Being Gbaba

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Morden wrote:snip
Could always be something even more simple/scary than that. The Milky Way has already been purchased on the Galactic Scale by another far more advanced race and the Gbaba are basically watchdogs/pest controllers who's sole purpose is to keep the galaxy clear of unwanted beasties until its new owner can get around to building its new mansion...

In that case galactic pest control would have to be a lot wider spread than textev gives us evidence for

Thus far... but the chances of a species maturing enough to be a threat within a thousand years is slim. But yeah it wasnt the most likely cause for their xenocide.

SWM wrote:Maybe. That's the problem--the uncertainty. If they have no warning about the existence of the Gbaba, there is no guarantee that Safehold would be sufficiently advanced to defeat the Gbaba when the ran into them. Just because the Terran Federation was nearly the equal of the Gbaba does not mean that Safehold technology will develop the same way. Safehold could easily expand into space without developing past Federation technology.

Even so, they'd probably still win. By the time they got that far, their colonized region would be so huge that the Gbaba would be the ones facing impossible numbers.

Shan-Wei's point was that it would be irresponsible and potentially disastrous to the future of the human race not to give them the warning. When the risk is the utter destruction of the human race, you don't take the chance.

Well, sure, but it seems far less likely a problem than (say) accidentally stumbling on some other mean species much closer to Safehold. The Gbaba don't really strike me as a plausible threat at that distance, with the level of FTL tech they've got.

cralkhi wrote:

SWM wrote:Maybe. That's the problem--the uncertainty. If they have no warning about the existence of the Gbaba, there is no guarantee that Safehold would be sufficiently advanced to defeat the Gbaba when the ran into them. Just because the Terran Federation was nearly the equal of the Gbaba does not mean that Safehold technology will develop the same way. Safehold could easily expand into space without developing past Federation technology.

Even so, they'd probably still win. By the time they got that far, their colonized region would be so huge that the Gbaba would be the ones facing impossible numbers.

Shan-Wei's point was that it would be irresponsible and potentially disastrous to the future of the human race not to give them the warning. When the risk is the utter destruction of the human race, you don't take the chance.

Well, sure, but it seems far less likely a problem than (say) accidentally stumbling on some other mean species much closer to Safehold. The Gbaba don't really strike me as a plausible threat at that distance, with the level of FTL tech they've got.

Part of the plot line seems to be that humanity develops its tech and industrial base to the necessary levels and then goes looking for the Gbaba.

I've wondered about the chances of happening across another species closer to Safehold myself. When all is said, humanity moved into a new neighborhood when Safehold was established and really knows nothing at all about the neighbors.

Don

Actually, the more I think of it, I'm not even convinced that knowing about the Gbaba is safer - since it creates the possibility of a warmonger leader setting up an expedition against the Gbaba & alerting them to humanity's survival too early (e.g. to divert attention from domestic political problems, or due to an honest desire for revenge)

Maybe not particularly likely, but I think it's at least as plausible as an utterly vast (thousands of light years in radius) human sphere still losing to the Gbaba.

(I don't think Gbaba space is actually that large compared to, say, the Honorverse. I can't see the TF lasting for decades if they were outnumbered hundreds to one or more.)

cralkhi wrote:Actually, the more I think of it, I'm not even convinced that knowing about the Gbaba is safer - since it creates the possibility of a warmonger leader setting up an expedition against the Gbaba & alerting them to humanity's survival too early (e.g. to divert attention from domestic political problems, or due to an honest desire for revenge)

Maybe not particularly likely, but I think it's at least as plausible as an utterly vast (thousands of light years in radius) human sphere still losing to the Gbaba.

(I don't think Gbaba space is actually that large compared to, say, the Honorverse. I can't see the TF lasting for decades if they were outnumbered hundreds to one or more.)

My reading is that they were outnumbered hundreds to one or more. The only reason they lasted as long as they did is that initially the Gbaba didn't mobilize very much of their available strength. That's why the Federation initially had some victories. Then it took a few more years for the Gbaba to gather their forces together (which is an indication of how large a volume they were gathering those forces from). Once the Gbaba had mobilized, the Federation was overwhelmed by enormous odds. And the Federation has no of knowing how large a fraction of the potential forces were represented by the visible forces. The Gbaba could easily have an empire many thousands of light-years in radius, and I suspect they do.

cralkhi wrote:Even so, they'd probably still win. By the time they got that far, their colonized region would be so huge that the Gbaba would be the ones facing impossible numbers.

We can't actually know that. We know very little about Gbaba, and for all we do know, they may just as well span galaxies (huh, perhaps that's why their ships are so old - they're produced in some galaxy far-far away and sent to Milky Way). Although this is true that by the time the Safeholdians settle the sphere of 20+ FTLY radius, they'll have much more space to lose or mobilize from than the Gbaba.

However, war against the Gbaba certainly won't be easy - mostly because RFC plans to write about it too, and curb-stomp war would be boooring.

The most important question in my mind is not WHY the Gbaba are doing what they do, but how they find their victims.

What attracts them? And what can you do to avoid being found?
- Did a scout ship enter one of their systems? Then you should not send any scouts out to explore the galaxy until you have a big fleet.
- Is it simple radio wave emissions? In which case there was a listening post somwhere within 500 LY of earth and it's colonies (ca 500 years from the invention of radio to first contact) and likely it was at least 400 LY from earth. Assuming an even distribution of listening posts in the entire galaxy (worst case) Safehold has a maximum of 500 years from reintroduction of space travel until the war.
- Is it FTL drive emissions? Or hypercom emissions? The first is unlikely since they would be able to track the colo fleet to Safehold and the second is also not very likely because Crestwell's Star didn't have a hypercom. But just to be sure you should avoid both techs until you are ready.
- Are they simply sending small exterminator fleets to random systems? Then you have to pray for good luck.
- Or maybe it's something entirely different. Maybe they are telepaths and they consider every species which cannot communicate by telepathy as not sentient.

From the answer to this question you can infer reasons for their behaviour:
- They think the were attacked by a scout. The whole invasion is an automated "seek&destroy" process.
- They met another race and barely survived. Deep seated xenophobia
- Hyperspace/The Galaxy/The Status Quo is holy and humans profane/endanger it by their very existance
- They are allergic to radio waves or at least a certain spectrum of it
- Their hive-mind works by hyperspace connections and human hyperspace traffic within 500 LY gives them "headaches". Alternatively human brainwaves interfere with their telepathy

So I think we first have to find out what the humans and the other species did to attract them.

PS: And by "find out" I mean speculate since we won't know anything about it until we read it in one of the upcoming books

Sounour wrote:The most important question in my mind is not WHY the Gbaba are doing what they do, but how they find their victims.

What attracts them? And what can you do to avoid being found?
- Did a scout ship enter one of their systems? Then you should not send any scouts out to explore the galaxy until you have a big fleet.
- Is it simple radio wave emissions? In which case there was a listening post somwhere within 500 LY of earth and it's colonies (ca 500 years from the invention of radio to first contact) and likely it was at least 400 LY from earth. Assuming an even distribution of listening posts in the entire galaxy (worst case) Safehold has a maximum of 500 years from reintroduction of space travel until the war.
- Is it FTL drive emissions? Or hypercom emissions? The first is unlikely since they would be able to track the colo fleet to Safehold and the second is also not very likely because Crestwell's Star didn't have a hypercom. But just to be sure you should avoid both techs until you are ready.
- Are they simply sending small exterminator fleets to random systems? Then you have to pray for good luck.
- Or maybe it's something entirely different. Maybe they are telepaths and they consider every species which cannot communicate by telepathy as not sentient.

From the answer to this question you can infer reasons for their behaviour:
- They think the were attacked by a scout. The whole invasion is an automated "seek&destroy" process.
- They met another race and barely survived. Deep seated xenophobia
- Hyperspace/The Galaxy/The Status Quo is holy and humans profane/endanger it by their very existance
- They are allergic to radio waves or at least a certain spectrum of it
- Their hive-mind works by hyperspace connections and human hyperspace traffic within 500 LY gives them "headaches". Alternatively human brainwaves interfere with their telepathy

So I think we first have to find out what the humans and the other species did to attract them.

PS: And by "find out" I mean speculate since we won't know anything about it until we read it in one of the upcoming books

We do know a couple things.

1) The first time the Federation actually met the Gbaba was when they dropped into Crestwell in absolute crushing force. The Federation had found some planets which had been wiped out, so they knew someone was out there killing planets and were being cautious. But they did not actually find any Gbaba ships until the Gbaba came to find them. And the Gbaba knew where the colony was, even though they were being careful.

2) And David said in a thread here six years ago:

runsforcelery wrote:The Federation knew exactly what first brought them to the Gbaba's attention: interstellar expansion into an area the Gbaba had already swept of competing sentient (or, at least, advanced) lifeforms. They had no way of knowing whether it was because they'd blundered across some stealth sensor system that had been left behind to report to the Gbaba, or because the Gbaba ran patrols through the area on some sort of regular schedule, or whatever, but first contact with the Gbaba followed decades of survey ships turning up evidence of destroyed alien civilizations. Until the Gbaba actually attacked, there was disagreement over how and why those civilizations had been destroyed, but after the Gbaba attacked, the debate was generally considered to have been settled. So while they might not have known exactly what level of technology triggered Gbaba interest in the other civilizations which were destroyed, they had pretty conclusive evidence that it was their own expanding high-tech presence in interstellar space which had brought them to the Gbaba's attention.

3) And in another thread he said:

runsforcelery wrote:(3) Safehold is hundreds of light years beyond the Gbaba's sphere, and the overwhelming evidence at the time of the Gbaba's attack on humanity was that the Gbaba do not aggressively patrol beyond the borders of their own sphere. Rather, they react to incursions into their sphere with the equivalent of a "hot pursuit" response and the extermination of the interloper to be sure he'll never come back.
. . .
(As a "historical" validation of their assumptions, the mission planners could look at the fact that Earth's radio emissions had had ample time to reach well beyond her most distant colony before the Gbaba responded. In other words, they had empirical evidence that the Gbaba hadn't detected them despite radio emissions until they entered the Gbaba's sphere.)

4) And in yet another thread ( ):

runsforcelery wrote:As an aside, one of the points which I've made at least tangentially in some earlier threads is that Langhorne was never really concerned by the possibility of high-tech presence on Safehold attracting the Gbabas's attention once the initial Gbaba sweeps through the area had been completed. That is, he fully accepted that if Safehold "went dark" and stayed that way for three or four hundred years, it was extremely unlikely that a Gbaba scout would ever come close enough to the star system to spot the emissions of a technological society because those emissions would be pretty much completely lost in the background radiation of the system primary itself. There was a significant chance in the early days of the colony that a Gbaba scout might pass close enough to Safehold to pick up such emissions despite the primary's radiation, but once that threat had passed, Safehold could have built a technology with neutrinos and radio transmissions galore without much risk of its being detected by the Gbaba.

This may or may not provide some of the data you were looking for.

Thanks to SWM for reposting RFC's comments here for our edification.

What I get out of the discussion is that we really don't know what the limits of Gbaba size and strengh actually are. However those limits do exist. There are limits in everything. We do know that before the Gbaba trashed the TF, humanity had come very close to closing the technological gap, so we are given a sense of Gababa limits there. But otherwise, we don't know.

However, I'm going to cheat on the story a bit here (tongue in cheek-- if you're not cheating, you're not trying) by stating that humanity wins. The basis of that is that I don't believe that RFC is writing a story that has humanity getting wiped out as its conclusion. Working back from this admittedly unsupported speculative conclusion, that must mean that whatever the extent of Gbabba size and power, the differential is not so great that humanity cannot overcome it by building on the tech available from the the TF via Owl along with focusing on building an industrial base large enough to support the size of military that will be needed to do the job. That means no multi-galaxy spanning empire or such that would make humanity's challenge too large to overcome no matter what they might do.

Then too, consider that from the time humanity became aware of the threat the Gbabba posed, the TF had about 10 years to prepare to meet it. Yet, IIRC, it took the Gbaba about 40 years to reduce the TF. This implies that the Gbabba did not find wiping the Federation a cake walk. This in turn suggests that the Gbabba's limits are such that with more time and stronger preparation, the result can be in humanity's favor next round.

My wager is that this is the story RFC is writing in the second story arc of the Safehold series. We know the conclusion. The tension in the story will be in all of the twists and turns it will take to get there.

Don

n7axw wrote:Thanks to SWM for reposting RFC's comments here for our edification.

WHowever, I'm going to cheat on the story a bit here (tongue in cheek-- if you're not cheating, you're not trying) by stating that humanity wins. The basis of that is that I don't believe that RFC is writing a story that has humanity getting wiped out as its conclusion. Working back from this admittedly unsupported speculative conclusion, that must mean that whatever the extent of Gbabba size and power, the differential is not so great that humanity cannot overcome it by building on the tech available from the the TF via Owl along with focusing on building an industrial base large enough to support the size of military that will be needed to do the job. That means no multi-galaxy spanning empire or such that would make humanity's challenge too large to overcome no matter what they might do.

Don

Absolutely thanks to SWM for that research.

Don, should you not have labeled this as a "Spoiler" since it gives away the end of the entire Human vs Gbabba tale? sheesh.