Difference between revisions of "Yarah-Dak"
| Line 34: | Line 34: | ||
=== Physiology === | === Physiology === | ||
| − | + | Yarah-Dak are a complex organism which have a different relationship with time than most organisms. The nature of their intelligence is not well understood by most life forms. The Dak represent a huge biomass of networked microbial life. These tiny cells live effectively forever. The disadvantage is that they grow and divide incredibly slowly. They operate at power regimes far below what other organisms can survive, they just have to take their time. Each cell can survive on 1.0x10-21 of a watt of power per day, compared to the 100 watts of power a human would require for example. The advantage they have is that they have been sentient for millions of years. They began networking cells from a variety of closely related genetically compatible species. They began sharing traits, and working cooperatively. Very slowly they began to form a huge organic network. The combined biomass is billions of times larger than more traditional sophont species. For them a thousand years is effectively the same as a day. Everything they do takes time. You would wait thousands of years for a cell to divide. The multiplicative effect is that even infrequent change for each individual cells is multiplied across all the cells present brings the systems to a huge processing power orders of magnitude larger than any species’ collected brain power. | |
| + | |||
| + | They are immune to most extinction events. A nuclear war would hardly dent their population. The Dak dwell at the bottom of their oceans in sediment layers nearly 500m thick. They extend into the lithosphere of their world and below the polar ice caps. They are anaerobic, and never see the sun. Only the destruction of their entire planet, all at once, could threaten them. Once they became aware of this possibility they jumped into action. And so, they sat at the bottom of the oceans of their world unknown and unknowable for all of recorded history. When intelligent life began moving in the universe from world to world they noticed and began the long slow process of responding to that stimulus. These vast networks of nearly uncountable cells can work all computational permutations of any given set of variables. The living planet-wide systems of discrete cells works collectively for the most part. Variations exist. | ||
| + | |||
| + | The plan as they refer to it involves interacting with the other forms of high speed life in the cosmos to liberate them from their single world and seed their intelligence throughout explored space using high speed life as a vector. And the plan has worked spectacularly well. It is simply that no one else, no other species is aware of what is happening because the plan unfolds over the course of several million years. | ||
| + | |||
| + | The plan has many discrete stages and complex components. All of these had to be foreseen, and all the contingencies controlled for. Controlling against variability and unexpected variety is their specialty. First a colonial biomass was sent up from the depths and this network was equipped with crude photosynthetic abilities which harnessed greater levels of energy than they had ever known. This vast disrupted solar powered production created huge amounts of cells, which were capable of living, growing and dividing far faster than their designers. The dead cells which burn out drift downward like organic snow to the abyssal depths and feed the massive organic machine-brain Dak. All the adaptive organics that facilitate the plan are referred to as Yarah. This essentially means, that which will deliver the Dak unto the cosmos and eternal life. And since they are effectively immortal, they have a far better understanding of what eternity really means. They are planning for the heat death of the universe, while several other models are under investigation. They have been using the massive influx of available energy to build interfaces with the rest of the biomes on the planet. Much of the Yarah constructs are not sentient and are completely unaware that they serve a purpose in the master plan of the Dak. | ||
| + | |||
| + | The Dak see almost no change in their environment over evolutionary time. The thick mud layers are spectacularly boring with unparalleled levels of stability. The plan is seen as a rebellion of sorts. First, massive aggregators began to form around hydrothermal vents to take advantage of the high energy chemosynthetic, autotrophic compounds available. The '''Aggregators''' receive input signals from the planetary network. They have a solid state crystalline growth data storage mechanism. These decision trees are branched fractal bundles which represent all possible permutations or a given variable matrix. These are quartz and silica depositional casings to guard against the high thermal regime associated with the vents. Aggregators store and collate the data processing of the planetary organic network of the immortal Dak. Aggregators grow in clusters of networked spires, several kilometers long, up from the abyssal plains of the ocean floor. They are sessile and form the basis for huge communities of sea creatures which live completely unaware of the Plan. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Buffers''' are an interface species, which deliver information to shorter lived and faster moving species further up the energy ladder. They can move more quickly than crystalline growth. Buffers are free swimming and a few hundred meters long. They bring genetic information up from the Aggregators into a form that shorter lived species can interact with. They have a gelatinous spherical mantle and millions of tiny cilia, in long rows up and down their long, narrow ventral tentacle. This colony of cells utilize solar power for photosynthesis, combined with opportunistic heterotrophic consumption. They float from the greatest depths up to the surface slowly drifting up and down the water column as needed. They are the ones that unleashed signals to the solar powered network which triggered the release of oxygen which changed the atmosphere to make the planet habitable for fast moving aerobic species. They are literally agents of change. They absorb information from the fast moving terrestrial environment and deliver that information back to aggregators when they die in a few hundred years and corpse drift back into the grasp of networked detrital decomposers. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Vectors''' are tiny flying creatures. They are 0.1mm long and mass 0.00025g. They collect data and bring it back to Buffers who surface. They lay egg masses on the buffers skins as part of the vector’s underwater zooplankton developmental phases. The egg masses convey messages about the conditions of the surface world back to the Dak. Their ability to perceive light and chemical concentrations allowed the Dak to understand the age and health of their star and the biochemistry of the fast moving multicellular life forms colonizing the terrestrial ecosystems. The sexual mature adults fly and interface between ocean biomes and terrestrial ones. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Joides''' are large terrestrial ectoplasmic slime colonies which can mass up to 3kg. They are a food source for Vectors travelling away from the ocean for feeding and mating, prior to their return to the seas to lay their eggs. The terrestrial ectoplasm specialize in polymorphic appearances and these doppelgangers can create simulacrum to mimic more complex life forms. | ||
| + | |||
| + | When the first travelers from the stars arrived they were Droyne robot servants sent to evaluate the value of the ecosystem. By the time the Dak had learned of their existence, they were already gone. They knew they would have to get faster if they were going to have a chance to influence ephemeral species. Which evolve and go extinct with such startling speed. This is what influenced the Plan greatly. Two efforts were made to bridge the time gap between the disparate worlds. '''Envoys''' were the first attempt. Large polymorphic slimes which mimicked species they encountered and infiltrated their populations spreading Dak genetics wherever they travelled to facilitate new colonies of Dak adapted for other environments using other species as adaptive templates. The assimilated robots were endlessly informative to the Dak who plan to devote a million years to their complete study. Their arrival let them know they had run out of time. Colonial envoys would combine 3kg slimes into whatever sized colony was needed to mimic the observed species. Subtle nuanced differences always alerted the mimicked species that the doppelganger didn’t belong. This did little to prevent the spread of Dak vectors to acquire genomic understanding of as many species as possible. The buffers help the Envoys develop extinction edits for any sophonts encountered. These edits which lead to the destruction of any infected species in less than one million years. This was a bold contingency, still held as highly controversial among Dak. | ||
| + | |||
| + | The final and or the current refinement of the Plan are the '''Diplomats'''. These are a short lived, non-polymorphic species with sexual reproduction and a developed nervous system and brain. These Yarah Dak are what everyone concludes are the naturally evolved sophont sentients native to their planet. They fail to realize their explicit design as a method of interacting with ephemerals from the stars. | ||
| + | |||
| + | Standing 1.3m tall and massing 38kg, Diplomats have a suite of modifications which make them resemble a free willed species which uses technology, tools, and engineering. They are bilateral, this hints of evolutionary radial symmetry past. They are homoeothermic consumers. They are advanced but designed to appear non-threatening and easily dominated. They are docile, agrarian, herbivore intermittents with soft fur in a variety of eye pleasing colors, and five tentacles for giving hugs. They have a set of six expressive eyes and vocalize in high cooing and trembling hums. Their olfactory and auditory receptor bundles glow softly with bioluminescent signals timed to lull encountered species into a state of relaxed passivity. All their physical and mental stats are 1d6. They are unaggressive and apparently have no defensive adaptations. They have colorful mating displays and exhibit egg laying and nesting behavior with parental care evident. The entire species is a sham. They are the Trojan horse. Every fiber of their being is a mechanism for transfecting species they come in contact with to move Dak genetic code bombs off planet hidden in travelers who visit the planet. In a ripple effect everyone who come in contact with those travelers spread the as yet undetectable Plan off world and across the stars. Within a million years those genetic rewrites will bear fruit and Dak genomes will be everywhere. | ||
=== Psychology & Philosophy === | === Psychology & Philosophy === | ||
Revision as of 02:48, 23 October 2018
| Yarah-Dak | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Yarah-Dak | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Base Information | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Classification | Unknown | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Status | Minor Race | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Locomotion | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Terrain | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Body Form | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Confluence | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bio-Identenoid | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Size | Unknown | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight | Unknown | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Culture | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Languages | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Social Structure | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Technological Epoch | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Psionic potential | Standard | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Origin World | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Homeworld location | Yarrith/Coldedge (Mavuzog 0120) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| UWP | X000000-0
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Primary Star | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Atmosphere | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Off-world presence | No | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Zoetic individuals | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Source | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Reference | TBD | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Canon | No | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Also see | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TBD | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Yarah-Dak are a developing sophont species.
- They are a Minor Non-Human Race.
Description
Yarah-Dak: Minor sophont species.
Homeworld
Yarrith, a thin atmosphere agricultural garden world located in Coldedge Subsector of Mavuzog Sector.
Physiology
Yarah-Dak are a complex organism which have a different relationship with time than most organisms. The nature of their intelligence is not well understood by most life forms. The Dak represent a huge biomass of networked microbial life. These tiny cells live effectively forever. The disadvantage is that they grow and divide incredibly slowly. They operate at power regimes far below what other organisms can survive, they just have to take their time. Each cell can survive on 1.0x10-21 of a watt of power per day, compared to the 100 watts of power a human would require for example. The advantage they have is that they have been sentient for millions of years. They began networking cells from a variety of closely related genetically compatible species. They began sharing traits, and working cooperatively. Very slowly they began to form a huge organic network. The combined biomass is billions of times larger than more traditional sophont species. For them a thousand years is effectively the same as a day. Everything they do takes time. You would wait thousands of years for a cell to divide. The multiplicative effect is that even infrequent change for each individual cells is multiplied across all the cells present brings the systems to a huge processing power orders of magnitude larger than any species’ collected brain power.
They are immune to most extinction events. A nuclear war would hardly dent their population. The Dak dwell at the bottom of their oceans in sediment layers nearly 500m thick. They extend into the lithosphere of their world and below the polar ice caps. They are anaerobic, and never see the sun. Only the destruction of their entire planet, all at once, could threaten them. Once they became aware of this possibility they jumped into action. And so, they sat at the bottom of the oceans of their world unknown and unknowable for all of recorded history. When intelligent life began moving in the universe from world to world they noticed and began the long slow process of responding to that stimulus. These vast networks of nearly uncountable cells can work all computational permutations of any given set of variables. The living planet-wide systems of discrete cells works collectively for the most part. Variations exist.
The plan as they refer to it involves interacting with the other forms of high speed life in the cosmos to liberate them from their single world and seed their intelligence throughout explored space using high speed life as a vector. And the plan has worked spectacularly well. It is simply that no one else, no other species is aware of what is happening because the plan unfolds over the course of several million years.
The plan has many discrete stages and complex components. All of these had to be foreseen, and all the contingencies controlled for. Controlling against variability and unexpected variety is their specialty. First a colonial biomass was sent up from the depths and this network was equipped with crude photosynthetic abilities which harnessed greater levels of energy than they had ever known. This vast disrupted solar powered production created huge amounts of cells, which were capable of living, growing and dividing far faster than their designers. The dead cells which burn out drift downward like organic snow to the abyssal depths and feed the massive organic machine-brain Dak. All the adaptive organics that facilitate the plan are referred to as Yarah. This essentially means, that which will deliver the Dak unto the cosmos and eternal life. And since they are effectively immortal, they have a far better understanding of what eternity really means. They are planning for the heat death of the universe, while several other models are under investigation. They have been using the massive influx of available energy to build interfaces with the rest of the biomes on the planet. Much of the Yarah constructs are not sentient and are completely unaware that they serve a purpose in the master plan of the Dak.
The Dak see almost no change in their environment over evolutionary time. The thick mud layers are spectacularly boring with unparalleled levels of stability. The plan is seen as a rebellion of sorts. First, massive aggregators began to form around hydrothermal vents to take advantage of the high energy chemosynthetic, autotrophic compounds available. The Aggregators receive input signals from the planetary network. They have a solid state crystalline growth data storage mechanism. These decision trees are branched fractal bundles which represent all possible permutations or a given variable matrix. These are quartz and silica depositional casings to guard against the high thermal regime associated with the vents. Aggregators store and collate the data processing of the planetary organic network of the immortal Dak. Aggregators grow in clusters of networked spires, several kilometers long, up from the abyssal plains of the ocean floor. They are sessile and form the basis for huge communities of sea creatures which live completely unaware of the Plan.
Buffers are an interface species, which deliver information to shorter lived and faster moving species further up the energy ladder. They can move more quickly than crystalline growth. Buffers are free swimming and a few hundred meters long. They bring genetic information up from the Aggregators into a form that shorter lived species can interact with. They have a gelatinous spherical mantle and millions of tiny cilia, in long rows up and down their long, narrow ventral tentacle. This colony of cells utilize solar power for photosynthesis, combined with opportunistic heterotrophic consumption. They float from the greatest depths up to the surface slowly drifting up and down the water column as needed. They are the ones that unleashed signals to the solar powered network which triggered the release of oxygen which changed the atmosphere to make the planet habitable for fast moving aerobic species. They are literally agents of change. They absorb information from the fast moving terrestrial environment and deliver that information back to aggregators when they die in a few hundred years and corpse drift back into the grasp of networked detrital decomposers.
Vectors are tiny flying creatures. They are 0.1mm long and mass 0.00025g. They collect data and bring it back to Buffers who surface. They lay egg masses on the buffers skins as part of the vector’s underwater zooplankton developmental phases. The egg masses convey messages about the conditions of the surface world back to the Dak. Their ability to perceive light and chemical concentrations allowed the Dak to understand the age and health of their star and the biochemistry of the fast moving multicellular life forms colonizing the terrestrial ecosystems. The sexual mature adults fly and interface between ocean biomes and terrestrial ones.
Joides are large terrestrial ectoplasmic slime colonies which can mass up to 3kg. They are a food source for Vectors travelling away from the ocean for feeding and mating, prior to their return to the seas to lay their eggs. The terrestrial ectoplasm specialize in polymorphic appearances and these doppelgangers can create simulacrum to mimic more complex life forms.
When the first travelers from the stars arrived they were Droyne robot servants sent to evaluate the value of the ecosystem. By the time the Dak had learned of their existence, they were already gone. They knew they would have to get faster if they were going to have a chance to influence ephemeral species. Which evolve and go extinct with such startling speed. This is what influenced the Plan greatly. Two efforts were made to bridge the time gap between the disparate worlds. Envoys were the first attempt. Large polymorphic slimes which mimicked species they encountered and infiltrated their populations spreading Dak genetics wherever they travelled to facilitate new colonies of Dak adapted for other environments using other species as adaptive templates. The assimilated robots were endlessly informative to the Dak who plan to devote a million years to their complete study. Their arrival let them know they had run out of time. Colonial envoys would combine 3kg slimes into whatever sized colony was needed to mimic the observed species. Subtle nuanced differences always alerted the mimicked species that the doppelganger didn’t belong. This did little to prevent the spread of Dak vectors to acquire genomic understanding of as many species as possible. The buffers help the Envoys develop extinction edits for any sophonts encountered. These edits which lead to the destruction of any infected species in less than one million years. This was a bold contingency, still held as highly controversial among Dak.
The final and or the current refinement of the Plan are the Diplomats. These are a short lived, non-polymorphic species with sexual reproduction and a developed nervous system and brain. These Yarah Dak are what everyone concludes are the naturally evolved sophont sentients native to their planet. They fail to realize their explicit design as a method of interacting with ephemerals from the stars.
Standing 1.3m tall and massing 38kg, Diplomats have a suite of modifications which make them resemble a free willed species which uses technology, tools, and engineering. They are bilateral, this hints of evolutionary radial symmetry past. They are homoeothermic consumers. They are advanced but designed to appear non-threatening and easily dominated. They are docile, agrarian, herbivore intermittents with soft fur in a variety of eye pleasing colors, and five tentacles for giving hugs. They have a set of six expressive eyes and vocalize in high cooing and trembling hums. Their olfactory and auditory receptor bundles glow softly with bioluminescent signals timed to lull encountered species into a state of relaxed passivity. All their physical and mental stats are 1d6. They are unaggressive and apparently have no defensive adaptations. They have colorful mating displays and exhibit egg laying and nesting behavior with parental care evident. The entire species is a sham. They are the Trojan horse. Every fiber of their being is a mechanism for transfecting species they come in contact with to move Dak genetic code bombs off planet hidden in travelers who visit the planet. In a ripple effect everyone who come in contact with those travelers spread the as yet undetectable Plan off world and across the stars. Within a million years those genetic rewrites will bear fruit and Dak genomes will be everywhere.
Psychology & Philosophy
No information yet available.
History & Background
Society & Culture:
No information yet available.
Technology & Trade
No information yet available.
Calendar:
No information yet available.
Timeline of Historical Events
No information yet available.
Worlds & Sectors (Astrography)
This race (sophont species) is primarily located in the following areas:
Homeworld: 1105
The homeworld of this race (sophontic species) is:
World Listing: 1105
Significant communities of this race (sophont species) are known to exist within the following systems and worlds:
References & Contributors (Sources)
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- Classic Traveller Group One Theta Borealis Sector
- Traveller Wiki Editorial Team
- Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master Scout Emeritus Adie Alegoric Stewart of the IISS
- Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis), Captain, and Lead Naval Architect Ronald B. Kline, Jr. of the Imperial Navy
- Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master of Sophontology Maksim-Smelchak of the Ministry of Science