But Xan will be possessed by the goth hivemind, and will be acting as their mouthpiece. You wipe it out. Just as likely, the Goths don't have an ethics that we would recognize, but find it costly to intervene in our dimensions.
The inclusion of these references seems to suggest something that Elvi sort of referred to at one point in TW. The fact that humans are each individual consciousnesses, not a hive mind, and the idea that humans have a quantum consciousness that can be bootstrapped by biological functions seems to render them able to survive the Goth's attacks. What if humans accidentally bring back the Romans who just immediately see us as pests to be wiped off their precious planets. Press J to jump to the feed. I believe the Goths are benevolent beings and that reconciliation may be possible in the final book. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. And both those nicknames came up in TW so they are from the authors. The tech communicates using normal means (IE: within bounds of locality) at light-speed to initiate a 'handshake' to reactivate the dormant tech, and once a handshake is established, instantaneous communication proceeds via non-locality (shown in Elvi's catalyst experiment with Adro diamond). Flair your posts for type, content and spoilers. The Goths probably believe we are a resurgence of the Romans and are preparing accordingly. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call the Goths "benevolent." The Goths taught humanity about the danger of putting to much mass through the rings at once. Maybe all we have to do is find a way to explain to the Goths that we're actually a totally new group of conscious individuals, and not just old remnant Roman tech flickering off and on. This act of benevolence tells us that the Goths have some sense of 'morality' or at the very least respect for lower life forms. -The rings and ring station seem unaffected by the Goth weapon, and in CB, Miller states that while Ilus was a power station for the Roman's civilization (possibly instantly beaming that energy to other systems via non-local tech), but that the rings and ring station got their power from somewhere else that he was as yet unaware of. They engineered the protomolecule as a means of spreading a network of Ring gates throughout the galaxy, effectively enabling faster-than-light travel between star systems. -The Romans were a hive mind, possibly technology-hosted consciousness. For now the humans have an advantage that the Romans didn't, but I gotta think that it's only a matter of time before the Goth's figure out that if they knock humans unconscious for several days we'd all starve to death during that time. The second they are a danger to you or your resources, you exterminate them. That means the Goths were willing to play tit-for-tat with what they probably think is the Romans resurging back into existence. The amount of power seems to be correlated with how much they are able to impact in our dimension. If ring transit is truly bothersome to the Goths, there is no way the Romans were willing to maintain the tit-for-tat bargain. Also, I don't see any other way this story ends with humanity still existing, given what a Lovecraftian threat these aliens pose. "Not actively hostile until seriously provoked" is maybe a better phrase. They simply don't apply. Eventually all the different factions will put their conflicts aside in the face of the goth threat and form one massive fleet and go on a desperate counter-attack. Use Reddit's System to Tag All Spoilers in Posts & Comments.
I find it unlikely that humans will overcome these beings in the final book. Pest control. They are entirely human social constructs. The Ring Builders, also known as simply the alien civilization, were a technologically advanced extraterrestrial species whose vast interstellar empire once spanned a great portion of the Milky Way galaxy. When the Ring network was discovered by Humanity, it came into contact with these "Unknown Aggressors". The ring network is used as a corollary for the Roman road network.