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Photino Birds (race) vs Anti-Spirals (race)

NeloAngelo

NeloAngelo

Exceptional
V.I.P. Member
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Vs
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Most of the Anti Spiral are seemingly incapacitated or incapable of fighting except for their leader AFAIK. and I'm busy at work and only able to do a quick scan, but I don't see anything that would let them challenge the leader from those links
 
Read until the part of the very first sentence which elaborated that the author has a degree in mathematics.

Already know who wins.
 
@Stocking Anarchy Is the Anti-Spiral "leader" and Nia essentially the only sentient Anti Spiral in the series? I thought the Ashtanga were unmanned?
 
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Their page is outdated but it states they are weak to some types of gravitational anomalies, although they also outnumber the xeelee 8 to 1 and are stronger than them
 
If they're only multiversal then I don't see them doing anything to the Anti-Spiral leader, who should be MUCH higher than that.
 
Qinglong said:
@Stocking Anarchy Is the Anti-Spiral "leader" and Nia essentially the only sentient Anti Spiral in the series? I thought the Ashtanga were unmanned?
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The 'leader' is actually all of the Anti-Spirals collective consciousness together.

The Ashtanga are unmanned, but possess an artificial intelligence of their own, the same with the Nanda (which appears in the manga & novels), though I don't know if they're sentient or not.

The Visaka (novel only) is it's own lifeform which the Anti-Spiral willed into existence (with the maximum timeframe being the time it took for Team Dai-Gurren to escape the Galactic Spiral Abyss and to defeat the Ashtanga; the shortest timeframe of course being instantly). IIRC it's a virtual lifeform like Nia that's a dragon, so it's likely self-aware, but I'm not sure how smart it is.

There's also the Mugans, but I'm pretty sure those are just robots.

The Anti-Spiral also makes reference to other Messengers from other races other than Nia, but it's unclear if any of them are still around anymore, or how powerful they'd be.
 
Flowering Knight said:
If they're only multiversal then I don't see them doing anything to the Anti-Spiral leader, who should be MUCH higher than that.
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How much higher? The Transcendence was already infinite in actual IRL terms, and Xeelee stomped them out of history.
Qinglong said:
Their page is outdated but it states they are weak to some types of gravitational anomalies, although they also outnumber the xeelee 8 to 1 and are stronger than them
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Xeelee novels are mostly used by Baxter to explore IRL scientific principles by showing us the perspective of humans who have no clue what's going on most of the time as they explore the designs of races and beings far more advanced than them. We don't know much about we know even less about Photino Birds and their technology, except that they were absolutely certain to win against Xeelee

This is why I'm asking if we can give Xeelee feats to Photino Birds, otherwise there's no way to scale them.


^ A more detailed respect thread.
 
King said:
affecting infinite multiverses
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And multiverses here means an infinite number of universes, right?

Anyways, the Transcendece, which is well below the Xeelee can handle recusive infinities-
Through the Witnessing and the Hypostatic Union, it tried to bring the suffering of the past into its full awareness, and so to atone. But mere watching could never be enough. So the Transcendence went further. In the Restoration, every human that possibly could have existed would be brought into reality. It would be a stunning, shining moment of rectification. Such trivialities as causality and consequence would be abandoned—but the Transcendence would be infinite, I reminded myself; and to an infinite being even infinite tasks are trivial.

But still it wasn't enough.

Leropa said, her voice silky, "One way or another, the Redemption must be completed. And if atonement cannot be achieved then it would be better to make a simplifying choice."

I knew what she meant. "If you don't exist, you can never suffer." The ultimate simplicity of extermination.

"The Cleansing is within our grasp, if we will it to be done." - Transcendent
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And if you wish to understand the Transcendence, it is the way you must think, too.

"There isn't an infinite amount of room in my head. So how can infinity fit in there?"

He held up his thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart. "How many real numbers are there between zero and one?"

"An infinite number?"

"An uncountably infinite number, in fact . . . There are many orders of infinity; we won't go into that. So you can cram infinity into a finite space."

"All right. But this is the real universe! What about the granularity of space and time, of matter and energy? What about quantum uncertainty?"

He winked at her. "I won't worry about that if you don't." - Transcendent
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Imagine this. Suppose you owned a starship, bigger than the Nord, an immense ship with an infinite number of cabins. You number the cabins one, two, three… You have one passenger in each of the cabins — an infinite number of passengers. But now another ship docks, with a second infinite set of passengers, all of whom want lodging. What do you do?”

“Turn them away. I’m already full up.”

“Are you? Try this. You work along your infinite corridor. You tell the passenger in room one to move to room two. The passenger in room two goes to four. The passenger in room three goes to six…”

“Everybody shuffles up,” she said. “To the cabin with the number twice their old one.”

“Is there room for them all?”

She thought it over. “Yes. Because I have an infinite number of even-numbered cabins.”

“And how many cabins have you freed up?”

“All the odd ones.” She thought about it. “An infinite number of them, too.”

“So what do you do with the new set of passengers?”

“Welcome them aboard…”

He smiled. “You see? Infinity plus infinity equals infinity. Infinity lets you do things finitude would forbid. Infinity is a mapping; it is a way of doing things, a way of thinking, apparently paradoxical.
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A full Hypostatic Union of every soul in past and future with every other, the ultimate logic, would require an infinite effort. But the Transcendence will be infinite and eternal; for such an entity an infinite recursion is possible, and so it must come to pass. You understand that now.
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Alia saw it immediately. "I would have to do it again. Another life to be endured. And again and again." But the present was a surface surrounding a great ocean of past; the dead far outnumbered the living. "How many lives must I live through, Leropa?"

Leropa frowned. "If you have to ask that, as I told you, you don't understand the nature of the Transcendence."

"How many ?"

"All of them," the undying said simply.

It was the ultimate logic of Redemption. The purpose was atonement not for some of the past, for some of the human suffering it contained, but for all of it. And how could that be achieved piecemeal? So Alia, like every witness, would have to live through every human life that had preceded hers: Michael Poole, his second son, his family, his ancestors, and their ancestors all the way back to the point where humanity was lost, perhaps a hundred billion of them—and, looking forward, all his descendants, to the mighty Galaxy-spanning Exultant generation and beyond. And in the future, all those watchers would themselves have to be watched—and then there would be watchers to watch the watchers—on and on, a recursive chain of watchers upon watchers.

The ultimate logic was that every human being, undying, should live through the lives, and absorb the pain, of every other.
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There are orders of infinity in Xeeleverse and between one order and the next, there are 'uncountably infinite numbers'.

It has been heavily implied that the Transcendence has control over all orders of infinities because that would be required for their way of thinking- they can always create more infinities in front of another infinite set of problems. This might mean the Transcendence is the embodiment of absolute infinity, or so they claim for themselves. In the context of this fight, it means a race far weaker than the Xeelee can trivialize any higher infinities Anti-Spirals scale to. They would force it into infinity vs infinity alone, which always ends in an equal match.

Of course, here is a quote confirming the Transcendence is well below the Xeelee as a whole-
Why must the Transcendence aspire to this? Because it is essential if we are to survive. Alia, the more awake you become, the more control of your environment you acquire, and the more power over your destiny you acquire. We must escape from our long dreaming if we want to live!
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"We are done with fighting. After all this time, perhaps we humans have learned a little wisdom – and humility."

"We humans took on the Xeelee. Remarkable when you think about it: savannah apes against a super galactic power. We did them some damage, we drove them out of the Galaxy. But the Xeelee are far more than we ever were; we could never defeat them. And we barely noticed the true enemy, a foe of both ourselves and the Xeelee and everything made of baryonic matter, matter like ourselves—"
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They are talking about surviving the Xeelee, of course. This is further confirmed when the Xeelee basically retconned the Transcendence out of existence-
'But,' Asher said, 'look at it another way. That's all we found. Of humanity, I mean. M15, Wolf 359.' Jophiel nodded slowly.

'Right. Whereas, if humans had established some Galaxy-spanning super-civilisation—'

'We'd know about it. They'd be here by now.'

'But all we found here,' Nicola said, 'is one shabby lifedome in that Ghost cupworld.' -Redemption
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Think of the story of the race. Our timelines emerged from the oceans, and for millions of years circled the Sun with Earth. Then, in a brief, spectacular explosion of causality, the timelines erupted in wild scribbles, across the universe. Humanity was everywhere. But now, our possibilities have reduced.
-Redemption
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It was another time, another place, where human civilisation had survived for a million years ― they called themselves the Transcendents ― and was doomed. Well, Luru Parz tried to save Earth from the Xeelee. For, you see, in the final stages of our glorious Galactic war against the Xeelee, we were driven all the way back to the Solar System . . . What she did was to turn Earth into Old Earth, a jar of slow time stopped up to preserve its children.
-Redemption
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So if Anti-Spiral's claim of superiority comes from being capable of destroying more infinite structures, then that's not enough to beat even the Transcendence- much less the Photino Birds.
 
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Darth Zion said:
How much higher? The Transcendence was already infinite in actual IRL terms, and Xeelee stomped them out of history.

Xeelee novels are mostly used by Baxter to explore IRL scientific principles by showing us the perspective of humans who have no clue what's going on most of the time as they explore the designs of races and beings far more advanced than them. We don't know much about we know even less about Photino Birds and their technology, except that they were absolutely certain to win against Xeelee

This is why I'm asking if we can give Xeelee feats to Photino Birds, otherwise there's no way to scale them.


^ A more detailed respect thread.
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Yeah after that post I found out from Endless Mike on FV they had gotten boosts in new books, that page mentioned was last updated around 2014 or so
 
Qinglong said:
Yeah after that post I found out from Endless Mike on FV they had gotten boosts in new books,
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To be fair though, all these elements were always present- they were just not elaborated on in the early books but were proposed more as hypotheses and guesswork, which we never saw in action.

Mostly because Baxter's books are meant to explore actual science as I mentioned before and the theories behind multiversal reality wrapping and the nature of the universe were not exactly explored properly by IRL scientists when the original 1990s novels were written. The readers actually get to see the theorized powers and technology in action with the 2000's Xeelee novels in large part due to IRL physics advancing!

The Reddit respect thread does not have material from the newer novels such as Redemption, Transcendence, etc.
 
Of course, being vastly superior to the Transcendece is not the only thing Xeelee and the Photino Birds have going for them. There are numerous examples of them having infinite power that backs up the scaling.
'Olbers' paradox,' he whispered.

'Yes,' said the Ghost. 'A key moment in the evolution of human thought, a philosophical fossil preserved by exiles through the Qax Extirpation … If the universe were infinite and static, every line of sight would meet the surface of a star, and the whole sky would be as bright as the surface of a sun. Even occluding dust clouds would soon become as hot as the stars themselves. That was evidently not so, observed those thinkers of old Earth. Therefore their universe could not be infinite or static.'

'But here—'

'But here, things are different. This appears to be a pocket universe, Jack Raoul. We believe it is a bubble of spacetime pinched off by a singularity. The heart of a black hole, perhaps.'

'Infinite and static.'

'Yes.'

'It doesn't make sense,' Raoul said. 'If the whole sky is as hot as the surface of the sun – Ambassador, how do you keep cool?'

The Ghost rolled, shimmering. 'There is another pocket universe at the centre of the colony. Our heat is dumped there.'

Raoul gaped. 'You have a whole universe for a heat dump? And is that how the stars keep shining?'

'We think so. Otherwise, immersed in this heat bath, simple thermodynamics would soon cause the stars to evaporate. We have only recently arrived here, Jack Raoul; there is much we have yet to explore. But it is clear to us that this cosmos is heavily engineered.'

'Engineered? Who by?'

'The Xeelee,' the Ghost said.
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They also demonstrate infinite reality wrapping here by solving Olbers' paradox and changing Thermodynamics on an infinite scale. Other examples include the Anti-Xeelee being vastly superior to the infinite Plank-Zero AI and them having full control over the Configuration Space, which is made up of an uncountably infinite iterations of the universe.

This is to show that the claim of them being infinite reality wrappers does not just come from scaling.

Anyways, what stops the Photino Birds from going back in time and just retconning Anti-Spirals out of existence, purging their very history from every single timeline?
 
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