This is my fourth post on “modernizing” Traveller. The others are, here, here, and here. The importent bit is that in the last one I mentioned one flaw with the biology of the game. Namely, that it did not take into account how easy it will become for humans to modify their own biology.
Traveller uses a mechanic called Technology Levels to track how sophisticated a culture needs to be before they can enact certain technology, and the original authors in 1977 thought things like controlling the aging process would be the hardest, so only the most advanced technology societies (TL 15) could do it. It is not something that is just around the corner. And they set uplifting other mammals as even more difficult. Yet, controlling gene expression and modifying our own biology is something that is coming fast on the heals of the information age, more like TL 9 than 16.
As an aside, I think they wanted anagathics to be hard to balance their life path character creation system, but we don’t need to do that today—there are other, easier, ways to balance characters.
There is another element of the biological sciences that needs to be woven into Traveller, xenobiology. As part of my “miss-spent” youth, I worked for several years in the laboratory of Sidney Fox who happened to be a world-expert on the biochemical origin of life. Which, aside from being an inherently fascinating subject, is also central to the Traveller setting. I can’t blog a review of all the details of this field of study, but I will hit on a few relevant points.
How common is life in the universe? Or, why are we looking for evidence of life on mars? There is a concept of the stellar ecosphere (or Habitable Zone) which is a space, shaped as a hollow shell, around a star wherein water on the surface of a planet can exist in liquid form. Life appears to have started on Earth within a few hundred million years after the planet formed—very quickly in geologic time. But here’s the rub. For the first few hundred million years of its existence the sun was burning hotter and Mars would have been in the habitable zone—in fact, the Earth might have been too hot to sustain life.
Now old-school origin of life folks imagined that life forming was a freak event with an almost zero change of happening. Fox’s work in the 1950s and 60s showed that this was likely untrue. In fact, the formation of life might be almost a given on any rock with the right collection of elements that is the right distance from its star.
So to prove this, we need to look for life on Mars. If life started to form on Mars, and then froze, it would mean that life almost always forms on planets withing the stellar ecosphere and therefore we should expect life to form frequently on other worlds. In Traveller, we assume this is true. So within a couple thousand light years of Earth there are assumed to be hundreds of planets that have their own, independent, life.
The History of Colonization. Further, in the Traveller “future history” there are several important waves of expansion. The most important is the work done by the mysterious ancients. An alien civilization, 300,000 years before the game (which is about 2,000 years in the future) took humans and transported them to many other planets, for reasons unknown. They also uplifted dogs to create the Vargre.
The game has several other major and minor alien species. Just in the Spinward Marches there are the Aslan and Droyne, both major races with their own world of origin, and there are chirpers and a few other scattered in various adventures published over the years.
The Biochemistry Problem. If one looks at all the different mechanisms that have been proposed over the years for the abiotic origin of life, I would lump them into two groups. The first answers the question, “How did we get here” and deals with the formation of life on Earth, and the second considers mechanisms for the development of life on other worlds. These latter approaches (I’m looking at you Graham Cairns-Smith) talk about other types of life, silicon, clay, or even non-Terrestrial carbon-based.
Fox’s work suggests that non-Terrestrial carbon-based life could very likely have recognizable proteins. And if you look at the thoughts on the subject from Freeman Dyson (the Dyson Sphere guy, presented here), it is reasonable to think that these proteins would have a genetic structure controlling their replication—but even if they did use sugar-based genetics, the sugar moiety would likely be completely different. This means that all these worlds are going to have a completely different biochemical basis.
A Little Background. Life on Earth is a complex web of biochemistry that creates ever more complex structures from reduced carbon--remember those redox reactions from high school chemistry--living systems burn reduced carbon to liberate energy to create new structures of reduced carbon. Because no process is 100% efficient, we have to burn more reduced carbon than we end up making. We might eat 100 calories and make 10 calories worth of new material.
Life exists as a thin layer coating a planet in a field of energy flux.
And life exists at different scales. Within cells there are symbiotic subcellular structures that were once independent living systems that have found their existence within your (yes, you the reader’s) own cells. There are small blocks of genetic material that form viruses. And their are giant whales that live by filtering microscopic organisms from the water they swim in. And all of this life is busy building more of themselves. The autotrophs (mostly plants) are capturing energy from the sun and reducing carbon dioxide from the air, while the heterotrophs (animals and fungi) are taking apart other things to build more of themselves.
And these systems are more or less specialized. Humans can eat all sorts of things, but not everything. Only certain plants can grow up here in Manitoba, while those same plants will be out competed if they try to grow further south.
And this brings us to the Biochemistry Problem. When two carbon-based biochemistries meet, one is likely going to completely disassemble the other—wiping it from the world. Or, the two will be completely incompatible. Neither being able to extract anything from the other.
So if we want humans travelling from one of the human worlds created by the ancients and living off native life forms, they either have to be eating Earth-based life, or the humans have to be modified to eat it—with just the occasional, weird, “Oh, you can eat that” alien thing.
This is going to lead to an interesting set of worlds. Those that you cannot go to, because you will be eaten—likely by unseen microorganisms—and those that have Earth-based life transplanted by the ancients but modified long ago to fit the new environment. And those where Terrestrial life co-mingles with the native life, each mostly ignoring the other. And those where humans have changed themselves to adjust to the new biochemistry.
Conclusions. As I move towards a vision of a solarpunk Traveller, I think I have all my main issues laid out. (But I am just writing this as a go, it is a blog after all.)
In my next post I want to start talking about life and exploration in a post-scarcity society. We need to consider things like, “What resources are important?” and “Why go to another world?” There will be different types of worlds with different biologys. But this is probably enough for now. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and (as always) I welcome comments and questions below.
