End Of Safehold or end of the first series?

I think I remember a speculation by Arthur C. Clarke that the importance of intelligence as a long-term survival trait has not yet been demonstrated – long-term meaning on a "geological era" scale. We count the dinosaurs a failure because they are no longer around as such, but they walked the earth for a much longer period than homo sapiens has done so far.

Mark you, I read a piece of graffiti years ago which said "Is there intelligent life on Earth?", to which the reply underneath was "Yes, but I'm only visiting."
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dobriennm wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:..........

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.

Considering how us sentient beings in the here and now manage to fight and commit genocide, I wouldn't be so sure that waking them up from acting by reflexes to acting intelligently would be a good idea.

They might get even better at the genocide thing!

They might indeed, but you face the question of whether "waking them up" will in fact be an improvement over the current state. Since the current state appears to be "Kill any sentient species that isn't Gbaba", you can make a case that it can't hurt.

Of course, before you even consider that, you have to be able to do it, which means recovering technology and developing to a point where you are confident that it's superior to what the Gbaba are demonstrated to have. (In OAR , it's stated that new Gbaba construction exists as of the time they destroy Earth, but it's the same design and technology as stuff observed that was a couple of millenia old.)

And you still have the issue that you don't know the size of the Gbaba polity or the resources it has. Even if your gear is twice as good as theirs, you can still be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. To effectively compete, humanity will need more than just a single colony world and its population, so it's reasonable to assume further colonies being established further out in the same direction from Earth that Safehold was, and places least likely to be discovered by the Gbaba. Humanity will need numbers and a distributed base as well as superior tech.

And I do have to wonder about the assumptions of Langhorne, Bedard, et al, that humanity can dive into a hole, pull it in after them, and be safe forever by never poking their head out again. The original assumption behind Operation Ark was that humanity would abjure advanced technology for 300 years, to give the Gbaba time to decide they had successfully exterminated humanity and go back to whatever they were doing before they found us.

But we don't know what they were doing, and while they might stop actively looking for humanity, we can't assume they aren't still expanding and swatting anything they see as a threat in the process. Sooner or later, if they are expanding, they are likely to encounter Safehold, and no betraying high tech emissions won't save humanity if they decide to take a closer look. David hasn't revealed anything about the Gbaba in terms of what sort of beings they are, but since they have an interstellar polity, they obviously have colonies of their own, and they might just see Safehold as prime real estate to be developed if they don't think it has existing sentient inhabitants.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:
snip

And I do have to wonder about the assumptions of Langhorne, Bedard, et al, that humanity can dive into a hole, pull it in after them, and be safe forever by never poking their head out again. The original assumption behind Operation Ark was that humanity would abjure advanced technology for 300 years, to give the Gbaba time to decide they had successfully exterminated humanity and go back to whatever they were doing before they found us.

But we don't know what they were doing, and while they might stop actively looking for humanity, we can't assume they aren't still expanding and swatting anything they see as a threat in the process. Sooner or later, if they are expanding, they are likely to encounter Safehold, and no betraying high tech emissions won't save humanity if they decide to take a closer look. David hasn't revealed anything about the Gbaba in terms of what sort of beings they are, but since they have an interstellar polity, they obviously have colonies of their own, and they might just see Safehold as prime real estate to be developed if they don't think it has existing sentient inhabitants.
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Dennis

IIRC, in the Dahak series, some planets had the life wrecked because the enemy (name forgotten) was concerned they might develop intelligent life. This might apply here.

Of course waking the Ghaba up can hurt! They can remain just as genocidal but regain the ability and desire to do R&D and wipe you out with a whole new generation of weapons. Doh!

DDHv wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:
snip

And I do have to wonder about the assumptions of Langhorne, Bedard, et al, that humanity can dive into a hole, pull it in after them, and be safe forever by never poking their head out again. The original assumption behind Operation Ark was that humanity would abjure advanced technology for 300 years, to give the Gbaba time to decide they had successfully exterminated humanity and go back to whatever they were doing before they found us.

But we don't know what they were doing, and while they might stop actively looking for humanity, we can't assume they aren't still expanding and swatting anything they see as a threat in the process. Sooner or later, if they are expanding, they are likely to encounter Safehold, and no betraying high tech emissions won't save humanity if they decide to take a closer look. David hasn't revealed anything about the Gbaba in terms of what sort of beings they are, but since they have an interstellar polity, they obviously have colonies of their own, and they might just see Safehold as prime real estate to be developed if they don't think it has existing sentient inhabitants.

IIRC, in the Dahak series, some planets had the life wrecked because the enemy (name forgotten) was concerned they might develop intelligent life. This might apply here.

Assuming they didn't want to inhabit it themselves. David hasn't gotten into what the Gbaba are, or whether a terrestrial planet is a place where they could live.

The stuff David has done thus far has all had organic beings based in long-chain carbon biochemistry, breathing oxygen, with DNA providing the underlying blueprints. We haven't seen the sort of thing David Brin did in the Uplift series with hydrogen breathers and pure machine civilizations in the mix. It's a reasonable guess the Gbaba also inhabit terrestrial environments and might find Safehold congenial.

But while the Gbaba have been stated to have been spacefaring and had an interstellar polity when man wasn't yet aware those stars in the sky were also suns, the time scale doesn't seem to be that long. Brin's was, with Earth not becoming aware of the Galctics till humanity developed FTL travel and went exploring, because Earth was in a section of our galaxy being allowed to lie fallow so various worlds might develop intelligent life. Brin's Galactics had a civilization a couple of billion years old that had once extended over fourteen galaxies and still spanned five as of the period Brin depicted, and they routinely thought in multi-million year spans. (And Brin had things like the Institute for Migration, whose job was to coordinate the move of entire planetary populations to avoid conflict between oxygen and hydrogen breathing species.)

The basic issue is that we don't know what the Gbaba were doing when we met them, and assuming we could find a hole and pull it in after us to avoid them assumes they'd never come poking around in Safehold's direction. That's a rather large assumption to swallow, and it's hard to believe a faction of OA's command crew could make it, though they obviously did.
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Dennis

Randomiser wrote:Of course waking the Ghaba up can hurt! They can remain just as genocidal but regain the ability and desire to do R&D and wipe you out with a whole new generation of weapons. Doh!

I didn't say they couldn't get even more genocidal and be more efficient at wiping you out. It indeed could hurt. But I don't think you can assume that because it could happen, it will happen. We simply know too little about the Gbaba to say.

Recall the conversation between Nimue Alban and Admiral Pei as TF's last fleet awaited the arrival of the Gbaba and their own deaths in the final defense of Earth. Nimue asks "Do you think we at least forced them to start innovating again", and Admiral Pei hopes they had.

Pei's later bitter complaint that with another 50 or 75 years to work with, the TF might have been able to take the Gbaba strikes me questionable, since we don't know what sort of sheer numbers they could put into play. It might become the sort of situation in the Honorverse, where if the Solarian League could magically get every super dreadnought they had, both in active service and laid up in mothballs, back into service, refitted, and crewed, ans sent them all at Manticore in one huge mass, they might win, if they had enough ships to expend to run Manticore out of missiles.

(And if the Gbaba are anything like the Bugs in The Stars at War series, and simply don't care about losses so long as they destroy the enemy, it gets worse. An individual Bug doesn't care if it lives or dies, and considers itself completely expendable. Only the continuation and expansion of the species matters.)
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Dennis

Given the way the series is set up, I'm still banking on the Gbaba essentially being the CoGA writ on a galactic scale, and Safehold being effectively a Galactic Nimue's Cave.

When Safehold becomes advanced enough to "start looking for the Gbaba", they're not going to fight an open war. They're going to send out agents provateurs to spy on, analyze, and probably sabotage the Gbaba.

After all, a war is so much easier for you to prosecute when the other side doesn't realize you exist. That after all has been Merlin's MO, and I think Safehold as a whole could make it work if they can advance their space stealth tech to the point that their ships can cruise right past Gbaba ships without being spotted. It'd be one of the perks of having decades more advanced technology.

evilauthor wrote:Given the way the series is set up, I'm still banking on the Gbaba essentially being the CoGA writ on a galactic scale, and Safehold being effectively a Galactic Nimue's Cave.

David has used several variants of aliens inimical to humanity.

I do wonder a bit if the Gbaba will be similar to the Kangas from Apocalypse Troll. The Kanga's motivation was religion. They believed the God they worshiped had created them in His image, and any other sentient species was the work of their version of the devil, and it was their holy duty to exterminate them so only the Kangas would exist.

The Gbaba doing what they did out of religious notions would provide a form of symmetry with the situation on Safehold and the fight against the CoGA.

When Safehold becomes advanced enough to "start looking for the Gbaba", they're not going to fight an open war. They're going to send out agents provateurs to spy on, analyze, and probably sabotage the Gbaba.

They certainly won't do so in any short term time frame. The first step will be heavily stealthed scouts to find out where the Gababa are and what resources they have before anyone can even think about attacking them.

Ideally, sabotage should take place in multiple areas well inside Gbaba space, leaving the Gbaba doing their version of scratching their heads and saying "WTF is this coming from?"

After all, a war is so much easier for you to prosecute when the other side doesn't realize you exist. That after all has been Merlin's MO, and I think Safehold as a whole could make it work if they can advance their space stealth tech to the point that their ships can cruise right past Gbaba ships without being spotted. It'd be one of the perks of having decades more advanced technology.

Once you begin active operations, the other side knows something exists. The longer you can keep them ignorant of what it is and where ti comes from, the better.
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Dennis

And I see some striking parallels (and some striking differences too) between the Gbaba and the Dreen in the Baen Voyage of the Space Bubble series by John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor. Similar in that humanity is confronted by an apparently uncommunicative species that seems inexorably bent on the assimilation of any other species it comes in contact with. We know (for all intents and purposes) nothing about the species - their home, their organization, their methods of communication, their beliefs, etc. Just that they consume other species. The key (but by no means the only) difference is that they evolve based on their assimilation of overwhelmed species' technology - they destroy your species but they learn from your technology.

WeberFan wrote:And I see some striking parallels (and some striking differences too) between the Gbaba and the Dreen in the Baen Voyage of the Space Bubble series by John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor. Similar in that humanity is confronted by an apparently uncommunicative species that seems inexorably bent on the assimilation of any other species it comes in contact with. We know (for all intents and purposes) nothing about the species - their home, their organization, their methods of communication, their beliefs, etc. Just that they consume other species. The key (but by no means the only) difference is that they evolve based on their assimilation of overwhelmed species' technology - they destroy your species but they learn from your technology.

Other folks have also mined that territory. Tim Zahn's "Blackcollar" books (The Blackcollar, The Backlash Mission, and The Judas Solution) take place in a future in which humanity has fought a war with the alien Ryrquil and lost. The Blackcollars were commandos treated with a drug called Backlash that sped up their reflexes to permit them to go on on one against the Ryrquil, who were naturally that fast. The Ryrquil as depicted aren't especially innovative and don't create technology, but do use tech from species they have conquered.

William R. Keith has a fun variant in his Warstriders series. One of the alien species humanity confronts are the Xenos. Xenos actually live in the planetary mantle, one per planet where they exist. What humanity encounters are drones they create. They don't communicate because because the notion is incomprehensible. As far as each Xeno is concerned, only it exists, and the world is rock and not-rock. The Xeno humanity fights on one world isn't even aware humanity is there. It only knows its remotes are encountering obstruction it must clear to accomplish its ends.

Glen Cook introduces a different variant at the end of his Starfisher's trilogy. Humanity and the humanoid Ulant whom humanity had fought a war with must make common cause. Another alien force threatens both. The new threat is organic and technology using, but apparently not sentient. It appears to be terraforming teams created by a long vanished species to go out and prepare other planets to make them suitable real estate. The aliens largely don't even notice that a human and Ulant task force is attempting to stop their latest redevelopment effort, despite taking losses. They are operating on reflex according to programming embedded eons ago.
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Dennis