Questions tagged [alternate-earth]
For questions relating to radically changed Earth. This alternate Earth could be a post-apocalyptic Earth, or Earth with major changes in the current social/political/economical schemes.
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How far could you see the Andes from the Pacific on a flat Earth?
Several questions on related subtopics of vision distance on a flat world have been asked before, but this one remains unaddressed. Specifically:
The answer from Euclidean geometry would be infinite (...
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Ivory Headgear--Likely or Not?
My apologies for not giving you a larger image, but it does show you a compare-and-contrast on what horn is in comparison to what antler is. Basically, it's just a piece of bone covered in softer ...
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If the Earth would break apart, how likely would the large debris stay in orbit?
In the story I'm writing, Earth gets destroyed and the few million humans that survive go to live on another Earth-like planet.
Since the destruction of the planet, the humans do visit their star ...
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Megamangrove Roots--Which Kind of Aerial Roots Would Best Support Their Large Size?
In an alternate Earth, early or midway in the Eocene Epoch, there debuted a family of angiosperm trees whose roots need to be completely submerged. As a result, the limit is that they can't germinate ...
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Could Sharks Survive a Longer PETM?
First things first, a little backstory:
Sometime between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, there was a mysterious, sudden, dramatic rise in global temperature. This moment in time was known as the "...
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Would a Longer PETM Save the Creodonts and the Mesonychians?
Some 55.8 million years ago, Earth underwent a really dramatic heat wave known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. What happened, exactly? We don't know how it happened, but we do know ...
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Exploring a world with chiral biochemistry: chirality detection
Space explorers have landed on an Earth like planet and, to their surprise, the place is luscious and covered in life, to the point of resembling some earthly tropical atoll.
What they don't know yet ...
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Would the Oceans in This Map Be Freshwater?
So long ago, I asked on how to make Earth's oceans as brackish as Lyr's, one of the many worlds imagined by artist Chris Wayans. The only real answer I got was something that that world had already ...
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Could an Ice Age Extinction Wipe Out All Marsupials?
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials.
Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinosaur ...
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What would the world be like if COVID-19 occurred in 1999? [closed]
You could pick whatever start date you feel is most interesting, applying the number and distribution of cases on that date to the same date 20 years ago. For example, imagine if we had the same ...
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If Earth had a smaller second moon, what would the sky look like?
I am creating a fantasy world in which Earth has a second moon with an orbit between Earth and the current moon. The orbit of this new moon is faster because it's closer to earth. I'm not much ...
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Could Long, Dense Walls of "Megamangroves" Deflect The Deadliest of Storms?
This is the world's tallest tree--the coast redwood. It can grow as high up as 115.5 meters. Any taller, and the transportation of water in its vascular tissues would not climb all the way.
But in ...
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Can You Evolve a Second Pair of Pectoral Muscles Without The Need for Flight?
Somewhere on DeviantArt, there is an insightful tutorial by someone named "Uzlo" on how to create anatomically believable angels. Among the instructed details is the possibility of developing a ...
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Would human civilization develop at a slower pace if Earth was 5.8x larger?
EDIT:
Calculations were incorrect, the earth in my comic is not 5.8x larger, it is 2.4x larger. Its surface area is 5.8x larger but the diameter is 2.4x larger.
Anyway
I'm working on a comic that ...
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How CAN You Justify Melalo's Dorsal Casque?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Melalo, described in the Book of Creatures website as "the oldest and most feared of Ana's children." His name literally means "filthy", "dirty&...
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In an Ice Age Extinction, Which Latitude Would Be Hit Harder--Tropical or Temperate?
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was so ...
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How Would a Continental Landmass Sink?
Atlantis is real. It's just that there's more than one of them, and none of them are actually called "Atlantis". Instead, they consist from the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean to Zealandia, a ...
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What would allow a human being to create a rift in space-time and access parallel universes? [closed]
I'm creating a story where there are individuals that can travel to parallel/alternate earths. Obviously this is all fantasy but hypothetically speaking, how would you ground this is in some related ...
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How Would the Multituberculates Survive Longer Than in Our Timeline?
In exploring likely candidates for an alternate Earth without rodents, someone suggested multituberculates to me. Here's a little summary as to who the multituberculates were for anyone not in the ...
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Would the Muroid Niche Be Occupied by Just One Clade?
The muroids are a superfamily of rodents consisting today of mice, rats, voles, hamsters, lemmings and gerbils. There are at least 1750 different species of them, proof apparent of their ...
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What Else Could Reduce Global Sea Levels?
Anyone who has studied ice ages would know that during the last two-and-a-half million years of Earth's history, there have been periods where there was enough ice to suck up a lot of water. As a ...
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How Would These Planets Affect Earth's Eccentricity?
A cleaner, narrower-focused improvement of How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle, so not a duplicate.
For further clarification, eccentricity is the shape of a planet's ...
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What Kind of Bolide Would Chicxulub Be to Create the Bigger Airburst--Asteroid or Comet?
66 million years ago, something brought an end to the long-established dinosaur empire. The pendulum just kept shifting between an asteroid and a comet, astronomical bolides that actually have ...
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How to have hollows with complex plant and animal life on a planet
This is a slight continuation of my other post where I was trying to create realistic hollows with weather due to temperature changes due to bio minerals called Hearthstones. I was wondering if plant ...
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Assuming a flat world and no obstacles, how far could you see?
I know this question has been asked in similar places, but I'm after a specific part of the problem. Assuming the following:
Perfectly flat, infinite world
Earth's atmosphere
Sun directly overhead of ...
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How to Make This Alternate Earth as Black as The Dark Knight
"The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal—in fact, blacker than anything on Earth! ...
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Utility of a domesticated dwarf elephant
In prehistoric times, there used to be a dwarf elephant species in many Mediterranean islands.
They were about 1.5-2 meters high, but probably became extinct before the arrival of the first human ...
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Moved into further orbits to protect them, how much damage do Earth and Moon take when the Sun expands?
Short version A far future catastrophe burns/melts away large chunks of the Earth and Moon. For reasons related to my story's fantasy elements, the remains of the Moon have about one fifth their ...
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How Big Would We Be in a Venus-Sized Earth? [closed]
In the foreseeable future, we have found an alternate Earth with the same gravity, width, density and mass as Venus, but the core and atmospheric pressure are the same size as our Earth's. Since it ...
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Is it possible to live as a skeleton? [closed]
I'm designing a world that takes place in life after death. This place is like a parallel to our world, a worse version of it. Everybody here is a skeleton, their consciousness are loaded in their ...
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A Horse of Many Different Colors...Out in the Open Plains
In mapping the ecology of an alternate Earth where the family Equidae still exists but the genus Equus does not, it is usually difficult to find a biologically suitable mythological horse as a ...
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How Would a Merpanther Hunt?
Allow me to present the Brethmechin, a creature of Indonesian mythology.
The Book of Creatures website has drawn it as some kind of felid that has adapted for complete marine hunting, rather like the ...
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Could Cats Add Lots of Plants to Their Diet?
Because nature is never straightforward, there are different levels of carnivores. On the lowest rung of the ladder are the hypocarnivores, in which meat can't take any more than 30% of their caloric ...
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How to Renew Old Mountain Ranges
Conventionally, there are two ways to build mountains--direct collision (as is the case with the Himalayas) and one side sinking beneath the other (which explains why the Pacific Ring of Fire is ...
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The Fate of Marsupials in a More Southerly Australia
For the longest time, Australia and Antarctica were one and the same. It wouldn't be until 30 million years ago that Australia broke up from Antarctica. Nowadays, the distance between Australia and ...
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Perissodactylian Cetaceans
Perissodactyla is an order of mammals consisting currently of the seventeen species of horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs. Usually, any clade is connected by a coupling of genetics and physical ...
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A Horse of A VERY Different Way to Live the "Plains" Life [closed]
How the horse evolved to deal with life out on the open plains is...an odd story. Whereas other ungulates could walk through the hard ground with several hooves without problem, the horses couldn't. ...
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Are two Pangeas possible?
As we know, the Earth had one super continent at one point in the history of our planet, which eventually broke apart to become what we have today.
Assuming we're talking about a planet near ...
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Planetizing the World of Jack and the Beanstalk: How Small is Too Small?
We all know the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk--a farmboy sells his cow for some "magic beans", which in turn grow into a mountainously tall stalk that led him to the land of a giant. Now, ...
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What could hinder a highly developed species from erasing humanity from the surface of earth? [closed]
Sorry for my poor English. Me and google translator are doing our best to translate my question properly.
My story evolve around sentient planets. Let’s imagine every Planet in my universe is ...
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Could Bear-Dogs Look and Act Like Actual Bears?
Back home, Amphicyonidae (bear-dogs) predated Ursidae by only four million years. While the latter still lives in the form of eight species, the former had been extinct for two-and-a-half million ...
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Bryophitic Plants in an Underwater Forest
By "bryophitic", I mean "non-vascular land plants", being the liverworts and the mosses. (Hornworts are comparative latecomers, so we won't be talking about them.) Without vascular tissues, these ...
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The Great Oxidation Event...Artificially Imposed on a Tharn-Like Alternate Earth
From 2.4 to either 2.1 or two billion years ago, Earth underwent a surge in a waste product that we know as "oxygen". Before that, life thrived in an ocean rich with iron under an atmosphere loaded ...
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Wolves and Hyenas--Allies For Life
In recent years, we have found evidence in the Negev Desert of the Middle East of a striped hyena, a solitary carnivoran, tagging along with a pack of wolves. This sort of alliance is found nowhere ...
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How large can differences in gravity be without being overly dangerous to humans?
Let's imagine a planet that is 5000 km in diameter but has the mass of the Earth. I'd imagine standing on that planet might feel similar to standing on the Earth, because the gravity would be ...
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Pinniped Creodonts
Here is all you need to know about the creodonts:
They were a group of carnivorous mammals that, despite having carnassials, had no relation to Carnivora.
They were a global force, occupying ...
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Can Owl Ears Instead of Echolocation Guarantee Life in Cave Colonies?
In an alternate Earth, there are no bats. Instead, there are "flying monkeys" (which are actually lemuriform primates, rather like bushbabies or lorises.) And even though they have batlike ears, ...
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The Itsy-Bitsy Insect Has Made a Web. How Differently Would it Look From Spider Web?
In an alternate Earth, a mass extinction wiped out a percentage of the most successful phylum ever--Arthropoda. All that survived of the class Arachnida were the really small varieties--the ticks, ...
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How to have habitable hollows on a planet
In the world that I am making there are hollows all over the planet, which are massive underground subterranean areas of the planet. Think The Hollow of the Gears Of War series. So far the going ...
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The Marine Jungle of More Than Just Angiosperms [closed]
Recently, I asked whether or not the other plant groups besides the angiosperms could evolve to adapt to being submerged under salty ocean water 24/7. While marine conifers, ginkgoes, cycads, ferns, ...
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