Ignore that... I somehow got Chlorine mixed up with Xenon and can't for the life of me figure out how. I should have checked the table, I knew I said something stupid. Still modeling their worlds after Venus make sense.
You'll also want to have races that races other than Earthlings have to deal with, unless Earth is in the geographical center of the races. You also never mentioned if the 18(?) jump points in the Sol system was a large, small, or average number.
Quote:Wrong. We got desiccation mummified white people showing up before the Asians showed up and killed them off (It was in a Discover magazine article in the '90s) and most of the large fauna. North America was a lot more than like Africa species wise before the Indians started hunting by running entire herds of cliffs for the meat from 5 or 6 animals. Every once in a while a new boat load of people randomly came to America from some where. One of the theories is Atlantis was South America and those pyramids in South America did show up about the same time as in Egypt. If you want isolated there is Earth's official middle of Nowhere, Easter Island.
On the subject of genetic drift, the American Continents were isolated from the rest of the world for about 12,000 years
Quote:The first steam engine we have recorded of is from ancient Greeks... hell one of them literally was using a tower mounted solar, mirror based laser to set enemy ships on fire. The problem was he wrote everything on trays of sand (and we all know how good etch-a-sketch are for long term preservation of data). That guy and his small group of students literally double or tripled the siege length for a city of those resources. Some inpatient Roman grunt ran him through for not respecting his authoritay. The inventor was deep in a math problem on the beach and was ignoring thee actual wall breaching invasion. The grunt had specific orders to take the guy alive to (after over a hundred pieces of Mad SCIENCE that the Romans had had sicked on them that guy was the point of taking that city), but apparent said grunt didn't know who it was. If he didn't kill that guy we would be far more advanced then we are today.
500 years ago we didn't even have steam engines and guns were just starting to edge out muscle-powered weaponry.
Quote:SO there is the constant tinkering I mentioned before... or at least an 'intelligent' version of universal DNA.
I don't see why - if one assumes that one of their design goals was to maintain cross-compatability with the base strain, then that continued fertility makes perfect sense.
You'll also want to have races that races other than Earthlings have to deal with, unless Earth is in the geographical center of the races. You also never mentioned if the 18(?) jump points in the Sol system was a large, small, or average number.