116 réponses à ce sujet

[didymos1120]

To quote the always useful Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:



"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long walk down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..."



Now, add in the facts that no one has a clue how many mass relays actually exist and that they couldn't have been built simultaneously (i.e. Who knows when the Charon one was first put in place? Could be the last one built, and built millions of years after the first, for all we know) and it's not so hard to imagine that Earth just plain escaped notice.

[Mox Ruuga]

Unless they are in the "Reaping lockdown" mode, it only makes sense for the Mass Relays to be easily activated. Remember, they are meant to be easily adaptable, and to lead developing noob species to the Citadel trap.

[JPfanner]

The mass relays themselves have to be built. Whether the whole network was put into place prior to the first reaping or the Reapers expand the network a bit during each cycle isn't known. So the Sol relay could be a more recently constructed part of the network which would exclude it from earlier cycles.

[Cyadina]

JPfanner wrote...

The mass relays themselves have to be built. Whether the whole network was put into place prior to the first reaping or the Reapers expand the network a bit during each cycle isn't known. So the Sol relay could be a more recently constructed part of the network which would exclude it from earlier cycles.

Interesting, it would make sense since the reapers clearly have to do something with all those resources from the civilizations they destroy, build more mass relays, more things to harvest next round.  I could buy that.  Actually you could go one step further and make the assumption that the reapers build mass effect relays near garden worlds specifically to facilitate this.  Throw in some way for reapers to find or detect planets likely to evolve a space faring species within the next few cycles and it makes even more sense why earth wasn't discovered until now... better explanation than most so far.

[Godeshus]

 I like the idea of the Protheans being martyrs. 

Just to expand on my previous post, I assume that the goal of the reapers is to have civs discover the relays before they are technologically advanced enough to form their own advanced technologies. I believe the protheans themselves even discovered the mass relays prematurely, and used that technology to develop an incredible technological state very quickly, falling into reaper hands.  They seem to be a hive mind, so the more there are, the smarter the entire race is.

Could you imagine if Newton saw the mass relay through his first telescope? Humans would have been in space in the 18th century. All of earth's resources would have been dedicated to get to that relay and see what it was. Instead, it was "hidden" by the protheans, giving earth a chance to develop their own technologies, such as discovering physics on their own, learning about the strong and weak nuclear forces, and other forces such as gravity and electro magnetic. 

The protheans discovered the reapers agenda and methods, and I would like to believe that they sacrificed themselves to give future civs a chance to break the trap.

Some other thoughts on the charon relay:

I doubt that the creative team at bioware went this deep, but another interesting idea I had was this:

If the mass relays are next to indestructable, which the game seems to imply, then perhaps the charon relay actually came from a different system. A star going supernova and blasting the relay out into space, only to have it get trapped by Sol's gravity. This would make Earth unique in the sense that the relay was never intended to be there in the first place, and it could be unique in its distance to the sun. So far that it took way longer for our civ to discover its presence, allowing us to build a foundation of sciences like I mentioned above.

-Godeshus

[DaftPaycheck]

Cyadina wrote...

JPfanner wrote...

The mass relays themselves have to be built. Whether the whole network was put into place prior to the first reaping or the Reapers expand the network a bit during each cycle isn't known. So the Sol relay could be a more recently constructed part of the network which would exclude it from earlier cycles.

Interesting, it would make sense since the reapers clearly have to do something with all those resources from the civilizations they destroy, build more mass relays, more things to harvest next round.  I could buy that.  Actually you could go one step further and make the assumption that the reapers build mass effect relays near garden worlds specifically to facilitate this.  Throw in some way for reapers to find or detect planets likely to evolve a space faring species within the next few cycles and it makes even more sense why earth wasn't discovered until now... better explanation than most so far.

That seems to be the best or at least, most intriguing concept with the material we're given. It's tough to really go much deeper in depth considering how little we still know about the relays, reapers, etc. but I think the possibility that reapers can somehow observe garden worlds or emerging species and plan accordingly, such as building close by relays, is much better than simply saying no one discovered the relay in millions of years. Obviously it's safe enough to say the galaxy is far too expansive and earth  simply escaped notice until the protheans, but I rather like this concept of reaper cultivation.

[Nightwriter]

Earth actually was colonized. By the dinosaurs. Oh, yeah. They're originally from the Hawking Eta cluster. They achieved space flight travel quite early on (explains why you found that alien t-rex skull in ME1) and came to Earth to explore the system.



Then one day the Protheans showed up and by chance discharged the contents of their sewage compactor near Earth's orbit. Long story short, boom, big impact, big blast, big stink, no more dinosaurs.

[Massadonious1]

[Jayce]

Cyadina wrote...
As to these points, they had to activate it from outside to get to the local cluser most likely.  Its the same thing that sparked the rachni wars, blindly activating a relay from another relay in a different system, its the same thing people keep saying above that the council forbids activating unmapped relays.  There has to be a method to activating them from a distance, lord knows the asari and salarians didn't travel at sub light to get to the citadel.

If I recall the lore correctly, there are primary relays that cover vast distances that are a linked pair and smaller secondary relay s that link to multiple other relays but don't cover anything like the same distance. You only need to unlock one relay to unlock the pair in a primary or all of them in the secondary.

The Charon relay is a primary relay that links to Arcturus and Arcturus has three other secondary relays: one to the Shanxi Cluster, one to the Exodus cluster and a unamed third.

It was while an expedition were attempting to activate the Shanxi-Theta relay (relay 314 to the turians), in the Shanxi cluster that a Turian patrol ran across the Alliance expedition. So the Turians were already active in the Shanxi cluster before the Alliance got there via Arcturus.

Given all that, it seems pretty clear to me you only need to activate one relay to get your target relay to reactivate as well.

[Icinix]

Thargorichiban wrote...

Why do you think the dinosaurs went extinct?

Those poor T-Rex's should never have activated that mass relay! That's why we'll see a dinosaur reaper in the next game. I'm preemptively naming it Barney.

Actually Reapers are dinosaurs.
You see, it was at the height of the dinosaurs power, spread throughout the universe, that they realised, they had no food.
They decided to upload their collective tiny brains into large combat storage devices that would wait for mammals and other species to breed to massive numbers to feed their enormous collective fleet.
Think about it. <taps nose>

[RhythmlessNinja]

jimmyjoefro wrote...

Someone found Earth when the Dinosaurs dominated and dropped one off in the middle of a random planet. Earth has some pretty hostile creatures that may have made colonization more hazardous than beneficial.

That's how the dinosaurs went extinct. Reapers rolled in & took 99% of their population, made a dino smoothie & thus a reapersaurus was born. We'll see that in ME3.

[Cyadina]

Godeshus wrote...

Just to expand on my previous post, I assume that the goal of the reapers is to have civs discover the relays before they are technologically advanced enough to form their own advanced technologies.

This is basically stated in ME1 and repeated again by Legion in ME2, the relays cause every species to come after to use what was already built thus altering their technological future.

Godeshus wrote...

I believe the protheans themselves even discovered the mass relays prematurely, and
used that technology to develop an incredible technological state very
quickly, falling into reaper hands.  They seem to be a hive mind, so
the more there are, the smarter the entire race is.

Some misinformation I think.  Nothing I can recall says the protheans were a hive mind, although I would be happy to be corrected.  They did have advanced technology that allowed direct mind contact (the beacons), but that is more similar to what we know as telepathy than what you're suggesting which is basically the Geth.  They may have found their relay earlier than most, clearly they did have a very advanced civilization comparatively.

Godeshus wrote...

Could you imagine if Newton saw the mass relay through his first telescope?
Humans would have been in space in the 18th century. All of earth's
resources would have been dedicated to get to that relay and see what
it was. Instead, it was "hidden" by the protheans, giving earth a
chance to develop their own technologies, such as discovering physics
on their own, learning about the strong and weak nuclear forces, and
other forces such as gravity and electro magnetic. 

The protheans discovered the reapers agenda and methods, and I would like
to believe that they sacrificed themselves to give future civs a chance to break the trap.

Finding that in the solar system could have led to inumerable outcomes, for all we know we would have destroyed each other to be the first to get to it. You're also speculating several stages deep at this point, you're making the assumption the protheans hid it then giving speculations as to why, with no indication they had anything to do with Charon being encased in Ice.  They may have done it simply to hide humans from the galaxy, although if their intent was to save humanity from discovering mass relay technology while encasing Charon in ice they may have cleaned up their little spy post on mars which did far more damage development wise.

Godeshus wrote...

Some other thoughts on the charon relay:

I doubt that the creative team at bioware went this deep, but another interesting idea I had was this:

If the mass relays are next to indestructable, which the game seems to
imply, then perhaps the charon relay actually came from a different
system. A star going supernova and blasting the relay out into space,
only to have it get trapped by Sol's gravity. This would make Earth
unique in the sense that the relay was never intended to be there in
the first place, and it could be unique in its distance to the sun. So
far that it took way longer for our civ to discover its presence,
allowing us to build a foundation of sciences like I mentioned above.

Again several layers deep in speculation, obviously by this point humanity is well aware of how spatial objects travel, half the planets in the viewable systems seem to be extra solar captures, the relay to Ilos was knocked out of position, if the relay wasn't meant to be in the local cluster they'd probably have mentioned that by now. 

Frankly I'm more surprised that the protheans didn't have more species like the Hanar where they directly intervened, but then again by the time the reapers came they didn't have much time to really change the outcome.  My point being that the best advantage is to give more species an early start, the protheans came really close to making the mass relays there own, building their own, and establishing real control, giving other species a head start would have made more sense then forcing them to spend the next 50k years trying to make ships go fast enough the species doesn't die enroute.

Modifié par Cyadina, 23 février 2010 - 08:47 .

[TheUnusualSuspect]

I personally took it that most civilisations got wiped out pretty soon after they achieved space faring status. The Reaper that gets left behind wakes up every 100 years or so and starts scanning for life that's been using the relays. It then makes judgement as to whether that life has advanced far enough to be candidature for "Reaping". The race then gets wiped pretty soon after, like within 100-200 years, so there isn't an awful lot of time to get fully established on other planets in the Galaxy, aside from small colonies before the Reapers come and wipe it all out.



The difference today is that the Protheans broke the automated remote activation of the Citadel, and so for hundreds, possibly even over 1000 years, multiple races have become space-faring as the Asari and Salarians went around exploring, and we already know that the Salarians have boot strapped the Krogan into space-faring status.



ie. Earth wouldn't be likely to be discovered quickly in a normal scenario, because the Reapers come pretty quick. The Protheans found Earth but didn't do much else and the Reapers came very soon after.



Need to remember that ME1/ME2 is set in fairly extraordinary times as far as the Reaping cycle is concerned, and therefore, drawing conclusions based upon what's happening now is likely incorrect.

[Lothial]

Godeshus wrote...

 I like the idea of the Protheans being martyrs. 

Just to expand on my previous post, I assume that the goal of the reapers is to have civs discover the relays before they are technologically advanced enough to form their own advanced technologies. I believe the protheans themselves even discovered the mass relays prematurely, and used that technology to develop an incredible technological state very quickly, falling into reaper hands.  They seem to be a hive mind, so the more there are, the smarter the entire race is.

Could you imagine if Newton saw the mass relay through his first telescope? Humans would have been in space in the 18th century. All of earth's resources would have been dedicated to get to that relay and see what it was. Instead, it was "hidden" by the protheans, giving earth a chance to develop their own technologies, such as discovering physics on their own, learning about the strong and weak nuclear forces, and other forces such as gravity and electro magnetic. 

The protheans discovered the reapers agenda and methods, and I would like to believe that they sacrificed themselves to give future civs a chance to break the trap.

Some other thoughts on the charon relay:

I doubt that the creative team at bioware went this deep, but another interesting idea I had was this:

If the mass relays are next to indestructable, which the game seems to imply, then perhaps the charon relay actually came from a different system. A star going supernova and blasting the relay out into space, only to have it get trapped by Sol's gravity. This would make Earth unique in the sense that the relay was never intended to be there in the first place, and it could be unique in its distance to the sun. So far that it took way longer for our civ to discover its presence, allowing us to build a foundation of sciences like I mentioned above.

-Godeshus

Well they are Martyrs. I would dare say at this point they are the game's other real heros. Story wise they scream Prometheus. From their name to the Hanar's name for them the "Enkindlers" The Hanar credit the Protheans with giving them language, and art.

50 thousand years ago in human history is also when anthropologist believe we first developed language, and art as well. I wouldn't be at all surprised in fact if it were revealed in ME3 that the onset of human "sentience" is related to protheans efforts to  resist the reapers. It may even be said we weren't meant to find the Mars outpost much sooner, but set ourselves back through generations of war, and greed.

If we were not meant to find it they would have simply destroyed it on abandoning it.

[Nightwriter]

Massadonious1 wrote...

And here, in this historical rendering of the event of the extinction, we see several points of scientific interest, accuracies which historians study for sociological insights into the dinosaurs’ culture and subsequent downfall…

[Mox Ruuga]

The Reapers let the Protheans to build up an empire spanning the whole galaxy, they allow the individual species to take their time. Hell, the Protheans were on the cusp of unlocking the secrets of the relays and the Citadel. I guess the whole peaceful triumvirate rule by the asari, turians, and salarians was what triggered the Reaping cycle this time. Perhaps Sovereign judged that they had reached their apex? The Protheans were more adventurous and curious, comparable to humanity rather than the staid council species (with the possible exception of salarians) and were allowed to expand throughout the galaxy, before the hammer fell.

[Cyadina]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

I personally took it that most civilisations got wiped out pretty soon after they achieved space faring status. The Reaper that gets left behind wakes up every 100 years or so and starts scanning for life that's been using the relays. It then makes judgement as to whether that life has advanced far enough to be candidature for "Reaping". The race then gets wiped pretty soon after, like within 100-200 years, so there isn't an awful lot of time to get fully established on other planets in the Galaxy, aside from small colonies before the Reapers come and wipe it all out.

The difference today is that the Protheans broke the automated remote activation of the Citadel, and so for hundreds, possibly even over 1000 years, multiple races have become space-faring as the Asari and Salarians went around exploring, and we already know that the Salarians have boot strapped the Krogan into space-faring status.

ie. Earth wouldn't be likely to be discovered quickly in a normal scenario, because the Reapers come pretty quick. The Protheans found Earth but didn't do much else and the Reapers came very soon after.

Need to remember that ME1/ME2 is set in fairly extraordinary times as far as the Reaping cycle is concerned, and therefore, drawing conclusions based upon what's happening now is likely incorrect.

Possible, but that makes the assumption then that the protheans are unusual in their capacity to expand.  Also, the reapers did activate the citadel and destroy them like normal.  It was after they were nearly wiped out that they broke the signal.  So figuring that, the protheans accomplished more in their 50k years than we have in our cycle + some bonus time. 

Now you may be right that most civilizations get wiped out sooner, the average may be lower than the current cycle and the protheans are an outlier, maybe a single civilization not having to make war with anyone can expand faster.  I still think the cycle is pretty fixed in the lore for about 50k years regardless of the level of development of the civilizations in the galaxy.  The sentinel reaper left behind begins its work towards the end of the cycle, otherwise it seems odd they would wipe some out early, and let the protheans on the other hand get closer than anyone to fighting back.

Modifié par Cyadina, 23 février 2010 - 09:02 .

[Torguemada]

Schneidend wrote...
The relay simply wasn't active, and possibly couldn't be remotely activated because it was encased in ice. The Council also forbids simply running around activating relays. Besides, the Citadel races have only explored 1% of the galaxy to date. The Local Cluster had simply not been discovered. That's all the explanation necessary. If galactic exploration were as easy as you describe, the entire galaxy would be completely mapped by now.

It's not about why the current races havent find Earth, it's about how come noone has found earth during one of those 760 previous cycles of new spacefaring sivilizations.

[Default137]

The galaxy is a BIG place.



Seriously, I see other people pointed that out, but I don't think it was stressed enough, the galaxy is literally so large its impossible for you to imagine how large it is, it is so amazingly vast that even if we had the ability to travel a bajillion times the speed of light, and could zip around unhindered, we as a species would not explore 1/5th of the entire galaxy before our Sun died. And thats just our Galaxy, if we were talking about the Universe as a whole, it just gets silly, and then if you add the multiverse....



And then you even have to take in to account for the various races, they don't see Relays as we do on our minimap, and entire civilizations could potentially spring up in the same cluster as a relay, literally right next door, and they would never know it was there unless they got lucky and bumped in to it, heck, we are still not sure we've fully mapped out our cluster, there is a theory going around that there may be in fact up to two more planets, or planetoid sized things beyond Pluto, judging by the size of the planets we have currently, the asteroid belt, and all sorts of other projections, and I mean, we've lived on Earth how many years?



So yeah, back on topic, a galaxy is massive, very very massive, and even if you were deliberately looking for relays, you'd probably only find about 1/10th of them, as searching space is a fairly difficult task, the very fact the Protheans found us is a one in a million find, same with them finding the Hanar.

[Nightwriter]

Default137 wrote...

The galaxy is a BIG place.

Seriously, I see other people pointed that out, but I don't think it was stressed enough, the galaxy is literally so large its impossible for you to imagine how large it is, it is so amazingly vast that even if we had the ability to travel a bajillion times the speed of light, and could zip around unhindered, we as a species would not explore 1/5th of the entire galaxy before our Sun died. And thats just our Galaxy, if we were talking about the Universe as a whole, it just gets silly, and then if you add the multiverse....

And then you even have to take in to account for the various races, they don't see Relays as we do on our minimap, and entire civilizations could potentially spring up in the same cluster as a relay, literally right next door, and they would never know it was there unless they got lucky and bumped in to it, heck, we are still not sure we've fully mapped out our cluster, there is a theory going around that there may be in fact up to two more planets, or planetoid sized things beyond Pluto, judging by the size of the planets we have currently, the asteroid belt, and all sorts of other projections, and I mean, we've lived on Earth how many years?

So yeah, back on topic, a galaxy is massive, very very massive, and even if you were deliberately looking for relays, you'd probably only find about 1/10th of them, as searching space is a fairly difficult task, the very fact the Protheans found us is a one in a million find, same with them finding the Hanar.

You know, it's occurred to me that the Reapers intentionally place mass relays in locations near garden worlds, where they know life will grow.

[FlintlockJazz]

I think there is a lot of misconception about the space travel in ME. You do not need mass relays to travel at FTL speeds, as the Normandy shows this when it jumps to FTL when being chased by the collector ship after you have explored it. All ships in the game have a FTL drive that allows them to travel to star systems within the local cluster, with the relays merely allowing society to exist at a galactic scale.



The Protheans could easily have arrived at Earth without activating the mass relay there as a result, which therefore means that the Charon relay was encased in ice for millions of years, and no one else managed to stumble across the system while travelling using FTL engines.

[Pauravi]

Canon info says that ~1% of the galaxy has been explored. The fact that the anyone found us at all is a miracle, really, we just happened to have been in the latter stages of evolution by then. ~200 billion stars and probably a trillion or more planets? No, the odds of someone tripping over Earth are very slim indeed, and it is 100% certain that there are many more advanced races and even uninhabited garden worlds waiting to be discovered.

[Pauravi]

FlintlockJazz wrote...

The Protheans could easily have arrived at Earth without activating the mass relay there as a result, which therefore means that the Charon relay was encased in ice for millions of years, and no one else managed to stumble across the system while travelling using FTL engines.

That isn't very surprising considering the number of stars and planets in the galaxy.  At conventional FTL speeds it would take decades to cross the Milky Way and that is without stopping to explore.  There is quite simply way too much real estate in the galaxy to expect that anyone should trip over any one particular civilization just by wandering around.  You're vastly underestimating the scale of the galaxy here.

[b1n0ry]

Does it have to be something material for it to indicate colonization? For all we know, the plants, the animals... all could be the remnants of an ancient space faring species millions of years old.

[FlintlockJazz]

Pauravi wrote...

FlintlockJazz wrote...

The Protheans could easily have arrived at Earth without activating the mass relay there as a result, which therefore means that the Charon relay was encased in ice for millions of years, and no one else managed to stumble across the system while travelling using FTL engines.

That isn't very surprising considering the number of stars and planets in the galaxy.  At conventional FTL speeds it would take decades to cross the Milky Way and that is without stopping to explore.  There is quite simply way too much real estate in the galaxy to expect that anyone should trip over any one particular civilization just by wandering around.  You're vastly underestimating the scale of the galaxy here.

Yep, with the mass relay encased like it was the protheans were probably the only aliens to ever find Earth (except obviously the reapers when they built the mass relay to begin with), just explaining how they could have got to Earth without using the mass relay.