Posts tagged earth
In the world of this question, ants and especially termites are the dominant herbivores by mass. There are no large grazing mammals competing with the bugs for the siliceous grasses and thorny tree...
Premise: Earth has a magical cataclysm that pulls up new mountains, pushes down parts of landmasses, and generally reshapes Europe enough to make it unrecognizable (to the average person looking at...
Everyone suddenly disappears from earth except 35 people randomly scattered wherever they were before everyone disappeared. How long would it take on average for 2 or more people to meet? What othe...
I have the radius, volume, mass and density figured out. It does not have a moon. I do wonder how that will affect the rotation. The Earth's rotation was considerably faster before the creation of ...
I recently asked this question about what would happen if a fusion bomb went off in the core of a planet, and the answer was relatively uninteresting. As was aptly said in my previous answer, the e...
Please note that I have had some incredibly helpful and useful suggestions here that I have decided to make some major revisions as a result. I will reduce the overall atmospheric pressure and part...
Ok, so I have determined my world can keep it's planetary ring system. YAY! Now I just need to clarify once and for how it would look like from the planet surface. I think I have it worked out, but...
I'm an artist and I've been trying to find a comprehensive resource that would help me clearly identify likely sky colors for exoplanets that have atmospheres with a similar chemical composition to...
So, in this alternate Europe, there are some obvious differences. First off, the Baltic Sea is no longer a sea, but now the Baltic Plain. Also, the Low Countries are absent entirely. There are...
From a climatic point of view, what if Earth went through a radical polar shift that would place the geographical pole right where the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau are? (No matter if southern or n...
After getting help from the members of this site with Worldbuilding an Earth-like world around an F-Type Star, I have another question. The Planet's radius is 90% of Earth's. The Planet's rotation ...
Researchers are scratching their heads, and Portland Water Bureau is furious. In Portland, Oregon, a reservoir in one of the City parks has begun spilling out a river of naturally occurring beer/a...
Today, dinosaurs, alligators, crocodiles, gharials and caimen are all that remains of a special group of reptiles called the archosaurs. Recently, it has been accepted by the public that birds did...
We have an Earth-like planet except the tropics around the entire planet are covered with small island chains and archipelagos. No landmasses larger than Cuba appear between 35$^\circ$ N and 35$^\c...
Let's start with a little backstory--our planet underwent an impact-coalescence cycle only once, 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object named Theia destroyed the infant Earth in a glancing...
My superhero generates a force field which lets him and his equipment sustain the extreme conditions found inside the Earth. He decides to travel from the Geographic North Pole to the Geographic So...
In relation to a recent question of mine, this alternate Earth still has its core consisting of 84% iron, but the other 16% contains the greatest concentrations of all known species of heavy metals...
Setting In a tropical shore, where a great river empties into the sea, there is a zone of very high tides. The water level rises and falls by meters every day. In this challenging ecosystem, alter...
They don't posses any advanced knowledge, their knowledge is in fact irrelevant, just their possible actions (it doesn't matter how irrational those actions might be) that would cause significant e...
Imagine an Earth-like world in all respects except that the Moon is much much closer. I think I'm right to say if the Moon were very close that tidal forces would slowly rob it of momentum and it ...
The Bay of Fundy sees the world's highest tides, with ocean water advancing and withdrawing as much as 20 meters or more within a single day. Here is a list of the 50 tidal stations around the wo...
In my world there are two planets within the same solar system, which are connected approximately every seven cycles through a portal that opens for a few days. The planets are very similar. The ...
In a previous question I asked how Mutually Assured Destruction could be made not assured. Most of the highly rated answers focused on political methods, but one answer raised the possibility that ...
This scenario is based on the kea, the world's only alpine parrot. Even though it eats plants like other parrots, it also eats meat, and therefore could be New Zealand's answer to the smaller d...
On 20 October 1861, while in Paris, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Maria von Hapsburg, brother of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, received a letter from Jose Maria Gutierrez de Estrada, a Mexican nobl...
Let's say that in a different timeline, humans evolved to eat insects. How would that change the world today Note: Suppose that this didn't have any mass changes on our anatomy and that our species...
Let's assume that our intelligent alien organism is living on an earth like planet with an atmosphere but higher gravity. Its world is on the verge of doom. Somehow it could make it to earth with a...
What kind of realistic oxygen producing reaction used by life could exist in a carbon dioxide / ammonia atmosphere? There are also many volcanoes, either immersed or not, water oceans and you can e...
Humans already exterminated more than 50 % of wild vertebrates individuals since 1970 1, 2. I was wondering if it is possible to wipe out the remaining 50 % in less than a year ? Note that, in t...
252 million years ago, the worst event in the history of life on Earth occurred. 70% of all terrestrial species and 96% of all marine species became extinct through, according to geological record...
I have a world I am building that is similar to ours, and is set in the height of the Roman empire era. The main difference is that the winter is half the year and full rotation of seasons is 18 m...
While only counting seasons and years, but not weeks or months, how far can human civilization progress? Can they reach the middle ages? Or is the invention of the calendar such a cornerstone of ...
I was reading this question earlier today. It asks about the characteristics of global winds in a modern-day earth with Eocene-like temperatures. I'm here to ask about other kinds of weather in the...
This blog post about binary-star systems points out that, rather having the stars be close together, they could be far apart and a planet might orbit just one of them. It gives the example of the ...
An alien species has been conquering planet after planet around the Milky Way for some time. They detected intelligent life on Earth a while back and now they decided it's time to add us to their c...
I had this idea the other day just for the heck of debating about if it would be feasible to build a bridge that crosses North Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Spain. I mean from St-John's (Newfoundl...
I'm currently writing about an Earth sized planet that is 33% water and has 4 moons all the same size as our moon. All moons are 243,000 miles from the planet's surface and the planet takes 392 day...
My species of caniform-like creature has a relatively long muzzle because of its strong sense of smell. I would like to know how to give it a long muzzle with its large brain size. Members of this ...
Can a habitable planet have two separate crusts, both of which can sustain life? I am wondering if through the planet's creation, over time through some form of mantle cooling/erosion combination, ...
Recent news reported the discovery of three "earth-like" planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. This is interesting because the star is a small, cool red dwarf about the size of Jupiter. The three pla...
Scenario: An exact copy of our world is sliced in half by a particle beam. The beam has a diameter of 40 meters and moves at a speed of 0.999c. The beam slices the earth from top to bottom in 600...
Background There is a world with flora and fauna based on the life forms that evolved on Gondwana (see here for previous questions). Humans colonized this continent from a distant one some thousan...
I have a huge planet with two continents separated by a wide ocean. Inhabitants think that their continent is the whole world because the other side is too far and they never visited it. What if pe...
I am a vengeful scientist who crash-landed on your Earth. While I was repairing my space ship, I had to obtain nourishment by consuming organic matter, and visited a local nutrition warehouse your ...
How much force, momentum, and energy would be needed to have an object pierce through the Earth? I've tried to research this, but I could not find results for a mathematical value. Assume the Eart...
Based on various methods of geological dating, particularly radiometric analysis, Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billions years old. This is around the time the Earth's Moon was thought to be...
Premise Suppose a world has no other means to deal with a potentially devastating meteor impact than creating a net on the planet. Their hope is that the massive net will catch the meteor and slow...
Imagine two identical planets planet A and planet B, orbiting the same star. Is it possible that these two planets follow the exact same "route" as they orbit their sun, but are just distant enoug...
In a short sci-fi story i am writing, Earth has a shadow twin. A planet with the same chemical/geological characteristics as Earth and wildlife very similar (but different species because evolution...
I am drafting a short story about a small object orbiting the Sun at the precise 'speed' as Earth's opposite the Sun, undiscovered by us due to its position. The problems I see with this include t...
