SeptimusHeap
MOD
(Edited uphill both ways)
May 10th 2021 at 4:13:50 AM
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Removed from main page, as there is a cleanup effort on Jossed underway and I am not sure what to do with this entry:
- Canon Discontinuity: Gregory Benford's Man-Kzin Wars story "A Darker Geometry". Niven said its depiction of the Puppeteers and Outsiders was non-canon shortly after it was published, and subsequently Jossed it in the Fleet of Worlds trilogy. Also see Broad Strokes.
- The Peace Corben stories likewise, mostly due to having the Outsiders and Pak be Tnuctip bioweapons, among numerous lesser continuity gaffes and issues.
Pavlov
Since: Jan, 2001
Aug 16th 2013 at 12:13:57 AM
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Moved Too Dumb to Live natter here for safekeeping.
- Arguably, the Pak succumbed to being Too Dumb to Live because they're so brilliant that their hyperrigid thought processes blind them to the unorthodox solution. How else could they have overlooked the possibility of storing the scents of their offspring ... or, for that matter, of interbreeding their offspring with one another, thereby uniting their entire race in a common bloodline? No, they just sniff a stranger and reach for the nukes.
- It's not that they overlooked it, it's that they can't do it. At all. We're not joking about the "hardwired" thing. Pak Protectors do not have free will; their only drive is to grab the greatest advantage for their clan and bloodline, and since other clans want the same advantages, they're enemies and rivals. Because their biological lack of free choice, hyperintellect, and drive to grab the greatest possible advantage, they are literally incapable of cooperating past the moment there is a bigger advantage to be gained by betrayal. If one option gives their team 10 points and the other team 10 points, while a second option gives them 11 points but leaves the other team at 0, they will take the second option every time. And they have no choice in the matter.
- Then Pak evolution is Too Dumb to Live, for railroading them into behavior that can ONLY get their own bloodlines wiped out, slowly by inbreeding if not quickly by infighting.
- Inbreeding isn't a problem for the Pak because they kill all babies born with genetic defects. They get so much radiation from living in the galactic core that the baseline rate of birth defects is sky-high already anyway; they probably don't even notice the increase from inbreeding.
- Not until they run out of offspring, anyway. Hominids just aren't biologically equipped to be Explosive Breeders, so culling genetic flaws can't be sustained indefinitely.
- Inbreeding isn't a problem for the Pak because they kill all babies born with genetic defects. They get so much radiation from living in the galactic core that the baseline rate of birth defects is sky-high already anyway; they probably don't even notice the increase from inbreeding.
- Arguably, the Pak succumbed to being Too Dumb to Live because they're so brilliant that their hyperrigid thought processes blind them to the unorthodox solution. How else could they have overlooked the possibility of storing the scents of their offspring ... or, for that matter, of interbreeding their offspring with one another, thereby uniting their entire race in a common bloodline? No, they just sniff a stranger and reach for the nukes.
I think the section saying that Larry Niven has written multiple stories about A.I.s that self-terminate should be removed until we get some examples. I've read nearly everything he's written and I can't think of a single example of those themes in one of his stories.