Janery 8, 3263
The lecture on the history of life was fascinating—the bits I could understand were, anyway. I got the times screwed up in my head, so I had to rush to make it and consequently forgot my note-taking supplies, so I’m going off memory here, but I’ll try to convey the parts that stuck with me:
Basically, living things change slowly over time. The bigger the animal, the less perceptible and impactful the changes are for each generation, but they still add up over tens of thousands of years. Humans break that rule in a very real way, because we can build complex structures in our environment and iterate on their design within individual lifetimes. What’s more, language lets us quickly share these external mutations with others in what the lecturer called ‘horizontal meme transfer’, so they can spread through populations millions of times faster than genetic changes can. I’ll admit, I got lost in the jargon, but the idea is simple enough: if I invent something, I can show my friends how it works. I don’t have to have offspring to reproduce an idea.
So, we go around evolving at millions of times the rate of all our fellow mammals because of our prefrontal cortex and our thumbs, and that had serious consequences for the entire planet. Nature, it seems, tends to smoothly shift from one unstable equilibrium state to the next, but sudden, rapid shifts tend to, well, break things. In the time of the ancients—actually, for most of the history of Earth—if you picked a random square mile of forest and went around and counted all the types of living things and how many there were, well, you couldn’t. There were just so many different animals, plants, insects, and microbes, all living together in a complex network of predation and symbiosis, that cataloguing them all was beyond even the powers of the ancients.
‘But El’Sha, that’s absurd,’ you say, ‘I’ve spent my life roaming across thousands of square miles of terrain and I know every eagle and beetle, every snake, every fish, every rodent; why couldn’t the ancients do this too?’ Well, nature is still beyond our powers to fully understand, but it used to be billions of times more complex. That’s what big, rapid changes like rocks from space, volcanic eruptions, and humans do to ecosystems: they simplify them. There are fifty-six species of bird on this continent now, but only a millennium ago there existed over a thousand.
The ancients did more than simplify the biosphere, though; they made the terrestrial environment much, much more complex. They covered the planet with structures, and dusted everything, from the bottom of the ocean to the highest mountaintop, with a fine layer of plas. Most bits that remain are too small to see without special equipment, but it’s in the food we eat and the water we drink. Some people claim that it used to be much, much easier for couples to conceive, before the ancients invented plas, but others think the reports of ten billion humans on Earth are just hearsay. Humans just aren’t that fertile, and never have been. Current best-estimates for the global population hover around five hundred million, but no one knows for sure.
Anyways, back to the structures, because that’s where things get interesting and relevant. So, humans can effectively evolve faster than other animals, and change their environment drastically as a result, but these physical changes accelerate behavioral changes in other animals as well! Everyone has had to deal with packs of wild dogs—they used to be rare on this continent, apparently, but when the ancients began abandoning their cities, the structures became new ecosystems. By the end of the Time of Strife, dozens of animal and plant species had dramatically changed their behavior to take advantage of the resources and niches these vast, empty suburban zones offered. While most living things were maladapted to survive in the new climate, a very few thrived, becoming the basis of our modern, simplified ecosystems. The lecturer said that in a couple million years, so long as modern humans don’t figure out how to revive the ancient’s technology, things will be as complex as they were before the ancients came along.
All of this is a very roundabout way of justifying the route I’m taking from the country of lakes to the eastern coast of North ‘merica. This is the farthest south I’ve ever been, and each day of hiking brings more sightings of ancient structures. I’m tempted, so tempted, to investigate them, but I keep my distance for fear of the dogs. Maybe if I ever pick up a few travelling companions I’ll indulge my curiosity (maybe we’ll even visit Man Hat’n!), but for now I’m carefully avoiding the old cities and the dangers within. Old Syracuse is half a day south of Watertown, where the college campus I’ve been staying at is located, and I’ve been advised by the locals to give it a wide berth, along with the Bosstown ruins a day’s hike south of my destination on the coast.
There are so many mysteries in our world, so many sights that defy description, and I’ve known since I was little that taking in as much of it as possible would be my mission. This whole ‘blogging’ thing was born out of a combination of that wanderlust and the values my parents drummed into me: it’s a way I can give back and not just live for myself. I’m staying the night in HP forest—it’s a small foraging community that relocates often but builds pretty comfortable temporary shelters and is welcoming to travelers. I’m repaying them with news from the West and snippets of the lectures I attended, but tomorrow I’m heading to the coast. I need to see the venenum with my own eyes.
One last thing for this entry, and again I hesitate to even share this for fear it will damage my credibility, but I saw something in the sky last night. It was as bright as a star, and it moved. And before you say it must have been a shooting star, I was able to track it for several minutes as it passed overhead from the Northern sky before it grew too dim to see in the South. I have vague memories of seeing something like it once before as a child, but until yesterday I assumed it was a fabrication of an imaginative young mind. Now I know it was real, even though I have no idea what it could have been: a distant, stellar object moving impossibly fast, or something closer to Earth moving at an incredible but slightly more plausible velocity? Maybe I’ll conduct some interviews before I leave HP and see if anyone else saw it. For now, this is El’sha, signing off!