So in all these outer orbits the Martian co-ops were extremely busy, helping Martians and Terrans to emigrate to one of the new little worlds. And as the process continued, and a hundred and then a thousand asteroids and moonlets were given a local habitation and a name, the process took fire, becoming what some called the explosive diaspora, others simply the accelerando. People took to the idea, and the project gathered an energy that was felt everywhere, expressing a growing sense of humanity’s power to create, its vitality and variety. And the accelerando was also understood to be humanity’s response to the supreme crisis of the population surge, a crisis so severe that it made the Terran flood of 2129 look in comparison like no more than a bad high tide. It was a crisis which could have triggered a terminal disaster, a descent into chaos and barbarity; and instead it was being met head-on by the greatest efflorescence of civilization in history, a new renaissance.

Many historians, sociologists, and other social observers attempted to explain the vibrant nature of this most self-conscious age. One school of historians, called the Deluge Group, looked back to the great Terran flood, and declared that it had been the cause of the new renaissance: a forced jump to a higher level. Another school of thought put forth the so-called Technical Explanation; humanity had passed through one of the transitions to a new level of technological competence, they maintained, as it had every half century or so right back to the first industrial revolution. The Deluge Group tended to use the term diaspora, the Technics the term accelerando. Then in the 2170s the Martian historian Charlotte Dorsa Brevia wrote and published a dense multivolumed analytical metahistory, as she called it, which maintained that the great flood had indeed served as a trigger point, and technical advances as the enabling mechanism, but that the specific character of the new renaissance had been caused by something much more fundamental, which was the shift from one kind of global socioeconomic system to the next. She described what she called a “residual/emergent complex of overlapping paradigms,” in which each great socioeconomic era was composed of roughly equal parts of the systems immediately adjacent to it in past and future. The periods immediately before and after were not the only ones involved, however; they formed the bulk of a system, and comprised its most contradictory components, but additional important features came from particularly persistent aspects of more archaic systems, and also faint hesitant intuitions of developments that would not flower until much later.