Some things that need to be improved (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, October 22, 2014, 15:48 (3471 days ago) @ car15

We are violent thugs, parasites who call everybody else dark and steal their scraps to keep us going.

We make no knowledge of our own.

As others have theorized, this might actually be the point.

During the Golden Age we were certainly making knowledge of our own. The Clovis Bray tower we ascend on Mars was part of a much larger research complex as indicated by the subway maps showing several additional facilities along the route in addition to a mall and park. There's also the neat little advertisement (in the Grimoire I think) from Clovis Bray where they are trying to recruit the best and brightest minds by basically offering them unlimited resources to work on their mad experiments. The Ishtar Academy on Venus was also a major source of knowledge. They seemed to have been, among other things, studying the remnants of the Vex and eventually got in over their heads with it. Beyond that, we were mining the asteroid belt and gas giants during the Golden Age and were using the Moon to slingshot cargo cheaply into the outer solar system.

In the modern day of The City Age we are almost certainly making less, innovating less, and mostly relying on The Traveler for protection and the successes of our past for advancement, but as far as we know right now we never invaded another race's solar system or picked through the remains of their dead cities. The City is said to have industries and factories and is said in game (through weapon descriptions and such) to be relearning how to build things as well as we could during our Golden Age. It's understandable that we aren't advancing as fast though. We were once a race of billions, now we are one city under siege that might be home to a mere 10 million. (There's no data for The City's population that I'm aware of so I'm just estimating based its apparent size as viewed from the Tower.)