ReaderRemarksWD40 2

(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 20:15, 22 April 2024 (PDT))

This article was submitted by a reader who was not happy with the direction the Universe was taking - it is here as a source of ideas for other authors.

THIS IS NOT CANON

Further Thoughts

by wd40's (See also WD40's view on the Future History )

Subject: Further Swarm Cycle Thoughts

I'd like to help in fleshing out the universe-building here. Some of my ideas will fit right in, such as lesser nanotech rejuvenation provided during CAP testing which over a few weeks simply improves the bodies of people on Earth so they are effectively 20 years old, cures diseases and improves vision, without otherwise modifying anything. I.e., no body-sculpting. Except maybe people with money can buy limited body-sculpting, or the Confederacy provides it for services rendered.

Etc.

There are already irretrievable background flaws which must be Grandly Ignored for the sake of getting on with the stories. Those lie chiefly in political and economic matters. I can help paper those over somewhat, but beyond that they can only be ignored.

WHAT'S GOTTA CHANGE

The three most dangerous flaws are those which have people acting as something other than people, and having Americans, particularly armed ones, behaving like helpless victims when bad guys attack them. The first concerns the breakup of families aka marriages. Any extraction process which fosters such breakups will meet with overwhelming public resistance and outrage, and this will be universal across all nations.

The second concerns the unlimited arbitrary power volunteers have over their concubines. THAT threatens families and particularly children. Suppose a volunteer decides to execute a concubine who has her two children with her, one of whom is an infant. WHAT HAPPENS TO HER CHILDREN? Why the hell would a mother risk the murder of her children by choosing to be evacuated with a man who is not her mate? This is absolutely related to the family survival issue.

And do you really expect Americans to accept such arbitrary power by volunteers? Especially when it is obvious that the Darjee MUST have the cooperation of Americans to stop the Sa'arm?

The human race is founded on families. This is genetic and hardwired. Pretending otherwise destroys the credibility of the Swarm stories. People will fight to protect their families. An extraction procedure which breaks up families would (a) not be adopted in the first place, (b) be overtly fought by the initial volunteers, whose CAP scores select them to deem breaking up families to be so evil as to merit suicidal resistance, (c) result in immediate termination of cooperation from all but a few of the most vicious governments, (d) result in volunteers refusing extraction and fighting, in some cases to the death, to avoid it, (e) result in the immediate termination of CAP testing and (f) result in armed attacks on all accessible Confederacy personnel who do not resign.

Furthermore colonies founded on deliberately broken-up families will develop amoral sociopathic cultures making them useless to the Darjee.

So the concept of breaking up marriages and families HAS to go. Either families go intact, or they don't go, period. If a "volunteer" whose children are not present at the extraction site can have her/his children brought to them, their off-site spouses can be brought to them as well. Sure you might want to draw an arbitrary line there for story purposes. But then you've gone pure comic book and your characters are only cartoon characters, not people.

It's time to choose between those two.

Plus that volunteers have arbitrary power over concubines with families. That is a total no-go by the entire Anglosphere plus most Europeans.

Assuming that you choose to stop the family/marriage breakup policy, plus the unlimited arbitrary power of volunteers over concubines, I have different major objections about security problems during extractions. Those are patently unbelievable. First, the Marines come across as fumble-fingered numbskulls with only World War One trench-fighting mass conscript skills, weapons and equipment. Second, the bad guys are deemed to be super-ninjas with far better training, weapons and equipment than the Marines. Because the bad guys would sure need it to take out the armed citizens.

Only there aren't armed citizens. Excuse me? Knowing the Sa'arm are coming, and after the example of United 93, citizens don't arm themselves en masse, walk around in public with one person in three packing heat, and fight back against bad guys trying to kill them and their families?

Are we talking about Americans, or some Hollywood cartoon masquerading as a movie in which everyone but the bad guys are helpless victims?

Give the readers a break.

Not to mention just how effective and deadly American forces have been for the past 15-20 years. In the typical Swarm Cycle extraction at a diner, with 4-5 ordinary American infantry, 3-4 bad guys and 40-100 citizens, the following would happen. Bad guys open up. 20-30 seconds later maximum all the bad guys would be dead, 1-2 citizens might have been hit by
wild shots from the bad guys, and none of the soldiers would be injured (it's called body armor). And, in Texas , none of the soldiers would have gotten a shot off -- the Texans would have taken out the bad guys immediately. That's TODAY. Without any Confederacy technology.

Americans are not helpless victims.

Students of American character should pay close attention to Flight 93. A random sample of American adults was subjected to the highest possible stress and organized themselves in a terribly brief period, without benefit of training or group tradition other than their inherent national consciousness, to foil a well planned and executed terrorist attack. Recordings show the passengers and cabin crew of Flight 93 - ordinary Americans all - exemplified the virtues Americans hold most dear.

Certain death came for them by surprise but they did not panic and instead immediately organized, fought and robbed terror of its victory. They died but were not defeated. Ordinary Americans confronted by enemies behaved exactly like the citizen-soldiers eulogized in Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture.

Getting back to Confederacy Marines of the extraction period, they'd be less well trained and organized than modern American infantry (due to being expanded too fast -- that would get better over time), but they'd be far better equipped and so more likely to prevent trouble before it happens.

First, every Confederacy Marine on extraction duty would have wearable impact armor proof against small arms fire under about 1500 feet per second velocity, i.e., against any conceivable concealable weapons. Only there wouldn't be any concealable weapons as far as they're concerned -- their sensors would tell them EXACTLY who was carrying what weapon in their vicinity.

Getting back to the impact armor, it would just look and wear like clothes and then freeze into impenetrability when struck by projectiles or impact weapons. Furthermore it would spread the impact out over the entire surface of the side facing the impact. The effects of this are described in Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories. Troops could simply silently command, "Armor On" to extend visually transparent impact armor hoods over their heads and faces, and then put on gloves of the same material, perhaps automatically.

At the very least, ceramic torso armor of the sort worn by American forces could be mass-produced by Darjee replicators. It would be bulky and obvious, but do the job almost as well as Confederacy impact armor.

So how the hell can criminals and terrorists with only concealable firearms take on Confederacy Marines?

Worse, you've given the extraction teams the equivalent of stunners. The effects of that are described in the Miles Vorkorsigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold -- any significant trouble and the Marines would just stun everyone in sight en masse to take down the bad guys as quickly as possible.

I repeat, any attacks on extractions would last only seconds before all the bad guys are down. The only way it would be different would be when a LOT of the people inside the zone are hostile to the extraction, which would certainly be the case given the family breakup policy (though I repeat, the Marines would be the very first to fight that policy, and they'd win because the Darjee MUST have general human cooperation, not hostility let alone armed resistance).

I suggest that extraction problems be limited to public relations issues -- convincing the public to cooperate. This is where the cattle call scenes gotta end. Things would be much more well organized than that.

I recommend going with my proposed retroactive "fix" for existing stories about extraction issues -- pretending that they were Confederacy disinformation:

There were significant early problems in persuading humans to undergo CAP testing, or accept concubine status. Brutal arbitrary initial extraction methods had much to do with this. There were even armed attacks on extraction teams, particularly in well-armed America which, while they were portrayed as done by criminals, religious extremists and sociopaths, were really due to public outrage by citizens who believed they were protecting their families. The adverse public relations consequences of this were such that disinformation techniques were employed.

Wonderful stories can be written about people organizing priority lists, in advance, of friends and acquaintances who they might want to be extracted with given the chance -- I recall one about some school teachers which skirted the edges of that, and another story about a two co-workers who both qualified as volunteers and de facto "picked" each other.

There is lots more room for extraction stories. But drop the violence and security issues -- those are just not credible, particularly concerning Americans. Having people not behave
like people, especially having Americans in groups behave like helpless victims, has disastrous effects on the suspension of disbelief necessary for science-fiction.

Also it simply is not possible for any significant conspiracy against the Confederacy and/or the extraction process to exist without significant public support, particularly in America . And, to the extent anyone is targeted by such idiots, it would be local residents identified with the Confederacy (test center staff, etc.), not prospective volunteers.

CAP TESTING

IMO the principal focus of CAP testing will be selection for cosmopolitan tolerance, adaptability and being self-starters. The colonists HAVE to able to get along with each other even when thrown together in a disorganized mess. There just isn't time for an orderly colonization using evacuees carefully selected for each individual colony based on their nationalities. It must be possible for most any randomly selected group of evacuees to (a) not kill each other immediately and, (b) cooperate across nationality, ethnic and religious divides to build successful colonies. And they must be adaptable to cope with unforeseeable problems, and self-starters be any damn use to the Confederacy quickly.

The cosmopolitan tolerance requirement first rules out most to almost all of the 1.3 billion Moslems due to their religion mandating rule or ruin. The most likely countries to be exceptions are Indonesia , where most of the 88% Muslim majority (@ 200 million) are relatively laid back and pacific, and the 14% Muslim minority in India (@ 150 million). Indonesia and India , though, are very, very backward such that the adaptability requirement bites them big-time, plus China .

Basically pre-industrial populations have titanic problems with cultural adaptability and major problems with cosmopolitan tolerance. Roughly 2/3 of the populations of China and India are pre-industrial, and 80-90% of Indonesia 's.

Allowing for overlaps, this writes off about 1.1 billion Muslims in Muslim majority countries, 900 million Chinese and 900 million Indians (which includes @ 150 million Muslims). That totals 2.9 billion.

Then throw in almost all of sub-Saharan Africa -- another 660 million. For a subtotal of 3.56 billion, i.e., more than half the human race, of nationalities/cultures/areas so backward and/or vicious that significant CAP testing would be both difficult and futile.

So will the Confederacy really evacuate 1.8 billion of the 2.4 billion remaining humans and, if so, how the hell can the Earth's remaining population of 600 million of the bottom 25% of CAP scores, plus 3.56 billion too backward & vicious to be even tested, possibly be more than Sa'arm food?

So much for that idea.

Then throw in the self-starter requirement and you run into major, major problems with Europeans, who have been culled for centuries by emigration removing their self-starters, most of whom went to America which, oddly enough, has the greatest proportion of self-starters on the planet.

Even in areas where extensive CAP testing is possible, there will be will be major, major differences between nationalities, religions and ethnic groups in terms of the proportion of each whose scores are high enough to volunteer for Confederacy service.

So if the three most important CAP requirements are cosmopolitan tolerance, adaptability and being a self-starter, which nations, religions and ethnic groups do you think will produce the greatest proportion of volunteers? Try:

Jews
Americans (possibly also Australians)
Overseas Chinese - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese

MILITARIZATION OF THE EARTH

Basically everyone possible in the developed countries will be drafted, trained, organized and equipped to fight the Sa'arm, with those necessary to operate industry (including food production) and social and life-support infrastructure receiving less training and serving only as militia in case of need. Those persons of other areas who are deemed worth
training, organizing and equipping would be too. And fortifications and buried factories/supply dumps would be built everywhere, but most notably in the advanced industrial countries.

This would have totally over-riding effects on characters on Earth during the militarization period, which would be the 5-6 years before the Sa'arm arrive.

The really big problem would be keeping Sa'arm space to ground weapons from simply pulverizing the defended populated areas. After a while, they would get the idea. I assume you have, or will develop, a solution to the problem of long-range c-fractional (aka 50-90% of light-speed) projectile weapon bombardment of the Earth from space. The usual solution to the latter problem is to Grandly Ignore It. And that works.

In any event, the Earth's ground defense would have to be based on the populations with the social cohesion to form effective ground forces, plus the education and social skills to adapt to and operate advanced Confederacy weaponry. And their supply lines would have to be relatively short so ground-based space defense weapons could protect the supply lines against attack from Sa'arm orbital weapons platforms and spacecraft.

I.e., there would simply be no choice but to base the Earth's ground defense on "redoubts" in the areas with the greatest densities of socially advanced populations, i.e., Europe, North America and the east coast of Asia . Africa, South America and most of Asia plus Australia would have to be written off.

REVISED EXTRACTION/EVACUATION PROCEDURE

The extraction stories so far have not gotten to the really mass movement stage, though the county fair and ferryboat ones are close. Those sorts of extractions, on a mass scale, would utterly screw up the Earth's mobilization process and so elicit massive resistance from the governments and people. Extractions, etc., MUST rely on voluntary cooperation. Without that they are only random kidnappings and would run into widespread desperate (if not suicidal) armed resistance.

IMO you need to make it clear to authors that such extraction stories must be set in the early period of pre-Siege stories, before mass extractions/evacuations begin.

And, once the latter begin, they would be organized with the cooperation of the Earth governments where the extractions/evacuations are taking place. Prospective volunteers would be told their place in line in advance, and given varying amounts of notice, ranging from "Don't hold your breath" to "Always know where your priority concubines and children are".

Sure it's nice for story purposes if extractions come as a surprise. That is not, however, even remotely possible once large scale evacuations begin. Just because a prospective volunteer is in an extraction area doesn't mean he/she HAS to be extracted right then. Once large scale evacuations begin, the desperation to get out at the first opportunity would diminish, and be weighed against the desire for familiar, evaluated in advance, concubines, particularly for families.

You need more carrots here than getting off the Earth, which is one of the reasons I suggested adding rejuventation to CAP testing. Having the nanites in each person tested also provide the AI's with real-time surveillance of them all would also give them real-time knowledge of the locations of all prospective volunteers and, if the volunteers have "registered" their desired concubines with the Confederacy, the locations of their concubines. At that point the Confederacy could both almost perfectly coordinate extractions, and obtain voluntary cooperation from all evacuees.

The Confederacy would not be able to withstand pressure from its volunteers, and from Earth governments, to give priority to children in the final evacuations before the Sa'arm arrive in the Earth system. This would be foreseen and the AI's would have used their rejuvenation nanite-provided control over the fertility of prospective volunteers and concubines to reduce the numbers of young children.

Note that such fertility control could also be used for social, political and eugenic control, and serve as the basis for interesting stories. Women desperately desiring babies (this is both hard-wired genetic and hormonal) would go to great lengths to please the AI's to obtain permission to bear children, and would seek out males as fathers whom the AI's specially favored. So you could have a bright 15 year-old boy with a high CAP score and maybe some specially desired quality (eidetic memory, empathic or quasi-telepathic, etc.) who has a de facto harem of rejuvenated older women who want his children.

CONFEDERACY AND COLONIAL
GOVERNMENT

The less said about the Confederacy government, the better.

IMO there would be far, far more colonies than you envisage. If 1.8 billion people are evacuated to only two dozen colonies, they'd have an average population of 75 million each. Even 600 million evacuees spread around 24 colonies would produce an average population of 25 million each. I.e., the colonial governments of each would be unmanageable absent full cooperation from Earth governments cloning their governments onto individual colonies. Arbitrary power exerted by AI-appointed colonial governors simply would not work.
There would have be an extensive administrative bureaucracy plus a formal political government for each, operating with the consent of the colonists.

Worse, each such large colony would be effectively independent and either necessitate formal diplomatic relations with other colonies, i.e., a set of truly chaotic Earth-type nation-states transplanted to the stars, each with its own armed forces, and with only loose coordination by the AI's. Or you'd have to go for something similar to the United States of
America , with each big colony constituting something like an American state.

I recommend instead that you have 200+ fully terraformed colonies averaging 2.5 -- 2.9 million people each and a greater number of inadequately terraformed (including airless rock) outposts with populations ranging from several thousand to a hundred thousand. At least then the governments of each would be more manageable, and you could justify policy decisions being bumped up to the shadowy, AI-dominated, Confederacy government. More importantly, the smaller size of each colony, and particularly the existence of really small outposts, would facilitate story-writing.

Here is a slightly revised version of my proposed Encyclopedia Galactica. I cleaned some errors up.

Excerpts Concerning the Human Disapora,
with a Note on the Siege of Earth

(c) Encyclopedia Galactica, Demeter, 2350
(Oct. 25, 2007 draft)

Summary

Approximately 600 million humans, constituting about 10% of the homeworld's
population, were evacuated prior to the Sa'arm's arrival in the home
system. The national backgrounds of the evacuees, specifically the
dominance of those from the United States of America (" America "),
were critical in determining the future expansion, and the social
and political development, of the human race.

Initial assumptions that as much as 30% of the homeworld's population
might be evacuated were dashed due to delays both in terraforming
of suitable planetary refuges, and in production and manning of really
large population transports. This was true even though the Sa'arm
did not reach the home system until approximately twelve years after
large scale evacuations commenced. The initial 30% evacuation assumption
was also vitiated by the disappointing later results of CAP testing
outside the developed nations, which showed that a much smaller proportion
than anticipated of the undeveloped nations' populations were suitable
as "volunteers".

This was particularly true of the oldest, and largest, nation of "
China " which constituted approximately 20-25% of the homeworld's
population. This discovery was especially puzzling in that a different
and far smaller group of "ethnic" Chinese, called, "overseas Chinese"
produced a dramatically greater proportion of volunteers. The "overseas"
Chinese, including subordinate ethnic groups (see Formosans), produced
about half as many "volunteers" as the "mainland Chinese" from a population
base which was only 5% of the size of the "mainland Chinese". If
the "overseas Chinese" counted as a single nationality, their proportion
of evacuees would have been exceeded only by America ,
Israel and Australia .

The major reasons why the nation of China produced a surprisingly
low proportion of eligible volunteers are believed to be its level
of development and insularity. First, about 2/3 of its population
was effectively pre-industrial. Only about 30-40% of the rest had
education, skills, etc., comparable to those of developed nations
and, of that group, the proportion of eligible volunteers was comparable
to that of developed nations such as
Korea and Italy . Additionally the population of the nation of China
was very, very, insular by comparison with other countries, and this
definitely contributed to low CAP scores. The "overseas" Chinese,
by contrast, were exceptionally cosmopolitan and adaptive due to centuries
of living as minorities in lands dominated by other ethnic groups,
and this was reflected by their exceptionally high number of eligible
volunteers.

The sheer numbers of Chinese overall, though, meant that
their evacuees formed the second largest national grouping after the
Americans with the nations of India, Japan and Mexico (Siege of Earth
footnote) ranking next. Including the "overseas Chinese", Chinese
was the second most widely spoken language after English.

Statistics and Notes:

America. 180 million evacuees of 300 million population. Approximately
30% of the evacuees were American which, together with the remarkable
assimilative capabilities of American culture made their culture quite
dominant in the Diaspora. 39 million of the American evacuees were
adult males (23 million "volunteers" and 16 million "concubines"),
85 million were adult females (8 million volunteers and 77 million
concubines) and 56 million were minors under the age of fourteen,
evenly divided between males and females. The proportion of female
volunteers was significantly higher among Americans than in any other
nationality, and was the highest of any large nation for male volunteers.
This was due to the same social/cultural factors which made America
the
dominant nation at the time. Also noteworthy was that almost all
American children were evacuated, though this proportion was at least
equaled and probably exceeded by the much smaller nations of Israel
and Singapore .

Singapore. Approximately 75% of the population of the small island
nation of
Singapore was evacuated prior to the Sa'arm attack, which was easily
the highest proportion of evacuees of any homeworld nation. This
was due both to its small size and that the great majority of Singapore
's population were "overseas" Chinese. Its government and people
devoted themselves single-mindedly to securing evacuation and they
succeeded. There is some evidence that ALL of Singapore 's children
were evacuated.

Israel. The small nation of Israel is notable for several reasons.
Its population had the greatest proportion of eligible volunteers
on the planet such that 80-90% of its population, including concubines,
qualified for evacuation. But only half accepted -- the rest insisted
on staying to defend their homeland and its sacred city of Jerusalem
despite the certainty of defeat and death. And almost all the children
were evacuated.

Mexico. The importance of the nation of Mexico in the Diaspora is
almost entirely due to events which occurred after the Sa'arm arrived
in the home system. Approximately eleven million of 110 million Mexicans
were evacuated prior to the Siege of Earth, which was within the range
of normal for most nations. What made Mexico important was that another
thirteen million Mexicans were removed during the final evacuation
of the planet at the end of the siege, constituting 65% of the twenty
million survivors. The disproportionate number of Mexican survivors
was due to the Mexican central highlands constituting
the final "redoubt" on the North American continent, and because the
survivors of other nationalities gave the Mexicans precedence due
to their incredible valor during the Battle for North America . See
Siege of Earth, Battle for North America, and Flag of Chapultepec
. Ten of the thirteen million Mexican survivors were under the age
of 25, including all of the few children except those killed during
the final evacuation.

Anglosphere. American dominance in the Diaspora was not due solely
to their constituting 30% of all evacuees and the assimilative
powers of their culture. America had been colonized from the island
nation of Great Britain , which had founded other successful colonies
and whose culture significantly influenced that of the second most
populous nation of India . All those nations together formed a grouping
called the "Anglosphere". Approximately forty million evacuees were
either British in nationality or of ethnic "white", English-speaking
nationalities which had been British colonies or possessions ( Canada
, Australia , Ireland , New Zealand ). Almost all of the fifty
million Indian evacuees spoke English and were somewhat assimilated
by British culture due to India having been a British possession for
a hundred years. These ninety million English-speaking evacuees from
the Anglosphere, together with the 180 million Americans, constituted
45% of all evacuees. A disproportionate number of volunteers from
other nationalities also spoke English so it was inevitable that English
would become the de facto human Diaspora language. This too made
American culture dominant.

Evacuation and Preparation for the Sa'arm

There were significant early problems in persuading humans to undergo
CAP testing, or accept concubine status. Brutal arbitrary initial
extraction methods had much to do with this. There were even armed
attacks on extraction teams, particularly in well-armed America which,
while they were portrayed as done by criminals, religious extremists
and sociopaths, were really due to public outrage by citizens who
believed they were protecting their families. The adverse public
relations consequences of this were such that disinformation techniques
were
employed.

The AI's and High Command also noted that volunteers, driven by evolutionary
psychology, rarely selected concubines over the age of 40 years unless
they were spouses, despite publicity about nanotech rejuvenation and
body sculpting of concubines as well as volunteers. Males in particular
almost always selected only "nubile" females -- those in the 14-25
year-old age groups -- unless they were personally acquainted with
the older females chosen as concubines. This was deemed a waste of
useful people and genes. High Command was also concerned that evacuation
of a disproportionate amount of military-age concubines would impair
the homeworld's ability to slow down the
Sa'arm advance.

These problems were overcome, after two years, by extending limited
nanotech rejuvenation to all persons undergoing CAP testing. All
those over the age of 25 would receive injections of nanites which
would, over a period of several weeks (depending on their pre-rejuvenation
age), reduce the apparent biological age of their muscles and cells
to about age 20, cure almost all diseases, etc. Those with excessive
weight problems would have their metabolisms adjusted to deal with
it. Given proper exercise, almost all persons under the age of about
55 could be rejuvenated to appear as they did at the age of 20. This
also gave them the higher energy levels,
and libidos, of youth.

And the nanites of course provided the AI's with real-time surveillance
of all persons containing the nanites, though the AI's could not communicate
back as they could with fully augmented volunteers. This dramatically
reduced security threats, enhanced safety and gave the evacuation
more favorable publicity. It also allowed them to regulate human
fertility and better evaluate prospective volunteers.

Older females in particular greeted this offer with enthusiasm. Those
who doubted the Sa'arm threat still leaped at the chance to be young
again. Sexual activity overall sky-rocketed while those eligible
to be volunteers were delighted at having a far wider selection of
attractive, sexually experienced, concubines. It also created some
odd age-pairings between males and females, as those who were really
50 years old could appear to be 20, and the difference could not be
determined save by examination of identify cards and whatnot.

Fleet High Command and the AI's formed a plan, successful as it turned
out, to use the homeworld as a "fortress"
upon which the Sa'arm advance would either be broken or at least delayed
enough so that colonies formed by the human Diaspora would have the
time to expand and develop enough to eventually defeat the Sa'arm.
This required that the homeworld be completely militarized and stocked
to withstand a long siege.

It was also decided that, as much of the homeworld lacked the density
of suitable industrial infrastructure and particularly the skilled,
socially cohesive, population capable of operating it and adapting
advanced Confederation technology to permit defense, that the defense
would have to focus on "redoubts" where such infrastructure and population
were available. This meant
Europe, North America, Japan , Korea , Manchuria and coastal China
plus a few other, much smaller areas. Essentially most of the human
race was written off.

But there was a conflict between the needs of evacuation and the needs
of homeworld militarization and stocking, particularly in that much
initial effort was required to create and develop initially unproductive
colonies. This conflict was resolved by daring and sacrificial counterattacks,
to slow down and divert the Sa'arm advance, made by
hastily retrained homeworld military forces using converted alien
spacecraft and the early production of purpose-built human warships.
The Sa'arm did not reach the home system until twelve years after
large-scale evacuations began.

These large evacuations resulted in significant homeworld population
movements, notably to America as it was emptied by evacuation. The
most notable was that the entire unevacuated population of Australia
(@ 55% of its population) moved to
America . Australia was deemed indefensible as its population and
industrial infrastructure density were too low, while its people all
spoke English and were so culturally similar to Americans that they
could function as such. Much of the English-speaking population of
South America moved north for the same reason, and at least thirty
million who didn't moved to Mexico or Chile .

Siege of Earth

The Siege of Earth was THE decisive event of the Sa'arm War. The
human defense, particularly in the Battle for North America, so attrited
and exhausted the Sa'arm that the nascent human Diaspora colonies
had time to expand, industrialize and deploy large enough fleets to
hold off the Sa'arm when the latter recommenced their advance.

The
defense, as explained above, was based on securely holding the most
industrialized and populated areas and contesting much of the rest
so as to get the Sa'arm to commit the maximum possible numbers of
ground forces, while the Diaspora fleet operating from outer system
bases (notably the moons of Saturn) both attrited the Sa'arm fleet
and supplied the homeworld defense forces with technological knowledge,
intelligence, and key components.

Approximately 60-70% of the homeworld population died in the first
year of the nine-year siege. At the end of that year the redoubts
constituted the entire continent of North America plus its islands,
the European continent west of the Vistula River
and the Carpathian Mountains extending to the Black Sea, Anatolia
and the Levant, all Mediterranean Sea islands, the Korean peninsula
and Japanese isles, and the South American nation of Chile. Organized
resistance also continued in southern Asia (India-Pakistan) and the
South American nation of Brazil . Many island areas were not attacked
at all, such as New Zealand .

At the end of the second year the redoubts of North America, much
of Europe ( Italy ,
Switzerland , the British isles and western Europe west of the Rhine),
Japan and Chile remained.

At the end of the third year only the redoubts of North America, Chile
and two parts of Europe held out ( Spain and the British isles ).
Approximately ten million Japanese and Koreans were evacuated to North
America .

At the end of the fourth year, only the North America redoubt stood.
Approximately ten million Europeans were evacuated to North America
. 99% of all humans surviving on the planet resided in North America
.

The Battle for North America then started, and lasted
approximately five years. This was the decisive engagement of the
Siege in which the Sa'arm were really broken. The Sa'arm finally
accomplished a widespread landing in the little developed, and quite
unpopulated, Arctic areas of Canada and slowly forced their way south.

Fleet High Command decided in advance to evacuate the greatest possible
number of survivors, at any cost, when the redoubt area and population
base dropped so low that the end was coming quickly, and husbanded
the necessary resources for the operation. This was hotly disputed
by the AI's, who preferred either not to
use those resources at all, or to instead use them to inflict the
maximum losses on the Sa'arm in a surprise attack when their ground
forces were geographically concentrated to overcome the last redoubt
in central Mexico. High Command successfully argued that human morale
factors were now predominant. The AI's conceded that they were unfamiliar
with those.

Fleet suffered unbelievable losses in the evacuation, arguably exceeding
the value of the twenty million extracted population. This was most
notable when more than a hundred thousand naval personnel and several
million tons of warships were sacrificed just to secure the Flag of
Chapultepec alone (the 2020 battle flag, not
the 1847 flag).

The Flag has great totemic significance even today, and is located
on the grounds of the Military Academy in Mexico . While the homeworld's
biosphere was restored at titanic expense after the Sa'arm were defeated,
North America was not repopulated and remains a shrine whose few ruins
surviving the Sa'arm occupation are being overgrown. Only the Military
Academy and necessary park
maintenance facilities were built there.

Hindsight shows that Fleet High Command was correct in placing an
overriding value on morale factors in deciding to evacuate the Mexican
Redoubt. The survivors' stories were well-documented and remain stirring.
Every facet of the subsequent war effort was enhanced, from production
to cohesion to individual sacrifice.

A special and successful effort was also
made to preserve Mexican culture. The Mexican survivors themselves,
plus prior Mexican evacuees, were so much sought after as mates that
they today form a disproportionate amount of the gene pool relative
to their initial numbers. Plus a wholly disproportionate amount of
the ground forces.

American Dominance

Americans
quickly became dominant in any colony where they formed more than
15-20% of the population due to their bottom-up recreation of political,
economic and social infrastructures. The AI's had not anticipated
this. It is now clear that this dominance was rooted in the Americans'
frontier heritage plus peculiarly American attitudes. Those start
with the unique role of the American people in American nationalism
-- that the people (as an entity) felt they alone constituted the
nation. This was quite contrary to other countries' nationalism where
the "people" were considered one of many domestic factions, and often
an illegitimate one ("the rabble"). This distinction arose because
the American people had deemed America 's sovereign power to reside
in themselves, while most other nations began their national consciousness
with a hereditary monarch expressing the
sovereign power. Other peoples identified themselves with their nations.
Americans instead identified the nation with themselves, feeling they
collectively were the nation.

Many distinctive American traits grew from these feelings - exaggerated
self-reliance and individualism, disdain for elites, self-confidence,
etc. The American people did not hesitate to act on their own, as
individuals or in spontaneously formed groups, to address issues as
those arise. They simply did not suffer in silence or wait for anyone
else (including their own governments) to help them. The unique vitality,
power and independence of American local governments compared to those
of other countries arose from the fact that sovereignty and power
resided in the American people collectively and flowed from the bottom
up.

This resulted in the American evacuees insisting, based on their frontier
cultural heritage, on re-creating their political, economic and social
institutions in their new colonies, and this could not be stopped
when AI lack of foresight and neglect created vital administrative
and social needs for those colonies which the Americans' recreated
institutions met. This alone guaranteed conflict with the disorganized
top-down administrative structure the AI's envisaged based on their
experience with other sapient races. Some human
nationalities might have developed, after evacuation, in the directions
the AI's intended, but not Americans.

What really gave the AI's problems, though, was that these same attitudes
also made Americans so crucial in stopping the Sa'arm. This started
with their cultural tradition, arising with the dawn of classic Western
Civilization, of free citizens who, together, comprised their "polis"
and defended it with their individual lives as the expression of their
corporate selves. This tradition lay closer to the surface in America
than elsewhere in the West due to a combination of deeper traits in
Americans - self-reliance, individualism, etc.

The Sa'arm threat absolutely riveted the American evacuees' attention,
but in terms of wanting to fight the threat instead of running from
it as evacuees of most other nations did. Here there was a critical
difference among the different nationalities' "concubines". A high
proportion of the American concubines did want to confront the Sa'arm,
if only to protect their children, and were not willing to wait for
the AI's or understaffed colonial governments to tell them how to
do it. They joined in the war effort as much as possible without
being asked, and facilitated the economic and political growth of
their colonies so as to
support the war effort. This spontaneous voluntary cooperation by
the overwhelming majority of all American evacuees, not merely the
volunteers as with most other evacuees, dramatically increased the
military value of colonies dominated by Americans.

Another reason the AI's had for letting the American evacuees re-create
their familiar institutions was sheer economic productivity. Americans
had very high spontaneous social trust amongst each other relative
to other nationalities, and particularly so after recreating their
familiar political, economic and social institutions/environments.
Colonies dominated by Americans quickly formed
the major basis of Diaspora economic and military production. And,
as noted, the 30% of evacuees who were Americans quickly assimilated
the 15% from the rest of the Anglosphere. That combined 45% then
went on to assimilate most of the rest. Today the only significant
"ethnic" groups are Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese and Jews
(most of the latter now reside on Earth and refuse invasive nanotechnology
-- those are not allowed to leave the homeworld).

The AI's therefore let the Americans come to dominate the Diaspora,
and hoped that they could thereafter control the human race through
injected nanotechs. The outcome of the latter remains unclear, but
there is no
doubt whatever that the decision to let the Americans dominate was
crucial to defeating the Sa'arm.

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))