Author Topic: The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?  (Read 10457 times)

AuraTwilight

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #30 on: December 28, 2005, 02:50:15 pm »
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Well, The flame didn't allow anyone to ask a wish from it, at the top of Terra Tower. All it did was (Schala) tell them the truth, or how much of a better life they could lead or other dark stuff with "if only". Seems to me like the old RD reincarnation tactic is coming back. Schala wanted to live an "if only" life, but since she couldn't change time back then, the flame gave her the chance to live out in a different life, which Schala may have always been wishing and thinking "if only" etc. I dunno.


The "If Only" Plot device has been used in fiction since the dawn of humanity. It's how religion got started up. I highly doubt it's supposed to be a super-secret allusion to RD. If anything, it's a motif for satanic temptation of the soul.

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As to wishes. I'm not exactally sure either if it wishes them. In RD, Lavos may have played a part into reincarnating Schala. Or the flame has it's own sentience. I think it's more to do with the power that it has that metaphorically "can make dreams come true". Zeal's dream of becoming immortal (for instance) came true thanks to the power of Lavos. Masa, Mune and Doreen may have became physical because of Lavos' Time/Space power, and it could have taken them out of the astral/dream world etc. I guess it's limitless. But since Lavos' power is essentially the planets, who knows. Maybe whatever you dream can come true one day. That may be why Crono had said that FATE dreamed or wanted or hoped to use the power to make it's own spieces. I myself would have thought that it'd be a more powerful message if FATE wanted to become human, or a God.


in RD, I don't think the Flame had sentience. (Nor do I think it did in CC. In both instances, I think the Flame merely reflects a person's heart, mimicing their thought patterns to carry out what it needs to do.) Zeal's dream of becoming immortal was simple to do with pumping herself with Lavoid energy, keeping her metabolism going. The whole thing with making Melchior's "children" come to life might not even be attributed to Lavos. Lavos' great powers over the universe could be considered simple if you look at Chronoverse with a Gnostic viewpoint.

In Gnosticism, the entire universe is a dream of a false god, a demiurge, and mankind and other sentient beings are imbued with souls, making them more than dreams (even though their bodies are still dream stuff.) Bot hthe Planet's and Lavos' great powers over the universe can be simple if you consider them Demiurges. (Lavos is a false god, the Planet is the "creator" but in a highly limited sense in comparison to our view of God.)

As for FATE's wishes, who knows. Maybe it meant to become a new species from what it was, meaning to become human, or the species it would've created would've been godlike but under FATE's control. My personal interpretation would be to destroy humanity and give power of the Earth to a godlike race made of a conglomeration of Earth DNA, giving birth to a suspicious race of Lavos Spawns. It's my belief that Lavos may be controlling FATE via the Flame and using it as a tool to reproduce from it's sealed position in the DBT.

Zaperking

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #31 on: December 28, 2005, 07:03:26 pm »
The only thing that I have to add about the Flame is that powerful quote:
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Be very careful when
   you stare into the flame...
   For the flame will also
   stare back at you...

Directly after it follows:
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It will either transform you
   into a different being...
   Or burn you into ashes.


A different being is what Schala became in RD.... I knew I remembered some ties with it in the game. So if that is also one of it's power, than the RD flame and CC isn't really different.

BTW, Half of the game's antagonists such as FATE kind of point out that the Flame does have sentience when the chosen one is around. Like how FATE wanted to destroy the Dead Sea because the Flame would "Awake".

AuraTwilight

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #32 on: December 28, 2005, 11:40:53 pm »
You honestly have no grasp of metaphor, do you, Zapar?

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PostPosted: Wed Dec 28, 2005 5:03 pm    Post subject:
The only thing that I have to add about the Flame is that powerful quote:
Quote:
Be very careful when
you stare into the flame...
For the flame will also
stare back at you...

Directly after it follows:
Quote:
It will either transform you
into a different being...
Or burn you into ashes.


A different being is what Schala became in RD.... I knew I remembered some ties with it in the game. So if that is also one of it's power, than the RD flame and CC isn't really different.


Or like...how the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter causes people to waste away in front of it to find it's secrets.

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BTW, Half of the game's antagonists such as FATE kind of point out that the Flame does have sentience when the chosen one is around. Like how FATE wanted to destroy the Dead Sea because the Flame would "Awake".


Or maybe it lies dormant until the Arbiter arrives, and it peaks up in power in response to it's power.

GrayLensman

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #33 on: December 29, 2005, 01:43:00 am »
The Frozen Flame was simply a piece of Lavos's body.  The Arbiter of the Frozen Flame was the mediator between Lavos and the universe.  Legends about wishes were nothing but hearsay.

The Flame was controlled by Lavos's intelligence, either inside the planet or in the DBT.    There is no need to complicate the matter any further.

Zaperking

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #34 on: December 29, 2005, 01:57:06 am »
Quote from: GrayLensman
The Frozen Flame was simply a piece of Lavos's body.  The Arbiter of the Frozen Flame was the mediator between Lavos and the universe.  Legends about wishes were nothing but hearsay.

The Flame was controlled by Lavos's intelligence, either inside the planet or in the DBT.    There is no need to complicate the matter any further.


Schala was the one who talked through the flame on 3 different events whilst her and Lavos were in the DBT...

GrayLensman

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #35 on: December 29, 2005, 01:59:02 am »
Quote from: Zaperking
Schala was the one who talked through the flame on 3 different events whilst her and Lavos were in the DBT...


Schala was merged with Lavos.

Zaperking

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #36 on: December 29, 2005, 07:10:19 am »
Quote from: GrayLensman
Quote from: Zaperking
Schala was the one who talked through the flame on 3 different events whilst her and Lavos were in the DBT...


Schala was merged with Lavos.


She could still talk subconsiously. She sure got Kid very aggrivated by telling her who Kid really was, and what was installed with her in the very end (and Kid was all like "NO, IM ME. I'M KID AND THAT'S WHO I AM!!!!" etc. etc. But really, Schala probably told her the truth, of their later merging. Or atleast the memories get transfered or something.

Chrono'99

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #37 on: December 29, 2005, 07:41:07 am »
Quote from: Zaperking
Quote from: GrayLensman
Quote from: Zaperking
Schala was the one who talked through the flame on 3 different events whilst her and Lavos were in the DBT...


Schala was merged with Lavos.


She could still talk subconsiously. She sure got Kid very aggrivated by telling her who Kid really was, and what was installed with her in the very end (and Kid was all like "NO, IM ME. I'M KID AND THAT'S WHO I AM!!!!" etc. etc. But really, Schala probably told her the truth, of their later merging. Or atleast the memories get transfered or something.

Yeah no wishes or miracles in any case.

The Shadow

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #38 on: December 29, 2005, 02:53:31 pm »
Quote from: Zaperking

Yeah, that's why I pretty much said it's in onsistant because it happened so fast. Isn't the fires, the pressure cooker effect and then the ice age supposed to begin in that order?

Anyway, why does Azala think that more stuff will fall from the sky?

Oh Well, CT is a game. And the whole event is supposed to mimic what happened in our world, so I guess it can be passed off that way.


No one seems to have answered this one (if they have then yell at me, I don't care) but I think that the "stuff that will fall from the sky" is Lavos's attack that it uses on Zeal, 1999 A.D. and occasionally Chrono and company.  It may not really fall from space, but it still firey doom falling from the heavens (like lavos did).
......
...you guys can keep talking about the frozen flame now...

AuraTwilight

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #39 on: December 29, 2005, 04:19:53 pm »
Quote
She could still talk subconsiously. She sure got Kid very aggrivated by telling her who Kid really was, and what was installed with her in the very end (and Kid was all like "NO, IM ME. I'M KID AND THAT'S WHO I AM!!!!" etc. etc. But really, Schala probably told her the truth, of their later merging. Or atleast the memories get transfered or something.


Well DUH. Because she was merged with Lavos. Thusly she's connected to the Flame.

Daniel Krispin

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #40 on: December 31, 2005, 02:46:07 am »
Personally, I would vote on the cyclic side of things. It's more consistant from what we know of our own planet's history, after all. The thing that must also be considered is that not the whole planet was covered in ice, only the northern and middle regions. Creatures even marginally more protected than the Reptites could have survived for millions of years without even the need to adapt, simply by moving to slightly warmer climates. But even those warmer climates were still too cold for the Reptites and, even if they didn't die all at once, they were sufficiently weakened to pose no threat to emerging humanity. Nevertheless, I seriously doubt that the ice ages are the same. Consider it this way: it lasts for 65 million years, and leaves at that moment? Unless Lavos' arising once again shifted the climate - in this case for the warmer (which, I suppose is possible) - that would be a great coincidence. Anyway, the simplest scientifically plausable explanation would be, I think, that Zeal happened to rise just at a time when another Ice Age was beginning; it likely made it easier to enslave people as well, and so on and so forth.

Lin_Zhen_Quan

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #41 on: January 03, 2006, 07:30:15 am »
the ice age was brought about by the thick clouds subsequent to the impact of lavos, which would eventually settle therefore allowing sun to pass through and thawing the earth out eventually.

Tonjevic

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #42 on: January 03, 2006, 09:37:02 am »
Which it does, just after 12000 B.C. So what? if a concentration of a gas was put into the atmosphere by the collision, it would seesaw the temperature from hot to cold in lessening degrees until the world had settled down again.
Our Earth does this, and so does the chrono one.

I would make a more cohesive argument, but I dont think I need to. Also, Im tired of replying to your slipshod comments.

Daniel Krispin

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The Ice Age: A scientific inconsistency?
« Reply #43 on: January 04, 2006, 03:46:43 am »
Very true. I suppose that that must be considered as well, that drastic climate shifts often cause rebound the other direction, before returning to a median.

Now, something I had not mentioned. From when I first played CT, I figured that parts of it were loosely based on our world. In this regard, it is almost undeniably provable: 65 million BC is no coincidence. I think most of us knew at once that the creators were alluding to the great metor impact that destroyed the dinosaurs (in some theories, that is; I am well aware that not all are in favour of a drastic extinction, but that, it seems, is what CT maintains.) Now, seeing that, I assume the safest model for the Chrono world would indeed be our own, particularly the behaviour after the 65 million mark. The only uncertainty is this: how versed were they in that history? Did they know that that ice age was not the same as ended 12,000 years ago? It almost seems as though they strung those together. Zeal stands at the brink of human agricultural development in our own world, and the end of our most recent ice age. The time periods, thus, seem to imply that those making the game considered the two ice-ages one in the same. The question then is: do we assume the game-makers ignorance, and hold that the ice-age in the Chrono world was unbroken for that length of time? Or do we assume that they knew full well the history of it, and the distinction in the ages, and that it was just for sake of the story that they set one time upon the start of an ice-age, and another at an end?

The former has some strength in that the game-makers seem rather unconcerned with history. After all, humanity did most certainly not by any theories (unless there are some strange people out there) begin in 65million BC. Rather, they followed the old convention of the cave-people fighting the dinosaurs, so romantisized in old film and the like. As such, this disregard for true-world time could imply that the ice age was a single one.

However, concerning the latter, Chrono Cross is what gives it strength. It seems that whatever scientific errors existed (or seemed to) in Trigger were made good on in Cross. Whilst Trigger places intelligent humanity at 65million BC, Cross speaks of humanity only arising from primeaval states around 3 million BC, so as to better align with evolutionary theory. Thus, the transition from Trigger to Cross represents a step from the fantastical to the scientific. If that is the case, then it might be thought that the game-makers, though originally being dismissive of such things as the ice ages, would come to consider the real-world theories regarding them proper in the end, as they did with matters concerning humanity.

As such, I would recommend the latter. It is less simplistic, of course, but it allows for more accurate assumptions regarding the Chrono world. It also more cohesive with what seem to be the latter views of the story-writers.

Comments?

yujinishuge

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Planet wide Ice age for 64,988,000 years?
« Reply #44 on: December 10, 2008, 12:06:49 am »
How the hell would anything survive?  Lavos' fall may have caused an Ice Age, but not one that lasted THIS long!  I think the 12000 BC Ice age is unnaturally prolonged by some kind of Zeal Technology keeping it that way.  It is also planet wide because of Zeal.  I can't see the whole planet being in an ice age though.  Even during Ice ages, there are areas not covered with ice.