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Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur

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Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture
Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Sorry, just seemed perfectly appropriate for the title, heh heh. After listening to this song too many times and pondering Sky Ark, I have to wonder... How common are odd pets in the transhuman future? Given the presence of space roaches, smart rats, and other GM-pets, just how far does the high end of bizarre pets go? While it's obvious that some genegineers will go to no end to get that unusual and exotic creation (Meathab, anyone?), that still doesn't explain how common they are. Now, of course, the books mention that Loonies like their animals, especially monkeys, but that's hardly the most adventurous creation I can imagine. Pet velociraptors would be roughly the size of a turkey and certainly interesting and unusual, and that's just the first and favourite that comes to mind. Personally, I think it'd do well to enhance the unusualness players feel for the setting if they encounter these sorts of things. It's one thing to meet an Uplifted Octopus, but it's another for him to have a Ping-Pong Tree Sponge on his desk and a small non-uplifted dumbo octopus that he keeps in an aquarium by his desk. A woman whose pet mouse, Biscuit, is the size of a goat. A coconut crab with white fur on its shell. An overly large and affectionate slug that glows different colours according to its mood. A group of butterflies with unusual wing patterns, possibly forming logos; living business cards. Elephants that fit in a purse. All these things and more could be used to drive home the point that mankind is no longer at the whim of nature but, instead, holds nature at its whim... But how common would they really be?
Draconis Draconis's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Not common at all. Like any spice I would use them sparingly. Otherwise you alter the tone of the game too much. You'd be playing StarWars or worse Toon if you keep tripping over weirdness. Novel is good but becoming desensitized to constant strange is not. Save it for exoplanets which are supposed to be different and unusual. Yes, yes, I know dragons calling pots black and all. I'd personally just have the rich and bored have them as a status symbol.

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Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
I somewhat agree with your statement that it might be a good idea to reserve these pets to the rich and famous, but I have to ask, in a setting where a group of players could consist of an artifical intelligence, an oversized lobster, and an Olympian with a Hercules obsession, whose daily routine might involve going to a sushi bar in a Japanese slum on a space station to get some fresh vat-grown fish-substitute from a talking octopus chef... Well... Isn't the setting a little unusual already? Characters have the ability to broadcast their mind to new places across the solar system, visit a space station made entirely of meat, or even to create multiple copies of themselves to run a ship when they find the crew is dead. Unusual and strange is the rule of the day, really.
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
I disagree completely. Unusual pets should not be so 'unusual' among people of the middle class or above (more unusual would be people of the middle class or above :P ) EP has really neglected bioengineering, which is odd because in 2011, bioengineering is doing better nanotech than nanotech is, and is competitive in the fields of chemistry and mechanics. According to Dyson, bioengineering is the next 'big' revolution. It's expected gene sequencers will cost about $5,000 in the next few years, and are (right now) desktop sized. Normal people, right now, are designing custom organisms. I fully expect that those who have the luxury of time will find that bioengineering is trivially inexpensive to get into (costing more in time than resources). Most people will fail to make anything interesting, just like most people who get into basic computer coding or garage electrical engineering never make anything truly exciting. But a large number of people WILL make truly novel, interesting creatures, which they will share, for profit or not, with everyone else. As long as people want custom pets, there will be businesses who cater to that demand. I expect a wide diversity of truly crazy pets available to those with the resources to support them (however most of these pets will suffer from crippling errors at some point in their life, and almost none will be intelligent).
Draconis Draconis's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Bravo, I'll share your optimism with my advanced genomic assay team on Monday. Oh and if you're morbidly curious as to which sequencer is ours http://www.appliedbiosystems.com/absite/us/en/home/applications-technolo... You're right in that I'm probably being elitist and thinking in terms of WELL designed pets. It's not the tech that's hard to get it's the skills involved. I'm curious, do you expect there to be a myriad of morph types as well? Everyone running around in their own custom designed morph? Why or why not? Presumably it's the same tech right? Bleh I'm being an ass, claws out and all. I wonder why. I probably shouldn't post today.

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nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Stuff I'd want to put my ego into? Not so much. By virtue of having to support an ego and the difficulties of engineering such a complex organism, the bar is set much higher. You'll have a lot of abject failures, a number of morphs with minor tweaks (represented in morph modifications in the equipment list), but oftentimes with debilitating medical issues, and a limited number of genuinely unique and functional new morphs (more than we've seen so far, but still pretty limited). It's like the difference between the number of people who make functional model airplanes and functional real airplanes.
Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
I can agree to the lack of extremely numerous morphs, to an extent. I would assume that, while biomorphs might be somewhat limited, the huge array of anarchists and Titanians and microcorps in the PC just pumping out new bio/cyberware constantly, and the ability to use nanovats to alter your morph's aesthetics, means that biomorphs will have a very wide array of looks, even if they're functionally similar. Synthmorphs, on the other hand, don't need to worry so much about organ failure. Given that there are likely "stock" parts, I can see synthmorphs being as readily augmented as people today alter their cars.
Nathan Brazil Nathan Brazil's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
I might think there is also a "practical" issues on pets. There might be limits in many areas. Uplifts might be against the idea of pets, the closer a pet seems perhaps to their particular original genome feeling the same way we do now about primates. "Look! See! See what its doing! It's doing that thing with it's tentacles, just like we do. Poor octopus. Can't we make it smarter like us?" Bio-cons may not like more dangerous alterations to life forms Despite the whole idea of post scarcity, there are I might think limits in some habitats concerning having another stored personality restored and morphed, getting them to work (or enslavement depending on who does the restoring) vs having a "pet" which provides no return. Finally, there might be issues of resource usage (light, air, heat, food). Some people could use their own rep or resources to maintain them. Still. (about tribbles) Spock: They return nothing. Uhura: They give us love.
The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Axel the Chimeric wrote:
Pet velociraptors would be roughly the size of a turkey and certainly interesting and unusual, and that's just the first and favourite that comes to mind.
Hardcore programmers would have them to keep themselves honest.
Quote:
It's one thing to meet an Uplifted Octopus, but it's another for him to have a Ping-Pong Tree Sponge on his desk and a small non-uplifted dumbo octopus that he keeps in an aquarium by his desk.
"And I shall call him.. Mini-Me."
Quote:
A coconut crab with white fur on its shell.
That would be an ideal pet for children, actually. They would be durable, just as prone to getting into things as kids are, and sufficiently scary to deter anyone up to no good.
Quote:
A group of butterflies with unusual wing patterns, possibly forming logos
Why not living spimes to monitor the hab's environment? Bioengineered catfish that live in the waste reclamation plant (or did I read that somewhere? I think I did.) Geckos that patrol the interior of the hull looking for structural anomalies.
The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Draconis wrote:
Oh and if you're morbidly curious as to which sequencer is ours http://www.appliedbiosystems.com/absite/us/en/home/applications-technolo...
[url=http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/29/want/]Want to touch the shiny...[/url]
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
In my setting LOLcats are a real species... a bit of language AI, some comedy recognition AI, a mesh insert, and presto - AR projected LOLspeak. Other fun pets: Frog beetles - shiny, colourful beetles that are good at climbing with their long hind legs. In fact, plenty of beetles have been engineered for habitat ecology control, and some have been modified for pet uses: big dynastid or lucanid battle beetles with impressive horns and mandibles, decorative buprestids forming glittering reflections, even scent-producing beetles quietly emitting the right mood scents. Pet bats - cute, quiet critters that live in the beehive caves in the asteroid belt. Modified to deal with light and look more cuddly. Kids with ultrasound hearing/speaking have learned to call and interact with them, producing cool aerial ballets.
Extropian
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur
Here's another pet idea I had. Florie - Classified as an ape hybrid, flories also have a large degree of artificial DNA combined with recovered genetic information from the extinct species homo floresiensis. The result is a pet that has an eerie resemblance to tiny human beings. With limited total intelligence, flories have a cognitive capacity comparable to smart dogs... they are capable of understanding speech, but have limited ability to speak it themselves. Bleeding Edge Genetics' official statement regarding the creation of the florie is that it is primarily based on chimpanzee genetics, and therefore a partial uplift. This hasn't stopped detractors from referring to it as a "downlift". It's nature as a niche pet for the hyper-wealthy that have an interest in owning a "pet human" has ensured that it generally carries a very high price tag. However, clones produced outside of BEG have been discovered. It is theorized that some Mercurial group is behind this, and this suspicion is backed by the fact that the largest majority of unlicensed flories that have been discovered are owned by uplifts in the outer system. The idea of an uplift animal having a pet human is considered humorous enough that it has spawned a multitude of mesh sites based around photos for such pairings. Small underground "man shows" have even cropped up.
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]