Genies!

They must have been for Zanzibar, LOL.

KNick wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:I'm not sure this is the correct topic but her goes.

In The Stray there is mention of someone riding a horse and that made me wonder if animals, both pets and working types, were also modified for the heavier gravity of the 3 MBS planets.

Any thoughts of textev on anything of this nature.


T&R
GJS

The only direct textev that I can recall off hand is the mention of modified goats one of the YA novels. I can't remember if it was the second half of ABF or Fire Season.

George J. Smith wrote:I'm not sure this is the correct topic but her goes.

In The Stray there is mention of someone riding a horse and that made me wonder if animals, both pets and working types, were also modified for the heavier gravity of the 3 MBS planets.

Any thoughts of textev on anything of this nature.


T&R
GJS

A couple of nits.

1. Only Sphinx has a significantly higher gravity. It is at 1.35g. Manticore and Gryphon are at 1.01 and 1.05 respectively. Both of those are nearly imperceptible.

2. I don't think that anybody was modified spicificly for Sphinx. After the plague years quite a few people with heavy grav mods did move there, but there has never been any mention of a "Sphinx modification."

To answer your question: While horse sizes can and do very greatly, ridding horses are usually between 500 and 600kg, and some draft horses toping out at 1000kg. According to Wikipedia, the average weight for an American, where a lot of the colony came from, is 80.7kg. That is only 16% of the smaller horse or 8% of the large draft horse. I suspect that you could carry an extra 7 kilograms around, resting on your shoulders, even at 1.35 gravitys. While a modified horse might be useful, I don't think it is really necessary.

We don't have any data on it but I suspect that Sphinx is on the lower end of planets that are considered heavy grav. If it were up to me, I would delineate between earth like and heavy grav at 1.15 or 1.2 or somewhere there abouts.

If the alignment is so crazy about genetically uplifting the human species, then they would examine all the different mutations and changes that have poped up during diaspora, we know they used the slaves they produced as a testing nase, so those unique peple would be unique genetic samples to be collected.
I wonder if they have attempted to learn how to alter getetics after a human is born and grown to adult hood. THeoretically viruses and nanites could alter genes, byt it would be a long process to achieve.

The image of the Alignment collecting specimens from thousands of human colonized planets for testing and dissection puts a whole new spin on UFOs and Alien Abduction. A very scary one.
We have met the enemy and he is us.

Brigade XO wrote:The image of the Alignment collecting specimens from thousands of human colonized planets for testing and dissection puts a whole new spin on UFOs and Alien Abduction. A very scary one.
We have met the enemy and he is us.

Thandi Palane state that "Manpower" hasn't carried out slaver raids in centuries in Crown of Slaves.

Brigade XO wrote:The image of the Alignment collecting specimens from thousands of human colonized planets for testing and dissection puts a whole new spin on UFOs and Alien Abduction. A very scary one.
We have met the enemy and he is us.

Genetic samples collected using anal probing?

I wonder how much non-human DNA Manpower has experimented with. If I were to go looking for the best heavy metal tolerance for example, I would look at extremophiles (microbes evolved for heavy metal environments). Translation is an enormous problem. Genes from microbes wouldn't necessarily function in the same manner in higher species. And then there is the problem with side effects, what exactly would genes from a single celled organism do in multicelled species? There are 1000s of different cell types in a human, would they function the same in all of them? At least being from earth they have the same basic biochemistry, if manpower really wanted to get creative they could mix alien and human DNA. I'd be very surprised if they haven't experimented with at least some of the above, after all in their minds that's in part what slaves are for.

biochem wrote:I wonder how much non-human DNA Manpower has experimented with. If I were to go looking for the best heavy metal tolerance for example, I would look at extremophiles (microbes evolved for heavy metal environments). Translation is an enormous problem. Genes from microbes wouldn't necessarily function in the same manner in higher species. And then there is the problem with side effects, what exactly would genes from a single celled organism do in multicelled species? There are 1000s of different cell types in a human, would they function the same in all of them? At least being from earth they have the same basic biochemistry, if manpower really wanted to get creative they could mix alien and human DNA. I'd be very surprised if they haven't experimented with at least some of the above, after all in their minds that's in part what slaves are for.

Indeed. Completely unethical, but that is not something Manpower or the MA care a tiddly about. And they do so love playing God, how could they resist? Their agenda is not about uplifting humanity like they like to pretend, never really has been. It has been, and still is, about feeding their own megalomania and control freakness. To that end, of course they would tinker with anything and everything they can possibly imagine and get their hands on to tinker with, in as many ways as possible.

Who knows what results may lurk on their hidden worlds? Or how many failed experiments they've terminated as necessary. ...or what may have escaped their control... perhaps even unbeknownst to them. Could be anything from a virus to nano to... the mind boggles. Whatever the author cares to drop on us.

There actually is a mention of what Biochem is describing, though I don't recall exactly where. There is a mention that Mesa had managed to actually acquire a treecat in an effort to study it's telempathic abilities in order to determine if that trait could be inserted into humans. (Don't let Mesa figure our what you can do Honor, or they may try that experiment again...) However, the 'cat died shortly after capture, though they still had enough cells to allow them to clone it.

Borealis wrote:There actually is a mention of what Biochem is describing, though I don't recall exactly where. There is a mention that Mesa had managed to actually acquire a treecat in an effort to study it's telempathic abilities in order to determine if that trait could be inserted into humans. (Don't let Mesa figure our what you can do Honor, or they may try that experiment again...) However, the 'cat died shortly after capture, though they still had enough cells to allow them to clone it.

They may have failed with treecats, but what did they succeed with?