Teleporting, Time Travel & Terraforming, all in one story

[Noclevername]

I'm working on another story idea, this one involves the use of wormholes while trying not to beat up Einstein too badly.

The basic concept is that, X years from now, we accidentally discover a way to create portals in spacetime-- certain physical limits prevent you from going into your own past or any nearby place, but it does allow us to access the past of distant stars and planets; Basically if you go back as far as spacetime will "bend", 600 years, you can't get any closer to the physical space you occupied at that time than 600 light years. Someone decides to take advantage of this temporal property to terraform a thousand or so worlds by introducing tailored microbes into the distant past and then skipping ahead a few million years to where those worlds' conditions are more suitable for introducing Earthlife, which is then given a few thousand years to spread.

"Meanwhile" the accident that leads to this discovery has wound up stranding a group of people in an unusual environment, leading to the development of a bizarre culture. The world where they end up has also been retrofitted with life, but going back billions of years instead of millions, leading to an evolutionary development unlike Earth's. The planet itself is hostile to humans on the surface, but pools of oxygenated fluid can support large warm-blooded mammals. Thus over millenia they develop an extremely alien mindset and communication and a technology based on very different principles. They become the story's antagonists when they learn of the existence of other worlds and gain access to the wormhole technology, allowing them to attempt to absorb the rest of humanity into their own image.

[Ara Pacis]

Sounds confusing. What type of fluid?

[Noclevername]

Sounds confusing. What type of fluid?

Some type of PFC, I think. Since they can't drink water while immersed, water is extracted in small bladders that grow on the plant life that lives on the surface of the pools, and the bladders are eaten.

The fact that they live in these pools influences their culture; since most of them are small and isolated, groups have learned to avoid inbreeding by making "space suits" full of fluid and migrating to other pools, and absorbing any other tribe they find. That's what drives them to try to absorb mainstream humanity from its many newly-settled planets. It's a cultural imperative that, in their native environment, is a survival characteristic.