Bleachrude wrote...
Raxxman wrote...
Anyhow I'm not and never have said it's total destruction of civilisation. But it's regression from a galatic community towards smaller catches of people self supporting, outside galatic scale control. That's a 'dark age'. It's basically exactly what happend in the dark ages.
People always try and strawman here.
Um nope...What we are trying to do is actually look at what was presented and work with what we know.
The "dark ages" were mostly defined by a loss of knowledge which is not true at all in post ME3 for certain endings. You're assuming that ENTIRE stars clusters themselves can't support themselves which I think is a larger leap than anything we argued about.
This is still a society where they have FTL at 12 ly/day. Taken from wikipedia, there are literally 51 stellar systems within 16 ly of Earth itself (which includes 61 normal stars and 9 brown dwarves). In ME 2 and 3, we're shown explicitly that moving within a star cluster takes no appreciable time yet you're assuming society is crippled?
Sure, a couple of colonies get hit hard but the wider galactic society shouldnt collapse or even suffer majorly IMO.
What post ME3 potentially means is that "cheap" travel outside of star clusters is more time-consuming and much more expensive.. Hell, in ME2, it even mentions that when you scan certain planets that they get ignored even being resource rich or being a possible colony site because mass relays make it much easier to just find that perfect planet/resource....
Problem here is what you know is very limited.
You don't know what the dark ages actually entailed. You have the generally misunderstood concept that the dark ages were a regression of technology and culture. This never really happened, it was a decentralisation of control from a singular source, the western roman empire, to individual localised lead.
If we go deeper and see how Rome maintained it's empire, it was by and large by having a small but rapidly mobile proffessional army. Roads were key to the maintainance of the Roman empire. They were a military asset.
So far you've gotten everything wrong, have shifted your arguement all over the shop, changed points, and now don't even know what the dark ages were actually like.
One thing that ME shows is the universe is vast and sparse. That's the take home, the majority of systems aren't inhabitable. Humanity is largely scattered across 1/4 of the galaxy.
Simple fact is, without mass realys galactic civilisation would collaspe, local clusters will have to adapt to become self sufficent. This you know, but somehow you still seem to assume that these self sufficent zones will pop up overnight with no real social rammifications. As if they've not been war torn, and all have the required infastructure to immediately and seamlessly provide support. With no meaningful contact with one another why would these pockets of society maintain a galactic community?
You also fail to account for the rise in piracy with the loss of naval forces ability to rapidly deploy. The Terminus systems are widely war zones already. quite why these wouldn't descend/evolve into feudal zones and empires.
For places in the far reaches of alliance space, there is no reason for them to remain part of the alliance if the alliance can't support them with anything. This concept is why Scotland wants devolution from the UK government.
So when you say you're going with what you know, in no historical parallel has society ever survived a crisis the scale of losing the mass relays. The Roman empire fell for less, the Mongol empire fell for less, after world war 2 the British empire could no longer support itself and went into decline.
So when you say 'why would society decline' The answer is 'because it alway has done in historical context'. I'm fully aware this is sci fi, but the answer that galatic civilisation will restore itself within 20 odd years is pure handwaving.
*edit for some reason this didn't pop up first time round so I only saw it after replying*
Yes and nobody is arguing that galactic scale empires are
currently possible...But cluster sized empires are more than
reasonable...more importantly, we would/should see more highly developed
clusters than the current setup where it is relatively easy to simply
find another planet with better resources...
this is precisely what people are arguing for. Cluster sized empires repesents a very near perfect analogue for what happened during the dark ages. So what you're now proposing is that a dark age would occur, but you don't want to call it a dark age.
In a kinda odd way I understand this, most historians don't use the term dark age because of the generally negative connotation associated with the term. But the bottom line still remains that the dark ages didn't repesent a massive technological regression as alluded, its much more a political regression to decentralised governments, and the subsiquent growth of pockets of culture.
Modifié par Raxxman, 06 mars 2012 - 12:14 .
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