Author Topic: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)  (Read 141295 times)

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
why would it have gates leading to dead people...
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The argument of conciousness isn't really quite fitting here - I suppose GD is just about how huge and powerful the mind that it became from was. At some point this conciousness got so excessively powerful that it crumbled under its own strength - so omnipotent that it could not even grasp itself anymore. I thing this entity is so keen on eating whatever it finds because of the last thing that happened, last memory before the proccess was irreversible: I'm losing control. I need more strength. More resources. And the zombielike thing the GD is, it is just following that last memory even when it doesn't make any sense. This also kinda reminds me of Transcendant, he also was subverted to a process that made his mind a such... thing. And it started to yield very, VERY strange stuff, with changing the universe to be as much alike his last memory as possible. Perhaps Great Darkness IS actually Transcendant, who somehow transferred himself to another universe and started consuming stuff until he became too huge and converted into GD. This would make for a very interesting plot right there.

I also need to point out that in BP's texts there is a mention of a Vasudan called Jester, he seems to have had a contact with or at least a view of the Great Darkness. That's probably why he is basically nuts/in need of lots of psychotic medicine.

@Soulrheever: What creepy thing? You mean in the empty void, or during Bosh's monologues?

Dead people? Genady and Kyrenmaten are dead, but Simms is only unconscious and Levi is actually only presumed dead. I mean, I think there wasn't a scene of him dying in Delenda Est, just charging at the enemy. If Tevs captured him, he might be prisoners of war (not really likely) or they may be using him for something related to MORPHEUS (more likely). The rest of that pack should be fine (Lopez depending on your choice in HFH), but presence of high-ranking Tevs in their midst is... puzzling.
I also would like to suggest that since Nagari is non-local in space, it might be also non-local in time, too. It isn't the first time when someone grabs an echo of dead people - either it's how Nagari works, non-locally in time, or this can be a kind of a remnant after a long gone mind, just like the Ancients. Or their minds are actually stored by something in the network for some reason. All three possibilities could be handy for extracting info thought to be long gone.
By asking about the "others", I rather meant people engineered in a way similar to Laporte - and with similar hidden goals to accomplish. I think Levi and Kyrenmaten would fit here (as replacements/complements to Laporte), but not Simms. While I wouldn't want to use non-canonical sources (Morrigan stories), I still think Simms is different in that regard to these two.

I've also found a thing that could be somehow related to Shambala. It could be hinted here or there.

Since we've got quite some info on GD, I suppose couple of us theorists here should take a long walk back with that knowledge to the beginning of this puzzle, to look at things in another context, since there's a lot more information to use and search for hints.

I also wonder what exactly do these people in UT2 say - a shame but I don't really have the time to replay UT2 dozen more times or to manually search for text in mission files. By the way, is the hull integrity of Indus actually indicating the mental state of Laporte when you get to that segment of the mission? That would seem like a cool feature.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I also need to point out that in BP's texts there is a mention of a Vasudan called Jester, he seems to have had a contact with or at least a view of the Great Darkness. That's probably why he is basically nuts/in need of lots of psychotic medicine.

According to a chat log posted...I don't remember where or when, exactly,
Spoiler:
we will be playing as Nabirasul (a.k.a. the Jester) during Blue Planet 3. Which makes me slightly furious that it isn't out yet, because that sounds awesome.

Quote
I've also found a thing that could be somehow related to Shambala. It could be hinted here or there.

we figured it out guys

shambhala is a machine that creates a crossover with inferno

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
it should be noted that ken's warning during your scrape with the great darkness is very, very specifically worded:

Quote
If you turn around, you will never see anything else again.
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
the chatlog mentioned is http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86605 by the way
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Quote
Quote
I've also found a thing that could be somehow related to Shambala. It could be hinted here or there.

we figured it out guys

shambhala is a machine that creates a crossover with inferno

Blue Planet was originally conceived as an Inferno FanFic.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
why would it have gates leading to dead people...

Those gates are also different to the alive ones. I want to say they are red as opposed to green. You definitely don't pick up on any thoughts when you go through them like you do for everyone else. Simms is also the only one to have something unusual. Which, IIRC, is <silence>.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
MitoPL, I'll grab what you get from the nodes in a bit.

  
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
So, here they are.

Spoiler:
LOPEZ: I couldn't let Steele abandon abandon those people. I couldn't abrogate my duty to them. I paid the price. Was it worth it? I don't know. I hope so.
TOQUEVILLE: How could we accept a leadership, no matter how benevolent, controlled by an alien power? With the information gathered from the Vassago incident...we had to strike. Morpheus was the only option.
SIMMS: <silence>
CAREY: The needles. The needles. A crown of them, like thorns. All the drugs so clear like water, like glass. Did I know the Carthage information was a trap? Did I know? I don't know. I don't know anything.
STEELE: Watch the perimeter. Check your six. They sneak in through dreams. Watch the perimeter. Check your six.
MANDHO: Byrne is sure Shambhala will work, whether in the first stage or the second. All the simulations agree. But I wonder...are we too late? Is the verdict passed? Perhaps the second Wanderer will know...

The others all don't give you anything. They could be deceased Nagari sensitives. As to the why? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Laporte's traversing the network -- those are just all dead pathways, roads to nowhere.

 

Offline Doko

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
My main question:

- Are the shivans slaves to the vishnans?

If yes, are the shivans even aware of it? (the 3rd signal) then what triggered them to openly rebel against the master's wishes during AoA
If no, why aren't they the sole arbiters of who gets to live already?

Wouldn't mind some oracular answers to these too :D

- Is the great psyche on a clock? They seem to be trying too hard at saving their investment when they could just a few wait a few thousand/million/billion years or hell, just see what the vasudans end up doing.

- Is processing power the only thing stopping the great psyche from becoming a thinkaboutme, or an inherent property of it being composed of many different starting parent races?

- Noemi's character has grown very dark from when we first met her, yet we are constantly told by our wingmen how good we seem to be at killing, ken makes her sound like she herself is a shivan. Do you think of her as a sociopath that never fully matured due to ubunto way of life and is now blooming or the result of what she has endured?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
No, they're not slaves, but they do have a Protocol-defined role.

The Protocol is failing, and the Vishnans are taking more direct action. This caused the Shivans to say '**** you'

The Great Psyche is on a clock. The Protocol is failing, the universe is running out of good candidate species, and the Vishnans need to work with what's left.

The Great Psyche isn't in danger of going metastatic — the processes which lead that way involve recursive self-improvement, and the Psyche's not in that business. And yeah, their cognitive diversity is a big part of that.

I think Noemi is an extremely effective killer, but not a sociopath: she's able to empathize with and care for others. Falconer has a lot of thoughts on this topic. Noemi has full human experience, but is able to perfectly recruit that experience for combat.

 

Offline CT27

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I'm not sure if this is the right thread for it, but I do have a question on the BP universe:

It seems Ubuntu has taken over as a religion.  Do faiths like Christianity and Islam still exist in BP's Sol?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I'm sure they do. Ubuntu is a worldly philosophy as well as a spiritual one, and I'm sure there are interfaces between Ubuntu socioeconomics and religion, just as modern Christianity has interfaces with capitalism or communism depending on where it exists.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I'm not sure if any communist country was ever all that Christian. Most of the cold-war era communism didn't exactly encourage religion because that would diminish the power of their glorious leader.
Religion was mostly allowed but it would be much easier to get anywhere politically if you weren't religious. The common folk were still pretty religious but it wasn't exactly tied into communism, it was very separated.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Liberation theology tho

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I hope I can ask a question and I'm not too late.

In Universal Truth 2 there is a passage which i can't understand fully:

In the information pocket about why the Luciver attacked the Terrans and Vasudans, you get these informations:
("regional diversity minimized by pangalactic defect-strategy hegemon culled at present minus eight eight zero zero"
("bipolar defect-strategy conflict underway: anticipated xenocide and defect-hegemon outbreak (protocol failure). retrajectorize for mass upload to safe strata or exterminate incipients."

I understand, that a defect-strategy hegemon is a spacefaring species, who wages war instead of cooperating, like the Brahmans did. In this case, this were the Ancients.
If the Shivan encounter a "protocal failure", they have two options: Culling and "retrajectorize for mass upload to safe strata".
I always thought, that the Vishnan consciousness in subspace ist the "safe strata". But after reading General Batutta's informations about the Vishnans, this can't be the case. Only species, who aren't protocal failures can "become" Vishnans. So what is the safe strata?

Is the safe strata maybe an isolation of a species in a part of the universe? This propably could explain the supernova in Capella.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2017, 03:09:13 pm by JoeBalls »

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Huh. So this "minus eight eight zero zero" might indicate the time Ancients got eradicated. The ruins in Altair were about 8k years old, at least according to FS canon, right?

Quote
CAREY: The needles. The needles. A crown of them, like thorns. All the drugs so clear like water, like glass. Did I know the Carthage information was a trap? Did I know? I don't know. I don't know anything.
That seems a bit like an interrogation, to be honest. And with UEF being the interrogators.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Quote
CAREY: The needles. The needles. A crown of them, like thorns. All the drugs so clear like water, like glass. Did I know the Carthage information was a trap? Did I know? I don't know. I don't know anything.
That seems a bit like an interrogation, to be honest. And with UEF being the interrogators.
Carey passed information to the UEF and now GTI is interrogating her to see what else she might have done; the fact that the information she passed was a trap prepared by Steele doesn't change the fact that she still gave classified information to a wartime enemy.

If the Shivan encounter a "protocal failure", they have two options: Culling and "retrajectorize for mass upload to safe strata".
I always thought, that the Vishnan consciousness in subspace ist the "safe strata". But after reading General Batutta's informations about the Vishnans, this can't be the case. Only species, who aren't protocal failures can "become" Vishnans. So what is the safe strata?

Is the safe strata maybe an isolation of a species in a part of the universe? This propably could explain the supernova in Capella.
"retrajectorize for mass upload to safe strata" doesn't mean the mass upload will happen immediately; it means they're being put back on the path towards that outcome. In other words, by ending the Terran-Vasudan War, the Shivans "retrajectorized" them towards "mass upload to safe strata".
« Last Edit: November 01, 2017, 04:40:23 pm by AdmiralRalwood »
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Codethulhu GitHub wgah'nagl fhtagn.

schrödinbug (noun) - a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place.

When you gaze long into BMPMAN, BMPMAN also gazes into you.

"I am one of the best FREDders on Earth" -General Battuta

<Aesaar> literary criticism is vladimir putin

<MageKing17> "There's probably a reason the code is the way it is" is a very dangerous line of thought. :P
<MageKing17> Because the "reason" often turns out to be "nobody noticed it was wrong".
(the very next day)
<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again
<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."
<MageKing17> **** ME
<MageKing17> THE REASON IS PEOPLE ARE STUPID
<MageKing17> ESPECIALLY ME

<MageKing17> God damn, I do not understand how this is breaking.
<MageKing17> Everything points to "this should work fine", and yet it's clearly not working.
<MjnMixael> 2 hours later... "God damn, how did this ever work at all?!"
(...)
<MageKing17> so
<MageKing17> more than two hours
<MageKing17> but once again we have reached the inevitable conclusion
<MageKing17> How did this code ever work in the first place!?

<@The_E> Welcome to OpenGL, where standards compliance is optional, and error reporting inconsistent

<MageKing17> It was all working perfectly until I actually tried it on an actual mission.

<IronWorks> I am useful for FSO stuff again. This is a red-letter day!
* z64555 erases "Thursday" and rewrites it in red ink

<MageKing17> TIL the entire homing code is held up by shoestrings and duct tape, basically.

 

Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I'm not sure if any communist country was ever all that Christian. Most of the cold-war era communism didn't exactly encourage religion because that would diminish the power of their glorious leader.
Religion was mostly allowed but it would be much easier to get anywhere politically if you weren't religious. The common folk were still pretty religious but it wasn't exactly tied into communism, it was very separated.

As a History major I back this up. Battuta is right in that Christianity is involved with socioeconomics, but communist systems have typically been heavily anti-religious (communism typically forms it's own cult of sorts, you get "hero" worship like with Lenin, etc.). Soviet Russia was rife with persecution, as was/is Vietnam, and North Korea. The common folk's religious practices were in spite of communist rule, not interfaced with it.

Not that this really has any bearing on how Ubuntu works, though. It can work how the BP team wants it to work.

 

Offline qwadtep

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Does the Great Darkness think itself the only thing in the universe, or does it think itself the entire universe? Cogito Ergo Sum or Laplace's Demon?

Did anything in particular trigger the appearance of the Great Darkness in UT2, or was it simply the ghost of the Brahma drifting the Nagari-waves?

Is there a danger of the Great Darkness entering the Shivan network via Ken, who is based on Terran cognition?

Isn't revealing the existence of interdimensional travel to the GTVA itself an unacceptable risk to the quarantine?