Quote:*sigh* Yeah, fairly so. I just wanted to make it clear that the parallel wasn't something I was shooting for out of a desire to make any kind of social commentary so much as a lack of originality.
Which is further made weird, after looking back, because the Fanatics are actually acting exactly like the good Muslims (explained before previously) that you professed you didnt want to be an exact parallel of a modern Earth religion Convert or die is their creed. The details separating them are decorative icing on the issue. Not that Im stopping you, it makes sense, just that you should be aware of that situation.
Quote:And even worse than that, there's no guarantee that any honestly alien carbon/oxygen biosphere is going to rotate its proteins or sugars the same way ours does, which difference is, as far as I know, completely random, making the odds one in four at best. Which would be why I had been thinking that one of the previous epochs of starflight had included a race who went on a bit of a terraforming binge, seeding primordial worlds like the Earth of the time with suitable bacteria or other simple life... but in retrospect, that wouldn't go far enough, would it? Not given the time scale...
Technically, its a matter of generations instead of years here... 50-80k (your minimum time range) is about 50k/15= 3,333 generations and 80k/15=5,333 generations of adapting to a different set environmental conditions (examples of which I previously wrote). They have to deal with different obstacles so different physical changes will occur.... the simplest of which is the biochemical ones for the local food sources. Which are worse than extra body parts for a pregnancy... unborn humans do go through a section with a tail. Even relatively minor changes of this biochemical nature will makes pregnancy rather unlikely. The internal environment is just too hostile.
*sigh* Right, yeah, okay, that's too long - the driving idea behind that timing was mostly that it should be long before any hint of recorded history... I refuse to give any hint of legitimacy to the saucer nuts, see, even if their delusions would be convenient for my purposes.
Quote:Complaining, no. Telling their kids how to cheat their way around a particular problem, yes. The idea being that evolution requires that a particular genetic trait have an impact on an individual's ability to raise children, which event becomes much less common when cooperation and tool use so drastically increase the chances of everyone in the tribe doing so. As for biochemistry, see above.
You do realize you just argued that a species wont be changed by a new environment in several decamillenia, because they can complain about it? Or maybe that being able to complain about it and make new tools will somehow prevent them from changing genetically or biochemically regardless of their new environment
Quote:Pretty much what happened in Europe - somebody noticed that technological and economic improvements tend to have fairly noticable military effects.
So how did the feudalists get into space again
Ja, -n
(Remembers bonobos in genus Pan, right along with chimps.)
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