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04/24/24 13:30:51 [ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, [3], 4 ]

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Date Posted: 20:45:41 08/22/03 Fri
Author: SuperString01
Subject:

Timelines
In reply to: G-Lock 's message, "Timeline after Scattering" on 19:01:58 08/17/03 Sun

I don't have the timeline perfectly worked out but this I do know:

"when did the scattering begin?" ---
The scattering began about a hundred years after the death of the God Emperor. Since the whole Imperium was totally dependent upon him for support when he died a couple of things happened:
-Birthrates went way up (increasing a need for space)
-Food production went way down (anarchy destroyed agrarian supply and production)
-The thirst for "something more" was so powerful that it overtook humanity.

It also had to happen before the Tlelaxu invention of the synthetic spice, since the Tlelaxu descendents who went into the scattering did not have that technology.

The population that went into the scattering was in the "mega trillions" as stated in the book... let's say 12,500,000,000,000,000,000 [twelve-quintillion-five-hundred-quadrillion] people, that's 2,000,000,000 [two billion] times the total current population of the earth who headed into the scattering [the number I gave to denote "mega trillions" was abstract yet not exaggerated- the word "mega" means "in multiples of a million" therefore "mega trillions" means multiples of a million trillion (multiply a trillion by a million and you get a quintillion), in which case twelve-quintillion-five-hundred-quadrillion is a good conservative estimate. However, the number could be any HUNDREDS of times bigger]. Such a population if placed on the earth would fill it with people stacked side to side and one on top of each other covering all of its surface [even the oceans]- upwards of about 24 feet high [about 4 "rows" of people would be stacked on top of each other].

The figures about population are assumed and are abstract. Why? How? Well, by the phrase mentioned in Chapterhouse by a Reverend Mother "...those lost mega-trillions, gone into the scattering..." Now, this is NOT a specific number but, assuming the Bene Gesserit penchant for accuracy I hold this estimate to be true (were it hundreds of millions she would have said hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions as hundreds of billions, but she said "mega trillions"). Were I to fill in the vagueness of her statement with a liberal number I could have made it a number many hundreds (but not thousands) of times more (for if she meant to say "thousands of mega trillions" she would have said, "...those lost giga-trillions, gone into the scattering..." [�giga� means "multiples of a billion" i.e. gigabytes]).

The conservative estimate was just that, conservative. I only said 12.5 quintillion, whereas I could have assumed she meant 123.5 quintillion or 750.6 quintillion and still remain totally accurate!

"When did the people from the scattering start drifting back?"---
We know it was recent enough before the storyline in Heretics that it was alarming to the Bene Gesserit. We also know that their absence from the Old Imperium gave the scattering time enough to developed whole separate religious practices, cultural identities, accents, and physical traits, they started coming home roughly a hundred years after they "got their" (though it would have been "their" descendents)

Remember they all didn't go to the same place, they spread out, much like the ripples in a pond... so most weren't aware of the others. I would say less than 100 years before the story line of Heretics (about 1400 years after the death of the God Emperor) is when they started flooding back in. This gave them roughly a thousand years to develop the aforementioned characteristics while out in "The Scattering".

"When did the Honored Matres start taking over planets in the old Empire?"---
From Murbella's revelations, a whole series of events preceded the Honored Matres, "Fish Speaker democracy became Honored Matre autocracy." (The name Honored Matre, sounding so much akin to Reverend Mother was FH's clever way of scaring us into believing that they were rogue Reverend Mothers gone awry.) Therefore in the scattering they probably didn't come into existence for at least 600 to 700 years and then existed and grew for a couple hundred years before invading. They began conquering planets just towards the middle of Heretics. Gammu was the first. How do I know this? Because before the attack on Gammu the most provocative thing they did was harass the Tlelaxu and flood the old empire with people and ideas. Gammu was the first open hostility directed at a world.

---SuperString01
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Replies:

Thanx -- G-Lock, 22:34:45 08/22/03 Fri