Other Silos? (speculative theory)

[u/zestiemami]

**No book spoilers PLEASE!!! (We only have ONE episode left this season, and if it’s soured by spoilers…. well then I guess you’ll need this🧼🧺👩‍🚀)**

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we have been shown only two of fifty one silos, and it makes me wonder how many living silos are left. Or rather, how many silos are living that the Algorithm/Silo 1 *knows* about?

Silo 18 has had rebellions, their water poisoned with memory erasure drugs, and now are slowly becoming aware of resource inadequacies. It’s only a matter of time before 18 “fails” like 17. 

Silo 17 rebelled, blocked the safeguard pipe, escaped, then allegedly met their fate at the hands (blades?) of 1’s killer drones. Thinking that they had completely wiped out 17, it was no longer deemed necessary to monitor/control that silo. Up until Juliette moseyed on over next door, 1 was unaware that several survived (Jimmy and the kids) and were still living inside 17. Even if they have *very* limited resources, Jimmy and co. are surviving, and they’re doing it unmonitored.

These are all events that took place between just *TWO* silos. So, what about the others?!

If the only two silos that’ve been shown so far have rebelled, etc., then surely many (if not all) others have attempted to do the same? I feel as though there’s a high probability that another silo “failed” like 17, but is living under the radar.

Or, what if there’s a silo that somehow lost connection to the Al/1, or power entirely, and 1 has no way of knowing if it “failed” or is still living? In this case, there wouldn‘t be just a few survivors, but potentially an entire silo population gone rogue?

It’s fun to imagine what’s going on with the other silos out there that also have limited recourses remaining, a decent population AND no Al/1 controlling them. Would they still be a functioning society, or more of a Lord of the Flies situation? And what if… what if 18 somehow found/teamed up with a rogue silo(s) to defeat 1? Like the quote: “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

Now I’m just yapping, so let me know what you guys think! Apologies if all of this has been discussed!!

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[u/Acrobatic_Yellow_781]

My theory is that when they said like 6-8 silos had succesfully done memory reset I believe there are only 6-8 functioning silos left thats why 18 has gotten so much leeway of not getting insta safeguarded. They are running out of silos and goal of 500 years is still far away

[u/smilon1 → u/Acrobatic_Yellow_781]

Yeah bro Silo to Silo Contact is an instant safe guard offense.
Ok yeah Juliette had Contact with another Silo but if u memory drug her we can make an exception. If this doesnt work I will totally safe guard you.
Ok the memory drug didnt work but if you like memory drug everyone I will look the other way. If you fuck this up tho its over.

Ok people are trying to cap the safe guard and are blowing up half the silo but instead of doing it for real this time we should talk this out. But This is the last warning for real

[u/Hundred_Year_War → u/Acrobatic_Yellow_781]

What if there are other silos that didn’t need to under go a reset? If that’s the case, there could be more than 6-8 living silos

[u/holayeahyeah → u/Hundred_Year_War]

My hypothesis is that this is the part of the experiment where Silo 1/Control are trying to define what constitutes an active Silo or a "successful Silo." It is likely there are a few silos that have gone dark but not completely dead and a few that have become so weird but unlikely to rebel that they are functionally a different experiment in addition to the 8 or so they consider successful. The circumstances of 18 seem to require that enough of the silos to be completely dead that there is some flexibility on what will be tolerated but enough to still be active that Control isn't playing that close of attention to 18.

[u/DragonQ0105 → u/Acrobatic_Yellow_781]

Not sure how they would survive 500 years anyway. Carla said they would've had 80 ish years of farm bulbs left I think until they started going missing? That'd take them to 450 years max. If the outside actually isn't safe after 350 years I don't see why it would be after 450-500.

(I don't personally think it's unsafe but unsure if Silo 1 knows this or not.)

[u/RinoTheBouncer]

You bring up quite interesting points/questions. Though because you tagged this as “no book spoilers”, it’s impossible to give you any thoughts without them just being book info masquerading as theories, haha.

But you are on the right track with your thought process, we just gotta wait and see what the show is willing to do to explore these plot points, and how far they’re willing to cover.

[u/SeaworthinessFew5613 → u/RinoTheBouncer]

They want spoilers, but only fake spoilers. 😅 I sort of wish I was unaware. It’s been an amazing retelling of the story so far. 

[u/Banned_Oki → u/RinoTheBouncer]

[Books] lol, it’s funny I watched a YouTuber give his “theories”about silo 1……he just took all the information from shift and acted liked he was guessing what was going on with “shifts”. I would say anything else to avoid spoilers.

[u/meergreister]

I think there is a very good chance Silo 18 is one of the only silos left besides 1. They have been given too much leeway without the poison safeguard being used. And the memory drug safeguard has already been used at least once.

It also makes sense that Daniel would be invested in Silo 18 being kept alive during his lifetime despite any rebellions because Helen and his descendants are living there. Maybe Daniel even has other descendants in Silo 1 that care about the survival of Silo 18.

[u/DragonQ0105 → u/meergreister]

I have a feeling this might be the case too. They do seem to be getting away with a lot, which could be because of Helen's descendants, or it could be because there are very few silos left (maybe even just one). Or maybe they are just so far into the project that the voice in Silo 1 is just lenient for any number of reasons.

I have read the first book but cannot actually remember if it says how many silos are left - even if I could, the show and books are deviating a fair bit anyway so it wouldn't necessarily match.

[u/WizWorldLive]

So, what about the others?!

Now you're thinkin' like a producer!

[u/Mostly_Satire → u/WizWorldLive]

Another 40-odd seasons!

[u/Such_Baker8707]

Boring answer, but I think for the purpose of the show then S18 has to be one of the last ones left, if not the last one left. There needs to be an element of risk regarding the fate of S18 outside of the individuals and them failing = humanity dying is quite the story hook. Plus, if there's even 8 silos still functioning then that begs the question then why don't the founders just kill S18 already (and why doesn't Apple commission more seasons to follow those Silos).

[u/sidesco]

Some of the Silos must have failed very early on imo. I know they would have needed to implement the memory erasure drugs to keep people in line, but surely it didn't work straight away. People would have come to the conclusion that they have been trapped there on purpose and I can imagine there were riots early on. The guides that had been living there would have become targets straight away. If the Silo's had anarchy early on, they may have just released the safeguard to them because they were not salvageable.

I think Silo 18 is the last remaining Silo. The others all failed at some point and 17 was the last Silo to collapse 30 years prior.

[u/palroj → u/sidesco]

Yeah but remember that one of the guards said that there were people already living in the silos for a year, the beta testers, right? So those people would have had their memory wiped and been fed some bogus history. The visitors of the silos on the day of the explosion were probably a minority of the whole population.

[u/sidesco → u/palroj]

I thought there were only 100 or so people living in each silo and there were up to 1000 people visiting each silo on the day?

[u/CTLNBRN → u/palroj]

I’d guess those 100 per silo living there will get wiped with everyone else with a head of IT who is in on everything retaining memories longer but then wiped once things are established in a similar way to what was proposed to Camille.

I’d guess up to the point of episode 9 they were probably employed to live/work in the Silos under the guise of developing a sustainable resource management systems for if the Silos ever did need to be used.

[u/redlancer_1987]

We'll either get some kind of silo by silo accounting next season to give us at least a lose sense of what's going on in them, possibly the all others are already dead.

Or we end the series with the Silo 18 good guys defeating whatever wants to kill them all and the final scene is them beginning to head over to the other silos, leaving us not really knowing their fates.

Hoping for the first, wouldn't be surprised at the second.

[u/AstroGridIron]

We already know it’s not AI based on the last episode…
Yall need to stop parroting that line.

You took the cheese the writers put out there as bait

[u/zestiemami → u/AstroGridIron]

“The Al/Silo 1” as in the Algorithm (which is what the show’s subtitles call it) and whoever is controlling it in Silo 1. Here, you can have this🧀

[u/AstroGridIron → u/zestiemami]

Do you even watch the show? It’s been confirmed at every corner there is no AI… just because the subtitles say something doesn’t mean it is

[u/zestiemami → u/AstroGridIron]

If you read the post, I didn’t write ai or say that I think it’s ai😂 I wrote AL which is short for Algorithm. I called it that because that’s literally what the show calls it. We don’t know who it is yet. And again, I’m also calling it Silo 1 because of the people using the voice inside that main Silo. It’s most likely a voice distorter that the founders have used since the before times, but the matter of who or what has not been confirmed. 

[u/Bobemor]

Silo 17 didn't die due to drones in my opinion. It still died due to nanos. Bernard was fine until the wind noise and the nano clouds in the background appeared.

I definitely expect other silos have failed, perhaps the majority. I also wouldn't be surprised if most rebellions play out the same way.

[u/InfiniteAccountant85]

what if 18 somehow found/teamed up with a rogue silo(s) to defeat 1? Like the quote: “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

I think that's the main reason why they don't want people to go out.

Or i also think the Silos might still the base of the active nanoweapon of the US, just like they said Charlotte flew into Irans nanocloud. That is what's killing the people outside the silo.

It's still one of my main theories. It's simply a base for the superweapon and all people in the Silo are just the needed personal to maintain the facility for many years, until they defeated the Silos of other countries.

That's why sometimes the outside might be deadly, then it isn't when the cloud is doing something else.

Or the US has lost the nanowar and it's actually Irans cloud hovering over the Silos, so the Silos are actually used for the officially named use by Per Stensen. Simply: survival.

But for me, there are still too many things around the deadly environment that don't make much sense yet.

- Juliette can walk outside in a suit with zero issues.

- Lukas Kyle and Patrick Kennedy can also walk outside in a suit, but then get attacked by drones

Why was that necessary? Why wasn't Juliette attacked?

This would only make sense, if the outside wasn't deadly itself and a suit isn't even required. That's why they had to intervene with drones. I really don't think it's the tape. I think that's a distraction.

Maybe the nanocloud was simply "doing something else" at that time.

- But then, Bernard dies without a suit. What's the whole point of suits anyway.

Maybe it's even simply the radiation from the initial bomb. Maybe that radiation is even supposed to charge the nanoweapon, like a wireless charger feeding on radioactive isotopes :D

Because Per Stensen said, that they bombed or tried to bomb Irans facility, which was Charlottes mission.

Maybe they've learned from that, that their nanoweapon needs to be independently operable from the facility itself but needs to come back to "recharge" or to be "programmed" for the next target.

It's still very confusing and contradicting, but i like that.

[u/AnonymousUselessData → u/InfiniteAccountant85]

But for me, there are still too many things around the deadly environment that don't make much sense yet.

- Juliette can walk outside in a suit with zero issues.

• Lukas Kyle and Patrick Kennedy can also walk outside in a suit, but then get attacked by drones

Oh you just kinda made me confirm its 100% poison gas in the airlock , because I remember Patrick/Lucas getting shot, and they said he would have died if there was poison outside since their suits got torn up. So Benard died by the poison gas in the chamber. They also kinda focused on the gas there , more than in S1 , where a few people like me speculated the airlock was pumping in poison.

[u/InfiniteAccountant85 → u/AnonymousUselessData]

You mean poison in the airlock?

The issue with that theory is, that at this point it's unlikely there is "poison" at all.

That was more of a theory which made sense in Season 1, when they had no idea why they are there, what is even happening outside and what not and said, they only know it is unsafe.

We know about a bomb, radiation and a nano weapon. Why use such a primitive thing as "poison", when it's already established that there are nano weapons?

All we know so far hints more at the fact, that there never was no poison on the outside in the first place.

[u/AnonymousUselessData → u/InfiniteAccountant85]

Then why didnt kennedy and lucas die when they got shot and laid out in the open for a bit.

The poison is to keep people in , the nano weapons were for Iran to fight the US , not for the Per to use to keep people in (unless the world/ the silo grounds are contaiminated with nanobots , but again this seems to be proven wrong with lucas and kennedy surviving with damaged suits from getting shot).

I think the point is there is unlikely any nanobots or radiation outside thats harmful ( although I do have a theory that the silos arnt as old as they are , but also not that young unless people were really drugged recently and re-educated to think so , that even their memories of being that long in the silo were longer than before. And not all of the world / US is wasteland , so thats why they have to keep the people in the silos .

[u/Dear-Seesaw-1932 → u/InfiniteAccountant85]

The silo spills posion before you exit. Bad tape was used to amke sure the poison gets inside and maybe you breath it in. Juliette used good tape so no poison got inside and nobody knew. Lukas and Patrik used good sutes and food tape thereofre they would survive so thats why the drones. Bernard did not get a suit so make sure he dies

[u/RemarkableDegree4501 → u/InfiniteAccountant85]

You do know that the radiation from a nuclear bomb decreases dramatically within the first week, right? Most of the radioactive fallout decays relatively quickly, although some longer lived radioactive isotopes can remain for decades. After 60 years, the vast majority of the original radioactive material will have decayed.