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Your Project Ideas; A place to share your ideas for projects
Topic Started: Oct 14 2015, 09:27 AM (65,389 Views)
Flisch
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Holben
Jan 22 2017, 02:41 PM
I think the real problem is the lack of the refined materials needed to create electrical components. You need some sort of community extracting rare metals etc that can be passed along the food chains.
Which is why the only time I've heard of a plausible "artificial life takes over" kind of thing in Stephen Baxter's "Evolution", where robots are sent to Mars to autonomously mine for materials and build them into a colony for humans to inhabit eventually. Unfortunately humans don't arrive because the Qu plot turns them into animals and the robots simply continue mining for materials and reproducing until they literally replace the entirety of Mars with themselves, after which they enter an era of natural evolution where imperfect replications result in "mutations" and eventually they assume an almost biological evolution dynamic, eventually giving rise to intelligent space-faring machines.
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trex841
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I've kind of had a similar idea for the New New Amsterdam idea a had a while back. They don't form their own ecosystem, but maintain upkeep of the cities and other locals after humans die out, allowing life to adapt to ecosystems that would never have existed otherwise. Main issue is if I just have this be an earth future or something a bit more "exotic".
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A comprehensive list of all organisms, artifacts, and alternative worlds encountered by the foundation team.

At the present time, concepts within are inconsistent and ever shifting.

(And this is just the spec related stuff)
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Sceynyos-yos
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dheubewes wedor
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Holben
Jan 22 2017, 02:41 PM
I think the real problem is the lack of the refined materials needed to create electrical components. You need some sort of community extracting rare metals etc that can be passed along the food chains.
See, that's my pet-peeve with the nanobots-replicate-and-annihilate-everything trope. They can't just convert everything they touch to raw materials (alchemistry much?) to other nanobots. They can't mine, can't melt metals, can't purify, all the way to not being able to hold the information needed to assemble a peer (at least with today's technology). Heck they even can't repair themselves.
There are some ways around this problem and that problem, but when you apply all the solutions, you've turned the nanobot into a living cell before you realised it, alternative biochemistry or not. (Could cells and microbes count as nanobots?)
The only reasonable robot apocalypse scenario involves macroscopic robots, likely something along the lines of what Flisch said. Or just robots with AGI gone rogue.
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Uncanny Gemstar
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An alternate universe idea. An alternate universe made up of impenetrable spheres floating in the void, connected sporadically and temporarily by similarly impenetrable tunnels/tubes. Each sphere is half filled with substrate of varying types or water. Each sphere would have a different humidity, temperature, and light levels. There would be no sun or stars, the spheres themselves would glow, with the brightest glow at the top, fading until it reaches the spheres equator. Spheres 'higher' up in the void would be brighter than those low in the void, until it reached a point where those high in the void have so much energy in them they destroy any life inside them, and those low in the void have so little energy in it nothing can exist/survive. Life would get there via the portal system often used in alt universe projects, but instead of being totally random, sometimes when a tunnel opens up between spheres it also opens a one way door to HE, and it closes whenever the tunnel disappears.
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Fazaner
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An idea for anyone who is interested, since xenobiology or teraformed worlds are not thing i am good at, world where all animals brought there are vertribates, no invertribates, might not be possible, but if anyone is interested they can take this since i dont really know about other planets, and things that go with them, so this idea is open for all.
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Uncanny Gemstar
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On my alt universe idea stated previously, do you guys think I could pull it off by myself, or would you any of you guys be interested in a collaboration/another community project?
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Rodlox
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Uncanny Gemstar
Jan 29 2017, 12:35 PM
On my alt universe idea stated previously, do you guys think I could pull it off by myself, or would you any of you guys be interested in a collaboration/another community project?
we have faith in your skills
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LittleLazyLass
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Proud quilt in a bag

Hmm, I wonder what the implications of minecraft-style bedrock would be. Something completely indestructible, not effected by erosion or geologic uplifting.
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Whiteshore
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What about a scenario where KT was far worse and was as bad as the P-T extinction?
Go to Crurotheria:A world of Killer Rodents,Notosuchid Elephants,and Sirenian Hippos:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5035229/1/
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Nyarlathotep
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Like in Great Lakes Earth? Do you mean like a larger asteroid to create similar ecological damage, or do you mean the Deccam Traps being Siberian sized? Huge potential difference there.
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Tartarus
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Incidentally a project about a world where the K-Pg Extinction was as severe as the P-T Extinction could potentially be quite an interesting one if pulled off properly.
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Beetleboy
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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A project about the next 50 million years, following the evolution of certain animal groups, change by change. It would look at how organisms adapt with each other, so this methodical way of speculating might create realistic evolutionary histories and speculative ecologies.
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GlarnBoudin
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Going on Beetleboy's idea, a project somewhat based on D&D. Dice rolls determine how well different animal groups survive, whether or not a natural disaster occurs, forcing them to adapt, what adaptations they develop, etc.

It'd probably need several people to write up the charts for something like this, but I'd be willing to help out with it.

Also:

Quote:
 
A while ago I came up with a rather odd idea, which I remembered just today. The premise is that just prior to the K-Pg extinction (or perhaps during it, or right after the impact of the Chixculub bolide), a small area of land (not sure of the continent) centered on a large herd of dinosaurs is put in completely suspended animation by an unexplained force (let's say Alien Space Bats). Hundreds of thousands to a million years later, very early into the Paleocene (after life has comfortably recovered, but prior to any real speciation), the area "un-pauses", freeing the biota within - plants (probably quite similar to those outside of the field), invertebrates, small populations of smaller animals, and the herd of dinosaurs.

The catch is, the herd of dinosaurs upon which the area was centered was a herd of large titanosaurian sauropods, the area in question being their nesting site shortly following the deposition of their eggs.

The project then focuses on how the Cenozoic progresses with the influence of both a very limited raft of more "standard" alternative K-Pg survivors and that of a large sauropod, which at the moment is the largest species of animal on the planet (terrestrial or aquatic - a strange concept) by a few orders of magnitude and possesses neither competition or predators on an effective scale.

Do you think it sounds interesting, or is it too pulpy?


Do it. There is no such thing as 'too pulpy.' Hell, I'd argue that some pulpy stuff would make a welcome change on this forum. Question: Would any predators or nest thieves lurking in the shadows of the nesting grounds make it through as well? Stuff like that would be interesting to interpret, particularly if you go with large varanids like Estesia.
Edited by GlarnBoudin, Feb 4 2017, 02:05 PM.
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Yiqi15
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A terraformed planet where most tetrapods are predators of mound-building termites: anteaters, aardvarks, alvarezsaurs, echidnas, and chimpanzees (I know they're not specialized to eating termites, but couldn't resist putting them in, what with their termite fishing and all.
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Mr Mysterio
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A project that centers around taking simple yet implausible concepts and running with them. Concepts can range from mildly implausible ("what if dolphins re-evolved into terrestrial animals?") to really weird and nearing impossible but not quite ("what if a fish evolved to walk on its teeth?" or "what if a rodent evolved some sort of mind control?")

Then, as mentioned, you run with the idea. For example, let's just assume that a lineage of tooth-walking fish somehow became successful. Assuming that were true, jump ahead maybe 20 or 30 million years. What have the tooth-walking fish evolved into now? Have they become weird, downward-facing filter-feeders, using their tooth-legs to sift through food in the sand as they walk? Maybe their tails, now no longer used for swimming, are used in elaborate mating displays. Maybe their tongue has become more dexterous, with sharp spines on its tip used to spear small worms and drag them into its mouth as it crawls.

There wouldn't be a singular setting, as each concept would be a part of its own separate continuity (unless stated otherwise). Could be a group project.
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