Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[Zorg56]

Humans dont generate signature because we are all dead inside XD.

[CF2]

Do Loroi "see" with their telepathy like Alex's brief glimpse of Fireblade, with telepathically visible silhouettes overlaid across the world around them?

[boldilocks]

Is it a coincidence that when the forced interrogation is about to begin on page 25 everyone but the 'brownshirts' leave?

[boldilocks]

Another question:
If the umiak have been overrunning sectors, shouldn't farseers at least be able to detect loroi life-signs disappearing in those sectors?

[GeoModder]

Is it a coincidence that when the forced interrogation is about to begin on page 25 everyone but the 'brownshirts' leave?

IIRC its to protect the non-Teidar in the room from unwanted mindlashes.

[dragoongfa]

After watching the latest Tier Zoo vid I have to ask, do the Loroi retain the mammalian diving reflex?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex

[Mr.Tucker]

After watching the latest Tier Zoo vid I have to ask, do the Loroi retain the mammalian diving reflex?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex

Are they mammals? Could we even describe them as such, given they belong to an entirely different biosphere, with presumably different biological clades?
Could we even consider them as belonging to a "clade" given they seem to be almost certainly an engineered species?

[dragoongfa]

Strictly speaking they fulfill the mammalian criteria:

1) They are Endothermic verterbrates (they produce their own heat and have spines).
2) They have mammary glands to nurse their children.
3) They give live births.

My question is such because they are a bio engineered species, they have obviously been templated on humans but how much was copied?

The diving reflex is directly tied with the evolutionary path that Earth mammals followed when they rose from the seas and it is an evolutionary mechanism that all mammals seem to share to a certain degree, implying that it is part of the initial stages of the evolution of our brain. It stands to reason that a faithful copy of our brain and nervous system would retain such a fundamental aspect of our evolutionary path.

[Zorg56]

I think nothing at all was copied.
They will need completly different organs structure because they have different blood metal and way lower body temperature.
+
Dont forget that 250 000 years back then humans just...
Dont existed.
Modern humans appeared from 35 000 to 74 000 years ago.
99% that it is just coincidence.

[SVlad]

That wiki said humans appeared about 315 000 years ago.

[Arioch]

Loroi won't have an identical response to the mammalian one, but I think any endothermic animal class with access to water will have some kind of similar adaptation.

I would characterize the Loroi as "mammaloid." Technically speaking they are not a member of the class Mammalia, because they are not actually related, however similar they may be in form and function. I assume that exobiologists intend to invent completely new taxa to classify alien organisms (not least of which because that's what they seem to like best), and they will probably hesitate to use even words like "animal" in such classifications, much less "mammal." For for informal classification, I suppose those terms are appropriate.

The definition of "modern humans" varies according to who you ask (and whether you mean anatomically or behaviorally modern), but I think most experts now agree that Homo sapiens is at least 200,000 years old, and possibly much older.

[entity2636]

Strictly speaking they fulfill the mammalian criteria:

1) They are Endothermic verterbrates (they produce their own heat and have spines).
2) They have mammary glands to nurse their children.
3) They give live births.

My question is such because they are a bio engineered species, they have obviously been templated on humans but how much was copied?

and

I would characterize the Loroi as "mammaloid." Technically speaking they are not a member of the class Mammalia, because they are not actually related, however similar they may be in form and function.

Wouldn't that make the loroi an offshoot, artificial or not, of Homo Sapiens and thus classify them as, for example, Homo Sapiens Soialironsis and thus make them a member of the Animalia and Mammalia?

[Zorg56]

It seems that loroi use fighters mostly for anti missile job now...
Why they are not using somthing like Vulture droids or Tie/Droid?

You cam literally carry 4 of them instead of 1 piloted fighter, or even carry them outside the hull without fear.

[entity2636]

It seems that loroi use fighters mostly for anti missile job now...
Why they are not using somthing like Vulture droids or Tie/Droid?

You cam literally carry 4 of them instead of 1 piloted fighter, or even carry them outside the hull without fear.

Two reasons - AI is unreliable and politics.

The question about AI has been raised multiple times in the context of why don't the combatants use drones, drone fighters, advanced AI or VI. The bottom line is AI is unreliable and the more freedom it has the more unreliable, exploitable and dangerous it becomes. Also, true AI is way beyond the capabilities of the Union or the Hierarchy and it is unknown if the Historians even have something like that. The Emissary is not a true AI, more a VI (Virtual Intelligence, an advanced program that resembles an AI, but has strict rules and hard limits).

Second is politics - Loroi High Command is pretty much forced into using starfighters by Tenoin caste lobbyists, although everyone understands that starfighters are near useless in the current state of affairs. If they would stop using starfighters, a large chunk of their population would be effectively left without a job.

[SVlad]

Wouldn't that make the loroi an offshoot, artificial or not, of Homo Sapiens and thus classify them as, for example, Homo Sapiens Soialironsis and thus make them a member of the Animalia and Mammalia?

Loroi have different biochemistry from any earth mammal, and they completely unrelated to any earth live. They share exterior appearance with humans, but the resemblance ends there.
Classifying them as Homo Sapiens offshoot is like classifying T-1000 as Homo Sapiens Poly-alloyal because it looks the same.

But if you define mammals as living being with specified abilities, and not as specified part of earth biome, they could be considered mammals.

[Arioch]

Wouldn't that make the loroi an offshoot, artificial or not, of Homo Sapiens and thus classify them as, for example, Homo Sapiens Soialironsis and thus make them a member of the Animalia and Mammalia?

No, because they're not an "offshoot" of Homo sapiens; they're not related to us at all genetically or biochemically, despite having very similar physical characteristics.

Our current system of biological classification organizes organisms into an identifiable hierarchy in which organisms that are evolutionarily related are placed in close proximity. It is based on the assumption that any two organisms on Earth share common genes and therefore a common ancestor; the older that common ancestor, the more time has passed since the species diverged, and the more distantly related the two species are. All organisms on Earth share common ancestors, and so can be organized into a branching tree that, at its root, leads to a single common ancestor of all life, the mythical LUCA. As we use DNA to help with classification, we find that similar-looking species are not always closely related, and some species that look very different turn out to be more closely related than we thought.

Alien life that evolved on a distant planet won't share any common ancestors with Earth life (unless you believe in an alien origin for Earth life, which I don't), and so assuming that we use the same methodology for classification, each world's life will constitute a completely separate classification tree. Alien life is likely to be very different from Earth life at a fundamental chemical and genetic level, but even if it turns out to be very similar, it will still require a different hierarchy of classifications of kingdoms, phyla, classes, etc. Even if there was, say, a group of organisms from Alpha Centauri with characteristics nearly identical to Earth's Eukaryotes, we would have to give that group a different name, as Alpha Centauri's version of Eukaryotes and Earth's Eukaryotes do not share any common ancestor, and may be very different biochemically and/or genetically. They might not even use DNA for their genes.

Now, classifying alien organisms according to this system is going to be very difficult, because creating Earth's classifications took hundreds of years of careful study of all the organisms on the planet, living and extinct. Doing the same thing for every alien biosphere will be time consuming and may not even be possible given lack of access to these homeworlds, or fragmentary or even totally missing information about them. The existence of artificial life will throw yet another spanner into the works. So scientists may have to invent a new system of classification that just describes organisms according to their physical characteristics. We might begin by describing organisms according to their similarity to Earth groups, such as mammal-like or insect-like; hence "mammaloid" or "insectoid". So you might group humans and Loroi together into an arbitrary group called "humanoids", but you can't say that they're part of the same species, genus, or even kingdom or domain, according to our current taxonomic system.

It seems that loroi use fighters mostly for anti missile job now...
Why they are not using somthing like Vulture droids or Tie/Droid?

You cam literally carry 4 of them instead of 1 piloted fighter, or even carry them outside the hull without fear.

Entity's answer is more or less correct, but I'll elaborate on it.

Just because a fighter is unmanned doesn't mean it's cheap enough to be expendable. It will still need to be refueled and rearmed if it is to be used for more than one mission, so it will still require hangar space and servicing infrastructure. Carrying droid fighters on external racks as if they were missiles only works if they are expendable, and that's not economically feasible for the Loroi. The limitation on the number of deployable fighters has as much to do with available production as it does with how many each ship can carry.

The Loroi do use unmanned expendable craft -- torpedoes and similar weapons. These are made as simple and as cheap as possible to do the job -- basically an engine and a guidance package -- but they're still fairly expensive to manufacture. You could put things like point defense weapons on a torpedo, and that might make it more survivable, but it also makes it more expensive. The more expensive the weapon, the fewer you can manufacture, and the less viable it becomes as an expendable weapon. Torpedoes are always in short supply.

Loroi fighters are not expendable, at least in the sense that they're designed to be reused, and are comparatively more expensive than torpedoes. Loroi fighters are capable of operating in an autonomous mode without pilots, and sometimes they're used that way, but the Loroi believe -- rightly or not -- that putting pilots in fighters makes them both more effective in combat and more likely to survive, while only minimally increasing their cost.

[entity2636]

Loroi have different biochemistry from any earth mammal, and they completely unrelated to any earth live. They share exterior appearance with humans, but the resemblance ends there.
Classifying them as Homo Sapiens offshoot is like classifying T-1000 as Homo Sapiens Poly-alloyal because it looks the same.

No, but a genetically engineered red fruit that strongly resembles a banana, is immune to most banana pests and produces vaccines for 10 different human diseases, would still be considered a kind of banana if it was made based on a banana

But yes, I see what Arioch means - the loroi are probably so different genetically, i.e. their genome is so "clean" from evolutionary garbage and edited so much that it would be impossible to find any discernible bits of human in them and they would be classified as a completely different species.

[icekatze]

hi hi

Also, one of the characteristics of mammals is that our mature red blood cells have no nucleus, while the red blood cells of other vertebrates do. Loroi, don't have red blood cells.

[Werra]

their genome is so "clean" from evolutionary garbage and edited so much that it would be impossible to find any discernible bits of human in them

The Loroi have zero human bits in their genetics. The Soia used their own genetic "language" for their projects.
It's like if a programmer sees a program and then makes his own, vastly improved version of it using another, completely different coding language.

Question:
Are the various Soia-Liron species related to each other the same way earth species are or is each one its own project that started from zero? And if the former, is it therefore possible to use genetics to find out the order in which these species were created?

[Zorg56]

Do loroi feel "Uncanny valley" effect when they see humans?