"Hermes is colonized."
-Sandra Miesel, Chronology of Technic Civilization IN Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method, New York, 2009, p. 612.
-copied from here.
In Anderson's "The Game of Glory," Dominic Flandry learns that the planet Nyanza was:
"...colonized some 500 years back during the breakup of the Commonwealth." (II, p. 306) (For full reference, see here.)
This "breakup" is not to be confused with the Breakup.
-copied from here.
Thus, it has been necessary to differentiate between the Breakup before the Commonwealth and the breakup of the Commonwealth. However, The Night Face refers to the latter "breakup," then capitalizes it:
"'It's been twelve hundred years since the breakup of the Commonwealth isolated [the Gwydiona]. The whole Empire rose and fell while they were alone on that one planet.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT I, p. 549.
The Gwydiona have:
"...a legend that their ancestors were no more than a man and two women, one blonde and one dark, survivors of an atomic blast lobbed at the colony by one of those fleets which went a-murdering during the Breakup."
-op. cit., II, p. 557.
There was colonization but no murdering during the original Breakup.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I had completely forgotten about the Gwydiona legend you quoted! I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but a TINY initial population, with all the risks that means, could explain the way matters turned out on Gywdion. If the planet had been settled more normally by several space ships transporting hundreds or even thousands of people, its history might well had been very different.
Sean
Small populations are vulnerable to genetic drift, which can result in even quite harmful mutations becoming universal by the operation of random factors.
A starting population of three -is- possible; it's probable that modern cheetahs are descended from a very, very small population that got through a near-extinction event about 10-12,000 years ago, during the postglacial extinctions of the megafauna.
That -may- have been a population as small as one mother and her cubs, certainly not much larger. As a result, all modern cheetahs are virtual clones -- you could transplant a liver from one to another without much risk of tissue rejection.
The genetics also indicate that modern humans went through a population bottleneck, or at least a long period of very low population, in the last 100K years or so, when there were only a few thousand humans in total. Subsequent populations also show "founder effect", produced by having very low initial populations. The entire native population of the Americas may well descend from a few hundred individuals, for example.
It's never been as extreme with us as with the cheetahs, but it could be.
So, at some stage, there could be an "Adam and Eve" - almost? In GENESIS, it happens twice. The parting of the primordial waters is the creation of heaven and earth, then there are Adam And Eve. The Flood is the undoing of creation. After the Flood has subsided and the world has been remade, there are Noah and his family. At the end of REVELATION, there is a third cosmic cycle: a new heaven and earth "and the sea will be no more," meaning that the primordial chaos has been driven into non-existence and can no longer return to destroy the world.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Very interesting! And I have heard of how cheetahs are virtual clones of each other. And I can imaging something similar happening to human beings on some of the planets they may colonize in the future.
Sean
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