By the time I was about 5 years old I was aware of the mystery of our human origins. I grew up in a part of the world where it was easy to explore limestone deposits that were full of ancient fossils.
 |
| 400 million years old |
My dad was a science teacher who made sure that I had experiences collecting fossils and that I knew life on Earth was very ancient while the human species was relatively young. What a great mystery: how had humans come into existence?
I also grew up in a culture where many people had been taught that we humans were created. When I learned about the popular creation myths such as the Garden of Eden I was amused.
One of the interesting features of the human species is our capacity to invent fictional "explanations" for our own existence. Humans have long invented stories about human origins, but only recently have we had the means to scientifically investigate our origins.
Space Aliens
When I was about 10 years old I became aware of the idea that space aliens might have played a role in the creation of the human species. This is a fun idea, but it raises the question: if aliens created humans, then why do we humans have no evidence that space aliens have ever visited Earth? Some science fiction story writers including
Jack Vance have played around with possible answers to this question.
In Vance
's story
The Star King, "Star Kings" are alien creatures who resemble we humans. Vance prompted readers to imagine that about 100,000 years ago some humans were transported to the distant planet of the Star Kings (
Ghnarumen). After evolving for a time on
Ghnarumen, some newly evolved human variants were returned to Earth and became US, displacing other human variants such as the Neanderthals. In Vance's imaginary scenario, the alien beings responsible for the unique evolutionary trajectory of our species were gone from the galaxy by the time when Earthlings developed space travel technology.
Artificial Life
As far as we know, travel through outer space from star to star is not easy. If ancient aliens did manage to reach Earth and play a role in the creation of humans, those aliens almost certainly had more advanced technology than we do. Also, it seems most likely that some kind of artificial lifeform would make the long, slow journey between the stars, not a biological organism. The most famous fictional account of such an alien visitor to Earth is the film
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Time Travel
Some science fiction story writers have played around with the idea that human origins might have been shaped by time travelers from the future. My favorite time travel story is
The End of Eternity by
Isaac Asimov. At the end of that story, a woman from 10,000,000 years in the future arrives on Earth in the 1930s. She begins to make changes to Earth, introducing technological innovations that would not naturally arise.
Having it all
As a
science fiction glutton, I enjoy stories that combine
1) space aliens who visit Earth and create the human species,
2) artificial lifeforms and
3) time travel. For for my current story writing obsession, the
Exode Saga, I throw into the mix one more key plot element: the idea that the science fiction literary genre itself did not arise spontaneously as a human cultural innovation; rather,
it was created by space aliens.
The First Reality
For the Exode Saga, I imagine that aliens first arrived on Earth about 2.3 billion years ago. Those alien visitors were the
Phari and they made use of advanced technology arising from the study of
hierions, a type of fundamental particle as yet unknown to Earthly science. When the Phari first visited Earth, life on this planet was very primitive, but they set about guiding Earthly microbes towards bigger and better things.
Their strategy involved engineering all cells on Earth to contain a swarm of
femtobots that could help guide evolution. Those nanoscopic femtobots were all linked into a network that was connected to the
Hierion Domain. Using the vast computational resources available within the Hierion Domain, the Phari endosymbionts guided the course of cellular evolution on Earth towards a multicellular existence. Earth developed an integrated global lifeform similar to that which Asimov imagined for a fictional world, the planet
Erythro.
The Phari bioengineering project on Earth was still in its early stages and had not gotten very far when the
pek arrived from beyond our own galaxy. The pek were masters of an alternative set of advanced technologies based on
sedrons. The pek quickly "defeated" the Phari and took control of the galaxy and lowly planets such as Earth. The pek infested Earth with
zeptites, the sub-microscopic form of artificial life that they routinely used to guide biological evolution on planets throughout the universe. In the fullness of time, animals eventually evolved on Earth as composite organisms containing biological cells, femtobots and
zeptite endosymbionts.
When
R. Nyrtia developed time travel technology and began investigating
Deep Time, she soon discovered the Phari. Working on the theory that an enemy of her enemy could become a friend, Nyrtia secretly rescued from erasure key elements of the Phari civilization and began making use of advanced hierion technologies obtained from the Phari.
The Asimov Reality
In the
Asimov Reality, R. Nyrtia was even more aggressive in making use of the Phari. Working with the connivance of
Many Sails, R. Nyrtia made sure that the Phari were allowed to retain control of the globular cluster where they had originally evolved. That star cluster became a laboratory for exploring how to create human variants who could use a form of technology-assisted telepathy that was based upon a Phari invention: the
Bimanoid Interface.
R. Nyrtia's efforts created a foundation for the
Trysta-Grean Pact and gave we Earthlings an opportunity to spread human civilization among the stars. The other necessary condition for the long-term survival of the human species was that the Secret History of Humanity and how the human species was crafted by aliens must be told to the people of Earth in the form of a science fiction story. It appears that the Secret History of Humanity can best be told through the experiences of
Rylla.
Next:
When bad things happen to good characters
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