[Kestrellius]

Okay so here's something that occurred to me. It's kind of silly, but I think it has a bit of potential.

What if the Shivans perceive time backwards? Or, alternatively, Terrans and Vasudans perceive time backwards?

As I said, it's silly, but it would basically mean that from their perspective, they coalesced a nebula into a star system for these curious little lifeforms to live in, and brought hundreds of thousands of Terrans and Vasudans into existence. Then, the Terrans and Vasudans were kind enough to create a Lucifer-class supercreator for them, which they then used to terraform the barren Vasuda Prime into a habitable planet.

From a more serious standpoint, I think some things could be done with this and the concept of the Big Crunch. Now I don't actually know anything about this field, but as far as I know the Big Crunch is essentially the concept of the Big Bang in reverse: the universe collapses under its own weight, and comes together into a single point.

So, since space and time are related to the point of basically being the same thing, what if the universe's expansion reversing would also cause time to run in reverse? That is, time is just a set "run" from the Big Bang to the point at which the universe is largest, and it can be perceived as either going from the Big Bang forward, or from the end back to the Big Crunch.

The Shivans, then, are from the sort-of-alternate-universe the lies beyond the reversal of the expansion. They evolved, or were created, or whatever, in an environment where time runs backwards, so for them death is birth, and destruction is creation.

It would also mean that the Shivans are basically by far the most friendly species in the Freespace universe. I mean, all they do is create stuff.

[qwadtep]

what if the universe's expansion reversing would also cause time to run in reverse?

The short answer is no.

[IcemanFreespace]

I guess I'm not seeing where your narrative differs much from what's been discussed up thread. Do you have specific explanations for the motives and means of the Shivans, or for the changes in their behavior between the games?

I suppose I'm saying: well written post, but what's the takeaway?

Sorry, I really didn't see it that way. What I mean is, lately, and on this thread, most of the explanations of their behaviour, or, what they are really, seem to go toward alternative options, exploring them as the Universe's destroyers, one extreme side of a duality, or a big part of universe itself. I just wanted to put in a strong word for the classic theory, albeit with some gaps to be filled.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, that makes sense to me! I'm just trying to be sure I understand 'classic theory' - you think of the Shivans as an advanced alien race with individual thought, a culture of ruthless efficiency, and an aggressive mindset?

[IcemanFreespace]

For intents and purposes of this topic, and especially considering the other theory,yes, you could say that. But I must add that individual thought here is an interesting concept since the aforementioned efficiency and intelligence combined with understood and agreed upon goals of the whole race leave little space for creativity(and being wrong on a small AND big scale). So from that comes the illusion of a collective mind.

[NGTM-1R]

Ironically it could just be that Shivans, given they're obviously highly modified, all think the same because there's really nothing different about them. A dozen computers off the same production line will give you identical answers to a question. The existence of different consciousness is not required to produce uniformity; uniformity is required to produce uniformity, one way or another.

[General Battuta]

The problem is diverging input. In a system of that type you need some kind of feedback loop to prevent separation.

[NGTM-1R]

Diverging input only works if the input is judged to require a novel response rather than an existing one. As long as the answer is in the playbook already, nothing changes.

The fundamental similarity in behavior of Shivan weapons, equipment, and spacecraft to their opponents means this may be the case. The only thing deployed against them in both games to which they have nothing that could provide an immediate frame of reference is the TAG system, and even that seems well within their ability to have theorized before encountering it.

[General Battuta]

Divergence doesn't require novelty. Just experiencing stimuli in different orders or with dissimilar separations will start to push systems out of lockstep.

A big lookup table is a really inefficient way to handle cognition - you're giving up a lot of capabilities for functionally no gain. The ability to hold internal states like 'I am in a nebula' or 'although the stimulus is absent, I induce it will recur in the same pattern' is key to being useful, and once you have state memory, you've stepped outside a simple behavioral map. (This is the same problem that took out behaviorism in real life!)

I also don't think it does much interesting fictional work to explain elements of the canon, which is probably the biggest arbiter of ~theory~ for me. But if you've got a good angle on it, fire away!

[Kestrellius]

So...I'm the only one who thinks the Shivans seem really fragmented, not uniform at all? The Great War Shivans don't act anything like the Second Incursion ones. The Second Incursion ones seem more confused than anything.

[Meneldil]

Back to the begining of the topic here [...]

I like one point this post makes: the answer to "if the Shivans can destroy us all so easily, why don't they?" is "why would they?". To make a dumb analogy, there are bugs in my apartment, and I could theoretically get rid of all of them, but I'm too lazy to do that. First, I live in a very wooded part of the city and like to keep my windows and balcony open, so new ones come in all the time, and second, this one species of spider just gets on the ceiling and remains there doing their thing 24/7 and avoiding me completely. So sometimes when I see them there standing perfectly still and harmless on the ceiling, I'm like "meh, **** it, this is not worth climbing on the couch for". Of course some kinds of bugs are very annoying and unsanitary so I'll go to considerable but still not ultimate lengths to get rid of them.
So FS1 Shivans could have simply been in passing and were like oh well let's clean this mess up while we're here! and when they failed (admit it, it happens to you too) they were like oh **** it, it wasn't that important anyway. Of course a couple of decades later the same kind of bug got out from behind the closet, climbed up onto the dinner table and started crawling through the food, so they got pissed and shut the blinds.

You still run into a large number of problems when you assume that Shivans are intelligent and conscious, both in gameplay and in story. For example, if they are intelligent and "acting rationally", why did they R&D take an 8000 year break between the Ancient-Shivan war and the first incursion? How can their ships be only a lot, and not incomprehensibly better then the Terran and Vasudan ones? The answer to that of course is "shut up, it's one of the most common tropes of the genre", but you are obviously not obliged to take it, as BP doesn't, coming up instead with a lot better fitting story. On the flip side, I think that the large part in how well it fits is due to the loss of predictive power. If you assume classically intelligent Shivans, then it's easy to say that no, no self-respecting advanced alien civilization would ever incorporate a Shaitan into it's fleet, but with BP's Shivans it's "well sure, Shaitan isn't locally maximal, but totipotently speaking, who knows!"

[General Battuta]

So...I'm the only one who thinks the Shivans seem really fragmented, not uniform at all? The Great War Shivans don't act anything like the Second Incursion ones. The Second Incursion ones seem more confused than anything.

No, there've been a lot of posts in this thread pushing heterogeny and unpredictability as central to Shivan tactics. The immune response/escalation heuristic analogy is another angle. Or the BP totipotence/anima system, which combines local outbreaks of highly intelligent goal-directed action with a superordinate reactive architecture.

This thread is about lots of different theories, not about finding one to rule them all. You could even make an argument that that FS1 and FS2 Shivans don't behave dissimilarly, I guess.

[SmashMonkey]

Wat if the Shivans are a GTI conspiracy to take over the Gee-Tee-Vee-Aye? (Which they tried after the Great War)

What if the Lucifer was an Illuminati plot? What if its indestructibility was a fabrication?

After all, antimatter bombs do melt steel beams.

EDIT: I should make a campaign about this...

[Vrets]

What if we loaded our most pretentious philosophers into a decommissioned Orion and sent them to colonize Bernard's Star?

[AdmiralRalwood]

What if we loaded our most pretentious philosophers into a decommissioned Orion and sent them to colonize Bernard's Star?

Probably'd find Bernard's Star getting supernova'd in short order.

[Vrets]

What if we loaded our most pretentious philosophers into a decommissioned Orion and sent them to colonize Bernard's Star?

Probably'd find Bernard's Star getting supernova'd in short order.

Hogwash. Your response oversimplifies the totipotential superordinate reactive architecture inherent to the uniformity needed to produce uniformity.

[qwadtep]

Here's a thought: define "Shivan." The idea of a uniform alien species is itself anthropocentric; ants with differing roles within a colony possess radically different morphology. Anthropocentric too is the idea that an alien species crews ships the way that humans do. How do we know that the only type of Shivan is that with three legs and a shoulder-mounted anti-infantry beam cannon? Why do we assume that the ships are merely ships, and not a different type of Shivan? Would Lilith-strain necessarily have the same thought process as a Ravana-strain, even within some sort of collective mind?

[General Battuta]

Yeah, I'd personally like to think there's no common body plan or phenotype.

[NGTM-1R]

Here's a thought: define "Shivan." The idea of a uniform alien species is itself anthropocentric; ants with differing roles within a colony possess radically different morphology.

Not exactly. Ant colonies with specialized morphology for soldiers/workers are usually considered to represent a less optimized overall form then those with a single worker caste that does everything and in all but a few niches they will be out-competed. The evolutionary trend as mapped by the fossil record and observed science on the subject has been towards a single jack-of-all-trades form. If you're going to cite the science, be careful you're citing it correctly.

How do we know that the only type of Shivan is that with three legs and a shoulder-mounted anti-infantry beam cannon?

Because CBAnis and other sources have illustrated this point and told us. We have been shown that form is the pilot for their fighters, their response to boarding parties, and told it is the only one ever recovered from captured craft. There is no evidence for any other kind of Shivan. Further it's made clear this form is heavily augmented; standardization as a result of standardized augmentation parts in addition to any biological standardization that may exist.

[Mars]

We aren't ever shown a fighter pilot in Freespace that I know of.