Poul Anderson Appreciation: Near Light Speed

Tuesday 12 March 2019

Near Light Speed

Interstellar spaceships are faster in the Directorate History than in the Rustum History. At one gravity acceleration, they reach near light speed in a year and need another year to decelerate. Speed and time dilation make the intervening time brief. Passengers are in suspended animation while the crew stands watch. Captain Kahn reads history and has experienced some of it. He was born before the Directorate and his father was a radiation technician in the Solar War. Thus, there are hints at a future history.

A few hundred human beings have lived for four generations on Mithras but Kahn says that genetic drift would destroy such a low population in time. Would it?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...: Kaor, Paul!

I don't know anywhere near enough about genetics or biology to emphatically say that a few hundred humans on Mithras provides too thin a genetic basis for a colony, as distinct from a mere base, could survive. But we do see Poul Anderson saying over and over in various stories that a large population is needed for an off Earth colony to have the variability in genetics needed for survival. Recall how there was concern that the 3000 Constitutionalist exiles who settled Rustum did not have enough genetic variability. So this was eked out by using donated human sperm and eggs to conceive exogene babies.

Sean; 13 March 2019 at 06:52