Posts tagged reality-check
In a distant future, humanity has colonized and catalogued countless worlds in their home galaxy. However one day humanity has discovered a few habitable words in the Andromeda galaxy. After a wh...
Let's say that somehow, enough Neanderthals survived after the last ice age to be able to form a centralized government, economy, etc. Would this even be possible? What events could lead to this?
Nyarlethotep (the crawling chaos, the evil with a thousand forms, the messenger of the outer gods) originates from the literature of HP Lovecraft and is by far one of the most evil, sadistic, and i...
in the Cthulhu mythos, yog sothoth is depicted as a mass of splitting and fusing orbs, it is the past, present, and future and seemingly knows everything. but for the sake of trying to make it real...
A common weapon in science fiction is the Molecular Disrupting Beam, which disintegrates anything caught by the beam into basic atoms and molecules with no wound or gash, more as if a portion of th...
Reading this question about 1 mm tall people made me wonder: would a 1 mm tall person even be able to breathe? To someone of this size, the oxygen molecules around them would be much larger in prop...
Say in the future, humanity has developed technology to the point that it allows them to traverse through other universe, each universe having something either drastically different or not so diffe...
In the future, humanity has discovered countless worlds, some filled with life and others not. Likewise, they discover another world that is habitable, they study its various ecosystems, it's var...
The Orion's Arm Universe Project includes a description of what they call "To'ul'hian Worlds", planets that are (in the simplest of terms) a cross between Earth and Venus. I'm working on designing...
When I was younger I came up with a creature that seemed to contradict itself. It was made of some frozen material, but it had a large back fin in order to get warmth from the sun. I'm revisiting t...
On a distant, habitable world, humanity has observed a biological marvel. A creature that is primarily carnivorous, roaming its planet jungles and deserts, has been observed to be capable of manip...
In the distant future, humanity has encountered, made peace and wars with countless advanced civilizations, but one civilization that still baffles them, is the race of intelligent centipedes. The...
For my story there exists a fictitious element with special properties. In its pure form is most closely resembles metal (for its physical properties) This material is quite abundant in salt and o...
Say one day humanity has found a planet that supports life. It's filled with luscious forest and barren deserts, and various ecosystems that resemble Earthly ones. After a single year of researchi...
Most animals that glide are rather light and small. Flying squirrels, Colugos, and sugar gliders all weigh but a few ounces. The largest gliding predators are snakes of the Chrysopelea genus. Agai...
Let's suppose that a homo species divides in two separate species (like H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis) and they cannot breed. Could their descendants evolve to be capable of reproducing togeth...
Assume technology more advanced than current levels, let us theorise for this question that we are capable of reaching and if needed extracting material from any planet or moon / body in our solar ...
I like demons as they're portrayed in popular culture. I wanted to make a "anatomically correct" succubus question, but StackExchange tells me that this one already exists (even if it is not refere...
Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification are common concerns in marine environments, with natural examples like Ciguatera being a well known example caused by an algae that grows on coral that is th...
The Game Drive system, perhaps best exemplified by the "Buffalo Jump" of the North American Plains Indians is a hunting strategy in which large animals are chased into a preselected kill zone, su...
Many of the intelligent species on Earth, including us humans, are predatory. One of the reasons for this is the nutrient content of meat; a pound of meat is very calorie and nutrient rich especial...
There are several mammals that are actually venomous. Several species of shrews, Solenodon and the Platypus are all venomous. While the platypus is the largest of these, it uses it in self defense...
We all know how rabbits and hares escape ending up being a meal to a fox or a hawk, with long ears to hear danger coming, burrowing, long and powerful hind legs for speed and also living a social l...
I am developing a fictional planetary system in which a large gas giant planet (slightly less than the mass of Saturn), has migrated into the habitable zone during the formational years of the syst...
The Grey Alien trope almost always features a disproportionately large head, which often comes in unusual shapes to boot. There's nothing wrong with the trope, large brains are cool but what baffle...
The larger an animal, the harder it is to cool down. Ignoring the problem of bone/muscle strength vs size/weight and saying an animal could get to outlandish sizes, would a second cardiovascular sy...
I've been designing an an intelligent, bat-inspired avian race, and I've been struck with a question that I need answered. Now, I want to have these bats to fulfill different types of ecological n...
So, I have been a bit disappointed with the answers on how to store degenerate matter from my previous thread, and now I'm even wondering whether one can produce it at all, without invoking unreali...
This famous tapestry shows all the "modernized" traits of a unicorn--basically just a pale-colored horse with a single horn on its head. Of course, single-horned animals do and did exist: ...
I've been working on a sci-fi series set about 1000 years in our future. The discovery of an alien threat leads the ruling government to conceive of a doomsday machine, which they hope will be so p...
As far as it is known, Relativistic Kill Vehicles are a common weapon in science fiction and are rendered as powerful as nukes just due to their kinetic energy alone, a finite mass being propelled ...
It must be very dark and hot on the surface of Venus, but my humans want to change that and make a Venusian colony. The problem? The extremely thick atmosphere would make it problematic to say the ...
The purpose of this question is to get an alien race with a diffused set of organs, which makes any part of their body interchangeable. Why would a species need this? Well for one it might be becau...
I was looking for special missiles that do more than just explode or release radiation, thus I looked at some of the harder Warhammer 40k weapons, until I came across the Hellfire Missile. To desc...
It is typical of fantasy stories that there will be a dragon somewhere down the line. They are typically the strongest boss right before or after the main antagonist. Now the question is what colo...
In the movie, Kong: Skull Island, there is a species called the Spore Mantis. When stationary, the Spore Mantis looks like a giant, dead log. When active, it looks like a giant insect - a giant,...
For complicated reasons our hero's blimp in the Venus atmosphere at an altitude of 50 km gets a tear in it and sunlight floods inside (there is no gondola, the blimp is a semi-ellipsoid of breathab...
Would it be possible to create a probe which could survive the crushing pressures and temperatures to reach the solid core of Jupiter and return data to Earth? What would make this impossible? This...
So as I was creating a variety of creatures I wondered if speed is exclusive to smaller creatures or if a large organism could move deceptively fast to take prey or predator by surprise. This is as...
In the isle, a game about dinosaurs and a extensive lore, there are strains (viruses)that cause or inflict different effects on the affected dinosaur. The hypo strain is capable of making the body...
Interstellar travel is hard and complicated, yet I want to have a plausible interstellar propulsion system for my setting. Rockets are out because of the rocket equation and the horrible top speeds...
In the movie, Arrival, there is an advance alien race that arrives on are planet, with a few landing in specific places. The aliens species are called "heptapods" (by our standards). They have 7 a...
I have seen some discussions about Middle Earth's Erebor, the "lonely mountain" and how it really isn't lonely. How could a true "Lonely Mountain" (a single peak in the middle of a vast plain) form...
Some kind of WW3/resource war event happens. The majority of human beings (definately over 90%, so billions) are killed by a series of bioweapon diseases used by both sides or die in the ensuing co...
Is it plausible that a virus could contaminate the entire ocean to where humans that enter it are highly likely to contract the virus? It doesn't necessarily have to be the whole ocean what with th...
So I've been thinking about the idea of a series that takes place on a small fleet of generation ships, traveling at around 10% of lightspeed to Proxima Centauri, which should take around half a ce...
Phone message to you, Noel, on 10th October 2016 (AD): Hey, Noel, it's Rudolf JelÃnek here. God just send me a message on Facebook (I know it's true, because god gave me a vision in my sleep): ...
At the moment it seems we have two different types of planet We have Rocky planets with a solid core that occupies most of the mass of the planet We have Gas Giants that contain a solid core but ...
I'm considering making one "creature" that is encountered in a story a sentient star in an alternate universe. I hope to hand-wave a little of the more complicated stuff by saying "this universe's ...
My knowledge of Stirling engines is that they work via a heat difference and are extremely heavy when used on a larger scale. This makes the use of them on vehicles a strange choice when there are ...
