Seldon Plan

The First Foundation is one of the pillars of the Seldon Plan, the road map created by psychohistorian and pol¡tician Hari Seldon in the last days of the Trantorian Empire. Seldon, having predicted with his science the collapse of civilization looming on the future, created his plan to ensure the resurgence of a galactic state after a thousand years of chaotic interregnum, instead of the thirty thousand that would have ensued normally.

He maneuvered the Imperial authorities into exiling one hundred thousand scientists to the remote rim world of Terminus. Supposedly, those exiles were to write an Encyclopedia Galactica, a compendium of all human knowledge, that would prevent the loss of science after the fall of the Empire. But that was but the lesser of two purposes, for Seldon intended to isolate them, a world of science and knowledge in the remote periphery, the galactic area where the Fall would be felt first. Terminus was to be the seed of the Second Empire.

Barely fifty years after the creation, the sorrounding Imperial provinces became independent barbarian kingdoms that threatened Terminus. Salvor Hardin, mayor of Terminus, was able to create a balance of power between the kingdoms that saved the Foundation and in the following years, the Foundation gained religious influence over the superstitious and ignorant barbarians that had all but forgotten science.

A century and a half after the creation of the Foundation, this religious disguise was discarded, replaced by an economic yoke. The Foundation was the only world that could supply advanced technology in the Periphery, but to trade with Terminus was to lose one's own freedom. The growing influence of the Foundation eventually was detected by the crumbling, yet powerful remnants of the Empire and the Foundation had to fight for its very survival.

Around the 200 of the Foundational Era, Bel Riose, Imperial general, attacked the Foundation and conquered worlds within the core territories of the Foundation, tens of light years away from Terminus, but was executed under false charges of treason. Cleon II, the emperor, had grown fearful of Riose's growing popularity, as predicted by psychohistory, and so was the last great Imperial general defeated by the dead hand of Hari Seldon, in spite of having defeated the Foundation in battle.

After the war and the final collapse of the Empire that followed Cleon's death, the Foundation became the only superpower in the Milky Way and became a full blown dictatorship, supported by an economic oligarchy. The democratic resistance and the free traders opposed to the great oligopolists were ready to revolt when an unforeseen player appeared in the galactic chessboard. The Mule, a mutant with mental powers to change the human mind, conquered the rich world of Kalgan and shortly afterwards the Foundation itself, proving to be beyond the Seldon Plan.

The Second Foundation, a secret group of psychologists with fledgling mental powers created by Seldon as a safeguard, was able to correct the situation and the Mule's empire crumbled after his death and Terminus recovered its rightful position. But something had changed with the discovery of the Second Foundation. Its mental powers were a menace, the promise of an elite of mentalists that threatened to reduce humans at large to mere slaves. And as a result, the First Foundation seeked the Second in order to destroy it.

Eventually, the Second Foundation managed to hide again and the First Foundation grew convinced that the threat was no more. By 500 F.E., the Foundation was again a democratic federation spanning over a third of the galaxy and with over seven millions of member worlds. A true Second Empire in the making.

But the rulers of Terminus were disatisfied with the situation. They had the technological superiority to drop the Seldon Plan and proclaim a Second Empire five centuries earlier than predicted. And some believed that the Second Foundation still existed, lurking somewhere in the galaxy. In the middle of this scheming, a Foundation councilman, Golan Trevize, was exiled. His adventures eventually led him to decide the fate of the galaxy: a Second Empire ruled by psychohistory, a resurrected First Empire or Galaxia, a mentalic commonality of minds, a true living galaxy. He chose Galaxia and Gaia, the 'living' world that would become the genesis of this future, set events in motion that were to lead towards its goal after a few centuries.

We don't know what happened in the end. Galaxia was R. Daneel Olivaw's master plan for mankind, but in his last days Hari Seldon theorized that the First Foundation would eventually grow beyond all the boundaries created by the robot caretakers. That after thousands of years of stagnation, mankind would finally grow to become something beyond our wildest dreams. The very limited evidence avalaible suggests that he might have been right.

Record 1371 - data - Last update 28 Mar 2007, 23:14:54

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