In a nutshell, the worlds were going to annihilate into energy upon coming in contact with each other (even if other collisions don't involve annihilation, fully overlapping would cause it). Origin is a sort of Ark (in a game where the protagonist's name is Noah, because Takahashi) that contains a comprehensive record of the worlds and every person living in them that will harness the energy of that apocalyptic annihilation recreate the worlds instantly in the same state they were prior to impact (except presumably more stably to prevent them from having the same problem again). That does mean everybody dies (including the queens) but identical copies (complete with memories) are created instantly after their death, so calling it a practical solution isn't inaccurate. It's like ideas of teleportation that rely on destroying your local self and recreating you elsewhere: It means you die, but nothing about you is actually lost, so it's fine. The alternative is that everyone just dies, so...
I don't think that's any better than just dying in the first place. Definitely not a solution by any means. I also feel like the game doesn't say most of that and it's just you filling in the blanks with headcannon. It's also just the same concept they explored much better in X, despite every other aspect of X's plot being horrendous.
adjl posted...
Aionios exists because Moebius used Origin's power to freeze time, then force the two worlds as close as possible to overlapping before actually annihilating, allowing them to exist without having to fear what might happen if Origin didn't work (which is what coalesced into Moebius in the first place as a consequence of compiling everyone's thoughts and wills inside Origin). When Moebius was defeated and Origin was set back on its original course, they separated and went back to their original states and collision course (and then were recreated by Origin).
Why does origin have the power to freeze time? And if it does, why aren't melia and nia using that function to stall so they have time to come up with a solution that doesn't involve killing everyone anyway? Why does a desire to not die result in a world where everyone constantly dies? That seems antithetical to what Z should be doing.
adjl posted...
Because when your existence consists of eternally repeating the same experiences and actions out of fear of facing unforeseen adversity, you're pretty inevitably going to start trying to come up with ways to have fun with that process.
If you are human maybe, but Z isn't. He is just a coalescence of human fear.
adjl posted...
Given the thermodynamic implications of eternally respawning people, I'm guessing the "life energy" that is harvested is based on their memories and emotions and other such things that don't typically get carried over. That means carrying them over would make the system unsustainable (even more so than it already is), especially given the need to store that information somehow (everyone's birth states are roughly based on how they were stored in Origin when Aionios began). As for the life spans, letting people live out full lives would mean 8-9 times as much life energy would be tied up in the system at any given time, and I could believe that a monster born of the collective unconscious' fear of change would rather limit people's lifespans than choose to leave 85%+ of people out of the new world.
They presumably are leaving way more than 85+% out of he world. There's only like 40 colonies with at most like 100 people (probably closer to 50). There should be way more than 4000 people just from alrest, much less xenoblade 1's world 100+ years into their future.