I'm spitting my post into two areas: We can't trust the Factors: * They use ships from other nations. This means they either took them from other nations and integrated them into their fleet, or they traded for them. If we can't trust the Factors then I would guess the former is true. * They obviously don't trust us and treat us with caution and are deliberately planning out how they interact with us. This plays into their nature of being cautious predators waiting for the right moment to strike. I would guess we are currently in the early stages of the "kill" and are still being lured in. * They only deal with certain factions (and certain parts of those factions) of transhumanity. Again true to their nature they are seeking out the weak points to strike at and want to leverage those against the stronger points (like the Ultimates, Jovian Republic, and the militaristic parts of the Planetary Consortium (ie the "stingers" of our race)). Why the Factors are harmless: * They use ships that are not really that much more advanced from ourselves, and they appear to be of non Factor design. The Factors may be scavengers at heart (eating the decaying corpses of post-singularity victims). * They are willing to trade with us, and they are giving us truly valid warnings against singularity consequences. This says that they see another post-singularity survivor like themselves and they realize that only together can we survive another singularity. That being said they would have devoured our technology and corpses if we didn't survive the singularity. * They only deal with certain factions (and certain parts of those factions) of transhumanity. The Factors have suffered the pain of the singularity and survived, but it has left them scared. In their cautious nature they don't want to be hurt again. Hence they stay away from our "stingers". They are also only dealing for advanced bioengineering material that can benefit them in return.

By the by, if you want REAL spoilers on the Factors, I recommend people read Bruce Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper series, especially Schismatrix.

root wrote:

root@Why we shouldn't trust the Factors [hr] I think you miss something of unique value the transhuman race has to offer: an Exsurgent Virus infection. The Exsurgent Virus was produced by an ETI far in advance of the Factors. Even as transhumanity has fools willing to risk the Virus for a shot at Singularity, the Factors may be doing the same. We are their petri dish.

If colonies of Factors have been hit with nasty versions of the Exsurgent Virus, thus cutting them off from the rest of the collective, and they want to have an isolated sample so they can purge their species of the virus and be made whole again. It does state that the Factors are at their most powerful when they merge together. The Factor home world (ie their ground zero) may be one massive Exsurgent Toxic Sea of death. Compared to that, we would have came off repetitively well off and the Factors would want to know why.

The other problem with the Exsurgent virus is that it causes mental instability, so you end up with an entire planet that has gone completely bonkers very quickly. Yeah they are slinging sleighs left, right and centre, but they are also slinging sleighs left, right and centre (turning the entire planet into one ugly mess).

Or you could think of it as a hostile, insane version of Solaris, only with a reach measured in hundreds of light years (if not further) and an enhanced/resurrected racial proclivity towards trapping and devouring more powerful prey. Not that transhumans would qualify as "more powerful."

Rhyx wrote:

You know, in a way I find that we are looking at the Factors in much too human a manner. For example maybe the insanity that comes with Psi phenomenon doesn't apply to factors at all. Compared to Factors, humans have extremely rigid brains meaning if one thing in there moves or gets rewired, the whole darn thing is rewired because there is no real way for things to shift around without getting damaged or at least scrambled a bit. The factors, on the other hand, seem to be mostly bags of gelatin that's got more in common with an amoeba than a vertebrate. Plenty of room for changes means that not so much gets mushed in the process. So I think that Psi insanity is more of a physical side effect than a design element.

This is kind of what I assumed. You do need a physical brain in order to use psi. It's possible Factors have some analog, but their "biological thinking apparatuses" are so different from what transhumans use for psi that I don't think it's a safe assumption that it manifests the same (or at all) in them.