The Blob Overmind: Malicious, or just too big/different to notice or care?

[nameless_survivor]

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.

[kevin.granade]

It neither knows nor cares what your intentions are, in the scenario you outlined, retaliation would be the response, period.

[nameless_survivor]

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.

[Erk]

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.

[nameless_survivor]

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.

[Erk]

Nope. Ants aren’t aware of pi. Just as your survivor isn’t aware of things that matter to the blob.

[nameless_survivor]

I was thinking your ants were sapient, and trying to communicate with a greater sapience.

[Erk]

I think, to the blob, we’re roughly as sapient as individual ants are to us. It has seen our brains, and doesn’t think they’re worth noting. And I think, to a certain degree, it is correct within the bleakness that is cataclysm. It’s a great old one, and to a great old one a human’s mind and contributions are as interesting as an ant’s is to us.

[kevin.granade]

The only ways out I see for humanity are:

1. One-side cooperation, i.e. humanity stays out of the way of the blob.
2. Team up with mycus/fungus/triffids to drive it off.

1 is honestly not that bad, the blob isn’t trying to kill people on an ongoing basis, it’s just deriving some benefit from occupying the planet. You can just interact with it the same way as you would with a big mass of biologically-derived zombies. You might run into problems somewhere down the line if you successfully eliminate some proportion of the zombies though…

2 is a lot more problematic, I don’t know if you’ve looked into Mycus’ idea of “cooperation”, but it’s not something most people would consider “fun”.

[Erk]

What about 2b: find a way to direct the triffid or mycus into fighting the blob, letting them keep each other busy so we can scratch a little hole for ourselves to recuperate? That seems the most Human thing to do honestly.

[nameless_survivor]

Option 3: Scorched Earth Tactics. Destroy the biosphere utterly, and irradiate or otherwise contaminate the surface to deny our enemies any significant use of the planet. Remaining humans either die, live in underground bunker complexes, or on the moon or something.

2 is a lot more problematic, I don’t know if you’ve looked into Mycus’ idea of “cooperation”, but it’s not something most people would consider “fun”.

Yeah, I ain’t buying what they’re selling. I make a point of burning that wretched mold wherever I find it, and would shoot an Infested survivor on sight if I ever ran across one.

What about the Triffids? I haven’t seen much about them, I haven’t even encountered any yet.

[kevin.granade]

scratch a little hole for ourselves to recuperate?

That’s pretty much my option one, avoid direct confrontation and just endure.

Option 3: Scorched Earth Tactics.

That’s like saying you can get out of a debit to the mob by shooting yourself, yea it’s not a problem anymore, but it’s also not what anyone would call a “win”.

[nameless_survivor]

That’s like saying you can get out of a debit to the mob by shooting yourself, yea it’s not a problem anymore, but it’s also not what anyone would call a “win”.

Yeah, but it beats being tortured to death by some wise guy for not paying up. I’d rather see the earth burn and humanity dead than let the Mycus have us.

Plus, if they think we are dead (and some of us really aren’t) and earth is worthless, they might go away. We still would have the rest of our solar system.

[Eastwardrope91]

Well actually I’m pretty sure it’s got to have a brain somewhere so we find the blob and the mycus’s central brain and you nuke it so hard it doesn’t exist anymore and maybe the rest of the body dies as well I mean you do have brain blobs which tentatively control the local blob forms so for them it stands to reason that they would have a central intelligence somewhere in the multidimensional space they exist in. The mycus on the other hand seem more like the flood from Halo than a normal fungal infestation. And with the flood in Halo you have to burn ALL of it if even one spore remains they can devour your world and they get smarter with every infected being learning from infected beings like generals and pilots and the fungus did come from a portal as only a few spores and produced the infestations it already has it even has different pure forms like the flood and if it’s like the flood it’s intelligence is global and local; local when it starts as it is more animalistic as it becomes more serious it becomes more intelligent which reminds me of the marloss fruit and mycus fruit which proves the mycus became more intelligent and is trying to get you to willingly surrender to its infection.

But plus side is it is at least asking Yea?

[nameless_survivor]

Only until it doesnt have to ask. The moment it becomes more advantageous for the Mycus to brute force infest, it will. It needs infiltrators right now, and allowing its infested human minions to keep some free will lets them do that, while it spreads and learns more about us. That shit is insidious, and must be burned out wherever it is found. The infested may look like your friends or loved ones, but they have mycelia in their brains influencing them. They are already dead, they just haven’t figured it out yet.

[Eastwardrope91]

Still slightly better than the blob. Blob doesn’t really care and brute forced everything. Plus it gives some really strong buffs to those who spend enough energy to try and become one with it I mean using the blossom and blooms will pretty much one shot zombies into allies and kills most other enemies with a few puffs even NPCs will be injured by it instantly giving them the fungal infection.
But there maybe a way to communicate with the mycus like with the flood maybe we can convince it to work with us like when Master Chief worked the Gravemind to stop the ring from firing Cold War pact. So all we need to do is get a weapon that would truly threaten the mycus like a bioweapon and just hang that over their head you stop consuming us and we won’t revert you into compost. Then we use them to kill the blob win win they get the zombies and we get paybacks for the blob destroying human civilization and maybe a buddy for rebuilding civilization. Worst case in that they adapt to the virus and we have a war again hopefully will bigger guns active on our side.

[Erk]

I don’t think the blob has anything we’d consider a brain. It seems more dispersed than that. I’m pretty sure the mycus is, if anything, less favourable than the blob… The blob is so distant that it can ignore us, while the mycus will actively seek to wipe us out. Plus, I’m not sure how the few remaining survivors could hope to threaten the mycus.

[Tamior]

I’m not sure everyone is following the ants analogy here.

Even if somehow ants manage to kill humans threatening their anthill, the most likely result is that PROFESSIONAL ant exterminators will be called in. No one will try and negotiate anything with ants.

If ants manage to form an alliance with something very dangerous to humans (i.e. some bacteria so that now a single bite can potentially kill a human), again, that will simply make humans exterminate this subtype of ants with extreme prejudice, not open up “negations”. So alliance with Mycus might not go too far.

The best bet for the ants is to try and find a way to be useful (or at least a non-issue) to humans.

[Shard]

Mycus actively works with humans that prove worthy, blob just doesn’t care because you are less than ants to it. Pretty much anything you could do to get the attention of the blob would simply result it in moving from uncaring to actively hostile. It is not human, it does not think human, it does not feel human, it does not understand human, it does not want to understand human.

Of the three main factions, I believe triffid would be the most likely to agree to neutrality or alliance, followed by the mycus, while the blob is too distant and unfocused to even consider either. Think of humans as a remnant of a supermassive ant colony, triffid as multiple bee/wasp colonies, mycus as combination of mushrooms, mold, and parasitic fungus, and blob as a hurricane. Two of them have possibilities that don’t involve “You just die” but the third you don’t have much option with besides “Don’t get in the way” if you want to survive.

[Eastwardrope91]

Triffids have shown no sign of recognizing humanity unlike the mycus they have made an attempt so communication is possible with them. The reason we can’t really talk with the triffids is that we don’t have the capacity to speak to them the best we could get to is like talking to a dog a dog knows you are saying something and might vaguely know what you are saying but doesn’t really understand what you’re saying just the gist of something’s as its seen what they mean like when you say " do you wanna go outside? " and the dog gets excited it doesn’t know what you’re saying it just recognizes that when you say that you are going to take it outside. Mycus on the other hand can be talked with because they have still sentient hosts who can convey it’s wants and it’s words as well as telling it what you want and need it has a known means of communication unlike the triffids and blob and more often than not the triffids just want to be left alone and be hippies near their hive thing. As for the blob we have the same problem as the triffids this is also the reason why aliens are such a terrifying prospect as we have no way to communicate to them easily.