mcow, I might also assign a rather high probability to the Superhappies having just made everything up as a lie, were it not for their choice to blow up the Babyeaters while leaving the humans to return home.
For all we know, the Babyeaters don’t exist. That entire scenario may have been invented by the Super Happies just to make the humans easier to manipulate. If so, it certainly worked pretty well, don’t you think? Also, remember Akon’s thoughts on seeing the BE solution to withstanding the radiation:
the mirror-shielding seemed a distinctly inferior solution. Unless that’s what they want us to think…
I’m really beginning to think that the SH are predators who caused this nova to use it as bait. The BE are there because the SH have found that it sets up a nice prisoner’s dilemma situation for a large variety of meta-ethics systems. The target comes in, and the BE ship immediately transmits a fabricated archive (or maybe a real archive; the BE may have existed at some point). The SH know that tit for tat is a highly effective (and therefore probably common) strategy, and therefore their prey will feel obligated to send data back to the BE. The SH then use this data to determine exactly how to manipulate the prey—for humans, they used “super happy”, but had they been preying on, by way of example, Vulcans, they would have used “ultimate understanding” or something. Meanwhile, the prey wear themselves out trying to figure out what to do about the BE. After a day or so, the prey are ripe for the pickin’.
Maybe I’m wrong, but if there’s even a 1% chance that I’m right, I don’t think the crew of the Impossible can take the risk.
@Aleksei
For all we know, the Babyeaters don’t exist. That entire scenario may have been invented by the Super Happies just to make the humans easier to manipulate. If so, it certainly worked pretty well, don’t you think? Also, remember Akon’s thoughts on seeing the BE solution to withstanding the radiation:
I’m really beginning to think that the SH are predators who caused this nova to use it as bait. The BE are there because the SH have found that it sets up a nice prisoner’s dilemma situation for a large variety of meta-ethics systems. The target comes in, and the BE ship immediately transmits a fabricated archive (or maybe a real archive; the BE may have existed at some point). The SH know that tit for tat is a highly effective (and therefore probably common) strategy, and therefore their prey will feel obligated to send data back to the BE. The SH then use this data to determine exactly how to manipulate the prey—for humans, they used “super happy”, but had they been preying on, by way of example, Vulcans, they would have used “ultimate understanding” or something. Meanwhile, the prey wear themselves out trying to figure out what to do about the BE. After a day or so, the prey are ripe for the pickin’.
Maybe I’m wrong, but if there’s even a 1% chance that I’m right, I don’t think the crew of the Impossible can take the risk.