Posts tagged reality-check
I'm currently exploring a setting where humans have managed to create traversable wormholes with one critical flaw - something in the wormhole both kills multi-cellular life and destroys electronic...
The title is a bit different to the question, but there's a reason to that. I am currently in the worldbuilding stage of creating an alien planet, mainly the wildlife, and I may have run into a pro...
Would a creature similar to semi-aquatic slime mold living on a mostly freshwater planet with shallow seas be able to build technology to the extent that modern humans do? Assuming that each indivi...
A team of alien researchers get bored one day, and decides to conduct an experiment. Seeing that the great ape Homo sapiens sapiens turned out so well ( in terms of technological development and ...
A few years ago, an isolated tribe was found in the middle of South America. They seemed to be a normal tribe, but near their village is a lake with a special property- you can breath underwater in...
We all know the Kardashev Scale , and the energy output required to get to each level , but what would be the best way to transport those amounts of energy? I have come up with ways to distribute e...
An alien race decides to test the hability of humans to survive and engage into space travel, for whatever reason. The planets The aliens prepares a pair of Earth-like planets revolving around a ...
I have decided to change the numbers to make it easy on Hohmannfan. These two planets, for all intents and purposes, are identical to Earth, with he moon replaced by another Earth. So now the quest...
It's just my typical luck: I discover and recover the billion-dollars worth of gold on a sunken galleon on the same day my arch-nemesis decides to detonate a one Megaton hydrogen bomb right above m...
My basic question is could life 'as we know it' (carbon DNA/RNA based, using water as the main solvent in metabolic processes) evolve on a planet where the temperature ranges from 16 degrees Celsiu...
Elementals are based on the 4 classical elements: earth, fire, air, and water, as those were all that the ancients knew of. However, with science we have learned that none of those are actually ...
The Hecatoncheires was the collective name given to three monsters; (Briareus, Cottus and Gyges) who were the children of Gaia and Uranus. They were not only known for their frightful enormity, b...
I am somewhat new to worldbuilding so forgive me if I am not as clear as I could be. I have created a continent, but for relate-ability sake, imagine the US and Mexico, but where the Yucatan Peni...
Right now the Earth rotates around the y-axis so East and West replace one another. What would the affect be on Earth's seasons if it rotated on either other axis? The first is the Z axis, pointi...
I've been getting nowhere myself on this. My goal is to create a human or humanoid that absorbs heat to survive. As a result this can quickly freeze things solid. I need a way to make this, for lac...
That's the plot of lot of sci-fi stories, but on most of them the virus just affect all humans and get out of control. But lets say that my Umbrella corporation wants to target a specific human p...
Definitions Hamada: A type of desert landscape consisting of high, largely barren, hard rocky plateaus, with very little sand because this has been removed by deflation. -- From Wikipedia ...
Setting The US is waging a failing War on Drugs where cartels are quickly gaining power. Scenario In the near future, say 2030, with current technology, the Texas state government is implementin...
Characteristics: has close to 80.000km in diameter The atmosphere is composed of: -30% hydrogen (cold gas planets have hydrogen but it makes sense it exists in a rocky planet?) -20% oxygen -...
I'm working on a planet wherein the dominant species isn't humanoid (in this case, mantids.) However, I'm unsure as to whether or not it'd make more logical sense for the dominant species to be co...
Small debris thrown from a satellite down towards Earth will burn up in the atmosphere, but how much precision could it be done with. Would it be feasible with the correct launcher and precise timi...
Let there be an Intelligent alien species of heavily armored but lightly armed folks. Think of sentient crabs without claws. The are physically incapable of fighting each other. They are filter fee...
The situation I'm considering is as follows: A space ship (a transport ship operated by two people) crashes onto a planet on which a swing-by was planned. The crew could escape using an escape cap...
In this more realistic scenario than typical fantasy, the vampire is just an ordinary human being with a certain genetic quirk that results in the following: A reversed circadian rhythm (active a...
Because who needs a space craft? Picture this: While performing a routine spacewalk, outside your small, 1- man space pod, a fault in the propulsion system controls causes the pod to explode, laun...
Arising from the comments in This Question, which started to stray offtopic into the question of whether men are needed at all. In Short: Could you create a fertilized human (necessarily female) f...
In the bible, one of Jesus's earliest miracles was turning jugs of water into wine. Let's assume that I need some wine - and it doesn't have to be good wine - but I need some wine for my guest. I h...
Specifically, I was wondering if a core of magnitite or some such other magnetic metal could be a planet's core. This is in relation to my other question, found here: Can airborne floating/flying...
Would it be possible for a planet with surface conditions suitable for humans landing on it to have a very strong magnetic field, with field strengths on the planet's surface similar to the surface...
So I'm trying to make an orbital city, kind of like the ISS, but on a much bigger scale. And against all logic and reason, I want there to be balconies. Like, where someone can just step outside, w...
In the vision of its creators, the Dr. Watson AI would gather multiple live feeds from its insurance buyers, overcoming privacy concerns through friendly advice (I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't ...
So here's the rough idea. I'm trying to figure out what kind of life could exist that spends basically its entire life in the air, for an alien world I'm working on. No sentient life, just wilderne...
You are an intelligent species whose sun is very near expiring. When your sun expires your world will be engulfed by it. You are evacuating your planet as fast as possible but you don't yet have en...
Scenario run-down. Several billion years from now, Sol has finally exhausted its hydrogen supplies and has entered the red giant phase. It has already been increasing in lumosity for some time and ...
Inspired by Nick Staab's recent work "Jack" (pictured below), how would you go around cutting down massive trees? In this scenario the simpler the tools the better, as it would allow a primitiv...
So, I have a character who has an interesting quirk: they cannot wear flat shoes or boots (i.e. where the heel is at the same level as the ball of the foot or approximately so, within 1.27cm or so)...
You have a planet about the size of Earth. It needs to be continually dark, with just the slightest bit of light. Or no light at all. It makes little difference to the aliens that live there. But, ...
I am seeking to temporarily trap my protagonists on a wasteland. The kind I wanted to create was an icy planet that doesn't experience day or night, just a constant state of moonlight. I suppose th...
(I have tried to fix this question as best as possible with the help provided from the staff of the site.) I have started to develop my own crustacean species that resembles ants slightly. I would...
Scenario This is set in the future; humans already achieved Type II civilization status. Humans conquered the entire Solar System and managed to colonize Jupiter and all its moons. The next big ch...
In Artifexians newest video he discusses how you can have a habitable near earth world that still has rings. Fast forwarding to the end of the video, he points out that due to their pull on any lea...
Okay, so I'm a fiction writer and I love neo-futuristic tech, but when I write I like to be as realistic as possible. One such technology, which I'm thinking of using in a fictional series, is the ...
So the idea is that the world has been destroyed, and an emergency plan to put the rest of humanity on floating cities/islands has been put in place. These islands subsist off of some sort of gener...
I'm thinking of a planet incredibly similar to earth. It's located in a solar system where everything is 1000x bigger than ours. The sudden turn to this is that humans aren't scaled. The Earth ha...
The Chirr are a race of space-faring aliens that look vaguely like rat-sized ants. They've got powerful mandibles and small, fairly dexterous hand-like claws, though their chitinous nature makes de...
I am trying to imagine a scenario in which there is a world that has been terraformed in so far as it has water and oxygen but there is only one area which has been established as a strong foothold...
Plausibility check of the whole "insect race". As background, I want some poor astronauts to "crash" (safely land, but because they had no other option, possibly some engine malfunction) and meet w...
Would it be possible to raise a piece of land (say the size of Texas or France) from the bottom of an ocean (say, the middle of the South Pacific)? More specifically, would it be possible (given th...
All of the launched human habitable space stations in orbit around Earth (such as the International Space Station, are very spindly and brittle as of current day. In a idea I'm contemplating that ...
I stumbled across Vincent's answer regarding forests and deserts. He claims an elevation difference of 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) could put a forest and a desert in close proximity. That got me thin...
