Mass Effect

[deanb]

 

Errm ethan that's not how maths works. If the percentage is 1/100th smaller it doesn't make the resulting figure a hundred fold larger.

 

And if your'e going by the ME universe there's about a dozen new advanced civilizations every 50K yrs spread across a few hundred planets.

 

[jimmuhpage]

Reapers leave the relays so that any civilization that finds it stops trying to figure out another way to travel between clusters. Once the keepers send the signal, reapers warp from dark space into the citadel and travel to all the relays that are activated while slowly destroying the clusters that have been colonized: the ones controlled by spacefaring species. They don't bother with species that haven't advanced enough to find the relay in their cluster and activate it.

[Eleven]

 

Your maths is off by a long shot. First parts is on your extremely high life sustaining planet count, current estimates put it around 6million or so, and that's being generous. 0.005% of planets can support life, of the 40% of stars with planets. That's drastically lower than your 0.1% estimate. And that's just planets that support life, never mind life that develops, gains sentience and surpasses their nuclear age(which we still haven't).

 

Also where have they said space-faring civilizations only? Their aim is to wipe out AI(well their aim is to wipe out organic life that could/has created AI even), which we clearly have. And we have the means for that AI to launch itself upon the galaxy (not like they care for the time it would take). If you're something under the grand and hyper-intelligent Catalyst you're not going to be wizzing around and detect our planet and give us a miss until the next cycle in 50K years because we're a hundred years or so off FTL travel. We're a space capable race with nuclear and directed energy weapons as well as the basis for AI life. We're not a huge threat now, but give us 50K years (50K yrs ago we were banging two rocks together still) and we'd be an extreme threat. So I'd say we're in the "wipe them out" window of the selection process.

 

 

 

I think it was the starchild himself who basically said they only wipe out advanced civilizations. And we know what he means by it so let's not argue semantics, I'm just being pre-emptive.

 

Also, I don't think the reapers have any concern about our technologic progress as of right now in our real world. All the things we have now pales in comparison to what we have in the ME universe. So yeah they're gonna pass us up and just harvest us when they come back in the next 50k years.

 

EDIT: To add, the meme was saying "We don't want you to get killed by robots, so we made some robots to kill you every x years". The real reason is, "Eventually you are all going to get killed by robots completely. To avoid that, we have to kill off the most advanced civilizations capable of building these robots so organic life will continue to thrive. Oh by the way, we made robots to do this, as what else can we build? We can't build an organic race".

 

 

Edited April 6, 2012 by elev3n

[Waldorf and Statler]

I prefer Xzibit saying it. At least he's not trying to make art out of bullshit.

[TheMightyEthan]

Errm ethan that's not how maths works. If the percentage is 1/100th smaller it doesn't make the resulting figure a hundred fold larger.

 

 

I know that I meant that I made a mistake in my original calculations. Using the numbers 300 million, 50 thousand, and 50 million, there would be 300,000 new civilizations every cycle. I originally said 3,000. It was an arithmetic error.

 

THEN I used your number for the number of planets (6 million) and kept the 50,000 and 50 million and got 6,000 (1/50th what I got with 300 million planets, which makes sense since there's 1/50th the number of planets). Then I divided it by 10 for good measure and got 600.

 

This whole discussion with specific numbers is neither here nor there though. The point is that wiping out advanced civilizations every 50k years would not cause there to stop being advanced civilizations, and that that meme entirely misunderstands the explanation. As elev3n said, the meme says "To stop you from being killed by synthetics we made synthetics to kill you," when the actual explanation given is "to stop ALL ORGANIC LIFE from being killed by synthetics, we made synthetics to kill the advanced civilizations every so often to stop them from getting advanced enough to cause the destruction of ALL ORGANIC LIFE".

 

We both agree that it's a bad explanation, but that meme misrepresents the explanation and therefore misrepresents why it's bad. To go all formal logic on you, it's the difference between the argument being invalid and unsound. The meme is saying the Catalyst's argument is invalid, when in fact it is valid but unsound. The argument is "organic life will always invent synthetic life, synthetic life will always turn against organic life, organic life must be advanced to invent synthetic life, therefore if we periodically kill all advanced organic and synthetic life before that can happen synthetic life will never wipe out all organic life". It's valid, its premises lead to its conclusion. It's unsound however, because based on all the available data (the Geth, EDI, hell the Reapers themselves) synthetic life need not necessarily be in conflict with organic life (I say the Reapers because even though they're in conflict with advanced civilizations it's with the overall aim of protecting organic life). It's internally consistent, but not all its premises are true, so it's an unsound argument, not an invalid one.

 

 

Anyway, this is my last comment on the topic (or at least last essay) because really we're just arguing about WHY the ending is stupid, which is kind of a stupid thing to argue about imo.

Edited April 6, 2012 by TheMightyEthan
Fixed spoiler

[Eleven]

Fix the spoilers! NOOOOOOOOOO!

[TheMightyEthan]

lol, fixed. Sorry.

[deanb]

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

I think your maths is cocked up somewhere (it shouldn't be that high at all per cycle). And I also think the meme image is fine in it's conclusion that the catalyst has created synthetics to wipe out organic life in order to save organic life from synthetics. We're going to save the pandas from over-poaching by hiring some poachers to hunt pandas, take a few skin cells samples then shoot the pandas.

[TheMightyEthan]

I will comment to defend my math!

 

 

300 million planets, each evolving a civilization every 50 million years: 300 million planets evolving civilizations divided by 50 million years is 6 civilizations per year. 6 civilizations per year times 50,000 years per cycle is 300,000 civilizations per cycle.

 

6 million planets, each evolving a civilization every 50 million years: 6 million planets evolving civilizations divided by 50 million years is 0.12 civilizations per year. 0.12 civilizations per year times 50,000 years per cycle is 6,000 civilizations per cycle.

 

Now obviously the end result is determined by the numbers we put in, and those input numbers could be wrong (aside from the 50,000 years per cycle), but the math itself is fine.

 

[Hot Heart]

Krogan Vanguard. FUCK YEAH! Edited April 6, 2012 by Hot Heart

[Eleven]

Geth? Krogan Vanguard? And we finally get to see Batarians in action again? I'm buying!

[deanb]

Ah yeah that explains a lot of the figures being off.

 

1. Your numbers assume that all life sustaining planets actually develop life, sentient life, that surpasses stone age/nuclear age and beyond into FTL and AI eras.

2. Every 50million years, which doesn't quite work because it took 1.5billion to poop out 1 advanced civilization from first multi-cellular life. It only took 65million from the past extinction event to get to us because we already had life on earth to evolve from.

3. Therefore the 50million figure only works for planets the Reapers attacked that already that had life on the planet, and enough life was left over after their culling to begin anew.

4. An advanced civilization is only "advanced" for roughly 10,000 years (being generous here, the longest running civilization on the citadel council is the Asari and they've had FTL/relay capabilities for roughly 3,000 years, and humans had only had the tech for a hundred years or so. However given the long period of time of 50,000yrs between Reaper invasion there is the potential to be advanced for much longer). That's a pretty slim window given the large figures of taking a life sustaining planet 1.5billion years to get from multi-cellular life to advanced life.

 

 

[Hot Heart]

I'm buying!

 

No, you're not. It's free.

[Vargras]

>mfw the 'leaked' multiplayer DLC from a while back turns out to basically be real

[TheMightyEthan]

@Dean: I didn't say how long they'd hang around, just that they'd arise during the cycle. And I used 50 million years instead of 1.5 billion because the Reapers don't glass the planet, they just harvest the civilization. It would probably take chimps a lot less than 50 million years to replace us.

 

Even if we divide that number by 100 to account for all the ways that a civilization could get fucked up before reaching that point, it's still 3000 with my numbers, 60 with yours.

 

The point wasn't the specific number anyway, it was just that more civilizations would continue to arise even with the Reapers doing their thing.

[Eleven]

I'm buying!

 

No, you're not. It's free.

 

How dare they not charge me for a DLC this good!? These guys are scum!

[jimmuhpage]

I am so happy......

 

GAH!!!!

[Hot Heart]

Met a new type of annoying person in multiplayer. Was playing a bronze game as an Asari adept (getting my levels back up after promotion) with a couple of Krogan (soldier and sentinel, I think) and...a human adept, I think. During round 5 or 6, one Krogan and the adept died far away from me, right by an enemy spawn point. I had already started running towards them but I wasn't going to survive getting past two Geth pyros and at least one hunter (that I could see anyway). Then I noticed my other teammate had died so I started rushing back towards them. Just before I get there someone on their mic goes sarcastically, "Thanks for saving us, dude." and the lone Krogan uses a medpack.

 

It's not my fault you guys can't hold your own! Maybe don't rush into the deadly Geth classes? And guess who ends the game with a medal for 5 Revives...

[Vargras]

The fact that there's two new maps, three new weapons, several new race and class combos (all with unique abilities and heavy melee attacks, no less)? And for free?

 

This pleases me greatly.

 

Met a new type of annoying person in multiplayer. Was playing a bronze game as an Asari adept (getting my levels back up after promotion) with a couple of Krogan (soldier and sentinel, I think) and...a human adept, I think. During round 5 or 6, one Krogan and the adept died far away from me, right by an enemy spawn point. I had already started running towards them but I wasn't going to survive getting past two Geth pyros and at least one hunter (that I could see anyway). Then I noticed my other teammate had died so I started rushing back towards them. Just before I get there someone on their mic goes sarcastically, "Thanks for saving us, dude." and the lone Krogan uses a medpack.

 

It's not my fault you guys can't hold your own! Maybe don't rush into the deadly Geth classes? And guess who ends the game with a medal for 5 Revives...

 

Yeah, if someone goes down, and there's a bunch of enemies around them, I'm not gonna kill myself just to try and revive them. That's just stupid.

Edited April 6, 2012 by Vargras

[TheMightyEthan]

I leave voice off unless I'm playing with people I know.

[Hot Heart]

I'd not had a problem with people on mics before. One game, the guy was even reminding others about the countdown for extraction. Might do that though.

[jimmuhpage]

I wonder if the geth infiltrator's cloak makes it invisible to geth Primes.... that'd be really sweet.

[TheMightyEthan]

Does normal cloak not do that?

[Hot Heart]

I don't think cloak hides you from certain tougher enemies. I know Phantoms can see you. Part of it may also concern your distance from them?

[jimmuhpage]

I can't remember if Phantoms can see through cloak on Gold, but I know they ignore you on Silver if you keep your distance. Geth Primes can snipe from across the level with their cannons, but I think they prioritize visible targets if they're unobstructed.

 

Quick note about Phantoms: if you don't have someone on your team who can stasis, you can cloak, move to a flanking position where the Phantom is taking cover and line up an easy headshot.