How and why did the Jove go extinct? ( + other Jove lore & Tinfoil Hat Zone)

Fiction Portal EVE Lore Discussion
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I mean, besides the fact that the storyline team wanted them to make way for the Dark Eldar… Necrons… Second Empire Jove?

From what I remember from the old lore, Jove were essentially clones / grown artificially (old art depicts “Fetus-tubes, the Jovian way of reproduction for many millennia.”) and daddy and mommy Jove didn’t need to love each other very much to make a new one. They could make as much as they like. There is, of course the Jovian disease which supposedly kept them unable to reinforce their numbers, but onset of the Jovian Disease apparently can be extremely late in their lives.

Looking at the Inheritance -chronicle, parts of it mentions Ouria. EVE lore buffs and very, very, very ancient players might remember this Ouria from succumbing to the Jovian Disease in late 2003 and losing a couple of Eidolons (with his buddies) in the Stain region. It is explicitly stated that this is the same Ouria, not just some guy with the same name.
So, by that time he was probably around 400 years old.

The Inheritance -chronicle mentions him in a setting of “250 BYC”, Before Yoiul Conference, soon to be 120 years ago, so rounding up that was 370 years back. “A young but brilliant explorer” back then - I am assuming they didn’t assign him to be an expedition commander before he was at least in his 30’s or more - though who knows what such a long lived subspecies considers “young.”

Further, Veniel, the main Jove character in this chronicle is almost as old as Ouria was - so that makes him too anywhere about 350-400 years old, and he doesn’t appear to have succumbed to the Jovian Disease yet, though perhaps he sensed it approaching which prompted him to enable the “legacy protocol.”

Surely it is possible that Ouria and Veniel were of those lucky few who didn’t fall to “their curse” at an earlier stage in their lives. But lets assume they were not.

So, my question is this; How does a species that is this long lived, doesn’t reproduce sexually anymore but by Xerox machine, and appear to fall to suicidal tendencies only as centuries old, die out in a span of a few decades? Only explanation to this that comes to mind would be that they voluntarily went extinct. They stopped producing any new Jove hundreds of years ago for reasons only they know.

Additionally, Jovian Disease is said to be genetic. Jove, like any other intelligent species in the setting were still human. How come they could not cure this disease by studying healthy human genes all around the cluster? Some masters of genetic engineering they were. IIRC a tinfoil hat theory was that the pod technology was a conspiracy for the Jove to obtain samples of the “very best” as in most of the lore surrounding the older generations of capsuleers requires them to be the pinnacle of humanity in fitness, genetic health and intelligence.

So, yeah, there’s a few things to get the thread rolling.

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Couple of things to add to what you’re saying.

(1) I recall reading at some point that the average lifespan of a commoner in New Eden, barring any fatal complications, is ~120 years. Will need to look back and verify. The humans who exceed this to any extreme degree are the royalty of the Amarr Empire, and only with the help of incredibly advanced cybernetics and implants. As far as I know, we’ve never been told the average age of a Jovian. It may very well be that Ouria and Veniel are the exception, not the rule.

(2) As far as I know, the Jove aren’t quite extinct yet. They’ve simply decided to evacuate/immigrate from Jove space. Which, given the effects of the W477-P supernova on and around Jove space and stargates, was probably a smart move.

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I don’t have a source for this, but I recall someone once dumping Jove bloodline info on one of the older forums - probably from the time when they were still intended to be a playable race, that Jove are potentially very long lived, with rumors that some can be over a thousand years old. In light of that, 500 years sounds feasible if the Disease doesn’t get them first.

Edit: Many of the jove bloodlines, though I’m not sure where they are sourced from:

Inheritance does say there are “maybe hundreds” left, that Veniel or who exactly is supposed to be the author of said paragraph, knows of. And that eight-ish years ago only about 10,000 were left.
So, yes, not quite extinct, but surely getting there. I assume it is to leave the story team wiggle room if they need a Deus Ex Jove, that some of them still exist in hiding.

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It occurred to me that the Jovian Disease, being basically a maddening form of existential ennui or depression, might have discouraged the Jove from reproducing. Without a cure in sight, the Jove might have considered it cruel to condemn more of their kin to the Disease just so they could shore up their numbers.

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Indeed, I pondered that too, but it sounds so… Lame.

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I don’t disagree.

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Summoning @Uriel_Paradisi_Anteovnuecci

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:popcorn:

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So on the disease, it’s worth mentioning that there are two versions of it - the one everyone talks about is the one that causes the spiraling depressive state, which inevitably takes hold sometime in adulthood. The other one strikes while an embryo is developing in its tube, and immediately kills it. Between the huge decrease in population with the end of the Second Empire, and the disease becoming omnipresent in the Jove, it makes some sense that (over the course of the next few centuries) numbers would dwindle.

Adult Jove would have a much shorter average overall lifespan, in most cases likely far lower than the seemingly perfectly reasonable 400+ years, with the eventuality of the disease taking hold - and we have no real statistics on how high the percentage of unborn Jove killed are. Spread that over a few centuries (the decline hasn’t just been during the age of capsuleers, it’s been since the fall of the Second Empire and introduction of the Disease- the Directorate was never very open about its population or past) for an already drastically reduced and seemingly quite passive population. and the decline becomes at the very least believable.

That said, they aren’t entirely gone - they just don’t have the numbers or desire to form a fully functional empire anymore. Those who remain are leaving and leaving their legacy to the Society, like you said. Additionally, I’m definitely of the same belief that the gift of the Capsule was a part of some larger plan - that is, if the pod-giving was entirely the Directorate’s doing in the first place (since the names of the Jove in the wetgrave chronicle are very similar in theme to the name of another enigmatic Jove splinter faction :thinking:).

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It’s also worth noting that the Jove had engineered many desires out of themselves; one could easily presume that they had gone over to cloning both due to the complexity of birthing a Jove body, its incompatibility with natural gestation, and perhaps also due to a decreased reproductive urge. This is spitballing on my part, but would be consistent with Jove themes of abandoning ‘baser instincts.’

Additionally, from Inheritance: “By the time the supernova happened, those of us who were going were long gone. Those of us who had chosen, for whatever reason, to stay in New Eden permanently had dispersed to their hidden destinations far away from the abandoned remains of the Third Empire.”

The Jove have a long history of retreating to cryostasis in times of duress, to reduce load on their society while a resolution is sought. Combine this with the risk to Jove society and New Eden by the collapse of W477-P, and it may be that the Directorate remnants decided that emigrating to some place in the deep dark was the only solution remaining. A number of us commonly refer to the Jove as, “going West,” in that classic Tolkien fashion. There may still be millions or billions of Directorate Jove out there, somewhere, in cryostasis aboard motherships headed to god-knows-where.

As an observation, Inheritance’s timeline puts the Jove awareness of the eminent W477-P explosion before the Incursion events. It may be that the retreat from known space had begun before then, which is part of how the Sansha managed both their siege of the Prosper Vault and their theft of wormhole generation technology. This is purely an aside.

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I actually weren’t aware of that, but according to this old wiki post, the second form should be rare. Altough by modern medical standards and certainly in a future setting one-in-ten “pregnancies” failing is an alarmingly high rate of failure, with our technology and state of welfare it is around 1 in 250, or possibly even less. Again, have to wonder if that’s just the writer of the article not understanding what rare means in this context.

All you’ve said is true, but still doesn’t really explain how they simply can’t pump out as many babies they want if they are made by machines anyway. Only reason not to that I can think of would be somekind of ideological or moral reason, like the above theorized “we can’t just subject future generations to this random, shitty death.” What really bothers me that the decline seems to be really huge during the capsuleer era - I’m not sure where I’ve pulled this number from but something is yelling to me in the back of my head that there 100,000 of them during the start of Empyran Era (2003 in our time), which had plummeted to mere 10,000 by 2009. And we’re still talking about ridiculously low numbers here, to maintain even a facade of a stellar empire with a population for what most populous countries of today would barely consider a city, heck I recall hearing 100,000 people is about the population figure of a smaller NPC station.

Also, the Jove do seem to very long lived, as long as the Disease doesn’t get them. Certainly at least on par of the rest of the New Eden where people pushing 120 can still be found in active duty. The bloodline thing up there mentions the Elder subgroup being able to outlive even Amarr Emperors.

This is actually a very good and interesting point. The Jove Motherships weren’t mentioned in the chronicle, and from somewhere I remember reading that despite being millennia old (possibly from the age of the EVE Gate collapse even?) they were still being maintained and upgraded by the Jove. Still, trying to escape the Disease didn’t exactly work the last time, and sounds pretty moronic. You can’t escape a genetic disease by leaving people who exhibit it behind, especially if you’re basically clones of those people anyway.

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Unless they weren’t necessarily fleeing from the Disease, so much as from W477-P and any impending Directorate collapse. Either way, though, given that the Jove disease has a biological component, they can continue to ‘live’ while in cryostasis, Sleeper-style. Indeed, if I’m recalling Templar One properly, that invitation was extended by the Sleepers to the second empire Jove, and was one of the reasons why the Sleepers were suspected of having engineered the disease.

As for the disease itself, some of the earliest lore may not be completely internally consistent. The Jove Disease is stated to be genetic in nature, but we’d assume that the master geneticists would be able to deal with that. That does seem odd, doesn’t it? So either the nature of the disease changed from the initial cataclysm, or the Jove have in fact lost some of their capacity with genetic engineering, or it’s a complex epigenetic thing, orrrr… Either way, I tend to take the Jove Disease and Jovian story more as an Icarian tale of posthumanism and the danger of abandoning humanity than a hard science fiction thing-to-be-dealt-with.

A grain of salt may be needed.

In any case, it might still make sense to throw most of the Jove in the cold box in the hope that a Sleeper-style study might result in a solution, or that those who remain awake/behind/etc might be able to find a cure, even if it’s wholesale conversion of Jovian infomorphs to a new (or very old) clone architecture. vOv

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is there more information on this disease of theirs?currently it sound as if they managed to engineer some kind of bipolar disorder.

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Jove lore is always a bit thin on the ground.

https://community.eveonline.com/backstory/races/jove/

(oh, hey, it mentions the Jove engineering out sexual instincts. Welp!)

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http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Jovian_Disease

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Thank you both. Now I’m a bit clearer so it’s a depression that include mental recession and turns into a full fledged dementia. Demented people that reconize how demented they’ve turned can become like the pre final stage does describe it. (Latter is a bit Knowledge gained while working in nursing of the elderly)

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From Inheritance Chronicle

As Raish followed Veniel through various corridors and passageways he noticed signs of an almost organic decay in places. Once, he stopped to examine a particularly large patch on a corridor wall that looked as if acid had eaten through the substance of the paneling. Veniel looked back and nodded shortly, “Nanorot. Repair systems are losing cohesion and going rogue locally. It’s far more advanced on the truly abandoned stations. Let’s continue.”

Nanorot, huh? I’m afraid they’re going to wipe out everything Jove connected. Maybe to open Jove regions which now dont have gates connecting the systems for players to build temporary/destructible/conquerable gates. SoCT would still be there if they decide to introduce some Jove tech.

When did they post Inheritance Chronicle? Two years back as dates in text say? When players couldnt solve Drifter complex puzzle? I mean as far as I know they got Coalesced Element thingy, but its still unknown how and where to use it. Is the whole Drifter story a stub, a deadend without Drifter Incursions? Is there anything to solve?

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So, my guess is that the nanorot will be an excuse to have Jove space ruined, abandoned whenever we get to it. It’ll still clearly be Jove space, but without infrastructure. I also wouldn’t be surprised if, WH space-style, there’s some amount of tech we can loot/salvage/steal that will be useful for purposes of building the next T3 ship, but that’s purely speculation.

That said, Inheritance was released December 2015. The Coalesced Element BPCs weren’t acquirable until March 2016.

That said, puzzle-wise, I think the major issue is that there isn’t a ‘key’ or a ‘puzzle’ that hasn’t been solved; rather, the next stage will be unlocked when CCP is ready to advance the story. Our understanding is that they have a plan, an objective that was outlined as early as April of 2014, but that requires certain development milestones before they can act on it.

So, essentially, we keep running ops in Hives to be ready for when the next step is, as some fun positional play, and for reasons of space tourism. :smiley:

That said, I don’t know if there’s anything we have been unable to ‘solve,’ over the course of this thing. Our doctrines have changed, sure, but we’ve been able to ‘run’ Drifter Hive sites with various degrees of success since day one.

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I believe that the next T3 ship will come from the Drifters.

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Why not both at the same time? :wink: Imagine a FOB-style Drifter thing, a Hive that serves as a spawn point for Lancers/Drifters and has to be assaulted directly to remove ‘local Drifter presence.’

And in the meantime, trying to plant structures in that system/constellation results in Drifter task forces trying to nuke your structure.

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