#worldbuilding wednesday

shulabear:

theotherguysride:

stephendann:

fattyatomicmutant:

space-australians:

the-real-seebs:

madddscience:

An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.

[Imgur]

That is some fine writing.

The Imgur link is broken so:

[Series of posts on 09/16/11]

About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.

His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.

One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.

People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.

Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)

It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.

The galaxy moved on.

Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.

Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.

Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.

Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.

“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”

After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.

“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”

The Admiral said “Who?”

What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.

Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.

We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.

That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts - acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets - was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.

Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.

This makes me cry

It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.

Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five, 

A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field. 

Waiting.

When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”.  The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace. 

Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.

We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice.  In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off.  It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.

Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.  

Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.

We find it terrifying.

I love this one. Reblogging for something new. 

Humans had been part of the intergalactic alliance now for longer than most could remember. New member systems were typically bemused by the Dracs semi-reverence of these fragile, hairless beings, and the Hives’ blend of respect and fear. 

Until the moment when their ambassadors were shown The Film. 

That’s all it was called, because the contents weren’t comprehensible.

Over time, the Vandals had reorganized and rebuilt; they’d formed alliances, created new weapons technologies, and were completely ready to take on the Drac galactic navy.

They were utterly unprepared for the humans. 

The command ship of the Vandal fleet was unassailable. Ion weapons were turned aside, the most powerful laser arrays were useless. Physical projectiles did work, but the mass of even a missile next to the ship was insignificant.

When the human destroyer Athena began to accelerate towards it, all shields to front, full power to thrusters, the Dracs made contact immediately, demanding to know what they intended to do.

The comm channel came back with a medley of humans singing, chanting, praying, and the captain simply said, “Ending this damn war.”

And disconnected.

The Drac central command watched the remote readouts of the human ship as it soared past the Vandal fighter vanguard. The Athena wasn’t firing, and the Vandal command didn’t have a protocol to deal with this, so they directed no resources towards the destroyer.

The reactor on board the destroyer began to systematically overload. Command patched through directly to the engineering room, and were met with the chief engineer saying with a smile, “No time to explain, I’ve got to say my last words to my creator.”

And he disconnected.

TheAthena was traveling at an unsafe speed when it collided with the Vandal command ship, tearing through the armor.

When the Athena’s reactors then went critical and destroyed the entire Vandal command, the human admiral aboard the Drac command vessel bowed his head and said, “May their memories be a blessing,” and proceeded to help plan the final assault on the remaining, disorganized Vandal fleet. The remaining human ships were heard chanting “For the Athena!” as they went into battle with little regard for their own safety, and less for the Vandals.

Ambassadors were always pale by the end of The Film, but none of them questioned humanity’s place in the alliance again.

alphynix:

Retro vs Modern #17: Ammonites

Ammonites (or ammonoids) are highly distinctive and instantly recognizable fossils that have been found all around the world for thousands of years, and have been associated with a wide range of folkloric and mythologic interpretations – including snakestones,buffalo stones,shaligrams, and the horns of Ammon, with the latter eventually inspiring the scientific name for this group of ancient molluscs.

(Unlike the other entries in this series the reconstructions shown here are somewhat generalized ammonites. They’re not intended to depict a specific species, but the shell shape is mostly based on Asteroceras obtusum.)

1830s

It was only in the 1700s that ammonites began to be recognized as the remains of cephalopod shells, but the lack of soft part impressions made the rest of their anatomy a mystery. The very first known life reconstruction was part of the Duria Antiquior scene painted in 1830, but to modern eyes it probably isn’t immediately obvious as even being an ammonite, depicted as a strange little boat-like thing to the right of the battling ichthyosaur and plesiosaur.

Theargonaut octopus, or “paper nautilus”, was considered to be the closest living model for ammonites at the time due to superficial similarities in its “shell” shape, but these modern animals were also rather poorly understood. They were commonly inaccurately illustrated as floating around on the ocean surface using the expanded surfaces on two of their tentacles as “sails” – and so ammonites were initially reconstructed in the same way.

1860s

While increasing scientific knowledge of the chambered nautilus led to it being proposed as a better model for ammonites in the mid-1830s, the argonaut-style depictions continued for several decades.

Interestingly the earliest known non-argonaut reconstruction of an ammonite, in the first edition of La Terre Avant Le Déluge in 1863, actually showed a very squid-likeanimal inside an ammonite shell, with eight arms and two longer tentacles. But this was quickly “corrected” in later editions to a much more nautilus-like version with numerous cirri-like tentacles and a large hood.

The nautilus model for ammonites eventually became the standard by the end of the 19^th century, although they continued to be reconstructed as surface-floaters. Bottom-dwelling ammonite interpretations were also popular for a while in the early 20^th century, being shown as creeping animals with nautilus-like anatomy and numerous octopus-like tentacles, before open water active swimmers eventually became the standard representation.

2020s

During the 20^th century opinions on the closest living relatives of ammonites began to shift away from nautiluses and towards the coleoids (squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses). The consensus by the 1990s was that both ammonites and coleoids had a common ancestry within the bactridids, and ammonites were considered to have likely had ten arms (at least ancestrally) and were probably much more squid-like after all.

Little was still actually known about these cephalopods’ soft parts, but some internal anatomy had at least been figured out by the early 21^st century. Enigmatic fossils known as aptychi had been found preserved in position within ammonite shell cavities, and were initially thought to be an operculum closing off the shell against predators – but are currently considered to instead be part of the jaw apparatus along with a radula. 

Tentative ink sac traces were also found in some specimens (although these are now disputed), and what were thought to be poorly-preserved digestive organs, but the actual external life appearance of ammonites was still basically unknown. By the mid-2010s the best guess reconstructionswerebased on muscle attachment sites that suggested the presence of a large squid-like siphon.

Possible evidence of banded color patterns were also sometimes found preserved on shells, while others showed iridescent patterns that might have been visible on the surface in life.

In the late 2010s the continued scarcity of ammonite soft tissue was potentially explained as being the same reason true squid fossils are so incredibly rare – their biochemistry may have simply been incompatible with the vast majority of preservation conditions.

But then something amazinghappened.

In early 2021 a “naked” ammonite missing its shell was described, preserving most of the body in exceptional detail – although frustratingly the arms were missing, giving no clarification to their possible number or arrangement. But then just a few months later another study focusing on mysterious hook-like structures in some ammonite fossils concluded that they came from the clubbed tips of a pair of long squid-like tentacles – the first direct evidence of any ammonite appendages!

Athird soft-tissue study at the end of the year added in some further confirmation that ammonites were much more coleoid-like than nautilus-like, with more evidence of a squid-style siphon, along with evidece of powerful muscles that retracted the ammonite’s body deep inside its shell cavity for protection.

Since ammonites existed for over 340 million years in a wide range of habitats and ecological roles, and came in a massive variety of shapes and sizes, it’s extremely likely that their soft anatomy was just as diverse as their shells – so there’s no single “one reconstruction fits all” for their life appearances. Still, at least we now have something less speculative to work with for restorations, even if it’s a bit generalized and composite, and now that we’re finally starting to find that elusive soft tissue there’s the potential for us to discover so much more about these iconic fossil animals.

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