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Topic: Why did the Precursors build the Mycon? (Read 8878 times)
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Deus Siddis
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"I'm pretty sure the "Juffo-Wup" the Mycon ramble vaguely about -- the genetic imperative to create more Mycon, and more Mycon, and more Mycon, forever"
Nope, that's wrong. The Mycon where very clear, they said "Juffo-Wup is light". It's light energy. That's what the device you steal from them emits, and that's what is landing on the mycon you see in the comm screen.
"Heh. In other words:
"l00k!!!! 1 h4x0r3d 7h15 1337 5hr00m. 17 3Xpl0d3z pl4n3ts!!!1!"
"c00l!!!1!!!!!!!!!" "
Are you really a moderator? Sometimes I wonder if half the people on this forum are more nuts than I am. 
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Fossaman
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Deep fried Lemur, anyone?
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I feel compelled to point out one line from the mycon's dialogue:
'I am Dugee
I am the purity monitor
I choose what buds are permitted to mature
and which must be eradicated
I died of general misfunction 57,283 years ago.'
There are two other examples of mycons claiming they're dead.
Also, there is this quote from the mycon's makers:
'... planetary transformer biot 94-18: take your place at the dais...'
So, I think it's safe to say that the mycon were NOT supposed to be shattering worlds.
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Deus Siddis
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Whoa, whenever I see your avatar, I forget what I was going to say. Why did you have to use that crazy rat-cat thing?
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Art
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Nope, that's wrong. The Mycon where very clear, they said "Juffo-Wup is light". It's light energy. That's what the device you steal from them emits, and that's what is landing on the mycon you see in the comm screen.
Um, no. "Light" is a metaphor. The complete quote there is "The Non is darkness. Juffo-Wup is light." Or "Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is unfulfilled Non." It's pretty obviously a comparison, an attempt to say "negative" and "positive", and we do know the Mycon think of light as a positive -- it's necessary for their life cycle, if only part of it (since they do breed underground in the mantle and use geothermal heat for energy most of the time -- they apparently use radiation to keep themselves alive artificially when in the Podships).
But Juffo-Wup is used multiple times to mean "the Mycon" -- all life is "Juffo-Wup" and "Non", and they seek to turn the Non into Juffo-Wup -- which doesn't seem to involve putting tons and tons of Sun Devices around worlds, but *does* involve making lots and lots of Mycon. It makes no sense to say that Juffo-Wup is radiant energy -- radiant energy doesn't "command" people to do things, the Mycon are not slowly turning more and more of the universe into radiant energy, the Mycon don't *contain* radiant energy and radiant energy is not the reason for their existence. The Sun Device world is a place where "Juffo-Wup is strong" because it's an important part of the Mycon common purpose and the Mycon have heavily colonized there, not because of the Sun Device itself -- if you remember, the Source of Juffo-Wup isn't the Sun Device world but a completely *different* system that doesn't appear to be especially full of radiant light (and is not the source of all the radiant light the Mycon depend upon).
They say Juffo-Wup contains patterns, that Juffo-Wup commands them, that their expansion helps expand Juffo-Wup -- in other words, that Juffo-Wup is something like the genetically coded hive consciousness they keep talking about (the fact that all Mycon contain the memories of past Mycon and have a common, united goal). The fact that they say Juffo-Wup is "All" implies it's some kind of transcendent, abstract idea -- the Mycon's destiny to absorb all, or somesuch.
It's obviously not a clear idea -- Juffo-Wup is a concept, not a single physical thing -- but the Mycon aren't clear thinkers. The way they talk about Juffo-Wup is a pretty clear reference to religious thinking of various kinds.
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Censored
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Somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep.
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The big questions are, where did the precursors go, why did they leave rainbow worlds and mycon behind and why are the melnorme gathering data on both rainbow worlds and all life in the known universe? Has all life been modified by the precursors for some reason?
Well, this paragraph was something that bothered me in this discussion;
First off, the rainbow worlds are simply dump-sites for Precursor garbage. They are called 'rainbow worlds' because the energy emitted from them and recieved by the ship's sensors is so overwhelming (see Shofixti chat); it also seems to create a nice set of colors, rainbow-like on the screen.
I think it's quite obvious the Precursors didn't think their garbage-planets to have any speciality; also, they didn't 'plant' them specifically, as they left in a hurry (see Slylandro chat) and surely not to give other races any kind of clues.
The pattern of the rainbow worlds leading to the Precursors' destination could be simply explained - they just dumped stuff all over as they moved out of the quardant, so obviously it would be like leaving bread crumbs behind you.
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« Last Edit: February 22, 2005, 06:09:46 pm by Censored »
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"You boldly enter our space! Approach this Dreadnought as though it were a recreation base and then play the dumb hominid?
Who do you take us for, Captain... Spathi!?"
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Deus Siddis
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"It's obviously not a clear idea -- Juffo-Wup is a concept, not a single physical thing -- but the Mycon aren't clear thinkers. The way they talk about Juffo-Wup is a pretty clear reference to religious thinking of various kinds."
Yes a religion based on light and heat energies as its central focus. The Mycon spread by shattering worlds and moving into these intensly hot environments. Still, there are only two or so main worlds which have sun devices, one of which you steal. So basically, they spread "hot light" to the "darkness" expanding their own population as well as progressing Juffo-Wup; Expanding the amount of heat/light on the various worlds of the Universe. It's faulty bio-engineering which has become a kind of religion.
About the rainbow worlds, what credible source ever said that they were "dump-sites"? The shofixti don't know anything about anything except self-destruction. The Melnorme have a secret agenda and they won't tell you what the rainbow worlds are really about.
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Cronos
*Many bubbles*
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The Spathi *THINK* that the rainbow worlds are waste disposal sites, it doesnt mean that they *ARE* waste disposal sites.
Then theres the question of why the precursors would build entire planets for the purpose of waste disposal. Any society advanced enough to encompass a galaxy and possess the technology to build and implement planeteering tools would be smart enough to realise that it's far more efficient to reuse valuable materials rather then dump it and go through the steps of gathering new resources, processing them and rebuilding a new device from scratch (Ex: Aluminium Cans).
Also, what makes people think that the region of space fought over in the game encompasses 1/4 of the galaxy? Thats the impression I get every time I hear "Quadrant" mentioned. It's not right, our area is a small sector of space towards the edge of the galactic disk. The area is so small that you dont even see the general pattern of a spiral arm.
Also, consider the Ur-Quan have fought for 20,000 years, enslaving/cleansing the galaxy. If our area alone took 30 or 40 years to enslave then there must've been some SERIOUS resistance in the other "Quadrants" that gave even the dreaded Sa-Matra a tough time.
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Fossaman
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Deep fried Lemur, anyone?
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Part of the delay with the ur-quan would be waiting until they could find other races. In the intro to SC1 it says that our TV signals gave away our location.
The Sa-Matra wouldn't be used except as a last resort, probably. It's their 'great trophy', why risk some sort of natural or unnatural disaster destroying it?
On the subject of the rainbow worlds, about half the stuff there is cheapo elements, and the rest radioactives. They might have developed their technology past the need for sources of ambient radiation, fusion uses hydrogen isotopes instead. Why recycle useless stuff? Changing the form of a radioactive element is hard, it might be cheaper to just mine new material.
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Mormont
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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Precursors building Mycon - is that canon? I thought it was only in SC3.
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Deus Siddis
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Got it all.
« Reply #26 on: February 23, 2005, 07:27:31 pm » |
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The precursors built pretty much everything, the devices, your ship, the rainbow worlds, the mmrnmrhm, the mycon, the sa-matra, the crystal planet, the halo rings. . .wait uh, nevermind.
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Art
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"It's obviously not a clear idea -- Juffo-Wup is a concept, not a single physical thing -- but the Mycon aren't clear thinkers. The way they talk about Juffo-Wup is a pretty clear reference to religious thinking of various kinds."
Yes a religion based on light and heat energies as its central focus. The Mycon spread by shattering worlds and moving into these intensly hot environments. Still, there are only two or so main worlds which have sun devices, one of which you steal. So basically, they spread "hot light" to the "darkness" expanding their own population as well as progressing Juffo-Wup; Expanding the amount of heat/light on the various worlds of the Universe. It's faulty bio-engineering which has become a kind of religion.
Well, fine. But that means Juffo-Wup is only heat and light in the metaphorical sense. Juffo-Wup's most literal meaning, if it has one, is the genetic drive to create more Mycon.
About the rainbow worlds, what credible source ever said that they were "dump-sites"? The shofixti don't know anything about anything except self-destruction. The Melnorme have a secret agenda and they won't tell you what the rainbow worlds are really about.
The Spathi say it. And before we go on about how the Spathi aren't "credible", it's not some theory the Spathi spin out of nothing -- it's because the Spathi are translating Precursor records they happen to have, and find mention of the ten dump-sites in this area. (Just because you find their culture weird doesn't mean they're not capable of finding and interpreting facts as much as any other scientists.) The ten dump-sites could refer to something else, but that's really unlikely, at least from the perspective of a game-player -- it's very obvious that the only important thing in nearby space that comes in tens is the Rainbow Worlds.
Of course *no one* gives you the full story on what the Rainbow Worlds are for. They're definitely not *just* dumpsites, since the Slylandro make it clear that there's something important in the way they were arranged, and since making or modifying a planet into a strange, totally unique energy-radiating body seems overkill for just dumping waste. I always thought the dumpsite nature of them was a secondary consideration -- that the waste was the relatively ordinary stuff you found lying on the surface, left there because it was convenient, or else that they were made of some really exotic kind of waste that was used because it could create the rainbow effect.
I prefer to think that the primary reason for the Rainbow Worlds is as a signal -- the arrow shape is much more likely to be a signal than a natural "trail". Leaving two separate lines that converge on a point -- a point where nothing is there *itself* -- is a puzzle meant for intelligent races to solve, to figure out that you have to bisect the angle and travel along the path *between* the two lines. (Besides, if they have HyperSpace travel on a par with or faster than yours, there's no reason for them to be haphazardly dumping waste as they go along anyway, as they could freely move through the whole sector.)
Re: whether the Precursors would have waste -- No form of technological advancement would make it possible to completely reuse all raw materials over and over again without any form of waste. It's a basic consequence of thermodynamics that that's impossible. Moreover, technological advancement does *not* imply that it becomes successively more efficient to recycle rather than mining new materials. That's a political ideology centered in our particular problems today on Earth, but there's no reason it should have to be true for the Precursors. If you have the technology to constantly expand through space and suck up new resources it probably *will* be more efficient for you to do that than to try to develop some sort of self-sustaining economy. (It may not be what you would think of as responsible, but why should aliens be responsible by your standards just because they're technologically advanced? Are we responsible by the standards of the ancient Greeks?)
It seems especially unlikely that the Precursors, who *are* the Precursors precisely because they left huge amounts of crap just lying around all over the galaxy, would be a particularly tidy race.
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Art
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Part of the delay with the ur-quan would be waiting until they could find other races. In the intro to SC1 it says that our TV signals gave away our location.
Right. One of the reasons why known space is known space may simply be that there's no reason to assume that the intelligent races are evenly distributed throughout the galaxy. We probably happen to be in one little knot of civilizations, and elsewhere there are probably others that are too far away to easily travel to with current technology.
Which didn't always use to be the case, and basically back in the days of the Milieu *all* of local space was one province of the Milieu -- equivalent to a single sphere of influence, the Taalo's. That's kind of intimidating to think about.
Given that the Ur-Quan have traveled all the way around the *whole* galaxy, this makes them really really big and important compared to anyone in local space. It doesn't mean that the Alliance can't hold up to them -- the Chmmr seem to be a newly developed race that *can* rival the Ur-Quan in power -- but it means that the Alliance has a lot of development to do to match the Ur-Quan's experience and range of control.
BTW, the use of "Home Quadrant" is an SC3-ism. We shouldn't use it if SC2 is our canon, *particularly* because in SC2 they *don't* use a convenient term like Home Quadrant even when it would be very convenient to do so. We hear a lot of "this area of space" or "the local region of space" or "the stars around here". It strongly implies that there's nothing particularly geographically special or distinct about the area covered by our starmap, just that it's the area the races we know about happen to have successfully explored, more or less.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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What if there were ten devices the Precursors set up for some purpose, and those ten devices created a tremendous amount of radioactive waste, which was dumped onto nearby worlds?
If the ancient text was a fragment of a civil engineering study, it would be basically sensible for the text to address the disposal system without mentioning the massive machines.
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