Questions tagged [life]
For questions about the characteristics of living beings in different settings. This tag is not for questions about the daily life of characters.
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Could Megaflora Sustain Permanent Settlements?
So, a setting I'm brainstorming is basically a tribal world, with Hunter-gatherers, animism, and the like.
One of the features I want to add, to make it stand out from our own world is the existence ...
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Gas giant ecologies with more realistic weather. Sky anchors
I've always enjoyed stories that explore ideas about life in the clouds of gas giants. The Algebraist by Banks is my favorite. Though one thing that never quite rang true to me about stories like The ...
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Must a planet's magnetic poles be coaxial with the axis of rotation?
I have this idea for a planet whose magnetic field is not aligned with the axis of rotation as is the case for Earth (I know they're not exactly aligned, but hear me out). How plausible is this, and ...
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Could there be an alien life form (a complex animal) that lives hundreds of thousands of years, or even millions of years?
On earth, most animals live decades, and only a handful over 100 years. What has led to such a 'short' lifespan across the board?
Assuming there may be other carbon-based life forms similar to that of ...
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Could two planets located in the habitable zone create life and in turn intelligent life around the same time?
I have two planets located in the habitable zone of a 1.02-mass Star(Class: G1.7V).
The first planet is located 1 AU away from the Star and the Sun is 1.08 times brighter than our sun to anyone on the ...
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Would My Planet’s Blue Sun Kill Earth-Life?
I’m creating an Earth-like world where the sun appears blue to people from the planet’s surface. I think I’ve narrowed down the cause of this effect to the presence of 1 micron particles in the ...
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On a planet with larger gravity, would aquatic creatures be larger or smaller?
It is somewhat common knowledge in the worldbuilding community that larger planets leads to smaller land creatures, because larger planets means more gravity gets bigger and that makes it harder to ...
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How can I make my insect life cycle time system more accurate
In my world, there is not day or night, only dusk and dawn. Their time system is based on an insect called an Ersen which follows a very mechanical and strict life cycle which is synchronised ...
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Would this unorthodox planet be habitable by carbon based life forms?
While researching volcanoes, it’s very clear super-volcanic eruptions are not only dangerous to life in its vicinity, but the entire planet as it can decrease global temperature and cause long periods ...
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Could this animal exist on my planet
Im working on a project where I'm designing a theoretically possible planet with life and I had an idea for a massive sea animal (500-550 meters in length). Water animals get help from buoyancy but ...
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What adaptations would be needed for life and water around a blue star?
Of course it's very obvious that blue stars are insanely hot and would boil away most things if they got too close. BUT I'm curious if with just the right adaptations and fiddling, could there, ...
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Could a planet support life if its only energy came from antimatter striking its atmosphere?
This planet is a rogue planet without any star or without being volcanically active. Antimatter continually collides with the planet, and annihilates with hydrogen in the upper atmosphere. This ...
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Fire Planet as a light/heat source for my planets
So, basically, I was looking for a alternate light/heat source for my science-fiction novel which I am planning to write. I didn't rely on stars due to some reasons that I omitted from the original ...
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Could an ecosystem exist where no rain falls (only snow and ice)?
I am trying to create a boreal, alien ecosystem loosely based on Northern Siberia. Liquid rain never falls here, since snow and hail fall instead for most of the year, and the short, hot summers- the ...
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Could a moon of Epsilon Eridani b Have Surface Oceans of Liquid Water?
Specifically, the gas giant Epsilon Eridani b, and a moon that has a mass of ≥0.25 Me. If there's no feasible way the moon could have oceans at a distance of 3.52 AU from a star that emits 0.34 times ...
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Why is overpopulation not an issue on a floating island where people can live for a long time
In my setting there are large floating islands and much smaller floating islands that flow in random directions. Smaller ones sometimes contain mini ecosystems or ore veins that are extremely useful ...
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Organic reactions in alien peat [closed]
So imagine there's a peat composed of a mixture of partially decomposed polypropylene and polyethylene. Another girl and I worked out the reactions for polyethylene and its decomposition byproducts, ...
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Superactinide Incorporating Biochemistry
Alright so as it is known, trans-uranic elements are universally unstable. However, in this setting, I'm using forms of quark matter that can imitate the nucleus of transuranic elements at least mass ...
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Could a planet be cut in half and still sustain life? [closed]
Say some sort of anti-planet weapon shoots an arc of energy slicing the planet in 2, could the said planet keep it’s atmosphere and life.
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Underwater life on a 3G world [closed]
I'm creating a 3G ocean world and am wondering how the heavier gravity would affect life under this ocean?
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What evolutionary driver could produce life that are animated only by light?
Imagine an alien world populated by silicon based lifeforms, the mega fauna can only be animated by exposure to adequate lights from the star or the moon. This world concept is inspired by a ...
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Existence of life using sulfur instead of oxygen
All life on earth (or at least most of them) require oxygen, at least to form the organic molecules that build up life. We know that sulfur has similar chemical properties. Organic compounds that ...
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Darkness on a hycean world
Hycean worlds are planets twice as big as earth and covered in water oceans and with atmosphere full of hydrogen. A dark hycean world is one such world tidally locked to a star with one side forever ...
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Plants or something else that enriches distilled water
I'm writing a story in a world very similar to our Earth, but with few differences.
In this world, the "human" beings have to deal with the shortage of drinkable water. But they have plenty ...
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Reasons why a sentient universe would create life? [closed]
The basic idea I had was that the universe basically thought itself into being and from there decided to create life. It sent out the seeds for life to begin, then created a race to watch over things. ...
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Biological siege weapons: Part 2 - Can a living thing effectively perform the role of ranged siege weaponry such as trebuchets?
As was pointed out by the great answers of my first question regarding biological siege weapons, organisms can be rather capable of making it through fortified defenses at close range, but what about ...
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Biological siege weapons: Part 1 - Are living things capable of breaking down the gates of a medieval gatehouse?
The setting features biomancers who, to summarize, are magic users who can create living things as minions or servants through various ways(seeds, modified eggs, whatever), have the option to directly ...
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How big of a reactor a colony of a million should have for self sustaining, closed loop existance, assuming current level of technologies [duplicate]
Suppose there is no sun, how much total energy is required to grow food, recycle air, water, and waste for a single person. I want to know how large of a reactor would be needed to keep alive a ...
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Would soil alone be able to provide everything that's needed to feed the development of an animal body without in-between edibles?
The setting features biomancers, mages who are like necromancers in that their magic revolves mainly around the use and obtaining or creation of minions or servants or the modification of said ...
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What if all life disappeared from the earth?
What if all life (plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and everything from the smallest cell to the largest whale) disappeared instantly?
And here I don't mean things related to the disappearance of ...
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Is an almost entirely water-based planet stable enough to stay as a planet for long enough for complex life to form?
Imagine an earth mass that consists purely and entirely of water that orbits a star similar to ours at a similar orbital distance to Mars(or whatever distance would be sufficient for the planet to ...
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Too much oxygen and not enough carbon
If a planet has a lot of oxygen to support mega flora and fauna, how much would be too much?
My planet has the oxygen content about that of the carboniferous(as a starter example), which had a about ...
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Indicators of Ai Super Intelligence [closed]
Given the certain state of Ai, what indicators would show some level of ‘Super Intelligence’?
Here are some of my ideas of 'Super Intelligence' this is subjective, of course.
Able to operate on ...
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Realistic reverse aging?
More than a few times in fiction they've had a sentient species age in reverse, as in the children look like adults and the adults like little children. My question is how could this trait be ...
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Biosolvents for Life
What biosolvents could, in theory, permit the emergence of life on other worlds? I have been recently looking through possible biosolvents and I have found a good number, but I am specifically looking ...
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Synthetic hydro carbon based Life
This question includes Genuine Artificial intelligence as life so long as it is self replicating and sapient. Hard science only please.
Can a sapient self replicating entity be designed to exclusively ...
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Scientific explanation for rainbow fire or sparks from a biological entity
I recently re-watched guardians of the galaxy vol.2, and the creature at the beginning could shoot rainbow colored fire. This got me thinking, (as in my spare time sometimes I like to just write a ...
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Would this planet be habitable for intelligent lifeforms
I am trying to make a universe using math and this is a planet from the first solar system I am making. Firstly the star. This star, which I don't have a name for, has a mass of 1.3 solar masses, a ...
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How long can a vampire live?
Okay, say I have a castle with a single vampire living in it. They need to drink the blood of 5 humans per day to survive, but they can substitute with animal blood, or by taking small amounts from ...
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How would the ocean smell if there were no life in it?
My characters are on a planet with no life that somehow has a weakly breathable atmosphere. They're on a beach and they note the smell. This is salt water so maybe the smell is different from, say, a ...
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How can I change Earth to become like Mars?
Earth has its own current population, 7 billions individuals or so. Everything is going great: there are animals, rivers, houses and factories. The world as we know it (without pandemic!).
One day ...
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Is This Living Planet Plausible?
My idea is an planet that is one living organism wrapped all around an rocky foundation. It orbits an sun of one solar mass, and has an Earthlike radius. Its albedo is about 20%, so it gets 1098.4 W/m^...
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How will resurrection affect inheritance law? [closed]
In our world, but in the future, humans have just discovered a technology that will resurrect any person for which a sample of DNA can be obtained. Now, for the first time, some people have been ...
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Oceans of sugar?
Simple/Vague question but what would it take to have a world that oceans aren't salty but sweet? Oceans full of sugar is that even possible?. Also secondary question could life survive in the water?
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Tropical Moon Orbiting Gas Giant [duplicate]
I am asking this question, “How would it be possible for the moon of a gas giant to naturally be habitable for human life?” Specifically, I’m looking at these criteria:
Has a tropical climate with ...
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Can two distinct large isolated life pockets on the planet evolve independently and then merge without driving one another to extinction?
In the geological history of my planet, the plate tectonics resulted in the assembly of a kind of "ring supercontinent", that completely encircled a portion of the ocean and isolated it from ...
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A bacterial organism that survives on the surface of Venus
Yes, you read the title right.
Naturally this cannot be DNA/RNA based, the highest temperature organisms have survived as we know it is 122 degrees celsius and Venus surface is 4 times hotter on ...
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What systems would be needed to keep two halves of a spaceship viable for humans?
A large space colony transport ship (100 colonists) set off for Europa to populate a colony recently built by drones (near future, the 2070s). The six-year flight was going well until unidentified ...
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Life und a Double Planet System [closed]
i am currently working on a CG Short for my Portfolio. It takes place in a Binary system and just tells the Story of a Pilot on one of the Planets.
Anyways, my question for today is how we could ...
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How can we avoid the evolution of inductive reasoning?
Inductive reasoning is one of our most powerful thinking tools as humans. It allows us to find patterns in what we observe and generalize these patterns to predict what will happen in the future.
Even ...
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