Sure, but not just four days after my spouse died and the world changed as I know it. I’d just be really mad and uncooperative like Carol. The other immune are actually in a better mindset to investigate the nature of what has happened. They can have conversations with relatives and loved ones to quickly discover how much, if any, of the individual still exists. Or, unburdened by any close relationships, just explore the opportunities in this new world. Carol is stuck with her grief and a lame doppelgänger of a fictional pirate.
Yeah, Sprouts Farmers Market (the full name of the chain) is a slightly higher end grocery store. The stuff they sell there is perhaps not as ritzy as that which you get at Whole Foods or Erewhon, but definitely a step up from a Walmart or a Kroger. They sell all types of food, including meat.
I have been listening to the companion podcast on Apple Podcasts for the show. The director of this week’s episode was on the pod and mentioned the trials that went into having to film in an empty grocery store. He mentioned that the manager of the Sprouts where they filmed initially told them that they would have an entire week to film; as the request moved up the corporate ladder, that ultimately got cut back to two or three days.
According to him, the original script called for an elaborate, Busby Berkeley style (his words) sequence showing the store being restocked by the people who showed up. They ultimately had to scrap this because they just didn’t have the time to film it.
“… and that’s if it’s only pointed at us!”
It’s a new explanation for Fermi’s Paradox, why we don’t see other advanced civilizations … all civilizations that reach the technological point of listening for signals get infected and die off in the process of spreading the virus to any possible potential new hosts.
You’d think an entire civilization working 100% together towards a goal would have a good success ratio. If their mission is to spread the virus then survival is a pretty integral step.
Only to the point of getting the transmitter up and running. Once it has reproduced, defined as taking the action that will on average lead to one or more other sentient worlds becoming infected, in this case able to keep sending even after the sentient life forms are long gone … no need to use resources to create new life forms. Or to feed the ones you have.
What else are they going to use the resources for? they can just keep going, there are zero guarantees the signal would just keep going without them. Specially not given the timelines required. If they are not lying a fully infected planet would just be a utopia.
All resources to transmission.
But they want to keep that going literally forever, there is no reason to commit species suicide.
Transmission isn’t a one and done thing - not only would you want it to last as long as possible (since random alien species might only be listening thousands of years from now), but you’d want to direct it at many different star systems, so presumably that means they’d need to keep humanity and technology going for millennia.
A virus doesn’t actually want anything. A virus doesn’t plan. It is a simple instruction kit. And killing the host is neither the intent nor is avoiding killing the host the intent. Both can happen though.
There might be a marginal “fitness” gain by keeping some number of future sentient individuals in subsequent generations going to maintain the equipment but that would be a small number. No need to have billions or millions or even hundreds of thousands around.
Exactly, it leaves it up to the host how to best work out their “biological imperative” to continue to spread. At no point is mass suicide going to be the answer.
Even if we were to liken the hive mind to a virus (and while there are some similarities, it’s certainly not complete), why would a virus want to commit mass suicide once it’s transmitted to someone else? Viruses, of course, don’t have wishes, but in a metaphorical sense they’d rather stick around in their host indefinitely, living and spreading themselves even further. They just often can’t, because they kill the host, or the host’s immune system fights them off. But in the case of the hive mind, if they spend Earth’s resources wisely, they can keep the human race going indefinitely. And why wouldn’t they? Why would they want to kill themselves off just because they transmitted messages to someone else?
If they did want to reduce the human population, they have total control of reproduction – they could leave the Earth’s current population intact and simply reduce it to whatever number they wanted over time by controlling how many people have kids.
Humans waste resources. We use more resources than the Earth can support and we’re basically living at an unsustainable rate. Some estimates put us at 2 to 3 times the resource consumption that the Earth could sustain in the long term. If you have a hive mind, and you don’t need every single person to have their own car, their own entertainment, their own fashion, their own unnecessary gadgets, why not conserve Earth’s resources by cutting out things that are no longer useful or desired to people? Maybe it’s to use resources to beam messages across the galaxy, but it also simply makes sense from a utility perspective.
Mass suicide? I suggest no intent to kill existing people off, just lack of intent to maintain the organism of humanity. Neglect of it as immaterial and a needless use of resources. Again maybe worth the effort to keep a few around to maintain the machinery but more than that is superfluous.
They also have the biological imperative not to hurt anything, that just wouldn’t make sense with the premise we’ve been given. Unless they are just lying, which is possible.
Why they have this imperative to be nice hosts, after Tafffler said
An easy answer is just go ahead and kill the 13 and any more they find.
They haven’t explained the reasons for their rules/imperatives to not kill and be Vegetarian and step over worms and insects like Buddhist Monks.
It must be part of the humor of the show that Sprouts was quickly and needlessly stocked completely. I’d have thought that society - such as it is- would proceed as normal. Yet these others are conveniently nearby, and if they’re not wherever already, they soon will be.
If they are just part of a virus, pretty much all they need to do is build a powerful antenna to “infect” others and keep it powered. I suspect we won’t see any scene that Carol or one of the immune is not in,
For the shows’ needs, they have to keep revealing flaws that might be exploited to somehow “win” or at least stop the spread. The universe is old - this could be attack 10,000 or 100.
Can I just say, I love the joke of them stocking up the store with all that fresh produce - cut to Carol eating a microwave frozen dinner.
As noted, a virus does not have intent. However, it may follow a predictable progression. If the virus is just a straight forward virus, then there is no reason why its host populations shouldn’t persist indefinitely. The most “successful” viruses will be the ones that do not kill their host. More chances to be passed on to others.
Of course if the virus is the product of a design, then all bets are off. That said, I’m tentatively willing to take them at their word that they don’t want to—perhaps even can’t—purposefully harm anyone. If they wanted to/could, they’d have done so already.
Anyway, I’m wondering if we’ll see Carol break down and ask for a Helen avatar in a moment of weakness. Because that should be in the realm of the possible. Have a person draw on Helen’s memories and simulate her personality. Maybe, somewhere in the world, they could even find someone who looks exactly like her…
Thought others have probably had. Might the collective’s unwillingness to harm other creatures be because the emotions put out by even a scared insect are painful to the collective?
The difference between “I don’t eat meat because it is wrong to kill animals” and “I don’t stick my hand in the fire because it is painful.” one has a moral judgment, the other is just self preservation.
But so far it’s only been 4 days or so. They’ve had little need to make new clothes yet, even people who were homeless prior to being made part of the hive can be properly clothed using existing stocks, if we’re now all communist and such. So they’d be wearing the same stuff they’ve always had close to hand.
Until the existing clothes start actually wearing out, there’s no need for them to change anything.
Well, this touches on our old problem, that we’ve discussed in terms of how to maintain civilization if there’s some kind of apocalypse, or if we’re sending a colony to another planet: How many people do you need to maintain a technological society? One high-tech enough to send a complex message across hundreds of light-years?
“Maintaining the machinery” over a time scale of centuries means maintaining the entire society that built the technology - resource extraction, resource processing, factories to build parts for the transmitters, power plants to power a signal that has to cover that distance, and all the machinery involved in all that, mining equipment, smelters, transports, and on and on.
And they made it clear that this signal was specifically aimed at our solar system - but it was sent 600 years ago, long before we sent out any radio waves that would have told them we have the technology to receive the signal. That sounds like they’re sending it out to solar systems that are just likely to produce intelligent life. And that’s a gamble. They’d want to cover as many such systems as they can, and transmit for as long as possible, so as to maximize the chances of being heard. Keeping that going for centuries or millennia would take a civilization that could also last that long.
But we’ve already seen that, with the scene of Pirate Lady travelling to Carol’s home. I’m sure we’ll see more when it’s appropriate to the story.
But that effect came as a surprise to them, too, so it can’t be that. If they’d known this could happen, they’d have likely taken better precautions in dealing with someone as volatile as Carol.
No they didn’t. There was in fact specifically a line stating that the transmitter would need to be the size of Africa and that was if it was only aimed at them.
I hear the arguments and accept that the human organism meta mind could execute the imperative to spread the genetic code to any other possible technologically advanced species in a manner of building a lasting civilization in service of that. I still image dandelions and salmon and many fungi. All resources into a massive fruiting event then die.