Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

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Jayngfet
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Jayngfet »

Arioch wrote:
Jayngfet wrote:Aren't Barsam and Loroi archaeological appearances like, hundreds of thousands of years divided?

Isn't it probable that the Soia's needs just shifted from using Barsam to Loroi for one reason or another, even if they could be created for similar reasons initially?
It's true that there is no unambiguous planetary archaeological evidence of a proto-Loroi culture until right at the end of the Soia era coincident with the time of the fall, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't exist prior to that point. Loroi tradition holds that their ancestors lived exclusively in space aboard the dread-stars and starfleets, and had no need for planetary settlements prior to the fall. The oldest stories in the Loroi heroic myths purport to take place in a time long before the fall, though it is difficult to gauge how old they really are.
The obvious retort to that being that if that were true, there would still be either some remains somewhere, or depictions of Loroi, or items clearly made for Loroi use since their physical dimensions are vastly different from the Barsam or Neridi.

The fact that the same can be said for the Soia is a bit suspicious, but then we get into an "absence of evidence" argument where one essentially tries to claim two unknown entities are in actuality the same thing because of superficial evidence and modern political realities.

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Siber
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Siber »

It's easy enough to reconcile by saying that the Soian empire originated outside of the scope of modern civilization, and the ancestral homeworld is yet to be rediscovered.
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Arioch
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

I think that studying the remains of an ultra-tech civilization that was suddenly and violently (and purposefully) destroyed would be a challenge. On the one hand, you do have a snapshot of what things looked like at the end, but it may be difficult to accurately trace backwards in time.

Ancients civilizations leave a lot of distinctive and helpful things for archaeologists to find: funerary burials, midden (trash) heaps, monuments, and abandoned settlements. They tend to build new things on top of old things, leaving clear layers over time. If they have writing, they tend to put it on durable materials like stone or clay. The styles of their goods change over time as they develop and change, and they leave bits of it all over the place to find... the pottery shard in this layer helps us date it.

In a sustainable and digital ultra-tech society, in which waste is recycled and buildings are carefully disassembled before being rebuilt or replaced, and in which all information is digital and wirelessly accessed, the clues don't always speak as clearly. The writing is almost all lost, limited to signage and labeling; there are no newspapers or printed books, only digital devices that accessed data remotely. Surviving devices rarely work, and when they do their volatile memory is usually long since decayed, and even when it's intact, it's just fragments of cached data. Welcome to the cloud. Bodies of the individuals are all from the time of the destruction; bodies were not traditionally buried or discarded. Trash heaps are temporary collection points for materials to be recycled, so as a record they only go back for decades instead of centuries. The technology of tools didn't change much over the whole span of the Soia era; there is a range of object styles, but it's not always clear whether this represents a change over time or a contemporary diversity. Some objects may be clearly used for a particular species, but it's not always clear whether a ceramic spoon was used by a Loroi or a Mozeret, or whether that chair was for a Loroi, or a Neridi who just liked larger chairs. Was this building with a different type of foundation an earlier structure, or a later one done in a revival style? Radioactive element dating is not very accurate at a site that has been heavily dosed with radiation.

One of the reasons that the proto-Barsam and Mozeret can be clearly identified as earlier inhabitants is that they were involved in ground warfare against the Fenrias (ground wars being messy affairs that leave lots of evidence), and they inhabited some settlements that were clearly abandoned long before the fall.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Jayngfet »

The obvious counterpoint to that is that cached data has to have an origin point somewhere, the problem is though that the Soia themselves were largely spacegoing so logically, any cached data would disappear with wherever those ships went off to.

But that kind of proves the point, in that it's a negative you can't prove. The Loroi can't prove the Soia were or weren't anything, and so until other evidence appears anything else is conjecture of the same nature.

Even so, the amount of signage left around would have to be even smaller than described or almost entirely abstracted to the point of uselessness. After all, if you look at a crosswalk sign you can clearly see something resembling human dimensions under specific conventions, and the various other species in the Soia sphere are distinct enough that even a caricatured silhouette would clearly mark them as being different.

The actual implications of this, even in speculation, lead us down a long and confusing path that just leads to more questions that we either aren't getting answers to, or the answers will just lead to even more tangential questions.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Jayngfet wrote:But that kind of proves the point, in that it's a negative you can't prove. The Loroi can't prove the Soia were or weren't anything, and so until other evidence appears anything else is conjecture of the same nature.
This is true, but I don't think people just throw up their hands when there's no definitive proof; rather, they go with the best theory they have. A Loroi would ask, "okay, what's your alternative theory, then?" The Barsam alternative theory amounts to "we think they were magical beings from another dimension," which is not exactly an improvement in the Occam's Razor department.
Jayngfet wrote:Even so, the amount of signage left around would have to be even smaller than described or almost entirely abstracted to the point of uselessness. After all, if you look at a crosswalk sign you can clearly see something resembling human dimensions under specific conventions, and the various other species in the Soia sphere are distinct enough that even a caricatured silhouette would clearly mark them as being different.
I sometimes wonder what conclusions alien researchers would draw about human anatomy when looking at symbology like this:

Image

It's hard to imagine how the unknown cultural taboos and political correctness of an alien culture would affect their symbology. The Soia-era civilization appears to have been one multi-species nation, rather than a collection of allied nations; the artifacts, architectural styles, etc. have some variation, but there are similar variations on different planets with different species. I'm not sure that it makes sense in such a culture to use a lot of species-specific figure symbology on things like crosswalk signs.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Jayngfet »

The thing about those symbols is they're common enough with other symbols in the same context, that are similar to other figures, that you can guess fairly accurately what they're for. If you took a random sample of a hundred bathrooms you'd have enough symbols for male and female and enough disabled bathrooms that you could say "This is a facility made for separate individuals for separate specifications, for similar purposes. Given it's similarity to other depictions it's most likely a member of the same species with some sort of device or accessory". You could guess even if you don't know what a human or wheelchair or sexually separate groups are what the point is, simply because a stick figure human will almost invariably have certain dimensions and because certain common symbols will repeat enough that if you find something related it'll be easy to extrapolate it as some kind of variation.

The bathroom is a good example simply because there are about five confirmed species in that specific civilization, and they're so vastly different in physiology they'd probably require very different facilities since a Barsam is like three times the size of a Neridi and one of them is covered in hair. Out of convenience you'd have a lot of signage because specialized facilities, tools, and buildings would kind of need to exist unless every Neridi needs to physically climb into every chair or every Barsam drives around looking like they're in a clown car. Then you have to account for the fact that one of the other species exists entirely underwater and with radically different biology as a result. Generic Signage would work about as well there as expecting a dolphin to use a urinal.

The obvious point of contention between the two schools of thought will invariably come down to signage. The only point of contention one can imagine there is that the two dominant schools of thought are so far on each end of the spectrum that they point to two different sets of signage. The Barsam view states that the five groups proven to exist were subordinated to some other group. The Loroi view states that no such group exists, and the Loroi were in control. Which means either there are two wildly differing interpretations of specific symbols, or one group is simply ignoring artifacts that don't fit the narrative.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by entity2636 »

I thought I'd throw my two cents into this too. The thing about signage and symbols is that they need context to work. To understand the meaning of the above mentioned bathroom symbols, you need to know in advance, what a bathroom is and that sometimes there are separate bathrooms for different variations of users, to put it blunt. For someone who isn't informed about the meaning of the "inclusive bathroom" symbol, it could very well mean that this bathroom is reserved for a distinct third gender or beings that look like the wheelchair. To be honest, I myself had to look up the correct meaning of said symbol, because I was not sure what exactly it means.

For a space alien or future archaeologist it would be much, much harder and they might come to the conclusion, that humanity as a species has 4 distinct biological genders, because a digital or "throw-away" culture like ours will not leave behind a lot of usable data for them to obtain context. We see this already today when our relatively recent data stored on early computer storage mediums is much harder and often impossible to "access" than, say, a book from the middle ages. Electronic devices produced as recently as or 90s or 00s are often broken beyond repair, while early electronics from the 20s or 30s that have survived are either still operational or can be restored to operating condition with relative ease.

As a matter of fact, this situation presents a serious, but interesting problem or thought exercise. We bury our nuclear waste in special repositories where we believe it can remain safe for millennia. How do we mark these areas in such a way that any future civilization technically able to access them, understands what dangers it holds and doesn't accidentally or out of curiosity dig into them. How do we design markers and symbols in such a way, that they will be understandable to anyone anywhere anytime without any cultural or historical context. As an example => http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... grams.html

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Victor_D »

Siber wrote:It's easy enough to reconcile by saying that the Soian empire originated outside of the scope of modern civilization, and the ancestral homeworld is yet to be rediscovered.
I have a slightly heretical question that occurred to me after reading the above and knowing that the Loroi are most likely a Soia-made artifical species modelled after the humans.

How similar is the Loroi skeleton to that of humans? Suppose, hypothetically, that Loroi were at some point created and bred on Earth when humanity was deep in its Stone Age (perhaps with Soia Dread-Star in orbit of Earth...), and some Loroi died and their skeletal remains were preserved: would modern Human archaeologist even suspect they do not belong to Homo sp. sapiens? DNA testing would of course show that, but DNA often isn't preserved in old human skeletal remains and one would have to suspect something is amiss to conduct DNA tests in the first place.

What if some skeletal remains in some museum's depositories on Earth actually belong to the Loroi? ;)

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by dragoongfa »

As far as I know Loroi skeletons are identical to Human ones with the key difference being their biochemical make up. If they don't chemically test the skeletons then they would be mistaken for humans.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by entity2636 »

Victor_D wrote:Suppose, hypothetically, that Loroi were at some point created and bred on Earth when humanity was deep in its Stone Age (perhaps with Soia Dread-Star in orbit of Earth...), and some Loroi died and their skeletal remains were preserved: would modern Human archaeologist even suspect they do not belong to Homo sp. sapiens?
If that were the case and such a skeleton would be found, I believe an anthropologist would find that, although it would appear to be a skeleton of a female Homo Sapiens, there would be certain abnormalities with it, inconsistent with other Homo Sapiens skeletons from the same time period. For example, the joints would show much less wear, the spine and legs would be straighter, the teeth would not have any decay, the bones in the feet would be different because the Loroi would have been wearing tight shoes with support, and the skeleton would show signs of less muscle attachment, or what it's called correctly in English, because Stone Age humans were considerably stronger than modern ones or the Loroi for that matter. Also, in case the hypothetical Loroi would have suffered bone fractures during lifetime, it would be evident that they were professionally repaired.

Also, the age of the individual at the time of death can be estimated from the bones. In the Stone Age the maximum life expectancy was around 30-ish years, while the average was around 15. So, unless you found Beryl's skeleton (yes, yes, I feel like I'm picking too much on her), one would notice the inconsistency between the individual's age and normal skeleton wear.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Loroi and human skeletons are very similar, but I think a anthropological expert could tell the difference even without a chemical or DNA test.

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Mr.Tucker
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Mr.Tucker »

No one "bred" the Loroi here. Humans are a form and mechanical anatomy template. On the inside, at the molecular level, humans have probably more in common with a turnip. Even if the outside is very similar, there are no human genes in Loroi. A skeleton would ring a bell immediatly, since they might not even use enamel in their teeth, or have different bones, that most likely do not preserve in the same way.
Also, Soia-era tools and artifact in complete form are rare. You may not have 500 samples of bathrooms.
As for the nature of the Loroi, they would be the perfect underling species: capable of rapid reproduction to fill ranks quickly (and be easy to tweak, by means of tweaking small numbers of males to produce large numbers of offspring, something often overlooked), superluminal comms and detection, ability to keep other species in check by mind-reading. Hell, I bet most Loroi spent their times as admins on dread-stars.
That would make them very dangerous to the Soia masters, which leads to one conclusion: those masters were probably digital beings. Immune to telepathy and detection, able to always monitor what their underlings aboard dread-stars were doing (which were Loroi, and be able to do so without the Loroi even knowing), and physically immune even to the otherwise powerful Loroi TK (not gonna help when the very super-ship you are on is literally alive; in the walls, ceilings, floors and all systems; genius loci indeed). Rebelling would probably turn the ship and it's resident VI's/AI's into something that would make the "Event Horizon" look like a spa.
Barsam mythology would label these "incorporeal" beings as spirits/angels, and would remember them as such after the loss of high tech.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Victor_D »

Arioch wrote:Loroi and human skeletons are very similar, but I think a anthropological expert could tell the difference even without a chemical or DNA test.
Wouldn't they dismiss slight differences as being withing the boundaries of normal human variation? Let's not forget that equatorial African Pygmies and Swedish Vikings belong to the same species, yet the morphological differences are obvious at a fist glance. Or do Loroi have something special, not found in humans? (Like an extra vertebrae, rib or something like that?)
entity2636 wrote: If that were the case and such a skeleton would be found, I believe an anthropologist would find that, although it would appear to be a skeleton of a female Homo Sapiens, there would be certain abnormalities with it, inconsistent with other Homo Sapiens skeletons from the same time period. For example, the joints would show much less wear, the spine and legs would be straighter, the teeth would not have any decay, the bones in the feet would be different because the Loroi would have been wearing tight shoes with support, and the skeleton would show signs of less muscle attachment, or what it's called correctly in English, because Stone Age humans were considerably stronger than modern ones or the Loroi for that matter. Also, in case the hypothetical Loroi would have suffered bone fractures during lifetime, it would be evident that they were professionally repaired.

Also, the age of the individual at the time of death can be estimated from the bones. In the Stone Age the maximum life expectancy was around 30-ish years, while the average was around 15. So, unless you found Beryl's skeleton (yes, yes, I feel like I'm picking too much on her), one would notice the inconsistency between the individual's age and normal skeleton wear.
Good points, although I don't think Stone Age Homo sp. sapiens were stronger, physically, than current humans. More fit, perhaps. The Neanderthals were the ones with massive musculature, but you wouldn't confuse the Loroi with them.

Don't forget that the Loroi mature more rapidly than humans and their bodies show little signs of ageing; a 100 years old Loroi skeleton could look the same as that of a 30 years old human. Plus, if they had been bred on Earth, perhaps the Soia did so in special reservations where the Loroi were brought as hunters-gatherers. Maybe they could have even planted Loroi babies among the archaic humans for them to adopt the necessary hunter-gatherer skills. What I am saying is that they wouldn't necessarily have lived in a hi-tech society.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Victor_D wrote:Wouldn't they dismiss slight differences as being withing the boundaries of normal human variation? Let's not forget that equatorial African Pygmies and Swedish Vikings belong to the same species, yet the morphological differences are obvious at a fist glance. Or do Loroi have something special, not found in humans? (Like an extra vertebrae, rib or something like that?)
Any single specimen could always be dismissed as an aberration, but the differences would certainly be noticed. It's possible to determine gender, age and (in many cases) ethnicity in humans just by looking at skeletons.
Mr.Tucker wrote:Rebelling would probably turn the ship and it's resident VI's/AI's into something that would make the "Event Horizon" look like a spa.
5 star comment right here. :D

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by entity2636 »

Mr.Tucker wrote:Rebelling would probably turn the ship and it's resident VI's/AI's into something that would make the "Event Horizon" look like a spa.
LOL! More like 2001 Space Odyssey :D I imagine Event Horizon would happen if one let a bunch of really angry Mizols loose on a ship.

Speaking of which, Arioch => do Mizols "in canon" have mind control or suggestion abilities, or is that, *khem*, classified information? I imagine they would... 8-)

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

entity2636 wrote:do Mizols "in canon" have mind control or suggestion abilities
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is... you'll see for yourself before too long.

boldilocks
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by boldilocks »

Arioch wrote:
entity2636 wrote:do Mizols "in canon" have mind control or suggestion abilities
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is... you'll see for yourself before too long.
That's in 8-12 years for people who're new to the comic :lol:

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Krulle »

I wanted to comment something similar.
"before too long" is a very vague term by itself, and in the context of the comic update speed it borders on the verge of being a lie by obmission of the relevant data.


Anyway, looking forward..... ;)
Vote for Outsider on TWC: Image
charred steppes, borders of territories: page 59,
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Jayngfet
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Jayngfet »

entity2636 wrote:I thought I'd throw my two cents into this too. The thing about signage and symbols is that they need context to work. To understand the meaning of the above mentioned bathroom symbols, you need to know in advance, what a bathroom is and that sometimes there are separate bathrooms for different variations of users, to put it blunt. For someone who isn't informed about the meaning of the "inclusive bathroom" symbol, it could very well mean that this bathroom is reserved for a distinct third gender or beings that look like the wheelchair. To be honest, I myself had to look up the correct meaning of said symbol, because I was not sure what exactly it means.
I think you're overestimating context clues in and of themselves. Again, if you look at a hundred different bathrooms mens and ladies restrooms will have different layouts, but those layouts will be consistently different in the same ways between the two groups. Likewise the wheelchair symbol appears within a number of bathrooms for both genders in addition to having separate bathrooms, so it's reasonably easy to surmise that the third group isn't distinct.

Even if you don't know what a bathroom is, and all the sinks and toilets have been destroyed, you can still tell these rooms were made to move large amounts of fluids in specific ways, and are constructed using tile, linoleum, and other materials that don't soak water as carpets do. So even if you only have the symbols themselves and simply look at what's there in and of itself, you'll be fine.
For a space alien or future archaeologist it would be much, much harder and they might come to the conclusion, that humanity as a species has 4 distinct biological genders, because a digital or "throw-away" culture like ours will not leave behind a lot of usable data for them to obtain context. We see this already today when our relatively recent data stored on early computer storage mediums is much harder and often impossible to "access" than, say, a book from the middle ages. Electronic devices produced as recently as or 90s or 00s are often broken beyond repair, while early electronics from the 20s or 30s that have survived are either still operational or can be restored to operating condition with relative ease.
I think you very much underestimate the amount of information still on paper or preserved elsewhere. You won't get a perfect snapshot of all life but we can see enough surviving artifacts, made of wood and other perishable materials, from our own history that've lasted hundreds of thousands of years that it's fully reasonable to assume that even if humanity was violently killed to a man tomorrow half a million years later an alien archaeologist would in fact find surviving books, magazines, and newspapers if they looked hard enough.
As a matter of fact, this situation presents a serious, but interesting problem or thought exercise. We bury our nuclear waste in special repositories where we believe it can remain safe for millennia. How do we mark these areas in such a way that any future civilization technically able to access them, understands what dangers it holds and doesn't accidentally or out of curiosity dig into them. How do we design markers and symbols in such a way, that they will be understandable to anyone anywhere anytime without any cultural or historical context. As an example => http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... grams.html
That's an alltogether different argument because those signs need to not just be understood, but understood to a degree far greater than anything discussed here. Specialists spend a lot of time debating increasingly ridiculous hypothetical situations like robotic mole miners coming in from below, or similar such things. A discussion of "how can a random no context human know this is bad" is a far simpler problem.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by entity2636 »

Jayngfet => I think you are missing the point slightly, because your counterargument about signage and importance of context is kind of recursive - to decipher the meaning of signs you have extrapolated/created context based on a large sample of data. We as a species have a rather long history and consequently have loads of sources from which to gather context. In fact, we have so much context in regard to our own species and civilisation, that we don't even realize it.

For the sake of discussion, let's assume that our alien archaeologist who is exploring the desert of Earth, is a Pipolsid and that the Pipolsid for whatever reason haven't yet made contact with any land based sentient species. He finds a sign similar to this Image How would he interpret it?

And, as Arioch queried when presenting the bathroom symbol: "what conclusions would our Pipolsid archaeologist draw about human anatomy when looking at symbology like this?" Just the symbol, without it being attached to a bathroom.

*edited* better sign example
Last edited by entity2636 on Wed Jan 17, 2018 7:57 am, edited 3 times in total.

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