There could be the opposite, too their sleeping informorphs, waiting to be awakened. like the Ur, like the Forerunners or like... what are they called in Mass Effect, again? Whatever, there could be a 50/50 chance that it's either, if any usable material is found.

Thampsan wrote:

Point well made though, but one imagines that if the TITANS made the gates and so used the gates they probably scoured each planet for useful data to add to their ever-expanding base of knowledge leaving only the barest scraps behind. A computer would be useful, but a better bet would be to go searching for remaining organic matter that has been dead and buried.

That's under the assumption that they use obtrusive forms of analyzation. Virtually everything one needs to know can be acquired through unobtrusive technologies. Advanced millimeter wave scans are the first thing to come to mind... with sufficiently-advanced electromagnetic analyzation, you can do a complete autopsy without the need to slice up anything.

I got the theory that the TITANs didn't build them, merely reactivated ones abandonned behind eons ago. Or reassembled ones from some old alien files Nobody knows when they acquiered that technology. It could have been hiding in some governemental databases for decades (*cough*Rosswell,1947*cough*) and the TITANs dug it up. that brings a question: Would it be that the TITANs found the blueprints, built a few prototypes and activated one? the wormhole opened and something came through. Maybe some ETI 'digital RNA', who knows? It infected the unexpecting TITANs and drove them crazy. thanks to their self-upgrading abilities, they're able to regain their minds. But they're unable to counter the virus they unwittingly unleashed on the world and are forced, either by choice or survival instinct, to flee SOL through the Gates. $EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!$$ re Mass Effect, I didn't mean the Reaper (or the Sovereign), but the race that left the database on Mars and the geodesic relay network.

Thampsan wrote:

Ahh, you mean The Protheans. But the relay network and the citadel was all built by the Reapers and left for future races to find so that the future races would develop (technologically) along the same path the Reapers took. ME2 goes into much more detail and it is rather nifty. As regards EP and the Pandora Gates, that is very true. The core book only implies a link between the gates and the TITANs, they could well have been placed there by ETIs or be the product of ETI technology that the TITANs recovered.

Well, the one argument I'd have against that would be the fact that we supposedly only recently found one on Mars, despite the fact that it has been inhabited for a while. That somewhat points to the idea that the gates weren't there previously, but rather a new construction on the planet. Plus, it somewhat fits with the other technology that the TITANs have built, which are light years ahead of anything that transhumanity can produce (like the bush bots with their femtotechnological manipulation capability).

Smokeskin wrote:

That wouldn't even remotely work for Earth species. For example mitochondria has their own genome, independant of DNA, and without that your cells won't work. There's a whole range of bacteria in your gut and such that you need - about 90% of the cells in your body isn't human cells but bacteria. You need a fertilized egg cell and proper chemical and hormonal environment, something that the DNA gives very few pointers about. Here on Earth, we can take DNA, implant it in a fertilized cell and make it grow inside an animal (and soon artificial wombs). But even if we had nanotech and could construct everything inside a fertilized cell, that'll still be a trivial task compared to working everything out from scratch, as you'd need to do with alien DNA.

We don't need to work everything out from scratch, we just need to find corpses and fossils. Moreover, even without their mitochondrial DNA, we could simply genetically engineer a new strain of mitochondrial DNA that can symbiotically be hosted by their cells. It would require minimal levels of organic hybridization. To that end, exowombs alongside the tried-and-true method of trial and error will allow us to eventually get the necessary environment needed to maintain that organisms in vitro survivability.

Smokeskin wrote:

You're just going to "simply genetically engineer a new strain of mitochondrial DNA" for a cell that you have no idea of how works, and with the huge permutation spaces of something like DNA? You really need to find preserved cells or detailed medical science files if you want to do something.

Our degree of knowledge about how DNA works has apparently achieved a level so great that we are able to manufacture bodies capable of doing things that current organisms cannot. Complete immunity to natural diseases, complex organisms immune to aging, and nano-machines which can assist the maintenance of the body. We created creatures that can survive on the friggin' Sun! Why would understanding alien DNA be necessarily out of our grasp?

Sepherim wrote:

Precisely because it is alien, doesn't follow our rules, doesn't accept our knowledge, and works on its own bases. Even if we could be able to, it would take many, many years to work it out. Just recall how long it is taking to map the human genome, and we have more than enough living samples to work with and compare.

Believe it or not, genetics works on some fairly strict rules that, while we don't understand them now, complete mastery of the genome would render it more akin to a principle than anything. To that end, as different as an alien species might be, it is still confined to certain parameters if it too is a carbon-based life form based around self-replicating chemical structures. DNA, in the most generic terms, is a blueprint for creating a living organism (it's actually a paired set of instructions by which the organism's individual cells produce its own protein chains, but I digress). Having access to this information would provide us the means to figure out how this organism was built. It would also give us the means to recreate them. The human genome project is advancing slowly in our time because our knowledge of how DNA works is still in its infancy. This is not the case in the EP universe.

Smokeskin wrote:

Your problem is that you don't understand that DNA doesn't give you the complete picture. Without the cellular machinery to make it run, you're not going to get anywhere with it, and DNA doesn't contain the instructions for it.

Actually, while DNA doesn't give us the whole picture, much of the remaining factors can be calculated through simple trial and error. It may even be possible that we can produce generic totipotent cells, which act as a template that we can place other genetic information to create any number of unique beings. Obviously SCNT is not an option for creating clones of these alien life forms, but exowombs can provide us the means to do so without. From there its a matter of getting ahold of their genetic material, by one way or another. Unwashed food tools are probably the easiest way to do so (a close second being mummified bodies), and then the only big issue is whether that genetic material has been consumed by decay or other organisms.

Sepherim wrote:

Thing is that you are considering a human-like DNA. I doubt that many alien species are relatively similair. Imagine a specie based in silicon instead of carbon, one that breathes sulfur instead of oxygen... I doubt any of the rules that apply to our DNA are remotely similair to their "DNA".

That's assuming that you can have silicon-based lifeforms. Silicon does not have the ability to form the complex bonds that carbon can. Organisms only utilize it in a structural way, primarily in the form of biogenic silica. Such life forms that are purely composed of organic chains consisting of silicon are solely theoretical, and not something based on any accepted knowledge. However, artificial could be created as a silicon-based life form, since computers are already primarily composed of the material. But until we find proof that natural organisms can evolve from silicon structures, it's doubtful.

Arenamontanus wrote:

How many kinds of self-replicating chemical structures can there be? We already know that on Earth there are variants of DNA and RNA, a there are theories that peptide nucleic acid (PNA), glycol nucleic acid (GNA) or threose nucleic acid (TNA) may have been used as an early replicator. In fact, a lot of biopolymers might have the right properties for autocatalysis, just consider the "lipid world" hypothesis. And there may be more exotic things still, such as the "clay world" hypothesis. Add to this that any encoding scheme in this replicator medium is largely arbitrary. We have an assignment of 22 amino acids to 64 codons. This can be done in 64!/22!42! = 22 million ways, and most variants will not work.

All very true. However, I think we should all note that we have come across the largest amount of genetic research within only the past few decades. Considering that the Eclipse Phase universe may exist as far as a century from now, it's very possible that we may have a complete (if not nearly so) understanding of how this technology works. However, research would still continue. Creating the complex DNA codes that go into creating new morphs is probably the new field to which genetic research looks into. By this time period, our eyes may have turned away from understanding the code and started to look towards optimizing it. We may look at it less like a biological field and look at it more like a programming field, with genetic researchers manipulating the "assembler language" of DNA to their whims.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Carbon based life even pretty similar to ours is very likely to have fundamental differences in encoding (not just the direct code, but things like chromatin folding, methylation and other epigenetic stuff), biomolecules used (there are many possible amino acids and other small molecules to choose from, not to mention their chirality) and cellular machinery. I have no doubt a motivated transhuman team can untangle this if they get a few sample organisms, a lab and some time. But figuring out how the local biology works is quite different from resurrecting a dead species.

Agreed, but the local biology will give us huge insight in how those dead species worked, especially if they directly descended from them, or have a common ancestor. Much of the knowledge we have about dinosaurs today don't necessarily come from studying Dinosaurs, but also from studying still-existing life. The same principles could be utilized in xenobiological studies.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Many people I have met seem to think that it would be easy to run a simulation of biology, and hence we could just do trial and error. But running a molecular dynamics simulation of even a few cells requires the kind of computing power I have a hard time seeing people in EP accessing (especially if you want to do it right, using quantum models): you would need the kind of big supercomputing centre people frown at to run the massive biology simulator, and the trial and error would be rather slow - perhaps a few iterations per second for a few cells. There are billions of protein molecules per bacterial cell, all interacting with their environment on the femtosecond timescale. This kind of slow and local simulation is not enough to figure out what alien hormones and organs are needed to get an Iktomi baby to come out of its mommy's ootheca.

I'd hate to say it, but I only think the common population fears massive processors. Hypercorps and groups like Firewall have no necessary compunctions against. Besides, rather than creating the massive processor blocks similar to those which house Seed AI, they can simply create a networked structure of quantum computers running algorithms in unison to run the simulations they need. Besides, by the time of Eclipse Phase, they have processing capabilities that are able to render entire realities. I should think that molecular simulation would be of similar difficulty.

Arenamontanus wrote:

In the case of human biology and brain emulation the answer is that we know enough to approximate many irrelevant parts - over the decades it took to perfect uploading and synthetic biology researchers learned what aspects of biochemistry could be run as concentration dynamics and what needed high-resolution dynamics (and I guess the end result was that egos can be run on some abstraction of compartment model neurons rather than any simulated biochemistry). But this was a major research undertaking with big funding and plenty of understanding of the target biosphere. I am sure transhumanity will do wonders with extinct biospheres, but it has had much less than 10 years to learn from them.

10 years to work with their genetics, but they have a backlog of information from perhaps a century in prior genetic research to work with as well. To that end, other organisms that might exist on the planet can serve to fill in whatever gaps in information might still exist. The possibilities are there. Am I saying that Gatecrashing is definitely going to have alien morphs? Probably not. However, I'm sure that down the line in the setting, it is very well possible that transhumanity may repopulate groups like the Iktomi through artificial abiogenesis; and, we may even see hybrid morphs with alien genetics interwoven in to interesting effect.

Smokeskin wrote:

If we imagined aliens coming to Earth with humans extinct, and they found human DNA, how much would that tell them about humans and how to restore our species? What if they had access to other mammals to give them hints on cellular organization and such?

First, they would need to learn to decode DNA and cell biology, essentially figuring out the biochemistry and function of it. This is essentially like redoing all current biotechnology, but if the aliens got their own biotech (and it was not totally alien) they likely already have a pretty good idea what to look for (and starting with nanotech and supercomputers helps). Once you have the DNA you can compare sequences and relatively easily figure out how humans were related to monkeys, the overall genetic diversity and basic things like food eaten (this is likely where archeology becomes really useful to check the conclusions). To restore a species you need to produce a viable egg and implant in a functional womb. Putting a synthesized human DNA string into a denucleated chimp egg is slightly above what we can currently do, but it doesn't look that impossible. The real problem is the rather complex gene regulation (the cause for much of the trouble in cloning), this will require plenty of trial and error as well as deep investigations of how related animals do it. Similarly getting a human to grow in a chimp womb may require some deft manipulation of hormones and other things. This is not obvious from the DNA but requires some good (better than our current) understanding of mammalian reproductive biology. Now, humanity as got to our current biotechnology level in about fifty years, spending perhaps a few hundred thousand to a few million man-years in total. The accumulation of knowledge and ability looks exponential, so if we had to re-do all the past investigations but with the help of our new tools and understanding it would have taken much less time. Assuming a doubling time of 10 years (based on squinting at http://w3.ualg.pt/~rcastil/documents/BI_Higgs.pdf ) means that we should be able to do it 32 times faster with the same effort (or that we could do it with a smaller research community, something like a very big specialized university working for 50 years). Now, EP seems to be far in advance of this. Maybe we should assume EP tech and our aliens to be five doublings ahead. That would allow them to redo all our current biotech 1024 times faster or using 100-1000 researchers working for a century. With forking and speedups you can maybe bring this down two orders of magnitude, to year. So I can imagine a big research project with good funding actually figuring out an alien biology enough to get to the point of resurrecting an alien species within a year. The only problem is that pregnancy still takes nine months. In this kind of project biology is going to be the slow factor after the first unravelling of biochemistry. Researchers have to wait for organisms to develop before learning from the results and going to the next step. So this might slow down the project a factor of 10 - and biology often throws in odd surprises. The resurrected human child, for example, would grow up without human parents (likely monkey surrogates). Some emotional problems are likely, but the real problem will be language learning. Chimps don't have human language and no critical period, but humans who do not get to hear and interact linguistically at the right age get permanent language impairments. This critical period and the deep grammar structure of human language, is not obvious at all in our genome. Unless the aliens had figured out how human languages worked using archeology and presented them at the right time, the restored humans would be basically feral. Hmm... sounds like a great idea for an EP adventure. Suddenly a gate opens up and a large bunch of feral children appears (or they show up on a failed colony world as the PCs are exploring it). Physically healthy, but with some serious psychological issues. Their real origin was the remnants of a failed gatecrasher expedition that was found by some aliens. The aliens tried restoring the species and got decently far before figuring out the origins of humans and that they better stay far away (maybe the Factors told them). So they did the decent (?) thing and returned the small humans they had cultured. Now transhumanity has to deal with a bunch of feral children who mainly identify with alien medical experimenters and their surrogate mothers - the surviving colony dogs.