Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mainiac]

Good point.  It's fairly easy to imagine how a race can be very aggressive but spacefaring.  Imagining how they are stupid and spacefaring is why I wrote the OP.

[Karnewarrior]

Good point.  It's fairly easy to imagine how a race can be very aggressive but spacefaring.  Imagining how they are stupid and spacefaring is why I wrote the OP.

uplifting? Maybe someone gave them tech (inadvertantly or otherwise) and they're just smart enough to figure it out.

[RedKing]

This was actually my one real issue with Serenity/Firefly: Reavers. You've got a group of humans who are supposedly so incoherently, psychotically raging that they self-mutilate and they rape and cannibalize anyone they happen across. But yet, they can still fly spaceships?

[Bauglir]

Clearly, the spaceships are ultra-user friendly. I blame Steve Jobs for this.

[Puzzlemaker]

I had an interesting thought once... Our technology develops from our intellect.

Not all creations stem from intellect, some stem from instinct, such as bird nests and ant burrows.  If a species evolves to instinctively create some sort of space ship without the corresponding intellect...

Only problem is, I can't think of any way for that to happen, unless they where engineered to do so.

Or uplifting where someone else gives them the tech... only problem I see with that is, if you give someone 300 years ago a cell phone they wont know what the fuck to do with it.  They could perhaps use it, but copying it might be harder.

Hmm.

[Il Palazzo]

Clearly, the spaceships are ultra-user friendly. I blame Steve Jobs for this.

Yeah, they're all plug-and-fly man. And the turrets all have wii controllers included. Besides, the Reavers might all have slight ADHD, but it doesn't mean they can't achieve anything!

[mainiac]

I don't think the Reavers are stupid.  They are very, very murderous and prefer to murder in a brutal fashion but they're supposed to be capable of not only maintaining but modifying their ships.  While they are suicidally aggressive, it's not because their stupid, it's because they just don't give a shit.  They are the product of a change on a population though, so they don't need to be stable.  In a decade or so, there will be very few Reavers left.

[lemon10]

In a super-competitive environment resembling orcs, its likely that they would scramble for every single physical and mental advantage, and that there would be strong selection pressure towards not having any mental or physical deficiencies that might lower their chance of survival or finding a mate.

They would probably recover from interbreeding quite quickly due to the massive amounts of competition. Sure, inbreeding like that would be troublesome for a society that didn't really rely on physical attributes and one that its not hard to survive in as long as you have money/are born in a good country, one in which its a constant fight for survival interbreeding would be overcome easily (although the small gene pool would still probably cause some problems farther down the road).

I had an interesting thought once... Our technology develops from our intellect.
Not all creations stem from intellect, some stem from instinct, such as bird nests and ant burrows.  If a species evolves to instinctively create some sort of space ship without the corresponding intellect...
Only problem is, I can't think of any way for that to happen, unless they where engineered to do so.
Or uplifting where someone else gives them the tech... only problem I see with that is, if you give someone 300 years ago a cell phone they wont know what the fuck to do with it.  They could perhaps use it, but copying it might be harder.

Hmm.

Spaceflight would give no advantage without the high technology necessary to find and travel to other habitable planets, while a species could be genetically designed to have the necessary information to be able to construct spaceships and sensors in their genes, something like that happening naturally is pretty much impossible, since its either a hit or miss (although if it succeed they would have their descendents multiply tons of times over when colonizing even a single planet).

[Virex]

In a super-competitive environment resembling orcs, its likely that they would scramble for every single physical and mental advantage, and that there would be strong selection pressure towards not having any mental or physical deficiencies that might lower their chance of survival or finding a mate.

Unless the chances of finding a mate go down if you're not "orcy" enough. Social pressure can do a lot here.

[DJ]

Forget nuclear bottleneck. It was some pandemic and it just so happened that the genes that gave resistance to it also gave ugliness and stupidity.

[Heron TSG]

I'm no biologist, so can someone explain to me how a large increase in population would cause a genetic bottleneck and tons of inbreeding? I must be missing something.

[Karnewarrior]

I'm no biologist, so can someone explain to me how a large increase in population would cause a genetic bottleneck and tons of inbreeding? I must be missing something.

Large DEcrease.

You either misread or the OP typo'd.

[scriver]

The population boom would come afterwards, as the survivors start refilling the vacuum left by nuclear war/pandemic/other.

[Heron TSG]

Huh. I missed the part about the population hitting a bottleneck, and started reading from the rapid expansion thing.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm.

Interesting scenario I just thought of that ties into what the OP is talking about.

Imagine a world-wide pandemic of some sort. Now imagine that one of the few surviving pockets of humanity are some extremely insular and inbred villages from the deep south in the US. (That sounds stereotypical, I know, but I've SEEN some of those areas. They're rare, but they really do exist) Capable enough to use technology they find lying around and enough mechanical knowledge enough to fix things up. But not enough education do use anything really advanced (so, things like artificial genetic enhancement is out). This would only work if we had fairly reliable space ships in use that could be flown and worked on with a minimum of advanced technical know-how, of course, but it's an idea. Perhaps ships with self-repairing systems and robotics to do most of the maintenance?

It'd have to be a hell of a pandemic, but the more connected humans are the greater the damage a pandemic can do. If a disease carrier could spread it from continent to continent in a matter of hours, a truly nasty disease could wipe out all of the major population centers on earth within a few hours.