Zompist Bboard Again

For prompts, random ideas and questions related to worldbuilding that aren't about conlangs

I had a silly idea: a mythology where the primordial Earth (or conworld) is instead of being made of fire, water, ice or mud made from bread

In the beginning, the world was made of bread.
As time went on, the bread became stale and the crust hardened into stone.
The Gods saw this, and it was not good.
Walking on the crust hurt their feet, and no plants grew, not even in the cracks leading to the soft mie.
So the Gods decided to end this drought, and called forth vast quantities of milk.
Thus the Heavenly Fats did rain from the Celestial Udders, and the crust became soft and pleasant.
The rivers of milk enriched the world, and the land became fruitful and plentiful.
And the Gods saw it was good.

Not a silly idea at all! (Not entirely unprecedented either: in Mesoamerican mythology, human beings were created from maize.)

mèþru wrote: ↑Wed Dec 30, 2020 2:34 pm I had a silly idea: a mythology where the primordial Earth (or conworld) is instead of being made of fire, water, ice or mud made from bread

In the beginning, the world was made of bread.
As time went on, the bread became stale and the crust hardened into stone.
The Gods saw this, and it was not good.
Walking on the crust hurt their feet, and no plants grew, not even in the cracks leading to the soft mie.
So the Gods decided to end this drought, and called forth vast quantities of milk.
Thus the Heavenly Fats did rain from the Celestial Udders, and the crust became soft and pleasant.
The rivers of milk enriched the world, and the land became fruitful and plentiful.
And the Gods saw it was good.

I like the idea. The demiurge was a baker then.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed Dec 30, 2020 3:06 pm Not a silly idea at all!

Seconded! And this thread is a good idea, too; IIRC I thought about starting something like it once or twice, put wondered if there'd be enough interest on this language-focused forum.

In my world there's a sapient species of amphibious cephalopods that can limitedly change shape and can at will change colour. I'm a bit stumped though on how psychology and social structures can work when any adult can flawlessly mimic any other uninjured adult. Ideas?

mèþru wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 9:49 am In my world there's a sapient species of amphibious cephalopods that can limitedly change shape and can at will change colour. I'm a bit stumped though on how psychology and social structures can work when any adult can flawlessly mimic any other uninjured adult. Ideas?

Senses other than the visual may help. If they have any form of telepathy, they could perhaps sense the individual character in this way; you could also go the route of giving each one a slightly different tactile sense, or have them identify each-other partly by smell. If they have ink, you could also use that in greetings, with the ink being somehow differerntly-coloured, scented, flavoured, or somesuch, that could be used to identify each-other even when transformed.

mèþru wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 9:49 am ... when any adult can flawlessly mimic any other uninjured adult.

Flawlessness seems unlikely. I'd start with the eyes. Some cephalopods have pecking orders, but I couldn't find anything useful.

mèþru wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 9:49 am In my world there's a sapient species of amphibious cephalopods that can limitedly change shape and can at will change colour. I'm a bit stumped though on how psychology and social structures can work when any adult can flawlessly mimic any other uninjured adult. Ideas?

I think the question to ask is how does that capacity evolve? Camouflage is of course a factor -- but it probably won't fool another member of the species.

If they're soical, there is strong evolutionary pressure to distinguish between ally and enemy. If they're not social -- well, there isn't much point in mimickry.
This suggests a strongly social species, with both in-group and out-group rivalry.

An idea for an evolutionary path is that it starts out as camouflage (as I think occurs among real-life cephalopods?), then gets better as a way to game social interactions (mimicking alpha individual, or a member of a rival group is useful). This leads to an arm race as the species gets better at distinguishing individuals and at mimickry.

Over time mimickry could be used as communication and signaling group membership. Like passwords for secret meeting, the tribe's camouflage pattern changes every week! Or, more probably, members of the tribe know about the way you wriggle your third tentacle when you're angry; outsiders won't.

Other consequences: there's a strong pressure towards a very uniform species, physically. A larger (or smaller) individual is the odd squid out.

And of course, this has implication for learning. If you can mimic the way I move my tentacles, you can mimic the way I grow seawood or chop silex or whatever.
For that matter, there's an equilibrium of sorts between pretending to be the alpha individual and adopting the same successful strategy. The alpha individual within the group is not likely to be stronger (body size will tend to be uniform) but smarter, or at least more cunning. Each member basically gets a choice between pretending to be the alpha, or being as successful as the alpha by copying its behavior.

A real-life analogue might be social insects! They rely on smell alone to distinguish individual / members of the colony, and these can be imitated. This leads to some fascinating instances of parasitism and/or slavery. (A very common strategy is: get into the nest of a rival species, kill the queen and imitate its pheromones, replace the workers with your own brood.) They do somehow manage to distinguish some individuals (though I have no idea how) since some are demonstrably better at motivating other workers than others.
It's a place to start, but of course, cephalopods are pretty smart, and they won't be that easily fooled!

The "non-injured" has very interesting implications. An easy defense against parasites is that any member of the group that seems to be living off the other gets a limb chopped off, just so they can tell who it was in the future.
This suggests a very different social dynamic than between us monkey. If someone within the group hurts you, physically hurting him is an expensive strategy. Better to ignore him. Among mimic cephalopods, the benefits of physically harming your rival are much stronger!

mèþru wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 9:49 am In my world there's a sapient species of amphibious cephalopods that can limitedly change shape and can at will change colour. I'm a bit stumped though on how psychology and social structures can work when any adult can flawlessly mimic any other uninjured adult. Ideas?

my feeling is that it's harder to bullshit a bullshitter. as with many things, a sort of arms race would ensue where, say, I get a tatoo in some weird ink that can't be very well imitated by the natural cephalopod means, and then you discover that if you eat a certain mushroom you can, and then I do some other weird shit like, I don't know,

Conversely, if this is a bullshitter's world (i.e. difficult and ineffective countermeasures), you'd just not identify people by their looks? voice, (or whatever equivalent cuttlefish might have), for example, or poetic affectation: maybe jazz interpretation?

I'd like to do a sanity check on a conworld (or should it meta-conworld) idea I had.

Here it is:

A billion years ago or so, an unknown species built wormholes between several planets, including Earth.
The wormholes were built on planetary surface, with the explicit intent of having early life spread from one planet to another.

These were intermittently maintained (whether this was done by the original builders or by other agents isn't clear). The general intent seems to have been to protect the developement of lifeform, and interesting lifeforms, from the ever present threat of mass extinction.

Fast-forward to the present day: now we have a dozen planets or so with a biosphere much like Earth, with related species, in many cases including either humans, hominid species, or both.
Other places have life that might be related to Earth's but is otherwise really alien. On some planet, life is found but far weirder and most likely unrelated.

At least one human population has technology far beyond what we have.

How would you feel about such a setting?
Does that make sense? Or is it so much like Larry Niven and Ursula Le Guin as to be uninteresting? Or do you think the plot of Attack of the 50 foot woman made more sense?

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 2:12 am I'd like to do a sanity check on a conworld (or should it meta-conworld) idea I had.

Here it is:
...

How would you feel about such a setting?
Does that make sense? Or is it so much like Larry Niven and Ursula Le Guin as to be uninteresting? Or do you think the plot of Attack of the 50 foot woman made more sense?

What I personally feel is that it's somewhat similar to Stargate, which makes about as much sense as any 90's/early 2000's Scifi. But my thinking that is probably due to my strong nostalgia for the movie/shows and that pretty much any time there's worm holes and ancient aliens in a setting I think of Stargate. Someone who didn't see the show, or rarely saw it, might have other things they'd relate this idea to and different thoughts and emotions about it.

Basically, like everything under the sun (or other stars), it's been done before but you can still make it new and interesting.

linguistcat wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 3:25 am What I personally feel is that it's somewhat similar to Stargate, which makes about as much sense as any 90's/early 2000's Scifi. But my thinking that is probably due to my strong nostalgia for the movie/shows and that pretty much any time there's worm holes and ancient aliens in a setting I think of Stargate. Someone who didn't see the show, or rarely saw it, might have other things they'd relate this idea to and different thoughts and emotions about it.

Ah, yeah! I'm rather fond of Stargate too.

No brain slugs in my setting though.
I should add that the wormholes are currently inaccessible and/or not working.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking along very similar lines recently. Specifically, I’ve been wondering: how can one get an extraterrestrial world which can justifiably be inhabited by H. sapiens? (I’ve long been dissatisfied with the standard answer of ‘well, they aren’t actually humans, they just coincidentally look and act exactly like humans do’.) As it happens, I did in fact figure out a justification… only to read your post and realise that you had figured out the same mechanism. And, as usual, my thoughts on how it could work now look pretty half-baked compared to yours. (And I can’t even claim I came to this idea independently, since I’m pretty sure I developed it after seeing an earlier post of yours on this topic!) Ah well, back to the drawing board, I guess.

The most recent xkcd:

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 3:53 am As it happens, I’ve been thinking along very similar lines recently. Specifically, I’ve been wondering: how can one get an extraterrestrial world which can justifiably be inhabited by H. sapiens? (I’ve long been dissatisfied with the standard answer of ‘well, they aren’t actually humans, they just coincidentally look and act exactly like humans do’.) As it happens, I did in fact figure out a justification… only to read your post and realise that you had figured out the same mechanism. And, as usual, my thoughts on how it could work now look pretty half-baked compared to yours. (And I can’t even claim I came to this idea independently, since I’m pretty sure I developed it after seeing an earlier post of yours on this topic!) Ah well, back to the drawing board, I guess.

Like I said before, I have no problem with sharing the idea. Going even further and say I'd be interested in sharing the setting (meta-setting?) itself: I'd like both to have an interstellar setting and avoid the trope of having one culture per planet, but given the time it takes to flesh out one tiny corner of one planet, it's probably not feasible in one lifetime A sort of sci-fi Tlön, if you will.

That entirely depends on how you feel about it of course I think you said before you'd be more comfortable using entirely your own ideas (which of course is more than entirely understandable), but if anyone faces the same problem, well, you know where I stand on this.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 4:28 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 3:53 am As it happens, I’ve been thinking along very similar lines recently. Specifically, I’ve been wondering: how can one get an extraterrestrial world which can justifiably be inhabited by H. sapiens? (I’ve long been dissatisfied with the standard answer of ‘well, they aren’t actually humans, they just coincidentally look and act exactly like humans do’.) As it happens, I did in fact figure out a justification… only to read your post and realise that you had figured out the same mechanism. And, as usual, my thoughts on how it could work now look pretty half-baked compared to yours. (And I can’t even claim I came to this idea independently, since I’m pretty sure I developed it after seeing an earlier post of yours on this topic!) Ah well, back to the drawing board, I guess.

Like I said before, I have no problem with sharing the idea. Going even further and say I'd be interested in sharing the setting (meta-setting?) itself: I'd like both to have an interstellar setting and avoid the trope of having one culture per planet, but given the time it takes to flesh out one tiny corner of one planet, it's probably not feasible in one lifetime A sort of sci-fi Tlön, if you will.

That entirely depends on how you feel about it of course I think you said before you'd be more comfortable using entirely your own ideas (which of course is more than entirely understandable), but if anyone faces the same problem, well, you know where I stand on this.

Yep, I did indeed say earlier that I’m uncomfortable with stealing ripping off borrowing, shall we say, someone else’s ideas. On the other hand, a shared setting is a very intriguing suggestion — and as you say, it lets you actually have a properly realistic inhabited universe in a way that would otherwise require multiple lifetimes. But either way, wormholes and such considerations aren’t really relevant until you get to an Earth-like level of development or thereabouts, so I think I shan’t worry about these things until I actually have a conworld which is more developed than two language isolates.

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 5:58 am Yep, I did indeed say earlier that I’m uncomfortable with stealing ripping off borrowing, shall we say, someone else’s ideas. On the other hand, a shared setting is a very intriguing suggestion — and as you say, it lets you actually have a properly realistic inhabited universe in a way that would otherwise require multiple lifetimes. But either way, wormholes and such considerations aren’t really relevant until you get to an Earth-like level of development or thereabouts, so I think I shan’t worry about these things until I actually have a conworld which is more developed than two language isolates.

Cool. One good thing with the concept is that you can steal flora and fauna from history, or prehistory. (I borrowed a lot from prehistoric South America).

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 2:12 am How would you feel about such a setting?
Does that make sense? Or is it so much like Larry Niven and Ursula Le Guin as to be uninteresting? Or do you think the plot of Attack of the 50 foot woman made more sense?

FWIW I think it's rare that a premise is what makes or breaks a story/idea/setting. A truly unique setting can certainly enhance it (Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive would not be the same without the rather alien planet full of giant crabs), but it comes down to execution for me. Even the most tired setting and premise (that pseudo medieval thing every high fantasy novel does, IMO...) can be rejuvenated by a sufficiently creative execution. Sure, other people have done "portals from Earth to other places" before, but what makes yours different? That's where the interest comes in for me.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 2:12 am (a cool conworld premise)

I like it. Of course, in a way, surface wormholes are kind of indistinguishable from just portals to another dimension, isekai style. those are cool too.

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 3:53 am As it happens, I’ve been thinking along very similar lines recently. Specifically, I’ve been wondering: how can one get an extraterrestrial world which can justifiably be inhabited by H. sapiens?

My current conworld -and I think former ones too maybe i dunno- was seeded with life by a sort of probe sent from earth an unspecified amount of years in the future.