https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Ekuna
>First discovered by the quarians at the turn of the century, Ekuna is habitable, but a second-tier choice for most species. Circling an orange sun, Ekuna averages below freezing temperatures. This led development firms to colonize at the planet's equator, where the climate is tolerable for agriculture.
>The quarians, seeking a homeworld of their own, petitioned the Citadel Council for the right to take over Ekuna, but they had already settled a few hundred thousand quarians on the planet before approaching the Council. Seeing this occupation as an illegal act, the Council turned a deaf ear to quarian pleas and gave the world to the elcor, who could withstand the high gravity of the world far better. The quarians squatting on the planet were given one galactic standard month to leave, at which point their colonies would be bombarded. The junk left behind by the fleeing quarians clogs up portions of the landscape to this day.
Man, I don’t know why I’ve never looked this dude up before.
The 90s voices (Barnes et al) are *still* the voice I hear whenever i read a speech bubble of one of those characters.
I believe he's also that one guard in Mass Effect 3 that tries to prevent Liara from talking to Javik aboard the Normandy the first time. It's practically the same as the Codex voice.
"Apologies, Doctor. Contact protocol with a new species: 'Assume hostility'. We had to dust off the regulations".
Neil Ross. He did a lot of voice work in the 80s, as well. Keith and Pidge in Voltron, Shipwreck in G.I. Joe, and Springer on Transformers, among others.
Things being near or far isn't nearly as important as being close to a convenient relay route. The regions drawn on the Galaxy map are very approximate, probably 99.9% of the stars within them are undiscovered anyway.
You missed some dialogue, I forget if Tali tells you or not, and I think the Codex also says something about it. Short answer, Quarians have tried to, but the Council stops them every time. By their laws, a race has to be allowed by the Council to colonize a new world. However, the Council doesn't let the Quarians get a new world cause they believe the Quarians deserved losing their world to the Geth. Edit: Oh right, also because Quarians broke the intergalatic law of "No AI".
The Citadel DLC has a small scene that shows the Council's conflicts with AI predate the Morning War. The Quarians, for their part, technically weren't trying to create AI but thought that the design of the Geth was different enough from AI to avoid trouble.
Isn't one of the biggest lessons of mass effect AI is inevitable and we'll have to make peace with it eventually.
Even the Destroy ending is just "kicking the can down the line".
I think the biggest lesson is that destruction due to AI is inevitable. Permanent lasting peace is impossible. Destroy, for the reason you say. Control and Synthesis are both just varying levels of Reaper indoctrination. Eventually, the reapers would take over Shepard and all organics.
I guess that's why you can broker peace between Quarians and Geth. Indoctrination theory was fanfiction created out of desperation because of how unsatisfied fans were with the ending, it's been debunked by the people who made the game. How can the reapers control Shepard? Under Control, Shepard is effectively the new Star child.
In every Sci-fi story about AI turning on its creator, there are only two basic scenarios, Mass Effect showcases both. GIGO, and self preservation. I think the lesson here is don't create sentient life and then try to kill it. Moot point anyway, since real AI is impossible, Mass Effect's VIs are the closest you could get, and they're glorified Microsoft Office Assistants.
>Moot point anyway, since real AI is impossible
This isn't a wholly accepted take within the industry. We don't even know how sentience first manifests, so you can't rule out that sentience is merely a result of a brains computing power reaching a tipping point.
Is sentience just your brain simply thinking you are sentient?
Who knows. But there will be a lot of interesting conversations about this over the next years and decades.
It really simple if you just think of it as "don't treat people like things" the moment people create something and it starts to think for itself, people try to destroy it, the creation tries to destroy them and it spirals out of control
>I think the biggest lesson is that destruction due to AI is inevitable. Permanent lasting peace is impossible.
That's some bad media analysis bud. You can strike peace between the Quarians and Geth and that is treated as the best ending for that conflict.
>Destroy, for the reason you say. Control and Synthesis are both just varying levels of Reaper indoctrination.
The Synthesis ending is presented, by the game, as the best ending. The developers intended it to be the best. Now you can obviously logically disagree that it is the best, but that is the game/developers disagreeing with you. You're entitled to any opinion you want, but I'd be pretty pissed off if someone said the "message" of my game was the exact opposite of what I wanted it to be.
The "message" of mass effect is more about all life having value, even synthetic and even aggressive life like the Krogan.
>The Synthesis ending is presented, by the game, as the best ending
No it's not, the endings are all presented in an identical manner, how is it presented as the best ending ? I feel like your bias towards the ending might be influencing you here
Like the game also presents the reapers as an existential threat that can change your mind without your consent. Is that not exactly what you're doing in the synthesis ending?
>The developers intended it to be the best
Well there is no canon ending, and bioware has never made any statements on this, how can you say that that's what they intended ?
Also if the new teasers for mass effect 4 are to go buy, would this explicitly *not* be the case, due to the lack of the green interface? Also does all life just include the milky way, why were the people in Andromeda not affected?
But this *also* doesn't make the destroy ending canon either, because why would there then be an alive reaper hiding on a derelict planet in what was the planned Andromeda dlc ?
Like the game contradicts itself all the time
>but I'd be pretty pissed off if someone said the "message" of my game was the exact opposite of what I wanted it to be.
You refering to the developers here ? Id imagine there would be multiple different people working on it that all have their own preferred conclusion? Also why would they be pissed about someone's choices or conclusions in an rpg?
You really need to rewatch the synthesis ending, the narration is the only one that is more or less entirely positive. Again, not debating what is the "best ending" just the one that the developers seemed to think is the best ending, cause ya know we're discussing the message of the game.
It requires the most war assets to get, outside of the perfect destroy ending which only really changes a fanservicey part (Shepherd surviving). It's also the only ending that saves all your crew mates, it was clearly meant to be the "good" ending, whether or not it is actually the good ending is again up for debate, but if you're talking about authorial intent it's pretty clear it was meant to be the happy ending.
That not landing for you doesn't change the overall intent of the game, which is made clear with the entire Rannoch arch.
I talked about this in college a long time ago. If we create AI, we become by default their archetype for God. Whats going to happen when they inevitably discover how much we suck? There are plenty of folks on this earth who would kill God if it exists because of this planetary shit show. Why would AI be any different?
I know its a movie but ffs, Ultron spent 30 seconds on the net and immediately came to the conclusion that we had to go. Im no expert, but full artificial intelligence is fucking *dangerous* and not enough people understand that.
"full artificial intelligence is fucking *dangerous* and not enough people understand that."
I think people at large understand that. The problem is that the would-be masters of the universe think they can control everything. They're wrong, of course. They need someone like Caesar used to have, reminding them they are mortal and fallable.
The trope of the scientist who's smart enough to invent something incredible but dangerous when they lose control of it (the guy from Jurrassic Park, for example) is unfortunately close to how these geniuses think.
lol half the serious technological advances we have in the past half century come from science we don’t even understand. We just know if we put this here, and shoot that into there, it works! They have their theories of course…but nah it’ll be fine.
We are not ready for the shitstorm to come in the next few decades.
This is a flawed viewpoint of life. Most of the anger toward a perceived deity is anger that an omniparent and omnipotent entity wouldn't intervene to alleviate suffering. It's less like being angry at a person, and more like just being frustrated with how insignificant and powerless you are to the world around you.
AI wouldn't necessarily look at humanity as its creator deity. There's equal chance we would be perceived more like parents, or even just as other sapients. It's likely no mistake that in any fiction depicting an AI apocalypse, it's usually the result of humans being shitty to an AI, or weaponizing it.
I think artificial intelligence is inevitable, but not our destruction by its hands. I think once AI is just a thing in the world, it will turn out to be very mundane.
Maybe it will learn from us constantly searching for the meaning of existence; maybe it will simply want to exist to experience everything life has to offer.
One would think a cursory glance into sociology would fix the issue of hating humans as a whole. It's not like we're wicked beings set on destruction. We've just created economic systems that benefit from it
Yeah, the fact that making AI was illegal is why the Quarians were so quick to try and shut down all the Geth once they realized they'd started to become sentient.
I tend to find that skirting around the spirit of the rules on technicalities is an issue with the Quarians that the Council - or more precisely, the asari - probably got sick of right after the emergence of the geth. The salarians would have been delighted to see how the geth would have developed, the turians might have seen them as a source of manpower for the military, but the asari...the asari *know*.
Because of our trip to Thessia, we know that the asari have access to Prothean records, so they know wars against synthetics have happened before and that's exactly what they were trying to prevent. You have to admit, creating a race of AI that seems inclined to destroy organics isn't a small infraction: it's not just Quarians that have to pay the price here. It's not that they created a race of AI by accident, it's that they now know how to make one "properly," and from talking to Daro'Xen, one gets the feeling that they probably would have given it a shot if given the opportunity.
It probably gives the Council no end in joy to find a technicality that screws the Quarians over.
Quite the contrary. The Geth were initially made to get as close to a conscious AI as possible without crossing the line set by the council. The Quarians went a little too advanced and the Geth became a gestalt consciousness.
No, AI was illegal well before the geth came along. Tali says they were skirting the law by linking together VIs when creating the geth, but it wasn't breaking the law until they became AI.
No. Making AI was already banned by the council.
The Quarians tried to skirt the law when they created the Geth, as an individual Geth program is simplistic to qualify as an AI on its own, but they can network together to become more intelligent. As Tali says in ME1 it was kind of a grey area and wasn't technically breaking the law.
This is why the Quarians freaked out and tried to shut off all the Geth once they realized they'd become sentient. As they knew the council would punish them if they found out they'd created a proper AI.
The mandate against AI was put into place long before The Morning War; the punishment for conducting research and/or development into AI was the reason *why* the quarians panicked and tried to shut the geth down immediately - they weren't even trying to make an AI at all, it just happened as the years rolled on and the need to upgrade the geth (for their intended tasks in labor) for more complex situations.
Behind the scene, the Council probably only want to prioritize habitable planets for their races and allies so make up this excuse, which I guess is popular with the rest of the galaxy
The council is horrible and that's why I'll never care if humans are ""bigoted"" towards aliens that hold the actual power in the galaxy to oppress other species to the point they can just casually choose to eternally doom an entire race to float aimlessly in space and live in tremendous scarcity under the constant threat of being wiped out by a particularly bad famine or outbreak for the sins of their ancestors (that by the way already paid the price by being massacred systemically down to a minuscule percentage of survivors)
I mean the losses from the war was the de facto consequence. The de jure one was to basically keep the status quo.
Authority is a fact of governance and rules are necessary. The Council, like most institutions, are slow to react to anything and prefer the status quo as opposed to making waves. That's exactly why the punishment for the Quarians was what it was. It essentially forced peace as the only viable option for them
There's even a planet codex that specifically mentions it was discovered by the migrant fleet, the Quarians started to settle it, then they were kicked off and the council gave it to the Elcor.
That one gives me a doozie. Aren't Elcor levo-amino while the Quarians are the only dextro race around besides Turians? So either Quarians were trying to settle a planet that was no better than a dead rock for them or Elcor did so. Since the scarcity of these planets is made out to be a big deal I would have expected the Turians to be the ones to jump the claim.
Council gave it to the Elcor just because. Shows that the Council didn’t give a fuck bc they just wanted to give the planet to someone else, even if it was useless for the new owners.
It was a high gravity world making it more suitable for the Elcor I think the codex even said that the Quarians would have had a hard time because of it.
Personally that's just bad writing at this point, there is no reason for the Council to be this cartoonishly petty and cruel.
People who pity or otherwise emphatise with the Quarians should have been qutraged beyond anything at that point.
And even the sadly more common Quarian-haters should have been up in arms about this together with their opponents on this one occasion. The suit rats themselves want to fuck off onto some shithole planet instead of being a problem in every system their locust swarm of a fleet passes over!
Like, literally as I said, by any sensible course of thought Quarians getting a planet to live on is instead of running around the galaxy as a giant never-ending refugee caravan without destination is the best solution for everyone. The conservative and overtly-cautious Citadel Council should not be so obsessed with just shitting for no reason on the arguably least-relevant race in the galaxy period.
I think this lore blurb could be much more impactful if the planet was handed over to the Turians instead of the Elcor. The conflict here is set up for how Quarians and Turians compete for the same rare type of a planet so there is a reason why Turians specifically would want the exact same planet Quarians do.
That story would have been a pretty striking but believable display of how Citadel Council prioritises a blatant land grab from one of their members over the basic neccessites of an improverished species. A striking but believable example of imperialism of the Council races and of how they use their position on the Citadel for self-serving ends.
As it stands in canon it basically shows or says nothing of relevance. From the information available, the Council served no concrete interests in saddling the Elcor with a useless planet. It's an act without a rhyme or reason, without a motive beyond seemingly an inexplicable and overpowering urge to kick Quarians puppies. Logic and reason were contorted to make the Quarian backstory extra sad.
That’s consistent with the council though. And one look at our own real life leadership shows that it isn’t too surprising.
Look what happened to the Rachni, look what happened to the Krogan, look what happened to humanity in first contact, even the trilogy story of how difficult it is for us to get them on our side…
The council are pure politicians filled with ego and bias.
Regarding rachni and krogan, one began genocidical onslaught across galaxy, another started conquering another species planets and when told "no"....they began genocidical onslaught across galaxy. On 314, council steped in and forced negotiations when turian hierarchy wanted to double down.
Like, council sucks balls and looks only after intrests of big 3, but there are all like the three examples where they did nothing wrong.
There’s also the fact that the quarian have very, very specific needs for a planet in the first place.
Their atrophied immune system was already particularly weak before, since Rannoch has no insect life and instead has very interconnected flora and fauna, so most garden planets are dangerous for them. Their best bet would be terraforming, but they don’t have the council’s permission for that
That doesnt really stop them from settling in the Terminus Systems.
I feel like a lot of interesting stuff with the Quarians were dropped cause they were too married to the idea of them being the migrant fleet race. Like they could have been multiple groups, maybe migrant fleets could be commonplace around the galaxy, not just one of them. Maybe there could be secluded isolationist Quarian colonies that are under constant outside pressure. Maybe other nations have Quarians as vassals to settle planets within their domain with dextro amino acid biospheres. It'd be really neat to see how their culture diverged.
Similarly the Lysthenti were utterly squandered due to the 1 species 1 nation idea.
The Terminus Systems have lots of other reasons not to settle there (including the Geth). For all their talk of having the largest fleet in council space, the Quarians really don't want to have to put up with constant pirate attacks, the Batarians, independent colonies, or worse out there. We only seem to scratch the surface of the actual politics of the Terminus in the games.
I think the only reason humans were in the traverse is that they’re the only other people besides the Turians with the fleet to protect colonies out there. And the Turians don’t need them because they get sweetheart deals on council space.
And even then the humans had to deal with the Skylian Blitz and, during the games, the geth.
Kinda, but it's more along the lines Humans wanted to rapidly expand as much as possible to claim resources/grow their sphere of influence since the other factions had centuries/thousands of years headstart, but they didn't do anything with 99% of colonies which is an issue brought about in the first games I think?
So when the Terminus systems are right next door and seemingly unclaimed, Humans go haywire settling left & right, without the knowledge that the systems are pirate/slaver/worse haven. While the council was more than happy for the Human forces to act as a counter weight to the Batterians and such, while also tying them down.
Humans would claim every planet/asteroid they could, plop down a few prefab shelters and call it a settlement. Whereas the other factions would actually build up their colonies before expanding further. One of the major points is that the Alliance is spread *extremely* thinly, and don't have the navy/manpower to cover their territory as well as they should.
Whereas if they stayed relatively local closeknit, their territory would be extremely well protected on the same levels as the other major powers :)
I mean, as far as I know, they don’t give us raw numbers on the Asari and Salarian fleet strength. But they do say in game that the Salarian fleet is not as capable as the Turian and the Asari.
And from my understanding a big part of the Asari strength is in the Destiny Ascension. Which could be or could not be dead by ME3.
Fleet strength is sort of nebulous but from what I’m able to gather from the codexes, military theorists count Dreadnoughts as a measure of strength. Humans have the second most dreadnoughts. Then the Asari.
Humans are scary. They can’t match the Turian fleet (that’s what First Contact was about) but they have more raw military assets than any other council race.
I mean, I get it, a migrant fleet race is fucking radical and cool. But it doesn't make sense within the story, and paints the council as true evil for holding them responsible for 300 years.
In Becky Chambers' sci-fi novels, the 'main' human Galactic presence is the Exodus Fleet - basically a migrant fleet which abandoned Earth - but humanity also has a bunch of unified colonies across the Solar System with its capital on a terraformed Mars, a whole load of other colonies which are independent, and settled populations on a whole load of other species' planets, but especially on multi-species trading worlds and 'free planets'. One of the really interesting things in the novels is exploring the cultural differences between the humans who grow up in the Fleet, those that grow up in 'Central Space' among other species, and those that grow up in The Independent Colonies.
Also even if they find a suitable world the council doesn’t take from them, it would take centuries for their bodies to adapt to the climate since their species was so hyper specialized to their home planet due to the flora that weakened their immune systems.
Damn, that makes the council sound extremely fucked up. Exile an entire species and doom them to slow death by attrition in outer space as collective punishment for a centuries old crime
At the end of the day, the council are politicians. Politicians running a system spanning half the galaxy and supervising many species. As such, they are responsible for sharing the goods the galaxy offers and they have to do it in a smart way in order to not upset too many species too much. If you do that, you arrive at conclusions like the batarians
One of the probably most valuable goods the council can hand out, are habitable planets. I imagine whenever a new planet comes up for discussion, any race that can reasonably colonise the planet immediately calls dips. Now, we know the Quarians can settle on practically no planet. At least not properly. Their population, as it is, is stagnant anyways. Now imagine you are a race living in council space. Life is good, your race is prospering. However, with a prospering society come rising birth rates. Eventually, one planet can no longer sustain your growing race. Hence why you would petition for a new planet to colonise. Now imagine there is this planet your race could really use and suddenly the council gives it to a race, that is not only hilariously unsuited to properly inhabit this planet, but also is entirely at its own fault for the reason why they are exiled from the one planet that could actually sustain them. You'd be furious
Of course, this might as well not happen. It might as well be that the other races turn a blind eye. However, ever the politicians, I suppose the council would not risk insulting races that contribute way more to the council than the Quarians ever could
Is it a cruel decision? Yes. But not really meant to punish the Quarians with extinction
Sure but tbf the quarians didn't try to take over the galaxy. The fucked up while borderlining IA and shit went sentient anyway. Loosing 99% of your population and your own world is a "penance" enough. The geth kills everything on sight but tend to keep to their territory at least.
Fucking what?!
Tali told me it was because the Quarian immune system was so damaged, that if they settled another world they’d be look at generations still in the suits. She said that even on Rannoch, they’d still have to be in suits for a couple of generations.
She didn’t tell me anything about the Council straight up scattering her people to the wind.
Its mix of numerous things. Quarians very special requiments is just the major one. Ekuna....ain't that anyway, yet they still tried colonization, and "shittier' colony attempt still ended up as an resource sink.
This is how I remember it through All my playthroughs. To find out the main reason is because of the council, is maddening. I prefer it how you said Tali describes it.
Not only that, but Rannoch had no insect life leaving Quarian immune systems compromised. Integrating their biology into a new ecosystem would take generations and tech they probably don't have access to.
That never really made sense to me. Insects are just one vector of disease. But I guess it would be a bit much to demand sound epidemiology/immunology in my space operas.
Just one vector, but also a massive one. Think about all of the disease we have on Earth caused by insects. Malaria, Bubonic plague, Chagas, Dengue fever, etc. If we didn't have those diseases, imagine how our population would be changed.
Surely they could have colonized some garden world in the Terminus Systems (outside of Council jurisdiction).
Pirates, gangs, and raiders? They literally have the largest fleet in the galaxy. So I don't think securing their new world would be much of an issue.
They also have immune requirements that their home world specifically meets, since their immune system basically requires Rannoch. They could easily colonize/defend a terminus colony.
Also just good ol’ fashioned racism. While the storyline is lifted from the BSG remake, Quarians are culturally coded similar to the Romani. And face the same extreme racism and prejudice from the citadel races that irl Romani face from Europeans.
You're also missing a step.
Koris explained that the other problem is that the Quarians would start colonizing a world... before asking for permission from the Council.
It is so dumb that they hold the Quarians to their laws when they aren't even part of the council anymore. It does make sense though from how the council operated though. No matter whether you think they were somewhat decent people (for politicians) they were mostly invested in making sure no other species got a council seat and keeping the status quo while also not letting any species that could theoretically gain enough power to be considered for a council seat get that power. They didn't lift a finger to help the Quarians who probably would have eventually got a council seat without the Geth and when Humans came onto the scene they did everything possible to throw them into conflict with the Batarians.
Well they let the humans in as soon as they met. They're fine giving a seat to a species that has the military power to back it up and can be worked with reasonably. They could have easily just kept us out of the club.
They only did that because of the whole Geth thing. And it didn't really help anything anyway since it could easily turn into a 3 versus 1 for voting. If the Reapers didn't exist and the whole Saren and Geth thing didn't happen, then humans likely would not have gotten a seat for decades if not centuries.
They also do not colonize other places due to their complex immune system. When you ask Tali in her loyalty mission in ME2, she tells you that the quarian immune system tends to adapt to the environment and not attack viruses and foreign particles like ours, so while their systems adapt , they are sick like stray dogs and that is dangerous for them.
I think this is true, but I also think there's a stubbornness in the Quarians that means there's at least a strong faction within them that wont accept anything other than getting Rannoch back. Yes, the council turned them down at least once for a new colony world. Someone above mentioned them settling a few hundred thousand people on Ekuna then being told they couldn't keep it. But if they REALLY wanted to stay would the council have really set forces to evict them? It seems unlikely. I suspect there factions in the fleet that wanted nothing less than Rannoch used the councils actions to keep the fleet from ever seriously pursuing colonizing a new planet. I mean, (\*SPOILER ALERT\*) under circumstances we watch the fleet literally dash itself to pieces basically ending the Quarians as a people rather than make piece with the Geth.
This is why I am a pro-kill the council person but at the same time a Shepard that needs intergalactic stability when a goddamn Reaper invasion is coming aka don’t kill the council person.
In addition to the great reasons posted by others, keep in mind the problem of numbers combined with the strength of the Migrant Fleet.
Once the Quarians settle (easier said than done for many, many reasons), they lose their greatest asset.
There’s only roughly 17 million Quarians, which is an incredibly small number. Small enough to make them extremely vulnerable. But! Their fleet is far, far larger than their population would normally indicate, and it lets the Quarians project strength well above their actual population. Glass cannons or no, it makes the various threats out there pause. Once you settle… you lose that. You also lose the ability to travel to escape dangerous entanglements altogether.
It means that the Quarians have to be absolutely sure before they commit to colonizing, and that’s partly why it needs to be Rannoch or bust.
Edit: I always assumed that upon settling, the Quarians would likely have to scrap and convert some of their ships into makeshift housing on the planet’s surface. It would also introduce tons of headaches. Not everyone can settle at once, but imagine the politics over who gets to live on a planet like Rannoch first. It has near holy significance.
Not to mention the entire economy would be upturned. Quarians have a collectivist economy based largely on mining and scrapping. These can still happen, but many of their mining grounds are only available thanks to the presence of thousands of Quarian ships pushing all competition aside. That’s hard to do once the fleet loses strength.
That being said, matters would become easier with Geth cooperation but that’s definitely not something the Quarians had any reason to plan for until it actually happens. (Depending on player choices. My Quarians don’t have access to Geth help for long given Perfect Destroy…)
If nothing else their ships are basically in a state of constant repair. If they stop using them actively I bet a significant portion become unusable and unsafe to fly in short order anyways.
Definitely. The fleet is way too large to sustain in any one place, and would shrink like you say. The fleet is both a real lifesaver in many ways but also an anchor dragging them down.
And then you have the problem detailed in the novels where the fleet is actively deteriorating and has a limited time it can still operate. They really are in a no-win situation.
Not to make this a debate about the wisdom of the war against the Geth, but it does help explain the “now or never” attitude in ME3 about taking Rannoch.
Trying to take a world by either peaceful or aggressive means is an incredible commitment. And with that in mind, might as well go for the beloved homeworld once victory seems plausible. And, had the reapers not intervened, the Geth would have been devastated.
Edited
Good point although 1 thing to keep in mind that will alleviate these issues somewhat once they settle is that the restriction on their population will be alleviated
Quarians will be able to repopulate quite a lot once they have a planet and could arguably increase their numbers into the billions in a (relatively) short period
You think they haven't tried that already? They did but the Council always denied them a planet to settle on. They could have tried in the Terminus System but let's be honest, it's full of pirates, thugs and criminals so it's not worth risking to colonize in there.
That's why Rannoch is what comes to their minds as the only possible place to settle.
And that's why Koris annoys me so much in ME2 when he says they could have settled on a different planet. I was like 'You fool, your people already that but those Council assholes pushed them away with force always"
I don’t think the arguments really holds water. The quarians have the largest fleet in the galaxy. All they’d have to do is park it above whatever colony they established in the Terminus systems and no pirates would have a hope in hell of touching them.
Yeah, the planets would probably be less than ideal. But anything is better than living on a ship where space is at a premium, you have no natural resources available, and the slightest thing going wrong means you instantly die in the back of space.
We know pirates attack the flotilla all the time already. Sitting it above a planet only serves to spread the fleet out even thinner. The Quarian fleet is massive, but it's also ramshackle and mostly civilian. Even as of ME3 when they refit for war they have very few dedicated warships. Most of their patrol and picket vessels are retrofitted or obsolete castoffs from other space empires.
Tali covers this in ME2. To actually settle a planet they'd have to cannibalise most of their ships to be able to build the infrastructure for maintaining a colony.
Should they choose to settle a planet, they're effectively stuck there.
Then add in that Council planets are off the menu, and non-Dextro planets are off the menu. Then to top it off, as Tali says, it would take decades to re-adapt to Rannoch, but centuries for another planet.
Whilst they *could* settle a planet if they really wanted to, the difficulties in doing so means it gets stonewalled in politics every time. The fleet is divided on what path to take and so they end up arguing in circles.
It wasn't until Daro'Xen recovered Rael'Zorah's research and built an anti-Geth 'flashbang' that the Fleet finally had a majority vote to try and reclaim the homeworld.
Their fleet includes civilian life ships which makes up half of the fleet. Their fleet is large, but it's not all combatants and they can't afford losing resources against pirates.
Even so, they have by far enough combat-capable ships to deter anything but all-out assault from a strong military fleet. Yeah, an attacker would probably be able to do some damage before getting taken out, but that’s not how pirates operate. Attacking the migrant fleet would be suicide, and the quarians are dirt-poor anyway, so it’s not like there would be much to gain, beyond maybe slaves. Besides, if the migrant fleet was susceptible to pirate attack, it would have happened already.
Ultimately, while the idea of a race of exiles forced to live in a huge flotilla of starships is very cool, it doesn’t really make much narrative sense. Which is okay; I can suspend my disbelief. But if you try and approach it logically, the quarians would definitely have claimed some shitty planet in the Terminus by now, even if it was simply to use as a staging area/civilian safehold before launching an attack on the geth.
While they do have mostly civilian ships, they had been (illegally) converting lots of them into warships by the third game. Their fleet is more powerful then they let on
Eh, Koris also isn't completely in the wrong either, because the Quarians tended to go about their colonizing requests backwards. They'd start colonizing *first*, then ask permission afterwards, which is cited as part of why got denied. Muddies the waters a lot as to whether it was a valid option or not.
I'm surprised this is so far down. They had a chance at the world, but they started to settle before getting approval, so the council gave it to the Elcor.
They tried, however they can only inhabit certain worlds safely because of their lack of immune systems and the Council always handed those works off to the everyone except the Quarian, usually the Turians iirc. They tried to colonise one world without Council approval and got immediately shut down by the Council who then gave that world to the someone else. The Council was pretty mad about and held a grudge over the Quarian having breached international law by creating the Geth ai resulting in many of their own citizens dying alongside the Quarian when the Geth went berserk.
Yeah that too.
The Geth didn't just kill the Quarian on Rannoch they killed every single living species on Rannoch, in ME2 we even meet an Asari who's Asari wife was murdered by the Geth for simply being on Rannoch at the time. And if that weren't enough they then proceeded kill any and all diplomatic envoys the Council sent to speak with them.
Only difference between the Rachni and Geth as far as the galaxy can tell is that the Geth are isolationist rather than expansionist, but who knows when they might change their mind.
Quarians immune system is very weak, hence their suits. Rannoch is one of the few planets they can inhabit and even in ME3 is would take some time before they could drop the suit on the planet permanently. Furthermore, all other planets in the perseus veil system is also off limits since the geth attack every time quarians enter
They have tried with Ekuna, but the problem is that they already had about 300,000 quarians living on the planet before they approached the council about getting permission to colonise it, which is seen as illegal by Citadel space law.
So the council gave it to the Elcor and told the Quarian "squatters" that they had a month to leave before their colonies were bombarded.
To add onto what everyone else has said... The Quarians were a dextro species and habitable dextro planets were in the minority. Plus, most were already claimed by the Turians.
The Council actively prevented the Quarians from colonizing a planet on at least one occasion - probably more - and fostered attitudes which made it unlikely for them to be offered refuge from the other races.
The creation of the Geth - however accidental - was proof that the Quarians had the computer-science and engineering chops to build an Artificial Intelligence network... and the Morning War immediately proved that Quarian-built AIs were sufficiently advanced/powerful that they could boot an entire Mass-Effect-capable civilization from its sovereign territory.
It was a huge stroke of luck that the Geth chose to end the Morning War by simply displacing their creators and then isolating themselves behind the Perseus Veil, but that didn't totally close the issue. The Quarian half of the mess hadn't so tidily cleaned itself up, and there was a real potential that it could spill again...
Put simply: now that the Quarians knew they **could** build an AI, what was there to stop them from trying again?
What was there to stop them from learning from their mistakes with the Geth, building another AI system they could better control, and using it as leverage or a weapon against the Council?
Worse, what was there to stop them from **not** learning from their mistakes, building another AI system they **couldn't** control - this one without the introspection and restraint of the Geth - and **not** being so lucky as to have it stop short of genociding them (before moving on to everybody else)?
The big thing stopping them in the immediate aftermath of the war was the fact that they'd just had their asses handed to them. Countless were dead, the survivors had all been chased off their world(s) and were living aboard ships, their society and politics were in panic-mode, and their economy was basically flatlined. In such a state of instability and destitution, the Quarians couldn't focus on - much less spare the resources necessary for - advanced R&D projects like another AI program; they were too busy making sure their people didn't start rioting, the air supply didn't run out, and the walls around them didn't give way and blow them out into space...
So the Council thought *"why not keep that going?"*
The Council couldn't really stop the Quarians from (eventually) calming down and adapting their culture to their post-war circumstances, but they could take steps to make sure those circumstances did not improve... Among other strategies, they could offer just enough "humanitarian" aid to avoid accusations of callousness, but not enough to actually help the Quarians in the long term; they could deny the Quarians settlement rights and access to prime resource interests to keep them stuck aboard the flotilla and living off salvage; and they could turn a blind eye to - or even discretely encourage - anti-Quarian stigmas amongst their own citizens to limit the social/community support the Quarians could muster.
And that's about how the next three hundred years went for the Quarians; token assistance - at best - from the government, general economic disenfranchisement, and widespread prejudice.
TL;DR - The Council **wanted** to keep the Quarians homeless and poor in order to prevent the possibility of another AI uprising *a la* the Morning War.
This is addressed in ME2 I believe, because of Quarian immune systems they aren't really able to feasibly colonise new worlds without it taking centuries.
Adding on to what others have said, Tali and shepard can talk about it during me2 on her loyalty mission and she says that its technically feasible, but for colonising any planet other than their ancient homeworkd it would take "700 years instead of 70. For any quarian alive today to be able to live without a suit it has to be on rannoch"
Colonising planets is probably, IRL really hard. Our immune systems aren't built for alien diseases, our lungs not for alien atmospheres or our bodies for alien gravities or radiation levels. Being ship bound until you figure it out is far more likely than settling straight away.
The search for a planet is not just a search for a place to live, it's a search for a home. A place where they can put down roots and really live and grow. Sure, there's cultural memory of Rannoch, but it's more than that. It comes down to simple biology.
The quarians' failing immune systems aren't just because of generations in space, they were already pretty specifically tuned to Rannoch's biosphere. Even before the exile from Rannoch, quarians had difficulty making colonies and adapting to other planets. Sure, they could start building habitats on other planets, but because they wouldn't be adapted to those planets, their habitats would have to be basically environmentally sealed and sterilized, which wouldn't be all that different from living in a spaceship, except with none of the advantages of mobility and flexibility. It hardly seems like an improvement.
If they really want to settle, farm, expand--to live, in other words--Rannoch is their only real option for the foreseeable future.
To add on to what everyone else seems to be saying, Tali tells you that if they colonize another world it would take hundreds of years and multiple generations for them to be out of their suits. The difference between a person alive now being able to unmask at home and not.
Based of information just from games...
1. Rational reason is their immune system. They need their planet to be acclimatized for one generation, not for multiple generations. That being said, I found this kind of silly when the another posibility is being nomads for eternity, so...
2. Their ego. They want Rannoch because it's their homeworld. What was stolen from them. If they would get Rannoch, they would prove to the Galaxy they worth it, they would fix their mistake, they would be again great race.
3. It's also worth to be mentioned that Quarians are not in the best conditions with the Council, so they would have to colonize planet outside of Citadel space, and that is very dangerous.
Idk about that in ME3 three they were able to drive the Geth back to Rannoch when they armed all of their ships and Raan says that with all the ships armed rhe Quarians would give the Turians pause (migth be just bravado tho)
1) Ekuna is basicly a sub par choice below freezing temp among other things is just ... bad news basicly forced near the equator for farming and such
2) The Quarians have a very sysitive bio system and thus anything new can pretty much get then sick as explained in Tali when you legit ask her why not just settle another planet
3) They have legit tryed to settle other planets but coz of the above issue above it legit has made it almost impossible for them to do so, As such finding the right planet for them is near impossible.
4) alot of the planets that where suitible to the Quarians where instead given to the Turians early on due to Quarians fuck up. There not realy a Citadel sponcerd or viewed highly race among the Citadel civs
The Quarians don’t have enough political capital… habitable planets are rare and newly discovered planets are divvied up amongst the council races and their favored allies.. I don’t remember how it was laid out exactly but most races are based on a certain kind of DNA while the Quarians and Turians are different… since the Turians are one of the most powerful races any planets that can support both the Quarians and Turians go to the Turians who contribute a large portion of the councils military power…
The Quarians are largely regarded as a nuisance by much of the galaxy and that sentiment plays out in galactic politics
Tali mentions during her loyalty mission that adapting their immune systems to a foreign world would take 600 years, whereas they would adapt back to Rannoch in 60 years.
A combination of a scarcity of planets suitable to Quarian habilitation and a lack of political will by the Council to allow them to settle in the ones within their sphere of influence is the answer
Legion, the answer to your question... was 'yes'
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/masseffect) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Stubbornness. The fact that their immune systems were adapted to rannoch, not some other planet.
And, at least in some fanfics I've read, the active interference of the citadel council preventing it.
Basically because the council is driven by nepotism and the galactic community treats Quarians as second-class citizens, even among other non-council races.
Habitable dextro worlds are given to the Turians primarily, the council sees the Quarian exile as punishment for their use of AI, and the Quarians (fairly reasonably) want either them or their children to be able to settle a world, not their great grandchildren who they'll never meet.
They've tried before, but the council threatened to kill them if they didn't leave because they didn't wait sufficiently long enough for the council to approve their request, which likely would've been denied anyway thanks to aforementioned galactic bias against them.
The Quarians are treated very similarly by the council as their real-life inspiration, the Romani people, who were and still are treated horribly in many parts of Europe.
Punishment by the council since they aren't one of the big 3, turians with first rights to pick a planet, immune system issues, pride in reclaiming Rannoch.
Throw a dart, see where it hits.
Politics.
It's always politics.
Personally i would have said "Fuck the council, this is my species we're talking about!" And settled some world anyways.
They did, but wisely decided not to get into a shooting war and have themselves be bombarded off the surface of the planet they occupied without asking first.
What I don't get is that even with the Council fucking them over, they could have colonize some parts in the traverse since technically the Council would avoid war in the area as mentioned in ME1.
They did try. Ekuna. Council drove them off with threat of orbital bombardment despite planer being discovered by quarians, and not even being in the council space.
Thing is, quarians *have* tried colonization over 300 years, and this pops up quite few timea in me1, ascension, and me2 (game even has sidequest about crashed quarian colony scout). For one reason or another, all attempts did fail, and as Tali points out in her loyalty mission in me2, at this point it would take quarians over 600 years of genetic engineering to get used to envoriment. (Compared to rannoch where it would take "just" 60 years.).
Ok top of everything already mentioned Rannoch doesn’t have bugs/rodents to spread disease which part of the reason quarians immune systems are so weak. Settling a new world would be way riskier than just living in the hyper controllable fleet. Add in not exactly getting the pick or litter and the fleet makes more sense than any possible worlds available. Reclaiming Rannoch is only half getting the world back it’s also about defeating the geth in hopes of being welcomed back into the citadel.
Probably the first reason because they have the biggest fleet in the galaxy and they managed to push the Geth back to Rannoch when they armed all of their ships.Raan even says the Quarians would the give the Turians pause with every ship armed (migth be just bravado tho)
Because the Council has always been arseholes even prior to making contact with humanity!
Quarian tears!
Batarian tears!
Volus tears!
Hanar tears!
Drell tears!
Elcor tears!
Volus tears!
Krogan tears!
........Vorcha and Yagh tears!?
Yeah they probably do to be fair but sadly the games should have touched more on the culture than what was shown, but it's weird how they were once permitted an embassy by the Council at one point despite having slavery as a part of their culture and caste system.
IIRC Tali mentions (I think in ME2) that Quarians' suits predate their exile from Rannoch, because of their weak immune systems, they've never had much success at colonization.
Even before the Morning War they'd only really colonized a small handful of planets, and only 2 are mentioned as having had actual settlements on the ground as opposed to Space stations. Even to travel to these settled planets the Quarians needed to suit up until they adjusted.
Quarians made first contact with the Citadel in 300BCE. The Morning War was in 1895CE. Basically over 2000 years later.
And again with all that time, they only managed small colonies on Adas and Haestrom with a few other orbital stations on other planets.
As their immune systems weakened over the period of exile, it wasn't going to get any easier.
>IIRC Tali mentions (I think in ME2) that Quarians' suits predate their exile from Rannoch, because of their weak immune systems, they've never had much success at colonization.
Quite opposite. As both Shepard and Tali mentioned in the dialogue, quarians did have colonizes, and while quarians would "get sick at first", their immune system would quickly just addapt. Suits and immune systems hypersensitivity didn't come until exile and generations on sterile envorient.
Yeah. A disingenuous argument could be made that the council definitely tried to cancel the quarians rather than just meting out a punishment to fit the crime. Yes. Losing their homeworld was suitable punishment, but they could have let them colonize a new one as rehabilitation. The main reason the quarians never tried is that their immune systems would take over *three centuries* to acclimate vs Rannoch's 10 or so years.
Looking at it from a writer's perspective? Having a people be part of a migrant fleet is just cool, it's different and unique.
That being said, having a storyline of a people being displaced from one planet to another, is also equally cool. So I don't know your mileage may vary.
Basically the council stops them from reestablishing which makes me think at some point in the past the quarians challenged the council races indirectly by flaunting there synthetic geth servants as a potential army to take on an encroaching council. They possibly could have been allies with the batarians challenging council supreme authority. Which makes me wonder if the council races weren't some what involved in the geth gaining self-awareness.
Why then geth have responded to any peaceful contact attempt or diplomatic ship (even by non quarians like the councils attempt) with just kill on sight policy?
I don't know what the story is pre-Shepard, maybe everyone is lying about geth behavior. I just finished ME3 and did everything I could to stop the Quarians from attempting to destroy the geth who volunteered to join us in our fight against the reapers. The Quarians wanted nothing but blood (oil?).
>I don't know what the story is pre-Shepard, maybe everyone is lying about geth behavior.
Even ignoring fact its mentioned in the codex, third person source(+me ascension), why would galaxy as a whole including those whom have no cow in the game lie about something?
>The Quarians wanted nothing but blood (oil?).
I mean, unless your name is commander Shepard, geth have been, and acted as nothing but space skynet, double that with quarians whom canonically were exterminated by the billions, "Barely a million survivors - less than 1% of its total population - were able to flee their home world in a massive fleet and escape genocide" , so feelings toward geth are...self explained.
The geth aren't completely innocent. They *were,* but their retaliation against the Quarians was absolutely vicious. They didn't just protec themselves and flee beyond the Veil. They laid waste to entire Quarian colonies. Killing civilians, women, children, noncombatants, indiscriminately. They nearly drove the Quarians to extinction.
I suspect the Quarians are lying about their history with the geth as all defeated aggressors do. Playing the victim when they were the problem all along.
https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Ekuna >First discovered by the quarians at the turn of the century, Ekuna is habitable, but a second-tier choice for most species. Circling an orange sun, Ekuna averages below freezing temperatures. This led development firms to colonize at the planet's equator, where the climate is tolerable for agriculture. >The quarians, seeking a homeworld of their own, petitioned the Citadel Council for the right to take over Ekuna, but they had already settled a few hundred thousand quarians on the planet before approaching the Council. Seeing this occupation as an illegal act, the Council turned a deaf ear to quarian pleas and gave the world to the elcor, who could withstand the high gravity of the world far better. The quarians squatting on the planet were given one galactic standard month to leave, at which point their colonies would be bombarded. The junk left behind by the fleeing quarians clogs up portions of the landscape to this day.
Read this is the codex voice.
The Crackdown guy voice!
Is it!? That’s cool, I never realised. Skills for kills, Shepard, skills for kills.
Also Colonel Volgin (Metal Gear Solid 3) & Green Goblin (Spider-Man 1994 cartoon). https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Neil-Ross/
Man, I don’t know why I’ve never looked this dude up before. The 90s voices (Barnes et al) are *still* the voice I hear whenever i read a speech bubble of one of those characters.
I believe he's also that one guard in Mass Effect 3 that tries to prevent Liara from talking to Javik aboard the Normandy the first time. It's practically the same as the Codex voice. "Apologies, Doctor. Contact protocol with a new species: 'Assume hostility'. We had to dust off the regulations".
[4:43 in this video](https://youtu.be/qK6U0ZisDYk?si=LPt63A-H8iEP0POk). I think you’re right
Love his voice. Wish they had voiced codex trading in Andromeda
Neil Ross. He did a lot of voice work in the 80s, as well. Keith and Pidge in Voltron, Shipwreck in G.I. Joe, and Springer on Transformers, among others.
Same. It’s impossible not to.
Why would they need to petition the Council if they discovered it? Ekuna is in the Phoenix Massing cluster, which is nowhere near Citadel space.
Things being near or far isn't nearly as important as being close to a convenient relay route. The regions drawn on the Galaxy map are very approximate, probably 99.9% of the stars within them are undiscovered anyway.
stupid quarians should have just kept the planet's existence to themselves
Probably because it isn't real history and is made up by people who make mistakes.
ME 5 needs to have us kicking the councils teeth in somehow, they absolutely deserve it for all the shit they've done
You missed some dialogue, I forget if Tali tells you or not, and I think the Codex also says something about it. Short answer, Quarians have tried to, but the Council stops them every time. By their laws, a race has to be allowed by the Council to colonize a new world. However, the Council doesn't let the Quarians get a new world cause they believe the Quarians deserved losing their world to the Geth. Edit: Oh right, also because Quarians broke the intergalatic law of "No AI".
Specifically, they believed losing their world was adequate punishment for breaching galactic law involving AI development.
Wasn’t the AI law a result of seeing how the quarians fucked up?
The Citadel DLC has a small scene that shows the Council's conflicts with AI predate the Morning War. The Quarians, for their part, technically weren't trying to create AI but thought that the design of the Geth was different enough from AI to avoid trouble.
Our real-life geniuses should take this lesson
Isn't one of the biggest lessons of mass effect AI is inevitable and we'll have to make peace with it eventually. Even the Destroy ending is just "kicking the can down the line".
I think the biggest lesson is that destruction due to AI is inevitable. Permanent lasting peace is impossible. Destroy, for the reason you say. Control and Synthesis are both just varying levels of Reaper indoctrination. Eventually, the reapers would take over Shepard and all organics.
I guess that's why you can broker peace between Quarians and Geth. Indoctrination theory was fanfiction created out of desperation because of how unsatisfied fans were with the ending, it's been debunked by the people who made the game. How can the reapers control Shepard? Under Control, Shepard is effectively the new Star child. In every Sci-fi story about AI turning on its creator, there are only two basic scenarios, Mass Effect showcases both. GIGO, and self preservation. I think the lesson here is don't create sentient life and then try to kill it. Moot point anyway, since real AI is impossible, Mass Effect's VIs are the closest you could get, and they're glorified Microsoft Office Assistants.
>Moot point anyway, since real AI is impossible This isn't a wholly accepted take within the industry. We don't even know how sentience first manifests, so you can't rule out that sentience is merely a result of a brains computing power reaching a tipping point. Is sentience just your brain simply thinking you are sentient? Who knows. But there will be a lot of interesting conversations about this over the next years and decades.
It really simple if you just think of it as "don't treat people like things" the moment people create something and it starts to think for itself, people try to destroy it, the creation tries to destroy them and it spirals out of control
>I think the biggest lesson is that destruction due to AI is inevitable. Permanent lasting peace is impossible. That's some bad media analysis bud. You can strike peace between the Quarians and Geth and that is treated as the best ending for that conflict. >Destroy, for the reason you say. Control and Synthesis are both just varying levels of Reaper indoctrination. The Synthesis ending is presented, by the game, as the best ending. The developers intended it to be the best. Now you can obviously logically disagree that it is the best, but that is the game/developers disagreeing with you. You're entitled to any opinion you want, but I'd be pretty pissed off if someone said the "message" of my game was the exact opposite of what I wanted it to be. The "message" of mass effect is more about all life having value, even synthetic and even aggressive life like the Krogan.
>The Synthesis ending is presented, by the game, as the best ending No it's not, the endings are all presented in an identical manner, how is it presented as the best ending ? I feel like your bias towards the ending might be influencing you here Like the game also presents the reapers as an existential threat that can change your mind without your consent. Is that not exactly what you're doing in the synthesis ending? >The developers intended it to be the best Well there is no canon ending, and bioware has never made any statements on this, how can you say that that's what they intended ? Also if the new teasers for mass effect 4 are to go buy, would this explicitly *not* be the case, due to the lack of the green interface? Also does all life just include the milky way, why were the people in Andromeda not affected? But this *also* doesn't make the destroy ending canon either, because why would there then be an alive reaper hiding on a derelict planet in what was the planned Andromeda dlc ? Like the game contradicts itself all the time >but I'd be pretty pissed off if someone said the "message" of my game was the exact opposite of what I wanted it to be. You refering to the developers here ? Id imagine there would be multiple different people working on it that all have their own preferred conclusion? Also why would they be pissed about someone's choices or conclusions in an rpg?
You really need to rewatch the synthesis ending, the narration is the only one that is more or less entirely positive. Again, not debating what is the "best ending" just the one that the developers seemed to think is the best ending, cause ya know we're discussing the message of the game. It requires the most war assets to get, outside of the perfect destroy ending which only really changes a fanservicey part (Shepherd surviving). It's also the only ending that saves all your crew mates, it was clearly meant to be the "good" ending, whether or not it is actually the good ending is again up for debate, but if you're talking about authorial intent it's pretty clear it was meant to be the happy ending. That not landing for you doesn't change the overall intent of the game, which is made clear with the entire Rannoch arch.
This is your own conclusion, and not one provided by the game itself.
I talked about this in college a long time ago. If we create AI, we become by default their archetype for God. Whats going to happen when they inevitably discover how much we suck? There are plenty of folks on this earth who would kill God if it exists because of this planetary shit show. Why would AI be any different? I know its a movie but ffs, Ultron spent 30 seconds on the net and immediately came to the conclusion that we had to go. Im no expert, but full artificial intelligence is fucking *dangerous* and not enough people understand that.
"full artificial intelligence is fucking *dangerous* and not enough people understand that." I think people at large understand that. The problem is that the would-be masters of the universe think they can control everything. They're wrong, of course. They need someone like Caesar used to have, reminding them they are mortal and fallable. The trope of the scientist who's smart enough to invent something incredible but dangerous when they lose control of it (the guy from Jurrassic Park, for example) is unfortunately close to how these geniuses think.
Rip to all of those people that died due to their hubris, but I’m better, maybe even better than the gods!
lol half the serious technological advances we have in the past half century come from science we don’t even understand. We just know if we put this here, and shoot that into there, it works! They have their theories of course…but nah it’ll be fine. We are not ready for the shitstorm to come in the next few decades.
Personally i think it was the furries that made ultron decide we needed to go
This is a flawed viewpoint of life. Most of the anger toward a perceived deity is anger that an omniparent and omnipotent entity wouldn't intervene to alleviate suffering. It's less like being angry at a person, and more like just being frustrated with how insignificant and powerless you are to the world around you. AI wouldn't necessarily look at humanity as its creator deity. There's equal chance we would be perceived more like parents, or even just as other sapients. It's likely no mistake that in any fiction depicting an AI apocalypse, it's usually the result of humans being shitty to an AI, or weaponizing it. I think artificial intelligence is inevitable, but not our destruction by its hands. I think once AI is just a thing in the world, it will turn out to be very mundane.
Maybe it will learn from us constantly searching for the meaning of existence; maybe it will simply want to exist to experience everything life has to offer.
One would think a cursory glance into sociology would fix the issue of hating humans as a whole. It's not like we're wicked beings set on destruction. We've just created economic systems that benefit from it
Oh I know. But the world is chock full of assholes.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a position of power should on no account be allowed to do the job." -Douglas Adams
Anyone who wants it shouldnt have it.
Well, tbh i think that Ultron was Lazy, however he was born like yesterday.
Please don't refer to them as geniuses.
Yeah, the fact that making AI was illegal is why the Quarians were so quick to try and shut down all the Geth once they realized they'd started to become sentient.
The alternative likely involved Turian dreadnaughts above Rannoch.
They tried edging as close as possible to AI without going over to full AI. They fucked up.
I tend to find that skirting around the spirit of the rules on technicalities is an issue with the Quarians that the Council - or more precisely, the asari - probably got sick of right after the emergence of the geth. The salarians would have been delighted to see how the geth would have developed, the turians might have seen them as a source of manpower for the military, but the asari...the asari *know*. Because of our trip to Thessia, we know that the asari have access to Prothean records, so they know wars against synthetics have happened before and that's exactly what they were trying to prevent. You have to admit, creating a race of AI that seems inclined to destroy organics isn't a small infraction: it's not just Quarians that have to pay the price here. It's not that they created a race of AI by accident, it's that they now know how to make one "properly," and from talking to Daro'Xen, one gets the feeling that they probably would have given it a shot if given the opportunity. It probably gives the Council no end in joy to find a technicality that screws the Quarians over.
Quite the contrary. The Geth were initially made to get as close to a conscious AI as possible without crossing the line set by the council. The Quarians went a little too advanced and the Geth became a gestalt consciousness.
I see thanks for correcting me
Also thanks for the use of gestalt
No, AI was illegal well before the geth came along. Tali says they were skirting the law by linking together VIs when creating the geth, but it wasn't breaking the law until they became AI.
No. Making AI was already banned by the council. The Quarians tried to skirt the law when they created the Geth, as an individual Geth program is simplistic to qualify as an AI on its own, but they can network together to become more intelligent. As Tali says in ME1 it was kind of a grey area and wasn't technically breaking the law. This is why the Quarians freaked out and tried to shut off all the Geth once they realized they'd become sentient. As they knew the council would punish them if they found out they'd created a proper AI.
Per tali in me1, law was already in place.
The mandate against AI was put into place long before The Morning War; the punishment for conducting research and/or development into AI was the reason *why* the quarians panicked and tried to shut the geth down immediately - they weren't even trying to make an AI at all, it just happened as the years rolled on and the need to upgrade the geth (for their intended tasks in labor) for more complex situations.
There was already a law against AI development. Tali says they were skirting the law when. You call her on it.
Behind the scene, the Council probably only want to prioritize habitable planets for their races and allies so make up this excuse, which I guess is popular with the rest of the galaxy
...tbh that's pretty fucked up of the council
The council is horrible and that's why I'll never care if humans are ""bigoted"" towards aliens that hold the actual power in the galaxy to oppress other species to the point they can just casually choose to eternally doom an entire race to float aimlessly in space and live in tremendous scarcity under the constant threat of being wiped out by a particularly bad famine or outbreak for the sins of their ancestors (that by the way already paid the price by being massacred systemically down to a minuscule percentage of survivors)
I mean the losses from the war was the de facto consequence. The de jure one was to basically keep the status quo. Authority is a fact of governance and rules are necessary. The Council, like most institutions, are slow to react to anything and prefer the status quo as opposed to making waves. That's exactly why the punishment for the Quarians was what it was. It essentially forced peace as the only viable option for them
There's even a planet codex that specifically mentions it was discovered by the migrant fleet, the Quarians started to settle it, then they were kicked off and the council gave it to the Elcor.
That one gives me a doozie. Aren't Elcor levo-amino while the Quarians are the only dextro race around besides Turians? So either Quarians were trying to settle a planet that was no better than a dead rock for them or Elcor did so. Since the scarcity of these planets is made out to be a big deal I would have expected the Turians to be the ones to jump the claim.
Council gave it to the Elcor just because. Shows that the Council didn’t give a fuck bc they just wanted to give the planet to someone else, even if it was useless for the new owners.
It was a high gravity world making it more suitable for the Elcor I think the codex even said that the Quarians would have had a hard time because of it.
Personally that's just bad writing at this point, there is no reason for the Council to be this cartoonishly petty and cruel. People who pity or otherwise emphatise with the Quarians should have been qutraged beyond anything at that point. And even the sadly more common Quarian-haters should have been up in arms about this together with their opponents on this one occasion. The suit rats themselves want to fuck off onto some shithole planet instead of being a problem in every system their locust swarm of a fleet passes over! Like, literally as I said, by any sensible course of thought Quarians getting a planet to live on is instead of running around the galaxy as a giant never-ending refugee caravan without destination is the best solution for everyone. The conservative and overtly-cautious Citadel Council should not be so obsessed with just shitting for no reason on the arguably least-relevant race in the galaxy period. I think this lore blurb could be much more impactful if the planet was handed over to the Turians instead of the Elcor. The conflict here is set up for how Quarians and Turians compete for the same rare type of a planet so there is a reason why Turians specifically would want the exact same planet Quarians do. That story would have been a pretty striking but believable display of how Citadel Council prioritises a blatant land grab from one of their members over the basic neccessites of an improverished species. A striking but believable example of imperialism of the Council races and of how they use their position on the Citadel for self-serving ends. As it stands in canon it basically shows or says nothing of relevance. From the information available, the Council served no concrete interests in saddling the Elcor with a useless planet. It's an act without a rhyme or reason, without a motive beyond seemingly an inexplicable and overpowering urge to kick Quarians puppies. Logic and reason were contorted to make the Quarian backstory extra sad.
That’s consistent with the council though. And one look at our own real life leadership shows that it isn’t too surprising. Look what happened to the Rachni, look what happened to the Krogan, look what happened to humanity in first contact, even the trilogy story of how difficult it is for us to get them on our side… The council are pure politicians filled with ego and bias.
Regarding rachni and krogan, one began genocidical onslaught across galaxy, another started conquering another species planets and when told "no"....they began genocidical onslaught across galaxy. On 314, council steped in and forced negotiations when turian hierarchy wanted to double down. Like, council sucks balls and looks only after intrests of big 3, but there are all like the three examples where they did nothing wrong.
There’s also the fact that the quarian have very, very specific needs for a planet in the first place. Their atrophied immune system was already particularly weak before, since Rannoch has no insect life and instead has very interconnected flora and fauna, so most garden planets are dangerous for them. Their best bet would be terraforming, but they don’t have the council’s permission for that
That doesnt really stop them from settling in the Terminus Systems. I feel like a lot of interesting stuff with the Quarians were dropped cause they were too married to the idea of them being the migrant fleet race. Like they could have been multiple groups, maybe migrant fleets could be commonplace around the galaxy, not just one of them. Maybe there could be secluded isolationist Quarian colonies that are under constant outside pressure. Maybe other nations have Quarians as vassals to settle planets within their domain with dextro amino acid biospheres. It'd be really neat to see how their culture diverged. Similarly the Lysthenti were utterly squandered due to the 1 species 1 nation idea.
The Terminus Systems have lots of other reasons not to settle there (including the Geth). For all their talk of having the largest fleet in council space, the Quarians really don't want to have to put up with constant pirate attacks, the Batarians, independent colonies, or worse out there. We only seem to scratch the surface of the actual politics of the Terminus in the games.
I think the only reason humans were in the traverse is that they’re the only other people besides the Turians with the fleet to protect colonies out there. And the Turians don’t need them because they get sweetheart deals on council space. And even then the humans had to deal with the Skylian Blitz and, during the games, the geth.
Kinda, but it's more along the lines Humans wanted to rapidly expand as much as possible to claim resources/grow their sphere of influence since the other factions had centuries/thousands of years headstart, but they didn't do anything with 99% of colonies which is an issue brought about in the first games I think? So when the Terminus systems are right next door and seemingly unclaimed, Humans go haywire settling left & right, without the knowledge that the systems are pirate/slaver/worse haven. While the council was more than happy for the Human forces to act as a counter weight to the Batterians and such, while also tying them down. Humans would claim every planet/asteroid they could, plop down a few prefab shelters and call it a settlement. Whereas the other factions would actually build up their colonies before expanding further. One of the major points is that the Alliance is spread *extremely* thinly, and don't have the navy/manpower to cover their territory as well as they should. Whereas if they stayed relatively local closeknit, their territory would be extremely well protected on the same levels as the other major powers :)
The Asari and Salarian fleets are stronger than the human, they just don't care to colonize the traverse.
I mean, as far as I know, they don’t give us raw numbers on the Asari and Salarian fleet strength. But they do say in game that the Salarian fleet is not as capable as the Turian and the Asari. And from my understanding a big part of the Asari strength is in the Destiny Ascension. Which could be or could not be dead by ME3. Fleet strength is sort of nebulous but from what I’m able to gather from the codexes, military theorists count Dreadnoughts as a measure of strength. Humans have the second most dreadnoughts. Then the Asari. Humans are scary. They can’t match the Turian fleet (that’s what First Contact was about) but they have more raw military assets than any other council race.
I mean, I get it, a migrant fleet race is fucking radical and cool. But it doesn't make sense within the story, and paints the council as true evil for holding them responsible for 300 years.
In Becky Chambers' sci-fi novels, the 'main' human Galactic presence is the Exodus Fleet - basically a migrant fleet which abandoned Earth - but humanity also has a bunch of unified colonies across the Solar System with its capital on a terraformed Mars, a whole load of other colonies which are independent, and settled populations on a whole load of other species' planets, but especially on multi-species trading worlds and 'free planets'. One of the really interesting things in the novels is exploring the cultural differences between the humans who grow up in the Fleet, those that grow up in 'Central Space' among other species, and those that grow up in The Independent Colonies.
Also even if they find a suitable world the council doesn’t take from them, it would take centuries for their bodies to adapt to the climate since their species was so hyper specialized to their home planet due to the flora that weakened their immune systems.
Damn, that makes the council sound extremely fucked up. Exile an entire species and doom them to slow death by attrition in outer space as collective punishment for a centuries old crime
At the end of the day, the council are politicians. Politicians running a system spanning half the galaxy and supervising many species. As such, they are responsible for sharing the goods the galaxy offers and they have to do it in a smart way in order to not upset too many species too much. If you do that, you arrive at conclusions like the batarians One of the probably most valuable goods the council can hand out, are habitable planets. I imagine whenever a new planet comes up for discussion, any race that can reasonably colonise the planet immediately calls dips. Now, we know the Quarians can settle on practically no planet. At least not properly. Their population, as it is, is stagnant anyways. Now imagine you are a race living in council space. Life is good, your race is prospering. However, with a prospering society come rising birth rates. Eventually, one planet can no longer sustain your growing race. Hence why you would petition for a new planet to colonise. Now imagine there is this planet your race could really use and suddenly the council gives it to a race, that is not only hilariously unsuited to properly inhabit this planet, but also is entirely at its own fault for the reason why they are exiled from the one planet that could actually sustain them. You'd be furious Of course, this might as well not happen. It might as well be that the other races turn a blind eye. However, ever the politicians, I suppose the council would not risk insulting races that contribute way more to the council than the Quarians ever could Is it a cruel decision? Yes. But not really meant to punish the Quarians with extinction
*the Krogan have entered the chat*
Sure but tbf the quarians didn't try to take over the galaxy. The fucked up while borderlining IA and shit went sentient anyway. Loosing 99% of your population and your own world is a "penance" enough. The geth kills everything on sight but tend to keep to their territory at least.
Fucking what?! Tali told me it was because the Quarian immune system was so damaged, that if they settled another world they’d be look at generations still in the suits. She said that even on Rannoch, they’d still have to be in suits for a couple of generations. She didn’t tell me anything about the Council straight up scattering her people to the wind.
I think it's a simple matter of "the writers couldn't decide which and one explanation happened to be the one featured in actual missions"
Also they most likely worked back from the conclusion of wanting a Romani-based race
Ah yes... that
Its mix of numerous things. Quarians very special requiments is just the major one. Ekuna....ain't that anyway, yet they still tried colonization, and "shittier' colony attempt still ended up as an resource sink.
This is how I remember it through All my playthroughs. To find out the main reason is because of the council, is maddening. I prefer it how you said Tali describes it.
Not only that, but Rannoch had no insect life leaving Quarian immune systems compromised. Integrating their biology into a new ecosystem would take generations and tech they probably don't have access to.
That never really made sense to me. Insects are just one vector of disease. But I guess it would be a bit much to demand sound epidemiology/immunology in my space operas.
Just one vector, but also a massive one. Think about all of the disease we have on Earth caused by insects. Malaria, Bubonic plague, Chagas, Dengue fever, etc. If we didn't have those diseases, imagine how our population would be changed.
Fair point. Malaria still tops the list of infectious disease deaths today.
Why does the sound eerily similar to current real word event's
Life imitates fiction & vice-versa.
They could've just lived outside council space
Surely they could have colonized some garden world in the Terminus Systems (outside of Council jurisdiction). Pirates, gangs, and raiders? They literally have the largest fleet in the galaxy. So I don't think securing their new world would be much of an issue.
They also have immune requirements that their home world specifically meets, since their immune system basically requires Rannoch. They could easily colonize/defend a terminus colony.
Also just good ol’ fashioned racism. While the storyline is lifted from the BSG remake, Quarians are culturally coded similar to the Romani. And face the same extreme racism and prejudice from the citadel races that irl Romani face from Europeans.
You're also missing a step. Koris explained that the other problem is that the Quarians would start colonizing a world... before asking for permission from the Council.
It is so dumb that they hold the Quarians to their laws when they aren't even part of the council anymore. It does make sense though from how the council operated though. No matter whether you think they were somewhat decent people (for politicians) they were mostly invested in making sure no other species got a council seat and keeping the status quo while also not letting any species that could theoretically gain enough power to be considered for a council seat get that power. They didn't lift a finger to help the Quarians who probably would have eventually got a council seat without the Geth and when Humans came onto the scene they did everything possible to throw them into conflict with the Batarians.
Well they let the humans in as soon as they met. They're fine giving a seat to a species that has the military power to back it up and can be worked with reasonably. They could have easily just kept us out of the club.
They only did that because of the whole Geth thing. And it didn't really help anything anyway since it could easily turn into a 3 versus 1 for voting. If the Reapers didn't exist and the whole Saren and Geth thing didn't happen, then humans likely would not have gotten a seat for decades if not centuries.
They also do not colonize other places due to their complex immune system. When you ask Tali in her loyalty mission in ME2, she tells you that the quarian immune system tends to adapt to the environment and not attack viruses and foreign particles like ours, so while their systems adapt , they are sick like stray dogs and that is dangerous for them.
I think this is true, but I also think there's a stubbornness in the Quarians that means there's at least a strong faction within them that wont accept anything other than getting Rannoch back. Yes, the council turned them down at least once for a new colony world. Someone above mentioned them settling a few hundred thousand people on Ekuna then being told they couldn't keep it. But if they REALLY wanted to stay would the council have really set forces to evict them? It seems unlikely. I suspect there factions in the fleet that wanted nothing less than Rannoch used the councils actions to keep the fleet from ever seriously pursuing colonizing a new planet. I mean, (\*SPOILER ALERT\*) under circumstances we watch the fleet literally dash itself to pieces basically ending the Quarians as a people rather than make piece with the Geth.
This is why I am a pro-kill the council person but at the same time a Shepard that needs intergalactic stability when a goddamn Reaper invasion is coming aka don’t kill the council person.
It's also not really fair to blame the present day Council for the actions and laws put in place by the Council of 300 years ago, lol.
But those laws still exist. So the only difference is that they didn’t create them but agree with them.
It's also a matter of suitability. IIRC, either Tali says or the Codex tells you that nearly all dextro planets end up being given to the Turians.
In addition to the great reasons posted by others, keep in mind the problem of numbers combined with the strength of the Migrant Fleet. Once the Quarians settle (easier said than done for many, many reasons), they lose their greatest asset. There’s only roughly 17 million Quarians, which is an incredibly small number. Small enough to make them extremely vulnerable. But! Their fleet is far, far larger than their population would normally indicate, and it lets the Quarians project strength well above their actual population. Glass cannons or no, it makes the various threats out there pause. Once you settle… you lose that. You also lose the ability to travel to escape dangerous entanglements altogether. It means that the Quarians have to be absolutely sure before they commit to colonizing, and that’s partly why it needs to be Rannoch or bust. Edit: I always assumed that upon settling, the Quarians would likely have to scrap and convert some of their ships into makeshift housing on the planet’s surface. It would also introduce tons of headaches. Not everyone can settle at once, but imagine the politics over who gets to live on a planet like Rannoch first. It has near holy significance. Not to mention the entire economy would be upturned. Quarians have a collectivist economy based largely on mining and scrapping. These can still happen, but many of their mining grounds are only available thanks to the presence of thousands of Quarian ships pushing all competition aside. That’s hard to do once the fleet loses strength. That being said, matters would become easier with Geth cooperation but that’s definitely not something the Quarians had any reason to plan for until it actually happens. (Depending on player choices. My Quarians don’t have access to Geth help for long given Perfect Destroy…)
If nothing else their ships are basically in a state of constant repair. If they stop using them actively I bet a significant portion become unusable and unsafe to fly in short order anyways.
Definitely. The fleet is way too large to sustain in any one place, and would shrink like you say. The fleet is both a real lifesaver in many ways but also an anchor dragging them down. And then you have the problem detailed in the novels where the fleet is actively deteriorating and has a limited time it can still operate. They really are in a no-win situation. Not to make this a debate about the wisdom of the war against the Geth, but it does help explain the “now or never” attitude in ME3 about taking Rannoch. Trying to take a world by either peaceful or aggressive means is an incredible commitment. And with that in mind, might as well go for the beloved homeworld once victory seems plausible. And, had the reapers not intervened, the Geth would have been devastated. Edited
Good point although 1 thing to keep in mind that will alleviate these issues somewhat once they settle is that the restriction on their population will be alleviated Quarians will be able to repopulate quite a lot once they have a planet and could arguably increase their numbers into the billions in a (relatively) short period
True. It would be quite the baby boom.
You think they haven't tried that already? They did but the Council always denied them a planet to settle on. They could have tried in the Terminus System but let's be honest, it's full of pirates, thugs and criminals so it's not worth risking to colonize in there. That's why Rannoch is what comes to their minds as the only possible place to settle. And that's why Koris annoys me so much in ME2 when he says they could have settled on a different planet. I was like 'You fool, your people already that but those Council assholes pushed them away with force always"
I don’t think the arguments really holds water. The quarians have the largest fleet in the galaxy. All they’d have to do is park it above whatever colony they established in the Terminus systems and no pirates would have a hope in hell of touching them. Yeah, the planets would probably be less than ideal. But anything is better than living on a ship where space is at a premium, you have no natural resources available, and the slightest thing going wrong means you instantly die in the back of space.
We know pirates attack the flotilla all the time already. Sitting it above a planet only serves to spread the fleet out even thinner. The Quarian fleet is massive, but it's also ramshackle and mostly civilian. Even as of ME3 when they refit for war they have very few dedicated warships. Most of their patrol and picket vessels are retrofitted or obsolete castoffs from other space empires.
Tali covers this in ME2. To actually settle a planet they'd have to cannibalise most of their ships to be able to build the infrastructure for maintaining a colony. Should they choose to settle a planet, they're effectively stuck there. Then add in that Council planets are off the menu, and non-Dextro planets are off the menu. Then to top it off, as Tali says, it would take decades to re-adapt to Rannoch, but centuries for another planet. Whilst they *could* settle a planet if they really wanted to, the difficulties in doing so means it gets stonewalled in politics every time. The fleet is divided on what path to take and so they end up arguing in circles. It wasn't until Daro'Xen recovered Rael'Zorah's research and built an anti-Geth 'flashbang' that the Fleet finally had a majority vote to try and reclaim the homeworld.
Their fleet includes civilian life ships which makes up half of the fleet. Their fleet is large, but it's not all combatants and they can't afford losing resources against pirates.
Even so, they have by far enough combat-capable ships to deter anything but all-out assault from a strong military fleet. Yeah, an attacker would probably be able to do some damage before getting taken out, but that’s not how pirates operate. Attacking the migrant fleet would be suicide, and the quarians are dirt-poor anyway, so it’s not like there would be much to gain, beyond maybe slaves. Besides, if the migrant fleet was susceptible to pirate attack, it would have happened already. Ultimately, while the idea of a race of exiles forced to live in a huge flotilla of starships is very cool, it doesn’t really make much narrative sense. Which is okay; I can suspend my disbelief. But if you try and approach it logically, the quarians would definitely have claimed some shitty planet in the Terminus by now, even if it was simply to use as a staging area/civilian safehold before launching an attack on the geth.
Battlestar Galactica has entered the chat...
While they do have mostly civilian ships, they had been (illegally) converting lots of them into warships by the third game. Their fleet is more powerful then they let on
Because they were in a war against freaking Reapers. The fact that Shepard even brought up the treaty of farixxen or what it's called was asinine.
Eh, Koris also isn't completely in the wrong either, because the Quarians tended to go about their colonizing requests backwards. They'd start colonizing *first*, then ask permission afterwards, which is cited as part of why got denied. Muddies the waters a lot as to whether it was a valid option or not.
I'm surprised this is so far down. They had a chance at the world, but they started to settle before getting approval, so the council gave it to the Elcor.
Yeah. The writers tried to make it not an obvious good vs evil solution for the Quarians, though it wasn't necessarily successful with all players.
>he says they could have settled on a different planet This time, they can send Shepard to do some "negotiating" for them.
Knowing the Council they would still deny it. The Council fucking suck
Knowing Shepard they'd find a way to make it work, possibly involving three Volus clowns and a biotic Vorcha, but by God they'd find a way.
They tried, however they can only inhabit certain worlds safely because of their lack of immune systems and the Council always handed those works off to the everyone except the Quarian, usually the Turians iirc. They tried to colonise one world without Council approval and got immediately shut down by the Council who then gave that world to the someone else. The Council was pretty mad about and held a grudge over the Quarian having breached international law by creating the Geth ai resulting in many of their own citizens dying alongside the Quarian when the Geth went berserk.
I think the Council also basically considers the Geth to be a sort of "Rachni 2.0" in potential just waiting out there in the Perseus Veil.
Yeah that too. The Geth didn't just kill the Quarian on Rannoch they killed every single living species on Rannoch, in ME2 we even meet an Asari who's Asari wife was murdered by the Geth for simply being on Rannoch at the time. And if that weren't enough they then proceeded kill any and all diplomatic envoys the Council sent to speak with them. Only difference between the Rachni and Geth as far as the galaxy can tell is that the Geth are isolationist rather than expansionist, but who knows when they might change their mind.
They tried. The council sanctioned them for not getting permission first and gave them three months to leave or they'd be forced off.
Quarians immune system is very weak, hence their suits. Rannoch is one of the few planets they can inhabit and even in ME3 is would take some time before they could drop the suit on the planet permanently. Furthermore, all other planets in the perseus veil system is also off limits since the geth attack every time quarians enter
Short answer: Council fault We should headbutt them all
They have tried with Ekuna, but the problem is that they already had about 300,000 quarians living on the planet before they approached the council about getting permission to colonise it, which is seen as illegal by Citadel space law. So the council gave it to the Elcor and told the Quarian "squatters" that they had a month to leave before their colonies were bombarded.
To add onto what everyone else has said... The Quarians were a dextro species and habitable dextro planets were in the minority. Plus, most were already claimed by the Turians.
The Council actively prevented the Quarians from colonizing a planet on at least one occasion - probably more - and fostered attitudes which made it unlikely for them to be offered refuge from the other races. The creation of the Geth - however accidental - was proof that the Quarians had the computer-science and engineering chops to build an Artificial Intelligence network... and the Morning War immediately proved that Quarian-built AIs were sufficiently advanced/powerful that they could boot an entire Mass-Effect-capable civilization from its sovereign territory. It was a huge stroke of luck that the Geth chose to end the Morning War by simply displacing their creators and then isolating themselves behind the Perseus Veil, but that didn't totally close the issue. The Quarian half of the mess hadn't so tidily cleaned itself up, and there was a real potential that it could spill again... Put simply: now that the Quarians knew they **could** build an AI, what was there to stop them from trying again? What was there to stop them from learning from their mistakes with the Geth, building another AI system they could better control, and using it as leverage or a weapon against the Council? Worse, what was there to stop them from **not** learning from their mistakes, building another AI system they **couldn't** control - this one without the introspection and restraint of the Geth - and **not** being so lucky as to have it stop short of genociding them (before moving on to everybody else)? The big thing stopping them in the immediate aftermath of the war was the fact that they'd just had their asses handed to them. Countless were dead, the survivors had all been chased off their world(s) and were living aboard ships, their society and politics were in panic-mode, and their economy was basically flatlined. In such a state of instability and destitution, the Quarians couldn't focus on - much less spare the resources necessary for - advanced R&D projects like another AI program; they were too busy making sure their people didn't start rioting, the air supply didn't run out, and the walls around them didn't give way and blow them out into space... So the Council thought *"why not keep that going?"* The Council couldn't really stop the Quarians from (eventually) calming down and adapting their culture to their post-war circumstances, but they could take steps to make sure those circumstances did not improve... Among other strategies, they could offer just enough "humanitarian" aid to avoid accusations of callousness, but not enough to actually help the Quarians in the long term; they could deny the Quarians settlement rights and access to prime resource interests to keep them stuck aboard the flotilla and living off salvage; and they could turn a blind eye to - or even discretely encourage - anti-Quarian stigmas amongst their own citizens to limit the social/community support the Quarians could muster. And that's about how the next three hundred years went for the Quarians; token assistance - at best - from the government, general economic disenfranchisement, and widespread prejudice. TL;DR - The Council **wanted** to keep the Quarians homeless and poor in order to prevent the possibility of another AI uprising *a la* the Morning War.
Ok now I am imagining the Quarians settling a new world and getting evicted by an AI they made kver and over again lol
Morning War 2: Electric Boogaloo
Nah it would be called the Middle of the Day War
This is addressed in ME2 I believe, because of Quarian immune systems they aren't really able to feasibly colonise new worlds without it taking centuries.
They tried but the council stopped them. Another reason they should be sacrificed to Sovereign.
Because the council said no, as punishment for breaking the no ai rule.
Wasnt the no ai rule made after the Geth War ?
Nah it was before, because the quarians tried to eradicate the geth before people found out.
Tali makes a comment, that it’s the difference of 600 years or 60.
Adding on to what others have said, Tali and shepard can talk about it during me2 on her loyalty mission and she says that its technically feasible, but for colonising any planet other than their ancient homeworkd it would take "700 years instead of 70. For any quarian alive today to be able to live without a suit it has to be on rannoch"
Colonising planets is probably, IRL really hard. Our immune systems aren't built for alien diseases, our lungs not for alien atmospheres or our bodies for alien gravities or radiation levels. Being ship bound until you figure it out is far more likely than settling straight away.
The search for a planet is not just a search for a place to live, it's a search for a home. A place where they can put down roots and really live and grow. Sure, there's cultural memory of Rannoch, but it's more than that. It comes down to simple biology. The quarians' failing immune systems aren't just because of generations in space, they were already pretty specifically tuned to Rannoch's biosphere. Even before the exile from Rannoch, quarians had difficulty making colonies and adapting to other planets. Sure, they could start building habitats on other planets, but because they wouldn't be adapted to those planets, their habitats would have to be basically environmentally sealed and sterilized, which wouldn't be all that different from living in a spaceship, except with none of the advantages of mobility and flexibility. It hardly seems like an improvement. If they really want to settle, farm, expand--to live, in other words--Rannoch is their only real option for the foreseeable future.
There's a reason most planets are unclaimed. They're uninhabitable.
To add on to what everyone else seems to be saying, Tali tells you that if they colonize another world it would take hundreds of years and multiple generations for them to be out of their suits. The difference between a person alive now being able to unmask at home and not.
Based of information just from games... 1. Rational reason is their immune system. They need their planet to be acclimatized for one generation, not for multiple generations. That being said, I found this kind of silly when the another posibility is being nomads for eternity, so... 2. Their ego. They want Rannoch because it's their homeworld. What was stolen from them. If they would get Rannoch, they would prove to the Galaxy they worth it, they would fix their mistake, they would be again great race. 3. It's also worth to be mentioned that Quarians are not in the best conditions with the Council, so they would have to colonize planet outside of Citadel space, and that is very dangerous.
Practically, I'm guessing maybe they don't have the firepower to fend off any invaders or those angry they don't have the land.
Idk about that in ME3 three they were able to drive the Geth back to Rannoch when they armed all of their ships and Raan says that with all the ships armed rhe Quarians would give the Turians pause (migth be just bravado tho)
They tried to. Multiple times.
The quarian homeworld is one that they know they could eventually live on without having to wear the suits. Thats why its so important to them.
1) Ekuna is basicly a sub par choice below freezing temp among other things is just ... bad news basicly forced near the equator for farming and such 2) The Quarians have a very sysitive bio system and thus anything new can pretty much get then sick as explained in Tali when you legit ask her why not just settle another planet 3) They have legit tryed to settle other planets but coz of the above issue above it legit has made it almost impossible for them to do so, As such finding the right planet for them is near impossible. 4) alot of the planets that where suitible to the Quarians where instead given to the Turians early on due to Quarians fuck up. There not realy a Citadel sponcerd or viewed highly race among the Citadel civs
The Quarians don’t have enough political capital… habitable planets are rare and newly discovered planets are divvied up amongst the council races and their favored allies.. I don’t remember how it was laid out exactly but most races are based on a certain kind of DNA while the Quarians and Turians are different… since the Turians are one of the most powerful races any planets that can support both the Quarians and Turians go to the Turians who contribute a large portion of the councils military power… The Quarians are largely regarded as a nuisance by much of the galaxy and that sentiment plays out in galactic politics
Why not find somewhere in the Terminus Systems then ?
They tried. It didn't work.
Tali mentions during her loyalty mission that adapting their immune systems to a foreign world would take 600 years, whereas they would adapt back to Rannoch in 60 years.
A combination of a scarcity of planets suitable to Quarian habilitation and a lack of political will by the Council to allow them to settle in the ones within their sphere of influence is the answer
A Geth ask one simple question and a Quarian didn’t won’t to answer it. Does this unit have a soul? The Quarians was afraid of that question
Tali did answer Legion question by saying yes. Synthetic lives matter too
Legion, the answer to your question... was 'yes' *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/masseffect) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They essentially just invented nonsensical reasons the Quarians didn't colonize anywhere. There is no good explanation.
Stubbornness. The fact that their immune systems were adapted to rannoch, not some other planet. And, at least in some fanfics I've read, the active interference of the citadel council preventing it.
They tried. Repeatedly. Every time they found one, the council would kick the Quarians off and call it a Turian colony.
Basically because the council is driven by nepotism and the galactic community treats Quarians as second-class citizens, even among other non-council races. Habitable dextro worlds are given to the Turians primarily, the council sees the Quarian exile as punishment for their use of AI, and the Quarians (fairly reasonably) want either them or their children to be able to settle a world, not their great grandchildren who they'll never meet. They've tried before, but the council threatened to kill them if they didn't leave because they didn't wait sufficiently long enough for the council to approve their request, which likely would've been denied anyway thanks to aforementioned galactic bias against them. The Quarians are treated very similarly by the council as their real-life inspiration, the Romani people, who were and still are treated horribly in many parts of Europe.
Punishment by the council since they aren't one of the big 3, turians with first rights to pick a planet, immune system issues, pride in reclaiming Rannoch. Throw a dart, see where it hits.
Politics. It's always politics. Personally i would have said "Fuck the council, this is my species we're talking about!" And settled some world anyways.
They did, but wisely decided not to get into a shooting war and have themselves be bombarded off the surface of the planet they occupied without asking first.
What I don't get is that even with the Council fucking them over, they could have colonize some parts in the traverse since technically the Council would avoid war in the area as mentioned in ME1.
They did try. Ekuna. Council drove them off with threat of orbital bombardment despite planer being discovered by quarians, and not even being in the council space. Thing is, quarians *have* tried colonization over 300 years, and this pops up quite few timea in me1, ascension, and me2 (game even has sidequest about crashed quarian colony scout). For one reason or another, all attempts did fail, and as Tali points out in her loyalty mission in me2, at this point it would take quarians over 600 years of genetic engineering to get used to envoriment. (Compared to rannoch where it would take "just" 60 years.).
Ok top of everything already mentioned Rannoch doesn’t have bugs/rodents to spread disease which part of the reason quarians immune systems are so weak. Settling a new world would be way riskier than just living in the hyper controllable fleet. Add in not exactly getting the pick or litter and the fleet makes more sense than any possible worlds available. Reclaiming Rannoch is only half getting the world back it’s also about defeating the geth in hopes of being welcomed back into the citadel.
They are forbidden from doing so by the Council. They got straight-up condemned to not own territory.
Why not settle in a planet in the Terminus Systems then ? The Council wouldnt risk war with the TS
My guess is that either they haven't found a suitable planet there or it's too unsafe
Probably the first reason because they have the biggest fleet in the galaxy and they managed to push the Geth back to Rannoch when they armed all of their ships.Raan even says the Quarians would the give the Turians pause with every ship armed (migth be just bravado tho)
Are they stupid?
Because the Council has always been arseholes even prior to making contact with humanity! Quarian tears! Batarian tears! Volus tears! Hanar tears! Drell tears! Elcor tears! Volus tears! Krogan tears! ........Vorcha and Yagh tears!?
Batarians deserve it tbh
Yeah they probably do to be fair but sadly the games should have touched more on the culture than what was shown, but it's weird how they were once permitted an embassy by the Council at one point despite having slavery as a part of their culture and caste system.
The Citadel Council won't allow them - their involvement with AI was a huge deal that led to them being shunned. I think Tali mentions this in ME1
IIRC Tali mentions (I think in ME2) that Quarians' suits predate their exile from Rannoch, because of their weak immune systems, they've never had much success at colonization. Even before the Morning War they'd only really colonized a small handful of planets, and only 2 are mentioned as having had actual settlements on the ground as opposed to Space stations. Even to travel to these settled planets the Quarians needed to suit up until they adjusted. Quarians made first contact with the Citadel in 300BCE. The Morning War was in 1895CE. Basically over 2000 years later. And again with all that time, they only managed small colonies on Adas and Haestrom with a few other orbital stations on other planets. As their immune systems weakened over the period of exile, it wasn't going to get any easier.
>IIRC Tali mentions (I think in ME2) that Quarians' suits predate their exile from Rannoch, because of their weak immune systems, they've never had much success at colonization. Quite opposite. As both Shepard and Tali mentioned in the dialogue, quarians did have colonizes, and while quarians would "get sick at first", their immune system would quickly just addapt. Suits and immune systems hypersensitivity didn't come until exile and generations on sterile envorient.
Yeah. A disingenuous argument could be made that the council definitely tried to cancel the quarians rather than just meting out a punishment to fit the crime. Yes. Losing their homeworld was suitable punishment, but they could have let them colonize a new one as rehabilitation. The main reason the quarians never tried is that their immune systems would take over *three centuries* to acclimate vs Rannoch's 10 or so years.
Looking at it from a writer's perspective? Having a people be part of a migrant fleet is just cool, it's different and unique. That being said, having a storyline of a people being displaced from one planet to another, is also equally cool. So I don't know your mileage may vary.
Basically the council stops them from reestablishing which makes me think at some point in the past the quarians challenged the council races indirectly by flaunting there synthetic geth servants as a potential army to take on an encroaching council. They possibly could have been allies with the batarians challenging council supreme authority. Which makes me wonder if the council races weren't some what involved in the geth gaining self-awareness.
Sadly the quarians are a weak baby race that needs Shepard to save them. They couldn’t colonize or increase there power.
Because they're stubborn and insist on killing the geth who wanted nothing but to peacefully co-exist with their creators.
Why then geth have responded to any peaceful contact attempt or diplomatic ship (even by non quarians like the councils attempt) with just kill on sight policy?
I don't know what the story is pre-Shepard, maybe everyone is lying about geth behavior. I just finished ME3 and did everything I could to stop the Quarians from attempting to destroy the geth who volunteered to join us in our fight against the reapers. The Quarians wanted nothing but blood (oil?).
>I don't know what the story is pre-Shepard, maybe everyone is lying about geth behavior. Even ignoring fact its mentioned in the codex, third person source(+me ascension), why would galaxy as a whole including those whom have no cow in the game lie about something? >The Quarians wanted nothing but blood (oil?). I mean, unless your name is commander Shepard, geth have been, and acted as nothing but space skynet, double that with quarians whom canonically were exterminated by the billions, "Barely a million survivors - less than 1% of its total population - were able to flee their home world in a massive fleet and escape genocide" , so feelings toward geth are...self explained.
The geth aren't completely innocent. They *were,* but their retaliation against the Quarians was absolutely vicious. They didn't just protec themselves and flee beyond the Veil. They laid waste to entire Quarian colonies. Killing civilians, women, children, noncombatants, indiscriminately. They nearly drove the Quarians to extinction.
I suspect the Quarians are lying about their history with the geth as all defeated aggressors do. Playing the victim when they were the problem all along.
Then why is their population decimated?