To Anastasius
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3710
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
To Anastasius
I've heard it said that Karthians don't have a ton of genetic diversity, compared to humans. How is it that you've managed to prevent your species into collapsing, back on Telor?
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3710
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
As Anastasius
"The imperative of survival forced us to rethink many ethical questions which Terrans have the luxury of approaching with a righteous mindset, quite simply.
There are eight billion souls on this world. These multitudes now include Drifters, Transgenics and other aliens such as myself. Other species are coming to the forefront, as mister Azardad's involvement and Meris' tribulations will come to bring the Void Weavers into a small fraction of the public eye. There is more than enough for the gene pool to not only remain stable for generations to come - but for it to thrive in new and unsuspected ways.
Telor, comparatively, was a small outpost housing a few hundred million Karthians. Our birth rates were low, our mortality rate was high thanks to how unshielded we were from certain forms of radiation common to the outer reaches of the galaxy. To survive without help from a homeworld of which we knew nothing, our only hope was to abandon our ethical boundaries and to embrace cloning, as well as several other neighbouring techniques that have since been used to create the Transgenics.
We cloned ourselves. When identical duplicates threatened to disrupt the gene pool, we shuffled the mitochondrial data of a new batch of clones. Enzymes bonded in new ways, new traits surfaced, previously recessive racial traits became visible and stability was safeguarded. We did not entirely avoid debilitating disease or the loss of mental prowess observed after generations of sexless in-breeding - but we curtailed our collapse, created compatible, distinct and divergent bloodlines out of single strands. Every two generations, bloodlines would be cut short through planet-wide sterilization acts, and new embryo generations would be generated. What radiation took away from us, we gave ourselves by shuffling the primal deck of cards repititiously.
All Chimeras are fundamentally clones of Aspasia, Spearhead and Talon. Like my kind, however, they have been meticulously stabilized and differentiated from one another, so that their first generation would function as well as a fully developed civilization. No rejection, no collapse, no still births or miscarriages."
There are eight billion souls on this world. These multitudes now include Drifters, Transgenics and other aliens such as myself. Other species are coming to the forefront, as mister Azardad's involvement and Meris' tribulations will come to bring the Void Weavers into a small fraction of the public eye. There is more than enough for the gene pool to not only remain stable for generations to come - but for it to thrive in new and unsuspected ways.
Telor, comparatively, was a small outpost housing a few hundred million Karthians. Our birth rates were low, our mortality rate was high thanks to how unshielded we were from certain forms of radiation common to the outer reaches of the galaxy. To survive without help from a homeworld of which we knew nothing, our only hope was to abandon our ethical boundaries and to embrace cloning, as well as several other neighbouring techniques that have since been used to create the Transgenics.
We cloned ourselves. When identical duplicates threatened to disrupt the gene pool, we shuffled the mitochondrial data of a new batch of clones. Enzymes bonded in new ways, new traits surfaced, previously recessive racial traits became visible and stability was safeguarded. We did not entirely avoid debilitating disease or the loss of mental prowess observed after generations of sexless in-breeding - but we curtailed our collapse, created compatible, distinct and divergent bloodlines out of single strands. Every two generations, bloodlines would be cut short through planet-wide sterilization acts, and new embryo generations would be generated. What radiation took away from us, we gave ourselves by shuffling the primal deck of cards repititiously.
All Chimeras are fundamentally clones of Aspasia, Spearhead and Talon. Like my kind, however, they have been meticulously stabilized and differentiated from one another, so that their first generation would function as well as a fully developed civilization. No rejection, no collapse, no still births or miscarriages."