On the Natural History and Evolution of the Romans
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Hi everyone. I was the guy that deduced and popularized what has recently become known as the “Roman master plan theory” on this subreddit, a...

On the Natural History and Evolution of the Romans

Hi everyone. I was the guy that deduced and popularized what has recently become known as the “Roman master plan theory” on this subreddit, a theory that Ty and Daniel recently confirmed is correct. In the Alt-Shift X podcast where they confirmed it, they said that they felt they weren’t being subtle, and yet a ton of people seem to have completely missed this central part of the plot of Leviathan Falls. I think a major part of why I understood what the authors were going for is because I understood The Dreamer chapters in the book, and therefore understood the alien biology that they were trying to explain. A biology that is so alien that I think it actually challenges a lot of what we consider as “life” in the first place.

So, I thought that I would make a thorough post on the evolution and history of the Gatebuilders, so that other fans can understand their nature and the overall alien plot line of the Expanse. My background is in biology and neurology, so I think I might be decently suited to make a post like this. I won’t go into detail about their “master plan” - there are multiple recent threads on that. Instead, this will delve into their biology and evolutionary history. I will refer to them as the Gatebuilders throughout this post because that is the name we seem to have collectively decided on as a fan base, but by the end of this post, you’ll see why I think that instead of calling them “Gatebuilders”, we should instead call their species “Leviathans” - a name that I think suits them far better, both based on their origin and because they did far more than just build the gates, which probably wasn’t even initially deliberate in the first place.

This will be long. VERY long. I apologize for the length, but there was a lot to discuss here. There’s a tl,dr below.

I will also say, for clarification, that I repeatedly refer to them as “Gatebuilders”. But as Elvi points out, the plurality is a misnomer. The word “hive mind” is meaningless - all there is, is mind. Just as you and I are not a “hive mind” of the billions of neurons that contribute to our consciousness, so too were they not a “hive mind” of the myriad nodes that contributed to theirs. They were a mind, and therefore “Gatebuilder” or “Leviathan”, singular, would be a more accurate term. But because that is almost grating to our human perception, I’ll continue to refer to them in the plural.

Most of this information is contained within The Dreamer chapters and Elvi’s followup, explanatory chapters. I’ve collected all the information here, but rather than cite passages and explain their meaning sequentially (since everyone can read the chapters on their own) I’ve written this post in essay form for ease of reading and explanation. Besides, doing that would only increase the length of an already extremely long post. Some of this information is my own deduction from the information provided in these chapters, using my knowledge of biology to explain what I think the authors (likely mostly Daniel) were going for here. For example, when there is a “point A” and “point B” in the Gatebuilder evolutionary history, I fill in the blanks via the logical evolutionary step that must have occurred to get to the second point, even though it isn’t specifically mentioned. For example, for an aquatic species to become a terrestrial species on Earth, one logical intervening evolutionary step is breathing air via lungs or gas exchange analog, rather than gills. There are several such steps in the evolutionary history of the Gatebuilders that are easily filled in through knowledge of what came before and after. They didn’t have anything quite as mundane as breathing air though - they were far, far more alien than almost anything we are familiar with. But I will try to make sense of them for you.

Tl,dr: The Gatebuilders initially evolved as a very alien, aquatic, parasitic hive-mind species on a Europa-like ice moon of a gas giant, most likely based on both carbon and silicon biochemistry. The Protomolecule was, from the earliest point in their evolutionary history, intricately and irreversibly intertwined with their own biology and their parasitic nature caused them to change forms many times throughout their own evolutionary history, until the idea of a single form became meaningless to them.

​

Evolutionary Origin of the Gatebuilders:

Once upon a time, long, long ago in our galaxy, there was an ice moon of a gas giant. Like Jupiter’s moon Europa, beneath the shelf of ice covering the moon’s surface was a vast liquid ocean, heated by the tidal forces of the gas giant’s gravity. On the ocean floor were hydrothermal vents, the likely origin for abiogenesis on this world.

On a moon like this, there are two major biome divisions, which resulted in two distinct evolutionary pathways for life. Around the warmth of the hydrothermal vents lived “fast life” - life with a comparatively rapid metabolism and biochemistry. It lived fast, reproduced fast, and consequently evolved fast. But in the deep cold of the overlying ocean was a second biome - one of “slow life”, with a comparatively slow metabolism and biochemistry.

In such an ecological system, there was a selective pressure for the emergence of parasitism - for the “slow” life to parasitize the “fast” life for its own benefit. It is unclear if the Gatebuilders actually began as something akin to what would eventually become the Protomolecule - merely a self replicating biomolecule - or if this evolved within them, somewhat closer to a bacterial plasmid conceptually, but regardless we know that the Gatebuilders began complex life as a free-floating aquatic species (they are referred to as “jellyfish” more than once, and “slugs” on several occasions as well) who sent this primitive protomolecule down to the hydrothermal vents to infect fast life.

Once infected, the primitive Protomolecule pilfered genetic information from this fast life, and sent it back up to the jellyfish, if we can even call them that. It’s likely that even by this point in their evolutionary history, it was meaningless to describe them as one type of life form. As such, the genetic information was integrated into their own genome, and they reaped the benefits of the evolution of the fast life below, without undergoing selective pressure themselves. For example, they obtained genetics that produced bioluminescence - and then, when the fast life around the vents evolved eyes to perceive electromagnetic radiation (presumably infrared, at first), the Gatebuilders pilfered that too.

And it was at this point that something profound and interesting happened. The jellyfish were able to perceive the bioluminescence that they themselves emitted, and each individual jellyfish began to process those signals with a primitive nervous system, no doubt also pilfered from the fast life. This created an emergence - each jellyfish could be viewed as an individual “neuron”, and individual processing center - with the light signals they emitted the “axons” or “action potentials” communicating between them. A nascent hive mind emerged. An ocean-spanning brain, literally linked by light.

​

A Thinking Ecosystem:

While this complex, alien ecosystem can in some ways be directly compared to a deep ocean ecosystem on Earth, in one very important way it is different - it forms an integrated informational network. It is difficult to conceptualize where the species we call the Gatebuilders ended, and unrelated life began. We know that the jellyfish spanned the ocean, communicating with light between themselves, repeatedly sending infectious Protomolecule down to the vents below, infecting new forms of life, obtaining new genetic information - growing, adapting as one, learning. The evolutionary pressure of the slow and fast ecosystems can no longer be viewed as separate. The ecosystem itself is intertwined, as is any ecosystem, but the main difference here is that there is a direct analogy to a neural network. Just as the human brain has neurons that support information processing and thought, so too are there accessory cells that support the entire informational architecture, without which thought would be impossible. A similar situation arose here, on this cold ice moon.

But the energy that drove this ecosystem arose exclusively from geothermal energy around the vents - life was chemotrophically based. For the Gatebuilders to spread further, as all life must, they needed to adapt further - obtain new sources of energy, invade new niches. Initially, they sent tendrils down to the vents - all the better to extract energy directly, and likely to serve as a direct means of Protomolecule infection. But they were growing curious. They reached both down to the warm depths below, and explored the cracks of the ice sheet above.

And, one day, they broke through the ice and tasted hard vacuum. Except there was more than that - they saw light. The stars. And because their consciousness was based on light signaling between free-floating organisms, they perceived the stars as a second mind - the mind of “God”, in their own words. But they were not adapted to the vacuum, not at first - it burned, and they withdrew into the comfort of the ocean. But their tendrils were within the cracks, they saw the light of the stars, and there was no turning back. Like the first life on Earth that got a taste of land, in baby steps of natural selection augmented by the Protomolecule repeatedly modifying their own genome with traits stolen from other life forms, the Gatebuilder organism adapted to the vacuum on the surface of the moon.

Presumably, a new selective pressure emerged at this point. For the first time in the evolutionary history of the ice moon, a new source of energy rather than geothermal energy was possible to obtain: electromagnetic energy from the system’s star. The Gatebuilders already were emitting and receiving electromagnetic radiation, and processing it. It would be a small evolutionary leap from that to photosynthesis. And so, we see the origin of the protomolecule’s ability to feed on all types of radiation. First, presumably, was the visual light radiation of the system’s star - perhaps even of the distant stars themselves. But they were within orbit of a gas giant, which likely had an intense magnetosphere. Other types of radiation would be abundant in this environment - ultraviolet, x-ray, and there would be an evolutionary benefit in photosynthesizing everything they possibly could. An equally important driving force for the evolution of diverse photosynthesis is that the gas giant must be orbiting outside the natural classical “habitable” zone of the star, as liquid water could not exist on the surface of the moon. Therefore, the natural light from the system’s own star would be dim. There would be an evolutionary drive to consume all forms of radiation possible.

In this way, the bioluminescent, phototrophic, hive mind Gatebuilders extended their tendrils across the surface of the moon - and simultaneously deep below it. I imagine at this point in their evolutionary history, there was a “forest” of photosynthesizing structures across the moon’s surface, connected to the ocean below, growing ever higher towards the stars.

Around this time, the Gatebuilders also learned to appreciate “the richness of light”. What this means, in their evolutionary context, is that they signaled via bioluminescence using as many wavelengths of light as possible, increasing bandwidth without needing to increase the number of physical nodes. This would be analogous to a neuron having multiple axons instead of one, and it is something not seen in biological brains on Earth.

​

A Living Dyson Swarm:

Once the Gatebuilders had colonized the surface of the ice moon and were thoroughly absorbing all forms of electromagnetic radiation that they could, and then emitting it via bioluminescence - likely both on their surface “tendrils” and the ocean-dwelling parts of their vast hive mind below - the next step was easy, evolutionarily speaking. In the weak lunar gravity, it would not take much to break free. This would be easier still if the photosynthesizing parts of them had grown to a great height on the surface of the moon, reaching ever higher towards the stars. Towards what they perceived as God.

And it was at this point that part of them broke free from the lunar surface, leaving the rest behind. For the first time in their evolutionary history, there were two evolutionary branches of the Gatebuilders, and two separate hive minds. The original one remained within the ocean of the ice moon, but a second, vacuum living, space-faring collective had emerged as well, and it was physically separate. Evolutionarily distinct, subject to new selective pressures, but still maintaining connection to each “node” via light signaling.

But the vacuum is a vast ocean. Much more vast than the literal ocean they were born in. What would enable such a species to survive in the depths of space from that point forward? Well, each node would still need to remain in relative proximity to the others - they couldn’t randomly fly out into the depths of space, on unpredictable paths. Logically, if each node remained in orbit of the gas giant - or eventually, in orbit on their native star, then they could continue to signal via light amongst themselves.

As such, the hive mind was not structurally that different from its origin in the ocean - we still have free-floating organisms, relatively stationary with respect to each other, signaling via light and absorbing light energy from the star and likely the magnetic field of their native gas giant. They would proliferate, spread, as all life must. I imagine that at this point they would somewhat resemble a living Dyson Swarm.

And here I will cite the novels directly, as there is a seemingly obscure fact that I believe ties directly into this. In two of the “dead systems”, Naraka System and Charon System, Elvi observed the following in Tiamat’s Wrath:

“The massive crystal flowers with filaments running though the petals like vacuum channels, gathering the energy of Charon system’s wildly fluctuating radiation and magnetic fields like daisies collected sunlight, if daisies had been thousands of kilometers wide. She still thought the crystal flowers could be a kind of naturally occurring interstellar life.”

I submit for consideration that Elvi was right - and that they were a remnant of the Gatebuilders. At a point in their evolutionary history, it became meaningless to distinguish between their biological structures and technological structures. As will shortly become clear, everything was a part of them.

This part of their evolutionary history is somewhat murky in the Dreamer chapters, but we can surmise that they spread to absorb all available sources of radiation in their home system. Much like a Dyson Swarm. But as I said, the vacuum is vast. And a new evolutionary pressure emerged, unique to them as a species. The speed of light - in their case of information - is a constant in vacuum. The rate limiting step of their growth and further evolution is therefore the transfer of matter between their individual, living nodes. Just as neurons must transport biomolecules within and between themselves, so too did the Gatebuilders have a need to send more than light between their nodes.

And so, just as biological life on Earth evolved to harness principles of physics - Bernoulli’s principle for flight and aquatic motion, quantum mechanics in photosynthesis, mitochondrial electron chains, and navigation of certain species, thermodynamics for countercurrent heat exchange, etc. - so too did the Gatebuilders evolve to utilize aspects of physics. Except for them, the selective pressure was to move things through space faster. And so, what they evolved was the ability to manipulate spacetime. Inertial manipulation, as seen with Eros and Duarte’s egg-ship, is essentially akin to an Alcubierre drive. It’s also heavily implied that they utilized quantum information processing in the Protomolecule itself. The ring gates are a type of wormhole. And we know that they didn’t deliberately create the gates, in a technological sense, but rather they evolved naturally, because of the narrative of the Dreamer chapters. The gates emerged as what they perceived as “holes in the spectrum” - meaning literal holes in the spectrum of the rich light they used for neural signaling, because they were literal holes within spacetime itself. And we know that these holes within the spectrum were not deliberately constructed at first, because they were surprised by them.

​

A New Kind of Physics:

And more than that, the Gatebuilders were surprised that a new kind of physics emerged from interacting with these “holes” in the spectrum. The appearance of these original gates was somewhat akin to a violence - the Gatebuilders found them uncomfortable, in a sense, but soon they explored them - and just like they worked their tendrils through the cracks of the ice covering of their original moon, so too did they work their way into the cracks of the universe. Of reality. And in so doing, they witnessed the “true” reality. A space beyond space and time. A higher dimensional membrane, outside the universe itself.

Initially, of course, the gates were a part of them - they were created via Protomolecule biology, for the purpose of moving matter through space more quickly between their free-floating, photosynthetic nodes. But they enabled something far more important than that. And that was what was unexpected. A shortcut through time and space. By exiting the physical universe, the passage of matter between the gates (of which there were likely myriad gates within their home system, connected together) equated to faster than light transport and signaling. It wasn’t truly faster than light, of course, but a shortcut, and now they could communicate between individual nodes faster than the speed of light in a vacuum as well. This allowed their processing speed to soar to new heights. Although they were still very much “slow life”, living in the cold of space, they gained the ability to think exponentially faster than they did before. And it was at this point in their biological history that they likely began to explore a technological pathway, rather than a purely evolutionary one.

Although it is never directly stated, I believe it is heavily implied that Adro was their home system. It is one of the “Dead Systems”, meaning that the system is so old that the star has left the main sequence. It is now a white dwarf. But we know that the Adro Diamond is the oldest known Gatebuilder artifact at 5 billion years old, and therefore existed for 3 billion years in their evolutionary history. And we know it was built before the star left the main sequence, because the green coloration is secondary to a flux of radiation that occurred when the system’s star expanded into the red giant phase.

The Adro Diamond is a “Jupiter-brain” construct. It is a gas giant sized computational device, largely carbon and crystalline in structure, but built via Protomolecule and carbon-silicate structures. Within the superstructure of the Diamond are an untold number of ring gates, the purpose of which is to transport information within the Diamond faster than the speed of light, linking the vast computational structure together. These rings are not connected to the slow zone, but they are presumably connected through the same higher dimensional space. It’s unclear exactly when the Diamond was built, but I think it is reasonable to assume it was built very early on, both due to the age of it, and due to the fact that the rings inside it are not clearly connected to the slow zone sphere. Therefore, it is plausible that it was built before the slow zone itself was built.

Although a “Jupiter Brain” is a common megastructure concept in speculative science fiction, the fact that the Gatebuilders constructed a Jupiter-sized computational device, and themselves originated via the moon of a gas giant, is suspicious to me in the sense that there is likely a direct connection there. I imagine that before the slow zone was built, this parasitic, invasive and expansile species completely dominated and restructured their home system, including the gas giant and moon that they originated from. The reason for building a Jupiter Brain is obvious - it backs up the information stored within their hive mind, if any nodes are wiped out. Before they were an interstellar species, they were still a vulnerable one - solar flares and myriad other threats could have damaged their free-floating forms. There would be a need for a computational back up, early on. And although I believe the Diamond was deliberately created - like the early ring gates, it may even have naturally evolved, akin to a limbic system in their astronomical unit spanning hive mind.

Regardless, after the evolution of the ring gates, it is said that they built Ring Station. Conceptually, the station itself - as a spherical, protomolecule built structure that can support computation - is somewhat similar to the Adro Diamond. Indeed, we even see it support a “dive” in the story. They send ring station through a gate, and it “blows a bubble” within the “holes in the spectrum”, enlarging the slow zone from the extradimensional space. And it began to extract potential energy from the secondary, older universe outside the boundary of the ring space, because the space itself wanted to constantly collapse back inward. And it was from this seemingly endless source of energy that they could manipulate the laws of physics within their native universe further, accomplishing feats that would otherwise seem impossible due to violation of conservation of energy. Not only did they witness the emergence of a new kind of physics, but true to their evolutionary history - they found a way to exploit it, parasitizing the second universe.

​

A Vast Interstellar Mind:

From there, their evolutionary history was more familiar, more straightforward. We know what happened next. Just as they had done throughout their entire evolutionary history, they sent out Protomolecule to infect and parasitize other forms of life. Except this time, instead of sending it to the depths of the hydrothermal vents or potentially to other worlds in their own system (if any were lifebearing), they sent it to adjacent star systems that they surmised contained life bearing worlds. Or, perhaps they simply randomly sent out Protomolecule rocks in vast numbers, like a fungal spore bloom, without specifically targeting life bearing worlds. Regardless, some of the Protomolecule samples impacted worlds with life, and parasitized and repurposed that life entirely in order to first build a ring gate connecting back to the slow zone. We know that the Protomolecule was an extinction level event for each world, because every Gate world experienced a second abiogenesis exactly 2 billion years ago, when the Gatebuilder tech went inert. It is specifically stated that all life on every world was repurposed, unambiguously. This is brought up multiple times in Cibola Burn, and early in season 4 as well. The Protomolecule landing on a world was a bad day for that world.

When this process was discovered, we humans assumed they deliberately targeted primitive life bearing worlds because Phoebe was captured by Saturn when life on Earth was early, unicellular, and because that is what we as a species would consider most ethical.

But the Gatebuilders didn’t care about that. Indeed, they actually got more evolutionary use out of advanced and complex life, as they had throughout their entire evolutionary history. In the Dreamer chapters, acquisition of alien genetic information, along with the resources of a given star system, are the “gifts” brought back to the “grandmothers” through the ring gates. It is therefore feasible that many worlds with advanced multicellular life - perhaps even early intelligent life - were absorbed by them.

And so the Gatebuilders grew, expanded, ever outward as all life must. And system after system, world after world were absorbed. But this wasn’t merely an invasive species eradicating life in a new ecological environment. No, as we’ve seen, the Gatebuilders had evolved beyond mere free-floating jellyfish in their original ocean. Their hive mind was composed of light signaling, and their “bodies”, or “nodes”, had myriad forms. Just as you do not view yourself as a collection of neurons, they did not view themselves as a collection of jellyfish nodes. Every structure - the gates, the Diamond, the ruins on worlds, the Protomolecule itself - exhibited bioluminescent signaling and was literally a part of them. Their mind transcended matter, then it transcended space and time. They came to view themselves as separate from “the Substrate”, which was the world of matter, the physical universe. And although they were still technically a part of the physical universe, in the sense that electromagnetic radiation is a physical field, they considered themselves “beings of light”, repeatedly referred to as “angels of light” in the text, and it’s easy to see why. They did not have multiple bodies - they had one body. Ring station, it was said, was analogous to their heart. The gates, the ruins, and the memory structure of the Diamond comprised the rest of their body, and their mind.

And so they continued on - system by system, world by world. The Protomolecule would build a gate, reach out to the hive mind, and receive new instructions of what to do with this newfound system, depending on how the system could be utilized best as a tool. Ilus, for example, was turned into a mining and energy production world - the entire surface was geoengineered. Not terraformed - that’s important to realize - but geoengineered. The Gatebuilders had no use for Earthlike environments, only the life on them. The human compatible atmospheres developed much later, after the second abiogenesis happened on every world. It is also important to understand that despite being largely non-corporeal, they still required resources - they still required matter and energy to support their interstellar existence.

​

The Quarantine:

The Gatebuilders existed like this for eons. They forgot what it was like to fear. They knew no suffering, no death. And their mind was so vast that when the Goths began wiping out systems, they didn’t even notice at first. But eventually, the loss of processing nodes panicked them. With each system that went dark, and each system that they deliberately destroyed trying to “burn the cancer” out, their processing capability diminished. Cornered, frightened like a caged animal, they eventually made the decision to shut down the gate network and quarantine. The information comprising their consciousness - their evolutionary memory, the collective knowledge of their civilization - was stored within the Adro Diamond. They knew that they could return someday.

And they knew, through their brief war with the Goths and through acquisition and absorption of alien life throughout their history - that “beings in the Substrate are difficult to refract through rich light”. They knew that a hive mind based on biological brains rather than light signaling would be more robust. It is even stated that their own weapons, such as Tecoma or the ring station induced supernovae, “blew them apart like tissue paper” because they were “fragile”. The reason for this is because their consciousness was linked via light signaling to the ring gates and all of the Protomolecule structures on every world. A loss of a gate and system would be like a loss of a collection of neurons, for us.

And so, their long term plan, documented in full in the “Roman Master Plan” discussions, was to lie dormant in the Adro Diamond until a non-hive mind species “in the Substrate” inevitably encountered the Protomolecule, such as a sample that actually missed a world, because they knew that the Protomolecule would do what it always had done - it would parasitize them, manipulate them, and link back up to the Adro Diamond.

Their hive mind would then return. Reboot. Same software, different hardware. This time running on the Substrate brains of murder primates. Although they didn’t anticipate us. They just anticipated something different from them. That’s all they wanted. And from there, they would resume their war against the Goths - more robust, able to wield the weapons they designed before their quarantine without damaging their own hive mind.

Because this post is about their biology, I won’t go into the intricacies of that plan - it’s been discussed at length in other threads and recently confirmed by the authors as true. That was the overarching alien story of the Expanse, and the strange, very alien biology of the Gatebuilders is why it happened.

​

A Few Closing Thoughts…

​

Ontogeny Recapitulating Phylogeny:

Early in the history of modern biology, there was the idea that during embryological development, “ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny”. This idea means that the embryological development of an organism follows the larger evolutionary phases of ancestral groups. This isn’t true, at least not in the sense that the idea was formulated, but when looking at embryological development it is easy to see why biologists thought it was true, at one time.

But for the Gatebuilders, I think it was literally true. We see this with what happens in Sol system. First, it all starts with a Protomolecule infection that begins repurposing “fast life”. Then, after the development on Venus, it emerges from Venus in the structure of a spacefaring jellyfish. Then, after it ventures out far enough into space, it restructures itself as the ring gate.

This mirrors the evolutionary history of the Gatebuilders, and I think it was more than mere foreshadowing, given how intertwined the Protomolecule was in the Gatebuilders biology, and also given that Daniel Abraham has a degree in biology and would no doubt be familiar with this concept.

In this way, we can view the strange events of the Protomolecule infection in Sol system in a brand new, biological light.

​

Carbon-Silicon Biochemistry:

Unlike a lot of what I explained above, this isn’t directly stated in the books. However, I believe it is heavily implied. I think that the biochemistry of the Gatebuilders was based on both carbon and silicon. This is sometimes referred to as “organosilicon” in actual chemistry papers, but it isn’t a topic widely explored yet in biology.

There are feasibly two major biochemistries that we could imagine for “life as we know it”. Organic chemistry based on carbon, and that based on silicon. Both atoms are in the same column of the periodic table, both form long chain structures and can link to other atoms with four electron bonds, and therefore both could support a diversity of chemistry. However, silicon based life would have a distinct disadvantage - electron bonds are easier to break, and therefore the life would be more fragile. Furthermore, if a perfectly analogous biochemistry did develop on a world, then the product of aerobic respiration would be silicon dioxide, a solid, rather than carbon dioxide, a gas. It is hard to imagine how such a physiology could exist.

On a world like Earth, that is. It isn’t hard to imagine how silicon biochemistry could exist in the right environment of temperature and pressure, and it might even be optimally suited to survive as vacuum-based life.

But something that isn’t often talked about in speculative xenobiology is that a mixed carbon and silicon biochemistry is totally plausible, and would eliminate much of the downsides of a silicon-only biochemistry. In the Expanse, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the technology derived from the Protomolecule exhibits a “carbon-silicate” structure. Meaning, that there are alternating carbon and silicon bonds, the atoms of which are in turn bound to oxygen and hydrogen, forming a complex structure. For this reason, I believe that the biochemistry of the Gatebuilders was not carbon based, nor silicon based, but rather a hybrid combination of both.

This seems like a minor, irrelevant point, but I think that it might in fact be vital to understanding the Protomolecule and the Gatebuilder’s evolutionary success. Feasibly, such a structure could enable them to parasitize both carbon and silicon based life - almost any alien world they encountered, they could absorb and repurpose, and they might have even gotten better at this over time.

Furthermore, I think this also explains a lot of their architecture and Protomolecule constructs. Is it not a curious fact that some Gatebuilder constructs appear extremely biological in nature (such that Elvi, a xenobiologist, actually mistakes a protomolecule automaton for a normal organism on Ilus and it breaks her analyzing device), and yet some appear very machinelike in nature (such as many of the automatons on Ilus encountered near the end of Cibola Burn, or the ring station sentinels), and yet some others appear as a strange biological-machine hybrid?

I submit for consideration that the reason for this is because they use carbon-silicon biochemistry. When it suits them, for a given purpose, their constructs may be more carbon based and classically organic in appearance, and other times more silicon based, and other times a combination of both. In this way, the strange nature of their “technology” is explained solely by their adaptive biochemistry and nothing else.

And I’ll leave it at that. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. I apologize for the length, but there was a lot of shit to cover. And thank you Ty and Daniel for writing such a brilliant story. This is truly the most believable and creative description of xenobiology I’ve ever come across in science fiction, and I had a fantastic time deciphering what I think you were going for with respect to the Leviathans, or Gatebuilders, or Romans, or whatever we want to call them. Let me know if I got anything majorly wrong.

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Comments

  • This was very informative and well written. I’d love to see the authors take on this. ⏤ by anotherlostraveler (↑ 329/ ↓ 0)

    • Other than the book itself, here’s the closest thing I am aware of - transcript of the podcast where they confirmed the overall “plan”, courtesy of u/conezone33:(Ty) “Hopefully the last book helps people understand a little better the madness of Duarte, when they start to realize that he wasn’t entirely in control of his own actions. If you read the last book, it’s definitely heavily implied that what he’s trying to accomplish there is what the protomolecule wants him to do.”(Daniel) “And that the protomolecule is once again finding a form of fast life, and using its design and to recreate, pulling the hive mind back out of the BFE, and pulling it back into the world in a better form.”(Ty) “Yeah, we’re not exactly subtle. We have a species that lives very very slow, and the way that it interacts with the universe is to hijack fast moving life and have it do all the stuff for it. And then it goes to war. It realizes it can’t win that war, so it hides and it hijacks new fast life, to fight their war for it. The protomolecule Builders have one move, and they’re just doing it over and over again. They just keep playing that one card.”(Alt Shift X) "It’s made clear that the Builders are not very interested in matter. Matter, they can sort of take it or leave it. They exist more as information and light and stuff, some of which needs to be stored in the BFE. I wonder with the human hive mind that the protomolecule attempted to create, could that embody the Builders as they once were? Like, is the protomolecule converting humanity into the Builders, basically?(Ty) “I think that’s a meaningless question. I don’t think the Builders think of themselves as any one thing. If you run a flight simulator on a PC or a Mac, does the flight simulator think of themselves differently? I don’t think it does. I think the hardware is the least interesting part for the protomolecule.(Alt Shift X) “So the protomolecule and the Builders, they’re not an organism so much as a process?”(Ty) “Well, at a certain point they became that.”(Daniel) “As the Biology guy here, what is the difference between the two things you just said?” (…) What is a process, what is a life form, what is a life? That’s a religious and philosophical question. The Gatebuilders would absolutely challenge a bunch of our assumptions about that.” ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 492/ ↓ 0)
    • I usually love it when Daniel shows up in the comment section randomly and provides clarity but in this case I think the essay is beautiful and having him come in and say something regarding the accuracy could diminish its beauty. ⏤ by woahgeez_ (↑ 158/ ↓ 0)

  • Exporting this as a PDF, printing it in hardcover and rest it next to the books, titled “hardcanon Roman Gatebuilder Leviathan origins”.Well done mate, you’ve been privilege for this sub. ⏤ by PlutoDelic (↑ 538/ ↓ 0)

    • Hey, thanks :). ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 144/ ↓ 0)
      • Can you point me to where I could read the “Roman master plan theory”? ⏤ by ExternalTangents (↑ 66/ ↓ 0)
        • Sure thing, sorry - when I made this post both these threads were still on the main page of the subreddit, so I figured I didn’t have to link. I can add them though, as it seems that they did move down a page today. Here you go though:The Roman Master Plan Theory:/r/TheExpanse/comments/s7xggd/roman_master_plan_thread/And where it was confirmed:/r/TheExpanse/comments/s9jtd6/daniel_abraham_and_ty_franck_seem_to_confirm/The first directly cites one of my original posts on it. There are also multiple discussions kicked off by other people - two main posts on the front page right now, discussing various aspects of it. ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 98/ ↓ 0)
          • I love that masterplan, there’s one thing that bothers me though. The whole reason Duarte was able to do what he did is because they (the scientists) manipulated the Protomolecule to do something a bit different than the base “infect and hack” it usually does. If that hadn’t happened, from what I can see, every new species/hardware the Protomolecule would have encountered would have been turned into vomit zombies which can’t exactly run the Gatebuilders consciousness. Did the Gatebuilders really plan for a sentient species to alter the “technology” to such an extent as to make that possible? ⏤ by eatondix (↑ 29/ ↓ 0)
            • I don’t think so. I think that what we see with Julie on Eros is ultimately what their initial plan was. Julie was fully aware, and the Protomolecule on Eros formed a nascent hive mind by preserving the minds of everyone there, linked to her (and as we see in Cibola Burn, linked to Miller too). The Protomolecule did all that on its own, automatically.So I think humans actually fucked up the plan. Had Eros impacted Earth, I think some biomass would be used to create the ring, the rest would be kept in reserve waiting for contact with the hive mind to receive new instructions. When that didn’t happen, instead of making Miller, it likely would have sent a copy of Julie through the ring to ring station, plugged in, activated the network and the Diamond and instantly jumped to the endgame of the series, enslaving all of humanity.Instead, we almost ruined the whole plan accidentally through our greed and bungling. ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 113/ ↓ 0)
              • Oh you’re right! I love how all the details just add up, thanks! ⏤ by eatondix (↑ 17/ ↓ 0)
              • By contrast, what do you think would’ve happened if the protomolecule hybrids from Book 2/Season 2/3 had successfully made their way to Mars instead of getting shot down? ⏤ by AndreskXurenejaud (↑ 9/ ↓ 0)
                • We know the protomolecule was breaking through the constraints placed on it due to being able to communicate with other infestations (ultimately, Cortazar solves this with his uranium box thing, and this I think is the most key breakthrough that allowed the Laconian project to succeed). So once there, they’d likely do what they were trained to, be animalistic kids unable to understand what was happening to them and be threatened and lash out and kill people, but as the bullet holes within them led to imperfect regeneration (described by prax as the ideal time to break out of constraints) they would increasingly revert to the protomolecule base code. Mars would get fully utilised, at least as much as the Martians allow them to be used (without glassing the planet to prevent it). For what purpose is unclear. The ring gate was already being built and they didn’t need two, but the protomolecule would likely keep that biomass in reserve until they open the ring gate, at which point they would use it to find out what happened, same as miller. The protomolecule had to intentionally keep miller and co concious, it didn’t want to waste tools. The entire martian population it got access to would likely have had a similar treatment.Makes you realise what a complete prick Errinwright and Nguyen were. They didn’t know that they were condemning all of the Martians to eternal torture, but I wonder how much they would have cared. ⏤ by Lantimore123 (↑ 31/ ↓ 0)
              • Do you have any theories about why they would need ships if the nodes themselves would have been able to traverse the vacuum of space? ⏤ by eatondix (↑ 8/ ↓ 0)
                • It’s stated that they still needed to move matter around through the gates via ships, so I don’t think we need to theorize on that part much. The reason why they had internal compartments is because they did use automatons for more technical work - like the ring station or Ilus sentinels. Even the Strange Dogs themselves were artificial constructs (and an example of how sometimes the Gatebuilder creations are very organic in appearance, and sometimes very machinelike- an indication of their organosilicon nature I think). ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 50/ ↓ 0)
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            • The Laconian scientists may have been able to slow down / stop the PM’s standard infection hack, but the PM had many more hacks in reserve… When Duarte reassembled himself, he was just as seemingly free-willed and intelligent as ever. Except that his desires and ambitions kept changing to be more and more like the builders. ⏤ by DoctroSix (↑ 39/ ↓ 0)
          • Man I wish that link format worked on the Reddit app 😂. I found them eventually though ⏤ by ExternalTangents (↑ 15/ ↓ 0)
            • It doesn’t? Weird. I literally just copy/pasted the URL ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 3/ ↓ 0)
              • Because it starts from the r/ part and not the entire url, it doesn’t work as a link for me. The r/TheExpanse part makes a link to the subreddit, but the rest is just plain text ⏤ by ExternalTangents (↑ 16/ ↓ 0)
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        • There’s some links in his profile, but the gist of it was that they put their hive mind into deep storage at the BFE. Some remaining consciousness (the grandmothers) would guide any intelligence (by activating their limb if system with rewards, dopamine in Cara’s case) to the blueprint to network those life forms into a new, more robust physical template for the resurrection of the hive mind. Seems obvious having just finished the final book, but kudos to OP for latching on to those wary details. ⏤ by UsayNOPE_IsayMOAR (↑ 30/ ↓ 0)
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    • How do you save a Reddit thread as a PDF? Whenever I try its always cut off or skips some bits. ⏤ by JcBravo811 (↑ 3/ ↓ 0)
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  • Xenobiological research worth the University of Laconia’s finest. Beautifully done OP. ⏤ by Spy_crab_ (↑ 117/ ↓ 0)

  • After seeing the origins of the Ring builders, they remind me another parasitic species from the book Children of Ruin, the sequel to children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’d highly recommend that series if you want a series that explores the evolution of alien species and how they might interact with humans. ⏤ by Cantomic66 (↑ 98/ ↓ 0)

    • This is a series that is on my list, but I haven’t read yet due to prioritizing other things, but you just moved it straight to the top of my priority list. Thanks for the recommendation! ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 40/ ↓ 0)
      • Yeah definitely, it’s a great hard sci fi book series. Also I was going to mention that if the Ring builders were around for billions of years and controlled many habitable worlds. This means the chances for advance civilizations forming wasn’t possible until more recently. They also destroyed many habitable systems in their war with the Ring entities so the number of habitable worlds was also lessened. In this way Earth life and humanity had a huge head start compared to many other habitable worlds. ⏤ by Cantomic66 (↑ 43/ ↓ 0)
        • And this addresses Ty’s early statements that the expanse is a horror if it answer to the Fermi Paradox. ⏤ by olhado22 (↑ 41/ ↓ 0)
          • When an answer to the fermi paradox is " because ancient aliens incorporated all the older life; we just got lucky." ⏤ by Mr_Byzantine (↑ 27/ ↓ 0)
        • That makes sense. After all, the Romans reaction to any indication of intelligent life in another solar system would be to lob a protomolecule rock at it. ⏤ by Zathrus1 (↑ 25/ ↓ 0)
        • Yep. I think that the Expanse authors either knowingly or accidentally proposed multiple explanations for Great Filters in the series.One of which is definitely the Gatebuilders themselves, for sure. ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 22/ ↓ 0)
        • Just an update - I haven’t read this series yet (it’s next on my list) but right now I am reading another series I had put off for some reason for years: The Hyperion Cantos.I am surprised by how much this series has sucked me in. I’m loving it so far. Definitely check it out if you haven’t read it. It’s weird as fuck at times though. But in a good way most of the time. ⏤ by kabbooooom (↑ 13/ ↓ 0)
          • Did you read all 4? The way Simmons flips the script with the Consul’s chapter is just incredible. I love the Ousters, and my headcanon has them as the logical path of Belters. ⏤ by mmm_tempeh (↑ 4/ ↓ 0)
    • “Let’s go on an adventure” ⏤ by BoringEntropist (↑ 21/ ↓ 0)
      • That phrase has haunted me since that book. There were some gruesome moments there that preceded that phrase and now I can never erase it from my memory. I hope there’s going to be a third book! ⏤ by BlackfyreNL (↑ 7/ ↓ 0)
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      • Strangely wholesome horror. ⏤ by BaronCoqui (↑ 3/ ↓ 0)
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  • Excellent write up! A very minor correction: The fast life in the saltwater ocean that first evolved eyes wouldn’t have used them to perceive infrared radiation. Water absorbs infrared extremely well (absorption spectrum), making it basically opaque at IR wavelengths. Most likely, any eyesight that evolved in the ocean will have been in the visible range (~400-700 nm). Of course, our Leviathans eventually evolved their sight to cover a larger part of the spectrum, but presumably they did that once they got to the surface of their ice moon.Some additional thoughts on organosilicon lifeOne of the big differences between carbon and silicon is the strength of C-C and C-O versus Si-Si and Si-O chemical bonds. The Si-O bond (452 kJ/mol) is extremely strong compared to a Si-Si bond (222 kJ/mol), while C-C (346 kJ/mol) and C-O (358 kJ/mol) are roughly similar. This means the chemistry of carbon will involve a lot of C-C polymerization (formation of long covalent chains, e.g. hydrocarbons), while stable silicon polymers will primarily be built from Si-O chains. Long linear polymers are often cited as an important building block for any kind of biochemistry. These are easy to make with C-C bonds (hydrocarbons, fatty acids, etc.), but the Si-O polymers tend to form large amorphous networks. And although it is possible to form long Si-Si chains (e.g. silanes), these are much more reactive to water than their C-C counterparts. Organosilicon building blocks (Si-C or Si-O-C) are an interesting starting point for hybrid biochemistry. Unlike Si-Si bonds, Si-C covalent bonds (318 kJ/mol) are stable in water. Si-O-C bonds are susceptible to hydrolysis in alkaline conditions (rate dependent on Si-substituents and pH). However, as far as we know there is no life on earth that naturally incorporates/synthesizes Si-C or Si-O-C bonds. Naturally occurring terrestrial enzymes process silicon containing molecules via the carbon-containing groups. The silicon moieties are hydrolyzed if possible, or otherwise left intact. The problem is that the extremely high affinity of Si atoms for oxygen will make silicon in any form (e.g. Si-Si, or Si-C) other than Si-O bonds extremely rare in an oxygen-rich environment. Under hydrothermal conditions, such as the deep ocean vents where the Builders originated, practically all available silicon will be sequestered as insoluble and unreactive silica-containing rocks. There are ways for lifeforms to use