A World Run Wild

We humans are quite high and mighty of ourselves. We have mucked with the environment to our hearts content-tearing down habitats, ripping materials out of the ground and even bending and molding several species of plants and animals to our will and desires. It's quite something to see just how much we've influenced the planet and how much we power we like to the think we have over it. To some, it's easy to imagine how the various species-regardless of how we may feel about it-are dependent on use for survival: from dogs and cats to spiders and ants. But what if they weren't? What if animals that owe much of their success to humans were left on their own? How would they fair? What would dogs do without their masters? How far would rats go without us to mess with their spread? Would fire ants be the ecological menaces they are today without us?

That is exactly the premise behind Gaia, a seeded world focused on the evolution of species closely tied to humans without their influence. Domesticated and invasive species that have achieved worldwide success thanks to us, left abandoned on a planet like earth in many ways. The only thing different about Gaia-other than its plates and geography-is its axial rotation, moving opposite to earth. The terraformers are future humans who terraformed Gaia initially as a test of an emerging technology, which was successful. Afterwards, it was sold to a scientific organization, who seeded the world as a real time study of artificial selection. They selected a variety of domesticated, invasive, and urban species, all of which being species closely tied to humans or human influence-with a few clades of invertebrates being the notable exceptions. However, the project was abandoned due to the organizations collapse as a result of industrial espionage, which included a complete wipe of all company servers. As such, the plants and animals were left entirely to their own devices. Now their fate is left in the hands of natural selection.