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[Gravity Bun]

 Here's some passages from the novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey which I think everyone will find interesting...

From chapter 37 - Experiment, pages 186 and 187.

In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.
And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving towards new goals ... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic.
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

[marstor05]

Maybe the Reapers are a mechanism to detect when the younger races have reached a certain level of development. Each time they come back and wipe out everything advanced enough. Maybe they require a certain level of challenge to stop and leave the galaxy forever?

"I waited a long time for someone to find me. Now, like the others, I find I hate to leave. But none of us can stay behind this time. That is why it was necessary to find all the remaining First Ones. This is yours now. And you have an obligation to do as we have done. To teach the races that will follow you, and when the time comes as ours has, to step aside and allow them to grow into their own destiny. If your races survive — if you do not kill yourselves, I look forward to the day when your people join us beyond the rim. We will wait for you." Lorien. B5. Into the Fire.

[Customz]

I can't believe some of you actually hope the reaper's origin remains a mistery. What would ME3 be about? I're pretty sure will defeat them which implies getting info on them. And we must at least know the why of the cycle and that is likely part of the reason for their origin. If it isn't it will be such a surprise that it should be mentioned anyway.

@sympathy4saren I actually kinda like your idea, but I'd rather it be something different.

[Cpt-Kirrahe]

I don't know what they are, what they want or where they came from.

Only one thing is certain... If Shepard doesn't bring help soon, there won't be an Earth left to save...

[DarthSliver]

Customz wrote...

I can't believe some of you actually hope the reaper's origin remains a mistery. What would ME3 be about? I're pretty sure will defeat them which implies getting info on them. And we must at least know the why of the cycle and that is likely part of the reason for their origin. If it isn't it will be such a surprise that it should be mentioned anyway.

@sympathy4saren I actually kinda like your idea, but I'd rather it be something different.

I do hope we find out but right before we kill Harbinger, I want him to tell us something useful because taunting us.

[mulder1199]

bug machines that wait in dark space for 50k years then show up to be the vanguard of destruction for sapien life....

[LOLandStuff]

My neighbors.

[Candidate 88766]

Valdrane78 wrote...

Theory 4: My personal favorite
50 million years ago the race that created and built the mass relay system and the Citadel realized that their race was dying.  To preserve their lives they created harware the was built and designed to hold all of their consciences, to not  corner themselves in just a single systrem they created as well a vast number of warlike ships designed to let them traverse the universe.  For the time they flourished as a benevolent race befor erealizing that they could not conitnue on this way.  They discovered that they coudl prolonge themselves using organic matter and began to systematically purge their territory in search of all organic life thus beggining the genicidal cycle that has lasted millions of years.

I find myself agreeing with this one. From our point of view, they are evil. From their point of view, they are trying to survive. They are so far ahead of us that they probably imagine it is a privilege for us to serve them by essentially becoming their food supply and their means of reproducing. Essentially they farm organics every 50,000 years.



The thing that always fascinates me is that Sovereign says 'Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation. An accident'. This implies that the Reapers perhaps followed some other line of evolution and in their efforts to prolong themselves they created what we would consider to be organic life. I'm not saying the Reapers are made of metal and grew via magic, but perhaps they are based on some other element - we are carbon based, perhaps they are based on something else, perhaps even element zero. What we consider organic life could simply have been an experiment by the Reapers, and every 50,000 years they mix things up a bit and create new species that may or may not grow over the next few cycles - and if they stumble across a particularly successful organic species they can essentially integrate parts of them into the Reapers, making them stronger every cycle.

[xassantex]

when you investigate the Derelict reaper, you see that the inside is made for beings approximately our size : staircases, consoles .
But it's not so obvious when you look at the human reaper embryo which also looks much smaller than the typical starship reapers : watch its spine and imagine a body attached to it..not that big.

So were there some humanoid beings inhabiting those ships at a given time ?

If they are a few billion years old, what was the shape of the universe then , half its expansion compared to now ? So if some race created the reapers back then,their home world would lie somewhere near the confines of the universe by now ? or they would have moved out of it ... inside the reapers ... who decided to have them for breakfast eventually. 

Modifié par xassantex, 14 septembre 2011 - 06:59 .

[sorentoft]

I always ponder what the reapers who do not have awesome names do. Is there a reaper called Accountant? ^.-

[Valdrane78]

Candidate 88766 wrote...

Valdrane78 wrote...

Theory 4: My personal favorite
50 million years ago the race that created and built the mass relay system and the Citadel realized that their race was dying.  To preserve their lives they created harware the was built and designed to hold all of their consciences, to not  corner themselves in just a single systrem they created as well a vast number of warlike ships designed to let them traverse the universe.  For the time they flourished as a benevolent race befor erealizing that they could not conitnue on this way.  They discovered that they coudl prolonge themselves using organic matter and began to systematically purge their territory in search of all organic life thus beggining the genicidal cycle that has lasted millions of years.

I find myself agreeing with this one. From our point of view, they are evil. From their point of view, they are trying to survive. They are so far ahead of us that they probably imagine it is a privilege for us to serve them by essentially becoming their food supply and their means of reproducing. Essentially they farm organics every 50,000 years.



The thing that always fascinates me is that Sovereign says 'Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation. An accident'. This implies that the Reapers perhaps followed some other line of evolution and in their efforts to prolong themselves they created what we would consider to be organic life. I'm not saying the Reapers are made of metal and grew via magic, but perhaps they are based on some other element - we are carbon based, perhaps they are based on something else, perhaps even element zero. What we consider organic life could simply have been an experiment by the Reapers, and every 50,000 years they mix things up a bit and create new species that may or may not grow over the next few cycles - and if they stumble across a particularly successful organic species they can essentially integrate parts of them into the Reapers, making them stronger every cycle.

I think what Sovereign meant by that, is that Reapers were specifically created, while organic life just sorta happened and what he means by genetic mutaiton is evolution.  Please remember that the Reapers think of the Geth as a joke, nothing more than a tool to use to attain their goals.    I also don't agree that they created any sort of organic life or had anythign to do with organic evolution, they come in kill off the dominate species and let the weaker ones flourish then come and finish them off 50K years later.

[mjh417]

 

Gravity Bun wrote...
 Here's some passages from the novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey which I think everyone will find interesting...
From chapter 37 - Experiment, pages 186 and 187.
In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving towards new goals ... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic.In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

Great find, and very relevant. I think the Reapers or "Old Machines" were once an organic race of sentient peoples that created a vast civilization and expanded into the stars. The continued to develop and became heavily dependent on AI technology. Unlike the usual AI story, the AI of this civilization were very happy to be of service to their creators and together they perfected such technologies as the first Mass Relays. They eventually crossed paths with another species who was just as advanced though with different technologies, no Mass Effect tech or AI, but this other civilization was far more powerful in the ways of war. Their advanced weapon tech started to lead to a complete annihilation of the Mass Relay civilization and so the civilization turned to their loyal AI for help. The AI concluded that while there was little hope their organic bodies, which needed abundant resources and great shelter, the civilization could survive in advanced shells that the AI itself had been designing to be a massively powerful housing defense for its own computer systems and subservient machines. In order to become fully integrated into these shells though the civilization needed to first become cybernetic in nature and so the AI developed a process for turning the organic peoples into the first Husks. Once huskified the AI and the people were no longer separate entities but a gestalt intelligence of the full AI and programed network combined with the voices of each individual organic turned husk. The husks were then reconsolidated down into a new form of techno organic compound that filled the first of these new massive dreadnought sized mobile starship shells and the immortal Reaper race was born. While this new cybernetic existence and form factor was originally designed to be a defensive and passive existence to hide from and be protected from the hostile civilization that had threatened them, eventually a new approach was taken. This happened once the hostiles believe the rival race had vanished and so they began to use the Mass Relays they left behind to spread themselves across the galaxy. The Reapers realized this had happened but they still remained idol. The other civilization then began to full integrate Mass Effect technology they had appropriated from the abandoned colonies of the Reapers and eventually they built the original Citadel. This lasted for many more centuries while the Reapers remained idol and observed from a distance. Eventually though another civilization discovered a mass relay and reached the Citadel. This new civilization was yet even more powerful and advanced in weapons than the first hostile race that currently occupied the citadel and so they quickly became at war. The Reapers observed this and concluded that this pattern was always going to remain an inevitable result of organic civilizations rising to power out of chaos and so they intervened and used the Mass Relays to reach the Citadel. Though they at this point still lacked the weapons to fight between the warring civilizations, they discovered they did have an unexpected and surprisingly more useful tool, huskification and later indoctrination. They used these tools to turn the warring civilizations into docile creatures they not only controlled but could then incorporate into their network cybernetic fuel and networked intelligence. And so the first Reaper reproduction occurred and two other formally organic nations became part of the Reaper infrastructure. This first expansion caused the Reapers to conclude several things. 1) That by adding new civilizations of organics they had grown and become stronger 2) That what they had done for these civilizations was not an evil or an act of war but a courtesy that was mutually beneficial to all 3) That organic races will with time inevitably continue to reach levels wehre they threaten teach other and the stability of good living and balance in the galaxy 4) That the weapons these civilization had used to war with each other are too dangerous to ever be used my such separate and simplistic minds and that only the Reapers should be able to possess them but more importantly, 5) the Reapers could instead present developing organic civilizations with a path through technology controlled by them, they knew this because they had seen how the organics just absorbed had used their Mass Relay tech to expand as opposed to taking the time to develop their own tech, which meant that 6) If the Reapers left behind certain tech and in certain intervals civilizations would develop along a path controlled by them and that the path could lead to the Mass Relays and the Citadel where they could flourish until they peaked to the point where any further development would be a threat and therefore the Reapers could step in and elevate them to their level and thus grow themselves and preserve the order in the Galaxy they desire. And so the Reapers and their cycle was born.

Thats just my fan imagination, who knows what Bioware will tell us in this final game but I think my version isn't too bad and maybe not too far off.

[KevShep]

KotorEffect3 wrote...

sympathy4saren wrote...

My personal theory is close to your number 3. Except WE were their creators, long, long ago. We fought them, and they annihilated us. Before they wiped us out, we sent beacons with our genetic dna in it to preserve us in a form of stasis at a level hidden from the Reapers.

Remember how there was evidence that the Protheans meddled with our evolution? They did. They revived us....the species long ago who created the Reapers.

The Reapers aren't dumb. To the absolute contrary. They suspect something is special with humanity. I think it raised some instantaneous and complex mathematical evaluations with them.

I think we created them, and I believe they may be getting suspicious from their own equations and data processing.

 

I hope not,  I don't want humanity to end up being the orignal creators of the reapers,  this kind of stuff has happened before in sci-fi

This is actually my theory as well. I made a thread about this, its called cool reaper theory.

[xassantex]

i do 't think the reapers are anything benevolent.
They keep insulting Shepard and trying to humiliate him and his species.
And we have seen the colonist screaming as she's being melted into grey liquid.
Integration my foot.
They are cruel and sadistic , things high intelligence would not fall into because it 's not necessary .

[Valdrane78]

I don't think they are trying to humiliate Shep, they just see humans and other species as inferior, it's nothing personal. As far as the reapers are concerned we are in their territory using their tech, they can do with us what they will. What is different this time around is that there this one human who keeps defeating them, it intrigues them, and it is why the Reapers have selected humans as their next reaper.

[xassantex]

We can take totally opposite positions about the Reapers and there will be arguments validating both views. There's just too little info.

To me " you are nothing" sounds pretty humiliating , but maybe not to you .
.. same level as telling Shep he's just a piece of **** in my bok..lol.

I see them as pretentious and sadistic, suffering from a high superiority complex. Infinitely superior they tell Shep .. . that's like taking a stroll in the park looking at birds, insects and telling them non stop how infinitely superior you are..if i were another Reaper i'd tell Harbinger to just STFU ;p

/EDITed out redundant comment. 

Modifié par xassantex, 15 septembre 2011 - 04:02 .

[Medhia Nox]

The Reapers are servants of William Shatner.

[TobyHasEyes]

Candidate 88766 wrote...

Valdrane78 wrote...

Theory 4: My personal favorite
50 million years ago the race that created and built the mass relay system and the Citadel realized that their race was dying.  To preserve their lives they created harware the was built and designed to hold all of their consciences, to not  corner themselves in just a single systrem they created as well a vast number of warlike ships designed to let them traverse the universe.  For the time they flourished as a benevolent race befor erealizing that they could not conitnue on this way.  They discovered that they coudl prolonge themselves using organic matter and began to systematically purge their territory in search of all organic life thus beggining the genicidal cycle that has lasted millions of years.

I find myself agreeing with this one. From our point of view, they are evil. From their point of view, they are trying to survive. They are so far ahead of us that they probably imagine it is a privilege for us to serve them by essentially becoming their food supply and their means of reproducing. Essentially they farm organics every 50,000 years.



The thing that always fascinates me is that Sovereign says 'Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation. An accident'. This implies that the Reapers perhaps followed some other line of evolution and in their efforts to prolong themselves they created what we would consider to be organic life. I'm not saying the Reapers are made of metal and grew via magic, but perhaps they are based on some other element - we are carbon based, perhaps they are based on something else, perhaps even element zero. What we consider organic life could simply have been an experiment by the Reapers, and every 50,000 years they mix things up a bit and create new species that may or may not grow over the next few cycles - and if they stumble across a particularly successful organic species they can essentially integrate parts of them into the Reapers, making them stronger every cycle.

 Then again.. I am organic life but I can accept that organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation.. an accident.  Maybe they see themselves as taking charge/control of the directiion of the galaxy, making it purpose-driven rather than haphazard. Imposing order on the chaos of evolution, as I think a Reaper says at some point

[Kaos_Scorpio]

Well considering they need organics to reproduce and evolve my best guess is they are some sort of organic race gone wrong or right depending on how you look at it. They have the ability replace and intertwine cybernetics with organic. Knowing how massive ME has become I doubt Bioware will be stupid enough to give them a simple AI gone rogue backstory and that is even if they tell us. Protheans were only the first to be wiped out, but, if you read the planet info in ME2 while exploring random world it speaks about 1 other race older than the protheans that were wiped out. So I guess the big question is how many races have been wiped out and and how old are the reapers.

[CaptainBlackGold]

Going way out on a limb here; but almost everyone assumes the Reapers must be a product of natural evolution, in one way or the other. Whether an ancient civilization that "advanced" to integrate organic intelligence with machines, or an AI gone bad - it's all been done before.

Maybe, just maybe they are exactly what they say they are; entitites that are outside of the material universe and hence, beyond our understanding?

My best guess is that the "essence" of a Reaper is a "hyper" or even "pan" dimensional intelligence that exists outside of what we perceive as reality. They manufacture machine like bodies to interact with that reality - but they themselves are not a product of it.

Hence, to them, organic intelligence is an affront to their existence, a mockery of their own "superior" nature and therefore to be cleansed when it reaches a certain point. However, occasionally, they find one species with potential and "uplift" them to their status - hence baby Arnold terminator...

There is a lot of religious symbolism that runs right through both Mass Effect games - even the name of the lead character "Shepherd" and his "resurrection" in order to "save" the galaxy has tremendous Western religious symbology. There are also in some of the codices references to "beings of light" that battled the Reapers on occasion - or at least helped organic life.

Thus the Reapers fit the classic role of "Demons" or non-organic intelligent entities that are hostile to organic intelligence.

Anyways, making the Reapers some product of an ancient alien civilization gone bad is just a bit trite and cliche for anyone who has read much SciFi - it has been done to death. I think the writers at Bioware are cleverer than this - and therefore am trying to find an explanation for their existence and purpose that is not so easily discerned.

[111987]

CaptainBlackGold wrote...

Going way out on a limb here; but almost everyone assumes the Reapers must be a product of natural evolution, in one way or the other. Whether an ancient civilization that "advanced" to integrate organic intelligence with machines, or an AI gone bad - it's all been done before.

Maybe, just maybe they are exactly what they say they are; entitites that are outside of the material universe and hence, beyond our understanding?

My best guess is that the "essence" of a Reaper is a "hyper" or even "pan" dimensional intelligence that exists outside of what we perceive as reality. They manufacture machine like bodies to interact with that reality - but they themselves are not a product of it.

Hence, to them, organic intelligence is an affront to their existence, a mockery of their own "superior" nature and therefore to be cleansed when it reaches a certain point. However, occasionally, they find one species with potential and "uplift" them to their status - hence baby Arnold terminator...

There is a lot of religious symbolism that runs right through both Mass Effect games - even the name of the lead character "Shepherd" and his "resurrection" in order to "save" the galaxy has tremendous Western religious symbology. There are also in some of the codices references to "beings of light" that battled the Reapers on occasion - or at least helped organic life.

Thus the Reapers fit the classic role of "Demons" or non-organic intelligent entities that are hostile to organic intelligence.

Anyways, making the Reapers some product of an ancient alien civilization gone bad is just a bit trite and cliche for anyone who has read much SciFi - it has been done to death. I think the writers at Bioware are cleverer than this - and therefore am trying to find an explanation for their existence and purpose that is not so easily discerned.

So like, a space demon? I'm not sure about that one...I think that would start moving Mass Effect more towards a fantasy than a sci-fi...

[CaptainBlackGold]

111987 wrote...

So like, a space demon? I'm not sure about that one...I think that would start moving Mass Effect more towards a fantasy than a sci-fi...

Not at all; remember, I said, "hyper or pan dimensional intelligence." Though not a physicist by any means, I believe the idea of multiple dimensions has been around since the time of Einstein as well as a staple of Science Fiction for a long, long time; i.e. the concept of a "multi-verse" rather than a "universe." Hence postulating that such a different dimension of being exists and is the origin of the Reapers, does not take Mass Effect into the Science Fantasy camp at all because it is rooted, in real scientific speculation. 

Since such a "dimension" is normally beyond our ability to perceive, let alone interact with, it is "beyond our understanding" which is precisely what Sovereign insists.

Organics developing machine interfaces so that their intelligence lives beyond their organic bodies is certainly not beyond our understanding - heck, we are already working on that already (artificial organs, limbs, even implanting computer chips inside our bodies).

AI's going bad is not beyond our understanding - Mary Shelly wrote about it two hundred years ago and in-game, the Quarians were almost eradicated because of it.

However, something outside of the material universe - something outside of our perceptions and influence that nevertheless can interact with our "dimension" - that by its nature is impossible for us to understand - what are such beings like, what is the nature of their existence, what motivates them, what is their overall purpose or goal? All we can do is speculate based upon our own limited perspective.

And then, every few million years, such entities discover a species with potential to "ascend" to their level and they "harvest" them - to us, it sounds monstrous but to them, it might be the greatest gift they can concieve. In fact, the "reaping" may simply be the means by which they remove all the other species that are taking up limited resources getting in the way of developing the "chosen ones" - kind of like removing weeds in a flower bed.

After all, the Reapers are our "salvation through destruction" or some such - to become more than we are we must lose what we have been...

So, no, not a "fantasy" at all - just something to me more interesting than "Organic species evolves to machines" or "AI's Gone Wild." Both have been done to death - and Fred Saberhagen wrote about it fifty years ago in his Beserker series. Arthur C. Clarke before that - not to mention Star Trek. Babylon Five and the Terminator series.

Furthermore, if Bioware went the "hyper-dimensional entity" route, it adds a sense of mystery to their universe as well as the moral ambiguity that they seem to love so much. Sure the Reapers are evil, from our perspective, but by what moral standard are they to be really judged, if in fact, they are pan-dimensional beings?

Just one final comment; is it an accident that Ash has that conversation with Shep about God in the first game - or a foreshadowing that there is more to the universe that what our eyes, alone, can see?

Oh well, we'll see in six months time -

[marstor05]

I always thought the next step of evolution would be for organics to leave their bodies behind and become beings of energy. What we are is not a matter of flesh, but a matter of will.

Maybe learning to use combinations of organics and mechanics to do our bidding. Maybe this is what the reapers are. A manifestation of a higher power we could not possibly comprehend with our primitive little minds. Puppets for their masters. Tools for their amusement. Harbingers of our destruction. The gods fear us. So they wipe us out to stop us becoming more of a threat.

[Valdrane78]

I don't know, the trans dimensional thing has been done to death as well. It's all been done before so the question you have to ask yourself is, what seems more plausible? I wrote a theory in my first post that has nothing to do with them being built or being a dimensional being, but it just feels far fetched to me, even for sci-fi. It seems mor eplausible to me that they were built, then turned on their masters, and with that big chip on their shoulders decide to purge organics from time to time.

[azerSheppard]

sympathy4saren wrote...

My personal theory is close to your number 3. Except WE were their creators, long, long ago. We fought them, and they annihilated us. Before they wiped us out, we sent beacons with our genetic dna in it to preserve us in a form of stasis at a level hidden from the Reapers.

Remember how there was evidence that the Protheans meddled with our evolution? They did. They revived us....the species long ago who created the Reapers.

The Reapers aren't dumb. To the absolute contrary. They suspect something is special with humanity. I think it raised some instantaneous and complex mathematical evaluations with them.

I think we created them, and I believe they may be getting suspicious from their own equations and data processing.

You forgot to place a few obvious biblical refferences. And some dude in powerarmor.:innocent:<-- get it?