Maya Ben David
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Speculative Airplane Biology
🕑 Added 2025-07-22 23:34:16 +0000 UTCPrehistoric airplanes, pseudoscience and mythology. These are the things I’ve been thinking about lately. I made a fuzzy airplane girl. Like a machine dinosaur. She’s going to contrast with the slick design of my new airplane costume. I’m working on a video about the origins of airplanes. How they were previously feral and are now like domesticated cows.
I don’t know much about science so maybe some of you can help me massage this concept.
Here’s my pitch:
Prehistoric airplanes were apex predators. They would soar through the sky then land in an empty field. They would allow foliage and small animals to make a home in and around them. They would keep their mouths open so that creatures would use their bodies as caves. Real plants could grow in their stomachs because they had airplane window-like structures to let in natural light.
Eventually a human would discover this “cave” and be so excited about the safety and green life. The green life inside the plane would be their “airplane food”. They would invite other humans to co habit in the body of the plane not knowing what it was. When the plane had enough people in her stomach she would rise up in the sky and digest the humans in her stomach while flying.
Every molecule has a “handedness” called Chirality meaning they are either left handed or right handed. In a lab you are able to switch the the “direction” which changes characteristics of the molecules. The drug Thalidomide's left-handed form was used to treat morning sickness, while the right-handed form caused birth defects.
Scientists were able to flip the prehistoric airplane’s molecule from left handed (apex predator) to right handedness (herbivore) making the airplanes we know and ride in today.
I’m not sure what I want to say about this fictional genetic engineering yet. I just wanted to share with you all my new costumes and what I’m thinking about! How does the blue airplane come off to you? I wanted her to be decile and pretty but she’s kind of reading as a military machine or something!
-Your prehistoric rat
Comments
Maya Ben David
YES! This was the big hole in my plan because how would earlier humans know how to examine chiral genes? Plane herding and selective breeding as a start make so much more sense. Also, starting on a smaller scale just feels more believable. You always have such great ideas! Maybe the reason airplanes don't flip back so easily is because of this symbiotic relationship. Maybe the flip is coming. I like the frutiger aero aesthetic. I think i'm going to either save or minimally feature the blue suit plane and use my recently remade classic airplane costume for this. Since the fluffy airplane has a white face, I think it would make more sense to go with the classic white airplane design for this video.
Gwenivere the Ponderous
Fictional speculative biology is my jam, i have so many ideas about this! I'm thinking from a scientific standing maybe it would be better to phrase the chiral gene creating a more docile plane as the humans artificially selecting the planes with this trait. Or at the least maybe this could be the first step? It is the most ancient form of genetic engineering after all. Im imagining an old-timey plane herder trying to domesticate harmless gliders like the Kittyhawk Wright Flier, and maybe modern scientists figuring out how to imbue them with the traits of the larger planes so they can hold more passengers while still being docile enough not to eat them. Immediately I jumped to a symbiotic relationship with these new planes and their passengers. Kind of like the remora fish that rides on the great white shark to eat the growths of algea on their hinds, I'm imagining the in-flight food that the passengers eat as some sort of infection or algea that needs to be routinely cleaned out so they can fly properly. A beautiful ecosystem for sure, it's almost like the humans are part of the plane's gut microbiome! Im sure a similar thing happened to us when little microbes decided to start riding us to feed off our gut bacteria! I imagine that quite a few of the early gut microbes were eaten alive like our prey that we devour. Fluffy plane makes me warm and fuzzy inside, i think that if it were aerodynamically viable I would only want to ride in fluffy planes in real life. Texturally I think it actually makes sense, the direction you're going with the modern planegirl suit. Going from wild and fluffy to sleek and smooth and passive feels right, like the wild edges were trimmed away. Maybe adding some color to her would steer it away from accidentally being military-coded? Like some smooth and minimal floral curves to give it a frutiger aero aesthetic?
Maya Ben David
Woah it's so cool that you have that experience! I grew up in the city, so I have none of that knowledge
Tom Taylor
Love the concept. It reminds me of my childhood when my family would trade tips for hunting and trapping wild Spam which developed into a whole ecology.
