George-Kinsill wrote...
Dean_the_Young wrote...
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.
For Chorban, that's 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.
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.
While any planet able to support life in my mind is exceptional, there are many references to galaxy spaning civs (or at the very least cluster spanning), not just space faring. There are the Arhenni, spanning the Zelene cluster, the rimate based civ with the ome world of Joab having involvement with nearly every lanet in the Enoch cluster, and the Zeiioph in the Artemis Tau cluster to nae a few.
Good: now where are the other thousand of alleged civilizations that die out every 50k years?
Space-faring species exist, but
galaxy spanning species, the sort that actually fit the Reaper theory, aren't known... and we only know a relative few of them. Clusters are 'small scale' FTL development. The Reaper theory is based upon everyone having used the Mass Relays.
And you are missing the main point of this post: these are sudden extinctions, all of them in the same fashion, with no trace of a inergalactic organic war (like on Eingana) or civil war. These extinctions all exhibit signs of narrow minded decimation & genocide, and span at the very least entire clusters, and more. There are no outliers of natural or oranic based extinctions, with the only arguable one, Helyme, destroyed by a bio-engineered virus, which easily could still have been Reaper involvement, considering the other Arthenni planets were destroyed at the same time by dreadnoughts, and that the Reapers use bio-weapons when necessary. With its correlation to the 50,000 year cycle (which again, is the median number, found via Chorban's research, and there are refereces elsewhere) these extinctins are strange eough and correlate with the Reaper theory enough where the council has no right to call Shepard insane, and ignore the Reapers all together, resulting in disaster in ME3.
You don't have enough data for a corelation. This is the problem: ignore that correlation doesn't imply causation, you don't have enough to establish a meaningful correlation.. This is always going to be a problem. Until you have enough data, all correlations are effectively meaningless: any patterns you see in them are as based as star constellations. They qualify for confirmation bias and little else.
There simply isn't enough historical evidence of enough civilizations, or enough uniformity of the civilizations that would be known, to support such. The galaxy doesn't even know of civilizations existing every 50,000 years as a medium, let alone having all the known species fit into that don't fit into that band. You know, the one who would fit a 50,000 +/- 25,000, or effectively a 'whenever it feels like' pattern, IE statistically random. That is, mind you, when these extinctions aren't actually the result of something other than the Reapers... like other kinetic bombardments and bioweapons of conventional wars.
You're looking at a few dozen pre-Prothean civilizations like they mean something: in the scope of the alleged Reapers activities. The number of civilizations we've heard of is
nothing compared to the alleged vanished galactic civilizations that have never been discovered. Take 20, or even 200, cases spread across 10,000 and you don't have a pattern: you have a rounding error.
Seriously, here's a demonstration. Take the number of civilizations of pre-Prothean civilizations we hear about in Mass Effect.
Every dash (-) below represents an entire fifty thousand year period in which no known species existed: periods in which there's no indication of any galactic civilization existing by the wider galaxy. Fit the known number of extint species into the timeline, anywhere you want. Since a full list of cycles would be several thousand - long, this timeline has already been condensed: the Leviathan of Dis civilization alone would be 20,000 cycles ago.
I put the first two civilizations, ourselves and the Protheans, in. The Dis civilization is last. Fit however many pre-prothean civilization we know of wherever you want into this.
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