WI: non cellular life is much more prevalent.

What would the world look like if non cellular life was just as common if not more common then cellular life. I relize this will need a POD really really far back and will butterfly humanity but I'm more wondering how life on Earth would look with such a change. Would non cellular life be able to develop into "complex" organisms similar to modern animals?


non cellular life.
 
Evolutionary and prehistoric PODs belong in the ASB forum.

To answer your question though, it would probably be far more limited in what it could do and how it could interact with the world (after all the only non-cellular lifeforms we know of cannot reproduce without a cellular host), so I imagine it would exist in our world and affect the rest of the ecosystem about as much as Archaea do if they're self-reproducing. Archaea are the closest analog we really have, they're vastly different from other organisms (enough to be labelled their own domain, the highest level of classification), and only exist on the fringe, they are all adapted to make use of different extremes.
 
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If you count Viruses as non-cellular life, then it already is fairly prevalent.

Perhaps more prevalent wasn't the best choice of words. I meant like the non celluar life would split out into new kingdoms and phylum's like what cellular life did OTL so they would be just as many "complex" non cellular organisms as their are cellular.
 
Perhaps more prevalent wasn't the best choice of words. I meant like the non celluar life would split out into new kingdoms and phylum's like what cellular life did OTL so they would be just as many "complex" non cellular organisms as their are cellular.
And how are they supposed to be "complex" without a cellular structure?
 
Perhaps we should have a sub-sub-forum for it in ASB like how Shared Worlds is divided up?

No, it needs its own forum, since it really isn't ASB in and of itself, it's just that people often feel the need to stuff humans into their TLs despite that they would have been butterflied away.
 
Not all biological POD belong to ASB: Jared's 'Lands of Red and Gold' lay on biological POD, the fortuitous hybridization of two plant species.
Besides, a taboo on OTL biology would logically imply that it is itself determined by an ASB.

The point is Alternate History (as opposed to historical fiction / fantasy, how possibly enjoyable and stimulating it may be) is based, referenced on OTL history. Then, some time (time varying among other factors with the 'importance' of the divergence) after *any* POD ATL has diverged so much from OTL that almost no reference is possible, one can write (almost) anything and the exact opposite. And here we require a POD a billion years in the past.

About 'cellular', in French cellulaire tends to be restricted to Eucaryotes, so the question would be what if Eucaryotes had remained marginal: can Procaryotes (bacteria) evolve to complex organisms, differentiate tissues and organs more than slime molds (Myxobacteria) do? And the question implies an earlier POD, explaining why the eucaryotic cell did not appear or was out-competed...
 
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