Getting Rid of Precursors

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by gjc8

It could be depleted of something that the younger races don't know about and don't miss, because their technology developed without it and they only encounter it Precursor devices (and the younger races don't know how those work, anyway).

Ooh, exotic matter. Interesting idea.

[Sindri]

In a hard science game that depletes the amount of theoretical unusual materials the GM has to work with for anything but a precursors artifact though (which would generally be drained anyway)

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's hard to imagine an advanced technological species that is never the less incapable of changing culturally over millions of years.

So what happens if they don't ever sublime and an extinction event occurs?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Sindri

War is a great way to wipe out precursors but it has difficulty not leaving you another set of precursors in the same area. A war waged solely for the purpose of exterminating the precursors would work but that has a tendency of leaving glassed instead of nice t-shirt planets.

That's short term thinking. Pop all their planets with RKVs or fry them with induced solar instability and while all the large animal life may go the way of the dodo, but it's not likely to get all the microorganisms. Precursors start at at 10 thousand years gone and on up to millions of years. That gives planets time to cool down from whatever horrible thing they did to it.

They could also wipe themselves out by terribly lax safety rules with strangelets or whatever but that also leaves uninhabitable planets. Also it requires them to be idiots for a while and it seems hard to eliminate more than one planet or moon or space station that way.

I note that the humans of Star Trek are theoretically well on the way to extinction as of TNG.

Consider that in "The Menagerie" Captain Pike encountered a species that was in decline because they had developed illusion powers so potent that they could all live in dreamworlds divorced from the realities of survival (and notably reproduction). Now humans have developed holodecks and are showing an increasing tendency to retreat into them even when matters of life and death are going on in the real world. At the same time, wear and tear caused by warp drive is making interstellar travel increasingly impractical. At some point, it will simply have to be abandoned for a lengthy period of time to let the space-time fabric "heal". The Federation is abandoning fringe worlds as more trouble than they're worth, evacuating them or just leaving them unprotected to be wiped out.

Even without apocalyptic warfare, it doesn't seem unlikely that humanity will undergo a demographic collapse that will leave most of it's inhabited space abandoned, turning us, and the other species that face the same problems with holodecks and space travel into the precursors of the next bunch of idiots.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That's short term thinking. Pop all their planets with RKVs or fry them with induced solar instability and while all the large animal life may go the way of the dodo, but it's not likely to get all the microorganisms. Precursors start at at 10 thousand years gone and on up to millions of years. That gives planets time to cool down from whatever horrible thing they did to it.




I note that the humans of Star Trek are theoretically well on the way to extinction as of TNG.

Consider that in "The Menagerie" Captain Pike encountered a species that was in decline because they had developed illusion powers so potent that they could all live in dreamworlds divorced from the realities of survival (and notably reproduction). Now humans have developed holodecks and are showing an increasing tendency to retreat into them even when matters of life and death are going on in the real world. At the same time, wear and tear caused by warp drive is making interstellar travel increasingly impractical. At some point, it will simply have to be abandoned for a lengthy period of time to let the space-time fabric "heal". The Federation is abandoning fringe worlds as more trouble than they're worth, evacuating them or just leaving them unprotected to be wiped out.

Even without apocalyptic warfare, it doesn't seem unlikely that humanity will undergo a demographic collapse that will leave most of it's inhabited space abandoned, turning us, and the other species that face the same problems with holodecks and space travel into the precursors of the next bunch of idiots.

It seems to me that a culture will either ignore the real world and not leave their solar system or keep an interest in the real world and go on to do precursorey things. Still I suppose it's possible for there to be a major cultural change among the local precursors that causes them to lose their cultural adaptations to prevent withdrawing.

It's quite true that life can deal with things that can kill civilizations but that does have disadvantages

1 It means the precursors can't have any direct effects on the sentient species
2 Depending on the state of terraforming it could wreck the machinery or destabilize it
3 At 10 thousand years to millions of years keeping any artifacts or machinery around that happened to survive the precursor-killer weapon is rather difficult even for optimistic apocalypse proofing.

[gjc8]

Speaking of war, I'll return to the idea that the main body of the Precursor civilization need not be on planets. There's every reason why a race may want to move their industrial infrastructure to space. Even if it's in the same solar system, it could be destroyed without biosphere-devastating harm to the planets.

Destroy that infrastructure, and the Precursor civilization is crippled. It might collapse on it's own, or the Precursor-killers can push it along with impacts that "merely" cause KT level mass extinctions but still leave a biosphere (and, hence, an oxygen atmosphere, etc, intact).

You still have to decide why the Precursor-killers themselves aren't around (or at least aren't obvious, at least not yet). But that allows you to split the problem. You have the Precursors, who go around uplifting animals, terraforming worlds, and leaving artifacts scattered around. You have the Precursor-killers, who are reclusive and tend to not show up in the places younger races go. No back-to-nature Luddite Precursor-killers living on habitable planets, because hanging out on habitable planets was never part of their cultural history once they moved off the first one (which is outside of the campaign area/no longer habitable because of stellar evolution/inside a Dyson Sphere/whatever).

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

At the same time, wear and tear caused by warp drive is making interstellar travel increasingly impractical. At some point, it will simply have to be abandoned for a lengthy period of time to let the space-time fabric "heal".

Now that's an idea for the "depleted resources" thing. If the resources involved are renewable, then that provides a reason for the Precursors to collapse or withdraw, but still allows the younger races to use those resources a few thousand years later.

[bcd]

Civil war is a lovely way to kill a civilisation without necessarily leaving an intact conquering empire behind. Especially if the winning side was an anarchist luddite type movement.

Religious pogroms can have much the same effect.

Both of these extinction events are empowered by the observation that however technologically advanced you get, you are only ever going to be on par with the intellects of other members of your society.

Or maybe the precurs eventually discovered what exactly dark matter is and quickly concluded that once you know this, that is precisely where you want to be. So they're still around, but unless your civilisation has worked out the mystery of dark matter you're never going to meet one.

[vicky_molokh]

Psychohistory research shows that if they continue along the current path for the next million years or so, all possible outcomes will end in a trans-galactic disaster within 1½ to 3 billion years. They spend the next 50,000 years researching ways to radically shift their future development in order to prevent it. They calculate which bits of tech they need to leave behind, and which ones to destroy, what changes they need to undergo to make the change possible. Finally, they spent another two million years constructing and perfecting the cradles for the upcoming new civilizations. Why? Because when the project is done, Precursors will be no more. The primitive lifeforms spread to more than 50 suitable worlds, so different yet so subtly similar, from humanoid to starfish, are the Precursors' heavily-engineered descendants.

Far-fetched? Unbelievably complex? They're the damn precursors, of course it is!

[Langy]

Originally Posted by gjc8

It could be depleted of something that the younger races don't know about and don't miss, because their technology developed without it and they only encounter it Precursor devices (and the younger races don't know how those work, anyway).

Heh - recent findings suggest that our solar system is in a bubble that's particularly empty of dark matter. You could always steal that as the thing that precursor tech utilizes and used up.

[robkelk]

Another possibility, which I remember reading in a short story but don't recall the title or author:

There was only the one intelligent Precursor race, with nobody else to talk with... Becoming aware of their own limitations, they decided to withdraw from normal time (travel at .999999999c, orbit close to a black hole, something else that "distorts time") until another intelligent race came into being and came to talk with them - the interactions between the two races would either destroy both or create a "gestalt" society that was stronger than either component. They were hoping for the latter.

All the Precursor tech was left behind on purpose, so that the race(s) that would follow could find the Precursors...