Week 1 Lecture: The Planet Rowwwl (Patreon)

"Good morning, students! If everyone could put down their tablets and enter VR mode, we can get started... I said tablets down, Captain Alex!... Those porn games you youngsters are always playing aren't going anywhere...!

Ahem. Let us commence... I shall begin with a physics joke, as is customary amongst Humans. Then you will laugh - uproariously - or I shall mark you down for the whole term...

The Planet Rowwwl:

The Felinoid Planet Rowwwl provides the final answer to Schrödinger's Paradox... The cat is dead, but its descendants have gone on to build an extra-terrestrial civilisation! 

Back in the Dark Days of 2019, the embryonic SpaceCorps launched a number of probes designed to test the effects of long-term space travel on mammals, launching a menagerie of apes, dogs, cats and rodents into deep space. Due to catastrophic effects on the test-subjects (and a very strongly worded letter from PETA) the mission was abandoned, with all subjects deemed lost-in-space. 

Unbeknownst to Humanity, however, one probe managed to survive the mission - along with its passenger, a pregnant female house-cat called Mrs Tiddles. The craft was sucked through a small wormhole in the Oort Cloud - and transported 36 light years away to the Denebola System - reappearing 3 million years in the past. 

Not that poor Mrs Tiddles was aware of that, as she plummeted towards the early earth-like planet we now call Rowwwl. Mercifully surviving the crash, Earth's first interplanetary colonist crawled fearfully from the crashed probe and onto a virgin land teeming with small, edible prey. She immediately went into labour from the shock. 

Over the next three million years, Mrs Tiddles and her many descendants spread across the face of Rowwwl – evolving to fill every evolutionary niche beneath its radioactive sun. 40% of all life on the planet now contains 'The Mother's' DNA – from deep-sea catamarines to tree-swinging miu; and from the vast herds of rowpers that traverse the southern plains to the wee timorous catkins that nest and burrow in the soil. 

But of specific interest to us are the 7 Great Races – sentient species of gatopomorphs with varying levels of intelligence. Few planets in the galaxy have produced more than one sentient species simultaneously - let alone seven - and it is of great debate amongst xenobiologists how this could have occurred. 

My personal theory is that the intense territoriality of felines led to an unusually low rate of interbreeding between proto-species, limited territorial-range and accelerated evolution through competition for prey. [To learn more, buy my book 'Cats! I Like Cats!' - now available in all good bookshops.] 

Well, that's all we have time for this week, my dear students... Please attend next week's lecture on the first of the 7 Felinoid Races – the Khumon!