One Million Yrs of Evolution... · 9:42pm March 2nd
Struggling a bit with the time frame I made up in my fic (average Samble L).
Trying to research past human evolution and have been screwed over a bit by my own doing. I hadn't fully thought out that something like 1-10 thousand yrs and 1 million yrs were. Uh. Very different. It sort of had to be that long (seeing as at minimum, Voyager will take 40k yrs to pass closer to another star), but I've realized that speculating 1mil yrs of human evolution into the future as a layman isn't. My strong suit? More so even than the already pre-existing science aspects.
I'd really rather not make some sort of gross/terrifying eldritch horror evolution a la the narrator at the end of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. I mean, ancient human ancestors, while they didn't look like "modern" humans, weren't some sort of nasty looking abomination. They had the general "shape" of a person and are recognizable as humans, albeit lean more towards the primate side (homo erectus).
Those were around as late as 200k yrs ago...which is 1/5 of the time in the future this is set.
I think you can probably see the problem here.
While speculations about future evolution can be found online, most of it covers maybe 100k yrs at most, not a million yrs or more. I was thinking some sort of semi-artifical state. Not a hive mind, but a civilization where the people (in the sense of bodies) are mostly artifical/robotic. I'm mostly thinking of this based on a John Michael Godier video I watched awhile ago, where a friendly "hello" from aliens might be very unnerving if we found out their whole civilization was entirely artifical, especially if there was implication that they were once biological, but they didn't explain on how this change happened.
I could make a doomer ending and be like "the ponies found Earth but everyone had died, the end" but that would be a crazy mood shift and isn't what I want. I originally got the inspo for this fic from the song "Absent Hosts" off the album "Unreal Estate" — a filk (space folk) song entailing an alien race finding Voyager, coming to Earth to reply, but finding out that the whole population is dead from nuclear war, and has been dead probably since before the probe was even located. But I'd rather not have the story end with some downer, unexpected ending like "humanity killed itself with no survivors, the ponies are sad, lol". And the song is a bit open ended/has a silver lining anyways that implies it's possible some of humanity survived the carnage.
However.
I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I can either make a shot in the dark evolution speculation decision and just say something batshit, or I could try to toe the line and make future humans just more "advanced" "modern" humans. I'm leaning towards the latter. I'd like humans to be recognized as humans and not some creepy eldritch monsters, and any speculah that far in the future would be guesswork anyways (even moreso than usual). If humanity survives that long we'd probably be another species, but finding out What is the problem.
Sorry for the ramble here. I have part of the chapter done but this is holding me up. If it makes up for it, the human character here has one major complaint in the chapter — she has a cold. Why? Honestly just because I find the idea that modern humans can split the atom, create mini black holes, and break the sound barrier...but can't prevent colds, to be funny. Especially in the context of humans a million years in the future. POV you are a future human that destroys asteroids from your spaceship but still get mildly inconvenienced by a nanovirus.
There are several routes you could take here and all would be worthwhile.
But my favorite idea is that the humans left behind something for any visitors who may find Voyager and arrive well after they've...moved on in whatever evolutionary direction you end up taking
My absolute favorite idea would be an AI module that starts in with "HI! I'm Twilight Sparkle..."
If it's been millions and millions of years, maybe you could have had humanity turn into energy people, like that one episode of stargate
Well, homo erectus lasted as a species for… Geeze… Upwards of 1.8 million years. I thought it was only around 1 million… They went through a few subspecies, but then again we are technically h. s. sapiens… Our species has only been around for about 300,000 years. Of course, it’s quite likely we’d have spread some ways out of the solar system by then.
You could always come up with some kind of big event that happened that slowed or delayed humanities evolution.
Maybe they met aliens before and were almost wiped out because of it, then humanity would be wary of any other aliens.
Or maybe some kind of solar flare wiped out all electronics on earth leading to a time of anarchy.
Maybe most of humanity decides to entomb most of its population in underground bunkers with cryo freezers in order to survive some crazy event, then the ponies get to wake them up.
I think there are a few ways you could do it and not have humanity be crazy evolved.
Hahah, it sounds like you have a lot of idea competing for space in your story, and it sounds like you're already somewhat educated on the topics you're trying to take on. I'm not sure you'll be able to find a way to reconcile all of the things except to pick an appealing combo and try it.
Personally, I like the idea of the humans still struggling with the common cold. I think that could be pretty cute.
5770931
I mean, a lot of scifi horror stories have tropes like "wouldn't it be really scary and messed up if, say, the ice in the Artic melted (bad) and it let a frozen virus we have no immunity to escape (worse), and said virus is highly contagious, lethal, and/or has terrifying symptoms (awful)". The idea of an Ancient Virus plaguing humanity, but said virus is more annoying than scary (like a cold) is funny to me.
5770582
I've seen hypothetical posts about alien life that say things around the line of "the scariest/weirdest extraterrestrial life we could find would just be humans, on another world, but not from Earth" — especially with the implications and confusion (how did they get there, how are there identical copies of modern humans out there that we didn't know of, were they "us" from another dimension, etc). Ponies arriving on Earth to find that some version of EQ ponies are already there, especially if they were copies of preexisting ones, may be equally scary to them.
I don't think you need to have an evolution of humans. There are plenty of examples of a species staying virtually the same for much longer than a million years. As long as the environment stays the same, so will the species. And humans have developed the strategy of changing the environment to suit our needs. At this point in human history, we are not evolving, our technology is.
If you want to give some changes to humans. Make them taller or shorter dependant on the gravity of the colony planet they come from, extend the life expectancy on average, and go about tech based augmentation how tattoos and piercings are used today. And the technology, go wild, do what ever you want. Just keep in mind that everything we make serves a purpose, and that purpose can be as stupid as you want.