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RIP - Comicality
Stories posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 

Short Scribbles - 2. On the domination of the galaxy

Weird one. A pretend scientific article on alien species and reproductive methods I wrote while bored. I enjoy writing things like this for some reason. May extend some of these ideas into a world one day.

When a civilisation reaches the interstellar era, survival becomes a game of numbers. The faster a sapient race can reproduce, the more planets it can settle and the more resources at its fingertips. One of the ultimate forms of life then is mechanical.

No time is needed to reach maturity once created, and every new unit can create an unlimited number of more. There is no need for binary sexes as used in most organic lifeforms, so only one individual is ever needed to recover the species. Mechanical units can be theoretically immortal, and they can recode or modify themselves much more efficiently than organics.

Though organic lifeforms can utilise genetic engineering at advanced levels of civilisation, mechanicals require only their own existence to reprogram themselves. Of course, metallic beings evolve naturally in only rare cases, the only known occurrence being the Oup. Most so called ‘metal civilisations’ in the galaxy were artificially created by organics. Some of these were made as servants and their masters lost control of them, others outlived their master civilisations, and some were created out of sheer scientific curiosity and granted free will.

Organics do have some methods of fighting back against this. Extremely advanced civilisations have replaced organic reproduction with cloning, which has proven faster than natural reproduction. In addition some forms of life are naturally fast reproducers, such as insects. Hiveminds are common in insects and unicellular live, a useful technique allowing individual units to be created faster due to less complex systems on board.

Yet more systems exist. The pathogenic Ignik replace reproduction with stealing the individuals of other species, sapient and non-sapient, and manipulating their existing bodies to grow the brains required for the species to operate as sapient beings.

Plant-based sapience is rare but the Galc are an interesting example in the discussion of reproductive speed, given their unusual ability to warp space and time to seed themselves across the universe. An individual requires an entire planet to support itself, so the species had to evolve interstellar travel. Theoretically, they started with the ability to catapult their seeds into space, where they could drift until luck made them reach a planet, but this is hugely inefficient.

Theory suggests at some point the Galc encountered intelligence life and replicated their technology biologically, which means they can now send their seeds throughout all time and space. One plant may produce a thousand seeds in year, and many even seed itself. This ability to move their seeds through time mean the Galc can move backwards from where they are to seed a million years earlier, giving them a million years to reproduce in, making extremely efficient use of time.

Interestingly as a result, we do not know in which era when the Galc even began existence, possibly they are a future species - not one from our past or present time. This poses some interesting issues when it comes to physics and paradoxes, but that is not for this paper.

Copyright © 2015 Wicked Witch; All Rights Reserved.
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Stories posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 
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JohnAR

I love the Galc idea: time travel for procreation ... Maybe one day I might ask for your permission to write about that them myself.

Or you can take it as a seed for a novel (no pun intended)?

JAR

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albertnothlit

That was a very interesting read. The idea of planet-wide beings who can send their seeds across the interstellar void and have them survive is very intriguing. Regarding mechanical civilizations, while they do seem to outpace organics in many areas, I think the real question remains one of motivation. Organic creatures are programmed from the moment of their birth to make copies of themselves and survive, spreading throughout an environment and perhaps later throughout the universe. Machines do not have that directive, unless they were created with it specifically. What motivates a machine to copy itself then? Why would it ever attempt to reach the stars?

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Wicked Witch
On 04/18/2015 08:45 AM, albertnothlit said:
That was a very interesting read. The idea of planet-wide beings who can send their seeds across the interstellar void and have them survive is very intriguing. Regarding mechanical civilizations, while they do seem to outpace organics in many areas, I think the real question remains one of motivation. Organic creatures are programmed from the moment of their birth to make copies of themselves and survive, spreading throughout an environment and perhaps later throughout the universe. Machines do not have that directive, unless they were created with it specifically. What motivates a machine to copy itself then? Why would it ever attempt to reach the stars?
Thanks for the review! Glad you liked. Sometimes I just get little bursts of inspiration about an interesting concept and I like to create these type of things. Often this is also how I write about the settings to my worlds.

 

Regarding mechanical, well that depends. Theoretically science today suggests naturally occurring metallic life is possible, hence the Oup. Some experiments by the University of Glasgow have managed to create primitive metal cells, but its still theory whether they could form DNA. If this happened, then they would operate similarly to organics when it comes to evolution.

 

As for artificially created metal life, it would all depend on why they were created. For Von Neumann probes, they were created for the sole reason of replicating to investigate the universe in a cheap manner. Self replicating interstellar spaceships travelling throughout the universe at less than the speed of light. While it would take them hundreds of years to gain a foothold, once they did it'd be impossible to get rid of them. They are one of the scariest because it doesn't take much higher technology than Earth's present level to create them, and they can theoretically evolve infinitely faster than organic beings. One probe could become ten, ten become a hundred. If you are familiar with the Stargate series, the stargates were created using a similar contraption that simply ran around the universe building gates locally out of the materials at that location.

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Wicked Witch
On 04/18/2015 07:21 AM, JohnAR said:
I love the Galc idea: time travel for procreation ... Maybe one day I might ask for your permission to write about that them myself.

Or you can take it as a seed for a novel (no pun intended)?

JAR

Thanks for your review. It means a lot, I love your writing!

 

You're most welcome to write about them! I get so many little things like this I never flesh out, so feel free to run with it however you want.

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