Becka's Notes

So I'm not sure how coherent this post will be since it's a slighltly tidied up stream of consciousness from where I was talking to a friend on Twitter about the second Intelligent species on my Sulphuric Acid World.

The second intelligent species I only found about last night when I was wondering why they initially had problems agreeing with humans about what plants and animals are. When I initially realised what I had my first thought was "argh it's a triffid" so I set to work to make sure they actually aren't triffids. So it's fair to say they don't look like this.

Anyway on with the post:

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I am currently trying to design an ambultory, intelligent carniverous plant that isn't a triffid ripoff

On my sulphuric acid world there's a whole kingdom of mobile plants (as well as animals and more normal plants).

The mobile plants have actually evolved something like a nervous system (unlike earth plants) and this has formed something more like a terrestial cordate CNS (protected by a woody skeleton) than the animal sulphies have. This woody skeleton is made of internal tubes of their equivalent of xylem.

(There's two intelligent species on sulphuric acid world - the plant one and the animal one).

Anyway plant sulphie 'brain' is found in a woody capsule under their digestive organ which is at the top and is like a pitcher (into which they feed their prey directly. I think they are not immediately recognisable as plants to humans and possibly look more humanoid than the animal sulphies (which are four legged, feathered critters with tentacles as manipulatory appendages) though even the plant sulphies don't look at all human but they are bipedal with an obvious "head".

They also photosynthesize (well they are plants) but due to their mobility they can't get enough energy that way.

(The animal ones descend from a cuttlefish like critter so while they do have an internal skeleton it's not like a vertebrate's.)

Plant sulphies can either reproduce by exchange of germ material (which is mediated by a symbiotic species like many plants on Earth) or clone themselves naturally via cuttings.

I don't know if they have eyes. I think they use photoreceptors all over their body and they communicate via a combination of scent and sound meaning their language is very difficult for other intelligent species to learn.

The animal and plant sulphies did not at first realise the other was intelligent and preyed on each other but seem to have realised about the time both species developed agriculture. Almost all Sulphie religions have myths about this

By the time they contact Earth (to buy Venus for bioforming) they've been living and working together for millenia and the plant sulphies have various sound only creoles they use to talk to the animal ones.

A shared characteristic of both species is that since they have no access to metal they grow a lot of their technology though they also have glass and ceramics. (Yes, this means they have living spaceships – advanced biotech is surprisingly common among aliens in this universe because of the number of worlds where metal is either not extractable (no free oxygen) or impractical due to rapid corrosion (acid worlds).

I want to learn to write to prompts. I've never been very good at it but quite a few of my online friends have a good time doing it so I thought I'd give it a go. anke pointed me in the direction of origfic_bingo and this is the first prompt I've written to from the card I received. It's not very good. It's very first draft. I tell like anything. But hey I actually wrote something to a prompt, this is progress. I enjoyed writing it as well.

Title: First Contact
Genre: SF
Prompt: Diplomacy (I hope the word doesn't actually have to be mentioned).
Rating: G
Wordcount: 363 words

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When the strange ships first appeared in orbit it didn't so much cause panic as unease.

It might have helped if they'd done something other than sit there apparently doing nothing. Both aggression and overtures of peace were things that humans could understand. The lack of either just made people wonder what they were doing.

On the TV the talking heads spoke of invasions and how such a large fleet could only be there for the purpose of colonisation. A few even suggested that the aliens were really demons. One armchair pundit posted a video on Youtube suggesting they were trying to psyche humans into destroying themselves to save them the effort.
When the riots broke after the video went viral out one wag noted that if that was the case perhaps said pundit was being paid by them.

Then someone with too much power for their frayed nerves got twitchy. America claimed it must have been a Chinese satellite that fired the missile since they had no armed satellites, China claimed the opposite. The rest of the world agreed that whoever had given the order was stupid. The aliens clearly had the range of Earth's weapons and were sat just outside it.

Fortunately, the aliens didn't respond, they didn't even shoot the satellite down. The world gave a sigh of relief but continued to watch the sky distrustfully.

Months passed, the ships remained there, and still nothing happened publicly but it became obvious that something was happening behind the scenes. Scientists from NASA, ESA, Roskosmos, CNSA and various other space agencies met with world leaders in a summit at the UN.

"The aliens have been trying to talk to us since they first entered orbit," a nervous looking scientist explained to the press once the discussions were complete. "But they've been doing it carefully, making sure only those they wanted to heard them and we couldn't understand them anyway. It's taken this long to learn to speak to each other enough to understand what they want."

What she said next wasn't just close to the top of the list of things people didn't expect to hear, it was so unexpected that no one had even suggested it.

"It seems they really are colonists but they aren't interested in Earth. They want Venus but consider it ours, so they are offering to pay for it."


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Originally posted about a year ago on my tumblr.

So, I’ve obtained a copy of this World-Building book and it’s awesome and useful (though it lacks a section on designing biomes *sighs*). It’s going to be useful for the current project, but the book itself is spawning plot-bunnies. Science Fiction plot bunnies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had those.

You see in the book there’s a section called “not as we know it” which has suggestions for life-supporting worlds with some really alien (and by human standards hostile) worlds.

One of these was a world where the thalassogen is Sulphuric Acid rather than water. The author even suggests a mechanism by which Sulphuric Acid seas could form that involves the most original water ocean being lost via photodissociation and then a sulphuric acid one forming (there’s more steps to it than that). Now as he admits Sulphuric Acid reacts with most things which makes it an unlikely seeming solvent for life, unlikely but not impossible. He suggests that since most organic compounds react with Sulphuric Acid this might be where silicon based life develops. But I’m not sure that’s necessary. See this world had a water ocean to start with, so maybe primitive life got going before the water ocean all but vanished. Now the initial dessication and ensuing Sulphuric Acid downpour (is it just me or does this sound like a slightly cooler Venus?) would have killed off most everything in the mother of all mass extinction events but life tends to be tough to eradicate totally and even on Earth we have Extremophiles surviving in some really nasty (in our terms) enviroments including the highly acid. So maybe some of this world’s primative analogs of bacteria and archaea adapted quickly enough and manage to live in the sea. From there things carry on and eventually multicellular organisms, land life and so on develops culminating in an intelligent tool using alien race. Silicon is highly unlikely as replacement for carbon - it doesn’t form complex enough molecules.

So far so good. The problem is that Sulphuric Acid corrodes most metals like crazy so the author reckons an intelligent race on such a planet would be stuck as they wouldn’t be able to break out of the stone age. No bronze, no iron - yes, the noble metals but they aren’t much good for tools and weapons.

My reaction to this is something along the lines of okay, so what might they develop instead that we wouldn’t think of? Metal is easy for us, what might be hard for us but easy for them? I mentioned this on Twitter and @Charnigans suggested glass and ceramics. I’m not sure how they’d work chemically with a Sulphuric Acid environment but that’s worth looking into. Maybe they’d develop a flexible glass like the one Tiberius is supposed to have repressed though that’s probably hyperbole since even today we can’t make glass that ductile. It would be cool if it weren’t though. I think I need to find a list of things that don’t react with Sulphuric Acid so I can work out if a tech tree leading to space travel is even remotely likely without the metal ages. (More about that in this post on my tumblr which I haven't copied here yet).

Wow, that was a ramble…