Safe Acension for Baseline Bob

[Drashner1]

There is something I don't understand : why is there any risk from Ascension to begin with ?
Why not make backup copies so if an Ascension-Seeker is destroyed/become a Blight/ or even transcend a new being without continuity with his old self; the transapient overseer can reload a version saved before the whole process or a stable transavant build ?

Couple of issues here - these aren't an 'all the time' thing, but they are a risk:

1) Backups are constantly updated - presumably there is a point, even in societies that consider the backup to = the original, after which there is so much divergence that they are long the same person. So the backups are constantly updated or updated regularly in some fashion.

If a sophont ascends to an S1 (for example), and it then takes a while for it to become apparent that things have gone off the rails - then the new being will have updated (and presumably overwritten) their previous backup and so the original is now effectively gone and you're stuck with the 'gone wrong' ascended being.

As mentioned above, you could certainly hold a separate backup copy somewhere isolated from the ascended - but at what point is it no longer considered the same person? This may vary from place to place.

2) A really back Blight/Perversion may cause so much damage that it destroys the Backups of not only its prior self but everyone else along with causing much destruction all around. So the original is killed regardless.

Both of these are more likely to be issues without transapient oversight of ascension, which is apparently fairly common. Blights, etc. are rare in the OA verse. But those that slip through tend to make an impression.

Todd