SD.Net in The Sea Of Time

[Samuel]

Okay, switch that to modern democracy which while shares includes consensus making amongst people, it includes universal suffrage and more importantly the concept of rule of law, which will probably be the biggest one for the locals to wrap their heads around as control was enforced by strength of arms, personal charisma, community pressure, or other such personal, tangible, and most of all inconstant means, not seemingly intangible 'laws'.

Given the natives are tribal they haven't even gotten to the point where this was needed. Of course they won't get it. Once they start building cities things will change.

Some tribes put more emphasis on gathering scalps

Wasn't the custom introduced by Europeans? This is 1250 BC- we have no clue what the native culture is like.

Meet with the natives openly, but claim initially to be just another tribe.

Who don't look anything at all like their neighbors, wear entirely different clothing, speak a very strange language... the only thing going for us is our over abundance of young males will help make them think our group is bigger than it is.

The second is a show of "look what we can do to you - don't fuck with us". Sadly, this will require fighting and killing, most probably.

You can do shows of force without killing- we have a plan for example. Explosives would also work nicely.

Could you elaborate on that? I have the impression that hunter gather tribes tend to follow their elders or their spiritual leader (priest/shaman/etc) if they have a primitive religion. I would think such tribes would tend to look to people who are strong or who can provide food or safety to the tribe for leadership. In which case having a democracy (which would imply elections and votes and such) would seem rather foreign to such people.

Democracy doesn't require elections- direct democracy has people voting directly on issues. It really depends on the size of the tribe. Very small tribes don't have enough inequality to support such divisions.

[Darth Wong]

What about our government? How should it look to be the most effective?

Like I said earlier, I feel that the first government is going to be a oligarchic dictatorship elected by popular acclaim. After, say, a week or so, people are going to start get scared. Others are going to get sick. Some are guaranteed to be hurt. The first group that says, "We have a plan to get us all through the winter!" is going to be catapulted into power, precisely because people are hurt, sick, cold, and hungry. Let someone else make the decisions, most people will be happily thinking. Democratic ideals aren't going to put food on the table, so to speak.

Not just the first group: the first group which people can believe in. If a dozen teenagers get together and say "We've got a plan! Follow us!" nobody will listen. It would be a group composed of adults, and one or many of them would need to have an authoritative, charismatic aura, and they would need to be smart and capable and be able to inspire others to believe that they can lead effectively.

Now, after labor has been divided and we're no longer running the risk of starving or freezing to death(I'm thinking the first summer after we've started large-scale agriculture), it'll be a much different story. The conditions of want and privation that allowed the original dictatorship to assume power will be gone. Our modern sensibilities will no longer be choked back by fear. Like-minded groups with political axes to grind are going to form, and we'll probably have people drafting and presenting constitutions for ratification by the public. If the dictatorship is run by sensible people (and I suspect it will be), they'll preside over a constitutional convention, allowing a permanent framework of government to be established.

We all come from fairly similar cultural backgrounds. Most of the basic laws would be virtually assumed even without all of this lawyering nonsense. A society of only a few thousand people needs little in the way of formalized laws. Societies of such small size historically relied on judges who ruled more on a case by case basis than by poring through volumes of legal precedent and lawyerese.

I'm guessing this government will be a democratic republic of a fairly liberal slant. I'm also guessing that the first elections held will see a lot of the former dictatorship remain in government, though some people may be voted out just so the people can prove to themselves that the new system is working.

There might be elections of a sort, but we're talking about a society of only a few thousand people, with no outside support and with most of our technological infrastructure shorn away. Attempting to replicate the bulky governmental style of a modern multi-million person nation would be a mistake.

[PeZook]

I agree. We'd probably have some sort of comittee, with a "chief" who is considered the leader, and a cabinet of people responsible for the most important tasks he hand-picked. Too many formal structures will just impede the enormous amount of work we'd need to do in order to survive, that will require making many tough and unpopular decisions along the way.

Say, the fishing operation: it's going to be smelly, unpleasant, tough and sometimes dangerous work on all levels, from fishing itself to processing the catch. But somebody will have to do it, and this work will be assigned from the top down. And nobody's gonna ask if the workers want to do it or not: if some complain, too bad. We need the food.

[Stormin]

It's going to be worse because we will have to use the sail boats or row out. I don't see many people knowing how to use nets either.

There's 5 museums on the island, most deal with fishing or whaling so we can probably raid them for gear and basic information on how to do it properly. Me, I shut up about knowing how to operate a boat and hope to get in on the demolitions crews, fishing is probably going to lose us a lot of people especially if we have to do it all winter.

[MKSheppard]

Fishing would be a nice way to expend some of the worthless teenagers.

[Alferd Packer]

Not just the first group: the first group which people can believe in. If a dozen teenagers get together and say "We've got a plan! Follow us!" nobody will listen. It would be a group composed of adults, and one or many of them would need to have an authoritative, charismatic aura, and they would need to be smart and capable and be able to inspire others to believe that they can lead effectively.

Oh, certainly, I should've been more clear in that regard. A couple of teenage chuckleheads are probably going to proclaim themselves kings of Nantucket the first day (or very soon after arriving). But, as time goes on, people are going to see that a certain group is getting its shit together: gathering weapons, food, fuel, taking inventory of other consumables, scouting the island. And because this group has its shit together, it will likely be the first serious group to attempt to come to power, and they'll be railroaded into office.

We all come from fairly similar cultural backgrounds. Most of the basic laws would be virtually assumed even without all of this lawyering nonsense. A society of only a few thousand people needs little in the way of formalized laws. Societies of such small size historically relied on judges who ruled more on a case by case basis than by poring through volumes of legal precedent and lawyerese.

Well, when I described groups drafting their own constitutions, I had in my mind images of early Meiji Japan. During this time of great turmoil and civil strife, small groups in isolated villages, long bereft of central government, would get together and draft constitutions to establish a framework of government which, in the past, simply did not exist. These constitutions are actually still being found today, stuffed in the rafters of rural Japanese barns for 140+ years.

While we need not codify something as extensive as the US Constitution, I think a lot of people would feel better if some kind of governing document was presented for their ratification. Maybe 'constitution' is a poor term. What about calling it a charter, and limiting its scope to the most basic functionings of the government?

There might be elections of a sort, but we're talking about a society of only a few thousand people, with no outside support and with most of our technological infrastructure shorn away. Attempting to replicate the bulky governmental style of a modern multi-million person nation would be a mistake.

Indeed. See, at first, I was thinking we could run things through monthly or semimonthly town hall meetings, but I thought it might be too unwieldy to do with 4,000 people.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Run it the exact same way you run a city... Unicameral legislature of about 30 members. Make the Mayor the Head of the Council with majority votes of the council automatically being implemented. The Mayor, who is a council member elected by the council to serve as Mayor, then the mayor selects a City Manager or Chief of Staff to handle the day-to-day operations of the city, and the Chief of Staff hires/selects an operating staff of specialists in each relevant field. So we elect say a 31 member council, they select one of their number to be the Mayor, who controls the agenda of council meetings, and council votes are a straight up and down affair that are automatically binding. Day to day operations are handled by the Chief of Staff the Mayor selects, and he retains a staff of competent individuals from our population to handle the day to day operating needs. Elections are held every other year.

As for the issue of the highly male population, I think trying to run around the woods kidnapping Indian women is the height of foolishness. It makes a lot more sense for those of us--myself included, I might add--who can handle duties on a rigged ship to use the Eagle first as a whaler, which will bring home both food and OIL (and in 1,250 BC there are a LOT of whales in the world), and then once the situation has stabilized, we can basically sail up to the arctic, kill a bunch of whales and render them down for oil during the whaling season, and then in the off season, sail to Egypt and other developed Mediterranean societies and trade oil for female slaves in large quantities. They can then be brought to Nantucket and even maladaptive nerd husbands in arranged marriages will be a vast improvement over being a Bronze age chattel slave.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Another very big potential source of trouble would be the very skewed gender ratio. Quite a few members are young males and almost certainly the situation around the relatively few women would get ugly after a while. It would not be pretty, I'm afraid. One possible solution would be the "Roman one", that is stealing women from the natives, but many people would object to that for various ethical and practical reasons, so it might not get implemented and even if it did, there would be many serious repercussions.

Two words: Facultative Bisexuality. It is very common in humans, and is indeed the swiss army knife of human social evolution.

The first thing we really need to worry about is division of labor. We CANNOT build many of the things that we will want in order to, for example, sail to Egypt for slave girls without division of labor. To use just the board's biologists as an example:

Prepare to become Polymaths. You will need to play the roll of barber surgeon/primitive microbiologist, agronomist, and eugenics officer, as well as Naturalist. If you are not trained in these subjects, the community college has a library.

[Academia Nut]

We're likely to get into huge long term problems if we try to even out gender ratios by importing large numbers of manumitted slaves and putting them into arranged marriages with guys who couldn't otherwise get a girl, in that it will badly mangle perceptions of women's roles amongst our population, and perhaps worse, you're basically giving into the whims of guys who have huge entitlement complexes but not enough motivation to go for it. Admittedly, we're eventually going to have problems if we have large numbers of males running around with not a hope in hell of ever getting laid amongst the immediate population, but the government supplying them with wives is probably something the adult leadership wouldn't want to do while also creating the impression that if the AYVB whines hard enough they'll get what they want.

However, there's probably some way we can take advantage of the availability of slaves to help normalize our demographic problems that don't leave the moral and upright amongst us feeling dirty. As a midterm solution, perhaps we could use the Eagle to go pirate hunting in the Mediterranean. There's got to be some scumbag slavers we can steamroll with our supperior technology, and if any of the people who we rescue want to join us in returning to our land of wonders then that's just great, we could use the help. It would probably only create a trickle of fresh blood, but it could be used for propoganda purposes in that the guys going out slaver hunting will be the ones showered in praise and most likely to pick up thankful young women, thus encouraging the bored and listless young virgins to join the Navy where they can be put to more useful tasks.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well, how hard is artificial insemination, really? I would much prefer if we could just bring over a lot of manumitted female slaves and offer that as an alternative to guarantee our genetic diversity and growth. But the problem is that having three thousand men there and, what? Even if the families of the ones in relationships magically come along, we're still talking like two thousand single males. The problem is that ANYONE from that time period is going to be subservient and overwhelmed in our society by simple culture shock, so we'd have real problems integrating them. There's no way in hell we could handle bringing in more than perhaps a thousand male workers without serious, serious issues, and the number of women shouldn't really exceed the number of men. This is a brutal situation and for all I'm honestly a pretty radical feminist, getting to the point of equality between the sexes again may take quite some time.

[Alyrium Denryle]

We're likely to get into huge long term problems if we try to even out gender ratios by importing large numbers of manumitted slaves and putting them into arranged marriages with guys who couldn't otherwise get a girl, in that it will badly mangle perceptions of women's roles amongst our population, and perhaps worse, you're basically giving into the whims of guys who have huge entitlement complexes but not enough motivation to go for it. Admittedly, we're eventually going to have problems if we have large numbers of males running around with not a hope in hell of ever getting laid amongst the immediate population, but the government supplying them with wives is probably something the adult leadership wouldn't want to do while also creating the impression that if the AYVB whines hard enough they'll get what they want.

2 words: Facultative bisexuality. Just like in prison

You think I am kidding, but the reality of the matter is, males have been forming "alliances" like that for a LONG time, and it gives them a sexual release while the two work together to score females.

The simple fact of the matter is though, that our effective population size is NOT 3000 someodd members. It is much much lower than that, and without flat out Eugenics, we are going to run into long term problems of unregulated inbreeding depression in a few generations. With an effective population size that is as low as it is, we will actually need to impliment controlled inbreeding, sibmating and even backcrossing in order to expose the recessive lethals that we all carry to selection and wipe them out of the population. We CANNOT treat those diseases, and our long term population health requires that we inbreed for a while, and then outcross (within our population) again once those conditions are gone. Otherwise we are just forestalling the inevitable.

When we DO bring in new blood, they will need to be inbred in order to remove those alleles. Heh. This is what the AYVB should be used for. Inbreeding stock.

[PeZook]

As for the issue of the highly male population, I think trying to run around the woods kidnapping Indian women is the height of foolishness. It makes a lot more sense for those of us--myself included, I might add--who can handle duties on a rigged ship to use the Eagle first as a whaler, which will bring home both food and OIL (and in 1,250 BC there are a LOT of whales in the world), and then once the situation has stabilized, we can basically sail up to the arctic, kill a bunch of whales and render them down for oil during the whaling season, and then in the off season, sail to Egypt and other developed Mediterranean societies and trade oil for female slaves in large quantities. They can then be brought to Nantucket and even maladaptive nerd husbands in arranged marriages will be a vast improvement over being a Bronze age chattel slave.

I'm not sure whaling is such a good idea. It's extremely dangerous, and we're not going to be able to use the Eagle for a good, long time, not until we train the crew so that it's able to handle the ship in anything less than perfect weather.

As for women, I wonder if it's necessary to risk a cross-ocean trip where we may as well loose our only large ship at all? As I wrote before, if we get on the good side of some local tribes, our men will be able to simply marry their local women. Of course, the quantity will be much lower, and only those who can impress the locals could get in, but we won't have to risk the Eagle in a cross-ocean two-way trip with a green crew.

Me, I shut up about knowing how to operate a boat and hope to get in on the demolitions crews, fishing is probably going to lose us a lot of people especially if we have to do it all winter.

The basics of sailing are easy, you can learn then in a few days ; It's stuff like running into foul weather that is dangerous and requires experience to handle. Hence why I'm skeptical about thinking up uses for the Eagle before we can have a crew drilled and seasoned properly.

Let me be frank: a small sailboat won't lose us the same amount of people and capability as losing the Eagle, so they're a preferable fishing platform.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'm not sure whaling is such a good idea. It's extremely dangerous, and we're not going to be able to use the Eagle for a good, long time, not until we train the crew so that it's able to handle the ship in anything less than perfect weather.

19th century whaling is extremely dangerous. Not whaling with the 1,000 horsepower auxiliary diesel on the Eagle engaged, firing explosive harpoons from the ship herself. I'm talking about 20th century industrial slaughter of whales.

As for women, I wonder if it's necessary to risk a cross-ocean trip where we may as well loose our only large ship at all? As I wrote before, if we get on the good side of some local tribes, our men will be able to simply marry their local women. Of course, the quantity will be much lower, and only those who can impress the locals could get in, but we won't have to risk the Eagle in a cross-ocean two-way trip with a green crew.

Don't need to do it for several years, PeZeook. Not for several years. The whales migrate by the thousand in these days, so we can start by taking the Eagle under diesel to massacre pods passing by the islands. Then by the time we've decimated the local and migrating pods in the area, we'll be seasoned to go further and further out until cross-ocean trips with a crew with five or six years' experience "before the mast" will be quite viable. And the Eagle is a training ship so we can easily ship 300 people a trip, and with one trip a season we could fix our gender ratio within fifteen years of arrival through this plan.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Then by the time we've decimated the local and migrating pods in the area

How about we fucking NOT do that. First off, we do not need to. Our population does not require it, and whale oil is not a good fuel for engines (we lack the refinement capacity for starters, oh and it is not oil. It is a liquid wax). We will have the equipment to use plant based ethanol as fuel. That is preferable. Instead of harvesting entire populations of beings to whom we owe ethical obligations, how about you allow the biologist to survey and regulate said harvest so that it is sustainable, and also avoid the need to dodge icebergs in the arctic. Yes, I know how to do that, and can teach others.

Additionally, any women brought over will more than likely die from disease. We may not carry small pox, but we carry with us other things that their immune systems have never seen. Same goes for whoever we send overseas. Prepare for our crews we send over to Egypt to contract Smallpox, and Malaria. In the south, yellow fever. We will be spreading those pathogens world wide and into our own population if we use your plan Marina.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Then by the time we've decimated the local and migrating pods in the area

How about we fucking NOT do that. First off, we do not need to. Our population does not require it, and whale oil is not a good fuel for engines (we lack the refinement capacity for starters). We will have the equipment to use plant based ethanol as fuel. That is preferable. Instead of harvesting entire populations of beings to whom we owe ethical obligations, how about you allow the biologist to survey and regulate said harvest so that it is sustainable, and also avoid the need to dodge icebergs in the arctic. Yes, I know how to do that, and can teach others.

Additionally, any women brought over will more than likely die from disease. We may not carry small pox, but we carry with us other things that their immune systems have never seen. Same goes for whoever we send overseas. Prepare for our crews we send over to Egypt to contract Smallpox, and Malaria. In the south, yellow fever. We will be spreading those pathogens world wide and into our own population if we use your plan Marina.

1. Sea voyages last MONTHS under sail. They serve as effective quarantine in their own right.
2. We can innoculate against numerous diseases simply by acquiring samples.
3. This is 1,250 BCE. Even a single industrial whaling ship will make no dent in worldwide whaling populations, and look, it's easy and cheap food for people who don't know how to farm, on top of the myriad of uses of the oil (and it will work fine for steam engines as-is).
4. Malaria? So what; it was basically chronic in a lot of the merchant shipping men of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were sometimes crippled with reoccurring bouts but rarely died--the more lethal strains of malarial are mostly a more recent development. Life is tough and brutal and we'll die young, but, oh wait, we're in the bronze age so that's going to happen anyway. At least unlike them we know two reasonable effective treatments for it: Quinine and artemisia.

And yes, we'll probably succeed in killing millions of people by spreading disease, but we'll have already done that to the native Indians, and the social and structural problems of having so many men will rip us apart otherwise.

[PeZook]

19th century whaling is extremely dangerous. Not whaling with the 1,000 horsepower auxiliary diesel on the Eagle engaged, firing explosive harpoons from the ship herself. I'm talking about 20th century industrial slaughter of whales.

We have no spare parts for the diesel, very limited fuel and close to no industrial lubricants. Counting on the diesel engine as anything more than emergency power is rather dangerous.

Though I guess we could rig up some sort of harpoon cannon that would make killing the whales much safer, I'll grant you that. Not that we'd need to kill very many of them, though...Alyrium is right in that bringing people in from Europe runs a high risk of dragging smallpox in with them. I really think it's way too dangerous, given our limited population...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

19th century whaling is extremely dangerous. Not whaling with the 1,000 horsepower auxiliary diesel on the Eagle engaged, firing explosive harpoons from the ship herself. I'm talking about 20th century industrial slaughter of whales.

We have no spare parts for the diesel, very limited fuel and close to no industrial lubricants. Counting on the diesel engine as anything more than emergency power is rather dangerous.

Though I guess we could rig up some sort of harpoon cannon that would make killing the whales much safer, I'll grant you that. Not that we'd need to kill very many of them, though...Alyrium is right in that bringing people in from Europe runs a high risk of dragging smallpox in with them. I really think it's way too dangerous, given our limited population...

3,600+ males, ~100 females, and we'll have killed basically 90% of the nearby Indians before we have ourselves completely organized.

[Alyrium Denryle]

1. Sea voyages last MONTHS under sail. They serve as effective quarantine in their own right.

And when a full third of the crew dies from small pox and the rest are incapacitated and drift off course, I will chuckle.

2. We can innoculate against numerous diseases simply by acquiring samples.

Yes. But some diseases dont work like that. Most of them we would encounter dont actually.

3. This is 1,250 BCE. Even a single industrial whaling ship will make no dent in worldwide whaling populations, and look, it's easy and cheap food for people who don't know how to farm, on top of the myriad of uses of the oil (and it will work fine for steam engines as-is).

You are contradicting yourself. You cannot "decimate local populations" and not affect world wide population. We dont NEED industrial whaling, therefore should not do it. Our population is not large enough to need anything but subsistence whaling, and they do not produce enough blubber to be especially useful at our capacity to harvest them. The eagle is NOT a whaling vessel, at best it has the whaling capacity of an early 19th century frigate. We dont have explosive harpoons, we dont have factory processing aboard ship. That means that the whalers will need to row out in boars with hand harpoons, and that is EXTREMELY dangerous, even with something as slow and placid as a Bowhead.

The blubber will be more useful as a food source than as steam engine fuel, and will cost more combustible fuel to get than it will yield. There is a reason it was used primarily as lamp oil and for candle tallow. It was not useful for other things. The ethanol we can produce far more cheaply once we have agriculture will be much better for that.

Life is tough and brutal and we'll die young, but, oh wait, we're in the bronze age so that's going to happen anyway. At least unlike them we know two reasonable effective treatments for it: Quinine and artemisia.

None of which we have.

[Alyrium Denryle]

And yes, we'll probably succeed in killing millions of people by spreading disease, but we'll have already done that to the native Indians, and the social and structural problems of having so many men will rip us apart otherwise.

Very easy solution. Segregate the access males. No, seriously. We are not going to be able to correct our population problem. The vast majority of females we bring over will die, and they will bring small pox with them, which with our small population size will decimate our population and cause an infrastructure collapse. The variance in mortality rate with that disease could extinguish us entirely.

The best solution is to give up the notion of sexual monogamy. We will have to utilize eugenics and polyandry.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

With a hundred women? The population will rapidly drop to levels where no technology can be sustained at all. We'd be better off taking the best and brightest and going a-Sarawhack in the Mediterranean, if anyone else remembers the old Kipling story. Honestly, just leaving Nantucket has lots of advantages like that, if we take a few years to prepare ourselves for the voyage that might actually be the best course of action.

And smallpox is one of the diseases we CAN innoculate against.

[Alferd Packer]

Even if Egyptian women are better than Amerindian women, the latter are vastly closer. Even if our modern diseases wreak havoc on the local population, there will still be women left within easy reach, just a lot fewer than before.

Incidentally, what diseases, specifically, are going to ruin the native population? Off the top of my head, I'd say the flu, MRSA, and maybe some kind of meningitis, but I'm sure there are more.

[Darth Wong]

You know, none of actually have smallpox. It's not necessarily guaranteed that we would wipe out the native population the way the Europeans did. They were an incredibly sickly bunch. Even back in England, there was routine mass death from disease and poor living conditions on a scale that we modern people would consider a pandemic and a national disaster.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Measles can cause mass male infertility when it's first contracted by adults who've never been exposed before, and an extreme number of deaths. That's just the first example, offhand. However the flu will probably kill a vast number of them, too, and it's currently flu season. We bring with us a strain of flu which has evolved for 3,250 years more than what they're used to... And their immune systems aren't prepared against it.

[Academia Nut]

Well, on the disease front, there's a bit of good news in that while smallpox is present, it is fortunately probably only in the V. minor form as apparently the much, much deadlier and more familiar V. major won't have evolved yet and the lesser form will still be mostly confined to Africa and Egypt. Yellow fever will likewise be in West Africa as it shouldn't have been transferred over to South America. Y. pestis, the probable cause of the Black Death, is probably still in Central Asia.

I suppose the thing to remember is that this is 1250BC. Epidemic diseases are around and a problem, but human populations are still quite low and a lot of the evolution that went into making the diseases such monstrous killers hasn't been completed yet. The majority of humanity is still probably living in diffuse tribal conditions as hunter-gatherers or herders so the populations just aren't dense enough and mobile enough to support super deadly strains, they would just burn out their populations and then go extinct. So we need to be cautious, probably just staying away from all tropical regions at all costs and making minimal direct contact with the major cities that will likely to be festering disease holes where proper sewage disposal had yet to be invented. Perhaps for our first trans-Atlantic expedition should be to peek around in Western Europe, where there shouldn't be many large cities and the temperate climate should mean that the various killer diseases from the tropics shouldn't have penetrated yet, and we can make cautious evaluations of the conditions there, especially the disease fauna brought by any traders from warmer climes. If the traders from the Mediterranean civilizations are walking plague bearers then we just write off the whole damn place.

Also, as to quarantine, both the Eagle and Nantucket should have radio equipment good enough to make trans Atlantic communication possible. A group sails across, checks things out and sends status reports, and then quarantines themselves from any local populations but not on the ship for a month before setting out again to make sure that they haven't picked up anything and turn the ship into a floating death house. If shit goes seriously wrong, we'll presumably have other crews trained in sailing and some other ships worthy of the voyage, and they can head over to the last known location to pick up the ship and sail it back, because its just too big to abandon. Hopefully the locals won't have screwed with it, although if they make their base of operations say a Channel Island or something of the like hopefully there won't be many people around to cause too much trouble for the ship while it lies with the crew dying of disease.

Of course, this all rests on us not causing a tremendous amount of damage to the North American populations, but correct me if I'm wrong, but don't even mild communicable diseases start to mutant and go absolutely nuts when they hit populations with absolutely no history with them? So if even one person has a cold and doesn't realize it, we could introduce an airborne disease to the locals who would have absolutely no genetic history dealing with epidemic diseases and would get hit hard. I'm not sure about that though, so we might be jumping the gun there. Of course, for all the reasons I outlined above why Eurasia isn't yet the ultimate bioweapons program that would mean that trans Atlantic ventures could trigger the same problems over in Europe.

[Darth Wong]

Measles can cause mass male infertility when it's first contracted by adults who've never been exposed before, and an extreme number of deaths. That's just the first example, offhand. However the flu will probably kill a vast number of them, too, and it's currently flu season. We bring with us a strain of flu which has evolved for 3,250 years more than what they're used to... And their immune systems aren't prepared against it.

Has our genetic code actually changed so much that we've developed genetic immunities to all of these diseases? Or are we just more knowledgeable about disease containment and treatment protocols?