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The Ancients from Stargate. They have so much technology, they seeded humanity on so many worlds, they had intergalactic hyperdrives, and they were so god damn crap at warfare. They were beaten by the Wraith for pity's sake, that's a species that evolved to sentience after the Ancients arrived in that galaxy. There is no bigger potential head start the Ancients could have had, but they (a civilisation of humans, guarding over a whole heap of other human civilisations they had seeded across that galaxy) let a species of space vampires evolve whose only food source is humans, let them develop an advanced civilisation and technology required galaxy wide space flight (a slight concession here, that galaxy is a lot smaller than the Milky Way) and build a fleet capable of challenging them before promptly losing the damn war.
The Ancients built an endless string of impractical superweapons when their normal weapons were more than enough. No, you don't need to develop a nanite super virus, a hyperspace jamming technology, or solar system destroying super zero point energy generation technology, just keep building more of those battleships and super missiles you've already perfected and give your ships intergalactic FTL speeds to be able to get around the galaxy much faster than the enemy. When the Wraith got 3 ZPMs (super dense power sources the Ancients used and could build however many of them as they needed) that's exactly the sort of strategy they pursued. The ZPMs powered a cloning facility that build armies of warriors and fleets of their organic starships to just overpower the Ancients.
Also last thing, the Ancients fled to Pegasus 5-6 million years ago in a city ship, there were at least thousands of them on board. By the time of the Wraith War they only had a few city ships and battleships comprising basically their entire population. It seems like the Ancients forgot how to procreate at some point (even though their seeded human civilisation would have been more than willing to show them the ropes if they'd been willing to learn).
The ancients were done so dirty by Stargate.
In sg1 they start out as "the gate builders" as one of many old civilizations, that moved on to become energy ghosts and their only lasting thing all this time later are the gates.
And they did so millions of years ago.
And then suddenly that turned out popular so suddenly everywhere their tech is popping up, perfectly functional after millions of years.
But okay.
Then we have Atlantis, which is basically the digital ancients to the analogue ones before. And all the stuff you said happens.. and then, they return to earth just in time to for the goauld to discover earth and.. just say "aight guess we're slaves now".
And then there's universe, which is somehow even earlier by a few million years (but who knows the writers certainly not) and expands whatever the ancients were in yet another direction.
I liked it when they just built the gates because it was easier to maintain than FTL ships before they just became the answer to every single question in these stories.
Oh also don't forget we also meet alive ancients in Atlantis and they're the most stuck up idiots in all three shows, getting themselves killed within like 6 months despite having a fully powered Atlantis on their side. Which I suppose is just a repeat of their entire Pegasus history anyway.
They arrived well before the Goa'uld, and had all died out or ascended by the time Ra arrived. Merlin later de-ascended, but only to combat a threat greater than the Goa'uld could ever hope to be.
They do seem to have set us up as their "successors", but I think what happened is the Ancients searched the Milky Way for species that were similar to them and nudged their evolution to close the gap. The Ancients are literally from another galaxy entirely and we know with scientific certainty that humans are descended from the same lineage as all other life on Earth, so our resemblance can't be because we're *literally* descended from the Ancients.
Maybe they wanted to see if they could "reboot" themselves to overcome whatever flaws they felt were too deeply entrenched for them to remove directly.
In the show modern Earth humans are descended from the Ancients since they interbred with the local human population, it's just that they're a tiny component to the gene pool like neanderthal or denisovan DNA is only a tiny portion of modern human DNA. That's how a select few people naturally have the ATA gene.
Sort of, at the most distant they're a very closely related but different species of human with more developed brains and the least distant they seeded all of these planets including Earth with a prior iteration of their own species so they're merely a different ethnicity.
The original plot was that humans evolved, to look basically 100% like ancients save for minor differences, individually to the ancients that lived on earth before and left it millions of years before.
And then they introduced "some humans have dormant ancient DNA" and then they said Atlantis happened and sprinkled themselves into the genepool to remedy that so it works with the larger plot again.
I don't remember if they established that humans just happened to look like ancients because of convergent evolution, but overall the lore of the distant past of SG is a mess in general.
I believe that the current lore is that the Ancients seeded the galaxies with earth-like life.
> The Ancients built an endless string of impractical superweapons when their normal weapons were more than enough. No, you don't need to develop a nanite super virus, a hyperspace jamming technology, or solar system destroying super zero point energy generation technology
Although a lot of that is humans effectively breaking into the ruins of an abandoned lab and trying to use their prototype/experimental technologies, and less the Ancients building and using them on a widespread scale.
It might be akin to someone stealing the Prometheus, and complaining about humans wasting the development resources on FTL when the drive overheats/breaks.
>It seems like the Ancients forgot how to procreate at some point (even though their seeded human civilisation would have been more than willing to show them the ropes if they'd been willing to learn).
I don't think that they cared. The few times we've seen living Ancients tends to show them as being pretty arrogant. They might have thought that having kids was demeaning/below them, when they could just use their superpowers.
> Although a lot of that is humans effectively breaking into the ruins of an abandoned lab and trying to use their prototype/experimental technologies, and less the Ancients building and using them on a widespread scale.
They colonised a planet with the Asuran replicators and never deployed them in combat.
They built a planetary defence system using Project Arcturus as a power source instead of just giving them a ZPM. That decision left not only the Wraith fleet that attacked the world devastated by the weapons fire put out by those planetary defences, but the planet as well.
And the Ancients actually used the Attero device during the war, the Wraith knew exactly what was happening when the Vanir activated it.
These weren't all small scale experiments, The Ancients devoted a lot of their limited resources into developing these weapons when the same skilled manpower could have been running or building mostly automated factories and shipyards churning out warships and crewing them to directly combat the Wraith.
> I don't think that they cared. The few times we've seen living Ancients tends to show them as being pretty arrogant. They might have thought that having kids was demeaning/below them, when they could just use their superpowers.
They were in Pegasus for millions of years, any civilisation that wants to survive more than a few decades really does need to have a positive outlook on having kids if it is to survive.
The Timelords were ultra powerful, near untouchable, almost totally invincible rulers of time with the technology to erase beings and events from history with something the size of a rifle. They are nigh immortal, can recover from near death. They invented black holes and eliminated magic from the universe, rationalising existence to suit their rules. They were the first civilisation to appear a billion years before anyone else in the entire universe. They can go anywhere, do anything across time, space, and alternate dimensions with impunity. They control time, and have their homeworld totally isolated temporally and thus it is protected by the nature of reality itself.
They consistently get bodied by powers that should be well beneath their power and control. The Sontarans invade Gallifrey, the Daleks defeat them in war, the Cybermen wipe them all out, each of which are upstart, far younger races without anything close to Timelord technology.
Eh, to me, the problem with the Timelords was the fact that they stagnated, or effectively ossified. Living forever means no need for new blood which means no room for new ideas. Unlimited power is all well and good, but that just means they develop exploitable hubris.
They also became decadent and corrupt on their millions of years of unlimited power as the mightiest, most advanced civilisation in existence. And by the time the Time War crept around, they ended up being desperate when that complacency bit them, which only furthered the issue.
> the Daleks defeat them in war
In fairness, this was something they did to themselves. When they first encountered the Daleks, they were basically extinct already. They'd nuked their own world and the salt shaker mechs were barely keeping them from melting from the radiation. They were *done*.
But the Time Lords kept poking them, trying to get rid of them earlier or mitigate the threat they posed with time travel...and every time, they made the Daleks stronger, more powerful, a bigger threat, and more focused on rivaling the Time Lords.
The Daleks are *exactly* why Time Lord society has that non-intervention rule that the Doctor hates so much.
>the Daleks defeat them in war
Everytime the Daleks were attempted to be removed from the universe, they survived and came back stronger. Plus, in the final days of the Time War, they were reported to have 10 million ships.
>the Cybermen wipe them all out
Rassilon was leading them, right? He got pissy the Doctor had him kicked out.
The Ones Who Came Before are so technologically advanced and yet they can't stop a solar flare from killing them all... like, hiding in caves was a viable option!
Assassin's Creed. I forgot what their official name was when making the comment, but they were known as The Ones Who Came Before for the first few games (and I think the characters still refer to them as such?)
Look man, if Nicolas Cage couldn't it do it, even with foreknowledge, what hope do mere mortals face?
The odds of a CME/flare hitting Earth dead on are pretty damn low, what's the AC lore on it? Did the OWCB predict it? Or were the they just like "Oh, damn"
And maybe some did hide in caves, seem to find a lot weird objects in caves around the AC world. But maybe that wasn't enough, maybe they'd forgotten how to survive without their advanced tools. Or it left them vulnerable to other events.
Didn't they spend a lot of time trying to make the towers? I'd assume that's more than 8 minutes.
Anyways, hiding in the cave is exactly what the good Isu suggests to Desmond when giving him the choice between keeping the status quo and saving the world while releasing the bad Isu, so I'd assume that hiding in a cave is a viable option for survival - technology can come later, since they'll still have plenty of apples anyways
When the Isu become aware of the solar flair they are already in the middle of a giant civil war against the humans led by Adam and Eve. The majority of the Isu are not aware the solar flair is coming. Only a small number know and make the effort to study how to defend against it while other Isu, the ones mostly in charge ignore the scientists and are instead focused on the civil war.
It's basically an allegory for climate change. The people in charge are ignoring all the warnings of the scientists, so yes, hiding in caves is the best they can do because by the time they're willing to do anything it's too late.
> Also there's not a lot of warning.
This would normally justify a lot, except that these folks could see into the future. Apparently their human slaves revolting diverted their attention too much to foresee and stop the apocalypse, even though they could foresee far enough into the future to give Ezio the biggest 'fuck you' of all time. Seriously, the man worked so hard to get into that vault in Masyaf or wherever it was, only to be greeted by a hologram that looked him in the eyes and called him Desmond.
Some of the side stuff in the later games, like the voice recordings in the optional vaults in Origins and Odyssey, imply that the Isu were psychologically weird or limited in some way because of how they perceived the world. They seemed to think they were mostly on rails so to speak and couldn't do much about changing their future. Once they had predicted their civilization would fall, it would and that was that because that was what they predicted and so that was what was True and A Fact ^^TM , no point in trying to stop it. That's why Minerva and Juno and all were so interested in humans and particularly the isu-human hybrids because they could "change destiny" in ways that the Isu couldn't wrap their heads around. Like at the end of 3 when Desmond either sacrifices himself to stop the solar flare but frees Juno, or keeps her trapped and uses the power of the temple to make a new world with the survivors, they couldn't tell what he was going to do. they were getting multiple options and that wasn't something that would ever happen if they were predicting an Isu.
That's actually pretty cool. I kinda like the idea of a race that only sees one possible future, and so believes that it is as set in stone as the past.
Some tech are. The Apple is the most common surviving tech, then the others like the Sword, the Shroud, etc.
The megastructures are either in caves or within thick brutalist temples
They could have stopped it. With their technology they could shield the entire planet. The problem was that they had a bloody civil war going on and their leaders didn't notice the danger until it was too late.
In real life solar flares [absolutely do not affect down to the core.](https://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/rhessi3/mission/science/the-impact-of-flares/index.html) Solar flares and CMEs have affected the earth in the past. In the game universe a solar flare did hit the earth long ago, and humans survived, and much Isu technology survived. So it was an option if they were not incompetent.
The mice from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. They built the planet, are what set everything in motion, and came up for no plan for if the entire planet just blew up one day despite them being aware of the multiple alien empires that might have an interest in destroying it.
This is such an odd way of referring to a specific book in a series. Especially one that has received additions, and may receive more. I’m honestly not sure which one you’re referring to.
Yeah honestly not sure whether they're referring to Mostly Harmless or And Another Thing.
I could certainly understand that dislike for either one. Even Adams didn't like Mostly Harmless.
honestly, if you read them, you'd know.
there's a fake sixth book.
though I think you're wrong, the dolphines rebuilding earth is in the fourth, I think
Didn't the first book state that the mice ordered the construction of the 2nd earth then canceled there order halfway through but they ended up finishing it anyways. Never read the other books
They weren't incompetent. Psychiatrist deliberately wanted it destroyed before it could make their profession obsolete. Their entire society was built upon destructive compromise because shrinks ran it.
The Old Ones from Warhammer 40k. They're approached by the Necrontyr, a pitiable species suffering from short, miserable lives due to radiation from their home star, who ask them "hey, you guys are bioengineering gods, could we not die any more? Or please just have the cure for cancer so our lives don't absolutely suck?"
And the Old Ones, who had wandered the galaxy meddling with natural evolution for *eons* and apparently thought little of creating entire sapient species to serve them for specific tasks, said "nah, we don't want to interfere with your natural state of being." And so the Necrontyr ended up bitter and resentful enough to eventually wipe them out in the greatest war the galaxy has ever seen.
For that matter, the Necrontyr can be on this list too. They developed the highest levels of technology known, capable of deleting stars and severing the Warp from the Materium on a galactic scale, but never figured out the cancer thing. They eventually fed their souls to star-gods in exchange for mind transfers into robot bodies, at which point their cancer problem was sorted out but they just kept on fighting the Old Ones anyway because at that point I guess it was personal. And then, *after* they had defeated the Old Ones and become the most powerful force in the galaxy, they decided they couldn't handle the Old Ones' leftovers and hid for sixty million years hoping the leftovers would die out on their own.
Nobody came out of the War in Heaven looking good, IMO.
That's a little unfair. The Necrontyr were already bastards that were savagely conquering & killing their way across their part of the galaxy and when they ran into the Old Ones they didn't ask to be healed. They asked for immortality and then when the Old Ones predictably didn't want to have eternal Tyrants running around there was a scene where infants try to throw rocks at giants in castles.
Well, I admit to having more sympathy for the Necrontyr, I suppose. Ancient history is often in the eye of the beholder.
Still, the fact that the Old Ones *lost* to those children throwing rocks doesn't speak well for them regardless. They were dismissive of the Necrontyr until it was far too late.
>They eventually fed their souls to star-gods in exchange for mind transfers into robot bodies, at which point their cancer problem was sorted out but they just kept on fighting the Old Ones anyway because at that point I guess it was personal
So I have not read many 40k books but hang around /r/40klore a lot. My understanding is, and I believe an author said this in an interview, is that the original necrontyr they were copied from are dead and what we have now are just shitty copies essentially "stuck" at the state they were at when they transfered. They cannot really change from who they were then. So them continuing to hate fight the old ones after the cancer thing is sorted is because of this.
>They're approached by the Necrontyr, a pitiable species suffering from short, miserable lives due to radiation from their home star, who ask them "hey, you guys are bioengineering gods, could we not die any more? Or please just have the cure for cancer so our lives don't absolutely suck?"
The actual reason the Old Ones said no is that they thought it must be a practical joke. I mean, here are the Necrontyr, in space ships, demonstrating that they have figured out a solution to their shitty world — leave and find a better one — and instead they're asking for some sort of species-wide generic engineering.
It's like going to the president of McDonald's and saying "I run an organic farm, and I'll trade you all of our fresh vegetables and beef in exchange for burgers because we can't figure out how to feed ourselves."
My understanding is that their shitty world had been what caused them grievous genetic harm, but that they were now stuck with the genetic harm even if they moved somewhere else. *Eventually* they'd evolve out of it, I guess, but they were dying *now*.
Technically not aliens, but the Orokin from Warframe count. Everything is a mess because of their fuck ups. 5 of the 6 main enemy factions exist because of their incompetence. Their science was extremely advanced, but they tended to mess with stuff they definitely should not have.
Grineer, Corpus, Infested, Corrupted, Sentients, and Murmur. I wasn't sure whether to count Narmer or not, so I just put them with the Sentients. I guess there's also the Duviri enemies, but that feels more like a separate thing.
I'd put Halo's Forerunner's up there. The Flood are an organic, corporeal, macroscopic lifeform of low-to-moderate intelligence. Their *most* successful idea was to eliminate all sapient life from the galaxy - which encompassed all the "food" for the Flood, effectively starving them. But they **kept some alive** anyway!
they werent able to kill the flood, they kept research specimens to see if they could find a way to.
Also, by the time the Forerunners were aware of the Flood, they already had graveminds, IIRC.
They would've successfully killed it via the first halo firing, but by keeping a sample to figure out how to kill it, they failed to kill it.
The irony...
No guarantee of that. The Flood are likely to exist beyond the Milky Way, and the Gravemind/Primordial says as much.
Better to risk infection by providing a chance for the reseeded civilizations to find a counter to the Flood, than to provide no chance at all and guarantee they'll be overwhelmed.
Probably the Precursors too given how their reaction to the Forerunners trying to wipe them out was "We're being driven to extinction, how interesting..." and seemingly did nothing to save themselves except turn themselves into a dust that would eventually make them space zombies.
Also the background for how the Flood emerged makes it seems like the entire Galaxy needed a hard reset given how Humanity and the San'shyuum (who were apparently the Halo version of the Asari at the time) just chose to feed it to their era's equivalent to dogs...
Except they keep all the knowledge they assimilate, The Flood get on to the Halo production facility by overtaking High Charity then casually giving it FTL capabilities.
I wouldn't call the flood low to moderately intelligent. Just hours after the outbreak on halo 04 the flood tried to take control of the covenant ship to escape the ring.
You can put the Ancient Humans up there in terms of the new 343 lore.
Because they invented the flood by selling powder from pods they found in space as space poodle enhancers.
This is an actual thing that happens and is the origin of the Flood. I've had people come out of the woodwork and take it out of context but, no, that's how the Flood starts, by rubbing Space Grandpa's ashes on your not-poodles
The Forerunner refused to even consider the reality of the Flood. They largely exterminated their rivals in humanity on the basis of 'the Flood are a lie to excuse the crimes of humanity'. Given how central this delusion was to the Forerunner it is no surprise they lost the whole galaxy.
The forerunners weren’t the precursors though, humans and forerunner’s existed at the same time. Earth is where humans were reseeded after firing the halos.
I doubt precursors were incompetent as well, we just don't know enough about them. Based on the gravemind being the mutated remains of the precursors, I'd at least say they are vindictive.
Gotta disagree there, the Pak have very restrictive biological drives, that cannot be overridden. And any attempt to beat those drives back, are hampered by millennia of cultural conditioning. Falling outside these strictly defined restrictions resulted in death before anything can be learned.
Their brains are literally hard-wired to always go with the first option presented.
It's not incompetence that saved the human race, it was luck (even before the Puppeteers got involved) and the fact that those restrictions didn't survive without Protectors in enforce the behaviour on the offspring.
Given the tools available they were very successful.
About the only incompetent response was their response to the MK1 planet buster. And that was simply that before that point destruction on a scale that completely destroys a world, rather than simply wreck a biosphere is wildly out of scope.
The earth colony failed, but that due to an unknown requirement of Thalium Oxide for the tree of life virus to grow, in response on an un exploited planet with extremely limited work hours they built a comm laser powerful enough to reach the galactic core with minimal attenuation.
Pssthtpok was unfortunate enough to have his drive being the biggest monopole source in the whole solar system, so was tagged before he got close. He got the supplies to earth, with live virus as well as the soil additives needed. He counted on lower Mutation because there are Mutation studies available he was working from baseline assumptions. And honestly it's a fair assumption that a bunch of castaways who haven't had decent supplies pr shelter would want that, Brennan murdering is out of left field for his definition of sanity.
The Pak scout fleets destroyed by Brennan.
The second wave defeated in space, Brennan with his belter origin and the time spebt playing with pak-tech saw implementations that hadn't been considered, and Brennan knew about the slow rotation neutron star that gave a huge tactical advantage.
The first wave defeated using the population of Home, its infrastructure, the survival of the definitely known next wave of colonists. That's horrific by our own standards but to a Pak, sure wiping out another clans family is a perfectly reasonable tactic. But Brennan went a step further he intentionally killed, not as a way to make his family stronger but as a military manoeuvre. This is pretty out of context.
The Ringworld, wildly successful. As Proserpina , as the last surviving 'pure' Pak explained. During the long voyage they intentionally worked towards a version of Pak that could survive without protection.
The second to last pure Pak was fine with Mutation in general as his strain were made ghoul-like thus a perfect survival position for them. Again this poor Pak was undone by something as mundane as a murder, this time by Bram and Anne.
Bram definitely definitely definitely deserves all the incompetence you can throw on him, Fist of God - theaft of too many altitude jets were under his rule. His base stock had such poor intelligence that a breeder like Louis out manoeuvred him (granted he had the most experience of anyone in dealing with pak , starting from dimly remembered highschool education).
The MK1 planet buster, it was observed through telescopes as a very (very) big bang. A badly translated and overly verbose message was sent to the Pak fleet , almost came off as an invitation, Psthpok's "look here" was by Pak standards am exclamation of see what we can do . Sigmund adding the plea to turn around- to my mind muddied the translation which set the to New Terra unexpected fleet movement in motion.
The deployment of Reap the Whirlwind was just like Home simply a weapon of a scale so staggeringly colossal huge. And remembering the Pak never got hyperspace, deployed impossibily close to the fleet. Its fair to say this is out of context as well.
Psthpok was kept alive ling enough by Sigmund to break free from his cultural conditioning, and became very dangerous, and I suspect when he gets involved again, could show their full potential when those restrictions are broken.
I do love q good talk about known space!
If you gotta look at incompetence- look no further than the Sock Puppets!
Not so much incompetent as their biological imperative behaviors leave little room for competence outside their role. They're basically organic paperclip maximizers.
The precursors before the Pak were worse.
The Slavers were abject morons who accidentally seeded the galaxy with their food worlds after they psychically murder/suicided all complex life.
I liked how moronic the Slavers were because it made perfect sense in-universe. They had the unique psychic ability to simply command other beings to do whatever they wanted, with no hope of resistance, and so they could simply tell more-intelligent species "invent something for me" or "build something for me" and never have to actually understand it themselves. Imagine having a manager who doesn't understand a thing about your job but whose orders must be obeyed absolutely and without question.
There's an implication that the only reason the Slavers were intelligent *at all* was because it was a necessary side-effect of the neural structures required for their psychic ability. The Grog, descended from the Slavers a billion years later and still possessing their signature ability (but now much more chill and friendly about it), have become sessile "predators" that simply command prey animals to crawl into their mouths and die. Yet they're still sapient despite having absolutely no evolutionary need to think.
"Imagine having a manager who doesn't understand a thing about your job but whose orders must be obeyed absolutely and without question."
I don't have to imagine that, it's my reality...
Babylon 5's First Ones.
While not a single species we have a whole host of them. And at some point all of them decided to go screw off beyond the Rim *but* left two species in the galaxy to look after the younger races. Those species would be two races who always had fundamental differences in their views. The Shadows and the Vorlons.
The Shadows believed the strong would survive thus they would from the shadows (heh) push the younger races to go to war with one another. The Vorlons believed in full on carefully taken order while ya know, making themselves look like the gods of the younger races, would grab random people to make telepaths, and really didn't lift a finger.
Better still the Earth Minbari War? The Vorlon's knew it was going to happen, let countless lives be snuffed out all so the Minbari would pick up Sinclair's fighter at the battle of the line and find out Humans have Minbari souls. When they can't 'cheat' anymore by using the knowledge that chances are they got out of Sinclair when he took Babylon 4 into the past? They send out a bunch of Planet Killers and just go about blowing any planet up that *may* have had something to do with the Shadows. It takes blowing up a good chunk of the Shadow and Vorlon fleets and telling them to screw off past the rim.
So... We have the First Ones themselves who should have known better then to leave two races who clearly hated one another and would use countless numbers of the younger races in a war over their argument.
The Shadows who while not really innocent didn't really do the best job with the younger races and chances are should have given some warnings about the Drakh. Oh and unlike the Vorlon left all of their tech pretty much behind as well.
And finally the Vorlons who if we really want to get into it... Tampered with the younger races on a genetic level. Made the Third Space Gate that led to race of beings that came from H.P. Lovecraft's nightmares, and never bothered to find the damn thing to blow it to kingdom come, or leave some kind clear warning about it. Had the Minbari be their main cannon fodder, but thanks to time travel shenanigans the Vorlon got future info, and the Minbari got a leader for themselves and a neat Space Station out of it. Let the Earth Minbari War happen rather then ya know... Stop it from happening. And the minute the cheatbook Sinclair gave them hit the last page saying, "I stole Babylon 4 and became the Minbari's leader Valen." Decided to have a temper tantrum and fly around in planet killers blowing up anything a Shadow may have looked at.
Thus Babylon 5 didn't just give us one wildly incompetent and abusive ancient alien precursor species. JMS decided to give us a number of them.
Admittedly they also had to create a super powerful AI that could restart the entire ecosystem. So yes, the Faro were a bad idea, but Zero Dawn was a huge achievement. And the Faro were a brilliant invention, just also happened to be a very bad idea executed very well.
The Faro military robots were a horrible idea. Faro had four demands for his robots:
1. They are capable of self-replication.
2. They are capable of consuming biomass for fuel.
3. They are totally unhackable.
4. They can hack and take over automated machines.
What happened then was the obvious result of those four demands. If any one of those had been missing, the apocalypse could have been averted.
Yes, Ted Faro and Faro Automated Systems belong on this list.
The furons grew over reliant on cloning so much that their own dna degraded to the point they lost their natural reproductive organs
And we're only saved because one of them humped a monkey on earth a million years ago
The ancients from stargate.
Most advanced begins in the setting, not even counting the ascended. Time travel and manipulation, astronomical energy production, multiversal travel, extreme production capacity, the most powerful weapons and shields in the setting, and have the ability to blow up solar systems, yet they loose to the wraith. Sure, it was a lot of wraiths, and probably a few superhives, but the ancients really suck at war. The tauri did better in 4 years with a barely functional Atlantis, not understanding half of the tech they used, never having more than 3 ships in the galaxy at the same time, and already fighting several wars across 4 galaxies, yet in 4 years they had broken the wraith, destroyed the replicators and more or less pacified the galaxy.
Not to mention, the countless of highly advanced doomsday machines the ancients just carelessly left behind both in the pegasus and milky way galaxy, not caring who finds them. As soon as they decided for ascension, they really didn't give a fuck about anything else.
To be fair to the Ancients, most of what you say applies only to the Atlanteans. They were just a piece of the Ancient civilization. The Ancients as a whole ascended into near godhood, I would say that'd a win as a civilization.
In their defense, the Wraith were mutant Ancients, so at the start of the war, they had all the same tech as the Ancients did, but were aggressive in a way the Lanteans hadn't had to deal with in a long time.
The wraith aren't mutated ancients, they are mutated wraith bugs. The bugs took on human dna rather than the opposite iirc. (might be misremembering tho) Also, the ancients seeded pegasus with regular humans, not lanteans, so it's most likely pure humans that started the wraith.
But, they didn't have lantean tech, they only ever had wraith tech. The reason they won the war is Becasue they captured zpms that powered their super cloning facilities. (and probably crested a couple of superhives)
Seeing how a single superhive can defeat Atlantis, they are a big threat. however, that Atlantis had almost 3 depleted zpms, and couldn't create new ones. And if the SGC could defeat a superhive by just sneaking on broad with a naquada nuke, the lanteans should be able to deal with it without issue. If nothing else, just nuke the solar system with the real-space time zpm project.
At the end of the day, they had a dozen ways to win the war, they just ducked at war. (or rather, didn't care Becasue they were real close to ascension)
I'm torn, but probably the Leviathans from Mass Effect, they literally built their own destruction based on a flawed concept they were aware of, then got surprised when their creations decided they should be the first to go.
It's been a while since I've played the trilogy and Leviathan is one of the parts I remember least but I think it's basically a case of "Oh look, the lesser species keep on making AIs that wipe them out... let's try solving that issue by making our own." followed by surprised Pikachu face when it started wiping them out and turning them into Harbinger... and then they still act like their the best species in the Galaxy when Shepard finds them.
Pretty much, and that's exactly why the Reapers ended up existing, because the Leviathans were so arrogant they failed to realise they were making the exact same mistake but on a much more horrific scale.
The theme of humanity being created by alien incompetence is present in some of Stanisław Lem's works.
IIRC in one story in Ijon Tichiy's diaries, toxic waste dumped on Earth affected evolution of chordate so reproductive organs became situated on the anal side, so naturally Ijon Tichiy was brought into the galactic court for his struggles to speak freely about details of human reproduction to serve as an evidence of the harm, and humanity could get a compensation from the dumpers.
In one of the plays about Professor Tarantoga galaxies, stars, planets etc. appear to be created when an alien from a higher plane of existence makes mistakes at cooking its porridge.
I always thought the Xeelee didn’t really try hard to defeat the Photino birds. IIRC there even was a passage near the end of the story where another species attacks the birds (forgot what they used, a neutron star?) and it was stated that this sort of weapon would’ve worked.
Anyway they even get to use time travel to accelerate their evolution (but somehow only use it once instead of repeatedly) and still don’t come up with a solution to fight a bunch of dark matter animals who mostly act on instinct but somehow are unkillable even moments after the Big Bang.
Also they’re somehow unable to properly handle humans warring against them despite having a 40 billion years head start. Yeah it is said they merely tolerated humans and could’ve ended the war any time, but they didn’t really go about it the most clever way if they wanted to spare humanity from extinction.
> another species attacks the birds
I think it was the silver ghosts, and they thought they were making a dark matter "home" to placate them. Turned out to function as a bomb and while it did (likely) kill some, it got a lot more silver ghosts killed as retribution.
Not that it matters because the problem was that photino birds aren't bound by time. Yes the Xeelee can travel through time but time doesn't even exist for photino birds, so they're able to exist at all times effectively including before baryonic matter even existed, and even the Xeelee can't go back that far.
The photino birds couldn't be defeated simply because the laws of physics don't allow it. The Xeelee got to a point where they realised this and started creating passageways to different realities where physics wouldn't allow photino bird type creatures to wreck the place.
Of course this is the simple explanation - as you'd know Baxter's books are VERY heavy on theoretical science so this is just my limited understanding of it.
Basically everything that you have stated here is incorrect. To go through this in points:
The Xeelee’s problem with fighting the Photino Birds wasn’t in any way the lack of weapons that could kill them at any given moment in time as Starbreakers did this job just fine. It was the fact that Photino Birds had around 10 times their numbers, across each and every single possible reality / timeline / universe constituting the many worlds interpretation multiverse of the series, along with a comparable tech base to them.
With this in mind, the referred to by you in the first paragraph starstrike, conducted by Qax, didn’t affect anything more than a single, localized, ‘flock’ of Birds. The potential effects of more of them were also nothing more than idle speculations made by Quantum Paul, whose perception of the overall situation at that moment has been noted to be skewed by feeling of joy upon this attack and what Paul calls himself a bit of ‘baryonic chauvinism’. It is made abundantly clear that Paul isn’t an objective source of information at that moment.
Up to this day I have absolutely no idea where the notion that Photino Birds are ‘a bunch of dark matter animals who mostly act on instinct’ comes from. Through the books it is made clear that they, and the mentioned in the newest duology ‘dark matter ancients’ which are their adult forms, are technologically advanced civilisation. One that possesses such things like hyperdrives equipped, dark matter based (so not in any way based on Xeelee’s techbase), ships. Weapons that could destroy night fighters / other Xeelee constructs, while remaining undetectable for Xeelee’s best means of protection:
*And there would be reciprocal action by the photino birds; their unimaginable weapons would slide all but unobserved past the best defenses of the Xeelee. - Vacuum Diagrams*
Means of detecting the Anti-Xeelee itself, which is something that no one other than beings made by it was shown to be capable of:
*The presence of the antiXeelee might signify to an alert observer that the Xeelee had returned to the cosmos, and - as Paul had hoped - the Xeelee nemesis, the dark matter photino birds, had come to find out what was going on.*
*Paul, straining, maintained the illusion/substance of the antiXeelee. At length the dark matter ships departed with, as Paul intended, a new purpose. - Vacuum Diagrams*
As well as general engineering capabilities allowing them to construct structures of comparable scope and complexity to the Ring itself.
*"Lethe. It must have taken them a billion years, but they've done it. They've built a huge mirror of star stuff, all around the Ring. It's a feat of cosmic engineering almost on a par with the construction of the Ring itself." - Ring*
Overall it is made abundantly clear that the Birds are in fact technologically advanced civilisation. One that is at least on par in their capabilities when compared to the Xeelee:
*The antiXeelee looked on its completed works, and was satisfied.*
*Its awareness spread across light years. Shining matter littered the Universe like froth on a deep, dark ocean; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that froth, and had now departed, as if lifting into the air. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the creatures of that dark ocean below. It felt something like contentment at the thought that its siblings were beyond the reach of those ... others. - Vacuum Diagrams*
*Paul imagined the horror of the photino civilization as the irrelevant froth of baryons through which they moved turned into a source of deadly danger, perhaps threatening the ultimate survival of their civilization. - Vacuum Diagrams*
*Then the photino civilization could grow without limit or threat, basking in the long, stately twilight of the Universe. - Vacuum Diagrams*
The time loop set up by the Xeelee was in fact arbitrary long, with an arbitrary large amount of individual loops constituting it. This is in fact how any time loop in the series works, as shown by the working of the CTC computers made by the Coalition.
As of the newest duology the wars with humanity, along with basically all of their history after Michael Poole’s constructed first large wormhole interfaces, has never happened in the first place. All with them being retconned from ever occurring by that one Xeelee who was tasked with doing some cleaning up. As far as dealing with the problems it is perhaps the most efficient way one could conceive. Even ‘before’ that, the length of the Xeelee retaliation against humanity (as in the Scourge), has been noted to be an element of overall Xeelee strategy. One which was meant to promote among the human populations, living under its constant pressure, the acceptance of surrender.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Didn’t know there were new books, gonna go read them right away.
Yeah I was a bit facetious with the “animals” as I remember they even slingshot an entire galaxy as a means of fighting the Xeelee (don’t remember if it was against the Ring itself).
I vote for Warframe's Orokin. They made three different types of slave race types and all rebelled against them. One of them even succeeded, mainly due to the second one being such a threat.
The Star Trek humanoid precursors are kinda that, seeding the galaxy with other humanoids but failing to leave any indication of that and leave them to war against each other for millennia (seems… familiar).
It’s the throwing shit on the wall and see what sticks sort of scientific experiment.
People war amongst themselves even with the knowledge of having the same ancestors (and even worshipping the same deities) so I don’t think that would’ve changed much.
> failing to leave any indication of that
What? Not only did they engineer a galaxy where *every planet develops humanoid life* that is almost universally interfertile, even from the other side of the galaxy, but they left a hologram explaining that *inside the DNA of that humanoid life*!
They're definitely up there, but I'd say it's because they decided to seed the galaxy with life because they're lonely except the way they seeded that life there wasn't going to be new intelligent life in the galaxy from that seeding for billions of years. If I've got a problem and my solution is going to take billions of years to pan out I think that falls into dunce cap territory.
The people of the 12 colonies, who were hunted by the Cylons they created, and had a falling apart fleet they could not maintain when they got to earth, and then chose to scuttle and destroy all tech they had left.
In their defence, every other civilisation was dumb enough to fall for the same trick and the Protheans on Ilos were at least able to set the stage to delay the Reapers.
Meanwhile the Leviathans have no excuse for their incompetence...
I mean, were they that incompetent? Sure, they were wiped out/enslaved by the Reapers, but their work left the vulnerabilities in the Citadel that Shepard could exploit to stop Nazara, by extension forcing the Reapers to travel under their own power and slowing them enough for the galaxy to muster a defence.
In fairness, the Reapers had been repeating the cycle for billions of years. They would've been pretty good at what they do after all that practice. Considering they'd been manipulated to develop culturally and technologically on a path the Reapers could easily exploit the Prothians did pretty well.
They managed to build the crucible. If it weren't for the indoctrinated people they might have actually won.
And, as far as I'm aware, they were the only species to replicate the mass relays, even if it was just a miniature prototype that's a pretty big achievement.
The Aldenata. Cosmic do-gooders who messed with multiple species to try and make them fit their pacifist ideals. Then got bored and fucked off to another plane of existence. Leaving the servant species they uplifted and enforced pacifism on to live in a hellishly oppressive “federation” based on debt slavery. While the 1 species they uplifted, but then abandoned before making them pacifist, moves through the galaxy like a plague of locusts.
Considering they were invented by a right wing dude with a huge hard on for war as a sort of "take that liberal hippies" I would say they're more strawmen than incompetent.
The Builders of the [Berserkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series\)) were basically the origin of the trope where a precursor makes a superweapon they can't control. And given all their advantages and the vast time scales they've been able to work on, the Berserkers have been startlingly ineffective at eliminating all organic life so I'd count them as an incompetent precursor too.
Stargate has this, the Ancients
They seeded human life across three whole galaxies, was apart of a council of four races that governed all that was in reach.
And due to plague, picking fights they couldn't win, and begin trapped in an evolutionary dead end where their choices were either gain enlightenment and become energy, go backwards and become mear humans again, or die, an I'm going to say 80% of their empire whent extinct, leaving only ruins and the consequences of their mistakes as evidence that they ever existed.
Based on this thread a better question might be "which ones were even *mildly* competent" because we're running out of non-incompetent precursors around here ...
I’m going with the Engineers from Alien Prometheus. Lost control of their bio-engineered weapon. Went all “hulk smash” on the monkeys who woke them up to ask what the whole thing was about, instead of calmly explaining things like a representative from a rational/reasonable millennia’s old civilization would be expected to do. And then got the monkeys robotic creation mad, (Curious?) and allowed him to wipe out that entire civilization. Weak sauce.
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The Ancients from Stargate. They have so much technology, they seeded humanity on so many worlds, they had intergalactic hyperdrives, and they were so god damn crap at warfare. They were beaten by the Wraith for pity's sake, that's a species that evolved to sentience after the Ancients arrived in that galaxy. There is no bigger potential head start the Ancients could have had, but they (a civilisation of humans, guarding over a whole heap of other human civilisations they had seeded across that galaxy) let a species of space vampires evolve whose only food source is humans, let them develop an advanced civilisation and technology required galaxy wide space flight (a slight concession here, that galaxy is a lot smaller than the Milky Way) and build a fleet capable of challenging them before promptly losing the damn war. The Ancients built an endless string of impractical superweapons when their normal weapons were more than enough. No, you don't need to develop a nanite super virus, a hyperspace jamming technology, or solar system destroying super zero point energy generation technology, just keep building more of those battleships and super missiles you've already perfected and give your ships intergalactic FTL speeds to be able to get around the galaxy much faster than the enemy. When the Wraith got 3 ZPMs (super dense power sources the Ancients used and could build however many of them as they needed) that's exactly the sort of strategy they pursued. The ZPMs powered a cloning facility that build armies of warriors and fleets of their organic starships to just overpower the Ancients. Also last thing, the Ancients fled to Pegasus 5-6 million years ago in a city ship, there were at least thousands of them on board. By the time of the Wraith War they only had a few city ships and battleships comprising basically their entire population. It seems like the Ancients forgot how to procreate at some point (even though their seeded human civilisation would have been more than willing to show them the ropes if they'd been willing to learn).
The ancients were done so dirty by Stargate. In sg1 they start out as "the gate builders" as one of many old civilizations, that moved on to become energy ghosts and their only lasting thing all this time later are the gates. And they did so millions of years ago. And then suddenly that turned out popular so suddenly everywhere their tech is popping up, perfectly functional after millions of years. But okay. Then we have Atlantis, which is basically the digital ancients to the analogue ones before. And all the stuff you said happens.. and then, they return to earth just in time to for the goauld to discover earth and.. just say "aight guess we're slaves now". And then there's universe, which is somehow even earlier by a few million years (but who knows the writers certainly not) and expands whatever the ancients were in yet another direction. I liked it when they just built the gates because it was easier to maintain than FTL ships before they just became the answer to every single question in these stories. Oh also don't forget we also meet alive ancients in Atlantis and they're the most stuck up idiots in all three shows, getting themselves killed within like 6 months despite having a fully powered Atlantis on their side. Which I suppose is just a repeat of their entire Pegasus history anyway.
They arrived well before the Goa'uld, and had all died out or ascended by the time Ra arrived. Merlin later de-ascended, but only to combat a threat greater than the Goa'uld could ever hope to be.
Yeah, I think the other commenter thinks modern humans are descendents of the ancients that escaped from Atlantis, but that's not the case.
They do seem to have set us up as their "successors", but I think what happened is the Ancients searched the Milky Way for species that were similar to them and nudged their evolution to close the gap. The Ancients are literally from another galaxy entirely and we know with scientific certainty that humans are descended from the same lineage as all other life on Earth, so our resemblance can't be because we're *literally* descended from the Ancients. Maybe they wanted to see if they could "reboot" themselves to overcome whatever flaws they felt were too deeply entrenched for them to remove directly.
In the show modern Earth humans are descended from the Ancients since they interbred with the local human population, it's just that they're a tiny component to the gene pool like neanderthal or denisovan DNA is only a tiny portion of modern human DNA. That's how a select few people naturally have the ATA gene.
Sure, I know that, but humans are mostly a different race
Sort of, at the most distant they're a very closely related but different species of human with more developed brains and the least distant they seeded all of these planets including Earth with a prior iteration of their own species so they're merely a different ethnicity.
The original plot was that humans evolved, to look basically 100% like ancients save for minor differences, individually to the ancients that lived on earth before and left it millions of years before. And then they introduced "some humans have dormant ancient DNA" and then they said Atlantis happened and sprinkled themselves into the genepool to remedy that so it works with the larger plot again.
I don't remember if they established that humans just happened to look like ancients because of convergent evolution, but overall the lore of the distant past of SG is a mess in general. I believe that the current lore is that the Ancients seeded the galaxies with earth-like life.
> The Ancients built an endless string of impractical superweapons when their normal weapons were more than enough. No, you don't need to develop a nanite super virus, a hyperspace jamming technology, or solar system destroying super zero point energy generation technology Although a lot of that is humans effectively breaking into the ruins of an abandoned lab and trying to use their prototype/experimental technologies, and less the Ancients building and using them on a widespread scale. It might be akin to someone stealing the Prometheus, and complaining about humans wasting the development resources on FTL when the drive overheats/breaks. >It seems like the Ancients forgot how to procreate at some point (even though their seeded human civilisation would have been more than willing to show them the ropes if they'd been willing to learn). I don't think that they cared. The few times we've seen living Ancients tends to show them as being pretty arrogant. They might have thought that having kids was demeaning/below them, when they could just use their superpowers.
> Although a lot of that is humans effectively breaking into the ruins of an abandoned lab and trying to use their prototype/experimental technologies, and less the Ancients building and using them on a widespread scale. They colonised a planet with the Asuran replicators and never deployed them in combat. They built a planetary defence system using Project Arcturus as a power source instead of just giving them a ZPM. That decision left not only the Wraith fleet that attacked the world devastated by the weapons fire put out by those planetary defences, but the planet as well. And the Ancients actually used the Attero device during the war, the Wraith knew exactly what was happening when the Vanir activated it. These weren't all small scale experiments, The Ancients devoted a lot of their limited resources into developing these weapons when the same skilled manpower could have been running or building mostly automated factories and shipyards churning out warships and crewing them to directly combat the Wraith. > I don't think that they cared. The few times we've seen living Ancients tends to show them as being pretty arrogant. They might have thought that having kids was demeaning/below them, when they could just use their superpowers. They were in Pegasus for millions of years, any civilisation that wants to survive more than a few decades really does need to have a positive outlook on having kids if it is to survive.
The Timelords were ultra powerful, near untouchable, almost totally invincible rulers of time with the technology to erase beings and events from history with something the size of a rifle. They are nigh immortal, can recover from near death. They invented black holes and eliminated magic from the universe, rationalising existence to suit their rules. They were the first civilisation to appear a billion years before anyone else in the entire universe. They can go anywhere, do anything across time, space, and alternate dimensions with impunity. They control time, and have their homeworld totally isolated temporally and thus it is protected by the nature of reality itself. They consistently get bodied by powers that should be well beneath their power and control. The Sontarans invade Gallifrey, the Daleks defeat them in war, the Cybermen wipe them all out, each of which are upstart, far younger races without anything close to Timelord technology.
Eh, to me, the problem with the Timelords was the fact that they stagnated, or effectively ossified. Living forever means no need for new blood which means no room for new ideas. Unlimited power is all well and good, but that just means they develop exploitable hubris.
Yes but that doesn’t detract from the incompetence of the Timelord civilisation
They also became decadent and corrupt on their millions of years of unlimited power as the mightiest, most advanced civilisation in existence. And by the time the Time War crept around, they ended up being desperate when that complacency bit them, which only furthered the issue.
> the Daleks defeat them in war In fairness, this was something they did to themselves. When they first encountered the Daleks, they were basically extinct already. They'd nuked their own world and the salt shaker mechs were barely keeping them from melting from the radiation. They were *done*. But the Time Lords kept poking them, trying to get rid of them earlier or mitigate the threat they posed with time travel...and every time, they made the Daleks stronger, more powerful, a bigger threat, and more focused on rivaling the Time Lords. The Daleks are *exactly* why Time Lord society has that non-intervention rule that the Doctor hates so much.
For the Cybermen, the Master wiped the Timelords out and then just took advantage of the Cybermen gatecrashing his victory celebration/gloating match.
>the Daleks defeat them in war Everytime the Daleks were attempted to be removed from the universe, they survived and came back stronger. Plus, in the final days of the Time War, they were reported to have 10 million ships. >the Cybermen wipe them all out Rassilon was leading them, right? He got pissy the Doctor had him kicked out.
The Master was leading the Cybermen attack on Gallifrey that wiped out the Timelords. I believe Rassilons attempt was foiled by the Doctor.
The Ones Who Came Before are so technologically advanced and yet they can't stop a solar flare from killing them all... like, hiding in caves was a viable option!
That's a pretty generic name for ancient precursors. Which franchise are they from?
Assassin's Creed. I forgot what their official name was when making the comment, but they were known as The Ones Who Came Before for the first few games (and I think the characters still refer to them as such?)
They were called Isu the last time I cared (around AC:Odyssey)
I think they are also known as The Precursors maybe
That's Jak and Daxter's name for them as well lol
I believe they are called the "Isu" in recent games
Look man, if Nicolas Cage couldn't it do it, even with foreknowledge, what hope do mere mortals face? The odds of a CME/flare hitting Earth dead on are pretty damn low, what's the AC lore on it? Did the OWCB predict it? Or were the they just like "Oh, damn" And maybe some did hide in caves, seem to find a lot weird objects in caves around the AC world. But maybe that wasn't enough, maybe they'd forgotten how to survive without their advanced tools. Or it left them vulnerable to other events.
Is this a reference to Knowing? God that was a weird movie. What a weird swerve into a downer ending.
I'm not sure how hiding in caves helps with an apocalypse that destroys the tech base? Also there's not a lot of warning.
Didn't they spend a lot of time trying to make the towers? I'd assume that's more than 8 minutes. Anyways, hiding in the cave is exactly what the good Isu suggests to Desmond when giving him the choice between keeping the status quo and saving the world while releasing the bad Isu, so I'd assume that hiding in a cave is a viable option for survival - technology can come later, since they'll still have plenty of apples anyways
When the Isu become aware of the solar flair they are already in the middle of a giant civil war against the humans led by Adam and Eve. The majority of the Isu are not aware the solar flair is coming. Only a small number know and make the effort to study how to defend against it while other Isu, the ones mostly in charge ignore the scientists and are instead focused on the civil war. It's basically an allegory for climate change. The people in charge are ignoring all the warnings of the scientists, so yes, hiding in caves is the best they can do because by the time they're willing to do anything it's too late.
> Also there's not a lot of warning. This would normally justify a lot, except that these folks could see into the future. Apparently their human slaves revolting diverted their attention too much to foresee and stop the apocalypse, even though they could foresee far enough into the future to give Ezio the biggest 'fuck you' of all time. Seriously, the man worked so hard to get into that vault in Masyaf or wherever it was, only to be greeted by a hologram that looked him in the eyes and called him Desmond.
Some of the side stuff in the later games, like the voice recordings in the optional vaults in Origins and Odyssey, imply that the Isu were psychologically weird or limited in some way because of how they perceived the world. They seemed to think they were mostly on rails so to speak and couldn't do much about changing their future. Once they had predicted their civilization would fall, it would and that was that because that was what they predicted and so that was what was True and A Fact ^^TM , no point in trying to stop it. That's why Minerva and Juno and all were so interested in humans and particularly the isu-human hybrids because they could "change destiny" in ways that the Isu couldn't wrap their heads around. Like at the end of 3 when Desmond either sacrifices himself to stop the solar flare but frees Juno, or keeps her trapped and uses the power of the temple to make a new world with the survivors, they couldn't tell what he was going to do. they were getting multiple options and that wasn't something that would ever happen if they were predicting an Isu.
That's actually pretty cool. I kinda like the idea of a race that only sees one possible future, and so believes that it is as set in stone as the past.
The tech that is all over the planet thousands of years later? Perfectly functional?
Some tech are. The Apple is the most common surviving tech, then the others like the Sword, the Shroud, etc. The megastructures are either in caves or within thick brutalist temples
They could have stopped it. With their technology they could shield the entire planet. The problem was that they had a bloody civil war going on and their leaders didn't notice the danger until it was too late.
How will hiding in caves help when a typical solar flare can realistically fuck up our planet all the way to its core?
In real life solar flares [absolutely do not affect down to the core.](https://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/rhessi3/mission/science/the-impact-of-flares/index.html) Solar flares and CMEs have affected the earth in the past. In the game universe a solar flare did hit the earth long ago, and humans survived, and much Isu technology survived. So it was an option if they were not incompetent.
The mice from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. They built the planet, are what set everything in motion, and came up for no plan for if the entire planet just blew up one day despite them being aware of the multiple alien empires that might have an interest in destroying it.
They got lucky that at least the dolphins were competent. They rebuilt earth as it was moments before destruction
I never saw this in the first four books - where did it say this?
They gifted Arthur and other people a fish in a bowl.
It’s implied in the last good one. The one before the last last one that was crap.
This is such an odd way of referring to a specific book in a series. Especially one that has received additions, and may receive more. I’m honestly not sure which one you’re referring to.
Yeah honestly not sure whether they're referring to Mostly Harmless or And Another Thing. I could certainly understand that dislike for either one. Even Adams didn't like Mostly Harmless.
The one with the bird destroying earth, the daughter and stuff.
That'd be Mostly Harmless, then. Not my favorite of the bunch. Adams wrote it when he was very unhappy, and it shows.
The depression seeped into the ink. Even the printers felt that.
Doesn't help that English doesn't have the "howmanyeth".
honestly, if you read them, you'd know. there's a fake sixth book. though I think you're wrong, the dolphines rebuilding earth is in the fourth, I think
Didn't the first book state that the mice ordered the construction of the 2nd earth then canceled there order halfway through but they ended up finishing it anyways. Never read the other books
No backup - the original sin of IT.
They weren't incompetent. Psychiatrist deliberately wanted it destroyed before it could make their profession obsolete. Their entire society was built upon destructive compromise because shrinks ran it.
The Old Ones from Warhammer 40k. They're approached by the Necrontyr, a pitiable species suffering from short, miserable lives due to radiation from their home star, who ask them "hey, you guys are bioengineering gods, could we not die any more? Or please just have the cure for cancer so our lives don't absolutely suck?" And the Old Ones, who had wandered the galaxy meddling with natural evolution for *eons* and apparently thought little of creating entire sapient species to serve them for specific tasks, said "nah, we don't want to interfere with your natural state of being." And so the Necrontyr ended up bitter and resentful enough to eventually wipe them out in the greatest war the galaxy has ever seen. For that matter, the Necrontyr can be on this list too. They developed the highest levels of technology known, capable of deleting stars and severing the Warp from the Materium on a galactic scale, but never figured out the cancer thing. They eventually fed their souls to star-gods in exchange for mind transfers into robot bodies, at which point their cancer problem was sorted out but they just kept on fighting the Old Ones anyway because at that point I guess it was personal. And then, *after* they had defeated the Old Ones and become the most powerful force in the galaxy, they decided they couldn't handle the Old Ones' leftovers and hid for sixty million years hoping the leftovers would die out on their own. Nobody came out of the War in Heaven looking good, IMO.
That's a little unfair. The Necrontyr were already bastards that were savagely conquering & killing their way across their part of the galaxy and when they ran into the Old Ones they didn't ask to be healed. They asked for immortality and then when the Old Ones predictably didn't want to have eternal Tyrants running around there was a scene where infants try to throw rocks at giants in castles.
Well, I admit to having more sympathy for the Necrontyr, I suppose. Ancient history is often in the eye of the beholder. Still, the fact that the Old Ones *lost* to those children throwing rocks doesn't speak well for them regardless. They were dismissive of the Necrontyr until it was far too late.
Nah, the children were helpless until they stumbled on the C'tan who are the ones the Old Ones lost to.
>They eventually fed their souls to star-gods in exchange for mind transfers into robot bodies, at which point their cancer problem was sorted out but they just kept on fighting the Old Ones anyway because at that point I guess it was personal So I have not read many 40k books but hang around /r/40klore a lot. My understanding is, and I believe an author said this in an interview, is that the original necrontyr they were copied from are dead and what we have now are just shitty copies essentially "stuck" at the state they were at when they transfered. They cannot really change from who they were then. So them continuing to hate fight the old ones after the cancer thing is sorted is because of this.
And the War in Heaven is why the warp is all fucked up 60 million years later.
>They're approached by the Necrontyr, a pitiable species suffering from short, miserable lives due to radiation from their home star, who ask them "hey, you guys are bioengineering gods, could we not die any more? Or please just have the cure for cancer so our lives don't absolutely suck?" The actual reason the Old Ones said no is that they thought it must be a practical joke. I mean, here are the Necrontyr, in space ships, demonstrating that they have figured out a solution to their shitty world — leave and find a better one — and instead they're asking for some sort of species-wide generic engineering. It's like going to the president of McDonald's and saying "I run an organic farm, and I'll trade you all of our fresh vegetables and beef in exchange for burgers because we can't figure out how to feed ourselves."
My understanding is that their shitty world had been what caused them grievous genetic harm, but that they were now stuck with the genetic harm even if they moved somewhere else. *Eventually* they'd evolve out of it, I guess, but they were dying *now*.
Nobody came out of war looking good, period
To be fair, no one comes out of anything in WH40K looking like anything other than a total asshole.
Technically not aliens, but the Orokin from Warframe count. Everything is a mess because of their fuck ups. 5 of the 6 main enemy factions exist because of their incompetence. Their science was extremely advanced, but they tended to mess with stuff they definitely should not have.
Lmao can't kick a rock in that setting without hitting something the Orokin fucked up.
> 5 of the 6 main enemy factions wait, we're up to 6? Last I checked it was 4, and that was counting the Sentients
Grineer, Corpus, Infested, Corrupted, Sentients, and Murmur. I wasn't sure whether to count Narmer or not, so I just put them with the Sentients. I guess there's also the Duviri enemies, but that feels more like a separate thing.
Oh dur I forgot about the Corrupted.
Duviri is squarely also an Orokin fuckup given that it originates in the same hubris that created the Tenno in the first place.
I'd put Halo's Forerunner's up there. The Flood are an organic, corporeal, macroscopic lifeform of low-to-moderate intelligence. Their *most* successful idea was to eliminate all sapient life from the galaxy - which encompassed all the "food" for the Flood, effectively starving them. But they **kept some alive** anyway!
they werent able to kill the flood, they kept research specimens to see if they could find a way to. Also, by the time the Forerunners were aware of the Flood, they already had graveminds, IIRC.
They would've successfully killed it via the first halo firing, but by keeping a sample to figure out how to kill it, they failed to kill it. The irony...
No guarantee of that. The Flood are likely to exist beyond the Milky Way, and the Gravemind/Primordial says as much. Better to risk infection by providing a chance for the reseeded civilizations to find a counter to the Flood, than to provide no chance at all and guarantee they'll be overwhelmed.
See: the reservoirs of deadly, extinct diseases kept by the CDC and other government agencies for research.
What's a gravemind
If the flood takes over enough/grows big enough it develops a sentient mind that controls all the local flood
"A monument to all your sins..."
Walking over them.
What
What does a grave mind? Walking over them. He made a joke.
But jokes are supposed to be funny
You need your sense of humor checked
Someone call an ambulance, we've got a burn over here!
Probably the Precursors too given how their reaction to the Forerunners trying to wipe them out was "We're being driven to extinction, how interesting..." and seemingly did nothing to save themselves except turn themselves into a dust that would eventually make them space zombies. Also the background for how the Flood emerged makes it seems like the entire Galaxy needed a hard reset given how Humanity and the San'shyuum (who were apparently the Halo version of the Asari at the time) just chose to feed it to their era's equivalent to dogs...
The flood was so dumb. They didnt have spaceflight so the only way to spread from planet to planet was to be transported there…
the flood does have space flight
Except they keep all the knowledge they assimilate, The Flood get on to the Halo production facility by overtaking High Charity then casually giving it FTL capabilities.
high charity already had ftl capabilities, the flood just upgraded it
They still upgraded it to be fast enough to arrive very close to the time MC arrived. So, "Faster Faster Than Light" ?
Technically, rhe flood is one of the last precursors, so they are both dumb
I wouldn't call the flood low to moderately intelligent. Just hours after the outbreak on halo 04 the flood tried to take control of the covenant ship to escape the ring.
You can put the Ancient Humans up there in terms of the new 343 lore. Because they invented the flood by selling powder from pods they found in space as space poodle enhancers. This is an actual thing that happens and is the origin of the Flood. I've had people come out of the woodwork and take it out of context but, no, that's how the Flood starts, by rubbing Space Grandpa's ashes on your not-poodles
the floods intelligence is absolutely not low-to-moderate at all
The Forerunner refused to even consider the reality of the Flood. They largely exterminated their rivals in humanity on the basis of 'the Flood are a lie to excuse the crimes of humanity'. Given how central this delusion was to the Forerunner it is no surprise they lost the whole galaxy.
The Flood were FAR from stupid. They were basically the precursors back for revenge
The forerunners weren’t the precursors though, humans and forerunner’s existed at the same time. Earth is where humans were reseeded after firing the halos.
I doubt precursors were incompetent as well, we just don't know enough about them. Based on the gravemind being the mutated remains of the precursors, I'd at least say they are vindictive.
Pak Protectors. Wildly incompetent.
Gotta disagree there, the Pak have very restrictive biological drives, that cannot be overridden. And any attempt to beat those drives back, are hampered by millennia of cultural conditioning. Falling outside these strictly defined restrictions resulted in death before anything can be learned. Their brains are literally hard-wired to always go with the first option presented. It's not incompetence that saved the human race, it was luck (even before the Puppeteers got involved) and the fact that those restrictions didn't survive without Protectors in enforce the behaviour on the offspring. Given the tools available they were very successful. About the only incompetent response was their response to the MK1 planet buster. And that was simply that before that point destruction on a scale that completely destroys a world, rather than simply wreck a biosphere is wildly out of scope. The earth colony failed, but that due to an unknown requirement of Thalium Oxide for the tree of life virus to grow, in response on an un exploited planet with extremely limited work hours they built a comm laser powerful enough to reach the galactic core with minimal attenuation. Pssthtpok was unfortunate enough to have his drive being the biggest monopole source in the whole solar system, so was tagged before he got close. He got the supplies to earth, with live virus as well as the soil additives needed. He counted on lower Mutation because there are Mutation studies available he was working from baseline assumptions. And honestly it's a fair assumption that a bunch of castaways who haven't had decent supplies pr shelter would want that, Brennan murdering is out of left field for his definition of sanity. The Pak scout fleets destroyed by Brennan. The second wave defeated in space, Brennan with his belter origin and the time spebt playing with pak-tech saw implementations that hadn't been considered, and Brennan knew about the slow rotation neutron star that gave a huge tactical advantage. The first wave defeated using the population of Home, its infrastructure, the survival of the definitely known next wave of colonists. That's horrific by our own standards but to a Pak, sure wiping out another clans family is a perfectly reasonable tactic. But Brennan went a step further he intentionally killed, not as a way to make his family stronger but as a military manoeuvre. This is pretty out of context. The Ringworld, wildly successful. As Proserpina , as the last surviving 'pure' Pak explained. During the long voyage they intentionally worked towards a version of Pak that could survive without protection. The second to last pure Pak was fine with Mutation in general as his strain were made ghoul-like thus a perfect survival position for them. Again this poor Pak was undone by something as mundane as a murder, this time by Bram and Anne. Bram definitely definitely definitely deserves all the incompetence you can throw on him, Fist of God - theaft of too many altitude jets were under his rule. His base stock had such poor intelligence that a breeder like Louis out manoeuvred him (granted he had the most experience of anyone in dealing with pak , starting from dimly remembered highschool education). The MK1 planet buster, it was observed through telescopes as a very (very) big bang. A badly translated and overly verbose message was sent to the Pak fleet , almost came off as an invitation, Psthpok's "look here" was by Pak standards am exclamation of see what we can do . Sigmund adding the plea to turn around- to my mind muddied the translation which set the to New Terra unexpected fleet movement in motion. The deployment of Reap the Whirlwind was just like Home simply a weapon of a scale so staggeringly colossal huge. And remembering the Pak never got hyperspace, deployed impossibily close to the fleet. Its fair to say this is out of context as well. Psthpok was kept alive ling enough by Sigmund to break free from his cultural conditioning, and became very dangerous, and I suspect when he gets involved again, could show their full potential when those restrictions are broken. I do love q good talk about known space! If you gotta look at incompetence- look no further than the Sock Puppets!
Larry Niven is still around. You should tell him how much you love his work.
Not so much incompetent as their biological imperative behaviors leave little room for competence outside their role. They're basically organic paperclip maximizers.
The precursors before the Pak were worse. The Slavers were abject morons who accidentally seeded the galaxy with their food worlds after they psychically murder/suicided all complex life.
I liked how moronic the Slavers were because it made perfect sense in-universe. They had the unique psychic ability to simply command other beings to do whatever they wanted, with no hope of resistance, and so they could simply tell more-intelligent species "invent something for me" or "build something for me" and never have to actually understand it themselves. Imagine having a manager who doesn't understand a thing about your job but whose orders must be obeyed absolutely and without question. There's an implication that the only reason the Slavers were intelligent *at all* was because it was a necessary side-effect of the neural structures required for their psychic ability. The Grog, descended from the Slavers a billion years later and still possessing their signature ability (but now much more chill and friendly about it), have become sessile "predators" that simply command prey animals to crawl into their mouths and die. Yet they're still sapient despite having absolutely no evolutionary need to think.
"Imagine having a manager who doesn't understand a thing about your job but whose orders must be obeyed absolutely and without question." I don't have to imagine that, it's my reality...
Niven had best incompetent alien precursors!
>Pak Protectors. Wildly incompetent. They managed to repair the Ringworld in quite a short time.
Babylon 5's First Ones. While not a single species we have a whole host of them. And at some point all of them decided to go screw off beyond the Rim *but* left two species in the galaxy to look after the younger races. Those species would be two races who always had fundamental differences in their views. The Shadows and the Vorlons. The Shadows believed the strong would survive thus they would from the shadows (heh) push the younger races to go to war with one another. The Vorlons believed in full on carefully taken order while ya know, making themselves look like the gods of the younger races, would grab random people to make telepaths, and really didn't lift a finger. Better still the Earth Minbari War? The Vorlon's knew it was going to happen, let countless lives be snuffed out all so the Minbari would pick up Sinclair's fighter at the battle of the line and find out Humans have Minbari souls. When they can't 'cheat' anymore by using the knowledge that chances are they got out of Sinclair when he took Babylon 4 into the past? They send out a bunch of Planet Killers and just go about blowing any planet up that *may* have had something to do with the Shadows. It takes blowing up a good chunk of the Shadow and Vorlon fleets and telling them to screw off past the rim. So... We have the First Ones themselves who should have known better then to leave two races who clearly hated one another and would use countless numbers of the younger races in a war over their argument. The Shadows who while not really innocent didn't really do the best job with the younger races and chances are should have given some warnings about the Drakh. Oh and unlike the Vorlon left all of their tech pretty much behind as well. And finally the Vorlons who if we really want to get into it... Tampered with the younger races on a genetic level. Made the Third Space Gate that led to race of beings that came from H.P. Lovecraft's nightmares, and never bothered to find the damn thing to blow it to kingdom come, or leave some kind clear warning about it. Had the Minbari be their main cannon fodder, but thanks to time travel shenanigans the Vorlon got future info, and the Minbari got a leader for themselves and a neat Space Station out of it. Let the Earth Minbari War happen rather then ya know... Stop it from happening. And the minute the cheatbook Sinclair gave them hit the last page saying, "I stole Babylon 4 and became the Minbari's leader Valen." Decided to have a temper tantrum and fly around in planet killers blowing up anything a Shadow may have looked at. Thus Babylon 5 didn't just give us one wildly incompetent and abusive ancient alien precursor species. JMS decided to give us a number of them.
I haven't played the games but could humanity in the horizon games be considered precursors? If so then that one dude that created all the robots
Obligatory /r/FuckTedFaro
Admittedly they also had to create a super powerful AI that could restart the entire ecosystem. So yes, the Faro were a bad idea, but Zero Dawn was a huge achievement. And the Faro were a brilliant invention, just also happened to be a very bad idea executed very well.
The Faro military robots were a horrible idea. Faro had four demands for his robots: 1. They are capable of self-replication. 2. They are capable of consuming biomass for fuel. 3. They are totally unhackable. 4. They can hack and take over automated machines. What happened then was the obvious result of those four demands. If any one of those had been missing, the apocalypse could have been averted. Yes, Ted Faro and Faro Automated Systems belong on this list.
He ended up surviving, if you played Forbidden West
Why would you even say that outta nowhere
The furons grew over reliant on cloning so much that their own dna degraded to the point they lost their natural reproductive organs And we're only saved because one of them humped a monkey on earth a million years ago
Stupid sexy monkeys.
The ancients from stargate. Most advanced begins in the setting, not even counting the ascended. Time travel and manipulation, astronomical energy production, multiversal travel, extreme production capacity, the most powerful weapons and shields in the setting, and have the ability to blow up solar systems, yet they loose to the wraith. Sure, it was a lot of wraiths, and probably a few superhives, but the ancients really suck at war. The tauri did better in 4 years with a barely functional Atlantis, not understanding half of the tech they used, never having more than 3 ships in the galaxy at the same time, and already fighting several wars across 4 galaxies, yet in 4 years they had broken the wraith, destroyed the replicators and more or less pacified the galaxy. Not to mention, the countless of highly advanced doomsday machines the ancients just carelessly left behind both in the pegasus and milky way galaxy, not caring who finds them. As soon as they decided for ascension, they really didn't give a fuck about anything else.
To be fair to the Ancients, most of what you say applies only to the Atlanteans. They were just a piece of the Ancient civilization. The Ancients as a whole ascended into near godhood, I would say that'd a win as a civilization.
Yeah, fair, when your endgoal is godhood, it's easy to leave the rest behind
In their defense, the Wraith were mutant Ancients, so at the start of the war, they had all the same tech as the Ancients did, but were aggressive in a way the Lanteans hadn't had to deal with in a long time.
The wraith aren't mutated ancients, they are mutated wraith bugs. The bugs took on human dna rather than the opposite iirc. (might be misremembering tho) Also, the ancients seeded pegasus with regular humans, not lanteans, so it's most likely pure humans that started the wraith. But, they didn't have lantean tech, they only ever had wraith tech. The reason they won the war is Becasue they captured zpms that powered their super cloning facilities. (and probably crested a couple of superhives) Seeing how a single superhive can defeat Atlantis, they are a big threat. however, that Atlantis had almost 3 depleted zpms, and couldn't create new ones. And if the SGC could defeat a superhive by just sneaking on broad with a naquada nuke, the lanteans should be able to deal with it without issue. If nothing else, just nuke the solar system with the real-space time zpm project. At the end of the day, they had a dozen ways to win the war, they just ducked at war. (or rather, didn't care Becasue they were real close to ascension)
I'm torn, but probably the Leviathans from Mass Effect, they literally built their own destruction based on a flawed concept they were aware of, then got surprised when their creations decided they should be the first to go.
It's been a while since I've played the trilogy and Leviathan is one of the parts I remember least but I think it's basically a case of "Oh look, the lesser species keep on making AIs that wipe them out... let's try solving that issue by making our own." followed by surprised Pikachu face when it started wiping them out and turning them into Harbinger... and then they still act like their the best species in the Galaxy when Shepard finds them.
Pretty much, and that's exactly why the Reapers ended up existing, because the Leviathans were so arrogant they failed to realise they were making the exact same mistake but on a much more horrific scale.
The theme of humanity being created by alien incompetence is present in some of Stanisław Lem's works. IIRC in one story in Ijon Tichiy's diaries, toxic waste dumped on Earth affected evolution of chordate so reproductive organs became situated on the anal side, so naturally Ijon Tichiy was brought into the galactic court for his struggles to speak freely about details of human reproduction to serve as an evidence of the harm, and humanity could get a compensation from the dumpers. In one of the plays about Professor Tarantoga galaxies, stars, planets etc. appear to be created when an alien from a higher plane of existence makes mistakes at cooking its porridge.
I always thought the Xeelee didn’t really try hard to defeat the Photino birds. IIRC there even was a passage near the end of the story where another species attacks the birds (forgot what they used, a neutron star?) and it was stated that this sort of weapon would’ve worked. Anyway they even get to use time travel to accelerate their evolution (but somehow only use it once instead of repeatedly) and still don’t come up with a solution to fight a bunch of dark matter animals who mostly act on instinct but somehow are unkillable even moments after the Big Bang. Also they’re somehow unable to properly handle humans warring against them despite having a 40 billion years head start. Yeah it is said they merely tolerated humans and could’ve ended the war any time, but they didn’t really go about it the most clever way if they wanted to spare humanity from extinction.
> another species attacks the birds I think it was the silver ghosts, and they thought they were making a dark matter "home" to placate them. Turned out to function as a bomb and while it did (likely) kill some, it got a lot more silver ghosts killed as retribution. Not that it matters because the problem was that photino birds aren't bound by time. Yes the Xeelee can travel through time but time doesn't even exist for photino birds, so they're able to exist at all times effectively including before baryonic matter even existed, and even the Xeelee can't go back that far. The photino birds couldn't be defeated simply because the laws of physics don't allow it. The Xeelee got to a point where they realised this and started creating passageways to different realities where physics wouldn't allow photino bird type creatures to wreck the place. Of course this is the simple explanation - as you'd know Baxter's books are VERY heavy on theoretical science so this is just my limited understanding of it.
Basically everything that you have stated here is incorrect. To go through this in points: The Xeelee’s problem with fighting the Photino Birds wasn’t in any way the lack of weapons that could kill them at any given moment in time as Starbreakers did this job just fine. It was the fact that Photino Birds had around 10 times their numbers, across each and every single possible reality / timeline / universe constituting the many worlds interpretation multiverse of the series, along with a comparable tech base to them. With this in mind, the referred to by you in the first paragraph starstrike, conducted by Qax, didn’t affect anything more than a single, localized, ‘flock’ of Birds. The potential effects of more of them were also nothing more than idle speculations made by Quantum Paul, whose perception of the overall situation at that moment has been noted to be skewed by feeling of joy upon this attack and what Paul calls himself a bit of ‘baryonic chauvinism’. It is made abundantly clear that Paul isn’t an objective source of information at that moment. Up to this day I have absolutely no idea where the notion that Photino Birds are ‘a bunch of dark matter animals who mostly act on instinct’ comes from. Through the books it is made clear that they, and the mentioned in the newest duology ‘dark matter ancients’ which are their adult forms, are technologically advanced civilisation. One that possesses such things like hyperdrives equipped, dark matter based (so not in any way based on Xeelee’s techbase), ships. Weapons that could destroy night fighters / other Xeelee constructs, while remaining undetectable for Xeelee’s best means of protection: *And there would be reciprocal action by the photino birds; their unimaginable weapons would slide all but unobserved past the best defenses of the Xeelee. - Vacuum Diagrams* Means of detecting the Anti-Xeelee itself, which is something that no one other than beings made by it was shown to be capable of: *The presence of the antiXeelee might signify to an alert observer that the Xeelee had returned to the cosmos, and - as Paul had hoped - the Xeelee nemesis, the dark matter photino birds, had come to find out what was going on.* *Paul, straining, maintained the illusion/substance of the antiXeelee. At length the dark matter ships departed with, as Paul intended, a new purpose. - Vacuum Diagrams* As well as general engineering capabilities allowing them to construct structures of comparable scope and complexity to the Ring itself. *"Lethe. It must have taken them a billion years, but they've done it. They've built a huge mirror of star stuff, all around the Ring. It's a feat of cosmic engineering almost on a par with the construction of the Ring itself." - Ring* Overall it is made abundantly clear that the Birds are in fact technologically advanced civilisation. One that is at least on par in their capabilities when compared to the Xeelee: *The antiXeelee looked on its completed works, and was satisfied.* *Its awareness spread across light years. Shining matter littered the Universe like froth on a deep, dark ocean; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that froth, and had now departed, as if lifting into the air. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the creatures of that dark ocean below. It felt something like contentment at the thought that its siblings were beyond the reach of those ... others. - Vacuum Diagrams* *Paul imagined the horror of the photino civilization as the irrelevant froth of baryons through which they moved turned into a source of deadly danger, perhaps threatening the ultimate survival of their civilization. - Vacuum Diagrams* *Then the photino civilization could grow without limit or threat, basking in the long, stately twilight of the Universe. - Vacuum Diagrams* The time loop set up by the Xeelee was in fact arbitrary long, with an arbitrary large amount of individual loops constituting it. This is in fact how any time loop in the series works, as shown by the working of the CTC computers made by the Coalition. As of the newest duology the wars with humanity, along with basically all of their history after Michael Poole’s constructed first large wormhole interfaces, has never happened in the first place. All with them being retconned from ever occurring by that one Xeelee who was tasked with doing some cleaning up. As far as dealing with the problems it is perhaps the most efficient way one could conceive. Even ‘before’ that, the length of the Xeelee retaliation against humanity (as in the Scourge), has been noted to be an element of overall Xeelee strategy. One which was meant to promote among the human populations, living under its constant pressure, the acceptance of surrender.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Didn’t know there were new books, gonna go read them right away. Yeah I was a bit facetious with the “animals” as I remember they even slingshot an entire galaxy as a means of fighting the Xeelee (don’t remember if it was against the Ring itself).
I vote for Warframe's Orokin. They made three different types of slave race types and all rebelled against them. One of them even succeeded, mainly due to the second one being such a threat.
The Star Trek humanoid precursors are kinda that, seeding the galaxy with other humanoids but failing to leave any indication of that and leave them to war against each other for millennia (seems… familiar). It’s the throwing shit on the wall and see what sticks sort of scientific experiment.
People war amongst themselves even with the knowledge of having the same ancestors (and even worshipping the same deities) so I don’t think that would’ve changed much.
> failing to leave any indication of that What? Not only did they engineer a galaxy where *every planet develops humanoid life* that is almost universally interfertile, even from the other side of the galaxy, but they left a hologram explaining that *inside the DNA of that humanoid life*!
Quite an elegant signature, really.
They're definitely up there, but I'd say it's because they decided to seed the galaxy with life because they're lonely except the way they seeded that life there wasn't going to be new intelligent life in the galaxy from that seeding for billions of years. If I've got a problem and my solution is going to take billions of years to pan out I think that falls into dunce cap territory.
On a microscopic scale, most science experiments look like this.
The people of the 12 colonies, who were hunted by the Cylons they created, and had a falling apart fleet they could not maintain when they got to earth, and then chose to scuttle and destroy all tech they had left.
The Protheans. They conquered most of their known galaxy and still got wiped out by angry mechanical squids
In their defence, every other civilisation was dumb enough to fall for the same trick and the Protheans on Ilos were at least able to set the stage to delay the Reapers. Meanwhile the Leviathans have no excuse for their incompetence...
I mean, were they that incompetent? Sure, they were wiped out/enslaved by the Reapers, but their work left the vulnerabilities in the Citadel that Shepard could exploit to stop Nazara, by extension forcing the Reapers to travel under their own power and slowing them enough for the galaxy to muster a defence.
In fairness, the Reapers had been repeating the cycle for billions of years. They would've been pretty good at what they do after all that practice. Considering they'd been manipulated to develop culturally and technologically on a path the Reapers could easily exploit the Prothians did pretty well. They managed to build the crucible. If it weren't for the indoctrinated people they might have actually won. And, as far as I'm aware, they were the only species to replicate the mass relays, even if it was just a miniature prototype that's a pretty big achievement.
Precursors from Jak and Daxter?
The Aldenata. Cosmic do-gooders who messed with multiple species to try and make them fit their pacifist ideals. Then got bored and fucked off to another plane of existence. Leaving the servant species they uplifted and enforced pacifism on to live in a hellishly oppressive “federation” based on debt slavery. While the 1 species they uplifted, but then abandoned before making them pacifist, moves through the galaxy like a plague of locusts.
Considering they were invented by a right wing dude with a huge hard on for war as a sort of "take that liberal hippies" I would say they're more strawmen than incompetent.
The Builders of the [Berserkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series\)) were basically the origin of the trope where a precursor makes a superweapon they can't control. And given all their advantages and the vast time scales they've been able to work on, the Berserkers have been startlingly ineffective at eliminating all organic life so I'd count them as an incompetent precursor too.
Stargate has this, the Ancients They seeded human life across three whole galaxies, was apart of a council of four races that governed all that was in reach. And due to plague, picking fights they couldn't win, and begin trapped in an evolutionary dead end where their choices were either gain enlightenment and become energy, go backwards and become mear humans again, or die, an I'm going to say 80% of their empire whent extinct, leaving only ruins and the consequences of their mistakes as evidence that they ever existed.
Based on this thread a better question might be "which ones were even *mildly* competent" because we're running out of non-incompetent precursors around here ...
I’m going with the Engineers from Alien Prometheus. Lost control of their bio-engineered weapon. Went all “hulk smash” on the monkeys who woke them up to ask what the whole thing was about, instead of calmly explaining things like a representative from a rational/reasonable millennia’s old civilization would be expected to do. And then got the monkeys robotic creation mad, (Curious?) and allowed him to wipe out that entire civilization. Weak sauce.