Questions tagged [xenobiology]
For questions related to the biology of extra-terrestrial organisms. This tag implies the use of the science-fiction tag. Use the science-based or hard-science tags to impose greater scientific restrictions (see warning in tag wiki). The goal of this tag is to answer the question using known science.
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How strong is Copper Carbonate compared to Hydroxyapatite?
I'm currently working on a habitable super-earth and was considering using Copper Carbonate as a replacement for bone, I've heard it's both heavier and stronger although I would like to know the ...
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Could alien nanobots re-engineer humans using xeno nucleic acids?
Is it possible for alien nanobots to give humans new abilities (kinda like superpowers such as enhanced strength, carapace against gunfire, etc.) by altering their DNA using XNA without killing the ...
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Single-sex species that has specific culture roles for different body types? [closed]
Basically what the title question says. I want there to at least be three socially constructed genders, each with their own expectations of how they should act and dress. I want the species to have a ...
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How might extreme tides affect the evolution of life?
I was hypothesizing about making a planet with a different path of evolution. A planet with dominant species being more akin to amphibians albeit further down the evolutionary chain. Would extreme ...
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Explaining Swinger, giant bugs with swinging methods of hunting
What Are Swinger?
Swinger are giant bugs (ranging from the size of a toy mallet to a mace), teardrop-shaped with a stalk growing out of their dorsal (top) side at the pointy end of their body. ...
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Biological cold pack to increase the stamina of endothermic animals, alien or otherwise
The cheetah is really fast, and the primary reason it has such little stamina is getting too hot. Ive looked into having more efficient metabolism to produce less body heat and I didnt get anywhere ...
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How can my large cephalopod aliens have an upright stance?
I have a species in my sci-fi setting, that are basically land-dwelling sapient nautilus.
They differ from most concepts of "land-dwelling cephalopod" in that they're supposed to be the ...
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Alternative biology/Xenoforming 3:any ideas how to xenoform Mars? [closed]
So i have an idea of an super advanced being that travels around the galaxy and spreads life on every planet that has any potential for it.By "life"i do not mean only "Carbon based"...
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Alternate Biology/Xenoforming:Could the moon have a Chlorine atmosphere?
So I have this idea that a super advanced being travels across the galaxy and is terraforming/xenoforming every planet that CAN be modified for life, not just Carbon based Earthlike lifeforms but ...
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Is an organism possible which has an organ at a pressure of 5.5 bar/80psi?
In an earth-like environment (above sea level), could an animal have an organ which could exert pressures equal to 5.5 bar 80 psi, enough to maintain liquid CO2? Taking in account that the temperature ...
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How to make humans compatible with a high pressure CO2 atmosphere?
We've found a habitable planet around Procyon and do have the technology to settle it. However, it is in the outer part of its systems habitable zone. So while it has a well-developed and mostly ...
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What would Typical Adaptations for Life be on a Gas Giant's Habitable Moon? [closed]
Okay, this question may seem too broad, but bear with me.
On Damarian, the largest moon of the gas giant Checuti, there are no continents larger than the Americas (Both North and South America) in ...
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Impact of sulfur dioxide on biochemistry
Curious artist, not a chemist, kinda dumb boi looking for some kind galaxy brains here.
Okay. So. I have this planet. Its atmospheric composition is fairly earthlike: 21.6% O2, 77% N2, 0.2% CO2, 0.4% ...
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Can any monosaccharide be used as a XNA backbone?
I'm not a chemist—I'm an artist and I occasionally write. But I'm starting to get more and more interested in xeno/speculative biology. When it comes to these things I'm pretty much just looking at ...
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What radio wave frequencies work best for communication between deep sea creatures?
I have a species that have evolved from their world's equivalent of deep (~3 kilometres deep) sea snails, specifically from they resemble the Scaly-Foot Gastrobpod. The Xeno-ocean is salty/has a ...
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Are there any major problems with my creature design?
This mammal-thing is based off of kangaroos, red squirrels, dromeosaurs, cats, and of course, humans.
My creature is slightly bigger than most humans, digitigrade and bipedal. It has a long, thick ...
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Is a planet sized creature possible?
Now, I have started working on a game called In The Flesh, and I have decided to use this site to work on it.
The Game Itself
In any case, the main idea of In The Flesh is that it's a sci-fi ...
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Is my Bioluminescent, Four-legged, Bat Creature Possible?
Note, all animals are actually only Damarian equivalents of the animals named, except for my question creature.
My world, Damarian (Found in my newer posts), has a species of obligate carnivores, ...
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Could a humanoid spinal/neck structure support horns used for combat? [duplicate]
Bouncing off of this question from a while back: What alterations without drastically altering their humanoid shape nor horns, can I make to my species that lower the risk of neck snapping?
Let's ...
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Anatomically correct Shadow People
What would a realistic space-dwelling humanoid species under these guidelines look like? It's for a setting I am working on. They are sentient and live on asteroids, typically converted into ships.
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What would aliens with 'automated muscles' be like?
The automated muscles would be an alternative to animal muscles, which consist of a tissue that contracts like muscles, but does this on a cyclic 'timetable' which is synchronised across the entire ...
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Energetics in a reducing atmosphere
I am working on a speculative evolution project, which takes place in a reducing atmosphere consisting mainly of methane, nitrogen gas, hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, along with liquid ammonia as ...
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What kinds of creatures would likely evolve in this enviroment
In my verse there is one planet which is very warm and typically dry, deserts of black sands or large stone plateaus, outside of the area around rivers and on the lush sides of mountains. This also ...
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Plausibility of not noticing alien life on Earth
In the mid 21st Century a dinosaur fossil dig team has encountered something a little different from what they are used to. They have stumbled upon some kind of unknown ooze or slime, preserved in ...
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Can a "knockout bird" fly?
For an alternate Earth I am trying to develop a type of flying creature which poses an unusual threat model for the unaware explorers wandering in their habitat: when the creature is flying above 10 ...
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Realistic Micrometer-Tall Humanoids
Okay, I have a species of humanoids who are 1 micrometer tall, when fully grown. They have the same exterior proportions as humans, but due to their small size, they don’t need internal organs as we ...
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Would this setting be realistic or feasible for this race?
I have a concept for a race that I'm very confident is sound in general, but I'm wondering if they would do well in the setting I currently have in mind. The race has a lizard-like appearance, largely ...
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How long can a humanoid's arms be before it can't throw things?
I'm making a creature that is mostly bipedal but can run on four legs if it needs to. It's not nearly as good at running as a true quadruped but it's better than a human. To do this, I've elongated ...
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Is it possible for an species which can control autonomic function to exist
The autonomic nervous system (ANS), formerly the vegetative nervous
system, is a division of the peripheral nervous system that supplies
smooth muscle and glands, and thus influences the function of ...
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Scaling up the bat wing: still a good alternative for a large flying animal or inferior to a pterosaur wing?
My creature is an alien roughly 3 meters tall while standing (roughly 2,5 meters at the shoulders, with arms that can touch the ground while standing upright) and weights roughly 220 kg (roughly 485 ...
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Nocturnal or Diurnal?
I am currently creating a species similar to a squirrel. It lives in a rainforest-type environment and eats fruit. Its predator is a cat-like creature that ambushes it. The average temperature on the ...
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Horns for Cooling Off
I am currently creating a cat-like creature that lives in the trees. It is a diurnal ambush predator that's a little over a foot (30 cm) in height and two feet (60 cm) in length (not including tail). ...
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What would the skull of my creature look like?
My creature has a completely flat nosebridge, forward facing eyes, canine-like teeth, and horns. I'd also like to ask if the reference posted below has enough room for a large brain, as it is just as ...
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Movement Features for Tree-Dwelling Prey Animal
I am currently creating a small creature about the size of a squirrel. It lives in the trees and eats fruit. It is the prey of a cat-like creature that has a prehensile tail and is agile and can run ...
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Changes to water worlds to make them habitable
What changes/additions/deletions, large or small, minimum handwavium allowed, would be needed to make suspected water covered exo-planets such as Gliese 1214 b, Kepler-22b, Kepler-62e, and Kepler-62f, ...
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Oceans of breathable liquid
I want to create a locale (hopefully a whole planet?), where the ocean is breathable. I was looking at perfluorocarbons, so the liquid part is at least possible(?)
Is there any way to create a world ...
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What sort of Life Form could my Creature Excrete to Make Its own Habitat?
Concept: An organism that through its natural biological processes excretes some form of microscopic life that spreads through an environment by breaking down organic (and maybe inorganic) matter and ...
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Giant Parasite Wearing a Human Flesh Suit
I'm working on designing a creature for a sci fi horror story. The organism did not naturally evolve so any concerns about these traits evolving naturally can be handwaved. For the purposes of the ...
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Biological Antifreeze In Blood
Okay, so I have a sapient alien species that has a carbon-based biochemistry, and is extremophilic, able to survive having their internal temperature lowered to as cold as 253 K. They are able to do ...
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What color would plants be on a hot spring planet? [duplicate]
I had an idea for an alien world I want to set a story on and if this question proves popular I might ask other questions regarding this world.
The world in question is an earth like moon orbiting a ...
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Energy costs and gains for creature growth at a molecular level
This is a long time scale creature - it experiences a thousand years in the fashion that we experience one.
It grows by pulling one neutron from a $C^{12}$ molecule and building it onto other carbon ...
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Complexity of ecosystems in oceans of rogue planets
I'm looking into building a setting for my alien biosphere. I thought that a rogue terrestrial planet, ejected from its home system and then developing life underneath the ice of its deep oceans, with ...
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How would this Eusocial species deal with large Dragons?
My world has Eusocial Wyverns that live in groups of a thousand or so. They are about the size of rats. They have several castes, similar to ants or naked mole rats. All members of the same cast are ...
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How could an eyesight that can switch between perceived light wavelengths work?
So there is a race that is supposed to be able to switch from the visible spectrum to infrared, in about 10 seconds.
I was thinking it might be a double retina, and the eye has some muscles to move ...
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How could exobacteria be biologically compatible without using terrestrial DNA?
Humans are terraforming what they believed to be a barren planet when they encounter a new species of bacteria. This species is exobacteria (bacteria of extraterrestrial origin), but the human ...
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Teeth that grow proportionately to your size
Before we start, I'm not talking about the continuously growing teeth of rodents, or the tusks of elephants. Instead, what I'm looking for is one set of teeth that could fit in a newborn's skull, that ...
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What would an erosion resistance ecological system look like?
I was thinking about how given a whole host of sci-fi scenarios, you end up with landmass but no form of geological activity or plate tectonics, and so ensuring you end up with a lot of scenarios ...
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Tungsten-based life using molten sodium chloride as solvent
My idea is to have organisms that use molten salt as their solvent in the chemistry of the creature. So what I was thinking to have the cells consist of tungsten polyoxometalates but my issue is the ...
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Plausibility of Tribe-Sized Megafauna
Given inspiration from this post here, I have been working on a society of aliens in which each tribe lives on a single member of species of enormous megafauna. Let's call the megafauna the "...
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What might cause evolution to produce bioluminescence in almost every lifeforms on a alien planet?
On a planet similar to Earth, is is possible for all living creatures to have bioluminescence? If yes, what role would it fulfill?
What other traits would be useful in such an environment?
Larger eyes?...
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