Activity for SealBoiâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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How would a species be unable to produce steel? The antagonist of my story trades steel with a non-human, and non-humanoid, race, in return for a magical substance. They place great value in steel as they cannot manufacture it themselves. That is, they do know how steel production works, yet some aspect of their biology makes it unfeasible for the... (more) |
— | almost 5 years ago |
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How could a volcanic island last for 100 million years? Some islands can survive for very long. Madagascar, for example, has been around for 80-100 million years and is likely to remain isolated for hundreds of millions of years more. Volcanic islands, however, are generally much more short-live, due to the fact that the same spot rarely has access to ma... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Climate in an ice age Creating a map of Koppen climate zones for a very Earth-like world is quite easy, with the right instructions. However, what if the climate is several degrees cooler? Do I simply shift all the climates equator-ward, or is it more complex than that? If not, how much should I squish them? (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Realistic melange - Part 1: Formation Melange, also known as "the spice", is a fictional drug in Frank Herbert's famous Dune series, which has many benefits (and some drawbacks). In this series of questions, I'll try to see how many of its properties a single, consistent substance could plausibly have at once. These effects are: Incr... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Thunderstorms, 24/7 There are a number of places in which cumulonimbus clouds - and therefore, thunderstorms - are likely to form, such as: Cold fronts, where masses of cold air move into hot, moist air masses Around the equator, where the trade winds of both hemispheres come together Mountainous areas, which increase... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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How to figure out layers of the atmosphere? Earth's atmosphere, as you probably know, is divided into five layers - the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtmosphereofEarth#Stratification How can I determine plausible altitudes for the boundaries of these layers for my Earth-like ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Preserving the mammoth steppe During much of the Late Pleistocene stage, the world's most widespread biome was the so-called "mammoth steppe" - a cold, dry grassland which spanned eastward all the way from Spain to Canada. It was the favoured habitat of many iconic Pleistocene megafauna species. Roughly 12,000 years ago, the mam... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A planet of ice and fire I had an idea for a planet which has very hot days, roughly 40 degrees C on average, and very cold nights, average -5 degrees. These figures are subject to change. Of course, there are places which are similarly variable on Earth, but I want this to happen globally. The planet cannot be tidally lock... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Anatomically correct Guivre The Guivre is an amphibious dragon from French mythology: Many of its aspects are typical of Western dragons, but there are two which distinguish it from others: Its breath causes disease It cannot stand to look at a naked person. Hence it was chased out of France by streakers. How could an an... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Using sound to swim through sand Subarenaceous animals are those which can move long distances through dry sand - like sandfish lizards, or Dune's sandworms. The main problem they have to tackle is turning the sand immediately around them into a sort of fluid which they can move through. Real subarenaceous animals do this by undula... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Why do Ichisongas hate elephants and hippos? In the mythology of the Lambas people of Zambia, there is a creature called the Ichisonga. It is a herbivore, and very rhinoceros-like in appearance. Upon hearing a hippopotamus, it allegedly sneaks up on the hippo and then stabs it to death with its horn. It has a similar hatred of elephants and w... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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How to justify frogs taking over? A cool thing to imagine would be a world where the land was dominated by megafaunal frog-descendants, as it is/was by mammals today, dinosaurs before the mammals, and non-mammalian synapsids and crocodylomorphs before the dinosaurs. However, frogs aren't exactly the kind of creature that would be i... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Gastric acid as a weapon The dragons in my fantasy world spit fluid from their mouths when threatened, which upon contact causes a burning sensation. I could have this liquid be standard venom, like modified saliva, but I wanted to shake things up a bit. Could powerful stomach acid be spat as a means of defense and/or attac... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Lethal sonic weapons Sonic weapons are frequently used by military circles as non-lethal irritants to deter opponents. My question is; could a naturally evolved organism kill, or at least incapacitate, small prey using sound of some sort, and if so, how would it do this? I'm assuming a focused beam of sound, likely ultr... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Anatomically correct Isitoq This is the latest in a long series of questions I've asked on my fantasy world which contains many mythical and folkloric creatures. I won't link the other questions since at this stage the series has become huge. The Isitoq is a creature from Inuit mythology. This book describes it like so: T... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Can the Meissner effect explain very large floating structures? James Cameron's Avatar featured floating mountains which stayed aloft due to the Meissner effect; they contained large quantities of the room-temperature superconductor unobtainium, which, due to their strong electromagnetic fields, were suspended above the ground. Would this really work though? I'v... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Giant rock spikes sticking out of the ground Would it be possible for huge, hundreds-of-metres-long spikes of rock, ideally slanting at an angle, to arise under natural processes? For clarity, I mean like this: Copyright Joe Jesus There are so-called "stone forests" of sharp rocky spires in places like Madagascar, but these spikes are ve... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Would storms on an ocean world harm the marine life? On a habitable world completely covered in water, with no land above sea-level, there would presumably be storms of biblical proportions. Suppose this world has oceans so deep that the deeper layers just have too much pressure for life of any kind to survive - from the planet's organisms' point of vi... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Will winds always be the same? Around Earth's equator, there's a band of low pressure called the Doldrums. 30 degrees north and south are bands of high pressure called the horse latitudes. Finally, there are more low-pressure bands in the polar regions called the polar fronts. Air moves from the horse latitudes to the low pressure... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Eating one whale every three thousand days? My current ongoing project, about which I've asked many questions, is about a world in which evolutionarily plausible legendary and folkloric creatures roam the Earth. One such creature is the sea serpent. In my world, sea serpents are giant relatives of moray eels which use constriction to kill thei... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Plausible reason for gold-digging ant Medieval bestiaries describe a creature, a type of desert-dwelling ant that digs for gold. It was also said to be the size of a fox, but I'll ignore that in this question. Why would ants unearth pieces of gold? What evolutionary purpose would this behavior serve? (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Origin of life on a waterworld Take a planet like Gliese 1214 B, which has no land, an ocean 100s of kilometres deep and a seabed of Ice VII. For the purposes of the question, let's assume that the pressure and/or temperature near the bottom makes it simply impossible for any form of life to survive. Maybe it does. Of all the pla... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Full-body bioluminescence A creature I am imagining is a small mammal about the size of a domestic cat which - through symbiotic bacteria which live in its fur - is covered its whole body over in blue-white bioluminescence, 24-7. Is there any reason why an animal would be bioluminescent all over its body rather than in just... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A modern Noah's Ark This is not a duplicate of Building Noah's Ark or Can We Build Noah's ark?, because the former asks only about a relatively small number of species and the latter is set in Biblical times. Ignoring financial problems, is "Noah's Ark" technically feasible with modern technology? By Noah's Ark, I me... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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What are the uses of colour in a world where nothing can see? In a previous question - How might kinetosynthesizing "plants" look? - I introduced a worldbuilding thought experiment of mine centered around a habitable moon, heated by tidal forces, which orbits a rogue planet gas giant. This planet harbors complex life, including animal-like fauna. Now, Earth ... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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Pangenesis and alien life Darwin's hypothetical mechanism of inheritance was called pangenesis, whereby the body continually produced particles of information - gemmules - which aggregated in the gonads, and that that the offspring would be born as it was because of the information it had inherited from the gemmules. This ki... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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How much can you learn about a planet while in its orbit? Suppose a team of astronauts have travelled to another solar system, and are currently living in a craft which is in Medium Earth Orbit of a planet which has oceans, continents, and complex life. Assume that among them are people of every relevant field of science, and onboard there is all equipment ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Anatomically Correct Humbaba In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Humbaba was an evil giant slain by the hero Gilgamesh in the famous Epic of Gilgamesh. In the epic, there was only one Humbaba, but for the purposes of this question let's imagine there's a viable population like any other species. Accounts of his appearance diffe... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Extremely heterogeneous life All life on Earth is surprisingly homogeneous from a biochemical point of view. Every organism known to us is primarily built with carbon-based molecules that also contain hydrogen and oxygen, mainly proteins, fats and carbohydrates; short-term energy storage occurs in the phosphate-phosphate bond of... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Life in a gas torus around a neutron star Larry Niven wrote a novel called The Integral Trees, which was followed by a sequel The Smoke Ring. This is Wikipedia's synopsis of the setting: The story occurs around the fictional neutron star Levoy's Star (abbreviated "Voy"). The gas giant Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits this st... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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On the viability of living balloons This is not a question on whether or not floating, balloon-like organisms are biomechanically viable - I already know the answer to that, which is yes. This instead deals with the plausibility of such a thing evolving, a problem I've thought about for quite some times. So, in my alien world, there a... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Aside from low gravity, what conditions favor dramatic terrain? Fantasy and sci-fi works often are set in worlds of dramatic terrain, because, well... it's dramatic. A few examples of the kind of thing I'm talking about: I understand that Earth has some geographical features which fit the bill, but they're very rare, and not always as wondrous as fantast... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Macroevolution in an isolated room Imagine a large room, perhaps 50 metres in length and 35 in width, with its ceiling 40 metres above the floor. On this ceiling, there are LED lights, rendering the brightness of the room to look something like this: On the floor, there's a large pool, stretching 10 metres deep below the floor, and... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Can Europan ice cracks sustain complex ecosystems? Europa's surface is marred with huge, curved cracks, called lineae, which may - depending on the thickness of its icy crust - expose the subsurface ocean to sunlight. Pictures like the one above (Source: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Europalife.html) show these cracks in the ice sust... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Can land-living endotherms exist without hair, feathers, scales etc.? Aliens are very rarely portrayed as being furry, at least in proper xenobiology worldbuilding. They're virtually never depicted with feathers, and only sometimes with scales. Currently, there are three known integument structures which endothermic animals are known to use or have used; hair (in mam... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Alternative origins for the lungs The terrestrial "vertebrates" of my planet must breathe air, and therefore must have lungs of some kind. They are descended from fish-like creatures, which breathe through gills. However, I would like to - if possible - have an alternative origin for the animals' lungs. On Earth, lungs developed fro... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Adrenaline-fueled cognition So, I'm currently toying around with the idea of a hypercarnivorous sapient race on a planet in my universe, and I'd like to make them scary, but without abiding only by the "rule of cool". (Also note that the science, especially biology, involved in building this world is more important, to me, than... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Brine pool ecosystems (Question in highlighted text) So, the chances are that you've heard of brine pools, which form when methane erupting from the seabed expose ancient salt deposits - the concentrated salt mixes with the water and forms brine, which, being heavier than water, forms large pools in the deep sea. Someti... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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Alternate paths to orthostasis I've asked a whole array of questions, so far, centered around an ongoing project of mine that features a world, in an alternate evolutionary timeline, where a variety of well-known mythological creatures live alongside humans. One of the species I'm now considering to include in this project are we... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Why would a biped evolve into a monoped? Say that you have a medium-sized, bipedal, vertebrate-like creature. It no longer has the need to have arms, so they atrophied until they disappeared entirely. Now imagine an animal that shares similar morphology to the other one, except that its two legs have, over time, fused to become a single, ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Viability of Scansoriopterygid wyverns Scansoriopterygidae was a family of theropod dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic, the most well-known member of which was Yi Qi. They are thought to have been arboreal insectivores, and convergently evolved bat-like wings. Source: https://www.deviantart.com/pterosaur-freak/art/Draw-Dinovember-... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Could an intelligent race of seals craft tools effectively? A while ago, I asked a bunch of questions about my alternate Earth timeline, which contains plausible fantasy creatures. One of the concepts I've devised more recently is a solution for mermaids (Most people make them aquatic primates) - seals. Specifically, descendants of phocid seals. My premise i... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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What is the most efficent way of killing prey much larger than yourself? The title sums it up pretty well - I'm basically trying to envision the ultimate predator of much larger prey. A couple of requirements: The predator must weigh 44 kilograms or more (Megafauna) It must be specialized in killing said prey It must be something that could plausibly evolve It mus... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Why would a big cat have black fur around its face? A few days ago, I saw this very nice reconstruction of a Machairodus giganteus by Peter Hutzler: More recently, I've been thinking about it, and I'm wondering A) if it would evolve without getting in the way of hunting and B) if it would have a reason to evolve. Obviously, this isn't exactly a min... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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How to wipe out ALL life on Earth, but leave it habitable? NB: This is not a duplicate of this question, because A) it only asks to wipe out humans, not any other life-form, and B) it insists that one person must survive. The survival of anything is not possible in my scenario, and all of the answers are not applicable to wiping out other animals, plants, fu... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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How might kinetosynthesizing "plants" look? Suppose that there is a moon, orbiting a gas giant, and that gas giant is a rogue planet - it moves freely through the universe, unbound by the gravity of a star. This means that one, the moon will never see the light of day, and two, there will be no sun to warm it. But say that the processes of vo... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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How to cause a surge in large carnivore diversity, roughly 5-7 million years hence? I have had an idea for a possible story, where the protagonists are some kind of future, sapient hominid descendants (Not descended from humans; bonobos or gorillas or something). The main premise of the setting is that there is a huge diversity (In terms of number of species) of large mammal carniv... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Are Extraterrestrial's pagoda trees plausible? In the National Geographic mini-series Extraterrestrial or Alien Worlds, they featured a hypothetical gas giant moon called the Blue Moon. The Blue Moon orbits a binary star, has a very dense atmosphere with lots of carbon dioxide and oxygen, and a slightly lower gravity than Earth. The Blue Moon's ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Are plastic plants plausible? Edit: some answerers seem to be slightly misunderstanding the nature of the premise. Remember that the concept here is this; In the Precambrian of Earth, bacteria evolve to extract the abundant chloride in seawater and use it to emit chlorine gas as a defense mechanism. Their predators adapt, and the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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What is the best body plan to allow for giant size in a terrestrial animal? My question is rather simple; assuming optimal atmospheric and planetary conditions, what body plan would be able to support the largest plausible land animal? To split the above question into a multitude of simpler ones, I could ask "How many legs would said animal have, what size and shape would t... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |