From: bruce@bnkl01.astro.ucla.edu (Bruce Macintosh)
Subject: Re: CHTORR!! (mild spoilers)
Summary: various theories 
Organization: UCLA Dept of Astronomy
Date: 21 Dec 92 13:01:44 PST

xoanon@carina.unm.edu writes:
>durrell@pinball.arcade.uiowa.edu (Bryant Durrell) writes:

>>I have also been toying
>>with the idea that the Chtorran ecology isn't alien at all.  It's
>>perfectly suited for Earth,
>How about time travel? There's some mention in the first book of
>government experiments into fourth-dimensional physics. There's
>also a lot of talk (particularly in the first book) about how the
>Chtorran ecology is so much more evolved than Earth's. It could
>well be that the Chtorran ecology is simply the Terran ecology a
>few billion years in the future. That explains why everything in-
>teracts so well, it explains the red sun, and it leaves a _whole_
>lot of new questions to replace the old ones.

I've occasionally thought this too . . . especially since Gerrold does
seem to think that a red main-sequence star is older than our sun, which
implies he thinks our sun will turn into a red MS star later on. (It
*will* turn into a red giant in about 5.5 billion years, but planets of
red giant stars are hardly likely to have life - their original ecosystem
will be destroyed, and the red giant phase doesn't last very long...)
The thing for Gerrold's characters to do would be somehow get ahold of
one of the shambler-seeds-from-space and measure the ratios of various
isotopes in them for comparison with Earth's.

My favourite alternative theory is that there is no "controlling intelligence"
behind the invasion in any conventional sense. Either (a) worm colonies
become  a collective intelligence when they get large enough (he keeps 
likening intelligence to "software"; even if individual worms are stupid,
they can pass information from one worm to the next, and a colony of millions
might run quite complex "programs", even if they aren't intelligent in the
normal sense. Such a "program" might (randomly or semi-consciously) reach the
point of deciding to expand off its homeworld and build some kind of 
biological egg-launcher and packaged genetic set...(Since we know that
worm colonies can alter DNA even in living beings...)

Another alternative is that there is no controlling intelligence whatsoever;
just evolution. The galaxy is very large, and there are a lot of worlds out
there, some of which could have twenty times as much multicellular 
biological evolution as Earth; if one species out of these billions of
potential ecologies evolved a way to spread itself to other worlds,
it would go on evolving and getting better at the spreading process, until
you have something like the Chtorran ecology. (Depending how fast it spreads,
there's been time for a hundred thousand generations of such an ecology -
plenty of time for evolution to refine it.) Since reading SfS I don't 
feel as good about this theory, though - the "shambler packages" are *so*
complex and well-planned they seem unlikely to be the result of pure chance.
(I had other ideas about Chtorran genetics, now disproven, that supported
this theory.)

Bruce Macintosh				bruce@bnkl01.astro.ucla.edu
UCLA Department of Astronomy		Infrared Imaging Detector Lab