After Earth, Part 5

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 4th August 2008. (commentary)

This is the fifth and final installment in the second sequence of the Trailing Edge story. Read part one, part two, part three, and part four. I once again leave you in the very capable hands of Mr. Leon Winter.

The familiar histories from the time surrounding the riots and the exodus–which I had heretofore been disinclined to question–argue that there had been no major protest about the depopulation of Earth. Furthermore the governments of Earth had all been very pro-depopulation, and wouldn’t have had reason or interest in protesting emigration. This seems like a fair assessment at face value, given that there aren’t many records from that period. After all, the riots left the domes ill equipped to support their populations, emigration was generally popular among the people and the governments of the domes and the nation-consortia that remained backed (and constituted) the colonial effort.

But, if there was an organized anti-colonial institution in Marrakesh. Marrakesh! The central home of the exodus, is hardly the place that I would have expected such a movement to occur, but it’s possible that this is just the only place that has managed to hold on to this memory. In any case, I’m fascinated by the idea that even in spite of global deterioration and widespread economic and societal collapse, that there were people fighting to stay, people who had the prescience to say “this is a dangerous path to walk down, lets reconsider now.“

Right before the extra-solar transports left the system, there was a spate of anti-emigrationism, which in retrospect reflected a general contempt for the unified colonial authority, rather than contempt for extra-solar emigration. The records that I have–news reports and government budgets and the line–seem to indicate that Edwin defiantly had the ear of the government.

While I suppose this doesn’t have much practical import given how long ago these events were, and how depopulated the solar system is these days, but if there was opposition emigration that predated the opposition to the colonial authority, what happened to it? And by proxy what are the implications for our assessment of the colonial authority’s role in the emigrations, both of Earth and of the solar system?

And besides, once I get a grasp of this, I should very much like to send a message about all of this in one of the tight band transmission to the extra-solar transports. But for now, I must wait. Wait to get the information, wait to get back to the outer colonies, wait to read the information. I have nothing but time, and though we aren’t flinging ourselves toward distant star systems, there is still much to discover.

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After Earth, Part 4

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 1st August 2008. (commentary)

This is the fourth installment in the second sequence of the Trailing Edge story. Read part one, part two or part three. I once again leave you in the very capable hands of Mr. Leon Winter.

This time, I had come to Marrakesh for a slightly more oblique reason. In the several years since my last visit I’ve been able to learn a lot about the pace and tone of this particular dome during the exodus period, what the people were doing, what they thought about what was going on around them, how they orchestrated the exodus, and so forth. The Visa Riots left Marrakesh mostly unscathed and in a certain sense the Colonial administration was descended from the governmental structure in the dome, so we learned a lot about Marrakesh growing up on the colonies.

That history, as you might imagine was somewhat whitewashed–this is another topic that I’m sure will evoke a groan or two from former students, as exploring the roots of this history have been a central part of my research program for the last 30 or more years. Why did Marrakesh survive the Visa Riots? Why didn’t the dome’s society eventually collapse? And what happened on the other cities, of which we know even less during that time?

I’ve spent a career trying to answer these questions, and the results have been mixed. Last year I received a general history of the exodus written by someone who was young during the Riots, and then not only lived through the resulting epoch and then wrote about it. As you surely know, the record of the ongoing analysis of contemporary events during the Exodus is fractured, and there were details in this history that even I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

Most notably, I learned about a character, one “Edwin Noam” who lead a short anti-emigration movement right after the Riots. I’ve never seen this name before, but then the surviving histories of the anti-emigration movement are sketchy at best.

Like all of the other pro-Earth movements that proceeded it the anti-emigrationists were very forceful, but ultimately unpopular in their day. If I squint hard enough, I can argue their side–given my ambivalence toward the exodus’ effects on everyone left here–but the general consensus is that they were deluded and sentimental at best, and more typically that they were simple reactionary stalwarts.

There were a series of summits between several European and North African Domes–Rome, Cairo, Marrakesh, Tunis, and some others early on–on the subject of population consolidation. resource management, and structural maintenance of the domes: before the riots there was enough industry and governmental infrastructure to stay on top of all these “bare minimum,” but no one cared enough it seemed. Three years after the Riots, there wasn’t even a mayor or dome Council left in Marrakesh, the “best off.”

The other domes that Edwin Noam apparently tried to organized are–by now–completely abandoned, collapsed, or simply not safe to enter alone–and besides, given that I have a series of engagements around Jupiter and on Titan late next year, I really can’t linger now that my other obligations are fulfilled. Besides, given that my chances of finding anything here is slim at best, I thought it best to avoid fishing expeditions.

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