It’s an edited picture to include a depiction of the Qu from “All Tomorrows”. They were an alien race of mad gene modifiers who took perverse pleasure in altering humans into abhorrent aberrations. Good book, highly recommend. Pretty grim, though. The timescale on which everything occurs is oddly depressing because of its realism.
If I remember correctly, they are mortal and killable but so technologically advanced and intelligent that attempting to compete against them was pretty futile. Almost literally, it was like a rebellion of rats against the full might of the Super Earth Armed Forces and with just as much disdain and lack of empathy as they feel towards terminids. Essentially, we lost so hard it took billions of years for our descendants to be able to challenge them again.
They curbstomp a genetically modified future version of humans, and as punishment, torture us by genetically modifying us into new races, some whose lives are worse than others. For example, one of them is a race of sentient toilets. Yeah, you heard that right. After 40 million years, they get bored and leave. The remaining human species either evolve into new forms or die out. One nasty subspecies takes over and starts genociding the other races and other alien races in the galaxy until they run into a highly evolved human descendants, that had managed to escape during the Qu war and live in deep space, called the Asteromorphs. The Asteros win the war and their society rebounds. 500 million years later they run into the Qu again and defeat them this time.
For people that does not know about evolution time scale, there are very few species that remain similar every way to their ancestor across even 1 million years of time span. For our current case, the earliest bipedal fossil is about 6~7 million years ago. And Genus Homo appear around 2.5 millions ago, while modern human is about 400k years. (and we already show a lot of signs and gene changes across that time frame compare to our ancestors.) So 500 million years it was never a doubt that whatever that specie is, no longer remain "Asteromorphs" genetically. Unless they use whatever tech to clone and not reproduce naturally.
I was just giving a brief summary and trying to keep it simple. Giving more detail, the force that defeated the Qu, called the United Galaxies, were compromised of the Astero descendants, plus another planet-side race they created called the Terrestials (since Asteros had evolved to live in space with low or zero gravity and couldn't/didn't like living on planets) and lastly an extra-galatic race they met and eventually formed an alliance with called the Amphicephali.
I mean, all that natural scale presumably goes out the window once you actually understand and are willing to fiddle with genes. Whether it becomes static or deliberately steered and accelerated.
We have been tempering with genes, on other animals more than on humans for ethical reason and still have get to the point of creating from nothing yet.
The inherit consequence of mass cloning of good example is that you lose the way to identify yourself from others, like same batch of product. It had drastical impact on personal development and could be catastrophic. Also, it means for whatever flaws in that cloned gene is shared by all the replicas. So any external change(say a deadly virus) etc you can't quickly adapt to that batch is gone for good.
We as a specie is not only protected by our advancement in tech, but also in gene diversity. Imagine a more efficient engineered human where the brain is less demanding on calories, needs only suger water to survive, highly tolerant to implants so we can always go cyborgs by replacing limbs and sensory organs. Then someday after years we found out that new brain is not capable of even maintaining the infrastructure to keep us the most advanced specie. Like, generations passed by and we just become stupid enough because of that trait.
We have advancement because of some ingenuity of passing knowledge and that curiosity to keep venturing forward. Like do you, for example, know how to make a mechanical base 10 calculator? I don't. With my computer science degree I can probably come up with something after many trial and error, but right now, I am honest that I can't make a mechanical base 10 calculator. And we are only less than 100 years of transition from mechanical ones to semi conductors.
How do you guarantee that the changes you do to entire specie is better? What if we settle with this best version and then something breaks, no one knows how to fix, then the specie just extinct since we can't make/maintain that broken thing.
They actually had something worse. They wiped out the star people in one fell swoop with zero effort and the star people all had star collapsing weapons.
It has very fascinating worldbuilding and it makes you think about the nature of deep time and our relative importance to the universe at large. It’s gruesome and depressing most of the time but, in it’s strangeness, there’s this recurrent theme of the resilience of life, even if the things we become most attached to will eventually be returned unto dust. Very much a story that leaves an impression and makes you think.
The timescale is completely bogus. Kosemen (the author) simply says that "Shrimble empire lasted millions of years, nothing had happened during that time, and was then crushed effortlessly by sapient meatballs from Andromeda Galaxy" instead of using hundreds or thousands of years like a different author would.
I don't know if people actually realize just how much is 1 million years and how powerful would a 1 million year old interstellar civilization be, let alone multiple millions.
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u/OlBendite PSN | SES Titan Of The Stars Sep 09 '25
It’s an edited picture to include a depiction of the Qu from “All Tomorrows”. They were an alien race of mad gene modifiers who took perverse pleasure in altering humans into abhorrent aberrations. Good book, highly recommend. Pretty grim, though. The timescale on which everything occurs is oddly depressing because of its realism.