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Comment by jamesgreenleaf | Hacker News Reader

If Factorio took place on Earth, that would be pretty dark. But, remember the backstory is that you've crash-landed your spaceship on an alien world filled with giant hostile insects who will attack you when you get too close, even if you build nothing and never pollute. Hardly a paradise!

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On the subreddit, I once read a good argument that perhaps the backstory is actually more sinister. Supposedly you're crashlanded … but you launch a satellite? (Instead of ever escaping?) The poster supposed that, what if the narrator is a faulty narrator, and in reality, our character has been sent as a sort of advanced terraforming agent send to prepare the planet for colonization or such. After all, the engineer needs no sleep, no food, never seems to tire, can somehow research a wide range of complex technology on his or her own. Perhaps the PC has simply been led, or programmed, to believe that he's crash landed (or perhaps that's even the truth, just the crash landing was on purpose, to deliver him to the planet), and programmed such that he can't recognize the cognitive dissonance of getting to a rocket but never leaving, always expanding …

Wouldn't you be a bit hostile if aliens landed on your world and started exploiting it?

it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png

so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion.

besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to their own device will expand and kill the planet biomass. aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.

> aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.

Same as all other life really.

Eh, life tend to sit in an equilibrium with its environment, biters will happily destroy it. Their evolution and multiplication happens regardless of engineer actions.

Yeah that’s totally incorrect. Every species is an “invasive species” given an environment where it can flourish.

There is only equilibrium because everything is jostling as hard as it can to outcompete everything else.

Peace is a human invention, it does not exist in nature.

> Peace is a human invention, it does not exist in nature.

Common core is literally destroying people minds

Ever heard of symbiosis? Countless species not only tolerate each other, they cooperate one another. And yes that includes predators like crocodile and plovers or sharks and remoras.

Ppl here brandishing "totally incorrect" and spouting nonsense.

It really doesn't. Life sits in a complex, chaotic feedback loop which on our mayfly timescales tends to orbit around a semi-stable attractor. It only does so because everything is killing everything else just as hard as it can, while everything else tries to kill or outcompete it right back.

It's not like if all the foxes suddenly disappeared the rabbits would just reach optimal comfortable population and then start using birth control.

> chaotic feedback loop

So, equilibrium

This response tells me everything I need to know about your understanding of things.

Doesn’t that make it even worse? You invade, destroy the environment, and the beings that lived there don’t like it. So you commit genocide and unilaterally decide to destroy the planet.

Is that not a description of colonial America?

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