Page 75 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Homo Aquatilis

few days ahead of landing on Mars, then have a mysterious ailment
strike down the American astronauts in rapid succession. They
barely are able to land, and then the survivors discover that for once
the natives, as it were, have returned the favor, infecting their
technologically advanced but immune-clueless hosts with a
previously undetected nasty bug the frogmen cannot help but
introduce into the Martian waters. All will die, just like the scorpion
hitching a ride across the river on a frog.”
A minute passed while the room refilled with oxygen following
Rutger’s rambling rant. Then Hydrargyrum Diggers spoke.
“Well, if these aquatic humans are intelligent and willing to leave
their comfort zone—shrinking though it may be!—then why
shouldn’t they be the meek who inherit the earth’s hopes for some
kind of preservation and continuation of our cultural patrimony?
They start out as victims, but may be the final winners if they can
survive on Mars and we can’t. But something has to go wrong.
Suppose one of the key members of the project has the job of
preparing waterproof records for the education of the gill people.
She would distill as much of the historical, scientific and artistic data
of the world’s millennia of terrestrial activity as possible into these
presumably digital archives, while technicians design and assemble
computers and playback devices for underwater use. All goes
according to plan: the H. sapiens colonists establish their domed
bunkers, and the H. aquatilis pioneers get their fish and kelp farms
going below the Martian shoreline. Maybe the home planet then
becomes so screwed up with environmental catastrophes or nuclear
war that contact is broken: no more supply ships. And the people
on the surface haven’t become self-sufficient like the ones in the
water. Now you’ve got a tightly-focused crisis!”
“And a typical replay of every war in history,” said Brad
Razeberry. “I’d like to read about that first contact in Antarctica.
How would the ocean-dwellers convince our people that they were
really a different sort of human and not a different sort of sea
creature? They couldn’t look like us in a lot of ways—not just the
gills and webbed extremities. I think they could establish their bona
fides in a way that would grab the ancient-mysteries crowd: they

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