Posts tagged reality-check
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// AeT-Shield The shield uses nan...
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Humans require energy (food) to operate, but that energy must return back to the environment one way or another. If given an unlimited supply of handwave m...
I am creating a race of aliens that are amphibious and mammalian in detail, they have six tentacles, bunny ears and also fur covering their bodies. They are about 3-4 ft in length, if this species ...
I recently finished reading the Kim Stanley Robinson novel 2312 - set, of course, in the year 2312. Part of the background to the political negotiations and ongoing terraforming in the outer Solar ...
Scenario: The Moon disappears slowly -- within 3 days. It is a result of natural causes and we don't have any control over this disaster. What will be the Major Effects On Earth and life on Earth?
I am an average person being hunted down by a homicidal cyborg. He is about 90% metal, with his only remaining organ being a brain and all other meat on him being tissues which serve only as an anc...
I really think that we can feed way more than our current population using more advanced farming IF WE FIND A WAY TO PRODUCE CHEAP RENEWABLE ENERGY. The solution would be hydroponic vertical farms...
I would like to create a sentient creature with telepathy and/or telekinesis. Can either (or both) of these concepts exist biologically? If yes, what would the biological mechanism be? Would ...
Radiating heat into a vacuum is a no-go, so a spaceship that generates any kind of heat is going to be in trouble. I had an idea for a potential solution - dumping your heat into a disposable heat ...
This is sort of on the more realistic side of worldbuilding, but maybe somewhat exaggerated for the sake of a setting. What's the fastest atmospheric pressure drop in weather records? This questi...
So, assume that you have 1m$^3$ of normal Terran seawater you can adiabatically raise to an arbitrarily high pressure/temperature in situ (say, by compressing it with nuclear shockwaves from all di...
This question is about a phenomenon in the Dark Forest, part of the Three Body Problem science-fiction trilogy often considered 'hard science'. Be warned: there are major spoilers below for those w...
Generally, when you run a long distance or do something particularly strenuous, you start breathing heavily because of a decrease of oxygen in your blood. Your gasping and weezing is in an effort t...
The readership of science fiction gets smarter over time, so making your SF "smart" (even if it's not hard SF) is an ever-moving target. This earlier question makes me think about Conservation of ...
Here's the scenario: 400 million years ago, a species of lobe-finned fish created tetrapod history as it gulped up air, not water. Fast-forward to 342 million years ago, and one species immediate...
In the game Portal, there are glowing light platforms. These platforms are (supposedly) made of solid, compressed light. How can these realistically be made?
Looking for options with at least some grounding in science: Several hundred years in our future, a group of wealthy philanthropists lavishly funded a colonisation project designed to create a Uto...
On my planet, the only animals are plankton, krill, shrimp, etc., but no fish or land animals. The colonists on this planet have brought equipment and embryos from the home world, but the only free...
So let's say you live in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world. For whatever reason, this world is now infested with cockroaches the size of chickens (similar to radroaches from the Fallout games, bu...
Checkpoints have been a staple of video games for decades and are almost as old as video games themselves, but how? These little tiny features have made a huge difference in the way we play games, ...
A world, I am building, had been flooded, causing a species of fire ant that makes ant rafts to evolve a collective behavior, ditching anthills and becoming an ant-hill (I'm not sorry). Over thousa...
Let's say there is planet, similar to Earth in almost all respects. However, some sort of geological process has shattered its continents, leaving lots of islands no larger than Iceland with shallo...
It's hard to create a new animal from scratch. If you genetically modify an existing species until it becomes a drastically different species, then implant the fertilized embryo in a female of th...
Based on an answer of mine from a few months ago, I've been inspired to adapt the concept to my own Life Ball. Fair warning- this question and some of its links are not for the squeamish. May con...
Here's the background. I'd like the planetary year to be just under 800 days, with a longer number of hours per day-cycle. If the settlers live in the Mediterranean type climate area only and use g...
There have been many questions of moving, floral animals, most of these focus on their intelligence, but what about their sense of sight. I fail to understand how a botanic based alien would be abl...
There have been a few questions on mobile plants on this site and even more on their intelligence, but one that has not been asked so far is related to the lifeblood of creatures: blood. Inside of ...
A plethora of previous questions have queried the existence of botanic (plant) intelligence and they all have created good solutions, but their still remains a even bigger problem to even the dumbe...
Let's say that, in a universe modelled after Patema Inverted, there are two "flavors" of matter: one which is attracted by gravity (so when dropped on Earth it would fall down), and one which is in...
I'm exploring various kinds of potentially habitable planets as part of a universe-building exercise, and have recently delved into the fascinating concept of carbon-rich planets. My question is mu...
[WARNING] Approximate physics incoming A few months ago I was looking for a way to get to Gliese 581 within 100 years. So I've been reading a lot from Wikipedia and other sites about different pro...
Cancer works by making cells split and reproduce at an accelerated rate, slowly and painfully killing the afflicted. Its true weapon lies in its ability to surpass the immunity system. As far as ...
I'm designing planets for a hard (ish) science fiction RPG setting. So I want to find out if there are any clues or theories as to what proportion of planets with life will have the basic biochemis...
I have an idea for a scify/lost technology world, that I would like to check the plausibility of. What I want A terran world of large size. The crust of the world is thin, and hostile gas-organis...
Long story short I need a unique ring system around a Jovian planet and thus I think of möbius strip. Can a gas giant have a ring system shaped like möbius strip exist naturally? Why do I post ...
I recently learned about a chemical known as chlorine trifluoride. This utter abomination of chemistry reacts to almost everything, setting glass, sand, asbestos, and rust on fire (to name only a f...
Introduction: I've spent some fair amount of time thinking about inventing an element to make part of my world easier for me. In this case, it is an LTA gas which I gave the WIP name LAL-gas (Leich...
We can rebuild him. We have the budget... but do we have the technology? In the process of reviewing the proposed enhancements for the Six Billion Dollar Man the following was discovered: Enh...
We can rebuild him. We have the budget... but do we have the technology? In the process of reviewing the proposed enhancements for the Six Billion Dollar Man, such as improved oxygen use, the fol...
I won't claim to be a biologist, but I'm fairly certain that it's really hard for disease to survive in space because most bacteria and viruses need a host in order to survive for long periods of t...
Context Recently, scientists have began researching superatoms and supermolecules in depth. The premise is that existing, natural elements can be rearranged into clusters, in the lab, to exhi...
Tolkien wrote on The Silmarillion about Tol Eressea, an island that the vala Ulmo (a god-like figure) used to ferry the elves back and forth across the sea into the Western lands. José Saramago al...
When confronted with cloning which leaves the original alive, there is the known issue that the clone could want to replace the original (e.g. as seen in The 6th day). A shared consciousness is ver...
A terrorist wants to shoot a bomb down onto an unsuspecting high-value target, for instance Washington DC. So, the terrorists somehow get a private space company to deploy what seems to be a norm...
In this scenario, all the humans on earth have disappeared, except for Fred. Sure, Fred is sad that everyone that exists is dead but him, including his friends and family, but he doesn't let that g...
To My Valued Fellows, As we are all aware, our people have made tremendous progress both evolutionarily and technologically. Thanks to us, our species is protected from the ravages of cancer and w...
Venus is being paraterraformed with floating cities. Mechanical machines collect material from the surface and send it floating at an altitude of about 50 Km where conditions are more Earth-like. H...
A pharmaceutical company begins drug trials of a pill that they believe can activate a previously understudied and widely unknown region of the brain. The trial begins and when the first participan...
I'm considering a story set about fifty years (2065) in the future. It takes a rather optimistic view; space exploration has led to colonies on the Moon and Mars, as well as several space stations ...
This question on Physics.SE asks whether other colors are possible for the sky. I would like my planet to be inhabitable by normal humans. It has 768 days and they are living in a temperate/Medite...
