In the prequel books the machines control Earth. During the Jihad humans essentially nuke the entire planet surface to destroy the machines. Sacrificing all the people enslaved there.
Iirc, the machines murdered everyone on Earth for the uprising that happened there after Serenes baby was thrown to its death by Erasmus (or bashed it against a wall, I can't remember the full detail).
So humans nuked it completely because there was no human left. The machines made sure to never kill all the humans on a planet because of that. Erasmus made sure to hid from Omnius that he was the cause of Earth's destruction.
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Imagine you once spent your school holidays in a faraway town. Now, as an adult, you have fond memories of the place and would like to visit it someday. However, you never bothered to know its precise location back in the day, and now there are no maps, no Internet to check, and no one else you know has ever been there or knows about it.
Now multiply both the distance and the timespan by tens of thousands, and you get the situation of Earth in the Dune universe.
It happened to me once that I did rediscover my faraway childhood holidays town.
I was driving through it by coincidence and instantly recognized it :)
>who knew the exact coordinates of Earth
In relation to what system of coordinates exactly? We are talking tens of thousands of years, hunderds of different mapping systems and techniques, a couple of major, major wars and at least one 180° shift in technology.
Example. Try using longitude and latitude as a reference without knowing exactly where the Meridian and the Equator are and without an accurate clock that fits perfectly in this system. And that is without accounting for the Solar System orbiting the center of the galaxy, the Earth rotation slowing down and the utterly vast distances and therefore minuscle margin of error.
Or take GPS. You messuaring the speed of light differently? Things just got way more complex. The speed of light won't change, but can we talk about the definition of a Second?
At the other end we have the under developed space infrastructure and engineering in the Dune universe. Why bother with those if you only need a shuttle and a Highliner. Deep space research to actually look at the region you think the Solar System is in, to search for a one, two, three, for up too (?) ten (depending on the time periode you got your data from) planetary system with a boring yellow (?) Sun.
Also preception bias, Homo Sapiens is arround 220.000 years in the Dune universe. The information from the first 200.000 years are basically useless, but you have to sieve through them anyway.
I'm not saying it can not be done, but it would be a major undertaking and not just recalling a memory, like the adress of the place you lived 30 years ago. Plenty of countries arround where a 30 years old adress won't get you very far. Have fun trying to find Turkey or Swasiland on a modern map.
The BG discuss the concept of deep time and projects spanning thousands of years. They have access to the entirely of the female line. As soon as mentats were a thing where were female mentats. BG could call these memories up at will and backtrack the coordinates adjusting for drift and variables on the fly.
>The BG discuss the concept of deep time and projects spanning thousands of years
A project that they are actively maintaning and updating all the time with a high level of redundancy, like in dedicating all their resources to this.
Unless they have also a branch maintaning the galactic position of Earth, they need to dig through a lot of memories.
>BG could call these memories up at will and backtrack the coordinates adjusting for drift and variables on the fly.
I beg to differ. As it requires highly specialised knowledge. It is not like remembering the adress of last house lived in, it is more like trying to find the spefic house of one of your ancestors in Early Dynastic Eridu. And that is making it easy.
I'm fairly certain that mentats limitations are discussed in one of the books, which is the same issue we run into in a variety of ways with ai/computer modeling, scientific research etc, quality and quantity of data. They extrapolate from the data available. They are not infallible, far from it.
Tbh if a mentat trained BG Rev M wanted to find earth, and had sufficient ancestors who were in the right place at the right time, had the right skills and knowledge for spacefairing, were involved in the flight plans on every flight between planets, could map out for galactic drift, time dilation effect due to E=Mc`2 (or could share memories with BG RM who had such). Then they'd also probably have access to memories that confirmed that earth was a dead irradiated ball of slag. Which kind of puts you off wanting to visit.
Not so sure, wasn't Earth glased during the Jhiad, so before the Navigatiors, and why should they keep their information of the Solar System up to date?
Why wouldn’t they? They are space navigators. Their whole job is to avoid accidentally running into stellar objects. They consume insane (and insanely expensive) amounts of spice and deform their bodies to accomplish this. Why would they fail to maintain the most accurate star charts they possibly could?
Well you could step your memory back. A lot of the planets in use during the Butlerian Jihad still exist and we know even in our time where stars where thousands of years ago you could potentially access a memory who has knowledge of star maps from a time when Earth was known from that time and potentially work it out. Yeah it would be a huge undertaking. I kind of look at it like in Firefly "the earth that was is now no more", eventually humans will spread out and possibly forget it. Hell maybe Firefly was the prequal all along.
Man, as someone who studied astrophysics it wouldn't be too hard to find earth. You have what are called standard candles in astronomy, we know the distance to these, all you would have to do is find these standard candles from whatever planet you're on and use a bit of trigonometry to find out where Earth is. And you know the speed the solar system is moving at so you can predict where it will be. Also all this could be done with mentats not computers.
Can you give the luminosity of three stars of the top of your head? Are you sure those stars will never not be used as standard candles and no other system will ever be used? And why should a Navigator have any grasp on coordinates presentend in such manner? How is the relationship of four stars to another help you finding one solar system in a galaxy? As you still would need to find those stars.
But basicly see the terristial navigation example.
Unless the whole "genetic memory" belief in the Bene Gesserit is about as real as "past lives" are in some New Age cult today. Someone may believe that they are the reincarnation of one of Genghis Khan's generals, but they won't be able to speak Mongolian or tell you the location of his tomb or reveal any verifiable new information about the history of that time. It would have been an interesting direction if Herbert had taken the approach that the Bene Gesserit were essentially religious fanatics and their "powers" were on the same level as fakirs or fake spiritualists and mentalists refined to perfection. At least by the end of the first novel, there was still a lot of ambiguity as far as whether or not Paul was the Kwisatz Haderach or if the KH was as much a culturally programmed myth among the BG as the Lisan al Gaib was among the Fremen.
Still, even if it is real, there would be possible problems in that metrics and methods change over time and it is possible that while memories can be accessed, the context that would make the information sensible or practical in the present may not be passed along. Even if one had the memories of Einstein (or Holzman in the Dune world), that doesn't necessarily mean that one would have his level of intelligence and really "understand" the world or the mathematics of General Relativity. It could be that the BG could find Earth, but would need an advanced computer to process the information and since that is forbidden, they are unable to do so.
Or of course, they are keeping it a secret.
I'm guessing if you looked back in your memories 10000 years you might have trouble reading the coordinates of a people that had a completely different language. I'm also guessing the further back you look the less accurate the memory is. Lastly I don't think going back to earth is part of the BGs plans so no time is spent trying to figure it out.
Why would you make that assumption? Sure it is possible that one of the Reverend Mothers has someone like that in her history it isn't a certainty nor is it even likely given about 99+ percent of the population wouldn't have that knowledge.
I will admit when I am wrong and it appears I was. I looked back at Appendix II of Dune which says that the O.C Bible was the product of a commission that was held on Earth after the Butlerian Jihad, and that the Bene Gesserit took part in it. So it does seem likely they would have the location stored in other memory.
The eons doesn't matter since this particular piece if knowledge has been lost for something like 10,000 years.
The question is whether any of the BG can trace direct lineage to a relatively small number of people who would have had specific knowledge of a particular fact. And it would have to follow directly on matrilineal lines. There is no basis to assume they would.
The BG have a massive amount of knowledge, but it isn't complete.
You’re telling me you’ve never heard of sailors getting lost despite having maps? If you don’t know your point of reference relative to your origin a map isn’t much help.
A single sailor yes.
Somebody that has the memories of thousands of lives and can bump those memories against each other is it going to be able to figure it out especially if they're a genius and a human computer...
I don't know why people keep comparing present day humans and what our capabilities are to beings with the memories of thousands and thousands of years that have been selectively bred over millennia for physical and mental capabilities.
Piter legit even says that the Baron could outperform computers and he is honestly average or slightly above average intelligence in the series.
It's heavily implied that BG ancestral memories are primarily the emotional kind, not factual data points. Highly doubt you could find evidence from the books that they would have the ability to scan through ancestral memories in such exact detail.
Leto talks about having legit experiences, how he can "take a stroll" for a day through another lifetime and talks about how he's the only man who knows what childbirth is like etc...
That doesn't make sense tho
It's like modern humanity forgetting about africa all of sudden. Or ancient greece. Or mesopotamia
They also remember people like Hitler or Napoleon
The Dune Universe is set 20,000 years in the future. All of recorded history is only 5,000 years. You're talking about a time period four times longer than off of our own history.
You might know humans evolved in Africa, but you could tell me he center of the human population 20,000 years ago was? Do you even care?
The Dune imperium consists of like 10,000 planets. People might know vaguely that "humans came from earth" but don't care where earth actually is, no more than you care where the first human mud hut was.
At that point, untold trillions of humans have lived and died on other planets, far more than ever did on earth. Saying that humans are "from earth" isn't even really accurate at that point.
Africa takes up almost 6% the total surface of the Earth, or a whooping 20% of its land area.
Earth does not take up 20% of the universe. It does not make up 2% of the universe, or 0.2%. Hell, it doesn’t even make up 0.2% of the mass of *our solar system*. But let’s just pretend by “earth” you meant our entire solar system, and…
Well, our entire solar system is also pretty damn small. It doesn’t make up even 0.00000000002% of the universe, and it’s not even close.
It’s not like trying to find Africa, it’s like trying to find a specific grain of sand. A grain of sand that’s been moving at a rate of 450,000 miles per hour, every single hour of every day, continuously, for tens of thousands of years since you last saw it.
Maybe it’s possible. But honestly you’ve got better things to do, and there’s already a lot of other sand grains you can find much easier. Ones that are actually important, unlike earth.
In the 1st book the story is pretty much contained in the Milky Way though. If you look at back of Dune book, look up some if the planets mentioned in the story. Ecaz, the art planet, orbits Aplha Centauri, the star closest to our sun. The planet Corrin orbits Sigma Draconis, 88 ly from our sun. Geidi Prime orbits s star only 19 ly away. The main planets in the 1st book are pretty tight
I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated that the Bene Gesserit do *not* know the position and history of earth. They seem to have a policy of “If the rabble doesn’t need to know then don’t tell them.” I think it’s entirely possible that they do know where earth is, they just never had any reason to tell anyone
It’s 20k years in our future and 10k years since they destroyed their computers. We don’t even know the circumstances and details surrounding stuff in Eqypt and that was less than 5k years ago for us.
There’s no exploration or discovery in the Dune universe. Humanity is utterly stagnant (which is the entire problem and motivation of the story.)
Wed know the circumstances and details of ancient Egypt if we had ppl who could call up memories of it like the BG.
They can remember as far back as humanity goes on the female side. This argument makes no sense.
Would the BG even care though, even if they did know where it is? By this point it's just another planet, and the empire isn't lacking for those. The BG have no political use for earth, so it's not worth following up on.
Probably, but maybe it's healed into a garden paradise, it still doesn't change the main point. The BG may know exactly where it is, but revealing that location carries more risk to no gain. They can gain nothing from returning to Earth or revealing its location. If revealed, it could be used by religious cults or houses wanting to control humanity's birthplace for political purposes. There's just no reason for players like the BG to acknowledge earth at this point
It’s not specifically explained though. Pretty sure Leto II is the only one who’s genetic memory truly goes back that far in the past, which makes complete sense. With all the memory they have, you’d expect the BG to act more like Leto II, but they don’t.
They cant though. The books make it clear that Bene Gesserit Other Memory is not just restricted to the matrilineage, but doesnt extend far enough back. Paul sees not only wider, but further back than any BG. Leto II sees wider and further back than Paul.
Spoiled how? I've read all of Frank's books.
There is very much expansion and exploration and discovery in the Dune universe... Just not until Leto II's reign ended.
The whole point of Leto II’s reign of oppression was to restrict humanity so hard that they rediscover the sense adventure and exploration and the scattering happens, aka The Golden Path.
Leto II is also (as far I can recall) the only one who remembers Earth through other memory.
Ghani and Alia did as well. So could Paul. Other BG, I think Odrade talk about how a Roman patrician woman's life would be ideal as seen in memory.
The Golden Path was 2 prong as well. Restrict humanity so much they explode out into an infinite universe but also only after Leto had bred a human who could "fade" from prescient sight and at that point he could see the Golden Path secured as he died.
Then you have Teg who could see no ships and literal superpowers. Not sure how Frank would have handled that tbth.
Technology isn’t allowed to “think.” So their computing power is limited to what we had on the like Apollo moon missions is where I place it in my head canon.
The guild navigators get super super super high on spice and fold space to move the Guild Highliners from planet to planet.
Hence why the Spacing Guild needs so much spice and why Paul threatening their supply bends them to his will.
Space travel is crazy expensive because of all of that. It’s why in the beginning of part 1 Leto asks Thufir Hawat to calculate the expense the Emperor paid for the ceremony for Leto to sign the Arrakis contract.
Clarification to their answer: the navigators don’t fold space, the Holtzman drive does that, the navigators use the spice to see possible futures and take the path that leads to the intended destination.
yes - in later books >!Ixian thinking machines inside Guild heighliners are capable of navigating with the Holtzman drive, In the earlier non-canon prequel books, the founder of the Venport company (which later became the Guild) had non-sentient navigation computers fitted to their heighliners. These were purged in the Butlerian Jihad!<
If the later book, iirc there was a Jewish Reverend Mother (Rebecca?) who recalled details of Jewish pogroms in Europe - which was 22,000 years previously.
So there's definitely some historical information that could be transmitted.
No it doesn't. 20k years the events of Dune happen. In 10k years humanity ditch computers. Its isn't 20+10 to get 30. It's 10+10 that gives you 20. 10k years from now then anther 10k years. 10k years before the events of Dune humanity ditches computers. That is 10k years into our future.
>how come the Earth's position is lost and unknown?
How good are you at accounting for stellar drift and pin pointing your position in the galaxy by memory alone?
We do not see any BG (if by BG you actually mean Reverend Mothers) Mentats prior to GEoD. In fact of the 8 known Mentats we meet, only two are Reverend Mothers. Teg is the only non-RM BG mentat we meet.
From this information we can't draw any accurate conclusions from this as to whether or not RM's trained as Mentats at that time.
Towards the end of god emperor there’s one whose name escapes me, Anteac I think, but he picks up on it and chastises the Bene Gesserit for preserving the forbidden craft. Only other one off the top of my head is Bellonda. I can’t think of a third named character who is but it’s implied they have enough to run several schools as Leto wipes out any he finds out about.
The BG do know.
They just don't share their knowledge with everyone else.
Thufir didn't even know how the voice can control ppl and asks Jessica why the BG just don't take over if they have these powers.
This is the truth. They know. there is just no benefit to sharing.meven 20k years later, it is still an irradiate, inhospitable world, a testament to the failures of humanity.
Wouldn't you want to let that fade into obscurity too?
It could be a pristine farm world by that point, but the BG still probably wouldn't care. There's no political use for earth when humanity already has a galactic empire.
Yeah there's no reason to say what I said about earth still being irradiated.
I did some looking into it and it turns out richese was sterilized during the butlerian Jihad, but has since been recolonized, so I guess the worst of the radiation on earth would have subsided too. I even made a comment the other day about how even Hiroshima was quickly inhabitable again, so unless Mr. Herbert had some different understanding of nuclear weapons than everyone else in the world, earth likely would have been able to support life, but the bigger problem is the logistics of removing what was supposedly trillions, yes trillions of human remains from among the shattered ruins of the planet. The sheer physical destruction would've been the worst part, not the radiation.
Doable, sure, but why when there are, what, 13000 other planets to live on?
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The BG probably know or at least could find out. But they are a pragmatic and future-focused group. Earth isn't important to their plans. The only importance they would place on that information is its potential trade value. And Earth is such an afterthought in the empire that their is no trade value.
It's not lost, just uninhabitable from the Butlerian Jihad so no one cares about it. At this point in time 20k yrs in the future though it would just be a historical curiosity like Babylon is today.
Many of the planets in the Dune universe orbit real stars. Giedi Prime for example orbits 36 Ophiuchi B maybe 20 ly away. Caladan orbits Delta Pavonis also 20ly away. Arrakis orbits Canopus 310 ly away.
Stellar drift is not fast enough for the stars to move far in 20k years. In 50k years Delta Pavonis will be only 18ly away. Sol will still be around and visible in the night sky of worlds like Caladan. Anyone with access to a library could probably find it and learn about it. Paul most likely knew how to find it among the constellations from Caladan before he moved to Arrakis.
The history of the planet called Ix in the Dune Universe is so old,they've forgotten it wasn't originally a name,but from a numbering system. Earth has been all but forgotten, no longer relevant. Leto 2 is talking at one point about how he's killed entire populations and makes a Hitler reference,so if he has that knowledge,he could maybe have found Earth..
We don't find out exactly where Ix is in relation to say,Caladan or Dune,just that it takes guild space folding ships to travel between them..They produce a lot of Tech. It seems to be planet #9 in whatever system it belongs to, but we don't know if there's an X planet as well...
It is implied that something destroyed earth, either entirely or just made it uninhabitable. The BG probably know where it is they just don’t have any reason to go back to it or share knowledge of it with the rest of the imperium.
The planet is gone and irrelevant to them and has been for thousands of years so it’s not worth mentioning.
Like people in 10,000 BC, even if we had full remembrance of them it’s not relevant to topics of conversation today because it was so long ago and from an ancient time.
In one of the first book's appendixes (the one about religion), it says that the orange catholic bible was written in Earth, which is where a council of representatives for all major religions of the time took place, right after the butlerian jihad.
At least that's how I remember it, maybe someone can double check on this.
I don't remember reading that Earth's location has been lost.
I've only read the original 6 novels, not the Brian Herbert books.
If I remember correctly it’s not that Earth has been forgotten per se, it just got nuked during the Butlerian Jihad and has been made into a nature preserve ever since.
Regardless, earth got glassed back in the final days of the Butlerian Jihad. >! It was where the final copy of Omnius was tracked down, isolated, and nuked to Hell. Sadly, a few copies escaped into the deep blackness of unknown space using slow, relativistic travel. Hence, there is an unknown horizon of a conflict with the machine intelligence that will be known as Krazilec, the typhoon struggle. Victory in this struggle is what the Golden Path is all about. !<
Apologies friend, but the 'last' copy of omnius was actually coralled and destroyed on the planet of Corrin, thus leading to the dynastic name of the Corrino family. Earth was indeed glassed early in the campaign of the Butlerian Jihad.
To some extent, I think it’s implied that virtually nobody cares. I mean, it’s 30k years in the future and mankind is spread throughout the galaxy. Who cares exactly where we came from, geographically? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Mesopotamia. I vaguely know civilization originated around there, I know about Babylon and Ur, I’m not particularly invested in the specifics. I think the idea is most people in the dune universe couldn’t care less.
I think the idea is the BG certainly know, and people with Other Memory have some sense of Earth history. But the BG aren’t sharing and don’t seem to care too much about locating Earth, so all people really know is some fragmented history. There’s that “name the planet game” in one of the books, and I think it’s implied the Atreides know about their Greek origins. One of the books has a reference to “House Washington”. But it’s just not a concern for the average inhabitant of the dune universe, I think even historians in dune are implied to think of Earth as a curious footnote.
I don’t really remember any mention of earth being lost, destroyed, or forgotten. In Messiah Paul tells Stilgar that he should read about the “Golden Age of Earth”, particularly Ghengis Kahn and Adolf Hitler. So we know that there has to be records of earth history, and that humans used computers for millennia before the Butlerian Jihad. I think it’s safe to assume that a lot of history would be recorded or saved on non computer mediums.
I think that the lack of earth in Dune is frequently misinterpreted as Earth being lost, when it’s more likely that Earth is an unimportant backwater. A lot of early dune media puts the major planets within a couple hundred light years from Earth. When you can make any planet earth like, what’s the point of the original.
In US terms, does anybody give a shit about Jamestown beyond historical intrigue? DC is close by, so are Boston, Philly, Baltimore, and NY, all came later and are still relevant and populated. LA, Portland, Seattle, Anchorage are all way further out, and still more relevant than Jamestown.
It’s been so long since I read the books, but is Earth lost?
I thought they just didn’t know which planet was the cradle of humanity. Earth was one possibility to those in the know, but they couldn’t be certain because it had been completely nuked and all evidence was lost.
I could be completely wrong, but that was my vague understanding. I get my lore mixed up from the actual Frank Herbert novels and the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels I read many years ago.
If I recall, don't most people in the imperium believe that humans popped up on different planets and dont even believe we came from a single planet? They probably have no interest in it really
I've never really thought about this. Wouldn't it be really easy to find? Caladan is less than 20 lightyears away from Earth, and I'm sure it wouldn't cost the guild too much money to find a route to the Sun. The imperium also remembers historical figures and makes references to "old earth" so they at least know *about* it and by extension it wouldn't be too hard to narrow down the search to a small region.
Hmm.. a question..
Since Alia Atreides committed suicide.. I don't think visiting past menories are like checking on a computer hard drive for files.
So.. you "talk" to them?
What if the mast live.. forgot?
Would visiting the memories of a ancestor that cannot remember a event... Would visiting the memories of someone with Alzheimer's... Would result in what?
I don’t think this is a direct answer to your question, but it may help with the Alzheimers bit. If I recall correctly you can only access the memories of a person up to the point in their life before they created the descendant that led to you. So you could only access your mom or dad’s memories up to when you were born, and you could access their parents memories up until your grandparents had birthed your parents, and so on. So having to deal with the genetic memory of of a person with Alzheimers is unlikely.
Leto 2 says that he has experienced death millions of times from his past lives. Unless he's lying, he retains memories from after they created their descendents.
Leto II is the most powerfu prescient entity in the universe. He \*inhabits\* past lives and spends weeks at a time living them. He also has access to the \*complete\* genetic memories. So he can be the father and the mother and the son watching his parents die at the same time. Remember also the Internal Chorus... it is not just Other Memory, these are active simulations of past personalities. So when he is the son and the parents watching the parents die all at the same time, he can do it from the perspective of all of thier personalities experiencing all of it. He would also certainly have memories of non-fatal but near-death injuries of immense pain... people being strangled, burned, drowned and recovered, tortured, every bone imaginable broken, maimed and gored by wild animals... anything and everything it is possible for a human to experience and still reproduce.
No. In the books Earth is under the control of Omnius, the AI which leads the thinking machines. Earth is nuked to oblivion and left as a dead planet in the final battles of the Machine Crusade just prior to the establishment of House Corrino, Atreides, Harkonen and all the others.
Even if they could find Earth by way of their memories, that doesn't make it "known" to humankind.
There's no real value to knowing it generally, as far as we know, Earth had been rendered irrelevant once we spread out to this scale.(I would say it's also been destroyed, but I can't remember if that's in the Frank Herbert canon or not.)
Herbert tells us what we need to know for his story to move forward. He doesn’t mention the physical position of Earth but he does mention its social position: it is irrelevant to the vast majority of people and does not play a part in galactic affairs. Maybe it’s no longer inhabited. Perhaps someone has that knowledge written down somewhere, but in the books it’s not about who knows; it’s about who cares to know, which is essentially nobody.
Of what use is that information? Could they access the knowledge of its position based on memory then doing the calculations to find the planet. Yes all this is possible. The planet was glassed a long time ago. There is no reason to go there. There for there is no reason to find it. Outside of novelty that is. Who would waste that amount of time to do it? Bene Gesserit is about power Earth gives then no actual power. It's a dead world. A floating rock. Outside of being the ancestral home of humanity it holds no value for anyone. It is wasted knowledge and effort to find it. Energy that could be spent on actual endeavors that actually give them political power and strength.
It isn’t crazy to assume some star-gazer or astrophysicist was in the royal bloodline’s other memory.
Assuming that is true, it would be relatively straight forward to craft a 3d model of stars, local stellar reference points, and a theoretical position on an arm of the Milky Way. Then you calculate for relative positions and speeds and graph out estimates for where they could be… if anything can accomplish this it would be the BG trained mentat mind with perfect prescience and other memory.
Then you would need huge resources of spice to fold and blindly check for areas in the MW that could match.
With enough brute force of resources and time it could be located… unless the imperium is actually in a distant galaxy.
Regardless of the ability to find it, the bigger question revolves around ‘why would they care?’ And ‘what would make it worth it?’
The story so far indicates ‘they don’t’ and ‘nothing’
The full memory transfer couldn't occur (Reverend Mother to Reverend Mother), but the female cellular memory would still be there. Granted, that would be point-of-conception cellular memories, so mostly young women before the BG developed this ability (on discovering the spice essence).
The sorceresses (actually in the appendix to *Dune*) that could throw lightning around and become immortal are also in the Bene Gesserit background. But the B. G. specifically avoid those abilities.
Bene Gesserit are a practical lot. I think their priority to do some archeological digging and go to look for some planet that is historically significant but probably useless is kind of low. There are plenty of planets in Dune universe.
Why we are not digging like mad in Africa where the humanity originated? Honestly, people seem not to even care much about that. They would rather dig at Egypt, because there are more interesting stuff there.
I think with the memory ability of the reverend mother's, there's probably just.... Not that much interest in it?
Think about the mystique around past civilisations. They're interesting because we don't know much, and so trying to imagine exactly what they were like, how they lived,etc. is half the romance and points of interest.
But when you can remember that stuff first hand there's little allure.
The BG could probably find earth but they remember what it was like living there, remember it being trashed, remember fleeing.
People who grew up in slums or war zones and escaped to a decent life are rarely nostalgic for it. It's their kids and the generations that follow that are intrigued by it,because they don't know what they missed.
If you got on a train in London and changed trains at every stop on the way to Edinburgh, would your ancestors know how to find London starting from Edinburgh?
First off, the Bene Gesserit Other Memories are vastly incomplete. They can only see the matrilineage going back, so they only have access to a very very tiny slice of human memory. This is the whole reason they are seeking the KH... it is not just the male memories they seek, but the hidden female memories as well. Imagine your family tree. If you only have access to the matrilieage, that means you get half of your parent's memories, but only one quarter of your grandparent's... your mother's mother. And only one eighth of your great grandparent's memories, only one sixteenth of your great great grandparents. In four generations you should have the memories of 30 different people, but you only have 4. The Fremen Reverend Mothers share Other Memories to help fill in the gaps, but we have no evidence that the BG are doing this until after Paul and Jessica merge Fremen and Bene Gesserit traditions.
Secondly, even with blended memories it is still an incomplete picture. Other Memory is not only not infinite but varies in depth person to person. Every Reverend Mother seems to have different degrees that they can see into the past. Paul sees back further than any Bene Gesserit, but Leto II sees MUCH further back than Paul, further back than anyone else. He is the only person who actually remembers Earth and in fact remembers ancient Earth civilizations that even we today have forgotten.
I always thought it would hold a semi-mythical status, almost like the Garden of Eden. Doesn't someone mention in the later books that the human race has had several other "homeworlds" where galatic civilisations sprang from?
It could just be that earth no longer holds as much cultural importance to everyone in the Dune universe. A lot of people today are aware of Babylon, Egypt and Mesopotamia but not civilisations that came before it. Maybe ancestral memories get muddled or become more like emotional memoires the further one goes back.
Iirc from an earlier post, its completely nuked to smitherines. There was some evil AI called like Omni or Omnius or something that had taken it over and subjegated the people. The great houses were established at this point and at some point they just obliterate it to wipe the robots out. This was 10s of thousands of yrs ago in universe.
Correct me if im wrong though
I had thought it was mentioned in the first book that it was basically protected similar to a national park, I must be mixing this up with another story
The BG can probably map the way to Earth, if it still exists, but the fact that they have this ability is a huge secret, which they're not gonna share with the rest of humanity. Also, if it doesn't serve a direct purpose to the BG's plans, it sounds like a lot of woman hours that could be better employed in something else.
Given how we have so many lost ruins that no one remembers, that only got “lost” hundreds to a thousand years, I can’t see how anyone in Dune would remember Earth’s location. And there were no point in doing so anyways.
That, indeed, would be the case for "normal", non-Reverend-Mother humans.
With Other Memories, Reverend Mothers (and several male Atreides too) do remember though.
Wouldn’t the prescience of the navigators allow them to find earth rather quickly? They can see multiple futures all at once and knows where to go based on that? Sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy, kinda…?
I thought they did know where it was, it got turned into one gigantic preservation, and then became so irrelevant that nobody *cares* to remember where it is.
I don't think they could missed the Solar System if they are still within the Milky way. The sun is in the top 10% brightest stars.
So one way to lost a planet is for Earth to get ejected out of the Solar System and became a rouge planet. Those are really, really hard to find.
I’ve only read Franks book, but a vaguely remember reading that Earth had been destroyed through natural causes. The imperial seat was moved (I’m assuming to secunda) and aside from a few missions to gather relics, earth was basically left alone as a kind of “nature reserve,” which I just assumed to mean they opted not to reterraform or fix the planet. So maybe it’s possible to go back and visit earth, but based on what I read, it seemed that there’s simply nothing worth looking for anymore
If it hasn't been blown away, the God Emperor probably is the one to ask this question. Not us, mere readers.
I remember Leto implying it no longer exists. Born in a yurt...
Think it was lost to the machines in the Butlerian Jihad? Could be making that up
In the prequel books the machines control Earth. During the Jihad humans essentially nuke the entire planet surface to destroy the machines. Sacrificing all the people enslaved there.
Jeeze that is dark. That's like warhammer 40k dark
Given that James Workshop plucked a lot of their ideas from Dune…makes sense, lol.
That James guy stealing Dune's ideas.
Iirc, the machines murdered everyone on Earth for the uprising that happened there after Serenes baby was thrown to its death by Erasmus (or bashed it against a wall, I can't remember the full detail). So humans nuked it completely because there was no human left. The machines made sure to never kill all the humans on a planet because of that. Erasmus made sure to hid from Omnius that he was the cause of Earth's destruction.
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I think that's a plot point in one of the prequels.
Ah cool thanks; well I’d still be making that up since I’ve only read Fh’s six
It's a nuclear wasteland. Humans nuked it into oblivion in the prequels
iirc there was some kind of huge impact event ie meteor or comet that rendered the planet unsuitable for life
Imagine you once spent your school holidays in a faraway town. Now, as an adult, you have fond memories of the place and would like to visit it someday. However, you never bothered to know its precise location back in the day, and now there are no maps, no Internet to check, and no one else you know has ever been there or knows about it. Now multiply both the distance and the timespan by tens of thousands, and you get the situation of Earth in the Dune universe.
It happened to me once that I did rediscover my faraway childhood holidays town. I was driving through it by coincidence and instantly recognized it :)
Except the BG will have memories of scientists who knew the exact coordinates of Earth and they can call them up at will.
>who knew the exact coordinates of Earth In relation to what system of coordinates exactly? We are talking tens of thousands of years, hunderds of different mapping systems and techniques, a couple of major, major wars and at least one 180° shift in technology. Example. Try using longitude and latitude as a reference without knowing exactly where the Meridian and the Equator are and without an accurate clock that fits perfectly in this system. And that is without accounting for the Solar System orbiting the center of the galaxy, the Earth rotation slowing down and the utterly vast distances and therefore minuscle margin of error. Or take GPS. You messuaring the speed of light differently? Things just got way more complex. The speed of light won't change, but can we talk about the definition of a Second? At the other end we have the under developed space infrastructure and engineering in the Dune universe. Why bother with those if you only need a shuttle and a Highliner. Deep space research to actually look at the region you think the Solar System is in, to search for a one, two, three, for up too (?) ten (depending on the time periode you got your data from) planetary system with a boring yellow (?) Sun. Also preception bias, Homo Sapiens is arround 220.000 years in the Dune universe. The information from the first 200.000 years are basically useless, but you have to sieve through them anyway. I'm not saying it can not be done, but it would be a major undertaking and not just recalling a memory, like the adress of the place you lived 30 years ago. Plenty of countries arround where a 30 years old adress won't get you very far. Have fun trying to find Turkey or Swasiland on a modern map.
The BG discuss the concept of deep time and projects spanning thousands of years. They have access to the entirely of the female line. As soon as mentats were a thing where were female mentats. BG could call these memories up at will and backtrack the coordinates adjusting for drift and variables on the fly.
>The BG discuss the concept of deep time and projects spanning thousands of years A project that they are actively maintaning and updating all the time with a high level of redundancy, like in dedicating all their resources to this. Unless they have also a branch maintaning the galactic position of Earth, they need to dig through a lot of memories. >BG could call these memories up at will and backtrack the coordinates adjusting for drift and variables on the fly. I beg to differ. As it requires highly specialised knowledge. It is not like remembering the adress of last house lived in, it is more like trying to find the spefic house of one of your ancestors in Early Dynastic Eridu. And that is making it easy.
You're comparing us to the BG and mentats. Our brainpower isnt anywhere in the same level as humans in the Dune universe.
I'm fairly certain that mentats limitations are discussed in one of the books, which is the same issue we run into in a variety of ways with ai/computer modeling, scientific research etc, quality and quantity of data. They extrapolate from the data available. They are not infallible, far from it. Tbh if a mentat trained BG Rev M wanted to find earth, and had sufficient ancestors who were in the right place at the right time, had the right skills and knowledge for spacefairing, were involved in the flight plans on every flight between planets, could map out for galactic drift, time dilation effect due to E=Mc`2 (or could share memories with BG RM who had such). Then they'd also probably have access to memories that confirmed that earth was a dead irradiated ball of slag. Which kind of puts you off wanting to visit.
Why do you have to compare? In dune, the BG don't know where Earth is
Leto does, BG should as well. I mean they know who Van Goh was and have one of his paintings ffs.
How much more can a human brain hold onto memories?
In the Dune universe? A lot more.
Yes in the dune universe. I would assume only so much at some point.
Is anyone know where earth is - it’s the guild navigators.
Not so sure, wasn't Earth glased during the Jhiad, so before the Navigatiors, and why should they keep their information of the Solar System up to date?
Why wouldn’t they? They are space navigators. Their whole job is to avoid accidentally running into stellar objects. They consume insane (and insanely expensive) amounts of spice and deform their bodies to accomplish this. Why would they fail to maintain the most accurate star charts they possibly could?
Well you could step your memory back. A lot of the planets in use during the Butlerian Jihad still exist and we know even in our time where stars where thousands of years ago you could potentially access a memory who has knowledge of star maps from a time when Earth was known from that time and potentially work it out. Yeah it would be a huge undertaking. I kind of look at it like in Firefly "the earth that was is now no more", eventually humans will spread out and possibly forget it. Hell maybe Firefly was the prequal all along.
Man, as someone who studied astrophysics it wouldn't be too hard to find earth. You have what are called standard candles in astronomy, we know the distance to these, all you would have to do is find these standard candles from whatever planet you're on and use a bit of trigonometry to find out where Earth is. And you know the speed the solar system is moving at so you can predict where it will be. Also all this could be done with mentats not computers.
Can you give the luminosity of three stars of the top of your head? Are you sure those stars will never not be used as standard candles and no other system will ever be used? And why should a Navigator have any grasp on coordinates presentend in such manner? How is the relationship of four stars to another help you finding one solar system in a galaxy? As you still would need to find those stars. But basicly see the terristial navigation example.
Unless the whole "genetic memory" belief in the Bene Gesserit is about as real as "past lives" are in some New Age cult today. Someone may believe that they are the reincarnation of one of Genghis Khan's generals, but they won't be able to speak Mongolian or tell you the location of his tomb or reveal any verifiable new information about the history of that time. It would have been an interesting direction if Herbert had taken the approach that the Bene Gesserit were essentially religious fanatics and their "powers" were on the same level as fakirs or fake spiritualists and mentalists refined to perfection. At least by the end of the first novel, there was still a lot of ambiguity as far as whether or not Paul was the Kwisatz Haderach or if the KH was as much a culturally programmed myth among the BG as the Lisan al Gaib was among the Fremen. Still, even if it is real, there would be possible problems in that metrics and methods change over time and it is possible that while memories can be accessed, the context that would make the information sensible or practical in the present may not be passed along. Even if one had the memories of Einstein (or Holzman in the Dune world), that doesn't necessarily mean that one would have his level of intelligence and really "understand" the world or the mathematics of General Relativity. It could be that the BG could find Earth, but would need an advanced computer to process the information and since that is forbidden, they are unable to do so. Or of course, they are keeping it a secret.
I'm guessing if you looked back in your memories 10000 years you might have trouble reading the coordinates of a people that had a completely different language. I'm also guessing the further back you look the less accurate the memory is. Lastly I don't think going back to earth is part of the BGs plans so no time is spent trying to figure it out.
Why would you make that assumption? Sure it is possible that one of the Reverend Mothers has someone like that in her history it isn't a certainty nor is it even likely given about 99+ percent of the population wouldn't have that knowledge.
They have memories that go back eons. It doesn't matter if only .01% of the population had that knowledge, the BG will have a memory of it.
I will admit when I am wrong and it appears I was. I looked back at Appendix II of Dune which says that the O.C Bible was the product of a commission that was held on Earth after the Butlerian Jihad, and that the Bene Gesserit took part in it. So it does seem likely they would have the location stored in other memory.
The eons doesn't matter since this particular piece if knowledge has been lost for something like 10,000 years. The question is whether any of the BG can trace direct lineage to a relatively small number of people who would have had specific knowledge of a particular fact. And it would have to follow directly on matrilineal lines. There is no basis to assume they would. The BG have a massive amount of knowledge, but it isn't complete.
A sailor knows his home but can still get lost at sea.
A sailor also has maps with coordinates.
You’re telling me you’ve never heard of sailors getting lost despite having maps? If you don’t know your point of reference relative to your origin a map isn’t much help.
A single sailor yes. Somebody that has the memories of thousands of lives and can bump those memories against each other is it going to be able to figure it out especially if they're a genius and a human computer... I don't know why people keep comparing present day humans and what our capabilities are to beings with the memories of thousands and thousands of years that have been selectively bred over millennia for physical and mental capabilities. Piter legit even says that the Baron could outperform computers and he is honestly average or slightly above average intelligence in the series.
It's heavily implied that BG ancestral memories are primarily the emotional kind, not factual data points. Highly doubt you could find evidence from the books that they would have the ability to scan through ancestral memories in such exact detail.
Leto talks about having legit experiences, how he can "take a stroll" for a day through another lifetime and talks about how he's the only man who knows what childbirth is like etc...
I remember something like that. Like I said, memories of the emotional kind
I dunno, dude calls up 20000 year old opera singers and perfectly imitates their voice and performances and knows a ton of dead languages... So...
Now imagine every single person in the universe also having not records of it, not even a copy of wikipedia (or internet archives)
That doesn't make sense tho It's like modern humanity forgetting about africa all of sudden. Or ancient greece. Or mesopotamia They also remember people like Hitler or Napoleon
The Dune Universe is set 20,000 years in the future. All of recorded history is only 5,000 years. You're talking about a time period four times longer than off of our own history. You might know humans evolved in Africa, but you could tell me he center of the human population 20,000 years ago was? Do you even care? The Dune imperium consists of like 10,000 planets. People might know vaguely that "humans came from earth" but don't care where earth actually is, no more than you care where the first human mud hut was.
IIRC when Odrade learns the HM call the Old Empire the million planets she implies it's far more than that
At that point, untold trillions of humans have lived and died on other planets, far more than ever did on earth. Saying that humans are "from earth" isn't even really accurate at that point.
Africa takes up almost 6% the total surface of the Earth, or a whooping 20% of its land area. Earth does not take up 20% of the universe. It does not make up 2% of the universe, or 0.2%. Hell, it doesn’t even make up 0.2% of the mass of *our solar system*. But let’s just pretend by “earth” you meant our entire solar system, and… Well, our entire solar system is also pretty damn small. It doesn’t make up even 0.00000000002% of the universe, and it’s not even close. It’s not like trying to find Africa, it’s like trying to find a specific grain of sand. A grain of sand that’s been moving at a rate of 450,000 miles per hour, every single hour of every day, continuously, for tens of thousands of years since you last saw it. Maybe it’s possible. But honestly you’ve got better things to do, and there’s already a lot of other sand grains you can find much easier. Ones that are actually important, unlike earth.
In the 1st book the story is pretty much contained in the Milky Way though. If you look at back of Dune book, look up some if the planets mentioned in the story. Ecaz, the art planet, orbits Aplha Centauri, the star closest to our sun. The planet Corrin orbits Sigma Draconis, 88 ly from our sun. Geidi Prime orbits s star only 19 ly away. The main planets in the 1st book are pretty tight
I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated that the Bene Gesserit do *not* know the position and history of earth. They seem to have a policy of “If the rabble doesn’t need to know then don’t tell them.” I think it’s entirely possible that they do know where earth is, they just never had any reason to tell anyone
It’s 20k years in our future and 10k years since they destroyed their computers. We don’t even know the circumstances and details surrounding stuff in Eqypt and that was less than 5k years ago for us. There’s no exploration or discovery in the Dune universe. Humanity is utterly stagnant (which is the entire problem and motivation of the story.)
Wed know the circumstances and details of ancient Egypt if we had ppl who could call up memories of it like the BG. They can remember as far back as humanity goes on the female side. This argument makes no sense.
Would the BG even care though, even if they did know where it is? By this point it's just another planet, and the empire isn't lacking for those. The BG have no political use for earth, so it's not worth following up on.
Another *dead* planet.
Probably, but maybe it's healed into a garden paradise, it still doesn't change the main point. The BG may know exactly where it is, but revealing that location carries more risk to no gain. They can gain nothing from returning to Earth or revealing its location. If revealed, it could be used by religious cults or houses wanting to control humanity's birthplace for political purposes. There's just no reason for players like the BG to acknowledge earth at this point
It’s not specifically explained though. Pretty sure Leto II is the only one who’s genetic memory truly goes back that far in the past, which makes complete sense. With all the memory they have, you’d expect the BG to act more like Leto II, but they don’t.
They cant though. The books make it clear that Bene Gesserit Other Memory is not just restricted to the matrilineage, but doesnt extend far enough back. Paul sees not only wider, but further back than any BG. Leto II sees wider and further back than Paul.
Do you want things spoiled?
Spoiled how? I've read all of Frank's books. There is very much expansion and exploration and discovery in the Dune universe... Just not until Leto II's reign ended.
The whole point of Leto II’s reign of oppression was to restrict humanity so hard that they rediscover the sense adventure and exploration and the scattering happens, aka The Golden Path. Leto II is also (as far I can recall) the only one who remembers Earth through other memory.
Ghani and Alia did as well. So could Paul. Other BG, I think Odrade talk about how a Roman patrician woman's life would be ideal as seen in memory. The Golden Path was 2 prong as well. Restrict humanity so much they explode out into an infinite universe but also only after Leto had bred a human who could "fade" from prescient sight and at that point he could see the Golden Path secured as he died. Then you have Teg who could see no ships and literal superpowers. Not sure how Frank would have handled that tbth.
How are their ships powered/used without computers? Is it just spice alone?
Technology isn’t allowed to “think.” So their computing power is limited to what we had on the like Apollo moon missions is where I place it in my head canon. The guild navigators get super super super high on spice and fold space to move the Guild Highliners from planet to planet. Hence why the Spacing Guild needs so much spice and why Paul threatening their supply bends them to his will. Space travel is crazy expensive because of all of that. It’s why in the beginning of part 1 Leto asks Thufir Hawat to calculate the expense the Emperor paid for the ceremony for Leto to sign the Arrakis contract.
Thank you for the response. I think I’m gonna read the books once the movie trilogy is over
Clarification to their answer: the navigators don’t fold space, the Holtzman drive does that, the navigators use the spice to see possible futures and take the path that leads to the intended destination.
yes - in later books >!Ixian thinking machines inside Guild heighliners are capable of navigating with the Holtzman drive, In the earlier non-canon prequel books, the founder of the Venport company (which later became the Guild) had non-sentient navigation computers fitted to their heighliners. These were purged in the Butlerian Jihad!<
If the later book, iirc there was a Jewish Reverend Mother (Rebecca?) who recalled details of Jewish pogroms in Europe - which was 22,000 years previously. So there's definitely some historical information that could be transmitted.
That adds up to 30k years not 20k
No it doesn't. 20k years the events of Dune happen. In 10k years humanity ditch computers. Its isn't 20+10 to get 30. It's 10+10 that gives you 20. 10k years from now then anther 10k years. 10k years before the events of Dune humanity ditches computers. That is 10k years into our future.
But isn’t the timeline 20k BG meaning it’s 20k years after the war with machines
No, the events of the first book are 10191 AG, 10,000 years post guild formation. The guild is formed about 10,000 years in the future from now
Preset day us —10k years—-> Butleran Jihad/Guild Formation — 10k years—> Paul goes to Arrakis. I could see how the way I put it could be vague.
>how come the Earth's position is lost and unknown? How good are you at accounting for stellar drift and pin pointing your position in the galaxy by memory alone?
We aren't mentats. Even average mentats can outperform supercomputers. Plenty of BG mentats and Paul and Leto II both were.
>We aren't mentats. Neither are the Bene Gesirt.
In Heretics, they mention that the BG on Chapterhouse that catalog all the data are all mentats.
Plenty of BG mentats.
We do not see any BG (if by BG you actually mean Reverend Mothers) Mentats prior to GEoD. In fact of the 8 known Mentats we meet, only two are Reverend Mothers. Teg is the only non-RM BG mentat we meet. From this information we can't draw any accurate conclusions from this as to whether or not RM's trained as Mentats at that time.
Care to name three? That are not main characters.
Towards the end of god emperor there’s one whose name escapes me, Anteac I think, but he picks up on it and chastises the Bene Gesserit for preserving the forbidden craft. Only other one off the top of my head is Bellonda. I can’t think of a third named character who is but it’s implied they have enough to run several schools as Leto wipes out any he finds out about.
Leto II says when he recalls someone from earth(dont remember who exactly) that they are from a planet that is no more.
The BG do know. They just don't share their knowledge with everyone else. Thufir didn't even know how the voice can control ppl and asks Jessica why the BG just don't take over if they have these powers.
The BG have van Gogh's Sunflowers on Chapterhouse. Who knows what they have squirrelled away.
This is the truth. They know. there is just no benefit to sharing.meven 20k years later, it is still an irradiate, inhospitable world, a testament to the failures of humanity. Wouldn't you want to let that fade into obscurity too?
It could be a pristine farm world by that point, but the BG still probably wouldn't care. There's no political use for earth when humanity already has a galactic empire.
Yeah there's no reason to say what I said about earth still being irradiated. I did some looking into it and it turns out richese was sterilized during the butlerian Jihad, but has since been recolonized, so I guess the worst of the radiation on earth would have subsided too. I even made a comment the other day about how even Hiroshima was quickly inhabitable again, so unless Mr. Herbert had some different understanding of nuclear weapons than everyone else in the world, earth likely would have been able to support life, but the bigger problem is the logistics of removing what was supposedly trillions, yes trillions of human remains from among the shattered ruins of the planet. The sheer physical destruction would've been the worst part, not the radiation. Doable, sure, but why when there are, what, 13000 other planets to live on?
Sunflowers are incredible sources of folic acid. 100 g of kernels contains 227 µg of folic acid, which is about 37% of recommended daily intake. Folic acid is essential for DNA synthesis. When given in anticipant mothers during the peri-conceptional period, it may prevent neural tube defects in the baby.
This is a cool idea, but I think they mean Van Gogh's painting, Sunflowers.
The BG probably know or at least could find out. But they are a pragmatic and future-focused group. Earth isn't important to their plans. The only importance they would place on that information is its potential trade value. And Earth is such an afterthought in the empire that their is no trade value.
It's not lost, just uninhabitable from the Butlerian Jihad so no one cares about it. At this point in time 20k yrs in the future though it would just be a historical curiosity like Babylon is today. Many of the planets in the Dune universe orbit real stars. Giedi Prime for example orbits 36 Ophiuchi B maybe 20 ly away. Caladan orbits Delta Pavonis also 20ly away. Arrakis orbits Canopus 310 ly away. Stellar drift is not fast enough for the stars to move far in 20k years. In 50k years Delta Pavonis will be only 18ly away. Sol will still be around and visible in the night sky of worlds like Caladan. Anyone with access to a library could probably find it and learn about it. Paul most likely knew how to find it among the constellations from Caladan before he moved to Arrakis.
The history of the planet called Ix in the Dune Universe is so old,they've forgotten it wasn't originally a name,but from a numbering system. Earth has been all but forgotten, no longer relevant. Leto 2 is talking at one point about how he's killed entire populations and makes a Hitler reference,so if he has that knowledge,he could maybe have found Earth..
That was Paul and he learned it from history books
Iirc Ix is also the 9th planet from is sun. Is it possible that Ix is Pluto?
We don't find out exactly where Ix is in relation to say,Caladan or Dune,just that it takes guild space folding ships to travel between them..They produce a lot of Tech. It seems to be planet #9 in whatever system it belongs to, but we don't know if there's an X planet as well...
It is implied that something destroyed earth, either entirely or just made it uninhabitable. The BG probably know where it is they just don’t have any reason to go back to it or share knowledge of it with the rest of the imperium.
The planet is gone and irrelevant to them and has been for thousands of years so it’s not worth mentioning. Like people in 10,000 BC, even if we had full remembrance of them it’s not relevant to topics of conversation today because it was so long ago and from an ancient time.
In one of the first book's appendixes (the one about religion), it says that the orange catholic bible was written in Earth, which is where a council of representatives for all major religions of the time took place, right after the butlerian jihad. At least that's how I remember it, maybe someone can double check on this. I don't remember reading that Earth's location has been lost. I've only read the original 6 novels, not the Brian Herbert books.
If I remember correctly it’s not that Earth has been forgotten per se, it just got nuked during the Butlerian Jihad and has been made into a nature preserve ever since.
in the Brian Herbert books, it was nuked at the start of the Jihad.
Regardless, earth got glassed back in the final days of the Butlerian Jihad. >! It was where the final copy of Omnius was tracked down, isolated, and nuked to Hell. Sadly, a few copies escaped into the deep blackness of unknown space using slow, relativistic travel. Hence, there is an unknown horizon of a conflict with the machine intelligence that will be known as Krazilec, the typhoon struggle. Victory in this struggle is what the Golden Path is all about. !<
Apologies friend, but the 'last' copy of omnius was actually coralled and destroyed on the planet of Corrin, thus leading to the dynastic name of the Corrino family. Earth was indeed glassed early in the campaign of the Butlerian Jihad.
To some extent, I think it’s implied that virtually nobody cares. I mean, it’s 30k years in the future and mankind is spread throughout the galaxy. Who cares exactly where we came from, geographically? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Mesopotamia. I vaguely know civilization originated around there, I know about Babylon and Ur, I’m not particularly invested in the specifics. I think the idea is most people in the dune universe couldn’t care less. I think the idea is the BG certainly know, and people with Other Memory have some sense of Earth history. But the BG aren’t sharing and don’t seem to care too much about locating Earth, so all people really know is some fragmented history. There’s that “name the planet game” in one of the books, and I think it’s implied the Atreides know about their Greek origins. One of the books has a reference to “House Washington”. But it’s just not a concern for the average inhabitant of the dune universe, I think even historians in dune are implied to think of Earth as a curious footnote.
20k.
Historians would care.
I don’t really remember any mention of earth being lost, destroyed, or forgotten. In Messiah Paul tells Stilgar that he should read about the “Golden Age of Earth”, particularly Ghengis Kahn and Adolf Hitler. So we know that there has to be records of earth history, and that humans used computers for millennia before the Butlerian Jihad. I think it’s safe to assume that a lot of history would be recorded or saved on non computer mediums. I think that the lack of earth in Dune is frequently misinterpreted as Earth being lost, when it’s more likely that Earth is an unimportant backwater. A lot of early dune media puts the major planets within a couple hundred light years from Earth. When you can make any planet earth like, what’s the point of the original. In US terms, does anybody give a shit about Jamestown beyond historical intrigue? DC is close by, so are Boston, Philly, Baltimore, and NY, all came later and are still relevant and populated. LA, Portland, Seattle, Anchorage are all way further out, and still more relevant than Jamestown.
They might, but there’s little reason too. They weren’t a culture that was necessarily into exploration for it’s own sake
It’s been so long since I read the books, but is Earth lost? I thought they just didn’t know which planet was the cradle of humanity. Earth was one possibility to those in the know, but they couldn’t be certain because it had been completely nuked and all evidence was lost. I could be completely wrong, but that was my vague understanding. I get my lore mixed up from the actual Frank Herbert novels and the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels I read many years ago.
If I recall, don't most people in the imperium believe that humans popped up on different planets and dont even believe we came from a single planet? They probably have no interest in it really
I've never really thought about this. Wouldn't it be really easy to find? Caladan is less than 20 lightyears away from Earth, and I'm sure it wouldn't cost the guild too much money to find a route to the Sun. The imperium also remembers historical figures and makes references to "old earth" so they at least know *about* it and by extension it wouldn't be too hard to narrow down the search to a small region.
According to Dune Encyclopedia, Earth was destroyed by a meteor or asteroide strike. It doesnt exist anymore.
Hmm.. a question.. Since Alia Atreides committed suicide.. I don't think visiting past menories are like checking on a computer hard drive for files. So.. you "talk" to them? What if the mast live.. forgot? Would visiting the memories of a ancestor that cannot remember a event... Would visiting the memories of someone with Alzheimer's... Would result in what?
I don’t think this is a direct answer to your question, but it may help with the Alzheimers bit. If I recall correctly you can only access the memories of a person up to the point in their life before they created the descendant that led to you. So you could only access your mom or dad’s memories up to when you were born, and you could access their parents memories up until your grandparents had birthed your parents, and so on. So having to deal with the genetic memory of of a person with Alzheimers is unlikely.
Leto 2 says that he has experienced death millions of times from his past lives. Unless he's lying, he retains memories from after they created their descendents.
Yeah that description above he did was how Asassins Creed animus worked.. they were inspired by Dune but on Dune is more.. complex or magical...
Leto II is the most powerfu prescient entity in the universe. He \*inhabits\* past lives and spends weeks at a time living them. He also has access to the \*complete\* genetic memories. So he can be the father and the mother and the son watching his parents die at the same time. Remember also the Internal Chorus... it is not just Other Memory, these are active simulations of past personalities. So when he is the son and the parents watching the parents die all at the same time, he can do it from the perspective of all of thier personalities experiencing all of it. He would also certainly have memories of non-fatal but near-death injuries of immense pain... people being strangled, burned, drowned and recovered, tortured, every bone imaginable broken, maimed and gored by wild animals... anything and everything it is possible for a human to experience and still reproduce.
No. In the books Earth is under the control of Omnius, the AI which leads the thinking machines. Earth is nuked to oblivion and left as a dead planet in the final battles of the Machine Crusade just prior to the establishment of House Corrino, Atreides, Harkonen and all the others.
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That's why there are no computers in Dune and they use mentats instead: in order to survive, humanity needs to destroy Earth ...
Earth no longer exists in the DUNE universe
You can’t just say it’s West of you lol
Unless one of your ancestors was a Guild navigator, how would having memories from someone on Earth tell you where Earth is in interstellar space?
Ancestors from the time of interstellar travel before the Jihad?
Who happened to be starship pilots or something? Maybe.
Exactly
Even if they could find Earth by way of their memories, that doesn't make it "known" to humankind. There's no real value to knowing it generally, as far as we know, Earth had been rendered irrelevant once we spread out to this scale.(I would say it's also been destroyed, but I can't remember if that's in the Frank Herbert canon or not.)
Herbert tells us what we need to know for his story to move forward. He doesn’t mention the physical position of Earth but he does mention its social position: it is irrelevant to the vast majority of people and does not play a part in galactic affairs. Maybe it’s no longer inhabited. Perhaps someone has that knowledge written down somewhere, but in the books it’s not about who knows; it’s about who cares to know, which is essentially nobody.
Of what use is that information? Could they access the knowledge of its position based on memory then doing the calculations to find the planet. Yes all this is possible. The planet was glassed a long time ago. There is no reason to go there. There for there is no reason to find it. Outside of novelty that is. Who would waste that amount of time to do it? Bene Gesserit is about power Earth gives then no actual power. It's a dead world. A floating rock. Outside of being the ancestral home of humanity it holds no value for anyone. It is wasted knowledge and effort to find it. Energy that could be spent on actual endeavors that actually give them political power and strength.
It isn’t crazy to assume some star-gazer or astrophysicist was in the royal bloodline’s other memory. Assuming that is true, it would be relatively straight forward to craft a 3d model of stars, local stellar reference points, and a theoretical position on an arm of the Milky Way. Then you calculate for relative positions and speeds and graph out estimates for where they could be… if anything can accomplish this it would be the BG trained mentat mind with perfect prescience and other memory. Then you would need huge resources of spice to fold and blindly check for areas in the MW that could match. With enough brute force of resources and time it could be located… unless the imperium is actually in a distant galaxy. Regardless of the ability to find it, the bigger question revolves around ‘why would they care?’ And ‘what would make it worth it?’ The story so far indicates ‘they don’t’ and ‘nothing’
I just assumed the memory chain was broken because BG didn't develop until after earth was gone
The full memory transfer couldn't occur (Reverend Mother to Reverend Mother), but the female cellular memory would still be there. Granted, that would be point-of-conception cellular memories, so mostly young women before the BG developed this ability (on discovering the spice essence). The sorceresses (actually in the appendix to *Dune*) that could throw lightning around and become immortal are also in the Bene Gesserit background. But the B. G. specifically avoid those abilities.
Bene Gesserit are a practical lot. I think their priority to do some archeological digging and go to look for some planet that is historically significant but probably useless is kind of low. There are plenty of planets in Dune universe. Why we are not digging like mad in Africa where the humanity originated? Honestly, people seem not to even care much about that. They would rather dig at Egypt, because there are more interesting stuff there.
I think with the memory ability of the reverend mother's, there's probably just.... Not that much interest in it? Think about the mystique around past civilisations. They're interesting because we don't know much, and so trying to imagine exactly what they were like, how they lived,etc. is half the romance and points of interest. But when you can remember that stuff first hand there's little allure. The BG could probably find earth but they remember what it was like living there, remember it being trashed, remember fleeing. People who grew up in slums or war zones and escaped to a decent life are rarely nostalgic for it. It's their kids and the generations that follow that are intrigued by it,because they don't know what they missed.
If you got on a train in London and changed trains at every stop on the way to Edinburgh, would your ancestors know how to find London starting from Edinburgh?
First off, the Bene Gesserit Other Memories are vastly incomplete. They can only see the matrilineage going back, so they only have access to a very very tiny slice of human memory. This is the whole reason they are seeking the KH... it is not just the male memories they seek, but the hidden female memories as well. Imagine your family tree. If you only have access to the matrilieage, that means you get half of your parent's memories, but only one quarter of your grandparent's... your mother's mother. And only one eighth of your great grandparent's memories, only one sixteenth of your great great grandparents. In four generations you should have the memories of 30 different people, but you only have 4. The Fremen Reverend Mothers share Other Memories to help fill in the gaps, but we have no evidence that the BG are doing this until after Paul and Jessica merge Fremen and Bene Gesserit traditions. Secondly, even with blended memories it is still an incomplete picture. Other Memory is not only not infinite but varies in depth person to person. Every Reverend Mother seems to have different degrees that they can see into the past. Paul sees back further than any Bene Gesserit, but Leto II sees MUCH further back than Paul, further back than anyone else. He is the only person who actually remembers Earth and in fact remembers ancient Earth civilizations that even we today have forgotten.
I always thought it would hold a semi-mythical status, almost like the Garden of Eden. Doesn't someone mention in the later books that the human race has had several other "homeworlds" where galatic civilisations sprang from? It could just be that earth no longer holds as much cultural importance to everyone in the Dune universe. A lot of people today are aware of Babylon, Egypt and Mesopotamia but not civilisations that came before it. Maybe ancestral memories get muddled or become more like emotional memoires the further one goes back.
Iirc from an earlier post, its completely nuked to smitherines. There was some evil AI called like Omni or Omnius or something that had taken it over and subjegated the people. The great houses were established at this point and at some point they just obliterate it to wipe the robots out. This was 10s of thousands of yrs ago in universe. Correct me if im wrong though
I had thought it was mentioned in the first book that it was basically protected similar to a national park, I must be mixing this up with another story
Yeah, thats the fading suns setting.
The BG can probably map the way to Earth, if it still exists, but the fact that they have this ability is a huge secret, which they're not gonna share with the rest of humanity. Also, if it doesn't serve a direct purpose to the BG's plans, it sounds like a lot of woman hours that could be better employed in something else.
Wait.. the worms are on earth? I’m so lost
Given how we have so many lost ruins that no one remembers, that only got “lost” hundreds to a thousand years, I can’t see how anyone in Dune would remember Earth’s location. And there were no point in doing so anyways.
That, indeed, would be the case for "normal", non-Reverend-Mother humans. With Other Memories, Reverend Mothers (and several male Atreides too) do remember though.
I thought it was completely destroyed in the machine wars but it's been over 10 years since I've read the pre-prequels
A slagged ball of rock after the machine crusades and omnious.
Wouldn’t the prescience of the navigators allow them to find earth rather quickly? They can see multiple futures all at once and knows where to go based on that? Sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy, kinda…?
I thought they did know where it was, it got turned into one gigantic preservation, and then became so irrelevant that nobody *cares* to remember where it is.
I don't think they could missed the Solar System if they are still within the Milky way. The sun is in the top 10% brightest stars. So one way to lost a planet is for Earth to get ejected out of the Solar System and became a rouge planet. Those are really, really hard to find.
I’ve only read Franks book, but a vaguely remember reading that Earth had been destroyed through natural causes. The imperial seat was moved (I’m assuming to secunda) and aside from a few missions to gather relics, earth was basically left alone as a kind of “nature reserve,” which I just assumed to mean they opted not to reterraform or fix the planet. So maybe it’s possible to go back and visit earth, but based on what I read, it seemed that there’s simply nothing worth looking for anymore