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DMcCunney
Captain of the List
Posts: 453
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 2:49 am
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Part of the fun is that we really don't know anything about the Gbaba, save that their response to any encounter with the TF was to attack.
As far as the TF had been able to figure out, the Gbaba were an old civilization, who had apparently been starfaring and had an interstellar polity back when men still lived in nomadic bands, wore skins, and sheltered in caves.
When the TF first encountered the Gbaba, the Gbaba had superior technology. The TF appeared to be in roughly the same position vs the Gbaba as the galley fleets of Dohlor and Tarot were contending with Prince Cayleb's galleons.
Frantic R&D efforts addressed the technological imbalance, and by the time Operation Ark was dispatched, TF ships were equal or superior to Gbaba ships, but the Gbaba had sheer numbers. Even if the TF technology had been developed to an extent twice as advanced as what the Gbaba deployed, Earth would still face the problem of "Destroy one of them, and ten more appear to take it's place." The Gbaba did seem to be a static society deploying hardware designed long ago, and not updated because it didn't need to be and handled what they required.
We don't know how large the Gbaba polity is, or what total resources they have to draw upon. I think we can assume a situation like the one in Apocalypse Troll, where the Federation learns the Kangas had wiped 26 other sentient species before running into humanity, and we may well learn that dead species whose world the TF discovered weren't the only other sentient species the Gbaba had destroyed.
But there are a few speculations we can have fun with. One is "Are the Gbaba in fact sentient?"
Some folks here may have read the late Mack Reynold's "Section G" stories. In the first one, Ronnie Bronston is inducted as a new recruit into Section G, an arm of the Intelligence service of the United Planets.
The United Planets has the underlying notion that everyone should be allowed to go to Hell in their own way. A number of colonies were seeded from Earth, and many of them were formed by people who had notions of what Utopia ought to be, including theocracies and Neolithic hunter-gatherer societies.
The avowed purpose of the UP is to prevent others from upsetting those apple carts, so that folks who founded such societies can continue on their desired path. Ronnie is sent out on his first assignment in company of Supervisor Lee Chang Chu, with the mission of finding and stopping "Tommy Paine", a notorious terrorist and troublemaker who has been trying to upset the apple cart on an assortment of colony worlds.
He returns to Terra to announce "Section G is Tommy Paine!" He's told he is quite right, and is shown the reason - the charred corpse of the only non-human sentient being the UP has encountered. The corpse was found in the wreckage of a one-being scout ship. The parts of the ship the UP recovered include technology the UP still doesn't understand after years of research. But whatever destroyed it swatted it as casually as we might swat a fly. Whatever swatted the alien is out there somewhere, and the UP needs to be ready to encounter it. So Section G is Tommy Paine, deliberately upsetting apple carts and pushing less technological colonies toward greater intellectual and technological development.
In a later story, Ronnie encounters the swatters, and you can make a case they aren't, in fact, sentient.
Sentience emerged as a solution to rapid environmental change. Embedded reflex was no longer sufficient, and the reflex action might just be wrong and get you killed. The ability to consciously consider what was occurring and possibly create new responses became a survival characteristic.
What happens when you have achieved sufficient mastery of your environment that things like interstellar travel become matters of reflex? If you don't need sentience to insure survival, do you remain sentient, or does it atrophy?
(I believe Paul McAuley did a series with an alien species which only becomes sentient again when faced with a species threatening problem, and most of the time exists by reflex.
I've also seen the notion posed as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. "If the galaxy contains as many planets as it appears, where are the other intelligent species? Why haven't we seen any traces of them?" An answer might be that many of them simply aren't intelligent as we think of it any more, because they stopped needing to be to survive.)
What if the Gbaba are operating on reflex, and have stopped being sentient? Defeating them may be less a matter of military force, and more a question of finding something that will wake them up and force them to become sentient again. Once forced to actually think about what they're doing, they might decide it's bad and they should stop doing it.
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Dennis
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