Timholman

User:kjoonlee seems intent on starting a revert war. Can we get some outside mediation for this? He's utterly opposed to any kind of conversation or discussion on the issue.

Wellspring (talk) 13:54, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Given his reaction to my latest proposed revision, I have to agree. He seems intent on being "right", no matter what. So what do we do? I am not familiar with the Wikipedia mediation process.

Frankly, if we put it to a vote, I think most readers of the article would side with us, or at least with the modified paragraph I just proposed. Perhaps that would end this pointless nonsense.

Timholman (talk) 22:42, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Tim, I'd like to thank you for the work you're doing on the pak page. I'm thinking we give Kjoonlee a solid week. He seems to be working with us collaboratively now so I want to make sure we show him every courtesy, since I suspect we're all three of us science fiction fans and will be editing each others' pages again. Say we post the paragraph on Dec 9 if we don't hear from him?

Wellspring (talk) 22:23, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

That sounds fair to me. If Kjoonlee wants to add or change something, he can always do it later. Timholman 02:14, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Pak Speculations (The revenge)

Just wanted to say that (two years later!) I loved your post in Talk:Pak Protector about possible interpretations of the story. You've got some great points; here are some further thoughts.

Pak being immune to the Power: the more that I think about this, the more likely it is that Brennan took the amplifier helmet on Jupiter. Even if Protectors are immune to the Power, and even if they don't have enough natural telepathy to benefit from amplification, the chances of eventually running into another Thrint survivor of a galaxy-wide empire are very high, and he'd want to reverse-engineer defenses against humans being taken over, or even another Suicide Night. Also, he wouldn't know until he'd conducted a research project whether Protectors are immune to the Power in the first place.

A childless Protector running the ARM could also have done this, though. Though, if Protectors are (either by enhancement or selection of telepathic breeders) capable of telepathy, an amplifier helmet would make running the ARM, acquiring resources, and monitoring and manipulating humanity to keep it out of trouble much easier. I think Brennan grabbed the helmet almost immediately.

Brennan and hyperspace: Knowing that something like FTL was possible, he'd have been crazy to run off in sublight ships to fight a war without leaving someone behind. So I totally agree with you (and Louis Wu) that he left another protector to run the ARM. Nevertheless, I wonder if he didn't have a hyperspace shunt already working on Kobold. I recall a story (the epilogue to A Gift From Earth?) where it mentioned that the reason the Outsiders developed hyperspace and virtually none of the inner-system races didn't was that the hyperspace effects are only noticeable outside a system's singularity. Brennan could certainly have contrived some excellent hidey-holes on Earth, or even in the Belt, but he chose to lurk in the outer system.

Regarding your points three, four and five, I totally agree with your logic. Though you can view the problems through another lens. Given Brennan's (or his successor's) capabilities, why weren't the Puppeteers or Kzinti eliminated? Why weren't the grogs destroyed? On one hand, you can use their existence as evidence that the human protectors are gone (dead or elsewhere). On the other, you can say, are there scenarios where the optimum strategy is to keep the puppeteers, kzinti, etc around, wars and all? The gripping hand is that wheels-within-wheels makes for some great story-building.

Regarding force-feeding, you know I never thought about it. Considering that it appears that Truesdale had a few days in the hospital to complete his change and start force-feeding the "generation 0 protectors" before they died, maybe with iron discipline his protectors did manage it. The infection would have spread exponentially, but perhaps slowly enough that it was manageable. Maybe he developed a technical solution to stave off starvation (mass use of intravenous feeding, for example). Maybe this is further evidence that his story is bogus and something else happened on Home.

One possible scenario: I could picture Brennan going off in a hyperspace craft and doing a "time on target" annihilation of the Pak fleet all by himself. Meanwhile Truesdale does something unknown on Home: maybe it's changing them all into protectors, and maybe not. Maybe it's according to story, and again, maybe not. Meanwhile a childless protector (or another one decended from Brennan), a backup, is left on Earth to manage humanity through the ARM.

That only leaves the problem about why commit genocide against the Martians (no threat) but not the Kzinti, et al. Maybe the martians were more of a threat than we thought. Maybe he learned something new while he was experimenting in the outer system. Maybe the aliens are required for some larger plan.

You know, most aliens are based on Tnuctip food yeast and have common biologies. Except the Martians. It occurs to me that a telepathic and amplifier helmet-equipped Brennan family protector team could take firm control of all the local races. In that case, the problem of staging an alien invasion without endangering your own decendents becomes complicated but feasible. Brennan's decendents get to free-ride on the war-caused evolutionary advances from other gene-lines, and Brennan keeps a nice cast of unwitting and disposable alien servants around, perhaps in case something really bad, worse than the Protectors, is out there.

Anyway, this is a fun exercise in speculation. :)

Wellspring (talk) 21:17, 27 July 2009 (UTC)