Lampreys

The Aliens
The intelligent inhabitants of L-II are called Lampreys by the GM and the crew. They are land dwelling, air breathing carnivores that are slightly smarter but less physically enduring than the average human. The Lamprey population has stabilized at around 5 billion.

Biology
They look, roughly, like a cross between a lamprey and Cthulhu: A long, snake-like body, bilaterally symmetrical, fringed with a varying number of maniple tentacles about a quarter of the way down from their mouth

You have concluded that they are carnivorous. They're not venomous.Lamprey life uses the same amino acids as Earthly ones, almost exactly. LII protein-based life is overwhelmingly L chiral. The Lampreys use D-glucose as their prime energy source.

Looks
The mouth doesn't take up the entirety of the top of the aliens, though; above it, they have two things that are recogniseably eyes, and several protrusions about which you can can only speculate. Scaling from watching things fall, and knowing that the planet has a gravity rather less than Earth's (~.92g), you've estimated their size at about two and a half metres long. Typically, they move in a 1/3 erect position, lifting their mouth and maniples off the ground. Locomotion is, again, snakelike. They're smoothskinned, but their underside shows extra padding. They have a rigid internal structure. It's not bone..The Lamprey mouth is something of an anomaly, and is mostly found only in closely related animals. They do have lips and can seal their mouths shut (water-tight).

Habitat
They very clearly live on land. However, Lampreys can manouver in water somewhat better than humans. They're less at home in it than they are on land, but they can float, swim, and dive without trouble, and their vision operates underwater. Their endurance is just as miserable in water as it is on land.

They do not have gills, and cannot breathe underwater. Occasionally an oceanic megapredator will eat a particularly incompetent Lamprey.

The aliens communicate in pitches in the upper ranges of human hearing.

The Lampreys do not use facial expressions, so far as you've seen, but various arrangements of tentacles and general body posture communicate meaning, emotional subtleties, and the like. Of the Lamprey head, only the mouth features prominently in their visual representations; otherwise, the tentacles are the most emphasised feature.

(Getting) Lamprey Children
Broadcasts from the NE group have shown you your first images of Lamprey sex. It's a good thing you left your guts back in Sol; it's nasty. You've also seen your first pictures of a Lamprey birth and baby Lampreys; they do give (almost) live births, and do so in small litters of two-to-four (most commonly two). Baby Lampreys are born with a casing around them, which they break through moments after birth. This is handy, as it keeps them from eating their mothers from the inside out. Baby lampreys are tiny things, but capable of both motion and instinctive feeding from birth. A Lamprey goes from infant to physically adult in the space of two Lamprey years. Once physically adult, educating them and training them takes around another Lamprey decade.

There's no mention of medical evidence for facultative or stress-induced parthenogenesis in anything you have access to.

Whilst actual mating is going to be impossible, there's certainly nothing stopping humans from manipulating Lamprey sexual organs (or vice versa) except squeamishness. And pain, if anyone gets the bright idea of having a Lamprey give them a BJ.

Physicality and intelligence
They show signs of fatigue after what you would consider short amounts of sustained effort, and of effort lifting things a human easily could. Usually. In some of the more dramatic productions, they occasionally move very, very fast for intervals around half-a-minute tops.

They're less hard-rad resistant than a human would be. UV bothers them much less, though; they don't sunburn.

In short, biomechanical accelerations-- like for example going to a dash, or a fast grab-- they don't damage themselves the way a human might. In things like, say, flying a fighter jet or riding a rocket, their acceleration tolerances are lower than human.

The average Lamprey does seem to be somewhat brighter than the average 20th cent. human. This doesn't go to absurd levels, they're not all Einsteins or better, or Blindsight vampires, or Culture Minds or such fiddlefaddle.

Lamprey Evolution and Genetics
The Lampreys have analysed their genetic information; it's an amino-acid based complex-carbon molecule similar to DNA [different nucleotides, though].

The Lampreys believe they are related to the other species on the planet. As the biological classifications run, the Lampreys belong to an order-level division with very few living examples left on the planet. In general they share the Lamprey mouth and snake-like body plan, but vary widely in things like size, position of the eyes, size, number, and placement of the tentacles, and so on. Working off the fossil records, Lamprey scientists have estimated the Lampreys diverged from their closest living relatives around eight million years ago. The fossil record also shows several extinct offshoots and varieties from the Lamprey order. Two of these, both modern-Lamprey size, went extinct within the archaelogically known time for modern Lamprey existence.

Lamthropology theorises that the two extinct large-body Lamprey-types were intelligent toolusers very much like the modern Lampreys. Theories to their extinction are debated; the most widely accepted one is that the modern variety of Lamprey killed them off.

Genetics
Lamprey biologists have figured out the nature of their genetic information, in the sense of finding the responsible molecule. There's been very limited information on the subject anywhere since then. After some initial progress, news about the field died down. No specific trigger appears to have caused it. A statistical analysis shows Lamprey lifespans have continued to increase in the twenty-some years since they first figured out what molecule was responsible for their genetics, but their published biological studies petered out, dropping almost to a halt by T-10 Y. At T-10 Y, the Lampreys are showing very little interest in biology, though their medicine has improved somewhat. Lamprey population is closing in on 4 billion.

Lamprey diseases and causes of death
By order of deaths per average population, the following diseases are notable:
 * 1) Respiratory disease, air-capable spread. Low lethality as a rule and usually fought off naturally, but widespread. Symptom-treatable but not outright curable. Comes in a huge variety of slightly different strains. Cross-species contamination potential.
 * 2) Digestive inflammation. Moderate lethality, symptoms run between one and two weeks. Symptom treatable. Cross-species contamination potential. Spread by fluid contacts.
 * 3) YouGoDieNow. Total systems failure; destruction and disintegration of internal organs, incurable and untreatable by the Lampreys, short course. Infection requires consumption of infected flesh. Symbiotic with certain animals which use it as a predation defence. Very rare.

They're the diseases you'd see in the news, ranked by how many deaths they cause per hundred thousand people. Other common killers among Lampreys involve heart, lung, and brain failure from cells ceasing to replenish themselves, industrial accidents, and vehicular accidents.

Finding cures for the diseases in question should be within your capabilities. It is impossible to provide solid estimates, though, without detailed study of both the Lampreys and the infectious organisms. There are no incurable, lethal, Lamprey STDs.

Cancer used to be a relatively rare curiousity. As other causes of death have been knocked back and average lifespans extended, they're climbing the list and appear most frequently in the elderly. They're still fairly uncommon, though.

There are mentions of pandemic plagues. One was a contributing factor in the death of the original pan-NE Empire.

Technology and Science
In a very broad sense it could be said that the Lampreys level of technology is close to that of late twentieth century Earth. In some fields they are behind, notably (as far as the crew is aware) in biologial weapons. They have a comperatively very active and large space industry, though that is more an issue of economics and cultural priorities than of technology and science.

Origins of the Lamprey species and civilization
There's a bunch of Lamprey theories on the origin of life, religious and secular. The leading scientific one is that it arose naturally on L-II roughly four and a half billion years ago. A second one supposes-- without any particular evidence-- that the precursors to life were brought to L-II by comet or asteroid strikes in the deep past. What is known is that in a very short time, geologically speaking, L-II went from lifeless to swarming with single-celled organisms who significantly changed L-II's atmospheric composition and warmed it dramatically. This occured at the four and a half billion year mark, in either theory.

According to Lamprey archaeology, Lampreys were around at least 30,000 Y ago, but not in any way as a technological civilisation. The Lampreys have decent archaeological records going back thousands of years; they taper and fuzz out as you go further into deep time. At the thirty thousand year mark, when the modern Lampreys became the only surviving largebody branch of the Lamprey order, their records are limited to bits and pieces, labouriously excavated and restored. They have records that date back further; there's no sharp cutoff. The oldest work that is believed to have been done by something with the intelligence of a modern Lamprey dates back around sixty-three thousand years.

Engineering capabilities
At T-25 Y, from what you can tell, the alien tech is uneven. The signals you were getting showed, generally, electronics at around the same level as we had in the late 1960s, and have references to vac tube and, later, transistor computers. Cities and so on are shown as smaller population-wise, and more spread out, than human cities. Skyscrapers seem to be few and far between, and shorter.

They have piston-engined planes, but you've seen no reference to jets, nor to rockets or spaceflight. mkire's probe, despite its year-and-a-half long burn, had not been remarked on in anything you've analysed.

There is a noticeable upwards swing in overall development between T-30 Y and T-25 Y. There's the sudden switch of television to colour, but there's also been a proliferation of detectable signals, and you can already see that computers are getting more powerful. They're still big machines, though.

Nuclear research and Lasers
Note that, following Contemplator's speech, much of the following information is shown to be wrong. The Lampreys have conducted nuclear research in secret, allowing for the development and launch of the atom bomb-powered Dawn.

They're aware of the theoretical implications of fission and fusion. At T-25 Y, they had not detonated in war, tested, or built atomic bombs of any description; it was treaty-prohibited. So was research into it. They know about the existence of subatomic particles, radiation, elemental transmutation [you caught a science program], relativity, and they've got the basis of quantum theory. An awful lot of that occured, in our timeline, well prior to the 1940s. These guys got all of that together, realised what was happening and what the implications were, and froze R&D. Nuclear physics (as opposed to weapons) research is proceeding, with particle accelerators being built by both sides by T-23 Y. Nuclear power plants are on the drawing board by T-19 Y. By T-10Y nuclear powerplants are active.

By T-10 Y, that's changed. Nuclear detonations have happened. All 'peaceful' test shots, but they're well into the double-digit megatons by T-12 Y.

You've picked up thermal blooms indicative of high-powered laser shots in the atmosphere. The laser blooms are not consistent with combat use. They're close-to-perpendicular to Lamprey-II's surface, and you've only seen a few shots. They've come in clusters of two or three, with long intervals between clusters.

Fast development of (space) engineering
By T-18 Y, various innovations have arrived on-scene in suspiciously fast fashion. Jet aircraft are up and running. Rocketry programmes are no longer taboo and the Lampreys have put their first satellites in orbit, simple radio-relay comsats and photographic weathersats. Electronics have continued to advance and computers have been sold to businesses. Lasers are in production. You've picked up radar. Digital signals have started to show. Encrypted signals have shown as well; some have been crackable, some have not.

Space race
Between T-18 Y and T-10 Y, technology in general has continued to advance dramatically. There's an active back-and-forth Space Race. By T-13 Y, an Equatorial Lamprey has landed on their outer moon, an Equatorial probe has been launched to Lamprey-III (with plans to continue to Lamprey-IV and V), and an Equator probe has orbited Lamprey-I. The Lampreys have continued to launch satellites for various purposes.

By T-10, as a goodwill gesture, construction on a joint NE-Equator colony on Lamprey-II-II has begun. The primary reasons for cooperation, from what you can tell by the intercepts, are twofold: One is to reduce intergovernmental tensions. The other is to make sure that the other side isn't sneaking weapons into space on the side; hence the joint project, where both sides can see the other isn't up to anything. The initial work is along the lines of, pretty much, a scientific outpost/rendezvous point for other missions. Some of the longer term plans involved extending it into a larger colony for mining the moon, which happened by T-1.8 Y.

By T-2 Y, Lamprey tech development has started to even out, with their rocketry and materials science catching up to their computing. They have not lost interest in space. Lamprey-II space is swarming with satellites doing everything from satellite television to radio to telephony to positioning to survelliance to astronomical observatories. Their flyby probes of Lamprey-III and IV have aroused interest in sending further followup surveys of those systems, though the jump between Lamprey-II and Lamprey-III makes Lampreyed missions improbable. They launched a second probe to ecliptical Lamprey-III orbit at T-8.9 Y. It arrived at T-6.1 Y and has taken excellent images of Lamprey-III's major moons. It is still functional.

By T-2 Y, Lamprey population has stablised at around five billion. Technological progress has evened out across the planet; some nations are further ahead than others, but it's a gap of five years instead of the thirty or more that were the norm at T-60 Y.

Lamprey computers
Personal computers were introduced as economically feasible around T-17.4 Y. By T-10Y they're approaching ubiquity in the wealthier nations on both sides. Computing architecture by T-10Y has evolved to a mixture of systems. The transmissions you're receipting for digital are primarily 32bit words. Some of the military ones are 64bit.

At T-7 Y the Lampreys started building a public Internet-equivalent, started by telecommunications organisations.

Politics
Lamprey Politics page.