Posts tagged aliens
Recently, a planet around Proxima Centauri has been found. It is in the habitable zone, in the sense that if the planet was a black body, it would have a surface temperature of −39° Celsius. The p...
First contact with an alien life form often goes badly. In the case of Biothanata, it always goes badly. The first glimpse of this alien blob is in the form of a falling star, a meteorite. After bu...
I am making a sci-fi web-comic set on an alien world and I thought up an idea for an eye that works much like an eye from a mammal, but instead of moving the whole eye, only the pupil moves. This i...
I want to contrive a scenario in which 23rd century humanity faces a dire crisis due to an extraterrestrial von Neumann ecology that rapidly consumes Nitrogen as a part of its life cycle. So rapidl...
I have designed an alien species similar to octopi (Tetrapus Sapiens) who live in the tropical waters of a fertile, lush world known as Iridia. The octopi (more like tetrapi) have moved past the hu...
So, I understand that human skin color is based on the distance from the equator, but would it be possible to evolve skin to be a non-natural color such as green, pink, blue, purple, ect? Perhaps i...
I'm not talking about a single alien civilization that is stranded on earth, I'm talking about multiple civilizations that will cause major overpopulation on earth. So this means that the civiliza...
Would it be possible for an extraterrestrial humanoid or superhero to increase and decrease their hearing at will, and if so, how? I'm thinking specifically of an alien who can somehow adjust their...
An exploratory spaceship holding strangers from many cultures and races has a problem leading to escape pods being deployed to a nearby world that is conveniently survivable. The pods crash land in...
So in my world of Horizon, there is a sentient species known as the Jar'keth that lives in the inner ocean of Enceladus. They resemble a mix between eels and catfish, and are slightly smarter than ...
I have a story where the characters are colonists heading to a new planet. My plan is to have the native lifeforms be descended from a single celled lifeform on a comet that shares a common ancesto...
Defining what is a super intelligent civilization: An industrial civilization that invest on scientific progress and that builds and manipulates computers, robots and nano-machines, has effi...
One of the strangest and most effective weapons in the wonderful world of arthropods in the proboscis of the famed assassin bug, with even the head of the insect working as part of the weapon. T...
If we were to encounter alien species of, lets say approximately the same size as us, would there be any reason to expect them to communicate in the same frequency ranges as us? Human beings have ...
This idea comes up quite frequently in science fiction, but there has not been a question about it yet on Worldbuilding.SE. Is it possible that intelligent life was brought to Earth by an alien ci...
Plenty of aliens from various galaxies have managed to land on Earth without getting tracked on Radars or satellites. For now, as I want my story to stay undisclosed, please assume that aliens have...
I just detected a strange object in space, and it appears to be of alien origin! Telescope readings seem to indicate it is some sort of deep space probe, with a golden disk of some sort attached to...
My generation ship aliens have 2 thumbed hands. No, not the 2 thumbs on the same side that some humans have but the 2 thumbs on opposite sides. So it would be kind of like this: Except more rept...
4+ light years away, aliens living on Proxima Centauri B have space travel and incredible technology, but are not interested in traveling out of their system or in returning our radio-babble, rathe...
I'm imagining an intelligent race of beings with only one major difference from humanity: that they share one mind. Biologically speaking, they're identical to humanity, and their world is, by all...
Another question for my comic: my friend has made a demand that I give one of her characters a flying mount, preferably griffin-like. I have some designs but I want them to be plausible: How bulk...
Let's assume that sometime in the next year, we receive a transmission from deep space containing what appears to be blueprints of an alien genome. After extensive study and determining that the da...
Let's say a human engineer comes across an alien electronics lab. It occurs to me that electrons are electrons, if the aliens are at a similar state of development to us then at least the simples...
In an earlier question I shared the idea of Bill, the stranded alien that has a challenge getting the attention of local humans because he's the size of a mosquito. He needs to re-establish contac...
One answer to the question of "Why don't we see any aliens?" prompted me to consider: The computer was a comparatively simple design, what the natives would call "single core" Von Neumann arch...
In the creature type I asked about in my last question, there are some lower caste members who seem to have metal limbs. However I don't think they would waste resources to build the legs for lower...
Something I was working on in the past involved a species of sentient insectoids. The idea was the two sexes usually live in two very different environments and rarely come into contact with the ot...
I was thinking of an organism that lives its entire life in interstellar space It eats, defecates, moves, grows, ejects eggs, attracts mates, and has sex in interstellar space. It has skin that p...
Xenomorphs are one of the most dangerous, deadly aliens in movie history. They breed in massive numbers, live in an ant-like society, and have blood that doubles as concentrated acid. Most of tho...
I have devised an alien species for a universe I am working on. They originate from the same planet as my high-pressure creatures (What would happen to a high-pressure creature in a low-pressure at...
I'm writing a book about a man traveling on a Desert planet (colonized) and I need help with some of the species he might encounter there. I'm focusing on animals right now. I need to know what ada...
Is there a plausible makeup for a lifeform which is highly resistant to even very advanced firearms (or any ranged weaponry for that matter), but can be injured more readily (albeit still a major f...
I'm coming up with a science fiction world for an assignment. Would it be possible for a planet like Earth to be eaten by a giant alien creature that moves through space at a relatively slow speed...
Recently I've been creating a race of parasitic Aliens that eat entire Solar systems. So basically, the alien queen arrive's on a planet or moon that exists inside of a solar system. Then the queen...
TL;DR: suggest human traits of mind/society that one should (a) tweak (b) leave well alone, in order to generate an alien worldview that allows a novel length tale to be told purely from perspectiv...
What conditions are believable for a racial society majority to accept a racial minority, and those to reject them? I have two races. One is a racially pure majority and the other is a mixed breed...
If an alien species ate minerals (aka a lithovore species), how might their bodies differ from ours? How would they eat/digest the materials? Do those answsers change if they eat substances like di...
The organism is human-like in that it is intelligent, sentient, and has a humanoid figure. On its planet, the species has access to a massive source of organic energy unlike anything on Earth. Esse...
Imagine we have a shade launched in space that can be turned opaque and transparent. We can use it to communicate in binary, and mathematically sound extraterrestrials can pick up the pattern. Of c...
A message arrives from several light years away. It is a complete prepared document, not a two-way communication. The document can contain line-drawings and diagrams, both 2D and 3D, plus movies ...
So to start, let's assume that this hypothetical life form relied on something similar to LNG (liquefied natural gas) - mainly relying on ethane - as a solvent in the same way humans rely on water....
A quote from Story of Your Life (the short novel that Arrival movie is based on) Colonel Weber frowned. "You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring o...
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 imagine that on some planet some clever critters create an AI. Now lets say that while this AI does respect some of the ground rules that were put in place for it, it nevertheless finds nume...
To elaborate on the title, can alien plant life on an Earth-like planet look similar to ours, or would plants on an alien planet be radically different, unrecognizable, or incomparable to Earth pla...
I've created a species that, instead of eating multiple times a day like us, eats one tremendous meal and survives off of the fat stores for long periods of time. My question is about feasibility....
A good summary of the Zerg race is given on wikipedia as follows: The Zerg are a collective consciousness of a variety of different races assimilated into the Zerg genome. The Zerg were origina...
Is subsurface life possible on Titan (Saturn's moon) ? Temperatures on the surface are way too low to sustain any life (<-150 degrees Celcius) but since there is some tectonic activity, I was w...
Development The females ovulate on average 5-15 eggs per cycle. Unfertilized eggs get reabsorbed and fertilized eggs start developing a shell. The shell takes 2 weeks to fully form. Once all the f...
Diurnal vs Nocturnal These aliens have genes that influence whether the alien will be diurnal or nocturnal. Hatching time also influences this. Genetics: DD - Diurnal NN - Nocturnal DN or ND -...