David Johnson wrote: > These are the sort of questions that leave me wondering about "another > Merlin" back on Terra. I buy Beam's explanation for why Travis and his > officers, who had fought a long war to a punishing victory, might do > this. But that doesn't explain why folks back on Terra would stand for > it (even if some of them didn't want to be "upstaged" by a computer) > -- especially of they had another Merlin at their disposal. Foxx Travis might well have asked other questions of Merlin. If the Terran Federation is a point source that is failing, what strategy would force an exodus from the Alliance to have a substantial population outside the failure zone? Is the Terran Federation as a whole a zero-sum entity? How much economic expansion for one world might comparatively impoverish other nearby worlds? What is the political effect of comparative impoverishment?
