The basis for my theory:
If we developed warp drive, genetic manipulation, and transporter tech, I’d reckon even before that we’d first figure out how to make dogs live for hundreds of years. Because that’s easier and of course we would.
I’ve seen people post that it must have been like Porthos v9 because of the time difference, but there’s no way that dog didn’t outlive Archer by decades, because if we’re going to do anything good as a species, it will be making sure our dogs outlive us.
So Scotty lost the OG Porthos.
e: better phrasing
One of the reasons that cats tend to live longer than dogs there’s a lot of cats are just general muggies, they basically bread themselves.
You can always tell something funky has happened when there’s a litter of black and white cats and then a random orange one in the mix. There’s always some throwback to an earlier ancestor. But that basically never happens in dogs.
There is more going on in the background with cat coat colors, genetically, than dog coat colors, genetically. While the variations are huge in dogs (here’s just one breed’s possibilities), it’s quite possible to know the chances of the offspring from what the current generation are and what their parents were. Here’s another look at that. Horses are another one where there’s enough going on that you can’t always tell what they’ll throw.
Cats are also capable of having multiple fathers per litter, so even taking into account the weirdness of cat coats, you can get more diversity than you expect if another male happens to be wandering by.
This is excellent! Thanks for taking the time to share. It bothered me that the quality of the Guide to Housecat Colors and Patterns is too poor to read who the original artist is. I spent some time finding Joumana Medlej (https://majnouna.com/), the original artist, who has an extensive catalogue of work documented on their website.
I cannot find the housecat colors image in higher quality on Joumana’s site. My speculation is it’s included in the Artist’s Guide to Cats eBook on gumroad. I noticed the previews on cerdarseed, searched that site, and found a much higher quality version. While it’s fully readable in that small viewport the site owner is trying to prevent folks from downloading the image directly.
It seems they’re loading the image from cerdarseed.com/tuts/catcol#.jpg (where # represent numbers 1-8) and stitching it together on the loaded page. I think that’s an interesting technical choice worth noting.