How to Bake a Space Whale.
Ingredients: 1 singular, tiny pinpoint seed of all possible existence (metric)
Pre-prep
-First off, you want to set the cooking time of your universe. This recipe could take around ten to fifteen billion years depending on how you handle it, and you’ll want a good bit of time left after that to enjoy your Space Whales before the universe becomes uninhabitable by crunch or endless expansion into a cold, starry void devoid of all matter, light, and hope.
-Be sure to check your singularity before you get started! Nothing worse than getting five billion years into a universe and finding out you forgot to create the conditions for anything bigger than elementary particles to arise, or forgot to include gravity. Many of these problems can be brushed off by purchasing your singularities from reputable sources, but it’s good practice to give them a once-over before you start just to be safe. Better safe than sorry!
(If you are preparing your own singularity at home, consult the accompanying one-googol-page manual on ensuring the proper conditions required for a universe to support Space Whales)
Preparation
-Detonate your prepared singularity and wait a few billion years for it to come down a little from the boiling point and the matter to spread out a little.
-Now the tricky part: we need a planet that can sustain carbon-based macroscopic life. How macro? VERY. At a minimum a good Space Whale should be over five metres, and an expert can tease them out to more than 25 metres. Precision in planet selection is key here – especially since we need very large oceans of liquid water, the bigger the better! And be sure to remember the need for land animals at some point so our whale has something to evolve from; don’t think we can just find a world with no visible land mass and leave it at that.
-Other important factors include a nice, stable sun that’ll keep tickin’ along at the same, reliable temperature for a few billion years longer than you think you’ll need, and a solar system that’s relatively clear of floating debris – the last thing you need is for your Space Whale to take flight and then be whacked by a falling boloid.
-All right, once you’ve got your future water world all picked out and the math done to your satisfaction, here comes the hardest part of this whole recipe: wait. Wait until the oceans settle into place, wait while tectonic plates jerk and jostle around, wait wait wait WAIT. Do NOT attempt to rush things. You’ll feel the urge to tweak here and there, but stifle it: the most beautiful creations arise from a mixture of luck and planning, and anything that’s all planning has no soul to it. WAIT.
-If you’ve waited for a few billion years and no ‘primordial soup’ has arisen and you’re sick and tired of it, just go ahead and smash it with an asteroid loaded up with some pre-prepped nucleotides or amino acids or something. Nobody’ll notice the difference unless you’re on the cooking network, and by then you can just pay them to shut up.
– Time to do our favourite thing again: wait. Interference should be minimal at this point, although if you see an opportunity to poke anything towards getting larger, go for it. Macroscopic life should turn up anyways if you’ve picked your planet right, but there’s nothing wrong with giving it a slight boost – this recipe already takes billions of years, no sense in making it take millions more.
-Once you’ve got something with a good skeletal structure or a carapace or anything solid in it, time to prod that little sprout out of the water and onto the land. Go go go! Remember, the faster you kick your babies out, the quicker they’ll come back, raring to drop themselves into the big blue and get all nice and large. This is where you’ll find your whales. Bear in mind that this could take a while, and usually more than one try.
NOTE: the first things on land could very well be skittering little horrors with exoskeletons and too many legs. Those are bugs, and sadly, you’ll probably need them for ecosystem fodder for the entirety of your planet’s existence. Just grit your teeth and ignore them.
-Now this is the troublesome bit: once you’ve got your whales, you need some sapience. But not just any ol’ kind of sapience! Comb your way through your planet’s ecosystems, and find all the species that possess all of the following: (1) outsized genitals, (2) aggressive social dynamics, (3) at least basic capacity for tool use.
-Once you’ve got a list of candidates, take whichever of them seems to have the most capacity for mental development and see to it that they get as smart as they can as fast as they can. We need their brains to outpace any other portion of their anatomy: smart now, working posture or functional internal organs later. Any inconvenient physical difficulties can be propped up once they’ve got the proper technology for it.
-Next up is dispersal. Take your developing sentients and spread them as far and wide as you can – don’t worry about spreading them too thin, intelligent life is very persistent, unusually so for anything macroscopic! What you want now is a very diverse population with many different cultures and world systems, preferably all conflicting.
IMPORTANT: Check right now on the state of your developing societies. If many of them are in open conflict, that’s great and you clearly judged the socially aggressive nature of your species perfectly! If not, better start again. Slamming an asteroid or a comet or something into the whole lot should work for a clean-ish slate, provided they aren’t running on fossil fuels yet.
-Patience time again, but not for long. Technology spreads quickly, and it only gets faster and faster exponentially as it all builds up to a head. For the final stretches of this recipe we’ll need three or four branches of advanced science to all build to fruition at around the same time, but don’t worry; the odds of it are much higher than you’d think! Trust in the ingenuity of your sapients, and you’ll know it’s all about to pay off when you hit the following milestones: (1) advanced genetic modification, (2) fully integrated cybernetics, (3) a well-developed space program, (4) massively potent nuclear weapons stockpiled in vast quantities (relative massiveness of weapons and vastness of quantity is dependant on the outsizedness of the species’ genitals: the more everybody’s got, the more they need to flaunt!), (5) overwhelming nationalism and hatred between at least two highly-advanced societies.
-Here’s the last big job you’ll have to do: just try to make sure that the politics on both sides ramp up more and more and in the unlikely event that everybody looks to be calming down, maybe slap a pinpoint aneurysm on the troublemaker. In no time at all the magic of paranoia will have fuelled all sorts of whacky projects that promise some vague hint of dealing with the enemy. If you start to feel bad about what you’re doing, remind yourself that it’s all about the big picture, and really, what’s a few eons of suffering when compared to the eternal beauty of your Space Whale?
-IMPORTANT: at this point somebody will have the idea of putting whales in space. This will always happen, as long as all the societal and technological requirements for your sapients have been met and whales exist. It’s just one of those things that happens. Initial developments will involve putting cybernetics in the whales, tweaking their genetics for null-gravity environments, and putting them in very large spacesuits.
-Your final, and possibly smallest action necessary in this whole thing: find somebody with access to nuclear launch codes and sic ‘em (this should not be difficult).
-If all goes well, the very first ‘test pilot’ whale will be in the process of liftoff as the world is consumed in nuclear fire, bathing its altered form in radiation and sparking its glorious ascension into the heavens above all, where it will sing the songs of its world’s end until the end of the universe!
Congratulations! You have successfully baked one Space Whale, and can spend billions of years enjoying its sorrowful and haunting melodies! Now, if you still feel the hunger for creation and want a real challenge, try making a Space Squid for it to be eternal foes with! (pgs. 136-148)