Humanity would evolve due to a disaster, but the timescale is going to be forever in part because humans are so good at defeating our environmental challenges. Clothing, housing, weapons - we would be fighting the effects of the environmental change a lot more severely. So you need civilization collapse, and then you still need thousands of years.
The problem is they started with the premise from the new SyFy show that 200 years in our future, humanity is colonizing space, and evolutionarily adapting. :smack: NO NO NO! There might be a slight tendency for bones to grow differently under different gravity environments, that I will grant. But the suggestion seems to stem further than that. And that was the basis for saying further in Earth’s future there’s a disaster and humanity evolving.
Agree except for Scott, I kinda got the thing on the forehead as a moisture collector, except it requires a plastic shield to be worn, which kinda prevents evolution. The cheek things didn’t make sense, and the color didn’t make sense.
Though there’s a potential to save Scott. If the judges thought this was safely evolution based upon the quality of work, then the quality of work should have applied to Scott. As I said, if Scott could have put “genetic engineering” in his description, he might could have sold it. Alas, that never got that far, he was Safe before the questioning began.
Ben would have had to be significantly worse than any other contestant for me to send him home, because he’s got the best overall record. He’s had his misses, but he’s had more hits than anyone else. Stevie had a couple hits and a lot of misses, so her being in Bottom at all doomed her.
If Stevie had somehow hit, then my next Bottom choice would probably have been Nora, and even though she’s done well, her record isn’t quite up to Ben’s. But this from Nora vs this from Ben might have made me pick Ben to go home.
See, fish human alien thingy has been done. Scales didn’t make sense to me. Nose gills was a tough sell, and that design didn’t sell the concept. I would have gone for seal - closeable nostrils, less/no hair on head. The streamlining wasn’t that bad, but the balance was off. And I’d have stayed with human flesh tones and done a killer paint for realism.
[QUOTE=amarinth]
Stevie seemed to do the same, but with human/fish.
[/QUOTE]
Stevie was looking at humans evolving back to fish. We do have that buried in our evolutionary history, so it’s not impossible it could be drawn out. But dolphins and seals and walruses and manatees haven’t managed to develop scales or gills, so I would be hard to be convinced it would reemerge without GE prodding. Whereas cockroaches aren’t in our evolutionary past - they are split off the animalian line prior to skeletons and backbones. So Scott can’t rely on humans just adapting those traits accidentally.
There’s a thread on this from a Cecil column. The reason cockroaches would survive is because they don’t have complex organs to suffer the damages from the radiation we do, and they have a very short life cycle so they can develop and reproduce before the damage builds up. Hard exoskeleton is not really a factor, and antennae and mandibles are irrelevant. That’s why Scott is further off course than Stevie, both evolutionarily and adapting to the environmental disasterwise.
Ben was thinking something about the skin absorbing ash and that ash serving to reflect heat. It doesn’t really make sense, but let’s pretend somehow the skin could absorb materials and create a reflective and insulative shell. He then didn’t make it look like a natural biological adaptation, which would be symmetric and fit the lines of the face. His looked like a lava monster. And then he kept hair.
Nora was trying to suggest that the skin had grown pores that had natural filters (hair? membranes?) that would trap and remove atmospheric toxins. But it doesn’t really make sense for those pores to run all over the chin and face. Make the nostrils blocked, thin slits, curved membranes. Do something to protect the eyes, like an additional eyelid layer.
Like I said, Jordan was the only one to me that really looked like he understood the premise.
Okay, what about doing asteroid impact. Wouldn’t that just be a cause for the ice age?
I would have loved to see Scott, Ben, and Nora in the finale.
Stylistically, there’s a justification. Part of SF is projecting humanity onto the characters. This story seems aimed at empathizing with the character being chased, so there’s a strong justification to make it fairly human in appearance.