As we document the fate of each ecumene paperworkwise, one of the more important lines to be filled in, beyond Cause of Conclusion, is Duration of Foreknowledge.

This can be zero. An ecumene may be in a life stage of roaming their world, living more or less in accordance with the niche they evolved in, occasionally contemplating the true nature of what lies beyond their senses, but not any closer to understanding it than any other creature. They may spend 2⁷s of generations living, dying, loving, warring, praying, scrabbling, cleaving, agonizing, wooing, lying, rambling, haunting, anointing, condemning, circumambulating widdershins; assuming that while there may be mysteries here and there, they generally have the gist of how things work. The mechanisms of nature have been explained, perhaps in terms of gods and spirits, pigeonholed into their roles. One day, it is as pleasant to go out in the sun as it ever was. The next, it is scorching. People, animals, and plants get sick and don’t get better. The clockwork of the world deteriorates within one generation, monotonically worse and worse. No one knows that a direct gamma ray burst, from a whirling star collapsing into a black hole, has scrambled the upper atmosphere at a molecular level. Without a protective layer above, radiation from the world’s sun has its way with the ecosystem, which disintegrates into entropy. Nobody has had any chance of planning ahead for the event, and its effect is total.

On the other extreme, knowing far in advance that an end is threatening is not, as one might think, likely to help avert it. On the contrary, for many complex ecumenes, the longer a danger is known of and warned about, the more time there is to debate, to deny, to put off solving it. Most ecumenes believe they are unique in their perverse inability to cooperate on challenging the wickedest of nemeses, but it’s the rule rather than the exception. Large-scale coordination, let alone world-scale, is nearly unknown among the few worlds that even reach the point of having knowledge of how much world there even is to coordinate.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.