SD.Net in The Sea Of Time

[The Vortex Empire]

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?

Both. We will bring back a new strain of flu to which they have had no exposure, and it's a tougher strain since it has been exposed to our antibiotics and such defenses. We also understand what disease is and how to prevent it, something our ancestors never did.

[Academia Nut]

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?

A little bit of both, which is what makes it so bad. Since the advent of agriculture and domestication the increasing number of people in close contact with other species that can cause diseases to hop over to us has resulted in an arms race between the evolution of the diseases and human resistance to those diseases. If I remember correctly, there is supposed to be some population in the Mediterranean that has a resistance to HIV because their ancestors had to deal with the Plague hundreds of years ago. But don't quote me on that, I can't even remember where I heard that, but if it knocks anything loose in the heads of our more biologically knowledgeable members then it will have done its job.

Combined with our more advanced knowledge of vaccination and treatment, the current disease strains are much milder but much, much more robust and sneaky, having to deal with populations that are genetically and technologically ready for them. Introduce these pathogens to a population that has neither of these traits, and you're looking at trouble.

[TheLostVikings]

If I remember correctly, there is supposed to be some population in the Mediterranean that has a resistance to HIV because their ancestors had to deal with the Plague hundreds of years ago. But don't quote me on that, I can't even remember where I heard that, but if it knocks anything loose in the heads of our more biologically knowledgeable members then it will have done its job.

Actually it is found in all of Europe, not just the Mediterranean, but only about 8% of the people in southern Europe have said mutation. It is much more common the farther north you go, and extremely common among Scandinavians. (Linky: 1, 2.)

Coincidentally I happen to be one of those people, so no HIV for me. And I guess having those genes probably makes me more plague resistant than most, but I still think crossing the Atlantic is a bit too dangerous an undertaking. And anyhow, if all we wanted was to kidnap some females without making enemies of the local tribes, it would be much, much easier to simply travel up/down the coast until we are far enough away that the local tribes will never hear about it. With an inexperienced crew hugging the shore relatively close will also be a lot safer than trying to venture into the Atlantic, and the much stronger storms we might encounter there.

It's the rule of thumb for thieves: Don't work in your own neighborhood.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Uhm, no, I would not want to take the Eagle down into the Carolina coast or the Chesapeake bay with a green crew. I would honestly prefer to take on the North Atlantic. A ship like that can, as long as her auxiliary engine keeps on working, basically ride out even a Cat 5 huricane without much difficulty. You just keep your bow pointed to the waves (thus the use of the engine) and you'll handle pretty much anything the ocean can throw at you. The really dangerous thing is that we have no charts which means that when sailing coastwise we're much more liable to lose the ship on rocks or on a sandbar.

Seriously, look at that four-masted barque taking water when beating 'round the Horn. 3,000 tons burthen with a crew of 30 men--and no auxiliary engine. And taking that kind of water over the deck in 30 - 60 foot seas was normal.

But with the Eagle, as the narrator notes at the end, the danger is when the wind gets so high you have to heave-to or broach against the wind, when you can't run with it anymore--but with the Eagle and her auxiliary engine, when the wind gets that heavy we can start up the diesel and put her nose on to the waves and ride them out without the dangers attendant to a pure sailing ship. So, yes, blue water will in fact be safer than navigating a treacherous coastline for which we have no charts whatsoever, where we have to rely on lead lines for sounding. And lining ain't easy.

[Alyrium Denryle]

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.

If we go galavanting accross the world like Marina proposes, we will expose the local population to our influenza strains and we will be exposed to their strains (protip: due to genetic drift we will not maintain immune defenses against their strains). Put it this way. Our common pathogens, like the cold, have been in an evolutionary arms race with us for past 3000 years. All of them. They will do unpleasant things to natives. And yes, with diseases will become much more virulent without an immune system suppressing them, and evolution will run hog-wild.

You know, none of actually have smallpox.

We will once someone crosses the atlantic.

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

With cow pox. And it will only reduce the infection rate.

With a hundred women? The population will rapidly drop to levels where no technology can be sustained at all.

If we bring over women so everyone gets to breed, we wont be able to support them anyway and we will be exposed to diseases for which we have little defense. Our population will collapse.

If we dont bring in women, we will need to regulate against inbreeding depression and we WILL have a demographic collapse.

There is a third option. We keep the bulk of our population in nantucket. By bulk I mean the sequentially inbred-outcrossed breeding stock. So the 100 females and say 300 males in a polyandrous set up with carefully controlled reproduction. many of the remaining heterosexual males we send out to colonize new areas in smallish groups (say a hundred or so, with an number determined by the amount required to maintain our technological base). They will maintain cultural and economic ties to Homeland but will be quarantined on both ends during travel. They obtain local females, and do the same sequential inbreeding and outcrossing to remove recessive lethals which lead to inbreeding depression. Gene flow will be carefully maintained through arranged intercolony matings. This allows for enough compartmentalization that in the event of disease outbreaks a colony can be left to its own devices without endangering others, but also allow for the integration of things like evolved disease resistance into all populations. To avoid freaky incest issues with all the inbreeding through, children will need to be raised communally so no one, not even females, have parental certainty and no one knows who is who's sibling.

Long term population health is the goal here... Not necessarily comfort or "ethics"

So, yes, blue water will in fact be safer than navigating a treacherous coastline for which we have no charts whatsoever, where we have to rely on lead lines for sounding.

Yes, but without charts i doubt anyone on this board can navigate in the open ocean either.

[PeZook]

But with the Eagle, as the narrator notes at the end, the danger is when the wind gets so high you have to heave-to or broach against the wind, when you can't run with it anymore--but with the Eagle and her auxiliary engine, when the wind gets that heavy we can start up the diesel and put her nose on to the waves and ride them out without the dangers attendant to a pure sailing ship. So, yes, blue water will in fact be safer than navigating a treacherous coastline for which we have no charts whatsoever, where we have to rely on lead lines for sounding. And lining ain't easy.

We have dozens of small sailing boats that will do just fine for that purpose, anyway. We'll just need to train up some crews (easily done) and sail out in a small group.

If we're lucky, the marina will have some larger yachts, too, of the kind which can house up to a dozen people.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yes, but without charts i doubt anyone on this board can navigate in the open ocean either.

I've done it before, my family had a yacht when I was growing up and we damn well did sail blue water. I'm rusty, sure, and I was a kid at the time, but all of the naval guys on the board should know some of the practical details as well. With a copy of Bowditch's Practical Navigator, my current knowledge of trig and geometry, and a sextant and three chronometers (to check each other against) I could sure as hell hold a straight course in the North Atlantic, Ben. Charts are not exactly necessary when the bottom is thousands of fathoms deep, navigation in the open ocean is a simple matter of mathematics.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Yes, but without charts i doubt anyone on this board can navigate in the open ocean either.

I've done it before, my family had a yacht when I was growing up and we damn well did sail blue water. I'm rusty, sure, and I was a kid at the time, but all of the naval guys on the board should know some of the practical details as well. With a copy of Bowditch's Practical Navigator, my current knowledge of trig and geometry, and a sextant and three chronometers (to check each other against) I could sure as hell hold a straight course in the North Atlantic, Ben. Charts are not exactly necessary when the bottom is thousands of fathoms deep, navigation in the open ocean is a simple matter of mathematics.

Fair enough. On the other hand, one screw up and all those eggs in that basket hull are gone.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yes, but without charts i doubt anyone on this board can navigate in the open ocean either.

I've done it before, my family had a yacht when I was growing up and we damn well did sail blue water. I'm rusty, sure, and I was a kid at the time, but all of the naval guys on the board should know some of the practical details as well. With a copy of Bowditch's Practical Navigator, my current knowledge of trig and geometry, and a sextant and three chronometers (to check each other against) I could sure as hell hold a straight course in the North Atlantic, Ben. Charts are not exactly necessary when the bottom is thousands of fathoms deep, navigation in the open ocean is a simple matter of mathematics.

Fair enough. On the other hand, one screw up and all those eggs in that basket hull are gone.

Granted. Which is why I'm more and more tempted to say we just leave the losers behind, load up the 500 or so best people in the Eagle and every one of the yachts / boats in the harbour that can be either used for a cross-atlantic crossing or prepared for one (some of the trawlers could have their superstructures cut down and be rigged with sails, for example), and go a-Sarawak in the Mediterranean. If Pizarro with a hundred and fifty men with arquebuses could conquer the Inca, what is Ramses going to do when four times their number with repeating rifles show up in a steelhulled barque in the Nile off his capitol? We can use the smaller boats on the Nile to secure the populace a lot more easily than anywhere else in the world, since basically everyone in Egypt lives within rifle-shot of a navigable river, and we've got plenty of soldiers to train and discipline the lot into an actual fighting force. Really, demographically we're simply fucked if we stay, and there will be extreme opposition to the measures you've proposed.

So why bother with them when we can just turn ourselves into the warrior caste rulers of a population of several millions?

And we're basically very likely to fuck up and die no matter what we do, so we might as well gamble on the course of action which has the biggest payoff.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Really, demographically we're simply fucked if we stay, and there will be extreme opposition to the measures you've proposed.

I am banking on people looking at the math and realizing that chances of lineage extinction approach 1 if they dont take my route

So why bother with them when we can just turn ourselves into the warrior caste rulers of a population of several millions?

Better I think to take over an island in the Med like Cyprus. That would allow us to obtain the proper *ahem* genetic material to moderate our own population's vulnerability to disease while still allowing us to control our exposure. The hittites were going strong IIRC and could be used for this.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Really, demographically we're simply fucked if we stay, and there will be extreme opposition to the measures you've proposed.

I am banking on people looking at the math and realizing that chances of lineage extinction approach 1 if they dont take my route

So why bother with them when we can just turn ourselves into the warrior caste rulers of a population of several millions?

Better I think to take over an island in the Med like Cyprus. That would allow us to obtain the proper *ahem* genetic material to moderate our own population's vulnerability to disease while still allowing us to control our exposure. The hittites were going strong IIRC and could be used for this.

Well, we could try multiple avenues at once.

1. Group A: 600 of the most fit / useful people, under military training and discipline and armed with all the guns, and any simple cannon and flamethrowers and so on we can manufacture on the island. With the Eagle and the ocean-going yachts or ships that can be made ocean going, we sail to a much more heavily populated and reasonably civilized locale and go Conquistador on their asses (the universal language is Firearm).

2. Group B: The genetic females and 400 of the most fit / useful males (33% male attrition reserve) as well as the really young teenagers, who remain behind on the island to farm and fish and function as a small polyandrous village community.

3. Group C: The remaining, least fit and useful males, to be divided up into 18 groups of 150 each and dispersed through the east coast on the non-seaworthy craft from Nantucket to try their luck intermarrying with / lording over the local Indian tribes. They will be sent off in small boats and the boats will return to shore and they'll be cut off. Under the shadow of our guns, if necessary.

If group A succeeds they can start directing the natives to produce simple sailing ships and steam engines for power and building a regular army and merchant marine, and ultimately return to, if Group B needs it, provide them with supplies, help, more marriage prospects and so on, after we've gotten a handle through quarantine measures and public health sanitation on disease in the civilization that we've conquered. Once Group A and Group B are secure we can then travel the coast reetablish contact with the 18 tribes of Group C and helping out those who managed to survive.

If Group A fails, Group B may still prove able to create a prosperous little society on Nantucket, and if Group B also fails, well, a couple people from Group C might reproduce and leave something of a legacy of us in the world.

Note that the gay/bi males would be split between Groups A and B since they don't provide a threat to the stability of the social situation on Nantucket like the heterosexual males in group C do, so the actual numbers in Group B would be slightly higher, providing more labour for the Nantucket community.

[Alyrium Denryle]

That would be viable.

[Academia Nut]

Well, the biggest issue would definitely be just the initial starting conditions as you're going to have a shit load of scared people who don't know what's going on and looking at a mountain of logistics problems. Whoever gets to the police station and the guns first (and knows how to use them) will probably be the ones who establish control, even if it ends up in a catastrofuck situation. Then whoever amongst them or who gets their ear who can pose a viable way of managing the food situation will be the ones really setting policy since food will be the most necessary thing after we're not all rioting in the streets.

If we assume that the seasons are the same across the transfer then we probably won't have enough time before winter sets in for those with sailing experience to shake off the rust and train up the bright lads who can learn. So that's probably going to be a cold, hungry winter where the leading causes of death will probably be homicide and suicide. It will also be the time when long term plans get discussed, probably in a manner more reminiscent of rugby than parliament. Remember here that the most capable and mature members will be the ones to emerge as the leaders, and they're going to be the ones most likely to be attached to women. Thus anything that threatens their women, percieved or real, will be met with massive hostility. So any "gene-sharing" arrangement is likely to meet with massive resistance from a lot of the guys in charge. Of course, a lot of the mature guys will have lost their girlfriends and spouses in the transfer, causing problems there, although they could be resistant to the idea of trying to drive any sort of edge between their friends and their women since they know how much it would hurt.

By the time we have the resources ready to launch an expedition, the cliques would have solidified and any screwballs who hadn't all killed themselves or been killed by other screwballs would have to have grown spines, so figuring out who gets thrown into the wilderness, who stays, and who gets to have a harem over in Egypt is going to probably trigger a massive civil war. Any conflict amongst ourselves chews up resources that could be better spent elsewhere and risks killing people with vital knowledge and skills, to say nothing of the women who we'd be fighting over in the first place.

Now, I'm not saying that we're not screwed no matter what we do, just that you have to think about the human factor and what people are likely to do as irrational people, not as perfectly willing game theory participants.

[Coyote]

Hmm... going through the Gate of Hercules (Gibraltar) with a green crew and no charts, and with stars and compasses shifting over the years?

Better to go to... the Caribbean, maybe, or Yucatan. Land at the vicinity of what will be Vera Cruz and grab some Aztec maidens.

I'm "mister adventure" myself but a blue-water crossing in a tall ship full of greenhorns under all these conditions... too dicey. Let's sail about for a year or two and get some experience handling the vessel and then we'll consider cross-pond panty raids. The young teen guys have waited 18-19 years for some pooty, another couple years won't matter and there's bound to be some porno and tube socks on the island in the meantime. Or, God help us, sheep.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, its going to take at least a year, if not two, just to not kill ourselves when trying to go trans Atlantic especially since we'll need to recalibrate for stellar drift all of our navigational tools using the stars (compasses too now that I think about it), but as the Duchess pointed out, at least there's nothing to run into out in the middle of the Atlantic. Of course, if she doesn't want to take people into the Caribbean because of no idea about the position of the sea floor and sand banks why she would want to go through the Nile Delta is something I'm still scratching my head over.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yeah, its going to take at least a year, if not two, just to not kill ourselves when trying to go trans Atlantic especially since we'll need to recalibrate for stellar drift all of our navigational tools using the stars (compasses too now that I think about it), but as the Duchess pointed out, at least there's nothing to run into out in the middle of the Atlantic. Of course, if she doesn't want to take people into the Caribbean because of no idea about the position of the sea floor and sand banks why she would want to go through the Nile Delta is something I'm still scratching my head over.

Because in that scenario we don't need to come back out. Cortez burned his boats, you know. Running aground in the Delta is still having gotten to Egypt with an army to conquer the place. We'll have some cannon made on the lathes of the three machine shops on the island, some flamethrowers, and a bunch of nice hunting rifles with built up furniture and improvised bayonet lugs and, ah, "fifteen hundred years of history" looking down on us.... Obviously our chances vastly improve if we manage to get through the delta, though, since we can terrify the natives and decapitate the government instantaneously, just like Pizarro did to the Sapa Inca (Ramses' capitol was located in the delta, so we don't have to make it very far up-river).

That said, as I explained in my first proposal, we'd spend at least five years in short sails out into blue water to go whaling, thus gaining experience before attempting a transatlantic crossing. So the idea of sailing to Egypt is only after not one year or two but five years of gathering experience. I won't trust myself to actually handle a square-rigger effectively on the open ocean for quite some time, it's lightyears more complex than a two-masted, 48 foot schooner. The idea of simply working out the ballasting is going to be mildly terrifying--I hope they kept good notes onboard.

The sextant and chronometers will remain effective regardless of the age, though we would have to reprogramme any more sophisticated instruments. Fortunately we can do that without going to sea. Recalibrating the compasses will also be really easy because we know our exact longitude and latitude on Nantucket, so we can take compass readings and compare them with compass readings we would have expected uptime and derive the magnetic north pole in a pretty trivial fashion.

[Academia Nut]

Ahem. So I've been talking with Alyrium and we both have sort of ideas for things that might be interesting to write about in this scenario. Me, I have an idea about hiding out as the little guy in the early, chaotic days and then the process of scavenging for food, fuel, firearms, and pharmaceuticals in the early days.

The way I figure it, the first day when we all wake up in an abandoned Nantucket when we were pretty much everywhere else in the world will be incredibly confusing at first. There would be no power, no communication with the outside world, and for the most part we wouldn't know each other. But a few familiar faces would be known and we would start gravitate towards what we know. There would be growing fear and panic, but people would probably remain relatively calm simply because they would think that there is still a civilization watching over their shoulder, its just somewhere else at the moment. Some clever person would figure to take one of the boats in the marina or the planes at the airport and try and get contact with the mainland. While people are waiting for word to get back, the mature adults start to notice that there's a hell of a lot of teenagers and young adults around and there's no one keeping the weapons in the various police locations under lock and key, so those who know how to use them properly move to make sure no idiotic 14 year old blows their brains out with a shotgun they find lying around.

Then the news gets back from the scouts. There's nothing out there, its all just gone, nothing but wilderness as far as the eye can see, with a few primitive looking tribal villages doting the landscape. No one knows how to respond to this, and as the news starts to leak order starts to break down, and its up to those with the guns to restore it.

My story would basically be watching all of that happen as the confused and terrified bystander rather than being a leader or explorer or anything like that. I already know two guys in real life on the board who I would join up with once I saw their faces in such a scenario and I'll be asking them if they want to join in. I'm also going to be coming up with a few random extras, but if anyone else wants to sign up as part of my scared band of observers, feel free to pipe up. Outside of the survivor band, I could also use a military type or two to perform a 'census' of all the people once the initial shooting is over.

From Alyrium tells me, his story would be about him doing an early numbers crunch on the census data gathered once martial law is in place and seeing just how screwed we are. Probably also some commentary on the sort of nasty system we would establish in the early days just to survive.

Are there any other interested potential writers for this idea?

[LadyTevar]

Marina? You're an idiot.

Whaling was one of the most dangerous careers in the ocean, even in the early 1900s. The ships were specially built for the job of long months at sea, since they had to be prep-ships as well as cargo ships. The Eagle has none of that. The yachts have none of that. Where would you store the kill? How would you keep it from going bad? Freezers? Ice? Salt? Pickling?
You mention Explosive Harpoons? where would you get the explosives? What explosives are going to be best for this? How will you replace the harpoons? Where on a whale would you need to plant the harpoon to kill it before it kills you?

And more questions: Is WhaleMeat palatable? How do you cook it? How much of it is actually edible?

Why go after whales, of all the dangerous critters in the sea, when there will be stocks of Tuna, SeaBass, Flounder, and other fish right off the coast? A simple line in the water even now can catch seabass in the Chesapeake Bay ... back then, before overfishing, a few hours fishing could net dozens of them. Close to shore, there would be no need for storage other than water-tanks. Get them to the docks, start cutting them up. What's left over can be salted, pickled, dried, etc On Land.
As a bonus, even children can throw a line off a dock into the water and land a fish. No need for harpoons, explosive or otherwise.

Really, Marina... unless you want corset-stays and that perfume-additive from the whale's head, there is no reason whatsoever to waste time and resources on whaling, when there's far easier ways of getting seafood.

[Master of Ossus]

Marina? You're an idiot.

Whaling was one of the most dangerous careers in the ocean, even in the early 1900s. The ships were specially built for the job of long months at sea, since they had to be prep-ships as well as cargo ships. The Eagle has none of that. The yachts have none of that. Where would you store the kill? How would you keep it from going bad? Freezers? Ice? Salt? Pickling?
You mention Explosive Harpoons? where would you get the explosives? What explosives are going to be best for this? How will you replace the harpoons? Where on a whale would you need to plant the harpoon to kill it before it kills you?

Presumably we would be able to whale much closer to the island since the whaling stocks wouldn't have been fished-out. Commercial whaling began as day-trips to the open ocean and then back to harbor. There would be little need to store or prepare kills at sea--that could be done back on the shore. Questions of whether the Eagle would even be suitable for the task are more appropriate.

And more questions: Is WhaleMeat palatable? How do you cook it? How much of it is actually edible?

Quite a bit of whale meat is palatable and it's pretty easy to cook once it's been butchered. Countries like Iceland (and nearby islands) and Japan still do some whaling.

Why go after whales, of all the dangerous critters in the sea, when there will be stocks of Tuna, SeaBass, Flounder, and other fish right off the coast? A simple line in the water even now can catch seabass in the Chesapeake Bay ... back then, before overfishing, a few hours fishing could net dozens of them. Close to shore, there would be no need for storage other than water-tanks. Get them to the docks, start cutting them up. What's left over can be salted, pickled, dried, etc On Land.
As a bonus, even children can throw a line off a dock into the water and land a fish. No need for harpoons, explosive or otherwise.

Really, Marina... unless you want corset-stays and that perfume-additive from the whale's head, there is no reason whatsoever to waste time and resources on whaling, when there's far easier ways of getting seafood.

This is the most important criticism of whaling. Whaling seems stupid if we can fish for other things. If we can get people to the Chesapeake, for example, crabs were so abundant there that they were given away free in bars and people just had to pay for the drinks. Or Boston, for that matter, where lobsters were so plentiful that laws had to be passed in the early colonial era such that servants would only have to be served lobster a few days a week. And, of course, there are the Great Banks. If we don't have any industrial use for whales, there's no need to hunt them specifically.[/quote]

[The Duchess of Zeon]

*sighs*

The Eagle ex-Horst Wessel will work fine as a whaler because all we need is a pneumatic cannon we can build on some of the machine shops on the island, and for explosives we can just use blackpowder impregnated with powderized aluminium.



This.

I know all about how insanely dangerous whaling was, don't patronize me like that, I've lived my entire life by the sea and I know the entire procedure pretty damn intimately, from demonstrations, oral descriptions, and reading histories and other suchlike things, and I damn well know what whaling was, not just to 19th century whaling men but also to the native Americans--the Coast Salish peoples of my birthland--and how they hunted with raw grit and muscle power in dugout canoes. I also know how it became an extinction-level event in the 1920s. And it has everything to do with that picture up above. There are three machine shops on Nantucket and the island has its own electricity generation station to provide power for them. We can and we will easily fabricate a pneumatic cannon that can be fired from the foredeck of the Eagle and kill a whale in a single shot while roping it to be hauled alongside.

That is how whale populations were exterminated in the 1920s and 1930s. Not by traditional methods with sailing ships and men in long boats, but by harpoon guns firing explosive harpoons, and they are well within our technological capabilities to build quickly and easily, and the payoff is ENORMOUS in terms of cheap calories and oil for heat and light. But especially food, since I know exactly how important it was a food source for the coast Salish peoples. It will, in fact, be easier than trying to assemble nets for purseiners, since we have a lot of people here who can work lathes and other machine tools, but who knows how to make a fishing net? We can try long-lining but where do we get the extra rope for it when producing enough cordage for the sails will be hard enough as it is?

[Darth Wong]

Granted. Which is why I'm more and more tempted to say we just leave the losers behind, load up the 500 or so best people in the Eagle and every one of the yachts / boats in the harbour that can be either used for a cross-atlantic crossing or prepared for one (some of the trawlers could have their superstructures cut down and be rigged with sails, for example), and go a-Sarawak in the Mediterranean. If Pizarro with a hundred and fifty men with arquebuses could conquer the Inca, what is Ramses going to do when four times their number with repeating rifles show up in a steelhulled barque in the Nile off his capitol? We can use the smaller boats on the Nile to secure the populace a lot more easily than anywhere else in the world, since basically everyone in Egypt lives within rifle-shot of a navigable river, and we've got plenty of soldiers to train and discipline the lot into an actual fighting force. Really, demographically we're simply fucked if we stay, and there will be extreme opposition to the measures you've proposed.

Let me get this straight: you think it would be a good plan to leave behind 99% of what little remains of modern society on Nantucket so we can load up a boat with people and weapons, and attempt to conquer Europe?

How the fuck does that make more sense than taking women from native tribes in the Americas?

So why bother with them when we can just turn ourselves into the warrior caste rulers of a population of several millions?

And we're basically very likely to fuck up and die no matter what we do, so we might as well gamble on the course of action which has the biggest payoff.

That's a retarded rationale; it's like saying that the budget looks bad, so we might as well drain the bank account and put it all into lottery tickets.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Let me get this straight: you think it would be a good plan to leave behind 99% of what little remains of modern society on Nantucket so we can load up a boat with people and weapons, and attempt to conquer Europe?

How the fuck does that make more sense than taking women from native tribes in the Americas?

Mike, saying there'd be a hundred reproductive age women on Nantucket in this scenario is a gross overestimate...

I have two predicates which make my position logical:

1. By the time we're organized, 90% of the Indians will be dead from diseases we accidentally unleashed. Also the native population is so small in 1,250 BC, without any of the agricultural revolutions they later had, that they have none of the organization or numbers of the Indians of the 1500s, so when 90% of them die there will be basically none left.... And how the hell do we find them to kidnap their women in the middle of a virgin climax forest that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific? They can just keep moving, since they have no fixed settlements, and endlessly evade us with their superiour forrestry skills.

2. We don't want to just passively keep things orderly until we all die, but actually try to accomplish something.

That's a retarded rationale; it's like saying that the budget looks bad, so we might as well drain the bank account and put it all into lottery tickets.

The population that we have has a gender ratio which makes survival totally impossible, Mike.

I'm basing this off the closest thing to this scenario which ever happened in real life, the stranding of the survivors of the Mutiny on the Bounty on Pitcairn island, and the resulting insane butchery that went on between the men as they fought over the few women they had aboard from Taihiti, which led to all of them except one, and basically a small group of children, dying in the next two decades. Unless the native population is MUCH less affected by disease than it was when Europeans historically arrived, and I am not so optimistic, then we are going to end up like the Pitcairn Islanders if we stay.

That is what leads me to make my proposal.

[Junghalli]

Yeah but there's gotta be easier ways to get females than conquering an entire country. Why not just buy a bunch of female slaves from them or something? With all the tech lying around on Nantucket we should be able to come up with things contemporary civilizations would consider very valuable. I really don't see why we'd have to go to war to get our hands on a few thousand females. I suppose Egypt could give us resources and a base to work from but do they really have anything we could use badly and not obtain more easily elsewhere or through trade?

[Darth Wong]

Let me get this straight: you think it would be a good plan to leave behind 99% of what little remains of modern society on Nantucket so we can load up a boat with people and weapons, and attempt to conquer Europe?

How the fuck does that make more sense than taking women from native tribes in the Americas?

Mike, saying there'd be a hundred reproductive age women on Nantucket in this scenario is a gross overestimate...

I have two predicates which make my position logical:

1. By the time we're organized, 90% of the Indians will be dead from diseases we accidentally unleashed.

2. We don't want to just passively keep things orderly until we all die, but actually try to accomplish something.

1) By the time we could even think of attempting something so foolish as an attempt to conquer the world with zero infrastructure, we would know what kind of impact we would have on the natives. And to put it bluntly, if it's as bad as you say, we would be able to take the surviving women even more easily by that point, because the rest would be in no shape to resist us. It's a hell of a lot easier than trying to accomplish the exact same thing in Europe while simultaneously trying to carve out a beach head, establish a settlement, and compete with the locals for resources. And if you're right about the lethality of modern germs, we'll cause almost as much chaos over there as we would cause here anyway.

2) "Accomplish something"? This seems like a case of you having a grandiose fantasy of conquering the world like a nautical version of Alexander the Great. Anything you want to do in Europe, you could do more safely and easily on this side of the Atlantic, and we would have access to an entire city of modern stuff, albeit only partly usable. Even if you're completely right about us wiping out 90% of the natives, so what? We can breed with the survivors. Problem solved, and with a lot less risk than your "sail the world and become kings" idea.

The population that we have has a gender ratio which makes survival totally impossible, Mike.

So? We grab some females from the mainland. We have to do that in Europe too, in case you forgot. However, we would have to do it against much heavier resistance, after sailing an ocean and fighting wars. Precisely how have you made things easier with this plan?

I'm basing this off the closest thing to this scenario which ever happened in real life, the stranding of the survivors of the Mutiny on the Bounty on Pitcairn island, and the resulting insane butchery that went on between the men as they fought over the few women they had aboard from Taihiti, which led to all of them except one, and basically a small group of children, dying in the next two decades. Unless the native population is MUCH less affected by disease than it was when Europeans historically arrived, and I am not so optimistic, then we are going to end up like the Pitcairn Islanders if we stay.

That is what leads me to make my proposal.

That's ridiculous. North America is not a tiny island. Even 90% local fatalities from disease would not cause the place to actually run out of people.

[Junghalli]

Besides, as I said, if we wanted to get women from the Egyptians wouldn't it be easier just to buy a bunch of female slaves from them? I'm sure with all the high tech we have access to we could find something they'd be willing to trade for, and trade seems easier and safer than war, not to mention this way we'd be more likely to get a reputation as people you want to attract and have around and less to get a reputation as people you should run the hell away from, which is a good thing (of course, if we end up bringing plagues everywhere we go this may counteract this).