That might depend on whether the Earth of the year 2160 even has chocolate anymore.

Should such predictions come to pass, then no doubt civilization as we know it will end, and only those nations that have no cultural ties to chocolate will survive the ensuing riots and anarchy.

(Perhaps this explains how Alex knows the MIckey Mouse clubhouse song. Perhaps Disney owns the North American supply of chocolate. Perhaps, instead of a reference to a television show or anything like it, in this hellish future where chocolate is worth its weight in gold and corporate chocolate conglomerates make of it a power base [for he who controls the cocoa controls the universe], perhaps the Mickey Mouse clubhouse song has even become Alex's national anthem).

As long as coffee doesn't fall under similar restrictions and rarity I'm golden But imagine a lack of coffee. Now that would be a revolution.

coffee tastes like crap, anyway who needs oil, fresh water or food after all so who cares...but chocolate....that's scary.

Coffee and alcohol are the two things which keep capitalism churning.

*imagines Beryl having a sugar rush*

THIS! ^_^

This must happen, just for the image of the confused crew and Listel caste members it will generate.



Problem with this theory is that it is absolutely at odds with E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. Arioch said about the Terran Goverment until now.

Chocolate is a mild poison for dogs, and some humans are allergic, so the Loroi probably can't handle it. More for us.

Should such predictions come to pass, we will surely see less of the boring solid-chocolate bars and more of the actually interesting ones that have other stuff mixed in. Seriously, pure chocolate is TOO chocolaty, in order for you to actually enjoy the amount of chocolate, it needs to be thinned out a bit with pretzels or rice crispies or something. And don't give me that "but I'm paying for that chocolate, I want my money's worth!", that's the favorite argument metaphorically blind customers, if the extra chocolate doesn't add anything to the chocolatyness of the candy, then it's nothing but the luxury of waste.

And besides which, the cost of paying growers more is so little of the cost that paying them more isn't a problem: the cost is all in shipping, as with most other things that have gone up in price in the last few years.

Absolute lies.
I have eaten 100% chocolate before, it was awesome. Admittedly, since I got about a 1.5 pound block, I didn't eat it all in one go. And, in fact, I did just whack chunks of it off and eat them on occasion. Though I have to admit that after a few chunks of pure chocolate, I experimented with using it as a topping, and found it did quite well. It went awesome with a double chocolate fudge ice cream with dark chocolate syrup.
Also, when you have a block, it's simpler to convert it into shavings for use as a topping (seriously, just get a peeler or a small knife and go) than it is to take chunks of it off.

Seriously, though, I hauled a block of 100% along for Thanksgiving one time, in addition to some whipping cream (you can make your own whipped cream) - some of my relatives aren't good with sugar - and it was awesome as a topping.


In all honesty, I've started finding that a lot of milk chocolates are just too sugary and insufficiently chocolatey for my tastes.

Wait a sec, has he bathed in this time?

... oh dear lord he must smell something awful.

Oh gods. I don't think anyone else thought of that. If he hasn't ... that would certainly be another explanation for the environmentally sealable combat armor.

Eh ... It's likely that there are some sort of sanitation and hygiene facilities either connected to his cell or nearby, or a combination thereof. There's probably the equivalent of a toilet and a sink in/behind wall panels that they told him how to access, and a shower (or equivalent) down the corridor, serving the detention center.

hi hi

Maybe they just have someone hose him down every now and again? Thats a pretty common thing for prisoners to have to endure.

And zoo animals...

Eh.

Human sweat and human skin waste are actually in and of themselves very nearly odorless; it is only after various natural skin wastes are metabolized by your skin flora that you get what we would normally identify as "body odor."

Skin flora are not essential to your health; to my knowledge, the best thing that the nicest species do is take up space and thus keep other species of skin flora off, and give your immune system a workout whenever you get a breach in your skin. That is to say, they occupy space, and sometimes they fight you and die. (The worst things ordinary and normal human skin flora species can do? Eat the cartilage off of your bones, infect and permanently damage your brain, infect and permanently damage your heart, y'know, the works. You really don't want a lot of this stuff getting beneath the epidermis. Hell, most of us don't want it on the epidermis).

A small scout ship, as a sealed environment with a limited population expected to be in close quarters with one another for a very long period of time, could potentially be sterilized of human skin flora. Not with soap or showering, mind you, that does nothing, but some pretty harsh decontamination procedures--likely using future tech in ways I cannot even guess at--could be expected to eliminate human skin flora, for everyone on the Bellarmine, for the entire duration of the mission.

In fact, it is conceivable that skin flora are eliminated on all ships for all human missions, which basically amounts to "only Earth-Humans experience body odor, acne, and various other grooming woes." So the TCA space colonists might have a "stinky Earthman" stereotype.

Alex might not need to shower. Not without the propionibacteria and various staph infestations and other bodily horrors that the TCA just might not want to bring with them everywhere they go.

They might also want to get rid of oral flora. Cavities, bad breath, and a number of other inconveniences might not really be much of a a worry for Alex.

These issues plus the potential danger of being pathogenic to some species that we'd just made diplomatic contact with?

And that's just considering the human side of the equation. Alex has been through a Loroi shipboard medical facility, and, limited though it might be, he's had cause enough to be impressed by their surgical abilities. Loroi medical decontamination might've eliminated his skin flora, and potentially any or all of the other parasitic, mutualistic, commensalistic etc. bacteria colonies feasting and excreting on the human body at all times; Alex has pretty clearly not had to deal with infected tissues of any kind.

The Loroi might also not need to shower. Even if the original Soia had malodorous body flora, the Loroi are (probably) a designer species created in and meant to inhabit controlled environments; they might not have any body flora at all, or have body flora that was itself engineered to be non-pathogenic and inoffensive, and their own natural skin excreta might, as with humans, be inoffensive without flora metabolizing it into various more pungent molecules. Undertaking that sort of genetic engineering project might be difficult, as you would essentially be creating an entirely new ecology, but it'd be a whole hell of a lot easier than bioengineering telepathy.

Are you suggesting that the sky is in fact not falling? Sir, that goes against everything I've read in any news article since 1996.

I meant 'pure chocolate' a little less literally than that (I was referring to e.g. Hershey bars), but having tasted cocoa beans I am not impressed: any description other than 'bitter' is simply inaccurate. For common usage (ala candy bars) I recommend nothing above 70% (which is admittedly still a dark chocolate, rather than a milk or white). And bear in mind: I work in a health food store, I've tasted a fair amount of this stuff.

Marshmallows as well, though I haven't looked up how.

But without it, something else would live there. Biological skin (human or otherwise) without skin flora is like aluminum without an oxidized layer: it'll have one pretty soon.

Bacteria are a common enough thing in the human body (some of them are even required for our bodies to correctly function) that you're going to get something living on your skin. The question is only what, and when it'll start living there.

The first bit of this is, as I implied, highly unlikely. But the second bit? See my response on oral flora.

Some oral flora have recently been genetically modified to emit alcohol instead of whatever that acid is. They aren't approved for the market, due to 'unforeseeable consequences', but they're a lot more likely than trying to kill out all of your oral flora and then hope nothing replaces it: instead, the TCA is likely to kill it out and then replace it themselves. That way you don't have to worry about what your crew will get infected with between missions.

It could even be a standard part of dental plans.

As you might have noticed, the Loroi in the medbay weren't all wearing biological exposure suits: to me, that's a pretty sure sign that the setting is a little less strict than you're worrying about.

The Loroi have no idea whether those bacteria might be necessary for Jardin's survival.

Highly unlikely, bacteria have a tendency to colonize, so...

... this is pretty likely. By popping out your own designer micro-flora, you can reduce the chances of something less polite taking up the job.

Shocking, I know!

Ah, a misunderstanding, then.
I'll freely admit that solid chocolate without anything else whatsoever can get a bit 'boring' for some people, though not everybody; I do find things like chocolate covered peanuts or coffee beans are generally quite good, and are good for variety.
True, cocoa beans are bitter. Though, some people like bitter, at least, for some things.
Me, I like dark chocolate. Most milk chocolate usually needs something to help it out, especially the 'lighter' it is.
YMMV.


Pretty sure that marshmallows are a lot trickier to do quickly and from scratch though, and less applicable supplementing other desert items (scones, pie, cake, etc). Whipped cream just needs a blender or mixer (with the right attachment), or a whisk, and can be made on the spot, as needed - it's a whole lot easier, and can be used to safely distract/entertain small children out of the way if needed; also, whipped cream from scratch is a lot less likely (unless someone's lactose intolerant) to run into dietary issues.



Eh ... while the Loroi almost certainly have tweaks to make things simpler/easier for them ... they're bound to realize that non-engineered species are going have greater inherent hygiene issues than engineered species. Also, I'd bet that a lot of the engineering done to the Soia-form races had to do with internal bacteria and such. External bacteria would be trickier to fiddle with - and not have it messed up by accident.

Maybe half of the ship is affected by instical take-care-virus, whose victims are trying to do anything to get him free, feeded and snu-snued.

I was mostly referring to eliminating undesireable skin and oral flora, but, sure, you got me fair and square.


That seems a rather... radical proposal.

Are you really saying the Loroi were entirely engineered, and are not actually the natural Ancestors with minor genetic tweaks here and there? And that it is in fact Humaniti that is entirely natural?

The Humaniti sample observed may seem physically similar to a Loroi, though significantly larger and stronger, but he is also immune to telepathic attacks and telepathic interrogation, and utterly undetectable via conventional Farseer methods. None of these things are observed in the naturally sentient species known to Loroi science; the only direct comparison that can be made seems to be to artificial constructs.

Of the known biochemical differences, the most obvious is Humaniti's red blood; being based on iron rather than copper might make their blood vastly more efficient at normal operating temperatures and pressures. One would, of course, assume an engineered species to be in many ways a more efficient and streamlined improvement over the original.

The Humaniti male seems far larger and more imposing than any male has any right to be, seems immune to the primary advantage of the Loroi (upon which the Loroi Union currently depends for survival), and has a vastly different metabolism based around their own, potentially more efficient sanguinary fluid. The command staff's prevailing theory seems to be that Humaniti was engineered specifically by the Umiak as a weapon for the current war, which matches with a number of observations but leaves many unexplained. However, though there are problems with the “Umiak engineering” theory, it still seems vastly more reasonable than that they are a natural occurrence. Nowhere else in nature has such complete telepathic resistance found, and if Humaniti were indeed a natural emergence this would have to have emerged in an environment in which telepathy is actually absent.

The idea that you'd get so specific a result in the absence of actual selective pressure defies belief. Humaniti as engineered species seems the only explanation that matches current available data and projections.

The best fit to all currently known circumstances seems to be that they were engineered by the Umiak, perhaps after the capture of Seren—for all we know we might well be looking at a brainwashed survivor of the Seren atrocities, fundamentally and systemically altered in ways we cannot begin to imagine—or perhaps after initial contact, twenty five years before the war began.

However, as an alternate, they may in fact be the remnants of a lost caste; we are aware of the Listel caste having existed since the Ancestors' time, and have no idea just how specialized castes from different systems in the Ancestors' age might have been; perhaps there are far stranger remnants of Ancestral lineage scattered across the galaxy. It is known that the first Loroi worlds were settled by spacebound Loroi who presumably had no choice but to settle where they could, and subsequently lost their ancestral technology; perhaps the circumstances of Humaniti settlement were so difficult that their kindred had to re-engineer and alter many of their own traits with the Ancestors' technology. This, admittedly, does not explain certain known facts, such as their difficulty digesting Soia-Liron foods, whereas the Umiak engineering explanation does, as the Umiak have their own foodstuffs which they would presumably tweak their weapons to digest easily, with less concern over Ancestor-derived foods which they likely have a certain degree of difficulty acquiring.

Humaniti is a deeply and profoundly troubling mystery, and arriving in such delicate circumstances, too. We cannot afford to jump to any conclusions at all, and cannot even afford to rule out such seemingly absurd notions as “Humaniti is natural, Loroi are artificial human simulacra.” But there is a difference between not ruling something out, and embracing it wholeheartedly; one is a trait of a cautious observer, the other, of a fool.

[/joke]

And that sort of thing is, in fact, what I in general have come to prefer.

I've come to regard white chocolate as mostly being a waste of cocoa butter, so same here.

It's also about the only way you'll be able to get brown sugar whipped cream instead of the common refined sugar version.

I think external bacteria would actually be a little easier to deal with. Those modified oral bacteria are basically ONLY modified to produce alcohol instead of acid, everything else is the same. The internal system is massively complex: while the human body is by volume and mass genuinely human, by cell count it is bacterial. Everything is constantly interacting back-and-forth, most of the auto-immune system is actually in the digestive track, it's roughly akin to having a miniature rain forest inside your stomach. Scientists are even beginning to think that the appendix isn't actually vestigial: it's used to repopulate the gut after massive bacteria die-offs. The only way that it's vestigial is that modern Western societies are clean enough that such die-offs don't normally happen in the first place. If you add in the possibility that bacterial gene-swapping might be important for the general functioning of the digestive flora (e.g. to adjust to changing dietary behaviors faster) then you wind up with a system that's liable to be every bit as complex as the brain, and possibly even more so since several mostly unrelated gene-lines are involved, instead of just the handful that exist within human cells.

awww! Why did the chocolate subject had to come back before i had finish that animation :S (btw do you know any other, easy to use animation program than Flash MS? cause it keep crashing every 10 sec :S)

@Solemn

Loroi don't have copper blood.

Loroi blood is blue, based on the same transport mechanism (most likely an exotic form of hemocyanin)

hemocyanin

Now, technically, I guess you could argue that hemocyanin isn't blood, it's hemolymph. But you can't argue that it's not copper-based. There are reasons to use iron instead of copper, which that go down to the nature of cooperative versus non-cooperative bonding and so forth. But it seems pretty obvious Arioch wanted blood that was based on binding oxygen to copper, presumably with a ton of other mechanisms to make up for copper's shortcomings, presumably because that would give it something close to his desired bluish color under certain circumstances. I'd guess the Soia-Liron have some really ridiculously effective anaerobic respiration cycles, among a large number of other things which would be required to make something like that work.

Unless Arioch took back that "hemocyanin" comment at some point, yes, it's copper.

...

I was remembering a post where was talking about Loroi blood and what was in it and he said something different (or the same thing using different words). I can't find the post so I will concede the point.

It's "most likely" hemocyanin. Meaning I don't expect to directly address this in the comic.


Hemocyanin is just one component (the oxygen transport mechanism) in hemolymph, which also includes salts and nutrients and immune-system structures and what have you. Arthropod hemolymph has free hemocyanin molecules floating around in it, but in Soia-Liron blood it would be incorporated into more complicated transport structures (like our red blood cells).


I think somewhere in the past I may have mentioned methemoglobin, but I was confusing it for hemocyanin. Methemoglobin is really poor at transporting oxygen.

YES. That's what I was remembering.

Well not necessarily. Remember that there are some 'old stories' in which humans have telepathy. Given everything else that has happened in outsider discarding these stories as pure fantasies may not be all that wise. Which would then provided you with the possibility of an evolutionary pressure. I can think of two instances where this would make evolutionary sense. The first being a sort of arms race. Two competing groups develop increasing resistance to telepathy to counter the advantage the other group has. I think it would be more likely a bi-product to some other adaptation like say immunity to the black death, or some such. A thought occurs to me though: what if humanity only develop a resistance to telepathy, but did not in fact lose the ability to use it. Instead surrounded by unreadable sentient beings it just goes unused. Maybe not all of those telephone psychics are fake?

Also I don't think we can discount the improbable option that it just occurred completely by random. I'm no biologist, but as I understand it one of the core tenants of evolution is that mutations are random. I agree it would be strange as all get out, but still viable. The resistance could be a simple byproduct of the particular brain structure earth life uses.

I think there is one fundamental issue with this. Why bother putting them on a planet for them to evolve on for a couple thousand year, or even the memory of it? Why not incorporate it the Umiak empire? Personally I would make sure my secret genetically engineered weapon knew what side it was fighting for.

I actually think this idea makes the most sense. The food issue could be easily explained as a couple thousand years of evolution in a unique biosphere independent of the core species. That, or the need to radically re-engineered to adapt to the local biosphere. A genetic 'hack job' as the population is dying off on some strange alien world could result in all sorts of interesting changes.

Agreed

Yup, we´re the early dumped prototypes.


I like your way of thinking, and i like it to follow the paths of your high degree of abstraction. Like in your "devils advocate"-piece. Thumbs up.

My conclusion, though, in this case is a bit different, because unlike the Loroi we (except some "creationism"-wackos ) know how old our species is, and which way it took to develop. So my thesis of the "early dumped prototype". We´re either this or the Soia just used us as archetypes.
Unless of course there´s another explanation in the Outsiderverse we don´t know about yet.