What The Reapers are doing does make sense
If you look in the world today, it's just a bloody chaos. The rich is getting richer and the poor poorer. Wars and conflicts all over the place. The earth must be harvest.
shareWell yes, wipe out everyone and you don't have those problems any more. Sure, people can't kill each other when they're all dead, but it's not really a sensible solution.
shareSensible solution is to create new inhabitants for the earth. Maybe wiping out mankind, but the leave the animals alone to take over the earth.
shareThen you'd have Planet of the Apes and it would begin all over again except it would be in ape form this time around.
In war, victory. In peace, vigilance. In death, sacrifice.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean they will follow our identical evolution and history of violence. Or maybe they won't evolve at all.
shareAny time there's change there's eventually evolution (if it's not too sudden or too extreme), so there will be evolution. There's no guarantee that'll lead to intelligence but it's not an unreasonable assumption that if it does a lot of the same problems we have will still be there (as much as it's rather dubious to extrapolate from just what we've got on the Earth). Most violent and confrontational behaviour ultimately derive from fairly basic instincts, the sort we needed to survive in a harsh world. Perhaps an intelligent species will eventually learn to overcome those (which would require almost every member of said species to do so) but that'll take time.
shareWhy does it always have to go the human route? C'mon, the whole us where we are today isn't set up by a life manual instruction guide. It was purely accidently that mankind got were it is today. So if mankind were to be wipe out, it's just pure speculation what will happen next. And anything can happen.
shareIt's actually intriguing to think about. Chimps (or orangutans depending on which scientist you listen to) are our closest evolutionary relatives. What would happen if humans ceased to exist and they continued on.
It's already survival of the fittest in the animal kingdom. There's no question that would continue. They would eventually evolve, I would imagine, to be more intelligent, depending on what they would have to do to survive. I know this planet would be a lot better off without human intervention but what impact would animal, insect, plant, etc have on the planet over time?
I saw a tv show quite a few years ago about what would happen to the planet after humans. It may have even been called, Earth After Humans (or something along those lines). It went by the decade, if I remember correctly. It was a really interesting show. I wish I could remember the name of it.
As for the Reapers, we already proved that their logic was massively flawed in our cycle so I have no problem wiping them out at the end of the game.
In war, victory. In peace, vigilance. In death, sacrifice.
This suggests the same usual fundamental misunderstanding of "survival of the fittest," however. Evolutionary success doesn't depend on intelligence, or strength, or speed-- and doesn't necessarily 'encourage' or have as an end-goal greater intelligence, or strength, or speed; it depends on an organism's adapted ability to survive in its environment long enough to reproduce, passing on its genes.
We think we're "fit" or successful because our intelligence and resulting tools (helped tremendously by our pro-social brains) have allowed us to dominate most of the land area where we live; in an area with sufficient resources we can make tools and use them to drive out rival life-forms and transform said area (provided sufficient resources remain) to foster our survival and reproduction. We build shelters, cultivate food, develop medical care, set up measures to mitigate deadly violence, etc.
But a lone, naked human with no tools is poorly adapted to an ice shelf in Antarctica, or the bottom of the ocean (or its open surface, for that matter), or the top of Mount Everest, or outer space. A lone, naked human with no tools is no match for a lion, or a bear, or a golden eagle, or a shark, or certain viruses and bacteria.
So our "fitness" is highly situational, and highly fragile. And if our environment changed, some other species could prove far better suited to it, and bump us off. Hell, some other species could tip the balance-- previous mass extinctions were caused by ocean bacteria. If some kind of plankton or algae evolved tomorrow-- one little random gene mutation-- so that it thrived better in the oceans we're acidifying, and it belched out methane and reproduced like a mother****er, it could accelerate climate warming and potentially turn Earth into another Venus, where we couldn't survive anymore. Not because it was smarter, or stronger, or faster, but just because of advantageous biochemistry.
Point is, it isn't about what made us successful in the past through to now. It's about the environment, and being adapted to it. A 'successor' to humans-- the next species that could be considered 'dominant'-- could be another animal, but doesn't even have to be. It could be a slime mould, or a microbe, or it could be a toxic weed that we can't kill that chokes out everything else, collapsing the 'food chain.' There's no reason to think they'd be anything like us, or successful for anything like the reasons that we were. It's purely down to "what life form can propagate itself best where it lives." (Which is why we've really rolled the dice on our own survival by kicking off climate change the way we have-- it could result in an environment to which other species are better suited, and which becomes profoundly hostile to us.)
I'm an island- peopled by bards, scientists, judges, soldiers, artists, scholars & warrior-poets.
You need to consider why humans behave as they do, and therefore think about how plausible it is that intelligence would evolve in another species and that they'd behave differently. Why does intelligence emerge as an evolutionary advantage at all, for example? How likely is it that the basic behaviours that seem to cause wars (which seem to be present in an awful lot of animals) won't be present in one that evolves intelligence?
It's speculation of course but not totally groundless speculation. It's all very well saying "it might be different!" but without a convincing Why that's not enough to be convincing. Saying "we don't know everything" isn't either, appeal to ignorance is a logical fallacy. We don't know a lot but that's not the same as not knowing anything.
It was purely accidently that mankind got were it is today.
This is a common misconception. This is not how evolution works. Evolution takes random mutation and sorts it out to one that is best adapted to survive and multiply. So how we got here is not accidental, its deliberately set up that way to maximize our chances of survival. which is why we survived and, say, neanderthals did not.
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Resistance is impolite, Friendship is mandatory. share
"Deliberate" and "set up" imply a concious decision to make it so. It's all chance-based - deal the cards randomly, best hand is most likely to go through to the next round, where it gets dealt more cards but still keep the useful cards from the last round, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Occasionally the rules change so what was a good hand may not remain so (bye bye dinosaurs). No deliberate setting up required.
shareIt was neither deliberate nor set up, but it was not random. as i have explained, it was shaped by the suroundings humans lived in where those fit to survive in suroundings survived and those not fit - did not. Evolution wasnt just random mutations, it was random mutations out of whom only those fit to adapt carried on.
Your card analogy does not work, because it implies the player is looking for some specific set of cards. There is no such search in evolution, there os what is most useful at that moment in terms of survival.
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Resistance is impolite, Friendship is mandatory.
It won't be chimpanzees, orang-outans, gorillas, dogs, cats or bats. Why? Because that isn't how evolution works. Evolution does not have a goal like "become sentient, take over the planet", evolution is a thing that happens to a population when mutations prove favourable for survival.
Monkeys do not become intelligent monkeys given enough time: they get - as a species - to continue existing, that's the 'prize'.
Yes it does mean that it will follow identical evolution. this was a critical point of the Proethians and Reaper lore. Its an endless cycle because results are always the same.
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Resistance is impolite, Friendship is mandatory.
The Reapers didn't just wipe out the dominant species (not that I agree that's a solution either for the reasons given by RightBackAtYa), they destroyed the entire ecosystem of worlds they visited. Read some of the planet descriptions of worlds that show signs of having once been inhabited but are now mysteriously barren.
shareI always wondered why those worlds weren't used as 'proof' of the Reapers' activities, since how many dead civilizations can there be before the pattern becomes obvious?
I remember the days when Kardashians were just the bad guys on Star Trek!