WMG / Serina

What if the end Thermocene extinction didn't happen (speculative-ception!)

• Aardgeese (as vivas and serestriders) would go full "no KT dinosaurs" and keep on going. Mucks might still produce burdles, but the bumblets would remain small insectivores, with competitors on all sides. Either way no gravediggers. Some vivas might redevelop flight and become pterosaur analogues judging by the gliding one in the Thermocene.
• Tribbetheres would largely remain small, but its possible canitheres could still exist given all Mesozoic carnivorous mammals. Tribbats too, joining the flying vivas in the sky. But molodonts would have to content with the chewing vivas, so they wouldn't grow megafaunal. Its possible merwhals might make it to the sea (like our world's docodonts and monotremes) and actually suceed before the dolfinches have a chance, which would be peak irony.
• Porporants would be the dominant marine predators, so no dolfinches or burdles.
• Metamorphs could still produce neotenic fish and some insectoid species, but the great breakthrough won't happen with all other birds around, so perhaps they fade into obscurity
• For the sophonts, the babbling jays would be the least altered (now just regular canaries instead of seabirds that regressed into canaries). Woodcrafters would not exist, but some sort of serilope might take their place. Ditto for gravediggers, perhaps a role taken by a tribbethere if anything. Daydreamers would be porporants or non-existent at all.

The shoggoth's hive mind will go much further than their first draft.

Relating to the above, if the shoggoths are the last sapient species on Serina than the ants will be able to link their nervous systems together to form their collective intelligence rather than the ants simply communicating by sound.

• About the sapience part, it’s implied that the sea shoggoths are either almost there or they actually are sapient.

Human descendants have been recording life on Serina periodically.

Woodcrafters live on off-world, as the entire point of this experiment was to create other intelligent life.

Serina was seeded by the spacefaring descendants of the Gravediggers via time travel.

As in the above WMG, the gravediggers achieve an industrial revolution. As they heat Serina with greenhouse gases, the ice-caps shrink, and life begins to reclaim the moon. During this time, Gravedigger technology continues to advance to an astonishing degree, as they achieve powered flight, and space travel. As they began to explore space, they also experimented with quantum physics and wormholes, eventually developing a form of time travel. One one of their first such expeditions, they chose a selection of sample species from another planet and, traveling back in time, placed them on a seemingly uninhabited alien world. One of those species was the common canary. The world they seeded was none other than Serina itself.

The savage gravedigger will become sapient again, but retain their brutality and become land Warmongers of sorts.

This time, however, the Daydreamers would be unable to return the favor to their gravedigger friends as they are unable to go on land.

• On the other hand, since the thalassic gravediggers seem to mostly live on their boats and rafts the sapient savage gravediggers are mostly unable to harm them and the daydreamers attack and drown those who try.

There is a deity directly intervening in Serina's evolution

Brighteye wonders if he was born with a purpose and receives a voice in his dreams, rendered in a different font, instructing him to find the Sea Stewards. While this can be the product of a sophont longing for others of similar mental capability, this voice also spoke to Ember as she died. Things like the presence the Matriarch felt in her last moments and the daydreamers' prophecy effectively coming true points towards a higher power guiding life on Serina all the way from the beginning. They are only now acting because only the advanced brains of sophonts are able to be subliminally manipulated (and the daydreamers are particularly susceptible to suggestion) and being sophonts, transcend the boundaries of natural experiment and have greater inherent value as sapients.

• Outright confirmed with 'When Parts Become Whole', and while the deity is impressed, it's concerned that its natural project is going to spiral out of control and steps in to correct its mistake.

The “Late Ultimocene Sophont” mentioned on Patreon will be a descendant of the Aukvulture.

Their heads look quite similar, and it is mentioned that the aukvultures are nearing sparrowgull-level intelligence, so full-on sapience wouldn’t be too hard to develop in several million years.

• Confirmed with the reapers.

The observer has had clones of Serina running for a while.

Almost as a form of Save Scumming, the observer has periodically been making backups of Serina, paused or running in parallel, to see what different paths life can take. The sea stewards' preserve is only one of many worlds. And there may be multiple versions of the sophonts' consciousnesses present as well, unaware of each others' existence.

Serina itself is a computer simulation.

Serina doesn't actually physically exist. Similar to the simulation hypothesis, except instead of an ancestor simulation it is an alternate ecosystem / evolution simulation running on extremely powerful future computers, with resolution down to the individual thoughts of sophonts. The observer is able to quickly make new "save states" and roll back to them, editing bits of the world as needed.

The transported sea stewards are doomed anyway

Its an exact replica of their environment... except without fossil fuels. So not even a means to escape a snowball scenario.

• Not so sure about that. Word of God has said that this new world's core isn't dying and the observer themselve has stated that the ice will slowly recede.

The creator of Serina is magical/an actual god

Because lets face it, even the most advanced technological levels predicted so far pale in comparison to its feats. It could also explain some of the less scientifically plausible scenarios like the metamorph birds and less gravity having no impact on the circulatory system.

Multiple civilisations and/or sapient species were retroactively wiped out by the Creator for damaging Serina's ecosystem too badly

Probable candidates:

• The Fork-Tailed Babbling Jays developed a civilisation which entailed massive climate engineering that lead to the destruction of Serina's ecosystem. The Creator simply flooded their homeland with storms to prevent this from happening again.
• The Woodcrafters and Gravediggers entered a millennium-long arms race with culminated in them industrialising and destroying the world in nuclear war. In the "new" timeline, the two species cooperated and never left a Palaeolithic existence.
• Whatever the Vibropterans, who were originally slated to be the third sapient race on Serina according to Word of God, did to the planet was so cataclysmic the Creator simply removed their sapience altogether in subsequent timelines. They possibly played a role in the Woodcrafter-Gravedigger War or some iteration thereof that led to this (possibly discovering or manufacturing nuclear weapons?)
  • The observer didn't actually reset the timeline with the sea stewards, it simply transported them to a new world and wiped their memories. The original Serina still exists.
  • Still doesn't exclude the observer's ability to undo ecological damage and reseed life, including engineering extinctions of sapient species. The sea stewards and friends were merely the first sophonts it cared about. A few thousand years of civilization is ultimately nothing in geologic terms when "resetting" the timeline.
  • It was explicitly mentioned that directing Brighteye to the wumpos then saving the sea stewards was the first time it actively interfered. It also didn't undo any of the ecological damage caused by the fire, Serina was left as is, just with the stewards suddenly gone.

The Sea Stewards are the beings who created Fellstar.

• We know nothing about the beings who created Fellstar and its fellow robot probe, but it would seem odd indeed for the Sea Stewards to have been teleported to another world, only for Serina to be visited thousands of years later by a clearly artificial probe. Now, the Sea Stewards are explicitly stated to have no memory of their former existence on Serina, but that doesn't stop them, once they develop space travel, from potentially sending probes to it once they re-discover it.
  • Seemingly confirmed as Fellstar mentions an "alliance of three" sailing the widest sea.

The snowscrounger will become Serina's last sophont.

It's better adapted to survive the bitter cold, and it is smart and resourceful enough to thrive, perhaps increased pressures for intelligence drive it into sapience: but by then, it is too late to build a civilization and the sapient snowscrounger will only face an existentially dreadful fate.

• Semi-confirmed: two of its descendants do become some of the last sophonts, but they're joined by a descendant of the kelpie (a carnivorous thorngrazer), as well as the whisperwings, who are chatterraven descendants. They also show up 295 MPE, before the cooling gets that severe.

Whitecrown would've tried to get Brighteye to join him if he didn't die so soon after meeting again

Despite recognizing Brighteye, Whitecrown chooses not to immediately attack like a bluetail normally would, so the possibility exists that he would've tried to get his brother to become his subordinate on pain of getting killed by his megaflock. As Brighteye would most likely refuse, this would lead to a far more violent final confrontation between the brothers.

Jossed

The forthcoming sapient teased at the end of this post will be a reworking of the shoggoth in which the entire ant colony Hive Mind forms one intelligent being.

• Jossed: The "third sapient" is the Daydreamers.

The "wings of the creator" were the fork-tailed babbling jays.

Obviously the alliance has no means of actually knowing this, but they would stumble upon some relic of babbling jay civilization, and realize there were flying sophonts now extinct— thus meaning that the prophecy may have been true but now can never be fulfilled.

• Alternatively, it could be their descendants: the bluetails. One individual already became sapient, so they could also domesticate themselves after first contact like the daydreamers.
• Jossed, as Brighteye, a single sophont bluetail and thus descendent of the babbling jays, fulfills the prophecy.

The Woodcrafters and Gravediggers won't go extinct due to the ice age this time around.

Rather this time, their civilization will become more advanced thanks to their alliance with things like the discovery of fire to keep themselves warm, the discovery and use of metal and the Woodcrafters using combustible tree sap as a fuel source. Their technological capacity will increase by necessity thanks to the worsening ice age and they'll get to the point where they develop space flight and are forced to leave the moon in search of a new home. However, we won't see what becomes of them after that since the project is about the titular moon so we'll watch the rest of Serina's habitable stage play out.

• Semi-jossed as the Woodcrafters were too specialized to survive once the forests they depended on started to dwindle. It's still possible for the Gravediggers, however.

Sea Steward society will collapse upon Serina's thaw

The civilization and ecosystem the sea stewards have constructed is based around cold, shallow, highly productive ocean waters with the ice caps ever present. Even more so, as ecosystem engineers they made themselves keystone species. The global warming that is coming is implied to melt the ice rapidly and radically change the mostly domesticated ecosystem. The kelp forests dependent on optimal ocean conditions will be disrupted faster than they can move, affecting bloats and greenskeepers. Without the bloats, daydreamers and gravediggers also lose their main source of food but can transition to other food sources, but the main threat is the shoggoths, who without their regular deliveries, terminate the contract and begin eating everything in sight. While the three sophont species may survive, civilization as they know it will not.

• Jossed. The sea stewards straight up vanish, transported to a copy of Serina where they are not doomed to extinction. The rest of their ecosystem however...

The wumpo hybrids will lead their species in becoming allies to the Sea Stewards.

It's mentioned that the island wumpos communicate in higher pitched noises that other animals can hear unlike the wooly wumpos who communicate almost solely in infrasonic frequencies. The wumpo hybrids possess the ability to communicate in both methods (albeit with speech impediments when using the wooly communication method), it will also be revealed that in addition to inheriting the sapience of their wooly heritage they also inherent the greater innovation and lack of fear from their island parent, making them functionally similar to a widemind. These individuals will make contact with the sea dwelling society and serve as mediators between them and the family.

• Jossed. The wumpos burn to death in the fire and any surviving trunkos will never get to interact with the sea stewards, at least in this project.

The wumpos survived on Serina 2

No fire and the chatterravens are also present points towards their survival as well, though without Brighteye another first contact is not possible for a long time. And with that world shut away in a coat closet, we'll never get to see it.

• Nevermind Word of God said the wumpos are dead there too.

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