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[Eboreg]

Here, I'm going to talk about some underlying parts of the military operation we just saw. The main asset that helped the Akaelae military to succeed in their primary objective, namely rescue the cubs, was the element of surprise. Rama expected a much longer time then he had really gotten to bribe, blackmail, and brainwash the cubs into his servitude. He most likely did not expect a Sirac to ferret out his intentions so quickly.

The second issue to talk about is Rama's bomb. Originally, it seemed that he intended to kill Syrys with the explosives but the bomb detonated while he was well outside the blast radius. I think his real intention was to kill the cubs with Syrys as a possible secondary objective. Syrys may be Rama's mortal enemy but he's just one man. Timing a bomb to go off with his presence may have been too risky a gamble with the possibility of the cubs escaping and posing a huge threat in the future by sheer weight of numbers. Again, we have Quinn to thank for thwarting this plan while putting herself at great risk. If she were a bit more mature, she would have deserved an award equal to the Medal of Honor.

[St Anger]

[hariman]

The other side of the coin is Darius, Celina, Kel, Sheana, Quinn, Collin and especially Vin getting exposed to Rama's methods and allies.

This means they're FAR less likely to listen to anything that Rama has to say without extended psychological or possibly physical torture. (*Shudders*)

On top of that, Darius is likely about to be given a direct blow to his ego.

The whole reason that Darius had covered himself in mud and kept tracking the other cubs was to be the hero of the day. While they did get rescued, he failed in that endeavor.

Poor guy has to be burning up inside that after all that effort, he's getting hosed down by Celina and then he'll probably have to go home.

Of which, I think that last point about Darius is the whole point of this arc. Darius wanted to be in Quinn or Syrys' place instead of just being a pointer that helped Syrys find where they needed to be rescued from.

[Shippou-chan]

My hypothesis is that Rama may have triued to pull a public relations stunt to soil the name of the Akaelae.  Imagine if you will hearing about the ruling body sending in a detachment of troops into an area with little to no reported activity.  This is followed by sizeable damage to the area and to a large number of individuals in that area.  It could fare badly for the ruling body, especially if there aren't any bad guys to find..

If this was the plan, Rama would have waited for reports of Akaelae movement, then sprung the trap and escaped, leaving his hapless minions to suffer for his cause.  The kits may have been the bait, and may have been left to die.  Filaire may have also subverted this by her early discovery as well, although not in time to eliminate all loss.

Then again, That could also be a stretch.  For one, Rama was looking for SOMETHING down there by all appearances.  The most obvious thing would be the ship Quinn found.  Such technology would have been useful in Rama's plans (revenge on the Akaelae and/or taking over the Wolf empire?)

[Eboreg]

Shippou: There's also the fact that the area could block signals from the tags. That means that without Quinn, the Akaelae family would have been on a wild goose chase by the time they figured out something was up.

[hariman]

My hypothesis is that Rama may have triued to pull a public relations stunt to soil the name of the Akaelae.  Imagine if you will hearing about the ruling body sending in a detachment of troops into an area with little to no reported activity.  This is followed by sizeable damage to the area and to a large number of individuals in that area.  It could fare badly for the ruling body, especially if there aren't any bad guys to find..

If this was the plan, Rama would have waited for reports of Akaelae movement, then sprung the trap and escaped, leaving his hapless minions to suffer for his cause.  The kits may have been the bait, and may have been left to die.  Filaire may have also subverted this by her early discovery as well, although not in time to eliminate all loss.

Then again, That could also be a stretch.  For one, Rama was looking for SOMETHING down there by all appearances.  The most obvious thing would be the ship Quinn found.  Such technology would have been useful in Rama's plans (revenge on the Akaelae and/or taking over the Wolf empire?)

Hah! Rama doesn't want to take over the Akaelae lands. There's something else he has in mind.

Rama want to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! *Cue lightning and evil Rama laugh.*

[Tiffany Ross]

It hasn't been said, but he's looking for immortality.

[hariman]

I'm pretty sure that Rama will end up with a form of immortality.

After all, a death THAT gruesome and your head mounted on a pike after you started a THIRD war WILL give your name a LOT of infamy.

Thankfully, I doubt Rama will get to live to enjoy such infamy.

Unfortunately, I expect some of his other sons might live long enough to cause trouble.

...

Also, unless I miss my guess, the Rumuah were trying for effective immortality and perfection, and failed.

[Lillowen]

Hrmm.  Aye, it seems like the Rumuah were trying for immortality, and interestingly enough haven't looked into the concept of serial immortality, state-change to infomorph, or other methods, relying on the fairly simple (in concept) yet difficult to engineer ideal of a single body that is permanently renewing.  Useful, to a point, but in the end, flawed by the major limitation of information density in their own minds.  After a while, the old stuff will get overwritten, like a hard drive told x space is now free to use (even though there's data still there).

Maybe it's that I look at it from too transhumanist of a viewpoint, but the answer to me seems VERY simple, and more than easily within the grasp of Rumuah technology.  I'm wondering whether it's a cultural blind spot, or a deeply-held religious belief, or something akin to some odd fusion of the two that prevents them from contemplating these as viable solutions.

Oh, serial immortality: the idea of cloning up a new body and having your mind downloaded into the young clone.  Something most folk miss: a clone, as created, will be a blank slate, neurologically.  No memories, just the biological data needed to run the shell/body.

Huh, also realized the Rumuah also seem to not have looked at downloading themselves into advanced robotic or cybernetic bodies.  I'm now wondering if they have some form of taboo against mechanical enhancement or alteration...

[Brandon]

I get the feeling that the Rumuah never contemplated that reality always imposes tradeoffs .

Case in point, our brains consume the most nutrients and oxygen; followed by our organs and skeleton, and last of all is muscular system. In the rest of the Animal Kingdom, this is in reverse. The average adult male chimpanzee is about the same weight as the average man, but is seven times stronger than said man .

The price for our sapience is us Homo Sapiens being the weakest species in proportion to our relative size .

Reality not only imposes tradeoffs, but no matter how advanced genetic engineering were to become, tradeoffs cannot be eliminated. They can, however, be manipulated. But manipulated just so to create a balance. Not too great or it will threaten the existance of the species nor too light or reality takes over and imposes a harsher price that may cause the extinction of the genetically modified species.

I believe that this is the reason why the Rumuah are dying off: they attempted to eliminate tradeoffs instead of trying to work with them. If they wanted to be ageless then the best thing would have been to attempt the following:

If they were to live to a specific age, they end up dying suddenly, on that very hour down to that very second (think of a lightbulb that suddenly burns out, except you know when exactly it will burn out). Yet at the same time, there is an uncompromising one in one hundred million chance that it will not happen, so that the survivor ends up living indefinitely .

[hariman]

The Rumuah probably had two things keeping them from using cyborg or mechanical bodies.

1: The download option means that the original still dies.

2: Hubris.

They had managed to eliminate diseases, improve their eyes and such to a ridiculous degree, and they thought they would never have any problems with piling more improvements on top of the prior ones.

[Lillowen]

The download option admittedly brings with it a VERY uncomfortable world-view with it: that all intelligence, sapience, etc., is nothing special, nothing magical, that it is merely a side-effect of properly wired circuitry.  It also admittedly removes a lot of the various religious and pseudo-religious / spiritual aspects of things.  These are a security blanket for most of humanity, and therefore, by extension, and of our creations, fictional and real alike.

You ARE correct, though: the original "substrate" still dies, while the program instead is run in a different medium.  I admit, yes, it's a mechanistic as heck opinion and worldview, but such is.  It works on certain assumptions, none of which can be currently proven for or against without resorting to religion and spirituality on one side, and their defeat or removal from things.

I shall avoid getting into the social, political, rights, and other ramifications that occur when both the original AND a downloaded copy are in simultaneous existence.  That's a thorny ball of wax best left to the bioethics experts.

On the mention of immortality...  The odd thing is, we've already, IRL, conclusively and repeatedly engineered a "immortal" fruit fly.  The technology is, barring corporate and governmental interference, probably, at a (not too educated) guess no more than a century away.  Thus, I can't see the tech being out of the grasp of a sufficiently advanced race.  However, as a caveat, there are MARKED social and economic issues that flag themselves very quickly as critical once a species reaches immortality, whether it be via the traditional methods (engineering themselves not to age), serial immortality (repeated downloads to a young, virile cloned body, there to live however long medical technology can keep you alive), or other methods, some of which do not include bodies, and others involving multiple bodies housing the same sentience.  These issues can splinted a society, leaving fragments spinning off into the socioeconomic void.

On a personal level, rather than anything intellectual, I think some of this "incurable" issue has its' roots in the religious/spiritual belief that immortality isn't the provenance of we mere mortals, and that it is hubris to try to take such from the hands of God/the gods/etc.  While some might think me insane, or even equally filled with hubris, I could not disagree more strongly.  I believe we can and shall one day use this as commonplace.

^...^

Whoa.  I'm unusually verbose today.  Must be me being sick.  well, there you have my opinion on the matter.

[hariman]

There's a series of books I read that began with the novel "Hunting Party" that had medical treatments that granted immortality via age reversal.

There were a LOT of nasty problems with immortality, not the least of which was the tendency of those who were "immortal" to start thinking in terms of centuries and ignoring the needs of those who didn't live as long in the short term for their own benefit long term.

I'd rather not see immortality tech developed. Ever.

We've got enough trouble just handling mortality, so immortality will probably be too much.

[Eboreg]

I'm of the belief that in order for a species to advance, it's members need to die in a timely fashion. When people live for centuries, they bring many negative things along with them. Centuries-old ideas, centuries-old skills, centuries-old conflicts, centuries-old baggage. Take Rama for example, would he still be a threat if he lived for a normal period of time? Would he have even become a threat if he had a normal lifespan?

[Brandon]

What is actually being sought is a way to stop the ravages of the aging process. Eternal youth. But eternal is a loaded word because it means forever. In order to be forever young, one needs to live forever.

And nothing is forever .

A better phrase is an indefinite lifespan. Living until killed by something. And in death, still remain young (and then rot ).

The thing about the aging process is that it is not the result of one thing, but a multitude of things (ironically, the immune system being one of them because infections damage cells). The more of those things that are eliminated, the less destructive the aging process becomes (an immune system is still needed though, just a different type). Until a point is reached that there is no aging process and the side effect is an indefinite lifespan .