From A Young Person’s Companion to the Deep Past, 34th Edition (Year 12,416 CR)
The Saturation (approx 1950-2300 CR) refers to the period during which human civilization attempted to use electromagnetic and digital methods to record, store, and transmit the totality of their experience. The term was coined by historian Par Enuku in her landmark work The Silence After Speaking (11,830 CR), which remains a standard reference for pre-Dispersal cultures.
It can be difficult for students to understand why so little knowledge survives from the Saturation, given that its inhabitants are believed to have produced more information in a single generation than all prior civilizations combined across five millennia. The answer is the nature of the medium used. Unlike stone, ceramic, even the carbon-fixed manuscripts of the Middle Literate period, the Saturation’s records required continuous energy and active maintenance. As Enuku describes, the records were “written on running water.”
When infrastructure failed - not all at once, but in the slow, overlapping collapses that characterized the Thermal Adjustment - records did not merely decay. They simply ceased to exist. A clay tablet can be broken and still be read. A digital archive, once the last machines stop, is not a ruin - it is an absence.
We can only therefore reconstruct knowledge of the Saturation from indirect sources; the physical objects its people left behind, chemical and isotopic records, the relatively small number of texts transcribed onto durable media, and oral traditions of the communities that carried fragments of Saturation-era knowledge through Adjustment and into early Dispersal.
Key Characteristics
Ubiquitous self-documentation
Saturation-era humans recorded daily activities, meals, emotional-states, and social exchanges, often in extraordinary detail. These records were transmitted to centralized repositories maintained by a small number of powerful institutions.
The purpose of this practice remains debated. Enuku argues it to be a form of social binding, analogous to grooming behavior in earlier primates. The Yeneveh school contends it was primarily economic in nature - repositories extracted value from data and sold access to data. A minority view, advanced by Timlo Marsh, holds that it was genuinely devotional: that the people of the Saturation era believed that to be recorded was to be real, and to be unrecorded was a kind of death.
Linguistic convergence
At Saturation’s peak, a single trade language (what we now call Old Anglic) achieved a penetration unmatched before or since. This language functioned as the primary medium of commerce, science, and recorded culture for as much as 40% of the global population. Old Anglic is only partially deciphered - but it appears to have been a flexible language with multiple purposes, which may explain its dominance.
Thermal disruption
The most consequential legacy of the Saturation was the destabilization of planetary climate through the combustion of fossilized carbon. Students should understand that this was not an act of ignorance. There are clear examples of Saturation-era scientists processing the detail, and often with considerable accuracy. The failure seems to have been structural rather than cognitive. The systems that burned carbon and the systems that understood the consequences seem, in effect, to have existed in isolated parallel.
Common Misconceptions
The Saturation should not be treated as a single civilization. It encompassed thousands of distinct cultures, at least several hundred sovereign political entities, and multiple religious traditions, many of which existed in active conflict. Our impression of unity arises from the dominance of a much smaller number of economic networks, which imposed superficial homogeneity - something which some evidence suggests the Saturation’s inhabitants often resented or resisted.
It would also be incorrect to assume that Saturation-era people were unaware of their situation’s fragility. Surviving literature commonly addresses anxiety about collapse and legacy. They built literal time capsules, etched messages on spacecraft. We have records of warnings carved in stone above their nuclear waste.
Legacy
The Saturation demonstrated that information is not knowledge, that storage is not memory, and that a civilization can record extensively while also failing to identify what matters. It also demonstrated - perhaps the most important lesson - that people living inside a system can see a problem clearly, describe it with precision, even mourn it, and still be unable to stop it.
The Saturation is a significant counter-example to the Intentionalist theory of history. Its example argues that civilization is not steered, but rather weathered.
See also: Thermal Adustment; The Dispersal; Enuku, Par; Carbon Legacy; 5th Millennium Renaissance
Classroom discussion: If you could transmit one thing from our era back in time to a person living in the Saturation era - a piece of knowledge, item, or warning - what would it be? Why?
Article photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash.