The Milky Way galaxy contains countless organic and artificial species. While life in general is plentiful, sapient life is rare.[1] Only 4 sapient species are currently identified: Humans, Thargoids and the extinct Guardians with their Constructs. The existence of 2 unknown sapient species are implied by the Martian Relic, Soontill Relics, artefacts, sites, and data. The Mudlarks on Achenar 6d became extinct due to human colonists. That planet in Achenar became Capitol of the Empire.
Multiple non-sapient mollusks live in space. Various non-sentient fauna are on planet surfaces and in space. Collecting data requires a Genetic Sampler which is included with the Artemis Suit.
Flora
Fauna
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| Guardian | Human | Thargoid | Bell Mollusc |
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| Bulb Mollusc | Bullet Mollusc | Capsule Mollusc | Globe Mollusc |
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| Gourd Mollusc | Parasol Mollusc | Reel Mollusc | Squid Mollusc |
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| Torus Mollusc | Umbrella Mollusc |
Anomaly
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| Lagrange Cloud | E-Type Anomaly | K-Type Anomaly | L-Type Anomaly |
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| P-Type Anomaly | Q-Type Anomaly | T-Type Anomaly |
Anomalies are energy based lifeforms which are found in Lagrange Clouds. Approaching them could trigger an aggressive reaction. If you're in close proximity they could cause an electrical interference.
Conditions of occurrence of species
These are the conditions of appearance of exobiological species present on planets with tenuous atmospheres:
Exobiologists can sell the data to Vista Genomics for the sale values:
- Value greater than 15,000,000 Cr
- Value greater than 7,000,000 Cr
| Atmosphere Type | Only If G < 0,27 | Any Gravity |
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Lore species
These species exist only in the lore of Elite Dangerous and the Elite Universe.
| Name | Description | Sentience | Location | Image |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Construct | The Constructs are a sentient, robotic species that were created by the Guardians millions of years ago. It is unknown whether they still exist.[2] Machine sentience is banned in Federal, Empire and Alliance space since it proved to be very dangerous when it was created on a few occasions. However, it is believed that one or two AI escaped into deep space.[3][4] | Sapient | Lore | |
| Baltah'sine Vacuum Krill | Vacuum Krill are astonishing creatures. One of the few species to live in the hard vacuum of space, they are native to the ice rings around Baltah'sine 4b. Their eggs grow in vast numbers in tiny water pockets within the rocks - kept liquid by secretions from the mother when the eggs are first laid. When mature, they eventually burrow their way out, propelling themselves between rocks with tiny excretions of fluid, in search of a mate.[5] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Delines | Delines are rotund feline-like creatures with rich, black fur. They're indigenous to the Diso system. | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Giant Irukama Snails | Giant Irukama Snails are a molluscoid species which resemble snails. They're native to Irukama and a food delicacy. The meat of one snail can fill several standard cargo canisters.[5] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Giant Verrix | The Giant Verrix is a hardy beast of burden now found throughout human space, especially on the emerging worlds of the outer rim, but naturally bred Verrix are very rare and highly prized.[5] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| HIP Proto-Squid | HIP Proto-Squid are huge creatures of HIP 41181. They share many evolutionary similarities with the now extinct squid once found on ancient Earth.[5] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Kachirigin Filter Leeches | Kachirigin Filter Leeches can painlessly filter impurities from the user's blood, so can be used as a cure-all for hangovers and the worst affects of certain addictions.[6] | Non-sentient | Lore | |
| Karsuki Locusts | Karsuki Locusts are an insectoid species native to Karsuki Ti. They have a sweet flavor due to the native fungal parasites that infest their bodies.[5] | Non-sapient | Lore |   Karsuki Locusts |
| Ling Lang | The Ling Lang is a dangerous animal, a carnivorous life form from the Achenar system (most certainly Capitol).[7] Some people keep it as a pet such as the Imperial Prince Aristide de Lavigny.[8] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Mudlark | The planet Capitol in the Achenar system had alien sentient life known as mudlarks. The mudlarks unintentionally went extinct due to human colonists who brought bacteria to the planet in the middle of the 23rd century. The bacteria were deadly for the indigenous species. There was not much appreciation for alien sentient life at the time.[9] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Mulachi Giant Fungus | The Mulachi Giant Fungus is a fungal life forms found in Mulachi can grow to occupy entire continents. | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Mukusubii Chitin-Os | The Mukusubii Chitin-Os are chitinous native insects that are processed using industrial mining equipment, then re-constituted into convenient circles. | Non-sentient | Lore | |
| Radioplankton | Radioplankton are tiny, free-floating, carbon-based algae. These water-based life-forms live underneath the surface of gas giants. | Non-sentient | Lore | |
| Snake Sector species | The Snake Sector species is an unidentified species of insectoids native to an enclosed, underground ecosystem on the moon Snake Sector GW-W c1-1 AB 5 b. | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Uszaian Tree Grub | The Uszaian Tree Grub was introduced to the system from Lave, in an attempt to create a wildlife reserve for endangered species. | Non-sentient | Lore |   Uszaian Tree Grub |
| Warg | The warg is a deer-like creature with big eyes. It can be bred as a pet.[10] | Non-sapient | Lore | |
| Whispering Plants | Whispering Plants are alien carnivorous species from Quphieth. It has a thick, fairly short trunk, with a fringe of bright blue plumes sticking out horizontally for a distance about half the height of the trunk, then a mass of astonishing red fronds at least twice the length of the trunk topped the whole thing off. It's sessile, and uses colour, odour and sound to attract its prey. They were mentioned in Frontier: Elite II lore.[11] | Non-sapient | Lore |   Whispering Plant |
Sentience
Species can be categorized as: sapient, non-sapient and non-sentient.
Sapient
Sapient species are capable of higher thought and culture. It is the property of possessing or being able to possess wisdom.[12] This goes beyond mere practical wisdom and includes self-knowledge, interconnectedness, conditioned origination of mind-states and other deeper understandings of subjective experience.[13]
Non-sapient
Non-sapient species are living beings without the capacity for higher thought and culture for survival. They are sentient with the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively.[14][15] Any creature with a brain and nervous system is conscious no matter how tiny the brain. Some are self-aware and think about themselves as individuals with their own thoughts and personalities.
Non-sentient
These are species that are not self-aware. They cannot view themselves as individuals.
Alien Life and Relics
Alien Life
The first alien life was discovered on Tau Ceti 2 in the Tau Ceti system through observation from Sol which was confirmed by an interstellar probe in the early 22nd century.[16][17][18] The Tau Ceti colonists ignored Earth's policy of preserving indigenous life. At first, out of carelessness and for survival, then for exploitation and trade. After a scrutinisation, issuing additional ignored guidelines for life habitat conservation and imposition of trade sanctions, the old Federation sent a military task force which compelled the colonists of the newly renamed Taylor Colony to negotiations.[19][20][21] However, it did not manage to avert that the last remnants of the Tau Ceti aliens are now only in zoo enclosures for tourists.[16]
Futher discoveries of life were also concurrently made in the other prospective earliest human colonies in the Delta Pavonis, Altair and Beta Hydri systems. Unfortunately, life on Delta Pavonis 3 (now called Reagan's Legacy) was wiped out in a bacteriological accident in 2181.[22][23]
In 2242 after the military conflict on Taylor Colony, The Federation Accord was signed outlining certain independent rights and responsibilities to meet certain development goals for members, uniting many of the new colonies which were allready settled or were settled later.[24][21][23] One core principle of the new Federation transfered from the old one, was the respect for native alien life and ecological preservation.
Water-based life can be highly expected on Earth-like worlds and water worlds, albeit often not evolved much. Nevertheless extraterrestrial life does not necessarily need to use water as a solvent, ammonia is an alternative. It allows living in lower temperatures because of a lower melting point. Ammonia worlds are equivalents for Earth-like worlds with ammonia-based life.
Life in the universe does not even need a solid ground or a liquid ocean to arise and thrive. Water-based or ammonia-based lifeforms have been discovered in the water-cloud or ammonia-cloud layer of some gas giants.[5]
Space travellers can also come across lifeforms wandering in the vacuum of space.
Non-Human Relic
The first non-human relic was found buried on Mars in 2280. The relic is no bigger than a child's hand and still surrounded in secrecy, even in 3300. There's no public information about its properties and origin other than being non-human.[25]
Life in the Galaxy
Braben and Brookes explain the state of alien life in the galaxy of ED.
David Braben said in a interview at PAX East 2017, "If you look at galactic history and life on Earth, as a percentage of time it has taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve and a small number of millions of years to evolve sentient intelligent life. By the 21st century humans are not a space faring race yet. So even by the 34th century it's still a tiny slice of time. You can imagine different populations spotting up and you wonder how long we will last which is slightly depressing, but you know we might go beyond. The point I'm trying to make is the chance of two races that are at the point of being able to interact whilst both are still alive is actually small. This is the basis for the story, because the beauty and interesting thing with things like artifacts and unknown probes is that it creates wonderful speculation and that great feeling of discovery. There's a lot of interesting things in the history of the game such as the Thargoids which are mysterious and very dangerous, that have been in previous games, even interacting with them and then suddenly disappeared. So there are a lot of interesting mysteries such as the alien ships with hyperdiction. In the previous games the Thargoids have been a very powerful race. We don't know whether the sightings are real or manufactured. We don't know how peaceful they are so we have to see how that pans out. This is perhaps the first story where millions people interact with the same story. Where people on all the different platforms are cooperating or competing with each other in the same servers and story. How the story unfolds is determined by how players react and what they do."[26]
Michael Brookes said in the Elite: Dangerous Fiction Diary #1, "Alien life in the galaxy is very plentiful. However, sentient life is very rare. So the various races and types of indigenous that was reported in the original elite are considered a dominant species of their planets, but they aren’t sentient species. As far as humans are concerned they’ve only encountered a small number of sentient species. There was a sentient race on Achenar which the people who later became the Imperials wiped out. There’s the alien artifact that was discovered in the solar system. That’s a mystery although we hope to reveal a little bit more about where that came from in the future. And, of course there’s the Thargoids" [1]
Classic Elite
There were more sapient species in the original Elite (1984) which had populations on planets. They were named by various descriptive combinations of words like blue slimy frogs, black furry felines, weird lizards, green fat birds, fierce bony lobsters, harmless rodents, red horned humanoids and so on. They were even illustrated in the more graphical versions on Amiga, Atari ST and in the enhanced Elite Plus version on IBM PC DOS. These species never existed canonically in the Elite Dangerous lore where the universe is formed by humanity with the Guardian legacy and the Thargoid threat.
Videos
A summary of the alien story; from the Unknown Artefact to the discovery of the Barnacles.
Stellar Phenomena:
Gallery
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 YouTube: Elite: Dangerous Fiction Diary #1 (9:34)
- ↑ Canonn Research: Guardians Codex 6/28 : Civil War Log – Dawn of the Construct
- ↑ YouTube: Elite: Dangerous Fiction Diary #1 (8:31)
- ↑ Frontier Forums: Artificial Intelligence Why is it prohibited in Elite Universe
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Gas Giant with Water-based Life and Gas Giant with Ammonia-based Life In-Game Description
- ↑ In-Game Description
- ↑ Elite Dangerous Knowledge Base > The Alliance > Society
- ↑ GalNet: Zemina Torval and Florence Lavigny Join Patreus’ Campaign
- ↑ GalNet: The Birth of an Empire
- ↑ GalNet: Federal Warships Bomb Farms
- ↑ When a Plan Works Well, Stories Of Life On The Frontier by David Massey
- ↑ AskDefine: Define sapience
- ↑ Wikipedia: Wisdom#Sapience
- ↑ Merriam-Webster Dictionary: sentience
- ↑ Wikipedia: Sentience
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Tau Ceti In-Game Description
- ↑ Tourist Spot 0167, "First Interstellar Colony"
- ↑ Tourist Spot 0166, "Early Hyperspace"
- ↑ Tourist Spot 0169, "Ecological Loss"
- ↑ Tourist Spot 0173, "Alien Transgressions"
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 Tourist Spot 0174, "Federal Accord"
- ↑ Tourist Spot 0170, "Accidental Extinction"
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 Tourist Spot 0168, "Early Colonies"
- ↑ GalNet: The Founding of the Federation
- ↑ Tourist Spot 0175, "NonHuman Relic"
- ↑ YouTube: Interview with David Braben - PAX East 2017 - Elite Dangerous