ChosenOne54 wrote:Well, I've only read Exultant, but I was under the impression that the loop wasn't actually 'physical.' It was formed because the Xeelee at the end of their existence would travel all the way back to their beginnings to alter their development, creating a sort of time loop. That's how I understood it anyway.
The Xeelee appear to have engineered an anti-xeelee (to complement the Xeelee like matter/anti-matter) that exists at all points in Xeelee time to manage things (it is implied to be some kind of metaphysical entity that spans the entire universe at a quantum level), the time travelling is undertaken using the giant "sugar lump" cubes that the anti-Xeelee sends backwards through time.
This messes with causality by causing a permanent loop in the Xeelee timeline:
1) Universe begins
2) Xeelee appear
3) war with photino birds
4) anti-Xeelee sends sugar lump time capsules back through time to #2 carrying all knowledge gained
2b) Xeelee arise faster
3b) war begins earlier and is more intense
4b) anti-Xeelee sends sugar lump time capsules back through time to #2 carrying all knowledge gained
2c) ... wash rinse repeat in a permanent cycle
On another note it was the Qax that was using Neutron stars as kinetic weapons to attack the Ring. The Xeelee are only shown using Starbreaker beams as weapons.
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A Wankatron transapient archailectic-toposophic, sephirothic-sophont, hyper-Turing Greater AI-God of the third singularity with godtech wormhole brains and ISO-nodes from Orion's Arm. It defeats the Xeelee through memetic warfare and by instantly reverse-engineering all their technology.
More seriously . . . contenders are hard to find. Unlike (say) the Culture, the Xeelee are effectively unbeatable not so much because of their technobabble (although this can also be impressive, but not so much as much higher-end space opera) as through their sheer scale. Many stories feature galactic empires (not that they make full use of their galaxies, but then neither do the Xeelee apparently), but even assuming parity in resource extraction efficiency, the Xeelee resource base is billions of times bigger at least. (Do they inhabit merely the entire observable Universe, or all of it with no limits?)
Even something that would be utterly immune to just about anything the Xeelee could attack it with and could probably crush their local forces with trivial ease in any given engagement, and has vastly superior FTL (like a fleet of high-end Skylark ships) . . . would still take aeons to hunt them down one galaxy at a time, destroying every star. They could win simply by outlasting the opposition, if mere survival was the objective.
Similarly, the reason the photinos are a threat to the Xeelee is not their tech (which is by all appearances less impressive than theirs), but their resources advantage, there being more dark matter and energy in the universe than the kind we generally interact with.
I would think the aforementioned hypothetical fleet of Skylarks could rather comprehensively destroy the Ring in fairly short order, though. Since the strategic Xeelee objective above all seems to be to complete their megastructure, maybe that would qualify as a victory of sorts?
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Darth Hoth wrote:(Do they inhabit merely the entire observable Universe, or all of it with no limits?)
The whole thing, top to bottom. Impliedly because they expanded with the universe.
Do we know what happened with the From-Beyond-The-Light-Horizon aberrations in the pre-inflation universe? They seemed to be pretty dominant, but entire (relative) epochs passed between that time and the start of the stable Xeelee loop.
By the end of the story, the (post-)humans from Schild's Ladder had the capability to destroy the Xeelee universe and replace it with an engineered one of their own design. It will take a while though as they don't have FTL and the effect propagates at half the speed of light. Prime Intellect from the story of the same name could do the same thing in minutes, as it has the equivalent of super-effectors with instantaneous effect and infinite range. The Culture are not serious contendors but there are vastly more powerful civilisations and entities in their multiverse, e.g. whatever group The Excession belongs to (which considered a galaxy to be a 'local micro-enivronment'). Unfortunately we don't have enough detail on those to do a useful comparison.
The Higher Powers, the race that built the Carrier in Wildstorm comics.
A little about the Carrier. It's a (relatively unimportant) transport ship big enough to hold Manhattan in it's cargo bay (not the PEOPLE of Manhattan, the island itself) and it's powered by an artificially created universe basically like the grand mammy of all Dyson Spheres. It can travel to any dimension or universe, can travel through time, is basically a TARDIS with stargates--oh yeah, it has stargates which can also teleport you anywhere in space and time you want too.
All accounts from in-universe, even in the later DC comics' version, indicate that the Carrier was basically a schooner in the opinion of the people who built it--other military versions are mentioned but not seen, but considering that, by all accounts, the Carrier was at best a reusable transport vehicle (they basically tossed it down to Earth because it was broke and it was cheaper to buy a new one instead of fix it--so this technology is expendable to them) and at worst obsolete by their standards these guys are clearly not ones with whom you wish to fuck.
We get only bits and pieces of the background on who built it but the Monarchy miniseries gives some greater insight: it would appear to be a transport vessel used by the Higher Powers, an interdimensional empire comprised of several universes infected by a cancerous mutation that caused everything in them to become lizard monsters. The Carriers are basically their version of a car, used to travel between universes, timelines, dimensions et cetera. We see one scene where the Higher Powers have six or seven of them traveling in a group, and another where they use a Carrier to send monsters to infiltrate the good guy's base--which makes sense since the good guy's base was in the collective human unconsciousness...so a Carrier was the only thing that could get there. And yes, the Carrier was shown entering the collective human unconsciousness before, and our dreams, it can go to ANY parallel reality even the Devachanic Realm (read: "dream land") and the Mind Barrier Reef (read: "astral plane"), to watch the birth of a parallel universe and to the "center of a string". String as in theory.
So yeah...
Anyway, about the Higher Powers: they're not gods, but they missed a perfect opportunity. Technobabble abounds but basically the Higher Powers routinely invaded and conquered entire universes with ease, and Carriers were their light transports.
So yeah, they at the very least have the resources to eventually wear down the Xeelee. The Xeelee control our whole universe, the Higher Powers control (based on the picture in the comic) a dozen or so and climbing. More so, the fact they have the military resources to invade and conquer whole universes (NOT just parallel Earths but entire realities) kind of implies the Xeelee would be a minor blip on their radar. Of course they did get defeated by the Monarchy, the good guys, in the comic but...well, the Monarchy had three different gods, the Fenris wolf, a being of living thought with a sword made from a universe, a wish granting machine, two different Superman analogues and a kid who could mass produce superheroes on their side so I think even Galactus would at some point throw up his hands and say "Oh, c'mon!" at the very idea of all that firepower.
I'm not even kidding when I say the Monarchy, by the end of their series, could probably take on the Xeelee by themselves, seeing how one of their team mates built an entire parallel version of Earth (no bullshit, he made a world) which was also a ship that could travel across "an infinite number of universes" across the multiverse--but that would break the "no gods" rule because several of their team members are, explicitly, gods. And frankly they only beat the Higher Powers because they caught them by surprise and used their gods to sneak attack the Higher Power's homeworld directly. Kind of like a godly version of Pearl Harbor.
So yeah, the Higher Powers. Pretty sure they could take the Xeelee.
Oh and another obscure one from the old Wildstorm:
There was this one corporation that had MULTIPLE universes under it's control, who routinely took over universes in (literal) hostile takeovers. Their idea of a contract negotiation was to send planet-destroying bombs to blow your world apart if you didn't take their offer, and they had about as much concern for human life as a log...no that's not fair TO THE LOG.
Basically, the Higher Power but instead of being assholes they were Republicans.
Starglider wrote:By the end of the story, the (post-)humans from Schild's Ladder had the capability to destroy the Xeelee universe and replace it with an engineered one of their own design. It will take a while though as they don't have FTL and the effect propagates at half the speed of light.
It was a while since I read Schild's Ladder, but if I recall correctly, the people in the story (most of whom were still fairly humanlike in most respects) were able to engineer a technobabble antidote against the space-destroying effect within a couple of centuries or so, before it could affect most of Milky Way. ("Plancktech worms" or something to that effect.) Since the Xeelee will have untold millions of years to think of a "cure" before the attack begins to threaten them in any way and are already known to muck around with some bits of fairly deep and fundamental physics, I would not consider it unlikely that they could come up with something similar.
For that matter, according to the Xeelee timeline, they will have left through the Ring within some four million years of the present day in any case. So unless its propagation speed can be increased considerably, a Cassian "novo-vacuum" initiated anywhere in Milky Way should not meaningfully impair their plans either way.
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What about the Mantrid Drones? By the end of the series of Lexx, they were reported as making up the majority of the Baryonic universe, so they certainly are evenly matched on the numbers department.
Quick off topic question first: Does anyone know of a Xeelee wiki as opposed to looking at the wikipedia page which is, let's say lacking.
On topic: Time Lords as they can bring about the end if time and ascend to become beings of consciousness only. It is not explained if they could recreate a new universe and become corporeal but I wouldn't put it past them.
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18-Till-I-Die wrote:Oh and another obscure one from the old Wildstorm:
There was this one corporation that had MULTIPLE universes under it's control, who routinely took over universes in (literal) hostile takeovers. Their idea of a contract negotiation was to send planet-destroying bombs to blow your world apart if you didn't take their offer, and they had about as much concern for human life as a log...no that's not fair TO THE LOG.
Basically, the Higher Power but instead of being assholes they were Republicans.
Weren't these guys effectively defeated by the Authority? Not the whole thing, just whatever local force had been sent to deal with the Earth. In any case, that puts a pretty hard limit on what their effective scale is, given that their response to the Authority wasn't just to flood it with fifty galaxies worth of angry dogs or whatever.
The Anti-Monitor? Considering how he's eaten whole universes... Then again, he has been defeated several times already.
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The_Saint wrote:On another note it was the Qax that was using Neutron stars as kinetic weapons to attack the Ring. The Xeelee are only shown using Starbreaker beams as weapons.
The one from Flux that shows up again in The Ring was launched by humanity. Was there a Qax one, too?
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Starglider wrote:By the end of the story, the (post-)humans from Schild's Ladder had the capability to destroy the Xeelee universe and replace it with an engineered one of their own design. It will take a while though as they don't have FTL and the effect propagates at half the speed of light.
It was a while since I read Schild's Ladder, but if I recall correctly, the people in the story (most of whom were still fairly humanlike in most respects) were able to engineer a technobabble antidote against the space-destroying effect within a couple of centuries or so, before it could affect most of Milky Way. ("Plancktech worms" or something to that effect.) Since the Xeelee will have untold millions of years to think of a "cure" before the attack begins to threaten them in any way and are already known to muck around with some bits of fairly deep and fundamental physics, I would not consider it unlikely that they could come up with something similar.
For that matter, according to the Xeelee timeline, they will have left through the Ring within some four million years of the present day in any case. So unless its propagation speed can be increased considerably, a Cassian "novo-vacuum" initiated anywhere in Milky Way should not meaningfully impair their plans either way.
There are already several examples of Xeelee-verse having similar tech.
The Planck-Zero AI is an example of vacuum-meta-stability engineering. Created by the Silver Ghosts, it was a region of spacetime where planck's constant was deliberately reduced to increase the amount of computing which could be done per unit of mass. The AI brute force inspected some 10^80 states to validate some theorm in some trivial time despite being only a fraction of the total capcity of being able to reduce planck's constant. They actually hosted the experiment inside of red giant. The human observing the experiment was told by the Silver Ghosts that the Xeelee are fairly rigorous at policing experimentation with such technology, and that hidding the experiment inside a Red Giant should help hid it. And by hid it, the Silver Ghost means that when field expanded too much it collapsed into a blackhole with the influx of matter.
Later the Silver Ghosts used a similar planck-tech engineering to make the blackhole evaporate faster and then fished the AI construct out.
Silver Ghosts again have a number of examples where they play with the very laws of spacetime, for example making the speed of light tend to infinity within a region untill the star powering the reaction goes supernova.
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18-Till-I-Die wrote:Oh and another obscure one from the old Wildstorm:
There was this one corporation that had MULTIPLE universes under it's control, who routinely took over universes in (literal) hostile takeovers. Their idea of a contract negotiation was to send planet-destroying bombs to blow your world apart if you didn't take their offer, and they had about as much concern for human life as a log...no that's not fair TO THE LOG.
Basically, the Higher Power but instead of being assholes they were Republicans.
Weren't these guys effectively defeated by the Authority? Not the whole thing, just whatever local force had been sent to deal with the Earth. In any case, that puts a pretty hard limit on what their effective scale is, given that their response to the Authority wasn't just to flood it with fifty galaxies worth of angry dogs or whatever.
Well, I'm not sure that's an accurate interpretation of what happened, at least not exactly. It's been a while since I read that story arc but, if memory serves, one of the guys the corporation sent to destroy Earth (some kind of planet-killing WMD suicide bombers, IIRC) betrayed them and helped the Authority do the deed. Plus the Carrier allows them to go anywhere they want instantly, so they had a massive mobility advantage over the carrier-less corporation. So again, they kind of had the chance to sneak attack them, I believe on their homeworld, and to destroy their command structure with their own weapons since, again IIRC, they got the dude to blow himself and the corporation's leadership up. The impression was that the Authority wouldn't have done so well if not for the guy turning on the corporation and helping them.
Presumably ones with universe destroying wank and then the means to escape to another universe, or somehow protect themselves from it, will beat the Xeelee.
This includes the Time Lords (via whatever technobabble means Rassilon was planning to use, if its not the same as the Armageddon sapphire mentioned in the novels), and the Daleks using the reality bomb, which when placed in the Medusa Cascade can spread to several realities.
Also whatever technobabble the silence used to fuck the universe over in DW, plus the Doctor's attempt to "reboot" the universe using the info stored in the Pandorica.
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