Re: Planetary Charters, was Re: [TML] Amount of self-government on member worlds Tim 14 Jul 2016 09:01 UTC
On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 05:37:00PM +0200, Abu Dhabi wrote: > I actually wouldn't be all that surprised that pureblood Terrans > exist in significant numbers. Endogamy is a thing. Not with an absolutely perfect record over more than three thousand years of being embedded within a highly mobile non-pureblood society, it isn't. It only takes a single child more than about fifteen generations back to be non-pureblood -- knowingly or not, through any of hundreds of plausible scenarios -- for an entire inbred community to end up having been descended from that child and no longer pureblood Terran. The time period in question is more than a hundred generations, through dozens of major social changes and multiple interstellar wars. Such "pollution" would probably have happened at least thousands of times over, and any one of those incidents would be sufficient. That's only the beginning, really. There's also things like diseases that can carry DNA fragments from one host to another, and the whole thing just gets ridiculous. I mean sure, as a fictional premise or a political claim it's usable, but like many such absolutes it falls apart if you look at it closely enough. It's one thing to have records that state that all your ancestors have always been purely Terran for four thousand years. Having all those records be totally complete, correct, and not to have any other form of extraterrestrial contamination in your genes is quite another. By the time of the Third Imperium, there are no longer any truly pureblood Terrans. There are just those who might like to claim such a thing. - Tim