Chapter 2 writing about history
History is to truth what theology is to religion, that is, insignificant.
——LL
The human diaspora began two thousand years after humans first discovered Libby Sheffield Drive.The diaspora continues to this day with no signs of stopping.Therefore, the writing of history can no longer be a narrative of a single clue, even if it is narrated according to many complementary clues, it is completely impossible.On our home planet, we humans already have the capacity to triple our size within a century—provided there is enough space and raw materials.
Stellar drives give us both.Human beings spread to the depths of the Milky Way at a speed several times faster than the speed of light, and the population swelled like yeast.If the population had doubled in the 21st century, our number would have been approximately 7x10^9x2^68 unimaginably large numbers that only a computer could understand:
7x10^9x2^68=2,066,035,336,255,469,780,992,000,000,000
——In other words, more than 200 million trillion people.
— in other words, a mass of protein 25 million times the mass of our home planet Earth.
incredible.
It can be said that if the large diaspora did not occur, the above-mentioned huge numbers would be inconceivable.While human beings have the ability to triple their number every hundred years, we are also facing a crisis, and we may not even be able to achieve a doubling. This is called the inflection point of the curve in the law of yeast growth: the yeast population will Kill their own members at a fast enough rate to keep the overall number at zero growth, so as to avoid the entire group being swallowed by the poison produced by the yeast itself.For mankind, it is an all-out war, or other methods mentioned in Malthus's population theory, and the final result is extinction.
However, we believe that humans did not grow to that frighteningly large number, because at the beginning of the diaspora, the base that participated in this migration was not 7 billion, but only a few million.From then to more than 2,000 years now, human beings have continued to migrate from the earth or other colonized planets to more distant places.These migrations are small and not counted, and may add up to hundreds of millions of people.
As of now, we have no way of reasonably estimating the current number of humans, or even how many colonized planets there are.Our best guess is that the number of colonized planets must be over 2,000, and the population must be over 500 billion.In reality, there could be twice that number of colonized planets, and four times the population we think.even more.
Therefore, in the process of history writing, even such data as demographics are impossible to obtain.The data we receive is outdated and often far from complete.Yet the volume of data is so vast and of varying reliability that hundreds of staff and hundreds of computers under my supervision are perpetually busy analysing, comparing, extrapolating, and correlating some data with others before formally recording it. The data is checked.We had hoped that 95% of the data would be "probably correct" and 85% "minimally reliable".However, in fact, these two data can only reach 89% and 81% respectively, and they are still decreasing.
The immigrant pioneers were not concerned with sending records back to the statistics office.What matters to them is how to survive, to have more children, and to remove any obstacles that stand in their way.Typically, a newly colonized planet only thinks about sending data to us after four generations of development.
(It's impossible not to. If an immigrant cares too much about statistics, he's likely to be one of them—as a death toll. I thought about emigrating too, and if I did, I don't care if the office puts me on the books. I've spent nearly a century in this nonsensical job, partly because of interest and partly because of genetics. I'm Andrew Jackson A strengthened direct descendant of Libby "Slide Rule". At the same time, I am a descendant of the old ancestor, and may have inherited some of his restless nature-at least I think so. I would like to Feel free to travel to distant worlds and see what's going on there. I might marry again, leave a dozen offspring on a sparsely populated newly colonized planet - and start over. When I'm done proofreading the old ancestors Literature, directors, then apply an old saying of the ancestors in that era: goodbye to you.)
Our ancestor, he was my ancestor, and probably yours too.He is the oldest man in the world, the only one in the world who has personally experienced the crisis of mankind and resolved it.What kind of person is he?
We have overcome the crisis.Now, even if humans lost fifty planets, they could still gather their team and move on.Within a generation, our heroic women can make up for lost populations.Of course, such a thing is unlikely to actually happen.Until now, human beings have never encountered any desperate race as vicious, vicious, and tenacious as ourselves.By conservative extrapolation, we will reach the incredible numbers mentioned above within a limited number of generations, spreading out to other galaxies before filling the Milky Way.In fact, reports from afar have shown that human intergalactic spaceships have headed for the endless depths of the universe.These reports have not been verified, but we know that the most dynamic settlement areas tend to be far from the densely populated central districts.
Recording history can be very difficult at the best of times.At worst, history is a lifeless mass of indiscernible material.History comes alive only in the mouth of an eyewitness... and we have only one eyewitness whose life spans the twenty-three centuries from the crisis to the diaspora.After verification by this office, except for the ancestors, the oldest living person is only a little over a thousand years old.According to the theory of probability, there should be some people who are also half the age of the ancestors—however.
Some people may question whether this "ancestor" is really a member of the Howard family born in 1912, that is, the "Lazarus Dragon" who led the family to escape from their home on Earth in 2136.They point out that all the ancient methods of identification (fingerprints, retinal patterns, etc.) can now be forged.True, but at the time, those methods were still valid, and the Howard Family Foundation had special reasons for taking identification seriously.The birth of "Woodrow Wilson Smith" recorded by the Foundation in 1912 must have been "Lazarus Dragon" in 2136 and 2210.More modern, unforgeable means of identification were put into use long before the aforementioned methods of identification ceased to be effective.Early on was clonal graft identification, followed by absolute gene pattern verification. (Here's an interesting fact: about three centuries ago, there was an imposter here in Secundus who received a heart from a prosthetic clone of the ancestor. It killed him.) And his ancestor, whose genetic pattern is exactly the same as that of a small piece of muscle tissue extracted from "Lazarus Dragon" by Dr. Gordon Hardy in 2145 on board the New Frontiers spacecraft.Doctors cultivated this tissue for longevity research.The proof is over.
But what kind of person is he?You must judge for yourself.In order to compress this document to a reasonable length, I have omitted many confirmed historical events (scholars can find the original sources in the archives)-but kept some lies and not-so-true stories, because Reasonable analysis, a person's lies can reveal his inner world more than the so-called "facts".
Obviously, by the standards of the civilized world, he was nothing but a savage and a rogue.
However, children should not judge their parents.Those elements that make up his personality are exactly what is necessary to survive in the jungle—or the new frontier.Don't forget that we all owe him a debt, whether it's genetics or historical experience.
In order to better understand our debt to him in historical experience, it is necessary to look back at some ancient histories—parts of legend and myth, others of hard fact, as Julius Caesar was Murder is generally beyond doubt.The Howard Family Foundation was created by the will of Ira Howard, who died in 1873, which directed the trustees of the foundation to use his money for research to "extend human life."This is a fact.
Legend has it that he hated his fate and made the will because, in his forties, he felt that he was about to die of "old age".He was forty-eight years old when he died, alone and without descendants.So none of us carry his genes.His immortality resides only in his name, and in his notion that death can be thwarted.
In those days, it was not uncommon to die at forty-eight.You may not be able to believe that the average life expectancy at that time was only thirty-five years old!But advanced age is not the cause of death.Disease, hunger, accidents, murders, wars, births, and other atrocities claimed the lives of many before they were too old.But even if someone crosses all these hurdles, he will still face death between the ages of 75 and 100.Very few people live past 100 years.Even so, each ethnic group still has a small group of people known as "century old people".There is a legend about "Old Tom Parr" who lived 152 years and died in 1635.Regardless of whether this legend is true or not, according to the probabilistic analysis of demographics, there must have been people who lived for a century and a half in that era, but such people were very few.
In the beginning, the Foundation started with primitive hybridization experiments, because at that time people did not realize the existence of genes.The foundation uses money as a bait to encourage long-lived families to mate with each other.
Not surprisingly, the money bait worked.Also not surprisingly, the experiment was a success.This method has been used by livestock breeders for centuries, in the savage days before genes were discovered: crossbreeding can enhance certain traits, and it can also be used to weed out defective animals.
The family archives did not record how the earliest batch of defective products were eliminated, but only recorded the fact that some people were kicked out of the family, and their offspring were also eliminated.The reason is simply their unforgivable original sin, "dead too early".
By the time of the crisis in 2136, all members of the Howard family had a life expectancy of more than 150 years, some even longer.The reasons for that crisis may seem implausible, but both family records and sources outside the family support the narrative that the Howards were in grave danger simply because others thought they had lived "too long."Why this happens is the domain of crowd psychologists, and I just keep track of it.This is a fact.
They were held in a concentration camp and were about to be tortured to death because others wanted to pry the "secret" of "longevity" from them.This, too, is a fact -- not a myth.
At this moment, the ancestor entered the story.With his guts, his gift for lying, and what most people today would consider childlike adventure and petty intrigue, Patriarch pulls off the greatest escape of all time.He stole a primitive spaceship and escaped the solar system with all members of the Howard family (about 100,000 men, women and children at the time).
So many people crammed into one boat seemed unlikely at first glance.But don't forget that the first generation of spacecraft was many times larger than the ones we use today.They are self-contained man-made asteroids designed to travel through space for years at less than the speed of light—they just have to be big enough to do so.
Patriarch wasn't the only hero in that triumphant escape.But according to the various records we have (sometimes contradictory between different records), he was always the driving force of this operation.He was Moses who led his people out of chains.
Three-quarters of a century later (in 2210), he led them back home—but not back into the cage.That year, Year 1 of the Galactic Standard Calendar, marked the beginning of the Great Diaspora...causing it to occur due to enormous population pressure on Home Earth.Two factors made the diaspora possible: the hyperdrive known at the time as Libby Sheffield (not really a drive in any sense, just a method of navigating multidimensional space), and the first efficient (and most Simple) life extension technique, the principle is to use fresh blood grown in a petri dish.
Both of the aforementioned inventions were prompted by the escape of the Howard family.The short-lived people on earth still believe that the long-lived family has some kind of "secret", so they are determined to study in depth to unlock the secret.Like most research, this one paid off in unexpected places.It didn't reveal any "secret", but it discovered another good thing that was almost the same: a healing technique, which gradually developed into a combination of multiple treatments, which can delay human aging and prolong human vitality and fertility at the same time.
So the great diaspora became not only possible, but imperative.
In addition to being able to make up all kinds of convincing lies at any time, the ancestor has another talent: he can deduce the direction of things in any situation, and then use this to meet his needs. (He called it: You have to know what makes a frog jump. The psychologists who studied him thought he had a gift for being a pioneer and good luck--but Patriarch had less than terrific answers to them.) You're welcome. As an officer of the record, I prefer not to comment on this.)
The Patriarch immediately realized that the blessing of eternal youth, which was claimed to be available to anyone, was in fact only available to the powerful and their crony.Billions of ordinary people will not be allowed to live forever, because there is not enough room for them-unless they colonize other star systems, so that everyone can live as long as they want.
Exactly how the ancestor realized this idea is now impossible to verify. He seems to have used many names and various tricks.In the end, the major companies under his name were merged into the foundation, and then sold for cash.He used the money to relocate the foundation and Howard family to Secundus, leaving "the best land" to his relatives and descendants.Among those relatives and descendants, 68% accepted the challenge and embarked on the long journey to the new frontier.
We owe him genetic debts, both direct and indirect.The indirect liability is that immigration is a weeding out mechanism, a forced Darwinian selection.In the process, the superior population was able to travel to other star systems, while the weaker population stayed in their homeland to die.Some ethnic groups were forced to migrate (there were often forced migrations in the 24th and 25th centuries), but the law of natural selection also applies to them, the only difference is that the selection of the survival of the fittest occurs on an extraterrestrial planet.In the cruel new district, the cowardly and those who could not adapt to the new environment died quickly, and the strong survived.Voluntary immigrants must also go through this selection process.So far, the Howard family has experienced at least three such selections.
Our debt to our ancestors is actually easy to prove, just with the help of simple arithmetic.If you live anywhere other than home on Earth (if you can read this, I'm almost certain you're not living in the Earth), and if you find a Howard among your ancestors (as most of you will), you are likely to be descended from your ancestors.
According to calculations by the family's official geneticist, the probability is 87.3%.Of course, you are also descended from the rest of the Howard family in the twentieth century, but only Woodrow Wilson Smith, the patriarch.By 2136 AD, nearly one in ten young Howards were his "legitimate" descendants.The legality mentioned here means that the birth of each newborn has been recorded in the family, and the blood has been tested by means that existed at the time. (Blood type was not even known when the interbreeding experiment began, but the experiment took steps to keep women from committing adultery, at least outside the family, for their own good.)
As I just said, up to now, as long as any of your ancestors belongs to the Howard family, you are very likely to be descendants of your ancestors, with a cumulative probability of 87.3%.But if you have someone from the Howard family in the last few generations of ancestors, your probability is actually as high as 100%.
But, as an archivist, I have reason to believe—based on computer analyzes of blood type, hair color, eye color, number of teeth, types of enzymes, and a few other genetically related traits—that I have a strong sense of There are reasons to believe that the ancestors still have many descendants that have not been recorded in the genealogy.Some of these people are still in the family, and some are excluded by the family.
To put it mildly, he was a shameless ram whose seeds were scattered across this part of the galaxy in which we live.
Take, for example, the years when he stole the New Frontier and embarked on his great escape.In those years, he did not marry once.The records of the ship and the legends of the time show that he was a - in the words of the time - "unwomanly".
Maybe.However, an analysis of the biostatistics (not the family tree) shows that he's not all that unapproachable.The computer that did the analysis offered to bet me that he had at least a hundred children during those years. (I refuse to bet that computer can still checkmem me while giving me a car.)
I am not surprised by this.At that time, members of the Howard family's pursuit of life extension reached a pathological level.A man who lives the longest, if he is still capable of procreating—and apparently he is—will be endlessly tempted and given endless opportunities.The temptation and opportunity come from those anxious women, who want their offspring to have the same superiority he showed—"superiority" is the only standard respected by the Howard family.
We can surmise that it did not matter whether he was married or not.All marriages within the Howard family are marriages of interest - Ella Howard's will ensures this.Very few marriages last a lifetime.The only strange thing is that, under the attack of thousands of women of childbearing age, only such a small number managed to capture him.Of course, it is undeniable that he escaped very quickly.
If I meet a person today with brown hair, a big nose, a friendly smile, and a wild look in his gray-green eyes, I can't help but wonder if my ancestor Just passed through the starry sky.If someone with that look came up to me, I'd press my hands hard against my wallet.If he talked to me, I wouldn't make any bets or promises to him.
But the ancestor himself was only the third generation of the Howard family's hybrid experiment, how could he survive his first three hundred years without any rejuvenation treatment, and maintain his youth in the process?
Variation, there is only one explanation - which is also equivalent to saying we don't know.But through his subsequent rejuvenation treatments, we have mastered part of his body structure.He has a huge heart that is different from ordinary people, and it beats slowly.He had only twenty-eight teeth, no caries, and he seemed immune to infectious disease.He has never had surgery other than stitches or rejuvenation.His reflexes are exceptionally sharp, yet always appear deliberate.Maybe we have to redefine the word "response."His eyes never needed correction, and he was neither farsighted nor nearsighted.The hearing range of his ears is very wide, the low frequency is lower than ordinary people, and the high frequency is higher than ordinary people, and he can hear very clearly in the entire frequency range.He also has strong color vision, able to distinguish indigo, which lies between blue and violet.He was born without a foreskin and without an appendix - and apparently without a conscience.
He is my ancestor and I am proud of that.
Justin Foote 45th
Chief Archivist, Howard Foundation
Notes:
Notes: