The Plur1bus Solution
Lers of Spoi.
You have been warned.
Just a quickie for the moment, because I’m busy missing my deadline for handing in Gremlin. (I would have made it, if not for the fact that I miscalculated how long it would take someone to fall down a 37-km Higgs conduit where the gravity goes from 0.25G to 8G. Turns out it would take a couple of hours, which totally fucks the pacing and mechanism of the climax. There’s a reason action movies prefer 2-minute countdowns when their protagonists accidentally trip the bomb timer[1].)
But I’ll come up for air just this once because, like all ten or twelve of you, I’ve been watching Plur1bus. And last week’s episode reminded me of something.
I’m speaking of Alice Sheldon’s “The Screwfly Solution”, a 1977 novella that offered up—to a world in the throes of the then-nascent Star Wars phenomenon—an example of what real science fiction could do. The plot describes the rise of femicidal cults across the globe, generally under the auspices of religious dogma. (The western variant, a cult known as the Sons of Adam, is built around the belief that the Second Coming cannot occur until women are eradicated, since it was Woman who committed the Original Sin.) It’s an epistolary story, a collection of diary excerpts, news clippings, and research reports: ranging from a Vatican press release admitting that Jesus never actually said anything about women having souls, to diplomatic complaints about Japanese drift nets, wrapped around the bloated corpses of hundreds of females, posing a hazard to high-seas navigation. Those powers-that-be that haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon continue to insist that the problem is just some kind of contagious mass hysteria, a purely psychological thing best controlled by suppressing news of its existence so the hysteria doesn’t spread. Nobody pays much attention the the handful of scientists reporting that the phenomenon is correlated with global wind patterns, and appears to also manifest in other closely-related primate species. I mean, who listens to a much of elitist eggheads?
In the end, of course, the eggheads are proved right. Some airborne agent is fucking with the male sexual response, resetting the switch that redirects aggressive responses into sexual ones. Men thus afflicted manifest sexual urges through unadulterated violence. They are driven to kill rather than fuck. Adios, Humanity.
It’s a form of eco-friendly pest control, in other words. Something wants the place for themselves, but without ruining real estate values with nukes of asteroid strikes. The story takes its title from a similar campaign in which Humanity attempted to eradicate screwfly populations by messing with their reproductive dynamics.
Sheldon’s story was simultaneously one of the most powerfully feminist stories I’ve ever read—scary, but utterly non-preachy— and one of the most scientifically grounded. (A friend of mine used to study sticklebacks for a living, and was—as far as I know— the first to document exactly this kind of spousal abuse in that species. Male stickles normally face off against each other to compete for mating opportunities, then switch over to sex mode when approaching the female. Debbie observed some of them who, failing to make that switch, simply beat their mates up instead of spawning with them.)
If you’ve seen the latest episode of Plur1bus, you’ll see where I’m going with this. An alien pseudovirus has cohered virtually all of humanity into a single hive mind so ethically averse to killing that they won’t even willingly pluck an apple off a tree. For the time being, the seven-billion-odd individuals comprising this hive[2] make do by eating out of cans, collecting orchard windfall, and chowing down on human bodies that have died from natural causes. But that won’t last forever. We’re told that available food will run out in about a decade. At that point, Humanity—or at least, whatever Humanity has turned into—simply starves to death en masse.
Which makes me wonder: was this the aliens’ plan all along? I mean, what kind of agent converts an entire species into a system so pro-life that they refuse to even practice agriculture? We can argue about the logistics of how an alien species six hundred lightyears distant somehow knew enough about Human neurology back in the fifteenth century to build such a precisely targeted form of pest control (and perhaps I will, sometime further down the road). And I do not pretend to know where Vince Gilligan is going with this. But for me, it’s hard to imagine an alien agent that both has such precise and sophisticated knowledge and also doesn’t know where this Jainism-on-steroids program is ultimately going to lead.
Is there any scenario in which this is not a screwfly solution?
Postscript: And of course I just Googled “Pluribus AND Screwfly Solution” and found that some bozos on Reddit have already beaten me to this particular punch. Fine. Fuck those guys. I’m not even gonna read their posts. Although I suppose I should be gratified that the goldfish generation actually remembers the good old days.
Well, except for that episode of Archer… ↑
- Not 8.3 billion; significant numbers died during the assimilation process. ↑
“I do not pretend to know where Vince Gilligan is going with this.” By all accounts into an already-guaranteed second season, so I wouldn’t hope for anything to see much of a resolution in this one.
Does the World’s supposed protein/calorie deficit problem actually pencil out? I mean: we know the World is not averse to milking cows, and also the World wouldn’t want cows to starve, and presumably the World wouldn’t be averse to growing pasture that cows could graze on… doesn’t that go a long way toward solving the problem (at least in the medium term, after ramping up free-range dairy herds)?
I guess we have to believe that the World is squeamish about even being complicit in the eating of grass by cattle?
And come to think of it, the World said it would be willing to provide Koumba with fishing gear. If it can provide Koumba with the means to catch fish, I don’t see why it can’t provide cattle herds with access to plants (and then milk the cattle).
I believe the Screwfly Solution was an idea used in one of the episodes of Masters of Science Fiction TV series
Oh… that…
…is seriously giving me Lubin flashbacks. He seemed to have it under control, though. And women weren’t the only ones he took that impulse out on. It was a conditioned thing for him. But still, it totally reminds me of Lubin.
Thanks for the pointer, I managed to somehow miss Dr. Sheldon’s works. Some fresh reading for the holidays, yay!
Could non-aggression not be a designed feature, but an unexpected side effect? After all, maybe the engineers didn’t actually know enough about the 15th century humanity. Maybe non-aggression is an emergent feature of the Joining – larger simulation engine can afford larger, more precise simulations of the world, more precise simulations cause some military-grade empathy, because external agents simulated at this fidelity are indistinguishable from originals and any suffering inflicted on a fruit fly one inflicts on oneself as well.
Then again, hard to imagine engineers capable of remotely rewiring wetware that they have never seen before into magical transceivers, but not aware of the behavioural quirks of a truly computationally powerful consciousness.
Also, taking into account the speed of causality as it is understood, the only information the engineers could have possibly had is the information about the first half of 8th century humanity – Kepler 22b is 640 ly away, so by the time they were sending their message (in 15th century) the only information about the earth that could reach them without breaking physics should have been in transit for 640 years.
Non-aggression may or may not be a designed feature, but the show doesn’t seem to give any logical proof for how such a straightforward sentiment like non-aggression emerges from something so complex as billions of brains.
Then the logical consequences of that non-aggression are also so ill-defined: won’t you expect to kill yourself immediately just to prevent the deaths of trillions cells in the human body that will die each day? Won’t you let mosquitoes bite you? Won’t you stop eating and consuming energy entirely just so potential non-hive members can have more in the far future?
Well, i mean, the show is largely a parable, of course it doesn’t give any “proof”. Its focus is the conflict of collective vs individual and how much free will might a member of a collective have.
I gave one possible explanation for the extreme non-aggression, although a flawed one. You can come up with your own.
The “you expect to kill yourself immediately just to prevent the deaths of trillions cells in the human body” does not hold water from the point of view of the World though, because if it did, the Would would need to immediately start full eradication of life on the planet, down to bacterial, because death is an integral part of life as far as we know. But this does not happen, because eradicating death or even preventing it is not in the World’s paradigm. “Not deliberately causing death” seems to be their deal.
They think that they are deliberately causing harm by plucking an apple. How are they not deliberately causing harm by allowing new microbiome to die every day? They don’t need to kill themselves, just starve. (I realize bacteria can reproduce in our bodies, but so are new apples in nature.)
“Plucking an apple” is a deliberate act. In a convoluted way it does somehow hurt the tree, however minimally. “Allowing microbiome to die” is not an act – it’s inaction.
Even some laws make that distinction, “failure to act” to save someone is not equal to “murder”. But you seem to have a problem drawing that line.
“Allowing a microbiome to die” means doing all the actions you do to continue your survival – eating, drinking, etc. Those are deliberate.
Oh, sorry, didn’t realise you were trolling. That one’s on me, mate, I apologise.
I think that is unfair. I am more on your side of the argument, but i think he has a valid point: There is a point in radical pacifism where you HAVE to draw a line.
Because, yes, deliberately choosing to continue (or not continue) existing, necessarily at the expense of SOME life, is indeed an action.
I’m waiting for all the episodes to drop. It looks fun for definitions of fun that skew towards horror.
I would love to read your thoughts on the logistics of planning such an invasion and how the alien RNA-infected hivemind could possible work. How are two antipodal “humans” fully synced?
Another interesting thing is the hivemind as an analogy for current LLMs: all the knowledge in the world and yet can’t figure out novel concepts.
Maybe via spores – the way large networks of mycelium are synced. The syncing does have to be instantaneous, but as this is an engineered network, having multiple points of redundancy and smart routing could make it seem almost instantaneous
Screw Plusibus, did you just say Gremlin is almost ready?
Well, it’s currently 3K words too long for the contracted novella length, the climax scene has yet to be written (see “37-k drop down a Higgs conduit) and there are a couple of stitching passages between sections I hope to finish in the next couple of days. I still don’t know how I’m going to fix the climax, though, which is, you know. Not unimportant.
Writer’s job apparently shares a lot of painful similarities with software engineering…
Stick a kludge into it and see if it works.
This is probably too simplistic, but have you considered shortening the conduit? Unless 37k is sacrosanct, of course.
Eriophora is about 80km along its longitudinal axis, and the singularity that powers it is dead center. The Higgs conduit is the path along which the wormhole extrudes, so it has to be clear right along that axis. You can shave off a few k for the containment chamber and various field generators (not to mention you get up to hundreds of gees pretty quickly as you approach the core, and our guys have to at least be able to move), but beyond that, yeah. The 37k is pretty much nonnegotiable.
It’s okay, though. I think I’ve got it figured out. My big problem now is how to convey the necessary information to out protag between cyclic bouts of nausea and hallucination as the field generators keep charging and aborting.
I know I asked for a dragon once but would it be impertinent to ask for a wheelchair chase scene like in Johnny English? I’m pretty sure the conduit would be long enough.
Now, now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with requesting a dragon. Here on the Crawl, we are not judgey.
But, yeah, Physics is a wanky truculent arsehole—a pox on both its houses. Magnificent, but ya gotta takes ya licks. Probably why we use Jefferies Tubes in reality; a properly cromulent engineers’ solution.
.
BTW, for wheelchair chase scenes Wolfenstein: The New Colossus motherfusking slaps. Unflinchingly recommended*.
—
*There shall be some segfaults (not as rock-stable as New Order) but magnificent bastart owns on sheer Art alone.
Peter W. : ‘I suppose I should be gratified that the goldfish generation actually remembers the good old days.’
If it spins your beanie. Going further back, however, the setup and basic idea exactly replicates the one in Sturgeon’s To Marry Medusa/The Cosmic Rape (originally in Galaxy, August 1958, which is back in the era when Pohl & Kornbluth roamed the Earth)
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?9627
That said, I haven’t see Pluribus yet, but Vince Gilligan — generally a smart fellow — is by definition going somewhere else, because he starts where the Sturgeon ended, he’s already gone further, and there’s a second series planned.
While watching this, I was reminded of your take on hiveminds, particularly Echopraxia and The 21-Second God, and the Hogan twins and stuff. I am so glad you talked about this because I needed to rant.
I find it quite hard to accept the portrayed intelligence of the hivemind. We are shown that the brains are connected enough so it’s a single consciousness (and thus arguably a combined intellect), so stuff like this doesn’t sit right with me:
To point #3 – also considering that our immune systems are fighting back and killing germs and viruses every day would also constitute the need for self extermination.
Of course, they’ll just get John Cena to come back and explain it away by saying this kind of process is beyond their control so that, while distressing to them, it’s acceptable.
I wonder how much of this aspect of the plot is going to reply upon a clever loophole.
To add to that, imagine the death toll not just from mosquitoes, but from allowing living things like tuberculosis to flourish.
My impression from fan discussions on reddit is basically most people don’t really care about the hard sci-fi aspect of it. Among those who do they often chalk up the explanations to “it’s an alien consciousness, not a human one”.
What “hard sci-fi aspect”? This is not sci-fi, this is a fairy-tale, a parable, a myth. After thinking about it, I struggle to find any hard sci-fi elements in it. Remote construction of a biological agent to rewire humans? Bullshit. Wireless connection between people? I assume it’s based on radio, judging by the latest episode – and there’s nowhere near enough energy in any human to support radio communication, even discounting the absolute absence of any organ even remotely capable of radio receiving or transmitting. Bullshit. What else? I mean, if one wants to perceive it as sci-fi, one is bound to be disappointed, just as if one tries to read LotR as sci-fi.
Honestly, I half-expect for this parable to end with Carol being the asshole of the story and also with some cringeworthy moral, something about bright future of communism or “the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”. Although I am disappointed on that front so far, she seems likeable.
> Honestly, I half-expect for this parable to end with Carol being the asshole of the story and also with some cringeworthy moral, something about bright future of communism
Oh come on, give Vince Gilligan more credit than that.
I don’t understand their problem with fruit. If you are willing to eat an apple dropped from a tree then why not eat it when it is still on the tree? They probably should have limited their non aggression to sentient life. Of course that would still leave the problem of how to protect your food supply if you can’t kill and insects or other pests that would love to eat it.
Exactly. Fruit wants to be eaten, it’s not violence to eat it! The cells you kill by eating fruit were born to be eaten, that’s their entire reason to exist. (Though if you’re being really careful you should probably make sure to crap in a planter, or probably for industrialized humans into something that sorts the seeds out and replants them in nice compost derived from the crap with all the potential pathogens removed).
If you’re looking to extinct a species, there are better ways to do it rather than making them all starve themselves to death over the course of a decade.
If genocide was the goal, then the hivemind should have made them all kill themselves immediately (maybe they all jump into the Grand Canyon, or some other single location, so that cleanup for the invading alien army is a breeze).
I was also thinking that if the hivemind can be shut off,(as Carol thinks is possible) or perhaps temporarily suspended, then a group of individuals should be “disconnected” and then made to do the dirty work of food gathering and processing. Their reward is inclusion back into the hivemind where everything is beautiful. And from here you can manufacture all sorts of drama, as Carol pleads with the disconnected people to stay as such — some agree, some want back in to the love-fest that is a single mind.
I don’t know where Vince Gilligan is going with this, and I think it’s meant more as a character piece (Carol and her reactions) rather than a taut thriller meant to explore morality and individuality, as seen through the lens of a well thought-out hard science fiction premise.
If it is a bioweapon to destroy or weaken other technological civilizations, then its utility depends not just on its destructiveness but its safety to the party launching the weapon. To infect everyone, it needs to harness the intelligence it infects, so an expansionist hivemind that can coordinate and communicate in secret is central to its effectiveness. Ask yourself what happens if you create an expansionist hive mind but the self-destruction part of the payload doesn’t trigger? You now have a technological hivemind bent on expansion. That’s bad news for everyone!
And what about the next species that creates a technological civilization on the planet. If the infected all die, they can’t spread it to the next civilization.
Instead if an essential component of how the hivemind coordinates results in pacifism, non-interference with non-technological life, the inability to lie and a strong need to please, then you have a built-in failsafe. If they do expand, you can just tell them to stop. If you need something from them, just hit them up on the radio. They aren’t going to launch dark forest strikes against you. They are rendered harmless in the safest manner possible.
My pet theory is that this is the reverse of the plot of blindsight. The virus was intended as a message, using the biological properties of RNA as a metaphorical language (“We are peaceful, we don’t interfere with other life, we want to help, lets communicate, here is our universal translator that joins minds together”).
Holy fuck, that’s actually pretty compelling. The first part, the deliberations on the failsafe built-in inside the primary behavioural patterns.
Usage of RNA encoding over radio, on the other hand, seems dubious. It assumes a whole bunch of things to be true, and for none of them is there any basis to think they are true, any evidence for them being true, let alone any proof. First, it assumes universal RNA-based life, i.e. all life in the universe uses RNA for information encoding. Second, it assumes a universal RNA alphabet, i.e. AUGC is universal. Third, it assumes a universal RNA language, so a specific sequence of nucleotide bases in RNA encodes the same protein everywhere. And finally, it assumes universal protein semantics, i.e. a specific protein, encoded in RNA and activated in specific circumstances, universally means “we are peaceful.” These assumptions decrease in plausibility from the former to the latter, the protein-meaning correspondence being way out in the realm of woo-woo.
Maybe 100% of life is RNA-based or just 34% of all life, but that is enough for the viral payload to spread.
> Second, it assumes a universal RNA alphabet, i.e. AUGC is universal.
Theory 1: The RNA is a progenote, a self-contained RNA machine that does its own protein synthesis. If you were going to send a computer via first contact message the best approach would be an adaptive molecular machine that can self-assemble a more complex machine that can adapt and self-improve.
The RNA being a self-improving machine explains how the RNA understands how to hive mind humans when the sender of the message has almost no information about humans. The RNA self-improves, learns, and studies the organisms it infects. Each RNA machine in a cell has an antenna to communicate with other RNA machines. Even before they infect humans they represent a huge distributed RNA molecule. They use this same RNA-to-RNA mesh network to stitch the hive mind together. This could function like an RNA neural network.
If it is a progenote, maybe the aliens seeded Earth with progenotes 4 billion years ago.
Theory 2: The scientists worked out the RNA alphabet it used by studying it and them altered the RNA to be compatible with our RNA alphabet.
> And finally, it assumes universal protein semantics, i.e. a specific protein, encoded in RNA and activated in specific circumstances, universally means “we are peaceful.”
My case here is weak.
I suspect its peacefulness is a predictable emergent property of architecture used to join many minds. This way, the joining can not succeed without the peacefulness succeeding as well.
Perhaps if the scientists had studied it more, replicated the protein and modeled it, they would discover a universal principle of joined minds and might unpack the metaphor. Perhaps the protein even breaks down naturally as long as you don’t have a bunch of RNA machinery in your cells constantly producing more of it. Instead the scientists put the RNA in an viral vector and then infected the entire planet with it. Opps!
Well, yeah, you are correct in these assertions. But given all these things you said, the previous sentiment, “The virus was intended as a message” – i mean… Given the malleability of RNA, eh… I feel like there’d be a higher chance of properly deciphering a message encoded in Linear A rather than RNA.
Interesting. I wonder if that radio communication you mention is what’s being picked up by that isolated guy in Paraguay who was continually scanning the bands with his set.
Granted, now we are talking about dreadfully slow light speed communication, so either the aliens are closer than we think (so as to facilitate their instructions on a reasonable time scale), or they have a longer game in mind and have just adopted a “set it and forget it” style of communication with automated communication happening on a preset time frame.
Anyway, I think @Vteam is probably correct in their assumption that this is a parable and not sci-fi. So it’s kind of silly for us to debate these elements of the story.
Radio is quite fine for the World to sync between its members – an antipode communication time should be between 100-200 ms, let’s double that for overhead, so under 0.5 s, giving the RTT of under a second. It probably won’t need the perfect cohesion between actors on opposite sides of the globe though, so i’d say for global purposes radio would do the trick, if we close our eyes on its unfeasibility.
I’m pretty sure the last episode sets up an attempt by the individuals to jam the frequency caught by the Paraguayan to disrupt the sync between the joiners – but we’ll see.
Communication with the Source though – nah, radio won’t do. It’d need to be somewhere in the inner solar system to have any kind of two-way communication with the World. And if it was, it could just land. The most optimistic estimate of the Resistance numbers is 13. So if there was a local invasion force, it’d be over by episode two.
And any kind of communication with Kepler 22b, even subrelativistic, just sending a message to be received in 640 years – would require a lot of energy and a lot of focus. Because of the energy it can’t be produced by the virus or human bodies it inhabits. Because of the focus it shouldn’t be detectable on the ham radio on the surface. Although I might just be a shitty astroradiocommunicationologist.
Maybe they are just using space magic, iunno.
I have been assuming they are using levels of caching and pushing decision making to the closest nodes based on the fact that all nodes have similar state. There is likely some sort of high latency global distributed system for reaching consensus on critical decisions and long term planning but that isn’t needed most of the time.
This is supported by that fact that in one of the episodes someone who has never flown a plane, can just sit down and fly a plane over an ocean where they have no line of sight to the land. Additionally getting in faraday cages like elevators does not seem disruptive.
If we go with the RNA machines hypothesis. Each member of the hive, may have a backup of the memories/skills of all humans the hive absorbed and all important hive state.
A gram of DNA can store 215 petabytes of data. Add some error correcting codes have RNA machine in a human nerve cell have a mini DNA storage device. Depends on how compressible human memories are, do you need everyone’s memory of how to drive a car in every node or just the skills of the top 10 drivers.
Hmmm… Using molecular storage seems… Complex? There’s the central dogma of molecular biology to consider.
I’m not buying that. Although biology is not my field, I found my glass tubes in a trash can. Maybe an actual biologist could comment on DNA state storage?
It is just a theory but it is biologically sound as far as I know. I haven’t worked in biology in over two decades and biology is not my area of expertise so I welcome corrections from actual bioologists.
> There’s the central dogma of molecular biology to consider.
As they said in my genetics class the central dogma is not central, not a dogma, not true and has no agreed upon definition, but it mostly how things work.
There are a number of discoveries in biology that directly contradict it as a universal law:
RNA computers have been a thing for a while. We aren’t good at building them, but if we wanted to transmit a computer to communicate on our behalf to an alien species, probably the easiest to understand blueprint would be a RNA computer.
https://www.princeton.edu/~lfl/DNA2DNA/RNAcomputer.html
We have been more successful with using DNA as a storage mechanism.
https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/dna-data-storage/
RNA can write/read DNA and RNA can do protein synthesis by itself. An RNA computer that uses DNA as storage is a reasonable future technology in a hard science fiction story.
er, ahem…
“There was always something that didn’t belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to make animals glow in the dark when exposed to some toxin the EPA had lost interest in fifty years before. Even DNA computers, custom-built for a specific task and then tramped carelessly into wild genotypes like muddy footprints on a pristine floor. Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.”
That’s fair enough. But still, what about latency and transcoding?
Yeah, let’s say the little green men’s virus included the ability to encode/decode a skill or any kind of knowledge into DNA, as well as wireless brain to brain communication across the globe. Let’s even say all the skills of all the joiners are accessible in the DNA of every joiner, let’s discount the transmission costs for 7 billion nodes (but if one transmission of all knowledge from node 1 to node 2 costs 1 unit, then total costs would be 49 quintillion units, that’s 4.9 * 10^19)
Now, look, there’s a member of the World who needs to go from A to B by plane. And he’s got all the skills of every human in his DNA. How much time would it need to take to decode the relevant skill from DNA into – what? a protein? whatever – than use space magic to encode this whatever into electrical signals that would alter his brain chemistry in such a way that he becomes a skilled pilot? How long would that take?
Nah, maybe it would work for Denver sewers, but skill storage? No, not buying this. Latency, costs.
And also, all this is new infrastructure. And if you’re rewiring meatbags at this level – you’re better off rebuilding them from scratch. Fix this weird glottal nerve that doesn’t know where it’s going, the eyes that are inside-out, the breathing and eating through the same hole (the dolphins could, right?), the excretion+reproduction combo, the gallbladder, the lymph nodes, all this fucken mess. Then we can talk adding DNA cold storage as a replacement for writing.
Going to throw my 2 cents into the ring: we’re witnessing the life-cycle of a cosmic parasite. First an interstellar signal, then synthesized by sapient organisms into an mRNA virus, which then infects the host civilization, turning them into a single meta-organism with an urge to build a planetary-scale transmitter than overwhelms their very survival instincts. (A side-effect of this drive is overwhelming love for, well, everything. Pathological, but irrelevant to the parasite.) The transmitter, when completed, blasts the signal out in every direction, propagating the parasite. Origins and evolution of this parasite left as an exercise to the reader. (Though, I am fond of the idea of the originating species attempting to re-engineer themselves to be more benevolent and cooperative, and maybe pushing some dials a little too far.)
Orrrr, it could be an engineered parasite designed by beings who’ve concluded that technological intelligence is inevitably disastrous for its biosphere (see Vonnegut’s “Galapagos” for a cool spin on this), and thus created something that would only propagate in the presence of technological intelligence. It rids such worlds of their techy species while preserving the nontechy elements, and leaves nontech worlds completely unaffected.
Not an invasion strategy, but a conservation strategy.
While I like the idea of a species trying to maintain balance in the universe, as someone who sees the universe and everything in it as essentially hostile, I lean toward the idea of the originating beings holding a “dark forest” view of the universe, with this “virus” being an effort to neutralize potential enemies. Although maybe these are the same thing?
I feel like everyone has missed the real genius of this episode.
Manousos Oviedo sets out on his great journey towards More Significance In The Narrative, and does so in his lovingly cared for MG soft-top. Which breaks down just as he needs it most.
As anyone who has ever owned an MG soft-top can tell you, this is truly genius writing of the highest order. Gilligan is God.
Forty years ago I was cruising the streets of Toronto in a Diamond taxicab, when a smartly dressed family of four standing beside a beautiful new Jaguar hard top flagged me down. It was new that day, and they had just finished a celebratory dinner.
I drove them home.
Soft top is obviously more appropriate for New Mexico, though.
My father drives a Jaguar F-Type, a beautiful, beautiful car. And if i say drives, i mean he drives it to the car repair shop, because there is always, ALWAYS something wrong with it. Which gets fixed, for a ridicolous price, and then next month it has some other ailment.
It is like a machine that burns money, the gasoline it guzzles is the cheapest thing about it.
It’s sad, really, because they make such aesthetically appealing machines.
“It is like a machine that burns money”
It sounds like owning a sailboat, which they say is akin to standing under a cold shower tearing up $100 bills.
Oh yes, it is a ravishingly beautiful car. Like, i am an atheist, but i am willing to concede there may be a divine spark of creativity in humans, and the designers of the Jaguar F-Type were channeling this Shefa when designing it.
Sadly this touch didnt extend to its actual engineering.
Could an emergency explanation squad drop into this thread and explain the joke to the people who never drove and the only thing they know about cars that they have five wheels, one of them steering? Like, what’s an “MG soft-top”? Not to me though, I know cars perfectly well, I totally got the joke.
It’s a British car from a probably extinct brand.
Like most British cars known worldwide, it has a reputation for being prone to breakdowns.
E.g. I was reading about owning a Jaguar and it was mentioned driving on a holiday in a loaner BMW bc the Jag broke down is basically universal.
The insidious Quaker menace and their successors, the loathsome Fabians have turned Britain from the cradle of the modern world to a gruesomely depressing joke.
Clearly, the British should be able to make reliable cars-French, Germans, even the bloody Romanians manage but the corruption has messed up the entire region to the point that they can’t.
German here, while not as prone to breaking down as british cars, german cars are also no longer really reliable. Usually because the software is utter shite. Like our WW2 tanks, our cars are ludicrously overengineered everywhere except where it counts.
If you want to just drive a car with nary a worry because it will never let you down, these days you have to drive a japanese car. Those things are indestructable, there is a reason the Toyota Landcruiser is THE vehicle of choice for insurgents worlwide.
I have been driving Mazdas and Toyotas all my adult life and never had ANY problems with the engine whatsoever. Even when my first car started disintegrating around me from wear and tear after years and years of abuse, the engine ran as well as on the first day.
Re: Episode 7 The Gap
During Manousus’s chant
My name is Manousus Oviedo
I am not one of them
I wish to save the world.
I kept hearing,
Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya
You killed my father
Prepare to die.
Anyone else?
This episode had it all – Clive Barker’s Hellraiser pinhead palms from hell, gorgeous scenic drive, the random destructive nihilism of Fight Club. I wonder, would a tiny ticker in the bottom left corner showing declining world population be too distracting?
Found an article on Carol creating a “thought bomb” to destroy the hive.
https://meaww.com/when-does-the-next-pluribus-episode-come-out-ratings-pluribus-episode-6-reddit-theories-finale-release-date-ai-carol-others-hive-mind
“And so it will end with a thought bomb. When Carol is assimilated, the whole world has access to her memories, and being a writer, she will design a “thought bomb” that makes everyone else feel as miserable as she is, and sever the hive mind’s ability to control them. Another user echoed the same sentiments by writing, “I love the thought bomb angle. The show could lead us the the inevitable but sad realization that Carol is about to be assimilated. Carol will figure out a way to destroy the hive as they begin her assimilation.” A fan noted, “I like the idea that everyone goes back to being an individual, but I’m not sure about the full-circle ending connecting with her writing ambitions. Maybe everyone remembers what it was like to be a collective mind and are never truly the same after?” A Redditor quipped, “I think she will destroy the hive. But in turn, it will kill the human within them, too. No one will live, and she will be even more alone. I feel this is similar to Breaking Bad. No one wins, and it was just someone’s ego the whole time. The hive was actually paradise synced to the earth. And she was actually the cancer.”
Why did you reply with this list?
It’s the “Inigo Montoya’s Golden Standard of Introducing Oneself”. Pretty well-known.
It’s weird to say “I kept hearing, Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya… Anyone else?” when you’re comparing someone’s introduction to the well-known golden standard of introduction. Like, yeah, literally everyone else.
All my work messages are like that. Anyone I know who has to send messages to strangers conforms to it. “Hello. My name’s Bob. I work in acquisitions in the office down the hall. You forgot to flush again, this is getting annoying, I’m going to have to contact the HR.” See? One, two, three, four.
The rhythm, the flow of Manousus’s chant reminded me of the Inigo intro from the Princess Bride. By anyone? I meant does anyone else hear that? I’m not an English major but that’s how it struck me. I don’t see why you have to be so snotty about it.
The broadcast doesn’t need to be tailor made, there are lots of weird emergent hacks. From honey comb hexagons to carcinization… Also it’s possible that broadcast was different targeted but broadcasts gonna broadcast. The final solution of the war between the crabs and primates of epsilon erendi.
I’m curious about the claim that it would take several hours for someone to fall 37km from 0.25G to 8G because it sounds a bit counterintuitive. As a basic sanity check, even at 0.25G with zero initial velocity, a 37km fall would only take three minutes. If the gravitational acceleration increased from 0.25G to 8G inversely proportional to the square of the distance, then a two-minute bomb timer sounds like a very close number. Is this due to some special property of the Higgs conduit?
Fuck, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Not about the Higgs conduit; about me having failed the basic sanity check.
Thank you, iavas. You have put me back on track.
That’s great! Never expect to speed up (really? Anyway I hope so) seeing your new work this way.
Glad that somebody helped
Also you know pharohs killed their pyramid builders as last necessary step to their own immortality. Just saying.
Wow, good eye, I didn’t even register the thing. it actually would take 91 seconds considering acceleration grows linearly on position, not time. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+t+%3D+integral%5B0+to+37000%5D%28dx%2Fsqrt%282*2.5*x+%2B+%2878.5+-+2.5%29*x%5E2%2F37000%29%29
That’s a cool function, but I’m dubious of the result. That’s almost half a kilometer per second on average, which seems remarkably fast for a descent which takes 24km to even make it to the 1G isograv.
Not having done calculus since the last millennium, I did an iterative approximation assuming constant acceleration within each interval but increasing acceleration between intervals. (I also stopped the descent at 4G rather than 8G, which actually makes very little difference in elapsed time because the curve is really climbing at that point). I’m getting a total descent time on the order of 13-20 minutes, depending on how finely I slice the intervals. I can work in that ballpark.
I noticed this thread while looking for Pluribus ideas and dug in. Given the distances and g’s, I’m getting roughly this:
Maybe I’m messing up the geometry, but my understanding is that 0.25g point is 37 km away from the 8.0g point – that is the distance of the fall. Given inverse square gravity, we can place the singularity at 8 km away from the 8.0g point and 45 km from 0.25g point.
I.e.
g1 = 0.25g
g2 = 8.0g
r1 = r2+37000
k = some arbitrary coefficient (m^3)*(s^(-2))
g = k/(r^2)
g1 = k/(r1^2)
g2 = k/(r2^2)
g2/g1 = (r1^2)/(r2^2)
g2/g1 = ((r2+37000)^2)/(r2^2)
8.0*9.8/(0.25*9.8) = ((r2+37000)^2)/(r2^2)
((r2+37000)^2)/(r2^2) = 32
(r2+37000)/r2 = 5.657
r2+37000 = 5.657*r2
4.657r2 = 37000
r2 = 7945 m ~ 8km
r1 = r2+37000 = 44945 m ~ 45 km
You can then use this to get the velocity at the end of the fall using conservation of energy. Comes out to about 3.2 km/s at the end. Total time falling is about 30 sec according to AI mathbot.
I tried five different ones (AI bots that is) and all of them managed to give different solutions between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. Dr. Watts is sceptical of such results, and rightfully so. Ideally one would take the wiki link Kirill provided and use Wolfram Alpha to calculate the value.
This method gives 145 seconds, i.e. about two and a half minutes.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%2845000%5E3%2F%282*G*%288*9.8*8000%5E2%2FG%29%29%29*%28+sqrt%28%288000%2F45000%29*%281-8000%2F45000%29%29+%2B+arccos%28sqrt%288000%2F45000%29%29+%29
Some of the starting parameters are a bit off, but that does seem to be the right ballpark.
Abut did dey fall or waz dey pushed?
They jumped.
Amusingly I saw the rough, one-sentence-long, plot of Pluribus written in some news article, and my first reaction was “better check Peter Watts’ website, I bet he talked about it”.
You have patterns, sir.
Imagine you are
Siri KeetonPeter Watts… ha! That is hilarious.Shhhh. Sit down before you’ll hurt yourself!
Ran into several pretty descriptive lore videos recently and as an engineer IMO I have quite comprehensive picture of what has been so far done and said in the series rather than guess it. First and foremost it’s a cinematography so obviously they talk through scenes rather than words, and being lazy creature I am, I’m not watching through all the episodes to seek something beyond casual meaning. I build theories instead.
Having said that, there’s several uh, designed vulnerabilities, open questions in the entire plot, as well as some unintentional ones I suggest.
1. It matters not if the virus itself is engineered or naturally evolved. Perhaps on cosmic scale it’s really all the same. For virus itself, the sole purpose is to propagate further, and everything leading to it is rational and desirable. It will require less effort later when the hive decides that enough is enough and population situation is stable, fitting to purpose. In the end, it’s irrelevant for the virus if the current host even survives after the deal is done and the transmitter is built. It is also somehow irrelevant if the human technology is too weak to build a transmitter, it will try anyway. It’s a living entity, it will take it’s chances, it will come around.
2. The good theory I saw that has been pretty agreeable is that while the entire violence aversion protocol is the major cause of extinction, it’s way too powerful and impractical. But it may also be a sort of metabolic issue. Could diving into violence destabilise the fragile bond of the human chain and destroy the virus? This is clearly a hint left by show creators, so the resolution is left for later.
Also it seems like simplest nonviolent solution for starvation would be to just compell the host to lie down and not get up, given how absolute the control mechanism is.
3. The entire logistics of worldwide radio connections makes no sense, unless we assume that carrier frequency is just a tip of the iceberg of some specific quantum communication protocol. A signal from a distance of 600 ly is also kind of ridiculous, what chances are that this has been emulated from much shorter distance with huge Fresnel lens? Is there still carrier signal after 600 years, or would it be more local, too? I honestly lost on this issue, up to a point I’m ready to give up on laws of causality like it’s something from Arrival.