David Brin has many virtues, but he is hardly obsessive about editing for continuity. Contacting Aliens has a huge number of discrepancies. The discrepancies are internal, it contradicts itself, it contradicts things written by Brin, it contradicted all sorts of stuff from Gurps Uplift, 1st edition, and (though the Encyclopedia is not canonical) it contradicted the Encyclopedia when the Encyclopedia could have been accommodated.
As a systematizer I choose to think of CA this way. It was written as a very introductory training manual for all manner of Terragens who might work with aliens. One has to presume that anything distributed so widely would get into the hands of non-friendly agents; therefore, CA contained many intentional gaffes as a form of disinformation meant to lull any alien who might study Contacting Aliens into a false sense of security. On Thursday 2006-03-16 13:02, Alberto Monteiro wrote: > Jim Sharkey wrote: > > That's an interesting idea, and one I hadn't considered! However, as > > they might say at Terragens training schools, you can't really take > > human experience and overlay it onto Galactic experience. The > > extrapolation of "generations" makes some logical sense, but the > > core idea that you *can* extrapolate from human history to Galactic > > history may be flawed. > > Ok, but at least it gives some "magnitudes" about what we > are talking about. And we hit the 150 My ago critical date, > when something nasty happened :-) I have no problem with the mean O-2 race living in main sequence civilization about 1My. That's a long time. Why don't most races hit the post-Hollarith [sp?] singularity and retire much earlier? Maybe they do. Some outliers seem to hang around the edge of main sequence civilization for tens or even the low hundreds of megayears. If the mean life span is 1My a lot of races need to pass on fast if they are to offset an elder race that is 200My old and not Retired yet. It also means that disproportionately long-lived races will tend to be more wealthy and powerful. > > Also, from strictly a "this is an awe-filled universe" point of view, > > I *like* the idea of races such as the Tothtoon and Krallnith still > > being out there adn having a legacy that stretches over half-a- > > billion years. It gives the Four Galaxies a broader and (while I > > know the Good Doctor would hate the expression) more romantic scope. > Maybe it's ok to have _one_ ancient race, but the problem is > _too many_ ancient races. Worse: these races have just one client, > and this client was uplifted some 500 My after the 1st race. This > does not make much sense. Billions of years is PLENTY of time to build up quite a pantheon of heroic elders. > > I imagine > > that's just another reason why some Galactics hate Earthclan; here > > are these obnoxious wolflings who got to become treated like nid- > > level patrons because they've got two client races. ** Uplift and number of clients. > > >Also, races that do more than _one_ Uplift should be the exception, > > >not the rule [unless you count Uplift-consorting], otherwise > > >there would be too many races with _no_ Clients! > > > > I can't really agree with that. The implication in all the books is > > clearly that there are hundreds of races totaling trillions of beings. > > Plenty of pre-sapients for all. And of course, clearly most of the > > important clans have multiple clients, often concurrently. > No. I'm with Alberto here. The clear implication is that suitable presapients or ur-species are in very short supply. The main sequence sapients are O-2, H-2, and machine and of these the biological sapients (at least) are very careful ecologically. The books actually imply tens or even hundreds of thousands of O-2 races with (at least) trillions of individuals. But the Institutes are bound to keep O-2 civilization in environmental equilibrium. One will want millions or billions of individuals in an median race. This implies a relatively fixed number of races (not taking into account loss of galaxies) with a VERY slow rate of growth. Thus, the average mature race will patron just over 1 client. After a major space-time quake the institutes may make clients particularly scarce as they try to reduce the race count so that races will tend to some optimal species population. > Most of the important clans have multiple clients: this is the > whole reason [with cause and effect mixed] that they are important! > > Most of the clans would have just one huge line of Patron-Client. I don't think most races will be part of long, thin chains. These chains will occur, but will be more rare than one might expect. Instead, a tree of patron client relations would be dominated by "explosions". Fertile patrons will have lots of clients. Most of these client lines will die out relatively soon, but some will have their own large families. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
