Fiction > The Children of Tellus > The Peoples of the Solar System

The Peoples of the Solar System

When scientists began to suspect that there was life on other worlds, they took it for granted that there would also be people. But, no one expected they would be human people, the sort of people who could breath oxygen and digest beer. But, this was incontrovertibly proven in the 1920s, when millions of human Martians moved to the Earth.

Apparently, human beings conquered the stars long before modern civilization, spreading themselves across the Central Worlds. But, for unknown reasons, their empires crumbled to dust, and their descendants were left to diversify into all the peoples of the Solar System.

§ 1 Tellurians

The Earth is the cradle of civilization -- all other human beings are more related to Telurians than they are of each other, and there are a plethora of hominid fossils on Tellus (not to mention the only non - human apes anywhere in the universe). A thin layer of microplastics, situated in the early Pleistocene, betrays a vanished industrial civilization, one which neatly coincides with the arrivals of mankind on other worlds.

Not coincidentally, Tellurians are the most basal of men. Their build, skin, and hair color may vary from place to place, but they have not had many novel evolutionary pressures. For most of their existence, they have lived as their ancestors did: foraging for food and running down big game.

§ 2 Phosphori

Phosphorus has little dry land -- there are a few islands here or there, but a tiny proportion of the population lives there. Most live on floating islands, great mats of floating plants. A smaller proportion live in great rain-forests which grow out of shallow seas.

Phosphori tend to be tall, with long torsos and shortish legs, along with large hands and feet. This is believed to be an adaption for better swimming. All of them have notably long arms, but this is taken to an extreme among the tree - dwellers. They constantly brachiate, and almost resemble gibbons.

In the tropics, most Phosphori have dark skin. But, in more extreme latitudes, they tend to have a brown or olive complexion. Almost all of them have black or auburn hair, with typically gray eyes.

They also have notably long lifespans. If not slain by disease or violence, most Phosphori will live into their hundreds. They tend to have very good memories, though this may be due to nurture rather than nature. Venus is very wet, so paper and papyrus degrade quickly. Most Venusian cultures do have writing, but it's fairly rare -- only the most important information is written down. Almost everything is recorded and transmitted orally.

The Phosphori mate for life. None of them practice polygamy or serial monogamy; if a psychologically normal Phosphoran hooks up with somebody, it is only out of morbid curiosity. They tend to marry in their late twenties, and 'til death do they part. If her spouse dies, a Phosporan will never marry again. Usually, she will fall into a deep depression and waste away. They are as fast as gibbons, though perhaps more faithful.

As there is no ground, there is no metallurgy, so the Phosphori have had to breed plants to do everything for them. Some are spun into clothes, others become food and medicine. They have wood as strong as steel, fibers as sleek and water - resistant as any industrial product. Some create conveniently boat - shaped stalks, a few have been bred into dirigibles. Many carnivorous plants function as traps or sentries.

§ 3 Cynthians

Cynthia is Tellus's only moon, a small and dry world. On a purely physiological level, Cynthians appear very distinct. To adapt to the lower gravity, they have grown tall and lanky. And their faces are quite strange to Tellurian eyes; they have hooked noses and long piercing, bright eyes.

But, this is not what makes Cynthians unique. Cynthia is a tidally - locked world -- the Moon's day is as long as its orbital period, which happens to be about a month. Humans were not designed for such an environment, so evolution had to get very creative.

During the long night, a Cynthian's skin grows very pale, almost to the point of albinism. But, during the day, they become very swarthy. But, their odd approach to sleep is the most distinctive thing about them.

Cynthians cannot sleep through the night, because the night is several hundred hours long. So, they have developed naturally split brains. One hemisphere will dream and sleep while the other commands the body, and they will trade every few hours. The two halves share memories, and their personalities are usually quite similar. But, occasionally, something goes wrong, and they function as two completely separate people. This has led Cynthians to have different intuitions about moral responsibility and personal identity than most people do -- their philosophers are much more prone to Anattā and Humean bundle theory.

Every so often -- about once every three or four Tellurian days -- the whole person must rest for fifteen or twenty hours. This is to let the body recuperate, the minds can go without it just fine.

§ 4 Celish

Cels is a moon of Jove, and it is frequently battered by intense radiation storms. At their best, they can produce beautiful aurorae. At their worst, they cause cancer.

To cope with this, the Celish learned to live underground, in tightly - knit fortresses or warrens -- typically not nasty, dirty, wet holes, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell; nor dry, bare, sandy holes with nothing in them to sit down on or to eat; but rather lovely and well - furnished holes which are kept obsessively clean. Today, many of them are lit with light-bulbs. But, the more traditional method involves terrariums filled with bioluminescent insects.

Their bodies have grown short and slim, to better fit through thin passageways. And their eyes have grown big to see in the dark. Their skin tends to be light - colored -- sometimes as fair as a Swede's, sometimes gray, sometimes as white as alabaster. Their hair can be a wide variety of colors, but is typically black or auburn. Offworlders often think Celish women are incredibly beautiful, but Celish men are too small for Tellurian beauty standards.

They tend to be meek and intellectually curious, but they also value predictability. The Celish have a much stronger sense of place attachment than other human beings, and they rarely leave their warrens. Most dislike change, and their social structures tend to be simple and explicit -- many of them have written social contracts which one must assent to at the age of majority. Most of them have a piercing hatred for sudden bright lights or loud noises. When a child is assessed for Autistic Psychopathy, Celish ancestry is a common differential diagnosis. And immigration to Cels is a popular treatment for autism.

§ 5 Martians

Mars is small, cold, and dry, and this has driven Martian evolution. They tend to be tall and muscular, and very furry. Both sexes grow thick beards, and many are entirely covered by fuzzy stubble. They tend to have thick chests and large lungs, to breath the thin Martian air. Before the invention of agriculture, most Martians appear to have been pastoralists, and all extant populations can digest milk.

Martians were the first to develop spaceflight, and they explored the central solar system in the early twentieth century. At first, the exploring Martians were just curious, or else selling something. But, in 1923, a volcanic catastrophe befell Mars, and tens of millions of people fled. Some of them conquered Boreas, where many Martials still live. They passed up Venus, finding it too warm and wet, and they found Cels too radioactive.

But, they loved cool grasslands -- Mars is was replete with cool grasslands. Many peacefully immigrated to Argentina and the North American prairies (especially to the North, they really love Montana and Alberta). But, millions of them wished to immigrate to the Eurasian steppe. Stalin was not particularly keen on this idea, so it was taken from him.

The Karashan Dynasty, one of the most powerful houses of Mars, abruptly decided that Northern Asia was theirs now. The Karashan empress descended into warlord era China, armed with millions of drones and railguns. She would unify the country within a few months. By 1928, Moscow had fallen. The Martians were beloved by their subjects. They ended China's century of humiliation and ushered in a new golden age. The Russians found them to be very genial rulers. Admittedly, they were competing with Stalin and the Tsars, so this was not a wringing endorsement.

But, today, most Karashan Martians are not totally Martian. They definitely have Martian blood, but they also have Slavic, Han, and Turkic ancestors. Culturally, the whole empire is slowly but surely becoming Chinese.

§ 6 Boreads

Boreads live on a cold and inhospitable world, but it only became so on geologically recent timescales. And, it happened well after Boreas had its industrial revolution, so they were quite able to technologically adapt. As a result, the Boreads are less physiologically adapted to their home than they might be--a Martian is more visibly built for the cold than a Boread is.

Boreads tend to be tall and slender, and they're virtually hairless from the eyebrows down. They are much less sexually dimorphic than any other race of humans, and Boread societies tend to have weak gender roles. Millennia of globalization have destroyed the racial differences which once existed between Boreads; they tend to look more or less the same everywhere--lightish skin, gray eyes, vaguely elfin faces.

Though not intellectually exceptional in any other respect, Boreads have savant - level mathematical abilities. A typical Boread can perform complicated arithmetic in his head. He has an intuitive understanding of trigonometry, logarithms, and infinity. An educated Boread will learn calculus by the age of six.

This has made Boreads generally make better decisions than other people. They seldom mismanage their finances, for instance. No Boread has ever lost money on the lottery. They quickly achieved industrial civilization -- Boreads were building railroads while Martians lived in huts. But, they never advanced further than the industrial age, because they never had any reason to build computers. Many Boreads built Babbage Engines over the centuries, but these were novelties. For thousands of years, Boreas had trains and plastics and nuclear energy, but they never built an internet or traveled space -- the millions of calculations needed to fly a spacecraft are beyond even their abilities. So, when Martians needed a new home, Boreas was totally conquered, and they ruled uncontested for decades. But, since the 80s, several Boread revolutions have been successful, and most of the planet at least has home rule.

In Boread cultures, numbers are almost venerated. They often see them in a mystical, vaguely Pythagorean light, and they find numerical harmonies very pleasing. Their homes are decorated with complex geometric patterns, and they have a great love of instrumental music. They tend to frame problems in a quantitative way; philosophically - inclined Boreads are usually at least sympathetic to utilitarianism. In Boread religions, doctrines of eternal torment are almost unheard of, because they have a visceral understanding of what exactly infinity is.