[Matierialist] Stars are not living or thinking things, it is acceptable to harness it for power.
[Fanatic egalitarian] I agree it is acceptable to harness it for power, but what of harnessing
all of it for power? Imagine if you were, Earth's early days, when many nations conflicted for resources without higher arbitration to settle disputes. Now imagine we are one such nation, and we occupy a plateau whose river source feeds a river extending down into many nations below. They use this water for agriculture, for fishing, for drinking and so on - is it right then for us to build a dam, blocking off their supply of water so that we may utilize it all?
I don't think it is okay. But I don't think mars was okay either. This is the same thing, we're irrevocably altering large swaths of space, the planets, the sun itself, in time even the surrounding stars.
That said, we've already thrown away so much of ourselves. All our values and ethics have died in the name of survival. So what's one more stab into the corpse?
Failure is not an excuse to abandon ourselves to amorality. By simply choosing to not care, we close so many avenues of thought which could have altered the outcome for the better. We may have decided that the long-term impacts of harnessing the star in such a manner was simply not worth it, or that there were things we could do which would mitigate the affect of the galaxy seeing one light turn off. Earth is dead, but the environmentalist xenophilic egalitarian successors on Olympia remain as they are. Humanity on Earth had their own dark eras of history before the UN took control, just as it does now. Yet the imperative remained after each failure: Keep trying to make things better.
No, no, no. You're looking at it wrong. There's no moral dilemma at all.
The main business of a star is to produce light, right? But very little of that light actually falls upon a world. Most of it just radiates out into the vacuum. If I were a star, I'd really like more of my energy to be harnessed toward useful ends.
And what do they lose? Radiating into the blackness of interstellar space, radiating into the blackness of a solar collection array, who cares? Contact with the other stars? The sight of their planets? Really? You think stars communicate, over billions of miles, and that they can see the pinpricks of their companions through the glare of their own light? No way.
I'm fine with spiritualism, but it has to have some basis in reality. So think about it from a thermodynamics point of view. The job of stars is to create a temporary breach in the dominance of entropy, to force open a beachhead against the powers of entropy, chaos, and death, so that life can grow and evolve under their protection. That's what they've been doing for billions of years. That's their purpose. If we mortals can increase the efficiency of that process, ensure that more of their energy goes towards the eternal battle for life to exist... why the hell not.
So yes. Dam a star. Dam a few. Use their Light to fight back the Prethoryn, to reclaim all the planets and resurrect them with new life. Like I said, spiritualism is all fine and dandy, but we're faced with giving a much-needed tune-up to the clockworks of the Galaxy. Anyone that knows physics knows that entropy will win. That at some point, all the stars will cease to shine and the last living thing will draw its last breath. And then the universe will be plunged into darkness and silence forever. We have an obligation to stave off that fate as much as possible, by using every photon emitted by every star to the best possible end. So get that Dyson sphere up and running as soon as possible.
Start with type O and A giants with no planets for maximum risk/reward.
Of the tens of billions of trillions of stars composing the observable universe, we propose the claiming of one. The modesty of this number disguises the fact of this monumental undertaking: We are the only civilization in this galaxy with the technology and infrastructure required to make this possibility into a reality. Once more I find our discourse centers around the privilege of sapience, that because the stars do not think, they do not matter. Far beyond the human lifespan, potentially far beyond the lifespan of life in this galaxy, this star will forever be removed from the constellation, its companion star systems no longer seeing its light amongst them. Surely, yes, we can be this light for as long as human civilization lives - but how long will that be? How long is eternity?
Furthermore I caution you all to not allow your own prejudices to affect your judgement, as it did with the machine debate. Once more I see spiritualists lambasted despite having nothing to with the dyson sphere debate, and I must be frank that the spiritualists of the UN are not the superstitious stagnant cults that bigoted theophobes would have you ironically, believe in. The only difference between spiritualists and materialists in Stellaris is one of temporal mindset.
Materialists believe that everything should be exploited and utilized now or else it is useless, that the primary goal is to preserve ourselves and enjoy ourselves, that the material substance of the galaxy is the limit of purpose and so there should be no limits to material use. The spiritualists would take this assertion, that the material substance of the galaxy is the limit of purpose, and question it. They posit that the materialist on the one hand accepts material limits to all substance, then trusts their own material brain to tell them this is the truth of things. The materialist simply observes the universe's substance, the spiritualist explores existence itself. Think for more than the present - situate ourselves in the sheer expanse that is not only the space of the universe, but space & time.
We endorse neither materialism nor spiritualism within the UN. Our ideas which are mis-attributed by materialists as belong to the influence of the spiritualist faction, are a result us walking our road to Utopia. Thus our ideas do not hail from the spiritualist faction, the spiritualist faction exists
because of our ideas. We chose to look inwards in material consciousness, we chose to look outwards in time, both past and future. We abandoned the material senses of self, of desire and the need to exploit, expand and extinguish, we looked beyond the material limits of matter to try and find the deepest reason, causation and nature of reality. We have pierced the shroud, gazed upon this collective dream held across universes, our species gaining total psionic ascension, and yet Xeltek materialists still deride our progress? Demand we return to material limits? For what, so that we can build robots? Despite the sheer banality of this materialism, materialism itself declares there is no meaning or purpose in this galaxy, all the while defeating itself: It cannot fathom purpose, therefore it declares none exists. One can only be so glad that the Fedora faction died 3 centuries ago in the great flame war of 2088.
Thus I'm going to be cheeky and ask you to consider it from a thermodynamics point of view, making no assumptions on the job of stars or the like of such assumptions, for they are impositions of human consciousness and have no basis in reality
Stars and life exist, but neither can claim that the purpose of the galaxy is to serve them. We do not fear death, knowing it is an accepted conclusion to life. We do not fear chaos, knowing it allows for free will. We do not fear entropy, because its power is inevitable. Any star does not exist so that life can grow and evolve under their protection, they have not been ordained such a task as if commanded by a higher power. For billions of years stars have shone and erupted into supernovae without the semblance of life upon the cosmos. Reason then suggests it is life that has emerged from the stars expenditure of energy, shot by the arrow of time, not staving off entropy - but a product of entropy, an expression of the universe's primal laws itself. The first ancestors of life were the progenitors most capable of absorbing one form of energy and dissipating it as heat, things like radiation dissipated as heat, replicating to increase this process. Thus life is as the notorious Mandasuran weed, the ironflower sprouting in the cracks of a neoconcrete pavement, sucking the power out of a transmission cable. It would be hard to argue that the transmission cable's purpose was to fuel this spontaneous instance of life, and not that it was the expression of so many plans - the engineer who laid the cable, who laid the road, and the erosion which allowed the ironflower to take root.
So if we do encapsulate a star within a lifeless star system, one which has none of the compounds required to spark the genesis of life, what is the consequence?
In the short term we will never want for energy. We will most efficiently use all the energy of this star and be able to power great peacekeeping fleets or rank upon rank of Fortress lines. The aesthetic issues of disappearing one star in the sky don't seem so grave when everyone who could be alive to witness it now would be consumed.
Ethically it would be different from all of our current energy efficiency drives, in that we would not be making our planets more efficient at producing environmentally friendly energy, we'd be monopolizing the productive output of an entire star. And on the long, long, long term, we're encapsulating this star in a structure that will far outlast humanity, whether we are consumed by the scourge or not. Millions, even billions of years from now empires could wage devastating wars to win our planned solar engine. Then again, they could use it to power their most industrious and beneficial civil development projects... The issue is we cannot project so far beyond the human timescale, considering that for example our species is currently 18 years old and what we are proposing will last until someone blows it up or the star itself is destroyed.
The arguments made by you all have been very convincing (don't let my sincere reservations fool you, the galactic environmental protection agency sponsors me on patron.biznis), and while I express my sincere reservations over this proposition, unless there is a good objection to the hyperharnessing of one star: We shall begin, and we shall make the star a diamond in our necklace, caught in a prism of our making. Thus shall begin: Operation Imprisment.
Also, I've heard that there is a strategy for beating the Prethoryn Scourge: Bombard/barren-ify all of the planets at the edges of the Prethoryn Scourge's empire until there are no more habitable planets within infestation range of the Prethoryn Scourge's remaining planets. This will prevent the Prethoryn Scourge from infesting any new planets, enabling you to whittle them down over time without fear of being destroyed by them.
Ok, so I'll be speaking out of character on this one just to explain the mechanics and some oddities.
I've beaten the Prethoryn many times before, but I've never seen anything like this. A lot of that I think stems from how there were balance changes between the previous version of Stellaris and the current 1.8 version. This meant that we spent 2 centuries with all empires developing under old Stellaris, while they got hit by the prethoryn from the new stellaris.
Oh boy! How Fun! And that's capital Dorf Fortress Fun, and I think is why after about half a century the galactic states are beefing up, because they're acting more and more like new Stellaris AI, which is needless to say much better (it's why for example, the Mandasurans didn't do any colonization, but as soon as we updated to new Stellaris they started colonizing everywhere. New AI is an improvement).
Couple that with our unusual early game, we left a whole lot of the Western galactic quarter empty, full of uncolonized and underdeveloped worlds. Even the native Hiffnar didn't develop that many worlds, and much of that development was undone when the Hiffnar were first genocided. Just remember this for future reference, as it's important.
When the Prethoryn invade, they select a random point on the galactic rim to be their invasion point. Like extragalactic mongol locusts on crack cocaine, the first glimpse of the horror to come is the appearance of 3 vanguard fleets, together with a combined strength of about 100,000k. This is more than anything anyone should possess, unless the prethoryn have invaded a fallen Empire or a late-game star empire/federation. Whether the vanguard have pacified the entry point or not, the main fleet arrives in swarm.
The fleet then expands through two means.
The first is with infestor ships. These are the prethoryn analogue to colony ships, in that they go forth on their own and take over an uninhabited world and turn it into a prethoryn world. Given how much of our quarter was uninhabited... You can see why this was a problem.
The other way is through invasion, as we saw around Earth, and ultimately with Earth. The prethoryn send out a fleet (or fleets) of ships to a star system, wipe out orbital defences, destroy the planet's defences and when all of the planet's bunkers and armoured convoys and airports are destroyed, they send down the invasion fleet. An unending diarrhea of prethoryn ground forces.
There has been no successful defence against the prethoryn ground forces noted in galactic history once it reaches the point where all planetary fortifications are down. Once the prethoryn successfully defeat the planet's ground forces, they take 2 years to convert all of the planet into a prethoryn world, mutating all the fauna (including the survivors of the invasion) and the entire biosphere into more prethoryn bioforms.
In both cases the only cure is to obliterate all organic matter from orbit, leaving a barren planet behind. The one consolation is that the planet could be returned to a lively state, but for the time being, it's strategically important to leave them barren so the prethoryn run out of planets to infest.
We have already reached the phase of the invasion where the prethoryn no longer have planets they can infest with infestor ships (as all planets are either colonized or safe behind friendly lines), but they still possess the second avenue of converting a planet by force. In regards to your proposed strategy, we unfortunately have no ability to choose our targets that well. While I have prioritized border worlds, our standard operational procedure is to eliminate worlds where we can, and leave as soon as we can. Staying any longer risks getting hit by a prethoryn megaswarm - which is bad, bad days. Maybe with the prethoryn queen we can do more risky stunts though.
While we will gain the ability to support risky fleet actions more often, another thing to consider is that our primary objective is to reduce the number of their planets in absolute numbers and to occupy their fleets attention in as large numbers as possible. Thus I try to keep the prethoryn megaswarms deep inside their own territory, chasing after our ships, instead of invading border worlds. If we can complete both of these objectives we can gradually dry up the supply of prethoryn ships, and eventually begin to win this war of attrition.
Furthermore, prethoryn get an insane bonus to border projection, which means that we don't possess the means to place a buffer in between allied states and prethoryn space. Even if we could, I'm not sure if that would stop the prethoryn from simply going over the no man's void.
All in all I'm optimistic, but not letting down our guard - constant raids continue as usual. We had a stalemate on Earth, and we saw the prethoryn suprise us then, so efforts focus on preventing another such unpleasant surprise breaking the Southern Front or the Western Front.
Remember that if you are going to recolonize stuff, you should probably enable the AI rights policy first: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/AI_rebellion
....have you not been watching the thread, we are VERY well aware of this stuff and have had pages worth of debates on this stuff. Thanks for the reminder that we need to treat our creations as friends and equals when possible though.
The creation of robot pops is illegal, I don't think there are any pre-sentients left in the galaxy
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Topic: Stellaris: Never leave Earth (Read 90955 times)