this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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Invincible (show and comics)

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[DISCUSSION] Invincible - S4E2 - I'll Give You the Grand Tour (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by LambdaRX@sh.itjust.works to c/invincible@lemmy.world
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As Nolan and Allen's mission takes a dangerous turn, Mark is pulled back into action when a new threat targets Earth. With tensions rising inside the Guardians, Mark begins to question who he can truly trust.

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[–] qualia@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

tl;dr: Shoulda just sequenced all the dead Viltrumites' genomes to bypass that bottleneck.

Genetics nerd here. Maximixing genomic diversity is indeed the only way to maximize fitness for a species. But just because billions upon billions of your species dies doesn't mean their info dies. Viltrumites (at least) have DNA-like genetic code meaning they have up to a max of a million years to sequence all that diversity.

If they have any familiarity with bioengineering they could either do in vitro fertilizations of the dead's gametes and implanting them en masse in surviving surrogates or just record all sequences in a massive database. Even mildly smart humans' ability to sequence and synthesize DNA is growing faster than Moore's Law. Over evolutionary time this might even lead to higher fecundity (cf: twins, triplets, etc) making Viltrumites stronger via a new dimension.

The only way around this plothole of their societal fear of an inevitable inbreeding bottleneck for me is if their entire society has specialized in only combat and have completely neglected science. Which could be possible but makes the world less realistic for me. While they could surely conquer a more brainy species to do their bioengineering for them, maybe they'd consider that a significant breach of privacy (e.g. the brainy species could create their own army of Viltrumites with an ideology beneficial to themselves).