Posts tagged reality-check
Context: Brains in Vats and Virtual Reality on Steroids In the (reasonably near) future, humans have developed the field of medicine significantly, and we now have the technology to isolate the b...
Mythbusters did an episode about trying to foil a blood hound, when Adam played a convict who tried to make the dog lose his trail. Every trick he did failed like washing, changing clothes, going ...
Giant Planetary Ring Bases (or GPRB's) are space stations built on planetary rings or are artificial rings themselves, such as Starship Troopers' Luna Base But are these super stations feasible?...
In many countries, we number the years based off of proximity to an event in the Christian religion - we are over 2016 years past that date. However, in this scenario, religion has become less main...
Could two planets in the same solar system sustain life? I have one world that is about the size of our own planet. The other planet is farther away from the first planet think of it like Mars but ...
Santa keeps his elves under horrid, appalling conditions. Working everyday of the year for little pay in the freezing cold of the North Pole. But just how many elves does he need? How many elves w...
I have a metallic alloy called "Attrahite" in my world that conducts gravity the way that copper conducts electricity. Currently in the world, passing an electric charge through Attrahite "activate...
Some estimates put the percent of Earth's surface covered by landfills at 0.02%. Even if the world composted and recycled as much as possible, we would be left with an insanely large amount of w...
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/thermal-metamaterial-innovation-could-help-bring-waste-heat-harvesting-technology-to-power-plants,-factories.html http://www.nature.com/articles/nc...
My novel take place in a world where the civil war in Ukraine escalates to a Third World War after a terrorist attack (dirty nuclear warhead) in Kiev. This war is ruled by Private Military Compani...
So, on the Planet of the Aves, Tres' sapient crows are the dominant sapient species. Given that your average bird spends plenty of time on the wing, how intuitive would they find subsonic aerodyna...
Ideally this would be some sort of sun or star-related natural disaster that would affect the entire planet and make life outside of protected/shielded areas extremely dangerous. This is a human-in...
So most of you have probably heard of extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air to make water. In a world where water could be scarce, is this technique even feasible? Specifically, assuming ex...
According to several sources, all organisms process information at different rates - to a fly, the world is in slow motion (relative to humans), for instance, but to a pigeon, the world may move fa...
The animal I envision is very protective over its planet. It goes out into space and eats anything that gets close to it. To do this, the animal can float through space, and leave/re-enter the atmo...
I was wondering on others people's ideas on how to take a Space Age civilization and send it back to the stone or bronze age. My own idea was that war and disease broke out, crippling the nation as...
Let's not delve into specific genuses, families, orders etc. Broaden your definition of "classifications" to words like "mammal" or "fish", "crustacean" or "avian". Science fiction depictions of...
Are there any reasonably plausible alternatives to the process used by our plants on earth (Carbon Dioxide, Chlorophyll, Oxygen) around which an ecosystem could be built in a planet with a complete...
I am a huge Minecraft fan and just realized, this hasn't been asked before, so I wanted to ask a live-long (31. August 2009) question, and pay my obulus to the Anatomically Correct series. I have ...
Assuming you already had sufficient money and resources to build a tower stretching from the top of Europa's ice layer down to the bottom of the seabed, could you build it on top of one of its geys...
I have an idea for a story in a post-apocalyptic setting where guns and other explosive devices unusable or otherwise impractical. Is it possible to do this by changing the atmosphere (either by a...
Back home and in this alternate scenario, the Ozarks are all that remains of a Proterozoic mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago. Back home, the Ozarks look like this, highlit in lime: ...
I'm writing a science fiction novel set 100 million years in the future, but humanity is still the same basic form we have today, biologically speaking. Would 100 million years of evolution drastic...
I just had an idea "“ likely an absurd one "“ but it could make an interesting plot. Picture this scenario "“ Present day earth. (easy to picture) But, there is an antagonist. He has a facility ...
In an Earth-like world with a moon as large as this: Would the larger tides discourage oceanic shipping?
A person is born with no senses, so he can't hear, speak or sense. The only way in which the world can communicate with him is through brain signalling. So they can send different signals to his b...
Pretty simple question. Whether you're launching a spy satellite, building a top secret orbital missile weapon, or investigating a mysterious alien artifact in orbit around Earth heralding the retu...
I am considering whether a pre-Industrial civilisation could carry on for millennia on an Earth-like planet without entering the Industrial Age. Of course, regularly destroying everything with pla...
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." "” H.P. Lovecraft One example of this is the universal fear of the da...
At the center of my small (one million star maximum) galaxy, there is an incredibly enormous light pillar, originated from a ridiculously huge super-construction. The stars orbit around the giant o...
In the future, AI systems sanitize humans as they walk through doorways. Home surfaces self-sanitize. Food is mostly 3D printed from cleaned particles, including Vitamin K and possibly some probiot...
In the overly sterile environment my characters live in, the AIs supplement probiotics with food servings for the humans. Let's say one type of gut flora went extinct. The AIs are trying to fix t...
I've been reading this question about agriculture for merfolk and more specifically the accepted answer. They mention the problem of food preservation only minutely. Now I'd like to pour that thoug...
Simply put is there an upper bound for the largest possible living creature in a scientifically rational world without incorporating anti-gravity, magic, the force, or other physical concepts we ar...
How would you justify hidden aliens on Mars, which no one on Earth has discovered yet? I was thinking over it, and having them be primitive or highly advanced seems a necessity. The latter gives a...
This world is all water, and I want the trees to be the only thing that represents land. The trees are horizontally positioned, and start from a large self sufficient floating seed pod, much like a...
I'm looking for creative people with knowledge of radio waves and space flight to help me out. I'm currently writing a screenplay about a spacecraft that is basically a radio antenna in space. The...
Would it be at all viable for a person to have certain plant characteristics such as: Chloroplasts in their hair and skin, with the skin maybe lookmuch darker because of extra light absorbance (m...
On an Earthlike planet with one large moon (just like Earth's), I have a large landlocked sea with one narrow exit (like the Black Sea, but much larger, something like six or eight Mediterraneans, ...
I'm trying to design human like race where all the children are born as girls, but later in life some of them switch to male, but no sooner then 15. Usually only the most dominant women switch, so ...
So I'm pretty sure your are all aware of what a cell is the microscopic organic units that make up all life. Well they don't have to be microscopic. An unfertilized chicken egg is a single cell. ...
A short time ago I read that life might be possible on interstellar planets (i.e. planet-like objects which aren't bound to a star by gravity.) They may be insanely cold on the surface but inside t...
Cube worlds are cool and many people like them but unfortunately, they are less than feasible. Does this have to be this way though? What factors could lead to the creation of a roughly cube shape...
In a world I am building, I want the primary species to be 100% peaceful. The best way I have thought of for doing this post-sapience is to remove all identifying traits (skin, eye and hair color, ...
Western civilisation fell over a few centuries ago, because the Earth shifted back into a full on ice age climate. Oh and Skynet kind of happened. Ice sheets expanded, inexorably rolling over the...
My premise involves a habitable planet with a dual core: it has two masses similar in composition to Earth's core, which revolve around each other over the course of hundreds of thousands of years...
Suppose a mad engineer needs the world destroyed by next Tuesday. For efficiency's sake, he considers "Gray Goo," a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario in which self-replicating machines devour ...
Space nets are a theoretical space organism designed by Tim B, to quote him: Imagine a life-form shaped like a giant net. It gathers space dust into itself to grow, using light from stars bot...
I'm developing a world in the near future where a start-up company develops an artificial womb. Now well-off people could grow their children from their eggs & sperm. My story is about couples ...
The primary armament of the space warships of a race I am building use an armament that consists of explosive shells that have a rocket engine in them. The idea is that they are fired from the shi...
