What if: a non-stupid Xeeleeverse Humanity (spoilers to the Xeelee Sequence)

[SolarpunkFan]

This is a hypothetical divergence of mine from the story of the Xeelee Sequence. I'm partially sharing it for discussion and partially for dissection. You know me, I'm an idiot.

So, Humanity has driven off the Xeelee for the time being, as they did in Exultant.

But after the Xeelee leave, some cosmic entity hits Xeeleeverse Humanity with a Hercules–Corona-Borealis-Great-Wall-sized clue-by-four, and they realize something:

"Hey, we've had some independent discoveries of dark matter acting quite strangely, including records in the Venusian chalk crust. Maybe we should look into that?"

So they investigate and surprise! They find the Photino Birds and what they're doing.

Of course there's the little fact that the Xeelee, the baryonic lords themselves, couldn't defeat them. What hope would Humanity have?

Hopeless? Maybe not. There are two phenomena that, I think, could actually help Humanity out.

First: the reality dust entities. First time we saw them they casually shifted Callisto virtually instantaneously a few thousand kilometers or so. This killed a Xeelee that was attacking due to the fear that the dust entities were powerful enough to hinder the Xeelee (!). The Xeelee was killed by being trapped under the ice (a method that seemed to act by both encasing the Xeelee in the ice and impaling it thanks to the fact that Callisto suddenly occupied the same space the Xeelee was in). They also helped out in the Prime Radiant conflict by giving the Coalition the designs for the black hole gun when Pirius was sent to contact them. So they are powerful enough to beat single attacking Xeelee (maybe more if the situation demands it?), and Humans can communicate with them by uploading/copying their mind to the configuration space reality.

Second: the Snowflake technology. We're not given hard parameters on what Snowflakes can do. It's based off of the Mach principle which, in brief, states: "matter over here affects matter over there". The original Snowflake damaged a Human vessel with "coherent gravity waves originating outside of our galaxy". The Human made Snowflake in The Siege of Earth restructured Earth's space-time to produce a sort of temporal gradient (with time at the top/outside of the restructured space-time running the fastest, and time at the bottom/inside at the center of the Earth running the slowest, with a smooth gradient between the two). Judging by these events it's dangerously close to being flat out magic.

[NOTE: the Snowflakes created by Humans were only used as weapons during the siege of the Solar System, but not during the first or second Xeelee/Human wars that occurred earlier. There is conflicting information and guesses on whether Snowflakes were weaponized by then, or only much later. For the sake of this scenario we'll assume that they were being weaponized during or shortly after the Prime Radiant conflict.]

There is a range of possibilities on how this turns out. Worse case for Humanity is that it only royally pisses off the Photino Birds without making a dent in their plans. Best case is that the Photino Birds are purged from, or flee, the Milky Way Galaxy. A middle scenario being that they're driven away for a while (possibly long enough for Humanity to prepare for a longer battle with the Birds).

My guess would be on driving the Birds away for a bit while Humanity tries to develop new technologies and tactics for better defending against them.

[Simon_Jester]

Given that the Xeelee already went back in time to the beginning of their species and optimized themselves to develop every possible asset and technology they could imagine, as rapidly as possible...

I'm a little unclear on how you expect anything humans do to make much difference in the long run. Are you saying that humans are smarter than Xeelee and can somehow devise weapons and tools unknown to the Xeelee, despite their entire civilization being a time loop, so that they could somehow defeat the photino birds entirely where the Xeelee failed?

[SolarpunkFan]

I'm a little unclear on how you expect anything humans do to make much difference in the long run. Are you saying that humans are smarter than Xeelee and can somehow devise weapons and tools unknown to the Xeelee, despite their entire civilization being a time loop, so that they could somehow defeat the photino birds entirely where the Xeelee failed?

Not necessarily. Rather, Humanity has a few things at their disposal that could buy some time for the baryonic species.

Of course I could just be pulling a "Star Trek could beat the Empire because one trick ponies" argument here, so I'm probably wrong.

[Khaat]

Of course I could just be pulling a "Star Trek could beat the Empire because one trick ponies" argument here, so I'm probably wrong.

This is the vibe I'm getting.

If they had made a point of the Xeelee having some kind of "reasoning color blindness" they hadn't/couldn't overcome, and that humans happen to have "reasoning color vision", I could see a window for this.

And reality dust entities do sound very... Q-ish.

[Sea Skimmer]

Isn't defeating the Xeeleeverse how spacebattles got OBS going? With the level of time travel they throw around it shouldn't be possible to beat them unless you can build a universe destroying missile or surprise better time magic.

[Q99]

Pushing the Photino Birds out of the Milky Way? Maybe, but it won't change the long-term result one bit.

Isn't defeating the Xeeleeverse how spacebattles got OBS going?

Nah, just a series of pics of increasingly powerful ships blowing each other up.

With the level of time travel they throw around it shouldn't be possible to beat them unless you can build a universe destroying missile or surprise better time magic.

Note, everyone uses timetravel. Even with it, some factions simply cannot win. Humanity has no chance against the Xeelee, and the Xeelee cannot beat the Photino Birds- heck, with time travel, they can barely *escape* the Photino Birds, after many re-sets.

[Simon_Jester]

I gather the problem with the photino birds is that they're reproducing and altering space and time in such a way that you can't "get them all," and the more time passes, the greater their position of superiority becomes.

Also, what is OBS?

[Q99]

Also, what is OBS?

Stands for "Oh! Boy Steve." An old meme/thread from the early days of the spacebattles forum that gained legendary status due to the succession of escalating pictures. The versus forum had a rule that OBS always wins because it represents nothing less than the concept of one-upmanship.

[J Ryan]

To be fair there may be something to think about in this theory. It's a common theme in some of the short stories, that no other race that Humans come across really do any inventing of new concepts or science and instead spend their time and effort reverse engineering Xeelee artefacts or concepts.

One short story comes to mind (going off old memories here) where a Human Ship and a Grey Ghost ship are being sent to investigate a star many thousands of lightyears away. Before they set off the human inventor of the ship brags to the grey ghost that his drive he's come up with will beat them, to which the grey ghosts reply that theirs will be better as it's based on Xeelee FTL. As it turns out the human drive using completely different concepts than the Xeelee beats the ghosts, but this is of course 1 example that only focuses on speed (other aspects of the drive may be inferior) and is only against Xeelee derived tech rather than Xeelee tech, but it does set a precedent for there may be better ways of doing things than the Xeelee do.

After this Humans fall into the same trap everyone else does and seems to only bother with Xeelee based tech, but thought it might be worth a mention,

[Sea Skimmer]

Stands for "Oh! Boy Steve." An old meme/thread from the early days of the spacebattles forum that gained legendary status due to the succession of escalating pictures. The versus forum had a rule that OBS always wins because it represents nothing less than the concept of one-upmanship.

Yeah, and well before it reached that point, it well reached the point that nothing people normally think up was going to beat it, like various universe protecting adaptive shields that would adapt to even localized destruction of reality by anything someone wordstrung together. Technology wise the Xeeleeverse is already heading up that path.

[mr friendly guy]

I am sure someone has already thought of this... but, since the Xeelee could trap humanity in some sort of pocket dimension, can't that technology be used against the photino birds for example?

Either trap the photino birds in this pocket dimension and throw away the metaphorical key, or trap stars inside the pocket dimension. Since the birds require stars to breed (don't their young live inside stars?), then no stars, we would eventually stop their life cycle.

For technologically inferior humans of the Xeelee universe, could they kind of make dyson spheres? Because that might work. Depends if the birds could break the dyson sphere.

[Imperial Overlord]

The Xeelee trapped humanity after kicking humanity's ass in a war. The pocket dimension was a jail, not a wonder weapon.

The photino birds live on dark matter planetoids in the hearts of stars. The Xeelee aren't trying to destroy the stars, they're trying to avoid the heat-death of the universe, which getting rid of stars would do. Dyson sphers won't stop the photino birds. They're immensely destructive when they want to be and nearly indestructible.

The Xeelee decided to run away to another universe which didn't have dark matter because they couldn't win. They were also nice enough to leave the door open.

[mr friendly guy]

Ok, so could we use the pocket dimension to trap stars then? At least the ones the photino birds haven't infested, and cause the rest to go nova.

I am not sure how long the photino birds live for, but assuming like all life forms they eventually die of "old age", then we can wait them out, or travel to the future when they die and then reintroduce the stars.

This is a long shot, but I am just going on with what I have heard about the Xeeleeverse over the years.

[Q99]

I am not sure how long the photino birds live for, but assuming like all life forms they eventually die of "old age", then we can wait them out, or travel to the future when they die and then reintroduce the stars.

They live longer than we do, and one can't just 'reintroduce stars'. Entropy and all.

The further one goes, the more Photino-friendly the universe is.

[SolarpunkFan]

They live longer than we do, and one can't just 'reintroduce stars'. Entropy and all.

IIRC the Birds weren't making the stars burn their hydrogen faster. Rather they were just ensuring more helium and other heavier elements got deep enough to interfere with stellar fusion. The outward effect would make it appear that the stars had fused all available hydrogen, but it hadn't fused it, the hydrogen just wasn't available within the cores of stars anymore.

The only other way the Birds interfered with stars was through their formation. This was done via an ongoing program of isolating interstellar gas clouds so that they couldn't collapse (as per Secret History).

So theoretically speaking a civilization with starbreaker technology could just create more star-like areas of fusing hydrogen (as per The Baryonic Lords).

I also remember a bit in Mayflower II where the escaping Jasofts used dark matter ramjets to propel their ships, with the scooped up dark matter being crushed within the reactor to annihilate the dark matter (because the dark matter particle(s) in the Xeeleeverse are also their own antiparticles). So Humanity knew of some way of corralling dark matter to one degree or another, and that dark matter annihilates itself when squeezed enough.

And of course there was the soliton star experiment by the Silver Ghosts which was documented by Jack Raoul and (if I remember correctly) only failed because of the insane Placnk zero AI the Ghosts salvaged. Could that still have been feasible with Humanity's CTC computer?

Uh... did the Xeelee try all of this stuff only to find out that none of it worked? Quite honestly I find that incredibly hard to believe. Out of everything I had listed the only thing that had gone sideways was the soliton star experiment and that could just have been caused by the Ghosts being stupid enough to trust a haywire AI that nearly killed them once before. Snowflake tech alone, if applied early and often enough, would have really fucked up the Birds' plans.

The alternative explanation is that Stevie boy is an even worse writer than I've come to believe (obligatory YMMV of course) and he basically put Mary Sue level character shields on the entire Photino Bird race. The resulting shields allowing him to milk the Xeelee Sequence for as long as he can (and if his latest writings are any indication, he'd be cremated toast if he left the XS behind).

At the moment I'm thinking it's more likely to be the later one.

[Imperial Overlord]

It's not none of these things can work, its that they aren't enough to win. You can't get rid of all the stars in the universe. You can kill dark matter beings, but legions of immensely tough and immensely powerful dark matter beings whose civilization is powerful enough to reshape the universe can't be beaten by Star Trek episode of the week deus ex machina wins. The Xeelee Nightfighters are armed with Starbreakers. Starbreakers do what it says on the tin. That's the rifleman of the Xeelee forces. Humanity, comparitively speaking the guys armed with sticks and rocks, got locked away in a pocket dimension after launching a full scale attack at the Ring, a Xeelee megastructure that outmassed galaxies. Humans used, among other things, near C velocity stellar cores as weapons. They got crushed and then the Xeelee retaliated.

[Solauren]

Unless someone can come up with some thing to turn non-Baryonic matter into Baryonic matter, then the Xeeleeverse is screwed.

[SolarpunkFan]

Unless someone can come up with some thing to turn non-Baryonic matter into Baryonic matter, then the Xeeleeverse is screwed.

IIRC the (proto-)Xeelee were able to majorly tweak the physics of the universe a few times (for example: changing the production of matter and antimatter in the universe from equal amounts produced to a slight preponderance of matter produced). And furthermore, said (proto-)Xeelee did the previous tweaks to destroy or avoid attacking forces.

Ah what the hell, I think I'll just leave things as they are. The frustration isn't worth trying to make a grimdark hard-SF universe (consisting of writings from a man obsessed with the shitting and fucking of primates no less) have a happier ending.

[mr friendly guy]

I also remember a bit in Mayflower II where the escaping Jasofts used dark matter ramjets to propel their ships, with the scooped up dark matter being crushed within the reactor to annihilate the dark matter (because the dark matter particle(s) in the Xeeleeverse are also their own antiparticles). So Humanity knew of some way of corralling dark matter to one degree or another, and that dark matter annihilates itself when squeezed enough.

Ok, this was an idea I had for a Doctor Who fan fic involving dark matter. Essentially you need 3 pieces of technology. The first is something that can consume dark matter. The second is a replicator type thing which allows said dark matter eater to replicate itself. The third is time travel.

I gather the Xeeleeverse has the first and the third. Can anyone tell me about the second?

Because essentially my idea is to park one of these things which can consume dark matter as far into the distant past as you can. Let it replicate itself from the energy derived from the dark matter (clearly if you can use dark matter to create energy to propel a ship, that energy can also be used for replication assuming you have the tech). So you now have tons of these dark matter devices. If the birds notice, have the devices move away.

Not enough dark matter consuming devices you say? No worries, here is where time travel comes in. Lets say you have one device, then over time it becomes x number before the photino birds start noticing and trying to take them out. Then time travel back so instead of one device at the beginning, you have x device. Rinse and repeat. After numerous time loops, you will have shit loads of these devices.

Less dark matter, less number of photino birds. Of course fucking with that much dark matter might change the universe a bit, with universal expansion speeding up and all.

[Imperial Overlord]

It kind of depends of the photino birds, who also have time travel, just passively letting it happen. Which isn't going to happen because they're causing the heat death of the universe to make the universe more liveable for them. They're just going to destroy your dark matter annihilators as soon as they find them. They aren't orcs, they're a universe wide civilization of immense power that have been involved in an endless war where time travel is merely one of the weapons employed.

There is no silver bullet just lying around. They're a universe wide, massively powerful phenomena that tosses galaxies around when they want to. Sure you can kill them. The Xeelee killed countless numbers of photino birds but it wasn't enough. Most of the universe's mass is dark matter so they have an immense numerical superiority as well as immense power and a lot of warfighting experience.

[mr friendly guy]

Can you create the dark matter annihilators, such that they escape interdimensionally, and then reappear at a later time? Humanity and the Xeelee invented pocket universes, so it depends on whether the photino birds can also enter the same pocket universe. As long as these devices are replicating faster than the photino birds are destroying them, eventually we win. However it becomes very speculative at this point.

The other way I can think of, is cloaked time travel. Yeah ok, I got that form Star Trek, but if you think about it, the photino birds did not stop the Xeelee time travelling. Does that mean the photino birds don't always detect time travel everywhere? So can we sneak enough of these dark matter eaters through?

Short of this, I am struggling to think of how to stop the photino birds short of universe destroying wank such as the armageddon sapphire from Doctor Who EU (Quantum Archangel), or Rassilon's final sanction (The End of time), or meta baron wank device which destroys universes, or some Doctor Who Pandorica reset plot device (just reset the universe like one which doesn't have dark matter life forms). AFAIK Xeeleeverse don't have these type of tech.

The other possibility is to have something which removes you from time, and ends up creating a time line where you never existed. Sort of like Annorax time ship from ST Voyager. Of course one ship isn't going to turn the tide, however races like the Time Lords have lots of these, they just call it a demat gun. Since the photino birds reproduce as clones of the parents, wipe out an early enough photino bird, and all its descendents are gone. Again, I don't think the Xeeleeverse have these type of technologies.

Edit - just thought of another wank Doctor Who tech idea. The Time Lords do have some wank replication tech, called block transfer computations, which creates things via equations. How it exactly works is not explained because the technobabble is bullshit, but anyway.. block transfer computations essentially create things from thought, although it does lead to the interesting idea of where they get the energy from. But according to the EU if you have a powerful enough computer that can multitask and run these computations, you can create vast armies (Quantum archangel, and that was done by a super computer made by alien race of the week). Since these creations aren't synthesised from the normal baryonic matter found in our universe (they just get the energy from ... somewhere) we might be able to overcome the numerical inferiority baryonic matter has against dark matter (since there is way more dark matter in the universe than baryonic matter).

In fact, don't a lot of high end civs like the Culture draw energy from some extradimensional source. Can we not use this to come up with an army to fight the photino birds. How about lots of dark matter eaters using energy from extradimensional sources. And yes, I suspect the Xeeleeverse doesn't really have anything close to this type of tech.

[mr friendly guy]

I just had another idea which the Xeeleeverse could potentially use. Although you might think it pointless at this stage, but I will explain.

Since there will always be more dark matter than baryonic matter, the Photino birds always have numerical superiority. I believe they outmassed the Xeelee's resources 8 to 1. So they outmassed baryonic matter in the Xeeleeverse universe. But what happens if we could go another universe, pillage its resources, and then come back. The Xeelee clearly can kill lots of Photino Birds, just not enough of them. If you can escape into say 20 alternate universes without dark matter life forms, and become the master of baryonic matter in those ones (lets say you time travel in the new universe to before the first life form was around so there is no moral compunction about killing sentient life), then you would now have more mass than the Photino Birds have.

Come back for vengeance.

Now here is where its pointless. If you have already done that, why go back to fight the photino birds in the first place, other than revenge? I suppose you could make a case that the birds could potentially escape so you got to wipe them out at the source, but from all appearances the birds are content to simply live in their universe.

[Imperial Overlord]

Time travel is constant in the Xeelee verse because ftl and time travel are linked. The plot of Excursion deals with a human who time travels while fighting the Xeelee and thus has two different versions of himself in the present. Since the photino birds are also doing time travel all the time anything you sneak through via time travel will be detected by time traveling photino birds if it creates any significant changes in the time line and then they will act to counter it, possibly with more time travel. Since setting up a secret army of dark matter annihilators large enough to make a difference in a universe wide war counts as one of these, no its not going to work. Its just a new front in a universe-wide war involving time travel.

This is why the Xeelee went "fuck it, let's bail for a universe with no dark matter at all."

[SolarpunkFan]

Though it's weird as there was no mention of FTL necessitating time travel until the Destiny's Children sub-series. There WAS time travel, but FTL was never stated to lead to it until we got to Exultant (the Sugar Lumps traveled back in time, but they weren't moving relative to their immediate surroundings). In fact, outside of the aforementioned novel and a few of the short stories in the DC collection Resplendent, the FTL/time travel link was never mentioned again.

[Imperial Overlord]

Well most the books aren't about time travel wars. The Xeelee and photino birds are mostly background details in a universe where many of the stories are about odd forms of life thriving under extreme conditions.