Any confirmation if that crossing is open? Every time I had gone there, the bottom of the hill at Taylor Stadium was blocked off. I Like to use that as a shortcut to avoid the big traffic light by The Football field.
Alt Shift X put up another podcast interviewing the Expanse authors. They talk about the final three books in the second half of the podcast (around the 50 minute mark) and around the one hour and 15 minute mark, they seem to confirm that it was indeed the Builders' plan to ultimately use humanity to restore their hivemind through the BFE. They even said they were being pretty obvious about it. I'm not able to listen to it at the moment so I can't type out exactly what they said verbatim, but they did confirm that Duarte wasn't actually acting independently, that the protomolecule was using him to basically return the Builders' hivemind in a better form (human bodies). They talked about how doing so is just another example of the Builders co-opting fast life. This time it was due to a war they knew they couldn't win, so they "went into hiding," until they could co-opt a "fast life" to fight the war for them.
Some things to note: it wasn't that they intended for it to be humanity specifically. They don't go into any detail about this but the implication seems to be that the Builders just assumed/believed/maybe knew that over the course of literally billions of years, some form of intelligent life that was sturdier than they are would happen across the protomolecule and from there, one thing would lead to another just as it did with Duarte/humanity. Personally, this is what I always believed once the theory started making its rounds. Phoebe wasn't intentionally placed. It simply missed. I don't have the book in front of me but IIRC, there was a passage in one of the Dreamer interludes that suggests not all of the protomolecule rocks they shot out into space hit their marks or "came back," but enough did to open the door to thousands and thousands of star systems. If my memory is correct on that point, then Phoebe was just one of the many protomolecule rocks that missed. Further to that point (again assuming my memory is correct), that probably means there are god knows how many protomolecule rocks out there in the galaxy, perhaps some similar to Phoebe, captured in the gravitational well of a planet, with the intended target planet left alone long enough for intelligent life to evolve, then discover the protomolecule, then by some chain of events open the ring gate...
They mention earlier in the podcast about how the Builders are "slow-moving life," where millions of years means basically nothing to them, so I'm guessing that while the odds of this "mas
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Not a bad morning, eh?
