Mustrum_Ridcully
Legend
Good nit picks and critiques.Just watched it. Overall was enjoyable, I did like how the story kept shifting the focus amongst the main characters, so it really felt like "they're" story rather they the story of a single protagonist.
I do like the concept of a 400 year "cold war" where we know a big fight is coming up, it will be interesting to see if future seasons time skip ahead or if it will all take place in the current day. I also thought the idea of a race that feels they have to wipe us out because we are liers is a cool premise, and one that makes sense. Realistically any society that doesn't have conscious deception would not do well coexisting with a duplicitous one....way too easily to manipulate. The "super proton super computer" was really neat.
That said, I of course have my nit picks and critiques.
- It is implied the aliens do not lie, and don't even have fictional stories. And yet....they helped make a VR video game in which people take on alternate names and personas, even creating civilizations that fit old earth aesthetics. So....plenty of deception there. And they learn our use of metaphor (calling us bugs near the end), so clearly they are capable of learning aspects of fantasy association. Probably one of the biggest holes to me.
- The aliens learned we can lie through a conversation with Evans. However, the man has been talking with them for decades (and since a few months ago basically communicating for hours a day). Heck he has even read to them another children's story. Yet THAT is when they learn we can't lie? That was either just a trumped up reason for the aliens to dump us, or the show just wanting to show the audience that while willing to drop the "realism" card.
- The Wallfacer concept is both interesting and incredibly stupid. Sure trying to make plans without the aliens knowing is a monumental task, but 3 little old humans (that are publicly announced), they should be hunted every second of every day for the rest of their lives. And the second they die, all of their plans die with them.
- Further, any plan of the kind of scope that would be needed to beat the aliens is likely going to show itself once they start implementing. The aliens can see anything on earth and are highly intelligent, it wouldn't be hard to start figuring out our plans once those plans are set in motion.
- My gut is telling me its a feint, that the 3 wallfacers are meant to be decoys for the actual leaders.
- The biggest "hole" in teh story....so why don't the aliens just win? They have already displayed an incredible ability to control our technology, and can even alter our sensory inputs. Hell within the day of Saul getting announced, they tried to kill him in a car accident and had a sniper almost kill him. And that's a few hours of work. Why not destroy the internet, take over every communication network. Create electrical surges across the grid, hack into the CDC and have one of the big plagues get released. If their goal is really annihilation....just start annihilating. Throw crisis after crisis after crisis at us. Every key leader should have 40 assassination attempts a day, not hard at all when you can adjust every computer system in the planet in fractions of a second. And this problem should only get worse as our tech advances, and we become more dependent on computers. From what we have seen of the alien's capabilities at the moment, there really should not be anyway for us to win.
- This hole is so large to me I actually wonder if the aliens really want to win? Is the ultimate goal what the original founder actually wanted, are the aliens just providing a threat to get us to come together and progress? That its just a feint meant to unite us rather than an actual invasion?
I was wondering about the lies, too. But one thing the aliens said that if they communicate, the communication is "total". Maybe when they play games or tells stories, the knowledge of the narrator that this is just a story or game is also communicated. But their communication with humans didn't work like that, and they only then realized that they couldn't actually tell what was a story, what a lie, and what was real. They all took it for real, and realized they were helpless against that.
Also I think fun stuff like reading fairy tales to aliens has only become possible very recently with their quantum-entangled sophons. The back and forth interval was basically 4 years (or 8 years for the round-trip), so they probably communicated a lot less and were more focused on essentials and facts.
I think while the proton computer is a neat idea, it's limitation are unclear. They mention they can maybe run so many concurrent experiments to overwhelm the capability of them to manipulate all. Maybe their ability to really hunt down the wallfacers is limited by that, too. Sure, they can convince people to join them, but they can't actually make all machines fail all the time, and even persistent sabotage could fail.
They only dimmed the stars for a moment, and put that mirror shield up for a limited amount of time.
But their goal is not annihilation. They might want to get rid of humans, but they must do so in a way that preserves the planet in a usuable state (for them, climate change might be something to deal with but global thermonuceal suicide would still suck.) Stringing the humans along and hoping their wallfacers don't actually come up with something that works might be still their safest bet.
But for the fun of it, further nitpicks.
The idea of the sophons seems to based on two ideas:
- There are more than 3 dimensions of space.
- Quantum Entanglement can be used to communicate information.
The first is basically something that became popular with string theory, that kinda only worked with 10 or 26 dimensions. But unfortunately, so far it offered no testable predictions and instead has too many variables that you can tweaked to explain away if any predictions ever not come to pass, to make predictions for even more difficult to achieve scenarios. Overall it is bad at giving falsifiable predictions. It's mathematically interesting (and has some uses in other areas apparently), but probably not describing our world. Of course, you could always invent reasons why there might be more dimensions.
But even with that, it is still difficult to explain how a proton could do anything the sophon does. Definitely the fi part of sci-fi here.
Quantum Entanglement cannot be used to communicate information. If you measure result A on yur side, you know the other side would get result B, but you don't know before you measure on one side, and the only way to tell the other side that they'll get A or B is to send a singal to that side - which still isn't faster than light, unless you already had an FTL signal, in which case, why bother with quantum entanglement, just use that other signal.
The author is of course in great company - Mass Effect also had a quantum entanglement communication device.