On Dec 4, 2011, at 9:32 AM, Onno Meyer wrote:
> In both of these cases, most ancient history is alien. Stargate 
> may be a partial exception. 
> 
> * If most significant artifacts are human, from an early phase 
>  of space exploration, can they be more than filling out the 
>  details of the historical record? McDevitt's Alex Benedict 
>  series makes that the day job of the hero, who then gets 
>  into more exciting adventures.

If you speculate that the fragmentation takes a political bent (Dorsai series 
would be the extreme example, but there is plenty of reason to speculate on 
less extreme cases), it can also be trying to recover what the official records 
tried to hide. Could be important if the civilization died out and you've got a 
new set of people wanting to inhabit the world. Even more important if that 
fragment came into contact with a different alien race that wiped them out and 
now you are starting to meet that race.

If you have two phases of space travel (sub-light and FTL) that are separated 
by a long period of time you can also have them trying to verify the history 
that a reconnected colony is giving. Make sure just who you are reconnecting 
with.

>  Maybe it was long enough that information wasn't re-recorded
>  on new media when the old one wore out. I'm pretty sure I'll
>  be able to find this mail ten years from now, but 100 or 
>  1,000 years? And will they understand the context of GURPS?

There is going to be a lot of cultural information lost that way. Consider that 
copyright holders have no responsibility to maintain the data nor distrubute it 
once it goes public domain. Furthermore, it is illegal in the USA to extract 
data that has gone into the public domain because of the DMCA. The data may be 
public domain, but extracting it requires defeating a security key.



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