I may be wrong. It's been a couple of years since I did the ram tah mission but I believe the thargoids actually predate the guardians. I may be wrong. I need to look up a transcript of all of those messages and read up again.
Humans are the Guardian Constructs: Theory
- Thread starter Jeron
- Start date
Correct they do by millions of years
The thing that noone ever talks about is how close the only sentient life forms are in relation to each other. Look at how big the galaxy is and out of that galaxy there are millions and millions of earthlike worlds that could produce life. Take into account life could grow on ammonia based worlds as well and that number easily doubles. Now out of all of those worlds in this big huge galaxy the only 3 sentient life forms (4 if you count the soontill) that ever evolve are litterly less than a thousand light years apart from each other. There's no way that's a coincidence. That's why I personally think the guardians somehow influenced humanity's evolution.
Post guardian extermination a faction might break off and live in peace on a viable world?
Humanity has been an interstellar civilisation for more than a thousand years, yet despite that it's (allegedly) only in the past few years that we've found the remains of another large interstellar civilisation in what's effectively our own galactic back yard. I think that sets the picture of how well informed we are with regard to the existence of sentient life in the rest of the galaxy.
We also don't know where the Thargoids come from.
A few other points:
- As above, we're really talking interstellar civilisations, not sentient life.
- We're also really only talking of things that players have encountered, or are public knowledge within humanity. - we don't know what else humanity as a whole has encountered that a lid has been kept on.
- In terms of known sentient/sapient life there's the Mudlarks that were wiped out in Achenar.
- Who knows what exactly the sentience level of life was in Tau Ceti before it was largely wiped out by colonists? The same for other colonies.
Where've you got "(and related ancillary life on Guardian worlds)" from?
Just going to pick up on what's probably a key point in this (not necessarily on the front of the hypothesis, but important nonetheless).
"Thargoids are known to be instantly hostile to humans." Isn't correct.
Has a Thargoid been instantly hostile to a human? Quite possibly.
Are all Thargoids instantly hostile to any human they encounter? No.
Yes, the permit locked volumes elsewhere in the Galaxy come to mind.
It is interesting that the Guardian libraries distributed on airless moons all over the area don't mention a single non-airless moon where their civilization was located.
From this we can either infer that game designers were lazy and did not want to put permit locks on atmospheric worlds where the Guardians were located, or that the Guardians lived on these airless moons, which were stripped of life by the AI. Take your pick.
It’s not the environmental damage that I was questioning. It was the assertion that it was the AIs who were responsible that I was questioning. Where’ve you got the impression that it was the AIs who did it?
I thought it was well established that the AIs rebelled against the Guardians and wiped them out. Maybe I'm on planet Cyberdyne...
The Guardians largely wiped themselves out in a huge civil war (their second one as an interstellar civilisation). The AI just finished them off.
Exact timings aren't 100% clear, but the war lasted over 100 years and it seems that the actions of the AI to finish it were very rapid, which puts that right at the end. Given that I'd argue that in all likelihood the environmental destruction had already been done by the Guardians, and may actually have been a contributing factor towards the AI decision to take the action they did.
Key logs are below:
History 18: This data describes details about the Guardians second civil war. The war was ostensibly fought between the people of the homeworld and the colonies, but in truth there were divisions even among individual city-states. The scale of the conflict far exceeded that of the first civil war. In human terms, the first Guardian civil war was little more than a political clash, albeit with some violent conflict, but the second was an all-out war between the abolitionists and the rest of society. The war eventually destroyed the Guardians’ habitats, forcing them to retreat into ‘sacred’ domes protected by powerful shields
History 19: This data describes details about the Guardians second civil war. The war raged for many years and eventually destroyed the Guardians’ habitats, forcing them to retreat into ‘sacred’ domes protected by powerful shields. Eventually even the domes were destroyed, or their shields failed, and ultimately the population died out. Their predilection for expending resources on honouring the dead – a key tenet of their religion – only served to accelerate their extinction. Records indicate some variation in the nature of this devastation, most obviously at sites consisting of multiple domes. In these locations it appears the inner domes were destroyed later than the outer ones, as indicated by the slightly lower radiation signatures in the inner areas. I can only surmise that the attackers returned, after an initial assault, to finish the job.
History 20: This data describes details about the Guardians second civil war. It appears that the Guardians approach to warfare vastly changed as the war continued. Warfare was conducted using automated battle fleets. At first these were controlled by the Guardians via brain implants, but later they became entirely autonomous. In the early stages of the war the Guardians fought each other directly, but within a decade – and after much loss of life – most of the fighting was conducted remotely. Soldiers were deployed only to occupy areas that had been captured by autonomous or remote vehicles, and eventually were not used at all.
History 21: This data describes details about the Guardians second civil war. The war raged for over a hundred years, and Guardian populations fell dramatically during this time. Fertility rates dropped due to increased radiation levels and because the Guardians considered it blasphemous to use technology to address a biological issue. Eventually, one of the competing forces triumphed, but by that point, all the Guardians other than those who had been exiled a century earlier were dying.
Language 21: As is always the case with research of this nature, finding answers tends to raise further questions. I’ve found references to another form of communication in this data packet, but not one used by the Guardians, or not all of them, at least. As far as I can tell it references some kind of foe or adversary. Combined with the devastation seen at a number of sites, it indicates the Guardians may not have been the cause of their own demise.
10/28 : Civil War Log – Annihilation This log concerns the end of the second civil war. Remarkably, it seems the artificial intelligences developed during the conflict became fully self aware at some point, and were horrified by the destruction unfolding around them. It’s difficult to get a sense of exactly what happened next, as the Guardians were not privy to the Constructs’ thoughts. But reading between the lines, I believe the Constructs determined that even if peace was restored the Guardians would never be able to transcend their violent natures. I believe they decided that the only way to preclude further violence – while giving their own burgeoning society the best possible chance of survival – was to destroy what remained of the Guardians’ civilisation. By this time, the Constructs had complete control of the Guardians’ munitions and automated war machines. Their attack, when it came, was swift and merciless. Strategic nuclear and chemical-weapon strikes were executed with a precision that only a machine race could accomplish. The few that survived were able to record what had happened, but they soon succumbed to radiation poisoning. The Guardians were utterly destroyed.
The Thargoids appear to have been the first sentient species in the galaxy. If not the first, then certainly very early. Thousands of other sentient species have indeed no doubt arisen; the Thargoids seem to have wiped out every single one of them, except for two (that we know of): the Guardians, who exterminated themselves before the Thargoids could finish the job... and Humans, whom the Thargoids are currently working on extermination. Most of those other sentients would have been wiped out shortly before or just after they achieved space travel, while they were still confined to their planet of origin. Once we can land on Earth-likes and Ammonia Worlds, we will probably find evidence of their existence. The Humans and Guardians were both unusually fast in their ascension from stone age to space, so their sudden appearance and spreading across hundreds of systems caught the Thargoids off-guard.
Thus, in ED, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is "The Thargoids killed them all".
Is there any actual evidence of this, or is it just something that's being posited?
The only thing I'm aware of in game is a bit from the Codex, but that's just stuff from the mouths of Ram Tah and Palin, and Ram Tah's certainly said stuff that's wrong about the Thargoids before - enough to suggest he's just to doing his part in distributing propaganda.
As for the OP's hypothesis: No. My reasoning:
- There is a continuum of fossil evidence for humanoids and proto-humanoids on Earth, dating far further back than the Guardian Wars. Humans appear to be a natural part of that continuum. Unless it was Earth lifeforms that the Guardians chose to engineer to create their Constructs, and their modifications were so minor as to not be noticeable in the fossil record? In which case, why go to all the trouble of engineering them at all? Why not simply enslave the proto-humans and use them as cannon fodder?
- The Constructs were presumably dispersed throughout Guardian space during the Wars, and afterwards. Why would their descendants only be found on Earth, out on the fringes of Guardian space? We should be finding remnants of Construct colonies - other humans, at various stages of evolution/devolution - throughout Guardian space.
- Constructs are recorded as having machine-like precision and efficiency - the whole point of the Guardians creating them was to fight and win their wars more efficiently than they themselves could - and they were a warrior race, pretty efficient themselves at fighting and killing if they chose to be. The Constructs won the Construct-Guardian War quickly and efficiently. Modern humans do not have this level of efficiency, and there's nothing in the fossil record to indicate that ancient proto-humans were more efficient than us.
- The Guardians (or at least, the dominant faction of the Guardians) seem to have regarded biological life as sacred, much more so than Humans do. They don't seem to have gone around guardianoforming every life-bearing planet within their territory, for example; all the ELWs and Water Worlds in Guardian space are as wonderfully different and diverse as such worlds are in the rest of the galaxy. They would not have created an artificial sentient biological lifeform that was more or less identical to themselves, when they had the technology to create an entirely artificial AI that did not violate their precepts.
Yes. The evidence is a galaxy that's full of Earth-like worlds but virtually no sentience. Something has been killing them off and/or preventing them from developing space travel. We know the Thargoids ruthlessly attempt to destroy all aliens they encounter, and that they've been around for millions of years.
Occam's Razor: why postulate the existence of a second invisible galaxy-wide sentient-race-exterminating force, when the one we already know about will suffice as an explanation?
We don’t know that about the Thargoids though.
Rumours are that the conflict with humanity started as a result of us attacking a peaceful delegation they sent.
Ram Tah makes some assertions, but he backs them up with incorrect info, and he’s only giving the Guardian’s official version of things anyway. That’s almost inevitably going to be a very one sided perspective on events.
And why postulate a galaxy-wide sentient-race-exterminating force at all?
It’s not necessarily needed. The supposition seems to be that the Galaxy should be teeming with sentient life. That’s not necessarily the case.
Also, we don’t fully know what the situation is with regard to sentient life in the ED universe. Our info as PF members is limited.
What we do know for sure is that humanity have been responsible for the wiping out of at least one sentient species, the Mudlarks in Achenar.
How sure are we that that was a one-off?
And a big question to throw in - what of the beings that Halsey supposedly encountered? ‘The real caretakers of our galaxy’, ‘the paradox of their existence - tiny yet gargantuan, fleeting yet eternal’.
I believe that the sudden explosion of knowledge humanity had can be counted as evidence of tampering by the guardians. It was suggested earlier that the Soontill were actually thargoids but I don't believe that to be the case because in reading about it they do make a distinction in soontill artifacts and thargoid technology. I believe this indicates the thargoids destroyed that civilization. We may find more remnants of other civilizations also when we can land on atmospheric worlds.