Posts tagged reality-check
I'm working on a setting with merfolk that I'd prefer to be fully mammalian. However, they have underwater cities and I find that hard to believe for a species that needs to surface every few hour...
As far as I know, summer and winter are governed by the amount of sunlight absorbed per unit area, where longer days would increase the temperature along with a higher sun angle. To elaborate on ...
I am currently creating a world for a series of fantasy short stories (and hopefully movies one day), and I need some help with the science. Ideally, I would like the story to take place on a moon ...
The world I am creating is in a swamp that contains larger than life bugs; this includes fireflies. What I ask is, could the bioluminescence of their glow somehow be harnessed or used as a light so...
Assume a civilisation with futuristically advanced knowledge of biochemistry. Assume it wants to develop a cybernetic device meant to facilitate the organism's ability to perform high-power activit...
I've pretty much finished the map of a world I'm building for a fantasy novel, but I've realised that on one of the continents I need there to be forest on both sides of a large mountain range. I'v...
Suppose that for some reason gravity magically changes, but only for people. While this goes on, instead of gravity pulling people down, it pushes them East. To be clear, it's just people. Not anim...
I am trying to design a single seat fighter capable of achieving (or getting close to) hypersonic velocities at high altitude. In this universe I am assuming compact fusion is a common technology. ...
I have a planetary system with a yellow dwarf similar to our own Sun and three habitable planets. I want to hide this system from sight and long range scans in a nebula, a giant cloud of dust and ...
Some background In the movie The Wandering Earth, the rotation of Earth is slowed to a stop, and then 10000 engines are strapped to one side of the planet and used to accelerate it out of the sola...
I'm writing a drama book and it's meant to be taken 100% seriously, and the main character was born with an allergy to $H_2O$. She does not have Aquagenic Urticaria, as that only affects the skin. ...
I want to build a habitable desert gas-giant moon and I´m not sure how little water I can give it and still get plate-tectonics instead of an Io-like lid-tectonic setup. I want plate tectonics bec...
I'm in the process of designing a creature loosely resembling a theropod dinosaur that sports a number of horns/tusks on its head and face, and I'm wondering if anyone can help me evaluate its feas...
I am trying to wrap my head around the geography of a settlement in my world. The settlement is situated along the coast, along a river roughly 500m wide with temperate mixed forests surrounding i...
I would like to use this scenario in writing a book. Using only countless balloons that permanently hold hydrogen made from water could a city be built in the sky? Workers from the ground can rai...
Premise I recently recalled when the Chelyabinsk meteor crashed overhead in 2013. The pressure wave was immense. The infrasounds, as recorded by nuclear missile detectors, appeared to traverse the...
With the evolving global warming and thawing of permafrost, an ancient deadly virus begins to spread from Siberia across Eurasia, affecting domestic animals first and mutating quickly onto the rest...
I have a potential sub-plot in a story that takes place in the not too distant future where most of the world's fossil fuels are exhausted or contaminated (war reasons more than environmental) and ...
This question is about the Cube Prison as seen in the 2012 film The Cabin in the Woods. My question is not about the film or its lore, but how the cube prison can be constructed. Specifically, ...
Premise I want to explore the possibility of a planet that is extremely misshapen. If we were to extrapolate what we have observed from our solar system and the extra-solar planets discovered so f...
As far as I could gather the digestion relies on enzymes which in turn set requirements for pH. Is it possible for an alien creature to have a different set of enzymes that require basic environme...
If a spaceplane like the Rockwell X-30 existed and was flying to a location in geostationary orbit, would it be substantially more efficient to take off from a runaway at the equator, or would it n...
Assume there's a spaceship in earth orbit that its crew of 24 want to get to Mars, the crew are all humans and possess all of modern day knowledge and equipment, is it possible for said ship to mak...
Planetary conditions: ~0.5x Earth gravity (guess: 0.9x Earth density, 0.777x Earth radius, so about 0.42 Earth masses... but that's probably not important). Atmosphere broadly similar to Earth but ...
So, let's say we have a character like this: Living in a place like this: In many post-apocalyptic media, leather jackets and blue jeans are the main form of attire for characters, even ones ...
I'm creating humanoid specie with two subspecies Hairy races - roughly based on humans, chiss, mirialans, with standard males & females sexes Tentacle races- roughly based on asari, twilek, t...
I assume a planet like earth. Obviously the Amazon river is fed into the Andes mountains as well as other rivers that give water to the system. Could the same amount of water come from a specific c...
I want to know about the plausibility and required parameters of the following scenario: Take an Earth-like planet, about the same size, composition and gravity. It has no plate tectonics to speak...
A livescience.com article claims that trees can reach a theoretical height of 400 to 426 feet (122 to 130m). This is due to the tree being unable to carry water up to the top at that certain point ...
Flame lickers work by sucking hot air into a cylinder and then relying on the cooling of the air by the cylinder wall to create a partial vacuum to pull the piston back. see video In an alternat...
I want to put a story in place where a country lived underwater, and I am wondering of its viability. Here is the world description: It is a square of 100 km*100 km on the ocean with the weather ...
I was thinking of a life form with a similar surface temperature to Earth, as well as a similar temperature variation to that of Earth. Could such a life form evolve an organ for generating temper...
Knowing foam is formed by trapping pockets of gas in a liquid or solid, what could a foam able to support life on an earth-like planet be made of? This foam ought to be stable enough and large eno...
Whilst not strictly relevant to this question, the questions and answers may interest the curious: this is the 4th in a series of question here - 1, 2, 3. My population (in excess of 500,000) und...
In the movie Kingsmen, there is a poison which behaves differently from most other poisons. It has to be ingested in order to kill, but that is not enough. It is harmless until a radio signal is b...
I am trying to write a sci-fi setting in a not so distant future in which analog signal (brainwaves, in this case) processing is one of the main points of the plot and pretty much required to expla...
I was inspired by Dead Space which had cloned organ banks for transplants due to mining accidents. I honestly found this idea intriguing so what I'm wondering would it be practical or do better alt...
During an ice age, would it be possible for a great lake to be frozen while a relatively nearby river was still running? To help illustrate my point: Would it be possible for Lake Michigan (or par...
In a sci-fi universe where man has the capability to leave our solar system would metals or alloys above and beyond our own be possible? Or at least within the bounds of reasonable possibility? As ...
The great venture capitalist Elian Minsk has decided to start an "autonomous" car driving service. But who needs complicated AI based systems when he can hire tech support workers in India to driv...
On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens made American history with an eruption that took 57 human lives and killed thousands of animals. It has released only a quarter of a cubic mile of ash, but it i...
I was wondering if an object that changes its own mass could exist. But let's try not to fill it up with air or other gas so it feels "lighter". That way you could protect things from being stolen...
In my world there is an old human guarding something of great significance. All chemical reactions in their body have been slowed down to a microscopic fraction of what is deemed usual*. Once the ...
Supposing climate change continues at its current "worst case" projected rates, would we see a noticeable reduction in insects down the line? I am wondering if it makes sense to have a character wh...
Long ago, I asked a question on how to make the Nine Realms of Norse mythology--Niflheim, Muspelheim, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfhiem, Svartalfheim and Helheim--a reality in regards t...
A space opera sultan has a problem. Sentient androids are haram, but an unwelcome android spy has saved his life and helped prevent a coup. Rather than have the android destroyed as his ministers d...
In my setting, centaurs are related to other six-limbed creatures such as dragons and griffins (the "fur" is actually made up of tiny feathers). Assuming they were originally creatures similar to s...
So, let's say Bill wants to gain immortality. Bill is a billionaire, and so invests a large portion of his estate to Brain Transplant research. After a bit, the doctors vivisect him, and encase his...
Right from the beginning, the xenarthrans--armadillos, sloths and anteaters--have been at a disadvantage. For the longest time, their home was an island continent, which made them extremely vulner...
There is a forest in my world with a special property: All the trees are optimised to shade as much as possible during summer and give as little shadow as possible during winter, to regulate the te...
