ALT.SF4M

  More about "Marooned in Realtime" SPOILERS

   • j********o@***.com
     29/11/2000 07:23:023 UTC

     SPOILERS (It's a great book: read it! Even if you've read it already.)

     SPOILERS

     SPOILERS

     SPOILERS

     The book ends with the presumption that once the survivors' tech level

     stabilizes, they will rapidly catch up with the already transcended 3
     billion.

     If the transcended cared enough about the survivors to wait for them,
     they'd

     have come back to fetch 'em! Unless they transcended to the next level
     of

     reality only to be enslaved or masacred by those already there! Or for
     that

     matter, grew so detached from quotidian reality (thank you, Stefan),
     that they

     simply commited cheerful mass suicide like the Heaven's Gate cult, or
     flew off

     en mass to watch the cosmos transpire like the Robinson clan, or lost
     the will

     to live and grow and derive their only purpose in life from vicariously
     sharing

     the struggles of the survivors, like pathetic invisible ghosts. This
     also

     misses the point that the same exponential curve displaced to the right
     of the

     horizontal axis (time, say) will not only never catch the earlier curve,
     but

     fall ever farther behind! But the main point is that there are just so
     few of

     them that unless they do breed like rabbits, their population and
     economy may

     not be ready to support technological advancement for millennia: despite

     having the knowledge base of the High Techs, they just don't have the
     hands to

     build the machines! (to build the machines, to build the machines, etc.,
     a la

     Peter Townshend's The Iron Man, an excellent A side, incidentally, and
     on the

     discount rack yet!) It's an interesting thought: a modern but static

     technology, with a hundred generations driving the same Model-T's.

     It just occurred to me that this business about them needing the zygotes
     to

     avoid disastrous inbreeding among their 200 people is crap! Many islands
     and

     isolated communities have been settled quite successfully for centuries
     with a

     root stock of fewer colonists, and with vastly less initial diversity
     than

     those motley time-castaways. I guess Vinge was thinking along the lines
     of

     animal populations, where this would be a problem (the answer why
     animals and

     humans are different suggests itself immediately: intelligence,
     knowledge, and

     social organization to recognize the danger and enforce rules against

     inbreeding. In other words, animals are dumb; they are thus much more

     vulnerable to early death, bad luck, repeated population crashes, and
     prone to

     "monopolygamy," harem-keeping, where a few of one or the other sex
     monopolize

     all the potential mates to the exclusion of their rivals - all of which
     tends

     to reduce genetic variety).

     I suppose one can excuse this that Korelov *expected* just what I said
     back on

     8/21: that without access to labor-saving birth-aiding devices (pun
     intended),

     most of their bloodless, neurotic colonists wouldn't mate:

     >If we project modern habits into the next

     >few centuries (the time period the survivors date from), the only
     people still

     >having children will be the Amish, devout Catholics, and ultra-Orthodox
     Jews!

     >Another amusing possibility for Realtime is that despite the zygotes, a

     century

     >after the colony effort, most of the population is the deeply inbreed
     spawn of

     >the few technophobic, traditionalist breeding couples of these
     varieties, with

     >some of the other original survivors still bitterly dottering around, a

     >pathetic reminder of a doomed lifestyle.

     But this isn't sustainable: Korelov hoped to arrive at a self-sustaining
     tech

     level like that of circa 2100? The in-vitro selective fertilization,
     genetic

     testing, etc., available right now can probably greatly alleviate the
     effects

     of inbreeding. And, barring a total and permanent dedication to
     monopatrony,

     the genetic diversity of all the men could contribute even if few of the
     women

     were willing to bear children (especially as bobble technology would
     allow the

     economical and indefinite storage of these resources for future
     generations),

     unless, of course, the men were determined to end the human species as
     well. I

     am being very well behaved indeed, given the potential for ribaldry...

     Or maybe Korelov was simply lying about her projections: she knew that

     civilization was doomed and that their only hope was to burn up her
     consumables

     in a calculated way to build up society to allow the maximum population

     explosion before the delayed but inevitable crash into an animalistic

     barbarism, wherein inbreeding would become common and neither custom nor

     technology would exist to prevent it. Or, she secretly knows that
     mankind

     *was* destroyed by some alien enemy, perhaps pro-nature, anti-sentient

     berserkers? An enemy sure to return, thus, the only hope for humanity
     would be

     to build up a diverse population before scattering them in precious
     handfuls to

     a million different stars, a desperate broadcasting of seeds in the hope
     that a

     few tender shoots might avoid the hungry birds long enough to grow tall
     and

     tough.

     Gorno