[Dragaera] Dragaeran WMD

[Maximilian Wilson]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Sun, 10/5/08, Maximilian Wilson <wilson.max at gmail.com> wrote:
>> * There must have been hundreds of thousands of descendants
>> of the
>> e'Kieron/e'Lanya line by now.
>
> The noble houses seem to have low birth rates (but in
> general there are very few siblings on Dragaera,
> especially for major characters).  And Dragons pop
> off all the time (or did before revivification) in
> duels and battles.  It's a wonder there are any left--
> still more that there are any Dzur.

FHYA makes a point of noting that Aliera, at 500 years of age, still
looks like a Dragon of a single century's age. My sense of it is that
this is roughly analogous to a 30-year-old still looking like she's
18. 30 is still "young" in the sense of experience (Teldra calls
Aliera a "young Dragon") but old enough that it's somewhat remarkable
to still be looking totally fresh. Anyway, if Dragaeran generations
can be assumed to be about 500 years, the Empire is approximately 400
generations old. If no inbreeding exists and birth rate is at
replacement levels (which it obviously is or there would be no Dragons
at all), each e'Kieron descendant produces 2 e'Kieron descendants in
the next generation. 400 generations means 2^400 descendants, or 2.58
x 10^120. That's 30 orders of magnitude more than the number of
particles in the universe. Obviously, therefore, there _is_ in
breeding because there aren't that many Dragons, but even if the
inbreeding is total (400 generations of sibling marriage) you still
accumulate 800 e'Kieron descended souls. "Hundreds of thousands" is a
conservative estimate, IMHO.

Of course, it's possible that either 1.) soul-recycling means that
most e'Kieron descendants were _already_ e'Kierons in a previous life,
and thus don't increase the total pool, or else 2.) the e'Kieron
"genes" died out, mostly or entirely, early on. Aliera, and presumably
Adron, had the ability because of who they were in past lives.

Or else, I suppose, 3.) the "gene"/soul interactions are just totally
weird, as Aliera hints to Vlad.

-Max

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