Talk:Background Races

Sapience vs. sentience
Insofar as the two terms have a difference in meaning: sentience, being sensation or the capacity for sense perception, is common to all animals such as roaches and gold fish, whereas sapience is not. Countless races have attained sentience on earth alone (which is not news), but only the human race can claim to have forged civilizations (societies with high development of the arts and sciences), let alone gone into space. Sapience, which is wisdom or the capacity for it, would then appear to belong to the "countless" races (in the ME universe) who have specifically "forged civilizations [and] explored the depths of space", and thus better fits the meaning of the opening paragraph (otherwise the triple predicate should have different qualifications). Notwithstanding anything on the page being a direct quote, I'm returning to a previous user's edit of "attained sapience" (and even changing the Aphras' adjective to "sapient" as well, since the capacity for entering into any "metallic" age really applies to sapient beings; such would also agree with the Aphras main page). -- AnotherRho 19:26, January 4, 2011 (UTC)