Vargr weakness
- Thread starter Lowsonic
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ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
By the end of the Nth Interstellar War, the majority of Solomani humans were 'colonists'... having been born and raised off of Terra. Add in the 3-400 years of the Rule of Man era. Then add 1800 years of the Long Night and 1000 years of the Third Imperium. That's 3000 years of extensive cheek-and-jowl contact.
The OTU has been very clear on this matter... The Human genome is thoroughly mixed and most Humans in the Third Imperium simply don't care about Solomani or Vilani origins. Their concerns are more personal and intimate. Even the [descriptively rather bland] Imperial Culture emphasizes the poly-cultural aspect.
The vast majority of Humaniti never leave their homeworld. 'Travel' to them is visiting another continent on that same world. Let's use the High Pop world of Aramanx /Aramis as an example... most human natives of that world don't care if someone is Vilani or Solomani. They care if someone is from Senled or Lanax.
YTUMV and all, but that's how the OTU and the MgTU have consistently described it.
The OTU has been very clear on this matter... The Human genome is thoroughly mixed and most Humans in the Third Imperium simply don't care about Solomani or Vilani origins. Their concerns are more personal and intimate. Even the [descriptively rather bland] Imperial Culture emphasizes the poly-cultural aspect.
The vast majority of Humaniti never leave their homeworld. 'Travel' to them is visiting another continent on that same world. Let's use the High Pop world of Aramanx /Aramis as an example... most human natives of that world don't care if someone is Vilani or Solomani. They care if someone is from Senled or Lanax.
YTUMV and all, but that's how the OTU and the MgTU have consistently described it.
How then do their genomes get mixed?
I understand that someone with canon privileges wrote down the statement that the genome is thoroughly mixed, but if the rest of canon makes that statement implausible at best then writing it down doesn't elevate it.
That they separately care more about world citizenship or identity than ancient origins from Terra or elsewhere is a better point, but still doesn't mean they're mixed, if those world identities started out as one or the other.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Colonization mostly.
Consider the United States and Canada. All of us have one at least brave soul in our background that had the courage to immigrate to this continent. That person married and bred children who have not been forced by circumstances or wanderlust to venture very far from their home-place. It's only been in the last century [since War Two, really] that families have split up into multiple states or provinces. Prior to that, there were a lot of neighborhoods or town in the East and Midwest that had strong familial roots in the bedrock. But nowadays, most of us can't name our great-grandparents and many of us are not entirely familiar with the stories of our own grandparents.
It would have been better to say that the "standard Imperial" is a mix of a variety of different human minor races and various adaptations to homeworlds. There aren't many "pure Vilani" any more because mixing with other humans and the effects of the separation during the Long Night means that the culture and physical environment that made them "Vilani" is gone.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Which was why I made the distinction between cultural Vilani and pure genetic Vilani. And why I described 'Standard Imperial' is not only a hodge-podge of different cultural elements but different genetics as well.
Yeah, I was just commenting on the canon writers who suggest that the Solomani made a significant dent in the Imperial population's genetics. The Vilani started colonizing other worlds 7000 years before the Terrans did. There's no way that 500 years of Solomani "rule" made up for that. Unless Terrans are like rabbits compared to other humans. 
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
And the Secretary General blessed them, and the Secretary General said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the heavens, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the land.
Geir
Emperor Mongoose
Some things to consider when looking at how much Solomani blood is in the average Imperial include:
- The Plague of Duskir, if as severe as the diseases ravaging the New World for a couple of centuries after European arrival, could potentially have killed 90% of the Vilani population over time.
- The Long Night likely led to the preferential survival of those most adaptable, which the Vilani were not.
- Border regions, not just Rimward, but Spinward and even Trailing, seem to have been preferentially settled by Solomani during the Second Imperium.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
100,000 officers - let's say 100 enlisted per officer.
10,000,000 Terrans spread out between every world in the Ziru Sirka, many of which had populations in the hundreds of millions.
Worlds with a Terran fleet stationed there would have 100,000 Terrans, they could do that to one hundred worlds if they had one hundred fleets.
100,000 diluted by 100,000,000 - you may notice Terran DNA the way you find Europeans are descended from Neanderthals, but only on those one hundred worlds.
The Ziru Sirka actually had a higher world count than the Third Imperium...
Now as to canon - classic Traveller Third Imperial canon is written by an unreliable narrator with a Third Imperium bias.
Of course they are going to say the average Imperial human is a hybrid, even though it isn't true, because they still believe in Solomani racial superiority. The Syleans that became the Third Imperium claimed pure Solomani descent.
The ISW didn't just gift technology to the Terrans, the Vilani had the chance to get up to speed on human bio-tech.
The Vilani were not always culturally stagnant. For thousands of years they were adventurers, explorers, merchants. During the Long Night the Ziru Sirka shackles are removed from true Vilani nature...
10,000,000 Terrans spread out between every world in the Ziru Sirka, many of which had populations in the hundreds of millions.
Worlds with a Terran fleet stationed there would have 100,000 Terrans, they could do that to one hundred worlds if they had one hundred fleets.
100,000 diluted by 100,000,000 - you may notice Terran DNA the way you find Europeans are descended from Neanderthals, but only on those one hundred worlds.
The Ziru Sirka actually had a higher world count than the Third Imperium...
Now as to canon - classic Traveller Third Imperial canon is written by an unreliable narrator with a Third Imperium bias.
Of course they are going to say the average Imperial human is a hybrid, even though it isn't true, because they still believe in Solomani racial superiority. The Syleans that became the Third Imperium claimed pure Solomani descent.
The ISW didn't just gift technology to the Terrans, the Vilani had the chance to get up to speed on human bio-tech.
The Vilani were not always culturally stagnant. For thousands of years they were adventurers, explorers, merchants. During the Long Night the Ziru Sirka shackles are removed from true Vilani nature...
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Could also be a question of educational access, and an artificial universal Terran culture indoctrinated within it, highly Anglo Saxonized, in order to repress nationalism.
That was thousands of years ago for the OTU. After the IW period, there was a period of a few hundred years during which more Terrans would have left, and then 1000 years of the 3I before the present game date for more Terrans to leave Terra.
So, there's plenty of time for intermarriage.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Look at the canon numbers.
100,000 officers, my conjecture of 100x as many enlisted. 10,000,000.
Where is this massive wave of civilian ships from Terra sending missionaries and colonists to every Ziru Sirka world mentioned?
It would have to be a bigger fleet than the entire Terran navy by a factor of a thousand at least - that's a lot of civilian ship building taking place where and when?
The Long Night didn't affect Earth, it was the collapse of the Ziru Sirka that lead to the retrospective declaration of a Long Night by the Syleans centuries later as a means to legitimise their power play.
100,000 officers, my conjecture of 100x as many enlisted. 10,000,000.
Where is this massive wave of civilian ships from Terra sending missionaries and colonists to every Ziru Sirka world mentioned?
It would have to be a bigger fleet than the entire Terran navy by a factor of a thousand at least - that's a lot of civilian ship building taking place where and when?
The Long Night didn't affect Earth, it was the collapse of the Ziru Sirka that lead to the retrospective declaration of a Long Night by the Syleans centuries later as a means to legitimise their power play.
There is little doubt that the Vilani of this era are highly diluted. It is just unlikely that the Solomani are a significant contributor to that. There are around a 100 human minor races within Charted Space. The Vilani were the first to contact most of them. The Vilani started spreading to the stars about around 10,000 years before Terrans did. Their culture didn't turn rigid until about 5000 years later. That was about contemporaneous with the later part of the neolithic on Earth.
Earth is one planet amongst thousands. Yes, they spread out. Yes, they were eager colonizers. No, they almost certainly aren't a significant factor in overall human genetics (beyond the fact that all humans were originally from Earth). They are probably the second most dispersed human race (I think they beat the Zhodani), so as a shorthand saying "Vilani/Solomani" might work. But as an actual description of the 100+ human species and their admixture? Not really.
Earth is one planet amongst thousands. Yes, they spread out. Yes, they were eager colonizers. No, they almost certainly aren't a significant factor in overall human genetics (beyond the fact that all humans were originally from Earth). They are probably the second most dispersed human race (I think they beat the Zhodani), so as a shorthand saying "Vilani/Solomani" might work. But as an actual description of the 100+ human species and their admixture? Not really.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Considering the number of Brownie points a missionary could credit to his account when confronting Saint Peter, from a near infinite number of convertible heathens, missionaries may well outnumber the Terran military.
And then you have the carpetbaggers.
Undoubtedly, quite a number will go native.
And then you have the carpetbaggers.
Undoubtedly, quite a number will go native.
Marc Miller's write up in T5 says there are about a hundred worlds with "native" human races in charted space and some number beyond charted space. I imagine the few defined ones are the weirdest ones. But who knows.
The weirdest ones are probably the ones that needed and got the most adaptation to the local environment. So they may not have intermarriage.
But for the ones who did, it not being deliberate doesn't mean it didn't happen, and thie sheer scale of it means it probably happened a bunch.
GypsyComet
Emperor Mongoose
The interbreeding of the Vilani is not just with the Solomani. The Vilani were dancing with the locals thousands of years before that. Some matches are not fruitful, but we do know of several that are Canonically so successful that the others are now quite rare in anything approaching native genetics. The Syleans barely escaped this fate under the Vilani due to having some backwoods types who refused to play with the outworlders and thus preserved the Sylean genome, while the Yileans were thoroughly hybridized before the Solomani came along.
Evidence suggests that the Geonee, Suerrat, Acheron, Sydites, and Zeda aren't compatible with the Vilani/Solomani/Zhodani baseline, while the Vlazhdumeca, Darrians, and Luriani are different in details but compatible to some extent. Most of the other named minor Human strains are undetermined, but I suspect the Vilani valued the purebred abilities of the Answerin enough to not interbreed them into oblivion.
The old Classic data indicating "about" 50 minor Human Races has been reinterpreted as an in-universe statement that has unstated assumptions and is not accurate.
Evidence suggests that the Geonee, Suerrat, Acheron, Sydites, and Zeda aren't compatible with the Vilani/Solomani/Zhodani baseline, while the Vlazhdumeca, Darrians, and Luriani are different in details but compatible to some extent. Most of the other named minor Human strains are undetermined, but I suspect the Vilani valued the purebred abilities of the Answerin enough to not interbreed them into oblivion.
The old Classic data indicating "about" 50 minor Human Races has been reinterpreted as an in-universe statement that has unstated assumptions and is not accurate.
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