Actually, you're thinking of the house-cat lineage. A while after the project was abandoned the Soia did another sweep for reference species, and found that something domesticatable had developed in response .

I really need to make a 'death from above' image...

I don't think that's really such a fundamental problem. From a Loroi perspective based on what little information they've had a chance to gain over the course of the three or so conversations they've had with Alex, the Loroi have no real reason to believe either of those things happened. They only have Alex's say-so that he represents a world and has an independent government behind him; they don't know whether the thinks he's telling the truth or is knowingly and intentionally lying to their faces. After all, their mind-probe was less than a complete success.

All the evidence that he comes from an independent world come from his claims to represent the “Terran” Colonial Authority and “Terran” government; “Terran” is similar to the Trade word for “rot, decay,” and could easily be part of some sort of easy-to-remember emergency cipher or code-word meaning something like “something bad has happened, all Umiak friendlies please render assistance” intended perhaps to be discreetly slipped into conversation, so a friendly contact who understands the code who catches it will be able to figure out what to do (the Loroi certainly don't seem to trust the Historian construct, and flatly stated that sending Alex with Mozin [which would incidentally have had a good chance of putting him in prolonged direct contact with the construct] was "out of the question" and immediately ordered Mozin [and thus, incidentally, the construct] to leave the system; to me, this really seemed as more of a move to keep him under control and monitored at all times than a matter of concern for his personal safety). The Loroi would first have to verify that “Terran” isn't some elaborate fiction on Alex's part or some sort of some code, but rather, a real actual government before judging the likelihood of the Umiak implanting false memories or constructing a Potemkin world (and, unfortunately, most if not all the real evidence they could have had of Earth's existence is likely drifting through space or utterly disintegrated).

Stillstorm has more or less publicly stated that she believes Alex is lying about everything.

They have no way of actually telling that Alex actually remembers anything; everything and anything he says might be some sort of code or catchphrase meant to be caught by, say, a Historian personality construct. If there's one thing the Umiak do not lack, it's the ability to build different ship designs out of whatever they needed to put together; even his ship's wreckage is hardly solid proof. Even if the Mizol fully understand normal Loroi physical tells for when some Loroi's lying, they wouldn't be able to safely bet on the same rules applying to Alex. Especially since he hasn't been caught lying, which in turn means there hasn't been a moment where they could tell that he was lying and thus understand that he probably wasn't lying about anything else.

Betting on Alex's honesty is very much a leap of faith.

The Loroi have every reason in the world to be cautious with him.

Even if it does make them seem like jerks.

Okay, but I think you're using information that the Loroi do not have to arrive at that decision. It's already a settled matter for you that humanity has been around for thousands of years, instead of, say, since last Tuesday, so you're predisposed to reject that notion out of hand.

Stillstorm, to all appearances, is not.

I'll allow it. Mostly on account of telepathy not actually existing.

The Loroi, though, from an in-universe perspective, they probably ought to have a harder time swallowing it.

No doubt the Loroi opinion on the matter of humanity's origin will change after they learn more about us and they get a decent body of evidence (or even just decent testimony from Alex) that humans are all-natural, organic grown, no artificial colors or flavors. I cannot imagine what sort of cultural backlash this knowledge might have for the Loroi, it really depends on how firmly their Soia myths are entrenched in their society (for example, their Ancestral mythology might be integrated into how they justify their caste system, especially since certain castes [and thus caste divisions] supposedly predate the fall of the Soia; cutting their cultural identity off at the roots might wither the tree and bring the whole thing slowly crashing down).

I honestly have a hard time trying to think of an explanation for the Loroi that I'd be able to accept. I mean, there comes a point when the premises of a work of fiction become so unrealistic that you just lean back and accept them, because explanations only make them worse. Psychic powers and FTL travel are usually pretty far past that point, right next to suspiciously-human nonhumans with no relationship to humanity, swordfights with future tech, and, of course, zombies. You don't question the zombie plague, you just accept it as fact and move on, no matter how interested in the origins and causes and rules of the zombie plague the story's characters are. At some point you realize that you don't need to know the answer to the zombie plague because you've become an old man, and bitter, and you just wanted to watch a damn zombie movie, not hear about cordyceps as if fungi were midichlorians.

Anyways.

My own personal theory at the moment is that the Soia had some technological means of telepathy (probably involving hyperspace in some way because why not), which they used for all the things the Loroi use it. They ordinarily could detect life anywhere with this advanced technology, but while mapping a route between systems some Soia ship came across Earth, found that it had advanced life with no telepathic signatures, and thought this was odd. So they took some samples and experimented with the brain structures and such of the largest and most advanced brains then on the planet; proto-humans, and, of course, humpback whales.

The proto-humans were engineered to eventually work as living replacements for certain devices that required a living person as an intermediary, particularly in situations where the use of those psychic powers or technology would have a deleterious effect on the health of the individual; no reason to waste Soia brains on far-seer duty.

The humpback whales, of course, were pushed in an opposite direction, given limited telekinesis as a way of manipulating objects in hazardous ocean environments but left utterly without telepathic abilities, and, more important, without telepathic signatures; each side, proto-human and whale, intended as a check upon the other. Sort of like the Roman and British tradition of pitting two powerful tribes against each other and keeping their rivalry simmering in order to better keep each under their thumb.

Then some idiot gave some Loroi telekinetic abilities or forgot to cull their telekinetics or just spilled some coffee on the Loroi gene sequencer, and all hell broke loose and the once-proud Soia empire was reduced to dust within a few generations.

And that's not just the origin story of the Loroi and the Pol, but also, possibly more importantly, an important moral lesson about whaling. The whales aren't our enemy, and if humanity and whalekind could only have put aside their rivalry they might have avoided so much bloodshed.

But now, after thousands of years, perhaps we and the whales can both finally learn to forgive.

You raise a very good point.
This could really hit them hard.

And don´t forget about the Barsam, who were all sceptics before. Free lunch for them.


Turmoil ahead.

Solemn, are you consumping some halucogenic sustances?

Whales? Waht the hell are you on about?

Also, mething you are overthinnking this. For the Umiak to geneticly engineer false humans is way too much work and too much trouble for no real gain.
And if Umiak were able to engineer humans, then the fight agaisnt hte Loroi would have been over wAAAY sooner.

I can very honestly say I have never in my entire life comsumped any halucogenic sustances.

Sorry, I thought that was clear.

There was a movie once involving a race of telepathic space elves and a mysterious aquatic race and a human star fleet that was no match for the super-advanced race, so mankind had to take an extreme risk to select a diplomat to make peaceful contact and establish healthy relations with this superior power.

To that end, they ended up with the least likely choice of diplomats; a mated pair of humpback whales.



Are you suggesting that not all science fiction stories are obligated to follow similar patterns even if they contain some roughly similar elements?


...if genetically engineering humans could end the war, wouldn't that be real gain?

Then theres the part where he'll have to explain where Terran comes from when someone asks him, which would result in him giving them an explanation of how it is derived from something that represents the opposite of what it means in trade making him sound completely phony to them and inadvertantly dig himself a hole.

EDIT: And the thing I am talking about is the goddess that Earth is named after, Gaia/Terra. In case I wasn't being clear.

Vulcans aren't space elves. Elves are all emotional and passionate - and openly so - at least when it's something they care about. Vulcans aren't.

Anyways, my understanding of what happened in that movie is that the Probe had already swung past Earth, in the past, and thought we'd murdered all the whales (as we had). Allegedly, the Probe was built by telekinetic space whales from somewhere far away, and they sent the Probe out to find their 'relatives'(or whatever) on other planets and uplift them. It didn't consider us to be anything other than, well, irritating mites, who'd killed its friends/master's relatives. When Kirk and co brought the whales back to the future and they started singing, whales were no longer extinct, and the Probe was somewhat confused and stopped.
Of course, a fair chunk of that comes from having read the sequel novel. So it may or may not be canon. Paramount no longer has a publicly available canon policy for Trek.


How knowledgeable is Alex about that kind of ancient myth, though? I'm not actually sure just how 'common' that knowledge is, even today.
Admittedly, Alex has an interest in oddball stuff, since he actually knew what his name meant with only a little bit of thought.
I think that the Loroi (assuming they believed what he said) could understand how languages that evolved completely separately from one another could have words that sounded similar to one another.

Oooh. I know how he can 'prove' that he's not a Umiak construct. English. There's no way that the Loroi could possibly think that English is an artificial language.

Has anyone actually considered the option that humanities immunity to telepathy could be an evolutionary trait.

Not sure if anyone here read anything from the known space series (kzinti wars) but in there a cache of ancient neanderthals is found on a zoo planet in suspended animation.

It then comes forward that they are actually a telepathic species.


It is certainly plausible that outsider verse neanderthals or other hominid were likewise a telepathic species and once a counter telepathic trait manifested in humans they were able to quickly supplant these.

It could actually imply that the Loroi are not based off of humans but of neanderthals.


Or you know, latin for earth. Which is also a root for Earth|soil in a lot of languages from esperanto to french to spanish.

Alexander could easily translate Terran into Trade as Of Earth or From Earth. Because that's essentially what it means.

Problem with that theory. Some time ago the gene sequence of the Neandethals was fianlly sequenced. Guess what? It was also found completely submerged/assimilated in current Homo Sapiens DNA ... we have simply "consumed" the Neanderthals into us. They are us - we are them.

Well, he did say other hominid as well. However, that we subsumed the Neanderthals doesn't necessarily rule out his theory.
As was said, "old stories". If homo sapiens (or one of our precursors) was up against a different branch of the tree, or other sanzai-using species, and the winners were who developed a hereditary latent mask or shroud, then, well, even if we still retained the telepathy-accessing genes, they'd be more or less useless.
However, I'm not sure this theorycrafting all works out, since among the Loroi telepathic strength and bloodline do not seem to be inherently connected to one another. Though ... I suppose it's possible, at least, I don't think that there's anything to contradict this, that some of the apparent randomness in Loroi telepathic strengths is related to the artificial womb methodology being used, and that the strength of the mother could (maybe) affect the development of the future strength of the child while the child is in the womb. And, even so, things could work differently for humans than Loroi.

Well after many years of keen observation I have come to the conclusion that humanity's resistance to telepathy has developed as an evolutionary defense mechanism. I have found that females of the terran species proceed from the assumption that males can read their minds, this suggests that some sort of mind reading telepathy might have existed in the past. It is very likely that this telepathy went both ways and understanding the innate inner workings of the male brain, allowing a female access to such thoughts could result in ruinous disaster. Therefore, males who were able to protect their thoughts from probing were able to protect themselves and survive to procreate.

This is undeniably true. Also, allowing others of one's own gender into one's thoughts is also generally highly inadvisable.

:Cort:

Alternatively fairly simple thoughts in males could have been seen as an evolutionary advantage. As there was no reason to probe anything.

I think the Author meant with it things like the Old Testament events and the "miracles" that Jesus did in Judea. Or also perhaps the random occurences of telepathy *e.g. ESP - Extra Sensory Perception* or precognition *e.g. seer's* here or there that had actualy a success rate greater then 50%.

Still wondering about the following: how did the genome of the pre-inbreeded Homo Sapiens looked then (without Neanderthal influences)?
I don't have the impression that our Homo Sapiens (or Cro-Magnon if you like) ancestors are considered a different species, despite the lack of Neanderthal genes.

Just wanted to point out, belatedly, that this cracked me up.


...that they had to go back in time to get. You have to include that part for maximum ridiculosity.


Yeah, that always seemed obvious to me. DNA tests show that all current humans descended from the same group that left Africa ~100,000 years ago, but there were (for example) Homo erectus in China more than half a million years earlier than that who had distinctly Asian features. The answer seems like a no-brainer: clearly the various hominid "species" interbred with each other.


Or, male thoughts are structured so as to be unreadable. They did this (a bit) in the original Star Trek pilot, The Menagerie; the telepathic zookeepers were so complex that when Pike filled his mind with primitive, violent man-thoughts, they were unable to read him.

Hell, if my memory serves me rightly (and assuming it's still valid), if you go back far enough, the gene pool that we're descended from got culled down to around 600 or so individuals.
Whose descendants then spread back out and ultimately intermixed with the descendants of earlier waves.

Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis appear to have interbred immediately after leaving Africa, but there are still modern humans without identifiably Neanderthal gene markers. All non-African and some African ethnic groups have neanderthal genes, but there are African ethnic groups without Neanderthal markers.

Modern Africans are not considered a separate species from the Eurasian, Neanderthal-influenced ethnicities.

The actual expression of genetic traits is far more complicated than simple bloodline heredity. The epigenome is way more complicated than the genome. We won't map out the human proteome for quite a long time. Telepathic abilities are presumably some very very complicated systems where minor differences can fundamentally change and affect everything, doesn't mean heredity isn't an absolutely huge part of it.

When he translated lyrics from Space Oddity into Trade, he used "Terra" for "Earth." I think this indicates he's been saying "Terran" as "Terran" this whole time.

Funny discussion about Neanderthalers. Guess some of you wouldn´t be too surprised about the fact that i was born there.





On re-reading i stumbled over this:

I´m pretty sure they cleaned him up before medical treatment, because he didin´t show any signs of blood when strapped on that bed in sickbay.

Also they have washing machines.

From reading about the making of the movie, my impression is that the probe just thought it didn't have the volume ramped up enough, and started to turn it to 11.

Yeah, non-canon Trek novels have always been really non-canon. Lucas at least asked the various Star Wars authors to try to keep things working with each other, but the Star Trek novels I've read give me the exact opposite impression. Which isn't surprising, since the shows haven't ever been that consistent with each other either.

Go look at my cat joke, further up the page. This isn't the first time I've made it .

I'm not certain whether Cro-Magnons are considered a separate species or not. At any rate, it's suspected that by the time our ancestors encountered Neanderthals we were already a mixed-breed race. However, many parts for Africa (especially the rainforests, and thereby their surrounding zones, which presumably would have been important population centers) are apparently very fossil-poor, making it difficult to impossible to point out other species in the first place.

That's also the primary source of our X and Y chromosomes as I best recall (some genes might have jumped from other sources, of course, but both of those chromosomes have had their 'origin generation' pinned down enough to put them in the same approximate neighborhood of each other). I think it's fairly safe to define Homo Sapiens Sapiens as the modern descendents of specifically that group of ~600.

If anything, all the rest of us should be considered just a horribly-inbred sub-species of Homo Sapiens Africanus or something. I forget the exact number, but the percentages say that the vast majority of human genetic diversity is still within the various ethnic groups of Africa. Wanderlust seems to have always been the domain of only a minority.

And how would it win the war?

If Umiak engineer thousadns of humans and assmble a whole fleet wiht them to make a deciside push? That might work.

But why let one be captured then? Adn what does ti amtter anymore if hte push already started?

In other words - if Alex was engineered by Umiak - how does that help them? What can they gain from it?

"Species" is a useful construct for a lot of purposes and in a lot of contexts, but honestly it becomes far too squishy and nebulous when you're comparing groups as closely related as modern humans, neanderthals, and denisovians. Heck, it arguably breaks down between lions and tigers.

It's not really something to get particularly hung up over; there are some pretty intense mental acrobatics required in the rules and exceptions to the rules and exceptions to the exceptions (each with their own exceptions, etc.) involved in biology's long and troubled efforts to transform the term "species" into something rigorous and definitive and, well, specific, instead of something some Swedish guy once thought was a pretty useful way of organizing his notes.

We're never going to get rid of "species," though, because, again, it is useful. It's just not useful when dealing with, say, ring species, or any of a thousand other matters. The lines blur too much.

An expression I heard once was "more genetic diversity between two neighboring villages in the Congo than between all of Japan and Ireland."

But you just said that if the Umiak had engineered humans then the war would be over. Those were your own words, which you said right after saying that engineering humans would be worthless.

...yes?

Your second question seems to answer your first. You could easily stand to "let" one be captured because it doesn't matter anymore since the push already started; worst-case, the Loroi learn that biologically engineered Lotai is possible, at the same time that they would have already learned that the Umiak have engineered Lotai. Slightly better case, the Loroi spend time, resources, and ships chasing a false lead to a fictional independent government given to them by an agent intended to lead them into, say, a massive ambush. Best case, you've got the Loroi fleet chasing those shadows, and you've also got an agent in a position to, I dunno, assassinate the Storm Witch, or possibly even the Emperor, if the Loroi aren't sharp enough or are too trusting to figure out that this creature with perfect lotai might have some relationship with the massive fleetwide lotai already established. So, I'm not really sure what you're asking here. Please explain.

...what wouldn't they? Never before have they had the opportunity to directly deceive and mislead the Loroi on this scale. They even took the extra step of opening communications in the middle of a battlefield just to specifically deny any knowledge of this totally awesome plan of theirs. They don't open communications to negotiate for anything else, and they had to know Stillstorm would reject their offer; must be that they wanted to get that denial of knowledge across, so that the Loroi would take the misstep of trusting Alex, and maybe diverting a couple of needed vessels to this "Earth" of his, or get the Storm Witch to relax her guard and turn her back just enough for him to strike, that she may not transform the imminent Umiak victory into defeat as she has in so many less important battles.

Fortunately, the Loroi know better.

So you were born in North Rhine-Westphalia, near the Neandertal valley?

Yup.



You raise a good point again. Alex and the whole humaniti arent´t save at all. There´s a lot to sort out (diplomatically and else), any disaccord can lead to a catastrophy.

I´m looking forward to how all this unfolds.

You're missign the point - if they have the biological know-how to make an engineered species thats immune to telepathy, then they should be abel to make themselves immune.

In other words - why bother with humans in the first place?
If the lotai is a weapon, why give it to a slave species, but not yourself? Why make humans
AT ALL?