It Hain't Paktical

spoilert: main plot element of Larry Niven's Protector / Ringworld Series

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I've been re-reading Protector, and there's just something so quintessentially... Scie Fie, about Larry Niven's books. Sure, his independent minded frontier "belter" social structure's more or less lifted from Heinlein and some of his alien species come across like half-baked placeholders for a better idea, but he was never afraid to think BIG, man! Solar system sized hula hoop big. Transgalactic migration big. But there's something aggravating about the Pak's main plot point as extraterrestrial ancestors of humans. It was equally annoying in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels, where Terrans are merely the remnants of a colony established by the four million year old Hainish civilization, and wherever else this notion of humans as an introduced species crops up.

As a narrative cause, it's golden. It is at once pathetic and grandiose, establishing a noble heritage but demoting Earth from the center of the human universe to an abandoned outpost. It lends itself both to poignant tales of paradises lost or to hints of reconquest and lends our filthy ape species the mannered stoicism of an impoverished aristocracy. As a psychological motivation it's why, in the real world, Europeans have been looking back fondly to Rome ever since they remembered they had one, and why in the semi-real world conspiracy nuts and New Age quacks like to claim Atlantean or Anunnaki ancestry. Noble ancestry makes us feel special.

But as a narrative effect, it faceplants into justifiable disbelief. When consuming SF, we agree to choke down a phlebotinum now and then. Proposition: force fields exist. That's all right. We don't know what those are so they don't interfere with the other workings of the universe. But what about the proposition: on some planets, gravity works sideways? Gravity already exists. Its sedate predilections could be observed to vary if they ever did... and they've been the same every time anyone's counted down to lift-off. Humans being alien to Earth, that would be the biological equivalent of spontaneous sideways gravity.

Okay, sure, sure, it's easy to declare this gimmick obsolete now, as molecular clock measurements have provided us with the most minute gradations in genealogy. Your hemoglobin, cytochromes and every other flavor of goop in your goopy ape body differ slightly from those of other apes, slightly more from those of other mammals, and not nearly as much as we'd like to think from those of parasitic worms or amoebae. We might forgive older authors like Niven or Le Guin on this point, as both the Known Space and Hainish series began in the late '60s when molecular biology was still in diapers. But even then, the fossil record was fairly extensive and at least where macroscopic life is concerned, the gradations in anatomic divergence had laid out humans' relation to the rest of the animal kingdom to a more than satisfying approximation. We fit within the primates, within the mammals, within the tetrapods and vertebrates and deuterostomes and bilaterians and eukaryotes. We are intrinsically, mundanely Terran creatures. In fact, while it's nearly impossible to predict an alien species' appearance, we can safely say we know what an alien species would not look like; it would not look like us.

And here we have to address the issue of convergence. The human body, it has been said, is utilitarian. Most things that get around on land will have a use for legs. Cephalization has its advantages. Eyes confer an immense survival advantage anywhere there's light. So on and so forth, when adaptation adapts to the same conditions, it often finds very similar solutions. Wings, flattened surfaces for catching air, are so useful they've evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom. But note: despite adapting to the same basic utility, they evolved differently every time. If we saw a hummingbird with dragonfly wings, we would notice. An extraterrestrial might very well have a head, but it would not be an ape skull with ape molars. It might have hands, but they would certainly not contain metacarpals homologous to the forelegs of horses. The idea of an extraterrestrial "blending in" with four billion years' worth of independent Terran evolution is, paradoxically, not weird enough to be accepted. It grates, not because we don't know how it would work, but because we know how it doesn't work.

Note, this does not exclude every other means of alien influence on Earth, whether it's assuming our planet was initially seeded from outer space via directed panspermia, or a certain animal genus had its intelligence uplifted by a mysterious black monolith. However, we should really lay to rest the notion of humans alone being biologically descended from anything other than local animal stock in all its filth and monotony.

We are not intrinsically special.