Intergalactic Summit

Could you provide your sources on that ? I did not know... I am interested to learn more about it.

Thank you for sharing. I have already read a lot of those, but I am always glad to find new ones.

My apologies if I was not concise enough. I referred mostly to the fact that our biochemistry would not be native to any known planet in New Eden... What makes you say so ?

Okay, so there's a well-documented "split" in the species extant across known space between species which share certain genetic, biochemical and mitochondrial markers with humanity, and those that don't (the latter being the vastly larger group). Common-origin thinkers - myself included - describe the two sides of this split as "anthropogenic" and "xenogenic" species - life forms which came from the same place that humans did, and the native "alien" life forms, respectively. (Yes, I know we're technically the aliens if we came from elsewhere, but the point is to describe how these things exist in relation to us.)

Slaver Hounds, Fedos, Hanging Long-Limbs, Charisocos, Shiksi and so on are all xenogenic species - none of them share a common evolutionary history with humanity.

Take the Charisoco as an example. Most people just call them "mammals", but in fact that's wildly inaccurate. One of the prerequisites for properly being a mammal is to also be a Synapsid (distinguished from other amniotes by having a temporal fenestra, an opening low in the skull roof behind each eye, leaving a bony arch beneath each.)

Humans are Synapsids. Charisocos are not, and this indicates that they definitely do not belong to the order Mammalia, as we do, because mammals are synapsid by definition. Sure, they may be warm-blooded, furry, four-legged and give birth to live young, which is the layperson's definition for a mammal, but cladistically speaking, they're the product of a whole different tree of life.

That's the fairly simple macroscopic stuff, and it helps us identify the large bulk of species which DO share common heritage with us. There are other things like which body structures form first during gestation, percentage of shared DNA, relative composition of certain tissues, the apparent total absence of any anthropogenic species or their precursors within any known planetary fossil record, and so on.

It's all well documented in the journals I mentioned... and it's exactly what you'd expect to see if we didn't evolve here.

"definitely proven" is not something that ever happens in science. There is only "has survived everything we can throw at it".

And I'm sorry, but External Common Origin is the lone theory that HAS survived everything we can throw at it. There's no "taking for granted" here, any more than you presumably take it for granted that there are five digits on your hand.



Because every temperate life-bearing world in New Eden has been, if not colonised, then at least surveyed, bar the ones in Jove space. The databases are fat and heavy with information on tens of billions of species, most of them gene-sequenced, all of them taxonomically sorted. A field botanist's kit is quite capable of performing those basic functions and uploading the results via fluid router, which means that the databases are pretty well constantly updating as new species are discovered.

One interesting correlation that's very apparent is that those few planets where the majority of life forms are anthropogenic are also the handful that were terraformed.

Caldari Prime is the most notable example, and yet even that has a few "native" xenogenic species, the most prominent being the Kresh trees. The working hypothesis that I subscribe to there is that they're a transgenic species designed to play a role in the terraforming process that were supposed to be killed off and didn't. It certainly explains how toxic they are to those humans who aren't adapted to them.

Short version: we couldn't have come from a planet we terraformed, and everything else is known to have xenogenic native ecosystems. How do we know? Because we've gone there and looked.

Now, that could just mean that our origin is somewhere in W-space, or even that the ancestral homeworld of humanity was located in the New Eden system and became a cloud of hurtling interstellar asteroids when the Point Genesis Event happened. But we know for as close to a solid fact as science ever gets (p<0.001 if you want to get technical) that no charted temperate world is the ancestral homeworld of the human race.

And because the only worlds we've ever thus properly charted are in the New Eden cluster...



This bit, I'm afraid, is factually incorrect. It's not even a distinction between "two" sides of a divide, it's the distinction between every tree in a forest. Trees that are growing close together may get their upper branches intertwined, but you can still pick them apart and, with care, identify which tree each branch belongs to.

In this analogy, anthropogenic species would be like a large liana, or some other climbing plant that covers the whole forest and covers all the trees. Not a tree itself, always sharing space with the trees, but still very obviously distinct if you know what to look for. What you're suggesting here is that after a long enough time, that liana becomes indistinguishable from the tree it's growing on, which just isn't the case.

As for "theories on parallel evolution", well... have you ever heard of the recurrent laryngeal nerve?

This is the nerve that carries impulses from the brain stem to the larynx, the vocal cords. In other words, in humans its end points are a whole ten centimeters apart, from the back of the neck to the front.

The nerve itself travels this negligible distance via our chest cavity, looping around the heart. It's about six times longer than it needs to be and takes a completely pointless detour.

Now, there's no good reason for this. It's just a fluke, a relic of the blind iterative nature of evolution. There's no inherent survival advantage nor disadvantage to having the nerve that controls your vocal cord lassoing around your aorta, that's just how we happened to grow up, and it's true for every synapsid in the cluster. It's not true of the Charisoco, nor the slaver hound.

"mold theory" parallel evolution hypotheses overlook the fact that our bodies are riddled with such little curiosities - quirks that had no good reason to come out the way they did. There's no good reason for us to be majority right-hand dominant. There's no good reason for our retinas to be configured in such a way that the nerves are in front of the light-sensitive cells they're attached to. There's no good reason why human embryos form the anus first - it could just as easily be the mouth. And yet all of those are constant not just to us, but to all anthropogenic species.

Far-fetched ideas about so-called "parallel evolution" simply can't explain the existence of little biological tics like those.

That is hardly technical, but I assume like I did above with 'definitely proven' this is a slip of the tongue ?



Well, I do not see why not ? You keep stating ideas as evidence and facts where they are not, sir. You are making things up, and that itself, is rather insulting to science and knowledge.



Well yes, it shows a difference between your Charisoco and slaver hound, and other species that probably do not come from the same ancestry. It hints at a difference of ancestry - and other similar hints would be needed to be anything close to conclusive on the matter - but does not prove anything else.

I am also afraid, sir, that you are mixing up everything when introducing societal evolution and human sciences (right hand dominance) with phylogenetics and taxonomy...

As for observable facts ( 'quirks' as you say) that apparently make no sense, and referring myself to your judicious remark about me being inaccurate in your opening statement, by saying that some 'quirks' do not make any sense does not make it true the slightest. It does not make any sense for you, or for our current science, but that does not mean that it does not make sense stricto sensu. After all, to take another example, it took us eons to understand what real use the mere human appendix has. People - like you - continued to tell around that it made no sense and that it was it, because they could not put into question the true extent of their limited knowledge to acknowledge the fact that they remained ignorant on some matters.

You are the only one here using such radical stances as "it is undeniable", "we know for solid fact", where there are truly none.

Down with this sort of thing.

Forgive me but that is not proof you are talking about, but just theory. That theory is the Theory of Common Origin... I agree with you that it is a solid one and offers good arguments as to why.

However, there are other theories, like Synchretism, that are no less solid and offer very different outcomes, although based on the same facts (of which the extra galactic origin is not part of). And yes, I am no fan of the Mold Theory myself as I find it a bit too far stretched and offering very little facts to back it up (although offering very little flaws as well, which is very convenient...).

I have read papers, scientific articles, and journals. But I happen to have also read a lot of the Synchretist ones...

I am just saying that you uh... seem to jump to conclusions.

Maybe we are also misunderstanding each other, and please accept my apologies if that is the case...

There is more of a debate than I realized could have been supported by the facts as I understand them. I am missing some detail. In order for it to not be known that we are not native to a known world, there would have to be a known world on which we at least appear to be native.

Is there such a world?

I realize that there may be an "unknown" world on this side of the EVE Gate to which we are native.

Is the probability of discovering such a world like rolling dice (each roll is independent); or, is the probability of discovering a previously unknown world to which we are native affected by the fact that within so many light years of all known positions of our species, we have found no world to which it is native?

Whatever you say...

We still aren't done exploring this galaxy and already there's thoughts of going to another?

As for the Drifters, they are human the same way the Jovians are human: just barely. They had, far as we see it, genetically engineered themselves to an extent beyond the dreams of Sansha's Nation, and they just went and augment themselves further with cybernetics to an extent beyond the, again, dreams of Sansha's Nation.