Incompatible System

[Frogs321]

Milky Way - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Look at the size of the Milky Way Galaxy.

If you had billions of years as the controller/conqueror of the Milky Way Galaxy what kind of resources would you have?

Compare that to what the Reapers have.

Compare what the Reapers would have if you were running them to what they have.

There has to be something (or a lot of somethings) holding the Reapers back.

Or it could be that the game (hardware/software) could not could not handle real galaxy sized numbers.

 

[Neruz]

There has to be something (or a lot of somethings) holding the Reapers back.

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Could easily be simple arrogance; the Reapers believe they are perfect and infallible and so simply do not consider the possibility that their methodology might fail because it is perfect and infallible.

If you had billions of years as the controller/conqueror of the Milky Way Galaxy what kind of resources would you have?

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The vast majority of the ~1 and a bit billion years that the Reapers have been running their operation were spent in hibernation though; the extermination of the Protheans took a few centuries and that was implied to be an unusually long Cycle. Most of the time the Reapers just wake up, pop in every 50,000 years, run their harvest for a century or so, and then go back to sleep. They haven't actually been doing anything with their control of the galaxy beyond waiting for the next crop of civilizations to grow up.

They have a vast amount of resources and numbers, but nothing like the amount they should have if they were actually exploiting the galaxy the way they could, because the Reapers are the dumb products of a dumb AI built by dumb idiots with dumb goals who only ever really achieved anything because they started from such a massive advantage that actually failing would have required nothing less than literally committing suicide.


I'm not sure if the whole thing with the Leviathans\Crucible\Reapers was how the ME story was originally planned to go, but assuming that it was and it was just the execution that got screwed up, it did actually have some decent potential as a Sci-Fi story about how incredibly horrible things can happen for the most stupidly banal and meaningless reasons. Executed properly (aka, not at all how it was actually done) the reveal that the Reapers were in fact idiot fuckups all along could have been pretty great.

 

[Arden]

According to in-story statements, there are about 3200 Mass Relays in the entire galaxy. That's quite a lot, but with over a hundred billion solar system in the galaxy, it's pretty clear that the Reapers don't just slap a relay on every garden world where intelligent life might pop up eventually. There ought to be an order of magnitude more of them in that case, at least.

 

[mp3.1415player]

I believe that in the game only about 60 or so relays are shown, which is enough to give coverage of much of the galaxy. Coverage being entirely the wrong word, of course, as all it really allows is for a small number of systems scattered around an obscenely huge expanse to be visited. My figure of some 3200 or so is a reasonable extrapolation based on game lore and a little thought, as I'm working on the basis that the reapers don't have unlimited resources, particularly in the area of eezo, which they need a hell of a lot of for each relay built. Vastly more than required for a spacecraft drive, definitely. As has been said, most of the time the reapers have been in existence has been time they've been dormant, and of course, the number of reapers hasn't been constant. They started off with far less than there are now, so one can't assume that their current abilities have always been the same. The network presumably has expanded as time went on, which would be backed up by the differing ages of the relays found and disabled by humanity.

In practice I very much doubt that the reapers could plant a relay in every potentially-habitable system, as in a single galaxy there could well multiple billions of these. 250 billion stars would only need a small percentage to have suitable planets to end up with a huge number of places intelligent life could evolve over a period of a couple of billion years, even assuming you're only targeting Earthlike worlds. It seems far more likely that they picked a few of the more likely candidates that were within usable range and targeted them, expanding this range each cycle as they gained more resources from the genocide of that cycle. It would be a slow process even so, as moving relays around via normal eezo ftl drive would take quite a while.

The galaxy is simply too large, the number of reapers too small, and the eezo drive too slow, to allow them to comprehensively fill it with enough relays to put one in every star system that might evolve life that could become space-faring. If they'd spent the entire couple of billion years doing it, yes, it's probably just about possible, but they clearly and canonically didn't actually do that.

I'd suspect that they actually move relays around after each cycle, and only seldom add new ones. And it's entirely possible that they don't go back to worlds they've already decided aren't suitable, those merely get marked as "not valid target" and bypassed. The reapers are not exactly infallible, or in real terms all that smart. They're very single minded and inflexible and assume they're always correct, which in the long run isn't doing them any favors. This approach will work right up to the point it very suddenly doesn't. At which point they've got a problem since they're not really capable of working outside their programming to the level that might be required.

 

[Userid70]

You have the amount needed per Reaper also so they have to be expanding production over time. If it is just energy intensive to produce can simply setup a dyson swarm around a red dwarf and sit back and harvest as it produces slowly expanding the number of setups. If it takes a supernova at a key point in the stars life cycle then they would need to be seeding them to get the numbers needed.

 

[CastleTrime]

Your right putting them at every potential candidate would be impossible, but I'm only suggesting those worlds with complex multicellular life. Those are far far fewer, and develop very rarely. You could probably sweep the galaxy every few hundred millions years in a staggered fashion. Thats far more plausible and we know the Reapers think in such time scales regularly.

 

[Dur'id the Druid]

At which point they've got a problem since they're not really capable of working outside their programming to the level that might be required.

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My two cents on this. Their limitation isn't a result of programming, but more of what little culture they have. They are very goal oriented, and have fallen into the insanity of doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results. Or rather have rationalized using the galaxy as an ongoing science experiment that keeps giving them results they don't like.

 

[mp3.1415player]

Your right putting them at every potential candidate would be impossible, but I'm only suggesting those worlds with complex multicellular life. Those are far far fewer, and develop very rarely. You could probably sweep the galaxy every few hundred millions years in a staggered fashion. Thats far more plausible and we know the Reapers think in such time scales regularly.

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But we have no idea how rarely that actually is. Given the sheer numbers involved, it could still work out to hundreds of thousands of planets over that amount of time. And 2 billion years is a very small amount of time relatively speaking as well. 'Sweeping the galaxy' is also something of a problem. At, let's be generous and say 20 lightyears per day for a really advanced reaper FTL drive, it would take something like 30 years of non-stop travel to go from one side to the other without actually investigating any system you ran into on the way, which would actually be a fairly small number. Add in the apparent requirement to 'discharge the drive core' every so often, which I would assume is also a thing with reaper drives, and that goes up considerably as you have to locate the right sort of system to allow that to happen. Even using the existing relay network and spreading out from each of them wouldn't massively reduce the amount of time taken. And even with half a million ships a comprehensive inventory of every star system in the galaxy would take a vast amount of time and effort. And fuel, of course, which would probably be the ultimate bottleneck. It's not really practical, given the canon limitations, to do a full survey of the galaxy in the time available, never mind multiple such surveys. It would take so long that by the time you finished life could have evolved to intelligence and left one of the planets you first checked, possibly several times over, rendering the entire process pointless.

Basically, the canon game lore simply doesn't allow for many of the ideas people come up with for how it would actually work. This could well be because the people who made the game have no real understanding of how fucking huge a galaxy is...

Nor would they need to, as it's utterly irrelevant for the game itself, of course. The reason the Council are idiots, and the Turians are militaristic idiots, and so on, is purely to put enough combat into play to make for an entertaining game. It's not even close to a practical reality, nor necessarily internally consistent Trying to take that basis and convert it into a real story is always going to need a lot of extra information to come from somewhere, and inevitably some of this is going to conflict with the game canon to make it work at all.

 

[Arden]

But we have no idea how rarely that actually is. Given the sheer numbers involved, it could still work out to hundreds of thousands of planets over that amount of time.

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Considering how many sapient species have developed just since the last cycle, there clearly is an absurd amount of them in the Mass Effect universe, far more than anyone could realistically keep surveillance over.

 

[Logos01]

But we have no idea how rarely that actually is. Given the sheer numbers involved, it could still work out to hundreds of thousands of planets over that amount of time. And 2 billion years is a very small amount of time relatively speaking as well. 'Sweeping the galaxy' is also something of a problem. At, let's be generous and say 20 lightyears per day for a really advanced reaper FTL drive, it would take something like 30 years of non-stop travel to go from one side to the other without actually investigating any system you ran into on the way, which would actually be a fairly small number. Add in the apparent requirement to 'discharge the drive core' every so often, which I would assume is also a thing with reaper drives, and that goes up considerably as you have to locate the right sort of system to allow that to happen. Even using the existing relay network and spreading out from each of them wouldn't massively reduce the amount of time taken. And even with half a million ships a comprehensive inventory of every star system in the galaxy would take a vast amount of time and effort. And fuel, of course, which would probably be the ultimate bottleneck. It's not really practical, given the canon limitations, to do a full survey of the galaxy in the time available, never mind multiple such surveys. It would take so long that by the time you finished life could have evolved to intelligence and left one of the planets you first checked, possibly several times over, rendering the entire process pointless.

Basically, the canon game lore simply doesn't allow for many of the ideas people come up with for how it would actually work. This could well be because the people who made the game have no real understanding of how fucking huge a galaxy is...

Nor would they need to, as it's utterly irrelevant for the game itself, of course. The reason the Council are idiots, and the Turians are militaristic idiots, and so on, is purely to put enough combat into play to make for an entertaining game. It's not even close to a practical reality, nor necessarily internally consistent Trying to take that basis and convert it into a real story is always going to need a lot of extra information to come from somewhere, and inevitably some of this is going to conflict with the game canon to make it work at all.

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My understanding is that Reapers get the full 50LY/d drive speed with minimum necessary discharge.

Combine that with the fact that they have FTL comms that are significantly faster than that and that they can and do make use of "lower" mechanical/synthetic platforms and the fact that in your setup eezo is synthetic in nature, and there's nothing really stopping the Reapers from having used a Von Neumann model to scout out Relay placement beyond the fact that they'd have had to afterwards scoured the galaxy for the probes to ensure they all properly self-destructed rather than experience value drift (which, given FTL comms synchronization, would be much more feasible than it sounds).

I could see the whole process taking somewhere between, say, 50,000 and 1,000,000 years.

Especially if those same probes were what handled the initial Relay deployment.

 

[mp3.1415player]

My understanding is that Reapers get the full 50LY/d drive speed with minimum necessary discharge.

Combine that with the fact that they have FTL comms that are significantly faster than that and that they can and do make use of "lower" mechanical/synthetic platforms and the fact that in your setup eezo is synthetic in nature, and there's nothing really stopping the Reapers from having used a Von Neumann model to scout out Relay placement beyond the fact that they'd have had to afterwards scoured the galaxy for the probes to ensure they all properly self-destructed rather than experience value drift (which, given FTL comms synchronization, would be much more feasible than it sounds).

I could see the whole process taking somewhere between, say, 50,000 and 1,000,000 years.

Especially if those same probes were what handled the initial Relay deployment.

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Sort of plausible, yes. However a million years is still long enough to allow a species to go from plains apes to space travel, merely based on the one example I can think of Even 50k years is getting towards too long to be safe from their point of view. Fifty thousand years ago there were a few hundred thousand proto-humans wandering around with clubs, now there are billions of us with nukes and at least primitive space capability, almost all of which has happened in the last couple of centuries. Much of it in less than one century.

To properly do what has been suggested would probably need close to real time monitoring of almost every possible candidate world in the entire galaxy, which is clearly not possible for the reapers due both to resources and the fact that they didn't actually do it. They set up a system that worked well enough for a while, but had massive holes in it that they either didn't recognize, or felt were acceptable. There's no practical way given the observed capability they have that they could keep it going forever without cheating massively, which of course the entire eezo trap was supposed to do.

But that only works as long as everyone falls into that trap...

 

[Logos01]

Sort of plausible, yes. However a million years is still long enough to allow a species to go from plains apes to space travel, merely based on the one example I can think of Even 50k years is getting towards too long to be safe from their point of view. Fifty thousand years ago there were a few hundred thousand proto-humans wandering around with clubs, now there are billions of us with nukes and at least primitive space capability, almost all of which has happened in the last couple of centuries. Much of it in less than one century.

To properly do what has been suggested would probably need close to real time monitoring of almost every possible candidate world in the entire galaxy, which is clearly not possible for the reapers due both to resources and the fact that they didn't actually do it. They set up a system that worked well enough for a while, but had massive holes in it that they either didn't recognize, or felt were acceptable. There's no practical way given the observed capability they have that they could keep it going forever without cheating massively, which of course the entire eezo trap was supposed to do.

But that only works as long as everyone falls into that trap...

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Oh, sure. I only meant to say that the initial Relay deployment would have fit that model.

The Reapers themselves -- despite a billion years of increasing their number by thousands every fifty thousand years or so -- definitely never had the numbers for real-time monitoring of everything.

But like we see with what happened to the Protheans ... They used a more "hands-off" approach when it comes to everything within the Relay network but still had sufficient monitoring within it to ensure they could track when races reached a high enough level of tech to be bothered with.

Though this does make the thranx a bit of a hole in the narrative, but it can be allowed for under the initial Von Neumann Probe network not having 100% coverage due to minor incidents of value drift or simple uncaught checksum errors in data storage causing data corruption.

The real trick here is that they didn't feel the need to have real-time coverage because they only cared about certain trigger conditions and were perfectly happy to have to spend centuries on any given active culling phase under the assumption that their technology and logistics would carry the day.

And to be fair -- that's a safe enough assumption. Any coverage areas they DID miss would have a fairly low chance of having interstellar civilizations spring up within them but leave no data traces of themselves anywhere on the Relay network.

Data traces like, say, relocating or destroying relays.

 

[GuiltyAsCharged]

I remember the endscene of ME3, those relays shooting light at other relays, what if the reapers sectioned the galaxy into sections or spheres where they can observe in that potential sphere possible areas of life and move the relays as needed. As billion year old AI, I think they have the processing power to sort that out, as we have great programs for sorting already. That would explain the vast distances between relays.

 

[Userid70]

It is all a question of how outside the box you can think for how to quickly ID habitable worlds and worlds with advanced life on them. Place say a dozen telescope stations around the galaxy and you can ID 99% of habitable worlds and what level of tech they are at just off the reflected light from the parent star and the night side light produced. A wood fire produces a fingerprint in the light just as a tungsten incandescent light bulb dose.

 

[Drich]

At, let's be generous and say 20 lightyears per day for a really advanced reaper FTL drive, it would take something like 30 years of non-stop travel to go from one side to the other without actually investigating any system you ran into on the way, which would actually be a fairly small number. Add in the apparent requirement to 'discharge the drive core' every so often, which I would assume is also a thing with reaper drives

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My understanding is that Reapers get the full 50LY/d drive speed with minimum necessary discharge.

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30 Lightyears per day with zero discharge required, actually. They couple that with systems that would apparently violate thermodynamics and just keep running forever so long as they're not destroyed, and, in fact, continue functioning even after receiving heavy damage for over thirty seven million years, as evidence by the derelict Reaper.

All the Reapers need is enough Mass Relays with a wide distribution to check most of the galaxy in fairly short order. At the speeds they go at, and the numbers they possess after so many years (And with the ability to still build remote non-Reaper platforms as necessary), having a grid of Mass Relays every thousand or so light years means that after a Cycle is done, they activate everything, check the vicinity of them, shift the Relays around as needed (They shifted the Citadel, which is significantly larger, so we can infer they possess the ability), and then leave the Vanguard to watch the galaxy for the next cycle. Rinse, wash, repeat.

A hundred years on a cycle, ten more for basic checking, then thirty-fifty years for shifting the Relays around, is quite reasonable.

 

[Jake]

To properly do what has been suggested would probably need close to real time monitoring of almost every possible candidate world in the entire galaxy, which is clearly not possible for the reapers due both to resources and the fact that they didn't actually do it. They set up a system that worked well enough for a while, but had massive holes in it that they either didn't recognize, or felt were acceptable. There's no practical way given the observed capability they have that they could keep it going forever without cheating massively, which of course the entire eezo trap was supposed to do.

But that only works as long as everyone falls into that trap...

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And to be fair, that the Humanx have dodged the trap is purely down to a couple of unlikely but plausible fortunate coincidences. If not for the derelict Prothean outpost on Mars then humanity wouldn't have known about planium until the Charon Relay went up. And if we'd been wiped out by the ensuing explosion, or if a human exploration ship hadn't happened to detect a Thranx merchant vessel in distress by sheer happenstance and force the issue of First Contact, they wouldn't have been warned off trying to boot up Relay 314 and everything might have gone down much the way it did in canon.

 

[CastleTrime]

Yeah the Reapers can't perform real time monitoring of every candidate. But again multicellular life doesn't just appear from nowhere. Yes it took humans only 50k years to go from cavemen with clubs to space flight. Meanwhile life of Earth first evolved 3.5 billion years ago. Multicellular life only 1500 million years ago and complex life 500 mya. Again garden worlds don't just pop out of nowhere unless some else intervenes and then there would be records.

EDIT: Of course we have no clue how regularly bacteria and complex life evolves, but the second is unlikely to be too common. Most of the garden worlds in mass effect were probably terraform hundreds of millions of years ago hence why they appear so different.

 

[GuiltyAsCharged]

I'm a bit confused at how the reapers miss their relays being stolen... Well it must be a new problem, but how can they miss a destroyed one? No failsafes? Isnt the AI in the citadel at least monitoring such things? Signals etc.

Sorry if this has been answered already, kinda new to this thread 😅

 

[Driven by Apathy]

If eezo is actually a naturally occurring substance, rather than artificially produced, maybe it is actually relatively common in the universe (or at least the Milky Way), with the area of space the Humanx are in simply being an exception due to "insert rare cosmological phenomenon here"?

That would explain why there aren't any other WIMP-using civilizations around: They inevitably start making use of any eezo found on their planet, then go on to either never develop WIMP-technology or blow themselves up in the discovery. On the rare occasion were there are survivors who manage to retain some data about what might have happened, those would conclude that WIMP-research is what causes the gigantic explosions and swiftly ban it. And the Reapers don't know any better either, which explains why they're unprepared for the possibility of a WIMP-using civilization arising.

Furthermore, if the Reapers believed eezo to be the only possible means of FTL-travel, and the Humanx area of space had very little of it, it would explain why said region is considered an area of low concern and only got a few mass relays. So what if the Reapers miss a civilization or two during a cycle? Without eezo and FTL it's not like they would ever become a threat...

 

[E M Berner]

Did a little number crunching to see how long it would take to survey the entire galaxy.

Here are my assumptions:

1. There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
2. The average distance between stars is about 4 light years.
3. It would take on average roughly 12 hours to survey a system for life bearing or potentially life bearing planets and any other interesting information.
4. Reapers can travel at 30 ly/d indefinitely.
5. They are about 50% efficient at setting up a route with minimal backtracking.
6. The Reapers already have accurate star maps and thus doesn't need to spend any time searching for new stars to travel to.

If all this bears out than it should take about 420 million reaper years to survey the galaxy. So if you have a hundred million reapers it would take around 4 years to do it. A million reapers could do it in 400 years etc.

It's not impossible to do but it would be an immense undertaking and this is just for a basic survey, if you also want to search for rogue planets that could hide a Prothean base it would take far longer or require far more reapers.

If you had to spend weeks in each star system to search the neighbourhood for bases in the oort cloud or on planetoids far out in the black it would quickly escalate to thousands of years even if you had millions of reapers.

 

[Frogs321]

If you are looking for a "The Reapers are unbeatable we are smarter then you God/Kings of the Universe" with the goal of making more Reapers. Then the Reapers should not exterminate but use their indoctrination to set up every conquered biosphere/race to willing happily dedicate themselves making more Reapers. Reaper expansion forever unending.

If the Leviathans were really the be all that the story would have you believe then the one off first Reaper should have lost. Or the first Reaper would have won a little and the Leviathans would have counter attacked and won. Or the war would/could be on going forever. Or, yes more 'or', the Leviathans could have quarantined Reaper space/area and are observing for what ever Leviathan reason.

Or,, the Reapers could have run into a more advanced civilization(s) and got their Reaper ass kicked. With even more options.

 

[CastleTrime]

Did a little number crunching to see how long it would take to survey the entire galaxy.

Here are my assumptions:

1. There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
2. The average distance between stars is about 4 light years.
3. It would take on average roughly 12 hours to survey a system for life bearing or potentially life bearing planets and any other interesting information.
4. Reapers can travel at 30 ly/d indefinitely.
5. They are about 50% efficient at setting up a route with minimal backtracking.
6. The Reapers already have accurate star maps and thus doesn't need to spend any time searching for new stars to travel to.

If all this bears out than it should take about 420 million reaper years to survey the galaxy. So if you have a hundred million reapers it would take around 4 years to do it. A million reapers could do it in 400 years etc.

It's not impossible to do but it would be an immense undertaking and this is just for a basic survey, if you also want to search for rogue planets that could hide a Prothean base it would take far longer or require far more reapers.

If you had to spend weeks in each star system to search the neighbourhood for bases in the oort cloud or on planetoids far out in the black it would quickly escalate to thousands of years even if you had millions of reapers.

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We're arguing about finding life baring world which could evolve intelligent life which are far easier to spot. Still there's a reason I suspect the Reapers have someway of detecting eezo at range, it would explain how the Reapers so easily discover any hidden facilities. Or maybe there just really going at data analysis and making use of indoctrinated agent to locate them.

 

[Logos01]

If the Leviathans were really the be all that the story would have you believe then the one off first Reaper should have lost. Or the first Reaper would have won a little and the Leviathans would have counter attacked and won. Or the war would/could be on going forever. Or, yes more 'or', the Leviathans could have quarantined Reaper space/area and are observing for what ever Leviathan reason.

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By the time the Reapers entered conflict with their makers, they significantly outnumbered them.

 

[Frogs321]

In the game the Reapers are defeated by a human. Are all of you telling me that one human is better then all of the Leviathans?

 

[Logos01]

In the game the Reapers are defeated by a human. Are all of you telling me that one human is better then all of the Leviathans?

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One human alongside every known race, whose victory-inducing contribution is to complete and use a weapon created by a galaxy-spanning civilization that was marked to be the equal of the Leviathans in capability, who themselves advanced the weapon based on work of their own precursors.

So... Yes.