spoiler
Episode 6 is titled (in English) HDP. I saw a lot of discussion on reddit (but not here) that this stands for Human Derived Protein. Another post showed that the translations always match this in the target language. But in Arabic it’s apparently harder to make acronyms. So it turns out they just used the whole words. I guess this confirms the theory.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/eab895f8-a5bb-49e4-8d49-ac51b14d9358.jpeg
Also, incidentally. The pH of your body is about 7.4. This stuff was 7.1. Apparently a brain is about 7.2. It’s a bit off but my guess is that she saw brains. Her delayed reaction means it can’t have been something too obvious.
I mean, yeah…
They can’t kill anything, they can only harvest what’s dead.
And Carol keeps losing her cool which kills millions of humans.
They’re going to starve if they ever run out of dead humans. Which may be a reason the signal doesn’t convert 100% of the species that decides it.
The group doesn’t have any outside knowledge, they don’t really know what’s going on either. It’s not like joining the hive comes with a secret decoder ring. So just because they don’t know why people were immune, doesn’t mean that’s not the plan.
I know that they have said that they don’t kill, but does that extend to plants? We saw them operating food distribution in the intro and I don’t think cannibalism gives you all the nutrients you need. I would guess reutilizing the human meat is more efficient is what they’ll say is happening but Carol is going to think that is an important part of maintaining their control
but does that extend to plants?
The hive can’t lie, but it doesn’t want to displease anyone either…
To me it felt implied that they couldn’t even kill a plant, especially because “consolidating resources” was being talk about pretty close to it.
Possibly, but a lot of plants want to be eaten, for lack of a better phrase. Most fruiting plants reproduce by being eaten. You’re not killing a strawberry plant by eating the berry, you’re helping it
Plus if people are just eating each other then we’d only last 33 months. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense for an alien virus. Consider that whatever sent the signal knew enough to know our DNA. I think it’s reasonable to assume it has an idea of how many people are on the planet. If you wanted to wipe us out there are more efficient diseases and who knows how long it was going to take us to get the first person infected. It just seems short sighted for something presumably very intelligent
Possibly, but a lot of plants want to be eaten, for lack of a better phrase. Most fruiting plants reproduce by being eaten. You’re not killing a strawberry plant by eating the berry, you’re helping it
I thought the same, and I find it surprising that this thought wasn’t expressed. But then again, it might be that they are aware of it, and still find it immoral to consume something tied to being alive, because of some misguided implicit imperative. There’s only so much innate behavior that you can encode in xNA, and the end result might be contradictory. Just like most people can rationally understand that farming animals is morally questionable, and still eat meat because…they think they really have to. They accept the cognitive dissonance. We all have our own dissonances.
Wildly speculative (my headcanon untill proven wrong, which will happen): The virus was created from a species much like ours, in an attempt to put an end to wars and communication barriers. The broad strokes that the design of the virus allowed in controlling these emerging behaviors made it so that, by erring on the side of EXTREME life preservation instinct, it made it to be not self sustainable. It’s a mistake. But couple that to the other imperative, spreading and replication, and you have a suicidal hyve mind. It’s not that different from extremely aggressive viruses like Ebola. They come in waves because they can’t really become endemic, given that the extreme mortality coupled with the extreme transmissibility burn through the population very fast. It would be an evolutionary advantage for the virus to have mild symptoms and move around with minor consequences, but evolution is not a great optimizer, not on the short term at least, and not when population spikes and ebbs fast. And when something is artificial, it might benefit even less from this long term optimization. So what would this dying population do, faced with imminent death, and an imperative to propagate? Propagate the virus. Turn the entire planetary efforts to broadcasting the virus, as a last ditch effort to try again elsewhere. Perhaps we received the 4th, 5th, or the 960323th rebroadcasting, each intelligent species succumbing to it, and passing it forward. And who knows, it might be that on some species it works different, or it doesn’t work in everybody (hint, hint) and that leads to a different approach to solving the self-annihilation-by-starvation catch.