A Few Pieces to Add Color and Background to Solar System Space Opera

The time is 2725.

It is the Solar System Era, after the 7th post-Industrial Revolution (so-called).

The text below -in bold- was decoded from the microdot read-only array removed from the brainstem of a dead cyborg-soldier of MURF (Martian Underground Resistance Forces). Although the Martian population database is virtually complete, identity of the cyborg-soldier could not be uncovered. During battle, focused sonic pulses emitted at close range from a 1-meter long floating drone damaged its mecharonic systems, decisively. In reaction, a self-destruct redovirus randomly distributed throughout every chromosome of the cyborg-soldier was activated, scrambling its entire DNA.

The text was originally in an archaic dialect of SySpeak which is no longer extant. This helped date its origin to approximately 500 years in the past. Translation is as follows:

Mission Statement of the Chimericus ManiFold

The insects, an invertebrate group 138 hundred million years older than the first rodent-like mammals, predating even the dinosaurs which dominated the large animal world for 160 million, have evolved amazing adaptations, enabling them to survive cataclysmic climate changes that have driven many other species to extinction, including the dinosaurs. What advantages do insects (arthropods generally) have that allowed them to survive for so long, with a carbon mass exceeded only by plants, fungi and bacteria? To roughly answer this question, consider a dinosaur weighing X tonnes with x number of cells comprising its body and compare this to an insect weighing Y milligrams with y number of cells for its body : as size differences in animals correlate to number of cells, 1 dinosaur = y/x insects. To sustain x cells in its body, equivalent to that of an insect, the dinosaur has to feed all y cells of which the x cells are but a small part. If there is adverse weather (drought resulting in famine) with food shortage enough for only 100x cells, the dinosaur will starve while 100 insects will survive and breed. This is the advantage of being small....Note that this difference in survival adaptation due to body size rests on the existence of an individual organism as an integrated whole, each a subjective self, that can be composed of 1 cell to trillions of cells. Note also that an animal is bigger because it has undergone more cell divisions from the original fertilized egg .....

Further, a single dinosaur equal to y/x insects can only be at one place at a time while the same weight of insects can disperse over a wide territory....Since life began as unicells why did large multicells evolve? What is the survival advantage of increasing size across generations? A big animal has the muscle mass to move large objects in its environment, for example an elephant uprooting small trees. Require large forces to injure – think toy car in collision with a real truck; therefore a large size animal is prey to fewer predators and can attack larger prey (or eat many small ones). Conversely a small animal like an insect is food to many larger animal species (frogs, lizards, birds, rodents, anteaters...). To avoid extinction insect females have be fecund, laying many eggs so that the percentage of the population that is not consumed can easily find mates to repeat the reproductive cycle.

In addition, the insect DNA is capable of enormous variation, producing 950 000 distinct species (that have been counted to date, more than any other multicell group) ranging from the prosaic ant to the orchid mantis which looks like a flower to bizarre looking treehoppers. What’s more, dragonflies invented flight 320 million years ago and they are still here!

We humans, by contrast, are a very young species. Primitive agriculture began 12000 years ago. Before that humans were hunter-gatherers living in small tribes - talking, using fire and stone tools but little better than chimpanzees. Our only advantage is that we have a brain-driven culture and for this reason we may yet surpass the insects. In the 21st century it has been estimated that the technosphere on Earth (all cities, roads, vehicles, gadgets, garbage etc) weighed 30 trillion tons compared to a total of 550 billion tons of carbon occurring in biomass (mainly land plants and bacteria, humans accounted for only 0.06 billion tons). It was estimated that there was about 900 billion tons of forests before the advent of civilization, double the amount present. Forest ecosystems are being rapidly replaced by human cities and agricultural regions with a consequent loss of biodiversity! We are now in the Anthropocene and the 6th Great Mass Extinction Event in the Earth’s geologic history!

Another danger we face in the present era is the competitive instinct for war which we have inherited from our chimpanzee ancestors. Is it a coincidence that technological prowess is coupled to a propensity for organized violence in the human brain? Why did not the ability to model and manipulate objects emerge in a more pacific species? There are many such, even among the primates. Are we confronted by a cosmic test? Beyond the relatively thin envelope of air and water at the surface of the earth is an indifferent, hostile universe. It would take tremendous vision and technical power to spread life into this inhospitable realm. We human beings may be life’s first attempt. We may fail. DNA-based life as a whole has billions of years, it is doubtful our species has that much time. In thousands of years at most, human beings will have a shot at living beyond the mother planet. To get there will be a long and arduous climb. Mistakes will be made, lessons will have to be learned, knowledge accumulated, new directions tried, generations unborn may have to undergo genetic alteration, but there is a chance that human beings will make it. This possibility was not open to those who lived a thousand years ago; in retrospect, however, we can see that they, or rather we, had the potential.

In every generation henceforth, there shall be those who dedicate their lives towards this great dream. Who must play the cards they are dealt with, of talent and circumstance, to the utmost of their skill, not for themselves, nor for their tribe, but to keep this possibility alive: a better humanity that can step out to the stars!

A search carried out in System InfoSpace and Classified Archives did not turn up any organization called the Chimericus ManiFold in the time span minus 500 years to the present. This suggests, with probability of over 99%, that the text is a fictional construct. No further resources need be expended on it. The case is closed.

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The Linquin credo : there is no hardware limitation to putting diverse experiences together, what is circumscribed by one configuration of human thought can by another be unbound. For us chimerics, this is the open path.

Tigerman Gol Sim Hayiman

Simmering Orbital

Solar Year 930

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He who understands is he who understands. Natural selection at its finest.

Attributed to

One Mouthful Chomp

Early Earthbound Histories

minus 500 SY

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Once history has developed over several millennia we can no longer live for the moment of tribal power and glory as the first civilized humans did. Knowledge of what may happen in the course of many lifetimes forces us to be responsible for very long term consequences. We cannot quite close our eyes to the possibilities several lifetimes removed. This is the blessing and curse of knowledge. Ignorance is bliss!

A vehicle for the soul to undergo discipline in this life the body is.

Wind movement on an infinite road each thought make.

Good technique from the spirit flows.

From The Seven Attitudes of Waydo

331 Solar Year

Ganymede Cluster

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Problem One

I write down a word. It is the word “any”, it can be any word.

Now, can you point to the place in my mind where this word comes from?

(The word exists - it is there, as you can see - so it must come from somewhere).

Does it make sense to say that my mind is in my head?

Why or why not?

Problem 2

You are walking in a broad valley. It is hot and you are perspiring. After some time you sit on the ground and notice your shadow. “Kage” is the word for “shadow” in Japanese. Remember this.

You think of a tree of many leaves, and the shade the tree provides, and imagine yourself resting in the cool shade. Out of the heat haze a man appears and says, “No sun, no chlorophyll, no tree, no shade.”

This is the first question: How would you know that you are in a dream?

If you have succeeded with the first, answer the second: What is the man’s name?

From The Waydo Tests of Zen Sentience

(2nd Level, 2nd Series)

331 Solar Year

Ganymede Cluster

(Answer: you know that you are dreaming because he can read your mind.)

(Answer: it is your dream, the man can have any name).

(Third question : why should you remember the word “kage”? Do you remember? Why?)

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Be thou inclusive in nature. It is not the DNA-proteins alone, it is the living. It is not the wave sound-pattern alone, but the music; nor the text alone, but the story.

Howsarg Octogon Angle 5

112 Solar Year

Krotong Orbital Combine

The Chimeric transhuman Toodots Octogon Angle 6 took her people, the rootless, restless technoradicals, out of the worlds of settled existence, where they could not feel at home, into the wilderness between Jupiter and Saturn, for a life of adventure and change. Her opportunity was the Hurricane-7 War, her vehicle : The GoodShip YoGear Bear.

**A Post**

Call me CounterClockwise. I am, or was, a citizen avatar of the posthuman Chimericus BioDome. In Earth near-space, the most daring and uninhibited of the gene-splicers who acted on baseline homo sapiens. We have been labeled “monsters” and “freaks” by the not-us people, mainly those who are still clinging onto that cradle, the planet of origin. I, however, feel quite natural to myself - but is this feeling not the same for all of us? And does not this feeling, whatever my outward appearance, make me a person?

I say “was” because at the time of this writing I have become an outcast, a renegade from the Networked CapsuleStations of my Homeworld. I did not achieve this status from an independent act of free will, from a desire to be rebellious or different (hah-hah). I was the victim of an Upheavel, a Crisis in the historical sense - the further breaking up or breaking down of humanity. You can call this event a drastic enlargement of the continuum that we can call “we”.

It is strange that those who are believed to be freaks by the human majority can have freaks among them, but then, as I have said, we all feel quite natural to ourselves and those whom we regard as unnatural are by definition…..

It is from this experience that I know for a fact that for all the genetic wizardry of our minds and our domicile among the stars, we have not transcended the status of being animals, to become as “angels in heaven”. Homo Sapiens Chimericus can be as jealous, as fearful and hate-filled as those of the baseline race. A pity. We have come far but apparently not far enough, and so I have become a renegade to my kind.

The Upheavel had been building up for many earthyears, but the decisive moment - the crisis - came when Magma SpaceSemen (yes, that was his name; we Chimes have no taboos against the engines of procreation) brought forth from his TempleLab the first philosopher pig, Porkochop Oifutt Oink. As Chimerics are wont to do this was later amended to Porkichap Oifutt Think [1].

He was a very, very smart talking pig. He could chop hair-splitting logic with ease. You can have an intelligent conversation with him onscreen, like he was an animated character in one of those interactive software games from the old times, except you can then meet up with him and dance cheek-to-cheek. Oifutt. He chose this name by the way. His obvious sapiency confronted our whole community with a profound and divisive question. You guessed it. Was Oifutt a pig or a man? If you decided from his appearance that he was a pig, then the next question you would have to ask was “can a pig think?” True, he can make the intelligent sounds that we interpret as speech, but then so can a cellphone, a recorded disc, a parrot. Is there a human mind behind those sounds?

We are, or was, a democratic society. A vote was called. A referendum. Those who voted “yes” were the majority. Those who voted “no” were branded “bigots”. How could any Chime, a container of so many odd genetic modifications, object to the sapient status of a talking pig? The arguments became heated when Migma SpaceSeven[1] uploaded his Mammalian Cognitive Enhancement GeneWare onto the public domain. Now your hamster, your cat, your dog, your rabbit can have an intelligent conversation with you. Those of us who protested vehemently against this irresponsible act were branded regressive and exiled from the community.

I am no bigot. I merely suggested that sounds that sounded intelligent, by themselves, did not prove beyond doubt that an intelligence made them, nor can intelligence be attributed to any physical object that made those sounds. (Despite rumors (to the contrary), I was not pointing (my finger) at Oifutt when I said this).

My protests fell on deaf ears, I was booted out with the others. The majority, by opening their arms to a talking pig, rejected the minority who dissented, such is the irony. Or perhaps it was justice: the minority group who rejected a unique individual were themselves rejected by the majority. (See? This is what it feels like!)

(Note “boot” like “sandals” is an archaic term for military footwear).

What next? That is the question I am now asking myself……

Notes:

[1] Chimeric names may morph from one occasion to another, as befitting individuals with no fixed identity. A “chime” can be taken to be the generic term for a harmonious sound, while the actual sound heard may vary infinitely. In the dictionary it has various meanings related to producing, becoming or being such sounds.