cB557
voOOP
"It looks like it worked at first but then just made things worse" does not count as actually working
Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
- Start date
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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- He/They
No, no, it does work. It gets rid of the current government.
It can also result in a government that causes you problems later, but it does work.
Note that just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I'm not saying we should try to do that. Just that we could.
Maybe. We'll have a really, really hard time preventing Batarians from enslaving other Batarians, but we may be able to prevent Batarians from enslaving non-Batarians. Interestingly, the idea that Batarians instinctively draw a sharp contrast between Batarian and non-Batarian (as opposed to the human habit of anthropomorphizing even inanimate objects) might help us here, if we can persuade the Hegemony to adopt the view that slavery is fine for Batarians, but not for non-Batarians. It's a delicate situation, though, especially since many members of non-Batarian races will be less appreciative of the distinction and may be inclined to see any actual endorsement of such a policy as being pro-slavery.
Not really. While it would be very hard, though perhaps not impossible, for external economic sanctions alone to provoke an internal revolt, Batarians are still sapient beings, and thus will be capable of going against their natural inclinations. A possibly-useful mental shorthand here would be to consider Batarians to be like xenophobic house elves, of Harry Potter theme: as a race they actually enjoy being servile to those they see as "one of them", but if conditions become truly horrible you might create a Dobby, or even a whole group of Dobby-s.
There's a saying that every society is two skipped meals away from revolution; with Batarians that saying might morph to four or five skipped meals, but the sentiment will still be there, eventually. The terrible fact is that once a revolution does begin among Batarians it would almost certainly prove to be far, far more vicious than even extremely bloody instances on Earth like the French Revolution. Relations between castes would become so bad that the castes would schism: each side of the conflict would see the enemy as foreign invaders rather than members of the herd, and thus be inclined to be extremely vicious to them.
The point is that such a Batarian civil war would be vicious and terrible, laying waste to cities, maybe whole continents or planets, and produce a massive number of refugees, refugees that off-world aid organizations would have to evacuate off of Khar'shan and all the Batarian-owned worlds and flood the galaxy. It'd be a nightmare: the Quarians are considered a menace with "only" 17 million of them in their Migrant Fleet, whereas there are up to 15 billion combative, hostile Batarians on Khar'shan alone, not including the Hegemony's other colony worlds.
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What @azoicennead said. The goal is 'replace the current government,' the fact that the replacement government is worse is not cause to say it didn't succeed in its intended goal.
It's cause to say 'it's a bad idea so let's not do that' instead.
- Location
- the Netherworld Dood
Guys how about we wait and see how the situation develops? The SA might not even back up an attack on baterian soil
Nobody wants ParSec or the SA to attack the Batarians directly, and most of us don't want to incite revolution inside the Hegemony. Even if we succeed in crushing them it'll be a disaster for generations to come.
cB557
voOOP
Not quite. The real goal is to put ourselves in a better situation, and destabilizing the Batarian government would just be a means to that end. Seeing as the plan in question would likely put us in a worse situation, I would say it failed at its primary goal.
- Location
- the Netherworld Dood
Then why are we discussing it? And there is not much stoping us from basically reverse slaveing ( basically with some covert action develop a sort of underground rail road. Everyone will know we are behind it but with not enough proof for the 4 eyes to openly declare war )
Topic arose organically.
There's likely already several underground railroads on Khar'shan. You're not going to persuade the Batarian population at large to go along with the idea of abolition, though, not for generations. Assuming my idea is right, you can think of Batarians as house-elves in that respect: they like being enslaved, or they consider it such a part of the natural order that it'll take a multi-generational educational campaign to get them to think differently about it.
Makes me wonder if Eternal Youth is a good idea after all. Most of the time, the way you create political change is to influence children, and wait for their parents to die of old age, but with Eternal Youth the later just won't happen. I mean, sure we'll have to do it, we have a moral obligation to do it and release it to everyone as soon as possible, but the moment we do it's going to slam the brakes on all other plans for widespread social change, like persuading the Batarians not to enslave their own people.
- Location
- the Netherworld Dood
What I was thinking is something more ... Drastic. We raid batterian coloneys ( in a way that we will only get unoficaly Fingered as the culprit )
Basically we apply pressure to the them in the same way they do us. Only far more successfuly as we have a 100 to one combat ratio not to mention the shock and awe tactics
And no not convincing them we use this to get backing from the citadel ( I imagen that over the years slavers have hurt a lot of importient people)
Yeah no eternal life is out way to many long term issues with it
Yeah, I wanted to comment on that.
Effects of Eternal Youth on Batarian society are going to be interesting. They have a caste system. Most likely there is mythology / religion facilitating reincarnation between castes or some sort of inter-generational caste movement - all necessary societal control tools intended to lower whatever . In addition to that, I would assume suicide is heavily frowned upon under normal circumstances. Existence of eternal youth would either further separate the castes, with only slave owners / higher castes being allowed to use the treatments, or play merry havoc with the idea of caste-to-caste (intergenerational) transition.
Another interesting point is slave raids. Slaves are expiring resource simply by their nature - they age and die. With eternal youth, it might be economically profitable to keep slaves eternally young, as this minimizes the need to break in new ones. So, overall, eternal youth might lead to a reduction of slave raids.
Eternal youth could also be used as a political tool, at least for some time - as it is a treatment, restricting its use to batarians who don't own any slaves might be somewhat effective for short to middle term.
Speaking of batarian society, one needs to consider what a slave is, and who batarians consider to be slaves. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if all batarian military personal were slaves. I absolutely believe that batarian caste system is more complex than "slaves and non-slaves".
But, well, effects of Eternal Youth on any society are hard to predict. I mean, salarians practice species-wide breeding programs, from what I remember (their genetic maps and such). With eternal youth? This leads to some strange practices, I think. Also, influence of immortal salarian dalatresses would be a very scary thing, given that salariansimprint on them from birth:
- Location
- Budapest, Hungary
We do not need to release eternal life immediately.
With Mordain we can surely make a limited variant which only slows aging for a set time.
Increasing the lifespan of the Salarians to 100-200 year would be very beneficial, and it would not change their culture too much, in fact the would be more cautious.
We can delay the reveal true formula after the Reaper War is resolved. It will be a very long and slow social engineering project, but we will have an eternity to finish it.
With Mordain we can surely make a limited variant which only slows aging for a set time.
Increasing the lifespan of the Salarians to 100-200 year would be very beneficial, and it would not change their culture too much, in fact the would be more cautious.
We can delay the reveal true formula after the Reaper War is resolved. It will be a very long and slow social engineering project, but we will have an eternity to finish it.
I am pretty sure that we are developing an ongoing treatment, rather than a sort of injection / drug that, once taken, makes someone immortal. In such a case, we can't release an incomplete version. Besides, if we don't finish it, someone else will. And that's not even looking into moral implications of sitting on this discovery IC.
Um, you do realize that basically makes either ParSec or, depending on who you're suggesting conducts these raids, the entire Alliance into pirates, right? As in we will have everyone, Citadel and Terminus, dogpiling on us at the same time? Even if what you're suggesting is a good idea or likely to succeed, which it's not and isn't, we don't have the means to do anything like what you're suggesting, at all, and probably never will, certainly not before the Reapers come.
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- Location
- Budapest, Hungary
Well that is the question, how will it work.
Frankly the best option would be a a relatively affordable and infinitely repeatable rejuvenation treatment with controllable lifespan extension, at least on short term.
Or it might be similar the Peak Human, and the subject will stop aging after x time of gene therapy.
In either way it needs to be controllable. In a modern society everyone being immoral would either slow the the development of the species(Asari), or it would cause massive overpopulation(Krogan).
If were not for Wrex and Bakara, I would have and convinced Mordain to go along with the plan.
Krogan overpopulation was caused not by their livespans or (apparent) immortality, but their sudden shift from very high child mortality (on the order of 99 out of every hundred children dying shortly after birth) to very low one. As to development rate... No, f*ck no. Politically, maybe. Technologically, at least in human society? No. Wouldn't make sense.
I assume that at first it would be repeatable treatments, and then, later, possibly self-sustaining nanotech.
There is also the possible side effect of stopping children from being born in Salarian, Human, Hanar, Volus and Elcor cultures.
It is a biological fact that the longer the lifespan of a living creature is, the less children they produce sexually.
The Krogan get past the limitation by being a prey species.
It is a mechanism to avoid overpopulation and overstressing resources, something that the Krogan do not have, as they never adjusted themselves or their culture after becoming the apex predator.
Heck, according to some biological theories, people only have children to pass on their genes and parts of their personality, thus gaining a small measure of immortality that way, so if you gave those people immortality...
Well, expect a steep decline in children being born and quite possibily a steep rise in STDs.
Could I get a citation on this?
- Location
- Budapest, Hungary
And low production rate makes the society stagnant.
Lifespan is quite a big factor in the forming of cultures. In the medieval era people got in their mid-late teens an everyone tried to have much children as possible. Now? We have much longer lifespan, this making children is a lot less urgent, hence the depopulation in western Europe.
After generations of immortality human culture will slowly change, life will become slower, the time perception of humans will be more long-term. People will start thinking in decades instead of years, and weeks will pass as days passes in the present.
Without the need to passing something to the next generation,such instincts will fade productivity will lessen.
I could write even more projection, but I am too tires to do it right now
Again, it is long term effect.
On the other hand people wold be more focused on preserving the environment.
I do not say, that an immortal culture is automatically bad, but it won be the same as before.
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Caste rank is in part determined by value I'd guess (pretty much literally everyone in Batarian society has a price tag), however I'd also guess also works the other way caste effects value.
Batarians do believe in a soul. It leaves though the eyes. Which is why destroying the eyes of a corpse in taboo. Also makes headshot snipers not well liked
.Don't recall there being lots about the faith. But I'd Imagine its a lot of what you'd expect from a caste system like you said.
Of course it is more complicated. It a system were everyone is ranked in large part due to their monetary value. People in higher caste can probably afford more rights, but pretty much everyone is someone's property. Being not a slave basically means being worth so much that no one can buy you.
So who is a slave? Most everyone.
Of course I'm just theorizing off of the limited text we have.
There are a couple of different version depending on other techs you have researched, but most this:
The repeatable version, would be a sort of rejuvenation treatment. The permanent version would be incorporating it into the body some how, nanobots, gene-modding etc.
However creating a lesser version (time limited) would require modifications that might be interpreted as criminal as you basically causing unnecessary damage or coding countdown timers into people.
That said... the brain may still reach some form of terminal memory limit, eventually. Of course then you just install more!
- Location
- the Netherworld Dood
Can we all agree that eternal life is a bad idea? as attractive as it sounds there are just way to many issuse with the after efects of it. we would be better off scarping the idea before anyone comes up with it.
It's a horrible idea, terribly destabilizing, possibly catastrophic.
Do you know what's worse? Everyone dying.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
eternal life is impossible until the universe is mastered, indefinite life is what we're talking about.