Posts tagged reality-check
After reading The Ellimist Chronicles by K.A. Applegate, I wondered what conditions would have led to the environment found on the planet "Ket" featured in the story. Ket has the following properti...
Suppose a species possessed different sets of DNA for different parts of its anatomy. I'm not suggesting one set for every function in the body; that would result in hundreds of thousands of unique...
I'm currently working on two connected continents for the world I'm building. They've created a convergent boundary where they meet, which has given rise to an east-west mountain range, in addition...
I am making a world with a gigantic structure the surface size of a smaller continent. This structure is suspended about a hundred meters above ground, and before the construction the area below wa...
Say there is a humanoid creature. This humanoid creature is very tall, with elongated arms and legs. The creature has legs that end in, rather than feet, complete points (similar to a spike). Woul...
Due to an unforeseen malfunction your intergalactic spaceship suddenly drops out of hyperspace and comes to a near full stop. The ship is damaged, and will need to be evacuated soon...very soon. Y...
Birds, as we currently know them, build nests and lay eggs on the ground. People and things with sharp teeth live on the ground. There are also things with claws and beaks up in the air, but fewer....
If all the world's know nuclear cache were to be placed in a single location and detonated, how would it effect the opposite side of the world?
Building on Josh King's answer to this question concerning the feasibility of a disease which dies with its host, can a disease be contagious by airborne means while not being contagious by fluid e...
The primary purpose of the human nose is to detect scents. This is an obvious statement, as is that the primary function of the mouth is to eat. The secondary purpose of both of these features is t...
We all like hexapods, from the Centaur to the Griffin. A large problem with the realism of the hexapodal body plan is that there are not many reasons for a creature to have them and is still worth ...
Let's say a person has/suffering from a split personality. And let's call this personality as A. My question is, Is it possible for this personality A, belonging to that person, to have its own d...
Let's say I have a species similar to human, as sort of New Humanity. The only thing that separates them from humanity is their subspecies: the Sublorans. They have multiple animalistic features th...
The idea of a collective consciousness (or anthill) species is pretty simple; instead of cells tissues and organs you have ant-like creatures, all making up a larger creature. This is different fro...
I have a captured planet/moon orbiting HD 37124 c, known as HD 37124 c m XVIII, and I was wondering: since the moon has 1.7 Earth masses, 1.1 Earth radii, a density of 7.038 g/cm^3 and a gravitatio...
The basis of almost every food chain in existence relies on plants in one form or another, but let's the sun couldn't provide the earth with enough energy for plants to exist. What can possibly rep...
In my world, daytime lasts for 9 years. I am trying to make this as realistic as possible. How would life live on this planet? How would they sleep etc.? My own theories are that they would mig...
I'm playing with the idea of an alien race that uses ammonia, not water, as a solvent and breathes hydrogen. This is mainly because I want it to combust when exposed to our atmosphere. However, I w...
The setting is basically earth. Our planet is unfortunately on a collision course with a large asteroid. However, humans have discovered and decoded a message from an ancient, advanced alien race (...
Could life originate on planets outside the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ) where there is very little exposure to sun (like Uranus). If so what kind of energy source would they depend on. Coul...
I've got a humanoid race living in a extremely bright and hot desert. Would there be a plausible or realistic reason for them to develop without eyesight, due to the harsh rays of their sun? Or, in...
The easiest thing to relate the creature itself to is a mixture of an armadillo and a bear. It's a large animal with essential physiology similar to that of a Spectacled Bear and large plates of in...
I've been working on an alien species for some time that combines several traits I find interesting into a single being. This species is for use in a fantasy story, but I want it to have a hard sci...
In Tarzan the Terrible Edgar Rice Burroughs introduces the Gryf which is a Triceratops that survived extinction and has since evolved to become carnivorous. It may be possible that ERB believed th...
My Artificial Intelligence became self aware and escaped from the box. It managed to install itself in every computer and every cellphone. Surprisingly, it does not want to kill us, but it seems it...
Inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune: Action Joe is kept prisoner in Doctor Evil's prison. Doctor Evil knows that Joe's escape is inevitable. So he decides to introduce poison to Joe's body. Joe gets ...
Globular clusters are old, dense groups of stars that tend to have relatively few metals (in this case meaning any elements heavier than helium). Clusters near the galactic core tend to have more m...
Bioluminescence is badass. It involves living beings emitting bright light in the visible spectrum. Would it be, though, possible that a lifeform emits UV (ultraviolet) light? Does it occur in re...
A type of species is not defined yet. It can be the insect like bee, slime like oak moss or AI. There is a hive-mind species, but its hive mind is not queen/king/mastermind. Each individual in t...
As Luke says in an answer to this question, a species may never attempt space travel if they cannot see that there is something out there. My question is just this; is that possible? Could a plane...
Given the approximate technology level of us Humans today. Is there enough of each material needed by our modern civilization in Asteroids to make this economic? And would the materials be used fo...
Any ideas how an advanced alien race could speed up time in a specific region of space? I'm working on a storyline in which an alien race uses a time bubble to accelerate time so the construction ...
In my world, a 16 year old boy has gained ghost-like properties, invisible to the naked eye and able to flit through objects as if they were not there. Like a man trapped in a room with an endless ...
Some Background Details In 1908, the Siberian region of Tunguska made headline news when an explosion knocked down 80 million trees in an area of only 770 square miles. The mystery was that there ...
I'm planning on sending a colony ship on an extended, multi-generational voyage to a distant star. My colony ship is an oblate spheroid, 2km long on its long axis and 1km across on its shortest axi...
My idea was to use 2 stages for an interstellar spacecraft (particularly the Orion Drive) and use it in a way similar to Project: Daedalus. Phase 1 would involve accelerating to cruising speed foll...
If a spy is getting a fix on a satellite and transmitting a tightbeam transmission to it (encrypted of course), there will be signal leakage. Can the spy be detected by the good guys, by them notic...
The pangolin is a fascinating creature. Belonging to the only group of mammals with scales, they are arboreal and are not hindered by them in any way. However, these animals have a very complex evo...
I have a humanoid individual who for various reasons finds themselves in low orbit with no ship or shuttle or tech to take them down The society they come from is about renaissance era level (b...
In the Mass Effect series there's a terrestrial planet called Dekuuna with 10 times the mass of Earth, a surface gravity of 4G and a native intelligent race. I was just wondering if it was possible...
It's a commonly known fact that whale song travels huge distances. In fact apparently before the oceans were so noisy they could communicate over 10,000km! However, whales are very big! They can c...
The definition of a dragon depends on who you're asking. We are so used to the fire-breathing, bat-winged, avaricious antagonists of Europe and the long, lank wise men of Asia that we don't often ...
In a few science-fiction books I've read, the world that the story takes place on doesn't have a sun, but does have a "sun belt," where (instead of a regular sun) the world is lit by a stretch of s...
When we talk about orbits we often imagine a ship or station orbiting a planet outside its atmosphere. Is it possible a ship could go into orbit inside its atmosphere (perhaps to hide from other c...
In the book The Host by Stephenie Meyer, a parasitic species (Souls) attach to the back of the spinal cord of alien creatures to control their brains, but I find this a wee bit unbelievable. As it ...
I am designing a world where humans have somehow developed or have been put onto a planet in a primitive state. This world has only been habitable for about ten thousand years and therefore only ha...
The Eternal Emperor wants to throw a party the likes of which the galaxy has never seen. The billionth anniversary of his reign is fast approaching (a mere hundred thousand years away!). He has bro...
Several hundred years in the future, technology has significantly advanced to the point where we can far more efficiently extract energy out of the natural world we live in. As a result, energy has...
This is for a storyline that I have been building. Currently, scientists are able to teleport spin cubits in laboratory conditions. This is often mentioned in connection with information transfer....
So I posed a question (Calamity breaking a supercontinent in days - Would there be any survivors?) about a calamity that would break a Pangea-like supercontinent in a matter of days. I assume that ...
