Ionian Philosophy

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On Ionian Paranoia (from a Human Perspective)

NOTE: portions of the following are superseded. The language and names, as well as the existence of human "daughter worlds," is no longer applicable. 

Humans have found Ionians incredibly frustrating and baffling, over the long history of their connections to them. This frustration has to be balanced against the fact that, however mercurial, bizarre, uncommunicative, condescending, or otherwise annoying the reality of Ionians may be, the human population of the Daughter Worlds and other habitats in Human Space owe their very existence to their altruism and technology. It was Ionians who saw fit to rescue some human beings who (at least, so the story went) were in imminent danger of extinction. This was during the tail end of the Wisconsin glaciation on Old Earth, at the time of the original discovery by Ionians of the Solar System Link to Ionian Space and consequently of Earth itself.

Ionians of that era provided the means (including transportation) to inhabit a new world, Zubos, a remarkably Earthlike world which they set aside specifically for these humans. Zubos was partially terraformed (having already been relatively habitable), and various geoengineering tweaks have been undertaken over the time of its habitation. In fact, Ionians seem to pay attention to their charges, and have frequently offered help just in time when systems were failing, politics had made a particular world or habitat ungovernable, or other serious problems threatened catastrophe. They didn’t interfere, exactly, but just made available some out or fix that defused the situation. It was disconcerting, in a way, and humiliating, more than once, but people just came to think of it as part of the way things are.

The Ionians originally shared some basic science and technology with the primitive humans, and made some of the infrastructure of their vast civilization available. Within a millennium after the First Contact, there were several human worlds, and humans had access to spacefaring technology. But these things were consciously doled out. There was never general access or acceptance of humanity as belonging to the Ionian supercivilization in any meaningful way.

Ionians kept the locations of links to their own home systems secret, and did not share with humans the techniques of locating and prospecting for spatial links. Even after millennia, this technology and even the basic science behind it proved elusive. Nor did the Ionians share with humans much information about themselves or their history, or any of the other civilizations they had encountered. They were very careful not to share technology that could be transformed into weapons, and when they did communicate directly and straightforwardly with human leaders and scientists (which was infrequently), as often as not it was to warn them to stay away from any destructive or weapons technologies, which, they made clear, would simply not be tolerated. But, apart from this, they were benign zookeepers, whose motto seemed to be Live and let live, mostly separate from us, thank you very much. In fact, only one of the Human Worlds had any permanent Ionian population, that being Koros (also called Corrace), which was the location of the Ionian Institute of Earth and which had a population of very eccentric Ionian pure-biologicals who apparently thought it acceptable to share a world with humans of Earth (not something which the vast bulk of Ionians would consider as even sane). All of this was the case, even though to a close approximation Ionians and humans are biologically similar enough that the worlds they would choose to inhabit would tend to be the same worlds, and their artificial habitats would have roughly the same internal conditions of gravity, pressure, temperature, air mixture, etc. 

The general belief among humans came to be that Ionians are just naturally paranoid. They will not take any chances with upstart races. They aren't hostile, but they don't let them in; they keep them at long-arms' length and carefully control not only contact, but technology and information transfer as well. The principle of both of these being: only that which benefits the Great and Glorious Totality of Ionus will be allowed. The secondary goal of benefiting the aliens (i.e., us) is not ignored, but it is subservient. And nothing not actively useful to them, or at least harmless to them, and important to the well-being of their client (again, that being us), is allowed to pass between them and us. So, millennia after Contact, humans still know relatively little about them, and have surprisingly little actual direct contact with them and their technology. 

As a result, although the broad outlines were known, of how Human Space and its worlds and habitats came to be, and how they were dependent on and connected to the ancient and almost unimaginably powerful civilization of the Ionians, the sweep and grandeur of Ionian history, the scope and geography of the Connected Space known to them, and the bulk of their scientific knowledge, are and always have been  mostly a matter of conjecture and mystery. 

Yet, whatever the frustrations and alienation people have felt over the long years of co-existence with Ionians in their various forms and apparitions, there has never been anything like enmity: Ionians have not actually harmed humans in any verifiable incident, ever. They just haven't been forthcoming. This is frustrating to human beings, but it is also generally understood that, however baffling and annoying they may be, they are, ultimately, benign. This is presumptively a hard-wired feature of their civilization by now; there do not appear to be any exceptions, or even any near-exceptions. Ionians have from time to time rescued humans from accidents (although not reliably: it would seem that their surveillance of human activity is at most sporadic). They have, again, from time to time and somewhat unpredictably, provided needed technologies when systems failed; offered new links to new worlds (at odd and unpredictable times, however). Occasionally in history, this particular move has defused tensions that appeared to be on the verge of leading to human/human conflict.  It could even be said that they have, invariably, been humanity's benefactors, if not always in quite the ways that the humans involved would prefer.

Given the penchant of humans on Earth to make gods of what they don't understand, it might be expected that at various points along the way of the relations between Ionians and humans there might have arisen cults or even full blown institutions of worship or supplication to these mysterious, seemingly invariably beneficent, if distant and uncommunicative, beings. But this, too, the Ionians have managed to quash: one thing they have let be generally known, in no uncertain terms, is that they are not essentially different from us. They are living beings, or the augmented descendants of living beings. They are, indeed, more advanced, both technologically and even in their intrinsic, artificially enhanced, biological nature, but originally they evolved naturally on a world not unlike Earth (somewhere, and they aren't saying where), and they believe that life in the various forms in which it has arisen is intrinsically valuable. (And that intelligent life, which they know to be exceedingly rare, is truly precious and worthy of preservation even at great cost). They have a civilization-wide value of biophilia, which they will discuss, at least to some extent, and they have managed to inculcate something of this philosophy in virtually all of the diverse cultures that make up the humans of Human Space (not including Old Earth). 

An Earlier Alien Link to the Solar System, and the circumstantial evidence of the Ionian discovery thereof

The exact location of the Spatial Link between Earth's Solar System and Ionian Space is a closely guarded secret, which plays a role in the story of the Recontact, to be discussed elsewhere.

During the course of the approximately 16,000 years of human culture within Ionian Space, however, it gradually became clear to human scientists that the Ionians had contact with Old Earth that exceeded a single visit in the relatively recent past. This inference derived from evidence that there had been some surveillance and continuous contact with the original home world of the human species in the millennia that followed the original contact. This too, is an essential element of the story of the Recontact, and the details of the unfolding of this mystery are told elsewhere.

Although prior to the period of the Recontact, humans knew very little of Old Earth, and therefore had no basis to suspect the fact, it was eventually realized, post-Recontact, that there must have also been at least one other link in Solar System Space that connected to a location from which contact had been made with Earth in a much more remote past time than the initial Ionian contact. The evidence consisted mainly of the fact that there were species of prehistoric plants and animals on Zubos and other human worlds and habitatats of Ionian Space which certainly did not exist on Earth 16,000 years ago (along with many that did, but which had since become extinct on Earth). The assumption was that there had been at least one other alien visit to Earth, long before the Ionians discovered Earth, or even had become a spacefaring civilization on their own. 

It was generally understood, even before the Recontact, and despite the fact that the Ionians did not share this kind of information, that the Ionians were in contact with, or aware of, truly ancient alien civilizations with which they had come into contact or discovered as extinct civilizations while exploring Connected Space. An intriguing mystery presented itself from the evidence that one of these extremely ancient civilizations must have been discovered by means of the Link with the original home of humanity, Old Earth. Again, the evidence was purely circumstantial, but no other explanation presented itself. The assumption was that the civilization itself was either extinct or otherwise no longer in contact with Solar System space.

The actual evidence consisted of living small dinosaurs which had become extinct on earth over 65 million years earlier, but which continued to thrive on one or more of the human habitations and planets. There were also plants descended from cycads and ginkgos, as well as giant club mosses, extinct varieties of fishes and arthropods, ammonites, extinct mammalian and reptilian orders, and numerous other forms of life, which were either no longer extant on Earth long before the Ionian contact, or which belonged to branches of life forms that still survived, but which were, in the specific forms found, no longer present on Earth itself, nor had been for ages past. The assumption was that some other aliens had taken an interest in Earth much, much earlier, probably around the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that these aliens had transported these life forms to one or more other worlds, reachable via sequential link from the Solar System. Further, it was inferrable that the Ionians had at some point visited this other world or worlds, and transported some of these life forms, not back to their original home, Old Earth, but to some of the human worlds of Ionian space.  

The inference that Earth was the connection between these ancient preserved life forms and modern Ionian Space was the only reasonable conclusion. The Ionian reticence to discuss the details of their discoveries and the extent of their "empire" in Connected Space, which approached and even transcended outright paranoia, left the human scientists who pondered these questions to conjecture, infer, and deduce what facts they could, without the confirmation or additional details that undoubtedly were well within the power of the Ionians to grant. From a human point of view, their invariable refusal to do so, or even to communicate on the subject at all, was beyond frustrating, but it had been a fact of life for so long that it just had to be accepted. It was, in fact, scientific investigators from Earth itself who found this entire subject so compelling that they sought to push for disclosure from the Ionians, but cooler and more experienced heads at places like the Institute for Urbonian Biology at Zortzipak, realized that this was a fool's errand: the Ionians would divulge nothing. If there was more to be learned of the "Old Ones," as they came to be known, who must have visited Earth tens of millions of years ago, it would have to be the result of human re-discovery, via the Solar System Link that must exist or have existed, if that were even possible. But where was it? How could it be found? All these things remained unknowns.