Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-67.193.170.188-20170224122257/@comment-92.234.82.49-20180106153234

Janus100 wrote: The thing that gets me is how did Grounder society even come to this state? The original group were people inoculated from the radiation by Becca. The Becca who was a super-genius who created two AIs (expert in machine learning and programming), one of which directly interacts with the human brain (expert in neuroscience, biomedical engineering, etc.), and created a radiation cure (expert in gene therapy, medicine, etc.). How'd they go from Becca to people who know practically nothing about modern science? I would think Becca would create a society where education, science, medicine, etc. were all highly valued skills. Instead we got a warrior culture with clans fighting each other. Beca was only able to inoculate a few people, who became Nightbloods. The rest of the radiation resistance is down to natural selection.

Good question about how they became so primitive - it does seem a bit "compressed" timeline-wise. The Mountain Men definitely play a part, in that they seem to have suceeded in preventing the grounders from using firearms and generally controlling them with superstition. Another clue might be found in just how few old people there are in the show - Indra seems to be the oldest person that we see.

My guess is that Becca died young and most people don't make it past their forties due to the chance of being killed in the incessant gonplay or getting cancer. Remember, this is a very violent society with no modern medicine slap bang in the middle of the greatest environmental disaster since the dinosaurs died out.

Such a trauma would have the double effect of utterly changing society anyway, and lowering life expectancy to the point where, by 2150, you've probablty had several kids by the time you're 20 (if you're not sterile) and your grandparents would have been born less than 60 years ago. Still feels like a little bit of a stretch though... I forgive it of course, because the drama's just so damn good!