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bensen-daniel — Snider!
#evolution #sciencefiction #snake #speculativeevolution #speculativezoology
Published: 2016-09-16 06:37:40 +0000 UTC; Views: 1095; Favourites: 26; Downloads: 2
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Description
"Watch out for sniders tonight."
I turned away from another breathtaking Rasan sunset. Behind Enrique and Firey Plummet, the moon shone below the glittering webwork of one of the mechs' space stations. The stars were coming out on my first night on Rasa.
"What," I asked, "are sniders?"
"A fascinating example of the inventiveness of natural selection," said Firey Plummet, his artificial voice buzzing from the speakers on his squat environment suit.
"Not something you want to surprise you." That was Enrique. He was human and didn't need an environment suit. Our mentor was dressed in his usual layers of khaki, which struck me as uncomfortably warm for this muggy night in what would have been Earth's southern China.
Rasa had the same basic land forms as Enrique and my home timeline. Those big forest capped limestone pillars you see in the backgrounds of famous Chinese paintings. Except this landscape had no people in it. the vegetation at the top was all various forms of grass inhabited only by various forms of invertebrate and bird. No mammals, no lizards, not even bees. Something had wiped all those forms of life out in this version of Earth. I hoped to be the one who discovered what.
This story was inspired by @cyan-biologist ’s post about the evolution of snakes. It takes place in the same universe as Fellow Tetrapod.
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Comments: 11
This is amazing. Good that you chose alternate timelines for such an extreme bodyplan. I see some of the relative newbies to spec evo, and they populate the post-Anthropocene eras with odd things like truck-sized bipedal herbivorous frogs and snake-shaped birds, and I have a REALLY hard time seeing that come about in our home timeline (or maybe I am just a curmudgeonly old veteran with too-conservative senses in this artform). But if we consider alternate timelines in different realities, or barring that, Panspermia set selectively on some planetoid or ringworld, all of this becomes potential fodder. Snake shaped birds could come about hundreds of millions of years after the first urvogel, on a planet where mammals never evolved, giant herbivorous frogs could come about on an eons-old ringworld, where ecological succession never got past small semi-aquatic things like tadpoles and bullfrogs. It's good to know that with enough ingenuity, all sorts of things can happen.
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I actually started out with a scenario like...oh which one was it, where humans terraformed a gas-giant's moon and seeded it with only grass and sparrows. But I want to tell stories, and stories are hard to tell when they take place millions of years in the future.
So I made this part of my "Fellow Tetrapod" universe in which different alternate Earths are linked by stargate-like technology. In the timeline of Rasa (the Earth where this story takes place), sapient prosimians evolved in the Miocene and nearly sterilized the Earth before driving themselves extinct. The "mechs" are descendants of Van Neumann robots these prosimians left in space, which have evolved intelligence more recently.
Because Rasa was wiped so clean so recently, it has a lot of empty niches and a lot of weird experimentation going on.
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That's a great premise for having creatures fill odd niches. I am toying with panspermia currently, but I keep worrying my evolutions of seeded animals are too conservative.
The premise for my current project is a little more BWFLI than yours perhaps. The idea is that a large planet (or a small ringworld) is divided into 20 segments, with partitions that reach high enough so that no animals travel past them. Each segment is about as large as Australia or Europe, with a small sea and plenty of rivers, as well as terrain, and each segment has been seeded with 3 main animal species (besides boring stuff like plants, fungus, decomposers and bugs and stuff). So one segment was seeded with capuchin monkeys, hairy armadillos, and orinoco angelfish, as an example, and each segment has different species in differing combinations. There are some that were seeded with prehistoric species that might not have gotten a good enough swing the first time around. From this starting point, they are all given 65 million years to progress, before we see the result.
My intention was to have it as a textbook written by humans, at some future point in galactic exploration when they have stumbled upon this experiment. That of course would require some alien master race, in posession of time travel tech, to have set all this stuff up for us to find. The timeline stuff I have sort of neglected a little, But I suppose these aliens go around in time and space collecting species to seed their experiment with, and then just so happen to start all of it off 65 million years before we get to it. I guess a lot of standard hard sci fi is about as contrived or even more contrived than this premise I am setting up, I mean Star Trek and Known Space are a lot more "suspension of disbelief" than that even.
What do you think?
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I think as long as the suspension of disbelief serves a purpose, it's fine. Maybe your handwaving teaches the audience something about the real world, or allows you to tell an entertaining story, or supports a theme. Or you have no audience in mind and this is all just for you, which is fine too
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The main purpose is to explore the idea of different creatures being given a chance to explore their evolutionary potential, via adaptive radiation. As for the actual timeline of the aliens and seeding, what I will actually write in the project will probably only be approximate best-guesses made by the human cosmonauts when they discover it, and after they have tested the genetics of different creatures to determine their ancestors, molecular clocks, etc. Maybe the aliens will have put an obelisk somewhere to stamp their initials on it, but I'm pretty sure I'll have them be virtually unknown to the humans, and probably they went extinct, got lost in time, or reached the singularity by then anyhow.
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So how's progress going on this project of yours?
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