Possible way to take out the OBS

Max wrote:This is another series I am going to have to reread for details. I might be wrong, but I thought I saw a section early on that described the Gbaba going after a non-space-faring race that exposed itself through its radio emissions. That was the main justification for no electronics...

Max

I thought that it was another colony of Terra similar to Operation Ark that was destroyed.

runsforcelery wrote:...snip...
There was one other aspect to the destruction of Alexandria which has not yet been discussed in the books because even Nimue didn't know about it. Let's just say that the rakurai strike on Alexandria actually killed a lot more people than Nimue thinks it did.

I mean, a lot more people.

Merlin will not be happy when he learns about it.

Hmm.. A couple of possibilities comes to mind who they where.

• A large amount of colonists in cryo (with memories intact perhaps)
• A contingent of military personnel (friends/colleagues of Nimue?)
• Many children/students attending schools/universities (which will make Nimue go ballistic when she finds out)

Max wrote:

Kytheros wrote:I thought it was clearly stated that without outside interaction, AIs/Virtual Reality Personalities can and do go crazy given time. And that any such under the Temple couldn't have been active, otherwise it would have done something to correct things centuries ago, and would be inactive waiting on a timer to reactivate.

...unless it had something heavy to work on. But, yes, that could be considered a kind of "crazy". On the other hand, why didn't OWL go crazy (or did he? Shutdown with a multi-century wake-up event??? IIRC, we do not get OWL sub-vocal monologues.)...

Kytheros wrote:There may be something along those lines involved with the Return. That actually seems fairly likely.

Tell me, how does the "religious solution" work better than the secular solution that was the Plan?

It's easier to wake it up when that needs to be done. It takes time and phasing to do it, but it can be done. The secular solution is much less "stable"; it either grows and exposes itself; turns into a degenerate oligarchy, or dies. Also, how do you turn the secular solution around when the time comes to do that?

Kytheros wrote:Also, if the Official Plan changed, there's no way that the senior staff involved wouldn't have been informed, that the change would have been restricted to Langhorne and Bedard. Plus, they wouldn't have need to "stack the deck" in the Executive Council to change things while Shan-Wei was busy terraforming Safehold. They simply could have used the new official orders/plan.

But the "Official Plan" did not change. Some if the implementation details changed. Yes, GROSS, under-handed and more than a little dis-honest, but just barely covered by the original mission parameters.

Kytheros wrote:Also, there's nothing in the Tech Enclave that would have caused a detection risk. Per that plan, the only way the Gbaba would have found them would be to enter the system, in which case they're screwed anyways.

I think you can't know this for a certainty. The initial set-up had that property, but it would not be a forever state of affairs. There would be a constant risk that the enclave would grow and "leak tech". The way it got shut down is definitely a strike against Langhorne's and the others character though...

Kytheros wrote:Also, the "wakeup" or Return is something that was probably only arranged after Langhorne's death, presuming Schueler's Key is connected to it and can cause it to happen early.

Fair, but just as probably it's what the developed agenda called for. RFC gets to make this call...

It’s inconceivable that any planning committee would have ever even considered, let alone approved, implementing the Ark plan through strict religious controls. Even setting aside the moral and spiritual repugnance of the idea, purely pragmatic concerns would have tanked it from the beginning: namely, religious controls could develop in unexpected and unpredictable ways even with close oversight by the surviving command staff.

As a means of control, the CoGA has a lot going for it: centralized authority, a divinely-approved mechanism for enforcing compliance with the Inquisition, a cohesive body of scripture, and a wealth of primary texts to support its claims. But that doesn’t mean it’s static. We have lots of text ev to prove that the Church changed core tenets (infallibility of the Grand Vicar, the election of Archbishops, etc.) over time. A single Martin Luther, as has been mentioned before, would be more than sufficient to cause all sorts of problems.

But the biggest impediment would be turning back the clock once it’s time to stop hiding. All of the features used to stifle innovation would be actively working against you when you tried to tell hundreds of millions of people “by the way, ignore everything you’ve been raised to believe as fact and do the opposite.”

There’s really no parallel example in history of a society being told to make such a substantive about-face in their fundamental belief structure. The closest ones involve conquest and blood as the change is forced on them.

It’s reasonable to assume that the initial Writ had some sort of account of the battle between good and evil, if only to ward off apathy in the face of life’s harshness (i.e., “what kind of God would let this happen?”) and give a reason for the Inquisition’s existence. How can you fight heresy, for example, without defining it? And what’s the explanation for why anyone would embrace such fictions in the first place (since everybody “knows” the truth)?

At that point, there’s a ready-made explanation for the returning Archangel who says that everything is wrong (or worse, a lie) and that Safehold should start doing what Langhorne said not to. Even if the account of evil doesn’t reference the possibility of “demons,” it wouldn’t take much for humanity to concoct the concept. After all, we already managed it here on Earth (possibly multiple times across disparate and disconnected cultures). Whether demons or some other explanation, it wouldn’t take much to work up a theological justification for rejecting this newcomer. Maybe God’s testing the depth of their faith.

People don’t want to believe that they’ve been so completely wrong about such a fundamental aspect of their lives. It’s easier to reject the message than embrace the psychological pain that would come with it. Look at how harsh some of the clashes on theological interpretations have been over the past two thousand years across for pretty much every religion. Those are minor issues compared to what you’d be asking the people of Safehold. Cognitive dissonance would be hard at work protecting people from having to make such a painful realization.

In any case, the Church and all of its leadership, would have a vested interest in supporting that conclusion and actively rejecting the new Archangel because acceptance would mean giving up *all* of their worldly power. And that’s not something massive, authoritarian organizations with absolute power do. Ever.

Even under the most optimistic assumptions, the mission planners would be weary of creating a situation with this possibility of failure after overcoming all of the earlier odds with Breakout. Best case, you impose some sort of religious-based tech on humanity that makes mass-innovation impossible. Even if you tell people that “technology” can be improved by mortal hands, how many people will embrace the practical implications of the idea that the miraculous tech handed down by God himself isn’t already perfect? The end result would be functionally equivalent to the Gbaba’s stasis, and we already have proof that last-gen TF tech isn’t sufficient to the task.

There’s also the real risk that a Jihad or Holy Crusade against the demon Gbaba would launch well before humanity was ready. Between divine weapons and the knowledge that there’s an evil so vast that God himself wants it wiped from existence lurking in space, there would be one hell of a collective desire on Safehold to go on the offensive immediately instead of taking the time to do it right. And it’d take just a single ship of adventurers heading towards Sol on a knightly quest to ruin it for the rest of humanity? And another secret colony? Unlikely; why would you be cautious when you know that God himself is on your side?

History is proof enough that crusades are long, bloody, and quite frankly, not filled by rational thought. Just look at the traditional accounts of the Children’s Crusade, whether it happened as such or not. That’s the sort of irrational exuberance that would scare any mission planner. Losing the fight against the Gbaba after careful planning and preparation is one thing, albeit a very undesirable outcome; losing it because your drones (that’s more or less what you’d get in this scenario) didn’t take things seriously enough is something entirely different.

But the absolute worst case? People reject your announcements and you wind up with a brutal religious war. And since you’re telling people to abandon *everything* they were raised from birth to believe, you’re unlikely to have numbers of your side. If you lose, everything you’ve preached and introduced is automatically tainted. Even if you win, there’s no guarantee that people will be comfortable enough with the drastic societal changes you’re trying to introduce to fully embrace all of their aspects.

But the really crazy thing is that the returning personality (whether a virtual personality in a PICA, an AI, or a command crew member who sat in an improved form of cryo developed while on Safehold) needs to be acknowledged as a Archangel/Angel in order to have the clout to get people to listen to them.

If people accept what he’s saying, then not only do they have to reject the persona that got them to listen to him in the first place, they have to also accept that he’s one of the scheming bastards who lied to them, committed a brutal act of mass murder, and purposely kept the entire human race chained for centuries while denying them the medical care that could have lengthened their lifespan and cured countless illnesses that crippled and killed.

It’s a nasty little conundrum that would brutally undermine the personality’s efforts.

***

As a temporary means of control, the religious approach is a horrible one. There are two many ways it can diverge from the plan, and when it comes time to abandon it, your few options are all pretty nasty. Nimue/Merlin is going about this because there’s literally no other option. No one would want it to be the first, planned option instead.

Compare this to the original, secular plan. The goal was to have enclaves that kept past knowledge alive, and the people in a state of relative stasis for ~300 years. With the life-extension treatments, most of the original command crew would still be around when the time came to turn on the lights. There wouldn’t have been an opportunity for a corrupt oligarchy to form precisely because the people with first-hand knowledge of the Gbaba and the plan would be around to ensure their children didn’t lose their way. Even without that, AIs could have locked them out of their advantages if they were abusing them until a change of leadership came about.

Based on Earth’s development, the command crews could have been completely hands-off for 300 years and Safehold would have likely made it through the detection window before redeveloping analog radio that and blasting EM signals off into space.

While Safehold was far more advanced than most pre-industrial civilizations from the beginning, they didn’t have a history of inquiry or the scientific method to help them advance. All of that was, quite literally, deleted from the colonists. Benjamin Franklin’s experiments didn’t come up out of the blue; they were inspired by, quite literally, centuries of commentary on a scientific oddity. Starting from the beginning, they’d need far more than 300+ years to build up a scientific tradition, become an industrialized society, and work their way towards electricity.

If they wanted to have a more active role, the command crew’s tech base would have allowed them to monitor the planetary population and remove anyone who jumped a bit too far. Take them to the enclave, explain the situation, and give them a choice: return home and work with the command crew, stay in the enclave, or sit in cryo until your genius can be safely appreciated. Beyond that, they could subtly manipulate events and philosophies, reintroduce the scientific method at some optimal point to lay the ground work, and generally getting things ready for when they can kick things off into high gear.

That’s really the beauty of the original plan; the command crew didn’t have to do anything beyond play the part of the watchdog and (hopefully) continue working on R&D within the enclaves. They didn’t have to ‘reset’ anything at the end of the detection window, or plan out any major cultural and religious revolutions.

Big, centuries long plans like Ark are all about the KISS principle. Keep it simple, involve as few moving parts as possible, and play the role of a gardener than that of a controlling mastermind. Adding a religion into the mix, which you then have to later dismantle, only serves to make everything more complex.

Langhorne’s religious controls were about one thing, and one thing only: permanence. It couldn’t work any other way.

As for detection, it was never really that big of a concern. The inverse-square law means that they’ll get lost against the star’s background radiation after a relatively short distance. The big problem would be if it’s spread across the planet and the Gbaba are in-system. The command crew or AI systems would be more than capable of recognizing the preliminary efforts for electrical generating or radio towers, and taking the appropriate actions to stop them in time.

Bluestrike2 wrote:If they wanted to have a more active role, the command crew’s tech base would have allowed them to monitor the planetary population and remove anyone who jumped a bit too far. Take them to the enclave, explain the situation, and give them a choice: return home and work with the command crew, stay in the enclave, or sit in cryo until your genius can be safely appreciated. Beyond that, they could subtly manipulate events and philosophies, reintroduce the scientific method at some optimal point to lay the ground work, and generally getting things ready for when they can kick things off into high gear.

And this could pretty well led to another bad situation: the technocratic elite in enclaves which controlled and suppressed the outside population for centuries under the pretext of "Gbaba threat".

Joat42 wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:...snip...
There was one other aspect to the destruction of Alexandria which has not yet been discussed in the books because even Nimue didn't know about it. Let's just say that the rakurai strike on Alexandria actually killed a lot more people than Nimue thinks it did.

I mean, a lot more people.

Merlin will not be happy when he learns about it.

Hmm.. A couple of possibilities comes to mind who they where.

• A large amount of colonists in cryo (with memories intact perhaps)
• A contingent of military personnel (friends/colleagues of Nimue?)
• Many children/students attending schools/universities (which will make Nimue go ballistic when she finds out)

I think your list is too exotic; the simplest is that there were several enclaves on the continent, not just Alexandria.

I suspect electronic personalities stored and awaiting the time when they can again research ways to defeat the Ghana.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I think your list is too exotic; the simplest is that there were several enclaves on the continent, not just Alexandria.

You are probably right. I've had some time to think about it and the most logical explanation for the death toll would be tsunamis.

Hm... this bring the old question: why destroy the whole continent? Not just it was overwhelmingly incomparable to the size of problem, but it was also pretty dangerous in ecological and climatic therms. Such ammount of organic matter burned, such seismic vibrations, so many soil swept into oceans... This may quite well turn Safehold in a much less hospitable planet.

So, what exactly the initial Rakurai array tried to hit? They have sweeping attacks exactly against Alexandria, basically hitting the enclave location against and against. Three separate waves of at least kiloton-size impactors against the total area of 2544689.52 km2 - and FIVE waves against just the Alexandria.

It looks like combination of barrage attack (against what? What could Dr. Pei have in comission, that must be pinned to the ground and npt allowed to launch?) & hardened target penetration. I.e. those-who-launched-attack supposed that there is something really deep buried under Alexandria, and tried to hit it... before what?

Basically, why all this fuss about having Rakurai array constructed completely in secred and used so suddenly? Maybe I'm too paranoid, but it almost seems that BOTH sides were afraid of each other, and the loyalist (whoever actually launched the strike) tried to forestall the opposing side strike. What could possibly Dr. Pei have, that she could not be allowed - under any circumstances - to atc first?

- A bunch of nuclear-tipped missiles, stached in silos under Alexandria?
- Old-fashioned artifical intelligence virus, capable of pre-programmed controlled pandemia?
- An army of military-grade PICA's shocktroopers?

Your variants?

Joat42 wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:...snip...
There was one other aspect to the destruction of Alexandria which has not yet been discussed in the books because even Nimue didn't know about it. Let's just say that the rakurai strike on Alexandria actually killed a lot more people than Nimue thinks it did.

I mean, a lot more people.

Merlin will not be happy when he learns about it.

Hmm.. A couple of possibilities comes to mind who they where.

• A large amount of colonists in cryo (with memories intact perhaps)
• A contingent of military personnel (friends/colleagues of Nimue?)
• Many children/students attending schools/universities (which will make Nimue go ballistic when she finds out)

Those seem like the obvious possibilities, but there are arguments against all three. First, if there were lots of colonists in cryo, wouldn't Pei (and therefore Owl) have been aware of them? They had the original manifests and lists of colonists, and I don't see how Shan-Wei could have hid hundreds of colonists from Langhorne when they clearly had to go to considerable effort to hide just one PICA. This would apply to all of these possibilities really.

My guess is that Shan-Wei had several hundred (or thousand) AI personalities stored at Alexandria. It's been mentioned in other books that many of Earth's best minds had been stored as AIs, and it's probably a lot easier to hide a bunch of electrons than it is cryo capsules.

Nick wrote:..snip..
My guess is that Shan-Wei had several hundred (or thousand) AI personalities stored at Alexandria. It's been mentioned in other books that many of Earth's best minds had been stored as AIs, and it's probably a lot easier to hide a bunch of electrons than it is cryo capsules.

That kind of makes sense, and it would seriously tick Merlin/Nimue off. I wonder if a PICA can burst in to flames?