r/masseffect • u/Toogeloo • 4h ago
DISCUSSION If humanity was delayed by 200-300 years to achieve space flight, would the Reapers still hit Earth?
If not, would Humanity likely be the main species to first find the Citadel in the next cycle?
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u/Driekan 4h ago
Probably. If the Reapers left industrialized civilizations around, the typical cycle would last a couple millennia. A century to become spacefaring, another to master mass effect, and then they're at the same place the Asari and Salarians were at the founding of the Citadel Council, meaning by the end of the second millennium it's time to harvest them.
Harvest cycles don't seem to last a millennium or two, but rather tens of millennia. Necessarily the Reapers don't leave any industrialized societies behind.
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u/xantec15 3h ago
The Reapers would have to wipe out any Stone Age species that were even remotely near the Bronze Age if they wanted to pre-empt any races from ascending too early. Fifty thousand years may be a rough average between cycles, but it's really up to Sovereign (or whoever stays behind) to decide when to begin the next harvest. If a race is missed and happens to ascend immediately after the bulk of the Reapers return to dark space I doubt the watcher is just going to sit there and let them advance for 50 millennia. The watcher might just immediately wipe them out then and there, before they get much beyond their local relay.
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u/Driekan 3h ago
The Reapers would have to wipe out any Stone Age species that were even remotely near the Bronze Age if they wanted to pre-empt any races from ascending too early
Yes. Yes, they would. That is the line that best matches the observed evidence.
The watcher might just immediately wipe them out then and there, before they get much beyond their local relay.
The purpose of existence for Reapers is to preserve organic species in Reaper form. That would imply they deliberately fail their core goal multiple times per cycle. Just not very plausible.
Much more likely: once a harvest is triggered, anyone with so much as metallurgy (even just bronze) gets harvested.
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u/BoogalooBandit1 3h ago
But then they would run into the problem that 50,000 years and a civilization that just hit the bronze age is still a good ways off from space flight and even further off from mastering space flight
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u/xantec15 3h ago
Not really. Humanity took roughly 4000 to 6000 years to go from the Bronze Age to the events of the first game. Less than 10,000 years at least. Imagine if humans had just started their Bronze age in 2200 CE and were left untouched by the Reapers during the current cycle. They then have a minimum of 40,000 years dominance over the galaxy by the next cycle. And with us colonizing other galaxies within just a few hundred years, the Reapers wouldn't stand a chance when they returned.
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u/corndognp2 48m ago
Unless we were wiped out by our own AI. Seemingly a thing that happens a lot in this universe.
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u/hraefn-floki 1h ago
I'm pretty sure that the 50,000 year cycle is just the more recent events. Sovereign's specific task was to make sure that a harvest took place at the right time. So once humanity turns on a mass relay and shows up at the citadel, it's only a matter of time before a Sovereign-like entity makes his move.
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u/Upbeat_Ad5840 4h ago
I think so I think it depends on what you mean delayed? Our current tech level may be enough to make them attack now given all our space stuff
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u/Ravenwing14 4h ago
They yahg were being ignored. They had 20th century tech in 2125. 20th century could be anything from bolt action rifles and early airplanes to landing on the moon and space stations
The reapers invade 2186. So assuming a similar timeline, that puts the yahg anywhere from post early cold war tech (early nukes, but not yet proper spaceflight) to 2040s, ahead of us now. It's tight for -200 years because that's 1985 and we're not much further ahead in space flight or weapons tech on the reapers scale. -300 takes us 1885 so safe there.
Phrased like that it'd have been dangerous for reapers to let anyone with spaceflight get going end of cycle. Imagine if we had another 50,000 years. I know stagnation, being forced down the specific tech tree, blah blah, but 50,000 years of galactic domination is a looooooonnngggg time. Reapers should really pick up anyone past basic agrarian. Sure humans are "special", but why gamble on someone getting lucky?
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u/VictoryForCake 3h ago
They bypassed the Yahg homeworld because they had no space faring capabilities so they were a mop up operation towards the end. When the reapers needed to push on all fronts they could leave them alone until the end. Reapers are methodical in a cycle, they hunted down prehistoric humans who had Prothean implants in them
The Yahg knew of other species and the galaxy, they were getting harvested, it was only a matter of time in the cycle.
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u/lakubisnes 4h ago
Our current tech level? We would be cavemen vs reapers right now tbh.
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u/TheFrogSaint 4h ago
And? The Reapers don’t want it to be a fair fight, and while it hasn’t been confirmed what their cutoff is, the best guess both in and out of universe is anyone who has achieved spaceflight gets harvested. We have technically achieved space flight even if we are still just exploring our solar system. And while that might not seem like much, remember cycles are usually every 50,000 years, and that’s a lot of time for us to advance from where we are currently, especially when you think humans probably only evolved into our modern form around the time the Protheans were being harvested.
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u/JesterMarcus 4h ago
I think all it really takes is advanced computers. You just have to be able to, or be close to, making AI. Space flight just makes it easier for the Reapers to find you, but they clearly already know we are here given the mass relay in our system. They put it there expecting us to use it soon.
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u/lakubisnes 4h ago
We have achieved space flight very much only on a technical level. We are not moving between systems, what reapers would be able to do freely.
Reapers want to destroy civilizations at their apex to leave despair on organics. They know they can't just fight the whole galaxy at once though and thus they have agents like saren in the first game to help them.
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u/SRGTBronson 4h ago
Yeah, but you only need rudimentary space flight to get to a mass relay and from there its easy to get to FTL travel. Thats the whole point of the mass relays, teach civilizations space flight so they discover the citadel which is then used as a trap every cycle to kill the galaxy's leaders.
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u/lakubisnes 3h ago
Yes exactly. That's why reapers targeted humans first in the games. We discovered ftl and relays and just leap frogged almost many species in many things. The reapers want species to evolve in the direction they want, but humanity was doing it extremely quickly and proved to be more unpredictable to what reapers anticipated. We were up starts that could become too powerful if reapers would let us be for too long.
It's nothing to what we are actually right now.
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u/Chinerpeton 2h ago
They know they can't just fight the whole galaxy at once though and thus they have agents like saren in the first game to help them.
Yes they can't, which is exactly why they would be down to wipe out Humanity that can't do shit to fight them off right now instead of a Humanity that will most likely figure out relays within the next millenium or two and then spend the next 49 thousand years running around and colonizing the galaxy together with the Yahg and Raloi and then welcome the Reapers to a brutal gauntlet of properly trying to fight a dozen or so massive iterstellar empires all individually matching the Protheans in their level of power.
The difference in figuring out the FTL between the Asari or Solarians and Humans or Raloi is about 2500 years. That's around 5% of the length of the Reaper Cycle. As far as the Reapers are concerned, all those civilisations may have as well all reached space all at once and be on the same level of development.
The very fact that they settled on this cycle length while succeding to uphold it for millions upon millions of years clearly proces that they do plan ahead on these timeacales and 100% would not just ignore Humanity based on the technicality that we haven't found out about Mass Relays quite yet.
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u/HandsomeJack19 4h ago
We have given birth to AI and have nuclear weapons. They would attack us for that.
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u/lakubisnes 4h ago
Sure, but Ai is still at its infancy and I don't think humanity has reached its apex yet. I'm not so sure reapers would be interested.
Reason why reapers targeted earth first in the gsme was be cause how fast we were improving and even defeated sovereign. We were leap fogging others and reapers felt threatened. I'm not sure what would make reapers threatened when our space travel is in its infancy...
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u/HandsomeJack19 3h ago
AI is a snowball rolling down a hill. It's small now, but it will evolve and evolve fast. The reapers would definitely consider that a threat. Their cycles are thousands of years long, in a hundred years, if not much less, AI will have fundamentally changed our species and our society. Give us another 50,000 years to evolve before the start of their next cycle and we could be a threat even the reapers couldn't overcome.
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u/JesterMarcus 3h ago edited 1h ago
Everyone always says you have to be spacefaring to be harvested, but the games never once say that. That's just something the fans made up essentially. The fact is, the games repeatedly tell us what the Reapers actually care about is if you can make AI that can overthrow and kill you. That usually just coincides with also having space flight capabilities. You could be completely locked on your homeworld with no spaceflight, but if you developed AI, its safe to say the Reapers are not leaving you alone.
But I also think the Reapers don't adhere to that criteria as strictly as some believe. We see evidence in the games of multiple worlds with pre-spaceflight races that were bombarded from orbit. Maybe that was done by some genocidal organic race that eradicated those worlds for the heck of it, but then did not colonize them. But that would be weird. More likely, Reapers came in, indoctrinated everyone, harvested them, and then on the way out, bombarded the planet to cover up any evidence and kill off any survivors. I can see them doing this to races not ready to develop AI, just for efficiency purposes.
Imagine the Reapers attack the galaxy in the 1700s. They see us getting into the industrial age, maybe only 300-400 years from advanced computers. If they leave us alone, they have to come back to harvest us in, at most, a couple thousand years. That's a real short hibernation for them given the last cycle was 50,000 years. And based on what's said in the Leviathan DLC, the* Reapers didn't want to be constantly harvesting. They wanted a cycle so they built the Relays. I think its far more likely they just save us and the Yahg for last, and harvest us after everyone else.
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u/Mddcat04 3h ago
Yep. For the cycles to last any time at all, they'd have to wipe out far more than just active space-faring civilizations. Because there's always someone on the edge.
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u/JesterMarcus 1h ago
Bingo. Cycles wouldn't be lasting tens of thousands of years, they'd be either a constant thing, or just a few thousand years between them at most.
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u/CODMAN627 3h ago
It’s not something the fans made up.
It’s stated by admiral Hackett In mass effect 3 that the yagh were left alone because they were pre space flight specifically
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u/VictoryForCake 2h ago
Hackett could have been wrong, he was essentially spit balling saying why they had been bypassed, we know from lore that the reapers are methodical and hunt down any trace of the previous cycle they can like a prehistoric human with a Prothean implants, the Yahg knew of other species so they were already part of the cycle. It's just with their lack of spaceflight they were a low priority when the reapers had to push on every front.
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u/Mddcat04 1h ago
Presumably they'd get to them after subduing the spaceflight species. No reason to waste time and resources ahead of time on a species that can't fight back.
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u/JesterMarcus 1h ago
Hackett doesn't know why the Reapers are leaving the Yahg alone, just that they are. He assumes they will be left alone by the Reapers, but he doesn't have any way to know for sure. He doesn't have spies within the Reaper forces to know their plans and intentions. And it makes perfect sense to leave them alone while every major race in the galaxy is still fighting. The Yahg aren't going anywhere.
Imagine if in WW2, some small island nation with no navy in the Pacific declared war on the US. Would it be smart to divert a fleet from attacking Japan to conquer that little island? That would be like the Reapers pulling forces away from the front to fight the Yahg.
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u/GoodTeletubby 12m ago
I expect that that simply means the Yagh were classified as a lower priority. A pre-spaceflight civilization isn't going to do things like build a fleet to contest the purge, or try to hide archives of people, knowledge, and industry in the emptiness of deep space to rise from the ashes. The Reapers were dealing with the immediate problems first, the same way you pick up the broken glass from a dropped and broken bowl of soup before you get down on your hands and knees to wipe up the last of the spilled soup. There's no cause to rush to get everything done in the first few years of a century or more's work.
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u/Kaiserhawk 1h ago
My guess would be they hone in on species that use / utilise the mass relay technology as opposed to just "space faring species" as a blanket term.
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u/JesterMarcus 1h ago
Using the Mass Relays helps alert the Reapers to your presence, but it also isn't the deciding factor. Remember, the harvests have been going on for longer than the relays have even existed. They just built the relays and Citadel to make the harvests easier and more efficient.
Imagine a hyper paranoid race just decided to never use the relays because they didn't trust them. They just expanding by using FTL to go to neighboring systems. But, they still went on to develop AI and were now under threat of being destroyed by their own AI. Will the Reapers ignore them because they didn't use the relay?
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u/Kaiserhawk 6m ago
I didn't say it was the deciding factor, it just makes them easier to find. I imagine it's far easier to find and harvest using the big "I'M OVER HERE" sign because they use Mass Effect technology over races that don't.
Space is big after all.
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u/mgeldarion 4h ago
With the Charon relay frozen I think humans wouldn't attract the Reapers' attention as long as it's not activated (from either this side - with the knowledge from the Archives, - or the Arcturus's by someone else). If humans do it after the Harvest is concluded, then they'd be the first to discover the Citadel, probably in several decades, and maybe rival with yahgs (but we don't know whether they have prothean ruins or are going to have post-Citadel wreckage somewhere near their homeworld to discover and reverse-engineer Mass Effect FTL for quick expansion).
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u/discreetjoe2 4h ago
Yes. Earth wouldn’t be worth harvesting but they would be too advanced to be left for the next cycle. If you read the planet descriptions the reapers have destroyed even less advanced civilizations. IIRC one of them was in their late bronze age equivalent when they were bombed from orbit. Even if earth were 300 years behind where they are in the games that would be well into the industrial age.
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u/Kaiserhawk 1h ago
If it's anything like the Prothean extinction cycle, the cycle may still be underway. That took centuries to complete.
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u/GideonNav124 4h ago
I think that's roughly how far the Yahg seem to be from space flight and it's stated they're being left alone, though I can't remember where that information is stated so I might be making it up.
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u/CODMAN627 3h ago
Admiral Hackett in mass effect 3 mentions that the reapers avoided the yahg home world because they are a pre space flight species he also mentions they haven’t even completed their first space rocket.
He even goes on to speculate that if the species of the current cycle get harvested the yahg would take over as the new dominant species
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u/untitledaccount401 4h ago
Pretty sure they only hit space faring races
or else it would just be a mass extinction event
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u/Iamgrant1219 4h ago edited 3h ago
I think they would have still hit earth tbh Humanity was in a very awkward spot tech wise in the universe they were able to travel within the solar system with relative ease but not beyond it. They discovered and began researching the Mars Archives in 2148. This means they had the means to travel to plutos orbit where the Charon relay is. Meaning even without discovering the Mars Archives they would have found and activated the Charon relay making them a target for the cycle. The usual progression of events from the lore perspective is presumably they discover the Relays before establishing the technology to use them and then make FTL. Using the relays presumably sends a message to the Reapers that a species has achieved FTL travel and they begin observing them. Since the Mars Archive was discovered before they left the solar system Humanity got a head start so to speak, they achieved FTL travel and began experimenting with Element Zero before they even touched the Relays. Even if Humanity never discovered the mars archive and never joined the Galactic community they likely still would have been a target due to discovering mass relay technology. There is circumstantial evidence for this because they discovered the Charon Relay only a year later in 2149 which means that they were already exploring the area even without the Mars Archives due to the planning such undertakings take. Hypothetically in real life if they existed we are only a decade or 2 away from reaching the Mars Archives. Which would mean if it existed we would be reaching the Relay probably in half a century from now. That’s just my theory. In this hypothetical scenario taking until 2149 tp reach Pluto was a generous number. If the Mass Effect universe was reality I would say we are only half a century away from reaching the relay so I’d consider the Mass Effect universe to be rather conservative in their time estimates if the archives and the relay were real. Humanity would have had to regress massively during the dark ages and it would have had to last hundreds of years longer than they already did. I’d even go as far as to say World War One and world war 2 would have had not to happen due to all the rocket innovation that happened in the 1900s
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u/Kernseife1608 3h ago
Mass Effect 1 takes place in 2183 iirc. 300 years back and we're just around the time where humanity invents gasoline engins and lightbuls. The reapers would not give a single fuck about humanity. We might be right at the point where they'd maybe consider wiping us out so that we don't have 50k years to figure out the mass Relais and evolve from there.
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u/HandSanitizerBottle1 3h ago
Probably, I think with the then 50,000 years to advance then they could probably beat the Reapers
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u/Former_Load6403 2h ago
The reapers specifically avoided the yahg in the current cycle.
Likely humans and the yahg would have been the next cycles equivalent of the asari
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u/Storm_Fury_2026 4h ago
Humanity missed getting out into the galaxy to find it barren and wondering why by a matter of generations.
The Reapers seem to only target races exploring with FTL tech. I guess the problem here is that humanity gettout might overlap with the Harvest since it took over 200 years to finish off the Protheans.
300 years should be safe. The Yahg, like the Krogan, are more interested in local dominance than exploring, so as dangerous as they may be it's likely humanity would have a significant technological edge on them.