Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[Arioch]

How resilient are Loroi as a species to sickness, poison and diseases? Have there been massive die offs due to diseases, say the equivalent of the bubonic plague?

Loroi have robust immune systems; some Loroi are healthier than others. But keep in mind that Loroi are introduced alien species in foreign ecosystems. Unfamiliar pathogens can be very dangerous to an unprepared immune system, but pathogens will also have a difficult time adapting to a host if it is too alien. So it's relatively uncommon for an alien pathogen to make the jump to a Loroi, but if it can, the Loroi may have little resistance. Without the symbiotic parasitic relationship that co-evolved organisms share, alien pathogens tend to burn through a population, killing everyone who isn't immune, and then die off due to lack of new hosts.

Viruses, for example, are very specific to certain hosts, as they must target specific chemical receptors and genes. The vast majority of the native viruses that the Loroi encounter have no idea what to do with a Soia-Liron host. Viral outbreaks among Loroi are very rare.

On Deinar and Taben, most of the primitive native microorganisms were displaced by the yeast-like Dreiman terraforming agents and their descendants. These yeasts are mostly benign to Soia-Liron organisms, mainly causing allergic reactions or minor respiratory ailments.

On Perrein, which has a highly developed and ancient ecosystem, infections by native fungus-like pathogens was much more common (before the recovery of modern medicine). This was one of many hostile environmental factors that helped to keep the Loroi population small and dispersed.

Poisons also tend to be variable; what's toxic to one species may be beneficial to another.

[Suederwind]

Is there some kind of loroi equivalent to the common cold and what is it like?

[Arioch]

Is there some kind of loroi equivalent to the common cold and what is it like?

The common cold is an example of the type of infection that you won't see among the Loroi: a common, mild, chronic, untreatable and un-immunizable viral infection.

On Deinar, a Dreiman yeast infection could cause cold-like symptoms: bronchitis, rhinorrhea. However, it is easily treated with antibiotics, and most Loroi are immunized against it.

On Perrein, a Creeper fungus infection causes flu-like symptoms: fever, lethargy, nausea. There's no vaccine and it is usually fatal if not treated. The victim slowly loses higher brain function and eventually becomes a shambling, spore-spreading zombie.

[Hālian]

How do you treat creeper infections if there's no vaccine?

Also why isn't there one by 2160?

Also also, do the infected run the risk of blowing up?

[Arioch]

How do you treat creeper infections if there's no vaccine? Also why isn't there one by 2160?

Treatment and vaccination are usually two very different things. Treatment with drugs or antibiotics directly attacks the pathogen. Vaccination improves the body's immune response to a particular pathogen, usually by exposing it to an inert version of the pathogen or toxin. Vaccinations aren't always possible, if the pathogen is too variable or mutates too rapidly to be recognized by the prepared defense (as with many viruses), or if the defenses are ineffective against the pathogen even when prepared (such as with HIV, which attacks the immune system itself), or if there's no such thing as an inert version of the pathogen. In the case of Creeper, it's a combination of all of the above. Perrein has an ancient ecosystem, with some very highly evolved pathogens.

[icekatze]

hi hi

For a species that has been genetically engineered, it seems a little bit strange that they would have pathogens that attack them. Although, I suppose with an entire genetically engineered ecosystem, it is more likely to have pathogens arise just from natural processes in the centuries after the last active engineering. Still, Creeper sounds pretty specialized... perhaps it is the remnant of an ancient biological weapon.

[RedDwarfIV]

Creeper sounds a lot like the fungus from that episode Primeval, except moore realistic.

Kind of like Cordyceps, but it leaves the host body 'alive'.

[Arioch]

Creeper eventually kills the host. Cordyceps also affects the behavior of the host; it can make an infected ant, for example, climb to the top of a plant before it dies and sprouts the spore-releasing fungal bodies.

The idea is not that the Perrein fungoids are specialized, but rather that they are extremely sophisticated and adaptable (they would have to be, to be able to infect an alien organism). Perrein is almost twice as old as Earth, and so the long arms race between parasite and host has produced some sophisticated biological weaponry. Creeper is a single-celled colonial organism, but it has almost as much genetic information as a human, and is capable of very complex behavior.

For a species that has been genetically engineered, it seems a little bit strange that they would have pathogens that attack them. Although, I suppose with an entire genetically engineered ecosystem, it is more likely to have pathogens arise just from natural processes in the centuries after the last active engineering.

The terraforming yeast was benign when it was seeded almost a million years ago, but has since proliferated into a variety of different forms.

[htabdoolb]

If this isn't going to spoil anything in the upcoming story, I'd like to know approximately how large each species' domain is. From reading through this QnA thread and from reading through most of the Insider articles, I know that humanity has a presence in about 40 systems; Earth, five additional colony worlds, and several dozen smaller outposts. How large is the Loroi Union compared to that? Or the Umiak Hierarchy? Could we get a rough breakdown of major(100 million plus population) and minor(less than 100 mil pop) colony worlds?

I'm really very curious about how active the colonization efforts have been by each of the species in Outsider. It is one thing to plop down a small monitoring station on a moon somewhere, and quite another to actively move hundreds of thousands or millions of colonists to a new world with little to no infrastructure already in place. Also, do other species engage in terra-forming activities(such as humans apparently do on Mars), or do they focus on worlds that are already more or less habitable for them?

One more thing. I noticed that on your technology levels page, level 9 mentions longevity as a technology that a society will usually work on during that phase of their development. Do Outsider humans live substantially longer lives than current humans? I would imagine that 150 years of medical development and research could very well have solved basically every health problem most of us dread, but even if one never got sick and most injuries could be completely recovered from, eventually a person is going to run headlong into the Hayflick limit. Once your cells stop dividing, it's game over man.

[Arioch]

If this isn't going to spoil anything in the upcoming story, I'd like to know approximately how large each species' domain is. From reading through this QnA thread and from reading through most of the Insider articles, I know that humanity has a presence in about 40 systems; Earth, five additional colony worlds, and several dozen smaller outposts. How large is the Loroi Union compared to that? Or the Umiak Hierarchy? Could we get a rough breakdown of major(100 million plus population) and minor(less than 100 mil pop) colony worlds?

Welcome to the forum. I'm glad that you were able to get past your registration difficulties.

The Loroi Union is divided into seven sectors, each of which is roughly comparable in size to Human territory. It contains roughly 150 inhabited worlds, of which about 40 are major settlements (>100 million inhabitants). This includes both Loroi and alien populations.



The extent of Umiak territory is not well known, but it is believed to be larger than that of the Union.

I'm really very curious about how active the colonization efforts have been by each of the species in Outsider. It is one thing to plop down a small monitoring station on a moon somewhere, and quite another to actively move hundreds of thousands or millions of colonists to a new world with little to no infrastructure already in place. Also, do other species engage in terra-forming activities(such as humans apparently do on Mars), or do they focus on worlds that are already more or less habitable for them?

The major colonization efforts by the Loroi in the Seren sector, for example, took place over a 400 year period; there was a lot of time for emigration and population growth. Because of the existence of previous civilizations in the region, many habitable worlds had already been terraformed, and so most colonization by the Loroi and others concentrated on systems that were already habitable. The new colonization efforts in the direction of the Dinnan ("Frontier") Sector since the start of the war involve less attractive systems, and some terraforming is planned, but these efforts are only 25 years in.

One more thing. I noticed that on your technology levels page, level 9 mentions longevity as a technology that a society will usually work on during that phase of their development. Do Outsider humans live substantially longer lives than current humans? I would imagine that 150 years of medical development and research could very well have solved basically every health problem most of us dread, but even if one never got sick and most injuries could be completely recovered from, eventually a person is going to run headlong into the Hayflick limit. Once your cells stop dividing, it's game over man.

Yes, given access to the appropriate medical care, humans can live a long time. There are people alive today who are still alive in 2160.

[GeoModder]

Ah, a Sector map. At last!

It's a bit weird to see a sector adjacent to the Maizan Sector as a "new frontier" for the Loroi. Is that because of stellar movements since the time the Soia civilization fell? Stars with unhabitable, but potentially terraformable, planets moving into the Local Bubble along their orbit?

Also, how did the other sectors historically form in the Loroi Empire? For instance, the Seren sector looks quite big with the capital of the sector being very distant from the Loroi core sectors. So I imagine there'd been a time the "Golim-Chei" territories were administrated from another seat of power before Seren itself was colonized.

[Zakharra]

One more thing. I noticed that on your technology levels page, level 9 mentions longevity as a technology that a society will usually work on during that phase of their development. Do Outsider humans live substantially longer lives than current humans? I would imagine that 150 years of medical development and research could very well have solved basically every health problem most of us dread, but even if one never got sick and most injuries could be completely recovered from, eventually a person is going to run headlong into the Hayflick limit. Once your cells stop dividing, it's game over man.

Yes, given access to the appropriate medical care, humans can live a long time. There are people alive today who are still alive in 2160.

o.o Children or adult now? If adult, that puts the possible age humans can live to two centuries. Are the few people that old still mentally capable or senile? Are they limited in their ability to move? Can a human in 2160 expect to have a long and vigorous youth and middle age (up into the 80-90-100 year mark)? Or are you old at 50-60 and can expect over a century of being flat out old?

[projekcja]

In the map, the directions are descriptively labeled "Coreward, Rimward, spinward and antispindward", with clear meaning regarding the Galaxy's motion. How would the 2 other directions (into the screen and out of the screen) be labeled? North and South? The thickness of the Milky way in that direction is around 1000 lightyears. Do territories extend all the way in that direction making maps essentially 2 dimensional, or are there vast unexplored regions "above" and "below" the map?

[Arioch]

The "Great Wasteland" is so-named because nobody lives there; the precursor civilizations never reached what's now Human territory (or, at least, they never established colonies there). It's not clear what the motives of the Dreiman or Soia were in establishing their empires, but they seem to have concentrated their efforts in regions where there was already native life. For whatever reason, the band of the rimward edge of the Local Bubble stretching from the Periphery to the Ninnil Gap is dotted with dozens of worlds with advanced native life. The existence of such life predates the arrival of the precursor civilizations, though there is evidence that they may have helped some of them along on the road to sentience.

The early starfaring Loroi were not bold explorers or especially interested in expansion; they acquired territory mostly by accident. The earliest expansion was just to connect the three Splinter Colonies and search for more; then they stopped. When alien contact was made, the Loroi established a few outposts to better trade with their neighbors, and then they stopped again. They acquired more territory in the Minzan Sector as a result of the Delrias war. The first large-scale Loroi colonial effort was at Maia, which was largely a political move to place a buffer between the Mannadi, Neridi and Pipolsid, who weren't getting along. Increasing tensions meant establishing bases in Neridi and Pipolsid territory to help protect against Mannadi raids, and then there was the series of wars against the Mannadi. So when the Loroi Union was formed in 1557, the Loroi found themselves in charge of a huge swath of territory, almost none of which they'd colonized themselves.

When the Loroi did get into the mood to colonize in the late 1600's (under the new expansionist Second Emperor Swiftsure), they did so in the direction of Seren rather than Dinnan because there were readily habitable worlds there and new races to trade with. Seren itself was colonized relatively early in the period as a distant trading post with the Morat, Jilaad and Historians (the path through former Mannadi territory to Historian space having been closed). It was a bit analogous to San Francisco in the mid-19th century: remote but important. After Swiftsure established the provincial system, the Seren region grew rapidly (mostly with entrepreneurial colonists from Maia/Donei) and became prosperous and influential (to the point where a former Seren governor became Emperor). Prior to the Umiak war, the Seren sector extended into the Steppes and spinward of Ukko.

Without any native inhabitants or peach planets, the Loroi mostly ignored the Dinnan region until the Umiak war. The Barsam had established a few outposts there, and now there are a number of new joint Loroi-Barsam colonies. They are mostly resource gathering colonies.

In the map, the directions are descriptively labeled "Coreward, Rimward, spinward and antispindward", with clear meaning regarding the Galaxy's motion. How would the 2 other directions (into the screen and out of the screen) be labeled? North and South? The thickness of the Milky way in that direction is around 1000 lightyears. Do territories extend all the way in that direction making maps essentially 2 dimensional, or are there vast unexplored regions "above" and "below" the map?

Yes, galactic North and South are "above" and "below" the map, and the territory does extend beyond what you can see. Notably, the Maiad Sector is much larger than it appears in this view, extending south and contacting Umiak territory. At some point when I do a formal map it will have to include two views.

o.o Children or adult now? If adult, that puts the possible age humans can live to two centuries. Are the few people that old still mentally capable or senile? Are they limited in their ability to move? Can a human in 2160 expect to have a long and vigorous youth and middle age (up into the 80-90-100 year mark)? Or are you old at 50-60 and can expect over a century of being flat out old?

It depends on the luck of your health and the quality of health care you can afford. Some people over 100 are fit and healthy, and some are confined to beds in oxygen tents.

[projekcja]

How many stars are there approximately in Loroi territory, and what fraction of these have been explored, colonized, or somehow utilized?
atlasoftheuniverse says there are 260,000 stars within 250 ly of sol. Seeing the scale of the map seems to suggest similar numbers. Are all of the stars in the region safely accessible with jump drive, or is a significant number of stars inaccessible due to being too far from any other star or other reasons? Are there significant bottlenecks, where some clusters of stars are only connected to other clusters through a single possible jump?

[Arioch]

There are surely several thousand stars at least in each sector, with the vast majority being very dim red or brown dwarfs. The number of systems with terrestrial planets in the biozone would be a very small percentage; I wouldn't even hazard a guess. Except for the frontier sectors, most systems will have been surveyed if not thoroughly explored. The peculiar nature of jump drive does mean that the safe routes through each sector will be circuitous and bottlenecked at certain key systems, but most stars will be reachable (the more isolated a star is, the safer it is to jump to at longer distances).

[Zakharra]

o.o Children or adult now? If adult, that puts the possible age humans can live to two centuries. Are the few people that old still mentally capable or senile? Are they limited in their ability to move? Can a human in 2160 expect to have a long and vigorous youth and middle age (up into the 80-90-100 year mark)? Or are you old at 50-60 and can expect over a century of being flat out old?

It depends on the luck of your health and the quality of health care you can afford. Some people over 100 are fit and healthy, and some are confined to beds in oxygen tents.

True, but for someone at 160-200 years old? Unless medical technology has gotten a lot better at reducing the effects of aging (brittle/weak bones, worn out joints, lower muscle tone and organs and such), I cannot really see anyone that age in anything other than a medical center because of their extreme age.

[Grayhome]

True, but for someone at 160-200 years old? Unless medical technology has gotten a lot better at reducing the effects of aging (brittle/weak bones, worn out joints, lower muscle tone and organs and such), I cannot really see anyone that age in anything other than a medical center because of their extreme age.

If anything I would say Arioch's previous quote is woefully pessimistic, I've been examining lectures by economics and business masters that declare that unless a nation wishes to commit economic suicide they will implement any and all advances in medical technology concerning longevity as soon as is fiscally possible. We are already seeing the effects of developed (and many developing) nations providing free medical care to their citizens in the present economy. I anticipate that this practice will only increase in quality and quantity in the future, the nations who do not will simply fall behind and will not take a part in the future world stage.

That point and the comic taking place in over a century in the future and the human lifespan has on average barely moved a decade or two up the ol' average ladder... well I'd call it odd to be polite. Did all the first world nations get together and collectively declare that "Only the wealthiest of us shall live past a century! Now fetch me my expensive jewel encrusted wine glass peasant scum!"

Cause that could be a thing. I mean it's been done before in Sci-Fi but it's still a nice plot hook, if that is the case I expect to see prisoners being used as organ banks and minorities being sentenced disproportionately more than say, white Christian males.

[Arioch]

True, but for someone at 160-200 years old? Unless medical technology has gotten a lot better at reducing the effects of aging (brittle/weak bones, worn out joints, lower muscle tone and organs and such), I cannot really see anyone that age in anything other than a medical center because of their extreme age.

Lifespans have dramatically lengthened in the last 50 years just through better general health care, without even tinkering with genetics. But genetic science means that increasingly we will have direct control over the fundamental processes of life, the ones that build and maintain our tissues. Most tissues are entirely capable of regenerating themselves, but are actually prevented from doing so; most (but not all) Earth organisms have "planned obsolescence" built into their genes, so that organisms don't compete with their own offspring. In theory, a body should be able to regenerate itself indefinitely, provided that you know which genetic buttons to push, you can afford the treatment, and the genetic information itself hasn't deteriorated. This is what I'm referring to with the "longevity" reference in the tech chart. But I don't expect such treatment to be easy or cheap, especially in the near term.

If anything I would say Arioch's previous quote is woefully pessimistic, I've been examining lectures by economics and business masters that declare that unless a nation wishes to commit economic suicide they will implement any and all advances in medical technology concerning longevity as soon as is fiscally possible. We are already seeing the effects of developed (and many developing) nations providing free medical care to their citizens in the present economy. I anticipate that this practice will only increase in quality and quantity in the future, the nations who do not will simply fall behind and will not take a part in the future world stage.

The problem with declaring universal health coverage for everyone, no matter how unnaturally old they get, is how you pay for it. If the treatments to keep people alive become exponentially more expensive as they age (which is what's happening today), then that's not economically sustainable.

This stuff doesn't greatly figure into the story (it doesn't really matter, in story terms, what the health care rules on Earth are like or how old Captain Hamilton or Admiral Callan really are), and in a tale about aliens, it's not advantageous to focus on how much humanity itself has changed. But if you're thinking about the future state of Earth, I think it's hard to ignore the implications of what happens when people stop dying. If these treatments are effective and affordable, then taken to its logical conclusion, the inevitable result is a society like that described in Niven's "Known Space" novels, in which everyone is functionally immortal, and reproduction becomes a rare event to replace individuals lost to violence or unusual circumstances.

Of course, there are ways in which you can place limits on such as system. One problem is the integrity of the genetic material itself... even a regenerating organism is still susceptible to gene damage and cancer, and as an individual ages, the rate of cancer and other cell malfunctions may increase to the point where that individual is no longer viable -- even if you can treat the cancer, it could reach a point where you just can't keep up with it. This may place an upper limit on how long an individual can live, even with perfect ability to manipulate genes. This is what I have in mind with the upper limit on Loroi lifespans of ~400 years; Loroi don't have a built-in limited lifespan the way we do, but after a long enough time, the cumulative damage to the genetic system becomes critical and the body can no longer regenerate itself. Loroi can be kept alive past this age, but it requires extraordinary measures.

Another possible limitation is societal: such practices may be considered immoral or illegal. The Umiak, for example, do not hesitate to manipulate their own genes or reproduce artificially, but seeking immortality doesn't make much sense in a society in which the value of individual lives is placed below the good of the society, and in which an individual is expected to willingly lay down its own life more or less on demand.

Cause that could be a thing. I mean it's been done before in Sci-Fi but it's still a nice plot hook, if that is the case I expect to see prisoners being used as organ banks and minorities being sentenced disproportionately more than say, white Christian males.

I think that once you have the ability to grow or construct tissues and organs based on your own genes, the need to use other people's parts (which your immune system will try to reject) will all but disappear.

[RedDwarfIV]

Ageing is caused by a combination of damage to DNA caused by free radicals (atom/molecule/ion with unpaired valence electrons) and the fact that on the ends of DNA you have a lot of junk which is there solely because every time a cell replicates, a little of the DNA is lost. It's called a telomere. Better to lose junk than the important stuff... except the junk eventually runs out.

I guess one possibility of suspending ageing is a means of adding more junk to the ends, and then repeating it every so often. To combat the problem of direct damage, have the original DNA on file and check cell DNA against it. Then repair the damage, either by fixing it directly or by replacing the DNA strand altogether, in the manner a virus does. Viruses could probably be used that way, but so far, only the replacement of single alleles is being used on humans. At least to my knowledge.