Possible new premise for my uni - please critique

[Somes J]

I'm working on a possible new premise for my Omniverse Zero universe, moving away from the alternate universe concept (which has a lot of problems) and making it a deep-future postapocalyptic setting. I'm posting this here because I'd really like some critiques on my ideas and this area is more high-traffic than the individual universe forums.

OK, here goes:

The Fall of Man:

The story picks up maybe a few decades or centuries from now, as humans are just beginning to explore and colonize the solar system. Unfortunately for them, their civilization is detected by aliens, who are out to eliminate all intelligent life than might be a threat to them (at least that's the way I think I'm going to handle it - it could be an internal conflict, but aliens seemed to work better for this). The aliens destroy all the humans in space, destroy human civilization, and bombard the Earth with asteroids, killing all but a handful of people.

The aliens, though they are determined to eliminate all potential threats, do have a sense of mercy, albeit by our standards a twisted one. Humans will be permitted to survive, but not in a form that could become a threat to them. They release on the world a genetically engineered virus. This virus enters the human host and attacks the gametes (sperm and eggs). It inserts genes that stunt human brain development, insuring that the next generation of humans will never mentally develop beyond the equivalent of a 1-3 year old. This insures that humanity can survive, but in a form that will never be a threat to the aliens; these mentally stunted wretches will never built a campfire, let alone a starship. When the last fully sapient human dies humanity will be plunged into a dark age more profound than any it has ever known; even fire and language will be lost.


The Long Dark:

The wilderness reclaims the cities of man, and his relics crumble to dust. Centuries become millenia, and millenia become geologic eras. Ice ages and interglacials wash over the world. And all the while the sadly degraded remnants of humanity go about their existences. As time passes, they begin to change and diversify. The aliens' bombardment has wiped out most other large animals on Earth, leaving many ecological niches vacant, and the dumb people have lost the abilities that were crucial in protecting man from his environment: the ability to make clothing, fire, and sophisticated tools.

Millions of years pass, and the dumb people give rise to a whole family of new posthuman species. Wandering the frozen tundras of the north are shaggy posthumans covered in fur and adapted to the cold, like the Bigfoot of human myth. Desert-adapted humans wander the great deserts of the world. The forests and grasslands are stalked by posthuman predators that seem like something straight out of the nightmares of ancient legends or horror movies. There are scavenger humans that eat carrion and herbivore humans specialized to live on plants. There are even human seals that have taken to the sea. Though many are bright for animals these are all child-like creatures, with only the barest rudiments of language, tool use, or higher thought. The brightest of them can love and hate, feel joy and suffering, even plan and think a little, but their minds are but feeble shadows of those of their distant human ancestors. But that is about to change.


The Rebirth of Man:

The aliens thought that by crippling man's brain they could keep him from ever becoming a threat. And for a time their plan was effective. But even the most foolproof plans often fall victim to the demon Murphy.

Somewhere in some jungle or forest, a child was born to one of the dumb people. This child had a mutation; one which just happened to knock out the gene the aliens had inserted to prevent the human brain from fully developing. The aliens had been too complacent; they had not bothered to dismantle the complex of genes that gave humans their bright minds but had been content simply to surpress their phenotypic expression. Now, with the surpressive regulator gene gone, it was as if a book had been re-opened. For the first time in more than a million years a man looked out on the world with bright, fully human eyes.

That first man would have been alone as no man before him had ever been alone, save perhaps the last fully human man to die after the aliens had come more than a million years before. Still, he lived and reproduced and he passed the critical mutation onto some of his children. The increased intelligence of the offspring that inherited the gene allowed them to survive better, and the mutation spread quickly. Soon entire tribes had become sapient. Humanity had been reborn, and it now began to spread across the world and slowly begin to redevelop culture and technology.

But humanity would not enjoy their privilidged place for long. There were many posthumans they shared the world with, and many of them were still close enough to mate with humans and produce fertile offspring. Inevitably, here and there, humans mated with posthumans, and in doing so they inadvertently passed the spark of sapience to them.

In one case, for instance, a human must somehow have mated with one of those posthuman predators, and on that night man's greatest enemy was (literally) concieved. The child of that union inherited the sapience-permitting gene, and passed it on to others of the predator's kind. The result was a race with the bright minds of men but the strength, instincts, and appetites of a creature that had evolved specifically to kill and eat the posthuman herbivores of its native part of the world; a creature that naturally hungered for the flesh of its fellow hominids. Possessed of intelligence, language, culture, and tool-making these nightmares exploded out of their native forest and quickly spread from the Bering Straight to the Straight of Gibraltar, becoming the dominant predator on the planet and the scourge of other types of man, on whose flesh they fed. When humans walked across Beringia and recolonized the New World in the next ice age, these predator-people followed them.

This is but one example of a story that was repeated multiple times. By the time the reborn humans had recolonized most of their ancestors' ancient territory a number of other bright posthumans had been spawned. The result was a world inhabited by many types of people, some fully sapient, some not.


What do you think?

[Siege]

Left to their own devices humans with the mental capacities of 1-3 year olds aren't going to survive longer than a week, let alone geological eras. Have you seen any 3-year-olds? They're completely helpless. They need people with further developed intellects - ie adults - to care for them. I could see a handful of them surviving for a while if they're taken in by animals "Mowgli style", but I sincerely doubt they'd reproduce sufficiently to survive as a species.

As I understand it our brain is basically our trump card for evolutionary survival. If that advantage is artificially neutered and we lose language, fire and farming and had no way to quickly redevelop them I think it would be increasingly likely humanity would go the way of the Woolly Mammoth within a generation or two.

[Destructionator]

Some of that reminds me of what Surlethe did in his "Global Mean Temperature" series in the fanfics forum on SDN. Humans left in certain areas end up rapidly diverging into various types of primitives.

Left to their own devices humans with the mental capacities of 1-3 year olds aren't going to survive longer than a week, let alone geological eras. Have you seen any 3-year-olds? They're completely helpless.

That's untrue, unless the young children I know are especially smart. Their numbers would surely be hugely diminished, but some number should be able to survive as gatherers - they will go to the refrigerator and eat on their own now and love picking fruit when on walks. They grab their coats when it is cold.

I'd expect most if not all in the harsher environments to die off, but outright extinction is going too far. This would drive evolution to the result the story is looking for.


The scenario sounds plausible enough.

[Somes J]

Left to their own devices humans with the mental capacities of 1-3 year olds aren't going to survive longer than a week, let alone geological eras. Have you seen any 3-year-olds? They're completely helpless. They need people with further developed intellects - ie adults - to care for them. I could see a handful of them surviving for a while if they're taken in by animals "Mowgli style", but I sincerely doubt they'd reproduce sufficiently to survive as a species.

Basically what I was going for was to reduce humanity back to the level of Homo Erectus or Homo Habilis. They have very simple stone tools, maybe simple spears, no fire, no clothing, and only a very rudimentary language, probably with a number of words measured in the dozens and no syntax. What I'm going for is to reduce human intelligence to the point that I don't have to worry about the classic problem of scenarios like this: a bright race uses technology to adapt itself to its environment long before biological evolution can do anything.

[speaker-to-trolls]

I personally don't think your original paralell universe idea has too many problems, you just need to juggle the dates around a bit until you find some that work. I think this one honestly follows Nemo Ramjets story a bit too closely, and it always struck me as a bit contrived that these aliens would come down and turn humans into subsapient animals Just Because.

[Somes J]

Hmm, I can see what you mean. I still like the postapocalyptic future idea better though. The alternate universe explanation relies on an even bigger Dues Ex Machina.

and it always struck me as a bit contrived that these aliens would come down and turn humans into subsapient animals Just Because.

Like I said, it was their idea of being humane. They saw it as a good way to leave humanity totally incapable of ever being a threat to them, while still leaving them alive (sort of).

I'll try to think of a story that works better.

Edit: one possibility I can think of is to use a more straightforward postapocalyptic scenario, and say that before the End human civilization had embraced genetic engineering and transhumanism. Sort of like Dougal Dixon's Man After Man. The nonhuman species left over are genetically modified transhumans. The big problem I can see with that is what to do with species like the Killer People or the Blind People. Why the heck would anybody want to create/become something like that?

[Invictus]

Nemo Ramjets

Thank you so much. I had forgotten his name and the address of his website and I thought I'd never find it again.

[Somes J]

OK, I've been thinking about this timeline, trying to flesh it out a bit, and this is what I came up with. Please critique.

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Several centuries from now, humanity has colonized the solar system and is preparing to begin going to the stars. But as we prepared to launch ourselves into the wider universe we discovered that we were not alone. A huge fleet of Bussard ramjets was detected entering the solar system.

The first contact was hostile. The aliens were a species completely obssessed with safeguarding the survival of their own species. They had detected humanity and determined it was a potential threat, just like every other species theoretically capable of building starships. The fleet was on a mission of genocide.

High speed kinetic weapons were slammed into human space stations and bases. Asteroids were diverted onto collision course with Earth, laying waste to the planet. But the humans weren't helpless. For years, a brutal war waged through the asteroids. In the end, the aliens decided that digging all the surviving humans out of their holes was more trouble than it was worth, and they decided to offer the survivors a truce.

The terms were that humanity would be allowed to survive, but only in a form that would be no threat to the aliens. The hold-outs in the asteroids would be assimilated into the aliens' society. Their children would recieve some genetic modification to help integrate them into the aliens' society, but they would remain essentially human. An independent humanity would also be permitted to survive on Earth, but in a form that would be no threat to the aliens.

The humans, realizing that if they continued to resist it would ultimately only be a matter of time until they were exterminated, decided to accept the deal, but at the time they did not quite realize what the aliens had in mind for the humans on Earth. They imagined that Earth humanity would be allowed to survive as a technologically primitive species, perhaps with automated weapons sattelites in orbit programmed to destroy anything more advanced than a steam engine. But the aliens had in mind a far more elegant and drastic solution, one that struck directly at what they percieved as the human problem: the fact that they were smart enough to potentially build starships and be a threat to the aliens.

The aliens would use genetic engineering to change humanity into a form that could never, ever build a starship. Their brain development would be altered so that they would never mature beyond the intellectual equivalent of early childhood; they would have only the most rudimentary language and tool use, or none at all.

As if to add insult to injury, the aliens would use the modified humans to repair the Earth's ecology, which had been devestated by their asteroid strikes. They planned to fill the gaps in Earth's ecology with a multitude of human-derived forms. There would be herbivore humans, predator humans, scavenger humans, even aquatic humans. An entire ecology was to be created of near-mindless humans competing against and preying upon other near-mindless humans.

By the aliens' own standards, this was a merciful and generous peace. Yes, the modified humans would have the minds of small children, but many of them would still be able to love and hate, feel fear and pain and joy; they would have all the same basic emotional experiences as humans, only at a vastly less developed level. From their perspective, these creatures had not lost anything essential, and they could not understand the humans' reaction to this. Neither could they understand the humans' utter revulsion as the bioengineers proudly showed them plans for one modified human form after another. Such a great diversity of humans would allow more humans to exist than if they were simply allowed to continue as primitives, and a diverse human family would be more likely to survive any future catastrophes or the simple ravages of deep time. Difficult as it might be for humans to understand, the diversification of humanity had been intended as a gesture of good fellowship.

Many humans wanted to reject the aliens' peace proposal, or even accept it but demand that the human species outside the assimilated ones that would serve the aliens be allowed to die out. But the humans' leaders realized the desperate position humanity was in, and decided to take the best chance they saw for species survival. But they did not go along with it entirely in good faith. They put into motion a plan to allow the survival of an independent humanity.

There was much work to be done on Earth in repairing the damaged ecology prior to the aliens leaving, and much of it was done by surrendered, and later modified, humans, as the aliens could not survive Earth's surface environment unprotected. At one of these work camps, in the middle of a dense rain forest, a handful of surrendered and modified humans staged a rebellion and fled into the forest. The aliens simply shrugged and bombarded the area with anti-human bioweapons. The aliens assumed they had contained the outbreak and continued their work.

What they did not know was that the rebellion had been better organized than it appeared. High-level human sympathizers had slipped the escapees antidotes to the bioweapons that would be used against them, and gear to help them hide from alien sensor scans. The escapees could have begun a guerilla war against the aliens, but they chose instead simply to hide. Their victory would come in simply surviving, and breeding.

Decades later, their work done, the aliens left, content that it contained no sapient life. Nothing that could be a threat again. They were wrong. The tiny community founded by the escapees had escaped detection. Unable to take much technology from the base, they quickly reverted to stone age foragers. But they had survived.

As time passed, the humans began to multiply. They began to spread through a world eeirily transformed by the aliens, populated by strange, warped versions of themselves. There were herbivore humans that moved endlessly through the forest, browsing mindlessly. There were predator humans; creatures with the bodies of nightmares and the minds of children that lived hard, dangerous lives tearing apart their prey with their bare hands. There were desert-adapted humans in the deserts and shaggy fur-covered humans in the cold regions.

None of these creatures had more than rudimentary minds, but that would change. Many of these creatures were still genetically close enough to humans to mate with them and produce fertile offspring. Inevitably, occassional hybrids were produced, and these hybrids often mated back the nonhuman parent race and passed the genes for sapience on to them. Almost always these genes conferred an enormous advantage to their possessors, and so as humanity spread across the planet they left a trail of newly sapient species behind them.

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What do you think? I kind of like but I'm concerned it might be a little too close to All Tomorrows.