Chapter 5 Is that a Human?!

A few weeks after the major expansion

Vlad made a major discovery the left him further baffled.

What is the major discovery you may ask?

He has found a settlement of intelligent humanoid looking creatures! And their appearance has a striking resemblance to a human!

This discovery left Vlad stunned beyond words as he watches these human like looking creatures move about in their daily business very much unaware that they're being observe.

The drone who was sending this live footage is miles away from them, using powerful cameras so it's isn't very strange for the human looking creatures to be unaware.

Anyway Vlad eventually snaps out of it as he thinks hard not quite believing what he's seeing.

To see a human looking creature in this odd new world is totally outside of his expectations, as the chances of there of being an intelligent creature that looks like humans is so minutely small that it's almost a miracle that humans came to be in the first place.

Yet now he's seeing this in another world with a different gravity, air pressure, atomic density and the exotic particle(s)/energy field.

This should almost be astronomically impossible! This make no sense at all! Yet Vlad will still have to accept the facts before him.

Vlad ponders deeply as he stares at a still image of a native human looking creature as he examines the specs.

Although the drone is too far to do any detailed scan but judging by appearance dimension wise the human looking creature is near identical to a pre-war standard human of eastern decent.

Now some might ask why Vlad kept insisting on referring to the as human looking creatures and not as human or people?

The reason is simple... THEY are not HUMAN.

You see rather than some nonsensical definition of what a human is that some of some pre-war people had, for example like in the most romanticised pop culture of the time. (Cough cough Star Trek)

They vaguely define as those with the ability to think and "feel" as humans.

'Simply ridiculous!' Vlad thought as these brain deficient pre-war humans extends the term human to machines.

It can be observed from records of pop culture of the time they would consider an "AI" as actual humans.

Such absurd notion is like an ant and a dinosaur is the same.

So just because a computer can do a million billion calculations it will be considered the same as a human?! Just because someone programmed the computer to emulate emotions with certain responses it will be considered as having the ability to feel, there by considered as being human?!

(For IPhone users try asking Siri what "0/0", so as Siri can make jokes can the IPhone considered intelligent? For those without iPhones Siri's response is "Imagine that you have zero cookies and you split them evenly among zero friends. How many cookies does each person get? See? It doesn't make sense. And Cookie Monster is sad that there are no cookies, and you are sad that you have no friends.")

'One of the defining features of being a human should include having certain amount of human DNA.' Vlad thought as he recalls doing a little research on pre-war society.

It is only naturally that a biological question would have a biological answers and not some nonsense about feelings and intelligence!

Now back to the point as to why Alpha 1 side human looking creatures can't be considered human, it's simple they're NOT HUMAN!

They may look like human and their organs layout might be similar to pre-war humans but they're not human.

A crocodile and an alligator might look the same and the leather boots made out of them might feel the same but they're different nonetheless.

It is said that the genetic similarities between an ape and a human is around 95%, so anything that has more than 5% genetic deviation is clearly not human.

So now let's add in the genetic differences between the ancient extinct human species known as the Homo Neanderthalensis (neanderthal) and Pre-modern Homo Sapients, it's estimated that both species share roughly 98% of the genome.

Anyway we're getting into the insignificant details as let's not talk about common ancestor and genetics, Judge by the fact that they don't produce small craters when walking they're also not much different from the denizens of this universe (that being their body is 95% less dense)

The mass alone of these human looking creatures is already 95% less than a normal pre-war human putting them way out of the considerable range of being called human.

Despite their human like stature their weight is around that of a normal pre-war house cat roughly 4kg.

These creatures are clearly not human.... Although technically Vlad is also not human, technically he's a member of the Homo Sapients Conrectus one of the numerous genetically enhanced humans artificially developed during the Apocalyptic Great War .

The the Latin word Conrectus means corrected or Improved, so Homo Sapients Conrectus means the corrected/improved wise man.

Homo Sapients Conrectus embodies what the pre-war humans considers as the ideal human form.

Eternal youth, tissue regeneration, enhanced body strength, cure for male pattern baldness and so on, all the ills that once plagued humanity has now been cured and removed, it can be considered the perfect human.

Of course there were other human species developed during the centuries long war, some are slightly augmented from the standard pre-war human while others went to some crazy extreme.

For example the was once a group of individuals who were just a little bit obsessed with biological enhancements, so obsessed were they that they eventually ended being a bunch if inhuman biological abominations. (Think of xenomorph from the movie Alien)

As the Earth's surface was becoming an irradiated hell hole some people tried changing their body structure in hopes to adopt to the heavily irradiated environment.

While some turn to biological engineering some turned to mechanical, they started with just replacing small portions of the body with cybernetics eventually they got to the point of giving up their bodies entirely and has been reduced to a brain in a jar, but of course this is not the end of it as nearing the end they tried converting downloading their memories into super computers.

At that point can they still be called human? Is the term "human" just collection of memories?

Vlad doesn't think so as Vlad thinks that you are what you are and the blood inside you determines what you are.

Fortunately Vlad's faction was called Arcadia-Lotharingian Empire.

It's an "empire".... well it was.... or it started out as an empire.

Arcadia-Lotharingian empire was an amalgamation of monarchies of pre-war Earth.

It rose to power due to the inadequacies of the democratic system, as democracies has a tendency to be plagued by corrupt incompetent leaders and ignorant masses that just keeps voting these people again and again. When a crisis happens the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

Anyway so Vlad's faction being an "empire" is quite conservative and didn't go to deep on this whole bioengineering insanity.