Posts tagged reality-check
So, once there was a war between the titans and the gods. In the end, the gods' leader, Anon, found a way to permanently remove the titans from the world, but the victory extracted a terrible price...
In the story I'm working on, a rift in space time opened up between our world and a layer of oxygen in a gas giant at some point in the past. Eons earlier, a species of fish symbiotically linked wi...
Goal: Just imaging a Star Wars X-Wing fight, and you've got the idea. However, I want to know whether something like that is possible without tons of metaphysical hand-waiving and 'just because'. ...
Part of the Anatomically Correct series of questions. Due to the nature of Superman having so many different powers, I wanted to focus specifically on one aspect of his character: the ability to...
Imagine a species one foot tall that has a relatively large brain for its size. The species has human like intelligence and in principle the ability to build anything that we could. It lives on a w...
When one thinks of a shelled cephalopod, odds are high that the first thing to come to mind are the ammonites. They were one of evolution's success stories, thriving from 400 to 66 million years a...
So it seems that the Nuclear Handgun, Powergun and Absorbic Bomb have all been busted, but this one might be more interesting, Larry Niven's Wunderland Treatymaker. Description of how the weapon (...
The setting I have in mind is an Earth-similar planet which has most of its landmass covered in forests. A civil conflict on this planet ingnites forests fires, which then spread. I was wondering i...
It's 2016, but for some reason, the Cold War never ended. You've been inspired by your (for some inexplicable reason) favorite movie, Indiana Jones 4, to start a new business: building refrigerator...
Unless I am mistaken, a Jaculus, also called a javelin snake, is a creature found in Roman myth, described as a snake that hurls itself from trees and impales its prey. Its head is usually describe...
Amide bonds are extremely stable and their half-life for hydrolysis in neutral aqueous solution is estimated to be seven years. Amides bind to metal ions through the carbonyl oxygen. Neodymium Mag...
Would a horse (trained or otherwise) not be wholly spooked by a Dragon merely flying overhead, even more so trying to enter combat with it or just trying to approach it under any circumstances? Wh...
I was imagining a sort of post-apocalyptic/collapse setting, where a few centuries of climate catastrophes brought on by climate change cause essentially your general end of the world as we know it...
I wish to build a sort of Dyson swarm around the sun. Not to transmit energy, but to put supercomputers in each satellite so they can calculate spatial trajectories. The main idea of the project i...
In large doses, the body's ability to change cyanide into thiocyanate is overwhelmed. Large doses of cyanide prevent cells from using oxygen and eventually these cells die. The heart, respiratory s...
After reading the following question, I know that there are not that many solutions to the 3-body problem, and I know that a ternary system is unstable. The 3 stars all orbit each other in a rotati...
Is it scientifically plausible for reincarnation to exist? When I think of reincarnation I am thinking of the following: Memories, personality, biases, opinions and feelings carry over from one ...
So I'm writing a story set in the close(ish) future(say 2130), and space debris is starting to be a real problem. Stations in orbit are constantly having to maneuver out of the paths of orbital deb...
To have a fire you need three things: oxygen, heat and flammable material, therefore the cold vacuum of space is the last place you would expect something to burn. I was, however, wondering if a ve...
What happens to small pieces of debris left floating around inside a derelict space station? My space station had 100 people aboard, and due to sabotage, it decompressed and was abandoned. Inside...
And I'm not talking about the wimpy 32"‰MJ kind we have in the real world, I'm talking about the superweapon kind. Anyone familiar with Knights of Sidonia and their flagship's Heavy Mass Cannons wi...
My story is set within one solar system, which can be assumed to have a similar composition to that of our own: one Class G star, a handful of rocky inner planets and a handful of gas giants on the...
Aquatic races are usually assumed to be stunted in technological development by the inability to create fire or forge metals. But what about doing chemistry at all? The development of chemistry i...
I did the orbital period for a planet orbiting a mass = 1 sol with a 24-hour year, it's got a semi-major axis of 1.82 million miles - far and away beyond the Roche limit, still beyond the corona, b...
or, Anatomically Correct Weebles A group of behaviorally modern humans was cut off from the rest of the earth-like planet millennia ago. (Myths hold that the separation occurred four to five ka BP...
In my world, there was a man that wrote a virus in binary code - which in turn infects every computer-based system in the world, as long as it is connected to the internet. Is this even possible? ...
Like on a scale of one to ten, how plausible are Alcubierre drives in terms of our current understanding of physics? Plausible enough to be considered "hard sci-fi", or are they just another form o...
Would it be possible to have a planet created by a God - but still obeying the known laws of physics - to have a bouncy surface that would be strong enough to bounce any large incoming matter, like...
In the 1960s we were disappointed to find that the moon is a pile of dust and rubble with no easily accessible valuable materials. Well, we kind of knew it before that, but we weren't sure. Anyway,...
So I build a city on the ocean floor out of handwavium, Bioshock style, but I want an easier way to get there besides taking a boat to the middle of nowhere and then getting into a submersible. I...
In the world that I am making there are hollows all over the planet, which are massive underground subterranean areas of the planet. Think The Hollow of the Gears Of War series. So far the going th...
Trying to work out mechanics and visuals from one of two moons orbiting a gas giant. My idea is that the moons are tidally locked so they can never see each other's backsides, but this might be ach...
So diamonds are the hardest natural substance, but can be broken/shattered by impacts. If a planet had a large mountain range made of diamond (maybe the size of the Rocky Mountains on Earth), wou...
Physical transformation relies on evolution, which typically works n the scale of millions of years and in accordance with environmental needs. However, is there any plausible way maybe through th...
Giant Spiders are a traditional element of fantasy worlds. They prey upon most human's primal fears, and are easy to make as evil as possible. (Note: Not to scale) But are they actually plausib...
This question hopes to make a space tug crew's life tolerable. A supply pipeline links two civilizations. Due to the long travel time between the ends, cargo is "thrown" at the other side in unman...
In FTL-free universes, interstellar travel is often done by vessels capable of continuous acceleration (the drives themselves are often magitech), which can use the effects of relativistic time dil...
In my world, a "perfect" robotic eyeball has been created. This eyeball is electronic, but it emulates a human eye perfectly. This does not necessarily mean that it has millions of synthetic cones...
I want to propose a new method for tree growth to exceed the max of 120 or 130 meters restricted by Earth's gravity. I propose for the tree to rely very little on its base or roots. The living part...
Advance our technology 200 years, develop very precise celestial navigation controls and very efficient nuclear reactors. Distill to ensure only the most stable elements are used in production, cos...
In the video game Dino Crisis 3, a recurring boss that the player fights called the Australis (a bio-engineered human-Tyrannosaurus Rex hybrid) that has skin exposing the muscles of its body. An in...
We know that Earth creatures can generate high-voltage electricity (your nearest electric eel can attest to that). We also know that ordinary air at Earth atmospheric pressure can be used as a las...
Setting: Earth, in the future, near 2060 or 2100 Technology: a bit more advanced than ours Armies and police forces are already using systems for crowd control. Some devices can generate disco...
Here is Carolina Lang's interpretation of one of Britain's heraldic beasts, the enfield: For anyone not familiar with the creature, here's A Book of Creatures' basic description of it: It ha...
Real x-ray vision, the ability to (at least) detect X-rays as a 'visible' light (or any other detection system) seems it would be very problematic. X-Rays are a high energy form of electromagnetic ...
I have an idea for an energy source for a colony on a cold world with not enough solar power. Is my idea workable, or is it debunked as perpetual motion machine? Here is the set-up and my plan: Sc...
In my last question about methods of deflecting a rogue planet, there was a fascinating answer from Willk. Willk basically suggested that if you knew the location, mass and velocity of objects in ...
I want to make a superhero that can control all forms of energy. From what I've heard you can do a lot like, manipulate time and space, open blackholes, teleport, shape shift, and manipulate matter...
I am interested in adding a race that relies on echolocation to sense the world around them in my scfi/fantasy setting. What I'm wondering is, how can a race protect against highly advanced sonic ...
I recently came into possession of a rather large mass of molasses due to a misunderstood Alexa inquiry and since the restocking fee is outrageous, I plan on using it to answer a nagging question I...