Getting Rid of Precursors

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It is also highly attracted to the human element.

I know all about you humaans. Your root beer. Your baseball. Your atomic bombs.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I know all about you humaans. Your root beer. Your baseball. Your atomic bombs.

Don't forget our reasonable interest rates on loans prohibited by most religions yet effectively practiced by everybody.

[Dark Knight Renee]

I've never had much luck with precursors. I have difficulty “suspending my disbelief” enough to make incomprehensible precursors, and I also have difficulty with the idea that anything short of the deliberate actions of another, separate group of comparable power can obliterate a civilization that is high-tech enough to have established multiple interstellar colonies (and most precursors are fairly wide-spread and very, very high-tech in their time). It just seems unlikely that anything the precursors might do to themselves would get rid of ALL of them, even if a high degree of unity is assumed.

Thus far, the best approach to precursors that I’m familiar with is that used by Mass Effect, where doomsday machines appear periodically to wipe out the most advanced civilizations. It still involves a precursor-killer that’s still around, but less problematic since it’s hibernating until dictated by the plot. I’m still a bit hazy on the exact nature and motivation of the Reaper and their creation, but from what I gather the reason for the Reapers was comprehensible enough to have seemed like a good idea to somebody at the time.

The only idea for precursors that I’ve come up with on my own involves a species of intelligent aliens that are very inventive, but not particularly smart (for certain definitions of smart). As a general species trend, they ignore basic safety measures (handrails, safeties on guns, and on up into big, dangerous, fragile and explosive stuff), don’t think their actions through, and don’t keep good records or backups, and generally tend to self-destruct. Somehow, they managed to survive the invention of nuclear weapons and get off their homeworld, and since then their self-destruction events have never succeeded in killing them off completely. They have managed to attain and subsequently lose “Precursor” level technology, perhaps more than once, as a result of their poor planning, insufficient record-keeping, and the large-scale destructive power of high-TL technologies. A fairly large region is space is littered with the ruins of their previous space-faring civilizations, along with scattered splinter colonies surviving at various TLs. They also function effectively as precursor-killers for other civilizations they might have encountered during their glory days, which may have provoked them (or been provoked by them) and been wiped out with extreme prejudice – effectively keeping less chaotic and insane precursor-level civilizations from hanging around.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Dark Knight Renee

I've never had much luck with precursors. I have difficulty “suspending my disbelief” enough to make incomprehensible precursors, and I also have difficulty with the idea that anything short of the deliberate actions of another, separate group of comparable power can obliterate a civilization that is high-tech enough to have established multiple interstellar colonies (and most precursors are fairly wide-spread and very, very high-tech in their time). It just seems unlikely that anything the precursors might do to themselves would get rid of ALL of them, even if a high degree of unity is assumed.

Thus far, the best approach to precursors that I’m familiar with is that used by Mass Effect, where doomsday machines appear periodically to wipe out the most advanced civilizations. It still involves a precursor-killer that’s still around, but less problematic since it’s hibernating until dictated by the plot. I’m still a bit hazy on the exact nature and motivation of the Reaper and their creation, but from what I gather the reason for the Reapers was comprehensible enough to have seemed like a good idea to somebody at the time.

The only idea for precursors that I’ve come up with on my own involves a species of intelligent aliens that are very inventive, but not particularly smart (for certain definitions of smart). As a general species trend, they ignore basic safety measures (handrails, safeties on guns, and on up into big, dangerous, fragile and explosive stuff), don’t think their actions through, and don’t keep good records or backups, and generally tend to self-destruct. Somehow, they managed to survive the invention of nuclear weapons and get off their homeworld, and since then their self-destruction events have never succeeded in killing them off completely. They have managed to attain and subsequently lose “Precursor” level technology, perhaps more than once, as a result of their poor planning, insufficient record-keeping, and the large-scale destructive power of high-TL technologies. A fairly large region is space is littered with the ruins of their previous space-faring civilizations, along with scattered splinter colonies surviving at various TLs. They also function effectively as precursor-killers for other civilizations they might have encountered during their glory days, which may have provoked them (or been provoked by them) and been wiped out with extreme prejudice – effectively keeping less chaotic and insane precursor-level civilizations from hanging around.

They don't have to be incomprehensible though perhaps comprehensibility is a suspension shaker for you.

One thing I've noticed in this thread is that you don't need to get rid of all of the Precursors just the local ones. After that all you just need is a reason for them to not come back.

The inventive but not very smart thing is interesting but it seems like inventiveness would be selected against nearly as often as for without the other intelligence to back it up by having particularly inventive specimens kill themselves.

[Dark Knight Renee]

That's why there's only one such species roaming around... Mostly I just found that the odds of such a species evolving were better than some other precursor-level species wiping itself out.

[Edman]

The Tommyknockers deal with a species like that. I heartily recommend it.