The People

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Tortanick
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Re: The People

#16 Post by Tortanick »

eleazar wrote: It's believed that some genes have multiple purposes, however the needing the genes for an entirely different body plan, massively improved brain, etc to accomplish a totally unrelated thing i.e. swimming fast or reproducing— is the sort of explanation which in my mind makes something less believable than if it simply wasn't explained.
I guess that's out then.
eleazar wrote: If you don't want to say "the Orions did it!" (and if they did they seem rather twisted) the simplest way to make these guys more plausible is to:
While I don't want to, if there isn't a better idea then I'd use it, of course it dosn't have to be the Orions, I'm sure there were a several prefall races who had that kind of technology during the golden age. Using a different race would also avoid makeing the Orions twisted.
eleazar wrote:1) involve the "adult" form in reproduction somehow.
2) make the adult for watch over or care for the immature ones in some way that needs greater intelligence
No 2 is unlikely because they live in different environments, not to mention that I deliberately removed every single physical need from The People, no need for food, no predators, no competition to mate to result in a race with absolutely no reason to fight or oppose anything, if they had to care for their larva they'd probably be reintroduced to some of those, something I want to avoid more than genetic modification.

No 1 could work if they did it as a passive by product of their existence (or their death) I suppose they could basically be a way of moving the young to the surface (lets say its safer) until they're old enough to return to the water, I'll have to think about that, see if I can find a way of doing this that justifies a fully sentient adult form, to be honest I'm not sure I can.

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Krikkitone
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Re: The People

#17 Post by Krikkitone »

How about this, the "real" history of the people

There was an advanced intelligent race. Fairly normally they had some standard wars. TThey got somewhat more bioadvanced than normal so their Final War involved advanced biological weaponry (as well as advanced orbital/nuclear weaponry). In the process they nearly destroyed themselves, and the ecology of their entire planet. They then genetically modified themselves to survive in the drasically altered environment. However wanting to preserve their intelligence, but avoid the problem of ruthless competition shaping that intelligence they made significant complex manipulations to their genetics to allow a self-maintaining non-reproductive intelligence with advanced communication skills. Unfortunately the manipulations resulted in a drastically reduced lifespan, and the ancestral race died out before they could fix that shortfall.

The People never really had any contact with/knowledge of the ancestral race, until they were contacted by the self maintaining orbital installations that survived the war (It had limited asteroid mining capability). This gave them a renewed sense of purpose as their advanced philosophy understood the needlessness of the suffering they had been born from.

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Tortanick
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Re: The People

#18 Post by Tortanick »

If we're going to have genetic modification* I can easily do it without rewriting their entire history. I like the way they started off nice :)

* Looking more likely, since I can't think of any other explanation that works.

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Tortanick
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Re: The People

#19 Post by Tortanick »

Well I've come to the conclusion that there really is no evolutionary advantage in intelligence since they historically didn't use it for anything other than philosophy, and the metamorphosis itself is quite wasteful, so I've given in and gone with genetic engineering, but to avoid forcing any personality on them it probably wasn't the Orions, although I did use the name as a place holder.

I'd like to thank everyone who commented, I think in retrospect I was a little too resistant to any change, I always knew I would be if something like this came up but that doesn't make me right, it certainly would have saved quite a bit of effort if I just went with it when you first proposed it Krikkitone ;)

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