![]() ![]() Their eyes have grey pupils and black or dark brown irises. The Fith’p (racial name, individuals named Fi’) resemble small (around 1000-1600 pounds each), tuskless, short-eared elephants with broad, paddle-shaped tails, clawed feet, and trunks which branch and branch again, giving them eight “finger-equivalents” to grasp and manipulate things with, albeit more clumsily than human hands. Whether the Soviets could have managed to keep all the plates spinning much beyond 1995 remains unknown, since at that time Earth was attacked by aliens from the Alpha Centauri system. The Soviets continued to support third world rebellion and started building a canal to refill the Aral. US forces were tied down in Honduras fighting rebels based in Nicaragua (tit for tat for the Contras) and after an ill-fated intervention, occupying Lebanon. The European Community, now Union, moved towards neutrality. The US tried to compensate for the Soviets new orbiting ion beam weapons and other fun toys with a major push in commercial space development, building the first orbiting solar power satellite array, a square mile of solar power panels able to send 1000 megawatts of power back to earth (cooking birds daily) by 1996. Russia and the US both established bases on the Moon, but the Soviets had the only real permanent orbiting space station, and had responded to the US “Star Wars” program by putting an awful load of suspicious crap in orbit (when the US complained about their “aggressive” postures, the Soviets just said “you started it.” By 1995, the Soviets had a clearly superior presence in space from orbit to the Moon. Mikhail Gorbachev never took the top spot in the USSR, and the Soviet Union under intelligent hardliners managed to keep economic collapse at bay until 1995, in the meantime retaking the lead in space from the US. ![]() The Predecessors had already tampered with their genetics, to make them a more useful and intelligent beast of burden… Blocks carrying simpler information, such as how to make the wheel or fire, were placed in easily accessed places, while stuff their theoretical descendants would need later, such as atomic power, were placed in hard to reach areas such as mountain tops, barren wastelands, polar deserts, etc.Īs it turned out, those Predecessors who survived the collapse ended up dying off as a result of major climate change and new diseases, and the difficulties of learning to become hunter-gatherers on the fly, so the stones ended up benefitting another species entirely. Before the final implosion of technological civilization on planet and the departure of the last spaceships an effort was made to make things easier for any future civilization that emerged from the wreckage: rectangular stone blocks some 30X30X15 feet, with pictorial step-by-step guides to science and technology carved meters deep into them with energy weapons, so the entire block would have to erode away before the message would be lost. Earth and the Australopithecines narrowly avoided colonization, the Predecessor travelers deciding it would be unsafe to pitch their tent so near to their own solar system while other factions still survived in space habitats back home. Some managed to get away into space with shaky hopes of creating a self-sustaining society off-world. ![]() Through runaway global warming, disastrous misapplied planetary engineering (several competing programs didn’t help) and brutal warfare over dwindling resources the Predecessors managed to wreck their planetary ecology to the point where an advanced civilization really wasn’t maintainable any longer. The ones known as the Predecessors ruled the Alpha Centauri system of suns some three million years ago, but although their technology reached great heights, they never managed to create a unified planetary government or a certain racial tendency towards paranoia. Doing a scenario for Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's SF story, Footfall. ![]()
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