2013-04-03: [CT]Moving On...

[The Comment Golem]

Discussion thread for [CT]Moving On...

[5Cats]

Naw! The shiny crystal thing is very cool! Gives the room that "mystical" look.

I'm guessing the Gods (should I capitalize that?) knew the Elf bloodline would stagnate like the Dwarves had. They took 4 cracks at it (1 'oops' and 3 're-trys') then started on a new concept...

[Forrest]

Naw! The shiny crystal thing is very cool! Gives the room that "mystical" look.

I'm guessing the Gods (should I capitalize that?) knew the Elf bloodline would stagnate like the Dwarves had. They took 4 cracks at it (1 'oops' and 3 're-trys') then started on a new concept...

We know that for a fact now, from Meji's revelation near the finale. The Paedogogusi were initial prototypes; the Dwarves were a first pass which both wouldn't work for their purposes (no magic) and were too resource-intensive to create one at a time (no reproduction); the Elves were a second pass both fixing the magic problem and adding self-assembly (reproduction) but had an error in the reproductive system that would leave still too few of them to work; and the Trolls were supposed to be a fix to that problem but the suffered from Creator Existence Failure and Came Out Wrong (exactly how wrong is unclear as they seem to have magic use and no known reproductive problems and by the few encounters with them we've seen appear to be far and away the most pragmatically intelligent people in this 'verse).

[Neko7]

Plus, still from Meji's revelation near the finale, we know the "gods" realise that the elves reproduction system would because incompatible (at least on a nintra-species level) after 427 generation.
We already throw some big spoiler around, but if you want some of the ultimate spoiler you can go: http://www.errantstory.com/2010-07-12/4871

[Forrest]

Plus, still from Meji's revelation near the finale, we know the "gods" realise that the elves reproduction system would because incompatible (at least on a nintra-species level) after 427 generation.

What's what I meant by:

the Elves ... had an error in the reproductive system that would leave still too few of them to work

You know, I never caught that we now know exactly how many generations of Elves there have been. Combined with knowledge of when the last one was born (which we have), and how long ago they were created (not sure we have this), we could compute the average length of an Elven generation.

[Graybeard]

Plus, still from Meji's revelation near the finale, we know the "gods" realise that the elves reproduction system would because incompatible (at least on a nintra-species level) after 427 generation.

What's what I meant by:

the Elves ... had an error in the reproductive system that would leave still too few of them to work

You know, I never caught that we now know exactly how many generations of Elves there have been. Combined with knowledge of when the last one was born (which we have), and how long ago they were created (not sure we have this), we could compute the average length of an Elven generation.

We could, but we're not going to like some of the conclusions that result.

First the calculation. The timeline that Impy graciously put up for us, now viewable at the HKV, says the elves were created around "8000 BCE" -- which is to say, 8000 years before the start of the current era. That's actually a remarkably short time, all things considered. It's shortened further by the fact that the elves haven't been able to reproduce at all for the last 1400 years, as you point out, so the available reproduction time was 6600 years. Then divide that by the 427 generations mentioned in the Big Reveal, and you find out that the average length of a generation was only about 6600/427 years, or 15 years to adequate precision. It is quite obvious that this isn't right.

There's another problem. Suppose that only one elf (Misa) was born in the 427th generation. If her parents were from the 426th generation, and all of that generation succeeded in reproducing exactly once, then obviously there were two elves in generation 426. By the same reasoning, there were four in generation 425, 8 in generation 424, and so on -- and working it back, there would have had to be AT LEAST 2^426 elves present at the creation, to provide enough ancestors for generation 427 to be Misa and Misa alone. That is an unholy number of elves. Even if you assume a vast amount of inbreeding, so that there were only the number of parents that would be required for, say, 35 generations, you still get 2^34 elves at the creation -- which is a number in the many, many billions. And all this only works if every elf in each generation does succeed in begetting another elf. Note that Poe has said that siblings are almost unknown among elves. A given pair of elves wouldn't have more than one kid. Many, however, may well have none at all -- which makes the number necessary to produce Generation 427=Misa even greater.

So the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the use of the term "generation" in the Big Reveal isn't describing what we think of as "generations" in the real-world, genealogical sense. What does it mean? I haven't the slightest idea.

[Forrest]

One thing to consider is that at any given moment, the breeding group of Elves consists not only of the latest adult generation, but of all surviving members of all generations prior to that. Elves don't seem to make much out of how old someone is once everyone's adults, since they grow to a fixed adulthood stage of life and just stay there and never move on to some senior state. So Alice and Bob, call them Generation 1, have one kid; then Alice can fuck Bob's dad and Bob can fuck Alice's mom (call the parents Generation 0), and pop out another two kids, for three kids in Generation 2, all without any incest thus far or any more than one child per couple. Meanwhile Alice and Bob may have two half-siblings also in Generation 1 from where their parents used to be married to each other's parents (elves don't stay together forever remember), and those half-siblings can in turn pull the same trick of fucking unrelated members of the previous generation, adding another three kids each to Generation 2. So from an initial four Elves in Generation 0, with no incest and one child per couple, you can produce another four Elves in Generation 1, and then still with no incest and only one child per couple you can produce 12 Elves in Generation 2.

Those twelve Elves are then related to everybody we've discussed thus far and so there can't be any more breeding without either incest or full siblings. But if there were another four elves elsewhere in Generation 0 and this same thing occurred in isolation there, then each of the twelve Elves in each of the two groups in Generation 2 now has (12+4+4)/2 = 10 unrelated mates, so from 8 members of Generation 0 we can get at least 240 members of Generation 3 with no incest and only one child per couple. Probably a whole lot more than that if we let the two groups interbreed in Generations 0 and 1 first. Let's see: each of the 4 women in expanded Generation 0 can have 4 kids by the 4 men, for 16 kids in expanded Generation 1. Each of the 8 women in expanded Generation 1 can have 6 kids by the 6 men in that generation who aren't their brothers, and another 3 kids by the 3 men in Generation 0 who aren't their fathers, for 6+3=9 kids per each of 8 women or 48+24=72 kids thus far in Generation 2; plus, in addition to their contributions to those offspring, each of the 8 men in Generation 1 can have an additional 3 kids by the 3 women in Generation 0 who aren't their mothers, for another 24 kids in Generation 2 bringing it up to 96.... Huh. Apparently allowing interbreeding sooner decreases the numbers? I must have done my math wrong somewhere, can someone check this?

Either way, with the Elves' immortality and consequent intergenerational peerage, and serial monogamy, even with one child per couple and no incest the Elven population can expand much more quickly, while everyone's still fertile. Imagine if, every time a child was born, they would eventually have one child per every unrelated member of the opposite sex who existed at that time. Imagine you just start out with a population of a 1000. The next generation will have 500*500=250,000 members once every possible pairing in that first generation has occurred. Each kid in that next generation then has the potential to eventually produce 499 kids, with no incest and only one child per couple, before they even mate with any of the 498*498=248,004 members of their current generation who aren't half-siblings. So the first generation produces up to a 250 times population growth; the second generation produces up to over a 248 thousand times population growth, for a total population growth of over 62 million times in just two generations. Our initial population of a thousand can now be almost ten times the total population of modern Earth (over 62 billion) after only two generations.

My point being, the initial populations of Elves could have been reasonably small, then rather quickly EXPLODED over the earlier generations, before reproductive problems kicked in, to populations large enough that by midway through Elven history, there would be enough Elves around to provide the requisite number of ancestors for Misa at that time. If Elves have Human-like levels of tolerance for related people breeding (e.g. beyond 1st cousins is generally OK), then the no-incest requirement in the above calculations is loosened considerably (you only have to worry about any but the most obvious incest at all beyond two generations ago; all but four potential mates in your great-grandparents' generation [everyone of the opposite sex who's not a great-grandparent of yours] are fair game!), and the population can explode even more quickly.

Can someone better at math help work out the actual Elven maximum population growth formula? So far I've got this start of a series:
After generation 0 is born: n
After generation 1 is born: n + (n/2)^2
After generation 2 is born: n + (n/2)^2 + (((n/2)-2)^2 + ((n/2)-1))
But I can't math well enough right now to continue the series or derive an elegant formula for it. Help?

Anyway, it's unlikely that Elves would actually have maximized their population growth potential this way, but the point is that from a small number of elves at the start there could very quickly have bloomed a sufficient population of Elves that there's no problem with Misa having enough ancestors 427 generations later.

[5Cats]

MY take on @Forrest and @Greybeard's posts?

"It's marked on a CURVE!"

Sure, the initial number of Elves had NO trouble reproducing, they were GOOD at it!

But the problems that overwhelmed them didn't come on a "gentle curve".
They exploded on them! One generation (377? Just a random guess) they were reproducing happily, then 15 generations later? TROUBLE!
(OK, not that sudden, but in cosmic terms? It's the blink of an eye...)

One cannot apply "straight line algorithms" to a curve. The failure of Elven DNA was a sudden and shocking surprise. At least to the Elves...

In My Humble Opinion: This is one of the "things" that sets Errant Story apart from the pack: attention to detail!

[Imp-Chan]

Keep in mind that the elves weren't just good at wiping out other populations, they also did a fair bit of damage to their own in those first 4500 years. So while an explosive population growth at the start is extremely probable, it doesn't need to have been THAT explosive to still explain Misa being the only elf of her generation... nor is Misa necessarily the 427th generation, or so far as I know the last possible elf to be born (at least as of the start of Errant Story).

So, yes, it's marked on a curve. Sarine is only coming in at all halfway through elven history, too, so she's not the most reliable narrator, either. Her assessment of birth rates may have been fairly accurate for her subset of the population in her time, but still not at all accurate for the first reproductive burst at the start.

Plus, remember that the gods produced entire CITIES of dwarves in the beginning. The starting numbers for the elves could have been similar. Which sortof makes the lingering power of the decayed gods a lot more terrifying in scale, at least to me.

^-^'

[BloodHenge]

In the reveal page, it mentions that Anilis and Senilis didn't have enough power left to fix the Elven reproduction problem. However, notice that their first solution to "create a race of creatures" was "create them one by one". I wonder if a less energy-intensive solution, like retroviral gene therapy, would have been within their grasp, but they just didn't think of it because they were blinded by the obvious "dismantle each member of the population and reassemble them all correctly".