Cataglyphus Sapiens Comes Walking I

A re-post from Lux Umbra Dei.A possible future. Problems and solutions. Life meets challenges. Calorviator. A beloved grandson.

[This is a re-post from Lux Umbra Dei, July 6, 2023. It is a natural explanatory prequel to a new second installment this year that will continue the narrative of our planet Earth in this future era]

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The year is approximately 3200 C E. The temperature is a!most 65° Celsius outside- about 150° Fahrenheit. Blistering heat. You and I would have to wear special moonsuits to survive even five minutes of this.

The desert extends as far as the eye can see, but there are few human eyes to observe the world-spanning desert that dominates all the continents. A searing heat plagues a once green planet and the last of the mammals, the unmodified, original humans, left here some time ago although they, through their remarkable ingenuity, were able to stave of the end for several hundred years after the last of the thermophilic, xerophytic, halophytic crops they had engineered had failed.

The world now is hot, very hot. There are no clouds in the sky and daytime highs average in excess of 140° Fahrenheit even in the winter months. The world has dried up and a common sight are the glaring white saltpans where lakes once had rippled under clouded skies and rains had once fallen.

In this desolate furnace-like waste a figure comes walking across a saltpan expanse. At first a wavering mirage on the blinding white plain, it slowly become solid. It is our descendent, a product of the superb bio-engineering skills of a humanity now gone from the planet. It is a nostalgic and not completely rational response to a feeling that ‘There should always be some of us on our own home planet” The rest of Humanity has went out to colonize the Solar System and has begun to bio-engineer itself into forms adapted to the varying environments encountered. This process will eventually lead to great wars before a new Golden Age arrives.

The individual walking along on the saltpan, our descendent, was bioengineered from Cataglyphus bombycina, the Silver Ant- a thermophilic species found in the hottest places of the former cooler planet. Because of the small ant's remarkable indifference to extremely high temperature and aridity, humans had chosen it as a subject for their engineering skills. They aspired to create a new human capable of living unaided on the surface of their now inhospitable world- a skillful blend of DNAs, a hybrid of two dissimilar species, a superbly adapted amalgam.

Cataglyphus Bombycina is remarkable: silvery in appearance as if it was dipped in chrome metal. An incredibly fast runner, it is capable of sprinting 110 body lengths in one second- equivalent to a five-foot human running 550 feet in one second, a mile in roughly ten seconds! All this speed necessitated by the demands of survival in hot conditions where duration on the surface must be cut to the absolute minimum. The silver ant, Cataglyphus bombycina, was widespread and had been on the planet for millions of years. A survivor par excellence, marvelously adapted to a desert world; the bioengineers of the thirty-third century could not have made a better choice in choosing one of the two grandparents of all future humans- the new creation Cataglyphus Sapiens.

The Silver Ants were covered in short, triangular cross-sectioned hairs- a remarkable solution by Mother Nature to the challenge of heat reflection and black-body heat dumping. The ant/human hybrid will also be covered in this heat shield. The ants had an extremely advanced navigational ability, a mosaic equivalent to the functioning of an onboard GPS/GIS system. Again, this was crucial to Bombycina's central origin foraging abilities on mixed, chaotic, and featureless terrain.

So one of the two ancestors was gifted with remarkable physical attributes, but how about the brain? Bombycina's brain is also remarkable for the sheer neural modifications allowing for a sophisticated behavioral repertoire with different suites of abilities being called into play at different stages of its life cycle- all packed into a neural mass smaller than a pinhead! A marvel of neural miniaturization with a half million cells and circuits reaching a “degree [of miniaturization]...that far exceeds that of the human brain." As Darwin said of an ant’s brain “..one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man” Anyone who is not astounded by biological wonders is simply not paying attention.

So our descendent, let’s call him “Calorviator” approaches us in our moonsuits, over the burning waste and as he comes up to us he shines like chrome, and is but three feet tall.

Our fully human descendents wanted a human who could survive the loss of all technology and reboot civilization if necessary. This they achieved. It is a little strange to look at the fruit of their efforts and to feel real kinship and affection for him, our true and able grandson. We hold hands briefly, not a word is spoken, then he turns back to his distant city and we, conveyed by the matchless technology of the great civilization 80 million years in the future return to our cool green world of the past. to report to those who sent us. Of Calorviator. Of the heat and desert to come.

Coda: Home again, we cannot look at the small racing desert ants of our world without realizing that we are seeing the co-parents of all future humans! We clearly grasp that Life as a whole is sacred and truly there is nothing we should not cherish.

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[Of Calorviator, time traveling visitors and the origins of the desert planet we will next write]