A NEW LEGEND OF ATLANTIS - YouTube
Transcripts:
The first spawning 3.8 billion years ago, the Hadian Ocean. Earth was barely recognizable as a world. The young planet still bled heat from its violent formation. Its surface a nightmare landscape of volcanic hellscapes and acidic seas. The atmosphere was poison. Methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide.
Nothing that would later be called life could breathe it. The oceans were not blue but rust red, heavy with dissolved iron and sulfur compounds. Meteorites still bombarded the surface regularly as each impact releasing energies equivalent to millions of nuclear weapons. It should have been sterile. It should have been dead.
But in the deepest trenches of this primordial ocean, where superheated water from the planet's molten mantle mixed with the freezing waters above, where toxic chemicals concentrated in ways that would never occur again, something happened. Not life as it would later be understood, not even quite chemistry as it would later be categorized, but something in between.
a cascade of self-replicating molecular patterns that found the violent toxic environment not hostile but perfect. The first protodraul were nothing like their descendants would would become. They were barely more than complex protein chains wrapped in lipid membranes floating in the superheated water near thermal vents.
But they had three characteristics that would define their entire evolutionary trajectory. They consumed other molecular structures to grow. They replicated with variations, allowing rapid adaptation. And most crucially, they thrived in conditions that would destroy almost any other form of chemistry. Part two, the hostile garden 3.
5 billion years ago, the age of protoells. While other life struggled to emerge in the shallow UV bombarded surface waters, simple photosynthetic bacteria that would eventually fill the atmosphere with oxygen and poison themselves. The proto draul flourished in the deep. They grew larger, more complex. They developed primitive sensory organs that could detect chemical gradients and electrical fields.
They evolved rudimentary locomotion, psyia and fleella that allowed them to swim toward food sources or away from dangers. Most importantly, they developed the beginning of their signature biological architecture. They learned to build. The first structures were crude aggregations of cells that worked together, forming colonies around thermal vents.
These colonies discovered they could manipulate their environment, secretreting chemicals that altered the mineral composition of the surrounding rock, creating cavities and channels that concentrated nutrients. They were the first architects of the deep and they were voraciously relentlessly hungry.
Any other molecular structure that drifted near the colonies was absorbed, broken down, integrated. The proto draul had no concept of mercy or restraint. They were pure consumption machines optimized by billions of replications to devour everything they encountered. When they exhausted the nutrients around one vent, they migrated to another, leaving behind only barren rock.
Competition between colonies was fierce and brutal. When two aggregations encountered each other, they waged chemical warfare, each releasing compounds designed to dissolve the others membranes. The victorious colony would consume the remains of the defeated, incorporating any useful genetic material into its own structure. This horizontal gene transfer accelerated their evolution exponentially.
Successful adaptation spread through the population within generations. Part three, the complexification. 2.8 billion years ago, the rise of predation. A crucial mutation occurred in one colony near what would eventually become the Mid-Atlantic ridge. A random copying error in the genetic material produced cells with a new capability.
They could actively hunt other cells rather than simply absorbing whatever drifted close. These proto predators developed primitive jaws, protein structures that could grasp and puncture other cells. They grew larger, faster, more aggressive. Within a few million years, the blink of an eye in geological time, they had diversified into dozens of forms, each specialized for hunting different prey.
Some became ambush predators, attaching to rocks near vents and striking at passing microorganisms with lightning speed. Others became pursuit predators, developing streamlined shapes and powerful fleella that allowed them to chase down prey. Still others became parasites, burrowing into larger colonies and consuming them from within.
But the most successful were the pack hunters, colonies that coordinated their attacks, surrounding prey and overwhelming it with numbers. These colonies developed the first primitive communication systems using chemical signals to coordinate their movements. They were the direct ancestors of the draool and their evolution was about to accelerate dramatically.
The great oxygenation event whenphotosynthetic bacteria in the surface waters began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere was catastrophic for most anorobic life. Oxygen was poison, a highly reactive molecule that destroyed the complex chemistry that most early life depended on. It caused the first mass extinction, killing off countless species.
But in the deep, the protodraul were insulated from the worst effects. The oxygen didn't penetrate to the depths where they lived. However, the extinction of surface life did affect them. Dead organic matter raining down from above became a new food source rich in complex molecules. The proto draool that could best exploit this resource thrived and diversified part four the neural revolution 1.
5 billion years ago the first mines the colonies had grown staggeringly complex were now visible to the naked eye if any eye had existed to see them sprawling networks of specialized cells spread across hundreds of square feet of seafloor division of labor had become extreme with different cell types performing different functions digestion locomotion reproduction, defense.
Then came the most important development in their entire evolution, nervous systems. Simple at first, just cells specialized to transmit electrical signals faster than chemical messengers could diffuse. But the advantage was immediate and overwhelming. Colonies with nerve nets could react to stimuli in milliseconds rather than minutes.
They could coordinate complex behaviors. They could learn. Within a 100 million years, centralized nervous systems evolved. Clusters of nerve cells that processed information and coordinated responses. The first true brains, primitive as they were, gave their possessors abilities that seemed almost miraculous compared to their predecessors.
They could remember, they could predict, they could plan, and they could suffer. This was perhaps the darkest milestone in their evolution. the moment when the proto draul developed enough neural complexity to experience something resembling pain and fear. But unlike many species where suffering became a limiting factor that encouraged avoidance behaviors, the protodraul developed a different response.
They began to inflict suffering deliberately. The ability to model other minds, to predict behavior, to understand prey led naturally to the ability to manipulate, to terrorize, to torture. Protodraul discovered that prey that was frightened before being eaten released chemicals that made its flesh more palatable.
They learned to keep prey alive during consumption to savor its distress. They were becoming monsters. Part five. The multisellular explosion 750 million years ago. The Cambrian Prelude. On the surface world, life was experiencing an explosive diversification. The first true multisellular organisms were emerging. Sponges, jellyfish, primitive worms.
In the fossil record, this period would be called the Ediakaran, characterized by strange softbodied creatures unlike anything that would come later. In the deep, the proto draulle had long since surpassed these simple forms. They had developed into creatures that would be recognizable as animals with distinct organs, complex nervous systems, sophisticated sensory apparatus.
But they remained hidden in the deepest trenches and the surface world remained ignorant of their existence. The proto draul of this era stood at the threshold of true intelligence. Their brains had grown large and complex with distinct regions for different cognitive functions. They had developed social structures with dominant individuals controlling territories and subordinates.
They had primitive tools using rocks to crack open the shells of prey using chemical secretions to modify their environment. Most significantly, they had developed the beginning of biotechnology. It started accidentally, a proto draul consuming a prey organism but keeping some of its cells alive inside its own body, protected from digestion.
These captured cells continued to function and the protodraal discovered it could benefit from their activity. It was a form of internal symbiosis, but one that the host controlled completely. This discovery revolutionized their society. Protodraul began deliberately incorporating useful cells from other organisms into their own bodies. They became living chimeas.
Each individual a patchwork of genes from hundreds of different species. They enhanced themselves, adding bioluminescent organs for signaling, electrical organs for stunning prey, poison glands for defense. They were learning to edit life itself. Part six, the first hive. 600 million years ago, the dawn of collective intelligence.
A profound transformation occurred in a deep sea trench near what would eventually become the Pacific Ocean. A population of protodraul discovered a new way of organizing themselves. not as individuals cooperating, but as a true superorganism with specialized casts and central coordination. It began with chemical communication becoming sosophisticated that it approached telepathy.
Individuals could share not just simple signals but complex information, memories, sensory data, even emotional states. Groups of protodraul hunted with such perfect coordination that they seem to share a single mind. Then came the queens. A genetic mutation produced females that grew far larger than normal, becoming cesile, attached to the seafloor, unable to move, devoted entirely to reproduction.
But these queens didn't just produce offspring. They served as neural hubs, processing information from dozens of mobile hunters, and coordinating their activities. The queens were the first living computers, biological processors that could think thoughts too complex for individual minds. Around the queens, the first protohives formed.
Warriors hunted and brought food. Workers tended the queen and maintained the living structures that grew around her. Scouts explored new territories and reported back. And a new cast emerged, the architects, individuals with enhanced neural tissue, who designed the living structures, who planned expansions, who solved problems.
The hives began to build in earnest. They created structures of breathtaking complexity. Labyrinth of living tunnels that extended for miles, breathing walls that filtered nutrients from the water, sensory networks that could detect prey from vast distances. These structures were not built, but grown, modified at the genetic level to serve specific functions.
The proto draal had discovered the power of collective intelligence, and it would carry them to dominance over the entire planet. Part seventh, the Cambrian conquest. 541 million years ago, the explosion of life. On the surface, life was undergoing the most dramatic diversification in Earth's history. The Cambrian explosion saw the emergence of most major animal fila creatures with hard shells, complex eyes, articulated limbs, predators and prey locked into evolutionary arms races, driving innovation at unprecedented rates. The
protodraul noticed for hundreds of millions of years they had remained confined to the deepest trenches. Their expansion limited by the hostile conditions in shallower waters. But the Cambrian seas were changing, becoming more oxygenated, more mineralrich, more hospitable, and they teamed with new prey.
The protodraool began their first systematic expansion into shallow waters. It was a slaughter. The early Cambrian fauna had no defense against predators as sophisticated as the protodraul. These creatures from the deep brought hunting techniques refined over billions of years of evolution. They brought biotechnology that allowed them to adapt to new environments within generations.
They brought collective intelligence that let them coordinate attacks on a scale the surface world had never seen. Trilobytes, those famous arthropods that would dominate Cambrian seas, found themselves prey to creatures that hunted with terrifying efficiency. Anomalicaris, the apex predator of its time, with compound eyes and grasping appendages, discovered it was no longer at the top of the food chain when protodraul attacked from below.
Their acid blood dissolving its armor, their fingial jaws punching through its body. The proto draal established hunting grounds throughout the world's oceans. They were still most comfortable in the deep, still returned to their abyssal hives to spawn and rest, but they ranged far and wide in search of prey.
They drove several early animal lineages to complete extinction, consuming entire ecosystems before they could fully establish themselves. This was when they earned their name, the devourers. Partate the great refinement 450 million years ago. The orivision optimization. The protodocal had spread across the world's oceans, but their expansion had created new challenges.
Different populations were adapting to different environments, diverging genetically, losing the ability to coordinate. The hive mind was fragmenting. The queens recognized this as an existential threat. If the species split into competing populations, they might turn on each other, wasting their capabilities in civil war.
They needed unity, standardization, a way to maintain genetic coherence across vast distances. The solution was radical. They would create a new form of collective intelligence, one that transcended individual hives and united the entire species. Using their mastery of biotechnology, they began growing massive neural structures.
Acres of brain tissue kept alive in specially constructed chambers connected to smaller nodes throughout the oceans. These neural networks could store memories, process complex calculations, and most importantly maintain communication across the entire species. This was the prototype of the neural cathedral. Initial attempts failed catastrophically.
The neural tissue would grow out of control, consuming resources, developing something like consciousness, and then going mad from isolation. Entire hiveswere destroyed by their own neural networks, devoured from within by structures that had become cancerous. But the protodraul persisted, refining the technique through trial and error.
They learned to limit growth, to partition consciousness, to create stable interfaces between individual minds and collective intelligence. After millions of years of experimentation, they succeeded. The first true neural cathedral came online 420 million years ago. And its first act was to think a thought no individual protodraal could have contemplated.
It modeled the future. Using data from millions of individuals, incorporating genetic information from thousands of species, drawing on billions of years of evolutionary history, the neural cathedral made predictions. It foresaw the eventual colonization of land by surface life. It anticipated the rise of vertebrates.
It calculated optimal hunting strategies for prey that hadn't even evolved yet. and it began planning the construction of Drathul, the great city beneath the waves. Part 9, the extinction events 445 million years ago. The first test Earth experienced its first major mass extinction event since the protodole had emerged.
A sudden glaciation that froze the poles and lowered sea levels dramatically. Shallow marine habitats vanished, taking with them countless species. It was one of the big five extinction events that would punctuate Earth's history. The protodraals survived with ease. Their deep sea habitats were largely unaffected by surface climate.
The glaciation actually benefited them in some ways. The concentration of nutrients as shallow seas dried up created rich feeding grounds in the remaining deep waters. They emerged from the extinction event stronger than before with fewer competitors and more available resources. But the neural cathedral drew a different lesson from the event.
The surface world was unstable, prone to catastrophic changes. Any species that depended solely on shallow waters was vulnerable to extinction. The proto draul's deep sea origins had saved them. This realization shaped their entire strategic philosophy. They would remain primarily creatures of the deep, making the abyssal trenches their fortress.
They would hunt the surface waters but never depend on them. They would build their civilization in places where no catastrophe could reach them. Over the next 100 million years, Earth experienced several more mass extinctions. The late Deonian extinctions that killed off most pleaderm fish.
The perian triacic extinction that would later be called the great dying. Each time surface life was devastated. Each time the protodraul endured in the deep and then emerged to feed on the ruins. They began to see themselves as eternal, as the true inheritors of Earth. Surface species came and went, but the draul they had stopped thinking of themselves as proto anything would persist forever.
Part six, the age of dinosaurs. 252 million years ago, the triacic dawn. The Peran extinction had killed 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. It was the closest life on Earth had come to total annihilation. The world that emerged from this catastrophe was strange and new. The age of dinosaurs was beginning.
The Draul watched with interest as reptiles diversified and conquered the land. Some even returned to the oceans, becoming ichthyossaurs and plesiosaurs, marine reptiles that ventured into the draul's hunting grounds. These creatures were unlike anything the draul had encountered before. Warm-blooded, intelligent, social.
They were almost worthy prey. The draul began hunting them with something approaching respect. A plesiosaur could fight back in ways a trilabitete never could. It could learn, could adapt, could work with its pod to defend against attackers. Hunting these creatures required strategy, coordination, patience. The Drawool found the challenge exhilarating.
They also found the marine reptiles intelligence useful for study. The Drawool had been refining their biotechnology for billions of years, but they had never encountered brains quite like these. Warm, fasting, capable of sophisticated problem solving. They captured specimens, studied their neural architecture, learned from them.
This period saw the first draw experiments with genetic modification of prey species. They would capture marine reptiles, alter their genetics, release them back into the wild, and observe the results. Most quickly, unable to survive with their modified biology. But some changes persisted, spreading through populations, subtly altering the evolutionary trajectory of entire lineages.
The draul were learning to guide evolution itself. Part C, the construction of Drathul 200 million years ago, the Jurassic vision. For billions of years, the Draul had lived in organic structures that grew naturally around their hives. But the neural cathedral had been designing something far more ambitious, a planned city, a metropolis that would be themasterwork of their biotechnology.
The construction of Drathool began in the mid-Atlantic ridge where volcanic activity provided abundant geothermal energy and where the tectonic plates were slowly spreading creating new seafloor. It would take millions of years to complete. But the draool had patience. They started by modifying the seafloor itself, seeding it with specialized organisms that would alter the mineral composition of the rock.
These organisms, barely alive, more like living geological processes, slowly transformed the substrate into a surface that could host the structures the draul intended to grow. Then came the foundations, massive columns of bioengineered coralike substance grown to specifications calculated by the neural cathedral.
These columns would support the vast structures above, distributing weight and stress according to principles that human engineers wouldn't discover for millions of years. The building materials themselves were revolutionary living tissue that was harder than steel, more flexible than rubber, self-reping, self-regulating. The draul had created biological equivalents of engineering materials, substances that defied easy categorization as either living or non-living.
Slowly over millions of years, Drathul took shape. Towers rose from the seafloor, their surfaces covered in sensory organs that monitored the surrounding water. Domes grew over the central hive areas, maintaining specialized atmospheres for different activities. Tunnels burrowed deep into the seafloor, connecting to the natural geothermal systems below.
And throughout it all, the neural cathedral grew. acres of brain tissue forming the computational substrate of their civilization. Thinking thoughts of such complexity that they would have been incomprehensible to any individual Draul. By 150 million years ago, Drathul was complete and it was magnificent. A city 3 m tall, 10 m across, home to millions of draul powered by the Earth's own heat, grown from living tissue that had been engineered at the molecular level.
It was the greatest achievement in Earth's history, surpassing anything that had come before or would come for millions of years. And it was just the beginning, part the golden age, 150 to 66 million years ago, the Cretaceous Zenith. This was the apex of Draul civilization, the period when they truly dominated Earth.
From Drathul and dozens of smaller cities, they controlled the world's oceans with absolute authority. No creature swam without their knowledge. No species evolved without their influence. They had perfected biotechnology to levels that would seem like magic to later civilizations. They could design organisms from scratch, writing genetic code as easily as humans would later write computer programs.
They created living machines, creatures that existed only to serve specific functions with no independent will or desire beyond their programming. Their understanding of genetics allowed them to preserve their own species in genetic stasis. Unlike other organisms that evolved constantly in response to environmental pressures, the Doolool had achieved genetic perfection.
Or so the neural cathedral proclaimed. They actively prevented mutations, maintaining their optimal form generation after generation. But there were heretics who questioned this stasis. Some draul argued for continued evolution, for adaptation, for change. The neural cathedral deemed this thinking dangerous, and those who persisted in it were recycled.
Their genetic material was broken down and used to grow new structures. Nothing was wasted in draw society. The surface world during this time was the age of dinosaurs, the Cretaceous period when those great reptiles reached their maximum size and diversity. The draul watched with interest and occasionally amusement as massive sarapods browsed vegetation on the shores as tyrannosaurs hunted on the land.
These creatures were impressive by surface standards, but they were nothing compared to the draul. Still, the draul recognized something in the dinosaurs, a potential for intelligence, particularly in certain theropod lineages. Some of the smaller raptors showed signs of sophisticated social behavior, problem solving abilities, tool use.
The neural cathedral made calculations. If left undisturbed, these creatures might evolve true intelligence within 20 to 30 million years. The cathedral deemed this unacceptable. Intelligent land dwelling competitors could eventually threaten the Draool's dominance. So, the Draul began subtle interference, hunting expeditions targeting the most intelligent species, releasing designer plagues that affected neural development, gently steering dinosaur evolution away from intelligence.
It was genocide by policy, extinction through engineering, and it was entirely effective. The dinosaurs that survived were magnificent in their own way, but none would develop the intelligence to threaten the draul. This was the periodwhen the Draco's cruelty reached its apex. With total dominance came absolute disregard for other life.
They experimented on living creatures without restraint, creating abominations for their own amusement, testing the limits of biological possibility. They hunted not for food but for sport, terrorizing entire ecosystems for entertainment. The draole had become the universe's most successful predator species.
And with that success came a darkness that would define them forever. Part three. The warning signs 70 million years ago. The first anomalies. The neural cathedral detected something strange in the radiation patterns reaching Earth from space. Unusual frequencies, regular patterns, signs that could only be artificial.
Something out there in the darkness between stars was using technology. The cathedral intensified its monitoring. Over the next few million years, the signals grew stronger, closer. They were not random cosmic radiation, but deliberate transmissions, communications between multiple sources, and they were approaching the solar system.
For the first time in their long history, the Draul felt something approaching fear. They had dominated Earth so completely for so long that they had forgotten what it meant to face a potential threat. They had grown complacent, assuming that their biotechnology made them invincible. The idea that something from beyond Earth might challenge them was almost incomprehensible.
The neural cathedral ran millions of simulations. If the source of these signals was a space fairing civilization, they would have technology the Draul had never developed. The Draul had mastered biology, but had never needed to master physics or engineering. They had everything they needed on Earth. They had no spacecraft, no weapons designed to fight at a distance.
No experience with the kind of warfare that might be waged by beings from the stars. The Cathedral made recommendations. Accelerate weapons development. Create new warrior casts optimized for combat against intelligent tool using opponents. Expand the deep earth cities to provide fallback positions if the surface became contested.
The draul began preparations.
