Posts by dsollen
personality, and intellect, to name a few important criteria. Physical appearance is only one of many factors we use when choosing a mate, and arguably in the modern era it is less important to th...
Inspired by this question, and my own answer to it: Avoiding galactic pandemics. World ending pandemics are a common disaster/after-the-end story trope, I'm trying to determine if plausible, and h...
This is a follow up to the creature 'griffins' I sort of created here: Anatomically Correct Griffins The idea of the final griffin was a small tree based species that will leap down on much larger...
On the earth today most animals use a two sex mating system where male and female provide the same amount of genetics to the resulting offspring, despite the fact that in many cases the female prov...
I'm imagining a near-future world where a process can be undergone that will halt all future aging of the body, but the approach causes infertility. Those undergoing it will not have (biological) ...
I'm looking to create a species of marsupial that is heavily K select, which is to say they put significant effort into raising their young after birth (both of them :P ) in which both the male and...
I want to play with the idea of a sapient species evolving on a world where at least part of the world experiences a permanent day. The obvious way to doing this would be where part of the world f...
Imagine someone from the modern day somehow gets transported back in time around the same time of WW2 without warning ahead of time. He has with him a laptop, graphing calculator (and a hand full ...
Lets say I have a space fleet flying to attack an installation. The enemy knows I'm coming but not my numbers or exact disposition. Since I'm moving much slower then C the light from my fleet wil...
It seems that my ability to create interesting creatures is limited by the need for sexual reproduction, which is absurdly useful, but also rather limiting, method of sharing genetics. I acknowled...
As mentioned in this discussion: How to keep humans pilots instead of AI in sci-fi future? the ability to handle G forces is a limiting factor on what pilots can do. Some of my solutions to addres...
I have a world where prehistoric humans were kidnapped and transported to another world. This other world is Earth-like, with mammals (also transported from Earth then later diversifying into othe...
I had an idea for a character that was stuck in a ghost-like state for a length of time after an accident. During this time, they would have very limited ability to interact with the rest of the w...
Imagine a situation kind of like Zootopia with many different creatures all living in one environment, some significantly larger than others. These species aren't necessarily furries like in Zooto...
Plenty of stories have done AI's before, but many of them feel unrealistic. If you make an AI that is as smart as humans, but with faster reaction speed and ability to process and calculate certai...
This is a very closely related question to my previous: Evolution of tree-dwelling species that will help predators find prey if prey species doesn't give it a bribe? The premise is the same, a t...
I had a rough idea of a species that has a tendency to blackmail other species into feeding it. The concept was a tree-dwelling species, a larger one that has few predators among the trees to worr...
I'm looking for a very grounded evolutionary justification for the existence of a hermaphroditic sapient and social species, preferably roughly mammalian but not mandatory, which is not as easy as ...
Imagine a world in which earth has started to colonize other worlds slowly, though the expense to send ships to other worlds is extremely high, and without FTL drive it takes some times to create a...
Lets say that, for some reason, humans decide to breed true sapience into one of the great apes (chimps or bonobos). They start to use active selective breeding to encourage increased intellect an...
I'm retouching the idea discussed in detail here Evolution of species with seperate sapient and non-sapient forms?. I like the discussion had there, but want to focus in on one specific question, ...
Humans sleep more then nearly any other creature (true sleep, not low-activity like cats and sloths), and are some of the only true sapient species on earth. Many other intelligent, or nearly sapi...
Imagine a species that evolved almost identical to our own, except for one difference. A child's sex is not decided by the presence of a Y chromosome, and all embryos have the potential to evolve ...
My answer to this question essentially came down to the pilot being in a sphere with anything large jutting out of it. Some of the arguments made against me I feel are true if we assume fights like...
This question is inspired by the last paragraph of my answer here: Negating the negative effects of childbearing (A follow up question to this can be found here: Methods to ensure gene flow in spe...
