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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25669 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

This is what always bugged me about Star Trek, I understand they have this complicated lore that is basically Raelism before it was cool, but still. By the common definition, the frequency of inter-alien reproduction made it clear that all the humanoid species in the galaxy were one species. Vulcans are humans are Klingons are Romulans. Ignoring the fact that they're all just humans in various kinds of prosthetics, of course.

One thing I would like to see explored in science fiction(maybe as a collaborative project somewhere) is a hard sci-fi future where early human colonization efforts led to speciation and the different species interacting with each other in the distant future after some kind of sea change in frequency of interactions.

The GURPS Transhuman Space series may qualify. In this setting, set in year 2100, many different groups of space colonists have engaged in extensive genetic modification. There is no FTL, and the setting is limited to the Solar System.

You might enjoy All Tomorrows

This is such a thing that there is TVTropes article about it.

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