As bad as I feel about saying this, someone needs to explain this one to me.
EDIT: I'm not a plant guy.
EDIT 2: Nope, just really boring.
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Okay. As far as I'm concerned, the tone here is spot on (asides from the Anomolous typo).
Well done.
However, the idea itself isn't very intriguing the way it's done - it's grass that's dead, but stays green, and the chemical it produces is killing plants all around. It also has a harmful effect on people. Meh.
What might be interesting is why does it exist. Did someone make it on purpose to induce famines? Why does it mess up rice so hard? (0.8 by mass of the enzyme instead of starch) Was it designed to fuck with the Chinese, but turned out to work much more extensively than expected?
Noticed the additional notes, with it being in a crop duster. Vote reversed.
This is extraordinarily dense, and the way the effect is described makes it sound as though this is purely natural if I read it right. I'm not clear on which element of this process is deemed anomalous. Moreover, while it's clearly dangerous, I don't find it all that interesting.
I agree, for the most part. I think this is decently written, but not very interesting, and doesn't actually sound very anomalous.
The science-y stuff doesn't come off as horseshit, article's genuinely well-written, lots of interesting detail, sensible procedures and goings-on in-universe, and the tone's spot on. Upvoted.
Military Consultant, SCP Wiki
What do you mean "what"
Military Consultant, SCP Wiki
They speak English in What?
Military Consultant, SCP Wiki
agreed on all points, but i have to agree with the things noted up top….this is great as a document, but what in particular makes this anomalous/paranormal to the point that the Foundation is the group containing it? how is this an SCP, outside of it being very hazardous?
i am pretty sure i understand what this is and what it does and why it's so dangerous. but dont really understand how it's something the foundation would contain vs the world at large, as i dont see how it's paranormal enough not to be common knowledge.
if it's NOT paranormal, then there's no reason for the foundation to keep it secret, as that would actually hinder the containment of it.
Eh. Someone apparently made it, we aren't quite sure how, and it has quite a lot of damage potential.
The Foundation doesn't just bother with explicitly anomalous phenomena in my understanding - they take care of anything that might screw humanity over this hard.
Thinking on it, I do agree with Rhett. The Foundation does counter threats where it can, but this is one where they would be better served letting the world as a whole know about it, rather than keep it secret.
It would work better if there was a clearer paranormal angle, some reason why the Foundation would keep this secret.
I suspect this is going to have a -EX attached to it a few years after this document was filed.
Furthermore, it might well be clearly paranormal - I don't have a sufficient biology knowledge to tell, but there might be things that'll make any botanist go WTF. Best see what someone like Photo thinks of it.
I suspect this is going to have a -EX attached to it a few years after this document was filed
That bothers me, actually. If the Foundation thinks that this will eventually become an -EX, then that means that there's already sufficient evidence that it isn't anomalous, just not fully understood yet. By that reckoning, quantum mechanics is a Keter-level SCP w/ memetic (causes confusion and uncertainty in everyone who studies it) and reality warping capabilities (observation determines outcome, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, etc.).
Giving bearhugs to the unsuspecting since 1872.
they take care of anything that might screw humanity over
Even allowing that this is true (it's not my understanding at all), they've really dropped the ball on containing nuclear/chemical/biological weapons and HIV, at minimum; I don't know why they'd make an exception for this.
Eh. Containing nuclear weaponry would be a bad idea (Hell, I have read that MAD is the main reason that developed countries don't fight each other so much these days) ,besides, it'd have a bad effect on energetics, and HIV , for all the issues on how it screws over some african countries isn't a world-shattering threat as a condom works as prevention.
They could have contained nuclear weapons before everybody had them, on the grounds that, like with SCP-1717 here, their development could have lead to total global war. Yes, now that nuclear weapons are something we all know about, it'd be dumb to try to contain the technology and knowledge, but there was a point when that wasn't the case. Ditto for HIV.
Can you come up with any examples of things without anomalous properties that the Foundation is currently containing?
Perhaps the Foundation was sitting on nuclear weapons technology for decades. And as for HIV, well, at the time the Foundation probably had its hands full staving off a fanatical parallel universe devoted to our destruction, or something like that. :D
"We were busy" is a terrible excuse. And the Foundation sitting on nuclear tech for decades actually makes it less explicable, not more: if you could keep it under wraps for decades, why would you stop?
The basic question remains: does the Foundation contain things with no anomalous qualities (i.e. things which are or appear to be explicable with contemporary scientific knowledge), or doesn't it? I'm still saying no, it doesn't.
It's a well-written article, but it doesn't do anything for me. Please keep writing, though; you have potential.
Side note: I laughed at all the sentences with CCR in them, since I'm more familiar with the abbreviation referring to Creedence Clearwater Revival.
if your reading this your gay
I upvoted. It's dense, but it's also a rather horrifying scenario when you think about it, if this stuff was allowed to spread.
This affects grasses. All of them. Think about that for a minute. Not just what you think of as grasses, but corn, wheat, bamboo… Okay, starting small, there would be widespread massive starvation. Bamboo is used worldwide as a building material. No more bread. No more rice.
And then think about what the grasses do from an ecological standpoint. First think about the mass extinctions of grazing species, and of all the species that depend on them. Think about erosion for a minute. Think about all that arable land blowing away because there's nothing there to keep it down anymore.
The article doesn't go into any great detail on any of that, but just stop and think for a second what this would mean for the world.
Yeah. This is one of those "delayed oh SHIT" articles. Consider the following:
- 2/3 of the human food supply is made up of rice, maize, and wheat (in that order). The planet's carrying capacity is stretched as it is. "Massive starvation" doesn't begin to cover it - this would result in major global depopulation. As in, cut human population in half, easily. All the social disorder which would follow from such a massive die-back would result in further casualties, as would the inevitable wars over the remaining viable food supplies.
- The majority of domesticated agricultural animals eat grasses, either directly (e.g. grass- or pasture-fed livestock) or indirectly (e.g. livestock fed processed feed, which is often based at least partially from grasses).
- A great many wild herbivores and omnivores eat (among other things) grasses. Most wild carnivores and omnivores also eat the aforementioned grass-eaters.
- There is a historical instance of what happens when widespread grasses that hold erosion at bay die. Lets just say it ended badly for all involved.
So, why would the Foundation work its tail off to contain this? Because having it uncontained would risk XK level ramifications, and the Foundation doesn't let that sort of thing happen if it can help it.
Also, I'm a political scientist, not a biologist, and I had little difficulty following. An important thing to note for those who've not had any biology or chemistry: LD50 is short for "median lethal dose", a measurement of the dose of a toxin, radiation, or pathogen required to kill half the members of a tested population after a specified test duration.
These are the reasons I like this thing — these and Echo's. The science is solid, and let me tell you, solidly-written botanical SCPs make me very happy. The Keter reasoning is moderately subtle but also solid: a sudden extinction of Poaceae would mean global ecological collapse, fast enough that even the abrupt extermination of most of the world's staple crops wouldn't necessarily be our biggest problem. The hidden backstory is chill-inducing: why the hell would someone spread this by crop-duster?!
Yeah, it's not as anomalous as a lot of the things we've got contained. Normally, that would bother me. Normally. But this is so well-written, and it's anomalous enough (too widespread and too lethal to really have evolved naturally, for one), that I don't mind.
Also, the containment procedures are a great way to make this hit close to home. It's wildfire season right now where I live, and practically every day, I drive past a new patch of charred earth. Fire is pocking my state with thousands and thousands of scars, many of which will never heal. Every year, as temperatures rise and invasive grasses spread, it gets worse. Now add in the idea that some significant percentage of those burns could exist because the Foundation is trying to save us all from catastrophic extinction… well, it's 100 F out today, and I've got the shivers.
Have my +1, sir. This is good and you should feel good.
(too widespread and too lethal to really have evolved naturally, for one)
Suppose it's an endogenous retrovirus that codes an enzyme that builds part of a virus protein and confers a survival advantage on the plant by, say, increasing seed production. If nobody had ever created the chemical that activates CCR production, we would never have any idea that it did anything other than those two things. It's hardly unprecedented for a protein to do two things at once, and there are currently a lot of chemical compounds on Earth that have never existed here before, which would never previously have triggered the effect. I mean, if the triggering compound had a perfluorocarbon component, say (to use a really broad example), then there'd never have been an occasion for this to happen.
The fact that the virus is specifically described as an endogenous pararetrovirus also means that there'd be no way to contain it by burning. I mean, you could contain grasses that had already been triggered to produce CCR, but since any other plant in the family could also produce CCR if exposed to the right chemical, and since the Foundation doesn't know what the chemical is, and isn't likely to tell anybody if they find out, we're all boned anyway, whether people burn the prairies or not.
I agree that the SCP is good, and I like it — I swear I do — and I'm not trying to talk you out of upvoting it. I'm just saying that I can't upvote it, because I don't think the knowledge belongs in Foundation custody, and I don't think it's containable in the first place.
Yeah, it's definitely very well written, but I feel it's making up for its lack of a hook by hiding behind a very VERY dense layer of scientific jargon. Ideally, SCP pages are supposed to be worded and written in a way that any layman can pick up on what it is and what it does. For this, you pretty much have to be a biologist to understand 80% of what's being said here.
I'm a military grunt with a (barely-passable) high school education and I came away with a clear understanding.
Military Consultant, SCP Wiki
True, I was able to get the gist of it too, but I kept getting this nagging feeling that all those dense scientific terms were there just to distract me, rather than provide any meaningful contribution to the article.
i'm a normal guy studying english, and i understood most of the article (maybe because my parents are agricultural engineers), but this is a little bit heavy and there is no doubt of that.
By the way, i upvoted this with a smile in my face.
It does have a hook. It's just done rather subtly. The hook is the fact that this could exterminate all grasses on Earth. Think about it for a second, and you should see why that's absolutely horrifying.
Two thirds of the world's staple foods gone…no corn, wheat, rice, oats, barley. We all switch to potatoes and then the super-blight hits. That is pretty horrific I think.
It probably could be spelled out a bit more though.
I'm very interested, and don't have a problem with any most of the science,1 but I'm not seeing how it's anomalous: there's not really anything here that depends on something particularly unnatural happening.
EDIT: Which is not to say that I don't still like this. I just don't see how it's the Foundation's problem.
Footnotes
1. (There's a bit of a problem with "SCP-1717-2 is an unknown substance that induces the expression of the SCP-1717-1 gene" and "A 20mg sample recovered from the same tank contained no identifiable SCP-1717-2" both being in the same piece: if you don't know what it is, how could you tell whether it was present or not?)
I'm with those who have a concern with 'yeah dangerous but really anomalous?'.
Also I was put off by excessive annotation/footnote stuff. As science-y as it sounds I'm not sure that '24 hour LD50 rat, oral: 2100mg/kg' and '24 hour LD50 D-class, ████: 4800mg/kg' and whatnot are completely necessary and may instead distract the article from the 'real' hook. But, as before,it occurs to me that it's just dangerous, I'm not sure what specifically is the anomalous part. So no vote.
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
/forum/t-547497/scp-1717#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
