Gudo wrote: ↑Wed Dec 15, 2021 9:53 pm
All this is interesting and correct, but there are several BUTs.
Firstly, Loroi are not terrestrial organisms.
Secondly, they are not a naturally developed species, but appeared as a result of a bioengineering project.
This leads to a few tweaks to your bed sheet above:
1) The fact that Loroi blood is based on copper does not equate them with earthly organisms with a similar property. Terrestrial molluscs exist in the terrestrial biosphere, eat terrestrial life and shit with the corresponding secretions.
He is terrestrial organisms, it's just that oxygen in their bloodstream is carried by a cell based on copper, not iron.
Loroi, in turn, live in the biosphere, in the overwhelming majority built on a different biochemistry. There are no terrestrial bacteria there. There are no earthly protozoa. There are no terrestrial plants and certainly no terrestrial animals.
Yes, humans are obviously able (to a limited extent) to eat food based on the biochemistry native to Loroi, but this is the essence of digestion - to disassemble what has entered the gastrointestinal tract into the simplest and most assimilable compounds, release them into the bloodstream, and then remove waste from the body.
Most of the microflora that the human body carries will have similar problems.
First of all, terrestrial viruses are absolutely safe for loroi. Because viruses can only interact with certain types of cell membranes and intracellular mechanisms ... which, for obvious reasons, you can hardly find in Loroi.
It will be more difficult with bacteria and other things that perceive the environment primarily as a source of food, but in general they will have problems similar to Alex's problems when trying to eat loroi products - they simply cannot eat everything and will be able to digest even less.
Well, the most controversial situation with fungi. For them, the environment is primarily a substrate, they develop on it, but their cycle is more autonomous. And the products of their vital activity can easily turn out to be very unpleasant for the loroi organisms.
However, as a space civilization that has successfully populated many planets and successfully contacts with other intelligent species, both with Liron's biochemistry, and with a different one, the loroi probably have an idea about these problems and know how to deal with them ... otherwise all of the above would simply be did not have.
2) The fact that loroi is a product of bioengineering, and not evolution, also has a number of nuances.
First, there is no "common ancestor".
300k years ago, humans in their modern form did not yet exist as a species. And the hominids who lived in those days were very remotely similar to modern humans, to say that the loroi was "copied" from humans.
By the way, there may well be a similar story with the "prototypes" of Barsam and Neridi - at the time of their creation, the modern species simply did not exist in, well, the modern form.
Which raises the next question, how did Liron so accurately guess the appearance of the species that appeared, in the case of people, 150k years after the creation of the "heirs", but we are not talking about that now.
Secondly, since loroi and other types of Soya-Liron groups were created artificially, their creators probably knew about all the "pitfalls", some of which you raised in your thread. And it is likely that they have introduced mechanisms and algorithms into their creations that allow them to effectively deal with these problems.
Which?
We do not know. And if I were Jim, I wouldn't go into such questions. Trying to explain the structure of a hyperdrive in conventionally "hard" fiction has never been a good idea, even if you are fluent in the topic, which is unlikely.
There should be a hyperdrive, but let the reader figure out the subtleties of its device.