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Old 05-26-2018, 10:22 PM   #11
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: ORICHALCUM UNIVERSE Sidebar: Multisapients

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

Of course there was more than one world upon which the Familiar Eldren established Multisapient settlements. Originally, there were nine such planets, widely spread across the galactic spiral. On three of them, the unwilling and uncomprehending transportees failed to adapt sufficiently well and died out.

The other six followed varying paths, just as the enormously more numerous Homosapient worlds were following different paths. In all cases the Multisapients remained a single species, but they took widely diverging paths with regard to 'society' and technological development. On the first world we discussed above, eventually events culminated in the rise of a single collective to fill the entire planet, though this took tens of thousands of Terran years.

Other worlds experienced different paths of development. On one planet, the Eldren established a few collectives which expanded to number in the tens of millions, but for whatever reason, their technological development languished and they had hardly advanced beyond Neolithic levels of development even after the passage of tens of millennia, and the individual collectives numbered, for the most part, no more than a few hundred members. At the same time that the first world we saw was waging nuclear wars, this world saw various collectives battling each other with stone axes and spears.

Another world made a most unpromising start, its settlement consisting of just one collective, on a world that was less inviting for hominid life forms than most of the chosen colonies. This single collective came within a narrow breadth of dying out several times, but survived by the narrowest of margins and grew and fissioned into new collectives, and in time this world saw a thriving Multisapient population with thousands of collectives.

Yet another world was interesting in that it had little in the way of continents, but rather was mostly covered in ocean, dotted with thousands of islands of modest size, with the largest land masses only slightly larger than Britain. On this world, the Eldren established a number of settlements, each on a different island, and for thousands of years the oceanic barriers meant that the collectives on the islands had little contact with each other.

On this planet, instead of a single history, the species had a fractured history, with many islands developing in near-isolation until seafaring technology could bridge long ocean distances. By that point, many islands were occupied by a single large collective, and often had been so occupied for ages, while other islands had a few or several such, and some had many. Each island had almost been like a world unto itself for tens of millennia.

Of all the six successful Multisapient worlds, the one we first observed was the most 'successful' in the sense of achieving the largest population and highest level of 'conventional' technology at the earliest date. As we have noted, they/it had achieved nuclear technology by 24,000 B.C., and a single, unified collective filled the entire planet by 19,500 B.C.

At that point, though, something interesting happened. The rate of change on this world slowed down enormously. There were various reasons for this, but the most important one was that the entire planet was home to what amounted to a single person. It was a very peculiar sort of person, by Homosapient standards. It was a person of vast knowledge, vast intellect, spread across hundreds of millions of bodies, possessed of vast arrays of skills and talents, but still a single mental entity.

Now that single entity had a world to itself (made up of both male and female 'members, a Multisapient collective is itself genderless), had achieved a state of effectively perfect safety, perfect comfort, and perfect security, and unlimited uncontested access to the resources of the entire planet gave that entity what was for practical purposes unlimited wealth.

A single human or near-human in such a situation would still have human needs and wants that would probably make contentment elusive. Most especially, of course, a single human with a world to himself or herself and a lifespan of millennia would likely be tormented by loneliness.

A Multisapient collective is not, however, either human or near-human. For all the physical and genetic similarities of the physical forms, the mentalities of Genus Homo and Genus Nonhomo are very, very alien. Indeed, it was precisely this physical similarity and mental dissimilarity that led taxonomists, when they learned of the existence and nature of Multisapients, to christen their Genus with such a derivative name. Though they are closer genetic relatives than even the great apes, they are most definitely and emphatically not human, nor even near-human.

Some Multisapient collectives display something comparable to, or at least parallel to, the Homosapient desire for company and social interaction, with other collectives. Others are almost fanatically 'isolationist'. Some vary back and forth. Some form a close bond with another collective and remain hostile to others, but in all cases the nature of the relationships is somewhat alien to anything Homosapients experience.

Indeed, in some limited ways the mind of a chimp or a gorilla, or even a dog or a cat, is less alien to Homosapient thought processes than a Multisapient collective. At least these other mammal species have some limited concept of 'self' or 'I', tied to a single perspective and form. The sense of Self of a Multisapient collective is radically unlike anything in Homosapient experience.

In the case of our greatest collective, contently occupying its entire world, loneliness simply was not an applicable concept.

To be continued...
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Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 05-26-2018 at 10:26 PM.
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