Quote Originally Posted by kaynide View Post

If a person is given a soul, it can’t return to the life stream to allow a new individual to be born. Unless souls are infinite, there will be a point where souls run out and new babies can’t be born. We can infer souls are not infinite because Sphene plans to harvest every last ounce of life-energy until there is none left, then move on to other shards. If it was sustainable to “harvest life force” in any way, the AI would have thought of making a gigantic fish farm or something.
Query: How can we infer that from Sphene's plan? They established animal life was insufficient in 'Life Aether' in some way so an animal farm wouldn't work. Why, I don't know, as clearly animals have 'souls' as we learn from Arcadion, but they did mention it was insufficient.

Even if souls are finite, the fact that the aether stream crosses shards, and multiple shards are destroyed/wrecked, that would tell us there's plenty of extra souls entering and exiting the aether stream than is normal for a given shard which would suggest that what Sphene planned was entirely valid as a sustainable tactic (if not entirely immorale.)

Mind you I'm not arguing: I don't think we know enough about 'Life Aether' or 'Souls' in this canon to make these determinations and wish to highlight that. What we've seen of 'Life Aether' and 'Souls' makes no sense already, so I'm hesitant to try arguing about the nuance of it. PoTD touches on it, Y'Shtola dying and coming back like she gets stickers for a free sunday touches on it, resurrection as a spell touches on it, but it remains so absurdly vague its hard to put a finger on and most of what I just listed as examples complicate if not directly conflict with what DT touches on it.

We'll have to wait and see, I suppose. I personally suspect the writers are going to intensely regret these story line choices for the implications they create.