You know what a statistical variation of 48,000 +/- X,000 years means, though, when you run through a few hundred iterations and then throw in plenty of white-noise? No obvious pattern. It's the sort of data cluster in which you only realize there is a pattern if you're already looking for it. Especially when we don't even
know all the species that have been reaped: we know a bare few, and nowhere near enough to put a 'every 50k years' label: some are separated by tens of thousands of years (us and the Protheans), some by millions, and others by nearly a billion (Leviathan of Dis). There is no signficant statistical pattern of '
someone dies every 50k' by the archeological digs.
For Chorban, that measurement is in part justified because he's both looking at the Citadel itself (the triggering device free from noise of false-bombardments/disasters), and already is inclined towards Sheaprd. For everyone else, however, the numbers alone don't prove it: if that interstellar war 127,000 years ago produced an extinction (or two), and interstellar wars themselves aren't unknown (this Cycle has had two major ones in one thousand years), you pretty quickly get strong diversions in the patterns. Get a row of a dozen 48k year cycles, and you're pretty far off but could be 'averaged' by an outlier on the long side. The extinctions aren't divisible by 50,000: they aren't the only extinction causes, nor are does that 50,000 actually mean much in actual application. And then there's the dead space in which no galactic civilization is known.
Moreover, you also miss an important aspect of the planet scans: these are exceptional individual planets, not entire empires of themselves. Multi-system runs of the same species are rare If you took the ruins of, say, London, you wouldn't necessarily have anything that pinpoints the existence of the British Empire unless you found actual ruins of those as well. A large part of galactic understanding of history is based upon that only Prothean Ruins are (with difficulty) as wide-spread as the Mass Relay network. Other species ruins were often singular, or limited, with no other existence: space faring doesn't mean galaxy-spanning, and enables all numbers of other extinctions to occur.
It's also important to realize that these empires themselves didn't last 50,000 years +/- however many: these are not long-enduring species who leave huge empires, but short flickers of flame in small parts of the galaxy. The modern galaxy's expansion is incredibly exceptional: the Council itself would only have lasted about 500 years had the Prothean sabatoge not worked, and Sovereign had to indoctrinate the Rachni. The 2500 years of modern galactic civilization is really about 2000 past the average: comparitive species would have been incredibly brief, and had far left of a presence to leave.
Modifié par Dean_the_Young, 24 juin 2011 - 08:58 .
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