Thread: Why Dirigibles?
View Single Post
Old 05-12-2018, 02:31 PM   #28
AlexanderHowl
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Default Re: Why Dirigibles?

An alternative design would be to have dirigibles being the product of alien biological science. Perhaps aliens arrived millions of years ago and, after a failed colonization effort, left behind biological dirigibles. Every spring, they migrated from the tropics to the Arctic to take advantage of the long arctic summer. Every fall, they migrated from the Arctic to the tropics to winter away in the tropics. There could even be distinct populations for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the Americas (I choose the Americas to minimize historical divergence).

The biological dirigibles would be the products of alien genetic engineering of Earth life and are mobile plant-animal hybrids that use photosynthesis to extract hydrogen from water for floatation, use natural sails for propulsion, and use tentecles to browse the tree tops and fish for sustenance. They would breed with sexual reproduction before planting the resulting seeds in the tropical earth.

In order to make them more useful, the aliens would have given them equivalent intelligence to herbivores so the aliens could domesticate them, a trait which early Native Americans would have learned to exploit. Tribes would ride their domesticated biological dirigibles and use them for trade and war. Now, imagine a world where Europeans encounter Native Americans that have domesticated the biological dirigibles and ride them from the tropics to the Arctic (or Antarctic for the Southern Native Americans).

How would the Europeans have fared against aerial opponents? How long would it take the Europeans to steal the seeds and plant them in tropical Africa or tropical Asia to help them with colonization and trade? What impact would they have had on modern history?
AlexanderHowl is offline   Reply With Quote