WIP Discussion (Part 1!)

[GeoModder]

Now I wonder if Tempo's WIP comes before or after the WIP where the girls look shocked.

[Onaiom]

Now I wonder if Tempo's WIP comes before or after the WIP where the girls look shocked.

After. Tempo's WIP is 176_3 and the girls is 176_1.

[Krin]

I wounder if his datapad has a portable Wikipedia site, if those datapads are advanced enough for full site storage.
I imagine him bringing it out to show them a picture of a cow.

[boldilocks]

I wounder if his datapad has a portable Wikipedia site, if those datapads are advanced enough for full site storage.
I imagine him bringing it out to show them a picture of a cow.

Hmmm

[Mithramuse]

Alternately....

[Murph]

Thank you, I AM going stir crazy....

[Ithekro]

Tempo is being (possible subconsciously) sexy, while the pilots are kind of cute in their reactions. Beryl is of course fishing for information about Earth.

[Jagged]

I am immediately suspicious that they say they eat dogo

[Luge]

I'm interested in Tempo's opinion that the Loroi worlds "did not have animals suitable for farming beyond meat and hides".

Neither did earth, 5000 years ago.

Ever tried to eat a wild banana? They're almost inedible - as are wild apples and root vegetables. I'm sure we might say the same of most chickens, sheep, goats and cattle prior to 3000 BC.

The domestic animals (as well as fruits and vegetables) that we have now are the result of five millennia of selective breeding and careful genetic management.

You don't know how a species will evolve until you do it. I don't think farms in ancient Africa could ever have imagined how big and productive the animals they had could eventually be.

L.

[Arioch]

I'm interested in Tempo's opinion that the Loroi worlds "did not have animals suitable for farming beyond meat and hides".

Neither did earth, 5000 years ago.

Sure they did. Earth had sheep and horses and goats and chickens and pigs and cattle and llamas and dogs and cats and turkeys and ducks and geese and many more. The animals of those days weren't the same as the carefully-bred ones we have today, but they were close enough to be domesticated and to get started. Each already had specific traits that could be enhanced through selective breeding.

Deinar and Taben were a totally different situation. Deinar was a very young world with native life limited to marine microorganisms. The Soia colony on Deinar had only imported domestic animals, and most of them were wiped out in the bombardment that ended the Soia period. The Loroi there were left with the equivalent of pigs and chickens... and that's about it in terms of animals. The Loroi farmed both of them (miros for meat and hides, and tirriti for meat and eggs), and there are a wide variety of domesticated (and feral) variants of both... but a few thousand years of selective breeding won't turn a chicken into a horse, or a pig into a cow.

Consider historical examples from Earth: ancient America had very little in the way of domesticatable animals: dogs, turkeys, and waterfowl, and that's about it. South American also had llamas. Other domestic animals weren't introduced until much later by the Europeans. So why didn't the Incas simply breed their llamas into riding animals and large draft animals? Why didn't the Aztecs have riding dogs and giant milking dogs? Why didn't Africans have riding zebras and pet crocodiles? Because that's not how selective breeding works. You can breed for and against desired traits in an animal, but you can't breed for a trait it doesn't already have; you can't simply reshape it to your desire.

Taben was a similar case to Deinar: it had much more advanced native life forms, but still limited to the oceans. It's very hard to domesticate a giant lamprey.

[Werra]

Shouldn't the eco-systems of Deinar explode or have exploded in a massive speciesation event? With all those untapped opportunities around, I'd expect the Soia-Liron lifeforms to take advantage. Evolution can work lightning fast under the right circumstances.

A comparison with earth is difficult, as humans had to slowly domesticate themselves in order to better shape their environments. Which is why different parts of the world did so at different speeds and with varying efficiency. Zebras and bison for example aren't that different to their pre-domesticated counterparts. But bison ranches are a thing, as are trained zebras.
Our ancestors did a lot while being less intelligent than us...well, 17th - 19th century us.

In my eyes, the early history of the Loroi post fall is one of the weaker parts of your setting. The Loroi didn't change much genetically between the fall and modernity, did they? That means the Loroi then should have had the same average IQ and other genetic characteristics that enable their descendants to field starships.
250.000 years is a very long time for such intellects to work on one planet. We went from the pyramids to crowd-funded butt implants in 4.500 years.

[orion1836]

We went from the pyramids to crowd-funded butt implants in 4.500 years.

Not always progress. I never thought I would have such a perfect opportunity to link this comic.

[Ithekro]

Much depend on how long it takes to get to the tech level they are on, verse how much their society allows for change. Also if they have reached a state of society-technology that was comfortable, with no real challenge to make them need to advance, than they could easily have stagnated for millennia.

They their species is not that curious about the galaxy at large, they might have been comfortable with where they were for a time.

The other possibility is that the remaining ecosystems were far, far more battered than Earth has sever bin within the lifespan of out species, and thus it took a lot longer to rebuild back to anything other than subsistence levels after the remains of their technology gave out. The Loroi have been around about as long as our current species of human, but they had a head start by being a product of a local galactic power, but also their culture is the result of some kind of local galactic collapse. So they didn't need to go through as many levels to get to where we are now, and had a head start, but got more than a planetary disaster level event that did a number on them and left them with less, ecologically, to work with than the humans did on Earth.

[Mr.Tucker]

Shouldn't the eco-systems of Deinar explode or have exploded in a massive speciesation event? With all those untapped opportunities around, I'd expect the Soia-Liron lifeforms to take advantage. Evolution can work lightning fast under the right circumstances.

A comparison with earth is difficult, as humans had to slowly domesticate themselves in order to better shape their environments. Which is why different parts of the world did so at different speeds and with varying efficiency. Zebras and bison for example aren't that different to their pre-domesticated counterparts. But bison ranches are a thing, as are trained zebras.
Our ancestors did a lot while being less intelligent than us...well, 17th - 19th century us.

In my eyes, the early history of the Loroi post fall is one of the weaker parts of your setting. The Loroi didn't change much genetically between the fall and modernity, did they? That means the Loroi then should have had the same average IQ and other genetic characteristics that enable their descendants to field starships.
250.000 years is a very long time for such intellects to work on one planet. We went from the pyramids to crowd-funded butt implants in 4.500 years.

Well, we've been around for roughly 150-200.000 years, and we spent most of that time worshipping bears then spearing them. Very little change in overall technology level. The last 12.000 years (a generous figure at most about 5 percent of our species longevity) is when we went from state of the art grinded stone tools to state of the art free electron lasers. Even THIS short history is filled with civilisations that were reasonably close to industrial level but never seemed to quite make it (roman mass production, greek technology, chinese exploration, etc). It's not unreasonable to assume that the more warlike Loroi would pave themselves quite a few times.

As for speciation, 275.000 years is a pretty short window of time (even if we agree that species appear in apparent rapid leaps followed by slow modification). And we don't know how stable the genome of these species is, how long-lived they are (longer lives-slower evolution), and if they feel competitive pressures that would force them to adapt (from what I've read in the Insider, they're pretty much top dogs everywhere that isn't Perrein).

[Arioch]

If you've never seen or read Guns Germs & Steel, it's worth watching this first episode of the series. It seeks to answer the question: "Why did some human cultures develop technology and build great works, when other cultures (that had individuals who are just as smart) remain stone-age hunter-gatherers?" I think it offers some interesting food for thought on the subject.

You can start at 4:40 to skip some of the introductory fluff.

[Werra]

Well, any sort of calamity that leaves an eco-system productive enough for macrofauna should be quickly recoverable from.
A functional, if limited eco-system should likewise rapidly diversify. The pressure would come from resource competition amongst each other once every area was settled by these organisms.
Maybe Soia-Liron species are made in a way that stops this process very efficiently. But then the Loroi wouldn't even have had to shape their environment much.
Humans did have to. Which includes not only domesticated animals, the founder crops but also genetic changes in our own genome. Everything for permanent agrarian settlements was in place ~12k years age, for example. But we still needed a 5k years period to switch from mostly hunter-gatherers to agrarian settlers in which total population growth was in the single digit percentage. Not annually...for the entire 5.000 years or about 20 USAs. The current theory is that our immune-system was just insufficient for the packed, dirty living conditions.

The Loroi skipped stuff like that completely. War can only explain so much, as it destroys yes, but also forces an arms race of optimization. Population numbers, ease of production, logistics, civilization included.

I've read Guns, Germs and Steel. Two decades ago. It is an interesting book, but made obsolete and often proved outright false by newer research.
Zebra domestication is one example of where GGS and most of the internet are wrong. Wild Zebras can be captured, ridden and bred in captivity. Nothing but stone age tools required. Of course Zebras look unappealing compared to modern horses which have been domesticated for 5 millennia. We'd have to compare them to Tarpans.

[boldilocks]

If you've never seen or read Guns Germs & Steel, it's worth watching this first episode of the series. It seeks to answer the question: "Why did some human cultures develop technology and build great works, when other cultures (that had individuals who are just as smart) remain stone-age hunter-gatherers?" I think it offers some interesting food for thought on the subject.
You can start at 4:40 to skip some of the introductory fluff.

Guns germs and steel is a just-so story. Diamond begins more or less without any more methodology than "assuming radical human genetic egalitarianism why didn't every tribe turn into the united states" and moves on from there.
His empirical claims are lacking, since a zebra certainly can be tamed and broken, the same way as a modern horse, which is why colonial powers did so in africa until african diseases were dealt with to such an extent that regular horses could be used instead.
At best, you could make an argument that the europeans and asians were lucky enough to live close to animals that were easier to domesticate, but there's not really any empirical evidence that aurochs or horse progenitors were substantially easier to domesticate than zebras and bison.
In the first video, the narrator compares zebras to modern horses, but modern horses are the result of millennia of selective breeding, and it's strange to assume that 6000 years of selective breeding of zebras would lead us to a zebra that is equal in temperament and behavior as the present species.

The biggest obstacle to domesticating a species today is more likely that another species has already been domesticated to serve whatever purpose you'd want the new domestication to serve, we've replaced animal power with mechanical power, or we consider the practices necessary to break a wild animal too barbaric to engage in anymore.

Edit: Dammit, werra, why every time I try to show off you one-up me.

[raistlin34]

If you've never seen or read Guns Germs & Steel, it's worth watching this first episode of the series. It seeks to answer the question: "Why did some human cultures develop technology and build great works, when other cultures (that had individuals who are just as smart) remain stone-age hunter-gatherers?" I think it offers some interesting food for thought on the subject.
You can start at 4:40 to skip some of the introductory fluff.

Guns germs and steel is a just-so story. Diamond begins more or less without any more methodology than "assuming radical human genetic egalitarianism why didn't every tribe turn into the united states" and moves on from there.
His empirical claims are lacking, since a zebra certainly can be tamed and broken, the same way as a modern horse, which is why colonial powers did so in africa until african diseases were dealt with to such an extent that regular horses could be used instead.
At best, you could make an argument that the europeans and asians were lucky enough to live close to animals that were easier to domesticate, but there's not really any empirical evidence that aurochs or horse progenitors were substantially easier to domesticate than zebras and bison.
In the first video, the narrator compares zebras to modern horses, but modern horses are the result of millennia of selective breeding, and it's strange to assume that 6000 years of selective breeding of zebras would lead us to a zebra that is equal in temperament and behavior as the present species.

The biggest obstacle to domesticating a species today is more likely that another species has already been domesticated to serve whatever purpose you'd want the new domestication to serve, we've replaced animal power with mechanical power, or we consider the practices necessary to break a wild animal too barbaric to engage in anymore.

Edit: Dammit, werra, why every time I try to show off you one-up me.

So by the time we figure out how to modify genetically a specie to be docile to humans, it won't be necessary.

[boldilocks]

So by the time we figure out how to modify genetically a specie to be docile to humans, it won't be necessary.

Pretty much. There's not really any animal we need domesticated at this point. At most, it'll be a niche thing, wealthy people who want to show off their riding zebras, though with the elites we have today that seems unlikely.

[Mr.Tucker]

To add my favorite type of input (the uninvited kind) I would like to point out that horses were not ridden at first. They were draught animals. In warfare they pulled chariots. Early horses were way too small to support a human on it's back. If we consider the Caspian breed as being the norm (and indeed, archeology seems to support this, going by egyptian and sumerian images) then it seems, oddly enough, that initially horses were selected for smaller size. Most likely because that made them somewhat more manageable. It was only after the advent of cavalry that bigger horses were required, and that brought with it knowledge that was used for civilian applications as well. Though that's an opinion.

I don't see why it's less believable that zebras were not domesticated. Firstly, while we were living alongside them, we hadn't really domesticated anything yet (like dogs), so probably this whole domestication business was unknown. Secondly, even if we accept the fact that it's possible, that doesn't mean it's practical. If their fear of humans is ingrained in their instincts, then even getting them to willingly come close to you is a massive feat (compared to the aurochs, who might be wary, but doesn't feel instinctual fear like from a tiger's growl). Just because some rich white men and their burdens played large sums of money to do so (in quite small numbers I might add, and with a large body of people and research by that time to support them) doesn't mean stone age people could. I mean... stone age people could build hot air balloons, but I think it's a pretty big thing to ask of people who, most of their lives, toil for food, and rarely can spare such manpower. Domestication is all about practicality and use on large scales.
Here's a caspian horse:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AyOuTK3OvFI/hqdefault.jpg
Here's a video from Atlas Pro on livestock domestication (horses at 8:06)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6S8JnkJkRg
Here's a video on why we haven't domesticated the moose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suGNUm0jGuo
And here is Lindybeige with a funny video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uUk5WGAydI