The CBB

Is this for a coastal, plains, forest, or what? Many of the First Nations had no concept of a sea, others knew little else. Personally, I'd like to submit a phonology and phonotactics I like. t d k θ ð r l i iː u uː e eː o oː a aː Romanization a e i o u r l k d t th ð Vowel hiatus and synaeresis are...

Oraataā has words for earth, water, air and fire, and also words for solid, liquid, gas and plasma. In its setting, the four elements (and positive and negative energy) really are the basic components of everything, and all four can exist in any of the four states. Lava? Earth with a great deal of p...

Chirpie Chirpie, as the people of the neighbouring lands call it, is the native language of the Stillwater Archipelago. Unique among all the languages of the world, Chirpie is a musical language, sung rather than spoken, and its actual name is, using our terminology, either “2-1-3” or “re-do-mi.” Th...

This is just a rough sketch for a setting element. A series of large caverns is lit by naturally occurring "panels" in the walls, floor and ceiling, or maybe just some of them (just one wall, perhaps). The mechanism is that a large body of high grade radioactive material behind a thick wal...

The hydrogen allows it to rise a little higher, which means it's less subject to waves. Basically, I have an image of a living balloon, like an airborne man-o'-war, and I'm trying to work out a somewhat plausible evolutionary path that leads to it.

One correction: I imagined the creature to be like the Portuguese man-o'-war, floating on the surface of the ocean.

I should have spotted the water problem myself.

The concept is fairly simple: a creature that outwardly resembles a siphonophore. At some point in its evolution one of its metabolic processes began to leak moderately pure hydrogen into its bubble, making it slightly more buoyant. This provides a survival advantage due to the ones with it being le...

I see nothing implausible about it. Basically, you're describing escargot.

That's fair, but it raises the question of how to classify organisms of another planet, at least until there's enough information available to start drawing up cladograms. I'm not trying to be obstinate, I'm trying to get a handle on the problem.

Well, the idea was to collect ideas for how biologists might classify some of the native creatures, particularly the odder ones that don't really fit into Terran categories.

Question: Does this creature belong to a class of animals we don't have on Earth? That is the intent. I'm trying to come up with non-Terrestrial life forms, but as the world is broadly Earthlike, the life is likely to also be vaguely Earthlike, though still quite different in at least some cases: t...

The concept is of an organism that bears live young and nurses them in a mammalian manner, and at the same time lives entirely in the water and breathes water. Imagine something akin to a mammalian ray or a ray-like dolphin.

What might one call a warm-blooded animal that breathes water, bears live young, and then nourishes them on a fluid like milk?

One thing I don't understand is why everyone seems to assume that "Edo period architecture and aesthetics" also means Edo period tech and society. Unless aesthetics has some additional meaning I've not previously encountered.

OK. I think I need to clarify some assumptions. First: FTL travel is slow, compared to what's shown in most SF, only five lights. Second: No FTL signalling. Communications between systems is by way of the analogue of e-mail on USB keys. Third: Ki is not yet fully harnessed for the simple reason that...

I am sorry - all my past few posts have been, is quibbling, not addressing major issues; please, continue your worldbuilding. AI and robotics get cheaper and more versatile every time you turn around. Do you have any idea how much of the work force still does repetitive rote work? I was referring t...

even now, AI can't replace humans - or function as well as humans; AI are simply good at things that humans aren't, and vice versa. AI keeps getting better, and steadily cheaper than humans, and the trend of replacing people with machines will continue if not checked (which seems unlikely). What ha...

I've never been able to remember Gardner's first name. Thank you.

Keenir wrote: ↑23 Jul 2019 17:59 um, why would it? people have been domesticating and inventing time- and labor-saving devices for millenia.

None of which have, until recently, been capable of truly replacing humans. Also, though human society as a whole might not collapse, individual societies can and do and have.