Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-27721925-20160606130021

From Stephen Baxter's Manifold books.

Quotes on their power:

The Downstreamers are a posthuman civilization, the descendents of humanity who live some 10^117 years in the future. Their abilities and feats include:


 * Time travel - They can travel to any point in the past and move between timelines at will, or alter timelines


 * Universe/dimensional travel - They can travel to other universes along the Manifold (sort of like a multiverse)


 * Omniscience - Their neutrino computer at the end of time contains all of the information, down to the quantum level, completely describing the history of the entire universe from the Big Bang to the end of time, but not only that, they have complete knowledge of all possible timelines. So they know everything that is happening, ever happened, ever will happen, ever could have happened, and ever might happen.

They do not have physical bodies (non - corporeal beings). They can transmit influence back through time and make subtle alterations to the DNA of organisms like human beings, and also give them their knowledge.

They can built time portals made out of molded timespace itself (sort of similar to Xeelee construction material). Said portals are completely indestructible to brute force, and can transport anything that goes through them to any point in time or space, or even to other universes along the Manifold. The time portal still existed, completely undamaged or altered, 10^117 years in the future, when all the matter in the universe had decayed to nothingness and the heat death had used up all energy. The portals can project a field around them that can alter the laws of physics- it's powerful enough to shield a normal human in a spacesuit (made with earth technology from the mid - 21st century, not very advanced) from thousands of Big Bangs and Big Crunches per second.

They managed to send back information and genetically reprogram human children (none of them more than 8 years old) to increase their intelligence enough to build a space/time ship that was bigger on the inside than the outside (like a TARDIS), also immune to brute force weaponry (it took a nuke undamaged, then flew to the moon, and normal humans on earth attempted to destroy it for over 200 years with more advanced weapons but they did nothing). Time flows faster inside than outside the ship, so 200 years outside was only a few minutes inside. It could also send objects back through time to specific coordinates in time and space. In the end the Downstreamers sent back instructions for the children to build a quark strangelet - powered device that induced a vacuum decay, creating an expanding sphere of altered physics that spread across the universe at the speed of light, destroying and remaking the entire Manifold of universes so new life could arise. Apparently the Downstreamers survived the recreation of the multiverse, and actually transformed it from a finite multiverse with a limited number of universes, to an infinite multiverse with an unlimited number of universes. In this infinite multiverse, every possible universe that could exist does. Seeing that those universes where extraterrestrial life existed usually ended up with humans being killed early or never evolving due to alien interference, the Downstreamers isolated a sheaf of universes (a sub multiverse) where humans were the only intelligent lifeforms in the universe. They then built the Red Moon, a moon with a powerful "World Engine" inside of it that would wander this multiversal sheaf, teleporting from universe to universe, each time appearing in orbit around that universe's Earth (displacing that earth's original moon if it had one).

It would then open a portal that would teleport various hominids between earth and the Red Moon, and return again millions of years later to teleport them back. That is why different species of hominids evolved on different planets in the multiversal sheaf (this was done to help human evolution). Bump, also it should be mentioned that before they reached their strongest form, they were building gravity mines that were stated in Phase Space to span the entire universe (and this was trillions of trillions of years in the future, when the universe had expanded to be many times its current size).

In case you didn't get the implication, these things would utterly dwarf TTGL. And this was just a construction project from an earlier point in their civilization. Okay, new info: In one of the stories in Phase Space, called Refugium, there is an artifact that might have been built by the Downstreamers. According to the author's notes at the back of the book, this story takes place in one of the universes of the Manifold, so it's canon to the Manifold series. In this story, as soon as sentient life evolves and develops a civilization advanced enough to travel into space (anywhere in the universe), these ships referred to as "bubbles" are sent to their planet. When someone enters a bubble, it immediately takes off at FTL speed across the universe and deposits the occupants in a custom - made ecosystem to support their type of life, and entire fleets of these bubbles seek out and transport every being of that race to this ecoystem.

The ecoystems are built around a cosmic string, which is said to encircle the entire universe. It was speculated that there were enough diverse ecosystems to accomodate every possible type of life in that universe. Each ecosystem had its own sun, and was powered by the Cosmic String. The ecosystem to support humans alone was large enough to fit 10,000 earths. The purpose of this was to allow all of the intelligent races in the universe to live in a safe place so they could survive to the end of the universe, without worrying about asteroid impacts, stars exploding or changing phase, etc. Also, the bubbles are capable of reading minds and seeing who each occupant cares about the most and bringing them to their location in the ecosystem, so someone would have their family and friends brought to them, without having to look across the whole ecosystem for them.

It was never stated who built this system, but the Downstreamers are a likely candidate (at least, I know of no other race in the Manifoldverse capable of doing such a thing). Okay, after finishing The Gravity Mine, I have new info:

Relatively early in the Downstreamers' history, they had built many gravity mines around supermassive black holes, the first one being around the black hole that formed the remains of the Milky Way galaxy. Each of these structures was galaxy - sized or so. At this point, it was stated that the universe had expanded to 10 quadrillion times its current size. Even at this point, the Downstreamers had shed their physical bodies and lived as energy beings, with a group consciousness (but individuals could form periodically and then rejoin the main group).

Even farther in the future, they were herding together all of the last remaining supercluster-sized black holes in the universe with a massive structure that spanned the entire universe (I mentioned this in an earlier post). The universe was much larger then, since it had been a much longer time since the last part of the story. So this thing was absolutely ginormous - maybe a low - end estimate would be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 light - years across (based on the size of the black holes and the previous information, as well as cosmic inflation).

EDIT: I forgot to mention, at this time the Downstreamers were having internal conflicts and wars, and the result of these was destruction and damage of large parts of this structure (called The City). In other words, significant portions of this thing were ripped apart by their weapons/powers, and this was at a relatively weak stage of their civilization.

Even later on, all the matter in the universe had decayed and only a few black holes remained, but the Downstreamers were still active, although they were in forms that each spread across galaxy - sized areas or larger, and took the entire lifetime of modern civilizations to form a thought. One of them found a naked singularity and modified it to develop into a new form of sapient life.

This was all before they reached their final neutrino state, developed their time mastery, and remade the multiverse. New info: In one universe in the new infinite Manifold, there was a device (again, never confirmed to be built by the Downstreamers, but possibly could have been) that surrounded the solar system and created a perfect illusion down to the quantum level that was indistinguishable from reality. This was said to take more energy than an entire galaxy had. Anyway, some humans on earth suspected this (due to the Fermi Paradox) and tried to bounce a laser off a planet in Alpha Centauri, because this was an expansion faster than the device would have predicted, so it wouldn't have set up the illusion that far. It worked, and the simulation started to collapse, with objects closer and closer to the sun disappearing/shifting to alternate forms. It was not made clear in the story whether these alternate possibilities (for example Neptune's moon Triton being in different orbits, being two moons, not being a moon, being a ring system instead) were actually alternate universes/timelines invading the normal one, or just alternate states of the simulation.

Anyway, the phenomena was slowly approaching earth, and in the end it consumed the earth (along with the rest of the solar system). We don't know what happened next as the story ended there.

Now this may seem to contradict previous information (namely the Downstreamers' omniscience). However, I can think of three possibilities to explain this:

1. The Downstreamers were only omniscient in the original, finite multiverse. Once they expanded it into an infinite multiverse and created other infinite multiverses, they still had their original amount of power and knowledge (or perhaps even more), but it wasn't enough to predict everything in infinite universes.

2. This "planetarium" illusion (That's how it was referred to in the story) was an autonomous device (like the Red Moon in Manifold: Origin) that was not supervised directly by the Downstreamers. This is the hypothesis I personally think is right.

3. It was built by someone other than the Downstreamers.

Anyway, that was the last Manifold related story in Phase Space, so unless there are more stories in this series I don't know about, or Stephen Baxter writes more in the future, this respect/capability thread is complete.