Thursday 17 September 2015

The End Of The Danellians?

I have always rather vaguely imagined that the Danellians existed at the End Of Time in both a chronological and a teleological sense of "End," that they transcended time and thus were beyond "change and decay," or at least decay. A Christian upbringing engenders the idea that the far future merges into eternity whereas the eternal as the timeless, atemporal or maybe transtemporal is ever present, without past or future.

The Danellian Era begins only a million years after the twentieth century, which is nothing in cosmic terms. Even if this universe is only one of many, no single universe is supposed to last forever. Poul Anderson's later AI future histories present the idea that consciousness might somehow survive the heat death of the universe but no such notion was on the agenda when the early Time Patrol stories were being written.

So do the Danellians like everything else come to an end either at the heat death or before and, if before, how? Their only fictive role was to explain the Time Patrol. Thus, these further questions are unanswerable.

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Or the Danellians might somehow come to an end BEFORE the heat death of the universe. In a cosmos already billions of years old and with at least as many billions more to exist, that kind of "Ending" is as likely as somehow lasting till the heat death. And this does not have to mean physical extinction, Danellian civilization might some how fall while they, as a race, continued to exist.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
I have never thought of the Danellians in that way but I cannot think of any argument against it.
Paul.