I think the reason they’d need to do a thing in a pressed timeframe is that, while psychohistory describes populations over time, sufficient understanding can allow someone to make a relatively small tweak that ripples through time.
You make a good point. With sufficient knowledge of the mathematics they might be capable of exploiting it. It seems like it should be possible to expedite the results you want, but I don’t feel like that should make them a necessity.
spoilerI suspect we will see Demerzel in season 3 taking full advantage of this.
I haven't seen any of season two yet, but enjoyed the first one with the understanding that it was an adaptation. I had always said that any attempt to bring the Foundation books to TV or movies would have to take the general plot and ideas and heavily adapt them to make them work. The Foundation stories are both very dated in characters and in science fiction to make them believable to today's audience, and were originally short stories that eventually were combined for a large scale galactic story spanning centuries with lots of different people. You might be able to pick out from these points as to how the TV series handled those issues in a new imagining of the overall concept of an Empire that both in its peak and yet doomed to collapse, and the attempt to minimize the effects.
Read the books. They won't spoil anything since the series is using things but in different ways. There are later prequels written by other authors to fill in more of the story with the permission of Asimov's estate, and while they're not too bad it's a similar problem to try and use and capture the original magic while being more up to date with new ideas. It doesn't always work.
Do you remember what those prequels were called? I could have sworn there were some prequels written by Asimov himself. Specifically Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation.
He had a few that were published after his death, presumably finalized and edited by someone else. The other ones are: Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford, Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear, and Foundation's Triumph by David Brin.
I’m a big fan of C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur series, where humans are on an at least equal footing but mainly incidental (except for a few parts). The nice part is you can then read her Cyteen and Foreigner series to find out how being technologically advanced doesn’t necessarily always work out well for the humans.
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