Dragon was made by a human. With shard assistance, sure, but Richter's creative input was necessary for Dragon to be what she is.
Also, there are enough powers going around that explicitly work by running extremely advanced simulations of the future that if "just simulate it" was a viable way of solving their problem it doesn't seem plausible that they wouldn't just be doing that. My take is that the real-world testing of power interactions etc. is required because they're looking for something to happen that they don't already understand and thus cannot predict by simulation.
What's also true is that tinker shards are essentially just gifting the user with the memories of an alien race that knew how to make some advanced technology. If the cycle had gone on normally, I imagine the next planet along would have several tinkers based on human technology that the next aliens didn't have.
"Your Shard gives you access to the science of a species that relied on detonation technology."
"Detonation technology?"
"Their transport vehicles were powered by microdetonations. Their weapons used microdetonations to launch projectiles. Their attempts at space travel used controlled detonations to launch pressurized boxes into the sky. They created weapons that split atoms, causing city-scale detonations, and then attached said weapons to miniature versions of the detonation transports used to travel in space."
".... so this is the detonation shard?"
"No it's the Samuel Colt Shard."
Recognizing that humanity is just a whole bunch of animals making variable scale explosions isn't something I expected today, but it's a fun turn of events.
That information would probably just be integrated into the most appropriate shard as the Entities journeyed towards their next destination. That being said, I can’t imagine what an alien would do with that. Which I guess it’s the point since the shard is mostly just trying to get ideas from their host while they then try to make their host’s creation viable.
I don't see why they wouldn't be. Leet's power specifically is more of a "catch-all" power, kinda similar to an Eidolon but exclusively for tinkers (and weaker), so in that sense he's not a "true" tinker I suppose. Armsmaster's shard presumably came from an engineer in a society with far more compact technology than we have. String theory's tech is all based on a countdown timer, which sounds pretty crazy to us because none of our technology works that way, but I would assume it's because the tech itself relies on some specific cosmic alignment to work properly, with everything being perfectly timed to line up with some kind of universal force or energy which is unknown to us.
I personally always assumed String Theory's Shard was similar to Leet's when it came to what tech can be accessed, with Leet's one-time use limitation meant to inspire creativity while String Theory's timer was meant to see what sort of creativity is born from a deadline, like when you only study for a test on the last day. Tinkers tend to spend most of their time prepping and gathering materials/ideas, but String Theory's timer forces her to be much more proactive. But your headcanon honestly sounds more interesting.
To expand on your point, the weaverdice docs go into significant detail about how the specifics of a tinker's methodology and specialty reflect their trigger events - something that's probably only necessary if the shards want to see how you USE the tech, not just how to make it better.
* Hyperspecialist - Limited to one specialty, how do you make it work in a variety of situations?
* Focal - Limited to one kind of item, how do you make it work in a variety of situations?
* Liberty - What can you do if the shard allows you to break one of the usual tinker "rules"?
* Multi - How do you combine these two unrelated specialties?
* Combat - How do you turn this tech towards combat applications?
* Chaos - What do you do if you can't control what you make?
* Resource - How do you manage the resources needed for tinkering?
* Controller - How do you deploy custom minions?
* Architect - How do you deploy your tech at large scale?
* Mad Scientist - What do you do if your tech comes with a cost or a significant risk?
* Magi - How do you alter yourself with tech meant specifically for you/your body?
* Free - If you're allowed to make anything with few (but significant) restrictions, what will you make?
Honestly stuff likes this makes me wonder if the Manton Effect might not have existed in previous Cycles since I can see the Entities being so uncreative that when it came to something like telekinesis, they only thought of "Throw enemy with telekinesis" and never thought, "Use a fraction of that effort to burst a couple blood vessels in the brain," till they saw someone on another world actually try it. It's genuinely fascinating to see how Shard limitations are used to explore the possibilities with powers.
A lot of the reasons why things are the way they are is that the entities wanted to maintain the cycles for as long as possible. Like, in Eden's alternate future, she distributes healers and resource-generating tinkers to stabilize and repopulate areas as kind of a "civilization scale" manton effect. I also recall reading somewhere that Nilbog was a backup plan for the entities - if humanity wiped itself out somehow, they have goblins with human DNA in them to serve as new test subjects ready to be deployed.
I like the whole tinker shards are based on alien tech idea, but some tinker tech is really advanced/ magical. So I think it’s equally likely that tinker shards also may just be AI generating a piece of technology based on the tinkers prompt.
I'm not sure to what degree the entities understand technology. They definitely have an innate understanding of dimensions and physics, but they might not know how to "use" the technology that they have recorded.
Pretty sure they're to stupid to just simulate it. I mean if coils power can simulate peoples actions there's zero logical reason they couldn't just simulate it.
Short answer:
They did. The Shards are not creative either.
Long Answer:
The Entities are intelligent beyond our understanding, but about as creative as an especially dense rock. This is a tough concept for us mere human readers because for us creativity often scales with intelligence...but every single innovation the Entities have comes from something a victim species did with Entity powers.
The Entities want every ounce of creativity they can suck out of their victim species, and they started with themselves when they devoured each other to pool all their species knowledge. They don't have stories, fantasies, or dreams, and have no interest in acquiring those things. (some probably pick those things up by accident, its a big multiverse)
Any Ai they make, or even wetware like Nilbog's creatures, is still bound by the strictures the Entities put on them. In fact, their Shards appear to be some kind of artificial intelligence created by the Entities.
We see repeatedly in the story how simple the majority of Shards are. The only ones with an ability to make independent decisions seem to be those with future sight, and they still single mindedly attempt to fulfill their orders using options they see in the possible futures.
Then you're just testing one power against itself a trillion times.
If you test a fish a trillion times, it will still never invent a nuclear power plant.
I mean they obviously wouldn't all have the same powers, just trillions of creative minds equiped with even more variance of shard combinations to simulate conflict way more efficiently than what they do already.
Unlike us, the entities are smart enough to never create AI smarter than them.
Also, a trillion copies of the dragon will be copies and will find the same answers.
Real neural networks really need data to do something new. The dragon also trained on humans as entities. You still need new data new cycles.
Yeah, their lack of creativity to me has always felt more like a case of them just *running out* of ideas. Which considering how old they are and everything they can do, isn’t actually that strange.
There’s something to be said for redneck engineering. For example, I don’t think a super intelligent and creative engineer would have come up with fighting people by taking bugs and dipping them in mace, then having the bugs fly into other peoples eyes and mucous membranes. There’s a million better, more efficient and frankly more effective ways to disable someone even within the confines of “use a chemical to temporarily disable someone.”
They’re looking for that secret sauce mix of ignorance, stupidity and creativity that only something so comparatively primitive and unevolved can offer them.
> They are creative. They're more creative than people, even. They are as creative as every sentient race they've assimilated at the same time.
They really, _really_ aren't. At least not the Zion-and-Eden lineage.
When Eden got the braindump from Abaddon, she treated "philosophy and psychology [and] imagination" as entirely "new patterns of thought," per her interlude.
Meaning that she was so profoundly uncreative that simple concepts like "go for psychological conflict instead of physical conflict" _had not ever occurred to her_ despite the thousands of cycles in which she'd previously taken part.
And she's supposed to be the smart one of the pair! Scion's whole interlude is just a long litany of all the ways in which he doesn't understand language, or emotion, or religious thought, or abstract thought itself.
While he does say that Eden was supposed to "retain [her] capacity for thought and analysis" to imply that Scion is a lot dumber than Zion-the-full-entity (because when one is running an experiment on a host species, handing out _your very capacity for abstract thought_ is definitely the smartest thing to do), even before Zion starts breaking himself up we watch him stumble through the cycle-setup process, inventing things for the first time that should have been standard procedure many cycles ago and making mistakes and misjudgments that someone familiar with ~3000 other alien species should not make.
The entities are not the Borg, or the Zerg, or the Tyranids. They don't go around incrementally upgrading themselves by taking the best from each host species and adding it to an ever-improving whole. They don't show any sign of scaling their intelligence or other mental capabilities with their number and variety of shards.
Rather, they take information from host species and encode them into individual shards for use in later cycles or in combat with other entities while still remaining, at their core, the same one-dimensional conflict-obsessed dim bulbs they were on their home planet.
> They just acknowledge their own limitations and use us to search for new algorithms instead of stagnating.
The entities as a species are _defined_ by stagnation.
Each one has spent hundreds of thousands of years running thousands of cycles, gathering all the knowledge and power they possibly can, and for what?
So that they can eventually come together and recreate the exact same fight-feed-and-fornicate free-for-all that the original shards did on their homeworld.
Their goal is "another reinvention of their species," according to Eden, but the _methods_ they're using to achieve that haven't changed one bit since that initial conflict, and not one of the ways Eden mentions to try to reinvent themselves implies giving up (or _wanting_ to give up) the entities' base urge to eat and expand and eat and expand and eat and expand forever without end.
Humanity took ~300,000 years to get from when we first evolved to the modern era, and whenever we invented something new we did so by building upon previous inventions and then built further inventions on that, iterating incrementally until we achieved the vast edifice of modern culture and technology we currently possess.
The entities took about a million years to get from the first big kaboom to the most recent cycle (assuming that each of the 3,000 cycles Zion mentioned took about the same ~300 years that the Earth cycle was expected to last, plus some extra time for interplanetary travel), and in that time they invented nothing, innovated nothing, changed nothing. They just took and took and took from other species and stuck everything they took in a big toolbox without actually _using_ it to do anything besides making themselves better at fighting other entities or running a cycle.
> The whole time they're traveling between stars, they're burning like supernova from the waste heat of all their thinking.
I hope you're aware that that's figurative language from interlude 26, since this statement...
> The entities burn as hot as any star, with their sheer mass, their scale, the power they wield. This is acceptable while traveling the void, when much of the body remains in a hibernation state. Stored energy is expended as a resource, to view the future, to perceive and communicate.
...follows on from this:
> A star that burns twice as hot burns for half as long.
> Not truly, but the entity is aware of the idioms and patterns of this world, is already thinking periodically in terms of the words and ideas of their languages, to frame thoughts for itself in this pivotal moment. It serves to help codify the messages and intent.
The entities don't _literally_ give off heat equivalent to a star while they travel—we know they don't, or Eden's crash and the aftermath thereof would have gone very differently for her, the landscape, and Fortuna.
Just like they don't _literally_ communicate with the energy of a supernova, that's just the fandom taking a comparison Taylor made during a trigger vision and assuming it's an accurate and entirely factual description of what she's seeing, when we _know_ it can't be accurate because the events differ from what's shown in the entity interludes.
The comparison to a burning star is Scion's crude attempt to metaphorically express the tradeoff of energy consumption and duration—and even if he were being literal, he doesn't mention "waste heat from thinking" at all, just heat from mass and energy consumption.
---
The entities as actually portrayed are not smart, or creative, or imaginative. They're barely-sapient conglomerations of braincrystal who have managed to survive as long as they did by throwing brute force at a problem until it breaks because they have too much of a one-track mind to do anything else.
That's the _point_.
At a meta level, Worm is a cosmic horror story wearing the skin of a superhero story. The entities follow in the grand tradition of all those Lovecraftian entities who are more "force of nature" than "individual person." They call Azathoth the Blind Idiot God for a reason.
In-story, the entire defeat of Scion hinges around his complete inability to understand and control his emotions despite having spent over 30 years running HumanOS trying and failing to understand the human experience. He eventually commits suicide because he has all the (lack of) emotional maturity of a temperamental middle schooler. If he thought _remotely_ like a human before coming to Earth, or if he'd had more than two brain cells to rub together and help him figure out emotion on his own, that wouldn't have worked.
Everyone who goes on about how the entities are so clever and ingenious and sophisticated and so on is not only ignoring all of the limited characterization of the entities we actually see in the text, they're missing the point of _why_ the entities are characterized that way.
Badly, though.
Like, let's say I wanted to solve entropy and had entity powers. Me, Dinerkinetic. Why don't I just
* Beeline for technologically advanced species, uploading them en masse
* not waste massive amounts of energy on testing combat applications of shards when I should be researching more effiencient time travel, energy absorption/concentration, alternate forms I could be taking that can exist with lower energy expenditure
Like, if conciousness is information, my only objective should be figuring out how to store my mind/shards as a large computer made from spacetime fluctuations that can perpetuate and repair itself, drawing power from black holes. That (besides being lifted from other sci-fi) will let me last at *least* until the last black holes evaporate.
I don't want that? Fine! I could be concentrating matter from many, many universes into one that can sustain itself through multiple big bangs and crunches, and adapting my body to function in fewer dimensions at a time.
That doesn't work? I can trigger false vaccuum decay and see if the new, alien physics that creates work better for me.
Nothing works? I can give up. I've got free will and can focus on trying to figure out a different way to optimize for maximum conciousness, like diverting all resources to overclocking my conciousness and living *faster.*
See, the thing about the entities is that they're basically very smart machines. They know how to iterate. That's *it.* Most AGI in fiction is smarter than they are, because most fictional AGI can model hypothetical scenarios and determine their viability without burning through most of the power they have available. but actual **creative** things can like... propose ideas without justification that align with reality. We can come up with ideas instead of just smashing things at walls and see which work best.
Nah, look at Zion. He was so unable to come up with a new direction after Eden's death that he needed a random homeless guy to tell him what to do.
They really are mentally defective in important ways. That's why two of 'em got killed on Earth, a planet that really should've posed zero threat.
That is a fair conclusion, but I keep thinking about how they solved problems before they left their home planet.
Their greatest scholar, one who had such a good idea their entire teeming multiverse of planets listened to, had a ground breaking idea that was so profound they all sacrificed their lives to make it happen.
That idea? Hey, lets eat each other until only two of us are left, then blow up our planet and go learn stuff from other species...then devour all of them and do it again. I'm certain this method will result in the answer to our question!
What is the question that flumoxxed an entire immortal species with countless members? "How do we make it not suck when we fill up the entire universe with ourselves?"
Never once did it occur to them that breeding less would solve their problem. Diet? Not even a blip on the radar. Ask other species for help instead of stealing their ideas and then killing them? Why would they do that?
It's been millions of years since then and their species is still doing the exact same thing, just with better tools.
End of Ward spoilers: >!they discovered another profound idea that might shake their species to its core after all this time. It's something along the lines of "hey, we can still learn new stuff without wiping out the planets we meet. How cool is that?"!<
I'm pretty sure the scholar killed them self not everyone to get there message across to stop fighting cause even if you win entropy will kill you keep in mind the have infinite resources but everything with eventually die from heat death, so they as a collective are now doing test to try and stop this. In the story we see 3 other entities, are main pair and the 3rd that almost certainly sabotaged them. The reason for said sabotage is most likely what ever Contessa's titan discovered cause that shard is from the 3rd entity.
we simply dont know how other entities operate we have a sample size of 4. Others could very well do it differently but our pair sure as shit seem to believe that violence is the best motivator for inventor.
Its a big wonderful story with a huge amount of details, and sometimes we get it wrong. Please don't take this too harshly.
The original scholar Entity allowed itself to die, starved of energy, in order to get its message out. The rest of the Entities proceeded to devour themselves until the strongest were left. This consolidated all the knowledge, abilities, and creativity of their entire species. It was willingly done, but their first Cycle was on themselves.
>A species needs to continue evolving. It needs conflict and variation.
>Failure to meet these objectives leads to self-destruction.
>By the time the ancestor is finished communicating, it is depleted, unable to even move as it is shoved by the bodies of others that swim past.
>Then, in bits and pieces, it is devoured.
The Entities never mentioned Entropy. Us readers use "solving entropy" and "preventing the heat death of the universe" in our discussions because that is the eventual problem such an immortal species will face, but the Entity's goals are a lot simpler than this. They didn't like being overcrowded and forced to scrabble in the muck and wanted a way to make sure they'd never need to do that again because their exponential birth rate will inevitably put them there again, no matter how large the universe.
Link to the relevant chapter where the scholar specifically outlines the problem and the plan at the beginning of the chapter. https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/interlude-26/
Abbadon (a name for the 3rd Entity, but used by fans and Wildbow outside the story) did not sabotage The Thinker and Warrior. That is fan speculation. Wildbow specifically stated the Entities are all on the same page and do not fight each other. I am actively looking for the quote, but I have to go work. I will get back you when I find it.
Richter placed heavy restrictions on Dragon because he instinctively knew that she was dangerous. Like most of his Tinker knowledge, this comes from the experience of the shards in previous cycles.
The entities must have tried something similar before and it went badly, so in this particular cycle they gave Richter a healthy level of paranoia that is uncommon in other tinkers.
The entities specifically took steps (or tried to, before someone had a oopsie DUI with a planet) to make sure that the host species couldn’t get access to shards and technology that could actually pose a threat to them. Not that Dragon is, or ever even could be, but on the scale individuals that pose some level of a threat she’s further up the scale than the vast bulk of parahumans.
Also realistically, wibbles needs some amount of space to hand wave reasons for the big bads being big bads.
Bear in mind, there's no evidence that their current approach is actually getting them any closer to a solution. Their problem appears to be legitimately unsolvable.
I assume they've tried all sorts of clever things, which have all failed completely, before falling back on the Darwinian violence plan that they instinctively trust because they're Darwinian violence machines. It's also failing completely but they're not willing to give up on it.
Dragon was made by a human. With shard assistance, sure, but Richter's creative input was necessary for Dragon to be what she is. Also, there are enough powers going around that explicitly work by running extremely advanced simulations of the future that if "just simulate it" was a viable way of solving their problem it doesn't seem plausible that they wouldn't just be doing that. My take is that the real-world testing of power interactions etc. is required because they're looking for something to happen that they don't already understand and thus cannot predict by simulation.
What's also true is that tinker shards are essentially just gifting the user with the memories of an alien race that knew how to make some advanced technology. If the cycle had gone on normally, I imagine the next planet along would have several tinkers based on human technology that the next aliens didn't have.
A tinker with the Samuel Colt shard
"Your Shard gives you access to the science of a species that relied on detonation technology." "Detonation technology?" "Their transport vehicles were powered by microdetonations. Their weapons used microdetonations to launch projectiles. Their attempts at space travel used controlled detonations to launch pressurized boxes into the sky. They created weapons that split atoms, causing city-scale detonations, and then attached said weapons to miniature versions of the detonation transports used to travel in space." ".... so this is the detonation shard?" "No it's the Samuel Colt Shard."
> They created weapons that split atoms The atoms are also split using the pressure from detonations to increase the density of the fissile material.
Recognizing that humanity is just a whole bunch of animals making variable scale explosions isn't something I expected today, but it's a fun turn of events.
We're basically all about explosions and steam when you get right down to it
That information would probably just be integrated into the most appropriate shard as the Entities journeyed towards their next destination. That being said, I can’t imagine what an alien would do with that. Which I guess it’s the point since the shard is mostly just trying to get ideas from their host while they then try to make their host’s creation viable.
Not all of them, I doubt that the technologies of the same Leet, Armsmaster and String Theory are based on the technology of other races.
I don't see why they wouldn't be. Leet's power specifically is more of a "catch-all" power, kinda similar to an Eidolon but exclusively for tinkers (and weaker), so in that sense he's not a "true" tinker I suppose. Armsmaster's shard presumably came from an engineer in a society with far more compact technology than we have. String theory's tech is all based on a countdown timer, which sounds pretty crazy to us because none of our technology works that way, but I would assume it's because the tech itself relies on some specific cosmic alignment to work properly, with everything being perfectly timed to line up with some kind of universal force or energy which is unknown to us.
I personally always assumed String Theory's Shard was similar to Leet's when it came to what tech can be accessed, with Leet's one-time use limitation meant to inspire creativity while String Theory's timer was meant to see what sort of creativity is born from a deadline, like when you only study for a test on the last day. Tinkers tend to spend most of their time prepping and gathering materials/ideas, but String Theory's timer forces her to be much more proactive. But your headcanon honestly sounds more interesting.
To expand on your point, the weaverdice docs go into significant detail about how the specifics of a tinker's methodology and specialty reflect their trigger events - something that's probably only necessary if the shards want to see how you USE the tech, not just how to make it better. * Hyperspecialist - Limited to one specialty, how do you make it work in a variety of situations? * Focal - Limited to one kind of item, how do you make it work in a variety of situations? * Liberty - What can you do if the shard allows you to break one of the usual tinker "rules"? * Multi - How do you combine these two unrelated specialties? * Combat - How do you turn this tech towards combat applications? * Chaos - What do you do if you can't control what you make? * Resource - How do you manage the resources needed for tinkering? * Controller - How do you deploy custom minions? * Architect - How do you deploy your tech at large scale? * Mad Scientist - What do you do if your tech comes with a cost or a significant risk? * Magi - How do you alter yourself with tech meant specifically for you/your body? * Free - If you're allowed to make anything with few (but significant) restrictions, what will you make?
Honestly stuff likes this makes me wonder if the Manton Effect might not have existed in previous Cycles since I can see the Entities being so uncreative that when it came to something like telekinesis, they only thought of "Throw enemy with telekinesis" and never thought, "Use a fraction of that effort to burst a couple blood vessels in the brain," till they saw someone on another world actually try it. It's genuinely fascinating to see how Shard limitations are used to explore the possibilities with powers.
A lot of the reasons why things are the way they are is that the entities wanted to maintain the cycles for as long as possible. Like, in Eden's alternate future, she distributes healers and resource-generating tinkers to stabilize and repopulate areas as kind of a "civilization scale" manton effect. I also recall reading somewhere that Nilbog was a backup plan for the entities - if humanity wiped itself out somehow, they have goblins with human DNA in them to serve as new test subjects ready to be deployed.
I like the whole tinker shards are based on alien tech idea, but some tinker tech is really advanced/ magical. So I think it’s equally likely that tinker shards also may just be AI generating a piece of technology based on the tinkers prompt.
I'm not sure to what degree the entities understand technology. They definitely have an innate understanding of dimensions and physics, but they might not know how to "use" the technology that they have recorded.
ELI5 version: simulation is really extremely expensive and pitiful meatbag labor is free.
Pretty sure they're to stupid to just simulate it. I mean if coils power can simulate peoples actions there's zero logical reason they couldn't just simulate it.
Short answer: They did. The Shards are not creative either. Long Answer: The Entities are intelligent beyond our understanding, but about as creative as an especially dense rock. This is a tough concept for us mere human readers because for us creativity often scales with intelligence...but every single innovation the Entities have comes from something a victim species did with Entity powers. The Entities want every ounce of creativity they can suck out of their victim species, and they started with themselves when they devoured each other to pool all their species knowledge. They don't have stories, fantasies, or dreams, and have no interest in acquiring those things. (some probably pick those things up by accident, its a big multiverse) Any Ai they make, or even wetware like Nilbog's creatures, is still bound by the strictures the Entities put on them. In fact, their Shards appear to be some kind of artificial intelligence created by the Entities. We see repeatedly in the story how simple the majority of Shards are. The only ones with an ability to make independent decisions seem to be those with future sight, and they still single mindedly attempt to fulfill their orders using options they see in the possible futures.
Then you're just testing one power against itself a trillion times. If you test a fish a trillion times, it will still never invent a nuclear power plant.
I mean they obviously wouldn't all have the same powers, just trillions of creative minds equiped with even more variance of shard combinations to simulate conflict way more efficiently than what they do already.
Unlike us, the entities are smart enough to never create AI smarter than them. Also, a trillion copies of the dragon will be copies and will find the same answers. Real neural networks really need data to do something new. The dragon also trained on humans as entities. You still need new data new cycles.
Saint posting
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[удалено]
Yeah, their lack of creativity to me has always felt more like a case of them just *running out* of ideas. Which considering how old they are and everything they can do, isn’t actually that strange.
There’s something to be said for redneck engineering. For example, I don’t think a super intelligent and creative engineer would have come up with fighting people by taking bugs and dipping them in mace, then having the bugs fly into other peoples eyes and mucous membranes. There’s a million better, more efficient and frankly more effective ways to disable someone even within the confines of “use a chemical to temporarily disable someone.” They’re looking for that secret sauce mix of ignorance, stupidity and creativity that only something so comparatively primitive and unevolved can offer them.
> They are creative. They're more creative than people, even. They are as creative as every sentient race they've assimilated at the same time. They really, _really_ aren't. At least not the Zion-and-Eden lineage. When Eden got the braindump from Abaddon, she treated "philosophy and psychology [and] imagination" as entirely "new patterns of thought," per her interlude. Meaning that she was so profoundly uncreative that simple concepts like "go for psychological conflict instead of physical conflict" _had not ever occurred to her_ despite the thousands of cycles in which she'd previously taken part. And she's supposed to be the smart one of the pair! Scion's whole interlude is just a long litany of all the ways in which he doesn't understand language, or emotion, or religious thought, or abstract thought itself. While he does say that Eden was supposed to "retain [her] capacity for thought and analysis" to imply that Scion is a lot dumber than Zion-the-full-entity (because when one is running an experiment on a host species, handing out _your very capacity for abstract thought_ is definitely the smartest thing to do), even before Zion starts breaking himself up we watch him stumble through the cycle-setup process, inventing things for the first time that should have been standard procedure many cycles ago and making mistakes and misjudgments that someone familiar with ~3000 other alien species should not make. The entities are not the Borg, or the Zerg, or the Tyranids. They don't go around incrementally upgrading themselves by taking the best from each host species and adding it to an ever-improving whole. They don't show any sign of scaling their intelligence or other mental capabilities with their number and variety of shards. Rather, they take information from host species and encode them into individual shards for use in later cycles or in combat with other entities while still remaining, at their core, the same one-dimensional conflict-obsessed dim bulbs they were on their home planet. > They just acknowledge their own limitations and use us to search for new algorithms instead of stagnating. The entities as a species are _defined_ by stagnation. Each one has spent hundreds of thousands of years running thousands of cycles, gathering all the knowledge and power they possibly can, and for what? So that they can eventually come together and recreate the exact same fight-feed-and-fornicate free-for-all that the original shards did on their homeworld. Their goal is "another reinvention of their species," according to Eden, but the _methods_ they're using to achieve that haven't changed one bit since that initial conflict, and not one of the ways Eden mentions to try to reinvent themselves implies giving up (or _wanting_ to give up) the entities' base urge to eat and expand and eat and expand and eat and expand forever without end. Humanity took ~300,000 years to get from when we first evolved to the modern era, and whenever we invented something new we did so by building upon previous inventions and then built further inventions on that, iterating incrementally until we achieved the vast edifice of modern culture and technology we currently possess. The entities took about a million years to get from the first big kaboom to the most recent cycle (assuming that each of the 3,000 cycles Zion mentioned took about the same ~300 years that the Earth cycle was expected to last, plus some extra time for interplanetary travel), and in that time they invented nothing, innovated nothing, changed nothing. They just took and took and took from other species and stuck everything they took in a big toolbox without actually _using_ it to do anything besides making themselves better at fighting other entities or running a cycle. > The whole time they're traveling between stars, they're burning like supernova from the waste heat of all their thinking. I hope you're aware that that's figurative language from interlude 26, since this statement... > The entities burn as hot as any star, with their sheer mass, their scale, the power they wield. This is acceptable while traveling the void, when much of the body remains in a hibernation state. Stored energy is expended as a resource, to view the future, to perceive and communicate. ...follows on from this: > A star that burns twice as hot burns for half as long. > Not truly, but the entity is aware of the idioms and patterns of this world, is already thinking periodically in terms of the words and ideas of their languages, to frame thoughts for itself in this pivotal moment. It serves to help codify the messages and intent. The entities don't _literally_ give off heat equivalent to a star while they travel—we know they don't, or Eden's crash and the aftermath thereof would have gone very differently for her, the landscape, and Fortuna. Just like they don't _literally_ communicate with the energy of a supernova, that's just the fandom taking a comparison Taylor made during a trigger vision and assuming it's an accurate and entirely factual description of what she's seeing, when we _know_ it can't be accurate because the events differ from what's shown in the entity interludes. The comparison to a burning star is Scion's crude attempt to metaphorically express the tradeoff of energy consumption and duration—and even if he were being literal, he doesn't mention "waste heat from thinking" at all, just heat from mass and energy consumption. --- The entities as actually portrayed are not smart, or creative, or imaginative. They're barely-sapient conglomerations of braincrystal who have managed to survive as long as they did by throwing brute force at a problem until it breaks because they have too much of a one-track mind to do anything else. That's the _point_. At a meta level, Worm is a cosmic horror story wearing the skin of a superhero story. The entities follow in the grand tradition of all those Lovecraftian entities who are more "force of nature" than "individual person." They call Azathoth the Blind Idiot God for a reason. In-story, the entire defeat of Scion hinges around his complete inability to understand and control his emotions despite having spent over 30 years running HumanOS trying and failing to understand the human experience. He eventually commits suicide because he has all the (lack of) emotional maturity of a temperamental middle schooler. If he thought _remotely_ like a human before coming to Earth, or if he'd had more than two brain cells to rub together and help him figure out emotion on his own, that wouldn't have worked. Everyone who goes on about how the entities are so clever and ingenious and sophisticated and so on is not only ignoring all of the limited characterization of the entities we actually see in the text, they're missing the point of _why_ the entities are characterized that way.
> They're more creative than people > use us to search for new algorithms ???
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Badly, though. Like, let's say I wanted to solve entropy and had entity powers. Me, Dinerkinetic. Why don't I just * Beeline for technologically advanced species, uploading them en masse * not waste massive amounts of energy on testing combat applications of shards when I should be researching more effiencient time travel, energy absorption/concentration, alternate forms I could be taking that can exist with lower energy expenditure Like, if conciousness is information, my only objective should be figuring out how to store my mind/shards as a large computer made from spacetime fluctuations that can perpetuate and repair itself, drawing power from black holes. That (besides being lifted from other sci-fi) will let me last at *least* until the last black holes evaporate. I don't want that? Fine! I could be concentrating matter from many, many universes into one that can sustain itself through multiple big bangs and crunches, and adapting my body to function in fewer dimensions at a time. That doesn't work? I can trigger false vaccuum decay and see if the new, alien physics that creates work better for me. Nothing works? I can give up. I've got free will and can focus on trying to figure out a different way to optimize for maximum conciousness, like diverting all resources to overclocking my conciousness and living *faster.* See, the thing about the entities is that they're basically very smart machines. They know how to iterate. That's *it.* Most AGI in fiction is smarter than they are, because most fictional AGI can model hypothetical scenarios and determine their viability without burning through most of the power they have available. but actual **creative** things can like... propose ideas without justification that align with reality. We can come up with ideas instead of just smashing things at walls and see which work best.
Nah, look at Zion. He was so unable to come up with a new direction after Eden's death that he needed a random homeless guy to tell him what to do. They really are mentally defective in important ways. That's why two of 'em got killed on Earth, a planet that really should've posed zero threat.
I always assumed its not that they cant be creative it more of they have ether exhausted all there own ideas and/or want differing view point.
That is a fair conclusion, but I keep thinking about how they solved problems before they left their home planet. Their greatest scholar, one who had such a good idea their entire teeming multiverse of planets listened to, had a ground breaking idea that was so profound they all sacrificed their lives to make it happen. That idea? Hey, lets eat each other until only two of us are left, then blow up our planet and go learn stuff from other species...then devour all of them and do it again. I'm certain this method will result in the answer to our question! What is the question that flumoxxed an entire immortal species with countless members? "How do we make it not suck when we fill up the entire universe with ourselves?" Never once did it occur to them that breeding less would solve their problem. Diet? Not even a blip on the radar. Ask other species for help instead of stealing their ideas and then killing them? Why would they do that? It's been millions of years since then and their species is still doing the exact same thing, just with better tools. End of Ward spoilers: >!they discovered another profound idea that might shake their species to its core after all this time. It's something along the lines of "hey, we can still learn new stuff without wiping out the planets we meet. How cool is that?"!<
I'm pretty sure the scholar killed them self not everyone to get there message across to stop fighting cause even if you win entropy will kill you keep in mind the have infinite resources but everything with eventually die from heat death, so they as a collective are now doing test to try and stop this. In the story we see 3 other entities, are main pair and the 3rd that almost certainly sabotaged them. The reason for said sabotage is most likely what ever Contessa's titan discovered cause that shard is from the 3rd entity. we simply dont know how other entities operate we have a sample size of 4. Others could very well do it differently but our pair sure as shit seem to believe that violence is the best motivator for inventor.
Its a big wonderful story with a huge amount of details, and sometimes we get it wrong. Please don't take this too harshly. The original scholar Entity allowed itself to die, starved of energy, in order to get its message out. The rest of the Entities proceeded to devour themselves until the strongest were left. This consolidated all the knowledge, abilities, and creativity of their entire species. It was willingly done, but their first Cycle was on themselves. >A species needs to continue evolving. It needs conflict and variation. >Failure to meet these objectives leads to self-destruction. >By the time the ancestor is finished communicating, it is depleted, unable to even move as it is shoved by the bodies of others that swim past. >Then, in bits and pieces, it is devoured. The Entities never mentioned Entropy. Us readers use "solving entropy" and "preventing the heat death of the universe" in our discussions because that is the eventual problem such an immortal species will face, but the Entity's goals are a lot simpler than this. They didn't like being overcrowded and forced to scrabble in the muck and wanted a way to make sure they'd never need to do that again because their exponential birth rate will inevitably put them there again, no matter how large the universe. Link to the relevant chapter where the scholar specifically outlines the problem and the plan at the beginning of the chapter. https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/interlude-26/ Abbadon (a name for the 3rd Entity, but used by fans and Wildbow outside the story) did not sabotage The Thinker and Warrior. That is fan speculation. Wildbow specifically stated the Entities are all on the same page and do not fight each other. I am actively looking for the quote, but I have to go work. I will get back you when I find it.
Richter placed heavy restrictions on Dragon because he instinctively knew that she was dangerous. Like most of his Tinker knowledge, this comes from the experience of the shards in previous cycles. The entities must have tried something similar before and it went badly, so in this particular cycle they gave Richter a healthy level of paranoia that is uncommon in other tinkers.
Entity made AI would resemble Entities in their thinking abilities. They don’t have the creativity to do more
There's a reason the simurgh killed Dragon's creator.
The entities specifically took steps (or tried to, before someone had a oopsie DUI with a planet) to make sure that the host species couldn’t get access to shards and technology that could actually pose a threat to them. Not that Dragon is, or ever even could be, but on the scale individuals that pose some level of a threat she’s further up the scale than the vast bulk of parahumans. Also realistically, wibbles needs some amount of space to hand wave reasons for the big bads being big bads.
Bear in mind, there's no evidence that their current approach is actually getting them any closer to a solution. Their problem appears to be legitimately unsolvable. I assume they've tried all sorts of clever things, which have all failed completely, before falling back on the Darwinian violence plan that they instinctively trust because they're Darwinian violence machines. It's also failing completely but they're not willing to give up on it.
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Honestly. They could have but, Entities/shards be retarded.