This Post is About Lobsters in Space

So one of the things I spent doing today was research the social lives of lobsters.

Lobsters, it seems, are a pretty angry bunch. They spend all of their time fighting. They live in burrows all alone and know all the other lobsters in the neighborhood. The males establish a dominance hierarchy based on who kicks everyone else's ass. This fellow, let's call him the Lobster Boss, then spends his time going around and dragging other lobsters out of their burrows and beating them up. They all know who he is because lobsters recognize each other based on the fact that whenever they see each other they piss in each other's faces, an act which says "I am Bill, the second-tier lobster from down the way. I beat you up last week so you can submit without too much fighting. I am not interested in mating."

Okay so then there's lobster sex. When female lobsters want to fuck they have to shed their shells. Lobsters shed their shells anyway but the males don't have to do it in order to have sex. So female lobster wants to have sex she goes over to the Lobster Boss's house and she pisses on the door. When male lobsters smell horny female lobster piss or drink it or whatever they get high and don't want to fight as much. So he goes out and maybe they do some dancing or something, then they go inside. After a while she takes off her shell, and now she's smaller and soft and fragile and he could just eat her, but instead he mates with her with "a tenderness that is almost human" as one scientist I was reading described it, turning her real careful over onto her back so as not to break her and then fucking her with his two lobster-dicks.

So she hangs out for a few weeks and then her clothes grow back and she leaves. And here's the neat part about this: Only one of the lobster-chicks can be down there fucking the lobster boss at a time, so -- They take turns! Isn't that cool? The lobster women cooperate in the drugging and fucking of the dominant lobster male while the men spend all their time fighting each other, the reward for which is, they get to have sex.

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Here are a few other exciting Lobster facts:

• Lobsters are hunters and kill and eat everyone else in the area. Clambs, crabs, fish, younameit.

• They cannibalize each other in captivity but we don't know if this happens in the wild.

• They're pretty slow, but they can migrate very long distances -- some lobsters once moved from Maine to Nantucket in a year, and that's almost 300 miles!

• They don't start out lobsters, but rather go through a bunch of different development stages.

• Lobster women lay 10,000 eggs and only ten of those grow up to be lobsters.)

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Okay so here's why I like thinking about this kind of stuff. Because half my time is spent (as you know) thinking about science fiction. And I think about aliens, and think: What would happen if culture and complex society developed among species that had a different basic social structure from us?

That is to say: before there was culture there was society, you know, but it didn't look like it looks now. And the way we structure our societies now -- At the social level -- Think, for example, of the traditional ideal here of one man, one woman and a mess of kids -- Conservatives claim this is the basis of "society," and they're correct in that the combined power of the State and the Church enforced this ideal. Enforced by the state means, ultimately, imposed by force, and the One Man And One Woman marriage is a social structure imposed (at one time) by force onto our otherwise much more promiscuous species.

Okay, so what if some aliens on another world originally lived basically like lobsters. Only over time their brains got smarter and their capacity to learn and to teach increased, thus bringing culture into being amongst them. What would their civilizations look like?

Maybe once in a Lobster Folk neighborhood near the Big Swamp in the fertile Southern Continent some of these (remember, relatively cooperative) lobster women got together and had a few thoughts. Included among these were:

1. We seem to have killed most of the prey animals in the area.

2. These lobster-men we have are pretty big and brutal fighters. And they're kind of fighting over us.

3. There's a lot of food a few valleys over. But there are also other lobsters there.

4. If we killed those other lobsters, they wouldn't be there.

5. We don't feel like killing anyone ourselves.

6. These boys fight each other so they can mate with us.

7. This was the thought that brought all the other thoughts together. It took a while, some clicking of claws and slashing with tails. Then the lobster women said: What if, instead of mating with the boy that beats up all the boys in our neighborhood, we told these boys that we wouldn't mate with them if they fought with each other. Instead, we'd only mate with the one that killed the most lobsters in that neighborhood over there!!?? Then we could go there and live in their burrows and eat all that food! And we wouldn't have to kill anybody -- the lobstermen would do it!

And thus was Lobster Civilization born, in a manner not dissimilar from human civilization.

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What else is true of our lobster aliens?

Well, I don't want them to live under the Sea. So...they don't. They live on land, though the creatures that live on their planet are even weirder than the creatures that live under the Sea, so that's fine. But their planet has a weird atmosphere -- It's breathable by humans, but, it's really humid, and, there is this whole ecosystem kind of floating in the sky like plankton...including the young lobsters at various stages of their lives.

At this point in their history on which we are looking, Lobsters are born like this: They are shot up, ten thousand eggs, to float around in the sky. They develop through various stages. Eventually, after a final midling avian stage, they float down to earth to live as Lobsters.

In the Dawn of Time, the young Lobsters, having gone through their final transformation, became part of whatever Lobster neighborhood they happened to land in. Later, various Lobster cultures developed various methods, often involving a severe ass-kicking, for initiating new-landers into the local 'hood. Our cabal of women near Big Swamp did it this way: All new males were kept around for use in the wars (and of course, fighting males being a valuable resource, more wars were fought to possess them).

Females were a different story. They were tested, put through a series of harsh trials. Only those who proved themselves were inducted into the cabal. The rest were killed. And this was doable without any great expense: Lobster young tend to, based on weather patterns and other concerns, congregate in particular areas of the sky. They are blown in from all over the world -- so, at least this early in History, population has little to do with food supply.

More is necessary for civilization than war, though war is the starting point. On earth agriculture is the other necessity: Allowing as it does 1. control of the food supply and 2. expansion of the food supply therefore 3. population growth.

On Lobster World these things happen a little differently. Sex is an important resource and that for which the Lobster men were originally motivated to war. These first Lobster civilizations were nomadic pillagers; they'd eat everything in a territory, move on, kill everyone, move on. Population began to increase when they began letting males from rival territories surrender and join the fighting force (rival females were still usually killed en masse -- they were potential rivals, and capable of mating with the males.)

How would Lobster civilization develop from here? If this killing of young women and women from rival groups continues, there is eventually going to be a population problem, as fewer and fewer Lobster eggs will be shot off into the sky every year. Possible solutions: a) Less killing; b) Keeping rivals alive for breeding purposes; c) Ensuring the survival of more than one out of ten thousand eggs.

Maybe the various Lobsters-to-be in the sky (how long do they live up there? let's say for at least 20 years) start developing cultures of their own, based on their existence as what they are, unattached to the cultures of their elders on the planet below (of whom they may not even be aware) -- thus leading to an increased life expectancy, among other things...and the Lobster equivalent of a generational conflict.

They can live to be very old. (Even on earth, they can -- but usually don't -- live a damn long time, and they just keep getting bigger and bigger). They die of accidents, disease and violence often enough, but even today there are a few alive said to be terribly ancient...a few old fighting men the size of giants...women who remember the Dawn of Time...What becomes of their minds, their thoughts, these thousand-year-old behemoths?

There was a time when a woman refused to share with her sisters. She was confused, manlike, capable of jealousy. She loved him, the dominant male, the Captain of his company of warriors, and would not share him with any other. And the two of them went into exile, gathering eventually a number of warriors, settling finally somewhere in the west, where they founded the great red city in the rocks -- the Lobster World's first patriarchy.

...And what happens when a pair of human scientists arrive on Lobster World (I bet they call it Crustacea, cause...well you know why), intent upon research, study, and -- if the time is right, if the Lobsters are willing, if God is with us -- uniting the Lobster Folk with the rest of Great Humanity, seeded across ten thousand worlds by the Exogensis Starship? Emmisaries, ambassadors -- for whom? Arok's Galactic Common; Queen Marishta's Army of the Reunity; the League of Free Worlds? -- they live among the Lobster Folk...learn their ways...learn that their enemies have forces here as well, and that the Lobster World has its own dark secrets...

!!!!