SEARCH IN THE GALAXY

The way I'm interpreting Gaal in the series is that she's a composite character of several others in the books, with some other ideas thrown in. Or maybe you could say she's an entirely new major character pretending not to be an entirely new major character by having enough features of known characters. She's got in her Gaal, Manella, probably Wanda, and maybe Bayta. I also wonder if the Second Foundation in the series is going to be a lot closer to the First Foundation than it is in the books. In the books somebody would be a First or Second Foundationer, but rarely both. I'm thinking Gaal may be both, and this situation may be relatively common.

She mentions the mule in the opening voice over of the series so unless she is a clone, I doubt it. The Mule was sterile and sickly in the books. She looks healthy to me though deep space travel on the slow boat as it were could drastically alter one’s life expectancy. As for her character’s ability to have children, who knows?

OK, I began to read Foundation's Martyrs and saw this straight away: If a culture relies for its cohesion on hatred of the outsider, calculate the probability of each projected outcome, and its time of fruition. I'm going to put on my amateur psycohistorian hat, I can't resist it. First of all, how do you define in a measurable way "cultural cohesion", or another related idea, "cultural diversity"? Clearly, a society that is only loosely bound by a loose common culture but with a general feeling of being the same community (think maybe Ancient Greece at a point in time when they weren't too busy fighting each other) is a different thing from a society that is bitterly divided into opposing factions. So it can't be a single-number parameter. Let's suppose you have a way of measuring communication within the society, and you have some idea of the shape of communication networks and the language used within those networks (something that Facebook almost certainly has, for example). You could establish clusters in the language used, how tight those clusters were, and how closely they relate to clusters in the social network. You could also establish what sort of feelings are being expressed between the clusters. And you could summarize all that with a bunch of numbers. Second, what sort of things you would expect would be affected most directly by those numbers? Well, too little cultural diversity would almost certainly make it more difficult for a society to change, learn and adapt to new situations. A polarized society would have increased chances of conflict. Polarized against an outsider, it would increase chances of war, and polarized within, it would increase chances of civil war. High levels of cultural diversity are likely to come with increased inequality of all sorts, especially if it comes with low cultural cohesion (positive feelings). But then, you wouldn't expect any of those things to be affected only by cultural factors. The ability to change and adapt would also be strongly affected by access to basic resources and whether there is a well-functioning economy. The likelihood of war would depend on whether there are resources worth fighting for, and/or inequality/injustice worth fighting for, and realistic chances of winning for both sides. Inequality itself can be affected by how easy it is to establish and destroy links (commercial links, if you are thinking economic inequality, or any other sort of link, for other types of inequality). At this point you come to one of the fundamental problems of any amateur psychohistorian, which is figuring out which variables to consider and which to ignore. It's too easy to come to the conclusion that people will never agree on any sort of common framework, and therefore, the very idea of psychohistory is dead on arrival. Except for one thing. Networks have some very general properties that have value for forecasting even at the most general, rule-of-thumb, count-with-your-fingers level. And I'll leave it at that.

Just saw the last episode. Wow. Demerzel is killing people right and left and without a blink. I get that there's this whole idea of her either (1) wanting revenge for what Brother Daw made her do to Halima or (2) deciding that faulty Brother Dawn threatened Empire of (3) Brother Day wanting to start "bending" and changing maybe threatened some way larger plan of Demerzel that's spanning all these thousands of years... But it just feels wrong for the robot to have no qualms about killing a human being even if it works within the robot law about a threat to humankind. And isn't there a weird mixed message in the flawed DNA? We're told that the Cleon's are soulless because they are exact clones (the same person over and over) and can't evolve and now we learn that hasn't been true for a long time so...isn't that premise false? I mean, which is it that the writers want us to believe? Is the Cleon empire going wrong because people have screwed up the DNA or because an Empire run by exact clones can't work?