Human evolution IN SPACE

[Dangerious P. Cats]

So I'm working on a campaign built around space exploration where nearly all of the "aliens" encountered are evolved humans (the players will be modern humans, think of it sort of like star trek except with evolved humans instead of aliens). In some cases they will be humans who have evolved to live in drastically different environments, in other cases humans who have been subject to selective breeding imposed the state, psedo-religious bodies or just social custom. I'm trying to come up with ideas on what this would result in. How might a society try and selectively breed itself based on different social pressures and how might living in radically different environments cause humans to evolve?

[Nereidalbel]

How long has humanity been colonizing space? Any major changes would take tens or hundreds of generations.

Populations on low-gravity world will tend to be taller, while high-gravity worlds lead to shorter members.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility for humans to expand their visible spectrum.

[Dangerious P. Cats]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

How long has humanity been colonizing space? Any major changes would take tens or hundreds of generations.

Populations on low-gravity world will tend to be taller, while high-gravity worlds lead to shorter members.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility for humans to expand their visible spectrum.

I'm assuming sufficient time for things to be a little crazy. With my current group the exact length of time will probably be a matter of serious discussion so I'm going to let them work it out (especially given that two of them are biologists).

[DangerousThing]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

How long has humanity been colonizing space? Any major changes would take tens or hundreds of generations.

Populations on low-gravity world will tend to be taller, while high-gravity worlds lead to shorter members.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility for humans to expand their visible spectrum.

Genetic engineering could do more in as little as two or three generations if genetic engineering is good enough and there are valid computer models of the human genome and the resulting changes.

[DangerousThing]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

I'm assuming sufficient time for things to be a little crazy. With my current group the exact length of time will probably be a matter of serious discussion so I'm going to let them work it out (especially given that two of them are biologists).

One way of doing this is to have had a major war or just a change in the economy such that space travel was politically unreasonable for a long time.

And changes can start from simple discoveries. Perhaps somebody develops a small device that can easily power a large house really inexpensively. The power companies go under, then the banks go under, then the economy crashes world wide. The third world countries may be the ones that come out on top because they may not have as much invested in a large centralize power infrastructure.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

I'm assuming sufficient time for things to be a little crazy. With my current group the exact length of time will probably be a matter of serious discussion so I'm going to let them work it out (especially given that two of them are biologists).

Absent genetic engineering, we're talking tens of thousands of years for anything terribly significant, so I'd assume advanced biotech.

[Mike_H]

the TV show Andromeda was very much like this but with a few species of alien. The concept was that te commonwealth had fallen and communication and travel was cut off between worlds. I suggest trying to find it as a source of ideas.

[Dustin]

I too would go with genetic manipulation rather than straight evolution. Zero-gravity and aquatic adaptations of various sorts seem inevitable, as do hermaphroditism and asexuality. Various approaches to intelligence augmentation could produce interesting divergence.

[Proteus]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

How might a society try and selectively breed itself based on different social pressures and how might living in radically different environments cause humans to evolve?

You can always go with some familiar old tropes, based on taking the extreme of planetological or social trends:

• On a water-world, you might get selkies (seal-like parahumans).
• On a cold world with declining technology (perhaps because of a damaged colony ship on its last legs?) you might get werewolves (furred parahumans with switchable hunting reflexes).
• Some high-gravity worlds with active vulcanism might produce stocky, strong parahumans with filter lungs and a tendency toward hemophilia (because of their high-pressure circulatory systems). I'd call them "dwarves", but I'm hitting way too many fantasy correspondences here. :)
• A low-gravity world with a thick atmosphere (perhaps a terraformed moon) might find its cultural and economic elite granting themselves wings, until it spread to become a general phenomenon.
• Worlds with thin atmospheres (and no hope of terraforming, for whatever reasons) might yield parahumans with barrel chests, fur (to avoid radiating as much heat), nictating membranes (to avoid drying of the eyes), etc.
• Systems without habitable planets might get humans totally adapted for space habitats in zero-g (see Bujold's "quaddies", with legs transformed to arms) or even life in vacuum (see the "Void Dancer" parahuman, I think it is, from GURPS Bio-Tech).
• On a world settled (or overcome) by doctrinaire feminists, you might get amazons (idealized female parahumans), and men might be reduced to unintelligent parasites (as with the angler fish) or eliminated entirely through parthenogenesis or artificial reproduction.
• The reverse works, too: a society full of men, with reproduction conducted either artificially or through sub-sentient women turned into genetically engineered "brood cows" otherwise kept out of sight and out of mind.
• A highly regulated, bureaucratized culture with no social mobility might end up like Aldous Huxley's novel [i]Brave New World[i], with deliberately bred classes of workers from Alpha executives down to Epsilon elevator operators (or something else, given current technology). A more familiar take on the idea is H.G. Wells' Morlocks and Eloi (or, at least, the way they were originally intended to work, rather than how it came out) from The Time Machine. A scarier take might resemble termite "culture".
• On the other hand, idealistic communists might produce a culture in which everyone is an identical clone and differences are eschewed.
• Low-tech fetishists (though obviously not averse to using geneering to accomplish their ends) with a thing for folk tales might breed a race of medievalist farmers, physically imposing to live under primitive technology and economy, intellectually blinkered to make them incapable of envisioning or accepting technology or behavior beyond the traditional (the Hidebound disad to the max!), and perhaps with a few other fairy-tale "tweaks" like the ability to hibernate if food is insufficient, or regenerate digits or other wounds to avoid scars, or summon up massive adrenaline-fueled feats of strength in dire situations.

So there's a few, some of them admittedly among the obvious and traditional.

[Nosforontu]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Absent genetic engineering, we're talking tens of thousands of years for anything terribly significant, so I'd assume advanced biotech.

Yes and no, it depends a bit on just how selective they are with their initial colony populations/immigration, and how strong an effect the colonies environment plays on their survival. It also of course depends on what you mean by significant.

While I agree with your time scale for anything Exotic/supernatural (barring a strong exotic/supernatural environment in the colony). I could see colonies with a very small genetically screened initial population and with strong immigration rules developing very differently from the rest of humanity.

If your initial colonist were selected from Olympic Level Athletes, and the environment of the colony really requires very athletic/fit people to survive then your colony is probably going to have a fairly high preponderance of people with various Athletic Talents. They will probably also have a higher Health Attribute/Dex/ or Strength scores as well. Just because the initial genetic starting pool might exclusively be composed of the top 1% of people in athletics in the world.

You could of course set the criteria differently and get different results as long as your starting population is not generic humans but humans selected from the greater population because they all share trait x or lack traits y. As a bit more crude example if your colony is composed elusively of Asians then none of them are going to be blondes or red heads barring extreme environmental factors on the colony world.