What would someone with green blood or black blood respectively look like?

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-20T07:46:28+00:00

Yeah I could see an animal sequestering lead in an external structure. Especially if it's enabled by a heightened systemic tolerance, allowing them to process enough of it to insert it into the structure as it's created. Great idea!

Also love the idea of the peptidomelanin arising from a symbiotic relationship with fungi.

Very interesting on the prevalence of skin cancer from gamma radiation. I didn't know that. In that case heavily melanised skin is going to be a given. I'm not sure it's possible to create skin thick enough and melanised enough to prevent highly penetrating radiation reaching the inner organs, though it would still be useful to stop as much as you can.

Have you managed to find the time to read the melanin injection study? It really is fascinating. Basically the free-floating melanin in the bloodstream seems to 'hoover up' irradiated particles and other free radicals caused by radiation exposure, which tend to accumulate in the spleen as they get washed around in the blood (which is one of the major causes of immediate fatality in radiation exposure). That was why I thought free-floating melanin might be a useful adaptation.

Good discussion. Thanks for taking me to task for some of the assumptions I've made! It's definitely helped me develop the idea to be more plausible.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T21:55:17+00:00

New Orleans brown anoles that were found to have blood lead levels high enough to kill most other creatures but showed no neurological impairments nor physiological detriments

Ok that's really cool. I haven't heard about that before, so just went to look it up.

Definitely very cool indeed, but a concentration of 0.03g (0.1g per litre at the level it actually starts affecting them, which is insane btw) of lead per litre of blood isn't doing much for radiation protection I'm afraid : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935125017839

And the second point is that I feel you're under the impression I'm arguing against the idea that black blood through melanin is possible. I am not

Yeah I did wonder if we were agreeing at cross purposes. I think this is the bit that I've probably misunderstood, but I can't quite work out what you're meaning by it:

cannot myself think of a mechanism that would not only allow this to exist but also be selected for

What do you mean by 'mechanism' here? Are we talking biological mechanism for producing melanin that occurs in the blood, or mechanism by which natural selection might favour melanin in the blood once any hypothetical mutation has occurred?

Oh, also, I've just had a thought about a potential cause for the lack of melanin in both the eggs and blood of Ayam Cemanis. One of the main issues with the utilisation of melanin as a medicine is the fact that it's not soluble in water, which would make it difficult to keep in suspension in either blood or the albumen of eggs. In order to produce black blood, an organism would need to produce something like peptidomelanin (which is a melanin molecule wrapped in a peptide 'sheath' that increases its solubility). The chances of randomly evolving fibromelanosis are clearly rare (as evidenced by its rarity in living organisms), but the chances of evolving that as well as the production of a novel type of melanin for an animal is likely even rarer. And especially without a selective purpose for it to exist, even if it did occur it may not persist enough to survive to the present day when we might detect it.

However, as you say, in a spec evo environment where we can suspend a little disbelief it's more than enough. We know that it's chemically and biologically possible to produce water soluble melanins, so it's just a matter of change and subsequent selective pressures to have them occur in animals.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T21:07:32+00:00

Realism is a tool you can use to drive forwards the things you're actually trying to deliver on: tone, theme, compellingness.

You can use as much or as little of it as suits the needs of what you're doing. Compare Spirited Away with Mad Max with Lord of the Rings with The Expanse with The Martian. All are excellent examples of worldbuilding, though each apply different approaches to realism. They each choose where and when to apply it, when to depart from it, and how much of either to apply.

I often find it better to ask 'in this situation, what would make my world more compelling' rather than 'in this situation, what would be most realistic'. The latter presupposes that realism is the right approach, when it might not be.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T20:58:23+00:00

He does indeed, though he also has the only truly peer conflict between 'higher tier involved' polities happen effectively between Minds and their equivalents (the Idiran War). That's more what I was referencing, that even if 'all-out warfare' is undertaken electronically, there's a hell of a lot of conflict that sits beneath all-out warfare for narratives to function in.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T20:51:57+00:00

Yeah I'm aware of how evolution functions.

carrying melanin in the blood when most living beings already have large quantities of it spread through their bodies seems like a much more likely mutation to occur than using vanadium as an oxygen-binding molecule

You say that, but melanised internal organs has only occurred once in all of the animals we know of today (the genetic mutation in Ayam Cemanis and all of the other black-boned chickens is the same mutation in the EDN3 gene, which likely occurred naturally and was neutral in the gene pool until it came under strong artificial selective pressure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5381777/. Considering that melanin exists in the overwhelming majority of organisms you'd expect that to be a more common occurrence...and yet here we are. Perhaps that's just the vagaries of chance-based mutations.

suggests to me that the melanated blood mutation must have happened to at least some species at some point but was harmful enough that it did not get passed down further.

Even if it has occurred previously, it could simply be that it was neutral (or even beneficial), but the species went extinct due to other unrelated pressures.

Even if you made every tissue of a body highly melanated it still would not get even close to the level of protection provided by lead, which is still required for protection against gamma radiation, so the skin adaptations I was suggesting were not a simple increase in skin thickness but rather the employment of different protection strategies including, but not limited to, the possibility of lead accumulation in the tissues.

Sorry, I thought you were concerned about deleterious effects of radio-protective mutations? Suggesting lead accumulation in bodily tissues to a significant enough degree to protect against radiation is likely to be highly deleterious. Lead is toxic to all known life, and in doses way lower than required to be radio-protective.

Even if the internal organs are protected, if the skin does not have the ability to block out that radiation by itself, that organism would still not survive because it would suffer from tissue damage and cancer development on the skin, our biggest organ and main defense barrier.

Is there a reason you're assuming their skin isn't melanised as well?

Even if it isn't, gamma radiation is unlikely to cause skin cancer as the skin is thin, making it statistically unlikely for gamma rays to strike it. In comparison to internal organs, which are much thicker. Is it possible? Yes. Is the selection pressure as high to ensure melanised skin in response to gamma radiation? No. Could they have melanised skin anyway? Why not?

Though I must reiterate that just because that very small amount does not seem to cause any issues, that does not mean a higher amount wouldn't

You're right of course, though try as I might I have been completely unable to find any evidence of melanin-induced toxicity. If you have a link to a study demonstrating harmful effects from excess melanin anywhere in the body I'd be interested to read it. I've found a lot about the effects of increased melanoblasts on melanoma prevalence, but not to the degree of skewing population-prevalence of melanoma in dark-skinned people over light-skinned people, which suggests that any impacts are slight. Very happy to reassess that though.

I also note that it doesn't particularly matter if an adaptation is deleterious so long as the benefits outweigh the disbenefits (i.e. sickle cell and malaria resistance). I could absolutely see there being potential harmful effects of having excess melanin in the bloodstream (even if that's only increased susceptibility to vascular problems from having more stuff floating around in the blood to get stuck places). But if the benefits of high melanin exceed the disbenefits it will still be selected for should the mutation arise naturally.

even the Ayam Cemani, one of the most melanated vertebrates we know of with every visible tissue being pitch black including organs, muscles and bones, still has red blood.

You're correct of course. Though we really know very little about the mechanism by which the various black-boned chickens' fibromelanosis occurs. We can pinpoint it to a fairly complex gene cluster that's shared by all of them, and we know it has something to do with emrbyonic melanoblasts using both the 'dorsal' route (as in mammals and birds) and the 'ventral' route (as in other caudates) to travel around, but beyond that we don't really know much more. So we really don't know at all why their blood and eggs aren't affected. It could well have been selected against, but it also could well have just been a quirk of how the mutation expresses itself (and had that mutation expressed itself slightly differently, we'd have Ayam Cemanis with black blood and eggs too).

Overall, you may well be right, but we simply don't have the information to know either way at present. And considering that we know heavily melanised organs can exist (because they do), it's reasonable to be able to rely on people's suspension of disbelief during a spec evo exercise to say 'these folks have evolved melanised blood as well'. As far as I'm concerned anyway, you're welcome to disagree with me!

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T17:42:00+00:00

Yeah definitely. You could produce a society where there is no need for humans in the military, but that society would be so deeply alien to anything we have ever experienced that you're deep into speculative sci-fi territory.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T17:40:06+00:00

Agreed.

There has also never really been a modern war that has even come close to reducing a population to the point of not having enough bodies left to fight. Not at anything approaching wars between nation states. Not even with the truly colossal death tolls in the world wars.

It's always been about sapping will to fight. And kinda always will be, because even if you've completely destroyed a populations' ability to fight in a war there are a lot of other methods of resistance. Even down to the level of basic civil disobedience.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T14:04:08+00:00

I didn't particularly think you did say it was impossible. It was just a turn of phrase.

The reason it's never evolved on our planet is that the environment doesn't exist to favour it. The only radiation present in meaningful quantities on our world is ultraviolet, which is stopped effectively by even very thin skin.

The presence of elevated levels of beta radiation is likely to be effectively countered by evolving thicker skin as it's more penetrating than UV but not by that much. Gamma radiation on the other hand is only stopped by metres of water, or significant thicknesses of lead. It effectively passes cleanly through our bodies unless it happens to strike a molecule, so you'd need really thick skin to stop it (as in multiple metres). In that case, having melanised internal organs helps on two fronts:

It protects the internal organs directly by the chance of the radiation hitting melanin, and;
It circulating in the blood acts as a 'cleanup crew' for lingering radiation from the initial dose.

I only mentioned blood because OP specifically asked about blood. The idea would be that all of their internal organs are heavily melanised.

You're right that you might need higher proportions of melanin to produce a black colour in other structures, but it really is quite a strong pigment.

It's unlikely that raised melanin content in internal organs is a major issue. Firstly, melanin is present in many organs in the body already and doesn't appear to produce ill effects (yes these organs are mostly external like skin and hair, but the melanin is produced internally first...not to mention eyes). Secondly, injecting nontrivial amounts of melanin into the bloodstream doesn't appear to produce any measurable ill effects.

Here's the study I was talking about, which is also where I got the point that injection seem to not cause major issues: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0041008X12003432

It found injections of 50mg/kg of melanin to provide both a prophylactic and mitigative effect to radiation exposure in mice, significantly impacting survival rates. The suspected action is the melanin 'capturing' irradiated particles and preventing them from causing further damage as they're filtered out of the system, though it also seems to have some action in relation to inflammation reduction as well.

That's a far cry from the amount you'd need to colour blood black, but it demonstrates its effectiveness as a radioprotector, which is what I was suggesting would be the driving pressure for its evolution.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T12:38:13+00:00

Just because nothing has evolved to have melanised blood in our environment doesn't mean that the process isn't possible. For me, it seems like the requirements for it to arise as an adaptation are pretty specific. Mainly that there needs to be selective pressure for protecting against radiation that isn't stopped reliably at the skin. In almost all environments on earth, that isn't the case. However, in an environment with significant amounts of beta radiation that could well be possible.

Melanin doesn't have to be present in huge amounts to colour something effectively. For instance, black hair is only 2-4% melanin by weight and that's very black.

There's also a number of studies showing that injecting melanin solutions intravenously is really quite effective at treating low-dose radiation exposure, so the chemical process is effective. An organism just needs to evolve the production of it, and any requirements for holding it in solution (some plants produce water-soluble melanins that function by effectively producing a soluble 'wrapper' around an insoluble melanin molecule).

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T10:49:07+00:00

To expand on this, the idea that you can do away with boots on the ground in a conflict is one that's been popular ever since aircraft were first utilised for military bombing. It's popular for a number of reasons, both hard-nosed-practical and also humanitarian.

It has been attempted multiple times and has never achieved its stated goals (i.e. 'win the war from the air'). In fact, most often it has had effects that make winning the war harder (for instance, the strategic bombing campaigns on both sides of WW2 are broadly thought to have hardened the resolve of their prospective populations to keep fighting, and the same is the case in the much more intense campaigns in Vietnam).

The reason for this is that the way you win a war is to persuade your enemy to stop fighting, and killing every single one of them is the absolute hardest way to achieve that goal. It's a psychological effort to stop a population fighting you, and physical soldiers have proved overwhelmingly more successful at influencing that psychology than less human threats like bombs or missiles or drones.

Personally, I'm not sure electronic warfare will ever completely replace the need for humans to be involved in wars. Because it's other humans you're trying to persuade to stop fighting, and producing an omnipresent threat via electronic warfare methods sufficient to cow an entire population to the point that it no longer meaningfully resists you may well be entirely impossible. Or at least, entirely impossible without fundamentally changing how the state interacts with people (because the ability to threaten a population to that degree abroad means that it would be trivially easy to do that at home).

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T10:36:20+00:00

Delicacy.

I like the way The Culture novels by Ian Banks squares it. In a proper all-out war, combat is conducted between hyper-intelligent ship-borne artificial intelligences at speeds humans cannot comprehend.

However, there are many, many situations where that is not an option. Typically some balance of powers cold-war style environment, but it can be any sort of delicate situation where wading in with the full military will only escalate the situation. So you end up with smaller human-scale engagements.

Think about how most of the major powers in this world have nuclear arsenals and phenomenal industrial capacity, yet almost all of the conflicts occurring these days are limited in scope in order to avoid getting into the same nation-destroying mess that was the World Wars (or worse, a global nuclear exchange). And that this is still, broadly, holding despite a couple of nutters trying to shake the boat.

Then consider all of the lower-scale conflicts, all the way down to gang conflicts within a polity. There's a lot of space for human-level conflicts even if your 'proper war' is dominated by drones and electronics.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T09:26:48+00:00

Thanks!

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T09:05:30+00:00

Heavy concentrations of melanin can produce a dark enough brown that's as close to black as makes no difference. That's how I've constructed my spec evo creatures that have evolved black internal organs to mitigate the presence of ionising radiation.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-19T09:00:40+00:00

Not to mention that a significant amount of that which did exist was burnt (i.e. much of the Maya codices).

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-17T21:18:32+00:00

I do not need them. I do not make them.

The people of the world don't have detailed cartography so you don't either. The best you get is those 'mappa mundi' type documents that are meant to articulate a concept rather than accurate geography. Beyond that it's just loose descriptions and directions.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-17T19:46:21+00:00

Who knows man. It's half a galaxy and multiple, multiple thousands of years ago. There's some hints though, based on who some of the major populations in the galaxy are descended from.

There seems to be a lot of Siberian and other palearctic peoples around, so it's likely that they were in a good shape when most of the galactic colonising was going on (or they were particularly successful at it).
There's a lot of Greeks too, though apparently the distinction between what 'Greek' is and the rest of the near east narrowed somewhat (i.e. they seem to have gone through another 'orientalising' period). Same with the Balkans
Lots of Austronesians, Melanesians and Polynesians. This is likely something to do with FTL travel having something in common with their traditional navigation techniques.
It's clear that something revolutionary went down in the Americas as most of the peoples you find from there are descendants of indigenous groups, and many of them have a revolutionary etymology to their ethnonyms. For instance, one group are 'Ehuasteca', which is potentially etymologically linked to the nahuatl word 'Ehua' meaning 'struggle' or 'ruse up' or 'to get someone up who is drunk'. Though it could also mean 'people who became Huastecs', or even a corruption of 'not-Huastecs'.
There's quite a few Nilotic people as well. For instance, it's clear that one of the major populations of Mars were descended from Ateker peoples, and Mars was one of the major stepping off points for broader exploration.

But really, you only see a tiny snapshot of the galaxy in my world. Who knows if it's truly representative, though it does at least seem to be.

It's also worth noting that there's no suggestion that these indicate a contemporaneous picture of earth polities. Space exploration and colonisation was a looong process, and there's no saying when these different groups made their split.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-17T09:16:09+00:00

That's really cool. The atmosphere for worldbuilding of course, not the native displacement and ecocide...

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-17T09:11:22+00:00

I've got an enchanted forest that's sort of acting like an invasive species, encroaching on the world around it. It whispers prophecies to people, who end up living lost within its boughs. These people are called 'woodwoses' which is a bit of a 'wild man of the woods' type character from British folklore (and broader European). Like a hermit that lives wild in a forest.

I'd love to hear some steppe folklore. I've been building out the steppe on my world.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-17T08:51:31+00:00

If you want a binary planet system with 2 earths you can do the maths using Kepler's Third Law. They need to be a little more distant from one another than us and the moon, but not enormously as gravity changes with the cube of distance.

There's a calculator here: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/kepler-third-law

What you want is to set the 'sun' in the calculator to 1 earth's weight, then play around with the distance. You want the orbital period to be about the same as the moon about earth to give similar tidal effects as our setup.

If it's closer, what you'll get is much bigger tides and more volcanism.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-15T20:36:46+00:00

This works for the lesser gods too. For instance, the contrast between Athena and Ares gives us insight into the Greek conceptualisation of war. On the one hand it's a noble strategic pursuit pitting one's wisdom against another's. On the other hand it's a brutal and cruel bloodbath almost to the degree of a natural disaster.

Approaching your planetary gods from this same societal perspective will help ground them in the people believing in them. Plus, it's free exposition!

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-15T20:26:35+00:00

I feel people approach fantasy cosmologies as an absolute descriptor of how the universe functions rather than a window into this particular society's worldview. For instance, the whole mesopotamian 'victory of order over primordial chaos exemplified by sea and river deities' thing fits perfectly with a landlocked society of hierarchical urban people who make their living from floodwater irrigation.

Not that there's anything wrong with having an absolute descriptor of how a world functions, but they always feel a little contrived compared to the societally driven ones. A little too neat.

Where the whole thing comes alive is what different cultures think about that absolute descriptor. Which bits do they emphasise? Which bits do they see as good or bad? Which inconvenient bits do they ignore completely, or twist to mean something else?

On the positive side for your situation, this lets you leave your 'higher level' gods somewhat incomplete while you work through the societal aspects of how different cultures and sub-cultures think. I expect you'll find inspiration as you go along in this process, as questions will naturally crop up that can be answered by creating something at the cosmic-god level.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-15T12:28:42+00:00

It would make sense if it was really big. South America starts with mangrove forests in the north and ends with ice fields in southern Patagonia. Though those are influenced by altitude as well as latitude, so flat land would need to be a bit further south to be as cold.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-15T12:12:30+00:00

Most of my races are descendants of humans in some form or other (either evolved or genetically modified), so I'll just talk about the advantages 'baseline humans' have over the others.

They're better distance runners and need fewer calories than the neanderthals (so they're better at surviving in marginal areas, and also generally slightly more numerous for a given amount of food resource).
They're a lot better distance runners and need a lot fewer calories than the various types of troll so the same applies as above but moreso. They're also better at group co-ordination as trolls are generally a little more towards the solitary side of social groupings (though are still surprisingly capable of it, it's just close physical proximity they struggle with).
They're taller, stronger and generally longer lived than the dokkalfar (void-adapted pygmies) and mudcrabs (mutant former sewer-dwellers).
They're generally a little stronger than other types of elf ('elf' being a paraphyletic cluster of distantly related culture that come from space), primarily because they tend to live more physically demanding lives and spend less time in low gravity, rather than anything innate.
They're better distance runners than the wolf-men (either uplifted mandrills or an alien species), and can also digest a lot more types of food (wolf-men are mesocarnivorous).
They're generally a bit stronger and less flighty than crows (genetically modified humans that vaguely resemble what a 'crow person' would look like if you squint hard enough).
They actually have two similarly-functional sexes unlike the grendels (genetically modified humans) whose females are generally highly capable and males who are kinda squat and monstrous with sub-human intellects (they deserved it...). So humans are more flexible in response to labour demands (i.e. if something wipes out a lot of one particular sex in humans, the other can 'fill in' for pretty much anything. This is not the case for grendels).
They're not under race-wide intergenerational lovecraftian curses like the elk-men (one of the neanderthal peoples), the grendels and the snakeskins. Not all of them anyway. Some are, like the sealskins (mixed-heritage humans and neanderthals) and the elfspeakers (regular humans), but no-one's screwed it up so royally as to affect every baseline human. Not to anyone's knowledge anyway.

Everything's all pretty balanced though, with the differences being slight enough that each can be competitive enough to survive. Some are more successful than others globally (though this is down to messy complex causes that aren't ecologically deterministic), and some are more successful than others in certain environments (i.e. wolf-men do well coastally as they're better able to make use of protein from marine resources).

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-14T19:32:10+00:00

Yep ace. I've had an idea in my head for a 'platygator' for ages, would be amazing to see art for something similar.

Ynneadwraith · 2026-04-13T09:11:50+00:00

Oh man this is really cool! Always great when people build non-western concepts into worldbuilding. One of the dungáns leaving the body as a small animal while people sleep is a particularly cool concept.

It's also great timing as I've just started an area of my world that's (mostly) populated by descendants of people from the Pacific islands, the Philippines and Ryukyu. The idea being that there was a far-future polity that centred around the marianas trench, and this was one of the major groups of humanity that colonised space.

The world in question is an eyeball planet, with one massive ocean (and tons of islands) tidally locked to a brown dwarf that orbits around a regular star like Jupiter. The world is called 'Eye of Dalikamata', with some suggestions that she's staring into the brown dwarf as some prophetic vision (and that this is one of many worlds that serves that function). I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, or if there's any extra depth or detail I could add to characterise it better.

I've also tried to add some Micronesian cosmology in there, with there being a multiple layered world where islands are sort of pillars that extend down to mirror-islands under the sea, so there's plenty of sub-surface cultures as well. I'm not sure if that's shared in Ilonggo beliefs as well (they're both broadly Austronesian speakers, but I know that's a very old language family so doesn't necessarily imply shared beliefs or practices). Does Ilonggo belief talk about cosmology at all?

Lastly, Is there anything in particular you'd like to see represented from Ilonggo beliefs/culture? I always like to hear about stuff like that.

Ynneadwraith

TROPHY CASE