So, the chapter you have all been waiting for. Reproduction. Nothing sells better than sex. Except maybe alien sex. Are you excited? Well, I’m about to disappoint you ladies & gents. We are hermaphrodites (organisms that have reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes). You are probably even more excited now, the possibilities! Well, let me stop you right there. We reproduce much like some of Earth’s plants do and let’s be honest, you don’t read “Botany for Dummies” in an incognito window.

Every member of my species has both male and female organs and we are also capable of producing an offspring asexually, an exact genetic copy of ourselves, if certain conditions are met (though this is now prohibited on my planet). Once a year, triggered by external conditions (simply put: seasonally) we are ready for reproduction. While we are biologically capable of taking the role of both genders, each season we are limited to only one of them. This is driven by environmental conditions but is randomly distributed, just like the gender of a human offspring.

So once a year (our “long” year, remember?) for a lack of a term for it, we “blossom”. Although it is tempting to use biological terms describing Terran flora, I will try to avoid this since the exact biological mechanisms are different. During this “blossoming” (rut season if you will), we lose a few of our sensory spikes. When detached, genetic material is released into the air by the “males”. You can consider it as pollen or airborne sperm. On the other hand, the “females” absorb the airborne genetic material through the roots of their lost spikes. Since we are social animals, much like humans, it is enough that we are in the vicinity of others during the right time in order for the miracle of life to happen. There are no mating rituals, loud noises or frustrated partners. We give birth to a single offspring after almost two and a half years of pregnancy. Conceiving more than a single offspring is very rare and usually ends up with the death of the offspring and/or the “mother”.

I did mention in the previous post that we hold an evolutionary ace down our sleeve. This is the offspring’s genome composition. While about half of it originates from the “mother”, the other half can, and usually is, contributed by multiple “fathers”. We can only guess that this feature originated by mutation, but it serves as a major evolutionary advantage. This feature has had a major impact on our society and culture since antiquity until our modern era. I will discuss my species’ evolutionary path in the rest of the post.

We evolved as herd animals. The major difference was that we were only ‘gatherers’. Since we are strictly vegetarian there was no need to hunt or scavenge for other food sources. Food was abundant during that time period. Life diversity was low (resulting from our low ILPT score) and competition was scarce. These are excellent conditions for any species to thrive and indeed we flourished. There were only a few predatory species which presented any kind of threat to us and not many other large species that competed with us directly over food sources. We turned out to be a remarkably peaceful species. Maybe it is the fact that we are vegetarians, maybe it is because our reproduction doesn’t consist of any physical advantages for the ‘father’. Maybe it was the abundant food sources or the high gravity which encouraged energy conservation. We can’t be certain, but the bottom line is that we never resort to violence.

During our prehistoric period we used to live in small herds (estimated at 10 – 200 individuals per herd, but these estimates are not backed by any physical findings). We do know that meeting other groups was considered a positive thing and did not spark any competition regarding food sources. Furthermore, it was customary for these tribes to meet in a specific location to celebrate the reproduction season which helped distributing the genetic material even further. We know of these events and traditions from ancient wall carvings (we can’t “see” paintings, remember?). We believe that our species lived as nomadic tribes for almost a million years before making the jump to settlements. Why did it take us so long? In contrast to humans, we did not discover (or better put: control) fire until a much later stage. Humanity’s technological ‘quantum leap’ was no doubt the ability to control fire and harness its potential. We were not that lucky. While fires can naturally occur on my planet (lightnings, volcanic activity) the conditions are strongly against it. Since my planet’s water supply is mostly airborne and the humidity is constantly close to 100%, dry combustion material is very scarce. Not only that, but due to our atmospheric oxygen concentration and the high pressure, if you could manage to start a fire, it would burn extremely hot and would deplete its existing fuel rapidly. In other words, it was too hard to manage fires before we had some technology for controlling the process.

For my species, the agricultural revolution was our first milestone on our path to civilization (well, we are vegetarians…). My planet’s environmental conditions are ideal for growing plants and once we figured out how to scale this process, settlements started to appear and we relinquished our nomadic lifestyle. We domesticated our flora much like you did, and those were the seeds of our civilization. I mean it literally. There is one family of plants in particular which we owe our civilization to. It is a small grass like bush with seeds that can be mashed into a very nutritious puree. These seeds have all the characteristics of a game changer food source: they are light, durable and can be stored for a very long time before used. In other words, these became our grain. In case you were wondering, this is what sparks civilizations (on Earth as well). This is the first material possession that leads to classes, wealth and a central government.

There are still plenty of unturned pages in the tale of my species’ path to technology but I think that we have lingered enough on my species’ background. There are other topics that you may find more interesting, for example, space travel and how the hell I got here. In my next post I intend to embark on the journey of explaining who I am, as so far I only discussed my species, and how did I manage to mess up so badly.