The Night Mammoth wrote...
HYR 2.0 wrote...
It's not exactly what the catalyst does.
The cycle does not wipe out life, it immortalizes all advanced life into a new form.
It's nothing like, say, the geth wiping out the quarians on Rannoch. There is no attempt to clone them all back to life or anything, much less take their genetic material and upload it to a supercomputer. They're dead and gone. In time, they will be entirely forgotten. Not so with the civilizations the catalyst has preserved. They at least live on in some way.
The Reapers are very much the same idea as what one organic race did to preserve themselves over certain-death.
That doesn't make advanced life any less dead. I see nothing of value in storing some genetic material unless they're planning to do something with it. It's like burning every book in the world whilst keeping a single copy of each, but never letting anyone read it. Completely pointless.
So yes, aside from one minor detail which is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, the Catalyst is doing the same thing synthetics apparently would.
No, they simply died in the process, but they are not dead at the end of it (chew on that one for a moment).
The Collector attack on the Normandy SR-1 killed Shepard, but that wasn't the last of him/her.
Mass Effect has clearly promoted the idea that you are your memories. Project Lazarus brought back Shepard because they had his brain. The Clone is not you because he doesn't have your brain. In that way, the Reapers have preserved entire civilizations by uploading their minds to form the collective.
Legion indicates they are a gestalt intelligence (like himself). Is the individual preserved? I would argue "yes," by virtue of their knowledge being stored and making up part of the collective. I don't think each mind is individually conscious (but collectively). You don't need to be conscious to be alive though.
In the end, life is more important than lives to the catalyst. In some ways, that is sound. A culture (IMO) is defined by its collective knowledge, memories, traditions, and what have you that is passed down from each generation.
The Reaper basically embodies all of that sometime before its about to die out.
I don't understand.
Till now, I've always understood the Catalyst as killing off advanced organics before they can create advanced synthetics which will kill them and eventually all organic life, space-cows and all. I think it's a f*cking stupid motivation for the whole Reaper conflict to be based on and its introduction handled about as delicately as an airstrike meant to kill a termite infestation, but logically sound on a basic level.
Is your explanation different? Is the Catalyst simply killing advanced organics first to preserve their genetic material in Reaper form, instead of because they'll make synthetics which will wipe out all organic life (which is flora, fauna, bacteria etc.)?
Because, yo dawg, I hear you don't want to be killed by synthetics...
I thought, initially, that the argument was that synthetics would not only wipe out advanced organic life through conflict with them, but would over time eradicate all others by virtue of having no use for them.
However, EC seems to focus squarely on the issue conflict between both sides.
In that, you can't come into conflict with life that isn't sentient to begin with.
You're not in conflict with a tree when you cut it down.
Synthetics, even if they were to overrun the galaxy, would have no use for our planets, not really. Legion indicates living on asteroids is more efficient. Not to mention, new organic life could still be formed over time.
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