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Post by smurfton on Dec 20, 2023 18:31:09 GMT
Alright, I’ll bite: What is the inclusion criteria for the Ether ecosystem? The robots, it seems, were not a part of it at all on their old bodies, despite their consciousness, and have only now joined after inhabiting organic (but still artifical) bodies. Surely the issue wasn’t that their old bodied weren't carbon-based? Consciousness probably isn’t a criterion at all. Ketrak guides the souls of insects, after all, and even the simplest Court robot is (I think) more conscious than a fly. So yes, it might be an organic chemistry thing. It could also be that psychopomps inherit the prejudices of their parent human cultures, so they're not prepared to recognize the etheric potential of intelligent inorganic tools. But in that case you'd expect the Japanese psychopomps to have declared them tsukumogami and laid claim to them already. Lastly, it might be that future Kat ends up reaching through time to collect the souls of all destroyed robots in history, so the psychopomps never had a chance to notice their existence. I think the issue is that the robots, as they were, cannot die. They were always able to be repaired, so there was never a point when their soul was finished inhabiting its shell — no matter how many years they lay dormant |
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Post by silicondream on Dec 20, 2023 21:26:04 GMT
Consciousness probably isn’t a criterion at all. Ketrak guides the souls of insects, after all, and even the simplest Court robot is (I think) more conscious than a fly. So yes, it might be an organic chemistry thing. It could also be that psychopomps inherit the prejudices of their parent human cultures, so they're not prepared to recognize the etheric potential of intelligent inorganic tools. But in that case you'd expect the Japanese psychopomps to have declared them tsukumogami and laid claim to them already. Lastly, it might be that future Kat ends up reaching through time to collect the souls of all destroyed robots in history, so the psychopomps never had a chance to notice their existence. I think the issue is that the robots, as they were, cannot die. They were always able to be repaired, so there was never a point when their soul was finished inhabiting its shell — no matter how many years they lay dormantI'm not sure that they were indefinitely reparable. Take a hammer to their CPUs and no human power could fix the damage, at least. Diego's golems could only be revived because they suicided via a simple breakage of one path on their "hearts." OTOH, the psychopomps don't know that, and maybe it's their opinion that counts. Would humans be exempted from the ether cycle if we got better at healing mortal injuries? |
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Post by Gemminie on Dec 21, 2023 5:13:15 GMT
Arbiter Saslamel's speech is described by showing his square speech balloons filled with unintelligible text covered with the Interpreter's rounded balloons. We first see part of Saslamel's patterns as he says that the Ether is the life of the world (after saying that the world is a dead thing, filled with nothing). We see a spark as he says that the Ether began as a small spark. We then see fire as if drawn in ancient art, a circle in the center containing the spark, as he continues his story; the Ether spread through the world like a fire. The next frame shows the spark impinging on some kind of rectangle, the other side of which seems to have broken open into shards, stones, or perhaps bricks, and curls of air or perhaps water, giving rise to what may be fish, wings, strange creatures, and more, as Saslamel goes on that the Ether transforms things and "makes the dead alive."
We then see people, animals, and buildings, one of them with a sign that may be written in the language Saslamel speaks – perhaps we're seeing a glimpse of his now-long-dead culture of origin. The spark is in the sky like a star. He says that the Ether is a vast shared ocean of life that is taken from and added to. And the final frame is an echo of the first, showing the spark with its rays filling the space, and Saslamel says that through life, the Ether is also changed, and made more powerful.
I don't think it's accidental that the Ether is likened to a spark and a fire in a story with one character closely linked to fire. I also think that the Court's plan to move to a planet where they can be divorced from the Ether is extremely doomed. They will probably find themselves either dead or dying, a "dead system," as Loup put it, either literally dead as in without the ability to grow food or have children, or metaphorically dead as in unable to ever change, innovate, or create.
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Post by silicondream on Dec 29, 2023 12:38:56 GMT
I also think that the Court's plan to move to a planet where they can be divorced from the Ether is extremely doomed. They will probably find themselves either dead or dying, a "dead system," as Loup put it, either literally dead as in without the ability to grow food or have children, or metaphorically dead as in unable to ever change, innovate, or create. Even if that doesn't happen, they're doomed anyway. Their plan requires cutting off contact with the merostomatozons, who have vastly more experience with space travel and exploration. They're losing everyone who's ether-touched or has an ether-touched loved one, which apparently includes virtually all of their most competent researchers. They destroyed the robots' minds and replaced them with far more simplistic zombie AIs, who won't be capable of managing their infrastructure or even maintaining and replicating their own bodies. And because the only thing the Court hardliners are really competent at is censorship, the colony will collapse without recognizing or correcting its errors. It will be pretty ironic if they depart in a "semi-metaphorical" state and end up as a pure metaphor for ignorance and hubris. The space lobsters will be warning each other "be careful you don't pull a Court" for the next thousand years. |
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Post by pyradonis on Dec 30, 2023 13:02:41 GMT
I also think that the Court's plan to move to a planet where they can be divorced from the Ether is extremely doomed. They will probably find themselves either dead or dying, a "dead system," as Loup put it, either literally dead as in without the ability to grow food or have children, or metaphorically dead as in unable to ever change, innovate, or create. Even if that doesn't happen, they're doomed anyway. Their plan requires cutting off contact with the merostomatozons, who have vastly more experience with space travel and exploration. They're losing everyone who's ether-touched or has an ether-touched loved one, which apparently includes virtually all of their most competent researchers. They destroyed the robots' minds and replaced them with far more simplistic zombie AIs, who won't be capable of managing their infrastructure or even maintaining and replicating their own bodies. And because the only thing the Court hardliners are really competent at is censorship, the colony will collapse without recognizing or correcting its errors. It will be pretty ironic if they depart in a "semi-metaphorical" state and end up as a pure metaphor for ignorance and hubris. The space lobsters will be warning each other "be careful you don't pull a Court" for the next thousand years. You're assuming a great much here. You don't know how many people are planning to go there, how many competent researchers in the Court are among them, whether the currently used robot AIs enable maintaining infrastructure (and really, why shouldn't they?) or their own chassis. They also didn't destroy any robot's mind, just removed some of the CPUs, a thing that had been done a thousand times before whenever a particular robot switched from one chassis to another. |
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Post by silicondream on Dec 31, 2023 15:35:59 GMT
Even if that doesn't happen, they're doomed anyway. Their plan requires cutting off contact with the merostomatozons, who have vastly more experience with space travel and exploration. They're losing everyone who's ether-touched or has an ether-touched loved one, which apparently includes virtually all of their most competent researchers. They destroyed the robots' minds and replaced them with far more simplistic zombie AIs, who won't be capable of managing their infrastructure or even maintaining and replicating their own bodies. And because the only thing the Court hardliners are really competent at is censorship, the colony will collapse without recognizing or correcting its errors. It will be pretty ironic if they depart in a "semi-metaphorical" state and end up as a pure metaphor for ignorance and hubris. The space lobsters will be warning each other "be careful you don't pull a Court" for the next thousand years. You're assuming a great much here. HOW DARE YOU ...okay, yes. But I have an amazing view from my armchair. And I've only sometimes mostly been wrong before! I figure "most competent" because they're losing Kat and probably Tony, who seem to be Court MVPs. They're losing Jack, the most technically talented student we've met after Kat. They're losing Aata, who at least oversaw (we don't know his degree of involvement) the creation of the only Court technologies that have even a slight effect on Coyote and Loup. They're losing the Donlans and Juliette. Is there anyone introduced so far, with any notable science/tech feat to their name, who's likely to go? Doctor Disaster, maybe, if he can stand saying goodbye to Jones? Just seems like a lot of the "geniuses" in the Court are touched by, or attracted to, the ether. Kat said that the overridden robots are "nothing like" their old selves; I don't think they have the personality and memories of the originals. Probably don't have their cognitive capabilities either, because none of the Court researchers besides Kat can even read the robot operating code, let alone duplicate it. Now, the current robot bodies are heavily simplified from Diego's original designs, because the golems and robots couldn't recreate something as complex as the originals, even by studying themselves. Stands to reason that the overridden bots will have the same problem replicating the current bodies and inheriting all the robots' tasks. Basically, I think the Court hardliners badly underestimate how much skill, intelligence and creativity the robots usually put into their work, and how much worse a job they'll do now that they've been zombified. Right, but I don't think they've been able to unlock those CPUs after triggering the shield protocol. That's why they're using the hardware overrides, no? Kat's team can recover the minds on the CPUs by downloading them into New People, but as far as the rest of the Court's concerned, those minds are lost. |
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Post by Storel on Jan 2, 2024 9:09:10 GMT
So, where did the original spark come from, then? - The Seed Bismuth
- Errant Tic-Toc
- Annie's pyromaniac great47-grandfather
- Ancient Merostomatozon astronauts who were hoping to colonize an etherless world
Even if that doesn't happen, they're doomed anyway. Their plan requires cutting off contact with the merostomatozons, who have vastly more experience with space travel and exploration. Um, if these hypothetical Merostomatozons colonized Earth and caused the ether to come into existence here, they would be the ultimate ancestors of all life on Earth, yes? That doesn't sound like any of them are still in contact with anyone in the present day, so how would the Court be "cutting off contact" with them? |
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Post by silicondream on Jan 2, 2024 9:49:11 GMT
- The Seed Bismuth
- Errant Tic-Toc
- Annie's pyromaniac great47-grandfather
- Ancient Merostomatozon astronauts who were hoping to colonize an etherless world
Even if that doesn't happen, they're doomed anyway. Their plan requires cutting off contact with the merostomatozons, who have vastly more experience with space travel and exploration. Um, if these hypothetical Merostomatozons colonized Earth and caused the ether to come into existence here, they would be the ultimate ancestors of all life on Earth, yes? That doesn't sound like any of them are still in contact with anyone in the present day, so how would the Court be "cutting off contact" with them? Nothing in the first post's list was serious! The Court is currently in contact with the merostomatozons; that's why Bud and Lindsey are visiting, and that's where they got their Star Ocean tech from. But once they emigrate to the new planet, they'll turn off the Star Ocean, and they'll have to cut contact with the merostomatozons too if they want that world to remain untainted by the ether. *EDIT* oh, and currently I'm guessing (partly because Jones seems to have inhabited an etherless past, and partly because people can survive in ether-depleted test regions) that the ether was not necessary for life on Earth to begin. It was only necessary for the life forms Sass & Clippy really care about: etheric beings, and maybe particularly imaginative/creative/psychic people. I'm thinking of it like the Great Oxidation Event on Earth: First there was life that didn't need oxygen, and then photosynthesis evolved and organisms started spewing out oxygen as a waste product, and then life that did need oxygen evolved and took over most of the planet. This would fit with Clippy's "a fire grew" metaphor quite well. Fire itself is just rapid oxidation, and so aerobic organisms like us can be thought of as running on a slow, steady flame that the original inhabitants of Earth would have found useless or harmful. |
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Post by Hatredman on Jan 2, 2024 13:12:43 GMT
I think the issue is that the robots, as they were, cannot die. They were always able to be repaired, so there was never a point when their soul was finished inhabiting its shell — no matter how many years they lay dormantWhat about the Police Guard at the Ether Station? He's not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead. (As coroner I must admit I thoroughly examined it). |
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