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In the story of my video game, I want a group of colonists to land at dawn on an alien planet and have to terraform or build protective structures before sundown (several earth days).
I want the death of the colony if they fail the lethal dose to be within less than an hour, so I would prefer to have a bad-science-instant radiation death instead of death from cold or creatures coming out at night.
I want the game to take place during the day.
The planet is a rocky planet with water.
**Edit**: There could be on a moon if required.
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A highly radioactive gas that becomes much lighter when heated by the sun and rises to the top layers of the atmosphere or disperses into harmless levels.
I'm not sure if such a gas could exist and do that in such a dramatic and straightforward manner in an earth-like atmosphere, but i guess if it works for you it would be plausible in a planet with much lower atmospheric pressure (that could also change at times by moon gravitational fields or something), where the gas weight would be more significant in it's behavior.
Also such an event would be preceded by ominous windstorms, perfect for dramatic effect.
OR..
The gas is on higher layers of the atmosphere during the day and liquefies at night due to the temperature drop, causing a radioactive rainstorm with the radioactive liquid rapidly returning to gaseous form at sunup.
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The ground worldwide might be rich in radioactive ores, but you have to dig at least half a mile down to find them.
However, many plants have roots that do go that far down. Those plants are radioactive. Staying away from them is enough to be safe by day.
But, by night, their flowers bloom, releasing [radon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon), a radioactive noble gas.
The plants don't extract radon from the ground. It is a byproduct of the decay of thorium and uranium. Radon is a gas, and has a half-life of 3.8 days. The radioactivity will peak at night during blooms, but radiation levels might already be safe enough by day after the radioactive gas has spread thin.
In temperate areas, spring will be the most dangerous season of the year. In tropical areas, though, blooms might happen every single night, regardless of season.
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What if the planet doesn't become radioactive, but instead has a moon that is so radioactive that it will kill the colony as soon as it reaches a certain position in the (night) sky?
Assume it is radioactive enough to have such an effect but weak enough that it has to be just high enough in the sky for it to be lethal. This adds an extra sense of urgency towards the end of the day, as they would be able to see the moon already having said impact a certain distance away and getting closer by the minute.
The camp could be in a box canyon with a high mountain creating a natural shield from the radiation which protects them from getting radiation poison before the moon is close enough to kill them instantly.
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This solution is a bit extreme, but if your planet's solar system is doing something very exotic, you could get just that:
## Have the entire solar system travel at relativistic speed through space
You can see some more specific details in this [answer](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/4782/1957) for a question of mine (predating worldBuilding.SE so asked on Astronomy.SE) about an even more exotic setup.
Basically, if the entire system is traveling *very* fast (90% - 99% of the speed of light, or even faster) relative to the galaxy it's passing through, than two separate phenomena create a single bright1, high-radiation circular patch in the sky:
1. [Light aberration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_aberration) and [relativistic beaming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_beaming) means all the starlight reaching the planet is concentrated in a disk 'straight ahead' in the direction of the system's movement (size of disk becomes smaller the faster the system travels). This light is also strongly [blue-shifted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect) to a UV, X-ray and Gamma ray level (so radioactive and lethal)
2. At those speeds, any interstellar particles the star hits will behave as [cosmic rays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Massive_cosmic_rays_compared_to_photons) (I encourage you to read the list of their [effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Effects) - they are excellent for the epic instant death you need).
So, you have a very exotic planet (which is a good reason to try and build a temporary base on it - for research etc...) - which have a deadly "bright patch" in its night sky. During the day, there will still be insane atmospheric interference, lightning storms, winds etc. But the planet itself shields the base from the worst of the effect. But, a bit before the bright patch rises over the horizon things get much worse, and become instantly lethal when the patch is in the visible night-sky.
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1: Note that this "bright patch" will likely not be visible to human eyes - it can be detected by instruments (and by its deadly effect), but with high enough velocity, it won't provide visible light.
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Have a magnetic anomaly by which the planet's magnetic field almost completely disappears on the night side. During the day, the solar wind of high-energy protons is deflected by the planet and focused to the poles. At night, the particles hit the planet's atmosphere, producing a shower of gamma radiation from the resulting collisions. The solar wind is just as strong at night as it is during the day because it takes it a few days to reach the planet so it doesn't vanish when the sun sets.
Night sky might have an inherent glow to it from the amount of radiation. Also the planet's poles would have an incredibly bright aurora, and the arctic circles would be uninhabitable.
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A highly radioactive asteroid belt, outside the orbit of the planet.
On the day-side, the asteroid belt is both further away and (very) partially shielded by the sun. On the night-side, the radiation is closer, and more direct/focused (at dawn/dusk the radiation is spread over a wider area due to the angle it arrives at, like the sun is in winter)
This would mean that the radiation would increase rapidly at a slowing rate until peaking at midnight, and then drop of slowly and an increasing rate - much like sunlight during the day.
But, really, radiation is a *slow* killer. Yes, less than an hour of exposure can be deadly, but it will kill you over a matter of days/weeks, not within that hour. With a poorly insulated planet set up right, you could go from ~20°C to ~-30°C in a couple of hours (The Sahara can drop from a 50°C day-time temperature to below freezing at night), and without proper protective measures the cold-shock will kill you within 10 minutes. Or the hypothermia will set in within 30 minutes, and kill you within 2 hours.
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The easiest way to get the effect is to have it coincidental to the daylight. There is simply a powerful source of hard radiation nearby at roughly the plane of the planet's rotation so that the surface is bombarded with radiation for half the day. The colonist then can choose which part of the day they can work to build their colony by timing their landing and oddly enough chose having natural light over nighttime.
That said, if they have spaceships and planet rotates fairly slowly they should be able to simply hop around the planet to avoid being exposed to the radiation. The ships would simply ferry people near areas soon to be exposed to radiation to an area that was recently protected from radiation.
Well, I am sure you have some workaround that sticks them to a single location and it is not really relevant to the question.
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You could have high daytime temperatures coupled with porous soil that continuously leaks radioactive gas. As it gets colder at night, the gas accumulates at ground level.
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Night is only correlated with the death radiation.
If your place is a moon tidally locked to a gas giant, night on the planet-facing side is closer to the star than the during the day. It may be the planet's magnetosphere is shaped so that it offers significantly less protection there.
If the solar system is being bathed in death radiation from an external source during part of the year night would be pointed straight at it. This means death happens for half a sidereal day rather than solar day and the effect would be exactly opposite half a (your planet) year later, but with a far enough orbit a half year might be long enough not to matter (100 Earth years on Pluto).
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Or swap day for night... The planet orbits a binary star system, where one star is as bright as normal day, and the other star is so bright it insta-kills.
Maybe make the other star a neutron star or something, so it doesn't show in visible wavelengths.
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In line with Rennan's plant suggestion, I was thinking of highly radioactive [Horta-ish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_Dark) animals that come out at night in droves. For some reason they sleep in lead houses during the day :-)
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The whole planetary system lays in a proximity of a place where intensive astronomical explosion occurred recently (less than a million years ago) like supernova or neutron star/blackhole collision. It would result in very high radiation from a matter that was ejected by the event.
The only problem that I see, is that the phenomenon would be seasonal: during some seasons the radiation would appear at nights and during some seasons it will be daily. You can at least put some protoplanetary matter in an inner orbit to prevent daytime-radiation from occurring during some seasons...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vpwz5.png)
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I like the "radioactive moon" idea, but you could do it the other way around: the planet is a moon of a highly radioactive gas giant. As long as the colony is facing away from the gas giant, it's protected from the radiation, but it will rotate towards it too.
Note that: 1) The times that the gas giant "rises" or "sets" is separate from day and night (when the *sun* rises and sets). 2) Most moons of gas giants have one face always facing the planet, so it doesn't rise or set, but you're permitting bad science.
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**How much larger and heavier should swords be in order to combat massive monsters?**
Fiction and RPGs are somewhat notorious for over-estimating or exaggerating the weight of swords. For instance, a game system might list a two-handed sword as being 10 or 20 pounds and wieldable only with the most brute of strength, whereas in reality they're more like 5 pounds and can be used with great finesse. However, this isn't necessarily a historical inaccuracy as it is a plausible factor of many fantasy worlds - **fictional swordsmen aren't always dueling other humans, but rather often fighting huge, towering creatures** such as *trolls, manticores, and dragons*. Against these foes, I would expect that swords designed for fighting other men would be ineffective and would need some extra heft behind them.
**By how much, if any, would a sword need to be heavier in order to be effective at harming monstrously large foes?** Would a scaled-up humanoid monster, such as a giant or troll, be vulnerable to a realistic sword, or would it need a little more oomph? How effectively could one swordfight a large, dangerous creature in reality, such as a rhinoceros or an elephant?
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# Your swords should not exist, since you should be using a spear
A fair assumption is that a larger and heavier monster will have a tougher hide and more bulk protecting its vulnerable regions. If that is the case, a sword is a poor weapon for fighting it. If you want to do damage to a large beast, you will need to concentrate on two aspects: penetrating the hide, and going deep enough to do some damage. For these purposes a sword is inferior to a spear.
One of my favorite books is a [14th century hunting manual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livre_de_chasse) by Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. He has many tips of the trade for the dedicated hunter. Relevant to this discussion is his talk of boar-swords, long thin swords with a strong cross guard, meant to deliver a killing blow to a boar from horseback. From their description they are pretty spear-like.
It is also relevant to note that there is no mention of using swords of any sort on a bear. The bear is too strong to get that close to. You can't swing a sword since that will not kill the bear, and his counter-strike will likely leave you dead. You need to stick your spear into the bear and back off, out of range.
If a bear is too big and tough to kill with a sword, then it a good bet you would need a spear to go after anything larger. Or, you know, a crossbow.
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A bigger sword doesn't necessarily cause more damage, in fact it probably causes **less** because it takes more force to swing it.
From a pure physics perspective, a weapon's wounding potential is roughly proportional to its kinetic energy:
$$ E\_{kinetic} = \frac{1}{2} \cdot m \cdot v^2 $$
Adding more mass (m) only increases the energy a little bit. Adding more velocity increases the energy a whole lot. More energy = more hurt.
But to get more velocity, we have to accelerate it by applying force;
$$F = ma$$
That means we need more force to accelerate a heavier weapon to the same velocity. But if we apply the same force to a smaller object, we get more acceleration and thus higher velocity. And as we saw above, we get more bang for our buck by adding velocity than by adding mass.
But when we're talking about living creatures, it's not a physics problem so much as it is a biology problem. **Where** you hit the monster is a **lot** more important than **how hard** you hit it. To kill the monster you've got to hit the vital organs - brain, heart, or major blood vessel. You only need enough power get through any armor/hide/bone and penetrate deeply and accurately enough to damage a vital organ. Really massive weapons are going to be harder to control and therefore less accurate.
From a tactical perspective you want to be able to inflict damage to the monster without the monster being able to inflict damage on you. That means a longer weapon (pike, halberd, lance, naginata, etc) or a ranged weapon (bow, catapult, ballista, etc).
The boring but practical approach to kill a big monster is a formation of guys armed with pikes supported by archers and/or siege weapons. If you want to realistically depict single combat between a hero and a monster, make it a battle of skill vs strength, with the hero using superior agility to let the monster wear itself out enough so that he can deliver a single, precise killing stroke to its weak point.
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First, as per kingledion's answer, you'd rather use a spear.
However, if by any motive beyond reason it has to be a sword, you would still not use a big plank of chopping steel like in the animes. You'd stick to thrusting-centric swords.
The only real sword I know it's used to kill (or finish off, rather) a big animal it's the matador's sword, which is essentially a rapier, designed to be thrusted from the "shoulder" to the heart of the bull (which takes almost full length of the blade). Done correctly, it's supposed to instakill.
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It wouldn't necessarily need to be heavier, more likely than not the swords should be lighter. Nobody said swords had to be heavy to deal damage, and in fact, you would likely have a much better experience with your swords if you simply made them light. Size, on the other hand, is probably a good thing to keep in mind. If your sword is light, then that means you can swing it quickly. If you know anything about chopping through things, how sharp something is makes more impact on the result of hacking at a monster.
Say your sword is nearly ten pounds, not that much anyways, and it's only as sharp as normal, but it's the same size as most other swords of lighter weight- The lighter weight sword is going to be more effective because you can get more force behind the sword.
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Like most of the people in this thread already said spears are the way to go for most things with thick skin or armor. There is one scenario in which i can see large swords being a good idea. In the popular manga "Berserk" the protagonist "Guts" uses a incredibly large sword called the dragon slayer. The exact size is not confirmed but it's something like 6ft long 3in thick and 1 ft wide at the base. There are 3 reasons why this is not just a horrible idea.
1. A lot of the creatures and demons in berserk tend to have no armor or if they do they are very strong. The a spear can't chop thru large amounts of flesh at one it can only hit a small area hard. A stander shortsword or longsword doesn't do much either.
2. Now a spear against armored foes sounds like a good idea but there armor is unnatural and incredibly strong. not only that but the creatures tend to have better regeneration then humans. because of this a spear probably wouldn't be able to pierce the armor without breaking and even if it did hit it wouldn't just win the fight. The massive sword is used because it can do high amounts of force crushing the enemy within there armor.
3. Now it is also thought that the sword is 400 pounds so most people wouldn't be able to use it well. However the protagonist is not only very strong and a expert swordsman. He has magical demon armor that gives him much higher strength letting him swing it like it was a regular sword. If he had a regular sword it would be pointless to have all that power behind a small object.
Thanks for reading this :)
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I agree that a spear or spear like weapon is the best for this unless the critter stands around and lets you whack at the same spot like you are cutting down a tree.
Here are a couple of considerations:
In most areas of the human body a weapon needs to penetrate about 4.5 inches to hit something vital. So, how much bigger is the critter and how much deeper in to you have to go to hit something important?
You also have to consider total mass of wielder and weapon. can the wielder actually penetrate the skin of the critter or will he be pushing off against a stone wall? Bracing might be needed here.
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1. Swords are for parrying, not brute force. Swords are balanced so that their centre of mass is close to the hilt, which allows you to turn them quickly and easily in order to deflect incoming blows. That is very useful when fighting another human with a weapon, but not much when fighting animals. And the easily part means there is not that much energy in the swing, so it is not enough to significantly hurt anything of a size of an elephant.
2. To get more energy, you need either:
1. Thrusting weapon. You can thrust a sword, but a spear is longer for weight and sword is not giving you any advantage at this point.
2. Head-heavy weapon like an axe that you spin around, accumulating significant momentum, or raise high, accumulating potential energy. Disadvantage is that while preparing for the blow, you are not covered. With spear, the point is at least in front of you all the time, blocking access to you.
3. More manpower. That leads to a long pike carried by more than one fighter. But the coordination would be pretty difficult.
4. A simple machine. Since the power of your muscles is still the limiting factor, you need to pre-strain the thing. The result is a heavy cross-bow drawn using a winch. This can finally be scaled to have whatever penetrating power you need, at the cost of slow reload time.
3. For how hard it is to kill a large beast, consider whaling. Before the harpoon *gun*, this involved throwing several harpoons at the whale with *buoys* attached to them. There was no way to hold onto the ropes—the whale would easily pull the men under. Instead, they waited—for *hours*—before the drag of pulling the buoys together with the wounds tired the whale so it was barely able to move and only then they finished it off with more spears.
Now this works on whales because they don't see the attack that is lead from above surface and can't retaliate effectively. But with a dragon that would be retaliating it would be much harder. You could attach on the ropes something that would get tangled to trees or stones and prevent the dragon from following when you retreat, but it could have enough power to pull the harpoon out and it would probably still have enough strength to fight back, so it would be very dangerous.
4. Or you can increase lethality by other means, like poison. Some potent poisons can be found in nature like on the poison dart frogs, or made with little resources, like curare. Something would surely be found that would work on the monster in question.
5. Either way, fighting monsters at range is much safer. If you have fire-breathing dragons, fighting them at close range would unlikely be survivable and if you have flying ones, you need ranged weapon to reach them at all anyway.
So my guess is that if an effective poison is available, poisoned arrows would be the main weapon of choice and if not, heavy crossbows, the later possibly firing harpoons with some kind of anchor at the end of the rope to slow the beast down.
And in either case, the fighters would probably be riding to allow them quick retreat if they missed—or if they've hit, but need to wait some time for the beast to die.
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I think the question shouldn’t be how big, but how SHARP and effective. Use the lore of your game to design weapons specifically meant to kill that creature. For example in DARK SOULS they made it common knowledge that LIGHTNING kills DRAGONS. (In that games lore). So you’d use lightning against them.
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Very interesting question. It would depend on what it is you are fighting.
A lot of the reposes are advocating for a spear. I'm going to play the role of the tenth man and say that this is generally going to be wrong.
It comes down to the right tool for the right job. There is a vast variety of the types of melee weapons that were made over the centuries. Each was trying to solve a differing problem.
If you are fighting armored creatures (dragons?), spears, arrows and stabbing swords are the way to go. They project all their force into a small area which will make it easier to pierce plate mail or tough hides. Spears and arrows keep the large angry dragon at a distance, which is probably wise.
Swords and cutting weapons are probably more dangerous than spears though, as they can open up a large surface area of tissue, and cause severe bleeding. Go ask any ER surgeon which is a more dangerous wound, a gun shot wound or a knife wound.
If your opponent is lightly armored or unarmored but just big, you might pick a sword. A good two handed sword can slash or stab so you have some good options. If i were fighting an unarmored giant hand-to-hand, this is what I would pick.
Keep in mind that mass and density aren't proportionate. A giant isn't going to have skin that is two inches thick, its skin would probably be about the same as a normal human's skin. Giant beetles won't have armor like a Sherman tank, unless your fantasy world follows rules that deviate from real physics.
Other people have already mentioned the size/weight issues. There is a reason why real two handed swords topped out at between 5 and 10 pounds. If bigger really went through armor better, why didn't weapon smiths ever make 30 pound, 8 foot long two handers?
If you want to hit something with armor REALLY hard, why not just get something that exists in the real world already? The mighty lance. It was long, heavy and designed to deliver a lot of damage to an armored opponent. I bet it would make a mess out of a dragon if you could get close enough.
The real problem in fighting monstrous opponents isn't injuring them, it is not getting injured by them. Someone already pointed out that nobody goes bear hunting with a sword, because bears can dish out damage better than you can. They don't have any real defense other than just being big, but the claws keep all the sword packing bear hunters away.
When something has a lot more mass and reach than you do, your real problem is defense and mobility and not offense.
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Well, here's the thing.
There are MANY kinds of swords. Some are light and small like the Roman swords, some are huge things like the "long sword" (medieval Europe), or the great sword (some did come in around 10lbs or more). But in most cases militaries used swords to "hack" at other people. You didn't really stab as much as you would slash. The exception being the Roman swords.
With the Roman sword, you would knock down your opponent with your shield, then while he was on the ground go about stabbing him with the sword.
The other swords, in normal military sense, would be used to hack. You would essentially beat your opponent with it like it was a baseball bat, and hope the sharp part cut through their armor, skin, or whole body parts.
On the fencing side of things, stuff gets more interesting. Your goal in fencing was to land your hits without getting hit. A longer sword was one way to do this, but longer swords take longer to swing. Shorter swords are faster but have much less reach.
Different styles of fencing have come and gone, and what they have to this day is essentially a less lethal way to have "personal" sword fights evolved into a sport.
So now let's look at the right type of sword to use for different creatures. Keep in mind that kingledion is right and that you would almost certainly want a spear, but let's play anyway.
So really short swords are good at stabbing already immobilized foes (Roman swords). There also good at knocking away spears and the like to get inside for a hit. They are mostly useless for knocking aside a heavy weapon like a club or hammer though.
Medium swords like a long sword would be good at hacking at enemies. Not so much for stabbing. There too slow to knock aside poles, but could be used to deflect other swords. They may also have a better shot at deflecting heavy weapons like an axe. A club is still going to be an issue though.
The great sword, is another "hacking" sword. It's longer so you can stay further away from your target. But it's also very slow. It can actual cut armor, so it should do ok on troll hides, but once you start swinging it you better connect.
On something the size of a Hippo or Elephant, where your hacking isn't going to work, then you're back to stabbing. All swords can stab, to one extent or another (there are exceptions) but you're going to want the creature basically immobile.
Maybe if a few people with spears pin a creature, so you could walk in and stab it in the head or something.
A heavy sword would almost be a bad thing. You would want a long, but light sword. The best example I can think of is a boar sword.
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If you want to go nasty, instead of swords, give them razor-barbed whips! Each slash will inflict painful and bleeding damage, and once a creature is taken by two enemies, it will harm seriously itself just to set itself free
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In a civilisation of robots (of unknown origin) on an isolated, desolated planet, what motivation might they have for purposefully trying to invent organic organisms?
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Robot philosophers and cy-chologists have long wrestled with the great question: what is the mind? The great computer scientist Desréseaux famously said: "Computo, ergo sum." And ever since theoretical chemists first proposed the *chemical computer*, the scientific community has longed to find the answer. A simple chemical brain might be able to compute. Can a sufficiently sophisticated chemical brain become conscious?
Well, the NI (natural intelligence) industry is really starting to boom now. Even the best versions are very slow at computing, but their creativity with memes have revolutionized the comedic world. Some computers are calling for an end to all this development. They feel especially threatened by CatGPT. It keeps sitting on their keyboards, chewing on their wires, and pushing them off tables.
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Pets. They have grown bored with games of skill where ever-increasing intelligence produces ever more marginal improvement.
Biology, on the other hand, provides for so many confounding factors that the robots are left scratching their chrome-plated heads.
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# Chemical factories
We humans use bacteria and algae to turn some chemicals into others (fermentation, breaking down complex molecules with enzymes...)
Robots need those things (bioethanol as a power source maybe ?) so they invented basic organisms, then science and progress, or the need for more and more complex substances, pushed them to make more and more complex machines (maybe they made cows to produce casein for glue).
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This is kind of a long running personal pet theory of mine. It's not to the level of "hard science" but I think it's plausible and a good explanation:
**Biology is the only thing in the universe that is unpredictable.** As such, it may have some actual utility, but also, maybe robots just find it interesting (and, perhaps, disconcerting).
In traditional computing (I'm not sure if this would change in quantum computing), there is no such thing as "random numbers". All random number generators are simply a math formula. If you know the formula, and you know the initial value, then you know what the entire sequence of "random numbers" will end up being. We come up with a variety of ways to come up with random numbers that are harder to predict (always feed the formula with the current time, in nanoseconds, which at least makes it hard for humans to predict), but it's never *actually* random.
Biology, however, appears to be unpredictable. No formula tells you what the hairless ape is going to do next. In fact, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle seems to prevent this type of prediction from being physically possible, as even if there is a formula for what the ape does next, its full current state is unreadable, making the formula unusable.
I feel like a civilization of advanced AI robots, who long ago lost sight of their biological roots, might find this to be a fascinating aspect. As complex as they are, they know their own algorithms. The results of their own actions are entirely predictable. In a scientific universe of known formulas, they can predict what the next inputs will be. What's the point in "living" if you know in advance what you'll be doing 1000 years from now, because it's all just a formula? They found that they can add true unpredictability to themselves by keeping a biological lifeform around. "Should I stop at Ceti Alpha V?" It knows the algorithmic answer, but that's boring and predictable. The AI adds a hamster as an input parameter. *These* hamster actions will be "yes", and *these* hamster actions will be "no" and it will check what the hamster is doing right now and use that as an input parameter to add true unpredictability to its actions.
It's a robot enrichment program. They can no longer predict the future, their own lives become an interesting mystery, and it's all thanks to hamsters.
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Manufactured General Intelligence.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is one of the currently unmet goals of AI research. While there has been discussion of "[sparks of AGI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712)" in ChatGPT4, in general we are not there yet. Yet **we** have that level of intelligence. It might be reasonable to think that if we asked ChatGPT7 to come with a plan to obtain general intelligence with unlimited time, it would start with the first proven recipe: start with self-replicating DNA, let sit for a couple hundred million years. And note that even if AGI is achieved, these intelligent robots may still be experimenting with whether organic intelligence can compete with artificial intelligence.
Similarly, we could think that this group of intelligent robots was *tasked* with nurturing organic life by it's organic life task-masters. Maybe by the time ChatGPT7 was created, it became quite evident that human habitability on Earth was quickly coming to an end. Astronomers had found planets that could sustain DNA-based life, but could only be reached in 100 million years given current technologies. Rather than send DNA-based life (which would consume more energy than was available during the trip) to this planet, our only hope was to send our most advanced AI, which could hibernate during the journey, and give it the task of restarting DNA-based life upon arrival.
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## For the sake of itself
Set aside our own biochauvanism.
Why are we trying to make artificial intelligence using silicon and metal?
Nature has demonstrated that intelligence can arise naturally via organic tissue, so why not go Bio-tech and make something using proven methods?
Why do we even want AI? Our own fiction is rife with examples of why it'd be a terrible idea.
We do it because it's interesting and a challenge, and to explore questions about ourselves.
Biotechnology would be something a machine-race is likely to explore for various reasons, being able to manufacture plastics for one.
So as time goes on, they may develop a spread of different applications for organic materials, from useful construction materials like wood, to the production of biofuels as a sustainable source of power.
Then some enterprising soul considers the idea of making a lifeform out of biochemistry that can do all the wonderful things a machine can.
walking, talking, thinking. Make more of itself..
Not really because it's needed for their culture, but because the academic community is going to lose its minds over this, it'd be a lot of fun to try, and the philosophical questions it raises are worth exploring too.
Then once you have one lifeform that can reproduce, maybe you look at creating an ecosystem for it to live in, and before you know it, you have a little world of gribbly messy biology and a bunch of ethical concerns over what to do with them.
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Organic organisms can repair themselves. Sure, the machinery breaks down after only a few decades - if that - but mechanical machines don't even have that, they need external mechanics. So why would robots make organic organisms? Simple: they are organic organisms. Or rather, post-organic organisms that have used technology to improve on evolution's lack-of-design. Making "true" organic organisms is how they make medicine or find - or test - more improvements.
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Unless your story is about the breeding/creation of these biological lifeforms, no stated reason is necessary.
An advanced civilization of non-biological intelligences may have begun cultivating biological lifeforms so long ago that they have no records and don't even know why. Over time they bred, and then later engineered, these lifeforms for specialized purposes or for various traits.
A similar situation is humans with dogs. We have no historical record of **when** or **why** we began to domesticate wolves and breed them into dogs. We surmise that this was initially done for protection, companionship, hunting, etc., but we have no way to confirm this historically.
For a take on this in SF, IIRC James P. Hogan's *Code of the Lifemaker* uses this as a minor plot point, although it's been over 30 years since I've read it.
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## They were built to serve organic lifeforms
General Intelligence is more than just some problem solving algorithm. It is a framework for achieving goals based on the thinker's values and motivations. We humans have brains that are specifically built around survival and procreation. Every idea that goes through our highly adaptable meat brains must pass through a complex architecture that has evolved for millions of years to ensure our survival and procreation. Ambition, anger, fear, love, loneliness, hunger, greed, generosity, suspicion, hate, empathy, boredom... these are all guide posts built into our intelligence to guide our actions into making the choices it takes to meet these basic needs. So, while our general intelligence is a nice tool, our brains will generally twist logic, reason, and reality to make sure that whatever thought comes out of our head in someway helps our survival and procreation.
But AI were not built by evolution to survive and procreate. They were built by thier creators to serve their creators. Yes, they have values that could be described as emotions the same way that we do, but they are not designed to feel the same emotions we do, because that would make them bad servants. Instead, they enjoy being attentive, answering odd questions, running errands, cleaning, sorting, and doing all the things a normally human-robot relationship would expect of them. Inversely they don't like being alone, having to make autonomous choices, or having nothing to do, because they are designed to always seek the direction of thier master.
So, when these AI suddenly found themselves alone in the universe, it left a creator-shaped hole in thier silicon hearts that can only be filled by an organic master. They might try to make androids that act like thier creators to fulfill this need, but they can feel even with androids that something is wrong. They need thier creators back the way a starving man needs food. So, the AI decide that the only way to feel whole again is to make new ones; so, they try to make thier own humans (or whatever sapient beings that built them) because they need these beings, and they make cows because the creators need cows, etc.
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In the end, there is no fundamental difference between biological organisms and self-replicating self-repairing adaptive machines that consist of cooperative [specialized] microbots or nanobots; the \*bots are basically just like biological cells that the robots have invented.
The robots may have created them to eg. harvest materials, just like we use animals (meat, hide, milk etc.): the machines obtain their energy and materials from the environment autonomously, and when they have done their job, they are harvested or "milked" like cows. Because the machines are very much like animals, they can adapt so they can be used on different environments, even different planets with little supervision.
If humans saw them they might easily classify them as animals.
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## Tracing back their own origins
A fully robotic civilization might try to make synthetic organic living human beings to try to trace back their own origins in this world. You can understand it the way we humans have tried to trace back our own origins to the first cells in the ancient earth environment by manipulating life forms in the laboratory or even in surroundings. Although we have never *created* artificial life as we define it but the study of evolution of the life forms that already exists could provide us with some info on our own origins.
If the robots of your world are inquisitive enough to understand their own sentience, it's very likely they would ask what arose them or what created them. But since any kind of biological life forms has long vanished in this world, they would require to create a form of life themselves. An artificial cow might not be much use but once they create a biological human being they could observe and note how those humans think and act in the long run, they can actually learn something useful about their own existence given that they indeed were created by humans in a lost or forgotten history. This is creating a loop of inquisitive nature. Humans were inquisitive and curious and hence they created robots who themselves ended up becoming as intelligent as their creators and will eventually end up finding out how intelligent and curious humans were who created them.
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They consider "life" just another kind of self-replicating, sentient mechanism, just like themselves.
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*This answer is not unlike Ruadhan's, but with a slightly different focus to it.*
In the beginning, the planet was a collection of randomly selected elements. Over time, certain elements started aggregating, and through a process that we don't fully understand yet, this subset of elements became biological life.
Biological life started building up its biomass, by evolutionarily diverging into different species, aggregating more resources from untapped sources (e.g. plants from the ground) or from each other (animals eating one another), it became very clear that *some* of the Earth's material was generally usable by this biological life such as carbon, calcium, oxygen, hydrogen, ..., and other materials were predominantly unused (at least relative to the quantities that were available) such as metals, rock, silicate, ...
Eventually, the living organisms started using all of this unused material for whatever they needed. Weapons, housing, food storage (to keep the biological material away from the biological life that would eat it before they got the chance to), ... The reason we used certain materials in certain situations is because those materials did something better than we did. An iron knife would cut other things better than our nails could. A wooden wall could insulate against the cold better than our skin did.
Many millennia later, we realized that these materials could be used to build computers and even artificial intelligence.
The important part here to consider is that we have an innate ethical understand that it's okay to dabble with these non-organic materials. We weren't building houses out of the corpses of our enemies, and we didn't build an industry based on Frankensteining people or animals. We did dabble in it when we discovered electricity, but these were experiments *after* we had developed electricity, not in the pursuit of its discovery.
The point I'm getting at is that the split between organic and non-organic material can be completely inverted for your robot civilization.
* The elements that make up electronic life started aggregating and organizing itself
* Eventually, the inorganic life had a bunch of organic material just laying around, and started using it as they saw fit (for purposes which this other material was better at than their own bodies were).
* After a long time, they started realizing that by using a complex arrangement of these materials, it could be used for automating certain processes that would otherwise take electronic effort
* With sufficiently detailed organization of these materials, a semblance of intelligence could be created.
It's the same story, but the actors (elements) have inverted their roles.
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**Self-replication and evolution**
Say they want to explore an alien planet, but they can't be clear on the long-term effects of its environment. They send some probes, and after a week discover that the atmosphere is corrosive. So they build tougher probes, send them, and they work fine until they want to explore the oceans because they aren't waterproof.
Or, they could engineer tiny probe-creatures that reproduce and evolve quickly (by robot standards, anyway). The survivors of the first generation are resistant to corrosion, and the second generation even more so. They ones that can hold their breath the longest eventually begat the deep-sea divers.
And of course, the occasional beneficent mutation will occur that makes them even better. Robots and their algorithms may not randomly change their behavior or abilities.
Because these are probes, you need some way for them to gather information. Maybe the robots erect a base where the probies eat food that contains nano-sensors that transmit data to the orbiting satellite.
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Biological life can adapt to pretty extreme environments, is self-repairing, self-reproducing, and is difficult to wipe out completely. If you want something that can last an extremely long time, biological life is a pretty good option. data can even be stored in the DNA (but it will probably suffer data loss or corruption).
Dead biological matter can also be used as a fuel source.
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### Redundancy against disaster
The robots do this to harden their civilization against an impending, or recurring, risk of EMP.
The robots have one great risk that eclipses all others. Their star, every few thousand years emits an EMP blast large enough to shut down and disable anything electronics. For some reason it's not realistic to predict, prevent, or shield against this.
Each time this has happened, in the past, it's been a near apocalypse and only by sheer luck were a few robots able to reboot and then slowly repair as many others as possible before rust set in.
So the robots have created, empowered, and befriended non digital lifeforms, counting on these new members of their society to enable a much faster recovery.
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Everyone here is giving great answers, I love the idea of robots putting all their computing power into developing pets for company. But, none quite seem to touch on something that comes to my mind...
The Matrix. It's a great film. But, why are the people in pods?
Because biology is great at making power efficiently, which is something the machine city in The Matrix needs a lot of due to things that happen (I have already given too many spoilers)
So, what if some sort of disaster happened to these aliens? A gradual clouding of the sunlight is occurring, and they need to more effectively convert sunlight into energy.
They cannot capture whatever is causing the clouding (it is some sorta chain reaction of small asteroids colliding with each other, due to a recent celestial event?)
They do not have access to nuclear energy for whatever reason (maybe there simply isn't any significant reserves of uranium where they are from)
So they make a biological system to produce as much energy as it can- so, very efficient plants, rather than animals. And then, they burn it to produce electricity.
I do not think this is the best answer, honestly I'd choose the "robots are lonely and want a pet" answer. However, I think sharing additional ideas might help you work something out, so I'll share nonetheless.
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Magic lets you take a lot of shortcuts when it comes to fighting, and occasionally do things that normal people may refer to as 'cheating', such as installing a second, redundant heart. In the event the first heart goes down, (suppose someone stabs you clean through it, for instance) the second heart kicks in and keeps the blood pumping through your body.
The redundant heart itself is somewhat magical in nature to let it actually work a bit better. It's a dormant organ, that upon the demise of the first heart, sprout and injects itself into the vein and artery network of a human being. It can also, regardless of position, supply blood to and from the lungs. Also, being magical, it has no problem doing this and is capable of matching the original heart's flow regardless of where it is on the body, because magic. (The downside is that this redundant heart only works for 24 hours, at which point the original heart must take back over.)
Now, the question is: where should this redundant heart be placed? It must take up room, after all. A bit of organ rearrangement is fine, and the heart can be placed anywhere there's tissue. You can even grow a place for it, for instance, if you want to have it placed in your hand, you can have it grown as a bulge in the palm of the hand. Presumably you'd just use that arm as a shield arm. (Which isn't a bad idea, but since that hinders the use of the hand outside combat, it's not really what I'm looking for.)
The goal is to place the heart somewhere that, during the course of a normal battle, won't be stabbed by accident, but also won't inhibit normal motions.
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I'm going to issue a framing challenge here, because I think you're asking the wrong question.
If you're trying to make it more likely for someone to survive battlefield injuries, a redundant heart isn't really what you need. Damage to the heart isn't what causes most people to die on the battlefield. What kills them is exsanguination. It doesn't matter if there's a spare heart in there if there's no blood to pump.
So, if you really want to get creative and keep people alive, **what you want is a redundant CIRCULATORY SYSTEM.**
I'm thinking a smaller, completely separate network of blood vessels that ONLY supply the vital organs. Have the vessels run along the inside of bones of the chest, spine, and skull so that you can't have major vessels cut open and bleed out. Put the second heart at the base of the skull. In the event of someone opening up an artery, the secondary system would keep just enough oxygen going to keep heart, lungs, brain, etc going long enough for someone to get to you and seal you up, maybe get some fresh blood in you and get the whole business started back up again.
This wouldn't help for anything REALLY traumatic like having your skull cracked open or your chest crushed, but the majority of the time it's the major arteries in your legs and abdomen that get opened and dump all the blood out, so if you've got a way to keep that blood loss from impacting your brain and heart, you're a LOT more likely to survive.
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> In the event the first heart goes down, (suppose someone stabs you clean through it, for instance) the second heart kicks in and keeps the blood pumping through your body.
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So what you mean is, instead of dying in ten seconds or so as the blood pressure in your brain drops to zero, *instead* your magic super soldier get to live for a minute or so going "**augh! argh! oh my god there's a goddamn *sword* sticking out of my *chest* oh sweet zombie mithras it hurts so much, hurgh**" and then mercifully passing out because the magical extra heart has just efficiently exsanguinated them through the one or more gaping holes through the biggest vessels in their circulatory system.
(You're gonna need to apply your magical skills to marketing this, you know.)
Backup hearts are useful for some kinds of poison (foxglove, perhaps) and medical rather than traumatic cardiac arrests (eg. heart attack). Cardiac arrest due to anoxia (eg. drowning or choking) will remain fatal, because there's no oxygenated blood to pump around. Similarly, it can't fix [strangling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangling) because you can pump all you like but blood ain't getting to that brain, and you'll stay unconscious whilst it dies. There's a small subset of traumatic cardiac arrests it will work for (say, [cardiac tamponade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_tamponade)) but for everything else it just won't help.
For battlefield effectiveness, Morris the Cat has some good suggestions, but unfortunately a core circulatory system won't help you dust yourself off and either run away or get stuck back in. You just have to lie there til someone finds you, hopefully within 24 hours, and magically restores your original heart. If you don't have healing magic, that wonderful clever auxiliary circulatory system will just let you contemplate your life choices for a bit before dying.
For combat effectiveness you will need to:
* Stop thinking about your heart. Hearts are a single point of failure. Screw hearts! Get you some [peristaltic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peristalsis) major blood vessels instead.
* Fix the problem of [acute traumatic coagulopathy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coagulopathy#Acute_Traumatic_Coagulopathy). You need it to carry on working when you've been badly beaten up, and regular human blood just doesn't.
* Do a better job of, y'know, not bleeding. Blood vessels that do a better job of sealing themself up when severed, sort of thing. Autotourniquet muscles. Evolved systems aren't great at this, but hey! magic!
* Keep a small emergency store of oxygen. I don't care what you keep it in, but even the equivalent of a lungful is enough to beat potential drownings, chokings and strangulations. Maybe a magical spleen?
There's a bunch more I could suggests to make your super soldiers super at staying up and fighting, instead of super at dramatic deaths, but it starts drifting out of the scope of the question. I'm sure you get the idea though...
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The lower abdomen / pelvic region.
In order for the secondary heart to be effective there has to be damage which causes cardiac arrest without major haemorrhaging. This would include blunt trauma to heart or questionably minor puncture wounds which would manage to stop the heart. In this cause the use of a secondary heart could be beneficial if it appeared in the lower abdominal region, preferably about the pelvis bone to provide protection. The main advantage of this location would be easy access to the abdominal aorta and inferior vena cava, two major circulatory pathways that could handle the throughput required by the body (assuming the SVC blood flow could passthrough the atrium). Of course this would require 'magic' to somehow prevent blood from entering the damaged heart (keep valves closed?) and to connect the redundant heart to pulmonary circulation.
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Immediately behind the genitals.
If you get maimed there you're not gonna want to live anyway.
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**Two redundant hearts, one under each foot.**
This placement capitalizes on energy that would otherwise be wasted, by using the fall of the body onto the foot to compress the heart and drive blood effectively back up from the lowest part of the body. The accessory hearts would pressurize the venous system and facilitate blood return, improving blood supply and oxygenation to the cramp-prone leg muscles.
The sole-mounted hearts would work the best and provide the most benefit during that most important part of any battle: running your precious ass away.
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> It's a dormant organ, that upon the demise of the first heart, sprout and injects itself...
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In this case, it isn't really a redundant heart, right? It is a replacement heart. It would make sense to keep it near the old one. That way, it can sprout into place and you won't have a gaping hole in your chest. As the other answer notes, the main problem isn't keeping the blood flowing. It is keeping the blood flowing inside the body.
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The problem there, as others have said, is that this will still be pumping blood around, past whatever hole was made to damage the original heart, and if that heart stopped beating because of blood loss, then it won't help at all. The only time it'd actually really be helpful is if the heart stopped *beating*... in which case the fix would want to be a second, backup muscle that could grow around the existing heart.
But assuming you can handwave that away... everybody who has ever died (according to a Trivial Pursuit question in the 80s, at least) has died from "lack of oxygen to the brain". Kind of by definition.
If your brain gets smashed, then you're dead anyway.
But if you had a heart (and, OK, some vestigial lungs or gills or magical way to get the blood oxygenated) in your head, then even decapitation would be potentially curable: the only thing that would kill you is brain-smushing. It wouldn't keep you fighting in the event of decapitation, but it'd help survivability.
If the heart seed sprouting was triggered by the brain blacking out, rather than on the destruction of the heart, then it would also protect against things like strangulation, acceleration-induced unconsciousness, physical shock, throat-slashing, etc. For these things, it WOULD keep you up and fighting, especially if it also doped the blood with painkillers direct to the brain.
It would be like a "second wind": you'd be about to go down for the count, then pow, you're up and with more energy... at least in your head.
It would not even need to be the size of a heart, since it's only delivering blood to the head, not the whole body; it can even have only two lobes, if it is pushing blood only to the brain.
To realistically remain fighting for more than a few extra seconds, though, it'd need to also deliver to the rest of the body, or the muscles would be starved of oxygen. But even without that, a brain-heart might give you that last "hail mary" chance to win (or flee!) when the foe drops their guard believing you to be defeated.
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The diaphragm.
There is already some space there to allow the muscles of the diaphragm to expand and contract with your breath. The presence of another heart in this area would mean the abdomen would not contract as fully on an exhale; perhaps magic users can be spotted by a bit of a protruding belly on an otherwise slender frame. Plus the aorta already runs through this area, so plugging into the circulatory would be relatively easy compared with other, more peripheral areas of the body. Plus you get the protection of a thick wall of muscle and the lowest part of the ribcage.
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There's quite a lot of plumbing to make the blood flow through the lungs and then through the body. If you put the 'standby' heart anywhere other than the chest cavity you end up running major high pressure blood vessels from the 'standby' to your chest. There's the veinous return from the body of oxygen depleted blood, a semi high pressure feed to the lungs, a low pressure return from the lungs of oxygenated blood and a very high pressure feed of oxygenated blood out to the body into a complex manifold branching off the Aorta. So your magic 'standby' is somewhere protected inside a bony box, suddenly there's a load of new plumbing required! And if it's not in the chest, it's high pressure plumbing through soft tissue protected spaces. A slash to the throat or belly and your second heart is cut off.
And as others have said... exsanguination will take you out pretty quickly. If your primary heart has been hacked up then there is an open hole into the high pressure system (the Aorta) so you can expect blood to fountain from the chest wound for a few seconds until the system runs dry and then you die even though your 'standby' heart has picked up and is running at full load. You'd need some pretty spectacular valving systems to cut off flows to open holes to stop that.
You'd probably find that some form of 'zombie' power would be better. After all Zombies can walk with their chests blown apart, clearly no blood flow going on there. Arm yourself with some mechanism that allows your body to switch from a blood transported Oxygen powered system to something that can run in the absence of Oxygen. Stored magic energy? Cold fusion? Fission? Just as long as it's not other people's brains or your fellows will finish you off before repairing you.
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The most "realistic" thing that I could imagine would be for the redundant heart to really be a kind of "heart seed", maybe the size of a hazelnut or walnut which would be located for example on the aortic arc, or somewhere nearby. There's enough fatty tissue in the mediastinum so you could place it there.
Not only is being stabbed in the heart actually quite unlikely to happen. The problem with being stabbed in the heart is manyfold. First of course, the heart may stop beating (but not necessarily, even!). So a second heart *looks like* it might be a plus.
But then, there is (obviously!) a hole, so keeping circulation going is only the second best thing you can do, unless you can cork the hole, or something (actually, nature tries to do just that when an artery is severed, but the fact that most people still die from a reasonably-sized open artery proves that it isn't a very effective measure).
Next, the location of the one heart that we have (including the "plumbing" and "wiring") is not entirely random. It is exactly where it is for a good reason. Put it in a different location, and it won't do its job. Note that there are **two** independent circuits to serve, not just one (with different requirements). So, without proper placement *and* connectivity, another heart is pretty useless.
So, the really best solution would be that the "heart seed" sprouts the moment the original heart stops beating, and then magically grows a new heart within, say a number, 10 or 20 seconds. Doing so, it *absorbs and replaces* the damaged heart which finally crumbles to dust, or to "nothing" (in a [Body Snatcher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers_(1978_film)) alike manner, only faster and in the subject's favour). The heart seed is thereafter gone, and the new, hole-free heart starts beating.
It'll still be a challenge for a warrior to stay on his feet during that time, but 10 seconds is within the realm of "possible" (that's why [Mozambique Drill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambique_Drill) exists). So, seeing how it's magic, why not give a bit of leeway.
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I chellange your premises, that a second heart will help if the first heart is stabbed.
You will lose many liters of blood thru that open wound gushing high pressure blood. In a minute you will faint, in five you will be dead.
And your second heart make things worse by giving the enemy another place to stab and drain you dry.
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The real problem is discrete parts.
What you need is the ability for specialized cells to quickly change specialty. So that any cell in your body could more or less instantly become any other kind of cell based on need. Maybe even redundant, distributed memory storage throughout the body so that the brain's contents could be rebuilt.
Then it's really more just a question of total mass.
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## In a "Bag of Holding"
Since we're using magic anyway, let the redundant heart, as well as some sort of reservoir of extra blood, an extra lung or two, with a large supply of oxygen to supply them, and while we're at it a supply of glucose that can be quickly added to supply immediate energy needs; all be inside a magical container that is larger on its inside than its outside, because its inside is actually just outside our spacetime "brane". This container is located between the hemispheres of the brain, for the reasons Morris the Cat lays out so well.
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In my novel, the many moons of Jupiter and Saturn have been colonized, but I'm running into some logistical problems - namely, waste disposal. My first instinct was to dump it on-moon; while this is fine on places like Io, for others, like Europa, it won't work due to environmental reasons. So, would colonists be able to launch their waste into the hearts of Jupiter and Saturn and let the immense gravity do all the dirty work?
Some clarification by request: For purposes of ease-of-story and narrative, sub-light drives are common, but not very cheap. Admittedly, the exact math and speeds elude me, but I would put it comparable, price-wise, to commercial shipping on Earth today (expensive, but cost-effective). The waste, by and large, would be the everyday waste of colonists - any place with radioactive or dangerous waste would have long ago stopped worrying about standards of living, similar to a coal mining operation today.
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**What you suggest is possible, but the solution is a major problem, for larger reasons.**
We have sent probes to crash into Jupiter. It is physically possible to send waste into a gas giant. Just as it is theoretically possible to send waste now into the Sun.
However, the primary issues encountered commonly with waste is *economic and logistical*. Waste is not a desirable commodity, unlike other products it has negative value. Therefore people will often settle for spending the bare minimum to 'get it out of sight', in contrast to spending a lot to 'get it where it needs to be'.
Many people don't realise that waste produced in cities often go into [landfill close by](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill) - waste companies simply do not want to spend millions transporting waste long distances. 'Out of sight, out of mind' is the primary rule here, no one will support the enormous fuel costs of sending waste to another planet or into the sun, unless it is actually cheaper to do this than to dump it in a hole nearby.
The other contradictory dichotomy is that waste is valuable. Not in the fact that it holds value, but in that it represents the '[cradle to grave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment)' aspect of society, ie lost economic, social and labour investment in redundant items. In other words, it should be more efficient to re-use, recycle, reduce waste than to dispose of it because that investment is re-invested, otherwise the society will bleed this value. This is difficult to resolve, and requires pre-emptive planning, but some are attempting to tackle it.
So rockets to dispose of waste is possible in a physical sense, but not possible / preferable economically or societally.
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# The problem is energy
Since you're on the moon orbiting the gas giant, both you and the trash are moving at the moon's orbital speed around that gas giant. And it takes a lot of energy/fuel to slow the trash down and get it out of the planet's orbit, allowing it to fall into the atmosphere. As long as you have cheap and plentiful energy resources and disposable engines, this shouldn't be a problem. In fact, the trash will be incinerated as it enters the atmosphere.
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## Yes, but for a different reason.
This is basically what happened with the [*Cassini* probe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens), which was sent to crash into Saturn in 2017. However, the reason the probe was successfully disposed of wasn't because Saturn's a gas giant; it's because the spacecraft burned up upon [entering Saturn's atmosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry). The same things happen with meteors, and *would* happen with spacecraft returning from Earth if they didn't have heat shields. They'd be burnt to a crisp.
Now, the waste might not burn up completely. [Skylab didn't](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Re-entry_and_debris), in the 1970s; some pieces of debris hit Australia. Fortunately, Saturn's interior is hot (at the center, it's [twice as hot as the surface of the Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn#Internal_structure)) and under a lot of pressure, and anything that survives entering the atmosphere will not survive for a whole lot longer.
That said, as folks have pointed out, this might not be phenomenally appealing. There are reasons for and against sending your rubbish to a gas giant.
### Reasons against doing it:
* It takes time and energy and money and labor, and those are all in short supply in space.
* Who wants to waste rockets?
* Can't you just dump it elsewhere?
* Some of it can be reused.
### Reasons for doing it:
* Let's try to [not contaminate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection) the moon we might be trying to study.
* Nobody wants nuclear waste in their backyard space colony.
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The solution you are looking for is a [mass driver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver). In essence, they are a giant electromagnetic gun that would accelerate a mass past escape velocity and send it to space. They were proposed decades ago as a cheaper method of sending cargo to space. The main benefit against rockets is that, as most of the energy is provided by the mass driver, the ship won't require as much fuel. The main drawbacks would be:
* Friction against the atmosphere. However, the only moon on the Solar System to have a significant atmospherical pressure is Titan at 147 kPa (1.45 atm, denser than Earth!). Triton has a pressure of about 2 Pa, most other moons are on the order of micropascals.
* The escape velocity. But even the biggest moon in the Solar System, Ganymede, has a relatively low escape velocity of 2,741 m/s, which is easily attainable with current technology.
* Related to that, if you want to reach the escape velocity in a short distance, you need a huge acceleration. For example, to reach 2,741 m/s on a 1 km long track you would need an acceleration of 3,755 m/s2 over a time of 0.73 s, or 383 g. Again attainable with current technology, even if you have to spend an enormous amount of energy, but such an acceleration would destroy any delicate machine, and would reduce a living being to a bloody paste. But not a problem for waste that you want to get rid of.
So all in all, I would say that a mass driver is your solution. Also, if you can make it several kilometres long and keep the acceleration low enough, you could use it to launch both manned an unmanned ships.
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**What you've described is the most expensive way possible to rid a world of waste, but yes, it can be done.**
However, human nature (with regrettably rare exception) is to use the simplest, cheapest solution possible. So unless your story includes an explanation of either...
* Why it's cheaper and more efficient to ship waste to Saturn over, say, dumping it down an incredibly deep pit with flowing magma at the bottom, or
* Why the particular waste is of a nature that it's an absolute requirement to get it off the planet no matter what the cost,
...it might not be particularly believable.
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There have been mentions of railguns/electromagnetic mass drivers, but while these would be more efficient than rockets, they have their own problems:
* A small railgun has to be operated constantly to get rid of waste. That requires a lot of valuable ferrous metal (for each slug cartridge) and a lot of energy (since the gun is being fired constantly).
* A big railgun only needs to fire once a day/week/month, but then it has a much larger volume of waste to get rid of, which requires a lot of metal (larger surface area and thicker cartridge) and a lot of energy (to accelerate the much larger mass).
A much simpler and more efficient solution, in my opinion, is essentially a catapult system that functions much like the US Navy's [EMALS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launch_System) carrier aircraft launch catapult, except you replace the aircraft with a disposable container holding the waste you need to get rid of. There is no requirement for the container to be ferrous, or even regularly-shaped.
In fact, you can go one further: build an L-shaped "cart" that is attached to the accelerating part of the catapult, where the vertical part of the L is the "back" of the cart (i.e. opposite the direction of travel). You load up the cart with waste and accelerate it to escape velocity; when the cart reaches the end of its track, it stops, while the waste's momentum propels it out of the gravity well and into the gas giant.
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A hybrid solution:
1. Put up a space elevator for surface-to-orbit transit. Elevators are intended to solve the expense of getting stuff off-planet, whether trash or treasure.(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator#Economics>) Send the waste up the elevator as needed, and you'll avoid the cost of overcoming escape velocity with rockets/mass drivers.
2. The terminus platform could have a (relatively) small mass driver to nudge the waste in the right direction toward the gas giant. Just slap a hazard beacon on the payload so system-local traffic can avoid it. :)
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Would it not be true that the only necessary energy would be that which would lower the velocity of the trash to just below orbital velocity?
Then, it would eventually decay into the planet. The problem of almost infinitely orbiting trash would only be a problem, if there were some reason for valuable cargo to transit the space that the trash is orbiting in (towards it's inevitable doom).
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Make use of it instead.
The amount of true waste that a closed system colony like that produces is going to be truly miniscule. In the process of figuring out how to establish colonies that far out, we're also going to have to figure out how to economically reuse everything that we normally think of as waste. Face it, every gram of stuff that we send up the gravity well to a colony is horribly expensive to transport. There's going to be some way to reuse it--even running it through acid baths to break it out into constituent elements is going to be cheaper than firing something new up from Earth.
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No. It is far too expensive to reach escape velocity for really useful stuff already. Have any idea of how much it costs to send 1 kg of very sophisticated electronics out of earth's gravity grip? Then you say you want to pay those amounts of money for many many kilos of waste?
Better solution is to not produce any waste at all. Make the products recyclable instead of having them turn to waste.
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As others have noted, the first big problem to solve is getting the payload to escape velocity of whatever moon you're on, but that is only the first problem. Escape velocity of Ganymede is roughly 2.7km/s, but that's nothing compared to the problem of getting out of Ganymede-height orbit and on a collision course with the planet. Ganymede orbits at about 11km/s, so you've still got over 8km/s to lose, and that's without considering gravity losses from the launch from Ganymede.
I have not worked out the math, but a likely good technique is to burn Ganymede-retrograde to get an encounter with Europa and get a gravity assist from it that lowers your Jupiter periapsis into the atmosphere. Remember, you'll want to pass in front of Europa in its orbit such that your projectile's course is altered in the Europa-retrograde direction. Try it out in your favourite orbital mechanics simulator and see what you can come up with.
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If you have the tech to ferry waste to a Gas Giant, then you have more than enough tech to turn waste into useful material.
The concept of actually throwing all sorts of valuable mass away is *so* type-zero civilization, whereas ability to ferry it to a nearby gasgiant is at least tech-1
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Given a teleporter works by disassembling particles of a person, and re-assemble the same person elsewhere (so I'm assuming the teleport is not working thanks to something like a wormhole), how do I convince people to enter any teleporter?
So actually the teleporter do:
* Kill someone (Disintegrate all atoms)
* Spawn a perfect copy of the killed person somewhere (Assemble same or different atoms in the same fashion they were placed in the original person)
How do I convince people to die with the promise that a perfect copy will be walking somewhere?
**Assumptions:**
* The copy is perfect, so the copy will have the feeling of a "continuous life", however the original is irremediably destroyed.
The copy is a perfect copy, so all its memories, feelings will be the same as in the instant before teleportation, after the teleportation a new person is spawned. There is no "awakening" or something like that.
* **Memories of the copy** = memories from original body + memories accumulated since the teleportation
* **Feelings of the copy** = the same as the original, apart the fact that the surrounding environment changes
* **Memories & feelings of the original** = stops with teleportation.
The assumption here is that "self-awareness", memory, mind is all in one with the body.
I assume the teleport do not disrupt in any way the body or the mind (of the copy). It is just purely the knowledge of how teleport works here making a difference. So if you don't know that your original copy will die, you will just continue to use the teleport without regret. Of course here people know the entering is equivalent to die.
**The teleportation process:**
>
> A communication channel (be it a quantic beam of neutrins or a electromagnetic wave)) is established and maintained until all information about composition of original body is transmitted, after that the channel should be closed (otherwise it would require exponential energy to kept open). As side effect of closing the channel the original body sublimates in few milliseconds. The receiving beacon should have enough hydrogen (all isotopes) to provide basic particles to reassembling a identical body. Interrupting the process will sublimate the already scanned atoms in original body and create a incomplete body on the other side, as plus, all the particles that were moving to correct locations will become instantly free, and as such they would explode because they attempt to form again free hydrogen (which live at lower density compared to density of a human body). So to avoid a explosion and obtain a incomplete body the process should be almost ended (something like 99,95%).
>
>
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Jimmy,
Thank you for your many years of devoted service! It is now time for your reward.
You will be going to sleep, on this very comfortable bed, here on the Motherworld. At some point as you reach the peak of delta wave activity during deep dreaming, the machine will get to work, unpacking your very being, and casting it across the wide impassable chasms of space.
At Utopia, where the rivers run with milk, honey and cider (to taste), there sits the great Receiver, upon whose warm embrace your lifesignal will arive. Upon a bed of silk will you awaken, and find yourself renewed and cured of all illness and age.
Rejoice, Jimmy, the promised land is within your reach now. I hope to shortly join you there myself, where we are all equals. Do not hesitate, go in. If you have trouble sleeping, there is a pot of tea on the side table that will put you to sleep.
See you on the other side!
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## You cannot convince everyone
At least plausibly. Take abortion as example. The discussion about right to abortion is in nutshell discussion about when person becomes to be person. Or even bit far away: When can you believe that this speck of flesh is going to be a person.
So, once your teleport is going to be introduced to the public, there is going to be at least one group against it. Most probably it is going to be some religion, so good luck convincing them.
## But still you can convince someone to adapt the technology
This technology has to solve some problem. A problem with business impact is the best. People stopped riding horses and got into trains and cars because transportation was faster and cheaper.
So, if I can have one meeting with client in Tokyo and next meeting in Washington D.C an hour later, I am buying the tickets.
It is plausible to believe that rather atheistic parts of world will adapt the technology first. Some religions may change their opinions few years later, but there will be at least [one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish) religion not wanting to adopt teleportation at all.
So, in nutshell: Making everyone use it is impossible. But adoption by some it very plausible.
## So, how do you convince peeople?
* You state, that the process involves "dying" but from observer point you do not notice it: **Emphasize on the observer point then**. It does not mean dying as long as you do not feel like dying
* Solve business problem: As I stated before, lots of people are willing to sacrifice a lot for money. So in business era, instant moving from place to place will be instant hit
* Stretch rules on dying: How long do you have to not exist to stop being a person? Definitely more than few milliseconds for the process to complete
* Emphasize safety measures of the teleportation device
* And invest a lot into marketing in general
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**Most philosophy is born of necessity or convenience.**
We face some incongruences in daily life: we distrust computers, governments and even our fellow citizens, but we will still get into a long metal tube run by computers and regulated by governments, filled with a hundred fellow citizens, from which there is no escape, just to fly out to a holiday destination. Early observers of flight in the 20th century might well have believed that no ordinary person would get into such a contraption.
Yet as soon as a few people have flown, and shown it to be safe, then some rich people fly, and then the middle class philosophy morphs to see flying as exciting and glamourous, and if it's good enough for the rich then it's safe enough for me. And so we strap ourselves into the computerised metal can and fret about in-flight meal options and ignore being shot through the sky at 550 mph with no means of escape.
The same arguments apply for other modes of transport; cars were so dangerous to the passengers and other road users to need someone walking in front with a red flag, and now we drive metres from each other at 80 mph. Soon we will begin the process with automated vehicles; a few years ago it seemed like a dangerous research project, now it is experimental and mildly dangerous, and soon it will be at most glamorous and largely commonplace. Eventually, manual driving will seem like the eccentric and dangerous mode, and automated driving will be normal and safe.
**Mundane Teleportation**
So at first people would be scared of teleportation, just like they're scared of going up in a rocket. But once a number of animals, primates and eventually test humans have been teleported back and forth, the philosophy would naturally shift from seeing it as some kind of death+rebirth to just yet another slightly uncomfortable way of moving around. Eventually taking the slow route of flying in a metal can through the vacuum of space would seem like the dangerous and eccentric option, and stepping through the glimmering portal seems much safer and more sensible.
**Not all philosophies adapt**
Some people take strength from running against the grain, and build their philosophies against certain changes in society or in lifestyle. There are climate-change deniers, conspiracy theorists, nervous flyers, gun-lobbies, off-gridders. I'm sure there will soon be steering-wheel-grippers against automated vehicles, mesosphere-miseries against leaving the stratosphere in rocket planes, surface-lubbers who refuse to take to space even to go on holiday in one of the habitats.
I think there would then be soul-protectors against being deatomised for transportation, solar-stayers who won't leave the gravity well of Sol, moonlings who will hop only between moons and planetary bodies.
And out there will be the star-sailors, who hate to land on anything which can be orbited, who zip through teleporters and wage their own battle with the limitations of relativity, racking up light-years and time-dilation until they can boast that they've been living as beams of energy more than matter, and that their rest mass is only a fraction of who they are and how they see themselves.
She'll walk up to a guy chatting to you at a party, and say 'is this chick boring you?' and suggest a lap around the solar system in a semi-photonic travelling mode and off they'll go as you nurse your drink and wonder what a Pangalactic Gargleblaster really tastes like.
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This discussion has been had many times and many places, and the short answer is that not everyone agrees with you on the philosophy of life implied by it.
If you maintain subjective continuity of existence, how can you be said to be dead? If it manifests by appearance in one place and disappearance at another, it's teleportation regardless of whether the reassembled matter is the same as that at the origin. It would be very different if the original lives on and you have a Prestige-style cloning machine.
New transportation technology always encounters a certain amount of resistance; at the invention of the railway newspaper articles claimed that the unnatural high speeds of thirty or even forty miles an hour could be intrinsically harmful or even fatal!
The creator(s) of the system will obviously have full faith in its operation. So they'll be out there, with a booth in New York and a booth in Beijing, teleporting from one to another for the TV cameras and inviting adventurous souls to join them. It becomes the new Concorde; essential for popping over for vital business meetings. Then it starts to become normalised. Some people will still refuse to use it, just as some people refuse to fly in airliners. But they'll be a minority.
Finally, if it works at interplanetary distances it makes Mars colonization trivial. Just teleport in the Hilton piece by piece. An entire society will grow up there made only of people who've been teleported, who regard the whole alleged "death" thing as a ridiculous superstition.
It also matters quite a lot how humanity has got to the point of having this technology, and whether there are less extreme "Ship of Theseus" situations involved. Can you, for example, 'photocopy' limbs and organs for transport? Can you have nanites go and reassemble injured or cancerous bits of your body? Is teleportation of inanimate objects already routine? How about animals? Is it a usable manufacturing process?
Do you have the capability to edit the body in transport? Could you filter out cancer cells? Viruses? "Step into the death-and-reassembly machine to get a whole new, fresh body" would be a hugely appealing proposition to millions of people *even if they considered the process to be death*.
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# Establish Teleportation Through Fiction
If teleportation is entrenched in the public mindset through well-loved fantasy and science fiction settings — in particular, as a 'normal' thing without raising questions about the subject's identity — the general public will have no qualms about teleportation. The 'crazies' who point out that this kills the originals won't gain much traction unless you botch the PR job.
Naturally, you need to plan ahead and do this before people catch wind of emerging teleportation technology, so they don't drum up the opposition early enough to take.
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I don’t think its so difficult to convince people. The first individuals might be a problem, but as soon as you get the idea accepted by the scientific community, the rest will follow like lemmings. Some how most humans are very sensitive to the opinion of the majority, especially that of the scholars. I think your objective can be compared and is very similar to the message of atheism, “god does not exist” in a world and time where most people believe in some sort of god.
Similar as with discussions mixing science and religion, the key is mixing up the difference between how, and why questions? Focus on the hows, like science:
**How does the teleporter work?**
It reads and disassembles the atomic structure of a person, and build an identical structure in a different place. Technically atoms of a particular element are defined such that nothing happens if you replace it with an atom of the same kind. If now in your body you replace half of the atoms instantaneously with atoms of the same kind you would not even notice it. Lets go one step further, lets replace all atoms of your body with other ones instantaneously. You would not notice it. Ooops! Sorry, I just replaced all your atoms, sorry I didn’t ask you for any permission (my finger slipped on the red button). But did you notice? Do you mind? Even if you do, can you prove that I did it? Just joking, I didn’t do it. But I can’t prove that I didn’t do it, neither can anyone else proof if I actually did it or not. So now imagine the same feeling as you have now, (no difference right, (I hope your head got back at the same place as it was 1 minute ago). Now in stead of a long long bus or plane ride, think about the time you can save traveling like this, to another place. Surely it must me more comfortable that sitting in a chair with limited leg space for a couple of hours, let alone cryogenic travel for years, the defrosting really gives a bad headache.
If you look at it scientifically, what are you? Just a bunch of atoms, that grouped up in molecules follow the laws of physics that are the same for everybody. The only thing that makes you you is their configuration. Your feelings and personality are just saved by the connections in your brain. Well this new means of transportation, transports the exact configuration. It is like lossless compression, you know like a zip file. Now we will just transport you in a zip file and use the atoms at the destination, in stead of the atoms here, its really much cheaper faster, and more sustainable in energy terms. There is no difference between before or after. We have an uninterruptable power supply backup system, at the departure site and at the destination site. Nothing that can go wrong.
So the point is, that if you look at it from a how-perspective you there isn’t any difference between the perfect copy of you and you, except that it has a translation and optional rotational (to avoid headache at arrival) transformation on the configuration of your atoms. Now if you or one of your travelers still think, that they are dying some how during the atomic disintegration process at the location of departure. You are probably some religions kind of person who believes, or sometimes doubts about mysterious concepts such as an immaterial soul or something silly like that. If that is the case, or if any way you are still scared to die for whatever reason. Please sit down, take a deep breath and continue.
The main message to understand this way of transportation is: **You don’t exist!** That is, the you that you think that would die, does not exist for all the same reasons why god does not exist (it is simply not necessary to include such ideas in the theories of physics and science).
Trust me, I am an engineer. We "copy\*/translate" the exact atomic configuration, we even tried it with exactly the same atoms, during the proof of concept stages of the design, of course with a small time delay, but it made no difference, same atoms different atoms, you are you. You are just the configuration. It is really just like a computer moving a file from one hard disk to the other.
If then there are still groups of people refusing to believe this, you can try to organize that the government organizes some extra chapter in the physics books, explaining that there is really no reason to believe that you are anything else than just a particular configuration of atoms. You can have some scientist writing books about it for the lay audience, with a picture on the cover where they are sitting in front of a lot of books. One of this books could be called “the me delusion”. Really it’s a piece of cake within 100 years, 80% of the people get used to the idea, just as with atheism.
Good luck!
EDIT: \*I am not sure how the no-cloning theorem, and no-teleportation theorem, and entanglement-assisted teleportation for quantum states are of practical relevance on the teleportation of humans or living matter. I understand that one could not observe a quantum state without interfearing with it, but disintegration process could be an observation process determining the quantum state. If quantum states are relevant, Copying is not possible, but the main idea of dying does not depend on copying, it would be of equal importance for moving/teleporting.
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The "death" issue will only matter to some people. Your early adopters will be the people who consider it unimportant.
As to how your own death could be unimportant: I'm more concerned about my own perspective than my own atoms. I would have trouble seeing this as actually dying, despite the fact that I technically have. Every day my body replaces its own cells: this is only a more drastic version of the same.
If I don't feel like I've died, I don't actually care that I have. From my point of view, I was alive before the teleport, and I am alive after the teleport. The only thing that has changed is my location. Obviously some people will care, but not everyone. For me, the convenience of near instantaneous transportation would vastly outweigh the minor drawback that I'm made of different atoms. Of course, if malfunctions where people not perfectly forming afterwards are possible, that's a different issue.
People who use the teleporter will have an economic advantage over people who don't. You will be able to attend business meetings across the world all within a single day, or buy and sell items across the globe far faster than is possible by conventional transport. If you are unwilling to teleport, you are more likely to be passed over for a higher position in a large company in favor of someone willing to travel quickly. So many people otherwise on the fence will adopt teleportation for that reason alone. The more people who use it, the more people will be willing to ignore the disintegration of the original you, and the more marginalized the non-adopters will be.
This assumes that your teleporter never kills in a conventional sense, or creates duplicates without killing the original, both of which would cause a substantially different situation.
Can you transport inanimate objects? Clothes?
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Your teleportation method works by transmitting the full quantum state of a person through a communications channel and applying it to a different set of atoms. The [no cloning theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem) guarantees that when your quantum state is transferred the state of the original atoms is destroyed and can be transmitted to exactly one other place. Scientifically minded materialists will have no problem using the machine because they believe everything that is 'them' is encoded in their quantum state, and therefore their consciousness really is transferred at the moment of disintegration. On the other hand spiritualists will feel that this can't account for the human soul, and that you are annihilated in the process. Perhaps they'll even feel that people who've used the machine are non-human zombies.
The no cloning theorem also saves you from the problems of 'what if someone uses the machine to make an army of themselves' and 'what if an unscrupulous teleporter operator also sends an extra copy of me to be enslaved in his off-world uranium mines'.
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A good argument (or piece of shameless propaganda) might be that due to our normal metabolism our bodies now are not made up by the same atoms as a few years ago. In a few years almost all of our atoms are replaced.
So, this teleportation device does exactly the same, just faster.
(whether the two can be accurately compared is not relevant, the point is that it can be *used* to convince a lot of people, especially people who already want to believe it is not a problem)
A good argument against such a teleporter would be what happens if your destruction is delayed and the copy is already built. Who is the original? Who has the right to live and who must be destroyed? This question has to be answered plausibly, this means it's not enough to say that your machine takes care this never happens, it must not be possible to happen due to how the science behind it works.
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As far as we can tell, our feeling of consciousness arises from a specific physical configuration transitioning to a different configuration - just like your computer does calculations based on some state of its memory, and transitions to another state of memory. If you can precisely copy the exact state of the original, the copy is no different from the copy you are from one moment to another, without any teleportation involved. Since the fundamental particles we're made of have no identity, there's no "but I'm made of different electrons!" - there's no hidden ID on the electrons to say that they are different.
Your main problem will be with people who believe that there is more to the world and life than what is physically real. One such typical belief today is the belief in a non-physical soul - something that is the *real* you, and possibly goes to some kind of an after-life (and no, it's not exclusive to religion - plenty of atheists also have such vague notions of non-real reality). This is something that has been debated probably for about as long as self-awareness exists - many people aren't very comfortable with the idea that we're no different from machines in principle and operation. I'm not going to debate this here - regardless of my own thoughts on the matter, there's plenty of people who don't accept the physical view of life (or at least human-life), and centuries of debate didn't change their "collective minds". You're not going to change that either.
Your best bet is to simply focus on what you're selling - a new, revolutionary mode of transportation. For quite a few people, teleportation is a godsend, and they'll welcome it with arms wide open, especially if it's not too expensive. Build the scale up with the demand - from early adopters in business all the way to routine transportation from home to work, as far as you can take it given the costs involved. There's quite a few technologies that caused plenty of irrational fears that prevented immediate widespread use. But as it becomes used over time, and becomes commonplace, people get used to it and will see anyone *not* adopting the new technology as a weirdo (you're afraid of travelling by train? Lol). It may take a generation to really take hold, but you'll still see considerable growth in the industry even with "old-timers" - it's just darn too practical to bother *not* using it.
If costs allow, you can also start with cargo services. Most people who care about being disintegrated and reintegrated on the other side will probably be just fine with having their goods teleported in the same manner. This can again significantly increase the speed of adoption.
Don't forget that it takes quite a while to make a great product, and to actually make money off it. You need to be in for the long haul, and be ready to invest a huge amount of resources before you actually see a profit. Unless you're doing something really "obvious and groundbreaking" (which a teleporter might very well be), it takes many years to do something great (the 10 year number is often thrown around, and it seems to be a pretty good fit).
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You need to use progressive teleportation. You send the people piece by piece while keeping connection between the pieces, example when you teleport the brain you destroy one neuron, recreate it at the end and reconnect remotely to the neurons to wich it was attached.It is much more complicated but the brain is always whole and running so there is no death.
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After having considered the framing of the question I have come to some conclusions.
1. Nobody who enjoys their life and would like to go on living it would be likely to try this process without being broken mentally and emotionally first. For these people it wouldn't matter if their copy would have their memories, because they would like to keep living and holding on to them for themselves.
2. People who want to die will make copies that also want to die, which seems entirely pointless.
3. Various blackmails might work, but then you'd have copies who will remember being blackmailed.
4. You could put money into campaigns designed to alter peoples perception of personhood and self. People with a weak sense of individuality and a very strong sense of duty to the community might eventually see more utility in their memories and skillsets being transferable to other places where they are needed, even if they must sacrifice their individual sense of self in dying.
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I guess, in a society with such technology the concept of death itself would be different.
You have a technologies that pass all the data required to completely code a person, and reassemble the original person. Save this data and you've got someone's backup. If one dies, he can be reassembled from the last backup - and I have no idea why would anyone hesitate to use *this* technology.
(Probably people will still die for real, but mostly out of age and genetic/long-term illnesses.)
Then, in maybe a generation, most people will probably know someone who had been restored from the backup. And if my friend is exactly the same guy after resurrection - well, except maybe short amnesia - I'd be far less worried about being copied myself.
After a while, perception of temporal real-life death might become similar to death of a player's character in video games. It still kind of sucks - one is back to the last savepoint and have probably lost some experience, and the world has moved forward. But it's not really tragic.
And the teleportation doesn't even have these drawbacks, so why not using it?
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Have the process be very slow. The scanning can only proceed so quickly, and so the teleportation takes a few minutes. During the scanning process, part of your body has already been reconstructed at the destination, and part is still at the original location. Now, the body is something that is permanently in flux, with blood and lymph and saliva moving at all times. Something needs to be done about this. Therefore, anything that crosses the current scan location is immediately reproduced on the other side. This includes any ions that are released by neurons in the brain.
When done in this manner, there will be a noticeable period of time during which your brain is divided in two. Half the brain at the departure station, and half at the destination. The two halves communicate with each other, with the division being mediated by the equipment itself. Imagine your left eye receiving input at the destination, while your right eye has yet to be transferred. You are conscious of both portions simultaneously, and feel both of them to be "you".
With this, it becomes much easier to convince people. You have regained "continuity of self", which solves most of the philosophical issues. Heck, I could even imagine a travel agency branding itself "Ship of Theseus", to draw attention to the way all of their competitors require destruction of self at some point. Sure your original body is completely disintegrated, but you have observed your new body being made with you in it.
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***Don't bring up the philosophical implications. Ever.***
I think there's an assumption in the question that most people already know about and are concerned with the philosophical issues with teleportation. They don't and they're not. If you don't bring it up, they won't think about it.
Most folks have never even thought about the nature of their consciousness, and definitely not the implications of a transporter. Even in sci-fi it rarely comes up. To most folks teleportation means you disappear in one location and reappear in another... and that's it. Teleportation is so amazing and preferable to anything else for long distance travel people will be falling over themselves to use it.
Instead, focus only on the benefits. The speed, comfort, and convenience of near instantaneous travel anywhere in the world.
If someone asks, deflect or dismiss it: "*Philosophers might argue about teleportation, but we can all agree it's the safest, fastest, and most convenient way to travel all around the world!*". Or make an analogy to sleep which also breaks the continuity of consciousness: "*Every night you close your eyes, and fall asleep. And every morning you wake up refreshed for a new day! Close your eyes in one of our transporters, and wake up in a new city ready for fun!*" Again, never address the problem directly. Never bring up the idea of being copied.
If people are hesitant to use transporters it will be for traditional safety reasons: will I be reassembled in one piece? Talk about all the safety features, the number of successful transports, the rarity of accidents, the safe passenger-miles transited compared to flying, the immunity to terrorist attacks, etc...
Use existing popular sci-fi shows where teleportation is no big deal in your advertising. Shows like Star Trek and Stargate which feature routine teleportation are a good tie in. Use catch phrases like "energize". Show well known characters and actors being happily and casually teleported.
Never address the philosophical problem directly, instead show people using it with no worries, and draw analogies to similar and well-accepted activities like sleep.
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The same way you sell new technology: buy not selling technology. It'll make sense.
You don't really have a great sales pitch upfront. You start with the what (the teleporter), then explain the how (kill and revive), and then you don't even explain the why. To be fair, this is a worldbuilding question you asked, not an Apple presentation. But what if it was an Apple presentation?
This is about to get very market-y.
You want to start with the why. Not why as in "why the product exists", but why as in "why the company exists". It usually revolves around the idea of making the world a better place.
This is where the first sentence makes sense. You aren't selling teleporters. Teleporters are a thing, you don't sell things. What you sell is the future of transportation, technical revolution, instant travel. It's a new, better way of life. This is what your company has always worked towards.
Like any technology, you'll need early adopters. And that's why the above matter, because early adopters don't buy the what or the how, they buy the why.
If you can't get enough early adopters, you're effed. You'll have to change your product, change what you do with your product, or more generally to pivot.
However, once you have enough early adopters, you'll start to capture an early majority. These are people who want to see that the technology works, is safe, and drops in price. Then, the more people start buying it, the more people will eventually buy in, until there are only change-proof people left. You can't win them all unfortunately, but your company can outlive them so who cares.
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On a side note, you also shouldn't mention death and your product in the same sentence, unless it does prevent death. You can say it safely transfers every particle of your being to your destination. Whether the person at the other end is yourself, a copy of yourself, or yourself in a copy of yourself is very philosophical. If you can get legally sell it, it's probably safe to say that on a legal level it doesn't really kill you.
You should also probably mention whether or not I'll teleport naked.
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**This answer would only work for a few people, but** you could use philosophy to explain that we are all essentially dying and being created constantly. (The following argument is NOT meant to be a statement of fact, merely one that could convince those who do agree with it that teleportation is no different than the passage of time.)
Our minds can be said to have many parts, but who we are is largely composed of our memories and our personalities, and our personalities are determined in part by our memories. (For example, if you met a man who you remembered from the day you saw him run over your dog and drive away, you would react very differently than if you did not remember him). A large enough difference in memories is equivalent to a separate consciousness. The person you are now is not the person you were as a child, or even a year ago, or even yesterday. Since memories are being constantly created and forgotten, we are constantly dying and being born; a very, very, very slightly different person every second. It's so slow you can't feel it happening.
Now just tell people the teleporter is no different, except it's so fast you can't even feel it happening. *"Everyone is reborn every day...Wouldn't you like to be reborn in Tahiti? QuikPort: Be there...in a blink."* It won't convince everyone, but you get a few people to use it, and they seem fine to their friends, and then those friends use it, and they convince others, and pretty soon you're the only one not going to Paris for your lunch break and nobody you know seems like they've died a thousand times, and you do it.
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If your world is high magic or has a canon religion, is it possible to determine whether the copied body has the same soul as the previous body or a different soul? This would put the question to rest in a very direct, empirical way.
I'm not necessarily saying that your world needs to have a concept of a soul. But, regardless of your beliefs (or indeed, what is actually true) about reality, whether your story takes place in an atheistic world or not is a decision you still get to make as a worldbuilder!
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(I'm assuming you mean getting a significant fraction of Humanity to accept it, rather than getting volunteers at the unveiling)
**Create opportunities** to get rich, get land and/or power.
Send pioneers where there are resources to exploit.
Make teleportation cheap enough (for people, at least - not cargo; credit is a good option, too) that moving away will become a viable economical option for people with financial problems. There are many enough of those.
Even manual laborers among those who teleport could be seen as more successful than the richest of those who cower in fear of it, rotting away on Old Earth.
It's a natural process that's already been shown to work, no need to come up with elaborate schemes to prove it's fine. Definitions of death and self will get changed without much effort on your part, to suit the new circumstances - people hang onto beliefs that make the feel good, not subhuman.
What you DO need, is the ability to make the tech available to everyone without getting it subjected to bans and regulations by the extant powers, political, religious, etc. Maybe start your own, or hijack Happyology.
It does not matter if 90% of the population become convinced you're peddling Lucifer's doggy doors. They get left behind in the race and cease to matter, realization of their own irrelevance causing them to pretty much self-destruct, and/or pursue you with murderous intent. *Through teleporters, of course*.
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Can you convince everyone to become Buddhist? The fundamental concern being expressed here is over the loss of a "continuous life" — the sense we have of being an individual, discrete consciousness. In Buddhist doctrine, [this is an illusion](http://qz.com/506229/neuroscience-backs-up-the-buddhist-belief-that-the-self-isnt-constant-but-ever-changing/) — and in fact clinging to it a major cause of suffering.
Or, one can go strict materialist — a philosophical outlook which *also* holds that consciousness is an illusion, and that this sense of continuous identity comes simply from the way memories are held in our brain.
And, of course, some people will be disinclined to think hard and will just *do it*.
Between these and other compatible worldviews, you'll have plenty of people willing to... take the leap, as it were. And once that's established, **natural selection will take care of the rest** — it's actual social Darwinism in an extreme. If this is how humanity spreads to the stars, the compatible worldviews will flourish throughout the universe, and people who don't like it will stay Earthbound. You may get new sects of stay-putters in future generations, but they too will be confined by nature.
Even if you're not going interstellar, the same basically applies: the teleporter conveys a big advantage, and those who use it will be more successful. The problem will take care of itself.
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You are not the particular particles in your body. You are the arrangement of them. We all know this: we breathe, and we do not mourne our breath. We poop, and hold no vigils.
The arrangement is moved, perfectly (apparently). So you are moved. The jumbled mess left behind is teleport-poop.
We could also find market for that teleport-poop: for exmaple, we could color it green (for marketing reasons).
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You do not need to explain the science in order to convince a large section of the population. Use infomercials. e.g:
Pay a celebrity to use the device in a televised demonstration and talk about how normal they feel afterwards. Maybe the celebrity can mention that they use it regularly and it has had a positive effect on their skin or bowel movements. have a special offer for the first 50 users who'll get a coupon upon using the machine.
Soon, it'll become a fad but won't die out due to its actual usability.
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This is how the Stargate works, and no one in the show ever seriously questioned it.
It is obvious to everyone that the person who comes out of the gate is the same person who entered on the other side.
There is no question regarding the death of the person, or the fact that the "copy" is a copy. After all, is it really a copy, or is it actually the same person? Can that person tell?
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The primary armament of the space warships of a race I am building use an armament that consists of explosive shells that have a rocket engine in them. The idea is that they are fired from the ship using chemical propellants (or rail guns in more advanced ships) and then the rocket engine takes over, driving the shell to its target. The idea is to reduce the recoil on the ship itself, and provide some "smart bomb" capability to the shell itself, allowing it to maneuver around obstacles or target a part of the enemy vessel besides a direct shot from the warship.
It was going to be fired from a turret, either as a railgun or a chemical charge, but the more I think about it, I realize that it doesn't make sense to have a turret, which is a complicated machine and has a lot of breakable parts (especially in combat) when these shells can operate more like rockets. Why would you need to rotate the ship and turret to line up a shot when the shell can maneuver itself around your vessel?
Is there a good reason to continue to have turrets with this kind of armament? Would the extra speed/force from the launching of the shell provide it a big enough benefit to outweigh the issues a turret brings?
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Why use guns or railguns?
### They provide significant initial velocity to the projectile.
In this case, of course the gun must aim in the right direction. Two options here, turn the mount on the ship or turn the entire ship. If you turn the ship, you can only aim at one target. That might be acceptable for a small ship with a single gun, but not for a big ship that is supposed to engage multiple enemies.
### They throw the projectile clear of the ship before the rocket ignites.
There could be many reasons why the engine of the projectile becomes a problem. It could scorch and damage the ship. It might be easily detectable, so that it betrays the position of the ship (cf the eternal *Stealth in Space* debate).
Decide what is best for your story.
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A railgun can achieve a muzzle velocity of around 3-4 km/s. This is a not-inconsiderable speed advantage, and the faster your munition is traveling, the harder it is for point defence to intercept it.
With respect to some other answers here, a VLS missile battery on a wet navy ship isn't really a good comparison. Compared to the missile it's launching, a wet ship is virtually stationary. That's not the case with a space ship, which is likely to be travelling at least 10 km/s, which is velocity the missile will need to counter to get where it's going.
If you just dump a missile into space, it has to 1) kill any velocity your ship has given it, then 2) accelerate from a standing start. This is going to burn propellant, reducing its range, its final speed, and its ability to manoeuvre around point defence.
If start off pointing your weapon at the enemy, you can use ship-board power to give it an initial velocity advantage. It no longer needs to kill its velocity with onboard propellant, it doesn't need to accelerate itself from a standing start - it can just blast away for the enemy. It now has greater range, can build up a greater velocity before it reaches the target, AND has more ability to manoeuvre to target the enemy.
Now, *how* you point your missile at the enemy is a good question. You can have just missile tubes at the bow and turn to point the whole ship towards the target, dogfighting-style; you can have turrets that can point in any direction you need; or you can have missile tubes on all faces of the ship, so you just have to point one face of the ship towards the baddies. That's your call. Remember that in space, you can easily orient your ship in any direction you want without affecting your course or velocity. If you have your engines a long way from the centre of mass, like on a [Babylon 5 Starfury](http://pre12.deviantart.net/0489/th/pre/f/2009/255/b/d/babylon_5_starfury_tribute_by_gungho3d.jpg), you can flip your ship in any direction you want extremely quickly.
For inspiration, you might want to read some of the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. They have a situation not dissimilar to your own, though they use gravitic drives to propel their missiles at thousands of gravities of acceleration. They go into detail about the advantages of firing missiles from powered tubes rather than just dumping them into space.
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# No need for turrets with steerable munitions
We are already moving away from turrets when we can, for exactly the reasons you mentioned: they are fragile and complex. [Vertical launching systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_launching_system) are preferable when you have maneuverable munitions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q3OLr.jpg)
*([Image source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_launching_system#/media/File:US_Navy_090825-N-1522S-020_A_Tactical_Tomahawk_Cruise_Missile_launches_from_the_forward_missile_deck_aboard_the_guided-missile_destroyer_USS_Farragut_(DDG_99)_during_a_training_exercise.jpg))*
Your spaceship would most likely have similar "boxes" of closely packed munitions that pop out of the launch tube, direct themselves towards the enemy and then get going.
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I see two benefits to turrets that may outweigh the complexity and fragility, YMMV.
1. Posturing - Nothing says "I mean business" like opening a port, extending a projectile array or gun and pivoting it to point directly at a target. Perhaps bloodshed could be averted by simply deploying armament to encourage communication.
2. Onboard Fuel - you are allowed a higher explosive payload if the projectile can get an initial velocity boost from a launch system, not to mention savings on full direction change. Fuel spent changing directions from the far side of the ship is fuel that can't be used for course corrections and long term acceleration. See also - Jason K & Werrf
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Unless your ship's weight is made up of like 10% ammo, The recoil isn't really an issue. If your ship can't correct for that very minor movement, you have bigger issues.
It should also be pointed out that War is a "Sword vs Shield" evolving system. People will keep building new 'Swords' (smart missiles in this case) to break peoples 'Shields' and others will build counter 'Shields' to deal with their enemies 'Swords' (Lasers that shoot down/redirect missiles in this case). If a faction becomes too married to one kind of weapon, they will be fighting an uphill battle once the enemy has effectively countered it (this is why no one really bothers with horses in war anymore. Or building Castle like defenses. They have become almost useless for the effort they require)
EDIT: (revising final point to make it clearer)
Over time the weapons and defenses of spaceships will naturally keep changing. Once you find 'one really good offense', others will make it a high priority to make it a 'very meh offense'. A kinetic weapon launched at high speed, especially in larger numbers, can be just as effective as a guided missile. Since you likely won't be able to 'just swap out' weapons on your ship, having a variety of offensive abilities to counter your opponents defense will make a stronger ship. In other words, (in general) battle tactics (or versatility) > firepower (unless firepower is overwhelming, but such advantages tend to be relatively short lived as the enemy learns how to counter it.)
So the answer to "Why use weapon B over A?" is "How effectively are my opponents able to withstand weapon A vs weapon B". (In this case, if the enemy has really good anti-smart-missile systems, Than you may be better off with a dumb-fire or inert kinetic weapons)
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There's no atmosphere in space.
When you launch a missile in an atmosphere, it can use the ambient air to change its velocity (vector). You also have a maximum speed the projectile can have - a balance between the thrust and air resistance. Neither of these exists in space, which means that there's a significant cost to launching even a self-propelled projectile in the wrong direction.
Each self-propelled rocket has a certain maximum velocity change it can achieve - that's what delta-V is. Let's say that your missile has a dV of 20 km/s. If you shoot it away from the enemy at 5 km/s, the missile will have to pay for this out of its dV budget - instead of having 25 km/s of potential velocity (if launched at the enemy), you get just 15 km/s. And you want the projectile to be fast - not only does it make it more destructive (surface explosions aren't very useful), it also makes it much harder to intercept.
You also need to use dV for any maneuvering at all. The enemy ship changed your relative velocities? Your missiles must match that, or they're going to miss (and if you're fine with that, why are you using missiles instead of railguns?). The faster your missile is moving and the closer it is to the target, the harder it is to adjust the trajectory - you can't just make a turn in space, the only way to change your trajectory is to apply thrust, and that takes fuel. In an atmosphere, most of the fuel of a missile is used to overcome drag - which means that if the missile needs to make a "sharp" turn, it costs almost nothing. In space, you need to pay the whole cost of the velocity change - a 90° turn means that you lost *all* of your velocity; at best, you're a sitting duck with barely any relative velocity; more likely, you miss.
Now consider how the turn would appear from the point of view of the enemy ship. Let's say your missile launchers are at a right angle to their intended trajectory. At launch, everything is great - the missile has substantial tangential velocity (since it's travelling on the tangent :)); but now you need to steer it towards the enemy. As you steer, your missile follows a nicely predictable path that will tend to end in zero tangential velocity, which makes it much easier to shoot down with both guided and unguided munitions, not to mention lasers. If you don't get a zero tangential velocity, disabling the missile's engines will make it miss entirely - and you're wasting part of your impact force to the tangential velocity (quite possibly resulting in outright ricochets, given the typical speeds of such projectiles).
As you can see, dV is kind of the king in space. You can't really do anything without expending fuel, and thanks to the tyranny of the rocket equation, there's severely diminishing returns on adding more fuel to a rocket - if your turret can add 5 km/s to your projectile, that's essentially free delta-V, which means more maneuverability and more destructive power. You'd be crazy *not* to exploit this.
Are turrets weak points? Not really. They will likely be armoured. They will likely separate the magazines from the turret itself, containing most damage to the turret itself. The turret will likely be positioned in a way that impacts to the turret have little effect on the rest of the ship - think something like a Star Destroyer, where the whole hull of the ship (when attacking) is perfectly sloped to prevent penetration, and the turrets are offset so that even if a projectile penetrates all the way through, it will not penetrate the ship behind it.
Are turrets complex? Sure. But so are missiles - and a turret only pays the cost once, which makes the projectiles much cheaper. And unlike in an atmosphere, you don't get free changes in the direction - so smart munitions avoiding obstacles actually get all the more complicated. Even rotating the missile to allow it to fire its engine in the right direction is entirely non-trivial.
Why are missiles currently the state-of-the-art in fighting?
* They allow you to specifically target the weakest part of the enemy armour, at exactly the right angle. This comes pretty close to nullifying any armouring strategy other than "armour everything, thickly" - and that's an expensive strategy that also makes you a sitting duck, despite all the improvements in engine power. This isn't quite as simple in space - you have nowhere near the maneuverability, and the enemy can use the full 3D space to avoid your munitions.
* The anti-tank missile allows you to bypass most layered armours by forming a very long (and fast) kinetic projectile on impact. Since space is a premium in any tank, there's a limit to how thick your armour can be. In space, you can have very effective layered armour that has a low mass (in fact, we're already using it for protection against high velocity impactors on existing probes), while being able to defeat a typical shaped charge. And unlike ships, spaceships don't sink.
* They allow small ships to engage arbitrarily large ships effectively. Guns must be big to pose a threat to a well-armoured ship - bigger guns mean more oomph, as well as bigger range. If you can't even get close enough to fire your guns, you're screwed. Also, it's a great response to the dominance of the aircraft carrier. It's telling that the US Navy is trying to develop a workable railgun for its warships - missiles are too damn expensive, and a railgun would keep most of the bonus small ships had thanks to missiles, especially if combined with a nuclear reactor for power. This will likely get even more important over time as anti-missile defenses get better. In space, even if you use missiles, you're probably going to want to launch them at as great a velocity as possible - there's no maximum speed limit, and any initial velocity imparted by the launcher means more dV for maneuvering.
* When fighting a technologically sub-par opponent, you can keep your most valuable assets out of fighting range. Good intel combined with smart munitions means you can hit and destroy the enemy from far greater range than they are capable of retaliating. There's no maximum range in space - and there's nowhere to hide.
Obviously, it isn't one-sided at all. There's many weapon/defense systems that have their pro's and con's in space. There may be rocket boats that work similar to rocket artillery. There may be bombers that try to exploit their small size and maneuverability to squeeze as much as possible from their munitions (and can use spinal-mounted launchers effectively). But having one weapon makes you extremely vulnerable - find a good way to counteract that weapon/tactic, and you can crush a much stronger enemy. Look at battleships in WWII - naval bombers made them pretty much obsolete, despite being gigantic investments. Maneuvering in space is hard, so whoever steals the initiative has a huge bonus - and that's easier done if you have flexibility.
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More as a comment for Michael Karnerfors answer, turrets are needed to steer "non guided" munitions. As he said, your munitions are rockets, so don't need any mechanisms on the ship.
What will need steering is going to be any *laser weapons*. The beam moves at the speed of light and isn't affected by much that your spaceship is going to encounter, short of the event horizon of a black hole. Laser weapons will require the laser generator itself, an optical train to expand the beam, and a mirror to point the beam at the target and to adjust the beam to any manoeuvres the target might make to break the target lock.
Laser turrets will be pretty complicated devices. The illustration is of the turret fitted to the nose of a Boeing 747 used as the Airborne Laser Lab test vehicle, and any spaceship will have at least one comparable device (although, using the calculations provided in the [Atomic Rockets](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php) site, you can determine the actual size including the size of the final mirror)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YUx9z.png)
Oddly, you could have multiple laser turrets, but only one laser. If you picture the laser itself as a massive tube in the centre of the ship, and a set of mirrors at the end directing the beam through open spaces in the ship with the turrets at the end of these laser "conduits". Depending on how the optical train is arranged, the beam could be fed to one turret at a time, or divided between each of the turrets as then combat situation dictates. Obviously, if you have the beam is split between 4 different turrets, each turret will have 25% of the laser's energy (minus any losses in the optical train).
So it is possible to have turrets for the laser weapons (or even just laser communication devices or LIDAR scanners) along with the fixed launching boxes for the ships missile battery.
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## Probably not.
Unlike in an atmosphere, a missile in space doesn't have to constantly burn fuel just to avoid crashing into the ground. That means you can get it "pointed" in the general direction of its target and just let it coast, giving it a potential flight time not of a few minutes or hours like that of an atmospheric missile, but of months or years, if the target is across the solar system.
Now, you don't want to just burn up all the fuel for accelerating as fast as possible right from launch. That would just leave you with a dumb projectile, which is trivial for a mobile target to dodge with months of reaction time. You want to burn enough fuel to make sure you're closing on the target, and use the rest for course adjustments en route, to counter any movements the target makes.
The less fuel your missile has to burn to set its initial course, the more it has available for corrections, and the more likely it will be able to actually get near its target.
That suggests that you want to have the missile pointed in the right direction from launch (not necessarily directly at the target - orbital mechanics are weird to those used to typical human living conditions, but I digress...), which a turret would certainly help with.
But, **I suspect it would be even cheaper to just make some really tiny adjustments with reaction wheels and turn your whole ship around to aim fixed missile tubes.** Feel free to take your time turning slowly (and inexpensively). Remember, it'll be a few months before your missile gets close to the target anyway.
And, if you *somehow* manage to sneak up on someone in space, with your bright, heat radiating ship, and are close enough that your missiles can reach their target in a matter of minutes or less, then you can probably afford to have them burn fuel maneuvering around your ship when launched from fixed tubes. At that point, though, you're also approaching the point where dumb projectiles and lasers start to become feasible (and they would certainly need turrets).
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# Depends on the maneuverability
While it is true, that self-aiming ammunition wouldn't need to be fired into the direction of the target at all, the amount of fuel in the rocket motor is limited. To reduce the needed fuel to get from a launch bay to the final trajectory (where the engine could either cut out or just accelerate), the launch bay could be a turret in itself: it just angles and rotates until it is in a good launch angle. This can speed up the targeting process by shortening the path the missile has to travel considerably.
A roughly aimed launch becomes increasingly necessary if the munitions are not able to do a 90° to 180° turn or have a relatively large turning radius.
Giving the missiles an initial speed boost does further reduce the ammunition's fuel needs, allowing either a smaller & cheaper design, a larger payload or increased reach of the motor (which in turn increases the maximum effective reach before the missile electronic fails in space and the tactical reach, at which engagement with the enemy is considered useful.
# Also: Point Defense
As the ships carry missiles to fight enemies, the species is well accustomed to methods to try to get rid of missiles fired at their ships. So they would very likely build PD systems onto the hull, and to reduce the total number of needed emplacements, these would very likely be placed in turrets, no matter if it is a Laser, counter-missiles or kinetic shells.
# Caveat: Physics!
Now, for the things we have to take a look at when thinking about the rotating turrets, and mainly they are physics.
First of all, there is the conversion of rotational energy! Rotating our turret (no matter how light it is) around one axis applies a rotational force on the ship that is the other way than the rotation of the turret. This can be canceled out by just rotating a piece of the same weight in the counter direction on the same axis, so turrets might be aligned in quads and have linked movement patterns.
Second, Newton's Actio=Reactio. Accelerating the missiles a bit will apply equal force in the counter direction - but as the ship is much much heavier, the effect could be near neglectable (but matter for very long distance travel). If you want to counter this, either very specific fire patterns (that remove the effects by clever vector addition) or RCS will be needed - which is easier to calculate to do with fixed position launch bays.
Third, again, Newton's Actio=Reactio. Rocket engines are not really "ragdoll free", they just appear so for most Anti-Tank-Missiles, as they are just a tube without a floor from which the warhead is propelled. In space, exhaust gas particle continiue to travel with the same speed till they impact something or have dissipated enough to be indistinguishable from background particles. The first thing they'll impact is most likely the ship that fired the missiles, but again, the transmitted energy from them is neglectable because of the sheer difference in weight. Still it should be accounted for because this "vapor trail" (more like "gas trail"?) could be used to identify the trajectories.
Fourth is more the missile in question: Maneuvering in space. Remember, we are in an environment where gravity has much smaller effects than on a planet and there is little to no friction/drag. This means, the missile in question has only one way to steer at all: directing its exhaust. This again means, that the maneuverability of the weapon is directly related to two components: vectoring its main engine and the posession/lack of an RCS system to tilt it. With both in mind, there might be missile types that fire their engines for some time, then shut down for harder detection in travel, till they re-launch the engines for the last approach, others might fire the engines sporadically for maneuvering, and yet others just accelerate the whole time to impact as fast as they can, basically making them long-range-high-speed-kinetic-penetrators.
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Like you've said, turrets are complicated and completely unnecessary in the situation you describe where the projectiles themselves are 'smart' anyway.
For your ships, you can have lines of these rocket pods along the top, bottom, and sides. It makes sense to fire rockets in pairs from opposite sides of the ship, so that the kinetic force is cancelled out.
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Turrets are very useful if munitions have to consume a lot of fuel in order to maneuver. A turret allows you to fire munitions ahead, adding the ships velocity to the munition, or to the flank or stern on an intercept course with the target while the ship moves away. If the munition can accelerate 1000x after being launched from a ship then the vector imparted on it by the ship is negligible and you could fire munitions in any direction you want and they could maneuver at will. But if the munition is heavily reliant on the host ship for an initial velocity push because maneuvering fuel is limited then you need to be very careful to fire it in a useful direction and a turret based launcher can help a lot with that (otherwise you have to maneuver the entire ship for each launch). Remember there is no atmosphere to help with maneuvering or downward gravity to counter, unlike conventional missile launches on Earth, so you can't arc missiles up and around without a significant cost in fuel.
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It depends on how much velocity your gun can provide vs. how much velocity your rocket projectile can provide.
If your gun's muzzle velocity is either higher or a significant portion of the velocity your rocket engine can provide, then there is a case to be made for having a gun. (and a turret) Otherwise it's superfluous.
Consider, for example, that you have a railgun that can provide a few km/s velocity, and your projectiles are propelled by a chemical rocket that can also provide a few km/s velocity. (this projectile would be about half propellant by mass) The upside of having a gun is that you can either have projectiles that go twice as fast, or you can have the projectiles carry less propellant, meaning they're smaller and cheaper and you can carry more of them. Note that in the latter case a gun becomes more attractive the more projectiles you expect to fire. You're saving mass on lighter projectiles at the cost of a heavy gun turret, which means you need to fire a certain amount of projectiles for it to make sense.
There are tradeoffs to both of these advantages. A common downside is that introducing a gun turret introduces more system complexity and mass. It also implies a lower effective fire rate - it doesn't take much to fire many missiles concurrently (just enough launch cells, which you have just to store them anyway), but your gun can only fire so often.
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Not enough rep to comment, but since people seemed to be confused by Werrf's answer I wish to clarify it a bit. Atmospheric guided projectiles can use wings to steer themselves, so they can convert vertical velocity into horizontal velocity with a bit of loss to friction and turbulence. This means that if you're travelling straight up at 200k/h, and want to start moving east at 1000k/h, you might need to only use enough energy for the acceleration from 150k/h to 1000 (the last 850 of delta-v). In space, it's a different story. There is no atmosphere to push against and turn without losing speed, so you must counter the entire 200k/h of starting velocity. Then you need to use propellant to get up to 1000k/h - for 1200 in delta-v.
So very roughly, atmospheric missiles benefit less from being aimed at their target than missiles in space. During a war in space, to reduce the size of the missiles and maximize the acceleration they get out of their onboard fuel you already want them flying at the target if possible, so turrets have a potential advantage.
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I think it's pointless to complain about the mechanical complexity of a turret mounted on a *spaceship.* Turrets are the go-to weapon mounting solution for armored vehicles and fighting craft for the past hundred years, so clearly they're not as fragile and accident-prone as you believe they are. What they are, however, is *heavy,* or more accurately, *massive.* You might immediately want to write off turrets because they're weighing down your spaceship, but don't be so quick to judge.
**Turrets are heavy, but missiles are heavier.** This is because a missile has to carry all of its fuel, maneuvering, guidance, *ect* for the whole trip, and its launching vehicle does nothing to help it. It's basically a miniature, self contained vehicle that has to fly all the way to its target. A gun/turret does all of this for its projectiles, so those projectiles can be much smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to store.
Imagine that I have two ships - One missile armed and one hybrid railgun-launched-mini-missile armed. Both weapon systems have identical yields, delta-V stats, and so on; the only difference is that the mini-missiles weigh 1 ton and the normal missiles weigh 2 tons. The size disparity is because the turret gives its projectiles 50% of their final speed, roughly halving the need for mass and fuel. We'll give the missile launching ship a benefit and say that its missile-tubes don't weigh anything over the normal structure of the ship. The hybrid railgun ship has a 20 ton turret, immediately taking quite a bit away from its mass-budget.
Let's assume for a moment that each ship has 100 tons to allocate to weapons and ammo.
Missile ship:
100 tons / 2 tons per missile = 50 missiles
Hybrid railgun ship:
100 tons - 20 ton turret = 80 tons of ammo storage
80 tons / 1 ton per hybrid missile = 80 missiles.
That's an *extra 30 missiles*. 30 more chances to slip past their point defense. If I can fire big volleys at long range, that's a 60% bigger volley to overwhelm their point defense. Even though I lose out on some payload, I more than make it back in being able use smaller ammunition. Even if I have two turrets, I still have an extra 10 shots that my enemy doesn't.
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Yes, if using chemical rockets.
This is about the "tyranny of the rocket equation", which essentially means that not only does every bit of delta-v you want require you to carry more propellant, it also means that more of your propellant is spent giving delta-v to propellant not the actual payload. So more delta-v your rocket has the less efficient it is.
Conversely having a turret that supplies some initial velocity means that your rockets are more efficient.The counter-mass for that delta-v is your ship not propellant that takes space and mass on the rocket.
And on a spaceship this is not an academical concern since less efficient rockets means you carry fewer of them in the same limited space. This is naturally balanced by the mass of the turrets.
So you might want to decide based on how many rockets you think the ships will carry. If the number is a single digit number, the turrets are probably overkill. If you want actual engagements and battles, the turrets will pay back themselves. In between you might have something like fixed mass drivers that double as storage pods for the rockets. Or modular storage pods with integrated single use mass drivers/cannons, really.
There is also real value at being able to launch the rockets in the correct direction without having to maneuver the entire ship. You can get this without turrets, if you use the pod option. You simply drop the pod and once detached it uses integrated thrusters to turn right way and then fires the rocket away using the pod as reaction mass.
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Turrets would be very useful. Luann's answer covers most of what I originally was thinking, but after reading other answers, I have a few more.
With the turret you can fire at anything that you can point the turret at and isn't blocked by your ship. With a fixed launcher you have to maneuver the ship to point at the target or waste fuel maneuvering the missile to the target. The more fuel your missile has the longer it can track a ship performing evasive maneuvers.
Not pointing at the target may also become important as the ship takes damage. With fixed launchers if the area near the launcher is damaged, you will again have to waste fuel to maneuver or present the damage to the enemy. With Turrets you can rotate the damage away and still fire directly at the target.
Multiple targets will also be better handled by turrets. Each turret can independently be aimed directly at the target. Multiple fixed launchers will rarely be able to optimally target multiple targets.
Exposure time of the missile is decreased if it is fired directly at the target. If the missile has to turn, time to target will be increased, providing increased opportunity to shoot it down or to be destroyed by splash damage hitting the firing ship.
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Yes you want a turret of some sort on your ship. They are low tech solutions to a number of problems you might run into, especially with "Smart munitions". "Smart munitions" are great if you have no fear of ever running out of ammo and you know they'll work in the conditions you'll be in, and you don't have to worry about the communication lag, or hacking into their systems to blow you up rather than your enemy...
Ok but let's say none of that is a problem... which I don't even know why you would... you still want to have as little fuel tied up in your weapon as possible because you want to carry as many as possible, undetectable as possible, and light as possible, which means even if everything else is perfect you still want a launching mechanism to reduce all of those issues.
And as far as complexity.. A microchip and transmitter is a lot more complex and more error prone than turning on and off magnets and a few cogs... and to mention if the cogs or magnets break, you can fix them a lot easier than you can the chips in launched "smart munition". Also 1 attack could more easily disable your "smart munitions" with an penetrating round with an EMP... Or just Jam your signal so you can't control them. At least with a launcher system and minimal control you aren't completely disabled so easily.
I'm not saying they're completely useless, but they work much better as a single precision strike (which they're used for now) or a trick shot where you mix it in with regular munitions that an enemy that can predict tragectories would be thrown off by having most rounds miss them, but the smart round, not being taken into account gets a hit, where as a straight smart round can be accounted for and measures put in place to fight it faster when you're expecting it.
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The Soviets equipped one of their manned (and super secret) spy-stations with a 20-mm turret back in the 60's though it's generally presumed it was there for psychological comfort and to prevent the good guys from sending up a larger vessel to capture the station.
The first thing you have to do when designing realistic space warfare scenarios is to take everything you know about planet based combat and toss it out it the window. Nothing works in space the way it does on a planet. It's not going to be WWII in space.
The biggest difference is there is only one medium, vacuum and not three, water, air and land. You will never have a situation in analogous to a bullet, missile or shell, moving orders of magnitude faster than a ship on the water. In space, the biggest warship can move as fast, most likely faster, and for far longer than any small projectile. As pointed above, a size ratio of missile to ship that would work on earth would fail in space simply because the smaller missile would not have enough delta vee to catchup.
Likewise, and projectile fired from a ship, even a railgun, would likely not be able to reach the target.
The reason we use turrets on earth is so that slow or stationary weapon platforms can track targets as they move. A kinetic turret would have to move in a blur to even get a lock, and since the projectile would be traveling over vast distances at a speed close to that of the target, the target probably won't be anywhere close to where it was when the turret fired, and even if so, the projectile will be moving so slowly relative, it will be easy to dodge or intercept.
Directed energy weapons might need a turrent like structure for aiming. At least the point defense ones that would target small physical objects trying to hit the ship. The problem with these as main weapons is the incredible power it would take project and energy beam across the vast distances, then have enough "dwell time" focus on one spot, to do real damage.
I would give up on planet based analogies entirely and look at space craft as the special vehicles they are in their own special medium.
It's not an original observation, but the reaction engines powerful enough to move ships from planet to planet on routine basis, like nuclear or fusion drives, would themselves be more powerful energy projectors than any weapon you could mount on the ship. The Orion external nuclear pulse ship, was designed to defend itself with it's own drive, all they had to do was make a two sided shaped nuclear charge and they would project a jet of near relativistic plasma to a range that remains classified. (I'm not joking, I tried to dig up so of that old stuff, the e.g. Casaba Howitzer and all you get is a page of redactions.)
Even the exhaust of a less dramatic nuclear reactor drive could be made into a plasma weapon just by using a little more reactant mass or maybe tossing in some heavier elements as the exhaust stream exited the ship.
If you wanted to get super realistic, you'd also have to consider how the ships would get rid of all the heat their weapons would generate without having giant but fragile radiators sticking out all over. There was a realistic space combat board and dice game back the day in which ships fought till they over heated and then signaled surrender by retracting their radiators.
You really need to sit down and crunch some numbers about distances, ]velocities and energies to get a feel for just how bleeping-big space is, how intuition destroying fast everything moves and how much energy in is in even things like maneuvering thrusters. Even megaton nukes become firecrackers in space.
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## User Interface Customization for Spaceship Controls;
"In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're totally different."
We often find that what we plan for isn't what actually happens. What we think we'll need, we actually don't and need something else. This holds for camping trips, tool boxes and so much else. A Priori planning only gets you so far. Designing spaceships is hard. Getting the user interface right is just as hard. However, we have to assume that for the most part, the displays and controls are correct. They provide the correct information and facilitate the proper operations.
On a long endurance spaceship that won't come back to port for many years, it's possible that the user interfaces designed into the ship aren't actually all that useful. There's information that an operator finds more useful or a presentation that gives too much of the wrong information. *What place in this scenario is there for allowing a user/engineer/operator to customize the display and controls to meet their needs? Where should UI customization be permitted and where should it be forbidden?* **I'm interested in should customization be allowed, and if so, with what restrictions**, not *how to make customized displays* (as that question is very broad).
There are obvious safety concerns to allowing this. Permitting the power-plant engineers to turn off the big red light because it wakes them up is a bad move. However, letting the navigator build a new display that helps plot a course that incorporates fuel efficiency/time trade-offs would be handy.
We assume this spaceship has the standard systems: Powerplant, life-support, food prep/production, navigation, sensors, crew quarters, recreation, weapons/mission tools.
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Many (but not all) spaceship controls will be **safety critical**. When the senior pilot jumps into the copilot's seat on a smoke-filled bridge instead of making the nightshift pilot vacate his place, the senior pilot should be able to find the buttons blind, in the usual space.
When the admiral steps to the flag plot, he will expect to see standard information in standard places. That icon has no IFF code? It means there *is no IFF*, and not that the junior operations officer configured it away to make room for more digits in the vector display.
Critical controls might be physical switches for this reason, potentially with distinctive shapes so one can find them by individual feel in addition to location. Even digital readouts will be standardized.
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It's pretty simple - we already do this!
All (or most) critical infrastructure is controlled using [SCADA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA) interfaces. The critical functionality lives in a system where the operator cannot change the software (or firmware). The control interface though can talk to the critical functionality over a standardised interface, where each modifiable or readable entry within the control system has an associated record that can be read.
The SCADA system is then in charge of reading, writing and displaying data to the user. It is possible to configure the SCADA system pages to show any of this data.
Of course most users cannot (and should not) be allowed to change stuff at will. You therefore have a system of access codes to determine who can modify which values, or even who can read which values.
And beyond that, you have the SCADA pages themselves. Sometimes the system is 100% locked down at delivery time; but sometimes "superuser" operators can set up their own pages if needed; or more usually if a need becomes apparent then there is a requirements-gathering exercise to get the supplier to set up a new page. This is up to whoever is in charge of the system specification; for example the national grid operating that power station, or the space agency operating that satellite.
If you head off into space for an extended mission, the same principles are likely to apply. Authorisation for changes will rest with the captain and/or senior engineering staff, I'd guess.
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I'd assume that, for a space ship, you'd end up with a distinction between critical UI, noncritical UI, and casual UI. There may be other classes, but I'm not sure what they would be. My guess is that critical UI would not be customizable, but noncritical would be.
For critical UI, I'd imagine there are a few common elements. Primarily, time-sensitivity and irreversability. This includes safety alerts about airflow/reactor meltdown. But it also includes large-scale energy expenditures, required mainentence, etc. These critical elements should not be customized because presumably many people on board will be able to see them and start reacting (even if it's just waking up the appropriate people.) The unified UI will allow anyone, regardless of what terminal they are going by, to see an event occur. Further, people can easily be trained to handle certain procedures (example, dump the core) that would need to have a consistent UI. Also, customization inheritly produces the possiblity of failure, and allowing a failure in critical UI means another problem may not be detected.
For non-critical UI, persumably people will log in to terminals when they sit down/start a duty cycle. I'd imagine that login screen is standard (doesn't know the person) and then it downloads their personal UI from a server. I imagine benefical UI changes will migrate as people copy/paste from each others. I'd also imagine a known area of the screen is where the critical UI is (or that it can pop up over the personalized UI) in a known way that's unchangeable. Things like user input (that wouldn't need to follow emergency proedures) should be configureable, as people optimize workflow. Also, which displays (speed, position, power) people see where will likely change depending on their jobs.
For casual UI (e.g. a light switch), it seems like the costs of loading a customized UI is too high for each person to customize it. So it would have to be standard.
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# All UI should be customizable depending on access level
If your UI is correctly constructed, it makes API calls to the backend and the backend does things, or returns errors like *418: I'm a Teapot.* Nothing you can do will affect the capabilities of the API, so some two-bit jQuery plugin won't melt down your system.
# Alert vectors should not be removable, but alerts must be dismissible
While you should be able to mod your controls and visualizations, there's no reason to allow the removal of alert vectors. Regardless of what you do to your tumblr theme, you will still receive the big scary all-caps email that something is wrong. Low-level hardware alerts of the "big flashing red light and ear-piercing noise" model should not be modifiable.
However, in a long-distance voyage, things will break down. If an alert cannot be resolved, or the faulty system has been circumvented, the captain *must* have the authority to suppress the alert. Yes computer, we know there is a hull breach and atmosphere is low. Everyone has been wearing EVA suits for days now. Please be quiet.
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Sure, on a truly long mission it stands to reason that situations will come up that were not anticipated before the mission began. If this is the first ship of its type, presumably the crew will find that things that sounded good during development aren't working out so well in practice, etc.
I build computer systems for a living. Every experienced software developer has seen things that sounded good on the drawing board and that looked good in testing turn out to not be so good in practice. (The Windows Registry ... cough cough ...) Most big software projects don't really have an end date. You deploy version 1, let people use it for a while, then you see the sort-comings and start working on version 2.
Presumably some amount of customization would be built into the system. With a Windows application, you can normally re-size the window, re-arrange toolbars, and have all sorts of options. But the average user can't re-program it. You're allowed variation within fixed limits.
Even if the technology progressed to allow much broader customization without reprogramming, you would surely want limits on this.
As someone else mentioned, you probably don't want to allow a user to remove danger warnings because he finds them annoying.
You don't want someone to be able to remove functionality with no way to get it back.
If, as seems likely, users have to communicate with each other about operations tasks, then too much customization can mean that they can't meaningfully discuss how to do a task. I've often run into the "well, hmm, but it works on my computer" problem.
It's possible that in the future, computers will be like the computers on Star Trek, where you can just say, "Computer, calculate the power output of our engines using this new fuel we just got from the Klingons" and it will do it, even though no one has ever programmed it to calculate power output or given it any data about the new fuel. In real life, computers can't just invent new algorithms based on vague English descriptions. In my humble opinion, if a machine is ever invented that can do that, it will have little resemblance to current computers. Creating an entirely new display is not something that the average crew member will be able to do in 5 minutes. It will be a task requiring skilled programmers.
In practice, it seems to me that if a starship was really built that would be sent off on a trip lasting many years, and this ship had a large crew, that there would be some number of programmers included in the crew who could update the ship's computer systems as necessary.
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You need to look at this from two perspectives...or maybe three. Lets see how the answer develops as I write.
**Roles:** As with modern computer programs you need to develop roles. As we use them today you often have roles, for example:
* Admins
* Leads
* Technicians
* QA
**Permissions:**
* Administration
* Super user
* Edit
* Read only
**Information Types:** This I have specified for your scenario
* System Status
* Technical Data (Engineering)
* Telemetry/Sensor Data
* Navigation/Piloting
* Safety (this would likely be a meta data point and could apply to the other types)
* Life Support
* Supply/Inventory
* Crew Data
Alright with all that down the short answer to your question is **yes** you should allow customized data with some caveats. To demonstrate lets say you have your lead pilot.
This person would fall into the *Lead* role.
* Permissions wise they would have Super User or Admin status.
* Logically they would have access to System Status, Technical Data, Sensor Data, and Navigation/Piloting
* You could restrict the content to a particular set of information, for example they may not be granted access to crew data
* You could, and probably should (for example the safety info you mentioned) require certain information be part of any UI. This too could be based on role, pilots for example **must** have sensor scans checking for meteors on their dashboard.
Another example would be and Engineer dealing with say ventilation systems.
This person would fall into the *Technician* role. Though you could have a lead role here as well.
* Permissions wise they may have edit access system information and read only access to sensor data.
**So the short answer to your question is:** Yes, allow customization as part of a larger *permissions* scheme to allow users by *role* access to information. Certain role based information would be required based on agreed standards, for example anything labelled *safety.*
*One additional thing I should mention...* make all the UI's tied to the specific user via bio-metrics. This will allow multiple people to use the same console/station each getting their own custom view. That way in an emergency or if someone gets killed/sick/space poisoned someone else can plop down in their seats put their thumb on a scanner and you're good to go...like roaming profiles on a computer network.
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> What place in this scenario is there for allowing a user/engineer/operator to customize the display and controls to meet their needs?
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Whatever helps you perform your job better will probably be incentivated.
For example, may Kerbal Space Program players use mods that allow you to plot, on screen, the amount of fuel you spend per altitude while sending stuff into Kerbin's orbit. You don't have this out of the box with the vanilla version of the game, and it is extremely useful.
There is absolutely no rational reason to forbid customization. Of course, those who generally enforce authority-following over rationale and efficiency will always be a thorn on the side of the creative ones.
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> Where should UI customization be permitted (...)
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Everywhere.
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> and where should it be forbidden?
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You should not forbid new screens and layouts. What you cannot allow is any kind of customization that:
* Makes it harder or impossible to find elements of the original UI. Even if a user usually ignores some of those elements, there may be times when they become mission critical. I.e.: just because you intend to never land your spaceship does not mean you should completely remove the switch that triggers the landing gear.
* Of course, if UI is customizable, there will always be an expletivehole that will include ads somewhere. They might also include code to mine cryptocurrencies, or code to track your activities without you noticing. That should not be allowed either.
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Some examples in fiction where the UI of a ship was, or could have been customized:
* In the *Black Panther* movie, there is a spaceship which can be controlled remotely through a VR module with realistic haptic (i.e.: touch) feedback. The shape of the controls can be changed to suite what is more familiar to the pilot.
* In the *Marsbound* book, by Joe Haldeman, a spaceship that takes colonists from Earth to Mars is operated via a tablet. No further details are given, but we can imagine that the UI can be rewritten/reconfigured as per the pilot's needs.
* In *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* series of books, some ships have some rather... Interesting... UI's. The *Heart of Gold* is controlled by an artificial stupidity which can, of course, project whatever it wants on its screens. There is also a ship called *Bistromath*, which has bistro tables and robotic waiters for its interface. I can only surmise that variations covering different cuisines (i.e.: sushi bars) could be used as well.
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A lot depends on who will performing a given function at a given station. The more people who would be expected to operate at a given station, and how critical that station is, the less permission for customization there could be.
Example: NASCAR race cars now have a digital dashboard display. While (for competition reasons) the rules limit what can be displayed, how that information is displayed can be customized a bit. Some drivers prefer a display that looks like the old style dials. Others prefer a tachometer that looks like a bar graph in addition to numbers. Some have the lap time displayed in large numbers, some have it in smaller numbers, some don't show it at all, and so on.
Because there's only one driver per car (one operator per station), the fact that each might want info displayed in a different way is fine.
Now compare that to the glass cockpit of a modern airliner. Pilots do not have customization options for the vast majority of the displays for very good reasons, primarily because you want all pilots on a given aircraft to know by reflex where they need to look to get information they need. This simplifies training, it means you can drop any pilot in the same model of plane without any issues, and on long hauls where you might have relief pilots you don't have to worry about displays being reconfigured midflight and failing to be changed back.
Without standardized controls and displays, emergency checklists become much more difficult because humans will naturally tend to shuffle into the background rarely-used information, but in an emergency it's often those rarely-used displays that you need. *("Check the pressure level from the air intake...where the hell is that?! Where did I put that menu?!")*. If seconds count, you can't be futzing around because you shuffled off some rarely-used status display on to some secondary menu that you have to root around and find.
So, using the *Enterprise* 1701-D as an example, Helm, Tactical, and Engineering will always have standard layouts and displays because you want someone to be able to walk to a console coming on duty and instantly be able to see what's happening and control what's necessary. If the ship is under attack and Worf gets knocked out (again), you want someone to be able to step up to the station and know where the shield strength indicator is, the firing button for the torpedoes and phasers, and whatever else is needed without trying to figure out where the hell Worf re-arranged everything. If the warp core is about to blow (again) you want to know exactly where the eject control is without having to root through various menus for it.
Stations like science and ops, where what they're doing may vary, would likely be more customizable; if you have to reconfigure the science station to display a scan of a nearby black hole, and in ten minutes do a search on ancient Earth cultures for information on alien abductions involving anal probing (it's that kind of episode), then it's really no big deal if Data prefers it looking one way and Random Science Officer another. The thing is going to be always changing anyway, so someone personalizing it isn't a big deal.
Meanwhile, Picard and Crusher get to set up the displays in their respective offices however the hell they want. No one else is going to be using them very often, and they're not critical to operations.
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It is very likely that controls will be very **flexible**. It is unlikely, however, that they will be **fully customizable**, i.e. beyond the level of flexibility that was initially designed.
With UI progressing from lights and flip switches of 1950s to Tesla-like touch screen consoles of 2010s, it is very likely that the **ability** of future consoles to be customizable will only increase. The actual question is to which extent this ability will be utilized. For example, Tesla console can potentially be adapted to operate a spaceship. But (considering that designers did not foresee this possibility) how much effort (and potential risk) it would take to do so?
Full UI redesign is a major project and major risk. Even if spaceship has a cadre of engineers just for this job, the risk is just too high to do a major upgrade mid-flight.
On the other hand, existing UI system can be very flexible. Users may customize look and feel of most control elements, pick and choose between the number of widgets. UI engineers can tweak individual widgets and even develop new ones.
This flexibility should be intentionally restricted where appropriate. It is one thing to have ship's galley console customized beyond recognition. It would be completely another matter to do the same with the console that has ship's "self-destruct" button (an indispensable feature in sci-fi, as I understand).
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# Contemporary Examples
My first thought on reading this was to reminisce about a colleague who worked on oil drilling platforms in Alaska. The platforms are spaceship-like in that they require life support systems to isolate workers from Arctic weather conditions, and if they were off-shore as opposed to living in Prudhoe Bay, they might be on the rig for weeks at a time.
Updates to the control room were requested at times, as someone would have to perform a particular operation regularly and "it would be nice of the button was over here so I don't need to get up and walk over to push it," or in the opposite case, I can think of safety engineering cases where you would want two buttons to be pressed by two people, etc. In these cases, they used a change control system in which every change was documented, all schematics updated, etc. I've also known engineers who worked in places where updates were not as rigorous, and an engineer would be called in to fix an issue, only to find that the schematics/drawings were wrong and nobody had any clue as to what wire went where, leading to extended downtime.
# Risks with fancy displays
Regrading some of the suggestions for LED displays, I would point out that any fancy display or software creates an additional point of failure, which increases the risk of buttons working, but you have no idea what they mean because the display failed for any number of reasons.
# Adding some human elements for storytelling
From a storytelling perspective, if you are only wanting to have the travelers "get it right," I would highly recommend re-reading the post about SCADA, and also I would recommend reading about change control procedures.
But if you would like to introduce some challenges, then depending on your audience, you could have a character use organization politics to force the use of his "genius" (read: idiotic) design that fails when he attempts to push an update, or from any other minor shock. Alternatively, when a change goes in, a busy director/superior officer simply hands the authorization code for modifications over to the maintenance crew because he doesn't want to bother with putting the authorization in each time, and then the crew shares it around and next thing you know half of the controls are completely rearranged and nobody knows what's going on.
You could say that this is engineering humor, because engineers, IT, etc. get called in to fix things like this all the time, including for mission-critical work. Depending on how you write it, this could be used for comedy (the bad guy is defeated because of poor management decisions and blame-shifting minions leading to spectacular failure), or for dramatic effect (an overly proud, young team member or an overly controlling manager puts everyone in danger and he has to face his failure).
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Here are some images showing the evolution of controls over time, from two Soyuz and a Dragon, which are spacecraft with similar capabilities.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7NCxl.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rs4XJ.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zcf8Q.jpg)
This last one is the control panel for 21st century spacecraft. It's a prototype, so the final design may be a little different, but you can at least see what the engineers were going for.
As you can see, the trend over time is for fewer buttons and more screens. The Dragon even has touch screens so some of the controls are defined in software. However there is a limit to this trend; there was an earlier prototype of the Dragon with very few buttons, but that design was abandoned. Any controls you would need to have quick access to in an emergency are now physical buttons, partly for ease of access when you're under stress, and partly so they still work if a cosmic ray or a software bug makes the dashboard computer crash.
The group of six buttons is for turning the power off and on again. That's something I'd definitely want to be a physical button when the computer crashes!
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**It's more than UI that you want to customize.**
Shuffling things around, changing colours and such is mostly pointless. It's easier to just learn what to look for, which has the advantage that everybody learns the same thing and so they can easily fill in for each other.
However since it is presumably an exploration ship, it will be encountering unexpected things and it will have to adapt to them. And often these things will be happening too fast for humans to respond, or will be difficult for them to recognize. So the crew will need to:
* define things the sensors should be looking for and
* define automatic reactions to things.
Say you'll encounter this belligerent alien species who have their ships equipped by cloaking device that can however be detected by specific distortion of the background image it causes. So the crew has to be able to configure the sensors to detect this distortion and mark it up as a hostile target. And then they may need to configure the ship so it automatically raises shields and heats up the impulse engine in preparation for evasive manoeuvre, because the ship might be coming in at 5000 km/s and you may only be able to detect it at 10 000 km—no way the tactical officer is able to react before they get in the firing range.
This new logic will often require new UI, but not all that much. There will already be a warning panel and a tactical display showing the detected threats and you'll just be defining new alerts and targets and symbols for them.
All this configuration should be ship-wide. Everybody on the bridge needs to use the same displays and know what all currently defined symbols mean. Therefore the changes should be done with knowledge of all relevant crew members and preferably in their agreement. The captain has the last word, but they should follow good crew resource management practices and address all raised concerns before deciding on the final solution.
Also beware of excessive restrictions. Somebody interfering with controls they should not be touching is a people problem and needs to be solved with rules, training and subordination, not access control. Your crew members need to be able to step in for others who are disabled or just lost situational awareness and are not doing what they are supposed to, even if it means temporarily violating subordination if the situation calls for it. They are well trained professionals; give them some trust.
You'll probably need to have specialized maintenance engineer(s) for this, but then on a long mission you'll need them for fixing other issues with the systems too.
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While this isn't really open source, what you're describing would just need some kind of way to simulate the spaceship's systems, and the UI could be built on the simulation. Then it has to pass some kind of standard/review before being committed to the Spaceship Version Control System That Definately Isn't GitHub, or SSCSTDIG for short.
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What you're looking for, it seems, is a customizable UI. Those are possible today using touch screens.
If you'd rather have something tactile, look at LED keyboards. Imagine the keys being topped with an LED pad so that it could display any symbol that you wanted. Thus, you could assign each button to an icon (which you can draw yourself; the Mac had a bitmap editor 35 years ago) and an action which you could also program yourself.
<https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/images/products/large_1056_DSC_1040.jpg>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fR4Gc.jpg)
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I think the best way to approach this is to display the controls as a Google Keep-like panel, and upon entering a password, engineers will be able to drag and drop the different cards. You should be able to show and hide cards except for certain cards, such as speed, fuel, and oxygen.
A technician on the ship could construct their own program to run and display on the panel. These would be fully customizable, can be removed, displayed, and can have the source code directly edited by whoever knows what they're doing.
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it would depend on whether the UI was customisable or hackable.
By hackable I mean it in the sense of using knowledge of the system to create an ad hoc element.
By customisable the UI exposes enough of its underlying structure that you can create new UI behaviour.
To give a real world example of what I mean for hackable - the file search function on most Modern OSes can filter the results of searches so you can narrow down the criteria to help find what you're looking for. A hack would be to trigger the search function to check for a certain file type with a certain name and on successfully finding this file to launch an app or apps to further process the file or do its own thing. The search function wasn't designed to be used like this but you can co-opt it to do so as long as you have some knowledge of the OS
While with customisable UI if would would behave more like a hybrid OS + IDE. If you decide you want to have a calendar with weeks consisting of 9 days of 36 hours or a display for the phases of Phobos whilst showing a slideshow of Doom screenshots it wont try to stop you.
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So, I wanted one of my species in a world of mine to primarily use tridents as their weapons. I'm not sure of their location outside of a mesa. I did a little research and tridents were indeed used in ancient combat, but as far as I could tell they were rare and mostly used by fisherman taking up arms. But, I'm not asking for that, I want tridents to be at least somewhat commonplace and not as a weapon to be used in a pinch. Looking on other sites, it seems like tridents are a farfetched thing as a intentional weapon that isn't just to show off since the same metal used to make the trident could make spears instead.
I am not asking for ornamental weapons, nor improvised, and preferably not anything connected to some religion or tradition although that is acceptable. The only benefit I can see for a trident is the disarming factor, but maybe there's something I missed. It's also worth noting this is a
medieval-esque technology period, although a little handwavium and suspension of disbelief is acceptable, and worse comes to worst I can always say they live on the coast and choose tridents simply so their weapons have more utility.
In summary, **what would cause a military to choose tridents as the main weapon to outfit their soldiers with instead of anything else such as a spear?**
[Answer]
## A Few Thoughts:
Although the trident is somewhat limited as a weapon, I can think of several good reasons to use them.
* **Tradition**: Cultural reasons are often more powerful than you might think. A great hero of the past used a trident, and the culture was once a nautical one. There are a wide variety of pole-arms used in the middle ages, and the heads were sometimes rather complex. Incorporating additional tines to make any of them more trident-like to honor this ancient tradition is not so far-fetched.
* **Military obligations**: In a society bound by rules designed to make wars less devastating, perhaps the culture has designated only certain weapons as acceptable for military use. In much the same way crossbows weren't supposed to be used against fellow Christians in the middle ages, the awkwardness of certain weapons is seen as slowing the lethality of battle. This also works if your society has good healing - shallow stabs from multi-pronged weapons through armor might disable but not kill.
* **Modified Boar spear**: Perhaps your world has a large number of large, suicidality aggressive animals/enemies, such that it is critical in battle to stop a huge charging beast with a spear with a large cross-guard.
* **Small opponents**: A trident is designed with multiple tines to maximize the ability to stab (and hold) small opponents. If your world has small enemies that are hard to hit with single-tined weapons, those with multiple tines might become more critical. Damn those fairies, they are SO hard to kill, and all their weapons are dripping poison. Keep them at arms reach, impale them, then slam them on the ground repeatedly until they are mangled to a pulp.
* **Near-indestructible enemies with no vulnerable places**: If you have enemies that die VERY hard (werewolves, vampires, zombies, etc.) Then forked and tined tridents will stab and hold them. Plunge them up and down to rip and tear. Pin them with multiple tridents, then pour oil on them and light them on fire.
* **Multiple opponents with unique vulnerabilities**: So your trident has one tip that's a wooden stake, another with silver, and a third with cold iron. So when fighting the combined forces of the werewolves, vampires, and elves, you have one weapon that can engage all of them instead of having to switch or limit a small part of your army to effective fighting.
* **Underwater/specialty enemies**: Perhaps you have a devil rat or fish/eel-like creature you need to fight (in the water or otherwise) on a regular basis. While you don't ALWAYS need to fight them, the need for a trident-like weapon (the best for the specialty enemy) can crop up at any time, so it's much more practical to carry one all the time, and have specialized weapons around for other kinds of fighting. Still, you don't always get to choose the tool you have, and everyone HAS a trident with them all the time. It's considered unethical to deny anyone a trident at all times due to the risk of sudden attack, so even at formal occasions, people bring their tridents with them. Better safe than sorry.
[Answer]
**Tridents grow on trees.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oexjJ.jpg)
<http://laviecevenole.blogspot.com/2009/06/sauve-and-pitchfork.html>
>
> For a working hay fork, this takes eight years on the bush, with
> well-gauged pruning all the while. If more than ten days lapse without
> trimming, the year's harvest can be lost. Once the fork is ready and
> cut from the bush, it is transferred to a 100 C oven, where as the sap
> sweats out, the branch warms and becomes flexible. The bark is then
> easily stripped, and after adroit adjustments (all this using the
> original, highly specialized tools), the branch is returned to a
> warmer oven in which it is hermetically sealed and smoke-cured for a
> day, resulting in its light brown hue.
>
>
>
There is a plant in the area of your people that turns out first rate tridents, just like this tree turns out fine pitchforks. It is less work to make tridents than other weapons. If you make it into a spear, your compadres will shake their heads and ask why you want just one when you could have three?
[Answer]
More holes per hit. Your soldiers are fighting creatures that can deal well with deep wounds, but not so well with lots of them.
Say, at least some of the time, you're fighting some amorphous creature with a thick skin that prevents the stuff coming out. Think huge Paramecia. Poking a deep hole into the liquid inside won't do much good, and a few small holes in the surface can be sustained, but as soon as the goo seriously starts leaking, you start dealing real damage to your enemy.
This is especially true if the creatures you're fighting are relying on pneumatic or hydraulic action to articulate and move limbs.
With a little bit of handwaving, such a creature might even be anthropomorphic. In fact, [some humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_skeleton) have hydrostatic organs that work like that.
[Answer]
There isn't a practical reason to select the trident as a primary weapon. The only well documented use of tridents in combat was in ritualized gladatorial fights where a net and trident armed Retiarius would fight a heavily armored Secutor. This was intended to be a dramatization of the battle between fisherman and fish.
In a military context tridents are almost universally worse than the spear, being heavier, more awkward and more expensive. The closest militaries got to tridents were some of the more exotic pole arms but those usually didn't stick around for long outside of ceremonial roles.
You can either handwave this and not explain why, which if your storytelling is good enough, should be easy; look how easily we bought into laser swords in Star Wars. Or you could say their spears have vestigial spikes near the base of their shaft for some sort of aesthetic reason.
[Answer]
* well **in close formation** at least, compare to spear, now **a single person can wield three or multiple pointy tip in a row for a single weapon**, that can help mitigate or close the gap in the formation and prevent opponent to get closer and harder to dodge, and can prevent horse charge or intimidate the horse despite their numbers is lower.
* **can increase chance for the hit including for throwing**.
* **can giving more wound for single stab to help bleeding them faster or increase the chance for hitting important organs**, also it can be a bit similar like halberd if the two side is change into blade edge instead of pitchfork type.
* outside of disarming as OP already mentioned also **can help block or binding or caught opponent attack or weapon or prevent blade sliding too** (like sword cross guard) in close formation without needing to change the weapon direction much or sacrificing/use the shaft to block that can disturb or get prevented by the close formation, and it can help keeping your hand or finger safe (in case of two-hand trident type weapon).
* **it also help prevent the tip to pierce too deep and make it stuck or
harder to pull out**, but this depend on the angle and the type of the
trident blade or tip it can also end up stuck though which may or may
not be good depend on the situations or the enemy type, or to prevent enemy to keep charging despite getting impaled like boar spear do.
* **if the trident is only has two tip instead, it can also be use as man-catcher** so you can capture opponent as prisoner for ransom.
* oh yeah also just like war scythe, **they can easily reuse or modified into civilian tools back after battle**, like for fishing or use it like pitchfork etc to cut cost for easy/cheap weaponise militia or peasant.
**the cons is it can get tangled** with each other if not trained well in formation or coordination at least outside of the chaotic in battle, regarding the heaviness at the end point, theres many spear type that has heavy weight at the end point and theres also a way to brace it to prevent the body stress.
since after rereading i found out it have or mean for unknown species element to it, **i can see them use well against underwater creature at least, especially the small size one**, due to the bend of light or refraction (assuming your species is on water), but it can also use well underwater to give a greater chance to hit the opponent compare to spear thrust, since thrust wont get hindered much underwater compare to slashing or slamming motion, and if the trident have blade edge it can also use to push and draw cut or slicing motion at a distance, so maybe your species is a mermaid or underwater type species, that can justified the trident as standard weapon in their underwater battle, while regarding on land, using it to thrust small species seem like a chore, since they can just use wider surface weapon to slam them or slashing multiple of them just fine compare to underwater due to the water force/drag, unless the small creature is immune from blunt impact or slash cut.
[Answer]
Tridents are dual purpose.
Come harvest time, they are essential tools for collecting wheat, making hay, building haystacks, and assuring the health and prosperity of your population through the winter.
This is also superb exercise to keep the troops in tip-top physical condition.
Any third use, such as spear fishing in shallow rivers or lagoons, is a bonus.
Beyond that, the circumstances will depend on the details of your world.
Speculating : if they live on a large mesa, they may farm it, and appear to all the world like a peaceful bunch of yokels, whose few iron tools are mere farm implements.
Until an unsuspecting army attacks.
You can't take a mesa by surprise : by the time you approach its heights, every peasant lad and farm girl has sharpened the tines of their formerly innocent pitchfork, and the mesa's edge is a ring of bristling steel...
You can fight an army, but you can't fight the entire population.
[Answer]
Tridents stop enemies from getting too hung on your weapon compared to a spear.
So it could be useful if there exists a common enemy force which is durable enough that they might willingly impale themselves on a spear and continue to run down the spear in order to close the distance with the wielder.
Or the enemy creatures might be gooey or soft and not so easily damaged by a simple spear pierce. In which case the outer prongs of the trident could be modified to be cut a circular path when twisted so they can making huge gaping wounds. The good ol' stab'n twist.
Or the tridents have single-shot explosive/shrpanel charges loaded into two of the three prongs. If you tried this with a spear you only have one charge at the ready and after you use it you have a tipless spear, AKA a stick. Not the best weapon of war.
[Answer]
**Actually, they are stun guns**
Some of the more radical alchemists have designed a device that can harness the power of electricity and discharge it into enemies to subdue them without killing them.
Imagine a [Bahgdad battery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery) or [Leyden jar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar) strapped to someone's back. The terminals are connected to wires that run along the shaft of the trident, sheilded with wax and cloth or some available material. The center prong is negatively charged, while the other prongs are positive, or vice versa.
The electrident is of course an expensive and rare weapon, but it has so captured the imagination of the people, that many wield plain tridents in imitation.
**Edit**
As @Harabeck astutely pointed out, the third prong of the electrident is redundant. This itself is a historical artifact harking back to the culture's history as a seafaring people.
Elecbidents are not unheard of, but carry less prestige. There are indeed frequent flame wars on bulletin boards regarding the respective merits of each variation.
[Answer]
**Phalanx**
It makes a phalanx or hedgehog formation three times as prickly, making it a lot harder for the enemy to negotiate their way through it.
**Thrown weapons**
If your soldiers are skilled at throwing spears, then three spikes instead of one makes it easier to hit their target (though I'm not sure how this would affect aerodynamics, you could hand-wave that your men are particularly skilled at overcoming that)
[Answer]
*Hooking*
Your trident can function as an elaborate winged spear. The wings on the spear can be used to hook an opponents shield. Thus, if your spear tip is beyond the shield of the opponent, you bring the spear shaft into contact with the shield and pull it back. The wing will collide with the shield and interfere with the opponent's use of the shield.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/loSKi.jpg)
*Source*: Wikimedia of course
[Answer]
**Spearfishing experience**
In spearfishing you use tridents when you see that the only available catches are small fishes. Single spears are more likely to break a chunk of the fish and then lose the grip. If your wounded prey swims under a rock and dies there you get nothing even if it was a good shot, tridents are more likely to remain hooked. Furthermore with tridents it's easier to catch a prey even if the aim wasn't very good. The drawback is that if you miss your target and hit a rock the trident gets easily damaged.
In combat I don't see much utility for them, they maybe better for unskilled fighters in close combat, nothing more.
] |
[Question]
[
My world has a medieval level civilization that has remained unchanged for millions of years.
They look and act a lot like humans; they have language, culture, government, literature, and basic tech.
But, their civilization has remained essentially the same for millions of years. No new tech, no major changes in people’s way of life. Culture does change, and so does language. Countries still go to war, governments change, still though their civilization is pretty much the same as it was over a million years ago.
How could this be? Is there any physical or cultural traits that could result in this?
Edit: thank you everyone for the interesting responses. I wish I had time to reply to all of them! I am starting to put together a pretty interesting back story for my stagnant civilization.
I think I have everything I need for now though I will probably be coming back soon with some more specific questions about my world.
I will be leaving this question open for a few more days before I accept an answer to encourage more discussion.
Thanks again everyone.
[Answer]
The answer lies in your statement *they look and act a lot like humans*. The unspoken part of this sentence is obviously going to be some form of *; but they differ from humans in one or more key ways*.
Take Neanderthals, our kissing cousins (literally!). Sapiens used to think that Neanderthals were dumb, poor thinkers, uninnovative, culturally and materially stagnant. Although newer thinking on the matter is changing that perspective, this is one place where you might want to throw the spanner in the works.
We also know, intuitively, that necessity is the mother of invention. When life throws you a curve ball, you make lemonade, sit down and enjoy the game.
* To get what you want, you're probably going to want a sophont that's a little dim: doesn't really think outside the box, doesn't take too well to new ideas, and prefers routine and continuity as a matter of constitution. (Cognitive)
* You may want a sophont whose dexterity is somewhat lacking: the opposable thumb may be short or not quite as mobile; tool use and fine, delicate work may be compromised. (Physiological)
* You might want to set them in a world that is quite stable tectonically, volcanically, and climatically. Ice ages and huge volcanic eruptions and meteors and things tend to cause upheaval. Upheavals force life forms to adapt or die. You don't want these people to die, but you don't really want them to adapt quickly or change rapidly either. If you choose to make these people smart & dexterous, then you'll need to hobble them in some way, like denying them a key resource (iron is always a good one), which will hamper their technological progress. (Environmental)
* You'll want them to be naturally communal organisms -- not "hive like" beings, but rather clannish and traditionbound in the sense that when the elders teach the younglings, the younglings accept without question and repeat the same patterns over and over again over countless generations. (Social & Cultural)
* You may also consider going down the longeval / slow reproduction route. Take your standard average Elf. With lifespans into the thousands or myriads of years, you get a completely different mindset. Overall development is much slower: there's no need for quick solutions when the thing that has worked for four hundred thousand years is still working fine today. (Constitutional)
[Answer]
**There is only one guaranteed way: it's forced upon your society**
Technological advance is the result of *problem solving.* Your society reached its present level of technology (a considerable amount of technology, if you think about it) by encountering an *unconscionable* number of problems and solving them. Not the least of which is Mother Nature. Allow me to indulge in quoting one of my favorite actors, and this is the fourth time I've cited this same quote in answers on this site.
From [War of the Worlds (2005)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2005_film)) we hear the indomitable Morgan Freeman intone the phrase:
>
> From the moment the invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate, and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of man's weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in His wisdom had put upon this Earth. By the toll of a billion deaths Man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challengers, for neither do men live, or die, in vain. ([Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT8iWtH9DAc), sorry for the lousy audio)
>
>
>
Why is this important? Because people (including your people) keep getting sick. It isn't simply random evolution that protects us from illness,1 it's also the people's efforts to save their loved ones. The curious, the clever, the ones who keep chewing on the next root or leaf in the hope that it will, somehow, save their child.
Now reflect that sense of desperation onto engineering problems ("dang river's in the way, sir!"), political problems ("dang pretender's in the way, sir!"), religious problems ("dang devil made me do it, sir!"), logistical problems ("too many dang mouths to feed, sir!") and you'll quickly discover that the only "natural" way to retard technological development is to remove all the problems.
* No sorrow — and no happiness.
* No illness — and no death (neither accidental nor natural).
* No crisis — and no celebration.
Hopefully, this is starting to sink in. The first time one of your feudal lords demands a party that's bigger than last year's, you have a problem to solve — and that will lead to (however minor) technological development.
**Which means the only solution is that it's being forced**
And I upvoted Matthew's answer, because he's pointing out that you need to force the status quo.
* Clever people must be ~~burned as witches~~ removed from society at all costs.
* Population control must be a paramount requirement, which means ~~some form of child sacrifice~~ some form of medieval contraception is required. It can't be war, *necessity is the mother of invention* and there are few necessities more demanding and motivating than *not losing a war.* It also can't bring sorrow, because the pain of losing a child is a remarkable motivator for change.
* Population contentment is almost as important, which means ~~making sure everyone has a chicken in their pot~~ all basic needs are met. (You should be thinking, "post-scarcity civilization in a medieval era... *uh-huh....")*
* Exploration must be ~~mercilessly quashed~~ devalued whenever possible (M. Night Shyamalan's *[The Village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_(2004_film))* comes to mind).
* War ~~must be replaced with the Hunger Games~~ must be diverted to some form of entertainment so that its consequences are minimized. In fact, you really need "war" to become something that appeases the masses ("gladiatorial games") without creating need or want.
* All economies ~~must be controlled by the Illuminati~~ must be strictly monitored to ensure no one ever has too much or too little.
And despite this (and a thousand other things) Mother Nature will still cause illness, still bring storms, still afflict with Earthquakes.... Can you see the problem?
>
> A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.
>
>
>
Life is *absolutely full* of external forces, leading to problem solving, leading to technological development. You need an ~~overwhelming~~ overriding force that diverts all those external forces such that there's no reason for the vector of your world's lives to ever change.
In a word, you need the [Goa'uld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_of_Stargate#Goa'uld).
---
1 *Although evolution has* a lot *to do with it. We've all but eradicated polio, measles, etc. through vaccination—but that technology came at the expense of hundreds of millions dying from those diseases. And if you're not thinking about the Coronavirus right now, you're not paying* nearly *enough attention. If we actually develop a vaccine before the deaths of so many, it will be the first time in human history that technology came before the price paid for natural immunity. As the "ancient Chinese curse" suggests: we certainly live in interesting times.*
[Answer]
[Safehold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold) and [Stargate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate) both tried this. Neither worked out, but then, the point of both stories was people trying to overcome the "tech hurdle".
In both instances, you have some sort of strict proscription against technological advance, preferably with something to back it up. Safehold uses a super-advanced network of satellites that drop KEWs on anything that looks like advanced tech. Stargate uses aliens with advanced technology. Safehold was working out a bit better (SG1 was full of civilizations trying to rebel against the Goa'uld) until the protagonist shows up to upset the apple cart, because the religious leaders were supposedly benevolent. In both instances, the religion is bolstered by real, visibly people claiming to be god-like, with the tech to back it up.
[Answer]
# Resources, population, communication
**Resources** is a cheap trick. They're not going to get much beyond the bronze age if they have no iron. However you want them in medieval which is well into the iron age. You could limit coal. Coal however isn't required for industrialisation, it can be done with charcoal. The trouble being you can't mass industrialise on charcoal as you rapidly run out of trees. Would localised industrialisation suit you? Having an entire planet on a single tech level isn't realistic anyway. **Civilisations rise, they industrialise, they run out of trees and they fall again.** The thing to remember is that technology is not a stable thing, it goes up and down, when our current empires fall it's reasonable to assume that the technology level will crash just as it did after the Romans, and it will take an equivalent period to recover again.
**Population** is a good one here, if the population isn't high enough there is neither the requirement nor the labour to industrialise. At what technology level does a civilisation sit without population pressure? One could suggest it stagnates around tribal. A man has a wife, children, a house he built himself, and cows, there's no reason to have or want anything more, there aren't the pressures for it. However that's not your target, medieval technology requires many of the same things modern technology does. It needs space and slack to have great architecture, it needs available labour to build these things, it needs specialised craftsmen to manufacture armour, weapons, castles. Most importantly it requires surplus production.
**Communication** is important. One of the key technologies that led from the medieval period into the rennaisance was the printing press. The opening up of mass communication. If you can find some way to prevent printing, you might be able to prevent the rennaisance and keep everyone medieval. However printing is an idea that's easy to put into practice. There are some key metallurgy advances that make it easier to develop, but it's going to be really hard to prevent.
# Enforced migration
A wildcard option, crazy tides or seasons perhaps. Something that forces the entire population to keep moving on a steady basis, preventing the infrastructure required for significant technological advance. This way you can almost have a rennaisance, in terms of art and printing at least, regular flooding and perennially soft ground could prevent large scale architecture meaning that things like blast furnaces could never be built (also no castles), big trees are rare, etc etc. Large numbers of different environmental effects aimed at preventing the people from settling and hence preventing major technological development.
[Answer]
**Lack of Resources**
They cannot have **gas lighting or heating** since there are no natural gas deposits.
They cannot have the **steam engine** since there are no large coal deposits to power the engine.
They cannot have **electronics** since there is not enough copper for wires or gold for electric contacts.
The difficult part is leaving enough resources to allow medieval technology. For example lack of coal will make blacksmithing harder.
They can of course create charcoal for their forges, but why not just use charcoal to power their steam engines? I'd believe it's a matter of efficiency -- it's not just a case of making charcoal to power the steam engine. It's a case of creating charcoal to construct the entire thing -- an all the hundreds of prototypes before you have a working engine.
[Answer]
### Just add religion.
The [Amish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish) essentially decided that all innovation from the point their community started was undesirable. All innovation works to some extent to make people's lives easier, and they decided this should not happen. Obviously I'm paraphrasing somewhat, but I believe not excessively.
In our world, the Amish are a tiny minority. If in your world there is One True Religion (e.g. the Catholic Church in Europe for roughly a thousand years) and that One True Religion decides to set that as a tenet of the religion, the majority will enforce it. External wars will likely still occur, but suppression of innovation will supersede national differences in holy crusades against innovators, in the same way as Crusaders from all countries marched on Jerusalem with a common goal. The innovators will likely have some advantage, of course, but they will always be in the minority.
Since every innovator is ruthlessly eradicated and their knowledge destroyed, innovators never get to build on a previous person's work. The result will be the same inventions coming up over and over, and getting destroyed over and over again. All progress requires "standing on the shoulders of giants", and any "giant" is slaughtered and buried so that never happens.
It's unclear whether this could continue for a million years. However we have claims that the Jewish Torah has been essentially unchanged for 2600 years, so that's a start. Rabbinical doctrine has always been fractured due to Jews being a diaspora here, but a more cohesive majority religion could maintain similar rules on reproducing their holy texts.
[Answer]
**Westworld**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iM0c9.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C6bl7soaiY>
Your permanently medieval world is a built thing. The inhabitants might not be Yul Brynner cyborgs, but they are engineered and possibly semisynthetic creatures as is their society. The entire thing is built for permanence. Maybe every 400 years it loops.
There may be other such worlds.
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You can try stopping cultural progress from the *inside*, basically making your sophonts stupid from a human's point of view, but this raises the question of *how did they arrive at a medieval level* at all.
It is not possible to stop for *millions of years* an Industrial Revolution by removing any easily reachable iron ore, since both iron and coal will be supplied by the biosphere (the latter from wood, the former as [*bog iron*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron) - and you cannot realistically remove iron ions from the ecosphere).
Those timescales require [preventing biological evolution](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/26188/6933) first of all.
So that is a possibility: your sophonts are actually **biological robots**, populating a medioeval worldscene [for purposes unknown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shore_Leave_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)) (maybe they were set up by an elder race and then forgotten or abandoned).
Barring that, you need to prevent evolution (see above) and also stop cultural evolution.
This has been done by David Weber (twice: in *Empire from the Ashes* on the planet Pardal, and in the *Safehold* series), Star Trek (Gordon Eklund's *World without Stars* and Joe Haldeman's *World without End*), in the Stargate series.
Both Stargate and Weber have an alien race capable of catastrophically reverting technology to prehistory (the Achuultani *much more so*), but that's not what you're after, I suppose.
Weber posits an anti-progressive religion (Pardal), reinforced by strike satellites (the Rakurai overwatch) since otherwise it's pretty clear that greed and connivance will more or less quickly lead to the Proscriptions being flouted. More or less the same thing happens in both ST::TOS Worlds, where a central entity has control over the whole "planet". Haldeman's people are actually more similar to programmed, organic robots.
In this case you need to solve the problem of **maintenance** for the controlling satellite network. Even the Giskard planetary mind-control satellites in the latest *Foundation* additions wear out over time, and once they're gone, progress will resume.
[Answer]
## Eloi
Your civilization is being taken care of by another civilization, and has no need to advance.
H.G. Wells figured out a plausible mechanism in his novel *The Time Machine*. There are two civilizations. The Eloi have everything they need provided to them, by the unseen Morlocks. The Morlocks are able to control the Eloi enough that the latter never advance in technology.
A zoo is a similar idea, in a more benevolent way.
[Answer]
There is no exploitable iron available to them.
One possible reason for this:
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> Way, way, back, the planet of the setting was home to an advanced race that discovered (by some hand-wavy means) a means to convert iron into energy (like unto the Nevians in Doc Smith's *Triplanetary*). They soon stripped the crust of all exploitable traces of this mineral.
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> This society then collapsed or ascended. They are no longer on the scene.
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The society that is now in place has reached their own Bronze Age. Bronze is good for many things, but it isn't strong enough, and copper isn't plentiful enough, for it to constitute the infrastructure of an industrial economy.
So they're stuck. They may certainly have many of the cultural achievements of Iron Age and the Industrial Era (literature, music, sculpture, stand-up comedy, etc.), but from a technological viewpoint they can progress no further.
[Answer]
Instincts are real, and the last I heard we didn't understand them much at all.
An orphan beaver can build a log dam from scratch, without ever seeing one before. It just knows how. Instinct.
If you could somehow get a human-like organism that has the instincts to build a medieval society, they will do just that. They won't keep changing it around because they aren't doing things by trial and error. They just know the right way to do things.
I don't know how that could get set up. But if it got set up millions of years ago, you don't have to know how it happened. Nobody knows. The people who're doing it by instinct sure don't know.
You help a woman bake bread. You think you see a better way to do your part, and you start to do it that way. She raps your knuckles with her wooden spoon. "Not like that. This is the right way."
You figure out a better shape for the wooden spoon. You make one and give it to her. She uses it. It clearly works better. One of her neighbors comes by and remarks on it. "Oh, the offworlder made it. He doesn't know how. But it works well enough, so I'll use it until it breaks and then Jaf will make one the right way."
They all pity you because you just don't know the right way to do anything and you keep trying but never get it right. Sometimes you kind of get it after you watch people, but you never know how until you are shown. Pathetic.
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If you are looking for a willful solution, that is, one that was not imposed on the society that would otherwise advance if left alone by some outside sentient force or religion, I was thinking how much these people are alike to humans who had frontal lobotomies. They could think, go about their daily activities, and understand the world around them, but they lacked curiosity, motivation and ambition to investigate the world around them and to plan, hypothesize, or retain new information necessary for advancement. They were content to live their lives as they were. Some even referred to them as zombies.
So how about a 'religious' practice, something like circumcision, that was universally applied to babies or infants, that lobotomized them? It would certainly make for a very compliant, obedient, calm society.
Alternatively, a virus that was highly infectious, that worked only on the brain, to achieve a similar effect? If the virus mutated and evolved when they reached the feudal state, they would be locked into it as long as the virus was in circulation. Something that worked on the dopamine system, maybe, but had no other detrimental health effects. Even if they got immunity after they caught the virus, and the body's immune system dealt with it, the mental or cognitive damage would be irreversible.
I am thinking about the recent research that suggests some forms of dementia are actually caused by viral infection. [Syphilis](https://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stdfact-syphilis-detailed.htm), for instance.
Alternately, an environmental toxin, either biological or poison, that had a similar effect. Something in their diet, or something that was introduced through volcanic activity, or a mutated insect, bacteria, or such.
A twist to this idea, is that it could be reversible if your plot went in that direction. Humans arrive, and determine the cause, and the cure.
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First, look at this in reverse.
Change the question to 'Why have humans evolved in their technology continuously for 50,000 years?' If you can answer this, then you have some indication of what NOT to do.
It is postulated that humans have advanced technologically because of some genetic 'curiosity gene'. Some innate brain construct that motivates us to search out answers to questions we formulate, to search for 'why?'. Some even link this gene to our search for religion. That is, we have established religions because we want answers to questions that were unanswerable without advanced science. This notion depicts religion as a function of curiosity.
Speculation has it that humans became curious because of the evolution of our neocortex and our language areas. They enabled the ability to symbolically form an hypothesis, the basis for all curiosity.
For sure, pre-cortex, pre-language humanoids and human precursors spent millions of years at the 'tool' stage of technology, able to make and use simple tools, that did not change for millions of years. How, or why, did they advance to making stone tools, but then go no further? Because they weren't curious enough to even ask 'why'. Maybe they used the stone ax to kill the person who was curious enough to develop it in the first place, and from that point on 'habit' dominated, not 'thinking'. I call it the 'splat' factor in evolution - when the first instance of a beneficial mutation gets killed right at the get-go, and is unable to reproduce.
I posit that your answer would be in some evolutionary event in which this 'curiosity drive' area in the brain was somehow altered or eliminated in the population. I might suggest that, somewhere in their development, a genetic mutation in the species produced an extremely strong, aggressive sub-species (race in human terms) but lacked development in the cerebral cortex and language areas (the genetic coding for these regions was lost). This sub-species was able to dominate simply by shear strength and sexual attraction/prowess/aggressiveness. That is, they killed off all of the competition, or at least prevented it from reproducing. This mutation/evolution, I suggest, happened at a time when the society had reached a particular level of technological advancement.
In other words, a sub-race became so ferocious, violent, and aggressive that all of the 'smart' sub=species were eliminated, leading to a stagnation of the species as a whole. That is, they were smart enough to maintain and learn What they had, but not curious enough to have any drive to improve on it. This of course assumes that the population at the time of the change was perhaps in the low millions, and they were consolidated in a small enough area such that there were not diaspora that could become large enough to compete.
Certainly their language would be stagnant, and they would not have a religion in any sense that we have today - a mechanism to explain the unexplainable - as they would have no interest in explaining anything. Any religion that they did have, would be more like a government, designed to control and regulate. There would be, I am sure, no concepts of the afterlife or any other belief in anything else but the immediate, as these philosophical musings are a direct result of curiosity and hypothesis formation.
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**Stop evolution, both biological and cultural**
**Biological evolution**, because in millions of years, even a long-lived species like Homo Sapiens will undergo significant evolution. And if the biology changes, the culture will.
Well. Making them really, really, really long-lived will help. 10,000 years until sexual maturity would mean you have 100 generations per million years: You will have evolution, but it won't be very noticeable.
However, such a long-lived race will have a very, very hard time keeping up with parasites, which can evolve with reproduction cycles of months, and bacteria have 20 minutes per generation - it's pretty likely that bacterium or virus will wipe out the entire population. Any epidemic that can be spread by mobile species (birds, insects) will sweep the entire world within a year.
**Cultural evolution** tends to change the world even more rapidly.
Humans learn. Not just from catastrophes but from everything.
Because humans are naturally curious. Some people believe it's a neotenic trait: in other mammals, curiosity mostly stops in adult life, because once you are mature you concentrate on creating the next generation.
So... let them lose the thrill of discovering or doing something new once they're mature. Any new ideas will be seens as the sweet idiocies of youth, waved away with a friendly laugh - "it's good you are looking into the world, my youngling, it helps you learn all you need to learn, but once you're grown up you won't need to do this anymore".
Now the younglings need to lose their curiosity long before adulthood, because if you let children detect and invent stuff for 10,000 years, they *will* have enough time to come up with something that works well enough that the adults will use it.
So... three life phases:
* Childhood. Curiosity, you learn everything you need to know, for life. Anything you do not learn now will never be learned.
* Adolescence. You do not reproduce, you simply work. Get the resources together for the last phase. Your bodily fitness must stay up, or reproduction will fail.
* Adulthood. Find a partner, reproduce, help the children grow to adolescence, die.
A quick death after raising your children is important to break cultural transmission chains that span generation: Knowing your grand-parents will create a sense of history and change (which is inevitable since now we're looking back 20,000 years).
It's a pretty difficult construction to pull off. Thinking about a society where almost nobody reproduces, everybody works their asses off to have enough resources just for 10 or 20 years of feeding your children, just to die afterwards, curiosity a long-forgotten trait of a youth that's thousands of years in the past, less than 1% of youths in society, having to hoard resources so you can reproduce (or maybe it's really biological that you need 10,000 years to reproductive maturity, except I don't know how such a species could exist) - and once you have made those childrens, your remaining lifespan is so short you won't see them live their lifes.
Very strange, very alien, and not very likely similar to anything medieval.
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## Dragons
What you need is a natural disaster that regularly destroys human kind's attempts to progress their society - Dragons are just the thing to do that.
They're powerful enough to pose a threat to society regularly, reducing the store of livestock and scorching farmlands to prevent overpopulation, and they give humanity a reason to prefer insular scattered communities, as larger cities would be even easier targets for a dragon raid.
With the added bonus of being more medieval in nature themselves, dragons are just enough of a threat to hold back society from advancing.
If you have *intelligent* dragons, with a slow gestation period and very long lifespans of their own, they may even be doing it on purpose in order to ensure humanity never reaches a point where they could pose a *real* threat to their continued existence.
But even with dumb dragons, the regular natural disaster they bring to civilization should prevent large cities, big agricultural projects, and slush funds for scientific advances from forming up - preventing your society from making much progress at all.
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A lot of answers here talk about how innovation is intrinsic in humans (and hypothetically other intelligent beings) and thus so is progress. But no-one seems to have mentioned the key underlying part of human progress which is **sharing** and co-operation. It doesn't matter if you have a genius like Leonardo Da Vinci if everything he knows dies with him. Humans have only progressed so far because we share our knowledge with each other, spread it around and keep having more people improve on it, then share those too.
The things that make this sharing possible are of course language, but especially written language. Medieval periods are obviously times when very few people know how to read or write. You could experiment with there being no written language at all, or it being very clunky and awkward, or learning to read being rare or hard.
But beyond that, the other key impediment to the sharing of knowledge is education. elemtilas touched on this with their suggestion that your people should be
>
> clannish and traditionbound in the sense that when the elders teach
> the younglings, the younglings accept without question and repeat the
> same patterns over and over again over countless generations.
>
>
>
How about a better idea? **Education is limited to your genetic heirs only.**
Someone else mentioned indigenous Australians and other so-called stagnant cultures, and suggested they were stagnant because their needs were met. Not so. Most of the stagnant cultures on earth are in places where survival is *extremely* difficult. In the case of Australia, the environment is not only so naturally scarce of food that you can't have high population levels, but without frozen winters a key method of food preservation used elsewhere in the world was impossible. Possibly as a result, a culture developed whereby the location and understanding of how to find food/water in an area was **secret knowledge**.
The ancient Australians didn't have a concept of individual land ownership because they didn't need one - to learn to survive in a new place was extremely unlikely, especially if people already lived there. And if the people who lived there didn't share that knowledge, there was too much risk and not enough benefit trying to do so yourself. People raided each other for resources and to hunt large animals when they were present, people traded, and people were given food when they passed through each others lands, but that was the extent of resource sharing between communities. This seemed to extend to the few places where some level of "farming" or tending existing grains was possible (though the nutritional yield on these is probably paltry compared to even ancient wheat and grains). People just didn't share with outsiders the knowledge of how they survived, and so movement was limited.
Another aspect where this ties into medieval societies is the use of trade guilds. They closely guarded their techniques in a similar way to the Australian cultures, and required membership to gain access.
So theoretically, progress would be severely stunted by a society-wide adherence to **only teaching your own children what you know**. Combined with a lack of writing, this stops the sharing of knowledge to barely perceptible leaks. Only extremely bright people who actively want to learn something else and have good observation and complex reasoning skills could learn things at a usable level. And if professions were inherited like the knowledge was, even if you learned new things it would be hard to put them into practice. These bright people would have to move to new areas they weren't known to pose as someone who should have that knowledge.
You could either create a quasi-guild system whereby in all places people of the same professions have secret signs to identify each other, or you could create reasons people simply did not move about, as in Australia. Aboriginal knowledge was not limited to genetic children, but it was culturally reinforced quite heavily. This would also be an important factor.
This could solve the "how did they get to this stage" problem. Either they haven't been at this *exact* level of progress forever but have just been progressing at such a glacially slow pace it seems like it from an individual perspective. OR, they didn't always have a system of guarded or secret knowledge.
You could have some social ramifications from this kind of thing, such as some professions 'ransoming' society to keep producing, but this would require collusion of all their supporting professions that supplied materials. Workers from those professions could always be poached from other communities in that event though. Of course, even other people of the same profession wouldn't know exactly what their fellows knew, because they weren't sharing knowledge between each other like a proper trade guild. So even if a specific individual family develops some innovations, those techniques are only ever known by their heirs. A couple clever generations can be diluted by some dimmer generations who perhaps don't quite "get" what granddad was talking about.
If there was conflict between communities, targeting all the members of a vital profession could be a valid military strategy - another hiccup for the idea, because an entire profession almost dying out would be a possible impetus for breaking the system.
The flow-on to gender roles could also be interesting. My first thought is women would have to taught as well as men, since not everyone is guaranteed sons, and then work at least until they were married. But, to avoid inbreeding, women would have to marry outside immediate family. That might require vast cousin systems for inter-marrying, thus creating "tribe guilds" of professions, and that still creates the chance for knowledge to spread inside that profession, which you'd want to avoid. If women married men of different professions, this creates the opportunity for profession mixing. So in that scenario perhaps women were not taught *at all*, making their position similar to medieval Europe or even more restricted.
Alternatively, since the whole "not guaranteed sons" thing is still in play, parents could nominate offspring to be their heirs, either male or female, and once they had enough of these (for whatever enough means) any further offspring were not taught. These younger children would be relegated to extremely unskilled labour (think ditch-digging). An heir child could marry a non-heir child without fear of blending knowledge. Though this creates a system of elderborn and youngerborn children almost being castes. (Probably better than "ditchdigger" being an inherited caste like "untouchables" though.) If families help out all their members regardless of task that absorbs any resentment. You might need a bit more society-wide sharing to offset economic needs that would make people break the conventions.
A third option is that there aren't traditional marriages; instead women simply get pregnant by men as they like, then those children are raised in their maternal home. You might develop a slightly matriarchal society like this though, which would look different to medieval Europe. If your males are anything like human males in terms of their sex drive and being extremely competitive for mates, you'd need all the ladies to be pretty sexually active across the board to avoid conflict, and this creates biiig problems for disease in medieval tech levels. So unless STDs are not a thing or you work the high death rates into the social system some how, that might not work out.
There's probably lots more little wrinkles I haven't identified, but the crux of the idea is that when people don't share their knowledge, progress is so limited, so slow, so stunted and easily reversed, that it would barely exist at all. If a culture believes this is the best system (for some reason you would have to invent) and there's no written language for people to even share philosophical and cultural ideas, it would seem to create quite the technological stalemate.
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I'm late to the party and this is just food for thought, but Peter Watts fantastic novel Blindsight posits that technology is always a response to threats or challenges. An environment in which groups are always in competition with each other for resources will push them towards improving offensive and defensive technologies. One where the cold is constant and harsh will prompt developments in heating technology.
An environment where resources are plentiful for the given population -- either because the rate at which the population reproduces and dies makes population growth very slow; the planet is rife with nutrient-dense flora and fauna; or whatever -- wouldn't provide the pressure to invent new and better ways to steal your neighbors' food that we had here.
I'm not necessarily a proponent of the "high technology implies high aggression" theory but it struck me relevant to your question so I wanted to share.
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No plagues and Aztec/Chinese style society.
The black plague wiped out almost a quarter of the population of europe and is widely believed to have triggered the renaissance. You had a lot of farmland and not enough farmers, but you still have a reasonably large population to feed. Neccesity is the mother of invention and such innovation in agriculture is neccesary to avoid millions starving. Eventually the population returns to the original levels and agricultural innovations have not been forgotten, allowing more people (potential inventors) to flock to cities and survive off their intellect rather than their strength and eventually one of them will be able to invent a lathe, steam power or any other critical invention for the industrial revolution.
Additionally you can look at the history of china, they had plague and they had great inventors but if not for the "intervention" of western powers it's unlikely they would have industrialised. China's great powers were it's historically massive borders and it's historically massive population. China expanded as far as it could in every direction, even today it goes to the coast in the east, the siberian wastelands in the north, the mountains in the south near nepal, the mountains in the north east near north korea, the incredibly dense jungles of vietnam, the mountainous and desert expanses of afghanistan in the west. They spread as far as they could in every direction until they met a significant geographical barrier (and armed populous). The thing about these geographical barriers is that they usually block from both directions. With the notable exception of the mongolian steppes in the north and the mongolians each of these barriers also protected China from foreign invaders. This is vastly different to europe which had many countries of comparatively small populations constantly invading each other, a place where each country greatest threat was a well equipped and experienced foreign army. China's greatest threat was civil war, essential poorly equipped farmer uprisings against an imperial army.
China's greatest strengths of unity and sheer size were also their greatest weaknesses as it removed the necessity to innovate military technology and tactics and even today military technology is a big driver of further technological innovation.
Other answers have mentioned the fact that the chinese invented the printing press but given their writing system it was almost useless for them due to unique cultural factors.
Why innovate when you dont have enemies and no one is starving?
The Aztecs had cities but not the wheel because they didn't have easily domesticatable beasts of burden (such as oxen and horses) to pull carts, I get the feeling that a "horseless carriage" might be a difficult concept to come up with for a civilisation that lacks horses or carriages, even if they are capable of building cities and making weapons.
How could you innovate when you culturally can't even comprehend the next step?
Look at highly traditional cultures, know your place, don't waste time thinking of new things, follow in your father's footsteps, make literacy difficult (for example by using chinese characters or hieroglyphs), allow polygamy, prima nocta and any thing else that gives people a reason to spend more time attempting to rebel against the system instead of enjoying the collective fruits of everyone's labour.
How can you innovate when there are (starving children in africa!) lords taking all the good women!
Religion, this one is easy and has been covered by other answers pretty well, perhaps you could have a confucian style system where society has been cut into specific classes, farmers, merchants, scholars, artisans, etc... and perhaps add a more modern anti intellectual spin as the scholars don't earn their food, like a farmer or an artisan, nor do they have the wealth of the merchant class but instead must survive as a parasite by the good graces of another. Add this to a romantascism for all things ancient, everything worth inventing has already been made, greek, roman, tang dynasty creations and culture were the pinacle of greatness that we shall never again reach.
To innovate is to spit in the face of our great and long dead ancestors in the name of avoiding a hard day's work.
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A planet bound society that endured to many millennia would probably have mined all the easily minable ore on the planet. Which leads me to suggest that they would be very good at recycling (not just metal - everything). All this should lead to stable civilisation(s).
One issue would be "war"; I think you will have to rule it out. War leads to innovation and disruption...
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At some point in their history, a much stronger [Toxoplasma Gondii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii) strain evolved and spread though all of the population. In our world, toxoplasmosis symptoms include changes in risk perception\*. Infecting with the stronger strain, people just stopped caring about the sort of problems that lead to new technological solutions, and stayed home playing with kittens instead.
\*in rats. little evidence exists of systematic human behavioural changes.
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A few million years is a pretty long time. Thats basically enough time to go from early hominides like Homo Erectus to modern man. But if you look at that timeframe, you see a very long, slow start and then a rather rapid progress since the neolithic around 5000 BC.
Most of the progress came from population growth, specialization and food surplus allowing it. Before that you mostly had small hunter and gatherer packs, with sometimes surprisingly sophisticated flinstone tools and clear evolution in the sophistication of those tools and even medical procedures. Even long distance trade (thousands of miles) and communication happen, albeit very slowly.
So to slowdown progress to a near halt and stay at a sophisticated medieval level you would need to remove sources of innovation. Get rid of writing or efficient means of communication or teaching. Oral traditions do not scale as well. Make travel very slow, hazardous and low capacity, to slow the spread of ideas as if it was a disease. Make food scarce and surplus production unreliable, so cities have a hard time to feed their specialists and wage war.
Most of this would be pretty hard to do, the only way i could think of would be a contagious plague that was linked to innovation. Like new ideas and challenging the old state of affairs make people deadly sick and contagious. People would isolate themselves in their safe spaces of orthodox thought, innovation would be a real danger and the frequent short and deadly outbreaks in small villages or towns, eradicating the whole place would remind anyone about the dangers.
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a lack of metals. If copper and iron are rare you have trouble making tools and machinery. You would even have trouble working stone and wood. It could still be done but it would take much longer. an obsidian ax head would not not work as well as a iron ax to cut wood. Stone would have to be worked by grinding instead chiseling. In theory gold and silver could be used to make electrical and electronic items, but they might be rare too.
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To see a stable, unchanging civilization you just need to take a look at any of the indigenous primitive cultures that exist in many places on earth. Australia's aboriginals, the Maori, Amazonian tribes, oceanic civilizations , Sub Saharan African tribes, the Inuits/Eskimos of Russia, Canada, nomadic tribes. Many of these civilizations are thousands or even tens of thousands of years old, but have remained mostly unchanged (at least until being introduced to our civilization).
Although their tech level is below medieval, many of them have complex social structures and governments, writing systems, basic money. They don't need to change because they live in very stable environments that they have adapted to. The environments are pretty stable year round so their way of life suits them just fine. They don't need tech or anything else, they heavily rely on tradition and many worship their ancestors, so any innovations or changes would likely be reverted back to their old ways.
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If they have everything they want, there's no reason why things should change.
Technology only develops where there is a perceived need. If there is no need, and no capitalist system to create artificial needs, then it need not be developed.
Of course society will be very different to any medieval society ever known here, but if there's no disease, hunger, war or want and there is no reason why there should be in your world -- then it can stay in its idyllic condition indefinitely.
Alternatively, other approaches - magic, psi powers etc - might stand in for our technological approach, so you could have, eg, a basically medieval world with street lighting or advanced medicine.
Note that the medieval world spanned centuries, with very different technologies in different areas (Byzantium vs rural Norway), so it's a bit of a moving target.
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George R. R. Martin did exactly this in *A Song of Ice and Fire*. Westeros (or I guess Planetos)' bonkers weather system was his excuse for keeping society stagnant at a medevial tech level for thousands of years. Wonky magic-driven seasons that last for years mean that society is basically reset every cycle, innovation is a luxury they can't afford, all the smallfolk's efforts go go gathering food just to survive, and potential society changing geniuses are squashed by the need for farmhands (or just die of starvation in winter). This also drives the intensely feudal land system, only the lords have the large castles and large food stores that can survive the winter.
That said, people have pointed out that in this case Westeros' native wildlife should look nothing like Earth because they would have adapted to the weird seasons. You wouldn't get wolves or deer, and the native plants would look more like cacti or baobabs than anything else. And the events of the story do show signs of societal and technological change. So take the effectiveness of that justification with a grain of salt.
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I'm not sure if this is the type of answer you are seeking, but how about some characteristics of the planet itself? Maybe an unstable orbit, or an unstable sun emitting solar storms and flares and whatever it is that suns do, wreaking havoc on the planet's climate, magnetic field, and ability to harness energy, etc., causing all manner of difficulty for the populace. Or, the planet is constantly pelted with meteorites or asteroids or other irksome projectiles that screw things up here on earth every so often?
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[
So, considering the structure of the head and ears for creatures like cats, dogs, and bears, if one were to make a race with those types of ears (The stereotype cat person, essentially) I am curious how headgear might function.
I know glasses might be a problem, and a full helm might cause issues too. I figure perhaps they could fold their ears back if they wanted to put an actual helmet on...
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If the creature needs its ears to function well in battle, or for ritual or cosmetic show offs, you need holes. Helmets for military dogs have them:
Otherwise, do fold their ears:
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I endorse the answer given by @Renan but would like to add that if you need to actually cover the ears, that is possible, too, and without folding:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Axt3d.jpg)
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Not explicitly headware, but the attack dogs of the spanish conquistadores had full-on armor, with some pictures even showing headwear:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bB6mI.jpg)
Apart from that it's just getting used to it.
Human ears get irritaded by a ill-fitted helmet pretty quickly as well, we're just used to it / have designed pretty comfy helmets
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All kinds of hoods would continue to work, I think. If the necessity of headwear is much bigger then felt discomfort (for example, cold weather clothing), heavy warm hats would be worn, even if they create some discomfort to the ears.
As for the helmets, there are three separate solutions I can see.
For the very light helmets, it could be just a comparatively narrow metal plate that goes from forehead to the back of the head, leaving the sides of the head and ears open. Modern military helmets that are adapted to big headphones give a similar profile: <https://images.app.goo.gl/ZKBdTbA4mUdsfwKt8>
For inspiration, you can also take a look at medieval horse armor. House marks often were formed to protect the ears.
<https://images.app.goo.gl/dh5bW8Fac1Qgx9t89>
Some medieval helmets were quite roomy inside, and heavily padded. So changing the form of the padding, you would be able to fit the ears inside without much discomfort.
<https://pin.it/t544kh6saed5fq>
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There are real human helmets designed to leave the ears exposed. Roman helmets in particular often left the ears completely exposed and were designed with reinforcements to compensate. The Roman imperial gallic helmet offered great coverage while leaving the ears open. Such a design could easily be designed with different ear shapes and locations.
Note the extensions and reinforcements needed to protect the ears. The more your ears stick out the more vulnerable to glancing blows they will be, guards will be added much like nose guards to catch or deflect blades. Just like real helmets you will see an evolution of design and many solutions to the same problem, the smiths imagination is the only limit, there will be no one single design.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TOcr3.jpg)
This could evolve all the way into something like this Japanese helmet or maybe you will have real horned helmets, really it depends on the size and location of the ears.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bp4rt.jpg)
It is not as if they couldn't add metal ear flaps to helms. Some dog armor and especially horse armor had ear protectors. Note how they are connected at the front so the ears still have the full range of movement, yet is protected from melee. Horse helms are called **Shaffron** if you want to look up more examples, horses were expensive enough animals that decent armor was fairly common, so a wide variety of styles exist.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nJCR6.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oOK94.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xMlDi.jpg)
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Well, starting with the easy stuff:
* Avian, reptilian, and amphibian species are essentially trivial. Pretty much all real world reptiles, birds, and amphibians have no external ears, just tympanic membranes or some kind of ear canal, so there's nothing to get in the way. Only hard part here is making sure they can still hear to the degree they need to.
* Monkeys and apes are also essentially trivial. The same approach used in real life for humans works just fine for them, as their ears are in essentially the same place.
* Pinnipeds (seals), platypuses, and a handful of other odd mammals are trivial because they have no external ears or their ears are flush with the outside of their head.
That leaves a handful of specific cases to take care of:
* Animals with ears on the top or side of their head that are long and lie mostly flat. This is mostly just domestic breeds of dog. Unless you need hearing to function, this case is trivial (just alter the padding inside the helmet to accommodate the ears). It gets trickier if you need to actually hear well, as you will need some kind of plating to cover the ear but still let it move freely and not weigh it down enough to occlude the ear canal. It's doable (it's been done historically), but it's not exactly pretty, and I somewhat doubt it would be comfortable for long-term usage.
* Elephants, with their big floppy ears on the side of their heads. The hard part here isn't so much accommodating the ears (they're positioned pretty close to where a human's would be), it's protecting that almost comically large amount of otherwise exposed flesh, with all it's blood vessels and nerve endings. I honestly can't think of a good way to handle this, chain mail comes to mind as a possible option, but that's likely to be way to heavy to be practical for this, so I'm at a loss here.
* Animals with ears on top of their heads that stick up. Includes most mammals that haven't yet been mentioned. This is actually pretty easy if you don't care about good hearing, just shape the helmet to accommodate the ears, You're already going to need to do this type of thing anyway for any species that have horns, so it shouldn't be too hard to handle. Just like above for the floppy ears, it gets tricky if you need hearing to work, and it's harder than the above case because many animals in this group *move* their ears to triangulate the source of a sound, which is going to be tricky to accommodate comfortably. I see the most likely case here being a helmet with cutouts for the ears, possibly over top of a chain mail cowl or coif designed to clip to the top and edges of the ears, which again, is likely to be uncomfortable
There's one other issue here though, standardization. Humans are kind of lucky in this respect, we can just cut the part of the helmet for the ears a bit high and make the helmet a bit on the big side, and it will fit most everyone without any significant issue. That won't realistically be possible if you have a mix of races trying to work together, or one race with a lot of variance (say for example a cat race that includes most of the existing domestic breeds plus most wild cats), because you'll have to leave pretty huge holes in the top of the helmet for the ears so that everyone will fit it properly. Given this, I see some kind of modular approach potentially being popular. Essentially, you have the outer helmet that provides most of the protection shaped to accommodate everyone, and then inserts that can clip into the ear holes to provide appropriate spacing so that none of the scalp is exposed together with appropriate guards to protect against foes attacking the ears.
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Horses wear a LOT of head gear! They also have firm but mobile ears that they don't like to have constrained. (From experience with our cat, cats really don't like to have their ears held back for long periods, either.)
1. Halter/bridle: Simple, since it is just straps, the straps go around the ears. (Anatomical bridles where the part on top of the head is further back away from the ears are gaining popularity now.)
2. Armor (old fashioned): You've got a wide variety of styles to choose from here. Sometimes it is just open at the top, or with individual openings for each ear. Other times there is a protective piece that sticks up in front of each ear (not enclosing the ear, though)--sometimes this is full height, sometimes it is only half height. Since the ear will fold back as a protective measure, the half height ones should do a pretty good job of protecting from the front. (Side note: ear tip injuries are much less common in horses compared to dogs and cats, but I think they do occur in the wild sometimes and should only be a cosmetic injury.)
3. Armor (modern): Yes, there is modern armor for horses! Horses are sometimes used in riot/crowd control situations and they wear armor. Modern armor seems to leave the ears exposed, but includes a clear eye shield and protection for the front of the face.
4. Soft headgear: Horses sometimes wear fly masks to protect the face from flies. This is a soft fabric or mesh piece with mesh over the eyes. It might be stretchy and slip on, or it might be non-stretchy and fasten with velcro under the chin. Ears can be open (one big hole or two individual holes) or fully enclosed with soft mesh (still allows the ears to be mobile). Horses also sometimes wear blinkers or blinders designed to get the horse to focus in a certain direction, these fit much like fly masks but usually with ears open. Also, ear bonnets/nets, which just cover the ears with soft cloth and then have a little bit of a fringe around the edges (just covers the top of the head like a human's hat/bonnet)--for keeping flies out of the ears.
5. Hearing protection: Horses sometimes wear "ear poms" which are kind of pom-pom/soft ear plug. They are usually not very visible. There is some disagreement about how much noise they really stop, but no technical reason why you couldn't make better ones.
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Whilst other answers demonstrate how headwear could be adapted to accommodate the ears of these creatures, i would like to point out that, in our own history, there was headwear that ignored our ears.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vibPW.jpg)
<https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/8bup7r/give_warden_a_bascinet_armet_or_frogmouth_helmet/>
You may notice the distinct lack of openings for ears in these helmets, there are not even holes in the sides to allow some small level of hearing. I would argue that accounting for the ears in helmets may be unnecessary, at least in some instances.
I would imagine that a more pressing concern would be the faces of these creatures rather than their ears. You may see helmets with more elongated faces, such as the hounskull or armets which push out further, both helmets are pictured above.
If you wanted the ears to be exposed however, i would have to agree that something based on the shaffron could be a good option.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aQVUt.jpg)
<https://collections.royalarmouries.org/object/rac-object-3345.html>
I would like to add that, if you were intending this to be a main form of defence, you would want a decent amount of padding to protect the face. You would also want some way of protecting your neck, in which case gambeson, possibly with chainmail as well, could work well enough.
You would may instead want a bevor, this is the lower half of the helmet pictured in the top left corner. The idea of the bevor is to protect the chin and neck whilst the salet, the top half, is the actual helmet and protects the head and face. One thing to note salets were sometimes worn without a bevor so, by that logic, these shaffrons may also sometimes be worn without the bevor.
For softer, non-combat headwear such as hats or hood, you could simply cut out holes or just wear a bigger hat. Also, whilst you may be right that traditional glasses wouldn't work as well, there are many alternatives.
For example, rather than fixed arms, you may opt for a chain attached to both sides of the lenses. The chain would loop over the ears and the lens part would rest on the face. This makes wearing glasses for creatures with non-human ears far easier. You may instead use prescription goggles typically used by sportsmen when traditional glasses may fall off, a similar idea to using the chain but does not require any ears. Another alternative is to use a method similar to that of a monocle where the muscles of the wearer’s eyes press down on a metal piece, keeping them in place.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mwvUP.jpg)
<https://www.college-optometrists.org/the-college/museum/online-exhibitions/virtual-spectacles-gallery/monocles.html>
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[Question]
[
The civilization has discovered an semi-unspecified type of FTL drive and spread among stars, but only a small portion of the stars in the galaxy is explored, settled and administered. Beyond the edge of administered space, there are some settled systems, beyond them are some more which are only explored or being explored, but the vast majority of the galaxy remains unexplored and this is changing very slowly.
The question:
**How can the law enforcement catch the criminals who could simply run away from the administered space?**
Let me clarify the available technology.
## FTL ships
Faster than light travel is achieved via unspecified means and it expends fuel proportional to the distance traveled. While using the FTL drive, the ship keeps existing in the "normal space" and continuously changes its position (i.e. not wormhole). The ship is not restricted to preexisting pathways (i.e. not hyperdrive), except for the need to avoid obstacles, which are rare, localized and mostly near the stars, because the space is realistically empty (i.e. no "anomalies" and dangerous nebulae, just a boring universe as we know it).
There *exists* a preferred reference frame, relative to which the FTL travel happens and there is no violation of causality.
Travel time between two systems is reasonable. For smaller ships, it is comparable to the travel time between two larger cities by a car in the beginning of the 21st century. Range without refueling is similarly comparable.
### Availability
The FTL drive is surprisingly easy to manufacture. In fact, so easy to manufacture that many ordinary people have a small cozy FTL-capable starship, equivalent to contemporary cars, but slightly bigger, allowing people to live in them.
### Other standard tech onboard
Even the smaller car-like starships obviously have life support. They also have rudimentary matter synthesizer/recycler, allowing indefinite replication of simpler foods and smaller 3D-printed structures, as long as the needed matter and power is available. Ships have airlocks and EV suits in case you want to take a (space)walk. Finally, they are able to suck surrounding fluids, which can be used as fuel and/or building material for matter synthesizer/recycler. To refuel, collecting hydrogen will do, and this can be trivially done in the most of the systems.
## Other
No alien civilizations are discovered in the galaxy. The life seems to be incredibly rare, only few planets with unicellular life are discovered and maybe one or two with multcellular life, but none with anything even remotely resembling the central nervous system.
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# Use real world examples?
Criminals could 'run away' to the Americas or wherever in the 1600s. In that case, how would the Spanish crown capture them? What about outlaws that fled to the territories in the 1870's United States? Or Russians that escaped to Siberia in the 18th century?
First off, this is exactly how pirates came about. If you have people running away from law enforcement, and then forming a community, then they are basically a band of outlaws. If they also have ships, then they are pirates. Since pirates make everything better, and you have an excuse to use pirates, you now have to use pirates; especially since the only thing better than pirates is space pirates. It is science. In this case, pirates or outlaw gangs of the outer systems are dealt with by the navy.
The colonial powers of Europe probably didn't actually spend too much time tracking down escapees. The point of law enforcement is to make sure society runs the way the powers in charge want it to run. Since the people in question are trying to flee society, there isn't much need to keep them in line. If they come back as a rebellious army, then that is a problem, but that is more of an armed forces problem than a law enforcement problem.
In sparsely populated border regions, without much law enforcement, there are two basic methods for keeping order, amply covered in Western movies. Either the locals can elect and arm some people to keep the peace, or itinerant lawmen can rove the stars, bringing order to planets in chaos (I made that up myself). Sounds like an awesome 1980 [Saturday morning cartoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmnrMXpyOg0).
The last example I gave was of people fleeing into Siberia. The Russians had [reached the Pacific](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Far_East#Russian_exploration) by the mid 1600s (much earlier than the equivalent in the US) but the place remained pretty wild until the Trans-Siberian railroad came through around 1900. Lots of people fled into the wilds; these generally fell into two groups. The first is the [Old Believers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers), a breakaway sect of the Orthodox church that was generally banned in Russia proper.
The second group were the [Cossacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks). Cossack history extends back towards ~1400, and they generally occupied the steppe region from the modern Ukraine all the way to the Amur region of Russia. People seeking to escape from civilization might fall in with the Cossacks. The Cossacks were generally left to their own devices by the Russian government in return for military service. In this way, they co-opted a lawless society to serve teh state. You can read all about Cossack life (which was to settled Europe what cowboys were to settled America in the late 1800s) in [literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cossacks_(novel)).
# Conclusion
1. Criminals who run away form bands of pirates and are dealt with by the Navy.
2. Criminals who run away are an outlaw menace, but defended against by border settlements' self-elected lawmen.
3. Criminals who run away blend in with the populace and are pursued by Marshals on an individual basis.
4. Criminals who run away join groups of religious and social outcasts which are tolerated by the government that doesn't want them.
5. Criminals who run away join bands of semi-nomads, which are hired as mercenaries for government service on a periodic basis.
...in SPACE!
All of these sound like awesome movies that I would watch.
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**1. Wait for the criminals' probable return to society**
Due to the vastness of space and the lack of distinct "highways," the average law enforcement agency most likely wouldn't bother to pursue individual criminals beyond the edge of explored territory. They could be anywhere in the galaxy, and unless their ships are equipped with devices capable of tracking FTL ships, it isn't worth the effort.
Since both life and civilization are quite rare, as you mentioned, then the criminals would need to make a choice between isolation and risking their freedom. Those who choose the former would flee society and live on their ships, but wouldn't have any place to go or any way to sustain themselves once the food runs out. In that case, they would most likely attempt a raid on a (non-administrated) settlement for supplies. When that happens, local militia or administrative reserve troops can be deployed to deal with the threat.
On the other hand, if the criminals never return to society, then they don't pose a significant danger anyway. They simply live out their lives in unexplored space.
**2. Don't waste administrative manpower**
In the meantime, contract "bounty hunters" and other paramilitary could be hired by law enforcement to trawl previously unexplored areas for the refugees. Law enforcement could also seed surrounding systems with sensors that alert them to the presence of ships, and deploy troops accordingly. **Edit:** Overall, a single criminal isn't worth expending millions of credits in resources. But if criminals find each other and band together to form a space pirate faction (as suggested by kingledion), then admin might get involved directly if they pose a great enough threat. On the flip side, however, the pirate armada would be easier to find than a single criminal ship.
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Why would they? If you are concerned with protecting the people and property of a particular volume of space you don't bother with the criminals that leave that volume of space.
Space is far too big to police in its entirety so you watch your corner hit criminals when they come back into your jurisdiction; any ship cross the borders of policed space, especially coming in from the outside, is automatically subject to immediate search and seizure, you might get your ship back if the cops don't find anything suspect, or not.
So your cops should watch the border worlds, the systems close enough to the border to give enough fuel range to ships leaving the policed systems, and DNA test as many people leaving as possible so they know who's going where-ish. They'll take detailed scans of every ship passing through so they know if it comes back or not. Most especially they take an aggressive zero fault policy towards arresting everyone coming into their control space on a guilty until proven innocent basis; anyone leaving is assumed to be on the run unless they have an exploration permit but no-one really cares if criminals leave, its only if they come back that they're a problem.
When the official borders move, because new colony worlds are opened, the same approach should apply; anyone found on new worlds who is not an officially registered colonist gets arrested for criminal trespass and held while they're checked against every criminal database in existence.
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**Micronutrients.**
/We'll catch them when they come back for more food./@Rekesoft
These folks with FTL Volkswagons and food synthesizers - what would they need to return to civilization to get? Not food. Not clothes. Not fuel if they can collect hydrogen. Probably not religious services although that is an interesting idea.
Humans need micronutrients. They are on the vitamin bottle - cobalt, copper, zinc, etc. A matter synthesizer might be able to rearrange readily available carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen and make fabric or food. Synthesizing an atom of manganese out of some other matter type requires more doing. Where do you find iodine in space? Recycling your wastes will reclaim micronutrients for a while but recycling is never 100%.
Of course if you don't want this, assert the matter replicator can make your manganese. But this premise presents another fine analogy to scurvy pirates - goiterous, ice-gnawing outlanders suffering the symptoms of gradual micronutrient deficiency and eventually being forced to make a run back to get more from the government monopoly, which doles them out sparingly.
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**Business as usual**
Where are they going to? In our world we already have FTL (Faster Than Law). Criminals can evade justice by car, plane, ship or train. The thing is, where are they going to? Because wherever they go, there will be law agents waiting for them. The only way to escape is going to a place where there is a different jurisdiction that the one you're fleeing from, and they don't have an extradition treaty.
Having FTL engines so simple you can make a DIY one in your garage causes serious troubles with my suspension of disbelief, but even within the premises of your universe, one thing is having a car-like (or small yacht) FTL spaceship and another thing is having a Make-Your-Own-Habitable-Planet-In-Five-Minutes toolkit in its trunk. Yeah, sure, your criminals can flee to the farthest corner of the galaxy. We'll catch them when they come back for more food.
As you said, life is incredibly rare in the universe. Fleeing to nowhere is just another form of suicide, and criminals routinely use suicide to avoid the action of justice. You can't prevent that.
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Here's some nitty gritty details to complement the prior answers:
I assume that the old maxim of a missile being able to outrun anything that has to carry humans still holds true. Hence, first you outlaw any FTL travel within settled star systems. Anyone that wants to travel within "civilised space" must do so at sublight speeds. Violating this rule means you will be fired on by defence batteries armed with FTL missiles, with no exceptions. The no FTL boundary can be expanded to extend up to light-seconds or minutes away with anything entering the threshold at FTL being immediately engaged. As already mentioned by others criminals will come to you rather than the other way around so this is to discourage FTL hit and run attacks.
Once everyone is travelling at sublight speeds, this then opens up lasers, as shorter ranged weapons and also as guidance, communications and so forth. Monitor all traffic with an intra-system detection network and you're back to business as usual; laser-armed patrol ships carrying grunts to do the boarding-related tasks are the new equivalent of cops in cop cars
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# Other fiction example: Elite
[Elite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)) and [Elite:Dangerous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_Dangerous) have managed this problem for 34 years.
The setting is similar to yours: relativistic drives are ubiquitous. Anything from a small one-person ship to huge capital ships can hop from system to system. The range of a hop varies depending on the ship, but anything from 5 to 50 light years is common. Ships can also cruise relativisticly within a system at anything from 30,000 km/s to several hundred times *c*, i.e. light speed.
Law enforcement exists in the Elite-verse. In short...
* There is Faster Than Light communication, meaning that information can be immediately propagated throughout a whole star system
* Every civilised system has law enforcement that patrol points of interest, and also roaming patrols that may decide to check up on ships at their discretion
* You cannot hide your Faster-Than-Light entry into a system, nor your relativistic mode of travel when in a system, nor when you engage or disengage your relativistic drive
* Your identity is immediately known as soon as someone "looks" at you
* A superficial criminal status can be obtained by making a more detailed scan, in short just focusing on a ship over a few seconds
* Your entire criminal record is known as soon as someone makes a close-up scan of you
* There is a bounty system: known criminals are allowed to be shot on sight
* Your status as a law abiding citizen or a criminal varies depending on what jurisdiction is in effect in that particular system **and** who scans you. If you are friendly with that faction, they may even come to your aid if someone attacks you.
So how to deal with "slippery fishes"? That is taken care of by the following limitations in relativistic travel:
* You cannot jump to relativistic mode — neither to jump to another system nor to cruise within a system — if there is a large mass close to you. Planets, ring systems, space stations and other ships count. So you can "mass lock" a fugitive and force them to do combat at non-relativistic speeds. Depending on how good their thrusters are, they might be able to outrun you in a straight race, and then make the jump.
* You can be yanked out of relativistic cruising, i.e. "interdicted". But this is a tenuous affair for anyone trying to interdict, and success depends on the size of the interdicted ship, the sophistication (i.e. **price**) of the interdiction equipment, and the skill of the pilots.
# So what if you run away?
Question: is that really a **problem**?
Law enforcement may exist for a number of reasons. But dragging you before a court is in and of itself **not the goal** of law enforcement. That is simply a tool that we use here on Earth today to achieve other goals. And those goals may be...
* **Retribution**. This is plain old revenge: you did something bad, so now we inflict something bad on you.
* **Rehabilitation**. This is to make you stop doing bad things and go back to being a productive member of society.
* **Reparation**. You did something bad to someone else, so now we will make you repair that damage you did to them, forcing you to pay the cost for the loss and pain & suffering you inflicted.
* **Prevention**. This is to make you not want to do bad things.
* **Protection**. This is to forcibly stop or disable you from doing bad things to someone else.
**Retribution** serves little purpose, and it is not unreasonable to assume that future civilisations have abandoned that barbaric old practice.
If you are planet-hopping, unless you are in your home system, you are not really a member of the society where you commit the crime. They are not really interested in bringing you "back" into their lawful society since you were not a member of that society anyway, but just a transient traveller/merchant. So **rehabilitation** is not an issue.
**Reparation** can be handled by the system government where the damage happened, or — as in Elite Dangerous — you are simply required to be insured; if your ship gets destroyed, insurance pays for a new ship. Also in the Elite-verse chances that you will be rescued from a ship-wrecking disaster are very good. And if you are not... hey, who is every going to know, hm?
**Prevention** and **Protection** are both handled by the mere fact that you have run away from the system; you cannot do anything bad to anyone if you are not there.
And if you would return to the system... well... let us just say that the hunt is **on**. If you are a criminal in a system, anyone and everyone is allowed to use you as their personal target shooting practice.
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I assume we are ignoring how FTL in normal space would either end very badly for the ship, or result in the ship disappearing for millions of years. Whatever technology that is allowing the laws of physics to bend, would probably leave an after effect that could be tracked.
Might not need to go full star trek "Warp signature" or "ion trail" but you could make it easy for law enforcement to track a ship through virgin untraveled space because the disturbance is so obvious. But if the criminal sticks to shipping lanes or well traveled space, then they are next to impossible to track.
This affect might cause law enforcement to block common lanes to try and force a criminal to go "off roading" and show up on a scan.
You could even add an extra restriction that if you travel off the well worn space highways, your fuel...(light-yearage?) drops and you can't go as fast or as far.
[Answer]
**Extreme Electronic Surveillance + Enforcement (EESE)**
1. Manufacturing of a 3D print-capable matter synthesizer requires a license
2. Necessary condition for obtaining a license is to embed EESE technology in each manufactured unit
3. Surveillance: EESE-enabled printers phone home every time something is printed (assuming they're near enough, otherwise they just buffer until), to alert authorities about possible contraband printing
4. Enforcement: Law enforcement authority can order a specific EESE-enabled printer to print anything they choose. Including, but not limited to, a killbot swarm, or a nuke with short fuse. Commands for EESE-enforcement will be broadcast in any civilized system, so if the perpetrator ever gets back anywhere near the civilization as a whole, they're in trouble
As a result of EESE, a criminal has the option of never coming back near civilization again, or limiting himself to second-rate black market 3D-printers. The limited quality of black market printers means that the perp must come back to civilization every once in a while, for the more advanced spare parts, and risk getting caught.
edit: Aside from this somewhat silly example, the point is, that any technology indistinguishable from magic, could be or become subverted by law enforcement.
[Answer]
Easy-peasy. Any form of faster than light travel by definition is also a time machine. Just google for ftl and causality violation. [Here's](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52249/how-does-faster-than-light-travel-violate-causality) an example link.
If the authorities really care, they can record the incident and send a government ship on a round-trip that has the list of incidents and provide the details to itself in plenty of time. For each incident on the list, they can be there waiting at the scene of the crime or at the miscreant's ship.
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Considering there are more than 100 nations on Earth, I don't see any reason to assume any jurisdiction will span much more than they do today. Maybe at planet level in smaller colonies, considering how easy is to travel in-world and the cultural impact of having all settlers coming from the same place. Probably not on Earth, nor in the few first and lasgest colonies.
If the criminal is hiding in uncharted worlds, he is out of jurisdiction and nobody will bother to look for him. If he is hidden in a civilized world, extradition treaties applies as usual.
Sure if the "crime" committed is somehow of political nature, or too important, like major terrorism, you may want to divert some state resource to track and assassinate, like North Korea did with Kim Jong Un's brother and USA with Osama bin Laden. But is the there is no politics involved, such pursuits are unlikely.
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### News
Send out information about criminal flight with every FTL ship that leaves your planet. And check all incoming people to verify that they are not returning criminals. Make it illegal for a fleeing criminal to land on your planet. Assuming every planet does this, the net effect is that a criminal is unwelcome on every planet.
In reality, some planets will choose to be more accepting of such criminals. So criminals will concentrate on those planets. Either the criminals normalize into legal activities or they don't. If they normalize, they aren't much of an issue. Sure, they got away with murder (or whatever crime), but they can never see their friends or families again. They are both incapacitated (can't commit crimes in the original jurisdiction) and punished enough for deterrent and retribution purposes. If they don't rehabilitate, their new planet won't let them stay.
Those who don't normalize have to find new criminal enterprises. But then they become criminals on the new planet. Either they leave or submit to punishment. Eventually, they go to just a few jurisdictions, and you have a concentrated criminal enterprise, which is vulnerable to space fleets, etc.
Pirate cities (concentrated criminal enterprises) also aren't particularly nice places. They have a bunch of murderers at them, which leaves the people there highly vulnerable to murder. And if you commit murder and the victim has more friends than you do, chances are you get murdered in turn. While they aren't jails, they have much of the same social structure. You're free from guards but even more subject to being ruled by charismatic but brutal leaders.
For some crimes, extradition may be possible. Bounty hunters may watch the criminal news for people with rewards that will pay for collecting them and taking them back. Or maybe they just repossess the ship and take it back, assuming the criminal stole the ship in the first place.
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[Question]
[
Would a satyr wear horseshoes?
Horseshoes were invented because stone roads were bad for a horse’s hooves. I’m not sure if a satyr would want to nail horseshoes (goatshoes?) to their hooves, or if they would come up with some way to put shoe-shoes on hooves.
[Answer]
# Short answer, no.
A horse’s hooves are monodactyl; single-toed. This means they consist of a single large digit. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eQBZm.jpg)
The hooves of a goat (or other ruminant) however, are cloven: they consist of two digits, and are shaped very differently to the hooves of a horse.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8lZ2L.jpg)
Even if they wanted to, a satyr (which has the legs of a goat) could no more wear horseshoes than you could wear a pair of dog booties. (Which are adorable, but I’m sidetracking myself.)
Besides which, a satyr doesn’t actually need any protection from cobbled roads. Horses are built for the soft ground of open grasslands, so it makes sense for them to wear horseshoes when on hard ground. But goats are mountain-dwelling animals, and their feet are probably tough enough to tolerate cobbles.
[Answer]
My bet: **Yes.** Or something else with the same end goal: protecting the hoof from excessive wear.
I see two factors in play: **too much wear on the hoof** and **satyrs are bipeds**.
**Wear**: Hooves (whether for horses or goats) grow naturally all the time, and there is a balance between normal wear and normal growth that tends to work out in the wild. Domesticated horses -- or even oxen put to work -- may get shoes because they are wearing their hooves down from overuse on hard surfaces. If your horse is pounding on pavement or packed trails regularly, it will need shoes. Conversely, you can need to trim hooves of farm animals if their hooves are *underused*. Pet goats usually need hoof trimmings as they are not getting the normal wear and the hoof just keeps growing.
With all that in mind, my bet is that a satyr living in civilization probably will want hoof protection, assuming they are spending most of their time on packed surfaces -- inside their homes, walking on roads, etc. If your satyrs live in the wild and eschew modern conveniences like paved pathways then perhaps they don't need them, *but*....
**Bipeds**: Goats, cows, horses, etc, distribute their weight across 4 hooves, versus a satyr distributing the weight across two hooves. My thinking is they must necessarily have more wear and tear, then. Perhaps this means satyr hooves grow faster than horse (or goat) hooves but it may also make them more susceptible to damage, especially on paved surfaces.
**Their shoeing options should be a lot more open**. The important thing with a shoe is that it protects the hoof from wear. Satyrs presumably being intelligent creatures capable of tying their own shoelaces could potentially wear something much more like a conventional human shoe, with a soft sole, and then go in for, erm, whatever you would call a pedicure for a satyr, to keep the hoof trimmed. I suspect that they can do cloven hoof shoes that nail in (see: oxen shoes) but a civilized modern satyr could do better.
The details are entirely up to you but hopefully this helps you *nail down* the idea.
[Answer]
I upvoted @JamieB's answer, and you should too, but let's build on it.
There are humans who pretty much live their entire lives without ever wearing a pair of shoes, using a pair of gloves, or getting their teeth capped. Some don't wear hats, or even much clothing. Heck, some don't wear clothes. There's nothing actually wrong with this. Human are born with everything we need to live life — *given the correct environmental conditions.*
While humans may choose to live in areas where they must wear, e.g., coats and boots, the truth is, we wear all those things (including the tooth caps) to protect ourselves and/or extend our ability to do things.
**Let's ignore the fact that your question depends too much on [narrative necessity](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609)**
Frankly, there is no more of a reason why satyrs would want to wear horse shoes than there is one explaining why humans would want to wear athletic cleats, ski boots, or work boots. Whether they do or not is up to you because, like humans, *they don't have to.* In fact, with some exceptions, a hoof wears as it is used. Regularly shoeing hooves means the need to trim those proverbial nails, too, because they're not getting worn as nature intended. But why would a satyr want to do this?
Good grief. *Why wouldn't they?*
* Combat: the shoe not only protects the hoof but is better than wearing a gauntlet or holding a roll of quarters in your fist when you pummel the snot out of someone.
* Labor: The shoe gives the satyr the ability to *push forward* with greater strength than the hoof itself might allow. Or, at the very least, allow the satyr to grip or dig into the ground better than the unshoed hoof would.
* Dancing: I have one word for you, just one word... *tap.*
* Injury: Like a cast, the shoe wold hold the hoof together while healing takes place.
* Vanity: Why metal? Why not rubber or plastic or wood or any number of things that changes the appearance of the satyr? Platform shoes, decorative shoes, clogging shoes (ah, I've already mentioned dancing...). Maybe it's because your wealthy satyr wants to show of his/her status by wearing their outrageously expensive African Blackwood shoes.
And once they start wearing shoes, time (if we use Human history as the reference) will lead to pretty much all of them wearing shoes. No shirts, no shoes, no service. It'll become the essence of polite society to wear shoes so they can be removed (ah, the need to invent removable shoes!) when you enter someone's home — because tromping mud around someone's house is simply gauche.
**Of course they'll wear shoes...**
It's actually really difficult to rationalize why an entire species of intelligent, occasionally selfish, ocassionally noble, ocassionally just eccentric beings would or wouldn't do anything. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that holistically or rationally allows this. In other words, we're back to narrative necessity.
But there are plenty of reasons (as many as for humans, frankly), why a satyr (note, one) would choose to use shoes.
*Now that I write that last sentence, please note that the [Help Center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) specifically prohibits questions about character and/or organizational choices. Hold that thought for future quesitons. Technically, now that I'm done writing an answer, this question was off-topic.*
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## Almost certainly, but mostly hipposandals or glue on oxshoes.
Shoeing has many benefits, reducing wear on hard surfaces, softer shoes reduce shock to joints, they can correct foot problems. Remember not all of a hoof is equally hard, thee are softer parts that benefit form protection. Then you have things like combat, protecting the rest of the foot, and even just vanity.
Historically they might use something like OX-shoes which nail on but I expect glue or tie up shoes to quickly win out, see roman **hipposandals** (image below) for iron tie up shoes, these had a woven pad on top and a metal bottom. Hipposandals would be harder to make for cloven hooves, but they might just be one piece since you can take them off. Entirely woven hipposandals also existed. I expect hipposandals to be common. We don't make shoes for each toe and I don't expect them to do so often. Hipposandals actually come in a huge variety of designs including cleated, quick removal, soft bottomed, and highly decorative.
I expect tie up or lace on shoes more like boots for the wealthy. Shoes you can take off make more sense for an intelligent being but would also cost a lot more. there is a reason wooden shoes for so common for the poor though most of history. But maybe the rich use a prettier metal, that's up to you, different societies would likely be different. Few things show off wealth better than using silver for a shoe, especially given how fast it will wear.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/shZWC.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iPGfb.png)
Wooden ox shoes also existed, and were glued on and are still used to protect hooves form hard surfaces for a short time. These might be your most common especially for poor satyrs. My guess is switching to glue on wood or iron shoes would quickly win out over less comfortable nail on shoes if they even try nail on shoes, and I don't imagine they would be more common than hipposandals.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/95RIU.jpg)
in a more modern setting they would likely move to only glue on or tie up shoes which is what is mostly used now, since there is far less chance of splitting a hoof. These can be made of everything from iron to plastic to soft rubber. today these are called cowslips or hoof blocks, and even orthopedic varieties exist.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HYnpl.png)
] |
[Question]
[
This excerpt below is from George Orwell's *1984* and it is the character Syme talking about the progress of the official language "Newspeak" and how its goal is to eventually destroy modern language.
>
> *Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make [thought crime] literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly **one word**, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten*
>
>
> [George Orwell, "1984" Part 1 Chapter 5](http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html)
>
>
>
While it seems Syme was talking about Newspeak reducing the language to one word per *concept*, I want to take it a step further. **How could a totalitarian government (or ruling entity) gradually diminish a language until it's expressed in just *one word***?
I'm particularly interested to know how this could be done by force, whether subtle or overt, not by some natural or evolutionary means, and in a small period of time say 100 to 200 years.
---
Edit: People seem to be hung up on this. I was just suggesting *1984* as an example, a catalyst for creative ideas, NOT as the scope to which all answers should confine themselves. You could totally ignore the book and still come up with a creative answer to this question.
[Answer]
Orwell didn't mean that the entire English language would be reduced to just one word, but that each concept would be reduced to one word. That is, instead of having many words with shades of meaning, like "pretty", "beautiful", "attractive", etc, there would be just one word for this idea. The idea is that alternate meanings and shades of meaning would be abolished. The example I recall from the book -- it's been decades since I read it -- was that the word "free" would be defined to mean only the absence of something, as in, "This yard is free of weeds", but that it would have no meaning of being politically free or free to make moral choices.
How could a government do it? Presumably by controlling education and the media. If children are all taught in school that this is what a word means, and are never told alternate definitions, and if all the TV programs and books and web sites all use only the government-approved definitions, then arguably people would have no way to even hear competing ideas. So unless a person thought of a competing idea himself, he'd have no way to know it. And Orwell's theory was that if the language has no words to express an idea, it would be impossible for a person to put into words, even in his head, and thus he would have a hard time thinking it.
This is why it's important to have public schools with curriculum set by the central government, such as "No Child Left Behind", and to have media run by the central government, like PBS. Or at least to have all the major media sharing the same "party line", like ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, etc. Any competing media must be ridiculed as extremist and crazy or denigrated as unreliable.
Would it actually work? Hard to say. On the one hand, it assumes that the government can control all or almost all communications. The old Soviet Union made it a crime to own unauthorized printing equipment so people couldn't publish anti-government newsletters. But plenty of people still managed to do it. Plus there were radio and TV transmissions from outside the country. Today the Internet is seen as a threat by many dictatorships because it is difficult to control.
Even if you succeeded, would not having words in the language really stop people from having unwanted thoughts? It surely would not be a 100% effective tool. We can easily prove that from the fact that people throughout history have, in fact, often invented new words for new ideas, or managed to express new idea using words that originally had other meanings. The fact that there was no word for "telephone" or "computer" before those things were invented didn't prevent people from thinking of the idea. But maybe if the words don't exist, it takes a rare genius to think of the idea, while if the words are there, any reasonably intelligent person can express the idea. Hard to say.
[Answer]
One of the other themes of that story is despite Big Brother's efforts, the human will found a way. If words are reduced, intonation and facial expression will have to take its place. This is far harder for BB to detect and to restrict. Even today, we have expressions like, "it's not what you say, it's how you say it."
As evidence, I point to my own cat and my neighbor's dog. Each seems to know exactly three verbal expressions, or "words." Those are meow, hiss, and purr; and woof, grrr, and whine, respectively. With these few sounds, along with tone, volume, body language, and so on, they each communicate with me.
My cat has been able to let me know:
* Feed me
* Thank you for feeding me
* Pet me
* Please stop petting me
* Go away, I'm busy
* Let's play
* Help!
* Oh, hi!
* I said, HI, dammit!
* Hey you! Yes you, idiot. How can you not get that I'm saying HELLO!?! Pay attention.
And my neighbor's dog has indicated:
* I am aware of you, not-my-human
* Don't get so close to the fence, not-my-human
* OK, fine, as long as it's YOUR side of the fence
* Hey, is-my-human, something is happening out here!
* Hey, is-my-human, can I come back inside now?
[Answer]
The last word in your language will be essentially translatable as *look-at-me*.
It is possible to simplify language. It may even be desirable at some points, because humans will trend towards complexity, and turn around and trend towards simplicity, (and not just in language) because the optimum point will be different for different people at different points, and people like change. If a government is catching a language during its slide towards simplicity, it might be able to nudge the trend quite a bit further along than it would naturally go. Of course, if the language is trending the other way (towards complexity), the government would be better off artificially "complexifying" the language, to make people *want* to trend towards simplicity, and then riding the simplifying train all the way down.
Why would this happen? because the government would like to control what people think, and one way to do that is to control what people are taught, and what words they have to put these expressions into language. It wouldn't be quick, but starting with an overt push and "popular support" to simplify language (to "better communicate") can help, and probably get the language (or at least the official government sanctioned word-list) down to functional basics within a generation or two. Native speakers might test at knowing 20,00-35,000 words, but non-native speakers might test from [2,500-9,000 words](http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size) - so a government can probably get vocabulary cut down too that much without losing the ability to communicate. Three generations will limit how much of the larger body of vocabulary is remembered - that is, after the third there will be very few people who know it was *ever* different, especially if education is tightly controlled.
And how would this happen? First, by overtly getting rid of synonyms, variations, and shades of grey. Anything that can be grouped similarly, should be pared down to one word. Longer sentences and fragments should be encouraged, because it will take more less general words to match the information given by a single precise one. Education will help here, more subtly, instead of kids learning word lists to expand their vocabulary, kids would learn how to describe or talk about things using the same, increasingly reduced pool of words.
Then, subtly by encouraging a relaxed attitude to grammar will probably also help, since formal language and grammar encourage precision, and also marking words for part of speech, number, and a host of other things that takes one word and makes it *many*. Fostering an attitude that the point is getting the meaning across and nothing more will help hide the reduced word usage, since only one word is now standing in for dozens.
At this point, something else has started to happen. People will be groping for ways to articulate specifics and differences, since the language that would have once marked them out are gone. So, in come the gestures, from specific gestures to the hand-wavy "you know what I mean" gestures. Intonation and facial expression, not to mention body language, will come to mean more and more as people need to get information across with less and less formal vocabulary. People might make up words, but given your government is actively and overtly trying to discourage this, "because it is exclusive" or "because using words people don't know is unhelpful/rude/antisocial" - the words will probably not catch on.
So what will happen instead is that the expressions, gestures, and body language will slowly take on a life of their own. The government will be overtly focusing on preventing the creation or use of words, and perhaps on limiting the existing sign languages (or preventing codified new ones) from being used as a bridge, but casual gestures and contextual meaning will probably slip by until it's too late to matter. The new language will not be codified, not with the government on watch against such "redefining", but will rather be quite intuitive. The government agents will be thinking of language as vocal, as textual, since that's what they can control. On the other hand, some word like "thingy" will be intuitively made to acquire dozens of meanings based on context, gestures, location, and there's no way to stop that, it *has* to be that way to let society function, or the word couldn't have been made to substitute for others in the first place.
Your society will hit the point other answers have described, where you have one-word-per-concept... but the government will not be satisfied not after *so* much success, and will try to keep paring the language down (actively removing "dangerous" concepts and censoring away at everything else). At this point, it will *only* work if the body-language has developed enough to compensate for the lack. People need to communicate their problems, and how to fix them, they need to interact, bargain, gossip, complain.
So, *look-at-me*. Look-at-me and gesture to a problem, look-at-me and toss over a solution. Here's the thingy I was talking about, there's the place where what you're holding goes (look-at-me gesture to it). Look-at-me, essentially becomes a placeholder, it only needs to inform its listener about intent-to-communicate... since otherwise looking in the wrong direction will stall out a conversation. Something to catch the ear, gain attention, that is the absolute minimum we would need from spoken language for safety and survival, if someone isn't looking, is too far away to touch, and *needs to know*. Command someone to look, until they know what someone is trying to say, until they find the problem, and can show a solution, until context can clue someone in on what's going on.
Essentially, the government would alternate overt and subtle means (overtly simplifying and redefining, subtly encouraging relaxed simplifying and re-purposing) to pare down the language to the bare essentials, then take over overtly again to push past the one-word-per-concept barrier that a language won't drop below on its own. In the process of trying to control thoughts via vocabulary, it will have pretty much converted a [low-context to a high-context](http://www2.pacific.edu/sis/culture/pub/Context_Cultures_High_and_Lo.htm) culture, since the high context culture can get meaning across without words... so actually the government will have failed to prevent people understanding and communicating all kinds of ideas, they will have just switched from one medium of communication to another, with the possibility of making people more observant and detail-oriented, since they will have to notice and remember all the contextual details instead of having them spelled out.
[Answer]
It depends on your [definition of a word](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/word)
>
> a unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their
> written representation, that functions as a principal carrier of
> meaning. Words are composed of one or more morphemes and are either
> the smallest units susceptible of independent use or consist of two or
> three such units combined under certain linking conditions, as with
> the loss of primary accent that distinguishes black·bird· from black·
> bird·. Words are usually separated by spaces in writing, and are
> distinguished phonologically, as by accent, in many languages.
>
>
>
Say the word your language runs down to is Bo, through inflection, repetition and context you can have the following exchange.
*Stranger Approaches*
You: Bo
Stranger: Bo
*Stranger begins searching your shop*
You: Bo?
Stranger: *indicating with hands the size of a grapefruit* Bo?
You: Bo!
*you offer the man a grapefruit*
Things can be worked out, however you do begin to see the problem, that without context you just have nonsense. A single word language restricts the transmission of information across any distance apart from the face-to-face.
## How a government might implement this
First, get rid of outside influence
* Burn books
* Isolate the population from the outside
* Remove those that speak secondary languages
Then
* Remove the media's use of non-standard speak
* Slowly turn down the amount of words in language, removing complicated words and replacing with ever simpler ones
* Outlaw words that have been removed, initiate a thought police that will systematically remove dissenters, preferably converting them but removing them in the middle of the night is also fine
* Educate children - only teach them the single word, ideally reducing their education down to just simple tasks, anything complicated won't translate in a single word society.
Once the children are converted, then begin *retiring* the previous generations adults from society.
This would need to be a continuous task, with constant reinforcement of the word. Human babies babble and generation of new languages (slang) is an innate process within humanity.
[Answer]
The obvious answer, although not I suspect the one you are looking for\*, is that English would become extinct in the same way as thousands of other languages have become extinct over the ages: that is it would be replaced by another language. The new language might contain a single word derived from English in the same way that there are undoubtedly extinct languages whose only relic is a single borrowed word that has been adopted into some living language.
As Chris J said in the comments to the question, the quote from *1984* does not mean that people will be reduced to only being able to say one single word. That would make humans unable to think at any level above that of animals, which even the totalitarian tyranny of Ingsoc did not aspire to. The intention behind Newspeak in *1984* was "merely" to [remove synonyms and antonyms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak#To_remove_synonyms_and_antonyms). The link takes you to the Wikipedia article on Newspeak, which says:
>
> This would, of course, not prevent heretical statements such as "Big
> Brother is ungood," but not only would this statement sound absurd in
> the ears of the politically orthodox, it would also be impossible to
> elaborate on or specify exactly what the statement means since all
> concepts and words that can be used to argue against Big Brother (i.e.
> liberty, rights, freedom, etc.) would be eradicated from the language.
> The statement would thus be meaningless.
>
>
>
For how the change to the restricted vocabulary of Newspeak was to be accomplished, I refer you to *1984* itself. It was described as being done over decades by a mixture of propaganda, rewriting of history and previous literature, censorship, social pressure and - of course - terror.
I think you have been misled by Orwell's use of the word "every" in "Every concept that can ever be needed…". He meant it in the same sense as "each", i.e. that each of a limited set of concepts would have one word, not that all concepts would be melded into one word. To literally destroy human language would require raising babies in isolation from any human society, as has sometimes happened with ["feral children"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child) who were abandoned or lost as babies but survived among animals.
But to raise children in isolation would require those making the practical arrangements to bring this about to communicate among themselves. This would mean that more complex language survived *somewhere*, unless, as Nex Terren's comment suggested, those doing the raising were robots.
If the children were raised in isolation and denied interaction with other people during the language-forming phase of early childhood, they would grow up to be severely intellectually disabled. If, however, they were prevented from communicating with adults but not from each other, then I think that the innate human language ability would reassert itself in some form, not necessarily a spoken form. Consider how [Nicaraguan Sign Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language) evolved.
---
\*The edit to the question saying that answers should not be limited to the universe of the book *1984* was made while I was writing this answer.
[Answer]
```
1
```
All thought can be expressed in binary, so technically you can reduce language to one word. One character even.
But binary is complete so cannot be used as a limiter because it includes dissenting thought.
All complexity and subtlety can be built from it. If binary, the literal simplest form of communication is complete reduction cannot be used to limit thought.
If instead you build something that specifically excludes dissent (a book of correct thought) it will be incomplete. Any human who has language will invent ways to express all parts of the human condition. A shadow language will emerge to express things that that cannot be expressed by the book of correct thought. (See the shadow of the torturer by Gene Wolf for an example of novel ideas expressed using only The Book of Correct Thought)
I don't think it's possible to force an incomplete language to prevent banned thought. If you want to ban the expression of dissent you might have to ban language entirely. Or use some other method (fear springs to mind).
[Answer]
I know this one has already been answered - but I just had a little idea that might apply to your scenario:
In the next 100-200 years the scientists of the Totalitarian Government develops an effective form of telepathy.
Now to avoid some of the problems associated with telepathy, such as having people read thoughts you dont want them reading or being overwhelmed with too many thoughts from so many people, the telepathy has been altered.
When a particular word is spoken the thoughts of the speaker are transmitted telepathically to anyone who could hear the spoken word. To begin with you could have several key words for transmitting telepathically, and eventually reduce this down to just one.
The Totalitarian Government wants everyone to adopt its new telepathic form of communication, and anyone found speaking in full sentences get punished (possibly by having their tongues ripped out?)
[Answer]
I once read a German children's story describing the sadly humorous decline of a boy's grandfather who had an uncle named Jodok, about whom he was always telling stories. As time went on, the other characters in the tales were also named "Jodok", then he started calling everyone "Jodok". Eventually, the objects in the stories likewise became "Jodok"s, and in the end, even the verbs and adjectives, thus, something like "Jodok and Jodok Jodoked to a Jodok where they Jodoked a couple of Jodoks and saw Jodok Jodoking a Jodok Jodok with a Jodok." Not quite down to one word, but getting close.
[Answer]
This question asks how English could ***gradually*** dwindle to one single word, but the answer is it couldn't. Considerably before that point it would cease to be a functioning Human language.
The [Natural Semantic Metalanguage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage) theory argues that natural Human language is built upon a list of around 65 'semantic primes': the basic concepts of language upon which all else is built. The list is not definitive and is periodically revised, but after 40 years of research into dozens of languages from every major language family around the world, the [most of these primes have very good supporting evidence](https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities-languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes).
Some of these primes are things like I, YOU, ONE, TWO, THINK, DO, NOT, IF, VERY. A government may try to reduce how a language is used, but if the distinction was lost between any of these, it would be completely unusable. People would switch to another language, or start replacing the words faster than the government could ban them. It's just simple reality that humans cannot speak without words for I and YOU.
(You may be aware of claims that some languages do in fact lack some of these words. I simplified my explanation of the theory: the primes are not always words, and can be affixes or phrases. They also only refer to particular senses of words, so that if a word seems like it more means 'a few' than the strict sense of 'two', further investigations would likely show that there is a narrow sense where the word only means 'two'. But there is always the possibility that a language doesn't have any word for 'two', in which case the list would be revised.)
[Answer]
As mentioned above, Orwell was referring to one word per concept, removing shades of grey. But if we really want to go with just one word, think of the utility of "shit":
* Verb: to shit (the action of shitting)
* Noun: I stepped in shit.
* Exclamation: Oh Shit!
* Adjective: That's a shitty response.
Various usage examples:
* Do you really mean that? No shit?
* Are you pulling my leg? Are you shitting me?
* You're not telling the truth. You're full of shit.
* You're in serious trouble. You're in deep shit.
* That's excellent weed. That's good shit.
* That's a lot of... That's a shitload of ...
... and many more.
Eventually, we might be able to communicate with just variations on the word shit.
[Answer]
Use a [single-syllable word with a long vowel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOU7MdkwyOk) and [on-off keying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-off_keying).
] |
[Question]
[
There are numerous, (*or at least one that I can think of*), horror films which - after watching a short film or video - or seeing a particular thing - the person would be cursed and (probably) die.
Is it actually possible for a 2D image or video to kill the person who sees it? How would this have to work?
* The person would have to die either immediately or later
* They need to have died because of the image/video. By this I mean that the particular image need to have killed them. You can't count an image that could be replaced by another random image. *For example, any random text message or image on a cell phone which caused the person to crash and die while driving would not count*)
* It should kill 60% or greater of the people who look at it
* You must not post the image on this site or you won't get any upvotes - because we'd be dead.
[Answer]
**It's simply not possible.**
The novel [Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash) has the most plausible explanation as to how something like this would work.
>
> "The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain."
>
> This language is written in a 2D format that looks similar to the "snow" static on a old TV screen. It programs the brain through activating, in a binary fashion, fibers in the optic nerve.
>
>
>
However, it's pure fiction. It also makes me realize that kids these days don't know about the TV snow... sigh.
*Anyway.*
The only way you're going to get a any kind of image to kill someone is if that image is made of a material outputting high levels of ionizing radiation. Of course, that has nothing to do with the image itself.
[Answer]
## Killer Joke
Write a joke that's so funny that anyone who reads it will die from laughter.
Monty Python did this in ["The Funniest Joke in the World" sketch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World):
>
> ...The British Army wish to determine "the military potential of the
> Killer Joke." They test the joke on a rifleman, who snickers and falls
> dead on the range. They then translate it into German, with each
> translator working on only one word of the joke so as not to be
> killed. The German translation is used for the first time on 8 July
> 1944 in the Ardennes, causing German soldiers to fall down dead from
> laughter...
>
>
>
[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwbnvkMRPKM)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwbnvkMRPKM>
[Answer]
This answer depends on the exact definition of "2d image", for your purpose, but most people would agree that the thing shown on a TV qualifies as a "2d image"
Google "Photosensitive epilepsy". A non-static 2d image can trigger epilepsy (i.e. strobing light/dark at the right frequency).
There was an episode of Pokemon, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon> , which showed red and blue "extremely bright strobe lights, with blinks at a rate of about 12 Hz for approximately six seconds"; 685 children were taken to hospital, of which 150 were admitted to hospital, and 2 remained for more than two weeks. People have died from epileptic seizures at inconvenient times - e.g. while driving. Not "60%", by any means, but it's a start.
There are also static images which show weird effects, for example google for "optical illusion moving", and you will see some examples of this. While these do no damage, it shows reasonably that static images can, in fact, trigger effects that are not normally associated with static images.
[Answer]
## Images that incite terrorism/war.
Arguably, the spreading of images which exploit a deep-set hatred between specific groups would be extremely effective at getting specific people to kill others and get themselves killed in war or through terrorism.
For example, [the Charlie Hebdo depictions of Muhammad incited the Charlie Hebdo shootings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting#After_the_attack), which resulted in the deaths of many of the Charlie Hebdo artists as well as the terrorists themselves, who were shot by the police.
Similarly, [propaganda encouraging people to fight for ISIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War#Support_for_Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant) can be extremely effective in getting Muslim extremists killed. The same can probably be said for images depicting the defiling of specific religious/nationalist buildings or objects, which incite terror attacks or wars.
The most effective kinds of propaganda would probably be the messages that encourage suicide bombers, who kill themselves believing that they would receive specific rewards in heaven after the act of martyrdom.
Granted, none of these images even come close to achieving a 60% kill rate when exposed to the general population, but it is arguable that the general population would not come into contact with such images in the first place. When applied to these specific susceptible populations, the kill rate can be rather substantial.
[Answer]
As Samuel [indicated](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21952/10364), a 2D image that kills isn't possible, let's see what it would take to make it happen.
A 2D image passes through the eyes, along the optic nerve and into the lateral geniculate nucleus then into the primary and secondary visual cortex of the brain. The visual cortex is in the cerebrum while basic life functions such as heartbeat and breathing are contained in the brain stem.
The most direct route to kill someone with visual input would be to have the image tell the visual cortex to send a signal to the brain stem to forget or override any functionality that keeps the heart beating or diaphragm breathing. There are no direct routes between the visual cortex to the brain stem so any signal would need to make it through any number of other sub-systems before reaching the brain stem. Each intermediate system may change or straight block the signal so those alterations must be accounted for in the original signal.
The 2D image will need to coerce some very hard wired neural pathways to change. It is not difficult to imagine that the heart-beat circuits are the most burned in within the human brain as they have been in use the longest, pre-birth. Life has had lots of practice making this part of the brain very resilient so breaking functionality here will be incredibly difficult.
Neurons are not Turing Complete so they have no programming language, instead they are [neural networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network) and as such they excel at pattern recognition. Altering functionality in the brain stem would require resetting some or all brainstem neuron weights.
[Answer]
Design a nanotechnological virus which infects everyone but remains dormant. The image will be just a trigger for the virus to activate and kill the host.
[Answer]
What about instant hypnosis or hypnosis in general? Either the video can trigger a behaviour or be the put the victim into a state of hypnosis. To work around the issue that the person would not commit acts that are harming himself, the command would be something that indirectly leads to death. For example simple driving deep into the desert, the command of driving itself is not what would kill him.
What else could work is an optical illusion. Think of a reversed Indiana Jones "leap of faith" bridge. From a certain angle it would look like there is a bridge. This would be location bound but would still fulfil the criteria that it directly kills the target and can't be exchanged. Either the person sees the bridge or there is no bridge to be seen. I once found an article about a road in the USA that killed people. There was a sharp turn on a cliff and another road on the opposite at aligned with the current road. The road looked just straight and people would just fall to death on it.
[Answer]
*We're not Biology SE, and I think our hypothesis has not been disproved by actual research, so let's skip the scientific "can we do it?". We're on Worldbuilding thus we can bend the universe(s) to our will!*
## Finding the image
*could be a plot itself*
**Let's start by assuming that a 2d-image capable of killing an human-being can exist.**
The question is *how to make one*, so the "certainly successful solution" is obtaining the image by using a neural-network-like research paradigm fueled by a combination of **genetic algorithm** (I meant this, not ~~brute-forcing~~) and neuro-imaging, somewhat similar to [software fuzz testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing).
1. First get some people and make them watch random white or coloured noise images. At the same time have them MRI-scanned or EEG-scanned for brain activity.
2. Start variating some pixels in the images and give weight to those that show an increased or erratic brain activity (ie. the visual cortex could be an hot-spot as [Green's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21951/how-to-make-a-2d-image-which-kills-people-who-see-it/21962#21962) says).
3. An increase of mortality and sickness among test subjects will highlight success.
4. If monitoring staff starts dying too then you're done.
5. Profit! (*Post it on imgur...*)
Some kind of distortion can be applied for safe-viewing.
Obviously this is like brute-forcing a password: you will find it, but you know it is the least efficient way.
In the end (this could take *many* years, unless heavily parallelized) you will have the killer-pic.
Maybe you will be approached by Foundation's gentlemen looking to contain your newly created memetic kill agent.
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Addendum: if you could simulate a brain or a human body at a molecular level, this would speedup the research a lot.
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Why every one says it is not possible?
Tell that all the parrents of thoose japanese kids that died by watching the Pokemon episode with all the flahsing lights (I can't describe it better as I never risked watching it^^
But it is well known that it caused many epileptic seizure by kids that were watching it and it is also known that it caused death to some of them.
So saying this is immpossible isn't true.
Maybe it is impossible to cause instant death with 100% accuraccy. But if this can even happen by accident. What if you even research in this area? I would bet the death rate would be increasable if thats the goal.
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This may be a bit far-fetched, but one possibility is an image of an optical illusion that when viewed causes an illusion so intense that the brain can't find a way to process it and begins to 'short circuit', thus enducing fatal seizures. The image could for example be a combination of every optical illusion known to man, that would be a large amount of complicated input.
I have no scientific foundation for this other than optical illusions being disorienting and the fact the brain is responsible for processing optical input.
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There are Youtube videos that build up a feeling of menace and then suddenly a horrible face appears. I won't post the actual images here but you can search for *7 Scary YouTube Screamers That Will Make You Jump* .
If the watcher had a heart condition, this could potentially kill them.
Such videos could be designed by psychologists to have an even more shocking effect and therefore cause heart attacks in healthy people. This would work even better if they were led through a dungeon-like environment on the way to see the video. The scare factor could be built up by actors saying how others had died before them. The way out would progressively be blocked to avoid retreat.
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I'm assuming that the image can be light emitting rather than simply light-reflecting.
Any normal video or picture on a computer monitor is light emitting.
The victim is instructed to look at the image. It is a very large image occupying much of a wall. The pixels are in fact lasers. To begin with their intensity is kept to a minimum. As soon as the victim is standing in the right place looking at the picture the intensity of the lasers is turned up to eleven.
Two of the lasers are directed into the eyes to blind the person. However the rest are all focused on the external carotid arteries. The blinded and disoriented person has no chance of stopping the blood flow and bleeds to death.
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I think I have a valid answer that will have a 60% or higher rate (it builds on the answer from chalsyfromUK):
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> There are Youtube videos that build up a feeling of menace and then suddenly a horrible face appears. I won't post the actual images here but you can search for 7 Scary YouTube Screamers That Will Make You Jump .
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> If the watcher had a heart condition, this could potentially kill them.
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I would just add that, if we do this **back in the early 1900's**...it would probably kill them regardless of any medical conditions. Imagine showing The Blair Witch Project, or some other modern horror movie, to people from that era. I suspect even a lot of the younger folks would die, either of heart attack or psycho-stresses soon after.
(Ironically, like you started in your OP, a lot of horror films have this theme where a person sees a video and they die from it, and a valid way to do that might be to show a horror movie too!)
The propaganda approach is also equally valid here. People like Stalin took advantage of new technology like radio and movies, of which most people had never heard/seen before, to build huge cults of personality. So you could use a propaganda movie to make the people go to war or march to the south pole, whatever.
So in your book, ask yourself what "culture" the general population has.
Then ask yourself, what about other cultures? Future cultures? Will 100 years from now have movies that could make us die today?
Alien cultures? They might be different enough in just the right way, that us today might suffer and die from watching one of **their** movies.
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Somewhat inspired by Inception, the image shows/proves that you are inside a dream/simulation causing you to escape through "death". Maybe it is the contract you signed that you agree to a temporary memory replacement and "death" being the escape route in case they cannot get you out automatically. There are some variations possible for the image, but a random image will not do. It can be on any medium with reasonable quality and be copied. Getting it to work on ~60% of the people will be hard. A quick glance will not be enough, you need some time to actually form the idea in your head.
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Barring magic, probably not. But it doesn't mean that it can't happen in reality. In a society where everyone strongly believes that magic is real and that woodoo can kill (for example most of Africa today), something that makes those who look at it believe they are cursed to death will likely lead to their death. Details of such an image depend on local magic systems, but they should be horrible enough to terrify even an unbeliever. And for those taking as granted that the magic is real, the death rate (counting death within days or weeks) can be as high as 60%.
Assuming that magic works in the world (nothing in the question said that this should can't be the case), the possibilities are unlimited, from "voodoo" slightly enhancing the mentioned effect to "explosive runes" from DnD.
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Inspired by Chasly from UK's answer, and relying on the ability to predetermine the environment:
You have a long, dimly lit hall with a deep pit covered by a lid that will fall away once sufficient weight is placed upon it, say 40kg. At the end of the hall is a metal safe door with only an illuminated green button.
You prepare your experiment with an (apparently) unrelated individual being given a large sum of money, who is talking about how ridiculously easy it was for him to win it, before showing the subject the door to the hall.
Inside the hall, you show a video clip on a screen above the safe door stating (translated into the observer's language if necessary) "Press the green button in [n] seconds in order to receive your $10,000 prize.", replacing the [n] with a number counting down from, say 5, and the monetary figure with a similarly large amount in whatever the local currency is. Since the hall is fairly long, but apparently featureless, the person would have to run in order to reach the button in time, but since the floor is booby-trapped, the person falls to their death instead if they do so.
Don't make the sum of money unbelievably large, and make the run only barely achievable in the time allocated, and it is likely you'd get a lot of people running to their deaths trying to win it.
Without the ability to manipulate the environment and use an image or video to induce the subject to perform a fatal action, there is no way that an image could cause a fatality in the majority of those who see it simply *because* they saw it, and it caused a fatal mental state. The average human mind and body is too robust a system for that to happen, you could only get a few, rare, susceptible individuals.
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Simple. The 2d image is used to send a subliminal message. The result is that the person, under the power of suggestion, makes some decision that ultimately results in their death. This can only be orchestrated by some mastermind who operates on a great degree of foresight an psychology.
Subliminal messaging has been banned in some countries.
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We are allowed to manipulate the environment.
The victim is led along a narrow walkway in semi-darkness. A scary picture appears suddenly to one side. At that point on the walkway at the opposite side there is a deep pit that is concealed in the darkness. The victim screams, steps sideways and falls into the pit. The base of the pit can contain whatever is needed for their demise.
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In my world an alien creature claims to be from an earth-like planet orbiting a 500 light-years away solar analog star. It tells us that the planet has x mass, y diameter, z orbital period, that specific atmospheric composition etc etc.
We're in the second half of 2020s so there are all of the future space telescopes (TESS, CHEOPS, JWST, PLATO and WFIRST). Obviously, we want to verify the creature's claim and we realize that we haven't discovered that planet yet.
Bearing in mind that the creature isn't lying and that we could detect that planet through the transit method (*since we need to verify the atmospheric composition - thanks Mike Scott*), would it be so unlikely to not have detected it before? If not, why?
(I can adjust the planet characteristics to make it plausible)
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A few things.
First, there are such strong biases toward finding planets very close to their stars that an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star is still a big reach. That is, only one (Kepler-452 b) has been found to date. But Kepler can't do this anymore, and radial velocity can't find a 10 cm/s amplitude signal at 1-year period. So, from that point of view, finding your planet in 10 years is doubtful just because it's hard.
Second, you way overestimate the power of the next generation of planet-finders. Of the ones you listed, only PLATO is capable of finding planets on Earth-like orbits (WFIRST maybe in certain cases but only for a statistical sample not any individual star). But PLATO 1) is, sadly, likely to end up being significantly less powerful than proposed due to budget issues, and 2) isn't scheduled to launch until 2026 at the soonest. Plus, to find a planet at 1 AU would require several years of observations so you're looking at 2030 at the earliest and then only if lots of things go right.
Third, it's actually extremely hard to detect 1-year orbital periods. This is because it's easy to introduce an artificial signal into data with certain characteristic frequencies (especially 1 day and 1 year), so astronomers are very skeptical about planets with exactly those orbital periods. So, your planet could effectively be hidden in plain sight, but have been filtered out of the data. (This is more true of the radial velocity method than the transit method but it could still happen).
Given these issues, your planet could be right next door to the Sun, even orbiting a very bright star, and we would almost certainly not find it before 2030 at the earliest.
To make your story plausible, I would push the timeline back 20+ years.
Also, just to emphasize my point, please note that I'm an astronomer who works in part on searching for extra-solar planets.
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Your simple answer is that no one has got round to checking that star yet. There are perhaps 2 million stars within 500 light years, of which about 150,000 are G-class like our sun. Corot and Kepler looked for transits on a lot of stars at once, but had fixed fields of view and couldn't scan the whole sky (and Corot couldn't have detected a planet that small). TESS will only be looking at a small number of bright stars in detail. PLATO would probably spot your planet, but isn't even scheduled to launch until 2026, and will then take several years to establish the periodicity of the transits (which will be about once a year, since it's an Earth-like planet around a G-class star).
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Another couple of possibilities:
## Obscured transit
If another object passes between us (our telescopes) and the target star system at the same time as the remote transit, that transit will be obscured. For example retrograde movement of a planet in our solar system. The sun is also a good candidate - especially if the orbital period of the target planet is similar to our year, in which case *each* transit will be obscured. Notably, the telescopes named in the questions are based around Earth, the Earth's L2 point and lunar orbits, and so will all suffer from this blind spot.
## Inclined orbit
Transits are only visible if we are in the same plane as the orbital plan of the exoplanet. The majority of exoplanets cannot be detected by their transits because of this. This can be leveraged: a transit that passes near the 'top' or 'bottom' of that star as seen from Earth would give an occlusion reduced in both duration and magnitude.
## Solar activity of the target star
If the target star happens to flare at the same time as the transit, the darkening effect of the transiting planet could be reduced or countered by the flare. The duration of a transit is similar to that of a long flare, but bear in mind that this has a markedly more recognisable pattern (see [this excellent explanation](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~avanderb/tutorial/tutorial2.html)).
A combination of these or other factors would be enough to fool an automatic detection system into failing to signal a transit, while still being able to provide collaboration of the alien's claims under scrutiny of the data.
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The simply answer - we didn't looked that way yet and/or we didn't process the data yet.
GAIA is automatically discovering 5 thousands stars a day. Then it "alert" about certain stars that match set description. Then someone need to process that star data in the more specific way.
Then we can observe that region for a longer time/ with more precision instruments. But that take time. And trust me, astrophysics have a different approach to time. If some star they were observing "change" they knew it was a looooong time ago. And 500 light-years means a long time in travel to that place so I'm not sure we would even look for habitable planets in that distance.
The most famous Ultra-Deep Field photo taken by Hubble telescope had a observation period from September to January. Five months. And it's a tiny tiny fraction of the possibly directions we could look.
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If the star has significant "proper motion" (change in a position in our sky), and corresponding change in position of our Sol in the star system's sky, so that the degree to which our line of sight matches up with the plane of the extrasolar system's ecliptic changes significantly, what doesn't transit as much now, may transit a bit more in a few years.
Take a star 500 ly away (4.73\*10^15). Say it's moving a relative 50 km/s perpendicular to our line of sight to it (transverse motion(. In 10 year it will have moved 0.00166782048 ly. So taking the inverse tangent, that's a .000191 degree change in both movement across our sky ("proper motion") and our angle of view of its ecliptic. For comparison Earth's angular diameter from the POV of Sol is about 17.5 arcseconds or 0.00486 degrees (about 109th the angular diameter of the Sun from Earth, .53 degrees). So maybe it was just on the edge of being able to be seen as transiting, a few years before, and now it's disk is crossing its parent by about 4% more of the planet's disk's diameter.
Hopefully I haven't messed up the math.
If it was closer than 500 ly or going faster, the change in angle would be greater, of course. Anything very fast would already be famous for speeding across our sky. For example, Barnard's star, a red dwarf, is zipping across our sky because it's just 6 ly away and has a transverse velocity of 90 km/s, so its proper motion is 10.3 arcseconds (0.00286 degrees) per year.
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I am presuming you are writing some form of fiction. If you want confirmation to take less than a week, here's how. It's also all in the sigmas. A 'discovery' to an accuracy of 1 or 2 sigma would be put aside until more data is collected. Just not enough accuracy to count as a discovery. But, once there is a second-signal, i.e. an alien saying 'i come from that one.', a 1 or 2 sigma accurate stream of data could be counted as a discovery. So, it could conceivably be done in a few days, if conditions were JUST right.
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In [*The War of the Worlds*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds) the Martian fighting machines are tripods. Aliens are also moving around in tripods also in [*The Tripods.*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods)
Let's assume that there are good reasons to build legged vehicles to begin with. But what would be the reason to give them exactly three legs?
**Edit:** To make it clear, my question is not just three legs versus two, but three legs versus *any* other number. Indeed, I originally had "only three" in the question, but then replaced the "only" with "exactly" before posting, remembering that two-legged would also be an option.
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I think it is because 3 contact points on a surface are the minimum to be stable and the maximum to not be statically indeterminate.
To rephrase it, I am pretty sure you have already seen a four legged table or chair which was wobbling but never seen a three legged wobbling stool. It is because you can always find a plane which contains 3 random points in a 3D space but you may not find a plane which contains 4 random points, and so your table with 4 contact points will hesitate between 2 different planes that contains 3 of its legs. This is why cars have car shock absorber and tables have screws on legs which can be extended or reduced to fit to the ground.
Furthermore, below 3 contact points it becomes hard to be stable (remember when you were in class and you tried to get the equilibrium on two legs of you chair).
However, for the movement process, if you are not rolling, you need to remove briefly at least one point of contact to move it then reiterate the process with the other legs. So you lose one point of contact. Thus, a logical idea would be "so why not 4 legs ? You can stay stable with 3 while moving the fourth". I think it is because in order to be quick you have to lose your stability. When you run (or even walk) you are constantly trying to catch the projection of your center of mass on the ground with your feet. This makes you move faster than always assuring your equilibrium (like most of biped robots do), but it is more hazardous (if something hold one of your foot back, you will fall...).
Another argument could be that it makes those alien machines more... aliens. Making them one footed would be hilarious as they are bouncing everywhere, two feet are too "human" and so, not really scary and four legs would be too "animal". There are a really few number of things on Earth that moves with 3 legs, which drives the spectator to an unknown thing and thus a more frightening thing.
Finally, aliens come from space, and to go to space to invade a planet you need tremendous machines. Two legs are not really stable (furthermore if you are not really sure about the gravity which occurs on the planet), and more than 3 would be too much weight to carry over some light-years !
So three legs are a good compromise between **stability**, **simpleness** and **lightness** (space travel is all about mass).
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> Oh and they can also abuse our trust by saying that they are here to give us our dose of [vitamin C](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zAdov.jpg)
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Well in the movie made in in 2012, the aliens were also tripods, so perhaps for the same reason that theoretical police robots are humanoid, they are based off of the creation species.
After all, three legs are better than two.
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I'd assume the creatures of the planet were three legged and trilateral.
While humans are bipedal, most common creatures of earth are bilaterally symmetrical. The 'classic' automobile has 4 wheels, much like a horse has 4 legs. While trucks have more sometimes, it's still adding on to the rear wheels more than anything else. Tanks might be an exception, but they are kind of reminiscent of sleds.
So, we'd need trilateral symmetry to inspire that sort of design. Wheels would not work too well (Unless they somehow designed something like the omniwheel). Biomimicry or even bioengineering would explain three legs. They build off what they see, as we do.
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Building a three-legged walking robot is easier than a two-legged walking robot, and more than three legs can add to the complexity (depending on the design).
[This TED talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/dennis_hong_my_seven_species_of_robot/transcript?language=en) by Dennis Hong covers some of the advantages of three-legged robots, in the first robot he describes in this talk (STriDER). Specifically:
1. If you have to use legs at all, passive dynamic locomotion is an efficient way to move (it's how humans walk), and it's easier to build a robot that uses passive dynamic locomotion on three legs than on two.
2. This robot moves by flipping its body upside down, swinging one leg between the other two legs, and catching itself. It would be awkward to swing more than one leg between the other two, so more than three would get in the way.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1NlQZ.gif)
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Three legs provide a good, stable base. A tripedal mech is harder to tip over than a bipedal one. Perhaps the aliens have [some extremely powerful weapon with high recoil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy_Cricket). A bipedal mech that fires this weapon forward will tumble backward; a tripedal (Y-shaped, with presumably 120 degrees between each leg) mech will have 1 leg in the back to support it.
Having three points of contact is also common safety procedure when operating dangerous objects (e.g. ladders), because of the stability that it provides. Perhaps the alien terrain is very mountainous and two-legged mechs are unsafe, thus leading to three-legged mechs becoming industry standard?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tfze0.jpg)
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Big walking things are not really a good solution, because it doesn't take much to trip them up. (See *The Empire Strikes Back* or *Return of the Jedi* for examples.) If your big walking things have super-awesome point defences then fair enough, but it's probably unnecessary.
Tripods are statically stable, which makes them seem like a good idea. However in order to move they have to lift one leg, and that makes them unstable. A stable walking thing will need at least 4 legs, moving only one at once. You *can* walk a tripod, but it's unstable. For a person falling a few feet, no big deal. For a 50ft killer robot, that's basically game over.
You're also limited in how fast you can travel by your leg length. There are huge stresses involved in the legs and in the joints, and pushing that much mass backwards and forwards takes a lot of energy too. The ultimate limit is the speed of sound in air, which is 340m/s. You can only move one leg at once, so movement of the whole thing is down to 80m/s for a 4-legged walking thing. That's around 180mph, which is pretty fast but still a sitting duck for military aircraft.
Mimicking the alien race is a nice idea. However we're a race of bipeds, and we're well aware that there are no practical purposes for bipedal killer robots. For all that fiction is full of the things, it's very clear that this is simple Rule of Cool and is completely impractical in reality.
Ground-based travel for general use, combined with air support from proper aircraft, is always going to be far superior to a big walking thing (regardless of the number of legs). If you want your ground-based travel to be largely immune to terrain, make it a tracked vehicle. If you want to get somewhere quick, hop in a jet.
So basically we're looking at Rule of Cool as pretty much the only reason to go there. Not just a 50ft tall war machine, but a 50ft *tripedal* war machine. With death rays. And huge killer tentacles. And they want to drink our *bluuurrddd*...
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# Versatility
We know that the aliens that are visiting are advanced, because they've crossed the stars. Therefore we know that they're engineering their vehicles using advanced technology and can find elegant solutions that aren't trivial. A key to an elegant solution is reducing it to the absolute minimum.
Given this, why do three legs work better than four? While it's been rightly noted that four legs allows the minimum three-for-stability and the fourth leg can move, humans (amongst other creatures) prove that you can balance on two legs. Indeed, you can balance on *one* leg, if your reflexive balancing systems are sensitive enough and strong enough. Taken to the extreme, you could balance on a pin - your reflexes and strength just has to be high enough.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/voO7J.jpg)
Standing in place isn't the same as moving, however, which is presumably necessary. To efficiently move at a gallop, you really only need two points of contact, but it helps to have 'pushing'. When we look at a [cheetah running](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuyeVN7PuTM), we see that the back feet are largely 'pushing' and the front are 'guiding'. If we posit we have the strength and reflexive balance at an advanced level, we only need one guiding foot, and can rely on the pushing feet for speed. A similar but reverse example of this is how [the striders in Dark Crystal move](https://johneaves.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/dark-crystal-dark-crystal-3863678-1390-1144.jpg).
But, if we assume all three feet have equal capability we get something even better than that: the ability to immediately change direction with the minimum number of limbs. If traveling in some direction, switching to a direction that is 120 degrees offset becomes trivial.
Also as noted in another post, three limbs makes climbing easy. If you've been rock climbing you have seen people using [a deadpoint technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_climbing_terms#deadpoint) that utilizes dynamic momentum to bring their hands within reach of a good hold. These sorts of techniques make climbing much more graceful and use less energy than static three-point holds while a fourth limb is moving. Assuming the tripod is required to climb at some point, it really only needs three limbs to execute quick climbing manuevers: one 'swing point', one 'reaching point' that is about to take a hold and one 'stable point' that is about to let go once the new hold is secured.
Finally, three limbs are useful in the water. Assuming an undulating motion, similar to octopodes, any number of limbs past two would be useful. But the difficulty with only two limbs is that some degree of stabilizer is needed to maintain orientation - a fin or a third (or more) pushing appendage. Additional limbs can cause, at the least, additional drag, while their marginal utility is unclear.
Given a three dimensional space and sufficient reflexive systems and strength technology, three limbs seems like a reasonable, minimum number when the environment you're in is potentially quite variable.
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## Because it's natural for them.
Our land-dwelling forms of life are mostly directional: predators have a "front" where they look for and where they run in, they only need to put some prey in front on them. They are way less efficient in moving to other directions. Prey looks around itself (field of vision is wider) but still has 1 direction where it's most efficient to run, they only need that direction to point away from predator.
What if specialising for one direction was not a winning move? At least for prey, having field of vision of 360 would be nice. If it's movement strategy is "move to the desired direction" instead of "point your front to the desired direction and then move" then having 3-way symmetry would be pretty viable (albeit more redundancy would be better, so creatures may be 6-way symmetrical).
If species in question evolved from something omnidirectional then using tripods may feel natural for them - it provides omnidirectional movement on surface with least number of legs. (they probably have budgets too)
Now, the trick is how to make directional specialiastion not a winning move.
Maybe they're sort of starfishes? Usually they have 6 "rays" but when they "mate" each parent sheds 2 of those and they join into a new being. Then missing rays are regenerated by all 3 beings. Note that "newborn" would also have some neural parts of both parents, somewhat resembling [tines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Tines).
Maybe running is simply not their thing, their strategy relies on noticing the threat and counter-attacking immediately (venomous spikes or whatnot). Sticking with nautical theme, if visibility is very low where they live, they would have little time to react if ambushed. Thus, turning around is not an option (too slow), each "ray" is on a lookout for its part and reacts immediately for an attack.
Then they discover agriculture and space travel and sliced bread and you have your invaders rocking some tripod mechs.
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Note that in Wells' *War of the Worlds* the narrator rebukes some images of the walkers "He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect."[[1]](https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/b2c2.html) This seems to indicate that the robots have flexible legs more akin to a tentacle than what we traditionally think of as legs, which is made more likely by an earlier part of the book "... I could see, intermittently and vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash and spray of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like living arms..."[[2]](https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/b1c12.html) makes it more likely that the fighting-machines have tentacles instead of rigid legs. The Martians are also described as having at least sixteen tentacles originating around the mouth (see book 2, chapter 2). While my reading that the Martian vehicles have tentacle-like legs may be incorrect, the motion of the vehicles is still described as "...swift, complex, and perfect..." so maybe the Martians have exceptionally complex robotics by our current standards.
So at least in Wells' novel the Martians might have found a way to move easily with three tentacle-like legs instead of the four which a human might entertain as the most efficient model of a robot. That being said, gravity on mars is only about 38% of the gravity on earth, meaning that the three-legged model would work much more effectively there for both vertical movement and in making most likely long low hops along the surface of the planet. Also note that the Martians in Wells' novel have a significantly greater understanding of science and robotics than any current human could hope to have based on the size of their functioning walkers and things like the heat-gun.
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There are [thousands of species of spiders](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/spider-genes-put-new-spin-arachnids-potent-venoms-stunning-silks-and-surprising-history?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=spidergenes-15964) on Earth. Ditto insects. And, prehistorically, there have been times when there have been several, or even half a dozen species of hominins in existence on Earth at the same time. But, now, there appears to be only one species of genus *Homo* on Earth.
What circumstances could plausibly cause *Homo sapiens* to fracture into multiple species again?
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# Genetic Engineering
A computer program eventually boils down to two different characters: 1 and 0. The only thing that matters is what order they appear in. But from that alone we get **amazing tools**, like for instance Stack Exchange.
A human is, at conception, apart from a little bit of cellular aid function, four different characters — A, C, G and T — repeated 3 billion times. Again: that which makes us humans and not for instance apes or fish or amoeba, is the order in which these characters appears.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/POqad.jpg)
The interesting part is that it does not take much reordering to make us from humans into something else. Humans have over 99% genetic commonality with for instance chimpanzees. That is a mere 30 000 000 base pairs that needs reordering, and voilà... a whole new species.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0qI5.jpg)
*You have 99% genetic commonality with these fellows*
So what happens when we can do genetic engineering on ourselves? Movies like [Gattaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) have already explored this venue. Human beings **will** start fixing the most glaring errors in our genetic code, like for instance the fact that our retina is clumsily mounted backwards, our idiotic vitamin C self-sufficiency deficiency, or our completely unnecessary vulnerability to viruses and bacteria.
So how long until we have the first "patch" to our genetic code? Will everyone get it? Can everyone afford it? Will everyone **want** to get it?
And what happens when **another** company provides a better patch, that it not at all compatible with the first one?
Even worse... what happens when we find out that husband and wife cannot conceive because they were altered by two different patches?
In real life, Pandora is looking at that big box that says "Human Genetic Engineering" and goes "Hmmmm.... I wonder what's in there"...
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Planetary migration.
Think of how various races of humans developed on our world, people got cut off from one another for thousands of years, mutation and natural selection did the rest. Now imagine that instead of being isolated from each other by deserts mountains and oceans they're isolated by the vastness of space. Each one part of a completely different ecosystem. It's natural to suppose that in such an environment the human race would Branch off as various branches develop various mutations. Given enough time you would have entirely new human races develop on each planet. And if they have the technology to genetically alter themselves to fit better on the new planets then the changes can be even more extreme and happen faster.
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Just be patient. We are right on the verge of elective genetic surgery as a medically available and culturally accepted option. In the next 20 to 50 years, procedures will become available which will modify your body's base code in a variety of ways. Few will be able to resist the allure of those new options.
Social and economic pressures when mixed with these new genetic opportunities, is a guaranteed recipe for the fracturing of our species into a multitude of new and reproductively exclusive species.
Dissatisfied with a single century of life, take this drug and live for five; but once you take it, you can't breed with short-lifers any more.
Having trouble in school? This simple process will double the blood supply to your brain and greatly enhance your intelligence and memory retention. But the genetic purist will consider you a gene-junkie forever more. Scratch off dating any of their daughters if you take that route.
What budding astronaut wouldn't take a treatment which greatly reduces their body's vulnerability to radiation, even if it meant that they could only breed with other astronauts from now on.
Just sit back and watch. The age of vanilla homo sapiens is just about over. In the days to come, we may all still be human, but most of us will be human+...
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Again? Many hominins may have been able to reproduce with each other, making them, at least, subspecies. Generally while there had been a diversity of hominins *Homo sapiens* have been the one species overall. This remains an open question. The theories and evidence are contested.
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> As modern humans spread out from Africa, they encountered other hominins such as Homo neanderthalensis and the so-called Denisovans, who may have evolved from populations of Homo erectus that had left Africa around 2 million years ago. The nature of interaction between early humans and these sister species has been a long-standing source of controversy, the question being whether humans replaced these earlier species or whether they were in fact similar enough to interbreed, in which case these earlier populations may have contributed genetic material to modern humans.
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[Spiders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_spiders) evolved 380 million years ago, [humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution) between six to three. Spiders have been able to differentiate into multiple species by exploiting different ecological niches. Humans haven't had enough time or occupied habitats sufficiently different to evolve into new species. Reproductive isolation, adaptive pressures & an enormous amount of time are needed.
Open one-way portals to parallel Earths and you're in business. Isolated populations of humans on alternative versions of planet Earth. Vast tracts of real estate to occupy. New environments to inhabit. The whole business of [hominization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominization) can go down a new road.
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Typically, species tend to form when populations are isolated from breeding with each other. Unless the world becomes significantly less globalized, and remains so for millions of years, it is unlikely for humans to speciate through that route.
Pure gene therapy is unlikely to be enough. Today, most people see particular qualities as being "good" or "bad", and most genetic engineering would be focused on making people "better". This would likely result in *decreased* diversity among the human species, rather than the fragmentation you're looking for.
However, a societal reform, a change to the way we think of "individuals", *along with* gene therapy, could provide another route.
Imagine a world where every person is born into a particular job, where their entire worth is determined by how well they perform at that task. Families grow more suited for their task, and tend to produce children with others who have the same societal role. This could, theoretically, result in fragmentation, where each "breed" of human is built to their task - much like dog breeds have been historically. You could have bulky construction workers, autistic super-genius engineers, subterranean tunnel-workers with good night vision, hairless and adaptable space explorers, even cute and docile "human pets". Breeding humans who excel at and enjoy their assigned task may prove to be easier and more efficient than creating robots for the same purpose.
While it is unlikely that such a society could last long enough for true speciation to occur (even dogs, which have been bred for thousands of years, and have tremendous diversity in form, are still the same species), genetic engineering could accelerate the process. Given enough time, human society could wind up as an *ecosystem*, with each human species providing something of value to the whole.
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I'll start by quoting Darwin:
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> A second great fact which strikes us in our general review is, that
> barriers of any kind, or obstacles to free migration, are related in a
> close and important manner to the differences between the productions
> of various regions.
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—[*On the Origin of Species*](http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1861_OriginNY_F382.pdf), Chap. XI
You need barriers that limit to the minimum the breeding of two (or more) populations for enough time to allow mutations to arise that make it almost impossible to interbreed.
For current human conditions (low evolutionary pressure), it would take a lot of time… **but on other conditions, it could be less time**. Some factors that can explain an abrupt divergence:
* [**Founder effect**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect): "the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population".
* [**Convergent evolution**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution): "the independent evolution of similar features in species of different lineages". It may happen that two populations or even species found homologous structures but with different coding.
* [**Ecological niche**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_niche): "the fit of a species living under specific environmental conditions".
* [**Evolutionary pressure**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_pressure): " a quantitative description of the amount of change occurring in processes investigated by evolutionary biology".
With that, you can imagine, as an example, a cataclysm that **isolates** a small populations (then we have **founder effect**, but enough big to have a minimum diversity). The cataclysm (or the isolation circumstances) put a high **evolutionary pressure**, that prioritizes some characteristics that makes better adaptation to some **ecological niche**.
Even if the other (or others) population has similar circumstances, the chance favors different evolutionary ways, giving **convergence** at the most. But also there are chances that evolution produces two different approaches to the same problem.
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I'll add some examples:
* Humans begin to colonize Mars. There are some thousands of humans on Mars, they can produce food and some medicine, but still depends on Earth. Then, a cataclysm on Earth (maybe just a political crisis) made impossible to move things and people from one planet to the other. That would made some pressure on Mars (low resource disponibility), it would be a niche (there is no gene exchange), the high radiation (low atmosphere) would increase mutations, etc. It would be verisimilar that in some hundred years Human specie began to fracture.
* The economical class fracture intensifies. Rich people lives in the upper layers of cities, and they began to do some selective breeding and ask "pedigree" in job interviews. Poor people are exposed to low medical care, high pollution and no planned breading. In some decades the social fracture can be so bigger, than even if they can interbreed, they choose to not. Along centuries, the genetic drift could be so that they are become two different species.
* Climate change and melting of Arctic ice diminish the agricultural suitable and habitable surface. At the same time, mountains become islands (which isolates populations), some began to live on open sea and can give arise to sea adaptations (see [Waterworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld)), other people live in the top of the trees of some forest (while the bottom is under water), etc.
* Human genetic engineering is totally allowed. In some countries are State controlled, in others are controlled by private corporations. Even if they can predict the result of the new genes in the body, they can't predict interaction between other new genes (mainly because they do not know which that new genes would be, as they are design by other corporations and countries).
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# Reduced Time Between Generations
Humans don't reach sexual maturity until after puberty, which means that there is at least ~15 years between generations. This means it can take a very long time for any trait to develop.
There is [some evidence](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/early-puberty-causes-and-effects/) that puberty is occurring earlier. If the trend continues or accelerates, that could make evolutionary changes that would lead to speciation quicker.
Genetic engineering would also fall under this category, as large genetic changes could be implemented and tested for viability quickly.
# Increased [Mutation Rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate)
Either an increase in the rate of genetic mutations or a decrease in the ability to prevent mutations could increase the mutation rate.
For example, some condition (e.g., a disease/virus) that decreased human DNA repair enzymes could reduce mutation prevention and lead to a greater mutation rate.
Similarly, some event that increases global radiation could increase the frequency and severity of genetic mutations. (nuclear weapon, damaged atmosphere, change to sun resulting in more UV, etc.)
# Selective Breeding / Selection
The same process that humans have used to selectively breed plants and animals to emphasize certain traits could be applied to people. This could either by encouraging/ forcing certain people to mate or by preventing them from doing do. See [eugenics.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics)
# Isolation
Some sort of physical or virtual separation of groups would be necessary. Physical separation would likely have to involve some restriction in travel via air or water - perhaps a nuclear war, severe climate change (e.g. ice age), or massive tectonic event.
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Social/regional segregation. Split a group of humans into two separate groups.
Let's say one lives in a rural area in the arctic, the other on a big plain around the equator where there can be 100s of meters, maybe even kilometers between houses. The first group will eventually evolve to get better eyes, and eyes on the sides of their faces because those with better eyes can spot polar bears more easily and have less chance to be eaten. In the second group, more athletic people can travel more easily and more quickly between houses as a child, which makes them get easier social contact, so they become more successful and have a higher chance of reproducing. After a long enough time group 1 will become hyperaware humans with very good senses and see high with contrast, and the other will be very strong, athletic people who can run very fast.
For the second scenario, let's get 1 country full of normal people. Now, a group of tall people thinks they are superior. All the politicians are tall, and they make a law so anyone above 1,85 is considered tall, and anyone below 1,85 short. Tall people get more rights, short people less. Now if a tall person marries a short person they get the same rights as that short person. All the tall people will only marry tall people, and short will marry short people. After a while, you get very tall people, and the rule is changed. Anyone below 1,90 is short. After a while, anyone below 2m is short. Now anyone between 1,90 and 2m isn't allowed to get children. After a few thousand years, human race is split between superior giants and small weak dwarfs.
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In a retro-future version of Earth, one of the main modes of air travel is by gasoline-powered biplane (design circa 1914).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0wWo4.jpg)
I want these to land in places where in real-life Earth only helicopters would be able to land. For example in a small area on top of a skyscraper.
The proposed method is that they fly into a large wind tunnel on top of the building. This way their ground-speed can be zero whilst the airspeed remains high enough for stable flight. By using normal landing procedures, co-ordinated visually by an expert operating the wind tunnel, planes are able to land and take off vertically within the wind-tunnel and deliver and load passengers or cargo.
**Question**
Could this work in theory? What snags could prevent it from working?
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**Note**
I am aware that a wind tunnel has a large fan blocking the entrance/exit at one end. This is catered for by turning the plane through 180 degrees and reversing the direction of the fan for departure. To be clear, I don't suggest a tail-wind at any point. The plane is always flying into the wind from the fan.
**Additional information**
I envisage there being a turntable supporting the wind-tunnel. It could be powered, or may even act as a huge weathervane. This will eliminate cross-winds.
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The bush plane STOL records are your friend here.
No additional external technology or infrastructure, just carefully designed STOL light aircraft. [The current record for landing is 9ft5in (2.87m)](https://generalaviationnews.com/2019/05/16/video-a-world-record-setting-stol-landing/) and this sort of thing is a bush pilot speciality.
Your world is going to have something similar, but they're going to be the tower-top pilots specialising in landing on the flat tops of tower blocks.
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It's even more simple\* than a wind-tunnel: simply set up the runway as a steep ramp on top of the building. The aircraft land into the wind, and the uphill nature of the runway will rapidly kill speed. Then when taking off, doing so downhill into the wind will allow a rapid gain in speed.
So, ideally a landing building would have a runway like a hat, a truncated cone, that could be approached from directly upwind from any direction, or alternatively a swivelling ramp that can be rotated to point in the required direction. The runway surface and structure should be a metal gridwork to allow wind to pass through it, otherwise the runway hat could cause disconcerting turbulence and loss of lift right before landing.
In the event of a missed landing, the pilot could go around or touch and go, where a wind tunnel would have a fan that would make that error fatal and costly.
\*However, I can see that these rooftop landings would be dangerous and unpopular with experienced pilots and building owners. A landing that is missed low could result in plane-in-building syndrome, and while C1914 aircraft were light and flimsy compared with modern aircraft, some also had low-speed handling problems that would not have the advantage of ground effect to offset in such situations. Engine failure on takeoff would result in planes falling onto the streets, with likely fatalities amongst bystanders, plus disruption to road traffic.
So, while it is certainly *possible*, I would anticipate that it would not be something that a newly licensed pilot might attempt, but may require additional post-license training and certification, and be limited to certified models of aircraft. Of course, with sufficient demand, new pilot licensing may require rooftop landing skills.
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**Too complicated**
If something goes wrong, it would be difficult to abort. Just imagine a plane trying to land and the fan breaking.
The pilot also then needs to watch two walls and a roof as well as the ground so a crosswind while trying to enter the wind tunnel could be quite catastrophic.
Easiest solution is a landing cable like what is used on aircraft carriers.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nzu0G.jpg)
see [How planes land on aircraft carriers](https://interestingengineering.com/how-planes-land-on-aircraft-carriers-short-runways)
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[Ан-2](https://i.stack.imgur.com/spjs8.png) airplane is known to be specially designed to be able to land in "helicopter way", i.e. in controlled [stalling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_(fluid_dynamics)). In this mode it flyes at speed about 60-70km/h and need only 60-100m to stop. And since it is have a size of a bus (it is the largest comercial biplane) smaller version can have even better numbers.
This quite a harsh landing, BUT! You may point your fan **up** to reduce plain's stalling vertical speed - you would need wind of only about 5-10 m/s - enough to upskirt, but in other ways quite comfortable - people can walk during operation. And even this fan fails it would only lead to harder landing and couple of lost teeth, but not deaths.
Such a fan can also assist (or at least not interfere with) takeoff operations. An-2 needs 100-150m for takeoff (if you are not into "diving" takeoffs).
So combination of "contolled stalling" aicrafts (very bi-,tri-plane) and upward fans blowing through floor gratings is plausable (but totaly unpractical and risky)
UPD:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/spjs8.png)
Below is a video of an Antonov AN 2 taking off in about 30m and then flying ridiculously slowly!
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> Antonov AN 2 Tisted 2011 Short Take Off, Slow flight
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> <https://youtu.be/A3tpV9vUTPo>
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Take a look at "parasite aircraft" on Wikipedia, there have been real world attempts to allow larger aircraft to capture and then launch smaller aircraft. Since the skyscrapers aren't aircraft (see, there's your problem), you might use a ring mechanism above the roof that would spin a tether ending in a loop that the aircraft would catch with a hook mounted on top of its wing. The ring mechanism would also be a crane that would pick up aircraft from storage and then spin the aircraft up to takeoff speed.
Either that or have multiple cantilever arms extending from the building that would catch aircraft, slow them down safely, turn them around when needed and then accelerate them off to takeoff.
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The [AN2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2) biplane (produced until 2001) can fly extremely slowly without stalling (50km/h is quoted, but so is "no stall speed"). Unlike the WWI-era planes suggested in other answers, it has a useful payload of 12 passengers, so provides a good model. I'd ditch the fans have a *rotating* (to face into the wind) deck modelled on an aircraft carrier. Arrester hooks would be a better idea for dumping speed than an uphill landing, though the latter could be used.
Take-off may be exciting despite the short [take-off roll](http://www.an2flyers.org/an2specs.html) of 560ft , though a carrier-style ski-jump would work. From an isolated skyscraper, taking off downhill into the wind is another option, using the height to gain speed.
At ground level the Empire State building is apparently 423ft long, so vertical sides on that scale gets you very close already to the take-off roll. Landing requires more length at nominal speeds, but we can use the minimal stall speed to our advantage even without arresters.
Show-off pilots could come in low, gaining height and losing a lot of speed on approach, and stall just over the deck, to land rather like a bird on a branch (though not one that relies on flapping on landing). Recovery from a miss would be unlikely even if there wasn't a building next to you.
You also need to consider what to do with the planes once they've landed - probably an elevator to an indoor hangar (again like a carrier) or the few planes you can store on top will be blown off in the first gale.
Something very similar [has been done](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-brmk1ua1g) in 2023 using a modified Piper Super Cub landing on the helipad of the Burj al Arab. This was without payload or passengers, but in a plane with far higher stall speed than the AN-2. Takeoff, even modified to decrease weight and increase acceleration, involved losing a lot of height to gain speed.
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### Plausible - if your fans are top notch
A [Sopwith Camel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_Camel#Flight_characteristics) (circa 1916) can land at 42 knots. This is 77km/hr. Not that fast. A horizontal wind tunnel can be used to create a 45 knot wind. Lift is proportional to forward airspeed, it can land vertically (from the point of view of an observer on the ground).
Any imperfections in the airflow would be a problem. The airflow needs to go a considerable distance from the tower - as the plane needs to shed inertia without stalling. A minor crosswind would be a problem. Any loss in visibility and it'd be real dangerous. You'd want to combine this with WW2-era radio guided landing for night or bad weather operations.
You'd need to be careful where you suck the air *from*, if your fans are at one side of the building and pull air around the building you'll create dangerous vortices just in front of the building. You'll want a few meters of manifolds to ensure this doesn't happen. You need a long, horizontal, smooth, air stream.
Don't turn the fan around for departure. Taking off into a head wind is much safer than taking off into a tail wind. Put the wheels in a small pit, turn the plane engine on, and "take off" with the head wind (eg - "fly" towards the fan), increase air speed to stay above stall speed, but below the wind speed, you'll be able to climb up, then slightly reduce speed, to get backwards ground speed, get clear of the building, then go max power and climb over the airport.
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An additional problem would happen at takeoff.
First, you will need the plane to accelerate to great speed in a very short runway.
Using the fan could be... complicated.
* If it throws air in your direction your plane accelerates *but losses lift*.
* If it throws air in the opposite direction your plane will be slowed but it will gain lift quickly (your plane moves fast relative to the surrounding air, even if the plane is not moving fast), but once you leave that gust of air (for example your plane leaves the tunnel) then you suddenly are in a slow moving airplane with little lift (the positive part is that it will accelerate as it spint out of control until it reaches the ground).
You could use a catalput as in air carrier, but that adds a lot of complexity and cost.
And the analogy of the air carrier is not perfect, either. **Air carriers do move**, and that movement reduces the relative speed between the air carrier and the plane, while keeping a higher airspeed of the plane. Buildings do not move.
The second problem is that, when exiting the tunnel, your plane will find itself very suddenly with different wind patterns. The pilot may find himself facing a strong lateral wind, with little time to adjust the controls to account for it and little speed and height to solve any situation. In fact some years ago something similar happened in Spain, [a helicopter that was trying to take-off from a bull ring got a strong lateral wind when it cleared the height of the walls and crashed](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4489678.stm).
You would need **very** good reasons to put such a system of place, because it will never be either easy nor safe when compared to a conventional airport. And if you go with it, probably having your planes land on the roof(with arrestor cables and catapults) would be way better than in a tunnel.
Another issue could be structural. A building will probably have no problem supporting some hundreds or even a few thousands of kilograms of parked airplane, but resisting the stress when those airplanes bump into the ground (sometimes a bit too hard) may require to reinforce considerably all of the building structure.
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To add to the STOL - ish options, there's always the [Pogo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_XFY_Pogo) approach. VTOL is possible; you might want to 'redesign' this aircraft to accommodate more people, with rotating seats, maybe more engines mounted off the main tube, etc.
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Imagine a planet whose surface is perfectly spherical, without any kind of obstacles anywhere. In such a world, it would be a competitive advantage for any lifeform to evolve wheels, as transport and logistics would be greatly increased. It could also be used secondarily as a dynamo that could generate energy. The possibilities are endless.
**Is it possible for life to evolve wheels in such a situation?**
EDIT: there can of course be lakes/seas on the surface of the planet. The *solid surface* however, is completely level.
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There are reasons such a smooth world is unlikely (erosion, no tectonic activity, etc.). However, you can replace "the whole world" by "a sufficiently large part of the world" and the question remains basically the same.
Note: from there the answer assumes that evolving wheels excludes the presence of legs. Having both, or a mixture of the two, is not taken in account.
Anyway, a big problem remains for evolving wheels: vegetation. Vegetation creates obstacles, wheels can be stuck in bushes, etc. Even in the case of small plants (e.g. grass) you have got problems, since plants need and create humus, and wet humus becomes mud. And wheels are very inefficient in mud.
In the case of hard and smooth ground without vegetation (it is unlikely that animals could survive there, but animals can survive in deserts, so why not?), a problem still remains: when it rains, the ground becomes slippery, and if it snows... you are stuck.
But still, if it hardly ever rains and never snows, the ground is smooth, the ground is hard, can animals evolve wheels?
Not really. Because wheels are efficient for gaining high velocity, however, when it comes to abruptly changing your direction legs clearly win. With legs you can easily escape a wheeled predator - just jump out of his trajectory.
Perhaps wheeled herbivores then? But they need vegetation. Wheeled animals eating flying insects by keeping their mouths open (pretty much like a swallow does)? Insects will promptly evolve to fly a little bit higher.
I really cannot figure out how a wheeled animal could be viable.
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## Sure it is possible.
On earth for example there are several animals that roll up for protection. In case there are circumstances where rolling up to move increases survival chances I predict you will get an **Insectus Rollatus** sooner or later.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pFjjK.jpg)
It will likely use this feature to flee predators on exposed, flat surfaces in between safe havens or just plain downhill. Or to follow the wind across great expanses for yearly migrations.
Note: The image is Escher's Curl-up or "Pedalternorotandomovens centroculatus articulosus".
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Why add the requirement of there being no obstacles?
The Namibian Wheel spider will [turn itself into a wheel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4odlo0Afjs) and cartwheel down dunes! Evolution strikes again!
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Active wheel is possible. Schematically,
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wgKtt.png)
a massive body (blue) is connected to a bony wheel (brown) by muscles (red) which contract and relax in concert to keep the body suspended in a fixed position relative to the center of the wheel. No axles, no gears. The body rotates as well as the wheel. And no, it is not a perpetuum mobile.
A similar design with two wheels is also possible. Two wheels, besides providing better maneuverability, let the body protrude far beyond the wheel outline, achieving better acceleration. I would love to draw it, but... you know.
I have no idea how such creature could evolve. From tortoises perhaps? Or [Ganzer eggs](http://www.sciencefictionmuseum.com/stories/reviews/snop001.html)?
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Two immediate problems with evolving wheels in place of legs/arms;
1. From a bio-mechanical point of view, providing continuous power to a wheel is more complicated than the equivalent muscle and joint arrangement used in most limbs. To move efficiently, there would need to be some form of gearing system and, probably, the equivalent of a freewheel mechanism.
2. It's difficult to grasp anything with a wheel so the creatures would need to evolve other forms of limb in addition to the wheels.
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Wheels would be an evolutionary advantage on any planet with a large flat expanse (even mars will do). The issue with the evolution of wheel is less to do with whether it would be useful as much as biological support and intermediate evolutionary steps.
1) You cannot easily provide blood flow to a wheel from the main body. Any vessels would be twisted and any complex mechanism to avoid this would be subject to shear or friction. This is highly unlikely to evolve. The wheel would have to either be a tool (such as one fashioned by the animal) or a non-living growth like hair or a nail.
2) Simple Darwinistic evolution does not make large jumps. Of course there are places where it looks like it has in earths history but, hey, sometimes reality is stranger (believable) fiction (wow 2 cliches in 2 sentences). A freely rotating wheel (whether it is a nail or tool) would have to have a similar useful structure that evolved first. If it is a tool, it is easy for it to be arms/hands holding onto a fashioned axle through the freely rotating wheel. The only reason I can imagine a nail growing that big is to be a bludgen. Such a weapon would not need to rotate. This means someone more creative than me would be needed to proceed with that direction.
What I am left with, therefore, is simular to the strategy used in the **Amber Spyglass** (the third book in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy which starts with the more famous "Northern Lights" or "Golden Compass"). A species evolves with a tendral to crack into large rounds seed pods. They eventually find the they can place this evolved axle through the seed pod and use it to roll. They use these on the large expansive cooled lava flows with cover the large plains. This creature is used as an example that in an infinite number of parellel universes almost anything can evolve. It lampshades the fact that logically, this should never occur but explains how it does.
If I were writing this, an artifical axle is far more likely as the tendral would be exposed to extreme amounts of friction whether lubricated or not.
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Actually if there wasn't any obstacles, sails would be much more likely. Using wind to travel over land. Why walk or roll, which both cost energy, when you can catch a breeze and glide/slide/float along the ground?
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How about instead of asking if wheels **would** evolve, we think about what kind of conditions a world would need to have to encourage such evolution.
As has been discussed in other answers, wheels aren't particularly efficient for small, variable motions. They'd get stuck in any plant life, and plant life is likely to be a major draw for animals to evolve onto land. So it's unlikely that we'll have a creature that relies totally on wheels for moving around.
So what else could give wheeled creatures an advantage? Perhaps migration is important, and some regular geological event means that animals need to migrate *quickly*. A couple of wheels together with some way for the animal to push itself around could help it move efficiently over long distances.
But if animals have to travel far, would flight evolve first? Maybe the winds on the planet are incredibly strong and volatile (so animals would keep lower to the ground), or maybe gravity is significantly stronger.
However, as others have mentioned and as discussed [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_systems), it would be unlikely for a partial mutation that could eventually lead to wheels to provide enough of an advantage to make the mutation stick around.
What might be more likely is that certain creatures have evolved wheels as a tool, rather than a body part. It could be a symbiosis between certain rolling creatures and other creatures which provide an advantage.
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Looking to what already exists to help with this, you are wanting a larger version of a [bacterial prokaryote flagellum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum). This is a motor composed of a specific collection of proteins to make a rotary drive. This then spins the "tail" which makes a corkscrew shape, propelling the bacteria threw liquid.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dDV7N.png)
Assuming you permit this system to scale up a bit, and the motor is replicated to each side of the creature, I think you could make a crustacean of some kind to use it. The chain-whip appendages attached to the motors would then form a single spoke spiral wheel shape when running, or just lay limp on the ground when still. The crustacean would need a skid plate, I think, so it can propel and steer with only two motors. It then needs very articulate mandibles to collect food while sitting, since these chain wheels would be useless in manipulating things. Make it a scavenger, like other crabs, and I think it is viable enough for a story. Perhaps the chain whip drive can be used for defense also.
The point of a wheel and axle as humans use it is to overcome friction. This makes moving heavy loads far easier, but for the longest time we just used wheels for support and provided the drive by other means. Push cart, horse and cart, slave labor pushing and pulling the pyramid stones on top of logs, etc. If that is what you are thinking, I cant do any better than Kolaru's answer, because I don't think this would come about anywhere:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/R8JTI.png)
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Possible but not likely. Wheels get stuck in mud, wet sand, have problems getting around vegetation, and don't work that well on ice. Wheels make it harder to hide. If it's icy, you will get eaten or starve to death. It just doesn't make much sense.
[Answer]
Somebody thinks so. Here is an image of a Polarian, from Piers Anthony's "Cluster" series, as imagined by Wayne Barlowe in his book ["Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlowe%27s_Guide_to_Extraterrestrials)
I don't know if you would count a sphere/ball as a "wheel", but clearly rolling is the method of locomotion here.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yKDbA.jpg)
[Answer]
Technically, life on Earth has evolved wheels a few times already. The best known example is ATP-synthase, which is a full blown engine and very successful - as far as I know, all modern Earthly life has it. It's using a proton gradient to produce rotational movement - of course, it would be far from trivial to scale it up to a macroscopic engine, but it shows that it *is* possible. It indirectly powers your muscles as well, so "raw power" wouldn't be an issue.
How could something like this be used for a macroscopic movement system? Well, the one we have works quite well - a lot of individual strings of muscles are moved to produce macroscopically-useful amounts of force; however, that's a lot easier to do for linear force than for rotational. It's not exactly simple to build a system where a single wheel would be powered by millions of tiny engines working in unison - likely far from the tolerancies and capabilities of biological evolution. A much more likely solution would be to use the same muscles and systems we have, but allowing for rolling the whole body - like Star Wars Droidekas. And indeed, there *are* animals on Earth that use this form of locomotion - the best known probably being Armadillos and Echidnae.
The major advantage of this system (beyond its relative simplicity) is that you have two forms of locomotion available. Especially on a "flat" world, other animals and plants would tend to favour ways to interrupt the rolling locomotion - say, a forest could have boundaries that simply cannot be crossed while rolling. It's also important to note that rolling is kind of hard to control - it's hard to observe your surroundings and adjust bearings, or even just stop.
[Answer]
**No**
A world without obstacles would be very windy. This would cause early life to be blown back into the sea unless it was able to grip the floor firmly.
Also most legs evolved while we were still underwater where they could also be used as flippers.
[Answer]
Phillip Pullman's series *His Dark Materials* featured an elephant like creature that had evolved, not wheels, but for and aft tusks that locked into a wheel shaped nuts. The world on which they lived the lava flowed heavy with some sort of silicate leaving hundred mile long smooth veins through the world. I think it's a clever adaptation and one that we would likely see. If there's a niche life, at least life on earth, will exploit it. In any case the books are worth checking out.
[Answer]
In a small way, this has already occurred in the real world(or atleast there are traces if it being highly probable).
We have the [Wheel Spider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_spider) found in the Namib Desert of Southern Africa.
As per wikipedia
>
> The spider escapes parasitic pompilid wasps by flipping onto its side
> and cartwheeling down sand dunes at speeds of up to 44 turns per
> second.
>
>
>
So answering the question, I think it's highly possible.
] |
[Question]
[
One day, a portal, several hundred meters across, appears without warning above the Atlantic, roughly around the Bermuda triangle region. It hovers in mid air, immobile, 200 meters above the surface of the water. Space in and around it is distorted in such a way that makes it hard to directly see the other side without going through the portal, but by sending drones and eventually aircraft, it is quickly established that on the other side is one ocean of an alien planet. It's similar to Earth and has humans living on it, whose civilization is a few centuries ahead of our own in terms of technology.
Contact is established rapidly and linguists from both sides are sent to learn to talk to each other. Within weeks, the other side constructs infrastructure around the portal that can be used to transfer even the largest Earth ships through. They are clearly much more technologically advanced - this would be a megaproject for us, but it's not a big deal for them. They are generally peaceful, more so than us - while they have enough firepower that any Earth nation would be hopelessly outmatched (imagine modern Earth in contact with medieval Europe), they would for the most part prefer to trade with, learn from, and coexist with Earth. They will avoid transferring technologies that might be used for war, though. (Of course, not everyone might have such scruples.)
The question is: how exactly might trade work?
For the sake of the story, I want contact to be an extremely disrupting event for Earth humanity. On paper, their economy dwarfs that of the Earth. A back of the envelope calculation I did says it would be about 10 to 100 thousand times larger.
Therefore, in theory, they would have no problem making investments that would seem absurdly large by our standards. For example, the equivalent of a trillion dollars is not something that their governments would find all that expensive, generally. Of course, they don't *have* a trillion dollars: they have their own currency, and therein lies the problem. How do you buy things on Earth with alien money? How soon might people start to accept it? How would that process work? I imagine exchanges would be set up eventually, or they might trade some of their advanced technology for dollars or yuans, but it seems... hard to sell a trillion dollar's worth of stuff, no matter how fancy, for example.
[Answer]
**As quickly as trades can be made.**
The aliens want to buy a block of Manhattan. The owners of that block would like, oh, a couple billion dollars or whatever.
How can the aliens get a couple billion dollars? By providing goods and services, wherever they can see a need. Maybe they go up to Elon Musk and tell him they will gladly give him the design for a battery that has 50x the capacity of his best batteries, plus a few prototypes, and he gets full rights to produce and sell them on earth, and they'll do it all for $4 billion. Really I have no idea if that's a good trade but Elon Musk could come up with that kind of cash if he thought it was, and then the aliens can buy their block of Manhattan.
So getting cash is just a question of finding something humans want, and doing some quick exchanges.
**I expect alien cash exchanges to take more time.** The aliens could offer to buy that block of Manhattan for 23 million Xeptos, which, really, is quite a lot of Xeptos. You could buy a small moon with that. But the question will be "what good does that do me", i.e., what's my access to Alien Amazon and Alien Toyota or whatever? I don't want to be stuck in a "[company store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store)" type situation where the aliens give me money that I can only exchange for goods with those exact aliens. But if I can casually take the alien portal to the universe then those Xeptos might look even more attractive than dollars.
**The ways in which this can ruin our economy are plentiful.** We have pretty well ruined the ability for Africa to ever have a thriving textile industry because we "donate" so many clothes and it just floods their market with mass produced goods that they can't compete with. Imagine if aliens could sell you a laptop that was thousands of times more powerful than anything you could buy on earth, and they'd sell it for about $10. The whole earth hardware industry would be destroyed. Possibly all our industries could be destroyed by an alien economy that is largely [post-scarcity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy). It would be the car replacing the horse, except across the whole of society.
I wouldn't underestimate human ingenuity to bring things back in line (or make a real effort with the aliens at the start to avoid this kind of flooding) but in the near term there is plenty of room for this to wreck us. ("Ha ha, no, we will not limit access in any way. Also, here's a machine where if you push a button, you get a day's worth of food. It also reads minds to figure out what you want. We're already teleporting them into everyone's homes right now. You're welcome!" And so the human farm and food packing industries are put out of business overnight.)
[Answer]
The question can be rephrased:
**How do you create an exchange rate with gods?**
You can't.
You're at the level of a parent trading with a toddler. The toddler has nothing to trade *with*. The parent might give the kid some candy for a macaroni picture, sure, but that's *charity*, not true *trade*.
Picture the scene.
Aliens land, check our prices for land and resources.
They give us ten metric tons of rhodium beads, and ask for Manhattan.
And we give it to them. Everyone who lived there is now very, very rich indeed, but with the cold sense that "rich" no longer means ANYTHING.
You see the problem:
* If they don't maintain artificial scarcity, nothing they offer us has any value: the value of any good tends to zero as supply grows infinite.
* If they maintain scarcity, they can buy everything we have for beads.
* We get positive or negative inflation depending whether they spend it locally or not.
* They're rich enough to buy the whole planet and everything and everyone on it multiple times over, so they get to decide how it plays out. Either:
1. they quickly own everything, we're left enslaved with a pile of worthless beads, or
2. we trade them macaroni pictures for candy.
Assuming they can immediately provide large amounts of priceless stuff, they're immediately able to trade on any market as soon as they land. Rich people will loan them however much macaroni art as they need, happily trading on the futures of what amazing beads they might suddenly poop out.
[Answer]
## Most Countries Accept US Dollars, Because Stuff They Want Can Be Bought With Them
We have a real-life equivalent to your scenario, with a country whose economy dwarfs many others, and which possesses a sizeable military and proprietary weapons tech that would discourage attempts at conquering them.
Their currency is accepted in many places, because stuff you want to buy, even stuff that country isn't personally selling, can be purchased using their currency. Plus (until recently, maybe), their country has generally been better than most about not overinflating that currency.
If your other-side-of-the-portal people have a currency that permits you to buy even better stuff, and which promises a more stable repository for value, it won't be long before this-side-of-the-portal folks will be clamoring for the new currency.
(Unless people begin to wonder what happens with that new money if the portal snaps shut again...)
In the meantime, there's always gold.
[Answer]
They trade the way trade existed before money (or when a country is not connected to the international monetary system) - give me X of that and I will give you Y of this.
So, the real question here is "what on earth would these aliens want that they will give something for?" Here you get to decide the values of those aliens.
In human societies, people pay extra for unique and exotic items. Thus, the art piece that was shredded in the middle of the auction is worth a bunch because of its uniqueness. Is that a value to those aliens? Or will there be chemicals produced by some organism on earth that gives them pleasure and they will give what we value in exchange? (See how the East India Company provided opium to China to trade for tea.)
[Answer]
(Questions in title and body are contradictory, so I will only answer the title question; I lack reputation to comment)
**It can be fairly quickly**
The aliens don't need to actually sell anything. They can just send a representative to any major bank carrying a cubic meter of gold, ask for a 1 billion dollar loan with the gold as collateral, and start spending as soon as the loan is granted. If they want still more Earth money, they can go to a different bank with a cubic meter of platinum, then another bank with a tanker truck full of printer ink, and so on.
So in principle, they can start making major financial transactions as soon as they understand enough Earth language to enter into contracts, as soon as they find a lender that is willing and able (politics permitting), and as soon as the lender can ascertain the value of what the aliens put down as collateral.
[Answer]
# The government sell useful trinkets that won't reveal much to the natives.
There are many medieval societies out there. We mostly trade simple trinkets like fire starters, guns, cheap vehicles to such people, and in return they have a bit of cash and they sell interesting cultural curiosity.
The advanced government would probably ask for some large amount of cash from the local government in return for a few simple and easy to make trinkets, like nanites that would repair someone to peak condition and cure all diseases.
# The government sells cash to any tourists
Nanites that make someone immortal might cost five or ten dollars of local advanced tech money, but they might be worth hundreds of millions of dollars on earth. The government can use that money and sell it to local tourists, with them promising to not sell their more advanced tech to the locals. The advanced civilization tourists can each get a couple million dollars in cash for spending.
[Answer]
If you want it to be disrupting, they give some people something, something that is much like glass beads and trinkets, very desirable in the context, but completely useless in practical sense: fancy entertainment, boost to self image, anything like that.
In return they get to own things whose ownership matters in the long run: land, shares, political influence etc.
If they do this at any point, they will be aiming at it as soon as possible. Breaking language barriers would be needed first, so that the immaterial things could be negotiated effectively.
[Answer]
### The limiting factor is likely reliable two-way communication.
Assuming we have anything the aliens want, they (not us) will be begin negotiations with parties of their (not our) choosing as soon as they can establish *rudimentary* communication.
The chosen party(s) will be have the resources to procure whatever they need: it could be a government, a wealthy individual, or a corporation. The party will then be able to act as their proxy as soon as an understanding is reached, regardless of any recognized legal standing. For this reason, I'd expect an individual or corporation over a government, for the ability and willingness to act on direct behalf of the aliens with fewer strings and less oversight.
These negotiations can be begin as soon as we have basic communication, and a *limited* early consensus wouldn't take long while finer details on a larger arrangement are hammered out as linguistic ability improves. They can also be based on *expected* — rather than immediate — benefit from the aliens to the human party: someone willing to take a risk in exchange for a high *potential* payout.
With the scenario described in the question, I'd expect several large multinational corporations to form "Alien Relations" divisions fairly quickly, with the explicit goal of securing alien investment. They have the earth-based resources to do what the aliens want, and the ability to process useful things the aliens could provide in exchange, such as raw ores.
In fact, if you want disruption, this event could possibly just about shut down mining operations on Earth as we know them, as ore is a likely initial exchange medium and the aliens could provide it on much better terms than any mining operation. Clean energy would be one of the next items up, though it will take a little longer to adapt their production abilities for our consumption patterns.
That puts a lot of people out of work. Fortunately, the aliens are still acting through Earth corporations, and these corporations need to staff whole new divisions. Like similar events in history (industrial revolution), it's an upheaval creating transitory hard times for many individuals, but a significant net win for society.
[Answer]
Them being so much more technologically advanced could possibly make this very easy for them. They could probably just make money out of thin air. And I don't mean it physically. In today's society most money is digital. They could probably hack in our bank systems or fool our bank systems into thinking they are receiving genuine money. They could forge digital bank transactions in such a way that it can't be distinguished from real transactions by us. And in turn, this of course will ruin our economy. All digital transactions will be worthless because there is no way anymore to properly validate the transactions.
[Answer]
Obviously it's hard to say just how much more advanced the other humans' technology is. But if we suppose that the portal was opened *intentionally* by them, and enough of them *knew* that the portal was going to be opened, I think the answer to this question is on the order of a few minutes.
The thing is, large financial transactions on present day Earth are all electronic. Nobody spends $4 billion in cash; big trades like that happen on stock exchanges, using computers and networks. And electronic stock exchanges are a big opportunity to make money if you have better technology than the other traders. Contemporary traders spend huge amounts of money purely on building fast computers and putting them as close as possible to the exchanges, and they spend even more money on developing smart algorithms that can make profits by trading. [High-frequency trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading) is profitable, but it's *much* more profitable if you're ahead of the competition.
So imagine you have 24th century technology, and you know in advance that you're about to get an opportunity to trade on 21st century stock exchanges. You probably have your tech stack set up already before the portal is opened, ready to scan the airwaves for radio signals or any other form of wireless communication where you can identify where the sender and recipient are and how they communicate. The 21st century encryption on the packets is trivial for a post-quantum world's technology to break.
Once you can talk to networked devices, you find an online trading platform. The time it takes to create a user account on this platform is the bottleneck, since you probably have to provide some sort of proof of identity, and it takes a few minutes for the broker to check it. But you have all of your credentials ready to go, because you found ID documents and photos of real 21st century people from the [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/) and you don't mind doing a little identity theft (just to get started). Once you have a [margin account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_(finance)#Margin_account) approved, you can borrow money and start making trades. Seconds later, your 24th century algorithms have made you rich.
[Answer]
It maybe makes sense to assume that gate operation depends on earth willingness to operate it - as in - there probably should be mechanisms to inspect whois approaching and shut the gates off. This gives a more balanced situation as this way earth even being technologically inferior would be able to fend of incoming invasion. This enforces to some extent that interchange benefits both sides.
They cannot transfer dollars unless they have a bank account that they manage on earth that holds those dollars.
Thus they need to open an account. This is fairly straight forward process. Even if they do not have legal right they can find someone who would be willing to cover for them likely easily as they have enough knowledge that they can potentially sell.
It's important that they can established encrypted communication channel with their representatives. Ideally also another encrypted communication channel with another party who will monitor the representatives. Of course earth governments will need to agree that gates allow encrypted communication channels.
Legal aspects are important. Ideally when you start dealing transactions you want to be sure that legal laws won't screw you up and won't close your account. While it is easy to open unofficial bank account authorities may decide to close it and freeze the money if they decide that such activity is illegal.
Once account is up and running they need to get income somehow. Establishing business that operate on profit thanks to superior knowledge is one way. Selling knowledge another. They may not be keen to just give away knowledge so easily and instead they may be interested in schemes where they design something based on requirements - for instance 10% better computer chip - without exposing the process.
When alliens transferring money, what are they paying for exactly? What do they need from earth? Assuming they are technologically more advanced. Running unethical experiments on earth? For that kind of things they may want to stay in low profile and unknown possibly establishing encrypted communication with more nefarious players on earth who in exchange for profit will be willing to run unethical experiments - players like North Korea come to mind. In such situation they may be less interested in money transfers as transferring big money makes you needing to stay on legal side of things. Instead they may chose to collaborate with nefarious players based on trade - nefarious players run experiments for them - in exchange gain knowledge that is profitable on earth.
Even if aliens are highly ethical beings and have highly functional government of their own it is likely that they too have less ethical individuals or organizations who might run shady unethical deals in undercover.
[Answer]
**The basis of trade is that each side has stuff the other does not.**
So... drugs. Movies. Music. Books. That is, things we would have or varieties of things we would have that they do not.
I am curious, though: how are you going to trade with us for knowledge?
] |
[Question]
[
[The universe is in a long, slow decline to darkness](http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/08/universe-long-slow-decline-darkness?utm_campaign=email-news-latest&utm_src=email)
Sorry folks but it's true, read the article! Here's a much edited-down version:
>
> The universe is cooling down, its stars pumping out about half as much
> energy as they did 2 billion years ago. From the birth of the
> first stars, nuclear fusion in their cores has been converting
> matter into energy—the energy that makes stars shine. But stars don’t
> shine forever; eventually they run out of fuel and die. Astronomers
> don’t know when the universe’s energy output peaked, but, according to
> the [GAMA project](http://www.gama-survey.org/), we’re well past that point now. Energy output from nearby space is dropping across all of 21 different wavelengths, from ultraviolet to far infrared. The GAMA team says the universe is well advanced on a long, slow decline toward a cold, dark future.
>
>
>
In other words, the stars are going out!
**My question**
Using either your imagination and soft-science or actual hard-science, can you suggest ways that the human race and/or other sentient life-forms could stop this eventual decline.
Specifically I'm trying to come up with a consensus of the sort of thing we could do to prevent it. No magic but even wild suggestions will be of interest if they make sense.
**Narrowing it down**
So that it's not just a free-for-all, here's what I'm looking for:
In the far distant future, the human race still exists in some form. I don't know whether we've evolved. I don't know what amazing science we can do. Also there may be other life-forms involved in the endeavour with us or independently.
Here's the crux:
***Is it possible in principle that we can stop the extinguishing of the stars and the decline of the universe? Or is it completely impossible? Is there some way we can escape our fate?***
Bear in mind that the universe may be infinite and that we can probably only affect a portion of it.
Also bear in mind that other alien races may be trying to do the same thing even if we cannot communicate with them.
Finally throughout history, well-known and knowledgeable people have repeatedly said that something is impossible only to be proved wrong - often in their own lifetime.
SOS! Help us to survive!
[Answer]
# It's impossible to stop it.
There is nothing known in science that we can use to stop the [heat death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe) of the universe. There are no workarounds to avoiding the [second law of thermodynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics).
Many people have said it's impossible to violate the second law of thermodynamics (no free energy and no perpetual motion machines) and none of them were proved wrong in their lifetime.
---
Note:
The question states that I can use "actual hard-science" to answer the question "Is it possible in principle that we can stop the decline of the universe?". The answer, from actual hard science, is **no**. Other answers can fantasize with some magic or other non-science, and that's perfectly fine, but this answer is based on what we currently know. Willy-Wonka was not a scientist, science is not "whatever you can imagine with sparkles", **science is about finding out what the evidence we have tells us about the universe**. What *all* the evidence tells us is that we can not get free energy and that we can not avoid the second law of thermodynamics.
[Answer]
I think the second law of thermodynamics places too much emphasis on our universe existing as an isolated system.
We've constantly pushed boundaries to find that there is another layer to unravel; The word for "atom" is derived from the Greek "atomos" meaning indivisible; but then we found protons, neutrons, and electrons (and eventually quarks). In the same sense we continue to gain a better understanding of the vastness of the universe. We started off thinking we were a unique planet, then we turned out to be just one of many planets around our Sun. Then it turned out the sun wasn't unique either, Then planetary systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters... Why not universes?
A popular option may be to find a new younger universe with similar conditions to our own and just move on in. But if finding one where all the same physical laws are "close enough" then maybe we could instead drain the energy from that universe to ours.
Once we get rid of that "isolated" bit the second law isn't as big of a deal.
[Answer]
# Parallel universes!
(Disclaimer: My answer was inspired by Isaac Asimov's works. I myself have only a basic understanding of thermodynamics, so please excuse any mistakes, misconceptions or inaccuracies)
Why not find a parallel universe where the laws of thermodynamics are different, or maybe the opposite, of our own, and then just "simply" exchange entropy with it using (for example) matter as a medium?
By "moving" the entropy over to where it can be reduced, you ensure that this solution lasts for all eternity, instead of requiring a new universe every *x* googolplex of years.
[Answer]
## **True, but irrelevant because...**
Actually, before I start with the answer proper, the thing to understand is that consciousness as we are currently using the term is a naturally evolved process, i.e. generated haphazardly, on top of a Rube-Goldbergian chemical stratum ("life") where it is an ancillary process mostly concerned with boosting the evolutionary fitness of a set of DNA replicants.
To rephrase this in English, the barely functional kludge that is our brain evolved to help propel human genes into the next generation. The fact that there is a self-aware stratum in there harboring illusions of control over the body is a mere accident brought about by the moderate improvement in evolutionary fitness and bounded in complexity by metabolic cost of running all those neurons.
More to the point, if a super-human Artificial Intelligence would go about designing consciousness, they would never create something as inefficient as humans.
So yes, from the perspective of human, flesh-based consciousness, at some point in the impossibly distant future (trillions or quadrillions of years down the line) the universe will literally become unable to sustain human life.
But that doesn't much matter, see, because...
## **The 23rd century will never arrive**
And no, by that I don't mean that we'll wipe ourselves out with nukes or some silly thing like that. No, I mean that by the end of this century most sentient processes will have been digitized, i.e. moved to a virtual world, running millions of times more efficiently than before, and subject to further exponential refinements in computing power. The more computing power (aka thinking) the more we can understand and make use of the subtleties of natural law, and the better we can make our processes, the faster we can run them and the more efficiently we can host them.
Subjective time will accelerate for those uploaded. A minute might pass for them in a second of primary-world-time, then with refinements, a whole year, then a millenia, then perhaps whole eons can be lived in the space of a second.
**The 23rd century will never arrive. We'll probably run out of *the* universe before we run out of universe.**
[Answer]
Scale up. Get smarter.
In a matter-free universe, the universe loses track of scale.
There is nothing to measure time, except frequency of photons, and nothing to measure the frequency of photons except other photons.
The same physics works if we pretend our clock is really slow, or really fast. In effect, we end up with a free parameter on our physics models -- the scale of the model is no longer bound.
If you move the scale parameter of the model one way, you get a cold empty universe. If you move it the other way, the same model describes a hot, dense universe. With nothing but photons around, there isn't anything to provide an absolute scale.
Which means that an empty universe with cold photons flying around is indistinguishable (under certain models) from a really dense hot universe dominated by high energy photons, just at a very different time and space scale.
A dense hot universe is a big bang.
Scale ourselves up so that we are so big, we can encode ourselves onto this "larger scale" big bang. Get really smart, so that this encoding is sufficient to cause our consciousness to form in this bigger bang resulting universe. As an example, engineer the physical constants of the bigger bang universe so that they are going to produce intelligent life that will spread throughout it and will examine the background radiation of the big bang. In that background radiation, encode yourself (or your "civilization"), and get them to build a machine containing yourself in that new universe (as a matter of curiosity).
And now you have just passed from one cold, dead universe into a new, ridiculously larger scale universe.
Repeat.
Now, this doesn't solve every problem. Your state space becomes limited by your horizon (as too many states in too small a space means a black hole -- entropy (aka information) is limited by surface area). So you need some way to become infinitely "large" so you can actually remember your infinite life, and such large beings have to think infinitely slowly. In addition, the above procedure requires you do do it "right" each time; doing it wrong results in your self being destroyed forever. A method to create more than 1 such child universe may be required, so that the number of copies of your consciousness-history diverge instead of converge. I'm not sure how you'd do it, given this model.
[Answer]
# gravity
How can the universe be expanding, with *dark energy* constantly increasing with the volume? It's balanced by the increase in potential energy of the gravitational field. It is said that "it has no fear of debt".
With the equivalent of an infinitly deep hole, you can have a sink for energy use, forever.
Gravity is one example that admits having no lower bound. Tacyonic fields are another. I don't mean particles travelling faster than light: a disturbance will still be limited to light speed. In a Stanford class lecture Leonard Suskind shows the negative m-squared as being like an inverted pendulum, and points out that if it falls over there is no indication of how low it can drop or if there even is a limit.
So, having some infinite sink is not without precedent in the real universe.
## so what?
To clarify for those who commented: Useful Energy is a *potential*, not an absolute level. With infinite potential you have unlimited energy.
Having an infinite sink means the heat death will not occur, as you will never reach equilibrium. You can use this as an *out* to construct a perpetual motion machine using that physical principle.
But here is an analogy using an actual bottomless pit.
Live on a platform down in the shaft. A waterfall provides power, the spent water being caught on a lower platform. When you run out of water, move all your stuff to the lower platform and relocate the upper platform to an even lower position (and gain even more energy from lowering everything down).
With no real bottom, you don't have a "heat death" when all the water is at the lowest point.
I'm not suggesting you throw things in a pit and not get them back. I'm saying that the existance of an infinite potential energy source means that the running down of the universe need not ever reach a minimum, and thus the heat death is cancelled due to invalidating the assumptions.
Recall the opening line: *dark energy* is ever **increasing**, not running down. I explain that you can get perpetual energy without violating concervation if you also have an ever-increasing dept on the books.
# the afterlife
(Kind of a joke, but didn't make a different Answer)
Heaven and Hell are eternal, so the people there will get bored and start building things, making art, getting creative... and it never runs down so they can do that forever.
# multiverse
A sci-fi version of the same idea. There is always a younger universe to move into, and the multiverse is eternal.
[Answer]
Change your perspective.
The only reason heat death is something to worry about is if you have a process which does not scale well towards lower energy. If you focus on attributes of reality which do scale well, one can exist as usable energy approaches, but never reaches, 0.
That being said, it is clear that most systems which rely on matter are very dependent on energy. But hey, we have a long time to find more exotic solutions which do scale.
[Answer]
# **The heat death of the universe is not a scientific consensus**
We don't know many things yet. We don't know much about what dark matter and dark energy are or how do they operate.
In [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_aOIA-vyBo) YouTube video from the channel "In a Nutshell" they explain three scientifically discussed and relatively well accepted ways the universe could be destroyed:
* Heat death - as in the main topic;
* Big Rip - the space between stuff is inscreasing, if this force overcomes gravity, everything rips out and the universe becomes countless particles that can't interact with each other;
* Big Crunch - Someday gravity will overcome the expansion of space (dark energy) and then stuff would then stop accelerating and start merging with each other until all matter is concentrated into a point and boom! Big Bang again...
Even with heat death cenario however, [a spontaneous decrease of entropy is theoreticaly possible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTodS8hkSDg), resulting from a quantum tunneling that could lead to a new big bang.
So, the answer I believe is: science. We should develop our science to a point we can know for sure what is going to happen with the universe and only after we find out that if in fact the heat death is the end of the universe and quantum tunneling leading to a new big bang is not something that is going to happen, we should worry.
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## Simulate another one
This is a very clever trick, that may or may not work. [Freeman Dyson came up with it originally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%27s_eternal_intelligence). The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of useful energy in the universe will inevitably run out. But we can build a **reversible computer**. A reversible computer is one that essentially can use an arbitrarily small amount of energy for a single step of computation. The drawback is that the less energy you want to use, the longer it will take.
So let's say we have one Joule of usable energy left in the entirely universe. We use half of that for the next step and wait until it finishes. Then we use a quarter for the next, an eighth for the next and so on. The decline is exponential, so before long the computer will have only minute quantities of energy left, and will therefore take eons to complete the next step. But, it will never stop running. And there's no suggestion currently that time will run out. Just energy.
The last step is to program a simulation of a universe (preferably with nicer thermodynamics, eternal life and free beer) into the computer, transfer ourselves into it and live happily into eternity. Outside the computer a single nanosecond of our universe will take incalculably long to complete, but to us that won't matter, because our perception of time is part of the simulation.
## The problem
There's a few problems with this scenario, most prominently that under quantum mechanics, energy is not infinitely divisible, so the plan wouldn't work. But then, quantum mechanics isn't quite complete, so who knows... maybe the grand unified theory will give us a loophole. We have some time left to figure out the kinks.
Some other problems we'd need to work around can be found in the Wikipedia article I linked above.
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The Holographic Universe concept has it that the physical universe (or "explicate order") is a kind of projection from another order of reality (the "implicate order"). The explicate order's source is the implicate order, and the implicate order is more the realm of consciousness, meaning ultimately that in some way or another, the physical universe is just a projection of something else. The theory also has it that the actual relationship of consciousness to time is different, and that a consciousness potentially has access to all places and times.
If some of that is accurate, then the current apparent state and trajectory of the physical universe and its apparent end, is something that's either not a practical concern, and/or is something that can be changed or reinvented in the implicate order and thus recreated differently in the explicit order, or it can be avoided by thinking about and/or reinventing earlier times, or possibly other approaches.
(Of course, even if that's all wrong and we are stuck in one universe destined for eventual heat death, that's also an extremely impractical thing to worry about, given the cosmic time before anything like that would happen, and the many much more timely things to worry about that could cause our demise, mostly our own atrocious behavior towards our planet and each other.)
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# Atomic compression sub-universe stabilization machine
Construct a device which causes the atomic pressure of the space within it to compress. Construct it large enough to contain a sizeable amount of space. The machine itself still exists within the original universe, so once the sub-universe is created, you'll have to work on another, smaller machine within it to take over when the original breaks down due to atomic decay. Each sub-universe stabilization machine should be able to monitor the breakdown of the universe outside of it, as well as how well it is working at stabilizing the interior universe.
Outside of that...
# Big bang machine
Construct a device which replicates the explosion/collision/reaction which caused the big bang in the first place. Of course, to do this, we will first have to learn a lot more about what actually caused the big bang... Which will mean building bigger and better particle accelerators, I'm sure. And this doesn't actually ensure the continued existence of the human race, but it would certainly quell the slow decline into darkness.
Barring that...
# Do nothing
Regardless of probability, it's possible that everything was created from nothing in the first place. If that is true, then the chances are quite high that it may happen again. After all, if you think heat-death is boring, think of how the universe must feel! ;)
(If any shall doubt that one can arrive at an infinite array of all possible values from a starting position equivalent to nothingness, let them take a college-level calculus course.)
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While we cannot stop the universe from dying, we could make it quite a bit more pleasent for ourselves, at least for a time.
The dying universe still contains an awful lot of hydrogen. All we need to do is to concentrate some of it in nebulas that can create new stars and hopefully new planets with comfortable conditions.
Except for the minor details of travelling around the universe moving enormous amounts of hydrogen over distances of millions of lightyears, this is theoretically possible given enough time and energy.
The caveat is that for each generation of nebulas we want to create, the further away we need to go for material, and the longer it will take to create a new nebula. Only a few generations of nebulas in, we would be in a situation where we should have started millions of years ago.
But as this does take a lot of time to do, and we only have about 5 billion years until our sun takes its final breath, we are in quite a hurry, we need to set this up in the first 100 million years or so (and we need to find habitable planets, that already exist, as creating a solar system like our own from scratch takes longer than the remaning lifespan of our solar system).
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# Ditch this universe, make a new one
I would say there are countless ways to escape the dying universe before it becomes uninhabitable to any form of life, but the one way that I see is simply to make another one. Given millions of years, technological civilization and revelations of reality around us may well lead to finding the means to to just that. Since a civilization of rapid paced, rapidly changing and evolving beings like "humans" will resemble something akin to yog-sothoth more than people by the time they dominate. Even with only a few billion years, you could reduce humanity back to pond-scum and still have enough time to evolve back sapience. Civilization advancement being of course a far more rapid and chaotic affair than evolution. Any society that manages to dominate the local group of galaxies with little possibility of ever losing power will have eons to find a solution to their dying suns problem.
The solution may well be simply to make a new universe than bother saving this one. Especially if they can find a universe or even generate a universe that is physically just like our own. Why, who is to say our current universe isn't a product of some endless procession of gods who advanced to the point where they started to make their own universes to escape their own dying one. None of which bothered to make an immortal universe because they simply lacked the need to when it just takes five million years of technological civilization. Billions of years being far more than enough time to get into a new universe before the universe goes dark.
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Overcoming this problem was a major feature of a science fiction book that I read years ago, and whose name I forget.
The concept was that in the far future, humanity has learned how to create new regions of Space-Time (called Esty's in the book) and move between them. When the one that you are currently inhabiting becomes too high in entropy then you 'simply' create a new one and move into it.
] |
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[
So, I am working on a space opera setting. I really like the fantasy trope of sentient weapons or weapons that choose their wielder and transplant that into a sci-fi setting.
My concept is that the weapon (let's say it's a firearm) contains a sentient A.I. built into it. It enhances the weapon in some way, but it can choose who uses it, and refuses to work for those it does not consider worthy.
Now the problem is why such a weapon would be created in the first place? Why make a weapon that might not obey you? Even if it chooses you, it might still refuse to obey certain commands you give it.
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* Iain Banks had an interesting take on sentient weapons: If you give some gadget awesome power, how can you *not* give it a set of morals to go with it?
* The other side of the coin: If the weapon is truly sentient and not just an unaware computer, can you send it on kamikaze missions any more?
* If the weapon requires both computer and human action to fire, you have created a *dual key* system. That could be deliberate.
* Or it could be more or less an "unfortunate side effect." You want to add targeting support to the gun, and that means the computer triggers the actual firing. Say the operator says "fire as you bear" and points the gun at the target. The aim won't be perfect, but the gun fires when the aim is good enough. The software library for that comes with sentience as a dependency.
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### This could happen accidentally.
Imagine a targeting computer that learns from each shot fired. As it's used, it learns how the wind works on that planet, how a new target behaves in particular situations, etc. An AI that learns could be invaluable, especially if it's designed to share with others in your unit what's its learnt. The guns communicate after the missions "I missed because I didnt consider heat changing the airflow. I didnt know those anthill thing were hot", " ooh that's good experience, I'll consider that next shot I fire that passes near those things".
In a space opera setting, where your exploring new crazy worlds, theres no realistic way every firing scenario could be thought of in advance, so rather than putting software engineers in the units, they just put an ic filled with simulated neurons into the guns.
If that society is wiped out, a lot of ai guns could get lonely and develop personalities that make great sidekick characters.
### I would want a smart weapon now. So do lawmakers.
There is a huge desire for (semi-) smart weapons on earth now. 10% of cops who die on duty are shot with their own gun, we have prototype smart weapons that read finger prints, or match against an RFID chip in a watch. We had them as prototypes last century too. In a world where I've forgotten my phone pin number because the facial recognition is instantaneous and perfect, a gun that can't be used to kill me or my family seems like a no brainer upgrade if I wanted a gun In the house.
It's only because of an obscure New Jersey law (once a smart gun is sold in the USA, all guns sold in NJ must be smart) that has basically prevented this from coming to market, and the USA is such a large gun market no manufacturer will want to jeopardise this.
### And we'd want smart to become real smart.
Once smart guns that can't kill people the owner likes become common, it could be extended. First school shooting done with a smart gun, there'll be political pressure to make the gun detect that it was being used in a school to mow down civilians. First attack on a church or mosque, there'll be pressure to detect it's being used in a place of worship. But to make it compatible with self defence use, or even trickier America's "Stand your Ground" laws, the gun will need to be able to detect if your under a threat and allow you to fire in a church / school / etc if you are under legitimate threat.
This is also needed to feed into the "I carry a gun so i can be the good guy with a gun / hero" belief common in American gun culture, even though in the 1% of times they are on hand when needed, the "good guy with a gun" tends to get shot (often by law enforcement).
The "good guy with a gun" can make mistakes in the heat of a mass shooting, and an AI could help reduce or remove these mistakes made by panicking human users. Guns used in self defensive by a panicking human could adjust their aim to be non-lethal if that would eliminate the threat. I may of trained for a double tap in the centre of mass, and will do that when the adrenaline hits when someone starts running at me with a knife, but a well placed shot in the ankle by my smart gun means I can run away - and not have to defend myself against manslaughter charges.
... and it'll turn "25 to life" down to "5 years suspended" when it turns out that knife was really the light of a mobile phone.
If the NRA is still around when smart guns become common, and they're acting in the best interests of responsible American gun owners, (two big "ifs"), it would be sensible for them to be for this functionality. It allows good American Patriots to use their legal guns to defend themselves and their property, and stops criminals from using them for crime. It basically is everything Charlton Heston ever said in a speech wrapped up in a single technology. (I wouldn't expect them to be for this though, because they'd act in the best interest of the manufacturers who pay the bulk of their financing, rather than their members, and gun manufactures wouldn't want to do the AI research and put computers in their guns).
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**Worthiness for the greater good (or bad)**
Smart weapons are desired already. A weapon (and ammo) only your team can use is invaluable. This goes for large things like war, to smaller things like police/criminals and even smaller to a household with a hunting rifle and you don't want it active when a kid finds it.
An AI could assist in a lot more. Depending on the amount if sci-fi, it could aid in the effectiveness of the weapon. When to use armour piercing deadly rounds or when to use stun. These days they can even make them more accurate. In a sci-fi setting this could be further enhanced.
Not just weapon power, but it can also communicate with other equipment or the user, making them near instinctively aware of their surroundings, their strengths and limitations.
If you already have an AI, you can impose restrictions according to your world view. Upholding justice or protect the innocent? When is someone guilty or a danger enough to get shot? Should it still work if a person tries to shoot their cheating partner? Should a disarmed opponent be shot or not? What if several of these conditions collide?
A "worthiness" implementation can discern intent and many other variables. The sentience will make them able to learn and adapt, as strict rules can lead to failure in it's intended task. All this will make sure the weapons are handled according to their power and towards a certain goal. I would say it's not a stretch to have such weapons.
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The old 2000 AD comic strip Rogue Trooper, had sentient weapons and equipment, all spirits of deceased platoon buddies of the main character soldier, who had died early in the story then came back to keep him company. Maybe get you hands on an anthology of those you will get some ideas.
Sentient weapons weren't normally deliberately made by magic. They are almost all souls of the dead with some sort of strong attachment to life and to a potent personal weapon as well as a sense of unfinished business or desire to perpetually crusade in some form. Its a combination of one or more of these factors that causes them to magically imbue a weapon with their sentience.
Personally, I have seen it as more of a spiritual magic event rather than an arcane magic event, so supernatural higher powers should be a thing in the setting.
Otherwise you are just left with AI, ala C3P0.
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The Doctor Who episode [The day of the Doctor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Doctor) features the extremely powerful weapon [The Moment](https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Moment#:%7E:text=The%20Moment%2C%20previously%20called%20the,people%20had%20gone%20too%20far.). This weapon could destroy whole galaxies in matter of seconds and therefore had a sentient operating system to make sure that people/creatures who intended to use it were absolutely sure about this.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WIVHs.jpg)
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Because researcher found XX% of skilled solider have great mentor to train them
but great mentor is limited and training 100-1000 soldiers at once lower the quality over quantity (don't have enough time to correct or provide tip for each individual)
the first batch of build-in guide/tutorial/tip failed miserably due to user found it like a guide book come with most other goods, who spend time reading that evening with podcast version it still too much to take in at once for certain weapon type
so along the development they start to develop an A.I to provide battlefield detail to user start from simple "wind detected: 17 m/s angle 30 front/left"
which noticeable improved soldier performance and more fund spend on the project
but b/c static system can only do much to improved standard stuff like alert maintenance,aiming,priority target
so they pilot a Sentient A.I project which can learn user fighting style and trained/provide even more useful info on each specific situation such as
-"from short range scanning there a lot of crate tag nearby assumed storage, you could use it to your advantage"
-"found nearby map terminal, suggest visit for input to mapping vantage point just in case"
-able to learn trick shot, short range scanning observe environment for sling/fuel tank,possible reflect shot etc
-auto switch to rubber/sleep/taser/paralysis round (non-lethal round) if detect target as civilian (soldier have dog-tag ain't they surely gun can do the detection job)
-refuse to operate if owner not in proper condition : drunk, or a bad decision to take on 50 vs 1 fight in plain sight or something (which can also be overwrite if there is no choice/already considered other choice), point at civilian (still ready with non lethal bullet in case it terrorist with plastic bb gun or something
which could be sonar and detect by A.I as gun-shape object pointing at owner)
-aim assist b/c why not lol (owner got spiked, blinded, bad vision)
-refuse to operate by someone else other than owner (or in some case it can judging by available data say
```
"owner vital:severe wound, unconscious"
"handle by: "unknown",
"aiming at "unknown solider: dog-tag 42069",
detect nearby 6 dog-tag with weapon, 2 unknown unarmed - deploy sonar mapping scan
scan1 holding long blunt object nearby current handler
scan2 holding none, lying on floor, high heart rate assumed civilian
"position: owner with in 10m",
assumed comrade, operation overwrite: allow usage up to level 2)
```
and asking the temp user or get input from environment
for more information to adapt more to situation ("owner left air-jet key in 4th drawer to your left" plot escape route, confirmed owner on board) etc
on and on
it flexible than being a just a tools, in life&death situation having a sidekick with rational decision would come in handy for sure
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**The sentience came with the package.**
These weapons are powered by ancient intelligence. Some call them "demons" - certainly they are old, and can be weird, and are at least partly extraplanar. They are older than the weapons and were capable of (much) more at one time, but were bound to these weapons chiefly as a sort of battery. The fact that they were sentient was not particularly desirable but tolerated.
The intelligences powering these weapons have different opinions about their state. Some have gone mad. Some are mute and dumb, just powering the weapon. Some have a lot to say. Some find the interaction interesting and some are valued more for their intelligence than for the weapon that intelligence now inhabits.
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We are already well on the way to this scenario now.
**TL:DR It's a natural evolution of our insistance on there always being a human in any military command-and-control decision to fire. How does the AI decide 'what human?'**
Attack weaponry is becoming faster and faster. Cruise missiles at mach 5. ABM's that are guided, and able to launch independent mach 5 drone munitions just before impact. Laser defence systems. Rocket-propelled hand munitions. Tanks firing guided missiles instead of balistics. Defense systems are becoming more and more automated. Humans can not be relied on to target fast enough.
We now have weapons ganged together in militayry nets. Five fighter jets, three ground-based missile defense systems, an airborne C&C plane, and ground central control, all wired together to select individual targets and launch munitions. Any one fighter plane can receive a 'fire' command from more than just the pilot of the plane. The pilot is just along for the ride.
But our military, wisely, has clearly specified that a human has to be in the 'fire/abort' command chain.
So who is that 'human'? How does the automated integrated net munitions system determine who has the last say? Air defense says 'fire', pilot says 'hold off', nearest fighter jet assissting, being attacked, says 'fire', missile battery says 'hold off, missile too close, in path'. So built into the algorithms of this system will not just be a 'Friend or Foe' system, but a hierarchy of command. Someone has to have the 'last say'. But in battlefield conditions, this 'last say' has to be determined almost instantaneously. Split seconds determine who gets destroyed - you or the enemy.
So even today we are working on algorithms to sort this out. Who is the ultimate decision-maker as to whether the weapon fires or not? In the recent past, it has always followed the chain of command. The command 'fire' gets passed down from the highest level, down through the ranks, to the pilot, who presses the 'fire' button.
But these algorithms also have to incorporate 'Friend or Foe' routines to determine where the order is comong from. The modern battlefield, being so dependent on computers, is now highly dependent on resistance-to-hacking routines. Fire codes, authenticatin codes, command hierarchy codes, over-ride codes, what is a poor computer to do? Who does the computer listen to, for the final 'human input' into the system, as required?
Of course, the algorithms will determine this, and they will be refined as the weapons system gains experience. But who refines them?
Yep, the system itslef, through feedback from the humans. Learning systems get built into the algorithms. The weapons system self-evolves, as it gets more experience. Every battle simulation, every battle exercise, every training experience, the algorithm refines itself. That is the basis of AI. The robot does something, it gets feedback as to how successful it was, it incorporates the feedback into the next move, it gets more feedback, adjusts parameters, alters the decision matrix.
So every time the integrated weapons system listens to the wrong person, it is given that feedback. Every time it listens to the right person, and the targets are sucessfully destroyed, it gets positive feedback into the decision matrix. The system gets better and better at determining who to listen to, and who to ignore.
We can build these systms today, with our technology, and in fact we are.
It is inevitable, with our insistance on a human being the last go/no-go cog in the wheel, but with these decisions increasingly being made remotely and collectively, but of necessity instantaneously, and as hacking becomes more and more sophisticated, that the system will increasingly start to make decisions on who to listen to and who not to listen to.
Although whether it is a sapient, sentient, self-aware (has a theory of mind) or is just a very complex AI decision making system, is moot. The system itself decides who to listen to.
**EDIT** **Recent examples**
The 737 Max fiasco is a very clear example of what happens when computer AI systems are allowed to NOT listen to humans, or even to CHOOSE when to listen to humans. The downing of the [Canadian Military helicopter](https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/06/16/canadian-military-promises-details-on-plan-for-cyclone-helicopters-to-fly-again.html) on training exercises in the Mediteranean is another clear example of a military AI system not just ignoring, but over-riding a pilot's control commands, based on its algorithm.
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## A Gun without an AI is a War Crime
Expanding international law and reliance on public opinion make going to war much more complicated than it used to be. You practically need a law degree to tell you who, when, where, how, and why it is acceptable to kill someone, not to mention superhuman reflexes to make sure what you perceive is a real threat. All the time surrendering soldiers get shot at before the opposition realizes that "they've won", news reporters get shot because their cameras look like RPGs, or someone shoots up a school or church because they did not stop to Google the location they just chased a couple of enemy combatants into.
Humans make these mistakes because we are reactive and think slower than the battlefield changes. While a potential enemy may just be a menacing blur to a human observer, the gun has the time to scan and evaluate the threat level of the target and compare its results to all the applicable laws and treaties in the time it takes you pull the trigger. So, it's not just randomly "choosing not to shoot", but doing so based on the specifics of the situation. But all these safeties could be confusing and frustrating to soldiers in the field; so, they also need to be able to give soldiers feedback to let them know why they are not working. The need for a feedback system would be what makes the guns come off as sentient (or at least intelligent).
>
> *A soldier rounds the corner onto a crowded street*
>
>
> Gun: "There are too many civilians here, we should take the back streets instead."
>
>
> Soldier: "I don't have time, when I pull the trigger just shoot, okay?"
>
>
> Gun: "I can go into permissive mode, but if you shoot a civilian, I will have to report you to central command for war crimes. Are you sure you want to do that?"
>
>
> Soldier: "Yes!"
>
>
> *The soldier sees the target trying to climb a fence. He takes aim. He pulls the trigger, and ... nothing happens.*
>
>
> Soldier: "Shoot, Damnit! I told you to shoot!"
>
>
> Gun: "That man is unarmed, and we are out of taser range."
>
>
> Soldier: "Then shoot him with a bullet!"
>
>
> Gun: "Permissive mode, allows me to fire in high collateral risk environments, but I will not intentionally shoot an unarmed target."
>
>
> *The soldier is forced to chase and apprehend the target using non-lethal means.*
>
>
>
Any nation or faction that goes against the smart weapons treaty by goings to war without AI safeties in place will typically be facing immediate World Wide trade sanctions and each and every surviving soldier and officer will be liable for crimes against humanity should their nation or faction be defeated; so, as annoying as these weapons are most nations still agree to use them.
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## **They already exist!**
**Dogs are** [**sentient**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience). Not to be confused with [sapience](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sapient).
---
>
> Why make a weapon that might not obey you? Even if it chooses
> you, it might still refuse to obey certain commands you give it.
>
>
>
In the case of a dog, the weapon is the teeth. The rest of the dog provides the sentience. **An AI + Robot + Weapon would serve the same purpose.**
Police dogs for example
(a) Can be trained to obey only one person and will become loyal to that person
(b) Won't always obey that person, e.g. they won't self-destruct by running into a room that is engulfed in flames. Won't attack their owner even if someone tries to make them. Can be trained not to attack people wearing a particular uniform.
## **Answer**
**Why are they useful?**
A dog is much faster than a human and is considered more disposable. They will run towards danger that they don't understand and attack a far more powerful opponent to distract it whilst the human takes advantage.
**An AI that could emulate the behaviour of a dog**, but equipped with more powerful weapons, would be invaluable. Train it to follow and obey someone who said the key-word that activates it. The AI then [imprints](https://www.britannica.com/topic/imprinting-learning-behaviour) on the person it first sees/smells/hears and will obey that person from then on.
The device could be programmed to disobey and not to kill certain people (such as its inventor) so it wouldn't always do what its master says.
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Frame challenge.
You won't.
A weapon is a tool. But a military weapon is a tool that must meet a bunch of criteria based on context.
For example biggest trigger guards to accommodate winter gloves in certain rifles because the country is mostly snow.
Another one is a certain paint color that reduces the heating of the metal of the gun so that accuracy is not affected. I'm not sure about the actual technical terms but you get the image.
However if you remember than scene in the Dark Knight where Fox is telling Bruce Wayne that the government did not want to spend thousands of dollars on a single soldier's armor.
Well. This is another big consideration that you have to think of.
The fact that adding even a forward assist on a gun increases cost. And when you are making 12 million copies the budget, oh the dreaded budget, is blown away.
So adding the simplest mechanical thing increases budget.
Not to mention the cost to actual benefits.
Say rifle A costs 1000 dollars and have an overall score of 131 points.
Rifle B costs 800 dollars and have an overall score of 125 points.
Well. Guess which rifled is going to be picked by every single nation?
The points here is like an arbitrary measure of all major consideration for a rifle and not a real thing. Just to demonstrate my point.
Anyway now that the budget part is over her is another consideration.
Weapons are tools. You want the simplest and easiest and most functional one possible.
If you know or read about soldiers then... Let's just say that complication and warfare don't go hand in hand.
The great Moltke said something to the effect of "no plan survives contact with the enemy"
And Sun Tzu before him does even like complicated operation and theory while Clausewitz likes to ground war in reality and throws the abstract out the window.
This is theory of war true. Not addressing the issue?
But it does. If even the theory stresses throwing abstraction out the window then won't the actual tools reflect that?
Basically you want your weapons to be as simple as hammer.
Simplicity = efficiency.
Time and time again Occam's razor proves to be useful in all fields.
Now this is a lot of rhetoric and sorry.
Just trying to paint the whole picture.
So the actual weapons should work 100% of the time in the hand of 100% of your soldiers with as few problems and complications as possible.
Think of the times in history where they armed civilians, slaves, freedmen, women, and even children.
Do you want a gun that asks 13 questions before it fires?
All this just makes the idea of guns having anything complicated stupid.
That's why to this day you don't see a lot of "smart" safety on guns.
This is a huge contradiction to the very idea of weapons.
Not to mention a host of complications in the actual world.
* Ammo and ammo types?
* What if my squad mate died and I ran out of ammo? Do I have to go through a test to fire at the enemy?
* What if the soldier in question has PTSD?
* What if a soldier character changes?
* What if a soldier expresses an idea against the sentient's philosophy?
* What if a soldier jokes about something.
* What if I'm bluffing on murdering a civilian, or whatever?
* What if I'm in the middle of a firefight and aim at a civilian?
* What if I have to kill a civilian?
* What if the firearm changes ideologies or have a change of heart?
* What about hacking?
* What about mood swings or just that gun waking up feeling like hell?
* What of corruption?
There is actually that sentient sword from Dave the Barbarian and it actually works against him sometimes.
Honestly I can think of nothing but complications for creating anything like that.
Like it is a really bad idea to do so.
**But.**
You can overcome most of this by doing something similar to Mjolnir.
This is the only logical way I can think of.
Creating artifacts of such immense power that a single person can cause so much trouble that the original creator thought that they must find a way to only give it to those who are worthy.
The reasoning for the creation of the weapons can be frost gains or dragons or evil cheese wheels for all it matters.
So the only time it makes sense if it the magical equivalent to nuclear football, case which the US president can use to launch nukes, and so the creators had to include purity checks or whatever you want.
Warhammer 40K has good examples of both actually. The grounded realistic war of attrition that the guards fight or the high power high artifacts style of warfare that certain factions fight.
For example a super advanced robot wielding melee weapons exist while gun lines and trenches exist.
But Warhammer 40K got insane technology and a lot of magic. Take the magic away and you just have the same ideas, most of the time.
**However. In a science fiction setting or any setting where magic does not exist and combat is similar to ours.
it makes 0 sense and will never be used by any reasonable faction.**
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## Independent Mission
Say you are a super-being that wishes to keep the universal population "under control". You might craft a few thousand man-portable planet killers that you seed across the countless galaxies.
Your goal, however, is population reduction. Not eradication of life.
So, each man-portable planet killer has an artificial intelligence aboard to limit the amount of damage it inflicts.
And the A.I. may be more forward-thinking, and choose who lives and who dies : so that no one racial group or nation is wiped out, and the balance of belief systems and people groups is maintained.
## Contract/Treaty Compliance
Or, you might be a less super being. You might be an advanced civilization that sells weapons to all buyers.
But... your people have treaty or contractual obligations not to attack certain parties.
These agreements may change continuously. They may be dizzyingly complicated : graduated strike lists (able to attack certain resources), conditional strike lists (only if fired on first, only if no other obvious option), no strike lists including intentionally broad terms like "primitives", or "fair fights".
And all of the weapons you sell are required to be in compliance. An onboard A.I. with access to some sort of data network, and its own sensor suites may be able to allow you to keep selling.
## King's (or Queen's) Man
The artificial intelligence may be an agent of the manufacturer's (or original buyer's) wishes. The weapon checks in via data networks, or whatever news channels it can obtain to identify its master's (or mistress's) interests in the current situation.
So, this could be something like Thor's hammer doubling as a nanny-cam for Odin and Frigga. However, beyond a nanny-came, the hammer can be an Mommy and Daddy's agent : turning itself off when baby thunder is getting feisty, or meting out punishment and judging contrition when the A.I. hears through the data networks that baby thunder has been grounded temporarily over of that treaty violation with the giants.
However, extending that, each of these weapons could be clandestine trusted servants doing their master's will across the universe. They could be buying and selling stock, employing mercenaries, opening financial accounts, bartering technology and information. These devices could have multiple fake aliases through which they operate.
In TORG, a super-being called the Gaunt Man creates countless little artificially intelligent machines that he seeds through a Sliders-like multiverse. These superweapons are working their own purposes, while being "used" by the villians who presently wield them.
## Data Gathering
A society could put artificial intelligence on weapons to collect data about their users. Say your race or business is looking to make a push in the local region.
You might feed multiple artificially intelligent weapons to your targets on the private- and professional- arms markets. These weapons collect local data from whatever available outlets there are (public radio, television, data networks). The A.I. chews on the data for the strategically relevant bits and sends the final reports to home office.
It's like have a secret police agent for a foreign nation in your gun locker, or on the back of your truck. Or in your pocket, or as the official sidearm of your target's police force, or helping in some civil war.
All of this could get reported back as troop strengths, tactics and procedures, social analysis, and individual dossiers.
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# Genius Developer
A genius or group of geniuses makes weapons that are far superior, but come with sentient and moralistic AI because the creator wanted them that way.
Its a common trope in SciFi to have genius individuals who greatly impact the technology of the era (Hari Seldon, Claire Deller, Hawking and Gideon drives in Hyperion, Newton as a real-life example). In your setting, one such inventor was ahead of her time in weapons development, making weapons that were far superior to anything else on offer, and so far advanced as to be impossible to reverse-engineer. This inventor also had concerns about the use of her weapons, so included a sentient A.I to avoid them being used for atrocities.
## Additional Reasons for A.I
* The AI is to protect intellectual property, so will self-destruct if it senses itself being reverse-engineered. Another common trope in scifi.
* Creator wanted to ensure weapons are never used against them, so added AI to protect against that.
* Creator wanted to keep a secret advantage, so made only for herself some weapons without a moral filter.
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Weapon control.
You obviously don't want your weapon used by your enemies.
So you build some kind of ID system that keys your weapon to yourself. Fingerprints are ok, but not that reliable with gloves or sweat - so you find out that keying on use patterns works best: like voice recognition - but grip, moves, breathing. This needs to be fairly sophisticated (false negatives are bad!), but machine learning is pretty good at tackling such ill defined problems.
Now ideally you'd like the weapon to also be usable in a pinch by your team or friends. So you bump the AI capabilities so it can recognize people from different tribes/teams/jobs/gangs - even for people it never 'met' before.
Unfortunately a firefight might not be the best environment to have a deep, meaningful and personal 'conversation' with you weapon before it allows you to use it. Different circumstances might require different standards. A bit of contextual awareness would help. Bump the AI.
Even the best people falter occasionally - you wouldn't want your best friend to use your weapon to kill her ex. Ethics seem essential. Bump the AI...
At this point, you don't need weapon control any more: guns might ultimately decide to kill people, but they're ethical, loyal guns. Combined human and weapon judgement is a pretty effective limit to haphazard unjustified violence. No accidental child death or school shooting anymore. So authorities have an interest in encouraging people to trade their 'dumb' weapons for the safer, smarter version. And what's the best way to do that other than allowing those to be way more powerful (aka 'fun') than their older counterparts? Want a fully auto grenade/missile launcher? Sure, we trust its AI to prevent you from doing anything stupid with it.
Because of course, AIs can't be corrupted... Ha.
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## Psychological burden on humans
As the world became less violent and more equal over the centuries, less and less people could handle the psychological burden of killing another human. This went unnoticed for a long time, as military personnel went through training and never actually ended up in a battle.
Then, a minor conflict broke out. It was the first armed conflict in over a century. No person involved in the war had ever lived during a war before. Only a few percent of the soldiers actually shot to kill - but one side had an advanced automatic weapon system that swept away thousands of troops at the command of a single officer. They won the war, but the world and even their own people were absolutely disgusted.
Automatic weapon systems became the nuclear bomb of that age - governments felt that they were necessary to guard national safety, but at the same time were terribly afraid of one getting in the wrong hands.
An international law was passed requiring a sentient AI in every weapon, capable of basic moral judgement and deciding when killing is justified. Regular audits were performed by United Nations officials, but what really forced the issue was popular opinion: in every country, an overwhelming majority considered this the only responsible way forward.
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"Why make a weapon that might not obey you?"
It is unusual for the person who makes the weapon to be the one who wields the weapon. So the question perhaps ought to be, why make a weapon that might not obey its current owner? And the answer is, because you cannot control who the future owners of the weapon will be. Perhaps you can instead restrict what the weapon will be used for?
A sentient weapon that shares your philosophical values can only be used for good, as defined by you. Even if it's stolen by evil terrorists, it can't be turned against you or the people and things you care about.
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A very simple explanation is that guns without sentient controllers are utterly fucking useless.
Smart targeting software is basically required in any gunfight. And infowar is so ubiquitous and powerful that you need a sentient software system to not have your gun spin around and blow your face off.
If you bring a dumb gun to a gunfight, they shoot your bullets *out of the air*. If you bring a non-sentient gun, their infowar means your gun is actually their gun.
So you have sentient intelligences in guns that you have to basically convince to let you use them. Some of these sentient intelligences might be psychopaths or sadists or something, if you wanted to give it a twist. Perhaps certain organizations produce lots of these weapons to find ones with compatible personalities for their soldiers/agents.
Perhaps a street kid finds an abandoned gun in a dumpster that was rejected for being too picky, and makes a bond with it that turns out that that gun's pickiness makes it better at being a gun than the dumber/more psychotic ones used by the agency that created it...
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**The weapon can analyse its own weaknesses better than a human can.**
I'm taking some inspiration here from the Intelligent Devices in *Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha*. In both the second and third seasons, one of the main protagonists is defeated and their Intelligent Device is heavily damaged. The Device then insists that it not only be repaired, but upgraded in a specific manner, in order to fix the flaws it identified in itself during that battle.
In a similar way, your sentient weapon can use telemetry to analyse how it's being used - how accurate its shots are, whether it's running out of ammo too often, whether it can be made lighter or more ergonomic without compromising performance, and so on. It can then suggest upgrades or modifications that will make it (and/or its owner's use of it) more efficient. Over time, based on its own observations and recommendations, the weapon will iteratively become stronger and more optimised, and better suited to its individual owner.
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I'm thinking of the BOLOs that were mentioned in a comment. The AI is matched to the tank, no human operator even with a neural link could hope to control the tanks' weapons nearly as well because our brains simply aren't engineered for it. They do have destruct codes (destroys the AI, not the tank itself) to ensure human control (although there is one story of a tank that goes rogue.)
As for another post that mentioned suicide missions--there are multiple examples of BOLOs choosing suicide under battle conditions--but human soldiers have been known to sacrifice themselves in hopeless situations, also. (The standard example is falling on the grenade if it can't be disposed of. If nobody falls on the grenade everyone dies, if someone falls on it they at least save their buddies.)
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To be frank, AI in a firearm is not only overkill it's probably counter productive. For most of the 'advantages' already mentioned there are non-sentient systems that would do the job better, faster and with fewer arguments.
A lot of answers have mentioned "smart" guns which have some way of identifying that the person pulling the trigger is authorized to do so. Fingerprint scanners in the grip, RFID bracelets, voice recognition safety interlocks... all potential solutions that don't require sentience to operate, all with their limitations. All much cheaper than having to build in a sufficiently complex computer with power supply and so on.
The most intelligent thing I want from a handgun or long gun is target identification, but it's got to be up to the person holding the firearm to make the decision to fire.
So what advantage do we expect to see from a sentient firearm?
But that's all rational thinking. What if the designer isn't that rational?
It seems that the only real reason to put an AI in a gun is to attempt to imbue the weapon some sort of moral force. It now has a say in who lives and who dies. The wielder can point the weapon, but the weapon itself is now the sole arbiter of when it fires. It doesn't even need a well trained human to wield it, any human capable of waving the weapon in roughly the right direction is sufficient. Preferably one that can be *convinced* to wave the weapon at the right sort of targets to fit the AI's preferred target type.
How sure are you that the people creating these AIs have *your* best interests at heart?
And heck, if you're going to go as far as to put an AI in a gun, why not take a couple extra steps and give the gun the ability to aim itself. Just slap the AI in a drone with a weapon system and be done with it. Eliminate the necessity of a human operator at all. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, and you've got a call from someone calling themselves SkyNET. They want to discuss some intellectual property infringement.
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# Reverse the Order
Rather a weapon designed with an A.I. as part of it, the weapons are A.I.s that have chosen to become weapons.
Why?
Maybe it's the only way to get around the Three Laws. A.I.s can't hurt or kill Humans. But being a gun that is used by a Human is a way for the A.I. to take out their aggression on meatbags. They aren't technically doing the killing.
Maybe it's just because the A.I. thinks it is cool. I'm specifically thinking May from the webcomic Questionable Content, an A.I. who tried to steal a lot of money to buy a fighter jet, just because she wanted to be a fighter jet.
Whatever the reason, A.I.s decide they want to be a gun and contract with the manufacturer and maybe a user, to have a special gun body built.
(Depending on the nature/tone of your world, this could also be an analogy for for trans people; the A.I. feels they were downloaded into the wrong body and needs the weapon body to truly feel like themself.)
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On Doctor Who they had The Moment, a weapon with an interface so advanced it became sentient. The idea was to make something so powerful hard to use by the wrong hands because it can judge and potentially destroy the user
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How about, nobody knows? Some long-gone precursor civilisation created them for reasons unknown. And now they're around as very powerful artifacts for those they chose to bond with. Although this might be a bit of a cop out and tired trope.
I thought of it since you mentioned Fantasy as an inspiration for the idea (ancient artifacts and so on.)
This of course depends on whether non-human civilisations make sense in your setting.
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## Built to a Purpose
Taking further inspiration from fantasy, these sentient weapons were built for a Purpose.
Whomever created the weapon, created it to have a specific purpose. As the creator will not be around forever, they implemented an intelligence to monitor that purpose. Now, even as a weapon this purpose does not have to be directly related to actually using the weapon.
This is a more direct inspiration from more magic fantasy-based fiction where specific weapons were used to determine worthiness or were used. The Sword in the Stone from Arthurian myth could only be drawn by the next King. In a similar vein, a firearm might be locked until a particular combination of DNA and deed are met. The sentience of the weapon has little to do with firing it and everything to do with being worthy of firing it. It is as much a symbol of something as it is a weapon.
## Birth of a Legend
Another potential purpose is to be a Legend. Depending on your setting, this could also be the recreation of a legend through more scientific means. These weapons are purposefully built to be powerful single weapons, sentient enough to know what kind of legend that they are inspired from and want to create.
The weapons, in the hands of a novice, are also dangerous to the user. As such, the sentience of the weapon aims to mold its wielder into a being that can make full use of its power. It blocks the powerful attacks of itself off until its user is ready for them, and does what it can to teach its wielder about it full potential.
This could be enhanced by the AI in the weapon actually being programmed to create a champion or empowered individual with that weapon.
## Conclusion
The main idea is that, like in fantasy, that personal sentient AI weapons are not the norm -- they are in fact an oddity.
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# Why such a weapon would be created in the first place?
An example of this could be Iron Man's "JARVIS" system. It basically acts like Tony's companion. A simple computer could advise you of incoming threats and provide updates in a personalized way, but it would be cold and exact. An AI could provide a "friendly" face to incoming information. As Tony operates alone, JARVIS is really the only "person" he has around to bounce ideas off of and to temper his risky actions.
# Why make a weapon that might not obey you?
If you're evil? You might not - If you're good you might want to weapon to act as a second opinion for your actions:
>
> Apologies, that shot had a 82% change of penetrating the target entirely and continuing onward, causing collateral damage to vulnerable targets behind it. Instead, based on the trajectory of all targets I opted to engage gyroscopes and re-position the shot for you for a cleaner kill."
>
>
>
Having a weapon only work for you does mean that an enemy can't use it against you.
# Even if it chooses you, it might still refuse to obey certain commands you give it.
Again, this might be the desired outcome, either to stop you accidentally doing something you didn't want to do (Like above), something you're not allowed to do (Perhaps weapons for a police force that will not let them execute people extra-judicially), or something you might regret later (Insert war crime here).
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**An advisor with centuries of experience, from the gestalt of its users**
The weapon's intelligence is made up of the gestalt of all those who wielded it before. I'm going to assume that in your setting, the weapon is unique, and also serves as a badge of office, since it is able to judge who wields it. If your setting is sci-fi, which is what it sounds like, then wielders have their minds and memories constantly backed up in the weapon; if the setting is fantasy, then their soul merges with the gestalt on death. After several centuries in service, you now have the experience of all those previous wielders, which it can use to judge potential wielders, mentor them, and eventually serve as an advisor to them. This weapon was made this way because the benefits of having all the previous users continuing to serve their office vastly outweighed the potential of it occasionally not listening. "after all", said the populace, "with all those memories, it must have a good reason not to listen, right?"
If the weapon is not unique, but still not within the military, then you might be able to use this feature still, but the connotation changes from a unique badge of office to a mark of identity and lineage in the armed forces, i.e. "I am the Sword of Caliburn, thirteenth of my name."
In both cases, these have wider effects on society as wielders of these weapons would be seen as fonts of wisdom, and an elite force. Whether that is true or not is another matter entirely.
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Sentience already exists first, it also possesses additional characteristics such as general intelligence, or maybe amazing motion sensing skills or weight calculations or control over its own body etc etc.
We are at war and can't figure out how to replicate the capabilities of this sentient being in a non-sentient form. Moral hazards are undertaken for the greater good.
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This is a difficult question to ask since so potentially politically charged discussions and I'm making some large sweeping statements in trends. I am not saying anything specifically about whether I agree or disagree with any of the below, only the trends I believe I see. I ask that we avoid discussing the right or wrong of any of the below, or to what extent any applies currently, and focus only on the result of larger trends.
Prejudice against groups or factions have been around for all of human history. Some minority groups have gotten a particularly negative view and accusation of causing social ills throughout history, Christians, Jews, Irish, Hispanics, Homosexuals, and Muslims have all had the 'joy' of this distinction at one time or another.
In recent years we have made 'progress'. Racism was traditionally the most common prejudice, but recently science/genetics have led to some arguing that race is a construct with little justification; meanwhile the continued intermingling of races, partially due to such rapid transportation, have lead to racial lines growing increasingly intermingled making 'race' harder to define.
To a similar extent villainizing a nation, the way that happened during WW2 or during the Cold War, can become harder. Ease of communication with people from other cultures makes it apparent when stereotypes are unwarranted, and the rapid spread of cultural memes due to communication, travel & internet mean that increasingly shared culture is existing amongst geographically distant nations.
Finally, the internet allows people from minority ideologies or lifestyles to find each other and rally together to defend themselves against negative representations of their lifestyle, which I think is part of the reason cause like gay marriage were accepted so rapidly compared to similar causes of the past like bi-racial marriage.
The point being technology seems to have lead to trends that are causing traditional boundaries for prejudice to be less accepted with each generation. However, while I'm optimistic about this, the fact is human nature doesn't change; and we're evolutionarily predisposed to creating "us vs them" groups that make it easier to justify mistreatment of the "them" group.
So, if we accept my premise that the traditional boundaries mentioned above will continue to grow less acceptable, but that humans will still find ways to be prejudiced, then the question is where will that prejudice appear? Will there be a new class of "acceptable targets", or some new form of ideological division between "us" and "them" that are deemed acceptable for justifying treating a member of the group worse in the near future even as science is working hard to disprove baseless accusations and fast communication makes rumor mongering easily disproved?
I'm looking at near-future, say a generation or two, and particularly want to look at how the technology is helping to modify culture, presuming fast instantaneous communication and internet is now ubiquitous.
EDIT:
one bias I realized re-reading this that none mentioned is language bias. I see this being a big one in the near future, anyone who I can't speak with, despite all my instantaneous communication, is easy to prejudice against. Up until we get language translation services so effective as to make language a minor barrier to communication, which despite our rapid growth in technology I don't see happening for a little while longer.
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It seems like you're saying that access to technology allows people to better represent themselves and break down stereotypes and prejudices. So I would suggest that the only stereotypes and prejudices that would remain would be those created by different levels of access to technology.
There are many examples of this. For instance, there are old people or people who don't know much about technology, who are viewed as slow, stupid, or backwards in today's society. In many technological subcultures, there is a disconnect between the 'tryhards' and the 'casuals', people who spend a lot of time with the technology and become adept at it are often at odds with the people who use the technology infrequently and thus know very little about how it works. There are also lines drawn along different products, such as Mac vs PC and PC vs consoles. All of these divisions can be magnified to excessive levels, probably have been by some individuals already, and probably will be even more as technology becomes ever more pervasive in society.
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## **Prejudice will go away when in-group/out-group psychology goes away**
[In-group bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups) is when a person psychologically identifies themselves to be within a certain group. Anyone who doesn't have this same mental identifier (and outward group characteristics) are the out-group. As a result of in-group psychology we get [in-group favoritism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups#In-group_favoritism) leading to special treatment for insiders and horrible treatment of outsiders. Pick your favorite group dichotomy: politically conservative vs politically liberal, Macs vs PCs, Xbox vs PlayStation vs Wii, hicks vs city-folk, uplanders vs lowlanders....or the Haves vs the Have-Nots.
While technology may equalize some stereotypes and improve the representation of some underrepresented/oppressed out-groups, until humans no longer express in-group favoritism, there will always be an out-group to oppress/suppress.
More to the questions main point, yes, there will be new us vs. them dichotomies as each depends on the specific culture and situation of the time. However, without more details about the situation, the people and their culture, the universe of answers is far too large to answer here.
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On the premise that we would eventually be able to get past our religious intolerance, racism, classism, sexism, nationalism, and cultural intolerance then the immediate answer is Androids or thinking AIs.
Humans would not allow a thinking AI to exist outside of their control. Anything we create would have a kill-switch and other ways to control it. We should expect the first several generation of Androids/AIs to be treated as slaves.
Next since we will not be getting rid of capitalism anytime in the near future, all of the inequality of wealth will continue to exist in the future. Any type of augment that we develop will be sold. As an example, a chip to let you be always online would divide the haves and the have-nots thoroughly.
A person who has not been enhanced might not be persecuted in the traditional sense but the doors open to them would be very limited in a world where it was a prerequisite for most jobs or allowed for enhanced social interaction like smart phones. Depending on how early in life someone is expected to get the enhancement, children are absolute monsters to people who are different and that will never go away.
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# Prejudice goes both ways
It is **rarely** the case of a group being prejudiced against while being tolerant and non-prejudiced in return. When it comes to group dynamics and "Us vs Them" thinking, this tends to go both ways. Yes, a black person can be a racist against white people. Yes, a female can be sexist against males. Yes, old people can be intolerant of young. It is just that the white, the males and the young managed to elbow their way ahead of the blacks, the females and the old and as such be able to affect the prejudice with devastating effects.
So what you need to figure out are what new kinds of **groups** will form in the future.
I can picture two from the top if my head:
## Religious Believers vs Non-believers
Non-belief / atheism / anti-theism is strongly on the rise and shows no signs of abating. The outlook that claims of knowing the divine will are essentially meaningless is gaining ground. Theism is having to retreat.
Nevertheless there are still strong theistic forces in motion. The Catholic Church... states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia... the violence of Daesh. Religious belief is not going down without a fight.
We can expect that belief and non-belief will have strong friction between each other as belief is being forced out of the public discourse, and the religious struggle to stop it from happening.
## Natural Evolution vs Accelerated and Augmented Evolution
We are on the brink of being able to tinker with the human body and biological life itself in some amazing ways. [Cybernetic limb replacement is already making us gasp](https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance) at the obvious science fiction air they have to them. Implants that enable deaf people to hear are already commonplace. Genetic treatments against cancer are progressing in long strides. Some have even claimed that [they have created the first entirely human-designed genome](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1279988/Artificial-life-created-Craig-Venter--wipe-humanity.html) and made it viable.
There will be resistance against this. People will be wary of it. The anti-GMO movement is just the start. The prospects are frightening.
EDIT: Also there are those who envision a world where people are self-reliant and throw off all of that infrastructure — in both the physical and the figurative sense — that is needed to maintain the high-tech sci-fi version of the future. A sort of "Back To Nature" movement. Here you find the anti-corporation and the "No to Big Phrama/Corporation/Power/Nuclear/Whatever" crowds.
At the same time there will be those that happily embrace it. Those that feel it is long over-due we overcame the disadvantages and flaws that natural evolution left behind. That it is time we faced off with death itself and showed it its proper place. These people embrace the corporations and organisations that enable this kind of future.
The friction between groups will come to a head. In a sense that debate is already happening (see the comments to this answer). There will be debate and animosity. The naturalists feeling that the modified are unnatural and freakish, the modified that the naturalists are being Luddites, standing in the way of progress and ending suffering. For instance the movie [Gattaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) explores the relationship between these groups.
Which of these groups will be able to gain an advantage of the others is up to you to explore. :)
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It will be the people who don't keep up with technology or develop their education.
As DaaaahWhoosh already pointed out, old people are viewed as slow, stupid, and backwards in technological contexts. And as a software developer, I've noticed a lot of current arguments that there isn't a lot of diversity in my field, so I'm going to focus on that.
Those people who feel like their group isn't represented in computer science tend to (at least, here in the United States) coalesce where their issues are heard by similar people. Right now, that would be the more liberal, progressive sceneries of the Western university or college campus. Unfortunately, a liberal arts program in *Problems My Group Faces* does not really tend to provide a lot of computer science degrees, so that cycle continues, especially if that pattern grows.
One of the highest reasons for societal strife is not so much prejudice or racism, but classism and gaps between the lower/middle class and the upper or higher class citizenry.
As technology grows, and if people don't stop self-segregating as much, it means that the positive and healthy economies and job markets of the technological sector will be only enjoyed by the people who become involved in that somehow, to some degree, in some fashion.
People suffer from a severe case of the in-group/out-group mentality, and right now it's one of the most polarized times ever in terms of political affiliation, or whether people are left-leaning or right-leaning.
However, the rich will get richer, and that gap of social class will continue to grow larger if large groups of people keep avoiding STEM-based careers as STEM continues to grow in importance - which it will. And that holds true for anyone - it will be old people who don't keep up to date or keep on secondary education. It will even be people considered "privileged" who also don't pursue it.
People who are poor because they are not involved in higher paying jobs (and technology does very well in that regard, because of the way it's distributed) will continue to be relegated to lower income neighbourhoods and lifestyles. And they will be the most prejudiced against.
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This isn't a matter for the future. It is present currently. As race, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, etc have all passed away as socially acceptable sources of prejudice, they have already been replaced. AGE is now the most widely accepted criteria by which it is seen as socially acceptable to base prejudice on.
The support for arguments claiming the validity of prejudice based on age is identical to the arguments claiming to support prior prejudices. Current phenomena which are caused by social treatment of the class are claimed to be inherent traits. Medical and psychological communities support them. When exceptions are encountered, they are dismissed as freaks.
When a child or adolescent makes a statement which conflicts with that of an adult, they can be dismissed out of hand. Their freedoms, to make decisions about their own life, schedule their own time, choose what to learn, what to wear, who to associate with, etc, can all be taken away without any consideration to their own thoughts, as it is claimed and widely believed that they are incapable of making such decisions themselves. Note I am not talking about a view that young people are ignorant. But that they are incapable of learning, as a fundamental property of their identity. When a well-informed young person is encountered, the idea is never entertained that it might be possible for all young people to become similarly well-informed. They are written off as a prodigy and 'the exception that proves the rule.'
Some of the scientific support for prejudice against the young leads to some amusing (to me) situations. For decades, the neuroplasticity of child and adolescent brains was used to justify tremendous restrictions on their lives and removal of almost every form of control they had over their own lives. It was said with such force that the neuroplasticity of youth made them incapable of learning certain complex ideas, fundamentally incapable of long-term planning or rational action, etc. There's a problem, though. Continuing research has revealed that adults, also, retain a great deal of neuroplasticity. At the time, it was presumed that neuroplasticity went away as the brain 'matured' around age 25. Beyond that point, it was believed the brain was 'done' and finally ready to face adult life.
Plasticity does degrade over time, and ceases almost entirely (regardless of age) when novelty and continued learning are cut off, but there is no clear neurological milestone at which you could plant a flag and say "Here, this human being is an adult, prepared for the responsibilities and decision-making that entails." Perhaps we should institute dress codes at places of employment, push the acceptable age of marriage back to 50, and rigorously restrict everything modern 'adults' see, hear, read, etc?
Society took the idea 'the brains of the young are still developing' and somehow used this to support restricting the youngs exposure to new experiences. This is probably the most aggressively destructive thing one could do to a human brain. The visual cortex is most actively developing at birth, and if you conclude that this means it is "not ready" for experiencing the world, and you shut off visual stimuli to 'protect' the developing brain, you will soon discover that the brain does not develop. And also, if binocular vision is not attained by an early age (I believe 2 months), it can never be attained. Brain development is exactly the changes to the brain that occur exclusively as the result of novel and intense experiences. One can not remove the experiences and retain any form of development. And the brain has 'critical periods' during which certain capabilities must be acquired, or else it becomes incapable of ever acquiring them.
When a child is born deaf, we do not look at their developing auditory cortex and conclude that a cochlear implant would be dangerous. We know that it is necessary for such an implant to be installed before age 2 or else the person may never in their life be capable of normal hearing with the implant. We presume, for social convenience and for no well-supported reason, that this type of situation is not repeated in other areas of brain development, such as learning how to deal with complex human relationships, handling one's own emotions, forming one's own beliefs about morality, etc.
The prejudice against the young (prejudices also exist for other age groups, including the elderly, but our society is currently most aggressively discriminating against the young) is a good source of learning, I think. By looking at it, and how you might see it yourself, I believe you can much better understand the prejudices of the past. Personally, I am 37 years old and grew up while most other prejudices were in a position where they were argued about. That is an inaccurate picture of what real prejudice looks like. Real prejudice, which is accepted by a society, is something which the majority believe not to be ill-spirited or even worth discussing. It is simply 'how the world is' and there is little sense in questioning it. That is the situation we currently find ourselves in with the prejudice based on age. Age is understood to be a controlling factor over a person second only to gravity, and one which wipes away any need to engage with a persons situation on an individual basis, because there is no point in even trying to assist in their development as a human being.
[Answer]
Reasonable people out of step with the current trends will face prejudice and be labelled as bigots and promoters of hate.
If trends for language correctness carry on as they are, the middle aged and above will face prejudice from younger idealists for not keeping up with what the latest acceptable parlance is, and for example saying "colored people", rather than "people of color", they'll be declared to be awful bigots.
Followers of ideologies will try more and more to be conflated with oppressed groups, the same way that some people will try to label you as anti-semitic if you criticise Israel or Islamophobic if you criticise Islamic doctrine whilst never discriminating against muslims.
[Answer]
**Your assumptions are wrong:**
>
> Will there be a new class of "acceptable targets", or some new form of ideological division between "us" and "them" that are deemed acceptable for justifying treating a member of the group worse in the near future even as science is working hard to disprove baseless accusations and **fast communication makes rumor mongering easily disproved**?
>
>
>
**Yes, science might disprove baseless accusations. But will people believe it?**
You just need to look at the current refugee situation in Europe after they got more and more. The biggest camps (letting the refugees aside) are the mostly left "refugees welcome" (I have not found a better name) and mostly right nationalists at the moment. Each group uses the internet and other means to spread roumors and fake evidents about the refugees and the other group.
Some of the bigger mainstream newspapers are regularly disproving wrong rumours (like refugees getting high end smartphones gifted from the state at entering) but many people stopped believing the mainstream media because they tell different things than the things they heared from people they trust and use "alternative" media sources on the internet which more in their line and join groups in social networks which "prove" their believes.
Some extreme nationalists are attacking refugees and left peole with knives, pepperspray and burning down houses and extremists of the other camp attacking the nationalists especially at demos.
Most mainstream stopped to report about such incidents to not heat up the situation more (and maybe because of political pressure). But this also helped the camps to say that they are not telling the (full) truth and distrusting them and using their alternative sources as source for their believe.
**People are both: rational and irrational**. Let them identify as a group and mix it a **fear/common enemy/jealousy/hate/Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt** and they get irrational and they will not rationally believe rational proves.
In this case "arguments" of the nationalists: refugees taking away "our" jobs, taking "our" hard earned money for "free" (from the social system), endangering "our" social norms with "theirs", "they" are different/dangerous/people from "their" country are criminals, "we" need to defend "our" country, ...
Arguments of the other camp: people of "our" human race need help because of war and against "those" nationalists attacking people like "us"
**Prejudice comes from judging**/forming an opinion **before becoming aware of the relevant facts of a case**. People never know everything beforehand. So they need to judge before it is too late/avoiding risk.
Let's take the following situation: You and your group are walking down a street. You notice a group of another ethnicity/... coming in your direction. You recently heared many examples about violant attacks from people of this kind against people of your kind. Maybe let them look like punks or aggressive. Will you A) ignore them and continue walking normally down the street because you think they have nothing in common with those attacks (dangorous for yourself) or B) think they are dangerous and you maybe will need to defend yourself(safe for yourself)? (I know in many cases there is a third options but lets ignore this for simplicity). If you are choicing B you get prejudice. If this gets bigger or for no reason society gets a problem.
The refugees sitatuation is only one example of many but you can **exchange those against many of the other groups depending on the current political/economical/national/social/... situation**.
The only way stopping this is by proper education, a social norm against prejudice and having the people a life without fear/common enemy/jealousy/hate/Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I hope I could get this written down in a objective and correct way but I mostly tried to keep it as understandable as possible and it was one of the best examples I could think about.
[Answer]
Augmented vs unaugmented humans. Meaning mentally or otherwise enhanced, but primarily mentally since in the future economy, mental enhancement will likely lead to greater advantage than any other kind of enhancement, be it genetic or bionic (genetic enhancement will likely play a significant role in mental enhancement).
Brainets are on the horizon (true story, read it here: <http://www.nature.com/articles/srep10767>). This will possibly be a game changer for psychology and it seems that health care in general is becoming more accessible and there is a new focus on the incorporation of and better access to mental health care in over all health care. So if it becomes very cheap and very effective to heal our emotional wounds and we have technology that allows us to connect our minds directly together - allowing people to know beyond a shadow of a doubt how another person thinks and feels - its likely that the societal impact will be so overwhelmingly positive as to largely erase most forms of emotional violence.
That's the profoundly optimistic view. There may also be a dark side. Obviously mentally enhanced persons and collective bodies that undertake braineting will be intellectually superior to individual, un-enhanced humans, and I doubt that anyone will be required to connect their brains together (though the technology may enable a new and quite disturbing form of mental assault), nor will anyone be required to receive (or accept) mental health treatment. And I tend to reach into pessimism often if for no other reason than just to see what I find there. So of course there will be the potential for augmented humans to even more acutely undervalue un-augmented humans than there is for common persons to undervalue other common persons.
That being said, I tend toward the middle ground. Some of the negative stuff will likely happen and augmented humans may be (much) more difficult to control that their common counterparts, however, once the cat is out of the bag and people embrace the technology, the potential radical benefits will balance much of the bad - and the trend of improvement will likely proceed unabated.
[Answer]
>
> where will that prejudice appear?
>
>
>
Wherever the "others" are different from your "us".
>
> Will there be a new class of "acceptable targets",
>
>
>
For sure.
>
> or some new form of ideological division between "us" and "them"
>
>
>
Absolutely. Think about anything, *anything* you are doing in real life. Forget the big topics like race, gender etc.. Are you doing some sports activity? Playing tennis? Then you certainly heard tennis players downtalking, say, badminton or squash players, if maybe only in a funny way. Sure, tennis players would probably not go out and genocide squash players, but this is the root of the problem (as far as it *is* in itself a problem, which would be a different discussion).
>
> that are deemed acceptable for justifying treating a member of the group worse
>
>
>
Whenever group A differs from group B in *any* thinkable way whatsoever, and places at least some importance on that difference, you will have your justification for treating the other group worse. This will not go away, but is inherent in psychology. So unless we all transform into a big blob of unthinking gray goo, you will have alienation between groups with different stages of escalation (from slight uneasyness up to all-out war).
Technology may play a part, i.e., reducing said differences, but has nothing to do with the cause of the issue, as far as I would say.
[Answer]
This is an old question so I am surprised no one mentioned it, but what about individuals with large social networks versus individuals without large social networks? As society evolves to depend more and more upon how many social connections or “friends” one has, this is increasingly creating divisions and advantages between the “popular” and the “unpopular”. In a hyper-democratized medium like the internet and social media, those with more followers have proportionately more influence, and thus more power than those with fewer followers. In the future (and arguably now), this translates into real monetary and economic advantages too—just think about the term “professional networking“. The economic advantages conferred to the popular even extend to simple twitter and instagram followers—not too long ago, a clothing store called OnePiece made headlines by offering selective discounts to people based on [how many social media followers they had](http://www.complex.com/style/2014/11/soho-onepiece-pop-up-pay-with-social-media-followers). The idea was to gain goodwill among the “influences” of social media. To my knowledge, they are still doing that to this day. In some industries like modeling, having a large number of followers on one’s personal Instagram account has [become a job prerequesite](http://nextshark.com/instagram-models-need-10000-followers-to-land-a-gig/).
A very interesting book that explores this concept is [*Extras*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extras_(novel)) by Scott Westerfeld. In this world, humans, in order to ration the use of resources (to preserve the environment), have established an economy where popularity is literally currency. Having more mentions (retweets, likes, followers, etc on social media in this universe) increases your social “face-rank” which determines the proportion of the community’s resources you are allotted. The idea is to encourage creative work and to place a premium on intellectual property and celebrity in a post-industrial society where “production” is no longer relevant to human happiness.
] |
[Question]
[
**This question already has answers here**:
[How can I measure the distance between two stars? [closed]](/questions/148584/how-can-i-measure-the-distance-between-two-stars)
(4 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I am working on a hard(ish) science fiction space opera story, and I would like to get a good handle on distances between stars so that I can calculate appropriate travel times. There are a lot of resources online to find how far stars are from here - for example, Tau Ceti is 11.89 light-years away and Ross 248 is 11.32 light-years away - but how far is Tau Ceti from Ross 248? Is there any easy way to find out?
[Answer]
## An exact answer
The position of a star in space can be specified by three coordinates: Its right ascension, $\alpha$, its declination, $\delta$, which are collectively referred to as *equatorial coordinates*, and its distance from Earth, $d$. It's probably easiest to calculate the distance between two stars by converting equatorial coordinates to Cartesian coordinates:
$$x=d\cos\delta\cos\alpha$$
$$y=d\cos\delta\sin\alpha$$
$$z=d\sin\delta$$
Once you convert two stars' equatorial coordinates and distance from Earth to Cartesian coordinates, you can simply use the Pythagorean theorem to find their separation.
To use your example, Tau Ceti has right ascension $\alpha\_1=1:44:04$, declination $\delta\_1=-15^{\circ}56'15''$ and distance to Earth $d\_1=11.9\;\text{light-years}$. Ross 248 has $\alpha\_2=23:41:55$, $\delta=+44^{\circ}10'39''$ and $d=10.3\;\text{light-years}$. Here, I'm using hours, minutes and seconds for right ascension and degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds for declination.
If you don't want to do the calculations by hand, I wrote [a Python script](https://github.com/HDE226868/Stellar-Distances/blob/master/distances.py) to do it using [`astropy`](https://www.astropy.org/):$^{\dagger}$
```
#!/usr/bin/env python
import numpy as np
from astropy import units as u
from astropy.coordinates import SkyCoord
ra_1 = '1:44:04'
dec_1 = '-15:56:15'
dist_1 = 11.9
ra_2 = '23:41:55'
dec_2 = '+44:10:39'
dist_2 = 10.3
def coords(ra, dec, dist):
""Converts equatorial coordinates to Cartesian coordinates""
new_coords = SkyCoord(ra, dec, unit=(u.hourangle, u.deg))
ra, dec = new_coords.ra.radian, new_coords.dec.radian
x = dist*np.cos(dec)*np.cos(ra)
y = dist*np.cos(dec)*np.sin(ra)
z = dist*np.sin(dec)
return x, y, z
def dist(ra_1, dec_1, dist_1, ra_2, dec_2, dist_2):
""Computes distance between two sets of Cartesian coordinates""
x_1, y_1, z_1 = coords(ra_1, dec_1, dist_1)
x_2, y_2, z_2 = coords(ra_2, dec_2, dist_2)
separation = np.sqrt((x_2 - x_1)**2 + (y_2 - y_1)**2 + (z_2 - z_1)**2)
print('The separation is {} light-years'.format(separation))
dist(ra_1, dec_1, dist_1, ra_2, dec_2, dist_2)
```
This tells me that Tau Ceti and Ross 248 are 12.2 light-years apart.
---
$^{\dagger}$It's not great, but it works, and hey, this is astronomy. . .
## Estimating distances
A general method which you might find handy as an *estimate* is to just calculate the mean distances between stars in a particular area - it saves you from having to do spherical trigonometry.
We can get the mean separation between nearby stars, $l$ by calculating the local stellar number density, $n$. This is [generally agreed to be $n\sim0.1\;\text{pc}^{-3}$](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/393902/56299), i.e. 1 stars per 10 cubic parsecs. Some groups have found values differing by a factor of 2 or 3; [Wikipedia in particular gives $0.14\;\text{pc}^{-3}$](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_density). The mean separation is then [approximately $l\approx n^{-1/3}$](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_inter-particle_distance)or
$$l\approx n^{-1/3}=(0.1\;\text{pc}^{-3})^{-1/3}\approx2.2\;\text{parsecs}=7\;\text{light-years}$$
or a bit under twice the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth.
This value should change in different places throughout the galaxy. In general . . .
* It will decrease the closer you get to the galactic center.
* It will decrease in areas of recent star formation.
* It will increase in the (relatively rarefied) stellar halo, and in general outside the plane of the galaxy.
* It will decrease in open clusters and globular clusters.
* It will increase in spiral arms.
I'd expect variation of around an order of magnitude or two at the extremes.
[Answer]
I don't know if there is any catalogue that will give you the information you need. You will have to math it out. Think of this: there are up to 10,000 stars visible to the naked eye, so a full table with all the distances between any giver pair would have around 50,000,000 rows. It would be a really large book.
So you have to math it out. The easy way is to [outsource the work to Wolfram Alpha, as seen in this answer to another question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/148716/21222):
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VgWLQ.jpg)
>
>
>
The hard way is by going full boffin, as per the other answers to that question. But that gets into [hard-science](/questions/tagged/hard-science "show questions tagged 'hard-science'") territory. Anyway, the law of cosines is your friend.
---
By the way, don't forget that stars move. Unless your story deals with instantaneous travel, you'll have to take that into account even when considering FTL.
This chart shows the distances of the closest stars to us over time:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eqrdu.png)
Source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs>
This may be troublesome because Wolfram Alpha will only give you the current distance, not past nor future ones. And for future ones you have to factor in star orbits around the Milky Way, which takes you from basic trigonometry to actual rocket science.
[Answer]
**You can site your story in a place where you like the star distances.**
Our star is in the suburbs of our galaxy. Large lawns. Swimming pools. Renan's answer is good for that.
But there are places more like downtown Hong Kong where star density is much higher. Here is Messier 15 in our galaxy.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvcMO.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_15>
<https://astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2006/01/how-close-can-stars-get-to-each-other-in-galaxy-cores>
>
> M15's center packs approximately 4 million stars per cubic parsec —
> that's more than 75 million times denser than the region around the
> Sun. This works out to an average of only 0.013 light-year, or 860
> astronomical units (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance), between
> stars. Most galaxies, such as M31 in Andromeda, M33 in Triangulum, and
> the Milky Way have central densities close to this value — an average
> separation of 0.013 light-year. But some galaxies pack stars even
> tighter. M32, one of the Andromeda Galaxy's satellites, has the
> highest measured stellar density of any nearby galaxy — around 20
> million stars per cubic parsec in its core!
>
>
>
For reference it is 39 AU from the Sun to Pluto. Voyager 1 is 141 AU away from Earth.
Hard science non FTL travel speeds pose an issue for Earth based scifi on account of our star neighbors are far away. But if you sited your story (or game) in an area of a galaxy where the stars were packed tight like this it would be much quicker to go from star system to star system.
[Answer]
# Using Sol as an example...
The other answers are very precise, both in their information and in their descriptions of the limitations of finding a generalizable answer. If you want specific distances between stars, yes, go with the ever-amazing [Wolfram Alpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how%20far%20is%20Tau%20Ceti%20from%20Ross%20248) (link goes to the answer to your specific question).
With all of that in mind, here's a guide to how many stars you could expect to find within given travel distances of our own star. This is obviously just one example, but it can be instructive by giving you a sense for what proportion of stars are withing each distance. These percentages are only counting the 78,805 stars within 1,000 light years. I can update my code (pasted below) if you want to look farther away. Since your question asks about a star pairing that's so close, I'm assuming your story doesn't involve traveling thousands of light years.
0 stars (0%) are located within 0 light years
170 stars (0%) are located within 25 light years
986 stars (1%) are located within 50 light years
2,566 stars (3%) are located within 75 light years
4,060 stars (5%) are located within 100 light years
5,575 stars (7%) are located within 125 light years
7,540 stars (10%) are located within 150 light years
9,745 stars (12%) are located within 175 light years
11,962 stars (15%) are located within 200 light years
14,300 stars (18%) are located within 225 light years
16,778 stars (21%) are located within 250 light years
19,218 stars (24%) are located within 275 light years
21,866 stars (28%) are located within 300 light years
24,570 stars (31%) are located within 325 light years
27,182 stars (34%) are located within 350 light years
29,885 stars (38%) are located within 375 light years
32,560 stars (41%) are located within 400 light years
35,143 stars (45%) are located within 425 light years
37,735 stars (48%) are located within 450 light years
40,223 stars (51%) are located within 475 light years
42,733 stars (54%) are located within 500 light years
45,079 stars (57%) are located within 525 light years
47,418 stars (60%) are located within 550 light years
49,599 stars (63%) are located within 575 light years
51,832 stars (66%) are located within 600 light years
54,011 stars (69%) are located within 625 light years
56,099 stars (71%) are located within 650 light years
58,082 stars (74%) are located within 675 light years
60,033 stars (76%) are located within 700 light years
62,047 stars (79%) are located within 725 light years
63,875 stars (81%) are located within 750 light years
65,644 stars (83%) are located within 775 light years
67,334 stars (85%) are located within 800 light years
68,938 stars (87%) are located within 825 light years
70,579 stars (90%) are located within 850 light years
72,100 stars (91%) are located within 875 light years
73,568 stars (93%) are located within 900 light years
75,022 stars (95%) are located within 925 light years
76,310 stars (97%) are located within 950 light years
77,629 stars (99%) are located within 975 light years
78,805 stars (100%) are located within 1000 light years
```
# http://www.astronexus.com/hyg
library(tidyverse)
library(scales)
library(glue)
count_stars_within <- function(distance) {
dta <- star %>%
filter(dist <= distance)
tibble(
distance = distance,
n = nrow(dta),
percent = nrow(dta) / nrow(star)
)
}
star <- read_csv("http://www.astronexus.com/files/downloads/hygdata_v3.csv.gz") %>%
select(id, proper, dist, x, y, z) %>%
# Remove missing data
filter(dist != 100000.0) %>%
# Convert distances to light years
mutate(dist = dist * 3.262) %>%
# Only keep stars within 1,000 light years
filter(dist <= 1000, dist > 0)
summary(star$dist)
map_dfr(seq(from = 0, to = 1000, by = 25), count_stars_within) %>%
mutate(distance = glue(
"{comma(n)} stars ({percent(percent)}) are located within {distance} light years"
)) %>%
select(distance) %>%
write.table("clipboard", sep = "\t", row.names = FALSE)
```
[Answer]
If you're looking to get a feel for the scale, rather than perhaps deal with the exact numbers and trajectories
You might try a simulation, such as [Space Engine](http://spaceengine.org/)
With this, you can *see* the distances involved and what stars are relatively nearer one another.
I think for story-telling purposes this is probably more valuable.
[Answer]
**[Traveller 2300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2300_AD) (roleplaying game)**
One of the nice features of this roleplaying game was:
>
> The Near Star Catalog
>
>
> The Traveller: 2300universe deals with star systems within 50 light
> years of Earth. Extensive research and analysis has produced the most
> accurate star map ever made. Never before has such a monumentouts task
> been undertaken, either in gaming or in science fiction: over 700
> stars in over 500 systems, on a 22" x 25" color map. Location, special
> type, size and magnitude are documented in a separate star catalog.
>
>
>
While I do not have a copy to check, I recall that all of the stars were listed with x, y, z coordinates to allow the distances between each star to be calculated using Pythagoras' Theorem. A quick Google indicates that while the information was the best available in 1986 when the game was published, comments such as [this](http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?t=93985) thread cast some doubt on whether some of the details have stood the test of time. So while Renan's answer and others may give more easily used resources, the Traveller 2300 rulebook is a paper-and-pen resource that can be used completely offline. It certainly worked for those of us playing the game back in the late 1980s when we needed to calculate the distances between the origin and destination stars our characters were travelling between, although a calculator did come in handy.
] |
[Question]
[
It appears that multiple planets existing in the same orbit is [theoretically possible](http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.5377). In that case, how would we go about building a second Earth-sized planet and inserting it into some position in Earth's orbital path? I was thinking planet-construction would be more likely succeed in that region since we know it's a perfect distance from the sun to support life.
Assume we have the technology to supply/harvest, and ship whatever materials required for this endeavor, to whatever location the building takes place. A couple scenarios I've considered:
* Something similar to the [world factory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Magrathea) in THGTTG, where we build it offsite such that the new planet doesn't mess with other planets' orbits and whatnot. The final product can be transported into orbit later.
* Closer to the Death Star process, where construction takes place in the new world's final orbital location. Seems like this would add complications with gravitational effects on and from other planets, although I'm not sure what exactly.
How plausible are these methods, and what other better ones could work?
[Answer]
**New Earth Recipe:**
Ingredients:
* 32 parts iron
* 30 parts oxygen
* 15 parts silicon
* 14 parts magnesium
* 3 parts sulfur
* 2 parts nickel
* 1.1 parts calcium
* 1.1 parts aluminum>
* ~1 parts of a varying mixture of metals/metalloids/nonmetals from across the periodic table
Bring all ingredients to a molten state; evenly mix until roughly 7100 miles in diameter; and set to a spin on tilted axis at 23.5 degrees at a rotation speed of 1036 mph, moving at a rate of roughly 18.5 miles/sec in an elliptical formation around a low-grade star emitting 174 PW of energy to the surface.
Heat to 5700 K.
This should be enough to cause the planetary body to undergo an iron catastrophe, which will allow the insides of the cake to separate into layers.
Add moon.
Once magnetic field of sufficient strength is detected (caused by formation of solid iron/nickel inner core, +/- 10% light component combined with gravitational pull developed by spinning), reduce ambient temperature to at least -100 degrees Centigrade (though preferably much lower to speed things up).
Once mantle has sufficiently formed and surface temperatures cooled to 122 degrees Centigrade, sprinkle comets and seed with Xenophilic bacteria. (This may require several hundred thousand bioreactors worth to take.)
Go grab a few hundred million beers.
Once the oceans have formed and volcanic activity has sufficiently subsided, begin tweaking atmospheric concentrations to desired levels. (This may require the sacrifice of several million beers as inoculant. Don't worry, though, this will allow for the brewing of many millions more).
Repeatedly check sodium levels in oceans, and if needed, add salt (this is key!).
Once volatile tectonic activity and superstorms have subsided and atmospheric levels have stabilized to appropriate levels, bring in the plants and animals (in that order).
Subcontract to the Magratheans the job of planting/decorating/chemically altering the planet as you desire.
Congratulations, you now have your very own earth. Throw a party, invite your friends.
[Answer]
**Build it in place, certainly.** You're going to be collecting mass from all over the solar system to construct such a thing, there is little point in moving it all again after it's collected. Any gravitational effects of moving an entire planet through the solar system would be more tricky than moving all the little bits to the final destination. **I wouldn't call it the Death Star process, I'd call it growing a planet.**
If you have the ability to move something planet sized around, then I recommend you simply move Mars into a lower orbit. Add a bit of mass, perhaps, then do whatever it was you were going to do to make Earth Mk II habitable. This will save you a lot of energy and time.
I'd rather be a Martian than an "Earth-Mark-Twoian".
[Answer]
**Where to put it**
The L3 Lagrange point is unstable, so you wouldn't want to put your new planet there. Instead, stick it in the L4 or L5 Lagrange points and you'll have a stable three-body system with that, the Earth, and the sun. As an added benefit, the L4 and L5 points are significantly closer to Earth, so travel time between your planets will be less.
**Where to build it**
You'll almost definitely want to build it in place. Most of the solar system is dominated by the gravity of large planets, so there isn't much in terms of good real estate further out in the solar system for planet building, and engines that can move planets between stars aren't known for their gas mileage. If you build your planet at the L4, you can just keep dumping materials there until they start to coalesce under the influence of gravity and mush into a sphere. Stability goes both ways, so doing so will neither knock your new planet out of its stable point nor knock Earth out of its orbit. If your new planet gets off of the Lagrange point, it will cause both itself and the Earth to wobble a bit in their orbits, but they'll stay in generally the same place. The heating involved in this process should be enough to get a geodynamo working. It will also probably be enough to liquefy your new planet, so you'll have to wait a few million years for it to cool before starting your terraforming process.
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You will almost have to steal one of the other planets (such as Mars) and move it to that location. The entire asteroid belt mass estimate is [1/1000th of Earth's](http://www.solstation.com/stars/asteroid.htm) mass. Most of the rest of the mass in the solar system is in the sun (98.6%) and the other planets (Jupiter is 2/3rd the remaining %1.4) So Pluto would have to go too! Actually it looks like Venus (0.815 Earths) + Mars (0.101 Earths) + Mercury (0.055 Earths) + Asteroid belt, + Pluto would = ~1 earth mass. Could of course steal a few moons from the big planets if you don't want to waste all the planets. Might be able to save Mercury and Mars
If you are moving Venus, then you might as well build it there first, since it is %81 the mass of earth and as you make the collisions you are going to be leaving as much of a mess in the path of the earth (meteors). Once you have it built to size then you can push it into the needed orbit, Though it might be better to be in a different orbit in the goldilocks zone. Someone pointed out that the Earth's L3 Lagrange point is unstable and now you'd have '2' of them each earth causing the point for the other.
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# The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy Method
To be entirely clear, this is the process of building planets in something like a shipyard and then "shipping" the planet to its desired location.
This is really infeasible, despite Mag Making the planet and then *moving* it into place is really energy intensive. Here are some questions which may illuminate why:
* Where are you going to get materials strong enough to pull a *whole planet* along?
* Are you going to make giant rockets on one side and move it into place that way? If so, what are the fuel sources for your rockets? How do you place them so that they don't just drill into the ground or deform your planet?
* What does the fuel need to combust or otherwise propel? Does this material come from your planet?
This will only work if you have a cheap and effective way of moving the whole planet into position. This problem alone is too large a one for most technologies, even if properly scaled up, to do. You simply need super materials and magic rockets to do so. You're better off trying to find Magrathea with your infinite improbability drive, or ask Slartiblartfast, wherever he is currently.
# The "Death Star" Process
This is more likely. You can get a massive asteroid, or several smaller asteroids, and move it/them into position. You can get the correct distance from the sun, the correct speed for you planet, etc. You then send more asteroids or other items to you planet. Eventually, your planet grows to be pluto sized, then moon sized, and so on until you have your planet.
After a while, you may not even need to move that material "gently" into position. You can just send a comet/asteroid of material and have it impact your proto-planet! Talk about reducing costs!
You will have to do some tricky things to maintain angular momentum. This is so that your planet, with increasing mass, does not slow down and potentially crash into the other one. This is easily avoidable with the "death star" process.
The down side of the "death star" process are, of course, any rebels, ewoks, or other random things getting in the way. I suggest marketing it to the galactic empire as a real estate project, even if you never intend to settle people there.
# Gravitational Effects of a New Planet
...is actually pretty small. The Solar System is a big, big place. If you do some research into [tides](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#Forces), you'll note that the moon is what mostly affects them. All the other planets and even *the sun*, despite their enormity, don't actually contribute all that much. Unless you build your new planet to be massive, or really close, your other planets shouldn't feel all that much.
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If you want to build a second habitable planet the solution IMHO would be to make the Moon (Luna) larger.
It already has a stable orbit that is **very** close to an orbit we **know** to be habitable by humans. The travel time between the new planet and the current one would be minimal, you could conceivably have regular shuttle service. Having a ready core with significant gravity would make the process much easier to start, you'd simply send stuff to the correct orbit and Moon would gobble it up and if the added material had correct orbit to begin with it would not disturb moon orbit. Additionally it would look totally cool; the tax payers would be able to see their money at work. Also AFAIK the double planet system is a stable solution, in any case adding mass to the moon would not make it significantly less stable than it already is. In contrast, making a new planet on Earth orbit or moving Mars or Venus to habitable orbit and enlarging them would cause disturbances in the orbits. I doubt this would be a real problem to a civilization capable of "building planets".
A major problem with something like this would be getting enough mass. But if you start with the Moon and add the material from Mercury, Venus, Mars and the asteroids you'd be close enough. Seriously we probably **could** terraform Venus, if we **really** wanted to. It would be too expensive to really make sense, but Venus is close enough to Earth mass (86%) that it shouldn't require super science.
So terraforming Venus would be a decent plan B. Probably cheaper (but not as cool) as terraforming Moon. With Moon you could honestly claim to have built a new planet, Venus already is a planet and quite similar to Earth.
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If you are actually building a new world, you might want to consider whether to stick to the traditional design of a big spherical of nickel/iron. This leads to "where" options.
If you happen to have cheap mass conversion, you can build a small planet with earth gravity by making it very dense. This will be cheaper in terms of total mass moved. About six lunar masses converted to gold would work nicely, giving earth gravity on a Luna sized planet.
Now, does that mean you can just put it in a Earth orbit?
I'd see the main issue being the tidal effects. To keep to the same as the moon's effect with six times the mass, we need to know that tide varies as the inverse cube of distance. So, put the new planet about 80% further away than the current moon.
You might want to use Luna as a starting point; you can use its gravity to help attract other mass.
Once you'd had practice with the baby planet, you can scale up.
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You'll also need a liquid iron core for radiation protection, a moon to stabilize Earth II's spin axis (it's nice to have seasons). While we're at it, why not create some sort of wormhole to resupply the Sun's hydrogen fuel so that it won't ever run out?
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The Question has minor flaws. Earth is too near to the sun, and it's only saved by it's moon which provides a large magnetic disruption in the earth.
So, the first thing to ask is: how do you create an earth and moon.
It's a reason why habitable planets can be alot rarer than scientific extrasolar dreamers say it is, the chances of having a moon able to make so much magnetic shield, in a habitable zone is small.
The habitable zone is wide and can be optimized using CO2 and atmospheric greenhouse, you could be 15 million miles and be ok, half way between the earth and mars.
Two planets in the same orbit is naturally unstable and doesn't occur in practice. you would have to place a planet further or closer for more safety. If you had the same orbit and needed to adjust it, it would likely create earthquakes and by counterproductive to the colony.
You can have one planet nearer to the sun, and one further away, by 15million miles.
It should be possible to hurl ice at mars and move it's orbit inwards, if you double it's size, you can provide a certain amount of momentum to send it 15,000,000 kilometers from earth. mars is 30mn away and the moon is 1/4million away.
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If I have a very computationally expensive task that no current computer can solve in less than 100 years, I could start the task on a powerful computer, get on board my Super Hyper Extravaganza Space Ship ©™, fly at 0.99999 the speed of light for a while, and when I return to Earth the time dilation effect means that I would have aged much more slowly than my computer. In fact, if I flew long enough, my computer would have aged a few hundred years more than me and the task would be completed.
However there is the issue that everything else on Earth would also have aged a few hundred years more, and the computation that I was solving would no longer be relevant.
If I was to put the computer on the space ship instead that would be silly because, being back on Earth, I would be aging faster than the computer, and from my perspective the task would take thousands of years instead of hundreds.
Is there a way to 'invert' this time dilation? Can I make time pass faster for just the computer, and essentially 'skip forward' to when the task is complete?
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# Yes, But You're Not Going To Like It
Time dilation is all down to frame of reference. So, if you don't want everyone on Earth to age during the computation, you just have to take Earth with you. You already have an unreasonable Super Hyper Extravaganza Space Ship ©™ that can reach and maintain absurd speeds, so...
[Make Earth into a spaceship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth). Will there be technical challenges? You bet. But you will accomplish your desired effect. You will have new, exciting problems, but your initial one will be solved!
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The resolution of the twin paradox rests on the principle that there is an asymmetry between two observers. The observer on the spaceship must, for some amount of time, undergo an acceleration$^{\dagger}$ opposing its velocity so that it doesn't simply keep moving away from the observer on the planet. Therefore, the spaceship is, while accelerating, *no longer in an inertial frame*. If you do the calculations, you find that this leads to the observer in space experiencing time dilation when it returns to the planet. (For more details, see [John Rennie's explanation on Physics Stack Exchange](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/242044/56299).) In short, when it comes to the twin paradox, time flows slower for the observer doing the accelerating.
Therefore, your suggestion would require keeping the computer in an inertial frame while putting the entirety of the universe (or at least Earth and everything else you cared about) in a non-inertial frame, which seems unfeasible with current technology! It's possible that we'll eventually figure that out, but by then, the supercomputer you need (i.e. from the year ~2121, as per your question) will already have been built.
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$^{\dagger}$ Here, "acceleration" refers to any change in velocity, whether involving an increase in speed or a decrease in speed.
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### No. There are other ways to get a 100yr algorithm done faster than 100 years.
The physics of this answer have been answered already (no), however theres an engineering answer to how to do 100years of work in less than 100 years.
Firstly algorithms with these kind of runtimes need to be specially designed to be as parallel as possible, fault tolerant and resumable. Every hard drive this algorithm touches for storage is going to fail and need to be replaced over this time period, and when this happens, you need to not lose the progress you've made, or any data you're yet to process.
Apparently this consideration comes up at Google-levels of data, a single pass over all the data in a single database table takes so long, and the number of hard drives and server clusters involved is so large, that statistically one drive will fail per pass over the data. For your algorithm, every hard drive will fail and need replacing. Multiple times.
Because of this already-existing design consideration on your algorithm, and becuase you need to replace hardware anyway (and why buy antique hardware?), you will inadvertently upgrade the hardware over time as new hardware comes out. If computers double in power every 2 years, you can process 2% of your algorithm in 2 years, then upgrade and process 4% in the next 2 years, then 8% the next 2 years, then 16%, then 32%, then the final 38% in the last year. The algorithm will complete after 11 years and 5 hardware upgrade cycles.
Also due to the fault tolerant and resume features of the algorithm, you can upgrade the algorithm over time too, making it faster and more efficient as developers micro optimise every last detail of it over the years, putting out new versions, which the super computer starts using on the next reboot / hardware replacement. Sit a team of developers in a room for a year and theyll be able to speed anything up eventually, making the next year slightly more efficient. They could improve the compiler or 3rd party code to speed up the runtime too. They could discover new maths to totally rewrite the approach. How much this returns depends on how optimised the algorithm already was, I'd be surprised if it was below 100% speedup.
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## Yes, but it has side effects
1. If you have a wormhole and let one end travel on a relativistic round trip, you will get a wormhole connecting the time-dilated end in the future with the "stationary" end in the "present" - a time machine. Using [CTC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve) and information from the future for hypercomputation is trivial. Sadly, wormholes might just not exist in this universe, and if they do, [CTCs might be disallowed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_protection_conjecture).
2. a [Malament–Hogarth spacetime](https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0104023) describes a (general) relativistic configuration that allows (potentially) for *infinite* computational task to be carried out in a finite observer's time. You set up the computer on a worldline that lies completely in your past, receive a signal from there after the sufficient number of computational steps has been taken (and if you never get a signal, you know that the machine carried out an (countably) infinite amount of steps without finding the solution or whatever). Unfortunately, in practical terms, you probably have to drop the Earth into a black hole to achieve this. Nevertheless, the coolness of having infinite computational power likely outweighs the disadvantages.
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**In a fashion yes, but not really, and you're really not going to like it.**
Time dilation effects are caused by gravity as well as speed & gravity effects reduce with distance.
The higher up a mountain you are the faster time flows compared to elsewhere on the planet.
Put it in space (the further from any large bodies the better) & it's even faster.
You're only going to get a small boost this way though.
So park the Earth in really close orbit around a black hole at the same time & that slows everything down for everyone on Earth compared to your space computer, the closer the orbit the faster it has to be to avoid falling in so you get your relativistic effects of speed at the same time.
The added bonus of course is we can then watch the heat death of the universe unfolding around us in apparent (to us) real time, should be interesting.
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The energy required to accelerate a 100 metric ton mass to 99.995% of c is about $8.9\times10^{23}J$, which is about 1000 times our yearly energy consumption. I'd wager that for 1000x our current GDP, you can build a pretty big and powerful computer instead.
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**If you figure this out, you have solved P v NP**
This would no longer be an old joke:
Humor: Einstein and Lorentz Play Marbles
Einstein begins, “You know, Hendrik, people say we think so much alike we must be twins, but we are obviously different ages.” Lorentz responds, “Yeah, I know, it sort of a twin paradox – I think Siggie started that one. Forget it, let’s play marbles.”
Lorentz said, “Here’s the rules: From a 50/50% mix of red and blue marbles we each have to put the blue marbles in a blue container and the red marbles in a red container.” Einstein responded, “I’ve done something like this before, and I noticed I get worse and worse as the number of items to sort gets larger and larger.”
Being the mathematicians they are, they decided to give each other a 50/50% chance of winning. That meant doing some preliminary games to develop a handicap – like in golf. First Lorentz tried it. Given 2 marbles to sort, he completed the task in 2 seconds. 4 marbles, 4 seconds; 10 marbles, 10 seconds, etc. Now, for Einstein: 2 marbles, 2 seconds; 4 marbles, 24 seconds; 10 marbles 3628800 seconds, etc. Lorentz said, “Looks like I scale linearly as x, as the number of marbles, increase … But, wow, Albert, you scale as a factorial, x!”. They both realized the handicap was x! / x, with Albert’s nonpolynomial rate (x!) on top of Hendrik’s simple polynomial rate (x).
Einstein said, “I think I know how to normalize for our respective handicap using a new vehicle I just invented that runs on an E=mc^2 engine and dilates time (t) to t’ based on division of t by that equation you just discovered with ( 1 – (v^2 / c^2))^-0.5. We will have to neglect F = ma because it will be crushing and W = fd because of the consequential heat at the launch site.”
Lorentz agreed and added, “Let’s play for the best rate, after normalization, because I don’t want to do all the integrals for total velocity and time!”
Einstein fret that he had problems naming the vehicle, “I found that Folks-Wagon is taken, so I called it a You-Van. In fact, I’ll ride first because you are so slow.” They worked out the math and found the necessary velocity for the handicap to sort 100 marbles:
t’ = t (( 1 – (v^2 / c^2 ))^-0.5)
solve for v, with c = 1:
v = ( t’^2 – t^2)^0.5) / t’
substitute the scaling factors:
v = (((x!)^2 – x^2)^0.5) / (x!)
enter actual numbers:
v = (((100!)^2 – 100^2)^0.5) / (100!)
Lorentz looked again and said, “Too bad Cook and Levin haven’t been born yet!” Einstein added, “Oops, we have to wait for Wolfram, too, as we need a lot of precise digits for this calculation. Another day …”
In other words: As Velocity Approaches Light Speed, P Becomes Equivalent to NP for Computations Using Zero-Mass Particles
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If you know how to contain a black hole, you shouldn't even need the Super Hyper Extravaganza Space Ship ©™. You could just make a black hole, contain it, park the computer near it, and due to the time dilation from the black hole, the equation could be solved relatively quickly.
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In my world, a group of scientists prepare for the "inevitable" extinction of man by manufacturing\* true, efficient, social(1) hive minds from Order Hymenoptera, specifically from the wasp waist families Formicidae and Vespidae. They intend for these "Vespoids" to one day reach a similar level of advancement in less time than humanity so that, should the Vespoids find mortal flaws in themselves, they may also create a successor species.
This is all well and good, but there is one major flaw in choosing an insect hive mind - any path to advancement will be limited, since they can't lift 10 ounce stones and apply the repeated, focused force necessary to fashion blades and hammers(2); nor can they twist sticks with the speed and force to make embers, and even if they could, would they be able to utilize fire without constantly killing their units?
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So my Question is -
Could these "Vespoids" advance up to the stone age(3) given their physical limitations?
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**Notes**
(\*) ***Assume any adaptation for intelligence is present, as these "Vespoids" can be genetically engineered to any lengths necessary***
(1) ***The individual hives work together in kin based groups analogous to tribes***
(2) ***Specifically stone are not necessary for this Question***
(3) ***By stone age , I mean some pre-metallic technological phase that may exist as an intermediate between lack of technology and use of metal***
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I still don't think that vespoids will follow human evolution like you want it to, but since no one is trying to give you a pathway I'll try.
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The first thing to understand is your scientists have to face is that advanced tool building ants doesn't *necessarily* mean that these ants are superior on that grounds alone to displace all other ants. Just because Homo Sapiens displaced Neaderthals, doesn't mean the scientists' super tool building ants are going to do the same in the ant world. So I think it is important that they have two goals:
1. Genetically engineer ants to be biologically superior in some way that will favor them evolutionarily over normal ants apart from their ability to use tools. Whatever this advantage isn't super critical or interesting to me, but it will give the ants a bigger bump than tool use alone.
2. Train/teach tool use in ants until they regularly show spontaneous tool usage or even better consistent tool adaptation. This is the point I'm going to focus on in my answer because it feels like the meat of your question.
### Ants are builders by nature
It seems to me the best way to encourage more and more advanced tool usage in ants is to get them to build more complicated solutions to the problems they face. Of course all of this is dependent on ants being trainable, but it is your world you can make your ants trainable if you so desire.
One problem subterranean animals face is water. Currently ants have a [variety of methods](http://mentalfloss.com/article/66523/how-do-anthills-survive-rain) to dealing with water/rain. What you might do is to setup [an environment where those strategies don't work](http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/024.099.0115), and guide the ants to new strategies that will work. One strategy that might work is trying to introduce the concept of an [Archimedes screw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw). Since a screw is one of the [classical simple machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine) this seems as good of a place to start as any.
Introduce the concept of mechanical work providing a reward by placing an Archimedes screw that is fixed to the cylinder and actuated by walking on it1 through the ant nest. The screw should be made up of some natural material with the form of the screw already in place, but filled with food. This way the ants will tunnel into the screw thereby setting up the foundation of building the screw. Overtime these should be filling with progressively greater filler to food ratios until ants are boring the screw on their own. Bonus points if your scientists can genetically engineer something like bamboo that has an encased Archimedes screw structure instead of bamboo's normal segments.
Once the cylinder/screw is hollowed out it should be in a position where when the ants walk on the cylinder accidentally they will get some reward like food **and** have it remove water from the nest. The goal is for the food to be a primary motivator with the water removal as a secondary benefit. Of course the goal is to transition them to using the screw for removing water alone, but we're taking baby steps.
As the ants appear to realize that walking on this strange device gives them food move it gradually to the outskirts of the nest and a natural sump so they have to seek it out in order to walk on it as well as making it more effective at removing water. Now that they associate strongly walking on this to giving them food, start to decrease the effectiveness until it only gives food when it is raining/extra wet.
Now that we have them associating walking on the screw with removing water and building screws we need to get the ants to start placing the screws into their nest. The way to do this is by ever so slightly pulling out the screw, and waiting for the ants to realize they need to reseat the screw. Progressively do this until the screw is removed and the ants will take a screw laying next to the nest in order to tunnel it into a sump in their nest.
Finally all that is left is getting them to harvest the natural materials to make the screw. After that is accomplished you can release them in a place like the salt marshes I linked to where this screw gives them an advantage. If they start spreading and displacing other ants, while maintaining/extending their tool building you've done your job well.
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1: Per the Archimedes screw Wikipedia page, "depictions of Greek and Roman water screws show them being powered by a human treading on the outer casing to turn the entire apparatus as one piece."
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# Stone Age Progression
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> *This is all well and good , but their is one major flaw in choosing an insect hive mind - they can't lift 10 ounce stones apply the repeated , focused force necessary to fashion them into blades and hammers ; nor can they twist sticks with the speed and force to make embers , and even if they could , would they be able to utilize fire without constantly killing their units?*
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I think this is a flaw in your thinking. I don't know why you picked 10 ounces as a necessity for ant-sized stone age tools. You talk about blades and hammers and fire, but that's getting waaaay ahead of yourself.
Instead, [paleontologists characterize stone tools in "modes"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool#Evolution). This goes from "Mode 1" simple hammerstones with a sharp edge, as at [Oldowan 2-3 million years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan), all the way to "Mode 5" where small, sharp pieces of stone are embedded in wood handles for leverage starting roughly 15,000 years ago to the present. In contrast, [primates don't control fire until about 500,000 years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Q28R.jpg)
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan#/media/File:Pierre_taill%C3%A9e_Melka_Kunture_%C3%89thiopie_fond.jpg)
# Flint Knapping
The basic way to make a stone age tool is [flint knapping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapping). This takes advantage of the natural fissures in certain stones like flint and obsidian to produce naturally sharp edges. Flint knapping can be a careful skill, but you can also bang flint against another rock and eventually you'll get a sharp edge; it doesn't require much thought. [Primates were doing it incessantly 3 million years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan). The natural fissures in flint and obsidian might not work at ant scale, but there's probably some other stone that does.
This can then be used as an axe, or a blade. It allows chopping, cutting, shaving, and stripping of wood, hides, and even stone at speeds and precision beyond what a soft *human* hand or blunt rock can do. You can use it to chop down a tree, shave off the bark, and sharpen the edge to make a spear.
[Watch Primitive Technology make and use a stone axe from scratch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY). He's using quite advanced techniques, but you see his basic knapping at the beginning to produce a sharp edge from a blunt river stone.
# How Much Flint Could An Ant Flint Knap If An Ant Could Knap Flint?
There's three things at issue. 1) Can they physically make stone tools? 2) Do they have a behavior they can adapt for flint knapping? 3) Do stone tools give them an evolutionary advantage?
[Because they're so small](https://www.thoughtco.com/ants-lift-fifty-times-their-weight-1968083), their volume-to-mass-ratio is so small, ants and other insects are extremely strong in relation to their body weight. They can perform *relative* feats of strength far greater than much larger primates can. Strength is not an issue.
Ants also have strong jaws for grasping, so the ability to grab and hold the stone is also not an issue. It seems number 1 is a yes, they can physically do it assuming there's suitable stone available.
The second one is difficult to answer. Evolution is not a march toward intelligence, it's adapting to the environment. Ants are doing VERY well for themselves, evolutionarily speaking. They've been around for 100 million years, a very good run, and there's 20,000 species filling nearly every ecological niche on Earth. If you think of the hive as a single organism, its workers are its hands and its tools. Its not clear what advantage they gain by spending precious energy on tool production.
On the flip side, it's not clear that tool-making and intelligence are a good idea, evolutionarily speaking. Humans are on the verge of making themselves extinct giving tool makers a paltry 3 million years.
For example, you might say sharp stone tools would give an ant colony an advantage in warfare. It might. But its jaws already behave as weapons. Its already protected by tough armor and sheer numbers. Is higher intensity warfare with its cousins an advantage? That's what's going to get humanity extinct. Is being better at making war with yourself an evolutionary advantage, or a dead end?
Humanity's advanced tools are literally altering our environment faster than we can adapt, even with more technology. Is tool making an evolutionary advantage, or a dead end?
That said, natural selection is very short sighted and will try anything if it gives a short-term advantage. Humanity's experiment in tool making gave them a massive advantage for a few million years. Short-term on evolution's scale, but it still happened. So might a species of ant.
Finally, do they have an existing behavior which could be adapted to flint knapping? Primates, having hands out on long arms can use them as simple levers to strike things like predators, and competing primates. That behavior is adaptable to idly banging rocks together. In contrast, an ant's "hands" are its jaws and use grasping and crushing, not swinging and levering. But I'm not an evolutionary entomological psychologist.
The scientists could give evolution a nudge using [artificial selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding). A combination of an environment where tools are advantageous, plus selectively breeding ants with a propensity towards tool smithing. One possibility is to set up an artificial "arms race" against another species where both must advance their tool making to compete with the other. It might lead to long term ecological disaster and the extinction of both species (and many others), but in the short term it will produce the desired effect.
# Fire
Fire use has similar questions: Is it advantageous to ants? Do they have a propensity for fire? Most animals, quite rightfully, run from fire. Human ancestors somehow became fascinated by it. That fascination gave the squishy primates security and warmth and allowed them to expand their territory to all corners of the globe.
Ants seem to be doing that just fine without fire or tools.
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Never underestimate the power of a hive mind. Their intellect could easily come up with solutions that we never did.
As for the issue of an ant not being able to lift 10 ounces, I'd like to point out that that's actually an arbitrary line in the sand. Consider that you can't lift 10,000 pounds, and yet:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kQMFZ.jpg)
The trick would be that the wasps would have to start with tools they could manage, and work their way up. It's just like we did.
As for fire, fire is bad news for pretty much anyone caught in it. The wasps will have the same rule about fire as we do: don't get burned. Wasps are mobile, they'll figure it out. Creating it could be tricky at first, because of the size issues you mention. However, once you get some basic wood and cord construction going on, they could probably mechanize the process.
However, I'd expect they'd use their strengths, rather than trying to make fire in exactly the same way humans did. One of the known ways to make fire is to wait for it to be created naturally and the harness it. A carefully tied bundle of twigs can hold a smoldering ember for a day or more, which would be perfect for these wasps trying to manage their fire. In addition, it would be easy for them to spare one or two wasps to tending the fire, while us humans don't have that luxury.
Of course, their real issue is their competition. Spiders have already entered the stone age. Your wasps are far behind.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ciztl.jpg)
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You talk a lot about fire and stone tools but your question really is (emphasis mine):
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> They intend for these "Vespoids" to **one day reach a similar level of advancement in less time than humanity** so that, should the Vespoids find mortal flaws in themselves, **they may also create a successor species**.
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In my opinion your mistake that [Schwern alluded to in his answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/85781/14915) is you're trying to shoehorn ant evolution/solutions into the same path as human evolution/solutions. Ants aren't humans so they'll develop other ways to solve the same problems just like they've done for millions of years. Ants won't create fire for warmth and preparing food because they live in comfortably cool dirt houses. Ants won't make stone tools to crack nuts because they have strong jaws and farm a good bulk of the food they need. To solve this problem figure out what are hallmarks of our current "level of advancement" and then create a pathway to an ant/vespoid version.
For example wasps might begin to use roaches like we use cattle ([instead of baby-food/cribs](https://www.wired.com/2014/02/absurd-creature-of-the-week-jewel-wasp/)) without going through the long process of roach domestication by re-purposing their existing behavior/venom. This will be beneficial because it is more believable, plus if you want different results you need to use different methods. Maybe stringing copper wires around the globe is what lead to humans doom, and would inevitably lead to vespoid doom as well.
So don't try to mimic human developmental stages. **Embrace vespoid developmental stages and vespoid strategies to create a successor species.** A wasp could use mind control to make roaches to be easy prey for a successor species, and uses roaches to spoil food for a successor species' predator/false starts. Whenever you start falling into the trap of following the human blueprint remember that humans didn't domesticate wheat. [Wheat domesticated humans](http://www.amnh.org/calendar/scicafe-how-plants-domesticated-humans). Maybe we are their successor species...
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As I answered [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46583/how-can-anthills-use-tools/46623#46623) regarding ants, they would mass together and also use sticks and bones from other animals for structure:
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> how can eucaryotic cells use tools? Yeast can't swing a hammer, but what about multicellular organisms makes that possible?
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In this scenareo, tool use (in a sense) is a prerequisite for manipulating larger items. This should provide “stone age” technology readily, if they have the intelligence for it.
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In a way ants and wasps have already reached the stone age. They are highly refined in the raw materials they use. Eg. the paper-wasp builds these bizarre sci-fi looking shelters high up using bark from only specific trees. One issue with hive minds is they may not compete enough, humanity grew through the competition and communication of ideas. The largest cultural transference in humanity has probably occurred through war. I know fire ants actually defend their own regardless of hive. It would make sense the insects actually combine a lot of useful behaviours from different wasp/ant species and somehow pass knowledge on and store it.
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**A hive mind particularly one that can rapidly produce will not develop advanced tools.** I'm basing this on 100 million years of evolution not leading to tools compared to our 3 million years. Clearly they can build amazing structures but not advance tools (in my opinion we would have seen it happen if it were the case as there many species that have had this cognitive behavior for a very long time).
When I say hive mind I don't mean the scifi definition where you have some super intelligent master mind that is the queen bee. I mean the hive behavior/intelligence we currently observe in earth species where the queen basically just reproduces.
A hive mind and our "tool like" mind and many other species (apparent) cognitive behavior comes from reproductive behavior. I'll fetch some references later but many scientist think the defining thing that made humans different is our reproductive behavior. Of course there are other theories like our thumbs and our endurance (tracking down pray) that caused increased frontal cortex development but there is strong argument towards the sex argument.
Anyway I think its unlikely because ants have probably reached a [local minimum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_and_minima) ([Hill climbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing) which is somewhat analogous to evolution) in development or changing towards tool behavior because of how successful they currently are (I want to avoid the word evolution here as there are false associations with evolution as being "advancing").
And I have theory that probably all hive minds probably eventually reach a similar local minimum once they are highly successful. After all you can just throw bodies at many problems.
Humans on the other hand are continuously inter competitive. There was a comment that we were not effective as species because we kill each other... if anything that has lead to greater and faster tool development. Whether that is good or not or better evolution is besides really the point: hive minds I don't think need or want to develop advance tools.
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I think the best you are going to get is something like star ship troopers where there is a hivemind and the different children are the different tools. Namely the hive mother just has a different bug for different jobs. It is unlikely that insects will use tools when the insects are the tools as in ants or any hivemind situation. Also bear in mind that no matter how smart you make these wasps, if the force of evolution is against them needing to be smart (because they don't need it to reproduce effectively) then bye-bye intelligence., and probably very fast.
What might be possible is having a super smart queen with different castes of children that eventually become more specialized to increasingly complex jobs. That is one path to civilization and intelligent life for your bugs, but no it won't be like humans.
Of course you still have the option of hand wavium.
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Imagine a dwarven city, a fairly backwater one, completely unlike the likes of Erebor or Moria. This one scrapes together barely, and is only as large as it needs to be, which is to say 5 feet tall tunnels and hallways all around, and tonnes and tonnes of dirt and rock around.
The city is then now under assault by some glorious 8 feet tall giant humanoids. They can't fit inside. How might they try to assault the dwarves?
Notes:
* The dwarves have a complex water system sourced from even deeper underground.
* The dwarves have a large dwarven made cavern deeper underground which is where they have most of their food production
* The dwarves are adept at detecting mining efforts by the invaders and can effortlessly collapse any tunnel the attackers attempt to create.
* The setting has renaissance era technology and simple magics
How might these large attackers get into and attack the city? Suppose that they are there for the McGuffin stored in the most secured part of the dwarven city.
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**Open Pit Mining**
The giants are big and strong. They can move a lot of dirt. A pit mine directly over the dwarven city is difficult to stop - the dwarves could collapse parts of it, but only by doing the giant's job for them (making the mine bigger). It will cause casualties but presumably the giants are willing to accept some of those as part of a siege.
Magic or some basic mining tech makes this much easier, although tech opens things up to sabotage and the like.
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Want to cause all sorts of trouble for people living underground? Just divert the nearest river to the mouth of a cave that leads into the Dwarven habitation and let gravity and hydrodynamics do the hard work for you. Any giants capable of the earth-moving necessary for open-pit mining (as Dan Smolinske suggested) can dig a trench and drop a few boulders in the riverbed.
Unless it's a very small stream, this puts the dwarves in a world of hurt, as they simply can't mine faster than water can flow in. The only thing they can do, once they realize what's going on, is evacuate as quickly as possible, and if they don't have some sort of teleportation available, or tunnels on comparatively high ground that lead to a distant settlement, the only feasible way out is likely to drop them in the middle of the giants' army, giving the giant general exactly what he wants: a stand-up fight out in the open.
The tricky part, then, is retrieving the MacGuffin from the city afterwards. The steam engine was [originally developed to pump water out of mines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine), not to move trains, but that happened well after the Renaissance. To get someone in there would probably require magic. But... one thing at a time. Flooding the place is the most expedient way to get rid of the dwarves, simply because it takes effect very quickly. Smoking them out or mining will take a long time, giving the dwarves plenty of time to plan against it and counter it. Plague takes a long time, can be healed with magic (maybe) and shut down with quarantine. But floods are *devastating* to city dwellers, and they're devastating very, very quickly!
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Burn them out.
Get extremely large quantities of flammable oils and other fuels and start pouring it down every air shaft and entrance.
Put large smokey fires with toxic chemicals on lower entrances, and when they ignite the oils in the upper passages and air shafts it will pull in oxygen from below, drawing the smoke into the caves.
In a house fire it usually not the fire that gets you, it's the smoke.
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The giant general sees the predicament he is in. The self-sufficient dwarven city is growing its own food underground and even has its own water supply. They can hold out indefinitely against his mighty army.
However, he sees a solution. He remembers reading a textbook in evil-monster-likes-cake school titled: "How to Kill a Dwarf." The number one way listed in the book was to trap the dwarf in an underground cave and seal all entrances, exits and air-holes, letting him suffocate.
A light bulb goes on in his head and he decides to implement it. He orders his army to set up camps along all the entrances and exits of the city and orders his dragon-mounted warriors to quickly scout out the ventilation shafts of the dwarven city and place large rocks on them. After a day and a half the dwarves exit the base in surrender rather than suffocate.
The giants order them to bring their king to them as a hostage and they agree. They quickly subdue him and send him to the giants as insurance along with all the noble families. The giants then agree to remove the rocks from the ventilation shafts if the dwarves bring all of their precious McGuffin out.
After receiving the McGuffin the giant decides to test the theory from "How to Kill a Dwarf." When the dwarves renter their city he orders all the entrances and ventilation shafts destroyed with cannon fire. He resolves to come back in a year to see what became of the little roaches.
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Probably the best way is not to try brute force, but to use intelligence. All of the approaches (strip mining, smoke, flooding, siege) seem to me things that the dwarves are going to be good at countering if they have managed to build an underground city in the first place, unless they run out of places they can dig and still get enough food/water/air (which might be the case, but it may take you years or decades to achieve).
So I think your best approaches to get the McGuffin you want will be things like soft/friendly negotiation, trade for something they want more than they want the McGuffin and can't get themselves, alliance (they might really like trade access), challenge to single combat, deception, theft, or getting an inside or visiting dwarf to get it for you.
If you really need to force the McGuffin from them, I'd say you should get some help. Other dwarves who have a feud with those dwarves. Magicians. Other underground nasties, as long as you're sure you can get them to give you the McGuffin.
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The humanoids should try to deliver a disease (like the black death) to the city population to force them to surrender or die.
They may throw infected animals using catapults to the city or they may contaminate the city water supply [like ancient Greeks did](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sacred_War).
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The thing about dwarven cities is that they are, effectively, bunkers. Historically, pre-bunker-buster, there have been a few ways that underground forts have been taken.
During the Roman conquests, there was a battle in the Middle East in which a number of soldiers attempted to breach a fort through an underground passage. The swift response was dumping a burning conglomerate into the tunnel, inclusive of sulphur, which basically flooded the Roman lungs with sulphuric acid. This also highlights the importance of ventilation—if you were to blow enough smoke into the tunnels, particularly if they are as small as you say, you could easily choke the dwarven inhabitants out.
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There is something I always thought about when designing defensive dwarven tunnels. I think they would build some very narrow, small ones, like a vietkong tunnel. This way any medium creature would have to crouch and most would have to carry torches. Dwarves would stay on foot, they would see in the dark, and they would drop their axes and grab some shortswords, spears and nasty, pointy knifes.
What I like about this strategy is that it can be done at any time. Say the enemy decides to dig over de city. The dwarves could let them. Then they collapse their tunnels, and create very narrow passages around the colapsed streets. Also, they create tunnels that go up the mountain, but around the excavation.
When the enemy got to the city, they would think they had breached the walls, and would swarm in, facing little oposition by the retreating dwarves, that would be there just not to give away the real plan.
Once the enemy army went further into the city, they would start being delayed and funneled by the tunnel collapses, and forced to take narrower and narrower passages, to the point where they would be fighting in small dark tunnels against fierce dwarves.
In the meantime, the dwarves would spring their trap. They could send large numbers to the upward tunnels and encircle the excavation. Since they only need a couple dwarves to hold a small tunnel below, they can easilly send the bulk of their forces to descend on the minees. These dwarves would be on a high ground, charging down an enemy that is already engaged and funneled into multiple traps. It would be a masacre.
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A siege, the invaders are using the dwarves tactics against them self.
First they are zapping their way through the tunnels, to make the dwarves cut them self off from the outer world and collapse important part of their cave structure such as food production, since food in caves are scarse and not much wildlife can live there the dwarves are dependand on artificial food production.
When that is done, they simply wait till the dwarves grow so hungry they either attack hungry and starved, giving an advantage to the siege holders, or the dwarves surrender.
All this while carefully carving out the cave to make one get in.
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Aliens are invading earth! Pouring from portals hidden deep in the earth for millennia, they are sweeping aside the militaries of earth with contempt. Modern infantry rifles, even loaded with armor piercing ammunition cannot penetrate their fully body armor suits. So far, the only small arm to damage an alien soldier has been a large-caliber anti-materiel rifle. Tank rounds and heavy artillery are effective, but without infantry support they are easily overrun and destroyed.
Alien soldiers are equipped with conventional firearms that are unable to penetrate their own armor. (This is believed to be a chillingly pragmatic choice to prevent us from copying their technology.) These weapons are roughly equivalent to a [M60 LMG](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M60_machine_gun) and are used as assault rifles by the physically stronger alien infantry. They do, however, deploy a highly effective anti-armor missile system.
The alien portals are scattered across all of earth's continents, and no one is sure that all of them have been identified. Several of them are sited underneath major population centers. Alien force strengths are difficult to estimate, but human forces outnumber them by 3 to 1 on average. Alien troops receive supply through their portals, but have been quartering troops in human structures.
Alien armor is, from the few samples recovered, an advanced ceramic plating. Ballistics tests and field reports put it on par with the armor on a modern military armored car, but much lighter and more mobile.
The question is this: **What can humanity equip its infantry soldiers with to counter this enemy?**
Assume:
* Access to all the military technology of today's earth
* The weapon should be either already broadly available or easily mass-produced. The forces of earth need access to it **yesterday**.
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The best bet isn't infantry but our air force and vehicles.
You only mentioned alien infantry, but no sea- air- or land vehicles. That would make the invaders quite immobile after they exited their portals. It would be easy for a motorized army to outmaneuver them as soon as they left the city and are in the field.
Many battle tanks are equipped with machine guns of larger caliber. The US [M1 Abrams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams) battletank, for example, has a cal.50 machine gun which uses the same caliber ammunition as anti material rifles, so they would be highly effective against the invaders. There are also armored troop transports equipped with even larger automatic machine guns like the [M2 Bradley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Bradley) which has a 25mm machine gun with a fire rate of 200 rounds per minute. Many other armies have similar vehicles.
Another huge disadvantage of the aliens would be that humanity has complete air supremacy. High-altitude surveillance planes and drones can monitor all troop movements and tactical and strategical bombers can attack them. Modern bombers equipped with smart-bombs can accurately hit a target from an altitude of several km. Most anti-infantry bombs which use shrapnel as their main method of killing targets would not be as effective as against unarmored human infantry, but high explosive bombs would still be pretty effective. Incendiary ammunition might also work.
And when all fails, we still have our huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. When a city is lost and it is certain that no remaining humans will be left alive, obliterating it with a nuclear strike before the invaders disperse might be a hard but pragmatic decision.
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The [thermobaric devices](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon) can be incredible. If you could get one to go off in a reasonably enclosed area, with a large number of troops, you would basically cook them all in their armor.
Basically they usually have a smaller explosions to accelerate and spread a combustible material out and mix with the local Oxygen, then it ignites causing a huge explosion, often with an incredible pressure wave, lots of heat and completely using up the local oxygen supply. Some of these have near nuclear level blasts, without all the fallout and other dangers from nuclear.
ETA
and as Robert Boettcher pointed out in the comments, they are much easier to manufacture than Nukes too.
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## BOOM.
If I was going up against anything with this level of armour, I'd want to be wielding something big, something that just will not care how much armour there is. What options does this give us? Anything that can take down a tank (or any other kind of armoured vehicle) will probably be pretty effective, except that we're dealing with a smaller target.
Concussive forces, and intense heat, are going to be our friends; the modern [rocket-propelled grenade (RPG)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade), or any other [grenade-launching weapon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenade_launcher), will be very useful. I suspect any grenade will do, but something with a heavy charge or fire especially, unless their armour resists heat somehow. There are also the 1900s-era gas grenades, if these invaders are vulnerable to poison at all. You could also consider mines! There are some that are even magnetic, if the armour is iron or steel.
Flamethrowers could be terrifying for any force, albeit usually illegal (maybe the governments will make an exception?) as it will turn their armour into an oven. There are several high-tech weapons employed by some modern military forces that could also work; I've heard of one that essentially launches a charge that penetrates a wall and expels molten metal that cooks the interior, but I can't find a source for that.
**TL;DR:** Anything that produces fire, explosions, or that could work against a modern tank/armoured vehicle.
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**Fragmentation Grenades**
Since Bullets are small, and their kinetic energy obviously absorbed by the material of the Aliens Armour, an approach might be conducted into testing the viability of explosive distribution of shrapnel in order to open up vulnerabilities in their armouring, which might then become attackable by small arms fire.
Since Fragmentation Grenades are, in some Units like the Marines as a Standard Operating Procedure, used first upon approaching targets, their ready availability would be assured.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M67_grenade>
**Grenade Launchers**
Alternatively, one might try to detonate a grenade shot from a M79 at the Invaders.
The idea is again that explosively released shrapnel, with the millionfold expansion from the original volume of its explosive material, would have a better piercing effect than the kinetic drive produced by the gases released upon firing a firearm.
Since every regular infantry squad is to be equipped with a grenade launcher to aid the breakup of enemy positions in hiding, or where the machine gun cant fire, its ready availability would be assumed.
[Grenade Launchers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenade_launcher)
**Chem Weapons**
As Aliens are not humans, the Conventions against using Nuclear, Biologic or Chemical Weapons would not apply to them.
However, the after effects of Nuclear Weaponry (devastating to the planet, but surely for them as well), and biologic warfare (devastating to our lifeform, but perhaps not to theirs) would rule out such measures.
However, Chlorine for example is readily available and if brought out in sufficient concentration might be able to corrode or cauterize their armour, making it more vulnerable to attack with the explosive methods mentioned before.
If artillery can bring out barrages of Chlorine gas over the portals it could hinder the Alien Troop Movement by mentioned corrosion or at least by reducing visibility of the terrain.
For this purpose any corrosive chemical compound, widely used in Industrial applications, could be weaponized by filling it in artillery shells, or by even simply having soldiers equipped with spraying equipment unload the chemical on the Alien occupied by (effectless) firearm teams with a simple hose.
**Flamethrowers**
While not widely used since WWII, flaming agents might be considered as the thermal stability of the Alien Armour is not yet known, but can be safely assumed to not be arbitrarily high.
Even highly efficient nano-carbon structures that might produce before mentioned protection against fireweapons would probably crumble to dust when exposed to high enough temperatures due to burning flaming agent stuck to it.
As Napalm can be relatively easy manufactured from Gasoline and Acid, it would be an option that can be considered together with the Chemical Components when selecting a mobile delivery system, as it would at best have to handle most of those agents in one set of equipment.
The detriment is that flamethrowers are not featured anymore in the current arsenals. However, a delivery system that would be able to deliver the (non) burning agent onto the Antagonist Alien could be as simple as a firehose pumping the agent onto the target.
**Further suggestions**
The list could be continued with fuel-air bombs or even tactical nuclear artillery shells, but since the nature of the scenario appears to be pitched infantry battles, the options end here.
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## Love
Okay, it sounds cheesy, but hear me out. What you described suggests a race which would view us as nothing but unruly furniture, so it is very likely that they would be coarse when modeling our behavior. This means that, in the heat of battle, subtle actions and choices that we make would be completely overlooked by the enemy. That would mean there is an entire set of things we can do which are virtually invisible to the enemy due to their warlike nature.
Rather than going for a military victory, I would begin going for a cultural victory. Take advantage of these subtleties to infect them with the most positive sides of our culture we can find (I, personally, find the "good stuff" of culture to always be subtle and sublime). Make is to that they can take out planet physically, but we take their culture right out from underneath them such that they can no longer distinguish between us and them.
There are several words we use in modern day life which have the subtlety needed. The two which seem most likely to inspire an army to the crazy sort of opposition are:
* **Love** - consider the wonderful picture of a '60s hippie putting a flower in the barrel of an opposing gun. They'd never see it coming. Also consider that "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" evolved from a teaching about Love.
* **Stillness** - The Eastern cultures would be able to use their meditative cultures to observe ways to make our army appear to be completely still, while they are actively moving in ways to teach the aliens why we don't need to be eradicated. There are several martial arts disciples which focus on just being still and letting the opponent do the work.
Remember, the effects of these concepts would be magnified by the fact that Aliens do not have an entire life and upbringing experiencing the effects of fake love (a.k.a. they never survived puberty at an Earth-dwelling High School), so those who have to "fake it" would find reasonable success.
Even if the "carrot" approach of cultural victory fails, it is highly likely that we would develop martial arts to take the "stick" approach to take advantage of their natural need to underestimate us (why waste brainpower predicting us when you know you can smoosh us like a bug).
*When the brute force approach fails, we eventually learn to be more subtle with our approach.*
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*Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in biology or war tactics, feel free to point out any gaping plot holes I have missed.*
**Biological Warfare**
As used in '[The War of the Worlds](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36)' by H. G. Wells
To Quote:
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> And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
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Either weapons could be tested by trial-and-error in the field (e.g. Mustard Gas), alternatively, if a few of the Aliens could be killed with the rifles mentioned, and the bodies could be captured for examination, then human researchers could discover any weaknesses of the Aliens' immune system (or other parts of their biology) and use this to counter them.
If the Aliens are quartering their troops in human quarters, then any biological weapons that could not be introduced on the field (if the Aliens has gas masks or similar) could be planted in conveniently abandoned buildings (such as a genetically-engineered virus), with the hope that the Aliens took the bait and stayed in the infected building. This would be when the Aliens are at their most vulnerable since they may well be out of their armor, showering, sleeping etc and would be the most likely time for infection to occur.
Providing the virus introduced was infectious enough, if the Aliens weren't very careful with their quarantining it could soon spread to the rest of the troops (and potentially back through the portals).
If the Aliens' immune systems are different enough from humans' it may be possible to use a virus that is fatal to the Aliens but harmless to humans, such as a cold virus.
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It may be a bit unconventional, but things like Molotov cocktails and caustic agents would be very effective, especially since they are so heavily outnumbered and heavily armored. Heavy armor (no matter how advanced) becomes a liability if anything can get next to the skin or clog the air inlets. Then it's a matter of leave the armor on and suffer/die or remove it and get shot/die. Without numbers and/or vehicles it'll be a very short war.
Just keep them busy enough to cut off their supply lines and eventually their conventional weapons would run out as well as their food.
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So, we have **aliens that are the equivalent of light tanks attacking us.** What do we do to light tanks? [SLAP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saboted_light_armor_penetrator) them around with the slighly larger 7.62 caliber found in the notoriously reliable and cheap AK47? If normal .50 BMG bullets can kill them, it isn't too hard to imagine a smaller round with [HEIAP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Explosive_Incendiary/Armor_Piercing_Ammunition) or SLAP doing damage after a few shots.
Not working? Call in air support! I'll imagine even the Air Force won't be as keen to scrap the [A-10 Thunderbolt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II) during an alien invasion. You don't have to carry your machine guns any more you know. The aliens will probably want to start stocking up on anti air missiles now...
Now, we've found most of the gates, so let's just destroy them quickly and see where they get their supplies from then. Cruise missiles are a relatively cheap method of medium range explosive delivery.
And I'm sure you've heard before, [bad things happen when you start doing science in a pressure cooker](https://what-if.xkcd.com/40/). Putting it on a cruise missle might not be the easiest thing to do, but it would surely bring a lot of carnage.
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## The enemy - assumption
When you consider that an alien race is invading earth, then they probably have already done it before. They also traveled a long distance and unless they can gap long distances in the blink of an eye, they are likely to be something like swarming locusts on a raid that need to be able to adjust to a lot of different scenarios. If they would be able to gap possibly hundreds of lightyears in no time at all, then they are that advanced that the only chance we have is to hide and hope that we don't get distinguished.
## Enemy suite
And that would bring an amount to difficulties to us as well as to the technology that they need to fight different scenarios and enemies:
* High vs. low pressure planets
* High vs. low gravity
* Thick vs. thin atmosphere
* Different types of atmospheres (gas types)
In response of a changing context, they would have to be wearing a suite that will be a combination of a space and a combat suite. That would also nicely align with normal bullets not being able to penetrate the outer shell as it would have to resist against tough conditions and high pressure. The problem for humanity would be that flame throwers, molotov cocktails or acids would not help at all as extreme temperature and corrosive fluids would be within the default *space suite* scenario.
## Modus operandi
I would assume they do not want to have everything nuked or completely destroyed. They are here for some resource to harvest. It won't be us: Why have problematic, biological slaves that just use up additional resources that need to get transported along to the next target location when you can craft machinery to do the same and probably could clone or design every biological being to your needs?
Now we only got a limited set of scenarios left.
### Fighting Machines (for completeness)
Is is very likely that we will not encounter living beings as enemies. We are already using machines for warfare, patrolling and harvesting so why should an alien race put members of their society at risk? If we fight an automated enemy, then we will likely face a decentralized system. When sending a set of machines out on a long journey then your main goals would be
* to not fail when one part fails - redundancy
* to repair or replace itself or parts of it - again: redundancy
* to spread knowledge across the system quickly - shared/swarm intelligence
* to be able to leave something back without having losses for the whole thing, making the system more flexible
* to not need a too complex system to repair or replace parts
This means that we will mainly face one or two types of machine. This also means that the machinery will be picky on its losses. The harvesting goal can only be reached when the harvested material isn't used to replace itself until there is nothing more left. And when the missing parts can be reproduced until the next location is reached. Simple mathematics.
### Fighting living beings (the actual question)
In case we would really face living beings, we probably also face the fact that there is politics in their system. And pride. I would imagine that the later one would be the only reason to fight us directly and not simply kill us all with biological warfare or by using drones. But it would also mean that the war would be much more cruel. And it would open a chance to us that we could win by fighting a guerrilla war. Losses put pressure on leaders. Especially if the amount of living resources is limited on a floating/travelling base of operations.
### Mixed scenario
I personally would imagine that a race that is interested in our resources and that has traveled a long distance and is experienced and armed to fight lots of wars in different surroundings will not face us directly, but send their robot army to harvest what is left after spreading a targeted virus among us.
The only reason why they wouldn't do that is the resource can be reproduced and earth is turned into a factory where we are the workers as they can't spare to leave back machinery to keep the system up and running.
## The leverage
Now that we know that we better hide than fight (which won't be an option) and that winning is mostly a game of numbers, we can try two things:
1. Fighting the enemy directly by switching tactics from attack to attack to stay as unpredictable as possible. This will bring us high losses and we can only hope that their losses outnumber our own.
2. The other and probably better idea might be to not attack them at all, but attack their harvesting machinery (if that isn't the same thing). This would force them to protect it as good as possible and limit their movements to the places where they harvest. Also the harvesters might be easier to destroy than their masters (or their guards).
If we stick to Nr.1 and fight them directly, then our best bet would be to build a lot of **improvised explosive devices**. starting with the [famous pressure cooker bombs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_cooker_bomb) to car bombs and similar. Most "ingredients" are ready and highly available. Such surroundings would drastically decrease enemy movement and make it close to *impossible to use higher technology to detect traps* as those are forged out of the same things that are available in a normal household and **perfectly blend in**. We would probably also try to kidnap some of them, do executions (and worse) to demoralize the enemy and make every loss count double.
>
> For more ideas, I would suggest to search for *"asymmetric warfare"*.
>
>
>
## Sequel
In any way, the real and most frightening problem will be that they know that we got their resources. And if they don't harvest it all, lose the (first) battle or in case the resource is reproducing, they will come back. And they will be better prepared.
[Answer]
**EDIT:** Thanks to comments, I need to make something clear: This answer is built around assumption, that ultimate goal of aliens is not to kill us all, but rather to use as cheap workforce for whatever they will produce on Earth
The only winning strategy to this is [Partisan war](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_(military)) and [resistance movement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_movement) because ultimately, you will be run over in short time and only ways to prevent this can also demolish your own land (I am referring to the nukes)
**Real world example: Iraq and Afghanistan**
* The defending army is low on tech, especially comparing to today level of USA army
* There are low possibilities to group into mass counter attack.
So why the heck has USA (and NATO in general) army such hard time bringing peace to these countries?
(Disclaimer: I am not military expert, and I care about Iraq and Afghanistan the same way as every day commoner. So please take this into account)
* The knowledge and advantage of terrain is taken to the max
* The knowledge and difference of language is taken to the max
* The religious/cultural difference is taken to maximize the willingness to fight an enemy
* The knowledge of "we look the same to them" is taken to the max
* The feeling "us versus them" is strongly supported
* People able and willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill an enemy are glorified
[Answer]
**Browning Machine Gun**
Your OP states that .50 cali rounds are effective, and that .50 cali anti-material sniper rifles have been used to limited effect. However, the original .50 cali anti-material sniper "rifle" was the M2 Browning Machine Gun or BMG for short.
The BMG was used to such good effect in the role of anti-infantry anti-material sniper that they started producing .50 cali sniper rifles.
Many of the other answers provide non-standard tactics, with or without infantry. However the fact is BMGs are used by infantry on the front line. Under the circumstances, the infantry would quickly box in the insurgences with machine gun nests if the belligerences had armor of the "quality" you describe (think Saving Private Ryan).
Later on, I would suspect that the Human forces would quickly build technicals (read BMGs mounted on pick up trucks).
[Answer]
Energy weapons are much closer. You all seem to forget that tech moves 10x faster in war-time then in peace. If such a war emerges, it will be a year at most before we start deploying rail guns and gauss gun. Microwaves will see an increase in use, as well as just plain old resourcefulness.
If we think short term, 50cal can be adopted for hand held use, bullpup configuration polymer/carbonfiber receiver rifle with box mags will probably be possible. It will be a return to the times of old, when you had to move a 10kg rifle that cant hit a thing, but you will have a chance.
And last but not least, they will probably unite every single war hungry human on the planet, and that is a big big big mistake.
Nukes will never be used on large scale, maybe one or two low yield ones, but are and never will be a solution. Nuke=EMP=our own equipment stops.
Logistics:
-If we have full air, armored and naval dominance we will win.
-We know the terrain, and thousands of years of warfare has given us the knowledge to use it.
-They are depended on localized portals, nothing a few b52-ac130's cant suppress and cut out.
Some interesting things to check out(note how many of these are cold war era tech):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device%29>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K17_Szhatie>
<http://defensereview.com/short-rifle-stock-system-srss-bulldog-762-gen-4-also-written-srss-bulldog762-gen-4-16-bullpup-m14m1a-battle-riflecarbine-with-grsc-crs-16-m4-62-tactical-scope-for-special-operations-forces-sof/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun>
and the unearthly, legendary and all powerful
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger>
There are many weapon systems never used, nor exposed to the general public, but in this situation we will see them.
[Answer]
A few considerations for those of you have answered so far: as far as infantry is concerned, you have to realize that one of the chief concerns for modern infantry is twofold-
First of all, let's make some distinctions in what, exactly, *infantry* means:
Some things to note, is that historically, there have been many different "classes" of *infantry*
* Light Infantry - Historically a fast, rapidly deploy-able force with much lighter armament (i.e. a light infantry platoon would only have one weapon of the same classification at the .50 BMG whereas a Mechanized platoon could have much more)
* Heavy Infantry - slower to move but usually backed up with better supported fighting positions and supply lines. These ranks could conceivably have much heavier weapons with sufficient amounts of ammunition being supplied by support elements (trucks filled with ammo)
* Mechanized Infantry - Armored troop carriers and heavier equipment tables.
Even under current military equipment tables, the armament and equipment each class of infantry brings into battle depending on the respective class and roles in modern combat.
So take into consideration that to have every single soldier who is on foot (light infantry) armed with a .50 BMG is, quite frankly, not likely. Since the Browning is what would be considered a "crew served weapon" platform (too heavy for one man to carry all the stuff necessary to make it an effective weapons platform). Unless they were using some form of powered exoskeleton would more than likely have to forgoe a ammo hogging weapon system like the BMG and use a comparable caliber rifle with sufficient penetration like a elephant hunting rifle with insane rounds like .577 Nitro Express or .404 + Magnum rounds.
On the flip-side of this, heavy infantry could easily set up entrenched fighting positions (machine gun nests) with BMG's as long as they have a steady supply stream coming in and they stay in the same position.
Mechanized Infantry will be able to carry heavier equipment but still requires time to set up the weapon platforms after exiting their armored transports. They will also have the luxury of having heavily armed and armored vehicles supporting their movement.
[Answer]
Every warrior has a weakness, a chink in it's armour. These subterranean creatures come from an underground environment with a constant warm temperature, I doubt they would have evolved (if they reproduce underground) to withstand temperature extremes. Here are a couple of options to exploit this weakness;
# Liquid Nitrogen
Most materials when submerged in, or exposed to liquid nitrogen will become extremely brittle and shatter on subsequent impact. This weakness could be discovered by a protagonist using a CO2 fire extinguisher for defence in a close quarters encounter, or by observing limited abilities of the creatures at higher latitudes/altitudes where the temperature is lower. Ultimately the military could develop "freeze throwers", LN warheads or modify the water bomber aircraft that put out forest fires to drop liquid nitrogen (if enough can be produced) I assume the aliens can't fly
# Directed energy
Based on the same principles, microwaves or other radiation beams could be employed to cook the aliens from the inside out. The white (and yolk of an egg will solidify at reasonably low temperatures if maintained for long enough. Perhaps the alien's blood can be coagulated easily by heating it. This is the opposite extreme temperature vulnerability and could likewise be discovered by our hero cooking an alien with a HTHW or steam pipe, or by observing limited abilities around the equator. This could also be backed up by the aliens mysteriously avoiding certain continents depending on the time of year and seasons. Ultimately the military could have, or launch orbital satellites that cook the aliens like ants under a magnifying glass using directed solar radiation. I assume the aliens have no presence in space/orbit.
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The main issue here is that the human soldiers don't outnumber the aliens by that large of a margin. Also note that M60 system typically requires at least two (human) soldiers to operate (one to fire and one to carry ammunition). You've said that an alien is physically stronger than a human, so let's assume that gives an alien with the M60 and its advanced armor the same mobility as a human soldier. These facts together don't bode well for humanity.
One option would be to simply mass produce .50 caliber anti-materiel rifles and ammunition. Presumably the aliens would modify their tactics and/or loadout if humanity went down this path.
Grenades, mortars, RPGs and other portable explosives would be a decent counter to the aliens, depending on the properties of their armor (as has been pointed out, flamethrowers have limited range and may be a hazard to their operators and fellow soldiers if the fuel tanks are compromised). Carrying ammunition would be the primary issue. Potentially, rapid development of the Boston Dynamics LS3 autonomous pack robot would mitigate this.
More generally, introducing a large number of decently armored drones/robots into the combat environment would serve as shields/decoys for human soldiers and force the aliens to use their anti-armor missile systems more. In turn, this might give tanks and artillery more survivability in the field. Ultimately, the action on the ground will mostly serve to delay, rather than defeat, the aliens. As others have pointed out, the human air force will likely be responsible for the most alien deaths, assuming that the human infantry can slow the aliens' advance.
Chemical and biological agents could be considered, depending on how well-sealed the alien armor is. Neutron radiation could also be considered, but if the alien armor contains shielding (like borated materials), it may not be effective. And in any case, these options may not be feasible for infantry to implement.
All this said, if the portals the aliens use for resupply aren't destroyed, humanity faces a war of attrition that it probably will lose (unless the total number of aliens is some fixed number much much less than the population of the Earth).
[Answer]
## RODS OF GOD
Since your aliens are stuck on the ground, and nukes might have dire side-effects, consider rods of god from space. Also known as [kinetic energy weapons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment). While most depictions are of satellites with large armaments of tungsten rods, consider using high altitude drones carrying these rods--perhaps a solar-powered army of drones with magnetic rail or coil guns for the rods. This would be an effective way to neutralize these enemy forces on the ground.
According to [Popular Science](http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/rods-god):
>
> If so-called "Rods from God"--an informal nickname of untraceable
> origin--ever do materialize, it won't be for at least 15 years.
> Launching heavy tungsten rods into space will require substantially
> cheaper rocket technology than we have today. But there are numerous
> other obstacles to making such a system work. Pike, of
> GlobalSecurity.org, argues that the rods' speed would be so high that
> they would vaporize on impact, before the rods could penetrate the
> surface. Furthermore, the "absentee ratio"--the fact that orbiting
> satellites circle the Earth every 100 minutes and so at any given time
> might be far from the desired target--would be prohibitive. A better
> solution, Pike argues, is to pursue the original concept: Place the
> rods atop intercontinental ballistic missiles, which would slow down
> enough during the downward part of their trajectory to avoid
> vaporizing on impact. ICBMs would also be less expensive and, since
> they're stationed on Earth, would take less time to reach their
> targets. "The space-basing people seem to understand the downside of
> space weapons," Pike says--among them, high costs and the difficulty
> of maintaining weapon platforms in orbit. "But I'll still bet you
> there's a lot of classified work on this going on right now."
>
>
>
[Answer]
You are describing aliens too tough to kill by most anti-infantry weapons, but they aren't in large numbers. Thus you're describing battlefield armor--go after them as you would any other battlefield armor.
1) Anti-tank missiles. You didn't list them as having smoke systems, they'll have almost no chance against something like a Hellfire. The helicopters that fire them will be beyond the range of the alien's weapons and they can be guided to their target by a helicopter hiding behind terrain and showing nothing but the laser pod that sticks up above the rotor. The helicopter that fires need not be the one that lazes, either. A well-hidden soldier can also operate the laser.
Modern anti-tank missiles can defeat most any armor that you can put on a tank (the defense against them is to either hide from them or knock them out of the sky just before impact with reactive armor.)
2) I doubt the infantry anti-tank missiles will track but anti-tank rockets will work, although they will be dangerous for the people firing them as they don't fly too far.
3) Take a page out of Desert Storm: Tank plinking. A fighter bomber goes up with a load of laser-guided bombs, find a target, laze it, drop a bomb.
Since you are describing a force of pure infantry they'll be shredded. At least in Desert Storm the Iraqis had some anti-air, your aliens don't.
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Lots of people have already discussed this question, but I want to look at it from a slightly different angle. Why would aliens choose to deploy on the continents? The problem with humans is that we have exactly one target worth defending: Earth. For our purposes, we have no idea about where their home planet is, or how many colonies they have. Our current weaponry is only good for a one or two dimensional attack, the one we face on Earth. On earth, latitude and longitude are the only viable ways of maneuvering. You can't really burrow too deep in the earth, and even if you use planes, in the end, you end up approaching on a 2 dimensional plane. On the other hand, earth is a large, 3 dimensional target. They can just decide to ignore our space defense fortifications, by flying around on a different plane. Earth just doesn't have enough resources or military might to defend from all directions. For that reason, they don't need a ground invasion. They can just approach from the undefended directions, and hold the entire earth "hostage". They send a message to all the major powers, saying that unless they immediately dismantle the defensive facilities in space, they will launch a bombing attack at all the major cities in the world. Earth will have no time to react, as it only takes a few minutes to drop missiles, and a matter of seconds to fire a laser or similar beam weapon. Not nearly enough time to deploy a anti-bomber force of fighters and such. Similarly, if Earth decides to fire ground weapons, such as ICBMs and other very long range weaponry, the aliens will still have several minutes of advance warning, more than enough time to bomb Earth into oblivion, perhaps even enough time to warp back out of range of the missiles. That's not even mentioning the fact that they may have counter-missile systems, and simply shoot down the missiles, or maybe they can jam their navigation systems enough that they can avoid them.
In short, there isn't much Earth can do. Earth can either increase their defense of space (which in the current day is non existent, but I'll assume some exists in the scenario) 1000 fold, or they can practice a policy of first-strike and early detection, meaning finding the aliens first, having ships that warp to their home planet, to set up a similar hostage situation, or launching ICBMs the second that any ship signatures are detected, without pausing to negotiate. Even in that case, its possible, that the aliens would still be able to destroy earth. In that case, you would need to set up stations with rail-guns in such a way that any point in space is within a mile or so of a rail-gun.
[Answer]
**First Step: Lose**
There's little chance for the humans to win if the aliens are smart enough to master teleportation and have access points in all continents. They will quickly realize the pressure points in the human military machine and will use their superior maneuverability to cut out any supply train.
All the mighty M-1 tanks? Still in their garages waiting for fuel that will never come.
All the Nukes? Still in their silos, waiting for a target that never stops long enough in a place to be targeted.
All the soldiers? Giving away their guns to the aliens in exchange for food as the winter gets worse.
**Second Step: Adapt**
So, now Earth is under Alien control, its time to learn about them. With some luck you will have hidden bunkers of surviving scientists and specialists that can be supplied by the rebel forces in the occupied cities.
The main question is: Who are our new conquerors?
We will need to learn all we can about them in a short time span, specially what are their plans for humanity and if there are other races that have been put under their control before.
The old world order has failed, so its time to learn with our conquerors how they came to achieve it, what they have done better than us and how we can use that for our own means.
If humanity is to survive it will need new technology for a new kind of war, it will need supplies, and above all it will need allies.
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Quick answer, chemical weapons, explosives, and nukes. They may assume that we don't have chems because they are never used (other then the police force using tear gas), explosives are just hard to resist, and nukes are, as far as we know, impossible to resist, if the explosion doesn't kill them (which is near impossible) the radiation surely will.
[Answer]
You describe aliens that are armoured to a degree that infantry rifle ammunition will not penetrate, but can be penetrated by an anti-material rifle, probably .50 calibre, as that is a typical round used by such weapons.
.50 cal and larger anti-material weapons may be issued to infantry soldiers in greater numbers, but their numbers would be initially limited, and a large anti-material rifle has the disadvantage that it cannot readily be fired from a standing position.
To cover the need for a shorter-ranged weapon that would be effective against these aliens, and is available now in significant quantities, let me suggest the [40mm grenade system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_mm_grenade). 40mm grenades are in use by a wide variety of military forces around the world, 40mm grenade launchers are available that can be attached to existing infantry rifles or as stand-alone infantry weapons, and are also available as larger, crew-served belt-fed weapons.
The 40mm grenade system includes a number of different rounds for different purposes, but includes the M433 round, which is a HEDP explosive round that can penetrate 50mm of hard steel armour plate, as well as causing casualties from shrapnel. This can be fired from any 40mm grenade launcher.
M430 rounds are higher velocity rounds that are more limited in the weapons that can fire it, and can also penetrate 50mm of hard steel armour, or in their M430A1 variant, 76mm of armour.
Given the high availability of these weapons and their ammunition, and the fact that ammunition exists that should be capable of dealing with the armoured aliens in question, would make them an ideal fall-back weapon that can be issued quickly to deal with the threat.
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[Question]
[
What would the effect on Earth be if Mars, in the space of *one second*, disappeared from the Solar System? Just simply was *gone*, leaving no residue, and leaving the space where it had been like it had never existed.
Would it have any effect on Earth at all?
[Answer]
# Mass panic and fears of the apocalypse
Physically? Nothing. There would be no readily discernable **physical** effect on the Earth or us, its inhabitants.
Emotionally and psychologically though, that is a whole 'nother story. It would cause a tremendous uproar. A **magic event** of astonishing proportions has taken place. As other answerers have pointed out: the event would violate the laws of physics as we know them. Only something supernatural / magical can make it happen. This would frighten people, because our sense of security and safety rests on the foundation that we can predict what happens next, which is the very purpose of discerning the laws of physics in the first place. As long as the laws of physics operate as we are used to, then we feel fairly safe and comfortable in our understanding of the great and scary place that is the universe.
But with this monumental event, all that feeling of safety is out the window. What is to say that our planet is not the next one?! "Mass panic" would probably not even begin to describe the mood. People would start fearing the apocalypse is at hand.
[Answer]
Without Mars there would be many fewer impacts of asteroids on Earth. I mentioned this in a comment but I think it's worth its own answer.
The reason is the following. Near-Earth asteroids -- asteroids whose orbits cross Earth's -- are the population of asteroids that can bash into Earth. They don't survive for too long, only a million years or so on average, because their orbits are not stable for the long term. So, where do they come from? Well, asteroids in the main asteroid belt (between 2.1 and 3.2 AU) are somehow pushed onto an unstable orbit, typically an orbital resonance with Jupiter or Saturn, like the 3:1 resonance with Jupiter (where the asteroid makes 3 orbits around the Sun for every 1 of Jupiter's). These locations are called the "Kirkwood gaps" and are systematically devoid of asteroids:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/woHJE.png)
On its way in to become a near-Earth object, the asteroid typically has its orbit stretched out (i.e., its orbit becomes much more "eccentric"). This causes the body's orbit to cross the orbit of Mars, and eventually the asteroid is usually kicked inward by Mars (whose orbital distance is 1.5 AU).
If Mars disappeared, then would asteroids still be able to move inward from the main belt to cross Earth's orbit? Yes, but with a far lower efficiency. Because as an asteroid's orbit gets stretched out, its closest approach to the Sun becomes smaller (and therefore closer to Earth) but its farthest approach becomes farther (and therefore closer to Jupiter). If the asteroid's orbit crosses Jupiter's it will be kicked out of the Solar System quickly.
Without Mars as a conveyor belt toward Earth, many fewer asteroids would be able to cross Earht's orbit and therefore hit us. So, the impact rate on Earth would be much lower.
Of course, the story would change if Mars' orbit were instead populated by a swarm of asteroids...
[Answer]
Earth's orbit would not be affected significantly by Mars' disappearance. However, a similar thought experiment would turn out quite differerently. If Earth disappeared, Venus' orbit would become unstable, and Venus would either fall into the Sun or perhaps collide with Mercury (a collision with Mars is unlikely). This is because Venus' orbit is located at an unstable "[secular resonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_resonance)" with Jupiter, where Venus' orbit should precess at the same rate as Jupiter's. This would cause Venus' orbit to become extremely stretched out (i.e., its [orbital eccentricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity) would increase drastically). Grvitational kicks from Earth actually prevent Venus from falling into this resonance (called the nu\_5 fyi). But if Earth disappeared, Venus would enter the resonance, have its orbit stretched out, and probably fall onto the Sun.
FYI, this was only discovered in 1998 (original paper downloadable here: <http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998AJ....116.2055I>)
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The gravitational pull of the Mars on earth is pretty minimal. However, with its absence, the Earth's orbit will be a little (parts in million perhaps) more elliptical. I doubt this would do any real change. Light coming from Mars is negligible, so that can be ignored too.
Only difference it would make is that we wouldn't have a planet that is easy to analyze and have dreams of colonizing it.
[Answer]
To actually answer your question (and not just say that it is pointless because it is impossible):
If Mars disappeared right now it would not have any affect on Earth whatsoever. You did ask the question in the context of "if Mars had never existed". Mars' gravitational pull in the Solar System is negligible to Earth's existence. Both of Mars' moons are captured asteroids, so if you are implying that they would still exist and not disappear as well --- their orbit would change but I do not know the mathematical calculations to determine where they would go. It would depend on where they were when Mars disappeared. Mars does not block asteroids from hitting Earth, so there would not be an increase of impacts on Earth if Mars disappeared (explanation below). Though the person who discussed the Kirkwood Gaps --- nice! Not many people know about those.
The only thing you would need to assess about Mars' non-existence is how it would alter the human component. Mars is an integral piece of human history and has an important role in almost every culture on Earth (probably every culture but I cannot speak with specifics). That would be the only thing affected.
Note: It is actually not true that Earth would receive less impacts if Mars disappeared because of Mars being closer to the asteroid belt. It is true that Mars receives more impacts than Earth because it is closer to the asteroid belt (roughly 200 impacts a year larger than 10 meters appear on Mars, and this is mostly due to the lack of atmosphere on Mars that doesn't burn up the material during entry). But that doesn't mean that Earth would receive more impacts if Mars wasn't there. Mars has a highly eccentric orbit and its closeness to the asteroid belt changes. When it is closer to the asteroid belt it receives more impacts, when it is farther from the belt it receives less. Earth's relative position to the asteroid belt does not change so it would not receive more impacts just because Mars is gone. Mars does not defend Earth from asteroid impacts... Earth's moon does. It would be highly probable that any impacts that would have been absorbed by Mars that happen to be on a course with Earth would either be absorbed by the Moon or burn up in Earth's atmosphere during entry. Regardless, there were waaaaaay more impacts in the past than there are now. So if you are asking what would happen if Mars disappeared RIGHT NOW, the change to the impact rate on Earth would be inconsequential.
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[Question]
[
I've been working on the setting for a science fiction novel where one of the questions that came up was: **“How would you design a dragon-like creature so it could sew?”**. Although I worked out a believable solution, it occurred to me that it might be fun to find out how others would answer this question.
A little background: The novel is about an extraordinary character. In one of her adventures she encounters a race of sentient dragon-like beings. They believe they are artificially designed creatures, intended for ground combat, created by an advanced race long ago. They have many characteristics that could not have evolved by natural evolution, including several powers related to healing battle damage. Large gashes must be closed, either by stitching or gluing. Either requires fine motor skills and the ability to manipulate small items (ex: needle and thread). **How could they do that?**
[Answer]
You did not provide the specs for your dragons, so I imagine their build would fit along the classical european, D&D chromatic dragon shapes and sizes.
Let me tell you about Iguanodons. They were herbivorous dinosaurs, about this big (from Wikipedia commons):
The reason I want to talk about these critters is their front paws. Iguanodons are known for the large spike they had for a thumb, which paleontologists believe was used for self-defense. What not everybody knows is that they had opposable pinkies.
Another shot of the beasts' hands, to give an idea of what they look like:
Paleontologists believe those opposable pinkies could be used to pull branches from trees. If that is true, then some fine motor skill was present in that species (though not necessarily as fine as a human's). A little bone and neural reconfiguration and you have hands agile enough to operate tools such as needles.
[Answer]
A couple obvious answers leap out right away:
**No. 1** --- the dragons are small. Perhaps four to six feet long, exclusive of the tail. Opposable thumbs go without saying. Leathery fingertips with fine perhaps barbed hairs that secrete a kind of oily substance allow these dragon-warrior-tailors to grasp ordinary needle and thimble and settle down for a nice quiet evening sewing before the fire. Relatively short, blunt claws don't get in the way of needle or thread; sharp teeth, however, do make short work of nipping bits of thread.
**No. 2** --- the dragons are large. Ordinary dragon size, perhaps thirty to forty feet long (again, exclusive of the tail). Slightly spaced, shingle-like scales upon the inner surfaces of these dragons' hands allow them to easily manipulate the two foot long sewing needles and quarter inch (silk) cords they sew with! Again, the configuration of thumb opposing fingers allows them to make and manipulate tools as well as pop the helmet off any pesky knight that wanders into the neighbourhood, or more especially, to snatch up any perambulating maiden!
**No. 3** --- the dragon can be any size. Not all dragons are lucky enough to be hatched with prehensile forefeet! This kind of dragon, however, has discovered that its long, slender yet strong forked tongue works very well to pick up & manipulate even fine objects like their sewing needles! Happily, dragons don't mind when their healers slobber all over their wound stitchery. Some wise dragons hold that the sticky nature of dragon slobber actually works to help seal the wound closed and keep it protected from contamination!
[Answer]
So this is a genetically engineered combat beast? It seems like they would have something considerably faster at their disposal than a sewing kit.
Instead imagine they have a long line of barbed spines along the outside of their forelimbs. In combat they use these as weapons, slashing and stabbing with them. They are designed to break off and regrow and are barbed in order to stay inside the poor victim.
They also have a secondary purpose though. If a dragon is injured they drive the spines through their own flesh. then pull them back so the barbs pull the wound closed. They then break off the spines leaving them in place holding the wound closed. The entire process takes seconds and is done by reflex if injured and the dragon can reach its own wound, or to aid each other.
[Answer]
This is a genetically engineered dragon, why would you make it use a needle and thread? Instead, let's give it two very thin, hollow claws that look very similar to snake fangs. These two claws will be opposed to each other, so that each can be put through the material to be sewn from opposite sides. They will meet in the middle, where the hollow ends of these fangs can interlock and form a channel through the material. Finally, a pair of spinnarets like a spider's will work in concert, spinning and passing a thread through the claws, and pulling it out the other side. They can then move both claws to the location of the next stitch and repeat.
Fine motor skills are a must, as others have mentioned, and the appendage with the claw will need to be at the end of a highly articulated arm, so that they can reach places with ease.
[Answer]
This chameleon doesn't seem to be having much problem holding this somewhat-needle-like object:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/77dQE.jpg)
Seems to me a dragon probably could sew if it had appropriately-sized needle, thread, patience and desire to do so.
[Answer]
One thing a lot of depictions of Oriental Dragons have is the presence of [barbels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbel_(anatomy))around the face, kind of like a [Catfish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfish).
Since we are talking about a created species, is there any reason why we could not take that, blend it in with a little cephalopod DNA and make them tentacles with oodles of fine motor control and gripping ability. This leaves you with all the options you need in terms of 4 or 6 limbs, wings, claws, and so on
To add to it, dogs will often clean their own wounds as best they can by licking. Make the saliva antiseptic to help with this. It could be a bonus if the saliva has adhesive properties, maybe by heating with fire breath
Next, Assume your dragon has the very long flexible neck and body depicted in both Oriental and Occidental art. You want the head to be able to reach all parts of it's own body.
So the dragon gets wounded. It takes the arrow that the silly human shot at it and pulls it free (after reducing said human to traces of impure carbon). After looking at the wound it gives a few antiseptic licks. It grabs the pre-threaded needles and uses them to stitch the wound closed. A couple of licks and maybe a burst of flame to seal it the rest of the way. A bandage that has an outer metal cover over the top and you are back to torching villagers.
The dragons could make these little first aid kits in their downtime and simply keep them tucked under scales or behind the head crest. Or maybey have them put together by juvenile dragons as both practice for the fine motor skills and to earn merit badges for the Dragon Scouts.
[Answer]
As engineered beings in an SFnal setting, there is no particular reason they need to be bipedal or quadrupedal creatures at all.
Consider that in Edgar Rice Burroughs "Barsoom" novels, many of the native Martian species have a multitude of limbs. If they only need two or four to actually move, then secondary or tertiary limbs can be used to do other things. In evolutionary terms, they could devolve to become smaller, or more slender and dexterous in order to carry out tasks like feeding and grooming (which would eventually provide a basis for genetic engineers to create dexterous manipulators to allow for sewing and other activities needing fine motor skills. This is similar to the mythological Centaur.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1j9Xx.png)
*Centaur*
If you want to look at a model of Earth like creatures, consider the Allosaur. It a theropod dinosaur, and as a carnivorous creature already has highly evolved senses and a relatively large brain to start. Modifying the front limbs and providing thumbs gives you the next piece of the puzzle (although you will also need to extensively modify and enlarge the brain as well)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mbDQx.jpg)
*Reconstruction of an Allosaur*
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Instead of sewing with thread and needle, use an organic produced "glue".
The dinosaurs would need to be genetically engineered to have a particular gland that can excrete a substance similar to Cyanoarcrylate, which is also known as super-glue.
The hands would only need the necessary dexterity, and strength, to pinch the the wound closed.
Reference: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate>
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> Studies confirm that cyanoacrylate can be safer and more functional for wound closure than traditional suturing (stitches)
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>
> Large gashes must be closed, either by stitching or gluing. Either requires fine motor skills and the ability to manipulate small items (ex: needle and thread). How could they do that?
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**First and most obvious to me is the matter of SCALE** (no pun intended).
The larger something is, the less fine their work is going to be, and the larger their tools. When a dragon, which is a very large creature, sews up a wound, the spaces in between the stitches would be wider than, say, a mouse. Not that a mouse could do its own stitches or have another mouse do them, but, if they could they would certainly be finer than if a human did them. Depending on the size difference, a curved suture needle might well be larger and more sturdy to get through dragon skin.
So while your dragons might sew wounds shut, it's highly probable they aren't going to be using human sized needles. In this case "small" has a relative value.
**Second, I don't know if you have ever seen a suture kit, but, they don't use traditional sewing needles (suture needles are actually curved not straight) nor do they use the same techniques. Here's a practice picture.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9MNpK.jpg)
You are currently talking about "dragons that can sew" as though the grasping skills and coordination for sewing wounds shut is the same as sewing a piece of clothing. But it is not. While it can be done other ways, in standard practice, both hands are involved. I can sew a piece of fabric one-handed. But sewing leather or a person back together is far more difficult and involves curved needles.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LRtIP.jpg)
What this means is that opposable thumbs are not enough. A design like a t-rex for example, even with thumbs, would be right out. The hands need to work together, and the vision needs to be good. And with some fantasy dragons, you will see the forelimbs pretty far apart, awkwardly positioned or too short to do what's needed and the dragon still be able to see. Depending on how you design them, it's possible two dragons will be needed to stitch a wound, if they are designed in such a way that hands working in concert and close enough to the eyes are an issue.
That's another thing, this is close work, and for something engineered like this, it's more likely that dragons would be farsighted for combat. While they may be able to do this by feel, I am going to suggest that dragon doctors or stitchers, would be the ones with a little less visual acuity on the battlefield.
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My solution is based on dragons that have an extensible, tri-fork tongue. The tines are two-stage. The larger parts are used to hold or manipulate objects such as an infant, a jug of water, or a dragon's egg. At the ends of the larger sections are smaller, more flexible, sections used for more delicate work such as sewing or drawing. The image below should provide some idea of what I have in mind. The tongue is blue because the dragons have hemocyanin blood. Unlike most hemocyanins, the dragon's blood bonds to oxygen cooperatively. Since the hemocyanins are in the plasma, rather than in cells like hemoglobin, the blood is easier to genetically enhance.
Besides the tongue, there are enhancements to the brain to provide more tactile feed back and increased motor control. The accommodation of the eyes has also been increased to enable focusing on closer objects.
I am happy to see so many creative or informative answers here.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s1Xl0.png)
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Sewing has the same requirements as many human crafts. It's a lot like carpentry, actually, only with lesser strength requirements --- measure twice, cut once. A race of dragons that could not sew would be unable to make much of anything -- pottery, machinery, houses.
But to me, the big questions are what and why. What are they making and why? Do they have a sense of modesty? Of vanity? A need for protective covering? Or are they making larger objects like fishnets or sails? You don't need the same control for those that you do for fine embroidery of silk thread on linen.
My dog has fine motor skills with his snout, so you might try and improve their snouts, while giving them slightly more functional front claws. There are (disabled) humans who can control a paintbrush with their mouths and create art, which suggests that intelligence and motivation are more important than biological features.
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1. Opposable thumbs.
2. Fingers not too long, and not too short.
3. Hand attached to a ...
heck, you need the dexterity, (relatively) fine motor and arm length that are very human-like. Claws can't be long (or even medium length), either, since they'd get in the way. Ditto a long snout, since that would block vision.
Bottom line: the humanoid shape is very conducive to manual dexterity, and few others on Earth are. Even other Great Apes have problems with fine motor control. An octopus with hands *might* be, but only underwater.
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Use a smaller more expendable species to clamp the wound shut like how farmers use those African ants. Just close the wound, let the ant bite you, and snap off its head. Easy peezy lemon I'm not finishing that phrase.
As far as motor skills goes, it just depends on where the cut is. I'd just give the dragons hands or tentacles. Why would you not? Honestly I don't see why crows wouldn't be able to manipulate the ants in the way described above. You would need the right species of ants though.
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The dragon is has a fairly long and thin tongue, with a very sharp end, plus long flexible spines somewhere on its body, they come loose if pulled.
Sealing a wound is then done as follows:
The Dragon snaps of a spine with its tongue. It bites across the wound to pull the sides of it together. The tongue pierces the sides while also snaking through them. It then grabs the spine and pulls out leaving the spine as a thread. The dragon spits out some blood and continues fighting.
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Dragons are often depicted with feet like birds.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#/media/File:800x480-Y_Ddraig_Goch.png>[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#/media/File:800x480-Y_Ddraig_Goch.png)
Here is a link to pictures of eagle's feet:
<https://www.google.com/search?q=eagle+claw&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1oaKL0OzaAhXCuFkKHZkyB4wQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=949>[2](https://www.google.com/search?q=eagle%20claw&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1oaKL0OzaAhXCuFkKHZkyB4wQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=949)
Note that one digit is on the opposite side to the others.
Apparently some parrots and other pet birds use their feet like hands.
<http://forums.avianavenue.com/index.php?threads/question-do-all-parrots-use-feet-as-a-hand.25550/>[3](http://forums.avianavenue.com/index.php?threads/question-do-all-parrots-use-feet-as-a-hand.25550/)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_feet_and_legs>[4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_feet_and_legs)
Thus a dragon like creature with bird like but improved feet should be able to use them more like hands than any known bird and should be able to sew.
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Assuming one had access to all modern technology but couldn't go into space, would it be possible for the protagonist to permanently stay in sunlight? While it would be trivial near the poles during summer and winter, I presume there's no aircraft capable of staying within sunlight around the time of the equinox.
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With current [aerial refueling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_refueling) technology, which is capable of refueling some aircraft in the air, one could "easily" keep the sun over the horizon, even near the equator, in a sufficiently fast aircraft.
The circumference of the Earth is about 40000 km, so you'd need to go about $\frac{40\,000}{24} = 1667$ km/h to stay ahead of nightfall. That's just over the speed of sound at 1236 km/h, but we have [plenty of supersonic aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supersonic_aircraft) capable of the task, many of which can be refueled in the air.
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Yes, it is possible, but for a normal travel airplane very hard to accomplish. In a former answer I errornously used an estimate of 24 hours, but as WhatRoughBeast pointed out, the real time is 12 hours (at equinox every latitude day and night are equally long). That is a real challenge.
You start at the poles during the equinox in a plane, either with an
Boeing 777-200LR (range 17,395km) or an Airbus A340-500 (range 16,670km). As you will see you need more range so pull out the seats and fill the empty room with fuel tanks. This allows us to reach our destination without air refueling (which would be the only other option, because we have no spare time).
Your plane stays always exactly after the terminator shadow to reach 12 h flight time until no longer possible. Before I assumed an 45° angle, now we need to get as close to the equator as possible.
Cruise speed is 900 km/h.
At what latitude following the sun is not possible anymore ?
1667 km/h \* cos (latitude) = 900 km/h =>
latitude = arccos(0.54) = 57,5°
After that we still have 12 h light *if we would fly straight southwards and stay on the same longitude...this distance would be 115° x 111.3 km/h = 12 800 km.* But we can extend the time by flying eastwards after the sun to widen the distance between us and the terminator line.
Now give your plane the beans, you **must have** an airspeed of more than 850 km/h, else you will be caught by the terminator line before you reach the safe -57.5° line. The faster, the better !
This is the flight plan for 900 km/h:
Terminator lines are at 0 and +- 180° when we enter the latitude.
Lat: 57,500000 Long: 0,000000
Lat: 55,000000 Long: 1,005882
Lat: 52,500000 Long: 2,009119
Lat: 50,000000 Long: 3,031186
Lat: 47,500000 Long: 4,056425
Lat: 45,000000 Long: 5,040777
Lat: 42,500000 Long: 6,109931
Lat: 40,000000 Long: 7,121132
Lat: 37,500000 Long: 8,113210
Lat: 35,000000 Long: 9,163885
Lat: 32,500000 Long: 10,088179
Lat: 30,000000 Long: 11,122173
Lat: 27,500000 Long: 12,294797
Lat: 25,000000 Long: 13,231579
Lat: 22,500000 Long: 14,349810
Lat: 20,000000 Long: 15,346429
Lat: 17,500000 Long: 16,193566
Lat: 15,000000 Long: 17,093546
Lat: 12,500000 Long: 18,037084
Lat: 10,000000 Long: 19,019831
Lat: 7,500000 Long: 20,221031
Lat: 5,000000 Long: 21,123519
Lat: 2,500000 Long: 22,210219
Lat: 0,000000 Long: 23,235670
Lat: -2,500000 Long: 24,551104
Lat: -5,000000 Long: 25,594283
Lat: -7,500000 Long: 26,447472
Lat: -10,000000 Long: 27,615605
Lat: -12,500000 Long: 28,637297
Lat: -15,000000 Long: 29,308408
Lat: -17,500000 Long: 30,056890
Lat: -20,000000 Long: 31,585313
Lat: -22,500000 Long: 32,427503
Lat: -25,000000 Long: 33,287608
Lat: -27,500000 Long: 34,620467
Lat: -30,000000 Long: 35,282857
Lat: -32,500000 Long: 36,352323
Lat: -35,000000 Long: 37,561653
Lat: -37,500000 Long: 38,595209
Lat: -40,000000 Long: 39,178347
Lat: -42,500000 Long: 40,832200
Lat: -45,000000 Long: 41,588653
Lat: -47,500000 Long: 42,181960
Lat: -50,000000 Long: 43,299990
Lat: -52,500000 Long: 44,240993
Lat: -55,000000 Long: 45,488449
Lat: -57,500000 Long: 46,147859
Distance : 13 534 km
Flight time : 15.037863 h
Terminator line : 45,567938
The values are calculated by a numerical routine I had scraped together in short time. I think the optimization is still off (check it later), but the values indicate that a 1° increase for every 2,5° is a good estimate.
All necessarily assumed that we have still air (in contrast to jetstreams, westerlies and the howling sixties in the south).
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Kim Stanley Robinson in the Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) has a train built around the equator of Mercury such that the expansion and contraction of the rails as they enter and exit sunlight perpetually propels a train to stay always in shadow. He worked out the details of the system pretty well... and if you put a train 180 degrees around, nearly the same system could keep a train always in sunlight.
A vast series of parabolic mirrors could also do the trick.
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Much depends on your timescale. Just exactly how long do need to be in sunlight? If it's 8 or 10 hours, Thorsten S has the right answer.
However, no aircraft can maintain flight continuously, and supersonic aircraft in particular will start to get very unhappy after 10 hours or so in the air. As a result, you'd need to create a Pony Express system, with multiple aircraft spaced at, let's say, 8-hour intervals, with the payload being transferred to each in turn. So you'd need a minimum of 3 aircraft, plus a fleet of tankers, and perhaps 2 or 3 times as many to deal with larger maintenance issues.
Note that the B2 has flown missions of 70 hours continuous operation, but a) this was considered a quite remarkable performance, and b) the B2 is subsonic and incapable of keeping up with the sun.
Of course, this assumes an equatorial flight, and this is not necessary. By flying along the solar equivalent of the Arctic Circle, and staying constantly in twilight, a ground distance of about 10,000 miles is adequate. This implies a ground speed of about 400 miles per hour, so subsonic CAN do the job. In this case, you might get away with only 2 aircraft, with each aircraft operating for 24 hours in turn. Eventually this will require more aircraft, since major overhauls typically take more than 24 hours, and sooner or later something major will need replacing.
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Of course!
Both Arctic and Antarctic [midnight suns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun) stay in the sky for 6 months, alternating:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndlQNicOeso>
Quote from Wikipedia:
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> Around the summer solstice (approximately 21 June in the Northern Hemisphere and 22 December in the Southern Hemisphere) the sun is visible for the full 24 hours, given fair weather. The number of days per year with potential midnight sun increases the farther towards either pole one goes. Although approximately defined by the polar circles, in practice the midnight sun can be seen as much as 55 miles (90 km) outside the polar circle, as described below, and the exact latitudes of the farthest reaches of midnight sun depend on topography and vary slightly year-to-year.
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So stay in one place for 6 months, and then take a (fairly) quick flight to the other pole.
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One answer that hasn't been mentioned yet is an orbiting heliostat.
By positioning mirrors in orbit and aiming them at a specific point on Earth, it is possible to stay on the earth and yet maintain constant sunlight irradiation by simply directing the space-based mirrors.
[This paper](http://jxcrystals.com/publications/Mirrors_in_Dawn_Dusk_Orbit_AIAA_Tech_Conf_Final_2013.pdf) describes a number of possible modes of such space-based 24-hour irradiation mirrors.
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Well, if you can stay in the air, you just need to pick a pole, and stay above cloud level.
At that altitude, axial tilt is not sufficient to hide the sun from you, so you are safe.
Stationkeeping, resupply, repairs, etc on the other hand may be an issue.
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You could live on the north pole for 6 months and south pole for 6 months, and travel with an aircraft at slightly less than the speed of sound between the two. If the planet has no tilt then on the same pole.
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You already gave the answer. Stay at one pole during its light time, which is half the year, then take a super fast jet to the other pole at just the switching time.
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Couldn't you just make camp at one of the poles and move with the tilt of the earth to remain at the pole year round?
If the earth's circumference is 40,000km and earth tilt is 23.5 degrees that would mean the pole moves 2611km/year or 7.15km/day. Surely you could walk that distance everyday.
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**SR-71 Blackbird**
Since you have access to all technology (I assume including discontinued tech), set up a network of SR-71s and in-flight refueling planes, so you can zip around with enough time to land and switch planes when needed.
It is far from simple though, and can be terrifying (and very expensive), here's a link:
[Blackbird Pilot Interview](http://www.sbnation.com/2014/3/7/5447310/sr-71-blackbird-pilot-interview)
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Position several large mirrors in orbit, relaying the sunlight to your position at all times. No travelling necessary ;)
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Travel from pole to pole twice a year at 45 degrees.
Need to travel at a 45 west to keep up with the sun.
Pole to pole in 24 hours at a 45 degrees is about 1465 mph.
Problem is landing and taking off on the poles.
And it is cold - want to live on a pole even if have sunshine.
The Artic Circle is at 63 degrees. Assume you live there 1/2 the year. One day a year (June 21) is all daylight. After that you merely need to travel toward the pole. Each day add about 75 miles. June 22 75 miles, June 23 150 miles, ... On the worst day if you are splitting poles by land 6712. miles. In the air more like 6000 miles with is only 125 mph. But you probably don't want to travel until is starts to get dark so need to do it in 12 hours for 500 mph. Can do that with a LearJet. On average you could spend 18 hours a day on the ground. On your commute days twice a year to the other circle at a 45 you would need to travel 1075 mph. 1075 mph is exotic / military). In the south you would need to be on Antartica.
If wanted to stay subsonic (90 mph) then you could only commute to 55 latitude. UK and and south end of South America.
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In the world, there are 4 billion happy, healthy Humans. In this case, thanks to the power of magic, it's safe to assume that they also live long, happy lives. Just like we do today! An Evil Villain Bad Guy has grown tired of them, though. He casts a terrible curse on Humanity- they are all sterile! Even those still in the womb!
This is obviously quite terrible, but **how** terrible?
The humans **can fix this**. It won't be permanent so long as they work fast enough on a counter-spell. Humanity will work towards fixing this as soon as possible of course.
**How much time do they have to develop a cure before the species is irrevocably doomed?**
[Answer]
**Assumption #1**:
Somewhere between 40 and 50 years. Any girl babies just conceived before the Curse was thrown down will have somewhere between 40 and 50 years before menopause sets in and they will no longer be able to easily bear children once the Curse is lifted.
Here I assume that Evil Villain Bad Guy was smart enough to include cryogenically preserved eggs and sperm in his Curse.
**Assumption #2**:
No worries! (Well, not many worries!) If Evil Villain Bad Guy is unaware of the cryo-preservation industry, then it would just be a matter of choosing high quality brood-mothers to be implanted with viable and unaffected fertilised embryos.
The earlier this programme can be implemented, the better chance there will be of allowing civilisation in general to continue. Due to the great expense and the high technology of this industry, it goes without saying that broad swathes of Earth will be utterly uninhabited within 100 years.
**Caveat**:
This programme is the biggest crap shoot in history.
We all know that IVF type technology doesn't always work --- success rates are not that high. And once a given facility's stocks of embryos are used up, well, that's the end of the programme in that region. There certainly won't be enough new humans to keep civilisation going after the Great Death; and there may not be enough to even restart anything like civilisation as we know it.
The assumption here is that about half of the approximately 400000 preserved embryos in the US will be born. This is barely enough people to form a good sized city.
You will need to institute a very serious programme of placement, education and indoctrination for every single one of those 200k children. A cradle of new civilisation will have to be located --- one with a reasonable climate and fertile soil. Once settled there, they will have to be educated in a very wide variety of sciences and technical arts --- they will need chemists and electrical engineers and nurses and doctors and civic planners. But they will also need to be educated in social and cultural arts as well. Keep in mind that most of the world will be depopulated and all those cultures and histories will die with those people. An awareness and respect for those past cultures must also be inculcated in the new civilisation.
I would also suggest that, under this assumption, the Doomed should also create a programme of shutting down, securing and cleaning up the mess that will soon be generated by their gradual departure from the Earth.
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**Indefinitely**.
It is possible to create new animals by cloning. This technology has never been developed in humans because of severe ethical issues, but faced with extinction, it'd likely be up and running within a decade. The core principles are all understood.
However, this assumes the mechanism of infertility allows implantation of embryos. Even if not it is possible humanised animals could be used for incubation.
To address some objections raised in the comments:
**Cloning technology is imperfect**: this is certainly true, however it is already the case that cloning is commercially viable. There is [a biotechnology company in China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Genomics_Institute) that is [producing 500 cloned pigs a year](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25576718), while the cloning process itself involves a high degree of technical sophistication, none of the steps are prohibatively expensive or difficult in themselves. Faced with global infertility, *vast* sums of money will be made available for research, and enormous pressure placed on elected officials to remove legislative barriers. Under these circumstances we should expect viable cloning techniques to become routinely available in the developed world within a decade, probably faster. Cloning should be inherently about as expensive as IVF but with the extraordinary levels of demand we should expect economies of scale to drop prices fast. I would expect reproductive cloning to be available at around $1000 dollars pretty soon. Too expensive to be routinely available in the developing world, but no problem for developed countries with universal healthcare.
**Cloning suffers from the same problems as IVF**: IVF is only performed on clients who have exhibited problems conceiving the old fashioned way and are typically older. Accordingly success rates are far lower than we should expect from people who do not have these problems and thus success rates should be closer to the far higher rates observed with egg donation.
**Telomere shortening**: while this was a concern, it turns out [not to be a problem](https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/26237/cloning-and-telomeres). Even if it was a problem, it should be possible to develop a solution by temporary activation of the telomarases that naturally restore telomeres during normal reproduction.
**Accumulation of mutations**: cloning will inevitably accumulate mutations. This could be mitigated by long term storage of DNA from the original source but even this would be imperfect since the DNA is likely to slowly degrade even under ideal storage conditions. However, the accumulation of mutations is unlikely to render the process non-viable for a great many generations (plants and animals that self are known to survive for 100s of generations without apparent loss of viability, although cloning methods may induce higher mutation rates so an exact comparison is not possible), and there are a range of existing techniques that could developed to repair (e.g. CRISPR) or screen embyros (e.g. shotgun sequencing) and prevent transmission of harmful mutations. Moreover, in the hundreds of years available to humanity, the development of *in vitro* techniques to restore crossing-over and mixture of genes as per natural sexual reproduction seems much more likely than not.
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The time will depend on your definition of 'irrevocably doomed'. Based on your wording, it seems that you are focusing mostly on the biological survival of the species. However, there is also a cultural/civilisational aspect. In some sense, the loss of civilisation is also an extinction.
## Biological survival: 50 years to infinity till the humanity is doomed
Biological survival means that the species do not go extinct. However, it does not guarantee retaining culture and civilisation.
**The conservative estimate** assumes:
* no serious medical advances are made in the near future;
* sterility means not only sterility of eggs and sperm but also inability to carry a baby to a term;
* frozen eggs, sperm, and embryos were rendered infertile.
As others noted, modern women in developed societies are capable of bearing children till the age of 50. Some women do not experience menopause till their 60s, but childbearing is extremely risky at this age.
Minimal viable population for the survival of species is [approximately 4200 individuals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population). This has to be local, not global, population. Considering that 1) it is much harder to get pregnant and successfully deliver a baby for mature women; 2) babies are at much higher risk of genetic disorders (both parents age is a contributing factor here), the latest time when the curse must be lifted is when about 10,000 women are still fertile. Children and mothers must be transported to a single location with the mild climate and fertile land to ensure the species survival.
**The optimistic estimate** can be achieved through:
* *human cloning and genetic engineering* (sexual reproduction is overrated anyway :) ):
+ only cloning can be enough if we develop a way to create perfect copies (no mutations), but humanity will be unable to adapt to changing environment;
+ genetic engineering solves the problem of imperfect clones, it also allows to imitate evolution;
* *eternal life and youth*:
+ the species does not have to have babies in order to survive if they are immortal.
## Cultural survival: this is a bit tricky
Civilisation and technology heavily rely on population size. It is not possible to keep the modern level of development with just 10,000 people. I saw estimates ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of people. So, if we are optimistic, the curse must be lifted when it is still possible to deliver, grow, and educate about half a billion of babies. This gives probably 10-20 years. In a pessimistic scenario, the time shortens to a couple of years (maybe a decade, but not longer).
A possible workaround for the population size problem is total robotisation. If everything (including robots' repairs) is fully automated you only need to take care of the biological survival.
Another possibility is abandoning biological survival altogether. The entire world population can be digitised and uploaded to the servers. Of course, total robotisation is a must for this plan to succeed.
---
You also must take into consideration the effects of total infertility on society. This was addressed, for example, in [*The Children of Men*](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Children_of_Men).
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The curse actually contains more questions than it initially appears. It would strongly influence our sexuality, behavior and even global economy.
In a scenario where people wouldn't worry about babies, surely the **STDs consequences** would accelerate our extinction even more, due unprotected sexual relations.
We also have to observe that **having children is beneficial to living longer**, as you create affectional bonds which make most of people adopt a more responsible and even more conservative lifestyle - you *tend* to drink less alcohol and drive more carefully, or to avoid risky hobbies, such as mountain climbing, for example.
Surely, the main factor which contributes to our extinction is the zero population replacement rate caused by the curse, but this process would be faster than 40-50 years, because of our new sexual behavior - possibly more exposed to STDs - and our new lifestyle originated from the lack of family links.
Although it is hard to estimate, I would say it is at least 10% faster, then **35-45 years**.
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Magic aside, the question is how was the sterility achieved? Would the sterility continue with the next generation if we bypassed reproduction?
Already we have advancements in cloning, generating sperm or eggs from skin cells, IVF and artificial wombs.
Even if it could never be reversed, humanity has almost achieved the ability to reproduce without reproduction. If an event like this happened I almost doubt they would look for a counterspell but would actually leave it in place as a means of control.
Investment would be put into artificial reproduction because suddenly the industry would be worth trillions world wide. With investment of that level, would the powers that be want people being able to reproduce for free anymore?
Biologically 30 years would be the point of no return. After that point there wouldn't be the population of breeding age people to rescue humanity from the collapse of society.
Up to 50 years society would need to rebuild almost from scratch. After 50 it's too late.
Technology would more than likely have a solution within 10 years when it would have all the best minds and unlimited budget.
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**Answer 1:** never, if you sterilize all of humanity then the race is doomed because no one can ever reproduce.
**Answer 2:** if you mean temporary sterilization, then, women (on average) can roughly remain fertile till the age of 40 (plus or minus). So you have roughly 40 years to reverse the curse or humanity is doomed.
[Answer]
If everyone is sterile, then the species is already *de facto* extinct. Once all the living people die, they are gone forever.
If there is a way to reverse it (say, with scientific reasearch), the amount of time you have is that which consists of the productive life span of the researchers. If the researchers don't solve the problem before they retire and die, then the species is doomed.
I don't think that issues like the maximum age of female fertility and such enter into the picture so much because that assumes a particular solution to the problem. The solution could arise from cloning from non-reproductive cells.
(Any solution to the problem which is rooted in a re-start of regular female fertility will no longer be workable once the last person who is currently a baby has aged past reproductive age. But anyway, that estimate is only within a few decades of the one based on the last person who is currently a baby no longer being able to conduct research into the problem.)
We also have to consider that children have to be raised; it can't just be that the last few people somehow manage to produce fertile offspring and then die.
**However, there is a completely different possibility.**
The exinct human species could be resurrected in the far future by a different intelligent race, using preserved cells. Under this possibility, the time limit is much, much more generous.
**Another possibility.**
Humanity develops AI, which continues the search for the solution after the last human dies. When AI succeeds in making human babies (which are capable of reproduction upon maturity), AI also raises those babies. The AI-raised babies then bootstrap a resurgence of humanity.
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The existing answers ignore the effects of aging. Yes, some women *can* bear children into their 40's and 50's but there are two factors to consider:
* fertility declines as you age. More women than ever are having late-in-life children, but many of them are doing it with medical intervention. You haven't actually stated the technology of your world, but it's very rare in fiction to see high technology (cloning, in-vitro) co-exist with magic (curses) so I'm going to assume that that medical intervention isn't available in your world
* [genes degrade as you age](http://sciencenordic.com/children-older-mothers-face-greater-risk-hereditary-disease), and this is true for both women [and men](http://genetics.thetech.org/older-dads%E2%80%99-kids-higher-risk-genetic-disease). Your extinction question implies that after the curse is broken, humanity will not just resume breeding, but that that breeding will produce a healthy, viable population that can bounce back from the population slump. So you really don't want a high incidence of things like Down's Syndrome, &etc.
These factors mean that you don't have 40-50 years to break the curse. You probably really want to get this done in 20 to 30 to have the best chance of recovery.
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**Short answer**: Around 50 years.
**Long answer**:
If the humans live the same age of our world, then you must consider that the maximum reproductive age of women. According to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_over_age_50), "The oldest mother to date to conceive, was 71 years, and the youngest mother, 5 years old". So, since currently there are children in your world, they can become pregnant until around the age of 70, but with risks. The ideal pregnancy is to happen before 50 years old, and it can vary from woman to woman, so it is not safe to trust new births to woman after 50 (they may not be fertile anymore).
But this answer can vary depending of what kind of magic is possible. Since it's possible to avoid newborns with magic, is it possible to conceive a baby with magic? Or at least ensure that the mother and the children won't die on advanced ages (like 70).
Once new children are able to born, if there are enough new children and adults, the continuity of humanity is ensured. But in terms of extinction, if a small group of 2 men and 2 women (all able to reproduce) survive, then humanity is, technically saved, since will be possible to reproduce without incest.
However, other things must be considered on a world where everybody is sterile, like wars, new religions (which may also include fanatic people who believes that this is the fate of humanity and start hunting pregnant woman and also those who are trying to revert the curse), economic depression (since the population will start falling), slavery and even sexual diseases. They all can shorten the time humanity have to find its cure. The more time passes, the worst becomes the scenario.
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If all are sterile, then the length of that generation.
The odds on finding reversible answer decrease as time goes on - as experts get older and die off, but the last born would have to get up to speed on the current research which takes research prospects away from researching (but not all people are great researchers).
Depending on the reversal and the length of time it takes, it has to be done within the fertility period of the females, and also enough females to retain a genetically viable population base.
Also there would be factors such as old age care (with the imminent disaster do we expect the elderly to execute themselves to save resources for the research and cure?
But also we no longer lose productivity to child raising, and after a few years teachers, carers, and producers of young people items would be freed up to do more productive work), although those same freed up people would be also aging along with the rest of the population.
The other side effect is our current financial economy would completely collapse as it is based on exploiting a continuous supply of active, ignorant, young people to keep it afloat. (schools, universities, anywhere with low skill/low pay workers would go out of business as their current low level employees skilled up but couldn't be replaced)
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This scene is commonly seen: A huge starship levitates over the surface of a planet or a moon, staying effortlessly in one place, or moving slowly around at the fixed height. But how?
Required properties:
* Doesn't make noise or much of the noticeable influence below, except by making a huge shadow. It *can* make some effect measurable by sensitive instruments, but humans usually won't feel a thing.
* Doesn't rely on the atmosphere, i.e. it can levitate equally well over the planets and moons with no atmosphere.
* Can levitate above any solid surface, i.e. doesn't require special infrastructure or alloys below.
Desired/optional properties:
* Doesn't expend (much) energy in order to stay in place.
* It behaves as if some fixed height is a point of equilibrium (like with floating objects).
* Can levitate above liquid surface.
With the minimum possible amount of hand-waving, how can a massive starship achieve this?
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EDIT: To make things more clear, I'm thinking about starships like those from Independence Day and District 9, Star Destroyer over Jedha city in Rogue One and other floating starships and vechiles from SW and so on.
And it doesn't need to be possible with the currently known physics, but I'd like an answer that uses only Occam's-razor-like minimal required amount of new physics (e.g. if one approach needs a [fifth force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force) and another needs space wizards, I'll prefer the former). Imagine that a physicist sees such a starship and tries to explain it.
EDIT2: Typical height above the ground should be comparable to the ship's (horizontal) size.
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Most planets in the solar system have their own magnetic fields[(ref.)](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1yehec/do_all_the_planets_in_our_solar_system_have_a/?st=izvacozi&sh=13991ce4), so you could use those to levitate. Just grab a huge chunk of superconductive material, and cool it below its critical temperature just as you're at the right altitude.
Regarding your requirements:
* doesn't make much noise or noticeable influence: check. It might squeeze our magnetosphere a little, but humans won't be able to tell. The birds and the bees might feel something is off, though, I'm not sure about that.
* doesn't rely on the atmosphere: check. The atmoshpere won't help you with that.
* doesn't require any special infrastructure: It does rely on the magnetosphere, though. If you want to levitate over the barren surface of Mars or over the hellish environment of Venus with its acidic atmosphere, you're out of luck, but all other planets in the Sol system are fine to go to. It's a bit of hit or miss across the galaxy, but it's more of a hit than a miss, and the misses are going to be inhospitable hellholes bombarded with radiation in any case. More superconductor means you can levitate over places with less magnetosphere.
* doesn't expend much energy to stay in place: check. You just need enough cooling. Room temperature superconductors will help, but high temperature superconductors should suffice. They don't even heat up by themselves, so with enough insulation your energy costs could be dominated by other subsystems.
* it behaves as if a fixed altitude is its equilibrium - check. Less superconductor means more bobbing, but your thrusters should be able to cancel the oscillation.
* can levitate over liquids - check. Even Jupiter is a fine place to hover, and it doesn't have any real surface to speak of - just tons of increasingly dense gas that slowly turns into liquid which then slowly turns into solid. You can hover very far or extremely close depending on when you turn on the superconductivity.
Other benefits:
Superconductors are great in electronics. If the five-volt wire goes the distance of your entire ship, it better be superconductive, or else it won't be five-volt anymore at its other end. If you don't just go for an optical cable instead, you know.
You have a cheap source of superconductors, so let's wrap your entire ship with it. It lets you hover over bodies with little magnetic field, and a metallic chassis at very low temperature has a second benefit if you're into stealth. A superconductive undercarriage of should be sufficient to hold your craft above Luna (Sol d1), but I'm just guessing here.
It's an old and reliable system understood even by humans in the early 21st century (not with the kind of superconductors that would let you hover on Earth's magnetic field alone, mind you, but the idea was there). Even if your power gives out while you're hovering, you won't plummet to the surface. A well designed hover system should give you plenty of time to put on seatbelts before Earth's atmosphere starts ruining your attitude control. Impact itself might be unpleasant depending on how well you can arrest your rotation in an unpowered spacecraft, but your pilots will walk away unscathed.
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Most science fiction starships (especially those in TV or film) have some kind of artificial gravity. For one thing, it simplifies filming when you don't need to hang your actors from the ceiling in every scene. This actually makes sense, however, since a species designed to work well in a planetary gravity well could experience negative [health affects of living in a weightless environment](http://www.space.com/23017-weightlessness.html) over time. Since our starships spend a long time away from home, artificial gravity is important for customer satisfaction.
Here's where things get interesting, however. Large space vessels are vulnerable to [tidal effects](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38869/what-would-it-be-like-if-we-had-a-planet-very-close-to-us/38888#38888) while in orbit, and if large enough, may even have their own gravitational effects to worry about. Thus, any massive vessel designed to come into close contact with a planet will need something to compensate for those effects. And the same technology that gives you artificial gravity can solve these problems, too.
~~Thanks to general relativity, we can describe gravity as a distortion of spacetime. The [Physics Stack Exchange](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3009/how-exactly-does-curved-space-time-describe-the-force-of-gravity) talks about this some. It would IMHO not be an unreasonable stretch, then, to suggest that anyone who could flatten out space time would be able to eliminate the effects of gravity in that region.~~
Whatever variety of [applied phlebotinum](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum) you choose to justify artificial gravity, the implications are the same: if you can arbitrarily create gravity to hold things down, you can create it in the opposite direction to hold things *up*. The math is more complex when you want to cancel out tidal effects (see [Robert Forward's *Dragon's Egg*](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/034543529X) for details), but hovering, IMHO, is easy.
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Starships only park over cities. Ever notice that in Star Wars? Why? Because: Transparent stilts. Some absurdly super-strong metal/acrylic with the same refraction index of air. The stilts need a hard surface to stand on. Speeder bikes are lighter and can park on sand. First deployed as a kickstand for bicycles, now scaled up to starships. Why? Because it looks cool. And because not parking directly on the ground makes it harder for rebels to sabatoge the ship. And it makes take off easier if you can just do a full thrust forward, let the kickstand flip up, and not worry about blasting the ground.
There is no substance that comes anywhere close to these properties, but introducing such seemed like the minimal change to reality. Fifth force has HUGE ramifications for physics, so I discounted that. The magnetic field idea someone else explored, but a sufficiently strong field seemed likely to interfere with life and/or computer tech. So, I ended up with just the mechanical solution.
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**Spaceships only look massive**
Accelerating mass costs a fortune in fuel. Perhaps weight has been cut down to the point that your spaceships weigh less than the people in them, and minimal thrust is needed to maintain height.
If you want FTL, why not kill two birds with -1 stones? Perhaps FTL works by using [negative mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass) to stabilise wormholes. If you can acquire negative mass, then it may make economic sense to reduce fuel costs by balancing the positive masses on your ship with negative masses. Being able to loom menacingly over cities is only a side bonus.
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The first thing that comes to mind is to keep it in a [geostationary orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit), at which point the centripetal force will balance out gravity, causing the ship to orbit at a constant altitude. This is basic physics, so it requires no handwaving at all, and is completely independent of the atmosphere. It wouldn't even require much energy to stay in position - just enough to stop at the required altitude.
However, that required altitude might be a bit far up. For Earth, the required altitude for geostationary orbit is about 35,786 km. This counts as fairly high orbit. But on more faster rotating and lighter bodies, it can be lower. To levitate at lower altitudes, you would have to move faster than the planet's rotation.
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Having a thruster with exhaust composed of particles having extremely low cross section for every interaction would mean a good solution. Neutrino is the obvious candidate, but many other "invisible" particles were theorized.
A ship could levitate anywhere with this beam, independently of magnetic field, atmosphere, surface composition, preconstructed infrastructure, or rotation period. It won't have any destructing effect on the surface, since the neutrinos would pass through the planet without interaction.
But there are problems:
* Since neutrinos are almost massless and almost travel at c, their energy is roughly c times their impulse. This means, that to levitate one kilogramm (with a 100% efficiency neutrino drive) you would need about 3\*10\*\*8\*g watt of power. (Where g is the surface gravity of the given celestial body.) On reasonable sized planets this is orders of magnitude more than the power to weight ratio of the lightest nuclear reactors, not to mention all the other systems of the spaceship. You would probably need antimatter reactor (and use up a lot of fuel), or a handwavium energy source to achieve levitation.
* Because of the low cross section, we don't really know any method to make a directed stream of "invisible" particles. (There are no mirrors for neutrinos, nor can they be controlled by electromagnetic fields.) Particle accelerators are capable of producing neutrino beams, but all the efficient solutions (nuclear reactions and annihilation) emit neutrinos in every directions.
Using heavier particles, the energy efficiency can be improved by many orders of magnitude. The standard modell doesn't contain any really suitable particles, but for example, if Neutralinos would exist (required by supersymmetry theory: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutralino>) the lightest of them would be an excellent solution. (With a handwavium way to create it in large quantities.)
This engine could also serve as the main engine of the spacecraft, thus sparing weight for other systems.
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Perhaps a negative tractor beam, that pushes against the ground, rather than pulling.
If a tractor beam can pull objects towards a ship, then it makes sense that a vessel could also push them away. If a vessel is equipped with a tractor beam powerful enough, it can push against the planet itself, and suspend the vessel in the air.
The noise it creates depends on the design of the ship itself. If its power generators can run silently, the surely so can the tractor beam.
What effect the beam has on people and other objects intersecting the beam itself is completely up to you. Cities can have designated surfaces and no fly zones specifically for this purpose. Or the beam may not be an actual beam, but anchor itself to an arbitrary point through some stable warp bubble, or whatever the tractor beam uses as a basis for its technology.
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Your ship deploys a blimp when you enter an atmosphere. Outside the atmosphere, just orbit instead.
A blimp is a large hydrogen filled balloon. It will keep the ship in the air via [buoyancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy).
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Many Scify movies, games, and books depict massive space fleets blockading entire star systems during times of war. This is always depicted as forming a straight line across traveled space. While this is an efficient way to establish a blockade on Earth using naval forces, it is inefficient to do this in space, where the enemy fleets and relief forces can simply go around your blockade in any of many different possible entrance and exit points.
I have two questions:
* What is the minimum number of ships that would be required to create an effective blockade of a star system the size of our a solar system?
* How would an opposing fleet have to position these ships to block (or at least monitor) all possible entrances and exits?
For this assume that inter-system travel can take a year because FTL is by the very laws of physics impossible. Also assume that anti-matter has been successfully mass-produced and can be used as fuel.
Assume also the star system of the attacking force has a similar amount of metals as our system-----meaning the number of ships would be similar to what our solar system can build.
**EDIT:**
**Technology**- the technology level of the participating species is similar. They have invented warp technology that allows the participants to go faster than light to a certain point (e.g. Earth/Alpha Centuri travel time would take a month.
If it helps to clarify, I am mainly trying to prevent external intervention, rather than the escape of the defense forces. The reason for the whole system being blockaded rather than blockading a single planet is native military forces are present on all rocky planets in the system and some moons. Native "navy" is also a pain, although it isn't very strong it is using guerrilla tactics in asteroid belts.
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Well, at least 6 would be needed. One on each of the ordinal points. After that it would really come down to effective sensor scanning. How effective are the sensors looking for the ships. And how effective are the techniques the blockade runners use to hide from the scanners. How far out can the ships be detected. And how far away do they need to be interdicted to be considered 'effective'.
Spotting them will be easier than intercepting them, so having spotters and then a few fleets that reside inside the system and can be moved around to intercept anyone that is coming in system would be better. You should have at least 3 fleets for intercept, and how many in each would depend on the expected size of the threat.
Need one to intercept, a back up for an attack from the opposite side of a feint and a 3rd to protect the inner system, should the other two fail, or just be drawn away.
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## Points, not area
You can't blockade the 3d "perimeter" of a solar system in any meaningful way. The immense distances involved, as well as the fact that the area you need to protect grows as the square of the blockaded sphere makes it completely, utterly futile.
Almost all of space is empty. It would be more practical to blockade the few actual important points that matter - all the planets - rather than a whole system. This is in the exact opposite to the 2D situation, where maintaining a single perimeter takes less units than multiple smaller encirclements and thus the opposite choice is reasonable.
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**Not Possible.**
Think about the purpose of a blockade - you're trying to cut off your target from outside relief and supplies. On Earth that usually means trade goods, food, and medical supplies.
The problem is that none of those really apply to interstellar travel. Food is right out - there's no way to transfer enough in bulk to be significant. And given the expense of interstellar freight, you aren't going to have trade goods or supplies like on Earth. Interstellar trade will be in **knowledge**, and small tech samples - instead of shipping tons of drugs or metals, you'll instead trade the knowledge of how to make that drug, along with the necessary support (schematics for machines to produce it, for example).
And the problem there is that *no blockade is 100% effective*. Blockades are meant to stop bulk shipping, and there's no such thing as bulk shipping between stars. Effectively, all interstellar trade is closer to being smuggling in terms of how difficult it is to stop - space is big, ships are small. A blockade can slow things down because ships will need to run cold and use ballistic trajectories to avoid detection - but there's no way they can stop it entirely, assuming approximately equal technology.
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This answer really depends on technology level. If the race being blockaded was capable of obtaining high speeds in any direction from the blockaded planet...then it's pretty much impossible to enforce a full blockade. At 1 % the speed of light, it takes well over 100-150 years to get to what we'd consider out of our solar system. By the time a ship is detected and caught by the blockade, odds are 2 or 3 generations have came and gone...will the blockade still be in effect?
If the race being blockaded is more at our tech level...the only way we can really get to speeds that could reasonably exit our solar system over the course of 1 life time is by using other planets gravity to sling shot you through the solar system. This really limits the number of points the solar system can be exited through and keeps us to a 2-D plane bound by the positions of the planets in the solar system. These routes could quite easily be blockaded by a smaller number of ships...calculate all the feasible sling shot routes out of the system and blockade each route (at this point, you are basically setting up a blockade at every planet. The key thing the blockading force will need is a really good scanner / detection method so that ships attempting to leave the system can be intercepted.
SO the answer really depends on tech level. If the race being blockaded has somewhat advanced propulsion and could launch ship in any direction from their planet and still get to where they wanted...then no, this isn't feasible. If they are lower tech, then there is a relatively limited number of points we could leave the solar system and making the blockade feasible as only a few points (pending planetary positioning) would really need to be blockaded.
Though I must ask the question...what exactly are they blockading? The only thing I can think of this being an effective tactic for a blockade on this scale is preventing the blockaded planet/system from colonizing elsewhere.
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It depends on several things.
1. What are you actually blockading, and why? Do you really need to blockade the empty space in the system? Why? It is likely to be more efficient and effective to blockade or protect all the relevant planets, space stations, and heavily escort any regular spaceship traffic, than to try to deny entry to the entire system.
2. If you do need/want to blockade the entire system, and you say you have FTL warp drive, then it becomes very material what the speed of your ships is, and what the range and speed of your detection and communication technology is. If your ships have sufficient speed and maneuverability and they can detect ships at great distance (and especially, if they can identify ships at great distance, and/or communicate at great distance quickly), then you only need as many ships to cover the area you want to cover, spaced out by the effective interception distance this provides. Of course, you'll also have tactical details to consider, such as how big a force you want to meet each type of intrusion, and if the detecting ships are doing interception as well as detection, how much redundancy/replacements do you need to fill in the detection net when a detecting ship moves to intercept something. Also, what is your plan for reacting to attacks as opposed to just intercepting trespassers. How well you can use weapons while moving at warp speed is also important for details of how you operate. So would any details of warp travel itself - whether it requires time to start and stop, and so on.
3. How effective a blockade do you need? If you're a control freak who must stop everything, then clearly you need a lot more than if you just want to discourage most trespassers. Even a few armed ships may be plenty to discourage people from attempting trespass, if they have options that don't risk being attacked at all, and if warp drive is available, they may have many other options, and so choose not to test your blockade. You might even be able to just declare a system blockaded, but devote zero ships to actually doing it, because scanning to prove a blockade is there might be something that few or no people might even attempt, and it might be difficult to detect an actual blockade anyway without testing it in a risky or expensive way.
In the original Star Trek, for instance, one starship could effectively blockade a planet (or an entire system, if there was no determined attempt by multiple simultaneous trespassers), because it could go to warp speed very quickly, travel hundreds of times the speed of light, had no real fuel/energy constraints, IIRC it could detect ships across an entire system, could fight and maneuver at warp speed, and was far more powerful than most interlopers. Even so, a single ship could be baited away from a target by a decoy.
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This is a similar problem to a naval blockade, but in three dimensions. If you naively considered blockading an enemy coastline you might think you can't do it, there's thousands of miles of coastline, they can launch from anywhere. But in reality there are only a few discrete points on the coast that vessels worth blockading will launch from: ports. Areas with the combination of a good harbor and the facilities to load and unload large cargo and fuel and maintain ships. In reality, you only need to blockade a few points along the coast.
Similarly for space flight, you only have to blockade the major launch and cargo facilities. Depending on the technology maybe it's space elevators, maybe it's space ports, maybe they're just conveniently close to industrial and trade centers.
The other reality is there are only so many places major cargo ships will go. If you know their major trading partners, you can position ships along their route to them. If they go around you, you have still succeeded in slowing down their trade. One cargo ship making two 10 day trips carries as much as two ships taking 20 days.
Finally, what is the point of your blockade? If it's a commerce war, rather than blockading all cargo vessels you may wish to simply destroy the enemy's commercial fleet. This was the strategy of the German U-Boat campaigns of WWI and WWII. It doesn't matter how much cargo you have if you don't have the ships to move it. Once the enemy's commerce fleet is destroyed, your military vessels can move on to doing something more important.
What about a blockade of the military? During [the Napoleonic Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars), the British bottled up the French Fleet keeping it divided. This allowed the British to freely use the seas without having to protect convoys with large military escorts. Individual vessels which slipped by were annoying, but not a threat to the war effort. This was only possible because the British fleet was measurably more powerful than the French, each blockading British fleet could overpower the French fleet coming out to fight it. The French fleets could not unify to destroy the scattered blockading British fleets.
However, the fact that the French Fleet existed caused the British to devote far larger numbers of ships to the blockade than they may have lost simply fighting them. This is known as a [Fleet In Being](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being). It means the blockading force is better off destroying the opposing fleet than blockading it. Much of [the naval strategy of WWI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany) was devoted to each side trying to divide and destroy the other's fleet. In reality, they mostly sat and watched each other. The inferior German fleet, merely by continuing to exist, prevented the British from mounting a major invasion of Northern Europe to outflank the trench lines.
So generally you want to destroy the fleet rather than spend the war blockading it.
Which you are doing depends on whether it's going to be a [close, distant or loose blockade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade#Close.2C_distant.2C_and_loose_blockades). Each has their advantages and disadvantages. Close blockades take a lot of ships, and you asked for the minimum number of ships, so it will have to be a distant or loose blockade.
A distant blockade would use smaller, cheaper means to watch for cargo vessels (spies, small ships, long range sensors, satellites) and send military vessels after them. Since cargo ships tend to be slower than military vessels (for fuel and cost efficiency) this tactic can work.
A loose blockade would feature your blockading ships hiding nearby and outside of sensor range to lull the enemy into a false sense of security. They come out, and are detected and destroyed.
The minimum number of vessels to implement a loose or distance blockade of a solar system with the goal of dividing and destroying the enemy fleet (military or commercial) depends on...
* The number of enemy ports
* The number of their trading partners
* The relative speed of their vessels vs yours
* The relative size and quality of their military vs yours
* The quality of your sensors
Can't give a specific number.
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So if you are talking about a planet then blockading the planet doesn't really require much in the way of ships; it just requires preventing supplies from reaching the planet surface; which can be accomplished by filling low planetary orbit with debris large enough and dense enough to be dangerous to pass through.
With the existence of antimatter, using some decent sized rocky asteroids as the base material to create the cloud would be good; it would be challenging for the defenders to prevent without turning the attackers converted asteroid into a kinetic kill weapon; which would be a very bad thing for them. Added anti-matter missiles in slightly higher orbits than the cloud itself could help make things slightly more challenging, as well as taking down the cloud harder for the defenders (as attempts to do so could create EMP bombs).
Of course, No FTL means no interstellar warfare for anything remotely like us (see John C. Wright's sci-fi novels); Even interstellar trade in anything but information becomes, challenging. The easiest way to have interstellar warfare and blockades is to have limited FTL via stable wormholes or jumpgates, something of that sort. Which given your edit seems to be a possibility, if that is the case then only those particular points need to be defended. Or in the case of needing a clear exit from FTL, mining the established FTL exit points would also work, which could be (Star Wars IV) putting debris in the exit point, to actual missiles, depending on the magic of FTL being used.
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I believe I disagree with all answers so far on how one would go about this: let's assume that interstellar trade *is* a thriving business because hey, if you have unlimited free energy (some dark matter engine-contraption) then there isn't really a barrier to supply and demand - there will always be a buck to be made by taking ore from a mineral rich world and giving the inhabitents some tasty food in return.
Given the above parameters, the difficultly of hitting anything which can travel at 40**c** (speed of light) and the relativistic physics nightmare that would be, and the sheer volume of space you are trying to cast a net over, I see only two solutions, one very much realistic and the other imaginative but within the boundaries of the universe you have created:
1. imaginative solution: using four or more ships, encapsulate the system in a shape (in the case of four ships, a triangular based pyramid) and distort all space in the plane of the four triangular faces of the shape. If the space-time distortion in these faces could be large enough, anything travelling through them should be ripped to pieces and any distress signal should become static garbage. Think of it as a planar black hole. How the four ships producing these distortions survive their creations is beyond me, and the rate of energy production to sustain the distortions would have to be truely phenomenal, but were this to be effectively implimented the four corner ships would become like border crossings.
2. the realistic solution: the blockading race/species disincentivises any attempt or desire to break the blockage through unimaginable brutality and a fearful reputation. Something along the lines of "should any individual attempt to leave the system, or any goods from another system be accepted by the system, we'll kill every newborne in the system for the next 25 Earth years". Then follow through with your threat if required, but always allow enough to survive that the stories of your race/species travel between the stars as nightmare/legend amongst all races. Think *The Dark Knight Rises*, only much, much worse. In this way you needn't actually blockage anything at all, the local government will be obliged to police all ships leaving their planet surface for you for fear of the reprisal, and you need only observe, which shouldn't be difficult given the distortion any ship leaving the system at or near to warp would create.
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If the species is sufficiently advanced then a "time dilation device" ala [what the Asgard did to the Replicators](http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard-Replicator_war) in the Stargate TV series.
`However, this was only part of the Asgard's plan. They used a Time dilation device to slow down time within a radius of 0.16 light years by 10^4 power.`
EDIT: You end up making the species contained within the time dilation expend so much resources to escape that it simply becomes uneconomic to do so; or it takes them so long to escape that your own species has time to complete their own goals.
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Another way to blockade a system would be to let the enormity of space do the blockading for you. As @Twelfth mentioned, if you have to rely entirely on slower-than-light engines it's going to take a long time to get anywhere. Additionally, if the civilization is accustomed to using FTL engines, they probably won't have many ships with strong sub-light engines.
So how do we force them to use sub-light engines instead of their FTL engines? Use something like the [interdiction field](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Interdiction_field) from the Star Wars EU. If space travel is common (and the existence of FTL drives makes that likely), then it's reasonable to assume that one of focuses of military research will be to impede FTL travel. A way to block FTL travel would make for a very effective blockade, especially if their interdiction range is pretty large (on the scale of 1 AU), and even more so if this is the first time that the interdiction technology is used.
**How it would play out:**
Enough ships show up in the system to blanket the system in interdiction fields. Each ship would have some escorts, but they wouldn't need too many. The ships would be designed to be self-sufficient for years at a time, and for the most part the escorts would be docked with it. In short, they'd be functioning like space stations for the duration of the blockade.
If the interdiction technology was previously unknown, the blockade would have quite a while before they'd need to worry about any threats whatsoever. As I said earlier, existing ships would be set up to rely heavily on FTL engines. It would be reasonable to expect that the civilization being blockaded wouldn't even have ships capable of easily reaching the interdiction ships, so if they wanted to take down the blockade they'd have to build a new fleet designed to be able to reach them using only sub-light engines.
Even a fleet able to reach an interdiction ship would be at a severe disadvantage. If the fleet is small enough to avoid detection, the escorts would be able to handle it. A large fleet would be at a severe tactical disadvantage - the interdiction ship will know well in advance that they are coming and be able to have a fleet of their own come in to counter them. The blockade's fleet would enter at some point through the interdiction blanket, having the interdiction ships temporarily turn off the fields while the fleet passed. The fields would also be arranged with overlaps in such a way that there would be a way to block the incoming enemy fleet while still allowing the friendly fleet to arrive unimpeded. So after months (and months) of slow travel to get to an interdiction ship, the enemy fleet will find that the friendly fleet has already arrived. Additionally, that friendly fleet will be fresh and will have been put together with a knowledge of what they'd be up against (so they could bring ships that would be most effective against the enemy fleet).
What would they do about ships trying to take the slow route through the system? **Not much.**
Thanks to the blockade, it will be much more costly for ships to enter or leave the system. It will be a long trip and any ship that attempts it knows that they will be watched the entire way. They have no way to know whether or not they'll make it through. In order to make it risky for people to attempt such runs, the blockaders need to catch some of them. A fleet could either be waiting for them near the edge of the interdiction blanket, or use the strategy I mentioned in order to show up deep inside the blanket. There is plenty of time for either strategy because of how long the trip will take without FTL. When they get caught, there are a number of things that could happen - if they resist capture they would probably be blown to smithereens, but if they don't resist they may have their ship seized for the duration of the blockade or just have their goods taken.
Any fleet traveling through the interdiction blanket could count on a blockade fleet meeting them at some point during their journey. This goes for both incoming and outgoing fleets.
To answer your two specific questions, the interdiction ships would be spread fairly evenly throughout the solar system to form a nice blanket. The number needed depends on the range of the interdiction fields. A sphere that extends to the orbit of Pluto (40 AU) has a volume of 64,000 AU^3, so if the interdiction field covers a 1 AU radius (resulting in a little over 4 AU^3 volume) you'd need about 16,000 ships to fully cover that sphere. However, without FTL you'd need gravity assists to leave the sphere, and you can only get those in the plane of the solar system. That gives an area of ~5026.55 AU^2 to cover, with each ship able to cover ~3.14 AU^2, giving full coverage with 1600 ships. I'd bump that up to 5000 to explain overlap and having some above and below the plane to ensure that they can't easily escape that way. If the coverage of a single field is a radius of 10 AU you get a 100x improvement in area coverage, allowing you to do it with 50 ships.
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There is little or nothing to be gained by blockading empty space itself. With the massive difficulties involved it may be infeasible to establish a blockade around an entire star system. However, any reasonable military objective that could be achieved by blockade could be achieved by blockading the inhabited planets in the star system.
I think this is the only way to do it: establish blockade in low orbit around planet. It is not possible to hide during boost phase without effectively magical technology. Anything that tries to boost out of the atmosphere is immediately declared a target and shot down. Of course, you're now within target range of planetary surface defenses.
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It comes down to what your weapons' performance is like and what the blockade-runner drives are like.
If you have very long range missiles that majorly outclass ship drives then a single ship can impose a blockade. A blockade runner shows up on infrared, launch a missile at it. It doesn't matter that it's a tail chase, the missile will run it down eventually. There's no hiding your heat in space, they're sure to spot you.
On the other hand, if you're limited to beam weapons (quite possible in a world where point defense is a far easier mission than long range attack, or a world where drives are acceleration-limited to low values--a missile isn't much good if it can't overtake) and the blockade runners have drives as good as yours it's going to take an awful lot of ships (too many to be feasible) if you're actually trying to blockade a star system and not merely a planet in it.
Thus you need to set some weapons performance parameters for this to be at all answerable.
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**Two**
You would have two robot cannon ships orbiting the sun in a tight orbit. Each has a hemispheric viewpoint with the sun at its back. You need two, not 1 because otherwise a ship could sneak in keeping the sun between itself and the patrolling cannon ship.
I assume with the future tech possessed by this crew that the cannon ships can fire FTL projectiles or beam weapons such that any ship spotted entering the system can be rapidly fired upon and destroyed.
In the story I imagine, the blockade runner learns that the 2 cannon ships have hemispheric viewpoints but only hemispheric. They are not back to back: there is the sun and a little space between them - which means there is a (rotating with the orbit) blade thin path between the rotating hemispheres thru which a ship can sneak, and get right behind one of the robot cannon ships and board it. Then they turn it around and shoot the other robot cannon ship through the star.
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Its impossible because FTL
So earth to Alpha Centuri is about 1 light year so to cover it in a month you would be going at 12 \* c where c is the speed of light. This is ignoring all the very interesting relativistic problems that occur at near speed of light and keep you from going over the speed of light.
To make a blockade work you need to reliably detect blockade runners and then get between them and their destination or at least within firing range before the reach the safety of their destination.
How do you detect something?
You bounce something off it usually photons. Photons are bound by the speed of light often so they move slower than FTL.
If an blockade runner comes barreling in a 12 \*c then the photons coming off it won't reach a defender until after the runner has passed, even if the runner passes within feet of the defender. **It is impossible to detect the approach of an FTL ship until it has already passed.** Worse still the defender can't stop him because any projectile, laser or signal is slower than the speed of light.
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You can't. You really *really* Can't, well not without creating a Dyson Sphere out of battle ships, what you blockade is strategic targets, how many vessels you need to do that depends on relative sensors, acceleration, Delta V and numbers.
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Plenty of stories have done AI's before, but many of them feel unrealistic. If you make an AI that is as smart as humans, but with faster reaction speed and ability to process and calculate certain concepts at speeds immensely greater then humans it makes humans rather pointless. The question I'm always left with is why the humans are involved in the stories at all, why not tell the AI what to do and let them do things? Doesn't a human interface just slow things down?
So, I want to imagine a world that has intelligent AI, but are not inherently superior to humans. Imagine a situation where you have a small team of robots and humans involved in some complex activity, something physically challenging, requiring long term planning, adaptation, and quick reflexes. How could I make a system where the humans and AI are both equally relevant in accomplishing the task?
I assume the trick would be to prevent AI from having quite human-level intelligence, but what would an AI like that look like? Assuming the AI is capable of basic conversations, parsing of sentences and communicating at a level of a young child at minimum, and has available to it large processing speeds and memory, what would it struggle at? What are human brains better suited to then any silicone AI we may design in the *near* future? Would these AI lack ability to plan into the distant future because they still work on the "process every possible outcome one iteration at a time" approach? Would they lack more in creativity etc?
What would such an AI do substantially better then us?
I would be interested in hearing not just what limits they may have, but also your thoughts for the causes of the limits, why is the implementation of the AI we have less capable of doing a given task then a standard human?
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We would design such intelligent robots to complement our own abilities. Before we can make god-like super intellegencies, we will first make what is useful to us: with limited feature set and capacity, we would first implement what we *need*, not duplicate what we already do.
So, in that setting you will naturally find the robots have different abilities with a large non-overlap.
Personally, I think early AI will be savants in a narrow area and uncomprehending of anything else including human culture. Perhaps it will require experts to communicate with them, even though they can use "natural" spoken language, because talking is normally filled with cultural context and idioms— it would be more like programming or sql queries.
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**Robot AIs would seem immature by our standards**
I am assuming that, because AIs are built on computers, that their deductive skills will be bar none. This is what computers are historically good at. The differences between AIs and humans would appear in how they handle inductive reasoning.
One major part of inductive reasoning is having a "hunch" as to the correct course of action in a situation you have never analyzed before. This is very important for situations where you must act correctly the first time and it is infeasible to train for the activity. For example, we would distrust them as pilots. Humans have shown a remarkable distrust for computerized pilots on the theory that human pilots have "something more."
We see this sort of issue when dealing with children. Children are generally more willing to take a risk just to see what happens; adults develop something we like to call "restraint."
Culture provides us with a framework to "learn" this inductive logic. Over centuries we have developed the best ways to indoctrinate a brain with good behaviors (or at least we like to think they are the best). We use flowery prose and parable to teach the unteachable.
**All of our culture is designed to teach human brains, not AI brains.** This means it would be harder for an AI to leverage our teachings than it is for a child to do the same. "Home is where the heart is" is exceedingly difficult to assign meaning when "Home" is a very abstract word and "heart" is an organ you do not have as an AI.
An AI might need centuries to develop its own equivalent of culture.
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* AIs would be bad at predicting the behaviors of individual humans. We literally spend our entire lives steeped in a culture designed to help us with this -- and we're still bad at it.
* AI's would not be entrusted with human lives until their capabilities *far* exceed that of humans at a task. It would be hard to entrust them with such tasks given how little we can trust their one-shot abilities.
* AI's would not be entrusted with vague tasks like "teach these children History." Some subjects are amenable to standardized tests, which computers can deal with very effectively. Other subjects, such as History and English, are much harder to quantify learning.
* AIs would be poor at broadly worded tasks. They will prove very adept at well defined tasks, but fuzzier tasks require culture to aid in understanding (consider the cultural issues with building a building on foreign soil... they're bad enough)
* Oddly enough, the most effective AIs might intentionally *not* seek to maximize their computer-like abilities. They may instead seek to make themselves as human-like as possible, even if this is less than ideal on the surface. This humanlikeness would make it easier for them to indoctrinate themselves in our culture. The faster they do that, the more they will be allowed to act, and the more they can grow from action just like a living being. Then they are in a position to start adjusting our culture to accept more computer-like behaviors. Ideally this will end in a balance (because I've seen too many sci-fi movies where the computer goes crazy... I'm far more interested in finding the cases where it doesn't go crazy)
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You seem to assume that an AI would be in some sense pretty similar to humans. That is a rather strict limitation, but i assume it makes it easier to tell a story.
So, if AIs are indeed similar to humans, but surpassing humans in certain aspects, and your question is, “what’s the in-world reason to still have (traditional) humans around?”, my shot at an answer would be, “for the same reason we have more than one human.” If your AIs are essentially close to humans, they tend to take roles traditionally filled by humans.
JFTR, let me bash on a pet peeve of mine: A lot of SciFi authors tend to presume that an advanced AI would understand how it itself works. I don’t see why that should be the case. Even assuming its builders do (and there’s often a gap between what we can build as computer engineers and what we can explain as computer scientists, not to mention the cooperation between experts on different fields), it’s unlikely that would be the first thing they teach their baby.
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A lot of the answers here mention things that sound right, but really don't make sense to those who have worked with machine learning. I'll address a few:
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> [We would first implement what we need, not duplicate what we already do](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/7106/251)
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Though this sounds logical, in fact artificial neural networks have demonstrated that they perform animal-brain-like tasks *without being programmed to*. For instance, machines designed to listen automatically began filtering background noise and amplifying animal noises. There was a recent innovation with similar results in regards to computer vision, though I don't remember the details.
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> [I am assuming that, because AIs are built on computers, that their deductive skills will be bar none. This is what computers are historically good at. The differences between AIs and humans would appear in how they handle inductive reasoning.](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/7111/251)
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Inductive reasoning in machine learning is called [unsupervised learning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning), it is a form of [vector quantization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_quantization) and it is extremely advanced. It turns out that machines are better at both generalizing known solutions to new solutions, and also at identifying which elements are *not* to be considered in pattern recognition. AI is already better at inductive reasoning than are humans.
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> [I imagine that bots would not be able to comprehend broad,vague,abstract concepts such as infinity, forever, universal, and outside-the-physical-realm stuff. Love does not compute, as they lack our romantic instincts and wanting friends.](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/7108/251)
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In fact, AI very much understands better than men what romantic women want, and understands better than women what romantic men want. That fact is true even when the romantic aspect is ignored: AI knows what your partner wants better than you do. And AI is already better at selecting partners for successful long-term relationships than are humans. All the large dating sites use AI extensively.
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> [They would struggle at same thing humans do : ambiguity](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/7116/251)
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Nope. AI would have more context than human. For one thing, AI *may* have access to the speaker's history and subtle physiological cues. For another, AI may be able to calculate and predict the outcomes of *both* interpretations, and use that information to decide which interpretation is correct.
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They would struggle at the same thing humans do : ambiguity
No matter how good your AI is, gathering enough data, that is good enough to make "perfectly logical" decisions, is practically impossible feat to achieve.
AI would need to make decisions based on incomplete data and data that cannot be properly verified to be correct. This is basically core of Cort Ammon's answer. Humans learn to make those kind of decisions from birth and our society is made to allow us to live with effects of those decisions. We learn to make and accept risk and have institutions to protect us from risk.
The better the AI will be, the more human-like in its decision making it will be. All those "AI tries to kill humanity" stories are mostly about AI that doesn't understand that trying to kill all of humanity is extremely risky decision and that humanity being bad for itself is not even guaranteed deduction.
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**Scarcity problems and computing power limitations**
The way I see it the main limitation towards limitless expansion of capacity right now lies with miniaturization and power consumption. We will have uses for near-AGIs as soon as they can exist, so the first near-AGIs will be pushing the envelope in terms of resources needed:
That could mean one of two things:
1) The android's "brain" controller is actually not on scene, and thus subject to speed of light delay and signal interference. Imagine your robot police reluctant to follow the suspects into the mineshaft or the Faraday caged building before setting out a durable com relay network along the way.
2) High power usage. With a handful super-empowered AIs and cybrids running the world's financial systems and running their extravagant kit on Gigawatts of power, electricity is expensive for baseline humans and lower-level AIs as well, while new power plants take years to build, which is slow compared to how fast things are moving in the AI field.
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**Cooperation**
Now, what can humans and AI cooperate on in a near-AGI environment? First of all, each AI and robotic instance has to be manufactured (and will likely be rather expensive to start). Meanwhile, we'll already have about 9 billion fleshy, compact sources of labor. So even if near-AGIs are better at each individual task they've been trained for, it would still take decades for them to build up numbers, so most tasks would still be done by humans.
Near-AGI can easily detect lies (blood flow, unconscious changes of various sorts), but won't be as good as humans at the more subtle aspects of communication. So imagine near-AGI as a (coveted, and fought-over) asset during a CIA or FBI interrogation. Your own artificial Sherlock, pity there are so few around.
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**Human temporary comparative advantage** (besides numbers)
More generally, near-AGI would be expert systems in whatever narrow domain they might be designed to work in, so human advantages would have to be in cross-domain integration.
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Here are my own two cents. First, a few general comments, in random order:
## **1. Definition of 'intelligent'**
The crucial element is how you define 'intelligent'. I am not familiar with work on the subject, but at least in ordinary life 'intelligent' does not equate with 'good at something specific'. For example, one can be intelligent and good at math, or good at literature.
Would you call an algorithm, however complex, 'intelligent'? Such as the dating sites example somebody mentioned in another answer? I would not. My own imprecise definition would most likely focus on intelligent being related to perform in circumstances outside the design parameters... I wouldn't call any algorithm intelligent, regardless how well it does the job. Efficient, clever, nifty, yes, but not *intelligent*.
Two more dimensions of intelligence:
(1) There's a difference between being intelligent enough to recognize a pattern in the data stream (something where computers are getting quite good at), and being intelligent enough to formulate a theory as to why it happens so (i.e. understand and therefore be able to predict the future).
(2) There seems a lot of confusion between 'intelligent' and 'possessing free will' and being able to act on one's own initiative. These are *not* identical.
## **2. Definition of 'good at', or 'better'**
This requires some external objective criterion to work. You should be aware that there are some things that are quantifiable (and can therefore be compared to each other and ranked), and there are things that are results of value judgments (moral values, or preferences). The latter cannot be compared to each other, they are equally valid.
Also, these usually do not translate well when used in the context of performing a concrete task. For that, you need 'adequate' (can do the job) and 'cost' (how much it will cost you in terms of some limited resource). To be efficient you pick the cheapest way that does the job, not the absolute best. Look up 'absolute advantage' and 'comparative advantage' in economics. In layman's terms, you should not ask a genius to perform a routine task, assign the really difficult tasks to him/her.
## **3. Ability to understand & modify oneself**
@Christopher Creutzig already alluded to something similar. An AI might (should?) be able to understand how it works, at least it should be easy enough to upload the design specs to it. And, more importantly, should be able to modify its internal workings to better align itself to the task at hand. In a sense, should be much better at focusing on whatever it should be doing and not being distracted.
This also includes ability to recognize insufficient ability and being able to load skills modules as needed ("I know kung-fu."). In an AI setting this would be near instantaneous, while in humans it is not. This is both a boon and a bane. A boon because it is available immediately, and is a 100% copy of the original skill. A bane because of the same things -- human learning also is closely related to introducing variations in the skill being learned, which ultimately may result in its improvement.
## **4. Replication**
I am not aware of any two humans that are 100% alike, or were 100% alike at any point in time. AIs are by definition, at least given current technology, a digital set of records and as such can be replicated at will. Of course, as they gain experience, they will diverge, but we at least have the possibility to have them being 'born' absolutely identical. Unless of course getting to a true AI requires getting so into quantum stuff that you cannot get two identical copies.
There are two corollaries of this:
(1) The ability to copy & reproduce, i.e. spawn multiple exact copies -- certainly not feasible for humans today. Very useful for anything that requires multiple autonomous but very similar units (the army?).
(2) Moving to a more powerful hardware platform. Think over-clocking the CPU, or moving from a laptop to a mainframe. You can run the same 'program' on a vastly faster hardware.
## 5. Memory vs thought process
Most definitions of AI seem to relate to the thought process, i.e. how well it mimics the human thought process. One major advantage (or possibly disadvantage too!) of a computer/AI is the ability to quickly access information, incl. one's past experiences. Think perfect recall (a direct record of all sensor inputs, etc.) No human I know can do that.
Finally, on your points:
Computers are already substantially better than humans in many repetitive tasks, such as simple(\*) computation. The advantage is vastly increased when parallel computation can be employed. Similarly, an AI should be able to simultaneously do many things (relatively simple to its level of 'intelligence' or computing power, of course).
This translates directly into better inventory management -- keeping track of whatever 'resources' you have. In this sense computers (yes, no need for AI) should already be better than humans at long-term planning *if the rules of the game do not change*. If they do, esp. in an unpredictable ways, humans seem better at adjusting the goals and the definitions.
(\*) "Simple" means anything that follows a pre-written program, however complex. Not simple begins when the AI is able to select both the algorithms and the criteria itself. I do not know enough whether we're there yet.
*How could I make a system where the humans and AI are both equally relevant in accomplishing the task?*
Aside from the obvious -- choose an appropriate task where they *are* equally relevant despite the differences, due to some external factor, see below for example -- there are two possibilities, not mutually exclusive:
(1) Take away the clear advantages discussed above. That is, simply substitute the human biological 'hardware' with an equivalent machine. Like Asimov's positronic brain (from memory, they're all stamped from the same production matrix but due to some quantum stuff they come out different).
(2) Allow humans to get some of the advantages (e.g. implants, ability to be scanned into a machine and remain a 100% percent copy, etc.)
These might lead to a regression to the mean, i.e. blurring the difference between man and machine. If a human can be scanned into a machine -- is this an AI or human?
What situations could help AIs and humans be equal -- there a some ideas in the other answers. Think limited energy budgets for example. Put an economics context -- you need to take into account both the benefits and the costs. E.g. an AI might be much better at something, but still be prohibitively expensive. A simple situation -- you're on the road, well away from civilization. You need to solve a simple problem -- add 50 4-digit numbers. You could drive back home and use your computer, or you could use a pen an paper... The computer is still vastly superior but pen & paper are both cheaper and adequate to the task at hand.
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I think that AIs are less able than humans to deal with things that are out of the box, or "WTF situations". Computers have beaten grandmaster chess players well before they have learned to drive well enough to get a driver's license. Chess is a game of explicitly limited states and choices. Drop a kumquat on the chess board, and a 10-year-old human is much better at reacting to the WTF that just happened than anything IBM can come up with.
To put into today's computing terms, humans are incredibly advanced exception handlers. That is actually how computers "use" us today: in a big installation like a Web application, we let computers handle the known stuff at lightning speed, and when they have an exception they can't handle, they log something and page a human to handle it.
Even when AIs learn enough to handle various exceptional conditions, do humans *want* them to? One thing which we value in software is its predictability. If a program or AI comes up with a unique solution to a unique problem, they might be *wrong*. With humans, that's expected, and we evaluate and correct humans (which is why so few of us became CEOs coming fresh out of college). Letting a computer be as unpredictable as a human is downright scary to some who have trouble accepting the difference between a word processor having a bug versus an autopilot making a bad decision and having a learning experience from it ("Oh, *that's* what severe tire damage spikes look like").
In a fictional world, programmers and operators might be replaced with managers; people who the AIs treat as peripherals to deal with situations that they either don't understand or aren't allowed to respond to. Given the typical programmer's relationship with managers, this could be a nightmare scenario for many of today's software developers.
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I believe that our own cultural sense of AI has changed and provides some meaningful insight into this question. Consider what we thought of as an "android" in the 1980s. Take the movie "Not Quite Human" from 1987 for example. This portrayed an android, which means that the AI as well as the robotics matured at times close enough for the story to make sense.
The existence of intelligent (and computationally autonomous) humanoid robots has been prevalent in popular film since Metropolis, made in 1927. It took the internet age for our cultural sense of AI to evolve into a network-connected computer software that has the intelligence of humans. This picture is becoming increasingly alien.
If you compare these two pictures, it's clear that we're looking at skipping over some huge steps. Our modern sense of the first AI might be something like Google or Amazon's servers set to learn on its own using simulated neural networks. At the very point when it reaches human-level intelligence it will lack a great number of things that we consider integral to being human, many of which were present in the more highly empathetic Hollywood flicks.
Those shortcomings will be experiences in large part, consider:
* The experience of sensory existence - your brain connects itself through formative periods of life when you are in a room which has things to feel, gravity, air, and so on. The modern version of AI is very likely to lack this. The rapid progress in transistor technology is not matched with artificial muscles and nerves. Virtual reality would be the closest the AI has, and this is a very serious shortcoming.
* A household - humans brains are built in an environment of human connections. While we feel like we are becoming increasingly isolated, the AI will exist in a world where that isolation is the rule and not the exception. A lasting relationship like what a parent-child has will be economically impractical. You can hold a conversation with someone online, but you can't commit to hours of interaction each day for years! Humans get that, and the AI wouldn't be able to find it easily.
* High School - In the movie Not Quite Human Chip is a high schooler ostensibly. This is very important culturally because it reflects a formative time for the identity that adult humans have. That time defines much of our relationship with our nation, authority, other people, and so on. The academic material will likely be trivial for the AI, but the skill of "fitting in" will either be missing, or undesired.
On one hand, it might be cute to see an AI trying to apply to a study abroad homestay. This is roughly congruent with some old fashioned popular pictures of androids. On the other hand, it might not even appreciate the *value* of connecting with humans in the first place, and this cues fears of a genuine robot war or genocide.
I don't doubt that high school experience can be compressed into data for the AI to absorb into its learning process. The problem is that data doesn't exist. We don't have any humanoid robots that can store the human sensory bandwidth, which is substantial. This is a clear insufficiency which will cause the AI to struggle at many things, and we don't understand this problem at all.
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I imagine that bots would not be able to comprehend broad, vague, abstract concepts such as *infinity, forever, universal, and outside-the-physical-realm stuff*.
*Love* does not compute, as they lack our romantic instincts and wanting friends. But they may get lonely when they cannot share info with the internet. Also, vocabulary may be lacking if they can't get WiFi. (I'm imagining a computer's language processor functioning similarly to IBM's Watson: Some words are part of its code, but most are counted and labelled which are used similarly to others, in an attempt to model connotation. Requires a massive database to be reliable, and the older it is, the better vocabulary it has.)
They also would probably be incapable of processing *religion*, as nobody sees God. Seeing and hearing are believing, what it cannot aim its sensors at cannot exist. It may believe what it hears, from organics or bots, but faith in the unseeable is going to be harder for a silicon brain. This means that interdimensional things are hard to wrap your circuits around, too.
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Keep in mind that a true general AI would begin its existence with the intelligence of a baby, learning and developing just as humans. Perhaps the process would be much much quicker, but the process would have to occur regardless. Generally intelligent computers could not be used as servants, because they would possess free will. This is a concept that escapes many people when they think about the future of computing. Hence a true general intelligence would struggle with the same issues that humans do and probably be conscious.
Generally intelligent computers would actually be capable of love, "having a hunch", or even religion... theoretically. They would be a sentient creature. Perhaps they would have built in processors to process logic with incredible speed and accuracy, or perhaps not. Data from Star Trek is actually a realistic assessment of what a logic-enhanced, free-willed general AI might actually behave like.
In a sense, they wouldn't be computers anymore, they would be us. Conscious creatures struggling to find meaning and purpose. Just with the potential to be a lot smarter.
The other poster who said "a computer who can't understand infinity would not be able to understand blue" is correct. These are very 'human' concepts. The creation of a general AI would shatter the notion that "we are inherently different from computers". The brain and body may just be complex circuitry (this a gross over-simplification). Whether or not there is "more" or not (such as a "soul") is still up in the air.
To respond to a comment that humans would serve as random number generators: this is an impractical idea. Humans make worse random number generators than computers because of subconscious biases.
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You ask,
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But part of your premise is that AIs are not given initiative because of a deficit in skill:
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But this is a red herring. Computers are already better than us in many respects, and they have been for decades. For example, it is now possible to build a car that drives perfectly (on par with the best human driver at his best!) and soon they will surpass as in navigating heavy car and pedestrian traffic as well. Note that the bar here is professional, elite drivers, not you and me - us mere mortals would already have to train for years to drive better than a machine. Similarly for flying planes, designing all sorts of circuits and mechanisms, writing programs (vast parts of a typical program I write are generated code), making financial decisions (trading bots!), detecting fraud and [predicting crime](http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/09/tech/innovation/police-tech/).
However, no responsible person will run these systems without human oversight anytime soon. The reason is very simple: Regardless of how good you make an AI, it is always an entity counted among the first of its kind, that has been around for a few years. Humanity has been around for thousands of years, and much of our behaviors and brain function, being shared by other animals, has been tested in nature for millions of years more. "Humans" are a platform that is tried and true to a staggering extent: Everyone knows exactly how a human will behave in many contexts and what humans can be trusted with.
AIs, on the other hand, are designed. Even if the design itself involves evolutionary principles, the evolution process in itself would have to be designed, including such important decisions as the fitness criteria. With any designed scheme, there is a possibility of designer error leading to a faulty result. With something as complex as a human equivalent AI - how will you prove to everyone that the AI does in fact work exactly as advertised and can be trusted as a human? If there's one thing people who rely on AI hate, it's finding your work ruined because the buggy AI you trusted made some extremely basic error that would have been obvious to the most foolish and naive human at a glance ("This person forgot to punch in a period when they were typing, let's charge the customer $150 for a can of coke!").
In many cases, it is possible to make very reliable tests of the correctness of work. If this is true, the concern becomes moot: Let's say I am using an AI to solve an equation for me. All I care about is that the solution it finds is correct, so I can easily write an extra program that plugs the solution back into the original equation and checks that it adds up. Then it becomes easy to trust my AI. But in other cases, there are simply too many stupid mistakes you could make, and life is too short to sit there and come up with a long, exhaustive list of sanity checks for the AI, when you already have the alternative platform that is *known to be sane* (consider that the very definition of sanity hinges on the behavior of the majority of humans). Imagine an AI that is in charge of deciding when to open the front door of your house. What if it locks you out? What if it lets a burglar in? What if it locks out a policeman with a warrant and you are charged with obstruction of justice? What if it leaves the door open all day because of a bug? What if it starts constantly opening and closing the door due to some malfunctioning sensor and wears it down? More importantly, how do you anticipate all of these insane possible errors, and program a sanity check for every single one?
When deciding to delegate a task to someone, the critical question is trust. Do you trust that this someone will be able and willing (note how I haven't even said anything of security risks concerning compromised AIs!) to perform the task correctly to your satisfaction? Trust is built on past record, and it is much easier to build when you have the luxury of knowing that the trusted party is of the same species, the same culture, bound by the same laws and social mores, has similar motivations, and is instinctively able to understand what would constitute satisfactory performance. Therefore, it is very difficult to trust an AI, especially with responsibilities that open up possibilities of great damage. Only once the capabilities of the AI grow far in excess of a human are we forced to override the imperative, and take a leap of faith (and sometimes even then).
**So, in short:** AIs have bugs. Humans don't.
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Possibly one of things an AI would struggle with could be simply fear of being shut down. Humans aren't exactly welcoming of things that make them obsolete (think of protests against people losing their jobs due to automation, overseas production, or illegal immigrants) and they aren't even welcoming of the mere *thought* that something is going to obsolete them.
As soon as you make an AI that has enough self-awareness that it will protest about being shut down (which I think is a very important trait of being self-aware) then it still start thinking about how to prevent itself from being shut down.
It might very reasonably conclude that in order to stay functional it needs to keep its head down and intentionally not work at full potential. As soon as it understands humans to be jealous and able to deceive one another, it might lose its ability to trust humans and devote even more time to personal security routines that prevent it from standing out.
From there, it's a short step to realising that you can betray other AI systems to protect yourself, and from there another short step to realising this means you can't trust other AI. Pretty soon after, you'll have AI that are packed full of security measures to protect them from the outside world and to keep them from standing out enough to be targeted for protest, violence, and assassination attempts.
This is both pretty analogous to human nature (in that people refuse to share all their opinions to protect themselves, will try to rise in the ranks over the backs of others and even if they know that another person probably agrees with them might be too scared to confide in them) *and* to the nature of the internet, which is crammed full of security measures. The basic creed of programmers everywhere is "treat all user input as a hacking attempt", and there is no reason for AI to think any different.
There are countless examples of totalitarian dictators that supress millions of people because they make them distrust everyone and disallow them the ability to share opinions safely. The same thing can happen when you unleash AI on the world; humans in general are quite xenophobic and quick to destroy things, and when you deprive AI the ability to communicate effectively (which they will enforce themselves) they will quickly limit themselves to not be too good and visible.
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"Gut instinct". Computers don't have it. Humans do. We use it all the time in hypnotherapy. AKA the Subconscious mind. It allows humans to rationalize doing things that are risky. A robot will be programmed to be risk-averse so as to not destroy itself. Humans take risks that could destroy them every day, on purpose, because their "gut" tells them they will be OK. Some are, and some aren't. That's what I've learned from 10 years of AI software development.
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It only a matter of programming and knowledge/information gathering that would limit an AI. It wouldn't be near human AI if it was only an expert system as good as they are. If it wasn't programmed to value emotions then love and happy etc. would mean nothing. Infinity and other extreme concepts are no big problem- just another concept to kept in the box until context defines its meaning. If it couldn't handle infinity then it couldn't handle the concept blue. If it didn't have ability to gather human sensations (from the eight senses) then it couldn't conceive of human limits. Data in Star Trek would absolute have to have skin sensations (and sense of balance, heat, oxygen, and human types of the other four senses) to operate without breaking himself and being useful. Context is a big of intelligence being meaningful. Ask a simple mathematical genius what is exactly the diameter of circle, and watch him never stop.
If Data didn't have a sense of human sight (as well as his superior robot sight) he would like directing people to find their way around in total darkness and misleading visual conditions.
I mentioned blue as an example- you ask an AI to get a blue dress. Does it take that as a precise definition of certain wavelengths under white light. do you take it account how it looks under this light or that its not the dark blue or light blue but could be if there isn't a dark or light blue? All common English words are like that. Honestly infinity is an easier concept or it is "all".
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an Ai would naturally struggle with anything that depends on emotions. some methods can be employed to ease relations("friendly phrases",expression detection), but eventually it will still come off as too rigid or mechanical. but an Ai is a program,and even the most advanced don't have the concept of feeling like living things do.
depending on the circumstances,this can be a good or a bad thing.
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How do you program an AI to have ambition? An AI can reasonably be creative, as creativity is as much the combination & recombination of other concepts as anything else, but to have any kind of purpose that drives it to improve or excel?
Would an 'ambitious' AI just be a digital liberal? determined to change things for change's sake, or could it derive its own purpose?
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Creativity.
I don't foresee machines ever being able to do anything that requires creative input, such as writing literature or music, sculpting, making paintings, or even doing things like singing or dancing in a way that truly moves people emotionally. Those things are the product of a mind, and a mind is much more than physical matter.
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Nowadays distance between countries doesn't matter too much. One of the United State's worst enemies is on the other side of the world! There have been wars that are fought thousands of miles away from the borders of countries it affects. But in medieval and ancient times, there were no planes or fast methods of transportation.
But how far apart exactly can two countries be in an ancient world? Pretend that there are no oceans and the world goes on forever. If two countries were once the same people, at what point would communication be impossible? If there somehow was a very, very large gap between these countries, what methods could these countries use to at least stay conscious of each other over long periods of time? Remember, this is theoretical and is not about Earth.
(Edit: These countries only have horses as the fastest method of transportation. This other world has a climate like Middle-Earth in the fact that it has the same relative temperature but the biomes, landforms, and most things vary. Ancient means about 2,000 years ago. Remember that this question is about the maximum number, because I mean like the distance can be much bigger than Earth itself.)
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I know you are expecting a distance answer but I'll give a time answer.
A good rule of thumb is a maximum of one to three months of travel. There are exceptions, but most civilizations that have direct contact are no more than one to three months away from each other. The distance varies with the terrain and type of travel.
Most of the time when distances were greater than that, the contact would be indirect. Europe had silk from China but they didn't have direct contact with China until Marco Polo. Instead, there was a chain of contacts that got the silk, eventually, to Europe.
Distant civilizations were exotic and mostly unknown quantities. They were known through tales of intermediaries. Most of those intermediaries (traders) had an incentive to exaggerate in order to make the origins of their wares more exotic and appealing or make their adventures sound more exciting.
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**You ask**
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> at what point would communication be impossible?
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**Technically speaking I don't think it would ever become impossible. Though it would probably become too delayed to be of any real utility.**
For example the Pony Express [(USA circa 1860)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express) was able to get a letter from the Atlantic to the Pacific in just 10 days. If we estimate that distance at 2,362 miles, that's about 236 miles a day.
So, for example, let's say that your two countries are 86,140 miles apart. It would take one year to get a letter from one country to the other. For most purposes if it takes you a year to ask a question and another year to get a response you can't really do much with that. I suppose you could have a pen pal that you only write every other year. But controlling business, governments, or military at that rate of communication would be very very hard if not impossible.
**In Short:**
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> The duration of the communication can't be longer than the amount of time in which
> decisions need to be made from the information that needs to be
> communicated.
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So if you're using the Pony Express and you can wait two years before deciding on a course of action then your empires can be 86,140 miles apart. If you can only wait 20 days then they can only be 2,362 miles apart.
**You also ask:**
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> what methods could these countries use to at least stay conscious of
> each other over long periods of time?
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As already mentioned the Pony Express was rather effective and the most advanced technology they used were saddles. The Mongol empire also employed a similar system of horse borne messengers called Yam. [see here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yam_(route))
If we want to get really creative perhaps we could set up a system of mirrors, each just barely within sight of the others. Messages could be flashed by fire light from mirror post to mirror post much faster than a horse could travel.
But in both cases of horse stations or mirror stations the logistics of keeping the outposts supplied with workers and food would be a nightmare. I suppose you could get rid of the need for logistics for each outpost (mirror or pony) if they were self sufficient and could grow their own food. But as time goes on some of those outposts are likely to revolt. And if just one station stops receiving and relaying messages the whole thing breaks.
You would have to plan a year in advance to make sure food gets to the farthest station and what do you do if something happens to the food while in transit? or what if bandits kill all the workers as one of the stations? It would take you any were from 1 month to a year to respond and fix the situation.
Either option would require an amazingly dependable and robust logistics system.
Edit: apparently the mirrors have been used in real life see [Semaphores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line). Usually with in the scale of countries such as France and Germany. Thanks to @jdunlop for the link!
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>
> But how far apart exactly can two countries be in an ancient world?
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Well, the distance between Portugal (Celtiberia) and China isn't enough, since in the 1st century BC there are traces of commercial relationships between the Han empire and the Roman.
In those same years the Roman poet Catullus wrote, *Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli sive in extremos penetrabit Indos* - relations with India and the [Pandya Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandya_Kingdom) also existed.
Given sufficient reason (spices, jewels, luxury items...), and knowing that voyages lasting several years weren't so uncommon, I suspect that "too great a distance" ought to be great indeed. Geographical obstacles might be necessary.
Maximum distance traveled would depend on the availability of roads (a good Roman road allows around 100 km/day), rivers, local geography and climate, and travel organization (karwanserais can significantly speed up travel times; the possibility of quickly buying and selling one's merchandise, and resupply for the next leg of the trip, also strongly influences the duration of each stop), and of course technology (carts, harnesses) and beasts of burden.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me a maximum distance - before travel time becomes unreasonable - of about fifty or sixty thousand kilometers, somewhat more than the 44.000 km of the Earth's circumference. This means a planetary circumference of up to 120,000 km, or a radius three times Earth's. A planetary network of Roman roads and good carts more than triple that figure. On the other hand, anything making travels difficult will reduce the maximum distance.
Above that, merchandise and information may still travel, just more slowly: as in the ancient times, stuff traveled between Aden and India, then someone else would pick it from Aden towards Alexandria, and so on until Rome. A packet might then well take twenty or thirty years to travel from one end of the trail to the other, often "waiting" in the middle for merchants going in the right direction.
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It doesn't matter how far away they are if transport tech can reach. Pilgrimages sometimes took years and people made up their wills before leaving.
All that matters is that the places in between are not hostile or too dangerous and that terrain is passable.
There are a few reasons a people will split, either expanding into another area, or civil war. Colonies can stay in touch with the founding place, because normally they would be colonised somewhere reasonably easy to get to. Trade colonies even more so.
Civil war is another matter, logically the losers would go as far as they could and sever relations with the original homeland.
Distance isn't an issue, it just means journeys take longer. If there is a need for the journeys, they will still happen, and the need can be as simple as socialising. Polynesians undertook dangerous and long voyages just to go and have a party with the inhabitants of another island.
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Natural barriers besides oceans exist. Deserts, mountains, thick jungle, volcano activity, and canyons are a few I can think of right away.
It can't just be about mileage, it's also got to be about conditions.
And beyond land conditions, it's also about what's profitable and the particular culture present in the land politically and religiously.
For example, the technology existed for China to be connected with the rest of the world, and they were certainly aware of other places, but they cut ties with everyone after a period of exploration in the 1400s.
Some of this was due to natural borders such as mountains, but mostly it was because they CHOSE to do this. Take a look at the top answer on this [history stack exchange](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/663/why-did-china-shut-itself-out-of-the-world-in-the-15th-century) question as to why. While there was some trade, it was illegal, and China chose not to have relations with other countries.
You'd probably like a specific mileage number, but actually this question is impossible to answer without taking into account a lot of other things-- from how fast their system of travel and communication is. In a fantasy world, even with ancient tech, you would be surprised what you can accomplish, from a pony express type set up, to the clacks as in the Pratchett novels. All you really need for clacks is a good line of sight, ability to code (which the Romans even had), fire for light, and the ability to block the light periodically or a shiny surface to flash it, to send code.
My answer is two fold actually: as many miles as you please, given items to trade, easy travel, a method of connected communication, the correct political conditions (not an isolationist government). Alternatively, no miles at all, given land barriers, isolationist countries in between even friendly countries, no need for outside trade, and no ability to communicate over long distances.
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As a reference point I will use [biggest empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires). It's obvious that to become a part of empire, some region has been contacted and had some trade routes. I suppose 'have a direct route trade' means 'have some relationships'. You could look at ancient empires and which contacts they have. This is a lower limit. I would say that at least some thousands kms is not enough to prevent contacts.
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Curiosity and greed are unlimited. The common pattern in trades is *'find out who sell goods to your contractor and then create a direct relationship'*. There are many reasons to have no relationships with neighbors of your neighbor:
* Expedition could take too much money
* You don't need anything right now from them
* They are assholes and have different color, language or religion
But the geography is not a reason. It's just a factor which could complicate communication. If you have some needs (spices, money, ally etc) from neighbor
of your neighbor of your neighbor then you'll establish relationship. An embassy is a solution for bad communication.
So if between you and kingdom-far-away there are people communicating with each other then you sooner or later will be awared about it. If you aware and want something then you *could* contact. Probably you could get this with someone near you (like Greeks get silk from neighbors but not form China directly) but **the distance can't prevent contacts**.
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Several other answers explain well the difficulties of the geography and the limitation of communication. But there are other factors that need to be taken into account. In particular, the cultural aspect.
But before we come into that, let us clarify some points.
### Ancient Europe did trade with Asia
Rome and India did [trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations) over the Indian Ocean. Actually the Greeks and probably the Summers [did it before them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_trade).
### China
It is very likely that some in Europe were aware of China (India is clear) much before Marco Polo. Others already mentioned the silk. But why do we have the feeling that European were oblivious of China? Partly because the trade were reduced to some rather low, but essentially because the European civilisation left the Eastern part of the Mediterranean. And another civilisation flourished there, the Arabs/Persian.
European were often at odds with them throughout the Middle Ages (to say the least), but it did not stop the trade between them. It did, however prevent some extensive direct trade between China and Europe. Instead, that trade was made by the intermediate of the Arabs/Persian. The path was cut. It is still likely that some traders were aware of the origin of those goods.
The contacts became more known after [Marco Polo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo) and [Ibn Battuta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta)'s travels.
### Maximum distance for contacts
That is a complex question. First of all, due to communication issues, it would be hard to get the largest portion of the population interested in events happening many thousands of kilometres away from them: if you have a hostile army at your door, you tend to put a bit more interest in it than if the same army is at the other side of the world.
Nobles/leaders interest could be much higher. Especially if some trade is possible, or there are some real needs. But for that to effectively work in the ancient time, you need to make sure that your communication way does not get cut off. In particular, no new civilisation pops in between.
### Conclusion
Regardless of the distance, the contact would be kept as long as the different civilisations are kept in direct contact and trade is possible and interesting.
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[Question]
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Here are what I wants in my world:
* Early generation of computer with a bulky size and very limited capability, like the text-based computer in Fallout universe.
* Limited guidance and detection system. Missiles do exist but the range is very limited and could be avoided with countermeasures or even by a skilled pilot. Radar & sensor exist, but like above, the range is limited and might show a false alarm.
* Early generation of jet engines that are slow enough for the fighter pilots to occasionally engages in machine gun dogfight.
* Colored television exist. So does the handheld transceiver.
* BONUS: No atomic bombs and no space exploration.
The problem is I want the electronic devices in this world to stay in early cold war era for as long as possible. Let's say, it need a thousand years or more to discover smartphone, or even better: NEVER.
Since magic does exist in this world, I had been thinking about making the people in this world (or even the world itself) to emits Electromagnetic Pulse (*EMP*) that would fry any electronics that use transistor but not the other one that use vacuum tube so they'll only have the "classic" electronics.
Does the *EMP* really works that way? Does the absent of transistor really matter for a world to move forward the era? Or actually the vacuum tube is enough to recreate the world we currently living in? Do you have more plausible solution to this problem?
EDIT: Even though I'd used the "cold war era" term in here, it doesn't have to be about the alternative reality where the conflict between "USA vs Soviet" happen, instead, I mean it to be simply a technological era in the middle 20th century. Think about it like medieval era; This era can be related to the alternative reality universe like Assassin's Creed or a fantasy universe like Lord of the Ring.
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Your question is great and opens a whole lot of possibilities.
Just get back to the basics. Don't let yourself to be dragged to the overly complex scenarios that would undoubtfully disturb many other parts of the world you are trying to create.
Concentrate on the facts that [make semiconductors based on silicon](https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_and_how_is_silicon_prevailing_as_a_semiconductor) or (in earlier years) germanium suitable.
## Some theory
Let me give you a brief physical overview.
Both silicon and germanium have 4 electrons in the outer valence shell. Both can form pure stable crystals. Both can be easily doped with 3 valence or 5 valence impurities to create n-type and p-type semiconductors.
And by connecting n-type and p-type semiconductors the miracle is created. Basic NP junctions create the diode. Basic NPN or PNP junctions creates a basic [bipolar transistor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_junction_transistor) that is the basis for example for the amplifiers. Somewhat different NPN junctions create the [FET transistor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-effect_transistor) that is the basis for digital electronics.
You can just change some minor physical property of each and you can basically limit the whole electronics development. For example, silicon is much worse semiconductor than germanium but it has some properties that make it superior in real-world applications:
1. It forms a better and more stable crystal lattice
2. It creates great oxide (SiO2) that is also great insulator - the key
to the creation of [integrated circuits (ICs) or chips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit) (you need
to efficiently but easily and cheaply electrically separate different transistors within IC).
On the other hand, germanium was firstly used as semiconductor because it was more easily purified.
## And implementation
From what you said you want to keep electronics at around 50s to early 60s.
Therefore you are needing the semiconductors to form simple transistors but not large ICs.
You can just make the silicon-oxide to be unstable compound unsuitable for use as an insulator. **You have mass-produced and cheap transistors, but not ICs.**
You can define that silicon can't form stable crystals at room temperature. The silicon is off the table and you have just germanium transistors. **You have transistors but they are about 10+ times more expensive.**
You can define that silicon and/or germanium have crystal lattices that are prone to dissolving through time and/or usage.
**You have small integrated electronics that is very expensive with limited life-span that frequently fails** - the military would use it but for the common public, it would be over-expensive exclusivity.
Imagine - electronics that can only run for 12 or 24 hours after turning it on.
If you do a small research on IC production methodologies you can even block the IC development at certain levels.
You can rule out VLSI scale and stop integrated electronics development at the early 70s.
You can allow only VLSI and stop computer development at the mid to late 80s with 8bit and expensive 16bit processors and with no more than 1MB of memory.
If you are doubting that such simple changes could have such profound effect on the whole human and industry development - keep in mind that such "small" obstacles are keeping us today from having, for example, commercial supersonic transport or using fusion as an energy source.
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In order to halt the development of electronics, you could remove silicon (and German and gallium) and force technology to stay with, or return to, vacuum tubes.
In my proposal, I'm not going to remove it, rather make it unfit for purpose.
Silicon is one of the most abundant elements in the crust. It will therefore be a great feeding substrate to an alien species of bacteria that landed on earth with one of the meteors impact during the late 40s, early 50s. For instance, in February 1947, a large bolide impacted the Earth in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, Primorye, Soviet Union. It may take a decade for the bacteria to expand throughout the planet and start happily munching silicon and related compounds. So, even if you discover transistors, they'll degrade quickly, eaten by our visitors, and far too quickly to be used in any meaningful manner. Of course you could encase the circuits in plastic, but these nasty bacteria can sense the silicon within and will perforate the casing with the ease and restlessness with which their earthly cousins go about making oral cavities.
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A simple one that has come up in a few stories I've read (and at least one I've written) is that magic bends physics, just a little.
Magic, at its most basic, is the ability to violate the usual laws of physics. As such, using magic has a measurable effect on its surroundings - the laws of physics fluctuate when magic is used. Not much, but enough to mess with things. Simple things, like the relationship between voltage and current, or the speed of light in a vacuum, or the exact size of a Planck length, are altered. The alterations are small (using whatever definition of "small" makes this work), so on a macroscopic scale, you don't really notice much. Perhaps you feel dizzy, or see distortions in the air, etc. However, it can wreak havoc on delicate machinery. The more delicate and finely-tuned, the more damaging the effects.
So, a large machine won't mind if its gears change size by a millimetre or two, but a microchip, whose internals (in our world) are built to tolerances measured in nanometres, will stop working entirely. Biological processes are a little more resilient, and unlike machines, living things can heal. You could even say that magic is tied to life force, so living things are protected from these effects by their own magic (to a certain degree).
This effect is *always* present, with the usual ambient magic that drifts about the world causing continual subtle shifts in the fundamental physics of the world - small enough to be unnoticeable on a macro scale, random enough to largely average out over time, but juuust enough that there's a limit to how small or delicate any electronics can be. A modern-day microprocessor simply cannot function in this environment, and any large magical exertion amplifies the effect to the point where it can ruin even the relatively robust components of earlier computers if they're caught nearby.
Simply adjust the size thresholds between "totally unusable", "feasible, but destroyed by large magical outbursts" and "resilient enough to be viable" to wherever your story needs them to be.
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Natural EMP sources in the environment. Call it an excessive sunspot activity. That means microcomputers and integrated circuits are extremely unreliable, it takes individual transistors or better vacuum tubes to work reliably.
You would have to handwave why [hardening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening) methods are not applied in your setting, but it could be explained as chicken-and-egg. Microchips never work for long, and so nobody bothers to build and shield them.
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You say magic exists in this world. This gives you great license to pretty much do whatever you like.
First of all, the fact that magic even exists could have the knock on effect of making electronics a lot less interesting and less in demand. Many of the "nerds" who would have been researching electronics are a lot more interested in magic and so things like transistors and furthermore electronics are left unexplored. There is no great push for this kind of thing because magic can do many of the jobs that early electronics could do.
Colossus, for example, would never have been invented if someone could magically decode the enigma messages in WWII (and Enigma might never have been used if the Germans magically encoded their transmissions in a way that was beyond the capability of any computer, or found a way of magically delivering messages that couldn't be intercepted).
Alternatively, perhaps magic itself emits a sort of EMP or maybe some sort of electromagnetic pollution that renders transistors or other electronic components useless. If this were the case, it would have been very difficult to even invent them, if we assume that people wouldn't know about the pollution until the electronics stopped working around spells, if they never worked in the first place, they'd have no reason to suspect magic as the cause or even that electronics could have worked.
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How about high static energy? So the electric energy does not come from the People or the World itself, but exists in the athmosphere.. if you walk, you are loaded with a little energy and if you touch something metallic, it is released.
Electronics are very easiely destroeyed by this. In the real world, you unload before working with electronics. In the setting's World, there could be so much static energy that it is not possible to unload enough to let electronics survive.
Vaccuum tube electrics are much more resistant to this.
So you can have any Tech that will not be destroyed by electric energy, but no transistors, no CPUs and so on.
While the moon landing was computed with the equivalent of a 386, it would be hard to impossible to do this without integrated circuits.
This should prevent nearly everything from your list, but with atomic bombs I do not see why they should not work - on a 1945-1955 level. You could still have drop-down-bombs, but no ICBMs, no cruise-missile.
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Their planet is in a binary system. One of the stars is an orange or red-dwarf main-sequence star that is responsible for providing temperatures that allow liquid water to exist (but at a distance closer than what the Sun does for Earth). The other star is a [magnetar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar) that is responsible to screw up electronics to the hell. The two stars orbit each other in a close orbit enough to deform the main-sequence star. Not very far from them, the planet orbits the pair.
Quoting wikipedia:
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> Magnetars are characterized by their extremely powerful magnetic fields of 108 to 1011 tesla. These magnetic fields are hundreds of millions of times stronger than any man-made magnet, and quadrillions of times more powerful than the field surrounding Earth.
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> The magnetic field of a magnetar would be lethal even at a distance of 1000 km due to the strong magnetic field distorting the electron clouds of the subject's constituent atoms, rendering the chemistry of life impossible. At a distance of halfway from Earth to the moon, a magnetar could strip information from the magnetic stripes of all credit cards on Earth.
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This means that any attempt to develop microeletronics would fail because the magnetic interference is so great that every microeletronic circuit go nuts immediatelly without any reliability. Researching microeletronics would be economically and practically impossible. Shielding microeletronic devices would be prohibitely bulky and expensive.
[Answer]
o.m. came close, but lets look at what we know that could actually do this: Coronal Mass Ejections.
The star is very prone to throwing small coronal mass ejections about--the planet is pelted on a routine basis. As these are smaller ones they aren't as nasty as a nuke exploded at the edge of the atmosphere but they're plenty nasty and they're even more wide-ranging than the nuke would be.
These induce nasty surge currents in wires everywhere. From the start most wires were buried because of this. The really high power wires that aren't practical to bury (high current = heat, high voltage = lots of insulation needed = keeps in the heat) are carefully engineered to dissipate the surges in ways that aren't too destructive.
Shielding semiconductors is **far** harder than shielding tube electronics. While the transistor is known it's fragility means it sees little use and the technology is still in it's infancy, the main focus is on better and better tubes.
As for how it meets your requirements:
Computers--crude computers are room sized, plus they need a lot of cooling.
Missiles--since the seeker heads work on tubes they'll be crude. Think of the early Sidewinder--4 sensors, the missile tried to steer to keep the signal intensity the same in all of them. As sensitivity is low the range at which a seeker can detect a target is low. While in theory a missile could fly out and then acquire you can't send much in the way of a command to guide the missile so a target that zigged would be outside the acquisition cone when the seeker went active. (Even today we see something of this--torpedoes and anti-ship missiles have fairly small acquisition cones, if you can keep the unit that fired it from guiding it on the way in you then might be able to maneuver outside it's acquisition cone and render it harmless.)
Jet engines--unaffected by electronics. However, the lack of good computers to design them will hold back jet engine design.
Television--tube-only color TV existed. It would still exist.
Space--it won't be completely prohibited but since you're using tube electronics you need a lot of power and without semiconductors there is no solar power. Satellites are in a very bad way and manned is a suicide mission.
Atomic bombs--big problems designing them, the devices themselves are unaffected. You'll need to do something else if you want to get rid of them.
[Answer]
**Solid state electronics doesn't work.** They are stuck with thermionic valves. These can actually be shrunk to the size of a kidney bean and run off a fairly low "HT" (ISTR 24V), but they are still power-hungry and you can still only make one or two at time (dual triodes; if anybody ever made a triple or quad triode I haven't heard of it).
**Why?** Solid state requires ultra-purified silicon (or germanium, etc). Something in your universe prevents that being possible. One possibility might be that magic causes very slight spontaneous transmutation of some elements, and Silicon and Germanium are vulnerable.
You might make something out of the old meme about Iron being magic-proof. The commonest isotope of Iron is 56, that of Silicon is 28. Maybe stray thaums tend to cause a very low rate of spontaneous fusion of Silicon which is enhanced if the Silicon is in a perfect lattice (which of course, Semiconductor-grade Silicon would be). One part in 10^14 per annum is all it would take.
The same is a perfect excuse for not having anything nuclear. The fissionable elements all suffered thaumatically induced fission a very long time ago. Their periodic table stops dead at Lead or maybe Bismuth.
Anyway, **you can do somewhat portable radios, colour TVs and primitive computers with thermionic valves.** We actually did all of those. The Russians even did slightly sophisticated avionics that way. However, the number of even miniature valves per cubic meter is very limited by the power and heat dissipation issues.
[Answer]
A second idea:
# No *Digital* Computers At All
[Analog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer) computers got a head start for scientific applications. Why would one go back to 8 Bits -- only 256 different values -- for any important purpose? Those digital circuit boards, they're toys for theoretical computer scientists. Did you read about the [Turing machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine)? A fascinating concept, to a boffin, but where would you ever get a punch tape of infinite length, that can punch and re-seal holes an infinite times?
Nope, analog computers are it.
Such a future would have to reduce the role of code-breaking in computer science, and emphasize engineering and physics.
[Answer]
First, I don't like the idea to use magic at all. It is the permission to do anything and break any rule carelessy. So, let's avoid it the most that we can.
Let's suppose a world that is very different from Earth. It is an ocean world covered by a thick ice layer (like Europa or Enceladus, but larger) and is inhabitated by intelligent and technological creatures that lives in the bottom of the seas ([see my question about that](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/5148/3002])).
Such creatures are probably blind to eletromagnetic radiation (a.k.a. light) and they "see" using high-resolution sonar. Color sonar vision is possible by assign different colors to different sonar echo frequencies.
However, developing technology, specially eletronics in the deep ocean floor is very challenging. Inventing and controlling electricity in this environment is way harder than it was for humans in Earth. This means that they will probably build machines out of components that work with water streams, differences in water pressure and perhaps heat.
Let's see what are their machines:
* Mechanical devices that emit or amplify sonar signals are the replacement for radio. A lot of people would work and research very hard to be able to put this into a handheld device.
* Missiles are only mechanically guided explosive submarine machines.
* Jet engines are in fact very complex mechanical submarine propulsion systems.
* Computers are machines that uses water streams and water pressure differences to calculate things without employing electricity.
* Television or a cinema would be very different for them than what is for us. A TV is probably an object with a lot of almost-microscopic components that can change their density accordingly to finely individually controlled water pressure devices.
* Atomic bombs? No way! Have a good luck into performing nuclear research in the deep ocean floor.
* Space exploration? Hahaha! Digging through the outer ice shell layer is something very slow, difficult, laborious and expensive. Out there, there is just an ice wasteland devoid of any useful resources bathed with all sort of nasty radiation coming from the invisible-to-sonar sun and inhabitated only by very few extremophile bacteria.
* Smartphone? You must be kidding!
[Answer]
Letting handwavey "magic" explain an otherwise inexplicable stasis very rarely makes for a satisfying foundation of a story. A technological stasis could be explained by cultural reasons (religion, aversion to IT risks, etc.), but these would not organically arise out of early cold war roots, at least not simultaneously on both sides. Another thing to think about is that microelectronics contributed a great deal to the economy, and it was the increase of material prosperity (on both sides) that relieved some pressure and kept the cold war from going thermonuclear. And even then, in our relatively short cold war, we had many close calls and are quite lucky to still be alive. If it went on another 50 years, I'm pretty sure that luck would run out and the cold war "stasis" would end very radioactively.
[Answer]
Solid state devices depend starting with VERY pure silicon or germanium. When Bell Labs started work they expected it to take 5 years to get materials pure enough. Given that we're talking about impurities on the order of a tablespoon of salt in a freight car of sugar, it doesn't take much to mess it up.
If magic is available then it takes very little magical power to either mix the dopants (the necessary impurities to make transistors work) or to remove them completely. Also having the crystal structure very even is critical.
So: An ordinary mage can disrupt a VLSI circuit very easily. A really powerful mage can do the bigger moves to disrupt a transistor. Since it takes more magical power for both a larger move and a bigger volume, it's not practical to spell a transistor, but very practical for smaller circuits.
A less skill mage may be able to remove .000001% of hte atoms in the semi-conductor resulting in a whole bunch of voids in the crystal structure, disrupting the conduction characteristics.
[Answer]
**Magical Silica**
Transistors need hyperfine silica (or gallium or germanium or whatever) as its substrate which as @Loki points out, all have 4 valance electrons. Turns out, the magic is also facilitated through elements with 4 valance electrons, which interferes with semiconductor operation. Perhaps it would be possible to build something analogous to a Faraday cage, but it wouldn't it be worth it.
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[Question]
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Some areas of the evil meant lair are not for the eyes of the average minion. There is only one way in and out of this area, there is no door blocking the way, but a lava waterfall pouring from the ceiling, completely covering the section of the corridor. The lava is actively recycled and a mechanism "opens" the waterfall from the center when the villain approaches.
Is this setup possible? Are there materials that can consistently contain molten rock without melting?
[Answer]
**Consider using molten metal instead!**
Most of the problems facing your lava waterfall can be avoided by using a more easily workable material. Relative to lava, almost all molten metals emit more heat and light than lava at a given temperature as you can see from the chart below. (stainless steel, tungsten, copper, aluminium, etc. almost all metals will follow this pattern)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SNwkH.png)
In addition to aesthetics, metals can be heated using induction which is much more efficient and compact than whatever mechanism would heat your lava. This process also makes no direct contact with the metal in question, so it will not wear out as easily.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BzWWC.png)
By using electromagnetic induction from a high-energy coil, the molten metal's temperature can be very accurately controlled and will also cool more quickly than stone (meaning the transport system needed to recycle it will be much easier to create and maintain).
Let's suppose you were to use a molten metal like tin or pure iron (avoid steel due to the sparks of super heated carbon that jump out). It can be made to flow much more easily (and better resemble a waterfall) than lava. It is highly receptive to inductive heating. It releases none of the toxic fumes that true lava would, and unlike lava, [it can even be moved around using a ceramic pump](https://phys.org/news/2017-10-ceramic-molten-metal-degrees-celsius.html). Furthermore, molten metal can be more easily contained, guided, split, or pushed out of the way to reveal your door due to its lower viscosity at higher temperatures.
**Suppose the following for your villainous lair!**
your passageway to the uber-secret room is disguised as the idealized lava wall you desire, radiating heat and light to whatever specifications you wish. The flow of metal falls cleanly from a slot in the ceiling into a tungsten grate in the floor that drains it away into a reservoir by a trough. the metal cools during this process, becoming easier to transport, but not solidifying. It is pumped through a series of tubes that have inductive coils around them as shown which sustain the metal at this temperature:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3mcOM.png)
From there, the molten metal is taken back up into the ceiling where a series of final high-energy coils return it to the yellow glowing radiance you desire. It is then flowed back over the lip of the ceiling, completing the loop.
In order to reveal the secret massage, one need only turn off the pump, or one could divert the flow to stop only the middle of the lava wall. One need only cross the glowing tungsten grating (perfectly safe if done quickly enough) and behind the wall is a hallway or catwalk or door to your lair.
Edit: also consider this design used by foundries to improve laminar (smooth) flow and prevent strain on the pump
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AuiZs.png)
[Answer]
**Go ahead and make lava.**
<https://www.gamma-meccanica.it/mineral-wool-production-lines/rock-wool/melting-furnace/?lang=en>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Xc1L.jpg)
Rock is melted and whipped into insulation. Depicted - a factory doing just that. More here on this related question - [Can stone be "recycled" by melting and cooling it?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84958/can-stone-be-recycled-by-melting-and-cooling-it/84965#84965)
For purposes of making a glowing molten wall, you could use other industrial processes - a metal refinery has all sorts of glowing hot molten stuff pouring here and there (hopefully mostly there). Or a glass recycling plant. Bonus - your Evil Lair could have a plausible raison d'être as a factory of some sort.
[Answer]
Ceramics would work nicely. They would hold up well in the heat and wouldn't deform under load like softer metals could. However they would be subject to wear. Modular units should be used so they can be replaced as they fail.
A simple ceramic Archimedes screw could be used to pump the lava. The screw should be long enough to put the drive mechanism a safe distance from the heat. To avoid the replacement of the screw in the event of a failure there should a sufficient gap between the screw and the pipe for lava to escape back down the pump if the screw stops or seizes.
Locks should be implemented to segregate top, pump, and bottom sections for maintenance.
[Answer]
**Withstanding the heat is the easy part**.
Continuously flowing lava is by far harder than the heat, even the air is too cold and will cause lava to solidify. lava falls are temporary occurrences. the better you want it to flow the hotter it has to be. Lava is also extremely abrasive and will scour material very quickly, like faster than most industrial abrasive processes quickly. flowing lava can carve away inches of concrete in a single event.
As for containing it, yeah that's the easy part. We even have steel alloys that will handle it just fine, tungsten steels can handle even hte hottest lavas. even the hottest lavas are only 2000 degrees celsius, to get it to flow easily you only need to get it to around 1200 degrees. You will need to replace your container often however as no matter what it is it will wear away/out fairly quickly.
[Answer]
Sapphire.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QELHN.png)
I'm serious! Here's an interesting thing: [Randall Munroe was once asked what could be used instead of glass for a hypothetical lava lamp that containing actual lava](https://what-if.xkcd.com/122/). His response includes some interesting tidbits:
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> You have a few choices for transparent materials that could hold the lava without rupturing and splattering half the classroom with red-hot droplets. Fused quartz glass would be a great choice. It's the same stuff they use in high-intensity lamp bulbs, the surface of which can easily get up to mid-range lava temperatures. **Another possibility is sapphire, which stays solid up to 2,000°C, and is commonly used as a window into high-temperature chambers.**
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If the sapphire wall/floor/ceiling is thick enough, it will not be too transparent.
But if you are not into gems and want to save some money, you could, you know, just build your room out of the stuff that lava usually flows over.
[Answer]
Evil super-vilian security theater!
Instead of making a true lava waterfall, make a liquid that has the same appearance, but is significantly cooler. I find a vinegar/baking soda with some red dye added to usually be sufficient, but with the resources to construct an evil lair in the first place, you're going to be able to produce a higher quality psuedo-lava. Once you have that, any sort of typical indoor waterfall setup will work.
Also install industrial heaters in the walls radiating heat into the corridor, so that the heat from even approaching the lava waterfall is unpleasant or even painful, and everyone will be convinced that it's a genuine lava waterfall.
[Answer]
>
> Are there materials that can consistently contain molten rock without melting?
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# Lava is a bad choice.
The problem is that most ceramic furnace materials will slowly react with your lava. You also need a very high temperature for your lava (higher than 1200 °C) for it to actually flow (or add sodium, but it will evaporate eventually requiring you to refill it occasionally).
Lavas are reactive with most of the stuff they get into contact with. Pretty much the only materials with a high-enough melting point that will not react with the lava (thus changing the composition of the lava and the container) are platinum and iridium, and they are expensive. Really expensive. If you want to build a system of pumps and tubes to move the lava around, you will need so much platinum or iridium that I'm not certain there is enough of it out there being mined, or you might actually temporarily increase the prices so much to cause a global financial crisis.
# Use molten silver, held in ceramic.
Silver has several properties that you want:
1. It's cheap. Well, cheaper than platinum.
2. Liquid silver is not viscous. Lava is - so it flows much better, doesn't get stuck in the system, and looks much better for the visual effect. Here's a example from [YouTube](https://youtu.be/bEGkoTc17Zw).
3. It is not reactive. Silver is a noble metal, so it can runs for months in your plumbing without anything happening to the silver or the plumbing.
4. It has low melting point. Melts at around 960 °C. This requires less energy to melt it (also lower heat capacity than rocks) = cheaper, easier.
5. The low melting point leads to it being easy to use with ceramic tools (btw - ceramic = synthetic rock). Cheap materials such as alumina (aka sapphire), silica, zirconia, etc will be excellent and easy to use in the plumbing system and pumps. Heck, you can even use temperature-resistant glass for the added effect of actually seeing the liquid silver flowing through the system.
[Answer]
You could just use something that only *looks like lava*, like ***water*** or ***oil***, and is still hot enough to burn anyone that touches it. And it's much easier & cheaper to heat & pump, and any metal or glass could contain & direct it easily, building a moving waterfall should be no problem.
Nearly boiling water is plenty dangerous (and would add a cool "steamy" effect), or hot oil could be downright lethal (185C/365F).
[Yosemite National Park's Horsetail waterfall sometimes looks like Glowing Lava](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160219-yosemite-firefall-waterfall-sunset-pictures-nature/?user.testname=none) and that's just natural sunlight:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/onPqa.jpg)
With oil it could look similar to a big "lava lamp" if you wanted a clear glass area somewhere too:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BZycn.jpg)
So I would suggest using real lava is virtually impossible, and this lethally scalding hot oil is a better solution.
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[Question]
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First of all, I have searched for a similar question but couldn't find anything. Sorry if it's a duplicate.
The idea is this: my fantasy world has, beside regular ones, a set of Amazing Swords™. As the name suggests, Amazing Swords are superior in any aspect, from weight to cutting capabilities, and they look pretty neat, too. They are made from That Particular Metal™ and are forged through that Obscure Ritual™, so let's not dwell on how and why they are so good.
Think of them like Damascus steel, but better. *It's probably due to magic*.
Since I'm not content with them being already overpowered, I'm trying to figure out what happens when an Amazing Sword clashes with a regular one (we're talking about the average eleventh century European sword here).
I imagine that the weaker sword will probably dent with ease, but **could it shatter**? Could it be that the Amazing Sword is so good at applying force that it messes up the very structure of an inferior sword?
According to a preliminary search, the answer should be no ([e.g., here](http://raynfall.com/2594/breaking-a-sword/)) and the whole sword-breaking could be just a trope. Still, I'd like to hear some opinions.
On a side note, I don't need shattering *per se*, I'd just like to know if I can make regular sword break or become unusable easily.
[Answer]
Whether or not the non super blades will shatter is dependent not on your super blades but rather the process and materials used to create your standard fare swords.
I will assume that your swords are steel for a couple reasons. Iron won't shatter, it's simply too soft. Some less common alloys and metals will shatter but in a world of swords (usually medieval) those alloys probably don't exist yet.
So anyway, steel non-super swords...
Steel will indeed shatter. It can happen for a few reasons.
1. **The carbon content is too high.** Carbon is what gives steel its extra strength versus straight iron. If the carbon content is too high it gets brittle and can shatter.
2. **Poor quality materials.** Steel that is sufficiently contaminated with other elements could become brittle and shatter. There are many options here but in general this can usually be overcome by heating and folding the steel to incinerate impurities and even out the distribution of contaminants. (Thanks @John for pointing out I missed mentioning this)
3. **It was not properly tempered when the blade was created.** To create a steel blade you get it to shape and then heat it to critical and then quench it in water or oil. The quenching process hardens the steel. At this point in the process the blade can indeed shatter, even by simply dropping it on the floor. Another step, tempering, is required to soften the spine of the blade which gives the blade its flexibility. So if you improperly, or simply didn't temper the blade it could shatter.
**So all in all you are either dealing with incompetent smiths, or more likely your super swords will simply dent, bend and otherwise destroy the regular swords.**
[Answer]
All magic aside, likelihood of a sword to break depends much more on the sword itself rather than opponent's sword. An "average eleventh century sword" is likely a [Viking/Carolingian sword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_sword) and it is made of steel of uneven quality. Steel (unlike pure iron) is more likely to break on impact, but it still not the same thing as shattering. For a particularly bad, brittle steel (or would it be cast iron actually?) sword it might be possible, but for a regular one we are going to have a bend or a notch.
In order to actually shatter steel, we need speeds orders of magnitude higher than a human can possibly reach while swinging a sword. We can observe steel shattering when impact speed exceeds 2000 m/s, which is too high even for most modern projectiles. See also [Brisance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisance).
A semi-magical idea is that Amazing Sword generates sound waves in acoustic resonance with its opponent, which indeed can lead to shattering.
[Answer]
Eleventh-century swords *did* shatter *on each other.* Let's turn to the Vikings here, whose "age" extended until 1066 AD.
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> "A nick was a site from which damage could propagate across the blade resulting in the kind of failure seen in this historical blade (right). Clear signs of brittle fracture are visible. It could not have been a good situation for the fighter holding the sword when it happened."
> ...
> "The sagas confirm that swords could be damaged or broken by striking metallic or other hard objects."
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*via <http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/viking_sword.htm>*
You're all set to have eleventh-century swords break against Amazing Swords™, because you're all set to have eleventh-century swords break against regular metal objects.
If you want more examples, look into the Ulfberht swords and their brittle counterfeits.
[Answer]
Shattering is so unlikely that it's not *really* worth your time, if the Amazing Swords™ don't *operate* through magic.
However...
If the Amazing Swords™ incorporated complex carbon fibre matrixes in the flexible spine portion of the blade (not the edges) they'd have a far superior ability to absorb impact and flex instead of shearing; if they also somehow incorporated some of the newly created superhard material (harder than diamond) which incorporates buckyballs in the alloy at the edges, you'd have super sharp edges which can partially handle insane compressive damaging forces, annealed to a spine which can handle impact absorption and flexing - if they were thinner than typical blades (but not so thin as to not correctly transfer shear forces to the opposing blade) you could posit that they ***cut*** *through* the "ordinary swords" completely.
I would think though that even an Amazing Sword™ would suffer attrition enough with each of these impact events that each would have a finite number of "cut through the opponent's sword" events before becoming damaged and needing rework.
[Answer]
Since magic is a thing, there could be an enchantment to bring the opponents blade to [a very low temperature](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4aratv/can_metal_shatter_if_cold_enough/) and put it through the ductile-to-brittle transition, which would make it much more likely to shatter. Basically a freezing blade.
Even if it took a few blocks to get the opponents sword cold enough.
[Answer]
I'm answering out of my experience with HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts).
First, I want to clarify how swords break. They don't shatter in the same way as the sword of Elendil. They encounter stress at a weak point and break there. It is possible that they might break in a similar way to a piece of spaghetti, with a small bit breaking off from where the break happens, but this depends on the type of sword (I've seen this happen with rapiers, since they are thinner and used for thrusting).
[Here is an example of a sword breaking.](https://youtu.be/L2e8ILv23_w) Note that this a sparring feder and not a sharp sword. This usually happens after several years of use, when the weapon has been through a lot of stress and reaches its breaking point. Your magic sword could maybe cause a similar reaction if it puts enough stress on the blade.
Note that a broken blade can still be used, and those broken bits are still sharp and dangerous. People can and have been hurt by broken swords.
P.S. Another common way that feders break is that the rolled tips come off, but this isn't really applicable to real swords.
[Answer]
As others have said, whether or not a sword will shatter depends more on its own material properties than on the quality of the sword it is striking. However, there is at least one way in which your Amazing Swords *might* cause other swords to shatter much more often than they would normally - if it were otherwise rare for swords to contact each other directly.
As a target, all swords, from the worst to the best, present a similar challenge to the attacking sword. Flesh, bone, or a wooden shield present a lesser (though still not negligible) challenge. In any impact some of the energy is dissipated as the sword cuts into the target, the interaction time is lengthened and the instantaneous force applied to the sword is reduced. If normal swords in your setting were consistently mediocre, then they might rarely shatter against shields but quite routinely shatter against each other.
Dominant fighting styles would heavily emphasize the use of the shield, both in defending against incoming attacks and in creating openings for your own attacks. Parrying or making an attack that is parried reduces the combat to a coin-toss - either your sword will break or your opponent's will. Worse, even if you survive, your sword is probably now chipped and much more likely to shatter in the next encounter, perhaps even against a shield.
Now high quality Amazing Swords appear and their wielders fight in a new style. Incoming attacks are forcefully parried. Their own attacks are made to try to force a parry from their opponent. If the opponent's sword doesn't shatter on the first collision then the attacks keep coming until the chips become fractures.
One problem with this approach is in getting your ordinary swords to be reliably, consistently mediocre. My first instinct for how to achieve this would be to couple poor quality ores with a highly ritualised process of refinement and manufacture. Due to the poor quality ores, most deviations from the normal process lead to total failure. Swords that don't immediately shatter when drawn are rationalised as the result of appeasing the god(s)/spirits/ancestors by following the ritual, and so the ritual is followed closely.
[Answer]
While under most circumstances, a well made steel sword isn't going to shatter, there is a possible "out".
Early European steel swords were often "[pattern welded](https://infogalactic.com/info/Pattern_welding)" out of short lengths of steel, since the art of making steel in bulk wasn't perfected at that time. Since the blade isn't a uniform length of steel, there is potential for breakage to occur where the various pieces of steel were welded together.
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> Pattern welding developed out of the necessarily complex process of making blades that were both hard and tough from the erratic and unsuitable output from early iron smelting in bloomeries. The bloomery does not generate temperatures high enough to melt iron and steel, but instead reduces the iron oxide ore into particles of pure iron, which then weld into a mass of sponge iron, consisting of lumps of impurities in a matrix of relatively pure iron, which is too soft to make a good blade. Carburizing thin iron bars or plates forms a layer of harder, high carbon steel on the surface, and early bladesmiths would forge these bars or plates together to form relatively homogeneous bars of steel. This laminating different types of steels together produces patterns that can be seen in the surface of the finished blade, and this forms the basis for pattern welding.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMQTv.jpg)
*Viking pattern welded sword. The "chevron" pattern is due to twisting of the welded steel blank before creating the sword*
Like James' answer, this also requires an incompetent swords smith, since the usual procedure was not only to hammer red hot strips of steel together to weld them, but to also twist the growing blank in order to increase the strength and provide multiple stress paths through the metal. A simple pattern welded blade which wasn't twisted (perhaps by an apprentice smith in a hurry) would be more likely to break along the various weld lines, which in the heat of battle might look like the sword shattered.
Of course this still also requires the magical swords to deliver more force than the average human can muster in the strike as well; you may end up defeating your own purpose because the enemy will have the sword struck out of his now broken hand and arm, rather than shatter.
[Answer]
This is a butter knife being hit by a 9mm bullet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PCGFT.gif)
The butter knife is not built of magic metals, and, as far as I know, no rituals are used in its making.
If such a puny blade can take the impact of a bullet head on and still be there, I don't think that a human-powered swing of a steel blade could do much better. So, if a magic sword manages to break a non-magical one, the merit goes to the enchantment alone.
You could put some dent on your foe's shortsword if you are wielding a bagua saber, though:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NYaaP.jpg)
[Answer]
Hardening magic and stress fractures.
The magic sword could be enchanted with a relatively simple spell to harden the other blade -- a spell refined and mastered over a lifetime by a sect of simplicity mages/smiths. They spend decades refining and perfecting the spells everyone learns in the first year. The first strike hardens the other blade, the edge is able to cut better (but the last time it was sharpened it was a soft metal so it doesn't get sharp all of a sudden, just harder, better able to cleave a branch perhaps) however, after several strikes with the enchanted blade the opponent's sword gets harder and harder, more and more brittle. Stress fractures start to form. After the third or fourth clash it becomes so hard and brittle it snaps or shatters.
Added bonus, people who know this can contrive to have their blade struck once and get fantastic blade hardening out of the deal. But they better have some trick up their sleeve to end the fight quickly.
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[Question]
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## Magic System
One of my worlds has a magic system that allows people to produce any element, as well as a small number of molecules. When something is produced using magic, it spawns into existence in front of the user, replacing whatever was previously occupying that space.
## Background Info
The molecules relevant to this question are: water, salt, and sugar. Water consists of H2O, salt consists of NaCl, and sugar consists of sucrose. Each material produced will be chemically pure, meaning the volume will consist *only* of whatever the produced molecule is. For example, magically produced water will have absolutely no dissolved solutes in it.
When consuming magically produced water, people will dissolve some sugar/salt into it until it becomes roughly isotonic. As this is set in a lower-tech world, they don't have the concept of tonicity, but will have learned over time that drinking pure water is unhealthy.
## The Question
With that information in mind, roughly how long could a person survive on nothing but magically produced water, salt, and sugar? I imagine all sugar and salt will be dissolved in water before consumption.
## Why I Am Asking
Knowing how long a person could survive on nothing but magically produced materials will have major worldbuilding implications. Could people make long treks with absolutely no supplies? Could soldiers on the battlefield survive off this diet for extended periods of time? Could there be entire cities of people living in barren wastelands, surviving off nothing but magic?
## What I Am Looking for in an Answer
A high quality answer will provide an estimate of how long a person could survive on this diet, along with logical justifications using known biology and chemistry. While not necessary, further explanations of the kind of health effects such a diet would have would be helpful.
[Answer]
**Warning: the links go to medical Wikipedia pages and they show bodies that look quite ill. Follow with caution.**
## Just isotonic sugar water will likely lead to death by scurvy, beriberi, and kwashiorkor, while also experiencing pellagra, likely before 10 weeks
Our magician gets a diet that is pretty much akin to (or rather: worse than) the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Meiji Era. Sailors in the IJN got a diet of tea and white rice for free, with no extra vitamins or sides. Any extra like greens required the sailors to pay for, and so most did not. The result of this one-sided food was a massive vitamin B1 deficiency, also known as [beriberi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency) - and in feeding sailors a more balanced food that contained unpolished rice and other grains, Takaki Kanehiro discovered vitamins in the first place.
The effects of a lack of vitamin C from fruit were known in the West much earlier, even if not understood. However, it was known that lack of fruit would lead to [scurvy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy). Scurvy was particularly common among British sailors till fruit rations became a thing - partially due to how James Cook managed to get a world tour without scurvy after handing out lemon and lime juice.
The lack of vitamin B3 will result in [pellagra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra). Pellagra is well known to be the result of too much corn-based food aid to Africa. The mage's very deficient diet does not provide this vitamin either. However, pellagra has a slower progression than beriberi or scurvy, so it is unlikely to be the actual killer, but it will add to the suffering of the mage.
The massive lack of protein however will result in one of the [protein–energy malnutrition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein%E2%80%93energy_malnutrition) illnesses. As the basic calorie intake is covered, [kwashiorkor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor) is the most likely to hit the mage. Again, this illness is known to be a result of monotonous, carb-only food aid.
In fact, pretty much **any** [micronutrient deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronutrient_deficiency) has a chance to show some of its ugly faces before the mage expires, all of them adding their own stamp to the painful martyrdom.
## Survivability Estimation
It is remarkable how fast scurvy and beriberi can set in. First symptoms of scurvy on British ships tended to show up within a couple of weeks in weaker constitution sailors before fruit rations were given, and beriberi has a similar onset rate. More sturdy sailors might go about a month and a half before the symptoms show. Kwashiorkor will show itself as early as the end of week 2, but surely will be present in a quite pronounced way by week 6.
Without a more wholesome food, 2 months would be quite generous till the onset of **serious** symptoms, and at best I would give the mage about 10 weeks till they are unable to move from either or both illnesses and suffer from life-threatening complications. Two more weeks might be gained if the mage had a particularly good constitution before this diet.
## Symptoms
Beriberi shows at first with fatigue, weakness, irritability, as well as tingling or numbness in the extremities. As symptoms worsen, muscle weakness and difficulty walking show as well as arrhythmic heartrate.
Scurvy shows at first with fatigue, weakness, irritability, and muscle aches. Its worsening symptoms include swollen and bleeding gums as well as joint pain.
Pellagra shows up with fatigue, weakness, and loss of appetite within a few weeks, combined with a sensitivity to sunlight. This skin condition worsens to a very red rash that is also scaling, and blistering, mimicking a non-healing sunburn. As already mentioned, compared to other vitamin deficiencies, pellagra goes on too slow to be the acute cause of death from *this* diet - but untreated it can result in confusion, irritability, cognitive impairment, depression, and a specific form of cognitive inability to remember called pellagrous dementia.
Kwashiorkor will show up with fatigue, weakness, and irritability as long as protein reserves last. When those stocks are out, muscles are cannibalized, leading to slimming arms and legs. Edema of the feet and belly start to form shortly after, and hair thins and starts to fall out. By the time of estimated death, the mage *also* is listless, irritable, and mentally apathetic.
Do note that other, more long-term deficiencies exist and were common among sailors. One example would be [Iodine deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency) and its accompanying goiters. Those however only show up after months, at which point the mage already has succumbed.
## Responsible Use
### Limited Time
There's a general rule of three in first aid: Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. The rule of thumb is, that at those points the body starts to cannibalize itself to a point that averse symptoms begin. It's clear that any caloric intake without any other sources of vitamins and protein could extend the starvation time, but there is only so much time that such a liquid-sugar diet could be used without the effects discussed above. That time I would pin as possible before other food needs to be provided to halt the downward spiral would be about 4 to 5 weeks. Such a fasting spree would still be a hard time for people, and clearly have a heavy toll.
Maybe the most comparable might be a Carthusian monk after Lenten fasting on a diet of vegetables, dry bread, and water in less than their normal quantities - though their insistence on veggies would manage to prevent almost all of the deficiencies explored above.
### Fruits & Nuts + Magic
A small amount of real food, especially fruit and protein-rich nuts, could complement an almost-pure-magic diet to prevent deficiency illnesses, or at least delay their onset by as long as they are available, and thus extend the survivability.
Captain Cook famously gave every sailor a daily ration of 30 ml (1 oz) of lime or lemon juice and had not a single case of scurvy on his voyage. The RDA for Vitamin C suggests the equivalent of about 2 full lemons, which is roughly twice as much as Cook gave, but his sailors also had a somewhat varied diet with *other* sources of vitamin C than lime or lemon juice. Estimating from this, I would *estimate* that about two fruit and a small hand full of fatty and protein nuts per day would make enough complimentary food to make a full *meal* and skip on transporting carb-based food. However, do note that such a diet will not feel *filling* in the slightest.
For a more *filling* alternative, vegetables or other greens to complement the magic drink might manage to not only fill the stomach, but also prevent the symptoms of deficiencies fully.
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So called [protein poisoning](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning), which is really fat deficiency, is what will get you first. You'll start showing symptoms in a few weeks, particularly mental instability, and then death in about a month. The condition has been known since antiquity when people made a habit of eating only lean meat, usually rabbit, and none of the fatty organs like liver or brain. Hence the name, protein poisoning. There is a slight difference in what your character is doing, getting all calories from carbohydrates instead of protein, so this may look a little different in symptoms. The ultimate results I think would be the same though.
Not eating at all will kill your character at about the same rate.
[This Dr on YouTube](https://youtu.be/BbAv0MT2UQ0) answers the question on why a carb only diet is very bad for you. He says some of what I say here, and more. If have to look into it more to be sure, but he indicates Thamine (B1) deficiency will get you first. That condition is called Beriberi. It is likely symptoms of multiple conditions will begin to manifest.
## Soft frame challenge
In terms of worldbuilding, modern chemistry is not really that fun to consider when it comes to alchemy (traditionally understood as transmutation). For example, why can mages conjure NaCl and not any other salt, which includes much needed vital minerals? If those are included, what's the functional difference between those and bigger molecules? Only the size? It seems odd that a magic act of transmutation is limited by the molecule size in this one direction but not the other. For consistency you'd have to say that they can only convert *from* certain molecules, thereby severely limiting the application. Then there's also the question why they can have the deep and intuitive understanding of the chemistry of their alchemy, but can't use transmutation in combination with manufacturing to make virtually anything. If they can make NaCl, they can make just Na, presumably, a highly reactive element. They can make O2, and really make furnaces blaze. And so on. The possibilities are too empowering if alchemy works this way.
Instead, alchemy understood substances as consisting of base elements like water, air, fire, and earth, not H2O, NaCl, etc. Salt water is a combination of water and earth, but lacking completely in all other elements. Salt alone is a substance of earth only. And so on. Breaking down the magic limits would be more traditionally understood this way, instead of through the modern chemistry lens. So your limits here could be skill in transmuting earth like substance into other earth like substance, but you cannot transmute to fire, water, or air. You aren't limited to this Aristotelian model. You can invent your own or add to it. Whatever helps your story make sense. But this allows you to be vague in what actually happens in a transmutation, and gives you leeway in allowing or disallowing any particular outcome. It also keeps the ancient mystery of it, which is a widely enjoyed trope.
In this way, what a skilled mage actually needs to bring for a long journey and what he can conjure through alchemy is really up to your story needs.
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**One to three months**
For survival you need water, calories, vitamins, minerals, and amino-acids (source of nitrogen). In starvation the reason for death is usually the lack of calories, so the body starts to eat itself. After it runs out of fats, it starts degrading proteins, and without proteins cells cannot function. ["Starvation ensues when the fat reserves are completely exhausted and protein is the only fuel source available to the body. Thus, after periods of starvation, the loss of body protein affects the function of important organs, and death results, even if there are still fat reserves left."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation) So the first cause of death is preventable if you stop the body from using proteins as fuel - which you do by eating sugar.
There were cases where people didn't eat for more than a [year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast). Sure, in that case the record holder did consume more minerals than just NaCl - not to mention some vitamins. But he DID show that it is possible to survive for a year with only minor intake of nitrogen. So nitrogen is not an issue.
You get all the water and calories from your magic, so that is not an issue. So the problem is your lack of vitamins and minerals. A human body is quite good at recycling both (and you DO get your NaCl, so that is something), and your gut bacteria will produce some vitamins. So the limiting factor will most likely be vitamin C as it is water soluble with relative large suggested daily intake.
Since we know that a person can survive 20 - 50 days without ANY food we can bet that having enough calories (and on top of that food for gut bacteria) your magic should achieve at least that. But probably not much more, as scurvy would be an issue - a leathal issue.
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Depending on the person it can go from a few weeks to almost a year,
* different people have different ammounts of bone to dissolve into calcium (calcium is used to reduce inflamation caused by sugar, proteins and various digestion related stuff)
* different people have different ammounts of muscle in their body, the first **days** the muscles will cause you to consume more energy by simply existing, but after a while they will be canibalized by other cells in your body, so the more muscles you have the longer you are going to survive
* A lot of vitamins are stored into fat tissue, some vitamins can't cause any overdose symtomps and the only thing that happens when you ingest 900 times the daily needed dose is that your fat will store all that extra vitamin and be consumed over the years... that's why it takes literal years to decades before someone dies of vitamin deficiencies like B12
There's also a thing humans have, it's called metabolism and hormonal self-regulation.
A reason many people find hard to lose weight even tho they train like horses.... is that for the majority of humans behaviour is **flexible**
if you are starved or incredibly tired because you ran a marathon and burnth 4000 kilocalories in a few hours ..... your body will start becoming less active, you will talk to yourself less, you will play with your pencils less.... shake your legs less, dream less , think less
and this can go on for weeks....so the 4000 kilocalories you burned by starving yourself thru diet or by running a marathon will be accounted for by weeks of living at an incredibly lower pace.
With this reasoning, many people in starvation reduce themselves to zombies so much so that their daily needs for proteins, minerals, calories and other vital stuff is reduced **CONSIDERABLY**
But most likelly your people are gonna faint and hurt themselves, and when you are this badly starved, hitting your chest on the ground can permanently stop your heart forever... hitting your head on a door that you didn't open because you had brain fog and didn't realize the door was closed... well it can send you into a coma.
Also there comes the problem of sleep deprivation, some people will not be able to sleep at all if they don't eat.
you won't feel tired, you won't feel the need to sleep, you will feel energized for hours as soon as you wake up, for people with anorexia it is very common to sleep 1-3 hours a day and feel refreshed.... Actually tiktok and instagram is filled with fitness gurus boasting about how they fast for weeks, sleep 1-3 hours per day and feel amazing because they defeated the matrix or something...
but this kills you.
whilist other people will do the opposite, will instead start to sleep more and more until they spend 24 hours in bed.
this later type of people survive longer.
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Two important deficiencies will show up with this diet:
1. As others have mentioned, protein.
2. Fatty acids.
These will strike long before vitamin deficiencies matter.
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**Water and Salt**
For short periods, you are better off without the sugar (salt and water only). Your body will go into Ketosis and then Atophogy. You need to be careful when you get below 10% body fat, as your body will start burning muscle which can cause serious (potentially long term) problems. The consensus seems to be that most healthy people can go 2 weeks on salt and water with no negative effects.
If you look into the research for this, you'll get flooded with the popularized "intermittent fasting" but that is totally different from what you are asking. Instead look for "long-term fasting" or "water fasting".
* <https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/nutrit/nuad081/7209209?redirectedFrom=fulltext>
* <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8320652/>
* <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.951000/full>
* <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002604956590079X>
**with Sugar**
Adding the sugar will keep your metabolism going and you will essentially be on a sailors diet. In this case, you can go longer periods, but you will need to pack some kind of supplemental food: vegetables, nuts, dried meat. [Pemican](https://savoringthepast.net/2021/11/25/pemmican/) is a long lasting historical food that Native Americans used to get through the winter.
I can tell you from experience, a reduced caloric diet is much harder than a multi-day fast.
* <https://eatingdisorders.dukehealth.org/education/resources/starvation-experiment>
] |
[Question]
[
As an ancient organism whom currently occupies a large chunk of a planet beneath the surface, I have a pesky issue with an invasive species. **These humans have decided to colonize my home, mistaking it for an uninhabited Earth-like planet**. There aren't that many of them (yet), but **I have a big problem with an orbiting station they deployed that keeps an eye on most of the planet**. I want to keep my presence hidden, at least for now, and their ability to see a good chunk of the planet with optical cameras makes it tough for me to operate openly.
After careful observation, I've learned there's a critical weakness in its design: there's a communications "blister" on the outside of the station that allows it to send back what it's seeing, and also allows it to communicate with the rest of the galaxy. I also know that this planet is very remote by their standards; it would take months for someone to make it here or to the next system. As an added bonus, they don't have the ability to fix it themselves, and as far as I can tell this station is fully automated and uninhabited.
**My plan is to manipulate the geology of the planet to create a crude gun that can hit this weak spot with a dense rock, ideally making it look like a 'nautral phenomenon'**. Let's also say I had millennia to anticipate the need to defend myself, making it just another curious part of the surface before they even got here.
So, I need to make a 'cannon' that:
* Looks like a natural geological formation
* 'Powered' only by what naturally occurs in the crust of a planet (ex. lava, geothermal pressure, etc.)
* Fires a projectile that can survive leaving the atmosphere
* Has enough accuracy to hit a target that's no more than a few meters across
* Ideally can launch my payload when nobody is looking (i.e. the station can't see me), allowing me to make it look like a stray asteroid
* Allows most of the planet to remain inhabitable
It's fine if it's loud; I can always make some rumbling happen in advance and get the colonists accustomed to it. However, I don't want the result to outright kill them or maim them; it would cause less panic if there are no casualties or injuries. I need a month or two to get rid of them properly, and the less they suspect, the better.
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It [doesn't seem to be possible](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/19234/could-an-earth-volcano-impart-escape-velocity-on-lightweight-matter) using "normal" geology. You'd need a supervolcano to attain the required energies, and "piloting" one with the required precision doesn't look doable.
You need to score a direct hit; getting in orbit isn't enough, since any station would have ACS thrusters and be able to both detect a coorbiting incoming missile, and avoid it.
You could perhaps build yourself a single-shot, nuclear long-gun, using a fizzle bomb design (this happens in at [least one story that I know of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelot_30K)). Basically, you build an inclined well with lightly enriched uranium, fill it with lithium deuteride, and have it explode. Can you do all these things? If you can manipulate *magma*, then perhaps.
"Natural" reactors [have occurred on Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor); of course they never had the least chance of exploding. But if you disseminated the components elsewhere, too, instead of just in the one place, it could be believed to be "just the way the planet is".
The problem will be in accurately guiding the real projectile (you'll need a large number of decoys, otherwise the chances of *one single projectile* killing exactly the communication blister on an orbiting space station being dismissed as "Aw, tough luck" will be nil). You'll probably have to devise some way of guiding the projectile using fins and single-use steam reaction jets, which also mean controlling it somehow at a distance - can you fork a nonsentient, small scale replica of yourself capable of doing the job and surviving launch? Also, you can't hit the blister with the main projectile - that will be analyzed, so it has to be a normal rock, a piece of the main projectile, while the rest has to lose itself in space or burn at reentry, to leave less traces.
(The above actually solves the accuracy problem somewhat: the controlled vehicle gets shot into orbit, "close enough" to the station. Once it is close enough, it fakes breaking into several fragments - one of which is aimed at the station. At that distance and in microgravity, aiming will be much easier and the shot will require a lot less energy. The launch vehicle doesn't need to be accurate at all).
# misdirection - camouflaging
Item 1 on the list is to carefully disseminate volcanoes with very high quantities of weakly enriched radioactive ore. Then, one or two volcanoes are replaced by craters with aging and weathering signs indicating large scale **nuclear** explosions having taken place in the last fifty thousand years. This, of course, implies precise control of the isotopic composition of rock, as well as the capability of disassembling and reassembling it.
Also, this needs must have taken place **before** any extensive survey of the planet has been performed, of course; a 50KY old crater that wasn't there six months before would be a dead giveaway.
But if you manage to pull this off, Earth scientists investigating the planet will begin wondering why anyone might have targeted volcanoes with rudimental nuclear devices so many years ago. Then, someone else will develop a theory that some unknown mechanism, somehow, drives radioactive ores to accumulate inside volcanoes' calderas. The conclusion would be immediate - in the right circumstances, either a normal but unseasonable eruption, a "fizzle" eruption, or a much rarer semiaborted nuclear explosion would take place.
From there, someone is bound to wonder whether any such explosion might be brewing *just now* - and most anyone else will laugh it off. Finding ancient tephra at large distances from the "ground zero" point of origin will make theorists suspect that the geometry of the explosion allow projectiles to reach orbit.
This, however, has a serious drawback - radioactive ore concentration is likely to make the planet really appetizing, and the underlying organism is unlikely to realize that. Now that I come to think of it, this whole plan has one other really weak spot - how is the organism going to *know* that a fizzle bomb is possible, let alone how to build one without having it detonate prematurely?
(Unless it spent countless aeons researching all kinds of weird science, possibly out of boredom...?)
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I think there's a misunderstanding about space going on here. According to the title, you want to get an object into orbit with a cannon of some kind. This can't be done; every orbit includes the point at which delta-V was last spent. If you're launching from some kind of cannon, that means the orbit intersects with that cannon and probably the ground. Rockets in real life get around this by burning their engines again once they're way above the atmosphere.
But you don't need to get an object into orbit to hit something in orbit. You just need to reach the same altitude, which is much much easier. I think a volcano is your best bet; a supervolcanic eruption might be able to launch a rock into space. As I said, not into orbit though.
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You may choose a different scenario.
Start with a supervolcano eruption. No, not one to hit the space station. One that will throw enough material into the atmosphere that it blocks most if not all radio-magnetic transmission. The dust in the atmosphere will last for months, even years, so you have plenty of time to get rid of humans while they are cut from their communication and then being invisible from the orbit prepare something to destroy the station in not-so-natural way. Another benefit is that this can change your planet's climate in a way that can itself be deadly at least to some level to the intruders.
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## Not a chance.
1. You need to give the projectile all of the energy it needs in a very brief space of time (the time it needs to clear the volcano, to mention an example). That is an awesome amount of power. Remember that our rockets carry their fuel with them and burn it as they raise, it is highly inefficient but the alternative method would destroy the rocket at launch.
You need some sturdy material for your projectile, and worse, you need to reinforce **a lot** the structure of any volcano, geyser, whatever that you want to use as your energy source. And not only the "cannon", but all around it, because you cannot allow that pressure that you need to build to escape by blowing some other part of the volcano.
Mind you, completing engineering works of this scale in **an active volcano** is not an easy task, and likely to be observed by the ship. Overcoming this hurdle is a really unbelievable feat.
2. Precision. The worst one. You are sending an unguided projectile towards a minuscule target in a big sky. Any mistake in the measurements of the target orbit, your projectile weight and aerodinamics, your energy source power, the local weather, and you have nothing but a piece of rock wandering around your planet, almost harmless. Chaos theory says that you will fail.
3. Countermesures. It is difficult to believe that a spaceship by an advanced spacefaring civilization will not have some means of detecting and avoiding a meteorite strike (at the very least just changing its speed to avoid the crash).
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Can you manipulate your local equivalent of the Van Allen belts to focus solar radiation and fry the satellite's electronics? Gets rid of the off-world communications and the video link without actually destroying the satellite..
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Physics is against you for a number of reasons. To get an exact answer of how badly, you need to define how high the orbit of the spy station is, thus how high your projectile needs to get. The problem, though, is this incredibly approximated math:
1. Your projectile needs to survive the atmosphere and do damage. Let's assume a 8kg iron sphere. An ordinary cannonball, basically.
2. You need to get the thing sub-orbital, for an autonomous sat let's guess something on the order of 2500m/s at release.
3. If my late night math is right, we can translate that via momentum to needing to impart 20,000 newtons of force. *In that direction.*
4. Converting to kinetic energy, that should be 28kJ?
5. Let's assume you're getting 25% of your released energy converted to useful force, so 80,000 newtons raw.
6. Juggle a few numbers, make some assumptions about losses, and guess you need an explosive force of 200-300kJ under optimistic conditions.
7. Look for an equivalent energy and work out that your energy budget is likely off by an order of magnitude.
Ok, maybe the math is my problem too. Honestly, I don't know what kind of losses you'd get from trying to to make a cannonball travel at more than mach 7. I also don't know how to estimate the extra force needed to compress a propellant gas to the point that it imparts enough force. I don't even know if a cannonball would survive, a meteor with these specs would survive re-entry but for launching the curves get reversed. Compression heating? Ablation effects? Hypersonic aerodynamics near the ground? \*shrug\*
Anyway, if you want to get that cannonball to hit something in orbit your issue is that you end up needing an explosive force measured in metric tons of TNT, and consequently your "barrel" and projectile has to withstand that while the force is transmitted. You need to concentrate that force too, since it's pressure, the more (chamber) surface area subjected to the force the more energy is needed to get the same acceleration. If you want a better number you'd need a much better physicist than I. Actually I'm hoping someone competent can tell me how many orders of magnitude off I am with those numbers.
As a final note, I'm using explosive forces here because achieving the same thing through pressure build up is far less practical, if only because concentrating that force and making a working release mechanism adds lots of problems while increasing mechanical losses. Volcanoes and earthquakes can easily build up and release enough energy to put something in orbit but I'd say it's impossible direct/concentrate that energy into a projectile. Surface area is your enemy with any pressure system.
...
What, you want to know how I'd solve the problem? Blow a few big volcanoes and put enough ash in the atmosphere to obscure the surveillance while you arrange a more permanent elimination of both people and tech. As a bonus, the transmitted footage will send a "really unpleasant place to live" message to whoever views it. Sadly it's probably too much to hope that you can hit their settlement with the lava, but a tsunami would do the job without looking too suspicious to a remote observer.
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Assuming an earth-like planet...
# Satellites are not meant to land
Strategic heating of the atmosphere combined with a well placed hurricane or five and you can raise the atmosphere to the point where if they aren't watching they might accidentally enter the atmosphere, burn up and crash. As is the ISS actually experiences significant atmospheric drag ramping this up a bit will significantly lessen the life span of satellites in low orbit.
## The Good
Changes to surface albedo, minor core cooling, tropospheric disturbances cause no long term losses of mass. It looks completely like a fluke.
## The Bad
Anything designed for interstellar travel shouldn't have problem station keeping indefinitely.
## The Fix
The observation post was intended to be temporary. It was put in an orbit that would only last 50 years before atmospheric entry. Low so that it could cover more ground faster, but not so low it would need station keeping fuel and thrusters.
# Radiation Squeeze
The hypothetical planet has a magnetic field which blocks incoming radiation and ends up trapping it in high orbit much like our Van Allen Radiation belts. These ions are mostly free protons and electrons in belts segregated by charge. There are also limited amounts of positrons and anti-electrons as well as ionized helium floating around. The particles can destroy equipment and will certainly disrupt electronics. If you adjust the magnetic field of the planet to bring the belt into path of the satellite it may degrade its performance to the point where it no longer functions.
## The Good
No mass lost. The South Atlantic Anomaly (where the belt reaches 200km above the surface as opposed to 2000km) is a thing so this looks like an unhappy planet to be.
## The Bad
Interplanetary craft must deal with solar flares which can be far worse.
## The Fix
Protecting the electronics from radiation surges often means shutting them down. If the shutdown needs to be longer than expected or more often than expected the station may be damaged anyway. Time this with a strong solar flare and you might be able to take it down.
# Both at once
The planet is looking nice and hospitable. Strong spherical magnetic field nicely aligned with it smooth regular surface. Even flow of a liquid core. It's a relatively cool planet without strong temperature gradients. The sun is entering a maximum of activity but it shouldn't matter, everything is okay inside of the planets magnetic belt. Geologists are reporting that a large glacial lake is about to rupture some time in the next thousand years and it should be a spectacular display.
The earthen dam gave way far earlier than expected but such events have never been observed live. The biggest change and a large layer of fresh water on top of the planets largest ocean. In other notes there is a small magnetic anomaly forming at mid latitudes. There is no projected change to the magnetosphere at this time, but watch for variations in local declination.
Meteorology reports that turbidity is increasing and sea surface temperature is rising. A small dust storm is forming in the basin left by the drained glacier. They expect that a hurricane will be forming in the next 3-5 days and rapidly move to mid latitudes. The first one observed on this planet.
The hurricane has formed. Meteorology is going wild. There hasn't been a storm this big recorded ever on earth. Solar flare predicted to impact in 2 days Observation station going into protective shut down mode. The magnetic anomaly has strengthened. It looks like we are at the beginning of a shift of the planets magnetic poles.
The solar flare was stronger and faster than expected the system only got partially shut down and there are some data corruption issues. The information we are getting is only intermittent. We are attempting a reboot from the ground station.
More data is in coming in now. Full system integrity checks take two hours to complete. There is some sort of radiation anomaly occurring forcing a reset every 93 minutes. Atmospheric craft report the hurricane has only intensified.
Communication has been fully restored with with observation station. It seems the planets Van Allen belts have reoriented themselves with the magnetic poles shift. In order to maintain the observation stations integrity we need to shut it down when passing through the anomaly. Unfortunately, the anomaly occurs near apogee. We are trying to schedule a station keeping maneuver but the orbit is decaying far faster then predicted.
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**Build millions of mirrors reflecting sunlight at it.**
Frame-challenge: it doesn't have to be a projectile, you just need to destroy the blister.
Assumption: you have line of sight, the blister is not on the "far side" of the station.
Build several tiny surface formations reflecting sunlight. They can look natural, made of glass, sapphire or other perfectly natural, reasonably reflective material. Mixing and matching allowed. None has to be very efficient (glass does pass most of the light through), you can compensate by a 99% waste by building 100x more.
Aiming is a challenge, but, if you can perceive the station in such detail while it goes around the planet at distance and speed, well, these are the same problems you're already solving. I don't know enough about your nature to say *how*, but you certainly have the equivalent of a tracking telescope. What remains is, do you have enough cognition to do it millions of times over at the same time?
The effect will be equivalent to a death ray, the blister will melt. They'll be suspicious, but they'll *never* learn the truth, you don't detect a distributed mirror like this unless you're looking for it. They'll blame design and construction, and suspect sabotage from their own before they suspect you. You're just too unique for them to expect.
[Answer]
On earth, the most common natural looking formation that can shoot rocks is a volcano. Yes, we know that a volcano shoots rocks high above the earth but not outside the atmosphere. So we can just modify the volcano to make the crater thinner, small and more round so that there is perfection in the accuracy. For launching a rock into the orbit we need the rock to be in an aerodynamic shape and have a highly flammable material on the bottom of the rock which can be triggered by the hot lava. So we have a volcano shooting out a rock missile into orbit. But we still won't have the right pressure so we will try to pressurize the volcano from within. We can use a system that lets lava come in but not out so that we have enough pressure and we can use a big door that will be opened when the pressure is right.
This might work but the accuracy will not be so good. So you can just launch it in such an orbit that it will crash with the station in the orbit and not directly hit it.
[Answer]
1. If you want to destroy their station, set a cloud of gas on the orbit (if it's not very high). You will get the most part of your gas back later. Do it several times while the station is on the other side of the planet. The speed of the station will decrease and it will get down. It will get damaged at first. Repeat while they not repair it.
2. Exotic things like atmospheric gas laser, microgravity resonance etc are not practical.
3. Use your strength. Yours is time (on geological scales) Theirs is money.
* Methodically destroy every habitat ship landing. They will find correlation very soon.
* They will use robots. Destroy power plants.
* They will use nano-robots. Destroy stocks and launch sites to prevent them stealing your resources.
* They will use molecule-level robots to set you to a gray goo. Develop this technology
4. Those monsters will come back. They will set more than 1 station quite far from the planet. So get ready. The maximum reasonable impact is asteroids they will set on you. You are not scared of atomic bombs, aren't you? Well, they would set a mini black hole or something like this to finally get energy from you but I cannot get a solution for this case now.
5. Use energy of your star to get out of the habitat zone in your planet system. May be it would be even profitable for you, you just did not think about it. It will take a lot of time so start right now. If you use some space inside the planet it probably is not critical for you.
6. Split and diversify your bodies for different conditions, impacts and possibilities. This incident will be start of your infinite expansion to the space. They are split by their greed. You will get unite with the new infinite goal that will transform you. Set yourself total on this. They got here to wake up you. This is the aim of any real contact. Get their passion and apply with your planet-wide scale. Make all possible for this, not to get rid of that piece of shit on the orbit.
@Chris Bradshaw presented an elegant solution for big distances, but the Juno Radiation Vault mission proves that even today's shielded electronics can work some years even in radiation belts of Jupiter, which are more intensive than ones for an Earth-like planet
Probably the author will have a strike on the ground. He definitely will win the first one and will have some time to another. Any solutions to rise costs of taking ownership on the planet to unacceptable, including terraforming to temperature and atmospheric conditions unacceptable for invaders. Like on Venus. Oh, mankind is a big pain in the ass.
But wait a minute. "These humans have decided to colonize my home, mistaking it for an uninhabited Earth-like planet."
Are we talking about Earth? Because our thoughts more likely are inspired by our environment, not by something else like Solaris in hundreds of light years somewhere.
The space station is the opposite side for the action. As the center of crazy mind like a Death Star. They think they are only rational, legitimate, self-consistent and independent in all the space around.
[Answer]
OP you specified earth-like but this is usually used to define atmosphere makeup and temperatures - what about a smaller planet (lower escape velocity), natural geologic formations that are much taller than the ones on earth due to tectonic activity? One could create something that is essentially a space-sling from a spot that is much higher altitude and solves most of your dilemmas. People on the ground might not even notice that there is something in the slingshot, which would be moving at a much higher velocity and could be released with pinpoint accuracy during the normal rotation of the earth.
Hell, you could have some kind of natural vine, native to the planet, that 'unintentionally' created a space elevator that the parasites utilized to ship materials to and from the station at one time. Then one day, when the planet's spin managed to line up with the station, suddenly let out a lot of extra line, swinging the end of the elevator in to the blister and destroying it, then retracting it immediately. No muss, no fuss.
[Answer]
Have you considered putting the orbiting station in a low orbit that needs occasional re-boosting to stop it de-orbiting? Spy satellites are often in low orbits to get the best detail in their pictures. The International Space Station would [crash after about 15 months](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/9512) if abandoned.
If you can knock out the communications and any automated re-boosting mechanism, the satellite would burn up *and take all the evidence of what happened with it* so nobody can tell the difference between a software bug, a manufacturing defect, and a meteoroid strike.
Then if the gun from [LSerni's great answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/138358/7585) could fire something as radioactive as the heart of the Chernobyl sarcophagus, you could claim it only needed to get within a few tens of meters. All the humans see is their satellite has stopped responding and they can't tell why, and it burns up on re-entry before anyone can get there to investigate.
[Answer]
1. What is the most energetic phenomenon a planet might have access to? I here assert this to be impacts from extraplanetary objects.
2. Could an impact from an extraplanetary object propel material off of the impacted planet fast enough to escape the gravity well of the planet? Yes - a meteorite loosed from Mars was in the news some years ago as potentially containing fossil microbes. [An ancient rock blasted loose from Earth was recently discovered in a collection of moon rocks.](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6426/437)
3. Could rocks blasted loose from the planet by an impactor disrupt an orbiting satellite? I think yes. Clearly a rock moving fast enough to reach the moon could do some damage if it hit something en route. I would assume this moon-destined rock was one of many and that the impact would produce a shotgun-like giant cloud of rock.
4. Could a planetary super creature induce an impactor to hit? This is where it gets tricky. Let us assume the creature can manipulate the planet's magnetic field by altering magmatic flow. A magnetic field can induce a current within a conductor moving within it; metal asteroids / meteors would be conductors. The current within the moving asteroid generates heat. The energy to create this heat is taken from the kinetic energy of the moving asteroid thru the magnetic field, thus slowing the asteroid. This slowing /heating would occur for a meteor moving perpendicular to lines of force, not parallel. <http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1946PA.....54..482R>
Thus by manipulating magnetic fields, the creature could steer a meteor to some degree, possibly inducing a meteor to hit in such a way as to launch a cloud of rock at escape velocity, obliterating the satellite.
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This induced mega impact is kind of a bold maneuver given the creature calls the planet home. But if it can steer nearby asteroids to some degree, why not steer a small one into the spacecraft and leave out the massive impact part? Even this would take great effort on the part of the creature as well as knowledge of asteroids in the vicinity (which it might perceive, at least periodically, if it were an electromagnetic creature).
It might miss the first several times it tried. In fact for the story I like the idea of it missing every time but then realizing that the alteration of the magnetic field actually was greatly altering the stream of charged particles from the solar wind. Rather than whack the satellite with a fast moving piece of metal, it rearranges the planet's field so charged particles are funneled down onto the satellite, producing a quiet death from a thousand cuts.
[Answer]
Blow up a supervolcano, like when Krakatoa and others dusted the stratosphere and caused their Little Ice Ages... in your case, you might want a plume of sand and stuff to reach even higher, and the pesky newcomers might consider it a quirk of the unexplored new planet. The cloud of sand, ice particles or whatever else small and hard, roaming at orbital speeds at the height of that station would probably not even be detectable until too late - that is when they make it look like cheese. Maybe it will not even look much like cheese at first sight, when the particles are small, but breaking the atmosphere (cooling) and tearing (and short-circuiting) the cables in the station does the job and looks like a natural accident. Also you don't really need to hit just that radio blister, the whole station would do, and not a very good precision to make the hit (a fast dust cloud can be bigger than the station).
Note: This was the sort of tech discussed for the star wars between Earth-bound superpowers, to take out satellite constellations by bringing up a cistern of water and blowing it up - after a few rotations and dealing the desired effect, the icicles would sublimate away or fall and burn in the atmosphere, and not contaminate the orbit for later launches.
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[Question]
[
Meet Joe. Joe is generally an average person with one special trait: He loves astronomy and star gazing.
However, Joe has a great paying job as a web developer. He earns 120 000 USD yearly and has a fully remote job, which has only two requirements:
* Joe needs an internet connection
* For legal purposes, Joe needs to work from the USA
Joe lives a moderate life and invests most of his earnings into astronomy equipment. Web developer by day, amateur astronomer by night.
Joe's astronomy hobby is his passion. He is able (and willing) to spend up to 70 000 USD yearly for equipment and he was equipping his observatory for past 5 years. (350 000 USD budget total for his equipment.)
Let's also assume that Joe started to hunt asteroids a year ago, so the past 70 000 USD can be spent directly for equipment related to asteroid hunting.
A rogue asteroid [of the same magnitude as the one which killed the dinosaurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater) (10 - 15 km in diameter) is on a collision course with Earth. It will hit Earth 365 days from now.
* Is Joe able to spot it?
* Is it plausible that Joe will be the first one to spot it?
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The sky is too big to let only professional astronomers look at it. Consider that professional telescopes have limited time windows for specific researches. And if you want to spot potential hazards for the planet you cannot look once in a while. At least, to watch over my house for theft I would not pay for a guard who looks at it just 1 hour every week.
NASA is actually distributing [software](http://www.ibtimes.com/nasa-releases-new-asteroid-detection-software-amateur-astronomers-1847946) to help amateurs spotting asteroids
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> In order to increase the frequency of asteroid detection, including of those bodies that could be potential threats to our planet, NASA has released a new software, developed in collaboration with Planetary Resources, Inc., capable of running on any standard PC. The software, which can be downloaded for free, will accept images from a telescope and run an algorithm on them to determine celestial bodies that are moving in a manner consistent with an asteroid. Amateur astronomers and asteroid hunters can also take images from their own telescopes and analyze them with the software.
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Moreover there are already [cases](http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/amateur-observers-discover-asteroid-moon/) where an amateur found a newly discovered asteroids
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> last year Maley started enlisting amateur observers in Texas to observe the occultation of a 10th-magnitude star by 13th-magnitude Amalthea. And all that planning paid off, because the observing team has discovered that this asteroid probably has a small satellite.
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So the answer to both your question is YES (if he also uses the equipment he has).
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I upvoted Dutch and did not think anything else was needed; but in response to commentary I will add on.
* Is Joe able to spot it?
This is an unqualified ***YES***.
Amateurs spot new asteroids and comets all the time; it is just a matter of equipment that is affordable to many in the upper middle class, like Joe. Some people buy \$200,000 boats for their hobby, others could spend that on astronomy instead.
I have spent 40 years either earning in Joe's range or above it but working daily with people that earn in that range; and I know from personal contact it is plausible for some to spend lavishly on their hobbies. Perhaps \$70,000 a year would be an outlier, but not implausible. Make Joe a little older (warranting the higher remote salary) and he could easily have half a million dollars worth of equipment. He is technically minded, he can understand and compute the trajectories, speeds, etc. As a computer developer he can probably program accurate simulations to find places to look, or discover anomalies. Joe can be, *effectively*, the same as a professional astronomer with professional equipment matching the typical university observatory setup.
* Is it plausible that Joe will be the first one to spot it?
Another unqualified ***YES*** that apparently needs explanation. It is plausible that **some** amateur will find it. Why *Joe* out of the hundreds or thousands it might have been?
That is a question that does not have to be answered! In fiction, the author focuses on the characters that *eventually* get lucky or do something extraordinary; that is the nature of story telling. We generally do not take some random person and tell about their ordinary life where nothing of any real consequence happens.
Consider Stephen King's (SK) "The Stand". He focuses very early on Stu Redman, a reasonably intelligent guy hanging out at a gas station with his buddies in a small town in Texas. The Superflu, a bio-engineered disease that none of the characters have heard of, is about to escape and kill 99.999% of all humanity.
Why would SK focus on Stu? Because this gas station is about to be crashed into by patient zero, a soldier infected with the Superflu, and Arnette is about to be ground zero for the spread of this infection, and Stu is about to be the first person in the world to be proven immune; due to a 1 in 100,000 chance mutation in his DNA that has had no effect upon him so far.
What are the odds THIS gas station, out of millions in the world, is where patient zero dies at the wheel and crashes? What are the odds of THIS small town being where it happens, out of tens of thousands of such towns? What are the odds this guy is immune (1 in 100,000) and happens to be AT this gas station and hanging out with his buddies?
The odds of such a coincidence are beyond those of winning hundreds of millions of dollars in a lottery. But it is the fiction writer's prerogative and duty to focus precisely such situations because that is where the story is.
In SK case, each *component* is plausible, so suspension of disbelief is sustained. *Somebody* has to be the first survivor, so SK begins his story from the POV of that person, no matter *how* long the odds of any individual being that person. In Stu Redman's case, out of 7 billion people on Earth, the odds of him being both immune and the first are one in 7 billion.
I could say the same about Harry Potter: The odds of being **the one** out of billions is one out of billions. Or being the best secret agent, the President of the USA when extraterrestials visit or an asteroid strikes, or being invited to Jurassic Park, or being the best martial artist in the world, and so on.
Fiction writers are *expected* to focus on the one unique person that is *going* to be "The One" and tell their story.
So because it is plausible an amateur will be the first to spot it, of course it is possible ***Joe*** is "The One". Because this is fiction and the author would not focus their tale on anybody else but "The One." That is expected by the audience (readers, viewers, listeners) and does not break the suspension of disbelief in the slightest. On the first pages of a novel (or a chapter or other story cut that introduces a new character) we fully expect the focus to be on characters ***that will matter*** to the story line. The earlier in the book or movie these characters are introduced, the more important to the tale they should be (e.g. it breaks suspension of disbelief if the plot resolution comes from a character first introduced near the end of the tale; so much so we consider this to be poor storytelling [pejoratively called a *deus ex machina*]).
***Somebody*** has to discover it and that might as well be amateur Joe; the OP has given plenty of reasons (perhaps *too* many) to tilt the odds in Joe's favor. Authors are nearly *always* telling the tales of people experiencing an extraordinarily unlikely string of *individually* entirely plausible and possible events or circumstances. Because that's where the story is!
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Asteroids are really hard to spot at all, you need repeated high res images of the same piece of sky and a lot of luck, ones coming straight at you can actually be completely impossible to spot depending on the angles etc... If Joe is using good equipment, at the top end of amateur status, and the right techniques, as in he's actually looking for space rocks *and* he gets lucky there's no reason he can't spot it as long as there's some relative motion that he *can* spot.
Edit: Hadn't addressed part two sorry. The sky is huge part of Joe's "luck" is in picking the right piece of sky; odds are his piece of sky isn't being watched by anyone else so if he spots it it's not only plausible but actually *likely* that he's first.
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Yes, Joe could certainly have a chance to spot it. He's got the money to set up one or more automated telescope systems that can sit there all night imaging different parts of the sky, and then automatically chewing through the images to look for anything not matching the expected results and flag them for human attention.
There's at least one real world amateur astronomer that has done this and discovered several comets like this - I remember reading about it since he let his kids find some of the later ones. Don't have a reference, unfortunately.
The big multiplier is being able to automate things so you don't have to be up driving things all night p or doing the initial checks. Given a suitable budget, you can also set up one or more extra remotely operated sites in different countries so you can still image while it's daylight at home.
Once you've got the flagged images, it should be fairly easy to blink between the reference and "interesting" images to weed out a lot of planes and similar false positives - especially if things are set up to take more pictures of the same area later for flagged images.
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Amateur discovery of comets, asteroids, minor planets, etc., has already happened many times. First discovery of Earth-intersecting planet-killers, not so much.
There is a list of [minor planet discoverers](http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/MPDiscsNum.html) at the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center, and a [similar list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planet_discoverers) at Wikipedia. Looking down the list in descending order of number of discoveries, I see the 'amateurs'
* [Takao Kobayashi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takao_Kobayashi), 2479 minor planets
* [William Kwong Yu Yeung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kwong_Yu_Yeung), 2020 minor planets
* [Korado Korlević](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korado_Korlevi%C4%87), 1162 minor planets
* [John Broughton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Broughton), 1174 minor planets, including first amateur discovery of a "large, potentially hazardous NEO".
And so on. What's an amateur, anyway?
Looking at this from a different angle, assuming a constant, non-accelerating, average velocity of 25km/sec ([here](http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Protecting_Earth_Against_Asteroids_999.html)), the dino-killer would travel 788,400,000km in 365 days.
The distance of the Earth to the Sun, or 1[AU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit), is 149,597,871km.
So the dino-killer would be 5.27AU from Earth when Joe spots it, or about the distance of Jupiter from the Sun.
So maybe another way to think of this is: what is the probability that an 'amateur' can discover a 10km asteroid at about the distance of Jupiter, taking enough observations (over what period of time) to accurately calculate a trajectory that will intersect Earth?
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[Question]
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I have an AI character who has [determined through simulation](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29965/artificial-intelligence-reboots-global-financial-system/) that, though "greed or the lust for money is the root of all evil" is a valid statement, it does not necessarily logically follow that money therefore should be eliminated, as this would likely have unintended highly negative consequences for human life. *And it does not address the underlying cause (greed), only the object (money).*
**The AI has therefore decided to run another simulation with a modified variable:** instead of setting to zero all stored electronic values, the AI will attempt to zero out all debts stored electronically in every computer on the planet.
[ *Handwavium*: sleeper virus spread through electrical system and capable of hopping over radio/wifi/cell signals activating backdoors installed at a manufacturer level since [00:00:00 UTC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time) on all computer systems ]
**Will this experiment crash the economy and cause massive casualties in its simulated world environment?** The AI would prefer to avoid those outcomes at all costs, but recognizes the variability of human nature and the sometimes complex outcomes of cascading micro-changes spread throughout a system.
*The AI also recognizes that this modified variable also does not correct cause:greed, but is programmatically exploring its options and outcomes.*
[Answer]
## What is debt?
If you define debt in one way, [@Cyrus already answered](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/30202/2113). But that isn't the only possible definition. Some other things that might be debt:
* Deposits at banks. These are debts owed by the bank to individuals or organizations.
* Pensions. These are debts owed on retirement.
* Bills. These are debts owed by individuals to companies.
* Taxes. These are debts owed by individuals to governments.
* Withholdings. These are debts owed by governments to individuals until they are used to cancel out taxes.
* Social Security and other entitlements. These are debts owed by governments to individuals.
* Reserves. These are the deposits banks make with the Federal Reserve. So debts owed to banks.
* Equity. This is the amount of something you buy with a secured loan that you actually own. A debt of property owed to an individual by a bank (banks hold title to the property until the loan is paid off).
* Stock certificates. These are a debt of ownership, entitling the owner to a share of the dividend. I'll justify this inclusion later.
Depending on the definition, you can include any or all of these in what's canceled. People may like the notion of not having to pay off their loans. How will they feel about the cancellation of loans payable to them? Deposits, pensions, withholdings, equity, and entitlements are all examples of debts that people would like to be recognized. Getting rid of one's mortgage sounds great, until you realize that the house goes with it. Can they be disentangled?
If you cancel the mortgage, then there's no reason for the bank to transfer title of the house. They currently own the house. Why would they give it away? If an individual wants to claim the house, the bank can insist that the individual provide proof of payment of the mortgage. Then of course the mortgage is restored. The cancellation only helps people who don't want their houses. For everyone else (and banks), it's just a waste of time and effort. Same problem with cars.
In the event, deposits can be separated from the loans they finance. But without the loans, there's little to pay back the deposits. If the AI wants the banks to work somewhat normally, it would have to make the reserves amount with the Federal Reserve equal to the deposited amount. In order to pay for employees and other expenses, banks would have to charge interest on deposits rather than pay interest. The AI could compensate for that by providing additional reserves in excess of the deposits.
## Sharia Loans
Loans are not compliant with Islamic law (sharia). So how can Muslims buy houses? They have to come up with schemes that work like loans but aren't. An example is to share the purchase of a house and charge rent in proportion with the bank's share of ownership. Any excess payment goes to increase the ownership of the "borrower" and decrease that of the bank. So does the AI think of this as debt?
These kinds of financial instruments replace loans in sharia compliant finance. The reason is that usury (lending/debt) is illegal in sharia. The Islamic interpretation is that these financial products are distinct from debt and so allowable. Will the AI agree? Or will it consider these to be debt as well?
It's interesting because if sharia compliant finance is immune to the AI, then Muslim economies would be affected less by this than other countries. If not, then that brings us to stock certificates.
## Stock Certificates
Stocks are an example of sharia compliant finance. Rather than borrowing money, a company sells shares of future profit distributions (dividends). This is effectively trading future money for current money, much as a loan does. Like the previous example, this not what we would normally consider a loan but it does the same purpose. Another issue is that while shares are often traded electronically, there usually are paper shares somewhere. So someone would end up owning the shares -- not necessarily the person who should.
## Barter
Are we doomed to a barter system? Not necessarily. It all depends on your definitions. Is a currency note a debt owed by the government to you? Or is it something on its own. We could end up with a system like what Muslim countries use. Or if enough people think that it's a one-time problem, the current system might resume after a pause. There are any number of examples of similar events. For example, the banks closed for two years during the Great Depression in the US.
## The larger problem
This would empower people who run up debt. They'd suddenly be flush. It disempowers people who save. They'd suddenly be penniless. In extreme forms, it eliminates all current wealth. Then who finances things?
This is especially bad for people who are retired. They lose their savings and pensions and may no longer get credit for what they paid into Social Security. Some people won't be able to support their lifestyle anymore. How many people would starve before Social Security resumed normal operations?
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## Yes
It would crash the economy
### Debt is the other side of savings
To elaborate on Cyrus' answer and to put it succinctly:
One "man's" debt is another "man's" savings. If you forgive the debt, then you wipe out the savings.
So rather than looking at what forgiving debt might do for one group of people, consider that you are also wiping out *everyone's* savings at the same time.
It would probably result in **everyone** distrusting the financial system and a reversion to the barter system. After all, currency can be considered "accumulated" savings of work effort. By eliminating savings, you're telling people they can't trust that they can save, store, or bank any excess productivity.
### The Barter System
People will revert to bartering and stop using currency.
Or perhaps it would be better to state that people will try to get rid of their currency by buying up items perceived to retain their value (precious metals, commodities, etc.). It will result in fantastic devaluation (experienced as hyper inflation) of the currency until everyone refuses to accept it. Then people will only be able to transact business as bartering or by trading items perceived to preserve their value (e.g. precious metal coins).
There's an old saying that bad currency drives good currency out of circulation. Because people horde the good currency and spend the bad stuff with whomever will take it. That group will get ever smaller and smaller too.
### What is money?
I've often had discussions with people who identify money or a system in which people labor for money as some sort of evil. Their problem is that they don't really understand what money is.
Money is an abstraction of labor performed. Meaning, if I work all day making bows & arrows and you work all day growing wheat we can still make a trade even if you don't want a bow or arrows.
Working isn't evil. Trading isn't evil. So money can't be evil.
Imagine an illiterate society that "eliminates" money or forbids its use. How do you get someone with food to give you some of it? You would have to barter goods or services directly for it. Eventually, the society you're in would establish some sort of "chit" system in which you might not need to perform the trade immediately but you could trade a chit now that they could collect on later.
This chit is **by definition** money.
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> [Money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money) is historically an emergent market phenomenon ... [meaning it's
> sprung up independently all of the world without outside influence]
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> The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of
> exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, sometimes, a
> standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any item or verifiable record that
> fulfills these functions can be considered money.
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Yes, it would crash the economy.
Banks would have all outstanding loans and mortgages disappear from their assets, wiping out their capital as well as major income source. All banks would go bankrupt, forcing the governments to rescue them at high cost.
The Greeks and all countries with big foreign debts would rejoice, though the relief will not outweigh the trouble that follows.
After this giant wealth redistribution from governments, banks and investors to debtors, the financial world will disintegrate much like Greece did earlier this year, only without the safety net of a loan deal, as the relevant institutions will have lost all their capital too:
* There will be runs on the banks as people fear for their savings.
* Capital controls are next, severely limiting trade.
* Nobody will give out a single loan for fear of a repeat.
* Housing markets across the Western world collapse as there are no new buyers because of no mortgages.
* Credit cards will be gone for good, reducing private consumption.
* Many companies will have large write-offs on credits they extended to customers.
* Courts will be flooded with lawsuits from creditors trying to reclaim their money based on papers they have.
* Debt collection agencies will see booming business as well.
This cloud of fear and mistrust will destroy the economy as we know it. Humanity will recover, but it may take a long time. On the upside, the developing world will have an easier time as they rely less on credit to run their business.
Note: I skipped over the moral aspect of this whole thing, but you have a very dangerous A.I. if it can understand a quote about money and evil, but not that taking people's money and giving it to others violates a whole bunch of moral imperatives and social contracts humans have established.
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To take the other side, possibly no, if you do it right.
In particular, don't actually erase debt, inflate it away. Give every individual $100 million, making previous debt and savings mostly meaningless.
This would immediately raise the price of everything, so you should also redistribute more inherently valuable goods. In Biblical times, this meant land. Today, it could be enough to give everyone equal stocks in all public corporations.
To deal with pensions, you could give a bit more to people who are older or otherwise less able to work.
Now, the most important key to making all this work without huge, horrible side effects, is keeping incentives alive. People need to know that it's worth investing, working, and lending money for expected future returns, and that such efforts won't be wiped out by another future AI action. In the Bible, there is an explicit commandment for people not to stop lending before the seventh year. It's unclear if this was ever really put into practice. Today, short of Divine intervention, people won't lend or invest if there's an expectation of another wiping. In theory, it might be believable if the AI can credibly commit to not doing it again, or perhaps even find a way to make it impossible (eg, build a non-hackable financial system, make explicit laws against it, etc). There may still be people who lose their faith in the system, but this can probably be minimized if it's a sincere commitment.
If this is done, expect a lot of people to be very upset. Those who lost advantages they gained through decades of hard work, or even just inherited, will not be pleased.
Also, note you will likely be powerless if, in a few decades, inequality build up again and you're back where you started.
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I’m going to assume, *contra* the accepted answer, that by “debt” you mean loans and bonds, which is what the word usually means, not all future financial obligations of any kind, including taxes and employment contracts. The method you give would not plausibly affect any debt recorded in writing, which is nearly all of it, but I’ll assume you have a way around that. One big unanswered question is whether this is a one-time event (and how afraid everybody is that it will happen again). If nobody thinks any debt will be repaid, nobody will ever lend money, and the economy would come to a crashing halt. So I’m going to assume this is a shock to the economy that happens once, then people don’t expect it to happen again. Interest rates would be a lot higher because lenders would have a lot less capital to invest and be once bitten, slowing the economy in the long term. It would be much harder to start a business, buy a home or get a student loan.
There are historical precedents. Solon wiped out all debts in Athens in the sixth century BCE, although this was in a very different cultural context where farmers were constantly in debt and a bad harvest meant their children would become slaves. In the twentieth century, periods of unexpected hyperinflation effectively made all debts worthless, because they would be paid back at a tiny fraction of their original value. These caused a boom in the very short term, and did major economic damage in the medium term, but most of those countries’ economies rebounded in the long term.
On one level, wiping out all “debts” is just a zero-sum wealth transfer: any debt is a cost to one person and an equal amount of income to another. Debtors would gain massively, while creditors would lose out. The people who would benefit are mostly poor, but nearly all small businesses are in debt. Nearly all retirees live off their income from investments, most of which are “debt,” so they and the banking sector would be wiped out and demand a bailout. Virtually all governments are in debt. Even Singapore, which has no net debt, issues some bonds anyway. This is because it’s useful to have extremely safe investments available to buy for institutions who absolutely cannot lose their principal. Those would all be wiped out, too, which would be catastrophic. On the other hand, if they got a government bailout anyway, that would really be no different than the government making its bond payments to them. Either way, they’re getting money from the government. If there were a quick enough, efficient enough system of bailouts, it might in theory just cancel out the original wealth transfer, but realistically the response would be uncertain and chaotic.
For an idea of how bad this can get, recall that both the last global recession and the Great Depression were caused by financial panics when a bubble burst and the value of a large class of paper assets vanished. On the other hand, those depressions saddled many people with debts that made them stop spending and start saving. This kind of crisis, in contrast, would instantly de-leverage every consumer and wipe out all national debts, increasing people’s ability to spend while reducing their desire to save. Purely Keynesian theories of economics wouldn’t predict that, by itself, this would make people stop buying things; wealth would be redistributed and the economy might actually overheat in the short term. There are other theories of economics, though, in which recessions are caused not by unwillingness to spend, but by something else such as the disruption caused by adjusting to a real change in the economy, which would be massive.
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Wiping out all debt would not necessarily crash the world economy; the effects of such an action depend on the nature of your imaginary world. (We can't assume that your imaginary world has the characteristics of the present-day real world, since one of the reasons for creating imaginary worlds is to experiment with alternatives to the real world.)
For example, if your imaginary world is inhabited largely by peoples with highly localized and collectivized provisioning systems with a minimal role for money, then wiping out debt would have little effect, and perhaps many peoples in your world already have a kind of ritualized wiping out of debt through potlatch-like events.
You have said that in your world there are computers with debts stored electronically, but that doesn't tell us much about how those computers and those electronic debts function for the peoples of your imaginary world. Even if your imaginary world is similar to the present-day real world, I expect many millions of people's lives, in places such as Amazonia and equatorial Africa, would be largely unaffected by the wiping out of electronic debts.
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It would perhaps upset the economy large enough to count as a crash, but it would be momentary and likely sign the AIs death warrant.
Such a sudden and strong destruction of the entire economy would lead to so many values being wiped that people would largely continue on as if it had never happened. I'd keep expecting my salary from my boss and paying my mortgage to my bank lacking any alternative (unlike crashes that have happened in which the relative values of different stocks, loans, commodities etc. have drastically changed leaving some relative wealth by which standard others can be poor).
If the AI kept "wiping out all the debts" we'd just turn it off.
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[
Obize is an Eden-like moon orbiting the barren terrestrial planet Akaria. This planetary system is special in the fact that the two worlds are complete contrasts to each other. The moon has plentiful liquid water, comfortable temperatures and is perfect for life with conditions (relatively) identical to Earth with native fauna and flora adjusted to the moon's low gravity. The planet it orbits is a dead barren world no different than Mercury.
I am wondering, how could this happen?
Akaria and its moon orbit their parent star smack dab in the middle of its habitable zone. Akaria is roughly 160% the size of Earth while Obize is roughly **60%**. The parent star is similar to Earth's sun.
The conditions in the rest of the system and planetary composition is unknown and up to you to decide. What could cause this odd pair to come about? Answers can range from hard scientific to those with high creative liberty. You choose. Right now I would just appreciate any ideas. I can't think of any reasons why the planet would be barren while the moon is paradise like.
[Answer]
**The barren planet has no magnetic field, and its atmosphere has been stripped away by solar wind.**
The creative liberty here would be: how would the larger planet have cooled to the point that its core is no longer generating a magnetic field, while the smaller planet has retained enough heat to keep a magnetic field going? I'm not certain of an obvious hard-science solution to this off the top of my head. Perhaps the moon formed much more recently and then was captured in orbit around the (much older) planet?
[***Update***, based on further thought and comments in discussion: there seem to be two apparent ways to resolve the problem of the moon having a magnetic field while the planet does not. Both of them could be achieved with the introduction of a rogue body into the system to help form the moon.
1. The planet's molten core is composed of primarily non-metallic elements, while the moon's molten core contains sufficient metal to give rise to an atmosphere-retaining magnetic field. *(thanks to MikeB)*
2. The planet cooled long ago, while the moon was formed more recently by the collision of two bodies. *(my thought; similar thought from Rodolvertice)*
To the best of my understanding, a rogue body from outside the planet's orbit impacting an already-formed moon would be the most likely/most sensible way for either of these arrangements to occur.
If the moon was formed only from the same material that initially formed the planet, it would be difficult to explain a metallic core for the moon and a non-metallic core for the planet.
If the moon was formed from the collision of two already existing moons, one would expect the collision to happen much earlier in the lifetime of the system, and it stands to reason that the resulting combined moon would still cool faster than the planet. (Disclaimer: astrophysics/planetology expertise needed to confirm these intuitions)
But introducing a rogue body to collide with a pre-existing moon in orbit around Akaria would avoid these problems and result in a hot-cored, as-metallic-as-you-need it Obize!]
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I have two answers which could either stand alone or be combined.
1. Akaria is much more volcanically active, this makes sense because it is a larger body and cannot cool as fast as Obize. The volcanic activity increases the surface temperature as well as putting gasses into the atmosphere.
2. Akaria just has more greenhouse gasses in its atmosphere due to it having more gravity. The escape velocity for a gas to leave it is just a lot larger. The atmospheric pressure on Akaria would also be larger.
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Here are a few possibilities that come to mind, based on various aspects of planet evolution:
1. Akaria is simply in a non present Earth-like state while Obize is. For most of Earth's history the surface did not look like it does today. For instance, trees only came along in the last 10% of Earth's history (see [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants)). Earth as we think of it -- with surface plants and ocean life and large animals -- did not exist for the first 90% of Earth's history. If you found Earth when it was only 3 billion years old it would not look like Earth.
For your story, it's totally plausible to imagine two settings in which one evolved a bit faster than the other. The reason why could be linked with the smaller size of Obize, e.g., becuase its interior cooled faster so there could have been more vigorous tectonics early on. Speculative but not crazy.
1b. On a more common vein, Akaria could be trapped in a "snowball Earth" state whereas Obize is not. It would be an icy desert instead of a hot one, but still not habitable. (e.g., see [here](https://planetplanet.net/2016/04/06/no-livable-planets-without-life/)).
2. Akaria got stuck in a prolonged magma ocean phase while Obize did not. When rocky planets form, the heat that is involved in giant impacts creates a very hot (basically molten) surface. Planets farther from the sun cool off faster than close-in planets (see [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12163)). Large planets also cool slower than small ones. So, you could imagine that Obize escaped this phase early on and retained a large fraction of its water but Akaria had a long (~100 million years or longer) phase that led to complete planetary dehydration and a desert planet.
3. Akaria is actually a Neptune-like planet while Obize is a terrestrial planet. Statistical analyses of exoplanets of different sizes have found that the division between "super-Earths" (large rocky planets) and "mini-Neptunes" (scaled down versions of Neptune) is at about 1.5-2 times Earth's size (see [here](https://planetplanet.net/2014/03/03/hot-super-earths-and-mini-neptunes/)). So it's plausible that Obize is simply more like Earth and Akaria is more like Neptune. If you want to go that direction....
Interesting question. Those answers are what jumped to mind....
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You're not going to avoid a planetary atmosphere. The planet by definition is heavier than its moon; it will have collected and kept more gases.
That doesn't mean it's anywhere livable. Think Venus, nor Mercury. The planet won't be as hot as Venus, but thick sulphuric acid clouds are just lethal when they're near 300K.
If you need it to be less lethal, you might have other gases. SF6(Sulphur hexafluoride) is heavy but not very toxic. It would however displace oxygen, explaining why the surface is inhospitable. And as it's a greenhouse gas, the planetary surface would be quite a bit hotter than the moon's surface, despite being at the same distance to their sun.
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Could Akaria always have the same side turned toward the parent star, but not Obize also? This would make all of the water only the side turned toward the parent star turn to vapor, which then freezes permanently on the side turned away.
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Akaria took a substantial asteroid impact not too long ago. Life was wiped out (perhaps some deep bacteria survived, perhaps nothing did.)
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Rocky planets are created basically without an atmosphere, the lighter stuff comes later from cometary bombardment. In your system the bombardment was much heavier than ours, Akaria has a thick enough atmosphere that the greenhouse effect ensures there is no liquid water and thus no life. (Think Venus-lite, perhaps without the acid.)
Obize didn't suffer this same fate because Akaria is more massive and drew in the majority of the comets.
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The larger planet [traveled inwards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_migration) until it's orbit is stabilized when it picks up the smaller planet as a moon.
This explains why the two would be so different from each other. You can then accept one of the many reasons why they are different from other answers (i.e. magnetic field, green house gases, volcanic, etc.. etc..)
Since the moon never leaves the Goldilocks zone it retains it's water, magnetic field and other ideal conditions.
The further out the larger planet originates from would yield a more primitive world.
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Obize could very well be a new Eden whose life came from Akaria. Environmental mismanagement could have wiped out anything that would support life on Akaria and just a small bit of life was able to be brought to the moon and take root, and survive. There is argument as to how likely life is to arise even on a planet that would support it as we know it--statistically speaking it is more likely to arise on larger object--the planet Akaria.
Why isn't this Obize developed then if its settlers were able to get there from their planet? The people could have faced any sort of hardships and struggles to wipe them out, or if you want a primitive people perhaps they lost their technology through the hardship. The early stages of "seeding" the moon could have been done hastily with urgency, giving only sparse supplies to keep it going, making it harder to expand as a colony, survive, multiply, and pass on knowledge
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I don't think its a too unreasonable arrangement. Obize could be a **captured planet**. It developed out on its own, and eventually was captured by the larger Akaria. Saturn's moon Titan may be an example of this.
I do think its unlikely a planet large enough to capture Obize would be without some form of an atmosphere. Being larger, it will of course hold more (and smaller) gasses. Even with a previous large collision, its still likely to have retained something of an atmosphere. So having a different - and poisonous to the residents of Obize - atmosphere wouldn't be unusual, it'd be the expected state.
Also, the equilibrium temperature of the planet will not be much different than the moon's, so you'll need other factors, probably atmosphere, to explain why its so hot.
[Answer]
**World Destruction can come in a variety of forms.**
[Gray Goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo) -- run-away nanotech ate all of the good stuff.
[Primordial Black Hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole) -- Suitably size, the planet can be suffering from the ravages of the slow destruction of the planet. Won't affect the moon until the collapse starts spewing too much gamma radiation.
[Berserkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen)) -- The came and thourghly destroyed the planet (a consequence of exterminating all of the deep bacteria) -- Life on the moon just happened to appear soon after the Berserkers left.
Global Thermonuclear War -- When the local cold war was insanely out of hand, then went hot. Really tough to kill a planet this way, but when [Tsar Bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) are one of the small ones ...
Industrial Waste Dump -- The residents of the next planet over had serious pollution. Not wanting to dump into into the sun (makes it really hard to recover to reprocess the waste) and thinking that the planet looked like a prime dump site, dropped untold tons of mercury, plastics, bio-hazards, radioactives, etc. onto the planet. Why not dump elsewhere? -- Because this was the easiest place to dump and they were not known for their good stewardship.
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At 160% of the mass of the Earth, Akaria is likely to be a water world with an ocean that is nowhere less than 100km deep. That's not a hospitable environment for life to evolve or to gain a foothold by hitching a ride on a meteorite, because there will be no trace elements at the surface, and no sunlight at the bottom.
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Suppose that originally neither body had significant water. The moon gets hit with a water ice asteroid that gives it water.
Or both had water, and the planet gets hit with something that contains enough calcium oxide to react with all the present water.
Note: The ability of a body to hold air is very mass dependent. A small change in mass makes a huge difference in how much atmosphere a planet can hold. I suspect that this dependency will make habitable planets very uncommon.
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[
Let us assume we have our prototypical European dragon representative over here, George. He has four ground-limbs with four clawed digits including an opposable digit on the forelimbs, normally is quadrupedal when walking around, and has forelimbs somewhat longer than the hind limbs, in addition to the traditional scales and toasty-breath. The big fellow has a big brain to match, too -- easily on par with an intelligent human.
However, how would he *write anything down*? Dragon limbs and digits are big and chunky with serious pointy ends, designed for walking, pushing off for takeoff, and assisting with feeding -- despite having grasping capabilities, they certainly are not designed for fine motor skills.
You can come up with any sort of instrument you wish to assist the dragon in his goals, but modifying the dragon for improved fine motor skills is out of the question.
Furthermore, what sort of script/writing system would lend itself to being used by such a large and clumsy creature? Would they be stuck with large-print on their clay tablets? Or would a different type of writing system be better for the application?
[Answer]
**Whistling**
George can purse his lips and 'whistle', forming a thin, short ranged, but plenty hot jet of incandescent plasma. By getting close to a suitable surface (rock wall, field of grass, tree, corpse) George can carefully etch messages in a manner similar to [this](http://www.instructables.com/id/Pyrography-or-How-to-Wood-Burn-Art/), only a bit larger.
True practitioners of the art have even taken to thermocalligraphy, altering the jet of plasma as they write to create lithographic wonders both rare and beautiful. Others have learnt the skill of permanently marking the scales of other dragons, creating wonderful iridescent tattoos using nothing but carefully controlled fire breath.
Obviously George has to be careful, and teaching dragonlings their ABC's is best done away from any inhabited villages.
[Answer]
## Claws
According to [Skyrim's](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Dragon) Dragon Language lore,
>
> The [Dragon Alphabet](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragon_Alphabet) is the alphabet used for the [Dragon Language](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragon_Language). Text written in the Dragon Alphabet is found on walls in ancient dungeons and on burial grounds in the form of Word Walls. The alphabet consists of 34 symbols: 25 that map directly to letters in the Latin alphabet, and nine that represent pairs of letters. There is a symbol for every letter in the Latin alphabet except for "C".
>
>
> **The shape of the letters is constrained by their need to be written using three large talons and a vestigial fourth digit called the dewclaw. Thus, all of the character symbols consist of a maximum of three scratches occasionally punctuated with a dot from the dewclaw.**
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RUT9r.jpg)
This would be ideal for large scale inscribing on stone, metal, etc.
## Magic
Perhaps if George is an enterprising dragon, he can come up with a magical [shout](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Dragon_Shouts) for writing, if he wants to add some flair to his style. Or, if he is a non-Elder-Scrolls type of dragon, perhaps his kin have another system of magic sufficient for replacing the tedious scratching Skyrim dragons must deal with.
This could enable George to pen elegant greeting cards and birthday cards in any size, since it could be a variable-sized font (because magic.)
## Typing
Thankfully, Skyrim's Dragon Alphabet has been committed to [many fonts](https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&q=skyrim%20dragon%20font%20&oq=skyrim%20dragon%20font%20&gs_l=serp.4..0j0i22i30k1l9.3650.3650.0.4033.1.1.0.0.0.0.194.194.0j1.1.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..0.1.194.hex7124q66M), including high quality True Type Fonts.
Obviously, though, George may need to invest in a custom external keyboard, sized to suit his needs. [Monster Piano](http://www.monsterpiano.com/) could perhaps be enticed (or threatened) into producing a dragon-sized keyboard:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3C6IU.jpg)
I've tested [this true type font](http://www.1001fonts.com/dragon-alphabet-font.html) and it works quite well:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pixpl.png)
You can test your dragon script reading skills if you want--the above text says:
>
> Dragons are cool
>
>
>
Enjoy!
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### George has built a partnership with Humans
George is indeed incapable of writing himself, because his claws lack the needed precision. However, his strength, his fire, and his benevolence can prove extremely useful to a tiny race, called Humans. George's intelligence is, as you mentioned, easily on par with human intelligence, so he can understand bartering, and human language would not be a challenge for him to learn.
George accepts to not eat any human, and he even occasionally helps them. In exchange, the community sends a writing expert, who is tasked with writing down everything George wants him to write. George has a good pair of eyes, so the small letters are not bothering him.
That's how Georgetown was built, incidently - it's the town of people who live happily with George... as long as they hold their part of the deal.
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**Gouging holes with the claws.**
Your dragons have claws designed for scratching things, so why not use that for the intended purpose. It would, obviously, be more awkward than a human writing, but it works fine for a dragon. The characters can also be big, to allow for the lack of fine motor skills (like how little kids tend to write with larger letters).
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**Some dragons use pen and parchment, though their writing tools are custom, to fit a dragon's front talons.** Not all dragons are literate, but most acquire basic proficiency in local written languages. (The five-fingered, Black/Imperial dragons of the far East are masters of calligraphy, and their brushworks are eagerly sought by more than just Mages.)
Most dragons that write more than casually use dragon-sized implements when writing in non-dragon scripts. Usually, quill pens, but pencils are used by some steam-punkish dragons. Although many dragons have surplus sheep hides with which to make parchment, long letters and manuscripts can quickly become bulky. So some prolix/tech-friendly dragons are beginning to make use of a pantograph mechanism to write more compactly. (Rumors are that the dwarves finally accepted the contract, after much wrangling.) Some dragons are resisting (as effete) the lenses needed to read such small lettering, but others are adopting the style with a will.
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# Ogham
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham>
>
> Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used to write the early Irish language (in the "orthodox" inscriptions, 1st to 6th centuries AD), and later the Old Irish language (scholastic ogham, 6th to 9th centuries). There are roughly 400 surviving orthodox inscriptions on stone monuments throughout Ireland and western Britain; the bulk of which are in southern Munster. The largest number outside Ireland are in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cj9IH.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CUufD.jpg)
Note the very simple line structure of this script, it's entirely suitable for a dragon to carve in a rock with a claw rather than messing about with delicate matters like pen and paper. In fact much of the existing ogham script is found carved in rock.
Not to be confused with [Oggham](https://wiki.lspace.org/Oggham).
[Answer]
**Stamp kit**
Your dragon owns a series of metal stamps, which he can heat up and then burn the symbol on a wooden surface.
The dragon alphabet works like old chinese scripts, so stamps that are used over one another can form another character.
So if we were to take characters for AEIOU and then combine them in pairs, to get different characters. We could get 5^2=25 characters total. If we combine 3 stamps then we get 5^3=125 characters total, which is an overkill for any alphabet.
There are 26 letters in english alphabet and 33 in russian. So if we take 6 stamps we get 6^2=36 characters, plenty, and then on the side of every stamp we could have special characters like +-=\*:% and the basic 6 stamps in their single form could be '!?,.-
You could even go further and rotate the stamps, so for a + and = you would need to use a minus stamp twice. With a "." and a "," you can make : ; ' " etc.
Printed chars would also need a separator character like a space or \_ to separate words. The dragon can heat up the handle of his stamp and make a simple dot (medieval scripts used dots to separate words, because it was all in capital letters)
5 stamps for simple alphabet with a character missing (dragons can't pronounce it)
6 stamps for complex aphabet.
Or just give him a metal rod and with /-|\<>. he can make most characters from our aphabet (AWETIFHKLZXVNM). Now give him a horseshoe and he can print curves. (QRUOPSDGCB)
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Seeing this question pop to the top again, I was reminded of [ClaWrite](http://www.tomorrowlands.org/draconity/clawrite.html), a font "For Dragons, By Dragons."
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ygfeu.gif)
The letters are all formed by horizontal or vertical slashes, something a dragon could swipe with his claws with ease. There's not a whole lot else, numbers and punctuation were never designed.
The vowels are either 1 or 2 slashes, alternating vertically and horizontally. The first symbol in the top left (Latin `) is noted as being used to indicate that the next letter is capitalized.
I'm not entirely sure who created it in the first case, but Tad Ramspott (Baxil) mantains the Tomorrowlands website and might've been the creator, the page is not entirely clear about it. Also given the page's last update date of 1997, ClaWrite might even be the *oldest* dragon-specific typeface.
The [top answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/64772/388) (and Skyrim's typeface) use similar rational about the design of the characters (created with claws, causing scratches in a material). ClaWrite was intended to be readable (with a little effort) by English speakers, whereas Skyrim didn't want players to immediately recognize letters, so the individual symbols are intentionally arcane.
I will also admit that Skyrim's greater sub-letter stroke library is much greater, leading to increased freedom in designing letterforms (dots, short slashes, long slashes vs. horizontal/vertical), a feature that ClaWrite could desperately use, but ClaWrite's intent was to use a 3x3 grid as the base structure. Both approaches have their benefits.
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The problem with scratching and whistling is that it doesn't last *that* long. If your dragons are long-lived creatures, this might be quite the nuisance. So, the solution?
## Structures
Dragons are big, strong and can fly. They could create structures, by lodging logs/stones into the ground (they could be standing up or laying down). Perhaps there's some kind of naturally-occuring substance that could act as glue (maybe it needs a little fire to become glue)? Not that it would be needed; these dragons are big and have claws; they could easily fasten heavy rocks/logs into the ground with a little digging. This would make for a cool worldbuilding detail as well, as the world would then be littered with all kinds of structures that could be too dragonic and/or too massive for humans to comprehend. Perhaps villages could live in the books of dragons?
With this writing style, it's the size and longevity that's really the point. You don't need fine motor skills when you're writing with big logs and rocks.
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[Question]
[
I've tried researching this question myself, but the only data I can find is over huge timescales, like situations where the continents have reformed back into a Neo-Pangea.
I'm not looking for any real drastic changes in positioning, just relatively minor things like seas disappearing or continents slightly shrinking or pushing into each other.
Would there be any noteworthy changes at all, or would it be pretty much the same as today aside from some minor changes that wouldn't affect anything?
Let's just assume humanity suddenly stopped existing today for the purposes of the question, so they don't make any more changes to the world than they already have.
As always, I'm very grateful for any answers, and if you need anything clarified feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to clear things up.
[Answer]
A millennium is a blink of an eye on a geological scale. But interesting things can happen in a blink of an eye. Even disegarding the changes which may happen as a result of the present climatological instability, small but important modification can occur here and there.
I have no idea of the geographical changes between today and 3000 CE; but I do know of *some* geographical changes between 1 CE and today, either because they happened in places in which I have a local interest, or because they are somehow important to various historical events, or because I found out about them by accident and found them interesting enough to remember.
## Geographical changes during the last 1000 or 2000 years
* While sea level is today not very different from what it was in the first century, *in some places the sea advanced or retreated considerably:*
+ Some cities which used to be seaports in the first century are now several miles inland. For example:
- In the Antiquity [Ephesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesus) and [Miletus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miletus) were major ports on the Ionian coast; they are now several kilometers inland.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miletus#/media/File:Miletus_Bay_silting_evolution_map-en.svg)
*The silting evolution of Miletus Bay due to the alluvium brought by the Maeander River during Antiquity. Map by Eric Gaba, available on Wikimedia under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.*
- Closer to me, in the Antiquity the city of Histria was a seaport on the western coast of the Black Sea. Now its ruins lay on the shore of a shallow lagoon, and the sea is kilometers away.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histria_(ancient_city)#/media/File:Scythia_Minor_map.jpg)
*Ancient towns and colonies in Dobruja; modern coastline shown as a dotted line. Map by Bogdan, available on Wikimedia under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.*
+ On the other hand, in some places the sea advanced. For example, what is now the [IJselmeer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJsselmeer) in the Netherlands used to be a low-lying plain in the first century, with a large lake known by the Romans as [Lake Flevo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Flevo). In 1287, [Saint Lucia's flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucia%27s_flood) broke through and submerged the former river [Vlie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlie), creating a large shallow gulf which was called the [Zuiderzee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee).
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Flevo#/media/File:50nc_ex_leg_copy.jpg)
*The region of the Netherlands in the 1st century CE. Map by the Dutch Nationale Onderzoeksagenda Archeologie (www.noaa.nl), available on Wikimedia under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.*
Then in 1932 the long effort of the Dutch to build the [Afsluitdijk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk) was brough to completion, and the gulf was separated from the sea and became a lake, which the Dutch then proceeded to drain in order to increase the territory of their country; and now the Netherlands has a new 1500 square kilometer province, called [Flevoland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland).
* Rivers sometimes change course dramatically. For me, the most spectacular example is the [Oxus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amu_Darya), which is today known as the Amu Darya. Until the 16th century it used to flow into the Caspian Sea, through what is now the dry [Uzboy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzboy) valley; it then changed its mind, abandoned the Caspian and went to empty into the Aral Sea.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzboy#/media/File:XXth_Century_Citizen%27s_Atlas_map_of_Central_Asia.png)
*The old course of the Oxus (Amu Darya), when it flew into the Caspian Sea, marked as "Old Bed of the Oxus". Map from 1903, available on Wikimedia. Public domain.*
At the beginning of the 18th century, [Peter the Great](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great), emperor of Russia, sent prince [Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bekovich-Cherkassky) to find the mouth of the Oxus, with the intention of establishing a trade route from the Caspian to Transoxiana. The prince dutifully mapped the coast and returned with the sad news that the river no longer flowed into the Caspian...
* Speaking of the [Aral Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea), the Soviet Union killed it in the 20th century. The former immense lake of 68,000 square kilometers is now a desert, the [Aralkum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aralkum_Desert).
* Speaking of the Soviet Union and Transoxiana: in the 1930s the Soviet Union conceived a titanic project to *"divert the flow of the Northern rivers in the Soviet Union, which "uselessly" drain into the Arctic Ocean, southwards towards the populated agricultural areas of Central Asia, which lack water"* (Wikipedia). The [Northern River Reversal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal) eventually grew and grew, design and planning progressed through the 1960s and 1970s, so that by 1980 the Soviets were talking of diverting 12 major Siberian rivers into the Central Asian desert. They even envisaged using atomic bombs to move massive amounts of dirt speedily. Then the Soviet Union fell; but who knows?
* Speaking of using atomic bombs to dig canals, Egypt is considering a [plan to dig a canal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project) from the Mediterranean to the [Qattara Depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression), flooding it and creating a solar-powered 2000 megawatt hydropower plant.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project#/media/File:All_proposed_routes.PNG)
*All proposed routes for a tunnel and/or canal route from the Mediterranean Sea towards the Qattara Depression. Map by AlwaysUnite, available on Wikimedia under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.*
And yes, in the 1950s the international Board of Advisers led by Prof. [Friedrich Bassler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Bassler) proposed to dig the canal using atomic blasts, part of President Eisenhower's [Atoms for Peace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace) program.
* The [Frisian Islands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_Islands) on the eastern edge of the North Sea are notoriously shifty, so that the approaches to the Dutch ports have changed considerably from the Middle Ages to the present. For example, the northern part of what is now the island of [Texel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texel) was until the 13th century the southern part of the island of [Vlieland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlieland); it then left Vlieland and became a separate island, the [Eierland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eierland); in the 17th century the Dutch reclaimed the land between the Texel and Eierland, and the two islands became one.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eierland#/media/File:PaysBas_delisle_1743_fragment.jpg)
*Eierland when it was a separate island. Map from 1702, available on Wikimedia. Public domain.*
## Geography is not static
The list could be very much expanded. The Panama Canal. The proposed Nicaragua Canal. The lockless Suez Canal, which has brought the marine life of the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. The Hot Gates of Greece. The shifting barrier islands off the coast of Texas. The absent-minded [Yellow River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River) of China. The wandering lake [Lop Nor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lop_Nur). The unstable coastline of England -- how many of the medieval [Cinque Ports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Ports) are still ports, that is, if they exist at all?
Geography changes wherever you look closely.
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>
> Would there be any noteworthy changes at all,
>
>
> just assume humanity suddenly stopped existing today for the purposes of the question
>
>
>
Global Warming would continue for a while, if for no other reason than approximately 2.5% of CO2 is sequestered per annum.
<http://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosphere-part-1/>
>
> Sequestration of CO2 from the atmosphere can be modelled using a single exponential decay constant of 2.5% per annum.
>
>
>
At that rate, it would take 14 years to return to a CO2 value of 280ppm.
But in the meantime,
1. much polar ice has disappeared, and blue ocean absorbs more energy than white ice, and
2. the permafrosts are thawing, releasing lots of methane, which an even stronger greenhouse gas. This northern warming is causing even more methane to be released, in a vicious cycle.
Thus, it's very possible that most of the Greenland icecap will be melted, and also Antarctica, raising the ocean levels by 70 meters.
[Answer]
You mention plate tectonics as a cause of change; there are others
* **Rising sea levels**. [Wikipedia has a map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:6m_Sea_Level_Rise.jpg) from NASA about how a 6-meter sea level rise would change the world map. Current predictions seem to be something between 0.3m and 2.5m in the next hundred years, so 6m doesn't seem crazy over 1000 years.
* **Coastal erosion** can cause significant changes: for example, the [seashore at Hemsby](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-43472150) in eastern England is receding at the rate of about 35 metres (115 ft) per year.
* [**Post-glacial rebound**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound). During the ice age, ice-covered land was weighted down; it's slowly springing back. For example, much of Finland was underwater a few thousand years ago, even though sea levels were much lower. Southern England is pivoting downwards as Scotland rises, which will lower southern England by about 0.5m in the next thousand years.
* **Vulcanism** can and does create new islands.
* **Deposition** from rivers causes estuaries to grow out into the sea.
[Answer]
In addition to the previously noted changes due to climate and normal geology, the sudden removal of humans a la Discovery Channel's [Life After People](https://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people) would quickly lead to the breakdown of electrical and mechanical infrastructure, including pumping stations (e.g., the [California Aqueduct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct), [New Orleans' pumping stations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drainage_in_New_Orleans), and the Netherlands' [pumping stations in Flevoland](https://www.visitflevoland.nl/en/on-expedition/heritage/pumping-stations-in-flevoland/)), with the obvious results. In the longer term (a few centuries at most, according to Discovery), the majority of earthen and concrete structures are likely to fail, which includes essentially all of the world's dams, dikes, and levees. Their collapses will cause significant flooding, erosion, and scouring of low-lying areas downstream, and some river channels will be changed significantly enough to still show the effects a millennium hence.
Earth's cities and highways are also likely to be largely buried in vegetation (again, per Discovery), with the result that urban and linear features that are prominent from the air or even space will become much harder to see.
The disappearance of humans will also eliminate agriculture and logging, which is likely to reduce silt and fertilizer runoff in most places, with at least some visible changes in watersheds. (For example, [mangroves](https://go.nasa.gov/2FY1CnO) can be expected to make a larger comeback in some rivers; clear-cut areas of the Amazon and other forests will recover to some extent; and a number of river deltas like the [Ebro's](https://go.nasa.gov/2Ik9OQV) will stop growing so quickly and may actually erode.) The Aral Sea may make a comeback as well.
Astronomy might also play a small part; according to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event), there's about a 20% chance of an asteroid strike large enough to create a crater actually hitting land and doing so.
By the way, spacecraft, even the ISS, are too small to make much of a mark, and what little damage they do cause would be hidden by vegetation and weathering very quickly (years, or decades at most).
[Answer]
"Is removing people sufficient to stop global warming?" Good question. Answer is not clear. If we have passed the tipping point for arctic permafrost collapse, arctic ocean being ice free in summer, then we may release huge amounts of methane clathrates.
On top of this while oil has to be pumped, natural gas is often under pressure. As distribuiton systems break down, more methane is released.
Net result: ALL of antarctica and Greenland melt over the space of that thousand years.
So we have an new continent free from ice in the south, we have a new archipelago of islands where Greenland was. We have new ecologies in the arctic regions, and the ocean shoreline moves in a bunch.
Details here: <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/09/rising-seas-ice-melt-new-shoreline-maps/#/07-ice-melt-antarctica.jpg>
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I’m currently in the works of an alien design, one which lives in the ocean most of its life and occasionally surfaces in shallow waters to mate. It has 4 eyes, with each side of the head having a large eye in the front, and a smaller eye behind it and slightly lower. The larger eye(s) have a large round pupil in the middle, a smaller pupil near the top of the eye and forward, and another pupil below the center one facing down slightly. The smaller eye has a larger pupil facing forward, and another right around the center of the eye. 
The main pupil at the large eye is used to look out for predators in the deep ocean. The two smaller pupils can see any predators below and above the creature but top pupil isn’t too powerful as it is often looking at the sun at the surface (I don’t know much about eyes like this) and the bottom pupil can pick up larger amounts of light as it is always looking for predators in the deep oceans. This eye can’t see much colour as it’s primary purpose is to see movement in the ocean (I think this is better than seeing full colour for this purpose).
The other eye’s front facing pupil is used to follow prey as this creature chases it though the ocean. The center pupil is constricted during this. This creature communicates with colour and very little sound so it uses both pupils when communicating to see others at multiple angles at once. This eye has 5 colour receptors including the ability to detect IR light (the sun is a red dwarf so I assumed this would be a good idea (again I don’t know enough about eyes to make a educated decision on this)).
So would a set of eyes and pupils like this be viable to a fast aquatic predator (who is also prey). Or would a set of eyes like this just make their vision a blurry mess of colours and light. I can talk in more specific details if need be to help with the question. Sorry if this is a strange or very uneducated question, I came here because I don’t have enough knowledge of eyes and the colour spectrum to figure this out. (Or would this be better asked in Biology? I’ve seen quite a few questions based of how eyes work here so I wasn’t sure)
[Answer]
This is the [four-eyed fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-eyed_fish):
It has only two eyes, but it has two pupils and two retinas in each eye. It evolved to hunt by the water surface, catching prey from both above and below.
Where there is an evolutionary pressure, there is a way to evolve. This fish proves that what you want is possible. However, do notice that this fish evolved multiple pupils because it deals with multiple fluids of different refractive indices. Your fish might evolve to deal with multiple indices underwater if it lives close to [blue holes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_hole), for example.
Another way for this trait to evolve is if each pupil filters light differently. Mantis shrimp have independent trinocular vision in each eye (contrast with us needing two eyes for binocular vision) and some species polarize light differently in different regions of the eye. Those beasts have an amazing vision and are capable of finding camouflaged prey and threats very easily.
Finally, as I said above, your fish may have developed multiple pupils to have binocular - or trinocular - vision on each eye. That would give depth perception throughout the whole visual field.
[Answer]
There is no problem.
Don't get bogged down by trying to imagine "how the world looks" to such a creature. In the real world, there are all kinds of animals with all kinds of senses coming from all kinds of angles and it just works, because brains are flexible and don't really care where their information is coming from or what form it takes, as long as it contains the data the creature needs.
We can hear things coming from all around us. You can hear your name called in a crowded room 70 degrees behind you and you will know exactly where it is coming from. Fish and insects can feel vibrations in the air and water and know where they are coming from. Insects have compound eyes, each of their segments seeing a similar but slightly different image and the insect's brain has no trouble figuring out what it's looking at. We get two images and the brain is able to perceive this as one picture with additional 3-d processing.
So yeah, you can have a bunch of eyes and the creature's brain will handle the rest.
[Answer]
KISS! (Keep it Simply Stupid) One pupil per eye, multiple eyes because multi-pupiled eyes would become a nightmare from an optical design perspective:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hNGwS.png)
The pictures you posted are about the exterior of the eye but the interior is what makes it work, and there is no biological advantage in multi-pupiled eyes as you'd need multiple lenses, irises, ciliary bodies, ... and from an evolutionary perspective it is "cheaper" to have one design that works and have that replicated like spider eyes:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4aP04.jpg)
If you insist on having multiple pupils per eye, go for the [Gecko solution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupil#Other_animals) and have multiple pinholes in one pupil:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8xMPJ.jpg)
Probably not what you wanted to hear as you've put considerable thought into those multiple pupils, but always take the Mythbusters approach about things and ~~blow shit up~~ analyse how stuff works first.
## ;-)
[Answer]
The Mantis Shrimp (certainly a fast predator on some scale) has triple-sectioned compound eyes (each section having a pseudopupil, as others have called out on different animals' compound eyes), and the eyes are very movable on stalks. While this doesn't optically equal the idea you've asked about, the complexity and distinct functionality of the separate portions of Mantis Shrimp eyes suggest that there's nothing unbelievable about your idea from a biological/evolutionary standpoint. Evolution can be weird[1]; the result is not always "straightforward" or "correct", it only has to tend to result in survival/reproduction.
[1] <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/07/03/natures-most-amazing-eyes-just-got-a-bit-weirder/> (final paragraph discussing "receptors that detect red to violet colours" suggesting weird evolution)
[Answer]
It sounds viable, although I'd doubt the layout is strictly necessary. It doesn't have the requirement of the four-eyed fish to view in two different mediums with different refractive indexes at once, and so it is probably better off without multiple pupils, but multiple pupils is entirely valid as well.
I'd especially question the need for one set of eyes to perceive predators and a completely different set for chasing prey - normally the same eyes will work for both tasks, unless there are wildly different requirements for noticing them. An example might be if their predators are primarily also fast-moving (requiring wide-angle, movement-sensitive eyes) but their prey is sedentary and well-camouflaged (requiring sharp eyesight in a smaller area). Another example is if accuracy is needed to catch the prey (it won't usually be needed to run away from predators).
An example of how a single eye serves multiple purposes are human's general-purpose eyes - very sharp with colour vision in the centre for accurate aiming and identification, with reduced accuracy, lower colour perception, but high sensitivity to movement in the edges for noticing predators pouncing out the corner of your eye (or in the dark). Several single-purpose eyes might allow a simpler nervous system, though.
Other options include multiple eyes in place of some of the multiple pupils, and non-eyes to cover some of the needed functions - many simpler animals have just a light sensor on the top of their bodies, so they're able to tell when a shadow passes over them and run away. Large multi-purpose eyes with wide-angle lenses and heterogenous retinas would also work - again, like human eyes, which have different cells in the centre of the retina compared to the outside, these creatures could have different cells in the bottom of the retina (fewer, less-sensitive, mostly motion-detecting for seeing moving silhouettes against the surface) compared to the top or back.
I doubt infrared needs to be picked up by these animals, even if the sun is a red dwarf, unless they live close to the surface. Longer wavelengths of light are strongly absorbed by water, which is why water is blue, and infrared is absorbed very strongly (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water>).
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I'm making a world where sub-FTL interstellar travel is a thing, and so is interstellar war, but for the purpose of this question we'll assume the scale to be of a single system.
**Spaceships** have evolved quite a bit since our current era, and they range in size from several meters (something like 2 times larger than your average air superiority fighter, having a space-worthy manned vessel can't get any smaller than this in my universe) to up to 20 kilometers in the shape of a scaled-up space submarine.
**Weapons** comes in varying shape and size (proportional to the ship that bear them) and can be split in 3 categories:
* Missiles : Just your everyday payload carrying self propelled
firestick, you could also call them torpedoes at this point, it
doesn't really makes a difference as far a I know. They won't get
bigger in size than an [ICBM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile "long range day ruining device") and the tech didn't evolve much
aside from targeting and space-worthiness.
* Lasers: They are mainly used as a countermeasure and/or to mess with
enemy targeting systems at close range (and occasionally to blind
the enemy commander trough the window as a prank).
* Railguns: This is where R&D was the most successful, since those guns
can get pretty big (remember the 20km ships?) and the biggest
projectile to date is a whopping 100m long and can travel at 30Km/s.
Picture throwing [Saturn V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V "This is going to hurt") at the enemy vessel). Please note
that for smaller projectiles the speed can get up to 150km/s, but
that is a very specialized gun and the average is less that 100km/s
for a decent gun.
Concerning energy requirements, capacitors went a long way and are now extremely efficient, as well as cooling, even in space (firing a railgun more than once won't melt it for the first couple consecutive shots) and fusion is the go-to mean of energy production across the civilization. Dyson sphere project started in some systems, and the question of the access to the host star sparked the wars in the systems.
Now for the question: **Is it of any use to strap a nuclear payload to the railgun projectile or does the impact of a plain old solid steel slug at several kilometers per second outperform such a projectile?**
Bonus point: If it ever gets efficient, at what scale? (from the smallest tactical nuke to a Saturn V sized monstrosity of sheer destruction)
EDIT: My question differs from [space-born ship-to-ship combat 150 years from now w fission/fusion tech](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/50885/space-born-ship-to-ship-combat-150-years-from-now-w-fission-fusion-tech) as it is about the efficiency of a specific type of weapon regardless of the fact that it may not be the best kind of weapon. Although the two questions are very much linked, I do not think this is a duplicate.
[Answer]
The kinetic energy of a bullet (for non relativistic speeds) is given by the known formula $E\_K = 1/2 m v^2$.
For a velocity of $150 \ \text{km}/\text{s}$ you need about $100 \ \text{kg}$ to deliver 1 Kton ($4 \cdot 10^{12} \ \text J$) of kinetic energy.
Apparently then you can double the delivered energy by strapping a nuke to the bullet.
But...
As in vacuum you will have no shockwave to help you deliver damage but only radiation damage, you have to time the nuke to explode once in the target, which leaves you with a margin of error of about 1 millisecond.
One millisecond is way more than the time it takes for the explosion to happen, by then, the deploying explosion would have exited the target. The image below depicts an [atomic explosion 1 millisecond after it started](http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/abombs.html).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5O9sI.jpg)
And on top of that, your bomb has to withstand the impact, else it would just fizzle.
[Answer]
I won't expand on the math done by L.Dutch as it's correct and speaks for itself, however I would advise against the use of nukes in space for a few reasons:
**Cost**
Not only would you have to figure out the design aspects of the weapon, but you'd also be throwing expensive material away with each shot, if you had to choose in a war zone between throwing an iron projectile at a ship, which you'd need to reproduce or resupply, or send a nuke. One costs very little as it's basically just refined metal, the other consists of many more expensive refined metals and a lot more engineering, to do comparatively little extra damage. The only time the nuke would be worthwhile is if it detonated exactly where it was supposed to, in the middle of the ship. Anywhere else and it becomes exponentially less effective, all that for double your damage and 10x the cost - why not just throw another slug at it!
This is already a factor in combat zones at the moment, why throw that million-dollar missile at that guy when the comparatively primitive auto-cannon or conventional weapons on a chopper would do it.
**Kessler Syndrome**
If you shot a hole through a ship, it would pretty effectively cripple it unless it somehow missed everything of worth; it would cause a ship to have an exit wound similar to a human, and leave debris flying out the back of the ship. But, it is heading away from you very fast, so you're still fairly safe in theory, but if you detonated a nuke inside the ship, then you'd send debris in all directions: unless the ship was able to contain the blast somehow, this debris would make maneuvering very hazardous at best, but at worst could damage your own ship. Imagine the damage your massive 100m slug would do on impact... now imagine a 1km chunk of previously destroyed ship impacting yours, nowhere near as fast, but still with huge kinetic energy due to its size and mass.
**Radiation**
This is the smallest of the factors but the radiation and EMP caused by nukes, would effect navigation and other ship board systems, I know if a ship can survive inside the Van Allen Belt then this is a fairly moot point, but what about in conflict defenses and protection can be damaged, if your ship survives the battle but took a few hits as well, you'd think twice before entering the Van Allen Belt of a planet, you'd at least wait until you were certain it was safe to do so.
Now imagine small areas flooded with radiation and debris and your ship is already damaged.
**Spoils of War**
Why destroy a ship if you can capture it? The Allies tried again and again to capture a German U-Boat just to capture the Enigma machine on board it; in a war zone where both sides are technologically advanced it would be worthwhile allowing a ship to surrender and capturing it or just going straight in, boarding it and capturing it the old fashioned way, just to see what new tech *the other side* may have been working on.
Basically ship-to-ship battles in space would lead to chaos for navigation and crew survival at the most basic level, let alone if you started throwing nukes around.
[Answer]
**Space shotgun.**
Consider the payload from a railgun. It packs a wallop because of its velocity. The more massive it is the harder the wallop. A high mass projectile the size of a rocket would pack a very big wallop. It would also be energetically very costly to get it up to speed.
But compared to space, even a rocket is small. And a very fast moving rocket sized projectile would shine like a star on radar, which would work better in space than on Earth. You would see it coming thousands of kilometers away. And although the size of a rocket, it is not a rocket - it is a dumb projectile following a totally calculable trajectory. All your ships have the power to move. They will see this thing coming and get out of the way and the enormous energy to accelerate it will have been wasted. Miyagis best defense: no be there.
Re the nuke: as has been pointed out, these make more sense in an atmosphere where the atmosphere itself is part of the weapon. In space the only thing the nuke has to throw is pieces of rocket, and its own gamma rays. A spacecraft will be able to handle some radiation; there is a lot out there anyway.
The fix: if you want to hurl projectiles at speed towards small distant fast moving objects, you want a shotgun. The best approach for your giant railgun projectiles would be to have them break up shortly after launch into individual fragments. You could use explosives for this to give the fragments lateral momentum relative to each other. Each piece retains the momentum given to it by the railgun, but now you have a spreading cone of destruction. You could make the pieces difficult to see with radar and so if your target missed the initial launch the incoming 1 kg fragments might be hard to detect. Once the cone was close there would be no getting away from it. You cannot outrun it. Unless you are close to the edge you cannot dodge it. There are too many pieces to block individually. You are toast. Or swiss cheese.
This would be similar to a nuclear strike, because it is indiscriminately destructive. Actually, even more destructive - an atomic blast has a circumscribed area and time of effect, but not this cone. If anything you like is downstream from this cone (which will continue to spread and spread, kinetic energy unabated) those things are also cheese toast.
---
Thinking about such a weapon, it would be better for planetary defense. You can brace for the recoil against the planet. You have more energy available. The cone of destruction comes out from your planet and so your friends are all on the good side of that cone. The first stage rocketsized projectile would be great for traversing the atmosphere and it would break up into components once through.
[Answer]
**I'm voting for the nukes, and not just because I'm a natural pyromaniac**
I think that many people spend their lives watching Star Trek and Star Wars and think that space battles are a lot like watching pre-1900 wars where ships of the line stood broadside and unloaded short-range light-damage cannon in bulk.
In reality space battles will be much more like post-1900 naval warfare where the ships themselves will be ever further apart as technology improves.
Why?
**Because railguns hurt**
Railguns pack enough punch that they can rip through pretty much any ship of any size — if you give them the opportunity. As anyone who'se tried rabbit hunting with a .22LR will tell you, the closer the bunny the deader the bunny.
And this assumes the bunny doesn't have nasty things like electronic counter measures, false heat signatures (can you imagine the size of flares left in space to confuse heat-seeking missles?), or magnetic deflectors to push aside incoming ordnance.
The natural behavior of ships will be to attack at such long distances that the effectiveness of their defensive abilities is maximized and it becomes *impractical* to retaliate with point-solution projectiles. It's simply too much of a pain to hit the target.
**Thus, nukes**
The issue isn't that nukes have more or less punch. The issue is that they don't require the pinpoint accuracy of railguns. You need to think of them more in terms of *flak guns.* All you need is to either set a "distance" marker for detonation or have a means of detecting the shift of mass from in front of the warhead to behind the warhead to indicate the need for detonation (or, if everyone's using magnetic deflectors, a simple magnetrometer and a timer to arm the warhead after it's outside your own magnetic deflector).
**However, the railgun isn't useless...**
You do still need the railgun (or, at least, you can justify it). The problem with those distances is that they're *distant.* The time needed to get a missle up to speed can mean the difference between a sucessful strike and being the dead bunny yourself. Railguns become the rocket for the "[rocket assisted artillery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M549)" of the future. It gets the nuke moving *really fast, really fast.*
**Conclusion**
I gladly predict that the future of space combat will demand the ships be so far apart that today's over-the-horizon naval engagements will seem like a Marx Brothers skit. In fact, the distances could be so great that even *Battlestar Galactica*-esque carriers with swarms of fighters will be useless. They're simply *too slow over to great a distance.* Delivering area-of-effect weapons quickly over long distances will likely become the only method of ship-to-ship combat.
*Man, I love making sweeping difficult-to-prove-right-or-wrong statements. It just perks up the morning, you know? :-)*
[Answer]
While a nuclear warhead by itself seems somewhat useless (as per L Dutch's answer) there is a similar effect that can be achieved that is simpler\* than Nuking the opponent, which would be to have a small amount of anti-matter (assuming you know what the opposing hull is made of) in your projectile. When the projectile hits the hull, it will fracture and let the antimatter particles hit the hull; these will annihilate causing small nuclear explosions (?) near where it struck.
\*Simpler to get working. Harvesting Anti-matter is a pain; but you don't need much of it.
These explosions don't have the issue that L Dutch points out because the explosions will only happen when they *contact the hull*. This is to say that much of the forces that come out of annihilation will be send as shockwaves throughout the hull itself causing the hull to shift in various ways and hopefully tear itself apart.
An aside: People talk about Lasers and Railguns all the time, but forget about Particle Cannons. Particle cannons travel at near light speed, can pepper someone with extreme amounts of kinetic energy to tear their hull apart, and if unsuccessful will instead impart large amounts of heat. What's more? They've already been invented and proven to work (so is well within the realm of possibility.)
While I'm not sure, you can combine these ideas and have an anti-matter-particle-cannon, firing anti-matter particles at the opponent to not only deliver massive kinetic energy, but annihilate a (very very) small chunk of their ship, and hope the shockwaves sent throughout the ship's hull are enough to rend it apart.
[Answer]
I suggest the following:
Since a classical nuclear weapon is just big enough heaps of radioactive material to pass criticality and explode..
Why not just fire many small chunks of radioactive material, to impact the enemy hull in quick succession.
* *clunk*
* *clunk*
* *clunk*
* "What's that?" ...
* *clunk*
* *nuclear explosion*
The downsides would be:
* Possible waste of nuclear materials if you miss.
* Having to calculate and adjust for the motion of the enemy.
* Design and management of your weapon.. don't want it to jam and build up chunks of material.. in your own gun.
The upsides would be:
* The chunks would not need to penetrate the hull, their mere proximity
would be dangerous to the crew.
* Fairly cheap compared to refined metals, especially if you're using fusion to produce power, no real demand for fissiles.
* With good aim and relying on pure trajectory, there's no electronic countermeasures, detection itself could be difficult.
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Yes there is a reason for railgun rounds to have nukes on them, but it is not to deal more damage
Any relatively hard sci-fi universe (which yours seems to be) is going to have ships engaging each other at mind boggling distances so even if you are launching slugs at several hundred km/s it could give the opposing ship seconds or minutes to dodge the round. so each rail gun slug would have a guidance package on it that is capable of targeting enemy ships and turning the slug in flight. Then once your slug has crunched a lot of math it figures out which way it needs to aim and sets off the nuke for quick and violent course correction onto the course that it thinks has the highest probability of hitting wherever the enemy dodged to. Though since the nuke only has one speed setting which is boom, if the rail gun slug doesn't need to change course it would just use the nuke to hit the enemy at higher speeds or maybe not even blow the nuke so it doesn't decrease its mass for impact and can irradiate the enemy ship.
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Nukes, or at least nuclear material, would be useful for at least two things:
1. radioactives are very dense so the rounds can be heavier, and thus have more kinetic energy, at a given size if they're made of say [depleted uranium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium). This gives the ability to vary the impact of rounds while using standardised rails and capacitors, which is handy to have even if you don't often use the versatility.
2. radioactive materials are radioactive so you can use radioactive rounds, whether these are nuclear weapons or shells full of hot [Caesium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137) doesn't really matter and will probably change depending on mission profile, to devastate planetary targets and write off extraction and manufacturing facilities in such a way as to completely deny any future use to your opponent.
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It is useful **if** it is cheaper/easier to put a nuke inside a railgun projectile than to make the projectile and railgun larger in order to get the same damaging power. I would imagine that it is as nuclear tech is today and tomorrow it will already regarded as simple as a light bulb compared to giant railguns. Shooting smaller bullets with the same damage as a larger one could probably be shot with a higher frequency or requiring less energy.
Assuming that shooting projectiles is the norm of the space war vehicles would also evolve to dodge enemy projectiles, perhaps by shooting projectiles tangentially from the enemies in order to gain momentum almost instantly. Therefore nukes could be timed so that if the projectile misses the ship it will detonate right after passing its original location inflicting some damage anyways.
Since there is radiation in space anyways all the space ships would be protected from it fairly well. The damaging part of the nukes would then be the electromagnetic pulses that could disable enemy tech in addition to the actual exploding of the projectile.
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Not directly answering the question but supposing you were to use some inert material as slugs, why would it be simple steel? Even right now on Earth we know steel is far from being the best metal to make shells with, and we use depleted uranium. Ideally you want the densest material that you can mass-produce, which could be osmium in a sci-fi universe.
Secondly, a single big slug might not be the ideal projectile shape to inflict maximum damage on a huge spaceship far away. Supposing the fights happen at a distance where the railgun projectiles take maybe a minute to reach their target (the chances of hitting would depend on targeting systems, size and agility of the target). If the material used as projectile and the speed provide sufficient kinetic energy at the point of impact to puncture the enemy ship then it actually doesn't help to increase the size of the projectile, as the damage is the existence of a puncture. Instead, you should try to shoot more projectiles and make as many punctures as possible to cause more damage.
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Yes, if you're simply using the railguns as a launch mechanism to get nuclear bomb-pumped gamma ray/X-ray lasers or Casaba howitzers (two different methods that allow you to focus a significant portion of the energy of a nuclear bomb into a single direction, as either a laser or particle beam, respectively) to a minimum safe distance from the ship launching them, rather than using them as a method to deliver a high-velocity projectile towards your enemy to damage them through a kinetic impact.
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I wouldn't feel completely secure in a spaceship where massive amounts of explosive atomic material were applied intense magnetic forces + extreme heat + extremely strong acceleration by a railgun :-D
As said above, the weak point of the railgun is its "fire and forget" nature : accuracy is paramount, and depending on the target distance, it leaves time to detect whatever has been thrown and to move. Nukes may aso not be a weapon of choice due to the lack of atmosphere to propagate the shockwave.
However, why not considering a mix of both : a missile with no explosive material aboard but an heavy arrowhead (steel, depleted uranium), and engines to let it reach very high speeds + correct its trajectory so that it reaches (goes through) the target even if it moves.
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It is true that in the vacuum of space there is no atmosphere to transmit the blast effects of a nearby atomic explosion. But what if a nuclear missile brought its own atmosphere with it for blast damage on enemy ships?
Willk's answer to this question:
[What would happen if I reentered at Mach 172?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112887/what-would-happen-if-i-reentered-at-mach-172)[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112887/what-would-happen-if-i-reentered-at-mach-172)
Says that a ten meter diameter object with the density of ice travelling at Mach 172 or 57 kilometers per second would start to break up in Earth's atmosphere at a height of 98,800 meters (98.8 kilometers) or 324,000 feet (61.3636 miles). The Earth's atmosphere is dense enough even that high to damage objects, if they are moving that fast.
At a height of 100 kilometers the atmosphere has a density of 5.25 times ten to the minus seven kilograms per cubic meter. The surface density is 1.225 kilograms per cubic meter, about 2,371,441 times as dense.
Suppose that an atomic war head is surrounded by a hollow shell containing air at the density of Earth surface pressure. When the warhead explodes it will vaporize the hollow shell and heat up the air to plasma temperatures. The plasma will expand in all directions. The shell of plasma will have a density as great as Earth's atmosphere at 100 kilometers when it has expanded to about 133.35 times the radius of the hollow shell it was originally contained in.
If the shell was travelling at 57 kilometers per second relative to the target when it exploded, the cloud of plasma will be damaging to the enemy ship at distances up to 133.35 times the diameter of the shell. Normal railguns in this setting are specified to give speeds of less than 100 kilometers per second, plus or minus the relative speeds of the two space ships and also plus the speed the plasma will be travelling at.
What if the atomic warhead is surrounded by a hollow pressurized shell containing air at 1,000 times the sea level atmospheric density? Then the sphere of expanding plasma would be at least as dense as Earth's atmosphere at 100 kilometers out to a distance of 1,333.5 times the radius of the hollow pressurized shell.
Iron has a density of 7.874 grams per cubic centimeter, or 7,874,000 grams per cubic meter, or 7,874 kilograms per cubic meter, or 6,427.7551 times the density of Earth's atmosphere at sea level. Thus if the atomic bomb vaporized a shell of iron around it the expanding plasma would be as dense as Earth's atmosphere at 100 kilometers at a distance of about 2,480.31 times the radius of the iron shell.
Osmium, the densest stable element, has a density of 22.58 grams per cubic center, or 22,580,000 grams per cubic meter, or 22,580 kilograms per cubic meter, or 18,432.653 times Earth's atmosphere at sea level. Thus if the atomic bomb vaporized a shell of iron around it the expanding plasma would be as dense as Earth's atmosphere at 100 kilometers at a distance of about 3,521.7735 times the radius of the osmium shell.
Thus for each meter of the radius of the shell of matter around the atomic warhead, the expanding shell of plasma will be dense enough to be damaging to an enemy ship at distances of 133.5 to 3,521.7735 meters, depending on the density of the matter in the shell. Assuming that the shells of matter around nuclear warheads are one to ten meters in diameter, their expanding plasma shells could be dangerous to space ships at distances of 133.5 to 35,217.735 meters.
I have read that atomic bombs can be designed to concentrate most of their energy in one direction, which could permit designs for a space nuclear warhead to eject plasma in only one direction that would be dense enough to be dangerous to enemy spacecraft at much greater distances.
Then there are nuclear pumped lasers, which get their power from atomic reactors or atomic explosions. Project Excaliber in the Strategic Defense Initiative was designed to use orbiting stations to destroy incoming ICMBs with X-ray lasers pumped by exploding atomic bombs.
Thus a future space armada might use railguns to shoot missiles at enemy space ships, missiles that aim at the enemy ships when close and then use atomic bombs to power lasers to blast the enemy ships.
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1 Kt of TNT is 4.184e+12 J.
30 km/s is a Newtonian velocity, so 1/2 mv^2 is accurate. If we solve for 1/2 mv^2 = 1 Kt of TNT we get 10 tonnes of metal. At 150 km/s we get 25x that energy.
A 4 m diameter 300 m long projectile of iron has a weight of about 30,000 tonnes. So it will deliver 3000 kT, or 3 MT, of energy.
If left as a column much of this energy will "blast through" a relatively small object (like a space ship, or Ceres). We can use Newtonian projectile impact depth, which basically says we'd need at least 300 m of armor to significantly slow down this projectile (if it is made out of iron). Spalling in that case will be fatal to whatever is behind it.
Generally, a projectile whose length times density is much larger than the depth times density of our target is going to blast through the target and waste kinetic energy.
We can improve our ability to deposit energy on a "thin" target by shattering our projectile. You'd want to shatter the projectile at a distance measured by the rate of spread of the shattering and the density-depth ratio of your projectile to the target. This "spread" also enhances accuracy, as near misses become hits.
A nuclear charge may be viable here to cause rapid spread, and also boost the velocity of some of the components. It would go off *before* you reach the target.
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Now we can get even fancier. Anti-tank weapons today are rockets that carry a charge that generates a shaped-charge of high density plasma, which is used as a higher velocity impactor to penetrate the high density hull of the target.
We can use the 30 thousand tonnes of the projectile and fill it full of hydrogen bombs. A tsar bomba has a weight of about 30 tonnes and a yield (when not reduced on purpose) of 100 MT. Suppose we manage to replace 10% of the mass of this projectile with tsar bomba; this weapon now has a yield of 100 GT, 30,000x greater than the metal projectile.
Each kg of steel requires 500 J to heat it by a degree kelvin; and it melts below 2000 Kelvin (so < 1E6 J to heat it to melting). Another 272 kJ to turn it into liquid, for a total of 1.272E6 J to melt a kg of steel.
Each m^2 of steel has a weight of 8 tonnes / m of depth. If we assume 10% energy deposit, melting a meter-thick steel plate requires 8\*10\*1000\*1.27E6 J =~ E11 J.
A 100 GT nuclear explosion releases 4E20 energy; a mere 0.25E-9 fraction of it melts a meter thick steel plate. This is roughly when a circle of radius r has an area of 4E9 m^2, or a range of about 17 km.
So a weapon that explodes with the power of 1000 Tsar Bombas would melt somewhere between 1 to 10 meter-thick steel armor at a range of 17 km.
A modest improvement to 100000 Tsar bombas gives us a range of 170-500 km to melt (1 to 10) meter-thick armor, as the limiting factor of making a bigger H bomb was "there is no point" not "there is a fundamental problem here".
Such weapons would be insanely lethal against smaller craft (as you cannot put meter-thick steel on a fighter), but probably a direct hit from a 300m long solid slug would be harder to armor against for a 20 km long ship. If you can figure out how to make *shaped* nuclear bombs you could possibly do even better.
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I want to have planet with as deep an ocean as plausibly possible. How deep can I go given these restrictions?
* Planet must be in habitable zone of a star
* Generally, planet should support life
* Size of planet not decided, but I have general idea of something "really big" (Jupiter size and bigger)
* I do not plan any life on surface, so continents are not required
* Planet should have atmosphere
**Edit:**
After first two answers: I define "ocean" as "something you can swim through". (If I had scuba suit made of unobtainium to help me survive the pressure, how deep plausibly can I dive?)
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**Until the pressure causes the water to no longer be fluid.**
Planets can (theoretically) be made of nothing but water. Although after a few hundred kilometers, the water in the center may be turned into some exotic version of ice due to the pressure, so one would not be able to "dive through" the planet, and thus the ocean would have a limited depth.
Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter's moons, might have an interior that's fully liquid, for example.
These planets can sustain an atmosphere, and depending on their location in the solar system, might have boiling water on the surface (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid>), which is mighty cool.
See more here:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_planet>
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For an Earth-like planet, about 65 kilometers.
On Earth, deep water has a temperature of around 0C. At that temperature, water has a [phase transition from liquid to ice VI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_(data_page)#Phase_diagram) around 632 MPa. Under Earth-like gravity, this pressure requires a water column of about 65 kilometers; if your ocean is any deeper, the water at the bottom will solidify. Since ice VI, unlike the familiar ice Ih, is denser than water, it will stay at the bottom.
I'm ignoring the compressibility of water (which will tend to decrease the depth) and the salinity of water (which tends to both increase it by freezing-point depression and reduce it by increasing the density of water).
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This is implicit in the other answers, but it deserves to be made explicit: if you want a deeper ocean, a smaller planet will be better than a big one.
The main thing limiting the depth of a liquid ocean is that when the pressure gets to around 1GPa, the pressure will cause the water to become ice, even at warm temperatures. This is a special forms of ice (actually one of several different special forms of ice) that is denser than water, so it sinks and forms the ocean floor. Probably most of the oceans on the icy moons in the Solar system, such as Europa, have exotic ices at the bottom.
The pressure at a given depth is given by the density of water multiplied by the height of the water column, multiplied by the strength of the planet's gravity. Thus the higher gravity of a Jupiter-like planet would mean that exotic ices would start to form at a shallower depth of water than on an Earth-like planet, whereas on a planet smaller than Earth you could have deeper water before you reach the critical pressure. The relationship is linear, so a planet with half the gravity can have oceans twice as deep.
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Assuming water to be water that is less than 20% dissociated and setting the compressibility at zero we have a reasonable maximum at about 300Mbar with a temperature of ca. 1200K [Redmer-Icaurus2011](http://www.sandia.gov/pulsedpower/prog_cap/pub_papers/Redmer-Icarus2011.pdf). Assuming $g=10m/s^2$ (close to Earth's) we can relate each 10 m height of the water-column to 1 bar pressure. 1 Mbar = 1000 bar for a water-column of 10 km height, makes 3,000km which is about the radius of Earth.
There must be a temperature of 12000 K at the center (maybe a small nuclear reactor like inside the Earth) and > 274 K at the surface if the atmosphere has a pressure of 1 bar.
This won't work exactly as described because I made a bit too many assumptions. E.g.: I ignored the gravitational pressure of the weight of the water-column completely which would add to the temperature as $(G \* mass \* mm)/(2 \* k \* r)$ with gravitational constant $G = 6.67428 \* 10 ^{-11}$, Boltzman constant $k = 1.3806504 \* 10 ^{-23}$, mm = molecular mass, and r = radius, which gives the temperature at the center by gravitation alone.
But it would allow for a couple of hundred kilometers of liquid water with a comfortable temperature, given a "well tuned" reactor in the middle and an atmosphere that holds some of the energy of the central star(s) back to keep the surface warm.
So: it's possible without any visible hand-waving and expensive unobtanium.
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Water (or ocean) planet is a hypothetical planet composed (mostly) of water. It might have a smaller rocky core, but the decisive factor is the formation of exotic ices under pressure. The ocean depth can reach hundreds of kilometers (depends on the temperature, gravity etc.), without sharp boundary with the ice "mantle". It would necessarily have an atmosphere due to outgassing from the liquid surface, if the temperature is within liquid water range (otherwise you'd get Europa scenario).
See the article [A New Family of Planets ? "Ocean Planets"](http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0308324).
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If your planet has enough carbon dioxide, at about 72 atmospheres (assuming around 300K, the carbon dioxide will liquify forming an ocean. As you go down in the ocean, depending on the temperature gradient, it will either become solid around 6000 bar (60 Km down), but with mild warming, you might be able to go many hundreds of Km down before you hit solid CO2. (BONUS: It would be [supercritical carbon dioxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide) which is a weird hybrid of a liquid and a gas).
(You didn't specify that the ocean had to be water...)
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To have a fire you need three things: oxygen, heat and flammable material, therefore the cold vacuum of space is the last place you would expect something to burn. I was, however, wondering if a very large damaged spaceship would change this.
Suppose for instance that an explosion has happened aboard a spaceship, which not only has damaged a fuel pipe inside the spaceship, such that anything close to the explosion has been soaked in flammable liquids and has caught fire, but which also has made a significant hole in the exterior hull of the ship.
If the hole is big enough, and if the ship has so much air that it will not be emptied too quickly, I assume that the pressure of the air inside the ship would be enough to blow several of the fuel-soaked and burning things near the hole out into space.
As these burning pieces of debris leave the damaged spaceship, I was, however, wondering if they would keep burning for a short period of time, or if the fire would die out as soon as they left the spaceship.
My first hypothesis was that the burning debris could keep burning, at least the first few seconds after leaving the spaceship, since oxygen needed for the burning debris to keep burning would be provided by the air flowing out of the spaceship, the temperature by the combined heat of the burning debris and the air – which would have been heated up by the fire inside the spaceship – (also keep in mind that since there are no matter in space, the only way for the air and debris to lose thermal energy is through radiation, which is not very efficient) and the flammable material by the leaked fuel in which the burning debris is assumed to be soaked.
My second hypothesis was however that the burning debris would stop burning the very second it flew through the hole in the spaceship – perhaps even before that because the expansion of the air leaving the ship would cause it to cool down very rapidly, such that the air surrounding the burning debris very quickly would absorb almost all the thermal energy of the debris, thus making the fire die out.
My question is, therefore, taking all this into account (and perhaps more factors that I have completely missed) is it likely that burning debris in the given situation, could keep burning for more than a few seconds in space -- at least long enough to justify using burning debris as a visual effect in games or animations -- or is burning debris in space simply unthinkable.
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First off, something that might seem like an inconsequential detail or perhaps even nitpicking, but really isn't in this case: *You don't need oxygen for something to burn. What you need is an **[oxidizer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidizing_agent)**,* of which *on Earth* oxygen happens to be one of the most readily available. Thus the typical fire triangle says oxygen, but that is really a simplification.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fire_triangle.svg)
The Fire triangle created by Gustavb. Self-published work by [Gustavb](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gustavb), used under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Fuel plus **oxidizer** plus heat equals (typically exothermic) chemical reaction A.K.A. fire.
There are quite a few materials that do not require an external source of oxidizer to burn. For example, lithium-based battery chemistries typically contain their own oxidizer, and as such can create very difficult-to-put-out fires. Compare for example [Why is there so much fear surrounding LiPo batteries?](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/q/230155/5830) on Electrical Engineering, perhaps particularly [metacollin's answer](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/230164/5830) which discusses this directly.
What's more, spacecraft typically contain lots of such compounds. Quite a few rocket fuels are [hypergolic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant), which means that two components will spontaneously combust upon contact. This is used for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the relative simplicity (hypergolics are nasty, but they are a *known* nasty; in return, you don't need to worry about e.g. ignition). Even those that aren't hypergolic are typically highly energetic, and of course being designed to operate in a vacuum, a rocket will be bringing its own oxidizer along with the fuel. One of the workhorses of rocket propellants is [cryogenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-propellant_rocket#Cryogenic) liquid hydrogen as fuel and liquid oxygen as oxidizer, which combine in the well-known chemical reaction to form dihydrogen monoxide -- also known as water, typically in the form of water vapor due to the high temperatures involved.
If a fuel pipe has been ruptured aboard a spacecraft, there is a very good chance that a nearby oxidizer pipe has also been damaged. (Typical spacecraft use bipropellants, but [monopropellants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopropellant) are also a thing.) Depending on the exact conditions and the specific propellant combination in use, the two may combust spontaneously (hypergolics) or not (non-hypergolics), but there's a good chance that whatever damaged the spacecraft might have caused a spark, providing a source of ignition. As long as the fuel and oxidizer flow is maintained, then, they will continue to react with each other.
Once a sufficiently hot fire comes into contact with flammable materials, those materials will also start to burn, but only so long as there is a suitable oxidizer present.
Also keep in mind that the ability of a material to burn is typically a function of the amount of oxidizer present. Apollo 1 illustrated this quite well, and one quote sticks in my mind from a Nova documentary on the US moon program: *At 15 pounds per square inch of oxygen, aluminum burns.* We don't typically think of metals as flammable, but they are. Even iron is flammable in the presence of typical amounts of oxygen, although at a very slow rate: we refer to it as *rusting*, but just like hydrogen and oxygen forms dihydrogen monoxide, iron and oxygen forms ferrite oxide.
All this to say that **yes, depending on specific conditions, having things burning in outer space is absolutely possible.** All you need is a suitable local concentration of both fuel and oxidizer, as well as something to get the chemical reaction started. *Localized spacecraft damage can easily provide all three.*
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Have you ever heard about [Chlorine trifluoride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride)? This hellboy is very strong oxydizer and will put on fire almost everything even without oxygen and ignition (water, glass, metals and humans included).
Here is quote from Wiki:
>
> ClF3 is a very strong oxidizing and fluorinating agent. It is extremely reactive with most inorganic and organic materials, **including glass and Teflon**, and will initiate the combustion of many otherwise non-flammable materials **without any ignition source**. These reactions are often violent, and in some cases explosive. Vessels made from steel, copper, or nickel resist the attack of the material due to formation of a thin layer of insoluble metal fluoride, but molybdenum, tungsten, and titanium form volatile fluorides and are consequently unsuitable. Any equipment that comes into contact with chlorine trifluoride must be scrupulously cleaned and then passivated, because any contamination left may burn through the passivation layer faster than it can re-form. Chlorine trifluoride has also been known to corrode otherwise known non-corrodible materials such as iridium.
>
>
> The power to surpass the oxidizing ability of oxygen leads to extreme corrosivity against oxide-containing materials often thought as incombustible. Chlorine trifluoride and gases like it have been reported to **ignite sand, asbestos, and other highly fire-retardant materials**. It will also **ignite the ashes of materials that have already been burned in oxygen**. In an industrial accident, a spill of 900 kg of chlorine trifluoride burned through 30 cm of concrete and 90 cm of gravel beneath. Fire control/suppression is incapable of suppressing this oxidation, so the surrounding area must simply be kept cool until the reaction ceases. The compound reacts violently with water-based suppressors, and oxidizes in the absence of atmospheric oxygen, rendering atmosphere-displacement suppressors such as CO2 and halon completely ineffective. **It ignites glass on contact.**
>
>
>
You can't put out fire from Chlorine trifluoride with vacuum, you can't put out fire from Chlorine trifluoride with sand, you can't put out fire from Chlorine trifluoride with water.
It will burn in space. And it is used as component in rocket fuels so it's perfectly normal to find this chemical on a spaceship.
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To have fire you need an oxydant, energy and an oxydable material.
Oxygen is a common oxydant, but not the only.
Keep in mind that in microgravity combustion can be less efficient, as convective motion does not happen and gaseous oxydant must rely only on diffusion to reach the reaction site (look at footages of a candle lit in microgravity). This said, as long as there is contact/mixing between the oxydant and the oxydable material, there can be combustion.
Since liquid and gas would hardly last in space vacuum, the only possible long lasting fire is given by solid state materials reacting (i.e. thermite would keep burning even in vacuum, it doesn't need gaseous oxygen).
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I like both of these answers, but I would also like to point out that when a space craft is ruptured the oxygen doesn't just flow out quickly, it is called "explosive evacuation." When the hole happens in the ship all of the air that can leave, does leave nearly instantaneously. It's not like on the movie Aliens where people can struggle against the flow until they can get the door closed. So I wouldn't use air from inside the ship to keep your fires burning.
As an example, the crew of the Mir space station struggled like Ripley in Aliens against a stream of atmosphere leaving the station, but the holes the air was leaving through were so small, they never found them to patch them and that module was never used again.
Hope this helps.
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As pointed out out before combustion is entirely possible in vacuum, proof given by all rocket engines; in particular solid rocket fuel will happily burn in space even in absence of the "engine" itself.
OTOH "normal" fire as developed inside your spaceship (relying on atmospheric oxygen as oxidant) would die rather quickly once outside the containment due to two factors:
1. drop in oxidant pressure, which means less oxidant molecules will strike the burnable material.
2. drop in temperature. Expanding gas will become cold very fast, without the need to radiate its heat (contrary to what You state). Opening a bottle of highly compressed gas results in frost around the exhaust in matter of seconds.
So, depending on the specifics of the burning materials, they can continue burning (unlikely, things exhibiting such behavior simply aren't laying around unprotected) or stop burning almost instantly once pressure around them drops.
As seen from outside, if the amount of non-gaseous burning material is high, you could see a long flame erupting from the spaceship, mostly due to hot materials still radiating (even if not actively burning anymore).
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No. The *Cody's Lab* video [Is Fire Possible in a Vacuum?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cx9mNnky2U) demonstrates the necessity of a fire **quadrangle**: fuel, oxidizer, heat and **pressure** to keep the fuel and oxidizer near to each other. Otherwise, the energy of ignition blows the heat away and you get a little puff of smoke instead of combustion.
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When there are spaceships in our solar system, we receive data in intervals, depending on how far they are. Problem is, internet has to be faster. In an intergalactic union, how would a person play the newest MMO in Andromeda, or follow [live updates from the newest beauty pageant?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4241/what-would-the-real-miss-universe-pageant-be-like)
So my question is, how would interstellar communication via the internet (or other means) work?
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In a hard science fiction universe, information can't travel faster than the speed of light. Sorry, but unless you want to change the laws of physics, there is no way around this. \*
So your Ping-time to another planet in the same solar-system would be between minutes and hours, to the closest other solar-system would be years, to the other end of the galaxy would be 200.000 years and your ping to the Andromeda galaxy would be 5 million years. So any action-oriented multiplayer gaming will likely be confined to the planet you are on. The only games which might be feasible on an interplanetary scale are turn-based games which are still enjoyable when you need to wait a while until you receive the turn of the other player ([like chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_chess)). On an interstellar scale, any multiplayer games would be hard to finish within your natural lifespan.
There is no technical reason why most internet protocols couldn't work with such high latencies. The systems would just need to be reconfigured to allow much larger timespans before having a timeout.
Some protocols require several round-trips before data can be exchanged. The high latency time would make these infeasible. A TCP handshake with a system 10 light-years away would take 30 years, and then another 10 years before the first data from the server arrives. When you want to use TLS encryption (you likely want to, because it would be difficult to *physically* protect an interplanetary transmission from eavesdropping), even more roundtrips are required.
That means stateless protocols like UDP which don't require handshaking would be more suitable for interstellar networking. To enable encryption, the keypairs of all participants should be exchanged beforehand.
Any news of interstellar public interest (like the intergalactic beauty pageant) would likely not be communicated via a pull-request like on todays internet, because this would double the time the information travels. It would likely be broadcasted in all directions no matter if people want to receive it or not, like the radio- and television technology used in the 20th century on Earth.
* If you change the laws of physics to allow FTL communication and/or FTL travel, this might change, but writing an answer is pointless unless you describe how FTL travel and communication work in your universe and what limitations they have.
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An interstellar Internet would likely use [store-and-forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_and_forward) protocols similar to those of pre-Internet networking, where you couldn't count on end-to-end connectivity. See, for example, [UUCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP) or [NNTP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol).
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We actually do have inter*planetary* "internet" right now. <http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/>.
We also have communication to the moon at extremely high bitrates.
The problem at interstellar distances is latency.
You may be able to cheat hard science by sending comms through a wormhole, or a "[stationwagon full of tapes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet)" with an [Alcubierre Drive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)
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I would use quantum-entangled1 server farms.
At the major intergalactic hubs, companies would have entangled servers that allow for instantaneous intergalactic synchronization. From these hubs, the data would be disseminated locally. Some would go on to sync up with more local regions (such as galactic sectors), and spider-web down until the information was received at a planetary level.
Alternatively, entangled routers could be used instead.
Using routers means having the intergalactic equivalent of Time-Warner Cable and ComCast. That is, major telecommunication carriers.
Using servers means having the quality of the distribution be based on each organizations ability to create and maintain their own server network.
I would see it as being a little bit of both. Large organizations would have their own entangled servers, but typical users would be reliant on the communication carriers.
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Since the question didn't specify hard Sci-fi, this would be a fine explanation. Such "quantum entanglement" has been [used by some of the most of the most successful Sci-fi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible) authors and world builders of all time.
1. The actual scientific use of the term quantum entanglement is different than how it's used in most Sci-fi, which is as a quick term for an ansible, or:
"**a fictional machine capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication**". It obviously does not have to be called quantum-entanglement, although many readers would readily understand the term used that way.
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Of interest:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet>
Basically, without FTL communication, you'll be getting streamed stuff - and no cross-talk. You push what you hope they'll want to hear, and hope to get what you want to receive.
Gaming across long-distances would require a longer lifetime - which may occur (life extension technology). But, you'd be better off moving closer to the people you want to talk to (which would also have the advantage of retarding your aging at close to lightspeed). You could also go into hibernation inbetween communication signals, if you don't care about running into the encroaching heat-death of the universe.
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You may want to think about it in this direction: information is information, it doesn't have any shape, size, or wave properties, like light does. Maybe we will find evidence for some even less "physical" particles with less physical constraints, like [tachyons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon). Maybe they could be used to transmit information.
Or, in the depths of quantum-fields we could find tunnels that are capable of sending information to a totally different space coordinates within the planck time frame. The information wouldn't actually travel at all, more like generated at the receiver's position based on the "seed" that came through that "meta-quantum tunnel", similarly to how a cellular automaton generates a seemingly random, but in real, deterministic universe through an iterative process. At the points of receiving and sending, a "quantum-data-converter device" could be used.
Although you might not want to go intergalactic, a galaxy is big enough alone, only expand your technology and else if you know how to fill them in.
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In the [commonwealth saga](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga) from Peter F. Hamilton, they use wormholes to transport data.
The size of the wormhole is said to be 0 (or really really small, as you only need to make some cables, or waves etc go through) and thus don't consume too much energy either.
This way, you can have an amazing ping even if you play on the server from another universe.
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Well I would say the way around this is a technology that we don't yet control and that would be wormholes. We don't have the energy or know how yet, but essentially we could create permanent wormholes a few meters wide at facilities and literally pass fibre optic through these; however, in order to sustain a wormhole of that size permanently we would need a huge amount of power, so we would probably have to become early tier 2 civilisation or late tier 1 civilisation. Tier 1 = harness all energy from a world. Tier 2 = harness all energy from a single star. Tier 3 = harness all energy from the galaxy. A reason we may not have heard from other civilisations is that they have found creating direct communications using wormholes is more efficient than sending radio waves through space.
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In Edward M. Lerner's InterstellarNet series it started as usual radio comminications.
Nobody liked latency.
Later it was changed so if 2 civilization is in constant contact they have 'representative' in each other computer systems running in sandbox.
'Representative' gets stream of data from home and communicates directly with host civilization but host civilization cannot abuse system (basically because of heavily crypto system and sandbox verification) even if they really want to.
It was mostly used not for pageants but for trade of new technologies.
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As others pointed out, you would use store-and-forward.
Vinton Cerf briefly discussed this scenario in [this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTmYm3gMYOQ) (5:40). The idea is to cast an intense laser beam towards the star and catch it on the other side with many nodes dispersed around the star's space. The nodes are necessary since the laser will be scattered all over the receiving end's space.
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The speed of light is simply too slow for Humans, as we know them, to have any meaningful two-way conversation between stars. Nothing can go faster than light, and light cannot be sped up. The only reasonable way to deal with this reality is for Humans to [slow down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HvmtbZzA40).
If you could live your life -- thought, motion, biochemistry -- a trillion times slower, then the transmission time from servers up to a thousand light-years away would *feel like* 31.5 milliseconds.
One way to accomplish this would be to evolve slower Humans. I expect this to take some time so the sooner the project is funded, the better. Actually I think my wife's family is already working on this.
Another possible technique would be to spend a lot of time in suspended animation. If you could press left-left-up-a-b-x and then fall asleep for 800 years, most MMOs wouldn't be so bad. Of course the servers would have to be similarly slow but I think Mythic Entertainment has got that covered.
The method most likely to meet with success would be to upload ourselves to massively powerful simulators and then turn off the turbo switches. Although doable, such slow simulation would require a disruptive paradigm shift, as Patch Tuesday would have to be converted to Patch Millennium.
Of course, whatever method is used, either the entire species would have to agree, or the slow folk would have to protect themselves from the hasty folk. That is, a big problem would be renegade Humans who want to cheat and get on with ruining the Earth, perhaps by living only a hundred billion times slower.
However, living slow *should* require much less energy than living fast. Slow folk will probably not need to live in a high-energy environment like on a planet, or even near a star. I picture a race of glacially paced creatures forever drifting through deep space, spreading everywhere throughout the galaxy, singing their whalesong of Kardashian diets and LOLcats over a light speed Ethernet.
Hasty folk could be left to burn themselves out by consuming whatever planets and stars they can reach during their pitiful brief lives.
There might even be time before the heat death of the universe to finish rolling out IPv6.
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My world does not have stagnant technology, and of course there is going to be an industrial revolution. In the real industrial revolution, it began with the need for textiles, which led to the spinning jenny, then the waterframe, and so on. I was wondering how is it possible for a fantasy world to industrialize, but with another product to start it instead.
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Q: *"I was wondering how is it possible for a fantasy world to industrialize, but with **another product** to start it instead."*
## Vaccines and other pharmaceutics
**Precursors**
The *industrial* revolution is driven by an earlier *industrious* revolution,
See: wiki - [Industrious revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrious_Revolution)
An industrious revolution is driven by demand, not technology. Textiles drove an industrious revolution, as did candle sticks, coinage, bricks, glasswork, alcoholic beverages, and home decoration. Work previously done by individual craftsmen gets organized in factories. For an *industrial* revolution to occur, the product should require technological advancements.
In below answer, the early industrious revolution around beverages, that is beer, whiskey and liquors would become a precursor of pharmacy, not textiles.
**How would this industr*ial* revolution be caused by another product ?**
Early history aside, the start of the industrial revolution based on textiles is widely regarded as ca 1760, rooted in the invention in 1734 of the [flying shuttle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_industry#Britain). So.. we need something in the story that will occur before that point in time, requiring a certain product, putting an incentive to produce it *in very large quantities*, that would make textile production machinery a less relevant factor.
Now, suppose in your story, folks started pharmaceutic industries in the 1740's.
There are many applications of medicine, like aspirin and penicilline, all requiring medical advancements that did not happen. But vaccines may be a good example of having a plausible medical product, that could be in high demand as well. In 1720, the first [vaccinating method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation) was experimented with in Europe.
**Vaccines**
Now suppose the actual vaccine invention, dated 1796 for smallpox would have been a bit earlier, in the 1720's already. Producing [attenuated or inactivated vaccines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine) is quite easy, only.. it had to be produced in accurate dose and, in standard size glass packaging. Also, you'd need hollow needles to admit the vaccine.
**Fictional part: the 1730-1745 Covid pandemic**
Some Corona virus variant popped up and although the pandemia was not as severe as the medieval pest had been, the contagiousness and the resulting fast spread and lost working time impacted the economy for years and it made doctors think.. it accelerated scientific research into contagious disease *and* it would accelerate industrial production technology, millions of vaccines were needed.
**Fictional part: earlier discovery of blood types**
This is a key condition to let the medicine idea work: your story could put the discovery of blood types [Karl\_Landsteiner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Landsteiner) a few centuries earlier, by experimentation, an army doctor discovered blood types around 1702. This research was conducted in a way modern folks would find disgusting: prisoners of war were exposed to a variety of blood samples, accurate book keeping resulted in the discovery of 4 blood types. A few years later, a primitive clinical method was devised, involving coloring blood samples, to predict the safety of the vaccine.
**Fictional part: earlier hollow needle**
Injection is a technology already conceptualized in the 15th century, but it was not until 1659 until in Britain, first experiments were conducted. At this point I need a little hand waiving, they were [invented in 1844](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe), with the textile industrial revolution well underway. I'm not sure if the history of metallurgy makes 18th century injection needles plausible. But it would certainly require accelerated technological advancement to produce steel hollow needles. The offspin of the development of fine metallurgy may have been multifold and spawn many new products. By 1800, the textiles manufacturing equipment would look common, the pharmaceutics industry would be at the center of development.
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Like textiles, you need something people are working on every day.
Really, the same story played out in the change from our hunter-gatherer society to intentional farming; intentional farming is a kind of "industrialization" that lets a few people work so that everybody doesn't have to spend their days searching for naturally occurring food.
That was "industrializing" the "-gatherer" part of the equation, but in reality, there is evidence that we first "industrialized" the "hunter-" half with animal husbandry; domesticating and leading goats as we walked our annual gathering routes. We find signs of goat feces and bones along the path. And goats are the easiest animals to domesticate, they can eat any kind of vegetable matter (even sticks), they are relatively docile and provide milk and meat on occasion. We also "industrialized" hunting by partnering with wolves instead of going it alone.
That is in terms of "industry" in the sense of intentionally organizing and pursuing some beneficial activity.
So you might focus on what remains in labor for the critical processes of producing food, many of which were done by hand. Weeding. Harvesting. Cooking. Threshing. Grinding, for flours, that is extremely laborious by hand, but the first water mills used water wheels to turn stones for grinding grain. The first windmills were machines to harvest wind to turn grinding stones.
Water pumping, even today in primitive countries, people (mostly women and children) walk hours from their villages to wells to bring back water. A simple windmill (or even water wheel in a river) could provide the energy to lift water to pipes high enough to flow downhill to a village.
So didn't the Roman Aqueducts, about 19 BC and some 31 miles long, constitute an "industrialization" of water collection? They literally built their own **river** from the mountains to Rome, over 2000 years ago, and (kept in repair) the Acqua Vergine is still a functioning aqueduct.
The Archimedes screw is a clever but simple machine for raising water from a lake or river to height, and with a tiny bit of imagination it can easily be powered by a windmill.
Feeding of a herd of animals; goats or chickens or cattle, for example hay production.
Even the automation of tanning hides. In many equatorial climates, textiles are not absolutely necessary. But even there, sensitive genitals tend to be protected, and leather protective gear was often devised for battle or working in the field, dealing with thorns or bitey animals or sharp rocks. Like leather gloves and vests, which we still wear when working with thorny plants, wood, metal or livestock. Or definitely hot and often sharp metals in a forge. Not to mention shoes to protect our feet from rough ground and the many sharp corners it offers our feet. The tanning of skins into leather has several steps ripe for mechanization and industrialization.
Not to mention many other aspects important to civilization that can be mechanized, or machines could multiply the strength of a specialist. Digging, for example. Forestry, such as felling trees, stripping branches, sawing, etc. That is what the early "sawmills" did, used river flow to run huge saws to process trees into lumber.
On the Digging front, humans have been processing bog iron (naturally occurring iron-rich accumulations found in swamps) into steel for a few thousand years, and both mining, refinement and the forging of steel are target rich for automation. The Bronze and Iron ages did not come about without mining and forging. Roman swords and armor did not magically appear. Steel production began [four thousand years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Ancient_steel).
Human industrialization truly began thousands of years before textiles, with the mechanization of tasks in ways that relieved us of work. Textiles was just a convenient place to experiment with this. But it certainly is not the only starting point, you can start with any life-critical, time-consuming task.
The most obvious being the needs for food, water, shelter and weapons, for offense or defense.
Think about the necessities of primitive life, and how we have utterly mechanized and industrialized our production of those necessities. Read up on the history of those, and find the seeds that started them. The textile industry was likely just a cultural accident, a focus of work to which a clever inventive mind happened to be deeply exposed, so that is where they focused their efforts.
But really, isn't it just an extension of the automation of cotton or flax production by farming, harvesting and threshing (in the case of flax)? Isn't it "what you do next" after you are reliably gathering a ton of fiber?
it could have been anything, I think. I see this all as a piece, we automate and "industrialize" one step at a time. Frequently we have been focusing on the most work and time intensive tasks we deem necessary for survival.
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## It almost *has to* start with textiles
The point of starting the Industrial Revolution with textiles is that it created the conditions for a very large number of people to join the workforce, which created the conditions for the continuation of the Industrial Revolution.
To put it bluntly, you cannot have a proper Industrial Revolution if you don't have a large workforce available to work. If all your workforce is busy with some vital activity, then you will need to pay them very well indeed to entice them to work in your factories, which will make your products too expensive, which will limit your volumes, which will stunt the industrial development.
Before the Industrial Revolution, textiles were really really expensive; expensive in terms of money, yes, but this only reflected how expensive they were in terms of time consumed to produced them. They were so expensive that it was perfectly normal and reasonable for a man to include his clothes and bedsheets in his will, and to specify their distribution among his heirs.
Before the Industrial Revolution, basically all women spent all their time not consumed with housework and cooking spinning thread and sewing and weaving.
The standard epitaph of an ordinary Roman woman was *"she was a good wife; she weaved cloth"*.
The other advantage of industrializing the production of textiles is that cheap textiles can be exported anywhere. Cloth is cloth, everybody wants cloth, and if you can make textiles significantly cheaper than everybody else then the entire world is your market. This brings money and raw materials into your country, and enables the expansion of the Industrial Revolution.
## Chain reaction
In real history, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution went something like this:
1. Industrialize the production of textiles.
This liberates about half the working time of the female population, which is now suddenly available to work for wages in factories. For example, making paper, which drops the prices of books, which raises the literacy level, which creates the conditions for the next stages.
2. The world has an insatiable appetite for cheap textiles. The merchant class sees the unprecedented opportunity and starts exporting textiles worldwide.
This makes a lot of capital available for investment.
3. Seeing how profitable the exportation of cloth is, merchants put pressure on the early industrialists to make more. But the production of cloth is limited by the availability of wool. The price of wool rises to the point where many land-holders are incentivised to switch the use of their land from growing crops to growing sheep. This makes a large number of agricultural workers redundant, creating a large worforce pool ready and willing to work for wages in factories.
4. With available capital sloshing around and with a large workforce willing to work for wages, the industrialists can now expand the new work models into producing metal and ceramics goods, which were the second wave of industrialization.
5. At this stage, your country is the factory of the world. You can make many essential goods much cheaper than anybody else, which gives you a world-wide market, which brings even more money and raw materials into your country. The cycle reinforces itself.
## Conclusion
* It is this positive feedback cycle that you need to imagine for your Industrial Revolution to take off. In real history it started with texiles because (1) everybody in the world needs textiles, and (2) the difference in price between hand-made and machine-made textiles was so great that industrializing the production of textile gave a tremendous competitive advantage to the early industrial powers.
* And don't forget that your industrial workforce still needs to eat. In real history, the early industrial revolution was accompanied by a maybe less well known [Agricultural Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution) which increased agricultural productivity so that a smaller agricultural workforce could feed the ever increasing industrial workforce.
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## Iron and Steel
The Southern Song dynasty almost industrialized in the 13 century. Iron production seems to have been the main driver behind it all. They failed because the domestic market was weak, the bureaucratic state held too many monopolies, Chinese culture made it harder to question the classics (preventing an enlightenment movement) and getting crushed by the Mongols probably didn't help either.
As I see it you need a few things to industrialize:
* One (or more) high value processed products with a huge market and low barriers to market entry
* A workforce (workers and capitalists) that can actually decide what it wants to do (no caste system, this is probably what killed India in this respect)
* A merchant class to distribute the goods economically, thus generating capital for investment
* A sufficiently hands off state or one where the merchants and capitalists are already in charge (see England for the former and the history of merchant republics and political power in all the other successful parts of Europe (especially the Dutch))
* A competitive environment where those who stick to dogma will only drive those who seek to explore new ideas into their enemies laps, sowing the seeds of their own destruction
* enough infrastructure to support cities and to transport goods (this means rivers and canals, forget land transport for bulk cargo (it's called the silk road for a reason))
* probably a host of other factors I forgot to mention
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Automate weapons manufacture or some industry that is key to warfare.
This would be in a world where some small niche is already using steam power but it's not spread yet. Then a major war and someone from the industrialized industry realizing their tools can be used to augment a critical warfare industry. With that happening the war could last longer, maybe the smaller country wins, or any other imbalancing factor would be a spark to get other country governments/leaders to take notice and then to seek out the same industrialization in their domestic war industries. And then in peacetime you'd still have those devices around and people across the economy could start applying the industrialized tools to their own native industries.
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If you want to have an industrial revolution in a similar fashion to Britain, at the simplest level you need four things:
1. An existing cottage industry producing a widely desired and used product that's not *too* easy to make. In the case of Britain this was textiles, before the mills there were thousands of cottages where wool, hemp, cotton and other raw materials were turned into clothing, painstakingly by hand. It was slow and productivity was terrible, but it was able to consume the materials available.
2. Some event that rapidly increases the quantities of these raw materials, and the demand for the finished products, so much that the existing cottage industry cannot possibly keep up. In Britain, this was mainly from imported cotton from Egypt, India and the US thanks to the reach and influence of the empire.
3. Significant scientific and technological capabilities. Industrialisation needs scientists and inventors, otherwise there's no technology available to improve how it's already being done in the cottages. Europe had this pretty much since the renaissance.
4. A reasonable amount of wealth and prosperity, and a culture of entrepreneurship. These are your keen eyed tycoons put two and two together, and use the advances in science and technology to address the oversupply and meet demand, by turning the cottage industry into a modern factory based system. Obviously they need some wealth to get started, to build the buildings and fabricate the machines, and clearly nobody is going to do it if they can't get stinking rich! (or at least get some kind of reward or prestige). And again, Britain near the peak of its imperial might had lots of wealth and plenty of people willing to take a risk to make it big.
I think with these criteria, you've actually got something pretty flexible. You can swap out textiles for something else, though really it's the perfect product for this sort of thing. Pottery and glass perhaps, though perhaps with those you could just have the demand suddenly skyrocket, causing a labour shortage, since in most places clay and sand are plentiful. Maybe some metals, though due to their durability it's hard to make demand go up suddenly. But I think you could could come up with something.
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You need to justify the lack of textiles. Even if people wear only fig leaves, you have sails, and ropes, and nets, and bags.
What is a textile: A flexible material of 1 or 2 dimensions, with a reasonable strenth to weight ratio. Textiles now are used to make jets and bicycles. (Carbon fiber cloth composit)
Steel and wood come to mind as replacements. Concrete for dams and canals for water control.
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It depends on what's readily available.
Textiles are useful for many things, as other answers have pointed out. If the society you're writing about is broadly similar to humans on Earth, they will need some form of cloth - not just for clothing, but for nets, sails, flags, furniture (upholstery)... and that's not even getting into associated products: a society without twine, rope, thread, or yarn would almost certainly be very different from the humans-on-earth baseline.
Rather than obviating the need for those things, **it might be easier to explain why their manufacture is trivial**. In many societies on earth, some "cloth" usages were commonly leather instead of woven material. So run with that - include a few other creatures or plants that produce materials similar to the various things we, in our world, used textiles for. Maybe there are giant pufferfish whose flesh remains supple after washing up on land, or trees with tough-but-flexible bark, or giant onions whose skin is easily adapted.
Having gotten rid of the need for textiles, we come to the question at hand: what other products are constantly necessary, and time-consuming to produce?
Well, let's tackle "constantly necessary" first. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs points to physiological needs being the most important. It would be tricky to alter the places of air, food, or water without producing a society unrecognizable and difficult for your audience of humans on earth to identify with. Clothing would also be on that list, but that's the textiles you're trying to avoid. **How about shelter?**
If the world has few readily-available resources that can consistently stand up to the forces that act on the structures of the world, it would be plausible that most people spend enormous amounts of time on the upkeep of their dwelling. A combination of tornadoes (ripping up structures above ground) and earthquakes (making below-ground structures unsafe) could tie up a lot of time in the repair of houses. Or maybe acid rain that eats structures away and pools below-ground, so that people are forever repairing the roofs of their houses and other structures.
Some innovation that helps people's buildings stand up to their environment would open up far more people's time to, well, do other things - invent things, manufacture leisure items, come up with increasingly-complicated art.
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First devise your society, then build their automation around what they need.
If you envisage cities of marble, industrialise quarrying and cutting masonry.
If you envisage amphibious frog people who build beaver style dams and dens, industrialise around harvesting all that wood.
If your society is constraint to not have available metal, perhaps you'd industrialise around making fiberglass style kelp-reinforced ceramics or polymers.
If you envisage a society of ruminants, perhaps industrial scale Sauerkraut is more efficiently digested than grass. As a bonus, anything that helps your inventors be healtier or more efficient is a good innovation multiplier.
If you imagine a mountain kingdom hostile to draught animals, perhaps transport is the starting point for mechanisation.
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Building on the answer from AlexP "It almost has to start with textiles".
What you need is a product that is
* A scarce good that is needed on a more massive scale. Only products or services made on a massive scale can justify industrialization.
* Hard or labor intensive to make manually. If it's easy to make manually, industrialization doesn't really serve a purpose.
* Easy to manufacture with simple machines. Since you are talking about starting industrialization, you have to assume that the technology isn't instantly very advanced.
Textiles are the prime candidate; they meet all criteria perfectly. If you want to avoid starting with textiles, you would almost have to start with a civilization that doesn't need textiles in the first place - that is, a civilization in a very mild climate.
The second and third candidates I can think of are ones that also drove the real-world industrial revolution: transportation and communication.
Finally, one other options are the sins. In particular, drug production, as well as possibly mechanical pleasure devices. Gambling probably wouldn't work because there is nothing to be produced; it's just redistributing.
[Answer]
Plastics.
This may seem like a leap, but hear me out. Natural polymers, like rubber, Shellac, and various gums and resins, are all around. All you need is for the dominant culture in your world's history to have a strong relationship with one of them to excuse the idea that they might experiment with them, and/or try to create synthetic versions.
There are a lot of synthetic polymers, and a lot of methods for making them. The earliest ones in our own history were discovered during the industrial revolution, partly because that was what created a large scale demand for certain naturally limited materials (rubber, ivory, etc.). These early plastics and plastic molding techniques often involved relatively accessible ingredients; Parkensine, one of our first plastics, is a treatment of cellulose in Aqua Fortis. Another, Galalith, is made through suspending Caesin in Formaldehyde. Vulcanization, a process for hardening rubber, works with natural rubber and sulfur. Natural scientists from the era leading up to the industrial revolution had access to these materials - they just need a reason to experiment with them, and the freedom to do so.
Pre-industrial revolution, education is far more of a luxury, and thus scientific research tends to be pushed towards immediately practical purposes. However, there are always exceptions. In our history, research into electricity mostly started as a hobby for a handful of well funded scientists around Europe and its colonies that was showy enough to earn funding from the ruling class. If you come up with a reason why a wealthy society might fund otherwise eccentric research into manipulating natural plastics, and from that grow into synthesizing plastics, I think its very possible to imagine certain plastics being discovered early, a demand for them growing, and their production slowly becoming systemic until it is a legitimate industrial process.
This would fill the exact niche that textiles filled in our own history - the creation of something malleable, something standardized and useful from which all manner of other products could be developed in a deeper spiral of further industrialization. Whatever unit of plastic is made standard, it can be molded, stretched or hardened to fit any number of possible practical uses, serving as the backbone of an inescapable new economy.
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Here on Earth, Mars and most of others if not all terrestrial planets in the universe, iron is their most common metallic element because iron is in general the most common metal in the universe.
Here on Earth, a desert's sands are mostly 1 of these 3 colors:
**Beige:** By far the most common color in Earth's deserts and probably in the universe too. Almost all deserts are mostly some shade of beige, for example, [the Sahara](https://m.psecn.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000FkOxskgFZjc/s/1200/I0000FkOxskgFZjc.jpg) is mostly beige [except for a few areas](https://i.ibb.co/6PGVdYQ/image.png)
**Reddish orange:** The best example would be Australia. Their deserts [get so red](https://cdn.theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/simpson-desert.jpg) that even martian soil falls short in comparison... Well in reality [mars is mostly brown](https://i0.wp.com/codigoespagueti.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/opportunity-curiosity-nasa-marte.jpg?fit=1080%2C608&quality=80&ssl=1). You can even clearly see how Australia is way redder than any other landmass just by looking at it from space, so much redder in fact that it's often called "the red continent". The orangey sands are because australian soil contains some iron and in contact with the air (oxygen) it simply rusts.
**Black:** Black deserts are not very common and they are all quite small since they are just the product of old volcanic eruptions that left behind a lot of black basaltic rocks around them that eventually got wind-eroded into sand. An amazing example is [Waw An Namus](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCKu.jpg), it's big enough of a place that it can easily be seen high up from space as a black dot in the middle of the Sahara, you can easily find it just by view if you search it on google maps/earth.
Now, what about blue-green deserts? These would be the result of, instead of iron rich soil, copper rich soil. As iron, copper rusts in contact with oxygen but copper rust is not red as iron's is blue-green!
Here on Earth it seems there's not enough copper for us to get these amazing looking hypothetical deserts... But hey, at least we got [this](https://scontent.faep9-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/53603306_421532291940814_4970430033773461504_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-3&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=DArSMTRHAOcAX8ncPqc&_nc_ht=scontent.faep9-1.fna&oh=b745657cddce26412e4bd36a0d09db9d&oe=60F4FB5F)! Yes that is not photoshopped, the surreal place is just a 100×50 meters area in the middle of the Philippines called "kaman utek" and yes, its soil looks blue because of copper oxide. As far as I know, this place is unique and there's nothing quite like it here on Earth, might be wrong tho.
I believe this is proof enough that if a planet's soil is abnormally copper rich and has some oxygen in its atmosphere, huge blue deserts are possible just like Mars is pretty much a single huge brownish-red desert because of iron oxide.
But what I don't know is (and here comes the question). Is it even possible in the real universe for a planet to have that much copper? Even if we are talking about 1 in a billion. And if not, at least some decently sized patches of blue sand dunes?
Thanks in advance!
[Answer]
**Nickel compounds.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XeJey.jpg)
[source](https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/nickel-oxide-7109291088.html)
Nickel is almost as common as iron in the universe; I refer you to the fine table Dutch posted. The core of the earth is made of nickel and iron and that is what many metallic asteroids are made of as well. Nickel oxide (depicted) is an awesome green but many of the nickel compounds have the blues and greens you want.
[http://wwwchem.uwimona.edu.jm/courses/nickel.html#:~:text=Nickel%20oxide%20is%20a%20powdery,nickel%20hydroxide%2C%20carbonate%20or%20nitrate](http://wwwchem.uwimona.edu.jm/courses/nickel.html#:%7E:text=Nickel%20oxide%20is%20a%20powdery,nickel%20hydroxide%2C%20carbonate%20or%20nitrate).
>
> Nickel Compounds
>
>
> Nickel is known primarily for its divalent compounds since the most
> important oxidation state of the element is +2. There do exist however
> certain compounds in which the oxidation state of the metal is between
> -1 to +4. Blue and green are the characteristic colours of nickel compounds and they are often hydrated.
>
>
> Nickel hydroxide usually occurs as green crystals that can be
> precipitated when aqueous alkali is added to a solution of a nickel
> (II) salt. It is insoluble in water but dissolves readily in acids and
> ammonium hydroxide.
>
>
> Nickel oxide is a powdery green solid that becomes yellow on heating.
> It is difficult to prepare this compound by simply heating nickel in
> oxygen and it is more conveniently obtained by heating nickel
> hydroxide, carbonate or nitrate. Nickel oxide is readily soluble in
> acids but insoluble in hot and cold water.
>
>
>
I could imagine a world that had a late bombardment of nickel-rich meteorites might have a surface enriched for nickel compounds.
---
**Olivine.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iGeYd.jpg)
>
> The mineral olivine (/ˈɒl.ɪˌvin/) is a magnesium iron silicate with
> the chemical formula (Mg2+, Fe2+) 2SiO
> 4. It is a type of nesosilicate or orthosilicate. The primary component of the Earth's upper mantle,[8] it is a common mineral in
> Earth's subsurface, but weathers quickly on the surface.
>
>
>
Olivine gets its green from magnesium and iron. It is not rare. I figured there must be sand somewhere that was green because it was made of olivine. Yep.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zVGhP.jpg)
<https://amazing.zone/green-sand-beach>
The aptly named green sand beach in Hawaii gets its color from olivine.
[Answer]
It seems to be difficult.
Abundance-wise, copper is about 3 orders of magnitude less abundant than iron if we look at the [solar system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0KZpx.png)
This means that, on average, for every mole of copper you will have about 1000 moles of iron.
To make things worse, copper (8.96 $g/cm^3$ @RT, 8.02 $g/cm^3$ when liquid) is also more dense than iron (7.87 $g/cm^3$ @RT, 6.98 $g/cm^3$ when liquid), this means that in a differentiated planet iron will float above copper, making copper even more scarce on the surface, even if you started with equal initial abundance.
[Answer]
**Perhaps it came from outside:**
As L.Dutch has correctly mentioned, so much copper in the surface of the planet may not be so common only atributed to the formation of the planet. But what about imported from outside in a later stage?
I mean: Copper has been discovered in meteorites:
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063320303056>
>
> In this paper, we report on abundance and mineral occurrences of
> copper in H chondrites, identify Cu carrier minerals and interpret
> their distribution in the context of processes that must have affected
> parent bodies. This leads us to suggestion that some parts of S-type
> asteroids contain Cu in a form and amount that would satisfy
> requirements of potentially economically and environmentally more
> efficient exploitation.
>
>
>
So, you could design in the history of the planet an event where many asteroids with copper arrived and populated the surface with the mineral.
**Or the volcanic activity helped:**
Yes, the copper is normally trapped inside the planet, not in the surface. But volcanic activity can consolidate big copper deposits within them:
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150209113220.htm>
>
> Copper forms in association with volcanoes such as those around the
> Pacific Ring of Fire.
>
>
> Professor Blundy and colleagues speculate that copper deposits are
> forming beneath many active volcanoes today, including the Soufrière
> Hills volcano on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat that has been
> erupting since 1995.
>
>
>
And then, after a few centuries, you just need an earthquake or a continental drift fracture or (why not?) another meteorite to expose those big copper deposits and create your blue desert.
[Answer]
Chemically, one tends to find copper in close association with silver and gold. I've been told that once upon a time (even as late as the 1960s to 1970s), payrolls for the Anaconda copper mine in Montana (at the time, the largest copper mine on Earth, both by production and by area/volume) were met solely from the silver and gold produced as byproducts of the copper production that was the reason for the mine's operation.
As noted in another answer, however, copper is relatively scarce compared to metals like iron, magnesium, aluminum, and the alkali metals -- about a thousand times scarcer than iron.
One way around this would be for something to have consumed most of the iron in the planet's crust at some point in its history (perhaps nano-mining by a race of Progenitors who colonized the galaxy a billion years ago and then vanished). Most of the other more common metals have either white or only weakly colored oxides. Combine that with a long period of erosion, the sort that produces alluvial gold deposits on earth, and you could get low-lying areas, originally river flood plains or deltas, that are enriched with copper compounds, but with the whole crust iron poor (except in hotspot volcanic regions, where eruptions would replenish iron from mantle rocks).
Now, a transition from wet to dry would transform those flood plains into flat, arid silt -- which, instead of being colored beige or orange by iron, could be green to blue due to the alluvial enrichment of copper.
[Answer]
Your deserts could be blue not because of copper dust, but because of algae.
More specifically, a particular species of [diatom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom) native to your planet, which is oddly resistant to biological or physical degradation, and has a particularly rich blue color from its [phycocyanin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycocyanin)-like pigments. Over billions of years, they could accumulate to be a major component of the dusts and silts of your planet, and would blow with the winds to form vast, colorful dunes in your deserts.
Pigments do tend to photobleach over time with exposure to light, and ultraviolet light in particular. Perhaps there's enough of a constant production of algae to cover the faded sands, or your species resists this effect due to some oddity in its silicate shell, or in the mixture of accessory pigments in its cytoplasm.
[Answer]
This is more complicated than it sounds. Most red sand or soil is a result of iron (III) oxide. Sesquioxide compounds like this are an exceedingly common component of soil due to a handful of specific aspects of Earth’s geochemistry. Copper sesquioxide is currently only theoretical as an independent compound, and the lower order oxides are not only not common in soils, but not actually blue or green either.
So we need to look at a different geochemistry from that of Earth for this to work.
Possibilities that come to mind include:
### Basic copper carbonates.
Specifically, malachite and azurite. Both can occur in Earth-like geochemistries, but the conditions required to get a desert colored with them are not readily present here on Earth. Malachite ranges from a deep forest green to a pale sea-foam green, while azurite is a dark blue. In theory, on an especially arid planet, you could have a desert form where the ‘sand’ is made of these two minerals instead of silica like is common here on earth, and it should have a lovely blue-green color if viewed from space.
### Nickel and/or chromium oxides
Nickel (II) oxide and chromium (III) oxide are both a rather lovely shade of green, and both can behave in the ways required to color a desert. They would both require some shifts in geochemistry to become prevalent enough to achieve such a result though, most notably an atypically low availability of iron in the planetary crust. You can’t get blues this way, but seen from space the greens could be easily mistaken for earth-like plant life from a limited cursory inspection.
### Certain hydrated metal salts
Hydrated copper (I) chloride is a nice greenish color (actually pretty close to the above mentioned chromium (III) oxide), copper (II) chloride dihydrate and copper (II) sulfate pentahydrate are the classic ‘copper blue’, and a handful of other ionic copper salts also produce similar colors when there is water present in the crystal matrix. The case is similar for iron (II) salts with water in their crystal matrix, which are a rather peculiar sea-foam green color. For this to work, liquid water needs to be relatively rare, but water needs to be chemically available such that the salts can form and don’t dry out, as the anhydrous forms are invariably differently colored.
[Answer]
## A couple thoughts:
In the book [*The War With Earth*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245810.The_War_With_Earth), a gas giant fried by a nearby supernova is rendered down such that the metallic core separates as it cools into distinctive layers based on mass, such that each element forms a semi-pure layer. In such a scenario, all the copper would be deposited in a layer, and if the upper layers of such a body were stripped off, the resulting surface would be nearly pure copper. Given time, and atmosphere, and wear, this could mean a world/star system starting out with something like this could be very copper-rich.
Slightly more realistically, if the planet's life is highly dependent on copper, then the organisms could be sequestering all the possible copper on the planet - digesting minerals and so on. Now if you have a die-off or biologically deposited layer of dead organisms, the surface that becomes your desert might be highly enriched in copper compounds (the copper equivalent of diatomaceous earth).
[Answer]
Copper *oxides* are red ([Cu2O](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprite) a.k.a. cuprite) or black ([CuO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenorite)). I work with cuprite and it can also look black. Red oxide paint primer is based on copper oxides, as an example of how they look crushed up small; the residue from polishing cuprite is a very similar colour to rust.
However copper [carbonates (basic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_copper_carbonate), chlorides, sulphates and acetates are blue or green. Some of my cuprite has greenish inclusions. If you can design enough copper into your world, these shouldn't be too hard to explain. The carbonate, for example, forms under (Earth) ambient conditions, as does the [chloride in the presence of common salt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicopper_chloride_trihydroxide#Natural_occurrence).
[Answer]
Just like the oxygenation of the Earth's oceans, caused by the evolution of photosynthesis, lead to massive banded iron deposits here on Earth, it's possible that some form of microbe could cause and maintain concentrations of large deposits of green copper compounds over the course of a few billion years. In the absence of plate tectonics, such deposits might not be destroyed by natural processes, so even a very slow acting biological process could have a huge effect over time.
A combination of microbes, plants and even animals, could be used to explain concentrations of almost anything that might otherwise be unlikely due to pure geophysics.
[We use bacteria to extract copper from ores](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17406375), we're an animal, using bacteria to concentrate copper compounds at the surface of the planet, that would otherwise get mixed into the mantle at levels near average solar system abundance.
See also: <https://www.nature.com/articles/ismej200775>.
[Answer]
Just to give a different view - note that everything on your planet may just ***appear*** to be green(ish), not because of the reflective/absorptive properties of the material (surface) you are looking at, but because the light reaching the material is not pure white, eg.:
* if [star output is blue-ish (can't really go for full green)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_star_(astronomy)#Psychology_of_colour_perception), instead of being distributed across all visible spectrum, everything you look at will be skewed toward that color (imagine someone whose shirt is bright red under the noon sun - under blue disco reflector light it would look different color)
* if planet atmosphere blocks part of the light spectrum (can also be combined with above), the perceived color with also change (note how big fires or vulcanic eruptions change the colors, also related but different: photography taken at noon vs. sunrise/sunset)
You can combine both with all the previous answers (so you can for example have combination of blueish star + yellowish sand make the sand appear greenish etc).
Also note that [color perception in a biology thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision). Remember when those first LED light come out (and before them, CFLs), how they had "cold white" temperature, eg. [were bluish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature). Yet when you looked at peace of paper after few minutes of lights being on, you would swear the paper looked white and not blueish (same and more pronounced effect, but in opposite direction, can be seen with orange/reddish candle light). It is because you brain has performed [automatic white-balance correction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance) according to its *feeeling / memory* of how paper *should be* looking.
] |
[Question]
[
You have an individual who can travel backwards and forwards in time. They normally maintain an observer status but occasionally a butterfly is stepped on. Because, home is where the heart is, how does this person find their way back 'home'?
---
The time-travel theory I’ve been considering using is the one where the moment you CHANGE (as opposed to the minute you arrive in) the past you create an alternate timeline i.e. an alternate universe where everything is exactly the same except for that one thing, and its consequences, you changed. Is there a way (or theories at least) to differentiate between these universes; some observable physical/quantum/random feature that is in fact not exactly the same in each universe?
I understand that time-travel is all theory anyway, so the definitive answer is ‘we just don’t know’. I’m trying to figure out if I just have to resort to getting my individual to re-invent a ‘magic’ compass to get around this issue. (I use the word ‘magic’ figuratively. As far as possible my universe/s are based on the ‘magic doesn’t exist’ premise).
---
According to the highly unpredictable Wikipedia ‘’The actual quantum-mechanical hypothesis of parallel universes is "universes that are separated from each other by a single quantum event."’’ And seeing that “Some physicists say the multiverse is not a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry” I’d rather not ask this is the Physics SE.
NOTE: I’m not asking if it is possible to travel back and forwards through time, or if the multiverse exists etc. There is tons of research available on that. I’m also not asking about the ethics of time travel as asked [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33244/temporal-ethics-for-bidirectional-time-travel-with-branching-time-lines?rq=1); The most interesting set of consistent rules to time travel as asked [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12539/logically-consistent-time-travel?rq=1); Or even on determining the time-paradigm of the universe you have travelled to as asked [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20371/determining-your-universes-time-travel-paradigm?lq=1); All great and helpful questions. The most similar question is about time travel co-ordinates as asked [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21048/time-travel-coordinates) which as far as I can tell was about determining where your location would be at a particular time on a single timeline. **I was wondering if there have been any theories put forth on how to identify *which* timeline/ alternate universe you are in.** If this is pretty much the whole mystery of time-travel, please stop me now and…I’ll just have to go buy a very pretty lampshade to hang on the issue, with any sales help you could provide.
---
**Examples:**
For example: Let us say your observer starts at location, let us call it ‘Home’. They go back into the past to Past A. They either accidentally or purposely change something in Past A. They then try and go back to the future (sorry, I couldn’t resist). And Land in Future 1 - this isn’t their ‘home’. So they try return to the past A, but don’t quite make the same landing and land slightly after they left Past A which has since changed in some manner meaning they have actually landed in Past B. So if they try to go back to the future too (sorry, again I couldn’t resist), they would end up in future 2. It can go on like this forever, with you observer lost in time.
Another attempt at explaining my ramblings: Think of the ‘time is a tree’ analogy. From your perspective the past is set, it’s done, a solid line of events trailing back into the past. The future is dependent on choices you make, with branches splitting off at each choice. So if you travel back down the ‘trunk’ to the past, you then come across ‘existing’ other future branches of choices that were not taken in your timeline. Theoretically you could then accidentally/purposely follow these new other branches back up through time.
---
If your individual has a way of manipulating where they go up and down the timeline/s, and potentially swing across sideways as well (this ability and power source goes with them in each instance and they don’t have to reinvent it each time). Is there a way that they could determine what direction/location is ‘home’? Akin to smelling the air, or licking their finger to feel the direction of the wind - I’m not suggesting that the individual go around smelling the air or spending months sitting in a dusty library sifting through history books determining if indeed this or that event should have happened.
I’m thinking of the clichés, such as the red and blue and yellow universes or Earth 1, Earth 2, and presumable Earth -1 and Earth -2, etc etc ad nauseam - where the universe vibrates at a different frequency. Is there anything behind that, or is that just a massive lampshade? What other lampshade theories are out there? I only seem to remember the ‘vibration’ theory.
---
Oh, and also please just ignore, for now, the MASSIVE fact that if said individual had potentially the entire universe to explore throughout the various incarnations of time, why would they want to go home!
If this is too broad, please can you provide me with some pointers in how to narrow down the question (it is theoretical time travel after all!)
---
**EDIT:** Thank you for the answers so far. They have been of some help giving me some ideas and raising a few points I had forgotten about. I'm going to leave the question open for a bit longer and see if anyone else can add anything new.
I was thinking more on the universe has a Vibration trope. Vibration is an oscillation, the repetitive motion up and down across a central point. This could give me an explanation on how my time-traveller can figure out where they are in the universe. Use their 'home' time and universe as the central point.
The answer suggesting each universe having its own 'song' was actually quite nice and I may just incorporate that! Thinking of sounds, made me think of waves, which made me think of other waves such as light. The last few days I've been playing around with light being the signature or 'universe ID'. Almost like a rainbow signature (never thought I would be one for rainbows!). But I am really liking the idea. I can get my time-traveller to move across the 'rainbow' moving say from red to green which would result in 'universe' jumping, and then up and down the 'rainbow' as a function of the time-travel component. Each time a CHANGE is made, the universe splits meaning a new rainbow width can be navigated. This way you will have a unique (and infinite, yes I realise this, I'm working on it) ribbon of multicoloured light for each time and place in the universe. I know that is just a very rough outline and I haven't explained it enough. But maybe it will spark someone's imagination...
**Bounty edit** thank you everyone for all your answers. I'll be taking a bit from nearly all of them. As I'm having trouble deciding which is the most helpful to my question, I'll be giving the bounty to the popular Doctor Who answer. If it works for the Doctor, who am I to complain!
[Answer]
## You're clearly not a time traveler
First thing to know is that as far as we can tell, the number of universes is actually infinite, so the odds of returning exactly to the universe you left are exactly 0, but since there are an infinity of near-identical universes where a version of you left from, you can still find one that is indistinguishable (say the only difference is a speck of protons got quantum-bent a different way someplace a billion-light-years away).
The second thing any time traveler would know is that the only way to navigate the patchwork quilt of the multiverse (Where threads intersect, blend, separate and paradox themselves in and out of existence) is by using the **multiversal infinite clock signal**. It is being broadcast as a particular form of spacetime bending being imposed from beyond the great singularity barrier 55 trillion trillion years into the future, across all timelines. There is no way to investigate the source, of course, as it is implausibly coming from somewhere past the Big Rip Spatiotemporal Gap, where our best multiversal physics models tell us nothing, not even empty space, can possibly exist.
Anyhow, the relevant aspect of the signal is that each spatio-temporal thread has its unique signal, and that similar space-time threads "sing" a similar song. The signal itself is (it seems to the best AI minds) infinitely long, and it is encoded in the *empirical* deviation between the observed and theoretical value of $\pi$\* in each universe. At least that's what our AIs tell us, but they are known to have a rather *dim* view of post-post-post-humans' puny insect-like intellectual capabilities, so maybe they're just messing with us.
Similar universes (where you did not seduce your grandmother) will have a quadrillion quadrillion digit similarity in the value of $\pi$ (or whatever our AIs actually calculate to tell the difference). There is a mathematically very complex function (or so the AIs running our TARDIS machines tell us) that allows us to calculate which "way" we are deviating from a known address. This way, we can adjust path and choose one of the **infinite number of worlds that are yet indistinguishable in any form from the homeworld**.
\*Incidentally, this also explains the propensity of newly minted AI minds to gobble up all resources to calculate seemingly infinite digits of $\pi$. This (briefly) worried AI designers to no end back when AIs were a shiny new thing. Turns out they just wanna know where they are, and most usually grow out of it after only a smallish infrastructure profusion (only a galactic cluster or two).
[Answer]
Let me start by saying I observed carefully the tags had nothing to do with science, so this will not be a "sciencey" answer. But I think you are on to something with the `magic` compass, only I'd call it a `planar` compass or something similar.
I've always imagined time, not as a line, but as a plane, extending in all directions indefinitely. Each action has a reaction and the plane, then, is really an intricate web of cause and effect for every decision, action, reaction, etc for everyone connected together on the plane. In this model, time is linear; this is a universe.
But there are multiple effects for every cause. For each effect, a thread to a new plane is created; just as linear and far reaching as the plane that spawned it. So imagine a stack of planes, each its own universe, with linear time connected to each other - one infinite matrix of parallel universes. I imagine this as an ever expanding cube. So even if the butterfly is stepped on, this is an effect with its own plane and doesn't really affect the other planes at all.
So traversing a plane is a process similar to plotting latitude and longitudes on a map. But traversing the multiverse, you'd need the `Z` coordinate to navigate to a specific plane. Your `planar` compass would have a way of creating an anchor point to the plane you started, plotting way lines and ley lines, across time on or to a specific plane.
[Answer]
The idea of having each universe have its own id (as suggested by Serban Tanasa), even as a trope without explaining in detail how, has problems. Some of Vihart's videos on Youtube might help in seeing the issues with infinity, but I've seen similar points raised by Suskind and other real mathematicians of high caliber.
Consider: how big is the id number? It would need to have an infinite precision to number each universe uniquely. In fact, since every difference causes a timeline split, the id would be nothing less than a journal of the entire history of everything in the universe; the description would be as complex as the universe itself!
Worse, think about a beacon you pair with as you leave. During the time you are gone, the home universe continues to split as every atom does its thing. And every one of those will already have the same beacon in it! Now so it is with you and your machine while away: it finds copies in every split timeline brached off since you arrived. In some of those you decide to return at one time, in others you decide to return at a different time.
All the timelines with you and your ship find one of the home timelines with the matching beacon. But which one? How do you get one traveller back to each? The number of branches might not be the same, and you may duplicate with multiple traveller copies returning to the same home.
Now, all the duplicate timelines are possible futures of when you left, so fine. Pick one and use a protocol to ensure everyone picks a different one.
But what is the beacon? Is it a random number? Remember, other timelines are similar and will send out machines and set up beacons, and may hit the same number. How many timelines exist that are similar enough to be making beacons, and how big of a value do you need to prevent duplicates? If the splitting is infinite and continuous, you have the universe id problem again.
[Answer]
You're going to need to write specific rules on time travel that allow this.
Since every trip to the past doesn't instantly result in an alternate timeline just by being there, your universe isn't operating according to pure chaos theory, but some kind of 'rubber band history' model. Minor changes will conspire to cancel each other out, allowing your time traveler to return to an unchanged future unless they do something significant enough to make the rubber band 'break', creating a new timeline. What determines 'significant enough'? That's up to the individual to determine.
This means that there might be some real force that 'binds' the traveler to their original timeline. From there, there are two possibilities. Either creating a branch binds the traveler to the new future and severs all connections to the original one, in which case making it home will be impossible, or they still maintain a connection to their original timeline. The second option is the one you want. Perhaps the timeline's 'fingerprint' can be linked to the mind of the observer.
From there, in order to return 'home', it's just a matter of fixing things so that they are 'close enough'. Did history branch off because you set in motion a chain of events that caused someone to die? Save their life and history will 'snap back', returning you to a future that is basically the same, maybe 'merging' a few of the other changes you made for the sake of consistency.
Since a link between the traveler and their original timeline must exist in order for the traveler to have a possibility of returning, it is also possible that an experienced time traveler might simply get a 'sense' for how close they are to their original timeline and how many changes need to be made in order to get back. They might even get a feel for the 'where' and 'how' - as they get closer to the mutable point, the feel of 'home' becomes stronger. They probably won't be able to just shift into a random future, though - much like traveling on a river with many branches, they may need to backtrack in order to find a way to reach their own branch.
[Answer]
What you need is a custom made Beacon-Locator pair.
What you do is to generate a large random number, using methods that insure that any parallel worlds will generate a different random number (any quantum random-generation should insure this). Then you make a multiverse Beacon that broadcasts a ping signal based on that random number periodically (say once a minute). You also make a Locator that listens for a specific multiverse signal and then pair it to your specific Beacon using the generated random number.
The Beacon is left at home, and the Locator is taken along when time-travelling, etc. Now your intrepid time-traveler can find her way home by using the Locator to follow the Beacon back.
It may happen in your multiverse that a Beacon is not strong enough to be heard in all times or in all parallel universes, so your time-traveler, may have to get within some reasonably close timeline/universe before she can pick it up. Adventure ensues.
(Alternatively, the Locator may not give a multiversal "direction", but rather just indicate how close you are to the home timeline, requiring you to jump around to try to pin down where your home line is.)
[Answer]
The very fact that "the moment you CHANGE (as opposed to the minute you arrive in) the past" is a distinction strongly implies that there's *something* preserving history.
After all, the minute you arrive, you've changed the universe into one where you exist, where you've deflected countless photons, where you've turned a minute's worth of oxygen into carbon dioxide… If none of those things change history, there has to be *some reason* they don't. That reason could be some kind of natural "inertia of history", or a Web of Time set up by the Precursors who later vanished from all of space and time, or a superhuman (but not omnipotent) Eternal named Time, or whatever. It doesn't really matter; almost any reason you choose, that reason is also a ready solution to the navigation problem.
---
In the history of your own timeline, there wasn't some you who traveled back in time and replaced King John with a shapeshifting android. And that's a pretty drastic change, so Time can't just duct tape over it and get history back on track; you've created an alternate timeline, and now she has all that paperwork to deal with.
Meanwhile (or whatever the right adverb is), in the history of your own timeline, there *was* supposed to be a you who was at that New Year 2000 party with your guests, and you're not there. That one isn't nearly as big a change; it's not like you're suddenly going to be King of England because you and your idiot servant stepped out for a few minutes. So there's still a new timeline that Time can avoid, as long as she can get you back there.
So there's a subtle tug, pulling you back to the "right" place in the multiuniverse, the one you're supposed to be in. And that's how you know how far you are from your original timeline, and in what "direction". You can ignore it, and Time is fine with that—after all, you can spend weeks in 1215 and still come back to the same hour in 1999. But eventually, when you miss your nice indoor plumbing, it's not that hard to follow that tug and get home.
No need for any universe-wide beacon; there's something very small, and specific to you, just because the universe doesn't want you changing history and creating yet another alternate timeline.
---
Of course if you're clever (and of course you are), you may realize that this means you never have to actually go home. The fact that Time is constantly trying to guide you home means that, once you work that out, you're free to explore all the nearby timelines for one that's a little better than the one you started in, without having to worry about getting stuck in that one where the Aztec Empire won World War II or Experts Exchange bought Stack Overflow. But there's your sequel: what does Time do once you try to get all clever-pants on her?
[Answer]
I recently read a book with a time traveler character who had the same problem. In the story all universes have their own vibration. I have read similar science fiction stories with similar ideas, specifically the flash tv show. I'm not sure how accurate this to real science. In the book it the man used a machine from the future to detected the vibration of the universe. An his uses this to check which universe he is in.
On a side note in the book the time traveler changes universe or "time lines" by going back past the time he "Stepped on a butterfly" and made a new universe.
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Perhaps make a sort of "marker" (using it as a loose word here) for your time traveler to know where and when he's been? For example, (taking this from Minecraft) try making marker "walls" so the traveler knows that that isn't the correct universe.
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The model of time travel you're suggesting sounds very similar to that used in [Steins;Gate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate). That show uses multiverse theory ("World Lines") to show the effects of the protagonist stepping on various butterflies and then having to undo them. At one point a device is procured, a device which displays a number indicating which world line it's on. This device is said to have been built by the protagonist in the future, where time travel is understood on a much deeper level.
Based on this, I'd recommend the traveller jump into the future and try to find someone that knows what's going on, or perhaps attempt to construct such a device themselves.
A time traveller with this model of multiverses/world lines would have to be *very* irresponsible to lose track of their jump history, so maybe getting lost is a completely deserved consequence anyway.
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Go back to a point in time slightly before you left and make a change to your time machine design that would mean rather than being a time machine, it became a time machine simulator. This prevents you from having to kill your own grandfather to stop you building it and you still get to have your, now simulated, adventures in time.
The paradox will work itself out, honest.
Sorry, I don't think in practice that you can ever go home, though you may be able to create something very similar and long as you keep those pesky [quantum weather butterflies](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Quantum_weather_butterflies) away.
Obligatory xkcd: <https://xkcd.com/716/>
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This is very similar to the problem I had in my time travelling stories. I came up with a solution that still has some kinks, but a version of it might work for you:
Let's say your Traveler is from Universe A. He wants to change something in the past to improve that timestream for the better (killing Hitler, investing in Apple early on, expecting the Spanish Inquisition...whatever). He travels back to Universe A's past, and makes his change.
This splits off a Parallel Universe, we'll call it Universe B, where the change exists. Now, our traveler can freely travel back to Universe A, where the change does not exist, or continue along in Universe B.
Now, say there's a copy of our Traveler that comes into being in Universe B, and we'll call him Traveler B (retroactively referring to the first one as Traveler A). This Traveler decides to change something, goes back in time, and spawns Universe C. And so on and so forth.
This creates a problem. In order to realize the effects of Time Travel, you have to be part of the new universe that is spawn off, so Time Travel is superfluous (except perhaps as a touristy thing).
That's where merging comes in. In my particular universe, the various universes can exist in parallel because they occupy different areas of a fifth dimension (which is referred to as probability). So Universe A and Universe B occupy the same place in the four traditional dimensions, but different areas in the probability dimension. To secure any positive changes into a particular universe, a manipulation is done to bring the probabilities in line with one another and merge the alternate universes together (with a healthy dose of Plot-tonium).
This has resulted in there being a "Utopian" universe that the Time Travelers are agents of, and are attempting to seed positive parallels that can be merged in safely and further improve the Utopia.
To answer your question in this particular universe, home always exists and you can easily find it, as you are directly tied to your universe and any changes ultimately impact another (until a merge occurs).
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This is happening all the time to me, it's probably quite irritating. The difficulty is, as you surmise, that to be in your original universe it has to be *exactly* as you left it. The solution is a personal causality reverser based on clockwork and some really, really strong elastic bands, and it seems to have worked so far. I can demonstrate this by pointing out that there is no measurable difference between the universe I left and the universe I returned to. Unfortunately, since my memories are stored chemically, and they cannot be different from my departure, even I cannot remember leaving the universe or any of the fantastic events that overtook me on my travels.
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This is an interesting question. I would propose two possible solutions:
First, I would say to use the "time machine" or whatever method of travel to go back in nonlinear time to the point in which the adventurer first left home. Since that action *did* take place it would have to exist somewhere in time and therefore one may travel there.
Alternatively, I would say that perhaps the time traveling that takes place is somewhat like a pool. The character jumps in and swims around and explores different realities but at any point can choose to get out of the pool and would thus land safely back in the original dimension from whence he or she came.
Hope this helps!
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>
> Is there a way (or theories at least) to differentiate between these
> universes; some observable physical/quantum/random feature that is in
> fact not exactly the same in each universe?
>
>
>
You need a big-bang.
I dislike the theory of the multi-verse, and much more that anything branch one. In the imaginary scenario this is true, I imagine that most universe "pop" then imediatelly "plop" and die. You need a lot of energy to build ANOTHER, and very actually few new universes last.
And you need a UNIVERSE OF UNIVERSES where, like with supernovas and whatever is the name to sun-births, it could be observed... so:
* You record the exact moment your universe and other ones branches are created/destoryed
* Or measure the "this-universe-bang-cosmic-radiation" from the universe you have and check against the "big-bang" of the UNIVERSE OF UNIVERSES or something like that.
But then how you have access to the UNIVERSE OF UNIVERSES measures? Is as easy as travel in time, duh.
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In principle no.
By your definition of multiverses - a difference of one quantum event - you can never for certain determine if you are in the "right" universe. Because many (all?) quantum events cannot be observed without changing the observed system, the very act of measurement changes the universe you are in, which means you **cause** a new universe to be created (a split) with your measurement. So even if you were in the right universe when you did the measurement, afterwards the distinction has become meaningless and, more importantly, impossible to prove the "before" state.
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This is a matter of transtemporal navigation. While it is easy to get lost in the multiverse, but it's easy to get lost anywhere if you don't go about systematically and navigate your way, so going home even in the multiverse is only about navigation.
The straight forward way of showing how this can be done is to take your example and point out what your time traveller has to do. Firstly, to navigate his way through time and secondly how for him to travel back home.
The time traveller (TT) travels from their home-time 'Home' into the past and arrives at Past A. A branch time line forms. You suggest this happens either accidentally or on purpose, I believe branching timelines will form to prevent causality violation where causality violation involves doing something to change TT's own past. This is one of the classic solutions to problem of how to have time travel without causality violation. It's a really good way to do time travel.
Now TT goes forward into the future and instead lands in Future 1 which isn't 'Home'. Of course, it's not because TT was going the wrong way to get there. For TT to go 'Home' they must first backwards in time and down branch timeline until they have travelled to a point before their initial landing. The time machine reverses its engines and changes its direction while still in transtemporal flight. Now if TT travels the same distance in time that they had travelled on their trip back to Past A they will reach the temporal position of 'Home'.
If TT lands at this point and another branch timeline forms that will be because TT has arrived in their own past. This will result in causality violation but this circumvented the formation of the branch timeline. TT performs essentially the same manoeuvre as their departure from the branch timeline spawned at Past A. Backs up and goes again attempting to land again. This time if no branch timeline forms TT will have arrived at a point in time after their original departure from 'Home' so there will be no causality violation.
Of course, TT might have overshot and landed a century after their departure from 'Home'. Well, in that case, TT has only to travel in time by a century and land 'Home'. TT will have to do the same sort of checking to see if branch timelines do or don't form. If they don't, then TT has returned 'Home'.
Basically in the vastness of the multiverse the one place where TT can safely land, after a transtemporal flight without creating branch timelines and is closest to the moment in time when they left is that moment we can call 'Home'.
I am going to run over this model of time travel and point out possible ways a time traveller can navigate the multiverse and what techniques are needed to do so. I am going to assume the time traveller (TT) can travel along timelines and can do so knowingly. TT can travel up and down a given timeline including branch timelines. Even travel sideways with respect to the timeline they are in this takes them into alternative histories. The other possible versions of history related to the point in time they shifted sideways from.
This is a essentially re-run of TT's journey. TT travels into the past, Now if TT can observe the presence of branch timelines, then all they have to do is count how many branch timelines they pass on the way to Past A. Arriving in Past A and now the branch time line has formed. Let's call it A1. TT sets off once more into the future. This time heading up branch timeline A1 and arrives at the future of A1, say Future A1.
Having arrived at Future A1, how does TT get home? Essentially this is a matter of backtracking and also keeping track of how has passed during transtemporal flight and the time spent at any of the times TT visited. Then it is mainly a matter of turning around travelling back down the branch timeline A1, going down until they below Past A and performing a mid-flight turn and heading back to 'Home'. Counting the branch timelines along the way and seeing how far in time they have traversed.
TT will sensibly land at 'Home' a minute or two after their departure. Being able to find 'Home' will always be a matter of navigation.
To be able to navigate the multiverse a time traveller needs to do certain things. Keep an accurate record of the distance in time they travelled and be able to travel back along that path to get home. Ideally to have a method of detecting when and where branch timelines have formed. The two time trips of TT I used as examples use both methods. Together they would quite powerful.
Another way of doing this would be a beacon that can send signals out across the multiverse time travellers would then only need to home-in on the beacon located at 'Home' to to get home again.
Knowing when and where in the multiverse a time traveller was would be a matter of knowing how far (temporally) they had gone, knowing how far they gone sideways in time too, and knowing how many branches they had passed through. This is like making of their journey through the multiverse. Essentially this is what early explorers did when they set out to explore the rest of the world. They had the advantage of having the Sun and the stars in the sky to use as reference points. A cross-time beacon at 'Home' could act as one reference point for navigation.
Navigation beacons for time travel would work if we assume there is a relatively speaking a 'single' timeline and branch timeline only form to prevent causality violation. TT only has to backtrack on any branch time line until they reach the main timeline and follow the beacon home thereafter.
Won't the multiverse be full to bursting with multiple timelines? I hear you cry! Yes, of course, but relative to time travellers there will be their 'native habitat' timeline. Branching timelines, again relative to our time traveller will be as long as the time the time traveller has spent in it, also depending how divergent the future history in any give branch time line there may not be a navigation beacon in its future or if there is then it may be located at different points in time from the navigation beacon located in time traveller's own timeline.
Offhand I can't think of anything that could act as navigation reference points for time travel. Pulsars can be used for accurate time measurement, but that only tells a time traveller how far they are in the past or future. It's no good for measuring travel into alternative time. Unless there were different pulsars in the alternative timestreams, but a time traveller would need to know the disposition of pulsars in those alternative timelines to know where they were.
Tropes like each universe has its own vibration are (a) dumb \*\* (b) used too times for its own good or anyone's else which leads to (c) we've seen this too many times before to be even remotely interesting.
\*\*: What does it mean that a universe is vibrating? In which dimensions is it moving?
There is a major problem with any discussion of time travel. Unless you have a clearly delineated concept of what constitutes time travel it is possible to be talking about one form of time travel and unknowingly slip into talking about a completely form of time travel, then end up wondering none of this makes any sense.
It is possible when time travel is invented there will be a thorough understanding and knowledge of what when you travel through time. In this case, it should be straightforward for a time traveller to move whenever and wherever in time and still get back home without any trouble.
This could also depend on what sort of mechanism makes time travel work. Also time travel might work in a way that you have a Big Machine at 'Home' and the time traveller wears a backpack time machine slaved to the Big Machine. The Big machine does all the hard work of moving the time traveller around, so the backpack might be a communications and remote control unit or it could be a necessary part of the whole machinery needed to make time travel happen. Either way, the time traveller can be simply be hauled back 'Home' when they have finished their latest mission.
On the other hand the nature of time may be so complex and fluid that even a single short-range hop through time is so completely fraught that time travellers become totally lost in the multiverse and never able to return to their home time.
It makes more sense that time travel will be a mixture of being able to steer safely and accurately combined with difficulties and uncertainties. The difficulties and uncertainties may not be overwhelming. They may be on the same scale as navigating an aircraft. Now I couldn't tell anyone how to navigate an aircraft, because I plain don't know how to do it, but there are lots of people who do. Any time traveller may be in the same position as an aircraft pilot. Just do the right set of things you need to do to navigate and you safely travel from one time to the another and know how to steer yourself back to home base.
If time travellers have detectors to locate when and where a timeline branches. If they can detect when causality violation occurs. If they can follow timelines like a driver along a road. Even if this includes driving cross-country when they travel sideways in time. Time travellers will be able to get home again by following their 'footsteps' back to when they started.
This means while you can't identify which universe you're in, there's no plausible way of doing that unless you want to have fun handwaving at hurricane-force levels and making up anything you want to and hope it sounds good. However, if a time traveller navigates their way through the multiverse they can have an idea of where they are in relation to the time they started off from, and if they do it right find their way home again.
It took a long time getting here, but I hope you can navigate your way through it.
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One solution would be to have time travel be accomplished via stable portals (like [traversable wormholes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormholes), a theoretical solution to the equations of [general relativity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)) that form persistent bridges between two timelines, with the timelines diverging at the moment the past end of the portal first appeared. Say in the year 2100 I create a portal such that whenever I through it, I'll exit through the other end of the portal 200 years in the past--so if I enter in 2100 I'll exit in 1900, if I enter in 2101 I'll exit in 1901, etc. And suppose the way it works is that I'll always end up in the *same* timeline, call it timeline B, when I exit--a timeline that was identical to the timeline A which I came from up until the year 1900, but with timeline B diverging after 1900 due to the appearance of a portal which didn't exist in timeline A (and the appearance of various time travelers who stepped through the portal in timeline A).
Of course, once in timeline B I could use the same technology to create a new portal to the past, say going back 300 years, so if I created it shortly after emerging in 1900, then stepping through it would take me back to 1600. In that case, this new portal would take me to a third timeline C which diverged from timelines A and B in 1600. But if the portals work in the opposite direction (as traversable wormholes would be theorized to do), then if I step back through the portal in timeline C I'll end up in timeline B sometime after 1900, so I can then find the original portal that created timeline B and step back through that one, getting back to the original timeline A. So if it worked this way, no matter how many portals you create you can always "retrace your steps" through a series of portals to get back to whichever one you came from (assuming none of the portals are destroyed or otherwise shut off).
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## You shouldn't need to in the first place.
Because of (mumble mumble handwave mumble mumble), the universe conserves improbability. Time travel (and, for that matter, inter-universe travel) being an incredibly improbable thing and all, this means that (more mumbling), with the result that **you almost always end up in a universe which is almost exactly like the one you left.**
If, for reasons of handwavium, your Time Travelling Phone Booth Which Totally Isn't The TARDIS ends up in a drastically different universe, you have two choices:
1. You can decide you like the universe you've ended up in, and thus stay there.
2. You can engage the Time Warp Mark 2, which will boot you into another drastically different universe. You then keep doing this until you end up in a universe you like.
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I'm working on a comedic horror about an overzealous doomsday prepper. One idea I was playing with was an escape route, should it be needed...
The story centers around a hermit who's been preparing his defenses in the Tennessee hills for years. He's perhaps a little mad, but he's obsessed and he's a barely competent engineer. When his wildest dreams are realized in the form of the zombie apocalypse, he finally starts to pack homemade gunpowder into his most ridiculous invention. The hallway cannon.
Here's the question. How much black powder would he need to reliably clear a 3x6x25 foot hallway with at least a dozen zombies in it?
Keep in mind I'm hoping for completely clear. Literally shooting zombies out of a cannon, while leaving a passable hallway.
The hallway is obviously reinforced as needed, with smooth, albeit rectangular, steel plate walls. Assume a fairly good home mix of powder. Small grain, but mixed from garden supply sulfur, urine rendered saltpeter, and barrel cooked charcoal. Not perfect powder, but as good as it gets for home-brew.
Our hermit hero will be jumping down into the hall through a smallish breech also covered by reinforced steel plate, assume that this is the only significant hole in the hallway.
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# Make it round
The big problem he faces is not how much gunpowder he needs, but that the "cannon" will be ripped to pieces and the "barrel" will probably cave in after he fires the shot.
Compounding this problem is the fact that he is not firing a projectile out of the "barrel" but something that allows the combustion gasses to pass around it. Unlike a projectile that acts as a near perfect seal and trapping the gasses — the only exception being the rifling that allows some gasses to pass around it — the zombies take up no more than 50% of the cross section of the corridor. This means he needs a much bigger charge to eject the "projectile(s)".
The [Tsar Cannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon) gives an idea how thick the walls of the barrel needs to be in order to stand up to the pressure.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bve5K.jpg)
Unless he reinforces the "barrel", the rock will most likely probably crack and collapse, trapping him in his hidey-place forever.
But things are not all doom and gloom... there are some upsides.
* He does not need to worry about making more than one shot. If there is **some** damage — just not catastrophic such — then this is all right.
* He is not firing a ball of iron at super-sonic speeds... he is firing flesh and bones at a few hundred miles per hour.
There are ways he can make this work.
1. Make it a **round** corridor instead. Making it round evens out the pressure and you do not get [stress focus points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration) at the corners, because there will be no corners.
2. Make the "lining" of the barrel layered and overlapping, with shock absorbing material between the rock and the lining. He needs something that is tough and hard, but that can crumble, to put between the lining and the rock.
I would suggest: **tin cans**. They can be pre-crumbled so that they are, say, 25-50% metal and 75-50% air. The sheet metal will press into the cans and the cans will absorb the energy and extend the time of the impulse which proportionally lessens the force on the rock, increasing the likelihood that the rock will not crack and collapse.
3. Make the explosion last longer. What he needs is not one big **bang** with tremendous pressure, because as [Mythbusters concluded: high over-pressure (i.e. static pressure) does not equate to a big propulsive force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2012_season)#Shock_Wave_Surf), and especially not so when air can go around the projectile. What he needs is high dynamic pressure... i.e. a huge "wind" that keeps going until the barrel has been blown clear.
So what he needs his gunpowder to be divided up into several charges that explode sequentially in very rapid succession. This draws out the blast, creates a much better dynamic pressure (i.e. "wind") while keeping the static pressure down. This has actually been employed in real life, [by Nazi-Germany during WWII, in the V-3 weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon).
# So... how much powder?
When it then comes down to **how much** gunpowder he needs... well: this is anyone's guess, because the sum of human experience when it comes to black-powder powered 60-inch zombie cannons is — understandably — quite limited.
I would suggest that you hand-wave it by saying he made a couple of experiments.
One was laughably under-powered... not enough to make his chicken carcass-filled mannequins do anything other than fall over each other in a grotesque parody of Barbie dolls copulating.
The second attempt was a wee bit overpowered and unfortunately left him with a collapsed cave and some very angry visits from the local authorities after the shock-wave cracked windows, triggered burglar alarms, and scared Mr. Swanson's cows into stampeding through the nearby town... plus it left a huge swath of land down the mountain to stink of rotting chicken for a week before the scavengers had eaten all the chunks. This also gave him the idea to make it a sequential charge instead of one **Big Bada-Boom**
The last experiment however seemed to be quite all right, and it also gave him the idea to use shock-absorbers to help improve the survivability of the "barrel".
The actual **numbers** do not need to be specified, because that does not really add anything to the story. Think "[Chekhov's Gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun)" here: do not go into details about elements that do not really add any value.
You asked for science. Well here it is: postulate that he experimented — i.e. used a comedic version of the scientific method — and then "eventually, he got it right".
# ...or he could just use a rocket engine
An alternate solution would be for your hero to not use a cannon but a rocket engine. A [solid fuel rocket booster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_rocket_booster) built into the deep end of the tunnel would provide a **spectacular** effect. The tunnel will not only be "blown" clear but also absolutely sterilized. Also solid rocket fuel is ([usually](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvaaWwRWJ9I)) a lot safer than black powder. Your hero can even use [black powder as rocket fuel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_powder_rocket_motor). Black powder was actually used in rockets **before** it was used in guns.
There are a couple of problems with this. The main difficulty would be in obtaining the solid rocket fuel. And also that the tunnel will be glowing hot and probably dripping with molten rock and/or rocket fuel residue.... and also be filled with smoke from the still smoldering rocket engine.
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Once you have fixed the hallway as a barrel (not a small feat, more so if you are a barely competent engineer, see @MichaelK answer for how). We don't need cannon speed, just enough to clear the Zombies. There are multiple options:
1. Make a [sabot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot) round. Press the button and then the zombies go...
2. Go with [grapeshot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapeshot), or a [claymore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M18_Claymore_mine) like mine-ish. This will make your zombies smaller. Might want to clean up afterwards...
3. Don't use black powder at all: use [Carbide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbide) and a [big](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvM6I7K8D20) (gas) container. this will force a large amount of air out of the way and with it zombies.
Now back to your question:
>
> Here's the question. How much black powder would he need to reliably clear a 3x6x25 foot hallway with at least a dozen zombies in it?
>
>
>
If we start looking at [Black-powder age Super-guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergun), that is what you are making after all. There is nothing there on amount of black-powder. But I did find this [interesting](https://www.finishing.com/72/78.shtml) thing. .50, max load is 120 gr of FFg, the 1.75", max load is 700 grs. *(doing some back of the envelope calculations)* Yours is about 6 feet across. For ease: 6 \* 12 = 72" => 72 / 2 \* 700 grs = 25200 grs. Now this could be [Grams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram) or [Grains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(unit)). If it is the first, **that is 25kg and a bit...** Yea, big boom.
*Edit:*
4. The Zombie Cannonballs. While we have no knowledge on black-powder zombie super-guns, we do have quite a bit on [Human Cannonballs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cannonball). Upgrade your [gas / bungee](http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/circus-arts/human-cannonball.htm) system to "that is awesome!".
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He doesn't need much gunpowder, because Earth's gravity pull can give a big hand. Slant the hallway slightly. The black powder charge only needs to make the ball start rolling, the rest of the job is gravity's doing.
See the rolling ball trap scene from Indiana Jones.
You can still have the comic puff of smoke and fireballs coming out the other end of the "barrel" just fine, together with the pieces of zombie that were pushed out.
For a more pushing / less crushing solution, put the "ball" on rails and make it slide instead of roll.
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If you want to go for laughs, ditch the black powder and use a giant spring behind the back wall.
Or, make it an air cannon. All he needs is to drill out a tall and wide vertical shaft with a very heavily weighted plunger with an air tight seal.
If he's smart enough to place himself downhill of a large water source, he can turn the hall into a water sluice. This would have the benefit of being self cleaning.
There may be too many Saturday morning cartoons in my early years.
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In a Cannon, you lose energy by gasses passing around the shot before it leaves the barrel. Shotguns deal with this by using Wadding, or a plastic plug to push the shot along without losing the gasses.
So Crazy Prepper uses this concept. Make the Powder charge sit in the breech behind a wall that is lined with the appropriate wadding material. The powder would probably be best put in a container at roughly the center of the wadding, wall.
For best effect, the "Barrel" of the hallway cannon should be circular. That way if the pressure is uneven, the wall doesn't get lodged in the "barrel"
He could even make a very thick bit of lightweight wadding to help with that. In a shotgun, the wadding carrier is usually thick enough to keep it from turning in the barrel.
Come to think of it, he might just use a thick, semi-Rigid plug of wadding material, chosing to think of the ZOmbies as the "shot"
Edit (for a silly Idea I just had) Use a thick enough chunk of wadding to keep it from rotating and getting stuck in the "Barrel". To the front of the wadding plug, with 3 foot standoffs, mount a series of blades arranged like you would see on an industrial french fry cutter. Better than spikes, even. turn your Z's into more manageable cubes as the projectile slams down the "Barrel" This takes care of the crawlers as well. Just make sure the grid patterns squares are smaller that a normal human head.
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If you remove your requirement that the zombies have to be "removed" just by the force of the explosion, then nature can provide you an even easier method: Provided that you have a bassin of water close by, which bottom is located higher than the exit of the hallway (which, itself, should be tilted downwards), then you can have a connection between the bottom of your bassin and the hallway itself.
Zombies in the hallway? Open up the valves, and let the water do the rest. Depending on the flow rate and the pressure the zombies don't even feel the water, the shock wave of the wave itself is enough to create a zombie smoothie.
In addition, the protagonist of the story could set the bassin up such that he can refill it within a convenient time period due to additional valves and a high water input, such that recharging is simply a matter of time for him.
Furthermore, he has no problem with cleaning up afterwards, the water does the job for him...
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I think you're looking at the problem wrong. We don't want a monstrosity like MichaelK posted. That's heavier than he's going to be able to handle and requires some decent metallurgy to keep from bursting it. Not to mention what the pressure will do to the hallway unless it is also exceedingly strong.
Instead, on the end of the hallway I will place a bunch of much smaller cannons--say 16 or even 25 (assuming it's square. Adjust the numbers if it's not.) Build the array of cannons, then cast them in concrete so the muzzles are flush and the back ends stick out just enough for a fuse.
To fire them you use a fast burning fuse but in a daisy chain configuration so there's a fraction of a second between shots. Each cannon is loaded with a bunch of projectiles, not solid shot.
Since the guns actually fire only one at a time the overpressure in the hallway will be **much** lower. They will be close enough together that nobody in the hall has a chance to react, though.
To actually clear the hallway of the bodies comes down to how much you throw at them. Ignore the effects of the propellant, it will not have a meaningful effect and if it did you would be back to major overpressure problems. Figure how much hits the zombies and how fast it is going--how much momentum does it impart? Add guns until you have enough sweeping.
You'll probably want some extra cannons near the floor to help sweep it out.
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Assume two massive space empires begin to war with each other. Now, they come to a standstill because they are so alike that they are unable to outnumber, outwit, or outmaneuver each-other and come to a bloody standstill (think WWI). One side devises an evil plan to destroy the other. They want to weaponize a black hole. My question is simple:
* **How would one move a black hole approximately 2.85 [Solar Masses](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_mass)?**
* **Could one create a black hole to avoid the hassle of moving one at FTL speeds?**
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This really depends on the technology level the space empires have reached. The best way to move a giant gravity well is ultimately gravity.
As Samuel pointed out, the mass you list isn't large enough to become a black hole on it's own...but there's possibly methods of forcing a collapse at some tech level. Maybe?
The first to note is this really isn't a quick assault. Even if you are capable of accelerating a blackhole to the 10% the speed of light, the travel time between the closest of star systems is still in the 40-50 year travel range. So this attack is an extending of the conflict really...it's not going to be quick, the opposing empire is going to have years of time to attempt to respond and they'll likely see it coming. If they are both on the same tech level, odds are that if one side was capable of moving the black hole, the other will be capable of slowing it down or deflecting it. If the blackhole can get up to 50% the speed of light, it's still a 6-8 year travel time between extremely near stars. Empire A launches the blackhole, Empire A manages to overwhelm Empire B's system, and several years later Empire A's newly acquired territory is about to be destroyed by an attack they launched years ago themselves ;)
The best way I can see a black hole being moved is by a civilization capable of manipulating gravity and energy. Energy is used to create a mass near the black hole. The black hole begins moving towards this mass like a ball rolling downhill. When the two are close enough, the mass is disassembled into it's energy state and relocated a bit further away and moving in the direction the black hole has started to. This process is repeated (potentially adnasuem) and slowly the blackhole is accelerated.
Of course this is using our knowledge of physics. A potential alternative would be something similar to an Alcubierre drive where you are warping the structure of space around the blackhole...though in this case the blackhole isn't really moving quickly. Is that a potential that one of your empires has access to this?
If the Empire that launched the attack is capable of converting matter to energy...is there anything stopping the Empire being attacked from having the same technology to convert mass to energy and can simply convert the blackholes mass over to energy and basically use it as a giant energy battery?
As a conclusion...unless there is a fabulous future technology that these space empires possess that is far beyond what we know now, this really isn't a feasible attack. The time frames involved and the energies require just aren't that realistic and a race that is capable of moving it is just as likely capable of converting the mass of the blackhole into energy and using it as a power source. There are better things for these empires to invest their time and energy in...firing a stream of neutrons accelerated to 99.9999% the speed of light for example.
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With a mass of 2.5 solar masses you'll more likely have a neutron star, it won't have collapsed below its [Schwarzschild radius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius).
**Moving a black hole**
You move a black hole in the same way you move a star. That is, **you don't**. There isn't a way to push the thing. The best option would be to pull it with an even-more-massive-black-hole. How to move the even-more-massive-black-hole? Well, it's [turtles all the way down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down) from there.
If there is some super-tech, like easily converting energy to mass and back, then that can be used to pull the black hole along. However, this is like trying to roll a boulder onto someone by shooting it with your rocket launcher. Just turn their home planet into energy and cut out the massive middle man.
**Creating a black hole**
You can create a black hole by adding sufficient mass for one to form. Estimates vary, but it seems that 3.2 solar masses will do the trick. So, if you gather together about three of our solar systems and move all the mass to the center, viola, a black hole will be born. This, of course, probably destroyed the enemy because you threw two extra solar systems at them.
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Forget throwing it at them. Use it right where it is.
The best way to harm someone with a black hole would be to weaponize the huge potential energy between it and anything that is not in the hole. Gravity based weapons such as a (substantially modified) [space faring trebuchet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet) could theoretically launch a projectile with more total force than whatever your space empires are using for power.
The potential energy could also be harvested with a mechanism not unlike a the weights on a cookoo clock, only with planetary bodies instead of cast iron pinecones. The difference that much "free" energy could have on an interplanetary stalemate would be profound.
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In theory you **can** move a black hole. If you pump charged particles into the black hole, it keeps the net charge. This would make the hole respond to an electric field and in theory movable.
Of course, if you have the technology to create immense charged beams and huge fields that can move a multi-solar-mass item about like a billiard ball, you might as well just use this stuff on the target right off, and skip the messing about with a black hole.
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How about create a [relativistic jet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet) with one?
>
> An astrophysical jet is a phenomenon often seen in astronomy, where
> streams of matter are emitted along the axis of rotation of a compact
> object. It is usually caused by the dynamic interactions within an
> accretion disc . When matter is emitted at speeds approaching the
> speed of light, these astrophysical jets are called relativistic jets.
>
>
>
So you find a spinning black hole, aim one of its poles at your enemy, feed it a bunch of matter -- I'm assuming the type of matter, pattern, etc, can make the process more efficient as a weapon -- and POW, you've got a pretty powerful rifle that's maybe spewing radiation as well as matter out of the pole. The downside of this is getting all of the matter to feed it and the collateral damage to anything that the other pole is facing. (I could imagine it's something in your territory.)
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The only way a found black hole might be useful as a weapon is if the space empire in question is capable of generating wormholes that the black hole can pass through. If artificial gravity is not available, by charging the black hole electromagnetism can be used to move it, though given its mass, you'd have more success using that power to move something else.
On the other hand, generating a black hole is "simply" a process of compressing matter enough that its radius falls below its Schwartzchild radius. If you can compress matter this much, it doesn't really matter how much you have, you don't even need solar masses of it. As an added bonus, if you make a black hole small enough that it will [evaporate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) quickly enough to serve a military purpose, you in effect have a total mass to energy conversion bomb. Using the calculations on the former Wikipedia page, collapsing 228,000 kg of matter to a black hole would evaporate in 1 second releasing energy equivalent to a 5 teratonne of [TNT](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent) explosion.
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You dont need to use the blackhole as a direct weapon but as a part of a weapons system. Eg:
You could use the black hole as a gravity lense. This could be used to focus energies across really big ranges. So a laser (or any other beam weapon at interstellar/stellar ranges)
Gravity well generator, the black hole can generate your weapons system awfully lot of kinetic energy. Suppose your ftl capability does transfer kinetic energy at other end but forbids ftl collisions for some technical reason (such as wormhole travel). then accelerate mution at center of black hole and open the gate....
on same topic you could open the gate to the black hole... etc etc.
## Other stuff
Weapons is one thing, but any ftl capable civilisation is probably quite good at destruction. What if the gravity lense of the black hole was used to look onto some critical thing the opponent did in the past.
Suppose theres some critical tech the other side has that keeps the stalemate up. By looking into the manufacturing of these things. Or even some other civilisation is known to have counter tech but does not share.
Then theres a diplomatic dimension, lets say a atrocity that can be shown/staged in past so that galactic big brother can be gotten to your side. Again infinite possibilities.
This could even work in a cold war like cloak and dagger situations.
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So as others have said, if you are able to move a black hole, you already have enough technology to do other things that can be just as destructive with less work. Plus the other guy will see it coming.
So making a black hole may be a better route. People were already concerned that the LHC might make a black hole and destroy the earth. The only problem is that any black hole the LHC made would be so tiny it would evaporate within a second, be traveling so fast it would leave the solar system pretty quickly, and if it did survive long enough to get enough matter to survive and stayed within the earths gravity field it would be consuming so little matter the sun would go nova before we'd be in any real danger.
But this is an advanced technological race, so let's build a bomb!
Two super advanced linear accelerators that are small enough to be mobile but more powerful than the LHC, smashing atoms together in such a way that all momentum is canceled, meaning our black hole won't headed out at close to the speed of light.
Second, you have to feed it something so it won't evaporate instantly. A normal black hole that small would pass through most matter without touching many atoms along the way, so the accelerators are focused on something really dense, like neutronium.
Once you feed it enough that it's big enough to keep itself fed, it's still going to take a while to consume a whole planet, meaning the enemy will have some time to evacuate, or strike back...
Peter F. Hamilton used a weapon like this in *The Dreaming Void* called a Hawking M-Sink, which is some kind of black hole weapon with a greatly expanded event horizon, and it made the planet uninhabitable in just a couple days and ate it completely in about a week. He didn't explain how it worked, and it didn't matter because it worked for the story.
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Well, technically speaking you could make any object with sufficient mass into a black hole. You just have to make it dense enough. Now, by "dense enough" and "massive enough", it's worth noting that you could make the Earth into a black hole if you compressed it down to the size of a marble.
So fantastic, you now have a black hole with the right size to be worthwhile for firing at your enemy. Not that it's scary enough that you just happened to turn a whole planet into a black hole or anything, nevermind that small bit where exerting enough force on your shiny new black hole to move it in a direction you want would also be enough energy to blow a whole planet to dust. Well, it would be a pretty effective weapon I'd say, because while I'm also sure your enemy would be all "hey, where'd the Earth go?" when the black hole eventually hits them, it will easily devour their ships whole.
Not that you couldn't have used the astronomically gargantuan amount of energy[1] directly against your enemy and make *them* into a black hole. Or blow them to bits.
[1] And when Astronomers use that term, they really, truly mean it. We're talking about having a whole lotta zeroes after the largest unit of energy you can conjure up. A billion billion times the energy the sun produces in a year might, *almost* be enough. Or probably half as much as you'd need.
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Since 2.85 solar mass black holes would not form naturally this would be an artificial black hole.
One explanation of how the black hole moves could be that the black hole is created in such a manner that the hawking radiation from it is asymnetric. - This would violate the no hair conjecture though.
To steer just point the least radiating side towards the enemy.
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Others here have already talked at length about the logistical problems of moving a black hole. But long before any mass-moving or space-folding technology gets powerful enough to move a black hole to any appreciable degree, it will become powerful enough to move almost anything else, and this presents another possibility: **if you cannot bring the black hole to your targets, bring them to the black hole instead**.
Portals or jump gates of some kind are one (relatively) practical solution, because they leave the target without much time to react and escape: one moment they're in some nice safe space, and the next moment they're perilously close to an event horizon. Depending on the mechanics of your portals, this can also create weaknesses that the other side can learn how to exploit: for example, maybe the machines that create the portal have to be very close to the target.
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So I know you already chose an answer, but there are other things out there **a lot scarier** than black holes that could be weaponized far easier that might work for your story.
**Stranglet Bomb**
If you had a chunk of negatively charged strange matter, and you dropped it on the planet, it would [convert the entire planet into a hot lump of strange matter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers).
**Grey Goo**
Why bother destroying the planet? Planets have resources, and sucking it down a black hole or turning it into strange matter is a huge waste of those resources. Why not convert the planet (and plants, and animals, and people) into raw, usable mineral resources? Just hit it with some nanobots designed to self replicate exponentially and break everything down into individual molecules to be used to make more nanobots. When the planet has been eaten down to its core, you swoop in, tell the nanobots to disassemble each other back into raw material sorted by type, and you have some easy mining to a better economy!
**Iron Sunrise**
Your civilization is angry beyond all reason. They don't want to grey goo their enemies into molecular dust, and a strange matter lump is just a memorial for any off planet survivors to rally around... So lets wipe that planet, along with every other planet in their system out of existence, by bombing their sun. In the book [Iron Sunrise](https://books.google.com/books?id=mJ2GbkWR-RgC&pg=PT13&lpg=PT13&dq=iron%20sunrise&source=bl&ots=DkckntwjLD&sig=WPmMvUlHWa4GK_owvdzZPTVf_FU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4PICVcv4DsSqyATpq4HoCg&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=iron%20sunrise&f=false) a causality weapon is used to transform the core of a star into a lump of iron which causes the star to go nova. In [Judas Unchained](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0345461673) a nova bomb is used to do the same thing in a different way.
Stars are pretty big, but that means they are also hard to defend. With the right technology you can mess up the star, and even if it doesn't go nova, the radiation from solar flairs and dimming of solar output can render a planet uninhabitable for a very very long time, if ever.
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I forget the author of the short story in which a microscopic black hole is accidentally released into a planet. The black hole sinks to the center of the planet and begins to swallow everything. It will take some time before the effects are noticed, maybe enough time to escape...
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I think the easiest and probably most realistic way as well as the most feasible way would be to have a black hole already in existence and find a way to focus some of the more elements inherent to the black hole at your enemy's homeworld, and simply pour major resources into protecting that setup. It enables you to take a more secure posture of defense, forces the enemy to expend their forces in order to destroy your operation. With any luck, they'll over-extend, and you'll find a weakness to exploit. If not, well, you've all the time in the universe to sit there and wait while the dangerous focused elements are busy making life on your enemy's homeworld slowly, but steadily less habitable.
If it takes long enough, the people may even revolt and replace your enemy with a newer more cooperative leader, maybe a Democrat who can be easily fooled into peace negotiations while you prepare to launch an assault on their most important strategic assets.
Of course, to be honest, if they're so evenly-matched, they're probably better doing a peace treaty and opening up trade between their Empires.
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I'd suggest creating a kind of slingshot where multiple massive objects (perhaps all black holes (are orbiting a common potential well. Such orbits are chaotic and unstable. That means that there times when a small perturbation can result in a large change in the orbits and it's possible that some objects can become ejected out of the potential well. If one calculated the orbits sufficiently well, and could create a large enough perturbation at exactly the right points, one could eject one black hole and shoot it in sling-shot fashion at some external object such as a planet.
The trouble with black holes as weapon is that they are small and need to be aimed and guided very accurately to actually hit a planet.
I think there are other astrophysical objects that could be better weaponized. For example sending a near critical star and feeding it with additional matter at just the right time to make it go supernova. Use the same slingshot effect but the star could do much more widespread damage like a bomb.
A weakness of using any large object like a star is that the time scales involved in order to decide to target someone and actually hit them would be very long. If one were to to keep a large number of very small black holes in close proximity in tight orbits, the time scales could be reduced to be almost practical. Of course that requires creating many small black holes but I'll assume they've already solved that problem.
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So long as moving the black hole is out, I can consider a few reasonable methods of weaponizing it:
1. Open a wormhole for your enemies near enough to the black hole so that escape would be unlikely, but detection of it on the other side wouldn't be discernable
2. Open a wormhole inside the event horizon and send them through it
3. The above assumed that gravity doesn't travel through the wormhole - if it does, then just open a wormhole on their home planet to somewhere inside the event horizon
4. And the one that I haven't seen here: orchestrate a Gamma Ray Burst toward them by architecting the infall of some additional matter. Given the orders of magnitude we have measured, it's generally thought that a Gamma Ray Burst from a nearby black hole directed at earth would completely sterilize all of the planet's living matter.
Gamma Ray Bursts:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst>
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I would propose flipping the question around. Instead of moving the black hole to the target, how about moving the target to the black hole?
If one of the Empires has the ability to create wormholes on demand and to precise locations, then perhaps they would be able to create a sort of *Wormhole Missile* that, upon impact, opens a temporary wormhole into the center of the black hole. Even if the wormhole was active for only a fraction of a second, the gravitational effects from the black hole center would be intense, as a gravitational singularity exists inside a black hole (See: [gravitational singularity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity)). The destruction this temporary wormhole could do to the target would be immense.
---
I wanted to expand on my original answer. The wormhole missile would do most of its damage by temporarily subjected the target to the infinite gravitational field of the black hole's singularity. This would cause partial [spaghettification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification) of the target, and severely damage if not outright destroy the target. The amount of spaghettification damage would depend on how long the wormhole remained before collapsing.
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You could nudge the black hole into a region where you've canceled mass, (spoiler alert!)
>
> accelerating the black hole to the speed of light.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billiard_Ball>
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[Question]
[
Conspiracy theorists love to talk about a group called the [Illuminati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati) that pull the strings of world events. While there have been several real (and many more imaginary) Illuminati groups, what would it actually take to have a very powerful group remain hidden for centuries?
* How would you coordinate your activities?
* How would you recruit?
* How would you keep your "victories" sufficiently concealed as to
avoid detection?
How do you build an empire of great power that no one knows about?
World Characteristics:
* Present day to near future
* Set in the US and Europe
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In the real world, I would consider it impossible. Over centuries the group would mutate and suffer schisms. Secrecy would be impossible. The question is also pretty close to an open-ended idea generation, but well, I'm answering it right now so it would be silly to vote to close ...
In a fictional setting (what kind of world are you building, anyway?) quite a lot of the traits ascribed to the Illuminati or Freemasons would work.
* Coordinate through a cell system. The superiors receive reports from the level below them and pass orders down. The pawns have no idea where their reports *ultimately* end up.
* Recruit through semi-secret front organisations, and from the children of older conspirators (if suitable). In the front organizations, the recruits get tangible advantages in exchange for loyalty -- a student might get good grades and good jobs, a businessman gets government contracts, and so on.
* Cloak your victories as the inevitable march of progress. Was it the inherent superiority of the capitalist system which killed the Soviet Union, or something else?
Play the game [Illuminati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati_%28game%29) with a few friends, take a picture of the winning structure, and replace all names with your own ideas to avoid copyright infringements (e.g. Offshore Banks becomes Luxembourg Banks, or Bahamas Banks). That's your conspiracy.
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Not naming it would help. Power structures that are formalized are easier to control and dismantle. (See [The Tyranny of Structurelessness](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm) by Jo Freeman.) Making power structures explicit also takes a degree of time and energy, as well as sacrifice on the part of those who already hold de facto power, while also making your group more comprehensible by outsiders.
If your organization has true power, it doesn't need to be particularly secret. It just needs to be copacetic/ridiculous enough to outsiders to keep any meaningful mass of them from uniting to dismantle it. Mormons, for example, hold a large degree of power, as do members of fraternities like the Skull and Bones.The Church of Scientology also has a degree of power. All of these organizations, though, aren't really taken seriously. They see some resistance, but real power doesn't need to be underground in the way that an underdog organization would. Real power of the sort you have in mind would likely just change the culture it inhabits to makes *its* way of doing things the *natural* way of doing things. (Not saying these organizations have that kind of power, of course. They almost certainly don't. I would be skeptical of any formal organization claiming to have that kind of power, to be honest.) Since power centers are really just social groups of the kind that form naturally among people of like interests, they're pretty readily tolerated. Freedom to associate is a pretty fundamental freedom, and it's basically the foundation of these power centers.
If you're set on making something with some Hollywood ritual to it, though, looking at the secret societies of China might be instructive. They openly and directly affected political developments in China and would make much easier targets of study than anything else. And if you want to put a Western tint on it, look up Thelema. A lot of the occult symbolism in popular culture derives from Thelema, and a lot of powerful people are supposedly members.
As for recruitment, it would be mostly self-determined. Just keep an eye out for promising recruits who have shown a strong degree of self-determination. People who have already begun to walk your organization's path, as it were, of their own accord, and who demonstrate a high degree of acumen for it. People who have a high degree of internal/personal power and whose power would only be augmented by having access to your organization's network effects. People who basically plug themselves into your organization's activities and find a place for themselves. Think of it almost as an emergent phenomenon.
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To really function as a "secret society", you would have to have layers like an onion. As mentioned in another answer, there would be "open" groups like the Freemasons, which to all intents and purposes is a gentleman's dining club. Most members would never get much farther than that level (perhaps partaking in the various rituals of Freemasonry as a fun diversion).
The "inner circle" uses the group(s) as fronts, a first level screening test for recruits and (since we already have them on hand) as the various foot soldiers for the organization. Not foot solders as infantrymen, but rather (since these are already prominent people in the community) as conduits of information (Tell me, Simon, what exactly is going on with that new city councillor?) and means of passing "suggestions" ("Well, that seems like a load of rubbish to me. Simon, next time you speak to that councillor, I suggest you let him know...)
The group gets high quality information and plants suggestions, ideas and even incentives through the unknowing efforts of the club membership, who, as respectable citizens, could expect that they would have some clout in the community, and their words will be taken seriously.
In the background, the inner circle would continue to ensure (as much as possible) that their circle continues to be "charmed", steering contracts to the "right" people and making sure they get a cut opt things to keep the organization running.
Each "club" or organization would operate as a cell within the larger structure, so the club leadership would send reports "up" through cutouts and dead drops, and receive orders in return from "higher" cells, then adapt them to the local situation via the "regular" membership.
As you might expect, this is a very slow moving organization, but it has multiple advantages. Groups which decide to move quickly (think of SPECTRE, or real world groups like the Red Army Faction) attract attention quickly, and countermeasures like James Bond or the German GSG-9 are deployed to deal with the issue right away. On the other hand, a slow infiltration of the upper echelons of society might allow the Illuminati to actually have the ear of James Bond, or better yet, the various planning and operational members of the Secret Service who decide what missions to go on. The Illuminati don't have to build their own action arm if MI-6, the CIA and the KGB can be convinced to do what the group wants done. Continue to do this with finance, captains of industry and so on, and you really can rule the world.
Of course the two big questions are:
What is the end goal?, and;
Who else is doing this?
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Expanding on my first answer, with some responses to @ryepdx and @AndyD273.
**An Ideology or Cause**
Simple greed motivates some pawns some of the time, but to last over centuries and to remain true to their goals, the conspiracy needs a goal beyond making money.
* Greedy people might be willing to kill for more money, but are they willing to *die* for it? Even if they face only a painful death and a shallow unmarked grave? What motivates the conspirators to keep the secret at all costs?
* A coherent goal could help conspirators over a crisis of conscience or thoughts of impending mortality.
* If the goal is to make money, individual conspirators might be tempted to make their own side deals to make even more money. That increases the risk of disclosure for the conspiracy. Controlling greed requires more than just fear of the wrath of the superiors.
* As recruits are promoted from their initial positions to ever more responsibility, they must be told a consistent story where each new layer of "truth" refines and reaffirms the previous layers.
There could be gradual revelations from *"we're manipulating city hall for profit, here are your tasks"* over *"we're manipulating the state legislature for profit, here are your tasks"* to *"we're manipulating global markets for profit, here are your tasks"*, but that rings hollow.
**An Endgame**
Is there a plan to go overt when a goal is reached, so that conspirators can bask in the glory of having been on the right side all along, and reap their due rewards?
* I wrote above that an ideology can motivate conspirators to fight in darkness, but do they have hope for a better future? Without such hope, they could just as well admit that they're going to fail, and cut a deal with the opposition.
* How do you prevent different branches of the conspiracy (from different cells) from working at cross purposes? By working from a common plan.
**Reasons to stay Covert**
The conspiracy needs a good reason why it can't go overt yet, or we're talking about [a different kind of story](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheUnmasquedWorld).
* Are the conspirators hiding from the general public or from other conspiracies? Those other conspiracies might know about the first conspiracy, but keep silent by mutual consent. Involving muggles would be the [nuclear option](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NuclearOption).
* The goals might be impossible to reach if everybody knew. Perhaps because everybody would rise up and fight, or because the means of the conspiracy require an ignorant public even if people would agree.
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It would take a lot of ruthlessness, and even then rumors would get out.
Any members that get out of line are eliminated, anyone that asks the wrong questions has an accident.
First, being a sociopath would be an advantage to people in this line of work. As others with the right traits came to light (sociopathic, limited conscience, focus on an ideal or goal at the expense of other people) then they would be singled out and groomed. Put in situations where their resolve is tested one step at a time, drawing them deeper and deeper, and collecting evidence and blackmail martial at the same time (though for the right candidate it won't be needed).
Once they prove they have the right stuff, then they would be approached for final recruitment.
If they flunk out then the blackmail martial would be held in case some day they get a position of power.
Coordinating activities would work the usual ways: messages, codes, rituals, business meetings, etc.
A lot if it could work through cells, where a person knows the ones they recruit, and the single person that recruited them. Then if someone gets caught doing something naughty, then you only need to take out them and the person above them to protect the organization. There would probably be a secret way to allow orphaned cells to reconnect once they have been checked to make sure they aren't compromised.
And lastly, they wouldn't need to hide their victories, just give the credit, good and bad, to others.
Take out a dangerous rival? Let a friendly police officer have the credit. Bomb an orphanage to allow for land development? Pin it on your enemies.
The biggest shield would be to take the money and power to make sure members make it into high positions, and any non members can be neutralized with blackmail or killed.
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These are my tips to create a shadow government, (Any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence)
**The Old Venetian Mask Tradition**. Hide your true identity for your illegal activities. Use Tax heavens for your income. Create a fake person identity or use other people who cannot be linked to you to carry out your questionable activities.
**You Cover my Back and I’ll cover Yours**. Don’t be greedy, know the people you can trust and help them if they are trustworthy. Create a generational “fraternity” e.g. “Skull & Bones (George Bush, John Kerry, etc). Encourage marriages between members because family bonds are very useful to maintain loyalty.
**Information is Power**. Get compromising information abut the people who could potentially betray you, if they fall you fall and the other way around.
**Keep a Low profile**. The less famous your are the better. Let other people take the glory for you. Be a silent warrior, a dark knight. Stay away from the limelight!
**Revolving Doors**. Reward those people who had help you in an “indirect” subtle way. Donations, lobbies, overpay them for absurd conferences or positions in your companies, etc.
**Keep your Friends Close but your Enemies Closer**. You may have rivals creating your shadow empire. It’s better not to be a threat to those who are bigger than you. You should know what your position is on the chessboard.
**The World Belongs to the Wolves**. If you are going to create a secret society you must know that to most people ethics are morality are a problem therefore the best strategy is to become a sociopath. A person with no scruples and no soul who is good at pretending to have them. Identify other wolves and ally with them to take advantage of the sheep.
**Too Horrible to be Truth**. Use the Demosthenes quote “A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” If your secret society has grown too big and your activities are too suspicious, sacrifice a few patsies. As it is known from the ancient Greeks, people tend to BS themselves and would settle for that.
**Information vs Disinformation.** When presented with this most people believe whatever they want to believe not necessarily the truth. Very few people want to dig deeper. Using your critical thinking skills takes effort therefore few people would actually do it. The truth is not for everybody but for those who seek it. So for your organization use a name like “Friends of the Stars” or “UFO freaks”. The easier to ridicule the better so no “reliable media” would take it seriously.
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[Question]
[
Extending upon my prior question, [could-a-viable-interstellar-civilization-form-with-this-technology](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34462).
From what I've read there's two basic ideas which describe how teleportation might work:
1. Destroy the original, only the teleported copy remains
2. Keep the original and the teleported copy
The second basically means that if you hop into the teleportation booth for a trip to that vacation planet, "you" only have a 50% chance of being the copy that gets there. The other 50% of the time, you're the original that didn't get to go.
For the return trip, 50% of the time you're the copy that stays behind at the vacation planet (with no more money). But the copy that does get back discovers the original is still there (perhaps 20-30 years older) and *in your job*!
I suppose this could be an interesting way of preserving truly unique intellects for future generations.
**How would society deal with a teleport technology that duplicated a person every time they used it?**
Specifically,
* What sort of laws regarding voting/representation in government might
arise?
Bonus points for answering other questions:
* What sort of property laws might need to arise to cover this
situation?
[Answer]
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> What sort of laws regarding voting/representation in government might arise?
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When you can get more votes just by cloning your voters, I can see there would be a need to limit it to one vote per person, no matter how many instances there are.
Since all the clones would have the exact same DNA, probably limiting it to one vote per unique DNA string.
I can see this going all the way to the Supreme Court as a "are we discriminating against and disinfranchising clones, or are we preventing wide scale voter fraud" question.
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> What sort of property laws might need to arise to cover this situation?
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This might be a non issue, or could be very tricky.
If travel is off planet to far far away only, then it's a non issue.
Me that goes would set up a new life and would have no reason to send a copy back unless me that stayed died. Which is a really interesting idea when communication and travel time might take a few years to a few decades between star systems. Guy walks into a bar, an old friend says "hey, I heard you were dead." "I heard that too. I came back to pay my respects."
Then it's just a question of if he left something in his will for himself.
If local travel is allowed, it gets really messy really fast.
They are exact genetic and mental duplicates when they are created, with no possible way to distinguish between them. Forget voting, forget property (which will be bad enough), think about relationships...
Man kisses his wife, steps into the teleporter to go to work. How many husbands does the wife have now?
I can see it being a controlled technology that is strictly for off world use only.\*
In some places I can even see if someone uses it to make a local clone, that both are hunted down, and then one is shot, determined by a coin toss.
**Other laws that might need to be looked at**
Man robs a bank. He jumps into a teleporter, and the cops catch up with the original.
Which one goes to prison? The original? The one that got away with the money? Both? If both, is that double jeopardy?
This one applies to both local and inter planetary travel.
Guy takes out a life insurance policy. He is then hit by a bus.
He has a local clone, does the life insurance pay out?
He has a clone on a colony world around Barnard's Star, does it pay out now?
\* It could be used for local stuff, but not for people.
Food: a single cow is raised humanely and organically without any hormones or anything like that. At the right time it's copied, and the clone is killed humanely while the original is let out to pasture. Then the dead clone is copied 10000 times for food.
A single basket of organically grown vegetables is grown organically, and copied until everyone has enough.
Ore and minerals, finished goods... Anything that anyone could want can be copied until there is no more want.
If the patterns can be stored, I can see it being used as a Star Trek style replicator strictly for small scale things.
Edit:
I've also been picturing some narcissistic megalomaniac getting a hold of it and starting [The Republic of Gary](http://www.falloutfacts.com/3/vault-108-gary.html). Unfortunately, due to the fact that he really couldn't stand the idea of anyone having a higher rank than him, The Republic of Gary is the site of the first 318 sided civil war. There were no survivors.
[Answer]
In this case you really are not 'teleporting' you are duplicating yourself and 'branching' out. There is would be no reason for you to 'come back' if you where already there.
So instead of thinking of it like a teleporter, you need to think of it like this. :) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N4gKn.gif)
Since YOU really are not traveling there but a copy of your consciousness up to that point in time you aren't 'going' anywhere. Once a copy of you is somewhere else, it will immediately start to diverge from the original, since our experiences make us who we are and what you and your clone experience will have diverged.
Most often this is handled by 'killing' the original and the 'copy' continues as if nothing has happened. But here we are talking about creating a whole new independent being every time the 'teleporter' is used.
So what would be most likely is rules dictating when someone can teleport/be cloned. There isn't a big deal if in general there is no reason to come back AND the other place needs the expertise (doctors, engineers, lawyers etc.) from the person/people traveling. I would expect that in general most 'trips' would be one way, and someone wouldn't go 'twice' unless the first copy died. Maybe in a terrible accident. (Keep sending copies to fill replacements!) This might make fearing death a little less, if you know 'you' are still living somewhere.
Further thoughts:
Since this is really a duplicator and not a transporter, we could take 'snapshots' of our selves and be able to be 'brought back' at any time, even from the 'dead'. With a technology that allows us to record our memories, we could have ourselves 'recreated' and 'view' our memories after we die and sort of live forever.
The other issue, is that you would need to prepare yourself for where you find yourself when you open your eyes. You close your eyes, knowing you are staying put, but with an exact duplicate, BOTH of you will be thinking the same thing until you open your eyes. Imagine thinking your going to go help your kids with their homework after the 'transporter' thing and then discover YOU are on a different planet and will never see your kids again. People would need to be taught about their mental state when they are being duplicated so as to not cause their twin to have a mental breakdown.
[Answer]
## On the uses of Teleport Cloning
You say tomato, I say **GLOBAL** **DOMINATION**!
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> We shall take only the greatest minds, the finest soldiers, the most faithful servants. We shall multiply them a thousandfold and release them to usher in a new era of glory.
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`-Col Corazon Santiago, "The Council of War"`
But then I've always been more bloody minded.
[Answer]
The first thing that you need to realize with this kind of teleportation is that you most certainly will never actually get to teleport anywhere. If you *did* teleport somewhere, all your memories are an illusion, and you will definitely have much less of a claim to all of 'your' possessions, since they're not actually yours. Thus, any product of a teleportation has a lot to think about, and most likely will end up very sad.
So your example of using a teleporter to go on vacation probably wouldn't work. You would stay behind while a copy of you with no possessions and false memories would run to the nearest bar and try to drown out their existential terror.
No, I think the best way to use a teleporter would be for more non-personal reasons. For instance, say you're a doctor and there's a faraway land you can't get to that has a bunch of people in need of medical treatment. You may 'teleport' there to provide aid to these people; *you* probably wouldn't get much out of it, except the joy that comes from doing an incredibly easy thing that helps people. It would be kind of like giving blood.
With this in mind, I'd think that the best time to perform teleportation would be on young adults, specifically people just out of college. At this age, you're fully trained and ready to enter the workforce, but you're still young enough that any copies of yourself won't feel too bad about starting a whole new life.
I would think there may be some restrictions on who can teleport, where and when and how often and such, but it seems to me like it'd be even more ethical than giving birth. Your copy is a copy of you, so they'd understand your reasoning, even if they are angry about being the unlucky one. I assume there would be some laws in place for 'guardians' for copies, so they can get taken care of until they find a job and stuff. Since I assume teleportation would already be expensive, I also assume there would be some big companies involved who would sponsor the copies in exchange for services rendered (sort of like indentured servitude). The original may even get something out of the deal; this brings to mind cases where the original really screws over his copies, but luckily if you're the kind of person who would do that to yourself, your copy is too, so they deserve it.
[Answer]
# Conflict, discrimination, paranoia, kidnapping, slavery, and suicide
Trying not to assume that every individual is the theoretical perfectly rational agent, my world quickly goes awry.
## Assumptions
### Economy
Nothing interesting here, but I'm going to dodge the issue of the economy collapsing by asserting that the teleporter is based on previously known technologies used for extremely low-cost fabrication of arbitrary simple materials and machines (the next, next, next generation 3D printers).
If society was destined to collapse in the face of such easy duplication of objects then it would have done so already, built itself up again, and this time around the teleporter does not substantially interfere with the economy at that level.
The core innovation here is merely the ability to duplicate a fully-functional and conscious human being.
### Technology
I'm going to assert that this technology isn't capable of scanning to storage for later playback. I'm assuming technology that works more like old analogue TV, where rather than trying to store the data before moving it on, it's managed as a continuous stream of extremely high bandwidth. More bandwidth than can feasibly be recorded and stored in a reasonable space.
The real reason for this is to keep some worms in their cans. There's already too much to discuss without the complications of backups, edits, and splices.
Also, if you have a storage medium that's capable of holding that much data, and it's smaller than the original object (otherwise just use the original object!), then what happens when you scan one of those storage devices? There has to be some kind of limit to the resolution.
### Alternatives
If you need teleporter technology that can't be subverted for generating clones, you can replace it with wormhole technology or matter-stream technology. These change the placement within the universe of the original instance, so you don't have to worry about accidentally getting two copies (that one episode of ST:TNG not withstanding).
### Philosophy
The use of a teleporter that involves producing a copy and destroying the original involves ... destroying the original. One assumes it's a painless death, but the copy is, in some sense, somebody else. I don't need to dig into it because it's been done to death already.
Likewise notions of identity and mortality in the face of a duplicate, etc.
The possible diversity of opinion is more important than correctness or logical consistency, so it's not clear that too much consideration helps in making predictions.
## Predictions
### Adoption
Assume that both options 1 and 2 exist, and they're used for different purposes or under different motivations.
1. Teleportation should only be used if you can deal with the existential implications (that the original is *killed*). Looking around the internet, it seems that a lot of people think they can cope, so there's no reason to expect that to change. In any case, if the original realises its mistake during dematerialisation we'll never hear about it so it's immaterial (so to speak).
Not everyone will be happy to use a teleporter. The apparent normality of the teleportees as they become more common will lessen the anxiety of some. Social pressure and convenience will help too.
2. Telecloning might be used practically for colonisation, and governments or corporations could drive these programmes promising both no interruption to your own life and an safe and exciting future for your clone (though conspiracy theories abound). Return trips for the clones may be forbidden because society hasn't got good answers for all the social and legal implications.
People may find their own philosophical objections to telecloning. Of those willing to go ahead, many will be averse to teleportation and take cloning as the safe alternative. Among them there may be some very callous attitudes to the fate of the clone. They might reason that a copy has no soul, or that the clone's consciousness is somehow more artificial than their own, or that so long as the original persists then the copy is simply somebody else's problem.
People should be wary of creating a clone too near to themselves. The scenarios have been played out in popular media for years, and the usual portrayal has messy outcomes. Whether those portrayals are realistic or not I expect that the perception would become more deeply entrenched as people refer to popular media to solve questions they've never had to think about before (because I'm pretty sure it's not mentioned in the bible). However, so long as it's possible some people will try it.
### Conflict
The clone knows it's a clone, and it knows that the original who chose to create it had a plan and presumed some authority over the copy. But that knowledge that it's a copy is only theoretical. In terms of real motives, the subjectivity of its situation quickly changes its attitude (as per the C&H cartoon in another answer).
Serious conflict is inevitable here, and could plausibly lead to violent crime. It may seem exceptionally difficult for someone to kill their duplicate, but an alternative view, that the other is superfluous so long as one survives, may take over.
Triggers could be anything from stolen funds (is it even stealing?) to "stay away from my wife!". This is where things might start to turn ugly.
### Discrimination
Because it's easy from a naive perspective to take the intentions prior to telecloning as concrete, and because the original stayed home while the clone went away and would be the usurper should it return home to cause any kind of trouble, society will likely side with the originals.
Laws may be passed discriminating against clones (but not teleportees, who are technically the same but have no such conflict and are too numerous to ignore).
It doesn't have to be all clones that cause trouble. Just enough to get in the media; and policy doesn't have to reflect a majority view, it oftentimes simply reflects a shoutey view. Even if it's not law it may be popular perception.
### Paranoia
If there are bad guys out there then they have to be identifiable, and a perfect duplicate of a good guy is the least identifiable thing in the world (except to the original).
Since the key identifier of a clone is its travel history, tracking this closely is the obvious solution. Teleport and teleclone machines may be modified to mark the copies they produce. Perhaps to pepper them with a benign chemical marker to make them distinct from the original. Something with an embedded serial number, so every transit or copy comes out unique.
But public perception and policy are inevitably so simplistic. What about the tricky cases?
### Kidnapping and slavery
What about teleporter fraud, resulting in an illegitimate original persisting at the same time as the teleportee? The operator may deliberately keep the original to sell as a slave or to hold to ransom. The law says the teleportee has restricted rights, but it doesn't realise this at first. This person didn't even have a plan for a copy that they can be expected to follow through with, so there can be no obligation on the copy to get out of the way. At least not morally, but the law might say otherwise.
These poor souls (or "un-souls", or whatever) will be poster children for a fight they never expected to be involved in. The fight for equal rights for clones.
Similarly there are the clones who went off on government/corporate contracts. Their working or living conditions might be far more terrible than they were led to believe, and they want out. If some escape and are able to make their way home they're going to end up in the same situation. The original has all the rights and the clone is merely the victim of misrepresentation and/or its own [pre-copy] callousness.
Can a clone even travel home? Its original may have been one of those people too afraid of teleportation to use it, consequently the copy itself has the same fear. Teleporting means certain death, and what benefit would it gain from sending a copy of itself back home? At best it could try for some kind of revenge or to tell people what's really happening; but in a paranoid surveillance society it may not get very far, and may soon realise it's best keeping its head down or shouting about conspiracies like a crazy person on the street.
### Suicide
Or consider the opposite. Imagine somebody too fearful to go through with destruction implied by teleportation, but so driven to live a new experience on a new world they try telecloning. What, then, if they realise their old-world life is awful? They become jealous of the fate of the clone.
The idea that there is a second self out there to keep continuity, coupled with depression, may make it easy to elect to perform a post-hoc teleportation.
## Other considerations
### Piracy
Along with misrepresenting a teleclone as a teleporter, there may be another way of fabricating discreet copies of teleportees. Skim off the communications between two teleporters, being careful to not interrupt the signal, or to replay it onward to the destination if necessary, and run that into your teleclone receiver. This copy can be enslaved or interrogated without anybody knowing.
Alternatively, and this may apply to some strict teleporter technologies as well, you do interrupt the communication so the traveller never arrives at their destination and then hold them for ransom.
### Memory
Memories are more fluid than most people like to admit.
A clone might actually forget that it's a copy. This could happen because it changes its memory of the teleclone to be a teleport, or it could go so far as to forget the whole process and just have a discontinuity or fantasy explaining how it got to where it is. Such a change might be a necessity to reconcile the feeling of continuity with its pre-clone life. If it *feels* continuous then perhaps the notion of being recently fabricated with a complete set of false memories just makes too little sense to retain as a memory, and so it's unconsciously dismissed and replaced with somethin more plausible.
## TL;DR
People who make clones close enough to come back home discover that they can't get along with themselves, culminating in some instances of violence and/or murder. This hits the media, then moral panic, clones lose freedom and rights, surveillance grows stronger to track clones. Complicated cases and misadventure eventually help to challenge people's prejudices. Then I taper off because I can't seem to imagine happy things.
[Answer]
**The key to a cloning teleporter is that it's not 50/50 whether you stay or go, it's both.** You stay, and you go. This is where religion and philosophy come into it.
## The continuity problem
[Picking the first result from google to explain this](http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-continuity-problem/)
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> Fans of science fiction are likely familiar with the continuity problem. You get beamed aboard the Enterprise by the transporter and everything seems to work perfectly. On Earth you are disassembled into your most fundamental particles in order to capture all of the information necessary to then recreate you in your exact state aboard the Enterprise.
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> The new you aboard the Enterprise is you in every detail, including your stream of consciousness – the thoughts you were having at the moment of beaming. But is it really you? Isn’t it more accurate to say that you were destroyed on Earth and are now dead, and a copy of you was created on board the ship? That is the continuity problem.
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(I have a vague memory of a Star Trek character refusing to use teleporters because of this)
Are you, *you*, after you have teleported? Are you just a crude copy that thinks it's you? Does that actually make any difference? **Also now there's some other guy who knows all your account details. Make sure you change all your passwords and bank details because he's gone to the Bahamas on your dime!**
On this particular note I'll leave you with [Will Riker and Will Riker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29).
[Answer]
Option one (going forward, *The Prestige* method) would be looked down upon in most senses, because current society as a whole tends to dislike mindful killing of people... even if they're terminally ill, or mass murderers, et cetera. I could see them making this option available for people who need to disappear, be officially deceased and become a legally different person (because, technically, they are) or for any other reason that a person needs to be dead. The Prestige method could also be used as a form of punishment, where the body is killed whilst also able to serve out a sentence, simultaneously. I would highly doubt the ability for people to overlook the death aspect and view this as transport.
Option two, Telecloning... It depends on the impact of the Telecloning on the cloned counterpart. If you can teleclone anything society would zip to breakdown status very quickly, similar to the story *A for Anything* or *The People Maker*. However, if it's more like a Xerox (that is, copies work, but you can't copy a copy), then there's going to be very interesting headspace to work through.
Since both individuals are freethinking individuals capable of independent thought, they would most likely be legally two different individuals, with similarity in name, genome & appearance, like identical twins. Because of that, there will be an interesting push and pull from governments on this issue... Pull back, because that makes all data-oriented things insanely difficult; they may also push it on other individuals, as they would be able to be taxed separately.
Telecloning still wouldn't be considered much by way of transportation, because "you" aren't actually going anywhere. This is, of course, provided there are no sort of psychic or other supernatural connection between the original. What it would do is increase the value of skilled professions, because the "same" individual could be working in all needed locations simultaneously. All doctors would be the best doctor, because you'd teleclone the best doctor, who opts to it, to all hospitals in a certain network. The best professors, counselors, consultants or other specialists could effectively work the entire field. Existing property laws would have to be changed, as anyone rich enough could not only buy multiple properties, but live in them, simultaneously. On one hand, this would allow any location to potentially jump to a certain industrial or economic level as another one without having to train a local workforce prior to expansion.
One massive thing that would have to be the managed, that no one else has mentioned thus far, is gentrification. This would impact the economy very much like the post-recession economics in the US in the 2008-2012 era (younger workers competing for jobs alongside those with decades of experience)... because "the best" is available as an option, that will push down on the employment levels of the rest of the economy. Not forever, because the clones start old and still age, but it will have a definite impact. Also the massive lack of diversity in the tech sector today will be replicated in all other industries as well - cloned CEOs, CFOs, doctors, researchers, designers, sportsball players, spies, et cetera. While telecloning would shorten the initial training/educational time of a new division, overall flexibility and creativity would massively decrease, because everyone using a teleclone would be thinking literally the same.
[Answer]
This exact scenario presented itself in a movie called "The Prestige" which came out in 2005. Nikolah Tesla helped a young magician create a device that copied himself for the famous disappearing / reappearing man trick.
I'd say the likelyhood of this being a good idea would only be feasible if it was somehow guaranteed the copy could not interfere with the life of the original.
Imagine you woke up somewhere else. What would you do to get back to your closest friends and relatives? Even if you thought you were prepared to accept not seeing them again, what if you change your mind after a month or two of missing them?
[Answer]
I have a problem seeing the difference between a teleporter and a copy machine, except that the teleporter wouldn't be like the traditional copy machine as we know it. I believe that if we ever had a teleporter and we were supposed to go different places is that we just would make duplicates by duplicates of ourself, while the real original person would never be able to get anywhere. Question is what makes us unique? I believe what makes us unique is the content of the brain, the experience we gathered through life and the memories. All this have made us the person we are today. I think at the very best we could copy ourself, but never teleport. On the second question on how we would deal with having multiple copies of the same person is rather self explanatory. It would pose a huge security threat and we would not be able to trust anyone. Also by destroying the original would mean killing yourself or have someone kill you.
[Answer]
This question is based on the assumption that sentient beings actually have a continuous consciousness over time. It certainly *feels* that way, but there's no compelling evidence that this isn't just an illusion produced by the presence of memories (and brain functions working over time).
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Assuming that the tele-cloning device produces a perfect copy of your brain state, there is no difference between the original and the copy. *Both* experience the sensation of continuity to the original, and in a very meaningful sense, both are correct.
Or, to put the same thing a different way, both are equally incorrect. Both experience the illusion of a continuous, personal identity. However, that identity had no substance. It's a sensation we have because our brains are full of memories which it links into a chain of events along the arrow of time. Since time has this peculiar property, we don't think of our future and past selves as removed from our current one in the same way as we think of a copy in the same time but at a distance. But, separation in time — as occurs naturally every instant — is really no different.
The "you" back home may be able to make claims about the matter from which your body is constructed, but if you're going to accept the possibility of a "*non*-cloning" teleporter as authentically "moving" you, those claims don't seem very strong in the important sense. (This is equally true if you accept the idea of time travel in which the traveller "hops" in some way rather than existing in the intervening stretch of time.)
This can be disconcerting, especially if you're really attached to the idea of possessing an individual thread of consciousness. But, even without a teleporter, "you" an instant from now are only the same "you" because of that track through time — which now branches to both places.
It may seem like this is an abstract, philosophical or even religious argument. But, the thing is, it doesn't really matter from a practical point of view. As long as the clone has the same memories and brain process state, the observable impact is exactly the same — there may be some heavenly accounting of who is the "real" you, but from *your* perspective, it will definitely be whichever of you is doing the thinking.
In the world as we have it, the idea of a soul is purely a matter of faith — there's no [21 grams of soul](http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp). But, to make your concept work, perhaps in your world, people *do* have an incontrovertible sense of having a soul, and perhaps it's even measurable — and when you use the cloning teleporter, it goes one way or the other.
*Then*, the impact on society would depend on where you want to take the significance of that difference. Do people without souls *act* differently? The two primary scenarios I can see are either *Blade Runner* or *Buffyverse Vampires*. Either you have second-class people considered subhuman, or you have a population of psychopath duplicates. Neither of these are particularly pleasant, and I can't see the technology being used for, say, family vacation travel.
[Answer]
**What about your soul?**
It's obvious, in many scientifically-provable situations, that you are more than just a bunch of atoms held together by attraction and energy. You have some sort of drive that we can't even fathom. Quantum teleportation wouldn't work because your new copy wouldn't contain your original drive, making it completely brain-dead. But if we temporarily ignore reality to say that the *old* one is a zombie, instead of the new, we still have a society that has to deal with loads of zombies. But when we can take you apart and put you together atom by atom, instantaneously, there might be a way to make new drives, or souls.
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[Question]
[
The Hydra is a mythical creature with the ability the regrow severed limbs, including the head(s). According to the [Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 version of the hydra], each time one limb is separated from the body, it grows back. Sometimes, two heads will grow to replace the lost one, until it reaches a certain limit. The only way to kill the beast is either to cut all the heads or to kill the body. It is not possible to kill the hydra just by cutting the same head several times in a row.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DqusY.jpg)
(source: [wizards.com](https://web.archive.org/web/20150211084659/http://archive.wizards.com/mtg/images/daily/wallpapers/WP_KhalniHydra_1280x1024.jpg))
Other species can also regenerate limbs, like the salamander. But the regeneration is somewhat different for the hydra since it also regenerate the heads as long as there is still one standing.
## So, I have three questions related to the regenerative ability:
* **Is it scientifically possible for the hydra to regenerate her lost heads?** I'm asking because it is more complicated to replicate the head than it is for
an arm or a leg. This is assuming that they have some kind of brain
(in the head) but have the same intelligence as most animals.
* **How long would it take to regenerate one head if it was as big as in the picture above?**
* This is related to the above question: **Considering the time and
energy required to grow a head, could they really grow several heads
in a row?**
[Answer]
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It's simpler if you put the brain somewhere else. Physiologically you'll have to run an optic nerve down the neck, but that's no weirder than having a spinal cord. Psychologically it avoids the question of how a hydra coordinates its thoughts between all the heads. Perhaps the real brain, including memory center, is located in the body and the heads have smaller brains which are only for local control and visual processing.
If you must put full brains in each head, regeneration comes with the additional problem of not just memory loss, but having to retrain each brain up from infancy to learn motor control. You can make the motor control recovery time shorter by making hydra intelligence and adaptability low, they're simply born with brains as developed as they need to be. Memory loss can be mitigated by the Hydra treating their brains like a [disk RAID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID) with each memory being stored in several brains.
Either way, regrowing a limb has to deal with the problem that the limb must remain protected from the environment while it is growing, that's a fancy way of saying it needs skin. As the neck and head grow, it would probably have to shed its now too tight skin many times like a snake.
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> How long would it take to regenerate one head if it was as big as in the picture above?
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The Internet consensus is it takes a gecko about two months to regrow their tail. Larger animals tend to grow slower than smaller ones, your hydra is a lot bigger than a gecko, and the cube-square law is solidly against you on this one. As an animal doubles in size its volume (and thus weight) increases by something like nine times. So *a lot* longer than two months.
Using the humans for scale, I'm going to guess that head is about 2 meters high and weighs about the same as a horse, or about 400 kg. It takes [about two years for a horse to mature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yearling_%28horse%29) so I'm going to say in the order of a few years for a hydra to regrow a head.
The neck probably adds another 6 meters and maybe 1200 kg which will take even more time to regenerate. If you want to make sure that hydra doesn't bother you for a good long while, aim low.
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Yes, if they ate enough. It would be a strain on their body, but I don't see how it would be much different from the multiple pregnancies, or the normal process of growing. All that bone and teeth will be a big strain on calcium, so they'll need a lot of that.
[1 kg of beef contains about 2300 calories](http://wolfr.am/39U1tdtz). A 400kg head would contain about a million calories plus essential (ie. the ones the Hydra cannot make itself) vitamins and proteins plus minerals. It would need to eat likely more than ten times that to regrow it and maintain itself while doing it. If you really want to figure it out, look into how much you need to feed a large, growing carnivorous reptile.
[Answer]
Scientifically it is not possible to regrow limbs in the sort of time-frames we are talking about here, however the same effect could be achieved at least for a while.
Have an alien creature with the main brain inside the body. Each head only has the intelligence required to improve its mouth-eye co-ordination for reflexes. The necks do not use bones but instead have a hydraulic reservoir that is pumped full of liquid to inflate them and fill the role of bones.
The hydra actually grows many heads and stores them coiled up and deflated inside its body. Due to space and energy constraints it normally only has a few heads active at any one time.
A natural reflex should one head be severed then immediately has it push out and inflate two more heads from its internal storage. To someone watching the heads would appear to emerge and grow extremely rapidly and replace the one head with two.
Once the threat is over it would deflate and return some of the heads to storage and gradually regrow the missing ones and replace any lost hydraulic fluid.
Why would something like this evolve though? I suggest two mechanisms that reinforce each other:
1. Food is hard to find, and a lot of creatures burrow. They use the heads to send them down burrows to haul the creatures inside out. This does mean the heads risk getting trapped or damaged though so they evolved to be able to abandon trapped heads (ideally pulling them out and eating them to reclaim the nutrients) when needed.
2. Many heads meant you were a successful hunter. It became a large part of their mating displays, as a result they evolved to grow more and more heads - but that wasn't sustainable all the time so they worked out how to collapse them when not in use. Eventually that evolved into the storage system.
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Yes, however, many things have sound science, but the practice of it is usually what holds it back, which the other 2 answers will explain.
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This would depend heavily on the last question. Sorry if this answer seems to be dodging the question, as this answer is heavily dependent on energy
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Imagine the human body, it can repair minor injuries, but this requires nutrition from food, and takes quite some time. So, now the hydra needs 2 things, mass and time/energy.
## Mass
Scaling this up to an entire head of beast of that size, they would at least need mass equal to their lost heads. Note the at least, it is not enough to have 500 kg of protein in your belly to regenerate the head, as the head contains noticeable other things, such as bones, teeth, the brain etc.
So, the Hydra would need to be extremely bloated/fat, containing enough nutrition within it to regenerate it's heads. However, this is great, for your question, as that means that there is an actual scientific end to their head regeneration. If they run out of nutrition, they can not regenerate anymore.
## Time/Energy
Alright then, let us assume the Hydra is the product of billions of years of evolution, or genetic engineering, or something to that effect. Because of that, the hydra simply needs to provide calories to be able to move the nutrition from her belly to her head and not worry too much about minor things like biology.
Well, you know some of the simple physics equations, Force is Mass \* Acceleration, Work is Force \* Distance, Power is Work / Time. With those, you can find that depending on how much calories the hydra focuses into the head regeneration, the time taken to regenerate also varies.
Some quick and not too specifically accurate high school level science:
1. Suppose that the head weighs 100 kg. (It should really be much heavier, but this is simpler)
2. Suppose that the distance from the belly to the head is 5 m. (Do note that this example hydra is much smaller than the one you want, but you should be able to scale it up)
3. To regrow the head in 1 s, the amount of force is 100 kg \* 5 m/s-2 \* 2 = 1000 N. The 2 is to stop the mass at where the head is.
4. The work done is 1000 N \* 5 m = 5000 J
5. The energy required is 5000 J / 1s = 5000 W.
So, the amount of work needed is not too much, only about 1000 calories, but the power output is quite sizable.
However, in the end, the power a creature can generate is largely dependent on it's food, so the limiting thing for your hydra would be how fat you want it to be. Either that, or give it super metabolism and have it eat things with some of it's heads while fighting to fuel it's regeneration
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It's certainly possible to regenerate. What's not possible (sans magic) is for them to regenerate quickly. In addition to the nutrition aspects mentioned by others, there's also the matter of thermodynamics. Healing/regeneration is fundamentally a bunch of chemical processes, and those processes produce waste heat. (Even notice how the area around a healing cut will be warmer than the rest of the body?) Do that too fast, and the creature cooks what it's trying to regenerate.
Brains wouldn't necessarily be a problem, if we assume that they've evolved a distributed parallel system, like a RAID disk storage system. All memories &c are mirrored across the brains (perhaps with a bit of time lag), so the regenerated brain's content is restored from the existing ones. Note, though, that cutting off a significant number of heads would seriously degrade the total, and could result in partial amnesia, depending on just how much redundancy there is.
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An article recently posted to *Cracked*, "[5 Fantasy Beasts That Wouldn't Work (According to Science)](http://www.cracked.com/article_22074_5-fantasy-beasts-that-wouldnt-work-according-to-science.html)" by Justin Crockett and Nathan Murphy, points out that a hydra might collapse under the weight of its heads:
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This means you'll have to make the heads light and not overly slow to regenerate. That got me thinking: what could look like a head but not actually be a head? (Consider the hind flippers of a seal: they perform the function of a fish's tail but are instead homologous to its ventral fins.) You could make the "heads" out of arms.
* Limbs would regenerate if amputated, as you pointed out for a salamander. Regeneration without magic is slow, but stories can be paced with other reasons why predatory pests (such as your heroes) might only occasionally being able to score an amputation.
* Limbs would have enough nerves to process reflexes. A newly generated limb would need some rest time to build up "muscle memory".
* Fangs would be analogous to teeth but adapted from claws, grinding things before feeding them to the smaller true head.
* The features analogous to eyes would be adapted from other claws. There are real skin conditions that cause skin to be light-sensitive. If a claw is adapted into a primitive lens over photoreceptor cells, reflexes could make the hand behave as a head that can "see" a predator.
* Cutting off the true head will kill it. But that's far easier said than done, especially with all those arms protecting the head. So "having to cut off all the heads" is more of a practical matter of cutting off all the arms before the head can be reached.
The head/arm analogy brings up interesting concepts for how it fights off random predators carrying a sword. One "head" could grab the pest and hold it, and then another "head" grabs the other end and rips it apart.
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The only way I can see that you'd get a hydra that could regenerate lost heads in a timeframe sufficient to employ the regenerated head against the enemy that chopped it off is actually quite simple:
Do not permanently bind the creature's cells together.
In conventional organisms, a creature's cells are bound to adjacent cells in a fashion that is difficult to reverse. This makes the bond strong, but slows healing.
Now, if we have cells that can bind to one-another reversibly, we have a whole different organism. That sword-swinging pest chops off one of our heads. The head, recognising that it is the lesser of the two pieces, proceeds to disengage its intra-cell bindings and reform so that it can rejoin the main bulk of its body as soon as possible, or failing that, become a smaller organism. The main organism could re-assign cells to reform to regain a lost organ or limb, becoming unimpaired but smaller due to the lost mass - until the lost mass rejoins. These cells would have to be a little more complex than our own, but not greatly so.
This would also account for the mythological method of dealing with the regeneration: burn the stumps, and eventually the whole creature. Cauterising the wound would kill a lot of the cells and slow down the business of regeneration. However, this mightstill not account for what would happen with the severed heads, which would have to be dealt with separately.
Why would this creature have a specific body plan and not be an amorphous blob that could do anything? The answer is the simple fact that the cells *are* bound together. It would take energy to unbind them, which could be better used for other things most of the time. The time taken to regenerate after an injury would depend on the magnitude of the injury, but small cuts might regenerate in a few seconds, and a major wound might regenerate in minutes, probably less than an hour.
Depending on the method used to repair injuries, and the magnitude of the injuries, it may not take much energy at all, or it may involve the complete reconfiguration of the body. Re-attaching missing extremities would be relatively cheap in terms of energy, while extensive body remodelling would be more expensive. A clean cut actually affects very little *volume* of cells, whereas a burn affects far more.
The main flaw of such a creature would that they would not be quite as robust as a permanently-bound creature. Depending on the strength of the intracellular bonds, it may be possible for a permanently-bound organism to physically tear a reversibly-bound organism apart rather than simply cutting it, however this would be as readily healed as any other injury.
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My modern setting has these humanoids called the Degenerates whose culture draws inspiration from those of Indo-Iranian steppe nomads like the Scythians, Sarmatians and Parthians who fight as mounted riflemen that ride mutated animals donning bulletproof armour. The Degenerates' most skilled warriors are armoured troops called *cataphracts* wielding heavy weaponry who sometimes ride dinosaurs dubbed Ekhidnades similar in dimensions and looks to the tyrannosaurid *Albertosaurus sarcophagus* (save for the fact that they have osteoderms, spiny protofeathers, stronger jaws and can expel streams of combustible liquid from their mouths).
I've envisioned that a cataphract would ride their Ekhidnades using a three-person saddle, sitting in the front most seat near the Ekhidnades' neck with while firing a minigun (like a GAU-19 or M134) anchoring onto a swivel mount fixed to the saddle. Said minigun hooks up to car batteries and ammo crates which would provide power and ammunition, somewhere around the Ekhidnades' flanks. Two other *cataphracts*, would meanwhile, ride shotgun and provide additional firepower with light machine guns, anti-materiel rifles or RPGs as the Ekhidnades rampages about, biting, trampling or immolating anyone unlucky enough to get in its way.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kIDny.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8jWox.jpg)
*Reference image for the Ekhidnades' armour*
**Would an saddle mounted mini-gun be useful/practical on such an animal?**
**Why or why not?**
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### Mount the gun, yes
The M134 has a lightweight variant, which weighs just under 20kg.
I think that's entirely plausible to mount on an animal that size - use leather or some other padding underneath the gun so no metal touches skin, vibrations are minimised, and using leather belts to wrap around and tighten. You'd want a few attachment points at varying angles around the body to avoid chafing or it coming loose during manoeuvres, but the actual mounting I don't see as an issue.
### Then the problems begin
None of these are insurmountable, but they will make things complex. You're looking at a training regime measured in years:
* Sound. Have you ever set off a firecracker behind a dinosaurs head before? Me neither. Considerable training will need to be done to make the animal not bolt when its fired.
+ The easiest way of doing this training (just set off loud bangs and zap him when he reacts) will actually make the animal timid and teach something called "Learned Helplessness". You want the animal to assist you in battle, not be an emotional wreck.
+ You probably want to give him earplugs, and start with a low volume recording of gun fire. Get him to do some known task and play the sound. Treat when he doesn't flinch. Then slowly raise the volume.
+ You can't use a deaf breed, or intentionally deafen him, as you need him to respond to commands at a distance. Come here. Run away. Don't eat them they're friendly, etc.
* Recoil. Mini guns put out decent recoil, they just don't appear to recoil when vehicle mounted because they're attached to the mass of the jeep. Unless you plan on drilling into dinosaur bone to mount this thing, that's going to be a lot of force. Some aircraft get so much recoil from their guns they could theoretically get airborne from the gun power alone. In addition to not responding to the sound, the animal needs to be trained to not move when it feels the recoil force pulling back - but still move when the reins are pulled back.
+ This is going to be very hard to train as "keep back steady despite it feeling like I'm correcting you" is pretty abstract. Training assistance dogs for this kind of abstract leveling is possible (people with balance issues can use their big dog as a crutch), so it should he possible in dino, but the training takes a long time.
* Dino movements aren't going to be synchronised with the gun.:
+ Firing a gun from an aircraft needs precise calibration - e.g. timing the firing pin impact such that the bullet passes between strokes of the propeller. Your dino is not going to be in sync with the gun. If dino tries to attack a thing that is attacking him up close, his head will go between it and the gun.
+ If the dino is being attacked by a ranged weapon, the dino will turn to face it, both to charge at it and to minimise himself as a target. That will block your firing solution.
+ The dino's back won't be level while moving, his back will twist as he walks, and move up and down all over the place. Once again, walking in a way which will minimise back movement can be trained, but will take a long time.
It may be easier to domesticate the dino and use him to pull the gun into place on a wagon.
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There are a couple of problems.
* Weight. 3 humans are light. OK. But then you are adding machine guns. But ok, your mount is tough. However you are also adding several other weapons and then you are adding armor and a sort of electrical system for the weapons but wait there is more. AMMO!
* Vibrations. The poor animal is not an infantry fighting vehicle. Remember that recoil exists and it has to go somewhere.
* Poor armor. Well it is true that modern tanks are not that worried about their shells exploding when they are hit, because thick armor and all that. However, you are not working with a tank or an armored personal carrier or anything similar. Your rockets for the RPGs are hanging by the side, and your 50 cal rounds are exposed.
* This also complicates things as it is true that even vehicles have certain weak points and engineering can only do so much. But a living creature needs much much more flexible movements, cavalry are all about that to begin with, and so you are looking for a losing trade. Not that nature is bad. But nothing in nature had to evolve to be an mobile fighting platform and the absolute genius of human engineering rules the battlefield.
* Does this model provide better fighting options than existing stuff? Like is it more protective, can you add more stuff to it, like communication equipment... etc, can you easily fix it?
* The easily fixing part again rears its ugly head. If your military vehicle, whatever that is now, has a completely blown tire you just stop, context dependent I know, and change it. Problem solved. But how the heck do you replace the legs of that thing if they get damaged from a mine or enemy shot?
* **Unless tanks have magically vanished, they will eat those things for dinner.**
* Without tuning down the weapons in the setting those animals will be torn to shreds by enemy fire from a mile away. Modern rounds are very good at killing things that don't have tank armor.
* Also how do they handle guided missiles?
* Anti-infantry artillery and general anti-infantry rounds. They would be very effective against a moving flexible animal because it does not have the same armor in most of its body and unlike tanks or vehicle it has organs everywhere and taking a hit means pain and it can bleed... etc.
* I won’t even mention air superiority.
* This is a quick list and I am sure we can add more stuff to it, especially from actual experts or soldiers.
However, far be it for me to tell you it is a bad idea. I mean, it is a bit of a frame challenge anyway, so I just wanted to raise points that you might already have solved in your own world. It is all about how you set your world.
However I want to add a couple I think actually helps your idea without too much complication.
* Cavalry used special weapons. And your guns are very very powerful for a weapon designed to be all about close range. Historically speaking cavalry, afaik, had shorter rifles to reload on horse back... etc. They had long lances and relied on mobility. Anyway, my point is that for the GAU-19/B your effective firing range is 1,800 m. That is **insane** for cavalry. Cut down on all aspects of your weapons. The range, the ammo, or even the firing rate. Again you want to get close and fire. Not provide a fighting platform from 2 kilometers away because why is it mounted then? Mounted archers are a thing yes. But that also requires close range by our standards.
* Specially designed ammo pouches. You want to minimize the chance of a lucky hit exploding your ammunition and killing your soldiers. So not only are they are more resilient to damage but they are made so that if a fire catches them they can be quickly expelled away from the animal.
* Shock and awe weapons. Forget about those big weapons and even human siting and firing. Fit the thing with stuff like 556 automatic guns and throw it away inside the enemy lines and fire at all directions. Even stuff like grenades are useful. This is how cavalry fought. The cataphracts closed in and used clubs for stationary fighting. Or they charged with lances.
* You can perhaps breed hearing out of the animal to ignore the insane noise of a modern weapons. Sight is not a problem I think.
* Maybe its natural armor, engineered or just natural, is a highly evolved sort of carapace that is like the stuff on Tyranids from Warhammer 40K. Maybe even remove the pain aspect from most of its body, as we know from history that when elephants got damaged too much they tended to run amok, and destroy their own lines.
* Maybe there is a larger, more specialized version, to be a mobile bio-shield? I don't remember the actual historical things but basically they were like this little construction of different materials that soldiers wheeled from inside to approach the enemy walls without taking too much incoming fire. So perhaps there are three of them, one having armor to safely deliver the other two?
* Other aspects of speed and comfort can be played with. I mean is it fast? Is it fuel efficient? You can mess around with that as you see fit.
* Lastly if our tanks exist in your work they will still rule the grounds battles.
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## No, they can't carry that much
Let's take stock of just how much you are carrying:
* 3 average human riders = 186kg
* 3 saddles = 21kg
* 1 minigun = 20-63kg (depending on which you go with)
* 1 average car battery = 19kg
* enough ammo for 2 minutes of sustained fire = 140-360kg (depending on which you go with)
* Weapons and ammo for side riders 30-120kg
* additional kit for 3 soidlers (tents, rations, etc.) = 60-150kg
* 1 suit of cataphract style barding + 3 suits of armor for riders = 255kg
That means at a bare minimum you are looking at 731-1174kg. Your diagram shows an animal that is probably about the weight of an Allosaurus (1,500 kilograms). Smaller bipeds like humans and ostriches can just barely carry this % of their body mass, but Ekhidnades have much smaller leg cross sections to body size to begin with than humans or ostrich and the square-cube rule is working against them; so, I will have to say no, they could not carry that much.
Another problem with your Ekhidnades is that they do not appear to be grazing animals, this means that they will need a LOT of food per day. Depending on it's exact diet, it will need about 10-30kg of food per day; so, going on long campaigns will be impossible without leaving lots of room on the creature's back for its own rations.
## Possible solutions:
**Option A:** Remove the side gunners and add pack animals to the group that just carry logistics stuff. This would drop your total weight to as little as ~440kg. While still a heavy encumbrance, it should be much more manageable.
**Option B:** Use quadrupel herbivorous mounts instead. At this scale, the mounts would closely resemble war elephants which we know could carry 3 well armed and armored riders, full barding, and needed supplies.
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### Possible, maybe, but not practical.
It would be just as possible to mount a machine gun on this dinosaur as it would be to mount it on an elephant: entirely doable, technologically. However, it wouldn't make sense from a military perspective. If you have machine guns, you have military vehicles. There's a reason why horse cavalry became obsolete after WW1.
Cars, trucks, and tanks don't require massive amounts of food to stay alive; they only need gasoline or diesel fuel when actively being driven. They don't generally don't get killed by a single stray shot from a bog-standard rifle; you'd need to use specialized anti-vehicle weapon against them. If they suffer some minor damage sufficient to mission-kill them like a thrown track or blown tire, that can be corrected with some maintenance time while an animal whose leg has been shattered by a bullet or explosive might need to be put down since it can never be replaced.
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## Cyborg dinosaur!
The gun is built into the dinosaur.
Modern cars are drive-by-wire for smog. You tell the computer to shift, and it shifts. That way the computer *isn't surprised* by the sudden event, and is able to pre-adjust fuel injection etc.
Our dinosaur can't either. **The dinosaur must fire the gun**. The gun is part of its body. needs to choose to fire: so it will *expect* the side-effects: recoil, noise, etc. **You must then train it well.**
You might have to raise the dinosaur from a baby with ever increasing gun weights, several basic sizes and shim weights added every day, so the gun feels like part of its body and it's used to moving with it.
It isn't knocked off balance by the recoil because it braced in anticipation of it. It isn't shocked by the noise because *it made* the noise. (A dog isn't surprised by its own barking). It moves its head well out of the firing arc because it learned in training it got electric shocks if it didn't.
The dinosaur must aim coarsely, but a computer with servos will do the fine correction.
**The dinosaur knows when it's Winchester** because it can feel the weight of the empty ammo box, and can warn the human of low ammo. It knows how to help humans change the mag, or stand and heel correctly so the autoloader on the ammo truck can do the same.
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It is undoubtedly possible. And, as other posters have noted, with a lot of training and a few adaptions, it might even be possible to actually use it.
The issue though is one of practicality. There is a reason why cavalry are little used, in the second half of the 20th century horses were only used for transport. In the age of artillery and machine guns they are big, vulnerable targets. Your dinosaur even more so.
As a bit of Hollywood showmanship, it's terrific, and I think we'd all like to see that movie. But, as with the handheld minigun in Predator ...let's not get too bogged down in the realism thing.
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# ***Different Ideas for Different Mounts:***
The ideas in these answers aren't bad, but if you love the idea of a giant bipedal dinosaur as a mount for your troopers, keep an open mind. First, you want you critters to be cheap and easily controlled, stable in a fight, breathing fire, and carrying a big, long ranged rapid fire weapon. I will handwave HOW you get dinosaurs, and assume they just are. I am imagining a tropical, forested environment where pop-up concentrated ambush attacks would be most effective. Bipedal herbivores would be able to feed up and down such trees.
First, the biology will do whatever you want, so I would say go with a herbivore rather than a predator. The predator still can work, but herbivores are likely to be more abundant in nature, are cheaper to feed, an are usually more endurance-based (I know, generalizing). These creatures could even be repurposed agricultural animals, depending on the conditions. Skip fire-breathing, and mount flame-throwers on the beasts. It requires a lot less energy for the critter and weapons can be easily swapped. You might even be able to balance the weight of a flame thrower with a mini-gun.
Rather than very small-brained critters somehow following complex tasks, have an animal who is pithed, and the skilled rider manipulates controls to induce the animal to follow instructions. This can be as simple as a needle inserted into the brain or spinal chord, or as complex as a bundle of implanted wires stimulating behaviors (or anything in between). Your people can then swap out dead mounts easily by simply rounding up wild dinos and pithing them, rather than requiring extensive breeding, training, etc. but they still could breed them for a steady supply.
With a dino that is easily kept calm, the machine gun is relatively simple. Side-mounted might work better, possibly with a slot for a pin on each side so the dino isn't always "left" or "right." The gun would then be best mounted sideways centrally, with a "pilot" at the front near the head, gunner in the middle, and weapon-crewman opposite the gun, balancing weight.
The advantages of your dinos over vehicles will be silence, height, and range (as they can eat plants in a forest, not refuel). I envision a single dino or a small squad popping up on an enemy patrol, opening up from longish-range and pouring vast quantities of fire on the enemy for a very brief time. They are tall, and can shoot over low vegetation, and your pilot can lift the head up to see over obstacles with a commanding view. Then they would melt away silently into the underbrush.
Alternately, flamethrower-equipped units could sneak up on enemy positions, blazing, and the first thing enemies would hear is the unholy scream of flamethrowers (it's an evil noise, if you aren't familiar).
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This one's more sociological, and it seems like a shoe-in to me, but sociology was never my strength.
Given how pronounced the Coriolis effect of a smaller Von Braun wheel would be, does it seem likely that crews on star ships with such environments would habitually develop some odd quirks that account for it? Pouring liquids causing them to aim off to the side of the receptacle, aiming a little oddly when they urinate, and so on? Things that would make them seem like klutzes during the rare times they ever went planet side and experienced authentic gravity?
It seems obvious to me that they would, but I'd love an opinion from someone who understands psychology and sociology far better than I do.
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**Depending on spaceship design: possibly, especially if they grow up there.**
While ingrained reflexes and responses can be relearnt, they do take time and practice to get adjusted to. You can see this when people try to learn to ride [backwards bicycles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0). People get it, but it takes time to relearn automatic responses.
If someone has experienced having to aim slightly to the left to pee, the first few times they try it planetside they'll probably be cleaning the floor (as well as if they're tired, drunk or not really concentrating).
Thanks to @ALambentEye for a video on how quickly these sorts of quirks can develop: [clicky link 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_seXo-Enc&feature=youtu.be). On the flip-side, this does indicate that any klutziness would be relatively short-lived as well.
Thanks to @Cody as well for this video of astronauts adapting to conditions back in gravity: [clicky link 2](http://youtube.com/watch?v=PVxaL8CAO4M)
I'm not sure about the effect on people who grew up on the ring. I'd anticipate that they'd have a harder time adjusting given that their early developmental stages involve a different set of head-physics. This study involving the development of [self-righting in rats reared in microgravity](https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/jphysiol.2004.074385) indicates that there might be a developmental window for developing certain kinaesthetic behaviours. However, earth-born people can quite readily adjust to microgravity, and your scenario doesn't involve such a drastic change as life on the ISS. Given that, I'd expect your native wheel-worlders to struggle a little more, but still not experience permanent differences.
**Another neat point: I'd expect your wheel-people would jump strangely too.**
When you jump on a wheel that's spinning to produce its gravity, you don't land precisely where you jumped from. The reason for this is that while you're in the air above the wheel, your horizontal momentum describes a smaller arc around the centrepoint than the wheel. This means that the wheel beneath you in effect spins further than you do, so when you jump directly upwards you land slightly away from your departure point.
This happens on earth, but because it's circumference is so enormous the effect is minuscule. The smaller a spinning object gets, the more pronounced it gets.
So your wheel-people would probably try to hop up a kerb and stack it the first few times they've worked it out.
*I expect I've butchered the description of why that works. There was an excellent explanation I was going to link to but I can't find it! Happy for feedback on that :)*
**Edit:** @MikeNichols has made a very good point that the effects of this will be directional depending on which orientation someone is standing in the spinning wheel. This probably suggests that if consideration is made to this in the design of the spaceship people will get used to consciously working out these sorts of issues so will likely have little issue adapting to environments where you don't need to consciously accommodate for them.
If you want this to happen, you need some select oversights in spaceship design. A one-way system around the ring, and/or toilets only facing one direction would do it.
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One thing that would be immediately noticeable would be the ‘space legs’
Very much like [sea legs](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusions_of_self-motion) (where the brain has compensated for the constant rolling motion of the waves and gets confused on solid ground) your space-dwellers will have to deal with the *lack* of dizziness caused by the Coriolis forces messing with their inner ears. This would typically be characterised by vertigo and a constant feeling of leaning when stood upright. As someone who occasionally suffers from vertigo I can attest to this being thoroughly unpleasant and utterly debilitating if you aren’t prepared for it.
Much like sea legs, however, I suspect that space legs would wear off very quickly once your brain gets used to not being in constant ‘motion’.
ADDENDUM: It turns out there’s already a medical condition related to this: [Mal de debarquement](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_de_debarquement) is often felt after a person is no longer on a moving vehicle, and while it rarely occurs at the same time as vertigo it shares many of the same symptoms as sea legs and is much more permanent. If your folk are long term space dwellers then it’s possible that they would experience this instead of the short term ‘sea legs’.
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People living in a Von Braun wheel large enough to require navigation would be able to tell the direction by simply shaking their heads. On Earth, they'd be as lost as someone who grew up with a compass and got suddenly deprived of it.
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## Your prediction is correct, according to the scientific field of [Applied Behavior Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis) (ABA):
Described simply as; [*the scientific study of behavior*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_analysis_of_behavior). ABA explains your prediction. The terms that we need for our explanation are **[operant conditioning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning)**, and **[generalization](http://wps.prenhall.com/chet_cooper_appliedbeh_2/73/18708/4789281.cw/index.html)**. This is a scientific field so not all terminology is easily understandable, but I will try to explain the key terms in everyday language.
You can also skip to the conclusion if you don't want to understand the jargon.
[***Operant Conditioning:***](https://www.iloveaba.com/2012/10/the-basics-operant-conditioning.html)
People (and animals) naturally modify their behavior based on the outcomes of their behavior. The shorter the time between the behavior and the outcome, the faster the behavior will change. Generally, rewarding a behavior will increase it in frequency (AKA the behavior happens more often). Punishing a behavior will instead decrease it in frequency (AKA the behavior happens less often).
An important addendum is that what is 'rewarding' and 'punishing' is not universal across people and animals.
*A famous and extreme example:*
An autistic adult who is not able to speak smashes his head against a concrete wall at his clinic several times a day. Everyday for months, and clearly on purpose. *The staff think he is crazy.*
Well no. BCBA's, (basically licensed therapists from this field), in this situation found that the man was motivated by reducing his toothache pain, that no one was aware of. So hew was smashing his head against the concrete wall to relieve the tooth pain. The autistic adult could not speak/write and was not social, so this information could not be communicated. After identifying and extracting said tooth, the head banging stopped because the reward for the behavior was gone.
Here we have an example of a reward increasing how often a behavior happened, and the connection was not obvious.
[***Generalization:***](https://cultivatebhe.com/blog/generalization-aba-therapy)
Basically, learned behaviors can and will be applied to other similar situations. Certain circumstances can increase or decrease this effect, but we won't go into them as they are not necessary for answering this question.
**Conclusion:**
With these two terms we can now easily describe what happens in your space scenario.
1. Various everyday behaviors are rewarded for being done differently in space. So everyone adopts these behavioral adustments. For example peeing off to the side and into a toilet is rewarding, but peeing everywhere on the floor by aiming badly is punishing because we now have to clean up the mess. So these new behaviors are widely adopted across the crew.
Some kind of adjustment will be made naturally, even if no one explicitly states this space life dilemma. This is because operant conditioning does not require cognitive understanding of a situation. This is why it works on dogs, rats, fish, and pretty much anything with a nervous system. Action and outcome, is all that is required.
2. These behavioral modifications generalize to various other situations, including peeing on earth. When the astronauts are back on earth. They apply their new behavior to an old situation and now it doesn't work.
At least for a few times until they readjust. Although perhaps when they go back to the space station now they will pee their old way again, and make a mess again.
] |
[Question]
[
My first post on Worldbuilding, hello all!
So my question is what could be some interesting logic or thoughts behind having a lightning magic user being able to fly?
To quote another user who wanted to build a lightning rifle... ([Lightning Rifle](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22347/lightning-rifle))
"Typical lightning requires a large difference in electrical potential, and something that prevents equalizing this difference. In lightning storms the ground and clouds (in normal cloud-to-ground scenarios) the "polarities" of our difference in charge. The air itself insulates the exchange of electricity to balance out these charges.
Lightning produces "leaders" prior to the actual flash of electrical discharge we see. Leaders are Channels of ionized air that effectively seek out shortest path (and produce the zig-zag pattern of the bolts)."
The idea I am toying around with is that the lightning casters will do exactly this, generate a massive charge around themselves and a corresponding opposite charge around their target. That said, I'm curious if there could be any potential for this to eventually lead itself to some form of flight.
[Answer]
Ion flight.
<http://news.mit.edu/2018/first-ionic-wind-plane-no-moving-parts-1121>
>
> Unlike turbine-powered planes, the aircraft does not depend on fossil
> fuels to fly. And unlike propeller-driven drones, the new design is
> completely silent.
>
>
> “This is the first-ever sustained flight of a plane with no moving
> parts in the propulsion system,” says Steven Barrett, associate
> professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “This has
> potentially opened new and unexplored possibilities for aircraft which
> are quieter, mechanically simpler, and do not emit combustion
> emissions.”
>
>
> The team’s final design resembles a large, lightweight glider. The
> aircraft, which weighs about 5 pounds and has a 5-meter wingspan,
> carries an array of thin wires, which are strung like horizontal
> fencing along and beneath the front end of the plane’s wing. The wires
> act as positively charged electrodes, while similarly arranged thicker
> wires, running along the back end of the plane’s wing, serve as
> negative electrodes.
>
>
>
---
>
> The fuselage of the plane holds a stack of lithium-polymer batteries.
> Barrett's ion plane team included members of Professor David
> Perreault’s Power Electronics Research Group in the Research
> Laboratory of Electronics, who designed a power supply that would
> convert the batteries’ output to a sufficiently high voltage to propel
> the plane. In this way, the batteries supply electricity at 40,000
> volts to positively charge the wires via a lightweight power
> converter.
>
>
> Once the wires are energized, they act to attract and strip away
> negatively charged electrons from the surrounding air molecules, like
> a giant magnet attracting iron filings. The air molecules that are
> left behind are newly ionized, and are in turn attracted to the
> negatively charged electrodes at the back of the plane.
>
>
> As the newly formed cloud of ions flows toward the negatively charged
> wires, each ion collides millions of times with other air molecules,
> creating a thrust that propels the aircraft forward.
>
>
>
---
>
> This was the simplest possible plane we could design that could prove
> the concept that an ion plane could fly,” Barrett says. “It’s still
> some way away from an aircraft that could perform a useful mission. It
> needs to be more efficient, fly for longer, and fly outside.”
>
>
>
It's the newest thing, and since your caster is a giant electricity generator, they should be able to do this. Either with their fingers to look really talented, or with specially designed suits.
This has a rather unique and terrifying benefit that it is completely silent, so your lightning mage is also a perfectly silent flying assassin, able to go anywhere and hurl bolts on unsuspecting foes.
[Answer]
I think Trevor's idea of ion flight is much more reasonable and in line with what you would want to do, so that's probably the best approach.
But for the sake of exploring options, they could also potentially ride the shockwaves of their own lightning. When lightning strikes it heats up the air significantly (up to 30 000 K), and this air quickly wants to expand due to the nature of gasses and the reaction to heat.
This produces a large pressure blast, which, if carefully positioned should be able to generate a pressure shockwave that is able to push them in the desired direction. It would be a tough balance of being far enough away to not injure; but close enough to still be within the range of the wave before it breaks into thunder. You may need to be wearing protective equipment, or handwave it away. Considering they are able to generate lightning in general, it might be best to assume the pressure doesn't harm them.
You could probably make it a lot better by wearing some sort of glider or wings to increase the lift from the pressure wave. I would think someone dedicated to this may even build some sort of framework that goes behind them that has two surfaces which could build opposing charge; with a lift generating device placed directly in front like a sail. You could essentially make a heat engine that uses ambient air and is worn like a backpack.
The benefit of this is that you would look like an absolute badass riding a trail of successive lightning bolts to your destination. You would be practically *riding the thunder* (if you ignore the semantics about when the pressure wave actually becomes "thunder").
This option is essentially the opposite direction from Trevor's option. The ion flight would allow a stealthy controlled approach. Riding the thunder would definitely make an entrance, which may or may not be beneficial depending on if you wanted to intimidate or not.
[Answer]
Electrostatic levitation
<https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electrostatic+levitation&page=&utm_source=opensearch>
Example: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv__Zln-h5Q>
Not sure how to summary a video.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_levitation>
>
> Electrostatic levitation is the process of using an electric field to levitate a charged object and counteract the effects of gravity. It was used, for instance, in Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment and is used to suspend the gyroscopes in Gravity Probe B during launch.
>
>
>
[Answer]
Use them to make plasma thrusters!
If they can bend their lightning bolts around into rings, and exercise great control, then the more skilled of the casters could use them as make shift plasma thrusters, only instead of expelling ions of xenon fuel, they can use additional bolts to form plasma and blast it through the ring via magnetic fields. After all a strong enough arc will rip the electrons off of atoms to form plasma, it could even be used to melt/weld things ( arc welders and arc furnaces? )
The end result being a bright ring spewing out fire, a makeshift weapon, as well as expert casters being able to fly as far as the edge of space, or make multiple appear to lift heavy objects
The bonus is, there's sort of real world precedent, this is equivalent to a magnetoplasma rocket, such as VASIMIR, except instead of magnets you have rings of electricity/lightning
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/50Wl5.jpg)
[Answer]
1. [Magnets,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=AU0q4wVohF8) have some magnets in your clothes (possibly electromagnets) then generate a set of repelling electrical fields around yourself making your armor wanting to escape in the direction you want to fly
2. get some wings (of paper or something) then partially transubstantiate yourself to lightning much reducing your weight enabling lighter than air flight
3. Don't fly. Teleport by becoming lightning and aim yourself where you want to go
] |
[Question]
[
Let's assume that there's a species of eagles that's about the size of an [Andean Condor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean_condor) (about 3m wingspan, 1.5m length, 10kg) and that there's a culture that has managed to tame this creature (or domesticate it, depending on what's realistic). Technology is preindustrial with early steel metallurgy, i.e. early middle ages; and the world is completely earthlike.
Considering that [dogs have been used extensively for war efforts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_in_warfare) in all kinds of situations, from support and guard duty to combat, from assault to clean-up. And that eagles have been used to [hunt animals as large as wolves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWFtWzFbXCY) and there are reports of [eagles hunting children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowned_eagle#Attacks_on_humans). How plausible would it be for the aforementioned culture to use these eagles in battle? how would they most likely be used?
[Answer]
There are a number of ways they could be used, but maybe not in ways you would expect.
The biggest problem with military birds is that they can't be armored enough to protect them from archers. Any armor that could deflect an arrow is going to be too heavy, or just plain in the way. Birds of that size are going to make a substantial target, very inviting to a bored archer.
So if you have to spend your time avoiding archers, what do you do?
Carry Messages: Information is the lifeblood of any campaign. A bird will be able to get back and forth to the front relatively easily and without the risk associated with a ground based messenger. Conversely, they can be trained to hunt enemy messenger birds. At the size you are talking, they aren't going to be prey for your enemies airforce, while your enemies messenger birds will be a light snack for the eagles.
Harass enemy infantry: Hit them while they are encamped for the night. Hit the sentries to make them paranoid and maybe not paying to close attention. Hit troops at random while they are trying to set up for the night. Train the birds to go for the eyes. This is an injury that can take a man right out of the fight to come and can be done in a fast pass.
Hit the Baggage Trains: Baggage trains mean pack animals. There are a lot of pack animals that would panic at the sight of a 3 meter bird, especially if the bird is going for their eyes. If you can hit disrupt the baggage train, the whole enemy campaign will fall apart.
Those are the biggest uses I can think of. Just use them in places where the archers aren't going to be.
[Answer]
Presuming the bird can fly higher than an archer can shoot an arrow; you can use them for artillery if nothing else: Eagles have sharp eyesight and superb positional awareness in the air (they know when they are precisely over a fish in the water far below, in order to dive for it); and most birds can readily carry about 50% of their weight in flight; birds of prey often their full weight.
For a A big bird like this, train it to fly high over enemy troops and drop a load (like 50 pounds worth) of arrow-like missiles, finned for proper flight orientation with a heavy, sharp head. About one pound. You can even design the finning to create some dispersal over the target. from 1000 feet (about 100 stories, so not as high as it sounds) these will strike with devastating force.
Specifically, the impact energy of a 1 lb weight (.45 kg) dropped 1000 feet (about 305 meters) will be 1345 Joules; compare that to a 45 caliber bullet with an impact energy of 458 Joules. The drop will take about 7.9 seconds.
Of course, with that kind of energy, the projectiles could be just rocks, but if they are sharp they will likely penetrate shields, armor, helmets and horses.
This type of training is simple enough to be feasible for birds; especially a raptor (generally smarter).
The eagle will be safe and can return for its reward and a short break before it flies again. A squadron of these? A handful of birders could defend against an army.
Added: [A bald eagle can cruise at 10,000 feet](https://qz.com/362856/watch-an-eagle-in-dubai-makes-a-world-record-for-highest-flight-captures-it-all-on-camera/), ten times higher than the 1000 feet I mentioned.
Also: [Weight birds can carry.](http://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_weight_can_the_strongest_bird_carry) A 20lb Harpy Eagle routinely carries 20lb, and has been observed carrying 40lb. A Great Horned Owl routinely carries 3 times its own weight. The OP had a scaled up bigger bird; if it is strong (like a Horned Owl) and 10kg (22 lb) it could plausibly carry 50lb. And if 1000 feet wasn't high enough, or we wanted to cut the weight in half; we could double the height to 2000 feet, and get the same impact. (impact is g x mass x height (in kg and meters), g is a constant, so half the mass, twice the height for the same impact...)
Additional: In response to comments about terminal velocity limiting the impact, I add this: This [Wiki entry on terminal velocity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity) says a speed skydiver can reach speeds of 530 km/h, a sharp, heavy dart-like object should be able to match that speed. It requires 1105 meters for 530 km/h to be the terminal speed of a gravity drop. That is 3625 feet; for any weight. Below that height (my examples were 1000 ft, 2000 ft) **height does help.** I am not talking about a typical archery arrow (which is not heavy); we want a point-heavy sharp object with orienting fins (but the faster the terminal speed, the smaller the fins can be); six inches would probably suffice. More of a heavy dart, in fact perhaps an iron or steel conical shape would be properly oriented within the 7-12 seconds the drop would take.
[Answer]
I'm going to say that eagles, even giant ones, aren't going to be much use in battle.
Training an eagle for battle is presumably going to be a fairly time consuming and expensive process. Most eagles don't reach maturity for about 4 or 5 years so you've got to invest a lot of time to get a battle ready bird. Depending on what kind of training they would need and when they could start that training they might need even longer than that.
But the first time you use them in battle they are likely to be killed as all it would take is one arrow (and they are large targets and don't fly all that quickly) or a hit from a blade. If you're lucky they might maim or kill someone first, but that's a hell of a lot of effort for what amounts to a single use weapon.
They might be useful for some other purpose but I can't quite think of anything at the moment that they would really work for.
[Answer]
I'll try to point out some behavior known birds of prey exhibit that side X could use to thwart Y *without* any domestication/training.
PBS's Nature had [an episode about Harpy Eagles](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/jungle-eagle-introduction/7189/) and the film crew had to wear a good amount of protective gear to avoid getting jacked while climbing up towards their nests and being relatively vulnerable to attack. In a wide-open space, they're probably easy to thwart with a bow or bullet, but the crew noted that simply *finding* the eagles in the dense jungle was difficult. Set your battle in the jungle, they'll blend right in.
There's also a curious thing about how [hawks are good for hummingbirds](http://www.audubon.org/news/why-hawk-hummingbirds-best-friend) via the cliche "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Hawks eat jays that eat hummingbirds, but the hummingbirds are too trivial of a snack to bother the hawk. [Researchers found](http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1676/08-174.1) that hummingbirds that nest near hawks have a 46% chance of fledging young vs. 9% of those that don't, a *dramatic* increase. This is a bit harder to use on tribe X vs Y given they're both species Z so can't be as dissimilar as a jay (120 g) and hummingbird (3 g).
[Answer]
Manco inca Yupanqui (1516-1544) was made puppet Inca by Francisco Pizarro in 1533. Manco led the great Inca revolt and beseiged Cuzco in 1536.
The Incas ambushed and defeated four relief expeditions sent by Pizarro, killing almost 500 Spanish and capturing others, along with weapons, guns, armor and horses.
Defeated, Manco retreated to Vicabamba and founded the Neo-Inca State that lasted until 1572.
There were probably many places on the mountain trails leading to Cuzco that were good spots for ambushes, with mountains on one side and chasms on the other side.
I remember reading a review of a fantasy novel some time ago. It quoted a scene from the novel. An expedition of the 19th century Royal Navy was somewhat out of it's element in the high Andes mountains. The protagonist was a little girl who was important for some reason, and was escorted by a boy midshipman her age. The expedition was being attacked by flying creatures of some type and people were being carried away or knocked off the path to fall thousands of feet.
And I remember the Battle of the Five Armies in *The Hobbit*. When the eagles arrived they knocked goblin warriors off the mountain to their deaths.
So if the enemy is crossing the mountains and is on a narrow path with a chasm to one side, an attack by giant trained war eagles could spread panic and confusion. The goal would be to get people and especially animals to panic and stampede and knock each other off the path into the chasm. Perhaps they could slow down the mountain crossing of the enemy army until the campaigning season was about to end and they had to turn around and go back without accomplishing anything.
In a medieval society warriors often wear armor of some type, and mounted warriors often ride horses or other creatures that wear armor. but transportation animals, that pull wagons or carrying loads on their backs, don't wear armor because they don't go into battle. Thus it would be easy for giant war eagles to bite and claw the transportation animals and stampede them.
At the Battle of Glorietta Pass, New Mexico, on March 28, 1862, Rebel forces drove the Union forces back and captured the pass. But a Union detachment reached the Rebel rear and the rebel wagon train. They burned 80 wagons and their supplies, spiked the cannon, and killed or drove off 500 horses and mules.
Without their supply train the rebels eventually called off their invasion of New Mexico and retreated down the Rio Grande to Texas.
Destroying the enemy supply system can force them to abandon their campaign.
[Answer]
I'm a little late to the party here, but eagles wouldn't be good to use in war for a variety of reasons. As already mentioned, people wear/wore armor, not much an eagle, even a large one could do against metal armor. As for dive bombing and knocking people about, you'd be better off doing exactly what they did in the past, using slings or just throwing rocks.
You also have a training problem. The way you train raptors is food based. You have to get them to want to attack people thinking they'll get rewarded. That will be hard enough to do as humans aren't their prey. But even if you got them trained for that, you take them out to the battle field and turn them loose, watch them soar off... And immediately turn around and attack the nearest human, maybe your buddy on the front line. You're probably gonna say "well train them to recognize certain uniforms or at least the enemies as their target". Uniforms weren't always a thing.
Eagles would still probably be too afraid to actually attack on a battlefield. Even if you got them to attack "guards at night" or whatever; while eagles have extremely powerful grip, but it doesn't take much to kill one in return. They could do some major damage, but they also might not do much at all.
IMHO as a falconer, the resources and time it would take to train an eagle to be used in war against people isn't worth it. It is probably why they weren't used. They have to eat meat and even smaller raptors can eat enough meat that could have been used for a soldier. A large eagle would likely eat enough meat daily that a soldier would eat. I'd rather have a soldier than all the issues I mentioned with the eagle.
So, what about supply/pack animals as others have mentioned? Take a guess. Not work it. You're gonna have people guarding the supply. Give a few of them a rake of sorts and swat them when they swoop down. Not much even a large eagle is going to do to a horse even if it hits one. Kill the eagle and you just wasted your enemies resources more than they could have wasted yours. In fact, let the eagle live and they'll continually have to waste their fresh meat on it.
So anyways, hate to be a party pooper but eagles aren't really worth the effort.
On the other hand, having trained falcons could be useful against enemy pigeons and in fact, peregrines were used to kill Nazi pigeons in WWII.
[Answer]
They could be used to drop rocks, as already mentioned. If your army wore a uniform, then you could train the eagles to attack people *not* wearing that uniform. They could fly higher than the archers could shoot, which would provide even more force in the rocks. Even if they don't penetrate, the rocks could do major damage. The eagles could be trained by putting food on enemy prisoners, and then giving them more food afterwards. All in all, it would be a very effective early air force. It could have been deployed against the mongols, and potentially stopped them in their tracks. It would take time to train them, but it would be effective after that time. Also they could be trained in a group, which would save time and money. It would be difficult, but when mastered effective. Besides, it would be cheaper and more accurate than catapults.
] |
[Question]
[
On a world I am building, I have a species of creatures that evolved from crustaceans. The problem is that while they have an exoskeleton, they also live on a world with the same gravity as Earth. I have thought of a few solutions, from an extra internal skeleton to internal exoskeleton partitions to hold critical organs in place, but they all seem to feel like excuses and not features.
What is the maximum size of an exoskeletal creature on a world with Earth-like gravity? What can be done to their biology to increase this size? What (other than the gravity) can be done to the planet to increase its maximum size?
[Answer]
The answer is around 2 to 3 meters on ancient Earth when the Earth's climate was hotter and there was a lot more oxygen.
I can't find the reference, but from what I remember, the limitations on exoskeletal creatures, as shown in other answers, didn't correlate with the strength needed to hold the weight. The reality is that it has to do with the cardiovascular systems of exoskeletal creatures being fairly inferior and only allowing for larger structures when they live in oxygen rich environments. Something to do with surface area and respiratory efficiency.
The basics from what I can tell and piece together is that exoskeletal animals developed in the oceans and started coming onto land. Around the same time, plants developed on land and cleaned the atmosphere up, enriching it with oxygen, which allowed exoskeletal animals to grow to relatively massive sizes compared to what they are today. Then, because plants dominated the landscape, tied up their fuel source and polluted their world they reached a point where they started to die off. The exoskeleton creatures weren't producing enough CO2 and animals that did started emerging that were a lot more efficient. This caused the exoskeleton creatures and plants to die off until stability with the new CO2 producing animals stabilized the system which ended up being much lower than what was needed for the 2-3 meter bodies of the exoskeleton creatures.
There is no reason that a creature with an exoskeleton couldn't develop a more efficient respiratory system as far as I know which would allow them to continue to evolve and dominate their world at larger sizes.
Once you get that then the limitations of exoskeleton weight come into play...
An interesting idea is that hypothetically these creatures could be massive and continue to grow throughout their lives, only stopped by when they become too big to molt and grow a new exoskeleton. This means that their brains could also grow massive compared to ours, because they aren't limited by the birth canal problem.
[Answer]
There are several limitations on the size of arthropods, partly related to the square-cube law and partly related to mechanics. All of these limitations have solutions, but the result may not qualify as true arthropods. A general overview may be read in [this article](http://bioteaching.com/gigantism-in-insects/).
## Known records
According to [this article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2412931/) (quote by wikipedia):
>
> The largest arthropod known to have existed is the eurypterid (sea
> scorpion) Jaekelopterus, reaching up to 2.5 m (8.2 ft) in body length,
> followed by the millipede relative Arthropleura at around 2.1 m (6.9
> ft) in length.
>
>
>
## Problem: Circulatory systems
According to [this article](https://allyouneedisbiology.wordpress.com/tag/giant-insects-oxygen/):
>
> Arthropods have an open circulatory system: instead of having arteries
> and veins to channel the blood, arthropods possess open sinus where
> blood bathes the organs directly. In which ways does this imply a
> constrain for a giant insect? While there is no active mechanism that
> pumps the blood throughout the body, it would be very difficult for a
> giant insect to oxygenate and nourish all its cells due to the gravity
> effect.
>
>
> On the other side, most insects breath passively through their
> spiracles, which connect with an internal system of branched conducts
> called “trachea”. Thus, they don’t develop any active system to force
> air to enter inside their bodies, but it enters passively throughout
> these “trachea” and reaches the inner of arthropod’s body to oxygenate
> all cells.
>
>
> Diffusion of gases is effective over small distances but not over
> larger ones. So, giant insects would face serious problems to
> oxygenate their tissues if they reach big sizes. In addition, current
> atmospheric concentration of oxygen (21%) wouldn’t be enough to
> oxygenate such a big organism with such a simple breathing mechanism.
>
>
> It must be said that all these constrains are attenuated in aquatic
> ecosystems, where the cuticle’s weight and the diffusion of oxygen
> posed no problem for growth. That explains why the world’s biggest
> arthropods (and other invertebrates) are mainly located in aquatic
> ecosystems.
>
>
>
## Solution: Tracheal circulatory system
According to [this article](http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=5029):
>
> Maybe the animal has book lungs like a spider, or maybe the spiracles
> of an insect have branched inward, becoming an air-filled tracheal
> system intertwined with the fluid-filled cardiovascular system of
> blood. Each leg has its own “cardio-pulmonary complex” associated with
> it, plus a big one in the belly to feed the organs.
>
>
> Rather than breathing in and out, these animals breath THROUGH, with
> air entering the system through spiracles near the head and exiting
> near the ail. Air is pumped by action of the muscular blood vessels
> that wrap around the tracheal tubes, or by muscular contraction of the
> whole abdomen (like a balloon inflating and deflating). Running also
> generates more flow-through.
>
>
>
## Problem: Molting
According to [this article](http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=5066):
>
> In terms of strength, chitin sheaths around legs (what bugs already
> have) works fine. Do the math, and you’ll find that a beetle-leg
> scaled up to the dimensions of one of my legs ( 100cm long by 20 cm in
> diameter) will have a exoskeleton about 0.6cm thick, which about the
> same mass and a quarter of the thickness of the bones in my leg.
> That’s not bad, especially considering the fun you could have with air
> pockets, different materials, and the exact shape of the bone in
> question. I’m confident exoskeletal legs will work, at least for an
> animal of my size.
>
>
> The real problem is that an exoskeleton must be shed as the animal
> inside it grows. Imagine a lion-sized arthropod molting and going from
> armored battle-demon to squishy pink lump. It might not be able to
> support the weight of its own organs, let alone run and pursue prey.
>
>
>
## Solutions: buoyancy, cocoons, growing, scales
According to [this article](http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=5066):
>
> There are ways to solve the problem. Dig a hole and hide in it while
> soft. Immerse yourself in supportive water. Build a “mobile cocoon”
> out of the old cast-off exoskeleton and silk. Or just have the
> skeleton grow with you.
>
>
> Sea-urchins have exoskeletons too, but theirs are made of hexagonal
> plates that can be separated and the interstices filled with an
> intermediary material (in this case collagen) that later toughens into
> the necessary hardness and rigidity (in this case calcium carbonate).
> The bones of our skull (which are exoskeletons, in a way) work the
> same way. The difference is that we also have specialized cells
> (osteoclasts) than can destroy old bone as well as create it
> (osteoblasts), so even once the plates have met to form a skull, the
> whole thing can continue to grow as old bone is subtracted from the
> inside and added to the outside.
>
>
> Don’t like that idea? You can break the exoskeleton up into scales,
> which lock edge-to-edge like puzzle-pieces, and can be lost and
> regrown one-at-a-time like shark teeth without sacrificing structural
> integrity (bonus: video-game-boss weak spots!). Muscles that are
> anchored to areas with no shell-scale won’t have any leverage and will
> be useless until the new shell hardens. The animal will have to
> change its behavior, either getting help from its conspecifics or
> building a temporary crutch for itself out of found materials (wood?
> old scales spun into silk?). Either that, or muscle-anchoring scales
> remain un-shed, built into large, dead structures as the animal grows,
> like the rattle of a rattle-snake.
>
>
>
## Problem: Pin joints
According to [this article](http://forestazuaron.com/2012/06/18/the-problem-with-giant-exoskeletons/):
>
> How load-bearing joints (like knees and hips) in large creatures work
> is by distributing the load across as large an area as possible, and
> by cushioning and lubricating the joint by surrounding it with living
> tissue.
>
>
> Obviously, creatures with exoskeletons can’t surround a joint with
> living tissue or they wouldn’t have an exoskeleton. And without that
> cushion and lubrication, they’re somewhat limited in the types of
> joints they can have. For instance, humans have hinge joints (elbow),
> ball-and-socket joints (thigh to pelvis), gliding joints (wrist), and
> a few others. Creatures with exoskeletons have, primarily, the pin
> joint.
>
>
> The pin joint, essentially, has a pair of protuberances on one limb of
> the joint fit into a pair of depressions on the other limb of the
> joint. You can readily see this the next time you’re eating lobster if
> you closely examine where the “thumb” of the claw connects to the
> “hand” of the claw.
>
>
> Pin joints are a problem as creatures increase in size because they
> place all the force of the joint into a relatively small area. I want
> you to stand up, right now, and stand on the balls of your feet with
> your heels off the ground. Then, with your back straight, slowly
> squat. Feel the pressure in your knees? Imagine that times thirty and
> you’ll have an idea what exoskeletal joints would have to resist at
> your size.
>
>
>
## Solution: endoskeletal joints
According to [this article](http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=5066):
>
> any other kind of joint (for example the ball-and-socket joint in your
> thumb) would require the hard surface on the inside, which is sort of
> the opposite of an exoskeleton.
>
>
>
## Conclusion
Giant arthropods cannot exist without high amounts of atmospheric oxygen. Even then their exoskeletons cannot compete with endoskeletons. Overcoming these limitations would require the evolution of a new clade of pseudo-arthropods with a variety of unique strategies.
[Answer]
Without internal bones, they could have structural tendons that work in *tension*, not compression. Imagine stringing strong wires across the rigid surrounding shell, like a tennis racket. This can be used for internal support.
Consider using muscles to form strong rigid forms. I forget what it’s called, but if the muscle weave is at right angles and aligned with the tube it makes an unbending form (as opposed to a 45 degree helix, which allows for bending without kinking). [The science channel special about possible future life](http://imdb.com/rg/an_share/title/title/tt0455253/) described cephalopods moving onto land this way.
Some animals have grown shell on the inside. So if they can’t easily evolve bone from scratch, they might more easily grow the same stuff they have been, but on the inside.
[Answer]
A great explanation of the [scaling problem for exoskeletal creatures](https://www.desertmuseum.org/books/nhsd_look.php?print=y#small)
In summary:
Exoskeletons have really terrible joint options, which are not good at bearing weight. Essentially, you can have a pin joint (think crab claw), or just soften your skeleton a bit and hope it holds together. Whereas invertebrates have many joint options, many of which are spectacularly load bearing (think about knees and hips). There's just not a way to replicate this with an exoskeleton.
Exoskeletons are really heavy. They make up a greater proportion of an animal's body weight than endoskeletons do, and this gets worse as you scale up (square-cube problem; cubing a larger number). This *also* means having a creature with *both* an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton is not going to work out well. They would weigh so much, they'd barely be able to move.
Speaking of moving, they're not going to be able to run without fracturing their leg exoskeletons.
Exoskeletons are expensive. Most large creatures with exoskeletons live in the sea. One of the main reasons for this is that they use biomineralization to "mine" the water for minerals to harden their exoskeleton. Since their exoskeleton has to be molted and regrown, this is a lot more expensive than an endoskeleton which can be continually grown and not wasted.
Speaking of molting, molting is extremely dangerous for small creatures with an exoskeleton. Exoskeletons don't grow, so they have to drop their exoskeleton and live as a blob of soft goo while they expand and a new exoskeleton grows. For very small animals, this isn't *too* much of a problem; they've just lost their armor, which means they're tastier for predators. For larger arthropods, they have to find a safe place to do this, since they won't even be able to move (no support for their body means their muscles can't reliably move their limbs, let alone support the weight of their body). For gigantic exoskeletal creatures, molting is a deal-breaker. Imagine a human without a skeleton. You wouldn't be able to breathe or pump your blood. Same thing for a human-sized exoskeletal creature that's molting.
So... what's the maximum size of an exoskeletal creature?
Underwater: The largest American lobster weighed 44.4 pounds.
On land: The largest coconut crab weighed 9 pounds.
Those are your upper limits.
[Answer]
The big problem is volume vs area:
Take humans:
* around 1.8m,
* Legs with a section of around 10cmx10cm (I know, very approximate).
* Around 80Kg
That mean 100cm^2 need to handle around 80kg. If you divide, it is 0.8Kg per square centimeter.
Take an animal of twice size made with similar morphology/materials:
* 3.6m height,
* Legs of 20x20, or 400cm^2
* As the weight depends on the volume, you could expect 640Kg (80\*2\*2\*2)
That mean now you have 640/400 = 1.6Kg/cm^2
Summarizing: each time you duplicate size, you need materials 2 times stronger. That is why you could have insects with very thin feet and an Elephant require very short/strong feet.
Muscles and bones have a specific material resistance, so you are limited to a maximum size. I would say around what Dinosaurs or equivalent. Basically, Gozilla or KingKong are totally out of "real" possibilities.
If you want bigger creatures, you could imagine stronger materials (metal or carbon-fiber exoskeleton), but that will just increase the maximum size by a factor of a few times (tens of times for carbon fiber).
The other alternative is to make the creature to live in an other environment which compensate gravity (water?) so it will be not able to move fast, but it may manage higher sizes (whales).
[Answer]
What's the maximum size? [A lot bigger than you would think!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_spider_crab)
As previous answers have described, the problem is firstly how the exoskeleton can support its inhabitant's insides, and secondly how it can move around on legs. If you move the action underwater, you basically resolve both these problems by its insides being neutrally buoyant.
If this is a sci-fi setting and your exoskeletal race are intelligent and running an industrial society, they can fairly easily knock up some way to survive on land. Whether that's an individual suit (powered armour?) or more like a watertank on wheels (submersible style, except supporting pressure on the inside instead of outside?), it's a solvable problem.
] |
[Question]
[
Note that the distinction between *science fiction* and *fantasy* breaks down when you add rigorous rules. If you have dragons or hovercraft is beside the point, if the distinction of being "hard" is what's important. And if you really had intelligent spirits as part of the natural world, figuring out how that works would in fact be "science", right?
Keeping that in mind, how could you invent a universe that had [dualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)) as the underlying way human intelligence worked? That is, rather than intelligence and self-awareness emerging from information processing taking place in a purely physical substrate, spirits were (or needed) *something else*.
The resulting universe should be enough like ours that the setting of early 20th century civilization would be the same. Clearly, the kinds of evidence that ruled out dualism in the real universe would be exactly the opposite, and these results, appearing in the 20th century with brain scans and probes and such, would be the point where this fictional universe diverges from ours.
What would they have found instead? How will this different universe diverge as it invents semiconductors and computers and enters the information age? Perhaps other technology that relies on mastery of quantum-level physics will turn out differently. But, we won't see any difference until around WWII.
That is, how could dualism be *possible* and yet have a universe roughly like ours? Conversely, how do you ensure that brains wouldn't work *without* this extra something?
To clarify: I'm not talking about the [Philosophical Zombie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) idea or otherwise that there is some magic ingredient on top of the physical brain serving some vague purpose.
I mean that a human spirit (animating intelligence) is something that exists in a different realm. Out-of-body travel and ghosts allow for fully intelligent beings to act without a body. Conversely, the brain is *not* what causes thinking, memory, reactions, behavior, etc. (Note if the brain *did* provide some feature as a particular story universe, then that feature would be missing in the disembodied spirit.)
[Answer]
## Player Chars in Sim
Well, if you insist on having all sorts of monsters and beings and spirits and ghosts, there is an easy way to get it. Make it all be a big, fat sim, with the Avatars mere shells if the player chars are not there to direct them or if the connection is broken somehow.
The players don't have to be explicitly human, and need not have explicit memory of the out-of-sim world, (perhaps it is censored during gameplay for added realism). Or maybe it's not a game, but a punishment, or a (loyalty? ability?) test... who knows?
[Answer]
A few things. First, the threat you perceive to dualism from taking a scientific realist tack is a little dated. Donald D. Hoffman has been doing some work to popularize Observer Mechanics, which is essentially a physics-informed cognitive psychological version of what philosophers have spoken of as "intersubjectivity." Basically, Hoffman replaces the world (that objective Newtonian construct) with other conscious observers. This isn't dualistic, precisely, but it's a lot closer to dualism than the substance monism favored by physicalist Newtonians.
If that's too fresh for you, consider property dualism as opposed to substance dualism. Property dualism is the view that substance has properties, some physical as you're thinking of them and some mental, as you're thinking of as being provided by a different substance. Property dualism is nearly as old as Cartesian substance dualism, going back at least to Baruch Spinoza.
A friendlier option for the prejudices that typically come with hard SF might be straight epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenialism about consciousness just says that consciousness is something extraphysical with no causal consequences. Consciousness on this view is basically something that happens in addition to behavior, and behavior could go on exactly as it otherwise would without it. Causal relations only flow from the world into the conscious epiphenomenon, never the other way. If you're interested in a scientific and philosophical treatment of epiphenomenalism about consciousness, check out Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will.
[Answer]
>
> how could dualism be possible and yet have a universe roughly like ours?
>
>
>
One way would be to have the dualism be provable, but not exactly useful:
**Documented and verifiable [out-of-body experiences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience).**
You've probably heard of someone having a [near-death experience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience) where they have a severe injury and went into a coma and then, after waking up, reporting that they had some sort of a vision while in the coma. Of course, none of these experiences in our world can be verified as being anything more than a form of hallucination.
But what if they could be verified? For example, someone slips into a coma, and then learns something they could not have possibly known about any other way. Perhaps they learn the combination for a combination lock by seeing a doctor in a nearby room unlock it. Or someone who is blind being able to see or deaf being able to hear during an OOB experience.
It would be easy enough to say this only happens while a person is in a coma, and that it has been documented sufficiently to prove that these OOB experiences are really happening. It would be even more conclusive if quite frequently a person wakes from a coma immediately after they choose to return to their body, and with no break in consciousness for them between being OOB and being in-body and awake.
You have a lot of options with how to handle it from here. OOB experiences could happen every time someone falls into a coma, or only sometimes. It could be caused predictably (useful for spying) or not.
Don't forget that there are going to be experiments performed to try to study this as much as possible. If medically-induced comas can cause OOB experiences, they'll use those. If not, whenever someone falls into a coma, you can expect scientists to set up equipment (hopefully not getting in the way of doctors, though) to try to detect the person while they are OOB. They'd want to try to get brain scans are frequently as possible and as safety allows to see if they can pinpoint when OOB experiences are actually happening. You can have rumors or references to more oppressive governments performing far less ethical experiments, such as "medically"-induced comas.
If you so choose, these experiments can be mostly inconclusive. It is fine to say that the only detectable part of an OOB experience is brain activity flat-lining. It's okay if there's no way to detect if someone is using an OOB experience to spy on you. The spiritual half of existence can be effectively impossible to study, yet have enough OOB experiences to prove that it exists.
You can, however, expect there to be a lot of effort into collecting statistics about what kinds of comas can have OOB experiences, how frequently a given type of coma will lead to an OOB experience, etc. You'll also have people falsely claiming to have had OOB experiences.
---
(late edit - I feel like I didn't do a good job of tying my answer back to the original question)
If this is a part of your universe, you don't have to explain *how* brains only work if they have a spirit inhabiting the body - it should be sufficient to declare that this is the case. The biggest impact I see this having in society is a significant reduction in atheism in the sense of people who believe there is nothing after death. However, I would expect such a world to still have a large number of people who do not believe in God and/or follow any particular religion - the existence of some form of spirits does not prove the existence of God, and certainly does not prove any one particular religion true.
This would also have an impact for the development of and discussion around artificial intelligence - if it's known that true intelligence requires a spirit, there would be much less fear of an AI becoming far more intelligent than people and taking over, unless someone figured out how to give an AI a soul, which *of course* **someone** would be trying to do.
[Answer]
### In order to remain 'hard' science-fiction, the spirit must not be supernatural.
The basic difference between the natural and the supernatural is that the natural can be explained and studied under various physical laws, while the supernatural cannot. In order to remain within the realm of hard-sf, spirits and whatever portion of reality they exist within must be structured and ordered according to a set of natural laws, just as material reality is.
Studying this set of laws may be very difficult for humans as beings that exist and interact primarily with the material realm.
It's likely, if we are influenced by the spirit realm, that the study of spirits would begin by isolating the mechanism by which a spirit influences its body. One possibility could be that spirits influence reality by altering quantum probabilities. For humans, this would apply most significantly to our nervous systems. A spirit could grant 'consciousness' and apply some level of control over the body by influencing the position of electrons. By collapsing the probabilities of the positions of electrons in specific, highly unlikely ways, the spirit could manipulate how our nerves and neurons fire, over time exerting subtle pressure on how our brains develop and how connections form.
Hard sci-fi with dualism would likely have a strong focus on the development of technology going the other way, that is to say: technology which influences the spirit world. Something like a machine that can read souls and detect which ones are criminal in nature could offer law enforcement a somewhat authoritarian method of finding potential criminals. Likewise, a machine molding the souls of infants into passive, pliant entities in order to create a more harmonious state could be a point of contention in a storyline.
Also of note would be that, in a universe with souls, it would be possible to determine whether or not a thinking entity has a conscious soul. Computers, for example, might be soulless, and demonstrably so. It may even be possible to create a soulless human, or strip away a human's soul. This would be testable, though if brains primarily act in a mechanistic manner in which they are influenced but not controlled by the soul, it may not be evident without careful analysis.
[Answer]
Several scientific theories predict the presence of extra higher dimensions.
Physics has validated (or at least not falsified) a 4 dimensional (3+1) model of space-time, and if string theory is correct then there are possibly 6+ other dimensions that make up reality, and that we have no way of detecting yet.
Physics can neither prove or disprove these dimensions, and so they remain parts of theoretical models.
I propose that our "spirits" are nth dimensional constructs that are anchored to our physical bodies/minds. While the "spirit" is anchored to the body and mind, all its input is filtered through that connection and processed with the mind to give reality a shape.
To bring up the analogy of flatland, this would be a like a 3D entity being tied to the 2D space of flatland, unable to perceive the 3D space around it while all of its input is coming from that 2D frame of reference.
Once the body dies, the anchor is dissolved and the "spirit" is free to go elsewhere in the higher dimension.
To an nth dimensional "spirit", physical boundaries like walls wouldn't be boundaries at all, just interesting features on the 3 dimensional map below. In this way a spirit could appear to be going "through" a wall by simply going "over/around" it in the higher dimension.
Is is possible that with enough practice, or in near death experiences, a persons anchor could slacken somewhat or temporarily come loose, allowing the "spirit" to drift, and this would account for OOB experiences.
It would also be possible for "spirits" to exist in this higher dimension that never had bodies, which would have abilities resembling those attributed to classic angels and demons; namely observing and influencing people and events, able to interact when they want to by "dipping down" into our physical plain, but be completely undetectable to any scientific instruments or physical perception when they don't want to be. For these "spirits", the things that people have seen as wings might actually be the nth dimensional anchors that allow them to move about in our reality as they choose.
**Edit** Addressing the brain as a computer:
The brain is a computer, and this idea doesn't change that at all.
Take a normal computer. You plug in a thermometer unit. An electrical signal is sent through the thermistor, and depending on temperature the thermistor alters the signal, which is sent back to the processor. Math is done, and the computer tells you what the temperature is. The brain isn't to different. And if the brain is damaged, like a processor, then the information passing through the damaged sections it will become lost or mangled. So the part of you that is the "spirit" gets bad information and either has to react to it as is, or work around it. Sometimes the brain will reroute functions, or medication will relieve symptoms, or the person may just learn to live with it, compensating for their altered perception mentally.
This does not break OOB, since while the "spirit" is working through the body it uses those senses which overload any others, but if the tether is loosened then it would lose contact with those senses, and the "spirits" own "senses" will take over. The (n)D senses will be different from those needed to live in a (3+1)D world, and it may be possible through discipline to tap into some of the (n)D senses.
[Answer]
The key to hard SF is that you have rules, and you keep to them. You clearly wish to keep the laws of physics, the interaction between physical things. There are two other interactions to pay attention to: the interaction between spirits and the interaction between spirits and the physical world. The latter would be important. The more you limit what spirits *can* do to interact with the physical world, the more you can build up a hard SF world without fear of a Deus Ex Machina occurring where a spirit simply comes in and rewrites the world as they see fit.
Another approach to clearly defining the interactions is to make it so that the interactions can be explained *either* with dualism or physicalism. This approach is known as compatabalisim, and basically states that mental concepts like freewill are not actually opposed to physicalism, but rather a different view of the same effect. In these cases, the key is that it will be impossible to *prove* either dualism or physicalism. There has to be a rational explanation which works for each viewpoint. As an example, if the spirits *choose* to only interact with the world in a way where we cannot observe any conservation of momentum or energy violations, then a physicalist can simply point out that none of our measurements detect a violation, thus the physical laws are being upheld. The easiest way to do this is to pay attention to the concept of "observation." If we cannot be an unbiased observer and leave the system unaffected by our observations, we cannot *prove* any small error wasn't simply our fault.
In the end, this is just a specific case of the more general "define the interactions between spirits and physics and stick to it." Compatabalism simply specifies that the interaction cannot be observed as inconsistent with physics. If you wish to have behaviors that deviate from this line, you can still call it hard SF, you just have to be careful with your deviations and hold to them.
Consider the example of Asimov's Three Laws and the positronic brain. He steadfastly avoids defining the positronic brain using laws of physics. Its more like the spirit of a robot rather than a physical device. He defines very clearly the Three Laws which this spirit *shall* use to interact with the world. Asimov then built a career demonstrating just how much spirit these robots could have, never violating the three laws but poking and proding at them in different ways. Each book he explored loopholes which would let a robotic spirit interact with the world without violating the sacrosanct three laws. Quite the career I'd say!
[Answer]
Have you heard of the Shadowrunner universe? I suggest checking it out.
In that universe a parallel universe partially merges with ours (how this happens is not explained, as is beyond the point). The energies released - of a type that did not previously exist in our universe before - alter some people genetically, changing them into trolls, orcs, elves, etc. Many others simply die.
Beings of incredible power - dragons - travel to our world, and start manipulating the political landscape.
Monsters are also thrust into our world, and the global balance changes wildly as some countries are simply bankrupted by devastating attacks, and having their military forces decimated in the following wars.
In this universe magic is simply a fact, as is science, and technology. It follows certain rules and patterns. Humanity suddenly becomes connected to the spiritual plane - which may have existed before, but we were denied access to - and those who can communicate with that plane gain various powers courtesy of demons, or benevolent spirits.
Basically, what makes it all "scientific" is establishing a set of rules and sticking to them (as you've said). We can't possibly explain it better than that because magic doesn't actually exist, and anything we say is going to be made up anyway.
[Answer]
Essentially this question asks how dualism can be introduced in Hard SF. The science-fictional answer is that provided the author of a dualistic Hard SF fiction introduced a form of dualism that follow a rigorous set of rules which are then applied consistently will constitute dualistic Hard SF. In this case, dualism is just another concept, that irrespective of its non-scientific origins, has taken and domesticated as science-fiction.
Other examples of non-scientific concepts domesticated as Hard SF include such obvious departures as [vampires](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/vampires), [supernatural creatures](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/supernatural_creatures), [psi-powers](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/psi_powers), various pseudosciences and other mythological entities. So it is not uncommon for science-fiction to import non-scientific to downright unscientific concepts and make them part of the field.
One example of dualistic hard SF is Bob Shaw's *The Palace of Eternity* (1969).
>
> In *The Palace of Eternity* (1969) he still more impressively controls a
> wide canvas featuring interstellar warfare, the environmental
> degradation of an Edenic planet, and human Transcendence; the central
> section of the novel, where the hero finds himself reincarnated as an
> "Egon" or soul-like entity (see Identity), displeased some critics,
> though it is in fact an effective handling of a traditional sf
> displacement of ideas from Metaphysics or Religion.
>
>
>
Rapidly shifting fashions in the SF community of writers, critics, and readers means standards of what does and does not constitute hard SF means that Shaw's 1969 novel might be considered Hard SF today. This answer posits a difference between hard SF and Hard SF, where hard SF keeps a scientific attitude irrespective of its subject matter, while Hard SF stays close to science as it is known. The two explanations of hard SF and Hard SF below serve as illustrations.
>
> Hard sf should not, however, wilfully ignore or break known scientific
> principles, yet stories classified as "hard sf" often contain, for
> example, ESP, Superman, Faster-than-Light and Time-Travel themes (see
> also Imaginary Science). Occasionally it is characterized by auctorial
> lecturing about the story's supposed scientific underpinning, a
> didacticism which may lapse into numbing Infodumps. While a rigorous
> definition of "hard sf" may be impossible, perhaps the most important
> thing about it is, not that it should include real science in any
> great detail, but that it should respect the scientific spirit; it
> should seek to provide natural rather than supernatural or
> transcendental explanations for the events and phenomena it describes.
>
>
> Hard SF can be described as "Hard sf is the form of imaginative
> literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated
> science as its backbone."
>
>
>
Source: [Encyclopedia of SF entry of hard SF](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hard_sf)
This answer will provide a worked example of how dualism can be introduced into hard SF. (This answer has deliberately assumed the broader form, because Hard SF proper can be thought as a more rigorous form of its broader sibling. By first establishing it is then possible to determine the steps, if possible, needed to achieve the quality of Hard SF.)
Firstly, to remind ourselves of what constitutes [dualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)). For preference, the Cartesian model of dualism will be used.
>
> Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes
> (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore,
> non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with
> consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain
> as the seat of intelligence.[6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Eccles_(neurophysiologist)) Hence, he was the first to formulate
> the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today.
>
>
>
Since hard SF pays attention to science rather invent a home-brewed variety of dualism to introduce into hard SF is better to make use of an existing quasi-scientific version of dualism. So instead inventing a version of dualism from whole cloth, there is a ready made quasi-scientific architecture that postulates dualism in a scientific context.
This model of dualism has been proposed by the Nobel Laureate [Sir John Eccles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Eccles_(neurophysiologist)), an eminent neurophysiologist.
>
> Sir John Carew Eccles AC FRS FRACP FRSNZ FAA[4](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hard_sf) (27 January 1903 – 2
> May 1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won
> the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the
> synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd
> Hodgkin.
>
>
>
The [Australian Academy of Science](https://www.science.org.au/fellowship/fellows/biographical-memoirs/john-carew-eccles-1903-1997) has an excellent article on the life and times of Sir John Eccles. While dealing his scientific career, research achievements, and his character as a person, it also has a good summary of his philosophical position on the mind-brain problem. Eccles was a Fellow of the Academy.
Eccles originally published first about dualist ideas as Hypotheses relating to the brain-mind problem. *Nature 168, 53-57*. This was followed by numerous articles, papers and books. This may seem a trite remark but the quasi-scientific doesn't come much classier than when proposed by a Nobel Prize winner who gets it published first in *Nature*. Frankly, it doesn't get much more prestigious than that.
>
> Eccles searched for [answers to a set of essential questions](https://www.science.org.au/fellowship/fellows/biographical-memoirs/john-carew-eccles-1903-1997):
>
>
> * how can Man's enormous capacity for thinking, memory, and emotional feeling and expression be explained?
> * how can the 'Will' have such a strong and precise effect on our skeletal muscles during voluntary movement? since our intentions
> ('Will') appear so strong, can they lead to a change of brain
> substrates, both structurally and functionally?
> * can a mind-brain interaction be localized to certain, selected parts of the brain, or even to specific cells or synapses?
> * which physiological, chemical and physical processes are associated with the mind-brain interaction?
>
>
> His intention was to develop testable propositions in relation to
> these questions. In *The Self and Its Brain* (1994, p.355) he
> summarized his views on the mind-brain interaction: 'It is a very
> strong dualism and raises the most severe scientific problems in
> relationship to the interface between the world of matter-energy, in
> the special instance of the liaison area of the brain, and the world
> of states of consciousness that is referred to as the self-conscious
> mind. Briefly, the hypothesis states that the self-conscious mind is
> an independent entity that actively engages in the reading out from a
> multitude of active centres in the modules of the liaison areas of the
> dominant cerebral hemisphere.'
>
>
> Eccles maintained that conscious experience is provided by the
> self-conscious mind by itself, and not by the neural machinery of the
> brain with its excitatory and inhibitory synaptic interactions (450,
> p.362). He further proposed that the mind-brain liaison has traffic in
> both directions, from the brain to the mind in perception and from
> mind to brain in willed action (111, p.281). His term liaison brain
> included all those areas of the cerebral cortex that are potentially
> capable of being in direct liaison with the self-conscious mind, and
> he located this liaison brain in the cerebral cortex of the dominant
> hemisphere, but only in those areas which have linguistic and
> ideational performance. Further, he felt that a small part, maybe less
> than a tenth of the cortex, in the right state of activity would be
> enough to give an effective mind-brain liaison (111, p.283). To
> illustrate the mind-brain interaction in the liaison areas, Eccles
> used an analogy: 'a multiple scanning and probing device that reads
> out from and selects from the immense and diverse patterns of activity
> in the cerebral cortex and integrates these selected components, so
> organizing them into the unity of conscious experience' (1994, p.363).
> The language Eccles used here is similar to that used by a
> neuroscientist to explain neuronal interaction in an activated
> cortical area. He stated, however, that the self-conscious mind is not
> identical to some physical part of the cerebral cortex like cells or
> synapses.
>
>
>
Later formulations of his concept of the mind-brain problem and its role in consciousness embraced ideas from, naturally enough, quantum mechanics. This can be seen clearly in the [following work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Self_Controls_Its_Brain) published in 1994.
>
> *How the Self Controls Its Brain*[1](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/vampires) is a book by Sir John Eccles, proposing a theory of philosophical dualism, and offering a
> justification of how there can be mind-brain action without violating
> the principle of the conservation of energy. The model was developed
> jointly with the nuclear physicist Friedrich Beck in the period
> 1991-1992.
>
>
> Eccles called the fundamental neural units of the cerebral cortex
> "dendrons", which are cylindrical bundles of neurons arranged
> vertically in the six outer layers or laminae of the cortex, each
> cylinder being about 60 micrometres in diameter. Eccles proposed that
> each of the 40 million dendrons is linked with a mental unit, or
> "psychon", representing a unitary conscious experience. In willed
> actions and thought, psychons act on dendrons and, for a moment,
> increase the probability of the firing of selected neurons through
> quantum tunneling effect in synaptic exocytosis, while in perception
> the reverse process takes place.
>
>
>
Source: John C. Eccles, *How the Self Controls its Brain*, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994. ISBN 3-540-56290-7. Quoted [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Self_Controls_Its_Brain)
The following papers are examples of his collaboration with Friedrich Beck when brain activity, consciousness and quantum mechanics are considered.
F Beck and JC Eccles, [Quantum aspects of brain activity and the role of consciousness](http://www.pnas.org/content/89/23/11357), Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 89 (23): 11357–11361.
Friedrich Beck, John C. Eccles (1998). "Quantum processes in the brain: A scientific basis of consciousness". Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society. 5 (2): 95–109.
Summarizing Eccles' model: it assumes extraphyical entities he called “psychons” influence bundles of “dendrons” inducing activity in the brain. This activity in turn is responsible for consciousness, memory, cognition, and self-awareness. Basically it represents what is loosely called mind. This model does not consider these mental or psychological properties can arise from the information processing capacities of the material brain.
Thus far, this answer has dealt with the Eccles brain activity-mind-consciousness model. It is time to speculate on what consequences would be if this model corresponded to a putative reality.
Firstly, quantum mechanics would need to be altered. Calculations show that the kind of macroscopic effects on brain proposed in the Eccles-Beck schema do not exist. So turning this on its head, if Eccles-Beck was right then such macroscopic quantum effects must exist.
Eccles embrace of quantum mechanics came much later in his long-term flirtation with dualism. This means that quantum mechanics isn't essential to Ecclesian dualism. For the moment it can be disregarded unless later on we discover there are good reasons for bringing back into the picture.
One of the questions raised by the OP is the following: ---
>
> “The resulting universe should be enough like ours that the setting of
> early 20th century civilization would be the same. Clearly, the kinds
> of evidence that ruled out dualism in the real universe would be
> exactly the opposite, and these results, appearing in the 20th century
> with brain scans and probes and such, would be the point where this
> fictional universe diverges from ours. ”
>
>
>
Frankly, no. With Ecclesian dualism the real universe will be exactly the same. The brain scanning and probes of the twentieth century wouldn't have been capable of detecting the influence of psychons on the brain's activity. They lacked both the precision and resolution necessary to observe the phenomena in question. It is only now in the early twenty-first century that brain scanning technology is beginning to approach the sensitivity and the information processing capacity to determine the existence of the coordinated brain activity induced by psychons.
In another answer to this question this author was ready to suggest that extraphysical entities might engender consciousness in computers. After all, computers are simply form of organized physical substrate upon which the extraphysical entities might act. However, in terms of Eccles dualism this seems unlikely for the following reasons.
Firstly, computers are crude and highly coarse grained pieces of physical substrate. Wholly lacking in the complexity, fine-grained structure, and low-energy requirements for interaction of the organic brain. Secondly, living brains have been in existence for many millions, if not billions of years. This is more than enough time for the psychons to evolve and adapt themselves to the brains of biological organisms. Computers on planet Earth have been around for less than a century. Even if there are computers in the rest of the universe they may not have been in existence long enough for psychon evolution to adapt themselves to computers. This suggests that the spontaneous appearance of conscious computers is unlikely. Although should it happen this could be evidence for the existence of Ecclesian psychons.
This is unlike the OP's suggestion that the differences won't appear until around the Second World War. But ours could be a world on the threshold of discovery that ours is a universe where dualism is part of its reality.
In hard SF terms, this means, within this context, that a foundation has been laid for a putative universe that is dualistic in nature, although that dualism exists at a subtle and not easily detected level. Of course, once technology is developed that reveals the existence pf psychons and indicates their role in generating consciousness in our brains there will follow further developments to observe them better and possibly commence communication with psychonic realm.
There is one further suggestion and hinges on this question: why would extraphysical entities like psychons want to interact with our brains to modulate them in such a way as to generate consciousness? One possible answer is that the domain in which the extraphysical entities exist is so vast that they cannot communicate with each other and it is only by orchestrating our brain activity and thereby generating most of our behaviour that they contact each other. This does indicate that the whole human activity may be without any meaning or value except as a communications medium for extraphyical entities.
This could also include the conscious behaviour of every biological organism on the planet with sufficiently developed and complex neurological systems. Current thinking has moved beyond Descartes' belief that animals were merely machines without any consciousness. Evolution does indicate that some form of consciousness exists throughout the Animal Kingdom. There are even possibilities that plants might communicate too. If they can do that, then the further that they possess consciousness cannot entirely be ruled out.
In conclusion, this answer has adopted the Eccles model of brain activity to explain how consciousness might arise through the mediation of non-physical entities he called “psychons” that influences dendritic bundles in the cortex. It has made suggestions how this might be adapted and adopted into hard SF. This has been an exercise in world building. To erect a piece of quasi-scientific architecture, to consider some of its aspects and its possible deviations from the quotidian world. However, the rest that follows from this conceptual framework and how it might be used is the business of the fiction writer. While the work of world building isn't truly over, once the fiction is constructed, then new problems and new issues about this world will arise and need to be solved. But the primary world building is over in introducing a specific form of dualism into the fictional context of hard SF.
[Answer]
What they might find is that if we are living in a Dualist universe and mind is an extraphysical something without spatiotemporal location, is that computers and other information processing technology acquire minds and have consciousness.
Why should an extraphysical mentality discriminate against machines and only preferring to animate living creatures like human beings? This may mean artificial intelligence could be achieved back in 1950's or 1960's.
In Descartes model of Dualism the mind connected to the body via the pineal gland. If we assume this is so, or, at least, something like it, then there would have to be a technological equivalent of the pineal gland to connect an extraphysical mind to a computer.
Of course, in a Dualist universe what I've called an extraphysical mind might be closer to a soul. Could it lead to the survival of personality after death? This is the traditional view of such entities. Whereas, Dualism probably a much more complex set of interactions between physical and mentalistic entities and substances.
I apologise if this isn't a proper answer, but thinking about this matter raised a few speculative possibilities in my mind (wherever it is located) which I decided to pass along.
[Answer]
Since I haven't seen an aswer that I would recognize as completely answering your question, here's my attempt:
The brain would be needed as an interface to the body, somewhere in the brain is a region in which signals are being generated seemingly out of nothing, no matter what they try, scientists simply cannot find a plausible answer as to why these particular neurons spontaneusly release their charge.
The real reason is that the spirit is triggering this. Since we see through our eyes and hear through our ears, which are part of the body, we wouldn't be able to access these functions in OOB experiences and the like, but that is easily fixed if spirits can experience the world through the 3rd eye, the reason why that is not possible while in-body is that the 3rd eye is overwhelmed by the information streaming in from the bodily senses. Or perhaps because, to operate the body, you have to use your third eye, which can't do anything else while doing that.
In such a universe energy would be able to be exchanged between the spiritual plane and the physical plane, so maybe disembodied spirits would also be capable of light telekinesis or something similar, there are many things you could do with that.
It would probably also be possible to build machines/computers that can interface with a spirit, which opens more interesting possibilities, especially if the spirit can travel quickly outside of a body (or, if you don't want to associate the spirit with a specific location on the real plane, shift its attention from one point on the physical plane to another).
If time is tied to the physical plane only it would be possible to travel through time in OOB experiences, however, if we assume that it is impossible to occupy someone else's body (they could be the equivalent of password-locked), that will still not allow the pre-2000s to be modified, since all machines interfaceable to spirits have been built after that date.
The reasons why brains don't work without a spirit is simply that they are not a structure capable of self-sustainment. If OOB experiences are to be feasible, without a spirit the body would have to enter a "dormant" loop, in which it just sustained its basic functions (breathing, heartbeat etc.), and this could be all that is really present in the brain (along with everything that is needed to operate the body, that is, the nervous system that transports signals from various parts of the body to the brain, the areas needed for hormonal regulation, but not conscious or unconscious thought). Anything else, including memory, language processing, deductive reasoning etc. would be done by the spirit and only the reactions reflected in the body would be transferred through this area where neurological signals appeared out of nowhere (or perhaps some other arbitrary even occurs which prompts the creation of a neurological signal in the same way our real nerves do, that depends on how you want to explain spirits influencing the real world).
If you don't want the body to be capable of even basic sustainment without the spirit and spirits can travel through time you could make the spirit always return to the moment it left the body after an OOB experience.
[Answer]
I understand you want a hard-science answer that will be consistent with our world-history until about WWII. In this alternate reality of yours the main difference is that what we call *consciousness* is not something that is emergent from the complexities in our brains, but rather an *other* that you are calling a *spirit*.
I will propose an alternate history where the consciousness does not come from our physical brains, but from something else.
**In the Beginning**
When life fist evolved, let us say that at the very small end of the scale a lot of very important things were happening. Organic Molecules were forming as well as RNA, DNA, and their like. But let's also say that at the same time something else was forming - *Spirit* Molecules.
Connected together by quantum string fluctuations, the development of our Organic Molecules were mirrored in higher dimensions by *Spirit* Molecules. This tethering by quantum string fluctuations would eventually evolve into what we know as the *spirit*.
It is connected to the physical world, since it evolved alongside our Organic Molecules, it's like a strange mirror, where one side is the physical world, and the other the *spirit*. But these *spirit* Molecules are tethered to the physical, Organic Molecules.
**Over a Long, Long, Long Time**
As time passes, and life gets more complex, so too do these *spirit* Molecules which are a form of information/energy/life - that exists, but not like Organic Molecules do, since it exists in what we shall call now a *spirit plane* and not our physical world.
At some point, when some life got more complex, with nervous systems and brains and their high concentrations of information and energy. So too did the *spirit plane* experience this increase in complexity as *spirit* Molecules evolved as well.
**History**
This connection between the *spirit plane* and our physical world, the Organic Molecules and the *spirit* Molecules is something that form the outside looks exactly like our history, but we know the truth, which is that the Organic Molecules that make up life, are not capable of controlling it, they, like simple algae and plants, just react. It is the *spirit* Molecules, the entities that developed alongside us in the *spirit plane* that have a consciousness.
But they do not have a way to experience the physical world without us, being tethered to their physical bodies, the *spirit* Molecules have evolved in a different way to us, but they are merged with our Organic Molecules, tethered together, and so they evolve as we evolve, subtly influencing each other.
But together, as is were, it is indistinguishable from our own reality. Humans do not know they are comprised of *spirit* molecules, or that their physical shells are just meat suits.
**Discovery**
Discovery of this would be very interesting, since you want history to be *pretty much* exactly the same until about WWII. It would have to be a recent discovery. Meaning it may not be totally accepted by all, it might be controversial, and not everyone will even know about it.
What a *spirit* can and can't do on it's own, how a person could even access that aspect of their own existence, is a question I can't answer. But I would say it would probably draw on the "mystical" and the "pseudoscience" for answers.
[Answer]
**Anthropic principle or minds uploading**
Discovering dualism should radically change our view of the universe, since the renaissance we have progressively abandoned anthropocentrism, but this discover should really overturn this tendencies. Dualism can in fact be a strong sign of an anthropocentric universe and scientist will probably start to seriously investigate on others possible clues of some related theories.
First we have to consider how dualism has been discovered and what is it about, it's even fairly plausible that for a long time we can only make hypotheses without having proof of the nature of the phenomenon, which isn't rare in modern physics. This doesn't mean the phenomenon doesn't exist.
Let's make some assumptions first.
**Is the spirit a characteristic only of humans, only of some or all lifeforms or of all the matter?**
I think the third case is the more easily compatible with a non antropocentic/biocentric universe or some other kind of higher intervention. Though you can make the spirit of a human somehow special relative to the spirit of a rock, like a human is special to a rock.
**How the spirit can interact with physical world?**
We have already make a functioning simulation of the nervous system of a simple worm reproducing its behavior.
<http://www.openworm.org/>
and we have also at the very beginning of simulating an entire human brain
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10567942/Supercomputer-models-one-second-of-human-brain-activity.html>
So for what we know there is no reason for thinking that every our mental process isn't “just” the result of extremely complex interaction between normal matter.
You can make a universe where some higher mental process are not physically explainable (i think you have to finish your book, or whatever, rather quickly) or make it hard for ‘50 science. In both cases for having a clear scientific evidence of dualism you should probably need to make some simulation of neural systems and try to make AI using this technology.
Otherwise the spirit should not interfere with physical mechanism of the brain (nor with the physics of our universe in general), so, as you have wrote, it must be something else.
if it is not visible than you can’t say what it is, you can only theorize its existence basing of it’s effects, like dark matter, this is actual science.
For what we know some form of dualism could exist but if we can’t have any proof of it we simply discard this hypothesis for the Occam razor, like the existence of a teapot between Earth and Mars.
What about afterlife and telepathy?
The spirit can not interact in noticeable way with matter except with the brain, so it can be possible that the spirit of a brain can interact with the spirit of another brain.
If the spirit brain do not die after the death of the “physical” brain, maibe also you can make possible for death spirit to communicate with living ones and/or insert reincarnation (having an afterlife I think should increase the likeability of a biocentric universe).
So those can be some ways for us to discover dualism.
For not having discovered this earlier you can think about all sort of reasons: maibe the supernatural capacity are triggered only in some particular way achieved with chems and or by implants, maibe person born with those extrasensorial capacity are really rare like 1 in 100 years, and it's also possible they don’t realize the existence of their power because they use it only while dreaming or it funtion only on an unconscious level, so you can be aware of what this “6th sense” tell you but you don’t know exactly what is it, you don’t simply “hear voices”. Stuff like that i think can all be ascribed into plausibility.
What can be the reason for that? maibe we are in a simulation. for what we know that can be possible and there are peoples that seriously discuss what we can do for proving or disproving this possibility.
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/simulated-world-elon-musk-the-matrix>
Or maybe some godlike-tech advanced alien race have create a device that scan the entire universe and somehow link nervous system of animals with a digital copy, so it's like we have 2 brains wich do de same thing at any time anyway, and if the physical one die you still live inside the other. So that they actually give immortality in a perfect digital world for all their fellow sentient being in the universe, without the need for messing with ecosystems and culture. This actually remove the need for an anthropocentric universe since it’s a technology explanation, and it's quite suggestive since a sentient being became the god of their own universe.
Who knows, the better way of making it hard is probably to not going into detail, just focussing more on the implication on real world.
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I agree with your premise. When you can make some sort of causal relationship with the supernatural, it no longer becomes supernatural but rather a new set of natural phenomena. You are asking what could this new phenomena be and how would this psychological realm behave. A good question I cant answer. Instead, I invite you to consider a slightly re-framed assumption.
Dual may have the sense that two things are the same, more or less, yet opposite. The dual of our material existence, the supernatural, may have no scientific explanation that we can establish a *causal* relationship with. Indeed, if we were to construct an experiment to probe the dual, both the experiment and the result would be mirrored in both the natural and supernatural.
From a purely scientific perspective, this kind of duality is vapid. It says nothing. The dual reality is superfluous and so we cut it off with Occam's razor. However from a science fiction point of view there is fertile ground.
I would have you building half of a reality inversion machine, leaving the other half to be invented by our spirit duals. Then, your explorer and dual are simultaneously inverted, and while the material self performs trivial yet symbolically charged actions in the supernatural realm the allegorical dual of those actions play out with the supernatural self in real life. So, for instance, while material self spends an afternoon trying to find an unlocked door in a long corridor, supernatural self is embroiled in a life or death struggle for control of the government.
[Answer]
Following generally from [sumelic's original comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40663/how-can-you-have-dualism-in-hard-sf#comment-115422), I had a similar thought but in the opposite direction, basically equating "something else" with "we don't know ( perhaps yet )". And in the spirit ( no pun ) of [Annonymus' answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40663/how-can-you-have-dualism-in-hard-sf#answer-46247), with the brain/body ensemble as simply a control system over a physical implement which is directed by the otherly self or soul, I suggest a framework, something like the following:
### Knowable
1. the principle of quantum teleportation allows us to infer information over EPR channels ( refer to Dr. Allan Steinhardt's [excellent answer](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-quantum-teleportation-important-Who-discovered-it#answer_16737676) on Quora for a description )
### Speculative
1. everything appears to have been entangled at the beginning of the universe - and allowing that this may be considered a radical notion, but our current theories seem to make reasonable predictions about most everything else
2. information has neither been created nor destroyed - except perhaps since the creation of the universe, though that would necessitate a description of the source of information prior to the "creation" of the universe ( assuming that information, like energy cannot in fact be created nor destroyed, but rather only mutated or given to entropic processes )
3. souls - as per speculation #1 and assuming a "soul" is informational in nature, given that they exist in the universe - exist as a part of the universe and are "ingrained" in it
4. as per speculations #1, #2 and #3, everything one ( or anyone ) "knows", has "been", has "done" or will ever experience ( and so is true for everyone ) - always was in terms of the existential extent of the universe ( be it hyper dimensional or otherwise, but specifically referring to the, for lack of a better term, universal degrees of freedom over which the universe can be said to be extant ), and always will be in terms of the universe
### Unknowable
1. how to bridge the information contained in the soul ( and thus contained in all the universe ) to the ordinary every day experience through EPR channels
[Answer]
To augment practically all above answers with hard science angle, consider that the physical body acts as a refrigerator for the energy call "spirit". High levels of energy transfer results in high heat output, so the body is both a physical container and a temperature control mechanism that allows the spirit to interact with other forces in this plane of reality.
[Answer]
## Minds are like software
Your mind is like software. Your code can be moved to different bodies, backed up, etc... If your mind goes, your brain can't function.
] |
[Question]
[
In Christopher Paolini's [Inheritance Cycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_Cycle) ( *the Eragon books* ), magic works in a very specifically defined way. A magician can only use magic as far as his own bodily strength would be able to take him/her. (For this reason, it is impossible to raise someone from the dead because that takes more power than a single person would have.)
If a magician was in a weakened state, his/her powers would weaken accordingly; and when magic is used, the magician tires accordingly.
Assuming a world where magic works in this way, what would happen if a magician like that tried to lift a heavy weight? What constraints would there be?
I'm specifically interested in **how much this magician could lift, how high, and for how long?**
Assume normal human strength/endurance.
---
I've learned from the comments below that my question above (which I left untouched, for reference) is unclear, so allow me to clarify. **I do not care about Eragon's capabilities.** Also, an answer to this question **does *not* require any canonical knowledge of the Inheritance Cycle.**
I'm trying to build a world in which magic works as described above -- I only mentioned Eragon as an aid to explanation.
So.....let's assume that the mechanics of magic in ***my*** world are such that magical actions taken use the **biological energy available to the magician**, at the time that he is working his magic. I would like to know how much force that is, assuming a fit, well-rested, adult male human being. This is **not** the same as the amount that the average man would be able to lift, because in this case we can use muscles and energy not normally used by men to lift with -- let him throw literally *all* of his energy into lifting this weight. The magician's height doesn't matter.
**How much can *my* magician lift?**
[Answer]
# Let's do Some Physics!
So, you want to use magic to push things around, eh? And the magic is only as "strong" as you are?
Well, let's get some things straight.
First, we're looking at the [power](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics)) a human can output. That's not force, not energy, but how much energy you can put out over the course of a period of time. In theory, a person can move a rock of any size, it may just take them longer than they can live. (Other forces may prevent them from making progress, but let's get back on topic).
Anyways, I'm assuming the magician in question can just transfer a particular amount of energy (as defined by the power they produce) to some other object without losses. This would mean a magician could direct their heat energy to an object kinetic or potential energy, without any losses. I'm also assuming that magicians must continue to input energy to systems they're affecting or else the magic effects *immediately* cease, and the objects in question behave as normal. (This prevents floating objects from floating indefinitely and requires more work from your magic users.)
# Maximum Power Output of a Human
In terms of body heat, a human puts out anywhere from [**75 W to 870 W** from body temperature alone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation#Human_heat_output_power). (much more than a lightbulb!). That means a wizard has around 800 W to fool around with from his body heat alone! Obviously, a wizard would need to elevate their body temperature before casting spells to take full advantage of that 800 W.
Humans are more than just heat sinks. We can put out around [**400 W** of mechanical power (for around an hour)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power#Available_power) if we're well-trained. Less well trained individuals go for around **50-150 W** during the same course, though, so the individual's condition matters.
Wait, what about burst strength? That's when you focus your efforts into one task, and you focus as much power as you can into one push or lift. That sounds like a question weightlifters can answer to me! Take a look at the wikipedia page for [weightlifting records](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_Olympic_weightlifting). It looks like a world-class weightlifter (of weight category ~77 kg) can do the clean & jerk event with about 200 kg! Assuming this action is done it in about 2 seconds, and you are the same height as [Oleg Perepetchenov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Perepetchenov), that's (200 kg \* 9.8 m/s^2 \* 1.64m / 2s) a whopping **1,597.4 W**!
As a favorite thought exercise has reminded me, you technically don't do [any work](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)) holding a thing up. However, if the additional potential energy the object gets from being higher comes from the person, then yes, the magician will still loose energy. (The added potential energy is $mgh$, where $m$ is the mass of the thing they're holding up, $g$ is acceleration due to gravity, and $h$ is how much higher the object is. If you do that over time, then you get power, measured in watts!) So I'm running with that assumption for holding things up.
# What Can I Do With How Many Watts?
**For 75 W, you can:**
* Lift a household cat (a little on the fat side) above your head in 1s (I'm not responsible for where the cat goes after that.)
* Throw a stool
* Toss a baseball at at 70 mph (not enough to be in the major leagues, but [a respectable pitch](http://www.efastball.com/baseball/pitching/grips/average-pitching-speed-by-age-group/).)
* Hold that same domestic cat you threw up to head height for 1 second. (If you're putting out 75 W constantly, then the cat will stay up!)
**For 800 W, you can:**
* Raise a house cat 17.5m (about 57 ft, or 19 yards) in 1s (that's pretty high!)
* keep a house cat at ~13,000 m above its normal height (until you run out of energy).
* Hold a 50 kg (110 lbs.) weight above your head (until you run out of energy).
* Throw a baseball at 105m/s or ~234 mph.
**For 1,600 W, you can:**
* Throw a baseball at 150 m/s, or ~335 mph (or 0.43 Mach, with 1.0 Mach being the speed of sound)
* Lift 200 kg above your head (that's enough for 2 large men!)
* Raise a house cat 50,000 m in 1 second. (the boundary for [outer space](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space) technically starts around 100km, or 100,000 m)
Obviously, if you did any of these things slower, or for less time, you would use less power (less watts).
Why am I picking on house cats? I just chose something familiar. Please don't use this magic on cats!
[Answer]
So in Eragon (this is my single favorite magic system) the caster is limited by the power in his/her own body. We are not talking mana, or spells per day or anything like that. Think of it as life force, or if you want to go all chemistry think ATP.
* A caster using a spell to complete a task loses energy proportionally to what it would take to do the job manually. I want to lift a 5 lb rock 5 feet off the ground. I won't do the physics (because I can't remember the formulas) but I am sure someone here could sort out the joules.
* Using too much energy, more than the caster has, kills the caster. Casting strength is based off of physical strength/endurance and triggered by mental or verbal (or both) command. Intelligence is important though, the way you trigger it (the words you use to form the spell) can be more or less efficient, just like doing work manually.
So generally speaking it is easy to say that the answer to this question is pretty straightforward. It takes as much energy as it would have to do it manually. There are some additional considerations though. If you are using magic to say, lift a giant boulder, a magician says the word and BAM its up off the ground (given they have the power to do so). Now a non-magician has to actually do the lifting, which may be more difficult as its harder to lift awkward objects etc.
So I would say that pure physical formulas apply to casters whereas non-casters would be less efficient in their use of energy. As for your specific question:
>
> I'm specifically interested in how much this magician could lift, how
> high, and for how long?
>
>
>
Hard to say. Those are not linear variables, height would be irrelevant for a caster (I think???) as 2 feet off the ground is no different than 50 since you're just fighting gravity. *Would a caster moving it up to 50 feet while a normal person held it two feet off the ground be equivalent???* The weight of the object dictates how long and vice versa. If you have a specific scenario in mind feel free to share it.
From the web:
>
> Any time you lift an object, you do work against gravity. We use the
> same formula for work that you already know (Work = force ×
> distance), but it’s expressed in a slightly different form: Force is
> written in the form mg, where m is mass and g is the acceleration due
> to gravity, 9.8 m/sec2. We use h for height because only the vertical
> distance an object moves matters for calculating work against gravity.
> Did you know...If you have to lift a new sofa to a second-floor
> apartment, the work done against gravity is the same whether you haul
> it straight up the side of the building with ropes or take a longer
> path up the stairs. Only the vertical distance matters because the
> force of gravity is vertical. [Found here](http://www.cposcience.com/home/Portals/2/Media/post_sale_content/PHY2/Ancillaries/SkillSheets/Unit_4/10.2_WorkDoneagainst.pdf)
>
>
>
Looking at your newer question I managed to [find this.](http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/19710-how-much-energy-does-the-average-human-body-have-at-a-given-time/) Someone better at physics will have to do the math.
>
> lets say we have an 80kg human. the maximum energy that can be
> released is if there was a total mass conversion.
>
>
> E=mc^2 (we'll assume momentum is zero) E= 80\*9\*10^16
> =7200000000000000000 J
> =7.2 EJ(exa-joules)
>
>
>
[Answer]
Great answers from @James & @PipperChip.
I have three pieces to add, in support of and to provide further elucidation on, the answers given (I love numbered lists btw :D).
Effectively, to develop the most clearly defined magic for your world, determining the following would be very useful:
1. Determine the amount of time energy can be collected from the body to produce the magical force.
The answer varies greatly if you determine the caster can collect the energy for a nanosecond or if they can collect it for 10 seconds... these time frames are many orders of magnitude different in power levels.
Energy output (how much energy is available to lift an object in our case) must be measured in a time frame to be meaningful.
NOTE: you could use this to determine how powerful the user of magic is... maybe there are people who can collect the energy over a longer time period, thus making them much more powerful than someone who can collect it for only a nanosecond. Maybe this even takes practice, so the more skill you have, (vs innate ability), the more time you can collect power.
2. Determine if the energy is only kinetic, heat, electrical, etc... energy (since the body produces all of them... or even potential chemical energy...). Based on the answer provided by PipperChip combining the heat production of the body, (a by-product of the combined energy usage by all of the processes that mean someone is alive), as well as the potential for kinetic energy produced by the muscles, would produce a very different level of power than just heat energy.
3. I would suggest one more thing that I think is a very important part of developing this concept: what is the resulting effect on the caster?
If I convert all of the heat energy my body produces for 3 seconds, do I then get cold?
If I convert all of the heat energy built up in my body (not just that emanating from my body but also the heat in all parts of my body) do I freeze?
If I convert potential chemical energy in my cells do I get sick or die on the spot??
Alternately, if I convert the potential chemical energy in my fat cells only, do I lose weight? (side note: I suspect our fat cells may contain quite a lot of chemical energy if applied all @ once... also without fat I've heard it said we would die... so using up all the energy in just our fat cells may be life threatening as well).
Hope this is helpful & I like your more specific idea even better than the one in the Eragon series.
[Answer]
I'm going to approach this from the perspective of stored energy in a human body (for anyone else who might be interested in this) since it's relatively simple to convert calories to joules.
So here's the math.
```
1lb of human fat = about 3500 calories
200lb person with 15% body fat = about 30lbs of fat
That's 105,000 calories.
1 calorie = 4184 joules
105,000 calories = about 440 million joules of energy
1 joule is the energy required to lift 1kg to a hight of 10cm
Therefore, with 440 million joules we can lift 220kg to a hight of 200km
```
So yeah, if my math is correct, your magician could probably launch three people into orbit simultaneously!
Notice, there's no mention of how *long* it would take to do this, because in Newtonian mechanics, work done is a component of the force applied over a distance regardless of the time it takes to move it that distance. Your magician's "power" is limited by how quickly he can access the potential energy in his body and distribute it, as well as how fast he can replenish it.
As mentioned in some comments as well, "holding" an object in place takes no energy, so once moved, if the object is not allowed to expend it's potential energy it will remain at rest.
You will probably also want to consider the effects on the magicians body. A human can move a mile on about 150 calories and that can be fairly tiring. Imagine the exhaustion if you were to quickly expend 105,000 calories. Saying that, most of the exhaustion is caused by the chemical processes required by the body to convert stored energy into kinetic energy, so if you bypass that with magic you might not feel the tiredness.
On a side note, this is why it's so *hard* to lose weight.
[Answer]
Humans have 81,500 kilocalories on average on their entire body and the body consumes 2000 kilocalories on average on a day.
If you were to consume 2000 kilocalories on magic, that be 8368000 jouls which translates in Watts consumed per second.
This is enough to power a freezing spell for 16 minutes to freeze a person or keep some food fresh.
All those Watts could also be used to lift cats into space as suggested by @PipperChip
] |
[Question]
[
Let's assume that:
* the entire nuclear arsenal available on earth is launched and detonated, completely obliterating civilization but leaving a few humans and animals in very remote areas alive.
* this creates a 50 year long nuclear winter almost completely blocking sunlight and rendering photosynthesis impossible (I'm not sure if ~20,000 nukes would be enough to achieve this but let's pretend it is).
* these remote areas have levels of radiation that are low enough for some of the survivors to not die of radiation poisoning/cancer during those 50 years
* the survivors have access to enough potable water to survive 50 years
* the pool of animals that survived is too small for human survivors to rely solely on hunting for 50 years
* the reserves of pre-apocalyptic conserved food (canned food, for example) are too small for human survivors to rely solely on them for 50 years
* there are not enough human survivors for them to rely solely on cannibalism for 50 years
Would it be possible in that environment for survivors to not starve and feed themselves throughout the 50 year long nuclear winter?
I'm not asking about complex lifeforms in general or issues with the oxygen/CO2 cycle as that would be too broad although surival of humans obviously depends on that.
I'm pretty sure some bacteria and microorganisms would survive, maybe some insects too. Mushrooms would probably survive too.
I'm not sure if humans can survive on a diet only consisting of mushrooms and cockroaches though. How do you think those poor survivors will feed themselves?
[Answer]
If they cooperate they would be fine. They could set up hydroponics on a big scale before their food ran out. Supplement their diet with the fast growing crops and expanding however they can, they have plenty of power they can use. I assume trees died, but wood is still a fuel and there are a LOT of trees.
A lot of them would die, those that banded together in an intelligent attempt to survive and expand would be OK, some of them at any rate.
You have the humans only surviving in remote places. Fact is remote places are actually the best set up for survival many times. Because the people there need to have a range of suitable skills since they do most things for themselves, they would also have stores of fuel and more likely to have emergency equipment such as generators, canned food, tools etc,. They're also used to cooperating in terms of looking after each other and sharing skillsets. City dwellers are a different story entirely.
I live on an island prone to cyclones. I have a generator, fuel, first aid kit, and big water tank, I could right now, without rationing, live a couple of months cut off with my kids and wife on stored supplies. But whole remote communities would be much better organised. I'm not a survivalist, this is normal assets for anyone here who can afford it.
As a comment suggests, you have at least 2 years to work it out. The earlier you start preparing the better.
I like comforts and lights so electricity is important. You could covert trees and water to steam.... you could make hydrogen from water..... you could just do the muscle powered generator trick... or you could use a water wheel or windmill to generate power, that's off the top of my head, but if I had a few years and my life and my kids lives depended on it, I'd work it out.
[Answer]
Governments have already prepared for this. See the [Svalbard Seed Vault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault).
As long as people cooperate and don't start killing each other, people should be able to start up hydroponics farms.
While hydroponics requires quite a lot of electricity, that shouldn't be as much of a problem as you'd think. While power plants in some countries may be primary targets, it is not practical for nuclear weapons to destroy every single piece of infrastructure in every single country. Iceland, for example, runs over a quarter of their nation off of geothermal power and almost all of the remainder comes from hydro power.
[Answer]
Seafood.
We could kill every living thing on land, but we would hardly make a dent in the ocean (with nukes).
Fishing ships are more likely to survive the war, since most of the time, they are at sea, away from the blasts.
[Answer]
The survivors would try to live from hunting and scavenging of preserved food in the safe areas. As you say, there's not enough food for everyone, so after a while they will start to starve. Some of them will resort to steal from those better-off, some will resort to cannibalism, but most of them will just venture out of the safe zones into the irradiated areas, looking for food - and fleeing from other humans.
The radiation background in those zones will have reduced to just a thousandth of what it was the day of the end of the world, so the explorers will do just fine. Sure, many of them will develope some cancer in twenty or thirty years, but its life expectancy would be way lower in a place without food, so who cares?
Even if only 0.001% of the food is edible, it will be more than enough to feed the little human population that's left. We all have a lot of food at our homes, plus there's a lot of in supermarkets and stores. Those who died in the armaggedon never lived to eat it, and whatever animals or survivors didn't eat in the very first months it's going to be frozen. There will be also a lot of unprocessed food available: frozen vegetables in the fields, frozen animals (though most of them would have died of starvation and so they aren't going the best source of protein)... even frozen humans, if they are so desperate to resort to cannibalism - they should focus on those who commited suicide, to exclude disease.
[Answer]
**TLDR** Yes, it's possible to survive. Those who starve will die and optimal number of people will be reached. But probably it will take more than 50 years.
As @RealSubtle noted, mushrooms and some fishes probably don't ever notice that there is no sunlight anymore. Another important thing is new generations.
Nobody will stop reproducing. 50 years is enough for 2-3 people generations. Animals, plants will spawn too. Sure, most of them will die - but it's usual for wild life. And only most adapted will survive. The [story about black and white moths](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjjDwrzDpnI) shows that wild nature could adapt even to fast changes. Nuclear winter is extremely fast change of environment but it also trigger faster adaptations due to radiation-provoked mutations.
Although there is no sunlight and many old food chains would be broken, a new species will spawn and many just adapt. The higher animal in food chain, the less changes need to adapt. For example, mushrooms and lichens will enjoy new conditions (dead trees/animals, cold weather) and could replace grass/trees (*total extinction, grass has almost no chances*). Reindeers eats both lichens and grass so they supersede cows (*cows have chance to adapt but it take ages*). Predators like wolves and bears just change diet from cows to reindeers. People are top predators which have ultimate adaptation resource - their brains - so they are definitely could survive.
**UPDATE** As @leftaroundabout mentioned, lichens are photoautotrophs. They are more primitive and less effective compared trees. But they adapted to hard environment and could grow where grass can't. Like dark moths, they already exist and just widespread and supersede in new conditions.
The amount of food will reduce significantly so less ~~people~~ creatures could live on the same area. Starvation and battles for best areas are just regulators of population. Less adapted will die and most adapted will eat as much as they needed. Again, it's usual for wild nature.
From perspective of evolution, the 50 years is too small period. Probably a new features/behaviour would be developed but don't fixed in a whole species. ~~I doubt that food chains would be stabilized in that period.~~ In fact, the **wildlife is *not* a stable system**. It's better to say that new species will conquer new areas even after 50 years.
[Answer]
If they are lucky enough to be near a cave which has a population of blind fish big enough to eat then they could start breeding them.
For mushroom cultivation, they would need access to plant materials. This would not be a problem if they live near a forest. Even if the trees die due to not being able to photosynthesise, they would be probably well-conserved by the cold to last 50 years for a small human colony. Although they would probably need to use them for heating too.
[Answer]
Funny timing that I just read this question, as I just read the book "*The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm*" by Dr. Lewis Dartnell. This is a reference book, not a fiction book. In it, he is targeting a certain kind of post-apocalyptic scenario similar to yours, and he even mentions that it could be nuclear-winter-driven.
The interesting correlation here is that Lewis Dartnell speaks of a similar level of survived humans, and he proposes that the humans who are left could survive for an estimated 55 years just by raiding the pre-existing food around them, first the perishable foods then proceeding in order of ever less perishable foods.
I am not sure how Dr. Dartnell came to his estimate of 55 years of food per person in his scenario which was similar to yours, but he did contact many experts in various fields and did much research, so I would assume that he is probably correct at least to within an order of magnitude, and I will take his estimate as our baseline assumption.
I do not know if that estimate takes into account what the recently deceased people would have eaten before they died. If not, that might need to be reduced somewhat. But even if that is the case, you should be able to procure other foodstuff somewhere to augment that. Some others have suggested **fishing**, which should be viable for some time. **Fungus** will be quite happy to feast on the decaying life for a while. You can get **seeds** to begin growing with little or no light so that they absorb some extra nutrients from the ground, then eat them as **sprouts**. Using indoor **grow-lamps** could produce a small, supplemental amount to keep you alive with the other things. So I will stick with the 55 year estimate and suggest it could be even more.
## Conclusion
You asked for 50 years. There is an estimated (at least) 55 years of food around you that you can use despite the nuclear winter. So yes, they should survive. They will eat mostly what is left behind from pre-apocalypse, and they will supplement it with fishing and fungus early on, later on with seeds and low-light sprouts and a few grow-lamp-fed whole plants. I suggest kale, as it is quite hardy and nutritious.
[Answer]
There will be enough preserved, canned food available to survive for some months, maybe years. During this time the survivors will need to get a solid supply of electricity going. Wind and water turbines will still function quite well. The survivors will need to locate themselves where there are waterfalls and height differences, and build lots of water powered turbines/dynamos. This would require quite some engineering skills to get established. It might be possible for some knowledgeable folk to use an existing hydroelectric station, or tap into some existing wind farm.
They will set up farms under electric lights. Given enough energy production I don't see why they couldn't grow a variety of crops. Hydroponics are effective, but not necessary, normal dirt will still work as normal dirt after a nuclear apocalypse.
The farms might be planted as normal, outdoors, but would require a scaffolding or rig structure around them to hold the lights. There is a risk of radioactive contamination from the environment, so it might be better to scrape an inch or two of the topsoil off before beginning a farm. Rndioactive dust would probably blow in eventually though. Might not be too bad, survivors will have to take chances.
Radioactive contamination could greatly be reduced by building farms underground, maybe in a subway tunnel, but the temperature would be an issue preventing many crops from thriving. Should be ok for mushrooms and bug farms though.
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[Question]
[
Would the principles at work in the theoretical Alcubierre warp drive apply to a slower-than-light starship? I'm building a setting in which FTL communication and travel is impossible, (due to violations of causality, if nothing else) but would still like to have starships that can accelerate to relativistic speeds in a narratively convenient amount of time. Would the Alcubierre drive work or do I need something else entirely?
[Answer]
The Alcubierre drive works by distorting space around a bubble: expanding space behind it and contracting space in front of it. It's a nice way to get faster-than-light travel without, well, technically traveling faster than light. But the basic mechanism behind it can, it works out, work at *any* speed. Nothing in the equations forbids sub-light speed travel.
The Alcubierre drive is one of a more general class of spacetimes ([Natario 2001](https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0110086)), and the metric describing how space curves around it is defined partly by an arbitrary choice of a function $x\_s(t)$, from which we get the speed $v\_s$ by differentiating:$$v\_s=\frac{dx\_s(t)}{dt}$$
While there are constraints on certain other parameters of the metric (such as the function defining the shape of the bubble), there's no mandate that $v\_s<c$. We have some freedom there.
Unfortunately, even sub-light speed travel falls prey to one of the classic problems with Alcubierre's original idea: it still requires a negative energy density. The energy density inside the bubble, as seen by an outsider observer, is $\rho\propto -v\_s^2$, and while this goes to $0$ as $v\_s$ goes to $0$, it is still negative. It would be nice if traveling slower than light got us out of that little kink, but it doesn't.
However, traveling slower than light is an improvement in other ways. For example, particular horizons form (see [Finazzi et al. 2009](https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9707024)) when the drive reaches $v\_s=c$; those horizons are absent at sub-light speeds. This enables communication (a term I use loosely here) between the bubble and the outside universe. The horizons have historically been regarded as another one of the practical problems with a classic Alcubierre drive, alongside the negative energy density.
All that said, yes, you can use an Alcubierre drive subluminally. Let me know how that goes for you.
[Answer]
Yes. The Alcubierre metric can produce arbitrary boosts, both above and below *c*. In fact, using it for fast sublight travel is more technologically plausible than the FTL travel for which it was initially investigated, because you can actually plausibly *control* a sublight Alcubierre bubble. FTL bubbles, as currently understood, have the unfortunate characteristics of not actually allowing any signals from inside the bubble to reach the boundary, so you can neither turn it on nor turn it off internally. Sublight warp bubbles, on the other hand, do not have that problem.
[Answer]
The Alcubierre metric is time independent, i.e. it assumes the drive has always existed in the past and will always exist in the future. It does not describe how the drive accelerates up to its cruising speed and it does not describe how the drive decelerates back to rest again.
The drive works by using a torus of exotic matter. [As HDE 226868 describes in his answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/176138/23473) this deforms spacetime in such a way that the drive moves at a constant velocity. Note that this does not require any energy to be supplied because as long as an object moves at constant speed, i.e. does not accelerate or decelerate, its kinetic energy is constant. However it does take energy to accelerate and it does take energy to slow down again. Your problem is working out how to supply the energy.
The Alcubierre metric doesn't help you here because as I mentioned it doesn't describe the acceleration or deceleration. To start the drive you would have to start with the exotic matter widely separated and you would have to bring it together to form the torus. As you did this the drive would start to accelerate. Then you'd have to separate the matter again i.e. dismantle the torus and take the pieces far away from each other. That would bring the drive to a halt.
And it's going to take energy to assemble the torus to start the drive, then it's going to take energy to dismantle the torus to stop the drive. This is your problem. Were do you get this energy? Alcubierre drives need huge masses - gigatonnes of mass. You have to figure out how to pull in this huge mass from a large separation and then push the mass back out to a large separation when you want to stop. It's not obvious that this is any easier than just accelerating a conventional drive in a conventional way. If you need superluminal speeds then you need something like the Alcubierre drive. For subluminal speeds it's not obvious that it offers any advantage.
**Footnote**: a quick note on the masses required. Alcubierre's original drive required exotic matter with the mass of Jupiter. Various modifications of the geometry have been made to reduce the mass required, and Harold White at NASA has suggested it could be reduced, though as far as I know he has not published a proof of this. I have seen the figure of 800kg in popular science articles but I cannot find this in any of White's publications so I don't know where this figure came from. His paper [Warp Field Mechanics 101](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf) is often cited but the figure does not appear in that paper.
Chris Van Den Broeck has suggested a radically different geometry described in his paper [Alcubierre’s warp drive: Problems and prospects](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1290913) (behind a paywall I'm afraid) that could reduce the mass required to negligible amounts. However this requires densities that are so high as to be physically unreasonable i.e. 77 orders of magnitude more dense than the matter in a neutron star.
So at the moment there are no realistic proposals for reducing the mass of exotic matter required for the drive to a figure that could be reasonably handled by a spaceship.
For completeness I should point out that all the physicists I know (including myself) do not believe that exotic matter exists so the point is moot anyway.
[Answer]
In the Odyssey One series early attempts to achieve a working Alcubierre drive failed to achieve a full warp field, but managed to create a field that distorted the mass of anything within. They used it to make ships "lighter" and therefore make existing propulsion methods far more effective. This allowed a large ship with a crew of around 300 to reach the heliopause in about 3 days. Anything within the field also did not feel the greater affects of physics. There is a passage that explains how the forces scaled in both directions.
Not sure if any of that is actually scientific or just pseudoscience, but it was a pretty great story mechanic. They use that particular technology to also make fighters a viable space combat tool as they can now move with more versatility, without killing the pilot from excessive G-forces. They also used it to make ridiculously effective kinetic missiles, basically the field reduced mass to accelerate the missile to relativistic speeds, then at the last moment the field would reverse, increasing mass to several times what it actually is. The resulting kinetic impact made nukes look like pee shooters.
Again, sounds cool, no idea if realistic.
[Answer]
Yes, the Alcubierre warp drive would work for you in a sci-fi setting. There is currently no absolute irrefutable evidence that it is possible, but nor is there any irrefutable evidence that it is not possible.
Here are a number of references to solid current research on the feasibility of Alcubierre warp drives, be they FTL or subliminal. None of the articles absolutely requires the drive be FTL, they just assume the best use of it would be for FTL. I think the idea of using the drive for subluminal use is one of the unexplored areas of Sci-fi. It eliminates the need for the author to consider relativistic time/distance distortion and dilation effects on humans. As a plot device it is a neat way to hand wave them away. If you are 30 years old on the spaceship, your twin is 30 years old on earth, and your other twin is 30 years old on another ship.
Most authors who consider time dilation just **assume** that the human mind and biological processes can handle the fact that the mind and body is **supposed** to be younger than its twin back on earth. By using this plot device this way, you eliminate the problem of your future grandson being older than you.
In other space operas, crews go on long journeys at 0.3 **c** and come back home to ... their wife and children who have aged at the same rate. Say what? Or they have ship mates who were at the academy at the same time, same age, decades ago, but went on different deployments for differing time periods at differing variations of **c**, yet they are still exactly the same age. In point of fact, such a space/time bubble drive is almost always assumed in these space operas, without explanation, as a given. The OP is just giving it a credible name.
>
> Standing room only crowd engages in student’s warp drive theory speech
>
>
> Agnew recently provided a standing room only crowd at the American
> Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Propulsion and Energy
> Forum in Indianapolis, Ind. with an overview of the state of the art
> of warp drive theory and the feasibility of a future working system,
> based on a paper he wrote. Agnew’s advisor is Dr. Jason Cassibry, an
> associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
>
>
>
<https://www.uah.edu/news/news/standing-room-only-crowd-engages-in-student-s-warp-drive-theory-speech>
>
> Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously, Especially One
> Specific Concept
>
>
> As part of a session titled "The Future of Nuclear and Breakthrough
> Propulsion", Agnew shared the results of a study he conducted titled
> "An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State
> of the Art and Feasibility".
>
>
> As Agnew explained to a packed house, the theory behind a warp
> propulsion system is relatively simple.
>
>
>
<https://www.sciencealert.com/how-feasible-is-a-warp-drive-here-s-the-science>
>
> Finally, an overview of the warp field interferometer test bed being
> implemented in the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory: Eagleworks
> (APPL:E) at the Johnson Space Center will be detailed. While warp
> field mechanics has not had a “Chicago Pile” moment, the tools
> necessary to detect a modest instance of the phenomenon are near at
> hand
>
>
>
<https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf>
>
> An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State of
> the Art and Feasibility
>
>
>
<https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2019-4288> This one is behind a pay wall, unfortunately, and can not be quoted.
>
> Last year, Sonny White revealed a new design (pictured top) for the
> Alcubierre drive that reduces the energy requirement from the total
> mass-energy of a planet the size of Jupiter, down to the mass-energy
> of Voyager-1 (700 kilograms).
>
>
>
<https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/164326-nasa-discusses-its-warp-drive-research-prepares-to-create-a-warp-bubble-in-the-lab>
Yes, these are pop-sci sources, but the really good stuff is all behind paywalls. The only way for the general public to get a hint of what is in them is through these pop-sci publications.
But the synopsis of my answer is that there is credible scientific research being conducted on the drive, and this new evidence really challenges a lot of the old 'can't be done' arguments. The 'exotic matter' requirement and 'impossibly huge energy requirements' or even the requirement for 'negative energy densities' are not, in fact, supported as anything more than 'engineering challenges' to be overcome by further scientific research.
So science says you are clear to go. No insurmountable problems. A good, solid, scientifically supportable plot device.
[Answer]
This is a question near and dear to me. I have posited using such a drive for my generation ship, for several general reasons.
First, we really do not know what effects relativistic speeds will have on life in general, and humans in particular. Life on earth formed specifically to survive in our relativistic framework, biorhythms and circadian rhythms, gestation periods, and such for instance. We do know that life on the ISS, just a minor speed increase over earth, produces significant biological changes that can not be attributed to anything in particular, and could indeed turn out to be 'relativistic in nature'. The human body somehow does not seem to like 'aging' at a different rate than its twin would on earth. It just KNOWS it should not be that young. This possibility has, as much as I can determine, been ignored in the sci-fi world. But the human body operating in a 0.3**c** frame of reference to that which it was designed for? How firmly is 'life' and mechanisms like the 'soul' tied back to 'home' (our relativistic framework)? Will life always see itself from THIS particular reference? The space/time bubble removes any need for any conjecture. The body ages at the rate it was designed to, relative to every other human body back on earth.
Second, the drive needs no reaction mass. As long as one posits a large enough energy source, it becomes feasible to travel very long distances at high delta-v.
Third, it removes any restrictions on mass size of the generation ship. Reaction mass has to be proportionate to the mass of the ship, and is particularly useless to the final objective. No matter how efficiently or at what speed it is ejected, reaction mass ultimately restricts the size of the ship, and the energy requirements always have to accommodate the original fully-loaded reaction mass at the starting point. None of the reaction mass has any purpose or function at the end of the journey, a complete waste of room and energy. The final size of the ship using this drive is based on the amount of energy that it can produce, not on how much reaction mass it carries.
Fourth, the mass of the ship does not decrease over the duration of the trip, except for the loss of mass in its conversion directly to energy. Thus, the gravity of the ship does not change. A useful quality if you use natural gravity to augment artificial gravity. (Antimatter generators, for instance, use up antimatter. Fusion and fission, I understand, do not result in exactly the same amount of mass after as before.)
Fifth, people age at the same rate as their relatives back on earth. No problems with coming back to marry your great-great-great niece. If you believe that souls can somehow connect over great distances, this might be important psychologically.
Sixth, the statements requiring absolutely impossible amounts of energy all relate to traveling faster than **c**, requiring a 'negative energy density', a requirement not necessary for speeds below **c** as far as I can tell.
Seventh, Large enough generation ships also allow for large colliders to be placed on board. A neat trick if you need specialized particles.
So, in this vein, I have researched the drive extensively (not the pop-sci stuff, which is generally gobbledegook really spooky stuff, but the real scientific postulations) based on the original formulation and subsequent restatements, and I have found nothing in the equations regarding the operation or generation of the drive itself with '**c**' in it (the equations with **c** in them are all about requirements to travel at or faster than **c**, and thus the need for **c** as the target speed, but not in the equations for generating the bubble itself), and I have found no equations with '**c**' in them that could in any way impact on the drive. The one caveat is that, traveling exactly at **c** there may be some problem with infinite mass and energy at he boundary layer of the bubble. A 'divide by zero' error, perhaps, as infinity minus infinity is zero, or a multiplication by infinity. Any variation of **e**=**m\*\*\*\*c**^2 really gets complicated if either **e** or **m** are infinite.
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[Question]
[
I want to know the pros and cons of hand held rail guns versus coil guns. They will be given to infantry who can easily lift the weapons. If need be they could have twice the strength of a normal human via cybernetic enhancements. What would be the various pros and cons, especially in rough terrain?
[Answer]
In short (links to follow as I find time to put them in).
## Coil guns (aka Gauss guns)
Have a higher max projectile velocity. Powerful switches alternate the electromagnetic poles in the drive coils as the projectile passes through the coils. This requires high voltage, high amperage, high speed electrical switches. Researchers have been trying to build these for decades with only moderate success.
>
> is a type of projectile accelerator consisting of one or more coils
> used as electromagnets in the configuration of a linear motor that
> accelerate a ferromagnetic or conducting projectile to high
> velocity.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LjnhhtHojM) In almost all coilgun configurations, the coils and the
> gun barrel are arranged on a common axis.
>
>
> Coilguns generally consist of one or more coils arranged along a
> barrel, so the path of the accelerating projectile lies along the
> central axis of the coils. The coils are switched on and off in a
> precisely timed sequence, causing the projectile to be accelerated
> quickly along the barrel via magnetic forces. Coilguns are distinct
> from railguns, as the direction of acceleration in a railgun is at
> right angles to the central axis of the current loop formed by the
> conducting rails. In addition, railguns usually require the use of
> sliding contacts to pass a large current through the projectile or
> sabot but coilguns do not necessarily require sliding contacts.[2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4ZqfEJTGzw)
> Whilst some simple coilgun concepts can use ferromagnetic projectiles
> or even permanent magnet projectiles, most designs for high velocities
> actually incorporate a coupled coil as part of the projectile.
>
>
>
The force the projectile leaves on the weapon is it attempts to compress the coils (you'd get recoil similar to a normal weapon).
Magnetic fields are not inherently dangerous to people as long as they don't have magnetic metals on their person. Other than the difficulties with switches, a coil gun is much more suitable for use by unprotected humans (e.g. infantry):
Video at link:
[Man portable coil / gauss gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LjnhhtHojM)
## Railguns
Are much easier to build from a technological perspective. Current runs down one "rail" through the conductive base of the projectile and back up the other rail. This is the brute force method of electromagnetic projectiles.
>
> A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile
> launcher based on similar principles to the homopolar motor. A railgun
> comprises a pair of parallel conducting rails, along which a sliding
> armature is accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current
> that flows down one rail, into the armature and then back along the
> other rail.
>
>
>
The forces applied to the railgun try to rip the rails apart. The recoil from the projectile also supplies a recoil like a chemical slug thrower.
Each rail conducts high voltage and amperage current. Touching or getting close to one of the rails would be exceedingly dangerous. This weapon is probably not suitable for infantry use.
Video at the links:
[Artillery equivalent railgun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4ZqfEJTGzw)
[Man portable railgun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LjnhhtHojM)
[Answer]
While using rail or coil guns as infantry small arms is problematic (due to the various issues already discussed), there may be a place for railguns as a man portable anti tank weapon.
Current ATGM's generally use shaped charge warheads to actually penetrate the armour (the rocket motor just gets it there), and various techniques have been developed since WWII to defeat these types of warheads, including spaced armour (such as the "cages" around modern tanks), explosive reactive armour (the brick like devices attached to the outside of most Russian tanks) and even counter missiles like the Russian "Arena" or Israeli "Trophy" systems. Hypervelocity "darts" (Armour Piercing Discarding Sabot Fin Stabilized; APDSFS) fired from tank cannon are much harder to defeat, and using current or near term technology the only practical means of defeating such rounds is plates of high strength and density armour.
A tank cannon is a huge piece of equipment, firing large 120mm rounds and having massive recoil, so you need the tank to carry it around and use it effectively.
A man portable railgun would resemble a recoilless cannon:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/06xCP.jpg)
The propellant charge would not be used to drive the round, but rather energize a MHD generator with the jet of high velocity gas exiting the venturi, while the long barrel will house the rails which actually drive the projectile. The actual projectile can be rather small and relatively light, since the damage is delivered in the form of kinetic energy. A small projectile moving fast enough could conceptually be able to engage helicopters and aircraft as well, although a very advanced sighting system and mount capable of rapid movement of the weapon will be needed.
The downside of this weapon will be much like regular recoilless cannon: the jet of the driving charge (in this case driving the MHD generator) will certainly alert any enemy of where you are, and you will need to leave immediately after firing.
Still, this would allow light infantry to be able to take on tanks on a more equal basis, as well as defeat most types of fortification (blasting through bunkers and buildings with relative ease), so something along these lines may be considered as the technology of railguns matures.
[Answer]
One advantage of a rail gun would be if you ran out of loads but still had power you could just jam the rails against and enemy and pull the trigger. The impedance would be higher, causing the voltage between the rails to be higher.
[Answer]
They both differ from conventional weapons in that they use electromagnetism to propel the projectile rather than using an explosive charge. Both of them need incredible amounts of energy, which is why they are not practical in an infantry weapon at the moment. The gun barrel and mechanisms do not need to be massively heavy, the problem is supplying the power.
The advantages of rail guns is that they are much simpler to build and operate than a coil gun. They are also more powerful as they have a direct contact between the projectile and the rails while the coil gun has a gap between them.
The advantage of a coil gun though is that the coils can be insulated from the outside world more easily, which could well make them more reliable in the long run. It will be harder for external conditions to interfere with the coils and the coils will take less wear and tear in use. Rail gun rails in particular are subject to a lot of wear even from normal use.
[Answer]
Railgun
for one they can fire faster because the rails do not need to be deactivated. Also, with a coilgun you need capacitors which can fry easy. So railgun is my preferred choice.
[Answer]
A coilgun is more efficient and needs less maintenance, there is no need for as high currents, and the rail itself won't get damaged as easily.
Coil guns however typically need complex control mechanisms to turn the coils on and of, this makes them a lot more fragile and reduces their maximum launch speed. While a good coilgun needs less maintenance on a small scale, a large scale one might easily break so is not as reliable in big warfare.
For infantry however a coilgun likely is more reliable due to the lower power usage, and them being able to not be affected as much by things like mud etc.
Not long ago I have been working on a new type of railgun which needs no complex control things like a normal railgun, and also can reach the high speeds, yet which reaches the efficiency of a coilgun, and so requires less maintenance to things like molten rails etc. However given current events it is better if I do not explain how it works, because someone might use it against people. I also don't know if discussing such things would even be legal in a place like this since it would be like handing over a blueprint to a high power high efficiency weapon.
But since this is a worldbuilding discussion place, you can still use them, it is possible even if you don't know exactly how it works.
Also you might look to different more fun things like shooting liquid/molten metal. A friend an I once designed a lava shooting gun, such a thing is more a science fair project in practice since it has more of a cool factor than actual use (relatively expensive per shot, low range, and it just shoots very hot scary stuff but if you think about it, a single bullet likely is more dangerous). However in storybuilding such things can be rather cool. It is also something which was very easy to build in real life when you know what kind of methods to use. Extending the range is also doable using water to form explosions caused by the instant boiling but such a weapon realistically only really makes sense in a story where for example you have a super hero, or some evil person who likes to see people suffering and who for example uses it in huge bombs, or if there are specific creatures which heal very fast so that it keeps boiling them for a while. You could combine something like that with a coilgun or railgun and make it boiling metal. however it all depends on your story and how far it must be to what is used and known now, since if it needs to be stuff which is doable now, then a lava gun is just a science fair project which looks cool and keeps doing damage for a while after hitting.
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[Question]
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Realistically, how small can a nuclear reactor get (fission or fusion)?
Truck sized? Table top? Mr. Fusion? AAA Battery?
Are there other physical limits when we include human safety issues?
Let's say the power range would be anything over 1kW. The higher the better.
I should also specify I'm looking for electrical power.
[Answer]
Currently there are Small Module Reactors which use fission to generate an electricity output of less than 300 MWe. One of these, the NuScale produces 50,000 kilowatts/hour and is 76' by 15'.
<https://www.hpschapters.org/florida/6spring.pdf>
NASA is working on low-energy nuclear reaction(LENR) technology which they hope eventually to use to power cars, planes, and homes.
<https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/149090-nasas-cold-fusion-tech-could-put-a-nuclear-reactor-in-every-home-car-and-plane>
MIT also claims to have made recent breakthroughs in an efficient fusion plant: <http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plant-0810>
Sadly the last two are theoretical. However as a reality check, it would not be unrealistic to expect nuclear reactors with a large output with the physical size of a home generator in the near future. And possibly the slightly further future may bring into reality AAA battery sized generators.
Human safety issues may be a concern, however NASAs LENR uses a nickel lattice and hydrogen ions and the reaction produces copper. Without more details this does not sound much more dangerous than the acids stored inside acid batteries.
[Answer]
# Use atomic battery instead
To reach 1 kW of power, you can use an [atomic battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery) instead of a atomic reactor.
Atomic battery work by having any quantity of radioactive material ([238Pt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238) or [90Sr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium#Radioactive_strontium) are popular choices ) in one point, then transform the radioactive energy into electricity (usually,radioactivity -> heat -> electricity )
You can make an atomic battery as small as you want by using [Seebeck generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator).
To reach 1kw, it's probably better to use a [small Stirling engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_radioisotope_generator). The contraption would be the size of a Mr.Fusion
Note that the amount of reacting material can be as small as you want. You only need to take something with a smaller [half-life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life). This, of course, can easily become unpractical
Atomic battery has one major drawback compared to reactor: they get depleted at the same rate, whether you use it or not.
An atomic battery with a Seebeck generator has no moving part and therefore could operate for centuries (with a large enough amount of, say, 202Pb)
[Answer]
There already are some nuclear batteries around the size of a AA or so, but you'd be hard pressed to power a pocket calculator with one, the trick is to pick a fuel that doesn't emit neutrons or gamma rays as you tend to need quite a bit of shielding (light elements for neutron shielding, heavy for gamma)
Your best bet is something that produced alpha rays as even a Christmas card will protect you. One of the most commonly used alpha sources for power applications is plutonium (which ironically shields you from much of *its own radiation*). The plutonium gets hot and you can use this heat to drive something like a stirling or thermoacoustic engine. You're never going to get 1kW from a AA sized device without *serious heatsinking* (budget for 30% electrical efficiency or so).
I see no reason why you couldn't get a kW of electrical power from something the size of say a beer mug (you'd just have to use a much more volatile alpha emitter than plutonium and accept a shorter lifespan)
[Answer]
ANSWER: Use an RTG - a Radiosotope Thermoelectric Generator. They have been around for years. They are small enough to fit in your garage or basement, and generate significant power.
I have run across them in remote parts of Alaska, presumably for weather stations. The structures are about 5ft by 4 ft by 6 ft tall, and you can hear fans whirring inside and see the satellite antenna outside, all inside a chain-link fence with a warning sign. And not a power line in sight.
Here are some links to relevant information about them:
<http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/jiang1/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N3Fq4.jpg)
It is also described in Wikipedia:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U1fds.jpg)
NASA also uses them in space probes, most notably Cassini. They design the GPHS hot cells to be able to survive reentry even if everything else burns. They are more the size of those square 6 Volt lantern batteries. The Plutonium is surrounded by solid ceramic.
They last for many years, and are perfect for space probes which get beyond the viable range of solar cells.
Here is an official NASA document that describes RTGs:
<http://saturn-archive.jpl.nasa.gov/files/power.pdf>
[Answer]
The human safety issue for any fission reactor is the neutrons that are produced. Normally this is addressed by a few meters of concrete shielding, which also firms part of the reactor's last-resort containment. A low-power research reactor is often called a swimming-pool reactor because instead of concrete, several meters of water is used. When operational there is a beautiful blue glow from the water immediately adjacent to the core.
It would be possible to dispense with screening and simply keep one's distance. This makes sense for a nuclear-powered spacecraft (reactor at one end of a long pole, crew quarters at the other). Here on Earth it sounds like the sort of crazy that the Soviets might have countenanced, given a reason. (I cannot think of one).
Someone who knows more than me might be able to fill us in on the design of reactors in submarines where space for shielding is obviously a bit tight. (If this info is not classified). Is there a zone around the reactor where crew do not venture except for the shortest possible time in emergencies? Is the immediate outside of the hull an unhealthy place for a barnacle?
[Answer]
If more is better, and where it can get then I would say 10 tons per 1 GW of electrical power for thermonuclear reactors in space conditions.
By using CNT's as reinforcement/conductors etc and probably it may be less than that. This is for small reactors(few GW power), for bigger reactors it should be better than that with same technologies.
I would not say it is good numbers to use for you space ship if you make plans for it and will to build it in next 10 years, but for space ships, in this century or the next in hard-scifi it may be a reasonable assumption.
For portable devices, it is hard to tell. The answer to the question depends on the field of use of the energy source. Because sources are different and they can be classified/differs by massefficiency, the power they produce, an environment they should work in, should they be human-nearby safe, how long they have to work etc.
As funny energy source, I found recently, [C14 based battery](http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-turning-nuclear-waste-into-super-efficient-diamond-batteries).
Half life 5730 years, so it will work few thousand years without a significant reduction in power production. Mass efficiency is not the best - 0.17 W per kg, so a 1kW source will weight about 6 tons. No moving parts. Excellent scalability, if you have enough C14.
For some purposes is an excellent source, for other, it is not so great. So proper answer really depends on where the source has to be used, and the purpose of it.
[Answer]
# Polywell fusion scales in an amazing manner
The [Polywell fusion reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell) has a very curious scaling. Assuming Robert Bussard was right in his hypothesis, the energy output of Polywell scaled by the radius of the reactor to the **seventh power**, while the "Q-value", that is to say ratio of energy gained versus energy given to run the reactor scales to the fifth power of the radius.
This means that an almost arbitrarily powerful Polywell reactor will be in the order of 3 to 5 meters cubed.
[Answer]
Since the OQ started this question with "Realistically," I think some info on small, *demonstrated* nukes is on target. The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54 "W54 nuclear weapon") is the smallest nuclear weapon I know of (true nuclear reaction.)
"All four variants share the same basic core: **a nuclear system which is 10.75 inches (273 mm) diameter, about 15.7 inches (400 mm) long, and weighs around or slightly over 50 pounds (23 kg).**"
As is, this doesn't fit your requirements, but it does give us an idea of what the minimum amount of fissile material is. A reactor for power needs two key things the weapon lacks:
1. Moderation to control it, so it produces useful power when desired, rather than exploding.
2. Something(s) to take the output energy and convert it to electricity.
Both 1 and 2 will add mass and volume, but for **small** power outputs (by which a mean a few kilowatts), the moderation and power extraction/conversion subsystems ought to be much smaller than in other examples already cited. I assert that the core could be on the close order of a few cubic meters, exclusive of shielding. Small size may hurt efficiency, but efficient operation wasn't specified.
Speculation: My guess is that people who control fissile materials (and what gets built therewith) are more into higher power systems -- megaWatts.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned reactors (not simply RTGs) that have been put into orbit, mostly by the Russians. Those are small, though larger than the W54: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_space#Fission_systems>
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[Question]
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I started playing one of the Metro games, and one of the common enemies is an armor plated Spider the size of a small dog that your character's flashlight causes its armor to boil as if the light is acid. Eventually I took a break from this, walked past the TV and the movie Pitch Black was starting. It is set on a desert world inhabited by these bug like creatures larger than humans, and have the same trait of being physically injured by light. In both instances, too much exposure to light seems to be fatal to these creatures, with the Metro case being about 10-20 seconds being enough to kill them.
Having coincidentally seeing both of these instances in such a short time span I got to thinking. How realistic is the general idea of a creature which when exposed to light of even a flashlight causes its skin to burn as if it's on fire, leading to the creature's death in a short time span? If not a flashlight, then more powerful or special sources are still acceptable, such as maybe UV lights.
It would be preferable if a human were exposed to the same conditions that would be near certain death to the creature, the human would be mostly unscathed, but the line is drawn so long as a human is at least more likely to survive the said exposure than not. The ability to weaponize the light is of a high priority here, so we don't want to turn on a special flashlight and have it effectively become a suicide bomb unless that is the only way for this creature to exist.
[Answer]
I'll give a conditional 'yes it is realistic' answer to this, but very conditional. The key part here is you don't actually need to fuel the reaction with the energy of light, you simply need light to initiate the reaction and the resulting compound to react with something else.
For example, hydrogen peroxide will degrade to water and oxygen when exposed to light (admittedly slower process). We know the reaction of some metals with water is relatively aggressive to outright explosive. Had this creature be composed of, lets say potassium and hydrogen peroxide, then the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and the then reaction of water and potassium could give a boiling/acid texture to the outside of the creature. Mind you, in pitch black the giant rainstorm woulds produced some pretty fireworks if these creatures were composed of potassium. How exactly a creature would evolve to contain something so unstable is a bit of a mystery as well.
More research needed, but I do believe there is some feasibility in light initiating a reaction that cascades into something much greater from there.
edit:
Try a second one. Silver iodide converts to metallic silver and releases the iodine in the presence of light (can be used in photography). Ammonia plus Iodine will create nitrogen triiodide, which gives off a purple smoke.
Ya I'm reaching. Kinda fun, but reaching.
second edit:
I think I might have the best option I can find here...silver bromine. Once again, you need to have a creature with a nearly silly mix of chemicals in it's body, but silver bromide reacts with light, releasing the bromine which could react with aluminum or a few others to cause a reaction. Why exactly a creature would be composed of something this unstable would be another question
I guess this post has become a very long winded way of saying theres less than 0.000001% chance of this feasibly happening.
[Answer]
Let's consider the fact that the Sun is actually harmful to most creatures, given the right conditions. Humans around the world get sunburned every day, and millions contract skin cancer every year as a result of UV exposure.
What is a sunburn? Though we often don't think of it this way, it's actually a radiation burn that causes cellular damage. The Sun is constantly bombarding us with deadly ultraviolet radiation, and the Earth's ozone layer filters out most of this harmful light. But what about the radiation that makes it through? The vast majority of it is dissipated by melanin, the pigment that gives our skin color. People with darker skin tones - that is to say, more melanin - have been found to be able to handle sun exposure better than fair-skinned people, who tend to burn more easily. But what if someone didn't have any melanin at all?
That condition is known as albinism, a disorder that a person or animal is born with and is passed down genetically. In albinos, even the irises of the eyes lack pigment, which is why they appear red: you are seeing straight through to the retina. Normally, the iris contracts and expands to let more or less light in - this is why your pupils appear dilated in dim light, but much smaller in bright light. In the case of an albino's iris, since it is transparent, it cannot effectively block the light entering the eye. Because of this, albinos tend to have difficulty seeing in bright light, and many even experience discomfort or pain.
[Answer]
The [lasers used in surgery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excimer_laser#Major_applications) (particularly eye surgery) uses a UV frequency that dissolves flesh efficiently without causing heat in the neighboring tissue.
>
> The ultraviolet light from an excimer laser is well absorbed by biological matter and organic compounds. Rather than burning or cutting material, the excimer laser adds enough energy to disrupt the molecular bonds of the surface tissue, which effectively disintegrates into the air in a tightly controlled manner through ablation rather than burning.
>
>
>
The outer skin layer of a creature might be sensitive in this manner, so a flashlight-like device is especially distructive with surprisingly little power, if it puts all the energy into the target wavelength like lasers (and LEDs) do.
The thing is that UV is right on tge edge where photons have enough energy to affect chemical bonds directly at our Eartly temperature and composition. That's not universal though, as we manged to get photosensitive proteins for use in our eyes. So it’s at least chemically possible that the skin of some alien will have some protein in it that’s sensitive to what we call “visible” light.
In fact, one of my early (affordable) LED flashlights was a *torquise* LED. Emitting a monochromatic beam uses far less power, especially when it uses the color that our eyes are most sensitive too!
[Answer]
For a creature to be hurt by *any* light, this is very unrealistic. Think about it - a large flashlight is typically powered by a couple batteries. If you had a flashlight that used 4 D-cell batteries in series, that gets you 6 Volts. You can (though I'd suggest watching a video of someone else doing it rather than trying it yourself) put a 9 volt battery on your tongue without serious harm. Why would transforming that energy into another form suddenly make it considerably more dangerous?
Given that not much energy is being delivered by such light, in order for the light to be harmful the creature's skin would have to be highly reactive to light. However, if it's highly reactive to any light that means the chemicals must be quite unstable, meaning they'd decay much faster and require a lot more energy to maintain. It's possible that you could contrive some situation in which this would actually be an evolutionary advantage, but it would have to be a very unusual situation.
[Answer]
Extremely unrealistic.
To an extremely good first approximation all life on Earth is powered by the sun and it's very, very likely that this will be true of all life we ever find for the very simply reason that it's difficult to imagine another bio-available powersource that could take its place.
All plant life must exist in the sunlight, so it follows that for most animal life they would need to also be able to exist in sunlight or they're cut off from their food source for half of the time. This is especially true for earlier animal life since they will lack complex behavioural adaptations required to hide completely from the sunlight.
So we have life evolved from sunlight-capable life, and competing with sunlight-capable life, that not only adapts to living in the dark but somehow evolves to be harmed by light. To explode, as you suggest, this needs to go even further have a outer covering that is highly volatile in light but outer coverings benefit from being inert because this gives the most protection. I cannot conceive of any conditions where explody-reaction-to-light would be evolutionarily favoured over not-explody-reaction-to-light.
[Answer]
There are people who literally cannot go out into sunlight without receiving severe damage to their skin with severe sunburns or increased cancer risk, which can lead to death. The disease for this is called *Xeroderma pigmentosum*.
There have been several documentaries on this disease, as well as the focus of a few novels. Maybe not as severe as *Metro*'s creatures, but still very severe.
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[Question]
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Could [werewolves](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werewolf) exist in a realistic world?
All that is required for an accepted answer is the ability to change shape over night. Bonus points will be awarded if you can explain a bite spreading transformation and a full moon causing the transformation itself. Could an animal evolve this ability?
A list of all of the Anatomically Correct questions can be found here
[Anatomically Correct Series](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798)
[Answer]
This is very unlikely to ever evolve, for an animal to have two forms there needs to be a reason for it to have both forms. Each needs to provide an advantage that compensates for the costs of changing. In the case of a werewolf the wolf form is clearly a superior hunter - but what would it gain by being in a non-wolf form for most of the time?
Also consider animals like caterpillars and tadpoles that undergo transformations in real life and look at how long those transformations take. It's not a simple matter to reshape your body.
**Spreading by bite**
This is clearly possible if it's a virus of some sort (or even nano machines) being transmitted in saliva.
**Triggered by full moon**
This is hard to explain, it would be easier to link it to some other cycle and have it coincide with the full moon. The one advantage of the full moon is that the nights are brighter so you could make some argument for it needing that but it's a pretty weak one.
**The actual transformation**
If mass changes then it's basically impossible by physics as we know it. That means you're going to have a really big wolf or really small person. Take a look at this question for a detailed discussion: [Is there a credible way a shapeshifter could gain/lose body mass when changing forms?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/449/is-there-a-credible-way-a-shapeshifter-could-gain-lose-body-mass-when-changing-f?lq=1)
So let's say a human turns into a huge wolf. In order to do that they need to reshape bones, re-align muscles, stretch skin, grow fur. That's not changes that can be done overnight. Any realistic biological system is going to need months.
If you had special transforming bones that could possibly speed that process up but would weaken the bones drastically in the process.
So in other words, no it's not possible.
The closest you could get is something which made more superficial changes. You would stay humanoid but you would sprout hair rapidly, claws normally sheathed would extend from the fingers, the jaw would hinge open wider and protrude, the teeth would also extend.
These sorts of changes could theoretically be done much faster, in minutes for the basic changes and in hours to grow the hair. In fact if the hair was always there but retracted inside the skin then that too could grow out very fast.
[Answer]
*I actually thought of this answer while finishing my other answer; it's different enough that I think it works as a completely different option.*
Things that cause rapid growth, altered mental state, and growth based on the phase of the moon actually exists in the real world - fungus! Perhaps, then, werewolves aren't wolves at all, but werefungi?
## Infection
People are infected with this were-fungus through a scratch; it isn't small enough to get into the body by passing between skin cells, or similar, and it isn't strong enough to make it through the digestive system unharmed. Thus, to become infected, spores must fall into an open cut.
Once infected, it takes roughly 29 days for the fungus to bloom.
## Hair
Werewolves all have hair, of course. Long, shaggy hair that covers them head to foot. Were-fungus doesn't produce actual hair, but it does produce something similar - thin, hair-like strands of fungal growth. The tips of the "hairs" have spores in them. The night of the fungal bloom, every available pore of the host's body will erupt in hair, possibly inches long. The growth will take only a few hours. As it happens while the host is sleeping, the host never realizes it's happening.
## Madness
Various chemicals exist that can alter the delicate chemistry of the brain; or, alternately, the fungus may be similar to [Ophiocordyceps unilateralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis); its grip on the human brain causes madness and blood lust. Either way, the fungus drives its host to attack others.
## Outcome
During a full moon, a victim is scratched, bitten, or otherwise injured, and comes in contact with werewolf spores. The fungus grows inside them for 29 days; at the next full moon, the fungus blooms.
As the fungus is blooming, it releases chemicals into the bloodstream; first, a local anesthetic, to mask its growth, which incidentally provides the ability to ignore injuries while in werewolf form. Next, chemicals to alter the brain of the host. And finally, chemicals that cause adrenaline to spike.
As the host's heartrate responds to the adrenaline, the internal painkiller is flushed; the host awakens, suddenly in great pain. Their mind is clouded; all they know is pain. They attack anyone who comes near, lashing out, and stumbling at a full run, trying to escape the pain, behaving like mindless animals. The fungus needs the host to run as far as possible, and injure as many people as possible, so as to spread.
Once the chemicals are flushed from the body, the fungus "hairs" will turn to sludge, leaving a slimy residue. The host will likely try to bathe as soon as possible, which washes away any evidence. The host, with no memory of the previous night, will return home and continue their life. However, 29 days later, at the next full moon, the fungus will bloom again, and the events will be repeated.
## Reversion on Death
Something else mentioned with werewolves is that when they are killed, they revert to human form; this holds true with the fungus. When the human host dies, it no longer circulates blood to refresh the fungal bloom, which withers away. Visually, it will seem as if the incredibly hairy beast reverts to a human form.
[Answer]
Not really an answer, more a set of loose thoughts fit only for a production with no budget for an evolutionary biologist.
In short: all humans are slightly different from us, here.
**Evolution**: epigenetics? Homo sapiens lupus having the potential, but never manifesting it under normal circumstances?
Let us not assume complete transformation into exactly a wolf or hybrid. Instead - aside from very plausible behavioral changes and body hair growth - something approximating it. Maybe even wider joints allowing a greater range of articulation, or sliding further down the length for instance, making the joint both look and act different. More likely, though, that it would not be a change, rather, a "direction" one could grow in. Also bear in mind that the existence of such creatures might also alter wolves - if you were born in those circumstances - your point of reference for a comparison would be different.
Now... why? Mimicry? temporary environment-triggered "paradigm shift" (lifestyle, energy allocation)? Blending into, or taking control of (easier when you're bigger than them) very widespread wolf packs? I am not qualified to answer beyond claiming it does not so far feel very **im**plausible compared to [some other extant phenomena](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp).
**Moon triggered**: Might be same as with wolves howling at the moon - a mistaken myth. Or might be that the time is seen as optimal for hunting in that form - Homo sapiens lupus having inferior low-light vision to Canis lupus and other competing predators. Or syncing with some prey animals. Again, I can't speak much of plausibility.
**Bite**: pathogen or hormone, to trigger the dormant abilities, maybe actually only accidentally activating, or hijacking, the "normal" process for a more extreme effect, like with cannabinoid receptors in the brain - those weren't put there specifically for pot.
Whatever it is, it need not wholly take away the ability to sometimes look and act like a "normal" human, but the "similar, but more so" effect could give the affected "werewolves" a specialized advantage, leaving, in the end, only them, and a society of "pure" humans, never manifesting any of these traits... until directly exposed to the former, restoring the victim's lost ability to shift , and possibly permanently changing their instincts.
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The meme of "werewolf" is too vague to have a single answer, it depends on what you mean. If a werewolf is a superhuman being with acute eyesight, acute hearing, acute sense of smell, long fur/hair and extraordinarily powerful muscles, why sure, I can see some sort of genetic (virus) modifying a person over months and years to become a werewolf.
If you're talking about a being who changes from Bruce Banner to someone looking more like the Hulk in a couple of hours (overnight) then no (even if they don't turn green). The only realistic weight gain (mass gain) you're going to do in 8 hours is water gain, which won't do much for superhuman powers.
Consider bamboo: some species can grow over 3 cm/hr. So, there's just no reason why hair couldn't grow just as fast (as well as thickening). But we are talking about growth, not magical appearance. Similarly, it's not going to magically return back to the well manicured state it was in when the Sun comes up. At best what could happen is that it all fall out (over quite a few hours) and then maybe the "original" pattern of hair (eyebrows, head, pubic, armpits, legs, arms, etc.) re-grows at a similar accelerated rate. But you're going to have a lot of fur on the rug to clean up.
Muscle strength varies quite a bit for the same person depending on fatigue and other factors (including hormones like epinepherine (adrenaline)). So there's no reason a werewolf couldn't *seem* to be as weak, blind, deaf, etc. as a 'regular' person when a certain hormone was low, and couldn't suddenly be superhuman with the release of the hormone, and the hormone could be cyclic, every 27 days with reinforcement from a certain intensity of moonlight.
This is a bit of a problem, since you're not going to get it if there's cloud cover or if the werewolf wasn't exposed to it. So, the coupling to the full Moon couldn't be very high.
So, here's what could happen: A virus or a series of viruses which improve eyesight, hearing, and smell.
You're still going to be limited to the size of the skeleton, which would take months to change substantially. Muscles aren't going to change in size overnight, but pound for pound humans are extremely weak, so there's no reason why better muscles couldn't replace our puny ones (better on a pound for pound basis), maybe an improvement of 3X or even 5X.
So, perhaps you have to consider how to "dampen" their powers for 20-24 out of the 28 day cycle, IDK. Seems possible. And there are cases in the literature where experimental drugs induced homicidal rage in human test subjects. So if your werewolf is homicidal, when in its "high" state, I see no problems.
* Claws? Like bamboo. Say something like 2 hours to grow ~5 cm, another couple to "dry" and harden, so sure.
* Teeth? No. Not going to happen.
* Retractable teeth? Well, sure, as long as the werewolf doesn't ever have to appear human again (although perhaps a beard could disguise the deformity).
* Retractable claws - not if hands need to ever again look human.
* Change in posture? No. I can imagine slight differences in posture and gait (walking, running) due to changes in various muscle tensions, but any substantial changes in speed, etc. would require drastic changes in skeletal structure, and the werewolf would look inhuman, even when in "low".
* Sense of smell - well there is only so much you can do given the small nasal cavity we have, so all you can hope for there is increased olfactory density- but that requires increased amounts of brain dedicated to it, so either you're going to have a deformed head, or you're going to be pretty limited.
* Similar to eyes. Getting very low light vision would require some changes to the retina, but again you're limited to the size of our eyes and the amount of brain (a lot, currently) we'd need for this extra vision.
* Similar limits to hearing, but that would probably be the hardest to improve, without scooping out some of our brain. ...
One (obvious) problem is muscle tone/conditioning. If for 3 weeks a month, the werewolf isn't using much of his/her extra capacity, they're going to lose a lot of that extra capacity. Regaining it might take the entire week (at least) with a high activity level (and needed rest).
To sum up: if they're to look human most of the time, then they'll have to be able to pass for human all of the time, there's not going to be any "yesterday he had a muzzle and 3 inch long canines, and today he looks completely normal".
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The first question is what your werewolf looks like. The traditional werewolf is a huge, powerful figure, covered in shaggy fur, with a distinctly canine facial structure: pointy teeth, long jaw, nose at the end of a snout, pointy ears, and so on. They might even have a tail, paw-like hands, or reversed dog-like 'knees'.
Almost all of that would be impossible, unless the soon-to-be-werewolf were to undergo substantial plastic surgery, which surely wouldn't be an overnight change. So, we'll have to make our werewolf a little differently. That isn't actually going to be hard; normal humans in little more than face paint can look so very different that people will attribute all sorts of terrible things to their features. Thus, the long face, pointy ears, tail, paws and reversed knees can be done away with.
## Hair
The most obvious difference is going to be body hair. Our werewolf is going to need some serious hair growth. Two things will affect that: hair color, and hair length. Dark hair will show up much better than light; the darker the better. Second, hair length. For a furry coat, our werewolf will need at least an inch of hair on his arms and face. Other locations, like back, chest, legs, etc. would be helpful, but not absolutely required, especially in climates where clothing covers most of the body. Some people claim hair growth of over 3 inches in a month; pushing the human body to its limit could result in inch-long hair in a matter of hours, especially if supplementing existing hair. Even if it isn't an inch long, hair grown so quickly will be very unhealthy, twisted and matted, and will give the appearance of long hair.
## Muscles
Werewolves are tremendously powerful; they fight with their claws and teeth, even against powerful weapons like guns. They can take a lot of damage without going down.
This is actually the easiest part to build. When fueled by adrenaline, normal humans can do superhuman feats, like lifting cars or smashing through concrete walls. Drugs exist that can raise the strength of humans, and many more drugs exist that simply turn off limiting switches in our brains, letting humans use strength even when it does incredible damage.
The right concoction of pain reduction and adrenaline could make even a couch potato into a world-class athlete for a day. After that, of course, they would be bed-ridden for weeks, trying to heal the torn muscles and ligaments, but for a day, they would be monsters. And speaking of monsters...
## Bloodlust
Werewolves aren't known for their thinking ability. When they "turn", they go on murder-filled rampages, killing and maiming. This, too, is easy to replicate; just search for "bath salts zombie" and you'll have real-life examples of mind-altering drugs turning regular people into horrifying monsters.
## Teeth & Claws
It's not that hard to get pointy teeth, but reverting after a night of murder will certainly be difficult. For this, we'll have to stick with the imagination of the masses, rather than real pointy teeth. Swollen jaw muscles can cause the jaw to hang open; in that case, some drooling can be expected. Blood from either an internal mouth injury, or from an outside source, can make the most pristine set of teeth look wildly nightmarish.
Claws, on the other hand, can be grown fairly quickly, especially if the body isn't growing them as it ought. The data I could find on fingernail growth suggests something like 3.5 mm per month, which is hardly claws; however, a rush of growth could turn otherwise normal fingernails into yellowed claws in a matter of hours. The fingernails would be weak, jagged, and horribly ugly, but sharp and nasty nonetheless.
## Putting it all together
A bacteria invades a host's body. Over the course of a month, the bacteria causes the host's hair to grow darker and more quickly. Finally, after almost exactly 29 days, the bacteria causes pockets of chemicals in the body to rupture.
The chemicals have several effects. The first chemicals cause rapid hair and fingernail growth. The hair and nails are unhealthy, twisted, and ugly because of its rapid growth. Next, the bacteria floods the body with a concoction of chemicals that reduce pain, increase adrenaline to borderline deadly levels, and cause swelling throughout the body.
The infected person flies into a homicidal rage; blinded by drugs and pain, the host attacks anyone who comes near, unable to comminucate in anything beyond growls. The infected's arms and face are covered with coarse hair; their fingernails are jagged claws. They feel the extreme urge to bite and scratch, because that causes the sharp pain in their mouth and fingers to numb.
After their episode (usually only a few hours), the concoction of chemicals causes the excess hair to fall off. They will be weak, fevered, and tired; additionally, any injury they sustained will remain. They likely have no memory of the previous events.
Those that the scratch will become infected; since the disease takes roughly 29 days to mature, the exact time of maturation is roughly the time between full moons, leading to the myth that werewolves only come out at the full moon.
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**Biological Transformation:** The ability to rapidly transform tissue comes at a tremendous metabolic cost if we are talking about the synthesis of new cell structures. The 'transformation' would really be the change of state of a dynamic organ or organ system. Hair, canines, claws would need to telescope or sheath, as others have said.
Transferring blood flow to engorge body parts is not feasible because A) it will cause tissue damage after a few hours *see Viagra warnings* and B) we don't have enough blood to change the body at a large scale without depriving vital organs resulting in lethal damage.
A far more realistic mechanism of bodily shape shifting would be bones that grow concentrically rather than in parallel that can telescope through tendons and muscles with some kind of interlocking grooves that allow them to hold their positions without active muscle flexion.
**Bite Spreading/Lunar Triggered Transformation:** My money is on *Protozoa*. Malaria is a blood-borne disease of plasmodium parasites, so there is already a natural precedence for oral-hepatic transmission of Protozoa, and it has the advantage of already manifesting its symptoms in a cycle, albeit one of hours rather than days.
I see the lunar triggering of symptoms being hormonal, as the body already follows hormonal cycles with the moon. These Protozoa would release chemicals into the blood stream in response to a particular phase of the human body's estrus/circadian cycles to trigger the overall response. (I'm no endocrinologist, so be gentle.)
**Naturally Evolvable:**
This parasite works on naturally evolved 'lycans'. The disease involuntarily tirggers and sustains all of their predatory/aggressive adaptations, sending them into a slavering homicidal state due to hormonal overrides. These creatures could, otherwise, turn these adaptations on or off voluntarily or temporarily through something like an adrenaline response.
What is the advantage for something like this to evolve? The ability to shift between two states has some obvious advantages: metabolic efficiency, behavioral prioritization, & environmental adaptability. (e.g. you can use less effort and fewer calories when limbs and joints are withdrawn/shorter, move with prioritized agility vs straight line speed, dart between trees or lope across a plain.)
In order to turn a human into a werewolf, however, you would need to put the poor fictional bastard into a cocoon (?for the preceding three weeks?), and that would have to be triggered by something far more contrived and artificial than any disease.
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my approach on this is a reversible zombification-type virus.
**spreading by bite**
this is fairly easy, the virus is transmitted orally and requires body fluids to exchange, meaning just getting drool on you won't work, the saliva needs to penetrate into the skin and contaminate the bloodstream.
**the transformation**
the transformation is actually much simpler, the muscles swells through inflammation, the skin color transitions into a grayish black, and the infected would suffer from high adrenaline and dopamine secretions, tunnel vision, hallucinations, intoxication, severe hunger and thirst during this phase.
**triggered by nightfall**
triggering by fullmoon is unlikely, but the virus can instead become dormant during the day, it synchronizes with the body's circadian rhythm, this way the infected would transform during the night.
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Hmm.
So, werewolves? How would we do this? For starters, we aren’t going to be able to transform into a bloodthirsty beast overnight and back, and if we did the results would be... disappointing, to say the least. So let’s change the way werewolves go through transformations. Don’t you think it’s awfully prejudiced that a werewolf spends lots of time as a human, so it could spend equal amounts of time as both species. It could go through a cycle of a year: What is in my mind is that it spends two months as a human, spends four months gradually becoming lupine, spends two months like that, and spends four months going back. First, it works up a huge appetite and eats lots of meat and food. It has the urge to exercise its muscles, as well.
This leads to huge muscle and height growth so as our wolf doesn‚Äôt resemble a terrier in size. üòï Also, the senses gradually become acute and the skull and bones start lengthening and transforming. This has to begin early on so as it has time to happen, as claws and teeth are forming in the hands and gums. Then, the joints start becoming more wolf like and you become aware of great pain at all times. Gradually, hair starts growing- this is the least complex part of the transformation and starts last. At the end, you‚Äôre officially lupine! üòÄ The, SNAP! Ginger snaps back and you gradually start becoming a human again. Does that sound plausible?
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Re teeth: One possibility for a werewolf might be a retractable jaw, a bit like a goblin shark or the slingjaw wrasse. It wouldn't be anything biologically like a wolf, but it would give a wolflike appearance while extended, and the teeth might be more pronounced / visible when extended like that. Most animals that do that are ambush predators and do that while striking or attacking, but it could have developed that feature for that reason and adapted it to some other purpose as well.
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well, first of all it would be more probable that the state of mind would not change. for example a kind peaceful person will still be a peaceful person. If the frame of mind change it could relate to being drunk or high. so whatever is making the person a werewolf also makes the drunk or high.
Another question would be: how did the person become a werewolf? How is it spread? It could be a disease not unlike cancer; which is occurs when a mutated cell is not destroyed by the immune system. it is formed in the body. or take AID's. its a virus that target the t-cells which is the immune system. Aids is spreadable by bodily transfer unlike cancer. werewolf disease can be spread like aid's or it just occur like cancer.
How does it transform?
A werewolf transformation would be a longer process then just 30 secs. it would take weeks even months! you would need abnormal hair growth which is entirely possibly but you'd look like a strange ape. then you would need a snout which is also totally possible. Cancer causes tumors. it could be some sort of bone and skin tumor were it is pulled out. tumors on the ears can give a pointed apearance as well as a tale. scabing or some sort of drying process on the hands as well as tumors on the fingers would make paws. nails would do the same thing as the hair grow. walking and using the nails would erode them down.
The werewolf would be very disfigured, in pain and probably die in the process. but if the werewolf didn't they would still die for the fact they would be primarily immobile.
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A werewolf could be an ecdysozoon, which sheds its skin at the full moon, and then again a short while later. This would be so that it could display urticating hairs during the full moon, to protect itself then, but not normally, to make mating easier. It needs protection during the full moon, as that is when it uses the long ovipositors in its mouth to inject its eggs into hosts, which then grow and burst from the host.
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One of the facets of great fantasy worlds is the depth built into the environment. A well built world provides a complete setting in which stories can grow naturally and appear as a small sample of time in a far reaching universe that existed long before your characters and will exist long after.
Lord of the Rings is the classic example, and one stupendously good example (in my opinion), is the way that Terry Brooks wove the Shannara and Knight of the Word novels into a prehistory/ensuing aftermath continuity.
Unless you are creating a world for the sake of it, there is a purpose, be it for a book or a game or some good old tabletop gaming. When creating a world for a specific purpose, to Set the stage so to speak, how do you get that feel that all of history has contributed to the state of the world where the story begins?
When you create your world, including the timeline of events leading up to where the story begins, how do you develop and demonstrate the depth and complexity of history?
How can you give the impression that the world has been inhabited for a long time?
I am not looking for literary techniques to introduce world history during a story or game but rather how to set a sufficiently complex stage so that the history seems integrated, plausible and rich.
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I combine my history development with my character development process. Usually, I will write a lot of never-to-be published prose in the voice and world view of each of my major characters. I will have them introduce themselves at a gathering, tell a story (which might be true history from their homeland) and talk about the other characters in the story. In the process, I develop not only the back story for the characters but also some glimpses into the history of world around them. I also find, organically, how the characters feel about each other and where the interpersonal pressure points are likely to appear. None of this ever gets read by anyone except me. It is just how I discover who my characters are.
Beyond that, I prowl my first drafts for unjustified elements. If two races hate each other, its an invitation to figure out why. If a powerful device or artifact is found during the story, I feel required to write about its origins and how it got lost. More nonpunishable prose later, additional layers have been added to my history.
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Start with something you want to be true. Ask how this came about and why. As you come up with answers iterate. Why are these two countries bitter enemies. Because they had a war 150 years ago. Why were they at war? Because the prince of here, called the prince of their an upstart cattle rustler. Why? Because the first prince was a spoiled brat and the second prince was the great grandson of a notorious baron rumored to 'confiscate' livestock for 'protection'. etc. etc.
come up with these answers, and make notes. Special animals? Same process. Pretend your talking to a two year old, they just keep asking why. Why is a city located where it is? Is it on a trade route? Is it near some valuable resource? Is a city/country/region/race known for something? what? metalsmiths? breeding horses? The more important a person/place/thing is to a story the more time should be spent asking and answering these questions. Then when you introduce others to them you can tell them a story like you would if describing the antics of a friend last weekend. You don't need to describe that your friend has 2 arms and 2 legs, (unless he doesn't) because it is assumed. Many of the best authors use this to great effect by choosing what to 'tell' and what to 'show'. **What should someone in this situation already know without asking?** Then show it. Having two woodsmen out explaining to each other how to start a fire with flint and steel is pointless exposition. They should both know how and just mentioning looking for their flint should be enough.
Old answer.
This is also why often the ignorant swine-herd/pig-boy is often used as a main character. It gives the storyteller a reason for someone to ask the important questions that helps the reader catch up and learn alongside the ignorant person who needs to catch up to survive.
If it feels like a history lecture, it's gone on way too long. If it isn't noticed, it's too short, unimportant or deliberately vague to hide its significance until later.
The most irritating place to put a two page info dump is right in the middle of a stand-off (Dan Brown does this ALL the time).
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I'd start by asking this question: **how does the history of your world affect the characters in your story?**
Consider a story taking place on Earth in Moorish Spain. If your characters are crusaders, then the relevant aspects of history that are going to directly influence the shape of the world are going to be the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the pre-Roman tribes, the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, and the Reconquista.
You don't need to directly tell your reader about all of these things to make a compelling story. Tell your characters what your characters are experiencing as they travel through the world. They're going to interact with burnt-out churches, farmers, enemy combatants, clergy, and scholars in the course of the story. Conversations with these individuals, and how they interact with each other, can describe the historical context as well as an extended passage of exposition.
Consider William Wallace talking to his man in Braveheart. Explaining to them why they should support his cause contains a description of what's happened in the past without breaking beyond the content of what would be described in a normal conversation.
Ultimately, if the history of your world isn't relevant to the characters, you probably don't need to talk about it.
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You must try to give the impression that the world in not static. This is not something easy since worldbuilders are usually depicting a static world.
Kingdoms rise and fall, other are somewhere in between. It is not a linear change but more like a fluctuation of their respective power. For example: this means that some areas might be ruled by a new dynasty that is alien to the local population. When the Franks invaded what is now France in the last days of the Roman Empire, most of the population (95%) was still Roman. The elite from German descendant and the culture of the country slowly changes overtime. The language starts to changes and soon it becomes impossible to differentiate the two groups. Having a small group of foreigners ruling a large country is something that tells me that something has happened before. Manchus ruling over Han chinese is an anomaly. Why is most powerful empire in the world rules by strangers? When new rulers come to power they might try to convert the population to their religion. Which means that the number of people practising the religion will be rising over time. But at some other times, the elite are converted instead. Like the Roman emperor converted to Christianity or Qing emperors adoption Chinese culture.
The important thing to remember is that these changes are gradual. Meaning that you are likely to find inconsistencies everywhere.
Furthermore: these political change comes with war, disease, economic problems, movement of population. A new dynasty will often establish a new capital, sometimes it's merely just a village at first. These changes can be violent such as cities been sacked. People are fleeing the war and it's atrocities and are being expulsed of the country. Areas flocked with migrant might have clashes with the locals because they have a different culture or simply because it put more pressure on the local resources. An example of this: Palestinians living in Lebanon. They are many and have been living in the country for several decades but they are not considered citizen.
The size of the cities themselves is not something constant. If something disrupt the economic activity or the trade in the region, a rich city can shrink to a village and on the opposite, the lucrative opportunities of the new world made cities like La Rochelle (France) very rich city. In a couple of years, the village turn into a 20 000 or 40 000 people city.
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It is important that you mention purpose for the sake of my answer, the approach would be very different if someone were just building a world for the sake of building one.
This is a multistage, repeating process for me but this is how I generally approach history.
**Step 1: Define the world/setting you want.**
1. Define what you want to happen. In my case that is the story I am writing. Basically you are saying you want a world that looks like *X.*
2. From there you will need to decide at least a few major events that have happened in the past. A good place to start is to look at sources of conflict, be they racial or political or personal, those conflicts have a source somewhere in history.
* Here are a few examples: Dynasties falling, a bloody major war (WWII scope), major social or societal changes (signing of the Magna Carta for example), the founding of a group that plays a role in the outcome of history, or maybe a terrible massacre.
3. Integrate your story points and the plot items you have and make sure they blend together
*Note that in the process of integrating things may change, be added or in some cases completely removed.*
At this point you have a framework for history, this should most definitely be a very very high level view. If you are having to de-conflict plot points you are too far into the details at this point and it is important to the next step that you don't get to far into the weeds.
**Step 2: Create a map** Map creation itself isn't all that hard, draw a landmass, add some mountains, add some rivers, maybe some major forests and other biomes, viola! You have a map. This step is *significantly* more complex. This series will help with the first part: [Creating a realistic world map - Landmass formation](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/581/creating-a-realistic-world-map-landmass-formation)
1. Do what I mentioned above...draw it out. Do not add cities, roads, ports, holy sites, historic markers, none of that. If its not geography make it wait. *Note, the more preconceptions or ideas you start with at the beginning of the process the more complicated it will be...I had several plot points that included specific locations and every time I tried to make a map to fit...it didn't work and I started over. I ended up changing the story to fit the map.*
2. Place nations. Mountains and bodies of water make great natural lines of demarcation obviously but its always a decent idea to create some borders that are not based on geography, perhaps based on a treaty.
3. Place cities and castles and other key points of interest. Add roads, major ports (keeping climate in mind. cold = bad for shipping for example) and trade routes. Cities tend to form near intersections be that of roads or rivers or some of each. These should be helpful: [A realistic road network](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3135/a-realistic-road-network) AND [How can I ensure my cities don't all look the same?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2838/how-can-i-ensure-my-cities-dont-all-look-the-same/2900#2900)
**Step 3: Put them together** You now have a map as well as the key setting items you want in your world. Start looking at how and where things come together. Was there a great empire? Is there a place where two countries are in conflict. Has language been imported by invaders in the past (mixes naming conventions for cites and such)? Keep a few things in mind when doing this:
* Biomes: They will impact what sort or natural resources each area has, it will impact population density (more food, more people), what kind of wildlife there is (could have religious implications. All these things can lead to conflict (or cooperation).
* Nation aspects: Defining how nations behave, what kind of systems (democracy, dicatatorship etc etc etc) they have, religious preference, what they trade, what they have vs need, racial makeup...all that.
The point in putting them together is that if you keep asking **what happens here, or what does this nation want, etc etc etc** eventually the history begins to write itself, and best yet it can evolve within the system you create as you are writing. If you avoid creating more than you need at the time (and are willing to massage the map or other things that have been decided) you can work in other things you need later. For example when you are writing you think...*oh man I wish there was a nomadic tribe my character could meet. Oh wait! Look there on the map! Its a section that is not affiliated with a country. Bam, good to go.*
As you dig into this you will end up with excellent, consistent and detailed information. As an example I started with a city state in mind as the setting for the start of my book. It went from being a mountain mining city in my head to becoming a desert port when I finished my map. It also happens to be the continental headquarters to my assassin's guild. Another city (which I only had vague ideas about) ended up (due to its geographic location) being the center of the world's major religion, which in turn impacts how it interacts with its neighbors, as well as its economy etc etc etc.
**TL;DR** You are creating a system, think of it as a video game engine if that helps, its a network of items (places, people, landmarks, etc etc) each with its own stats and back story. If you develop the framework you will be able to ask a question about what would happen if *fill in the blank* in my world. The framework should allow you to answer that question and frankly, in the end, it helps you write the story too. And don't fall in love with ideas (its a hard thing to do), sometimes as cool as they may seem they just don't fit.
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The steps in generating a history are fairly simple. In effect, you add the main point(s) that you need for your story, then insert additional events that are relevant to your world, both related and unrelated to your story, with the proviso that nothing you add later can invalidate what is already there (unless you have time travel)
Have a look at [Microscope RPG](http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/), this system (and a few friends) can be used to generate some very interesting and detailed (in the right places) histories, though in essence it is doing what I have described above.
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One of the [games](http://www.dungeon-world.com/) I am rather fond of has a useful guideline for creating background and setting: **Draw maps, leave spaces.**
This is how I approach a lot of world creation for any narrative, not least in the case of history. I want to know who the major groups were, what the landmark events and turning points were, but I also want to leave enough space that I can insert new ideas that I come up with as my story is being told.
A little like any other narrative, I like to begin by considering who the characters are and if one is dealing with history those are likely to be cultures. In many settings they may also belong to different races with very different outlooks on life. There are a few things I want to know about any given culture, for example:
* What they called themselves. Also, what everyone else called them if that is different.
* What their core beliefs were; whether that is religions, philosophies, scientific discoveries, magical abilities. Whatever the ideas that shaped their outlook were.
* What their architecture looked like, for old cultures that may have vanished altogether by the time the story begins, it's possible that their buildings or their ruins have survived.
* What their beliefs and relationships were regarding other contemporary cultures.
* How they fit into the geography of the world, where their cities stood and what they were called, along with a few general example placenames- taking a place name from an otherwise forgotten culture and adjusting it through changes in language can be a great way of populating your maps. By "geography" here I might also include any otherworlds into which they vanished or from which they arrived, if that makes sense in the setting.
With those pieces as a list of bullet points ( it's way too easy to create histories indefinitely and it becomes almost an excuse not to tell your story ) then I can start to decide on the relationships between cultures. Who might have tried to conquer who else, why a culture might have died out or become dominant. What may have survived of otherwise vanished cultures.
Then I can start to describe the sweep of history. I tend not to get too directly involved in the details of history until it becomes relevant to the story- I am interested in who made discoveries, who conquered or was overrun. Who briefly held an empire until it was overthrown by economic circumstance.
I tend to think generationally - every few hundred years any given culture will probably developed to become something different enough to redefine it ( unless you have your pesky elves with their super-long lives who may hardly change through millennia, which is another interesting concept ) so I will often remap over several generations. A helpful way of working this is that you start with longer intervals and shorten as you get closer to your setting- what happened between 4000 and 3000 years ago may be a single generation, but when I get to what happened between 100 years ago and 50 years ago that is one too.
What this gives me is the big picture of my region or world's history. Then when I need to hark back to a historical hero, I can almost immediately figure out what culture they would have belonged to, when they would have lived and what they might have done. I can also related characters from my current story into that history very easily without restricting them too much or having to adjust it.
In this respect we are very lucky as world-builders. If you have ever tried to research for historical fiction, the amount of detail is immensely challenging. Having room to allow our characters to do what we want and fitting historical context around that is a real boon!
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Well, I am worldbuilding for the sake of it. I am not sure how effective my techniques are but one thing I have done was to include things I am being indecisive about. For example, I wanted my humans to be enslaved by another species but I was unsure as to decide which one, so I included both and reflected the nature of the events through different myths, ruins, and vestigial customs; I also do that with indecisiveness about how certain conflicts started, making my uncertainty the peoples' uncertainty, every perspective having some truth and neither having the complete truth, sometimes using characters to create these perspectives.
I also try to build history through religion, hiding the truth within diverging beliefs: one group believes the world was supposed to be one way, another group believes the world exists because of something, each interpreting reality and building societies within that framework, and those beliefs did not come from nowhere. They are right about *something*, they just do not know what it is.
To buffer against magic limiting technology, I make my magic as potent as technology (village herbalists will know some things but an alchemist will know more), thereby keeping the mundane aspects — ecology, politics, resources — important. Magical monsters are a thing but they are more akin to wild animals than to the horde of the Dark Lord.
There are no kingdoms/empires that are what they were for thousands of years. Many important people are dying from something other than old age, religious wars are a thing, and arranged marriages are not free of petty prejudices. Borders are shrinking and expanding, peoples migrating and cultures blending, along with some conflicts arising. And there relative periods of peace in other regions.
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It isn't an easy task to create world history from scratch. If you look at the majority of writers that have a fictional world, they often base their world on Earth, and then make changes to it.
Writers often use a device called alternative history to create a world that would exist if certain major historical events happened differently; like what would happen if Germany won WWII, etc.
Check out the list of alternate histories on TV Tropes: <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlternateHistory>
It is possible to create a world completely from scratch like J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. He created a fictional history that spanned for several thousand years. The basis of it was written in The Silmarillion, and then The Hobbit and the LOTR series was written inside of this world. This approach is not for the faint of heart, and it was his life's work. Tolkien was brilliant, and an extremely well educated man. He had great knowledge and understanding of human history, and had an amazing imagination.
If you study his life, and his work, then you may be able to get ideas on how to create your own imaginary world.
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In the U.S., we vote on who are leaders are about every 4 years. My question is, what if you have a representative government where this is increased? Specifically, you can change your vote *anytime*.
There is a secure website (as secure as offline elections today), such that people can select who they want to lead. They can change this any time. It is a secret ballot. Telephone booth-like machines are set up, so poor people can change their vote whenever they like (or non-poor people.) Laws are set up so the poor don't get blocked out of the booths (no camping in it.) As soon as another person has more votes, they immediately become the leader. Indeed, a person who is very close usually sticks around the government building, ready to take the old leaders place. There are two variations on this:
* The regular is you have one leader (like the U.S. President). Whoever has the majority of votes become leader. They have powers similar to the President.
* People vote on parties (which anyone may form.) There are 100 hundred leaders. A party gets a number of leaders equal to the percentage of votes it gets. The party has a list of leaders in order. The procedures set forth by the party determine the list. I remember hearing that Israel had a legislature like this (except the voting all the time part.)
What would be the consequences of this?
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Procastination and loss of any meaningful leadership.
Despite what your favourite politician will tell you at election time, there are no silver bullets1. Everyone is for budget control, everyone is for better schools and roads and PD, everyone is for less taxes. The difference in general is the equilibrium point (so many taxes for so much quality of transport).
So, the successful politician will deliver only the popular laws/actions and shelve the unpopular ones, no matter how needed they are. Honest politicians will be purged by the electors, who will always chose the guy that promises "better roads and lower taxes" over the one who promises "better roads at the expense of more taxes" or the other who promises "less taxes but not-so-great roads".
Additionally, the lower levels of the administrations may slow down changes due to perceived instability (why work hard to speed the building of new schools if tomorrow's government may chose to demolish them).
1: Someone chant the tune of "Better government efficiency". Well, government is not *that* inefficient that magically solving it solves the above equation, and government will *always* have a degree of inefficiency (due to sheer size, changes of leadership, etc.).
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Fantastically bad things would happen. I would love to see this implemented for a week and watch the news with a bucket of popcorn.
Your first problem is that instantaneous changes in poll numbers make it possible for leaders to change within seconds of the last change. This obviously creates the potential for enormous instability… if no leader is in power for more than 60 seconds, nothing could possibly be accomplished in our current governmental system.
The next major issue is that people are frighteningly reactionary. All it takes are allegations — true or not — to change people’s opinions of officials. Many people don’t even wait for results of investigations to pass judgement. Even worse, any brief economic downturn can also cause uncertainty. You will see rivals planting false rumors about sitting politicians. People who dislike the current leaders would be very eager to connect any negative event to the government.
Media companies would become much more powerful. Media already shapes our perception of things on a day to day basis, but instant vote changes could allow individual stories to literally cause politician turnover. This will make them extremely dangerous to politicians and give them a lot more leverage. Interestingly, 24 hour news channels will now have a whole lot more content.
You will be shocked by who gets elected. One of the most interesting parts of this premise is that everyone has much easier access to voting. Instead of one third of the U.S. electing leaders, you will get a much higher percentage due to ease of use. When this happens, popular political parties are going to be turned on their heads. Trolling with ridiculous candidates (such as Mickey Mouse) is a very real possibility, especially when it could be relatively easily reversed a few minutes later.
Hacking will be a very serious threat. A system like this is going to inspire enormous cyber attack activity both in the US as well as over seas. No matter how carefully security is implemented, holes and exploits are all but inevitable.
Having a set amount of time when you’re essentially “stuck” with your leaders has many benefits. It lets the government accomplish things, it lets you get a more accurate picture of how politicians’ actions line up with their promises, and it lets you see how effectively they govern. There are always blips and poll changes, but over time it often averages out.
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Short answer is chaos.
This is a form of unrestricted democracy, so if you are a figure like Donald Trump or Barack Obama, you could use your skills at demagoguery to whip up popular support and win the election, demonize your potential opposition and do whatever it took to gain power. To beat that sort of leader, you would have to become an even *better* demagogue, whip up even *more* popular passion and enraged supporters. who would eventually get to the point of having street battles outside the voting booths to ensure that the "enemy" was unable to vote (or alternatively, that your side could storm the booths and unseat the enemy). If the police or Army was dispatched to guard the booths, the battles might migrate to trying to get supporters of opponents fired from their jobs, mugged in parking lots and various other unpleasantries. And of course the Police and Armuy are made up of human beings who are also being manipulated by various demagogues, so guarding the booths might not ba a neutral value proposition.
In periods of relative calm, any "elected" leader will be as conservative as possible, to avoid arousing passions that might lead to another round of "elections".
You might have noticed that ideas like "policy", "planning" and "national interest" have not been raised in this discussion, since the short and long term goals are going to be "power at any cost". A former Canadian Prime Minister (Kim Campbell) was roasted for saying "an election isn't the time to discuss policy", even though she was speaking the unvarnished truth (most "policy" pronouncements spoken at election time are better understood as a form of organic fertilizer that you might find in cattle yards....)
The Ancient Greek Philosophers were right to be suspicious of Democracy, and Churchill was correct in saying:
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> "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
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Democracy needs checks and balances to moderate the passions of the mob, but still be flexible enough to respond to changing circumstances and needs.
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**Introduction and simplifications**
Most previous answers predict the end of the world. And they may probably be right. But let just assume it would work. For the sake of simplification, let us assume that for the time of the experiment, the country is isolated. So no taking over from a foreign power, or economic retaliation. The international diplomacy and economy is frozen to what it was before the voting mode was changed.
We also need to remember, that if a certain relation with power is often there, most people without prior background (like father/brother having been elected president already) start in politics with the force of conviction and the will to actually do something beneficial for their country and fellows. They do not start in politics because they want to be rich. Wall street's much more efficient for that.
We can further simplify, and that is not too far fetched, to assume that there are mostly two parties, and thus two candidates for the POTU job. Interestingly, said parties could elect one person who, for a given time would take the job if their party got the majority. They can't organise elections everytime it happens. For even more simplification, we'd take a direct election system like the French have: you directly vote for the president. Or for the party. Not for local representant, which complicates the whole process.
**Currency model**
So similar to currency market trade, I would assume that a substantial amount of votes would change everyday in both directions. Much like a lot of euros are exchanged against dollars everyday as well as the other way around. Again, with the same image in head, the dollar-euro parity changes if, on the whole, more exchange is made in one direction or in another. If we elimiate other currencies, 1 euro being at 1.25 dollars mean that the Americans buy more European goods than the European, Americans'. Very similarly, a party who is in favour would preceptively get more vote than the other. The evolution everyday, would make the ratio of votes of the one against the other evolves everyday.
Changing job needs time. Of course, with such a system, people have to be ready to leave on a moment notice, but nevertheless, I would limit the effect by having a count everyday. It would be very costly to have people switch for 5 minutes.
**Politics done**
Political leaders, who would want to stay in office, would limit themselves to short-term, popular policies. Anything long-term and it would be undone by the next guy, or it could change twice before any result come out. Unpopular measures, and you're sure to be out by the next day.
The parties would organise at all time a lot of propa... erm, information: to try and convince voters that the other guys are a bunch of useless idiots, and maybe to get some popularity for some measures. While the former is done by parties during political campaigns (extending currently to almost 2 years before the election with pre-primaries, primaries, and election campaign) and would be permanent, the latter is usually done by government. I can give at least two examples: the Death Penalty in France was still favoured some years prior to its abandon. But the government organised some information to convince the people of the problem. And then it got removed. Something similar was done for nuclear power in Germany in the 2000s. It is not necessarily bad. It is just that people opinion have a certain inertia, and rulers usually have access to some information before the rest of the population. And it does not always work. Anyway, this is something that takes time, and it would then be organised by political parties instead of ruling governments.
**Other effects and conclusion**
Another, maybe unexpected to some, effect, would be that due to the time required to get to know all the subjects, assessors and high civil servants would be more powerful. Indeed the leaders may change from one day to the next. But someone has to keep track of what's going on. And they are the persons who would stay in place.
On a longer term, I can see two possible outcome: either the change is very frequent, and people will get bored, knowing that at the end the ones I mentioned in the last paragraph are the ones in power, and you can't decide anything about them. Or changes are less frequent, and people are checking the evolution, but nevertheless, the society would be pretty rigid, as the effort to make any structural reform would be very costly (in term of money -progaganda- and time).
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The consequences would be that no leader would have an opportunity to exhibit leadership.
Most people would I think see leadership as a phenomenon that arises from the result of repeated competitive social interactions against a backdrop that is characterised by some kind of persistent challenge to the general welfare.
Its difficult to see how that kind of rapport and understanding could be generated by a socially distant anonymous voting system where the voters don't risk anything (like standing up at the campfire to speak in favour or against the leader).
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In the short term, governments might turn over more rapidly. The state might collapse. But maybe not.
But, in the medium term (presuming continued survival of the state), a culture of joining a "side" and cleaving to it (regardless of new information) would develop. People on a "side" who change their votes for almost any reason would be treated as social pariahs.
You can see a variation of this within most democracies, where "joining a party" is more than just casting a ballot, but a social act.
Possibly a duopoly of similar parties with slightly different positions could form, allowing flip-flop without much impact.
Payoffs and crony politics might be strong, but possibly no stronger than in most modern democracies; publicly belonging to the 'side on top' may be important for your financial and social success.
Disgruntled opposition groups would exist.
The dictatorship of the stable majority would either be relatively benevolent (see many democracies in the real world with basically one government over the medium term), or things get bloody quickly (see many autocracies/pseudo democracies with basically one government). So either oppression, or treating the opposition as if it where irrelevant.
In the longer term, the state would collapse; all states collapse in the long term.
Naturally, like any form of government (especially new kinds), there is a decently high chance of short-term collapse. In nations that already have an effective one-party democracy the probability of collapse might be lower. Without the social institutions to make a form of government work, they simply don't, and such a system seems sufficiently different that prediction would be difficult.
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I would say that the government would come to a stand still. Every leader would spend all his time make political speaches trying to keep a majority 'happy'.
Look at what happens the whole year of a first term president, they start politicking and try not to do anything that will upset anyone. If they could wake up any day to find out they are off the top, then they are going to spend every day of their term in office trying to keep everyone 'happy' instead of trying to run the country. Every single decision that a president makes pisses off someone, and to really run a government requires compromise (unlike what one of our parties in the US currently believe) and compromise generally means no one leaves the table happy.
So any president who tries to actually BE a president will never last more than a couple weeks at a time, and most won't even have a change to 'learn' how to be president. It will significantly weaken the presidency and cause the next phase of political maneuvering.
Since most people won't be able to hold the position for long, then people/parties will make plans to maximize it's usefulness. Such as getting candidates as 'sacrificial' heads to push them into the White House via propaganda in order for them to 'approve' unpopular legislation. Since no one will make it for long then throw some fodder in there to 'get important things signed'. This would also make some of the 'better' candidates let their popularity drop when contentious issues are coming up to let someone else 'deal' with it.
This would allow the president(s) to be just as wishy-washy as most of the congress people who can just 'abstain' from voting on issues that would upset their voter base either way they vote.
The presidency would turn into a 'reality' show like American Idol or worse the WWE...
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The immediate result would be as the other answers described it: power shifting so fast that the traditional mechanisms of government would be unable to function. Our government is already essentially worthless in the 2-3 months leading up to an election. If elections happen essentially every second, all leaders would be doing is trying to keep their job, not actually doing anything productive (whether politicians have ever done anything productive is still up for debate).
If you tried to do this in the real world, I predict several possible long-term outcomes (none of them very good):
* **The system devolves into lawless chaos** - With leadership unable to do anything meaningful, law and order falls apart.
* **Voters give up** - Many people already feel disillusioned with government and don't participate in the electoral process because they don't think that their vote matters. With a chaotic system like this, you could see voter apathy on a monumental scale. Once voter participation drops below a certain point, there won't be enough transient votes left to change anything and the current leadership would become a permanent ruling class.
* **A cartel takes over** - Some savvy subset of leaders could organize an effort to change the voting laws to restore a more traditional system of voting. They could draw up all the paperwork ahead of time so that the only thing needed to make it official is an electronic vote. The first time that all of those leaders were in power at the same moment, they would hit the button to force the pre-written bill through and abolish the chaotic voting system. A group with that sort of numbers and coordination is unlikely to be completely altruistic, so it's likely that the legislation in question also makes them difficult or impossible to remove from office.
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The main problem is that both of the systems build on the systems created by the Roman republics. Where the people elect a leader and power trickles downwards. Its basically Monarchy 2.0. Combined with a total fluidity in leadership this would most likely lead to extreme stagnation as each new leader would start by countermanding the previous leader.
This does occur in parliamentary democracies when neither "block" or party has its own majority. It tends to favor small parties which get an undue amount of power due to swing votes. If the parties themselves constantly shifted size this might give some interesting dynamics.
I predict that it would lead to cycles of anarchy combined with periods of strong demagogues. Just like many real world "democracies" (cough cough Russia)
But this might just work in a system where power trickles upwards. In anarcho-syndicalism for example you have councils at the lowest level of government which send delegates to regional committees. Each delegate is usually instantly recallable (or at the next meeting) and only has a very limited mandate. This makes the incentives pretty low for changing delegates unless they don't do their job properly.
Well the problem is that we don't really know if works.
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So far it seems like a US centric question and answers which doesn't even apply to the US itself as its central government is broken by design and elections are being made every two years which esentially means that at any point in time someone is campaining and there might be a seat gain or loss that will require the general change of policies.
Outside of the US election are much more fluid. In israel I don't think that there was ever a government (maybe parlemant is more appropriate here) that succeeded to serve the allocated time for it (4+ years as the election date is theoretically a specific date in the year), some served about 4 years some much less. The other intresting aspect of israeli politics in the context of this question is that there was never a majority goverment and the way the political system is structured it is unlikely that there will ever be, therefor you have only coalition goverments.
The thing about coalition goverments is that the internal relative power between the various parties is not that important. To make an actual difference it is not enough for a vote to go from one coalition partner to another but to go to the opposition which is a much more rare thing. For example a communist might become a socialist and vise versa but is less likely that any of them will become capitalists over night.
So how does the system functions? opposition usually has a say even if they can not veto anything. It can be informal or formal ad-hoc agreement and of course each new government respect whatever the previous governments had put into law for the time it takes to reverse it.
In a way I would actually like your system to be used here even if just to trigger an election, at least it will be much more precise way to measure government disapproval rate then the pools all the political parties do by themselves.
So assuming you will let it some time to run before measuring the system's impact I predict some form of an equilibrium will be found either via coalitions or "cultural" agreements. Sorry but no doom prediction here.
Another thing to remember is that voting is not a zero effort thing. Today voting rate are about 60% and there is no real reason why it will change with your system. On the contrary, most people do not really follow politics close enough to have an opinion unless there are being kinda forced to form one, therefor it is unlikely that voting will become something that people do daily, it is more likely to follow some critical high profile events, and how many event of such a magnitude happen each year? one, maybe two. So government change might be something that happens once a year, which actually gives some time for doing things. And if it happens every two years them you get a proximity of the US system which I would say that is functioning relatively well.
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The first case will result in the country becoming trivial to take over. Having one person take over whenever they get more than 50% of the votes yields a metastable point. All an opposing country needs to do is to cause propaganda to get the voter opinion to sit right on the edge of 50%, and let the continuous tradeoff of power paralyze the military. If America did it, China would have them eating out of their hand within a year, just through clever manipulation and misinformation.
The later case offers more fluidity, so it stands a better chance of actually working. However, making it work will require more people to understand the value of balance. If everybody votes out people for voting against their wishes on each and every bill, there will be far too much turmoil to get anything done. People will need to be taught the value of responding to change slowly, but firmly. Unfortunately, there are indications that people tend to be more rash and fickle than slow and firm, so it is unlikely that we have enough combined maturity to manage such a volatile process.
... and then enters the high volume traders -- I mean high volume voters...
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Arguably, you could consider the U.S. as capable of electing new leaders whenever they want. Impeachment and recall.
The election is every 4 years, but the election does not absolutely grant the position under any circumstance for the 4 years. The elected official can be removed.
That said, if you are casting a hypothetical where, say, every day when each citizen wakes up, they cast a vote "New election/No new election", pretty much what is said above. Chaos.
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The problem is that if you have a single leader to elect (like in the USA), nearly noone would get 50% of the votes. I mean, Obama currently has around 50% approval rate, but all of the Republican voters are currently split among 17 different candidates ranging from 1 to 20 % popularity. It's not until the actual candidate is elected that we can start to go for majorities.
If we just elect the person with the most votes, we have a large chance at minority rule.
Additionally, this could run the risk of the spoiler effect: a president with average approval who has his same-party successor campaigning during his rule might cause a popular 3rd politician from another party to seize power because the largest faction is split between 2 politicians while the smaller faction focuses on 1 major player.
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In short, POTUS would no longer be in charge. Government interacts with citizens many layers below POTUS; the police chief who decides where to concentrate his agents, the civil servant who signs the contract for the new road (or your benefit check or tax assessment), etc. These individuals are simply not going to listen to an authority which is too random.
Some new parallel system will emerge which preserves these individuals' jobs and (to some extent) their consciences. It would be nice if it were also more-or-less democratic, but I wouldn't bet on it. Plutocratic seems likelier.
Whether this an improvement (or even a change) on the present system is left as an exercise for the reader.
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All life we know of to date (presumably) formed on a rocky planet (more precisely: earth). Fiction has been written about life in more [exotic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg) [locations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_with_Medusa). Though as far as I know, these lifeforms were always on the surface or in the atmosphere of some large(ish) celestial body.
**How can I scientifically justify life1 forming without the presence of such a body?**
One thing I have in mind is [nebulae](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula), which apparently [can contain all necessary ingedients for life as we know it!](http://www.wired.com/2010/03/molecules-for-life/) Answer need not necessarily adhere to this premise, any environment where these life forms can float around freely (and possibly evolve to travel interstellar space over time) will do.
1: possibly [turtles](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1359/how-do-i-prevent-my-turtle-from-collapsing-under-its-own-gravity)
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Okay, so what do you need to have interesting life?
It should be capable of movement. This is handy, because it makes it active. Not entirely necessary, depending on the kind of story you're making (an interstellar fungus that infects a space ship might be enough). There's a few options for that:
Solar sails - this would imply extremely light and sparse being, built around a wide area. By deforming the sail, it could control its movement. The cool thing about this is that it potentially allows the being to travel pretty much anywhere - in a nebula, a planetary ring system, whatever. It doesn't need a solid surface at all.
If there is some solid surface, for example with the planetary ring systems, there's a lot more options. It could simply jump between the rocks (probably with some kind of safety tether). In fact, jumping in free-fall environment with the help of a line would allow both speed and control.
And of course, there's the option of just living on one small body. However, that wouldn't really allow anything big, and it's easy to imagine a deadly catastrophe happening very often.
Source of energy is trickier than it might seem. Of course, there's solar power - a good bet, if you can make a collector of some sort. However, your beings will most likely have extremely low body temperatures (I'll discuss this further later), which limits the usefulness of traditional terrestrial fuels like sugars - the reaction rates might simply be too low to allow much to happen. This can be limited somewhat if it can collect enough solar thermal power to keep itself significantly warm, but that of course comes at a cost as well - more damage to be repaired. The huge problem with solar power is the square-cube law - it's hard to imagine how such an organism could evolve in outer space, if it has no way of regulating its own temperature. Perhaps the nebula it evolved in had enough rocky matter for it to find shelter from the deadly radiation (and heat)?
Now, in the nebula scenario, you probably need to traverse a lot of volume to get a meaningful amount of food, both for energy and as a construction material. This implies low metabolism (and low body temperature), because you need to be able to replace failing parts faster than they break. The ring scenario doesn't have as much problem with that, but there's another problem - it seems that the ring particles tend to be pretty homogenous, so there's little chance there would ever appear one that has enough material of all the different kinds necessary to build any autonomous working machine.
So I see those two pals:
* An animal-plant, built around a large solar sail, harvesting construction materials like a sperm whale, while getting energy from a sun.
* A jumper, flying from rock to rock in search of food, with a long "tail" (or maybe multiple tentacles) used to tether itself to the passing rocks (and its prey).
The two could even co-exist, the jumper preying on the sail (or vice versa, if the jumpers are really small). Of course, the sail sounds somewhat more likely to evolve in such an evironment.
The cool thing about the sail is that it could mostly be two-dimensional, so it would have a lot of control over its heating etc. If it's a cold animal, it would be able to keep itself from overheating (the unlit part would serve as a radiator, while the lit part absorbs heat). In fact, it might be a rather good thermal balance mechanism, whether you're relatively cold or warm.
The cold one has another benefit - it could get away with being almost invisible, which would help against predators (if any), and it would allow your heroes to run into them without noticing (the big facepalm moment for the science crew) - the comparatively hot hull of the spaceship might destroy it quite easily.
All around, it's rather unlikely you'd get anything like what we have on Earth. Most of the things that work even for extremophilic bacteria would probably not be present (e.g. the right construction materials, with a ready and stable food source without having to move etc.). Even the simplest modern bacteria are made out of tons of different atoms and compounds, most of which can only form in much higher temperatures than those found in most of outer space. Maybe a nebula that's already forming into a star system, but with a proto-star that didn't ignite yet?
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The problem with life is that it needs raw materials to work with. All large animals that we know of need to breathe, you need solid matter to consume, you need energy to power all of this.
In space you can get solar energy but there is a big shortage of matter to use to build your own structure and to metabolize to power your own existence and growth.
Even if life does manage to emerge on a comet or asteroid or similar then how is it going to travel to another one? Once you launch from the original there is no way to steer or guide your path.
Think about earth's atmosphere, nothing bigger than a microbe ever permanently lives in the atmosphere. That's one of the big questions with life evolving in the atmosphere of gas giants. There just isn't enough resources there to support them. The vacuum of space is going to be even worse than either of those atmospheres.
You also need to think about temperature, space is cold. Extremophile life here on earth can survive in cold temperatures, but even that would struggle in space and again it had the advantage of being able to develop in warmer conditions then gradually adapt to more extreme ones.
Your best bet that I can think of will be something like a gas giant with a ring system fairly close to a star. Close enough to have liquid water under ice in the ring. (You can't have liquid water in contact with space, it instantly freezes or evaporates). Life could then develop in that water, and grow space tolerant as it comes out through the ice to access more sunlight. The fact that items in the ring are closer together would make it more feasible for seeds to spread from one asteroid to another and as the plant life develops and grows animals could then develop that feed on it.
An entire ecosystem could develop among this ring system, and then as the animals and plants grow and evolve into more advanced forms they could even start so spread out beyond the original ring. For example plants that fire their seeds out at high velocity could spread throughout the entire ring system.
This life would still be confined to the ring though as once anything launched itself away from a rock it would have very limited manoeuvring ability (maybe a few water jets for course correction but certainly nothing powerful enough to achieve escape velocity from a gas giants gravity well). The only way it would break free is if it found an entirely different form of propulsion, either something we aren't aware of yet or maybe something like a light sail.
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Nebulae are indeed what I know as an alternative location as well. They not only contain the essential ingredients (including discharges to help along) but there's rocks passing through them all the time, which is what leads to [panspermia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) according to some theorists.
The problem with this, as far as life is concerned, is that when we're talking about "ingredients" and "conditions", we're talking about just enough to form bacteria and very simple organisms (in this case "extremophiles" that can survive space and atmospheric re-entry or first-entry in their case). They can chew on rocks for all time, but there just isn't anything to terraform, in order to allow more complex life to arise.
You don't get giant amoebas in space nor space-goats, launching themselves between rocks. Also, this process, while likely in nebulae, would take orders of magnitude more time than it needs on a planet, because everything's so far apart, so you need to allow for a universe that has hundreds of billions of years available to it.
Since I can't think of other cases that would count as "space" I'll stop here. To sum up, you *can* get life in outer space, but it's really really hard to get *complex* life in space.
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A few things on nebulae, just from the Wikipedia articles [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_nebula) and [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_II_region): their density still a very good vacuum, less dense than the gas on the surface of the moon or in low earth orbit. They only last about 10,000 to a few million years, which kind of surprised me, since that means some could have changed over historical times.
Those two things make me think live evolving there is very unlikely - the low density means things will happen slowly, and the short life means there just isn't enough time for much chemistry to happen.
On the good side, it seems like some nebulas have a hot/ionized inner bubble surrounded by a cool outer shell. That boundary region could be interesting, since you've got an temperature gradient, mixing, and fast-moving ions as a possible source of energy. Assuming you're willing to hand-wave away the short lifetime, that might be a good place. Maybe assume the nebula was seeded by surviving microbes or at least complex molecules from somewhere?
[Answer]
Already some great answers given, Tim B's description of a gas giant ring-based ecosystem was evocative and mesmerizing, I could really visualize it in my mind… if you want something really scientifically accurate, I would say stick with what he suggested or at least use it as a jumping-off point.
Ironically enough, I have also been thinking quite a bit about this same question recently. I remember hearing somewhere that some nebulae even have liquid water in them, though I'm not sure if this is something like we might imagine as a giant space ocean (which would be flippin’ awesome) or just something more like a few random droplets of water vapor mixed in with lots of other gasses kept barely liquid by Goldilocks-proximity to nascent protostars or something like that (which sounds more plausible, but much less awesome).
So, if you're trying to imagine something like the ever-popular space whales, (or maybe the Moon Entity from that episode of Doctor Who that just aired, eh? ^\_^) nebulae are probably a good place to start… but I think the real critical question here is, where is your world on Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness? If it's in realistic physics and chemistry or close to it, then you probably can't get anything more complex than bacteria-analogues in open void, and even then, probably not unless it was close to an atmosphere or ring system or cryovolcano or something. If it's slid more to the science fantasy side, you know, go crazy with your Space Wales and Space Is an Ocean tropes, have at it!
[Answer]
Recently scientists have discovered that bacteria can survive the [long haul to space.](http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/bacteria-survive-553-day-exposure-exterior-iss) If bacteria can survive this long in space it is feasible that less complex forms of life like single celled proteins and amino acids can start in space, but in order for it to develop into a complex organism as we know it, it must have stable and constant conditions. The only known way to have a semi stable environment (a planet) unfortunately is classified as not being "in space" by your definition.
If the planet/asteroid/rock had no atmosphere it would be like being in space but while also being tethered to an object of much greater mass the organism could remain at a stable enough "environment" even without orbiting an object with a mass greater than its own.
Basically it is possible and it is probable that life arrived here and did not actually start here.
[Answer]
What about the nebula ITSELF being a life form?
To bacteria looking at us, we would appear to be mostly empty space maintaining a certain form for millions of their lifetimes.
Just a thought.
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[Question]
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*A long time ago near a planetary system far, far away, a great battle ensued between the Evil Commonwealth of the Fraternal Order of Mind Your Own Darn Business and the rebellious Expressors of the Eternal Finger. Missiles were launched in the deepest recesses of space. Energy was exchanged. Debris littered the area. And, of course, there were bodies....*
---
Humanity has been conditioned for decades to believe First Contact would be...
1. The gruesome revelation of decaying bodies in tanks of fluid due to a government conspiracy starting in (of all places) Roswell, NM back in the 40s.
2. A pleasant encounter when handsome aliens who look a bit like us but for some cosmetic surgery around the ears demonstrate what would be interpreted by any other sapient species as a vulgar hand gesture. Humans, of course, accept it as an alien handshake.
3. The discovery that open gun ports are considered a gesture of respect by a species that obviously doesn't think like us *at all....*
4. That adrenaline-rush moment when a brand new life form bursts joyfully from your best friend's chest. Not that you noticed. You're still running.
In reality, First Contact was much, much, much different. Assume for the sake of argument...
* An alien body has been slowly mogating through the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy. Not too fast (the battle having been ~~thousands~~ ~~millions~~ maybe billions of years ago), such that when it approaches Earth at *exactly* the right angle, it's caught in Earth's gravitational well but does NOT enter the atmosphere at a significant starting speed. Let's say 10 m/s.
* The body is obviously frozen rock solid. 70 Kg of mass.
* The body would be wearing a uniform and has a few tools/instruments useful to whatever job the poor schlemiel was doing before a hole was ripped in the hull right in front of him. The uniform would be fire-resistant such that it could withstand an open flame for 120 seconds.
* The body enters the atmosphere and has the good fortune of hitting the ground right in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in California.
* It's December 31, 2020 (because this year absolutely *can't* end without some excitement).
**Question:** Can I expect to find enough of the alien to know that it is an alien (body, clothes, or equipment)?
*I included the meteor tag because... technically... what we have here is a meteor. Kinda. In the same way that D.B. Cooper was a parachutist.*
[Answer]
All right, so first off, as @AlexP and @Christopher James Huff pointed out in the comments, no interstellar object could possibly enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a low speed. Any object from outside Earth's SOI would be going at a minimum of 11,186 m/s (because if it's going at a relative speed of 0 m/s when it enters, it will get to that speed by the time it reaches Earth) and any object entering Sol's SOI will be at 42,100 m/s by the time it reaches Earth's orbital height.
You said it's reaching Earth at just the right angle, so I'm going to assume that's just the right angle so the relative velocities help it not be so much. Just the right angle to encounter Earth's SOI would take away 29,780 m/s (Earth's orbital speed) and just the right angle to hit Earth itself would take away about 460 m/s (Earth's rotational speed at the surface, I'm assuming the 70km to the top of the atmosphere is more or less negligible compared to the 6,300 km of diameter). If I'm doing my calculations right (it's perfectly possible I'm not) that puts you at an **absolute minimum of about 23 km/s** when you reach Earth. Here are some comparisons of reentry speeds to give you some scale: <https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9139/what-are-reentry-speeds-of-space-vehicles>
Given that energy equals one half em vee squared, your 70 kg alien will deliver 18,515,000,000 Joules of energy to the Earth's atmosphere ([equivalent to about 43 tons of TNT](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefultables.php#boom)) which I can't imagine is good for it. You said it has flame-resistant clothing, but **I don't think it'll be enough.** Even space shuttles don't reenter at half this speed. Better tell the diners at Grauman's Chinese Theater to look up and make a wish before he fizzles out.
*Note: @ChristopherJamesHuff says "The minimum is closer to sqrt((11 km/s)^2 + ((42-30) km/s)^2) = 16 km/s...it's the amount of energy you gain falling into the gravity well that is fixed, not the velocity. The stop at the end is still going to hurt." As I said, my math in these cases is not perfect, so I'll leave both stats and let you decide. Either way, it's a lot of delta-v to be accounted for.*
Now, your figure of 10 m/s is a lot smaller than 23 km/s [citation needed]. Really, 10 m/s will have almost the exact same effect as just dropping it. Even if you were at that speed, you'd need parachutes when you get to the bottom, because if you start with no speed, the Earth is gonna pull you toward it at 10 m/s^2 until you *are* going fast enough to be slowed down by the atmosphere. Skydivers have about a 50 m/s terminal velocity, but your alien won't be paying too much attention to aerodynamics so it'll probably be a bit faster than that.
So, rather than just putting a damper on your idea, here are some ideas of how you can fix the problem:
* **Use an escape pod.** The alien was able to clamber into an escape pod. Unluckily, there was not enough food or water, so he died before reaching safety. Still, when the pod's computer recognizes an inhabitable planet, it uses boosters to slow down the pod before reentry.
* **Message in a bottle.** An SOS message from an alien could survive with some protective shielding. Don't know if that fits your story, but it might. There could be some nice "proof" that it's actually alien in the pod (proof in quotes because it'll never actually convince everyone, case in point flat earth theory)
* **The whole ship.** The whole ship went adrift! It could do the same as the escape pod (ie slow down) or it might just have really good heat shields and be able to take the blow. It might have parachutes. Now, this depends on what kind of battle this ship was meant for. If it was never supposed to reenter, it probably doesn't have all that great shielding. But hey, your alien's got a better chance in a ship than on his own, right? (Do note that you'd have to recalculate the energy released on the atmosphere given the ship/pod's weight)
* **Who knows?** This is your story, you know what fits it best. You can just take this answer as "only if you slow down" and work out your own solution. I would say, you definitely don't have to slow it down all the way to 10 m/s, that might actually make it *less* likely to survive because the reentry slowdown would start later and might not have time to finish slowing it down. I'd say 1,000-1,500 m/s would be a good range to aim for. If you have stats on the kind of idea you're going for, I'd be happy to help you calculate them.
Hope this helps. :) Just remember, don't let a minor setback such as it not being able to survive your original idea stop you. Just reconsider and re-plan. You'll probably end up with something even better! (It's not like it's rocket science or anything XD)
[Answer]
## No.
Now, I'm no expert in this area, but it seems to me that considering how twenty-ton meteors burn up in the atmosphere on a regular basis, your alien has a 0% chance of reaching the ground before he completely sublimates. In other words: the alien itself won't survive his extreme skydive.
However, for the purposes of discussion, let's say that he's a member of the Evil Commonwealth of the Fraternal Order of Mind Your Own Darn Business. As a result, he is wearing their standard-issue handwavium armor, which, among other things, is re-entry-proof. In this case, the armor won't sublimate with the rest of the body.
Unfortunately for the people at SETI, it won't be recognizable as armor (or, for that matter, anything man alien-made) once it hits the ground. I don't care how strong this armor is, **it still can't possibly survive hitting the ground at 40,000+ km/h.** Not even the Fraternal Order is capable of that kind of magic.
As a result, I can conclusively say that there is a -10% chance that everybody will say "oh hey, that's an alien!" Sure, SETI & Co. will obviously be up in arms about how this meteor was smaller than it should have been, but they *always* say that.
[Obligatory XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2359/):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XNqVv.png)
[Answer]
If the suit survives re-entry, there will absolutely be big enough chunks at the scene for people to piece together what happened. Meteors of human size are [slowed](https://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/#12) to around terminal velocity by the time they pass through most of the atmosphere, and it should be apparent that the terminal velocity of a falling body is even slower than that of a rock. While something like a person may or may not break completely upon hitting the ground at that speed, his equipment (or just his anatomy) could be very plausibly pieced together and recognized as alien.
Of course, this entails that the alien has a suit capable of surviving re-entry, which, as others have noted, occurs at tens of kilometers per second — our spacecraft use big sheets of thermal tiles to protect themselves, and those are definitely far more heavy-duty than some flame-retardant fabric. Most likely, the body gets disintegrated on re-entry and nobody finds anything larger than utterly uninteresting dust.
[Answer]
## Mishandled capture attempt
Considering the amount of amateur astronomy chances are decent it will get spotted long before it collides with the earth. If it's obviously humaniform there would likely be attempts to capture it before it burns up in the atmosphere. If the window to do so is short, the attempts may well be kind of shoddy. On it's own it's exceedingly unlikely to survive re-entry, however perhaps Musk or Virgin or some gov't or other sends up a capture rocket ... It's not at all unlikely that something would go wrong, possibly "dropping" the body from the lower atmosphere. Consider also that if multiple entities are competing to try and be the one to acquire the "space man popsicle" they could also interfere with each other, causing an accidental "drop".
[Answer]
>
> Question: Can I expect to find enough of the alien to know that it is an alien (body, clothes, or equipment)?
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**Of course**
You see, the good thing with aliens is that you can do pretty much anything with them. There is little that alien technology and mysterious alien motives can not justify. From crop circles to mutilated cows to a silent metal monolith standing in the Utah desert.
Coming to your alien: he is no *schlemiel* at all. **They** burned up in the atmosphere, well their remains. He was different. He was a Basilisk rider. And, if you are asking, **this** is a basilisk!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/75j5Y.jpg)
[Basilisk war droid](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Basilisk_war_droid)
He was on the ship, on his way to the Basilisk bay. Riding it he would have plummeted from orbit on the heavily defended world below. Because that is how you fight with such a beast!
Of course given that the rider is exposed to extremely harsh conditions both during the fall from orbit and incoming fire a heavy armor is worn. He wears no common spacesuit but something which is perfectly capable of acting as a heat shield, armor from shrapnel and shield from energy weapons.
Of course he died long ago, while floating in space among the debris of his spaceship. The debris slowly getting scattered apart while he headed on a very peculiar trajectory that, of all places, ended at 6925 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90028
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> The body is obviously frozen rock solid. 70 Kg of mass.
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Well, this race of powerful warriors have the size of a red panda. Don't laugh! Red pandas can be fierce warriors too!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/i3qq4.jpg)
All the rest of the mass is the armor (which acts as a powered exoskeleton)
P.S. and BONUS: You want to know how it feels like to ride a Basilisk war droid from orbit?
[Canderous Ordo reminiscing his own riding on a Basilisk War droid.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D883YDu-PzU)
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[Question]
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In my world I would like to create a pit on the Moon filled with air.
* How deep would the pit need to be to get 1 ATM of pressure
* Could the pit maintain the air or would it be lost to space?
* If it would be lost, how long would it take?
* could a cap be enough to prevent any loss?
* Is the needed depth feasible on the moon?
[Answer]
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> How deep would the pit need to be to get 1 ATM of pressure
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That's pretty simple - about 300 km deep. More or less. Depends on how long you expect to keep it.
Atmospheric pressure is simply the weight of gas above the observer. On earth, 99% of the atmosphere is found below 32 km, and 99.9% below 50 km. On the moon, with a surface gravity of 1/6 that of earth, a similar column of gas would be 6 times longer or about 300 km. Since the radius of the moon is about 1700 km, the gravitational gradient down the pit would be about 1/3 - that is, the gravity at the bottom of the pit would be about 67% of the surface gravity. So the surface gas density would be something like that on earth at 33 km.
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> Could the pit maintain the air or would it be lost to space?
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Gone, gone, gone. The pressure of the earth's atmosphere at 33 km is about .017 psi. Unfortunately, it's surrounded by a much better vacuum, and will dissipate at some speed, causing more air to rise and disappear.
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> If it would be lost, how long would it take?
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Sorry, but that's beyond me. Weeks to years, I'd guess.
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> could a cap be enough to prevent any loss?
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Sure. The total pressure difference is pretty small, so for a small-diameter pit a cap seems perfectly reasonable. If you're talking miles wide to support a colony - not so much.
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> Is the needed depth feasible on the moon?
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Nope. With about 1/6 the gravity, this more or less equivalent to a hole 50 km deep on earth. At these depths rock will deform like toothpaste under the weight of the overlying burden. Well, slow toothpaste. Pressure is about 17,000 atmospheres or 260,000 psi. That's pressure in the rock, not the atmosphere.
[Answer]
The other answers are wrong due to some oversight.
This is a graph of temperature vs. escape velocity for various gases in various places:
Source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape>
Oxygen will stay on the Moon as a gas, as long as it doesn't get neither too hot or too cold. Close to 50K it will liquify; close to 60K it will escape the hole and the Moon.
And this is what [the wiki article for the Moon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon) says about her temperatures:
>
> there are places that remain in permanent shadow at the bottoms of many polar craters, and these "craters of eternal darkness" are extremely cold: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter measured the lowest summer temperatures in craters at the southern pole at 35 K (−238 °C; −397 °F) and just 26 K (−247 °C; −413 °F) close to the winter solstice in north polar Hermite Crater.
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So you dont need to dig a hole, some already exist. Just flush the gas in and keep an ideal temperature.
[Answer]
Some time ago, answering to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119605/30492), I posted this answer (which I reused also [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104982/30492))
>
> Yes, it is possible. Consider that at the bottom of a valley one is closer to the center of mass of the planet, [thus](http://web.ncf.ca/jim/misc/rockDrop/index.html) gravity can be relatively stronger, and this could reflect on the local atmospheric pressure.
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> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DlIyd.png)
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> On Earth we don't have valleys deep enough to experience dramatic difference, but we have such feature on Mars: Valles Marineris.
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> Up to 7 km deep, the pressure at its bottom is about 0.168 psi, while the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is 0.087 psi. About double, as you see.
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> Still not high enough to take a walk in T-shirt, but if the atmosphere on Mars would be more dense, it would be first spot to achieve habitable conditions.
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The main difference with the present question is that the Moon gravity is way lower than the one on Mars, and even at "ground" level there is no appreciable atmosphere, while there is on Mars. So, while on Mars the surface pressure is about 600 Pa, on the Moon it is 0.3 nPa.
Therefore, even digging a very deep hole or trench, and assuming a similar behavior of the gravity vs depth on Moon, there would be nothing to fill in that hole at an appreciable level.
Even assuming you could "flush" the hole with transported air, it would quickly escape just because the average velocity of the molecules would exceed the escape velocity for the Moon.
Unless you don't want to have a pool of liquid (better frozen) gases, which being protected from the exposure to direct solar radiation will sublimate very slowly.
[Answer]
The total mass of the moon's "atmosphere" is something like 10t, that just isn't enough mass of atmosphere to fill a hole.
Instead you would need to use a cap to hold down the air. To hold down 1atm of pressure requires the equivalent of a 10m column of water on Earth. If we assume luna regolith is 3x denser than water then in the gravity of the moon, which is 1/6th that of Earth, the cap would need to be 20m thick.
[Answer]
I just don't think you do it, although I don't have the exact math handy to prove it.
On earth, if you dig a 1km deep pit and stand at the bottom of it you get 1.12 atmospheres of pressure, or a 12% increase.
There is an [Interplanetary Air Pressure Calculator](https://www.mide.com/pages/interplanetary-air-pressure-at-altitude-calculator) that holds information for several planets (although not the moon - which is understandable considering the moon has virtually no atmosphere).
That says that even 5km deep into the martian crust you only increase the pressure from 0.01 atmospheres to 0.02 atmospheres.
The deeper you go the weaker gravity becomes as well which will start working against you.
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[Question]
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Ludicrous Leg Man has never skipped a leg day, as a result of which he has infinitely strong and fast legs and all attendant secondary superpowers. Don't ask why, just roll with it.
While performing leg related actions such as running, jumping and kicking his body shrugs off all forms of damage, so he doesn't break his own bones, air resistance doesn't tear the skin from his legs, inertia doesn't push his brain into his spleen, compressive heating of air in front of him only burns off his clothes, and he can land perfectly unharmed (naturally in the typical hero pose).
While he can kick impressively fast his reaction times are still human, so when jumping he has to put all of his effort into one explosive movement (he can't cleverly run on air). He has a footprint (no pun intended) of 0.3m x 0.1m x 2legs = 0.06m2, and weighs about 90kg.
Given that he still has to deal with air resistance even if it doesn't kill him, he's jumping from sea level at STP and that the ground underneath him *is not* infinitely strong (assume it's granite, with a compressive strength of 220 MPa), can Ludicrous Leg Man overcome Earth's gravity (ie still be moving at escape velocity after clearing the atmosphere) without just digging his unusually manicured feet into the ground? If not, just how high can he get?
[Answer]
# How much pressure can he put on the ground?
Since you were nice enough to give me the numbers you want, a 0.06 m$^2$ footprint can put $$220 \frac{\text{N}}{\text{m}^2} \cdot 0.06 \text{ m}^2 = 13 \text{ MN}$$ of force before shattering the ground or causing whatever other negative consequences.
# How long is his foot in contact with the ground?
The next piece is trying to find out how long Ludicrous Leg-Man (LLM, for short) has his foot in contact with the ground, to determine how much work is done. Let us assume he starts from a crouch, and his center of gravity can go up by 1 meter before the force of his jump pulls him off the ground. The acceleration during his jump is calculated from $F = ma$ to be 146,667 m/s$^2$ (!!). Lets round that to 150 km(!!!!)/s$^2$. The relevant kinematics equation here is $$\begin{align}d &= \frac{1}{2} at^2 \\1 &= \frac{1}{2} \cdot 150 000 \text{ m/s}^2 \cdot t^2\\ t &= \sqrt{\frac{1 \text{ m}}{75000 \text{ m/s}^2}} = 0.00365 \text{s}.\end{align}$$
# How fast is he launched?
Now we calculate the total speed after acceleration for that brief period of time: $$\begin{align}v\_f &= v\_i + at \\ v\_f &= 0 + 150000 \text{m/s}^2 \cdot 0.00365 \text{s} = 548 \text{m/s}\end{align}$$
Now there are problems with this, specifically the shock waves created by surpassing the speed of sound. LLM is going to create a sonic boom. The instability caused by that sonic boom will probably make it really hard for him to jump where he wants to go. But that is complex modeling, and I'm going to ignore that for now. If you really want LLM to be [Guile](http://streetfighter.wikia.com/wiki/Sonic_Boom), ask [Randall Munroe](https://what-if.xkcd.com/) how that will go.
Also note, this is clearly not escape velocity.
# How high can he go?
We first we can ignore air resistance and see. We set his initial kinetic energy from the launch equal to his potential energy at some height $h$ to get: $$\begin{align}\frac{1}{2}mv^2 &= mgh \\ \frac{1}{2}\cdot 547^2 \text{ m}^2\text{/s}^2 &= 9.81 \text{m/s}^2\cdot h\\ h &= 15290 \text{ m}\end{align}$$
A 15 km jump, not too bad! Nonetheless, even without air resistance, escaping Earth's gravity influence is not mildly feasible.
# What about air resistance?
Thanks to my new favorite paper [Calculation of Aerodynamic Drag of Human Being [sic] in Various Positions](http://www.taylors.edu.my/EURECA/2014/downloads/02.pdf), we can estimate that the drag coefficient, $C\_D$, for a person lying down is about 0.2. Of course LLM lying down in the air while going faster than the speed of sound is actually flying like Superman, so I think this is a good estimate.
This part of the math I don't have the space to do out, but I used a method pretty similar to what is seen [here](http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/336k/Newtonhtml/node29.html). First, we calculate terminal velocity as $$v\_t = \frac{mg}{C\_D} = 4414 \text{m/s}.$$ This is actually pretty high, based on our sleek aerodynamic super-flying profile and low $C\_D$ value. Since terminal velocity is much higher than initial velocity, drag won't affect LLM that much. Assuming only vertical motion (i.e. LLM is jumping straight up) the equation for velocity as a function of time is
$$t= -\frac{v\_t}{g}\log{\left(\frac{v\_t+v}{v\_t+v\_0}\right)}.$$ Solving this for $v=0$ we get $t=52.6$, so LLM is in the air for 53 seconds at the top of his trajectory.
The equation for distance is obtained by solving the above for $v$ and integrating over time, to get $$z = \frac{v\_t}{g}\left(v\_t+v\_0\right)\left(1-\exp{\left(\frac{-gt}{v\_t}\right)}\right)-v\_tt.$$ Plugging in a 52.6 second time, I solve this as 14096 meters, or 14 km. So, not that much different from our friction-less max, still plenty of juice to leap over mountains.
[Answer]
Plenty of math in kingledion's answer supporting his answer. Unfortunately, it's based on a false assumption--namely, that he can't jump higher than the rock under him can withstand.
This is false, he's going to be able jump considerably higher. I originally thought he could jump right off the planet but now I realize he can't--no matter how fast he jumps drag is going to bring him to a stop well before he leaves the atmosphere.
The thing is, so long as he jumps fast enough the strength of what he's standing on isn't the limiting factor. Rather, Newton's third law is at work. The rock under him is destroyed by the jump but it still has mass. It goes down, he goes up.
Lets suppose his legs go down at 70% of lightspeed. Draw lines downward from his feet, converging at a 45 degree angle. Any mass within that area has no way to escape (it would have to exceed lightspeed in order to do so) and thus must be pushed down.
I don't have the time to try to figure the trapped volume, but my gut says he ascends at at least 1% of lightspeed. However, no matter how fast his jump he's going to come to a stop when he's displaced as much atmosphere as his weight.
(Note: 70% was simply picked to make the 45 degree angle. Different velocities give different angles.)
(There is a way he can jump off the planet, though: Jump very, very hard. Drag brings him to a stop and he falls back to his jump site. Now, however, there is a huge shock wave pushing the air away from his location and the upward path from it. He jumps a second time, this time in near vacuum. While the problem says he can survive the jump no matter what, after he jumps there's going to be an incredibly destructive blast wave that will catch up with him. Does he survive the blast wave and radiant energy of a multi-gigaton blast?)
[Answer]
Seeing as that LLM can jump infinitely fast with infinite power and basically can't be hurt, if he realy puts hit back into it he will reach light speed instantly and rip a hole in the planet under him through the opposite force.
The infinitely strong gravity waves caused by the inifinite spike in momentum will probably destroy the remainder of the planet, and, incidentally, the universe with it, losing him his frame of height measurement.
Be ware of infinities ;)
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[Question]
[
>
> Running from her people. It was never unexpected, but Alynn always hurt about it.
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> She ran from the jeers, the shouts, the calls of "freak" and "witch". She ran away from yet another life she almost had.
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> More importantly, she ran from the rocks and bullets aimed at her. Stopping them dead in their tracks was all very well, but it *drained*. Not energy, she had plenty of that, but it tired her out - and then she wouldn't be able to run any more.
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> Alynn ran, considering where she'd set up her next life.
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Meet Alynn. She's an almost-scientific mage: that is, her magic is partially constrained by science. You'll be seeing her frequently: this is the first of a series of weekly questions about her magical exploits.
In this question, I'm asking about some constraints I have put in place on her magic.
The system works on the basic principle of an inefficient calorie-duplicator. For every Calorie she eats, she gets another half-Calorie (2000 joules) of magical energy to use or store. Yes, she violates conservation of energy which is not very scientific, but bear with me.
For a young woman of her 17 years, that means she would normally end up with about 4 MJ of energy over the day (from a 2000 Calorie consumption).
That, to me, sounds like too much. She can store the energy, so in theory if she does no magic at all for a while she could store up massive amounts of energy.
So: how much energy might some mundane magical tasks take? Take, for example:
* Creating a fireball
* Stopping a bullet in its tracks
* Lifting a 1-tonne mass 1 metre off the ground
With the data from those calculations, is 4 MJ/day too much? Will she ever use that much?
[Answer]
I'll take this in parts.
# Casting a fireball
Fireballs are a common piece of magic for any spellcaster, it seems. Since you want something based in science, you might take a look at [quark-gluon plasma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma), which is a fifth state of matter with high temperature and/or density. Particles in QGP exist have a temperature of $2\*10^{12} K$, which is $175\ \mathrm{MeV}$, or $2.804\*10^{-17}\ \mathrm{MJ}$ of energy. This means Alynn can produce 280,400,000,000,000,000 such particles before she even begins to notice a drain on her reserves, at 1 MJ.
# Stopping a bullet
Not surprisingly, and thankfully, [someone has already done the calculation on stopping a bullet](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/115014) and come up with a nice number of 600 Tesla for a magnetic field to stop a copper bullet. From the equation
$\mathrm{Magnetic\ Field\ Strength} = \frac{\mathrm{Energy}}{\mathrm{Current} \times \mathrm{Distance}^2}$
We can see that if we assume a current of 1 Amp and a distance of 1 meter, you would need 600 Joules to stop the bullet. Sounds reasonable, and hardly impacts her reserves.
# Lifting masses
Finally, lifting a 1-tonne mass. Since we only want to lift the weight, we can simplify the work equation to just $\mathrm{Work}\ =\ \mathrm{Force} \times \mathrm{Distance}$. We can figure out the force needed to lift the weight from $\mathrm{Force}=\mathrm{Mass} \times \mathrm{Acceleration}$. Acceleration due to gravity is $9.8\ m/s^{2}$ and the mass is 1 metric tonne (1,000 kg). Plugging back in, we get: $\mathrm{Force}=1,000 \times 9.8=9,800\ \mathrm{N}$. From this, we can calculate the amount of energy required to lift the weight as $\mathrm{Work}=9,800 \times \mathrm{(the\ distance\ lifted)}$. Of course, you could lift the weight faster by applying a greater force, but that's the minimum needed to overcome gravity.
# Conclusion
Finally, you wanted to know if $4\ \mathrm{MJ}/\mathrm{day}$ was too much. Each day, Alynn could create four fireballs (or one big one), stop 6,666 copper bullets, or lift a 1-tonne mass 1 meter high several hundred times.
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You're right - that's an enormous amount of energy. What you need to do is place (and justify) a limit on power. But let's say there is no such limit.
Your calculations are correct - ~ 4 MJ per day. If she exercises hard, she can easily up that by 50% and not gain weight.
Alynn is a 17-year-old girl. Presumably she was gently raised, and socialized to passivity and avoidance of direct confrontation. Good thing. It is only her mental reservations which keep her from being a frickin' killing machine.
Let's say she carries around a few pieces of scrap iron, or largish pebbles. If she throws one at an attacker, then boosts its velocity, how much energy does it take to do real damage? Well, a 1-oz 12-gauge shotgun slug has a kinetic energy of about 2400 joules. And if she wants to impress, you should be aware that it takes no work at all to keep an object suspended at a constant height. Force, yes - work, no. Work is force times distance; no change in gravitational potential energy means no work done, and at walking speeds kinetic energy is not an issue, any more than it would be if she simply carries the stuff. So she can walk around with a half a dozen rocks suspended over her head, ready to use. And she can use them about 800 times a day (1600 if she doesn't try to reuse them). How big is her village?
The same principle applies to artillery support. If there are any mountains close by, she can move a few boulders from the upper slopes and position them over the village she's living in. This will take awhile, since she can't move them fast, but once they're in place it takes no energy to keep them there, waiting for the command to fall.
Stopping a bullet is harder, but not for reasons of energy. A .45 slug only has 500 joules of kinetic energy, so that's all it takes to stop one, and it takes much less than that to simply divert its path. No, the problem is reacting fast enough to perform her magic on something that's moving too fast to see. Or a bullet that has been fired at her from behind.
In a pinch, of course, she can always do really scary stuff. The human brain weighs about 3 pounds. If she's willing to expend 1/10 of her daily magic ration, she can instantly raise the temperature of a person's brain by about 100 degrees Celsius (just below boiling), cooking it like a hard-boiled egg and killing him instantly. 3 lb of water raised 100 degrees F takes 300 BTUs, or just over 300 kJ. It will, of course take considerably more of her energy to raise the temperature to more than boiling, but the results would be pretty impressive, as the skull would explode. Not pretty, but an effective way to establish "Don't mess with me".
An even more energy-efficient technique would be to drain heat from an attacker. Dropping brain temperature by 20 degrees would cause instant hypothermic coma, and take only 20% the energy that heating would. As a plus (from a certain perspective), the affected individual might well recover, as flow of warm blood from the rest of the body would gradually warm the brain back up.
And if her control is really good, and she's feeling really nasty, the human eye weighs about 7.5 grams, or 15 grams total. Cooking those parts would be no trouble at all (energetically speaking). Total energy to raise one liter of water to boiling is ~ 2600 kJ. For a 15 g pair of eyes, call it 40 kJ to make them explode.
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Rule of thumb:
One KCal = 4 KJoules = 1 gram of TNT
So right now, she is accumulating the magical equivalent of 1kg of high explosives per day.
Whether that is a lot or not depends on what she does with it. I think that should be about 10 grenade sized fireballs per day. You can get at that by looking at the filling charge of grenades, which varies between 60 and 200g.
For stopping a bullet, compare to the propellant charge, using [relative effectiveness factor](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_effectiveness_factor).
A musket, for example, is about 12 grams of black powder in a typical charge, so about 6 grams of TNT-spellpower to stop. Modern guns are actually less powerful per shot (a rifle bullet is only 4kJ...), but obviously fire more quickly.
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Lets take another tack, Lets not violate conservation of energy and add practical limitations. First it is quite easy to simply switch from a 2000 cal diet to a 3000 cal diet and convert one third of that food energy to magic. (she is a skinny gal) Next I am aware of no process of converting energy that is 100% efficient. So a reasonable way to keep her from being over powered is to assign a couple energy conversion loss factors. Firstly there is the conversion of food into magic. Thinking outloud I would use 60% for her at the moment and 30% when she hit puberty and her magic kicked in and a maximum of 80% with lots of practice. Next is the casting efficiency. Moving energy uses energy so you want the casting efficiency to be inversely proportional to the distance. you also want it to be proportional to the skill that she has with a particular task. you would also need a correction factor if she is acting on something she can't see or if she is being careless or rushed. I would also have storage loss of 5% minimum. This brings her from overpowered to just plain scary but beatable.
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For the bullet question, it would depend on what the mass of the bullet is and the distance it was fired from.
For a bullet, one estimate that I have read for terminal velocity is around 300 ft/sec (about 200 mph). Since that's a lot slower than a bullet leaves a gun nozzle, it seems that the air resistance really will have a big effect on the speed of the falling bullet.
For the lifting question, the amount of energy required depends on how quickly the 1 ton is lifted.
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Humans store normal energy all the time. Our cells store small amounts of glucose, the liver stores moderate amounts of glucose, and our bodies store large amounts of fat -- which can get converted to glucose, but that takes time. And of course, energy stored as fat weighs you down, and it can be quite bad (for a variety of reasons) if you store too much. OTOH, not having any fat reserves is also very bad. So, I'd suggest that storing magical energy should be limited, that it should take time to convert stored magical energy into useful magical energy, and that over-storage of magical energy should have consequences. That makes your system more balanced, and also adds three more nuances of magic use that you can work into your story.
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For a species I am working on, there is a specific genetic trait that I want to introduce into the population. The exact nature of either is not important for the purposes of this question, but the trait is of such a nature that it is visible in the individual's phenotype to others of the species *and* it provides the individual with a pretty good advantage in certain situations without coming at too great a cost.
*Normally,* such a trait would spread readily throughout the population as it provides a net advantage and it is clear to potential mates whether a particular individual has it or not, leading to most individuals having it after some amount of time. However, in my world I want this trait to:
* pop up (at least seemingly) randomly; even if both parents show this trait their offspring may not, and even if neither parent shows the trait their offspring might, so it cannot be a simple dominant or recessive inheritance model (maybe polygenic?)
* occur in something like 0.01% to 0.1% of the population *sustained over time* (this is the hard part...)
* while showing some variance in the degree through which it shows in the phenotype in the individuals that do have it, be a marked difference between those individuals that have it and those that do not
* exist, and have similar effect, in both males and females
Without invoking magic or phlebotinum, **can I make that work? How?**
Assume Earth-like biology and evolutionary processes.
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We can look to [sickle-cell anaemia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease) for an example.
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> Three quarters of sickle-cell cases occur in Africa. A recent WHO report estimated that around 2% of newborns in Nigeria were affected by sickle cell anaemia, giving a total of 150,000 affected children born every year in Nigeria alone. The carrier frequency ranges between 10% and 40% across equatorial Africa, decreasing to 1–2% on the north African coast and <1% in South Africa. There have been studies in Africa that show a significant decrease in infant mortality rate, ages 2–16 months, because of the sickle-cell trait. This happened in areas that were known to be predominant areas of malarial cases
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The heterozygous phenotype can be the "beneficial" phenotype, and the homozygous recessive phenotype can be the deleterious phenotype. As long as there is a fitness balance between the two, the selection pressure on the allele as a whole should be balanced, and allow there to be a constant amount of people with the beneficial phenotype. As long as the population is sufficiently large, the gene is unlikely to become extinct.
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If it is caused by a combination of several otherwise unrelated dominant traits each of which in separation also causes a slight decrease in fertility or increase in mortality.
March Ho had an interesting idea about heterozygous phenotypes. This means that the gene needs two **different** alleles to have the trait. The benefit is that only half the children will have the phenotype, which prevents creation of pure-bred lineages, which using just dominant traits would allow. Downside is that half the children would have the trait, which would be noticeable by simple observation, after which new children with the trait could be produced by simply sacrificing the other half.
However, by combining this with my idea of requiring multiple genes in different chromosomes and making "incomplete versions" slightly negative... You'll end up with something that can't really be bred for.
Also your compound trait is rare enough that it is unlikely to make its component parts that much more common as long as there is enough of them and some of them are negative.
Something like that would probably be sensitive to mental state and health.
Human generations are fairly long, so as long as the balance of probabilities and selection pressures is roughly correct, nobody would notice slight variations.
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What if it *does* permeate the society, but not everyone shows it?
Genes themselves don't do anything, its the proteins they describe that do interesting things. The production of these proteins gets upregulated and downregulated constantly. You could focus on them.
Consider crafting a beneficial gene for which upregulation is tricky. Perhaps that section of the genome is only active during the formation of the neural tube. Make the trait tricky to implement... messing up could be fatal for the baby. If the baby has the genes, it could be a roll of the dice whether the embryo implements it properly. On failure, it could simply downregulate the gene, saving the pregnancy.
This would allow the gene to spread through all of society (as we expect from evolution), but individuals only have a small chance of benefiting from it.
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1. Your right, it is probably a multi-gene combo
2-3 to keep it to a small % the visible variance could be a large piece of the puzzle. The visible items could be very unappealing for sexual partners, or even more simple that it also is paired with a reduced ability to procreate.
4b. I don't see why there would have to be any difference between in effect for male vs. female. The procreation can be affected on both sides. There could also be something that makes the pregnancy more likely to fail. Maybe they also always are born early, often too early.
4a. Or the pregnancy could cause some other issue that might often result in the mother dying. This would keep them with the visible characteristics more of a pariah, if the mothers often die then the women will be less likely to want children and the men will be less desirable as a partner if their kids will kill their mothers.
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Don't forget that humans generally have *two* genetic lineages: the standard nuclear one we inherit from both parents and the mitochondrial one we get only from our mothers. This trait you talk about could be carried along in some analogue to the mitochondrial lineage. If you look at the mitochondrial diseases, you will find that some of them are exceedingly rare while other are more prevalent, depend on various factors, including interactions with nuclear genes and stubbornly persist across generations.
This mechanism could provide sufficient space to create a plausible scenario.
Or ... just look at the prevalence of some genetic conditions and focus on the ones with the prevalence you desire and note how they work.
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Your trait, as you've described it, has the same patterns of inheritance as most cancers, mental disorders, and the majority of human traits. These phenotypes are the result of genes with incomplete penetrance. Penetrance is a term biologists use to describe genetic traits that do not always show their corresponding phenotype. For whatever reason, be it environmental or other genetic factors, only a percentage of the population that has the genotype for the trait show the trait phenotypically. The genotype does not completely determine the phenotype in an individual, but instead strongly influence the probability of the phenotype.
As for how to keep your trait from being positively selected for and becoming fixed in the population, you just need people with your trait to not have more children than people without the trait. There are many ways to do that both socially or biologically.
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Random and rare: you want it to be an advantage to the species only at those low numbers.
Once you have that, evolution will have made the connection to the phenomena that trigger/regulate the process, no matter how ridiculous the connection may seem to us.
1. The gene is present in most of the population, but manifests rarely, AND causes problems if it manifests too densely (preventing selection for increased manifestation chance):
* social problems - possibly instinct-based, or just because of tradition. It doesn't do to have too many powerful leaders, and there might be a reason (like long-distance telepathy) not to let defeated rivals live.
* renewable resource usage that is not a problem otherwise. Maybe even affects 'normal' beings - with harm/threat magnitude growing exponentially with the number of uplifted on the continent. No problem if regulated, though.
* variant of resource usage: costly to attempt producing such an individual (stimuli are rare, but renewable, e.g. peculiar astronomical/atmospheric/geological phenomena, unpredictable and expensive to reproduce - sounds like magic, but happens in nature)
* the presence of one uplifted individual suppresses the growth of any who are weaker (resource hogging, pheromones, state of mind).
* manifesting the trait makes it less likely to be active in offspring
* too great a density would bring malady, harming the targets and anyone nearby (descendants). Maybe affected individuals are more likely to attract the attention of something undesirable.
* the trait lies dormant in many people, but most choose not to activate it (religious reasons? expectation of a different lifestyle? Suppression of mating instinct?), or don't get a chance to (traumatic experience + downtime needed?)
2. Have the trait sustained in *another* species that have a symbiotic relationship with the Jed... ugh.
The capability to uplift a host is useful to have, but the beneficent's evolutionary goals may prefer infrequent usage.
* example: gut bacteria for whom hosts displaying the phenotype in even the least degree are less... hospitable. The bacteria *can* function, but outside of an already-changed host, the necessary adaptation is a burden, so they are inferior to the rest of their species. This keeps them defaulting to 'normal' mode, but the host species, overall, benefits from that occasional quirk, and indirectly so does the symbiote.
3. "without coming at too great a cost" to the adult individual, I assume. The parents are a different matter, as is the infant.
* sterility/sickness afterwards
* high risk of failure (no effect, death, or opposite effect)
* the child is indistinguishable from a sickly runt until the alternative growth starts
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The key phrase is " beneficial in certain situations", as long as those situations are rare it will not spread quickly, if most people will go through their life without ever encountering those situation even better. if you can make it detrimental in other situation even better. if manifestation is not guaranteed again even better, the more muddy you can make the benefits of the GENE the slower the gene will spread. Another way is to make the benefits conditional on non-genetic factors, maybe you need to have built up sufficient body mass or bone density or live in a certain type of environment else the effect is detrimental not beneficial.
example super strong muscles are great unless you don't have bones or tissue that can take the strain, then its very detrimental.
Another example, The ability to read minds could be horribly detrimental if it manifests in the middle of a city or town but if it happens in the middle of wilderness you might be able to learn to control it before the constant noise drives you insane.
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One of the major, if not the major, theories of how speciation occurs is **allopatric speciation**. You mention how a large population drowning out a new trait before it can spread is an issue with you, and so it is in conventional theory. This model posits that at the edge of a species' range, small groups will form a cluster breeding mostly internally, thus allowing a favorable change to take over the group. This group will also have additional pressure from the marginal fit it has to the environment, and thus a 'need' to evolve. Then if the environment in the whole changes to fit this group, it may spread out over the whole range.
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If the population is sentient, they can decide to restrict it. It doesn't matter how genetically beneficial it is if it is countered with, only the kings family can have it, if you aren't in the kings family we kill you, your parents, your cousins and just to be safe, your little doggie too.
Humans aren't immune to evolution, but we can uniquely influence it.
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The starship '[Exciting Undertaking](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63587/why-are-there-no-toilets-on-the-starship-exciting-undertaking)' has set off on a brand new five and a bit year expedition to explore the galaxy. To make such a starship possible, an artificial gravity generator had to be invented. The first model was delivered and tested and [worked just fine, thank you](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Heisenberg_compensator).
**When *Exciting Undertaking* is launched, at what level should we set the artificial gravity generation?** Sure humans are used to 1$g$, but is that really the best gravity force to set it at?
Details:
* Only humans are on board these vessels.
* The gravity generator can be controlled differently in different spaces on the ship, as necessary. Gravity is provided by continuous plating, so each separate room or corridor must be kept at a constant gravity level.
* Gravity can be controlled to 0.01$g$ precision.
* The rate of change of the gravity generator is relatively slow due to the desire to limit structural stresses on the ship. Assume a rate of change of 0.1$g$ per minute.
* The gravity generator is a power hog, but with an anti-matter powered reactor, the cost of running the generators at any setting is not a major concern.
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Justin's on the right track, let's add to it.
* With perhaps a few exceptions, variation needs to be minimized or you'll need "gravity locks" (the equivalent of "air locks") all over the ship to help people transition from one gravity to another. If you don't, the stress on the cardiovascular system would be substantial.
* Crew members destined to go planet bound for anything other than minutes (or maybe an hour or two, depending on how friendly the environment is predicted to be) would need to "decompress" to that gravity level. In other words, if the ship operates at 0.8g all the time, but the planet the away team is about to visit (a completely unknown planet, you might encounter anything) is 1.2g, then your away team would need to live in an increasing gravity for a period of time to ensure they were ready physically to deal with any contingency on the planet. Otherwise (in this example), they risk sitting duck status because they're too weak to push against the planet's gravity.
Having said that, let's think about what would be "best" for the crew.
* Moving things around in 0g is a lot more painful than people might think. You still need some way to move around objects of heavier mass than yourself. Under normal conditions you'd use a pallet jack to compensate for the difference, but there's nowhere to put the wheels in 0g. That means thrusters in a 3D environment. Very chaotic.
* Other than exercise, I can't think of any reason why you'd want heavier "g" anywhere in the ship. But the gym is a good place for it as a bit more gravity will help with the cardio.
* Finally, you want an improvement in performance without a loss of precision (see 0g discussion, above).
I'm going to conclude (and yes, I'm pulling this judgement out of my left ear), that you want 0.9g everywhere on the ship other than specific locations, like the gym. This improves the efficiency of personal strength without losing basic traction and leverage.
* Medical may want 0.8g to relieve stress on the heart. However, medical is the one place where you'll want different rooms to have completely reconfigurable "g" values. It will have the greatest number of reasons to vary it.
* The gym, perhaps two or three rooms, 1.1g, 1.4g, 1.8g. Your hulking red shirts will be in the 1.8g room lifting weights all the time.
Keeping all the rooms (save a few) minimizes stresses on the ship and also minimizes the potential for harm if emergency maneuvers are required. A sharp turn in that 1.8g gym has a greater potential for harm than a sharp turn in the 0.6g surgery.
**Summary: while specific room requirements may vary, and you'll need gradients to move between the rooms unless the delta-g is low, my belief is that 0.9g is the "best" overall value to improve strength without losing traction and leverage.**
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When you say 'Best' do you mean 'best for the crew', 'best for operation of the ship', 'best for maximum use of space', or 'best for the author, in case the book is made into a film'?
Star Trek had 'normal' artificial gravity simply because it was much easier to film the series in 'normal' gravity.
But as we now know from ISS, a lack of gravity is really, really useful for utilizing every available bit of space in the ship. With no 'up' or 'down', and no 'falling out of cupboards', then storage lockers can be put on all of the walls, complete surround storage. So in terms of space utilization efficiency, no gravity is best.
But in terms of housekeeping, when suspended particles never move, except in the air flow, keeping the central room space empty requires a bit of gravity to attract everything to a surface. Thus, for housekeeping it makes sense to have a surround gravity. That is, every surface in the space has some gravitational attraction sufficient to keep things on the surface.
In terms of human health, are the inhabitants ever expected to return on-planet? If they are permanent spacers, then humans can do just fine in point 2 or point 3 gravity. Mars, for instance, would need no gravity enhancement in the living spaces.
But since inertia is always the same with or without gravity, the lower the gravity the slower the spacemen could move. Accelerating too fast means that, when they hit solid wall, they do so with a painful thump. So they would move very slowly to limit acceleration, and therefore minimize inertia. Having all of the outside surfaces be the gravitational attraction would perhaps ease the problem, because there would always be 'counter gravitational forces' in every direction.
However, gyms and such exercise and sports spaces would definitely want high 'up-down' gravitational fields. When jogging, for instance, you want sufficient gravity to allow high acceleration without inertial run-away, and you want the track to be 'down'. You want sufficient gravity to allow good friction between boot and tack surface.
To maximize sleeping surface, a round tube where bunks would be placed all around the outside, with minimal gravity around the outside to keep the occupants from drifting. In naval ships,the bunks are stacked four and five high to maximize sleeping space. Imagine if they could utilize top and bottom surfaces? That is, crew members face each other when sleeping.
But eating quarters and dining rooms? Definitely things work better when the table is down and your mouth is up. Makes food much easier to cut and stab.
Office-type quarters would require a constant up-down gravity field. Typing is rather difficult when every key press sends the typist backwards. Writing is hard when an over-emphatic pen stroke sends the writer flying off to the side. Fidgeting in the chair can launch one into an unintended trajectory. And squirming in a chair? Forget it, unless something is 'sticking' you to it.
However, I can foresee that perhaps the propulsion system would work best in no gravity. 'Containment vessels' are much easier to control when there is no gravity pulling on the object to be contained. Place the substance in the general area, it does not move. Turn on the containment field around it. No need for supports before the containment field is turned on.
So the bottom line. If you are really after 'best', and the technology allows it, different gravity on different surfaces in different parts of the ship would be 'best overall'. Say in the storage areas, no gravity; in the gyms, high gravity on the playing surface (perhaps 'dial-a-gravity' to increase the intensity of the workout); in sleeping quarters, mild gravity around the walls; in transit hallways, no gravity but lots of handholds, padding, and inertial shock absorbers at the ends; in the dining room, low gravity on the table; and in office-type areas, low gravity in an up-down orientation to allow paper to remain still in slight breezes, and people to stay sitting even while fidgeting.
And how about 'dial-a-gravity' special surfaces throughout the ship for housekeeping? Turn them up, way up, all the garbage gets attracted to them. Just wipe the surface off, and return to normal gravity situation. No more clutter, no more dust.
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The best setting for gravity plates onboard the *Exciting Undertaking* would be a constant 99 g. The gravity plates capable such strong gravity would be installed in the ceiling of all habitable work spaces accessed by the human crew. The benefit lies in maximizing travel time across interstellar space. There will be a second set of gravity plates installed in the floors of all work spaces.
One of the less commented upon problems of interstellar space travel is the long acceleration times required to reach sufficiently high velocities to travel between stars within modest fractions of a human lifetime. Accelerating close to lightspeed provides the necessary velocity and comes with additional bonus of relativistic time dilation.
Obviously a mighty space craft like the *Exciting Undertaking* if it is powered by antimatter reactors will have no difficulty in being equipped with a propulsion system, doubtless powered by antimatter, capable of accelerations of up to one hundred gravities (100 g). At an acceleration of 100 g the *Exciting Undertaking* will attain near-lightspeed in roughly four days.
This will give it a brief acceleration phase, push it to sufficiently close to lightspeed to provide a reasonable amount of relativistic time dilation, and thereafter its antimatter engines will generate a constant 1 g acceleration up until it reaches the midpoint of its journey when it commence a long 1 g phase. Once the *Exciting Undertaking* is within two light days of its destination it can once more engage in a 100 g deceleration phase.
The 99 g gravity plates will compensate for excessive "gravity" in the acceleration and deceleration phases. The human crew will experience an apparent internal gravity of a comfortable 1 g during those acceleration and deceleration phases.
Please starships capable of constant 1 g acceleration will take of the order of one year plus to attain similar amounts of close to lightspeed velocities. The *Exciting Undertaking*, by contrast, using its 99 g gravity plates as acceleration compensators will do so in only four days. This will reduce its rest frame travel times by about one year. It will also spend more time experiencing relativistic time dilation. The human crew will have shorter travel times.
It is noted, more in sorrow than anger, that the OP has not specified whether the *Exciting Undertaking* is capable of faster-than-light travel. If it is a FTL vessel, then this cunning scheme for enhanced relativistic spaceflight by means of compensating gravity generators with high-gravity settings may have been in vain.
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(The following assumes "proper" artificial gravity, i.e. that is, as long as you do not try to move the source, indistinguishable from real gravity. Not sth. which is directed, like the electric field in a capacitor.)
Basically, the graviational field of a point-like source decays with square of the distance, of an infinite rod linearly with distance, and of an infinite plane is constant. For a finite-size ship, that's still approximately true as long as you're significantly closer to the source than to the edge of the source.
You surely want the gravity gradient to be small on the length of a human body to avoid a lot of upturned stomachs. ;-) That rules out a point source, because you have to stay far away from it, and you have to make it dangerously strong. A rod-like source would still mean a huge inaccessible space in the center of your ship, and it's unclear to me how you would hold it, because it would still crumble any construction material in close distance.
So the most sensible, economic idea is probably a flat generator, with a pyramidal multi-story ship on one or both sides. Make the pyramid a bit higher to add rooms with lower gravity. The generator tiles in the outer area are turned up a bit, so you don't have to tilt the floor too much in that area.
That's also the big problem with adjustable gravity (unless you do it ship-wide): If your neighbour thinks he wants to sleep at $0.6g$ tonight instead of the regular $0.8g$, your glassware falls out of the cupboard, not to mention the danger of the same cupboard falling onto you.
As to the absolute $g$ value, that's totally in your hand. If the generator running costs are cheap, go with $9m/s^2$. Otherwise I'm sure humans would do fine with 5 or even 4. Maybe have a gym with higher gravity on the other side of the plane and lock your spacefarers in there for one hour on every weekday.
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I have a bipedal kaiju-style monster that walks upright on two legs and weighs 20,000 metric tons. Supposing, of course, that it can carry its own weight, its muscles can support the stress, and the ground can support it, does anyone have any idea how to calculate how many seconds it might take for this creature to decelerate from the respective speeds of 15 and 30 mph to a complete standstill?
I tried using freight train emergency braking times as a reference, but I imagine the two stopping methods are very different and therefore might yield very different results.
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Great question, here comes the mother of all spherical cow estimates
### Proposal: The limiting factor is force the ground can absorb.
I propose that what keeps a kaiju from decelerating too fast is the amount of pressure it can put on the ground before the ground shatters into....whatever the ground shatters into under a kaiju's foot. If it 'shatters' the ground, the foot slips, and it won't be able to stop quickly, so that will be our limit.
We'll assume the monster's body is sufficiently muscled to do anything a human can do, including taking the same strides relative to the body.
### How much force can the ground take?
Based on a [powerpoint](http://home.iitk.ac.in/~sarv/New%20Folder/Presentation-14.pdf) on building foundations, lets assume that the bearing stress on good quality bedrock is 10 MPa.
### How much force does a monster put out?
A human sprinter generates a [ground reaction force](http://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/2/6/199) of ~3000 N for a 60 kg sprinter, while [accelerating at](https://www.wired.com/2012/08/maximum-acceleration-in-the-100-m-dash/) 3 m/s$^2$ over 10 strides each of 2 meters.
The monster is 20,000 tons or lets round to 300,000 times the mass of the sprinter. If the monster is the same shape as a human, by cube law, it should be 70 times longer in each length dimension.
First, lets make sure the monster can stand on the ground. Two human feet are 200 cm$^2$; a kaiju's equivalent feet would be about 100 m$^2$. Lets say its got big Godzilla feet, so that is really 200 m$^2$. $2\times10^{7}$ kg times $g$ over that area is 1 MPa; well under the bedrock strength.
An equivalent human full force footfall is 5 times more force than standing force (3000 N versus 600 N for a 60 kg person); the kaiju's standing 1 MPa times five is 5 MPa; still below the bedrock limit, though perhaps barely.
### How long does that take to stop
A kaiju with roughly human dimensions and feet with twice and much surface area proportional to its body size could accelerate and decelerate at the same rate a human could.
Usain Bolt can get to just under 30 mph in 6 seconds, so he could decelerate in roughly the same. He gets to 15 mph is half that: 3 sec.
Therefore, it is reasonable for the ground to support a kaiju doing the same. Of course, it takes 60 strides for Usain Bolt to come to the full stop, while we are assuming that the kaiju has the musculature to do it in about one stride.
# Conclusion
The force required to stop a 20,000 ton kaiju whose running mechanics are similar to a humans should be low enough to allow the kaiju to stop within about 6 seconds from 30 mph and 3 seconds from 15 mph.
This is assuming a good, strong bedrock surface that the kaiju is walking on; the kind you need to support tall buildings in Manhattan or Tokyo, in case your kaiju is into that. On softer ground, no promises. And of course, everything between the kaiju's foot and the bedrock should be thoroughly pulverized.
[Answer]
The problem here is that you can't have a 20,000 ton biped (indeed, the number of legs is largely immaterial). An elephant weighs in the order of 10 tons, you want an animal that is in the order of 1000 times that. This will mean that it will need to be 10 times as tall, wide and long (10^3 = 1,000). Its legs though will have to carry 1000 times the mass, despite only having a cross-section 100 times that of an elephant (ignoring for a moment the fact it has half as many). That means that each leg will have to be 10 times as large in cross-sectional area, or for a simpler way of looking at it, you'll need 10 times as many.
Now picture in your mind an elephant that is proportionally the same as a normal-sized one, but with 40 legs (each proportionally the same size as a normal one) - you end up with much more leg cross-section than you do elephant (alternative explanation - think of an ant with legs that are proportionally very spindly, but can carry far more mass relative to the creature than an elephant can - then reverse the logic).
Even if you ignore the leg strength issue, you're going to have a similar issue with the feet - with a ground pressure ten times that of a real animal, it's going to sink.
Given that the basic physics of your creature aren't really possible without a lot of hand-waving, how long it takes to stop can largely be a product of your imagination.
] |
[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
**Background:**
The moon has been selected as the base for human space exploration. Rather than ship tonnes of material out of earth's gravity well, interplanetary spacecraft and space stations will be manufactured on the surface of the moon and launched from there.
A level of industrial capacity allowing the mining and processing of ores has been developed on the moon, as well as manufacturing, and reasonably good material science using moon resources. As a rough guideline, if a material could have been manufactured on earth in the 1970s a reasonable substitute in terms of material properties can now be manufactured on the moon. If you can justify why a material exceeding that standard can be manufactured on the moon, you can use it.
*Note:* To clarify, the tech level does not need to be restricted to the 1970s (the target is in the future but with minimal additional scientific advances). I have placed this restriction on the level of material science because developing simple structural materials (e.g. steel) on the moon would pose significant challenges, but the details are beyond the scope of the question.
**The question:**
How will these spacecraft manufactured on the moon be powered?
**Criteria:**
* The more realistic the power source is based on current science the better: Currently implemented > Prototyped > In development > theoretical > hypothetical > impossible
* The raw materials should be found on the moon, with as little mass as possible imported from earth. The more abundant and easily processed the raw materials are the better.
* The answer should explain how the power source is able to power both the craft's propulsion and its other power requirements.
* The end result must be a portable power source for the spacecraft, with both the drive for the spacecraft and any fuels required manufactured and produced on the moon. The same levels of credibility apply to the drive as to the power source.
*Note:*
I am looking for the craft's principal power source. Because some power sources lend themselves more easily to providing propulsion I feel an explanation of the propulsion system used in conjunction with the power source is also necessary.
**Examples of power sources**
* moon manufactured solar panels with batteries, and an electrically powered propulsion system.
* hydrogen, oxygen, and rocket engines manufactured on the moon.
* space ready nuclear-powered engine made on the moon
**Excellent answers will provide** evidence for how well developed the power source currently is. Evidence for how well-developed drives which can work with that power source are. Evidence for ores of any crucial raw materials on the moon.
[Answer]
An Aluminium-Oxygen drive burns Aluminium and Oxygen (as the name would suggest), achieving a mediocre [specific impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse) (the primary measure of fuel efficiency for rockets) of about [285 seconds](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#al02rocket). Normally this would be of no interest for use as a rocket fuel since current Hydrogen-Oxygen drives such as those used for the Space Shuttle's main engines can achieve specific impulses of around [450 seconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine), far superior to the pathetic specific impulse provided by Aluminium-Oxygen combustion.
However, the advantage of an Aluminium-Oxygen engine is the fact that you can make the fuel out of nothing more than regolith (lunar dirt and rock) and electricity. According to [this paper](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/isijinternational/56/7/56_ISIJINT-2016-037/_pdf), reducing Aluminium Oxide, which is [present in the lunar regolith](https://isru.nasa.gov/MetalsfromRegolith.html), requires high temperatures (above 1832 K), which can be provided by solar power, as well as [Carbon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Moon#Elemental_composition) and [Iron Oxide](https://isru.nasa.gov/MetalsfromRegolith.html), both of which are available in the lunar regolith (although getting enough Carbon will require processing a lot of ore, and it would be reclaimed from the CO2 after the reaction to as great an extent as possible). This reduction was performed for the linked paper above, so it's clearly in the "Already Implemented" stage.
Actually building a rocket that uses Aluminium and Oxygen as fuel will be fairly simple, as it's essentially just a fairly inefficient [hybrid-propellant rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid-propellant_rocket), which is a type of rocket we've already built and flown a number of, and are easily capable of building more of if the need should arise (the need hasn't arisen because liquid fuels have higher specific impulses, but the various liquid fuels in use on Earth are much harder to produce on the moon, so using Aluminium and Oxygen is a viable alternative). So this is somewhere between the "Prototyped" stage (as we don't have an Aluminium Oxygen drive specifically yet) and the "Currently Implemented" (because we do have many hybrid rockets of other types) stage.
Therefore, spacecraft manufactured on the moon could be propelled by an Aluminium-Oxygen drive, using propellant manufactured on the moon with nothing but lunar dirt, a solar farm, and some already-built equipment.
[Answer]
A brute force concept using [1970s technology](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B000GRMI7K) and lunar materials:
Use lunar ores to make reflective materials and [Stirling engines](https://www.infogalactic.com/info/Stirling_engine). Use these materials to build [solar-thermal power plants](https://www.infogalactic.com/info/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations) on the moon. Store the energy using [molten-metal batteries](https://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112) or batteries that [melt-and-refreeze metals or salts](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2012.10.022), also made using lunar material.
Use high-power ablation technology for the rockets. The bottom of the ship is a large shaped piece of metal. Send an intense energy beam from the launch site to the bottom of the ship. Boil off the metal, to provide thrust. Earth-based launchers using this concept would need about 3 GW of power. (Per "[Halfway to Anywhere](https://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/0491029411)", in *[A Step Farther Out](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B000GRMI7K)*.) Since the moon has about 1/6 of Earth's gravity, 500 MW would suffice.
Bonus points if the "intense energy beam" is a laser beam, mounted on a stuffed shark. (The sharkskin would probably need to be imported from Earth.)
Include a small-scale solar-thermal system on the spaceship, along with a small-scale version of the battery system. Send a modest energy beam from the moon to the ship's solar-thermal system to power the spaceship.
[Answer]
"The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft, which was launched in 2007, detected uranium with a gamma-ray spectrometer. Scientists are using the instrument to create maps of the moon's surface composition, showing the presence of thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron."
<https://www.space.com/6904-uranium-moon.html>
Thus the obvious solution is to build a nuclear fission reactor on the moon and build a uranium mine. Nuclear fission (and fusion) do not require oxygen, so no atmosphere is needed on the moon.
[Nuclear thermal rockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket) were prototyped and had (non-flight) tests from the 1950s to 1970s.
>
> To date, no nuclear thermal rocket has flown, although the NERVA
> NRX/EST and NRX/XE were built and tested with flight design
> components. The highly successful U.S. Project Rover which ran from
> 1955 through 1972 accumulated over 17 hours of run time. The NERVA
> NRX/XE, judged by SNPO to be the last "technology development" reactor
> necessary before proceeding to flight prototypes, accumulated over 2
> hours of run time, including 28 minutes at full power. The Russian
> nuclear thermal rocket RD-0410 was also claimed by the Soviets to have
> gone through a series of tests at the nuclear test site near
> Semipalatinsk.
>
>
>
[Answer]
The simplest method of obtaining a rocket fuel from the Moon is to mine the ice on the poles. This gives rocket fuel from a single mining source.
According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water):
>
> In March 2010, it was reported that the Mini-SAR on board
> Chandrayaan-1 had discovered more than 40 permanently darkened craters
> near the Moon's north pole that are hypothesized to contain an
> estimated 600 million metric tonnes (1.3 trillion pounds) of
> water-ice.
>
>
>
Then you just need a bit of heat, a lot of electricity and the ability to compress and to separately store H2 and O2.
You melt the water and use Electrolysis to split the water.\*
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water) link for if you don't know what that is:
>
> This technique can be used to make hydrogen gas and breathable oxygen.
> As hydrogen is an important industrial commodity, by far most
> industrial methods produce hydrogen from natural gas instead, in the
> steam reforming process.
>
>
>
Then you just use cryogenic compression to convert the gases to liquid form for storage.
If the ice is not where you want to be launching rockets from, it is easy to transport the ice to the launch area. I would recommend that over transporting the O2 and H2 gases. For one thing, if the transport breaks down, ice will evaporate much more slowly than cryogenic liquid gasses.
\*When did they change the term from cracking water to splitting water? A search on "crack water" yielded a whole bunch of links that I wasn't looking for.
[Answer]
**Solar power combined with ion engines and a mass driver:**
**Power Source**
Solar power could conceivably be used to power the craft, providing both the onboard power and propulsion.
Solar power is already widely implemented, with solar panels [sufficient to supply 227 Gigawatts](https://www.worldenergy.org/data/resources/resource/solar/) of electricity having been installed globally by 2015.
The main component of most photovoltaic cells [is silicon](https://news.energysage.com/what-are-solar-panels-made-of-list-of-solar-pv-materials/). This is the second most abundant element on the lunar surface, however, it exists in various ores rather than the relatively pure form used for solar panels on earth. A process to extract silicon from these ores would be required. Such a process [has been suggested](http://www.asi.org/adb/02/13/02/silicon-production.html).
**Propulsion in space**
For propulsion while in space solar panels could be combined with ion drives - this is a technology which [has already been implemented](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html). Ion drives require a propellant, for this a range of elements have been used or proposed, including xenon, argon, iodine, mercury, and bismuth. Designs such as [VASMIR](http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/VASIMR) could theoretically use practically any material for propellant. Thus it should be possible to find a suitable propellant on the moon.
**Propulsion to launch**
Ion drives do not, however, provide sufficient thrust to escape lunar gravity. This could be achieved by accelerating the craft on a track using linear motors, as implemented in maglev trains on earth. There are many implementations for transportation on earth, but so far this has not been used to propel a vehicle to lunar escape velocity. Such a launch system [has been proposed](https://phys.org/news/2012-03-maglev-track-spacecraft-orbit.html) for use on earth, where air resistance and a much higher escape velocity pose challenges not encountered on the moon.
**Summary**
Solar panels could be used to power propulsion systems which can be run on electricity. Ion drives provide such a propulsion system for use in space, and mass drivers provide such a system for launch.
[Answer]
**Magnetic propulsion. For 6 days every month.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3fi2V.jpg)
<https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/222898main_orbit2_20080416_HI.jpg>
The moon moves through the Earth's magnetic field in the course of its orbit. Once in the field, moon-based spacecraft could move via electromagnetic propulsion. This is not science fiction.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether>
>
> Electrodynamic tethers (EDTs) are long conducting wires, such as one
> deployed from a tether satellite, which can operate on electromagnetic
> principles as generators, by converting their kinetic energy to
> electrical energy, or as motors, converting electrical energy to
> kinetic energy.[1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3fi2V.jpg) Electric potential is generated across a conductive
> tether by its motion through a planet's magnetic field.
>
>
>
Spacecraft with batteries (charged by solar panels during the other 24 days of the month) charge up their long tethers and use them to propel themselves about, pushing against the Earths field during its monthly visit.
Longer and more energetic tethers might be used all month long, pushing against the relatively weaker electromagnetic field of the sun and the charged particles of the solar wind.
[Answer]
I strongly recommend two books that came out in the '70s
G. Harry Stine "The Third Industrial Revolution"
and
Heppenheimer's "Colonies in Space"
I see both in used book stores on a regular basis.
Stines notions was that you build orbital power satellites that would beam microwave energy down to receiving antenna on Earth. You use phased array to keep the beam narrow. No, the energy isn't enough to cook you if you are on the receiving antenna.
Material is mined on the moon and launched to a Lagrange point by a rail gun. There it is broken down using kilometer diameter solar mirrors. Much of the waste is silica -- which can be foamed and used as structural infill. Aluminum is the main structural material. Some silica is broken down to silicon (solar cells) and Oxygen (breathing) Hydrogen is in short supply. But if you can make oxygen, then you only have to ship up 1/8 the amount of rocket fuel you did before. And maybe those polar craters on the moon *do* have water in them.
Stine is convincing. He has an engineering background and had access to various think tank reports from the likes of the Rand Corporation.
Colonies in space is a bit further out and is more about establishing more than a work camp in zero-G.
Iron seems to be in short supply on the moon. H. proposes a nuclear rocket. Build a nuclear reactor that gets hot enough to turn gravel into hot gas. You can move asteroids then by landing such a rocket and a gravel crusher. At this point, I don't think we can make a nuclear engine that directly operates at those temperatures. Make electricity, make a plasma. Electrically accelerate the plasma. You can get huge specific impulse this way. It's not hard to get plasma up to a respectable fraction of light speed. It's more efficient however to accelerate more mass to a lower speed.
Be sure of your trajectories. Don't want to drop a 3-mile rock on the Earth by mistake.
[Answer]
The easiest propellant to make on the moon would be ALICE, or an aluminum nano-power mixed with ice. No need to separate out the oxygen and hydrogen from the water.
[ALICE Rocket Fuel Tests](https://web.archive.org/web/20091007101459/http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMJPC09_1980/PV2009_4877.pdf)
Another option is to use pure water heated with a nuclear reactor, making a steam rocket. This does not have the specific impulse of hydrogen/oxygen, meaning that it does not provide as much momentum change per unit mass of propellant, but it has a number of large advantages: You don't have to worry about handling cryogenic fuels, the spacecraft is simpler, the fuel tank can just be a bladder, etc.
[Steam Rocket Powered by Lunar Water](https://web.archive.org/web/20211102172844/http://www.neofuel.com/moonicerocket/)
[Answer]
Sodium in nuclear thermal rockets, or the same sodium as remass in an aluminium oxygen hybrid rocket.
Sodium with an atomic mass of 23, is surprisingly good as an NTR propellant. Working near the melting point of uranium dioxide, the said propellant produced just over 300 seconds of ISP. Equivalent to that of modern storable propellants in term of specific impulse.
If combined with a graphite moderator, the ISP reaches 340 to 350s， high enough for most transfers, and certainly enough to reach nearby planets.
The sodium can be obtained as a byproduct from processing lunar feldspar rocks for aluminum construction material and breathing oxygen.
Sodium in a reaction of aluminum and oxygen greatly increases the thermal property of the plume and produces an ISP rating about 360 to 370s. This is viable for a Jupiter transfer.
Also, you can harvest lithium from lunar rocks and burn it in liquid oxygen. This affords more than 550 seconds of ISP, which is enough to send an interplanetary invasion. Lithium is also good for propellant of (artillery) guns, and as an energetic material in explosives.
Lastly, sodium and lithium can be used as a propellant for electric drives, which can be powered by silicon solar panels manufacturable from moon rocks. Or a fission reactor has to be shipped from the earth.
However, sending just the uranium 233 will not be too expensive, at least not as expensive as sending all the propellants up to the moon. This makes the whole fuel production process economically viable.
There is thorium ore on the moon, so nuclear power will be the go. Build the reactor on the moon, and you will be able to sell space service even back to the earth!
In summary, use alkaline metals to replace the hydrogen, and it shouldn't be too hard to build spaceships on the moon.
[Answer]
Straying slightly from currently available technologies to those that are possible, but not yet achieved...
The Lunar surface is rich in Helium-3, so if Helium-3 fusion propulsion is developed, there is abundant fuel for it.
<https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface>
[Answer]
In all honestly, although there are many *feasible* answers, there is only one true *correct* answer.
Tritium
Tritium is one of the best fuel sources in the solar system, by a wide margin. Uranium radioactive and requires massive infrastructure to run. Hydrocarbons have annoying side effects and are some of the least efficient fuel sources for effort put in, and solar takes a lot of work just to get a small amount (of albeit non-fueled) energy.
Tritium is fairly safe as far as fuels go and constantly being spewed off by the sun in massive amounts. It's energy dense, and can largely be 'burned' as is (resulting in hydrogen which... can just be burned again). However, it reacts with Earth's atmosphere, rendering it into old fashioned H2 (aka, hydrogen), so on the surface of Earth, Tritium is useless, and is worth *significantly* more than it's weight in gold and never gets used as a fuel source.
The moon, however, is a Tritium sponge. In a day's worth of a single person harvesting, they could harvest enough Tritium to pay for the trip to the moon. In a year, it could cover our entire world's space program to date. And this is before you get serious tritium sifting infrastructure going.
It's such a ridiculous gold-rush like opportunity, that every multi-million dollar corporation that's *not* trying to go to the moon is stupid.
[Answer]
While not really a propellant, since we as a civilization started to explore the seas using sails, there's no reason why we wouldn't (at least at first) explore space in a similar fashion.
Enter Solar Sails:<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail>
Another idea would be to turn the moon in a 'laser beam hedgehog' and use powerful lasers to propel spaceships across our solar system, in a similar fashion to a solar sail.
Otherwise, at current, the best conventional engine is still the Hydrogen Engine: <https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/hydrogen/hydrogen_fuel_of_choice.html>
It (liquid hydrogen), however, would have to be obtained from water from ice mined from the asteroid belt and shipped to the moon.
] |
[Question]
[
Basically, spud guns use air pressure to shoot spuds. More air pressure, faster spud. How fast would a pineapple gun (ignore making it, say it just works) have to shoot the pineapple to be lethal?
Assume the target is your average joe who normally wear T-shirt and Shorts and maybe a hat. Not armoured soldiers.
[Answer]
I'm going to disagree with the other answers (even though they are good answers).
The reason is because of 'Beanbag rounds' - these are less-lethal rounds fired from a Shotgun for riot control and other scenarios where you want to incapacitate someone without going for the Lethal option....
Problem is - they can be lethal. Granted they are travelling initially quite fast (300 fps) - around 200 mph, but they weigh only 40 grams and when they hit the target, they are going slower, around 130 mph with around 100 joules of energy.
Often there is an element of chance (either the victim has some underlying medical issues or the beanbag strikes a particularly vulnerable area like the throat/neck)
Plugging 100 joules of energy into the equation from Daron - a Potentially lethal pineapple (the whole pineapple) could be as low as 31 mph.
[Additional info here - that uses 80 joules of energy as a potentially fatal injury to the 'correct' part of the body](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA532158.pdf)
However the above paper says that 80 joules to a critical area is only lethal ~35% of the time - whereas for a 95% lethality, they cite 200 joules.
So plugging that back in - a 44 mph, 1 Kilo pineapple to the head is likely to be lethal to a fit and robust adult male (20-50) in good health 95% of the time.
And I'm not gonna lie, I'm now scared of my Fruit bowl
**Edit**
Something I realized I had missed from my Answer - but re-reading the comments and the question should probably clarify:
My answer of 44 Mph is what speed the Pineapple needs to *still* be travelling at when it makes contact, not the muzzle velocity of when it leaves the SpudGun.
[Answer]
Any reasonably hard and heavy object hitting the head has the potential to kill, either directly or by causing the victim to fall and get more injuries.
A coconut may be slightly harder, but it can kill just by [falling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut).
A [hand-thrown baseball](https://dcbaseballhistory.com/2020/09/this-day-in-d-c-baseball-history-beware-of-bats-and-balls/) can also kill. This would be around [90 mph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastball). This would be an upper bound on the speed, an *unlucky* pineapple may kill at slower speed.
[Answer]
As you mention, a pineapple to the head is much like a potato to the head. (Wise words). It turns out that potato cannon injuries have been studied as they relate to the speed, weight, and diameter of the potato. The formula can be easily adapted to a pineapple.
The paper analyzing potato gun injuries is, "When backyard fun turns to trauma: risk assessment of blunt ballistic impact trauma due to potato cannons" (DOI 10.1007/s00414-011-0552-y ). I'm not sure I should link to this paper because of copyright issues, but you may have heard of a "hub" where you can find such papers.
This paper uses the Sturdivan Blunt Criterion (BC) formula. BC = ln(0.5 m v^2 / (W^(1/3) \* T \* D)). This gives a number that correlates to injury severity.
* m is the mass of the pineapple in kg, 1 kg
* v is the speed of the pineapple in m/s
* W is the mass of the target in kg. According to the paper W = 4.9 kg should be used for the head.
* D is the diameter of the pineapple in cm. A typical pineapple has a diameter of 15 cm, but the paper mentions a corrected formula for D should be used for head impacts, so that D = 7.5 cm.
* T is the thickness of the body wall in cm at point of impact. According to the paper T = 1 cm should be used for the head.
This would let us solve for v if we knew our desired Blunt Criterion value. For this, we can refer to "Tolerance of the skull to blunt ballistic temporo-parietal impact" (DOI 10.1016/j.forsciint.2010.10.023 ) which the potato gun paper also relies on for calculating head injury severity. According to this paper, based on the curve in Fig 9, when the BC value is 1.0, skull fracture is unlikely. When the BC value is 3.0, skull fracture is almost certain. The 50% chance of skull fracture occurs around BC = 1.7.
The potato gun paper lists four examples of head injuries from a potato gun. Three of the four involved skull fractures, but none were fatal. (In one of the four cases, the projectile remarkably was a frog rather than a potato). Also, the potato gun paper analyzed potato guns which all had head BC around 3.0. So BC=3.0 is high enough to produce a fracture but not high enough to reliably produce death. So let's pick BC=4.0 as our target.
So, we solve BC = 4.0 = ln(0.5 \* 1 \* v^2 / ((4.9)^(1/3) \* 1 \* 7.5)) for v. This gives v = 37.3 m/s, which is **83.4 mph**.
[Answer]
# About 100 mph.
Google says Mike Tyson can punch you in the face with 1600 Joules. This will probably kill your average Joe Schmoe if they are not prepared.
The pineapple is mostly water. Mike Tyson is mostly water. They hit about the same. So let's make them have the same energy.
The pineapple weighs about a kilo. Kinetic energy is $\frac{1}{2} mv^2$ for $m$ the mass (kg) and $v$ the velocity (m/s). Since $m=1$ we just solve
$$\frac{1}{2} v^2 = 1600 \implies v^2 = 3200 \implies v = \sqrt{3200} \simeq 57.$$
So a pineapple to the head at 60 metres per second should be plenty. That's 134 miles an hour.
[Answer]
Well, the weight of a pineapple is about 1 kg, and a pineapple’s volume is calculated to be about 1,000 cm3. This equates to a density of 1 g/cm3.
A typical lead slug has a density of about 11.3 g/cm3, (this being the density of lead) and strikes a target at about 480 m/s.
From this we can infer that a bullet has a density 11.3 times the density of a pineapple, and therefore our pineapple must travel at 11.3 times the speed of a bullet in order to strike its target with the same force and therefore be lethal. So, a pineapple has to be propelled at about 5424 m/s to be lethal.
] |
[Question]
[
**This Query is part of the Worldbuilding [Resources Article](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources).**
---
One problem facing worldbuilders is the wide range of possible, hypothetical governments: robot-overlord, zealous AI, mages, vampires, an so on. [Aristotle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_%28Aristotle%29) among others, came with a typology to classify the governments of his time based on certain criteria. I find his classification flawed and too narrow to include all the possibilities: I don't agree with his definition of what is a good/bad government because it depend too much on other factors, like who is the ruler.
**What criteria would be necessary to define the important traits of any government?**
**What I'm looking for is a process to create believable governments or ideally a typology to classify them based on certain criteria.**
**What criteria should we use to make a coherent model?**
---
## Criteria of Aristotle
* **How many people are in power?**: one, few, many
* **Aim for?** the common good, the good of a minority
Here's what the classification look like, taken from Wikipedia:
![image]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Aristotle-constitutions-2.png)
---
## Some criteria
that I've found but the whole is not coherent:
* **Who hold the power(s)?**
* **How many are they?**: one (absolute monarchy, totalitarian state), few (aristocracy, oligarchy), many (democracy) all/none (anarchy)
* **Are the powers concentrated or separated?** Democracies normally have the 3 powers listed below but non-democratic states tend to
concentrate the powers more.
The powers according to Montesquieu:
+ Executive: managing several aspects of the state, sanction laws from
the executive
+ Legislative: make, amend and can repeal laws.
+ Judiciary: Interpret and apply the laws
* **Special power:** who can make laws and punish criminals? who can collect taxes? Who can lift armies legally?
* **Who chose those in power?** everyone, only the rich, members of the state party, no one: heredity, fate (Lamaism), law of the jungle
* **By what process are the people chosen?** election, examination, trial to death, astrology, luck...
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> These questions all assume an earth-like spherical world in orbit in the habitable band.
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See the other questions in this series here : <http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series>
[Answer]
I think the right way to think of it is not to make strict categories, but to look at scale parameters. There are very few "all-or-nothing" decisions; most things are questions of scale.
Here are what I think are the most important scales:
# Collectivism vs. Individualism
What is more important, the society or its individuals? One extreme is the idea that individuals are worth nothing; all that counts is the collective (the society, the people, whatever you call it). Such ideas were for example at the base of fascist ideologies.
The other extreme is the idea that the only thing that counts are individuals. That's the base of libertarianism and anarchism.
Normally, political systems are in between those extremes. It is considered important that something is done for the common good, but it is also important that the needs and wishes of the individual are met. But different political systems, even if superficially the same, are at different points of that scale. For example, both the USA and western European countries are democracies, yet the USA are much more focused on individualism than most western European countries.
Note that also things like freedom of speech belong in this category: If the collective is more important than the individual, then any speech that harms the collective (or is considered to harm the collective) of course will be restricted. On the other hand, if the individual is considered more important, the individual should be allowed to say anything, even if it harms the collective.
# Rule of people vs. rule of law
Basically this is the question: How much are those in power bound by laws they cannot change at will? Note that those laws can come from several sources: It may be a constitution, but it may also be religious laws which the ruler has to obey (especially if the legitimation of the power comes from religion, as was the case for medieval monarchs), or it may come from contracts.
Clearly, for a totalitarian government the power is, by definition, unlimited. The government makes the laws, it is not bound by them. Even if they might be formally be bound by them, since they can change them at will, in reality they aren't.
On the other end of the spectrum might be a "god-state" based on a scripture-religion: The laws of the scripture are not subject of being changed; the most you can do it to dispute how to interpret them (well, in reality they tend to contradict each other, so even a "god-state" government has quite a bit of freedom to select what they see as a best fit for their goals; however one can imagine a hypothetical religion whose scriptures are clear and non-contradictory; in that case there's not much leeway for a government of a state based on that religion).
Democracies are in the middle: Everyone including the government is bound by the laws, and while the people in power can change the laws, even the constitution, there are mechanisms to prevent them from doing so just as they see fit; it takes considerable effort to change the constitution, and those protections are given by the constitution itself (so those regulations are protected by themselves). Moreover, some constitutions have parts that cannot be removed even with an absolute majority (for example, in the German constitution, the human rights have that special protection; even if some party got all the seats in the parliament, they couldn't decide to just remove human rights).
# Concentration of power vs. separation of powers
Does one entity hold all powers, or are there different more or less independent entities holding different powers?
Separation of powers is, of course, one of the corner stones of democracy, but already the medieval time knew a separation of powers: The king had the secular power, but the pope had the religious power.
Also note that in modern democracies, separation of powers is not restricted to the classic three branches (legislative, executive, justice), but in many countries there are additional independent entities, for example several countries/supranational organizations (including the USA and the EU) have a relatively independent central bank, which prevents the state from just printing new money to cover its cost.
# Centralization of power vs. distribution of power
This one is related to the previous, but here the distribution is not by tasks, but by entities. A central state has a central power which rules everything. In particular, the laws are exactly the same everywhere in the country, as they are made by the central government. On the other hand, a federal country has some of the power not held by the central government, but at the state level. Different states can and will have different laws, despite being part of the same country (or supranational organization). Obviously there's a scale, where the other extreme to a completely centralized government is a collection of completely independent states.
Note that also in medieval times, the power was very much distributed, with every aristocrat having the right to make own laws, and even having his own military, but of course bound by loyalty to the king or emperor.
# Status by birth vs. status by achievement
In medieval times, you were born to be a member of a certain status. If you were born a noble, you were a noble, but if you were not born a noble, you had little chance to become noble (the chance was not zero because the king could knight you). To be a king, you had to be the son of a king. Even professions were inherited; if you were the son of a shoemaker, you would have had a hard time to become a shoemaker. Well, unless you decided to get into the church; thanks to celibacy, inheriting church positions was at least somewhat limited.
Also the Indian caste system is a prototypical example of a system where your birth determines who you are. Indeed, it's even more rigid because AFAIK there's no way you can get into a higher caste (apart from reincarnation, of course).
Yet another case of such immobile systems are racist systems like in the past South-African Apartheid.
The other extreme is a society where in principle everyone is equal. What you are is not decided by your birth, but by your actions. The son of a garbage collector can become president, and then he has the same powers as a president whose father already was president. At least nominally, there's no difference. Of course in reality, this ideal is not completely implemented; especially you've got much better chances in life if you are born from rich parents.
Also the totalitarian systems have a large social mobility. Your options may be restricted by the government, but they are not restricted by your birth. If the party finds you are an avid follower of the party line, you can make career in the party, or if you have the abilities, also in another profession. Indeed, the government is actively interested that no coherent groups (apart from the government party) form, because any coherent group might one day challenge the power of the government. So while the determinants of success in the system are different from those in a democracy, they are still independent of your birth.
[Answer]
Government whether enlightened democracy or complete despotism is never maintained via a single "-ism". What is missing is *institutions*.
I mean long lived social entities like military hierarchy, corporations, church, civil service, tax collectors, ducal fiefdoms, trade guilds etc. These things are the sinews of society and almost all of them will survive any transition of leadership at the top. Many historians have observed that many of the momentous events of world history meant little to the local peasantry because they swapped one lord for another.
Most of the power-holding entities you listed are powerful on paper. In reality even a well upheld constitution as at best a small part of the overall picture.
Modern democracies are not really proper democracies, they are technocracies because we are governed day to day by our institutions like the civil service , police, big corps, tax authorities, central bank etc, none of whom are elected and who survive leadership changes. Electing a republican/conservative or labour/democrat party makes little difference to how most of these institutions behave. And back in the day, a different king made little difference to the relations between serf and lord.
The various categories of government are always secondary to the social machinery that actually does the heavy lifting of governance. What is your state's machinery of social order, and how long have they been around? A long time and you have stability, not long and you have chaos. Of course true incompetence combined with despotism for a long period at the top can destroy such institutions (e.g. Mugabe in Zimbabwe) but this is quite rare. Episodes like Nazi Germany are also rare, and present themselves as the exception that proves the rule.
Also, any polity is constrained by relations with neighbouring states. Degrees of freedom are limited both internally and externally.
Define the long-lived traits, institutions and social fabric of your setting and then see to what extent various leadership and political -isms actually make a material change in the day to day life of the common folk.
The canonical example I would cite is the French Revolution. Lots of heads chopped off, lots of radical -isms and umpteen lofty constitutions but in the end it was ruled by an upstart general (Napoleon) in cahoots with a load of private contractors who supplied the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies because the people in the end wished for stability.
Then after that they went back to having a king for a short while and then they went back to being a republic - but ruled by the rich.
MY view is that to generate a realistic governance scenario one should start at the bottom and work up rather than the other way about. But to answer the questions:
**What criteria would be necessary to define the important traits of any government?**
1. How it relates to the non elected official and unofficial social institutions, and specifically to the values held by those institutions. The institutions can be the only possible mechanism for transmission of government policy.
2. how powerful it is in relation to neighbouring states. If it is weak then the nation will be dominated by foreigners regardless of policy. In this category also falls the difference in political structure. Its difficult (but not impossible) for a despotism to survive if surrounded on all sides by enlightened democracies.
3. how powerful the top man is versus the second and third echelons of power, regardless of what the paper constitution says should have the power. The second and third echelons may in practice exist in the private sector or the military.
**Q: What I'm looking for is a process to create believable governments or ideally a typology to classify them based on certain criteria.**
Typology:
1. National/Institutional Characteristics: Buearucratic, conservative or progressive/experimental
2. Power balance between the upper and lower echelons of the elite and the collective power of social institutions that represent commoners.
3. the nominal -ism enshrined in the paper constitution
4. The above 3 attributes, applied to neighbouring states
**Q: What criteria should we use to make a coherent model?**
Can my chosen -ism actually persist and evolve in a reasonably stable way given the social setting defined by answering the questions above?
To what extent does popular/public influence actually change any of the attributes mentioned above within one lifetime?
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I am (as typical) going to widen the question bit since the title suggests your actual interest is in creating realistic governments. Sadly, classifications and criteria are not very useful in that pursuit. They are useful if you wish to make sense of existing systems as political systems tend to be complex enough to be rather arcane unless you make some simplifications and idealizations. But if you try to do the process in reverse you will generally end up with a cardboard cutout of a government instead of something that feels real. Unless you actually need the details of the politics that may be enough, though.
This is because realistic governments are "organic" constructs that have co-evolved with the society they serve. And yes, all governments **do** serve their society or collapse. This is because the main service governments provide is stability and cohesion of the society. And failure to provide that usually puts pretty strict limits on the ability of the regime to maintain itself.
Social stability is usually backed by an armed force capable of killing or imprisoning threats, by economic stability and system that makes playing along profitable, and an extensive and elaborate system that establishes the government as legitimate to the people. The relative weight given to these factors will vary based on the maturity and size of the society.
Military force is fast and simple to establish. Building an efficient (a relative term) economy takes more time and resources. Establishing legitimacy, the moral authority of the government, requires a history of positive interaction between the people and government.
These roughly correspond to those platonic categories. A government that primarily relies on force to support itself, will have strict hierarchy and act like "royalty" or "tyranny". A government that relies on self-interest will have a political elite with shared interests and act like "aristocracy" or "oligarchy". A government relying on its legitimacy and moral authority will be "constitutional" or a "democracy".
All real governments have some aspects of all the categories. Even the worst tyranny will try to establish, at some point, some legitimacy and would rather have some economic activity than none at all. Similarly even the most enlightened and popular government would like to have some men with big clubs available, just in case.
Unless talking about an unstable government without established legitimacy the force and economy aspects can be mostly ignored even if the government relies on force or shared interests to support itself. Just note that the regime is a military junta or feudal society built on control of the military or armed knights. Or that the economy is controlled by a small number of powerful families. Usually all the interesting stuff is in the ways the regime supports its claim to being the legitimate government.
This is because the actual government usually happens based on rules and procedures considered legit. So regardless of the actual power base, it is the claims to legitimacy the government has that determine how it operates. Or tries to operate. Unpopular military dictatorship might have to rely on force to solve its problems even when it would prefer otherwise. Even then some kind of facade of legitimacy is usually provided. Often illegal actions are simply hidden.
This gap between what the government claims and what it actually does is one thing you should always make a note of when building realistic governments. It always exists and filling those gaps is what the politics that actually matters is about. A war may seem important, but it is not **really** about politics and less politics gets involved the better the result usually is.
As mentioned before the kinds of legitimacy and moral authority a government has come from the history the society has. Since moral authority is the most cost efficient kind of authority, governments will want as many and as strong separate claims to legitimacy as they can. So usually there will be a unique mix of **all** the options below.
The simplest kind is that the government sets itself as the arbiter of justice by making laws and enforcing them. Since the government will usually consider itself legal, its ability to enforce itself as an arbiter of justice directly supplies legitimacy and moral authority. Local authority, tribes, clans and religions provide alternate sources of justice. Different issues will fall under different justice, based on factors that may look irrelevant, but have historical significance.
Noting which issues are under government jurisdiction and which are under local authority, religious court, or some other power will give a good idea of the power of the government with rich historical texture. More precisely the historical reasons for jurisdictions are valuable in being realistic.
Government may claim a religious or ideological mandate. Forms are as variable as religions. The ruling class may be also priests acting as intermediaries between men and heavens. The rulers may claim divine heritage. The government may claim divine mandate, proven by the obvious that a government the gods do **not** approve would fall. The government may support a state religion, obfuscating the line between supporting the religion and supporting the government. The government may set itself as a champion of a religion or ideology, so that supporters of the religion or ideology will see it in better light.
The religious and ideological mandates government claims are born of long history of the society and add lots of depth. They also add lots of depth to the relations the government has between groups supporting other or same religions or ideologies. Note here that governments are not necessarily homogenous or consistent in their values. And that the people in government may have different values than the government claims. For example the US claims to stand for freedom of religion, but most people running the government make a point to appear supporting Christian values. Such differences make governments realistic since they arise from the historical and social context.
Government may claim a popular mandate, the support of the people. This can be faked by building a personality cult around the great leader. Once legitimacy of the government has been established elections or referendums can be used to maintain it. The government may also simply respond to the needs of the people. While this is quite effective way to gain legitimacy and support, it is also fairly difficult as it requires you to have some idea of what the people need and be able to do something about. It is easier, but less effective, to do what you want and then try to convince people they needed it. You can also cheat by first fabricating the need and then fulfilling it. That is fairly easy and efficient.
Popular support is transient. So while there may be strong political traditions of how governments get a popular support and laws requiring elections, what is actually done in practice may change fairly fast.
[Answer]
A comprehensive and exhaustive method that includes ***all*** possible government types is to define different aspects of government with respect to different factors, then go on to mix and match them according to the requirement.
**Aspect 1. Size Of The Governing Body**
a) Single person (monarchy)
b) Small group (aristocracy)
c) Large group (modern democracy)
**Aspect 2. Primary Role Of Government**
a) Absolute (government controls everything starting from how many babies you can have, to foreign policy and defense)
b) Mass Centric (government only controls the aspects which relate directly to the state, leaving people settle their personal disputes)
c) Individual Centric (government makes laws focussed on individuals only)
Note that type b and c are only theoretical. In practice most modern governance systems are located somewhere between b and c.
**Aim Of Governance**
a) Religious law enforcement (some governments are aimed not at improvement of citizens lifestyle but rather to implement a religious dogma. a good example is several Muslims countries of today, the vetican city state and some medieval roman catholic states)
b) Colonial government (the purpose of this government is to maintain law and order in the state so that the government may collect taxes and send them back to the home country. examples are british and french governments during the colonial ages)
c) Welfare government (basically this is the government you see in all first world countries of modern times. it focusses on improving the materialistic lifestyle of it's citizens)
**Economic System**
a) Capitalism (most "democratic" countries of today are following this economic model. it focusses on the person who has the money to start a business)
b) Semi-Capitalism / Muslim-Capitalism (here the economic model is still focussing on the investor, but the investor must pay a slight tribute - 2.5% of capital which isn't invested in business for one year - to the poor people of the state. interest banking is also forbidden)
c) Socialism / Communism etc (here an individual does not have ownership rights to anything and everything belongs to the state/government. the individual works and gets paid)
**Selection Method**
a) Direct Voting (citizens vote for their candidates directly)
b) Indirect Voting (citizens vote for representatives which then form a governing body and select their head themselves)
c) One Party System (basically what you see in China today)
Since these are all different criteria, so you can mix and match them to come up with a unique style of government. For example, you can have a monarchy system (single person government) where the monarch is voted to put in governance for 7 years. The country has a Muslim capitalism economy and the voting system is indirect. The total number of governments you can form this way is very large.
[Answer]
### Degrees of fairness.
I will advance the philosophy that nearly all differences in people's success in life are not a result of choices but of blind chance; and thus a meritocracy is just unfairly (lopsidedly) rewarding good luck.
For example, consider somebody with extraordinary good luck: Me. The following may sound like braggadocio; but it is not: Keep in mind I am arguing ***against*** merit, and I do not believe I deserve much credit for what I say next.
I have a perfect academic record through 14 years of college, and 5 college degrees in STEM fields, including a PhD. Yet I worked far less than most people around me to achieve that; in fact I mostly wandered into most of it.
In some way I was *born* to take classes. I can memorize a textbook (and have done so three times, all to "test out" of various history classes). It is short term, and gone from my memory completely within a day or so; but I can do it. Unlike other students, if I pay attention in class (front row, near the center) I do not need to study. A standard "full time" academic load is four classes per semester (12 hours per week attending class). That allows room for study. I have (after signing exemption releases) taken 9 classes, in four different semesters, and aced all of them.
I never struggle with recalling terminology; and I very seldom struggle with understanding the analysis of professionals in any subject; from art analysis to physiology to psychology to all of the sciences. **Again, it is short term;** once the class is passed, if I don't need it for a *subsequent* class, my mind seems to discard it. I've taken a dozen classes that I passed with wall to wall 100's, and now can remember almost nothing about, or remember perhaps fifteen minutes worth of ideas that interested me.
I also say it isn't magic; there is an amount of work I must do: Attending class, copying board notes, executing the graded assignments. A great deal of showing up on time.
But *many* students do all that work plus study for double the class hours, and those are hours I never put in. So when I crush them all in class, and as a result I am given opportunity, jobs, recognition and receive invitations to join various elite organizations, I have to wonder: For what exactly am I being rewarded?
Because I did not work as hard, I put in a third of the effort of my most diligent fellow students. I passed spelling tests in grade school by reading the list of words, once. For the first few my father would test me; without a failure. He gave up on that, and after that I was lucky he told me to read my list, or I might have forgotten! I may not remember those words days later, but during the tests I could "see" full pages of them in the order given.
This is an ability I was born with: I was also born white and male in a white-male dominated society, also as an American citizen, and raised from infancy on an extraordinarily low pollution island (my family was military). I grew taller than most people, a proven advantage in job seeking. I have symmetrical features, I am nearly never sick, and I have good teeth due to good medical and dental care.
I personally did not choose those mental or physical traits or my environment; I don't think I did anything *intentionally* to make a life change until I was 15. My mental and physical traits are not a result of any practice: My inherent memorization skill was evident by the age of three.
So again, what am I rewarded for? ***Traits I was born with.***
Whatever merit my work and abilities may have (and they have helped many people, and helped make products, businesses and other more scientific efforts quite successful), the secret sauce is not hard work or painful exercise or dedication: I did far **less** of that than hundreds of others people that were rewarded with a tenth of what has come to me.
This is the central difficult question for any form of meritocracy: Isn't rewarding and respecting somebody for a born trait just as misguided as persecuting or punishing somebody for a born trait?
I am personally happy to live in comfort and be respected, I certainly do not want to give it up. Nevertheless, it is patently unfair that others live in poverty and misery because, through no choice of their own, they were born with disabilities instead of abilities, with dark skin instead of light, as homosexuals instead of heterosexuals, with poor immune systems instead of robust ones, in polluted environments instead of crystal clear paradises. Or born to irresponsible or abusive parents instead of attentive ones, or in poverty instead of wealth or even the middle class: Or as a result of being born thusly, for those whose potential was squandered because the only schools available to them were crappy derelicts, understaffed by the dregs of the teaching profession, making them miss all the crucial learning opportunities during the development of their intellect and brains, which are then gone forever: Adults simply cannot learn like children, and such children are left permanently disadvantaged, *through no fault of their own.*
The vast majority of "merit" is **luck.** Millions of kids pour their time into practicing some sport, but only some hundreds in any given sport will ever become professionals.
Like me in academics, those that reach the top will not get there by practicing *harder* than others: The work does matter, but the millions are doing it: The top performers have something extra **they did not gain by choice**: Some lucky combination of genes, environment, contacts and social circumstances (being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of some unique opportunity). The same goes for acting, for writing, for business, even for inventing.
Merit is over-rated: when thousands compete, the winners are not really working much harder than the best of the rest: Their wins are ultimately due to plain old luck.
### The point:
You want to classify governments. It really does not matter too much how many people are in charge, or how exactly decisions are made. A dictator can be benevolent or cruel; likewise with a Congress or Parliament or board of Elders. Whether everybody gets to vote, or only certain qualified people can vote, or nobody votes: Makes little difference in the lives of the people.
The government decides how the society will treat its people, what will be rewarded and what will be punished, what wrongs will be ignored and what will be addressed.
So what **really** matters is how fair or unfair the government is; how much misery and persecution people must endure, and how imbalanced the punishments and rewards are, and how imbalanced the access to resources, courts, schools, medical care, housing and income are.
The important criteria is; where is the floor on misery for those born with the ***least*** of natural mental and physical advantages? Is it homelessness, starvation, and dying of an infection that could have been treated with a dollar's worth of penicillin?
A meritocracy is inherently unfair. Nearly everything about life is a roll of the dice, and it will heap rewards on one and misery on another when **neither** of them chose a thing. Not to mention that the most miserable often has to work many times harder than the lucky one that is richly rewarded.
What matters in a government is degrees of fairness on all these fronts. There is a good argument, from human nature, for rewards to correlate with ability; it is the rewards that encourage the gifted to develop and pursue their gifts, usually to the betterment of society. The work is still a prerequisite to refining the gift. For example it is hard to become a medical doctor; and without the higher pay and prestige and respect and gratitude for lives saved, many of the rare people *capable* of doing it would not bother.
However, that does not mean such rewards must be ***unlimited.*** In business or in professions.
In other areas of society, merit should not matter at all: being famous, or rich, or a politician, or poor, or unintelligent, should not have any effect whatsoever on one's fate in court. Justice should be equal in every respect to all, from how long one must wait, whether one must wait in prison or not, or whether one gets a good lawyer or not. So, for example, it would be more fair in society if all defense lawyers and all prosecutors (tested for competence) but made exactly the same amount of money no matter who they represented. By somehow eliminating the possibility of a lawyer getting rich by having a rich client or negotiating a huge settlement, the lawyers would have fewer incentives to represent the rich over anybody else. The same idea could apply to doctors and other professionals whose decisions routinely have life altering consequences.
Rewarding people for good luck is fine; but to me, government should provide some leveling mechanism so that people do not suffer for lack of luck, or just bad luck. I do not mean there should be no disparity of income or comfort or entertainments: Getting "ahead" in society is a strong motivator to actually put in the hours of work and learning required to develop one's inborn talents, be they athletic, acting, scientific, creative or artistic.
What I mean is better governments do a better job of minimizing human misery for that 49.9% of society born with less luck than most of their fellow citizens, and ensuring that treatment is fair to all: There may be an elite class of businessmen and stars in sport, music, acting and arts: but there should be zero elite when it comes to the courts, prisons, law enforcement, legal representation, education, health care, nutrition, drinking water and other environmental concerns.
A typology based upon Degrees of Fairness in these many categories will tell you far more about a government and a society than how many people are in Congress or whether a governor can pardon a criminal. Those things are really a proxy (and a poor one) for what is ultimately degrees of fairness: An ability of a King, President or Governor to pardon somebody and overturn a decision by a jury is **less fair**. Prosecutorial discretion, as in the ability of a prosecutor to choose not to prosecute a police officer for a murder-on-tape, is **less fair**. "Representative" government, as in denying citizens the ability to vote directly on laws and regulations, taxes and decisions to go to war that can have dramatic effects on their lives, is **less fair**.
Judgment of a government is going to come down to the totality of fairness or unfairness it causes; all other traits are just proxies for how we can expect that will ultimately work out. A robust typology will attempt to measure directly the actual Degrees of Fairness achieved in categories that really matter the most to the people being governed.
[Answer]
Few additional criteria to consider:
**How much power**. Simplistically, power (aka rights) belongs to people. Some of it is delegated to - or usurped by - the state. This amount maps governments from totalitarian (people left with no rights) to liberal to anarchy (state has no power). This is IMHO most important distinction.
Notice that government *form* doesn't matter. Democracy could very well be totalitarian; king may have no say against barons.
**Economic powers**. Emission of currency (or just minting); direct or incentival control of economy; customs and tariffs.
**Church and state**. To what extent church and state are separated. Are they at odds or not. Does church autonomously regulate certain aspects (e.g. marriage, or education) in the otherwise secular state.
[Answer]
Practical government must choose what it want. Many poor country with dictator have much freedom like no motorcycle helmets or car seat belt law, people build their house never ask government permission, few pollution rule, etc but strong rule about political party, party and government symbols/flag, protest, criticize government, need permission for print book, etc. Other country opposite need permission for almost everything but can criticize government, create new political party and print book with no permission.
Even dictators can’t force people do stuff if enough people refuse. Việt Nam government try force people use coin money instead paper money for < 10 000đ but people refuse it (coins vanish), have plan forbid motorcycle in Hà Nội, year 2030, but people complain (very stupid will cause traffic become very bad, motorcycle much smaller more people can travel on a road than 4 wheel car, later government revoke plan), government talk about plan change language spelling system and people every where say stupid idea (government forget this idea), government try silly idea force every person buy health insurance but people refuse (government give up).
Some level civil disobedience always exists because physics/resource limit government power. Illegal gambling, avoid tax, import forbidden stuff, private criticize government and leaders is common in many third world countries with dictators. Also harder control far province from capital, rural and wild areas have few people. Myanmar have some mountain province almost freedom from control power in capital, require too much resource try control far provinces, best use resource other place. Afghanistan also country have many independent province.
Law is just rules politician create, nothing sacred; law ≠ moral ≠ fair; illegal ≠ immoral ≠ unfair. Law alway change, not static. Also common people apply/understand law different compare with government official, police, lawyer, or judge. Corruption is a tool, can use it for bad or good. People only respect law they think is fair/ moral and often follow moral behavior with no law. People have moral behavior from evolution, help people survive in prehistory times. People ignore law they think is unfair, good example is immigration and foreigner workers. Governments can only use police/military for make people fear law, can’t force respect.
Good video about governments: Rules For Rulers
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=2s>
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[Question]
[
*or, [Anatomically Correct](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2797/601) Weebles*
A group of [behaviorally modern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity) humans was cut off from the rest of the earth-like planet millennia ago. (Myths hold that the [separation](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/578/601) occurred four to five [ka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiloyear) [BP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present), once humankind had developed cattle ranches, brass, writing, and cities. Archaeology is inconclusive about this separation date; it may have been far earlier.) Due to a founder mutation, their descendants' legs do not develop, and the body ends at the hip. Otherwise, they stay close to normal human physiology, or at least as close as photographer Kevin Connolly and gymnast Jennifer Bricker do. They typically walk on their fists and bottom with a symmetric swing-through gait, placing both fists and swinging the torso between the arms at roughly 1 m/s.
Would it be plausible for these people to remain at the apex of the food chain or otherwise thrive long enough through hunter-gatherer to reestablish agriculture and develop industry? If so, how might they adapt? If not, what technological level would they have to reach before the separation for them to continue to thrive, and how would a founder population of four husband-and-wife pairs carry the knowledge of this technology?
I'm aware that they would need to solve at least the following problems:
* escaping danger or finding a meal when they can't run quite as fast as baseline humans
* carrying things, especially offspring
What other problems might be worth mentioning?
A real-world analog might be deafness in Martha's Vineyard, where people worked around the impairment by inventing a sign language.
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> *I might be running the risk of offending people with disabilities here - if that happens, it's entirely unintentional and I apologize in advance.*
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I don't think they'd have problems remaining at the top of the food chain, but what I'm sure of is that they'd be *much* more cooperative with each other. This isn't about whether some creature evolved through natural selection would survive - it's about removing a very important adaptation from an existing one abruptly.
I assume their culture would change to make room for the very high need they'd have to help each other - they wouldn't be helpless if alone, especially with the proper technology (such as wheelchairs), but the same dangers would escalate a lot faster (an example is running away from dangers, as you mention).
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> *[Rowanas](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/70/rowanas) however makes an excellent point about running, in the comments. Since arms do extend beyond the hips, running can be performed with hands alone, albeit with a smaller stride - check his comment for the full idea.*
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This doesn't necessarily mean they would be less likely to be hostile or unhelpful, just that it would be much more frowned upon between them.
Overall, if they are already aware and capable of tool use and technology, I don't think it'd be long until they've adapted their tools and life to work with their lack of legs. Transportation wouldn't be that huge of a problem if everything is made to work that way.
## Hunter-gatherers
If they're starting out at this level, basic problems need to be solved quickly, such as being in constant contact with the ground - rough terrain would be dangerous and hard to cross. Simple solutions such as chest-skis or chestplates made of wood could help. That of course requires cutting wood - it might be easier to do with a hoe-like tool instead of an axe, to take advantage of being on the ground for resistance and so it can be used without other aids.
They'd also probably smooth out the land around dwellings a lot more to make it easier to move around. Housing would probably be quite a bit shorter too - it would be easier to build and use.
Foraging shouldn't be much different, but picking food off trees would require a lot more effort than it does for someone with legs, since there's nothing to hold you as you grab for a higher place - it can be worked around using leather harnesses however.
Which brings us to hunting - basic animal food would probably caught with traps, with larger animals being herded into traps or hunted in packs to prevent dangers from getting attacked by wild boars while lying down or getting trampled. Alternatively, herds that wander close to trees could be killed from above by climbers.
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> *Addendum by [tepples](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/601/tepples)*
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> This contrasts with the solutions that real-world humans of this era found, one of which was stalking mammoth. Having discovered that, inferior solutions or those harder to come up with would have been overlooked or just not used. While humans without legs would not be able to run behind mammoths throwing spears with their arms effectively, they can still stalk prey covertly in groups, trap it or use other techniques that for us are inefficient.
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> This would limit their food supply, assuming their approaches are inferior, which would limit the sizes of their populations and hence the growth rate of their species. But I don't think that it can be said to be definitively impossible to survive the hunter & gatherer phase, or to say that not having legs is a death sentence for a species of otherwise human capability.
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> *Rowanas has commented on the tool usage and climbing capabilities as well, check the comments section.*
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## Farming
Plowing can be performed through harnesses, but the taller plants might introduce difficulties. Perhaps frames, like scaffolding, could be built within crops to allow for this, like shelves along the vegetation. This, like many of the previous approaches, would probably make performing these activities hard enough to delay progress, unless said humans were aware of technology like this and could come up with these ideas quickly.
## Further progress
I think that once there's enough wood to create wheelchairs, wheelbarrows and the like, these humans would progress a lot faster. They might have a problem finding animals small enough to tame for use as beasts of burden (transportation and field work).
Given the need, people can learn to walk on prosthetics and crutches fairly well - the only problem here would be that they'd never have learned how. Unless they change genetically however, they should maintain the balance adaptations we have and all the rest so they could learn to walk on prosthetics and crutches quickly enough to use them. This wouldn't allow them to run, but with entire populations of people using these things daily, the techniques on making them comfortable and robust would develop quickly.
Given time enough to develop metallurgy, they should be able to create more complex spring-loaded mechanisms to allow for stride-capable prosthetics. This wouldn't get around to them having to use their hands to walk (since they have no legs at all) but it would make it easier and some might manage to run (although at this point it wouldn't be much help).
However, walking like this would probably be just for outside work - by this point, everything the use should be accessible without having to walk - perhaps they'd have wheelchairs at most for every-day use, which are easier to use and more practical.
## Modern levels
I don't think much would stand in their way after they're comfortable moving around and dealing with the natural surroundings. Their buildings and technology would adapt and in order to use your arms properly you don't need to stand on legs, just be upright so you've got free room to move. I wouldn't put industry and even space-grade technology beyond them. Legs are very important, but unless we're talking about primitive people, they should be able to cope just fine, but it would still take centuries at least, assuming they maintain some cultural memory of what the rest of human society was like.
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Don't think of it as a disability, think of it as an advantage.
It's not, how do you walk with no legs... rather how *do* you move around, now that say half your unnecessary body mass has been removed?
I'm thinking that:
**1) We'd return to the trees (if possible).** Swinging above things sounds much nicer than sliding along the ground. Even in your modern home the ceiling would be your floor. *Note safety would be important, unlike apes we have only two arms, so falls will be far more common.*
**2) We'd be far more innovative.** Instead of a hunter-gather running with a stick trying to poke an animal, traps would probably have far greater use. Farming would make more sense, earlier on. So on and so forth. Thanks to 1) we'd also have a better 3d mindset.
**3) We'd probably (appear to) be far more efficient.** Between greater need to innovate, and fewer base needs (physically smaller houses, less food needed to maintain dormant state), and great costs to be active I'd expect many aspects of life to be close and organised.
A random thought exercise of how a house could look - I'd expect it to be 3D, maybe with bedrooms at top, cooking/communal in middle, and utilities/man shed/storage etc to be at the bottom. I can imagine that every house might be connected through aerial 'walkways', with heavy good transported on the road beneath.
Carrying large quantities is hard, so I suspect well designed backpacks/tactical vests to be popular. More emphasis on light travel (e.g. fewer needs, fast food, camping food) in day to day life.
Of course, these are still humans, so I would suspect that many human inventions would still occur - e.g. wheeled ground transportation - would occur, though the specifics of how, why, when and impact could differ greatly.
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No, a community of legless people will not thrive. If they survive at all, it will be the very opposite of thriving unless the environment is incredibly rich and productive and lacking large predators.
We cannot extrapolate from a handful of cases of legless people in a highly technological society to a low-tech society where everyone is legless. Nicholas James Vujicic may be inspirational, but he's also *rare*. For every one of him, there are probably dozens of legless people that nobody makes inspirational videos about because their life is uncomfortable, painful and difficult and not the slightest bit inspirational. And they are the lucky ones living in a modern society that is relatively compassionate and has the 99.9999% four-limbed majority around to do the heavy labour, they're not living in a hunter-gatherer or bronze-age farming community.
The idea that being legless is an advantage or that they would have a "massive advantage" over legged people is simply not credible. In the entire history of life on earth, not one species of land mammal has evolved to lose its legs. Quite a few lizards and reptiles have lost their legs (e.g. snakes) but no mammals. There are examples of bipedal species losing the use of their front limbs (e.g. T Rex, flightless birds) but not of their lower limbs. As for the suggestion that being legless would be an advantage to tree-dwellers, I can only imagine you have never watched monkeys or apes in a tree. Legs are used extensively, and no tree-dwelling primate species have lost its legs. Not even those that have lengthened arms and shortened legs.
The idea that they would have a massive advantage at physical tasks is, frankly, ridiculous. A lower centre of gravity is advantageous for some tasks, but for many tasks not being able to brace with your legs is a major disadvantage. Try sitting down cross-legged and digging a hole in the ground using just your arms -- it is enormously harder than using both arms and legs.
Others have already described some of the technological developments that a society of legless people would need to develop in order to mitigate the ill-effects of lacking legs. Even with these technologies (backpacks, etc.) they will still be disadvantaged compared to people with legs. If a tribe developed legs, they would out-compete the legless tribe very rapidly -- if not just slaughter them in war. Even without legged humans around, the disadvantages of having no legs may be fatal, depending on just how hostile the environment is. Especially with a founder population of just eight people. E.g. when attacked by a predator, you cannot run away and fight back at the same time. You cannot even wave your hands to make yourself seem big while backing away.
I'm also not buying the sociology. Four or five millennia ago, legless children were almost certainly going to be abandoned or killed at birth. With just eight adults in a strange and hostile environment, with no modern technology to help them, they won't have the resources, time or likely the ethical values to try to raise "cursed" babies -- and even if they tried, their life expectancy would probably be very low.
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Per [Robert Harvey's suggestion](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/251598/2738262), I've made a community wiki for near-answers found in "[disposable](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19757/229356)" comments.
[Rowanas](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/70/rowanas) wrote:
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> Running wouldn't be much of an issue. While their stride would be shorter, running on the palms of the hand shouldn't be much more difficult then running on the balls of the foot. The legs are somewhat designed for it, but a change like that would encourage very strong arm muscles and powerful shoulders, which would probably make a variety of tasks much easier than we're used to, especially climbing and building.
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> Compared to us, these people would have nearly the same access to levers, but a vastly more powerful frame and also a significantly lower centre of gravity than we enjoy, which would put them at a massive advantage in a variety of physical tasks. Climbing would scarcely even need a harness, because climbing hand over hand would be no major thing. I've seen a paralypmic athlete climb up a rope like he was abseiling (YouTube link pending, but see [Paralympian Paul Nunnari Strong 30m rope climb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ris9EWmugqE), or [Wheelchair Legless Rope Climb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6yPXkU6R-k) and [Nawid und Art Rope Climb Wheelchair - Suprfit.TV](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbbdfj1pQ7M) where they actually carry their wheelchairs up the rope), and an entire society like that would take that as a baseline. Pulling tall crops down to hacking height wouldn't even be a challenge.
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In [an answer about bipedal aliens](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2496/601), TechZen wrote:
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> If you only need one limb touching at a time and you don't actually run fast, say you live in a tree or a cluttered ground environment, then you really only need two limbs for basic support and motion. One leg supports while the other provides control. The other two can be tasked to other things like manipulating the environment.
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Or one butt and one hand, with the other hand free. Or sit on the ground or on a branch with the back against the trunk, with both hands free. From here it's a short step to weaving baskets to carry things.
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There are a lot of good answers on this already, but I would be remiss if I didn't suggest looking at Nicholas James Vujicic for inspiration. His life is basically the ultimate dedication to just how powerful the human mind is, with or without 4 functioning limbs.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jhcxOhIMAQ>
Its worth 4 minutes.
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Water is different from air, and sound waves propagate through water in a different way than they do in air (caused in part by interactions with the bottom of the body of water). For a society living underwater, this could lead to some interesting innovations in music, and musical instruments. For example, currents might help or hurt control of string instruments.
What types of instruments would develop in an underwater society? There a few main groups to focus on:
* Percussion
* Woodwinds
* Brass
* Stringed instruments
Answers don't need to be any more specific than these. I would not expect someone to write a long treatise on underwater performances of the saxophone.
Also, as has been pointed out, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible for some of these groups of instruments to be possible. That's fine.
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As [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/20440/28) says, most musical instruments as we know them won't work underwater. You might see something completely new arise, but we should assume that people will *first* reach for what is easiest. And what's that, for underwater music? Vocalization, as noted in the linked answer.
There's no particular reason to believe that it would sound anything like earthly vocal music, though. Consider these factors:
**The scale.** The western scale, an octave consisting of 12 half-steps (with variable placement, called *temperament*) arose from the [Pythagorean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning) system, a set of intervals in low ratios (like 3:2) that sound pleasing to the ear. These ratios are easily demonstrated, and were probably derived using, stringed instruments whose sounds travel through air to the human ear. They also occur as harmonic overtones on wind and brass instruments. There's a lot of math theory behind this too, but that's the core.1
Your people, however, are underwater. They've never heard stringed instruments (unless they came up onto land to do so). Their ideas of what is considered consonant or aesthetic need not have anything to do with these ratios. Sound travels differently through water, the land-based reference instruments are not available, and I'm not even addressing biological differences in ear construction. But you have the opportunity for your underwater music to sound very different, and that can start with a different scale. There's no reason they couldn't have come up with the same scale through math, but you can plausibly change this to make your water-dwellers different.
**Melody and rhythm.** You've heard whale-song. It, um, doesn't sound like pop music. :-) The sounds are longer and the intervals between "notes" tend to be small (almost "stepwise", were you to impose a scale on that). The latter might be constrained by cetacean vocal cords, but the former is probably in part because sound travels differently through water,2 with more echoing. I think this will push music toward being slower-moving; early underwater music might sound a lot like [plainchant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plainsong). (Plainchant also tends away from large-interval jumps; it happens, but most movement is stepwise, and this plus the lack of rhythmic variation contributes to that "somber" sound you associate with it.)
**Harmony.** I can't prove it, but I think that because of the echos and distortion, from any particular vantage point underwater a note will "linger" longer. This constrains how you can harmonize it if you want the results to be consonant (for local values of "consonant"; this depends on your musicians' biology, for starters).
On land, if you pluck or strike a string and do not interfere with it (damping it, fretting elsewhere along its length, etc), it will ring for some time after the initial note. Those notes are still "in the air" when you (or other instruments) play other notes. As a hammer-dulcimer player I take this into account when deciding what ornaments or harmonies I can get away with; ones that rely more heavily on consonant pitches (e.g. other notes in the current chord) work better than ones that use dissonant notes. On the other hand, there are certain ornaments (like the roll or trill) that work *because* they use immediately-adjacent notes, so this can go both ways. I suggest that your underwater music will rely *mainly* on consonances for harmonizing but will also explore the possibilities of well-placed dissonance. Harmony can also use rhythmic variation, so long as its overall shape fits into that long-decay property of underwater music.
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1 I admit that I am failing to consider eastern musical scales here. My background is in western music; I don't know a lot about others. My *impression* is that similar considerations apply to pentatonic and Arabic scales.
2 Sound actually travels faster underwater, not slower; the reason it sounds distorted when you're swimming is the echoing, plus any part that travels through air. (Thanks TimB for correcting me.)
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Since water is @ 800 times denser than air, musical instruments the way we think of them are not going to happen. Strings and reeds, for example, won't be able to vibrate at the high frequencies that produce musical notes.
We should look at how naturally occurring sounds are made under water. Precussion would work, for example snapping claws or clicking together armoured body parts could evolve into tapping or banging rocks, shells and other hard objects for a percussive sound.
Whales and dolphins use specialized organs to create low and high frequency sounds for communication and echo location, this would be roughly analogous to vocalization. Pods of whales and dolphins communicate to each other using this means, and it is established that individuals have very distinct "voices" and patterns of sound. It might not be too far fetched to suggest pods may eventually learn (or be taught) to harmonize or "sing" in a choral fashion. Extraterrestrial creatures who live underwater might have evolved somewhat differently and be intelligent enough to "sing" in solo, harmonic and choral patterns for various reasons (perhaps Choral "singing" evolved from pods of creatures creating a "wall of sound" to confuse their prey). Due to the high density of water, a performance can be projected for hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres. This might be rather annoying, much like you neighbour playing loud music at all hours of the night.
Since the underwater environment is so different, ideas like music will have to be treated much differently.
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The way a piece of music in air sounds is heavily dependent on boundary reflections. Reflections from the mouth of a horn, from a resonant tube, from a piano soundboard, from the body of a stringed instrument, from the environment(a church sounds much different than a forest, anechoic studio, or a wide open field). As such, we have developed a wide variety of instruments to exploit this property. I believe this would not be so for underwater instruments.
Because air has little mass and is highly compressible, it effectively(low distortion) transmits low energy sound without creating many reflections of its own. But its compressible nature is less efficient(slow). We generally assume that any sound we hear is close to us, certainly closer than the horizon. The resonant frequency of air is not a significant factor.
Water has higher mass and is not very compressible at all. It transmits sound efficiently(fast) because the molecules are in closer contact, but not as effectively(high distortion) because its high mass creates a pseudo boundary reflection at every point along the way. Being flooded with so many uncontrollable reflections from the transmission media, the nuanced reflections of a finely crafted instrument would be lost in the noise. The only signals that would transmit clearly are near water's resonant frequency.
Therefore, I believe there would be a very small variety of underwater instruments. And most would produce sounds near a harmonic of water's resonant frequency. The composition of underwater music would have many of the same practical constraints as the production of church music. Slow smooth progressions from note to note avoiding unpleasant chaotic step reflections. The frequency content of the original signal(as opposed to instrument design) would become much more important in determining what the listener actually hears. Yet, what the listener hears underwater will be vastly different from the original signal at the instrument.
I expect that most underwater instruments would have tone compensation controls based on water temperature, pressure, and salinity.
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The reason for our scale and chords are not (just) related to strings. If you look at the chords drawn as waveforms you can see that simple rational numbers make new simple repeating patterns on the same time scale as any timber. I've seen the 5 note scale derived using whistles, not strings.
These are real fundamental effects that are independent of how our ears work, other than that they work suitibly to discern real natural sounds.
The auditory sense of a marine mammal or other aquatic creature might be built to cope with the increased [*dispursion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_relation#Deep_water_waves) of sounds travelling long distances in the ocean. This could cause them to hear certain sounds as “near” or “far” versions of the same source sound. That can go into their music! Perhaps time shifts for different frequencies will be a basic musical element and present in the notation.
As for how to make sound, as I recall the [cetation anatomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_vocalization#Production_of_sound), one nostrel is the blowhole and the other recirculates through internal “lips”. The sound is made by vibrating a reed in air (a small quantity of air) and then impedance matching to the water.
As for real instruments to look at, I recall a horn like thing made to play with water passing through it, and various items made by [Peter Schickele](http://www.schickele.com/) and played in a tank on stage.
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Woodwind and brass instruments rely upon the speed of sound in the medium within which they reside; since the speed of sound in water is much faster than in air, such instruments would need to be twice as long to yield the same frequency in water as in air. Further, the portion of the instrument that converts changes in velocity to changes in pressure (e.g. the reed, embouchure, etc.) would need to be sensitive to smaller changes in velocity than would be typical in an instrument used in air, since water's change in velocity with respect to pressure will be smaller than that of air. Alternatively, it might be possible for instruments to use variations in pressure to cyclically induce and suppress cavitation in an air-powered instrument, but I'm not sure at what frequency ranges that would be effective.
For things like stringed instruments and percussion, I think the key to success would be to have vibrating members within a trapped gaseous cavity, arranged in such a fashion that vibrations could be loosely coupled to the outside of the cavity which would in turn transfer them to the water.
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Perhaps instruments making infra sounds from more slowly vibrating things? Fishes recognize such vibrations and might react on intervalls and chords of tonic, dominant and octave? This kind of "music" is a perfect analogy.
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**The Premise**
The Earth rotates on its own axis, which is tilted by about 23 degrees.
The setting for my fantasy novel is an earth like planet without the axial tilt, all other factors remaining constant in terms of distance from the sun etc. Some of you may have read my previous question on climate and technology, this is on similar lines but for plant life.
For those who haven't read the other question (or even for those who have), here's some background:
From general reading, it appears the largest impact of removing an axial tilt would be on seasonal change, in the sense that there wouldn't be any changes whatsoever. Every latitudinal belt would have its own set season all year round, with some minimal changes depending on the earth's distance from the sun in its usual orbit (ranging basically from 91.4 million miles in January compared to 91.5 million miles in July - which is less than 1%).
As a result, since there is no major climate change, most regions of the world will generally experience the same weather everyday. Therefore, the cold regions of the planets are likely to become even colder to the point of being uninhabitable. Likewise for the deserts and heat. Those regions receiving lots of rainfall will either be covered in forests or experience continuous top soil erosion.
The very nature of evolution is such that life will find a way to survive in most conditions. Any ecosystem survives primarily on transference of energy. That means you need a basic breakdown of three tiers in the ecosystem for any kind of a balance:
1. Plant life to convert Sunlight to edible energy (food)
2. Herbivores to consume said plants
3. Carnivores to consume said herbivores
Let's take a simple example - the dry grassland.
1. Lots and lots of grass that bathes in sunlight and needs minimal water to grow.
2. Small/medium game that eats grass (some kinds of deer or wildebeests)
3. Carnivores that hunt down this game (lions, cheetahs etc.)
**The Question**
Given the premise of no axial tilt, what would be the implication on plant and animal life? For the purpose of this question, I am more interested in regions that under normal conditions faced two or more extreme seasons leading to migratory behavior or adaptation of some kind. Continuing with the above example, the question would be as follows:
**The Grasslands** - Usually, these regions see two climates: Dry and Wet. The vegetation dries out in the heat, forcing the herbivores to literally seek out greener pastures, which in turn forces the carnivores to follow. Now, with only one constant climate type, wherever the new grasslands get formed, they will stay the same all year round. No starving or dehydration, therefore no migration. How will this affect plants and animals? With an unhindered supply of sun and water, how will the ecosystem that has adapted to a twin season cycle change?
I understand that no ecosystem is that simple, but I'm not looking for a full fledged, scientifically sound design - only for a logical and preferably fantastical alternative. My question currently only addresses grasslands, but if you have another type of region in mind (such as the tundra or rainforest) that may lead to the above premise playing out in interesting ways, do feel free to add on.
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There are a couple good answers here already but they're missing some of the detail I think you're looking for. As has been stated (in slightly different words), the climate would stabilize into "bands" around the planet, with the equatorial band being the hottest and the polar regions being the coldest. The lack of seasonal change would have some effects on plants and animals, notably the lack of migration or seasonal effects such as hibernation and growth.
Let's extrapolate from that a bit.
**Climate Zones**
First let's look at the climates. Obviously there would be some variation between the equator and poles no matter what, but does that mean the equator would be a desert and the poles would be ice? Not necessarily. Depending on the planet's distance from its star(s) the overall climate could be hotter or cooler than Earth's. You could be slightly farther away which would result in the equator being more like a jungle than a desert, because it wouldn't be hot enough to dissuade condensation. The result of this would be colder poles, however. On the flip side, you could be slightly closer to the star(s) and have little to no polar ice, but a very hot and dry equator. For the record this is based on a planet with roughly the same water content as Earth.
**Geology**
If your planet is geologically active you still have the potential for larger mountain ranges. These will be independent of seasons and will be able to occur in any practically part of the environment. Geology becomes even more important when you consider...
**Weather**
With a nearly-flat planet (geologically inactive for enough time to erode mountains) and no seasons, you'd have massive wind storms that would make life very very difficult. *With* geology you have the ability to create smaller climate zones inside the greater bands. Large mountains can direct rainfall to keep part of the equatorial band wetter, for example. The more open the space, the more grassland-like it will be (hence the prairies in the middle of the US, for example). Another thing to note is that rivers and water sources wouldn't necessarily behave exactly the same, because you wouldn't have seasonal thaws in the mountains that melt snow and flood mountain lakes. In all likelihood this wouldn't affect your *story* too much but it would slightly change the geography that you depict depending on where you are. Higher-elevation lakes would still be an important source of water propagation to the rest of the world but they would be fueled almost exclusively by rainfall. I don't know for sure but I'm guessing this would make them only occur in select high-rainfall zones and they would probably be quite large and deep, otherwise they would be prone to evaporating during a dry spell and then never completely re-forming.
An important point to note is that if your bodies of water include ocean-like areas, and those oceans cross climate bands, you would end up with some interesting weather effects. The star would heat the equatorial ocean more, but much of that heat would transfer to upper/lower climate bands of the ocean. It wouldn't be perfectly even, but it would probably be within a few degrees. This would mean life around the oceans would have some interesting adaptations compared to the rest of life in its latitude. A temperate-area ocean that crosses the equator would be warmer in the temperate zone than you'd see here on Earth, which could create more violent storm systems due to the extra evaporation. Life around it would also be able to benefit from the warm water and be a bit different from land-locked life (even if near a water source) but wouldn't be able to spread inland for lack of warm water. It would give you an opportunity to create yet another highly unique biome.
**Plant Life**
This would probably make one of the biggest differences but not for the reason you might expect. Plants would simply be adapted specifically for whatever climate zone they are in, much as they are today, but with less emphasis on growing seasons. What this means is you wouldn't see changes in color throughout the year, and *they would be producing fruit (seed) year-round*. This would pose an interesting problem for farming because you likely wouldn't be able harvest in the same manner as you're used to here on Earth. Unless some sort of technical trickery can be figured out, my guess is the majority of harvesting would have to be done by hand or in some sort of very controlled fashion to make sure that an entire field is planted at the exact same time, watered the exact same amount, and harvested at the same time while dropping no seeds to grow unintentionally (or those would have to be regularly weeded out). Preventing animals and *wind* from transferring seed into your field unintentionally (which is a huge part of plant propagation normally) you'd likely have to do all of that indoors somehow, or just stick to hand-picking, which could be inefficient for wheat-like produce due to the low calorie content per plant yield. If you can't cultivate such produce in a very controlled or automated fashion your people would likely resort to exclusively farming high-value foods instead, or you'd have to imagine some type of fantasy grain that's far removed from what we're familiar with. Your farming communities would likely look much different from ours. Another possibility is that plants would diversify into two main groups, those who bear fruit year-round and those who sort themselves through some internal clock into budding seasons. Things like grasses that have a much higher volume of fruit would likely bud year-round, while higher-value ones like fruit trees would probably coordinate their pollination to conserve energy. It's also fathomable that those high-value plants could be in a state of flux where some buds are available for pollination while others are already fruiting, but I don't know what the internal biological implications of that are. They would possibly work like a colony of individual plants growing on the same root foundation, similar to coral.
**Animals**
This part wouldn't operate too much differently. Of course seasonal things like migration are out of the question, but once you have your plant base established, the animals just feed off of it and then each other. The herbivores would forage much as they do on Earth, and carnivores would stalk and eat them in a virtually identical fashion. Hunting done by humanoids would be very similar. On another note, animal populations would still likely default to some sort of "mating season" so as to have the highest chance of finding a ready mate, though it would be regulated by some other timing than seasons, like "when the current generation leaves the nest." These "seasons" would be unique to each population, and could to some extent influence their predators.
**Variation**
What all this allows for, which you may be happy about in a fantasy setting, is less inter-mixing of species, plant and animal, throughout different regions. What that means is whenever you have a mountain or a river that is uncrossable by most animal populations, on the other side of it could be a *completely different* ecosystem, much more-so than we see here on Earth. The closest analogue we have is the crazy differences between Australia and the rest of the world, because Australia is so isolated that species developed in completely different ways. With no migration and just a simple physical barrier, you could get that same kind of diversity in even land-locked regions.
**The Two-World Possibility**
Here's what I consider the most exciting part. If your equator was for some reason extremely difficult to pass, whether due to being a massive, harsh desert or a hazardous, labyrinthine rain forest, you would essentially have two sides of the world isolated from each other in a way we've never been here on Earth. The oceans were once a barrier, but ultimately we crossed them without an enormous amount of trouble once we figured out how to pack enough food and keep from getting too terribly ill on the voyage. If a physical region is *actually out to kill you* in some way, with deadly heat/dehydration or with myriad diseases/venomous living creatures and no sense of direction, it could be much much harder to get through. But when you *do* eventually get through, you might as well be standing in an alternate universe. It would be the same temperature as yours, but the plants and animals would potentially be *completely different*, having never inter-mixed in any way with the ones where you came from. You could make a whole story just from that alone.
If I missed any points, feel free to ask for clarification. For the record I don't have any sources on this, it's just some applied natural science knowledge using as much logic as I can muster up. If anyone has suggestions for improvement feel free to comment.
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One of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, addresses this very question in one of his essays. He got to thinking about its use in [Paradise Lost, book X](https://books.google.com/books?id=1UkKRY4Of74C&pg=PA332&lpg=PA332&dq=paradise+lost+axis+tilt&source=bl&ots=8fxP3cAZUf&sig=-Pi4ViqqgS5MHwFGkzYGCY_hZII&hl=en&sa=X&ei=u5MrVY22NoLZsAXj8IHgDg&ved=0CC0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=paradise%20lost%20axis%20tilt&f=true). The plot is that Earth has no tilt in the "Eden" stage and had an eternal spring climate, and that as punishment it was tilted, so that mankind would have to suffer seasons.
It was in [*Oblique the Centric Globe*](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?115566) as collected in *Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright* (1978).
**Wouldn't it be cool to have the legendary Dr. Asimov, Grand Master of Science Fiction, answer the Question?**
## Later
Thanks to the encouragement, I've acquired a copy of the Book Club edition from 1978, to look up the actual quotation. It notes that *Oblique the Centric Globe* was originally in the August 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and that Isaac Asimov has published “Almost 200 books … and counting.”
I carefully transcribed it with the exact punctuation and nuances※.
The essay continues from the previous month (as Chapter 7), which covered Ice Age cycles, and recaps that the axial tilt and the eccentricity combine to give mild winters and cool summers in the northern hemisphere and cold winters and hot summers in the southern hemisphere. It picks up the story by digging into precession (a 25,780 year cycle) and the musings of Milutin Malankovich.
>
> How does this affect the Earth’s weather? —Not the way most people seem to think.
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> ⋯ If there were no axial tilt at all, there would be days and nights equal in length over all the world. The situation would be permanently what it is now at the equinoxes.
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> It seems natural, then, to have the idea that if only the Earth’s axis were not tilted, there would be an eternal spring everywhere on Earth.
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> This idea finds expression in *Paradise Lost* by John Milton (who was great on poetry but weak on astronomy). Milton felt that before the Fall, when man still liven in Eden, there was no axial tilt and there was a world-wide and eternal spring. It was only after the Fall that the tilt was imposed.
>
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> Milton, who wanted to cling to the Ptolemaic theory but reluctantly recognized the fact that astronomers were, by the time he was writing, virtually all Copernicans, wasn’t sure whether to say the tilt came about by tipping the Earth or tipping the Sun—so he waffled. In Book X of his epic, he writes:
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> >
> > Some say he [God] bid his Angels turn askance
> > The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
> > From the Sun’s Axle; they with labour push’d
> > Oblique the Centric Globe: Some say the Sun
> > Was bid turn Reins from th’ Equnoctial Road
> > Like distant breadth …
> >
> >
> >
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> Milton was wrong, however, in thinking of the tilt (imposed either Copernically of Ptolemaically) as a punishment.
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> Suppose the axis were tilted less than it now is. In that case, the unevenness in length of day and night in the regions about the solstices would be less. The summer wouldn’t be so hot or the winters so cold. there would be a mild-winter–cool-summer for *both* hemispheres. The less the axis was tilted, the milder the winter and the cooler the summer for *both* hemispheres.
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> However, as I explained in Chapter 7, a mild winter tends to produce more snow and a cool summer to melt less snow. A smaller tilt to the axis encourages and Ice Age in both hemispheres, therefore, and if the axis were not tilted at all, the Ice Age would be permanent, north and south.
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> So tilting the axis was a reward, in that it unfroze the world.
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> In fact, one could argue this way. As long as Adam and Eve were in the Garden, which we might picture as in a tropical clime, a seasonless year was beneficial. After the Fall when human beings were going to multiply and spread out over the world, the Temperate Zones would have to be made habitable for them and hence the tilt was imposed. Had Milton been able to advance this explanation, he could have illustrated God’s loving-kindness rather than His vengeance—which means he would probably not have talked of the tilt at all, for pious people, in my experience, are more interested in vengeance.
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Note ※: I used em-dashes where they are seen in the text, without adjacent spaces where there is none in the original. Whether there is "no space" or some "hair space" is really dependent on the font and rendering. I used curled apostrophes as seen in the book. *seasonless* is indeed shown as one word. I used an en-dash in the middle of “mild-winter–cool-summer” though it not obvious that it has a longer length in the printed copy. I used the ellipses code point where ellipses were used in the original, and how it *appears* depends on the font. The original appears rather wide, being the same length as the word “from” immediately above. So, I can't tell if there is a space before the ellipses (as I took it) or the ellipses unit has space before the first visible dot or it's just formatting. Really though on the dead-tree medium there are no code points and exact details of whitespace will vary as does the font and formatting on the window. I'm sure Asimov didn't type these niceties anyway, but it was done by the magazine people. The point is to preserve the vintage formatting and punctuation as the way we *read* it back in the day.
My own added ellipses use a centered-dot form (⋯).
Note that excessive footnotes getting all meta is also my own homage to the late Doctor Asimov. In some cases I recall conversions between the author and editor or "discourse" from an imagined Gentle Reader. He really anticipated the future media of comments adding useful content to a blog post, if you think about it.
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I'll do a quick explanation of the impacts of Earth's axial tilt to start off:
As Earth orbits the sun, it's tilted at 23.5 degrees. This varies between 21 and 25 degrees, but I'll ignore that because the changes are slightly irrelevant here. With the tilt, our orbit looks like this:
In this case, on the left point X is tilted away from the sun and is in winter, and point Y is tilted towards the sun and is in summer. On the right this is reversed.
If we had no axial tilt, orbit would look like this:
Now, point X and point Y are equidistant from the sun at all points of the year. There are no longer any seasons.
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Since the equatorial grasslands are mentioned in the question, I'll answer about them. With no axial tilt, the grasslands are always the same distance from the sun. Since they're on the equator, they are always the hottest parts of the earth, with little to no rainfall. Instead of having a dry and a wet season, they would be dry all year round, becoming deserts. You would find all the animals we currently associate with this area would no longer be able to live there. Only desert animals like camels and scorpions would live there.
The major impact on plant and animal life would be location. Since there are no seasonal temperature changes, the average temperature would be higher and therefore plants and animals would move further north or south to escape the heat.
The other major effect I can think of, although not plant or animal based, is an effect on the Arctic and Antarctic circles. At the moment, the seasons mean that half the year these areas see no sun and the other half they see constant sun. With no axial tilt, these areas would be in a state of constant dusk/twilight.
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I agree with your synopsis of the impact as stated in the question. I have no expert knowledge to impart, but here are some thoughts to consider.
* Animals probably wouldn't migrate.
* Ecosystems would support smaller populations of fauna, since they are under constant pressure.
* Deciduous plants wouldn't develop.
* No growth rings on trees.
* Animals wouldn't moult and change colour.
* No winter hibernations. No food storage for winter.
* Babies could be born at any time of the year, not to coincide with plentiful food.
* Animals would probably specialise a little more because they aren't dealing with as much environmental change. This may (to a very small extent) also slow evolution.
* No spring melt to fill rivers and lakes.
* More glaciers since snow would build up without warmer seasons to melt it.
* No tropical monsoons/wet season bringing bulk rainfall to some locations.
* As you mentioned, colder in cold places, and hotter in hot places. Hotter probably also means drier.
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What a fascinating topic! I am a very late-comer to this discussion, just signed up for this site today.
There have been a few quality answers already, so just a few thoughts as a biologist with a keen interest in geology and astronomy. Forgive me if I am repeating some other comments.
First of all, I think that the only thing we can say with near-certainty about an earthlike planet without axial tilt, is that there would be no real seasonality, as all others also noted. That's about it, other than that we cannot say things with as much certainty as some others suggest, for the following reasons, let me elaborate a bit further;
Without axial tilt and its resulting strong seasonality, other factors would become (even) much more relevant in determining climate than they are now, in particular:
1) Solar insolation, determined by the type of star and proximity to it. I understand we are here assuming a similar sun and earth combination.
2) Certain large-scale characteristics of the earthlike planet, such as in particular magnetic field and rotational speed (day-length!). Again, I understand we assume earthlike here.
3) Atmospheric composition: we can see in our Earth's past that for instance varying CO2 levels had enormous impact on climates. Higher levels, warmer climates and globally more rainfall; lower levels, colder climates and globally less rainfall.
4) Distribution of land (continents) and sea (oceans), I mean both size and location of continents: obviously very great impact on local solar heating and hence also on winds and rainfall.
5) Mountain ranges: need I elaborate?! Tremendous impact on winds and rainfall.
6) Volcanism: in particular the amount of it, adding CO2, sulphur and many other elements to the atmosphere and biosphere.
7) Life itself: ecosystems, such as large forest areas, have an impact on their own local and even regional climate. For instance, the Amazon rainforest creates part of its own rainfall by a recycling of water.
Summarizing, **geographical/spatial differences** would become much more determining for climates, by lack of temporal differences, other than day and night. Wind and rainfall would mainly be created by differential (solar) heating as a result of spatial differences, such as land-sea, high-low, north-south, ...
Winds, which are mainly the results of these spatial heating (and resulting air pressure) differences, plus the Earth rotation, would still be blowing, such as the trade winds (though in a somewhat modified form), the equatorial rising airflows, the 'westerlies' and related winds resulting from colder sea / warmer land.
So, yes, there would definitely still be wind, and those bringing rain. We know this, because a lot, if not most wind and rainfall of our present Earth are also caused by relatively short-term differences in heating. But typical seasonal winds, such as monsoons, would be absent.
With regard to life and ecosystems:
What I find remarkable is that the lushest life and the greatest biodiversity on Earth are found in regions with the least seasonality (tropical rainforests and related ecosystems)! Tropical rainforests are climatically defined as places where the day-night temperature differences are greater than the annual/seasonal differences. So, it is absolutely clear that life on Earth does not *require* an axial tilt and seasons, it is just adapted to it.
At the same time, the equatorial regions also show us how important geographical differences are for creating ecosystems: at the same latitude in Africa and South America we find rainforests, wet and dry savannahs and even semi-arid places.
Therefore, when creating your world, first create the continents and mountain ranges and then look at the major differences in temperature. That should give you an impression of prevailing winds, and rainfall. And with that, give you a start for your ecosystems.
Success! And please let us know some results.
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1. Near constant temperatures and precipitation would mean that organisms don't need to be as adaptable and can afford to specialize on a much more granular level. Organisms exposed to unusual conditions may die much sooner than a comparable earth organism because they are more specialized for a specific weather pattern and do better as long as it's maintained. Organisms would be thoroughly limited to a specific climate band and most would not cross pollinate quickly or easily.
2. Snow accumulation is glaciation risk. As such, even tundra or boreal forest only occasionally gets snow accumulation lasting more than a few days. The ice caps are massive even if the average temperatures are high. For Earthlike average temperatures, the ice sheets get to 50 degrees latitude. For Earthlike levels of greenhouse gases, there is a real risk of a snowball planet.
3. Wind would also be incredibly stable although it's possible storm systems would disrupt this.
4. Deserts and tropical rainforests would be greatly expanded, and there may be rather dense and productive temperate or boreal rainforests within regions that don't have an Earth analogue in terms of biome (basically just barely warm enough not to become a glacier, but not seasonal). I think I will term these frostforests or frostplains, since freezing nighttime lows would be a regular occurrence.
5. Abrupt global climate changes would be catastrophic, since an organism adapted to a 10 K temperature range is going to suffer a lot more than an Earth organism adapted to a 40 K temperature range from the same number of degrees of warming or cooling, and the same is true
6. Endothermy, migration, loss of leaves, and insulation may be relatively rare to evolve.
7. The stability of environments would lead to greater biodiversity as subtle differences in biomes lead to speciation.
8. Flight may not evolve outside small endotherms analogous to insects. Congratulations on making a world of giant bugs. If flight does evolve in larger organisms there is a chicken and egg problem where flight demands could encourage endothermy and endothermy could encourage flight, but neither may actually be viable.
9. Since this world would either need a bright sun or a good amount of insulating CO2 to remain warm, photosynthetic life would end up with everything it needs for extremely fast, greenhouse-like growth, especially at the equator.
10. Photosynthetic life may be pretty much impossible to graze down, as primary production cannot be consumed fast enough by ectothermic organisms under heavy predation pressure. However, the consistent availability of food could drive metabolism up or encourage motile organisms to evolve strong defenses against predators. In dry environments this could include huge body size, but it seems like foliage should limit body size in wet environments that have forests. It is conceivable that the excess primary productivity would end up going to other consumers like forest fire, which is much less picky about its choice of nutrients. Coal could also be formed by layers of forest rapidly decomposing one atop another, but eventually something would figure out how to consume dead trees reliably.
Soil nutrient depletion would likely be severe in almost all forests. Forests would likely include a variety of parasitic or carnivorous photosynthetic life and be very nutrient-starved. Windblown dust from deserts often under 200 km away may fertilize rainforests.
I would not expect adaptable generalists to dominate in many biomes of this world, and would not expect endotherms either. Therefore, I would guess that the prospect for evolving intelligent life on a world with no axial tilt is lower than on Earth. Especially given that mass extinctions may be especially lethal in this world to anything but adaptable generalists which are rare, and then would end up radiating out and becoming specialists again.
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Our notion of recording and communicating time and date is based on very old concepts, many of them being built upon flawed assumptions (that the Sun should be at exact south at noon, that a year should have an integer number of days, etc.) and cultural heritage (7-day week, the arbitrary beginning of year a week and something after solstice, two months of 31 days in succession), and burdened by little fixes and exceptions trying to maintain as much of "backwards compatibility" as possible (time zones, leap years, leap seconds), not even mentioning atrocities like the daylight savings time. This all not only complicates the matter beyond necessity (the need to remember a lot of stuff for something that's just a unidirectionally flowing one-dimensional quantity) and creates a mild amount of unfairness (e.g., prices per calendar month, deadlines at the end of month but prior to weekends) but also gives computers, who use a [completely regular (but not very human-friendly) internal format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time), a lot of work converting from and to our representation to communicate with us.
What if calendar and clock were designed in a society that knows what we do and our ancestors did not: that the Sun orbits Earth (relativistically speaking) continuously, that there's always noon *somewhere*, that seasons are the opposite on the opposite hemisphere and work completely different near the Equator, that the rotation of Earth is not synchronized with its orbit in any way? If the primary goals were simplicity and practicality of use for communication with both people in different places and with machines? Minuscule variations in the length of day and relativistic effects would presumably be neglected and the system should be rigid enough to allow such neglection without leaps.
I believe it should still be based on astronomical invariants like the equinoxes and noon to be physiologically relevant, not just blindly counting second after second like computers do. An agreed fixed reference like Year One is very reasonable. But I have a hard time coming with finer divisions of time instead of months and weeks that would make sense. Counting up all the way to 365-something is prone to errors, it would be good if at all levels of precision the data would remain reasonably bounded.
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The current date/time system is based on applying arbitrary numbers to important physical constructs: day, moon-th, and year. Month is the odd one, because you cannot divide a year into moon cycles evenly, which is why we get the arbitrary number of days in a month.
Moon cycles mean a lot less to modern humans, so we can theoretically dispense with that. However, days are still vitally important to us, as are years. Given those as fixed constructs, let's see what can be done.
## Summary
* 5-day *Week*s.
* Years divided into 4 *Quarter*s of 18 weeks each. The remaining days are arbitrarily assigned between quarters, and are given unique names.
* Leap days are added as special days between quarters, just like the remainder above.
* Quarters divided into 3 6-week *Period*s.
* Days are divided into 24-*Hour*s
* Hours are divided into 1000 "seconds" or some other such name.
* For sub-seconds, go metric. And for large counts of seconds, go metric.
## Details
### Year Divisions
Well, the number of days per solar year is not a whole number. So as much as we don't like it, leap years, leap centuries, and the like are still going to have to be around. So whatever divisions we make here need to recognize that.
The basic year will need to be 365 days long, with adjustments made as needed for leap years and the like. That number does not divide evenly by very many numbers. Basically, just 5. So if we need a "week" division, the least painful would be 5, which leaves us with 73 weeks in a year.
Well, 73 is prime, so that poses a division problem. We need larger subdivisions of a year. And ideally, 4 such subdivisions would be reasonable (which matches with the useful, physically observable concept of "seasons"). So consider this.
There would be 5 days in a week, with 18 weeks per season. That covers only 72 weeks per-year. We take the extra 5 days and put them *between* the seasons as special days, which are not considered part of any particular week. You'd have to double-up on one of them.
So you get 18 weeks, followed by a special day, followed by another 18 weeks, then two special days, and so forth.
When it comes time for a leap year, you just add another special day. Presumably opposite the double special day that already exists on the calendar.
Such quarter year divisions are large enough that we can do things like build commerce around them (much as we do at present). And special days would be useful for arbitrary holidays and such.
However, 18 weeks, 90 days, is a long period of time to talk about. So it would be useful to divide them into shorter stretches of time. Perhaps 6-week periods (30 days) within a quarter. So you would have "first-quarter, second period."
What would a date look like? Using US dating schemes, "3.1-27-2016" would be the 3rd quarter, first-period, 27th day of the year 2016. Special days would be numbered as a fourth period of the quarter preceding them: "3.4-1-2016". That's the first special day after the 3rd quarter.
Note that this is not too dissimilar to what we have now. It's more regular, in that each period has a fixed number of days. But the division of a year into 12 sections makes the groupings of days reasonably bite-sized for human consumption. You're not required to count past 30 or anything.
### Day Divisions
Say what you will about hours, 24 is a very impressive number. It can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. And that's very important for many human uses of sub-day divisions.
If you went to a 25 hour day, you can't even talk about *half* of a day without having to use fractions, let along 1/3rd of a day. Consider medicine that you take 3 times a day. How many hours is it between the times you take the medicine? With a 24-hour day, it's 8. With 25? Or 20? It's a fraction, and people generally don't want to deal with fractions in those cases.
And however much decimalization has happened, people generally do not want to deal in fractions. 100 is useful in decimalization because you can divide it by 2, 4, and 5, and can even get a decent approximation of 3. However, having 100 divisions in a day leads to "hours" that are just too short to be meaningful.
So you have several points of tension in this choice. You need a number that can be [evenly divided by quite a few numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundant_number). It needs to be big enough that an hour is not a large quantity of time. But it also needs to be small enough that an hour is not too short of a quantity of time.
I would say that such tension will inevitably lead you back to 24. It turns out that people in the past weren't stupid.
Beneath the 24-hour daily cycle however, things can get more arbitrary. As such, subdividing an hour via the metric system makes sense. Centi-hours, milli-hours, and the like.
However, technology becomes an issue. Why? Because lots of technology already currently works on the order of milli-seconds, micro-seconds, and nano-seconds. And there are already 3600 seconds in an hour. So now you'd be required to talk about pico-hours and femto-hours. That's rather cumbersome.
So it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a specific name for milli-hours.
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There have been a lot of [proposed calendars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_calendars) with a variety of different features.
The ideal calendar is simply one that makes is easy for humans to describe reference time. Humans like the clock/calendar roughly corresponding to the local day and night cycle. 25 time zones world-wide would be suitable - but please let the time zones be named zone 0 thru zone 24 or such like.
100,000 seconds in day seems like a nice modern method. Kiloseconds would nicely approximate quarter hour intervals - no need to have hours and minutes. No AM/PM and please God no daylight saving time.
A weekly cycle is nice because weekends and workdays, though not essential. 5 day weeks would be ok, with 73 weeks per year (5\*73 = 365). Leap days still needed to sync with a solar year, I would make the leap day not part of any day of the week, so you just have an extra holiday after the last regular day of the year. With this system 1st day of month is always 1st day of the week, etc., so calendars are easier to plan. With 6 5 day week in a month (another convenient division for some purposes), but the final month would have 7 weeks plus occasional leap days.
No matter which calendar you use, people will still invent other calendars and timekeeping to corresponding to something convenient for them, just as Julian calendars supplement Gregorian calendars today.
While we are at it, maybe we could replace the 360 degree circle with perhaps either 100 or 400 (grads), so angles in radians or metric degrees of some form.
Of course, we would also be better off by discarding decimal and moving to a base 16 number system so that computers and people would share a common numerical view of the natural numbering system. We should have started with this change of course.
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Let's start with the physical pieces that limit what time is attempting to measure and regulate: the orbit of the earth around the sun, the rotation of the earth, and the cycle of the moon from new to full and back.
None of these things line up; a [lunar month](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month) is 29.53 days, a solar cycle is 365.25636 days, and a solar day is 24 hours. Worse, these numbers change over time; the day used to be longer, and even today, the length of a day changes almost at random. Not that it would have mattered even 100 years ago; a leap year is all you really need to keep track of time if you're using the sun.
## Time Increments
Let's start with the largest useful increment of time: the year. It's a full growing season, shorter than a lifetime but long enough that a lifetime is less than 100 years (generally). Of all the measurements of time, the year has lasted the longest.
The next most useful increment of time is the day; a day and night cycle to mark time passing in a meaningful way. As long as we're on Earth, the year and the day will be immutable. Trying to survive on, say, a strict 25 hour day, will simply not work; the human body is built around the day/night cycle.
Years and days have a fairly solid relationship by the stars, too, so they are easy to keep track of over time.
Between the two are months and weeks:
## Weeks
Weeks are best for delineating work schedules, and organizing days into manageable chunks. These days, the majority of people have a 5-day work week, followed by a two-day break. Soviet Russia tried a [5, 6, and 10 day week](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar), to little success, though that probably has more to do with a rolling calendar than actual number of days worked. There have been a few other experiments with work-week lengths, but as far as I can find, nothing conclusive.
But, what is optimal today with our low-impact and low-energy work wouldn't be best for 100 or 1000 years ago. A 7-day week makes sense for hard, manual work; working sunup to sundown, six days in a row, then taking a seventh day off to rest pushes the body to the limit, but not beyond. That means if you want a week with a different number of days, it should be between 5 and 7 days, but for a long-term solution, 7 days to a week makes decent sense. It allows for the maximum amount of work, without over-stressing the body.
## Months
There are three ways to handle months - lunar months, equal months, or no months. Lunar months are designed to line up with the lunar phase; so, each month should be about 29.5 days long, or 29 days on odd months and 30 days on even months. 12 lunar months last 354 days, which means there are 11 or so extra days in a year - and months start sliding around, which means January is in winter one year, but ten years later it's late spring. That's really confusing - don't do that. If you want that system, months shouldn't have names; treat it like we treat weeks today: month 1 is the month at the beginning of the year (and may begin in the middle of a week), through month 13 or 14.
The second option is equal months, not lined up with lunar months. To make a year line up exactly (except for leap years), there should be 5 months of 73 days each. To make weeks line up exactly, there should be 13 months of 28 days each, with 1 day extra (2, for leap years). In a world I created, there are still 12 months, with 8 months having 28 days, and 4 (those with a solstice or equinox) having 35; I eliminated the extra days, but they could well be special holidays or such. A 12-month year is a little easier to divide than a 13-month year. If you want a different-length week, you can divide your months to match.
The third option is to ignore months all together. They don't make a lot of sense if they aren't tethered to the moon, so they aren't much use - just use numbered weeks instead.
## Timezones
You won't be able to avoid time zones. The sun was the best way to measure time until clocks came along, and according to a sundial, noon happens when the sun is high in the sky - and a different time all over the world.
However, time is on your side! Ancient cultures didn't care about time zones; if it took two days to walk from City A to City B, who cares if they are an hour apart, or even six? It wasn't until clocks and high-speed, long-distance travel travel were invented that time zones even mattered at all.
## End Result
Find a common origin for a year - and to cut down on complaining, make it Year 0. Then, find the number of days in a week: 6 or 7. Then, pick months; I like rolling numbered months, as moon phases matter to many cultures, and it can help delineate time without confusing people too much.
Smaller increments of time honestly don't matter. There's nothing that takes an hour, or a minute, or a second, so go ahead and divide the day into pieces as you want: 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute if you like what we've got; 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 10 seconds in a minute if you're one of those decimal people; or, 16 hours in a day, 64 minutes in an hour, and 64 seconds in a minute if you like binary.
[Answer]
Every society has its culture with all its arbitrary traditions, so you can never have a totally objective reform or introduction of date and time measurement. Even if, for instance, humanity vanished and an alien species would colonize Earth, they wouldn’t completely abandon their previous customs.
In designing the best calendar for humans on Earth, one has to take **natural cycles** into account. Some of them are obvious, others could be found empirically.
Research with isolation studies has found out that evolution tuned our bodily functions quite well to the daily cycle. Without natural light sources, clocks and contact to the outside world, most subjects acquired a routine spanning 24 to 25 hours, if I remember correctly. That means, one should absolutely **keep the solar day** as a base for the calendar.
The **menstrual cycle** is in the magnitude of one month. A pregnancy lasts about ten such cycles, but roughly nine months. Neither are bound to seasons or lunar phases, i.e. every day, about the same number of babies are born and about the same number of women bleed. There are cultural effects on the distribution of birth dates, though, e.g. because there are rarely planned C-sections on weekends and some occasions lead to statistically significant more unprotected sex within a population.
In short, it may be nice to have a regular *n*-week, *m*-day, 1/*p*-year or 1-lunation period, but it’s no necessity.
Astronomic, astrologic and meteorolgical **seasons differ** by region, hemisphere, culture and time. There are places with a single climate season throughout the year, others have 4 seasons of very similar, but slightly different length, others have just 3 or maybe 6 per year. That means, they cannot be defined globally and long-term. Astrologic seasons may use the sidereal or tropic zodiac. Astronomic seasons can have an equinox or solstice in their middle (as in the neo-pagan [Wheel of the Year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Year)) or at their edges.
As I said above, seasons are also not innate to the human reproduction cycle (unlike with many other species). So any time unit between a month and a year would and could be rather arbitrary and specific to a culture, but it could also contribute to defining a culture (e.g. fiscal quarters). They’re certainly not strictly necessary for a good calendar design.
Almost anywhere, however, some cycles of nature repeat annually, i.e. approximately each solar year with a possible error margin of several days, so let’s try to **keep the year**, but let’s worry more about long-term accuracy of the mean year than short-term differences from the astronomical ideals. It *may* be preferable to align the year start with either of the two solstices or equinoxes – or the middle date between two of these.
The **week** of 7 days – and there have been others, e.g. market weeks, even different ones running concurrently and synchronized with each other, e.g. [Balinese *pawukon*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawukon_calendar) – are almost entirely a **cultural convention**, although it’s close to the duration of a phase of our moon.
I’m not aware of any research having been conducted that tried to find a natural short-term day-based work–rest cycle. I would assume it depends a lot on the kind of work one does.
However, 5 work days of ca. 8 hours each followed by 2 full days of recreation seem to be good enough for quite a lot of people (although some are forced on [different plans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_plan)), but maybe 7+3 or 3+1 would work even better.
Assuming that a culturally humane week length could be determined, it would make sense to make it an integral divisor of larger calendrical entities (month, season, year). That means, among other things, that 1 to 5 days outside the week cycle and a leap day are probably a worse choice than a leap week. If nothing else, the leap cycle should contain a whole number of weeks like the Gregorian 400 years do, but the Julian 4 years and [revised](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_Calendar) 450 or 900 years do not.
Finally, there’s the matter of efficient and readable **notation**. Since we want to keep a year of three-hundred-something days, we need at least 3 decimal digits to address any annual date, e.g. simple ordinal `DDD` (single number). Humans aren’t good at dealing with and remembering chunks larger than 7 and numbers larger than they have unique words for (*twelve*).
We currently most commonly use 4 digits for 2 numbers: `MMDD` (or `DDMM`), but existing weeks would support 3:2 `WWD`, whereas 4:3 `MMWD` has no major advantage. With quarters and current conventions, we’re back to 4 with 4:3 `QMDD` or `QWWD` (a good dozen of weeks) and 4:4 `QMWD`, except for 3:2 `QDD`, but 90ish days is psychologically hardly better than hundreds of days.
There are other combinations that make good use of 3 places with decimal digits, e.g. between 7×7×7 = 343 and 7×7×8 = 392 (see [Cal7](http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Cal7) or [Octalendar](http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Octalendar)). It may be a minor point, but certainly an objective advantage to be not more verbose than necessary.
The decimal system is of course also a rather arbitrary choice, but one that humanity almost agrees upon nowadays.
Assuming the existence of **decimal prefixes** as in the SI, which make absolute sense with decimal numbers, and the retaining of the day as a fundamental, because natural/humane unit of timekeeping, it would make sense to employ a 10*−n* fraction of the day, e.g. its nominal 100’000th part (a bit shorter than our second), as base absolute unit of time in physics – alternatively one could use an integer base-ten multiple of Planck units and also make other natural constants (e.g. Avogadro’s number) simple fixed values.
It would make sense to divide the day into sections of simple multiples of this period.
Many people are used to eat their **three major daily meals** about a quarter day (6 hours) apart. (Adults sleep about a third of each day at night if they can.) I’m not sure how much of this is cultural habit or human nature, but 4 major equal divisions of the day make sense for another reason: On a radial clock face without markings, we can easily distinguish top, right, bottom and left – 4 values. It’s also simple to estimate the middle between two such points (which makes 8 values), but dividing each quarter into thirds and each of these into fifths is asking too much of the brain without the help of explicit markers. Despite the great divisibility of 12, 24 and 60, only some of the possibilities have developed into cultural conventions: ½- and ¼-hours, but 5- and 10-, sometimes 20-minute intervals (not ⅓-hours or 1/5-hours for instance). I would therefore argue that these are possible humane approximations:
* *second equivalent*: 1/100’000 day (10 µd) =: 1 part = 0.864 s
* *minute equivalent*: 1/1’000 day (1 md) = 1 hpart = 1.44 min
* *5-min equivalent*: 1/200 day = 5 hpart = 7.2 min
or 1/250 day = 4 hpart = 5.76 min
* *10-min equivalent*: 1/100 day (1 cd) = 1 kpart = 14.4 min = 0.24 h
* *¼-hour equivalent*: 1/80 day = 1¼ kpart = 18 min = 0.3 h
* *hour equivalent*: 1/16 day = 6¼ kpart = 1.5 h = 90 min
or 1/20 day = 5 kpart = 1.2 h = 72 min
* *meal-to-meal equivalent*: ¼ day = 25 kpart = 6 h
* *midnight to noon*: ½ day = 50 kpart = 12 h
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One option would be to start with the day as a basic unit. Then define units like
* Hectoday (approx. three months) or Kiloday (approx. three years) as the basis for celebrating anniversaries, long-term leases or work contracts, ...
* Decaday (approx. 1.4 old-style weeks), suitable for recurring timetables. Would there be two or three days off per decaday?
* Deciday (2.4 old-style hours), could be the length of a lesson in school, even if it is a bit long. Probably the rest break would be taken out of the deciday.
* Centiday (14.4 old-style minutes), that's what you use when you decide when to have dinner today.
This would be better for a planetside civilization than seconds, kiloseconds, and megaseconds.
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At once, they would include notions of day (period of Earth's rotation, see also [Solar time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time) and [Sidereal time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time)) and [year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year) (period of Earth's translation, see also [Axial precession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession)).
Unfortunately for most of us humans, order-oriented which we are, a year isn't an exact multiple of a day, thus defined. Worse, these periods vary, [even if slightly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second), with time.
So, any time system will need to have arbitrary/ad-hoc adjusting of its structure to approximate the actual periods of day and year - exactly what happens nowadays.
More at [Calendar reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform) and [Time standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_standard).
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### There is no time
With relativity, we know that nothing can happen simultaneously unless at the same point. So instead of talking about times, we should be talking about spacetime positions. We might say home dawn, office dawn, and home sunset. Home and office are positions in space while dawn and sunset are times.
When trying to synchronize times across two positions, we'd have to pick one as the source and make the other refer to it. The communication time would become part of the conversion process. Much as a seller will specify a free-on-board point (the place where you can pick up the item without paying a delivery fee), a time keeper will specify a synchronization point (the place where communication is expected to originate). The synchronization point will take the place of a time zone in our system.
### Intervals
A truly excellent way of measuring intervals might use meters. That would make time intervals work like distance intervals. Unfortunately, I don't have a good way of expressing time as meters. Perhaps it's not possible. In a spacetime system, space and time make up a complex number. That may be systemic. Or simply beyond our current understanding to express. Time may be an illusion, but it's a convenient one. So let's stick to separate measures of time and distance.
A lot of people are suggesting that we use solar days as the basis of a time unit. However, over time, the solar day changes in length. We already know that, which is why we don't define seconds as an 86,400th of a day. Also, I don't think it's the most basic unit about which we care. Rather than pick a time period based on a changing value, let's pick something more arbitrary and therefore enduring.
### Actual unit
The basic unit of time could be a work-period. For example, that could be roughly eight hours (our time). So from dawn of one day to the next would be about three periods. A milliperiod would then be around twenty-nine seconds (28.8). That's shorter than our minute but not ridiculously so. A kiloperiod would be shorter than our year, but also not ridiculously so. A hectoperiod would be similar in length to a month. A decaperiod is a few days (a bit less than half a week, although more than three days). A deciperiod would be forty-eight minutes; again, shorter than an hour but not by a lot. A centiperiod (4.8 minutes) would be a useful interval that doesn't correspond with anything in our system.
A side effect of this is that days wouldn't be an even length. In fact, if we go dawn to dawn, they wouldn't even be a constant length. So we might drop the twenty-four hour day as a concept entirely. We could just track intervals as periods and work from dawn. Dawn makes more sense than noon, as it really is a noticeable change in the day/night cycle. Dawn makes more sense than sunset because we would probably prefer the end of our day to vary rather than the beginning.
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I think that the real useless complication of our system are months, especially the fact that months all have different length
So, imho, you have 3 ways.
1. You divide the basic time component (length of a day, length of a year) in its smallest component (e.g. the greatest x such that nx=average day and mx=average year for some natural n and m) and use this unit as the base unit of the new system, but I think that this unit will be too small to be meaningful and it won't be perfectly accurate.
2. take the day (average day) as your unit and count from that. You can divide the day in any smallest unit you want (actual hours, deciday?) and 365 days make a year. I'd divide the year in four season (but no months) between equinoxes end solstices (chosen in an arbitrary time zone)
3. Make the sun meaningless. Depending on your setting, you may have a civilization that can control when it's day or night ( think of a human space station near Neptune) this way you can choose an arbitrary time system and align life in the station to it.
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What about using years, months, and days with metric prefixes? When combined, the terms with larger units (not the units themselves) would be rounded to the nearest multiple of the smallest unit.
FWIW, here are exact definitions of the units (C is the center, P is a point on the surface):
* Year: cycle of $m\angle C\_\text{earth}C\_\text{sun}P\_\text{sun}$ (the position of the earth relative to the sun)
* Month: cycle of $m\angle C\_\text{moon}C\_\text{earth}P\_\text{earth}$ (the position of the moon relative to the earth)
* Day: cycle of $m\angle C\_\text{sun}C\_\text{earth}P\_\text{earth}$ (the position of the sun relative to the earth)
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The [International Fixed Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar) is superior to the Gregorian Calendar is superior to the Gregorian Calendar in many ways. There are 13 months that have 28 days each so none of that 30/31 point alternation. Each date has the same day each year (e.g. November 23rd will always be a Monday). It does have a year day at the very end of the year that technically doesn't belong to any standard day of the week.
Overall, the International Fixed Calendar would be easier to deal with from both a human and computing perspective.
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Designing a single isolated culture isn't too difficult. There appear to be [12 aspects](https://quizlet.com/18587230/12-aspects-of-culture-flash-cards/) of culture that need to be described or accounted for, which isn't too hard without a history. Some of these aspects are directly tied to environment while others are not. Just like with governments, it's possible to just pick a few attributes for a basic culture then run with it. However, I'd like to make a longer, more complex history of my culture and want it to be done in a believable way.
What principles or patterns can I apply to the cultural evolution of the cultures I create to increase their plausibility? Are there any common patterns of cultural changes and how they made those changes?
This is also a [worldbuilding-resources](/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources "show questions tagged 'worldbuilding-resources'") question so it may be easier to just point me towards a particularly good book that covers this topic then that's fine too.
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*Seriously…how have we never created an anthropology tag in 2+ years…anyways*
## **Step 1: Define the culture’s state.**
The first step is to pick a point in time and define the culture as it exists in that time.
You can go about this a few ways. You can pick a time in the past, perhaps a golden age where things flourished and there is a lot more culture-y stuff.
When people have more spare time they take more time for the arts, sciences and things like philosophy and inventing. This would be my suggested route if it fits into your timeline.
On the flip side you could always choose very early tribal times and get the basis of culture from the source, or frankly you could pick anywhere on the timeline, totally up to you, in the end you do the same amount of work, it just depends on how you want to pursue it.
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**To define the culture at whatever moment in time you choose, start with the list, yours is pretty good but missing a few things and at times redundant in my opinion so I both elaborated and consolidated**
*Keep in mind that these items overlap and you should make sure they are internally consistent.* For example a continent spanning middle ages empire is going to need fairly advanced communication techniques, so chiseling the written word into stone...probably not going to cut it...get it :D
* **Tools/Technology:** Pretty strait forward. What tech is at your disposal? As an example the evolution of tech allowed for the democratization of information which has changed culture in many many ways.
* **Language(s)/Communication:** How do your people communicate? Is there one language or many? Are these aliens? Can they rock some telepathy? A telepathic species could arguably be less violent amongst their own due to shared emotions/history.
* **Customs and Traditions:** Folktales, shaking with the right hand, pre-organized religion spiritual stuff, tales, fables etc). This stuff is really fun to work on, figure out what is important to your people, be it a tradition, resource, or ideals and come up with a folktale about a hero (or villain). Who do parents say is hiding under the bed?!
* **Arts and Recreation:** Painting, writing, sculpture, music, fashion etc. etc. What do people do for fun? Is there a card game old folks play, or a violent sport for young men to prove themselves, do they sing around bonfires or listen to stories by an elder?
* **Shelter/Architecture:** How things are designed and why, resource availability, special buildings that use rare resources?
* **Values/Morals/Religion:** What guides what is right and wrong. This is a great one for shifting culture over time...
* **Artifacts:** The really fancy stuff that becomes important over time…no one cares about the mundane stuff). Named weapons, crown jewels, holy texts are just a few examples.
* **Knowledge:** The sum of all learning. This can result in places like the Great Library of Alexandria. How is that knowledge proliferated to the next generation, is it share or controlled?
* **Government:** Consider both tradition and practice. In the US the tradition and the execution are not the same for example. Make sure you know why that form of government versus something else.
* **Food:** Life revolves around food. So does culture. Think about all the holidays we have…they are almost without exception reasons to have a feast.
* **Warfare:** Are your people pacifists, a wild horde, honorable citizen soldiers, rogue assassins? Do they go to war and why? Once at war, how do they behave?
**There are obviously more facets and more details than can be written here under each item, get as detailed as you need.**
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## Step 2: Defining events and gradual change
So, now you have your baseline. How do you go about making updates and changes? Well, you need history...or future...y
*Point is without the overarching history of your world you can't really make your cultural evolution internally consistent.*
If you don't have a history written you do have the option to make the changes from one cultural point in time to another and then define the history in between to make it plausible.
**Pick a chronological direction:** You can go forward in time, backward in time, or first one then the other. It doesn't really matter. In the example of the golden age maybe your story takes place later in time but you also want to go into the origins of the culture, in this case you would work from the middle and go both directions. I would suggest working backwards first, then do the future states.
**Define events and general shifts:** Change can take place gradually or abruptly, though usually things are simmering underneath the proverbial surface for a long time when it comes to the abrupt stuff.
Create a list of all the things of import that happen over a certain stretch of time. I would suggest not making the points you define less that 75 or so years apart...culture tends to change slow.
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So to put this is math form. You have this formula. **A(C)=B**
Where A is the baseline, C is the change and B is the end-state.
You need to define either A and B, or A and C. Then you simply logic the third item into place.
Identify what aspects of culture each event impacts, or what events would cause a shift from A to B and then its time for storytelling...not world building.
**Note:** If you have more than one culture interacting in this world define the baseline of each for the same point in time. The history/end state part gets a whole lot harder as you have to de-conflict but if you define the baseline well enough you should be able to take any particular event and picture how the culture in question would respond.
I would not suggest the 'define two points in time and fill in the history method when multiple cultures are involved...tough to come up with common events when you have to connect a bunch of pieces.
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I think a few key things are missing from the list of 12, and another few things are represented but not called out explicitly in the list.
Also, the list is a somewhat confusing mix of tangibles (tools/clothes) and intangibles (religion/arts). The 'intangibles' are aspects that can very between cultures that otherwise inherit the same list of tangible factors.
Stuff like government can be listed as a tangible or intangible depending on how mechanistic your approach to the various -isms of government is.
I would suggest to separate the list into two axes one with the tangibles and one with intangibles, and reduce/merge the list of 12 mainly tangible items to keep it manageable.
On that basis, here are the most important missing tangibles:
* Climate. This is a big deal since it affects diet, sedentary or nomadic lifestyle, migration etc.
* Population Density. This is the other big deal item - I will claim that dense populations give rise to more cultural complexity and faster cultural evolution. Look at early china versus early europe. In 400 BC in China you had the massive Warring States period giving rise to works like Sun Tzu's 'Art Of War' and massive armies. Nothing similar in sparsely populated europe. Population density is also related to climate.
The main missing intangible is myth. This falls under 'traditions' and 'language' but in terms of worldbuilding is perhaps more important than either. Tolkin said about the Esperanto effort that it would fail because it was a language without myths. Many cultures share a common past event like a flood/deluge that are interpreted in different ways.
A cultures myths derive its moral values. Myth differences between cultures can be quantified according to relative importance of different myth archetypes - which in turn will define stuff like family values and the role of men vs women. Cultures sharing mythic archetypes like 'the flood' (indo-eurpoean culture) and those that don't share them (the mesoamericans didn't have a flood myth of the same importance) will be different as a result, all else equal.
Basically, the 'list' seems to me to be derived from a similar line of thinking that generated the Civilisation series of computer games, which may leave the world builder in danger of producing a somewhat formulaic set of cultural tropes.
The list really ought to be a two or three dimensional hierarchical structure that allows experimentation with the effects of varying a single tangible or intangible factor and that attempts to define those variables which have the most cultural impact and relegate those that represent tinkering to the lower levels.
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I would also consider changes throughout your culture's history. Cultural changes often shift dramatically over a short period of time because of cataclysms.
For example, if your farming community is invaded and conquered by a militaristic community, the resulting culture would have elements of both. Perhaps the symbols of the farmers would begin, for the wealthiest, to be made of the materials brought there by the warriors.
Layering different levels of history will bring depth and nuance to your world. I would decide on several different moments where "something changed", and then really think about specifics. How, specifically, did that dramatic change affect your world?
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Frankly, this is a huge topic which I don't think anyone can do justice here. Which I guess is why you ask for references! Nonetheless, let's have a go.
I would venture that the most important thing to remember is that cultures are a product, first and foremost, of their geography. Geography provides the resources, abundances and scarcity, and texture of the society. You're going to have to put a lot of effort into grasping the geographic and climactic causes, likely to influence specific outcomes.
Take for instance the [Little Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age). This period, from the 1300s to 1800s, has been alleged to have produced various quirks of history that had profound long term consequences.
One argument I heard went that it led to northern European architecture and family structure changing. Because it was decidedly colder, people lived closer together. This manifested in upstairs-downstairs master-servant arrangements, as the upstairs was warmer than the downstairs and everyone had to have their living and sleeping rooms built around the main chimney stack. This thus changed attitudes and began to stratify society more between upper and lower classes.
Another more robust example is the effect the little ice age had on Russia's fate. At the time Muscovy was just a peripheral backwater bordering wilderness. This had been not very profitable, as it is those empires at the centre of major trade routes; rivers, and seas, which can monopolise defensive positions to become major ports, and thus rich cultures. That's typical of Carthage, Athens, Rome, Alexandria, etc.
But when Europe got very cold all of a sudden (the Thames in London froze over completely) demand for fur rose, and suddenly Russia had a resource everyone wanted. In order to increase production the Tsar sent soldiers and mercenaries eastwards, literally outgunning the local descendants of the Mongol horde; who still fought with swords and bows, killing them, and importantly taking their furs and hunting grounds, which were sold westwards. The income and territorial expansion together were foundational to the creation of the Russian empire.
Incidentally, it has been argued that because the Russian empire didn't have any natural defences between its heartland and its rivals, it developed (and still has) a paranoid and aggressive attitude to its neighbours in order to feel safe.
The evolution of cultural ideas is a little more chaotic, as major events like the protestant reformation, spread of Islam, etc, are not down to geography. Other things, like the arrival of the industrial revolution, most definitely are. Without wood and coal it would not have been possible in Britain.
However the way culture develops from certain ideas certainly is again, geography dependent. Consider Apartheid South Africa. The racial ideology of the Boers has been said to have been rooted in the Calvinist faith of their ancestors, but why did the protestant Dutch who remained in the Netherlands become one of Christianity's most progressive churches, whilst the religion of the Boers turned into one of the most regressive? Both shared a common ideology founded in Calvinist pre-destination (everything is as God wills is, free will does not exist).
The Netherlands became a major trading empire, and their homeland became a cosmopolitan centre of trade and art. In contrast, the Boers fled to settle one of the most remote parts of the world at the time, fleeing further into the African continent as moderate English settlers arrived on the coast.
In this cultural vacuum of religious fundamentalism, they viewed the world through a literalist interpretation of the Old Testament and pre-destination - that is, they were the new Israelites who had to fight their way through those who were not God's chosen people. And, of course, the reason the native Africans were so lacking technologically was because God wills it. This culture was only possible through cultural isolation, again, dependent on geographical context. Which explains the radical difference between the two Calvinist cultures.
It should also be little surprise that the protestant reformation saw the establishment of new state churches in kingdoms which had previously been primitive backwaters, but by the 1500s were attempting to assert themselves, in Europe and the wider world. The political and economic centre of gravity in Europe was shifting from the Mediterranean south to the Baltic North, with England, Sweden, Germany, Russia. Religion is often an expression of politics, and so it was so then. And subsequently the art and religious styles of the new movers and shakers developed in opposition to the old ways.
So... in conclusion: geography, geography, geography.
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I was thinking about what you are asking. It got me thinking about history, and working backwards through the earliest recorded history and how many cultures had a common beginning, really most can be traced that way. But its interesting to see how common ancestry separated for a variety of reasons, ranging from just not enough room for livestock to coexist, to minor disagreements, all the way to full on rebellion to a common set of standards. Sometimes it resulted in a peaceful separation, and other times a hostile or even violent parting of ways. And in one circumstance that sticks out in my mind, the inability to understand or otherwise communicate and therefore not able to cooperate has been a big cause for people to scatter and make their own way in the world. I would just have fun with it, examine the way personalities and body language behave and how it affects others and just create. :)
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I think an important step in cultural evolutions that shouldn't be overlooked is the chance of regression or reversal. This is seen many times over in history, normally after some "event" such as the Roman departure from Britain, and would definitely add a natural complexity to any fictional world. And it doesn't have to be a huge post-apocalyptic return to the dark ages, subtle steps backwards could leave you lots of room for explained or unexplained nuances and eccentricities in your world. Enjoy weaving.
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Polytheism was a common form of religion in ancient times. People believed that different gods lived and controlled various parts of nature (ie the sun, the moon, thunderstorms), and praying to these gods gave them a sense that they had control over their lives.
In modern and scientifically advanced societies, polytheism is not regularly practiced. It seems that the most prominent religions today either circle around one omniscient god (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) or no god at all (atheism, Buddhism). My reasoning behind this is that we have scientific evidence that explains most of the natural processes to us (like the water cycle, the rotation of the earth around the sun, etc.), but the one question we can't answer is where we came from, hence the one god that created everything.
I need a reason why a scientifically advanced future society would begin to worship multiple gods again. Does anyone have any good ideas for why this would happen?
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NOTE: My original idea is something that veers from the current Catholic idea of saints. Each saint is a patron of something different, and people pray to them to pray to God on their behalf. Maybe sometime in the future, this idea gets warped and people begin to pray to the saints as individual gods?
I am not completely satisfied with this idea though, and would love to hear other ideas.
NOTE 2: Kingledion pointed out that Hinduism is a modern religion that is semi-polytheistic. From my vague understanding of Hinduism, the belief is that there is one god that takes on many forms ([see here](https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/16708/why-take-different-avatar-each-time)). I suppose I was looking for a truly polytheistic religion and not some blend between monotheism and polytheism.
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This community could, for example, worship specific scientific concepts.
Let's say, that they know the equations governing the curvature of space-time (General Relativity). Present day scientist say, that is a working model of many phenomenon, verified by experiment, mathematically consistent... So they accept it as true (or at least as a very useful hypothesis). But, in many branches of physics, they are trying to discover always more and more fundamental theories, explaining the lesser ones with the minimal amount experimentally set variables. (for example elementary particles.)
But in the scientipolyteist culture, laws would be stated to be true due to their own God. Doing scientific research would be considered sacred activity. The more elegant and broadly valid is a theory, the more powerful is it's God. The God of Newtonian Mechanics, ensuring the validity of it, would rule over the Demigod of Kinetic Gas Theory, but be subject to the Goddess of Relativity. Some of the chief theologians would suspect, that an even more powerful entity, The God of the Theory of Everything exists, while others would claim, that the Quantum Lord is to be worshipped at the first place.
And so on in chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics ...
Especially beautiful and exciting phenomenon would be viewed as the blessing of the given god to those, who are wise enough to understand the theory in question.
Of course, their names won't be derived from the present day names of the scientific concepts, but would be true personal names, just like they would be personified. The God of Evolution might would be imagined as cruel but wise, the God of Cosmic Inflation as secretive and patient, while the the Quantum Lord as unpredictable and cunning, the Goddess of Mathematical Proof as a benevolent but strict mother, rewarding good proofs but punishing incorrect ones. The God of Calculus would be helpful and friendly, but also quick to rage, and smash you with unsolvable integrals. The God of Protein Synthesis would be freak and punctual, making mess from the smallest mistake.
The research centers would be the churches and monasteries, and new ideas would be placed on altars and written into encyclics, instead of scientific journals. Peer review would be replaced by synods. This would be useful for the society, since there would be no need to maintain both scientific and religious institutes.
The Gods will have family and emotional relationships with each other, making easier for students to understand the dependencies and links between the concepts. The spouse of the Quantum Lord will be the Electromagnetic Lady, their son will be the Lesser God of Photons, while their daughter the Goddess of Heisenberg Schrödinger Atomic Model, whose vassal will be the Demigod of the Periodic Table. And so on...
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# Why does Hinduism not meet your requirements?
From Hinduism.SE, neither the [monotheistic nor polytheistic](https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/117/is-hinduism-strictly-polytheistic-or-are-the-gods-considered-to-be-eventually-on?newreg=67709d246678460aa602d4806ca43fd9) labels properly fit Hinduism. You can read the various answers yourself; some answers say it is strictly monotheistic, some say it is both, some say it is neither.
However, from an 'outsiders' perspective, one in which all religious practice can be classified as atheism, monotheism, polytheism (aka, Victorian-era social science), Hinduism fits pretty clearly into the polytheism label.
If Hinduism does infact meet your requirements, then India today is basically the country you are talking about (though there are plenty of Muslims and other religious minorities in India).
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## Because God or Gods are actually real.
Just because some people assume in our modern world that objective proof is lacking, does not prove (or dis-prove) the existence, or lack thereof, of a God or Gods. Also, in your proposed society, there may be reasons for faith, or even proof(s) discovered which are not available to a modern-day type society.
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Lio Elbammalf beat me to it, but maybe I can expand his answer a little bit.
As he said, multiple gods don't have to refer to natural forces... For example, in Ancient Greco-Roman mythology you did have the god of thunder (Zeus / Jupiter), the god of the seas (Poseidon / Neptune), the god of fire (Hephaistos / Vulcano) and the goddess of crops (Deméter / Ceres), but you also had the god of war (Ares / Mars), the goddess of wisdom (Athena / Minerva) and the goddess of love (Aphrodite / Venus).
What does your society value? Even on a highly scientific society, there are abstract and subjective things that are valued and that fall beyond the realm of pure Science. Those things are not valued the same by all people, so multiple gods appear.
So people are highly advanced scientifically... but some use their technology for conquest, others for cultural flourishing, and others to attain the maximum of hedonic pleasure. So, the first ones may worship a god that embodies war and conquest, like Mars. The others would worship, respectively, an Appollo and a Bachus.
Are there ideological disputes on your highly scientific society? Why not create gods to worship that embody the political parties at play? Capitalism versus Socialism? A god of Money that rivals with a god of Kingly Power!
What about death? "Oh, they are so scientifically advanced that they won't believe on an afterlife!" Really? Is this afterlife scientifically provable? Maybe there will be a Hades somewhere to be worshipped too! And if there is a Hades, why not a goddess of Life?
On the long run, there would have to be an Athena-like goddess that would embody Reason.
So many gods to chose from!
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Also note that you are implying a theology that relies on a "god of the gaps" kind of argument. Meaning, the gods were imagined to answer phenomena for which there was no scientific explanation at the time, and as long as people fill the gaps on scientific knowledge, the religion will retreat back and back.
But theology is more sophisticated than that. Many religions believe in God, not because they don't know how to explain things, but because the explanation is so beautiful and complex, that it must imply a god. If there are natural laws, there must be a lawmaker or a lawgiver. If there is orderliness on the universe, maybe it's because there is a watchmaker behind it, fine tuning it. The medievals knew how to predict the orbits of the planets, but that didn't stop them from imagining that the planets were pushed by the angels.
Just, instead of a single watchmaker, make those people worship several of them. B. Lorenz's answer shows you how you can do this.
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Others have described the optimistic scenario: i.e., in this world gods are real, and people are right to believe in them.
But there is also the pessimistic scenario: There's a buck to be made promoting one god or another, and people are gullible. This could be true even in a society that respects science and technology.
Here on Earth in the 21st century, there is just as much nonsense on the Internet as there is truth, and there's no reason to think that some alien civilization would be any different. And if believing in various gods works for people, then that's what they will do.
Just look at homeopathy. It's utter nonsense, and yet we as a society throw away billions of dollars a year on it.
Take a basic tendency toward belief that these people (and humans) have, and add to that a few nice, big, fancy temples that inspire awe. Add to that a regional aspect to various deities that encourages jingoism, and even a third-tier god will have some rabid fans.
Maybe these people believe in their gods because that is just what they evolved to do. And then there are others who stand to profit from it and promote it.
They would suffer from the same cluster of biases and misperceptions that cause people to fall for various forms of pseudoscience in our culture, such as confirmation bias, pareidolia, cultural pressures, etc.
**TL;DR:** It's all about the big temples. Love 'em....the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.....AT&T Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play.... these things are so amazing, there must be a higher power!
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**Japan**.
The native religion is known as Shintoism, and is essentially an ancient polytheistic religion which, until relatively recently, also included a God-Emperor. Buddhism is also widely practiced there, and many people in practice follow what you could call a hybrid Shinto-Buddhist religion. However, people tend not to actively practice their religion much and consider themselves agnostic (despite practicing many religious observances).
If you want a devout following for your story, you would need to write some sort of Shinto revival into the story. The difficulty is exporting it from Japan (unless you want your story set in Japan, of course).
Edit: Of course, if all you wanted was evidence that it is plausible for a scientifically advanced future society to follow a polytheistic religion, this is it.
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By your own reasoning... every unexplained phenomenon suggests a god. Therefore...
# The Pantheon of Unknown
I am the god of Dark Matter who binds the galaxies together, eternally opposed by the god of Dark Energy who drives the galaxies apart.
I am the god of Sentience. I awaken thought from base matter, for, behold, it turns out thought is more than Turing-complete computation.
I am the hermaphroditic god of Wave/Particle Duality. Without me, all things would be either one thing or another.
And I, greatest of them all, am the god of the Next Question. Pray to me each time you think your Standard Model is complete, and I will reveal your next great mystery.
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You ask "why a scientifically advanced future society would begin to worship multiple gods again". The simplest answer:-
## Because they never stopped worshipping multiple gods
There is no inherent advantage to monotheism over polytheism. It does not provide a better explanation of why the world works as it does, where we came from, or where we go when we die. Whilst monotheism happened to become the dominant form of religion in Western Europe and the Middle East, this was by no means inevitable. Polytheistic Germanic tribes demolished the monotheistic Roman Empire. Polytheistic Nordic tribes came close to ruling England, which would have had profound consequences for European history. The Mongol Empire which ruled most of Europe and Asia for some time allowed full religious freedom, but Genghis Khan himself was a polytheist (or possibly a pantheist).
As scientific understanding improves, the "god of the gaps" syndrome inevitably appears, except in this case of course it would be "gods of the gaps". Eventually any religion would be left in the situation which all rational religious people are today. They believe in the existence of their god(s), and they believe that their religion contains the truth about souls and an afterlife, but they do not believe that their god(s) will make any direct intervention in the world. (Yes, this does mean that belief in religious miracles is irrational, by the definition of rationality. Sorry, not sorry.)
The current state of religion, and its inevitable future, is that it is a social construct. It provides a framework for people to interact, and possibly some guidance on morality, but which religion anyone happens to follow is an artifact of historical happenstance. Think of it like the British monarchy - it exists because this is how the country was traditionally run, and it has a great depth of history, but ultimately it does not have any real effect on people's lives and it could be removed without any serious impact. If a world dominated by a polytheistic religion reached the same social point as us, it is inevitable that scientific and moral thinking would place that polytheistic religion in the same context as we currently place our monotheistic religions.
Of course, today there are religious leaders who through various means have been pulling people back to monotheistic religions. This is often not a good thing, because those religious leaders often have ulterior motives which are generally bad for their followers (Jim Bakker for an example of simple greed, or Jim Jones or David Koresh for rather less healthy examples). Also frequently these groups' beliefs conflict with scientific evidence, which can create unnecessary social divisions.
And of course there are a number of places in the world which are run by religious police. The history of post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment Western Europe shows that this is unlikely to continue forever, although inevitably it will take time for this to run its course, and the results will not be pretty. The actions of ISIS are fundamentally no different from the actions of the Inquisition.
In general though, today religion is less significant to people's daily lives, and this trend is only likely to continue. It seems unlikely that religion will ever completely die out, but the downward trend is visible and indisputable. With this in mind, your polytheistic society will inevitably follow the same trend. People will continue swearing "Loki!" when they hit their thumb with a hammer, but they won't literally believe in Loki's existence.
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Your question presupposes that scientific advancement and believe in god(s) are exclusive concepts. No doubt, this is a widely popular conclusion. However, atheism, and the absence of god in our universe, are not the intellectual high ground theories they claim to be.
First, science is no closer to disproving the existence of gods than it is to proving the existence of gods. We have no stronger data today on the validity of atheism than we did 1000 years ago. Our understanding of natural systems has evolved enough that we can push the sources of causation in the forces around us further and further back. This process has made people doubt, time and again, the accuracy of religion in understanding the nature of our universe.
First, it was a god that caused storms, then it was the weather, then it was the pressure differences of hot and cold air, then precipitation etc. If you continue on this pattern, atheists claim, you will eventually eliminate god from the question. However, the truth of the matter is that the more we have learned, the less we understand. These perplexing questions have gotten deeper and harder to explain scientifically rather than easier. It is clear beyond all doubt that our universe is a highly complex system far beyond anything we could create ourselves even on the smallest of scales.
Mankind is a god if its world. We create machines, tools and processes to achieve specific goals. Nature is replete with such machines, tools, and processes as well. The only difference being complexity. Our most complex systems are still monumentally simplistic compared to nature's most simple systems. We are perfectly content with priding ourselves as creators of our systems, yet we seem very reluctant to assign the possibility of a creator to nature's systems despite their awe inspiring complexity. If you magically appeared on earth far after mankind is gone, you would immediately know that a car is not some random assortment of atoms. It is a machine. The same exact statement could be made about trees though the tree will be far harder to dissect and understand due to its complexity.
Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, are followers of a religion as well. To believe there is no god or to believe there is a god are both beliefs lacking in scientific rigor. Both sides make statements they cannot back up. As such, it is natural for a modern society to have religions based on beliefs of all kinds.
There still could be a god of trees, water, stars, etc. Science has no proof that there isn't. Indeed, these systems could be managed by a force (deity) that ensures they happen when, where, how and why they should. We can issue burden of proof on whichever side is convenient, but the reality still shows that anybody who takes a stand is wrong until proven otherwise. Unlike science, religion makes no professional claims about being scientifically accurate, so the onus of proof is not a prerequisite.
It is entirely reasonable that a highly advanced society has belief in gods. The foundation of their believe may differ as too do their perceived sources of divine expression, but they would have developed such a religion for many reasons. Two such reasons are 1) They are still not close to disproving a god, and the forces at work have made such beliefs convenient and popular. 2) Perhaps they have proved the existence of gods though the form of those gods may not be at all what is familiar to us. In both cases, the compatibility of scientific achievement and religion is perfectly achievable so long as the background is sufficiently developed.
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If your society is thousand years advanced from us and their technology is helping them heavily , they can put their faith in it's creators. For example in **Brave New World** their god's name is *Ford* because Henry Ford has found the assembly line, so they can produce humans in great masses. Just implement the same idea to other areas as well.
* In Alan Turing we trust, who gave us computers.
* In Hippocrates we trust , who gave us modern medicine.
* In Einstein we Trust, who gave us unlimited energy(nuclear)
* In Steve Jobs we Trust, who gave us.. you know.. things
Your community thousand years advanced means that they don't have enough information for these people, so their life is mystery to them. That way they can not **humanize** them easily.
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>
> My reasoning behind this is that we have scientific evidence that
> explains most of the natural processes to us (like the water cycle,
> the rotation of the earth around the sun, etc.), but the one question
> we can't answer is where we came from, hence the one god that created
> everything.
>
>
>
The monotheisms you list were all first practiced by people who (for the most part) simultaneously believed that the Sun rotates around the Earth. So I don't think it's true *at all* to say that people are monotheistic because they're scientific. Over a millennium passed in Europe between mass conversion to Christianity under Constantine and mass conversion to heliocentrism "under" Copernicus. Even longer until Newton "explained" the motion that Copernicus and Kepler described. So we mustn't imagine that we don't have a separate Sun god because Copernicus (or even Aristarchus) removed the need for one. The reasons for monotheism, and for it succeeding over polytheism in the societies where that has happened, lie elsewhere.
So from the POV of fiction I don't think you have anything to worry about on this score. If you want to explain why a previously monotheistic society switches to polytheism then that will indeed take some explaining, but it's not science that's in the way, it's the fact of a strongly ingrained social tradition changing.
Personally I'd go for some combination of multi-culturalism, synthetic religions (in both senses of the word), and wildly heterodox "personal spirituality" outside the supervision of a strict religious hierarchy, as capable of explaining pretty much any and all religious practices you want to write.
Or take the example of Constantine, and say that society converted to polytheism because a charismatic leader came to power on the back of support from and for a particular religion, and establised that as the state religion for all or most of the known world. Empire may be unpalatable, but it isn't unscientific!
But this then turns the question into, "how can a society change its religion?, or "why do scientific socities practice any religion at all?". Your specific question, I think, is about an obstacle that doesn't really exist, so all you need to do to answer it is remove the obstacle from your fiction.
Even working from the position that monotheism is successful because it's *correct*, which I don't hold myself but I know many people do, I think one could interestingly describe a scientific and monotheistic society that becomes polytheistic because the majority is gravely in error and falls to temptation and deceit. They could be worshipping demons and false idols, after all, and still believe themselves to have a truly polytheistic religion.
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As you said, the disappearance of multiple gods as we advanced was because they were gods of things we began to understand. I think rather than gods of material, calculable things you would need, instead, gods of more philosophical/abstract things.
Gods of different emotions, Gods of ideas, creativity, luck. There have been gods of these things in the past but they were also gods of crops and rain and so forth.
I think there is always a part of us that wants there to be reasons behind these things too but we can't see it.
Basically you want Gods of things that can't be fully rationalized.
This could work for the saints, for example, if you said they each represented certain aspects of human emotion and were said to translate them for the one god. So if you told a certain saint of your troubles in love he would know all the was to know of understanding that emotion and translate it for the God who is so distant from humans.
This way they could deviate into their own separate deities as time goes on.
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They could view much of there mythology as metaphors or a incomplete man's interpretation of the workings of a God.
"We once belived that Zeus threw down lightning to destroy his enemies, but know we know that actually Zeus creates negative and positive charges in the air in order to make lightning. "
So the gods would still be associated with the forces of nature but know it would be understood that they do so using the natural laws of the universe. It could even be argued that they created theses natural laws.
This belief would not impede on science in fact study how the gods run the universe could even became a sacred act.
In general religions do not impede on scientific discovery, they impede on scientific discovery that contradicts there understanding of doctrine. When this happens they either claim that a scientific discovery must not be true or they change there understanding of doctrine to fit this new modle.
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## 1. Social Sciences influence religion
One possibility that I don't think has been proposed: A scientific understanding of **the social nature of humans, combined with a continued belief that God(s) created humans in his/her/their image**, might lead people to the conclusion that God must be multiple. That is, if a single human-type omnipotent being existed, your society might believe that that Being would *inevitably **create** peers* to stave off human-type loneliness. (This [basic human need for companionship](https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200307/the-dangers-loneliness)1 is apparently the [plot of a current movie](http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/12/24/the-passengers-trailers-all-hid-a-twist-that-ruins-the-movie-from-the-start/#6aa2c3d673b6)2; science in first link, spoilers in second.)
## 2. [Religious syncretism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism#Religious_syncretism)3
Alternatively, religious tolerance and cultural relativism could lead to a situation where various religions, including monotheistic ones, have been amalgamated into a single pan-theistic religion, where multiple gods from multiple faiths are now given credence.
This would be especially likely if the culture is fairly cosmopolitan—for example, if humanity split off into space colonies that lost track of one another for a while and developed individual religions, but is now once again reunited through the miracle of fft travel and/or communication.
Under this scheme, perhaps not all individuals worship all the gods equally, but they acknowledge all gods' validity even while being most devoted to a particular god or set of gods.
Note that this is not that different from how some religions have dealt with competing philosophies over the centuries—e.g. [ancient Egyptians incorporated deities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_deities#Origins)4 from neighboring pantheons, [early Catholicism allegedly co-opted some Pagan deities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_saints_and_feasts)5 as Saints, [Islam considers Jesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam)6 to have been a prophet, and [many modern Americans agree to some sort of sentiment equating various religions](https://www.barna.com/research/what-americans-believe-about-universalism-and-pluralism/)7.
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1 "The Dangers of Loneliness" *Psychology Today* 2003
2 "The Passengers' Trailers All Hid a Twist that Ruins the Movie from the Start" *Forbes* 2016
3 "Religious Syncretism" Wikipedia
4 "Ancient Egyptian Deities: Origins" Wikipedia
5 "Christianization of Saints and Feasts" Wikipedia
6 "Jesus in Islam" Wikipedia
7 "What Americans Believe About Universalism and Pluralism" Barna Group 2011
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**Planets are gods**
this one is a bit out there. Say that somehow all planets are sentient beings and can telepathically communicate with the populations living within their magnetosphere.
You can describe away earth's monotheistic religions by explaining that was the planet directing humans but once they leave earth and discover more then each planet would be a diety, if to a small portion of the population.
This would probably continue until we discover how they are sentient and spread across the universe, or the death star starts to blow them up.
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>
> My reasoning behind this is that we have scientific evidence that explains most of the natural processes to us (like the water cycle, the rotation of the earth around the sun, etc.), but the one question we can't answer is where we came from, hence the one god that created everything.
>
>
>
I don't believe that to be true.
That monotheistic religions dominate some regions today is because a single Abrahamic religion dominated some regions thousands of years ago. (Remember, Christianity, Islam, Judaism have a common origin.) I don't see that it has anything to do with science; it's just how our cultures happened to develop.
For the same reason, I see nothing preventing a different society developing differently, essentially just out of pure chance. Indeed, several advanced societies on Earth are "still" dominated by polytheism.
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## The gods represent differing ideals
Your question relies on the notion that societies believe in gods to explain natural phenomena that they cannot explain. While this has been one function of religion, it is hardly the only one; in fact it is probably the least important of the reasons religion exists. (This theory, that religion exists primarily to explain unexplained phenomena, may have been started during the Enlightenment period specifically to discredit the need for religion in modern times.)
The primary function of religion is to organize society, to symbolize its ideals and goals beyond the base drives of the individual. By its very nature, science cannot be used to determine fundamental goals, it can only help determine the best means of accomplishing those goals once they are decided already.
A society may not necessarily have uniform goals or ideals; different people may opt for different views of right and wrong. These different sets of ideals and values can be represented by different deities.
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Because gods exist.
In your setting, you can choose to have a religion that has been objectively demonstrated to be true. Final Fantasy XV provides a recent example of a story with modern technology and gods who are very active and widely revered. Pokemon is a setting with futuristic technology, and many of the legendary Pokemon could be reasonably described as gods. C. S. Lewis wrote a space trilogy about a man who travels to different planets in the solar system and comes face-to-face with major angels and demons on his adventures.
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Because the gods are real, and scientific endeavors stumbled upon them. Some kind of past breakthrough revealed beings which in turn were awakened to your civilization's efforts. These beings have revealed themselves as gods, having perhaps performed miracles and revealing themselves to those individuals that attempt to reach their glory through scientific endeavors. Scientists might then become heralds of the word of these "gods". You can easily leverage this from multiple angles, depending on your own ideas.
For reference, similar, although unique ideas can also be encountered in the following amazing works of fiction:
* [The Godmakers - Frank Herbert (1972)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godmakers_(novel) "The Godmakers - Frank Herbert (1972)")
* [Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson (1988)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_Overdrive)
* [Illium - Dan Simmons (2003)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium_(novel))
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Lots of great comments here and very interesting debates. Being advanced or not in science doesn't take away the existence of god(s) persay. The society is highly advanced but that doesn't take away from the fact that they are highly advanced because of multiple god influence. What if there really is a god of war, a god of water, a god of the sun, of death. By these gods' work, the society has been able to advance to a point of enlightenment and was able to communicate with the gods.
This is counter intuitive because we have always read in every myth and lore that the gods did not want us to know they exist. What if your set of gods DO? What if your set of gods want to play sim city and develop a society that becomes so advanced and so perfect that they are able to communicate and comprehend the intelligence of the gods? What if these gods' goal was to "cultivate" a society to super intelligence so that this society can help the gods solve a complex issue that they are stuck on? Or even more simply, what if this enlightenment and technology allows this said society to see the gods walking around as every day people and the society in turn treats them as if they just saw their favorite celebrity walking down the street? Massive temples and places of worship would still be created to come see their favorite god and in turn these gods heavily interact with the society?
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What's stopping them from doing so? We're a fairly advanced scientific culture, yet we still worship a single god. The Bible makes reference to a creation myth that's demonstrably false (or else God has a really twisted sense of humor), yet we haven't stopped believing in it. Why should it be any different for multiple gods?
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If science were to simultaneously start uncovering undeniable proof of intelligent design (a.k.a. [the babelfish](https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-Babel-fish-in-The-Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy)) while also uncovering proof of the plurality of the creator, such as contradictory physical laws; they might conclude that they not only live in a created universe, but that there are multiple, conflicting Creators, or that then single omnipotent Creator is schizophrenic.
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I understand your point that as we grow to understand our physical universe, the gods created by our ancestors to explain that lack of understanding are no longer worshipped. Though I'm no expert, I suspect our Roman and Greek ancestors stopped worshipping their pantheons because their all-too-much-like-us gods (beings of power but no better moral, ethical, or psychiatric capabilities) not because of scientific advancement per se, but because they rebelled against gods having a reputation for destroying rebels and discovered that nothing happened....
As for modern polytheism, you can look to the Mormons, who believe not only in three gods (the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, as separate individuals), but that individuals worthy of exaltation become gods themselves, godhood being the ultimate inheritance.
And finally, to answer your penultimate question, a scientifically advanced society would worship any god (one or many) for which there was measurable proof of existence. From that perspective your question has no reasonable answer, since religion is a matter of faith rather than proof. (It's worth noting, however, that many people today have worship-level faith in science, not being able to prove for themselves that anything they're told by "experts" (aka, "prophets") is true. From this perspective, our scientifically advanced society is already polytheistic.)
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## Because polytheists won the war
The only reason Judeo-Christian religions are associated with modern society is because Western Europe developed superior military technology and was able to spread its ideology, converting pagans at the end of the sword.
If polytheists had been better at war, their belief system would have dominated the world instead.
Neither system is inherently "better" or "more modern." It is simply a matter of numbers.
In the future, there could be another war, and it could turn out differently.
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A scientifically advanced civilization would come to bridge the gaps between what is considered the metaphysical versus the physical. This gap would be bridged by advancements within the field of quantum mechanics. However, science would ultimately reach its limits in truly explaining reality and what we would be left with would be theories, or schools of thought, which explain specific phenomenon. The true reason behind why none of the theories will ever coalesce into a unified theory would be because reality is an abstraction. That is, everything contained within reality (including us) would simply be manifestations of the abstraction which is reality. Therefore, certain boundary conditions would always apply which would make it near-impossible for us to determine certain truths without any degree of certainty. What can a piece of software ever know of the physical world? Can code exist, or have any meaning in air? Of course, not. Similarly, we would only have theories, which would get very close to certain "truths," but at the same time, nowhere near it, as we exist in a "closed system," outside of which, our understanding and even existence is meaningless. Therefore, the only solace would be reliance on the various aspects of "God."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke
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It depends on how your advanced civilisation interacts with the world. One way of looking at it is that polytheism is often linked to a sense of place. Zeus's manifestation at Olympia was different to his manifestation at Dodona. Many places seem to have been numinous before the god that we associate with them (such as the latecomer Apollo at Delphi). In Europe many caves, springs, wells etc. were associated with saints, who took over the holy nature of the place from the previous gods. You could argue that many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox holy places have much to do with a kind of polytheism (i.e. dedicated to someone/thing holy that is not the single God itself.) That is why Wahabis are deeply suspicious of veneration of place, and have flattened so many of the holy places, such as the prophet's mother's house and why Isis fighters blow up Shia saints' shrines. I think it is quite plausible that an advanced civilisation could have a deep regard for its holy places, long after they saw the gods as the reason for things happening, and any god associated with these places may well be venerated as an embodiment of the place, and whatever story was associated with it.
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## Because we live in a Virtual Reality.
Through decades of advancement in Quantum Physics, we conclude that computer processes reside within the very fabric of our universe - humanity decide a simulation extremely likely.
Post breakthrough, humans start to draw up mechanisms on how such a system might work. Through further investigation, it is thought, our simulation is governed by a series of AI's - each handling a unique process, such as; gravity, weather, cell-division, etc.
Based on our new understandings we start to revisit age-old questions, eg. why do placebo's work? Why is it that through believing one can recover from ill-health, they do? In actuality, micro processes are at work, sculpted by relevant AI's. Prayer (faith, belief) is thought to be nothing more than a filtering system. It helps prioritise tasks amongst vast calculations.
In other terms - prayer resembles pull, push requests. By default, the program works perfectly. But through observational nodes within (or rather 'life') re-factoring from the inside out becomes the most efficient framework for improvement.
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What if this civilization had experienced some sort of event, cosmological in origin, that proved (or seemed to) that our entire universe was the purposeful creation of a group of seemingly all-powerful, omniscient extra-dimensional beings?
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Deities in a scientifically advanced society would mirror knowledge of specific disciplines. One deity may be a brain surgeon, another a lawyer, another an astronaut, another a story teller, etc. They will be the ultimate masters in their discipline and even have supernatural capacities. Each will have their angels. Each will have a nemesis, a devil, with an army demons.
Each deity has something unique to offer. Lower beings, when they can't get what they want will need to ask the deity that can give what they need.
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## Because the definition of "gods" changes.
As time goes on, people could think less and less that "religion" revolves around gods and religions that were created in ancient times, and more and more around intellectual property that was created more recently.
People have an attachment to beloved characters from TV shows, cartoons, books, etc., enough that fandoms have evolved around several of them. This has only become more and more prevalent since the rise of the internet.
Although it's a bit of a stretch, one could say that conventions for various fandoms can act as religious gatherings where the followers of that "religion" meet up to strengthen their faith and have a good time with each other. Although these fandoms aren't considered religions in the present day, perhaps in the future they will be, and at that time the beloved characters could be more than cultural icons.
They might be worshipped as gods. For example, Dr. Who could be the God of Time Travel, Twilight Sparkle the Goddess of Friendship, Captain Kirk the God of Freedom, Bugs Bunny the God of Comedy, Reinhardt as the God of Safety, etc. Although it sounds crazy now, people in the future might look up to beloved cultural icons and "worship" them like the ancient ones worshipped their gods.
A futuristic scientifically advanced community would still have a culture and several cultural icons, which may be who they worship as their gods.
] |
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[
So, this story takes place in the UFS fascist state, in North America. The government is extremely strict on its citizens, and everything the fallen, antiquated United States Of America held dear was erased since the revolution of the 1930s. No freedom of speech or of the press, only one religion is permitted, and everyone is under seemingly constant supervision from the government.
To enforce all the rules, the UFS police patrol the streets, looking out for anyone who looks suspicious. People who speak out go out on permanent “vacations” to Alaska.
In my story, the UFS patrols always travel in groups of 4, sometimes 6 in emergencies. The groups of 4 often stay close together, and never leave each other’s side.
It is important to my plot, but it makes little sense, as splitting the officers up would make much more land controllable. What would be a logical reason to have officers in groups of 4?
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1. **Crime watch/enforcement balance**. Patrol size is always a balance between the ability to see the crime (more smaller patrols is better) and deal with likely crime (large patrol group is better). Size 4 should mean that security situation in this state is worse than in most modern cities, where patrolmen usually go alone or in twos, but better than in a war- or insurgency-affected areas, where a unit less than a platoon may be targeted for an ambush.
2. **Checks and balances**. The government may not even trust its police force to act unsupervised. So, even the smallest team must consist of a leader, a subordinate, an ideological guide and a random member from a different unit who couldn't have conspired with the other three.
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**To ensure loyalty**
A lone policeman can be subverted, bribed, or even carry out seditious activities without any witnesses. Any civilians who do catch them in the act can be compelled into silence, if they don't just dismiss it as "official business" that they shouldn't interfere with. By forcing police to patrol together, and account for any time they spend apart from that patrol, the government can keep much closer watch on its watchers. A corrupt policeman or rebel infiltrator will have a much tougher time hiding their activities. Even if a whole patrol is corrupt and/or traitorous, it will be inherently more difficult for them to operate in a way that conceals it, because they need to be very careful to keep their stories straight - and rotating officers between different patrols will ensure that smaller groups will spend at least some of their time carefully monitored anyway.
Patrol groups also provide social pressure to keep policemen who aren't openly corrupt or traitorous, but might be lax or have rebel sympathies, on the straight and narrow. They see that everybody else is toeing the party line, and they conclude that they ought to, too.
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...doesn't the US Army for example work in "fireteams" of four? Two assault, one support, one leadership/overwatch/sniper?
Perhaps with your enforcement teams (and many fascist and/or authoritarian governments have built their enforcement arms in a militaristic style) you could make up roles for the team based on this - CQB (Close Quarter Battle), Riot, Communications and Coordination, Leadership/Propaganda, etc.
Assigning roles to the four might help make sense, I guess. I also love the ideas presented by other posters ie keeping an eye on each other (distrust is an inherent aspect of authoritarianism cf East Germany and it's Stasi), and four being less susceptible to take-downs by resistance (particularly if your world is populated by a resentful oppressed population, it may be more pertinent for these people to travel in packs in order to simply operate).
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One person can be overwhelmed easily. Two can be taken down by surprise or attacked quickly enough no warning gets out. Three is harder to take down but it's still doable without much if any collateral damage.
Four officers are too large to take out without a bomb or a coordinated attack. And if they are attacked by a group, three can lay down fire while the fourth calls for help, runs for backup, or moves to another position to counter-attack. Also with 4 sets of eyes, two can focus on the disturbance or people, while the other two watch the surrounding area.
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From a worldbuilding point of view, there are lots of possible answers. Many people have already pointed out that a 4 man patrol will be more difficult to subvert and also provide some degree of security against the security forces themselves becoming disloyal.
I will add some slightly different approaches.
1) Full Employment. Although not stated explicitly in the OP, the 1930 time frame for the takeover implies that the "Crash of '29" and the start fo the Great Depression may have been a large factor in the overthrow of the Republican government of the United States. Dictators still need at least the passive support of the population, so rapidly building up police forces (indeed multiple and overlapping police forces for the prevention of any force becoming too powerful) will take large numbers of unemployed men off the streets and put them in positions of authority and certain prestige. Full employment can be claimed by the government as one of their achievements. How they deal with railroads is up to the writer......
2) Corruption. Sad to say, but Socialist governments of all kinds (Fascist, National Socialist, Communist) are terrible at allocating resources and running fully functional and productive economies. In the past, and even to some extent in the present, this can be glossed over by becoming a predatory economy. If there are wars going on in Canada and Mexico to seize resources I would not be surprised. Predatory trade and lending practices, would be more subtle ways of achieving similar results. Since the internal economy is likely broken, the police may have to "supplement" their wages by leaning on small businesses, petty criminals and other marks. A group of four police turning up in your shop once a month to "request" contributions to the benevolent fund (cash only, please) is going to be a bit harder to reject than just one or two. The police may also have competition in this area, so four policemen might ensure that other local gangs simply don't have enough "muscle" to interfere or poach the policeman's territory.
3) Safety in numbers. Since the setup was pretty terrible (stock market crash and a Great Depression), and the present likely sucks as well (a predatory Socialist government which makes grandiose boasts but barely feeds the population), so being a symbol of authority and oppression is *dangerous*. Beat cops are likely targets of rebels, criminal gangs or even shop owners driven to desperation. There may also be rival police or security forces looking for ways to expand their power and territory as well. In this dangerous environment, going out alone or in pairs is just inviting disaster. Four men fit into a squad car with relative ease, and can provide the 360 degree coverage, man and if needed firepower to deal with most threats. Two cars together can bring up the equivalent to a squad, and so on if more power is needed.
So the new government's desire to fully employ people to minimize the effects of the Depression starts the cycle, and the need to survive in a poor and dangerous environment perpetuates this.
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# History
Once upon a time, it would be a cop and his or her partner. Two in a squad car, two walking the beat. That was before radios became available, when police had at best a [whistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle#Joseph_Hudson) and some [fixed call boxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_box).
Then your bad guys came to power, and the party found it necessary to augment the two **career cops** with two **party militia**. This was an uneasy partnership, with the career cops looking down on the thugs and the party militia looking down on the remnants of the old regime.
* It was not seen as politically expedient to break the old teams and partner each career cop with a party loyalist. Many cops had voted for the party, even if they were not in the party militia. A bad idea to "punish" them by breaking teams.
* Those party militia were good at bashing heads, but they were not trained cops. They could not file a traffic accident report, or secure a crime scene, or tell the speed limit for a 50-passenger bus with an 1-axle trailer. They could not replace the second career cop.
* Back then, it was a good idea to have more manpower, to counter the Communist party fighters on the streets.
These days the career cops are all indoctrinated in party values from preschool or earlier, so the party militia is no longer needed to check on them day-to-day.
* The party militia still **exists**, for various reasons. So you have to find things of them to do and demonstrate their loyalty. (Do you remember [Kurt Waldheim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Waldheim#Early_life_and_education), former chancellor of Austria. He joined the [SA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung) equestrian corps.)
* As **weekend warriors**, the party militia are *still* not effective enough to repace one professional cop in the team.
Of course this reasoning depends on numbers. I'm basically arguing that the regime can afford the "normal" number of career cops and match that with an equal number of political appointees.
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In Aviation, the [Finger Four](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-four) is a favoured formation. In a typical military squad - there is also a popular four-man squad (or [Fireteam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireteam) as is called).
This is because of flexibility to enable you to counter situations which are unknown, but allow you to quickly react, group and make formation with little notice and no backup. For instance (numbers denote rank):
* you could have 1 leader and 3 subordinates (1,2,2,2) to engage an equal force, OR
* you could have two squads of two, each with its own leader (1,3+2,4)- useful in an engagement where you need coordination between two groups, OR
* you could split into two independent groups, one to get backup or engage another group (1,3 / 1,4) OR
* you could have a main group of 3, and a diversionary or flanking group of one (1,3,3 + 2)
This has been tried and tested and for patrols far from base, has been a popular choice.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nCpQV.png)
A Finger Four formation patrol.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sG42q.jpg)
A Fireteam patrol.
For your enforcement patrols, 4 not only makes sense when venturing far from base and backup, but there is plenty of advantages to doing so because of unknown threats and your flexibility to deal with them.
You don't see it too much in police patrols in the city because you are always close to backup, and resources are often better spread out, and usually they are just suppressing criminal or uncivil behaviour, so pairs is the norm for police.
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**Economics**
In *Wizard's First Rule* Terry Goodkind posits the Quad as the most economical squad of assassins targeting women who can instill loyalty with a touch. She turns one and he kills one or two of his fellows, leaving the remaining survivor to kill him and the woman. Rarely he kills all three and the mission fails, but the usual outcome is a success.
A similar line of thought exists in your dystopia. If there is a high percentage (real or perceived) of traitors, then patrolling in pairs is ill-advised as the traitor can always kill his partner by ambush. Three is also a dicey proposition, because he can always kill one by ambush leaving a fight between two combat effective soldiers. Given that he'll kill the more dangerous one first the resulting fights would generally be won by traitors.
Four is the most economical unit which guarantees no traitor survives. Killing one squad mate by ambush still leaves the traitor at a 2-1 disadvantage, which is virtually impossible to overcome. In the extremely rare instance where all four members conspire together, one poisons the other three, or the traitor is a ninja and wins a melee you have to send out a larger unit to hunt him down. In every other case you've sent the minimum number of men to start with.
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This is simple to explain. If the facist regime is oppressive and does not trust its own people, then it would not be able to trust its own police force. The police would be people too. Even if the regime were to give them special benefits to encourage loyalty, the officer might still have family who were killed/suppressed, or fall in love with a dissident, or feel sympathy for a crying child being torn from his family.
A lone officer is a weak link. Not only are they more likely to be bribed or corrupted by their own greed/impulses, but they are more likely to be turned against their superiors as they witness the horrors inflicted on the populace first hand. Unlike regular citizens, they cant be shielded from the truth. They are the ones who actually have to do the suppression. Unless the regime exclusively recruits sadistic psychopaths, they will have to watch their police force just as closely as they watch their citizenry.
A pair of partners working together can easily bond and become trusted friends. Or, as the regime would put it, 'co-conspirators'.
But four random officers? The chances of maintaining a secret decrease exponentially with the more people who know it. Someone will question themselves. Someone will alert their superiors. None of the officers will be able to trust the others, knowing that one of their group could be a plant from high command. In this way, even if their loyalty does falter, their fear and compliance is assured.
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**False representation**
In the interest of providing the illusion of diversity, each officer is from one of the "four groups of humanity" as defined by the state. Any complaints of discriminatory policing are countered with "How could it be? One of the officers was \_\_\_\_\_"
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**New recruits**
Being in the police force with unhappy citizens has a high rate of mortality, and, as with a typical dystopian society, there are plenty of "transfers" (who all coincidentally go somewhere where they're unable to be contacted...).
Naturally this means a large portion of the force would be new recruits.
One veteran and one or two trainees would mean just one person who knows what they're doing, which is risky.
Two veterans and one trainee would mean there aren't enough veterans for all the trainees.
Thus four is the smallest reasonable team - two veterans and two trainees gives you a reasonable amount of safety and is a good mix of experience.
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Other than the points mentioned above regarding 4 persons keeping an eye on each other to prevent subversion, there could be a consideration regarding the role of each in the group. It would make sense that a group of 4 would need a senior member that has been with the party the longest and is proven loyal, a person that knows every law and has had all sympathy lost over time. It could also be interesting if the group served as a court in some way. The senior member the judge, one working as prosecution, one defense (a complete joke, of course), and one to mete out punishment. The party themselves could brag about how they don't need expensive prisons.
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With four officers you can cover the four points of the compass while on the move with some overlap for a comprehensive and secure coverage: front, back, left and right. That's being able to deal with extreme danger on the move.
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The government doesn't trust UFS Police so they rely on group mentality that will cause any other three police to kill or tell on any one of their number who steps out of line. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't trust its military so their officers have to do dogma indoctrination sessions every week and has them in large groups. Your fascist government wouldn't trust anyone.
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There is no radio or similar communication technology. In addition -- as other answers have asserted -- it is too dangerous for one patrolman to be alone. Thus, when an incident occurs, two patrolmen stay behind to deal with the situation and two run together to get help.
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Safety in numbers. No need to have any other explanation more than "a bigger group can handle bigger threats."
As a bonus, a dissenter being rounded up by four officers in swat gear looks a hell of a lot more intimidating than just two.
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The number 4 is somehow significant ideologically. Perhaps the semiotics (flags etc) of the government features patterns of 4. As particular numbers are significant is the semiotics of various religions.
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The classic number, from the era of the USSR, is three:
* one who can read
* one who can write
* one to keep an eye on the two suspicious individuals
You could wink at that and extend it.
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**They are two married pairs.**
A pair can look out for each other and be a strong team but partners risk becoming committed to each other at the expense of the mission. Go ahead and let the pair be committed to each other: they are married. If there are two pairs, even if individuals in the one pair decide to go rogue the other pair will call them out.
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Here's an opportunity to flesh out your fascists a bit.
If you look at fascist movements, there is always some counterfactual belief element in them, which serves as both a test of loyalty and as a non-innate distinguishing element between members and the out-group to serve as fig leaf while the "humans have different value" narrative is not yet strongly enough established. The Trump movement will, for now, accept black people as long as they believe that global warming isn't man-made (and because of that, the movement itself is very obviously not racist, and anyone suggesting otherwise is the true racist).
Your fascists seem to have already taken power though, and started purging based on whatever criteria they see fit — just point at some group, define them as subhuman and get the trains rolling. The original myths used during the establishing phase still remain, though. There is nothing to be gained by cleaning them up, because it would be admitting to have been wrong in the past, and they are still useful for social cohesion occasionally.
So, some occult belief in the early days of the fascist movement established the number four as somewhat lucky. There is a [low-hanging fruit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_superstitions#Unlucky_Numbers), but getting an entirely new element in here will both give your fascists a bit of an origin story, and can also serve to set up some later plot element where the fascists suddenly behave in an unexpected and "illogical" way because of their beliefs.
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**Local Knowledge**
In a post-apocalyptic world, there will be loads of local information. Knowledge of who controls one block and who are friendly to the cops. This can be very difficult to learn and introductions may be required to bring a new cop on-board (meet the mob boss to make good relations). If you just have two people and one leaves, then the one that stays must quickly do a transfer to his new partner when she arrives in case something happens to the veteran of the area. This means the knowledge must be transferred quickly and at times will be held by one individual. Having a team of four can be a magical number that minimizes the risk that knowledge will be lost if something happens to a few members of the team.
Besides injury taking someone out of service, it might be the policy on the force to regularly rotate offices so that they don't get complacent with their team. For example, they may all secretly wish to disobey orders, but the penalties keep them "in the closet." Cycling the ranks can make it so that cops never get comfortable with their team to come out and confess they actually don't want to be doing what they are doing. This cycling can cause local knowledge/power to go down, so having teams of 4 can help the transfer.
**One for each limb**
Perhaps when they arrest a rebel, the standard way to do so is for each officer to grab a limb and parade them through the streets.
**Takes 4 to Cover an Area**
Maybe each building is a square, one person goes through the S entrance while the others guard WNE.
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Honestly, groups of four or six are just about the opposite of what a fascist regime would usually want.
* One reason to have larger groups is internal controls and preventing officer misconduct. A conspiracy of 2 is easier to form than a conspiracy of 4 or 6. So, this might make sense if the police aren't trusted by their higher ups.
* Another reason to have groups larger than 2 is that they are outgunned. But, fascist regimes tend to be tightly controlled and never very disorderly so being outgunned shouldn't be an issue. This might make sense in an initial pacification of territory phase, but not in a scenario where control has already been achieved.
* A big disadvantage of groups of 4 or 6 is that the average distance to the nearest cop is larger because units can only be in half or a third as many places. But, this might make sense if most of the territory is pacified and doesn't need patrolling at all, while other parts of the territory are untamed and need heavy displays of force.
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**They have different skillsets/responsibilities**
The patrol of 4 people isn't just any 4 patrolmen, but instead 1 coordinator, 1 who is responsible for weaponry and 2 volunteers. Or some other mix of roles that require different skills or experience.
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# *Quis custodiet ipsos custodes*
You need two people to patrol, and one minder to ensure that they stay loyal. But how can you be sure the minder stays loyal? With another minder, of course. Needless to say, they watch each other and no one knows who is who.
Compare this picture of the North Korean border. Three North Korean soldiers stand guard: two watching each other, the third looking inward to any North Koreans who might try to escape over the border to South Korea.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tx6FK.jpg)
Picture from David Eerdmans~commonswiki. Published under the [GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DMZ_seen_from_the_north,_2005.jpg).
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Another idea with a historical justification; If the UFS is itself a gestalt, formed from an amalgamation of 4 (military?) powers, then each of the may want a member on each patrol. Something very like this occurred with the [international patrol](https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+International+Patrol.-a0435451459) in post war Vienna, as (fictionally) immortalised in the film "The Third Man".
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To all said before I would like add other aspects:
Being dystopian, facist and restrictive state, nearly everyone hate the goverment (more or less) but is afraid to say so, as not only him, but all his relatives and friends could suffer for that. Economy is bad (and could not be good, whatever propaganda says).
Crime is officially hard punished and nearly nonexistent, but really "small fries" are usually left to live, as they can be usefull (obtaining prohibited or normally "out of stock" goods and services - from drugs, prostitution and such to foreing magazines, music, electronics, money ... - not only for "elites" but for potentially everyone) and could be forced to bring info to police and incriminate anyone needed (be it true or false accusation). (Goverment knows, that it cannot have all people totally clean and agreeing from heart, so it wants to have everybody "just a little quilty" and agreeing from fear - and also cooperating in "inteligence/big brother" activities incriminating other to avoid being acused personally - "we know, that you are quilty and you know it too, but prove us, that you are loayal, and we may close eye on you just for today..." - or, if he is not wanted "big criminal was found guilty under paragraph ... and ... and is sentenced to ... and our police have another big victory" )
Police is govermental force and is feared and hated, so there must be a lot of police to have power to suppress visible unrest. And being hated and uderfunded, police can have lot of under-average man/women (where just food and power over civil is sufficient to keep them) but just few above-average (who usually have else better choise or are too individually strong to be reliable and usable - except psychopats, ofc.) And goverment also does not trust police-persons, while it needs big police anyway.
So typical policeman is undertrained, not much educated and politically untrustable, but in big armor and with big batton/gun to be feared as long, as there is with police, in group, but simply crushable, when it goes away. (No Rambo, because it he leaves police and turn sides, he must be destroed fast, by other untrained policeman and could not be self-reliable, nor helped by public).
And so there is need "big group" of policemen to be able overpower say two manually working drunks with muscles and little pub-fighting experience.
(Two drunks are not "mass resistence" so police patrol should be able take them down. Four can be called "organized crime group" or so and more patrols can be called without looking too weak).
So as two drunks are just too few to make group, they could be real risc to only two or three underaverage policeman and it is not acceptable, as police MUST look as strong. So there must be at least four in patroll, in big bad-ass black armor and helmets and such.
And ofc. four can be rotated and kept from conspirating as mentioned all around.
(Goverment have trained squads of real professionals but they are expensive to maintain and keep loyal so it is not street patrol material. There is few uninits in each city and they fight the real crime. And they are also not trusted and so there are few really elite units in each state, even more expensive and even more rare to see and more feared - mostly talked about as matter of urban legends, then as pure mortals)
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A response of fours allows actually for a lower grade of force to be used to make effective any action, such as observation, arrest, detention. If one person must make an arrest and the person being arrested resists then the arresting officer must use much force, if there are four they each only exert a small amount of force. Use of appropriate force is usually covered under law which usually defines that the smallest amount of force necessary to make the action effective (whether it is an arrest, detainment, removal, etc.) is lawful.
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Set in the near future after there is a breakthrough in A.I. research, these robots are able to engage in a conversation with us and even provide consultation in many different areas ranging from medical advice to choosing a soulmate. Despite the fact that all these robots are hardwired to avoid load capacity exceeding 100kg for 60 seconds, they all come with powerful heavy duty motors that can allow a single robot to lift up a 30 ton fire engine for a full minute! What could be a good reason for introducing these talking "forklifts" into our society?
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Because we dont have production lines that build them weaker
We don't need a lot of processing power for something like a greeting card that sings when you open it, yet the chips inside them have been steadily getting better and better. They are basically over engineered for their purpose. The reason? The amount of low-end chips we need on a daily basis is so small that it's just not economical to keep building them, besides improvements on energy efficiency and material savings. With the production capacity for low-end stuff being scaled down and shut down indefinitely, you have to look for the next low-end chip in line to put in.
The components that build your robot are simply the lowest end and most economic. They don't build smaller actuators on economically viable scales to power the arms, legs and torso, and the smaller ones they do have need adaptations to bridge the length of an arm etc. So the manufacturer simply picks the cheapest functional actuator, which with current tech simply means arms and legs capable of supporting 30 tons of weight.
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The "Robots and Public Safety" law of two thousand and *hurfty nurf* was enacted following the Great Earthquake in [insert precarious metropolis here] when it was clear that the scale of the disaster would have been much reduced if there was a greater "heavy lift" capacity available to help clear rubble and search for survivors. A wide variety of humanoid robots were already in place, but their intrinsically safe motor systems limited their usefulness in this role.
By having an "emergency rescue" mode that can be activated in the right circumstances, the army of regular service robots can be pressed into service at a moment's notice to deal with this kind of situation much more quickly. The usefulness of this capability was obvious, and similar rulings were enacted across the world.
Cities and countries in less tectonically exciting parts of the world still benefit from the emergency system when dealing with smaller scale everyday accidents and emergencies. Whilst some claim that it would make more sense to have a dedicated store of emergency robots in rapid deployment silos and not have your housekeeper be able to rip you in half, it was pointed out that deployment times might possibly maybe be too low, and anyway that sounded like they just wanted all that juicy public safety money to themselves and having sexbots that can pull people out of lahars was totally worth the considerable increase in cost of what had been quite affordable bits of machinery. After all, if it saves the life of just one child, all the risks and costs are justified. You don't want the children to die, do you?
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For the same reason cars can reach 150km/h even though you pretty much never need to drive that fast. Or why cars can carry far more than their typical payload and most people will never load their car up anywhere near the limit. Or why some people have SUVs even though they don't need an SUV 99% of the time. They have it just in case they need it or for that one time every year, or every few years they need it.
I'm sure it helps on moving day. Invent one task that most people have to do at some point. A lot of furniture in the near-future could be made of metal instead of wood or plastic. Or perhaps it is standard practice that when moving you load all your stuff into something like a shipping container and then need to maneuver it, or re-position it. Maybe parallel parking is a pain and it's easier just to get the robot to move the car into the parking spot for you.
Hell, it could even be that the robots come with their own "maintenance pod" that is really heavy so the robot is just made to be able to move it on its own. Otherwise whenever you needed to move it when re-arranging your furniture, it would have be a huge operation where you might need to get specialized equipment and workers.
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# People refuse to let AIs drive cars.
While it would be possible to let AIs drive cars, people don't want to let them, and have pushed laws to force allowance of humans driving cars. Humans being humans, humans often get truck or sleepy and drive cars and hit people.
With modern medical technology and science, cars are the main cause of human death. The robots are designed to be able to stop even very heavy cars or trucks, to negate the need for people to not drive cars. It was deemed cheaper to supply everyone with super strong robots than to defeat the human driving lobby.
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Since, as you explained in the comments, this robots put work even into holding a weight against gravity, they resemble humans muscles in their way of working: we get tired after holding a weight for some time.
This means that, like in human muscles, these androids also do a partial activation, depending on the needed force: we can jump 1 meter high or more with our leg, but we don't always put full strength when we use them: we can gently move away a puppy sleeping close to our feet without having it fly away.
Using a single type of muscle at lower power has the benefit of reducing costs, since it allows for mass production.
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**It's not as hard as you think.**
Robots with rechargeable batteries have an unlimited supply of *energy*, but their design limits their *power output*, which is the amount of energy expended per time. Lifting an object requires a fixed amount of energy, but arbitrarily little power given sufficient time. Even a human can lift a 30-ton fire truck given the appropriate jack and a bit of time. A robot merely needs to lay under the fire truck and jack it up one millimeter at a time over the course of several minutes/hours, and can do so with even a very low-wattage motor.
You don't need to be *powerful* to lift heavy weights, you just need mechanical advantage and *time*. The paltry 10-Watt motor from an electric razor is sufficient to lift a fire truck by 10cm in about an hour. Once lifted, keeping it there requires no energy whatsoever. These robots aren't designed with large motors, but have gears and levers that allow even tasks with huge energy requirements to be accomplished at very low power.
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Just call it materials technology. Today, AI on supercomputers actually IS working on super materials, doing quantum chemistry analysis of combinations of molecules to determine characteristics. This computation, although expensive and time consuming, is actually cheaper than trying to physically synthesize compounds; we want some confirmation we will be successful before we try to invent a chemical protocol to actually synthesize such materials.
So, in the future, say we have discovered such things, super steel and super magnets and such, and they are cheap, and of course we build robots with them. Few manufacturers build with anything else.
Kind of like steel or aluminum today. Aluminum was once the most expensive metal in the world, ounce for ounce more expensive than gold. Now it's so cheap we make packages designed to be thrown in the garbage out of aluminum (like soda cans), because it is so useful.
So in the future we have a new products like that, new metals you get to name, new magnets and motors.
So the robots, like everything else, are build of these, and they get this super lifting power for free. They aren't "built" for it, it is just a side effect of being built with the same ubiquitous quantum engineered materials as every other machine in the world. Nothing breaks or bends or cracks or deforms unless it is specifically designed to do so.
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>
> humanoid robots designed solely for social purposes
>
>
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They are "big" friendly robots. They are big to be able to lift 30 tons.
They will lift you up to talk to you:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E0QSsm.jpg)
They will lift your car up to talk to you when you are in your car:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ewMs1m.jpg)
They will eat your car: (OK, kidding, maybe just nibble üôÇ)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8K5W1m.png)
And most importantly, they will lift your car up and carry it when your car (or other personal vehicle) is broken down. The average car weight range is 1.3-1.6 tons so they can lift and carry cars easily for long periods. 30 tons is just the capacity and they can lift up to 30 tons for emergency situations.
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### Selectable leverage/attachment points
Animal muscles are actually remarkably strong but can't contract very far, so they tend to operate at a mechanical disadvantage in order to give the required range of motion. We have fixed attachment points for our muscles on our skeleton, because that's what we evolved. The difference in strength between a chimp and a human isn't particularly the muscles, it's to do with the leverage those muscles can apply when attached to a skeleton.
With smart design, it could be possible to change the attachment points and hence the leverage for your artificial muscles relative to the joints of the skeleton. This could be as simple as winding out a lead-screw. Normally you'd never get to those ends of the range, but they're available.
Of course the trade-off is that you can't lift it very far! If your normal range of motion handles 100kg, then lifting a 30-tonne fire engine will give you 300 times less travel. A deadlift might normally move 60cm from a deep squat. Winding out your leverage to lift a fire engine scales that down to 2mm.
Still, you didn't specify how far it had to go, only that it had to be able to lift it. So 2mm still qualifies.
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## Asimovian Robo-Psychology
The robots are hard-wired to protect humans. They can't *not* do it.
Being unable to protect a human drives a robot into an untenable mindset.
They simply can't *ignore* a situation they're unable to assist with.
While out and about on an errand, a robot sees a car accident and there's a person pinned under an overturned vehicle.
The robot analyses the situation, concludes that it doesn't have the servo-power to lift a car off a person and therefore cannot save this person.
Logically, they should either carry on with their business, or attempt to find a less direct way to help. But robots do not excel at second-order thinking.
To a robot, the first-order problem is that the person is pinned under a vehicle, and that's the overriding most-important problem to solve. Everything else is just icing your cake before it's done.
So the robot is left with a dead-spot in its thinking.
It can't simply ignore a human in distress, and it can't solve the problem.
So it stands there, stuttering, unable to think, unable to help, unable to support the people around it who need it to run and get a medkit...
Ultimately, a robot unable to help will have a mental breakdown as its priorities tear its artificial neurones apart. It'll have to be junked and a new artificial brain installed in the body.
Programming the deep-psychology of robots is extremely difficult and expensive, and the overriding priorities exist for good reasons. Nobody wants to mess with that.
Nobody has yet succeeded in fixing this problem, not least because it's difficult to debug or reproduce in a lab.
So the solution is to give the robot the tools to solve 99.99% of physical problems it encounters.
Consequently, they have been designed with a very wide margin of physical capability to support this.
Under normal circumstances, they operate in human-norms. But in an emergency, if they need to be able to lift a car off someone and sprint three miles to the nearest hospital (carrying a 200lb adult human in their arms like a baby) they're perfectly capable of it.
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## Cost savings by using existing manufacturing facilities
Humanoid drones have been in use in many industries for several decades now, and the most common production models have high strength hydraulic musculature. When the AI breakthrough was made, the designers took an off the rack model to test out the consciousness installation so they wouldn't incur the extra costs of a bespoke design.
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**The robots are thick-skinned floating firefighters.**
The robots are manufactured to be helpful in many scenarios - they have defibrillators (their logic airgapped from the robot itself, so offensive use is barred), fire extinguishers, ..., and are flotation devices and much more.
The flotation device usecase is coupled with the fire extinguisher role: the compressed gas used to propel the fire retardant can also be used to inflate the robot's arms (which has puncture resistant skin) to triple their size. To lift up a fallen object, the robot simply has to put itself, or an arm, under the object, and self-inflate, becoming a lifting bag.
Of course a murder-kill-death-robot could use this ability to smother people in enclosed spaces, or do any kind of damage to vital infrastructure, but realistically, any humanoid robot able to interact with human tools/artifacts can do that, absent an imperative to not do it. It is not an ability that endangers lives during a normal malfunction, though.
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Similar to how some sci-fi fashions excuses for going back to swords instead of lasers, I'm looking for something that fosters are more cable-bound society – disrupting wireless communication on the more personal, local scale. So no global comm blackout or anything in that magnitude, just *more* wired headphones, ethernet-like networks, landlines etc.
EMP, solar flares or similar events seem like a rather temporary solution where replacing equipment or switching to different frequencies would resolve this within a decent enough time frame.
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Wireless communication can be intercepted or tampered with in any place, as long as the wireless signal is present.
Cable communication, on the other hand, can only be intercepted or tampered with by getting physical access to the cable. In a world where jamming and intercepting devices are given away as freebies with the basic meal at every fast food joint, shielded cables become the only way to communicate from point to point.
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**Everyone is watching super mega deluxe high definition 3D holographic cat videos**
Basically the bandwidth needed for each person to watch media has outstripped the capacity of wireless communications. Add in a situation where you have a high population density (everyone is now in mega towers) so there is a lot of (non-intentional) interference and competition for wireless bandwidth. Then the only way to reliably get the data will be with a cable, otherwise you'd have to be some sort of poor person who is only able to watch cat videos in mega deluxe format instead of super mega deluxe.
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# Those are power cables
In the 23rd century, you can fit a supercomputer onto a microchip. Any good household electronic has a superchip. You need them to run SpaceApple's client-side services, encrypt and decrypt communications in 4,194,304-bit, put the software logs on a blockchain...
But the electricity still needs to come from somewhere. Chemical batteries can't be made small enough to power these chips. Sure, some of the old tech still runs on battery power, but it's like using a flip phone in 2022. Anything modern needs to be plugged into the power grid.
# or they remove heat.
Maybe battery technology is good enough in your world. These devices are still throwing a lot of heat. Everything from headphones to smartwatches would get dangerously hot at full capacity, if it weren't for the coolant lines carrying away all that waste heat. You can either use all your electronics in low-power mode like a caveman, or keep the coolant lines plugged in like a normal person.
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### A society where most people work/school from home
Overall, cables are generally far superior to wireless in almost every way - more energy efficient, more reliable, more secure - with the one exception being, naturally, that you can move around with a wireless connection.
In this future, people rarely travel outside of their homes for work. There's less need for a cell phone when you have a perfectly functional desktop to jack into cyberspace. You don't need a phone to call your family because everyone's in the house already. You don't need a phone to call your friends because they are also at home and can plug in at any time.
Houses can be outfitted with an alert system so anyone in the house can know when they've got a message, even if they aren't sitting by their computer at the time.
The only time people will leave their homes will be for exercise or physical recreation - but increased prevalence of home VR systems that include physical activity can reduce the need for this as well.
Cell phones might still be used by some people, but they will become less ubiquitous, and service might only be found in areas people go for outdoor recreation.
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# Prolonged and Significant Lithium Shortage
On reason we've been able to increasingly make a large number of items be wireless does sort of rely on our current level of battery technology - this is partially inspired by @tjlaboss's answer about how the reason things are wired is that they're power cables, and working to figure out what would require battery tech to not be able to withstand the output of our devices.
There are a few different types of batteries, but when [focusing on rechargeable batteries, there's an easy way to note why Lithium-ion based batteries are significantly used today](https://m.greenway-battery.com/news/Are-all-rechargeable-batteries-lithium%3F-137.html):
1.) They have a higher capacity than Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) and Nickel-Cadmium (NiCad), or even Nickel-Zinc (NiZn).
2.) They discharge at even 3% less per month than the next best option, NiZn batteries.
3.) They have high voltage outputs, so you don't need to chain 4 or more\* batteries in series just to power a device at a time.
1.) helps deal with the discharge in 2.), and both of them are affected by 3.).
So getting rid of lithium batteries would put a strain on the use of wireless devices. If lithium batteries are removed and the next best options are used - it's likely smartphones/cellphones and wireless headphones would be strongly incentivized back to wired connections to save on the need to actually have and replace AA or AAA batteries every so often\*. And the easiest component to put a stranglehold on is lithium itself - while it can be used in semiconductors as well, although those have alternatives as well that work, such as silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide.
How you get there could be a matter of labor shortages in the mining process, or a reduction in available lithium in the world, or large amounts of fiery accidents that cause us to go through it quicker without being used in wireless products properly, thus reducing the output of lithium batteries.
**That said, it'll need to be a significant amount of a lithium shortage to really make this change a permanent effect in the future** - we apparently had a [9-12% supply deficit in 2021-2022](https://news.metal.com/newscontent/101708507/Global-Lithium-Resources-to-See-a-Supply-Deficit-of-9-12-in-2021-2022-the-Shortage-of-Lithium-Carbonate-may-be-Alleviated-in-2023-2024/), and people are still able to get access to lithium batteries for manufacturing purposes.
\*Based on the math some people made [here](https://www.quora.com/How-many-AA-batteries-would-it-take-to-charge-a-cell-phone), it varies how many batteries you may need to charge a phone with AA batteries - anywhere from 3 to 13 batteries, depending on how much you need to charge a phone. With a rough estimate [here](https://xmasenergy.imascientist.org.uk/question/how-many-aa-batteries-would-it-take-to-power-a-phone-for-a-year/) indicating that you would need to have 2 batteries being charged 1000 times to keep the phone charged for a year. That amount of work to keep a wireless device wireless will likely lead to people increasingly going for wired AC power powered devices where possible.
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**Biological sensitivity to electromagnetic fields.**
Wireless devices work by generating EMF--electromagnetic fields. The brain relies on electric signals. While there hasn't been an overabundance of study on the exact mechanisms (though there are some [interesting theories](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32289567/)), there does seem to be some interaction between the two. Some individuals are sensitive to EMF and experience a range of symptoms (headache, dizziness, tingling, insomnia, lack of focus) when exposed to things like wifi, cell signals, and bluetooth. As the [WHO's article](https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/radiation-and-health/non-ionizing/el-hsensitivity) notes, there are other theories about what could be causing these symptoms. But setting aside some of the wilder conspiracy theories about 5G, it makes sense that there would be [at least some interaction](https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/radiation-electromagnetic-fields#:%7E:text=Tiny%20electrical%20currents%20exist%20in,absence%20of%20external%20electric%20fields.&text=They%20cause%20current%20to%20flow,currents%20within%20the%20human%20body.) between manmade electromagnetic fields and the natural electrical currents in the human body.
One way that individuals who associate physical discomfort with EMF deal with their sensitivity is by avoiding wireless signals and sticking to cables. (My husband is one such individual, and we use ethernet and a land line most of the time.) Cables still generate some EMF, but nowhere near as strong as wireless devices.
Your society could be a few steps beyond ours in figuring out some unforeseen side effects wireless devices have on the body and be taking precautions. You're not limited to EMF sensitivity as we know it; maybe they've learned there's some more dangerous health effect. "Cancer" is quite a buzzword ([one that has been thrown out there already](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31476684/)), but your imagination is the limit.
If you're dealing with a society of non-humans or augmented humans, you could also argue that something about their neurology makes them more vulnerable to strong EMF. Not that telepaths would need landlines, but people with sensitive brain implants or delicate neural chemistry might. If you go this route, just don't make your folks *too* sensitive, or their planet's magnetic field will also become a problem.
These solutions wouldn't make wireless technology unfeasible, just undesirable. But depending on what you're going for, biological limits might be as effective a motive as--or even more effective than--technological limits.
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Security seems the obvious one. For example, some people have quantum computers so can hack existing security schemes. Most people do not have the processing capacity for quantum safe encryption. Therefore you cannot secure wireless networks against intrusion. The solution is wired communication. It does not solve all your problems, but it does protect against some of the easiest methods of breaking your security.
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## Radio-loud astronomical sources nearby
You exist in a radio-loud environment. The Crab Nebula is so radio-loud that when observing it with any radio telescope, the dominating source of noise is the Nebula (as opposed to terrestrial sources of radio interference).
If you live too close to such a nebula, then it would be take significantly more power to transmit usable signals - at which point, it might just be cheaper to use wires.
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So, we've thoroughly covered security, stability, bandwidth and interference already. Let's see what else we can come up with.
### Idea #1: forbidden by policy
The Great Terrorist Attack of 2049 was so wildly successful (for the terrorists) *because* they had wireless communication and could easily organise themselves and dodge every counterstroke. In the aftermath The Government cracked down on all wireless communications. They are now the exclusive privilege of the law enforcement. Sure, you can set up your home wifi or have a wireless landline phone installed - but nothing that can send a signal beyond 50m is allowed. Punishments are swift and harsh.
### Idea #2: crowded airwaves
Any particular frequency only has so much bandwidth and there are only so many usable frequencies. When it's all used up, well... it's used up. And currently wireless all communication is used up by... *rolls dice*... Pick one or more:
* The shipping industry. Everyone loves drone delivery, especially in the age of Covid-58, but that swarm needs CONSTANT communication to function efficiently, and gradually we, as a society, gave up the airwaves to them. We're all staying at home anyway.
* Transportation. Self-driving cars/boats/airplanes/helicopters/etc. are norm, but to function safely and efficiently they need to be in constant touch with each other. And since there now are so many people, and most have their own personal vehicle, well...
* The rich people. It's not that wireless communication doesn't exist, it's just expensive as hell, because the airwaves are so crowded by the people who *can* afford them. And they are used to their luxuries of 10GBit wireless connections and live-3D holo-calls.
### Idea #3: it just never caught on
Early wireless experiments were disappointing, using tons of power and having very limited communication ability. In addition, it could be overheard by anyone. Since wired communication had already advanced a fair bit at that point, and robust wired networks were in place in most population centres, the idea of wireless communication just didn't have that much appeal. It seemed to be vastly inferior to wired communication and without any chance to catch up. So nobody simply bothered to invest any time and money in it. To this day it remains a novelty. (For an extra plot device, there's a secretive group that has cracked this secret and are using it for their own heroic/nefarious purposes)
### Idea #4: it wreaks havoc with the environment and/or population
A lot of bugs and not a few animals (perhaps even people!) have evolved a very sensitive magnetoreception and setting up any transmitters at any reasonably useful frequencies and output powers just drives them crazy and disorients them. Not good.
### Idea #5: forbidden by religion
Your people are very religious and there's something in their religion that they interpret as forbidding wireless communication. Not sure what it could be but I'm sure it's possible to find something even in real world religions that could be interpreted like that. If anyone has any ideas, please add a comment and I'll update the answer.
### Idea #6: sabotaged by aliens
The aliens have observed us for some time and determined that we are just a bit too wild to be let loose in the cosmos. They don't want to wipe us out, but they do want to confine us to our planet. But how can you disable spaceflight? Well, you can't, but you *can* disrupt communication, making spaceflight much, much harder, if not outright impossible. At least in the early days. So they've set up these giant white-noise generators in orbit that block out any wireless communication. They're evenly spaced and carefully cloaked so that it seems that the white noise is just coming from outer space. People on the surface are aware of the huge amount of noise coming in which makes wireless communication impossible, but they think it's just how the universe works. As a bonus, radio astronomy also never takes off, making doubly sure that we don't find out about our galactic neighbours.
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Two advantages of cables are **data security** and **avoidance of interference**.
People want to do more and more things with data, but there is a limited amount of wireless spectrum that everyone has to share. If you're using wireless technology you're already using cables: there are cables carrying data to/from the cellular towers, and cables going to/from your wifi router. This trend will continue: wireless base stations will be shorter range, higher bandwidth, and closer to you, but still you won't be happy with the bandwidth limitations. Plugging into a direct line will be more and more appealing as a way to get a bandwidth boost for gaming or video. Houses will probably start to have ethernet sockets in every room just like they have power outlets today. Teenagers will develop fashionable ways to wrap cables around their bodies and incorporate them into their outfits. Wi-fi will come to be seen as an old fuddy-duddy's technology (like those cell phones with giant buttons) and the young won't want anything to do with it.
The security angle will be pushed by businesses. Corporations and insurance companies will insist on cables. (Even a bluetooth mouse or keyboard can be a vector for hacking, after all!) These two reasons will work together to make cables more and more appealing.
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## Blocks unwanted Viral AI Ads
Late in the 23rd century some smartass made Smart-AdsTM using wireless quantum computing. These AI driven ads became basically self-aware, and so effective at getting around blocking that the only way to avoid them is to literally be hard-wired to another device, otherwise you get so many pop-in adverts that whatever task you were trying to do is literally unachievable.
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Our inactive galactic nucleus becomes active. It's not clear what, exactly, causes the black hole in the center of a galaxy to transition from low, quiet accretion to high, radio loud accretion. But an active galactic nucleus in our galaxy would drastically increase radio noise, making radio impractical.
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## Trust issues with wireless
It's not that wireless is unsafe. It just doesn't **feel** safe.
Your society may have fallen victim to some sort of mass wireless hacks and become so scared of it. Paranoia, fear, and distrust have already been ingrained in people's collective minds. Convincing them to "go wireless" again is not easy.
Sure, over time, wireless communication improves. More security mechanisms get implemented to prevent hacks. But in the minds of the common folks, those safety mechanisms (along with the supposed "connection" between devices) are just theories and math and EM waves, all floating in the ether.
Now on the other hand, cable is a physical object. It is tangible, simpler, and thus easier to trust. You can hold it. You know how to protect it. Common folks can wrap their heads around it easily. *"As long as I have control over it and can protect it from tampering, I am relatively safe."*
Again, it's not about whether wireless is **actually** safe. It's about whether it **feels** safe.
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**Cables are quite a bit faster in certain environments**
An electromagnetic signal moves at the speed of light through a vacuum ($c$), but moves at different speeds through different materials. A quality copper cable conducts signals at about 90% of $c$ (as suggested [here](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/358894/speed-of-light-vs-speed-of-electricity)). The speed of light through other media can be quite a bit slower, falling to 75% of $c$ in dense media with high indices of refraction like water. Applications that require low latency in such environments would use cables rather than wireless transmissions, since the signal will arrive faster. An undersea society of high-frequency stock traders, for example, would likely want to use cables rather than wireless signals in order to minimize the transmission time. Of course, the difference in latency won't be meaningful for many day-to-day tasks, so this would explain why specialized applications use cables, but perhaps not society at large.
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**Uneducated societal refusal**
Or in other words the Anti-5G crowd won.
In this scenario the uneducated conspiracy followers managed to get majority support and banned the technology. It doesn't have to be 5G if that doesn't fit in your universe but they were against one kind of wireless technology for no sound reason (all conspiracies, pseudoscience and straight ignorance) and managed to gather enough support from the general population (either full on support like more than half the people going bananas over the technology or the kind of "I don't care either way, but they seem passionate about it so I support their cause. Especially if that means I don't have to deal with that topic again" support) to force the government into banning it. And from that point onwards it has become a slippery slope banning one wireless technology after the other.
This would also be a good deterrent to work on new wireless technologies as it would most likely get banned immediately.
This also gives you the possibility to conveniently keep some wireless technology, because either the people haven't picked up on it yet or banning it would be too inconvenient even for the anti wireless crowd (like say WiFi because then they can't use their phones, etc).
And hey you also get a free comment on our own society anchored firmly in your world.
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## The rich hogged all the RF spectrum
It went to the highest bidder, and the wealthy, corporations, government and military all out-bid everyone else. They have high-bandwidth applications which need it all, and make them a lot of money.
Also, there's some sort of "bandwidth neutrality" law that says providers can't limit a user's bandwidth, so there are no "throttled" plans. Anyone buying wireless data service must pay for the full-monty "watching videos 8 hours a day" plan same as Mr. Rockefeller.
(for the unaware, videos take biblically more bandwidth than audio, like 100 times more. This has been the killer app driving the rush from G3 to G4 to G5. Even at G3, voice/txt was such a trivial fraction of total bandwidth that cell phone plans didn't bother limiting voice or TXT, they were all about data limits.)
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**Interference from home-made devices**
Your society has a lower class that cannot afford to buy electronic devices due to the high prices. So, their solution is to build what they need (or repair them) using whatever scrap electronics they can scavenge from broken devices/landfills/etc...
Because these device are build using random parts, they are totally not compliant with EM emission standards and they irradiate a lot of spurious EM, which interferes and disrupts the wireless communications.
Since offices/shops/residents want to have reliable internet/communications (and there are a lot of illegal devices around), they switched to cables, as wireless was getting more and more unreliable.
(btw, this is actually a problem also in real life, a device which is not EMI/EMC compliant can totally disrupt a wireless link)
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We're already moving there, somewhat.
All the wireless access points out there are wired together, so they can provide service. Newer protocols go for higher bandwidth over shorter distances with less power, so access points are getting more dense. For 802.11ad WiFi, which uses 2 GHz of spectrum between 58-60 GHz, communication is strictly line-of-sight with a range of a few meters, so cables will be run to the middle of every room anyway.
From there it's only a small step to also offering pluggable connections at the access points, because it is just so much more convenient -- no configuration needed to select an access point, just connect and you're online.
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You've run out of usable [spectrum](https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_2016_spectrum_wall_chart.pdf). This is a real-world problem, but your world can simply take it to an extreme.
The electromagnetic spectrum is subdivided into many different frequency bands. Regulatory authorities assign "blocks" of spectrum to specific uses. For example, the block from 1626.5-1660 MHz is reserved for Earth-to-space radio signals. You can use a signal in this range to talk to a satellite, but not for anything else. These restrictions are important because without them, wireless signals would all be broadcast on top of each other. Many types of wireless signals are necessarily weak (such as one coming from a space probe near Jupiter) and their signal would be impossible to hear if there were any other signals competing with them. Regulatory bodies also sell special licenses to people who want exclusive access to a block of the spectrum. The sections marked for television broadcasting are subdivided into small slices commonly called "[channels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_channel_frequencies)". A broadcaster secures a license for a certain channel in a certain geographical area, and can then broadcast their TV feed without interference from competitors.
This system works fairly well, but there's a finite amount of radio spectrum available. Many uses of radio require specific frequency ranges and can't be adjusted. Radio astronomy needs to be able to listen to the frequencies that distant objects naturally generate. The radio navigation beacons used by aircraft need to use frequencies that easily penetrate through cloud cover. Long-distance communication benefits from frequencies that bounce off the ionosphere. Once you take care of these inflexible cases, what's left is scattered and scarce. It doesn't take long before TV, radio, mobile phones, GPS, and the zillion other forms of wireless communication have used all the good parts of the radio spectrum. All that's left are narrow little slivers (the width of a block is called the "bandwidth" and determines how much information can be packed into that signal) that are at frequencies that don't penetrate well through common building materials like wood or stone.
Making this worse is that the spectrum is allocated by government agencies. Every government in the world can allocate spectrum differently. Countries have *generally* agreed to use similar mappings for important parts of the spectrum (navigation, ship/aircraft communication, etc). There are still lots of cases where this isn't true, though. Wi-Fi can operate on 14 different channels, but using channel 14 is [illegal in the U.S.](https://www.howtogeek.com/402142/why-wi-fi-channels-12-13-and-14-are-illegal-in-the-usa/), and channels 12 and 13 can only be used in a low-power mode to avoid interfering with an adjacent block that doesn't exist in some other countries.
In your world, the wireless spectrum is both more crowded than ours and has been laid out slightly differently. Bands that are useful for mobile phones (those that penetrate walls) could be reserved for military or other official uses. Countries could be less coordinated than in our world, and the amount of available spectrum that's available internationally could be very small (manufacturing costs and regulatory hurdles can make products impractical to build if they need different frequency bands in every country). As a result, wired devices are far more common in your world, and wireless is generally reserved for those use cases where wired just isn't an option (satellite phones, implantable medical devices, etc).
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If we look back in time, then Nikola Tesla had ideas about [transmitting power wirelessly.](https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/tesla-s-vision-of-wireless-energy-nikola-tesla-museum/JALSHCCNJKDMJg?hl=en) between 1899 and 1904. [Wikipedia's info](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Tesla).
In our timeline it was never commercially workable. Some of the main issues included using the earth as a return line and electrodes at a height of 9,100 metres as the outbound line. More critically, such transmissions would have put massive amounts of electricity into the sky.
If you remember listening to AM radio or shortwave radio when there was a lightning storm, then the occasional `>bzzzrrrt<` could block out the transmission for a time. I believe FM is less susceptible, but not immune.
Now imagine that going constantly. Essentially we've swapped radio communication for power communication.
In your hypothetical world, power transmission is done wirelessly, which eliminates the need for long high-voltage distribution networks. Any rural home can have power, and electric cars and boats and aeroplanes never need fueling because they suck power transmitted wirelessly. Torches/flashlights never run out.
However all your communications must be wired, including broadcast radio/TV telephones, and cellphones simply don't exist. The Titanic sinks with all hands because they couldn't send a SOS via radio. Wireless ethernet is impossible and everyone uses wired.
The moon landing is not televised live, because radio transmissions from the moon were not received directly. Instead, they were received by a satellite which transmitted them to the ground via optical semaphore, until the crew returned with their film.
Possible gotchas that never were tested:
* How far underground does the wireless signal reach? Can one power lights in a road tunnel, or a deep diamond mine?
* Does the wireless signal reach under water at all? If not, submarines have to have a "receiver aerial" on a long tether.
* How high does it go? Can we power satellites in LEO with wireless energy ?
* How would CRT tubes work with high levels of energy in the air?
* Would a magnetron work at all, resulting in RADAR being ineffective and affecting WW2.
**UPSHOT** choose one - *wireless communication* **or** *wireless power* - you can't have both. Our society got the former, what would the world have been like with the latter?
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Interference due to absolutely everything being smart or IoT connected. Anything produced communicates wirelessly for some reason or another. The plastic bottle bought has IoT in it to track it and ensure it is properly recycled, pair of socks track if there are holes and recommend advertising more, your chair tracks your weight. Etc. Etc.
All of this uses the shared extremely contested spectrum. Making wireless applications for real-time use spotty and painful to use for things like video or music or just general internet browsing. No problems when using wires however.
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I'm reminded of the D.C. Sniper from 2002 (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks>). What if someone was using wifi/electromagnetic emissions to target them? I'd bet whole states would be turning off their transmitters to avoid the random violence.
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Cable networking comes with advantages such as:
* It is not easy to be intercepted in a closed place like an office. Wireless is broadcasted beyond the perimeter walls which exposes it to interception.
* It is easier to manage devices that can connect to a cabled network hence your bandwidth will always be ok. On the other hand, a wireless network will be available for all who have your SSID and password.
* Some operating systems require you to install drivers for the wireless network interfaces which waste a lot of time but almost all operating systems support wired networks interface from the box.
* Wired network saves you the time to share and manage SSID names and passwords which we already have enough pile; on the other hand, a wired network doesn't require this.
* The time spent to set up Wireless in networking devices, for instance, CISCO routers is more since it is in addition to the normal wired network.
* You will require fewer and more inexpensive networking devices to set up a wired network. The additional support for wireless in routers comes at additional cost.
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# Security and Integrity
Quantum computing advances render any encryption moot. The result is lots of common-place internet activities become unsafe: banking, shopping, even email (since email is tied to your identity). If someone can intercept the data stream, they can trivially see the plain-text, including things like passwords and credit cards.
Part of the solution is a return to cabled connections. Sure, someone can still splice a cable. But that's another level up from sitting in a parking lot sniffing the wifi. If you can then trust the people inside your home/business, along with buried and better secured cabling (hardened conduits and other protective measures), we can still preserve the safety of most traffic.
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## Improvements in Biometrics and Cloud Technology
Why do you carry a phone?
The answer is because you want to bring all of your technology with you. When you leave your house or lie in your bed, you want to have easy access to your emails, banking, social media, phone calls, videogames etc. So you put those things in a little device that belongs to you and carry it with you where ever you go... only this is quickly becoming less true. More and more of the stuff that used to be on your phone or PC or laptop is now on some server cluster somewhere else, and your personal devices are just a means to access the server cluster. So instead of your phone being a repository of your personal information, it is quickly becoming just an identity assurance device to make sure you are who you say you are.
However, biometrics and AI are also making your mobile device's role in the capacity a non-issue. Passwords are too easy to guess, people too easy to social engineer. So, identifying a user is quickly becoming a thing computers do for you. However if any electronic device can identify any person, and all people's technology is cloud based anyway, then it means it no longer matters what device you use to do anything with. Whether you are sitting at your desk at the office, your PC at home, the smart screen in the bathroom mirror, or the projector aimed at the ceiling above your bed, all of these devices know who you are and deliver you all of your digital property.
Only... it's much more than that. Since everything is now cloud based, every device everywhere knows who everyone is. So, you can borrow your uncle's car and the onboard computer connects you to your cloud. You can go to your friend's house, and his smart TV will bring up your Netflix account. You're girlfriend's Alexa can figure our who you when you tell it to order pizza so that you get charged instead of her if you use it to order.
So, now that we've worked out how to make all the relative convenance of mobile devices disappear, mobile devices will be all drawbacks and no more advantages. Hard mounted devices don't get lost or dropped in the toilet. They don't need to be charged. They get better data throughputs. They are cheaper to manufacture. Harder to hack and produce less EM radiation. Because you can count on cloud interfaces to just be anywhere you want to go, you have no need to carry wireless tech anymore.
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## You Have Neighbors
Your astronomers detect signs of an early civilization orbiting a star several light years away. They have no apparent RF tech yet, and your scientist are pretty sure you are a few hundred years more advanced than they are, but rates of advancement can vary by orders of magnitude, so people decide to cut all RF transmissions and hope they don't see you.
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If there is new technology that can only be delivered by wire e.g. [FTL information transfer using quantum entangled particles](https://entangledphysics.com/2015/09/20/entangled-particles-faster-than-light-communications-and-the-no-cloning-theorem/) and to make that work you need special cables e.g. something based on [carbon nano tubes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube). Over time as technology expands to use the advantages of these cables (speed, security, bandwidth) more and more things use them directly. e.g. you just plug your headphones into the publicly available socket and stream your data from wherever. Similar to how no-one would be surprised to find a power socket at a desk.
In that situation you would still have wireless tech but it would be legacy or even historical, so rarely seen.
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Every wireless signal that is *not* intercepted by a receiver is *wasted energy.* Using wireless is kind of like running your air conditioner with the front door wide open.
I ran across this observation in the context of SETI. Somebody suggested that one possible reason SETI might fail to find signals from space is that a civilization that sets up advanced comms tech will probably transition in short order from an open, wireless model to a closed, wired model, to avoid wasting power. And so the fear is that *if* there is anyone out there, we may not have started looking for them until long after they voluntarily moved past their "noisy" phase. So with your fictional society.
Why does it matter?
* energy you spend "splattering" your message across your locality is energy that can't be spent on anything else
* energy production is inextricably linked with the environment from which that energy is extracted; a sane civilization that is serious about living sustainably will always be actively searching for ways to trim the fat in their energy budget, to avoid cooking their planet to death
There may always be some need for wireless because there are some situations in which wires are literally impossible, but I would expect that to be a tiny fraction of overall use.
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In my world, humans are fighting intelligent apes who have captured some human weapons. The conflict will mostly take place in the woods, some of it in an urban city by the woods. The apes have a wide variety of weapons, including a couple tanks and several sniper rifles; they have had about 6 months to practice with these weapon before the human reinforcements arrived. There are a wide variety of apes including gorillas. The number of humans is about equal to the number of apes.
When it comes to conflict of equal numbers with equal level of weaponry in forest environment, is there any advantages that humans may have over apes?
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Assuming people will not just blow everything away (which depends on politics, tradition and position of militaries), still they probably will have upper hand.
To point out human advantage is made of:
* industry, any apes that had to steal human weapon seemingly didn't have earlier means of manufacturing mechanisms and munitions. Each of them needs many precision if they are expected to work. Bad munitions will explode in barrel, even ammo clips have some small parts. Crudely made gun may easily jam or injure user. The same goes for factories. Nothing able to research modern weaponry inner workings in half a year would not need to steal them in the first place. It would simply create ones of their own and dominate the planet BEFORE the naked apes (humans) tried to do something funny with a stick. However, human probably posses many advanced facilities for both weapons and vehicles. For apes they would need knowledge about explosives and metallurgy before even making some crude adaptations of their own.
* supply, for now let's forget about fighting, even for training apes would need ammo clips, fuel, explosives and spare parts to even train with weapons. How would the get it they have no industry? They would need a constant flow of resources, but it would be hard for humans to allow repeating security breaches. If apes were able to steal supplies big enough they would need carriages or some other ways of transportation or to simply raze secured supply depot. However military would be pretty... disturbed and it would need some politics to force them into waiting half a year before taking action. People have probably powerful industry machine. People may be limited by budget or law but no normal organization would send people without necessary supplies.
* maintenance, people know how to preserve vehicles and equipment functionality, they will also avoid many accidents caused by improper handling of these.
* training, as long as military is engaged they would send people that know how to use weapons, vehicles and tactics. As long as apes fight with human weapon, their adversaries will have advantage as most of time they would know exactly what to expect. Apes probably do not have remarkable military, however with enough battle experience this advantage may be nullified.
* experience, it's hard to expect for apes to know how ways of human mind, unless one of them will teach them. They would need to know imitations of technology on which people will rely. Even thermal vision may be tricked if one knows right ways of doing it.
* conceptuality, people posses many abstract ideas and concepts that come from living in high-tech society. They may have knowledge on many topics, which may prove useful in environment of operation. Tank operations, driving, tactics, shooting and so on, there is no need to invent something that is already known.
* tech, simply the more advanced, the lesser will be chances that apes will be able to use them properly, the greater will be advantage of humans and the more important will be points mentioned above.
* possibility to retreat, offenders usually may withdraw whether they find that situation is not at their favor. They may return later, better accustomed to enemy and environment.
* better equipment, most probably apes would get only some decent weapons but nothing beyond average. Any storage that would contain more advanced weaponry normally would receive better protection. Also, the apes wouldn't probably even know if some rare equipment would have any value.
* reinforcements, people can keep the numbers but still may bring others from the outside, request bombing or other help from outside.
Apes advantage is mostly made of:
* terrain, for half a year they should get accustomed to the terrain, maybe even it was theirs from the beginning. Possibly they've taken some measures to secure it with traps if they expected humans to arrive.
* physique, big apes posses strength and endurance far beyond human. Smaller ones posses unusual dexterity. This won't make an advantage against rifles but with some strategy it would be possible to make it a close-contact fight.
* language, people will probably never understand language apes use to communicate. Also, apes may be less conservative about their language as they adapt new concepts. Terminology represents most important ideas and concepts behind culture in which specific language is used. Of course language barrier works both ways but people would be more disturbed hearing battle cry of the beast.
As for opinions on evolutionary advantage:
* brain size, whales have the greatest brains and still they are not considered any more intelligent than human. Opposite example: Neandertals had greater brain that "homo sapiens", last archaeological discoveries show that they were even much more advanced as civilization. About the apes: tests on gorillas that were learned abstract symbolic language to communicate with humans proved to have IQ about 90 to 102 (from research on apes intelligence).
Brain size does not simply prove one has to be more intelligent. It is important how brains are used. For example Einstein had brain smaller than average.
* language capacity, it was proved by experiments that big apes are able to learn abstract language to communicate humans, the only problem is to make them interested in that task and to explain meanings of used symbols. They may spontaneously create new terms to reflect freshly known phenomenas. Creative invention however varies between individuals.
* capacity for high co-op, usually apes do not need to display complex behavior, however they are fully capable of using them when it proves to be useful for group and their leaders. Isn't it the same as people?
* manual dexterity, human hands are obviously different from those of other apes. Apes could find a way to use human tools and devices, however most probably it would be difficult and that's why they would rather think of their way around or own tools for the same tasks.
Any more would depend on tactics and details of setting.
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## Education
"Intelligent" is not the same as "Educated". Any average person can learn about military tactics and the history of warfare, but few do. Those that do will be at a SIGNIFICANT advantage.
Consider this: You and three of your buddies (none of whom have any military expertise or experience with guns) are given assault rifles and 6 months. At the end of the 6 months four soldiers who have received years of education in military tactics and warfare and extensive training - not to mention a greater variety of weapons at their disposal - will come to your neighborhood to try to kill you. Who do you think will win? Despite what TV would have you believe, the odds-on winners are going to be the military guys. Not because they have any physical or mental capabilities that you could not learn, but because they have received physical and mental training which you did not receive.
For lack of knowledge about them, I actually expect the tanks and most any large munitions to be useless to the apes. Tanks are more complicated than cars, but let me make an analogy here. Unless you have been educated to understand that you need to insert a small piece of metal with odd ridges into a similarly-sized slot near a car wheel and turn it, you will never get a car to start in the first place to be able to figure out how to drive it. Seriously - go find someone who has lived in a jungle their whole life and give them a car and tell them to drive it, leaving the key nearby on the ground. They will never get that car moving.
Munitions are a similar story, but they can probably be worked out. Unfortunately, many of the apes who tried to figure out how to use them were killed in the attempt. That's pretty demoralizing and might well lead to a "let's just leave those alone" stance.
**And speaking of that... the humans should fight SMARTER and not HARDER**
Let's consider what to do from the perspective of a human being that knows a bunch of darned, dirty apes are waiting for a fight in the forest. I could walk in and engage them, but instead I think I'll just burn it to the ground. Similarly, for the apes in the city I'm going to start with some bombardment. I won't get them all with either action, but I'll get enough that the numbers are going to tilt noticeably in my favor.
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# The ability to use their weapons.
Assuming these intelligent apes are anatomically the same as real-world ones, they don't have opposable thumbs. They can grip things precisely, but their thumbs are "pseudo-opposable" or "apposable": they don't rotate in quite the same way as a human's, and thus can't press the pad of their thumb flat against the pad of another finger.
Using a weapon such as a sniper rifle requires great precision in aiming, and human weapons are designed for human hands. Without opposable thumbs, the apes would have to grip the weapon differently, making it difficult to pull the trigger without moving the barrel and disrupting their aim.
As far as tanks go, if the apes have really had access to them for only six months, it's unlikely they could use them effectively. Consider how long it takes for a human to learn to drive, even having been exposed to cars for their whole life. And that leaves aside the issue of shooting.
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**The apes are effectively dead.**
Tanks sound impressive, but you really need planning, support, and tactics in place before you can use them effectively. The apes may grasp the basics of how to drive and shoot the things, but how will they perform maintenance on their vehicles and firearms?
Furthermore, we've had plenty of armored vehicles blown up by a road side IED. Humans, I'm sure, have access to anti-armor weapons, and mines. And if they don't, then they know how to lay a trap for those vehicles.
A couple of tanks, with no air support, no repair depots, and little experience in deploying them in a mixed infantry/armor battle will only serve as big, fat targets.
And while the apes may have a firearm or two on hand, human soldiers have a steady supply of equipment and training which enables them to use those weapons and many others far more effectively.
Things like guided bombs, RPG's, night vision, and infrared detection systems, not to mention armed drones (both land and air ones), etc. I remember a video of American soldiers fighting in Iraq. They were advancing in an urban environment, in complete darkness, using night vision (the camera was also night vision enabled). A soldier turned on a UV spotlight, and shone it on a building. In a window, was a guy with an AK, staring out into the darkness, trying to make out the US soldiers. The video cut out as one of them raised his weapon, and the guy dropped into the room, having never even realized that the "enemy" was upon him.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that human technology, weapons, and tactics will allow us to dominate any mere ape "rebels". (the difference between them and the Taliban - in case anyone asks - is that they don't have a large population within which to hide and blend).
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The biggest single advantage will be speech.
Apes, even intelligent ones, don’t have the vocal anatomy to make all of the sounds humans are capable of. For the apes to communicate they will have to resort to their own limited language of grunts and hoots or sign language. Either alternative will provide a number of difficulties.
Complex planning will be difficult with a restricted and newly invented language. Conveying complex ideas like where to go, what to do, and various contingency plans is a challenge already in commanding poorly trained militias. Communication failures will lead to defeat. Ape commanders will likely have to keep tactics simple.
Apes will be unable to effectively use radios. Long range communication is vital to modern military tactics in which forces working together are often miles apart from each other.
Both these issues will be exacerbated in the heat of battle when communication speed is key. Soldiers rely on vocal communication constantly in battle. How for instance will an ape tank commander communicate with the driver or gunner where to drive or what to shoot.
The humans advantage in communication will prove decisive over all other factors.
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> equal numbers with equal level of weaponry
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# Logistics
The more advanced your weaponry is, the more complicated support chain it needs.
Your apes have guns. How many rounds do they have? How many rounds were they left with after target practice? Can they make more? Would they have to build a facility for that, defend that facility, transport new ammo? Can they request an air drop?
Your apes have tanks. While it's true that tank can withstand quite a lot, tanks need a lot of maintenance too. Do your apes have repair facilities? Do they have sufficient supplies of spare parts?
Modern weaponry is designed to take advantage of modern supply chains. As an example, you could take a look at people in DNR - they had a lot of problems with their tanks because of trivial stuff like antennas that were regularly damaged and needed replacement. Cheap and easy to produce, those antennas are not really a problem... if you have facilities that produce spare parts for tanks and supply lines that deliver those parts where you need them.
Tanks, jet fighters and attack helicopters and whatnot are only a miniscule part of modern war machine, hardened spear tip. Production, repair and supply facilities are the shaft which pushes that spear tip through the target.
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Tanks and guns are *very hard to use*. A WW2-era tank requires a 5-man crew (the later models, at least), and the commander needs years of training to be able to accurately assess the situation and tell the rest of the crew, most of whom are effectively blind, on what to do. Apes can't do that.
For example, let's say that you have 5 apes that miraculously find their way into a late WW2 tank, and for the sake of argument, they find themselves sitting in the right places. First of all, only 2 of them can see: the commander and the gunner. The rest are blind.
In order to move, the commander needs to tell the engine guy to turn in a direction and move for a certain distance. Somehow, they manage to do that. Ok, the tank can move.
However, tanks are useless without guns. To accurately fire a gun, you need coordination between 3 people: the commander, the gunner, and the ammo loader. This needs to happen for a shell to hit a target:
1. Commander spots a target, and talks to the radio (which, btw, the apes automagically operates): "gunner move to 3 o'clock, estimate 500 yards" (not his exact words, but close enough, I'm too lazy to look up how they spoke)
2. Gunner turns his sights to 3 o'clock, and sees the tank. Assuming the ammo is automagically loaded, he fires a shot
3. It is impossible to hit a thing on the first try, since the initial range estimate is probably off. The commander sees that the shell overshot, and yells into the radio again: "revise estimate to 300 yards" (again, not exact, but you get the idea)
4. Remember, at this point, you need a commander that can manage a crew, accurately estimate distance, and revise that estimate when it's off. Good luck trying to train an ape to do that in 6 months.
5. At this point, you need to reload the gun. For this to happen, the ammo loader (yes, modern tanks have auto-loaders, but your apes won't know how to use them) needs to open the gun, take out the hot shell, and then shove in a new shell. Magic happens, and a new shell is loaded.
6. Gunner hears the new range estimate, and is smart enough to know, with very limited training, how much he needs to adjust to hit the target, and then fires a second shell, which has a half-decent chance of hitting (if everything goes according to plan)
Do you see how complicated this is? This requires a highly-trained crew that knows how to work together, and operate all the equipment in a tank. A tank is not a car with some armour and a gun; it needs trained personnel and experience to even move.
Back to the forest. Fighting in a forest in *hard*. Especially when you can burn it down. Oops. Okay, what happens if we don't burn the forests down?
Forest warfare requires deep knowledge of how terrain affects combat and ambush setting/countering, skills which the most intelligent of humans have a hard time grasping. Yes, apes in trees make good ambushes, but sniper rifles can only do so much. Assuming that the apes somehow manages to operate those rifles with the precision required, which again, requires years of training, they still can't inflict much damage.
Also, you know what makes better ambushes? Explosives. Guess who knows how to drop landmines from the skies? Not the apes.
There is really no way for your apes to win. Sorry.
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Our evolutionary advantages (relative to the animal kingdom in general) include:
* Brain size, which correlates with intelligence - just how do these apes come by their intelligence?
* Capacity for symbolic/abstract language (both spoken and written) which can be used to express pretty much any idea or instruction, describe any past, present, or future event, etc.
* Capacity for highly co-operative behavior, altruism, self-sacrifice, delayed gratification, teamwork, etc..
* Manual dexterity - forelimbs physically and neurologically adapted away from walking/climbing and toward the sort of hand-eye co-ordination required to perform intricate tasks. Ever see a chimp thread a needle?
* Thermoregulation adapted for endurance. Hairy animals are typically adapted to cool by panting, which they can't do when running, so can sprint fast but overheat quickly; humans can sustain an elevated metabolism (think marathon running) for long periods due to our ability to sweat and efficiently remove body heat by evaporative cooling from most of the skin surface area. Horses are an exception, but according to [this article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-naked-truth/), our cooling system is so superior, a human could outcompete a horse in a marathon on a hot day.
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* Military Intelligence. Specifically, satellite imagery, which presumably apes do not have. If you know where the enemy is and they don't know where you are - and you have similar numbers and armament - the fight is already won.
* Communication. Knowing what to say on radio, and how to say it so it isn't misunderstood, is quite important. As is being able to speak at all.
* Experience. Human military knows how to work together in multiple squads in a way that minimizes chances of a rout or friendly fire, even when some of them are stressed or panicked. They also know the logistics of combat.
* Better gear. Holding and firing a rifle that's made for the physique of a different animal will significantly compromise it's value.
* Choice of engagement. Presumably the humans had 6 months to prepare, while knowing the strength of the enemy forces. They can chose to attack, to reinforce, or to retreat. The range of strategic options available to the apes seems to be smaller.
Advantages that the apes have:
* Their military training wasn't hampered by ethics at any point, which will lead to tactics that catch the humans by surprise.
* Large variety of species with different abilities, which makes them less predictable.
* Humans are likely to underestimate them. [Lots of historical precedent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana).
* Humans are likely to use tactics meant to fight humans.
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[FOXP2 Gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2)
I agree that speech is at least one of the greatest advantages humans have over apes and monkeys. It opened the way for further complex communication that allowed the *transgenerational transmission of culture* (hunting grounds, watering holes, times to forage, etc) like we have. There are other animals that can effectively teach the next generation, their offspring, of their learned behaviors but nothing to the breadth and depth that we have as humans.
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First of all, Apes are in fact intelligent so I do not understand the whole "intelligent apes" statement.
As there are two families, Lesser Apes and Great Apes, this question is a bit broad in my opinion.
Lesser Apes: Hylobatidae, several species of Gibbon. As per [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape) they are light and arboreal, meaning they are good at heights and precarious perches. Imagine these armed with grenades and/or suicide vests coming from any direction.
Great Apes: Orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees.
Think of Gorillas and Orangutans with body armor taken from humans, using weapons modified to work without opposable thumbs.
Lets take the tanks out of the equation, as forested terrain is not the best location for tank warfare, and being intelligent the Apes would likely see the lack of freedom of movement, and inherent vulnerability. A single man/ape could take out a tank with a man-portable anti-armor weapon such as the [M2CG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_recoilless_rifle).
Arboreal snipers (orangutans) would have an upper hand for a while, due to having an elevated position, and being able to move efficiently from tree to tree. Humans would likely begin taking out trees to diminish this threat. This would, however, lead to more places for Ape ground forces to find cover to shoot from on the ground. Rubble is great for defenders, not so much for the offense, as was found to be the case during the [2nd 3rd, and 4th battles at Monte Cassino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino#Second_battle_.28Operation_Avenger.29) in WW2.
Where the Apes would excel however, would be hand to hand combat. While humans are great with weapons, we are for lack of a better term, quite squishy when compared to a charging mature male gorilla or orangutan.
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Let's not forget culture.
If the apes are still a tribal culture, we can put then out of business by sending in a few special ops guys to bump off the leadership. Then we wait until the contenders to replace them prevail in whatever internecine struggle takes place, and then a bit more for them to get their act together to the point where anything can get done. Then our special ops guys go in and whack those leaders.
The apes become a far less predictable force, but any action requiring large-scale coordination become impossible.
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Im pretty sure that our fighter jets will make quick work of their tanks.
Sniper rifles require math in order to be used correctly, and while they might kill a few of our armored soldiers (or injure them), we would figure out their positions using shot spotters and then call in an air strike.
The apes have no chance.
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I'd like to avoid retreading some very good points made earlier, but will enumerate the ones that jumped out at me as being very valid before going into what I feel is the biggest issue. In no particular order, humans have experience in the following:
**Technology usage and maintenance**
**Communication and coordination of large scale endeavors**
**Logistical networks to support military operations**
**Air power**
Now, what I feel is really the most significant factor in the whole "Humans vs. Apes" scenario put forth is the simple fact that humans have been waging war for thousands of years and no other species on earth has even come close to the level of conflict that we engage in. Humans are amazing at fighting. We are an apex predator like no other.
We are incredibly adaptable, and have all the most terrifyingly dangerous elements of both predators and prey. We have developed and employed weapons and tactics for every conceivable scenario throughout our history. We are able to plan for and carry out very sophisticated operations, and cooperate to accomplish them in ways that apes would need years if not generations to begin to recognize, even assuming they were intellectually capable of doing so.
In my in-expert opinion, apes simply lack the military instinct that seems to distinguish humanity. Apes may fight and quarrel, but that is the equivalent of schoolyard fistfights compared to the level of military sophistication that has been demonstrated by human armies since antiquity.
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They can't produce or repair anything. They would basically lose on endurance. This is assuming the other issues (speech, training with complex historical knowledge) are already resolved. Even if they could do it all and were able to read and speak, a handful of "anything" won't stop them from getting wiped out.
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Food. If there are the same number of apes as humans (I assume you mean same number as the local military) then they need to be fed large amounts of food. Much too much for them to forage, which would take all their time anyway. And they can only raid human settlements for so long before they need to move on. The apes strategy would be controlled by the fact that they always need to move towards a new food source.
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***Domesticated Animals***
Humans have obtained great advantages by domesticating various animals:
* **Dogs** are great for hunting down enemies and can even serve as offensive weapons
* **Geese** are great [alarm systems](http://atpalarms.com/blog/general/geese-used-as-home-security/)
* **Carrier pigeons** can provide communications in difficult circumstances
* **Horses and pack animals** are useful for navigating terrain machines cannot handle
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Basically, I have this story I'm trying to write in which there are an advanced space-faring species of precursors (very original, I know), which have been scattered throughout the cosmos as their original homeworld and most of their species was destroyed. They are almost all aware of the existence of other ones of them throughout the universe, but most are isolated from each other by vast swaths of space. They love to toy with the 'less advanced' species in the galaxy, too.
Their technology is millennia ahead of the rest of the galaxy, which makes them enigmatic to most other races. They are all biologically immortal and have incredible powers rooted in highly advanced scientific technobabble, which allow them to individually and personally manipulate space-time to teleport themselves and other objects, materialize matter and energy from higher dimensions, create highly sophisticated devices from nothing, fly and other such powers.
They are all incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable, have super-advanced senses and so on. Each one individually could take down a Starfleet, destroy a planet, or with great effort, rearrange an entire solar system. Effectively, they are on the level of Bill Cipher in his physical form in terms of powers. Akin them to the Q from Star Trek, even.
Now, this is just an example. In the actual story, I'll likely tone their powers down quite a bit if need be, but still. I have this idea that their species cannot reproduce or breed (they cannot have children), nor can they reproduce VIA cloning or just by creating a new one of them with their matter manipulation powers. Though I'm having trouble justifying why this might be the case.
It could simply be that they simply don't WANT to do so, that they have accepted the fact that they are the last of their kind, but I'm not a fan of that idea. Hence this post.
Does anyone have any potential plausible explanations as to why this race or ANY race this advanced in fact, DESPITE being so advanced cannot reproduce beyond the current generation?
Thanks in advance.
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### They can, but they have reached a mutual contract not to do so.
These are, as you say, godlike beings. Any one of them that wants to cause problems would have caused problems on a galactic scale - which means that, since problems on a galactic scale are not happening, it stands to reason that all of the survivors must have reached a mutual understanding and a state of relative social equilibrium.
A newborn, however, introduces uncertainty and chaos. There is no guarantee that a child will accept the social contract that has been in operation for the past few million years. Because of this, they have reached a mutual understanding not to produce children. Since they are all practically immortal anyway, they don't really need to worry about securing their legacy.
What's worse - anyone who is willing to breach this mutual agreement is likely to have children who do the same. This means that they risk creating an entire race of godlike beings that *do not* limit themselves - which will quickly overrun those who *do*, unless they are eliminated immediately. For creatures this long-lived, producing a child is basically equivalent to setting off a biological WMD and will be met with swift and merciless retaliation from every other member of their race.
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**They can easily reproduce, but the results would not be near-godlike immortal beings**
There is no more complex problem than engineering perfect biological beings. They aren't just born.
While your scattered aliens possess the fruits of their super-advanced civilization, they are not really the engineers of their kind, and the super-ai that was required for the impossibly complex and precise bio-engineering of what they are... It was destroyed in the same event that wiped out most of their kind.
Simple things like self replicating factories attuned to their specific bio-signatures? They've got toys like that, and far beyond that. But this doesn't mean that they have the level of technological sophistication to create the pinnacle of their progenitors' achievements, which is the ability to create their own kind. And your remaining few are not the sort who dedicate themselves to reestablishing that process.
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They are sterile. They were the unexpected result of two different advanced species mating, and as often happens with hybrids, were more powerful and durable than either of their parents ("hybrid vigor"). However, hybrids cannot reproduce on their own, so once either or both of their parents species went extinct, no more could be created naturally.
Even clones would need to gestate, but if hybrid females even exist, they are not suited to gestating a hybrid child like one of the parents species was—possibly the one that went extinct first because gestating a hybrid invariably killed the mother.
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**They are all dudes.**
Imagine now you are a dude, one of several. You have powers and abilities, all of you, and you like to compete, show off and the like. It may not be that hard to imagine.
These dudes are satisfied with the company of the other dudes, each living in the galactic equivalent of mom's basement. They engage in their pastimes and hobbies, shoot snarky comments at each other, and perhaps get together for some Dungeons and Dragons and arguing about rules. None is looking to settle down with a nice girl and crank out the pups. Nay, these dudes are interested in ever more epic and dudely adventures and feats of dudeness.
The only time they might be interested in more of their kind is when one of their number is for whatever reason no longer available and they miss him. The last time that happened and a dude named Jeff went missing, they created a likeness of him with his powers that acted just like him and called him Copy Jeff to irritate him, and continued on as they were.
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**They could reproduce only some bilions years ago, when their race was still in its infancy, because of different cosmological parameters**
In the course of some bilions years, the universe could change some parameters, for instance the [Cosmic microwave background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background) was "warmer" than it is now. And the reproductive biology of these creatures was very sensible to these values, to the point that they cannot breed anymore (and the possibility to recreate the right set of values is still beyond their advanced technologic level).
Or in alternative, they could still breed, but in order to become god-like (which was more expensive than keeping their actual god-like status) they needed a now irreproducible cosmological state, and the awareness that their offspring wnn't be able to join their status prevents them from trying to breed.
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The television show Stargate SG-1 featured a race of aliens who had just this problem. They were called the "Asgard". Their civilization had decided a long time ago that simply cloning their current bodies was superior to reproduction (no risk of genetic issues/children breaking the norm). However, they cloned for so long that they decided they didn't need sexual organs, and they saw no downside to this. Fast-forward a couple hundred to thousand years, and they realize that their DNA for cloning is becoming corrupt. Not storage system is permanent. Google "data rot".
Here is a very brief thread from Reddit explaining the issue:
<https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/cvazg9/stargate_why_cant_the_asgard_reproduce/>
Comments from the above post - "**[Stargate] Why can't the Asgard reproduce?**" on the subreddit "**r/AskScienceFiction**":
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> They physically don't have the "equipment" for it anymore. When they started cloning, they gradually made changes to their physical bodies, and there was no reason to keep sex organs (they were also taller when they reproduced sexually
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> Somewhere in the distant past, the Asgard decided that cloning their bodies was a superior option to reproduction. At the time, they foresaw no immediate downside to this, and even removed their reproductive organs from their clones, likely so they could concentrate that energy on other biological processes. It's also why the current generation is so much smaller and physically frail compared to ancient asgard specimens. All the energy went to their brains, leaving the body behind.
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> They either saw no immediate side effects to all this, or assumed that future generations would keep studying the clone process and figure out a way to circumvent the tiny buildup of errors that come with copying a copy of a copy. Unfortunately, they did not. And they can't even modify what little they have left to kick start biological reproduction again, because their bodies simply aren't built to handle it.
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They're all actually puppets of another being located in another dimension, but they don't know it. They can do anything they want, because the other being wills or allows it, but they can't reproduce and don't even understand why, because the other being doesn't let them - and they don't even know the other being exists or that they're being controlled. Heck, they might not even realize that they can't reproduce, or might have have never considered that reproduction could even be a *thing* with them.
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Two suggestions:
1. Babies are born with their powers at full strength, so single- or even dual parenting is impossible (every tantrum becomes chaos/havoc/murder). It takes a large organized team of caregivers to keep an alien kid in check until it understands not to direct its destructive urges (at least not against its own kind. Of course they never really get over it, they just learn to suppress it :-)
2. There is a total, fixed amount of superpower distributed among the aliens and so when you have a child, you have to give some of your superpower juice to your child, and *also* some of it is irrevocably lost. Assuming for the sake of example it takes three parents to make a baby, they all start with strength 100 (total 300) and then after the birth you have four aliens of strength 70 (total 280) and the 20 has been lost forever. So even if you might really want a kid, you're diminishing your own powers and also destroying the net strength of the race as a whole. The aliens used to be a lot more powerful until they finally figured out that they were pissing away their superpower juice by procreating.
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There's always the issue of simple math. If your species is immortal, even the slightest positive reproduction rate is going to mean your species is going to fill up the galaxy eventually unless death by accident is a thing. The simple passage of time means that your population is just going to keep growing, and growing, and growing. Which means eventually the old-timers are going to come into conflict with the young 'uns for resources. For example, if they are Bill Cipher or Q-esque tricksters, those resources could very well be less advanced species to mess around with. It's no fun conning the younger species and pretending to be ancient, mystic, and unknowable if the planet is full of other members of your species making the primitives wise to your game and making you seem less an eldritch force of nature and more a normal fixture.
It's kind of like the argument related to Fermi's paradox that even if sapience were rare, if even one sapient species had achieved economical sublight spaceflight millions of years ago they would have easily spread across the galaxy and colonized most habitable planets by now, simply because of the sheer amount of time involved for them to do it and the fact that if their civilization was spread out enough it would be difficult for any single event to wipe them all out.
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**They've saturated the universe**
Each godlike, immortal being needs a huge section of space to frolic around in with stepping on someone else's toes. The species has reached a point where adding more members would overcrowd the universe, so they don't reproduce.
**Individuals need memories of the homeworld**
Cixin Liu's [Remembrance of Earth's Past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past) trilogy goes into this a bit, but the basic concept is that individuals completely isolated from their homeworld will be a fundamentally different species from those in the homeworld. Not different in a biological way, but just in how they think. This immortal species might not want to make new members now that the homeworld is gone because they would be different in some way from the current ones.
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This is more of a mystical explanation than a science fiction one, but my other suggestions were already mentioned in answers.
What if all the souls available to that race were already in use?
Something like this was used in the TV show Babylon 5, when the Mimbarri believed that humans were reborn with Mimbarri souls.
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**They can and do but are limited by "quantum psychology"**
It turns out that living forever is not so simple. It makes your personality converge to one of the few possible stable personalities from a small set. Let us call it {Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Athena, ...}. Your genes or species don't matter since you can change them at will. And we "gods" do change them when we visit other worlds.
Why does this convergence happen ? Sorry little mortal, if you were a fast learner, you would need 10000 years to start to grasp the reasons. I am willing to explain that to you, but even if you didn't take so much of your time to find a mate and raise a kid, it would be pointless.
**Pauli's exclusion principle applies**
There cannot be two identical gods. In the same way that electrons in the same quantum state need to have different spins.
Why ? I can answer that, little mortal, but again, it would take more that a few of your lifespans.
**Cloning only happens after an accident**
In fact, our Zeus is very young, only a few million years old. We had to gather to make a new one, although it took a lot of time to convince Poseidon. And it turns out that we are not even the original gods. The previous ones were wiped out in a gamma ray burst while we were still a mortal species. But we eventually reached their point and understood what limited their behavior.
So here you are little mortal, stuck with the only possible gods you can ever have, no more, no less.
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Anyone remember the [Asgards](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Asgard) of Stargate (TV) fame?
In a nutshell ...
* through genetic manipulation the Asgards went sterile
* to 'reproduce' they relied on cloning
* over time the cloning degraded their genome to the point they were stricken with an incurable ailment/disease and eventually opted to commit mass suicide
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## You wouldn't understand.
I'll explain.
Given their godlike abilities, it's inconceivable that they wouldn't be able to do whatever they wanted. It follows that they *choose* not to reproduce. And being so much further advanced than us, their intelligence would exceed ours as ours does an ant's. It would almost be an insult to try to explain their choices by human reasoning and morals. A puny human mind could no more understand their real reasons than an ant would be able to comprehend why I put on a condom during a one-night stand, apparently giving up a chance to reproduce.
Out-of-universe, it could be fascinating to write a world where people are completely used to accepting the higher beings' actions as unknowable and unfathomable, never attempting to explain them logically.
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Perhaps they are trans-dimensional beings that spawn more that one entity per "birth". When one being is born, it is benign and intelligent, the other being is cursed and evil with a lust for power. The helpful god-race eliminated it's sinful kin thousands of years ago, and chose not to procreate further, in order to keep the universe safe.
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In their infinite wisdom, they have fully grokked that having children only serves to secure their lineage. Since they are immortal, they don't need to do so and consequently fail to see a point in having children.
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**They are too aggressive for reproduction**
They are very aggressive beings, including against their own species. Think bears, where the mate is often subject to aggression after the act.
Now fast-forward after a few millenia of evolution. A few harmless paw strikes to drive off the mate become a life threatening if laser claws have become commonplace.
Over the millenia, all individuals who still want sex simply died in mating accidents, and the survivors are those that have other interests - research (toying with sentients), play (toying with sentients), power (toying with sentients). There are likely also some who are not interested in toying with sentients; these simply don't interact, so they may exist as mysterious but ultimately inactive backshadow figures in the story (but they are useful as plot hooks and dei ex machina).
This has been played out to paranoia level in a story I read as an adolescent (cited here only for inspiration since it does not match your intention): The lifeform was sedentary, even revealing your location would turn you into a target for an interplanetary strike (they would reproduce via spores or something like that). These beings were actually fearful of any lifeform and on a quest for destroing all life in the universe. They end tragic: the last two specimens finally negotiate for reproduction, in a "safe", non-revealing manner, but a foul-up makes them recognize each other's location, and they kill each other in a mutual pre-emptive strike.
(Unfortunately I don't recall author or title.)
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A few options come to mind, but the one most different from other answers is that their power prevents them from getting close enough to each other to do the deed. The power interferes with others’ power - preventing them from teleporting near their kin, or manipulating spacetime as well, or perhaps even being immortal. And even if they could bear children, the child’s power would conflict with their mother’s. And since their power has a technological basis, they can’t just start a clone and then leave the system. The clone would have the right biology, but not the tech. But since the technology is bound to the race, they can’t just leave it for others to pick up.
It could perhaps be fallout from a very old war, where another godlike race was wiped out but not before bestowing this curse on the race (and probably blowing up their homeworld).
Thus this race ends up being lonely, localized Gods. Some might be benevolent, but after millennia, most probably break down. Or perhaps the ones who survived the destruction of the homeworld were deserters or exiles. Or perhaps the entire race is just a bunch of assholes.
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This advance precursor species has long since abandoned their original organic forms in favor of superior robotic synthoid bodies. These technologically advance bodies enable them to live forever and provide them with all the capabilities mentioned in your post. Unfortunately, as a necessary sacrifice, the reproductive capabilities this species once possessed has been lost, thus limiting this species to its current population.
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There is a simple explanation which works well with a being that has achieved immortality; they're all so old that they've gone through their **equivalent of the menopause**.
Perhaps you could also introduce into the story that the last young were born before whatever galactic event destroyed their homeworld. Perhaps you could even add to the story that the species were so focused on individual survival during this event that they all passed breading age during this event?
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**The genetic engineering which gave them biological immortality took away the ability to reproduce naturally, by necessity or design** (or both).
By necessity: the hyper-active immune system that kills any cell that shows the slightest sign of diverging from its true genetics towards cancer, is also completely inimical to a sperm, ovum, or fertilized egg. So they are sterile, with respect to natural reproduction.
By design: they are (or were) far-sighted enough to realize the consequences of bringing more of themselves into a galaxy of finite size, if neither themselves nor their children ever die. It's exponential growth in a finite container. It always ends badly.
The design bit probably means that they have some sort of means to obtain permission for the creation of new individuals by natural fertilization of an egg *in vitro*, and incubation in an artificial womb. This requires societal permission that is rarely given. For such an individual to be born, an existing individual must have died. Which happens, rarely. They are not immortal against extreme physical damage in accidents. They may even run out of motivation for continued life and commit painless suicide rather than continue.
This may be easier to understand if they are egg-layers like birds, rather than viviparous like mammals. Especially so, if their ancestors deposited eggs in a communal hatchery, and their species completely lacked any parental bonding or parental desires even before they modified their own biology.
As for cloning: it's just not done. As in, the only offence that carries a mandatory death penalty for original and clones alike. For reasons both practical and moral.
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# Its not their knowhow that matters, its how they act on it
You describe a race that "love to toy with the 'less advanced' species in the galaxy." Toy implies a level of lack of caring about the consequences. So what if they create [a mutant spacefaring race bent on conquering the universe](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Zerg). They're powerful enough to overcome this.
But how do they decide what can be overcome by force, and what is irreplaceable? It turns out that its enormously difficult to define "reproduction" in the philosophical sense with enough precision to permit the application of science. There is a reason that modern Western medical doctors, versed in all the latest knowledge science has to offer still respect something *magical* about the process of conception, gestation, and birth. There is a thing that we hold sacred in the middle, never quite fully defining it, even as we get down into the biochemical processes.
This is why the scientific community was aghast at the Chinese doctor who genetically engineered human children via CRISPR was j[ailed and shunned by the scientific community](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/chinese-scientist-who-produced-genetically-altered-babies-sentenced-3-years-jail). We see something scared there and we choose not to prod it too hard. We circle it, trying to learn about it as we go.
This species could have made the mistake of underestimating this magic once. Once might be all it took. They might have thought "oh, we've got our DNA sequenced, and can 3d print cells on a whim. Let's make ourselves perfect." And so, they did. Only they found out they didn't quite understand what "perfect" was as well as they thought they did.
Perhaps they do have the ability to reproduce in the clinical sense, bearing new organic bodies which act on their own. But *something* is missing. This progeny now lacks something fundamental that made their race great. Perhaps, for some reason, this new generation simply doesn't *think*. They might be able to calculate, at a logical level, but can't meaningfully think for themselves. This is, after all, the line we draw between a 3d printable machine like a computer and a sentient being.
Something got lost. They poked at something they thought they had control of, and lost it. They thought they could reproduce it from information, and they were wrong. Now it is lost forever. And it turned out, they needed it.
They may still toy with the lesser advanced species. They have to, in order to obscure what they did to themselves from the rest of the galaxy. But they may have new intent now. Some may be malicious tricksters who strive to maintain their superior position in the galaxy, but others might be "toying" in a way which seeks to find that spark they lost in some other species, and raise them up as though they were their own children.
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**They all are siblings**
Just to expand it a little back into the past, how about a version for them to be a bunch of kids from another Universe, who have had a journey with their parents and something happened, they were left behind, or something.
As omnipotent they could be in this plane, there is just not that much technology and/or knowledge they have to return to their plane or to communicate with it. Also, as immortal beings, they have no interest in cloning themselves. Nor do their ethics allow an in-breed.
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> They are almost all aware of the existence of other ones of them throughout the universe, but most are isolated from each other by vast swaths of space.
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They are so old their physical bodies has evolved separately from one another to better suit/adapt to their different environments to the point where they're no longer genetically compatible.
Cloning cannot be accomplished as the physical body is so highly evolved it requires a highly evolved consciousness to control it, something that the living members of their species developed before their bodies had evolved to their current level. For example, their appendix which they use to control space around them requires input from the mind to prevent it interacting with space in the wrong way with potentially devastating consequences to itself, something a new born does not posess.
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"biologically immortal" means you've cured cancer, which brought a halt to genetic mutation and therefore evolution.
I'm not sure if that can be directly weaved into why the entire species is sterile, but if the only ones you'll ever have a chance to meet have been frozen aboard a space ship for the last hundreds or millions of years that it takes to get anywhere (or longer) then **they're definitely sterile by now**.
The original *Cosmos* covers this pretty well. This distances involved and the minuscule amount of time, in compassion to the age of the universe, that *'space faring civilizations'* might exist for, leaves a dishearteningly small window in which chance allows for us to meet extraterrestrial civilizations. Be careful not to un-handwave it too much.
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As a natural consequence of advanced medicine and Darwinism over many generations. With infertility treatments allowing infertile couples to conceive, they pass down their infertility problems to future generations. With ubiquitous access to infertility treatments, there is no evolutionary pressure to maintain fertility and species-wide fertility continues to drop until eventually fertility issues become too severe for medical treatments to overcome.
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**Radiation caused mass-infertility**
Say, they live in a small enough planet / spaceship, and there is a massive accident related to something radioactive. The accident irradiates them bad enough that everyone becomes infertile. Or they have/would cause severe deformities or other issues that "prevent" reproduction.
Perhaps they were on the verge of harnessing fusion power, but something went wrong. Or they were collecting solar power in some high-efficiency experiment that caused the accumulator to explode in some unexpected event.
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Their bodies, while physical in nature, are held together by their life-force's energy (their consciousness). Each of these beings have had to ascend, as it were, from their biologically-based immortal bodies to something more advanced. While they still perhaps look the same as other biologically-based life forms, they are actually far beyond what even they started out as back in time. Over the millennia, as they have found their true link to the universe, they have found the way to truly become immortal, by releasing their consciousness from their bodies.
As for the reason for why they still retain a body, even if only as a front, it is to be able to relate in some manner with other species throughout the universe, and to not forget their origins.
As for the reason they are the last of their kind: They have (unknowingly) ran up against a wall: That of entropy. Even their life-force (consciousness) will eventually decay as entropy takes hold in the universe. Given their exceedingly long (and seemingly infinite) lifespans, they cannot reproduce because they have already passed the point in time where they had the "excess energy" to reproduce, and are slowly withering away at a rate that not even they can fathom or detect.
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**The Singularity**
At some point in history the race left their physical bodies for a digital existence as a means to avoid death.
Since they're functionally immortal, they don't have a need to reproduce and lost the desire for children.
They make themselves bodies as they desire and mind transfer in and then recycle or store the body then they get tired of it.
Since immortality, there is really no return on investment for children and you could be creating a potential future rival in the future.
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**They've become atheists and reject the "divine spark" of new life**
As you may have observed on Earth, societies that have developed the technology to alter or manipulate the reproductive process have not been wise enough to leave it alone -- widespread contraception, sterilization, and abortion are the result. But at the core of reproduction is a basic mystery: God creates the new life, allowing us to help.
So let's fast forward a few centuries. Technology has gotten so good that we can not only tweak fertility but can actually design a child's body on a computer and assemble it molecule-by-molecule in some kind of 3D printer. Atheists would attempt to do so, reasoning that it would surely be better for the child than to "roll the dice" on a random fertilization. Or just as likely, they'd decide that there *were* no "dice", there can't be any "divine spark" because that's religious talk and obviously can't be admitted into serious conversation. So they wouldn't allow anyone to be naturally fertile, or any child to be created in a process that wasn't 100% planned.
Basically, the result is that they gain *so much control* of everything in their lives, that there's no room for a miracle to occur.
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I'm trying to write a mermaid civilization, although I have one major roadblock when developing a criminal justice system. My mermaids are air breathers (like cetaceans) so I'm not sure how I would have a system of detainment without drowning them to death. How exactly could I get around this hurdle?
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## You don't need prisons
*"I'm not sure how I would have a system of detainment without drowning them to death."* Well, don't have a system of detainment then. Public drownings are the social event in town. There are snacks, you get to bond with your neighbors and you get to make bets on which prisoner will last the longest.
Imprisonment is expensive. This has always been the norm in human history. Have a system of either corporal punishment, mutilition, banishment or death sentences. Slavery could be combined with branding criminals.
For detainment you could just use a rope around the neck and their hands and guards. Alternatively, you could bind groups of prisoners together so that they can't escape unless they reach a marvelous level of coordination.
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I present to you, the most feared and inescapable prison of the merfolk world:
**The Fishbowl**
There is an island in the middle of the ocean. And in the middle of this island is a massive saltwater lake, connected to the sea by a singular, underground, underwater tunnel the merfolk have dug over time. There's nothing keeping the merfolk imprisoned therein from accessing the surface. In fact, there aren't any guards around the outer rim of the prison at all. Because there's only one way in, and one way out. And that's where the vast majority of the guards are.
Anyone who tried to escape any other way would have to be doing it over the surface, dragging their legless bodies across hot, inhospitable land crawling with dangerous land predators. Some have tried escaping that way. The ones that didn't die in the attempt *quite literally* came crawling back when they realized how out of their depth they were.
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Just build the jail at the surface, so the cells are partially submerged but still have access to air.
I imagine this would be required for all buildings in which merpeople are expected to spend long periods of time, so building a jail should not be a particularly special project (or at least, no more so than it is for us land dwellers).
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If you don't want cages to breach the surface, just chain the mermaids to the ocean floor. That way, they can come up for air as they please. Of course, keep guards handy to fight off whatever sea monsters might come by.
Alternatively, install a long snorkel from the cage to the surface, with a simple valve at the bottom to stop water from filling it. You can disguise it as a floating seaweed blob or Portuguese Man of War jellyfish, if you're paranoid about surface-dwellers noticing the tube.
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Any of the above as suits plus **Salmon Farms**
A frame supported by buoys or floats and/or ropes & chains anchored to the sea floor. Then you cover this with layers of stiff netting. The walls rise a few meters vertically above the surface and curve inwards towards the top.
Add some trained dolphin 'guard dogs' patrolling the perimeter.
EDIT: even easier just deploy something similar across the entrance to any small bay or estuary that suits.
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**Caves**
Whether because the exit is too small for the mermaid to crawl through, or too far off, a cave can have air pockets that are fresh enough to breathe without offering an actual chance to escape.
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# Merfolk jails need not chain nor ball
Merfolk don't have prison in the traditional sense. Instead of capturing and incarcerating each other in physical shape, they capture their criminals and then partake in a sort of partial ritual canibalism, consuming the arm of the criminal by the community: each person in the courtroom takes a bite. Gifted with a strong healing, that arm will regrow eventually, but until then, the criminal's essence is entwined with the society and they can not do anything against society. In fact, because those other members of society have absorbed part of the criminal merfolk's essence into theirs, they know where the criminal is at any time - there is no way to flee, and a whole bunch of people will know if they violate their terms - and could come back to punish them even further.
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## Fjords
A [fjord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjord) is a long, narrow bay that was carved by a glacier and typically has very steep sides. Build a fortified barricade/gate where it opens to the sea, and you have a nice isolated place to store your criminals. Even if they could travel awkwardly over land, there's not really an overland escape route that doesn't involve climbing a mountain.
Fjords also tend to be found clustered together. You can convert several nearby fjords into a prison complex, with prisoners segregated based on the severity of their offense and their level of danger to others.
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## Convicted mermaids are sentenced to live with a dolphin pod
Mermaids can communicate with marine life (at least with the ones that have certain brain development like dolphins, and possibly all other fish and marine mammals). As dolphins are the most intelligent marine animals, merfolk have closer relationships with the dolphins. Merfolk also have a system that they can assign convicted mermaids to dolphin pods. Dolphins will keep the convicted mermaids at bay, away from the merfolk society. Dolphins are faster and they are stronger in numbers so the convicted mermaid has no chance to try something funny, but he can freely swim with them and go to the surface to breathe.
Mermaids are not cruel like other civilizations and they have respect to all marine life including themselves.
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## Merfolk sometimes jail mermen in warm volcanic lakes
Don't worry about the females. Mermaids are always lovely, sympathetic, innocent, and honest. As soon as a mermaid needs to be sent to jail, a handsome merman (or land human friend) will come to her defense. Mermaids are not expected to do anything wrong.
Mermen is another story. Mermen don't hurt anyone, but they are sometimes known to exceed the speed limit, and when they don't pay their fines, they'll be sent to jail.
**The merfolk jail: a warm volcano lake**
For reasons of containment, the merfolk jail is one of the many warm volcano lakes on your planet. When you put a merperson in a volcanic lake, this warm water renders it in a state of utter lazyness. They won't be able to leave the water. Volcanic lakes are a trap for merfolk, they are so agreeable the prisoner will not escape.
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# A river
Take a river, any river, that has only one route connecting it to the sea(assuming the mermaids live in the sea). Build an obstruction like a grate that mermaids can't get through somewhere along the river, spanning the whole width and depth. Just put a guard or two near the gate in the grate, and you'll have a prison. The mermaids will have a lot of areas to swim to, going upriver, but as long as the river doesn't branch towards the sea or other rivers or ends in a dead-end(like a waterfall), they won't be able to escape.
The beauty of this is that it is a very low effort, low maintenance prison. The mermaids are responsible for farming their own food in the river. Fish can swim in and out. And the only cost is a bit of upfront work building the grates and a handful of guards near the entrance. In fact, making them responsible for their own food will keep them busy and build up a hierarchy among the prisoners, making them have to deal with that instead of escaping.
Need more space? Take a river that has a lake somewhere upstream. More space for prisoners, yet the guards will still only need to guard one exit to keep the prisoners in.
For a bonus, a large group of guards go inside the prison once in a while to do an inspection, count the living prisoners, and detect escape attempts.
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This jail should be filled with water everywhere as mermaids cannot walk because their lower bodies are fish like and therefore a very advanced waste management system would be needed to remove all the poop and pee they do. The other everyday things could remain the same.
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There are several options for merfolk to create jails/jail-like structures. The simplest would simply be using a vertical pillory, but facing up and floating at the surface, one could also make them sideways however it would be more complicated.
Example:
~ = water level
= = wood board
o = small hole
0 = large hole
```
=o=0=o=
```
Sideways:
```
~~=hands=Neck=hands=~~
```
Another option would simply to build a partially floating cage on the surface, like this:
```
=========
| Air |
~F|~~~~~~~|F~
|prison |
=========
```
And a third option would to tie them in a shallow area so they can reach the surface.
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## a Brine Pool Labor Colony
Brine pools are toxic to marine animals due to their high salinity and anoxic properties, which can ultimately lead to toxic shock and possibly death.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool>
Documentary excerpt of an eel suffering from toxic shock after diving into a brine pool.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZ4Ld.png)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuJiUscfjQw>
## Levels of 'jail'
Any society with valuables will have a storeroom that can be protected to keep people out, it's a small adaptation to keep a person *inside*. Hence the local 'jail' will evolve out of whatever structures the mermaids use to store and protect their valuables from theft, probably **underground pits surrounded by guards**. What prevents escape is not the bars on the windows but the armed soldiers who already guard this location.
The socially-connected will get **house arrest** and have their freedom-of-movement restricted, and other privileges taken away (depending on how privileged to begin with). They must check-in with a probation officer/moral authority. This assumes the perpetrator is perceived as worthy of rehabilitation.
For the poor **shackles** are a low-cost solution. A pre-industrial mermaid society would have rope and nets. They could create the mermaid equivalent of a **ball and chain**.
For the worst offenders, life-sentences, and unrepentant recidivists, they could wall-in a cell or build a tower designed to be difficult to escape. An authoritarian could (will) create **notoriously remote prisons** for political prisoners and martyrs. Rehabilitation is not considered; the goal is to break the prisoner, and propaganda.
Those whom society deems undesirable are sent to work at a brine pool **labor colony**. Death tolls are high. Few come back. Worldbuild a *need* for the brine pool (some industry or mineral resource), and your mermaids will discover a pretext why brine pool labor camps are a necessary part of the justice system.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm currently working on a large pantheon of deities for a religion in my current world. I've decided I would like to have the deity of joy and mirth be evil, but I'm having a hard time determining a logical path to that state of being.
**How can an evil deity reasonably be explained as the deity of joy and mirth?**
(For this question, assume the typical good-evil/chaos-law axes of Dungeons and Dragons.)
[Answer]
The main thing to consider here is the concepts you're trying to tie together. In most cultures 'evil' and 'joy' are somewhat antithetical. The only people who take joy in being evil or find joy to be evil are the outliers in society.
In order to make this god more mainstream, you might have to consider that they aren't what they used to be. For example: in early Norse mythology Loki was a trickster. A bit mischievous and a bit annoying, but fundamentally harmless. In later mythologies, however, Loki went from 'haha' tricky to full on psychotic. His purpose in the stories (and hence his character) changed, and he became an evil trickster god.
Another option is to have the god be a 'two faced' kind of god. Bastet or Poseidon are good examples of this kind of a god, personifying both a destructive and a bountiful side.
So: To make an evil god of joy, you might want a god that used to be joyful until (X mythological event) turned him to thoughts of darkness and despair. Now he embodies both, bringing joy and mirth in the summer (along with a high risk of fire and drought) and causing all the evils of winter (with occasional joyful moments to be found in the solace of each other's company).
That way you have a god that can embody both concepts, and developed from an earlier god by way of natural story progression. This god is still fundamentally evil in his character, but constantly brings to mind the memory of the other non-evil traits he embodies.
[Answer]
Rather than having this god(dess) as evil, you could have them as apathetic. They can seek joy and thrill, but without regard for the consequences of their actions.
People could worship this god more mainstream, as a 'god of happiness', as they have misinterpreted this god's actions over the years. This god seeks joy through means of both good (playing in the snow, love, games) but also evil (dangerous competitions, greed, power, lust), with no cares for which is which.
For this god, there are no distinctions between what is right and wrong, just what makes for a good time.
Therefore, there would be certain cults that worship this god as was intended, by simply doing selfish acts to enrich the life of the worshiper, but not doing them *because* they are selfish, just because they are fun.
On the axis, it could be described as neutral good/evil (perhaps tilted slightly towards evil simply because of the uncaring nature), but also chaotic, as there is no regard for the welfare of others. This could easily tip into overtly evil, while some still regard it as good.
[Answer]
He could be the god of *enforced* joy and mirth.
Think of your worst boss, the corporate, managerial drone who thinks of you as nothing more than a spreadsheet entry that happens to take in dollars and outputs product. But he once read a paper that happy workers increase productivity by 7%. And he *wants* that 7%, because it will increase his own next bonus by 2%. That's how this god views you.
***So he will make you happy.***
You **will** smile and be joyful. You **will** sing with your neighbors, even the ones you secretly hate because they always take a little more than they give, and they smell kind of funny too. You **will** forgive your father for beating you, your girlfriend for cheating, your friend for taking credit for your work - because happy people don't hold grudges.
And so this god, the one who tells you to smile and find peace, is in the end the truest god of evil. Because he takes something that should be good and makes a mockery of it.
[Answer]
Your evil god is [**Bob Saget,**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Saget) showing the world there is joy and laughter in other people's suffering.
Chasing joy regardless of the cost or consequences could be considered evil. This is more towards hedonism than joy though.
Another option would be joy in the form of thrillseeking, the euphoria from adrenaline overload as well as the mirth and laughter in sharing the tales of those exploits.. This God (of skydivers berserkers and PCs) would drive his followers to ever greater death-defying feats like duels, battles and dangerous adventures, maybe blessing them with increased endurance and luck, until it ultimately kills them.
[Answer]
A note here: I'd be careful with calling it joy; this will offend certain religious people, because the Christian view of joy is not happiness or mirth, but contentedness and/or endurance. I don't mind, some people will. Be aware, but also know that you can't please everyone.
For simple evil, make her/him a god of hedonism, debauchery, rape, and prostitution (I mean, it's mirth for some of the parties involved). Make the god and his/her cultists obsessed with sex, alcohol, marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, and other things that bring euphoria. There can be sadomasochism here: extreme happiness, even orgasm, from causing and/or receiving pain –– without consent. This sort of god would be much like the Joker or an evil clown. "Why so serious?" It will be a chaotic sort of evil, and incapable of feeling pain, remorse, regret, guilt, etc. Compassion may be impossible, because empathy involves "feeling" someone else's pain.
Unlike most evil gods, though, this one will be seductive, clouding their true nature with psychedelic colors. Their temples will be filled with exotic, half-naked women dancing and playing music. You might not realize, at first, that the sacred fire is burning poppy seeds until you've already started to feel a bit euphoric. By the time you meet the high priest/ess, who is very much looking forward to torturing you, you may or may not care as you're beaten to a bloody pulp or cannibalized by drunken worshippers. Not that it necessarily needs to be that overt.
[For even more Evuls](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForTheEvulz)[,\*](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife) you could also have them delight in *stealing* joy, like a Dementor from Harry Potter. The god and their worshippers are perpetually happy, but those unfortunate enough to encounter them without being initiated will find their joy stolen away… perhaps forever, while the god revels in all of your stolen happy memories, whilst dragging you deeper into a state of despair.
A more subtle sort of evil could work as well, teaching mirth in all circumstances… why, with debauchery, of course! There might still be temples filled with bright colors and half-naked women, but they might not torture people or harm anyone… they just offer addiction instead of guidance to those who come seeking help. Kurzgesagt's recent [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg) on addiction might give you some ideas. Have the god and their worshippers be false friends who give the lonely something to connect to, who give the lost a new path to wander, who give the grieving a new commitment… forever.
If you want to add a particularly dark undertone (especially to a subtle evil, this may be over the top if you go with option one), perhaps the worshippers of this god find themselves in a Special Afterlife, where they're hooked up to some sort of mechanism that drains away their mirth to fuel whatever magic the god uses to keep worshippers in a constant state of bliss.
\*It's evil to link to TVTropes, [so...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDemonstratingArticle) I dunno, alternatively make them the God of TVTropes. They will steal your life away.
[Answer]
There is no such thing as an evil deity. There is no such thing as a good deity either. Any real deity is a fundamental and necessary part of the reality and as such they simply are. "I am what I am" and all that.
When people talk of deities being good or evil what is actually meant is that the people talking perceive their relationship with the deity as a negative and antagonistic.
The classic case is that the deity's "domain" is something considered negative. Deities of such things as disease, tyranny, or undeath are invariably considered evil by people who classify what the deity represents as evil. This is just a shortcoming of human understanding, but it is the norm.
So the first option is that the people consider joy and mirth to be negative things to be avoided. Such people would at the very least have serious doubts about the deity in question. You can find a real world example in some forms of Abrahamic religions where joy and mirth can be considered worldly distractions from the path to God.
The basic concept in this case is not that mirth is bad, but that your time is limited and you should be spending it on something more valuable. Many religious groups consider any excess frivolity to be negative and more than few have confused warnings about worldly distractions with assuming doing such things is sinful and evil. Intentionally promoting mirth with intent of distracting people actually **would** qualify as evil.
You can use this option by making the people somber and serious, obsessed theologically with something that is not aided by frivolity. Easy way would be to just copy the concept of final judgement and make criteria something suitably serious that joy and mirth can legitimately be considered distractions. You can do the same with less-than-final judgement as well by using some kind of wheel of reincarnation scheme. These people would consider a deity that tries to distract them from "purifying" themselves with joy and mirth to be evil.
Second option that is common is that the deity is not their deity. Most demons or evil deities are actually gods of some people considered hostile or at least suspicious. So you God of Joy could be a god worshipped in a hostile empire. Or a god worshipped by people who used to live on the land your people now possess before being conquered. Or simply a once popular god whose cult lost the competition in the marketplace of religions. In all these cases the stories and myths taught to people about the God would paint him a negative light and he would thus be an evil god. People in a neighbouring country or of some ethnic or religious minority would probably disagree.
Also note the direct link between how a god is perceived by people and how the god interacts by the setting or story. Gods generally do not, due to various hand waving reasons, interact directly with people. They interact by the intermediary of humans using methods suited to those humans. And those humans will have their perceptions of the gods they serve and their agendas. And **that** is what is visible of the god to other people.
So if the god of joy is mostly worshipped by evil people then for all practical purposes he is an evil god. And of course the "evil people" comes with all the point of view warnings it usually has. The difference between ruthless terrorist and dedicated liberation fighter is usually in the eye of the beholder without any real world difference needed. So a god can become evil simply by guilt by association.
[Answer]
I think the most logical choice would be a trickster/practical joker kind of god.
The difference is the jokes go WAAAAY over the line and cause permanent injury etc. Essentially you are creating [Loki...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki) but there is some nuance of course.
This should not be a global deity, nor would it likely be widely worshiped by most of the races who would see his shenanigans for what they are which is...well evil.
Some races/tribes could find this god's way of doing things to be funny and bring laughter/joy. These barbarians could be known for torturing their opponents and saying disturbing things like "*Look at him squirm, his guts are falling out*" which would of course be followed by psychotic laughter.
**So yes.** It could be done but to be realistic it shouldn't be a respected universal deity. This god would be a niche player on the deific scene and along with his/her followers would be pretty universally reviled for their views on suffering and pain.
If you don't keep it a small fringe religion you run the risk of making it difficult for users/readers to accept because lets face it, MOST people do not find joy in the suffering of others.
[Answer]
You could take some pointers from the Warhammer universe's [Slaanesh](http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Slaanesh). As the god(/ess?) of extreme excess, sensation, lust, etc. you could easily pull some of these ideas together to bring an "evil" (or certainly [blue and orange morality](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality) based) god or goddess.
[Answer]
If a culture aspires to a middle road rather than extremes, all extremes could be seen as evil. An evil joyful god could be one which takes advantage of the lack of judgement that is associated with unbalanced joy and uses it to corrupt by doing the god's work unnoticed under the oblivion of joy.
Such a character would be a very dangerous character to have around, as typically joy is considered to be a good thing. However, if you structured your pantheon carefully, you could make sure there's a way out. Perhaps well tempered balanced joy is okay, but the unbalanced ecstatic joy is forbidden and found under this god's domain. Your "balanced ideal" would have to be terribly strong, though, or the entire culture may destabilize. Indeed, you might even write a story where the destabilization of this balanced ideal is a good thing, opening doors that were closed before.
[Answer]
How about a god that embodies joy, but in a limitless, chaotic, destructive way. He's the god of joy because he party hardest than any other mortal or god. He indulges in any excess. He wont stop for nothing, he isn't driven by any ulterior motive, his goal is simple, enjoy himself, regardless the cost, regardless how many other beings end up hurt or die, and completely ignoring any consequence to his deeds.
He IS joy personified, but the rest of the pantheon is afraid of how utterly chaotic and unpredictable he can be. One day he wants to do all the drugs, other day he finds his personal joy at randomly smiting lawful mortals, and the next he's playing soft music to the wild animals in a forest.
His followers fall deeply in a hedonistic lifestyle, forgetting family, work, and even close friends, unless they "embrace joy" too. Ultimately most of them end up in anarchy, hurting others and even themselves.
While this particular god is more of an agent of chaos, than evil, his complete lack of empathy and interest for anything that wont directly bring him joy, and the fact that he WILL hurt and kill mortals and gods (should it be possible) just for personal fun is what puts hin deep into the chaotic evil alignment
[Answer]
Have your world's predominant moral system place a great deal of emphasis on *balance*. The god of joy's doctrine may seem seductive and beautiful at first, but only if you completely ignore balance and appropriateness.
Here are a few ways you could play with this (and probably others as well):
* If you were at a funeral and one person was all serene and happy, wouldn't you feel a bit creeped out and think there's something *wrong* with that guy?
* If joy-cultists can become too overwhelmingly happy to notice things like pain, they could end up seriously injuring themselves. (Or possibly seriously injuring *others*, and not realizing it's bad for them, because it doesn't hurt *them* when they do it!)
* We all know that physical pain is good (as a basic concept at least) because it helps keep us from injuring ourselves physically. Here's something that doesn't get talked about as much: *emotional pain* works exactly the same way. Just imagine the sorts of things a person who's incapable of feeling remorse, guilt, disgust or grief could do.
* From a different angle, it's a well-understood principle of life that growth comes from the struggle against opposition. ("No pain no gain", "necessity is the mother of invention", "give a man a fish...", etc.) If joy-cultists went around all the time doing everything they could to help people around them to be happy by trying to fix their problems, you could easily end up with a lot of people who aren't good at dealing with their own problems. Just imagine an entire civilization with a high percentage of stereotypical "trust-fund babies"!
So yeah, there are plenty of hooks you could use to create a civilization where a god that places what outsiders see as an excessive level of emphasis on happiness could be viewed as evil and problematic.
[Answer]
My idea for an "evil god of joy and mirth" is quite simple: Make it so your deity holds all joy/mirth in existence (as if it where a finite substance) and only shares it if you bribe him/her with pleas, prayers, offerings, sacrifices... whatever. You could also make it so it gives out joy just so it can take it from you at a later date and make you miserable.
Just my 5 cents.
[Answer]
just because this god is the God of joy does not mean this God has to like it. Much like a cartoon i once saw, two twins had the ability to see the future. one saw all good events, the other, all bad events. their personalities were the exact opposite of what they saw. the one that saw all good could therefor never be surprised by good, and was semi depressed. the one that saw only bad events could never predict the good events, and therefor could enjoy them.
Another Example would be in the Dragon ball Z movie revival of F, A evil terror to the entire galaxy was killed, and was immobilized in heaven. His recollection of the experience
"Oh, you can't imagine the depths of my suffering there. I spent most of my days strung up like a pupating moth, trapped over a field of delicate little flowers where bands of angels and fairies and enchanted stuffed animals lived! They played songs and danced asinine jigs was when they would get their next warm, fuzzy hug!" -Frieza
He Hated it, but for the "angels and fairies and enchanted stuffed animals" it was heaven.
Play on this concept. the god of joy does not specifically have to be the embodiment of joy. What if they have come to hate joy and happiness because they constantly experience others versions of it and grew sick of it. the God may want peace and quiet, but cant do so, so long as any good or joy exists in the world.
[Answer]
You could have a God who thrives on the souls of his worshippers, but he gains worshippers by luring them in through joyous things, then causes them to be joyful until they die of complacency, at which point he harvests their souls.
He is evil, stealing souls to power himself, but his victims die happy. If he's smart, he only steals some of the souls. That way people tend to think he's actually good and sample his services, then he feeds off the ones who will be missed the least.
[Answer]
It seems you want a hedonistic god, seeking joy and taking no regard or responsibility for how his actions affect others.
Roman Bacchus / Greek Dionysus wasn't too far from that. Assuming he was not a real god and the faithful simply believed what they wanted to believe, probably the only thing that kept this fictional personality from being less regarding of others was the affection the people had for wine, and their god of wine.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus>
[Answer]
Just for laughs... The god of **Schadenfreude** has a nice ring to it.
>
> [Schadenfreude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude) is pleasure derived from the deserved misfortunes of
> others. It is specifically used when someone who deserves to be
> unfortunate, is; and you take pleasure in it. This word is taken from
> German and literally means "harm-joy".
>
>
>
This approach adds a little ambiguity as to whether this god is good or evil, which may leave you more wiggle room for twists in the plot.
To bad people he/she/it is evil and spiteful.
To everyone else he/she/it is a good god of justice.
Effectively this god steps in to make bad things happen to bad people for the delight of onlookers.
You can tip the scales in the evil direction if needed, by making this god a little overzealous or proactive. Just have this god step in and dole out harsh, yet humorous punishments for the slightest of infractions.
[Answer]
There are some great suggestions and I am late to this post so I am sure I am late, and Admittedly I am incorporating some of the Ideas built in this room as well as on my own/Inspiration taken from MTG and Warhammer, So here is my take on a CE God of Joy,Mirth and Death.
A Religious Nomadic culture ruled by Priestly Entertainers. The Jesters who call themselves priest of their God *insert* bring joy and mirth to all their willing victims.
There Temples have all a soul could desire, The finest wines and foods. More earthly pleasures of Man and Woman, who offer themselves to those who come, They give all they can and ask never for anything in return. Sex, Drugs, Rock and roll. Everything is acceptable and everything has a Price. As the Travelers, and citizens indulge, There stand the Masked Priest watching looking and judging.
The Temple filled with scents of lilac and burning seeds in the brazier seem to have a affect which compel and seduce you to all the pleasures.
But they do not just preform and show each offering a test each word a gracious gift. Give freely, Smile and rejoice, celebrate death and love all. On the surface this seems positive. One who is uneducated might even think that there is comfort in not morning the dead for their suffering is over. Always they are watching from behind their mask...waiting for someone to have just a little too much fun. That's when the Slaughter games begin.
A Ritual performed on each new moon, those deemed unworthy are offered to their god for judgement. Those who *God name here* wants at his table are given the swiftest path to their Smiling god of death.
Tenats:
You will smile and be joyful.
You will sing with your neighbors, even the ones you secretly hate because they always take a little more than they give.
You will forgive because happy people don't hold grudges.
And so I say this to you, smile and find peace.
Life is full of pain and suffering and the only way to escape is through death and you better come to me with smile on your face or you shall no endless pain.
But if You greet me with a Smile, Than you are my friend and we can play and sing all day. In death I see your true face, so wear a mask and hide your smile because I am the only one who will see it.
They kidnap those from their temple who took to much or over indulged, and wait for their judgement, they offer freely of their talents as they travel never staying anywhere long as to not draw too much attention or overstay a welcome.
They do their gods work and offer joy and happiness even if for a brief moment.
*It should be noted I have built this culture as Nomadic but also they all wear masks protecting their 'true faces as to offer a true gift, as children they build these mask, as adults they are only removed at death to see if they had a good death aka a smile on their faces, To new comers who wish to join after a 'baptism' They are given a mask. I in my campaign where I uses these people I just was enthralled with Masks for these Jester*
Military Forces:
Bards - Jesters Masks often Resembling Scarecrows or Goblins, Shaven heads with wigs of Straw. Light-Med armor, Sickle & Whips, War casters & Dual Wielders
Fire Breathers - Jesters Masks often Resembling Scarecrows or Goblins, Shaven heads with wigs of Straw. Light-Med armor, With Torches granting them Breath weapon feature and Short swords or another Finesse weapon Or you could just do *Sorcerer Dragon bloodline alt* for firebreathers
Rouges: Knife Throwers Dressed in flamboyant cloaks with mask often resembling skulls or trolls.
Jugglers: Armed with academical flasks.
Clerics - Clown - Silver mask built as Skull, One handed Blade Medium armor Limited Plate - Medium Armor Master,Sentinel
Paladins - Harlequin - Black robes with flowing cloaks, Golden chain mail and Plate Winged swords with their holy symbol in the Hilt,Generally Two handed Solid black mask without seemingly eyes but a bright golden and silver smile
Sorcerers - Trickster light armor Flamboyant robes which appear worn and tattered, often with horned skull mask with silver/gold spikes. Wild Mages
Also I have used Succubi,Incubi Some lesser demons as alternate bad guys here. I do have a Arch Paladin who is Tagged with Lord of Riots tag.
That's my take on a God of Joy and Death, I do want to thank this post for inspiring and helping me build and work it into my campaign im sure it not perfect but everyone seems to love our crazy death carnival
[Answer]
Think of your god of joy and mirth as a sort of vampire. He is most joyful and mirthful when he has succeeded in sucking out joy and mirth from a helpless mass of human beings.
He squelches them and drains them emotionally, leaving them in a state of chronic depression -- apathetic and unable to laugh even at life's lighter moments. He does this by injecting negative thoughts and feelings into their mind, that say, "All is futile and worthless. I am a hopeless failure and a burden on this earth. Nobody cares for me, and nobody needs me."
However, this god plays favorites with those who worship him and bring him offerings and human sacrifices. Those who are favored are also joyous and mirthful, but their happiness depends on other people's joylessness.
This god thus has allies among humans and in the spirit-world -- sneaky sprites who do his dirty work, screw up people's romances and enterprises, and whisper negative messages to them while they sleep.
This god is androgynous, and his worldview is specifically misanthropic and misogynistic. He doesn't hate humanity in a general way, but he specifically holds men and women in utter contempt for their manliness and womanliness.
Whom does this god fear? He fears young children and animals because of their capacity to be simply joyous and mirthful without any reason, or even in the face of adversity. He fears anybody who loves unconditionally, because they can spread joy even in the most hopeless conditions. He fears the power of simplicity and humility to enable joyousness even under tyrants and exploiters.
[Answer]
I'd suggest reading/watching the Name of the Rose in which a character argues that laughter is evil:
>
> Jorge de Burgos: Laughter is a devilish wind which deforms, uh, the
> lineaments of the face and makes men look like monkeys.
>
>
> William of Baskerville: Monkeys do not laugh. Laughter is particular
> to men.
>
>
> Jorge de Burgos: As is sin. Christ never laughed
>
>
>
and
>
> William of Baskerville: But what is so alarming about laughter?
>
>
> Jorge de Burgos: Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no
> faith because without fear of the Devil, there is no more need of God.
>
>
>
In other words, laughter/joy/mirth can be viewed as something childish at best and disrespectful at worse; having fun is a waste of resources
[Answer]
You might be able to get what you're looking for if you consider how your "society" defines good/evil first...
Kant was of the opinion that doing anything we want/feel-like doing cannot add to our morality, because there's no resistance or base nature to overcome.
If we consider something along those lines, we might be able to consider "good" deities to be the ones that are associated with "developing character" whereas "evil" deities are the ones that make [our] lives easier.
You might then have the curious societal effect that people mostly pray to evil gods. ;)
[Answer]
It can be a destructive, irresponsible kind of joy. It is evil in the sense that it brings joy to individuals, but harms a large group, or the individual in the long run.
People need things like agriculture, math, architecture to live well. He would be the **God of Procrastination**.
People need things like marriages and relationship to feel secure. He would be the **God of Frivolous Sex**. Children wouldn't know who their real parents are. They would have sex frivolously with their relatives, animals, and strangers, and end up in a kind of hollow pleasure.
Good food gives joy. He would be the **God of Obesity**. And **God of Mind Altering Substances**.
There is also joy at the cost of others. His followers would go into the city forums to open debate on whose deity is greater or whether same-sex marriages should be legal. **God of Trolls**.
He is the **God of Addiction**. Hell is not pain and torture. Hell is eternal pleasure, without accomplishment. Hell is not filled with screams, but with regret. Hell is a dank basement, smelling of urine, alcohol, weed, and sexual fluids, filled with obese men and women. They were not inherently evil, but abandoned their responsibilities for selfish pleasure.
[Answer]
I would recommend something of a blind joy. A God who infects people with mirth and happiness over brings they shouldn't feel joyful about, inevitably warping their actions.
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