50k Q&A

good afternoon everyone as promised I have returned to answer your various questions I have taken the questions that were submitted to me and have grouped them into three general categories number one about me the channel and other more general miscellaneous world building stuff number two questions specifically about con langing and linguistics and number three questions about speculative biology zoology and related matters now we're going to tackle each of these subcategories one at a time but before we do that I want to give another massive huge gigantic thank you to all the patrons including all the new patrons who have pledged it since the last video was uploaded in the last week I've received an absolutely overwhelming deluge of support and thanks to all of your support I am looking forward very hopefully to potentially going full time very soon I can't say exactly when because everything is kind of up in the air at the moment but almost certainly by the end of the year I will say that which for me is a very exciting prospect so cheers to all of you and now let's get on with some questions what are your plans for the future of your channel what topics are you hoping to cover so right now the two main fields that I talked about are speculative biology and comm langing and those will probably remain the areas that I talk about most just because those the ones that I feel I know best and have stuff to talk about right now it feels like there's kind of a sharp divide in my content between coal mining and speculative biology but I will eventually bridge the gap I promise there's a whole bunch of other more general world building topics I want to cover things like culture and politics and magic and things like the Hat the difficulty is just finding exactly how to fit it in with my other content so for the time being if people are interested I might start to punctuate the usual alternation between speculative biology and Khan lining with the occasional more general world building video and my hope is that as the channel grows I'll be able to cover a wider base of topics as the series that I have at the moment continue but let me know what sorts of world-building topics other than con lang and speculative biology you'd be interested in seeing videos about in the comments below how many worlds have you created it kind of depends because a lot of my worlds never achieved critical mass and never became proper projects in their own right and some of them were made for things like stories or RPGs or something where they were more of like a background thing that I kind of made up on the fly so I don't think those count if we divide things between speculative biology projects and fantasy worlds I was doing speculative biology way way way way before I was doing komlang Khan langing is still kind of a reasonably new thing for me I made my first alien world when I was like eight or nine and yeah it was terrible and most of the following projects were also terrible but it was all a learning experience I would say the planet I'm making for the alien biospheres series would be my seventh decent actually well fleshed out alien world and for what it's worth I think so far is by far my best thankfully and as for like fantasy worlds with cultures and people in them that were at least kind of based on the real world I would say I've done three of those and again the world that I feature in the komlang showcase videos is definitely my most fleshed out of those what advice would you give to someone who just started con langing slash world building so my main piece of advice that I would give to anyone who's just starting out with con langing or world building or really any sort of creative endeavor would be to have some goals for yourself going in I talked about this a lot in the video on my first komlang about part of the reason I it was so terrible was because I didn't set out a clear unambiguous goal for myself so with a komlang it's very important that you decide from the get-go what the goal of this con Lang is is it a naturalistic con lang that's spoken by a culture of people is a logical language where it's perfectly rational there's no irregularity it's very intuitive and easy to understand or is it just a personal language that includes features just based on your own subjective criteria of oh I think that's cool a lot of these goals will be at odds with each other so if you don't decide right from the beginning which one you're aiming for then it can make the language feel really messy and incoherent and it can just result in the language as befallen apart and I would apply exactly the same advice to world building so when creating a fictional world I would suggest the right from the start you set some ground rules for yourself decide what sort of mood and tone and feeling you want this world to have first of all big one does the world have any sort of purpose beyond being just a world building project is it the setting for a story for example because if that's the case then pretty much everything in the setting needs to be in service of the story so that should inform a lot of the decisions you make how much do you want to adhere to science and real world logic do you want everything to be grounded and realistic and relatable to real life or do you want to go more just rule of cool and throw some stuff in that stretches suspension of disbelief a little bit big one does magic exist because that opens up a whole other can of worms if magic does exist how prevalent is it and what sort of things can it do what sort of level of technology is this world at are there humans in this world or just human-like beings I think getting down all of these sort of general points he is pretty important to making your world feel consistent and coherent like if you're creating the standard sort of fancy world where there's a feudal Kingdom and in this kingdom there is magic but it's very rare only certain people can do it and when they can they can only use it for very small very specific effects and then in the next Kingdom over you have giant magical flying cities and giant robots and space shuttles and things that might be pretty hard to justify and it might make the tone of your world feel really incoherent unless that's the style you're going for which if it is then go right ahead even if your goal when starting out creating a world is I just want to make something that I find cool that's perfectly fine as long as you know that going in and as long as you stick to that goal throughout the whole process how do you go about integrating magic with a planets evolution that is so utterly dependent on the nature of magic and how the magic system works even if you're using a really hard strict magic system it's still really hard to answer this question speaking in generality just because there is so much scope for variation magic is in of itself really hard to define but at its core it's basically just the violation of the laws of reality as we understand it now I would say in a very very broad sense for like a top-down perspective I would first identify number one how your magic system works and what magic is capable of and then just think through and extrapolate what the logical consequences of having something like that in your world would be and again that is a very vague answer but it's really hard to say more than that without going into the specifics of how the magic system works I have been toying around with an idea for a video on magic and another video on magic languages let me know if you would be interested in seeing something like that do your conlangs exist in the same world as he each other will you ever talk more about the cultures that speak them yes with the exception of the language I'm making for the Kahn Lange case studies series which is for a separate project all of the conlangs that I have made thus far are for the same world it's my biggest and probably my most well fleshed out world I call it the refugium for complex world building reasons that would take a while to get into maybe I'll talk about that in another video but to the inhabitants it's just called the world because that's the only world they know I was initially only going to talk about the conlangs of this world because corn lining is like one of the primary focus my channel and Plus on some level it does feel just a little bit self-indulgence to just talk about my world and like show it off without any sort of context behind it but apparently people are quite curious about it because I have received a lot of questions about my world including how technologically advanced are the cultures featured in York online showcase videos so the thing with the refugium is that there is no default time period if you know what I mean like there's no current time that everything else is measured by I have about 6,000 years of human history planned stretching from a sort of Neolithic Stone Age sort of time period all the way up to a kind of post-industrial semi steampunk modern era now there are certain elements of this world that have very severely influenced the progression of Technology but I can't say anything about those just yet like a lot of people were a bit confused by the fact that in the 18 showcase video I mentioned that in modernity and there is a word for a steering wheel and I make reference to motor vehicles so the emergence and the proliferation of the Thorian languages what with some of them migrating into the central regions and all that that was all ancient history then by the time of classical a dune at Nakash d both empires were kind of somewhat medieval my upper medieval kind of the equivalent of classical Greece and Rome that sort of level of technology and then began the feud between the two empires that resulted in a big war that lasted for many centuries by which point Allah's rune was being spoken in the capital of the Empire of the Sun which then underwent a sort of technological boom like a renaissance of sorts and it was also around this time that classical alcoholic was being spoken as well and then shortly after that the Empire of the Sun finally fell kind of who larger than was then no longer spoken and then modern a tune which had at the time been the language of the peasantry in the lower-class then became the sort of dominant lingua franca of the central regions and remained so for the next few hundred years and after a period of civil unrest in the wake of the power vacuum left behind after the Empire of the Sun once the new United Empire had established itself there was another technological boom that launched essentially the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and over the next few centuries by the time of what I call the modern era you know the era that is most recent in history I'd say the level of technology would be roughly equivalent to that of the real world during World War two I suppose I could take it even further than that if I wanted to but it just kind of feels like a natural stopping point based on various aspects and elements of the world do sharks exist in your world or are they completely replaced by armored fish and other sea creatures do people have domesticated crea dots in your world so you might have noticed that being at some of the conlangs showcase videos I make references to animals that don't exist in our world or have gone extinct in our world like calico Thea's and Tara birds and Titanic II is and things like that so the biosphere of the refugium has a sort of alternate Natural History vibe to it there are men clades of animals that we have in our world like cats and dogs and insects that simply never existed in this world and instead they're replaced by other clades that have either gone extinct in our world or just never existed so in place of cats and dogs we have crea dots and to answer the question specifically yes there are certain domesticated breeds of crea dots and no sharks do not exist in the refugium and yes all of their ecological niches are filled by armored fish which is the general term that I use for placa domes what's your favorite culture you've made I guess it would be the oka lyre just because I think they're the most fleshed-out culture I've made like forth area and the Empire of the Sun I've got a lot of broad scale stuff done like cultural values and politics and religion and things like that but for the O Kaleo I've done a lot more work relating to more specific things like cuisine and the fashion and music and stuff like that like for example I'll give you one little tidbit I have no idea how I made it through the entire Alcala walk showcase without mentioning get pom even once I guess I thought it was just too specific to bring up so get bun is this special drink that the Ohio have that forms a very important part of their culture it's kind of like how the British are with tea it's made with coconut water steeped in the petals of a plant that's kind of like rose and depending on personal tastes and which region you're in it might also be mixed with things like ginger or cinnamon or lemon things like that and if you are the host of a social event and you see that your guests cup of get bum has fallen below half-full it is considered rude to not pour more for them even if they're not going to drink it and now for some questions about calling in will you make another con line showcase video yes and in fact the next video to go out after this one will komlang showcase for a loft way I hope to have that uploaded by the end of the month or within the first few days of June and after that the only two conlangs I have left are Taku kama and suma R and both of those are in dire need of a revamp so it will probably be quite a while before I'm able to actually make showcase videos for them when I get more time I'll have to go back and revisit them and after that I'm not really sure hopefully the language that I'm making in the con line case studies series will be finished by then and so I can make a showcase video for that are you planning on remaking the how to make a language series I think so I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to do it or if I'm going to stick to the same format or what because I think a lot of the content of that series is still valid it's just that I didn't know a damn thing about video production back then and there's a lot of things I would like to explain in more detail and there are some things that I think I elaborated on too much for an introductory series so I don't know when or how but I'd very much like to go back and touch it up and remaster it as it were especially since it's supposed to be like the introductory video to the concept of con lining like all of my other corn lining videos are predicated on the idea that the viewer knows and is familiar with all the content that's in that series so I'd really like it to be as solid and easy-to-follow as possible what linguistics resources do you recommend so for getting started I would recommend both the art of language invention by David J Peterson and the language construction kit by Mark Rosenfeld both of them introduce all the general basics of calling for slightly more advanced stuff I would recommend describing morphosyntax by Thomas Paine and the evolution of grammar by John by B Revere Perkins and William a luca the unfolding of language by a guide to it is also really good it has a very nice intuitive discussion on the evolution of the Tri consonantal root system in Semitic languages and the world lexicon of grammatical ization which I sadly still don't have a physical copy of is really good for derivation and evolving grammar out of lexical sources things like that and to learn more about sound changes and to get an understanding of what sort of sound changes are possible I very strongly recommend the index diachronic err basically it's a catalogue of every sound change that's ever happened in every language family so if you have an idea for a sound change that you want to apply to your con Lang but you're not sure if it's possible have a look through the index tie chronica what's the next language you'd like to learn so last QA I said I was looking forward to learning Manchu later that year unfortunately I never got around to that because I didn't have the time man she was still very high up on my list it'll probably be the next one that I get to Japanese is also a high priority because as I said last time I'm really ashamed of how little I actually know about Japanese so I'd really like to get stuck into it and I feel almost exactly the same way about German as well and I would really like to get more into Latin and Greek at some point along with Hebrew and Arabic as well and then there's always Swahili which is one of my absolute favorite languages and I'd love to learn it and then of course there's the issue of maintaining all the languages that I already kind of speak I definitely feel like over the past year or so I have been losing my Turkish and my Mandarin and my Spanish and my knowledge so I've got a pretty big long list and the trouble is just finding the time how do you choose the root words for your con Lang how do you perform sound changes for roots I honestly just come up with something that I think sounds right I know a lot of people use online generators for roots but honestly I've never really seen a need for that personally and for sound changes yeah I am old school I just do everything manually which is tedious and time-consuming and I do sometimes make mistakes but I'm too technologically illiterate to do otherwise how do you document your conlangs I do all of the initial work and the rough draft of the grammar in Excel and then what I'm happy with that I tap elated all inward would you ever consider doing videos on NAT Lang's or reviewing other people's comm Lang's I kind of decided fairly early on that I didn't want to do reviews of other people's car lines partly because there are other channels and other web places for that but also because I just don't feel like it's my place to judge it's someone else's car line because Kahn langing is so subjective that's another reason why establishing a goal for your komlang from the very beginning is so important the only objective way of evaluating how good or bad a Kahn Lang is is to see how well or how poorly it meets its goals and your goals and Sensibility is when making a Kahn Lang may be wholly and totally different to mine and features that you like or think are interesting I might not care for so much or vice versa so in the end all I could really do is tell you how much I personally liked the corne Lang which I don't think is very meaningful and with NAT Lang's again there are other channels and other places that talk about them and I prefer to stay on the more sort of creative side of sort of taking what we can from Matt Lang's and using them in conlangs I think studying broader cross-linguistic tendencies is just in general a lot more useful to Kahn liners how do you name your languages so there are two very common etymologies for the names of languages number one some sort of derivation from the denim for the name of the group of people or a culture that speaks the language and that denim almost always comes from the word that just means people so Alcala walk for example the Walker suffer is the definite ethereal class suffix applied to the root or polar which is basically just an old word that used to mean people but now is used specifically for their culture so it means something like the abstract concept of the people kind of same with double comma because comma is just the name of the tribe of the ethnicity of people who is the definite marker and tar is the class prefix for abstract nouns so again it's like the abstract noun of the people and McCarty is just an old Thorian derivational suffix on the end of nakata which is the name of the capital city of the Thorian empire the other possibility is just to use a word that means something like language a boon for example comes from an old pro Ithorian root that meant to speak in the passive participle so it literally means something like it is spoken at a loft we is very similar except it's got an instrumental prefix as well so it literally means it is spoken with words but if you wanted to do things a little bit differently I am obligated to mention my beloved Nala the word Nahuatl in the language itself means clear or clearly or clear sounding so you can imagine like when the Aztecs first encountered a tribe that didn't speak the same language as them they were saving themselves like oh we can't understand them because they're not speaking clearly and then over time clearly becomes the word for the language itself that is wonderful I love it what topics are you hoping to cover in future episodes of feature focus so I've still got a couple of very large-scale topics to cover things like gender systems and ok tivity and anima c and things like that and once I'm done with those I'll move on to more specific topics things like formality and consonant mutation and toner Genesis things like that I have a big long list of topics that I'd like to cover that are arranged loosely in order of priority but when it comes time to decide which topic to cover next I generally just do a poll on patreon sometimes I just decide myself like I knew I was gonna do verb agreement and case marking back-to-back especially since I knew I was gonna do the collaboration with artifexian on word order the following month I kind of wanted to do all three of the big role marking strategies in a row but for basically everything else I just left the patrons decide and I'm always willing to hear more ideas for topics and suggestions so don't hesitate to post those in the comments below or basically anywhere else what's your favorite and least favorite corn line that you've made overall I'd say my favorite would probably be Nakash tea it was the language that I just decided to include everything that I liked like it's got a noun case and Polly personal agreement it has the dental fricative it has now incorporation and compounding all over the place it's just the one that overall I think appeals most to my sensibilities as for the least favorite Fandi and immediately comes to mind but we don't talk about that of the conlangs that I haven't destroyed yet my least favorite would almost certainly be ADA number one it just sounds hideous I was really genuinely surprised by how many people commented on the showcase video saying that they liked the sound of a dude I'm glad you think so because I think it sounds atrocious it's easily my least favorite sounding out of any of my callings and the grammar is very weird and irregular which in some ways is good but it's it's difficult to describe but it feels almost irregular to a fault like I mean there are natural languages that are more irregular than a doing but that's not the problem it's that I don't know the degree of irregularity something about the way it's done and the way the system works feels a little bit gimmicky if that makes sense I mean I still like it if I didn't like it I would have destroyed it by now but it's definitely the one that I think might still need a little bit of touching up other than Sabu comma and Sumer our which have just become like obsolete by this point are there any videos or series that you really like to make but can't because of time not really I mean if there's an idea that I'm really attached to then I'll find the time to make it into a video at some point but I do have an idea for a project that I don't think I would ever do I don't think I have the time or really the inclination to do it myself but I really really like to see someone else take the concept and run with it so I'm obviously an a priori con like I make conlangs for con worlds I've never made a language based on a NAT Lang before but for any a posteriori con Lang is listening to this I've got an idea for you so in some versions of the Atlantis story I hesitate to say myth because if you actually read the original dialogues by Plato it's very obvious that it was never supposed to be taken as historical fact but in some versions of the modern of reimagining of the Atlantis story Atlantis is an island or a continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlantean culture is not only the progenitor of all of the cultures and peoples of Europe but also of the Americas as well which is supposedly why for example both the cultures of North Africa and of Mesoamerica both build with pyramids it's not because pyramids are just a very convenient way of stacking rocks no no no it's because the cultures in both regions descend from a globe spanning magical civilization that we have no archaeological records of but if we set aside the ridiculousness of this premise and kind of run with it what I'd like to see happen is someone take proto afro-asiatic and maybe proto-indo-european as well as proto Mayan and maybe proto use how has Tekken or really whatever other language families you like and from them reconstruct the original Atlantean language that gave rise to all of I think that would be really really fun but also really really challenging to do which is why I'm not going to do it but as I say any komlang is watching this if you like the idea go ahead and do something with it I'd really honestly love to see what you come up with I'll even give you a few freebies so in knock the word for water is art ATL as in Atlantis I know crazy right I mean it's a lot less impressive when you realize that the TL suffix is the singular ending for basically every single noun but if that doesn't impress you try this the word for God in ancient Greek is tales which is where we get was like theology and theists and the word for God in nahuatl is they are almost exactly the same root coincidence I think so not only that but the word for River in Greek is vamos which is where we get hippopotamus from because a hippopotamus is a river horse and on the east coast of North America there's a river called the Potomac which allegedly comes from an Algonquin word that means river I mean what are the chances right I mean there's no way that can be a coincidence the only logical explanation is that there was a giant continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that was home to a super advanced magical civilization that then somehow sank beneath the ocean so feel free to take that premise and those ideas and run to the moon with them your videos often mention how verb agreement generally evolves when pronouns are incorporated into verbs however in many languages I've seen most notably proto-indo-european pronouns have no clear phonological similarities to the agreement markers on verbs in addition the person marking comes at the end of the verb which is the opposite of what would be expected from ahead final language like p IE is generally agreed to be is there any way to mirror this without doing a large number of sound changes affecting pronouns and changing the word order over time respectively this is something that baffled me for a long time and I still don't have a clear definitive answer for the case of proto-indo-european but there are a couple of factors that might be useful to think about when doing something similar in a con langing context first of all most human languages have a strong preference for suffixing morphology rather than prefixing morphology suffixes on the whole are much more common than prefixes regardless of the languages head directionality I don't think it's known exactly why this is the case but I think it might be to do with the fact that people generally place more emphasis on the semantic content of a sentence rather than the grammatical content of the sentence and in most languages the so-called important information a guess shifted to the front so in a language with more flexible word order I can very easily see if it's understood who is carrying out the action if we already know who the subject and object are then the known information might be shifted towards the back of the sentence and the verb or any other semantic content will be brought closer to the front and then over time these speakers get used to the fact that the pronouns are coming after the verb and then they become suffixes even if the language is otherwise head final and then for emphasis the pronouns can be restated in the usual head final order that you would expect but now you've got that inseparable obligatory person marking on the verbs also another important point pronouns can change first and second person pronouns can be affected by formality like how an English thou used to be the second person singular pronoun and you what was just for plural but then people started using you or for formality even when they were talking to just one person and they did this so often that eventually you just replaced thou entirely a very similar thing happened in nahuatl where the first person plural verb form is the same as the second person singular verb form because they used the first person plural for formality for a formal second person and third person pronouns can evolve from demonstratives or they can change as new gender systems evolve so it's very reasonable to expect that by the time the original pronouns have been suffix onto the verb and have become dedicated person marking new pronouns will evolve that will office Kate the relationship between the verb form and the corresponding pronoun I've been using York online videos to inform a language I'm creating for a race of Orcs in a high fantasy setting and one of the first problems I encountered had to do with finding a phonology that would work with the rather large tusks the orcs had have you ever tried to create a calm line for another species and if so what did you find most interesting and approaching a different linguistic biology I have only ever made one language that wasn't spoken by humans or a very human-like species and that was a sketch I made for a race of reptilian mostly crocodilian humanoids the main thing that I did was that I just got rid of all labial sounds and all rounded vowels because these creatures didn't have lips but the other thing I did was that these creatures much like real crocodiles had a special palatal flap in the back of their throat that closes when they go underwater to stop the water from flooding their lungs and so I decided that this powerful flap would form an extra place of articulation the obvious problem became that I had no way of knowing what a sound articulated from this powerful flap would actually sound like but in the end I reasoned that it almost didn't matter because obviously it would be incapable of being produced by humans so unless I went to the enormous trouble of engineering or somehow creating with some sort of software the precise vocal tract of these creatures and hearing what it would sound like all I could really do was find some way to romanize these sounds and then leave a note in the reference grammar saying that these sounds are impossible to be reproduced accurately by humans specifically what I did was I used the uvula series because I reasoned that the sounds produced with this palatal flap would be roughly equivalent to uvula sounds so I just noted in the reference grammar that these sounds could be roughly approximated with human uvula sounds I think if you are making a phonology for a creature with a noticeably different vocal tract than a human I think it's much more important to pin down these sounds that humans can produce that these creatures can't rather than vice versa like with your example for the orcs it kind of depends on the exact shape of these tusks but I would imagine they would make bilabial sounds quite difficult while dentals sure but by labels might be a little bit too difficult for them how many of the Apollo Hawk languages are currently fleshed out pretty much just to protocol work and classical alcohol work for all the other ones I have lists of sound changes I want to apply add notes on changes in grammar and word meanings and things like that but none of them are actually complete in the same way that classical or Kowalik is same with the Thorian languages other than the Adrian family and Nakash T and depending on how you count their lost way and finally some questions about speculative biology how far are you planning to go with the alien biospheres series what sorts of topics are you going to include so when I first started working on the series I was planning to have a total of 8 episodes but since then the series has grown in popularity and I keep thinking of more topics I want to include such that now my list is up to a total of 14 episodes and there may still be room to add more episodes along the way and not only that but once the main series is over I have plans for multiple companion series and follow-up series that will talk about much more specific concepts that I don't have time to cover in the main series as well as topics that aren't applicable for the main series like life in fat seewalds or on gas giants or non-earth by planets things like that as of the most recent episode we're still fairly early on in the planets history but in the upcoming episodes we're going to talk about adaptations to different environments we're going to talk about biogeography as the continent starts to break up we're going to talk about the evolution of social behavior herding cooperative hunting and as for intelligent life I don't want to give away too much but I will say that we will touch on that by the end what software do you use to make the models for the alien biospheres series so back in middle school about 12 years ago I took a two-week course in animation and computer modeling and at the time the standard-issue 3d software for all of the school computers was Lightwave so I spent two weeks learning how to use Lightwave and then that same year I got Lightwave as a birthday present so I messed around with it for a while and taught myself some more of the basics but I didn't really have very much of a great need or use for it so I just kind of gradually stopped using it fast-forward to last year when I was coming up with the idea for the alien biospheres series and I thought to myself that I need to have some way of visually representing these creatures and it suddenly occurred to me that I still have the light way of software now from what I understand light wave isn't very commonly used these days there's all sorts of other programs that have come into existence since then but I thought to myself I might as well use what I already have rather than taking the time and energy and money to learn something new and it's been so long since I've used light wave I've actually had to kind of reach myself how to use it as I've been going through the series I can do individual creatures okay but the thing that absolutely defeats me is creating landscapes it takes so long to do and it always ends up looking like trash every time I try which is one of the many reasons why I'm now featuring fan art in the episodes I will eventually learn other software as well hopefully and that is again one of the things that I like to do once I get more time on my hands has anyone named your planet in the alien biosphere project so this is an interesting thing the planet does have a name but I've not mentioned it yet in any of the episodes I don't know why but when I started the series it just never occurred to me to give the planet a name but once I got a couple of episodes in and realized I probably should give it a name at some point I felt like I shouldn't be the one to name it because technically all effec seeing is the one who actually made the planet itself back in episode 1 and plus he knows way more about the conventions of naming planets than I do so I asked him if he had any ideas for a name for it and we kind of talked back and forth for a bit an artifacts ian has given the planet the official astronomical designation of terra 2:9 to be so as I understand it I could be wrong about this but as I understand it when an exoplanet is given a name the letters at the beginning of the name signify the name or the abbreviation of the telescope that discovered the planet the numbers represent the number of star systems that the telescope has discovered as of the discovery of this planet and then for whatever reason they give the first planet discovered in a new star system the letter B so Terra - 9 - be literally means the first planet in the 290 second star system discovered by the telescope Terra now I haven't mentioned this in any of the episodes yet because as of yet there are no humans around and there's certainly no telescope Terra to discover this planet but the name may or may not become relevant later on in the series also the name contains at least three or four Easter eggs what's your history with speculative biology what resources do you recommend for it so unlike khan liang which is a comparatively recent thing for me like I didn't have any interest in linguistics at all before I was halfway through University I have always been interested in biology for as long as I can remember the first piece of media I ever remember properly falling in love with was The Walking with Dinosaurs series which premiered when I was five and ever since I was hooked on dinosaurs and animals and paleontology and prehistoric life all of that but about five years later I saw the future as wild for the first time which for those who aren't familiar is a mockumentary series about how life might evolve over the next five 100 and 200 million years I really really liked the series and it was the first time that had occurred to me that biology and life had certain patterns like certain rules to it and that by studying these rules we could sort of extrapolate from them how life might evolve and other times and other places and that was a really big epiphany for me and I found out shortly after that that the future is wild is sort of the spiritual successor to this book after man a zoology of the future by Dougal Dixon which has a very similar premise of exploring what life will be like 50 million years from now and if you're all interested in speculative biology I would very strongly recommend this book as well as the future is wild so that was the first time I ever considered these sort of creative applications of biology if you like I began my own very simple projects to do with like animals from the future or different times in the past and things like that but the next big milestone came about two years later when I saw the Discovery Channel production alien planet which I very soon afterwards learned was actually based on this book expedition by Wayne Douglas bollo it's a very simple premise it's basically just a guy goes to a newly discovered alien planet and has a look around and just catalogs all the weird alien creatures he comes across but I just found the whole concept just really cool and interesting and that was the first time that I ever remember being inspired to create my own world my own alien planet with my own life-forms on it I made a couple of alien worlds over the next year or so but at some point I decided to compile all of my work in one single sort of volume I made a sort of compendium for all of my creatures and I redid all the drawings for them and I wrote up these long descriptions about what they were and what they did etcetera and then I was in the process of finishing up the last chapter of that compendium when completely by chance I came across Nyad by CM custom n I read through the entire thing over the course of one day and by the end I was so ashamed and embarrassed of how bad my stuff was in comparison that I immediately abandoned the project I was just so impressed with how interesting and alien it was while still being scientifically feasible and how all the decisions felt justified and logical and just by the sheer volume of content so many clades and species and the framing device of having this colony of humans that have just arrived on this planet and they're still kind of exploring and discovering things so as you read there's still this sort of sense of mystery that there's still so much left to explore I thought it was all just amazingly well done and for a while honestly that kind of put me off because I just realized that I would never do anything as good as that like it was such a high bar I thought there's no way I could ever compete with that but eventually I pulled myself together and thought okay let me try to get back into this let me let me see if I can do something better than my previous abysmal attempts and then I made a few more projects and gradually developed and grew and then died and it wasn't until I got to my fifth or sixth world that I finally created something that I felt kind of satisfied with but as I say I do think the world I'm making for the alien biospheres series is by far the best that I've made partly just because the format just kind of forces me to think about all the little details and that's basically how I got to where I am today in terms of resources honestly beyond just reading up about general biology stuff I would recommend these too as well as obviously snide I also recommend these both in a more sort of general world-building sense because these two books are at extreme opposite ends of the world building spectrum when it comes to application of realism like this book is entirely predicated on science and everything that is presented in this book has scientific justification for it like some of the ideas are a bit more adventurous than others but they're all grounded in some sort of science this book on the other hand has almost no scientific basis at all in fact a lot of the organisms presented in this book are flat-out physically impossible why don't go into this book expecting to glean anything about speculative biology but the strength of this book is in its presentation and its style like the world that's featured in this book does feel legitimately very alien it's not like Star Wars or James Cameron's Avatar where most of the aliens are just sort of alien of Fired versions of earth animals like some of the stuff that's in here is just really inexplicably bizarre but in a good way so I would recommend checking out both of these books as examples of the extreme end points of the spectrum from science to style like for me personally in my own world building style if we imagine a scale from one 2:10 where one is a very sort of conservative only sticking to what we know for certain can happen all the way to 10 being no sort of scientific basis at all and just totally style of a substance and just including things based on aesthetics I would put myself at about a three like I will always err on the side of being too scientifically conservative I guess but I like exploring weird new ideas if I find sufficient justification for them but maybe you veer towards the other end of the spectrum maybe you're more adventurous and prefer to explore those strange wild ideas that maybe aren't the most feasible or the most viable but they're cool I think there's merit in both styles and both approaches and ultimately it just comes down to your personal preference I'm not actually sure if that had anything to do with the question oh well could you go through your process of how you do your speculative biology so I've been doing this for long enough that the process kind of feels intuitive for me now so it's very difficult to actually put into words but the gist of it is examine what niches are available which niches are open for exploitation have a look at what claims you've got and decide which ones would be best equipped to exploit that niche and then think about what sorts of adaptations would help them to exploit that in each better that's basically all it really boils down to at the end another very important thing to keep in mind is to make sure that every step in the transition to adapting to the new niche provides an immediate survival advantage so like if a new structure evolves it needs to be useful to the organism it needs to increase the organisms Fitness at every single stage of its evolution so take for example balance or lighter-than-air organisms which I'm going to address in a proper full-length video at some point they say you want to evolve a creature that has a giant bladder filled with gas on its back and this gas is lighter than air gas so it helps the creature floats like a balloon why okay that may or may not work I mean there are a whole bunch of difficulties involved in that but the main difficulty is that how does this thing evolve like if this thing starts is just a bladder on the creatures back what benefit does it provide to the organism before it gets large and well-developed enough for it to actually make the creature lighter-than-air like what benefit does having half of a gas bladder actually confer surely that would just slow the creature down and it would just be a waste of resources and it would decrease the animal's fitness the thing is that evolution tends to work with what it already has rather than creating something brand new and that may be one of the reasons why we don't see any life than air animals on earth always think about the structures the organisms already have and how they can be modified to better suit a new niche rather than creating something brand new do you regret any decisions about the species in your speculative biology series or do you think that anything strange or unlikely is just going to make for more interesting species in the future you're probably not going to believe me but I really honestly did not intend the ostia pause to look so much like spiders like way back when I was planning the first few episodes I knew that I wanted to have a segmented body plan and I knew I wanted them to have more than two eyes and more than four walking legs to make them less like vertebrates and I decided to give them eight walking legs because I knew what I was going to invoke sin tourism at some point and I wanted it so that even after sin tourism they'd still have more than four walking legs but it was only once I started actually making the models for Episode three that I realized like yeah these things are basically just spiders and honestly I'm not too happy about that I I wish I had thought it through a little bit more and done something a little bit different I do have plans for certain adaptations that will happen that will hopefully make them look less like spiders and I think you're kind of starting to see some of that with the most recent episode and so far I don't think I've made any decisions that I think are too unlikely with the notable exception of the hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere and the whole biochemistry relating to the sulfur cycle I threw that in in the early stages because I wanted to make the planet slightly less earth-like and I'd had this idea a while ago about having biochemistry that was based around sulfur the thing is though I hate chemistry and I suck at it especially biochemistry and I think overall the idea has been a lot more trouble than it's worth so the atmosphere and the biology based around sulfur that I've come up with is almost certainly infeasible in retrospect maybe filling the atmosphere with a poisonous and highly flammable gas wasn't such a good idea are there any ecological niches that an alien planet might have that Earth doesn't can you make a video about potential biomes that could exist on earth but don't so the abiotic fat is at a planet like the gravity and atmosphere and what sorts of nutrients are available and all that those all go a very long way in determining what sorts of niches will be present by off the top of my head if you had a planet with a much much thicker atmosphere than Earth's you could potentially have Aero plankton like creatures that live in the air they can't actually fly they just sort of ride the air currents and if that was the case that would open up niches for terrestrial or aerial filter feeders you might have giant like sky whales that harvest these big clouds of aero plankton and then you'd have predators that feed on those giant areal filter feeders but of course on the other hand biotic components also go a long way in shaping what sorts of niches will be present to give an example from snide which I've already spent a big portion of this video praising snide is a pretty earth-like planet in terms of abiotic factors but it's got this unique type of plant called sprawl which is described as this spongy hole ridden plant that blankets much of the landscapes and forms the equivalent of grasslands and because it's riddled with these holes a lot of plains dwelling animals on snipe have evolved a serpentine body form to help them wriggle through and burrow into the sprog and there are a lot of predators with elongated or flexible mouth parts to reach into the sprog to pluck these things out and these sorts of niches are totally absent on earth I mean the closest thing we would have is something like woodpeckers searching for wood-boring insects but the presence of this unique plant is what cultivates all these new unique niches and it makes these unique body forms and lifestyles a lot more widespread than they are on earth so try to think about both the biotic and abiotic factors when determining what sorts of niches will be present on your planet all right I've been rambling on for ages now and I think it's about time I gave it a rest thank you to everyone who submitted questions I hope I provided somewhat coherent answers thank you again to all of you for watching and to the patrons for their support and I will see you all in the next video

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Length: 57min 0sec (3420 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020