33
This exists in reality
I mean, not as much as the gap you're talking about, but in general men live shorter lives than women. This organizes it in a nice easy table to compare various cultures, first world vs. third world, etc. The gap seems to be on average about 4-5 years.
So the question is, why? And the answer is: it's complicated. Well, it's not that ...
25
Ignoring social and cultural reasons in human society,
Well, don't do that. What kind of terrible scientist are you? At least do your study across difference cultural and economic groups. This is pretty basic stuff.
I hypothesize that their are biological reasons for the differences in lifespans
There are a whole bunch of androgen-related things that ...
12
The difference in average life spans for elephants is roughly as big as you describe. They are elephants, so it can't really be cultural, but it is behavioural and not biological. Female elephants live in herds, and if a female gets so old or sick that she can't stay alive without help, she will be supported by her herd essentially because her knowledge and ...
10
For any question that asks why a living system would be a certain way, the answer always lies in evolution.
Every biological trait you can observe has evolved. Even something as seemingly universally detrimental as aging happens the way it does because it represents an optimal evolutionary solution to the various forces at play. Exactly what those forces ...
8
Yes.
We already have living appliances, if you want to be really flexible about your definitions. A cat, for example, is a living rodent destruction appliance. A dog is a living alarm system and hunting tool. And, due to the empathetic nature of humans we still keep these appliances around, despite the fact that they are obsolete in many cases.
Dealing ...
5
Warning, this answer involves a teeny tiny bit of fluid dynamics, a field that I'm largely unfamiliar with. Take it with perhaps a larger pinch of salt than usual.
Clearly, this style of hovering flight works at larger-than-insect scale, because it's also how hummingbirds hover
The style of hovering used by hummingbirds looks superficially similar to ...
5
A quick search on the topic of child labour and its impact on the health of the worker led me to these two papers: The Health Impact of Child Labor in Developing Countries: Evidence From Cross-Country Data and Environmental and Occupational Health Problems of Child Labour: Some Issues and Challenges for Future.
They focus mainly on labour in hazardous ...
4
(almost) as wide as the widest unsupported tunnel
First, the flippant answer:
as big as an elephant if the cave is big enough for an elephant and there is a limited body of water
as big as a blue whale if the underground lake / sea in the cave is big enough for a whale
If "underground" is taken literally then the size of the cave is the limiting factor.
...
4
The females eat the males after mating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os3OBJSlpUc&start=77
3
There's evidence that feathers are an ancestral trait to dinosaurs, and that while people are used to the idea of theropods being feathered, they might have been more widespread, with the possibility that some species, especially larger ones, were mostly featherless but might have retained some feathers for display. On a quadruped, the logical place for that ...
3
All answers talk about testosterone levels and doing reckless actions. But in modern world this accounts for maybe 2-3%. The real culprit is selection shadow and grandmother effect.
Selection shadow: after an individual has mated and produced sufficient offspring, rest of their lives does not matter much. We are talking about wild hominins. Thus a human ...
3
Radiation and fat cell distribution in the body.
You've got a lot of options to accomplish your goal. Indeed, as other answers have pointed out the gap you're hoping to explain already exists, though it isn't as wide as in your setting. In that spirit, I'll suggest a potential agent which also has some real-world basis: radiation.
There is some evidence ...
3
She'd get a lot of ailments from repetitive strain injuries related to the type of work she does. For instance:
Housemaid's Knee (Prepatellar bursitis) if she spends a lot of time kneeling to scrub floors or similar tasks
This website mentions lye soaps and lead lined sinks damaging the hands of housemaids who wash clothes and dishes Edwardian servants
...
3
The great advantage of echolocation is the ability to judge distance. It works the same way sonar works: The bat sounds a chirp, and distance is estimated by the time it takes for the sound from its source, to the object or obstacle and back to the ears of its originator.
Sonar echolocation for hunting as well as hearing you way through has advantages over ...
3
I did some research on some of what you mentioned, since I was interested.
It seems that, at first, she'd be rather sore and in pain. In fact, considering that Cinderella started at the age of 6, continuous, strenuous household work could constitute child abuse under some state or national laws. If I get time, I'll look that up to support my claim. It's ...
3
Short Answer
Yes, they would. Doubly so if natural magic batteries are the most efficient form of power that is able to be harnessed.
It will depend on how well this magic is known about and integrated into society as a whole as well as the world's resources
Magic Notes
Since this magic is kinetic based, there won't be invisibility spells to see ...
2
You might think in terms of a bio-reactor for practical purposes. Could be anything along the lines of a compost container. Can be fed any kind of biological material or waste. Can be constructed such that it could be worn. A smart design would be shaped like armor but hollowed and reinforced in separate pieces, each similar in construction to the fuel ...
2
Just spitballing here, because I have a lot of questions. Is there a set amount of mana in this world, or can mana be created? If mana can be created somehow, then you don't really have an issue. Any decent witch should know how to find or create more mana, and should therefore be able to replenish herself during or after the pregnancy. (In this instance it ...
2
There is a balance between the length of the limb and the amount of force it can apply to draw the string. Longer than a certain point and the amount of force the limb can produce declines, shorter than a certain point and the length of the draw, and hence the time available to accelerate the arrow, will decline.
So probably what you want is a little less ...
2
The main problem with snake would be not size and weight, but interchange with external media: feeding, breathing, etc. Snake is cheating with square-cube, making it square-square or even square-linear (if it is does not increase its width).
There theoretically can be a kilometers-length snake of several centimeters wide in terms of structural stability. ...
1
My answer to this question: Can a land-based organism get to be at least 100 ft. in length and still be plausible?1 may be useful.
The Longest known land animals, sauropodmorph dinosaurs, had thick bodies, but their long slender necks and tails were a bit snakelike.
The longest known sauropodmorph dinosaurs were estimated to have maximum lengths over 100 ...
1
Even if the feathers may not solve a physical purpose, There could be some reasons for their existence like:
Mating
A peacock has those bright beautiful feathers as a tail, they don't serve much of a purpose other than the real purpose, that is attracting a female. Almost all birds use their feathers to attract a potential mate. Your creature may use these ...
1
Exaggarate stuff that exists in real life.
Super-testosterone. Male balding is really annoying, and comes from our hormones destroying the hair (apparantly). What if males have some extra-awesome-but-destructive hormon? It could attack the aging part of the cells directly, aging men faster than women. Perhaps it bestows men the ability to heal faster (...
1
Nagging.
So think about it. Women far outnumber men in this society. Perhaps initially it's the result of a war. But from that point on, every young man born into this world knows his father probably only for a few of his early years, and is otherwise hounded and hen-pecked by his mother, grandmother, aunts, great-aunts, great-grandmothers, etc, etc, for ...
1
Semelparous
A species is considered semelparous if it is characterized by a single reproductive episode before death.
The best known examples are probably the anglerfish and preying mantis, though it includes many spiders and at least one mammal. One thing to note is that all these creatures are at the small to very small (at least the males are) end of ...
1
So what would over a decade of non-stop labor, throughout childhood development, do to her physically? Would she be calloused and strong? I keep fixing my mind on the fact that she would be bending down quite often--could her spine be malformed?
This is really interesting situation... on one hand intensive labor, on the other, the time where the human body ...
1
So the thing is, our "modern" technology is mostly about cheap energy.
If you had to feed the animals to get the calories to produce the effect, most of our machines are ridiculously inefficient at what they do.
That 75W that a person produces? That comes from their food. If you redirect it into magic, they need to eat more food.
The energy coming from ...
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