Centrum Light, Homeline Dark.

[AlexanderHowl]

The last thing that Centrum wants is crosstime genocidal AI. If I was them, I would cross over at the Kuiper Belt and use orion drives to nudge a few thousand comets into a collison course with the Earth (keeping an overeat station to monitor the AI response so that Centrum can crossover nuclear mines to destroy any AI counter). The AI would probably blame the one on the Moon for countering their attempts to stop the comets and respond accordingly. It might be overkill, but it is better to kill a few tens of millions of surviving humans than to allow a potential threat to infinite trillions of humans to survive.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

It's not that they don't do these things. It's that it's not a simple matter of "outtimers aren't real people, so everyone here is perfectly fine with treating them as inhuman things." Realistically, many people would be outraged at what Centrum and Homeline do. But every time the setting would need to confront these issues, it sweeps them under the rug with ideas like Van Zandt's secret UN meeting. The nations of the world are okay with Infinity's control of reality because... reasons.

That part isn't hard to believe. Infinity is preferable to your national rivals, and the nations are afraid of who would win and who would lose in an all-out competition. The potential pay-offs are high enough that the competition would turn nasty quickly, too.

Parachronics offers the equivalent of uber-cheap access to interstellar travel in a galaxy full of habitable worlds, plus the added advantage that (usually) you know beforehand where the good locations and resources are, plus the ability to raid and steal from advanced rivals in near-total safety, as long as the secret is kept.

Infinity is preferable because it more-or-less keeps the lid on the status quo. That isn't a moral assessment, it's a Realpolitickal one, driven by fear and self-interest.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

They engage in extralegal and extraterritorial erasures of memories of foreign citizens, and have a place to which they kidnap innocent foreigners if they're getting too close to making discoveries they aren't happy with. Not as a matter of lone criminals working against the system, but as a matter of policy. That sounds like exactly the sort of believing that those quantum foreigners are unpersons that alphabet soups tend to engage in. And it's something UN supports and endorses, apparently.

(I say those Vorlons and Shadows should get out of everyone else's galaxy, or at least start treating them as 'real boys and girls', with autonomy, sovereignty and rights.)

The problem is that Homeline has coldly self-interested reasons, fairly compelling ones, for keeping the Secret secret. As long as the Secret is kept, potential nasty threats are kept at bay, and the relatively safe and secure status quo continues. Once the Secret is out, it's out.

Centrum and Homeline have identical motivations here. It's likely most of the other time lines, if they discovered parachronics first, would behave similarly for similar reasons.

The trouble is that keeping the Secret requires doing the sort of nasty stuff that secret conspiracies have to do...like making sure people who Know Too Much don't talk, one way or another.

From that POV, you can look at their policies of kidnapping innocent parachronics researchers as a violation of rights, or conversely as a humane alternative to a knife across the throat, which is the likely alternative if they intend to keep the Secret secret.

[Flyndaran]

That is the real fundamental problematic aspect of the setting: a vast near perfect global conspiracy but specifically avoiding saying what that hidden reason is.
Perhaps Homeline has an intrinsic difference in basic human psychology to ours in that such conspiracies actually work.
That would mean ours is a weird parallel with how near impossible it is to keep such secrets secret for long.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

The problem is that Homeline has coldly self-interested reasons, fairly compelling ones, for keeping the Secret secret. As long as the Secret is kept, potential nasty threats are kept at bay, and the relatively safe and secure status quo continues. Once the Secret is out, it's out.

Centrum and Homeline have identical motivations here. It's likely most of the other time lines, if they discovered parachronics first, would behave similarly for similar reasons.

The trouble is that keeping the Secret requires doing the sort of nasty stuff that secret conspiracies have to do...like making sure people who Know Too Much don't talk, one way or another.

From that POV, you can look at their policies of kidnapping innocent parachronics researchers as a violation of rights, or conversely as a humane alternative to a knife across the throat, which is the likely alternative if they intend to keep the Secret secret.

And more likely if they really don't consider them to be "people". They could after all just pull versions of the Bulgarian Umbrella using toxins local technology couldn't detect.

[PTTG]

So I suppose the question is, what would the most ethical approach be if one's goal remains the suppression of The Secret?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

The problem is that Homeline has coldly self-interested reasons, fairly compelling ones, for keeping the Secret secret. As long as the Secret is kept, potential nasty threats are kept at bay, and the relatively safe and secure status quo continues. Once the Secret is out, it's out.

Centrum and Homeline have identical motivations here. It's likely most of the other time lines, if they discovered parachronics first, would behave similarly for similar reasons.

The trouble is that keeping the Secret requires doing the sort of nasty stuff that secret conspiracies have to do...like making sure people who Know Too Much don't talk, one way or another.

From that POV, you can look at their policies of kidnapping innocent parachronics researchers as a violation of rights, or conversely as a humane alternative to a knife across the throat, which is the likely alternative if they intend to keep the Secret secret.

That attitude supports the unreality argument. Ever heard the saying "We can endure the suffering of others for a thousand years"? It seems spot-on. Hard Men Making Hard Decisions tend to view the predicted future wrongs against 'our' side as more real as the actual wrongs they actually do right now against 'others'. That this sort of attitude encourages other groups who climb up to their level to behave that way, providing them with a justification of becoming the Hard Men of their own, is a 'bonus'.

[Boomerang]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The last thing that Centrum wants is crosstime genocidal AI. If I was them, I would cross over at the Kuiper Belt and use orion drives to nudge a few thousand comets into a collison course with the Earth (keeping an overeat station to monitor the AI response so that Centrum can crossover nuclear mines to destroy any AI counter). The AI would probably blame the one on the Moon for countering their attempts to stop the comets and respond accordingly. It might be overkill, but it is better to kill a few tens of millions of surviving humans than to allow a potential threat to infinite trillions of humans to survive.

I can't see Centrum defeating the zone minds with a brute force approach. Centrum's best approach would be to trigger a global civil war to weaken the zone minds first. Possibly using VIRUS as was mentioned in an earlier post.

[scc]

I think the first question you need to ask yourself is: What is Good?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Centrum knows about Steel, and they are working towards taking out all the AI strongholds with nuclear bombs. They have also set up VIRUS as a support network.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The last thing that Centrum wants is crosstime genocidal AI. If I was them, I would cross over at the Kuiper Belt and use orion drives to nudge a few thousand comets into a collison course with the Earth (keeping an overeat station to monitor the AI response so that Centrum can crossover nuclear mines to destroy any AI counter). The AI would probably blame the one on the Moon for countering their attempts to stop the comets and respond accordingly. It might be overkill, but it is better to kill a few tens of millions of surviving humans than to allow a potential threat to infinite trillions of humans to survive.

Originally Posted by Boomerang

I can't see Centrum defeating the zone minds with a brute force approach. Centrum's best approach would be to trigger a global civil war to weaken the zone minds first. Possibly using VIRUS as was mentioned in an earlier post.

I can see centrum using the brute force approach. I've never seen their driving virtue as "subtlety", but rather as "patience". And slowly building up the data they need to pull off a perfect decapitation sounds very much like centrum.

The problem with a thousand comets is that if you don't know where the zone minds are hiding their backups, its really difficult to be sure you got all of them. And you're guaranteed to miss orbital with such a method, leaving you with a more conventional war on your hands.