Brightness
Mar. 18th, 2020 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkatkinaOkay, so, Southern Reach trilogy speculation:
So the brightness was some sort of terraforming technology, as I understand it. Okay, so we take that as a given. But if anything, it seemed to be making the environment of Earth more pure -- more totally endemic to the original biosphere.
So what the fuck was it doing?
I think it was intended to terraform not the planet, but the colonists. It seemed to be making copies of humans and nothing else, yeah? Maybe it was intended to detect sentience and treat sentient creatures differently than non-sentient ones.
Imagine: a technology intended to take someone's extant body, and then perfectly copy its aesthetics and mind, but change its composition to better comply with a given environment. It creates perfect dopplegangers (which in turn implies an interesting philosophical choice on the part of the terraformers, to consider continuity of memory more important than continuity of body), and then humanely dispose of the original body by using its biomass to create another creature. Now, I'm not sure why they wouldn't just use that biomass to create the clone to begin with, but maybe the original has to continue to exist unmodified throughout the creation process?
Then set this technology loose on a planet, sans its original designers, and waits. Waits for colonists to show up. If it has any sort of AI, it might mark the passage of time and note it as unexpected. After a certain point it begins looking, and finds sentience. Ah, it decides, these must be the colonists.
Time to start creating a safe zone for the rest that are coming. So it enters Saul and starts its work.
Also, I'm working from home now, for the next week and a half at least. Probably longer, but we'll see. Honest to god, I kind of love it.
So the brightness was some sort of terraforming technology, as I understand it. Okay, so we take that as a given. But if anything, it seemed to be making the environment of Earth more pure -- more totally endemic to the original biosphere.
So what the fuck was it doing?
I think it was intended to terraform not the planet, but the colonists. It seemed to be making copies of humans and nothing else, yeah? Maybe it was intended to detect sentience and treat sentient creatures differently than non-sentient ones.
Imagine: a technology intended to take someone's extant body, and then perfectly copy its aesthetics and mind, but change its composition to better comply with a given environment. It creates perfect dopplegangers (which in turn implies an interesting philosophical choice on the part of the terraformers, to consider continuity of memory more important than continuity of body), and then humanely dispose of the original body by using its biomass to create another creature. Now, I'm not sure why they wouldn't just use that biomass to create the clone to begin with, but maybe the original has to continue to exist unmodified throughout the creation process?
Then set this technology loose on a planet, sans its original designers, and waits. Waits for colonists to show up. If it has any sort of AI, it might mark the passage of time and note it as unexpected. After a certain point it begins looking, and finds sentience. Ah, it decides, these must be the colonists.
Time to start creating a safe zone for the rest that are coming. So it enters Saul and starts its work.
Also, I'm working from home now, for the next week and a half at least. Probably longer, but we'll see. Honest to god, I kind of love it.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:10 am (UTC)