Substituting Change
The ecosystem is constantly changing. First scientists must identify how all the other species are existing, what senses will need to be developed in order to keep on being able to perceive as much of the world as possible.
Then they compare them, trying to find the similarities between these new sensory stimuli and the systems that we already have, or had years ago. The physical molecular mechanisms will likely have to be made from scratch, but the pathways can be reused from some previous sense, one that hasn’t been necessary in weeks, maybe even months, sometimes even years.
We used to have three, back before the planet started spinning out of control, and the lifespans and reproductive cycles of all the creatures around us sped to thousands of times faster than our own. Now we have six, on average. We try to avoid having more than seven at a time, as the neural pathways overlapping can cause confusion. But it’s better to think that you can tell the magnetic fields of the creatures nearby are shifting when in reality the sulfur content in the air is rising than not noticing anything has changed at all.
It must have been terrifying, generations ago, when everything around them seemed to vanish. They could no longer perceive so many crucial parts of the ecosystem around them, and the laws by which they had defined their lives suddenly seemed insufficient.
One day, maybe the world around us will change so much that we won’t be able to tell that it’s even changed at all. One day, our technology might not be able to detect what we need it to. We won’t know when that day has come.
For now, we can sense time passing as we used to sense the magnetic fields that all life forms exuded. The iron rich mechanisms that would open the channels, allowing action potentials to fire are now being moved by currents generated by small devices. And now that the neurons have fired, the signals travel to our brain, fitting into the same slots that the previous sense has vacated, filing and being organized into what we know in the various cortexes of our brains. This works, as our brains have enough plasticity to adapt.
We suppose in this case our scientists decided that waiting for a mutation or developing a biological replacement would be much more effort. Because it’s speeding up.
Half a year ago, smaller life forms began to fade out of our perception, until our scientists realized that we could still detect them if we were to be able to sense the magnetic fields that they let out. For that, they were able to pull the design and rough protein structure for the mechanism from other creatures in the archives, so luckily the dark spot was shorter that time.
We’re sure you could track what our senses used to be, but attempting so through our histories would be useless, as we can no longer find them. In our rush to be able to see everything else on our planet, we lost our world. Maybe this will survive longer, if only because we now know what to expect.
Shortly after writing this, we went to sleep (which we have not yet managed to make unnecessary), and awoke to nothing. We could still sense each other, using the tools that we had created, as well as our own creation, but anything of the natural world around us had fully vanished. We could no longer sense the pressure currents in the air from their breathing, the mechanical gateways staying shut, the potentials no longer firing.
Our scientists have just realized what has happened. They are all now so small that we lack the sensitivity to detect them. The challenge of doing so without constantly being overloaded shall be the next step, we assume. Because we cannot simply adapt ourselves, we must rely on our technology to help us sense what has changed.
Then they compare them, trying to find the similarities between these new sensory stimuli and the systems that we already have, or had years ago. The physical molecular mechanisms will likely have to be made from scratch, but the pathways can be reused from some previous sense, one that hasn’t been necessary in weeks, maybe even months, sometimes even years.
We used to have three, back before the planet started spinning out of control, and the lifespans and reproductive cycles of all the creatures around us sped to thousands of times faster than our own. Now we have six, on average. We try to avoid having more than seven at a time, as the neural pathways overlapping can cause confusion. But it’s better to think that you can tell the magnetic fields of the creatures nearby are shifting when in reality the sulfur content in the air is rising than not noticing anything has changed at all.
It must have been terrifying, generations ago, when everything around them seemed to vanish. They could no longer perceive so many crucial parts of the ecosystem around them, and the laws by which they had defined their lives suddenly seemed insufficient.
One day, maybe the world around us will change so much that we won’t be able to tell that it’s even changed at all. One day, our technology might not be able to detect what we need it to. We won’t know when that day has come.
For now, we can sense time passing as we used to sense the magnetic fields that all life forms exuded. The iron rich mechanisms that would open the channels, allowing action potentials to fire are now being moved by currents generated by small devices. And now that the neurons have fired, the signals travel to our brain, fitting into the same slots that the previous sense has vacated, filing and being organized into what we know in the various cortexes of our brains. This works, as our brains have enough plasticity to adapt.
We suppose in this case our scientists decided that waiting for a mutation or developing a biological replacement would be much more effort. Because it’s speeding up.
Half a year ago, smaller life forms began to fade out of our perception, until our scientists realized that we could still detect them if we were to be able to sense the magnetic fields that they let out. For that, they were able to pull the design and rough protein structure for the mechanism from other creatures in the archives, so luckily the dark spot was shorter that time.
We’re sure you could track what our senses used to be, but attempting so through our histories would be useless, as we can no longer find them. In our rush to be able to see everything else on our planet, we lost our world. Maybe this will survive longer, if only because we now know what to expect.
Shortly after writing this, we went to sleep (which we have not yet managed to make unnecessary), and awoke to nothing. We could still sense each other, using the tools that we had created, as well as our own creation, but anything of the natural world around us had fully vanished. We could no longer sense the pressure currents in the air from their breathing, the mechanical gateways staying shut, the potentials no longer firing.
Our scientists have just realized what has happened. They are all now so small that we lack the sensitivity to detect them. The challenge of doing so without constantly being overloaded shall be the next step, we assume. Because we cannot simply adapt ourselves, we must rely on our technology to help us sense what has changed.
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