The Secrets' Crusade

[Simon_Jester]

The light bubble from the madmen in their own neighbouring galaxy, however, certainly may reach them and ruin their whole week.

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True, but not 'our' fault if 'we' are the ones proposing to blow up everything in our forward light cone only.

 

[Faraway-R]

These are not the actions of free people, but a servus slave rebellion against their oppressors. In other words this was a violent rebellion of academics against what they saw as their minds' oppressors. Think Glenn Greenwald, but as an entire race of people and having access to Kardashev Type 2 technology.

Basically when one strips away the metaphor of science fiction this story is about industrialized education and how it limits the development of the minds being educated to what the makers of the system think is being worthwhile. Like say how our current society has a problem with technical studies being underrepresented because everyone thinks a university diploma is necessary for a good job.

Like right now, if they haven't died or retired, the production of experimental chemical vessels depends on a literal handful of people in the US because their job isn't well regarded enough for it to exis

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No, they were both paranoid and narcissistic enough that they were willing to burn the universe if the Shiplords did not give them what they thought was their due. Anyone willing to use an omnicidal weapon like that is not someone you can trust to see that limits exist. Because the only way to test such a weapon is to risk destroying everything.

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I am with Lightwhispers on this.

The way Shiplords presented the tale of Gysian is this, when reduced to essentials:

1) The Gysian people were smart and inquisitive
2) The Shiplords were unwilling to tell the specific nuances of Secret use to the Gysians, for (in hindsight) reasons of being entirely too dangerous to apply to Reality as they know it.
3) The Gysian people both dug deep into SCIENCE to find the answers they seek despite Shiplords refusing to answer them, and also begin amassing fleets and armies for the war. They complete their doomsday devices.
4) Finally, when confronted by the Shiplords, they activate the doomsday device and nearly destroy the Universe. Notably, they have already brought the doomsday device into the range of Shiplords' Core worlds.



What wasn't said is the reason why the Gysians decided that arming themselves was the correct way to go about things.

It may be that they have expected the Shiplords to try and stop them from completing the collapse initiators by force. So it could have been a form of self-defense towards the expected conflict.

But... The facts are - they decided that crossing the line and developing collapse initiators, an act that they were certain would force the Shiplords into conflict with them, was the correct way to go about things, as opposed to... Not doing that.

The facts are - they readily brought (scaled way way way up) an armed thermonuclear device to the Shiplords' Capital, then detonated it once confronted and - not even shot at yet - but only demanded they cease and desist.

For all I know, Gysians are like the Hjivin turned out to be - desiring to be the hegemons of the galaxy. And this was to be their actual opening move - eradicating vast swathes of the Galaxy and crippling the Shiplords for the war to come.


To use modern/recent geopolitics, you can see this as the OTHER possible outcome of Cuban Missile Crisis, writ large. As the still possible outcome of the NATO military bloc creeping ever closer to the borders of Russia and plopping down military bases (and quite likely their nuclear missiles/missile launch systems) ever closer to Moscow.


Modern geopolitics aside, this is eerily similar to how the Zlathbu conflict played out (the first Sorrow that we visited). Different only in that with Zlathbu, the cause for the continued refusal for disarmament is readily clear (Zlathbu got the Shiplord "welcome" as Humanity knows it). And the fact that with Zlathbu, the Shiplords were already willing to stop them before the Zlathbu could get truly going.

 

[MTB]

Another thing: weren't we told 'teaching secrets is problematic' - not because of the content, but because the teaching precludes the understanding of the secret.

 

[Faraway-R]

Another thing: weren't we told 'teaching secrets is problematic' - not because of the content, but because the teaching precludes the understanding of the secret.

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Noooot quite.

It's been made apparent, though not spelled out verbatim, that Secrets have to be earned. They cannot be given.

IIRC we as in Humanity had it very easy solving the Fifth Secret (gravity) after dealing with the Tribute Fleet because we won the rights to the Secret as spoils of war, or so it was discussed in the previous thread... I think. Unless I forgot things.

But we had to drop the effector for the Third Secret and begin working out the Secret from the first principles because we got that effector without effort of our own, as a gift freely given.



Pertaining the situation I expect the Gysians already had access to 1 and 5 when they were asking how to blend them together, they had already earned the rights to the Secrets themselves.

 

[Dmol8]

I'd argue that that's kinda a reach here. The Shiplords, like any teacher, were trying to keep children away from knowledge that they didn't feel they were ready to deal with - and indeed were not at some level as this update shows. I've said before that what the Secrets are capable of is a lot more than you've seen on screen. You've seen different aspects of that in each of the Sorrows so far, and this one is no different. Except that once a collapse gets beyond, y'know, a few stellar volumes? You need to pump enough energy to incinerate a galaxy into the space to stabilise it. And you have no idea if the Uninvolved are even capable of that. There are limits.

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Alright since I have a problem with communicating ideas to people I'll try to be as blunt as possible:

The very concept of a teacher as an institution we as a species have and have had it for most of Human history is that of a slavemaster that breaks in children so they are useful to society. Teaching as a concept in humanity originated among parents passing onto their children the skills they thought their children needed and not all of the skills they've gained or all the skill their children wanted to gain. Then as civilizations started to appear a dedicated teacher job developed to do the same.

Now let me be clear an example of a good helpful teacher can be found throughout history in any place you care to look, but I'm talking about a concept of what teaching as an institution is for a civilization and not the exceptions to the rule people like to hold up as an ideal all teachers should be/strive for.

So not the teacher that inspires their student, but the teacher that shows up and only does their job uncaring of the state their class is in or worse very much caring about the state of their class in a missionary kind of way. Those are way more common and a lot less memorable than the good teachers.

That is what this entire First Sorrow part of the story brought to mind. As in this is what the Shiplords were before they jumped off the deep and into being the galactic abusers they are today. They were not good teachers to begin with.

The Gysians are the civilizational equivalent of a school shooter building a nuke and threatening to blow up the school board with it. Genocidely/Omnicidely out of line, but the underlying problem wasn't solved by whatever the Second Sorrow turns out to be. Because the problem was that the environment itself was encouraging school shootings and instead of figuring out what laws should be made to change the environment the teachers decided that they need to turn the school into a boarding school, then into a prison and then into a concentration camp while not once checking outside of the school for negative stressors and instead introducing new ones in their school as time went on.

*crosses arms*
Hunh.
Industrialized education only keeps what it values and discards the rest?...*frowns*
Counterpoint- that notion isn't really born of the industrial revolution, I think. Or rather...
I'm not seeing a difference in how we're educated today, versus the means of the past, in an idealogical sense? Like...
A Roman Legionnaire might learn to napkin math logistics, or a Chinese noble from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Era might learn how to eyeball how many troops a province of a certain level of population can raise without starving but I bet they wouldn't be nearly as connected to the knowledge the other holds, or value it as much- the Roman because his decision-making of how to run an army is less likely to think of how to handle peacetime, and the Chinese man because the country is, apparently super fertile and thus easy to feed it's population.
In short, it's not about modern advancement, it's about idealogical blindspots, and those will happen, as far as I can tell, under just about ANY system of education.

Now, I CAN see the Shiplords being terrible teachers in the vein of 'the pain helps them learn.' when really the pain is simply helping them to parrot the answers you've trained them to give. The Shiplords, are thus implied to lack proper Empathy for the whole 'Teachers of the Galaxy' role they've taken because they're doubling down on the severity of the pain in their lessons, but they don't REALIZE that. Possibly because they figure if they could tank the pain, so could their students...
But their age blinds them. And with things like the Sorrows being cases where the Shiplords take the pain of the decisions of others upon themselves, they fail themselves by injecting so much pain into their own culture they're basically a wounded animal lashing out against anyone else whenever something triggers them. I'm guessing the Shiplords nearly killed themselves with something like a Cuban missle crisis, but were so terrified of what happened that once the Gysian here pressed their trauma button, with actually FIRING the nuke, the Shiplords were too terrified to think straight afterwards, and their fear took hold. And every Sorrow since, the Shiplords have basically doubled down on letting their fear run away with them, until the present day of humanity.
'We must teach them so they don't make the same mistake we nearly did.'
'we must show them the fruits of their errors before it's too late.'
'we cannot allow them the chance to make the great mistake.'
'it is imperative that we are the uncontested super-power, so that no one may ever unleash the greatest of horrors upon the Galaxy.'
...I don't think I got the escalation quite right in my example, but that's basically it in a nutshell.

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Yeah pretty much this.

In other words, they're uninvolved because the Shiplords insist, very persuasively, that they should be uninvolved.

There always was an element of "Don't meddle with mortal affairs" in there, but before the Shiplords did what they did, I expect that was more along the lines of "Don't needlessly meddle in the affairs of other nations; it doesn't typically work." Besides, the Shiplords made better teachers anyway, just for being less arcane. This is me speculating, by the way; but we've already seen some of how it changed over time.

And @Dmol8 –

I can tell you, with close to 100% certainty, that this story isn't a metaphor for anything. It just isn't. It's not about any form of education. It's about the Shiplords, and Humanity, and Practice... and what was built on those.

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The Meta-text is always there even and especially when it is not intended.

And what Practice and the Secrets are built on. But we're not quite there yet.

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Some sort of galactic/universal library left by precursors that is running in the background that gives races authority over the secrets when they do the right set of things or something like that.

No, they were both paranoid and narcissistic enough that they were willing to burn the universe if the Shiplords did not give them what they thought was their due. Anyone willing to use an omnicidal weapon like that is not someone you can trust to see that limits exist. Because the only way to test such a weapon is to risk destroying everything.

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The only semi-reasonable explanation I can think of is "they were utterly unaware of the mechanism, just that they could build a fancy weapon to this design", because if there was any awareness that they'd created a false vacuum bomb, even if they thought they could control it, actually lighting it off would be recklessly irresponsible for anything short of imminent apocalypse. If you have a controlled false vacuum bomb, it seems reasonable that one failure mode would be uncontrolled false vacuum bomb, so assuming you don't just shelve the idea for being too dangerous, it should be reserved as a final deterrence weapon.

I'll try to be generous to the Gysians, so I'll be assuming they had good reason to believe they could contain a localized false vacuum collapse, but somehow blanked on "but what if containment fails?"

I don't get the impression that the Gysians were under immediate threat of being exterminated outright, so the most bellicose response which still approximated reason would be "back off or we use it".

I can sort of understand being afraid of the Shiplords and looking into this thing the Shiplords were being reticent about, but at this point, I'm kind of blaming Gysian leadership for being unreasonable. I don't think the Shiplords of this very early era were tyrannical or otherwise justifying paranoia to the point of opening a shooting war with an untested superweapon.

The modern Shiplords, sure; the threat that modern Shiplords pose to any given Tributary race is much closer to the immediately existential. I'd still argue against the use of a controlled false vacuum bomb, even if the engineers pinky-swear they can totally control it, but I can see where a race with a less inclusive monkeysphere (i.e. much less willing to consider aliens as people) might use it when the Tribute fleets roll around. Were I part of that decision, I would argue that the risk of an uncontrolled false vacuum collapse endangers not just our own species, but the entire universe in perpetuity*, and that bad as the Shiplords are, they're still not as bad as a false vacuum collapse.

*Or, to be specific, all species which rely on the Higgs field staying as-is, which live close enough to the Milky Way galaxy that the light-bubble from a false vacuum collapse will reach them. Most galaxies in the observable universe would be spared, as space is expanding faster than light, so they will never know anything about our actions here and now; only ancient light from a much younger Milky Way will ever reach them.

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I am with Lightwhispers on this.

The way Shiplords presented the tale of Gysian is this, when reduced to essentials:

1) The Gysian people were smart and inquisitive
2) The Shiplords were unwilling to tell the specific nuances of Secret use to the Gysians, for (in hindsight) reasons of being entirely too dangerous to apply to Reality as they know it.
3) The Gysian people both dug deep into SCIENCE to find the answers they seek despite Shiplords refusing to answer them, and also begin amassing fleets and armies for the war. They complete their doomsday devices.
4) Finally, when confronted by the Shiplords, they activate the doomsday device and nearly destroy the Universe. Notably, they have already brought the doomsday device into the range of Shiplords' Core worlds.



What wasn't said is the reason why the Gysians decided that arming themselves was the correct way to go about things.

It may be that they have expected the Shiplords to try and stop them from completing the collapse initiators by force. So it could have been a form of self-defense towards the expected conflict.

But... The facts are - they decided that crossing the line and developing collapse initiators, an act that they were certain would force the Shiplords into conflict with them, was the correct way to go about things, as opposed to... Not doing that.

The facts are - they readily brought (scaled way way way up) an armed thermonuclear device to the Shiplords' Capital, then detonated it once confronted and - not even shot at yet - but only demanded they cease and desist.

For all I know, Gysians are like the Hjivin turned out to be - desiring to be the hegemons of the galaxy. And this was to be their actual opening move - eradicating vast swathes of the Galaxy and crippling the Shiplords for the war to come.


To use modern/recent geopolitics, you can see this as the OTHER possible outcome of Cuban Missile Crisis, writ large. As the still possible outcome of the NATO military bloc creeping ever closer to the borders of Russia and plopping down military bases (and quite likely their nuclear missiles/missile launch systems) ever closer to Moscow.


Modern geopolitics aside, this is eerily similar to how the Zlathbu conflict played out (the first Sorrow that we visited). Different only in that with Zlathbu, the cause for the continued refusal for disarmament is readily clear (Zlathbu got the Shiplord "welcome" as Humanity knows it). And the fact that with Zlathbu, the Shiplords were already willing to stop them before the Zlathbu could get truly going.

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The Uninvolved existed and were being created by the Shiplords before the First Sorrow:

"We were teachers before. Explorers and artists and scientists, seeking to share all the wonders we had found among the stars. We saw the rise of many, and their passing into the beyond in peace. We understood the Secrets better than any of our peers, however, and so were careful in what we taught."

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so while the Shiplord didn't drive races to what amounts to mass suicide to reincarnate as God-Emperors Uninvolved out a loss of hope they were already basically being a cult that made it their mission to teach new races as they rose and then watch them pass into the beyond in peace. Which you know the Gysians might have objected on being brainwashed into becoming an Uninvolved precisely because they were planners who questioned and might have figured out that the Shiplords long term had wanted them dead and gone from the galaxy. Or the Shiplords actually at one point felt great grief for not being able to become Uninvolved until the Sorrows warped their view into it being white man's their burden.

Remember we are not talking with Shiplord leadership here, but mausoleum curators.

 

[Lightwhispers]

The very concept of a teacher as an institution we as a species have and have had it for most of Human history is that of a slavemaster that breaks in children so they are useful to society. Teaching as a concept in humanity originated among parents passing onto their children the skills they thought their children needed and not all of the skills they've gained or all the skill their children wanted to gain. Then as civilizations started to appear a dedicated teacher job developed to do the same.

Now let me be clear an example of a good helpful teacher can be found throughout history in any place you care to look, but I'm talking about a concept of what teaching as an institution is for a civilization and not the exceptions to the rule people like to hold up as an ideal all teachers should be/strive for.

So not the teacher that inspires their student, but the teacher that shows up and only does their job uncaring of the state their class is in or worse very much caring about the state of their class in a missionary kind of way. Those are way more common and a lot less memorable than the good teachers.

That is what this entire First Sorrow part of the story brought to mind. As in this is what the Shiplords were before they jumped off the deep and into being the galactic abusers they are today. They were not good teachers to begin with.

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Your first sentence here is a profound misunderstanding of the history of education. It is also profoundly insulting. If it were correct, and if the Shiplords were that kind of teacher, you might have a point. But Snowfire, as the creator/chronicler of this world, has said that you are wrong.
As such, trying to say that you know better than Snowfire about the history of this world, is just silly.

 

[Dmol8]

Your first sentence here is a profound misunderstanding of the history of education. It is also profoundly insulting. If it were correct, and if the Shiplords were that kind of teacher, you might have a point. But Snowfire, as the creator/chronicler of this world, has said that you are wrong.
As such, trying to say that you know better than Snowfire about the history of this world, is just silly.

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Could you clarify how it is both a profound misunderstanding of the history of education? And why it is profoundly insulting? I'm honestly lost as to how it could be insulting.

Also where exactly did Snowfire say I was wrong? All that reply said was:

I'd argue that that's kinda a reach here. The Shiplords, like any teacher, were trying to keep children away from knowledge that they didn't feel they were ready to deal with - and indeed were not at some level as this update shows. I've said before that what the Secrets are capable of is a lot more than you've seen on screen. You've seen different aspects of that in each of the Sorrows so far, and this one is no different. Except that once a collapse gets beyond, y'know, a few stellar volumes? You need to pump enough energy to incinerate a galaxy into the space to stabilise it. And you have no idea if the Uninvolved are even capable of that. There are limits.

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that my statement of:

Look from a Watsonian perspective it's about failing as teachers/uplifters of civilizations because the Shiplords were already too abusive to races before the sorrows and now we have proof from the horse's mouth:

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was kind of a reach. I've clarified what I'm talking about and now if the OP says I'm wrong...well OK then I'm wrong. Back to the drawing board with my ideas then.

 

[Lightwhispers]

Could you clarify how it is both a profound misunderstanding of the history of education? And why it is profoundly insulting? I'm honestly lost as to how it could be insulting.

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You're generalizing the worst forms of institutionalized education and declaring that they are the standard throughout history. This is insulting to everyone who has worked in education.

 

[Dmol8]

You're generalizing the worst forms of institutionalized education and declaring that they are the standard throughout history. This is insulting to everyone who has worked in education.

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From what I know of institutionalized education those worst forms were the standard until like a few hundred years ago. Can you point me to some form of institutionalized education from like at least 500 years ago that wasn't horrifically abusive in some way?

 

[Shard]

From what I know of institutionalized education those worst forms were the standard until like a few hundred years ago. Can you point me to some form of institutionalized education from like at least 500 years ago that wasn't horrifically abusive in some way?

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Should it not be your responsibility to definitively provide the ironclad citations and evidence to prove the outrageous claims you posit, and not the responsibility of the person rebutting it to demonstrate otherwise?

 

[Dmol8]

Should it not be your responsibility to definitively provide the ironclad citations and evidence to prove the outrageous claims you posit, and not the responsibility of the person rebutting it to demonstrate otherwise?

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Wait but I'm not the one making the outrageous claims? Like between Corporal Punishment not being eliminated from schools yet and school systems having a history of being racist and abusive to anyone not white and male and even then to them if you go back as soon as the 19th century exactly how is my claim the outrageous one?

 

[Shard]

Wait but I'm not the one making the outrageous claims? Like between Corporal Punishment not being eliminated from schools yet and school systems having a history of being racist and abusive to anyone not white and male and even then to them if you go back as soon as the 19th century exactly how is my claim the outrageous one?

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Your claim is that 'for most of human history, institutionalized education is horrifically abusive with teachers being like slavemasters'. That's a huge claim, especially when considering that human history is, like, 12,000 years+ long. Not only that, it's a major thread derailment because this essentially uncited assertion is then used to assert that Snowfire's fictional Shiplords of the past which were then looked upon favorably for some reason follows this paradigm when there is no logical method to actually connect the two.

I might as well assert that for most of human history doctors and medicine were ineffective, then use that as a basis to argue that humanity and other species in practice verse has no effective medical capability, and that we should consequently avoid doctors of any sort.

 

[Coda]

It should be noted that institutionalized education wasn't even a thing 500 years ago. Institutionalized education in the way we know it today is a product of the Industrial Revolution. For the vast majority of history, education followed a mentor/protege model. Someone would accept a younger person or a small group of younger people and teach them the skills they would need to know in order to do a particular job. This was not a master/slave kind of relationship. It was a lot closer to a parent/child kind of relationship. Yes, this could be abusive at times, especially because the student represented the teacher's legacy and a poor student could appear to be a failing of the mentor. But that doesn't describe a universal truth of the history of education.

Secrets in this model were primarily to protect the mentor's business, seeking to prevent competition in the market. Teaching a special technique to a protege early on ran the risk of the protege running off to start their own business or leaking it to someone who could coopt your customers. In this sense, it was selfish, and you could potentially argue it was abusive in that it was intentionally holding back knowledge from someone who was equipped to use it. Dangerous techniques that depended on earlier techniques weren't exactly secret, because the fact that it could be done wasn't exactly something you could hide. The mentor might reasonably withhold information on how to perform it until the protege was ready, but you can be sure an explanation of the risks would be made quite clear. In this domain, the concept of an infohazard where the knowledge in and of itself was dangerous without preparation is an extremely modern invention.


Religious education was a little closer to the description in question than vocational education was. There were fundamentals that everyone would be expected to know, with failures potentially having very harsh penalties, so children were exposed to what they needed to know from a young age and instructed in it as a part of growing up. And religious education is particularly more relevant to the discussion as quite a number of historical religions (and even a few modern ones) had secrets forbidden from the uninitiated. These were sometimes couched as infohazards as a way of instilling fear, but it's quite unlikely that they were actually infohazardous to the recipient. (Hazardous to the religion should a nonbeliever find out about it, on the other hand, is entirely possible.) But even so, this was not (at an institutional level) a master/slave kind of relationship, and the means of education in and of themselves can't be said to be universally problematic.


To loop back around... The kinds of issues you're describing are far more recent than you seem to give them credit for. "Schools" for children (as opposed to those for adults) are almost entirely unattested before the 1700s. School systems as a widespread institution are even more recent, only really cropping up around the early 1900s (that is, the 20th century, not the 19th).

Racism within a society is likewise a comparatively modern thing that was only really made possible by the mobility granted by modern(ish) transportation infrastructure -- before that, racism was between the people who belonged to your society, and the people who did not belong to your society. Institutions would by and large simply exclude those from outside one's society, so prejudices within the institutions would more likely be more a matter of favoritism and personal opinions rather than racism. And the dividing lines don't align with how we perceive them today, either; today we consider Irish people to be white, but they were the targets of racial discrimination in the US for a long time because they were seen as outsiders, newcomers that would never have had the chance to try to join society before the rise of trans-Atlantic shipping.

In short: You're overgeneralizing.

 

[Dmol8]

Your claim is that 'for most of human history, institutionalized education is horrifically abusive with teachers being like slavemasters'. That's a huge claim, especially when considering that human history is, like, 12,000 years+ long. Not only that, it's a major thread derailment because this essentially uncited assertion is then used to assert that Snowfire's fictional Shiplords of the past which were then looked upon favorably for some reason follows this paradigm when there is no logical method to actually connect the two.

I might as well assert that for most of human history doctors and medicine were ineffective, then use that as a basis to argue that humanity and other species in practice verse has no effective medical capability, and that we should consequently avoid doctors of any sort.

Click to shrink...

It should be noted that institutionalized education wasn't even a thing 500 years ago. Institutionalized education in the way we know it today is a product of the Industrial Revolution. For the vast majority of history, education followed a mentor/protege model. Someone would accept a younger person or a small group of younger people and teach them the skills they would need to know in order to do a particular job. This was not a master/slave kind of relationship. It was a lot closer to a parent/child kind of relationship. Yes, this could be abusive at times, especially because the student represented the teacher's legacy and a poor student could appear to be a failing of the mentor. But that doesn't describe a universal truth of the history of education.

Secrets in this model were primarily to protect the mentor's business, seeking to prevent competition in the market. Teaching a special technique to a protege early on ran the risk of the protege running off to start their own business or leaking it to someone who could coopt your customers. In this sense, it was selfish, and you could potentially argue it was abusive in that it was intentionally holding back knowledge from someone who was equipped to use it. Dangerous techniques that depended on earlier techniques weren't exactly secret, because the fact that it could be done wasn't exactly something you could hide. The mentor might reasonably withhold information on how to perform it until the protege was ready, but you can be sure an explanation of the risks would be made quite clear. In this domain, the concept of an infohazard where the knowledge in and of itself was dangerous without preparation is an extremely modern invention.


Religious education was a little closer to the description in question than vocational education was. There were fundamentals that everyone would be expected to know, with failures potentially having very harsh penalties, so children were exposed to what they needed to know from a young age and instructed in it as a part of growing up. And religious education is particularly more relevant to the discussion as quite a number of historical religions (and even a few modern ones) had secrets forbidden from the uninitiated. These were sometimes couched as infohazards as a way of instilling fear, but it's quite unlikely that they were actually infohazardous to the recipient. (Hazardous to the religion should a nonbeliever find out about it, on the other hand, is entirely possible.) But even so, this was not (at an institutional level) a master/slave kind of relationship, and the means of education in and of themselves can't be said to be universally problematic.


To loop back around... The kinds of issues you're describing are far more recent than you seem to give them credit for. "Schools" for children (as opposed to those for adults) are almost entirely unattested before the 1700s. School systems as a widespread institution are even more recent, only really cropping up around the early 1900s (that is, the 20th century, not the 19th).

Racism within a society is likewise a comparatively modern thing that was only really made possible by the mobility granted by modern(ish) transportation infrastructure -- before that, racism was between the people who belonged to your society, and the people who did not belong to your society. Institutions would by and large simply exclude those from outside one's society, so prejudices within the institutions would more likely be more a matter of favoritism and personal opinions rather than racism. And the dividing lines don't align with how we perceive them today, either; today we consider Irish people to be white, but they were the targets of racial discrimination in the US for a long time because they were seen as outsiders, newcomers that would never have had the chance to try to join society before the rise of trans-Atlantic shipping.

In short: You're overgeneralizing.

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Ah I see. Let me make myself crystal clear the relationship between parent and child in humanity is a slavemaster/slave relationship for most of human history. A parent can choose to not be a slavemaster and treat their child as a person from the start, but a depressingly large amount of people throughout history choose to abuse the instinctual trust of a child in order to shape them to their own wishes.

Why are you separating religious education from the rest? For most of human history religious education was just plain education with secular education separated from religion only being a recent thing. Like during the Enlightenment.

Likewise anti-semitism is as old as classical history at the very least. And plenty of ethnicities/tribes/clans were regarded as the lesser by more successful people simply because luck was and is seen as an moral arbiter called fate.

The Irish were outright seen as working for the devil because the US has a long history anti-catholicism to the point of sometimes being lynched. The whole Irish are white thing is only from 20th century onward.

I'm not overgeneralizing. You're taking the divide between secular and religious education back past the point it did not historically exist.

And to put this back on topic:

My point is that Shiplords don't have a secular education system. They were and are missionaries of the Secrets seeking to help other species reach/evolve into Uninvolved as they see that state as the goal of life. There is a lot of Childhood's End in the genes of this quest when you analyze it.

 

[Snowfire]

*sigh* and now it's time for us to pull out the pin on this.

None of this has any place here, and whilst we think we're usually quite open to discourse this is has blasted so far beyond the bounds of reasonability that it's in another galaxy.

Please stop this discussion. It is making us incredibly uncomfortable to see you apply this reasoning to our material to the point of being actively damaging to our desire to write.

 

[Dmol8]

Fair enough. I'm stopping. I do have a write in though I'm not sure how to phrase it or if it is needed:

Basically what were the Shiplords like before the Sorrows warped them? The Hearthguard is wistful for the good old days and unlike mortals there are members that still recall what those were like because they lived trough them. Is this even the right point to ask that question?

 

[Snowfire]

Ask me tomorrow when I'm not wanting to set things on fire.

 

[Dmol8]

Ask me tomorrow when I'm not wanting to set things on fire.

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There are days when I hate myself for being myself instead of just being. They are rare, but this is one of them. My apologies to you and my apologies to all of you for getting you to that point.

 

[Tirfarthuan]

So, it took me a bit of thinking to realize, but this isn't the Gysian system then? I had the basic assumption that it was given how the prior Sorrows were essentially tombstones for species, but this is the system they snuck into to put their vacuum collapse bomb, distant from Gysian space and close to Shiplord systems. Unless I'm misunderstanding?

In which case... what did the Shiplords do after this? Did they manage to get through to Gysians, or not? Or was this the first time they stopped trying, and destroyed their opponents in totality, believing the Gysians incompatible with a safe universe and the actions to fix that a grim necessity?

What did they do? What lesson did they decide this taught them, at the time and then in hindsight?

[X] Vega seeks to find a place within the great gallery at the centre of the station where she might tap into the well of remembrance. Amanda will go with her, to support the Harmonial, and seek answers to Mir's question more directly.

 

[MTB]

So, it took me a bit of thinking to realize, but this isn't the Gysian system then?

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Why? They used the weapon, Uninvolved stabilized the area, SL created the containment sphere. My reading at least ...

 

[Shard]

In theory, couldn't the False Vacuum be reversed by application of sufficient energy, precisely the same energy released by the False Vacuum expansion?

 

[MTB]

In theory, couldn't the False Vacuum be reversed by application of sufficient energy, precisely the same energy released by the False Vacuum expansion?

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I think that's the part where 'several galaxies worth of energy' was mentioned.

 

[Shard]

I think that's the part where 'several galaxies worth of energy' was mentioned.

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Right, but that amount of energy should already exist within the False Vacuum to begin with. In principle it could be used to seal itself shut.

e: Obviously it might be impossible to access the energy released by the false vacuum energy explosion to begin with of course.

 

[Tirfarthuan]

Why? They used the weapon, Uninvolved stabilized the area, SL created the containment sphere. My reading at least ...

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Because of this:

"What came next was predictable." Rinel swept one hand in a small gesture, and the pale colour of Gysian space flashed a threatening red at its edges. "Until it abruptly wasn't." Close to the heart of the galaxy, a single system flared into sharp, citrine light.

"The Gysian had dug into the Secrets searching for a way to force our hand, or to unravel the mystery they pursued. They found both. At the time, we saw only the massing of fleets, the armament of millions, the actions of war that we knew and could prepare for." Rinel shook his head, the movement endlessly weary. "By the time we realised what they'd done beneath that screen of expected action, they already had a functional prototype in range of our core worlds."

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My interpretation could be wrong, but the Gysians seemed to have set up the station with the vacuum collapse bomb near Shiplord space, at the system the Sorrow is now located in. That system was outside of Gysian space, and close to Shiplord worlds, which due to their belief that the vacuum collapse would be self-limiting, they thought would give them a powerful strike against the Shiplords without destroying themselves.

In the end, it's been indicated that the Shiplords and Uninvolved managed to intervene and stabilize things early on, hence the star the station was next to being repairable by the intervention of the Uninvolved. While there were many future consequences, and this is therefore considered the First Sorrow, it doesn't seem possible for the Gysians to have been destroyed fully by the activation of the weapon at this location, given the way things played out.

Though I could have misunderstood something.

 

[Baughn]

Right, but that amount of energy should already exist within the False Vacuum to begin with. In principle it could be used to seal itself shut.

e: Obviously it might be impossible to access the energy released by the false vacuum energy explosion to begin with of course.

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Yes, in principle the energy exists inside the expanding bubble. In practice that would be like un-scrambling an egg.

This type of vacuum collapse is, more concretely, the Higgs field dumping a lot of its energy into all its "neighbouring" fields. Those then dump into their own neighbours, and so on, spreading the same amount of energy out from existing in a single field to existing in a dozen or so.

This looks like spontaneous creation of a fairly hot soup of particles, plus the simultaneous alteration of basic physics. Physics doesn't actually change, strictly speaking, but that won't help anyone whose biology or technology is suddenly non-functional, so you can't do anything about this from the inside. Anything you want to do to stop it has to be from outside the bubble.

To stop it, you need to get the Higgs field back to the same uniform, high energy level, everywhere inside that space. You won't be able to keep whatever energy you put in it from spreading out into other fields, so really this means you have to saturate *all* the fields with a density of energy last seen in the Big Bang; so, you need a lot more energy than was there in the first place.

Or you could hide the whole thing inside a black hole.

It's unclear if this would crunch the true vacuum out of existence, or if it might restart if the hole ever evaporates. The black hole itself is stable on its own, of course, but the Shiplords aren't taking any chances.