the internet but I could see no reference. All searches gave results on the same idea but the effect was not what I'm looking for. ...
A spaceship flew across an unclassified region of the Milky Way galaxy and found a Super Earth in an unnamed system. The planet is almost twice as massive as Earth and is orbiting fairly far away ...
The running theory is that if the Earth is hit by a sufficiently large meteor, that the impact would create an ice age from all the dust it would put into the atmosphere. While this has been histo...
66 million years ago, the dinosaur empire was in its death throes when its final nail in the coffin came hurtling down from the sky. A clump of rock the size of Mount Everest smashed into the Gulf...
Right now merfolks are totally envious of us watching a live stream video of cat(fight) via WiFi or satellite internet, ok ok I get it's not the speed but its latency... Urrrr. Nevermind that I sin...
In almost every sci fi alien trope there will be a directive whereby one of the general order states no spacecraft may interfere with the normal development of any alien life or society and is puni...
So I'm currently designing an alien habitable planet that orbits a star similar to our Sun. Assuming that the composition of the planet's atmosphere, as well as its pressure, are similar to the one...
In this world I'm dabbling with, the dominant species is a race of six limbed humanoid with two wings on its back slightly below the shoulder blades. They are very slender ("BMI" is between 17 &...
A Traveler from a very advanced civilization has visited the Solar system. He found the humans likable, and decided to leave them a boon. For some reason, he couldn't do anything directly to the Ea...
A habitable (human could survive in its atmosphere without suits) desert planet which used to have large oceans is quite common in ScFi. I was thinking about the processes which could have been res...
In a comment to a recent question, it was pointed out that Biosphere II failed in part because too much CO2 was absorbed by the concrete, leaving insufficient oxygen in available CO2 to be released...
There is a space ship, flying from planet to planet for multiple years. It is a science vessel, so, once they reach a planet, they do research. But what do they do if they are in transit between pl...
Warning picture showing dissected Russian Doll My theory I believe that Russian Dolls reproduce asexually. They are born pregnant. At the time of birth, the outer doll dies. What is now th...
In a world dominated by steppe, the warmest regions give way into parklands dominated by stands of Aspen. My research suggests that Aspen groves may tend to exclude other species of tree, but I am...
"Tree" is (apparently) not a very well defined term as far as scientific classifications are concerned, so I'll put my own restrictions on it for this question: Typical healthy adult specimens mu...
There was once 12 kingdoms in the ancient days until the kingdom of Eo was devoured by the very forests it called home. The people of Eo have been turned into beasts wandering the woods and preying...
Assuming the planet is earth-like, with more surface water and atmospheric oxygen, and within the habitable zone of a sun-like star, how can a moon orbiting this planet retain a thick atmosphere? ...
Imagine a race of what we would call 'giants', each of them possibly around 8 to 10 feet (2.40-3.00 meters) tall. What differences would they need compared to us regular humans in order to function...
The established fact is that the shape of a planet's continental coastlines is determined by the planet's climate. Higher temperatures mean less ice, which ultimately means higher sea levels. (Ca...
Assuming that horses went extinct early in history, what would replace the horse, and how would the change in domesticated animal affect the development of the first civilizations? Info on horse e...
One of Milutin Milankovic's three big factors in his ice age theories was Earth's obliquity, or axial tilt. Earth's axial tilt varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees at an approximation of 41,000 ye...
TLDR; what would weather be like with minimal axial tilt? Included is a picture of my climate map and several perspectives of a paper model I made of the planet. The ocean covers over half the pla...
So there's this planet that, several decades earlier, suffered a massive famine and drought that made habitation impossible. Everyone still alive on this planet died, except for 2 escapees, both of...
In the far future, man is trying to build a small colony in the asteroid belt - on one of the bigger asteroids. All the materials are to be mined from asteroids, and it is assumed the colony will h...
I have created a planet which is a clone of Earth. Except I messed up where wasps, cobras and scorpions were concerned and they have turned out to be the size of elephants (everything in proportio...
***** Xenobiology expedition 'Profundity': Log entry 504 ***** Glass Ants are a fascinating species. We discovered them on an arid desert world last visited by humanity aeons ago. They seem to h...
