Why did the GBs bother with Mata Nui?

[NuvaTube]

After Mata Nui's destiny of Reformation was revealed and completed, a niggling question began to develop itself in my mind, and no one seems to have commented about it so I may as well do it. Not to mention some related, irritated

 

plot comments/questions that will drag out for ages after the main point (sorry).

 

I'll begin by asking you to place yourself in the shoes of the Great Beings during the Core War.

 

*Dramatic Narrator voice *

 

The mysterious, powerful substance, Energised Protodermis, has been discovered oozing from deep within Spherus Magna's core, possessing properties the likes of which even your hyper-advanced race has never encountered (even though you’ve lived on the planet for thousands of years apparently you never actually bothered to find out what is under its crust). What's worst, the people of the planet have begun warring over it, in a ferocious, planet-wide conflict.

 

Although you try diplomacy in order to quell the fighting, you always fail, and the very Element Lords that you created to help lead the planet’s people are at the forefront of the Core War’s continuity.

 

Amongst the violence to which you are impartial, you begin investigating the substance’s nature. Your experiments find Energized Protodermis is extremely volatile and unbelievably energetic, and that if much more leaks to the surface through mean of extraction, it could (somehow) lead to the entire planet literally blowing itself apart. Such an event would cause death on a scale of billions (no idea on what the population actually is but needed a dramatic number). And, as the war progresses, you see this is now a virtually inevitable fate.

 

As retired rulers and (sort of) patrons of this world, you begin planning for the worst. From the very substance around which the war orbits, you begin constructing a salvation of unimaginable scale: The Mata Nui Robot.

 

What does this pinnacle of engineering and technology do?

 

It saves everyone by being a giant space ark that can easily carry vast populations around to other habitable planets? LUL NOPE

 

*Initiate horrific punctuation due to the following resembling serendipitous thought chains.

 

It fixes the planet!

 

(Whose pieces don’t realign under gravity anyways because plot. (Not to mention, how the Karz does anyone survive being on a planet that blows apart? Surely that much force would flatten you if you were on Bota Magna for example, right? How does the atmosphere stay intact?))

 

So there it is: Why didn’t the GBs try and save anyone but themselves (BS01 says they left Spherus Magna, presumably to another habitable planet)?

 

Why bother going to the trouble of fixing your planet after everyone’s dead when you could save everyone before it happens, take some EP with you for further experimentation and just move to another planet?

 

Were they so angry with the fact the Core War happened that they condemned ENTIRE RACES to death or a horrible life wandering barren deserts? Because judging by Mata Nui’s job it seems more like the cared about the planet rather than its people. Are they really that cold?

 

If the MU project was to collect data to know how to fix Spherus Magna, that would suggest that there might be other worlds with EP. If not, collecting data on planets with fundamentally different structures (No EP) and compositions seems a bit odd. Why bother looking at other planets’ chemical mixtures if in the end you’re just going to tractor beam your planet back together?

 

Of course, Mata Nui looked at other cultures too (Meaning tantalising prospects of Bionicle characters meeting other aliens) so was it more about getting alien technology, and some pro-tips about stopping planet wide war (it’s interesting they didn’t end up in a Cold War situation seeing as they had really amazing tech on Spherus Magna) the Great Beings didn’t have/already know? Surely the priority order would be “save the world, research later”? Even though it was supposedly "research first so we know how to save the world".

 

This of course leads to a really big question: If the Great Beings know what they want to create (how to Reform the planet), but don’t know how to make it work exactly (hence sending Mata Nui to collect random space data) why didn’t they just make another Mask of Creation (or an equivalent device) to tell them how to do it to save them about 100,000 years? You could argue they may just not want to use that since it takes away the thrill of developing, planning and creating, but one a matter as important as THE END OF THE WORLD they may put that feeling aside. The fact that they can make a Mask of Creation presents some very interesting possibilities too, but I won’t go into that.

 

As for the “MU Ark” idea, I guess you could argue taking a bunch of warring people and putting them on a giant Megazord would probably not lead to an immediately peaceful co-existence (it doesn’t even need to have been the Mata Nui Robot, I just refer to it since it proves the GBs were capable of interstellar travel) since they would just keep fighting and probably kill each other by the time you got anywhere. Then again, would that actually leave more dead than the Shattering or not? We don’t even know how many people or percentage of people the Shattering killed.

 

But surely the GBs would still save some people? You could argue that they may have done so but we just don’t know about it, but for the sake of the debate we’re disregarding that possibility.

 

And how did they get away with taking the amount of EP (probably comparable to the mass of the Moon, judging by the MU's size) that must have been needed to synthesise the MU while everyone else was dying to get mere scraps of it?

 

If extracting the EP was causing the planet’s instability, does that mean the GBs were the biggest contributor to the Shattering?

 

Surely taking that much mass would also effect the planet’s centre of gravity, which may even cause other worse disasters like the planet’s orbit unbalancing causing it to fall into one of the Solis Magnan binary stars or out the system entirely?

 

You could counter this idea with the “Bionicle-Physics-Is-Not-Real-World-Physics” card. To that, I will express my immense displeasure towards Greg for doing that; to me it feels like a lack of imagination. I believe it started with Jaller being able to make flames underwater, and ever since it has been a rock to hide behind when convenient. A good sci-fi can do literally anything and blag a sciency sounding excuse (seriously, check out the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, heck, even real world Quantum Mechanics lol).

 

For example you could say the GBs had tuned gravity generator at specific points on the planet to keep it stable, make the Shattering survivable, maintain atmospheres, and keep the pieces together in predictable orbits (i.e. how Bara/Bota/Aqua Magna didn’t fly apart but settled together nicely in a stable orbit around one another for 100,000 years).

 

But, I digress. This wasn’t meant to be so much about the answers/theories but more the questions...perhaps it wasn’t my destiny c:

 

So waddya guys think? Have I completely missed something? Are there good points among my terribly articulated thought-like question/counter-questions? If anyone can tell me, it’s the members of BZP...Or Greg, but he seems to have vanished GB style.

 

Thanks for reading, and peace! :3

 

[Taipu1]

I skim read that, but a partial answer to some of these problems would be the GBs were into experimenting. They probably didn't go with an 'ark' to escape the planet because they wanted to see if they could rise to the challenge of reforming the planet.

 

As for anything else you've said, I can only throw in the Greg's physics card as you said, which is a bit disappointing really.

[Zox Tomana]

Just a minor, science point. Flames are perfectly possibly underwater. Calcium or magnesium, oxidized by a nitrate or sulphate, can used as underwater flares. Jaller's flames, as I understood from the story, where more along the lines of him simply having to supply more energy to flame to get it started and keep it going.

[Art Vandelay]

That's a tough question. I suppose the GB's really did want to repair Spherus Magna, so they created Mata Nui to do it, and as an added bonus, they would get to do some serious experimenting and learn about other interstellar cultures. That's really all I can think of.

[bonesiii]

Wow this is long... I'll have to reply as I read; please take that into consideration if I miss some of what you mean.

 

First I'd just like to give the simple answer to the title question:

 

Why did the GBs bother with Mata Nui?

Three basic reasons.

 

1) Greg said lives would be lost on the remnants of Spherus Magna if it Mata Nui didn't complete his mission. I'm not sure if he ever confirmed specifically why later but I presume it means that unless it was reformed, the planet would have eventually destabilized and everybody would have died. This is the interpretation I'm using in my retelling.

 

2) The humanoid form seemed efficient at guiding in both moons at once and using all the necessary powers to prevent all the deadly side effects (like massive quakes, etc.).See especially this image:

 

http://biosector01.com/wiki/images/c/c1/Art_Mata_Nui_Melding_Planets.jpg

 

That's the prototype robot just after Makuta-in-main-robot was defeated, but same principle. Mata Nui was planned to take over a third robot and do the same basic thing while Makuta (as a good guy) would do part of it (probably the gravity thing but intentionally).

 

3) They needed the machine that would do this to carefully study many alien worlds first to ensure he would do it right (worlds presumably designed basically like SM; it seems they knew or strongly suspected this to be the case, interestingly; we don't know why), rather than end up killing everybody accidentally. The moons would need around 100,000 years to stabilize anyways for reformation to be possible, so he had time to do this. He had to be smart to analyze all this.

 

 

*reads on*

 

possessing properties the likes of which even your hyper-advanced race has never encountered (even though you’ve lived on the planet for thousands of years apparently you never actually bothered to find out what is under its crust)

I hope you don't find that implausible.

 

Your experiments find Energized Protodermis is extremely volatile and unbelievably energetic, and that if much more leaks to the surface through mean of extraction, it could (somehow) lead to the entire planet literally blowing itself apart.

Specifically, if someone tapped into its power, it would explode. Being so energetic, and since the GBs failed to contain it, this was pretty much inevitable. The substance of the core of a planet exploding would naturally cause a shattering. They're really lucky it didn't just explode the whole thing, actually. Not really luck, though, likely rotation-caused geologic features made it weaker at the poles so that provided two pressure releases. Without that, the whole thing probably could have popped like a balloon.

 

 

It saves everyone by being a giant space ark that can easily carry vast populations around to other habitable planets? LUL NOPE

Actually we don't know that that was NOT a fourth contingency. The GBs are all into contingencies. But you can't sustain a population forever in space (which is why it was always intended to be shut down when no longer needed), so they would have to GO somewhere and since they had time, it would be foolish not to investigate alien worlds first to see if there even IS anywhere to go.Also probably foolish to send these squabbling fools up as the crew since they just wrecked (or were about to) their own planet lol.Basically, you should always assume that the GBs have made a large number of contingencies we haven't yet encountered or even heard about. This one would be easy; Mata Nui was studying other worlds anyways. If he learned the reformation was impossible he could have gone to that as plan B.

(Whose pieces don’t realign under gravity anyways because plot.

Er... if you were living on the planet, would you just trust to chance that they'd plop down in the same spot, and no deaths would happen, magically no quakes, etc? They would almost certainly crash down into populated areas if left to chance (that may have been the future risk of death Greg meant; unsure -- I think it more likely they were slowly receding; our own moon does this due to tidal forces, plus these were blasted up in the first place so yeah).

(Not to mention, how the Karz does anyone survive being on a planet that blows apart? Surely that much force would flatten you if you were on Bota Magna for example, right? How does the atmosphere stay intact?))

This kind of subject comes up (not in regards to Bionicle so much, ironically) more often than you might think, so I've got an answer to that from looong ago. It's all about acceleration rates. The explosion would first come out of faults along a ring. This would kill anyone standing over those circular faults. But people within the circles, and people on the "green part of the olive" shape would survive. Those on the circle would be lifted up slowly at first -- this is like a fluid pressure buildup, keep in mind. Rapidly the SPEED would shoot up, but the acceleration is what kills if it's too fast.Ergo, since they didn't die, the acceleration must have been slow enough. :)Given that this is due to a totally fictional substance, there's no way to quantify it to try to disprove this option, so it should be acceptable. (That's where the "It's Bionicle physics" thing comes in... but I think this could work with many real-world materials too.)

So there it is: Why didn’t the GBs try and save anyone but themselves (BS01 says they left Spherus Magna, presumably to another habitable planet)?

Pretty sure that's wrong; not sure where you read that, but this came up in a recent topic, and I think someone (fishers?) posted a Greg quote where he confirmed they're still on the planet. But please don't quote me on that one, I may be misremembering it. I raise it so if anyone knows better they can confirm or correct.

Why bother going to the trouble of fixing your planet after everyone’s dead

I'm not following you. Everybody was not dead. Relatively few (if any) were (due to that).

when you could save everyone before it happens

I'm honestly not seeing how? Other than what they DID do, which DID save everyone (or the vast majority anyways). True, things went wrong but that would happen with just about any plan (hence the contingencies ).

take some EP with you for further experimentation and just move to another planet?

The problems with this assumption are:1) We don't know for SURE they knew there were any (other than dead rocks, gas giants, etc.). I think they did, and I have my suspicions how (if my old "Original Beings" theory is right, those could have left records, or: there's evidence the GBs might not be native to SM themselves). But if not, and you only have two options (and doing the ark thing first might remove the better option), best to go for study and analysis first before you make a rash move.2) Even if they know there ARE other worlds, they don't know if there are uninhabited ones, and if those would be viable in the long term.3) If there were no uninhabited ones, the natives might resent such a huge population trying to move in and wipe them out.

Were they so angry with the fact the Core War happened that they condemned ENTIRE RACES to death or a horrible life wandering barren deserts? Because judging by Mata Nui’s job it seems more like the cared about the planet rather than its people. Are they really that cold?

Well, they DID make the Baterra. That's pretty cold. But keep in mind too their own lives were on the line for all of the same reasons. They had a vested interest in having a home just for themselves, sure. It ended up benefiting everybody there (plus the artificial life they'd made, unknowingly sapient), but that surely was not the ONLY consideration!I've used a lot of quote tags now... probably should switch to another method:"If the MU project was to collect data to know how to fix Spherus Magna"Not if -- confirmed. :)"that would suggest that there might be other worlds with EP. If not, collecting data on planets with fundamentally different structures (No EP) and compositions seems a bit odd. Why bother looking at other planets’ chemical mixtures if in the end you’re just going to tractor beam your planet back together?"If your point is that there are other EP-core megaplanets, I agree. Or at least the GBs would have had some kind of reason to strongly suspect it (sure can't hurt to go look and find out anyways... well, anything CAN hurt, but in these circumstances that seems the wisest course of action).Note, on this basic subject, if this ark was going to be in space indefinitely it should need to collect EP for fuel, and that would run out eventually, plus tapping it on other worlds might be dangerous for its inhabitants (if too much, etc.).Also, even if other planets weren't EP-cored or even not megaplanets (though I strongly suspect the two have to go together), at the very least he could do small-scale proof of concept type tests, scaling them up over time and study how scaling it up affects the results. Just doing it blind where people live is obviously utter folly.Re: Looking at other cultures: I personally interpret it as yes, wanting to learn alien tech, cultural psychology, alternate courses of history given different circumstances, etc. but these opportunities would be fairly limited for Mata Nui. He was mainly designed to study the geology. However, I believe that he would at least try to determine potential hostility to newcomers should the ark option need pursued, as well as likelihood of them tapping into their own EP cores and making the trip pointless.Incidentally, given "human nature" (okay, not human ), it's highly risky to even live on an EP-core world. By reforming SM the GBs had a chance to make a stable megaplanet withOUT an EP-core (since it had already blown up), removing the possibility of that temptation and making it one of the safest possible worlds (with gobs of real estate). Don't forget to factor that in here.Also, even if they did find an understanding society to move in with, the GBs would likely look at it as unfairly inflicting a foolish people on a naive one, since this is the same population that warred over a substance and then blew up their own planet. Not exactly trustworthy folk.

why didn’t they just make another Mask of Creation (or an equivalent device) to tell them how to do it to save them about 100,000 years?

 

Or just use the one they did make. That's a clever point. But I presume that's way beyond its scope. It's not omniscient; would it even be able to tell how? I think Mata Nui's research must be necessary (as evidenced in this case by the fact that they made him despite making that mask).I know it's a Legendary mask... but in this case I think megaplanet trumps that.Re: the population would keep fighting while aboard -- quite possibly so. And another thing you aren't considering is they might not WANT to go. They might resent being told they have to leave their land and prefer desert survival and the like to going off into the totally unknown. :shrugs:"And how did they get away with taking the amount of EP (probably comparable to the mass of the Moon, judging by the MU's size) that must have been needed to synthesise the MU while everyone else was dying to get mere scraps of it?"They're the Great Beings. They're in charge and they're brilliant. I fail to see how that would be difficult.

 

[Edit: I thought you meant the MU EP pools. I see you meant the artificial proto. Suffice to say I have a theory on this in my retelling I'd rather let folks wait and read there. ]

If extracting the EP was causing the planet’s instability, does that mean the GBs were the biggest contributor to the Shattering?

No. Unlike everybody else, they were smart enough to begin by sending some Agori to steal a tiny fraction, and test what tapping into it does, removed from the large collection. As seen in that one comic pic, they learned that it's explosive. Soon after this they realized the inevitability of the Shattering (after trying to convince the people to stop but failing). Obviously they wouldn't tap into the power of the stuff while collecting it from the extrusion tunnels; they would just collect some of it.In fact, logically by removing a large percentage of it from the main collection, they weakened the blast when that main collection was ignited. Take some explosive out of a bomb and blow it up, and do you really think that would make the blast worst? Quite the opposite.

Surely taking that much mass would also effect the planet’s centre of gravity,

Given that this is a megaplanet that would naturally have steel-crushing gravity without the gravity-absorbing-over-Earth-level effect (which cannot have been directly done by the EP since it continued after the Shattering), I'd say a huge mass besides all the EP could have been removed (as long as it was physically stable) without affecting the surface gravity at all.As for the center -- the center is still the center (since both poles left).The only thing it would affect (other than geologic instability due to the stress of the explosion, which Mata Nui healed) would be that whatever is absorbing the extra gravity is now absorbing slightly less. But we don't even know what does this, much less what it does with the absorbed energy (possibly converting it into some other useful energy). That MIGHT have detrimental effects, but it really depends on what it is. And I suspect the amount was just too slight to really matter.We just don't know. That question delves way too deeply into theory-upon-theory stuff, and any point in that house of cards could be wrong. At the end of the day the answer here has to be "fiction" and "they survived, ergo it must not have been bad enough, somehow." This kind of thing almost always has to have at least a little "somehow" remaining in this kind of science fantasy genre of fiction; I'm okay with that."which may even cause other worse disasters like the planet’s orbit unbalancing"I must admit I failed to think of this one. That may, however, be what the absorbed extra gravity handles. And this is assuming the absorption only works on the surface which seems unlikely. Probably the total output gravity is the same (Earth-level) regardless of how much mass exists over Earth's mass, so the orbit should remain unaffected.Presuming for sake of discussion that this is wrong, and If my old seeding idea is right, then what SM used to be would probably have been a roughly Earth-sized barren rock, and the "Original Beings" threw some EP at it in transformative mode (keep in mind, just theory). This would have increased the planet's mass to begin with so the original stable orbit would have already been messed up.It may be that there's a perfect flexible system, where the more mass the EP creates as it grew into a megaplanet, the more the transformed outer core rock (what I presume does the absorbing) redirects the extra absorbed gravity into stabilizing the orbit. So as the mass goes down due to the explosion (if it does; see following note), the need for stabilizing goes down, as does the available extra gravity to fuel it, as does the effect. It could all balance out regardless that way.Note: Actually we don't know that the total mass DID go down. Slightly, sure, with what mass Mata Nui took with him (though now he's brought it back, hasn't he? ). But the two major moons were still orbiting it as was the debris field and the AM minor moon. So the same basic amount of gravity was still there, just converted to a subsystem instead of one body.The only mass I can see being lost of any significance would be if the EP explosion was so powerful due to some mass being converted to energy (as happens in nuclear explosions and especially antimatter). Almost certainly true to some extent but IMO this would be a tiny fraction, probably not enough to really matter (any more than us sending some of our mass out as the Voyager probe would destabilize our orbit and the like).

You could counter this idea with the “Bionicle-Physics-Is-Not-Real-World-Physics” card. To that, I will express my immense displeasure towards Greg for doing that; to me it feels like a lack of imagination.

And then as I always say when this comes up -- there's two ways to take that statement. One, an excuse to NOT use the imagination... and two, paradoxically as an excuse TO use your imagination, as I've done (meaning "the physics are different but still theorizeable").There's no reason to be displeased by it -- it's your choice how to take it. It's one of those wonderful things about fiction that lets the fan have it however they want -- if you don't want to get a headache worrying about these things, fine -- just remember it's fiction and be done with it. If like me you LOVE thinking about the nitty-gritty details and plausibility, you can do that too and use your imagination to come up with reasonable explanations (IMO this is nearly always possible for any fiction).One nitpick I do have against Greg's use is that often he isn't that informed on real-world physics himself (but usually I find this is because he doesn't realize something actually IS plausible in the real world). But really this doesn't matter since real-world plausibility was never the point of Bionicle.Jaller making flames underwater is a great example -- that's perfectly plausible in real life. Torpedo explosions for example do this all the time. (Note: I have no idea if that was the first time he said it. But that doesn't really matter -- he wasn't inventing a "card" but simply telling you something that was always true from the start -- Earth physics only apply in Bionicle where the authors want.)"A good sci-fi can do literally anything and blag a sciency sounding excuse (seriously, check out the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, heck, even real world Quantum Mechanics lol)."You need to keep in mind that this is a stylistic choice that depends on the preferences of the fans; on this issue, "good is in the eye of the beholder." You and I share a preference that we love technobabble (and especially when it goes beyond mere babble). But the average target-age kid of Bionicle did not; it went over their heads. Greg's approach is for them entirely appropriate, as much as it might rub some of us supergeeks the wrong way. You don't want to lose the audience by boring them and do no good at all. You have to "choose your battles".Also, honestly it's not fair to expect all authors to be experts on all the vast subjects of science themselves in order to be qualified to tell an action-adventure-with-powers story! Even most scientists aren't; most are specialists (but anyways, let's not get too deep into that as some controversy exists along those lines...). In fact if you really think about it, having that kind of rule would actually cause less imagination. You'd be saying "you have to work really hard to learn a minimum, high-standard level of physics knowledge before you're allowed to express your imagination." That would logically result in far less expressed imagination because most authors don't have that kind of time. (Even publishing any story, even for an established company, is a gamble to begin with. If you invest so much time in that stuff and your gamble doesn't pay off you're screwed.)In short: the target-age kids at the time didn't want the kind of story you and I would have wanted (not exactly; but kind of), yet you and I CAN imagine background theories to understand this story plausibly in that way (that's a big part of the side goals in my retelling in fact )."For example you could say the GBs had tuned gravity generator at specific points on the planet to keep it stable, make the Shattering survivable, maintain atmospheres, and keep the pieces together in predictable orbits (i.e. how Bara/Bota/Aqua Magna didn’t fly apart but settled together nicely in a stable orbit around one another for 100,000 years)."Anything technological, especially using energy fields, needs an energy source, and the EP would run out eventually. Anytime you can come up with a stable physical solution it's far, far safer (and even saves lives in the long term; eventually economic and technological inefficiencies translate to mouths going hungry early).Plus: Giant robot battle = more fun.

Edited July 25, 2013 by bonesiii

[Unauthorized Autobiography]

Plus: Giant robot battle = more fun.

 

Agree here. XD

[Art Vandelay]

That's a HUGE answer, bones! I guess a big question calls for a big answer.

 

Anyway, I second bonesiii's acceleration theory. GregF physics or not, the acceleration couldn't have been very much, because all life on Bota Magna and Aqua Magna would have been extinguished if it was great enough.

[fishers64]

 

So there it is: Why didn’t the GBs try and save anyone but themselves (BS01 says they left Spherus Magna, presumably to another habitable planet)?

Pretty sure that's wrong; not sure where you read that, but this came up in a recent topic, and I think someone (fishers?) posted a Greg quote where he confirmed they're still on the planet. But please don't quote me on that one, I may be misremembering it. I raise it so if anyone knows better they can confirm or correct.

 

 

2.

Where are the Great Beings?They are on the planet, that is all I can tell you right nowNot in a place you have seenBut on Spherus Magna?Yes

That was what I could find on the subject. It doesn't confirm that the GBs don't space-travel, or didn't, just that their all home right now to watch the Giant Robot Planet Re-Assembly Show.

 

 

 

when you could save everyone before it happens

I'm honestly not seeing how? Other than what they DID do, which DID save everyone (or the vast majority anyways). True, things went wrong but that would happen with just about any plan (hence the contingencies ).

 

Cue the Melding Alternate Universe.* * *Also, this might help clarify things:

HERE we go, this is what I was looking for:

is bara-magna the GBs homeworld?No, Spherus Magna is.

Okay, the GB alien theory is debunked.

 

So it's possible that they never left the planet. I don't know where BS01 got it's assertion, but "elsewhere" could mean "elsewhere on SM", and that they retreated to their GB secret hideout (s)(on Bota Magna?). They could have sent the robot to explore other planets as a prelude to their own escape from SM, telling him to record data so they could get away from the unstable minds of the native inhabitants. We really don't know too much about the GBs, although the topic I quote above has a bunch of information.