Posts tagged reality-check
Idea I'm interested in exploring the following concept: people have discovered a certain kind of matter, let's call it "Unobtanium" (as it always goes). Unobtanium actually has mass and is compri...
Inspired by this great answer. There is a planet with: Floatium, a superconductor that behaves as such at 0 ºC and is found in nature. A stronger magnetic field than Earth's. In really cold a...
I made a question regarding floating cities coming from a misunderstanding of this great answer. Luckily one comment showed me how floating cities could be possible in a slightly different scenari...
Can we go from this: to this: Suppose over millennia (or as long as it takes) humans on Earth are artificially selected by aliens to be big and healthy. Is there any theoretical reason that ...
Following my last question asked regarding oviparous humanoids, is there a way for evolution to 'regard' females as the more dominant gender without going down that road, forming a heavily matriarc...
In my world a space civilization is colonizing a massive solid planet. The planet has an extraordinarily fast rotation. The gravity is severe at the poles, making life impossible, but life flouri...
In the movie Interstellar, Miller's planet is an ocean planet orbiting extremely close to a black hole. The ridiculous tidal effects caused by the black hole cause the planet's water to concentrate...
So, let's say a group of survivors tie an immortal being to a young tree sapling. The immortal does not need food, nor water, so can survive indefinitely. After about 100 years, could that young ...
I am currently working a humanoid roughly deer-like species in a sci-fi roleplay setting, and one of the developments I have had with such species has me stuck trying to explain it in a way that ma...
My world has a city of glass found along the outskirts of a desert. I decided on this because sand can become glass and so it was a huge resource that could be used for building. However, the conc...
So, I have devoted an unhealthy amount of my time to the dragon question, and a final solution will have to wait... for several thousand years at least. My original plan was to make them at around...
Is the following map fairly realistic? It is of a small continent, connected to a larger one, at a Europe like position on the globe. This is the continent in topographical map form, it also inc...
Colobopsis ants explode when they are losing a fight, a behavior which is probably meant to discourage predators from hunting that species. It may also turn tides when in ant wars for territory. W...
The idea is that the concepts of DNA, inheritance, and micro-organisms were discovered significantly earlier in history. Roughly 50 years after the founding of Alexandria as a city state in 332 B.C...
I am working out a future scenario in which humans begin to discover alien life; I want their discoveries to be plausible. For example, I've frequently heard that alien life will most likely be ca...
My ancient golden dragon has a lot of time, since he doesn't die of old age in my world, and a lot of magical constructs that will tirelessly built a defensive mountain chain for him. This chain w...
Well, I have been having computer problems and I decided that now is as good a time as ever to continue to waste my time developing my reptilian, honor-obsessed militaristic race of lizards for a p...
I'm thinking up a Mars or Venus type planet where the poles (or one pole) has a forest growing out of it due to a device that is used to make the planet more habitable by creating a oxygen friendly...
Based on a previous question asking about mechanical computing (Babbage engines, etc.) I wondered how a steampunk story could present the concept of a modern computer monitor in a steam-driven mech...
There's a planet called eaglypt whose surface is 100% barren desert. However, there is a twist: the planet's core consists of liquid water, and there are a few places where this water seeps through...
In my world there is a villain who rules over the unhappy. In fact, we recently determined that he actually absorbs their happiness and uses it as energy to make himself stronger. This world does, ...
Let's say a human were to live most of his life in a 200 G environment but then suddenly enter a 1 g environment, What would be the effects to his body and will this give him the ability to carry l...
A world idea I'm playing with for a sci-fi idea I'm working on has an atmosphere similar to the composition of Earth's atmosphere during the Carboniferous Period: Lots of oxygen, so while a human o...
A centaur as we all know is a horse with a human head (and torso). I would like to consider a reverse centaur, which, for the purposes of this question, I will define to be a human with a horse's ...
While by no means a smoking gun, there is still a reasonable amount of empirical evidence on the notion that socialization and testosterone are negatively correlated. Archaeological Evidence Fro...
Okay, so I have this binary planet system. The main planet a bit bigger than earth with a size appropriate moon-planet. Both are habitable and with a humanoid species that evolved there. But, I k...
Say in a post nuclear holocaust world, elephants managed to survive and adapt. It can consume and digest iron and steel and grow two rows of metallic tusks. When threatened the elephant will lift u...
Considering some of the answers given in a previous question, I would like to ask what climatic phenomenon would be necessary to generate a mega-fog, thick enough to at least reduce the intensity o...
For the purpose of this question (to make the idea more plausible) a vampire is not an undead creature. Rather: A vampire is a human, infected by a symbiotic virus; The virus is present in a vamp...
Imagine that humanity found a rocky planet with earth like gravity, atmospheric pressure, and temperature, orbiting a sun-like star. The only problem is that the planets atmosphere is that it is co...
I'm sure most worldbuilders will have heard the aphorism that in space "Everyone sees Everything", or that "There Ain't No Stealth In Space". I'd like to propose a possible solution to this. Th...
Say you were using a black hole as a propulsion drive á la Crane and Westmoreland http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf- so your black hole has a radius of around .9 attometers - super tiny - around ...
I'm trying to make a world where my "humans" have ZW sex-determination system that means sex is determined in the ovum instead of the sperm. Could I just easily hand-wave everything else as being ...
We know that light exerts pressure upon matter. I'm imagining a hallway where an intense light source on one end shines towards the other end. The goal is to have the beam of light exert so much p...
What happens when two flames (whether from dragons or blowtorches) meet head on? Many films make it appears as a front where the two flames repel each other, but my intuition is that, in fact, the ...
Hypothetical: Hundreds of years into the future. Humanity needs to travel to exoplanets quickly. I'm aiming for hard sci-fi. What kind of propulsion can travel people at 0.1 - 0.9 lightspeed? Is i...
Saw Pacific Rim for the first time with a friend recently; I'd never really thought too hard about giant robots/been as into Mecha and Gundam stuff as some of my friends before, but the Jaeger conc...
The last time I checked ASIMO's battery pack only had enough juice for something like 30 minutes of continuous operation & then it has to plug in & recharge which isn't really that useful. ...
I can understand Super-beings' great strength and some of their other powers, but flying is hard to justify. I want to consider only superheroes that can actually fly rather than merely jump tall ...
How does a joint need to operate and be structured in order to allow a person to do leaps of 10 meters in length with ease and without taking a long run first? Here's an example of what I'm talking...
I apologize if this question is not written up to standards, I am rather new to this site. I have been an avid fan of chucklefish's acclaimed sandbox title, Starbound, for a number of years now a...
So I am interested in doing a kingdom building novel in a sci-fi universe. I was thinking of having a English aristocratic government. With the king at the top and various nobles ( Dukes, Earls, Ma...
Let's say that suddenly NASA needs my characters, a party of scientists without prior experience, to go to space with a Space Shuttle-like spacecraft for a seven days mission. They only need to do...
Some Context The setting is a fantasy world with lots of magic where Liches exist. A Lich is "born" through a series of complex, dangerous and horrific rituals that a mage casts upon himself over...
I want to have a world when humans got serious about global warming and succeeded in making Lithium Air battery work. Since the lithium air has same potential energy density as gas, and electric en...
This is the second part of a series of questions I'll ask about a self-sustaining colonization ship. I'll keep editing this post as things unfold. If you can, check out the other questions of this...
I am writing a scenario for a game that I am a fan of. It involves an asteroid heading for impact with the Earth in 2027. This asteroid's initial diameter is about 1km, but it is slowly disintegrat...
I was recently redesigning some mostly hominid Aliens I designed a long time back in high school and felt were a little lackluster, and since they were already Tall, Wiry, and vaguely Shambolic-Loo...
My story takes place hundreds of years in the future after global warming has made life at the surface uninhabitable for most life forms. What's left of mankind survived because it became popular t...
This is a follow up to a previous question that I thought should be a new question instead of just discussing in the comments of that one. This is an idea for a space station on the surface of ...
