Scientific American, June 6, 2440
The most astonishing information disclosed during the Hiroshima question-and-answer session may have been delivered almost casually.
There are approximately forty billion V’ren.
They speak one language.
Not one common language layered over regional languages.
One language.
Accents exist. Local vocabulary exists. Archaic forms survive in old records and ceremonial speech. But across approximately forty thousand years of recorded V’ren history, linguistic divergence never produced separate languages.
For human linguists, this is extraordinary.
For V’ren historians, it appears almost mundane.
The explanation lies in a planetary history profoundly different from ours.
The V’ren did not spread across their world while technologically primitive.
For an enormous portion of their early recorded history, nearly the entire species remained concentrated on one unusually shaped continent.
That ancestral continent stretched roughly from 60 degrees north to 60 degrees south while remaining narrow east to west.
Its geography encouraged continuity.
A severe western mountain system intercepted incoming maritime weather. Heavy precipitation and snow accumulated at elevation, producing reliable seasonal meltwater that fed enormous river systems eastward across rolling interior country.
Along the eastern coast, a cool equatorward ocean current helped moderate the tropical zone.
The result was not environmental sameness.
The continent contained cold regions, broad temperate plains, subtropical belts and dense equatorial jungle.
But those ecological zones existed within one long, connected population corridor.
Institutions reinforced that continuity.
The oldest surviving V’ren university is approximately 39,000 years old.
It predates serious V’ren expansion into the major eastern archipelago by approximately 3,500 years.
Long before that diaspora, the planet had already been mapped and circumnavigated.
Indeed, V’ren sailors had a complete conception of their planet roughly a thousand years before serious settlement outside the ancestral continent became common.
That is important.
The V’ren knew the world before they populated it.
Their great eastern archipelago, located roughly a thousand kilometers from the ancestral continent, was not a mysterious undiscovered frontier when major migration finally began.
It was known territory.
By the time settlement became substantial, the V’ren population was approaching 2.5 billion.
They also possessed technology that makes Earth historical comparisons deeply misleading.
Steamships and railways existed roughly 38,000 years ago.
Computer systems with capabilities broadly comparable to primitive late twentieth-century human microcomputers appeared roughly 35,000 years ago.
Yet V’ren technological development did not proceed with the explosive cascade familiar from Earth’s industrial period.
It took until approximately 2,000 years ago for many other technologies to reach something broadly comparable to Earth around the First World War.
Statements such as “V’ren technology was equivalent to Earth in year X” are therefore nearly useless.
Their technological fields evolved at radically different speeds.
Spaceflight provides perhaps the clearest example.
The V’ren maintained a functioning satellite network for approximately one thousand years before sending members of their species to their moon.
Their first crewed lunar landing occurred in June 1968.
To human readers, the date is almost comically familiar.
The developmental history behind it is not.
Humanity went from its first artificial satellite to humans on the Moon in barely more than a decade.
The V’ren spent approximately a millennium operating orbital infrastructure before placing people on their moon.
Their civilization repeatedly displays a pattern of technologies existing for extremely long periods before later systems or applications emerge.
The same is true culturally.
By the time V’ren began serious settlement of the archipelago, they were exporting an already ancient civilization.
More than three thousand additional years passed before major settlement moved beyond the archipelago toward another ribbon-like continent.
The result is planetary dispersion without deep civilizational fracture.
Regional cultures developed.
Accents developed.
Local identities developed.
But they developed inside a linguistic and institutional framework older than the diaspora itself.
D’ren Th’kai, one of the young V’ren serving as a Japan page during Marmaduke and Th’ron’s visit, expressed the result simply.
“There are forty billion V’ren. We are culturally very similar wherever you go.”
He then contrasted that with Missouri, where neighboring communities already seemed culturally distinct to him.
That is perhaps the strangest thing about humanity from a V’ren perspective.
Humans dispersed early.
V’ren dispersed late.
Humans became countless peoples and repeatedly reconnected.
The V’ren developed an enormous mature civilization first and carried it outward afterward.
Their linguistic history is not a story of repeated reunification.
It is a story of continuity.
Social responses
1. @LinguisticsDepartment
Forty thousand years.
One language.
We are professionally offended.
Reply, @VrenLinguist:
We are available for questions.
Reply, @HistoricalLinguist:
I have approximately forty thousand years worth.
2. @RailFan2440
Thirty-eight thousand years of trains.
I welcome our green superiors.
Reply, @TransitPlanner:
You would betray humanity for reliable rail.
Reply, @RailFan2440:
Immediately.
3. @RetroComputerClub
TRS-80-ish computers 35,000 years ago is the most cursed technological timeline imaginable.
Reply, @TechHistorian:
Their development chart looks like somebody dropped spaghetti.
Reply, @VrenEngineer:
Your development chart looks rushed.
4. @OrbitalMechanic
A THOUSAND YEARS of satellites before sending anyone to the moon.
Reply, @RiskEngineer:
Remote systems first, crewed exposure much later.
Reply, @MoonLandingNerd:
Meanwhile humans invented rockets and immediately started strapping test pilots to them.
5. @MoonLandingNerd
Their first moon landing being June 1968 is hilarious.
Reply, @VrenCitizen:
Why?
Reply, @EarthHistoryNerd:
We need several hours.
6. @AncientUniversityMemes
Imagine your university having thirty-nine thousand years of alumni.
Reply, @VrenStudent:
Imagine the fundraising office.
Reply, @EarthStudent:
Please tell me they have lost donor records at least once.
7. @EarthExceptionalism
No language lasts forty thousand years. This is propaganda.
Reply, @XenoLinguist:
No human language has experienced forty thousand years of V’ren geography, institutions and demographic history either.
Reply, @VrenCitizen:
This remains a very human way of arguing.
8. @PlanetaryGeographer
That ancestral continent does a lot of explanatory work.
Reply, @ClimateNerd:
The western mountains and predictable snowmelt alone would support enormous continuity.
Reply, @MapNerd2440:
And the long north-south corridor gives ecological diversity without requiring separated civilizations.
9. @HumanChaosEnjoyer
Humans crossed one mountain and invented another language.
V’ren crossed a planet and kept theirs.
Reply, @LanguageNerd:
Wildly simplified.
Reply, @HumanChaosEnjoyer:
But spiritually correct.
10. @DrenFanJP
D’ren being stunned that Marshall and Columbia count as culturally different is still adorable.
Reply, @FreeholdLocal:
Wait until he gets to Memphis.
Reply, @DrenThkai:
This has been said to me several times and now concerns me.
11. @SystemsHistory
The interesting point is not that V’ren technology advanced faster.
In many areas it advanced incomprehensibly slower.
Reply, @RetroComputerClub:
Exactly.
Reply, @TechHistorian:
Which is why “Earth equivalent year” keeps failing.
12. @VrenHistoryForum
Humans keep trying to put our entire civilization on their technology ladder.
Please stop.
Reply, @ScientificAmericanEarth:
Fair criticism.
Reply, @EarthHistorian:
We are going to need a multidimensional chart.
