[extropy-chat] What Happened to "the Blight"?

[Damien Sullivan]

On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 02:06:47PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:

> A good dramatization of a grasping, solitary intelligence was Vernor
> Vinge's "Blight" in "A Fire Beyond the Deep". This transhuman
> intelligence had been contained, somehow, eons ago near its resting
> place in the lower Beyond. Then someone got in and monkeyed with

Urm.  When it woke up, it was in the Low Transcend, where Powers can
first live.  The Beyond is the realm of FTL and AI, but no Powers.

> How exactly did Vinge send in the cavalry at the end? Something about
> a great wave of *slowness* that engulfed the many lightyears of the
> Blight's locale?

Yes.  And there's a strong implication that that is how the Blight was
contained the first time around, except on an even bigger scale -- that
the Beyond and Slow Zones (in our and other galaxies) are artificial
constructs, presumably meant to act as sub-Power nurseries.  The Zones
shrank over time; the Blight archive would have recently found itself in
the Low Transcend, as opposed to High Beyond.  5 billion years ago, in
the ur-Partition, it might well have been Slow Zone.

-xx- Damien X-)