this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
12 points (87.5% liked)
Furry Chat
679 readers
1 users here now
Yiffit chat! Talk about anything you want here.
Mention @chat@yiffit.net from your favorite Fediverse / Mastodon client to post here directly, or post directly via any Lemmy instance.
Community Icon (CC-BY-NC-SA) Tom Fischbach
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Opposable thumbs are kinda important to everything. Climbing, throwing, manipulating. Basically the entire industrial world and all products. I think of my days working at an asphalt plant. No machinery is possible as it is now, cars, driving, maintenance of anything; it all requires thumbs. The extra step of some kind of prosthetic manipulator would make everything prohibitively expensive impractical IMO. It would be a world of cave life without tools and fire.
Assuming we're talking animal anatomy (and not 'hands' on species that normally have paws), all of the jobs and societal roles that require fine manipulation would be limited to a fairly small number of species. Monkeys would likely be very sought after for most of those positions. Rodents would likely be pretty high on the list, too. On the other side of things, canines and felines - despite their popularity - would have the hardest time with things. Never mind things like marine mammals and birds.
Do otters count with marine mammals? Birds are very good at manipulation and some can create some tools. In your description I think that world would have some pretty serious segregation issues.
If we're going with ferals, very different world, but you do have some with thumbs, bears, rodents... I like this take where a character without hands (a mantis) question how they got their cat friend into the straitjacket. I think you would get industrialization, it would just look different enough we can't envision it.
I am not into furry stuff (saw this in the New/All feed). However, I am very into AI roleplaying, hard science fiction, and this overall idea of how things might be different under some arbitrary ruleset. IMO, the less that happens "off screen" the more stuff becomes interesting to a wider audience.
I have trouble picturing the fundamentals like machining, welding, foundry work, all the way to maintenance. Like picture yourself changing a flat on a car and trying to replace the wheel with the spare. Ladders in particular would be out. Around the home, it would likely be easier to clean something like a grill you might find in a restaurant's kitchen than it is to manipulate pots and pans. A joystick might be easier than a steering wheel. Elastic closures on clothing would likely replace buttons, zippers, or lace ups. Those are just a few I can think of off hand.
Off screen is always a cheap excuse, but makes for funny comics.
From your descriptions, it sounds like the creatures in your world are sentient versions of the ones in ours. I think that world would look different in ways we can't imagine. The analogous technologies would have hundreds of years of development starting from a different baseline. I think there would be a lot more cooperation needed for tasks, and things would be designed with that in mind. Continued development would lead to more automation, like in our reality, but not in a form we are used to. A keyboard wouldn't work with paws, but that isn't to say something just as efficient wouldn't be created as an input method. The whole written language might look different to account for potential writing dexterity limitations. The world would be completely alien.