Trent Shipley wrote: > >> 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. > I do not support that the _mean_ life span is 1 My: Heaven's Reach states that most races stay about 1 My in the "Oxigen" Order. This probably means that 1 My is the peak of the distribution or the median, not the mean.
> It also means that disproportionately long-lived races will tend to > be more wealthy and powerful. > Or wealthy and powerful races tend to be long-lived :-) We have canonical references for two races: the Soro (2 My) and the Thenanin (30 My at least). Also, we know that the Jophur spent 1 My as Traeki before the Ash Nazg :-) of the Oailie. We also know that the Buyur are presumed extinct or retired after just 0.5 My since they left Jijo (numbers from memory, I could be wrong). ** Uplift and number of clients. >> 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. > Ok, those chains would not be stable. A tree with many branchings and some short lines might be a better model. An extreme case would be the human-world analogy of the matrilineal or patrilineal line of a population constrained in size. The problem is that the Uplift Institute would tend to curb more than 1 client per patron, and Uplift itself makes each race want to uplift a client. Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
