Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Killer Whale on June 23, 2009, 05:17:50 am
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When/if/will we are attacked by another shivan fleet, what size and tech do you think it would be? Personally, I think the inferno fleet minus gargant and SPD Vishnaak would be alright. I don't particularly like the subspace weapons though.
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Something similar in size and power to the Lucifer fleet, if you chose to view the Lucifer-led fleet as a roving expeditionary exterminator group. (This also happens to be really the only reasonable survivable option.)
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An amaritaya flagship with a couple of saths, half a dozen destroyers and cruisers and corvettes would be a cool option, and probably beatable. But I wouldn't say likely.
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The Shivans send a wing of Dragon-class fighters. With sheath shielding (like the Lucifer). And guns that shoot black holes at stuff.
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Gatling BFReds on Liliths which are as common as Cains. ;7
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Gattling USilvs on bomber sized cruisers with a quadrillion hitpoints.
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A cain... a dragon... a Star Destroyer... a Babylon 5... a Dr. Gregory House MD... and something else.
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and something else.
Fred Durst.
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Zombie Bosch.
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The Gigas.
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Wow, has this thread completely deteriorated or what?
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Hey, my post is half serious.
It's likely that Bosch would try to save the rest of humanity with his new allies (given that he's successful with negotiations). He'd show up with a couple Saths and would talk to GTVA about ditching the vasudans and joining shivans.
It'd be the GTI all over again, except they have Saths instead of Hades.
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I still think the idea of Bosch returning to the GTVA as some kind of mechanized Shivan hybrid monster thing sounds like something from a particularly retarded anime.
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Whoever said he'd be completely mechanized or a monster of any form? It's logical that if Bosch wanted to save humanity, he'd have to come back to the rest of everyone with the shivans at some point in time. As a normal human.
Besides, I said my post was HALF serious. That would be the half without the word "zombie".
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Agree with NGTM-1R. The Lucifer groups are roving offensive elements (maybe activated and drawn by subspace activity.) The kind of fleets seen in Freespace 2 serve a more logistical function in the greater Shivan entity...novagenesis or something like that. Nebulae seem to be nice places for the Shivans.
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Nebulae seem to be nice places for the Shivans.
We don't know if the Shivans destroyed the star for specifically that purpose. The nebula may just be a side effect.
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Completely true. It's just an aesthetically appealing idea: that the Shivans might draw materials from a resource-rich, high-energy area filled with newborn heavy elements. And the idea of the zero-G-adapted Shivans lurking in the fog of these nebulae feels kind of natural, doesn't it?
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Yeah, plus the gas minerz0rds
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Not to mention that there were swarms of shivans behind the Gamma Draconis Knossos in the nebula.
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Well the Shivans do harvest Nebula Juice, but they may also blow up stars to create new stars.
Whats the chances of the nebula beyond Gamma Draconis being a large molecular cloud? And how are they formed, is known for certain? IS there any chance they are formed from the expelled makeup of stars that have went supernova?
If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.
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Completely true. It's just an aesthetically appealing idea: that the Shivans might draw materials from a resource-rich, high-energy area filled with newborn heavy elements. And the idea of the zero-G-adapted Shivans lurking in the fog of these nebulae feels kind of natural, doesn't it?
Shivans In The Mist.
It's not quite as amusing as Chinchillas In The Mist, and I don't think it would be safe to write a book about your time there, because it's not safe to spend time there...
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If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.
I don't think Shivans would preserve anything ,but that's where the Vishnans come in.
I suggest you to play Blue Planet. :)
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Well the Shivans do harvest Nebula Juice, but they may also blow up stars to create new stars.
Whats the chances of the nebula beyond Gamma Draconis being a large molecular cloud? And how are they formed, is known for certain? IS there any chance they are formed from the expelled makeup of stars that have went supernova?
If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.
I'm confused. All nebulas are made of molecules and are born from stars exploding. So yeah, the chance that they were formed from some exploded stars eons ago is 100%.
Shivans blowing up old stars to make new ones is an intriguing idea. However, you'd be hard pressed to explain why they go around torching planets in their spare time when not making supernovas.
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If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.
I don't think Shivans would preserve anything ,but that's where the Vishnans come in.
I suggest you to play Blue Planet. :)
Arguably, the Shivans might call themselves the Great Preservers (keeping hegemonic life like the Ancients pruned back so that others can thrive) and the Vishnans the Great Destroyers.
Vishnu preserves and maintains, but stasis can be deadly. Shiva destroys and transforms, but sometimes change is necessary.
Not that this is BP canon or anything! (and certainly not regular canon)
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If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.
I don't think Shivans would preserve anything ,but that's where the Vishnans come in.
I suggest you to play Blue Planet. :)
:rolleyes:
No, actually. The Shivans are both the Great Destroyers and the Great Preservers.
The Blue Planet duality is simply Darius' interpretation.
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Hmm.
Going back to the idea that Shivans are a mechanized race:
It makes a lot of sense if their creating race needed specific conditions to thrive, such as a lack of certain wavelengths of EM radiation (they might sunburn easily/lethally, who knows). Now given that only species that are selfish are viable from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that as soon as they have achieved sufficient technology to leave their home planet (which is probably shrouded in an environment that blocks a lot of light from killing them), that they would want to. Except, they realized that leaving their home killed them. Yay.
So, they still want to leave...overpopulation and global warming are screwing up their home. So, what do they do? They build a fleet of genetically engineered cyborg creatures called Shivans that serve one purpose: Find or create environments for their masters.
Because most of a planet would have to be mined empty to create these fleets, the master race realized that they probably didn't want some other life form coming across them and converting their centuries of work into pretty clouds of debris. So, they arm them. They also didn't really care about negotiations or any of that junk, because they're concerned about self-preservation, not harmonious existence, therefore, they genetically program the Shivans to blow anything up that doesn't carry master race identifiers.
So, the Shivans are produced from the master race shipyards, and are warped out to random spots in space to either find or create nebula environments that would block out the appropriate wavelengths of light that are lethal to the master race, enabling them to spread out their territory.
Then comes Bosch, who uses ETAK to communicate with Shivans. The Shivans must also have used quantum pulses to talk with the master race (since that's all they can use), then mistake Bosch for either a master race individual, or someone who might be friendly with the master race, so they take him in but kill all the rest of the stupid humans that can't possibly be buddies with the masters.
Therefore, another possibility is that the Shivans just roam the universe blowing stuff up and making nebulae from suitable stars whenever they come across one. In a way, you could argue that they're even more hegemonic than the Ancients.
Or, we go with the Xel Naga parallel, which is that the Shivans completely owned the master race after developing sentience accidentally or something, and now just roam around with broken genetic programming that just destroys stuff that would have benefited the now extinct master race.
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...I don't like that, it makes the Shivans look too simplified. It's certainly a valid explanation, but I don't like how it portrays the Shivans as brain-dead slaves controlled by
the Aryans some master race.
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It's much more probable than the Destroyers/Perservers dynamic that's going on with Vishnans and Shivans.
Also, evolutionary evidence:
Shivans can survive in empty space. That's clearly an impossible trait to obtain via evolution, unless a planet's atmosphere is capable of gradually thinning away to nothing over the course of hundreds of millions of years. (That's not possible because atmospheres would either deteriorate in much shorter time, or be stable enough to last basically forever).
So, Shivans MUST be a created race.
All of this assumes that there is no god, of course.
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I still see the Petrarch "super-jump" theory as being far more elegant than anything that involves the Shivans taking out Capella just for the sake of sucking up some nebular gas. It humanizes (or Vasudanizes) them too much, makes them into one more alien race that's all about stealing someone else's resources. But if those Sathanas jumps really were inter-system, and not just out to the Gamma Draconis node...well, the sky's the limit in puzzling out what they were trying to do.
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It's much more probable than the Destroyers/Perservers dynamic that's going on with Vishnans and Shivans.
Also, evolutionary evidence:
Shivans can survive in empty space. That's clearly an impossible trait to obtain via evolution, unless a planet's atmosphere is capable of gradually thinning away to nothing over the course of hundreds of millions of years. (That's not possible because atmospheres would either deteriorate in much shorter time, or be stable enough to last basically forever).
So, Shivans MUST be a created race.
All of this assumes that there is no god, of course.
Don't say MUST, it's only your goddamned ****ing theory man. :doubt:
What really pisses me off is when people decide to present their opinion as fact and say that it's "postulated" or "inferred" from canon and hence is also canon, or some bull**** like that. It's your damned view and nothing more.
In fact, a more canon theory contemplated by Bosch is that the Shivans are a lifeform that evolved from the flux of subspace.
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Whoa there. Don't get so prickly here. I'm just going off of evolutionary theory, and am trying to shed off all the bad science in Freespace. I'm not claiming that anything I'm saying is canon (obviously).
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Whoa there. Don't get so prickly here. I'm just going off of evolutionary theory, and am trying to shed off all the bad science in Freespace. I'm not claiming that anything I'm saying is canon (obviously).
Well, don't say MUST MUST MUST then. ;)
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Kolgena, your theory doesn't include any 'better' science. Definitive statements about traits that are 'impossible to obtain via evolution' don't stand without evidence behind them.
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IMHO the only way to react to statements like that of Kolgena is to ignore all parts that potentially lead the reader to consider those opinions as facts ("must" and related terms). I've never seen a reply like Snail's (no offense :)) helping with the discussion and/or preventing flame wars.
The problem here is that we don't have enough canonical info to come out with undebatable theories... and that's not even a bad thing. What if we knew everything about the Shivans? They wouldn't be a mystery. Their unclear origins and motives underline the main difference between an alien species like the Vasudans and something far sinister, like the Shivans themselves. Less mysteries on the Shivan front would mean, IMO, turning FreeSpace into some sort of Star Trek/Star Wars (no offense).
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IMHO the only way to react to statements like that of Kolgena is to ignore all parts that potentially lead the reader to consider those opinions as facts ("must" and related terms). I've never seen a reply like Snail's (no offense :)) helping with the discussion and/or preventing flame wars.
This is usually because the person in question isn't willing to step down from their claims that their theory is somehow "more canon" than others (no offense :P).
The problem here is that we don't have enough canonical info to come out with undebatable theories... and that's not even a bad thing. What if we knew everything about the Shivans? They wouldn't be a mystery. Their unclear origins and motives underline the main difference between an alien species like the Vasudans and something far sinister, like the Shivans themselves. Less mysteries on the Shivan front would mean, IMO, turning FreeSpace into some sort of Star Trek/Star Wars (no offense).
Exactly! Discussion is healthy, it's not meant to come up with definitive theories or whatever. It's to throw around ideas and see other people's opinions. Calling something definitive and conclusive will only stifle the FreeSpace community. And let us not forget, HLP is a modding community at heart, these discussions should fuel a creative new direction for future campaigns.
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I also see a possiblity that the Shivans in the form we know them were "created" ,but by themselves.
They might have been genetically modifying their bodies through millenia and now they have heavy ,completely natural armour ,ablity to survive in space vaccum ,those white beams seen in hallfight and who knows what else.
They could have looked completely different before they started to change thier genome to better suit space travel.
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This is usually because the person in question isn't willing to step down from their claims that their theory is somehow "more canon" than others (no offense :P).
No offense indeed, but it'd be nice to see different replies to comments that go too far, if you get what I mean. I've noticed how people consider themselves authorized to blame a member who makes use of the wrong words (i.e. words that make opinions look like facts). I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the members who make use of the "wrong words" don't really believe 100% in what they're saying.
Exactly! Discussion is healthy, it's not meant to come up with definitive theories or whatever. It's to throw around ideas and see other people's opinions. Calling something definitive and conclusive will only stifle the FreeSpace community. And let us not forget, HLP is a modding community at heart, these discussions should fuel a creative new direction for future campaigns.
:yes:
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Whoa there. Don't get so prickly here. I'm just going off of evolutionary theory, and am trying to shed off all the bad science in Freespace. I'm not claiming that anything I'm saying is canon (obviously).
Well, don't say MUST MUST MUST then. ;)
Touche. It's the debater in me coming out, when I say thing definitively even when I know full well that it's all just postulation. I'll try to avoid doing so in the future.
Anyways, less about the invalidity of definitive statements, more about what you people think.
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A bit late, but:
Wow, has this thread completely deteriorated or what?
That was my intention:
The Shivans send a wing of Dragon-class fighters. With sheath shielding (like the Lucifer). And guns that shoot black holes at stuff.
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No, actually. The Shivans are both the Great Destroyers and the Great Preservers.
I'd say they are neither.
What's the point of saving somebody if you are going to kill him a few days later? You're not really saving him, now are you?
Neither are they the great perservers.
They are just...shivans. Strange, mysterious, xenophobic aliens.
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Also, evolutionary evidence:
Shivans can survive in empty space.
For a while. Not more than a human in space suit can I suppose. Were they "modified" by someone else, or did they do it to themselves, now that is the question.
I guess the former, since the shivans don't really look like they can make delicate things themselves - they got 5 massive arms with 3 massive finger things - very bad fine manipulators.
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No, actually. The Shivans are both the Great Destroyers and the Great Preservers.
I'd say they are neither.
What's the point of saving somebody if you are going to kill him a few days later? You're not really saving him, now are you?
Neither are they the great perservers.
They are just...shivans. Strange, mysterious, xenophobic aliens.
Wow, you kind of missed the point of FS1. The theory was that the Shivans destroy fast-expanding races so that other, younger races will get a chance to live. The Ancients wiped out dozens of species they encountered; the Shivans prevent that kind of business.
That's one theory, at least.
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And once those younger races expand, then they destroy them for the next one..etc, etc.
Like I said - that's not really saving them. More like raising (saving) cattle so you can slaughter them once they are no longer useful.
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Well, they COULD be.
The problem is that the system is grossly flawed then.
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they got 5 massive arms with 3 massive finger things - very bad fine manipulators.
I had a theory that perhaps the Shivans come in castes. What we saw were warior Shivans. There could be engineer Shivans for the finer tasks and worker Shivans for the heavy lifting.
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And once those younger races expand, then they destroy them for the next one..etc, etc.
Like I said - that's not really saving them. More like raising (saving) cattle so you can slaughter them once they are no longer useful.
Unless there are races that don't behave this way.
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While we have a very small sample size, counting the Shivans all answers point to "no such thing".
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Huh? Of the races we know of, two (Terran and Vasudan) have managed to achieve meaningful coexistence...
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Yes, because the Shivans said "adapt or die, kids". I was more meaning along the lines of the subspace entry = Shivany death point of view. But more to this point, one does not live long enough to become a sentient species without the capacity for violence. It is, I think, a natural extension of evolution: either to defend yourself from the predators, or you were already the apex predator and so came with it anyways. Once developed, it is too useful to throw away. Such is the nature of technological sentience.
The alternative is to unite against an outside force. Now, the Shivans served that role for the Terrans and Vasudans, but they've been around a lot longer than that and there's no evidence that anyone else ever survived them. FreeSpace presents a reality where situations like the T-V War are apparently very uncommon. They thus represent a grossly flawed system for preservation.
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Well, if they're supposed to be the third party in the Robber's Cave scenario, that'd definitely be an interesting twist.
As for the 'capacity for violence' deal, Larry Niven talked about that a bit in his Known Space story. Arguments have been made that aggression is useful only in moderation.
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When you think of all the technology required, chance and innovation. Perhaps many races will never reach space for millions of years and perhaps the vast majority may never reach the technology for sub-space.
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Unless there are races that don't behave this way.
But they all do.
Expansion and growth are normal for any intelligent species. Sooner or later, space travel will happen. Then comes the shivies and kill you.
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Respectfully, you have no basis whatsoever for that statement, whether in the Freespace universe or the real world.
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Haha, this talk about Shivans being preservers till a race gets too big really makes them out to be the universe's lawnmowers :D
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What's wrong with that statement? FS1's Endgame cutscene was pretty clear on the matter.
The unknown protagonist says that the Shivans are both the Great Destroyers and the Great Preservers, but IMO that's more a poetic view rather than an actual analysis. The Shivans act in a way that may be interpreted as the will to preserve the universe.
I wouldn't say that no advanced species would start colonizing space, either. Wheter or not they do that with the intent to kill and subdue other species is all but unknown to the Shivans: therefore, it's quite impossible to assume that they act as "moderators". How did they know what was behind the Ancient Empire?
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Respectfully, you have no basis whatsoever for that statement, whether in the Freespace universe or the real world.
Oh no?
Any intelligent species will sooner or later leave it's homeworld and spread among the stars. It HAS to to survive. Even something as big as a planet is rather fragile on a galactic scale.
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I wouldn't say that no advanced species would start colonizing space, either. Wheter or not they do that with the intent to kill and subdue other species is all but unknown to the Shivans: therefore, it's quite impossible to assume that they act as "moderators". How did they know what was behind the Ancient Empire?
An extension of the Great Preservers/Great Destroyers duality is Bosch's "Cities of Troy" observation, where there were countless numbers of galactic empires, stretching back to the beginning of time, and each was destroyed by the Shivans only to be replaced by another empire.
Any intelligent species will sooner or later leave it's homeworld and spread among the stars. It HAS to to survive. Even something as big as a planet is rather fragile on a galactic scale.
That's a pretty baseless statement. I sincerely doubt that every species in the universe would chose to leave their homeworld once they had the capacity.
(Oh, and just to nitpick, it's not space travel necessarily. The Ancients had been spreading across the stars long before the Shivans came. They had even been using subspace for a while before the Shivans showed up.)
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Respectfully, you have no basis whatsoever for that statement, whether in the Freespace universe or the real world.
Oh no?
Any intelligent species will sooner or later leave it's homeworld and spread among the stars. It HAS to to survive. Even something as big as a planet is rather fragile on a galactic scale.
Pure, unsubstantiated fantasy. Evolution is a greedy search algorithm. It finds local optimae, not global optimae.
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Meh... :doubt:
I think I'm with TM on this one. I'm not saying that every intelligent species will leave its home planet on its own, but that it will be forced to do so. Think about it. What will happen if it doesn't?
A) A big chunk o' meteor is bound to come around sooner or later and blow you to smithereens. That's a certainty. It's just a matter of time. A few million years? That's nothing on an evolutionary time scale. The dinosaurs were around for more than that. (and look what happened :P)
B) To avoid (A) you must:
i) have some way of blowing the rock away before it hits the surface. If that is the case, you've left your planet's surface, even with robotic probes, or missiles, or whatever. The tech to leave your planet is there. QED
or
ii) Figure out some way to survive after it hits and causes impact winter and so on and so forth. If that happens:
C) Sooner or later, an expanding stellar empire (like the Ancients or the GTVA) will come knocking on your door. Again, a certainty, just a matter of time. It might be i) friendly (in which case you get to be buddies and share techs) or b) hostile (in which case you need to develop space tech to defend yourself. If you don't, you're gonna get beaten to a pulp from orbit).
D) If you share techs and enter into some kind of alliance, in order to compete with the other species economically and politically, you will need to expand.
So, it's fly-where-no-man-has-gone-before...or die.
I think. :nervous:
If you can point out any flaws in the argument, I'd be glad to debate them... :)
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Yeah, sure, here's a flaw in the form of an alternative scenario:
The species never gets into space flight and just sits around on its planetary surface until extinction. For all we know, this might be exactly what plenty of species do. It might be what we end up doing.
Both of you are making the assumption that species (driven by their evolutionary imperatives) will make rational choices in order to seek global optimum survival strategies. I don't think there's a strong case for that view.
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Valid alternative scenario. Just completely irrelevant to my argument. :D
You misunderstand me.
Here's the point:
The species never gets into space flight and just sits around on its planetary surface until extinction.
I am not saying that every species will leave their planet's surface until they go extinct.
What both TM and I are saying is that every species will go extinct if they don't leave their planet.
As in here:
Any intelligent species will sooner or later leave it's homeworld and spread among the stars. It HAS to to survive. Even something as big as a planet is rather fragile on a galactic scale.
If you don't want to leave your planet, fine.
But you will die on your planet. Or you will be killed. Sooner. Or. Later.
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I don't misunderstand you at all, you just haven't presented any reasons why your common-sense point is in any way relevant to the topic at hand.
Trashman argues that the Shivans will kill everyone. I respond: no, they won't kill species that don't leave their planet. You say: well, species that don't leave their planet will go extinct on their planet.
So? The Shivan's don't give a ****. For all we know they'd rather have a lot of diverse species hanging out on their planets (or in their local neighborhoods) than a few, longer-lived species hegemonizing local space and driving other species extinct. Maybe the Shivans are there to provide an incentive for species to stay on their homeworld and learn sustainable practices rather than just taking their problems out into space. (Not that I necessarily would argue for that, but it's possible and a campaign could use it as a premise.)
We're dealing in possible scenarios here. The idea that all species are behaviorally driven to leave their homeworlds, and therefore the Shivans will destroy all species, is a totally unsupported one.
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This is totally tangential, but anyway:
And then there's the assumption that there is a form of handwavium that makes space colonization not only possible, but practical and even desirable.
Meh... :doubt:
I think I'm with TM on this one. I'm not saying that every intelligent species will leave its home planet on its own, but that it will be forced to do so. Think about it. What will happen if it doesn't?
A) A big chunk o' meteor is bound to come around sooner or later and blow you to smithereens. That's a certainty. It's just a matter of time. A few million years? That's nothing on an evolutionary time scale. The dinosaurs were around for more than that. (and look what happened :P)
B) To avoid (A) you must:
i) have some way of blowing the rock away before it hits the surface. If that is the case, you've left your planet's surface, even with robotic probes, or missiles, or whatever. The tech to leave your planet is there. QED
No. We currently have the technology to send robots to Mars. But there are no Mars expeditions (except for some preliminary planning) and most definitely no plans to colonize other planets in our solar system. Always remember, Earth is right now the only place in reach that actually supports human life. Moon colonies need a steady supply of consumables, but at least we can get there in less than a week. Mars, on the other hand, is several months away, even under the best conditions, and to get there requires a ship capable of letting the human crew survive long enought to actually do something useful on the other end of the journey (Not to mention delivering them without irreparable damage to their reproductive organs). Ships like that are possible, but require an insane amount of infrastructure to build.
ii) Figure out some way to survive after it hits and causes impact winter and so on and so forth. If that happens:
C) Sooner or later, an expanding stellar empire (like the Ancients or the GTVA) will come knocking on your door. Again, a certainty, just a matter of time. It might be i) friendly (in which case you get to be buddies and share techs) or b) hostile (in which case you need to develop space tech to defend yourself. If you don't, you're gonna get beaten to a pulp from orbit).
Fermi's paradoxon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) comes to mind.
Seriously, should we ever encounter a civilization advanced enough that interstellar travel is a viable way of life for them, chances are that we won't be able to stop them, even if we had a space infrastructure worth a damn. For further education, I recommend Babylon 5: Crusade Episode 12.
D) If you share techs and enter into some kind of alliance, in order to compete with the other species economically and politically, you will need to expand.
So, it's fly-where-no-man-has-gone-before...or die.
I think. :nervous:
If you can point out any flaws in the argument, I'd be glad to debate them... :)
Right.
There is no evidence for star-spanning empires.
There is currently no way to realistically solve the problems with getting a horde of canned monkeys into space, onto another planetary body, and allowing them to stay there without constant help and assistance from Earth.
Please explain how things like building up an extensive orbital infrastructure can be accomplished in a time span comparable to a human generation.
If you can do that without extensive use of handwavium, I congratulate you.
For reference for a far more eloquent (and better researched!) discussion of the problems associated with interstellar colonization, I refer you to Charles Stross' essay "The High Frontier, Redux" (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html).
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Books like 'Manifold Space' and 'Manifold Time' also tackle these problems rather elegantly. Good reading.
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@ GB:
Hmmmm...good points.
I agree that the Shivans will not destroy every species. At least not directly.
But if a species does not leave its planet, it is doomed to go extinct at some point. And you could argue that, by attacking and destroying all space-faring species, the Shivans are pretty much forcing everybody to stay on their homeworlds and die off. Which means that the Shivans do destroy everybody: the spacefarers with beamz and the non-spacefarers...by letting them die off.
Let me present you with an analogy: you're sitting in a pool of acid that will slowly kill you (your planet) and there's a big guy with a bazooka guarding you (the shivans). If you step out of the pool, he blows you to pieces. If you don't, you're dead anyway.
If you stay on the acid pool, whom are you going to blame for your death? Yourself, for staying there, or the bazooka guy who's forcing you to stay in?
And as for the flaming part -if the letters got too big there, I apologize. :p
@ The E:
If we're talking about the FreeSpace Universe, then everything you say is inaccurate, as the GTVA has already colonized 10+ systems. But you're talking about the real world, right? In that case:
The fact that we, humanity, cannot at this point colonize space, does not render my argument invalid. What I am saying is that if you don't manage to get off your planet, you're gonna be fried at some point -and not necessarily by nasty aliens. War. Famine. Evolution playing a joker and wiping us out in favor of a new dominant species (yes, I know that 'dominant species' is a stupid term, bear with me). Pollution causing the icecaps to melt.
I'm just saying that, if we don't get our eggs off this one basket (the Earth), we will go extinct at some point. We will probably go extinct anyway, but I believe our chances will be better if we go than if we (all) stay.
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I think it boils down to a category error we often make, in confusing our own self-interest in not experiencing personal extinction with the existence of a species-wide collective self-interest in not experiencing species extinction. But I'd be interested in hearing other explanations.
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@ GB:
Hmmmm...good points.
I agree that the Shivans will not destroy every species. At least not directly.
But if a species does not leave its planet, it is doomed to go extinct at some point. And you could argue that, by attacking and destroying all space-faring species, the Shivans are pretty much forcing everybody to stay on their homeworlds and die off. Which means that the Shivans do destroy everybody: the spacefarers with beamz and the non-spacefarers...by letting them die off.
Let me present you with an analogy: you're sitting in a pool of acid that will slowly kill you (your planet) and there's a big guy with a bazooka guarding you (the shivans). If you step out of the pool, he blows you to pieces. If you don't, you're dead anyway.
If you stay on the acid pool, whom are you going to blame for your death? Yourself, for staying there, or the bazooka guy who's forcing you to stay in?
And as for the flaming part -if the letters got too big there, I apologize. :p
Right, but then you're ignoring one of the very risk factors you brought up - part of the danger of staying on your homeworld is that another species will come along and butcher you.
If the Shivans prevent that, then it may be that more species live longer (as opposed to a single species living a really long time while everyone it runs into goes extinct.)
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Pure, unsubstantiated fantasy. Evolution is a greedy search algorithm. It finds local optimae, not global optimae.
We're talking about INTELLIGENT life here. Builders and creators. Given that progress can't really be halted, any creative species will at one point advance it's science enough so that it can leave it's planet. Greed, curiosity or need - doesn't matter why - the species will begin to spread, sooner or later.
Pure logic here.
Trashman argues that the Shivans will kill everyone. I respond: no, they won't kill species that don't leave their planet. You say: well, species that don't leave their planet will go extinct on their planet.
So? The Shivan's don't give a ****. For all we know they'd rather have a lot of diverse species hanging out on their planets (or in their local neighborhoods) than a few, longer-lived species hegemonizing local space and driving other species extinct.
So how does that make hte Shivans benevolent in ANY way? It's like you being in your room that's slowly filling with water (and is water-tight). If you don't leave you'll drown. If you leave I'll shoot you cause you MIGHT do something I don't like once you're out. Yay, shivies are very benevolent.
The fact that we, humanity, cannot at this point colonize space, does not render my argument invalid.
Actually, according no NASA, we could begin terraforming Mars right now. But it would be hideously expensive and take a minimum of 100 years.
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Pure, unsubstantiated fantasy. Evolution is a greedy search algorithm. It finds local optimae, not global optimae.
We're talking about INTELLIGENT life here. Builders and creators. Given that progress can't really be halted, any creative species will at one point advance it's science enough so that it can leave it's planet. Greed, curiosity or need - doesn't matter why - the species will begin to spread, sooner or later.
Pure logic here.
You talk about logic but don't evince a shred of it. Look outside the door: we have the capacity to leave the planet. Are we making any progress on it? Does the vast majority of humankind support space colonization even in the face of environmental collapse? Thought so.
Secondly, you constantly harp about how scientific and logical your thinking is, yet - just here - you've generalized from one example (human psychology) to a vast and unknowable populations (all possible xenopsychologies) without any evidence or rigor. You have no way of knowing how alien species 'must' act, particularly when many species here on Earth exhibit bizarre and sometimes apparently counterproductive attitudes with regard to their habitats.
Trashman argues that the Shivans will kill everyone. I respond: no, they won't kill species that don't leave their planet. You say: well, species that don't leave their planet will go extinct on their planet.
So? The Shivan's don't give a ****. For all we know they'd rather have a lot of diverse species hanging out on their planets (or in their local neighborhoods) than a few, longer-lived species hegemonizing local space and driving other species extinct.
So how does that make hte Shivans benevolent in ANY way? It's like you being in your room that's slowly filling with water (and is water-tight). If you don't leave you'll drown. If you leave I'll shoot you cause you MIGHT do something I don't like once you're out. Yay, shivies are very benevolent.
You don't just create your own strawmen, you actually believe in them. At no point in that argument did I assert that the Shivans were benevolent. I said that this was one possible explanation for their role as 'great preservers'. I never suggested that I agreed with or supported their methods. You do understand that people can argue points without personally investing in them, yes?
Even so, your counterattack against a point that was never made is still flawed. Your metaphor fails to mention that this man with a gun is keeping all the other people who want to kill you (much faster than the water would) from getting to you.
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We're talking about INTELLIGENT life here. Builders and creators. Given that progress can't really be halted, any creative species will at one point advance it's science enough so that it can leave it's planet. Greed, curiosity or need - doesn't matter why - the species will begin to spread, sooner or later.
Pure logic here.
Right. So every intelligent species out there will develop along similar lines to humans, use similar reasoning to humans, and arrive at the same conclusions? Why would they? Please consider that, prior to the european conquest, the australian aboriginees lived in an incredibly stable society that had an institutional continuity for a few thousand years WITHOUT developing things like steam power.
You're using one example to formulate a general rule. Please tell me where the logic is, I can't see it.
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Right. So every intelligent species out there will develop along similar lines to humans, use similar reasoning to humans, and arrive at the same conclusions? Why would they? Please consider that, prior to the european conquest, the australian aboriginees lived in an incredibly stable society that had an institutional continuity for a few thousand years WITHOUT developing things like steam power.
You're using one example to formulate a general rule. Please tell me where the logic is, I can't see it.
So the aborigini developed very slowly. Just because they haven't invented steam power in 2000 years, doesn't mean they won't in 4000...or 5000. Progress and growth doesn't follow the same pace everywhere and for everyone.
But change is a necessity of life.
A species that doesn't change will eventually die.
You talk about logic but don't evince a shred of it. Look outside the door: we have the capacity to leave the planet. Are we making any progress on it? Does the vast majority of humankind support space colonization even in the face of environmental collapse? Thought so.
1. We are making progress, but not much. Funding for space exploration has diminished.
2. For a species to be space-fearing, it's not necessary for the majority to leave the planet. Even if only a few colonize a nearby planet for scientific purposes, it's still expansion - slow, minimalistic, but still expansion. A lot of people would love for humanity to expand and colonize the galaxy. The popularity of Sci-fi is a testament to that desire of humanity.
Enviromental collapse? It's still not that critical an issue for most. If word came that the Sun were to go nova (impossible, but humor me), people would be all over the streets demanding we pour our money into space colonization.
Secondly, you constantly harp about how scientific and logical your thinking is, yet - just here - you've generalized from one example (human psychology) to a vast and unknowable populations (all possible xenopsychologies) without any evidence or rigor. You have no way of knowing how alien species 'must' act, particularly when many species here on Earth exhibit bizarre and sometimes apparently counterproductive attitudes with regard to their habitats.
Well, isn't logic some sort of universal constant? Logic is logic, for me or an alien. It should be the same thing (more or less).
I wouldn't go that far to say that a species MUST act that way, but if it doesn't, it surely isn't intelligent. Some herbivores stuck on a island may eat and reproduce without any constraint, which will lead to it's extinction once all the vegetation is gone - but that's not exactly a advanced civilization/species, now is it? We are discussing species that have the capacity to develop advanced technology.
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Right. So every intelligent species out there will develop along similar lines to humans, use similar reasoning to humans, and arrive at the same conclusions? Why would they? Please consider that, prior to the european conquest, the australian aboriginees lived in an incredibly stable society that had an institutional continuity for a few thousand years WITHOUT developing things like steam power.
You're using one example to formulate a general rule. Please tell me where the logic is, I can't see it.
So the aborigini developed very slowly. Just because they haven't invented steam power in 2000 years, doesn't mean they won't in 4000...or 5000. Progress and growth doesn't follow the same pace everywhere and for everyone.
But change is a necessity of life.
A species that doesn't change will eventually die.
No. There is no such thing as a species that doesn't change.
But even assuming the aboriginees had been able to develop their own culture without outside interference, what makes you so damn sure they would have reached the same conclusions as the western culture did?
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I personally hope humanity does develop viable interstellar travel. One, we need to get our eggs in multiple baskets in case of catastrophe. Two, if interstellar travel is viable for us, we might well stand a chance against any hostile aliens in outer space. Three, competition from population pressure. Either we get people off Earth fast, or WWIII happens over lack of resources and living room.
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They'd likely send something larger than the Lucifer fleet, since we very well whooped that one, but smaller than the Sathanas fleet, because that one whooped us. Now, they don't really need a fleet. They just need a few Sathani to go in and rape us all. with big, sharp, nasty BFReds and LReds.
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I personally hope humanity does develop viable interstellar travel. One, we need to get our eggs in multiple baskets in case of catastrophe. Two, if interstellar travel is viable for us, we might well stand a chance against any hostile aliens in outer space. Three, competition from population pressure. Either we get people off Earth fast, or WWIII happens over lack of resources and living room.
Population's due to level off soon by some projections.
In any case, I don't understand how people have started thinking that this is some kind of thread about the desirability of space travel. I think space colonization is a lovely idea.
We're just shooting down the absurd idea that we have any reason to think all species would reach the same conclusion. And Trashman's odd assumption that 'logic is universal' when human beings are incredibly far from logical.
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So let's say we do invent great space travel some day and colonize other planets and even solar systems. Our sun will still die one day, and so will all the other stars.
What do you do?
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Global exodus when it's necessary. :P
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To where? He postulated all the other stars are dead.
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Well, I'll continue the 'space travel' theme for now, but I might need to split this lot out and move it general, I'll see how things go.
As far as travel is concerned, I think we need to do a lot more work on our environmental control before we start seriously thinking about moving to other worlds, there have been a few wild ideas for terroforming Mars, but nothing tried, even on a small scale. Even on Earth our terraforming skills are limited by the 'funds boundary', which is the inevitable fact that those countries with the least hospitable environs tend to be the ones with far too few funds to perform any real terraforming in theory or practice.
The environment is probably the single hardest factor to alter on a planet, because it is affected by everything from microbes to mountain ranges, and even humans only have quite a small 'survival area' when it comes to environments, and we are a lot more adaptable than many other species.
The thing is, it's almost certain that other races will face extremely similar problems to us. I'm not certain that logic is 100% constant, but chemistry is, a race would be very fortunate indeed to be evolved to cope with such a vast expanse of environments and atmospheres, and such a creature would likely be too complex to be biologically viable. That's why Terraforming should be such an important step towards the colonization of space.
As for the question about Entropy, we are talking hundreds of billions of years in the future, for all we know Asimov is right, and 'God' is the sum total of all the races in the previous universe, evolved to the point of being Creators and generating a new Universe when the last one collapses, thus we become our own Gods ;)
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It's more a matter of 'would every race have that drive to leave its homeworld'.
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I think the concept of multiplicative growth will apply to almost any race, any race that cannot expand exponentially is pretty much doomed, it's a basic biological urge, and space and resources will, I suspect, become a premium in any society after a time. I would say that speculation about colonizing other worlds is a perfectly natural and standard stage in the development of any intelligent species.
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each Shivan encounter has involved a ship class bigger than anything the GT - PV - GTVA has been able to field
FS1 Lucifer
FS2 Sath
so there would probably be something new and bigger (especially as i assume they would have 30+ years to build them)
maybe some kind of world ship acting as a mobile near self sufficient colony easily capable of defending itself and being full of "civilian" shivans give a moral dilemma for the alliance about destroying it
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To where? He postulated all the other stars are dead.
But he didn't postulate that we populated the ENTIRE universe, stars take so damn long before they die you could have the entire exodus well out of the supernova's range long before it ever happens. :rolleyes:
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As for the question about Entropy, we are talking hundreds of billions of years in the future, for all we know Asimov is right, and 'God' is the sum total of all the races in the previous universe, evolved to the point of being Creators and generating a new Universe when the last one collapses, thus we become our own Gods ;)
Oooh. Maybe I should start reading Asimov...
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there is a very good reason to why Asimov is the king of sci-fi :yes:
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To where? He postulated all the other stars are dead.
But he didn't postulate that we populated the ENTIRE universe, stars take so damn long before they die you could have the entire exodus well out of the supernova's range long before it ever happens. :rolleyes:
You need an education in astrophysics.
The heat death of the universe will reach a phase wherein all stars, everywhere, are dead. This isn't a matter of distance, it's a matter of time, and every point in the universe ages at (more or less) the same rate.
Moreover, this has nothing to do with supernovae, which further betrays the fact that you have no understanding of the area you're trying to tackle. Supernovae are rare events, and most stars won't go out that way.
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Even so, it's still a long ass time, whether or not it reaches a point where humans get splashed by some alien race or we do it ourselves, it's unlikely, more like not going to happen, that we'll die because of the stars.
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Please read the post you're discussing:
So let's say we do invent great space travel some day and colonize other planets and even solar systems. Our sun will still die one day, and so will all the other stars.
What do you do?
Then go look up the definition of a 'premise'.
Let me know when you're certain you understand it. :rolleyes:
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It's more a matter of 'would every race have that drive to leave its homeworld'.
That's more dependent I think on how they become extinct. If they blow themselves up, it's unlikely.
If they have to face planetary resource depletion, there's really no reason to believe they won't go to space.
In fact, I think the whole conception of "some species won't go to space" is really more easily divisible to "some species won't develop technology". Any that does is going to have developed the capablity for spaceflight as a natural consequence of transportation efforts; any that develops the capability for spaceflight is going to find it easier to use that for something then to do it on the ground eventually.
Whether, of course, such a thing as a species that won't develop technology is even possible is still unknown. On the one hand, we may be talking about dolphins here. On the other, us.
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We still haven't done anything with spaceflight and we don't know that we will...which is pretty strong evidence against drawing any conclusions here.
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We still haven't done anything with spaceflight and we don't know that we will...which is pretty strong evidence against drawing any conclusions here.
But we could, we have the means and the technology or can develop it, and eventually we will find it easier to find, say, titanium on the Moon, then we will on Earth. And then we will go. You can bank on it.
The only thing that will stop us is if we, ourselves, stop. There is no reason to believe we, or any other species, will ever do otherwise.
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We still haven't done anything with spaceflight and we don't know that we will...which is pretty strong evidence against drawing any conclusions here.
But we could, we have the means and the technology or can develop it, and eventually we will find it easier to find, say, titanium on the Moon, then we will on Earth. And then we will go. You can bank on it.
The only thing that will stop us is if we, ourselves, stop. There is no reason to believe we, or any other species, will ever do otherwise.
Until it happens, we don't have any evidence for it, and even then, we're postulating from a sample size of one.
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Ok, consider how tiny changes in the past 2000 years of human history could have changed stuff.
First off, if Lenin had never come to power (actually, that was part of the premise of the Resistance series)... World War I would have ended sooner because the Allies would have had Russia's help on the Eastern Front, right? So Russia is still under the rule of the Czar, and the entire cold war never happens.
Or maybe in response to Russia's not leaving WWI to go be commies, Germany's strategy would have changed so much that they could have won. So Hitler doesn't have a Kampf to write about. Nobody else writes Mein Kampf either because the Germans aren't resenting the treatment they've been getting after their defeat. World War II never happens. Operation Sea Lion, the balloon barrage, and buzz bombs never happen either. Hitler isn't frustrated with the inefficacy of buzz bombs, so he doesn't force Wernher von Braun to design the V2 for him. No race against the Nazi's to develop the atom bomb or any of that either. After the lack of World War II, the Russians, living in their home country, Germany, aren't in the cold war with us.
Either way, there's no cold war. No politicans or military strategists marketing the need to control outer space to the President of the United States. Wernher von Braun never invented the V2, and most people don't even believe the physics behind a rocket would even work, let alone be enough to get from one continent to another.
Oh, and "colonizing other planets"? Let's just say if you asked anyone, they'd think you're crazy.
Now of course I've given myself some generous points here, particularly how much of the technology developed between WWI and the Cold War went undeveloped or unresearched. But the point is none the less valid: if the way such a small span of time as the Cold War plays out (small compared to how long man has been around) can have such big effects on technology and is probably the single biggest reason anyone on earth even seriously talks about colonizing other planets, to argue that aliens from some other planet (if they even exist) are as interested in space travel as we... it's awfully self centered.
Look up "strong anthropic principle" if you ever feel like adventuring outside the box.
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Good one, what I couldn't say because I'm not smart enough.
Think of the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy. I know it's a silly story, but the part I quote is perfectly likely. The world the Krikkiters inhabited was engulfed in a dust field which blocked out the sun and space. As a result, the sky was dark and dull. As long as the starship hadn't crashed into it, which was done intentionally to provoke them mind you, they would never have even thought of flying or entering space. Yet they were still a highly advanced civilisation of intelligent life. An example of a race that never thinks of entering space.
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So we know that even if you manage to avoid all other calamaties and disasters, eventually you'll have to face the death of all stars, and the death of the universe.
But what if you could find some way to solve this problem too? To what lengths would you go to ensure it works? Would any means be justified to try and hold off the ultimate end?
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Okay, so now your saying that an intelligent species must be able to survive the end of the universe, if it's not, it will die? So I guess we're not an intelligent species as we will probably die at or most likely before the end of the universe?
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;-)
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Okay, so now your saying that an intelligent species must be able to survive the end of the universe, if it's not, it will die? So I guess we're not an intelligent species as we will probably die at or most likely before the end of the universe?
No
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:wtf: So what's that got to do with with intelligent life hafting (spellchecker says it a word, so I dunno) to leave the planet it lived on sooner or later?
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:wtf: So what's that got to do with with intelligent life hafting (spellchecker says it a word, so I dunno) to leave the planet it lived on sooner or later?
Beats me. If you look back, you'll see I never really got involved in that argument. I'm not saying the ability to leave one's planet or survive the end of the universe has any bearing on intelligence either way. I'm just saying that even if you overcome global warming, nuclear war, asteroids crashing into us, the sun exploding, the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda, Shivans, Borg, and whatever other dangers are out there, it means frak-all versus the heat death of the universe.
Furthermore, since that would be the end of everyone and everything, would any price be too great to pay in order to avoid it?
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The goal is not for the species to live forever - it is to live as long as possible.
You're saying just because we can't survive the end of the universe, we should kill ourselves now?
We can do something about a asteroid crashing into the planet, or global warming ... but we can't do anything to stop the end of the universe. Therefore it makes sense to avoid death as long as you can.
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;-)
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;-)
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Only if life has a purpose and people are scared of death would there be a reason to keep a species going. If a person believes in pure science and eveything is physical and no continuing of my memories or consciousness after death, then that means existance is pointless from that point of view since we would not live after we die and not be around in some form eternally. all the stuff I learned would be a waste and lost. All that for nothing basically since nothing and no one would last in some form forever. It would make everything we think do and our being nothing special at all. Not saying I'm part of that view though. I mix diffferent views.
"We would not live after we die"? That just made my day. Some would say that not living anymore is a big part of that whole "dying" thing, you know.
And speaking as someone who is absolutely certain that the only things that will be left behind after my death will be my children, and whatever enduring works I created during my time here, will say that nothing I learn and do is wasted. After all, if I don't work to make this world better, I will truly deserve to be forgotten.
So, saying that life would be pointless if it wasn't infinite sounds incredibly silly to my (admittedly condescending/liberal/rude/sarcastic/atheist) ears.
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;-)
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And where did I talk about absolutes? Oh, yes, here:
"And speaking as someone who is absolutely certain that the only things that will be left behind after my death..."
My beliefs are the ONLY thing I can talk in absolutes about. Doing anything else would be dishonest.
I will not talk in absolutes since I know that I and no one knows for sure.
Oh, good.
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Wow, has this thread completely deteriorated or what?
Ask a stupid question...
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I've always seen the Shivans as an insectoid race, due to the appearance of their ships and the attack drones/shivens in the cutscene. So I've always considered them to have an insectoid mentality of working towards the greater good, and not being worried about their own lives. I know the explanation of why they attack civilisations is heatly debated, but I've always thought they simply attack races which are starting to become a possible threat to them. A sort of pre-emptive attack to stop them from developing the tech to be able to threaten the Shivans. That's why they're not bothered with taking land, as they aren't on a conquest, but more of pest control.
I'd like to see the next Shivan fleet focus on lots of Medium sized strong ships, rather than the traditional "boss" ship. Stuff which is supposed to swarm, overwhelm and pick apart bigger oppenents with numbers alone. Then again it's more likely we'd just see one huge arse Sath style beast, with the traditional claws which fire lazer b34ms.
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I concur with that idea of a focus on more tactically relevant medium-sized ships. Uberships are played out.
The Sathani actually did a good job of subverting that just by there being a lot of them.
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Sathanas Juggernauts are medium-sized ships to the Shivans! :nervous:
(in certain continuities)
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I thought they were meant to be disposable path finders? :P
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In that case, I wouldn't want to know what an Aeshma would be considered as . . . :nervous:
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One of the red blood cells in one of the soldiers in your army. Probably not even red blood cells, it's an aeshma, so maybe an adipose cell.