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Humans on another planet?

Usually I'm more into Urban Fantasy or alternative History with my world set here on earth. So this may be the first book where I have a Fantasy world created. I realized I'm not sure how to explain the existence of humans on this planet and that I've never read anything dealing with it. I considered creating my own race but they would basically just be humans so there didn't seem much point.

Do I need to explain it? If I made it this planet the Science is too advanced for the setting, magic would have to exist in a time we know it didn't. And it does have a wilder feel. Not totally medieval but not quite the advanced society we have today. Technology isn't as advanced. I have very little ideas yet for my setting but just wanted to get this question answered before I start working on it.

Thanks (happy to give my info is needed)
 

Alex Reiden

Minstrel
If it wasn't explained, I would wonder how or why there are humans on this other planet. A short passage or offhand remark about how they came from a portal/spaceship/divine engineering/etc. would be enough for me.

It doesn't seem to be a point of concern for many other readers, however.
 
Does the answer matter to the story?

That's the big question. If the answer is no, then answering the question is not necessary. That's how I feel about it.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
As the reader, how would I know they were humans? How would I even know it was another planet? Most times, a story will simply be set somewhere and it's clearly not our contemporary world, but neither does it need to occupy a place in our galaxy. It's just a fantasy world.
 

K.S. Crooks

Maester
If you're concerned then don't use the term "human". Use people or refer to the countries on your planet. Readers will assume the characters are humans unless you tell them otherwise.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
I went the 'ancient aliens' route with my worlds. Basically, tens of thousands of years ago, and erratic intervals thereafter, aliens would come to earth, collect the odd isolated tribe or village, and whisk them away to another world, initially by spacecraft, later via portals. Did the same thing with other races. ancient aliens are (mostly) long gone, though isolated individuals, semi-functional devices, and ruined outposts turn up here and there.
 
For me, as a reader, it wouldn't matter at all. It's a fantasy book. The default assumption for me is that the fantasy world is somewhere other than earth and the people inhabiting it are humanoid with whatever differences with humans the story needs (able to do magic or something like that). If you want to deviate from that you need to explain it to me. If not and it's not important for the story I don't need to know.

As a writer, I tend to go with "I need to know just enough to get by". There's a chance knowing how my humans arrived in my world matters, but in most cases I doubt it. And in that case, for me, it will matter very little to the actual story. So I don't need to know it. And not knowing it has the advantage that I can't bore the reader with it with an info-dump.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Indeed, with fantasy the author has to make at least some effort to tell me it's *not* another world. Urban fantasy has to do this. Use real place names, reference real events, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I'll just assume it's a close facsimile. Or that the story is about a magical corner of the world no one knows about, as in Beagle's In Calabria.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
I cant imagine a circumstance that resulted in humans being here on our planet that could not also apply to another. Even we don't really know how we came here. And many SciFi/Fantasy stories have tried to deal with this. Star Trek presented that there was parent DNA form from which the Humans, Klingon's, Romulans and Vulcans were all created from. Battle Star Galactica suggest that we are descendants of Caprica, and Alien/Promethues suggests were are created by the DNA of the Navigators. So its out there. In fantasy, many worlds intermingle by the use of magic, gates, and planes.

IMO, you don't need to explain. Just have humans and move on.
 
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ISawTheDragon

New Member
Right now, I'm writing something between those lines. I will say that if you write your own fantasy, you should make your own terms of what technologies human can use. For example, an Epic Fantasy in another planet you shouldn't write about spaceships.
So, how to explain humans in another planet... You can talk about "another dimension" or just write about "cosmic wanderers" without too much thought.
 
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Hi,

Or you could explain it as legend eg, in the long distant past the great god ??? brought people to this new land to plant his tobaccor crops etc. That way you've got an explanation without actually having one at all if you see what I mean.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Alex Reiden

Minstrel
I cant imagine a circumstance that resulted in humans being here on our planet that could not also apply to another.

It's not so much circumstance as plausible probability. It's generally believed, and (mostly) definitively proven, that humans evolved here on Earth naturally, and not germinated or transported here from somewhere else. This is the status quo. Since the chances of our species being on another planet are so infinitesimally small without some intervention, it's generally assumed they got there from Earth or through some other artificial means. The question it begs is: how? Which may or not be important to the story.

If a backstory establishes humans were engineered to evolve somewhere, anywhere, then yes, it opens the possibility this could have been done on another worlds too. It's a plausible explanation, but without one, we are left to wonder. Not an entirely necessary piece of exposition, since fantasy is the genre of "wonder," but we still pause to contemplate it.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
In the Prometheus story (Aliens), we saw the navigators came to the planet and seeded it with DNA, and achieved beings that looked relatively like themselves. In a magical context, it would only take one ancient wizard to magically travel to a new world via a magic gate and become part of their DNA creation process. Seems plausible--or at least as plausible as it was in Prometheus.

Fantasy stories tend not have SciFi type explanations, but instead Fantasy ones. The Gods created things such... That would also suffice for why humans somewhere else.

The probability is that the chances for life at all is infinitesimally small. The evidence, so far, seems to bare this out. On the only planet we know where life has developed and an evolutionary process took place, is one where humans were formed as the dominant species. Given a similar world, it would be reasonable to surmise that humans would do well on it as well, for the same reasons. Since Evolution is a process of survival of the fittest, it could be surmised as well that man shaped creatures, with things like wedge shaped bodies, forward facing eyes, opposable thumbs and high functioning brains, are the most likely fittest creature to achieve dominion. The probability of something greatly different is presupposing the realm of all possibilities, and not that almost all of the other possibilities would fail. In the realm of things that could succeed, we've no reason to believe human-ish beings would not be the result of the evolutionary process. It may even be the most probable.

In Avatar, we see a similar man-shaped species, that aside from the fact they were placed in a story with actual humans, if there were no humans, and the author never said, we would seldom know the difference. They may as well be humans.

So, I suggest, humans can exist on distant worlds, and still be in the realm of probability. And may even be a little more than probable.

None of which matters to the OP's question. Readers will believe Humans on distant planets. No explanation needs to be given. But...can we have something like Greek fire in a world with no Greeks?

Edit: I guess a less long winded way to say this is, Human's are the result of a process, not pure probability. If I start the world with probability, and then put it through a process, and let it ride a million years, the process will skew the pure probability nature of the experiment. Not all things that start as probable can survive the process (in fact, next to all of it wont). The process is more likely to produce humans (which I base on our only example, and some reasoning as to why that happened) than all the stuff pure probability could suggest.
 
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Alex Reiden

Minstrel
The examples you list may result in other species evolving into something similar to humans, if they start off as carbon-based life in the first place (another broad assumption!), but most probably not quite human. I'm fine with that, but even the smallest difference would result in character descriptions not explicitly human. After all, the difference between chimps and humans is only 1%, but how many fantasy characters could you realistically confuse for a chimp? Or even a na'vi?

The difference among humans ourselves, as variable as we are, is less than 0.1%, or 1 in 10,000. So for every story on another world I read about human humans, I should get to read 9999 others with something at least noticeably different, right? Okay, this isn't an apples to apples statistical comparison (the real probability is closer to 1:10^21, or one out of a billion trillion), but it sounds like fun. :greyalien:

Of the examples you listed, the most feasible is: the gods did it. That's pretty much what it would take. I'll go with that one barring anything else!
 
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