Another seed I will put down to get it out of my head
May. 7th, 2026 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollHumans discover ancient and extremely enigmatic alien relics around the Solar System. On inventing plot-enabling AFAL starships, humans determine pretty much any system old enough has relics from the whoever they were. The WTW showeed up in the early Proterozoic, did their thing for 300 million years--although not on Earth, as far as anyone can tell--and then vanished seemingly overnight for reasons that at as yet unclear.
They seem to have been interested in smaller terrestrial worlds, many of which now have life forms whose last common ancestor was six billion years ago. So probably they were xenoforming worlds? But apparently only barren worlds, for some reason. Also, if they used the PEAFAL drive, there's absolutely no evidence of it.
Age is one reason why the WTW are very enigmatic. 2.5 billion years of radiation and micrometeorites has turned all their artificial stuff into scrap. Sometimes, into subtle chemical traces in regolith. Nobody has ever reverse-engineered WTW relics into something novel to us. In fact, nobody is sure what the WTW even looked like (there are a couple of candidate remains of things that might have had big brain analogues). So, they make a nice Rorschach test for scientists to project their issues onto.
They seem to have been interested in smaller terrestrial worlds, many of which now have life forms whose last common ancestor was six billion years ago. So probably they were xenoforming worlds? But apparently only barren worlds, for some reason. Also, if they used the PEAFAL drive, there's absolutely no evidence of it.
Age is one reason why the WTW are very enigmatic. 2.5 billion years of radiation and micrometeorites has turned all their artificial stuff into scrap. Sometimes, into subtle chemical traces in regolith. Nobody has ever reverse-engineered WTW relics into something novel to us. In fact, nobody is sure what the WTW even looked like (there are a couple of candidate remains of things that might have had big brain analogues). So, they make a nice Rorschach test for scientists to project their issues onto.
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