Weren't the crew already doomed before WAU

[Abion47]

When Simon-2 reactivated the power plants at Upsilon, that's what seemed to activate Catherine, since the first communication with her happens immediately following turning on the turbines. So in that sense, had Simon never been in Pathos-II, and assuming that the power plant hadn't come back into operation by some other means, the mockingbird known as Catherine would never have existed at all.

Had the other scenario happened, it would depend on when Simon would have died. If he died while she was plugged in somewhere, then I imagine that, yes, Catherine would have slowly gone insane. Not the violent kind of insane, though, but the kind of insane where you are left completely alone for days, weeks, months, or years with nothing but your thoughts. You slowly start to just withdraw from the world and enter a sort of trance, a waking sleep in which nothing seems real and time stands still. She would probably try to keep doing something for a while, of course, like maybe trying to transfer her consciousness into a robot with some form of mobility, but depending on where she gets trapped, it's unlikely she would find host body capable of making the trek to Phi and launching the ARK, if she found a body at all. Ultimately, though, her fate would be similar to that of Simon-3's - trapped without a purpose in a world of darkness and fear, just waiting for fate to decide to finally pull the plug and end it all.

On the other hand, if Simon had died during the times where Catherine wasn't plugged in, then Catherine wouldn't even know about it. During those moments, time truly does stand still for her. To be honest, I consider this to be the scarier possibility, to be trapped in a temporal limbo, waiting for someone to come along and revive me back into the world. But that moment could potentially never come, and she would just forever be trapped in a state that is less than sleep, less than comatose, but simultaneously existing and not existing. In that state, she still exists conceptually, but in terms of her own reality, she may as well have never even been born.

[SlackerinDeNile]

You should be a science fiction writer if you aren't already Abion.

Keep in mind, both Simon and Catherine, the digital versions, do not exist in the same way that we do. They are highly advanced electronic copies of human minds. The 'limbo state' you refer to is literal non-existence.

[Abion47]

I mean, is that really so different from us, though? Simon's and Catherine's minds were the cortex chips. Our minds are biological brains. Both run on electricity in some form. And when that electricity stops, the mind ceases to function. In my opinion, that's a philosophical difference, not a practical one.

[SlackerinDeNile]

To be honest though, elements of the Cortex chip technology and Catherine's brief explanations of the science behind it to Simon are kind of contradictory and don't make a lot of sense when you compare them to real-life explanations of the human brain and computers.

The best example of this is in Theta when Simon asks Catherine why they can't just read through the files and code of the digital copy of Brandon Wan to find the security code they were looking for and she tells him that they 'just can't do that'.

She doesn't explain why they can't do that and I don't really get it. If these digital copies are simply advanced simulations of human minds then wouldn't they contain all the thoughts and memories of those people in digital form? Shouldn't it be possible to simulate individual memories or even just read through their programming to find that specific memory? (Yes I am aware that it would likely take quite a while.)

[Abion47]

Well, for one, our current understanding of how the human brain works is virtually non-existant, so making informed comparisons on that front would be extraordinarily difficult.

That being said, I imagine that the actual "data" of a brain scan would be insanely complex. Like, it would make Google's neural network algorithms look like chicken scratch. Even Catherine, who has spent her entire life studying these kinds of things and who invented the ARK, cannot just browse through the data and expect to understand it. It's not going to be like some XML file with all the memory fields clearly indexed, or even something that would even be remotely human-readable.

As an example, try using any old text editor or hex editor and open up a PNG image file. You might be expecting to find all the pixel data somewhere along with perhaps some metadata information describing the image itself. What you would actually find is a bunch of nonsense that a human couldn't hope to interpret as image data. That's because the image has been run through a compression algorithm that makes it easy for computers to read it as well as store it in a smaller file, but at the cost of losing human readability. Take that concept and multiply it by a million, and that's what a brain scan would probably look like.

They might have some program somewhere they can run to try and brute force their way into recovering the information from the scan data, but it would likely be error prone and take forever (I'm talking weeks or months), and any more "intelligent" program would probably be doing more or less the same thing that Catherine and Simon were doing anyway.

And his name is Brandon Wan, by the way.

[SlackerinDeNile]

Well, for one, our current understanding of how the human brain works is virtually non-existant, so making informed comparisons on that front would be extraordinarily difficult.

That being said, I imagine that the actual "data" of a brain scan would be insanely complex. Like, it would make Google's neural network algorithms look like chicken scratch. Even Catherine, who has spent her entire life studying these kinds of things and who invented the ARK, cannot just browse through the data and expect to understand it. It's not going to be like some XML file with all the memory fields clearly indexed, or even something that would even be remotely human-readable.

As an example, try using any old text editor or hex editor and open up a PNG image file. You might be expecting to find all the pixel data somewhere along with perhaps some metadata information describing the image itself. What you would actually find is a bunch of nonsense that a human couldn't hope to interpret as image data. That's because the image has been run through a compression algorithm that makes it easy for computers to read it as well as store it in a smaller file, but at the cost of losing human readability. Take that concept and multiply it by a million, and that's what a brain scan would probably look like.

They might have some program somewhere they can run to try and brute force their way into recovering the information from the scan data, but it would likely be error prone and take forever (I'm talking weeks or months), and any more "intelligent" program would probably be doing more or less the same thing that Catherine and Simon were doing anyway.

And his name is Brandon Wan, by the way.

Okay, fair enough, that was a big error on my part.

And yes, I edited the post with the correct character name, thanks.

[linkhead2]

A year or so (I don't remember the exact dates) they began to starve to death, evidently they didn't have the means to fish effectively.

Why do you think so? From the top of my head, Omicron has fish farms that seem to be in working condition and were operated until WAU screamed.
The only station that was starving was Tau. That was because they were in the Abyss, where they probably can't fish (and have limited space to potentially establish a greenhouse) and rely on the plateau stations to supply them. Omicron cuts them out, and they can't control the Climber from the Abyss, so after a while they run out of food. That's how I understood the story.
Also, Akers was able to stay at Delta for five full months. Sounds like other stations might have had extensive supplies or were even self-sustainable.

From what I guessed, The MS Curie used to ship objects from Lisbon to Pathos-II It says in the Wikia, "The ship was used to bring resources and equipment from inland to PathosII"