On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 05:37:00PM +0200, Abu Dhabi wrote:
> I actually wouldn't be all that surprised that pureblood Terrans
> exist in significant numbers. Endogamy is a thing.

Not with an absolutely perfect record over more than three thousand
years of being embedded within a highly mobile non-pureblood society,
it isn't.

It only takes a single child more than about fifteen generations back
to be non-pureblood -- knowingly or not, through any of hundreds of
plausible scenarios -- for an entire inbred community to end up having
been descended from that child and no longer pureblood Terran.

The time period in question is more than a hundred generations,
through dozens of major social changes and multiple interstellar wars.
Such "pollution" would probably have happened at least thousands of
times over, and any one of those incidents would be sufficient.

That's only the beginning, really.  There's also things like diseases
that can carry DNA fragments from one host to another, and the whole
thing just gets ridiculous.

I mean sure, as a fictional premise or a political claim it's usable,
but like many such absolutes it falls apart if you look at it closely
enough.  It's one thing to have records that state that all your
ancestors have always been purely Terran for four thousand years.
Having all those records be totally complete, correct, and not to have
any other form of extraterrestrial contamination in your genes is
quite another.

By the time of the Third Imperium, there are no longer any truly
pureblood Terrans.  There are just those who might like to claim such
a thing.

- Tim