Posts tagged humans
My main character is a human with grey irises, and I want to know how I could realistically explain her irises glowing - as if the irises themselves are lightbulbs - red or purple during moments of...
This is going to be a test run of hard-science, social science edition. This is in accordance with http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2348/8914. Okay, so a meteor is about to hit the ea...
How difficult would it be for a human to survive on a planet with an atmosphere 2-5 times as thick as Earth's but with gravity like Venus? Would such an atmosphere be survivable? If yes, then how ...
How would the human body be affected if oxygen levels increased by a lot? Our air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. If it increased to 30% oxygen, what would the effects be and how long would it ta...
I'm looking for a way to render a large percentage (30 to 50%) of Earth's human population infertile in about 10 years. Medicine and tech levels are approximately where they are now, maybe slightl...
So, I was reading this article about how difficult it would be for any alien race to escape an exoplanet with about 10 times the mass of Earth. It states they probably would even lack satellites. ...
Is it possible with some chemicals as intake for humans to completely convert the food/chemical to energy to survive? This is similar to when we are talking about clean energy where water and some...
I totally get why humans who have colonised a low gravity environment (Mars or an asteroid, for instance) are skinny. Muscles doing less work, square cube law, force output of a muscle proportional...
It turns out that a single strand of human hair measures 17 to 181 millionths of a meter wide. But anyone who creates or reinvents a fictional species of humanoid has the freedom to change the dim...
The story My hero is an average European city boy of the 21th century. Eighteen years old, doing a bit of sport, eating well, with a job that doesn't require much physical efforts. He would appear...
For a world I am working on humans managed to create a race of demi-human cat people. These people where tradionality treated as slaves/property but have in recent times been gaining some degree of...
Plants can have very different pollinators: The wind, insects, and even birds. However, is there a conceivable scenario where a plant could naturally have evolved to depend on humans as pollinators...
I'd like to keep this as science based as possible. I'm not even sure if this sort of question fits this exchange. Is there a possible world wide affect that when triggered (by human/cosmological i...
Taking genetic manipulation of humans to change them to live in other environments, besides maybe gills what other physical changes would need to be done for a human to spend 95+% time living in th...
Other than photosynthesis being an issue, if the Earth's surface became inhospitable and humans were forced to live underground, what biological changes would they be expected to go through to adap...
If all the rain for the next 24 hours fell in one go, say over 5 seconds, how would the world be different? We're assuming the same volume of rain falls in each place on the Earth as does now, for...
Is it conceivable that colonists/astronauts on a long term mission in a low gravity environment might use a low dose of an anabolic steroid (such as Equipoise) to prevent extreme atrophy in their m...
How would the human eye have developed differently on a planet with two suns? One sun will be a yellow star functionally the same as Sol and the other will be a red dwarf. The planet will be ea...
QUESTION Other questions have covered what the physical structure of a humanoid giant might look like. Assuming that anatomically modern humans (or something close) were dispersed into several dis...
There are thousands of species of spiders on Earth. Ditto insects. And, prehistorically, there have been times when there have been several, or even half a dozen species of hominins in existence on...
Scenario: A colony of 20,000 is founded, and has no access to any further inhabitants. Assuming this colony is humans of varying traits (genetics such as skin color, eye color, etc) with no single ...
Let us say that someone is 10 times faster at thinking or reacting than the quickest human, assume that they can survive these feats and their muscles can perform them and their senses detect them....
Let's say an isolated colony is established in an ideal environment with the goal of growing the inhabited human population as quickly as possible. Health care is provided for them by managers, or ...
If all humans (but no other species) just suddenly disappeared, leaving all of their structures standing, how long would it take for an intelligent species as dominant as the humans to evolve? Woul...
So I want to send a ship to Alpha Centauri very quickly - by this, I mean less than 5 years. This means that the ship will have to accelerate at 50-100 $g$ or even more. But we don't want to turn o...
Ten thousand random adults have been magically transported from Earth to an Earth-like planet with a surface gravity of 1.5g. The planet is otherwise completely habitable (enough sun, the right te...
Human evolution has a reasonably complete fossil record pointing to the fact that we and apes evolved from a common ancestor within the last 10 million years or so. But I want a world where it coul...
Setting: Earth, 5 million years in the future (see note 1). Continents are still recognizable but sensibly altered by tectonic movements. Climate is drastically changed. Civilization does not exist...
Jane was different from the other kids. While all the other kids were playing with fire, Jane played with ice. Now, Jane has grown up and is an accomplished scientist or engineer in your discipline...
NASA has sent a crew of 100 people on Mars to start a colony. The crew was in cryogenic sleep during their trip to save food and water. And after the 6-month journey, they have reached Mars. My que...
The idea of the trope is that at some point, Earth is doomed, humans flee into the stars, knowledge of Earth is lost in the process, eventually becoming legend or myth, either due to loss of inform...
You all know the story of a women waking up to find herself heavily pregnant with some demon child or somesuch, or the pregnancy spanning a couple of days/weeks rather than the standard 9 months. C...
Okay, so we are figuring out, that at least for how we are running things now, our Earth can fit about 10 billion people. We can probably raise if your economy distributed resources more efficientl...
This is the first question in a series that I have (that follows the human organ systems). This question deals specifically with the use of the muscular and skeletal systems in a robot. Since they ...
I've hit a wall in my tale of humans attempting to escape the Singularity or a fate worse than death by running off into the depths of space. And I only have myself and my accursed hard sci-fi lean...
There are seven planets, and each one has a different coloured sky. One has red, one has orange, all the way up to indigo and violet. Of course, they don't have a sky this colour all the time, but ...
What would be a situation in modern times where normal, healthy people would want to get infected by a non-curable, but non-lethal, virus? A virus that would have pretty nasty symptoms. There...
I want a character who has a highly developed ability of empathy. She knows what others are feeling, and often thinking. This story does not have any supernatural or non-hard SF elements, so it n...
My question is about unusual hereditary traits in humans. I'm new here and this is my first question - apologies in advance if I've accidentally messed this up or covered existing ground. I'm writ...
In my world there are humans who have undergone a mutation from being exposed to a certain kind of magic. They have not realized they have been mutated until they start noticing that they have the ...
Premise: Assume that one man has a genetic mutation such that his gametes (sperm) never have an X-chromosome. Unlike most men (who have a roughly 50/50 chance to sire a male or a female child) t...
Could a human's DNA be altered so that in every skin cell they would have a chloroplast organelle? How would this affect the rest of the body?
This is inspired by The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. In the book - in the far future - humans have split into two races, the Eloi, who live aboveground, and the Morlocks, who live underground. The...
In a world where torch ships sometimes will accelerate over 10Gs for hours, maybe sometimes days on end. Is there any way to keep the crew alive and preferably fully functional in during such hars...
In the MARS series of National Geographic, an organisation is steadily colonizing Mars by sending a handful of people every few months. However, these aren't ordinary people, of course; they are to...
This question is based on the articles saying that the Mongoloid body plan was all due to an individual mutation from 35,000 years ago. In science fiction, humanoid aliens that aren't of the human...
Has a device been invented that can lower a person's voice by various decibels (as in the loudness of their voices)? This would be to enable silent communication as in whispering at a much lower ra...
Imagine a species (the cause is largely irrelevant - could be alien meddling for all I know) that is Homo sapiens in all except one detail: they have additional organ which is kind of like gills - ...
