Posts tagged reality-check
About 5 billion years from now, the Sun will begin to swell into a red giant. This will cause some problems, because life on a planet orbiting a red giant is hard. Even if Earth isn't engulfed by t...
I am trying to fact check a consistent set of properties and applications for the titular unobtainium from the Mass Effect games in order to avoid introducing contradictions. Certain sources I rea...
Ok, so, some quick background... I'm not an evolutionary biologist or anything, but I'm helping a friend with some alien design ideas, and at least one of them she designed and wanted help to someh...
On a distant planet covered mostly by water a species of highly intelligence cephalopods have evolved and even developed space travel. The problem? Most other species are land dwellers and the cep...
In my research on how I could get elves to live the time spans I wanted them to live, I came up with this solution: Every elf generates while still developing inside the womb of the mother copies ...
In my story, there is a puppet master who uses disturbingly realistic marionettes in his theater. His goal is to create a marionette that is wholly indistinguishable from a real person, aside from ...
My main antagonist is an infant Great One that's been imprisoned below the Moon's surface and I want its influence and physical form to have a weakness to direct sunlight which, I think, gives me a...
I have a scenario where a spaceship has been badly damaged and now the normal vibrations of the power supply are becoming amplified through the damaged hull, and threatening to tear the ship apart....
Could a moon or planet with otherwise no atmosphere maintain gas pockets in sufficiently deep craters, and could it be habitable by humans without pressure or space suits? I found this similar que...
Description : Even in the ⅩⅩth century, biological warfare was studying only existing diseases. But recently we're able to modify viruses in order to cure genetic impairments. Would it be pos...
Without changing a planet from being habitable for humans and keeping a similar ecosystem why could intelligent races never access electricity? What in society or behavior could stop people from ...
Without changing a planet from being habitable for humans and keeping a similar ecosystem why could intelligent races never access electricity? What systems need to be erased from the planet to ...
This may seem similar to this question but my goal is for one: The bird does not die and secondly to get more exact solutions. The ultimate goal would be to create a bird which can ignite itself...
The Limbo People (who are hominids with intelligence somewhere between chimpanzees and humans) have long survived by hunting wild boar. They use spears with wooden hafts and flint tips. They are a ...
For a Matrix-type future I want to feed people via solid food. This is to keep all their internal organs working properly. The idea is to feed them an endless kebab that is held together along its...
Without going into great details for the reasons behind it, people in The City travel everywhere by bicycle. There are no stairs or lifts (elevators) in high rise buildings and no safe parking spa...
I spent my life, my fortune, my family connections... I sold my children into slavery and my soul to Ilnarren... Wanted posters hang from from the Abyss of Shrondir to the expanse of d'o (most bea...
According to multiple reputable sources, the idea of "photographic memory" in humans is a myth. While some people may be unusually adept at certain things involving memory - like remembering the la...
I want to know if the disease I invented is logical or just a total fiction. A parasite (parasitic fungus) lives within the human brain. It infects other humans by releasing spores while invokin...
Set in modern day, a small warren of rabbits randomly achieve sapience in an unremarkable, rural countryside. These rabbits become capable of thinking and self-reflection, as well as advanced teamw...
There are many hypothetical systems for bringing spacecraft of the near-future up to speed, some of which may attain some relativity-bending velocities. However, these systems, to achieve such high...
In the future, personal Cryonics (in the hope of cure or immortality on re-awakening)) have become enormously popular. However there is a storage problem. There just isn't enough space for all the ...
My world has a semi-nomadic people that inhabit a vast sandy desert. Underneath this desert lie the ruins of an enormous metropolis -- a city that was abandoned tens of thousands of years ago. In ...
After asking this question, What's the worst natural disaster that could hit New York City in our lifetime, it looks like the most popular answer was a Tsunami. A tsunami, however, from the sources...
In the distant future, space-stations use centrifugal force to emulate gravity, effectively being a cylinder (or something similar like a wheel) spinning around a central axis at high speeds. A sp...
So I am writing a Sci-Fi novel where humans are currently spread out over 440 Star systems ( ~ 2000 Light years). There has been several breakthroughs in Automation technology and all manual labor ...
Assuming we are unable to see the black hole via any way such as gravitational lensing, accretion disc or whatever. This is hand wave approach just to make my setting work, due to this answer whic...
So I've always assumed Mars never had enough available CO2 on-site for terraforming, something that new research seems to have confirmed. But my ideas have always relied on getting CO2 from altern...
An airborne disease with an incubation time of 18 years goes unnoticed, but spreads across the world. 18 years later, its "timer" goes off, killing all adults. Good idea (thanks, @Morfium !), but I...
Premise I envisage a world of would-be navigators with roughly Bronze Age technology, sailing on ships to explore their planet. In contrast to our history of navigation where we "cracked the code"...
In my book I have a city which is constantly dark. The sun doesn't reach it. This is because it's a city of waste, so all the waste gets thrown into this city and lit on fire every single day, whic...
Humanity, with modern science, has established that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. The universe appeared in a low-entropy state, and for billions of years has been expanding and movi...
An astrophysical jet is a stream of particles emitted by matter falling into an supermassive star/black hole, travelling at up to 80% the speed of light. A troll with a portal gun (which places p...
First of all, I tried to look if this wasn't answered before. Found this and this but neither is exactly what I need. Some Context There's this race of humanoid fish people. They live in cities b...
This is the continuation of a thread of related posts on a hypothetical alternate universe/Light Plane. Other posts from this thread are here: How To Make an Earth with 27 Suns Work Radiation L...
I have two magical stones. The first one"”let's call it fire stone"”is a stone that able to increase its temperature equal to that of a normal fire. The second one"”as you might already guess, is ...
Is it theoretically possible to genetically alter humans so that they could live off solar energy like plants? What biological and physiological changes would have to be made?
Somewhat in relation to this question - What could restrain post-singularity societies from spreading across the Galaxy? I'm assuming not all star systems move at the same velocity in relation to ...
An IPCC report of Oct 8, 2018 indicates - to keep the world temperature rise at or below 1.5 C, we need to reduce our CO2 emissions globally from the 2010 level by 45% by 2030, and a further 55% r...
EDITED to address the above suggestion. See below. Most animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon-dioxide. Most plants take in carbon-dioxide and release oxygen. Waste products from ani...
Assume a universe depressingly like ours, in which special relativity holds. No hyperspace, no warp drive, no wormholes, and even the limited get-out clauses offered by real world physics either do...
An evil scientist has engineered a plague that would kill anyone with an xy chromosome pair. This plague has systemicatically spread throughout the planet, killing all males within the population. ...
Could werewolves exist in a realistic world? All that is required for an accepted answer is the ability to change shape over night. Bonus points will be awarded if you can explain a bite spreading...
I'm creating a humanoid species, roughly based on humans. The difference is that not every opposite sex couple of fertile age could produce offspring. The premise of my story is based of some men...
As we all know the Earth is flat. Once upon a time a group of explorers set off with the idea of proving that the world was round and that there was a route to the spice islands the other way, but ...
In another question Everybody has a brain implant. What measures can a criminal take to escape justice? I assumed that a brain implant would be possible in the future for surveillance. In this que...
Is it possible for there to be a "solar system" of sorts with a black hole and a few suns orbiting around it? Could that system be stable and (if so) would it be possible for some civilization(s) ...
I'd like two medieval societies to be separated from one another by a huge vertical wall. The wall is so high that no-one has succeeded in shooting an arrow (or anything else) over it. It disappea...
Most current planets, and any inhabitants living on them, are ultimately the product of long-dead supernovas that exploded and sent matter across the universe, where it eventually got caught with o...
Larry Niven defines a macro-life civilisation as one that lives in interstellar spacecraft, independent of planetary resources and culture, full time and by implication keeps moving. This could mea...
