The Journey

So you are a person who was working on Hari Seldon's Encyclopedia project, and have now been told that you - and a hundred thousand others - are being shipped off to Terminus, there to start The Encyclopedia Foundation.

You didn't expect it. Hari Seldon knew you didn't, and even mentioned to Gaal Dornick that 100,000 people might not willingly move to the edge of the Galaxy. But given his performance at the hearing, the Emperor is now insisting on it.

We read much of their activities in "Foundation", the first in the original trilogy. But we read nothing about their trip from Trantor to Terminus. How long was it before they were even ready to go? What massive funding was needful? How many ships did it take? How long was the journey?

Remember, the era during which the Encyclopedia Foundation was started was a time of technological regression. Not only was technology and the standard of living diminishing, it had clearly been diminishing for some time. For example, the computer technology was at levels that we would think of as pre-nineteen eighties. For instance, they used hand calculators that while electronic, only calculated numbers. Newspapers were still being sold. Cell phones were unknown.

You are basically a pioneer, and the only additional technology to help that a mid-20th century person wouldn’t have is a spaceship capable of entering and exiting hyperspace.

Did they have to just take personal belongings? Who provided the raw materials that would create homes and factories at the other end, Terminus being devoid of metals? We know they used plastic a lot, where did the petrochemicals come from for that, Terminus being notably lacking in organic life?

Did each take a given amount of industrial supplies?

And then the journey. This wasn’t 500 years later, after the Foundation Federation had developed computer technology to let ships make a rapid series of jumps. It took months to get anywhere, and 100,000 eat a lot. And there aren’t any Star Trek “food replicators”. After each jump, from near the center of the Galaxy to it’s outermost edge, they had to stop, get a new answer from a very old and slow computer, check it’s math by paper and pencil, and jump again.

When we consider that it was 29 jumps from Terminus to Sayshell, we can see they had a very, very long trip.

When they got there, what did this band of scholars and researchers do? Someone had to build things, there were no robots – that they knew of! – to do any grunt work. Building a town for 100,000 people is not the easiest task, just laying a sewer system would be an enormous industrial undertaking. Clearly, Emperor Cleon was pulling out all the stops, and much more massively funding this project than we may have been led to believe. To give yourself a good idea of what it took, imagine if we relocated 100,000 professors and their families from east coast universities and libraries to a barren patch in Montana. What would we have to spend to move them there, build a town, and let them work on the Encyclopedia Foundation?

Now multiply that by lightyears, add increased time due to lack of computer power, and you’ll know what the Emperor had to have spent!