Quote:Smallpox Teddy Bear (from The Parking Lot Is Full; www.plif.com)
I challenge you to find a military application for Tickle-Me-Elmo-style talking plush toys, though. No, air-dropping them on enemy encampments to break their will does not count.
Quote:A half-dozen separate populations all reach roughly the same level of technological complexity at the same time after 80,000 years of natural disasters, ice ages, population bottlenecks, and inconsistant rate of advancement? Hard to swallow. All it would take is a 1% difference in advancement (800 years behind: dark ages; 800 years ahead: like unto gods) to completely unbalance things.
80-50,000 years ago: somewhere during this period, our magic Precursor aliens come along and look around at every seeded world in the this part of the galaxy, then decide that archaic humans represent the most promising of the available potentially sapient animal species. They scoop up substantial sized breeding groups and drop them on about a half-a-dozen other fairly ideal worlds.
The cleanest fix I can think of is for there to be a large collection of seed worlds, of which the relevant six are exceptionally advanced. Otherwise, you'll need to either push the date of the population transplant way up, or put an artificial control/assist on technological advancement.
Quote:A thought:
12 years ago: Fanatic Sect explorer starship stumbles across radio transmissions from Earth and relays location to home command. An invasion force is promptly dispatched to subdue the heretic planet and begin a forced conversion process that will give them a leg up against the other sects.
The relative proximity of the Fanatics' newly-established mining colony to Sol allowed them, for the first time, to pick up the radio chatter from the Sol system. There were a whole slew of audio broadcasts, but they weren't particularly useful -- it'd take decades for their linguists to make anything of them. Likewise, there were vast quantities of digital information flying around, but their computers would take forever to squeeze anything intelligible out of that. And then, there were a number of analog signals which appeared to be on an easily decypherable carrier. In fact, they appeared to be some form of video...
The glaringly inexplicable lack of anything even remotely resembling human remains in the fossil record past 80,000 years ago might be quite the hot-button to a group of fanatical extremists who's religion is firmly grounded in knowledge of the self. And when the first thing they decypher is a Discovery Channel "Origin of Man" special showing obvious proto-human remains....