General Q&A about worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from science.
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In many fantasy works, the world typically has giant caverns that house entire civilizations and ecosystems that are (mostly) disconnected from the world above. However, this concept, at least in ...
just suddenly struck by curiosity, i vaguely remember that big quadrupedal or hexapodal (if you count the wings) animals cant fly well basically. I dont remember why, but i think it was related to ...
I read a theory once which stated that the natural pain, sickness and general discomfort that humans can experience during sex, pregnancy, and childbirth help control the human population by discou...
The largest eye in the world belongs to the giant squid, which has eyes up to 27 cm in diameter (some reports from the 1800s say 40 cm). Extinct ichthyosaurs also had very large eyes, 20-30 cm in d...
I'm designing a species of tiny humanoids. They are about 13cm tall. Normally that would make them have very high pitched voices but I want them to be able to also speak in a lower pitch. Siamang...
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...
With the proper composition and mass, is it possible for a planetary body to collide with Earth and embed itself onto the mantle? To clarify, while immense destruction would undoubtedly occur to t...
Say there's an in-universe weapon so odd looking that it is rumored to have been stained by the blood of a "holy" mortal, so much so that no amount of water can wash it away. Is there a chance hu...
The Apex predator of the Sea of Grass biome from planet Andromeda is mostly bipedal, but capable of facultative quadrupedalism, it has long limbs, powerful claws on its hands and is roughly the siz...
On the earths surface, radar is pretty sweet. It apparently penetrates the atmosphere well and bounces back and can be detected. I think this has to do with the wavelengths absorbed by our atmosp...
In my alternative universe, Atlantis was a real city that existed, although it wasn't called Atlantis or founded by humans. Atlantis or rather, Dosham was a city on an isolated landmass in the nort...
Ok so my creature will look like this They're not big, about 2 feet tall. They're technically amphibians but have the scaly hide of a reptile. They live near the sea. Their life cycle is simila...
Rather than creating an entire world for my worldbuilding project, I was planning on adding an additional continent to Earth. Since the largest "empty spot" is in the South Pacific and one of my go...
I understand that one does not simply scale up the smallest of creatures to the size of megafauna without violating basic physiological constraints like the square/cube law, among others; so what w...
In my previous post, I asked about how tall trees could grow in my world. To be honest, I really need those trees to be huge for my storie, because a big part of the plot will be linked to those bi...
So I've been thinking about the idea of a series that takes place on a small fleet of generation ships, traveling at around 10% of lightspeed to Proxima Centauri, which should take around half a ce...
Consider a magic system that follows the Eragon model; "doing it by magic takes just as much (biological) energy as doing it the mundane way". In Eragon, magical energy can be drawn from other liv...
How plausible is a six-limbed flying animal roughly the size of hatzegopteryx to be aerial? In this case, an aerial animal will be defined as a creature that solely inhabits the sky. I will call t...
Let's have your typical fantasy world, with many races. During searching what I could do to make humans a little special, someone give me idea of letting them to be only race that have ability to d...
Some 55.8 million years ago, Earth underwent a really dramatic heat wave known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. What happened, exactly? We don't know how it happened, but we do k...
Imagine a spacecraft in a highly eccentric orbit. Say the craft burns at periapsis towards the planet such that its orbital eccentricity does not change and the craft's periapsis moves with the shi...
A bit of backstory: I'm attempting to create a militaristic alien race composed of elite warriors capable of conquering the galaxy. They posses a variety of "enhanced" abilities such as immense str...
Would it be possible to put hydrogen into a vacuum chamber and use something to turn it into a smaller version of a star? I am making a scene with a simulated planet environment in space and wanted...
I like the idea of elves having a distinct weakness against iron, to the point where they're intensely scared of it and can't stand the touch of it. My question is: Assuming the Elves are mostly...
In the grim darkness of the 22,d century, there is only war. humanity has waged war on itself for decades, turning many areas of the planet into wastelands. With every decade that passes, new weapo...
A cleaner, narrower-focused improvement of How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle, so not a duplicate. For further clarification, eccentricity is the shape of a planet's...
I originally wanted to create giant land biological life-forms but the square cube law is limiting me to sauropod body sized creatures so another element of my story is artificially enhanced biolog...
Those of you who are familiar with the DC Comics hero Firestorm know that he can alter the chemical structure of any form of inorganic matter, provided he knows the chemical equation. In my story, ...
In my universe, humans were seeded on Earth by an advanced race. They were also seeded on other planets, notably Jupiter, Neptune, Venus, and some others in other star systems. They were given a la...
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...
I once before asked a question on how to quickly submerge a large landmass/continent. The answers there basically concluded that literally ''Sinking'' (a la Atlantis) is pretty much impossible to...
Not exactly indestructible, at least after flying to certain height it may pop out. I mean something like the bubble is as hard as stone or steel but still elastic and light to float like bubble, ...
I have been playing with the ideas of electricity generating/attacks for my characters using either electric organs similar to electric eels or some sort of bio battery using bacteria that produce ...
It's something that's been used several times as a plot device on Star Trek, notably in the TOS episode "The Tholian Web", and the TNG episodes "The Next Phase" and "The Pegasus". I'm certain it's ...
So, two nations are in a war, land is off-topic as it's filled with zombies and necromancer zombies. The other logical option is the sea. Now, one nation has these creatures, called wyverns. Wyve...
I'm writing a story about a town whose residents all work at a nuclear reprocessing site. Some teenagers begin to hang out near a small body of water close to the site that they call "the swamp". T...
For my story there exists a fictitious element with special properties. In its pure form is most closely resembles metal (for its physical properties) This material is quite abundant in salt and o...
Around a rocky planet or small gas giant, could there be a system of rings that follow an elliptical orbit? I have used a gravity simulator (this one) to test it, but the way it handles its particl...
Throughout the ages, The Summoners were a prominent family of mages (but technology is magic here), who possess the ability to call forth creatures from cards. Of course they can only summon creatu...
Suppose an extra-solar object the size and mass of the Earth, travelling at a speed of $26\ \mathrm{km/s}$, the same of ʻOumuamua (the first known interstellar object crossing our solar system), h...
I think it will be possible in the far future to take a single person`s cells, genetically enhance and change them using genetic engineering and synthetic biology using new genes, and put it in a 3...
"At this very moment we face a threat insurmountable to Man. We are faced with two options. Stay on Earth and die, or leave Earth to space." - UN Preservation Council, CE 2047 Earth, year CE 2047 ...
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...
NOTE: I previously asked the same question regarding wheels, because I thought that the answers would still help me and that wheels were more applicable to a wider audience than propellers. However...
We are using a Morris-Throne Wormhole Metric. Let's presume the throat of this wormhole (in internal hyperspace) is short, let's say 1km. Now, as you are travelling through the entrance wormhole,...
In Deep, deep space, there exists a star system with a single planet. This planet, named Dewel, is a large, green gas giant with a mass of about twice Jupiter's. What could this planet's atmosphere...
I need ten Earth years long day-night cycle on my planet. Hemera is a world I am creating as a setting for my story. Name comes from Greek deity - personification of Day. Needs of storytelling hav...
During much of the Cretaceous period, oxygen levels were substantially higher than they are currently, with estimates indicating that around 30% of the atmosphere consisted of oxygen. Obviously, t...
I'm imagining a hypothetical scenario based on the Big Rip theory of the end of the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip), where eventually the expansion of the universe causes everythin...
So, If you're familiar with the anime GATE (not to be confused with Stein's Gate) or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you probably know what's going on and why I have a boiling hatred t...
