Are Thargoids good guys here?

I can't help myself but thinking that Thargoids are rather 'good guys' in the galactic events theater.
Let's take a look at the facts:
  • No hostility unless poked
    • Thargoids do not attack vessels which pose no threat (non-hostiles carrying no thargoid or guardian tech), simply leaving them to be
    • They were very aggressive in the past though, during First Thargoid War in 3150, which ended up with mycoid virus development and deployment by INRA and supposed Thargoid eradication
  • Were or maybe still are able to eradicate or severely damage Human Civilization, but chose not to
    • In Second Thargoid War in 3302/3 they reached a striking distance to Sol, but did not proceed further
    • Thargoids possess far more advanced tech, and are able to eradicate humanity should they decide to do so
  • Not interested in territories already claimed by someone else
    • There is clearly no aggressive expansion - due to far more advanced hyperspace travel technology huge amout of worlds is accessible to them, hence Thargoids rather cherrypick suitable uninhabited worlds than focus on territory
    • During Guardian/Thargoid Wars from Thargoid perspective Guardians have already occupied their worlds - barnacles might be considered settlements from insectoid race perspective - hence the Thargoid aggression
So, based on this I'd assume:
  • Thargoids are intergalactic civilization
  • They were aggressive towards humans in the First War due to resemblance of Human & automated Guardian tech
  • Milky Way thargoids hive was eradicated completely in the First War, the ones we see now are a new batch that arrived for investigation / replacement after Milky Way thargoids went silent
  • Thargoids are not interested in neither war nor any form of contact as long as humans do not interfere with their business
  • Should humans stop attacking & interfering with thargoids in any way, leaving them to be, there would be no conflict or war whatsoever
  • Humans are the aggressor
Everything I know about Thargoids comes from Drew Wagar Thargoid lore video and Thargoids ED Fandom article.
I got familiarized with ED world in 2020, and have no knowledge of past community events and various logs & POIs scattered around the galaxy.

Please prove me wrong :)
 
Do the Ram Tah missions.

Alternatively:
Should Thargoids stop attacking & interfering with humans in any way, leaving them to be, there would be no conflict or war whatsoever. Thargoids are the aggressor.
Will do, thanks!

But that's exactly what they do, don't they?
There is no attacking human ships on encounter, unless ship is hostile, where hostility is determined based on:
  • directly attacking thargoid ship
  • carrying thargoid tech (hence attacked thargoid ship or property in the past)
  • carrying guardian tech (who are perceived as ultimate threat due to past events)
 
Speaking as a commander with AX as my main gameplay: Yes, it is perfectly possible humans are the "bad guys" - or even more likely, conflict arises when species do not understand each other.

Does this change the fact that I can have fun blowing Hydras to smithereens in a game? Not in the least. :devilish:
(Always play through SW games on dark side at least once - play through RPGs as chaotic evil at least once...)
 

Deleted member 38366

D
I'd say so, too....

Number of unprovoked Human attacks on me so far in the years : alot
Number of unprovoked Thargoid attacks on me so far in the years : 1 (one) - I went sightseeing in a Threat 8 (or 9?) Signal Source and had a too-close look, so I poked them a bit

Since they got beaten near extinction and were even subjected to Biological Warfare in the last large war they lost - and them dying like flies to human aggression these days just as well...

...yep, when I apply classic ROEs (Rules of Engagement), they at best classify as Neutral, confirmed by many acts of non-aggression despite close proximity and despite being under human attack at that time already.

I'd say they're fleeing from something and just need a place to regroup and gather resources.
(them popping up so close to the human bubble in our vast Galaxy I simply deem credited to their limited Navigation and very limited Strategic capabilities)
 
Will do, thanks!

But that's exactly what they do, don't they?
There is no attacking human ships on encounter, unless ship is hostile, where hostility is determined based on:
  • directly attacking thargoid ship
  • carrying thargoid tech (hence attacked thargoid ship or property in the past)
  • carrying guardian tech (who are perceived as ultimate threat due to past events)
Interceptors are immediately hostile to Megaships and Stations. A Thargoid at either will immediately begin firing at it.
Scouts are immediately hostile to everything.

An interceptor arriving on scene with Scouts will also be Immediately hostile even if no shots have been exchanged.

The only reason Interceptors aren't immediately hostile to common human ships is that they don't care about the small ones.

Thargoids are, in fact, hostile.
 
The human mind is weak and easily manipulated.

starship-troopers-1.jpg
 
Humans are the aggressor

Please prove me wrong :)
I can't.

The totality of all player experience demonstrates without exception that Thargoids who initiate contact, or interceptors that are approached, will be non-hostile upon initial contact with the player. Limited circumstances will cause a Thargoid to open fire if, and only if, the interceptor perceives the cargo being carried by a vessel to be offensive to its species.

With regards to the attacks made on stations by the Thargoids. I will say that we are "told" that the Thargoids have attacked stations through Galnet, but as far as I am aware, no player has ever observed an attack, which is curious. We certainly see the aftermath, but nothing of how the conflict started.

If station interactions are anything like what we experience as players, then the Interceptor likely dropped in and shut off everyones power, flew around, and started scanning stuff. Each EMP deployed by an interceptor may have been considered the beginning of an assault by the stations, but may not have been the intent of the interceptor. However, the stations would likely begin firing upon the foreign alien vessels as soon as power was restored. But we have no knowledge of the specifics, other than what we are told through Galnet. It could very well be that the interceptors only returned fire to the stations in every instance, only after being fired upon during their attempts to scan.

It is entirely possible that the Thargoids were simply probing into human occupied space during their "assault" to try and study the human bubble. It is also possible that they fail to fully understand that their actions were even considered an invasion into human occupied territory by our species.

With regards to Guardian records:
I would be very hesitant to trust the Guardian records concerning the Thargoids. The Guardian records are millions of year old, and told through the narrative of a perceived "winner" of a conflict. We possess only a small understanding of what Guardian motivations were at this time, and thus cannot be sure of what Guardian intentions we're at that time. In contrast we have almost zero understanding concerning the motivations of the Thargoids, again reminding us of just how limited our knowledge is. Additionally, the Guardian records also state that the Guardian-Thargoid war was almost entirely fought by ground troops. To date, I am unaware of any attempt made by the Thargoids to "attack" anything other than a space station. With the exception of a very select few number of remote black-ops government surface sites, on distant backwater planets without atmospheres, which were also attacked by space vessels, and not by Thargoid ground units. This is a contradiction in the experiences of our species that has yet to be resolved.

Tl;dr You're right, and you should join my squadron and help defend the Thargoids.
 
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I get paid to kill a Targoid, I get paid to kill a Human General, I get paid to kill a Pirate.
It's just business.
 
Oh, this is an interesting thread. Can't wait for it to be locked.

I'd hesitate to call them the "good guys", but they're certainly not the bad guys. This isn't so black and white. If you look back through the timeline of this recent conflict with the Thargoids (easier said than done at this point) it becomes quite apparent that each act of hostility from the Thargoids has been preceded by some trigger event from us.

Just as the very first example: Thargoids return, and they're completely nonhostile to players, even though they could easily destroy us. First hostility was exclusively against Federal military ships - I doubt it's a coincidence that the first Unknown Artifacts/Thargoid Sensors were discovered in black-ops Federal military convoys. And those things transmit back home... and we now know that the Thargoids will attack if you don't give them their stuff back.

That later extended to Imperial military ships (blockading the barnacles along with the Feds), some civilian ships (who were also found with Thargoid tech nearby) and the Aegis stations (which were full to the brim of stolen Thargoid tech, and had hosted Operation Andronicus, a Thargoid massacre mission shortly before). And even when the station attacks began, the Thargoids were noted as deliberately holding back. Disabling the power generators, not dismantling the entire station like they easily could have.

Could all have been avoided if Aegis had been smart enough to identify the cause of the attacks. Or maybe they didn't want to...


And as for the Guardian logs, you've noticed several of the contradictions that indicate that things may have changed - one of the GalNets regarding those logs even has Ram Tah say something along the lines of "If the Thargoids take the same approach with us as the Guardians, they'll do this next. There is no indication that this has happened, however." Pretty clear signposting from the writers that, hey, maybe it's not quite so clear.
 
I'd like to point out that in nearly all of our interaction with anything we find that we cannot instantly explain, the first and immediate action that we take to interact with that thing is to shoot it.

At least be proud of your belligerent heritage and don't try to pretend "they started it!" as if that mattered.
 
@Rainbro has already nailed most of the key stuff I'd say, so I'm really just reinforcing what's been said already.

Thargoids aren't the bad guys are they aren't the good guys either. They shouldn't be looked at in such terms.

We don't really know who started it all, but there's certainly stuff to indicate that it was us - reports that colonists attacked a Thargoid deputation.

That also shows another major gap in our knowledge - was it a 'Thargoid' deputation, i.e. one which was on behalf of their entire civilisation, or was it just representing a particular group?

And that raises the question of what is the contra-situation? How are the actions of individual humans or groups of humans viewed within the Thargoid civilisation?

Perhaps a better way of that might be to ask what the equivalent of political machinations are within the Thargoid civilisation, and how would an Alien civilisation (i.e. humanity) influence those politics, and how would those politics influence the interactions with the Alien civilisation.


To switch it back around and look at how the political machinations within humanity effect things, there is evidence that a lot of stuff is just propaganda.

Let's assume for a second that the following points from an AEGIS report are true:

  • It is clear that our current situation echoes that of the Guardians. Our space, like theirs, was seeded with barnacles thousands of years ago, and now the Thargoids have arrived to reap the biomechanical harvest.

  • The codices indicate that the Thargoids may be an older race than the Guardians, and that the two species share a history of conflict. This hostility was a product of the Thargoids’ belief that they had a pre-existing claim to the regions of space occupied by the Guardians.

  • We now know that the purpose of the Thargoids’ ongoing military offensive is to remove humanity from what they consider their territory.

The key thing here is what is meant by 'Our space'.

There's no sign that Barnacles are in the bubble. So far Barnacles are only found in and around Nebulae.

So on a basic level, a far as we know, that slight point is incorrect - the Thargoids didn't seed our space.

What has happened is that various Nebulae were already seeded, and then we have expanded into those Nebulae.

Unfortunately a major part of the reasons for the expansion into those Nebulae is to reap the harvest from the Barnacles. (It was specifically the reason for the expansion into the Witchhead. See: https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/04-JUL-3305 )


This all puts Thargoids as the equivalent of farmers who sow a field with seeds and then return to the field to find the fields have been occupied and all the crops eaten.

The expansion into the Pleiades is one thing, but in the expansion into the Witchhead and Coalsack, humanity has absolutely and unequivocally, acted to knowingly escalate the conflict with the Thargoids.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the powers that be knew that the expansions into those areas would massively escalate hostilities, because we were told publicly that it was what would happen. They went ahead anyway.

(And we know that the powers that be had seen the report because we saw their response: https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/25-MAR-3304 )

In the terms that people look at the Thargoids, then we are the baddies.



Of course there's a whole lot more going on than that. Just to give some flavour...


From Ram Tah (in 3304):

2/28 : Thargoid Log – The War Begins This data details the start of the conflict between the Guardians and the Thargoids. Several thousand years after they seeded planets in Guardian space with barnacles. the Thargoids returned. Of course, they discovered that the planets they had seeded were now occupied by the Guardians! The Thargoids immediately launched an assault. making no effort to communicate with the Guardians, which tallies with the Thargoids’ behaviour in human space.


From Galnet in 3301:

"The community seems wary of awarding these artefacts any title yet, given the fifty years of false hopes since Soontill was first mentioned by the Thargoids."


Note that 3250 is well between the 'disappearance' of the Thargoids in the mid 32nd century (which we now know was down to the use of the Mycoid virus on the Thargoids by INRA), and their 'return' in early 3303.

Additionally, Project Equinox discovered the seeds of the Thargoids return around 3170, and reported it to the Feds and the Imps but were not only ignored, but shut down.

Whether it was completely ignored is unclear. Private outfits may also have known about the Thargoids return well before it publicly happened - the Black Flight appear to have been in the Pleiades monitoring Thargoid activity well before the recent expansion into there by the mainstream of humanity.
 
@Rainbro has already nailed most of the key stuff I'd say, so I'm really just reinforcing what's been said already.

Thargoids aren't the bad guys are they aren't the good guys either. They shouldn't be looked at in such terms.

We don't really know who started it all, but there's certainly stuff to indicate that it was us - reports that colonists attacked a Thargoid deputation.

That also shows another major gap in our knowledge - was it a 'Thargoid' deputation, i.e. one which was on behalf of their entire civilisation, or was it just representing a particular group?

And that raises the question of what is the contra-situation? How are the actions of individual humans or groups of humans viewed within the Thargoid civilisation?

Perhaps a better way of that might be to ask what the equivalent of political machinations are within the Thargoid civilisation, and how would an Alien civilisation (i.e. humanity) influence those politics, and how would those politics influence the interactions with the Alien civilisation.


To switch it back around and look at how the political machinations within humanity effect things, there is evidence that a lot of stuff is just propaganda.

Let's assume for a second that the following points from an AEGIS report are true:

  • It is clear that our current situation echoes that of the Guardians. Our space, like theirs, was seeded with barnacles thousands of years ago, and now the Thargoids have arrived to reap the biomechanical harvest.

  • The codices indicate that the Thargoids may be an older race than the Guardians, and that the two species share a history of conflict. This hostility was a product of the Thargoids’ belief that they had a pre-existing claim to the regions of space occupied by the Guardians.

  • We now know that the purpose of the Thargoids’ ongoing military offensive is to remove humanity from what they consider their territory.

The key thing here is what is meant by 'Our space'.

There's no sign that Barnacles are in the bubble. So far Barnacles are only found in and around Nebulae.

So on a basic level, a far as we know, that slight point is incorrect - the Thargoids didn't seed our space.

What has happened is that various Nebulae were already seeded, and then we have expanded into those Nebulae.

Unfortunately a major part of the reasons for the expansion into those Nebulae is to reap the harvest from the Barnacles. (It was specifically the reason for the expansion into the Witchhead. See: https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/04-JUL-3305 )


This all puts Thargoids as the equivalent of farmers who sow a field with seeds and then return to the field to find the fields have been occupied and all the crops eaten.

The expansion into the Pleiades is one thing, but in the expansion into the Witchhead and Coalsack, humanity has absolutely and unequivocally, acted to knowingly escalate the conflict with the Thargoids.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the powers that be knew that the expansions into those areas would massively escalate hostilities, because we were told publicly that it was what would happen. They went ahead anyway.

(And we know that the powers that be had seen the report because we saw their response: https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/25-MAR-3304 )

In the terms that people look at the Thargoids, then we are the baddies.



Of course there's a whole lot more going on than that. Just to give some flavour...


From Ram Tah (in 3304):

2/28 : Thargoid Log – The War Begins This data details the start of the conflict between the Guardians and the Thargoids. Several thousand years after they seeded planets in Guardian space with barnacles. the Thargoids returned. Of course, they discovered that the planets they had seeded were now occupied by the Guardians! The Thargoids immediately launched an assault. making no effort to communicate with the Guardians, which tallies with the Thargoids’ behaviour in human space.


From Galnet in 3301:

"The community seems wary of awarding these artefacts any title yet, given the fifty years of false hopes since Soontill was first mentioned by the Thargoids."


Note that 3250 is well between the 'disappearance' of the Thargoids in the mid 32nd century (which we now know was down to the use of the Mycoid virus on the Thargoids by INRA), and their 'return' in early 3303.

Additionally, Project Equinox discovered the seeds of the Thargoids return around 3170, and reported it to the Feds and the Imps but were not only ignored, but shut down.

Whether it was completely ignored is unclear. Private outfits may also have known about the Thargoids return well before it publicly happened - the Black Flight appear to have been in the Pleiades monitoring Thargoid activity well before the recent expansion into there by the mainstream of humanity.
There's just one thing. It flashed in your post, but I read it in more detail.
The Guards were able to understand the language of the Thargoids and tried to negotiate with them, but alas.
So on that basis the Thargoids can't have a reputation as the good guys since they don't take other life forms into consideration.
 
There's just one thing. It flashed in your post, but I read it in more detail.
The Guards were able to understand the language of the Thargoids and tried to negotiate with them, but alas.
So on that basis the Thargoids can't have a reputation as the good guys since they don't take other life forms into consideration.
Our source for that is Ram Tah. As per the post, there are other things Ram Tah says are not true. Do you trust that he is telling the absolute truth?

Ram Tah's source is the Guardians' official version of events. Do you trust that that is absolutely true? Is there no suspicion on your part that the Guardians may have done exactly what we did and basically pillaged the Thargoids' crops and then not been completely honest about it?

Fundamentally even if the Ram Tah/Guardian description of those events is accurate, the Thargoids have acted differently with us, so any conclusions about their behaviour which are based solely on how they acted towards the Thargoids are already invalidated by that.

As I said at the start of the post though, they shouldn't be looked at in terms of being either 'good guys' or 'bad guys' anyway. Neither accurately represents the nature of things. Trying to pigeonhole things will just lead to distortion.

Also if their actions mean they are the bad guys, then by the same rationale then we are also the bad guys. If we're the good guys based on our actions, then by the same rationale, they are also the good guys.

Case in point:

So on that basis the Thargoids can't have a reputation as the good guys since they don't take other life forms into consideration.

How many genocides of sapient species have been committed by each species? How many non-sapient species have been completely wiped out? Because the numbers attributable to humanity certainly do not indicate that we are any better. And we may actually be much much worse. (For the avoidance of doubt, I'm just talking about the ED universe here.)

Point being that if we're going to apply a 'they're the bad guys because they've done X' then that rule may mean that we are not only also bad guys, but far worse.

Equally a 'good guys because of Y' rule might mean that both us and the Thargoids are the good guys according to that rule.

Like I say trying to force things into 'Good guys' and 'Bad guys' pigeonholes is just going to distort things and things really shouldn't be looked at in those terms.
 
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