Two completely random thoughts
Jan. 30th, 2007 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
herewiss131) So the new invisible guy in Heros is the Ninth Doctor. I didn't recognize him last week, but it was pretty obvious this week once he stopped yelling and started speaking. This lead me to a truly weird chain of reasoning.
A) The man is invisible.
B) The man is a former incarnation of a Time Lord.
C) Maybe this is what happens to prior incarnations after regeneration...they don't get re-used, they get stuck in invisible bodies.
D) This would explain why Invisible Guy seems rather depressed and bitter.
E) This would also explain why the Tardis never works right. There are an ever-increasing number of invisible ex-Doctors meddling with the controls.
...it was at this point that my brain gave up and started looking around for something else to bludgeon into absurdity.
2) In the Darwin-verse, not only does everyone have super-powers (and are fairly buff in a Tarzan-like way), but they're also long-lived too. Why? Because in an environment as harsh as Planet Darwin, it's not enough to have a lot of kids fast and die young like many animals in highly competitive environments do...the kids have to survive too. If Grandma and Grampa are still relatively fit, they can help keep a watchful eye over kiddies while Mom and Dad do other survival related tasks. That means a selective pressure pushing back all those sensence genes, alzheimers, arthritis, etc. Anyone who suffers from those too early has grandchildren that get eaten; and so those weak genes don't get to thrive.
It's really a weird place. Unlike most environments, safety is the primary issue while food is just secondary. Most of the time non-agricultural humans have to devote a fair amount of time for food, but predators are not a daily or hourly occurence. In contrast: Planet Darwin is like a gingerbread forest crowded with rhinos and rabid wolverines.
Some of its parameters I start out with because they're "cool." Others, like this one, just emerge fortuitously. Tweaking things to keep Darwin's population on the knife-edge between "god-like" and "extinct" proves to be really interesting. I honestly don't know if it'll ever be a novel, but as a thought experiment it's damn entertaining. While listening to a piece of music called "Darshan" today I had a vivid mental film-clip of the sort of performing arts a culture with telekinesis might develop. I'm not up to describing it in words today; let's just call it an over-the-top cross between juggling and percussion...in three dimensions...with flaming mallet heads.
A) The man is invisible.
B) The man is a former incarnation of a Time Lord.
C) Maybe this is what happens to prior incarnations after regeneration...they don't get re-used, they get stuck in invisible bodies.
D) This would explain why Invisible Guy seems rather depressed and bitter.
E) This would also explain why the Tardis never works right. There are an ever-increasing number of invisible ex-Doctors meddling with the controls.
...it was at this point that my brain gave up and started looking around for something else to bludgeon into absurdity.
2) In the Darwin-verse, not only does everyone have super-powers (and are fairly buff in a Tarzan-like way), but they're also long-lived too. Why? Because in an environment as harsh as Planet Darwin, it's not enough to have a lot of kids fast and die young like many animals in highly competitive environments do...the kids have to survive too. If Grandma and Grampa are still relatively fit, they can help keep a watchful eye over kiddies while Mom and Dad do other survival related tasks. That means a selective pressure pushing back all those sensence genes, alzheimers, arthritis, etc. Anyone who suffers from those too early has grandchildren that get eaten; and so those weak genes don't get to thrive.
It's really a weird place. Unlike most environments, safety is the primary issue while food is just secondary. Most of the time non-agricultural humans have to devote a fair amount of time for food, but predators are not a daily or hourly occurence. In contrast: Planet Darwin is like a gingerbread forest crowded with rhinos and rabid wolverines.
Some of its parameters I start out with because they're "cool." Others, like this one, just emerge fortuitously. Tweaking things to keep Darwin's population on the knife-edge between "god-like" and "extinct" proves to be really interesting. I honestly don't know if it'll ever be a novel, but as a thought experiment it's damn entertaining. While listening to a piece of music called "Darshan" today I had a vivid mental film-clip of the sort of performing arts a culture with telekinesis might develop. I'm not up to describing it in words today; let's just call it an over-the-top cross between juggling and percussion...in three dimensions...with flaming mallet heads.
