It's Been Eight Months Since My Last Decision

[strange_aeons]

Sometime in July, the inimitable Charlie Stross wrote an absolutely fascinating post to rasfc on the subject of what sort of bits a twentieth-century city would leave for archaeologists to find a hundred kiloyears in the future, particularly after the city had spent some quality time with the underside of a glacier. This gave me some ideas, particularly the line about 'overgrown limestone cliffs with pot-holes and grottos', but I put them aside because I know what happens when I start getting ideas.

Not very long later, I went ahead and started getting ideas anyway, because there's only so long I can go. I've been having such ideas on and off ever since and they're all over my journal; interested parties should refer to the last two pages of entries. Initially these ideas had nothing to do with Charlie Stross' post or the ideas I got therefrom, but they did eventually collide with each other.

I've been working on those critters' cultures and, more importantly to this post, languages on and off for a while, and last night I finally sat down with what I had and made some damn decisions, like what they're called (ahi) in their earliest written language (Llahi). Earlier today, I posted on the subject to conlangs.

Then I caught up on my friends page, and saw that ursulav had posted about The Future is Wild, a documentary series airing today¹ on Animal Planet. Its premise is 'what would happen if humanity hied itself off to space and let everything else on Earth get on with its business undisturbed?', and in fact there's a framing story to that effect.

As speculative documentaries go, this one is pretty good. Some of the names the writers have come up with for the creatures they've invented are silly, but the creatures themselves are, for the most part, not implausible. In fact, some of them are damn similar to creatures we have on Earth now, or had, at one point — the killer caracara, for example, is basically Titanis walleri — seven feet tall, flightless, predatory, South American², hands. There's a scene with some small open-ocean prey animals, some midsized open-ocean group-hunting predators, and some aerial predators that is virtually identical to that scene with the shoal of fish, the pod of dolphins and the flock of diving birds that appears in so many documentaries (most notably Blue Planet, because damn, that series is good) — this is not unreasonable, convergent evolution happens for a reason, but it's still amusingly transparent.

The message the series, or anyway its two-hour opener, appears to be trying to send is that cephalopods will 0wnxx0r j00 — they show up in some form in at least two, I think all three of the time periods the documentary 'visits', and in the last, two hundred megayears in the future, a small arboreal cephalopod develops sentience. (It also has a run-in with a predatory terrestrial cephalopod significantly larger than an African elephant, which strains my creduility, but they do sort of answer the question of how a predator that big manages to catch anything edible, since filter-feeding [as in the whale shark and the baleen whales] is out of the question, and it doesn't have effective weightlessness on its side [as does Architeuthis] and is not at all fast: nduh, tentacles.

(This is one of the surprisingly few hecklable things in the documentary. The only other one I can think of is the sabretoothed polar wolverine. Wolverines don't need sabre teeth, especially considering sabre teeth are in fact remarkably impractical and easily broken. Oh, and one big airfoil is more efficient than three in a row, dammit; you think it's coincidence that all the best flyers on Earth have only one to a side, even the hawkmoth, which hooks its fore and aft wings together?)

I've gotten off the point a bit. The point was:

Synchronicity, how I hate you.

A lot of the stuff in this documentary is very much the sort of thing I had been, in the vaguest possible sense, considering for the ahi setting. The framing story in particular — humans leave Earth, send probes some long while later, and are surprised to learn what's been going on in their absence — is suspiciously familiar. And now I have a two-horned problem: (a) I fear that any work I do on the wildlife in this setting will be influenced by this damn show, but (b) I really, really want to work on it anyway.

There's a fair bit of cat-vacuuming I can, and in fact must, do before I have to grab those horns, at least. I don't have the climatology or the geology to figure out where and when weather conditions will be right for the early cultures I envision, nor the astrology to know what the stars are going to look like and which planets will have exploded. Actually, I could go for website and book recommendations, with preference given to the former, because I'm a little strapped for cash right now and there is no library in this godforsaken town.

But at least I have my health.

¹ I should note that here 'today' means 'January first', because I've been awake since then and it's still today until I sleep.

² Actually, I think Titanis is North American, but it's a Phorusrachid, and Phorusrachids are mostly South American.

Comments

[keeps.livejournal.com]

("Sorry, but your comment of 8353 characters exceeds the maximum character length of 4300.")

I got sidetracked with Stross' post when I initially started trying to read this, so to remain utterly useless, that's what I'll comment on.

He seems to know what he's talking about, but it clashes slightly with what I've been taught - but nothing I've been taught involves more than twenty or a hundred years. I don't think I've ever heard of concrete turning into limestone. He may be looking at raw chemical breakdowns, but the process of cement turning into concrete uses water as a catalyst. (It's also exothermic, so in large construction projects, like the Hoover Dam, workers have to walk around in asbestos suits.) As the water is metabolized the concrete gets harder. This is a continuous process with diminishing returns, such that seven days after it's poured it's a sizable fraction of the effective strength (half or two-thirds or something like that), and twenty-eight days after it's poured it's the rest of the way to the effective strength, bridges can be used, they finally take down those plastic fences and road cones after they've clearly finished working and it's just sitting there done but you can't use it because they're too lazy to get off their fat butts and get rid of the "CAUTION" lines and what are we paying them for anyways, and so on.

But the process never stops, and in one or two hundred years it is much harder than at twenty-eight days. Roman cement has been solidifying for thousands of years, and this brings about stories that Roman concrete is so much superior to our own, because we can't even dream of making stuff so impenetrable. But we don't have two thousand years to let it dry. Until it's destroyed, concrete gets stronger the longer it's around.

The rebar has vapor barriers to protect it from rusting, because that is an issue. I won't argue that they're perfect, particularly not over the span of a thousand years or more, because I'll be wrong. But concrete isn't waterproof, and bridges have to stand up in the rain. Now, if the rebar were to rust it would also expand, and this would crack the concrete and do the most structural damage. This was a great problem when Balanos reconstructed the Parthenon in the early nineteen hundreds, using iron clamps to hold the marble blocks together. The iron rusted, the marble cracked. (The Classical Greeks used iron as well, but they encased it in lead - watertight, and doesn't oxidize - to solve this problem, because they weren't stupid.)

But this only applies to concrete structures, like highway construction and CMU buildings. In skyscrapers, the concrete, which is getting stronger every century, is basically only used for the floors where it doesn't have to deal with tensile issues like wind sheer. (Under a glacier this won't be a problem, but that's not what we build for today, oddly.) The World Trade Center had its columns sheathed in concrete, but I don't think that's standard. Its design was unusual in several ways. I may be wrong, but I've only been taught to design steel columns with concrete floors. In this case, the steel would rust and it would all fall.

In a hybrid case (pre-stressed concrete is different - that, again, is for bridges, and is usefully stronger than reinforced concrete, but requires more thinking) of steel columns covered with concrete (under a glacier, with no wind sheer, with the steel vanishing (if the rust process doesn't break everything, but as I understand it there's usually air gaps in this case anyways to account for everything expanding, so let's assume there's enough for the columns to turn to dust without cracking things), and the concrete getting progressively stronger over thousands of years), it could be conceivable that the skyscraper could stand without the steel. Until the glacier melted and it got blown over. The inner floors would be suspended by the steel skeleton, so would probably collapse as the steel lost its strength. I'm just not sure I believe the water-destroying-concrete idea, but I'm not aware of the information he's going by in the first place.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

to remain utterly useless

No, I like having my hopes dashed to the stones like the proverbial baby. Are you happy now? Actually, though a new civilization getting its start in and on the melted remains of -- I don't know, what's a big inland city? Chicago? -- is appealingly circular, big, curiously regular slabs of impenetrably hard rock will do almost as well as cliffs and grottos. As long as I get to have my inexplicable rectangular chunks of ore.

I'm going to do some research anyway, though, just in case both of you are wrong and concrete actually turns into candy.

it could be conceivable that the skyscraper could stand without the steel. Until the glacier melted and it got blown over.

No, it wouldn't get the opportunity -- an incoming glacier will just mow an entire city down. They don't form on top of things, they slide in, they weigh a million tons, and for the purposes of virtually all of the structures to be found in a modern city, they are unstoppable. That sentence sounded a lot like trailer copy.

[keeps.livejournal.com]

Oh no, the inexplicable rectangular chunks of ore with nuggets under the hoods I really like. But Chicago's only inland in that it's away from the ocean, it's still directly next to a huge lake. ...Oh, but it would be safe from rising sea levels, that's probably what you were getting at.

...an incoming glacier will just mow an entire city down.

An incoming glacier would. But can't they also just grow? Snow falls, doesn't melt, more snow falls, it slowly gets compressed and melds onto the ice behind it, making the ice caps expand, span way down halfway across America, then start to recede with glaciers running around rampant, dotting the landscape with skyscrapers in places they aren't indigenous a la Half Dome at Yosemite. In fairness they probably wouldn't be right-side up. But you could have long retangular boxes of candy sitting in the middle of a forest, giving wildlife diabetes.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

...Oh, but it would be safe from rising sea levels, that's probably what you were getting at.

Right.

But can't they also just grow?

I'm not sure there are any major cities in areas northerly enough to develop their own glaciers but southerly enough not to be overrun by glaciers from elsewhere first. Or vice versa, for the southern hemisphere, which I'm informed does exist. I'm not sure there are areas like that at all.

[keeps.livejournal.com]

How many major cities are in Norway or Sweden? Canada might even have some development hidden somewhere. Even Chicago is a pretty good candidate. And if a glacier gets there first, it'll just fall into the lake. Then what's it going to do? It can't swim; it's an inanimate object! ...That moves.

[keeps.livejournal.com]

And I really doubt asphalt would last that long. It's not meant to last more than about five years as it is; asphalt roads are meant to provide pavement until the permanent road plan is formed, at which point it's ripped up and replaced with concrete, because concrete lasts so much longer. This allows new city expansion to remain flexible until everyone figures out where the roads need to be, since asphalt is spongy and cheap to tear up, while concrete is hard and very expensive to tear up.

I object to humanity just leaving. For the amount of time, effort, and money required to build one starship, the amount of people it can carry, the amount of time it would take to get anywhere useful, and the population expansion rate, you're left with a riddle even more silly than the amount of time it would take the entire Chinese nation to walk past a point in a column four wide.

Respectively, those numbers are a lot, no matter the advancement level, this one limiting the number of ships; relatively little (an aircraft carrier caries almost six thousand people - if humanity's serious about this, let's say they build something spacefaring twice that size that holds around ten thousand passengers); a long time wholly dependant on advancement (current specific impulse propulsion takes eight months one way to Mars, probably including gravity boosts; continuous acceleration would cut that to a fraction, the size of which depends on how much of a continuous boost, but would still take centuries to reach another star; all bets are off with FTL), but let's call it six months each way to anywhere; and Pe^(rt). So with these numbers I've made up, for each of these huge ships, you can only take ten thousand people away each year, when you're starting with nine billion or so since it's the future. You're never going to run out of people.

For mass population movement, you need things like stargates. And that still isn't taking into account that the vast majority of people never leave their village and don't want to.

You'd be much better off destroying humankind. That would probably end up messy, since starvation wouldn't be a hundred percent effective and I can't really envision a scenario where an isolated pocket of manflesh wouldn't be able to spawn a return civilization within a thousand years. I think you would have to destroy most of the terrestrial biosphere to get us untrenched. Despite what Waterworld claims, you could probably ignore the oceans. This would have some...adverse...effects on local wildlife, but the greatest surges of evolutionary change have always followed the cataclysms. Even if we went out in a blaze of radiation I still think this would happen. A number of (small) land species are radiation-hardened, and I think the sea should remain mostly unaffected, so that would give plenty of base for early evolution experiments. It could even provide justification for never-before-seen things like tertiary sexes, and shooting laser beams from your eyes.

Now, wiping out all life on Earth doesn't mean self-sustaining colonies elsewhere are gone too. If the damage is great enough, people would probably look immediately afterwards, and if the damage was severe enough, not repopulate. Eventually Earth could be forgotten while waiting for the leftovers to decay to survivable levels, then someone might remember and poke his head in to see a new civilization. You snooze you lose. Yes, it is quarter to five in the morning, why do you ask?

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

I object to humanity just leaving.

Oh, no. They wouldn't, not in some kind of mass exodus. I know my own species too well (http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?journal=ursulav&replyto=46507) to think we'd do that. That'd be like expecting the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement to get off the ground, ever. No. If they leave at all in this setting, rather than just being wiped out or something, it'll be by dribs and drabs, because there's a huge galaxy out there and it's all so much shinier and cleaner than Earth, and even that would take some finagling. Plus, there's bound to be some undiscovered tribe of naked brown people who've been living the same way for the last half-million years on a tropical island somewhere, and they wouldn't get in on the action.

I suppose I could get magic involved at some point -- magic is better than English's escape clause -- but I don't know, that seems to me like it would be needlessly complicating an already fairly complicated thing. And I don't get a sense of the aure having magic, despite their sentience and tool-use.

While doing something really unpleasant to Earth would seem to be the way to go, I don't want to go so far as nuclear war, because something that kills everything but cockroaches and gulper eels is going to be bad news for the aure too. So that pretty much leaves huge space rocks, interplanetary war, or memetic plague. Something that either just destroys civilization right off, or makes it so nasty on Earth that evacuation really is the practical option.

You'd be much better off destroying humankind.

You have no idea how often I tell myself that. No, that's wrong too. You have a very good idea.

It could even provide justification for never-before-seen things like tertiary sexes, and shooting laser beams from your eyes.

No, no, no. I may not be sure about a lot of other things, but I can say with absolute certainty that aure are not a naturally-occurring species, and relative certainty that they were created by humans. Though they remind me a bit of lemurs or raccoons, they're still too humanlike for anything else to make sense. This isn't Star Trek. And while I might accept two extremely humanoid species developing far, far apart in a universe teeming with other life anyway, it happening twice on the same planet would be bending plausibility over a desk. Unless there were magic involved, but again, I dunno.

Laser beams, though ... hmm....

[keeps.livejournal.com]

...and even that would take some finagling.

Not that much. As much as people want to stay within twenty feet of where they were born, there are always people who are willing to go elsewhere and explore or just start up fresh. I'd go. You just need enough time for the technology to come around.

Nuclear war could destroy land-based life except for cockroaches and bacteria, but water's an excellent radiation absorber, and I imagine most of the ocean would survive. There's a lot of pent-up evolution in there. A meteor impact, though, or Yellowstone exploding, would black out most of the sky (kill the plankton and the large whales and the entire base of the oceanic surface food chain), and fail to destroy humanity. It would come close, but pockets of people will be able to survive by eating dirt or sick animals.

This is all rendered moot if the aure are built. My mistake, I thought you were saying they evolved. Maybe a plague? Something really bad, long-lived, and airborne. Could be government-built, though that usually includes (in the movies) an antidote. In the Giving Plague (with the altruism virus), it's unexpectedly brought back from Mars, which brings up interplanetary contagion issues, but leaves humanity totally unprepared. Would probably also devastate a lot of the rest of the world, being not as precise as an artificial virus.

Different humanoid races evolving on the same planet isn't that farfetched - mammals basically all have the same skeleton, just in different proportions. And the mammal skeleton isn't dissimilar to avian or reptilian. Even if dolphins came back up onto land, they're already set up for four limbs. As bonobos show, using two of those to hold things and the other two to walk let you drag much bigger catches back to your children.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Not that much. As much as people want to stay within twenty feet of where they were born, there are always people who are willing to go elsewhere and explore or just start up fresh. I'd go.

So might I, but all the people still on Earth would still constitute a breeding population. Which probably wasn't clear. When I said 'leave', I meant 'leave entirely'. Or at least entirely enough for us to go extinct on Earth after a few generations.

This is all rendered moot if the aure are built. My mistake, I thought you were saying they evolved. Maybe a plague? Something really bad, long-lived, and airborne.

That was my original thought, before I realized how humanoid they are, and I'm not sure I ever made a point of setting it in stone that they didn't evolve. Plague is looking pretty attractive right now. Maybe something that gestates for a really long time, so nobody notices it until nearly everyone is infected. That could be bad for the offworld colonies, too. Unless that was what you meant by 'long-lived', in which case no!

Different humanoid races evolving on the same planet isn't that farfetched - mammals basically all have the same skeleton, just in different proportions.

That's true. And at different angles. I should have said, races that are so humanoid and yet so utterly different -- aure all have two sets of genitalia. One set doesn't develop in males and females. With the exception of some incompletely-separated twins, this doesn't occur in any other vertebrate, so you'd have to go all the way back to invertebrates, possibly even to single-celled organisms, and when you go back that far all bets are off. There's no particular reason why they should have X many limbs or eyes or whatever, and being able to pass for a human in low light and the right clothes ... no.

I'm not certain why they were created. From what I know of their anatomy, they seem a lot like really, really uplifted and tinkered-with red pandas, actually, which are (arguably) a kind of raccoon. The males do, at least. On casual examination the females could be mistaken for members of a different species. But even presuming they're uplifted and not just made from scratch, or from humans, they're so far-removed from their roots that pointing at any one species is probably pointless.

[keeps.livejournal.com]

In order to make this comment not a total waste, I've spent a little while trying to find a copy of a program I thought I'd seen that would plot out the night sky for a given year. But now after some total failure it occurs to me that I may just be remembering this program from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it doesn't actually exist.

I can tell you right away, however, that due to the Earth's 26,000-year rotation wobble, Polaris will be closest to true north in 2095, and over the next 26,000 years the axis will point vaguely at a number of stars with Vega being the strongest North Star in fifteen thousand years or so (before, when the 26,000 is up, it switches back to Polaris).

Look how loved you are! Maybe I should've put this in my journal or something, but I'd have nothing to explain it with.

[keeps.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot to conclude that unless you're talking about time spans of more than a million years, I suspect the only stellar drift that would come about would be because of that 26,000-year wobble, when the whole sky would shift equally. You wouldn't get constellation change. And even with a totally new civilization, the brighter stars will still be the most noticable ones (the dippers/bears, Cassiopeia, Orion's belt and whatever else around it makes a nice picture, for the northern hemisphere), even though the names change.

[kiya]

There are currently detectable proper motions of stars. Unfortunately, I can't find the one of my astro texts that I think has some of that data in, graaah.

[keeps.livejournal.com]

For astronomers, certainly. But to the naked eye? I just have trouble wrapping my mind around that. With the distances involved and so on.

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the reason they said "humanity has left the building" was because it sounded better than "humanity blew itself to bits, the dumb bastards" and anyway, somebody had to send the probes. Science is well and good, but the average viewer gets a trifle irked when you start out the show by telling them they're extinct.

I particularly liked the cephalopods. And they're undoubtedly hardy--ammonites survived every extinction up until the last one, with form and variation to make a paleontologist widdle themselves with delight. But I'm a sucker (ha!) for squid, so what can I say?

I suppose the geology depends on when you're writing this--however, there's a tendency for everything to collide, then break apart, then collide, so depending on your time frame, things could be Pangaeia-esque, or rather more like now. Dougal Dixon's "After Man" touches on future continental drift a bit, and his follow up "Man After Man" (which is insanely depressing, and I recommend flipping through it in the bookstore rather than buying it, because otherwise you're left with this desire to slit your wrists and end it all) covers what becomes of humans on a planet mined of its resources. On-line, I dunno any resources, although the Discovery Channel does have an extensive website dedicated to that show, which might kick up links to other useful bits.

Peace!

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the reason they said "humanity has left the building" was because it sounded better than "humanity blew itself to bits, the dumb bastards" and anyway, somebody had to send the probes. Science is well and good, but the average viewer gets a trifle irked when you start out the show by telling them they're extinct.

I would have been willing to accept a framing story in which humanity had blown itself to bits, or given itself a case of terminal cooties or whatever, but I'm probably not representative of the rest of the audience.

But I'm a sucker (ha!) for squid, so what can I say?

I'm not totally averse to them myself. (Though originally my handle had nothing to do with them.)

I suppose the geology depends on when you're writing this [...]

The really sad thing is, I'm probably never going to write anything in this setting. It's just an experiment in constructed language and culture and biology. I don't write non-humanoid perspective characters well, and even if I did, well ... these people are disconcertingly furry (they're noticably longer in the jaw than humans, have mobile ears, and I fear there may be tails; plus the females are all over hairy), and with a handful of exceptions I can't take furry characters in fiction seriously. And, I admit, I'm spectacularly bigoted and the thought of being regarded as a furry author makes me want to bathe myself raw.

I might get some art out if it, if I ever get my computer working properly, but again, dirty.

the Discovery Channel does have an extensive website dedicated to that show, which might kick up links to other useful bits.

Aha. I hadn't thought to try the Discovery Channel's site. thefutureiswild.com (http://www.thefutureiswild.com) is chock full o' annoying Flash, and from what I can tell with my slightly outdated version of Flash, it concerns itself mostly with the production and with trying to sell me the book.