Okay, so my story's not monetizable, so no need to be stingy with it.

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The idea was that some aliens see a colony of humans on a few different
planets who are about to face some utter planetary destruction in a hundred
thousand years. Let's say they've lost the ability for space travel.

They figure out that the humans won't ever have the technology to get off
the planet(s) in time.  They survey the surrounding corner of the galaxy
and find two very different and barely habitable planets.

So, they start kidnapping all the prebubescent kids, putting them through
different ordeals until say 1/3 are killed, then they release the survivors
back to their original respective planets. Occasionally one from the other
planet gets dropped off on the other one.

The thing is one set of ordeals has to do with water, the other with trees
or cliffs.

The aliens have this quasi-benevolent idea. They think that they can through
natural selection produce two different races of humans that can survive
better on these other planets-- one an ocean world with little land, and
another say a cliff-y planet.  They think that they can make human dolphins
and birds!

The humans of course are sorely oppressed by this, but eventually some of
the kids figure it all out. They save the humans, yada yada yada.


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I suppose the story could work if the aliens kidnapped 21 year olds, but
then the whole thing of artificially-imposed natural selection could be
moot since a non-small percentage of folks have kids by this time anyway.
And parental death for me is weirder than kid death, so that's not gonna
work either.

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