At the end of episode 07 Philip told Trevor "You are AT LEAST a 100 years older than me". What does that mean? How much is their life span? How old are the travelers? Are they coming from different times in the future?
There are two major points made about Trevors age on the show, that he is apparantly older than all the others combined and that he is more than 100 years older than Philip. It is also of note that both lines are delivered as retorts to some quip and not necessarily as a point of information. There is also the point where Trever talks about a person being a "that way for over a century".
Each one of those in isolation could be just a figure of speech but all together they appear to point at increased longevity in the future as matter of fact. I cant help but feel it is a little contrived that the youngest team member is the oldest team member, but cant help but notice this "experienced one" is the one always asking how everything works for one of the other team members to explain.
He only seems to be significantly older as a point to be made in various situations but while in his cover life he could just as easily be a 30 year old in a 17 year olds body.
The only reasons they would lean on the point so hard however would be either to exaggerate the joke from "3rd Rock From the Sun" or to make the point of information that people (can) live longer in the future.
Also, if he was training with the team he must have been able bodied despite his age
Yet therein lies the contradiction, I've too had thought about that. Regardless how advanced the Master Plan of The Director is, these people lived underground all their lives. As such, it's impossible, even with advanced technology to nourish and maintain life to a great longevity under artificial conditions.
Only certain Nordic people are capable to generate vitamins in lack of sunlight, which would mean the show is a spiritual followup to Vikings. It doesn't matter what and how we eat and how we exercise if we have no access to sunlight/natural light, so that's why I discarded the idea, that futuristic medicine kept them alive for so long. A chosen few come in contact with The Director, and my educated guess was, that its somewhere physically impenetrable, a space outside our spacetime.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.
Advanced techniques, like rebuilding telomeres with designer viruses or using nanotechnology to periodically restore your body to a youthful condition, would be necessary for significant life extension. I don't think they give these treatments to everyone (or really could given their resource situation), just the most capable and talented members of their society who are too sorely needed.
You could certainly sustain life and good health under normally unhealthy conditions with advanced medical tech. The people in the shelters probably eat nutritionally complete hydroponically derived soy sludge, like in The Matrix, with supplemental vitamins and minerals added. It would be bland as hell but could keep a person going indefinitely without malnutrition issues.
That is very much the fiction part of it. Non-nocturnal mammals, such as ourselves cannot function properly without absorbing vitamins coming from natural sunlight, and advanced technology cannot change that.
Even if we accept the premise, it still would have to include all living members of every shelters, not just privileged ones. The constant question of the Faction "When are you from?" indicates 2 things: one, the temporal location of travelers is on a need to know basis, and two, multiple events have forced people to live underground for centuries.
This brings to mind how shelters can't be expanded, thus the number of inhabitants can't reach a critical number, ergo the planning of offspring is subject to The Director, hence why fraternization among them is prohibited.
BTW I'm familiar with the process of the telomerase and apoptosis, and neither regenerates the eyes and the testes, so they better be some fine nanites, that actually keep their eyesight over the age of 80, or when it's damaged. My running theory is, that the AI exists out of time, and the select few working on it stay alive, while others they know die around them, as it was hinted by Trevor's age, that of the hacker possessing Grace's body, and their low traveler number.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.
Full spectrum lighting could substitute for the sun. And nanites can theoretically be programmed to conduct any kind of repair whatsoever, without limitation. You could even make substitutions of materials better suited to their function than the ones our bodies produce naturally, turning human organs into a form of organic technology, still living tissue but altered and with design tweaks that make those organs work better.
For all intents and purposes natural selection is done with the human race. The timescale over which self directed evolution can make major changes means we'll be taking care of our own development from this point forward. When you project centuries ahead you're entering a world that may be very different from ours, in a lot of fundamental ways. Everything that doesn't violate the laws of physics we will eventually learn how to do. So be careful about casually placing limits on our capabilities indefinitely into the future. You might be way off the mark. Even our understanding of what the laws of physics allow continues to change.
I'd never go as far as to say adaptation is done for us, since change is constant, but its measurements is in thousands of years.
I do agree, that our artificial intervention by way of agriculture and modernized medicine has altered how we would evolve and adapt, but what we do know for certain from testimonies made by characters, even the ones opposing each other, that the inhabitants of shelters have no place for leisure (they don't know what football is, suggesting, there's no designated or free area for team sports), there are no animals, neither are there bigger plants, like trees.
As such, I heavily doubt that the inhabitants receive the care you're arguing even if it does exist in their reality. The Director decides standard of living based on the usefulness of subjects, and in general it's bleak. There's nothing surprising in it, without the ability to measure how humans as social animals bond among each other, a strict plan concocted up by an emotionless AI is very similar to pre-Pasteur era doctors, who refused sanitation of equipment and themselves until they were proven wrong, unfortunate for the thousands, who died during that time.
Before it was revealed it's a quantum computer intelligence, I was convinced the travelers work for an authoritarian dictator, who seems benevolent on the surface, but is anything but underneath. To that end it doesn't make that much of a difference. For example, by most current calculations, and our way of life, the planet can sustain 4 billion people. Our solution is to reduce our impact by democratic means, whereas a strictly logical entity would opt for the forceful rearrangement of people, and obliterate the "excess" population to save time. If anything, a sociopath is the closest thing we have to an artificial intelligence, and given the choice they always go for the murder route.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.
That is correct. Adaptation via natural selection is the process by which gene mutations or gene preservation via environmentally selected breeding introduces an identifiable trait in a species, or as a bumper sticker in my neighborhood sates, "In order for evolution to work, the mutant has to get laid." But it is a process that takes thousands of years to have an observable effect in humans because our natural inter-generational time is at minimum about 16 years (puberty is a function of nutrition). What has caused so many problems for mankind is that natural selection has been effectively removed from the equation since the advent of agriculture. Now it is unnatural selection because those who likely wouldn't survive to breed now do via modern medicine, and our population has exceeded the niche capacity for some time now. As hunter-gatherers, I once read that the planet could support about 10 million humans. Agriculture radically changed these numbers forever, which is why at the beginning of the series I speculated that the first traveler may have been responsible for introducing agriculture, which then allowed all the other advances to take place in order to have a technology in place to divert the asteroid. Modern agriculture requires fuel both in the form of mechanization and in the production of fertilizer.
Anyone who thinks there won't be huge problems in 30 years is really bad at math. And Mars isn't a solution, it is a diversion to keep the masses from recognizing the problem. Which is exactly why the elites want to take away guns, because if the peasants have them, the odds of the elites making it to the next level are much lower.
My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2
I'm 98% in agreement with you, except for one detail, which is tied to the hunter/gatherer/plucker stage of modern humans: natural selection by way of mutual attraction would also affect the most violent ones in our societies.
Our species can be compared to any other higher mammal to see, that violence alone isn't what guarantees procreation, but also a sound mind, hence why when violent and crazy animals usurp power (or in our case, psychopaths and sociopaths), they usually don't last long as the other tribe/pack members revolt.
If anything, with every good we've been doing, we're still worse, than some of the animals we tend to reference when we talk violence. For example, lions are way less sexist, than many fellow guys I know (even with the tearing the cubs others in half part), and although wolves have a strict order, they still look after their omega both food wise, and during attacks by fellow wolves or other predators. Our imagination to do evil, unfortunately supersedes that by magnitudes.
Up to a point I even felt sorry for the travelers because they come from a world where noone could or would tell them what soylent green is, just accept it, which makes it macabre, that they chose cultists of all people to be hosts.
What concerns the weather... I don't live in the country where I was born, but traditionally it always had cold winters. However, right now a polar air mess ravages that region, in one place the measured temperature was -22 Fahrenheit or -30 Celsius, something I'm lucky only hearing of, the worst I lived through was half of that.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.
I'd never go as far as to say adaptation is done for us, since change is constant, but its measurements is in thousands of years.
... whereas a strictly logical entity would opt for the forceful rearrangement of people, and obliterate the "excess" population to save time. If anything, a sociopath is the closest thing we have to an artificial intelligence, and given the choice they always go for the murder route.
I agree with the proposition, except people still live in shelters, and it is established in-universe, that there is a privilege system, favoring potential and actual travelers. As such, whatever advances do exist, they're kept secret, including the withheld ability to reverse engineer anything new The Director gives them. We, as of now, can't measure how long it took for the Faction to build their own rogue method of travel, but their infiltration was only possible with inside help. One of the few novels depicting such corruptibility was featured in James Clavell's The Rat King, where the American soldier ran the black market in cahoots with local Chinese and some guards, who could be bribed, without actually caring if they get rescued. If anything, liberation meant for him going back to being a nobody.
I have not established by the season finale as to who played whom. By which I mean trickery, not the actors portraying them. Since the quantum computer can pick and choose which events to influence, while its own existence isn't in jeopardy (it hasn't been yet established if it was built before or after the disasters), it could very well lose control over the future population, and for a machine being able to dictate order, that's a threat to existence. From the little we know, it's also plausible it did plan to transport itself to our present, kept under wraps in case of compromise in the future (given the Faction can enter the barrier where The Director is). Benevolent and malevolent are our terms created in our consciousness, in a world of 1s and 0s, it's necessary or unnecessary, true or false. A case could be made, that The Director could have had motivated inhabitants with harmless knowledge of the past, like the difference between a bear and a dog. Then again, it's also the brilliance in writing, since the Caucasian bear killer really is as huge as a cub, and we never get to see it, ergo we can't determine, but it's hinted, that not knowing what cow milk is means The Director thinks such information is 0. Except that's also stupid. I've never visited the tropical hemisphere, and haven't ate all the fruits and fish it has to offer, and yet in theory I could be allergic to it. I can't post on social media I know nothing about, unless I'm a hypochondriac. In other words, The Director clocks out a lot, that is vital to a mission.
Just to compare, in the 1970s and the 1980s, North Korea executed a plan to infiltrate its perceived mortal enemy, Japan, and they have used local and loyal Korean Japanese to find ideal marks nobody would miss, and replacing them with their own. However, their plan was twofold: as part of a larger operation of abducting civilians from countries who fought North Korea in the war, they needed new "volunteers" to teach the language and newer customs, and to give wives to useful idiots who defected there from South Korea. One of their botched attempts has alerted the Japanese, and the operation had to stop, which was followed by decades of denial, then admittance. The point is, as much as I like the show, and I like it a lot, they've failed to establish if formerly arrived travelers help out with legwork finding the right targets.
I don't go further, than an FBI agent, who by company policy can't disclose much about him or herself online, this being the biggest gamble. I'm not saying it's the direction the show will take, but the travelers resemble Soviet operatives prior to WWII, who rarely could know who worked with them or against, that trusting their environment is a no go, but going home also means certain death.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.
Personally, I believe they'll reveal that the Director, by going back in time to the quantum mainframe in the barn, is creating a stable time loop(aka bootstrap paradox) with itself at the center. Which, actually, wouldn't be much different to how Skynet exists in the "Terminator" verse i.e. the only reason it exists is that humans reverse engineered neural networks from the leftover terminator parts from 1984 but the parts from 1984 only exist because Skynet exists in the future to send the original terminator back to 1984.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
Full spectrum lighting could substitute for the sun.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw share
Very cool. This is exactly the sort of thing you'd need to make permanent underground living tolerable for people. I imagine there will be a market for those living above the arctic circle, where it's dark for months at a time. And people who suffer from seasonal depression as a result of not getting the full solar spectrum from their lighting fixtures. Not to mention making outposts in space feel like home, when we start settling the solar system.
As time goes on the illusions will get more sophisticated, incorporating clouds and landscapes so you can look out your windows and see whatever scenery you like. You could set your full spectrum solar windows to give you a full day-night cycle too, sunrise, the sun moving across the sky, sunset, stars at night, randomly generated stormy weather, and so forth.
In our actual reality, that could be a possibility, there's just one problem, rather a mystery.
The current theory is, that due to climate change (not this one, but one a long time ago) our human race could abandon living in caves, and with the continued use of fire, tribalism could kick off. All fine and dandy, however...
We know for a fact, that despite all of our technological advances, the biggest hurdle in our way of elongated space travel is space madness. The relevance here is, that we can't live in closed confined spaces for a long time without going crazy, even if we aren't claustrophobic, and our bodies, even if subconsciously, but can tell the difference.
As such, the Fallout series is very close to the truth in depicting the various ways we would kill each other without stepping a foot outside. Yet, it still remains conflicting how and why only a handful of humans have retained immunity from the fear of being boxed in for a long time, since we know, that cave dwelling was a general feature, and over a long stretch of territory. The recently (2012) discovered cave in South Africa has revealed a tribe of humans, being cave dwellers, but their opposable thumbs did not fully develop, and were actually half way to more complex movement from effective tree climbing. Should we find similar examples, it could establish that we transitioned from forrestal regions into caves over a long period of time, and thus never developed an ability to live away from open spaces and sunlight for a long time.
How we could fare underground can be tested by a regimen similar to what we put astronauts through, but sensory deprivation remains a crucial factor.
As for the in-universe of the show, light does come from somewhere, since we've seen the two travelers exposed to it in their secret meeting, but my guess is, that it's either close to exits, which are off limits, or in a training room.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.
The series seems to be as much about the characters as the Science Fiction. Often I think that a plot twist was added to give us an interesting way to develop the character more than to open a time travel twist (Macy re-boot is hardly required for the plot but is very interesting in the subtle character change). Maybe what is different about Trevor is the result of his age. He does not seem to have any special skills so far but he does have the best ability to connect in a good way to the people in his current life. He treats his mother better, despite his father's frustration with him he manages to get thru to him, he manages to change his girlfriend's attitude and reach her softer side and his connection to Grace probably because he can see she is doing good work with the students. He is also the only one who is stopping to smell the flowers, i.e. really enjoying what the past has to offer and doing his meditation to keep calm and collected. In short, he displays all the characteristics of a wise old man. I wonder if this will lead somewhere relevant to the mission in season 2.
shareMy take is that the Director sending Travelers back has been going on for at least a few hundred years thus individuals will have lived centuries apart in the future even though they are now working together at the same time in their past(our present). So, what Phil told Trevor would mean something like "You came from a time a hundred years before my own." even though they are approximately the same biological age.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
My take is that the Director sending Travelers back has been going on for at least a few hundred years
As I stated in another post in this thread, I believe we'll come to find out that the Director is the center of a stable time loop i.e. Future Director will end up sending itself back in time to the quantum mainframe in the barn where it will be stored until eventually it becomes the Future Director sending itself back in time to the quantum mainframe in the barn...and so on and so on. So, I don't think it's a matter of them creating/programming the Director so much as they maintain the hardware and software that allows it to exist and be interacted with.
As for the physical age of Travelers when they were in their original bodies, I don't think it really matters or that they have a much longer life span than present day humans. In fact, their life span might be less considering how it's alluded to in the show that resources are pretty scarce in the future; so much so that humanity is apparently becoming extinct.
Also, I think for the most part their host bodies are as close to their actual age as possible likely due to compatibility issues(the closer their host is physically/physiologically to themselves equates to a more likely chance of a successful transfer of consciousness). I think this is why there are "mistakes" like Marcy who, due to the fake Facebook page David had her make, was assumed to be a normal human being capable of handling the consciousness of the team's medic(obviously a mentally handicapped person wouldn't be capable of handling such a technical position and wouldn't have been chosen as a host body to begin with because of that fact).
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
In fact, their life span might be less considering how it's alluded to in the show that resources are pretty scarce in the future; so much so that humanity is apparently becoming extinct.
Oh, I did take into account their advance medical technology I just think that it's only available to "important" people in the future. I believe most of the people who become Travelers are from the general population.
Also, you have to see it from the Director's point of view. The longer a human lives the more it will need to consume to maintain said extra life. If it's resource intensive to extend life spans, the Director will likely reserve its use.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
Also, you have to see it from the Director's point of view. The longer a human lives the more it will need to consume to maintain said extra life. If it's resource intensive to extend life spans, the Director will likely reserve its use.
There are a number of hints that at least some of those people have been alive for centuries. Given their dire resource situation it seems likely only certain people, the ones whose skills make them indispensable, can be sustained by whatever age-defeating medical tech they use. But we know Trevor is old. The oldest of MacClaren's team by far, older than the rest of them put together is what they said. And in the episode where the team was held captive, he knows a catheter has been inserted because even though it's been many years since he last felt it the sensation is very distinctive. That leads me to believe he was quite frail and elderly when the life extension treatment was initially developed and reverted to a younger state after receiving it.
shareTrevor seems rather astute imho. An astute person doesn't necessarily had to have experienced something to be sure that that something is occurring(in reference to your mention of catheters). I mean, I've never had the unfortunate luck to have the need for one(yet...knock on wood) but, if I suddenly woke up with the sensation of something shoved into my you-know-what, I think I'd be able to put two and two together. ;D
I'm willing to admit that Trevor may be older than the rest but I don't think anyone who becomes a Traveler is centuries old. As I stated in my other reply above, you have to see this from the Director's point of view. Why expend the resources to extend the life of someone who will likely end up being sent on a one-way-trip back in time long before even their natural life span would have ended?
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
They didn't send the important ones back until recently because of the high failure rate. In Episode 5, right after the incident with the family on the parking garage roof, Trevor said the first wave of Travelers had a misfire rate in excess of 30%. As helpful as some of the VIPs could be on the ground in the 21st, the Director was unwilling to risk sending them until those numbers improved. Significantly. Now that failures are rare (they got everyone in that cult without a single misfire) the time is finally right.
The hints at life extension technology have been pretty blatant. How else would you explain Trevor's comment about Bloom that she's "been that way for a century"? And what about Grace having been one of the original creators of the Director? Or Trevor being much older than the rest of his team put together? They have a lot of really old VIPs. How many coincidences does it take before it's not just a coincidence?
You forgetting one thing though. Who's to say they haven't been sending people back in time closer to their own future time? If anything, there would be less of a chance of misfires and such as their knowledge of when, where, and how these people died would be more exact than what they have from the 21st century. This would explain their "oldness" without them having to have been recipients of rejuvenation technology. It would also be a tactical advantage in their current time since they could conceivably plan ahead for any disasters or problems and minimize their effect.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
But then they risk potentially altering events during the preparation period for the Traveler project. And there may be a baseline misfire rate. In other words, rare misfires that occur even when the conditions are perfectly controlled.
True anti-aging medical technology is only slightly beyond our current level. Consciousness transfer and tachyon transmission, by contrast, are well beyond early 21st century science. Medical nanites would be more than capable of indefinitely maintaining a human body in the prime of youth and perfect health. And we know they've got those. There is no reason to doubt they have a technological fountain of youth, it's the least far-fetched explanation for the longevity they've alluded to.
Yes, they can potentially alter events but, once you've went down the "using time travel to affect current results" path, it's really a matter of how far they are willing to go. Affecting little events in their immediate time would be inconsequential to affecting major events on a much larger scale(such as preventing the impact of Helios 365) especially if affecting the minor events means a more likely positive outcome when manipulating the major event.
BTW, I've never denied they have the ability to technologically allow people to live longer than they normally would, I'm just arguing whether it is as widespread/common as you and others believe(or, at least, are arguing for). I guess what I'm really debating is whether those characters who have said as much are stating such from personal experience or if it is, in fact, a more common occurrence in the future. In other words, I'm trying to argue the side of "While some Travelers, who's survival is important to the overall altering of the past, are more than likely subject to rejuvenation technology, the vast majority of Travelers are but mere cannon fodder in the grand scheme of things and are, therefore, not recipients of such technology due to their lack of importance.".
All in all though, you shouldn't take all of this as me actually believing what I'm arguing. It's more a case of me being the 'devil's advocate' as I am highly fascinated by the concept of time travel and enjoy debating the ins and outs of such a hypothetical idea. :)
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
No, in a future like the one they've described they simply couldn't keep the average person alive indefinitely. The shelters are already over-capacity and they probably don't have the means to feed any more mouths than they already have. So they use it just for their most talented scientists, engineers, and programmers. If you've got Albert Einstein in your lab and Steve Jobs on your design team, you want to keep them there. You aren't really doing it for them. You're doing it for the greater good. But yeah, the average Traveler candidate wouldn't qualify. It doesn't much matter for them though. Long before they get old and frail they're going to be in new bodies back in the 21st.
I totally agree, time travel is a fascinating subject to think about. The number of mind-boggling situations you could potentially get yourself into is almost limitless.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
shareIn one of the conversations, I believe it was Grace, they asked how she could be the one who designed the director. It was mentioned that they basically sent her older mind in her younger body. I'm assuming all of them have their mind online and transferred to younger cloned bodies. With Marcy, they had a backup of her consciousness, in the same way.
share