Sure. Scene setup. Also helps illustrate the baroness she’s driving through.
I meant my guess is we won’t see the “worker ant” scientists doing whatever they at least said they would do: have everyone join them. My couple of questions are: what methodology are they using and why they are in a relative hurry to do so, considering all the immune are not military or scientists with resources and are being watched.
We won’t see Manuosos till the Others penetrate wherever he’s located, or perhaps he has Skype and that even has translation built in. Also, the Others must know they need to improve their World Census device, for the same reasons, they can’t wait 70-80 years for all the immune to die off.
It was odd that they are okay living without electricity and were “centralizing” food, yet it was all almost immediately at hand. Carol didn’t request a daily delivery of fresh food. She asked for her Sprouts back, and that’s exactly what she got.
In 1974, a message was sent from the big dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, towards M13 (The Hercules Cluster) 25,000 light-years away. It was just an exercise in “hey, look what we can do” and M13 is relatively dense. I believe the energy was 1 megawatt.
The Nerf tossing guys were also tossing out units and how big a dish to basically broadcast to everywhere and how much wattage it would take. I can only say it would be one of many big dishes and perhaps linked around the world so it was constantly “on” and how much energy can thousands of nuclear plants generate?
That didn’t sound at all like a Paraguayan accent to me, it sounded Mexican I think.
And a Paraguayan man probably wouldn’t understand the Mexican slang Carol used (but I think she probably got her meaning across)
One of the scientists speculated “megawatts?” as the transmission power and the other asked “gigawatts”? Either number would not significantly tax Earth’s power generation infrastructure which is in the 30 terrawatts range (currently). At least if we’re talking about a few transmissions rather than hundreds or thousands.
On the other hand, I asked chatgpt what sort of transmission power you’d need to send radio waves 600 light years and be detected with a large radio antenna similar to what we use on Earth and it told me we’d be looking at something in the gigawatt to terrawatt range. Of course radio astronomers should have a pretty good idea about this and in that scene they sounded like they were just throwing out wild ass guesses with several orders of magnitude of ambiguity. In the real world, radio astronomers could probably make a very good guess very quickly.
There is some flexibility in there, though – if you have a gigantic antenna the transmission power can be lower due to higher gain. I guess if you really did have a dish the size of Africa you could reduce the transmission power into the gigawatt range, so the signal could be extremely high power from a smaller antenna or less power from a bigger antenna. I’m not sure if you can tell the difference from receiving the transmission.
I reckon the signal was not only aimed at Earth some 600 years ago. Even if this (formerly intelligent) culture was able to narrow down about 200,000 stars in that radius to “Class M” / Goldilocks zone planets that’s still, let’s just say, a lot.
Astronomers do not have the tech to find all the “Class M’s” within 600 light years and it would indeed be amazing if it were known there was some culture as relatively close as 600 light years away. Yet for this other culture to zone in on Earth in 1426 is much less likely than they were broadcasting everywhere with the power of many nuclear reactors - let’s toss the Nerf and say Peta (One Quintilian watts). Any culture who has developed Radio Telescope Astronomy within thousands of light years in all directions will be able to receive it. Eventually.
This shows’ contemporary scientists were just at the right era where they would not see the inherent danger of experimenting with animals. Hey, it’s RNA so we’ve got some kind of universal imperative to play with fire.
That honestly is my biggest suspension of disbelief moment. Not only that they actually synthesized the RNA sequence despite the high risk, but that the scientists engaged in this highly dangerous, potentially (actually) world-ending experiment would have even had the option to physically handle a specimen injected with the sequence, even one that they (for reasons I still cannot fathom—I mean, why couldn’t it have been sleeping? Or unconscious? Why did they jump straight to “it’s dead”?) presumed to be dead.
I really hope there’s a lot of thought put into all of this. If this were just some random new show, I’d probably think there was not, but Vince Gilligan usually puts a lot of thought into his work. It’s very difficult to believe that even if DNA and RNA are somehow universal to life (and there’s no reason to believe this – there are lots of ways to store biological information similarly but differently to DNA), that doesn’t mean that creating an RNA virus with a particular sequence is going to affect every life equally, or even every intelligent life equally. The virus that created a human hive mind would absolutely have to be targeted at humans specifically – even if all life used DNA, there’s no universal DNA sequence you could create that would affect all life in that same way. Every organism would work dramatically differently. This is also supported within the show in that animals aren’t affected the same way, only as far as we know humans, which suggests it must be specifically developed and relevant to humans. So the aliens who created this transmission would’ve had to have been to Earth and known about humans to do whatever they did. Which makes one wonder why they wouldn’t just release it directly while they were here, rather than requiring us to receive the signal and create the DNA sequencing itself.
If I had to guess, maybe it was some sort of prime directive sort of thing. They knew about humans for thousands of years, and they created a signal so that when we reached the level of technology to detect it and create their RNA sequence, we’d be ready for the joining.
Or maybe they have the same sort of non-harm, pacifist philosophy that the hive mind seems to have, and they didn’t think that forcing the virus on us was ethical, but allowing us to detect it and create it ourselves was.
I really hope this ultimately makes sense. I don’t need precise technical accuracy but if it’s “the aliens transmitted an RNA sequence that has the same effect on all intelligence life” that would be extremely hard to believe and disappointing.
TBH, while I’m happy to engage in discussion of the technical details, I don’t really care all that much (unless/until it becomes essential to the actual story they are trying to tell and becomes a major plot hole) because science fiction has never been about the science.
That’s my feeling too. One has to take a Star Trekian leap of faith that planets with water and living things that breathe oxygen are compatible enough with RNA - just as this other culture assumed when they saw the radio transmissions from wherever and went down the same path.
Maybe, as has been posited here, the Others have no clue how to assimilate the immune. Even if this season’s cliffhanger is that discovery, what happens then? There’s still a lot of intrigue and a very good storyteller so I’ll side with ASL that we’re not going to see any science, just stories about the kindest, most generous quasi-alien invaders ever.
If I am willing to accept virally induced instantaneous psychic communication across the globe functioning as a hive mind, then this bit is no stretch!
A virus could very realistically have a portion protected from mutation containing its core function while allowing rapid mutation (in the mouse) until ones fit accomplishing what is required to spread rapidly between individuals.
One can also imagine that intelligent life will usually have convergent evolution and mostly all have neurons or something like them arranged in similar enough patterns (just like the octopus eye is structurally very similar to ours).
If the first doesn’t take me out of suspension of disbelief the second certainly won’t!
The lack of adequate safety protocols and security in the lab, shit even the casual nerd group approach to dealing with an alien transmission … that was a bit harder to ignore.
Is every single child in the world suddenly capable of piloting a plane or performing advanced maths? How does the hive mind work on the brains (and bodies) of very young humans, that are still rapidly developing? Is every single baby suddenly toilet trained immediately? Even if they lack the physical strength to actually climb the commode? Is there any need for daycare/schools for the Others? I doubt this will be answered in detail, but it’s just something I was wondering…
Think of all the PCs of various levels that were networked doing parallel processing on SETI data or protein folding. And capable of searching for any fact on the Web. Some could be “thin clients”, mostly just “dumb terminals”, but accessing the cloud, others could be adding processing to the cloud, and storage could be widely and redundantly distributed.
I’d WAG the analogy is that a developed enough individual system to communicate effectively with the distributed consciousness and the means to output it (a developed enough body) would be the limiting factors. Newborns likely not. Doubt toddlers but by three to four maybe?
Another thought, knowing that none of this is important or likely to ever be addressed by the show … if this was an intentionally created alien virus (rather than natural somehow or a lab accident escaped - poor containment seems universal - that neutralized its creator species as well) then it is logical from a Dark Forest perspective with a peace loving species getting there first: you don’t have to destroy potential competitors, you can be kind and make them happy and with no motivation to ever progress farther technologically in ways that could become a threat to you, and have each infected species spread it to any potential threat species “nearby” … a motivation to not intentionally harm other creatures is great for that purpose … and understanding why the weapon of mass contentment doesn’t work for some is important quality improvement process.
As per the same disclaimers that it won’t be part of the drama of the show DSeid wrote, and going with the theory that there’s plenty of life in other nearby star systems, I was not so much thinking of the species that originated this message but of yet another planet/species who are much further advanced and would also recognise this message as intentional, due to its non-randomness and being repeated. As well, they could have computing ability that would flag it as something dangerous - perhaps what it does - and not start experimenting with whatever they have that are similar to rodents. And if they’re inclined to be altruistic, they might set up their own broadcast with a cure, cleverly masked so other “Others” might think this looks like an improvement - let’s spray this all over!
It’s probably too scienc-ey to depict, and very Deus ex machina/Star Trekish to play out episode 18 with such a resolution.
On the drama tack, is Zosia her “real name?”. It was interesting that she could somewhat detach and have a drink, and probably wasn’t broadcasting “The History of Water” to everyone. In my non-chemist understanding of RNA and DNA,the DNA retains “the master plan,” so the question is "can they restore individuality?
- that neutralized its creator species as well) then it is logical from a Dark Forest perspective with a peace loving species getting there first: you don’t have to destroy potential competitors, you can be kind and make them happy and with no motivation to ever progress farther technologically in ways that could become a threat to you, and have each infected species spread it to any potential threat species “nearby” … a motivation to not intentionally harm other creatures is great for that purpose … and understanding why the weapon of mass contentment doesn’t work for some is important quality improvement process.