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[Question] [ Imagine a planet with the same climate all on the surface. There is only one living creature on this planet (let's say a plant to avoid food problem). It is perfectly adapted for the climate. And as there is no herbivorous animals, there is no reason to evolve for defense systems. In this case, would thi...
[Question] [ In the book I will soon attempt to write, a mysterious company will finance the construction of elaborate headquarters on a remote island somewhere in the South Pacific. ### The island The island in question will be extremely remote and largely unknown. This island will be affiliated with no country and ...
[Question] [ I'm working on a science fiction racing game that is centered around hovercraft that will race through various environments, both natural and man-made. I'm trying to establish a design language for these vehicles and I figured the best place to start would be figuring out how they hover and design them f...
[Question] [ At speeds near the speed of light, interstellar particles and gas may affect the movement of the ship, and microscopic particles may even badly damage the ship. Would not it make sense to make the shape aerodynamic so to reduce the damage and drag? Maybe the nose should even be armored? Maybe the ships s...
[Question] [ I'm currently in the world-building phase of my book (hence why I'm here). To add some perspective before I ask my question. The story is based in Britain, during the year 2032. In my story, there is a large wall around the city of Milton Keynes (89 km²). The wall is around 300 feet tall and made of con...
[Question] [ I want my advanced culture to have stone houses but I cannot think of a reason why they would keep this old fashioned method. What can I do to convince the czar of this land to use stone for building instead of metal or lumber? [Answer] # Stone Buildings are Hard to Burn This is no joke- if you want y...
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/26813/edit). Closed 3 years ago. [Improve this question]...
[Question] [ In my medieval fantasy world, there is the concept of the Five Pains for interrogation and punishment. Each pain correlated to a specific sense of the human body. Burning is used for touch, and a special chemical concoction is used for smell, etc. However, I have failed to find an adequate torture method...
[Question] [ The [M18A1 Claymore mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M18_Claymore_mine) is a directional fragmentation [anti-personnel mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-personnel_mine). It is designed to kill by projecting a lethal hail of steel balls within a 60-degree cone in front of itself. It seems settin...
[Question] [ What changes would you have to make to humans, the Earth, or the entire universe for humans to be able to go to explore the Moon and Mars with the technology levels of the Renaissance? [Answer] ## The problems I'm having a hard time being optimistic about this. The technological gap between the Renais...
[Question] [ I want to create a story about mind uploading, but I am completely convinced that even if you could transfer the contents of your brain to a computer emulation and then run it, it will always be a copy of your mind and the real you is gone or still in the body. The brain is an embodied system and once yo...
[Question] [ In a sci-fi project, bioengineering is now a fashionable and profitable industry. A couple of bioengineers decide to play silly buggers with the exobiologists downstairs by cobbling together an artificial life form and claim it is a naturally-evolved alien animal. They do this, not by extracting the DNA ...
[Question] [ Recently, I was going through the magical materials that existed in one of my fantasy settings. It was all going swimmingly, when a thought occurred to me: "You know, I should figure out how chemistry works with these things". I have been tortured and racked ever since trying to get something respectable...
[Question] [ In my story, there are a large group of technologically backwards Earthmen who wish to remove a futuristic Martian arcology from their ancestral land. The Earthmen do not have any 20th or 21st century technology, and using fossil fuels is strictly forbidden. The large gap in technology levels means that ...
[Question] [ So, if this is a science-based world, why are vampires, werewolves and other entities associated with the dark side so sensitive to silver? Well, it has nothing to do with the metal, but rather its inhabitants. Silver nanites are self-replicating robots that dwell on the surfaces of silver objects, as th...
[Question] [ We've had a few STEM questions asking for the total wattage necessary for a laser to vaporize a person. I would like to focus on the human aspects of it, specially relating to sensory experience. The reason being that in one of my tales, weapons that can vaporize people exist and are common enough that t...
[Question] [ The superiority of pole arms and spears in particular has become a pretty common meme across multiple online communities, so that got me thinking; what if you had a fighting force in which the *only* weapons were some sort of spear. No swords, no axes, no maces, no picks, no bows, no slings. By “some sor...
[Question] [ Around 100 years from now society has entered a multi planetary society, with mines in space bringing in resources to Earth in abundance. Utilizing this new material wealth, Earth Nations start to, metaphorically, buy the Rolls-Royce cars of the new hip military tech: soldier drones. These humanoid robot...
[Question] [ I want my world to be set in early to mid Industrial Age but for various reasons that I won't go into here I don't want there to be any gunpowder based weapons. Is it possible for a society to advance to the Industrial Age without ever discovering gunpowder? [Answer] If I understood the question corre...
[Question] [ Our spherical planet has two hemispheres divided at the equator. Those living in the north hemisphere experience the opposite season as those living in the south hemisphere at any given time of year. For example: New Zealand summer/Britain winter, USA spring/Australia autumn, etc. Is it possible for a pl...
[Question] [ So, I'm well aware that [Sci-fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale). This is an effort to avert this for intragalactic conquest. My mighty space navy has crushed a solar system's defensive fleet, and now control the space around a pl...
[Question] [ So there's this human empire spanning over many galaxies in our sector. They rely on a vast fleet of faster-than-light spacecraft for war and trade. 4 brave brothers are accepted into the space travel academy. One is assigned as a fighter pilot, one as a fighter-bomber, one as a anti-small-spacecraft, de...
[Question] [ Since they can't really work a job that would allow easy access to blood, I thought of having them volunteer at a blood bank then maybe steal a bag. Alternatively, is it plausible that they would come into contact with expired blood that needs to be thrown out? Or would the bank not allow them to be in c...
[Question] [ **Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help). Closed 2 years ago. [Improve this que...
[Question] [ In **Science Fiction**, when civilizations grow powerful enough to conquer the planet and are in need for room, they turn to the planets in outer space. Obviously, the other planets have very different conditions, some are hot, some are cold, and all don’t have proper air that we can breathe. At this poi...
[Question] [ A detective is investigating a series of grisly murders in New York. The bodies of the victims seem to have been ripped apart by a inhumanly strong person. He has narrowed down the list of suspects to one individual, Henry Jekyll, a scientist working out of a lab in Queens. He secretly follows Jekyll in ...
[Question] [ Deserts are defined by their hostility to flora and fauna and a distinct lack of rain. Plains are simply relatively smooth areas of land. My question is how much area would be required to have a shift from a desert area to a plains area? I.E. If I started in a desert and walked in one direction, what is ...
[Question] [ Imagine a late 16th-Century European Kingdom. The King is obsessed with invading a small neighbouring country for no good reason. He would not profit neither economically nor politically. However, his problem is that he can't decide on his own to go to war. He needs to put it to some assembly/government/...
[Question] [ I have a setting where there is power armor along with a somewhat compact power source that powers not only the suit, but some basic weapons and additional features on the suit. The problem I am currently having is that such a power source at such a compact level would have unintentional consequences. Na...
[Question] [ More posts from this thread will be linked here: [Metal-Feathered Macaw Viability Part 2: Best Wing Shape?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116518) # Info I'm designing a [macaw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaw) that has metal feathers, claws, and a metal beak--to be particular, steel. To s...
[Question] [ [Jupiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter) is a terrible place to be, but for a number of artistic reasons, I'd like to have my story take place there and only there. "Mining", **or resource extraction by any other name**, is the usual reason cited for sending human beings to live in terrible place...
[Question] [ In the setting of a novella I am just beginning to write, computing and engineering are significantly ahead of our world, but biotechnology lags massively behind: They have very efficient brain-computer interfaces and brain-controlled artificial limbs that are almost as good as the real thing, although a...
[Question] [ I know that Sun-sized planets are impossible in our universe, please, bear with me. Eastern high fantasy (xianxia) features worlds that span millions of kilometres. For example, descriptions of distances may state that it will take 200-300 years to go from place A to place B at the speed of 5000 km per d...
[Question] [ I've been thinking of doing a kinda riff on Planet of the Apes, where a space faring civilization sets out to colonize the stars only for one of the ships to wind up back on the home planet. I like the idea of the round trip happening in geological time (like hundreds of millions of years) so that by the...
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/107142/edit). Closed 5 years ago. [Improve this question...
[Question] [ ***UPDATE: I was informed that my English terminology was incorrect. I was using the term "celibate", instead of the intended and correct "chaste". The idea was "no sex", not "no marriage".*** Earth had no shortage of religious movements that to some extent prized chastity. But they were all either: * Re...
[Question] [ I have a world in which several countries use, as an alternative to rotting prison for the rest of your life, the deprivation of citizenship from one's home country and deportation to a desolate island with a bunch of other misfits (like yourself.) My world is technologically modern and this alternative ...
[Question] [ In humans skin color varies slightly in shades of dark brown to a faded pink, which has the purpose of protecting the skin from sunlight. An idea used commonly by people beginning designing alien is to have their aliens have every possible color of skin under the sun, but in my mind this is kind of unlik...
[Question] [ [Space Voids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void) are areas in the universe that are for the most part, empty. They lack stars, meteors and black holes; They are simply put, the lack of celestial formation. Considering that future universal empires may want to build super large space station...
[Question] [ This is from [the Sandbox](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/1716#1716). *Star Wars* fans, picture a setting like [the forest moon of Endor](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Endor), albeit planet-sized and without Ewoks running about. For everyone else...
[Question] [ In the steampunk era of my world there is a military academy that trains officers for the United Anglicynn Kingdoms' military. To be a little different I decided that cadets all train together with specialty classes depending on if they will serve on ships, in the air force, on the ground piloting mechan...
[Question] [ ... And if it absolutely has to, then such river should overflow in predictable matter. I have a city idea in mind, where such the city has a river contained in an artificial tunnel beneath such city. I instantly know one huge design flaw of such a city, which is the floods. So, I have to take one step b...
[Question] [ **The story so far**: Pennyless joe gets a "groundhog potion" that supposedly allows to repeat one day *once*. He drinks it and proceeds to win the state lottery by memorizing the numbers. He then discovers that he is fated to repeat every day for 3 to 5 times (randomly). He also finds out that other "gr...
[Question] [ I'm trying to write a scene in which a supervolcanic eruption destroys the [ISS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station) by blasting a shower of [tephra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tephra) to the ISS's orbital height. The ISS is about 400 kilometers up. Let's assume the supervolcano...
[Question] [ In a story I'm writing, I'm going to need iron to ward off magical creatures, faeries to be exact. This iron should not be used in an alloy with other metals or coated with something like paint, tin, zinc or something like that. It should be relatively quick and easy to obtain from the enviroment. The ...
[Question] [ The world I'm building is pretty much exactly the same as the real world, with one exception: there are some immortal people with access to magic. These people have so far remained hidden from the normal population and formed a fairly large community somewhere in the wilderness of Scandinavia. I want the...
[Question] [ I am currently trying to create a system of government for a project that, for reasons I can't quite go into, combines elements from both European feudal systems with current democratic governments, as seen in America or the UK. Without giving away plot specifics I'm going to try to divulge as many nece...
[Question] [ Suppose I created a private network of peer-to-peer cellphones and started handing phones out to people globally. Now, these phones don't have to use the common cell phone bands of the EM spectrum... I know some bands are better than others for building penetration, etc... the users of this network are w...
[Question] [ In my medieval fantasy world, airships are efficient and entrenched in the economy of trade and commerce. However, coordinating air travel on certain routes and prevailing winds seems difficult, especially considering that this world lacks much of what modern air traffic control uses to coordinate travel...
[Question] [ **Premise:** My setting incorporates an alternate history with a Martian invasion at the end of the 19th century as in War of the Worlds, the two major technical differences being that the Martians are not immediately incapacitated by endemic earth diseases and human warmaking is slightly more advanced a...
[Question] [ I have a fictional country which I'm currently mapping. My country's currency is the Lobe, an acronym for 'Loaf Of Bread Equivalent'. The government guarantees that 1 Lobe will always buy 1 loaf of 'government specification' bread. What I'm asking, is it feasible that a loaf of bread costs 1 lobe in 1860...
[Question] [ A nuclear attack submarine carrying a crew of, at least, a hundred people went missing in the North Atlantic Ocean, its last known location was the Bermuda Triangle where ships and planes have vanished. Cutting to the chase; the sub has traveled back in time several hundreds of millions of years into the...
[Question] [ I have two large continents on an earth like world. I would like for the dominate predator on the more desert continent to be a large cat. I have found the leopards and jaguars of Egypt, but am uncertain how much they actually live in the desert. I want a second opinion to catch anything I might have mis...
[Question] [ I have heard of gravitational slingshots being used to theoretically accelerate a spacecraft using a planet's gravity and momentum in orbit. But how about **decelerating** a ship? If it is at all possible, could it be done without g-forces killing the entire crew and destroying the ship if said spacecraf...
[Question] [ The other day I stumbled upon a youtube video from Bad Internet series: [Which of The “Friends” Are You?](https://youtu.be/2QyzjYqkj2U) and it made me remember a previous occurrence of an idea that people are sorted into their roles by some algorithm: The second one refers to the [Futurama](https://en.wi...
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/23688/edit). Closed 8 years ago. [Improve this question](/pos...
[Question] [ In [How can I convince members of peaceful religions to start a holy war?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20597/how-can-i-convince-members-of-peaceful-religions-to-start-a-holy-war), I made one critical assumption: Religious groups can be peaceful. As four separate people expressed som...
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/47181/edit). Closed 7 years ago. [Improve this question]...
[Question] [ Whenever people discuss mammalian-type merfolk, I usually see them be modeled after cetaceans like dolphins and whales. This is perfectly serviceable, but there is one piece of anatomy that I cannot figure out how to apply to a mermaid: the Blowhole. As to why a mermaid would have a blowhole, the reasons...
[Question] [ Let me explain further the idea. Nowadays (as thousands of years earlier) many people bound themselves in their mind to a particular nation, country, town, neighborhood etc. And very often these people think that they are good ones and other people, who live everywhere else are not so good, just because ...
[Question] [ Imagine an alien race. They are the creators of Unspecified Advanced Alien Technology™. One day they lose one of their ships. The crew had to evacuate, and the ship kind of crashed on a random planet. About four thousand years later, humans found that crash site, and found a few artifacts that they manag...
[Question] [ In my world, skeletons are a thing. They're raised from existing corpses under the control of their "master". Obviously, there's magic involved. But I don't want magic to be part of the whole process. Let's say the magician behind the skeletons control is simply acting as a puppet master, pulling strings...
[Question] [ In many famous alien species you see that the iris is so large that it almost appears that it replaces the sclera. What evolutionary history would support the irises growing to that size. The only two requirements of the species are that they need to be humanoid and evolved in jungles. For the record I ...
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/147413/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question...
[Question] [ In my story there will be animals that are incredibly strong and resistant to injury. To better understand how to design my creatures, I'm asking for help understanding how to make the [Eurasian Brown Bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_brown_bear) (common in Europe during the 1200's) more resis...
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/116505/edit). Closed 5 years ago. [Improve this question...
[Question] [ I have a question that concerns a story I am writing and I hope it is a valid one to ask. But in my story, several groups of colonists, each arriving on different ships at relatively the same time, land on a newly discovered habitable world with the goals of spreading and populating the new world while e...
[Question] [ Yet another airship question. We now all know that it would be impossible to build an airship of any practical size or effectiveness [before the 19th century](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79008/how-might-airships-be-made-using-18th-century-technology/79009#79009), and that once a civ...
[Question] [ Consider writing about aliens, in an alien setting. Not “costume” aliens mind you, but imaginative *different* beings in fundamental ways. Calling it “Bill” is campy. Making up some noise and trying to spell it in English is not right if the kinds of sounds they make are quite different than human langua...
[Question] [ **The ocean of my very earth-like planet is covered in its entirety by vegetation, forming a kind of carpet on top of the water's surface.** This free-floating halophyte is a superorganism formed by trillions of individual plants. The squishy upper layer always stays on top of the water thanks to pneumat...
[Question] [ Okay so there's a project I've been thinking about for a long time wherein humans colonise a world where the climate appears warm and benign only to discover that the local climate oscillates from something like the height of the last [Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum) to somet...
[Question] [ The world ends tomorrow, you can't stop it and you will die. You can, however, put information on a hard drive(s). What information has the best ratio of "days until world back to pre apocalypse state" reduction per gigabyte? General assumptions: * The largest amount of data that can be used is 10TB (raw...
[Question] [ For example, See the following evolutionary graph: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1RWIB.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1RWIB.jpg) $A$ is an original species. $B$ and $C$ evolved from $A$ but reproductive isolation. $D$ and $D'$ are almost the same, so they are not reproductiv...
[Question] [ On Earth, the mostly used calendar is the Gregorian calendar. This calendar has many issues though, just to list some: * It is not perennial. Each year starts on a different day of the week and calendars expire every year. * It is difficult to determine the weekday of any given day of the year or month. ...
[Question] [ So, the lead up to the story is that a skinwalker drags injured people into the deep forest and nails them to trees before summoning a demon into each of them, leaving them there as parasites who followed the Christians, until needed. Around the same time, a fugitive from the law takes refuge in the town...
[Question] [ > > The direction of the force will always be perpendicular to velocity and pointing to the opposite side of the rotation direction. In plain terms, any object traveling in the rotation plane: up (toward the axis), down (from the axis), Westward (spinward) or Eastward (counter-spinward) will seem to be ...
[Question] [ I am trying to wrap my head around the geography of a settlement in my world. The settlement is situated along the coast, along a river roughly 500m wide with temperate mixed forests surrounding it, which I hazard to guess is relatively common. The difficulty comes with the freshwater springs to which th...
[Question] [ I was wondering if creatures with thick natural armor would create artificial armor. They have all the resources they would need in order to create armor, but their natural armor is better than a knight's plate armor, for example. Would they bother creating artificial armor, which adds more weight, or wo...
[Question] [ I'll keep this brief: I'm not too well versed in secret government protocol nor have I read enough sci-fi books on this type of matter. But simply put, in my story, a series of UFOs crash land around the world, one doing so in the United States near a town in the deep south. [This older query](https://wo...
[Question] [ Man would never travel beyond his interstellar neighborhood in his lifetime. He can, but he'll never return home in the lifetime of everyone he knows. If he travels further, he will return to find even his home is long gone. This is due to one vicious supervillain ruling our universe. A supervillain name...
[Question] [ A mage has created an amulet of light. It shines light from one side, and the user is capable of controlling the color and intensity of that light. In an effort to avoid abuse, the mage has limited the amulet to only produce wavelengths in the visible range. Perhaps less cleverly, they did not think to p...
[Question] [ 1350 AD. A secret society is recruiting adepts in Rome, Florence, Paris, Wien, Prague and London; well-educated people in high ranks of nobility, catholic church, engineers, professors and knights. Given at that time Latin was used as formal/common language and cryptography was still relegated to militar...
[Question] [ Question speaks for itself. If you had an immortal (thinking God-Emperor Leto style), would language change? Assuming an immortal presence in society holding a high (or multiple high) positions of authority, I'd assume that language would not change as drastically as it could naturally. [Answer] Langu...
[Question] [ As a follow on from [Destruction by design - how best to go about crafting a ruined landscape?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96476/destruction-by-design-how-best-to-go-about-crafting-a-ruined-landscape) I'll be asking two questions about signature destructive patterns, this is the fi...
[Question] [ Consider a space opera sort of universe in which there exist communities of water-dwelling humanoids. These ocean people are derived from rootstock humans, descendants of genetically engineered human-variants who pioneered the colonisation of water worlds, or of Earth’s oceans. They may live their entire...
[Question] [ In this story I'm writing, I start in a sword and sandal "age of myth" type setting, but as the centuries press on, it becomes medieval in nature. As even more time passes, there is even some steampunk influence that begins to show up. My question is this; how long does an era last? What are the key fact...
[Question] [ ## What system do they use to distinguish robots from inanimate parts? I previously asked how a robot would know what metals to build itself with in [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213299/how-does-a-robot-distinguish-different-metals-and-materials-for-self-repair). That ...
[Question] [ In a Medieval Fantasy style world, I'd like to have a city/fortress that is impossible to besiege, because they can produce all of the food they need within the strong city walls. However, I'm not sure that this is feasible, as with more land to produce food you need more space, therefore more people to ...
[Question] [ In the world I'm creating, a branch of humans from prehistoric earth were castaway to another dimension by reality bending beings. The dimension exists as a large cavern filled with giant Earth arthropods and plants. Its strange laws of physics allow both organisms to survive with no negative side effect...
[Question] [ Boats and balloons both work because of buoyancy - they are pushed up by a force equal to the weight of displaced water/air respectively. I want my (otherwise earthlike) planet to have 'seas' of a liquid or gas that is * Denser than air, so it sits on the ground * Light enough that normal boats made of w...
[Question] [ ## The Eternal Arms Race Between Weapon and Armor This world has a race of giant [crabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab) who have developed armor sufficiently strong that the top predator's teeth can't puncture the armor. In response, the top predator has taken the next evolutionary step of developin...
[Question] [ I'm writing an urban fantasy world set in a world that was very similar to our own, except that powerful healing abilities have recently become available. It's now possible to heal someone from severe wound to full health in a matter of minutes via effectively magic; though only until they're too exhaust...
[Question] [ For context, I'm considering a story similar to the Netfilx TV show *The 100* in which humanity has to recolonize the Earth following a major extinction-level event. I'm aiming for the society they recreate to be similar to our current one. Everything from technology to cities to daily life is almost ide...
[Question] [ So I got this species of vampire-creatures (no conversion of other species, just mating and reproducing in typical mammalian fashion) that subsist entirely on blood. I'm using a bit of magic to imply they subsist on both the nutritional aspects of the blood and magical energy in the sanguine itself. Tech...
[Question] [ At the end of [a recent movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_%28film%29), the hero wakes up in a space station which is probably only a few kilometers wide and generates gravity by rotating. In this station, kids are playing **baseball**. It strikes me as **implausible** that baseball beco...
[Question] [ **The story** My hero is an average European city boy of the 21th century. Eighteen years old, doing a bit of sport, eating well, with a job that doesn't require much physical efforts. He would appears just as normal as you, or I, do. For the sake of the story, he will be white of color with blue eyes. B...
[Question] [ I'm in the process of adding the fun parts to my world, and I'm a bit perplex on this one; # Premise Let's assume a fantasy ooze > > An ooze is a mindless carnivorous blob of jello - think cube-shaped or formless jellyfish. It has no natural predators, and feeds passively - if organic matter touches it,...
[Question] [ There are two teams, ![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QFDfJ.png) green team and ![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvFAE.png) tan team, who are fighting each other for some reason that's not super important. Both teams consist of human shaped plastic figures about two inches tall and colored the same as their re...
[Question] [ An alien automatic "beacon" tries to warn us about some imminent danger. It does so with launching a succession of large "veils" in front of their star so we can detect them via the transit method. This succession of dips in the star luminosity forms a binary message. The first part of the message conv...
[Question] [ Imagine a setting where humans have to compete with another sentient race, which can only be harmed by magnetized weapons. Humans have only basic technology, and magic is very very rare. Would it be feasible for them to magnetize crude iron weapons with lodestones before a battle, or are lodestones not s...