Jim Sharkey wrote: > >> The reason was that the book was _initially_ made with a much longer >> lifespan for each race [with races living for hundreds of millions, >> or even thousands of millions of years] > > See, that makes a little more sense to me, in that it grants a lot > more stability to the Four Galaxies. Races coming and going at a > rate of 1M per seems like obscenely fast turnover for a 3 billion > year-old society. > If you replace "race" by "person" and "galactic society" by "human society", you will see that 3,000 "generations" would take us back to 100,000 years ago - and that 95% of this time is lost in myth, speculation and (rare) scientific studies.
The same goes for Galactic Society. Ancient times are lost in myth, with only a few races trying to study them scietifically. Taking the analogy again, we have realiable written records of events for 6,000 or 3,000 years ago. This would "extrapolate" to 200 My to 100 My ago, the canonical [Heaven's Reach] time when the Library has decent data. >> Heaven's Reach is explicit in the mention that most races "live" >> about 1 million years, then pass to the Retired Order. Races that >> live much longer [like the Thenanin, 30 My] should be the exception, >> not the rule. > > So for CA we should divide all the long-lived races' timelines by > 10? :-) > It's not that simple :-) >> 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. > 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. >> Alberto Monteiro, commander of the TimeLine Legions of Terror > > Ooh, what's it like having your very own Legions? You *have* been > following the "What not to do when you're an Evil Overlord" > guidelines, right? ;-) > But I am not the Evil Overlord, I just command one Legion of Terror :-) Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
