OOC Contest for a story in the near future...

[Rhovan]

Greeting fellow...things.(?) {Male and Female seems too suburban}

I, as your democratically elected, Master of Ceremonies, will be hosting a contest. It's similar to the game Baulder-Dash. The idea is that I ask a question, and you make up an answer. The idea needs to make sense, because you are trying to earn votes for your idea. Of course, this is a fantasy idea, as we are role playing.

No magic or devine intervention though, not that sorta fantasy. You know, kings, swords, heavy calvary charges...etc.

So, you want to know why I'm doing this? Well, I know hilarity will eventually ensue, as you are all very bright and funny folk. But I am also at my wits end on how to go about this story idea, so I need feed back or more appropraitly, I need to gleen your ideas, distill them, ingest them, and come up with an amalgum. So I'm asking you all; the deliciously demented, the morbidly funny and the partially fermented.

Question 1: Explain the remaking of the world.
Restrictions are as follows.
No nuclear holocaust because Russia launched a nuke and the US acted like a fool and fired back, thus causing a chain reaction of many nukes until the world is uninhabitable.
But nuclear devices are allowed.
The world isn't destroyed, but the human race is gone.
Most structures need to remain standing (so no cataclysmic earth shattering), the only real decay to human relic's will be the passage of time.
All carbon based life (IE. everything but viri and fire...which exhibit all the things needed to be alive, but aren't...::scratches head: changes in size. Nothing stays the same. (eg. A mouse is a mastadon, a cat is like a brontosaurs, a horse is a flea, an ant is a horse, etc.)

Winner of question 1 get's free access to my wet bar and access to the contents of my pants...when I'm wearing them.

If your male, well you win my wet bar and access to Sheread's pants. Thanks for volunteering Shereads (or being volunteered as the case may be.)

Let the games begin!



(Note: I was democratically elected. Just because you chose not to vote doesn't mean to can complain about who won. Besides, if I had actually held the election I would have lost.)

 

[prometheus 2]

Eureka! I have it!

I'd destroy the world myself for chance in shereads pants! (the wet bar is interesting also).


Global warming seems to be the topic of discussion these days and who has even the vaguest idea of the ramifacations involved or the real threat it poses to human civilization. since humans are relativly new to this planet and have yet to experience the ravages of millions of years of change its gone through it is rather doubtfull that they will be able to cope with the extreme conditions that will ensue when it becomes full blown. Loosing its atmosphere will only begin to drastically change and alter its envirnment, resulting in conditions of exrteme heat and cold. Human nature itself will only hasten its extinction. Hate and discontent will lead to moral decay and loss of intestinal fortitude. No guts no glory, only the speedy desent into the ground beneath them as they claw their way into a hole and cover themselves up refusing at times to see the writing on the wall or look to each other for help.

Its as simple as that. other species most notably those of a more simple nature simply change and adapt to the changing conditions each in their own way. The pendulum swings of course, so by and by... who knows how many millions of years pass and once again... the garden of eden (sans humans of course) they blew it.

 

[PhoenixPrime01]

An off shoot of Prometheus's Idea:

Global warming has altered the flow of water in the oceans of the world. The deep currents that circulate though the oceans from the warmer to arctic/antarctic polar areas causes catastropic melting of the polar ice caps.
This results in global flooding and the Earth's poles shifting with the result of earthquakes, volcanic activity on an unparalled scale and the demise of the human race. The few survivors either fight for what little remains and kill each other off or the climatic changes do it for them.
Most land creatures are gone; however, the seas are another matter. Now the sea creatures rule supreme. The top predators and the most intelligent marine mammals have vast areas to roam and explore, to populate and they become the dominent lifeforms on our "Big Bluer Marble" in space.
On land, now mostly islands of various sizes the scavengers and communal insects such as ants and other insect life have their turn to become dominent with humankind no longer poisoning, etc them.
Those in the new temperate and subtropical areas "learn" to protect themselves from weather conditions and evolve into the dominant land lifeforms, growing to sizes appropriate to their land areas and food supplies.

 

[Why]

.............

 

[Arioso]

Wicked Grin....Rho Dear....

Do you really want a lecture from the professor about evolutionary biology and natural selection?

Exactly how....erm..."firm" are you on your insistence that there be no fantastical explanations? You'd have a plausible enough explanation for mice and cats swelling to enormous proportions with the mere removal of human beings from the ecosystem. Fewer competitors for natural resources = more resources for surviving (better adapted) individuals and species = potentially larger individuals within a species. We've seen this happening to some degree with human beings. Those of us alive today are much larger than the average human of the Middle Ages, largely because we've gotten more efficient at extracting resources from our environment (hence, we eat more....to the delight of the Diet industry).

So, the first requirement of your story (vanished humans) could easily serve as an explanation for the mastadonian rats and Saurian cats. But shrunken horses? Hmm.....not so likely. Particularly not since mammals have many internal body parts (MUCH greater complexity of internal systems) than insects -- you'd have to reorganize their internal plumbing, so to speak, to such a degree that they'd cease to be horses and be...well...bugs.

Thus...unless you really want to stay after class and haggle about Darwin, you might possibly consider allowing for just a tiny bit of "fantasy" where the animals are concerned.

As for the disappearance of humanity? Shoot --- doesn't take much of a stretch of imagination. We're exhausting our own resources at a terrifying rate. It's more in the realm of natural consequences of our current way of life than it is science fiction to picture a sequence of events that starts with overpopulation and overuse/contamination of resources (water, clean/stable atmosphere, food, fuel), proceeds through famine, social conflict (as people get violent over diminishing resources), and the ever-popular mass epidemics (we should be seeing one any day in Baghdad, given the severe problems with basic infrastructure they're still facing). We're in the process of altering our own environment to the point that we won't necessarily be the most competitive species within it.



Wow. What a cheery thought. Think I'll go for a strawberry milkshake now Hope that gave you some food for thought, but sorry if it came across as....oy....another lecture.

And I'm not entering into the contest formally. Since I'm already getting into your pants, I figure someone else should get first dibs on the prize

Cheers,
AriO

 

[shereads]

deleted double post

 

[shereads]

Wait a second, which pants? If you guys have been trying on the brushed-silk cropped pants that still have the price tag on them, I'll...I'll...I'll go without coffee for 24 hours and then - smack-down!

The Pants Apololypse aside, it's obvious that a virus will wipe us out. Not necessarily one that we've tampered with, but something that has been harmful only sporadically in nature for as long as there were small, isolated populations of host creatures (us). Smallpox, for example. A lifeform that isn't even alive, by any accepted definition except that it reproduces, multiples, adapts and evolves. If you liked The Hot Zone (true story of Ebola outbreak in the eighties, and Centers for Disease Control's futile attempt to trace the virus to its source), you'll love The Demon In The Freezer (last year's book by the same author, about smallpox.)

You want true, or terrifying, or both? Think about this (that is, if the soon-to-make-headlines viral mutation that's busily making a nest for its young in your cerebellum doesn't mind stepping out of the way for a moment - Yes, you! Down in front!) Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has spent billions helping economically strapped Russia try to keep track of her plutonium, family heirlooms, etc. But no one has successfully petitioned Congress for the money needed to keep tabs on stores of bio-samples, including smallpox, that existed in Russia back in the seventies, when the two superpowers failed to agree on mutual destruction of the last remaining samples of one of the most hideous diseases known to mankind.

Imagine, at a time when a decades-long international effort had succeeded in eliminating smallpox in human populations, two countries kept it alive in vials that could not have withstood a minute in a microwave oven. Because we each insisted that the other guy fry his samples first. And now we don't know where all the little vials are!

Smallpox in a typically susceptible human host makes what happened to the ship's crew in Alien look like a stern lecture. The virus doesn't eat you; you're just the ideal environment for the hatcing of its spores. But not until you're dead; up until then everything is neatly contained in painful open sores and pustules, sort of a spore soup, if you will, where for all we know the local populace is wondering, "What are we? Why are we here? Will the Smallpox Race have wiped ourselves out through our own arrogance by the time The Great Pustule erupts? Or will our descendants be there to witness the end?"

Since the virus is neither animal nor mineral, and it ain't no hothouse orchid, we don't understand it and we shouldn't presume to know what passes for culture in there. Hell, for all you know, that annoying fungus that you notice only because it makes your toenails unsightly, might be one of their world's most celebrated natural wonders. Equivalent to the Aurora Borealis, The Milky Way, or George Clooney.

As is most likely the case with HIV and Ebola, smallpox has always existed and has always had its numbers limited by its resources. A tribe would be wiped out after someone unknowingly inhaled smallpox spores scattered after the body of an infected animal succombed and decayed, releasing the next generation of smallpox like kazillions of teensy balloons rising off of a parade float at The Magic Kingdom. A couple of people would survive to tell the tale, because the virus never had the limitless resources it would have required to adapt and evolve limitlessly.

Then somebody had a great idea: human beings should all hang out together in cities, so we could have commerce. And we should link our isolated populations so that by the turn of the millennium, anybody on the planet could theoretically travel fo the other side of the planet in a matter of days.

If you were smallpox, this was a key development for you and yours. In the space of a sneeze, one human host could cast enough of you onto the breeze to infect entire city blocks. Generations of you would have all the time and resources needed to adapt to your changing habitat. After all, you're capable of changing so rapidly and dramatically within a single human lifetime, those resistant hosts can't begin to match the pace at which you reproduce. Can't seem to get this host and its descendants to die, so they can decay and release your spores? Try random mutation. Do it fast enough, and eventually you'll create the one special form of smallpox that turns the most hostile host environment into the Welcome Wagon.

We've all heard that cockroaches would survive a nuclear holocaust. Isn't that only because radition doesn't spawn and produce new generations that are deadly to cockroaches? A virus can do that.

And if you think it's unlikely that the nations of the world will allow that to happen, and not throw our arsenal of intelligence and learning and global cooperation into destroying a virus like smallpox before it can destroy us, you probably didn't read the National Geographic article on bioresearch that came out after the anthrax scare a couple of years ago. True story: the writer of the article visits a research center somewhere in the former Soviet Union, that was believed by U.S. intelligence to have been a smallpox storage facility. At the time of the article, the writer couldn't find anyone in authority who was able to confirm that the facility still existed - Their economy couldn't fund operations there, and promised assistance from the remaining superpower didn't materialize; the visitor found his way there, and found it abandoned by its military guards, who had stayed on without pay for as long as six months and finally had to abandon it. Leaving security in the hands of two unarmed volunteer guards, one paid guard who appeared also appeared to be unarmed although he wisely refused to admit it, and - this from National Geographic = "an elderly German Shepherd dog." The guard bristled when asked about the dog's capacity to guard, and assured the writer that the dog was "very mean."

A tour of the facility revealed the cold storage for viral samples: a refrigerator, sealed with colored wax on a strip of tape to provide evidence of tampering.

From the big bang to the big whimper. That's how we go out. The new population will be the winning virus, and whatever new mutant feeds on it.

NOW GET OUT OF MY PANTS and take them to the dry cleaners. I need coffee.

 

[shereads]

As for the cats the size of mastodons, of course that will happen too. Having developed conscouisness, the virus will grow bored with looking like a math problem, and will look around for interesting forms to emulate. Most of the resulting future population will reflect not nature, but pop culture. So, assuming that the final generation of pre-teens in Japan and Los Angeles are obsessed with an animated cat called "Catodon," whose image appears on everything from wallpaper patterns to the new Hummer, there will be at least one viral strain that resembles a mastodon cat.

 

[Rhovan]

George Cloony is not a celebrated natural wonder.
He nearly single handedly (with a little help from O'Donnell and Ah-nold) destroyed the Batman Francise. I mean, when did the last one come out? 97?

Now that that is out of the way, I am going to add a little wrinkle to all that has been said previous. Except about Gilbert, because that made total sense :boggles quietly:

Human's are not extinct, but small. I havn't come up with an exact size yet, but I'm thinking that a standard sized high school (1500 students...which is quickly becomeing small, I know) could be an entire kingdom of these little bastards.

Thus the need that structures stay standing at that the process doesn't take millions of years. Cause nothing we've built will last a million years (except Stone henge, but that is because Aliens repaint it every year, and pain prevents rust. Yes, those aren't stones, their metal painted with 'stone' paint.)

True though AriosO, we do have to have some fantasy element to it...but I was thinking of explaining it similar to the 80's....use a term that isn't normally heard (ie. Gamma radiation and the Hulk, or the fantastic four and the cosmic rays) and people will believe you. I just don't know how to make it work.

But I do know I want to see people using soda can's as armor and riding ants to war! (yes, I understand that if ant's grow in size even a little bit, they would crush their own legs, their strength wouldn't transfer, and people would have a hard time getting that small.)

But, let me put it this way. If a creature adapted to the need of being very small, Mother Nature would find a way around the problems and make it work. Or god, if your ideals swing that way.

But I'm not making this a story based on the wonders of Mother Nature or god, thus I'm trying to avoid a 'religious' bent.

Now, I'm going to go post a bunch of things, and hope you all come back at least one more time to read this. ::cheeky grin::

 

[shereads]

George Cloony is not a celebrated natural wonder. He nearly single handedly (with a little help from O'Donnell and Ah-nold) destroyed the Batman Francise. I mean, when did the last one come out? 97?

I too regret that the franchise didn't die immediately, but it's not Clooney's fault it lingered. In his Vanity Fair interview this month...

>> shereads pauses for a moment to tuck her tongue back into her mouth <<

...Clooney says he learned an essential lesson from making Batman:

"If they ask you to wear a rubber suit with nipples, it's going to be a very bad movie."

Rhovan, if you just want people to be really tiny, that's easy. Make Earth bigger. (And all of its non-living components, such as chairs and Joan Rivers.)

If you wanted us all dead but our cities and shopping malls to survive, as I originally thought, maybe you could have extinguished our lives via nuclear fusion. Wasn't there a "smart bomb" development controversy back a few Presidents ago, that raised the possibility of killing enemy populations without ruining all of their stuff? The destruction of valuable loot being the downside of our familiar nukes?

I'm serious. I remember because the public discourse was so richly ironic. The outcry against developing this new, investor-friendly nuclear weapon, seemed based on a peculiar moral code: If we wipe out the population of a city, we should at least have a mess to clean up.

You gotta love those dour but funny Calvinists! Hobbes, too.

So I win, right? Hand over the keys to the wet bar, Rho, or I'll have a truck come by and pick it up. Making the Earth big is clearly the most direct way to make its occupants small.

 

[Rhovan]

Aha, but not everything gets small. Some get larger, some get smaller.

My vision is the ant replaces the horse as a beast of burdan, the human being is small, and other animals have sizes depending on what we think of at the time.

But from a role playing sense, I want a cat to be similar to an encounter with a dragon.

You know, difficult.

But no, you have not yet won the wet bar, but you do have a standing invitation to my pants, since you are the owner of the other pants being given away.

 

[shereads]

Okay...How about magic?

Fairy dust?

Fairy dust that's also a virus!

"Make it so." That usually worked.

 

[shereads]

If you insist on a plausible explanation, maybe the planet was bitten by a spider.

Or two spiders, one big and one small.

And Turk has superpowers, and wears a rubber suit with nipples. One big nipple and one...nevermind.



Goodnight, Rhovan.

 

[Why]

..............