225 réponses à ce sujet

[Tirigon]

tetrisblock4x1 wrote...

Tirigon wrote...

The Reapers are actually just little spoilt brats, their father being Ctulhu, and the harvesting is a game. It is like an interglalactic StarCraft Tournament, and the Reaper with the most won games (i. e. harvested planets) gets all the girls.

That is almost as bad as the Shepard is indoctrinated theory.

I dont think so. I always found it strange that synthetic life would never have freetime, or play games, or flirt with girls and stuff. Considering the popularity of games involving the killing of as many guys as possible, I would be surprised if a super-evolved AI housed in 2km spaceships would not want to play war on their own scale, for entertainment.

I mean, being stuck in a Spacesquid for millions of years seems rather boring to me.

Modifié par Tirigon, 26 mars 2012 - 01:54 .

[tetrisblock4x1]

78stonewobble wrote...

There's also the assumption that the penultimate development of life is a fusion of artificial and biological life.

I'm tempted to say this is a faulty assumption since we all know that only biological entities can evolve into angelic beings of pure energy right? RIGHT?

Oh wait that was another space magic series

...you're talking about Starwars?

[zer0netgain]

Tirigon wrote...

I dont think so. I always found it strange that synthetic life would never have freetime, or play games, or flirt with girls and stuff. Considering the popularity of games involving the killing of as many guys as possible, I would be surprised if a super-evolved AI housed in 2km spaceships would not want to play war on their own scale, for entertainment.

So, basically, one Reaper says to another, "Hey look what happens when you hold the magnifying glass just like so...."

[batlin]

Tirigon wrote...

I dont think so. I always found it strange that synthetic life would never have freetime, or play games, or flirt with girls and stuff. Considering the popularity of games involving the killing of as many guys as possible, I would be surprised if a super-evolved AI housed in 2km spaceships would not want to play war on their own scale, for entertainment.

I mean, being stuck in a Spacesquid for millions of years seems rather boring to me.

Not if they don't have emotions.

[Sebbe1337o]

Dark Energy, 'nuff said.

[Arkitekt]

Actual canon reason is good enough.

Shaun2406, you write well, but the motives on the reapers' culling every 50ky is missing. Quite the miss.

Authweight's plot is better. Good show.

I thought the game made it perfectly clear.... are you saying the fans are the ones making it complicated?

[mordin's voice]: YES. [/mordin's voice]

"We must convince the Geth to attack the organics to stop the Geth from attacking the organics!" - plot of Mass Effect 1.

Geth were used as tools as much as husks. Attempted trolling detected. My good sir, that was almost good.

Scarecrow_ES's ending is also good.

Zeronetgain:

If we presume that the creators of the Reapers concluded that no matter what, organic life would create synthetic life that would ultimately kill ALL organic life in the galaxy, the cycle of FINITE destruction of organics (and their created synthetics) every 50,000 years in favor of indefinitely preserving organic life in the galaxy makes sense.

Exactly.

Getorex:

How about sticking with the first, and best? Sovereign: "You are incapable of understanding."

... and people think this is a sh*tstorm, ah! You cannot even grasp the nature of the mob rage that would ensue after such trolling: "We could tell you why we do this, BUT WE WON'T PROBLEM?"

[tetrisblock4x1]

batlin wrote...

Tirigon wrote...

I dont think so. I always found it strange that synthetic life would never have freetime, or play games, or flirt with girls and stuff. Considering the popularity of games involving the killing of as many guys as possible, I would be surprised if a super-evolved AI housed in 2km spaceships would not want to play war on their own scale, for entertainment.

I mean, being stuck in a Spacesquid for millions of years seems rather boring to me.

Not if they don't have emotions.

Sovereign had emotions. You know how whe you're carrying a heavy load and you tell someone that it weighs a ton? Well it's highly unlikely that the load really weighs a ton, it's just an exaggeration for emphasis on the fact that it's making you strain and/or dramatic effect. "we are incomprehensible" and "we have no beginning" are clearly exaggerations, and in this case I'd say born of ego.

[Arkitekt]

Sovereign had emotions alright. His last line is filled with entitlement rage, almost kinda like the retake me3 mov.

Modifié par Arkitekt, 26 mars 2012 - 05:17 .

[Tirigon]

zer0netgain wrote...

So, basically, one Reaper says to another, "Hey look what happens when you hold the magnifying glass just like so...."

Yes! I mean honestly, if I was one of them, I'd so do that.

batlin wrote...

Not if they don't have emotions.

Nothing tells us they dont. They are clearly sentient beings, and EDI as well as Legion make it clear that Synthetic life DOES have emotions, or at least something similar.

[Straw_foot]

Actually I'd prefer not to find out why they were doing it. Their mystery is what makes them not giant cuttlefish ships.

[Naughty Bear]

The Reapers believe in a god higher than themselves, they sacrifice organics every 50,000 years to satisfy their gods or face their wrath.

Religion never made any sense, so my theory is actually logical.

[Arkitekt]

Naughty Bear wrote...

Religion never made any sense, so my theory is actually logical.

*grabs popcorn* 

[Heimdall]

Arkitekt wrote...

Zeronetgain:

If we presume that the creators of the Reapers concluded that no matter what, organic life would create synthetic life that would ultimately kill ALL organic life in the galaxy, the cycle of FINITE destruction of organics (and their created synthetics) every 50,000 years in favor of indefinitely preserving organic life in the galaxy makes sense.

Exactly.

Finally people that I agree with!

[Naughty Bear]

Arkitekt wrote...

Naughty Bear wrote...

Religion never made any sense, so my theory is actually logical.

*grabs popcorn* 

Have i just unintentionally set a nuke?

Modifié par Naughty Bear, 26 mars 2012 - 05:48 .

[Arkitekt]

Naughty Bear wrote...

Arkitekt wrote...

Naughty Bear wrote...

Religion never made any sense, so my theory is actually logical.

*grabs popcorn* 

Have i just unintentionally set a nuke?

You don't fool anyone.

[Tirigon]

Naughty Bear wrote...

Arkitekt wrote...

Naughty Bear wrote...

Religion never made any sense, so my theory is actually logical.

*grabs popcorn* 

Have i just unintentionally set a nuke?

Yes. Mentioning religion always starts a forum war, it is a law. Probably the mods have employeees to start it if it takes too long.

[Quotheraving]

The Reapers

The first of their kind came into being just after the Big bang.

Entirely random processes resulted in an ordered arrangement of molecules capable of surviving in the emptiness of space, a self organising, space faring life form capable of self replication and possessed of rudimentary consciousness, similar to what 20th century humans called Boltzmann brains.
http://en.wikipedia....Boltzmann_brain

Over the millennia these proto-reapers evolved and coalesced into the massive creatures that threaten the Mass Effect Universe. Forms that have remained largely unchanged for billions of years. Each is a colony organism, a hive of synthetic consciousnesses (considering their origin the usual divide between Organic and synthetic seems ridiculous, but they are closest to machines than to the squishy meat creatures that evolve upon planets). These minds are unified by a superconscious mind, the Reaper it'self.

While in a sense the Reapers have always been they know all too well that this Universe will eventually, unavoidably end, and they along with it. So they hatched upon a plan to create new universes, new big bangs in order to propogate themselves eternally. They would gain true immortality by entering these baby Universes, writing themselves into the very fabric of their physical laws.
Indeed it is possible that this may already have happened!

This plan extends over an unimaginable expanse of time, it has been billions of years in the making and will not reach it's culmination for billions of years to come.

Part of this plan involves the controlled evolution of super-massive black holes in order to encode information into the event horizon, to this end they erected galaxy wide networks of Mass manipulators (the mass relays, doubling as a fast transit system) in both the Milky way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy capable of sheparding exact quantities of mass from these colliding galaxies towards the Sagitarius A Blackhole in the center of the Milky way.
Another method has been to use radiation pressure from co-ordinated supernovae to create shock waves seeding new stars at exact positions. This last was achieved using Dark energy to hasten a stars end.

Unfortunately there is a troublesome factor that threatens to spoil their plans.
Organic life.

Organics and their synthetic creations are limited creatures, but for all that they evolve rapidly, far faster than the Reapers. It was rapidly realised by the Reapers that Organics couldn't be trusted not to inadvertantly ruin the Reaper plan and this was not something that the Reapers could allow. There would be no second chance at making this plan work, it was all or nothing.. survive the Universe, or die along with it.

They also realised that while eradicating all organic life would have been possible it would also have been too difficult and timeconsuming not to become a neverending task. A little like painting the golden gate bridge they would have been endlessly starting over when it evolved again.

The least difficult solution to the problem was to only destroy cultures once they started to become sufficiently advanced technologically to threaten the plan and hence the Citadel was constructed, perfect bait for emerging galactic civilisation to collect about and an effective means of quickly achieving their aim and eradicating the more advanced civilisations.

Nevertheless on occasion and despite their best laid plans an organic species would pose a real threat to the Reapers.
Such surprising resistance presents a rare opportunity.
The Reapers having no natural predators and (beyond the heat death of the Universe) little in the way of environmental pressures are in an evolutional dead end.
True resistance is an opportunity to Evolve. In the rare occasions when an organic or synthetic race gives the Reapers pause they would take a wide number of samples from that species in order to gain a complete spectrum of their possibilities (genetic, morphological and mental), and from these the distilled information would be used to further the Reaper's own evolution.

Modifié par Quotheraving, 26 mars 2012 - 07:10 .

[Sugaki]

They never needed an explanation, but here's one off the top of my head:

Organics by nature are flawed--fragile, capricious, prone to change at a whim. Yet that change, while destructive, has an upside--diversity. Genetic diversity. By harvesting the most advanced civilizations at their zenith, it adds that genetic diversity to the Reapers, each Reaper a perfect, synthetic amalgamation of a civilization. In doing so, the Reapers approach perfection that organics couldn't hope to achieve. Or something like that. The Geth are the organics' flawed way of trying to attain that perfect, hence that had to be reprogrammed and reworked to make them more perfect.

Still follows the synthetics vs organics theme, but in a less contradictory way.

[Overule]

If not dark energy why not just reproduction? Reapers harvest all life every 50k years as a simple function of their reproductive cycle. It's the amount of time needed for enough sufficiently complex life to propagate itself through the galaxy for them to complete a new generation of Reapers.

[ile_1979]

Overule wrote...

If not dark energy why not just reproduction? Reapers harvest all life every 50k years as a simple function of their reproductive cycle. It's the amount of time needed for enough sufficiently complex life to propagate itself through the galaxy for them to complete a new generation of Reapers.

Cause reproduction of immortal beings in a universe of limited resources would lead thowards ever increasing scarcity of those resources, and an internal fight for survival/redistribution of the said resources.

[tetrisblock4x1]

Sugaki wrote...

They never needed an explanation, but here's one off the top of my head:

Organics by nature are flawed--fragile, capricious, prone to change at a whim. Yet that change, while destructive, has an upside--diversity. Genetic diversity. By harvesting the most advanced civilizations at their zenith, it adds that genetic diversity to the Reapers, each Reaper a perfect, synthetic amalgamation of a civilization. In doing so, the Reapers approach perfection that organics couldn't hope to achieve. Or something like that. The Geth are the organics' flawed way of trying to attain that perfect, hence that had to be reprogrammed and reworked to make them more perfect.

Still follows the synthetics vs organics theme, but in a less contradictory way.

Ah yes, well I think the ending confirmed or at least suggested that the Reapers were made and not created by  perfect god or something. So if they're man made (or whatever) then their creators were flawed, so that pretty much means that the Reapers are also flawed. Don't get me wrong, I do know that the Reapers think that they are perfect... but they're only fooling themselves.

[Han Shot First]

Authweight wrote...

The reapers were the ultimate creation of an incredibly powerful species of organics. They took millions of their elderly and terminally ill, and poured their DNA and memories into powerful synthetic creatures. The goal was to preserve the collective memories of their race for all time. However, what they did not expect was that, like all living things, these new creations desired to grow, to reproduce, to expand and build. They wanted to impose order upon the cosmos, and not any order: their own order.

The new synthetic creatures rose up in fierce rebellion against their creators, and after a period of warfare, they had taken all those left and incorporated them into new reapers. They had a problem though: they could not reproduce without new advanced organic life to harvest. They were stagnant, uncreative. They wished to grow, to become something more, but they had reached a plateau. Without new blood, there is no innovation, no growth.

Hence the cycle. They carefully laid in place the Mass Relays in order to control galactic evolution. Their goal was to wait in dark space for new advanced civilizations to develop. With the new blood of another species added to their collective, they could grow and reproduce and become something more. They did not intend for this to be a cycle. They felt they were only a harvest away from transcending the bounds of space-time and becoming perfect.

Their plan had a fatal flaw though. By controlling the flow of galactic progress, they were choking the new blood they so desperately wanted. Limited by their own failure to understand this key concept, they could not understand why their plan failed each cycle. After untold eons, the cycle continues to fail, and will always fail. Ironically, the very problem they are attempting to solve, an inability to innovate, is the very reason they are doomed to failure.

This is what the Reapers should have been.

[Kakita Tatsumaru]

I liked ME1 theory about reapers harvesting technologies.

[MrAtomica]

Fear. Arrogance. A stalwart belief that all organic life can, and should, be "improved" to the highest form of evolution, willingly or otherwise.

The Reapers should never have been reduced to something as tertiary as technological singularity. This conflict, though perhaps hinted at, was never given any serious consideration until the very end. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we successfully combated it for a fair chunk of the series.

It's funny -- the Reapers claim to be "saving" organics by preventing a synthetic war, yet the only two historical cases we can reference of them attacking occur AFTER the synthetic "war" has already ended, or is about to end. Organics haven't exactly had a difficult time keeping the token few synthetics who actually rebelled from doing any major damage, least not that we've heard by the end.

And really, what was point of befriending EDI, or making peace between the Quarians and Geth? We devote time and energy into shaping their personal evolution and integration into galactic society, only to be told that they will inevitably destroy us? Someone is wrong in this argument, and it ain't Shep. But again, there should never have been an option to get so attached to these synthetic characters if we were only going to be fighting them in the end. At that point, you're just pissing in the chowder.

But hey, come April we'll have some idea of what exactly is going to happen from here. Not that I believe said answers will be terribly satisfying, but I won't make a concrete judgement until I know more.

Still think that Sovereign's "Mighty and mysterious" vibe should have been carried through to the end. Why do we even need to know why the Reapers choose to...reap? Would it not have been better to leave them as the dark and dangerous ultimate evil of the universe, and let us make up our own justifications and scenarios? That would have been a bit more conducive to the "Speculation for everyone!" schtick than what we got instead.

[NM_Che56]

It's that time of the epoch?