SWM wrote:Guardiandashi wrote:its going to sound bad in a way but my thought is that a lot of the genetic tinkering teams were essentially either "lazy" or guilty of "branding"
what I mean by that is that the Meyerdahl team essentially took the time to consider ALL (or a lot more) ramifications of the consequences of their tinkering than a lot of teams did. On the other hand Mesa, and /or Manpower go heavy for "branding" so they deliberately incorporate visual effects into their mods because as far as they are concerned the engineered outcomes are "products" not "people" and so make them easy to identify. much like a lot of apple computers products are rather easily identifiable as opposed to the more "generic" products many other companies put out.
You should probably remember that most of those extreme genemods were created at a time when interstellar flight was rare, expensive, and long. They generally pre-date reliable hyperspace travel. It was unlikely that anyone on a heavy grav planet would ever leave their new home, and unlikely that anyone else would ever meet someone from a heavy grav planet.
Once reliable hyperspace travel became available, it was unnecessary to settle for a heavy grav planet. The number of available planets grew enormously. I suspect that after hyperspace was opened, heavy grav planets were seldom settled unless it was by those who already had the right genemods.
It wasn't branding or laziness. The altered phenotype just didn't matter, because they were never expected to interact with unmodified humans.
It may well be a complicated mix.
The Mfecane worlds were settled with radical separatism in mind - diverging from the rest of humanity was entirely acceptable, however hard or easy interstellar travel was or would be expected to become.
Similarly, settling a place that demanded extensive "Mesa-forming" the
colonists was a statement for Detweiler, and an excuse for all the tinkering they'd continue to do. Interaction was entirely expected then, but going radical was also both expected and desired for a number of reasons.
For other heavy grav worlds (to take one of our better sets of examples), if you weren't expecting much off-world interbreeding, then taking steps to make sure it was possible would be pointless. As to looking or behaving differently, that could be branding, laziness, unavoidable given current resources, unavoidable due to other constraints (such as how else the target environment differs from terrestrial norms) - or positively avoided because you could and wanted to preserve your human identity even off on your own.
And once routine interaction became something to expect or reasonably plan ahead for, you could still have mods that display genetic or obvious phenotypic divergence because the world demanded it, or branding, laziness, low-budget, or ideological reasons.
Thousands of human worlds out there. Every one of them was settled for some slightly different reasons, and every one of them makes slightly different demands on its settlers. There will be all sorts of variety.
