This one features some reader feedback implementation. The “alien” question seemed a good one to ask. Thanks, Sessine.
They aren't Grey enough to be aliens, anyway.
This one features some reader feedback implementation. The “alien” question seemed a good one to ask. Thanks, Sessine.
Oh god. That response
yep, whoever picked Then to do this q+a stuff really didn´t knew him at all….pohl would´ve been way better. less smooth, but also less creepy 😉
If it were exclusively the adults there, Then would be a reasonable pick, as his sardonic humor could go over well with them. Not so much when the kiddies are present, though.
They picked someone more “real” to make it easier for everyone there to relate – Pohl comes off as a bit too optimistic because of his work environment.
Also Then’s response in the last panel is a perfect example of that realism.
THEN NO
“Oh, the ‘introducing a new sentient species’ part of the assembly went just fine! The questions kids are asking their parents about words like ‘probing’, on the other hand…”
On the other hand, that particular joke shows that he has a very human-like sense of humor. So he might be a good choice. The path to integration has to include people coming to accept that, psychologically, Sarnothi are pretty much identical to humans. Humor is a really good way to establish rapport.
Thank goodness that we’ve been Alpha Predators for the last several millennia.
Actually you will never find a natural sentient species that isn’t an alpha predator, be it carnivorous or omnivorous. All the most jntelligent animals are predators. Eating meat requires a larger brain as you have to actually hunt and outsmart your foodsource. A herbivorous species being intelligent would be evidence that they had been artificially uplifted by a predatory species. Which would beg the question how dangerous is a predatory alien if it needs an uplifted prey species to play diplomat? Such deceit would be the halmark of a true predator.
What about dolphins, whales, elephants, apes?
Ehh, humans still get et. Polar bears and whales will go for long pork if they get a chance, and wolves are know to do their thing. Have you ever seen “The Ghost and the Darkness”? Human cities are top predators, but individual humans really aren’t, even today, go back a thousand years to a time before mass-extinction got squared and it gets much worse. Really, anything external to The Roman Empire and its industrialisation of violence leaves humans as pretty unremarkable if they leave their tiny little settlements. True, traps are terrifying, but humans don’t have a monopoly on traps, and human traps need to be collected, which isn’t safe.
Dolphins, whales, and apes are all predators, and fairly dominant in their niche, and regarded as capable of a decent degree of theoretical thinking. Elephants are an outlier, while parrots are just a giant middle-finger to all things human-centric about intelligence. Birds use tools, make art, build buildings, lie, cheat, steal, and con… and these traits can be found in both meatatarians and seed-eaters. Ultimately, no amount of examples will tell us all that is possible, so even parrots and octopuses are not really proof of anything.
I am hoping that Kuraimizu is a troll. The term “sentient” is very difficult to even define, and far worse to try to prove as a subject. Taking something as complex and unknown as evolution and saying that something will never happen, especially something as mundane as “quality x will never occur in the absence of quality y” is to make an extremely dubious claim even if it is taken as exaggeration. There are plenty of pressures that could inspire theorectical analysis from non-predatory species. Going so far as to say it only applies to “alpha” predators is just silly. Using that as a basis of human intelligence, when by all accounts humans hunt by just walking at a thing until it is too exhausted to run anymore, it isn;t well-founded… Even then, humans are not dramatically intelligent. They are plenty smart, I’ll grant you, but I am dubious that a single generation of humans could construct an axe, as in a stone on the end of a stick that can hit something and remain a stone on the end of a stick. Humans are good at preserving and contributing to knowledge. Language is humanity’s real claim to fame, without that, it really isn’t remarkable amongst the other intelligent species, and even slow-and-simple-thinking species can surprise you. It goes without saying that eating animals requires as much brain as a plant has…
There are loads of reasons why something would be pressured towards civilisation. Having to plan out the activities of a sentient species in order to hunt it is a plausible one, but nobody has a reliably exhaustive list.
I think this is just David, Brin-ning with thoughtful plot ideas. Some will vaunt Peace. Some suggest a Wall. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is going to Uplift War-ring factions. Some hearing Then speak will think nearly alike- for peace, some few think only- conspiracy actions, some think identically- panic in the streets, Sun Diver-se reactions. Andi for one.
I don’t think anyone capable of making this right, maybe better, but not right. I think that is outside even Heaven’s Reach.
How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf? – Larry Niven,
A: Not much but it takes intelligence to hide from what is IN the leaves and tall grass.
Point of fact Parrots and Chickens are omnivores too I know of several who will happily nom on hotdogs. (Chickens are freaking not only carnivorous but cannibalistic as are turkeys and they are DEATH on Mice and snakes) Large Moa were carnivores (Look at a parrots beak and look at a moa’s those are made for crunching and human at some point was on that menu)
Oh and Octopus… those are not only smart Predators but Ornery and May in fact have a sense of humor.. I’m minded of my friends pet Octopus that would sneak out of his tank and steal the dogs food and would antagonize the dog I’m also somewhat certain this particular one understood profanity cause I’m PRETTY sure it gave me the finger after scaring the living shit out of me one night (Sleeping on said friends couch I HEARD a noise wet splorchy sound and a scurry across the living room Hear the dog yelp I startled jumped out of bed and had my flashlight on said Octopus with a hand full of dog food. Once it climbed back into the tank after noming on said food I SWEAR it flipped me off.
I’m also minded of another that used to get annoyed by a bright light and would jet water to short the thing out if you didn’t turn it out for him. And yet another that had figured out the security patrols at the aquarium and would wait for the patrols to go by sneak out of his tank and snatch fish from OTHER tanks then sneak back into his own enclosure.
@guest just because you can’t understand a concept doesn’t mean someone is a troll.
Sentient as I use it in defining a species, has the following requirements,
Use of language, capable of complex thought, the ability to pass on knowledge to the next generation, Able to pass the Mirror test by adulthood, able to use and invent tools.
as for a species the key technology a species must be able to invent to advance significantly is Fire. Without fire metal level technology can’t be mastered. no fire, no pottery or ceramics, no metal, no steam, no industrial revolution, no electric revolution, no space travel.
Fire also allows for the cooking of food which makes food easier to digest, meaning more nutrients can be digested. also Fire kills bacteria, and parasites, making food safer to eat, and improves health.
For the Sarnothi echo technology would be their replacement for fire, without echo technology they never would have advanced as far as they have.
in contrast, smart animals such as cuttlefish, octopi, dolphins, will never be able to advance, for the simple fact that they’ll never be able to invent fire underwater. Only a species that can walk on dry land will ever be able to invent fire. As such only terrestrial species, will ever have a hope of exploring space, and surviving the eventual death of their planet.
“Actually you will never find a natural sentient species ”
Based on a sample size of one? From one planet in the entire universe?
Yeah I’m gonna have to put this one in the fail pile.
I’m fairly sure the word “sapient” was what was intended in a large portion of this comment chain. Pretty much all complex mammals on our planet are provably sentient, and many more arguably so. Pretty much any animal which recognizes its reflection and can use that to perceive itself externally is categorically sentient.
For that matter, though, there are plenty of people who feels chimps and even dolphins qualify for sapience as well for having language, social hierarchies, and tool-use.
I’m sorry but that’s a very human-like response. 😛
It would probably be good to explain that the sarnothi are an alternate branch in evolution that evolved to be aquatic amphibious, while humans evolved to be entirely terrestrial. And that both humans and sarnothi share a common ancestor that was most likely a species of fish, therefore making humans and sarnothi, evolutionary speaking, very distant cousins.
This could be easily confirmed by comparing the genomes of humans and sarnothi. If they both evolved from the same origin they would have similarities between both genomes. If the sarnothi were infact “aliens” their genome would share very few or even no similarities.
This would work right up until a religious individual chose to get into the field, at which point this ‘proof’ of evolution would merely become proof that these are CLEARLY the children of satan created to make people question their faith.
In point of fact, so long as they -don’t- claim to be an evolutionary branch, religious people would likely ignore them for the most part, or attempt to convert them, or, as before because close-mindedness, claim they were some sort of ‘parody of the glories of the human form’.
If they say the word evolution though, all the divisions start vanishing and it ALL goes to xenophobia.
no. science is the language of the universe, it’s the language of gods, any religion that doesn’t accept the science behind evolutionary theory, clearly isn’t a church of truth. and if a church was true and argued against established science, I’d expect that church to provide an alternate theory, and evidence to disprove the current scientific models being used.
and xenophobia has nothing to do with evolution, Xenophobia would have to do with aliens visiting earth, xeno means foreign, or of another origin, all of evolution on earth has the same origin, therefore it is anti-xenophobic.
If they don’t show the evolutionary similarities between human and sarnothi genomes people will be more likely to claim they are aliens, instead of distant cousins. And if the alien theory takes root, then people will start acting xenophobic, especially when they discover sarnothi “alien” echo technology and “alien” powers.
“But you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people’s sins, so that they may repent. For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living.”
Wisdom 11:23-26.
This is the correct counter to any Christian claiming that something goes against the work or will of God, or that God hates X, or that X is the work of Satan.
Simply stated, by the Judeo Christian Canon, i’ts literally impossible for something that God did not create or that God hated to exist or continue to exist.
Anyone who makes an argument from a Christian perspective that something is evil or doesn’t deserve to exist is ignoring their own holy texts, or else cherry-picking from it, to justify their hatred or else projecting their hatred into the mouth of their God and falsely claiming it to be His will and not their own fear, ignorance, or malevolence.
so you’re claiming that god hated the dinosaurs and every species that is currently extinct, despite the fact that god created them and therefore must have loved them.
also pretty sure the wisdom of solomon is from the apocrypha and isn’t canonical, as it’s not in any old testament that I have ever seen.
You’re kind of missing the point.
Wisdom is the 27th Book of the New Jerusalem Bible and is considered Biblical Canon by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
Most Protestant denominations disregard any Old Testimate texts that are not present in the Hebrew texts but honestly, what is and is not biblical canon is highly arbitrary and honestly if at least two major denominations consider it canon it should be good enough.
Furthermore, several denominations that don’t consider it canon due still consider it something that should be read and understood, so it would at least be something in the mind of anyone who presents themselves as being educated in the scriptures.
So God loves mosquitoes, rats, fleas, and Bubonic Plague bacilli?
@Markm, Yes. because they are there to keep humans humble.
@markm Kind of missing the point.
The point of quoting that passage is that it establishes that any Christian arguing that someone(Gays, Non-Christians, other races, and in this case Sarnothi) is evil or dangerous because “God Hates it” or “It goes against God’s plan” or “Satan did it” is full of crap because Wisdom states that God created everything, loves everyone, and that such people simply would not exist if God didn’t create them and wouldn’t still be around if he didn’t want them around.
That’s basically what the passage means.
I, being a mortal man, am not qualified to state wht God thinks of any individual thing or even to know whether or not God exists, I’m just pointing out a Bible verse that contradicts just about every Christian Fundie Hate argument I’ve ever seen.
@rater it’s pointless to use a quote from an apocryphal book of scripture that is only used as canon by a single church. I know for a fact it is not in the bible my church uses. Just because God loves the sinner doesn’t mean he doesn’t despise the sin they commit. and if people suddenly ceased to exist after committing a sin god hates, it would make free agency impossible, and would also negate the entire concept of forgiveness. and just because someone is still alive doesn’t mean god approves of the sins they commit, as that would negate the laws and commandments written in the bible.
you quoting a scripture I don’t recognize as truth means absolutely nothing to me. and would mean nothing to everyone else that doesn’t accept an apocryphal book either.
I will confess I did not expect this level of reaction to my comment.
However, the fact I managed to gain this degree of reaction kinda proves my point.
The fact is, when a sufficient number of people have a sufficient amount of faith in a system, with or without evidence, they act in extreme manners, they write scathing lines and harsh arguments back and forth with expectations for others to know the exact words that their beliefs hold true.
Evolution is confirmed, yes, in many ways. Birth defects being inconsistent alone provides innumerable instances of evidence, as do dogs, as do numerous other little things, but many more conservative religions -do- hold as the party line that creationist theory is contradictory, as opposed to improves their particular position, with this argument.
Meanwhile, other religions, local churches, etc, might aid these, much as back in the first crusade, in response to one of the individuals who hijacked the term to try to spread Jewish hate, had many -good- non-Jewish denominational priests -protect- the Jews from the hatred of the more fanatical masses outside.
However, mob mentality -is- a thing. Even nowadays, even in the future, people -will- go stupid at the drop of a hat to support others or harm others based partially on things as little as ‘what color of shirt they wear’ or other such nonentities that don’t actually teach anything beyond who is what ethos.
Is religion bad? No. It is a means of teaching ethics. Is religion great? No. It has its’ limitations, the same as any other source of ethics.
Apologies for the argument I sparked. I will confess I did not, and still do not, properly reread my post to see how it might spark controversy.
Finally someone asks the obvious, glad that’s cleared up at last.
And think this indirectly answers whether sarnothi exist elsewhere too – a few thousand makes me think sarnoth and its colonies is all there is and we shouldn’t expect their atlantis or loch-ness cousins to show up.
There’s also the possibility that they just don’t know about any other Sarnothi colonies, I get the impression from the whole Echo thing, that whatever it is in the city of Sarnoth that Echo’s are echo’s of, were made by their distant ancestor, or by some form of precursor race that made them, and if that’s the case, then there might be other settlements of Sarnothi, and they just don’t know about them, seeing as contact was lost millenia ago, and Sarnothi aren’t exactly made for traveling, what with the fact that they regularly need to moisturize their gills while above water, so unless Sarnothi can live in Saltwater, traveling to another continent wouldn’t exactly be simple for them.
If they have saltwater cousins, then they might just not know about them, the Sarnothi managed to hide until about 20 years before the story’s start, and the ocean is much bigger and deeper than Lake superior, if the Sarnothi’s saltwater cousins are as isolationist as the Sarnothi was, then it’s fully possible that they exist, and just aren’t known to either humans or Sarnothi.
But really the fact the Sarnothi don’t know about other Sarnothi settlements, isn’t much of a proof that they don’t exist, prior to the war they weren’t exactly inclined to ever leave Lake Superior.
Sarnothi Saltwater Cousins= Merfolk! Sailors and Mermaids! Therefore, Saltwater Sarnothi! (Please save the manatees)
deep ones worshipers of DAGON!.
Thing is, “Sarnothi” is kinda a word like “Americans”. See, if the aliens had detained Neil Armstrong on the moon and asked him a few questions, what with language barriers and all that he would likely have explained that he was an American first, as opposed to a “people” or a “male” or a “scientist”. I mean, they put an American flag on the moon, not a world flag. The inhabitants of Lake Windermere and Lake Tanganyika all have their own languages and their own names for themselves. (not canon)
Y’know the hardest part of getting the Sarnothi accepted will be when it comes out that they are GMO – the Europeans of their species will have an particularly difficult time with that – after all the easiest way for Sarnothi’s parallel evolution to exist would be if humans had their DNA manipulated to make the “grow gills” part of their coding to be brought into play, or if they were spliced with actual fish. But that would have happened long, long before our humans got the ability to do that kind of splicing, so perhaps there are aliens somewhere in the story….
They aren’t Grey enough to be aliens, anyway.
Best response, ever! to the question, “Are you a grey alien?”
“I’s periwinkle.”!!
Selkie’s oppositional language is interesting to contrast with Mandy’s language. Someone with a psych BS or MS should do their Ph.D. Thesis on the differences.
The awkwardness of saying that in a room with children in it makes me trust his answer
Oh dear. It’s worse than I thought. “Several thousand” may sound like a lot to the child who asked the question, but as the total population of a species? That’s really small.
Yeah, a human colony living off that lake would have a population of millions, and they live in an urban invironment down there.
cold water lake systems are in North America or say Russia, are NOT resource Dense. They are really much like deserts below about 50 feet. NOT like say the rift lakes of Africa or amazon river systems, Untill you get to semi tropical waters With the exception of the Chesapeake bay and coastal riverine systems. Cold water systems tend to be low resource in terms of food potential and the predators tend to be VERY efficient metabolically. Its kind of amazing that Selkie isn’t somewhat .. adipose for her species due to her higher availability of fats proteins and sugars and lack of swimming exercise and low temp to keep those calories off.
I don’t know if it’s a sustainable population, honestly.
Yeah, I’m thinking Evolutionary Bottleneck issues…
I guess it would make sense that there’s so few, seeing as they’re obligate carnivores. The development of agriculture was what led humans to have their first big population boom, but sarnothi have to rely on fish and giant eels (which are also carnivores). So while we can grow food for ourselves and food to feed livestock, they’d probably have to grow food to feed the food that feeds THEIR food.
you do realize humans have suffered a worse bottleneck don’t you ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
the entirety of human civilization is inbred, to the point that there are recognizable subspecies/races/tribes of homo-sapiens.
Several thousand sarnothi is a perfectly sustainable base to restart a species and civilization from. especially as sarnothi are intelligent and will work together to rebuild their species. this isn’t like trying to get wild animals to breed against their will.
It’s workable, but not very healthy for the population. Then again, they’ve reached a technological point where I imagine diseases are well managed, meaning they have a better chance of recovering sanely from a bottleneck.
I always point those out to people who claim humans are superior… Nope We are the inbred hillbillies of the universe. WE are the family with the GTO on blocks in the overgrown front yard with 2 or 3 dead cars around back and kids running around bare assed and bare foot in the yard.
Only a few thousand total? Dang. They really can’t afford to be killing each other off, genetically speaking. That’s one hell of an evolutionary bottleneck, and they’re only making it worse by dividing the population and having wars.
Unless, of course, Then is lying about the population numbers.
Me: Then, I think the word you should use is “interesting,” not “fun.” Even if it may be less truthful.
Then: (?)
Me: This is an elementary school, after all…
Then: Oh. Right.
Pohl, you just disappointed a lot of rednecks and/or kink fetish types.
Actually, sounds to me like he may have encouraged a few of them. He did just suggest that his Saturday nights would be improved by probings, after all. That’s /gotta/ be enough to rev someone’s engine.
It’s not Bunny-Dr. POHL… it’s Agent Then, from the CIA…
The one time I like Then. Cuz that’s the best response against that question. XD
Welp. At least Andi turned her question more tactful than before. Still seems a little silly.
Honestly, Then may be the perfect person to do this Q&A. Today’s Global Snark Level is Black.
Diplomatic? No. But less threatening in the long run. Or so it seems to me. It makes the Sarnothi relatable to humans who may be trying to find some sort of common ground with them. It shows that their sense of humor is very similar to our own.
My question would be if they aren’t alien survivors of a crash landing, where are they in the fossil record? I will accept “On the sea bed” as an answer. But as the Great Lakes have only been in existence since the end of the last Ice Age, where were they until then?
you do realize that the fossil record has huge gaps in it, right ? There are species still alive today that we thought long extinct, because their fossils vanished from more recent fossil records, they still survived it’s just very difficult to actually make a fossil. a body has to be preserved soon after death for a fossil to even have a hope of forming. meaning it has to be buried in an oxygen free environment, in a situation that will cause the body to slowly be replaced by minerals, or under conditions that would either mummify it, or chemically preserve the body. the problem with this is, that most of the body is composed of soft tissues that readily Burn, dissolve, or decompose, because soft flesh is delicious to other animals, fungi, or bacteria. And under high pressure soft tissue has no problem acting like a liquid, deforming, as the bones or exoskeleton break under the same pressure.
there is also the question, “what do the Sarnothi currently do with their dead?, and what did they historically do?”
Do they bury their dead in the lake bed ?
Do they use their dead to feed the eels or other fish ?
Do they chemically dissolve their dead ?
Do they cannibalize their dead ?
each method would have different results for leaving a fossil or remains.
also there are very few fresh water lakes, that are large enough for a large population of sarnothi to survive, and even fewer that have dried up and left a dry lake bed that could be explored for possible fossils. the only places for scientists to actually find any fossils are all on dry land.
and Sarnothi while their humanoid appearance is evidence that they frequently walked on land through a large portion of their later evolution, the fact they are aquatic amphibians says they still spent most of their evolution in the water. and water is notorious for preventing fossils from forming. even more so when it’s salt water, and you can be sure that the evolutionary ancestors of the current sarnothi used to live in the ocean at some point. and salt water tends to be pretty corrosive to soft tissue, though bones and shells tend to survive well enough to eventually create limestone.
I would say that you are overthinking this, … only I can’t, because you are thinking it through, beautifully! Logically! Thoroughly!
Given what I know from keeping pet fish… its best not to know what happens to dead fish that you don’t get out of the tank immediately.
is the Sarnothi skeletal system Cartilaginous or calciferous? If cartilaginous the simple process of nitrification would explain why there are so few skeletal remains. (Shark remains except for teeth and occasional jaws are very notoriously hard to find)
I would also note that they are a relatively recent evolution as the Great Lakes didn’t even exist until the end of the last glaciation. There is possibly a salt water subspecies out in the Atlantic that migrated there after the glaciers melted. Possibly Atlantis? Given the short timeframe anything could have lived there, and being an aquatic environment, having a fossil or even archaeological record is slim.
I had the same question. And also, where is the fossil record of the previous species that they evolved from? There should be something showing up.
You’ll be searching for a while for that. Speciation isn’t a clear cut change. There isn’t a line between a species and a precursor. Even the concept of extinction is not well understood as the species dying out or mutating (evolving) into something else isn’t all that clear. For example, it wouldn’t shock me if something we identify as a dinosaur may have been an ancestor of modern humans.
Trying to find a clean evolutionary path is impossible because of this blurry differentiation. Futurama has a good clip for this:
https://youtu.be/UuIwthoLies
Yes, I am aware of that, I know evolution isn’t pokemon. However, there should still be precursors in the fossil record.
My question would be if they aren’t alien survivors of a crash landing, where are they in the fossil record? I will accept “On the sea bed” as an answer. But as the Great Lakes have only been in existence since the end of the last Ice Age, where were they until then?
Sorry about the double post, the page appeared to be locked the first time I hit Post Comment
It’s possible that Sarnothi are a branch of homo sapiens (homo sapiens piscis?) that went back to the sea when the rest of us went to land. We’re slowly closing the gaps in the fossil record but there are still gaps and “on the sea bed” or “at the bottom of the worlds largest freshwater lakes” is as good an answer as any for where their fossils might be.
evidence against
1. Sarnothi are not mammals
2. Sarnothi are Aquatic amphibians with gills instead of lungs
3. Sarnothi are not omnivores they are carnivorous
at best they branched off back when our ancestors were still fish or amphibians. there is no way sarnothi branched off after the reptile stage of human evolution.
Hey, I didn’t say it was a perfect answer. 🙂 I was thinking of dolphins and whales when I wrote that, but you’re right: Sarnothi aren’t mammals, properly speaking.
They could still be an as-yet-undiscovered amphibious link. Or even mammalian … platypoose are considered mammals, aren’t they? And they lay eggs but suckle their young. Have fur (hair). And carry poison. The only criteria Sarnothi are lacking, I think, is being warm blooded. They may be a completely new branch of mammalia, if we can classify the platypus as such, why not Sarnothi? Or maybe we do share a super-distant currently unknown amphibious ancestor.
I included this because I thought it was cool. It’s pure coincidence the highlighted bit runs from fish to human. The article that goes with it explains how to track common ancestors and the examples they used were salmon and humans.
https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/content/trace-fish-common-ancestor_1200.png
just because a species is humanoid doesn’t mean it’s mammal or closely related to humans.
While Sarnothi do breast feed, it’s not necessarily milk, and many parts of evolution evolved at multiple times. Eyes have evolved many times, and in different stages of completion. Simple versus compound versus composite being at least three of those evolutions. Some birds such as flamingos secrete a milk like substance that they feed to their young.
Second Sarnothi are cold blooded, meaning they have to have evolved from a cold blooded common ancestor, narrowing it to fish, amphibians, or reptiles.
Third Sarnothi have gills but can breathe air as well as water, narrowing it to an amphibious fish or neotenic amphibian, similar to a Mudskipper or a Axolotls salamander.
fourth given that Sarnothi have 4 limbs, it’s safe to assume that their evolution branched off around the same time that the human ancestral amphibious fish left the oceans for dry land.
does this make sense to you ?
It does make sense, Kuraimizu. Like I said, I knew I didn’t have a perfect answer originally. Based on the chart I posted in my last comment I agree that any common ancestor would have had to diverge during the amphibian stage of evolution. I hadn’t put enough thought into the original response and was being flippant when I mentioned the platypus and “as yet undiscovered” branch of mammals. It’s an interesting thought puzzle though, to try sorting out exactly where the divergence between Sarnothi and Human originated. 🙂
There are two classes of vertebrate that lay their eggs in water: fish and part of the amphibians. (Some amphibians lay their eggs in a wet spot on land.) The Sarnothi life cycle is quite like frogs: eggs laid in water, larva developing as a fish-shaped form in the water, then transforming to the adult form by developing legs and lungs. So it seems most likely that, if Sarnothi are of Earth origin, they either diverged from the other clades as amphibians, or independently developed from fish. (Fish developed lungs and fins strong enough to push them across land at least twice – the ancient ancestor of all tetrapods must have been much like a modern lungfish, but they seem to be unrelated – so a third emergence would be believable.)
Reptilian eggs must not be submerged. E.g., sea turtles have a life cycle inverted from frogs; they live in the water, but must crawl up on the beach to lay their eggs, even though land predators take a terrible toll of both the would-be parents and of the offspring. So Sarnothi are not descendants of the Reptilian-Bird-Mammal clade, unless they reverted to an earlier form of the egg and the earlier life cycle that goes with it, and it’s quite rare for evolution to go that way.
There are two classes of vertebrate that lay their eggs in water: fish and part of the amphibians. (Some amphibians lay their eggs in a wet spot on land.) The Sarnothi life cycle is quite like frogs: eggs laid in water, larva developing as a fish-shaped form in the water, then transforming to the adult form by developing legs and lungs[1]. So it seems most likely that, if Sarnothi are of Earth origin, they either diverged from the other clades as amphibians, or independently developed from fish. (Fish developed lungs and fins strong enough to push them across land at least twice – the ancient ancestor of all tetrapods must have been much like a modern lungfish, but they seem to be unrelated – so a third emergence would be believable.)
Reptilian eggs must not be submerged. E.g., sea turtles have a life cycle inverted from frogs; they live in the water, but must crawl up on the beach to lay their eggs, even though land predators take a terrible toll of both the would-be parents and of the offspring. So Sarnothi are not descendants of the Reptilian-Bird-Mammal clade, unless they reverted to an earlier form of the egg and the earlier life cycle that goes with it, and it’s quite rare for evolution to go that way.
[1] Did Dave ever say Sarnothi have lungs? In any case, something the size of a Sarnothi, or even of a cat, must have lungs. It cannot absorb sufficient oxygen to survive in Earth’s current atmosphere through the skin or by gulping air into an undifferentiated digestive tract.
Even though I don’t know if they’re supposed to be the same person, ‘aliens guy’ looks and talks quite a bit like Big Tammy’s dad (from Strip 259)!
Just…just a random observation >.>
A few thousand has to be an understatement. If not, the gene pool for the sarnothi population is incredibly small. IIRC it takes about ten thousand animals for a healthy pool?
Alcor tell that to humanity… go look up human genome bottlenecks
I’d say that he was playing to the audience… a stereotypical portrayal of an eight year old kid would be confused if Agent Then had given the more accurate numbers of “millions”… but that’s just TOO BIG of a number to mean anything to her… whereas “thousands” conveys the MEANING of a really really HUGE number of people to the KID, and at the SAME TIME, it DOWNPLAYS the REALITY of the “City-State of Sarnoth” being about the same size as the distance from Green Bay to Madison (about 150 miles) having (probably) MILLIONS of people… until said time that the reality sinks in and we (hopefully) get over our xenophobia and racism, and the Government kinda lets slip that, “oh no, that ‘thousands’ number was JUST the REFUGEES… not the WHOLE Population count”…
I wonder how the comment section is going to influence this Q&A section of the story. will be interesting to see what commented ideas Dave uses in the story