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Xenobiology
19 July 2010 16:28I’ve seen butterflies before. I just haven’t seen butterflies bigger than the car I used to have in my first year of college. There was one right in front of me.
I took Xenobiology at Cambridge. It was a difficult group of courses. Theoretical Biology, for instance, took six years just for a bachelor’s degree. I had to learn not only the biospheres of our own planet and the six known other races in the Inhabited Galaxy, I had to prepare and come up with several possible stable ecospheres different than our own. I came up with a lava planet. Not entirely original but I did go into great depth about how a silicate lifeform comprised of elements we haven’t found yet would be able to survive like a fish in the lava. Total bullshit but I was pretty flowery with the language and my professor loved it. It didn’t hurt that I was sleeping with her.
The Space Travel Commission Authority is pretty picky about who they let off the planet. Humans are classified as Unknowingly Dangerous. The ‘Unknowingly’ part is why we’re still alive. If we were consciously evil, we would have been exterminated. Makes me a little cold to think about that, even still. However, it’s known the galaxy over that if we have viable mating pairs, good food sources, and no punishments, we’ll have babies, feed those babies, and they’ll grow up to have more babies. Exponentially, we’ll breed and take over.
So they only let a few of us out at a time and they make sure we’re educated and in same-sex pairs. Sort of dream come true for the homosexuals among us, I imagine. That’s not me but I can imagine that having sex with someone you love while looking out of the spaceport window at the galaxies during Light-Jump would be pretty amazing.
So I didn’t graduate at the top of my class but I did graduate. I qualified for export and inclusion in the off-world teams.
So now I’m here looking at a butterfly that I could ride. The low gravity of this planet has made the insects larger. Exoskeletons can support these larger biological structures but the inner skeletal structures of humans need to be pressurized to withstand the atmosphere. Otherwise we get the bends.
The sky is green. The insects are fascinating. Myself and my team are in paradise.
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I took Xenobiology at Cambridge. It was a difficult group of courses. Theoretical Biology, for instance, took six years just for a bachelor’s degree. I had to learn not only the biospheres of our own planet and the six known other races in the Inhabited Galaxy, I had to prepare and come up with several possible stable ecospheres different than our own. I came up with a lava planet. Not entirely original but I did go into great depth about how a silicate lifeform comprised of elements we haven’t found yet would be able to survive like a fish in the lava. Total bullshit but I was pretty flowery with the language and my professor loved it. It didn’t hurt that I was sleeping with her.
The Space Travel Commission Authority is pretty picky about who they let off the planet. Humans are classified as Unknowingly Dangerous. The ‘Unknowingly’ part is why we’re still alive. If we were consciously evil, we would have been exterminated. Makes me a little cold to think about that, even still. However, it’s known the galaxy over that if we have viable mating pairs, good food sources, and no punishments, we’ll have babies, feed those babies, and they’ll grow up to have more babies. Exponentially, we’ll breed and take over.
So they only let a few of us out at a time and they make sure we’re educated and in same-sex pairs. Sort of dream come true for the homosexuals among us, I imagine. That’s not me but I can imagine that having sex with someone you love while looking out of the spaceport window at the galaxies during Light-Jump would be pretty amazing.
So I didn’t graduate at the top of my class but I did graduate. I qualified for export and inclusion in the off-world teams.
So now I’m here looking at a butterfly that I could ride. The low gravity of this planet has made the insects larger. Exoskeletons can support these larger biological structures but the inner skeletal structures of humans need to be pressurized to withstand the atmosphere. Otherwise we get the bends.
The sky is green. The insects are fascinating. Myself and my team are in paradise.
tags