I know this is kind of a basic question, but I'm still confused about it. So the purpose of the Reapers is to preserve organic life yet every 50,000 years they come and annihilate advanced organic species?

yep

lol

They only take the species advanced enough to create artificial life and leave everything else alive, because if artificial lifeforms decided to declare war they would destroy all life and then no organic species would exist ever again.

It's kind of dumb, but it makes sense from their point of view.

They don't wipe them out, necessarily. They preserve their essence inside the reapers, like in ME2, when the humans were getting liquidized and fed into the new Human Reaper. It keeps all the dna and genetic data safely stored inside.

yeah it makes sense from the reapers perspectives

they were told to preserve life (them being an AI) so they thought of all the different angles and decided that technology could be hazardous to all life in the galaxy. so they kill or harvest the intelligent and advanced races, burying technology for another 50,000 years, with life continuing after many cycles of harvesting

it's not the best preservation method but it works

WE CANNOT COMPREHEND IT.

WE CANNOT COMPREHEND IT.

Repears are more or less The Borg

@Brodehouse said:

@Baillie and @WarlordPayne nailed it. While the Reapers are a synthetic (or an organic-synthetic?) life form, they do carry the compunction to continue the process of organic life as a whole. Synthetic life created by advanced organic life may not have the same moral compunctions, after all, synthetic life does not require organic life for its survival. I've used a pruning metaphor; the Reapers are cutting off the highest branches of a tree to prevent it from growing into a power line and burning the whole tree to the ground There's also the typical villain idea of "look, I saved them, in Reaper form!" and not understanding that maybe those races didn't want to become Reapers. "My creators did not like my solution."

But wouldn't that make Shephard the bad guy because if he stops the Reapers, then eventually organic life will ceased to exist? Whereas if he doesn't stop them then organic life will only have to be occasionally reset, not cease to exist?

Or will life just become advanced enough to recreate the Reapers and the Mass Relays and do this whole fucking thing all over again?

@believer258 said:

@Brodehouse said:

@Baillie and @WarlordPayne nailed it. While the Reapers are a synthetic (or an organic-synthetic?) life form, they do carry the compunction to continue the process of organic life as a whole. Synthetic life created by advanced organic life may not have the same moral compunctions, after all, synthetic life does not require organic life for its survival. I've used a pruning metaphor; the Reapers are cutting off the highest branches of a tree to prevent it from growing into a power line and burning the whole tree to the ground There's also the typical villain idea of "look, I saved them, in Reaper form!" and not understanding that maybe those races didn't want to become Reapers. "My creators did not like my solution."

But wouldn't that make Shephard the bad guy because if he stops the Reapers, then eventually organic life will ceased to exist? Whereas if he doesn't stop them then organic life will only have to be occasionally reset, not cease to exist?

Or will life just become advanced enough to recreate the Reapers and the Mass Relays and do this whole fucking thing all over again?

Not necessarily. The Reapers are acting out of a concern for something that may or may not happen, but to them is an inevitability. They're not all knowing though, and organic life could go on to exist perfectly fine indefinitely. So by stopping the Reapers Shepard wouldn't have doomed organics absolutely, but the risk of losing organic forms to synthetic would be unchecked (by the Reapers at least).

Theoretically forms with a purpose similar to the Reapers could be created at some point in that future, but there's nothing that deems that the only path for life to go down.

The Reapers are a solution to a problem that threated life at a time, but they are bound to that problem and see no other direction for organic life to progress. But in reality, things are not so certain.

Unless the Extended Cut and Leviathong changed that too.