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

[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.