"The darkness enclosed by the Lunar crescent was pinpointed with city lights."
-Ensign Flandry, CHAPTER ONE, p. 10.
- which confirms again that those metrocenters are on Luna.
In A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, Dominic Flandry meets Emperor Hans in a room at the top of a tower with a domed roof transparent from waist height. There is a dolchzahn skin rug and a model of a corvette.
In A Stone In Heaven, Emperor Gerhart and Edwin Cairncross converse in a suite in the highest tower. They are under a clear dome. There is a dolchzahn skin rug and a model of a corvette. Presumably the same room where Gerhart's father had received Flandry.
There is always more but maybe that is all for tonight.
(We want to see more on Terra than - mostly - Admiralty buildings and the Coral Palace. But there is some more to come.)
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think it's plain Emperor Gerhart and then Cairncross met in the same office as did Flandry and Emperor Hans.
Ad astra! Sean
Personally, I doubt Earth will ever have as many people as is implied in the Technic History... but Poul's extrapolation was quite sound, given the data he had to work with.
The drop-off in -global- reproduction rates is largely a phenomenon of the last 30 years, and has only become really apparent in the last 10-20; it's only recently that it's become obvious that it's pretty well universal and inexorable.
NB: the drop seems to be a product of -communications-. Those introduce a wider, modernized "social reference group" for reproductive patterns, eclipsing 'the neighbors'.
Originally it was thought to be the result of affluence, or urbanization, etc., but those turned out to be secondary factors -- affluent, urbanized people were more exposed to the global communications network.
As access to that sort of communications infrastructure has spread and become more ubiquitous and cheaper, the same effect on TFR (total fertility rates) has increasingly shown up in settings that are neither affluent, nor urbanized.
Further, the resulting drops in TFR tend to be -faster- nowadays; there's a tipping point where the decline starts, and it accelerates very sharply after that.
This is in contrast to the original 'core' areas where the trend started, where it was very gradual for a long time at first.
In the US, the decline started around 1800 in eastern cities. At that time the US TFR was over 6 -- 6/7 is about the biological maximum, allowing for natural infertility(*).
It then declined over a very long period; then there was a sharp drop in the Depression era, a temporary rebound, and the trend resumed. Overall, the change year-to-year was extremely gradual, so that you needed to do statistical analysis over many decades to see it.
The pattern in other Western countries is similar, with the main variation being when the trend starts -- a bit earlier in France, later in Britain, later still in Scandinavia, then in Eastern Europe, etc. The later it starts, the faster it goes once begun.
In countries where it's started recently, the decline is -much- faster and steeper -- for example, in India the drop is just a little under 1% a year, and the current TFR is 2.02. It was 6 as recently as the 1960's, so the drop that took the US over 200 years took only about 50 there.
In Saudi Arabia, as recently as the 1990's, it was around 6, but it's now 2.1, and dropping at nearly 2% a year.
Places like Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are all now almost exactly 2.0, and similarly started dropping in the 1980's and 1990's.
An unpleasantly amusing side-note: in northern Iraq, there was a rash of suicides among young women in their late teens. Detailed investigation found that it coincided with them watching Turkish soap-operas on TV.
The women in the soap operas were courted by and married young, dashing, handsome men and then had small families.
So when faced with the prospect of being married off in their teens to uncouth, middle-aged neighboring peasants, the young women started killing themselves or absconding.
(*) which is mostly due to immune-system effects, where the body becomes sensitized to sperm or fertilized ova and treats them as invasive foreign matter. Some modern contraceptives imitate this, but it's quite common naturally and was the primary cause of infertility, often setting in after 1-2 children.
To take a really extreme case, in South Korea when I was born, the TFR was 6; it's now 0.77 -- an average of less than 1 child per woman, meaning that something like half the female population never reproduces at all.
That would also mean an eventual decline of over 50% in the total population per generation.
I can only say, "Amazing." We don't know what is going to happen next - although we still have to heed warnings about what might happen according to the evidence.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating comments, with some grim implications! That is, populations might decline so far that it becomes catastrophic to a nation. If you want an advanced high tech society you are going to need at least a minimum of educated people to handle the multitudes of different kinds of jobs and functions that requires.
In such a scenario I can imagine the governments in various nations offering incentives (such as lower taxes) to young couples who have 1, 2, 3, or more children. The Roman Emperor Augustus enacted similar laws, but I don't think they were very successful.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: things like that have been tried, by the government of S. Korea among others, and they don't work. Even intrusive and drastic measures have little impact, as the Romanian government demonstrated in the late Communist period. Governments can push fertility -down- but not -up-, apparently.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! The infamous "one child only" of Maoist China, accompanied by compulsory abortion for any mother who dared to have a second child is one brutally notorious example of how a state "...can push fertility-down-..."
Seems to me the most a gpv't can do for encouraging fertility is not to make it needlessly hard for parents to have children.
Ad astra! Sean
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