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

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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