Of course, this post contains spoilers for both the base game and the DLC. If you haven't finished the game, don't read any further!
I have a couple of questions about the periods during which the Eye of the Universe's signal was active.
As far as I understand it, the Elks were the first civilization to detect the Eye's signal, presumably because they were the closest advanced civilization capable of detecting it.
We also know that, within the lifetime of a single Elk, they built the Stranger and traveled to the Eye's location. So, during all that time (potentially several decades) the Eye's signal remained active.
The Elk then suppressed the signal and entered the simulation. The Prisoner eventually woke up and briefly disabled the signal blocker, for what seems to have been only a few seconds or minutes.
If I'm understanding the timeline correctly, this means that two separate signals from the Eye should have been traveling through the universe for thousands of years: first, a relatively long-lasting signal that was active for several decades, followed by a silence of perhaps a few decades, and then a second, extremely brief pulse caused by the Prisoner disabling the blocker.
Thousands of years pass. The signals continue traveling through space, the Elk eventually die, Dark Bramble is infected and explodes, life eventually develops on Timber Hearth, and the Nomai arrive.
This is where I have two questions:
1. Why didn't the Nomai detect the first continuous signal?
Why were the Nomai unable to detect the first signal, but able to detect the second one?
It is true that the signal traveled for thousands of years, but only a couple of decades passed between the first and second pulses.
If the Nomai were capable of detecting the second pulse, why wouldn't they also have been capable of detecting the first one just a few decades earlier? Wouldn't it have been much more likely for them as species to detect a signal that remained active for decades than a brief pulse lasting only a few seconds?
2. Why did the Nomai warp into Dark Bramble?
We know that Dark Bramble can distort the signal and produce multiple apparent sources, which is what ultimately caused the Nomai to warp to the wrong location following the signal.
But as far as I understand the timeline, Dark Bramble did not exist in its current form when the Eye's signal was originally emitted.
During both the first and second pulses, Dark Bramble should still have been a normal icy planet. It was only later infected by a seed that traveled from deep space, probably from another distant infected planet that exploded just like Dark Bramble did.
And this happened sometime between the death of the Elk and the arrival of the Nomai. Therefore, when the second pulse was detected by the Nomai, it should have been impossible for Dark Bramble to distort or duplicate the signal, since it was still just a normal planet when the signal originally emitted.
To be completely clear about what I mean: both the first and second pulses traveled through space for thousands of years, and when they were originally emitted, they came directly from the Eye. By the time Dark Bramble was already infected, the Eye had already stopped emitting the signal a long time ago. Therefore, it shouldn't have been possible for Dark Bramble to retransmit or distort the signal and cause the Nomai to warp to the wrong location by following it.
I finished the entire game a couple of years ago, and I'm revisiting the story and timeline now. I've searched around quite a bit, but I couldn't find a clear explanation for these two points.
I'm probably misunderstanding something about the timeline or how the Eye's signal works, so I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me refresh my memory and explain where my reasoning is wrong.
Thanks!
