>Pureblood, what does that mean?

>Just pondering the amount of genetic drift that should occur just by the act of settling new worlds.

>So Does Pureblood mean at the point of founding, then natural drift is ok?

Probably the case, yeah. It's probably just mixing with the populations resettled (and modified) by the Ancients that disqualifies one from pureblood status.

>However, you do raise an interesting point: a few generation ships were launched in the few decades before jump drive and contact. None of them would have arrived at their targets for at least a thousand years since they were limited to very primitive versions of fusion reaction drives, and of course all the nearby ones were rapidly contacted with jump drives.

http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/European_Space_Agency_Long-range_Colony_Mission

The whole Islands Cluster had no contact with the Imperium (the *Third* Imperium) until the Third Frontier War. Completely settled by Terrans.

>Contact, trade, and sex with extraterrestrial human races occurred long before any Terran colonies were established.

But did that lead to substantial admixture in the Terran population? It is almost inevitable that some mixing occurred, and that some part of the population of any world in the proximity of the Imperium has some extra-native origin. I'm very skeptical that even in the 4000 or so years since contact, the amount of extraterrestrial genes entering Terra was substantial enough that most inhabitants of the Terran system would have some. (I would expect a lot of Terran genes entering the populations of the former Ziru Sirka; but probably not enough to make a dent in the non-space-traveling populations of the First Imperium.)

>Even with that fanciful scenario, routine claims by Solomani politicians four thousand years after contact to be pureblood Terran would be nothing but fantasy. The best they could manage would be an absense of records to the contrary.

...or a genetest showing that a given individual has no extraterrestrial admixture. We can do such tests already (even commercially - if you got 150 bucks). Coupled with records of a given person's ancestry, that's pretty bulletproof evidence that they're pureblooded (random mutations do happen, and they can randomly be like those found in extraterrestrials; but if none of your recorded ancestors had them, and you are verifiably not a bastard, that's strong evidence that it's just that - random mutation).

On 17 July 2016 at 06:01, Evyn MacDude <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Pureblood, what does that mean?

Just pondering the amount of genetic drift that should occur just by the act of settling new worlds.

So Does Pureblood mean at the point of founding, then natural drift is ok?

Also to consider that the Terran Government established numerous colonies rim ward of Terra in the Interstellar Wars period to build up a population that was Loyal to Terra, in the face of the Vilani's much larger population base. Note at least one of the human client states in this are practiced heavy amounts of human engineering as a matter of state...

--
Evyn
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