the elimmists omniscience

[MoppingBear]

spoilers galore ahead
[spoiler]
so just how omniscient is the elimmist?  i mean, beings that can see the future are fairly common in scifi, and that is fine.  the elimmist however, seems to take it to a new level. when he looks at the earth, he is able to see its great future (ie humanity,) but humanity only came about due to his meddling in the first place, beause the animorphs wouldnt exist without him (andalites may never have evolved to be so advanced), so they never would have gone back in time and wiped out the dinosaurs/meercora.  so, he is able to not only see the future as it will be affected by time travel, he is able to see the future as it will be as a result of his own indirect actions.  does that mean he has no free will?  in theory, the ability to change the future would say that no, he does have free will, however, the existence of cassie (and perhaps other anomalies like her) would render him unable to change reality on a great scale.  going back to elfangor, aside from being responsible for his existing in the first place, the elimmist was responsible  both for his leaving the andalite fleet (via the creation of the time matrix), and directly for his return to it.  without either of these actions, tobias never exists (or never gets the power to morph) and without the events of book 13, he never gets BACK the power to morph.  the elimmist is extremely closely tied into the existence of humans in many ways.  he would have to be able to foresee ALL of these events in order to know to move the earth out of the way of crayaks destruction.


[/spoiler]

[RYTX]

Really quick:
I don't think he saw the whole of the future playing out when he moved earth: just potential for mammalian sentience

"andalites may never have evolved to be so advanced"
I do apologize, but I don't like this concept floating around still.
The ellimist did nothing to advance andalite technology-to our knowledge.

Post to be edited in the future
He still with them was on minimal interfernce

[DinosaurNothlit]

Russianspy, you bring up an excellent and very interesting point.  [spoiler]First of all, to answer the main issue at hand, it's been said that the Ellimist doesn't exactly see THE future, rather he sees possible futures.  Which would imply that what the Ellimist saw when he looked at Earth that first time, was not the guarantee of humanity's future existence, but rather simply the chance that a sentient race could arise.  He acted on chance, rather than certainty.  Did he purposefully alter other events, to bolster that chance of humanity's existence and survival?  It's entirely possible.  He supposedly hand-picked the Animorphs, after all, and so his influence on the Andalites notwithstanding he is still responsible for the Animorphs' existence and therefore for what happened in MM#2.  As far as Cassie goes, I would say that her existence doesn't really violate the Ellimist's free will, so long as he alters events as they happen, without going back in time and creating new time-lines as Crayak did.  That's what Cassie was reacting to, not the change in events, but the fact that she was in the wrong time-line.[/spoiler]

The ellimist did nothing to advance andalite technology-to our knowledge.

[spoiler]While I agree that the Ellimist didn't really have a huge impact on Andalite technology, keep in mind that he DID give them a cure to at least one disease that was ravaging their population at the time.  Without that, who knows?  They may have died out within a few million years.  Or they may have eventually eliminated the disease on their own and been just fine.  It's hard to tell, but over millennia even a tiny change can tip the scale one way or the other, and so that change probably had at least some effect on the Andalites we see today.[/spoiler]

[RYTX]

I'm going to hesitate to give you that too.

Page 178 in TEC
"The disease that had killed her was easily curable. The orbiting me took only a few seconds to discover the pathogen and work out simple countermeasures. I had the power to keep any Andalite child from dying of that disease. I could ensure that no other Andalite parent would ever experience that same loss."

Emphasis on could. He then goes into a moral rant of if he should or shouldn't

Since he then goes on to have 4 more kids, 2 of which die I'm going to say he didn't.
If you can give me an argument as to otherwise I maybe swayed, but looking at the chapters covering his time there, I still say no.

As to the true topic of the thread:
I don't think he can see the future. Not entirely at least.
Otherwise the game they play would just be going through the motions
Obviously he knows and understands many things beyond human knowledge of the universe, but it's repeatedly mentioned that he has his limits.

In my mind that plays to the limit idea in any omniscient....thing-and free will is critical to that.
Can you be all power if you are tied by fate? If anything is all powerful, can free will exist? The simple answer appears to be no, and things like be sub-temporally grounded argue a "destiny" in Aniverse
and this I have no evidence: Cassie's being an anomaly is not the ellimist doing, but a inherent property of...Cassie.
This anchors see things play out in certain ways, at least to an extent.
So while certainly more powerful than a human, the ellimist has his limitations. But if he is a pawn, or a challenger to rule the board-don't know

[Blazing Angel]

Wasnt it mentioned that Rachel wasn't supposed to be an animorph? That destroys his ability of future sight, instead I think he's like a mster chess player. Predicting every possible move.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Yeah, okay, the wording in TEC is pretty ambiguous, I'll give you that.  It seems to imply that he created a cure ("The orbiting me took only a few seconds to discover the pathogen and work out simple countermeasures", as opposed to "would have taken" or the like), but doesn't really say for sure whether or not he actually administered it.  As far as the additional two dead children go, the book doesn't specify what they died from.

To me, reading the passage, it seems like he was leaning towards administering the cure, if only slightly.  And the lesson that he took from the Andalites was to spread life wherever he could, and certainly wiping out disease would be part of that mission?

. . . That's all I got.  Yeah, you're right, the evidence is pretty weak.

[MoppingBear]

Wasnt it mentioned that Rachel wasn't supposed to be an animorph? That destroys his ability of future sight, instead I think he's like a mster chess player. Predicting every possible move.

not it simply states that she and jake werent hand picked, and were essentially random, unlike the other 4.

[Blazing Angel]

I dont think the ellimist would leave something like the identity of two animorphs too chance. He would definitely have two alreayd picked.

[MoppingBear]

I dont think the ellimist would leave something like the identity of two animorphs too chance. He would definitely have two alreayd picked.

it was supposed to be a random group of youngsters alltogether, he probably considered himself lucky to sneak the other 4 past crayak.

[Shenmue654]

The problem here is that the Ellimist is out of time, or at least in a place where he can see what will happen. When you're in that place, sometimes you know the consequences of particular actions. You can't always assume that preventing a bad thing from happening will produce the best result. Sometimes a blimp has to explode. Sometimes an evil, evil man has to orchestrate an event that will kill six million innocent people in order for the world to see what's right and wrong. That's, unfortunately, how time works.

For that reason, I'm kind of on the side that he left the disease in there in order to produce certain kinds of Andalites in the future. I don't have anything on which to base that theory, but you never know.

[Blazing Angel]

Sometimes a blimp has to explode

Pendragon series?

[Shenmue654]

*Chuckles* You bet. I'm a big fan of Pendragon, which might explain a lot. ;3 Moral quandaries, suave villains, dystopias....I love them all.

[Blazing Angel]

SO yeah ,sometimes blimps gotta explode

[SkyMorpher]

I've seen those books but they never attracted me. They do always make me want to giggle or grin though, because different Pendragons are a central part of my Merlin obsession.