BIGGEST Megastructure in Fiction: Xeelee Ring & Species (Explained)

[@qiurami5208]

Alright finally some lore about the xeelee series

[@Der_Dekanter]

Finally ikr

[@gregmarsters2434]

Not covered: Humans at one point became second only to the Xeelee. Albeit a distant second. They directly battled the Xeelee because they didn't understand the purpose of the great attractor pulling all the nearby galaxies toward it. Seems like the Xeelee never tried to explain themselves to all the "ants" that inhabited it.

[@RocketPropelledMexican]

Also my understanding is that for a large part of the conflict, humanity waged against a Xeelee. Not the Xeelee civilization. A SINGULAR Xeelee individual who just happened to be assigned to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. Humanity spent thousands of years fighting the Xeelee's equivalent of a ranger intern manning a remote watchtower, didn't even off him, and got stomped back into the stone age when the Xeelee equivalent of a police car he called for showed up.

[@MrocnyZbik]

@@RocketPropelledMexican Kyle from Engineering needed to take more Raid and Fly Traps for theirs next shift. The bugs start to be really pesky.

[@kellymoses8566]

The xeelee never communicated with humans once. We simply were never important enough.

[@Beepers559]

Also didn’t they fight only one xeelee to the point the galactic center changed colors too? If that’s the case imagine just how strong an army of xeelee would be

[@unknowablestranger]

@@kellymoses8566 The Baryonic lords spacecraft, and the anti-xeelee to poole

[@Mondy667]

The most surprising thing here is that this is based on hard-scifi on the extreme level

[@JohnDoe-jp4em]

I mean I wouldn't say on the "extreme level". It just doesn't doesn't break the laws of physics as much as other series. Lots of the physics in it are purely speculative too.

[@Mondy667]

@JohnDoe-jp4em yeah you're right

[@smugfrog8111]

@@Zileas01 Agreed, it's actually perplexing because it's clearly not. This is about as hard sci fi as Halo, which is easily in my top 5 favorite Sci Fi IPs of all time.. I'm personally not a huge fan of "hard sci fi" as I think it takes a lot of the fun out of it. Too much time spent on getting every single miniscule fact right sucks a lot of creative energy from world building and character development which are far more important from a literary context. Hell, even Carl Sagan didn't write a hard sci-fi novel, he wrote Contact which is not even close to hard sci fi. There was a reason, hard sci-fi as a story-telling medium sort of blows. Sci-fi that gets it so wrong it breaks the immersion can be just as bad too. Honestly, what's worse for me though is the way actors in sci-fi so often use and treat firearms. It's almost a trope that is thankfully starting to die out. Flagging, fingers on triggers, no optics, just purely unsafe and terrible handling all around from guys who are suppose to be "The best" That breaks immersion for me way more then anything else. And don't get me started on why any AR pattern rifle is superior to any "phaser" in actual combat, lol.

[@JillianPrimrose]

​@@smugfrog8111Nope, it is. The writer is an actual physicist and astronomer who used his knowledge in these subjects to create the series. Therefore, much of what happens in it is well founded from a scientific point of view.

[@smugfrog8111]

@@JillianPrimrose Carl Sagan wrote Contact. Scientists write fiction too.

[@brandojoansaldanarivas6143]

We need more Xeelee lore in KZbin.

[@Neoth40k]

You think Warhammer is absurd until you hear about this series

[@Unit-3475]

The horror part - that Xeelee is HARD science fiction.

[@Minotaur-ey2lg]

Warhammer isn’t absurd because it’s OP, but because it’s a realistic look at how starfaring humanity would actually survive.

[@Unit-3475]

@@Minotaur-ey2lg In both cases, mankind survives not because it has abandoned humanity - it survives in spite of it. In the case of ICoG, it resulted in humans being thrown back into the Stone Age for what they did. In the case of the Imperium, they are at war with everyone, suppressing any development, and have effectively already been defeated by Chaos, for whom the Imperium in its current form is simply a buffet.

[@JillianPrimrose]

The Xeelee coincidentally having militarized the Big Bang 💀

[@tampaxhero5176]

True...unless u know of gurren lagann then this is underwhelming

[@AspenBrightsoul]

Hey guys, I just invited a new megastructure. It's called the Dakota ring, its exactly like the Xeelee ring, but one centimeter bigger, making it the largest megastructure in history.

[@Shell-iq6cx]

I've made mine 2 cm bigger, and I name it Your mom

[@rommdan2716]

Cool, write a book about it, lol

[@frumpsterfire]

peak

[@jollygrapefruit786]

The thing that's super cool to me about this universe is how the Photino Birds seem like a genuinely animalistc species. They appear to be operating on pure instinct, like a bird building a nest, and are simply acting in their nature, rather than spite or a desire for conquest.

[@-eyes-of-static-8102]

Finally, someone made an actual in depth video about the Xeelee and their tech

[@themanfromerf]

There needs to be a virgin xelee vs chad photino bird meme. The fact that the xelee actually lose and have to literally flee the universe after all the crazy stuff they did is awesome. Photino birds have the manliest jawline possible.

[@saucevc8353]

Imagine if their panel is just blank because they aren’t made of baryonic matter and we can’t see them, so it looks like the Xeelee are malding at no one

[@themanfromerf]

@@saucevc8353 XD

[@redzeitgeist854]

You miss the point that the Xeelees are in actuality outnumbered in comparison to the Photono Birds

[@themanfromerf]

@@redzeitgeist854 this is just further proof that the photino birds deserved the w lol. -> luv muh gravitational wells, simple as -> nOoOoOooO, we need this invisible thing called radiation and.... -> mfw

[@turtek12]

Then there's the Thad Ghosts, who figure out how to build dark matter gravity stars to solve the war in an everyone-wins manner.

[@janemf]

i honestly don’t know why more people aren’t talking about the xeelee sequence

[@icedragongaming]

PancreasNoWork brought me here on the 40k isn't Op video.

[@LocomotiveThought]

I read Vacuum Diagram a long time ago. Fabulous read.

[@Conejoazul2018]

A small tip for those who want to get unto the xelee sequence, read the series as if you were reading a essay and hypothesis disguised as a scifi story. These stories are focused on events and themes rather than characters, plus baxter doesn't know how to write characters, believe me if don't go with that mentality these books are going to leave you dry.

[@peterfmodel]

This is a great series.

[@insanityrecords8869]

This video is so underrated fr

[@thorshammer7883]

How does the Xeelee Sequence multiverse compare to the Doctor Who EU and Faction Paradox multiverse in scale and power?

[@liamohman7426]

They are considered pretty much equal according to spacebattles wiki. This matchup has been debated to death a million times and usually ends in pretty much a stalemate.

[@thorshammer7883]

​@@liamohman7426 It seems like they are very relative to each other with how their multiverses work. With the exception of a few things Xeelee Sequence lacks something of the scale Glory machine in Doctor Who and gigantic creatures who eclipses universes called the Leviathans who swim across the Faction Paradox multiverse. But other then that they seem very even. I wonder how the Xeelee would deal with the Final Sanction.

[@liamohman7426]

@@thorshammer7883 xeelee sequence do actually have creatures of that scale, maybe. They are called monads and are to the xeelee what the xeelee are to us. They lay dormant in the event horizons of black holes in an abstract realm of mathematics Beyond configuration space. They are the beings that allow universes with complex structures to exist in the first place.

[@thorshammer7883]

@@liamohman7426 Like little Downstreamers? There doesn't seem to be much information on these Monads. If the Xeelee live in black holes too can't they interact with those creatures?

[@liamohman7426]

@@thorshammer7883 well for one monads only live in the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. Not to mention that spacially an event horizon is infinite. It is also possible that the xeelee can coexist with the monads in these environments since they are definetly aware of the monads. Although I am not entirely sure since I am not yet well versed enough in xeelee sequence.

[@VirginSnake2025]

Xeelee Sequence is kinda like Warhammer if you thoroughly distilled almost everything funny out of it, pumped it with genuine "grim darkness", soaked it up with more mature themes and topics, increased the power scale of every faction by a factor of some big number and swapped every fantasy element with rock-hard sci-fi. The chaos and 'nids are bad enough, but they can be fought and are only a problem for (maybe) one galaxy. The Photino Birds effortlessly obliterate their closest competition and any baryonic life. The Imperium is a decaying dictatorship, but it has a reason to be one and it even has some pragmatic elements. The ICoG is appalingly malicious and deranged in every single aspect, so much that atrocities commited to their child soldiers are just one small example of it evil. Well, there's far more to XS, but these things come first to my mind.

[@shitsugane]

Excellent, thank you

[@Luminouspandora]

As I always been saying... If H.P. Lovecraft was a scientist and born in the modern era? This would be the real cthulhu mythos and REAL cosmic horror.

[@anthraxmacabre5200]

So the biggest nuisance to the star gods are.. a bunch of birds?

[@Our4gedFiresOfOld]

According to our understanding of science, yeah; a bunch of birds killed the entire universe and they were some emo birds.

[@Mondy667]

They vaugely resemble birds

[@kellymoses8566]

Dark matter aliens who destroy stars.

[@GodofWeird]

They’re almost described like self replicating machines in Ring. They’re more like just living gravitational wells, from our perspective.

[@Luminouspandora]

They're not really birds, Its just a name we humans gave because of their effect in all of space-time. We actually cannot detect, see or even feel them. Bu ttheir effects on all the stars and entropy in the universe manifests as 'THe flapping of a horde of birds in space', which is why they got that name.

[@Hypercube2017]

Covenant: “Behold, the Great Ring!” This series: “Hold my beer.”

[@tampaxhero5176]

Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann would like to have a word.....

[@MohamedMustafaAlk]

Manifold too

[@sspillager12]

@@MohamedMustafaAlk manifold is baxter too

[@-eyes-of-static-8102]

@@MohamedMustafaAlk I haven't read the Manifold trilogy but afaik the Downstreamers are the most op entities in any of Baxter's works, even more ridiculous than the Monads from the Sequence

[@tampaxhero5176]

@@MohamedMustafaAlk Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann would like to have a word.....

[@Luminouspandora]

Gurren Lagan is literally anime craziness... its not hard science fiction. NOt even comparable.

[@robertsouth6971]

The photino birds wouldn't want to go through the ring. Why would they? Surely it will be safe over there.

[@someidiot881]

Hi

[@RobertHamilton-h4n]

Jeanette Cliffs

[@Susan-l5n7d]

Mathilde Parkway

[@sookendestroy1]

But what if it were bigger? This has honestly been a thing ive been thinking about and noticed doesnt exist in any fiction, Universal Megastructures. So far the only setting i can extrapolate something like this is Half Life, considering the Combine Overworld as a universal world construct.

[@liamohman7426]

Manifold has a structure trillions of Times the size of the observable universe i think

[@JustinMShaw]

Larry Niven wrote an essay called Bigger Than Worlds in which he speculated about a galaxy-sized Dyson Sphere. And going further back there's another story called He Who Shrank (I forget the Author's name) that involved a reality in which every star system is an atom, and every group of stars a molecule, for a larger universe. The protagonist is an unfortunate character who just keeps shrinking eternally through them, having to seek out a new world to land on each time he is shrunk to the size of an atom so that he doesn't wind up shrinking eternally through a void, too far from anything.

[@liamohman7426]

@@JustinMShaw The City from blame is somewhat similar. A sort of von neumann expanding dyson sphere maze the size of a solar system and although it doesnt have the volume of a galaxy, since the structure isnt actually hollow and filled with structures and layers, sort of like layered dyson spheres on top of eachother its calculated to have more mass then the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. It also expands in size uncontrollably and doesnt stop.

[@atavismvision]

Count to Eschaton Sequence Star Maker Well World Series Diaspora

[@spurguvitunhuora9119]

ChatGBT write a quick history of the Xeelee ring. Done. Would you like to do a fact check or ad anything? No. I dont have time to read a single story. This video will be uploaded within an hour.

[@ML8443]

Why would they be birds?

[@pewmandelt5745]

If I remember it correctly, It's not they are actually birds but instead on how the observer sees them. Since the photino birds is made of dark matter it's nigh impossible to see them but if they did see them it's shaped like a bird. That's why it's called photino bird

[@RelativelyBest]

From what I understand they don't look like birds at all, they're more like big blobs of sentient dark matter. IIRC, the name has more to do with their behavior.

[@KelleySherry-q4b]

Howell Isle

[@AdolfoDicarlo-t5n]

Walsh Common

[@JonsonCarol-p5f]

Parker Lakes

[@DickeyCarey-n4c]

Raul Keys

[@Theghostofall]

Love this stuff

[@CarrieRetherford-t4v]

Vickie Brooks

[@KennedyAlbert-d9d]

Verda Spring

[@eiric6958]

How are the Xeelee losing or in a deadlock with the photino birds/antimatter ravens? They seem too powerful.

[@Unit-3475]

The main problem is that both sides had no idea what the other was. Baryonic and dark matter do not intersect in any way. The only common criterion is mass. Thus, the "war" was essentially fought blindly and eventually reached a dead end. In fact, this is one of the well-founded conflicts in Si-Fi. When Xeelee was discovered that Photino exist outside of time, it was decided not to waste energy on this pointless exercise and simply find a universe with more suitable conditions.

[@eiric6958]

@@Unit-3475 Were Photino birds antimatter or dark matter. And if they were dark matter and couldn't interact with matter, how do they speed entropy of the universe.

[@Unit-3475]

@@eiric6958 They are dark matter - not antimatter. They did not accelerate entropy - they artificially "aged" stars by influencing them with gravity. Because this is the only way for dark matter to interact with baryonic matter (the usual one that we are made of) - mass and gravity. But their actions would lead to the universe becoming unsuitable for life, which the Fotinos did not even guess.

[@eiric6958]

@@Unit-3475 They seem more like a natural disaster than anything.

[@Unit-3475]

@@eiric6958 They are not - they are simply a species that is trying to adapt the environment to itself, to make the universe more comfortable, just as we are arranging our planet. Unfortunately, their physical nature has made them incapable of perceiving our part of the universe, just as we cannot see them And for the same reason - it is impossible to establish contact with them - too many different concepts and ideas in these planes of the world do not allow us to develop a common language.

[@JoyceScott-q6q]

Norbert Fall

[@PatriciaHarris-u1u]

Jaskolski Bridge

[@WallisMeredith-p7k]

Nella Street

[@BreannaHopko-o7r]

Crona Cape

[@StevenHoward-y3e]

Herzog Ports

[@AttleeRod-n9o]

Josefa Extension

[@xenoblad]

God damn birds 😂. I gotta read this series.

[@DeloisSochocki-b8l]

Hermann Forge

[@cihattekin562]

0:55 0:57 0:58 0:58 0:58

[@RayanBule-c2e]

Myriam Run

[@ShannonFine-w8j]

Ahmed Trace

[@ValeneQuoss-t1v]

Abigayle Brook

[@MurrayBarret-u3c]

Gleichner Stream

[@CrystalColson-b9x]

West Loop

[@JohoraParveen]

Schmitt Summit

[@AldingtonBerkeley-i6z]

Ernser Mountain

[@BrewsterHugh-h5q]

Kreiger Parkway

[@DaneilOreo]

So basically ... the xeelee would've been destroyed during the war in heaven (40k) being made from B matter, the weapons used during the war in heaven was tearing apart and separating dimensions lol

[@florians9949]

This is the perfect example of what works on paper but not in practice. Yeah the War in Heaven weapons should work on the Xeelee, but the technological difference between the two remain so great it qouldn’t matter. It’s like saying a Greek hoplite can take on a moder day marine because stabbing can kill humans.

[@DaneilOreo]

@florians9949 I disagree, all sci fi books have their little similarities to real known science That being said you find the closet thing they're relating to, then you can compare two sci fi books to a middle ground As I've said before every xeelee fan says their universe wins because of what they use to construct their weapons, ships and what they themselves are made of (B matter) Not only that but the xeelee's enemy (P birds) Okay ... now let's compare that to real science Real science = matter and dark matter Okay we have our middle ground now let's now analyse 40k In 40k the more advanced races know how to create weapons that have effects or use matter and dark matter More so than that in 40k there are warp entities that even the chaos gods are afraid of (these entities would eat the P birds and more) So basically if you were combined both sci fi books into one universe due to the lore of 40k the xeelee and P birds wouldn't have even been allowed to evolve into the apex of their species because they would've been eaten by another warp entity The thing xeelee fans often forget is there is no such thing as an apex species, all living things evolve and co exist in an equal liberium in nature, it's the circle of life and everytime balance is lost eventual consequences follow, this is a real life concept and we've seen it time and time again in history But the biggest thing xeelee fans fail to realise is that even IF (let's pretend) xeelee and P birds could win against 40k 40k fans still wouldn't care and would prefer 40k because it's both cool and more relateable, normal everyday men love hearing stories about heroic battles against evil, sacrifice and brotherhood mixed with bad ass weapons and armour and good story telling about military scenarios Xeelee is just a pipe dream of a virgin nerd with no real world experience about anything who tried to make something big and grand but it just came across as stupid and exaggerated

[@Arferrethjiu]

​@@DaneilOreo 40k fanboy be like :

[@Juanitorodr4448._]

​@@DaneilOreothe fans don't care if 40k fans prefer that , the thing is , the Type of person like you , that think the xeeles don't have a chance against 40k

[@DaneilOreo]

@Juanitorodr4448._ because they don't lol

[@MackAbeta-h1k]

Jakubowski Mountains

[@PeacockChristopher-x9c]

Kovacek Pass

[@FatimahArvizo-v5j]

Bauch Port

[@SusanMartin-m3o]

Kiara Track

[@DavidWaddle-j8t]

Yundt Rue

[@JohnMcCoy-m5e]

Ronaldo Square

[@ChantelPost-f5u]

Gutkowski Drive

[@DunlopIsaac-n1n]

Bethel Creek

[@JamesMeredith-f2o]

Zulauf Vista

[@HarrisDelmont-u7z]

Trantow Mission

[@brennenderopa]

And people claim that this is "hard" sci fi. It seems more like a religious experience of quasi gods constructing structures ten times as big as the milky way all willy nilly while moving around in time like time roller derby. Nothing anyone does in series actually matters and as soon as you include easy as pie time travel for all factions, you hard of hard sci fi goes out of the window. It is more a metaphysical thought experiment.

[@requiemlul3140]

While it seems ridiculous, at the time it was written the vast majority of the tech was based on real scientific theory. Now a lot of that information is outdated,

[@subnoticone]

It’s more of a play with theoretical physics and theories

[@Mike-ub2vw]

No itsringworld plagiarism

[@SadChief]

Biggest fictional megastructure😂😂😂😂😂😂my ass

[@creeperkinght1144]

I'm working on one that is basically holds the infiniverse (My fictional idea of what's beyond a outer verse, don't overthink it) as seven rings, each holding life and civilization, which is responsible for all life spreading out into existence. It also dimensionally sits in all realities as the origin of life in those multiverses as a structural constant.

[@liamohman7426]

Pretty sure the downstreamers made one a couple of trillion times the size of the observable universe which would be bigger although it isnt as detailed as the xeelee ring

[@liamohman7426]

​@@creeperkinght1144k. Although high powerscaling for high powerscalings sake is Kinda lame. Like the only interesting quality of your structure is powerscaling

[@creeperkinght1144]

@@liamohman7426 It's not for power scaling only. It's part of my lore, and is has many points as the major plot of my story. Plus if it wasn't there in my story in a lore sense the whole infiniverse would fall apart, as it's it brace. For example I have it where a corrupt government system is slowly taking over the rings, and the protags involved with that stories have to deal with it, along with the assistance of the higher authority before chaos spreads everywhere. And there are certain components attached to it that show where certain things and concepts come from, besides life, such as ancient mechanical guardians meant to protect it. I have a lot of detail going around it, but I focus on the story first, but offer it as a scope for the lore. Think of it like the Aetherius from the Elder Scrolls, or Yggdrasil from Norse mythology, except it's biomechanical in concept. It's not power scaling for power scaling sake, it has a major significance in the story, because if it didn't, that would be dumb and boring.

[@NeilOrellana]

Wait a minute, so basically the xeelee would've been destroyed by the weapons deployed in the war in heaven (40k) when they started ripping apart and separating the dimensions 🤣🤣🤣🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️😂😂😂

[@liamohman7426]

no... the xeelee shit stomp anything from the war in heaven

[@NeilOrellana]

@liamohman7426 with what? Xeelee's tech is either energy based or space defect blah blah blah (wrath bone) which both have pros and cons in 40k and have been covered

[@liamohman7426]

@@NeilOrellana with temporal rewriting

[@MohamedMustafaAlk]

Literally even ICoG would destroy all wathmmmer combined even with the warp and Chaos gods, Warhammer doesn't stand chance to even Silver Ghosts, let alone Xeelee

[@NeilOrellana]

@MohamedMustafaAlk a common mistake people make when comparing sci fi universes is not matching the lore From everything I've learnt about xeelee is that basically they use the equivalent of wraith bone And in 40k wraith bone has its strengths and weaknesses

[@JoeyCamm-m4e]

Frances Row