Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 3094485" data-attributes="member: 29746">For another "Epic" alien race of incredibly ancient origin and vast technological power, you can't do much better than the Xeelee in Stephen Baxter's books. The Xeelee (that's the name other races call them, their name for themselves- assuming they have such- is unknown) are a race with complete mastery of spacetime, such that they can fold it and manipulate it to create actual objects, and they invented the first workable faster-than-light drive (a "hyperdrive" which works via instantaneous translation across long distances).They are known to have mastered time travel, and have directly interfered in their own evolution more than once.After fighting a losing war over the span of eons with a race of beings made of dark matter, who are slowly but surely adapting the universe to suit themselves, the Xeelee created an "escape hatch" from the universe called the Ring, which is an artifact made of carefully knitted-together cosmic strings which form a spinning circle ten million light-years across, the gravity of which creates the phenomenon known to Earth astronomers as the Great Attractor. The purpose of the Ring is to create a spinning, naked singularity 300 light-years across at its center, which is essentially a portal into another spacetime- another universe.The Xeelee are a "species" of creature that are essentially several different types of lifeforms living in symbiosis; the base of the lifeform is made of shaped spacetime defects which resemble vast birds made of pure blackness. In the novel Exultant, he actually defines these beings as leftovers from a much earlier era of the universe, before the "inflationary period" that happened within a miniscule fraction of a second after the Big Bang. In fact, it's stated in the backstory that the beings who inhabited that vanishingly brief (by our standards) epoch were all spacetime-defect creatures. And a war between them led to the inflationary period which increased the size of the universe at speeds much faster than light itself can travel. The Xeelee are leftovers from that ancient time who somehow learned to survive in the new era which was, to them, incredibly cold and dark, much like the universe would seem to us once all the stars burn out.</blockquote>

Verification