okay but imagine if the primordial roots/fusang from nine sols was evolved astrophage...
more thoughts on this below! and by that i mean an essay
also i WILL be drawing shuanshuan and rocky soon they would be best friends
Okay so anyone thats read Interstellarisms’ "where nothing bleeds" may find this familiar because I LOVED their explanation as to why astrophage would've evolved to become the blood oceans/blood eel and this is inspired by that. Fair warning, I did... very little research so I really only have a surface level understanding of evolutionary science. This is all just a bunch of speculation and 3am craziness.
So, how would Astrophage evolve from little space dots into the Primordial Roots/Fusang?
Astrophage has spread through our galaxy, and it grows exponentially allowing it to adapt and evolve at an incredibly fast rate. In the event that humanity decided to pick up the mantle of saving the galaxy from Astrophage-death, sending probes out to drop off Taumoeba to stars would be the most plausible way to achieve this (thank you reddit thread that i cant find anymore). Except, exposure to Taumoeba over generations would mean that Astrophage would eventually adapt to resist it, the same way it adapted to get through xenonite.
In Interstellarisms’ explanation, the Astrophage risked extinction from overconsumption because Taumoeba had a very niche niche so it couldn’t get the Astrophage’s population under control, which is where the blood moons come in (I think? Correct me if im wrong plz). In this AU, Taumoeba keeps up with the Astrophage with a bit of help from humanity, so this time it needs a different strategy for survival. This is where Fusang comes in.
(For convenience, Penglai will just happen to have an atmosphere containing like, 80% CO2 so the astrophage has a reason to be there. It just doesn’t affect Solarians the same way the Nitrogen in ours doesn’t affect us much, ok? ok.)
I don't think its crazy to say that it eventually makes its way further down into Penglai to evolve into Fusang. Maybe it does this to escape the Taumoeba that would probably reside in the upper atmosphere, the same way it does on Adrian, I dunno. It would likely have a headstart on evolution before the Taumoeba gets to Penglai too, which is 500LY away from Earth… yikes.
The “Primordial” part of its name implies that it was one of the first things on Penglai, so if it did evolve from Astrophage, it probably didn’t have much to compete with. A Bajillion generations later, we get Fusang. And since (according to the wiki at least) Solarians came from the Primordial Roots… well.
Yes I know my timeline is probably way off but otherwise, any thoughts?? I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR THEM PLEASE and YES feel free to correct all my wacky science
