Posts tagged reality-check
Recently I have become obsessed with the idea of twin sapient species developing on separate planets of the same horseshoe orbit. As I was considering the technological advancement of this planet, ...
A scientist has recently invented a gravity machine. This machine pulls all mass within a certain radius (say 50 feet?) towards it at an adjustable rate. The machine can... create as strong a g...
Is it possible that a complex humanoid creature to somehow still use Mitosis as a method for reproduction, and if so, what would it look like?
Could a creature reasonably have both armor (in the sense of armadillos or pangolins) and be able to change color over the short term (less than a day)? I'm afraid I don't know enough about biolog...
Is it safe to assume that any two binary planets of 0.5 to 1.5 Earth masses having mass ratios of 1:1 up to 2:1 would always have become tidally locked to one another long before any life could nat...
In the latest Artifexian video, he talked about terrestrial moons, bringing up great ways they could and would exist. But the video ended with an interesting concept, Horseshoe Habitable Moons. F...
In my world there are rings, these rings are around 9.5 meters tall and a little around 5000 kilometres wide. Their closest point is a little over 12,000 kilometres away from the surface and under ...
This question is a sort of continuation of my previous question: Why would robots use verbal communication?. The answer here by @Mathias Foster about the robots organizing a revolution sparked some...
I have a world in mind that is essentially a planet-wide underground ocean. The planet doesn't have a strong magnetic field, so radiation on the surface is too high to allow life, but what I'm thin...
In an alternate Earth (or even in a pos-exctintion future), suppose intelligent but primitive humanoids 1/10 the size of humans inhabit the planet. They don't coexist with current humans or have ac...
The mountains of the American West have some major differences. For starters, only the Rockies stand firm"”no Coast Range, no Grand Canyon and most certainly no Sierra Nevada. The Rockies on Great ...
So, according to Other blood colors it is entirely possible for other blood colours to evolve based on what base they use, but why? What would be the benefits of these different bases? What purpose...
I have a parallel universe very similar to Earth but with a society with the technological level of Europe during the Middle Ages. I want this parallel Earth to be one big continent, one giant land...
I'm writing a setting for some fantasy novels, and came up with an idea about weather and climate. The world I'm imagining has an elliptical orbit around a binary system, giving it basically 2 st...
In a setting I've been working with, I sought a method of sublight travel that wasn't crazy engines or magic. I've already got FTL using a different method than the Alcubierre drive, so it wouldn't...
I am building a world with many deserts and swamps. So a simple question: Are there any real world examples of where a desert and a swamp meet each other? Deserts and swamps are vastly different ...
Let's say that tens of thousands of years pass and earth effectively becomes a giant city. What species of organisms survive our conquest? How do these species evolve to adapt? How long would huma...
I've had a great idea to leap over the giant boundary of respiration when making giant insects.The largest problem is that insects rely on diffusion through exterior holes (spiracles) to breathe, a...
Split out from this question since it was too large. I'm designing an exoplanetary system that was the victim of a drive-by super-Jupiter ejected from a nearby supernova that crashed into the syst...
Merfolk can be easily described as humans with the lower half of fish. On this site we have discussed; How their tails work, How they sleep, And how they hear. But there is one question that has no...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
I am working on the development of a humanoid species. I figured they'd have split along the evolutionary chain around the same time as humans. They'd live in a warm climate, resulting in little ha...
I'm making a world where you live in the air, as the surface is not survivable (like Venus). I'm going to leave out the story of the planet, as it's not important. Anyway, could there be a planet ...
In the animated movie Monsters Inc. the monsters which populate the universe all look very different despite the fact that they are presented as being the same species (since they can interbreed). ...
Suppose you are given an armor that has this curious property: as soon as a force is applied into it, the force vector is changed by 180°. If you throw a rock against it, the corresponding energy ...
It makes sense to believe life is more likely to evolve on the surface of large objects like planets, moons, and asteroids. However, a common fantasy trope is the massive space creature: some kind ...
On Earth, there are geothermal vents - heat coming from underground vents that support life at the bottom of the ocean where the sun cannot reach. My question is, would this be possible to support...
In one of the Worlds I am building, there are zombies. Sadly the zombie genre is dead(sorry), this is mainly due to the overwhelming domination in the genre and lack of new creative zombie types (w...
Is it possible that a monkey-like creature, in the mountains, could evolve to have no legs and a really strong set of fore-arms? I was thinking that this might be possible because of the climbing s...
What is the minimum size of a planet that could harbor human life? You get to decide what the atmosphere is, but I'm reasonably sure that O2, CO2, and H2O are necessary components of the atmosphere...
This was inspired by the question How would tattoos fare on reptilian scales Let's assume for this question that humans never lost their hairy, hairy bodies and are covered in fur. How would tattoo...
The habitat of the creature in question is most commonly atop mountains (or in moist areas). Such an idea would mean that the creature wouldn't need a heart or stomach to break down things into blo...
Consider a very conveniently placed asteroid in orbit around the earth, and we hang the space elevator off of that. It doesn't have to be at the geostationary altitude but it would probably help if...
My story (same world as here) take place in a future Earth between 3 and 5 million years in the future. What kind of artifacts, if any, would civilizations from this era find from the now extinct h...
Some days ago I had a discussion with a friend about possible alien life forms. He was stating that there anywhere could be lifeforms that do interplanetary or even interstellar travel by jumping ...
Thousands of years ago, human domesticated wolfs and from this domestication came dogs, one of the most varied species on earth. This occurred through simple genetic manipulation and forced evoluti...
So, after going through a some rough calculations, I figured my earlier question ran into a few problems regarding the final velocity of the asteroid. I pulled the mathematics a bit incorrect, so I...
So, I ran into a problem regarding the aftermath of a colonial war for independence. What happens is the following: The scenario is this: late 24th Century, humans have colonised the Inner Solar Sy...
I am working on a novel of a fantasy world on another planet. I am not too concerned with scientific accuracy, as again, it's fantasy, but I am not interested in supernatural things for my world. T...
In the Carl Sagan novel Contact and the 1997 film of the book, aliens from Vega have picked up TV pictures of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics, which is depicted as the first TV signal powerful eno...
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...
I would argue that ants are one of the most dangerous, effective and successful creatures on earth. But as we know they are not the dominant form of life. They also vary through-out their many spec...
All work and all play makes Jack a distributed boy: Jack is at the hotel reception with his wife. Jack is also in the office, meeting with unspecified forces for inscrutable purposes. Jack is also ...
My question regards mirroring, specifically what you would expect from a universe that was mirrored from the perspective of our own, regarding its interactions with our own. The mirroring works exa...
Inside our eyes are two different kinds of receptors: The rod, in which the human eye has 120 million and work in low light The cone, in which the human eye has only 6 to 7 million of them, the r...
This question is based off of an earlier question of mine that dealt with what would happen if humans and our Neanderthal cousins were dropped off on a world with large, technologically developed a...
In my world spaceships are guided by lighthouses floating in space instead of electronic navigational systems. A lighthouse in space has the shape of a huge sphere emitting intense red light. Like ...
For the sake of the question, assume conditions are Earth-like in all manners other than those which would be required to spur the development of such a plant. I want the plant to gestate in the di...
An idea for a story I'm working on involves a far away world that was once inhospitable. Scientists - likely alien ones - terraformed it so it could support life (coincidentally, Earth-like life). ...
This is inspired by a comment by JDÅ‚ugosz. Planets change their angular velocity when they orbit stars because they follow Keplerian orbits with (typically) non-zero eccentricity. The bottom line...
