(urth) Undine's nature

[David Stockhoff]

On 10/19/2011 1:11 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On Wed, October 19, 2011 11:38, David Stockhoff wrote:
>> On 10/19/2011 12:31 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>>> On Wed, October 19, 2011 08:40, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>>> It occurs to me that creatures who enter the ecosystems of alien
>>>> planets, especially as "beans," would do well to make use of the DNA of
>>>> native plants and animals to survive and to compete with them. This
>>>> would explain the apparent mixed human-nonhuman geno/phenotype as well
>>>> as fitting the chaotic, cancer-like growth of the monsters.
>>> Don't forget the Pythagorean notion that beans are vessels for
>>> transmigration, and possibly reincarnation.
>> Good point, but how would that apply here?
> The "beans" may engender the resurrection or at least the cloning and
> memory copy of specific individuals, rather than being generic monster
> seeds. This would make Scylla's threat just a pretext, the beans were
> meant to be sown all along by the creatures who produced them, in order to
> reproduce their consciousness.
>

Ah, so it's beans as interstellar mind transfer technology. Interesting 
idea. If anything, it seems even more compatible with the idea their of 
absorbing and co-opting native DNA on planets they "colonize," since 
minds naturally need bodies. And yet beans also grow into plants (in the 
right conditions).