Posts tagged reality-check
One of the main problems with creatures that they have tentacles instead of manipulating paws or hands. This isn't a big problem for developing sapience, but it is a problem for entering the realm ...
I want to create an inland forest on the western side of a large continent that features cenotes instead of rivers. Is this possible, and if so, how can I make it work? Any requirements for altitud...
I have a species of creatures that live in packs off the coast of my fictional world's one super continent. Humans have lived there for millions of years. At one point these humans had achieved the...
Sorry if this sounds stupid and/or messed up. So I'm writing this goofy splatter story in which my protagonists are fighting zombies. I'm trying to make the fighting as over-the-top and ridiculou...
I've got a race of aliens that have no sense of sight. They can measure electromagnetic radiation with instruments, but have no concept of vision. All I know about video encoding and transmission...
Somewhat related to this. I've already decided that both orcs and humans are subspecies of homo sapiens (homo sapiens praepotens and homo sapiens perpessio, respectively, because both species are a...
Anchor one end of the cable to the side of the moon that faces the earth. Drop the other end of the cable to earth so that it drags along the ground. The earth's gravity and friction contributes a ...
Inspired by https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/30400/3434 Related but too different in details for answers to apply Why not build a space elevator starting from the moon? As answered in th...
In a story I am (at least attempting) to write, I plan to have Earth's atmosphere become unlivable by humans. I assume that Earth's atmosphere could not be ignited by a solar flare event, because i...
Pretty straightforward. Is there an event which could get rid of the majority of the Earth's magnetic field quite suddenly, but only for about a decade? Could anything manmade assist in this?
I was at a musical event a while back and as I saw the brass instruments a question popped my mind, could an animal come with an instrument built in? It seems far fetched but evolution has given us...
I have an area of my world that is essentially a large crater. It is a huge barren land surrounded by mountains. The ground is stone, then below are underground rivers, and below those are pools of...
In the near future, the last of the human race has been forced to retreat underground due to extreme global warming or some solar flare event. Vertical hydroponic farms provide the food for the s...
Inspired by this question: Talking animals in a parallel universe I wonder, would it be possible, if there were more species which created their own abstract means of communication, would they b...
Suppose there's an earth-like planet, perhaps even modern day earth itself - and at one point in time, it began to be bombarded by a continual stream of Electromagnetic Pulses. For the sake of sim...
These creatures are a few feet longer and about a foot thicker than your average cow. Their skin is covered in densely packed bristles to trap air, and thus heat, close to the skin in cold climates...
If I had a parallel universe that had all the basic ideas of our universe (gravity, friction, inertia, etc.), how could I logically have certain animal breeds not only talk, but communicate verball...
Would humans have to become "wild" for this to happen?
All life we know of to date (presumably) formed on a rocky planet (more precisely: earth). Fiction has been written about life in more exotic locations. Though as far as I know, these lifeforms wer...
Suppose the Earth entered a period of intense global warming, say by 50° Fahrenheit (28° Celsius), and then levelled off at the new, higher, temperature. Obviously, anywhere near the equator would ...
Follow up to my previous question, after botched registration. We have an Earth-like planet tidally locked to a star similar to Sirius A. The star does not belong to a binary system. The planet it...
A modern day Earth nation is at war with another. That other nation is extremely advanced but they are also pacifists. Instead of killing peoples their gun rounds and shells have the effect of worm...
In the novel Ender's Game, all little kids are protected and closely watched via a 'monitor', a device that sees and hears through them. This happens from around age 1 to about 5 or 6. So my questi...
Cerebrospinal fluid is a thin layer of liquid that helps use avoid being knocked out (among other uses). Creatures with a thicker layer have more trouble being knocked out. I want my humanoids to n...
Humans show aggression by baring their teeth, dogs show aggression by growling and cats, by hissing. All groups of animal show aggression in a way that makes it clear to attackers that they are agi...
I was reading about the rogue planet PSO J318.5-22 which is thought to have molten iron rain and things like that, and I vaguely remembered from uni that almost all iron mixtures have a slushy eute...
In the particular world that I am working on, I am attempting to build a "utopian" society. A major piece of this society is that, effectively, all historical atrocities have been "forgotten" by th...
One of the older stories I found buried in my documents is about, and from the point of view of, the AI that starts the Singularity. It (well, he calls himself a "he" eventually, but I'm not even s...
Could life survive on a diet of dust or some other substance that is both abundant and that we don't place any value on?
Question 2 of Semiliquid atmosphere - Is my premise/conclusions correct; and will it get the result I want? Atmospheric effects - As mentioned before, I prefer it to be visually very similar to o...
I'm trying to picture life on a planet sized moon of a huge planet in a one-star stellar system. It would be tidally locked, which could do some interesting things. It has an iron/nickel core for t...
Most parts of the observable universe are generally extremely cold and has no air. So if some organism can survive naturally in space, and thrive near 3 Kelvin temperatures without any form of air,...
Let's say my terrestrial planet has a stable circumbinary orbit around two suns similar to the Kepler-47 system, in the habitable zone, with an orbit similar to Kepler-47c. The challenge here is th...
We love turtle worlds. We already have a question about turtle planets : How do I prevent my turtle from collapsing under its own gravity? but let's scale it down. I would like to have a waterball...
Question is ultimately asking why would we do this? A few parameters first... Technological: Our current knowledge of physics is correct and there is no such thing as faster than light travel, ...
One of the planets I am building has a very large crescent shaped continent that I want to say came about when a super continent split and the areas below sea level flooded. Could this have happend?
In countless series of the world of science fiction we see something that we all accept as realistic but makes no sense. Holographic controls. We simply say that since it's the future that it makes...
Science fiction often depicts humans visiting alien planets which have unbreathable atmospheres. No problem; they are shown wearing atmosphere suits including a helmet with a transparent visor/face...
In the answer to this question, it is said that that is needed to be done to make the solution feasible is to increase the growth rate of human hair. But the problem is that I cannot think of any e...
Melanin is what causes the color to appear in the skin, hair and eyes. But in humans there seems to be a limit to this. For example human hair can be orange(gingers) but not green or blue. iris's c...
In many famous alien species you see that the iris is so large that it almost appears that it replaces the sclera. What evolutionary history would support the irises growing to that size. The only...
Tidally locking a rock or metal moon isn't too hard and the understanding of how a solid moon behaves while tidally locked is relatively well understood. However, can a water moon be tidally locked...
Let's say that a gas giant (around the same size and distance from the sun as Jupiter) has a moon that supports life. The moon is around the size of Mercury (if this is too large please let me know...
Now I know that there are limits technically on size of plants as seen in this post, but what I want to know is what limits a plants speed? I'm guessing it has to do with the soil, but is that all...
Inspired by this article on Big Think: Genius or Crazy? Pangaea Reborn, how could humanity create a new Pangaea out of our planet? From what I remember of my earth science class, the amount of en...
Some answers to this question about mining asteroids suggest that it is easier and cheaper, in the long run, to bring the asteroid to you: move it into orbit around the planet where you are already...
In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...
My moon is the basis for a fantasy setting, but I just can't bring myself to abandon science and say "a wizard did it." I want to make the months and seasons realistic, and I want to find a way to ...
In many series (Elder scrolls for example) they have a huge moon. It is rare though when they explain how it can be larger. There are only two choices both of which couldn't work; One is to brin...
We like the moon. It's close, you can see your home from there, low gravity well, so you get easy mass drivers to orbit for fleshing out your spacer economy, plus you can do fun things in pools. ...
