Lee's Journal #001, Intro

I would say, let's start at the beginning, but I don't know what happened at the beginning. I was checking bats, working on white-nosed syndrome, in a cave I'd been to before, without incident. When I came out, nothing looked remotely familiar. And I mean NOTHING looked REMOTELY familiar.   Maybe I should start even farther back, in case someone who doesn't know me at all get ahold of this. My name is Lee, I'm 36 – or 37 now? I didn't have any real sense of time at home, and I've long since lost track of how long I've been here. More than a local year, anyway. How many digressions can I cram in here? Let's find out. Or not.   Let's try this again, I'm Lee, and I'm a biology professor at a midwestern university that I probably shouldn't mention by name. Not that it matters, if none of this ever finds its way back to Earth, but whatever. And maybe I should say that I WAS a bio prof, because if I have any say in it, I'm never going back. This place is fucking amazing.   I always wondered about people like Crichton in Farscape, and Ash in Army of Darkness, who are fighting so hard to go back to relatively mundane existences, when life is so much more interesting out there where they ended up. Fuck that. If I ever find out how to go home, I'll send word and try to bring more people here.   Which may not be such a great idea, because they fucked Earth up so badly, they'd probably try to do the same here too. But who knows, they might just be won over, once they get here, like Sapolsky's baboons. Or if nothing else, we'll just kill the corporate assholes when they step through the portal, and do both worlds a favor. Win-win.   Regardless, I'm here now, and stuck here, as far as I can tell. “Here” appears to be a habitable planet with gravity, air pressure and composition, and all other vital statistics close enough to Earth to make no appreciable difference. There are enough significant, irreconcilable differences, though, that I can comfortably say that I've been transported to another world, and not just dumped through time to a different era of Earth, or to another Earth in some parallel dimension. I honestly don't know which of those three options is least unbelievable.   When I first came out of the cave and figured out that I wasn't in Kansas anymore, my immediate thought was contamination. I was there dealing with the white nosed fungus, which was notoriously easy to transmit, and I knew I was covered in it. But even that aside, everything I was carrying was infested with... whatever else I was carrying. My own flora, the bacteria and whatever else that were normally present on my skin and hair, not to mention my intestines.   My first thought was to scrub, but that would just be moving all of those potential pathogens into the water, and therefore everywhere else in the world. No, I had to prevent dispersal, and that meant containment.   So I buried everything. Well, not quite everything. I dug a hole, a meter or so deep, and threw my clothes into it, then my equipment, then my bag. I only kept out my food and water, which didn't amount to much, since I was supposed to be in the cave less than 12 hours. I was a little worried about running around naked, but it was warm enough, and I was absolutely horrified by the possibility of introducing a disease that would end up wiping out an entire bloody ecosystem. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best thing I could come up with, given my limited means.   And speaking of limited means, I was going to need more food and water before too long. So I went walking. Carefully, since my shoes were in the hole too. The sun seemed to have risen farther since I emerged, but I didn't have good enough bearings then to be able to tell direction yet. The cliff face was a good landmark, so I was pretty sure I'd be able to find my way back there, and I headed downhill, looking for running water.   The sky is distinctly more green here, which implies more dust in the atmosphere. I don’t think that’s enough to account for the sun looking more blue, I think it’s really a blue star. I'm pretty sure it's smaller than the one at home, but I can't say that for sure either. I always used to try to AVOID looking directly at the sun, so I don't have a good basis for comparison. Maybe if I'd known it would be relevant, I would have squinted a little harder, and burned out a few more rods. Or maybe I wouldn't, because it still doesn't really matter.   Probably corresponding to the bluer light, the plants tend to have red-to-orange leaves. As in, their chlorophyll only reflects the low-energy red, and absorbs effectively all of the blue and green light, which are more abundant and higher-energy anyway. Should I still call it chlorophyll if it's that radically different? Hell with it, I will anyway, just for the sake of simplicity. The word itself really just means “leaf color,” and the tendency to make up new names for things just for the sake of being different always annoyed me.   Anyway, the red-orange chlorophyll implies a completely different evolutionary history from Earth. I'll go so far as to say that I've seen NOTHING to imply a shared evolutionary history. I haven't taken a class on plants since undergrad, so my knowledge of them is rusty at best, but I can say with much better confidence that none of the native animals here look anything like Earth animals.   Did you catch that qualifier? There are a bunch of animals that don't appear to be native. In particular, cats, dogs, horses, and humans.   Yeah, there are other humans here. I know, Wizard Tickle Fnord?   It took me by surprise too, when I first found them. It didn't take me long to find a small stream, which then led me straight to them. People still camp near waterways, go figure. I actually realized how little they were wearing before I remembered how little I was wearing, and there wasn't much difference.   As it turns out, this is a subtropical coastal area, so it's warm enough to run around mostly naked most of the year. The people themselves turned out to be hunter-gatherers, and it took me a good long time to learn their language. I'm not necessarily good with languages, but I had a minor in Spanish as an undergrad, which gave me a good grounding in Latin, and just being immersed in the sciences gave me a crash course in Greek too, and like a lot of other people, I can curse somebody out in a handful of other languages, so I guess I kinda had the wiring in place to learn something fundamentally different. By which I mean, no resemblance to any language I know anything about, and some sounds that I've never made before in my life, and I'm pretty sure I'm still not making them right.   In any event, I was forced into going native immediately. After a while, I did end up going back and exhuming my equipment, but I left my clothes. There didn't seem to be any point in bringing them back out. It would only have set me apart from the people even more, when I really needed to integrate as much as possible, and there was still the infection risk.   Anyway, from what they say, humans are widespread around the world, and have a wide variety of cultures and languages, but since I'm not a linguist or anthropologist or sociologist or whatever, I'm not going to talk about that stuff much. I'm going to stick mostly to what I know. And of course, the botanists will laugh mightily at that, once they see what I've written, but I like to think I've got a little bit of a clue about plants, and I have to say something about them, just to put my animal notes and descriptions in context.   These notes aren't in any particular order, just whenever I get enough info together to be worth writing up. For many of them, it's been a question of watching the progress over time, and getting more explanation from the locals on things that don't make sense. There are some things that I'll include here that seem incredible, and I've tried to substantiate them with evidence as much as possible, but even when I can't, I'm putting it in anyway, just for the sake of completeness. At least in the sense of assembling and consolidating everything I've managed to find out.   These entries will probably be equivalent to family-level descriptions, with genus- and species-level notes. I'm going to completely sidestep the question here of what defines a species by saying go fuck yourself. I always hated that debate, and it's not worth saying more than that on it here.   I'm also not going to bother coming up with scientific names for any of these things. Yes, theoretically it's my right, as first describer, but I'd have to come up with a whole new taxonomy, from the ground up (in whatever sense), with no real relation to anything I know. I'll put in a few phylogenetic notes, as best I can figure them out, but beyond that, I'd rather devote my time and energy to breadth, rather than depth, and leave the depth to the people who have better equipment, more attention span and fewer distractions.   I don't even know if these life forms have DNA, but at the scale I'm working on, it doesn't matter. That's another problem for whoever comes along later.   For the rest of this first entry, I'll just do a broad overview. There seem to be the same range of biomes and ecosystems, with the same sorts of evolutionary pressures. Big bodies and short appendages toward the poles, smaller bodies with longer limbs toward the tropics, following Bergmann's and Allen's rules, respectively. Not that I've traveled all of that range myself, but I've seen a fair bit during the however long it's been since I got here, and I trust the locals to back me up.   I mentioned the red chlorophyll earlier, but there's something else funny about the colors here, that I haven't figured out enough yet to be able to say anything more than that.   There are a bunch of ecomorphs for various vertebrates, and those are really fascinating. Or at least, those are the ones I find most interesting, since I'm into vertebrates myself. They have endoskeletons with muscles and skin over them, The other organs are inside a torso, except for the various sensory apparati, which are on appendages of various types. They seem to have sensory receptors for light, sound, smell/chemicals, and touch. Taste is tough to tell, and I'm not sure how fundamentally different it really is from smell. They're both about chemoreceptors, one for chemicals dissolved in air, one in liquid, and one set is a lot more variable, but that seems about it. I also don't know yet what other senses they might have that we don't have equivalents for, like magnetoreception or electroreception.   And that's about where the parallels end.   Their skeleton is made of something like chitin, like arthropod exoskeletons. And just like bugs, there are heavy reinforced sections, and thinner, flexible sections. And unless something gets torn or punctured, it's basically all a single unbroken piece.   Imagine origami made out of the heavy corrugated plastic from the totes the post office uses. That's what their skeletons are like. And I don't just mean larger versions of the origami crane, with a handful of big flat panels. Think, a series of tiny boxes linked together like vertebrae. A rod with a cross-section like a nine-pointed star in place of a femur.   Everything has sections with struts and supports where they need strength, but the flying forms have hollowed out cavities that are full of air, to reduce weight, just like with birds. The rest of them seem to be full of some other distinct functional tissue, but again, I don't have the equipment to be able to tell what.   It's a lot harder for them to dislocate a joint, it basically requires a fracture, but I also don't have the equipment to be able to judge relative strength, in terms of fracture, bending, torsion, whatever. And breaks are generally not very common. More likely, what would fracture a bone will instead form a new, unintended joint. Not to say that there won't be some tearing of the chitin, especially on the side of the break being stretched, under tension, but it's not likely to completely tear away. Which makes it easier to set the break and bind it in position, so it heals back the way it's supposed to be. Not that most of those animals have the intellectual capacity to do that kind of thing for themselves, but humans can do it for them, and even with that intervention, it's probably less likely to be catastrophic for them. Especially since they have a total of 6 limbs, which in most cases includes at least 4 walking legs.   There are other major divisions of animals, like the fleshy four-armed starfish that have members that live in the savannahs, the forests, and some even have gliding patagia, like flying squirrels. Then there are the things that I'm not even sure if they're plants, animals, or some third division. The line here isn't nearly as sharp as on Earth. More on them in future entries.   Unfortunately, I can't even begin to talk about microbes, or much of any physiology for any of the forms that I'll be covering here. See above re: lack of equipment. I promise I won't be harping on that so much in the future. Mostly just laying out my limitations here at the outset. I'm actually kinda glad that I don't have any pressure to deal with any of that stuff. I always hated histology, so being strictly limited to gross anatomy and low magnification suits me fine.   I managed to find a lensgrinder here a couple months ago, but thus far the local ability is still primitive. The local product is better than the little hand lens I arrived with, but I still can't even hope to be comprehensive in these reports, or do much of anything about physiology.   There are some locals with other methodological techniques, but let's just say that I'm not yet convinced that they demonstrate what the proponents claim.     I said a minute ago that the fundamental dichotomy between plants and animals isn't as sharp here as on Earth, which may mean that one group sprang directly from the other, rather than both from a common ancestor. It's possible that the three groups of plants here are three separate origins of photosynthesis that are all native here. Or since there are examples of Earth fauna here, maybe there are other transportees from elsewhere too, and this planet really does have representatives of a bunch of different origins of life.   As interesting as that would be, it would make a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis an absolute bitch, because you would have however many completely unrelated trees that things could belong to. But is that really fundamentally different from having the same number of widely divergent branches from a single tree? There are still going to be clues as to which one any given thing belongs to, once you know what to look for. It's just that initial sorting and figuring out which are quote-unquote “good characters” that will be complicated. And it probably won't even be that bad, once some molecular person gets here and starts looking at them. Whatever. Not my problem, in any sense.     Either I'm in the southern hemisphere of this planet, or the sun rises in the west, and once again, I don't know that there's any fundamental cosmological difference between those two situations. The local language that I've been able to learn doesn't help either. The word for “west” is “sunrise,” the word for “east” is “sunset,” the word for “north” is “winter sun,” the word for “south” is “summer sun.” As best I can figure out, anyway. I'm not entirely sure about “summer” and “winter,” because the people I've been dealing with are subtropical and coastal, so there's not much seasonality around here, but that's the best I've got at the moment.   The day is close enough to 24 hours that I can't tell the difference. I think the year is 366 days, but that's just what I've gathered from the locals, and I don't know if there's any correction factor to their calendar like leap years or something. It seems like a hell of a coincidence that the day and year length are so similar to Earth, but I don't know yet what to make of it beyond that.   Possibly the single most significant difference between this place and Earth, both in and of itself, and in terms of its repercussions, is the moons. There are two of them, both of which have shorter periods, which means they must be closer than Luna. Given their apparent sizes, they're probably smaller, but I don't remember enough of the math or physics to be able to say anything else about them with confidence.   The two moons define something like weeks and months, in terms of how the locals measure time. One has a six-day cycle, perfect enough that there doesn't seem to be any correction factor. It's probably a recently captured asteroid, because it's visibly not spherical, there’s distinct wobble to it, tumbling end-over-end, and its orbit is at a significant angle.   The other moon has a cycle of 20 days and change, and does appear to be spherical. It definitely appears smaller than Luna, but I don't have any way to try to calculate its mass or anything, so that's all I can say for sure. There are still significant tides here, but I know there's a lot of variation on Earth in how high tides are, just from one place to another, not counting variation over time, so I can't say anything about that either.     One final note. For the people who really know me, you know how much sci-fi and fantasy I read and watched. And yes, I always secretly wanted to be transported to some other world, but it was impossible, right? I mean, obviously, new age fluff notwithstanding, magic isn't real. Medical conditions aside, dwarves and vampires don't really exist. And while science fiction may be guiding real science, we aren't anywhere near discovering real life on other planets. And I'm enough of a slacker that I would never be chosen to work on aliens anyway.   Well, guess what. I'm here now, and all those people who worked their asses off trying to find aliens are still stuck back on Earth. And as far as I can tell, I'm stuck here. There's been no evidence of any way to get home, and nobody seems to have a clue. More on that eventually too. Probably. Not today, because I need you to take this shit seriously.   Who? Who am I talking to? Who's ever going to hear it? How am I going to get these recordings home? Fuck if I know. But I need to organize these thoughts somehow, and on the off chance that I do get the opportunity to send these home, I want to be able to, and not regret missing out. And for those of you wondering how I'm keeping my battery charged enough to keep recording, heh heh heh. That's another thing to wait on, until you've heard enough to take me seriously.   And I say again, that I just want to send information home, not actually go back myself. I like it here, and I should really start thinking of this place as “home.” I've been here long enough, the people are welcoming – holy shit are they welcoming! – it's interesting, and it's keeping me busy.   And with that, I'm going to sign off for this first entry. There's a local saying that I like, and which they seem to use much like “aloha,” an all purpose greeting, farewell, expletive, or whatever other part of speech.   “Keep it slippery.”