Someone With Mass wrote...
Do you know how stupid that notion is?
What a great way to introduce a counter-argument...
It's not certain that every organic race will build synthetics that are capable of "waking up" and the synthetics have nothing to gain on going on a galactic killing spree, unless some really deranged group of people creates a synthetic specifically designed to do so, in which case, they deserve everything they'll get.
See, you can argue over this point of it being certain forever – On one hand, you didn't formulate it correctly: It is not necessary for "every" organic race to build such synthetics, it is sufficient for
one organic race to build them. After all, you can't wipe
all organics out more than once anyway, can you?
Also, if the "really deranged" race builds them, that doesn't matter at all: If these synthetics wipe out
all organics, it really doesn't matter if these organics were just following their "deranged" programming or any other agenda. The organics are gone.
Finally, not a single time in the conversation does the catalyst mention a "killing spree". It only mentions "conflict". "Conflict" includes much more than a "war" – It could also be competition for resources (the Geth were building a Dyson sphere, as an example. With that sphere eclipsing Rannoch's sun, Rannoch is a dead planet, even though that was not the primary intention of the Geth. They just didn't care.). It could also be that the simple state of being the synthetics need is incompatible with organic life: Imagine a synthetic race broadcasting a powerful radiation throughout the galaxy to power its mobile platform, which incidentally also melts all organic matter. It really doesn't matter. You can construct countless scenarios in which an all-powerful synthetic race cleanses the galaxy of organic life as a secondary effect of another agenda they have:
It does not need to be a (rational or irrational) war!There are billions of planets in our galaxy. It'd be economically retarded to go every single one and wipe out all traces of organic life.
First, there's exponential growth: Synthetics are not bound by the slow reproduction cycle of organics – Even if a synthetic race doubles its numbers only once a year (harvesting the necessary resources from the galaxy's planets), there'd be enough of them within 100 years to colonize and (through resource consumption) destroy the entire galaxy – 2^100 is a huge number.
Second, we know that things like "sending a star into supernova" (the Protheans did it according to Javik) or "blowing up a Mass Relay to obliterate entire clusters" (Arrival) are possible. The Crucible affects the entire galaxy in a single "shot". Yet you claim that a synthetic race has to go to every planet to cause havoc?
What you are doing is narrowing down the catalyst's postulation to the most narrow, most contrived interpretation (yeah, like a spaceship going to every single planet to destroy it) and then call the whole thing "stupid". I don't know if this is intentional or not.
Besides, organics are killing themselves all the damn time. In some cases, it's even in their nature to kill other organics.
Fair point, but how is this within the scope of the catalyst's solution? Even if the warring races go to the extremes with one entirely annihilating the other, it means that the winning side persists. Organic life is not threatened by this.
To sum it up, what I personally think to be "short-sighted" (I'm not using "stupid" here) about the catalyst's reasoning is that it hinges so much on synthetics vs. organics, whereas its actual concern is that organics become capable of building something that could potentially threaten the existence of all life in the galaxy. I think the catalyst should rather have argued something like
When a race becomes advanced enough to create technology to affect the entire galaxy, the risk to destroy the galaxy irreversibly becomes apparent. We have witnessed thousands of civilizations meddling with technology they could not wield, destroying their planets, their star systems, their clusters. We cannot let that happen on a galactic scale. Therefore, we harvest every civilization advanced enough to affect the galactic scale. Organics are fallible. Such power in their hands has too much potential for destruction, and we won't let that happen. We harvest the old life to ensure the survival of new life.That's not so far removed from what's actually happening in the game (I always found the "cleansing fire" analogy and the "remove old life to make room for new life" lines much more interesting than organics vs. synthetics anyway). If that was in the game, the narrative significance of the Rannoch peace is not diminished, and we wouldn't need to argue about whether it is paradigmatic or simply anecdotal.
Modifié par geceka, 01 janvier 2013 - 12:54 .
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