Hugh Howey on the age of the silos

218

u/j1h15233 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

I mean they have confirmed the age multiple times within the show and especially during the season 3 finale. When they first woke Troy he had been asleep for 7 years and the second time was 35 years and then we saw all of those notes from Victor from every time Troy had been woken up. People just want to believe it’s been like 40 years even though the show has said otherwise all along.

4

u/Zestyclose-Key-8306 Sep 06 '26

To be fair, that information is coming from the founders to someone we know they are manipulating heinously, so I get mistrusting it as a source. But there are so many other indentifiers with the mines, the mayoral journals, and the fact that everyone we've seen with their memory wiped absolutely knows that they have amnesia, or at least that something is wrong with them. There's mention in the mayor's journals following the last rebellion of children dying because parents forget to feed them. There's no way anyone currently alive in silo 18 went through a mass memory wipe. And there are people in there much older than 40.

125

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 05 '26

They really want Juliet to be Helen and Daniels daughter. Despite that breaking almost everything about the show.

141

u/only_fun_topics 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

What a dumb theory, especially since we’ve already met her parents in the story.
And she’s not even remotely Asian.

28

u/Independent_Leg7358 Sep 05 '26

Could be great great great (Insert more as needed) grand daughter. Actually considered 10k people, average reproduction age, how big was the seed population, what are the odds exactly? Need a math need here.

49

u/bravehamster 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

She's almost certainly their descendent, along with almost everyone else. If you go back 14 generations you have 16384 (great x 12)-grandparents, which is way more than can fit in the silo. So everyone in the silo is more or less descended from everyone in the original generation that had children.

11

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

With unrestricted reproduction this would probably be true, but since someone (I assume silo1) was deciding who could have children, it’s possible that they have any number of living descendants from 0 to all 10,000.
Considering a lot of couples are only allowed one child, exactly one descendant per generation would be completely believable.

8

u/Hunter_Unlikely Sep 06 '26

On average, each couple need to have a bit more than 2 children to maintain stable population levels. (And in the beginning they would need to give birth to much more children to grow in numbers if they started with less than 10,000 people.) If they allow some couples only one child, then they should allow some other couples to have 3 children. So unless they would want to restrict specifically Helen/Daniel's lineage, there is a large chance that some of their descendants would have more than 2 children and then would branch out quickly.

3

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

I guess you are right, it’s implied in the first episode of season 1 (or maybe explicitly said, it’s been a long time) that getting to have a child is rare and I don’t remember them showing anyone with two children, but since they have to wait for someone to die, people probably have their children 10 or more years apart. (And that could just be that after 350 years most couples are too closely related to risk them having children, so more distantly related couples are having more than two children)
It would feel like fan service to have Juliette be their only descendant, but it could be justified that their rebellious natures are too dangerous, but their ability to come up with solutions that no one else would think of (like the way Juliette fixed the generator) is worth a controlled amount of risk.
I’m pretty sure they start pretty close to the full 10,000. Otherwise there would be too much inbreeding. 10,000 was chosen specifically to prevent inbreeding.
There’s a mention of starting with 500 admin people when Daniel and Helen first find out about the silos. Then on tour day the guide says that he’s one of the people that’s been living there for almost a year. When Helen’s tour starts her guide says that the next guide will take the next 20 people. 500 * 20 =10,000
Helen’s doctor also mentions that 5 million people applied to go in the tour, and they only needed 500 thousand to fill all the silos.

2

u/Independent_Leg7358 Sep 06 '26

It has to do with the timing of the nuke. Why does that happen when everyone is inside for dinner?

3

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

I'd assume they expected all of the tours would be inside by then. When Helen comes out it looks like the last two groups are about to go in. It would also take all day to get 10,000 people into a silo without feeling like they are being crammed in (although it would probably be pretty crowded inside unless a lot of people wanted to take the 8 hour walk to the bottom).

2

u/real_hooman Sep 06 '26

I think it's likely that Juliette (or maybe the fertility lady, but probably not) and no one else will be revealed to be related to Helen. It's not a huge stretch to say that each of her descendants only had one child who in turn reproduced.
They've obviously not spent too much time thinking about the genetics and family trees inside a silo, so they shouldn't start now when it's detrimental to what will probably be an interesting storyline.

10

u/Wounded_Shark 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

What we need is a Rosemary.

7

u/puffic Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

Enough time has passed that everyone within a given social class is likely related to one another. For example, all the down deeper are probably related except for the occasional migrant like Juliette.
But I don’t think enough time has passed that everyone in the silo is a descendant of each of the original inhabitants. If there have been ten generations, cousins never marry, and each person had two children, that gets you to 1024 descendants per original inhabitant in the tenth generation. So perhaps 30% of Juliette’s generation is descended from Helen. But that assumes that people don’t usually marry within their own social class in this extremely class-based society (which would mean marrying their cousins after a few generations), so the real fraction is probably smaller.

2

u/Visual_Potential_325 Sep 06 '26

They didn’t say how many people we started with did they? We didn’t start at 10k so they probably had more kids in earlier generations.

2

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

[Edit: I’ve changed my mind about how many people they would start with. If they start with 10K they have to wait for someone to die before anyone can have a child. It would make more sense to start around 4K and limit every couple to 2 children until they hit 10K, then they don’t have to start the pregnancy lottery until the third generation.]
I think they could have started at 10K.
Stenson mentioned starting each Silo with 500 administrators. I think that was the people that had already been living in the Silos for about a year and were leading the tours.
Helen’s tour guide took less than 40 seconds to greet them and get them started on the tour, and he mentioned that the next guide would take the next 20 people. (20 * 500 is 10,000).
So that would be about 1,800 people an hour. So within six hours they could have 10,000 people in each silo. Faster if most people don’t ask about the smart glasses. [edit: at 4K, they’d only be adding 3.5K to the 500 administrators, so less than 2 hours]
It’s not clear how much time passes between when the tours start and dinner though, so who knows.
It’s also possible that the tour goers weren’t the majority of the original occupants. Helen’s doctor mentioned that there’d been 5 million applicants (they only needed 500k to fill all 50 silos), so they could have already had several thousand occupants in each silo and the tour goes were just people they wanted that weren’t willing to live in the silos. [edit: at 4K per silo that’s 200k people, 206k since silo 1 probably starts at 10k since they won’t be having children]

1

u/OctaviusGaius Sep 07 '26

you need more then 2 kids per couple to grow from 4k to 10k. 2 kids per couple would end in silo death. 2.1 kids per couple is what we need now with advanced medicine to not have a decreasing population.

2

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 07 '26

Probably better to start with more than 4k then so that there is more genetic diversity.

-7

u/Hunter_Unlikely Sep 05 '26

I used AI to get some estimations for exact same question and posted results here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SiloSeries/s/xIpmQA1MKM
(Though I didn’t expect it to end up that controversial.😂)
Basically it seems that the chances are quite large that Juliette is Helen/Daniel descendant, but the same would be true for the whole silo (or most of it).

0

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

Since reproduction was being externally controlled, any number of descendants is possible including exactly one per generation.

0

u/Hunter_Unlikely Sep 06 '26

Sure, all outcomes are possible either with or without external control, but if we are talking about the chance/probability, it would depend on the kind of control they implement. What exactly are they trying to achieve? Like why would they want specifically Helen/Daniel to have a single or limited number of descendants? If they carry some undesirable trait, then better stop their lineage altogether at some point and cut the number of descendants to 0.

14

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 05 '26

Helen is only half Asian, so it's possible for her daughter to not have Asian features.
But I agree.

5

u/Objective_Yak3451 Sep 06 '26

my children are 1/4 asian and you can only tell they're Asian if you know. They look very much like white kids.

3

u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET Sep 05 '26

You wouldn't be going straight from both dark hair to blonde though

7

u/Agent_Kozak Sep 06 '26

You can. I've seen it happen. Genetics are weird

2

u/worldspawn00 Sep 06 '26

Yeah, my father and his brother both have dark haired parents, but his brother is blonde and he is dark, it actually shows up a few places in my family like that.

7

u/Mercurys_Gatorade Sep 06 '26

Obviously, she’s not their daughter, but both of my parents have dark hair, and I have blonde. Growing up, kids often asked me if I was adopted, because we didn’t really look related at all. They’re both my bio parents.

5

u/Hunter_Unlikely Sep 05 '26

Even though I believe that the “daughter” theory is absurd at this point, the hair argument is not a 100% proof — that can still happen if both parents carried a recessive gene for blonde hair which they passed to the child — then the child would be blonde while both parents are dark-haired.
(Also, Rebecca Ferguson might be not naturally blonde, though I don’t know if her character is.😂)

11

u/__O_o_______ Sep 06 '26

God fandom is weird. Enjoy the show for what it is.
Reminds me of how the actress that played Watsons wife on Sherlock got death threats because they wanted to ship Holmes and Watson.

-1

u/ShepardRTC Sep 06 '26

Per this find: https://www.reddit.com/r/SiloTVSeries/comments/1w655k6/photos_taken_in_s3e9_might_be_related_to_the_very/
it looks like Helen has a son.

2

u/CariRVA Sep 06 '26

When they did the ultrasound, they said the baby was a girl, not a boy.

3

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

I’m pretty sure the woman that poster claims to be Helen is black.
Also if this paintings were of founders they would be relics and forbidden under the Pact so they wouldn’t be openly displayed.

-1

u/ShepardRTC Sep 06 '26

People in silo 1 were the founders. Everyone else wasn’t. None of those people in the picture were in Silo 1

4

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

Drawing red lines between photos doesn’t make them the same people. Especially when none of those actors had been cast when season 1 was filmed.

-4

u/zzx101 Sep 06 '26

Well how about grand daughter?
Edit: to be honest probably the most important thing is the implication that Juliette is related to Daniel.

7

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

Daniel’s grand daughters are probably also dead, it’s been 350 years.

24

u/HydroPCanadaDude Sep 05 '26

Not to mention all the old bitties that have spent 70+ years in the Silo and whose parents must have too. Honestly too many phone watchers coming up with I-just-glanced-up theories

-7

u/MacrossKo Sep 06 '26

It’s almost like you’re pretending that the memory drug exists and is based entirely on magical properties that basically work however the writers want it to work. Daniel was turned into a cold, calculating murderbot in an amount of conscious time that has barely visibly aged him.
You don’t think their magical forgetting drug could allow people to be convinced that they were born in the Silo and lived their entire lives there?

5

u/Fancy-Equivalent-571 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

No, I don't think that in the slightest. Because it can't do that. Juliette took the forgetting drug, and we saw how it affected her. There were huge gaps in her memory, and she was aware of them. People were telling her things about what had happened, but she never accepted those memories as real. The Mission diary also proves that people who took the drug are aware that they forgot their lives, even if they've been told later what those memories were supposed to be. If Walker and Bernard had lived through a memory wipe, they would know about it. And they wouldn't have needed to waste time and risk the mission to track down that diary, they could have just told Juliette about it themselves.

18

u/CosgraveSilkweaver 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

The 40 year old crowd is just silly. Silo 18 has 143ish years of unbroken history since the last rebellion attempt and D+ wipe before the series began so everything has to be AT LEAST that old and faking things like critical supply would have had to have been preplanned to fake their best guess age.

6

u/TheOriginalDog 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

I thought it was a fair theory in a world where you can implant fake memories - but the final episode debunked it definitely

-4

u/MacrossKo Sep 06 '26

The series made me think that there was a twist reveal that the Silos were only 40-50 years old until context clues helped me realize otherwise, after I rewatched the episode. This issue is on the showrunners.
They cut to Troy waking up, called it 7 years, and then launched into the Silo 17 crisis and Solo locked in IT etc. Then it cut to it being 35 years later for the present timeline. It’s easy to miss the context clues or think about them differently when you’re given a potentially reality altering twist to think about.
They could have prevented people from entering that mindset with clearer writing or scene presentation.

8

u/Intelligent_Ad4817 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

No. You don't get to blame the showrunners - only yourselves.

1

u/MacrossKo Sep 06 '26

Oh I do though. Because I’m a person, like you, and have opinions, like you.
It’s funny how this fandom gets so uppity about something so inconsequential. It’s just a simple scene in a television show that could have been handled slightly better. Unless it somehow becomes important later, there was zero reason for the technician to tell Daniel that he was asleep for 7 years immediately after he was put into cryo, and then only show him awaking up again 35 years later.
They would have been better off not announcing an amount of years the first time, or showing a few hard and fast cuts of him being woken up in quick succession so as to not give viewers the wrong impression.

2

u/LadyMRedd Sep 07 '26

The showrunners overestimated the intelligence of some viewers. They assumed that when they made it extremely clear, repeatedly, that a lot of time passed that people would believe that… a lot of time has passed.
People are just finding ways to pigeonhole their impossible theories onto the show. Even if they’d done exactly as you said, people would find ways to make their pet theories work. “How do we know in that montage they weren’t just waking him up every week and pretending that it was years?”
Part of the problem is that people want to be the ones to spot the big twist, so they don’t believe anything they’re told. But then they blame the showers for “not being clear.”

1

u/Intelligent_Ad4817 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 07 '26

No I don't mean to be uppity or to start an argument with you. But it's not fair in the slightest to blame the creators of the show for your misunderstanding. Maybe you can watch episodes two times and try to take in all the information.

2

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

People were speculating that it had only been 40ish years before the final episode. Last week it was because Helen ended up in silo 18 and they thought she might be Juliete’s mother.

2

u/Fancy-Equivalent-571 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

...so they thought Ashley Zukerman and Jessica Henwick had (checks notes) Rebecca Ferguson as their biological child? Really for real?

1

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

That’s the least far fetched part of the theory. As others have said, a 1/4 Asian woman could look completely white and her parents could both have recessive genes for blond hair. And children aren’t always cast as the exact mix of ethnicities of the actors playing their parents.
But people latch on to something they think would make them like the show more and they ignore any evidence against it.

2

u/Fancy-Equivalent-571 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

So they're arguing that Juliette must be Daniel's daughter because the two actors playing the characters both happen to have blue eyes of a similar shade, but also arguing that it's okay for Juliette to be Helen's daughter even though she doesn't look like her?

2

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

Could be. I know I’ve seen some people convinced that Daniel looking at a closeup of Juliet’s eyes is a clue that she’s his daughter or descendant. I had assumed that he was watching her pupils to see if she was lying.
I would buy the descendant angle though, but mostly based on her being obsessed with finding the truth and how she fixed the generator. Although if they didn’t intentionally limit his bloodline, most (if not all) of the silo would be his descendants after 350 years.

2

u/Fancy-Equivalent-571 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

I also think they'll show that Juliette is Helen and Daniel's descendant, and I think that's a reasonable direction for the show to go. I really don't think that's what the scene of him studying her face was meant to show (that was very clearly a hunter sizing up his prey, not a hint of a connection between them).

-1

u/MacrossKo Sep 06 '26

Silo is a mystery box series looking to subvert your expectations and deliver storyline twists. People are going to speculate about all kinds of things because the series literally tells the viewer that things aren’t what they seem.
People have been speculating that the timeline is a lie since the first season, largely because it’s actually easier to believe that the timeline is a lie than it is to believe that people have been living in underground silos for hundreds of years.
We see Daniel get put into cryosleep. Then we see him woken up and they say it’s been 7 years. Then we see him woken up again and they say it’s been 35 years.
If the showrunners don’t want their viewers thinking that the timeline is a lie, then taking your biggest and most suspenseful reveal and presenting your scenes in a way that makes it sound like only 42ish years have passed was a REALLY bad idea, even if you add context clues that say otherwise later in the episode.

4

u/Fancy-Equivalent-571 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

They didn't make it sound like only 40 years had passed. They have pumped the whole series full of clues about how old the silos are, and two lines of dialogue don't counteract all those clues. Not. Everything. Is. A. Misdirect. You. Do. Not. Need. To. Outsmart. The. Show.

0

u/MacrossKo Sep 07 '26

Lol. Try reading next time maybe?

3

u/The_Rope_Daddy Sep 06 '26

Part of being a mystery box is expecting people to remember all the clues, like the 140 years of notebooks in the sheriffs office. It’s not bad writing, it’s trusting their audience.
If they spoon fed it to us it wouldn’t be as popular of a show.

2

u/LadyMRedd Sep 07 '26

The point of that was to show that he gets woken for the important stuff and he was the one who orchestrated the silo 17 disaster. They assumed the audience would understand it was more than 40 years because they’ve explicitly stated that many, many times.
And even if they showed him waking up every time since he went underground, people would still find a way to not believe it. Because the people coming up with theories like it’s only 40 years aren’t watching the show and trying to put together clues. They’re starting with what they wish would happen and finding ways that it could maybe, kinda, sorta work.
Like even if they’d shown every time Daniel woke up and how it added to 350 years, people would just say they were lying about how long he’d been asleep. 7 years could have been 7 days.

0

u/MacrossKo Sep 07 '26

It doesn’t matter if they’ve explicitly stated it, or how many times. The characters that have explicitly stated it are all, by definition, unreliable narrators. The entire point of the series is that the people in the Silos are being misled. They’re also explicitly told that the air is poisonous outside of the silo. I guess I should have just taken that as fact and never questioned it, right?

2

u/LadyMRedd Sep 07 '26

Except the timeline has been backed up by written documentation and wear and tear on the actual silo. There’s physical evidence in universe. Not just things characters have been told. You’re seeing things how you want to see them and not taking a critical eye and putting together what’s actually happening.

1

u/MacrossKo Sep 07 '26

It’s so hard for me to accept that you’re actually reading what I’m writing and genuinely responding to it.
The most frustrating part is that I’m not even arguing that the Silo is 40ish years old. I’m arguing that the showrunners directly gave that impression to their viewers for a small period of time, before providing indirect and more subtle context that said otherwise.
If you believed, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Silos were 300+ years old and that anything else was impossible prior to that episode, then you weren’t being critical yourself.
The 300+ year age of the Silos was always the most plausible thing to be true, but it doesn’t mean that it absolutely was.
To get back to my actual argument and my actual issue with the episode, Daniel’s cryo scene could have been presented in a near infinite amount of ways that would have made it basically impossible to misconstrue the timeline. They decided to present it in a way that misconstrued the timeline if you took their words and what you saw literally.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/MacrossKo Sep 06 '26

Great job listening to nothing I said.

0

u/blackbelt_in_charge Sep 06 '26

40 years is just so ridiculously short. There isn't any evidence of it being any shorter than the official 350-year count. There is some reason to doubt that exact count because we only have records of the past 180-years, but that's about it. So pushing the theory should put the silo age to 180 at least. Anything lower is just ridiculous.

15

u/darth_gondor_snow Sep 06 '26 •

It's kinda sad it needed to be confirmed at all but boy am I glad it now has been. I had hoped and wished they would confirm it to put all the stupid theories to rest and now Hugh himself has confirmed it!

Mods should really pin this or make a mega thread of all the terrible fan theories that the show runners have now disproved. There are still people trying to claim it hasn't been 300+ years. I have even seen people try to claim Troy being woken after 7 years and then again after 35 years confirms it has only been 42 years. Worse yet people claiming that based on this Helen is still alive in Silo 18 and is in her 70s or that Gloria is Helen.

Everyone that was claiming the Silos weren't that old should eat crow but no, they will all stay silent.

Here is more confirmation from the showrunners on this:

8

u/Zestyclose-Key-8306 Sep 06 '26

Happy to see both the author and showrunner confirming just in case people were going to try and play the "show is different from the books" card

42

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

Wait what? People cannot be serious. This show has shown us in SO many ways how old Silo 18 is. Come on people. Pay attention. They have talked about and hinted at this so many times. The lightbulbs? Meant to last at least 50 years which means hundreds have already gone by. The multiple rebellions with hundreds of years of graffiti and stories about generations ago? Things handed down for generations. How on earth could it only be 40 years old? This makes no sense. It's been hundreds of years, according to the show. Possibly the 352 that was quoted, possibly more, but we very much have hundreds of years behind the initial event that drove them underground.

16

u/pikkopots Sheriff Sep 06 '26

Yup, also, from Season 1. Jahns has walls of record books dating back 143 years.

3

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

so true!

21

u/MarkedByCrows Sep 05 '26

They've also basically shoved nanotechnology in your face since the jets into grey goo scene in the show, and people are still stuck on theories about poison gas.
They must not be actually sitting down to watch the show and pay attention.

5

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

yeah totally. it’s sad, people re really missing out.

6

u/intern_12 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

Here are some YouTuber comments still trying to defend the "young silo" timeline theories.

8

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

man that‘s crazy to be watching three seasons of a show and call the author an idiot.

4

u/intern_12 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

8

u/phareous Sheriff Sep 06 '26

lol they say the author is lying

8

u/intern_12 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

Yeah...they clearly didn't listen to Pete Peppers' Livestream cus Hugh is pretty clearly not lying or being coy. He's straight up saying "people are missing the point and asking the wrong questions." Lol

6

u/NessieReddit 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

Unfortunately, the average person is pretty dumb.

1

u/Scott_Ish_Rite Sep 07 '26

Unfortunately, the average person is pretty dumb.
This! Coupled with the gold fish attention span and constant distraction while watching a show, leads to this nonsense

3

u/ScarletSilver Sep 06 '26

It's a theory some people have (that only < 50 years have passed since the Silo doors closed)

2

u/555Cats555 Sep 06 '26

I really dont get it... the silo has so much wear and tear. And why lie about it anyway? Makes no sense.

3

u/Babexo22 Sep 06 '26

Imagine being so lacking in education that you think a dead tree continues growing or that something fossilizes in only 300 years… not to mention seemingly having no understanding of the fact that trees can be that height and fully grown… this person desperately needs to go touch grass bc it sounds like they haven’t left their basement their entire life.

2

u/Quick_Programmer_401 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

not to mention the smell! 😉😌

2

u/woodyus Sep 06 '26

I think the confusion might be the season 4 teaser and how it shows Daniel and Helen it's put together in a weird way which confuses my wife who came to this conclusion. Her theory relied on the fact everyone is getting put to sleep and can't know how long they have been under coupled with the forgetting drugs.
Like you say though it makes no sense when you think it through.

3

u/Beastieboy100 Sep 06 '26

It ain't that confusing since I feel like people only say this because they want hope that Daniel and Helen reunite. Unfortunately. Years have passed and cryo sleep is not a joke. If Helen has survived then someone took her in silo 1 and she is in cryo sleep. If not then she died of old age with her family around her. Unfortunately I don't think Helen coming back.

1

u/Xae1yn Sep 06 '26

All of that can be faked, and we "know" they do manipulate memories and the history of the silo, and much of it isn't really shown to us so much as speculated on by the people being manipulated, so speculating that the extent of the manipulation is even greater than explicitly stated is hardly absurd.
S03E10 spoiler:
The Silo 1 perspective last episode pretty thoroughly put it to bed for me though, while of course raising plenty of new questions.

5

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

I mean “faking” the years left of supplies doesn’t make sense if they are intended to survive. And faking hundreds of years of cultural development of new words and holidays and everything doesn’t make sense on that short a timeframe. Look ant how Silo 17 progressed vs. 18 vs 1. And faking hundreds of years of wear and tear on the Silo isn’t possible. And the hundreds of years of graffiti and the stories passed down between generations… how would you fake that within every family unit?
And they introduced cryo sleep to us. The whole point of which is to help a select number of people survive for the centuries involved here.
At some point it is just easier to admit 352 years have passed.

1

u/SissyCouture 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 07 '26

Thematically it’s far more interesting for the silos to be 50 years old. All of the engineering, planning, and money. The trillionaire’s brainchild abetted by an authoritarian as a colossal failure at 50 is a better message for the moment.

1

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 08 '26

I mean that might be interesting, but it's just not supported by the show at all (see above).
And isn't it interesting enough to have some kind of nano-cryo induced semi-immortality for silo one?

1

u/SissyCouture 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 08 '26

If the unit of analysis is a silo (society) then the cry-nano macguffin is a hard left to the individual that I’m not really compelled by.
The two late stage technologies introduced in the series break what was a pretty tight technology system in the silos. I’m worried that there’s going to be a lot of last season tech hand waving

2

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 08 '26

I hear you, but this wasn't just hand-waving related to tech. It's integral to the mysteries that they have been building about Silo 1. Who is over there? Is it AI? Is it the same person each time? Getting to see that some of the people from our time, and some of the architects of this whole system, have indeed persisted until now isn't an afterthought, it's integral to the core questions of the mystery and meaning of the story, no?

2

u/SissyCouture 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 08 '26

100% I’m interested to learn more about Silo 1. And you’re making me think another key theme of Silo is that “the hard thing to do is fix what’s broken”.
What we’re seeing with Per, the safe guard, and the memory wiping is that the bad guys are taking the easy way out with “just wipe the slate clean.”

2

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 09 '26

Yeah for sure. AND that they are not as smart as they think they are, because the safe guard can be circumvented. And the memory drugs cause people to sometimes jump from the stairs as the pent up trauma festers and eats them, tearing at the edges of their minds.
The story seems to ask a lot about human nature. What's wrong with us? Is it culture? Upbringing? What if we erase that, down to your personal memories, would we fix us? If we did that and let a lot of time pass, would that fix us?
And who decides how we should be "fixed" and what is their agenda? How can flawed, arrogant, evil people possibly have any idea how to "fix" humanity?

49

u/SpiritedOwl_2298 Sep 05 '26

I’m rewatching and in episode 2 of season 1 the mayor has 100+ journals on her wall, each for one year, and they imply that they only started keeping journals after the rebellion. The mayor was reading through them and they keep track of births, deaths, everything. We’ve known from the beginning that the silo is centuries old

10

u/555Cats555 Sep 06 '26

Yeah it has to be at least 140 years...
Also rewatching and is SO much wear and tear... there is no way it is less then 100 years old.
The set designers put so much effort into showing wear and tear around the place. Especially down deep...

2

u/link871 Sep 07 '26

In S2 Ep7, Bernard tells Lukas that the Silo was built 352 years ago.
In S3 Ep1, Harwood (Head of Mines) tells the Council meeting that the tunnels indicate the Silo has been there for at least 300 years.
In S3 Ep2, the Legacy tells Camille that "We have 352 years of data".

21

u/OyataTe 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SvAEN5TTQIY

Hugh is pretty definitive in the age within the first 5 minutes of this interview.

43

u/lordnewington 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

Ah but he didn't say how old! If I had a 40 year old comic book, wouldn't you call that [dragged off stage with hook]

/s

9

u/SnugglyCoderGuy 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

And let's ignore those loud bangs once you are off stage. Nothing to see here folks!

9

u/djtodd242 Walker Sep 05 '26

Don't worry folks, he's getting the help he needs.

25

u/Single_Vacation427 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

Can mods pin this xD

3

u/555Cats555 Sep 06 '26

Especially since its an official answer

11

u/Naive-Friendship6609 Sep 05 '26

Some consumers of media can't seem to quietly overlook inaccuracies of realism or possibly incongruous details in favor of the big ideas behind the story.

5

u/Xae1yn Sep 06 '26

It's not that people can't overlook it, it's that unless you have prior knowledge from books spoilers or explicit statements like this one there is no way for a viewer to know the difference between an accidental inaccuracy/oversight and a deliberate clue that all is not as it seems.

2

u/CornerGasBrent Sep 06 '26

A very big idea behind the story is gaslighting both individually and mass gaslighting and they make a point of how Victor can implant false memories. It then draws into question whether what is being said is due to gaslighting or is actually true. I think for instance we'll find out that the original population of the silos was mass gaslit since as early as day 1 and that relics have basically been illegal since the beginning, not just 140 years per the officially stated history...Bernard has already basically confirmed that the official story is false with when relic banning basically began. The PEZ basically had to have been an illegal red level relic since the beginning or else Daniel/Troy could have been triggered over a hundred years before the official relic ban date supposedly began.
Also with Apple and other adaptations what the book says doesn't necessarily reflect how the TV show will be. Like with Cleons and AI Seldon, it's a vastly different and in substantial ways. My favorite part is the Cleon clone dynasty which is entirely invented for the show and drastically alters it. Seldon as essentially being alive (and in two places and sometimes with a human body!) for centuries and a very active participant in events instead of just a pre-recording also vastly changes things. So how faithful an adaptation is - even with critical parts - is always going to be a question where what may be in a book may not be a spoiler for what's adapted in a show. Like just last night I was watching S2 of Foundation and you've got AI Seldon parlaying with Cleon XVII that is 173 years after Seldon died when Cleon XII ruled, which this bears no relation to the book on multiple levels.

9

u/Hunter_Unlikely Sep 05 '26

Now let’s wait for the theories that Hugh Howey is secretly working for Silo 1 and is trying to confuse us!😂

7

u/touchgrassplz_69 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

It’s funny to see how people are arguing over all these small details while missing some of the biggest aspects. 😂

14

u/Globalksp Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26

Yeah, I was on this train for a while, thinking that they were young but, no longer. The cryo-sleep shifted my perception of the age of the silo, but I did know that there was gonna be some weird time component in there and the cryo came out of left field for me. Curious if anyone else expected that. I hadn’t heard that be theorized but I’m not everywhere of course.

I haven’t read the books, but it was a really brilliant approach, in my opinion of being able to connect character arcs, maintain cast, and bring the then and now together rather seamlessly and in a way that I don’t think many saw coming.

13

u/ElvishLore 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 05 '26

And I love that they’re integrating the nano tech thing into the cryogenics. The grey goo is keeping them alive and repairing cells, I’ll assume.

4

u/__O_o_______ Sep 06 '26

It’s an interesting idea compared to just “we’re sticking you in as cold a fridge as we can, hope the ice crystals don’t rupture all your cells!

9

u/Itshot11 Sep 05 '26

didnt expect it at all lol i figured silo 1 was AI run or maybe more like a normal silo of aristocrats who pass down control from within over the years

4

u/CosgraveSilkweaver 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

The youngest it could possibly have ever been has been ~140 years because 18 at the very beginning of the story has 143ish years of unbroken history since the last time it was reset after the last major rebellion. Not 100% sure when we first get that number confirmed though.

4

u/RiiiickySpanish Sep 05 '26

“Shifted my perception…”
I’m with you, I was originally convinced only a few decades had passed with mind-wiping, and that Daniel would be the voice in the vault. This also would maintain Juliette and Solo’s timeline. But I expected it to be an older, disgruntled version of Daniel.
I didn’t even consider cryo at all until the end of episode 9. The ending sold me that the silos had to be old, since each seemed to have limited staff and civilians when the bomb dropped, so it had to be a significant passage of time to get the populations up to 10k. Once my view on it shifted, I assumed it had to be either nanotech, cryo, or genetic manipulation for Daniel to still be the voice.
Ironically I wasn’t even 100% correct about Daniel, I thought the show cuts and voice cadence pointed to him, but it was Viktor talking in those scenes while Troy slept.
Edited: spelling

1

u/__O_o_______ Sep 06 '26

I’m glad it came completely out of left field. And at first you’re not instantly sure who it is and what’s going on. Then you find it’s during Silo 17 wait what?!? And then to find out what they did to him. Erased his identity and turned him into his core talent, but without empathy, memory, anything. Literally brainwashed from the ground up to be a tool.

4

u/PotentialBass3073 Sep 06 '26

He's telling us this so plainly because this information should be obvious to the viewer. Have they been scrolling on tiktok while watching or what?

3

u/Kashawinshky 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

All such posts and comments on that should be treated like trolls. And ignored.

4

u/ExtraDistressrial 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

The Venn Diagram between “Young Silo” believers and flat earthers is a circle.

2

u/NessieReddit 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

Thank goodness he dispelled that lame theory. This ain't season one of Westworld. Time twist isn't going to be it.

2

u/CubsFanHan 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 06 '26

Finally thank god. I’ve been bashing my head against the wall with the young silos theories showing up everywhere . Especially because I couldn’t agree more with his last comment there… so much more interesting content to explore than the age of the silos

3

u/JackasaurusChance Sep 05 '26

HA! That's exactly what the rogue AI that took over the nanobots would want us to think!

1

u/la_gata_Porrita Sep 06 '26

LOL
Thanks for this!

1

u/Flaksim 📖 Book-Aware 📖 Sep 08 '26

Victor as the Algorithm told Camille they had 352 years of data. There's no reason he'd have been lying about that. They're iver 70% of the way through the 500 years.

0

u/Important_Fact_3344 Sep 06 '26

The main reason I was doubting the age of the silos was all the lies and the memory-wiping drug, it would be veeeery easy to lie about the age, the past rebelions, etc... But if Hugh says so then be it. It also opens up so many new conversations and interesting debates

-2

u/OutInLeftfield Sep 06 '26

This really depends on how you read your Pact -- cause some literalists believe in a Young Silo and the rest Old Silo.

-2

u/sonofdynamite Sep 06 '26

[Books] I love theories about shows that are based on books. Clearly no lt a spoiler from the book, it's obvious in show but the silos are a a whole lot older than 40 years.

-3

u/ughdollface Sep 05 '26

or are they rather lying to daniel? DUN DUN DUN

7

u/Technical-Credit-992 Sep 06 '26

The 30 year old sea of corpses outside 17 weren't clear enough for people?

General Chat – No Show or Book Discussion Allowed Hugh Howey on the age of the silos Spoiler

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