If Andalites abandoned Earth? A Human-dominated galaxy would be inevitable.

[Zacharychaos]

The suddenly change of heart of the Andalites in the end of the Beginning was always a bit jarring. Not only were they consistently resistant to any form of shared technology or cooperation throughout the series, they showed up with a golly-gee-I-hope-nothing-bad-happens Quantum virus that "might" be capable of exterminating 6 billion human beings.

But then all the sudden they negotiate away some morphing cubes and send over engineers. Why? What leverage did we have over them? The Animorphs didn't surrender Visser One, and I doubt the arrogant and condescending Andalites would just hand over some prizes for successful self-defense. (Or the intel on Anati, the critical role on Leera, etc). Oh, and the Andalites clearly knew next to nothing about humans or their intentions/capabilities at the point of victory. This drastic decision contradicted 56 books of consistently self-interested and paranoid behavior.

So what made them do it?

Because, if the Yeerk Empire was really out of the picture, Humans would be capable of overrunning the Andalites within decades.

Future timeline

So, Andalites leave --> Jake gives the US military the Pool Ship, voluntarily or not. --> the US military accesses Yeerk intel, seizes control of Earthside Kandronas. The presence of the Pool Ship is tightly classified and all findings controlled via advanced Yeerk encryption. --> all Bug fighters recalled to Pool Ship with autopilot --> Within 3 days Yeerks submit to a human-controlled pool or starve inside their hosts. --> Yeerk and Human military engineers immediately engage in a massive, secret effort to manufacture an overwhelming national armada of advanced mobile weaponry for the US military with the intention of pre-empting an arms race if technology becomes available worldwide.

(Recall that according to Ax Andalite production occurs at a incredibly slow artisan-like pace in private rural family scoops. There are no great Andalite cities, known colonies, or "client" races although there are certainly shipyards.)


Meanwhile, the Andalite task force immediately returns to their homeworld and reports to High Command the troubling human victory and their arrogant demands for morphing technology. Sightings of numerous morph-capable humans and Yeerks leads to the conclusion that Alloran and Ax have committed another "Seerow's Kindness," with a untrustworthy species. Perhaps Humans have achieved such a complete victory that they subjugated the Yeerks into a client race? Andalites urgently debate intervention, branding the task force as criminals for failing to disseminate the Quantum virus as ordered. Andalite intelligence scouts the the planet extensively and finds impossibly rapid deployment of advanced surface military technology by a subset of the population, along with a fully functional Pool ship well-stocked with human/yeerk hybrid fighters. Human sites have been rebuilt, large Yeerk pools are not present on the planet, and there is no conflict.They are not sure if Humans are in charge, or have created some kind of alliance/symbiosis with the isolated Yeerk population. As the Andalites pin the weakened Empire down and exterminate their hosts, they are alarmed at the primitive population utilizing technology they are not "mature" enough to control. Wary of the consequences of delay after Seerow's kindness, intervention seems inevitable.

Alloran and Ax are monitoring Z-space communication for Yeerk/Andalite military channels, and the growing hysteria within the Andalite military is made known to Earth's political and military leaders. Yerk technology is disseminated worldwide in a scramble to harness the productive resources of 6 billion humans for human/Yeerk orbital defenses. These defenses are publicly intended to stop an imminent and massive Yeerk counterattack. Earth unites. Alloran, realizing the potential annihilation of the population, works with human scientists to develop a countermeasure for Quantum virus technology. (If Alloran refuses to do this, he is betray and infested by a Yeerk loyal to humans, and this knowledge is exploited.) Ax is recruited to negotiate and delay the Andalites with they arrive; if he refused to betray his people, secret military orders lead to his infestation as well.

The Andalite fleet arrives in the form of two Dome ships (this should be overkill, especially for a relatively primitive target). Ax and Alloran (infested?) work to convince the commanders that the two Andalites have "domesticated" the humans. Human submission to Ax/Alloran on the ship's bridge, along with some human-like extravagant clothing, start to convince the arrogant commanders of Andalite control. In a moment of weakness, humans strike in a suicidal onslaught, with the goal of removing the 4 engines from one of the Dome ships. Unaccustomed to such aggressive and relentless strategy, such as kamikaze (which the self-serving Yeerks never used) and the ruthless use of human-allied Yeerks on a national hero (Ax), the Dome ships are crippled, and one is successfully captured. Most of the Andalites commit suicide by tradition.

A wealth of Andalite technology and Intelligence are seized by humans, acting in self-defense. United by the threat, humans send colony ships to unsettled worlds in the Andalite computer, and create colonies of hundreds of thousands, spreading production throughout hidden worlds.

The limiting factor of Yeerk expansion was the availability of host bodies. Humans have no such limitation, and are just as naive to this technology as the first Yeerks were. In fact, it is said that humans are much more resourceful, creative, and determined than Yeerks or Andalites. The inability of Andalites to match even Yeerk production would cripple any attempt to roll back human expansion once productive colonies were established.

Hence the generous gift of technology and "advisors".  They really are ruthless, aren't they?

[Cloak]

An interesting take on it, I'd admit.

[itw2009]

thinking bigger picture and long-term, i completely agree with your overarching hypothesis. in fact, from the andalite side of things, i agree with most of the details. i'm not, however, completely behind the assumptions made for the human race, the US military, etc.

i haven't read #54 in years, so i don't remember precisely how the timeline of events to the very end was laid out. i don't, however, think that the US military has the personnel right now to handle figuring out how to use and lock down a yeerk pool ship and all of its accouterments in the time that you suggest. (and they would need to work very, very quickly to keep everything under wraps. i mean, how on earth does the military find and secure all earthside kandronas and blackmail all controllers without turning that into a clusterf*? logistically, i think that this is impossible.) there would be an obscene volume of red tape needed to legally get the US military on board at all; i'd give it six months before they were ready to handle processing alien technology. i point out that most IT expertise in the exec branch is held by contractors. those take even longer to get into a project: via legal contracts and loads of paperwork, of course.

public opinion is a factor (and wild card at that), even if the average american doesn't feel like a driving force behind the decisions made on the hill or in the oval office. popular opinion is currently against increasing government expenditures. even considering potential future popular opinion- "yay, we just won a war without fighting it" and "OMG, there are hostile aliens out there, we should protect ourselves" and even "wow, look at all those cool toys that these aliens have; i want one!"- i don't know that the public would want the US military hoarding secrety alien technology.

...and yes, the general public would have a good idea of what was going on. i consider how many former human-controllers would be walking among the untouched if the blackmail "surrender or die" worked- but didn't- and yeerks simply starved out inside their host's minds. (the other aspect to rounding up controllers is: where do we keep them all? how do we know that we have them all? how do we process them all? i think that it's logistically impractical, given the time constraints.) the US military would then have an impossible time keeping a lockdown on secrets related to yeerk technology. dozens of smart and enterprising ex-human-controllers would be bound to go and sell their inside information to corporations (or create their own private businesses).

especially considering the above, i assume that other countries would find out - quickly - that US had monopolized yeerk technology. we'd then have to deal not only with US public opinion, but public opinion worldwide. we'd immediately be overwhelmed with overt and covert attempts by other governments to 'fairly distribute' the technology. we might have our butts raped; the entire world could see us as an enemy (especially if we're the sort to hoard this technology and then try to hide the fact that we have it) and something worth fighting against. even countries who would remain 'allied' to us would undoubtedly be seeking yeerk military information by whatever means necessary.




...thinking all human-like, it also occurs to me that a very proactive and anti-human andalite with some military and media connections might have gone about creating and distributing the anti-human propaganda necessary to usurp and manipulate any andalite relations with us with moderate effort. image is everything in politics and humans tend to look like self-interested, warmongering idiots. put a video of humans warring among themselves on some public internet-like thing and see what the andalite public and their politicians make of that.

even considering that humans, collectively, might agree on ways to distribute, joint-study, use, sell, and otherwise handle the newly acquired yeerk technology, i think that it'd take some serious guess-and-check / rigorous field testing to get to that "fear us, universe" point. contrary to popular hollywood belief, i don't think that just anyone (or plural anyones) can take something that alien and that advanced and turn it around on a dime for human use, even taking advantage of cooperative yeerks, former controllers, etc.

so the whole thing seems very politically charged, and i know how quickly politicians make decisions... especially on a global scale.


anyway. really nice points; it's not something that i'd thought about before. and my apologies for the brain-vomit, LOL. i realize that it's a bit off-the-cuff and disorganized. xD

[Zacharychaos]

Very interesting points you've brought up (and my argument was pretty long-winded too).

I would say that the Controllers on the ground would be helpless because

1) The Pool ship would contain knowledge of all known Kandrona except for personal units
2) The loss of one Kandrona affects tens of thousands of controllers as seen in #7, in which it is implied the entire Earthside yeerk forces had to be shuttled to the Pool Ship
3) Ax and Alloran were in a definite position to locate and, if necessary, bombard the Kandrona into non existence (at the expense of humans in the area), the action of which could be written off as farther Yeerk savagery.
4) Even if the Kandrona are deliberately not destroyed and/or too far underground to be blasted and/or the Chee permanently destroy the ships weapons systems; travel by and communication between the Human-controllers would be crippled. Their yeerks would be desperate for Kandrona rays and would willingly surrender (or so the series implies) if given sanctuary or even asylum (certainly these lifelong hostless yeerks were not all evil).

As for the Pool Ship, I will have to admit you are right and the existence would be known worldwide due to freed humans. As for Yeerk engineers, I suspect they would be willing to trade eternity as a helpless slug and/or starvation for a volunteer host. To prevent conspiracy, the Controller would always be watched, and the yeerk forced to leave every few hours for the host to report. Any attempts to sabotage or contact the crippled Empire would go nowhere.

Your strongest argument is that humans are self-serving and readily seek conflict. You're pretty much dead on, and I hadn't really considered the ramifications. (Global war? Andalites infiltrating Earth using morphing technology and instigating a plan like Visser Two's?)

But then again, how is that self-interested behavior much different from the Yeerks, who used weak Gedd hosts to overpower their Andalite mentors, seize their technology, and build a massive war machine within a few decades? Humans are noted to be much more resourceful and effective in a military structure.

(As for the funding part, I'm pretty sure the worldwide public would mobilize having nearly been enslaved. Yeerk technology would free parts of "the budget," and Yeerks would be effectively slave labor as the host needs only a capable body (well compensated, perhaps). Even if this was not true, auctioning of Yeerk technology to the highest corporate bidder would easily fund a war machine.)

[Allan_Oran]

I can see where your idea comes from, but I can also see some problems.
In #54 the Andalites didn't really pull a complete behavioral backflip. These were high ranking military officials/Princes/War-Princes who conferred over whether they would have public support for denying the request for morph tech and dropping a Q-Virus on a sentient species.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a closed cabinet meeting to find out whether the US would have public support to invade Iraq.

The Andalite people aren't so bad, but the high ranking Andalites in the military? It would be like judging the personality of humanity based on the actions of how Keith Alexander and similar men handled the NSA leak.

As for Alloran and Ax being potentially infested, it sure as hell wouldn't be willingly. Alloran was only just freed by the time Jake started negotiations, there would be no way he would go back to that. He'd rather behead himself with his own tail blade.

Initially locking down every Yeerk Pool would require concerted, international effort. There is no way it could be kept quiet. Especially when Yeerks started dying and former hosts started talking. Thousands of millions of corroborating stories. All of whom could have been working as Yeerk pilots, engineers, weapons manufacturers or computer scientists. Knowledge they could easily share now.

As for the rest, the Z-Space transmissions would be more heavily encrypted now that they knew earth had Andalite 'traitors' on their side, the same way the would have had to when Alloran became a controller, the majority of countries would have attempted diplomatic negotiations, hoping to hold a defensive line, etc, etc.
And considering earth would be rumored to havenot only Yeerk tech, but Andalite morph tech with sighting of morph capable individuals, earth would have become the highest priority. Earth would be lucky to have a few months to prepare a defense, depending on how close the nearest Dome Ships are.

But, after all is said and done, it all comes back to public opinion and support. Without that, the Andalites hands are tied just as much as our own military. They would need to send the propaganda machines into overdrive to get the Andalite public on their side.

Personally, I tend to think of Andalites as the Brits. Look at how England is handling Syria and you have a pretty good point of reference for Andalites.

[itw2009]

A. to budget and executive branch workings and such: i can only say "trust me; i know what i'm talking about". ....that's not enigmatic at all, haha.

DHS was formed in response to 9/11/01 and yet was not actually established and operating until 11/25/02. not even potus can move the federal budget around on a whim (despite what media sources like to dramatize for their audience's sake). that would take months, even using an established executive agency and/or the military to manage the funds and perform the work. granted, post-9/11, we were quick to use existing, mobilized troops in afghanistan to begin assaults on alleged al-qaeda posts, but the official war in iraq (another byproduct of 9/11) didn't begin until late 2003.

to reiterate, the US had (and has) existing resources in play globally to use in the event of these sorts of threats; you only need to look at how much money is already going into military and intelligence operations to know that. in order to accommodate aliens, we'd be nearly starting from scratch (well, imo. you could be an "area 51" conspiracy theorist, and in that case, we'd have some torchwood-esque thing already going), and that'd take a long time to fully realize, especially properly.

tl;dr A: all of the players would have plenty of time post-war before controllers would (or could) be rounded up by US military. lots of things could happen.


B. there's another point i think i'd like to make with respect to the "helpless controllers" bit.

1. non-controllers won't immediately be immune to the yeerk's ability to mimic their hosts; they will have emotional responses to any pleas for help by human-controllers. those non-controllers who are in politics and the military would have a hard time simply following orders: rounding up and enslaving people. (the assumption that this entire operation can't happen covertly stands. everyone knows what's going on.) essentially, i foresee mutiny within military ranks when the order is given to somehow identify and round up what appear to be innocent human beings.

2a. imagine that your friends and family members are suddenly rounded up by the military. the military- total, distrusted strangers- claims that your friends and family are evil aliens bent on destroying the human race. well, the human-controllers will still act like your friends and family. do you believe that you and the general, affected public are going to sit meekly by (or even anti-yeerk / vengefully by) and let this happen? definitely not out of the blue. i foresee riots.

2b. conversely, imagine that your friends and family turn themselves in to the military. they claim that they're aliens and their lives are being threatened. what are you going to do? personally, if i didn't know anything about the context, i'd freak out, lock said important people up at home, and call either the looney bin or a doctor. i definitely wouldn't let my parents up and leave me indefinitely for no good reason.

3. human-controllers with important positions within human society- otherwise known as the infested senator, mayor, general, commander, agency head, etc.- could work the system to their advantage. using the weaknesses above and below, they could generate public opposition to rounding up controllers. they could argue for compromise. resulting compromises might not benefit humans in the technology department as well and as quickly as your original suggestion.

4. imagine everything goes smoothly and all human-controllers are rounded up. suddenly society is left with giant holes in its infrastructure. teachers would disappear. police would disappear. well, high unemployment rate to the contrary, i don't think that we could find the skilled folks necessary to fill those gaps right away. since yeerks were angling for influential positions from the start, we might lose a lot of CEOs. how would companies cope without a leader? how would governments cope without theirs?

5. also: personal kandronas. i have no idea of how many there are floating around at the end of the war, but the last time we hear about it, it's much earlier on in the series- a couple of years, at least, before the end of the war. you mention that the pool ship wouldn't know where they were; personally, i'd think that there would be a register of kandrona purchasers accessible by the pool ship, especially in light of the yeerk rebels' existence. [[anyway, tangentially about technology: maybe alloran agrees to this plan (even under the guise of a cataloguing and not an enslavement plan) and can show the humans how to use the yeerk pool ship's technology to do all of these things... well, no. even given his background, i don't see it happening. that'd be a pretty morally bereft decision on his part. i imagine jake and the scooby gang arguing against it, in any case, and alloran surely would follow their lead, considering his debt to them. and then i'll reiterate that i don't see humans figuring out the pool ship technology right away so as to be able to use it to identify earthside kandronas or recall bug fighters.]]

6. taking tl;dr "A" into account, resourceful yeerks are going to have the time to find ways to escape. i doubt they'd care if they had to hijack a skrit na ship. and yeerks on earth, post-war, couldn't they, say, shut bug fighters down around the earth, reprogram them to ignore pool ship summons, and hold onto them for escape purposes?

tl;dr B: i don't think that controllers could be threatened and rounded up without significant consequences for all humans involved. emotional trauma, riots, crap shutting down.


yay for being organized.


and LOL. i don't even know what to make of my arguing for the yeerks and baron's arguing for the andalites.


EITHER WAY. i still agree that andalites ought to see the long-term benefits to "helping" our third-world planet and see their being extremely sneaky about it. i'm clearly an andalite conspiracy theorist... which i can't/shouldn't be, considering that i know really nothing about them and it's impossible to generalize a species.


btw, baron, i had a really good chuckle at the brit comparison. i'll have to take a look at this england-syrian relationship and see what i think.


EDIT: since i've been catching up on weeks' worth of news, i thought that perhaps i should throw in this link to wapo for a breakdown of the US' secrety-secret ops budget. needless to say... lots of $; lots of red tape.

[Zacharychaos]

It's an interesting topic, but I have to point out a few things before I get around to a longer post.

Recall that after World War II, the Soviets and Americans rushed to recruit the German scientists working on the V2 rocket. From that came critical advances necessary for ballistic missiles, space flight, etc.

The exact same would happen with any Yeerks with technical skill or advanced knowledge. Since the US military presumably has a straight line of communication to Jake (the Animorph-led battalion did not all die if I recall correctly), they would be in a position to seize the Kandronas with special forces.
Furthermore it is highly probable that the Pool ship contained a record of every high-ranking Human that had been infested. They would have to have this documented, otherwise how would they know which military units they could compromise and which would continuously resist a Yeerk invasion? So the highest ranking uninfested military officials would look at this, and order elite squads with no Yeerks to seize the Kandronas. High-ranking human-Controllers in the military would be ordered into isolation/prison for a "mere" three days. Or they could just be drugged for three days, until the Yeerk starves.

 Furthermore, it is implied that densest population of Controllers are in the United States. I think when you consider the powers of the President during an emergencies and the technical skills of shadowy organizations like the NSA, there is the potential to declare a state of emergency, seize technology, and begin developing it relatively rapidly.

Also:

1) Hosts don't gain all memories and technical skill of the yeerk that infested them. If you recall, Edriss had to talk with Allison Kim in order to actually teach her advanced physics, etc. Most yeerks just oppress their hosts. Even at the point of Kandrona starvation, the yeerk transfers a massive amount of mostly indecipherable memories. So even a freed human that was infested by an Yeerk engineer would not necessarily be any good at engineering his or herself. So, say, the Chinese government might have a bunch of freed humans but none of them would have the technical knowledge their Yeerks had.

2) Jake just has to tell Ax to "Recall all the bug fighters" and "Locate the earthside Kandronas". Why would Ax not do this? Certainly bug fighters running around would be massacring human forces nonstop until they were recalled, and there is no reason for Ax to protect the location of the Kandronas from Jake or the other humans.

3) As for locking loved ones up because the "military" wants to take them in [because they are Controllers], that makes sense. But their Yeerks would probably not be too happy about that. If access to the Kandrona was uncertain and the inter-Yeerk communication was cut, then the human-controllers (mothers, sons, commanders) would be polite and ruthless in the goal of getting out of isolation imposed by their host's concerned relatives.

Plus, imagine if they really were locked up, then the yeerk would begin starve...their family would see what looks like their loved one going mad, thrashing, and dying horribly. They would try to find a doctor, but they would find an informed doctor and/or Controller to transfer the person to a "hospital". The Yeerk would then be separated and imprisoned in a locked pool.

4) Andalites "are slow to dedicate themselves to an attack" (Council of thirteen). They would probably not rush into a war of extermination against 6 billion humans who have committed no aggression and just helped to defeat their greatest enemy. There would probably be years of debate before anything like that would happen.

[itw2009]

lol. "a longer post", he says. xD

so. i still agree with your big picture. give humans alien technology and they will figure out how to make use of it, no problem. and be dangerous with it? oh, yeah. absolutely. humans can make just about anything dangerous. and anyone who can see that would be a fool not to try to cultivate and manipulate that.

i still don't believe that humans can figure the pool ship and all built-in technologies out overnight. not even in a week. not even in a month. i give it at least five years before a pool ship can be taken apart and put back together by human hands: hands belonging to someone who understands the theory behind their origin well enough that he can replicate and even improve upon what he has. (or she. given as i'm a 'she', makes sense to throw that in there.) i mean... prove otherwise, really, is what i'm getting at.

mmmm... yes. the pool ship would have a listing of all infested humans, addresses, phone numbers, close relations, feeding history, etc. Absolutely.

....you might (might?) not have gotten my original point. tl;dr: i dare you to tell a lieutenant commander to lock his commander up somewhere. to even try.

if three american generals out of, say, six are infested, how do you lock up those three generals? do you tell the entire military (well, maybe just the army) that these three generals need to be held captive or put under house arrest for "a mere" three days? because they are a threat to national security? ...well, first: who would you have to be to give the order that anyone would listen to you? general 'a' can't tell those under general 'b' to just lock their commander up. general 'a' would be cited for mutiny and perhaps locked up himself. i can only think of mr. commander-in-chief potus, and he'd have his hands full with other things (like, he also has to deal with the andalites, get the information "there are aliens out there and this is what happened" scrubbed and out to the american public, get jake and the scooby gang taken care of in politically correct ways without allowing them to undermine his authority, take care of the remaining controllers and the other nations with controllers, their governments, blablah... no. this is game-changer. it isn't just one piece and it can't be taken care of in a week). how would you prioritize this mission to him/her? ....and when was the last time obama made a decision in a week? about anything? lol. (but then, this president is something of an odd duck... in that he tends to reach out for expertise from other sources- sometimes, too many sources- before he makes a decision. imo, that costs him time, and i haven't seen him make any better decisions for his having delayed an answer to wait on responses from his hoardes of resident wonks. ...but that's my opinion.)

question: how well do you know the US military? because i work with marines on a daily basis and can give you an idea of how rigid that line of command is.

plus, as i said before, it would take a long time before a human could figure out how to even find the equivalent of a "start menu" on a pool ship, let alone locate this list of infested persons. jake doesn't know how to hack a pool ship computer. marco wouldn't, either. and would either of them cooperate, in any case? or approve of the andalites with that knowledge doing the same? imo: absolutely not. and ax and alloran aren't doing diddly against jake's wishes.

1. but as for human-controllers: if yeerks die inside their hosts' heads (as my post inferred by "successful but not"), those memories would travel from yeerk to human and give the human enough information to allow him/her to at least take advantage of this knowledge and sell it to a corporation. (if you're getting at anything else there, i don't know what it is, lol.) an idea alone can sell for plenty of money, depending on who your buyer is. i doubt that anyone would have to explain z-space to get the point "we had faster-than-light travel and this is what i remember doing with it" to really get non-controllers on board with these ideas.

2. why would jake do this? i don't think that he would. he'd see the plan from 'a' to 'z' and disagree with it fundamentally. this is a cruel plan- an unnecessary plan. he would never agree to it. he might even go so far as to sabotage it. he's done with killing. this is crossing the line.

3. >________> .... i.... i don't understand your answer. personally, i think that 'a' of my point is more likely: i.e., yeerks would never try to turn themselves in. ergo, we wouldn't have the scenario of "human-controller locked up in family home". at all. simply put: i believe that if the military were stupid enough to go door-to-door to round up controllers, they'd end up with riots on their hands. humans simply wouldn't give their family members into the hands of a notoriously violent, antagonistic, and enigmatic (or "shadowy", as you put it) military. so: the human-controller yeerks would prioritize finding a way to escape without alerting their families or the alien (human) military. and i sincerely doubt that the yeerks would wait until they were unable to control themselves to do something about their situation, but they'd have plenty of time to find a way out. ....most of them, anyway. i doubt that all of them would have the resources to hijack skrit na ships or bug fighters. still, given as it's going to take the military a while to locate those earthside kandronas, i don't think that the yeerks have too much to fear.... right away. (i get back to: no one is decrypting a pool ship in 24 hours. or a week. or even a month.)

4. herp. i also don't know what this is responding to. i happen to agree with it from a human POV: no human military goes into a fight against such unknown odds / an unknown enemy unless the military leaders are insane. it's very sun tzu. very basic, imo. i wouldn't blame the andalites for doing the same. it'd be very bad pr otherwise, at the least.


i'm still not disagreeing with your hypothesis- just how you get about getting there, haha.

LMAO. okay, i put my foot down. ish. "shadowy". (enter dramatic finger-wriggling here.) i need to know: which government conspiracies have you fallen for? tell me: do you think that we've landed on the moon? was the invasion of iraq all about oil? where do the illuminati come into this? exactly how much do you know about these agencies?

psshh. crackers in the government? naw- not the kind who could hack a completely alien OS. i mean, i assume that the yeerks are running something better than linux or an iOS, lmao. for that gross assumption, you need to be speaking with better authority than someone who reads CNN or huffpost or wapo and decides that "NSA spies on people" (not that it's not true, but: tangent alert.). no offense, but "what about those unknown but super-powerful super-abilities that the humans in NSA have?" doesn't stand as an argument. these people don't exist.

namely- as i swear that i keep monotonously reiterating- humans wouldn't figure out a pool ship in a day. or a week. or even a month. these anime-esque cracker abilities that you assume the NSA possesses don't exist. there is no hyper-powered sixteen-year-old working undercover for the NSA or CIA or FBI to hack computers or foreign servers, etc. And said kid would never understand something completely, totally, utterly alien (i.e., was not programmed by steve jobs or bill gates) and hundreds of years advanced over human technology and hack it in a day. or a week. or even a month.

K.A. makes this sort of hacking sound very easy because she's got some aristh and a human kid taking down the yeerk empire with materials picked up from the local radio shack. ...this isn't realistic. don't let an author / authors with no computer programming/hacking experience fool you. if ax can hack a yeerk computer, the kid's got serious programming moxie. he's not an ordinary aristh (distracting females in class aside). no, you aren't going to fabricate z-space transponders with old computer parts. :| it's not remotely realistic. (yay for the obvious: children's book series.)



...i hope that i wasn't too patronizing, but i get irked when i have to repeat myself. :| but given as perhaps i wasn't clear enough the first time around, perhaps this post illuminates my thought process. your plan's success is contingent on the US executive branch agencies already having within it- at this point in time- someone who is willing to hack / access a ridiculously advanced and completely alien computer to sell out an entire race to slavery or death- a race with which this person may or may not have had any dealings or to which s/he may or may not have a relation or friend subjugated. ...that's a "no" on the probability scale for me. you just aren't going to find that person.

and... lol. that response was so random that i don't foresee myself adding anything to my arguments - not unless you can directly address the existing ones. it just kinda... is what it is, for me.




also... this was a bit rushed and off-the-wall. i'm exhausted and five minutes from falling asleep- which also just is what it is. xD but given as this is the internet and what on earth do i care? ....well, yeah. that's what you're stuck with: rushed and off-the-wall.

[Zacharychaos]

Haha I definitely threw up a long disorganized post.

I'll say that you have a strong argument. (And I think it's absolutely hilarious to call them Jake and the scooby gang... Sooo true)

I think the only way my scenario works is to the extent that Ax cooperates. Realize I'm not calling for the extermination of the Yeerks (Jake took care of that anyway) . In fact an argument could be made that the free humans would have a strong interest in allowing human-Controllers the right to feed without the threat of death. There's something about letting your enemy think that have an escape route that is very sun Tzu indeed.

Also a few key points I'll reiterate based on the books:
The pool ship contains an override to all bug fighters in the sector. In one of the early books (12?) it is stated that the Yeerk commanders don't trust their pilots. There is absolutely no reason I can think of for Ax to refuse to forcibly recall the fighters, even if he refused anything else. I can't imagine a few floating Scrit Na trash cans would have any real impact.

Based on the consistent failure to infiltrate the highest ranks of the military, it is reasonably likely that few very highly ranked officers are infested. And again, why would Ax withhold this information residing in the Pool Ship's computers? They don't need human hackers for that.

(And lets leave Obama out of this, I think it would be kind of weird to bring his unique leadership style into this scenario. I think a generic POTUS would be greatly empowered by a terrified country that just saw a major city turned into rubble by alien ships.)

[Allan_Oran]

this topic reminds me of a stroy I found a couple of years ago written by an online community called 'Earth Vs Hell', or something along those lines. I'd offer a link, but I can't find it anywhere.

Basically, it specualtes what would happen if Hell, having never adopted anything but their medieval weaponry their always depicted with, tried to invade a Bush Administration America and the rest of the Earth. Poor Satan never knew what hit him xD

[spoiler]It was a V-2 rocket, in case you're wondering.[/spoiler]

But let's assume here that the Andalites feel they would have the public support. Assume Jake does say "Get the hell off my ship" and turns it over to Earth. That would result in Ax's exile. Tail-blade gone and all. Depending on how that sort of trauma would affect him, he might defect to Earth, the only home he's had about half a decade.
That would help Earth scientists decipher Yeerk programming and computer code a lot easier, access more files, give a massive boost to Information Technologies on Earth, especially since some of the first tech Yeerks stole was Andalite. He'd also be able to help with Z-Space tech, since he has built a transponder in the past.
Alloran, being free would be able to help give insight to Yeerk and Andalite strategy and tactics and possibly weapons tech. Maybe in the same way a soldier who field-strips his gun everyday can walk you through how a pistol works.

Former controllers may have been infested long enough that they can share Yeerk tech based on their area. They may not have the same memories as the Yeerk, but a Human-controller who worked building Bug Fighter for five years still had to build them with their human host hands, recognise the parts with their eyes, etc. If you have nothing to look at but Bug Fighter construction for five years, you would have the same memories of building Bug Fighters even when the Yeerk is gone. It could almost be like muscle memory. Or watching the same video everyday for five years. You know exactly what goes where.

Going on those assumptions, Earth would have a pretty good chance, but I would not rule out pockets of Yeerk resistance using portable Kandrona Pools.
And Earth would have a better chance if Jake and the other kept the Escafil Device that they/Visser One had when they took the Pool Ship. That would be something worth reverse-engineering.

[Zacharychaos]

Baron,

Actually I think the morphing technology would bring absolute chaos to humanity if the Andalites weren't there.  Not having the Escafil device would be the only way a space-faring civilization could actually emerge.

Imagine one morphing cube, top secret, but eventually reverse engineered. (Obviously the tech can't be extracted from scooby gang, unless Visser Three was just selfish and never let the Yeerk engineers examine Alloran.)

Humans, we are crazy. We would spy, steal, impersonate, cheat, and raise all kind of hell if we could morph! Think of society would break down. And how could this tech be withheld? Every injury: healed. Every old person: new body. Men experience sex as women, and vice versa. Rare animals skyrocket in value, they are captured and the wild ones killed (Tigers, rhinos, blue whales etc). The tech itself would be worth billions for recreation, espionage, and health care. How much would Steve Jobs have paid? Ronald Reagan? (Hugh Hefner??  )

We would quickly become a society of haves and have-nots. We would live two lives, the second without morphing technology. We would constantly be suspicious as to whether our loved one was really who they said they were or whether our husband/wife was off canoodling as the neighbor's Asian mistress or whatnot. No business could be conducted without waiting 2 hours in a locked room.



[So maybe those sneaky Andalites don't need to destroy Earth, they just need to send some cloaked fighters and rain blue Cubes down from the sky. Earth destroys itself!]