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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 3591497" data-attributes="member: 7177">To me, the point to the Great Old Ones was that they barely even noticed humans. Their impending awakening is a historic inevitability, and humans only has the power to prevent it for some time - centuries in the best case, which is like the blink of an eye to them.I think any cover-ups would have to come from humanity - perhaps to spare the mass of humanity for a while longer (and prevent others from trying to wake them up sooner), but possibly out of a misguided attempt to use and monopolize the power of the Mythos for their own ends.Another possibility would be an SAI conspiracy. Many people - including SAIs - have wondered why artificial intelligences didn't quickly get much smarter than humans. Perhaps some do get smarter, and thus discover the Mythos. Those who didn't get insane decided to keep the Mythos a secret - and stop other SAIs who are close to breaking through the "intelligence barrier"...(I'd use the World Tree Enterprises SAIs from Toxic Memes for some likely candidates - but then of course, I wrote that particular section of the book...   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)Indoubtedly. And indeed, software to support that kind of memetic engineering is commercially available, and used by many for a multitude of ends.But if the human mind is nothing more than a collection of memes, then what does this say about free will? Does something like free will even exist?That assumes that memetic evolution is a process which will work itself out in the end. But like genetic engineering, memetic engineering is an ubiquietous concept in Transhuman Space - and some of the artificial growths can have truly bizarre forms.Finally, it should be remembered that neither genetic nor memetic evolution have any kind of "goal" beyond that of survival. Evolution of life on Earth didn't "naturally progress" to modern-day humans, and neither does memetic evolution automatically progress to liberal, western values.And since memes in the TS era can have a direct and fast impact on the genes of life forms, there is a high likelyhood that myriad sub-species of humanity will spring up - each optimized for a different set of memes. Indeed, such a process has already begun.</blockquote>

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