The EXPANSE - The Ring Gates, Ring Station, & Ring Builders Explained 

I enjoy it too.

Me too...binge watched all 5 and cant wait for 6 to be released in december...

Did the same thing too in june 2021 hopefully season 6 comes out soon and we get more info on the aliens and the aggresors

at Piti 2x - there needs to be some Aliens in the series I mean like real aliens..ones that the characters can interact with.. Telling us about the Ring Gate builder civilization is nice... but i want to see Aliens on screen interacting with the characters / the cast.

I’m jealous I found out about this when the first season came to Amazon prime. Such a nail bitter lol

I haven't read the books yet, but that was the exact conclusion I came to while watching the episode.

It’s because it’s on Amazon. Amazon isn’t that’s good. It would get more eyes if it was on Netflix. They should sell it. And let someone else continue the seasons. They got lazy here, ruining season 6 rushing it and cramping it all into just 6 episodes.

@@leonleon2276 Yes, almost like what happened in Babylon 5 Season 4.

@@Grimloxz yeh but here, they just skipped loads of potential story out. I mean they could have had two whole episodes on that new planet with the dog things that made that kid into a zombie , I mean they way they showed bits of that story, it was for nothing. They may aswell just left it out…..

Watching this show felt like the first time I watched Battlestar Galactica. It is so well done. The story, characters, acting, all of it. It has surpassed Battlestar as the most scientifically accurate sci-fi around and you just don't see quality like this coming from the film industry anymore

@@jakeg3733 Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders, The Expanse, Mandolorian all equally brilliant, timeless shows... and all releasing episodes in 2022 says you do indeed see the film industry churning out quality just as much if not more than anytime in history.

I think season 5 and the weekly release schedule will renew interest in it.

I imagine season 5 will give it a boost in popularity. It is completely underrated. Thanks for the sub.

Because it is exclusively on amazon prime. Makes it very hard to watch if you don't have a subscription.

@@geoffreycannon2197 150 million people have Prime...

@@geoffreycannon2197 The Boys is very popular and talked about so I doubt that. It’s much more likely that Amazon just hasn’t spent enough money advertising it.

One particular reason is that it doesn't tick certain 'boxes' like other shows. It doesn't pander to certain demographics, it doesn't push agenda, therefore a lot of places don't report on it.

Agree

Agree

Theres lots of better shows but it is pretty good

I came from Battlestar Galactica. IMO, it’s still the superior show. Highly recommended

@@GonzoGolf i'd love to have a list of better shows than the expanse lol. Could you also say why they are better without spoiling them?

"That really is how you go through life, isn't it?"

@@PetePeppers1 That exchange made me laugh out loud!

That was the best line in the whole damn series, IMO. Had me ROLLING! Too perfect being delivered by Holden, at THAT point in the show.

Im pretty sure the tier 3.7 civilisation would have some counter against protomolecule.

@@kaarelkahu212 In fact, the unknown aggressor aliens that destroyed the ring builders were likely a tier 3+ civilization. It appears they exist 'outside our realm', which means they have access to the multiverse. And they easily decimated the ring builder civilization.

protomolecule: *colonizes your planet* T3+ civilization: *thinks the protomolecule out of existence*

I don't think that you can place the "goths" on the kardashev scale for they seem to exist outside of our universe, maybe in some form of higher multiverse. We don't even know how they "evolutionized". Did they start like the Protomolecule or something humanlike o evolve from there to a point at which the could easily wipe the protomolecule from the face of the universe? For all we know they could be a natural defense mechanism or force of nature of that higher universe in which the Builders have nested the Ring Space (thus triggering that force / defense mechanism). Attention! Book/laconia spoilers incoming: Anyway, imagine being a type 0.6 civilization and suddenly a 2.8 civilization comes around to hijack your physiology as the new hardware to run their hive mind operating system on, then load the hive mind backup that is stored in the Adro system, and from there continue the fight against the goths. I'd call that a bad tuesday.

Think I might do that more often, thanks for the feedback

@@PetePeppers1 you have some quality Expanse content if you get ahead of the curve a produce some summary video's of the book's I bet that would get a ton of traction :) It's you and Alt X Shift who have the only decent Expanse content in the search engine

After we get through season 5 will do some speculation videos with more book related stuff. Probably do more of that around the release of Leviathan Falls as well.

Holden is able to do it for Proto-Miller. That's the only reason he had access and opportunity. It's not clear how they found the systems with habitable planets. Later in the final trilogy we get an idea where they are in relation to each other, but not insight into how they were first discovered. Could be a case of sending millions or billions of Phoebe style rocks out, or something else.

I think it's likely that the Builders just sent out proto molecule to systems with planets in the Habitable or "Goldilocks" zone. Why specifically such systems is unknown. Perhaps because they also intended to live on the planets they repurposed? Also an interesting point: in this video he explains what I think many missed; that Illus/New Terra had a purpose within the wider network of ring systems. What other purposes could systems have? And are that ALL habitable? If not, why not? I think in terms of letting humans in, I don't think the builders considered that they needed any other security other than what the ring station provides and presumably some sort of fleet to defend systems. I don't think they really anticipated competition seeing as the PM was designed to pretty much remove it.

Considering PM was designed to take single cells to highly evolved creatures it stands to reason that any planet finally able to connect to the gate indeed is habitable as it would become that way as the gate was attached to the network. Just a thought. It sat in our system for billions of years until something could activate it.

You can deduct lot more just from the show. What did the Protomolecule do all the time? It did not just build the sol gate. It gathered information, disassembled everything to learn what use it can take from whatever it was that it disassembled. That's how the builders evolutionized (Attention! entering spoilery and speculative territory now). They were a slowly evolving species that through the protomolecule attached itself to fast evolving species and copied the evolutionary achievements of these species. In a way they were like the Borg, just without the "Bring order to the chaos" mindset. It's just their natural existence and how they interact with the world of matter, without any sentient intention or prejudice. The "close the circuit" thing on the Ring Station was not a test to check if holden is like them. Quite to the contrary the Builders were asking "Do you come from the quantum realm like us or our enemies? Or are you made of matter configured in a way suitable to our plan?". In other words, holden could have put his dick in it to pass the test. The following vision was probably an experiment to see if his matter is compatible with what the builders needed. From Sesason 4 you can even deduct, what it could have been that the Builders wanted from humanity. Remwmber that sphere on Ilus? Everything that runs on the protomolecule died on ccontact, but Elvi could pass through it unharmed.

I'm really excited for season 5. Expect to make a lot of content throughout.

People often repeat that which they know before forming new thoughts.

Thanks for the feedback, plenty more to come.

Honestly such a beautifully made comment my guy. Really thought provoking. You seen S5 yet?

i feel like the station is beyond just AI, in warframe the orokin had technology to convert living beings into data and called them cephalons due to AI being too much of a risk. i feel like since the aliens are hivemind like, it could be controlled by the hivemind itself, in just a sort of hibernation mode only stirring to deal with what it perceives as threats

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK!!! Thats an interesting thought but unfortunately not the authors intended answer. Basically the Romans (Gate builders) havent achieved ftl travel. They need a point to conncect to. Imagine it like an airport. They send out the protomolecule to systems with organic matter. Once its there the protomolecule uses the organic matter as building blocks for the gates. Once its finished building, the ring comes online and connects to the ring space station, allowing interstellar travel. The "airport" is finished building and now planes can land there. That is the main use of the proto molecule.

if you read the books, the resion the goths killed off the builders was because the ringspace was a protrusion into another universe and it was siphoning energy out of that universe to keep them open. it is unlikely the leviathan has any consistent physical form as the entire species can be considered one organism made of different specialized units. and considering their evolutionary history it is possible that the protomolecule - specifically what was inside phoebe - is more of a seed than a bullet, and its the leviathans way of reproducing where it goes through all of its evolutionary stages in order to mature as the gate and rejoin the mother organism. i dont see why the leviathan would have more than one ring network as that would greatly reduce the efficiency of supply routes running between networks and require a lot more effort than just popping another ring on the existing network. the books also address the issue of fitting enough rings in the space as when the goths trigger a gamma ray burst that destroys two rings, the slow zone shrinks to keep the distances the same

The Romans built their "FTL" gate network by pretty much cheating and placing a gate network within another universe, where they could travel between systems at sublight speeds. Given how they're pretty much scouting out life by peering through telescopes, and taking a shot at lightyears of distance, it seems fair enough to say that even a slight error could push Phoebe wildly off path, and with no way to correct it once its far away from any of their outposts. As for an intelligent AI guiding Phoebe, I doubt that would be the case, since if that did happen, it'd be a far more profound plotpoint in the books, Protogen would undoubtable faun over legitimate intelligent tech than a goo which turns you into organic sludge. I think that the fate of Phoebe was a fortunate coincidence than a legitimate error. With the Builders needing habitable worlds to live on, It is pretty clear that they did somewhat rely on physical mediums for elements of their hive mind - Ghost Miller even says that the fact that Holden has a body gives him special status in interacting with Gate Builder tech, and the central hub of the Hive Mind was on the ring station itself, presumably a large portion of it dedicated to housing the "brain", adding further to the idea that physically existing is status. The worlds they colonised were presumably used to harvest resources (as in the case of Ilus with its large lithium deposits) or else be there for growing and expanding the reach of their own species, almost paralleling the human drive to explore space and colonise alien worlds. With their focus on life, I think that was just the way their technology developed, more along the lines of how we base our technology on metal. Transitioning away from it and onto some new, strange technological base would be jarring to say the least. Adding onto that is that biotech is their way of traveling the cosmos, by hijacking whatever single-celled organisms lived on potential host worlds. A million and a half people on Eros seems pretty overkill to achieve that. I think it is less about assimilating conscious life, and more about taking biomass and repurposing it into interstellar transport, like how a human would mine metal to turn into a plane. That'll be the case a thousand years from now, we'll still be flying around in boxes of metal since that is what our technology has been for millennia The "Goths'" primary aim for wiping out the Builders is pretty much them getting pissy at the Slow Zones existence - its constantly leeching energy from their universe to power the Ring Station and the Gates in ours, and had been doing so for billions of years. It probably took time for the effects of the leeching to become noticeable, and for the Goths to take action against them - its like how we took centuries to figure out that climate change is happening, and we're only just building solutions against it. It's like that, on a universal scale. The Builders messing with physics definitely looks like god-magic to primitive monkeys like us, but they were ultimately still bound by physics, Eros when it moved heated up by about 2 degrees C, having moved 200km in a couple seconds. Their efficiency is off the charts, but still within the realms of possibility physically. Also, yes, 1400 worlds is definitely only a fraction of their empire. In the closing chapter of one of the books, it is mentioned offhand that the 2 furthest systems apart are only 1000 lightyears away, about 1% of the entire galaxy if we take it by volume. It is definitely implied that the Ring builder empire was much, much larger. It was originally quoted that the Station had the power of "a million suns", which may just be hyperbole, or a literal statement of the size of the empire. As an interesting side note, that is about the number of planets that could harbour life if only 0.1% of planets within the habitable zone of stars evolved anything at all. With that, I'm going to guess that the "million suns" idea is closer to reality than not, which means that the Builders had control over the entire galaxy, and had been reduced to practically nothing as the Goths hive-mind cancelling effects spread across it. If I had to take a guess, I'd say that the region inhabited by mankind in the series was the furthest edge of the Gate Builder empire, meaning their homeworld would probably be across the galaxy from Earth's reference. Although once humanity does go beyond their inhabited space, they're going to find a lot of burnt up suns and a lot of dead worlds. Its safe to say that the fermi paradox has been solved in the nastiest way possible - literally nowhere else can harbour life except the tiny bubble that the gate system encompassed

I always thought it was the most scientifically inaccurate thing about this series that they describe the alien tech as a molecule. They appear to be nanites of some type that can repurpose other raw materials to assemble new structures. I know Protogen named it after their company but why not call it Protonite or something like that. If they originally thought it was biological from a behaviour perspective it behaves like a bacteria. Either way, a molecule is just a structure of 2 or more atoms that do not have inherent instructions on how to reproduce.

The ring Gate can be entered from either side, and looks the same from both sides, but you come out the same direction at the other end. we learned this in the most recent episode.

What have you got against the Primates pal ? Did one steal your banana as a kid ? Break your favourite toy ? This all, use a microwave thing. Use a bloody microwave,, we've been in a rocket and gone to space ! have you been to space at all ? no ? Didn't think so. Granted the monkeys are still plugging away at that whole Shakespeare thing, but in time they'll get it. You not seen Planet of the Apes ? So unless you want to meet four Gorillas and a Baboon in a dark alley one night, i'd leave off us.

@Pete Peppers Have you made Part 3 yet? Please let me know. Thanks

@Pete Peppers Can you remind me which episode in Season 3 shows to proto molecule structure leaving Venus?

I'll be doing 5 and 6 of the Expanse and definitely 6 for Saul.

The writers were just in a discussion about this on Twitter the other day - twitter.com/JamesSACorey/status/1339824545071386625?s=19

its probably a good comparation, but i believe that the builders in trying to destroy the stars in other systems they created something by accident that in turn fucked them up. it seems like it from the scenes were they shoot a star and then it appers to attacked them back or are dont remeber correcty snd they could have atacked those stars because that think that tacked them

​@@gerardovelazquez724 More like their von neumann probe construction life-form got into a place it should not have been. I imagine if the proto-molecule got trapped in inter dimensional space with nothing to contact it about progress, and no way for it to be contacted, it would effectively continue to "not stop the work," deconstructing ships that went through the ring, making it seem like there was an out-of-control infestation coming from the systems where ships were destroyed. Being a civilization as big as they were, it was likely: the severing of the gates from the infestation would have likely cut them from resources they needed and made them die out; they destroyed the gates on their end and survived as satellite colonies; and/or the nexus core killed those still connected.

i think what happoned is they started using rings but in doing so they unleashed sumthing unexpected because i think when you go thrugh a ring your going thrugh there world

Exactly my thought as ai see there are also rings now, protpmelecul is tested as weapon, same as flood on Installation 04, open space, much races and planets. Bi weapons ...also really good story. Sad that they all have to steal from each other

More like C'tan vs Deamos.. including some flood.

It's a pocket of our universe inside the place that the aggressors inhabit. Like a circular 2D plane sticking out into our world would be. The station siphons energy from their world and uses that to maintain the ring space and power itself.

@@TimTomChips It's really no wonder that the UA's were pissed at the Builders. From their perspective, the Builders invaded their universe and are stealing energy from it, doing only god knows how much damage to their universe in the process. The ring space is like a void bullet in their universe, but worse.

they say its getting paused, the problem is that the books "end" this timeline there, then there is a time jump of around 20 years. so many things change, for the last 2 books

@@gerardovelazquez724 I know it's difficult to adapt those last books but would you like to see the show end on a cliffhanger?

@Dan Correia well the last book is going to be published this year, so there's zero chance of producers screwing up the last seasons . Got didn't enjoy the same luxury

People aren't ready for season 5. Can't wait to finally see it all play out.

We'll see how much of the protomolecule story they include in season 5. Will definitely continue this series.

No problem, will be putting out a breakdown of the three episodes after they come out.

Yes, but what they never showed is what happens if you fly through it in the other direction. If it just works like normal space, then you could defend the ring easily by putting a ship behind the ring. It could shoot at anything entering the ring, but would be invisible to anything entering the ring. It's missiles would appear to the other side as being fired from inside the ring, not from the other side.

@@pfcrow I think it makes more sense for it to works both ways, would be weird if you can only enter a gate from "the front" but not the back. Say two gates A and B are connected, each have "a front" and back side, then Af Bf, and Ab Bb. In this setup, two ships should be able to enter a gate from opposite faces without crashing, since the gate is 2 dimensional...

@@EdwardChan.999 That's clearly not how it's depicted in the show. And since the gate space seems to have nothing outside the sphere, going through the other way would presumably be like trying to fly out of the sphere space without using a cube, which we're led to believe results in destruction. Now it's not what the show depicted, but what would work best is to have the other side of the gate connect to the sphere space on the exact opposite side of the sphere. So instead of 1300+ exits from the sphere space, there would be 2600+, as they would all be pairs. If I were writing the books, I might go with that. Or just have going through the gate the wrong way be the same as flying into the sphere-space outer wall. I haven't read the books, so I don't know if they addressed this at all.

Thanks. More to come.

@@PetePeppers1 i wanted to know is the books also called the expanse?

@@olechristianandersen4590 it's the Expanse series but each book has its own title. There are links to them in the video description.

Glad it was helpful!

Can the Donnager defeat Ra's ship? Can the Martian marines commandeer Ra's ship without casualties?

@@Joshua_N-A I highly doubt that they could defeat a ha'tak without energy based weapons and shields. Humanity itself would only be a type 1 civilization and them at least type 2, not a chance in hell.

I would support a video concerning how the technology of non-human origin in the series relates to the Fermi Paradox, and while not intending any pedantry, I feel I should offer here that the protomolecule does not 'repurpose unicellular life' but rather recognizes the capacity for self-replication in any thing with which it comes into contact and then appropriates that capacity, gaining (bio)mass and developing in complexity until it has reached a threshold for both at which point it travels to a given distance from the system's primary (or single star) and then creates the look, form and function of the Ring. Note I use the verb appropriate for what the protomolecule does to any self-replicating things it makes contact with, though a less diplomatic person could rightfully argue 'hijack' is what really conveys what the protomolecule does, and that using either 'appropriate' or the bowdlerized 'repurpose' is an effort in or at obfuscation. Whatever the gate builders were, believers in the sanctity and purity of life forms of any kind (which are seemingly all self-replicating systems everywhere in the universe) they are NOT. Cheers!

Without future book spoilers it does seem that the builders stifled natural evolutionary processes in the systems connected to the ring network. By the start of book 5 the powers that be have at least sent probes through gates, and haven't seen any signs of advanced intelligent life.

@@breakerofrocks the authors both have biology degrees, I believe, but they caution to keep it wiki-level. For all the intense studying seen at protogen we have yet to look at it under a microscope, let alone an electron microscope. We can speculate and have fun doing it. Does it have magnetic, electrical or gravimetric properties? Does it bring new elements to the table or use familiar ones? It must convert matter to energy once it reaches a certain level of sophistication. What is it's basis of replication? Some kind of quantum storage for it's basic instruction set which must be gigabytes. What level of AI? Does it have limited consciousness? It seems to do a pretty good Turing test with Miller. And finally, how does one ever get any privacy when you're hijacked by a "hive" mind? The human mind is a messy place, indeed. We can certainly hope it makes some improvements. Amos v2 ;>

@@PetePeppers1 although as Elvi points out, there logic for testing consciousness is pretty petty and costly.

@@jamesrmore yeah, it seems like sending millions of "phoebes" out to see what comes back might be the best strategy for constructing the network

No problem. Thanks for watching.

nah without alien arc it'll be so boring, the fact that such development start in 23th century is already very unrealistic, in real world by 2100 we'll have superintelligent AI but in this series there's no such thing, every space infrastructures build by human labors and theyre's even slavery, this is unbelievably slow progress, forunately the alien interference has give them a way to reach thousand stars as they should be

No problem, glad it was helpful.

Exactly what i thought when i 1st saw it.

These are clearly more complicated Creating an extra dimensional space linking over 1000 super gates constantly in such a way that using it angers some kind of quantum super beings into taking stabs at intelligent life across the galaxy Seems like more work than just linking two locations with some super conductors

Stargate, or halo rings....sinilar story

But with Pah Wraiths from DS9

@@johannesmohner8695 Halo rings ARE NOT a similar story. Those are super weapons designed to wipe out all life in the galaxy. The are not interstellar travel devices.

Probably techno-forming it into something like Illus.

1370ish systems wouldnt even bea a tiny quark in a grain of sand in a drop in a bucket to affectin universe expansion/contractions.. it might have a TEENY TINY effect in the Milky Way... but one would have to focus on the giant mass blackhole/uberRadiation wave emanating from the galactic center. Larry Niven wrote 5 more novels expounding on that informatiion to follow up on the foundations of his Puppeteer species from the RINGWORLD universe.

But the death of the universe will take very very very long no lifespan can be that long

I think they're more like the Photino Birds (sun eaters) in the Xeelee books by Steven Baxter.

He's important in the books because the opening of the ring gates made a person like him possible. That's part of the reason Avasarala sent Holden and the Roci to Illus hoping it would be a disaster, and that would slow down colonization efforts. Because they found a peaceful resolution to the conflict the exodus from Sol is starting, but the story isn't really about the colonization of the planets. It's more about people and how they're affected by these big changes.

@@PetePeppers1 ok so in the grand scheme of things, humans are basically abandoning Earth & Mars thanks to Marco. As of this writing, they don't make that clear in the TV show though.

@@Flippy_Nips they are abandoning Earth and Mars because they see an opportunity in the new worlds. Marco sees the instability that creates as an opportunity. By the time season 5 is finished it should all make more sense.

The gates don't connect to each other, they instead all connect to a shared hub space.

Hyperspace?

It is a bubble of our universe within the universe of the UA's, with the central station taking energy from their universe to power itself and the rings.

It was a planet. The ring builders just modified it.

The Gate Builders destroyed their own system trying quarantine it more or less. It didn't work because Unknown Agressors figured out how to destroy them after that.

As long as your enjoying life buddy. Keep it up

but that's exactly why these shows are absolutely masterclass. The fact that there are so many different factions, storylines, characters, motivations is exactly what makes the mystery around these shows work so well. They really are what "immersion" is all about because instead of a basic and straightforward story or show like stranger things or the 100, where you can sleep through episodes and still figure out what's going on, GoT and The Expanse are my absolute favorites because when you watch these shows, you get the feeling of listening to a bedtime story and get fascinated by every aspect of it. They really take you to a fictional world (or somewhere in space if you think about Expanse). It's really crazy how you can have shows with so much happening, you think they are just side quest, but then you figure out that every "side event" eventually collides with a main one. Got being mostly political but on the other hand you have literal ice zombies and an intelligent one controlling the pack. You have the Expanse where its basically Earth vs Mars vs The Belt, and as if this wasn't already a lot of drama, you get alien technologies and different dimensions. I love when shows make me wonder wtf is going on. Sorry about the long rant lol but i hope you agree. Both shows are even more fascinating upon rewatch when you start connecting the dots you missed the first time.

I thought I was the only one who got the stargate feeling. 🤣

They can do that, but the ring network existed before the Unknown Agressors showed up. They tried "disinfecting" systems by destroying them before shutting the network down completely to quarantine.

SPOILERS They find out later in the books that just about all of the systems have artifacts of some form or another. I don't think the homeworld is ever mentioned as being visited by humans, but it is described in the books, and it's a logical conclusion that one of them had to be in their system.

What are the similarities?

Exactly sounds like some Halo..thought about this way back when I was watching the series

@@kellymkwananzi9769 yeah to me learning about the builders makes me feel way back in 2007 learning about the Forerunners

actually it really sounds like the xeele series a hyper advanced nigh godlike technological race rander hopeless agasint a truly eldritch threat that they could not destory fast enough even the massive ring gates refrence the final scenes of the novel as the last solid matter species escape threw a gargauntuan ring to a new universe as there old was consumed by the photino or dark matter birds

Less than half a week officially