Belnar Imperium
The Belnar Imperium were an alien race that established a colonial presence on Mars. Their current whereabouts are unknown.
Contents
The Ruins
Currently, all information about the Imperium has come from archeological evidence discovered at the Belnar Complex on Mars. Located 3700 km west-northwest of Olympus Mons, 900 km souteast of Elysium Mons, and 375 km north of the northernmost of the Cerberus Fossae, this sprawling ruin has provided humanity with a wealth of information regarding our vanished neighbors.
One unequivocable facts is that 36.4 ± 0.3 million years ago, a spacefaring race established an outpost on Mars. It is known that the race was not native to Mars, as there exist artifacts of extra-areological provenance, based on comparative isotope analysis. In fact, the isotope distribution does not match that of any known location in the solar system, strongly suggesting an extrasolar origin for the Belnar.
The precise origin of the Belnar is currently unknown, though records have been uncovered giving tantalizing hints of a relatively local origin. A tactile plaque (see below) placed on the outside of what is believed to the main Belnar administrative building in the northern ruins appears to be a star chart with a number of nearby stars highlighted. Whether any of these are the Belnar homeworld, or whether they are just other locations visited by the Belnar (or perhaps even the homeworlds of other starfaring species) is unknown.
No biological specimen (either Belnar of of any other organism) has survived the ages since the Belnar city was abandoned, so a precise biological analysis of the Belnar is impossible. Based on the facilities, artifacts, and other remants, however, an incomplete picture can be assembled.
Several tactile plaques contain the gross body plan: three lower appendages arranged with radial symmetry, a stout, barrel-shaped midsection, three whip-like upper appendages, and a low, domed projection from the top of the midsection. From workstation ergonomic considerations, we can deduce that the average Belnar was approximately 120 cm tall. Belnar "chairs" are more akin to low stools which take most --but not all-- of the weight-bearing load off the legs.
Belnar workstations and tools are typically rod shaped, with control surfaces arranged in a spiral fashion all the way around. It is surmised that Belnar arms were long, tactile, super-prehensile appendages, tipped with a pair of opposing muscular "fingers," somewhat akin to the tip of an elephant's trunk, but more gracile. In order to operate the control rods, Belnar anatomists hypothesize that the entire surface of the arm had extremely dense ennervation and musculature, allowing fine manipulation of surfaces all along its length, with gripping of objects handled by the arm-tips and by prehensile wrapping.
The primary sensory mode of the Belnar is unknown. The tactile plaques have no obvious features analagous to "eyes," though this doesn't rule out their existence. However, at the very least, the Belnar appear to be unaware of the perceptual concept of "color," as the interiors of all Belnar installations (as well as their fixtures and artifacts) have no artificial pigmentation or coloring. Every item is simply the color of its constituent materials.
The leading theory is that the Belnar perceived the world primarily through their tactile sense. The surfaces of most Belnar equipment (as well as floors, walls, and sometimes ceilings) are densely covered with intricate patterns of raised and recessed markings. These markings are believed to be either written language or some more fundamental communications / information presentation protocol. In the Belnar xenology community, the term "tactograms" was coined to describe the markings. Work on deciphering these "tactograms" has been slow-going, though a small subset is thought to have a reliable correspondence established. No other form of communication has been discovered.
Complicating the matter is that the static tactograms engraved into the majority of surfaces appears to be a limited subset of a more general class of tactograms. Nearly every human language is recorded using a static set of glyphs, without any extension in time. It would seem the vast majority of Belnar tactograms have a temporal component to them. The same static tactogram can apparently represent quite different notions depending on its time evolution. In this respect, the Belnar language is more akin to modern signing languages.
Predominant among the evidence lending credence to the "tactile language" theory are the enormous quantity of "tactile plaques" present in the ruins. Most are electromechanical devices capable of changing their surface geometry to display tactograms. In a few extraordinary examples, an entire tank filled with a ICEF-contained Trans-Newtonian fluid is capable of acting as a three-dimensional tactile plaque, but all have quite sophisticated surface manipulation capabilities.
In general, these devices are thought to be the equivalent of our raster- and vector-scanned two- and three-dimensional display screens. Some plaques are paired, with the assumption that one is for input and one is for display, but the majority seem to combine both functions into one device.
It is through these plaques that we get most of our information about the Belnar. While our grasp of the tactile language is still extremely tenuous, guided trial-and-error exploration with the devices has given us access, in a few cases, to Belnar data. In many cases the retrieved data is incomprehensible until we develop a further understanding of the tactile language, other data is at a coarser scale and represents the tactile equivalent of a photograph or video.
Using 3D laser scanning techniques, it is possible to adapt from a tactile plaque to a human-readable display. It is via this mechanism that we have been able to begin to interpret the vast quantities of Belnar data still existent in their electronic record systems. We have a long way to go in understanding this data, but some insights have been made into the Belnar way of life.
One particular building contains dozens of tactile plaques that depict various Belnar going about their lives. Some researchers speculate that this building and its contents were specifically created to inform futre archaeologists about the Belnar, though there is nothing like a Rosetta stone to help with interpreting the imagery. For this latter reason, other xenologists suspect that the facility was a knowledge retention installation, meant to transfer useful knowledge of industrial processes to future generations. For this reason, the building has become known as the Academy.
What is is depicted in the Academy is what appears to be a very communal society. Belnar work exclusively in units that Belnar xenologists have come to call Trios, with two Belnar working while one appears to supervise. However, the supervisor role is rotated regularly between members of the Trio. In virtually all industrial applications viewed in the Time Capsule, there does not appear to be any higher tier in the hierarchy; there are no foremen, no managers, and no executives. The Trio is the fundametal and only functional worker unit.
Unfortunately, there are no tactile plaque depictions of leisure activities (indeed, no facilities dedicated to that purpose have yet been discovered) or Belnar home life. Whether any sexual dimorphism (or, indeed, any gender at all) exists is unknown. There are no depictions of Belnar reproduction or offspring.
A work-home split has been posited due to the fact that the majority of industrial concerns are concentrated in the northern ruins, while the southern ruins seem to be group dormitories and housing facilities. It is possible that less durable single-Belnar habitations existed and have been erased by time, but that not a single trace exists, while numerous dormitories are still extant would lend doubt to that supposition.
New Perspectives from the Belnar Corpus
The following consists of excerpts from the report of the 2035 UNIN/UNSA joint panel on Belnar phenomena.
Panel heads:
Commodore Tomas Boen, Chair
Commander sparkmaster
Commander GrimRevenant
Commander Space Shadowing
Commander LordNagash
Part I: The First Artifact
On 23rd April 2034, a Belnar shipping container holding 900 tons of refined neutronium (UMID: TLS-235135) was discovered in a Belnar storage facility on Mars.[1] Shipping containers are relatively common within the contaxt of Belnar artifacts, with over six hundred having been discovered to date.[2] More than 85% of containers are empty, and of the remaining 15%, most of those have contents of little or no interest (having faded into scraps over the millennia).[2] Some few have contained well-preserved Belnar industrial machinery, and a few more have contained Trans-Newtonian Element shipments, as these minerals are extremely durable over geological time scales.[3]
Belnar shipping containers are unsurprisingly rather similar to human ones: boxes made from mundane metals (though Belnar ones often incorporate duranium to achieve a mass-masking effect) with some mechanism for closure. The Belnar mechanism is an intricate three-petaled hinging arrangement. On the surface of all Belnar shipping containers is a low-powered tactile plaque that presumably displays manifest, source, and destination information.
Having examined a number of tactile plaque power sources (advanced TNE-incorporating batteries), it is clear that they are unlikely to have needed replacement over the course of thousands of shipments.[4] Over the course of the ensuing millions of years, however, they have all been fully discharged. As the tactograms on the plaques continually cycle, this means they are all frozen, displaying the state they were in when power dropped below operational thresholds.
While we understand the general mechanism of operation of the plaques,[5] the electronics used to drive them have long been corrupted by radiation. In fact, radiation rot has rendered essentially all Belnar software corrupt, and the only working devices we've found have been those with the most basic of functions. Tactile plaque display microprocessors are certainly not basic, so we've had only the most limited success reproducing their original displays.[6]
For this reason, shipping container plaques have been of particular interest. While most of the Belnar tactile language is still a mystery, one well-established fact is that Belnar numbers and mathematical symbols form an entirely discrete set from their lingual tactograms.[7] As the mathematical symbols are well-understood, we can be certain of which are mathematical in nature and which are lingual.
Operating on the hypothesis that source and destination displays on Belnar shipping containers will have fixed formats with varying numbers, while the format of content displays will be more variable, we performed an exhaustive image comparison against all intelligible shipping container plaques (sample size 248). What we found was a predominance of two tactile displays, and a variety of variations on a third format. We presume the most common two formats are the source and destination displays, while the variations represent different shipping manifests.
This has allowed us to then compare these manifests with actual container contents in some cases (sample size = 18) and establish, with 95% confidence, an extremely limited Belnar vocabulary. We believe we know the static tactogram symbols for "factory," "mine," "mineral," and "machinery." Indeed, we have recognized them from the corpus in places where the context makes sense.
However, the tactile plaque on TLS-235135 was not frozen on a manifest. It was frozen on either the source or destination display. These displays include a set of mathematical identifiers which it has been proposed are astronomical coordinates of some variety. Using knowledge of the Belnar mathematical symbols, we can reproduce the coordinates, though the order in which Belnar listed them was originally unknown.
Belnar astronomical coordinates were not able to be correlated with present locations due to not knowing the reference frame by which they were generated or the order of the coordinates. A very large amount of Belnar scholarship has gone into producing proposed Belnar reference frames.[8,9,10,11,12]. However, the discovery of the Fixed Trans-Newtonian Reference Frame (FTNRF), a by-product of theoretical and experimental jump engine research, changed everything.
The Fixed Trans-Newtonian Reference Frame is a formulation for spatial coordinates in the local space around a star. It is a set of equations, with parameters set by the properties of the star and local gravitational and void environment. The purpose of gravitational survey is to establish the parameters of the equations. Once these parameters are understood, they can produce a solution which corresponds to the spatial location (within the reference frame) of a jump point. It is generally not possible to work in the reverse fashion: i.e., to take a single solution and establish the paramters of the system. The exception is those systems with only a single jump point.[13]
Mr. Rene DeLaurier, a junior analyst at the University of Mars laboratory where the FTNRF was developed, and an amateur Belnar researcher, had been cross-referencing permutations of Belnar astronomical coordinates against the recently-established and still extremely classified FTNRF. He discovered that many of them matched local bodies in the solar system, but did not disclose his work due to the secrecy surrounding the FTNRF.
When TLS-235135 was discovered and catalogued, Mr. DeLaurier was surprised to find that the coordinates on the container matched precisely the location of one of the nodes of the FTNRF, the innermost jump point (which is now popularly referred to as the Sol-Klondike-Kagayan jump point). Deciding that this information was too valuable to hide, he turned it over to his superiors, who acted quickly to collate the work and pass it on to UNSA.[14]
Thus it was established that the Belnar themselves certainly knew of the jump point theory, the location of all of Sol's jump points (as would be required in order to express the position in one with respect to the FTNRF), and were likely engaging in either travel to or contact with entities from beyond our solar system.
Further recent investigation has turned up many more shipping containers with the Sol-Klondike-Kagayan jump point as the source or destination. A vital fact is that all the display plaques containing these coordinates are the same, either the source or destination. There are none of the opposing type. Stunningly, on 29 March 2035 a shipping container was discovered containing a coordinate for the Sol-Roanoke jump point, of the opposite type. No containers have been found bearing coordinates for the middle jump point.
This indicates the Belnar had knowledge of at least three star systems, with contact between all of them. The nature of this contact would have to wait on a further xenoarchaeological artifact discovery.
Part II: The Second Artifact
On 25th June 2034, Colonel Can-O-Raid, then CO of the 78th Engineering Brigade, made a momentous discovery. During a routine sweep through an underground Belnar vault, the colonel noticed a sheet of rolled Belnar steel leaning against a wall. Upon closer examination, the panel proved to be covered in raised, static tactograms. Behind the panel was a corridor which would eventually lead to a shipping container filled with nearly 3000 tons of processed duranium, but the important find would prove to be the panel itself.
Fig 1. The recovered Belnar artifact. It contains 36 glyphs arranged in a 6x6 grid. Note the predominance of three- and six-sided objects.
Initially believed to be a "time-decomposed" tactogram, initial studies of the object (cataloged as IDT-8341) focused on this aspect. While a few objects have been found with two or three frames of a dynamic tactogram transcribed, IDT-8341 was the first to contain nearly so many static images. However, the claim that it was a time-decomposed tactogram was called into question by the fact that no frozen tactile plaques showed any of the frames from IDT-8341, nor any interpolations between any two frames.[15]
A breakthrough came in early May 2035, when Commander LordNagash, running yet another statistical analysis of IDT-8341 versus the Belnar corpus, made a crucial discovery. While no tactograms in the corpus were a direct match for any of the tactograms on the panel, every Belnar tactogram appeared to be a superposition of portionss of tactograms from the panel.
While the early results were somewhat tenuous, a concerted effort was launched to discover the exact rules of combination used to go from the "base" tactograms on the panel to the complicated tactogram frames present throughout the corpus. Genetic algorithm techniques were used to compared hundreds of different randomly generated combination rules. Within three days, the program had generated a set of rules that split up the panel tactograms into a set of base elements. Every tactogram in the corpus was able to be assembled from these elements with 100% confidence. While the program has been allowed to run continually afterward, no other set of rules has been able to produce 100% of corpus tactograms.[16]
Discoveries came quickly after this. Assuming the generated tactogram assembly rules (TARs) are the same as those actually used by the Belnar language, researchers have engaged in intensive analyses of the corpus. The first major revelation was that IDT-8341 (by this point known to the research group as "The Tactogram Generator," or just "The Generator") was able to be sub-divided at different levels. The 6x6 grid could be broken up into smaller square grids (1x1, 2x2, 3x3, and 4x4, and 5x5). There are 36 1x1 grids, 25 2x2 grids, 16 3x3 grids, 9 4x4 grids, and 4 5x5 grids. The corpus was analyzed against these various sub-grids using nearest-neighbor methods, and the results were astounding: tactograms composed of only elements from sub-grids made up the vast majority of corpus tactograms. Even more remarkable is that different sub-grids seem to correspond to different conceptual groupings.
Based on studying the locations and assumed purposes of equipment decorated with corpus tactograms, the team was able to establish that the sub-grids are representative of major conceptual divisions within the language. For example, the previously discovered words "mine" and "mineral" are both composed solely of sub-tactograms from 2x2 grid #14. "Factory" and "machinery" are both from 2x2 grid #16. "Automated mine" comes from the 3x3 grid containing the overlap between the two. Extending this work (and applying a large amount of computer-assisted translation techniques developed over the years since the discovery of the Belnar ruins), we were able to confidently produce translations for 75% of Belnar concrete nouns and 25% of Belnar verbs. Another 10% of nouns and 30% of verbs are ambiguous, but context was able to render them intelligible.
Our grasp on the Belnar language thus increased dramatically, but there remained the fact that the corpus is all based on frozen tactile plaques and those few static tactograms that exist. However, possession and understanding of the Generator and the Belnar TARs also allows us to understand all possible Belnar tactograms. Working backward from this point, the experiments into reactivating Belnar tactile plaques were greatly aided, to the point that a working software emulator for the tactile plaque driver was produced on 24 May 2035.
Tactile plaques connected to the emulator and an appropriate power source immediately began cycling their contents, vindicating the methods used in the emulators production. Thousands of copies of the device were rapidly produced and distributed to UN engineering teams (though knowledge of the Generator and the TARs was kept classified). Over the next five days, nearly every cataloged tactile plaque was reactivated and its contents digitally recorded and submitted to a University of Mars database project set up for the purpose.
With the Belnar corpus thus expanded by a factor of over a million, computer programs were set to work attempting to translate these new texts. An iterative process, the program files translations with projected accuracies less than 90% into a separate database. As successful translations improve the overall accuracy of the programs, these less accurate translations are revisited and re-translated.
Through this method, nearly half of the recovered corpus has thus far been translated. The vast majority, much like human languages, is of little interest: instructions for machine usage, schedules, manifests, component lists, etc. Personal communications contain a large amount of dense conceptual content and are still poorly translated.
However, within the Belnar facility known as "The Academy," thousands of tactile plaques contain a vast wealth of information about the Belnar and their place in the universe. Our translation efforts have been the heaviest here, and the information contained within has been profoundly revelatory.
Part III: The Belnar
Our improved grasp of the Belnar language has given us remarkable new insights into the Belnar as an organism and as a civilization. The vast majority of our new knowledge comes from a facility known to Belnar xenoarchaeologists as "The Academy."
The Academy is a medium-sized complex spanning four buildings, both above and below ground. Within are 152 rooms, each containing one large tactile plaque and many smaller ones. While the smaller plaques all contain tactogram readouts, the large plaques display motion "video" of various processes.
As these were originally frozen like all tactile plaques, their purpose was unknown. Many of them displayed representations of the Belnar body plan, surrounded by machinery, both familiar and unfamiliar. When returned to motion, these plaques have turned out to be instructional "videos," with lingual depictions of the portrayed acts on the accompanying small plaques.
The purpose of the facility as a whole has also become clearer as a result of reactivating the plaques. Prior to the reactivation, there were two primary competing theories. The first (and somewhat more widespread) theory is that the Academy is just that: an educational institution intended to teach juvenile Belnar about processes in Belnar society and industry. The alternative explanation is that the facility is a sort of museum or time capsule, intended to teach future generations (whether Belnar or not) about the species that left it.
Two discoveries have helped to clarify matters. First, a recent comparative dating of the facilities has definitively established that the Academy is one of the last installations to have been erected on Mars by the Belnar, being built near the very end of the settlement's existence. Second, some weeks after the discovery of the Generator it was realized that the slab was a perfect fit for a large blank space in the Academy in a room quite near the primary entrance. When a reproduction was placed in the gap, it was found to integrate perfectly into a larger tactogram display on the wall of the chamber. This room quickly became known as the "Key Room."
While both of these tend to indicate that the latter explanation for the Academy's existence is the correct one, the matter was finally settled after the deciphering of the Belnar language. A prominent plaque in the Key Room reads approximately, "PLACED HERE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT OF FUTURE OTHERS." "OTHERS" here is a concept from the same sub-grid as the terms the Belnar use to describe themselves as a civilization. Whether it means future Belnar or non-Belnar civilizations was unknown at the time of the first translation. In any case, it certainly seems to rule out the use of the Academy as a place for educating contemporary Belnar. As such, we've begun to prefer the appellation "The Museum" to refer to the installation.
Once the corpus of the Museum began to be translated (both by our analysis programs and in some cases by hand), it became clear that the majority of the "text" used a rather simplified subset of the full Belnar language. Abstract concepts are kept to a minimum compared to examples from outside the Museum, and there are no "philosophical" passages. The language used throughout the first 90% of the Museum is clinical, scientific, and straightforward. We hypothesize that this was done purposefully in order to simplify its translation.
The first fifty or so rooms are given over to the Belnar origins and biology. While some portions are still a mystery, we have been able to fill in some important details.
For example, we have learned that Belnar homeworld is outside the water-habitability zone of their star (a red dwarf). They give their homeworld no specific name. (In fact, we can find no reference to any polity or individual being given a unique or specific name, though it is possible we are just unversed in Belnar naming conventions). In order to distinguish between the biology of life on the Belnar homeworld and the Belnar themselves, we have taken to calling the homeworld "Bel."
Bel is a world significantly larger than Earth, with a surface gravitational acceleration of 2.7g. It is extremely volcanically active as the crust is riddled with pores and openings that allow ammonia to make contact with the mantle and circulate in a gaseous form, creating ammonia geysers and hot pools. The atmosphere is mostly molecular nitrogen with a sizeable portion of molecular hydrogen and a small amount of methane and trace amounts of ammonia vapor. The Bel hydrosphere, meanwhile consists primarily of ammonia at well below the freezing point of water. Thus, ammonia is the biological solvent in the biochemistry of Bel organisms, while hydrogen forms the oxidizer. In a further departure from terrestrial life, the Belnar genetic storage system replaces adenine with diaminopurine, forming a DNA-like molecule rather more stable than our own. The rest of Bel biochemistry is carbon-based, as on Earth.
The discussion touches on certain aspects of the Belnar's take on evolution (which they appear to take as a scientific truth on par with gravity). For instance, they refer to the "very high" rate of genetic mutation in Earth organisms. They attribute this to both the more stable Bel DNA-analogue and to the reduced radiation output of Bel's star. It is interesting to note that the discussion parallels and contrasts between their own world's biology and that of Earth may indicate that these messages have been directed specifically at intelligent life from Earth.
The reduced radiative output of Bel's star and the low temperature of the ammonia-water hydrosphere would serve to limit the chemical reaction rate of Bel biology. This would have a direct effect on metabolism rates as well. The Belnar comment on this, noting the short lifespans and high activity levels of Eocene life on Earth. They give the average lifespan of a Belnar as over two hundred Bel years, a period of over a millennium on Earth. A low mutation rate and extreme longevity are deep drivers for many aspects of Bel life and Belnar civilization.
The earliest life on Bel, according to Belnar evolutionary theory, originated in deep thermal vents under the ammonia-water Bel sea. The course of Bel evolution took much longer than on Earth, on the order of 7-9 billion years, although its diversity seems no less than Earth's. While the focus of the Museum is on the Belnar, there are several plaques about Bel flora and fauna.
Belnar "flora" consists of organisms that fix atmospheric methane and react it with ammonia to form molecular hydrogen (which is released into the atmosphere) and hydrogen cyanide, which is excreted as a waste product. This reaction requires a large input energy, so most flora are entirely sessile and spread out over enormous areas to capture maximal sunlight. Others use temperature gradients in the copious Bel hot pool to provide the energy requirements. Some of these latter organisms are motile, and can store enough energy by visiting a hot pool to subsist for days at a time, allowing them to be predators. Some of these predatory flora have become quite advanced.
Belnar fauna react amines (created by metabolism of proteins) with hydrogen in a complex process that generates ammonia and methane. This is a more favorable reaction (though still far less energetic than typical oxygen-based cellular respiration), and allows the hydrogen breathers to be more mobile than the methane breathers.
Physically, a Belnar is a hydrogen-respiring, carbon-based lifeform. They take in ammonia via direct ingestion and as a component of their food intake, which consists almost entirely of cultures of the sessile Bel flora with additional nutritional supplements to provide trace elements. They possess a light internal skeleton that is augmented by a flexible, keratinaceous exoskeleton. Their muscles are rather more like the muscles of cephalopods than vertebrate muscles.
They are long-lived but not especially active. The Belnar reckon their species may have existed for over three million years before developing technology. They believe their remote ancestors were deep cave dwellers, which led to the lack of development of a visual sensory apparatus. In fact, the Belnar did not discover the concept of vision until well into their technological phase.
The primary Belnar sense is, as had been guessed, tactile, although the exoskeleton does possess a number of temperature nerve endings that can detect the direction of large heat sources. One of first large surprises from the Museum is that the Belnar do possess a sophisticated spoken language, and it seems to have been the primary form of communication. As the species never developed an internal auditory mechanism, the language is "heard" by directing a specialized portion of the prehensile appendages at the speaker. These areas are extremely sensitive to minute vibrations, allowing a Belnar to "hear" the speech of another at long distances. All Belnar possessed a second mode of communication, in which a pair would clasp sensory appendages and make minute manipulations in a form of tactile sign language.
The Belnar possessed four body orifices: inhalatory, exhalatory, ingestive, and excretory. Speech sounds were produced from the exhalatory orifice, located on the bottom of the organism near the excretory opening. Inhalation and ingestion were performed via twin orifices on the top of the domed head. Digestion and gas exchange were performed by organs specialized for the task (just as in humans).
However, the Belnar lack a central nervous system, with the brain-analogue being distributed throughout the central body cavity. This makes them less susceptible to neural damage, but also decreases the speed of ion transport, making Belnar neural impulses comparatively sluggish. This was not a selective factor in the Bel evolutionary sphere due to the low-energy environment. Additionally, the lack of a large, energy-hungry visual processing apparatus in the brain allowed the tactile sense to become hugely amplified, resulting in the Belnar tactile language.
There are three Belnar genders, and all three are required for reproduction, in a manner somewhat analogous to the game "Scissors, Paper, Stone." For want of better terminology for a trinary gender system, we have thus dubbed the genders as "Scissors," "Paper," and "Stone." Most higher organisms on Bel exhibited this trinary gender system. It turns out that the "trio" work units known to form the fundamental unit of Belnar society consist of one of each gender.
Belnar society dictated that a central authority mated three juvenile Belnar into a trio, and that this trio would last for life, except in the case of premature death of one of the members. The exact matching decision rationale is still unknown, as the plaque discussing it covers concepts which are as yet poorly translated. Young Belnar birthed of a trio were raised communally until the time of they were mated. There does not seem to be a concept of a Belnar "family." Certainly no terms for familial relationships (son, sister, etc) have been translated up to this point.
Socially, the Mars Belnar view themselves as a rather young race. This must be put into context, however, as the Belnar themselves believe that their species existed for over three million years before discovering technology. They cite a variety of factors for this: the low mutation rate of Bel organisms, the extreme longevity of their species, and the low-energy environment of their homeworld are the primary theories. The lack of an oxygen atmosphere made fires somewhat more rare, and the Belnar taming of fire was late in their species development. The lack of a visual sense led to a failure to appreciate the utility of electromagnetic radiation and its attendant technological benefits.
Eventually, however, they came to appreciate essentially all of what we recognize as modern science. This had enormous impact on the Belnar as a society. In fact, the Museum speculates that the mastery of fire may have caused a rapid evolutionary shift in their species, increasing their activity limits and their ability to exert their dominance over their environment, transforming them from sluggish, slow-minded grazers into a technology wielding society over the course of "only" a hundred thousand years. Full understanding of electromagnetic radiation enabled them to begin mapping their universe and expanding their presence on Bel. (The Belnar understanding of EM radiation is at least as complete as ours. The only difference is that while we place special importance on the visual spectrum, the Belnar merely regard it as another region on the EM spectrum).
The discovery of Trans-Newtonian mechanics caused a further paradigm shift. With the energy density of sorium, Belnar energy supplies were now nearly unbounded. However, it must be remembered that despite all these increases, the pace of Belnar advancement was still at least an order of magnitude below our own. The Belnar grappled with the new advancements Trans-Newtonian technology could bring them for centuries, slowly stepping off their homeworld for their first forays into the heavens.
It was shortly into their early exploratory phase that the Belnar were first visited by the beings they refer to as "THE MIND."
