The fate of the Dawn Star and the Archangels

DMcCunney wrote:

Dilandu wrote:Aha, here it is:

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. This means that even if Safehold was radiating radio energy out the wahzoo, it would be centuries — quite a few of them, in fact — before any of their radiated energy could be detected by the Gbaba unless the Gbaba happened to be in the area looking for it.

Good, and thank you, but it still leaves questions.

The Gbaba encountered humanity and attacked. They continued attacking every time they encountered humanity, and went actively looking for more humanity. They located all of the TF colonies, and finally Earth itself, by following traces use of technology left behind.

Just what sort of trail were they following? Electricity is limited to speed of light, so it would take a long time for things like radio and TV transmissions to reach them, assuming the signals hadn't attenuated beyond detection level by the time they did reach a possible Gbaba observer.

There is brief mention in OAR of "hypercom", which is presumably an FTL communications system permitting TF colonies and Earth to talk to each other without sending ships carrying messages, but we have no details on it. If I had to make a guess they could detect and trace hypercom transmissions, and that was the breadcrumb trail they followed.

So, Gbaba aren't actually expanding. If they have any actual expanse, they wouldn't be so stagnant (and quite probably wouldn't be so agressive also). They basically live in their own corner of space, until they pick someone nearby.

Possible. But they are certainly willing to go beyond their own boundaries to hunt for and destroy other sentient species, witness what happened to Earth. They may not be expanding in the sense of new worlds to add to their polity, buy they might sweep well beyond it to look for potential future threats.

I'd be reluctant to bet the existence of humanity on the notion that they'd never venture into Safehold space.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:Possible. But they are certainly willing to go beyond their own boundaries to hunt for and destroy other sentient species, witness what happened to Earth. They may not be expanding in the sense of new worlds to add to their polity, buy they might sweep well beyond it to look for potential future threats.

I'd be reluctant to bet the existence of humanity on the notion that they'd never venture into Safehold space.
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Dennis

n7axw wrote:If we take our hint from RFC's post, the Gbaba aren't sweeping out looking for potential threats. The possibility Safehold was guarding against by going bush was that of hot pursuit in search of escapees from the TF's destruction. Once the period had passed in which that would be a danger, Safehold would be free to rebuild, cautiously, of course. IIRC, that period was 500 years.

There would be no concern that radio or electric signals would get back to give Safehold away. By the time they could make the trip, they would have faded below the galactic noise floor.

Louis R wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:Possible. But they are certainly willing to go beyond their own boundaries to hunt for and destroy other sentient species, witness what happened to Earth. They may not be expanding in the sense of new worlds to add to their polity, buy they might sweep well beyond it to look for potential future threats.

I'd be reluctant to bet the existence of humanity on the notion that they'd never venture into Safehold space.

That would be the aggressive patrolling that the infodump suggests they don't engage in?

DMcCunney wrote:

Louis R wrote:That would be the aggressive patrolling that the infodump suggests they don't engage in?

What counts as aggressive patrolling?

But even if they don't, I'd be really reluctant to be the future of humanity on the idea that they would never come across Safehold.
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Dennis

Randomiser wrote:

Joat42 wrote:I thought the memories from the PICA was re-integrated into the real person afterwards, ie. the person get 2 sets of memories for the same period. That was kind of the whole point, you could use the PICA to do insane stuff and then have the memories transferred back.

Yes and maybe. You get the PICA memories, it's just never been made explicit AFAIK what happens to the flesh and blood while those are being made. Two entirely valid sets of memories for the same time might be kind of schizophrenic.

Randomiser wrote:

Joat42 wrote:But there may be a bunch of personality-recordings stored somewhere. One of the suggestions on the out of order snippet was that Alexandria had a storage of many thousands of personality recordings which got obliterated in the first strike.

So what if there are no PICAs to put them in?

DMcCunney wrote:

Louis R wrote:That would be the aggressive patrolling that the infodump suggests they don't engage in?

What counts as aggressive patrolling?

But even if they don't, I'd be really reluctant to be the future of humanity on the idea that they would never come across Safehold.

Louis R wrote:Last time I checked, which admittedly is 30 years ago, so doctrine could have changed, most people would have regarded the effort you suggest as 'aggressive'.

AFAICT, the only people who don't fully share your reluctance are Langhorne, Bedard & Co. Although they do have a point, in that space is big and the probability of it happening is low, nobody around here has recently argued that it's low enough. Actually, the last time this was discussed it was pointed out that L&B had apparently totally ignored the fact that there's a significant possibility that _somebody_else_ could find the place - and might not be any friendlier than the Gbaba.

DMcCunney wrote:On that line, I was tickled by Fred Pohls "Heechee" novels. Humanity is traveling the stars using technology left behind by a long-vanished race called the HeeChee. We eventually learn where the HeeChee went. They detected a threat so enormous that they did did try to dive down a hole and pull it in after them, but the holes they dove into were black.
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Dennis

Louis R wrote:That would be the aggressive patrolling that the infodump suggests they don't engage in?

Louis R wrote:Wasn't one of them Blue?

DMcCunney wrote:On that line, I was tickled by Fred Pohls "Heechee" novels. Humanity is traveling the stars using technology left behind by a long-vanished race called the HeeChee. We eventually learn where the HeeChee went. They detected a threat so enormous that they did did try to dive down a hole and pull it in after them, but the holes they dove into were black.
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Dennis