FAQ

This page is for frequently asked questions or glaring questions that deserve an answer upfront, and there are indeed a few glaring questions that deserve an honest answer upfront. These are mostly related to the fundamental premise of the Earthward Bound setting, namely questions about the existence of previous civilizations of the Earth, the existence of intelligent tool using creatures in the fossil record, existence of humanoid creatures in the fossil record, and convergence on the humanoid body plan. To put it mildly, these things are all highly unlikely.   So, I’ve created this page for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s to say that, yes, I am aware of some of these issues and how unlikely they are given everything we know about the fossil record. This being a work of fiction means that I’ve taken some liberty with this area, but I don’t intend to entirely dismiss the ramifications of it out of hand. I’ll lean into some elements of what I’ve severely bent away from reality (such as there being evidence of previous civilizations and humanoid intelligent creatures in the fossil record). Other elements will be more contrived, such as the repeat convergence of the Rodinians to a humanoid body plan. This is simply an axiom of the work as being generally furry-adjacent.   The stuff in here is open to being amended following critique if it turns out I’m being too hard or not hard enough.    

Glaring Questions

 

To what extent are Earth’s current inhabitants aware of their ancient cousins?

  Did the Viseans know about the Kellvass before them? Did the Carnians know about the Viseans and Kellvass? How much are humans aware of all eight Rodnian clades?   Initially I believed that there would’ve been obvious evidence everywhere that a prior civilization occupied the Earth. There would’ve been fossilized remnants of technology, buildings, urbanization and even burial sites. There would’ve been evidence of large-scale mining and drilling, and traces of synthetic materials such as plastics and alloys.   It turns out however that the likelihood of these signatures being captured by the fossil record are much lower than I had perhaps realized. There was a speculative paper titled “The Silurian Hypothesis” that discussed some of the ways in which we might be able to detect a pre-human civilization. One of the points it argued was that there’d actually be significant challenges in being able to use the fossil record alone in detecting such civilizations. It went over the scarcity of available exposed rock formations that predate the last 2.5 million years, the low rate of fossilization, and the relatively small area of urbanization of the present day that would enter into the fossil record, relative to the total land surface area of the Earth. To quote from the article:   “Limitations of the geological record   That this paper's title question is worth posing is a function of the incompleteness of the geological record. For the Quaternary (the last 2.5 million years), there is widespread extant physical evidence of, for instance, climate changes, soil horizons and archaeological evidence of non-Homo Sapiens cultures (Denisovians, Neanderthals, etc.) with occasional evidence of bipedal hominids dating back to at least 3.7 Ma (e.g. the Laetoli footprints) (Leakey & Hay, Reference Leakey and Hay1979). The oldest extant large-scale surface is in the Negev Desert and is ~1.8 Ma old (Matmon et al., Reference Matmon2009). However, pre-Quaternary land-evidence is far sparser, existing mainly in exposed sections, drilling and mining operations. In the ocean sediments, due to the recycling of ocean crust, there only exists sediment evidence for periods that post-date the Jurassic (~170 Ma) (ODP Leg 801 Team, 2000).   The fraction of life that gets fossilized is always extremely small and varies widely as a function of time, habitat and degree of soft tissue versus hard shells or bones (Behrensmeyer et al., Reference Behrensmeyer, Kidwell and Gastaldo2000). Fossilization rates are very low in tropical, forested environments but are higher in arid environments and fluvial systems. As an example, for all the dinosaurs that ever lived, there are only a few thousand near-complete specimens, or equivalently only a handful of individual animals across thousands of taxa per 100,000 years. Given the rate of new discovery of taxa of this age, it is clear that species as short-lived as Homo sapiens (so far) might not be represented in the existing fossil record at all.   The likelihood of objects surviving and being discovered is similarly unlikely. Zalasiewicz (Reference Zalasiewicz2009) speculates about preservation of objects or their forms, but the current area of urbanization is <1% of the Earth's surface (Schneider et al., Reference Schneider, Friedl and Potere2009), and exposed sections and drilling sites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface. Note that even for early human technology, complex objects are very rarely found. For instance, the Antikythera Mechanism (ca. 205 BCE) is a unique object until the Renaissance. Despite impressive recent gains in the ability to detect the wider impacts of civilization on landscapes and ecosystems (Kidwell, Reference Kidwell2015), we conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4 Ma, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples of their population is small.”   The paper goes on to explain that more durable signatures with a much greater likelihood of being discovered include looking at the concentrations of organic carbon in rock sediments to indicate fossil fuel usage; increased ocean acidity markers due to increased CO2, such as lower incident rates of carbonates in seafloor depositions; concentrations of nitrogen to indicate the possible use of nitrogen fixing for agriculture; increased amounts of minerals associated with industry found in coastal depositions (such as rare-earths, heavy metals, precious metals, etc increased sedimentation in rivers and coasts due to deforestation and increased continental weathering from vegetation loss; presence of transuranic elements such as Plutonium-244 and Curium-247 that don’t occur on Earth naturally, etc.   The issue is further complicated however by the difficulty in distinguishing some of these markers from natural processes. Periods of intense volcanism can produce similar results according to the paper:   “for instance, the coincidence of crustal formation events with the climate changes suggest that the intrusion of basaltic magmas into organic-rich shales and/or petroleum-bearing evaporites (Storey et al., Reference Storey, Duncan and Swisher2007; Svensen et al., Reference Svensen2009; Kravchinsky, Reference Kravchinsky2012) may have released large quantities of CO2 or CH4 to the atmosphere.”   The presence of microplastics, CFCs and other synthetic materials in sediments could offer promise in helping to distinguish artificial from natural, but the ultimate longevity of these materials across tens of millions of years is unknown.   I guess the final answer to this question is therefore this:   Each species of Rodinian suspected that something came before them, but there was never enough evidence to satisfy the strict requirements necessary to declare such a paradigm shifting scientific discovery. It was endlessly debated and no consensus existed. This was true for all the species (except for the Kellvass who were the first civilization with no predecessors).   There were multiple signatures discovered, each one corresponding to each civilization of Rodinian that once existed on Earth. However, this sometimes pushed a species’ scientific consensus towards the belief that this a natural signature, as they concluded that it was highly unlikely for intelligence to repeatedly develop on the Earth so many times.   The markers that each species generally became aware of were repeated signatures across geological time indicating possible extensive deforestation, fossil fuel burning, and production of technology rich in heavy and rare-earth metals. Additionally, there were trace (and I mean very trace) evidence for synthetic materials that managed to survive for tens of millions of years, found in the same sediments as the other geological markers.   Taken together, this strongly hinted that there was a presence on the Earth many millions of years before them, but generally there wasn’t a smoking-gun discovery of a fossilized piece of technology or another artefact. It could have been argued that the carbon, nitrogen and depositional anomalies were the results of global natural processes as opposed to being natural. The presence of synthetics was much harder to explain and served as the strongest evidence, but the possibility of natural sources again could not be 100% ruled out.   This caused much debate over what the term synthetic even meant if people suddenly couldn’t rule out natural sources... People just weren’t prepared to accept such a foundational shift in their understanding of life on Earth – and the consequences. Those consequences for each species living on Earth at the time suggested a grim outlook on the survivability of their own civilization. If the Earth had so many civilizations before them, then where are they now? Are they extinct? If so, then it means that extinction is overwhelmingly likely for the current inhabitants too. People didn’t like this.   The closest to a smoking gun that each current inhabitant of the Earth discovered were transitional fossils that seemed to offer a snapshot or two of mysterious creatures charting an evolutionary path into something that could have been intelligent and tool using. These fossils tended to date to around the time of one of the suspected civilizational markers, and so this too was taken as hinting of a previous civilization belonging to an Earth based creature. Due to the rarity of fossils, most of the discoveries only involved one such fossil pertaining to one Rodinian ancestor.   So, the belief that there were past civilizations survived on the aggregate of data rather than any single data point. It was widely believed by some, disbelieved by others, and no consensus existed. There were very limited fossils or transitional fossils displaying the repeated evolution of prior Rodinians into humanoid forms, and nothing directly linking these sparse fossils to the possible technological markers in the geology (such as burial sites showing objects alongside these creatures, or presence of synthetics within the fossils themselves).    

To what extent was there evidence in the fossil record for multiple intelligent and tool using species across Earth's history, including humanoid creatures?

  Again, I had assumed that not only would actual fossilized Rodinians be easily found, such as from ancient burial sites, but that it would also be possible to easily find examples of the creatures that the Rodinians evolved from. These transitional fossils would depict the gradual evolution of upright, bipedal, large-brained beings with tool using hands.   The Kellvass would be the worst offenders in this regard, and I assumed that there’d be loads of transitional fossils showing how such a creature evolved from ancient arachnids.   However, if it’s to be believed from the above paper that the low rate of fossilization might preclude such repeated and lengthy insights into the evolutionary journey of each Rodinian species from their primitive ancestors into the fully fledged walking, talking sophisticated beings they are now, then future civilizations may not be aware of what they looked like at all. They may not be aware of how they evolved and came to be. And they may not be aware of how intelligent life on Earth seems to converge on the humanoid body plan.   The answer to this question was touched upon in the last question above, but I’ll reiterate it here. The Earth’s current inhabitants only ever discovered one or two Rodinian transitional fossils depicting the development of common humanoid traits, due to the rarity of fossils and the low fossilization rate. There are many fossils out there waiting to be discovered that would have shed lots of light on the convergent evolution of each Rodinian, but almost none were ever found.   So, by-and-large, the Earth’s current inhabitants generally had no idea what the previous inhabitants of the Earth looked like. They may have had one or two transitional fossils that could be dated as being roughly the same age as one of the geological signatures of past civilization, and so may have had a rough idea of what one of the past civilizations may have looked like during their evolution. First contact between them and the Rodinians was therefore still largely a surprise.    

Why does intelligent life on Earth keep convergently evolving towards a humanoid body plan?

  Initially there wasn’t a reason for this, and it was simply just a basic premise of the setting that needed to be handwaved away and accepted as unrealistic. That may still be the case, but there’s a reason now adjoined to it at least. I’d like to retain some mystery about it just now however, as the Rodinians really have no clue where a lot of their power comes from. And the source of their power influences the soul of the Earth, and therefore the shape of the intelligent creatures it keeps producing.   Suffice to say, it’s wrong to name it after humans. Most Rodinians called it the Kellvass body plan, and find it equally as much of a mystery as to why they’re always evolving to look like the Kellvass. The thing is they’re not. They’re evolving to look like something else entirely.