Humanity finds the Charon Relay tomorrow and one of the Mars rovers find the entrance to an actual Protean data vault

>Humanity finds the Charon Relay tomorrow and one of the Mars rovers find the entrance to an actual Protean data vault.

How would humanity respond to this knowing how the series goes? Do we just ignore it and wait out the coming Harvest and then prep the fuck for a one? Do we try and help. Do we just say fuck it and stick to Sol?

The staff that worked on mass effect gets taken into custody by anyone nation with the opportunity to grab them, as different state level actors try to determine whether Mass Effect was somehow informed as a warning, or whether Bioware hacked reality somehow.

In the former case, studying the game becomes immensely important. Especially any earlier scripts or works in progress docs. Stuff that didn't make it into the final game might be more important because it is closer tot he original message. What fans 'know' from the games could be wrong.

In the latter case, replicating the success (which history ironically ends up labeling the 'Mass Effect' phenomenon, named after the game rather than what it stands for in game itself) becomes incredibly important. Whoever figures out how and why this worked has the chance to make incredible changes to reality. Importing all kinds of weapons, technologies or even whole factions from video games in our world could cause levels of destruction like nothing we can imagine, even before you start toying with games 'based on the real world' to make more direct changes to the geopolitical landscape. Suddenly, North Korea actually IS a nation with the strength to invade America.
If a private citizen discovers the secret first, we will be able to tell because their favorite Overwatch waifus will be real.

Remember: a key point in the games was ignoring warnings.
With that gone, RIP story as humans catapult ahead, knowing what to do.
Also, that shiz would be weaponized so fast.

> its a reality hack scenario
> It has limited range
> we send a ship through the mass effect relay
> there is no relay on the other end. There are no other relays ANYWHERE. They don't exist. Its just a giant one-way ticket.

Still calling my theory that something with so much power will be weaponized especially in this case of being useless for travel.

Honestly, while the mass effect technology in general might we weaponized, the relay itself can't be weaponized unless aliens exist. Its simply too powerful.

What are you going to do with it? Destroy the entire Earth? Because that's basically all you can do with it as a weapon.

Anyone with the means to weaponize wouldn't benefit from doing so.

that was the entire purpose of MAD, 'give us what we want / do as we say, or EVERYbody gets blown up'
so, yes, someone would do it

You... somehow got the entire premise of MAD wrong.

MAD has never been "My finger is over the button! Do as I say or the entire world dies!"

It was "Neither of us wants to die, and we both know that and ACTUAL war between the two of us would be fucking suicide. So we are going to spend the next couple decades hooting dirty looks at each other and pissing on each other's lawns in the dead of night, as hostile as we can manage without actually doing anything that might escalate shit to a nuclear war."

Wasn't that the plot of Gateway by Frederick Pohl?

Dunno. I haven't read Gateway, by Frederick Pohl.

Thing is, someone built it.
And freakin left the thing.
There's life out there.
More advanced than us.
Fuck it, free weapon in case they come back.

>no relay on the other end

than the relay wouldn't work. there has to be at least two linked relays for it to turn on and work. one to shoot you across space, one to stop you from flying on eternally.

now, if there are no other relays other than the two, that would be fine.

but you have to, at minimal, have two.

He's thinking of the Samon Option. Israel's version of MAD, if they get attacked by anything they can't fight off they nuke the US and Europe. It's proven to be very effective considering how much aid the US gives Israel.

It's still a one way trip if the ship has no way to stop.

After firing a few dozen probes and figuring out that the mass relay is useless without a second one at a destination, humanity would probably try their luck with slow boating mass effect ships which is still several thousand times the speed of light. Minor drawback of needing a planet or star with a magnetic field to discharge the drive after operating it for too long but it's still vastly superior to chemical or nuclear reaction propulsion.

no, im saying that a relay won't even turn on if there isn't another relay to link too. at best, the relay would be best for harvesting ezzo from to make actual ME ships if there isn't another relay to pair to.

You have the Sampson option wrong.

First, Israel's best rocket has a 7800 km maximum range, and it is more than 10,000 km to the US, so they literally can't attack the US, and second, threats toward the US and Europe don't exactly deter Israel's neighbors.

The Sampson Option is the destruction of every major city in the middle east and every Islamic holy site, including the ones in israel.

Harvest is lesser evil than ME3. Let it happen.

In Gateway, they're not one-way tickets; there's just no way of knowing where the ship will end up until you hit 'go'. You can make your way back once you arrive, assuming you didn't pass through a sun on the way.

Yo dawg, I heard you like transhumanism, so we put this bullshit plot twist inside your bullshit plot twist so you can pretend to be deep while you're pretending to be deep.

It's Samson.
Like in the Bible. Not Samon.
Definitely not Sampson.

For fuck's sake I'm not a native speaker and I'm an atheist to boot but it's awfully evident that it's named after the Biblical Samson.

Gateway was a hub of alien ships that you could be programmed for a number of unknown, pre-determined destinations. And then after reaching destination, you could program them for return or a new destination.
Thing was, some of the places you could go had changed since they were in use by the creators, so you might end up in a supernova, or worse.

So EVE Online?

I'll double your ISK if you follow the rules in my bio

>intergalactic rednecks fucking with upstart civilizations for shits and giggles

Nasa would make everything top secret in the name of ''knowing better'' and avoiding ''panic''. Nothing would ever be revealed.

>First, Israel's best rocket has a 7800 km maximum range, and it is more than 10,000 km to the US, so they literally can't attack the US
Israel bought 6 dolphin class submarines which are fitted to launch nuclear weapons, these only leave the coasts of europe and the US for crew rotation. Nobody said anything about them using an ICBM.

Let them nuke us. They'll only be targeting the problem areas anyways.

By Nasa's own founding articles they can't keep secrets like that. That's why all of the hush hush space stuff is always air force.
What would happen is the first few pics would get out and the public would know something had been found, but the air force would immediately take over almost all of Nasa and suddenly get way more funding from the US government

All I can think of is the sid meiers alpha centauri 'Golden Age begun' voice notification.

Considering we have a couple hundred year iirc before events of mass effect I recon we could easily build up enough to not worry about the Reaper IF we could get our shit together and stop fighting each other. Not sure if knowledge of an extra galactic threat of extermination is enough for that.
If we could sort our shit then all we need to do is not focus on the trap of mass effect technology. Sure we'd need it for ftl, and shields would be useful, but the whole point is that the mass effect technological progression is a reaper trap. And we would know this.
So we stubbornly pick another route. Go lasers, you know, the thing ME shields do dick squat to stop, but go big, not their puny point defense lasers. Even cold war theorized bomb pump xray lasers would be quite effective at killing Reapers.
(Statements based off of ME1 codex)

Y'know, you'd expect at least some nations in the galaxy to put at least some time and research into long-range lasers, even if only for special/black ops deployments.

You'd think, but I found no mention of such. The salarians and geth use more powerful UV lasers than the visible light lasers of the rest, but it still speaks about them being in a PD and later anti fighter role.
I remember thinking in ME3 (before it really went down hill) that if instead of wasting resources on the catalyst they should have just built something that size around a laser and a massive core for shields. Melt the reapers from a few light minutes and slice'n'dice at closer ranges.

Why the fuck would they nuke Europe and the US if they get attacked by their neighbours? That would only incentivise the Muslims to attack them, now wouldn't it?

Neat little thread but the unfortunate reality is that we'd probably fight each other either into the events of mass effect and not learn dick from story told. Humans would rush to reverse engineer the tech and advance ourselves forward to be the first ones to be able to take over the planet. If we didn't come up with a way to subvert nukes quickly enough, whoever is on the losing end of that will just squash the planet out, but if we did whoever managed it would rule the world and move forward the way humans in mass effect did

It's incentive for the US and Europe to give billions in yearly aid to Israel and to intervene destabilizing nearby countries for Israel.