“Except the explosion of the galactic core,” said the expendable helpfully.
“Yes, there is that chance, but there’s not much we can do about that.”
“Yet,” said the expendable.
“Meanwhile,” said Ram, “I think there’s another benefit we might enhance a little. The plan was always for the human race to exist on two planets. What no one planned was for our colony to be separated by more than eleven thousand years in time from the starfaring culture we came from. There is no chance of interbreeding between Earth and this world. It’s a true Galapagos opportunity to see where genetic drift takes the two versions of the human race in complete isolation for more than four hundred generations.”
“Technically, only this world will have 447 generations, using the average of twenty-five years,” said the expendable. “Earth will have had no time elapse at all.”
“So we will drift genetically, and they will not,” said Ram. “We will evolve and they will not.”
“Eleven thousand years is not really very long, in terms of evolution,” said the expendable. “Human populations that were separated for seventy thousand years during the great drought in Africa remained capable of interbreeding.”
“The separation probably wasn’t complete,” said Ram. “If you’re talking about the genetic bottleneck after the explosion of Mount Toba, it only lasted twenty thousand years. And the southern African group was known to be a seafaring one, since they colonized all around the Indian Ocean, including Australia and New Guinea.”
“I used the longer timespan to make my point clear,” said the expendable, “but even your shorter genetic bottleneck was twice as long as the isolation of this colony is going to last.”
“And at the end of it, modern humans were far different. Longer-legged, lighter in weight. Endurance runners who could chase prey until it collapsed from oxygen depletion. Spear throwers and expert blade makers. Storytellers who could use language to create a map that others could follow through strange lands to find water. Creative thinkers who could learn from others and then innovate and adapt, and then spread the cultural innovations across hundreds of miles in a single generation.”
“You seem to have made a detailed study of this,” said the expendable.
“After your question about the human species, of course I did,” said Ram. “Ten thousand years is plenty of time for real change in the human species, because this time the isolation will be complete.”
“But you have a question for us, dealing with nineteen starships and one world,” said the expendable.
“What if we could establish nineteen colonies, each knowing nothing about the others? They would never encounter their genetic doubles. There would be no rivalry. One would not triumph over all the others. These nineteen colonies, plus Earth, would divide the human race into twenty parts. Potentially, our species could explore twenty different paths of development, genetically, culturally, intellectually. All of human history, all the wars and empires and technology and languages and customs and religions, they all evolved in less time than we’ll have here. There is enough land mass to create nineteen enclaves larger than Europe, larger than the land from Egypt to Persia, larger than the Americas from the Aztecs down to the Incas.”
“No doubt the humans in every enclave will oblige you by becoming Egypt or Athens or Tenochtitlan.”
“I hope not Tenochtitlan,” said Ram. “I’d like to think we’d retain some of the progress we already made back on Earth, and leave human sacrifice behind.”
“But you’d keep the pyramids?”
“Or whatever monuments they build. And if they not only create new things, but also become a new, but still human, species, so much the better, as long as they don’t try to destroy any of the others.”
“Your optimism and ambition prove that you are truly human, especially because you ignore the strong likelihood that all the enclaves will end up like isolated mountain valleys, where primitive people who once roamed the oceans in boats filled with pigs and babies ended up living naked in mud huts and cannibalizing each other.”
Ram shrugged. “I won’t be there to see it.”
“Like a salmon, you spawn and die, letting the younglings hatch and thrive—or not—as chance dictates.”
“Not chance—their own strength and wit. Chance affects the lives of individuals, yes, but the human species makes its own chances.”
“We are in awe of your noble vision, while taking due note of the fuzziness of your ‘creative’ thinking, as opposed to the clarity of autistic and animal brains. Yet you have a problem whose solution your wonderfully fuzzy creative mind cannot solve.”
“Fuzzy creative human minds built you and the ships’ computers,” said Ram, “in order to solve such problems for us.”
“You want us to find a way to keep the colonies completely isolated from each other—to such a degree that they don’t know of each other’s existence.”
“You guessed it! And you say you aren’t creative!”
“We did not guess anything. We deduced it from the plethora of data you provided us, both consciously and unconsciously.”
“And yet you couldn’t detect the irony in my enthusiasm.”
“We detected it. As information, however, it was worthless.”
• • •