The Dor'Tel are... weird. I mean, they're machines. That part isn't weird. It's more that nobody really knows where they came from or what they really want.
But you're gonna speculate?
Oh, of course.
I think the obvious origin for them is Sikaren. The tech is a little similar, but not exactly a smoking gun. There's only so many kinds of power generation methods, spaceship drives, etc. Physics just limits you there. But my money is on Sikaren or Idaltu. I say that because we know for sure that they predate the Overlords. The Salmaxians confirmed that, based on their own records from the Overlord days. Now, the Oolians say they never had any knowledge of the Dor'Tel prior to the fall of the Overlords, so if there was some kind of conflict between the Overlords and the Dor'Tel, it wasn't all-encompassing.
My suspicion is that the Overlords might have tried to take them on once or twice, then gave up. I just don't see the Overlords tolerating this presence in their space without a fight. If the Overlords could have wiped them out or subjugated them, they would have.
So, their age isn't really in dispute. They've been around at least 50,000 years, likely a lot longer. Like, if you think about the age of the universe, and how life in our solar system began about 3 billion years ago, and we didn't have multicellular life until 600 million years ago, and now we've got the human race with all our technology and creativity and ambition only having been here for the blink of an eye, astronomically speaking... you have to imagine these patterns of empires rising and falling have played out over and over and over. There was probably something before the Idaltu. Probably many somethings. I think the most tantalizing explanation for the Dor'Tel is that they're just older than everything else around here. One reason I think that is because their star is 2 billion years older than ours. If their solar system developed like ours, which it seems to have, then they had a couple billion years' head start on life developing.
That's not even talking about the fact that we don't know how life arose on Earth, either. Although we think it might have been purely spontaneous, there's the possibility that the building blocks came here via comet impacts, and might have sparked the development of life on Earth several times, not just once.
What I think about is that maybe the Dor'Tel were built by an ancient civilization, something older than the Idaltu. I don't know if the Sikaren are older--nobody is sure about that at all--so maybe the Dor'Tel are the oldest civilization around. They just don't get the kudos the Idaltu do because let's face it, they didn't do anything. They didn't create fold vectors, they didn't leave behind a tomeworld, they just kinda sat around doing god-knows-what.
I think there's essentially three options if we assume they weren't created by some other foreign civilization. First, an organic species evolved and built a civilization, then created machinery that became the Dor'Tel. They could have merged with that machinery or the machinery destroyed them. The other, admittedly stranger, option is that they evolved machines naturally. It's not quite as crazy as it sounds, because viruses are really just self-replicating chemical machines. They're the original nanobots, if you want to think of it that way.
Now, obviously, it's splitting hairs to act like the Dor'Tel are machines and we aren't. We're organic machines, based on carbon and oxygen. In a different environment, you could evolve based on something else. The Overlord descendant species all have ammonia-based biochemistry. With the Dor'Tel, it's possible they emerged out of silicon dioxide biochemistry. That would mean they're made mainly of metals, with silicate rock acting like a "solvent," though it's obviously not like water.
Early on, they wouldn't have been much different from single-celled life on Earth, other than being based on different chemicals and having extremely different environmental requirements. But imagine they evolved cellular-like life in that environment, and also evolved virus-like particles. If you let those evolve long enough, it's possible they could have developed into what the Dor'Tel are now.
One thing about the Dor'Tel is that they don't have individuals as we understand it. They can create intelligent agents, for lack of a better word. Those can look however they want, since they're just mechanical constructs, and there's not really any design that's beyond Dor'Tel capability in that regard. They can walk and talk or whatever. But we've determined that those agents have no autonomy, and never did. They're more like interactive sensors than living beings. Here's the part where I start to get a little batshit.
You're familiar with the Gaia hypothesis, right?
Yeah.
What if that, but for machines? In other words, the Dor'Tel aren't a civilization or a single organism or a group of organisms or anything like that. Not in any way that is relatable to us. Instead, their entire planet--and every planet they have colonized--is all part of one vast lifeform. It's not a collective intelligence, because it's not created out of the thoughts of many individuals. It's more like a mycelial network. The intelligence is an emergent property of the sheer size. When you put that many distinct devices together, all communicating constantly, all sensing the universe around them, what you have is almost like a vast brain, with every device a neuron in it. And each one of them has enough local "instinct" to respond to immediate stimuli, which also informs the whole. I don't imagine that any part of it is static, either. It must cultivate memory of some kind. But there's the possibility it doesn't. We humans love memory because we're sentimental. Memory suits lots of animals on Earth because it's how they learn to survive. But once you get down to some of the simpler vertebrates and everything less complex than that, "memory" isn't really a thing. If the Dor'Tel have something like memory, then maybe it's just a bunch of stimulus-response encodings and nothing else. They don't remember important days, or horrible events, or have holidays, or whatever. They just constantly learn and rely on this working, living memory. Since anything detected at an "edge" is sent along the overall network, the entire Dor'Tel "being" can learn from the "edge" agents at all times. I could see that kind of intelligence building on itself so rapidly that it becomes completely unrelatable to forms of life like us.
Sounds like one of those Singularity things.
Yeah, you could look at it like that. Doesn't mean it was reached the way Kurzweil proposed. But the end result might be close enough. The question then becomes, what basic drives does it have? The basic biological drive of all life on Earth, and most life we've encountered, is simply reproduction. All life on Earth carries DNA or RNA and its sole purpose is to make sure it gets copied, copied, and copied again. It doesn't have any will behind this, of course. It's just a particular kind of chemical machine. But no matter how high up you go in complexity, that drive to reproduce doesn't disappear. Humans aren't sitting around thinking, "Oh, it's time to replicate my DNA today." But most people want children, which is really just a way of ensuring DNA gets propagated for another generation. Sometimes, I think it's a little funny that we put importance on our own personal DNA, like the reason you have kids is to pass on your genes, as if your one set of genes means anything to the greater picture of all humanity, or to all life on Earth. If DNA could think and talk, it would probably have a good laugh over all the complexity and capacity for rationalization that we've developed around what's ultimately a process for doing the one and only thing DNA ever wants to do--or rather, the one thing it does do, period.
But what about the Dor'Tel?
Yeah, so, what are their drives? Survival? Procreation? They don't have individuals to procreate. It's more one big thing. Though, going back to the fungal analogy, it helps ensure its survival by spreading. It probably goes without saying that the Dor'Tel don't have DNA. They have very small machines that crank out the parts to build more small machines, kinda like DNA, just not chemically similar. Then there are other machines that do the assembly. And the machines have many specializations, or so we have gathered. You can't exactly put these things under a microscope while they're active, and they haven't been forthcoming on giving us the lowdown. So, are the Dor'Tel just a great big machine whose sole drive is to keep getting bigger? Entirely possible. But it also seems curious about the outside universe, to a limited extent. It creates ships, and sometimes those ships venture out beyond their own space. They take readings. They collect samples. They go back home. What are they doing with all that? We don't know. We do know that they don't attack unprovoked. They will avoid planets where life already exists that might pose a problem for them, which seems to be more about avoiding the hassle than them having some respect for the sanctity of life. Like, "This planet is more trouble than it's worth, let's find another one."
They do communicate when confronted. They'll analyze and replicate any language they encounter pretty quickly, which I suppose makes sense if they are fundamentally an interstellar supercomputer. They'll say, "We are Dor'Tel." We'll ask what they want. They ask what we want. It doesn't get very far. One thing our analysis figured out is that the Dor'Tel don't know what a "want" is. The whole concept of desire, or longing, or ambition, or anything you could think of that constitutes a conscious effort to achieve or obtain something. They repeat the question back to us because they don't understand it. I don't think it's due to a lack of capability, either. It's just a concept they have no use for. It would be fair to say they have no emotions, at least as humans understand emotions, but that doesn't mean they're "logical." I think they analyze data and react to it. That doesn't mean the reactions are based on complex reasoning. Even their limited ability to communicate with us linguistically doesn't mean they have that kind of reasoning ability. We know that a sufficiently powerful computer can pretend to comprehend language, when all it's doing is recognizing patterns it knows and repeating the expected responses. It's just a Chinese Room deal.
A what?
It's an old thought experiment. Basically, put a guy in a room who knows English but not Chinese. Imagine he's given instructions, in English, on how to manipulate Chinese symbols based on the ones presented to him. With complete enough instructions and adequate time to practice, he could get very good and fast and replying as expected, but does he actually know Chinese? Of course not. I think it's entirely possible the Dor'Tel fake their understanding of language in this way, too.
That seems like it would make communicating with them impossible.
I don't believe it's completely hopeless. It's more that we don't speak their language. We don't know what their language is, other than the stimulus-response cycle of their edge agents. But we don't know how to manipulate that into communicating meaning to them. Another problem is that complex communication tends to require symbolic understanding, and the ability to think abstractly. There's no guarantee they do that, either. But maybe they are more like ants or bees, basing their communication on chemical signals that trigger specific behavioral effects. But not exactly like that, since again, they wouldn't have any individual troops to rally or anything. So, they're just a big puzzle.
I can see why everybody tries to leave them alone, frankly. They're telling the universe that they are none of anyone's business. Take the hint.