Quote:Go ahead and do that if you want... just remember that unless someone or something is tweaking genetics regularly that can't happen naturally from species that evolved so differently and so far apart. Which is why I wondered if the Seeders turned into or still tweak everyones DNA. The sheer unlikelyness of a successful mating is going to cause experts and mathematicians conniption fits of epic proportions.
Yes, exactly. Different morphologies and populations, but they can and will interbreed and produce fertile offspring given the chance.
Quote:Your asking the wrong question I think. Your question should be WHY are they so 'hell bent on locking horns with the UTN'? Are they just jerks that don't like the color scheme of the standard UTN uniform? Do they have just want to kill all life that isn't them? Did they ask one of their great Zen-like unanswerable questions and an engineer solve it in thirty seconds in a way that makes a major tenant of their religion seem flawed or silly? Does there holy book prophesize that a race with the human social and technological specs is going to destroy their society? Did they Grand militant puuba flip a coin on his opinion using some esoteric method that channels his uncontious instincts into it and it rolled into a duct and shorted out the heat to his quarters and sealed the door, thus making him spend 5 miserable hours in a cold, stuffy roof... then took it as a sign?
Either way, their most militant sect is pretty much hell-bent on locking horns with the UTN, and doing a decent job of dragging the rest in behind them.
For example, the Paladins have hit a plateau. They haven't made any major stride in new skills in a few decades. So they release a device to the other races, when the humans pop up they get it too as a gift. Good for relations and they get to see what others will do with the basics. The device is a psionic amp chamber that lets an entity put on a suit and project his/her/its self image into a visible controllable image. Some races used it for a upgrade to controls, some ignore it, the Paladins themselves use the tech as a trainer and a ship control device.
The humans first decide its great for figuring out what is mentally wrong with people. Do they hate their 'giant, Dumbo ears', do they think they are blobs of fat when 80 pounds? Are things from their past haunting them (they can't control the image enough to edit out random flashes of things that weight heavily on their mind.) Then the military works on using it to control things... which may or may not work well for them yet.
Then some bored engineers get hold of it and think... this is the basics of a great new type of arcade game. One that you think up your own avatar for. The tech is adapted easy enough to put 2 or more self images in the room. Next they run the images at each other beat them together until some one looses. Now the images in question are just weird looking and gamers with to much time on their hands evolve their images the fastest. Limiting controls make it so you don't always end up with someone uncontious.
After discovering this helps people gain mental strength and makes better, faster thinking employees it is implemented as a standard feature of space ship. The control booths can be set up along with the emitters in the standard gym. Sooner or later other races get wind of it and the controls are altered for other races. Thus the Paladin here of it.
The problem is that people want more than one character or have an easier times sicked not them characters on people or maybe their image's outfit isn't cool enough for their taste. So people start altering their characters through force of will. Very few get caught up in this enough for it to change them as mandatory trips to the shrink to monitor for psychosis in the medical machine where the self image isn't easily altered. So a safe game/self improvement method is born of the tech.
The Paladins are impressed with this device and a few units are bought for study and experimentation. The issue though comes with the militant hard-liners. People started adding wings and tails and horns and extra arms to avatars and they manage to control these extra limbs. The problem is that their religion calls for self improvement and these extra parts on their self image avatars are blatantly knowing a not-self self. This is just plain wrong and entirely misses the point of self improvement, you can't just go around making other selves in your self to improve. Improving not self selves is missing the point and makes their heads hurt.
So a split occurs. Most think either whatever or neat let me try and this may be the method needed to reach above their plateau. The hard-liners think that this is sign of a dark society destroying prophecy and if they did something this wrong and weird with the most basic tech.... what are they going to do with the nonbasic stuff.
Thus the militant ones decide to get rid of those loony humans before their society crumbles in the wake of thei stupidly random things these people are capable of. Most of their race things that the militants need to chill out.
Quote:That is true of any new tech. People are going to do three basic things with new tech. Come up with a military use for it. Come up with practical non-military use for it. Come up with an amusing/entertaining use for it. These 3 may over lap.
John's Law: Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you're willing to wait for maximum damage.