So I’ve been reading as much as I could find about the nature of the blob. It is supposedly a hyperintelligent macro-organism whose component cells span across dimensions. It infested earth with a mere thought when experiments being performed with dimensional travel caught its attention. The blobs we see and that control zombies are basically just its cells, no more intelligent than our white blood cells.
What I want to know is what level of motivation or thought did the “Overmind” have in the destruction of human civilization?
1.) Did it know there was a world of thinking minds on the other side, and deliberately destroyed us while colonizing earth.
2.) Did it just notice earth because of our experiments with dimensional transposition, and decided to move into this newly discovered “living space”, never even realizing or comprehending that other minds were there, and just more or less stepped on us by mistake. The zombie apocalypse and rampant mutation just being side effects of its cellular machinery adapting to a new environment.
3.) Did it notice we were here and just not care, neither deliberate malignant intent, nor ignorance, just doing as it willed, with no care of the consequences to us. Like a human walking down a street, seeing an ant, but not changing its footfalls to avoid stepping on it.
No, the devs have stated it is hyper intelligent and HUGE. The question only remains of its nature and motives for colonizing our world. Does it know we are here, and if so was/is it actively trying to exterminate us?
The fact that blob matter stays dormant in humans until we die seems to suggest that it hasn’t even taken notice of our existence, rather than if it was malicious. A disdainful lack of concern for our existence is also possible, but then why would it not just override all of us immediately? Its inside EVERYTHING, if it wanted us all dead, or mutated for its own purposes, we would be. Unless it has as much fine control over its cells as we have of ours.
Another possibility is that it is so alien that the nature of our existence is just as incomprehensible to it as it is to us, and does not understand that it just genocided the shit out of us. Alternatively, it may know we exist but not really see us as other minds, or have a radically different or incomprehensible moral structure.
One last possibility, though it seems unlikely given the bleak setting: It didn’t know we were here at first, but it figured it out after it was too late and the whole planet was contaminated. It has as much control over its individual cells as we do, and as a result its biology has run amok on our world. The whole thing was an accident, and it can’t do a damn thing to stop it, or the side effects of its actions (dimensional rifts, invasion by other extradimensional entities, etc).
From my understanding it doesn’t even notice, it simply grew into space it had access to. It doesn’t even notice deaths of the hosts any more than you notice a few skin cells dying. You nuke a city full of zombies and it is about like a single hair coming loose. (Less actually since it is far larger by comparison)
The Mycus is similar, though it notices when you try to interact with it.
Triffid are more individual and do notice, but they don’t care much if someone else was here first, they just want more land and there isn’t much fight for the wilderness, except the Mycus, which they already have conflict with to begin with.
So what if we gave the blob a poke. Not like nuking zombies, a BIG poke. Like say, transposing a multi-gigaton+ yield antimatter, nuclear, or vortex weapon to one of its home worlds. Would it immediately squish what poked it, or look closer first? It is supposedly extremely intelligent, I would expect that it would at least examine the cause of what damaged it first.
I expect its chain of reasoning would be thus:
The damaging effect is not natural, so therefore another mind was behind it.
Locate source of destructive phenomena.
Search for and locate other mind at origin point of destructive phenomena.
Analyze nature of other mind (either to determine how to best destroy it or out of curiosity).
It SHOULD notice us and realize what we are, and it would not have to be a genius to realize why its getting attacked after it observes our reality closely. It seems to me the big question then is what it would do next.
Maybe its typically symbiotic. The zombies could just be an unusual effect resulting from mammalian biology. You don’t have zombie bugs or plants running around after all.
Mycus mutations are not blob effects, the two are incompatible with each other, with the mycus burning out the blob inside you. Join the Mycus, we are the only side that actively purges the blob!
And the blob does impact bugs, it just doesn’t zombify them, instead it makes them significantly larger and more aggressive.
I think the blob is kinda like people we didn’t and still don’t really care what we hurt in our progress forward I think the blob is just expanding without really caring for what it hurts I mean if it is a hivemind like the mycus then it doesn’t have that small amount of minds that go hey we need to stop polluting and killing all the animals it just has its thoughts alone which is impossible for us as a species to really understand. I mean that we as a species don’t really have the ability to really relate with a hivemind I mean barely have a means to relate to each other and I believe this goes both ways it may even view us like cars, and other machinery just there for its benefit.
Super interesting question, to put it another way, “inflict greater damage than the sum of value obtained by occupying earth”.
I’m really not sure, I’d have to think about it.
I think its primary option at that point would be overwhelming retaliation, but I’m not sure what form that would take.
Options include:
Increased energy expenditure in existing goals, which would take the form of accelerated zombie evolution and more energetic zombies.
Ceasefire with other nether factions.
Deployment of special agents capable of operating directly in Earth-like environments.
Planetary destruction.
On the other hand:
Retreat from Earth is extremely unlikely. To the extent that it is aware of the existence of triffids and Mycus on Earth, it would be unwilling to yield control of a resource to them. Even more so, if Earth proves significantly dangerous, it would be very unlikely to let such a threat continue to exist.
Treaty or dealing with humans is extraordanarally unlikely, this relates to your second point about it simply being too alien to interact with humanity in a direct way.
I could see adding a scenario like this as an end-game thing, but it’s more likely than not to simply end the game rather than presenting a chance of “winning”.
I was’t proposing trying to kill it or force it to retreat, so much as doing something to get its attention enough to take a closer look at what exists here and analyze us further. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a hostile act, that just seems one way of definitely getting its attention. It doesn’t have to fully understand us to realize we don’t like being zombified, and there is plenty of other biomass for it to work with. If it could understand us just enough to make its minions ignore/avoid us, I’d call it a win. The Mycus and Fungus seem like they would be easier for us to deal with, as they don’t have the raw numbers on earth yet, and can be fought effectively for the most part using conventional methods.
The lowest energy/resource expenditure way to deal with humans is to just leave us alone.
Also, what if the Blob had an interpreter? I read some sci fi book years ago, where in order to interact with one species, they had to have another species whose thoughts were closer translate, and then that ones speech translated to human by AI.
What would it take to get its attention in a way that would not result in humanity getting squished like a mosquito or worse?
A congress of human psykers channeling their abilities through a slime pit or something? Something simple. Like very basic universal concepts. Similar to a psychic version of that gold plate we stuck onto the voyager probe.
Finding an intermediary, or more likely a chain of them to help translate human thought into something the blob can roughly comprehend? It can’t be so alien that NOTHING can comprehend it, same with the next thing in line, etc, etc, etc.
Changing it to be more similar to us, or one of us to be similar to it. Like in Prey (2018).
We don’t need to open true diplomatic relations, we just need to convince it to watch where its stepping so what few of us are left don’t get squished.
You’re attributing too much emotion to it. How would a colony of ants work together, doing things only ants are capable of, to convince a developer to not dig up their anthill to build a house there? The most herculean efforts an ant is capable of would still be nothing. The best they could do is be so aggressively annoying that rather than blithely dig them up, the developer actively exterminates them.
I’d move the dirt on the surface around the nest into geometric shapes, along with a simple representation of a circle, radius, and pi. Something to make them curious enough to look closer.
