Preliminary Analysis/Evidence Compilation: "The Plan"
TLDR:
"The Plan" is an effort to breed a "divine humanity" through selection pressures within a small, low-tech population. (Best guess of why: to increase divine population without increasing both Angel/Demon power and therefore instability.) The quadrillions of previous baseline humanity may or may not have gone into the Flower.
Man, this whole thing gave me some major mid-5th Era vibes.
This begs the question: if the 5th Era had a post-scarcity society with no involuntary death, where trillions of lives were a drop in the populace, how is it that the 7th era is instead a medieval shithole?
We know that the 6th Era had some sort of turning point decision involving the Melange and "natural creatures":
"No one really talks about it, but every natural creature owes Yalśfreet its life. The Melange only started properly stabilizing as a by-product of his intervention." – Excerpt from 'How we got here, and what should we should do now: Our Proposition, 6th Era'
I posit that it was around this point that a developmental ceiling to the post-scarcity form of society was discovered, one that could only be overcome through submerging the mortals into low-level conflict (the "Plan"). The best evidence of this comes from the Foundational Ethos choices:
tweak to keep stress levels within the optimal zone of development.
not trivialize related Vector incentives
rebalance conflict trending too far toward an unscheduled genocide resolution; re-establish status quo through new equalising variables.
introduce specific innovations at required critical points for ongoing stimulation as the Melange Tapestry continues to mature
not to generate synergy cascades and unintentionally disrupt an otherwise stabilized situation
Manoth has agreed to not disrupt the overall plan...Placement preferrable in static environmental conditions not suitable for more subtle progression stimulation.
Place between moderate to large powerbases to encourage healthy conflict.
To what end is this conflict driving humanity? One hint from the Foundational Ethos, and a rather bigger hint from Optimizer!Lilly:
benefits of enhancing mental frameworks
Baseline humans had certainly become several orders of magnitude more powerful since the commencement of the Plan, but it would still be foolish to shape an artefact around one of the girl's mortal concepts. One day the indivine would equal their patrons, but not today.
Humans have become significantly "more powerful", somehow. It's certainly not physical strength. The two obvious hypotheses are:
- Their ability to use ethos
- The unexpectedly large size of the soul
Either way, the nature of the "Plan" is made clear: conflict in order to force artificial evolution upon the remainder of humanity, so as to eventually turn them into divine-equivalent. (This can be compared to selective breeding of desired traits, but with a cage match to filter out the weak.)
Presumably, baseline-humanity wasn't powerful enough to accomplish the divine's purposes, and so they are breeding a new "divine humanity" in order to... combat stagnation? Serve as a military? Be farmed as divine cattle?
The most likely guess, to me, is to increase the divine population without making both Angels/Demons increasingly powerful (which would lead to increased instability should a conflict occur). Recall: with every angel seems to be birthed an equally powerful infernal
, and the population of neutral divines seems, as of yet, comparatively tiny ???
can no longer find the evidence of this. This would explain why the 6th Era quote was at the end of the "Angels/Demons heading toward peace" interlude: it showcased the limits of said peace, and hinted at the new Plan to surpass said limits.
So why the low-tech society with comparatively tiny populace? For one thing, with powerful technology there would be no selection pressure towards personal ethos power--development would go into better guns and warships instead. We may even surmise that the tech level is being kept intentionally low, in order to facilitate said pressures (hopefully, the divine are too distracted to do anything about it once we
start R&D). For another, it's more difficult to evolve the traits of a larger population; serious selection pressures would be needed in order to make favored
genes traits dominant throughout the population--pressures which would, in the end, probably destabilize the population back to medieval levels regardless.
Once a viable population of "divine humanity" has been established, the selection pressures can be removed, and the species allowed to grow as normal.
Finally, what happened to the quadrillions of baseline, post-scarcity humanity? Two obvious (and not mutually-exclusive) hypotheses:
- Some kind of disaster that ended the 5th era
- The Flower; it was created as a "boring eternity" (read: heaven) for the remainder of the baseline mortals.
...
Addendum: this is strong evidence that something about ethos (their power level or even the ethos themselves) are inheritable, hence also evidence for the "power is amassed through strong family ethos" hypothesis.
Addendum 2: Lamarckian inheritance is also a strong possibility, given the attention seemingly given to powerful ethos development while alive
Addendum 3:
Also a plausible rationale: developing fighters against the Maw. I myself get the impression that the Maw is much newer than the Plan (Evie's monologue; and also, would there really be a calm 6th Era proposal measuring progress in milennia?), but could be.
Addendum 4: Power improvement through gravitas (and conflict, in particular) is additional evidence of the Plan's objectives--assuming that it was designed rather than inherent.
