citrakayah | Entries tagged with speculative evolution

No, I'm not warning for spoilers because this is a mockumentary.

I like speculative evolution, so it was with considerable anticipation that I watched Alien Worlds, which Netflix released about a month ago.

After watching it, I don't think it's a work of speculative evolution. I think it's a work of science education, using speculative evolution to explain things--that's why it spent half its time talking about Earthly analogs, and why it didn't address what would, in a work of speculative evolution, be the equivalent of plot holes.

Nevertheless, I'm going to review it as if it was because why not.

Atlas -- This is probably my favorite episode of the bunch. I like the design of the giant flyers and the predators; I was prepared to doubt the ballonts because really small ones tend not to work so well, but they never specified size so I think we can assume these are large enough.

The scavengers--I'm going to call them shoggoths--were a bit odd, mostly because they looked like gibbering mouthers. Or, well, shoggoths. They're kind of like a macroscopic amoeba, and I just don't really think that works translated up to macroscopic size. They don't have anything in the way of recognizable organs--they've got these club things with what might be sensory organs on them. No visible signs of a respiratory or digestive system. I can't shake the feeling that they don't have one, especially since their strategy is to move by rolling and hunt by rolling onto prey.

Janus -- This your classic tidally locked world--one side hot, one side cold, and a temperate twilight zone. We have one species of pentapod--yes, just one--that breeds in the twilight zone and shoots larvae into the atmosphere to be dispersed by wind. The ones that land in the hot and cold zones have unique adaptations to survive there. But the documentary is leaving out some very interesting things, because the only way that the polyphenism they describe could be selected for is if some of those hot side and cold side pentapods make their way back to the twilight zone to spawn.

It's also not clear what the energy source in the hot zone is, given the fact that the entire hemisphere appears to be a totally barren flat. Maybe the blue-green bugs are photosynthetic; I'll assume they are.

Eden -- This is a lush planet. Other people have pointed out the problem with the premise (it would actually be getting less sunlight than Earth). I will not go into detail because I don't feel like putting in that amount of work.

I will, however, point out that the main predator of our main prey species is shown to be arboreal. The cocoons of the prey species hang between tree trunks from thin tendrils with no camouflage shown. Seems weird.

Terra -- This one shouldn't count. I don't consider the dreams of the space cadets to be good speculative evolution, and this was just dripping with it. From everyone being brains in vats, to fleets of AI robots obediently doing everything the creators wanted, to terraforming using giant floating platforms with no visible methods of propulsion other than the giant laser beams they were shooting into the ice caps. It basically looked like someone asked, "Okay, how do we communicate that this species is 'more advanced.'" And then they just did it without regards to sense.

There's really not much to say for it. It's aliens transforming a new planet to be like their old planet because their sun is aging and getting too hot. There, I saved you forty-five minutes.

The homeworld of the kraqrelk, Eclek is a planet about twice Earth's mass. It is notable for having life that is descended from two different common ancestors. One group has colonized most of the planet, and is called Quareya. The other is restricted to areas of geothermal activity, and is termed Cabava.

Eclek's unusual biodiversity is not limited to having organisms descended from two different common ancestors. Since Eclek's atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, and it orbits closer to its sun than Earth does, it has always been a flooded world. Most of the planet is covered in a shallow sea, and what land there is is far more fragmented than on most other planets. A fifth of the planet's landmass are islands, with the largest being 1,857,521 km2 (around three times the size of Madagascar). What continents there are are widely separated, and this has been the state of affairs for quite some time. Geological fragmentation means that many groups that might otherwise be outcompeted were able to hang on. The kraqrelk are members of one of these groups; when they left Ixvata they found that tsulaing were rare everywhere else.

The biological sciences are well-established on Eclek. Therefore, taxonomic names, the names of geological eras, and a few of the technical terms are given in one of their languages, rather than being derived from Latin. Some of the primary languages used in kraqrelk science include:

Hoetsho -- A confederation of on the eastern half of Ixvata, the Hoetsho flourished for a brief period when the biological sciences were first being formalized. Most scientific words of Hoetsho origin, however, are found in geology, as several of the rivers that flow through Hoetsho territory have carved through the bedrock and revealed cliffs with easily distinguished bands corresponding to the different time periods.
Kilo -- Used by the Kil, an ethnic group that lived along the shores of Watelk before colonizing the fertile land formerly taken up by the lake, Kilo is almost more of a language group than an actual language, but most of the syntax is highly conserved. Most of the organisms from the interior of Ixvata's western half have names in Kilo.
Naranya -- Used by the Vabi, an ethnic group that lives along the northern coast of Ixvata's eastern half. They are good shipbuilders to this day, and contributed much during the period of exploration. Much of the life outside Ixvata bears a name in Vabi.

Quick Facts
Average Orbital Radius: 1.122 x 10 8 km (~ 0.75 AU)
Eccentricity: 0.054
Satellites: 2 (Veqreyap, Neva)
Star: Narelk (G7V)

Radius: 15290 km
Surface Gravity: 11.768 m/s2 (1.26 g)
Mass: 1.075 x 1025 kg (1.8 Earth masses)
Albedo: 0.318 Bond
Average Surface Temperature: 32° C

The Time of Fire Life: The Afaguzddavenuv

During the Afaguzddavenuv, Eclek's landmass was united in a single supercontinent. It was a geologically active time, with many geothermal pools that were stable over tens of thousands of years. Little but Cabava could survive. While Quareya was present during this time period, it only existed as microorganisms in the margins of a few of the cooler pools.

The atmosphere during this time was still fairly primitive. Oxygen was scarce, but carbon dioxide from outgassing and hydrogen from the respiration of dzeCabava life were major components of the atmosphere, along with nitrogen.

The only macroscopic biome present during the Afaguzddavenuv was the hot spring. Distributed along the major fault lines, they were dominated by dzeKilawana, a group of distantly related genera of ñåich. Their only herbivores were various amoeboid grazers. While it was not the most interesting time period, there was great diversity--if you knew how to look for it.

Kilawana: A common sight in the geothermal springs of the Afaguzddavenuv onwards, dzeKilawanav were a form of ñåich. Nothing but short, photosynthetic filaments, Kilawana nonetheless became one of the most widespread organisms on the planet. Almost every hot spring at this time had a carpet of dzeKilawanav.

DzeKilawanav utilized a variant of c-phycocyanin, which is stable at extremely high temperatures. In combination with a variety of other pigments which protected them from ultraviolet radiation (Eclek in this time had a much reduced ozone layer), this rendered them dark blue. As with all dzeCabava autotrophs, they absorbed CO₂ and H₂O, and transpired H₂.

The very first dzeKilawanav reproduced asexually. The filament broke apart, and each fragment developed a holdfast wherever random chance happened to take it. Sexual reproduction evolved from the horizontal transmission of genes. Kilawana had always had the ability to exchange genes, having retained it from microbial ancestors, but only had the opportunity to when one fragment came in contact with another.

Several derived dzeKilawana lineages had secondary filaments, which would detach and be dispersed by current. Chance resulted in a group that had haploid filaments. When these haploid filaments came into contact with the haploid filaments from another primary filament, the two haploid fragments would swap genes and become diploid.

Natural selection favored filaments that were smaller and smaller, and pre-existing trichomes were exapted into flagella. Before long, dzeKilawanav were releasing free-swimming gametes through pores that studded the filament. The precise arrangement of the pores could be used to tell the different genera apart. Once fertilized, spores were released through the same pores. Brownian motion would ensure that they traveled at least a little distance from the parent filament.

While this worked well for dispersal within the pool, it made colonization of new geothermal areas an infrequent event. There were periodic floods that could transport the spores, and in this way dzeKilawanav managed to spread across most of the supercontinent. But this took a great deal of time, and as the climate dried towards the middle of the Afaguzddavenuv, all but three genera of Kilawana went extinct: Senyo, Yeyasechetais, and dzePrunutayada. Having previously evolved a filament that could endure brief exposure to the air, these genera developed part of their filament into a fruiting body that extended above the water level. Wind would disperse their spores.

The descendants of Kilawa, along with their grazers, still exist in similar forms along with more derived cousins.

DzeCabava amoeboid grazers: Not a monophyletic group, dzeCabava amoeboid grazers were a group of single-celled organisms a few millimeters in diameter. Most were equipped with a radula that they scraped across dzeKilawana filaments, and they used pseudopods to engulf the resulting fragments. A few had needle-like structures that could pierce the cells of dzeKilawanav and suck up their contents.

As with all dzeCabava heterotrophs, they got their carbon and oxygen from food, and absorbed H₂ from their surroundings. They generated CO₂ and water as waste products.

I have a problem--I am currently one of maybe two or three people trying to keep an entire wiki from sliding into the ground, and I can't do this job alone.

Q: What wiki is it?
A: The wikis are a ShoutWiki called Saecula Novae and a Wikia site called Speculative Evolution Wiki. We are in the process of moving the wiki to ShoutWiki manually, cleaning up pages as they go, and leaving behind pages and projects that aren't any good.

Q: What is the wiki about?
A: It's about speculative evolution. Basically, speculative evolution is the practice of looking at possible paths evolution could take, either in the future (future evolution), an alternate timeline (alternative evolution), or on another planet (extraterrestrial evolution). It is similar to worldbuilding, but it is a highly scientific exercise as well as an artistic one. For instance, flying cats were once on the wiki and quickly gained infamy, but were deleted because they were implausible.

For a more in-depth look, check out article. For an example of alternative evolution, see the Specworld Project.

Q: Why are you asking us rather than other people who are already active members of the speculative evolution community?
A: Currently, our members are several people around 13 with overly active imaginations (some of whom I'm going to have to ban because they didn't read Wikia's TOS requiring them to be over 13), one individual who writes tutorial articles, and another administrator who hasn't actually done much in several months and just wants to torch the place because he finally got fed up. I have tried advertising on forums dedicated to speculative evolution, but there has been no one actually willing to put in the time and effort... and I'm unable to both keep the Wikia site from degrading and move to the ShoutWiki site at the same time. Especially when I have to deal with college.

So, again, I need help.

Q: What skills would be necessary to be helpful?
A: Well, some layman's understanding of biology would be helpful. But you don't have to be a professional; I'm not and the project I'm working on, Rix, was generally received well. If you're conservative with what you postulate, and stay away from the really exotic stuff (plasma-based life, radically different blood oxygen transporters like Vaska's Complex, et cetera), you shouldn't have too much trouble.

There are also several community projects, all of which are future evolution. These are what I would recommend to work on for beginners, since most of the details about the planet are already known, and the scenario for each time period states what the general environment is.

Artists who could draw some of the life forms would be invaluable, and anyone who can wikicode would be of great help.

Recently, I’d been part of a party of adventurers in a Dungeons and Dragons game that met every Saturday (though we were moving to Wednesdays and Fridays). Note the past tense.

Last night, I was taken aside and informed that group dynamics were “not working out.” Given that my character was straight-laced chaotic good and over half the part was chaotic/neutral/lawful evil (though I really think the chaotic evil character wasn’t that evil, since he was merely a sociopath who killed evil people), I can buy that. Or maybe I somehow managed to piss everyone else off and not notice it, and no one explicitly told me. And the GM is open to, perhaps later in the year, doing another campaign that I can participate in.

I’ll acknowledge that I was a bit upset due to the fact that I hadn’t noticed any such undercurrents, but I guess that’s the price one pays for being autistic and having few social skills. I’m a lot less elegant offline than online. Would have been nice for them to tell me what it was, though. On the other hand maybe it wasn’t anything specific.

In any event. This does give me more time to participate in things like the Wildlife Society (whose last meeting I missed), eskrima (last few meetings missed in part due to being unable to find the location), and various other things. But still, kind of unfortunate.

Would be nice to join another campaign, whether face-to-face, play-by-post, or IRC.

In other news:

My echocardiogram was rather bizarre, at least in terms of my experience, though my heart was apparently normal. Also they won’t send me images of my echocardiogram, which is unfortunate because the video was kind of cool.
I started a speculative evolution forum called Saecula Novae because the mod on Speculative Evolution did several things I disagreed with, including but not limited to: closing and deleting threads without formal notice, unevenly enforcing rules, and not creating forums for community projects like promised.
Fuck anarchocapitalists. (Trigger warning: Sheer, mindblowing insensitivity to rape, which is used to score political points for a stupid ideology.)

My plant-etoids concept now has an image to go along with it!

I have discovered that I adore neopagan folk music, ever since someone was kind enough to post a link to ”I Don’t Speak Human” on the Werelist. Omnia is very, very good. So I bought some of their music off Amazon, while listening to my mother point out that if I plan on being an architect, I should probably not publicly identify as neopagan, at which point I reminded her that I am:

1. an atheist who is literally incapable of worship (which is, I suppose, not completely true)
2. am in possession of some degree of subtlety, so that if I did suddenly become neopagan, I would not feel the necessity to tell half the planet, nor (to address her other point) would I ever join any religious group without thinking about it heavily

After which she informed me that if I did join a neopagan group, she wanted me to know that my family wasn’t the sort to freak out about that. Which I already knew.

Debate.org is turning out to be rather fun. I won the debate on privatization of science, tied another on gun control (because no one voted), and am currently arguing that developed countries have a moral obligation to mitigate climate change. Also discussing the election on the Werelist, where many people are apparently not voting, and we all got into an argument as to the merits of voting, and then someone raised the issue of the whole ‘Fair Tax’ nonsense, which basically suggests that the solution to all tax problems is a tax on consumption rather than income, and that this will somehow close the loopholes rich people use to evade taxes (by lowering them drastically while allowing them to spend vast amounts of money on foreign goods and thus avoid paying the tax).

Meanwhile, I’ve been mentally beating myself on the head ever since I heard Romney has a five point lead. Good grief; I thought this wasn’t going to be a close race, but Romney seems to be convincing people that he isn’t actually an absurd Tea Party extremist. Which he is. And which he will probably govern as, given that on average political candidates try to fulfill a fair number of their promises. Don’t know exactly how Romney will act, but currently he’s basically the equivalent of an existential threat if he governs at all like he’s said he will, despite being (on the Political Compass) literally a unit to the economic right to Obama. Of course, the Political Compass ranks people according to actions, not promises. And I’m not really sure Romney’s past actions will be a very good predictor of his future actions.

I hate politics here. What passes for the left around here is really quite far to the right. I mean, can you even imagine someone saying, “Yes, I favor socialism and redistribution of wealth, federal funding of arts and sciences, regulations, and single-payer health care” and getting elected in this country? The right’s gone so far right in the past few years… Obama’s individual mandate was originally proposed by the freaking Heritage Foundation, after all.

Wonder what people in Europe are thinking of us right now. Probably that we’re all insane.

Found out that I was looking along the wrong lines if I wanted life in the Sun, and am now looking into plasma-based life, since the kilometer-long solar dragons I originally was planning at the request of

siliconshaman spent most of their life outside the Sun, moving into it as part of their orbit of it. And had to somehow evolve silica aerogel and a biological thermocouple. Which would be fine if these were genetically engineered lifeforms, but they aren’t.

Also, the corona is apparently too hot even for silica aerogels. I’ve heard of substances capable of withstanding the heat there, but they are metals, which are unacceptably conductive to heat.

Currently looking into technoshamanism, mostly to determine what it is, because so far I don’t think I’ve found any really good resources on the subject. Anyone know of good resources?

Reposted from here.

With the plants detailed here (I’ve decided to call them ‘plant-etoids’ in what I hope will induce groans) I worked backwards. Such an exercise, while not speculative evolution in the purest sense, is nonetheless a useful tool, for it allows us to consider how things we would normally consider impossible seem to be, at the very least, possible. Even if I am correct in all my speculation, plant-etoids are still very, very unlikely to exist.

The first problem space plants would face is adapting to conditions. As T.Neo pointed out, such a plant would quite possibly go into stasis, at which point while it would, indeed, be a PLANT! IN! SPACE!, it would hardly be anything particularly significant. No, to have space plants—and, therefore, plant-etoids—the plants would have to be able to cope with near vacuum, cold, and radiation. Zerraspace suggested the use of a planet slowly losing its atmosphere.

We have a planet like that in our solar system—Mars. According to some scientists, Mars may at one point have had a magnetic field. When it lost its magnetic field, the solar wind from the Sun stripped away the Martian atmosphere. Such a process would be slow, allowing gradual evolution, and would also result in an increasing amount of radiation reaching the surface. Mars, of course, did not go this route. If life ever existed on the Red Planet, it is either underground, in the ice, or simply extinct.

Escaping from the planet, I feel, would be best provided by volcanic activity or a meteor strike. While volcanic activity might seem like something that would result in huge amounts of heat, given the lack of air there would be no real opportunity for convection, and a reduced opportunity for condution via the air. Instead, the soil and rock on top of the volcano would be conducting the heat.

Water collection initially appeared to be an insurmountable problem. However, I believe I developed a plausible solution. The bladderwort has orb-like structures that it uses to catch prey. I propose that a plant on a planet with a gradually thinning atmosphere would be forced to develop something along the lines of an analogous structure. Ice would be surrounded by plant matter, after which the plant would develop an air-tight coating and generate metabolic heat to melt the ice. The limited space available would force the water to remain in a liquid state. Roots could then be extended to absorb the water. Dessication could, of course, be solved by a waxy covering, but plants without them are apparently already capable of surviving vacuum for a day or so.

Nutrition could also be assured in such a way. If the plant could survive in very poor soil (on a Mars-like planet, I would say this is quite possibly a given), then by capturing the ‘dirty snowballs’ they could also absorb amino acids and various other elements necessary for survival. These comets could be caught by having the plant-etoid extend structures made of spongy plant matter. When a small comet impacted it, it would then surround it in air-tight plant matter and absorb water and nutrients. In otherwords, it would use a similar method as aerogel. This spongy plant matter could evolve by natural selection; if the plant-etoid’s ancestors grew around bits of ice to absorb them, then a comet embedded itself in the plant would probably be absorbed, too. Sunlight, in turn, could be absorbed by the spongy plant matter.

Reproduction would be asexual and happen via budding, I would expect, though I suppose that if the plant-etoid’s existed in large concentrations sexual reproduction would also be a possibility—as they would be if the sperm and eggs were suitably protected from the elements. Certainly the plant-etoid’s would have a slow metabolism, so I would expect zygotes to last a rather long time.

The plant-etoid would not need inhale or exhale carbon dioxide or oxygen. Instead, it would operate by consuming all the oxygen produced for cellular respiration, and consuming all the carbon dioxide it produced for photosynthesis. Since the plant-etoid would have to have very, very slow metabolism, gradually it could accumulate more and more carbon dioxide (or oxygen), allowing gradual growth and reproduction.

The ideal shape, I think, for the plant-etoid would be a sphere. Such a shape would allow large amounts of area to be exposed to sunlight without risking decreased exposure if the plant-etoid turns sideways after getting hit hard enough. The aforementiond spongy tissue would cover the outside of the plant and be photosynthetic. It would also be only the outer layer that was alive; as the plant-etoid grew larger and larger, it would accumulate heartwood, or something similar, in the center, like a tree. Even after a plant-etoid died, it would still float on, potentially food for other organisms. Over a long period of time, the plant-etoid’s could act like clearers, as small micrometeorites would get stuck in their spongy tissue, but not digested.

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Citrakāyaḥ

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Alien Worlds Review
A Short Introduction to Eclek
The Time of Fire Life: The Afaguzddavenuv
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Eskrima, RPGs, And Other Things
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PLANTS! IN! SPACE!

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Spirit of the Wind

Writings of a Cheetah

Entries tagged with speculative evolution

Alien Worlds Review

A Short Introduction to Eclek

The Time of Fire Life: The Afaguzddavenuv

(no subject)

Eskrima, RPGs, And Other Things

Heyheyheyhey