History – Yom

A BRIEF HISTORY

When Zenon Benon and the crew of the Boreal discovered Yom in 2310 adtc, they named the slowly turning planet after the Hebrew expression for “day.” The Boreal’s crew spent the next nine months studying the smallish world and its strange life forms, including the trup. Because the trup had well-developed hands and a rudimentary culture, Zenon feared violating the non-interference policy of the Galactic Association. The crew therefore made most of their observations from space and exercised extreme caution when making occasional trips to the planet’s surface. Consequently, though the Boreal gathered much useful data about the planet, they learned very little about the living habits or the true capabilities of the trups. When Zenon returned to Earth, he reported Yom to be a planet inhabited by an “advance-able species,” ineligible for colonization.

Because such an inhabited world had never been discovered by Humans before, GAIL petitioned the High Council of the Association for permission to send an anthropological expedition to Yom to study the trups. In 2314, Dr. Joy McGillicuddy lead a team of scientists on a three-year expedition, the first of many that would take place over the next sixteen years. They took a great deal of specialized equipment that allowed them to observe the trups undetected at close range in their natural environment. McGillicuddy’s team catalogued the habits of the trup in great detail and managed to decipher much of the trups’ rudimentary language. Their findings repudiated Benon’s conclusion that the trups would eventually develop a civilization. They argued, quite cogently, that though trups indeed possessed a highly developed hand, they lacked the mental capability to advance beyond their primitive, foraging culture.

The conclusions of the McGillicuddy expedition report ignited a firestorm of debate. In those days, the discipline of predictive sociology was in its infancy, and the most advanced work to date had been done by the Chlorzi. To settle the question, the GAIL High Council authorized a second study, to be participated in by scientists and sociologists from all three GAIL members. The authorization also allowed a non-destructive sampling of 500 individuals from the trup population to be taken aboard GAIL spaceships and subjected to detailed brain scan and analysis.

The interspecies study project launched in 2319 combined all known techniques of the day to analyze the thought processes of the trups into fundamental bits of data. Then researchers, aided by powerful computers, spent the next four years trying to determine if such thought patterns might allow the trups to develop a civilization. Their conclusions ultimately paralleled those of McGillicuddy’s research and determined, with a probability of better than 98 percent, that the trup species, as it now existed, would never develop an advanced civilization capable of increasing its population above the current level or capable of leaving the planet to explore space.

The GAIL High Council authorized the colonization of Yom by Human beings in 2326, with the specific provision that trups must not be abused, mistreated ,or indiscriminately slaughtered. Final planning and preparation for launching the Yom colony proceeded in record time, since Earth’s scientists made good use of the time spent studying the trups to determine if and how Humans might live on Yom. The first pioneers from Earth set foot on Yom in 2331, just five years after GAIL gave the authorization to proceed. They established their first settlement at a place they called Praetolia on the northern coast of the Autumn Day continent. Despite the speed with which they conceived and built it, the Yom colony benefitted from the advance planning techniques used to develop Genesis. Unlike Genesis, however, the pioneers again adopted Hadar’s developmental model based on free enterprise.

Praetolia’s early settlers paid little attention to the trups, for the problems of establishing their tiny settlement took 110 percent of their waking hours. Yet within a few years of their arrival, observant pioneers found that the highly imitative trups could be trained to perform simple tasks. By the end of the second decade, trup labor had become an important factor in the colony’s industrial equations and began markedly to affect Human lifestyles on Yom. Now in its 46th year, the Yom colony stands out among the Human worlds for its lack of dependence on automated machinery. An important symbiosis has developed between trups and Humans that has helped both species.