Page 71 - Tales Apocalyptic and Dystopian

Minutes of the Posterity Planning Commission

ourselves. And here is where the case of Kalamoku differs from the
mainland, and why I am here tonight. If you can take the long view
and adopt a rationally-imposed sociobiological motive, then you
might be willing to do something for those descendants of ten
thousand years hence. An inaccessible island, which is what
Kalamoku will be for most of that period, is a virtually fixed gene
pool. Everyone living here when contact is again made with the
vanguard of renewed global travel will be your lineal descendants,
whatever mixture of Kalamoki and outsider you may now represent.
No mainlander can make that claim with any assurance: the
dislocations attendant upon universal atavism will mix and sift human
genetic distribution over wide areas almost at random. But you have
it in your power to help a group of people as much a part of you as
your own children. The ‘selfish gene’ theory would therefore not be
disproved by this sort of altruism, if you can exert your intelligence in
its application.”
“As I said, little or nothing will be left of recorded history, not to
mention all other branches of knowledge. New languages will have
arisen on the continental land masses along with new cosmologies
and origin myths. Owing to the mainland’s vaster territory,
population and resources, its inhabitants will develop technology and
the means of securing wealth by force while the people on this island
revive a tribal organization based first on hunting and gathering, and
then perhaps agriculture appropriate to the ecology. But the invaders
will arrive to large extent as ignorant of the past as anyone here.
They too will have lost their history over an eon of barbarism and the
dismantling of every constructed object for fuel or housing. You can
show them that lost history, and become a center for tourism and
economic development once again, regardless of any other attraction
you might have. Of course, your descendants will not know what
they have preserved, except perhaps as legend until enough ice has
formed to lower the sea level again. Having been submerged for
millennia that legacy will not have been vandalized or fallen to the
ravages of time.”
“At length we have arrived at the purpose of this meeting. Given
the scenario I have laid before you, and the value of giving your
descendants a way to thrive isolated in the middle of a long-
uncharted ocean once they are again threatened by an alien presence,

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