Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(57)
After the first battle, Dabeet told his squad, “Since we’re floating it anyway, we start with the outermost units, all right? Work our way back. That way we don’t spend the whole time exposed to enemy fire, we can hide behind the first units while we build backward.”
It caused them a lot of confusion for about fifteen minutes, but they were smart and, without Dabeet having to take over and tell everybody what to do, they worked it out. Now they built from the outside in, and they were down to two minutes by the third day.
11
From the landing parties that are establishing colonies on Formic worlds, we have learned that microbiota from two completely isolated genetic traditions are so incompatible that we are likely to have little to fear from microparasitic life-forms on planets we discover and explore. This does not mean we can shirk the precautionary measures etc. etc.
It stands to reason that the native flora and fauna of worlds we discover and explore also have little to fear from the microparasites we bring with us. The War of the Worlds scenario cannot take place. We, as invaders (although our hearts are pure), will not be overwhelmed by the local version of the common cold. Nor will we wipe out any species with smallpox.
Invasive species of macrofauna and macroflora are far more likely. Barnacles will not cling to our spaceships to overwhelm one world with another world’s fauna, but because of the incompatibility of evolutionary traditions, we will have no recourse, when establishing colonies, but to introduce Earthborn species in new worlds.
As responsible explorers, we aspire to non-interference, but our very presence is potentially overwhelming on any life-bearing world, which we assume will be all rocky planets in the goldilocks zone. A casual visit, suited up, should do no harm, but even a brief colonial experiment of, say, five years, may provide opportunistic Terran species a chance to become invasive and outcompete the local life.
However, the problem may be self-curing. If herbivores get loose that can only eat gaiagenic vegetation, then they can only live where that vegetation continues to thrive. Therefore the local flora will be safe on any isolated continents. If carnivores get loose, they can only live on gaiagenic herbivores and each other. It can be assumed that any problems we cause will be localized or self-curing.
The only exception I foresee is the statistically most-invasive mammal species, the hyperpredator and hypercarnivore we call “housecat.” Felis catus quickly returns to a wild foraging habit when cut off from human subsidies—if indeed it ever left that state.
Housecats have invaded every ecosystem that humans have entered, brought with us because of our fantasy that they love us and the reality that we love them. Having no loyalty except to food, housecats will inevitably stray into the wild.
They will always pose a danger to every small animal, bird, or fish that we try to establish, and it is also not far-fetched to imagine that if any creature can acquire the ability to make some use of the proteins found in alien life-forms, it will be the housecat, which kills without hunger, so that it would keep experimenting with every available ambulatory life-form until it found those whose proteins it could digest.
In addition, it seems highly unlikely that we could find a population of humans completely devoid of the toxoplasmosis parasite. Since this dangerous parasite can only complete its lifecycle in cats, banning the transportation of cats to any new world would also, within a generation, eliminate the oocytes of toxoplasmosis.
The ban on cats should be extended to every interstellar craft, because unplanned or accidental landings could inadvertently provide onboard pet cats an opportunity to get free and begin their astonishingly prolific breeding pattern.
This ban should not be extended to dogs, which, since we co-evolved with them for millennia, are useful companions and servants. Dogs are better at controlling seed-eating rodents and take their responsibilities far more seriously than cats, and humans would do the work of exploration and colonization far better and more safely with dogs. After all, we and our dogs shaped each other’s bodies and minds for at least fifteen thousand years and quite possibly a hundred thousand. Dogs are irreplaceable as human companions. Their presence on spaceships should be encouraged. There is zero chance of dogs thriving on their own well enough and long enough to acclimatize themselves to become invasive outside the bounds of human settlement, or to acquire the ability to digest alien amino acids.
Cats do no useful work, unless we account it useful to provide a blank face for their owners to project emotions onto. They explore willingly, but take very inconsistent and unreliable notes. Leave them and their toxoplasmotic oocytes in the star system they’ve already infested.
From “Keep Cats Out Of Space,” an in-class opinion essay by Dabeet Ochoa, for exogeography class.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy for the South Americans to get a message to Dabeet. It came in the form of a letter from his mother. The letter was genuine enough; it could not have been faked, since it was in her handwriting and it sparkled with her wit, slipped back and forth between Spanish and English in exactly her idiosyncratic way, and contained just enough pleading for him to write more and better letters that it was as if she sat in the room with him.
She had sat in some room with someone, for sure, because she included a word-search puzzle that “our old friend” had included for him. “It’s especially challenging, he says, because it contains both Spanish and English. I told him, Why not Latin? Why not Russian? You didn’t speak them here, but I imagine you could pick them up in no time, if there was a need.”