Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[CrownySuccubus]

In the long term the risk of extinction is 100%, but my point is that one can overcome Meteion and learn from the mistakes of the Dead Ends. A society that follows the Plenty does neither.

I'm still calling BS on this one, Eara. I disagree and 1000% reject the notion that The Plenty was a guaranteed extinction route. The Plenty all died out because the story wanted them to. Their society didn't collapse. They didn't die out to resource shortages or unsustainability or any form of external crisis. They chose to kill themselves because the story wanted the Buddhist argument of "life without death and suffering is meaningless" to be correct. I reject the argument that this philosophy, whether it comes from Buddhism or not, is the sole inevitable response to a world of complete betterment.

It's not really manipulating electricity if I have to explain to my washing machine why it shouldn't self terminate every time I want to use it. Of the beings used to manipulate dynamis, none resemble machines. Meteion had a will of her own, as did the souls that ultimately ended up in Ultima Thule, and of course humanity.

"None resemble machines?" Meteion was literally programmed with a scheduled status report that completely eliminated the free will and self.

Likewise, convincing a device not to kill itself to run whatever program you want it to run is basically what almost every modern machine with any form of complexity needs to do. Why do large computers and machines based on intricate circuitry have a cooling device? So that it won't kill itself doing what you told it to do. Why do machines have error messages and redundant systems? So that telling a machine to Divide by Zero, or perform some other logically-impossible task, doesn't shut down the entire machine. If an entelechy needs some sort of "dynamis regulation system" to avoid being overcome by oversights in its programming or method of power circulation, then that doesn't suddenly make them unfeasible. It makes them basically like most machines we use today.

Nothing, but it clearly wasn't enough to avert their doom. The Ea had their disagreements as well, yet that proved insufficient.

Again, these societies only failed because the story WROTE them to fail. They are supposedly "intelligent" societies that were written to act like they had 8th grade educations.