RE: Email

>From: Beth.Fulton@csiro.au
>Reply-To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
>To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
>Subject: RE: Email
>Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 16:42:01 +1100
>
>G'day,
>
> > >Preliminary concept sketches of newfound allies...
>
>Look pretty cool, he may want to get hold of an invertebrate biology
text
>and have a flick through some of the weirder phyla for further
inspiration.

Sounds good, I'll pass this along to him.

> >> Inverted-triangle cross-section provides stability in windy
> >> conditions.
>
>Assuming they remain dorso-ventrally flattened and close to the ground
>right?

right.

> >> Flat dorsal surface provided ancestors with protection
> >> against airborne predators.
>
>Truish - assuming they don't get a wide enough grip to use the shape to
>actually hook in (broad top and tapering sides so if can get across top

>then
>shut hold then harder to dislodge). They'd have to watch out for
burrowing
>preds though (which I'd expect more of in dense atmospheres as if
>underground then free from wind effects etc)

good point.

> >> Metal-based biochemistry.
>
>Sounds cool and Mercury blood isn't too weird.

cool.

> >> Exoskeleton...
>
>This may well limit their size unless, for instance, they've come up
with
>some tricks for their equivalent of respiration that the arthropods on 
>Earth
>have missed.

I'm going to suggest to him more of an armor-plated endoskeletal
creature, 
vis-a-vis toirtoises, armadillos, pangolins, & certain dinosaurs.

> >> Possible biological ramifications to consider:
> >>1) their unique technologies,
>
>Like what?

Non-metallic building materials, for one.

> > combined with the overwhelming difficulty of
> > going from a high-pressure environment into a vacuum,
>
>You may be surprised how resilient some animals can be about this.
While
>many deep ocean animals do "pop" if brought to the surface, others can
>survive and thrive at the surface as long as they're brought up slowly
in
>the first place. It may well be more a case of not being able to make
fast
>transitions rather than no transitions.

The concern was more for their crafts' ability to make the transition
than 
the creatures.	related to the spaceship/sub discussion, and the fact
that 
they'd have to hold in several more atmospheres than a human ship. 
While 
overcomable, it might mean they have to develop better structural 
techniques, as well as rely on heavy energy fields.  And when one of
their 
ships decompresses, it will do it more spectacularly.  Better 
shileds/armor/hulls, direr consequences to hull breaches.  Any
suggestions 
for game play?

> >> Wood all be done with energy fields.
>
>Not a bad idea though.
>
> >>3)slow thinkers:
>
>OK this one I don't understand... not saying its not just fine, just
don't
>understand the logic of it ;)

As I said to Karl, less dense neural nets mean their thinking, while not

linear, is closer to linear than ours.	Therefore, I'm thinking that
they'd 
have faster reaction times to situations they've trained for, but be a 
littlw more deliberate and less able to improvise on the fly than
humans.

Brian B2

"The Irish are the only race of people on Earth for which psychoanalysis
is 
of no use."

				 - S. Freud

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