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Old November 22 2012, 05:45 PM   #7
Christopher
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Re: Why no comment on the number of human species?

Gotham Central wrote: View Post
The Preservers need not have even been a species, but an organization who visited worlds who's people were in danger of contamination from aliens and merely created cultural preserves where they could exist and develop free of alien intervention.
I certainly think they could've been an organization or an alliance of groups from different species. I also think that the idea of "the Preservers" could just as easily be a historians' construct -- that they've taken what were actually unrelated instances of seeding/abduction by different species at different times and lumped them together under the "Preserver" label, which could explain some of the references in Trek novels and comics to so-called "Preservers" far more ancient than the historically recent ones portrayed in "The Paradise Syndrome."

But protecting them from alien intervention? Seems paradoxical, considering that abducting them and transplanting them on other worlds is pretty dang interventionist in and of itself. Presumably they took Miramanee's ancestors because they saw that the Native Americans were endangered by European diseases and colonization. I also like to think they were responsible for the Roman planet from "Bread and Circuses," although that requires assuming they've been around for a couple of thousand years, and what nation or society maintains the same practices and priorities for that length of time? Although it could've been a separate group of "Preservers" as I suggested above.

(Although, let's face it -- the Preservers' idea of "preserving" the Native Americans was to plop them down on a planet in the middle of an asteroid field and only give them a single manually operated deflector beam to defend themselves with. Which makes them seem pretty damn incompetent to me.)


Its worth noting that the Preservers picked a Terran culture that would not have interacted with Apollo's people and would thus be potentially free of any alien influence.
Again, let's avoid the mistake of conflating the past into a single era. Apollo's people were on Earth circa 2700 BCE, nearly five millennia ago. (Which is problematical in itself because that was 2000 years before the emergence of classical Greek civilization; the writers of "Who Mourns for Adonais" really dropped the ball on the research.) Miramanee's people were taken no earlier than the 17th century CE, no more than four hundred years in our own past (I misspoke before when I said 18th). That's over four millennia intervening between Apollo's people's departure and the Preservers' arrival.
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