"James P. Hogan - Giants 5 - Mission to Minerva" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

bringing the onset of the most recent ice age on Earth, while the even greater
effect on Minerva threatened to render the planet uninhabitable. The Lunarians
responded with a concerted effort to develop their space and industrial
technologies to a level that would permit mass migration to the more
hospitable climate of Earth. But, as with the Ganymeans before them, the
ambitious plan came to nothing. When the Lunarians were practically within
reach of their goal, the cooperative spirit in which they had worked for
generations broke down with the polarization of their civilization into two
superpowers, Cerios and Lambia. Resources that could have been concentrated on
saving the race were squandered instead on a ruinous military rivalry. The
result was a cataclysmic planetwide war, in the course of which Minerva was
destroyed.

The Ganymean culture, in the meantime, had entered a long period of stagnation
brought about by the unanticipated effects of advancing biological science to
the point of prolonging life practically indefinitely. When the consequences
became clear, they took a decision to revert to their natural condition and
accept mortality as the price of experiencing a life enriched by motivation
and change. By the time of the events on Minerva, they had established a
thriving interstellar civilization centered on the planet Thurien of the
Giants' Star system. The Thuriens were never comfortable with what they
regarded their ancestors' abandonment of a genetically mutated sapient species
left to take its chances in the survival arena of Minerva, and followed the
subsequent emergence of the Lunarians with a mixture of guilt and increasing
awe. But when it all ended in catastrophe, the Thuriens relaxed the policy of
nonintervention that they had been observing and sent a rescue mission to save
the survivors. Gravitational upheavals caused by the emergency methods used to
transport the Thurien ships threw what remained of Minerva into an eccentric
outer orbit to become Pluto, while the smaller debris dispersed under
Jupiter's tidal effects as the Asteroids. Minerva's orphaned moon fell inward
toward the Sun and was later captured by Earth, which until then had existed
as a solitary body.

Even after all their experiences and the loss of their world, hostility
between the Cerians and the Lambians persisted, making them incapable of
uniting to rebuild their culture. The Lambians went back with the Thuriens and
were installed on a planet called Jevlen, where they grew to become a fully
human element of the Thurien civilization. The Cerians, at their own request,
were returned to the world of their origins, Earth, only to be almost
overwhelmed by the climatic and tidal devastation caused by the arrival of
Minerva's moon. Their remnants fell back into barbarism, struggling for
millennia on the verge of extinction. Apart from myths handed down from
antiquity, the meanings of which were forgotten, all memory of their origins
was lost. Only in modern times, when they at last mastered space again and
ventured outward to find the traces of what had gone before, were they able to
piece parts of the story together. The rest was added when a freak occurrence
reestablished contact between the human inhabitants of modern Earth and the
ancient Ganymean race that had created them in the form of their Lunarian
ancestors. (See The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.)