No, it's the religious reverence for the Consolat and the Secrets. Anyone is allowed to exist before they access a Secret because they're not treading on the Consulat's gift. Citation:
The Shiplords don't do what they do when they do because they've done a utilitarian calculation and determined that this is the best way to keep the universe going. They do what they do when they do because cults gonna cult.
Well, we now know that the most similar thing to Practice is the Consolat's grand act of rewriting the laws of physics to build in the Secrets. And that was ten million years ago or so, and there's no sign of the batteries running down on the Secrets. So I'm cautiously optimistic that this kind of thing is self-powering or otherwise stable.
Not very, but that's because the human perspective in-setting has specifically been soul-edited extensively.
Where are the people lining up to try and patch the secrets? Has shiplord society grown so nihilistic that the concept of patching the secrets would be viewed as a direct attack on their waifu?
As a bag in our toolbox that's better than genocide? Sure, but I really don't think that it should ever be used. If a species is freakish enough to demand soul editing then they probably shouldn't have the tech base to stack rocks stop another.
It might not be their real reason, but it is their excuse.
I got the impression that they just don't think it's possible for a shiplord to do, and they don't trust any non-shiplord to do it right.
Well, I'm trying to be generous to @Enthusiast#117 and posit that the basic argument given is correct- that there is a realistic danger of universal destruction from isolated individuals deciding to blow up reality and that stopping this is worth paying nearly any price.
They've got millions of years of experience doing neither.
Then they're no longer fighting for the preservation of the universe. They're just racial supremacists. We know how to handle those. The hope is that some fraction of shiplord society is not that far gone.
I mean, if that's their response, then it's war to the knife I suppose.
This isn't exactly true. Suicide comes from the intent to no longer exist. A species that goes Uninvolved does so with the intent to continue existing while escaping a world they can no longer accept living in. The cost of doing so is enormous, as the individuals of the species do in fact die, but they die to ensure that some part of themselves lives on instead of being completely annihilated.
I wasn't really envisioning a handheld device.
I'm not trying to say it should be a basic right, I'm just pointing out that people are legitimately motivated to pursue technologies that would enable individuals to build much larger things than handheld devices.
Because they can divert resources towards stopping the crazy ones. The more resources total in a system, the more bad that is done, sure, but there's also more resources to do good.
That's where the old SL approach of 'trust but verify' wasn't so bad at all. And there needs to be some system in place because we know about one example in game where a race pressed the big red button - without the SLs interference there wouldn't be a humanity 2.0 around - and another one went 'eat it all'. So trust only doesn't suffice.
It would be both too much and too little, frankly; what the Zlathbu were trying to do was create a star lifter, essentially a way to lift thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of planetary masses of spent fuel (helium and heavier elements; Sol for instance has ~95,000 Earths worth of spent fuel, mostly in the form of helium) from a still-burning star, enough to eventually create a Dyson Sphere. A planet-killer wouldn't be enough; a star killer would but I contend that's not an acceptable use of force in any circumstance where we're not already talking about other star killers already being deployed or evidence of imminent reality erasure.
A star lifter combined with the Fourth Secret (transmutation of the elements) and the Sixth (near-arbitrary manipulation of the matter thus transmuted) would be pretty easily weaponizable into anything you wanted, including a way to blow up stars you didn't like.
This point is kind of far afield from the context in which we were originally discussing it. The original topic was "treaty ban on weapons of cosmic destruction." Either star-destroying weapons would be banned by such a treaty, or they wouldn't. If they wouldn't, the question of what protocols would be in place to limit their use is kind of irrelevant even if it's an important subject to resolve separately. If they would, then even having a procedure for deciding to use the things (and research and build them, naturally) would entirely defeat the purpose of the treaty by raising the possibility that under the 'right' conditions we might choose to research, build, and use the other types of proscribed weapons.
We could go for the exclusive club solution where some have these weapons and make sure nobody else does ...
You're having a different conversation than the person you're responding to. Remember how that one Shiplord said they couldn't include the Uninvolved because that would mean trusting them? That is the kind of trust being discussed. Nobody is suggesting just using the honor system for limiting superweapon proliferation. What's being suggested is that humanity doesn't have to prevent reality bomb construction alone, because most other people also want reality to keep existing and can be expected to take real, actual, sensible, productive steps towards that goal.
That still puts them in a different category than vacuum collapse bombs, which nobody ever has a reason to build ever.
No. Star killers should be banned, operative word should. Mass casualties weapons are bad for different reasons to universe enders.
My understanding, which I admittedly don't remember the source of, is that there's not really an "if" with Lumens. They're not like the Death Star, which can be pointed at a battleship if you feel like it, they just make the star go boom.
There is no variable yield on a Lumen, no. They're also one of the only ways that you're ever going to be able to kill Shiplord stellar convertors.
