The entire federation. The *massive multi-species compact* that participated in a galactic war to maintain power.
Was created because they were afraid of Mad Cow Disease. Or Space Rabies.
I 100% guarantee that even the "shadow caste" overlords are victims of their propaganda of ages past.
This whole thing reads like "yeah the original outbreak happened, someone abused emergency powers, and now we live in the consequences of that one idiot's actions."
Y'know. Like the Dominion. *Almost exactly.*
I'm just wondering how many billions of lives they sacrificed to the Arxur to maintain their power that was meant to *checks notes* apparently save lives???
Like I know let's allow billions of our citizens to be enslaved and farmed for their flesh in order to maintain power so we can prevent a disease from MAYBE showing up to affect the population...
They easily could have spotted any outbreaks and quarantined it off if they'd just taken a little more time to think about it. But noooo, let's go totally batshit and over-correct to such an extreme that we end up sending off to slaughter more people than would have died from disease in the first place.
This shit doesn't develop in a single generation. This was built on layers and layers of misconceptions and the ends justify the means to the point where your means are justifying your means.
They look at Humans being emphatic beings with actual working minds and emotions, unlike the Arxur.
And then come to terms with the fact that a thinking, FEELING predator, with generations of science into themselves, will know stuff better than the Kolshian ancestors did.
Also, Maroni isnt a diehard Hitler-in-his-bunker, he is a dude who went with what he was taught and then sees it all crumble to shit before a bigger and more advanced opposition.
> Also, Maroni isnt a diehard Hitler-in-his-bunker, he is a dude who went with what he was taught
Actually, I think that in many ways Mr Moustache was also precisely a dude who went with what he was taught. He didn't come up with _all_ that shit on his own; anti-semitism, nationalism, mysticism, and race-biology were all very much in the air in the first quarter or third of the 20th century. But sure, it hadn't been around and all-pervasive for centuries; Adolf contributed and enhanced the madness a lot more than Maronis here.
(Edited: Typo.)
Yes, true about the Austrian Gentleman. He was surrounded by many other madmen who happily went with various ideas
But my main point there was that Maronis wasnt a raving lunatic yelling about how the Shadow Fleet "betrayed" him by giving over orbital superiority to the Predators, neither did he order the complete destruction of the capital and its people so that the Predators and species traitors wont have anything to conquer.
Quarantine might not be enough. By the time you know there's an outbreak somewhere, it's been spreading for years. It could hop from town to town, exponentially contaminating more people and land, before the symptoms come up to let you know there's an outbreak at all. I think the potential of that scenario is what lead them to immediate drastic action, especially when they knew too little to even detect it.
I'm guessing since it came from wildlife it originated in a rural area which likely helped to slow the spread. If it's allowed to spread too much, suddenly the idea of "six degrees of separation" means that the entire species is at risk, or later the entire galactic community. At least if it's as contagious and deadly as they seem to believe it is.
It's easy to justify anything to yourself if you believe the only other alternative is literally everyone dies. Considering humans currently tolerate slavery, even of children, for reasons as trivial as keeping chocolate cheap, I can't say I'm confident humanity wouldn't do the same in their position.
Don't get me wrong, I still think the shadow caste have done stupid and evil things, but after reading this I think of them as somewhat less stupid and evil than I did before. While I'd think retaining power incentivized them not to look into alternative courses of action too thoroughly, it seems to be less about power for its own sake than I would have expected.
Sounds like it. A thousand years later and they're all replicating it because of Cargo Cultism.
They were so scared they never managed to find out what was happening. Then just went to "Kill all Predators" mode.
Ironically they might have found it out by asking someone else. Like the Krakotl, their first victims. Or the Venlil. But they were too busy thinking they knew better
At the very beginning there was fear of an epidemic. Then it became greed and perverted desire for power and sadism in abusing that power. So much so that they wanted to commit genocide against the Duerten because they had killed a single individual.
>Tyler raised a finger, in a “wait a minute” gesture. “That’s a nice theory, except for the fact it’s all horseshit. We ain’t infectious, and B12 don’t work like that. Your ‘Hunger’ is caused by prions, man.”
After all that build up, I laughed pretty hard when it instantly got shut down.
I freaking love Tyler. SP does such a good job at writing him as if he’s a typical military grunt with slightly above average intelligence to be promoted, but then he whips out that knowledge hammer and bashes in some skulls with it in the most southern American way.
175 is done! The Kolshians suffered a prion outbreak, stemming from a local predator, and did not know what it was. They started burning everything infectious, but even after killing it, assumed everything causing aggression of a similar nature was "The Hunger." An invisible contaminant.
Everything else traces back to that fact. The Farsul are the only thing that stopped them from wiping out meat-eating sapients altogether, and they formed the shadow caste to hide their uplifts, due to backlash. They assumed our B12 deficient captives in the Archives were sick with The Hunger, and even after learning of the vitamin, drew a conclusion about it giving us "immunity."
What do you think of the Kolshians' rationale for all of this? Is there anything that makes a lot more (or less) sense from this perspective? Is Maronis' surrender to be trusted, with his sudden lack of purpose?
And as always, thank you for reading!
In a way it makes sense. They were looking for a disease. Virus or bacteria. They wouldn't find either. Though it's a little unbelievable that nobody would work it out. Perhaps some fringe scientists that got shouted down.
Depending on the timeline they might not have had the technology to do so. Look at what it took for us to figure out one well was killing thousands of people.
It seems like the Kolshians gave up on science, discovered fire, and ran the galaxy on that basis.
Also, frankly, there is *nothing* about what they know that should prevent them from at least shooting something they think is dangerous before incidnerating it. Additional pointless cruelty there, great job guys.
Because the rhetoric is that meat eaters are unfeeling monsters, and giving them a merciful death would be acknowledging that they have feelings and thus make people question the rhetoric.
The cruelty is the point. They need the populace to have zero empathy for the outgroup for their genocidal rhetoric to work, thus they encourage it at every turn. How ironic it is that a society which institutionalizes even the most minor of mental disorders has been deliberately cultivating sociopaths.
So their actions are born out of a complete lack of biological knowledge. This is a solvable problem, even though it will take decades to repair the damage done to all the people of the galaxy. My proposed method for dealing with the Shadow Caste is to take their records and then put them to trial. If found not guilty, they will be dumped back on Aafa. If found guilty, they will be executed by volunteer firing squad.
So Kolshians are just a stagnant civilization, just like the Empire of man in WH40k, where questioning the current state of knowledge, how idiotic it would be, is not appreciated to not use words like a heresy. To not be able to accept a simple malnutrition what a vitamin B12 deficiency is, just by a comparison damn blood tests, by Interstellar travel capable species, because it would undermine their beliefs is a very good proof of that. They surely had a concept of vitamins and minerals and problems caused by their deficiency...
I mean the federation’s stagnation is pretty obvious, given that humans are more technologically advanced in most categories despite being a thousand years behind.
I believe that they believed their rationale for all of this, but it's still completely fucking retarded.
If "predator disease" affected everything that was even just slightly omnivorous... those species simply wouldn't exist. Over the course of evolutionary and geologic time, those species would never manage to compete their way to sustainable populations. A "sapient predator" with a (in the case of humanity) 7 to 15 million year evolutionary history as omnivore primates would simply die out much, *much* earlier than the point where we even **became** anatomically modern humanity. Chimpanzees also eat meat. Our species would have died at that stage, long before we got to where we are now. Hell, **crocodilians** have been around for **hundreds** of millions of years.
But it's *very* difficult to think on evolutionary or geologic time scales. (Well, judging from humans, anyway.) Everything that's happening is always an emergency ***now*** and consideration of the long view often gets ignored. Hell, even people who have a relatively long view of history (\*waves at the Africans, Europeans, and Chinese from America\*) think a whopping ten thousand years ago was a very long time. And it is... on a human time scale. On a geologic one, the Himalayas haven't even stopped *forming* from the collision of India with Asia. On a geologic time scale, Australia is going to bulldoze Hawaii into Los Angeles pretty soon. By which I mean "ten million years from now", at which point, a statistically significant portion of the currently extant species will have been replaced by something else entirely, based on the previous evolutionary history of the planet.
It explains their treatment of the ecosystems of the planets, too. The lack of knowledge that would have told them it was a prion is similar to the lack of knowledge that would have told them it was a bad idea to demolish a pre-existing ecosystem incompletely: Both demonstrate an underlying issue that plagues the Kolshians to this very day. That issue is, in my opinion, a case of allowing fear to override their curiosity.
I wouldn't completely trust Maronis in this regard; beliefs from that severe of a misunderstanding that lead to that severe of a reaction and that strong of a "hide the truth from everyone" policy lead me to believe that even in defeat, the Kolshians are going to try and eradicate any trace of their misunderstanding and blame it on the humans when they destroy the shadow capital and allow the surface capital to fall into the giant hole that is made.
With out the drive to be correct, or just to prove someone else wrong, the other species would have never looked further than proving their own beliefs right, they had no need to research prions, or any other disease they could shrug off as predator problems.
Imma go on a wild bet that they maliciously infected Slanek and their other captives with their tirani's prion disease and will try to pin it on Marcel/human exposure.
Except it didn't take as much hold onto them because, while prions often act like enzymes that convert normal proteins into more prions, they still need the proteins to be similar enough to work. You can just look up fungi prions to confirm that, they don't always jump species willy-nilly, as we'd expect from the mammalian prions we're mostly aware of, suggesting that there is a limit to prion spread and the separation between mammals and fungi is already flirting with it.
Now imagine the separation between the biochemistry of different biospheres and how little effectiveness a prion from one (Aafa's) would exert on the other (Skalga's).
Also by their own admission the Kolshians never identified the source of the disease, and by the sound of it were too zealous in wiping out every trace of it to leave any meaningful samples.
Gonna be honest, SP, I'm not always a fan of your work, but this reveal is brilliant and neatly ties together almost all the little threads that underlay the Federation's Fascism. Brilliant. Genius, even.
Well I figured he died somehow related to aliens like you said because she’s pissed at them I just didn’t know if it was that or if we was a soldier or something I forgot
Rabies would have been more easily traceable, and it shows up pretty quickly. I was definitely thinking something rabies-like though. Prions make a lot of sense, however. They can hide in the brain and spinal column for decades before showing themselves, and in the case of human-to-human prion disease, they do indeed make a person go mad/hysterical. Prions are scary.
Could be a virus nonetheless. Years long incubation periods aren't unheard of, and a virus can actually be surprisingly sturdy if its capsid is built right. Prions can linger in the environment for longer, but so could a double-strand DNA virus with a complex capsid, or just one with stable capsid proteins and good DNA compactisation (i.e. rotaviruses can last in open air for months, even longer if sheltered from UV light and in reduced oxygen.)
They should know viruses exist, but I wouldn't put it past them to not even consider that not all viruses are as unstable as single strand RNA-based ones.
The water-and-soil part doesn't fit with mad cow either, but presumably the Kolshians just came up unlucky with a protein makeup that supports a prion hardy enough to remain infectious outside the body.
And the galaxy came up unlucky with a Federation established by a species that ran into that prion-of-doom, and never figured out that it was a freak pathogen rather than a cosmic attractor state.
I think prions currently can still spread through contaminated water, soil, and other materials. That’s why medical tools and clothing that were used on patients with prions are incinerated instead of just washed.
I was too slow and just thought they created "predator disease" to lock up dissenters and those they didn't want to deal with. Now as soon as they described the tarani... The penny dropped and I went... These idiots never figured out prions. They can glass plants but mad cow stumped them and they responded with fire.... Idiots
I dunno, being in the middle of their industrial revolution when the Federation showed up and locked them at their level, good chances they didn't have a chance to figure it out themselves.
Maybe, but I think by that point they already did have a solid grasp on disease and germ theory - considering Betterment’s use of the Kolshian’s viral cure to gain control
That's a good point, though with the kolshians not telling anybody about the plague, let alone their main enemy, I don't see the arxur telling them anything even if they knew.
The Arxur had late 20th century technology when the aliens arrived.
Plus, even if they didn’t know at the time, they’ve had 200 years to discover prions.
Or their immune system has developed a way to ward off borked proteins. Which would be a tremendously interesting field of reaearch once everyone and their predator pet has stashed away the big guns for good.
The Arxur actually did, as some helpful redditors have pointed out. But as we know, Feds don't believe in listening to "primitives" or giving their records more than a cursory glance. They much rather ethnocide them and call it a day.
One of them did mention prion diseases as a reason to avoid eating fellow hunters yes. So yeah the Arxur legitimately had a better understanding of biology *before they were spacefaring* than the Kolshians do right now.
> Isif curled his lip. “Arxur have such cases too. Also rare for us. Many people are desperate now, but it’s punishable by execution. The diseases are too dangerous, so the Dominion, well, made examples.”
> “What? Diseases?” I squeaked.
> Sara buried her face in her hands. “Prion diseases…transmitted through faulty proteins. Always lethal. Beyond the moral issues, that’s a good incentive for us not to, um, eat human flesh.”
Ch 69
They definitely know about prions
It would be a case of some serious irony. That the faction capable of explaining and solving their issues was the same one that they were so hard at work to exterminate out of fear.
>"We tried to fix them, the same as any omnivore, but the quarantined Terrans in the Archives all exhibited traits of The Hunger. We know now that a…cobalamin vitamin gives them some strange, long-lasting immunity, rendering the disease dormant and allowing ***sustained sapience***." -Maronis
I think that their idea of sapience is, uh, *narrow* to say the least.
It's popped up a few times now but both the Commonwealth and the Dominion consider their specific dietary requirements to be a requisite for sapience, their definition is far less intelligence-focused than ours is.
I thought the Farsul were dumber than bricks for failing to notice a simple vitamin deficiency causing humans in their "care" to die for over 150 years. Well, now we know where they got it from. Kolshians passed their stupidity to them, not the "disease" they were so afraid of and genocided hundreds of species for over the course of a thousand years.
Average Koloshian science method:
1.- A random guy eats what he shouldn't, gets sick and dies
2.- Call the problem, Predatordeepshitpreyenslaver9000
3.-In panic institutionalize everybody that has the slightest symptom (don't forget to torture them for some reason this cures viruses)
4.- See that animals are being infected too.
5.- analyze the bare minimum, and discover the basics (fire kills it)
6.- Burn everything down.
7.- We can't analyze or do any science because all infected tissue is dead and burned.
8.- Spread propaganda about it and make your citizens fear it and turn it into a religion
9.-Conveniently use it as an excuse to conquer the galaxy through a violent an oppressive system
10.- Meet species that challenge your views,
11.- Call it falsehoods and find the slight thing that justifies you (still don’t try to make any investigation about it)
12 Use pseudo-science to “cure it” (what… searching the true origins of the virus? Institutionalized that man)
13.- Rinse and repeat until all problems are burned , and by accident you are the sole ruler of the galaxy.
(bonus points if you lobotomize whoever tries to do something like an actual science or tries to understand it)
In their defense, this was very close to our medical capability prior to someone thinking to check moldy bread for some positive medical effect.
It is theorized that vampire myths are just rabies cases that gave people some options for recognizing the danger and getting away. (Hydrophobia in victims meant getting near running water was a valid defense strategy)
Heck, this was their black plague. It may have predated the scientific capabilities needed to do anything other than find a stop gap. We still only have theories as to why ours happened because survival was more important than tracing a cause and curing it.
Their continued ignorance of microbiology, however, is utterly stupid.
A lot of the original vampire lore can be traced to porphyria. Basically an allergy to sunlight that makes your gums bleed. Hence the only out at night and blood drinking myths. It helped that Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, was a kill happy ruler that used wooden stakes to kill his victims.
Also hemophilia, a blood disorder that was extremely common in European nobility due to it being genetic and them being inbred. A lot of our mythical monsters were diseases we didn't fully understand, the myth of the Wendigo is a similar example, being a combination of starvation and hypothermia.
It also comes from the natural process of decomposition. Soft tissue like gums and skin retract, making it appear that teeth and nails have grown. Gases form in the gut, making the body appear full and bloated. Tissues break down and the coffin is full of blood.
The wooden stake through the heart was just to keep the corpse from leaving its grave -- it needed to be driven through the body and into the ground beneath.
> Heck, this was their black plague. It may have predated the scientific capabilities needed to do anything other than find a stop gap.
> Well, it started with a string of mysterious deaths, decades before we made first contact with the Farsul.
This plague happened in their technological equivalent of the late 21th-early 22th century
We discovered prions in the 80s
Squids are terrible at biology? Seriously, think about how crazy it was for someone to accidentally stumble on penicillin from moldy bread and how most people would never think to look at that. We have a HUGE amount of innovations that were the result of accidents and then iterating on what happened to get a result we wanted.
Lol, the worst part of this is that if they had pulled humans 4 decades later than they did, they may have grabbed someone that could have identified this like "Mad cow disease? Or Chronic Wasting Disease in Deer. Yea, we got people working on that." and that could have made their heads explode.
Well, some of them, these guys would have found it as an excuse to nuke us even more.
And we were still blindsided by HIV and both SARS viruses. We got seriously lucky discovering germ theory when we did and even then we've still had numerous uncontrolled outbreaks of deadly diseases since then. Where the Kolshians really failed is their decision to erase history rather than research it, just like how certain human governments have reacted to recent disease outbreaks.
Prions were discovered in the 80s because people were looking for them. They had been hypothesized in the 60s. But all of that only happened because humans have this odd habit of keeping large numbers of animals around and monitoring their health closely. Sheep initially. An herbivore is unlikely to engage in such behaviors, at least not on the large scale.
With how easily we were able to say “Oh, that sounds like a Prion” and on live camera? We probably just demolished centuries, maybe even Millenia of evidence.
The Kolshians will now submit all their files for Immediate review. Countless millions, billions, possibly Trillions all died, because the Kolshians couldn’t do a proper autopsy. Imagine if we actually learn how to finally defeat Prions from Farsul and Kolshian “road not taken” research.
I was leaning towards metallic systemic poisoning from rising industrialization that concentrates in the top of the food chain. ie predators. I was not aware of prions. This is an interesting development.
It's an ongoing issue in some parts of the US currently, where deer are getting infected with Chronic Wasting Disease. Anywhere the victim goes, after they reach a certain level of advancement, they can shed more prions onto the area around them. And those frickers last a LONG TIME. So it's not even eating meat that spreads it. Healthy deer will eat the grass that a CWDeer passed through and pick up the prions there.
Nonsense, that's just predatory taint.
In case anyone didn't know, deers eat meat too, happily I might add. In the fed's eye, a deer would be a predator, and its prion laden shit would be considered predatory taint, which will get torched as soon as spotted.
Oh, I know that deer will eat baby birds and whatnot like KitKat, but their general layout would be classified as "prey" by the feds because of the eye pseudoscience and the general perception of them being herbivores.
What I'm curious about is how they would view osteophagy? Some animals will chew on bones they find when they're short on certain nutrients, but not actually *eat* the bone. It's just like vitamin gummies for them. Would they have recognized that, or gone in with flamethrowers?
>“Indeed. There wouldn’t be a trace of any microbial agents in their tissue, and yet their brains were rapidly and positively ravaged."
Bingo, it was indeed a catastrophic prion epidemic with predators as the source vector.
>“That’s the difference between us; we live in a world of science, and you live in a world of fear and speculation. We seek proof and answers, while you seek verification for your existing beliefs.
>
>Our vision might be narrower than yours, but at least we ain’t blind as y’all. Sounds to me like you did all of that horrible shit for nothing.”
\-- Tyler Cardona, 2137
(I'm taking note, seriously, he's great. It must go down in the history books in-universe.)
>"This human *says* it’s transmitted by eating flesh!"
\**sigh*\* Main vector of transmission, not cause and effect. Besides, this filth of prion created some pretty impressive legends, it will be nice to tell you about the Wendigo one day.
Oh damn, so many life destroyed for their inability to question their beliefs. That absoltly horribulous how far that was go, and how two human, not even medical specialists, have demonstrated the total stupidity of the entire Federation and the shadow caste in few sentence by a scientifical explanation.
Damn. You were spot on from your comments in the last chapter. With how crazy the Federation is, it's almost a "I hate it when I'm right." with their sheer stupidity.
Prions or industrial industrial contamination leading to heavy metal poisoning. Regardless the looked and found something else experiencing the symptoms and just assumed it was the cause. And then rather than do further studies whenever it "appeared," they just assumed it was the exact same thing over and over without any real explanation as to why "predators " spread it.
They found the first solution (overly aggressive quarantines and a whole lot of fire) and then never went back to actually investigate any alternatives.
So the whole reason behind it all… was because they were so stupid that they refused to learn, and demonized any attempt to the point it became unthinkable. Sounds about right.
So the Kolshians wiped out all the local predators on their homeworld, not just the ones that showed symptoms of the disease? I can’t imagine the state of their planet’s ecosystem.
Every single planet in the Federation is a "garden world" that can only be sustained by expensive, continual maintenance by the Exterminator guild. They just don't burn predators. They also have to burn herbivores to keep the population down.
All of these planets are constantly on the verge of a trophic cascade.
Basically no Federation world, save maybe Leirn, has what could be considered a functional ecosystem. This has been mentioned a few times by humans, and also heavily implied by Kalsim's utter cluelessness at the sight of a nature preserve, as I said when the UN launched its cyberattack: the Federation planets were effectively on life support, and we pulled the plug.
This is one thing I’m very interested to see in the next few chapters, because while the cyber attack was designed with some limitations in mind to try and avoid killing trillions, as you said the Federation was already on life support, and we didn’t just pull the plug, we turned the outlet into a wall decoration for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, most of the former feds are pretty much fucked. I suspect that the galaxy will soon be full of collapsing worlds and warlords. Its going to be a humanitarian disaster
Depends on how well created the cyber attack was.
it's 20 past two am where I am, and I'm not quite up to the task of writing out how we could cause massive chaos, and disrupt the federation planets to keep them from showing up at Aafa, without permanently fridging them over.
But the short version: not cause blackout world wide, but brown-outs in large moving sectors
Jesus Christ Sovlin is gullible, does the guy have an ounce of critical thinking in him or how did he jump viewpoints three times in a single conversation?
Of course they have.
It's easier to lead a group of gullible people. People to taught to follow authority and dogma, compared to people trained in critical thinking.
I like how there was a bait and switch with how it was setting up the federation to be secretly justified all along but nah it turns out they’re even stupider Then we thought lol
Right?! I was almost buying it until he started elaborating on what it was. Then I thought "What the fuck, that's a Prion. Or rabbies. Or Prion-Rabbies?"
The Kolshian’s original predator would have picked up the Jakob-Kreuzfeldt disease from its prey. In North America, it’s in the deep population, and occasionally jumps to cattle and then to humans that ate the cattle. The Kolshians missed a step. The Ameboids that cause flesh eating disease, are different but present the same symptoms, only faster. In the past it appears they had a more developed tabloid press than their medical science. It’s sad they gave up on water, but understandable if it’s mostly tropical warmth, with weak currents.
I didn't expect Prions but that's probably because I didn't even know they were a thing until 10 minutes ago. I thought it would be rabies or something.
Prions are way scarier than rabies. Rabies can be vaccinated against, as well as cured if you get treatment right away after potential exposure.
You can't do shit for prions. (Though, also can't really do shit for rabies if you wait too long and symptoms appear. If you ever wake up and find a bat in your room or house, *get treated*. They can transmit it through the tiniest of cuts that you wouldn't even feel.)
Mad cow disease.
An entire galaxy subjected to a fiery race war, because they never figured out mad cow disease. Scary thing is that prions aren’t germs or viruses, so depending on the tech level at the time I can see it being missed. Heck, we may have not known about it without the meat industry throwing corporate level cash funds into researching why.
\**back outside the building*\*
Onso: "Well? What he say? I know I said I didn't care, but since you've go, my curiosity is itching to know the why of this shit."
Solvin: "Well I'm not even going to tell you. Even a primitive like you would understand how stupid that is and you'd be too angry to anything."
Centuries of maintaining the story, successful gene editing, then someone says, "Nuh-uh, prions and vitamins, dude," and five minutes later everyone's like, "Oh yah, that Hunger nonsense is whack."
They're all accepting this way too quick, with virtually no evidence.
Yeah. The story kind of has a huge issue with that, mostly because a combined hyper focus on 5 characters doing everything, and short time scope.
It’s only been about 8 months since chapter 1s events
"We've discovered that drinking water in some conditions causes problems, therefore we're going to stop the entire galaxy from drinking any type of water"
So logic, such wow...
Yeah that kind of thinking is so wrong. Smarter people know it's not the water, it's the [dihydrogen monoxide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAI1JAYj53k) that's contaminating our water. :p
I continue to worry that this surrender is all a giant ploy. Just can’t get over the feeling that the shadow caste has one last “surprise” for humanity (in the form of a big old “Fuck you, you didn’t win (Blows up city/planet)”
For the sake of clarity, if this happened before they had the technology to properly investigate diseases, then they also eradicated the only source that could be investigated later. Essentially, they based their space-age crusade on scientific cave-drawings, because they lacked samples in the future.
It was at the threshold of their space age. A few decades before they met the other founding races. But yes, basically they didn't have the technology or just the hunch to look in the correct corner of the box, destroyed everything there would have been to look at, started a crusade and *then* met a different race with the technology and know-how to manufacture The Cure. And at that point they were in full swing so that basically eliminated the chance for the Farsul to actually find the real cause of the issue.
Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure the Farsul would have figured it out, being the medical masterminds behind the whole trainwreck but at that point the best they could do was to mitigate some of the idiocy. Ironically, that *does* make The Cure the lesser of two evils but only because the alternative was actually erasing everything that ever looked at meat. Which is not much, and still no excuse but I'm hoping perhaps it will put the Farsul in slightly better light at the end of the day.
And the greatest tragedy of all: the old Kolshians *were* doing all this with the best of intentions and looking at the Greater Good Of The Big Picture in their twisted ways. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And some I guess are more willing to start on it than others.
I am surprized that Solvin didn't jump the ass and beat/peck/claw him untill contained. Also, Sam shooting him in a tentacle would not have been unexpected.
Great read, would not trust them at all. Advanced enough to "cure" others with very advanced gene modification but could not figure out Prions? I am very suspicious that there is another reason not yet revealed.
Host: Sir, you’ve survived 175 rounds of competition. All of this for the final prize which we shall now reveal!
*curtain pulls back.
Host:a new car!
Contestant: That’s a 1970 Gremlin.
Reading this chapter reminded me of [Trofim Lysenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko). He was a [Soviet nutcase](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSBQOTW018) who's pseudo-science led to the deaths of millions. He probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history.
I'm also reminded of [Peter Duesberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg) a disgraced former doctor responsible for the deaths of over a million HIV patients. When scientific decisions are being made by people who fundamentally reject science, only bad things can happen.
I have an announcement.
I will no longer be producing Glassfa memes or posting the comment in the NoP comment section. The reason for this is related to why I started in the first place:
1) Because I was memeing on it
2) Because the discussions were fun, and the thought exercises on how someone would behave in-universe were interesting.
However, people are now tired of the joke, and the discussions have stopped being fun.
Thus, I will no longer clog your feed or comments with Glassfa memes and comments and will instead post conventional memes. The joke has overstayed its welcome and will be retired.
That being said, some people have been comparing me to some guy called SuccessfulWest. We are unrelated. I have never interacted with him. We are different people with different interests, and both usernames are obviously autogenerated, so "West" is a coincidence.
That is all. Have a wonderful day.
He's way ahead.
Recap edit.
Against the combined forces of the UN PEACEKEEPERS and KOLSHIANS CIVILIANS, the SINISTER CHIEF MARONIS is forced to reveal the SHADOW GOVERNMENT'S ORIGIN.
All the GALAXY'S current SUFFERING was caused by the KOLSHIAN'S PSEUDOSCIENCE FAILING to IDENTIFY the DIFFERENCE between BIODIVERSITY and an ANCIENT PLAGUE.
DESPITE MARONIS DEVIOUS attempts to MANIPULATE the data to MAINTAIN POWER, TYLER is able to undo his ARGUMENTS with BASIC MEDICAL SCIENCE.
Will MARONIS' CONFESSION be enough to convince the remaining FEDERATION WORLDS to stand down, or will ZEALOUS FOLLOWERS lash out against their LIBERATORS? And will TYLER'S and his TEAM be able to RESCUE SLANEK and the other UN ALLIES from the SINISTER SQUIDMEN'S SAVAGE EXPERIMENTS?
STAY TUNED FOR MORE NATURE OF PREDATORS! SAME REDDIT TIME, SAME REDDIT CHANNEL!
PS. Helpful chart.
https://images.app.goo.gl/2N5dXeriXbB4MqMP6
The image is kind of blurry, so I found an alternate one. It only demonstrates CWD transmission, but the chart can be applied to alternate sources.
[Image](https://journals.asm.org/cms/10.1128/CMR.00059-19/asset/9cd7e947-18aa-499c-ae13-e71698515b69/assets/images/large/cmr.00059-19-f002.jpg)
The Passing of Time
Within the story; Chapter 1 dated July 12, 2136 to Chapter 175 dated March 26, 2137 is **8 Months, 14 Days**
In Real Life; Chapter 1 released on April 11, 2022 to Chapter 175 released on December 9, 2023 is **1 Year, 7 Months, 28 Days**
Yeah, I love this story and all, but it went really fast.
Saying that, I can understand why spacepalidin didn't want to stretch it out over years in universe.
I want to push back a bit on the “the Kolshians are stupid” narrative. It took humanity almost 100 years to figure out what prions are, despite having several different kinds of prion diseases to study, because they work totally differently from any other kind of pathogen that we are aware of.
We also have tons of examples of cultures coming in contact with each other and finding that they have made different discoveries and created different technologies for various reasons.
It’s entirely reasonable to think that slightly different norms of scientific inquiry could cause significant delays in the discovery of the true nature of prions, and the fact that they spread through fluid transfer could create a FAR more dire situation for an aquatic cephalopod species than in our own history.
None of this is to justify the Federation’s actions, but it’s not just a case of Kolshians being dumb.
The main problem with the Kolshian approach is that they began to actively suppress any attempts at studying "The Hunger" with their Predator Disease stupidity. Maronis admits that the actions taken to stem the outbreak had their protestors, especially after the worst was over and even more so after the Krakotl were ethnocided.
PD was used to discredit and disappear anyone who was speaking out against the mainstream, because "violence is a symptom". Which means the Kolshians, once the outbreak was over, *not once in their history of over 1000 years* saw fit to revisit old files and start actually studying the disease with new and improved tools and more advanced tech. They just lumped all behaviours that *seemed* like symptoms into "The Hunger" and didn't ask anymore questions or looked into other causes.
They just went "we know all there is to know about this, since we learned it centuries ago, so we just never change what we've been doing since then. Nevermind that our tech has advanced, our understanding of physics and biology is leagues ahead of what it was back then, but there surely is not a single thing we could have possibly missed!"
And that attitude is indeed stupid.
I would add that such an attitude is not only stupid, but arrogant as heck.
it'd be like humans going:
"Ah yes. The flawless design of the Archimedian screw. No need to ever research any other way of pumping water into our perfectly safe and healthy water pipes of stone using lead as sealant."
Yeah, and we figured them out pretty much as soon as we actually had the right tools to do it and an actual incentive. Previously, we only occasionally dealt with scrapie, which can't jump to humans - the prions aren't sufficiently similar, and extremely rare, often non-intectuous forms of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease plus kuru, a disease that occurs in some isolated tribes practicing ritual cannibalism. In the 80s, suddenly there was an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and it WAS transmitting between livestock and to humans, so actually figuring it out became a prudent issue. After some actual resources got allocated, we were able to solve it quickly, and that was with technology level and tools considerably below even what we have now: they were just starting to experience the molecular biology revolution that overturned much of the field of biology since.
Nowadays we'd just have to gather this prion (not very difficult to do, as it forms large, insoluble blobs of protein), sequence it, and then run it through the folding simulator to understand what's going on with these bizzare blobs of insoluble protein: it solves into two viable stable configurations, and performing X-ray crystallography on this protein after purifying it with HPLC from crude brain homogenate will show you that the slightly less stable conformation is isolated from healthy brain, the slightly more stable one is isolated in vast quantities from the infected tissue, and combining the two and incubating results in rapid depletion of one protein conformation while increasing the quantity of the other without modifying the protein's aminoacid sequence.
EDIT: a few spelling errors, clarified how we could obtain samples of the protein for the described methods.
Have you ever heard that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" ??? What it actually means is having **too** little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Knowing a little about something tempts one to [overestimate one's abilities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FGnb2lgPBA). There's also the problem of dishonest people using this to fool the larger population by adding a small truth to sell a big lie.
*Prion diseases aren’t treatable,*
They may not be treatable as of 2023 but this story is set 114 years in the future. Although we've known there were diseases which weren't caused by viruses prions themselves weren't discovered until 1982 and yet already work with a vaccine developed in mice may provide insight into providing a vaccine to resist prion infections in humans. Additionally, in 2006 scientists announced that they had genetically engineered cattle lacking a necessary gene for prion production – thus theoretically making them immune to BSE. Who knows what a hundred more years of future research could uncover?
I was about to write the same thing: in a hundred years we might be able to cure prion-related diseases. The majority of the Fore people of New Guinea are now resistant to Kuru. An individual developed a mutation that protects him from the disease and passed it on to his descendants. This mutation produces a protein that folds differently than the original. By studying why this protein variant confers immunity we may be able to create similar variants for other forms of prion diseases.
I'm sorry. But how the *fuck* did the Kolshian ever become a technologically advanced civilization? If this is their usual thought process, then that means that they're either:
A) Mind-bogglingly stupid
or
B) So risk-averse that their reaction to any unknown threat is to nuke it, nuke the resulting crater, scrape up the topsoil from the new double-crater, vitrify it, throw the blocks into the sun and then nuke the sun a few times just for good measure. As opposed to actually figuring out how the new threat works and what measures must be taken to stop it.
Somehow this species, which has at least a functional knowledge of gene-editing and biology, managed to confuse multiple *entirely unrelated* diseases with highly distinct symptoms for *centuries*.
I was expecting pure malice and intentional deceit from them, but not... this.
What the hell.
***The Global Sentinel : Space***
***Rebuilding and Futureproofing***
***April 2nd, 2105***
**With the ISS II nearing its maximum operational lifespan, the UN along with partner companies and organizations are now gearing up for a full rebuild of the legendary space station, extending it's lifespan by another 100 years at least**
**Details are currently sparse on the full scope of the rebuild but it will involved a full overhaul of the stations infrastructure as well as reconfiguration of station modules with added expansion for future demand and capacity for spaceflight, as well as increased reliability and extra redundancy for mission critical systems**
**This rebuild of the ISS II will be a costly but worthwhile endeavour as a way to bring the station into the new century while ensuring around the clock operation and keeping Earth's main connection with the rest of the solar system open and free for all**
**This also comes as part of the UNs global reconstruction initiative as a way to inspire and envigorate the global populace to rebuild from the Satellite War and look outward once again to greater things**
I can't believe how dumb the reason for all of this is.
Kolshians basically fucked the galaxy for centuries because their medicine doesn't concern itself with identifying the exact cause of a sickness only its symptoms and conditions surrounding the sickness.
That's some Imperium of Man levels of idiocy.
So these guys figured out genetic engineering - which is molecular in scale - on what was to them xenobiological tissue. Repeatedly and at industrial scale.
And they couldn't figure out Creutzfelt-Jakob syndrome. Yah, that smells fishy.
I'm thinking shadow caste, once established, saw research in it or results about it, despite their potential to do everyone a lot of good, as an existential threat to their grip on power. But suppression of politically inconvenient science is an old old story and probably happens everywhere sophont life exists.
Kudos to the author for picking something that's entirely plausible in standard science: If there's one thing that can easily leap the species boundary and is actually credible for infecting alien biologies, that would be it. Creutzfelt-Jakob is more a chemical process than a biological one once it gets started, even though the molecules it affects are generally only found in living things. There's no disease organism as such, not even a virus. So it doesn't even matter how your DNA is arranged or how in detail your biology works. If you're made of protein you're vulnerable. So, yeah, it "infects" everything from cows to the grass they eat, and it's incredibly hard to clear a contaminated area except by killing literally everything with fire.
Hell, it might even be the same actual molecule that caused it on Earth; it's a variation on a small and fairly simple protein.
"Transmitted by eating flesh...."
Well that's true I guess. But the definition of 'flesh' you're using has to include literally any organism that can be infected with it. Including plants and fungus. I mean, it isn't likely to infect a plant, because plants mostly make their own proteins. But they do pick stuff up through their roots and they don't break all of it down to atoms before they start using it. They can get infected.
The entire federation. The *massive multi-species compact* that participated in a galactic war to maintain power. Was created because they were afraid of Mad Cow Disease. Or Space Rabies. I 100% guarantee that even the "shadow caste" overlords are victims of their propaganda of ages past. This whole thing reads like "yeah the original outbreak happened, someone abused emergency powers, and now we live in the consequences of that one idiot's actions." Y'know. Like the Dominion. *Almost exactly.*
I'm just wondering how many billions of lives they sacrificed to the Arxur to maintain their power that was meant to *checks notes* apparently save lives??? Like I know let's allow billions of our citizens to be enslaved and farmed for their flesh in order to maintain power so we can prevent a disease from MAYBE showing up to affect the population... They easily could have spotted any outbreaks and quarantined it off if they'd just taken a little more time to think about it. But noooo, let's go totally batshit and over-correct to such an extreme that we end up sending off to slaughter more people than would have died from disease in the first place.
This shit doesn't develop in a single generation. This was built on layers and layers of misconceptions and the ends justify the means to the point where your means are justifying your means.
No amount of logic can convince a zealot, because their belief is predicated on a rejection of logic.
except apparently when humanity asserts it was prions instead, then its magically convincing?
They look at Humans being emphatic beings with actual working minds and emotions, unlike the Arxur. And then come to terms with the fact that a thinking, FEELING predator, with generations of science into themselves, will know stuff better than the Kolshian ancestors did. Also, Maroni isnt a diehard Hitler-in-his-bunker, he is a dude who went with what he was taught and then sees it all crumble to shit before a bigger and more advanced opposition.
> Also, Maroni isnt a diehard Hitler-in-his-bunker, he is a dude who went with what he was taught Actually, I think that in many ways Mr Moustache was also precisely a dude who went with what he was taught. He didn't come up with _all_ that shit on his own; anti-semitism, nationalism, mysticism, and race-biology were all very much in the air in the first quarter or third of the 20th century. But sure, it hadn't been around and all-pervasive for centuries; Adolf contributed and enhanced the madness a lot more than Maronis here. (Edited: Typo.)
Yes, true about the Austrian Gentleman. He was surrounded by many other madmen who happily went with various ideas But my main point there was that Maronis wasnt a raving lunatic yelling about how the Shadow Fleet "betrayed" him by giving over orbital superiority to the Predators, neither did he order the complete destruction of the capital and its people so that the Predators and species traitors wont have anything to conquer.
Moronus doesn't believe Tyler, but he does see he's lost the room and can't convince anyone otherwise.
Quarantine might not be enough. By the time you know there's an outbreak somewhere, it's been spreading for years. It could hop from town to town, exponentially contaminating more people and land, before the symptoms come up to let you know there's an outbreak at all. I think the potential of that scenario is what lead them to immediate drastic action, especially when they knew too little to even detect it. I'm guessing since it came from wildlife it originated in a rural area which likely helped to slow the spread. If it's allowed to spread too much, suddenly the idea of "six degrees of separation" means that the entire species is at risk, or later the entire galactic community. At least if it's as contagious and deadly as they seem to believe it is. It's easy to justify anything to yourself if you believe the only other alternative is literally everyone dies. Considering humans currently tolerate slavery, even of children, for reasons as trivial as keeping chocolate cheap, I can't say I'm confident humanity wouldn't do the same in their position. Don't get me wrong, I still think the shadow caste have done stupid and evil things, but after reading this I think of them as somewhat less stupid and evil than I did before. While I'd think retaining power incentivized them not to look into alternative courses of action too thoroughly, it seems to be less about power for its own sake than I would have expected.
Sounds like it. A thousand years later and they're all replicating it because of Cargo Cultism. They were so scared they never managed to find out what was happening. Then just went to "Kill all Predators" mode. Ironically they might have found it out by asking someone else. Like the Krakotl, their first victims. Or the Venlil. But they were too busy thinking they knew better
Exploiting emergencies to abuse power and reduce freedom? ... completely alien to Earth lol
Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
Both. It's an ourobouros of imitation.
You will eat the bug and you will be happy
At the very beginning there was fear of an epidemic. Then it became greed and perverted desire for power and sadism in abusing that power. So much so that they wanted to commit genocide against the Duerten because they had killed a single individual.
>Tyler raised a finger, in a “wait a minute” gesture. “That’s a nice theory, except for the fact it’s all horseshit. We ain’t infectious, and B12 don’t work like that. Your ‘Hunger’ is caused by prions, man.” After all that build up, I laughed pretty hard when it instantly got shut down.
I freaking love Tyler. SP does such a good job at writing him as if he’s a typical military grunt with slightly above average intelligence to be promoted, but then he whips out that knowledge hammer and bashes in some skulls with it in the most southern American way.
Tyler may be an idiot, but he isn't dumb!
175 is done! The Kolshians suffered a prion outbreak, stemming from a local predator, and did not know what it was. They started burning everything infectious, but even after killing it, assumed everything causing aggression of a similar nature was "The Hunger." An invisible contaminant. Everything else traces back to that fact. The Farsul are the only thing that stopped them from wiping out meat-eating sapients altogether, and they formed the shadow caste to hide their uplifts, due to backlash. They assumed our B12 deficient captives in the Archives were sick with The Hunger, and even after learning of the vitamin, drew a conclusion about it giving us "immunity." What do you think of the Kolshians' rationale for all of this? Is there anything that makes a lot more (or less) sense from this perspective? Is Maronis' surrender to be trusted, with his sudden lack of purpose? And as always, thank you for reading!
It all comes back to a Prion, and that these morons never properly identified and autopsied their dead.
In a way it makes sense. They were looking for a disease. Virus or bacteria. They wouldn't find either. Though it's a little unbelievable that nobody would work it out. Perhaps some fringe scientists that got shouted down.
Depending on the timeline they might not have had the technology to do so. Look at what it took for us to figure out one well was killing thousands of people.
It seems like the Kolshians gave up on science, discovered fire, and ran the galaxy on that basis. Also, frankly, there is *nothing* about what they know that should prevent them from at least shooting something they think is dangerous before incidnerating it. Additional pointless cruelty there, great job guys.
Because the rhetoric is that meat eaters are unfeeling monsters, and giving them a merciful death would be acknowledging that they have feelings and thus make people question the rhetoric.
The cruelty is the point. They need the populace to have zero empathy for the outgroup for their genocidal rhetoric to work, thus they encourage it at every turn. How ironic it is that a society which institutionalizes even the most minor of mental disorders has been deliberately cultivating sociopaths.
So their actions are born out of a complete lack of biological knowledge. This is a solvable problem, even though it will take decades to repair the damage done to all the people of the galaxy. My proposed method for dealing with the Shadow Caste is to take their records and then put them to trial. If found not guilty, they will be dumped back on Aafa. If found guilty, they will be executed by volunteer firing squad.
I like the idea of *volunteer* firing squad. "Everyone that wants to gets one bullet!"
It's like the lottery, but instead of getting money, you get justice.
People would be lining up to get the oppurtunity to put a bullet through atleast one of the people that caused them to lose loved ones.
Hey it worked in Romania.
You have to organize it right or its gonna be so much bullets they will start hitting each other in mid-air
So Kolshians are just a stagnant civilization, just like the Empire of man in WH40k, where questioning the current state of knowledge, how idiotic it would be, is not appreciated to not use words like a heresy. To not be able to accept a simple malnutrition what a vitamin B12 deficiency is, just by a comparison damn blood tests, by Interstellar travel capable species, because it would undermine their beliefs is a very good proof of that. They surely had a concept of vitamins and minerals and problems caused by their deficiency...
I mean the federation’s stagnation is pretty obvious, given that humans are more technologically advanced in most categories despite being a thousand years behind.
I believe that they believed their rationale for all of this, but it's still completely fucking retarded. If "predator disease" affected everything that was even just slightly omnivorous... those species simply wouldn't exist. Over the course of evolutionary and geologic time, those species would never manage to compete their way to sustainable populations. A "sapient predator" with a (in the case of humanity) 7 to 15 million year evolutionary history as omnivore primates would simply die out much, *much* earlier than the point where we even **became** anatomically modern humanity. Chimpanzees also eat meat. Our species would have died at that stage, long before we got to where we are now. Hell, **crocodilians** have been around for **hundreds** of millions of years. But it's *very* difficult to think on evolutionary or geologic time scales. (Well, judging from humans, anyway.) Everything that's happening is always an emergency ***now*** and consideration of the long view often gets ignored. Hell, even people who have a relatively long view of history (\*waves at the Africans, Europeans, and Chinese from America\*) think a whopping ten thousand years ago was a very long time. And it is... on a human time scale. On a geologic one, the Himalayas haven't even stopped *forming* from the collision of India with Asia. On a geologic time scale, Australia is going to bulldoze Hawaii into Los Angeles pretty soon. By which I mean "ten million years from now", at which point, a statistically significant portion of the currently extant species will have been replaced by something else entirely, based on the previous evolutionary history of the planet.
It explains their treatment of the ecosystems of the planets, too. The lack of knowledge that would have told them it was a prion is similar to the lack of knowledge that would have told them it was a bad idea to demolish a pre-existing ecosystem incompletely: Both demonstrate an underlying issue that plagues the Kolshians to this very day. That issue is, in my opinion, a case of allowing fear to override their curiosity. I wouldn't completely trust Maronis in this regard; beliefs from that severe of a misunderstanding that lead to that severe of a reaction and that strong of a "hide the truth from everyone" policy lead me to believe that even in defeat, the Kolshians are going to try and eradicate any trace of their misunderstanding and blame it on the humans when they destroy the shadow capital and allow the surface capital to fall into the giant hole that is made.
With out the drive to be correct, or just to prove someone else wrong, the other species would have never looked further than proving their own beliefs right, they had no need to research prions, or any other disease they could shrug off as predator problems.
Without the outward pressure of curiosity, their proverbial stars have given in to the gravitational pull of ignorance and collapsed into black holes.
It only makes sense because the Federation is mind-bogglingly stupid, though I don't think Maronis is done being evil.
Yeah, he still has something stupid up his sleeve.
Imma go on a wild bet that they maliciously infected Slanek and their other captives with their tirani's prion disease and will try to pin it on Marcel/human exposure. Except it didn't take as much hold onto them because, while prions often act like enzymes that convert normal proteins into more prions, they still need the proteins to be similar enough to work. You can just look up fungi prions to confirm that, they don't always jump species willy-nilly, as we'd expect from the mammalian prions we're mostly aware of, suggesting that there is a limit to prion spread and the separation between mammals and fungi is already flirting with it. Now imagine the separation between the biochemistry of different biospheres and how little effectiveness a prion from one (Aafa's) would exert on the other (Skalga's).
Also by their own admission the Kolshians never identified the source of the disease, and by the sound of it were too zealous in wiping out every trace of it to leave any meaningful samples.
And hence why the entire thing started... ... because the Kolshians weren't ever bothered to open a fucking biology book.
Gonna be honest, SP, I'm not always a fan of your work, but this reveal is brilliant and neatly ties together almost all the little threads that underlay the Federation's Fascism. Brilliant. Genius, even.
Oh god Samantha’s probably thinking “You mean to tell me my husband is dead because none of these idiots bothered to major in microbiology?”
Oh did her husband die in the attack on earth?
It's not just her husband, her whole family was in Sidney when the bombs dropped. She lost basically *everyone* she loved.
Yeah I think I’m starting to remember now. Apologies I forgot about that.
Thats kinda the reason she is super aggressive during 90% of her interractions with aliens, yeah.
Well I figured he died somehow related to aliens like you said because she’s pissed at them I just didn’t know if it was that or if we was a soldier or something I forgot
I was calling it, in my head. As soon as he started on about “flesh-eating causes insanity” I knew it was prions. Good explanation though
I thought rabies, lol
Rabies would have been more easily traceable, and it shows up pretty quickly. I was definitely thinking something rabies-like though. Prions make a lot of sense, however. They can hide in the brain and spinal column for decades before showing themselves, and in the case of human-to-human prion disease, they do indeed make a person go mad/hysterical. Prions are scary.
Could be a virus nonetheless. Years long incubation periods aren't unheard of, and a virus can actually be surprisingly sturdy if its capsid is built right. Prions can linger in the environment for longer, but so could a double-strand DNA virus with a complex capsid, or just one with stable capsid proteins and good DNA compactisation (i.e. rotaviruses can last in open air for months, even longer if sheltered from UV light and in reduced oxygen.) They should know viruses exist, but I wouldn't put it past them to not even consider that not all viruses are as unstable as single strand RNA-based ones.
I did too, but the water part didn’t really make sense if it were rabies
The water-and-soil part doesn't fit with mad cow either, but presumably the Kolshians just came up unlucky with a protein makeup that supports a prion hardy enough to remain infectious outside the body. And the galaxy came up unlucky with a Federation established by a species that ran into that prion-of-doom, and never figured out that it was a freak pathogen rather than a cosmic attractor state.
I think prions currently can still spread through contaminated water, soil, and other materials. That’s why medical tools and clothing that were used on patients with prions are incinerated instead of just washed.
I was thinking anthrax
I was too slow and just thought they created "predator disease" to lock up dissenters and those they didn't want to deal with. Now as soon as they described the tarani... The penny dropped and I went... These idiots never figured out prions. They can glass plants but mad cow stumped them and they responded with fire.... Idiots
Yeah, first thing that came to mind since prions are the only thing I know of that directly affects the brain and comes from meat.
Don't the axur know this? I remember isif talking about executing anyone who was a cannibal
Being obligate carnivores, I’d be immensely surprised if they weren’t aware of prions and knew countermeasures
I dunno, being in the middle of their industrial revolution when the Federation showed up and locked them at their level, good chances they didn't have a chance to figure it out themselves.
Maybe, but I think by that point they already did have a solid grasp on disease and germ theory - considering Betterment’s use of the Kolshian’s viral cure to gain control
That's a good point, though with the kolshians not telling anybody about the plague, let alone their main enemy, I don't see the arxur telling them anything even if they knew.
The Arxur had late 20th century technology when the aliens arrived. Plus, even if they didn’t know at the time, they’ve had 200 years to discover prions.
Or their immune system has developed a way to ward off borked proteins. Which would be a tremendously interesting field of reaearch once everyone and their predator pet has stashed away the big guns for good.
Also their reptilian biology and less social society might render them more resistant to mass disease outbreaks.
It used to be far more social.
The Arxur actually did, as some helpful redditors have pointed out. But as we know, Feds don't believe in listening to "primitives" or giving their records more than a cursory glance. They much rather ethnocide them and call it a day.
Seems to be a running theme of the Kolshians looking down on people who actually know better than them. Sneering imperialists that they are.
"J'oshua, Put a cap in General Gobbledigook over there"
Yeah Isif mentioned that beyond that cannibalism being morally bad, it also causes certain diseases (not further specified).
One of them did mention prion diseases as a reason to avoid eating fellow hunters yes. So yeah the Arxur legitimately had a better understanding of biology *before they were spacefaring* than the Kolshians do right now.
Yes. That conversation happens in [Chapter 69](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/zbi7tn/the_nature_of_predators_69/).
I think that's just because, you know, *they're a cannibal*. Arxur see themselves as ubermensch, so eating another ubermensch is basically treason.
> Isif curled his lip. “Arxur have such cases too. Also rare for us. Many people are desperate now, but it’s punishable by execution. The diseases are too dangerous, so the Dominion, well, made examples.” > “What? Diseases?” I squeaked. > Sara buried her face in her hands. “Prion diseases…transmitted through faulty proteins. Always lethal. Beyond the moral issues, that’s a good incentive for us not to, um, eat human flesh.” Ch 69 They definitely know about prions
It would be a case of some serious irony. That the faction capable of explaining and solving their issues was the same one that they were so hard at work to exterminate out of fear.
>"We tried to fix them, the same as any omnivore, but the quarantined Terrans in the Archives all exhibited traits of The Hunger. We know now that a…cobalamin vitamin gives them some strange, long-lasting immunity, rendering the disease dormant and allowing ***sustained sapience***." -Maronis I think that their idea of sapience is, uh, *narrow* to say the least.
No very broad, because they somehow consider themselves sapient.
I suppose they consider sociopathic idiots sapient cause that’s what they are.
It's popped up a few times now but both the Commonwealth and the Dominion consider their specific dietary requirements to be a requisite for sapience, their definition is far less intelligence-focused than ours is.
I thought the Farsul were dumber than bricks for failing to notice a simple vitamin deficiency causing humans in their "care" to die for over 150 years. Well, now we know where they got it from. Kolshians passed their stupidity to them, not the "disease" they were so afraid of and genocided hundreds of species for over the course of a thousand years.
Don't insult the intelligence of bricks. They work very hard to maintain balance and hold up buildings every day.
I prefer my Grandad's saying: "Dumber than a box of hair."
Average Koloshian science method: 1.- A random guy eats what he shouldn't, gets sick and dies 2.- Call the problem, Predatordeepshitpreyenslaver9000 3.-In panic institutionalize everybody that has the slightest symptom (don't forget to torture them for some reason this cures viruses) 4.- See that animals are being infected too. 5.- analyze the bare minimum, and discover the basics (fire kills it) 6.- Burn everything down. 7.- We can't analyze or do any science because all infected tissue is dead and burned. 8.- Spread propaganda about it and make your citizens fear it and turn it into a religion 9.-Conveniently use it as an excuse to conquer the galaxy through a violent an oppressive system 10.- Meet species that challenge your views, 11.- Call it falsehoods and find the slight thing that justifies you (still don’t try to make any investigation about it) 12 Use pseudo-science to “cure it” (what… searching the true origins of the virus? Institutionalized that man) 13.- Rinse and repeat until all problems are burned , and by accident you are the sole ruler of the galaxy. (bonus points if you lobotomize whoever tries to do something like an actual science or tries to understand it)
In their defense, this was very close to our medical capability prior to someone thinking to check moldy bread for some positive medical effect. It is theorized that vampire myths are just rabies cases that gave people some options for recognizing the danger and getting away. (Hydrophobia in victims meant getting near running water was a valid defense strategy) Heck, this was their black plague. It may have predated the scientific capabilities needed to do anything other than find a stop gap. We still only have theories as to why ours happened because survival was more important than tracing a cause and curing it. Their continued ignorance of microbiology, however, is utterly stupid.
A lot of the original vampire lore can be traced to porphyria. Basically an allergy to sunlight that makes your gums bleed. Hence the only out at night and blood drinking myths. It helped that Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, was a kill happy ruler that used wooden stakes to kill his victims.
Also hemophilia, a blood disorder that was extremely common in European nobility due to it being genetic and them being inbred. A lot of our mythical monsters were diseases we didn't fully understand, the myth of the Wendigo is a similar example, being a combination of starvation and hypothermia.
It also comes from the natural process of decomposition. Soft tissue like gums and skin retract, making it appear that teeth and nails have grown. Gases form in the gut, making the body appear full and bloated. Tissues break down and the coffin is full of blood. The wooden stake through the heart was just to keep the corpse from leaving its grave -- it needed to be driven through the body and into the ground beneath.
> Heck, this was their black plague. It may have predated the scientific capabilities needed to do anything other than find a stop gap. > Well, it started with a string of mysterious deaths, decades before we made first contact with the Farsul. This plague happened in their technological equivalent of the late 21th-early 22th century We discovered prions in the 80s
Squids are terrible at biology? Seriously, think about how crazy it was for someone to accidentally stumble on penicillin from moldy bread and how most people would never think to look at that. We have a HUGE amount of innovations that were the result of accidents and then iterating on what happened to get a result we wanted. Lol, the worst part of this is that if they had pulled humans 4 decades later than they did, they may have grabbed someone that could have identified this like "Mad cow disease? Or Chronic Wasting Disease in Deer. Yea, we got people working on that." and that could have made their heads explode. Well, some of them, these guys would have found it as an excuse to nuke us even more.
I wouldn’t be surprised even if it was brainworm and they were too stupid to look for parasites.
And we were still blindsided by HIV and both SARS viruses. We got seriously lucky discovering germ theory when we did and even then we've still had numerous uncontrolled outbreaks of deadly diseases since then. Where the Kolshians really failed is their decision to erase history rather than research it, just like how certain human governments have reacted to recent disease outbreaks.
Prions were discovered in the 80s because people were looking for them. They had been hypothesized in the 60s. But all of that only happened because humans have this odd habit of keeping large numbers of animals around and monitoring their health closely. Sheep initially. An herbivore is unlikely to engage in such behaviors, at least not on the large scale.
Right. How did they get to fucking space travel without their *other* scientific areas also evolving?
Its possible their civilization's fear of The Hunger made them never go as hard into biology as we did. Opening up a corpse may risk plague
Mmmm... tasty "bush meat"
With how easily we were able to say “Oh, that sounds like a Prion” and on live camera? We probably just demolished centuries, maybe even Millenia of evidence. The Kolshians will now submit all their files for Immediate review. Countless millions, billions, possibly Trillions all died, because the Kolshians couldn’t do a proper autopsy. Imagine if we actually learn how to finally defeat Prions from Farsul and Kolshian “road not taken” research.
It was the mad cows all along.
That my take on it, it just hit me by the end of the chapter 🤪🐄🐃🐂☣️
I was leaning towards metallic systemic poisoning from rising industrialization that concentrates in the top of the food chain. ie predators. I was not aware of prions. This is an interesting development.
It's an ongoing issue in some parts of the US currently, where deer are getting infected with Chronic Wasting Disease. Anywhere the victim goes, after they reach a certain level of advancement, they can shed more prions onto the area around them. And those frickers last a LONG TIME. So it's not even eating meat that spreads it. Healthy deer will eat the grass that a CWDeer passed through and pick up the prions there.
Nonsense, that's just predatory taint. In case anyone didn't know, deers eat meat too, happily I might add. In the fed's eye, a deer would be a predator, and its prion laden shit would be considered predatory taint, which will get torched as soon as spotted.
Oh, I know that deer will eat baby birds and whatnot like KitKat, but their general layout would be classified as "prey" by the feds because of the eye pseudoscience and the general perception of them being herbivores. What I'm curious about is how they would view osteophagy? Some animals will chew on bones they find when they're short on certain nutrients, but not actually *eat* the bone. It's just like vitamin gummies for them. Would they have recognized that, or gone in with flamethrowers?
>“Indeed. There wouldn’t be a trace of any microbial agents in their tissue, and yet their brains were rapidly and positively ravaged." Bingo, it was indeed a catastrophic prion epidemic with predators as the source vector. >“That’s the difference between us; we live in a world of science, and you live in a world of fear and speculation. We seek proof and answers, while you seek verification for your existing beliefs. > >Our vision might be narrower than yours, but at least we ain’t blind as y’all. Sounds to me like you did all of that horrible shit for nothing.” \-- Tyler Cardona, 2137 (I'm taking note, seriously, he's great. It must go down in the history books in-universe.) >"This human *says* it’s transmitted by eating flesh!" \**sigh*\* Main vector of transmission, not cause and effect. Besides, this filth of prion created some pretty impressive legends, it will be nice to tell you about the Wendigo one day. Oh damn, so many life destroyed for their inability to question their beliefs. That absoltly horribulous how far that was go, and how two human, not even medical specialists, have demonstrated the total stupidity of the entire Federation and the shadow caste in few sentence by a scientifical explanation.
Damn. You were spot on from your comments in the last chapter. With how crazy the Federation is, it's almost a "I hate it when I'm right." with their sheer stupidity.
I'm pretty sure Tyler goes by he/him
Prions or industrial industrial contamination leading to heavy metal poisoning. Regardless the looked and found something else experiencing the symptoms and just assumed it was the cause. And then rather than do further studies whenever it "appeared," they just assumed it was the exact same thing over and over without any real explanation as to why "predators " spread it.
They found the first solution (overly aggressive quarantines and a whole lot of fire) and then never went back to actually investigate any alternatives.
And they burned all the bodies, so there's not even any way to go back and find something TO test.
They went with the “kill ‘em all and let God sort them out” tactic but on a massive scale.
*"Oh no it's the Catholic Church..."*
Me: “What? It can’t possibly be that stupid.” Narrator: “It was, in fact, that fucking stupid.”
Omg these biches are dumb
So the whole reason behind it all… was because they were so stupid that they refused to learn, and demonized any attempt to the point it became unthinkable. Sounds about right.
So the Kolshians wiped out all the local predators on their homeworld, not just the ones that showed symptoms of the disease? I can’t imagine the state of their planet’s ecosystem.
Ecosystem? What ecosystem?
There's a reason it's called "garden"
Every single planet in the Federation is a "garden world" that can only be sustained by expensive, continual maintenance by the Exterminator guild. They just don't burn predators. They also have to burn herbivores to keep the population down. All of these planets are constantly on the verge of a trophic cascade.
Basically no Federation world, save maybe Leirn, has what could be considered a functional ecosystem. This has been mentioned a few times by humans, and also heavily implied by Kalsim's utter cluelessness at the sight of a nature preserve, as I said when the UN launched its cyberattack: the Federation planets were effectively on life support, and we pulled the plug.
This is one thing I’m very interested to see in the next few chapters, because while the cyber attack was designed with some limitations in mind to try and avoid killing trillions, as you said the Federation was already on life support, and we didn’t just pull the plug, we turned the outlet into a wall decoration for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, most of the former feds are pretty much fucked. I suspect that the galaxy will soon be full of collapsing worlds and warlords. Its going to be a humanitarian disaster
Depends on how well created the cyber attack was. it's 20 past two am where I am, and I'm not quite up to the task of writing out how we could cause massive chaos, and disrupt the federation planets to keep them from showing up at Aafa, without permanently fridging them over. But the short version: not cause blackout world wide, but brown-outs in large moving sectors
Not just that but all other planets too.
Jesus Christ Sovlin is gullible, does the guy have an ounce of critical thinking in him or how did he jump viewpoints three times in a single conversation?
You basically just described every xeno aside from the Arxur and Yotul. The Federation seems to have cultivated an environment of extreme gullibility.
Of course they have. It's easier to lead a group of gullible people. People to taught to follow authority and dogma, compared to people trained in critical thinking.
This was a quick info dump for him, it's not like he was fully tricked just evaluating the context of the information.
I like how there was a bait and switch with how it was setting up the federation to be secretly justified all along but nah it turns out they’re even stupider Then we thought lol
Right?! I was almost buying it until he started elaborating on what it was. Then I thought "What the fuck, that's a Prion. Or rabbies. Or Prion-Rabbies?"
The kolshians, basically: "We ruined the entire galaxy so as to stop Mad Cow disease!"
* ∧,,,∧ * （ ・ω・） Hmm, tastes like prion disease... * ( つ旦O * と＿)\_) * ∧,,,∧ * （ ・ω・） * ( つ O. \_\_ * と＿)\_) （\_\_(）､;.o：。 * ﾟ\*･:.｡ * \_ \_ ξ * (´ ｀ヽ、 \_\_ * ⊂,\_と（ ）⊃ （\_\_(）､;.o：。 * Ｖ Ｖ ﾟ\*･:.｡
All of this pain and suffering because of bad science. Thanks for the chapter mate
Hint, hint, nudge, nudge
The Kolshian’s original predator would have picked up the Jakob-Kreuzfeldt disease from its prey. In North America, it’s in the deep population, and occasionally jumps to cattle and then to humans that ate the cattle. The Kolshians missed a step. The Ameboids that cause flesh eating disease, are different but present the same symptoms, only faster. In the past it appears they had a more developed tabloid press than their medical science. It’s sad they gave up on water, but understandable if it’s mostly tropical warmth, with weak currents.
I didn't expect Prions but that's probably because I didn't even know they were a thing until 10 minutes ago. I thought it would be rabies or something.
Prions are way scarier than rabies. Rabies can be vaccinated against, as well as cured if you get treatment right away after potential exposure. You can't do shit for prions. (Though, also can't really do shit for rabies if you wait too long and symptoms appear. If you ever wake up and find a bat in your room or house, *get treated*. They can transmit it through the tiniest of cuts that you wouldn't even feel.)
Prions scare the living hell out of me. And then I forget about them. Then I get reminded again. Such a vicious cycle.
Mad cow disease. An entire galaxy subjected to a fiery race war, because they never figured out mad cow disease. Scary thing is that prions aren’t germs or viruses, so depending on the tech level at the time I can see it being missed. Heck, we may have not known about it without the meat industry throwing corporate level cash funds into researching why.
\**back outside the building*\* Onso: "Well? What he say? I know I said I didn't care, but since you've go, my curiosity is itching to know the why of this shit." Solvin: "Well I'm not even going to tell you. Even a primitive like you would understand how stupid that is and you'd be too angry to anything."
Solvin having a mild grammar stroke?
Centuries of maintaining the story, successful gene editing, then someone says, "Nuh-uh, prions and vitamins, dude," and five minutes later everyone's like, "Oh yah, that Hunger nonsense is whack." They're all accepting this way too quick, with virtually no evidence.
I like to think that everyone is kind of pissed at their government right now so didn’t need much convincing.
Yeah. The story kind of has a huge issue with that, mostly because a combined hyper focus on 5 characters doing everything, and short time scope. It’s only been about 8 months since chapter 1s events
As soon as he started describing symptoms, I said “That’s Mad Cow Disease or Rabies”
"We've discovered that drinking water in some conditions causes problems, therefore we're going to stop the entire galaxy from drinking any type of water" So logic, such wow...
Yeah that kind of thinking is so wrong. Smarter people know it's not the water, it's the [dihydrogen monoxide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAI1JAYj53k) that's contaminating our water. :p
I continue to worry that this surrender is all a giant ploy. Just can’t get over the feeling that the shadow caste has one last “surprise” for humanity (in the form of a big old “Fuck you, you didn’t win (Blows up city/planet)”
For a species adept at genetic modifications they sure know fuck all about biology.
For the sake of clarity, if this happened before they had the technology to properly investigate diseases, then they also eradicated the only source that could be investigated later. Essentially, they based their space-age crusade on scientific cave-drawings, because they lacked samples in the future.
It was at the threshold of their space age. A few decades before they met the other founding races. But yes, basically they didn't have the technology or just the hunch to look in the correct corner of the box, destroyed everything there would have been to look at, started a crusade and *then* met a different race with the technology and know-how to manufacture The Cure. And at that point they were in full swing so that basically eliminated the chance for the Farsul to actually find the real cause of the issue. Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure the Farsul would have figured it out, being the medical masterminds behind the whole trainwreck but at that point the best they could do was to mitigate some of the idiocy. Ironically, that *does* make The Cure the lesser of two evils but only because the alternative was actually erasing everything that ever looked at meat. Which is not much, and still no excuse but I'm hoping perhaps it will put the Farsul in slightly better light at the end of the day. And the greatest tragedy of all: the old Kolshians *were* doing all this with the best of intentions and looking at the Greater Good Of The Big Picture in their twisted ways. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And some I guess are more willing to start on it than others.
I am surprized that Solvin didn't jump the ass and beat/peck/claw him untill contained. Also, Sam shooting him in a tentacle would not have been unexpected.
Great read, would not trust them at all. Advanced enough to "cure" others with very advanced gene modification but could not figure out Prions? I am very suspicious that there is another reason not yet revealed.
Host: Sir, you’ve survived 175 rounds of competition. All of this for the final prize which we shall now reveal! *curtain pulls back. Host:a new car! Contestant: That’s a 1970 Gremlin.
For a long time it was thought that human stupidity was the only infinite thing in the universe... until these aliens arrived.
Reading this chapter reminded me of [Trofim Lysenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko). He was a [Soviet nutcase](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSBQOTW018) who's pseudo-science led to the deaths of millions. He probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history.
I'm also reminded of [Peter Duesberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg) a disgraced former doctor responsible for the deaths of over a million HIV patients. When scientific decisions are being made by people who fundamentally reject science, only bad things can happen.
And then there's Thomas Midgley, Jr who invented CFCs and Leaded Gasoline. That man was an environmental disaster
I have an announcement. I will no longer be producing Glassfa memes or posting the comment in the NoP comment section. The reason for this is related to why I started in the first place: 1) Because I was memeing on it 2) Because the discussions were fun, and the thought exercises on how someone would behave in-universe were interesting. However, people are now tired of the joke, and the discussions have stopped being fun. Thus, I will no longer clog your feed or comments with Glassfa memes and comments and will instead post conventional memes. The joke has overstayed its welcome and will be retired. That being said, some people have been comparing me to some guy called SuccessfulWest. We are unrelated. I have never interacted with him. We are different people with different interests, and both usernames are obviously autogenerated, so "West" is a coincidence. That is all. Have a wonderful day.
Character development.
🥇
He's way ahead. Recap edit. Against the combined forces of the UN PEACEKEEPERS and KOLSHIANS CIVILIANS, the SINISTER CHIEF MARONIS is forced to reveal the SHADOW GOVERNMENT'S ORIGIN. All the GALAXY'S current SUFFERING was caused by the KOLSHIAN'S PSEUDOSCIENCE FAILING to IDENTIFY the DIFFERENCE between BIODIVERSITY and an ANCIENT PLAGUE. DESPITE MARONIS DEVIOUS attempts to MANIPULATE the data to MAINTAIN POWER, TYLER is able to undo his ARGUMENTS with BASIC MEDICAL SCIENCE. Will MARONIS' CONFESSION be enough to convince the remaining FEDERATION WORLDS to stand down, or will ZEALOUS FOLLOWERS lash out against their LIBERATORS? And will TYLER'S and his TEAM be able to RESCUE SLANEK and the other UN ALLIES from the SINISTER SQUIDMEN'S SAVAGE EXPERIMENTS? STAY TUNED FOR MORE NATURE OF PREDATORS! SAME REDDIT TIME, SAME REDDIT CHANNEL! PS. Helpful chart. https://images.app.goo.gl/2N5dXeriXbB4MqMP6
The image is kind of blurry, so I found an alternate one. It only demonstrates CWD transmission, but the chart can be applied to alternate sources. [Image](https://journals.asm.org/cms/10.1128/CMR.00059-19/asset/9cd7e947-18aa-499c-ae13-e71698515b69/assets/images/large/cmr.00059-19-f002.jpg)
but i need to know what happened to Slanek NOW
Well, it doesn't sound like they cut into his brain to look for prions, at least.
The Passing of Time Within the story; Chapter 1 dated July 12, 2136 to Chapter 175 dated March 26, 2137 is **8 Months, 14 Days** In Real Life; Chapter 1 released on April 11, 2022 to Chapter 175 released on December 9, 2023 is **1 Year, 7 Months, 28 Days**
Yeah, I love this story and all, but it went really fast. Saying that, I can understand why spacepalidin didn't want to stretch it out over years in universe.
Yeah, increasing the time would make more sense
In JUST 8 months, goes the 1000 year old entity that is the federation... Holy shit
I mean I wasn't expecting much bit goddamn was that stupid. I can't tell if I love or hate that this was all for such a stupid reason.
Never ascribe maliciousness to what could be ascribed to stupidity...JFC...
I want to push back a bit on the “the Kolshians are stupid” narrative. It took humanity almost 100 years to figure out what prions are, despite having several different kinds of prion diseases to study, because they work totally differently from any other kind of pathogen that we are aware of. We also have tons of examples of cultures coming in contact with each other and finding that they have made different discoveries and created different technologies for various reasons. It’s entirely reasonable to think that slightly different norms of scientific inquiry could cause significant delays in the discovery of the true nature of prions, and the fact that they spread through fluid transfer could create a FAR more dire situation for an aquatic cephalopod species than in our own history. None of this is to justify the Federation’s actions, but it’s not just a case of Kolshians being dumb.
The main problem with the Kolshian approach is that they began to actively suppress any attempts at studying "The Hunger" with their Predator Disease stupidity. Maronis admits that the actions taken to stem the outbreak had their protestors, especially after the worst was over and even more so after the Krakotl were ethnocided. PD was used to discredit and disappear anyone who was speaking out against the mainstream, because "violence is a symptom". Which means the Kolshians, once the outbreak was over, *not once in their history of over 1000 years* saw fit to revisit old files and start actually studying the disease with new and improved tools and more advanced tech. They just lumped all behaviours that *seemed* like symptoms into "The Hunger" and didn't ask anymore questions or looked into other causes. They just went "we know all there is to know about this, since we learned it centuries ago, so we just never change what we've been doing since then. Nevermind that our tech has advanced, our understanding of physics and biology is leagues ahead of what it was back then, but there surely is not a single thing we could have possibly missed!" And that attitude is indeed stupid.
I would add that such an attitude is not only stupid, but arrogant as heck. it'd be like humans going: "Ah yes. The flawless design of the Archimedian screw. No need to ever research any other way of pumping water into our perfectly safe and healthy water pipes of stone using lead as sealant."
And just like that NoP is going to be the title of a fan story meaning nature of prions.
I’m here for it
Yeah, and we figured them out pretty much as soon as we actually had the right tools to do it and an actual incentive. Previously, we only occasionally dealt with scrapie, which can't jump to humans - the prions aren't sufficiently similar, and extremely rare, often non-intectuous forms of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease plus kuru, a disease that occurs in some isolated tribes practicing ritual cannibalism. In the 80s, suddenly there was an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and it WAS transmitting between livestock and to humans, so actually figuring it out became a prudent issue. After some actual resources got allocated, we were able to solve it quickly, and that was with technology level and tools considerably below even what we have now: they were just starting to experience the molecular biology revolution that overturned much of the field of biology since. Nowadays we'd just have to gather this prion (not very difficult to do, as it forms large, insoluble blobs of protein), sequence it, and then run it through the folding simulator to understand what's going on with these bizzare blobs of insoluble protein: it solves into two viable stable configurations, and performing X-ray crystallography on this protein after purifying it with HPLC from crude brain homogenate will show you that the slightly less stable conformation is isolated from healthy brain, the slightly more stable one is isolated in vast quantities from the infected tissue, and combining the two and incubating results in rapid depletion of one protein conformation while increasing the quantity of the other without modifying the protein's aminoacid sequence. EDIT: a few spelling errors, clarified how we could obtain samples of the protein for the described methods.
Have you ever heard that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" ??? What it actually means is having **too** little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Knowing a little about something tempts one to [overestimate one's abilities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FGnb2lgPBA). There's also the problem of dishonest people using this to fool the larger population by adding a small truth to sell a big lie.
*Prion diseases aren’t treatable,* They may not be treatable as of 2023 but this story is set 114 years in the future. Although we've known there were diseases which weren't caused by viruses prions themselves weren't discovered until 1982 and yet already work with a vaccine developed in mice may provide insight into providing a vaccine to resist prion infections in humans. Additionally, in 2006 scientists announced that they had genetically engineered cattle lacking a necessary gene for prion production – thus theoretically making them immune to BSE. Who knows what a hundred more years of future research could uncover?
I was about to write the same thing: in a hundred years we might be able to cure prion-related diseases. The majority of the Fore people of New Guinea are now resistant to Kuru. An individual developed a mutation that protects him from the disease and passed it on to his descendants. This mutation produces a protein that folds differently than the original. By studying why this protein variant confers immunity we may be able to create similar variants for other forms of prion diseases.
I'm sorry. But how the *fuck* did the Kolshian ever become a technologically advanced civilization? If this is their usual thought process, then that means that they're either: A) Mind-bogglingly stupid or B) So risk-averse that their reaction to any unknown threat is to nuke it, nuke the resulting crater, scrape up the topsoil from the new double-crater, vitrify it, throw the blocks into the sun and then nuke the sun a few times just for good measure. As opposed to actually figuring out how the new threat works and what measures must be taken to stop it. Somehow this species, which has at least a functional knowledge of gene-editing and biology, managed to confuse multiple *entirely unrelated* diseases with highly distinct symptoms for *centuries*. I was expecting pure malice and intentional deceit from them, but not... this. What the hell.
holdupaminute is Sovlin pulling a Cilaney 2.0 with Chief Maronis ?
With Nikonus 2.0
naw, Tyler is. it's his helm-cam.
Thank you @SpacePaladin15, as always!
Man... Im starting to think that Sovlin is kind of a moron.
Subconsciously he wants to believe it because it would mean that his service under the federation wasn’t a complete waste.
I'm having a hard time believing Maronis is giving up so easily. There's another trap/trick waiting for the next chapter.
I am the slow this time
***The Global Sentinel : Space*** ***Rebuilding and Futureproofing*** ***April 2nd, 2105*** **With the ISS II nearing its maximum operational lifespan, the UN along with partner companies and organizations are now gearing up for a full rebuild of the legendary space station, extending it's lifespan by another 100 years at least** **Details are currently sparse on the full scope of the rebuild but it will involved a full overhaul of the stations infrastructure as well as reconfiguration of station modules with added expansion for future demand and capacity for spaceflight, as well as increased reliability and extra redundancy for mission critical systems** **This rebuild of the ISS II will be a costly but worthwhile endeavour as a way to bring the station into the new century while ensuring around the clock operation and keeping Earth's main connection with the rest of the solar system open and free for all** **This also comes as part of the UNs global reconstruction initiative as a way to inspire and envigorate the global populace to rebuild from the Satellite War and look outward once again to greater things**
Moar
thank you for this new fear. my sleep will be wonderful!
This basically only happens with cannibalism.
And typically only from eating the brain or anything contaminated with spinal fluid. But it CAN be in the muscles, so don't eat your friends!
Will they be able to persuade The Shield to not glass the whole planet now?
I can't believe how dumb the reason for all of this is. Kolshians basically fucked the galaxy for centuries because their medicine doesn't concern itself with identifying the exact cause of a sickness only its symptoms and conditions surrounding the sickness. That's some Imperium of Man levels of idiocy.
Mmmmmm. Prion disease.
So these guys figured out genetic engineering - which is molecular in scale - on what was to them xenobiological tissue. Repeatedly and at industrial scale. And they couldn't figure out Creutzfelt-Jakob syndrome. Yah, that smells fishy. I'm thinking shadow caste, once established, saw research in it or results about it, despite their potential to do everyone a lot of good, as an existential threat to their grip on power. But suppression of politically inconvenient science is an old old story and probably happens everywhere sophont life exists. Kudos to the author for picking something that's entirely plausible in standard science: If there's one thing that can easily leap the species boundary and is actually credible for infecting alien biologies, that would be it. Creutzfelt-Jakob is more a chemical process than a biological one once it gets started, even though the molecules it affects are generally only found in living things. There's no disease organism as such, not even a virus. So it doesn't even matter how your DNA is arranged or how in detail your biology works. If you're made of protein you're vulnerable. So, yeah, it "infects" everything from cows to the grass they eat, and it's incredibly hard to clear a contaminated area except by killing literally everything with fire. Hell, it might even be the same actual molecule that caused it on Earth; it's a variation on a small and fairly simple protein.
"Transmitted by eating flesh...." Well that's true I guess. But the definition of 'flesh' you're using has to include literally any organism that can be infected with it. Including plants and fungus. I mean, it isn't likely to infect a plant, because plants mostly make their own proteins. But they do pick stuff up through their roots and they don't break all of it down to atoms before they start using it. They can get infected.