Amenta Worldbuilding Info

[Alicorn]

No, but even we think kakapos and pandas are outliers.

[Alicorn]

Spouse: "Does Amenta not have nukes because greens had enough caste solidarity not to tell blues about them?"

Me: "...it does now."

[Kappa]

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[jalapeno_dude]

It's been mentioned that Amentans are surprised to hear that any species make do without wanting to make babies very much, all the time. Does that mean their animals (including, say, pets) also display different behaviours than ours?

...have you ever been around a cat or dog that wasn't neutered? Humans are the exception among mammals in not going into heat, I think...

[DanielH]

IIRC there's some kind of evopsych excuse in-universe for the germophobia. Is it 100% bullshit, or just like 80%? i.e. would an Amentan raised by humans be any more fastidious about cleanliness than average?

Same question, re: highly inheritable traits/fast evolution. Would you get any statistically significant effect at all if you grabbed a bunch of people at birth and raised them in a caste they aren’t related to, controlling for conditions during pregnancy? Is there any chance of credit-based eugenics, even one with far better selection than ability to make money, would produce noticeable results by the time terraforming was better developed?

[lintamande]

It's really not remarkably fast evolution. Selective breeding for intelligence would totally get you more intelligence in humans over the course of eight-ten generations.

[DanielH]

Eight to ten generations? People estimate it would take that long to get terraforming?

ETA: I wasn’t caught up on Incredible Things, and now I’m confused that Telkam says there have already been eight generations. I thought universal population control only started around the time of the Oakh empire expansion, and Anitam’s in particular did not meet their standards. Amentans live a long time, but not so long that eight generations could pass while Governor Avalor was alive.

Plus inter-caste marriages (and other child-conceiving relationships) make eugenics harder; even something with better selection criteria than an auction wouldn’t aim for intelligent greys instead of physically active ones, and I bet every green has some grey in them in the last few generations.

Although he also said most traits are 70% heritable, which does sound high for humans.

Follow-up question: why aren’t there more twins and triplets?

ETA 2: Human heritability seems to average about 50%: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n7 ... .3285.html

[loki-zen]

I'm new to this whole thing (I followed a link from Alicorn's tumblr cause this particular AUSJ world was interesting) so apologies if these are stupid questions.

The list of countries - where could you find the stories or whatever that they are from, or more info about them?

In particular:

Biyan (child-torturers who drowned in garbage)

Dang, what was that about?

Orvara (first to be rid of reds via purple rotation; has theologians)

What's purple rotation? Theologians?

Doet (experiments on reds country)
Qoloc (underground reds country)
(Miolee) (red country that exists only in in color and late enough branches therefrom; built on rainforest bought from Calado)

These all sound interesting!


But, uh, also:

in color and late enough branches therefrom

what does this mean?

[Bluelantern]

in color and late enough branches therefrom

what does this mean?

In color is a thread found here https://www.glowfic.com/posts/803 and unoficial audioversion found here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... zNOOGw3djQ

"late enough branches" refers to the fact that some threads are AUs of In Color (same story until a point of divergence).

[Kaylin]

Probably best to start with "like we're made of starlight", actually, assuming a non-glowfic background: https://glowfic.com/posts/684

You will probably still be at least a little bit confused if you haven't read the Silmaril threads, but that thread was iirc the first time Amenta appeared, so it at least functions as a decent introduction to that even if the elf side will be inadequately explained.

(Glowfic tends very high-context, and you are coming into the Amenta thing rather late. Apologies.)

Once you've read that, the next one to read is "in color": https://glowfic.com/posts/803 which doesn't follow on directly but is higher-context and assumes more background knowledge.