What came first?

[Archmagus Thistle]

Which do you think came first, the drifter or D̶̡̧̛̩͇͈͎̻̮̗͚̗͇̞̂̎̆̎͒̄̂̀̀̐ą̵̦̞͈͑́͌̌̄̈v̷̥̖̔̐̉̂̾̾͝ȩ̸̰̰͖̠̺̣͒̃͊̀̉̓̒̔ 

[Vexxvididu]

my theory, not having gone far in the story yet, is that D̶̡̧̛̩͇͈͎̻̮̗͚̗͇̞̂̎̆̎͒̄̂̀̀̐ą̵̦̞͈͑́͌̌̄̈v̷̥̖̔̐̉̂̾̾͝ȩ̸̰̰͖̠̺̣͒̃͊̀̉̓̒̔ made the drifters and other monsters.

[LadyWYT]

Definitely Dave.

Spoiler

Drifters and other rot monsters are implied to have been human once, turned as a result of Jonas's Grand Machine. The Lens we retrieve for Tobias allowed Jonas to peer through to another dimension that was once filled with fantastical machines and related aesthetics, but is now dark and dreadful(the Rust world). Peering into the other dimension is where Jonas got many of the ideas for his tech.

 

[hstone32]

Well, I'm not too far into the story yet, but according to my current headcanon, the drifters, The Thunder Lord, as well as all denizens of The Rust are anti-causal beings. At the very moment they entered The Rust, it became as though they had always existed there for all eternity. I believe the events of the story, including the very first apocalypse, were all planned for millenia in order for them to guarantee their own existence by engineering the conditions that would lead to their own creation.

Therefore, seeing as you cannot mathematically find any difference between infinity and infinity, you cannot say one came before the other.

all of this is of course just headcannon of someone who has not yet completed chapter 2.

[Vexxvididu]

5 hours ago, hstone32 said:

Therefore, seeing as you cannot mathematically find any difference between infinity and infinity..

For the purpose of your post, this is mostly true.  BUT since I'm a big math geek I can't resist pointing out this is not in general true.  It's pretty established in mathematics that you CAN say two infinite sets are equal if you can make a 1 to 1 bijection between them.  But if this can be shown to be impossible, we can know one infinite set is "bigger" than the other.  For example, there are a lot more real numbers (decimals) than integers, because you can't make a continuous bijection between them.

[hstone32]

3 hours ago, Vexxvididu said:

For the purpose of your post, this is mostly true.  BUT since I'm a big math geek I can't resist pointing out this is not in general true.  It's pretty established in mathematics that you CAN say two infinite sets are equal if you can make a 1 to 1 bijection between them.  But if this can be shown to be impossible, we can know one infinite set is "bigger" than the other.  For example, there are a lot more real numbers (decimals) than integers, because you can't make a continuous bijection between them.

Well how about that then? Guess I don't know a whole lot about infimity after all. I've only studied how the regions between infinity (poles) affect the frequency response of a transfer function. I haven't thus far found one infinity to behave differently than another, so I assumed they were all homogeneous.

[Professor Dragon]

Dagnabbit, you jackanapes are sending me to the dictionary to read this forum.

[Heart_Afire]

The Vintage Story Forums: Come for the Silly Polls, stay for the surprisingly deep (and occasionally heated) discussions of various mathematical, programming, or other scientific topics.

Also, can I propose that, given the creature's official designation and our moniker for him, we christen this rust monster "Dave, Lord of Thunder" as his full title?

[Broccoli Clock]

15 hours ago, hstone32 said:

Therefore, seeing as you cannot mathematically find any difference between infinity and infinity...

Must... not... open... Pandora's... Box...

 

[Vexxvididu]

8 hours ago, hstone32 said:

Well how about that then? Guess I don't know a whole lot about infimity after all. I've only studied how the regions between infinity (poles) affect the frequency response of a transfer function. I haven't thus far found one infinity to behave differently than another, so I assumed they were all homogeneous.

haha, yeah.  One example of an application of this is to know that if you generate a decimal number at complete random, rolling a dice for every digit, there is basically a 100% chance you'll generate an irrational, incomputable number, since that's what the VAST majority of the infinitely many real numbers are.  Yes, there are infinitely many rational numbers too, and infinitely many computable irrationals, but their magnitude is trivial compared to the incomputables.

Irrational means it can't be represented as a ratio of two whole numbers (you've likely heard this one).

Incomputable means an irrational number that can't be represented in a finite algorithm.  Most famous constants such as Pi and e are irrational but computable since we have simple algorithms that will eventually calculate all the digits.

Okay, enough ranting about arcane math subjects. I just think this is interesting.