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[Aria Jenneth]

The two big unanswered questions on the animals-and-plants front are:

1) What plants and animals did Terrans find essential (or useful) for terraforming?

2) What plants and animals did Terrans have sufficient fondness for to have brought with them?

Wolves, apparently, didn't make the cut. I tend to assume, however, that a wide variety of edible flora and fauna did.

[Silver Night]

There would be a third one, which is of the ones they brought, which of them survived in one form or another?

[Makkal]

And they wouldn't have had to bring the actual plants and animals, just their genetic code.

I assume that all domesticated plants and animals made it. Chickens, cows, corn, rice, cats, dogs, tomatoes, bees, etc.

[Saede Riordan]

...Rats, cockroaches, mosquitoes...

[Makkal]

Rats and cockroaches could stow away depending on the conditions on the ship. Mosquitoes depend on specific conditions for breeding (pools of still water) that would be hard to find on a space ship.

And they don't add anything to the ecosystems they're in (there are no species for which mosquitoes are an important food source) so there's little reason to deliberately bring them along.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

Look at all the species that were transplanted on Earth for hints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_species

[Aelisha Montenagre]

I tend to get around this by assuming that the universal translator, instead of translating word for word is a 'Nearest Equivalence Semantic Parser' (NESP), which maps statements, phrases and attributions to a look up table of appropriate, culturally contextual sentences and/or words.  Where no direct equivalence exists, compound terms are created covering the basics of what is intended and/or implied, see German 'introduced native language terminology' for an example of such compound words. 

France is a good example of a nation that has a linguistics council dedicated to ensuring the survival of their language, by analysing neighbouring, trade and academic (English is dominant) languages - before creating new words in a prescribed, linguistically-preservative manner.  I imagine that the big four have similar ways of preserving their linguistic integrity (whether out of practicality, pride or purity reasons) and thus the NESP-translator has a vast look up table of borrowed, compound and native-semantic-equivalent terms to throw into your brain or at your screen in real-time. 

This is essentially a 'future tech' imagining of current investigations into how semantic parsing and equivalence construction can be used in natural language processing applications and roman-to-oriental direct translation in complex literature with little basis for equivalence (religious, cultural and sociological texts predating sustained contact in the colonial era). 

TL;DR and example: You say 'Athran Desert Scorpion' in common form Amarrian, I hear (as an Intaki who has recently graduated to capsuleer status) 'Stinging-Sand-Arachnid' with a conceptual image of the creature and maybe, as we are capsuleers, a skill-book-like data blurt that gives me an intuitive understanding of that reference from that cultural context from now on. 

Similarly, if you reference 'Einstein' it is treated as a reference to an equivalent academic, institutional or corporate work.  It is a concession to mutual understanding to further the rp without reinvention of 10,000 years of linguistic, scientific and social development .

[Nicoletta Mithra]

And they don't add anything to the ecosystems they're in (there are no species for which mosquitoes are an important food source) so there's little reason to deliberately bring them along.

Mosquitoes do of course add something to the ecosystem, if for nothing else, population control of humans in malaria regions. Maybe they don't add something to an ecosystem that is immediately desirable for humans, but given that there are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans, I wouldn't think that that is really that much of a consideration, as one would just omit those few hundred. In arctic ecosystems mosquitoes make up a huge chunk of the animal biomass, so they are certainly of importance there as a food source for predators like small birds and amphibians as well as reptiles and most importantly other arthropods, which are in turn food sources for species higher up the chain. Also many fish species depend largely on mosquito larvae in their diet, so in aquatic environments, where they make up a sizable chunk of biomass as well, the mosquito has a quite important niche in the ecosystem.

There are studies that show that birds that prey on small insects suffer a hit in their fitness if mosquitoes are removed from their habitat that is measurable by the eggs laid in average per nest, which drops from three to two.

Also, not bringing mosquitoes would probably only mean that for a brief period humans wouldn't have to bother with their kind of problem, as the niche would be filled more or less 'quick' (in evolutionary terms) by another species.

[Lyn Farel]

And they wouldn't have had to bring the actual plants and animals, just their genetic code.

I assume that all domesticated plants and animals made it. Chickens, cows, corn, rice, cats, dogs, tomatoes, bees, etc.

I am not even sure of that. They would have needed a huge amount of various samples for the species to remain viable and able to reproduce.

Maybe they did.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

Actually, if you terraform a planet to have a stable ecosystem, you need to introduce a huge amount of species and of the species enough individuals with a fair amount of genetic diversity, if you want to do it in a reasonable amount of time.

[Esna Pitoojee]

Walnuts made it, judging by the Customs Office description.


Anyhow, I think I have been massively embittered by being on the "receiving end" of this kind of thing via the fad of using copy/pasted RL atheist arguments against Amarr IC, as directly quoting or mentioning RL political figures is actually something that bugs me quite a bit. To me it really reeks of 'I cannot be bothered to create a logical argument specific to this fictional universe, so instead I shall steal the RL argument that best supports my point of view and wedgie it into the universe, whether it fits or not." But again, that's in response to a fairly limited range of topics and certainly not the case for every single RL transposition ever made in RP - I'm not going to freak out the next time I hear someone mention pyjamas, grapes, or a cat.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

I really don't mind the copy/pasted RL atheist arguments that much, as usually they squarely miss the Amarrian theism. (One can even see the popular "4 horsemen" to concede that their arguments don't have much traction against theism/deism in general, then going on how the question of the debate is Christian theism, though.) If they do hit Amarrian theism, I bother even less: It's not that I don't take the freedom to nick off RL defenses for theism.

[Steffanie Saissore]

My two cents on the matter:

In the two decades I've been doing role-playing, I have taken a lot of things from history when world-building. I've tried to steer away from using well known city names for locations for example, but I have shamelessly taken smaller towns and modified names when creating my own settings.

Given that there are obvious RL influences in EVE, I have no problem with someone picking a name from the past or from a cultural heritage. When I was putting together my Sebiestor, after looking at the various random names, I started looking for Scandinavian, Romanian, and Romany influenced names and eventually settled on Ellisif.

That said, I try hard not to reference famous historical figures, unless the setting supports it; at least not directly reference that is. I might take an idea and try to apply my own wording to express it than quote the original.

[Aria Jenneth]

There would be a third one, which is of the ones they brought, which of them survived in one form or another?

I tend to assume that most plausible "biosphere ingredients" we are likely to be able to think of probably survived somewhere.

It's become increasingly apparent in the PF (demographics articles, notably) that there are hundreds or thousands of Ancient-colonized worlds all over New Eden-- and there are probably a fair few that host Terran life even if the local humans themselves didn't make the cut. There might even be wolves somewhere-- only nobody knows that "wolves" are what that particular sort of wild dog is called.

[Myyona]

I have always thought that issues regarding RL historical names being used within Eve for both ships and daily talk was down to translator issues. We know that there are many different languages through out New Eden and that there is an universal translator, but that does not necessarily mean that there is an universal language and certainly not that the universal language in New Eden is modern day English.

As I see it, the universal translator is existing on the barrier between the player and the character too. And when it comes to RL references through names, SI units or philosophers, it is simply the universal translator at play, translating a New Eden reference into something we can understand. When somebody says "the old Gallente philosopher Immanuel Kant" it is the translator at play again, changing the name of the real Gallente philosopher into somebody we can relate to.

Essentially I am thinking along the same vein as Aelisha.