Guest_Saphra Deden_*
Firstly, as the codex will tell you, in space-borne combat the combatants can flee at any time. If at any point one side feels it is losing the battle it can turn tale and run away. It can do this infinitely. This is especially true of the Reapers.
There is a key difference between us and the Reapers though. Any enemy we fight will, somewhere, have some sort of planet/moon/asteroid based assets to defend. Thus we can assault their planets to earn a victory if we must.
With the Reapers however this is not so. They have no planetary assets that they must defend. The Reapers are self sufficient, space-borne intelligences. It has been pointed out that they want the Earth and while this may be true, I guarantee you that they want their own continual survival even more than that. Assuming we successfully rally the galaxy to come and get their people killed to save our planet this offers no promise of victory against the Reapers. As soon as they realize the battle is turning against them (assuming that it does and that they don't just obliterate every fleet in the galaxy), the Reapers will flee.
They'll fly up, abandon the Earth, and disappear in to the vast Milky Way galaxy. Maybe some aliens will get smart and blow up the Charon relay, isolating the Reapers in our cluster. This might buy the galaxy some time, but they'll never have any hope of winning the war.
The thing is, the Reapers don't need to capture any planets besides Earth. All they have to do is drop in out of FTL near a planet and bombard all of its inhabitants into ash. They can do this again and again on every populated world in the galaxy until none remain.
Whether it takes decades or centuries in time every race in the galaxy will be exterminated and any human survivors will be cultivated into a new Reaper.
The only remote possibility of victory is if we wait until all of the Reapers are busy harvesting Earth and then blow up the Charon relay. Theoreticaly the shockwave would overtake the Earth and destroy all of the Reapers before they could flee. After all, it is safe to assume that shockwave is travelling at the speed of light, or near it, or even faster than that. There is no way to avoid it unless you know ahead of time that it is coming. The Reapers could do this. If they have quantum entaglement devices installed in the relays (or at least in the Charon relay) they would know immediately that it had been destroyed and may be able to flee to avoid the shockwave. This is quite likely considering how trivial and widespread quantum entaglement technology is for the Reapers. The Collectors and Saren were riddled with it and the implants 'given' to Paul Grayson were linked to the Reapers in this way.
Now, assuming this isn't necessary and Shepard discovers some miracle that can defeat the Reapers, it will still be a hollow victory in some respects. The inescapable fact is that we will ALL BE CONSUMED BY REAPER TECH ANYWAY! Their technology will not vanish, it will instead be laying around for everyone in the galaxy to scoop up and reverse engineer. Terrifying things like indoctrination and quantum-entaglement devices will proliferate throughout the galaxy. One way or another, we will all become Reapers.
EDIT
It has occurred to me that humanity at least is doomed no matter what we do. I would like to point you all towards a specific planet... it was... ah yes, this one.
Mass Effect Wikia says...
Eingana is a hot, beautiful, and deadly world, covered with the debris of
ancient starships. Approximately 127,000 years ago, a series of battles
were fought over it by two organic species, the thoi'han and the
inusannon. Although no records of the conflict remain, most historians
agree that both races wanted to colonize Eingana, and neither were
willing to share. The two lost hundreds of ships in a series of battles
over Eingana and its moon, Barraiya; many of these were eventually
pulled in by the planet's gravity well.
The mass effect drive cores of these ships broke apart, dumping
refined element zero over large stretches of the landscape. This
poisoned the environment and a wave of extinctions followed. Many of the
animal species that remained showed a tendancy to develop biotic
powers. As the ecology of Eingana is energetic and aggressive, this
makes colonization a deadly peril.
The implications should be obvious, but I suspect I need to spell it out anyway.
Reapers contain massive drive cores of their own, and what fuels drive cores? Element zero, of-course.
So what will happen if we destroy hundreds of Reapers on or in orbit over the Earth? The same thing that happened on Eingana will happen on Earth. Refined element zero will poison the environment and wipe out much of the life there. The effect will likely be much worse on Earth because Reapers likely carry drive cores much larger than anything the races fighting over Eingana used, meaning a hell of a lot more eezo is going to rain down on the planet.
Earth will become a wasteland with most species on land and in the water dead, including plants. This means we won't be able to grow any edible food there. If the planet can't support life it certainly can't support industry and with that goes the human economy and along with it our military standing.
Someday the Earth will probably recover, but that could take tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. It might even take many millions of years depending on how catastrohpic and total the die-off is. Humans can't afford to wait around that long.
So I now reiterate my point that we must join with the Reapers. It is our only hope. When we lose Earth we will lose most of humanity, leaving too few humans to build a new Reaper with. We'll be stranded in a hostile and callous galaxy that will be eagerly working to reverse engineer Reaper technologies and their much larger and healtheir economies will ensure that they succeed long before we do (even with the Collector base). As they unlock the secrets of Reaper tech they will join in union with it and change... becoming unrecognizable to us and at that point they may do whatever they want with us. Our fate will be beyond our control.
Joining with the Reapers now, while they can still create a Reaper for us, is our only hope. It is a not a fate I'd have ever wished for humanity, but it is one we can choose for ourselves, even if reluctantly, as opposed to one left up to outsiders. I think the Illusive Man and Cerberus understand this and this is why they have decided to join the Reapers.
The war was lost as soon as the Reapers descended upon the cradle of our species.
However we will survive, we will continue. Our legacy will not end.
Humanity will be reborn, unified at last in a single form, many voices, but a single mind, a single will.
A nation, sovereign, free of all weakness, and... eternal.
Modifié par Saphra Deden, 27 juillet 2011 - 02:42 .
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