The Observation of Xeno-lifeforms, by Dr. Simon Didier
Aug 30, 2016 21:05:28 GMT
Narotiza, Atrox, and 5 more like this
Post by dinoman9877 on Aug 30, 2016 21:05:28 GMT
These are the writings of Dr. Simon Didier, observational ecologist of xenofauna.
Entry 1:
Space, a cold place, vast beyond measure. Life has only found its foothold on one small, blue rock. Earth. At least, that’s what we once thought.
Life has been discovered on planets from beyond the solar system. Thanks to advancements in space travel, the human race has taken to the stars. But before humans can even think of taking to completely alien planets to live, they must first be examined for their habitability.
I write this first entry from the orbit of Yuzu V. The system named for its discoverer, its star is a blue giant, named Yuzu A. Six planets orbit this large sun, five inner rocky planets, and one large gas giant on the very edge of the system.
Most of the rocky planets sit close to the sun, constantly bombarded by heat and sunlight. However, the very last rocky planet in the system, Yuzu V, managed to avoid this fate. The planet fits snuggly into the Goldilocks Zone, away from interference of any of the other planets, with its large, gaseous neighbor barely even a dot in its sky. Three small moons, captured asteroids from the inner asteroid belt, orbit the planet.
This planet is half the size of earth, yet contains a dense, unstable atmosphere. It is mostly made of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon, much like Earth’s atmosphere. However, an unusually large amount of helium is also prevalent throughout. The planet does have liquid water on the surface, however there is very little in the way of oceans, with only two visible at the planet’s poles. Yuzu V also sits on its side, much like Neptune, poles facing toward and away from its sun.
Yuzu V’s biggest oddity, however, is its rotation. It doesn’t rotate at all. One side of the planet is stuck in permanent, tropical day, while the other side is blanketed in an unending, frozen night. The only way the day continues is thanks to the planet’s revolution. A day for this planet lasts three and a half Earth years as it makes its journey around the star.
As the surface is likely too dangerous for personal exploration, I am equipped with an arsenal of various robot observers. Land rovers, drones, and submarines will help me observe the various forms of life on the planet. They are mostly autonomous with a basic artificial intelligence (with the ability for manual control in case of emergencies), but it takes a human to interpret the data of alien life, not a computer. My exploration will begin tomorrow, in Earth time anyhow…
Entry 2, first day of exploration:
The first few drones were sent down in their dropship. With the daylight just beginning to approach the planet’s southern pole, the time could not be more perfect to examine any potential life on both land and sea.
The drone was the first released, scanning the immediate area for any potential danger. The planet revealed itself to harbor life. Plants resembling massive cacti or aloes dot the landscape, with no larger plants yet in sight. The drone returned to the ship, retrieving the otherwise immobile submarine and taking to the air with it, flying off toward the somewhat close, thawing ocean.
The rover was left to its own devices, driving slowly onto the terrain of the planet. No auditory or visual anomalies, nor even vibrations to be felt. The wheeled robot drove north, perpendicular to the direction the drone went with the submarine.
I watched with some anticipation from the live feeds of the drone and the rover, but nothing was to be seen besides alien succulents. Finally, the rover came across a small river, one of the rare sources of water on the planet. The rover followed the stream, perhaps it could lead to some larger plant life.
Quickly, however, a large, scaly structure came into view. The rover’s camera slowly panned up to come lens to face with a massive, mandibled animal. It is so good that no one can hear you scream in space because my shouts of excitement were deafening.
The creature sniffed at the rover, which was tiny in comparison to it. The mandibles opened to reveal a beaked mouth beneath, which pecked once at the small machine. Determining that it wasn’t food or a threat, the creature went back to drinking from the river.
The rover went quickly in reverse for a full body shot. The creature was about the size of an elephant, its body long and lithe, almost decidedly dinosaur in appearance. Its two forelimbs bore three hoof-like fingers, with a fan like structure supported by an extended fourth finger pointing backward from the wrist and connecting to the elbow. The creature’s most unusual feature was the hind limb. As in singular. The creature once had two limbs, but they fused just below the knee, making one large, muscular four toed foot. The strange tripod moved much like a walking kangaroo, but its long muscular tail helped keep it balance.
I did not know what the advantage of such a limb structure could be. Surely an animal this large was untouchable. But on an alien world, logic laughs at your assumptions
The ground shook visibly, the sounds of something heavy approaching. The alien elephants turned out to be little more than antelope as a group of monsters approached the river. A creature on par with some of Earth’s sauropods, this animal dwarfed its three legged compatriots.
The body was hadrosaurine in appearance, with shorter, smaller forelimbs and longer, muscular hindlimbs. They walked with all four limbs, but two adolescent animals showed that they ran on two legs as they chased each other, and it was immediately apparent why. Much like the smaller tripods, the larger animals possessed a fan like structure, supported by an extended finger, but the fan was much larger, connecting just under the shoulder. Their long tail, which split into two tips horizontally, also held a fan like structure. If that wasn’t enough, the sharp, cutting mandibles that hid the mouth screamed the relation of the tripod with this larger, split-tailed animal.
The rover’s camera panned to show an approaching column of these two species of titanic aliens, vast and without visible end, as their calls rang out deafeningly. Like the herds of Africa, these species seemed to be migratory, but instead of chasing the rains, they chased the sun, relying on it for their food before it was gone.
The drone arrived to the rover’s position to show just how vast this herd was. The eye in the sky showed the column being at least six miles wide, and twice that in length. Millions upon millions of these creatures, decimating their succulent food as they went, leaving only seeds and fertilizer behind.
The rover and drone spent the rest of the day examining these creatures, finding they did not behave so differently from some of Earth’s large herbivores. The fan structures were used in both species for display in combat, but the larger of the two had capitalized on it.
I had taken to simply calling them ‘prong-tails’. The ones with the larger fans seemed to be the males, and the ones with the largest fans were the most imposing. They spread them out wide and flushed blood into them to make them look more threatening than they actually were, but physical combat was rare, and only consisted of shoving each other.
The three legged creatures, which I’ve taken to calling ‘Yuzu’s Gazelle’, were competitive amongst each other as well, but they were usually jumpy and much preferred to run from any conflict. The reason for their fused hind limb became apparent. Acting like a spring, it launched the massive creature forward with minimal effort, landing on their forelimbs, and then springing forth again. It made for a fast way of locomotion, but there must have been some reason for such an adaptation to evolve.
The rest of the day revealed no new life, however, and any life in the ocean had yet to awaken from its frozen slumber.
I was worn out from a day of excitement and fascination, still trying to process that I had encountered brand new species, and on such a massive scale.
I retired to my quarters, tired but almost too excited to see what tomorrow would bring for me.
Entry 1:
Space, a cold place, vast beyond measure. Life has only found its foothold on one small, blue rock. Earth. At least, that’s what we once thought.
Life has been discovered on planets from beyond the solar system. Thanks to advancements in space travel, the human race has taken to the stars. But before humans can even think of taking to completely alien planets to live, they must first be examined for their habitability.
I write this first entry from the orbit of Yuzu V. The system named for its discoverer, its star is a blue giant, named Yuzu A. Six planets orbit this large sun, five inner rocky planets, and one large gas giant on the very edge of the system.
Most of the rocky planets sit close to the sun, constantly bombarded by heat and sunlight. However, the very last rocky planet in the system, Yuzu V, managed to avoid this fate. The planet fits snuggly into the Goldilocks Zone, away from interference of any of the other planets, with its large, gaseous neighbor barely even a dot in its sky. Three small moons, captured asteroids from the inner asteroid belt, orbit the planet.
This planet is half the size of earth, yet contains a dense, unstable atmosphere. It is mostly made of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon, much like Earth’s atmosphere. However, an unusually large amount of helium is also prevalent throughout. The planet does have liquid water on the surface, however there is very little in the way of oceans, with only two visible at the planet’s poles. Yuzu V also sits on its side, much like Neptune, poles facing toward and away from its sun.
Yuzu V’s biggest oddity, however, is its rotation. It doesn’t rotate at all. One side of the planet is stuck in permanent, tropical day, while the other side is blanketed in an unending, frozen night. The only way the day continues is thanks to the planet’s revolution. A day for this planet lasts three and a half Earth years as it makes its journey around the star.
As the surface is likely too dangerous for personal exploration, I am equipped with an arsenal of various robot observers. Land rovers, drones, and submarines will help me observe the various forms of life on the planet. They are mostly autonomous with a basic artificial intelligence (with the ability for manual control in case of emergencies), but it takes a human to interpret the data of alien life, not a computer. My exploration will begin tomorrow, in Earth time anyhow…
Entry 2, first day of exploration:
The first few drones were sent down in their dropship. With the daylight just beginning to approach the planet’s southern pole, the time could not be more perfect to examine any potential life on both land and sea.
The drone was the first released, scanning the immediate area for any potential danger. The planet revealed itself to harbor life. Plants resembling massive cacti or aloes dot the landscape, with no larger plants yet in sight. The drone returned to the ship, retrieving the otherwise immobile submarine and taking to the air with it, flying off toward the somewhat close, thawing ocean.
The rover was left to its own devices, driving slowly onto the terrain of the planet. No auditory or visual anomalies, nor even vibrations to be felt. The wheeled robot drove north, perpendicular to the direction the drone went with the submarine.
I watched with some anticipation from the live feeds of the drone and the rover, but nothing was to be seen besides alien succulents. Finally, the rover came across a small river, one of the rare sources of water on the planet. The rover followed the stream, perhaps it could lead to some larger plant life.
Quickly, however, a large, scaly structure came into view. The rover’s camera slowly panned up to come lens to face with a massive, mandibled animal. It is so good that no one can hear you scream in space because my shouts of excitement were deafening.
The creature sniffed at the rover, which was tiny in comparison to it. The mandibles opened to reveal a beaked mouth beneath, which pecked once at the small machine. Determining that it wasn’t food or a threat, the creature went back to drinking from the river.
The rover went quickly in reverse for a full body shot. The creature was about the size of an elephant, its body long and lithe, almost decidedly dinosaur in appearance. Its two forelimbs bore three hoof-like fingers, with a fan like structure supported by an extended fourth finger pointing backward from the wrist and connecting to the elbow. The creature’s most unusual feature was the hind limb. As in singular. The creature once had two limbs, but they fused just below the knee, making one large, muscular four toed foot. The strange tripod moved much like a walking kangaroo, but its long muscular tail helped keep it balance.
I did not know what the advantage of such a limb structure could be. Surely an animal this large was untouchable. But on an alien world, logic laughs at your assumptions
The ground shook visibly, the sounds of something heavy approaching. The alien elephants turned out to be little more than antelope as a group of monsters approached the river. A creature on par with some of Earth’s sauropods, this animal dwarfed its three legged compatriots.
The body was hadrosaurine in appearance, with shorter, smaller forelimbs and longer, muscular hindlimbs. They walked with all four limbs, but two adolescent animals showed that they ran on two legs as they chased each other, and it was immediately apparent why. Much like the smaller tripods, the larger animals possessed a fan like structure, supported by an extended finger, but the fan was much larger, connecting just under the shoulder. Their long tail, which split into two tips horizontally, also held a fan like structure. If that wasn’t enough, the sharp, cutting mandibles that hid the mouth screamed the relation of the tripod with this larger, split-tailed animal.
The rover’s camera panned to show an approaching column of these two species of titanic aliens, vast and without visible end, as their calls rang out deafeningly. Like the herds of Africa, these species seemed to be migratory, but instead of chasing the rains, they chased the sun, relying on it for their food before it was gone.
The drone arrived to the rover’s position to show just how vast this herd was. The eye in the sky showed the column being at least six miles wide, and twice that in length. Millions upon millions of these creatures, decimating their succulent food as they went, leaving only seeds and fertilizer behind.
The rover and drone spent the rest of the day examining these creatures, finding they did not behave so differently from some of Earth’s large herbivores. The fan structures were used in both species for display in combat, but the larger of the two had capitalized on it.
I had taken to simply calling them ‘prong-tails’. The ones with the larger fans seemed to be the males, and the ones with the largest fans were the most imposing. They spread them out wide and flushed blood into them to make them look more threatening than they actually were, but physical combat was rare, and only consisted of shoving each other.
The three legged creatures, which I’ve taken to calling ‘Yuzu’s Gazelle’, were competitive amongst each other as well, but they were usually jumpy and much preferred to run from any conflict. The reason for their fused hind limb became apparent. Acting like a spring, it launched the massive creature forward with minimal effort, landing on their forelimbs, and then springing forth again. It made for a fast way of locomotion, but there must have been some reason for such an adaptation to evolve.
The rest of the day revealed no new life, however, and any life in the ocean had yet to awaken from its frozen slumber.
I was worn out from a day of excitement and fascination, still trying to process that I had encountered brand new species, and on such a massive scale.
I retired to my quarters, tired but almost too excited to see what tomorrow would bring for me.
