10 KiB
Following the Phoenix Chapter 100: Lost Innocence
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 21
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Created: 2014-11-02T09:40:12
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+14] (18 minutes later)
"You gave Harry a time machine to treat his sleep disorder!?"
"Not again."
Oh my yes.
Also:
Tamara cursed something in Arabian
You mean Arabic.
u/eaglejarl [+7] (2 hours later)
I had to drop back in time and reread the previous chapter to understand what was going on with the various rooms, but I finally got it. Clever plan; Bones is one smart lady. Also, I keep wanting to hear her say "Damnit, Albus, I'm a cop, not a botanist!" (Or whatever.)
I liked how you had Cedric's success at the TPC inspire Padma. I wonder if that sort of inspiration is an effect of the spell, or was that all her? Either way is great, but I rather like the idea that it was all her.
Harry's great realization about how maybe past deaths could be averted took me by surprise. I mean...duh. If your goal is to destroy Death then how could that NOT include retroactive resurrections?
u/heiligeEzel [+3] (11 hours later)
Harry's great realization about how maybe past deaths could be averted took me by surprise. I mean...duh. If your goal is to destroy Death then how could that NOT include retroactive resurrections?
In HPMOR-cannon, Harry only really gets that idea when HPMoR . I think most people who plan to overcome death think of getting around aging and disease, and maybe backing everyone up in computers - going back in time and getting back every person who ever died is a few factors of impossibility greater.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (4 hours later)
I think retroactive resurrection, or "The great common task" is more a product of today. You almost have to have a body of people thinking that death can be defeated before someone realizes the logical corollary, and realizes that entropy will be the enemy after death.
u/None [+2] (6 hours later)
But if you "defeat" entropy, how will you compute anything? You need an arrow of time to have any notion of a causal universe in which a world happens one instant after another?
I mean, if you gave me the base code of the universe, I could probably come up with something else because I was designing from scratch a universe in which the life-forms won't run down and die, but inside this universe I don't think we can actually do much about entropy except try to find more and more negentropy somewhere and use our existing resources as sustainably as we can.
u/drageuth2 [+2] (6 hours later)
Finding a renewable source of negentropy would prolly be close enough to 'defeating' entropy to count. Otherwise, finding a way to travel to different universes/create new universes, or just to induce and survive a big-crunch-big-bang reboot of our own universe.
u/None [+4] (6 hours later)
, or just to induce and survive a big-crunch-big-bang reboot of our own universe.
Unfortunately, the "Asimov thing" is very hard, since the real universe appears, AFAIK, to be heading for a Big Rip and a very depressing heat death.
u/drageuth2 [+3] (6 hours later)
Yyyyyep. But there could always be some way around that. Fold a little section of space off into a sub-universe that we can crunch, maybe? Some trick with black holes? Just plain clarke's-third-law stuff that we can't even imagine yet?
Once we defeat death, we've got plenty of time to start thinking these things up.
u/None [+3] (7 hours later)
I'm skeptical: just because some sort of Subliming is a solution to the Fermi Paradox and provides a way around heat-death doesn't mean it's really possible.
u/drageuth2 [+3] (8 hours later)
shrug I don't think it really solves the fermi paradox anyway. 'Cause if you find a way around heat death, then it's pretty dang moral to send out self-replicating probes and such to find every other sentient lifeform within your light cone (or beyond if FTL is possible somehow) and tell them how to do it as well.
But that doesn't mean it's not worth a try anyway, once you've got the time and the tech.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (10 hours later)
I mean in the sense that you have to reverse the dissolution of rot and decay on everyone that has died to fulfill the implied mandate to bring back everyone who ever died.
u/None [+2] (11 hours later)
Ah, yeah, fair enough.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (15 hours later)
If you read the Quantum thief series (from which I, and maybe EY, steal the "great common task" phrase) their are some interesting, if morally appalling thoughts about how to go about bringing EVERYONE who ever died back. Fair warning though, the transhumanists have gone down a path some people have issues with.
u/None [+1] (20 hours later)
Just spoil it already. I'm not going to pick up a whole new series just to see if I have qualms with its ideas.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Yes, that's completely infeasible and also appalling.
u/VorpalAuroch [+4] Life before Death (9 hours later)
One of the interesting deviations from MoR is that Professor Verres is much more rational here.
u/tilkau [+2] (20 hours later)
I'm inclined to agree, but I would also say that this story branch places him in situations in which he cannot gain in any way from exercising his parental irrationality. I mean.. There is a war on. However brief it may end up, the whole situation with the Dementors can rightfully be viewed as war, with billions of lives at stake. Harry is one of the few people who can prevail in this war. Until the situation is thoroughly remedied, anyone at all could die -- including the people capable of casting True Patroni.
That is an extremely sobering situation -- I wouldn't expect anyone to act as normal.
u/VorpalAuroch [+3] Life before Death (a day later)
That's not what I meant, and I wouldn't consider that behavior particularly irrational anyway. What I meant was this: in MoR, he's very stuck in his Hardcore Skeptic worldview, and here he seems to have adapted more or less effortlessly. Not that he understand everything, but basic MoR Prof. Verres would be having a lot more 'you turned into a cat' moments.
u/Evilness42 [+3] And even myth is long forgotten... (10 hours later)
Why exactly did the posts of this story skip from 17 to 98 and keep climbing up from there?
u/Putnam3145 [+3] (11 hours later)
? They started at 81.
u/Evilness42 [+0] And even myth is long forgotten... (11 hours later)
What? If you scroll down and look at the posts about the Following the Phoenix story on /r/rational, you will see that it goes up by 13, 14, 15, etc. until 17, at which point it skips to 98 and moves on from there. I was wondering what happened to the other 81.
u/Putnam3145 [+2] (11 hours later)
If you look at the chapter listing, you'll see that both are correct and the labeling is just inconsistent from the submitters to the subreddit.
u/Evilness42 [-1] And even myth is long forgotten... (11 hours later)
Gah... This sort of thing annoys me.
u/heiligeEzel [+1] (11 hours later)
The story started at "chapter 81", by assuming the first 80 chapters of HPMOR as a given, but of course fanfiction.net only sees the chapters in the actual story. So the chapter title says for example "chapter 99: day of the dementors" while fanfiction.net calls it chapter 19.
u/Evilness42 [-2] And even myth is long forgotten... (11 hours later)
Gah... This sort of thing annoys me.
u/RMcD94 [+2] (4 hours later)
If dementors are products of expectations how did they form initially and why do they behave the same way for those without expectations as those with, for example Harry reaction on the train in the prisoner of askaban. And what if you set up someones expectation that dementors spawn infinite gold or something
u/Muskwalker [+5] (6 hours later)
And what if you set up someones expectation that dementors spawn infinite gold or something
Bwahaha. Write a best-selling series of books where a girl falls in love with a sparkly dementor and a werewolf...
u/Gauntlet [+2] (13 hours later)
What if Harry creates the dementors? They are the system which copies a person's soul so they can be given an immortal body in the future.
As to why they create a sense of unease and visions of death it could be an unavoidable part of their design. Or a warning system. "This is what you will avoid".
Why the true patrons destroys them: if people believe they are immortal or have succeeded in obtaining immortality the dementors switch off and disappear.
u/RMcD94 [+0] (10 hours later)
Another thing I thought about was that if Harry thinks that he can save everyone after they die anyway, what is he bothered about them dying for? His solution is to travel back in time and save everyone the moment they die, so I can't possibly see how that doesn't undermine trying to stop people dying at the moment.
u/tilkau [+2] (20 hours later)
Harry thinks that he must save everyone (whether before or after death). His level of belief in his spur of the moment sketch of how to do so is somewhat less, as you can see a little after he has the original revelation.