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Author Topic: FTL travel and Jane in the Ender series*possible spoilers*
Tinros
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I posted this on the other side, but it was suggested that I post it here, so Mr. Card will be more likely to see it. So here it goes.

*WARNING! this will contain spoilers for those of you who haven't read Speaker, Xenocide, and Children of the mind. Although if you haven't, you should. *

I was re-reading the rest of the Ender series, and something occured to me.

Jane becomes a master at taking things Outside and Inside again EXACTLY where she wants them- as in, ON a planet's surface.

My question is this: what is the point of making those boxes to transport people? Why can't she just transport the whole of Lusitania at once, or even the planet itself to a different location, so as to avoid the fleet? If she was able to take Peter to the inside of the fleet, at an exact point, what's keeping her from taking the people, buggers, and piggies to another planet all at once? Wouldn't that save time, and, in effect, ease everyone's minds about the ordered shut-down?

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Leonide
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I'm not positive, but i think Jane has to hold the idea of the objects she's moving in her memory. Maybe the vastness of an entire planet, with all its intricacies and lifeforms, was too much?

That sounds a little hollow to me, but obviously i don't know the actual answer...

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Tinros
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That explains why she couldn't move the entire planet, but it doesn't explain the need for the boxes. Aren't they just a waste of time and material?
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mr_porteiro_head
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Didn't the boxes allow people to continue breathing while they were outside?
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Joldo
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I think the point of the boxes is that they stopped people from realizing they were Outside. I recall Jane telling Peter and Wang-Mu they could only go sans box if they were strong-willed enough to hold themselves together in that environment.
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clod
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Color me purple, but didn't Joss Whedon invent the "Jane" character?

He's kind of a badass, that one. Jane.

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Ramdac99
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Jane used the boxed because she thought she needed to. by the end of Children of the Mind she got better at Outspace travel and was transporting Ender-as-Peter, Wang-mu, Miro, and Jane-val without the boxes.
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Jeesh
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Don't you remember why Jane literaly wanted "a box with a door"? Beacause she has to hold the whole patern in her head! She asked for a simple ship, no cargo, and as few parengers as possible. A whole planet (plus the piggies, possesions, and all the people) would be too big a patern to do. If she somehow mandged to do it, it would take too much power. The ansibles would shut down and Jane would be too exausted to do anything.
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formic rising
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i was thinking that maybe after all of the mothertrees on many many many (did i mention many?) different planets have expanded into great and many forests on many planets and are connected philoticly then maybe jane might be able to hold all of the information needed to move an entire planet within her memory. then again, i couldnt imagine what moving a planet to a different point in space would do to it's ecosystem.
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Creator Aleks
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maybe she just never thought of it. Wasn't it Peter who came up with using the box to get the Dr Device?

Shes just a god, not God.

Uh-oh what have i said...

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neo-dragon
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quote:
Originally posted by Ramdac99:
Jane used the boxed because she thought she needed to. by the end of Children of the Mind she got better at Outspace travel and was transporting Ender-as-Peter, Wang-mu, Miro, and Jane-val without the boxes.

That's right. Jane was like a child learning to ride a bike; she needed her training wheels at first. If you recall, for the very first trip Outside Jane also thought that it would help if Ender was there, because she had a strong connection to his aiua. That was another crutch that she learned she could do without.

I think it might have also been suggested that it could have something to do with the fact that Jane was very familiar with Peter's (Ender's) aiua, and Wang-mu's had become connected to it. That helped her move them without a ship. So Jane can probably maintain the patterns of people she's close to easier than strangers, and thus it's safer for her to move them without a ship around them to help keep everything together.

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formic rising
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but she never actually had to hold peter or anyone else together outside. the individuals did that themselves.
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CRash
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I would imagine the only reason Jane would need the boxy ships after CotM would be to reassure strangers to FTL travel that it was an actual form of travel--to provide a little order. Create a uniform system, that sort of thing. It would be interesting to see how Starways Congress takes to the idea of a system of transportation that Jane ultimately controls.
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neo-dragon
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quote:
Originally posted by formic rising:
but she never actually had to hold peter or anyone else together outside. the individuals did that themselves.

But she had to remember the whole pattern of her passengers in order to bring them Outside and back. That's why she needed the processing power of the whole computer/ansible network.
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TheGrimace
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The key to not transporting a whole planet would definately be the memory capacity issue. If you think about it, it seems that to a certain extent even transporting a box full of individuals at a time seems to be taxing Jane's resources. Consider a planet who's mass/complexity would be along the lines of thousands of orders of magnitude greater than that of say 20 people in a box and you realize you'd need something like a whole galaxy populated with piggy forests to move that large/complicated an entity.

Furthermore in terms of "why do you need a box" think of the psychological strain on the passengers. If you were standing, and instantly everything around you changed (temperature, pressure, humidity, sound, sight, taste...) your body would likely go into shock. Mentally it would be far easier to walk into a closed box and walk out into a different place just as an elevator would be imminantly more bearable than just jumping straight down an elevator shaft to your floor.

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