Okay, so I know this might fall wa-a-a-ay out of the game’s scope, but I was thinking about silly things we could do in the final game; one of them being replicating more realistic interpretations of creatures from science fiction, in particular the Time Lords (from Doctor Who if you’ve never heard of them, which is unlikely, but you never know…)
Now while I understand TARDISes might not be possible since there’s know way of know if time-travel technology is truly ever going to be tangible, but we may be able to recreate other aspects of the race!
Now hear me out here, there’s a type of jellyfish out there called the immortal jellyfish (urritopsis dohrnii) that’s able to regenerate itself by reverting to an infantile state. Now, wouldn’t it be cool if we could stick… whatever allows it to do that in a hominid, throw in a second heart and bob’s your uncle! Time Lord!
A sentient creature is actully plenty likely to have two hearts, only a little less likely then one. The immortality part, well, the abilitiy to just not die of natural causes is acctuly not all that unlikely. “Immortality” has evolved many times, which means it is a feature that is likely to pop up on another planet. The only problem is that it has never evolved in any higher life form. Arthropods don’t have any immortal among them, neither do mollusks, and the longest lived vertebrae was little over 500 years old upon it’s death. This means that, either, nothing can live all that long with more structural complexity then a jellyfish, or, perhaps, that the lifestyles that select for immortality (which may not be the same that promote long lifespans like a tortoise or big shark) are of the kind that complex, highly moble animals simply don’t tend to fill. If we are using the first assumption, our best hope is of a society of sentient sponges, but not only is that (very) unlikely, but there is a reason that sentient sponges don’t exist on earth. For one thing, they don’t have the potential, dispite the fact that they are shaped in a way as to allow a brain. Aside from that, there is no evolutionary pressure to gain smarts. They don’t need it, so even if they could have them, they would quickly lose them due to the fact that a brain would crowd the sponges cavities. The second assumption is a little more hopeful. A creature that had a slow metabolism and lived in a truly inhospitable corner of the globe might evolve to use smarts to get what rare resources or energy there is. That creature might, and probably would, either gain or have railway had a memory. Their slow metabolism would let them live for years, gaining more and more knowledge. They would evolve ridiculously huge capacities for knowledge and equally ridiculous lifespans, by the time they had gained the brain power to knowingly manipulate their environment they might live for millennia, and be able to remember they day the hatched/were born on their deathbed. This would mean that they could build on the knowledge of eons without high levels of specialization because they were there. This means that even if they don’t develop immortality (which wouldn’t be all that hard at this point) they could watch a moon landing, then walk down the road to “old man Jericho” to ask him what he thought of the landing, seeing as he had been around sense the earliest farming villages, unlike you, a youngster only around sense the discovery of the new world, the Viking one that is. These aliens would almost definitely not be humanoid, and almost cerntently have a geiniocracy, but would be an interesting civilization nonetheless.
I’m terribly sorry, what are you trying to get at here? What do you mean by “either gain or have railway had a memory”?
Oh sorry, typo. I meant to say “either would quickly gain or already have a long term memory”.
…and why is that relevant to this topic exactly?
I was trying to create a logical story of how an immortal and sentient species could come into being. Making storys is a tool I use to test the plausibility of a concept. If I can come up with a reasonably likely and abstract story then it could evolve. For these creatures the logical evolutionary pressure toward immortality and intelligence was to exploit their slow metabolisms to learn. Since anything more complex then a jellyfish could have both a memory and a slow metabolism it is something doesn’t require ridiculously improbable circumstances.
Hmm… interesting. Not what I was expecting, but still interesting.