Schlock Mercenary

Yeah but that's an exceptional degree that falls out of line with previous expectations.

Okay lets see, the zoojack gate is 8 million. That's the presumed length of Gatekeeper truce. So even their current civilization lifespan is much over the Oafan expectations.

The Gate is 8 million, but Kevyn noted that's old enough for it have arrived from Andromeda, which means it at most started the trip to our galaxy that long ago, it's not when it showed up here.

It's been in the Zoojack systme itself for only at least 100, 000 years they can be sure of.

edited 10th Jan '16 9:44:06 PM by Seraphem

Yes but it's consistent with the Gatekeeper designs. The Paanuri must have used their baryonic allies in Andromeda to make it and ship it to Milky Way after they moved over to there and concocted the Black Hole Big Bang plan.

Or they had already set this all up in Andromeda and it was just another gate that was already in service for a few millennia over there, they they shipped over here later.

All we know is the Gate is 8 mil years old, we don't know how many of those it spent in Andromeda before being sent over, or how long it spent in transit.

And it looks as though the Oafa 'cycle' wasn't even the first. Of course, I suspect no previous civilisation ever had something like Petey.

Also, when you think about it, they've actually had a huge effect on Galactic events. Without them, Petey wouldn't exist, the Teraport Wars wouldn't have started, the Pa'anuri wouldn't even have been discovered by anyone (except the Gatekeepers) until it was well too late, etc.

On another note, anyone know what's happened to the Ovalkwiki? It simply won't load for me.

edited 11th Jan '16 1:59:58 AM by MattII

Looks like it's down hard. Down for Everyone or Just Me can't get to it either, nor could I through your link.

edited 11th Jan '16 6:39:28 AM by Nohbody

The impression I'm getting is that the Pa'anuri only popped up every time someone invented the terraport and related gravitic technologies, since those were harmful to them. They killed everyone with those technologies, settled back down, and a few million years later someone invented the technologies again and they woke up.

The Gatekeepers disrupted the cycle by allying with the Pa'anuri to create the gates and limit that type of technology. The DAMEs, in turn, were just using this alliance as part of a long-term plan to blow up the Milky Way with their core generator.

That.... makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, pretty much.

Of course there is question of what exactly remnants have the Oafans found. If it's "suddenly every star they owned had exploded" then it's Paanuri. On the other hand, it may be that the Bradicor's fall of civilization to immortality is a widespread phenomenon as well.

Unlikely. I got the impression from his speech that it was always multiple civilizations falling at once, and the immortality thing seems really unlikely to cause that.

Besides, the Oafan seem like the most advanced race of their era and not a hint of them having it. It really does seem more like a wild card that sprang up this time.

Do think the wiped out by the Pa'anuri every time the created Terraports idea works best. Though that does bring the question of what is Osri, or was it built by the Pa'anuri as their means of replication? just one of many, this one lost? Are the Pa'anuri natural or something that was created by some long dead civilization? Still a lot of questions.

Remember that the Can Full Of Sky existed because the Oafa wanted somewhere to hide from the Pa'anuri, unless "Lightless Wind" actually means something not-Pa'anuri and the stuff in "Broken Wind" was a mistranslation.

This also explains why modern scholars are unaware of this. The Oafans and their contemporaries found archaeological evidence of earlier cycles. The Gatekeepers presumably eliminated all that evidence as part of their deal with the DAMEs.

What was this again ? When was it mentioned ?

During Vog's description of how his race became immortal. Their minds simply could not handle immortality, eventually there was nothing new, they simply couldn't keep enough memories fresh to avoid descending into insanity. Some tried uploading their minds to computers for more storage space, but eventually they all died and the computers were wiped out.

The only survivors were Vog's tribe, who engineered their brains to be able to handle it, mostly by making them permanently semi-senile constantly rewriting and forgetting old memories to make room for new ones.

IMO the Pa'anuri are the more likely cause. I mean, if it was immortality insanity you'd expect civilisations popping up and disappearing all the time, but that's not now it happened. Instead it seems to be that every few million years someone hits the reset button on all higher intellect. Certainly sounds like a war to me.

Or they get in touch and share the immortality without proper precautions.

Or the likes of psychobears actually succeed in their crusade before turning on themselves.

Even then, to wipe out all intelligent life you'd need to do a considerable amount of uplifting because most intelligences would be hugely underdeveloped. a quarter of a million years ago Homo Sapiens was just the latest offshoot of the Homo genus, with nothing to suggest a meteoric rise that would lift us from wood and stone to metal and composites in a geological eye-blink. And that if you were bothering to look at all. No, to my mind only a war could cause such total devastation.

The RSS feed has not updated since the 14th for me, has anybody had the same problem ?

Still working fine for me.

And for me.

Apparently the feed had gone 404 for some reason. Now it's back but my rss add-on refuses to add it.

While that's a legitimate concern, they've got Fleetmind on the look out for it.

...You know I was expecting the last panel to make some "Bearcist" joke but that way is even better. :D

Landon is just the best.