Posts tagged reality-check
Is there a realistic way that a Charybdis-like creature could evolve? Starting with roughly earth-like biology, what is the closest plausible creature to the mythical Charybdis that could exist? ...
Say you have some way of seeing somewhere between a microsecond to 0.1 seconds into the future, or at least the most likely future. Is it possible,through something like a flip-book effect or some ...
The probe in my mind is unmanned, with a super-reflective surface to deflect most of the energy from the Sun on all wave length, only absorb enough to power its operation. Please also elaborate i...
I initially assumed my world was going to be pure fantasy, but the more I think about it, the more I consider having the story take place somewhere on Earth, either as alternate history or the far ...
Although a question about how large a living thing could be has been asked and answered, would a being such as Mogo from DC's Green Lantern series be possible? Mogo is the size of Earth roughly ...
I want to have a species based on humans, where everyone is born as female, but switches gender to male later in their life. Assuming that transformation takes 4 years (*) hermaphrodite is born as ...
I'm building a world with humans being genetically engineered species, created by certain advanced Alien civilization ("gods", Creators etc ...) like in the Sumerian hypothesis, but with a twist: t...
I'm writing a sci-fi story with some fantasy elements, and I'm trying to keep even the most outrageous moments grounded in the laws of our universe. This is one of those moments. The Situation ...
We are developing a game setting and, while discussing certain aspects of the it, have stumbled upon our inability to adequately account for some phenomena due to our lack of knowledge. The thing i...
In a world where the development of internal combustion engines had been seriously delayed (for whatever reason), would it have been possible to power heavier than air aircraft by steam propulsion?...
My planet (I'll call it $P$ for practical reasons) is 2 AU from the Sun, a distance in which it receives 25 % of the sunlight that Earth receives. This can be estimated with the Inverse Square Law:...
My world has giant geysers. The height of these geysers oscillates over a cycle of 3 or so days. Things you need to know: 1. There is an unknown force in the core of the planet, which exerts pres...
(maybe this should be part of the "anatomically correct" series. If so, feel free to edit accordingly, as I don't know how to add it to that list) Could a roughly human sized, human weight, biped...
A town dating back to the late 1880s in northern Wisconsin has a dark secret that must be kept hidden by as few people as possible. How can this town keep itself isolated and off of maps during the...
And if I wanted them to appear about 10 times the size of the sun and moon, would this be possible? Should they lie inside LEO or beyond it? I would like their orbit to be considerably closer than...
Assuming the same rules for physics apply to this world as they do for our own, how would a humanoid race that lives at the bottom of the sea be able to walk around like humans do on land? What kin...
[Edits added in italic] BACKGROUND A few thousand years from now the moon has become one of many habitable places in the solar system. Economy, constant growing knowledge and human will made drast...
It's around the mid-2300s. Earth is, to put it simply, in trouble. Climate change has resulted in flooding of major coastal cities, displacing billions, which ultimately led to widespread conflict ...
If the polar cap of a tidally locked planet was all ocean, what weather patterns would emerge? The ocean couldn't be half frozen/half boiling, right? I need a weather pattern so the planet isn't ju...
One common way sci-fi writers try to make their aliens seem more 'alien' is to give them an extra heart. This has been done for example in Babylon 5, Dr. Who and Alien Nation among others. But:...
This world has gravity, air, and clouds. If humans are weightless yet still has mass, it's gonna take some force to accelerate them. How fast can they move on air, say, if they had fins like divers...
I mean as in a city that is not situated at the bottom of the ocean but is not floating on the surface of it either. What would a plausible size and population size be for this kind of construct? C...
In my world, humans live on a moon of a gas giant that has extreme weather conditions. They also: have crystals that can store energy. possess the ability to make floating islands (on which they...
A bit outlandish, but here me out: I'm trying to make a villain for my story who's essentially like DC's Fallout in powers. Attribution: January 2015, dc.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout That being said...
How could a creature explode itself? Why would it? We see example ideas of these all the time (Scourges, creepers, etc.) but nobody ever said how or why a creature would intentionally explode. I...
For my space-fantasy setting I'm considering using the concept of Hollow-Worlds. I devised in-universe reasons for the presence of a day night and season cycle. The Hollow-world's "Inner-sun" cy...
Gravity does exist in this world, and so does air and clouds. But this creature only has enough weight to stay in the air without falling or being lifted up. It's big like a whale and it does have ...
I'm writing a short story about space faring race of people. I want to emphasize how technology has allowed a casual approach to space, making it seem like only a minor inconvenience or hazard. O...
In my world, ten is an important number that shows up frequently. In the solar system my world belongs to, there are ten other planets beside it, and there are ten months in a year. I know next t...
Here on the stack exchange we talk about dragons... a lot. We have discussed all the factors that would allow dragons to exist and yet, there is a question we have not asked. What evolutionary pres...
So basically, humankind was t the pinnacle of technological greatness. We had a massive network of floating cities all around the globe. During "The Fall", all the massive spire-like buildings fell...
In our world, mountains generally only move up (while forming) or down (while eroding or sinking). Otherwise they follow the tectonic plates they happen to be on. In island chains like the Hawaiian...
Sequel to this question. Basically, I've been designing an intelligent avian race based on bats. After reading through some of the answers for the linked question, I've decided that these bats wil...
I'm thinking of an alien alien world that has a vast biosphere. Now the creatures of this planet have evolved to be hexapods though there are a few creatures that are tetrapods (only have four limb...
I have a group of ecoterrorists who want to limit the amount of CO2 the world puts out in a drastic way: by poisoning oil fields so that the oil becomes unuseable, or at least forever uneconomical ...
Context I have been thinking about the Pip Boy device from the Fallout series of videogames. It is a portable, wearable computer that can gather a lot of data about the user. It looks like this: ...
Imagine a world that does not rotate in its axis, the planet is not tidally locked so no half is hotter or colder than other. For example the planet does not rotate because it is in a binary sistem...
I know A LOT of this gonna be a stretch and that I'm probably misunderstanding or exaggerating current real-life trends in science, but that's kind of why I'm asking the question. We know it's poss...
Technological approaches to refrigeration tend to involve either high compression ratios of fairly exotic (from a biochemical point of view, anyway) volatile substances, or high-power, low-efficien...
The basis for this question is the selected answer for Plausibility of Mushroom Buildings. Prototaxites and braket fungus are the likely candidates but I want to know if this type of fungis can flo...
I am currently working in a "fantasy" world without any kind of magic and I thought of a race with different skeleton color (blackish in particular but I want to know in general). I am not well ver...
I am inspired by some people who apparently believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. I know that for sweet, delicious chocolate to come into existence, we need to do things to cocoa. Ferment ...
Consider a planet $P$ of radius $r$ larger than Earth, whose mass is $r^3$. By the square"“cube law, this planet will have the same density as the Earth... assuming that the gravitational compressi...
Let's say there is another planet in our solar system that harbours sentient life and this sentient life can build castles, buildings, and other such structures. When would we notice that? We ca...
I am going to finally create a human cyborg with super-intelligence to beat an AI. It's mid 2050's and my company Neuroconnect has produced a nanotechnology BCI (brain computer interface) capable ...
I was reading some questions on Quora and I found this claim: The polar regions have a very odd reason for them to have so much oxygen production. You see the Polar aurora run day and night in ...
I was going to sort this all out beforehand, and then write the book, but when the writing flows... you make hay. I am a perfectionist/details-oriented person, but you lose me on math/hard science....
The setting I'm building has a race of people, derived from modern humans, whose primitive survival as a species relies partly on very fast reproduction, and I think I want them to have a tendency ...
Consider a planet very similar to Earth, with the same radius and the same mass. In a very simplified model of its interior, 70 % of its mass is magnesium silicate and the remaining 30 % is iron. T...
The Apollo-era A7L Extravehicular Mobility Units were used for less than eight hours at a time, within a few days, with a maximum of three moonwalks per mission. Assume a fictional moonbase with 1...
