Child of Valen

From The Great Machine

One of the millions, potentially billions¹, of descendants of Valen.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow. Affecting people who have not seen/read: Atonement

Delenn was one Child of Valen, and as a result, the Triluminary glowed for her. Because the Triluminary was programmed for Sinclair's DNA, any descendant of Sinclair/Valen with sufficient DNA would cause the Triluminary to glow.

The Triluminary also glowed for Sinclair. This was only the third time it had glowed for someone: Valen, Delenn, and Sinclair.

(Only glowing three times is speculation, but Dukhat's comment in Atonement makes it clear that it had never glowed before, yet clearly he knew that it glowing was related to Valen. Therefore one must assume that Dukhat's statement was really saying it had been 8 or 9 centuries since it has glowed, and perhaps not since shortly after Valen.)

[edit] Calculation of number of Minbari that are Children of Valen

Conjecture: The following information is purely conjecture and is non-canon.

Assume that Minbari give birth every 33.3 years, then there are 30 generation from Valen to Delenn.
Assume that every Minbari couple gives birth to two children.
Assume that no Child of Valen ever marries another Child of Valen.
Assume that no Child of Valen ever dies.
Assume that all Children of Valen marry.

This results in the following calculation:

Total = #(children/generation)^#generations = 2³⁰ = 1.07 billion.

Clearly with more children/generations this number explodes much faster; however, it is likely that there was interbreeding withing the Valen line since most localized communities will have interbreeding after a couple hundred years. It is therefore possible that the Valen line may have stayed fairly confined for a significant length of time and the number of Minbari carrying his genome may be on the order of tens of millions rather than billions.

Why did I do it this way? Think of the following example:
3 generations directly calculated. The first generation has 2 children. Each of those two has 2 children, resulting in 4. Each of those 4 has 2 children, resulting in 8. As you can see this becomes an expontential series.

Would someone check my logic? I realize that this doesn't match with other sites out there in their calculations, but I always felt that those sites were low and not calculating it correctly. --RC