Space Spiders
I love reading sci-fi, not because I’m an obsessive nerd, but because the ideas I glean from those books inspire me. I recently finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky after it had been sitting in the virtual dust of my Kindle for a few years.
Wow.
The premise is that humanity is destroying itself, sending the last gasp of civilization-builders into space. In the final act of terraforming, one such ship intends to launch a bunch of monkeys onto a lush planet along with a nanovirus to accelerate their evolution into an advanced species by many centuries instead of millions of years.
However, there is an accident, and the human ship explodes, the monkeys overheat and die, and the virus instead infects the spiders roaming about the vessel. These arachnids land, evolve over generations, develop language, grow to be huge — think Shelob from Lord of the Rings — and form complex societies.
Still from the film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New Line Cinema, 2003), Fair Use
Finding Empathy With Spiders
The challenge here, and returning to the notions of the BioSymphonic, is relatability. How do you develop empathy with giant spiders when their sensory mechanisms are so different from ours?
Tchaikovsky first accomplishes this by describing generations of spiders with the same names. Bianca, Portia, and Fabian. Bianca is an inventor; Portia is a leader; and Fabian an upstart male who can be useful. The larger female spiders dominate the males, and they struggle for some sort of equality.
These roles are similar to many spider species in real life. We have all heard of the infamous female Black Widow spiders. While they don’t always cannibalize the males after mating, as is commonly believed, they do occasionally eat smaller males ones for sustenance.
Webs, Signals, and Silent Speech
But where it gets really amazing is the differences in how spiders and humans communicate. Spiders can’t hear, but they can sense vibrations in their webs through slit sensillae, small grooves on their legs that deform when exposed to vibrations, along with hair-like setae on their legs. This allows spiders to “hear” low-frequency vibrations better than we can.
In the book, the spiders communicate by stamping their legs and waving their palps in complex patterns. Different vibrations may communicate alarm, courtship rituals, or define territorial boundaries. Different species of spiders use different patterns that are their own unique language, much like humans have different languages.
So, the city architecture evolves into using webs as communication lines. It is soft, sticky, and organic. Instead of hard machines and metal wires, spiders aim for the biological. They use ants to do their bidding.
Pheromones and chemicals drive their evolution rather than factories and computers. Females release pheromones that attract males, and the males can differentiate between adult and subadult females, and even their current feeding status, to help find the perfect mate. Between females, adult females avoid the pheromones of other adult females, presumably to reduce sexual competition.
The Cold-Blooded Edge
Spiders are ectothermic (cold-blooded), not endothermic. They do not generate their own body heat to maintain a constant temperature like mammals or birds do. Instead, their body temperature changes with the surrounding environment.
This gives them a huge advantage when it comes to energy expenditure since they don’t have to maintain a constant body temperature. This means they can survive on less food than we warm-blooded creatures can, allowing them to thrive in environments where resources are scarce. As you might imagine, this becomes a significant advantage when they eventually go into space.
Parallels With Humanity
Like with humans, the spiders fight wars amongst themselves. They struggle with diseases and with other evolved creatures (not so much like humans). They are surprisingly human in their frustrations and anxieties around self-preservation. Their intelligence and problem-solving rely on group coordination. Spiders die frequently and without the pathos of humans, though there is still grief, too. It’s odd.
However, unlike humans, they don’t form attachments to their babies. So, we don’t have that overplayed rescue plot, where the mother-father character saves their kid. That was refreshing.
Where Did Spiders Come From?
Although I had trouble relating to the many Fabians or Biancas, I did care about their survival as a species. I’ve always had a healthy respect for spiders, and this made me reconsider their evolution. Where did they come from?
It was long believed that spiders, like insects, all evolved on land, though it was never known exactly what they evolved from. However, new fossil brain evidence of an ancient sea creature called Mollisonia symmetrica that lived 515 million and 480 million years ago has turned this theory, well, backward.
- symmetrica are part of the group of arthropods that includes insects and crustaceans. But the issue is that M. symmetrica has a brain unlike any other arthropod in its group; it’s arranged ‘backward’, much like that of a different group of arthropods, the modern spiders. M. symmetrica also had a segmented body like a scorpion, a close relative of spiders, and six pairs of legs. By 400 million years ago, we have fossil evidence of true spiders on land. So, from sea to land, to space, apparently, there are no limits to where spiders can go.
No Spoilers
The less-interesting plot of another human generational ship plods alongside. More relatable, and of course, the two storylines eventually merge. No concrete spoilers, only vague ones. But when they do, it’s good stuff.