#or maybe they made a finite number of souls but because they can mechanically engineer an infinite amount of bodies

[starvingtongue]

mini watcher headcanons

Having no concept of gender, The Watcher doesn’t mind what pronouns you give them. It doesn’t concern them to 'have' a gender, as it’s never been something they’ve needed to think about, nor is it something that were ever a necessity with Guardians as a whole.

They don't really need to eat or drink much to survive. Sleep is necessary though, as it helps their body regenerate in much the same way that humans do, but they don’t need much of it to get by. I’m half tempted to say they ‘consume’ Eridium to give themselves more energy instead of food but maybe that's cheating. Considering they're also a bio-mechanical construct, food and water don't quite do as much for them as it would for humans.

They have a fondness for glowing flora or just anything glowing in general tbh. It reminds them of home, so any time they see anything glowing, they do stop and admire it for a couple of seconds. Not that there’s much glowing plant life on Pandora but they take what they can get.

They also have no concept of sexuality. Prior to getting heavily involved with humans, they identify as asexual/aromantic, and even after, still identifies as asexual. Their aromanticism as kind of developed into greyromanticism as a result of interacting with humans. Having never exeperienced sex, love, romance, all of that, they never developed a sense of understanding about what sexuality was until they started observing humans. I'm also very much under the impression that they didn't even begin to understand the concept until they became fully sentient either. Even after experiencing it in some semblance of the word, the asexuality remained and they realised they might be capable of love, but it would on very rare occasions.

The Guardians don't have the same view of sex as humans do, their bodies are bio-mechanical constructs after all, and they don't even need to have sex to procreate. This is something I'm hoping to touch on more in another headcanon, but as Guardian bodies are bio-mechanical in nature, their bodies are engineered, then their wispy souls are implanted when one's available. This is to keep their defenses up, and meant that the Eridians didn't have to worry about long gestation periods, the aging process, training, etc. The Guardians could be created in the 'perfect' body needed for the situation, the next available soul would possess the body, and off they'd go.

[spaceandindecision]

Some depressed thoughts

There exists some space of all possible mental experiences. Each of us, at any one moment explores one point of that space: one mental experience. A typical human mental experience consists of a great synthesis of sensory information, thoughts, emotions, and so on. Mental experiences can be anything you can imagine experiencing, and more. Is it possible to perceive and comprehend shapes in Graham’s number of dimensions? Not in this universe, but in theory yes. At least it’s possible unless you believe there is some special limit to the number of dimensions which can be appreciated by any possible being under any possible physics. Maybe a less controversial example would be eyesight. Even within the confines of this universe’s physics, the upper-bound on how good eyesight can be is large. You could have a creature with trillions of eyes on its body, and perhaps even great thin spikes covered in eyes. The brain of this creature might be enormous, or alternatively it might be small but incredibly efficient. The sensory neurons on this creature could be very numerous and very complex, and it could all be integrated within its mind and then analyzed. Imagine what kind of a mental experience such a creature would likely have as it gazed upon a frantic environment. It could see all of the electromagnetic spectrum in astounding details of depth and colors and shades. It might integrate and “witness” more sensory information in a second than all of earth’s organisms ever have combined, and all through its eyesight alone.

Anyway, where was I? You have this great space of possible mental experiences, which is either infinite or very large. It turns out that some mental experiences consist of various states of misery and suffering, while others consist of various states of happiness and pleasure. Now on earth you have all of these beautiful creatures which are capable of wonderful mental experiences. Upon inspection, however, it turns out that those beautiful creatures are miserable, and hateful toward each other. They destroy each other constantly, for all kinds of reasons. Mostly it’s for survival, such as killing for food. Other than that, a lot of it is over some kind of conflict. You also have features of the environment which maim, kill, and frighten many creatures. You also have disease, starvation, dehydration, poisoning, and so on. 

The creatures that exist now did not evolve for good mental experiences. They evolved mainly to survive and procreate in a dangerous world with finite resources. It fucking sucks being a part of this biosphere. I would prefer to be free of this. It’s because of fucking recycling. All the shit that dies ends up being nutrients for something else. It would be bad enough if life on earth was just a malicious infection that spread over the globe, exhausted everything, and then ate itself until it died and decayed. But no, we recycle. Instead of exhausting everything and finally putting an end to this miserable world, we have formed a vast community of organisms who, after feeding on the dead remains of others, turn those dead remains into something more juicy for another organism which will eventually eat it. So we are a malicious infection frantically growing and dying in a sea of misery. Some lives aren’t great. You’re not even sure when it started, but when it did you had no idea what was going on. Eventually bad things start happening. You’re taken to your limits and beyond, and tested. You are beaten as you develop fears, hatreds, sorrows, coping mechanisms, habits, behaviors, and so on. For some people it just saps away their capacity for enjoyment altogether. Then life continues in this way to be a struggle, and ends with death. Anyway, I’m getting really caught up on the details. The point is that life arose on this planet from an ocean of chemical reactions. There’s no God who made us. There’s no mother of life. There are no souls waiting to be reincarnated. The universe does not conspire to help us. We’re a chemical reaction that got out of control on a tiny isolated planet. At this point we are the infection that is fighting and destroying itself while at the same time consuming its decayed remains to keep the ocean of misery and death storming.

Worse than that, in general relativity there is the interpretation that the universe is in a 4-dimensional Minkowski spacetime block. In reality the universe is not shaped like a block; the word block here is only meant to convey the notion that in this view the universe exists persistently across all of spacetime, just as a block exists persistently across all of its parts. In other words, every moment of our lives is trapped eternally in this universe. And let’s get serious, no one has seen an end to the universe. What we can say is that the observable universe is not the whole universe. There are galaxies which are leaving the observable universe. In order to claim those galaxies are disappearing you would have to think that there was something special about the earth’s location in the universe that we just happened to be positioned where every galaxy a certain radial distance from us is disappearing as it crosses the boundary. Those galaxies still exist, but they are now too far away for us to reach, even if we were immortal and traveled at the speed of light. For all we know, the universe might go on infinitely. There are even some models of cosmology where our universe might be one of the products of an eternal inflation process. For all we know the universe might be akin to a pathological mathematical structure. Mathematics is useful for describing the universe, and we know that mathematics can go to very bizarre realms. 

There could also be more universes out there. I fucking hope that some of them are full of creatures, or whatever life is like there, that are happy, and either get along or have no need to interact. I would even be satisfied with some of them being isolated gigantic self-aware creatures who are unimaginably happy because they have the intelligence and capacity to maintain their environment and to modify their own mind into a mind that goes through states of unimaginable happiness. Maybe in our universe, or in another universe, there are highly intelligent, altruistic, and empathetic species that reach a point where they can engineer systems that are conscious and ecstatically and persistently happy. Perhaps they might even change themselves to be more like these systems.

Anyways, this could go on for a while, but that’s it for me, for now. The point is that I’m diagnosed depressed, that sometimes I think life on earth sucks, and that I hope this situation is not representative of how things are for all the aliens that might be out there.