The EXPANSE - The Protomolecule Explained

hey guys pete here today i'm going to explain the protomolecule from the expanse remember poor julie mal slumped against the wall in a room at the blue falcon hotel on arrows good old patient zero at least for all the proto-molecule-related stuff that happened in the soul system after that much of that is what this video is about but we'll also dive a little deeper to better understand how she ended up in that situation specifically what caused this chain of events i.e the proto-molecule what exactly that is at least as much as we're able to understand it where it came from and who was responsible for creating it this mystifying blue substance is at the heart of the events that shape the story of the expanse there is a lot to tell which i will try to keep simple and i would say this is the perfect time because the first phase of how it shapes things more or less concludes with the appearance of the ring gates and station out there beyond uranus for the spoiler warning i'm making this video before season 5 comes out as a reader of all the books and novellas in the expanse series but since this is the type of video that you might wander into at any point during your journey through the series i'm going to introduce the information in the order we learned it in the story season one stuff first then season two and so on that way you can tap out of the video if it starts getting ahead of what you've seen i'll also be referring to the books but won't spoil things beyond where the show is and there are some differences between the books and show but since overall we get to the same place i won't spend a lot of time pointing those out now with all of that out of the way and yeah i know it was a lot let's get into it what is the proto-molecule then the best description comes from an in-world explainer slash corporate presentation to the board of directors from protogen scientist anthony dresden in a video feed that's found in the first book he explains that the proto-molecule is not in itself a living thing but a set of free-floating instructions designed to adapt to and guide other replicating systems to put things in context he made this feed two years before arrows and essentially it's his pitch for that and for continued experimentation the protomolecule itself was discovered on saturn's moon phoebe eight years before the beginning of the series mars was exploring this little ice moon essentially surveying the resources that were available there in that process they discovered some anomalies they found some things that didn't exactly make sense and so they entered into a partnership with an earth corp called protogen to outsource some of the work to figure out what was going on there they set up a joint long-term research facility and protogen led by dresden made several discoveries about the proto-molecule they figure out that it's extra solar that it came from somewhere outside of our solar system and that it is actually technology it was made by something it is in fact the first technology of genuinely extraterrestrial origin so that answers some of our questions of where it came from and who was responsible for making it it was created by an alien civilization far more advanced than humanity what's more it has a prefabricated mechanism for the manipulation of living systems remember it's described as not a living thing but as a set of free-floating instructions designed to adapt to and guide other replicating systems i'm repeating that because that's where dresden who's the person who's worked most closely with the proto-molecule since its discovery ended up after studying he realizes that phoebe was a delivery system and therefore he believes that the proto-molecule is a weapon at this point he doesn't know what that prefabricated mechanism that's inside it is for but he knows it was sent to our solar system over 2 billion years ago and had it not been caught in saturn's gravity life as we understand it on earth might not exist phoebe would have crashed into our planet which would hijack any chance of life as we know it developing because that started about 800 million years ago now this video isn't about dresden but there is some things you need to know about him besides the fact that he works for protogen and that's owned by mao kwakowski mercantile which is why we see him answer to jules pierre he also has some strange personal beliefs most importantly he thinks that empathy is a real setback for humans essentially that it gets in the way of doing the kind of research necessary to prepare for the showdown that's coming from this alien civilization who sent the protomolecule on phoebe he uses a process on himself and his researchers that uses magnets to turn off the part of their brain that processes empathy creating ready-made sociopaths in the show we get this information from cortazar when he's being held prisoner after they raid the laboratory on toss station so dresden is aggressively doing experiments on phoebe eventually he kills the martian scientists there samples of the protomolecule are taken away they're transported on the anubis eventually phoebe and the research station are destroyed so those samples on the anubis are all that's left of the material in the meantime dresden is pushing for a bigger experiment with human subjects in a closed situation like eros the sociopath believes that what the proto-molecule needs is more biological mass to hijack he's still trying to figure out what'll happen if it's allowed to grow he pitches the idea to jules pierre mao that this is what they need to do and that they're really on the verge of the biggest discovery in human history to pull an experiment like eerosoft they need for earth and mars to be distracted so they decide to get them to fight each other that's where the canterbury comes in that's how the survivors of the cant become the crew of the rosannante and the one thing that protogen couldn't have planned for was julie mal and the opa getting involved with the anubis julie survives and she's able to make it to eros on a shuttle from the anubis but she's already been infected with the proto-molecule she eventually dies in her hotel and then the crew of the rossonante and detective miller both arrived there at the same time to find her not long afterwards anthony dresden shows up and to him this is great news because now they have active protomolecule again and in that julie becomes patient zero protogen is then able to move on with their experiment they're able to infect the population of arrows they're able to speed things up using radiation and to feed the proto-molecule a huge amount of biomass and they set up their laboratory on toss station to study the results by the end of season one we pretty much understand that the protomolecule acts as an infectious agent and we start to see how that affects life it can infect humans on contact we hear dresden say that it can't be transmitted through the air but if it's wet don't touch it unless you want something amazing to happen they presume that it was created to hijack single-celled organisms but by testing it on animals and humans they realize that it can adapt to multicellular life as well and in the first half of season 2 we start to see what happens when it gets inside a human how it affects the host and how it eventually spreads while things are evolving on eros the radon toss station happens where miller kills dresden he basically realizes that the proto-molecule in the research that protogen's done will be so valuable to everyone that dresden's gonna be able to talk his way out of anything he sees that holden who's level-headed and idealistic as hell is even starting to get sucked into the idea of continuing with the eros experiment so he takes the scientists out but at least one of his researchers survived the crew of the rossi fred johnson and miller come up with a plan to get rid of arrows to use the mormon generation ship the nauvoo to redirect it into the sun when they try to do this we get to see what the proto-molecule is capable of when it has the time to alter the building blocks of a large number of hosts we get the impression that it creates something that functions as a hive mind it integrates with what's available to repurpose in this case the aerostation and can take control manipulating things in a way that's unexplainable to us the protomolecule was able to maneuver arrows out of the path of the naboo and then it started accelerating towards earth this appeared to be it following through with that pre-fabricated mechanism and it seemed as though it was carrying out its prime directive to hijack life on earth miller ended up trapped on the station and he thought that maybe since the outbreak started with julie mal that her consciousness might still be in the system somewhere and i have to explain that what happens here isn't necessarily explainable yet at this point in the story we're gonna learn more about all of this stuff later but basically what we see is that he goes back to where julie died and he is able to make contact with her imprinted consciousness he believes that she's trying to go back home and he manages to convince her that she can't do that that it would kill billions of people instead he gets her to head to venus and we watch as the station crashes into the planet's surface turns out that this wasn't the only experiment going on protogen was also infecting humans on io in an attempt to create super soldiers while this takes up a lot of story time in the back half of the second season in the first half of season three the big takeaway from this is that yes they are able to infect humans they are able to create hybrids but they can't use them for their purpose because they can't control them so at least at this point in the story this whole idea of hybrids is just a failed experiment a few of the things that we learned from them is that they continue to evolve they're always in search of more energy and like everything else proto-molecule-related they seem to be in communication in other words they're a part of the bigger hive mind so on venus after arrows crashed on the surface the proto-molecule went back to its work it began changing the planet everyone looked on wondering what it might be doing we saw the science vessel the arbor gas try to get close it was broken down into all of its components down to the nuts and bolts and screws everyone on board died and all the components of the ship and their biomass was absorbed into the planet the proto-molecule continued to build for several months eventually we saw this squid light structure emerge from the surface it traveled out to the edge of the solar system beyond uranus where it created a ring that's a thousand kilometers across and with that we found out what it was trying to do the proto-molecule that was on phoebe that was sent to our system 2.3 billion years ago was designed to create this ring and i decided that's where i'll end this first part in the next video i'm going to talk about the ring gates the ring station and the builders and the additional information we learn about the proto-molecule when we visit ellis so at this point in the story we learned that it comes from outer space it was created by an alien civilization that's far more advanced than us who were trying to create a network which we'll learn something about when we go through the ring humanity thought that phoebe was a weapon and while it's true that if it would have crashed to earth we may not exist we can see that their intentions were to build a bridge to our system rather than sending a first strike for me one of the funniest things is that the name proto molecule it's actually branding by protogen as a corporation studying the first extraterrestrial technology ever discovered by humans their first move was to give it a brand name and i thought i would close this video out with a passage from the vital abyss where cortazar is remembering when he first arrived on phoebe he says tucked within the planetesimals icy layers the joint research group protogen and the martian naval scientific service had found tiny reactive particles the size roughly of a mid-range virus but with the design structure and informational depth unlike anything earth's biosphere had ever imagined the proto-molecule we called it branding it immediately in a territorial move that irritated the martian scientists we ignored their protest as irrelevant our best guess was that it had been sent from a distance we couldn't guess at a time when a defined cell membrane stood at the heights of terrestrial light the protomolecule appeared to be a message in a bottle but one that included its own grammar books and instruction tutorials ready to teach whatever aboriginal cells it found how to become the things it required we argued whether something as inert as a spore might be intelligent at least implicitly but without coming to a conclusion the first evidence of a tree of life apart from our own enchanted and confounded us me so the universe reaches out something we don't understand sends something we can't comprehend humanity thinks of it as a weapon and the different factions inside the soul system nearly destroy each other as they try to control its power in the end the only remaining sample from phoebe winds up with fred johnson after naomi wasn't able to destroy it the opening of the ring gates in season 3 changes everything again and i'll get into all of that in the next part of this series which will be coming soon so i'm gonna leave it there if you have any questions make sure you leave them in the comments i'll try to answer everything i can let me know what you think about the proto molecule and how it shaped the story so far if you have ideas about where things will end be sure to leave those as well your proto-molecule theories if you've read ahead in the books like i have though please mark anything that's related to future book spoilers please like this video if you enjoyed it please subscribe to my channel if you haven't already if you're an expanse fan i've been doing a lot of expanse content and i'll be doing that throughout the new season and the final season when that comes out and with that thanks for watching i'll talk to you soon

Channel: Pete Peppers

Views: 237,141

Keywords: the expanse protomolecule explained, protomolecule the expanse, protomolecule explained, the expanse protomolecule, the expanse protomolecule venus, the expanse protomolecule eros, the expanse protomolecule creators, the expanse, pete peppers, protomolecule ring, julie mao, detective miller, protogen, the expanse explained protomolecule, the expanse season 5, the expanse season 1, the expanse season 2, the expanse season 3, what is the protomolecule in the expanse

Id: 20M3rR2pVWo

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020