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This question graduated from the [Sandbox for Proposed Questions](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/47139)
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# Gravity magic - How does it work?
### (What physical law can magic manipulate in order to affect gravity?)
In my world everyone is capable of casting magic. It is possible for a single person to cast as many different types of magic as he/she wishes, assuming they know the spells. Every person also has an affinity to a specific type/form of magic, e.g. projectile magic, water magic or defensive magic. One of the main characters in my story has an affinity to gravity-based spells, so it is much easier and more intuitive to use them for her.
What I'm interested in is not how magic works in this context (assume there is some amount of recharging MP within every person that is used to cast spells), but rather how the gravitational effects caused by the magic could be explained.
I'm looking for a "generic" solution that explains explicitly this type of magic, not every single spell/usage, but rather "gravity-type magic" itself. I don't intend to explain my readers every single law of physics, space-time etc. in every detail, but the main aspect of "how" should come across.
When answering, take the following scenarios as use-cases for the magic to check:
* Slowing down yourself down when falling, so you don't hit the ground at full speed (as near to 0m/s as possible, at the very least you shouldn't be injured by landing) (e.g. jumping from higher up)
* Levitating yourself / other objects, so they don't move in any direction
+ Bonus points: still won't move if influenced by another force (e.g. a thrown stone)
* Pushing objects out of your way (e.g. a locked door)
* Ability to combine multiple "gravity fields", so you could simultaneously keep a cup in place and rotate it upwards-down, while still keeping the liquid inside
I've also found the question [How do I grant superheroes gravitational manipulation, justified scientifically?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94390/how-do-i-grant-superheroes-gravitational-manipulation-justified-scientifically), but it is somewhat different than my question. My question focuses on how to actually perform the gravity-based magic and not on how you could justify the existence of such powers.
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**Edit:**
Thank you for all the great answers! I'll go with the Answer by [Chronocidal](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/141538/47139), since it fits my own idea of how it should work best of the existing answers.
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> What I'm interested in is not how magic works in this context (assume there is some amount of recharging MP within every person that is used to cast spells), but rather how the gravitational effects caused by the magic could be explained.
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If you stick to Einstein's model for gravity, you can explain your magic via the ability of manipulating the curvature of space-time.
The Gravitational force experienced by an object (the Einstein tensor) subject to curvature $R$ (the Ricci tensor) can be calculated by the formula $G\_{µv} = $$8πG \over C^4$$ T\_{µv}$
To create a "repulsion" effect, the curvature can be made convex instead of concave. To limit how large an area is affected, use a sharper curve (this will cause the force experience to increase / decrease more rapidly as you approach the peak, instead of the normal $r^{-2}$ relationship experienced at distance $r$ under standard conditions)
By curving space-time directly, you can also apply the force in any direction instead of just "towards" and "away"
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> What I'm interested in is not how magic works in this context (assume there is some amount of recharging MP within every person that is used to cast spells), but rather how the gravitational effects caused by the magic could be explained.
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If you stitch to the Newtonian model for gravity, you can explain your magic via the ability of controlling magnitude and sign of the masses involved in the gravitational interaction.
The gravitational force between two bodies of mass m at distance r can be calculated according to the famous formula $F=G \cdot$$m\_1 \cdot m\_2 \over r^2$.
If you can change the sign of m, you can have gravity be repulsive. So, in case you jump from a skyscraper, turning your mass to negative once in fall would have the effect of Earth pushing you up, slowing down your fall. You can also levitate by alternating positive and negative mass values.
Turning upside down a cup while not dropping its content could be achieved in the same way.
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Personally I'd steer clear of trying to get some physics-based in-universe explanation unless your magical society also has a very high technology.
That said...
Since gravity is the result of curvature of space, the simple answer would be to have the magic operate to alter that curvature. We don't know exactly what mechanism causes space to curve in the presence of mass, so you can get away with some artistic licence. It's magic after all.
Let's say that the gravitational field strength, which is an expression of the warping of space, is something that you can move around. You can't make much gravity on your own, but you can potentially take energy from other parts of the field and concentrate it. Reducing the gravity in an area requires you to spread that field energy around, so gravity gets stronger elsewhere. The better you are at controlling it the more complex you can make the resulting changes, and the stronger your magical talent the larger the scope of the changes.
But gravity only really does one thing: pull on stuff. You can put a gravity well in the air 2 feet above the table and watch it fall in, but controlling the orientation of the table is going to be difficult. You'd probably need to create a shaped gravity field the shape of the table to get it in the right orientation, and it's not just going to sit there when you push on it... unless you have enough field strength to counter the push.
Since this is magic though, let's assume that you *can* deform space the way you want if you have the right spell. You could do all sorts of nasty things with it, like concentrating all of the gravity in a battlefield into a tiny ball of hyper-gravity strong enough to tear humans apart. You could make things fall in any direction, essentially making you the ultimate siege weapon. Water flowing uphill is way simple. How about castles falling into the sky? If it were my castle I'd be doing my best to outlaw gravity magic, as aggressively as possible.
So yes, you can stop people falling. Yes, you can walk on walls and ceilings. But it's going to take a hell of a lot of field shaping to get cups to dance and flip without spilling their contents.
Perhaps what you need is less gravity and more telekinesis? Directly applying forces to objects has a lot of potential too. Maybe a combination of both?
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Gravity sources are everywhere. Everything in the galaxy is attracting everything else.
The only reason the satellites in space don't come crashing down is because they are traveling fast enough to keep missing the Earth.
The only reason the Earth doesn't crash into the sun is that it's moving fast enough to keep missing it.
The only reason the sun doesn't fall into the black hole at the galactic core is that it's moving fast enough to keep missing it.
If any of them were to lose forward momentum they'd plunge to a fiery death.
The only reason two apples don't orbit each other is because they are overwhelmed by earths gravity, and the suns gravity, and all of the other gravity sources that influence us.
**So the way that magic controls gravity is by selectively ignoring, reversing, or reinforcing it around whatever thing you want to manipulate.** If you need to levitate, reverse the pull of Earths gravity. If you need to push something, reinforce the pull from things in line with the direction you want it to go, and then negate or reverse the pull from the other directions.
At the highest levels it would be crazy powerful, being able to increase an items gravity field to the point where it becomes neutronium or a singularity.
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This is more of an addition to [L.Dutch♦'s answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/141534/60972), *controlling magnitude and sign of the masses involved in the gravitational interaction*, but to achieve some of the points you mentioned (pushing a door out of the way, stopping movement even when affected by an outside force) you need to have a solution for **sideways motion** and **rotation**.
For sideways motion you can take into account the fact that Earth isn't a point source for gravity, instead we are pulled towards each particle that makes up the Earth and our gravity vector is the sum of all those forces. If your character can control the effect of gravity from different sources separately, then sideways motion can be achieved by getting a push from one half of the Earth and getting pulled by the other. You could even use gravity from other celestial bodies (Sun, Jupiter, supermassive black hole at the center of the the Milky Way).
Rotation can be achieved as described in Whitecold's comment, with nonuniform gravity: have half of the thing you're rotating be pulled down and the other half pulled up (gently so you don't tear it apart). Your rotating cup of water that doesn't spill could be done by having gravity push "into" the cup just near the mouth, pushing from the bottom of the cup to counteract the movement the first push would impart, all the while keeping the cup and water in the air (this might require more skill from your character than simple levitation).
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The Higgs field gives elementary particles their mass, and having some sort of a mechanism to attenuate or disable its interactions could work to your benefit at a level that doesn't really have a reasonably obvious counterargument. So in effect, the magic could somehow stop this interaction, making object momentarily more or less massive. (The remote pushing effect you mentioned I found the most difficult to explain...) The intricacies work very much differently for charged leptons and force carrier bosons, though.
Most of the mass of matter is from the mass of the atomic nuclei, and ≈99% of that mass doesn't come from the mass of the individual elementary particles but the strong force; potential energies of the quarks (and hence protons and neutrons) bound together can be translated to mass via E=mc^2. Another explanation for your magic could thus be not exactly one that works by meddling with gravity but meddling with another fundamental force which affects mass which in turn gets picked up unmodified gravity. The strong force is mediated by gluons (analogous to photons for the electromagnetic interactions), so off we go with gluemancy.
The problem with this all is of course, that if one is capable enough to modify these tine, fundamental properties of particles, it doesn't easily make much sense to be able to *only* demonstrate gravity-based powers.
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The kind of magic you are talking about is anthropomorphic.
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> * Slowing down yourself down when falling, so you don't hit the ground at full speed (as near to 0m/s as possible, at the very least you shouldn't be injured by landing) (e.g. jumping from higher up)
> * Levitating yourself / other objects, so they don't move in any direction
> * Bonus points: still won't move if influenced by another force (e.g. a thrown stone)
> * Pushing objects out of your way (e.g. a locked door)
> * Ability to combine multiple "gravity fields", so you could simultaneously keep a cup in place and rotate it upwards-down, while still keeping the liquid inside
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Gravity is the measurement of the degree to which mass-energy curves space time around it. What you describe above is a bunch of stuff that seems convincing to a human if you described gravity magic to.
A physics based process won't neatly fit in a "stuff that X magic would do" that a human would narrate, because physics doesn't really care what a human finds narratively convincing.
As an example, Electro-Magnitism covers everything from being able to touch things, see things, shoot lightning, and pretty much all of chemistry. Meanwhile, the human "story" based Magnatism is about being able to move metals around (because they are "magnetic"), and Electricty magic is about lightning bolts and static electricty.
If you want anthropomorphic magic, magic that makes sense mythologically or in categories humans care about, it has to be powered by an intelligence with a similar mind to ours. That intelligence somehow set up the rules in ways that we find are pleasing.
Spells become "instructions" to this intelligence, who then does what asked. The being being interacted with could be a god-like entity, a demon, or a post-singularity AI, or an ancient forgotten society of super-scientists who left "macros" active that their children used to play with.
In the last case, the affinity of certain people for certain kinds of magic is akin to being able to unlock a certain smart phone with your voice, because it coincidentally is similar to the real owner (it doesn't have to be voice-locked, but you can imagine it being so). The fact that these ancient intelligences let their children play with fireballs would be explained by the fact that everyone in their society was backed up, and repair/resurrection was trivial; that technology doesn't recognize humans as being in their pattern-banks. Humans who *can* heal are actually using the "veternarian" macros.
Now, once we divorce the physical mechanism from the "kind of magic", the fact that these are "gravity" macros is because they are the kind of thing that the parent programmed for their kid (or maybe bought the "play with gravity" kit for their kid's system).
Your entire environment could be a simulation running in an ancient computer, with the original hosts long exinct. The matter you are walking on and breathing could be programmable computronium (mass-energy optimized to do computation) that emulates being matter so as to leave a "natural" experience for growing up, but being computronium this is just an option; "magic" literally ignores the apparent laws of physics, because the laws of physics as you experience them are just an emulation layer.
Being able to float in either of these cases is little more than a matter of changing the position value of a variable in a specific coordinate space. Now, no human has access to this underlying system; so they cannot insert the wrong arguments and cause the water on the earth to start to orbit the other way around the sun.
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I'm borrowing heavily from the "Irregular at the Magic Highschool" light novel series where magic is done by influencing the information bodies of particles. Basically assume everything has an "information body" similar to how in physics simulations every particle has some sort of matrix/vector which stores its properties. These properties can be position, time, velocity, mass, energy, etc... This is somewhat similar to string theory where particles are strings and properties of a particle are determined by the vibration of the string.
Whichever way you want to go about it, gravity magic influences the vibration/information of the particle related to gravity. There are no "gravity fields" in this solution so I can't check off the ability to create multiple gravity fields but you can still rotate a cup and not have any liquid fall out by influencing the particles of the cup along with the liquid inside.
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> *This answer will not be scientifically detailed. I will be using simple terms to keep it understandable. Assume some accuracy to be lost as a result.*
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"What physical law can magic manipulate in order to affect gravity?"
# Gravity Magic Can Manipulate Gravity.
What? Were you expecting something different?
Gravity magic works by localizing a mass of mana in a specific region to cause specific gravitational events in that region.
What effects does Gravity Magic need to have?
* Gravity Amplification
* Gravity Reduction
* Gravity Nullification
* Gravity Reversion
So, how would this work?
First you need to consider what components influence gravity: Mass and Volume. The greater the mass in a volume of space, the greater the gravity it will influence other objects of mass with.
Mass is the amount of stuff an object is made of. Volume is the amount of space that stuff fills.
Next, you need to consider how LONG the increase will occur.
By increasing the mass of an area, you increase its density. In turn, the amount of gravity will increase. Now, normally, gravitational shifts are minor. If you have a crumpled ball of aluminum foil, that's going to have less gravity than a compressed ball of pure aluminum. By very little, but the gravitational amount will be different. But what about if the amount of mass in that ball was increased by 100 despite maintaining the same volume? Then the gravity would increase a fair amount. Would it be noticeable? Not really because the gravity of the planet would be more influential.
So, how would we affect the changes you desire?
* Slowed Descent - When you cast Slowed Descent, the caster casts a moving mass of high-density gravity above them which has its own gravity of 0.9 Gs, bringing the influence of the planet's gravity on you to a 10th of what it was.
* Levitation - When you cast Levitation, the caster casts a mass in an area which attracts anything nearby to its source. The central source of gravity is surrounded by another layer of gravity which serves to keep objects balanced between the two gravitational sources. In order to quickly drag an object, the gravity would be 5Gs, but would decay over time, quickly reaching 1.1 Gs before it maintains that for a while and decays completely. The higher the gravity and more localized the field, the more difficult it would be for an outside force to move the affected objects. The problem is, the greater the gravity, the more dangerous it is to be inside its direct field of influence.
* Push - A mass of gravity is created which draws in objects towards it.
* Combined Fields - Just create two separate masses moving at appropriate speeds in different directions so that they are both affecting the same object and not being negatively influenced each other's gravity.
The answer is just create masses of mana. They'll emit a gravitational force and that force will grant the desired effects. You could even play with the idea of negative mass, but that would be your own choice of creative liberty.
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I'm trying to build a setting in which humankind would have no other choice than to live underwater to survive.
Suppose there was a nuclear war in which a huge part of the human population died, and it renders the surface of the earth uninhabitable for several centuries. But people survived because they were conducting an experiment at the time, living in underwater habitats.
**How would this fallout then affect the oceans?** I'm especially interested in how much the water would be impacted by radiation, if it would affect the edibility of flora/fauna, and if this could possibly cause mutations.
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# Your premise is problematic
I am going to take two steps back and start by looking at what you want to achieve: **a way to force humans to live under water**.
Nuclear fallout does not really help you there, because of the way fallout works. Fallout is not some evil magical gas that floats around and makes surface life equally problematic everywhere.
In short: **nuclear fallout is dust**, not gas. The problem for you as an author with the fallout premise is that fallout does just that: **fall out** of the sky, as soon as there is some rain. That is how it gets its name, it simply falls out of the sky really quickly. This means that it is the **surface** that gets contaminated, not the atmosphere. And this contamination will not be uniform... it will instead be very uneven and spotty.
Nuclear fallout is harmful in two ways.
1) Direct radiation, we can call this "shine".
2) Ingested particles; i.e. dust particles that get into your body by breathing or eating.
Both 1 and 2 are solved in the most banal of manners: **remove the dust, mechanically**. Simply scoop it up and lift it away. Once that is done, prevent new dust from getting into your cleaned areas.
Doing this — cleaning up contaminated areas and make them fit for living and sustenance — is a lot easier and cheaper than moving down into the sea.
As evidence: this is how Hiroshima looks today...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/irHKn.jpg)
So in short, you need another premise... and there is one:
# The ozone layer is destroyed
The [ozone layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer) is essential for us humans to live on the surface of the Earth. But even with the protection that the ozone layer gives us, ultraviolet radiation from [Sol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Name_and_etymology) is still one of the leading factors to increase the risk of cancer(1), and very bad cancer at that: malignant melanoma.
The ozone layer absorbs 97 to 99 percent of UV radiation. So without the ozone layer, we could suffer 30 to 100 times more UV radiation on the surface of the Earth. This would pretty much preclude humans spending any time out in daylight.
Destroying the ozone layer is "easy" for you as an author. Remember that it nearly happened in real life. It was just that we caught the problem in time and fixed it. All you need to do is introduce a factor that does lead to the destruction of the ozone layer, and there you have a much more viable solution to forcing people to live under the surface of the sea(2).
(1) ...next after smoking, air pollution, viruses, and age
(2) ...or to simply become nocturnal.
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Nuclear fallout will first and foremost affect ocean plankton. Plankton is a mixture: it is part animal (including the larvae of many fish and crustaceans), part plant (microscopic algae). Plankton is the main food source for many creatures in the ocean. Contaminated plankton will kill the animals that eat it, and these animals will, like plankton that dies from other causes including radioactivity itself, sink slowly to the bottom of the ocean. In time it will be replenished, but some will not make it.
Your human survivors will have to eat some contaminated animals, maybe trying to screen out the most contaminated specimens. If they have some mastery of genetic engineering, they could create some enhanced organisms that consume and concentrate the most radioactive parts of the fallout (just as some plants have been naturally found to absorb and concentrate certain heavy metals from the soil). Then they could use those to clean up their underwater fish farms or whatever.
Water itself will disolve some of the radioactive elements and compouns found in the fallout, so water itself will have to be filtered, but if you're living underwater you are doing that already anyway.
One major problem is most life in the oceans is concentrated near the continental shores, which is (not coincidentally) where most minerals and nutrients are washed up by erosion from the continents. That would not be a good place to be. Your survivors would probably do better near deep hydrothermal vents, where they'll have a chance of getting some warmth (and therefore energy) and they'll be farthest from the most damaged areas.
Mutations will surely occur and most will of course have negative effects. In time the flora and fauna might even adapt to radioactivity, but not before lots of species have died out. But mutations, even if they kill people, will not by themselves imperil the future of the human race if they're slow to show their effects. Even if everybody gets a cancer and dies around forty, that's time enough for any healthy couple to raise twenty children (supposing they have any food left to feed them...).
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There is one important point to realize: Fallout is distributed over ground *surface*, but diluted in ocean *volume*. That difference is huge. It means, that the same nuclear material that settles in a thin layer on the ground is spread across a few meters of depth at first, and will keep reducing in density as surface water gets mixed with water from deeper layers.
Of course, depending on the intensity of the initial fallout, life in the upper layers of the ocean will be affected. Also, you will see significant impact around river mouths, as those rivers will wash the contamination from the ground to the sea over time. However, you have really good chances for a large amount of sea life to survive even when ground based life is completely eradicated.
Another effect to consider is distribution of fallout: If the fallout is man-made, the vast majority of it will be emitted over ground. There are just no cities to bomb in the middle of the pacific. As such, the fallout will impact the open oceans much less than the costs around highly populated continents.
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Taking this into consideration, I guess a good location for your under-water station would be a spot like Hawaii, which is very far from all continents. You don't need many nukes to eradicate life on Hawaii as it's small. However, it is surrounded by a vast ocean across which the initial fallout can distribute and dilute. And the isle is a believable reason for an under-water station to be built on its base. Of course, you can take any other isle either on a [hotspot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotspot_(geology)), or on a [mid-ocean ridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-ocean_ridge) as well, as long as it's far enough from the next continent.
Bonus points, if you can find an island that is located in a region where ocean water rises from depth to the surface: That will make sure that the station will remain relatively unaffected by the ration for a very long time. And when the fallout finally arrives with the upwelling water many years in the future, it will be diluted real good.
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Depending on the scale of the nuclear fallout on your story, the answer might range from totally harmless to fatal. Since your humans are wiped out after the fallout (presumably short time after the explosion), I believe it is a large scale explosion comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes, even greater, because it affects global population, so **the most probable answer is "fatal".** To the ocean in the whole world, too.
## Flora and Fauna
The high intensity of radiation from the fallout entering the ocean will "instantly" kill organisms it come to contact with in a few days. The few survivors will have the contaminants enter their system and produce mutations. The first affected will be the plants, then the fish eating the plants, then the fish eating the other fishes.
Can human eat them? Sure, without immediate effects. But after a few years, you will share the same fate with the poor sea life, mutation, that will lead to cancer.
With the scale of the nuclear we are talking about, the result will be likely cataclysmic to the ecosystem, and will likely result on the whole system failing, rather than just worrying about edibility.
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Note that your poor outpost will most likely to suffer from not being able to replenish resources from the surface base (fuels, reserved foods, tools, etc.) because of the scale of the destruction and the resulting hostile environment, rather than dying from the radiation, either directly or indirectly.
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As always much depends on details, but, in general, rain falls (also) over continents and most of that water returns to the oceans, sooner or later, transporting a lot of material it found on its way.
Any water-soluble radioactive material is bound to end-up in the oceans, sooner or later.
It will be much more diluted than on places of direct impact though.
You will have worst effects at the mouth of certain rivers, before further dilution.
"How much impact" strongly depends on how much radiation, of which kind, and geographic distribution of what is released, but, since you say all ground above sea level is uninhabitable, "prognosis is not good".
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You didn't specify what the nuclear fallout is from, so I'm going to assume it is from nuclear bombs instead of reactor meltdowns.
[Water is very good at shielding radiation](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/) (I know that isn't a great source, but it illustrates the point). It is unlikely that life under the water will experience very much direct harm from airborne nuclear fallout in the short term. Particles falling into the ocean would be more problematic, though very spread out. The ocean is big, and the global nuclear armament is about 14000 bombs, the heaviest of which have 110 lbs of nuclear material. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't compared to the vastness of the ocean. The main problems would appear in the big predators consuming the lion's share through [biomagnification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification). However, wildlife seems to actually do [fairly well](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-to-radioactive-wasteland-of-chernobyl/) with heavy radiation, and would probably adapt pretty quickly by becoming more resistant to mutations and cancer, but mostly would enjoy a long and productive hiatus from human interference. It is unlikely that the radiation could cause any crazy mutations (like speciation). Usually it just causes cancer and shortens life-expectancy.
The radioactive fallout is probably not what wiped out the people though. It is likely a combination of the destructive blasts, a global [firestorm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm), [lost infrastructure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse), and the quickly ensuing [nuclear winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter). The nuclear winter is likely the thing that will hurt your water-dwelling scientists and other marine life the most. Surface temperatures would quickly plummet, followed gradually by the oceans. The more temperature-sensitive systems like coral and phytoplankton would collapse first, followed by the creatures that rely on them. Deep sea creatures may be affected by the build-up of ash on the sea-floor, but I suspect they would be more resilient than the surface life. Some low-light, cold-loving life like mesozooplankton, ice algae, jellyfish, and other arctic marine life would probably have a population boom as their habitat is temporarily expanded to cover a much wider percentage of the ocean. This would cause an extremely unstable ecosystem as one species after another booms and crashes, possibly on a cycle until temperatures and everything else normalize.
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**Radioactive material**
It depends in the most common radiactive material used during the conflict. This material could maintaint his radiation level for a few seconds and then dissipate totally or million of years still keep emanating radiation.
Since this radiation is in the air, raining would bring it to the ocean but this process could increase decay even more over the level of radiation that they can emit.
Here there is an explanation of how the Fukushima leak is affecting the Pacific. <http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=127297>
**Effect of Radiation**
Poison for radiation is constant at every moment and from many sources, actually you could get radiation poison just for eating alot of bananas (well...millions of bananas).
The ammount of radiation needed to affect inmediatly a body is really hard to achieve and in most cases you will see only long effect symptoms (like cancer and tumors).
**Ocean Depth**
Most creatures living at the bottom of the ocean wouldn't even notice a change, probably less food for the reduction of species near the surface or a small change in the temperature of the water. But in most cases unaffected for the amount of water between them and the surface.
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What advantages would bovines have over horses when used as cavalry?
I've got a culture whose way of life is based around cattle, and I'm wondering what kinds of advantages they might have in combat over traditional horse-based cavalry if they rode a breed of bovines specifically bred for fighting. I don't want to limit them to just what we think of as a standard 'cow', but would like them to have mounts that are at least something cow-like, such as buffalo, bison, or gaur.
The riders are a distinctive culture that focuses on nomadically ranging cows across a large area of wet forest and swamp across a wet basin on the interior of the continent, and they've been there long enough to have bred and trained some of their animals into mounts capable of running and fighting. They do, however, have access to horses, as these are raised by another culture that lives on the far side of one of the mountain ranges surrounding the basin in some drier coastal plains. What I'm wondering is whether or not there is a reason, besides the practicality of already having the animals around, that they would be used in combat.
Furthermore, if cows can be used to an advantage in combat over horses, what sort of role will they take on the battlefield, and how would using them as a primary cavalry mount change the way a culture conducts warfare? This isn't to say that the bovine riders don't have *any* horses, but merely that the majority of their cavalry does not use them. Should they be far superior in some role, such as perhaps being superior scouts as a result of being faster, horses would be used.
Do they have any such advantages, or would they realistically be replaced by horses for combat?
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There are a few assumptions to make here before answering, most of which fall under the lines of 'define cow'.
If you are going for buffalo:
* A cavalry charge (in knight terms) was at its most destructive from sheer momentum. Ya, the mounted rider can help with the invent of the lance, but the ability to break a defensive line has more to do with the weight of a horse being thrown at the weight of a man (hence pikes being an effective defence). In terms of sheer weight, a stampeding buffalo is significantly heavier and would have considerable more breaking power when hitting a defensive line.
* Powerhouse head. A horse's head is somewhat small and leaves horse's chest open while it gallops forward. A charging bison looks like a giant armored skull designed for headbutting coming at you and leaves little for weak spots.
* Buffalo are big-ass creatures and can take surprisingly large amount of damage before being brought down.
* They are significantly more brutal creatures than horses and would easily gore and toss around a human soldier like he's nothing. While a horse doesn't do as much post charge, a buffalo can gore and toss around people like they are paper dolls.
* I would think a charging buffalo wouldn't think twice about going head-on with a horse while a horse would either need some pretty specific training or risk spooking instead. This was an effect of the elephant as well, elephants were particularly nasty when ran at horses.
Downsides are more in maintainability:
* Buffalo aren't an easy ride and require some pretty specific animal handling to control. Long treks on buffalo back don't seem feasible.
* Larger and lazier than horses. Bigger creatures tire quicker and don't have the same stamina horses ultimately possess.
* Food consumption. A herd of buffalo requires a significant land mass to feed.
* Larger target. Arrows (and bullets) are more effective against these giants as they are easier to hit from sheer size.
* Less sure on this, but in comparing them to Elephants, I would think the possibility of bison/buffalo 'spooking' and rampaging over their own troops is a possibility. Romans developed the tactic of covering pigs in oils, lighting them on fire, and sending the squealing herd into elephants. This would panic the elephants and cause them to rampage. As dangerous as these large 'beasts of war' are to the enemy on the battlefield, they also posed some degree of risk to friendly troops as well.
* Bison/buffalo are ultimately wild creatures. Horses have been domesticated for thousands of years and, like dogs, a relationship with humans is at the core of their spirit. This simply isn't true with Bison. You may be able to get around this point with your setup had this nomadic culture began forming bonds between Bison/rider in the same way a horse/rider does, but odds are, the Bison are going to retain some 'wild' qualities making handling of them far more difficult.
Ultimately, my answer is "yes, more than feasible". They come with specific advantages and disadvantages, but so did elephants and they saw their use. If you have access to them and can handle them, why not?
If this question is only about cows... I hate to say it, but human involvement has selectively bred cows to be eating machines. The majority of their internal make-up is focused on digestion and we have focused evolutionary pressures on these creatures to be the best eaters they can be, not much else. Unless cud can somehow be weaponized (or perhaps using the tremendous amount of methane that these creatures emit). They are also lacking in the endurance domain (once again, they are bred to eat not run).
I really hope you're not referring to dairy cows - that would seem udder nonsense.
On more add...
Unlike the previous 'unicorn charge' question, it's debatable if a horse's head and neck are really capable of withstanding the impact of their own charge. Buffalo, on the other hand, can fully use their horns for charging and goring as their physical make-up is designed to support themselves during these impacts. If you want to see nasty youtube footage, deaths from yellowstone bison annually is a measurable number and I remember at least one bison video where it charges a car and the car pretty obviously loses.
I guess if you lose the battle, you've unintentionally provided the opposing army with a great deal of food reserves ^^ Opposing generals can rally their troops with 'Tonight, we eat steak!'
Buffalo vs car
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ45m_D-rv4>
ya...
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Cows would have a couple advantages and of course disadvantages. I think they tend to be slower, and certainly less agile than horses, nor do they appear to be as smart as horses either.
The big advantages I would see is they come with their own weapons, Horns. Many cows tend to be more massive than your average horse as well.
But you gave a wide range of possibilities. so I'll go with Bison.
Certainly things like bison would be a terrible thing to stand in front of charging at you. Bison are as fast as a horse, not as maneuverable but good enough. A stampede of bison riders would break almost any defensive line. Bison can be broke to the saddle there was even a [tv show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ4T9CQA0UM).
So I would say it could be possible and work well. One problem I see is peoples who tend to domesticate animals for work don't tend to eat them. We ride horses, we don't eat them (no real reason not too) we generally eat cows, not ride them. Oxen might be one of the few that can sit on the fence. But I think they are generally worked until they can't, at which point you need to be pretty hungry to eat that tough old meat.
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I’m Vietnamese. And my country was invaded by France. We against them and there was one trooper was created by buffaloes only. They was controlled by flute. They can lay down, charge and stop depend on the flute’s sound. They defeated some company of France’s army. Lastly, they both die with the controller, since there no one can train buffaloes like him. That is lost secret.
In China, 3 kingdoms, Wei country, there is one battle they used buffaloes by binding touches to their tail, burn it up and guide them to enemy’s formation. The general who did that named Xu Huang. U can find him on wiki i think.
But i just only know that 2 cases only.
Now we come why they use horse:
1. Horses are herdity race. They will follow the ass of horse leader ( im not sure how do u call it in English, but in every horse’s crew/herd there is always one horse leads other) it helps cavalrymen save efforts to control horse.
2. Horses are very meekly, compared to buffaloes, they “closer” to human than buffaloes. U can imagine that they are kids around 4-6 years old, a little bit of stubborn, love sugar, love to act as a baby, but can run until die, not the same to buffaloes, they wont run when they are tired, and they will fight back if u beat them while they are tired.
3. Endurable better than buffaloes. It only true if running, a buffaloes can pull the plow for few hours nor horse cant.
4. The most important is seat, if u ride a buffalo, u cant keep ur body stability even u have a saddle and rein. It means that u cant fight anyone when u seat on a buffalo. U even can die if u try to fight because u will fall down and other buffaloes will step on u until u became a composite of meat, bone, blood, skin and mud.
Even cases I wrote over there, they wont ride buffalo, just use them as tankers and smashers
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For use as cavalry, I'd say that buffalo, cows, and other "edible livestock" generally fall short of a horse. I've seen the answers that say that cows have horns as weapons, but I don't really see that as great advantage as compared to the speed and maneuverability of horses or the versatility of infantry. Cows, even those not bred for food purposes, tend to be slow and slow to learn. They are also eating machines, while horses tend to be a little less focused on food.
If your nomads have access to horses at all, you can be sure they'll breed them and become the superior horsemen. It's what cowboys do.
On the other hand, if you are looking to shoehorn cattle into war, there is a power that they have that an infantry or cavalry doesn't have: herd mentality. 3 people on horseback can get 1,000 head of cattle to stampede, and woe be unto the infantry who is in the way. Have you ever seen Jurassic Park The Lost World? The stampede through the camp comes to mind. Depending on your choice of livestock, you could have a thousand thousand pounds of "usually meat" pounding through enemy lines. This makes a lot of sense from a tactical sense.
Just my thoughts, but I've worked with cows for years, and I would rather walk than hop on Bessie any day of the week.
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**Cataphracs**
Those where heavily armored horse units, a kind of shock cavalry that emerged in ancient times and influenced the medieval knights. On horses it needed quite strong horses to support horse armour, horseman, horseman's armour etc. They where usually slower than light cavalry and less suitable for scouting, but very usefull as shock troops to dismantle enemy formations. A variation of the cataphract was the cammel cataphract.
Advantage:
Even on the strongest horses there was a limit on weight. So if you are using cattle or bisons to make cataphracts, they might support a heavier load. Meaning stronger armours for both cattle and horseman, and bigger lances.
Disadvantage:
Cattle are usually slower than horses. Knectic energy is proportional to mass and the square of speed. This means that a lighter horse at faster speed will hit the first enemy lines with higher power than cattle cataphracts would. But once hit, mommentuum is spent and cattle might acceellerate faster due to power-to-weight ratio.
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Our ancestors had both cows and horses. They bred one for riding and one for eating for a very good reason.
There are very few ways cattle would be better for riding.
The most likely scenario is that they trade for horses then breed them for riding and cattle for eating exactly the same way as we did in our world...
The only way I can see this working is if there is a reason not to use horses. For example camels are used in deserts where horses would not cope well. Perhaps the grazing is particularly bad for example and horses struggle but adapted native grazers are fine.
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There is a certain value in specializing your efforts. The main advantage of a horse is speed. A cow or oxen might be stronger or more durable, which is why they are used to draw carts and plows at times, but even there horses are preferred.
Horses are more nimble than cattle, so are more likely to be able to work in difficult terrain.
In a battle, you might as well skip the cattle and use infantry. Speed is equivalent, or better. Men are far more reliable than any animal, and can handle rough terrain.
So if you are going to train animals for mounted use, it is far better to use the best animal for the job. There's nothing a cow-rider can do that men on foot can't do just as well.
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You might be better off with cow-like horses. Ie, cows that are effectively horned horses, bread for meat and milk. Which, barring the horns, is exactly how Mongol society worked.
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You might think about why no one has ever done this. While people have bred cattle as draft animals (ox, water buffalo, &c), AFAIK no culture has ever seriously used them as riding animals. (Aside from e.g. occasional attempts to ride dairy cattle as a kid.)
As for buffalo, ask why in the maybe 10,000 years of Plains Indians and their forerunners living near and hunting buffalo, there was apparently no attempt - or at least no successes - at domestication. Yet as soon as the Spanish introduced horses, the Plains tribes adopted them and changed their entire culture.
One factor, I think, might be the anatomy of the horse's jaw. The front and rear teeth are separated by a sensitive, toothless region called the bar, into which a bit can be placed. This makes it much easier to exert pressure to control the animal when it's nervous or frightened, wants to buck the rider off, &c, which would probably be the case in warfare. (Though I hasten to add that with a bit of skill & training, you don't ordinarily need to use this at all, but can direct the horse with small touches of reins, weight shifts, or even - if you're blessed - just by thinking.) I don't think the ox or other animals have anything similar.
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The basic premise is about a metahuman whose skin always emits large amounts of heat. It's usually around 300-500 F (150-260 C) degrees, but when he gets mad, in pain or in a serious fight, it can reach temperatures of 3000 Fahrenheit (1650 Celsius).
My question is what could he do to get around this problem or cover it up.
Any thoughts, questions or ideas would be greatly welcomed :)
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The first thing you have to worry about is feeding him.
To generate that much heat, he has to be getting the energy from somewhere. Let's assume that he metabolises energy the same way we do; through food. The average human consumes around 8700Kj to maintain a body temperature of around 37oC, in environments that average around the 25oC mark. Note, this is a MASSIVE simplification, but will help with rough order of magnitude figures.
That means that every day, the human body is using around 725Kj per degree C to maintain the differential. When we do the math, let's make it easy on ourselves and say that the average body temperature our hero maintains is 325oC, or 300o above room temperature. That means that our hero would need to consume 217,500Kj of food each day. He's going to spend all his time eating, and that's not the half of it; he's going to need massive lung capacity to metabolise the food with oxygen, and his biggest problem is going to be getting enough water given that it's going to flash boil as he tries to drink it.
Another problem that you have is that trying to insulate yourself so you can touch others is a REALLY bad idea. With that kind of warm blooded metabolism, even some form of lead lined insulative clothing including shoes and gloves is only going to amplify the problem in that the body can't dispel the heat through normal convection. That means that your body temp is going to climb rapidly, potentially melting down the insulative material and overwhelming it.
Even if he did find a way to have a meaningful and intimate relationship, he can never father children. I always wondered why (not to be indelicate) something as sensitive on the male body like testes were put out in the open so to speak, rather than being more protected inside the body. That is, until I read that male sperm is actually quite sensitive to normal body temperatures and actually start to die off at 37o; presumably this is so that women can't ovulate and be fertilised by 'old' sperm that may have degraded - you only want the fresh stuff. The scrotum is in effect providing a heatsink for them to keep them cool. The problem is at these temperatures, your hero is effectively sterile regardless.
**But for the sake of argument...**
Ultimately, the best thing your hero could do is go angelic; Imagine a thermal suit that efficiently takes the heat out to a massive heat sink array on his back that would effectively look like metallic wings. This might allow him to touch people with his hands or be around people to his front, with massive heat radiating out from behind him instead.
This would have two practical benefits; the first is that he could have meaningful conversations with friends in a circle around him so to speak, but it would *also* prevent anyone from ever sneaking up on him from behind.
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# Being entombed in a power plant is a pretty big problem
Your hero breaks the second law of thermodynamics, and creates more energy than she consumes. Even assuming that he isn't in a government lab, (they gave up on his power as non-reproducible) he's a non-radioactive source of constant heat that has no complex waste products. At 500Fish, he's hot enough to run a powerplant by virtue of his presence: at higher temperatures, which are achievable if he's properly stimulated, things get even better.
Of course, there's the problem of him heating up hotter than practical containment allows for, sometimes, which is, of course, why he's been lobotomized (or sedated permanently). Since he heats up when she's in pain, a low level constant agony would be handy to be able to induce, with an ability to modulate it to increase/decrease how much heat he's putting off.
All in all, being a lobotomized hunk of meat with some kind of subdermal pain inducer for his entire life probably isn't a lot of fun.
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## For their environment, it depends on time
The question of whether something actually *does* melt under heat has to do with time - how fast the heat gets in (conduction), and how much it takes (physical properties like specific heat). However, at a certain temperature and pressure, everything will melt. A body of hot mass at temperatures like the sun will always be a plasma - it simply can't deal with the extra motion to form bonds and stay together chemically.
## Keeping your cool would keep things ok
At 300 degrees Fahrenheit, not too much will be destroyed. Some rather unexpected substances like wood burn quite a bit hotter, but wood accelerates its own heating when it combusts. So it would mostly be about wearing something light enough and heat-taking that would not interact with objects in the environment too much. I would think wearing something insulating, and **not metal**, would be better if the temperature is always hot. Otherwise, the metal or material that transfers heat quickly would cause, well, embarrassing losses of heat and probably damage to property.
## ... but otherwise, get a disability waiver
300F is already too hot to do a lot of things, like touch people or anything with some flammability. It's probably too hot to reliably refrigerate on your body, if that's not somehow dangerous for this person (I doubt a home refrigerator could do that, unless mad-scientist Max made it). On the other hand, 3000 degrees Fahrenheit is quite balmy, and if your meta-human has temper tantrums or gets beat up a lot, and for long enough, they would melt just about anything. As a reference, sand melts at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit (into glass), and there aren't any known substances that survive above something like 5000 degrees Fahrenheit for an indefinite time. Many things will vaporize at 3000F, [like Aluminum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_point) according to Wikipedia. Your metahuman would be a dangerous foe if they weren't sinking into the ocean or melting concrete fast enough.
As an edit, I guess your metahuman could have a sort of flying superhero MO and then not get anything hot except a plume of air above them. The right suit could do the trick, in theory...
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### Containing the heat: cover nakedness and make short interactions possible
At those temps you can't clothe him, so he's always in his birthday suit. And you can't have anyone touch him. When it rains, the water turns to steam as it hits his skin. We'll need to solve that. A carefully manufactured suit (or gloves or shoes) of [Aerogel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel) could be used to contain the heat. Aerogel is [amazingly heat resistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerogelflower_filtered.jpg) as well as [surprisingly strong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerogelbrick.jpg). *However*, it comes with some downsides:
* Wearing the suit will cause the heat to build up inside, which can be lethal. (think of wearing heavy winter clothes at room-temperature; you can't dissipate the heat fast enough)
* A suit (probably) prevents minutetactile feedback (ever tried to pick up a penny wearing thick gloves?)
* It's expensive: manufacturing and maintaining such a suit is not easy.
### Food
If he can't feed on metal, he's in trouble. Water will steam. Certain types of oil may suffice for liquid, but that's assuming his body can feed on that. As @TimBII mentions in his answer, food (and intimate touch) are probably not on the table unless he feeds on different foods.
### Walking & Transportation
If he can't fly, walking on grass is a *very bad* idea. He won't be able to walk anywhere without heavy metal or aerogel shoes. He will probably have to live in a remote desert location, and be transported when needed. But any ship, plane, car, or other transportation device will need to consider how to move him quickly without destroying the transport.
### Trapping him
At that much heat being generated, especially when he's mad, he's basically a walking energy source. All sorts of bad people and governments would design facilities to house him, but collect and use that heat (eg, to make magnesium or hydrogen) or convert it into electricity.
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He/she/zer could wear a foil/thermal suit or a refrigeration suit but physics in this sutuation gets fuzzy and foggy. It may actually hurt the metahuman by means of overheating andor melting down.
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When it comes to naval guns, bigger isn't always better. The [46cm/18.1" guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_cm/45_Type_94_naval_gun) on the Yamato-class battleships didn't have much in the way of advantages over the Iowa-class's [40.6/16" guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16%22/50_caliber_Mark_7_gun). Yet the Japanese were planning on an even larger 51cm/20.1" gun for their [Design A-150](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_A-150_battleship) battleships.
In designing a world that has WWII-level (Maybe a little further, too) tech, delayed development of aircraft, and no equivalent to the [Washington Naval Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty), I'm trying to design mostly realistic battleships.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty)
In the chart above, you can see the definite upward trend of battleship size that is very suddenly halted by the Treaty. Interestingly, the Yamato fits very nicely where the line would be projected to sit at about 1936 when it was being built. Continuing this line would result in 90-100+ thousand ton battleships at around 1945-1950, the tech area I am aiming for. Such large vessels will have a significant amount of armor, and significant guns to defeat it. I'm using the Yamato as a baseline for ships that would exist in this time, but I'm wondering what sort of guns I should arm them with.
With that in mind:
* What advantages do extremely large guns give?
* What disadvantages do they have?
* Why would a nation use them despite the disadvantages?
* And, for bonus points: What would the largest practical battleship gun be?
I am defining **Extremely Large Guns** as guns in the range of 20-25 inches/50-65cm.
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First off, this is the [best place](http://www.combinedfleet.com/kaigun.htm) on the internet for information about the Pacific Theater of WWII; and specifically [this page](http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm) is for you. Also try [here](http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/index_weapons.php#Naval_Guns); I'm going to pull a lot of statistics from there without siting them.
# What advantages do extremely large guns give?
The range advantage of larger guns is not that significant. First off, range is determined by a whole slew of factors, and smaller guns can have longer ranges than larger ones. For example, the French 380mm/45 gun had longer range than both the *Iowa*'s 16"/50 and the *Yamato*'s 46cm/45. The German *Scharnhorst* and *Gneisenau* had a 28cm gun (equivalent to 11") that had better range than the American 16"/45 gun. *Scharnhorst*, in fact, with its 11" guns scored the longest range naval gun hit of all time, at 26465 yards, on *Glorious*, a British aircraft carrier.
So, having demonstrated that range isn't improved that much by larger size, the only advantage remaining is **penetration power.** This is somewhat significant, because light cruiser's 6" guns were generally unable to damage the belt or tower armor of a 40,000 ton+ battleship. The larger calibers could always pack a larger shell. A larger shell can penetrate a given armor thickness at more angles. Armor that shrugs off a glancing blow from a 12" shell might buckle from the same hit from a 14" shell.
However, once you were in the 14" plus range, the quality of the shell itself became a more significant concern. Shells that large can penetrate pretty much any armor and do massive damage, provided they explode. For example, at the [Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#Second_Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal.2C_14.E2.80.9315_November), *South Dakota* took 26 large caliber hits from *Kirishima*, but many of those hits did not explode. Thus *South Dakota* floated on, and only lost 39 of her crew. Meanwhile, *Washington* opened fire on *Kirishima* (at 9000 yards, in case you were wondering, which is a typical engagement range on ships for WWII big guns) and hit her 9 times with large caliber. This was enough to capsize and sink *Kirishima* within about 4 hours. Crucially, several of *Washington*'s rounds fell short, but hit *Kirishima* underwater and still exploded. That is a good, reliable shell! The moral of the story is that hitting someone is great, hitting with a round that actually explodes is much better.
# What disadvantages do they have?
As you can see in my 'pro' answer, I am not sanguine about larger guns. You should only make a gun large enough to be able to penetrate the enemy's armor at all angles. After that you should concentrate on shell reliability, range-finding equipment (preferably radar...definitely invent that), armor, and damage control.
The disadvantages of large guns are in what they cost you in terms of ship design. Guns have to be mounted topside (obviously) to do any good. Also, you need a lot of them. There are no automatic loaders with the specified technology level, so you are limited by the speed at which you can have men reload them. And since you need (vulnerable) men to reload them, you need the guns to be heavily armored to prevent the men, and ammunition, from being subject to return fire. Turrets were easier to put out of action by killing the operators than by destroying the machinery. The ammunition required for the big guns represents a huge vulnerability that can exploited for the [WWI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Invincible_(1907)#Battle_of_Jutland) or [WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Arizona_(BB-39)#Magazine_explosion) version of a one-shot.
It is the armor protection for the turret that makes a large gun a liability. If the turret is not armored well enough, you can take out the turret too easily, or potentially doom the ship. The larger the gun, the larger (and heavier) the turret armor. The fact that this weight is topside is significant. You can't let the center of mass rise too high for a number of reasons (not least, the higher the center of mass, the more you heel during a turn, and the less likely you can successfully aim at or hit a target while turning).
If you mount large guns with heavy turrets, high above the water line, you ship must get more massive to compensate. Sure this allows you to add even more armor, but at the expense of even more maneuverability. And this maneuverability is the key weakness. By WWII, the torpedo was a very advanced and effective weapon, despite being unguided. Destroyers and light cruiser could launch spreads of 4 or 6 torpedoes at a time. The true effectiveness of torpedoes in main fleet engagements, battleship to battleship was not really tested in WWII.
The last true fleet battle (until space battles!?!?!) was at [Jutland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland) in WWI. Torpedoes were largely inconsequential in that battle, though a storm of torpedoes from destroyers and light cruisers may have allowed the German battleline to escape destruction. However, by WWII torpedoes meant business. At the [Battle of Savo Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Savo_Island), the Japanese crushed the American forces, sinking 3 heavy cruisers, by opening with a torpedo salvo at about 12,000 yards. At [Tassafaronga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tassafaronga), the Japanese were ambushed by the Americans, who found them with radar in the dark. However, the Japanese [Long Lance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Lance) torpedo turned the battle; the Americans did not notice the torpedo launch and did not evade, causing the loss or damage of 4 heavy cruisers. The Americans got their revenge at [Vella Gulf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vella_Gulf) and [Cape St. George](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_St._George), once they had perfected aiming and firing torpedoes at night guided by radar. Between the two battles, American destroyers sank 6 ships without taking a single hit in return.
Since there was no true battleship to battleship fleet engagement of WWII, I have to conclude that the danger of torpedoes had become very significant. The penetration power of the torpedoes (recall, *Yamato* was sunk by air-dropped torpedoes) was such that they could stop capital ships.
While the effective engagement range for naval guns, especially on ships with radar, was longer than for torpedoes, torpedoes were enough of a threat at short to medium range that maneuverability was a concern. The increase in turret weight and corresponding increase in ship mass would have been counteracted by the vulnerability of such ships to torpedo attacks. The optimal battleship would not have been any bigger than the *Iowa* class, and perhaps even smaller.
# Why would a nation use them despite the disadvantages?
Simply put, pride and ego.
# What would the largest practical battleship gun be?
Guns in the 14" to 16" range were large enough. In a war with no aircraft, the medium range power of the torpedo would have been amply demonstrated. The ideal gun would have the range, accuracy, and rate of fire to engage torpedo carrying ships (destroyers and light cruisers) long before they could launch torpedoes, and the penetration power to punch through a battleship of similar size.
I believe that maneuverability would have been prohibitively bad for battleships above 50,000 tons, and this lack of maneuverability would have made them too vulnerable to torpedo attacks from small escorts. By limiting ship mass to 50,000 tons, total armor is limited such that guns in the 14" to 16" range are all you need to punch a hole in them.
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While a bit of a tangent, I think you need to look at the British "N3" and "G3" class battleship and fast battleship proposals. These were perhaps the last design concepts under serious consideration prior to both the Washington Naval treaty and the development of robust and reliable naval air power.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SiXQh.jpg)
*British G3 Fast Battleship design. The N3 was similar, but with 18" guns*
The full description of the N3 is [here](https://infogalactic.com/info/N3-class_battleship), and you can see the Royal Navy needed to make some radical changes to the traditional battleship design to incorporate the powerful 18" battery (the G3 used a similar design to incorporate a 16" battery in a much faster and more powerful "battlecruiser" or fast battleship) without making the ship excessively large or heavy. Some of the interesting changes, outside of the unusual placement of the gun turrets, was the concentration of the armour belt in an "all or nothing" arrangement. The bow and stern of the ship were unarmored, which saved a great deal of weight and allowed the armoured citadel to withstand much heavier shells than the more traditional medium thickness armour belt.
Despite the apparent advantages of the N3 and G3 designs, they were cancelled as part off the Washington Naval Treaty, although the British Government was certainly not anxious to spend the vast sums of money that the projected series of ships would have cost.
This leads to one of the conceptual issues of capital ship design and strategy. Since you have a limited amount of resources, you cannot build enough capital ships to conceivably sail every ocean or carry out every possible task that you want to accomplish with your Grand Strategy. While massive big gun battleships, or modern aircraft carriers provide the means of visibly projecting power abroad, you only have so many, and as high value targets, you will be up against literally everything the enemy can throw at you. In some circumstances, this might work in their favour (for example, the swarming speedboat attacks in the relatively narrow and shallow Persian Gulf work because the much larger conventional naval vessels don't have the stand off room to react or manoeuvre like they do in the open ocean or even the littoral waters outside of the Gulf).
Your super battleships will be relatively isolated in fleet actions, up against torpedo boats, fast moving destroyers, cruisers and of course whatever enemy battleships happen to be handy. Even primitive airpower could work against you, the Bismarck was crippled by a torpedo launched from a Fairey Swordfish, allowing the British ships to close in and destroy her.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvJWw.jpg)
*Fairly Swordfish*
Interestingly enough, for a navy with a wide ranging area to cover and a large list of tasks for its Grand Strategy, a fleet built around Frigates is probably a much more useful way to expend the resources. If you do have giant capital ships, they will still need the small, fast Frigates to act as scouts, and possibly to spot the fall of shot for long range artillery engagements, but the day to day work of the fleet will be with the smaller, less expensive ships.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JbBcL.jpg)
*HMCS Antigonish. Thats more like it*
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> What advantages do extremely large guns give?
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Well power, I guess, but you do reach a point of diminishing returns.
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> What disadvantages do they have?
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I am not an expert in material sciences but conceptually size becomes a problem for various reasons.
* Storage space. Ammunition takes up space, really big ammunition takes up a lot of space, meaning you have fewer shots available in combat. If your targets don't need bigger rounds to take down then whats the point in bigger guns?
* Accuracy/Aiming. How quickly can you aim a pistol? Ok now how quickly can you aim a rifle? What about a shoulder launched missile? Being able to adjust to enemy movement is important...if you can't hit your target, big weapons don't matter, and more importantly if an enemy hits you with a smaller gun a bunch of times...
* Maintenance. Big things break more. Weight matters even with steel. Not to mentioned that larger shells require more power which means more powder and stress to the weapon itself. Keeping parts on hand would be a nightmare too.
* Bigger guns require a bigger ship, for moving the weight, for stability when firing etc. This will tend to make the ship slower and more costly to operate.
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> Why would a nation use them despite the disadvantages?
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Well..ego I guess? This is sort of story driven but we can look back a military mistakes and it doesn't take long to realize they aren't all that uncommon. Picket's Charge, The Maginot Line, Thermopylae.
Human ignorance/arrogance is the most likely culprit in this scenario. Often the loser in a war is the side that holds on to the past truths of warfare for too long and doesn't adjust to new realities in mobility, communication and weapons technology.
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> And for bonus points: What would the largest practical battleship gun be?
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Well you mentioned the 40 cm/45 Type 94 earlier, and second to that was the [BL 18-inch Mk I naval gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BL_18_inch_Mk_I_naval_gun)
Currently with modern arms it looks like the US is in first place with the [Advanced Gun System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System) (which is a terrible name). I would say this is about the largest practical size...otherwise larger munitions would exist.
**Note:**
Purpose and scenario matter. Its not that the guns larger than the AGS were a bad idea, they just aren't practical now. Think about a battleship sitting of the coast trying to hit land targets, then consider guidance tech 70 years ago. In that case bigger was most probably better. **Build your weapons around the enemy at hand.** Big ships will be a target, ever heard of that Goliath guy? He always goes down.
[This link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_guns_by_caliber) will probably also be useful.
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One REALLY cool side effect of your world (1950s-ish technology with battleships still being prevalent) is the plausability of superguns being used to launch satellites.
Check out the work done by [Gerald Bull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull) with 16" US navy surplus battleship guns.
With 18+ inch guns readily available in a post WWII, battleship-centric world, it is entirely possible that work on such a supergun would have taken place long before the mid 1960s when Bull worked on HARP. Theoretically, all you really need to get into orbit is a big enough gun (Jules Verne thought that was how we would eventually launch people into space). The end of the era of big naval guns after WWII really put a damper on the foundational technology for such superguns right as they were finally becoming large and powerful enough to really work.
Obviously, whatever you are launching in this way would have to withstand some incredible acceleration (mitigated somewhat by making the barrel longer), but it is entirely possible that nations which have not focused on aircraft development, and as a result rocketry is less advanced than it was after WWII might use the largest available naval guns to launch spy satellites against one another.
As a side note: Bull was able to basically double the effective range of a 16 in battleship gun thanks to a lot of supersonic aerodynamics optomization that came out of his research. This kind of thing is what your theoretical navies would be doing. Clearly, WWII era battleship guns were not even remotely at the edge of the performance envelope possible for such weapons.
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The answers so far seem to concentrate on ship-vs-ship combat. I'm certainly neither an historian nor knowledgeable on military weapons, but it needs to be noted that these large guns were used both during WW2 and much more recently (I don't remember the date, but I recall them pulling a WW2 era battleship out of mothballs and using it prior to landing troops on the beach. Iraq maybe, not really sure. I remember the news blurb at the time describing the ordinance as the size and weight of a VW car.) to "reduce" land based (immobile) targets.
The obvious limitation is to hit there from here, you need to know exactly where "here" is, and at sea that's only possible to a certain (not so good) accuracy, especially in the days before radar and GPS type systems. Take a look at wikipedia (to start) on the V-3 cannon and the Paris gun. Range can be almost 100 miles. Ammunitions don't have to all be stored on the same ship. Stability of the platform (ever heard of recoil?) is definitely an issue. Plus, the barrels of these things wore down with each shot. You'll note that even towards the end of WW2, that the technology was evolving towards rockets rather than cannons (see V3).
What one PT boat can do with a couple of torpedos makes these hulks pretty vulnerable. Finally, given the need for trans and supersonic aerodynamic calculations for these high muzzle velocity rounds, it's pretty hard to buy into the absence of air power in your scenario. Keep in mind how easy it was for the Wright brothers (they did design both the wing and the engine for their first plane empirically, but that was in 1903. By the time of the 1950s its just not plausible that heavier than air aircraft weren't common. (Not to mention lighter than air craft).
This is moot, but brings up the question: what are the records for inventions that could have been invented years, decades, centuries earlier but weren't? Innovation generally takes both a number of inventions, but also requires economies of scale and materials availability. TV was first done in 1909, but didn't "catch on" until signal amplification became practical (mid-1920's).
The oldest "technology" which took a long time to catch on is probably vaccination. Although in all fairness, a 2% fatality rate *from the inoculation* was more than a little daunting.
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*What significant technologies would be lost in a world without "Advanced" Mathematics?* Specifically, what technologies required to get to the next level of scientific progress in an area would be lost. Your largest constraint is algebra. The humans on this world can count to small numbers, they can perform addition, subtraction, comparison, and other mathematics operations below the level of multiplication and addition on whole integers, you may consider variables as part of our working algebra set and zero may or may not exist.
I realize some basic Chemistry might be possible and that tinkering with ratios might lead to division since a ratio can be expressed that way, yet it may also be ignored like the number zero in our own history. So unless something explicitly *requires* more advanced math it is not removed as a possibility. Modern Chemistry, however, would definitely be removed as we play with algebra too much.
Geometry and Logic as areas of Mathematics have special consideration. Logic can be formulated without advanced algebra, although its level of utility and formalization may depend on it. Geometry is constrained to matching shapes and lengths as well as other things that are capable of being eyeballed. Anything beyond that should be kept to a minimum.
As a good test to constrain your technologies, ask if processes can be done via a "match" unit versus a unit requiring conversion. If you can directly perform comparisons it can be done with minimal math. Conversion of units however requires multiplication or division and is not allowed.
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Essentially you end up with very little, maths makes the world go around.
Without maths you have no:
* Computers
* Anything that requires computers
* Precision engineering and manufacturing
* Physics
* Elements of chemistry
* Economics
* Elements of biology
* Astronomy (in terms of understanding orbits, etc)
* And the list goes on, and on, and on.
Now, some things can be replaced by iterative trial and error. For example once you work out that gunpowder goes boom you can experiment with ratios to find the strongest mix. There would be no way to calculate the ratios of gears in an engine but again you could keep trying different combinations until you got what you needed.
There would most likely be books published full of nothing but various tables, similar to the old [logarithm tables](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_table#Tables_of_logarithms). These tables would allow you to look up your designed inputs and outputs and it would then tell you the combination of gears to use.
What I don't understand though is why the leap to abstraction would not be made. Once you've generated the table of gear ratios the patterns within them should be identifiable. Once you've identified the pattern you essentially have algebra, since all algebra is is a way to describe that pattern.
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I'll answer this question based on the clarifying comment given describing "an army of smart eight year olds".
While I have no doubt that a very clever eight-year old can perform demanding mathematical calculations, I have serious doubts that such a child could achieve the necessary conceptual understanding to formulate such calculations in the first place.
For example, little Mr. Smarty Pants may be able to write down something like:
$$ \frac{d x^2}{dx} = 2 \cdot x $$
if they were correctly taught the method of differentiating a polynomial. However, it defies credulity that he could conceptualize and formalize the necessary underlying mathematics to pose the question in the first place. Such methods require considerable abstraction and generalization.
Therefore, one has to assume that "an army of smart eight-year olds" would be limited to *elementary* aspects of counting, arithmetic, geometry, and perhaps elementary aspects of linear algebra. In the absence of a conceptual framework, these sorts of skills would have limited value in developing technologies.
In essence, I believe that such mathematical knowledge could only serve to modestly enhance *naive* technologies, by which I mean those technologies not requiring mathematical knowledge.
There are today isolated tribes of people whose mathematical knowledge has never surpassed this level. Their technologies are very modest. Fire. Basic materials technologies - mostly for weapons and shelter. Some basic agricultural knowledge. And of course combinations of these technologies, such as cooking.
**EDIT** Regarding comments made elsewhere concerning abstraction, take the skills of reading and writing. There are today many 3 and 4 year old children who can read and write to an elementary level. However, such skills are dependent on the teaching skills developed by adults and those skills are dependent on abstraction and generalization of a very sophisticated type and covering a wide range of subject. Consider how long it took for literacy to become commonplace and how it demands post-8-year-old levels of knowledge.
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This is interesting because what mathematics tells us is *how* things work, and consequently allows us to predict other things that will work or extend solutions to be more efficient, which is how we have made a lot of our progress for the last three hundred years or so.
So you might start by saying that without advanced mathematics you could get to a level of technology approximately commensurate with what we achieved by the mid seventeenth century, which was when people like Newton and Leibniz were building the foundations of much of the mathematics that we use on a day to day basis.
But consider some problems that are very mathematically complex and have been challenging to reproduce- if I throw you a ball and you catch it, you're doing a lot of processing ( from a mathematical perspective ) very rapidly. Likewise every time you recognise a face you are doing something that is exceedingly hard to replicate through mathematical means.
It certainly doesn't seem impossible that one could have a species that could innately *do* things that we need technology for without needing to understand why they work. Indeed this is one of the concepts in Stephen King's *Tommyknockers* - the aliens don't know ( or care ) *why* their technology works, they are just naturally able to construct it, which also has the benefit of making them very alien to us.
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A very disorganized world, and a communist one at that.
Without mathematics, or any attempt to understand mathematics, any invention will be a creation of pure guesswork, and very difficult to reproduce accurately. Complicated technology would be possible - harvesting, irrigation, wheels, telescopics, very crude electricty, steam power - but without a way to represent how these advances were achieved with any accuracy, reproductions will be crude and inefficient, and improvement almost impossible.
Economics would take the hardest hit. With no way to measure the value of goods and services, trade would be on-the-fly and individuals would often end up with much less or much more than they needed, leading to excess for some and poverty for many. Societies would have to gather all their resources into a single communal place for any equitable exchange to occur.
You would get something like an Iriqoui tribe, which makes sense - they didn't have much use for math. Focus would be placed on improving the natural bounty of the world, without a heavy focus on measuring how much improvement has been done or on efficiency in methods. Things would get accomplished, but with much trial-and-error. And most of the best ways to do things would be passed down through stories rather than formulas.
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In short, you wouldn't get very many empires (though you would get some as DVK points out, they would be limited in size, scale and type), you would get a lot of communistic sharing in small tribes, and you might get some remarkable advances in agriculture, but technological advances would stagnate due to their irreplicability.
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To illustrate what would happen without maths, you could look at how Newton came about his laws of motion.
The path was from high quality observations made by Tycho Brahe, Keppler's laws and Newton's concept of force (I simplify, I know).
Tycho Brahe could easily make these observations without advanced maths. Keppler could not have discovered that the vector from the center of motion to the planet swept an equal area over an equal amount of time without somewhat advanced maths. Newton needed to build on calculus to formulate his laws.
Though it was in general understood that the earth moved around the sun well before this, to understand why would, in my opinion, be impossible.
EDIT: But where would the development in maths have stopped? I think the best place to break the development we have known is the concept of functions. Without functions calculus would not exist. Why functions would never be thought off is a bit tricky to come up with a good reason.
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This is a tricky question because the lines you are drawing are kind of arbitrary. Multiplication and division are just fancy adding if you really get down to the nuts and bolts.
For the question as written you would be limited to pretty basic construction. No aqueducts, only the most basic of pumps, multistory buildings would be major undertakings. Trade would be rudimentary, a single currency would be possible but once you start looking at trade accross borders you need conversions and things fall back to straight barter (although whether barter would even work without knowing "2 cows = 5 goats" is arguable with the question as written).
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Looking at our own history, there is a logical answer. However, you would have to give the society **multiplication and division** but I may be able to convince you to do that!
The four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are all ancient operations that were independently discovered on numerous occasions. My oldest daughter was four years old when she "discovered" multiplication: If daddy, mommy, and her each have two ears then how many ears in total in the family?
**Now look at our own mathematics to see where we were stuck until a genius came along to advance us.** I would say that the first true "stuck" point was before calculus: that would have been Newton and Leibniz who got us out of that one. A world without Newton would be pretty much stuck at addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. **Everything before Newton is rather natural and intuitive, and there would be no convincing argument as to why multiplication and division did not develop.**
You could "stick" the society at pre-Newton levels of mathematics and see where they go. The beginnings of the industrial revolution would likely have happened, including early textile machines such as the [Flying Shuttle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_shuttle) and the [Spinning Jenny](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_jenny). Likewise we would have likely seem some advancement in iron-making as well. However complex machines would be right out. I would put the absolute limit at [Carnot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_L%C3%A9onard_Sadi_Carnot)'s work: controlled combustion and thermodynamic understanding would be completely impossible.
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Without multiplication you can't do a lot of modern commerce.
You can't sell 244 units each for 2.45$ if you can't calculate 244 \* 2.45.
Niall Ferguson argues in "The Ascend of Money" that new math notation was crucial for having the ability to make loans for precise amounts of interest and then use the money of those loans to build businesses.
Without those businesses you get problems with a lot of technology development.
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I want to add another perspective, but let me start with some examples:
* Somebody could operate an abacus without really understanding what’s going on. Of course, in our world, there was somebody who knew what was going on and built the abacus, but it is also conceivable that somebody could have painstakingly experimented with moving beans between bowls and empirically arrived at the conclusion that certain operations yield useful results. An extreme example would be a computer: It can perform complicated mathematical operations without understanding any of them.
* [Kepler’s laws](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws) (see also [Bent Nielsen’s answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2996/308)). They are complicated laws describing empirical geometrical observations but miss the dynamical aspects to an extent that is almost unrelatable for people used to our modern view on the problem. Still, it is conceivable that we would have continued with this approach to celestial mechanics (though it would have taken us much longer).
* As the example of economy was given: If you do not have large numbers, you can just stack different coinage levels (think of the [British pre-decimal coinage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_pound_sterling#Pre-decimal_coinage) taken to extremes). Somebody could have devised a complicated system for comparing magnitudes using weights which are appended to a scale at different levers (I am pretty certain, such a thing actually existed).
* There exists complicated mechanical devices for drawing certain mathematical figures or estimating areas and curve lengths etc.
* Even today, we find new ways to apply mathematics to long-existing concepts gaining new insights and people (usually from non-mathematical fields) reinvent mathematics all the time – e.g., [this paper](http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract) reinvented numerical integration.
This leaves you at the following problems:
* Where do you draw the line to mathematics? At the end of the day, mathematics is “only” the abstraction of things that already exist in reality. You can do a lot of mathematics without doing mathematics openly or even noticing that you are doing it. I think you can get surprisingly far without ever writing down an equation or having an elaborated concept of numbers (though it will be much more difficult, of course).
* Some mathematical relationships beg to be discovered under given circumstances. If they do not get deduced in a formalised mathematical way, another way will turn up which hides the mathematics – even to its inventor, if necessary. Mathematics does not need to be proven, it can be explored empirically (though this is arguably the more difficult way).
* What makes your world to be without mathematics? Is there a cultural prohibition? Are your people just unable to abstract in certain ways? Is everybody just stupid? This question may be tho most important, because it decides to what extent your people can circumvent mathematics.
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Nothing would be affected by the removal of mathematics. Since everything can boil down to binary, boolean logic can replace mathematics. Mathematics is simply pure logic, and removal of high-level mathematics is simply removal of high-level thinking of logic.
You can relate this to high-level programming languages and low level programming languages.
High-level programming languages, such as C/C++/Java/etc allow us to communicate and work with the low level logic, such as assembly or machine language. In this case, the highlevel languages are proportional to mathematics, and assembly/machine languages/etc are pure logic.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was written mostly in Assembly, so it goes to show that even pure logic can generate advanced technologies.
["You can represent any algorithm, or any electronic computer circuit, using a system of boolean equations."](https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece390/books/artofasm/CH02/CH02-1.html)
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What happens when two flames (whether from dragons or blowtorches) meet head on? Many films make it appears as a front where the two flames repel each other, but my intuition is that, in fact, the two flames would continue as two waves on the surface of a lake.
In short, does anyone have sufficient scientific skills (or experience) to describe what happens when two flames of the same intensity impact directly opposite one another?
**Can a dragon block a fire attack with its own fire?**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bWMYX.png)
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Flames are not waves, which can cross each other without perturbation.
Flames are basically flows of particles (the combustible) which are undergoing an energetic, exothermic reactions with the comburent (usually air Oxygen).
When the particle flows cross each other they will influence their respective motion, with a "simple" vectorial summation of their velocities, executed according to the principles of conservation of momentum and energy.
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Fire is not "a thing" itself, but rather the rapid, exothermic oxidation of some material, normally gas (most or all liquids, that seem to burn are actually evaporating from the heat and only the gas burns).
So if two streams of fire meet, they will in most cases behave, like two colliding streams of gas. Unfortunately I do not seem to be able to find a simulation of this. But [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYUQxIDwDOQ), you can see two streams of water collide. Gas will mostly look similar, but there will be more mixing of the two streams and more turbulences, resulting in a bigger cloud where they meet.
[edit: added from comment]
If angle, strength and surface are no exact match, but roughly right, it will still result in a lot of turbulences and most parts of the streams will disperse. But it quickly gets unpredictable and there may be small clouds of flame that reach one of the participants or cause collateral damage. If you watch the video, you will see, that the streams are not exactly the same. As a result, in the first 3 seconds the right source is hit by a blob of the left stream. After that, the streams reach an equilibrium. But this is partly because the sources are perfectly still.
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This of course only works, if both streams are roughly the same size and power and directly colliding. If one is bigger or has more pressure or they hit each other at an angle, it starts to get complicated.
But in basic principle, yes, you can block a stream of fire with another stream of fire.
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## It boils down to blocking a stream of gas with another stream of gas.
Fire happens when some sort of fuel undergoes combustion. With dragons this is usually presumed to be a flammable gas they are exhaling. The danger of such a fire comes from the combustion heating the gases that result from the combustion and other nearby gases to such a high temperature that they'll burn you or set you on fire if they touch you. So if you want to block a dragon's fire blast, you need to prevent that stream of very hot gases from touching you.
A simple experiment would be to have two people try to blow smoke into each other's faces at the same time. That should be a very rough approximation of what would happen. I suspect that the two streams actually would cancel out and become a cloud of smoke in the middle.
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Well since fire has no physical substance they should carry on through each other like, "two waves on the surface of a lake." However fire consumes oxygen so passing through where fire had just burn oxygen, they should both die immediately if in a confined space, while if they are outside, imaginable when two fire breathing creatures meet, then the fire should just lose some or most of its size, with anther possibility being that they will combine into one flame (it would depend on the speed of the fire). However if the fire was being created and maintained by a liquid fuel the effect would be near identical to that of which when water meets water head on.
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I want to develop a water-dwelling, intelligent species that could ultimately reach space.1 My question here is about the biology of such creatures.
I want my creatures to live in the water, not move onto land, but shorter outings onto land not only would be ok but would help my plot. This makes me think somewhat of whales and dolphins, which breathe air, live in water, and cannot survive long on land (at least without special intervention).
But whales and dolphins don't have anything like hands, and tool use is an important step along the progression that leads to advanced technology. While some dolphins [use tools](http://oceantoday.noaa.gov/newsoftheday_dolphinsusetools/), capacity without something like hands seems limited. (If I am suffering a failure of imagination, feel free to challenge this in an answer!) We know that [amphibious creatures can evolve hand-like parts](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51529/28); none of the examples there are very advanced, so I don't know to what extent this "goes with" the other developments I need.
Access to land implies some mobility on land. I assume this means something like legs (with flippers?). My creatures are native to the water, so it makes sense to me that mobility on land would be *harder*, but it should be possible.
I'm not looking for magical approaches like [selkies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie).
How should I approach the biology of my water-dwellers? What combinations of breathing methods, appendages for tool use, appendages for mobility, and developments that support intelligence are most plausible?
I am aware of [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/5148/28), which asks how a deep-sea civilization would evolve in a particular environment. I'm willing to adapt my environment to fit my creatures, rather than going the other way around, so while that question is somewhat helpful to me, I don't think it's a duplicate. I'm also aware of questions like [this one](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/30927/28) and [this one](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3828/28), which are about technological development but not about biology.
1 For purposes of my story they don't need to *develop* spaceflight, just use it. The water-dwellers want to leave their planet because the land-dwellers have polluted their environment beyond repair. If they can steal a ship from the land-dwellers and adapt its environment for their needs, that's fine. But they need to be advanced enough to operate it.
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As far as we are currently aware, the most intelligent things in the oceans are the cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and the pinnipeds (seals, walrus, sea lions). Further, it is more tempting to want creatures close to us biologically to behave more like us as well, especially in fiction. Again, the closest cousins to hominids in the oceans are cetaceans and pinnipeds.
However, if you want something alive today to reach the point of being able to drive a space craft, I think you need a [cephalopod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence) (octopus, squid, cuttlefish).
As the linked Wikipedia article describes, many cephalopods have demonstrated spatial reasoning, puzzle solving ability, tool use, dexterity, and communication1. The larger ones have brains as big as ours.
Also, as [another answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/65328/10851) confirms, cetaceans need their flippers and specific body plan for speed and agility while swimming, and to chase down their prey- even those who only eat krill. Evolving any part of themselves for gripping and dexterity would come at extreme cost elsewhere. The same would be true for pinnipeds, who already have hardship enough hauling out on a beach to mate.
Other fiction works have explored a future where cephalopods continue to evolve and advance, such as the speculative [squibbon](http://speculativeevolution.wikia.com/wiki/Squibbon). For the most part, they come to the same conclusion- there is nothing to prevent these creatures from ultimately becoming as capable as humans of manipulating their environment.
To get to the point where one can flood the compartment of a Saturn V and take the controls is not that much of a logical leap. I would expect the first ones to begin the charge would be ones in captivity, where we are already teaching them to open jars, take photographs, and predict soccer matches.
Edit: I almost forgot: <http://xkcd.com/520/>
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1All the more impressive given that their "language" consists of changing their body color!
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**Evolutionary biology: the first effective tool user wins.**
In most marine environments two issues dominate most niches: (1) obtaining food and (2) not becoming food. I posit that your creatures will need to become tool users on their way to space. In that case, my intuition is to look at where/how tool using would give them an advantage earlier on.
**I posit that the first creature (in your planet's large waters) to use tools effectively for getting food and self defense would out-compete the competition, thus having claws, tentacles or other dexterous appendages is a good starting point.** Imagine either crabs or cephalopods wielding sharpened razor clams or augur shells (long, thin cones) as weapons against prey or would-be predators. Sharpening a shell (or bone) on the right kind of exposed rock is plausible underwater.
Side question: Is the chemistry of these waters such that any native (in elemental form) metals might persist long enough underwater to be used? Perhaps as a side effect of a recently dormant underwater volcano? (Or a plant species that conveniently concentrates/precipitates some metal?) Metals are probably essential to any non-handwavium, non-magical spaceflight. Native copper was a big trade item, before the iron age.
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salamander-people or crabs
the hardest part is getting a water breather that can also build on land. Nothing intelligent fits the bill, so what does fit the bill: walking bottom dweller or something with a staged life cycle.
Crabs can come out on land for extended periods and have grasping appendages, exoskeleton is size limiting however so they should be dog sized at best. And they won't end up looking much like crabs.
Some amphibian like certain salamanders start out as aquatic but gain more and more terrestrial features as they develop. You could push this to the extreme and have a organism that is aquatic but becomes semi aquatic when it reaches sexual maturity. If their prematurity part of their life cycle is long you would have a creature that builds most of its civilization under water but the older ones can venture out onto land. There are extinct scaly amphibians that fit the bill. But you have a lot of flexibility with this approach and can create your creature to suit your needs.
I always liked the idea of a elongate six limbed scaly amphibians where the first two limbs function for grasping and the second set function for both grasping and locomotion. I used that as DM.
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To have technological civilization, at the very least you need to have tool usage.
Octopuses have been found to use tools with their very dexterous arms.
You also need a large brain and if they are to be able to survive on land for some period of time that seems to suggest a mammal.
So a mammal with large head and a few dexterous arms which can be used for swimming and walking on land as well as tool usage.
Sensory wise, if they are primarily oceanic species, sonar seems plausible.
Obviously, living in liquid they'll be very streamlined.
Finally, they need to have a social structure, work well in groups, which also seems to suggest a mammal.
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I would guess some evolutionary descendant of the Pacific striped octopus. Octopuses are extremely intelligent (especially this kind) and the tentacles allow them to be dexterous. The Pacific striped octopus is also very gregarious which would allow for social groups.
I would guess that in time the octopus's beak would decrease in size along with its muscles allowing more room for its brain much like our jaws are much smaller than our evolutionary ancestors. Overall I think the head size would decrease. The animals would probably take much more time to figure out how to get to space than we did since they would discover fire much later. They as a society would probably be more advanced in architecture as they would have to deal with the strong currents underwater. They would also probably be culturally extremely developed.
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I think you need to keep in mind, that the land mass and air above water level to those creatures is like space to us. So the question: "What could be up there?" would firstly mean the air. So their first attempts would be, to enable themselves to either walk on land or fly in the air.
(Nonetheless, they would need a motivation to do so much before the end conflict leading to leaving for space.)
From that point on they would start making better tools, and those tools which enable them to leave water will a) enhance tool production b) produce some kind of industrie c)enable use of other materials found "up there" and finally d) enable to think about what could be above "up there"...
For sea creatures I would guess the first thought about leaving water would be to mimikry those who can, like crabs. So they might start developing a kind of artificial exoskeleton unless they have techniques of DNA altering.
This exoskeleton which certainly will be quite improved over time and could be the basis for spaceflight.
Another point is, that additionally to "up there" in their culture there certainly would be the aspect of "down there" as they won't be able to travel far down without environmental suites either. This could even enable higher industry (using volcanos - see my addition to fuzzys post).
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Inspired by fuzzys approach I made some thoughts regarding possible underwater skills, tools, etc.:
**Tools**
* Many already said that remnants of hard shelled exosceleton animals or corals can be used as tools (like knives).
* There are certainly some sea plants to make ropes from. These can be a starting point to make nets or are used as fences against hostile animals.
**Skills and Techniques**
* Underwater surgery using those non-metal knives could certainly be possible.
* Aquacultures (see below)
* Art (see below)
* breeding animals to fit their use
* brain surgery on aggressive animals if taming doesn't work (to be able to direct them)
**Farming Plants**
* Growth of Corals can be regulated on purpose for several reasons (like Sponges, Food, Art, Architecture).
* Seaweed or similar plants to make ropes.
**Aquacultures and interactions with animals**
* Using ropes as fences, or a tamed potentially aggressive animal as herding animal, it can produce aquacultures for food, as a kind of underwater zoo, or other purposes
* aquacultures can be a food basis for bigger tamed working animals
* they can also be used to culturize and tame more powerful animals
* shell aquacultures can be used to produce perls and mother-of-perl for art and hard shells as a tool basis
* As this species is more intelligent than others underwater it can produce similar effects like between humans/wolves/dogs. So there would be at least one other species which developed side by side as a companion like dogs evolving from wolves as some of them outsourced the hunting to the humans concentrating on their remnants for food. Of course this animal would look quite different than the one it evolved from.
* whales could help moving large objects using a harness of ropes
* tamed sharks or orcas as protection against aggressive animals
**Medicine**
* Using poisons as a basis for producing medicine
* use of non-metal scalpells and saws
* syringes can be made from a coned shaped shell as needle in combination with an air bladder of fish for the medicine and a second shell around the bladder to reduce or enlarge the size of the bladder therefore injecting or taking fluids
**Possible ways of leaving water**
* breeding crabs as hosts / living environmental suits for land walks (possibly in combination with surgery)
* Flying could be possible if the atmosphere has a quite high CO2 atmosphere as that gas is quite heavy. So if they can produce gas which is lighter they can use it to fill a balloon made from whaleskin.
* They could also try to breed fish like giant sharks to develop a giant air bladder which can be used as a tool or basic material. Maybe they can even try to alter their physiology over time to produce a different gas which is even lighter than CO2.
**Art**
* Culturizing corals can be a great way of sculpted living art.
* Pearls and Mother-of-Pearl can be a elements in decoration (like tools, sculptures, architecture)
**Higher Industry and other resources**
* I am not sure about that, but one approach could be to use heat/hot water of underwater volcans.
* For using them they would also need environmental suits against the high pressure. I am not sure wether they might be developed before or after the environmental suits for land walks or flying?!
* Mining for certain minerals, gems etc. would also be possible under water, but I am not sure which ones could be of use under water. Maybe in combination whith an underwater volcano industry?!
[Answer]
My approach to this question begins with imagining what sorts of work would need to be done in an underwater environment. What assumptions can be established about these creatures' skills, and what do they lack? What sorts of objects must be associated with their work?
We imagine tools in an air environment as moving in certain ways and modifying or striking objects to change them in certain ways. How does the undersea environment affect movement and interaction of objects? What unique needs will be present underwater that do not exist in the air? How do biological requirements dictate the need for tools? What aspects of 'culture' would develop differently in the underwater environment, or how would what constitutes culture differ?
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[Question]
[
I'm considering a story where an exploration is devised to explore a binary system containing a black hole; the choice is [Cygnus X-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1), with its companion supergiant star [HDE 226868](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1#HDE.C2.A0226868). It would likely be dangerous to orbit the black hole, as the accretion disk means that there will be high emission of potentially dangerous radiation (it's also full of extremely hot gas). Therefore, the explorers are orbiting the secondary, HDE 226868.
I'm wondering, though: Is it safe to orbit this star? The two objects may only be 0.2 astronomical units apart - one fifth Earth's distance to the Sun - and the star is undergoing heavy mass loss, as many supergiant stars do. Can the explorers orbit HDE 226868 without being exposed to high levels of radiation or other damaging effects? If so, how close could they orbit (the orbit must be stable over a period of at least one year, with minimal maneuvering by the ship)?
I'm assuming that the protective technology for the spacecraft they're traveling in is similar to our own, although obviously some advanced form of propulsion was required to get there. Additionally, the ship can orbit the entire system, if it has to, but preferably just the star.
[Answer]
# X-ray radiation at the orbit of HDE226868
Cygnus X-1 is famous as one of the most powerful X-ray sources in the sky. According to the [US Naval Observatory](http://asa.usno.navy.mil/static/files/2000/Xray_2000.pdf), the max flux of Cygnus X-1 (near the bottom of the last page on the link) is 1.2672 Crabs in the 2-10 keV range. 1.2672 Crabs is equal to $3.04\times10^{-11} \text{ W/m}^2$.
I have the distance to Cygnus X-1 at ~1900 parsecs or $5.9\times10^{19} \text{m}$, while the distance of HDE 226868 is $3.0\times10^{10} \text{m}$ away. Using inverse square law ratios, I calculate that the x-ray flux at the distance of HDE 2268868 is $$\frac{(5.9\times10^{19})^2}{(3.0\times10^{10})^2} = 3.9\times 10^{18}$$ times stronger, or 117 MW / m$^2$. That doesn't sound so good.
# How extremely fast that will kill you
A rad is equal to 0.01 J deposited into 1 kg. A thousand rads will kill you.
Lets say the human body is 100 kg with a uni-directional surface area of 0.5 m$^2$, and about 20cm thick. The human body is mostly water, which has a half-value layer (HVL) for 300 keV radiation of 5.823 cm (Data from [here](http://webfiles.ehs.ufl.edu/rssc_stdy_chp_3.pdf), last page). This means that if a person is 20 cm thick, they abosorb 4 half-layers of radiation; alternatively we can say that $1/2^4 = 0.0625$ of the radiation escapes, or about 93% is absorbed. This is for 300 keV, which is much higher than the 2-10 keV we would actually be seeing. Those lower energy x-rays are more likely to be absorbed, we can assume that all incident x-rays are absorbed in the human body.
The HVL of lead is about 0.16 cm (again for the relatively high 300 keV radiation). In order to drop 117 MW to 0.117 W per meter squared, you need nine orders of magnitude, or 1.4 cm of lead. This will get your only about a quarter of a rad per second. That will get you to the radiation poisoning level of ~200 rad in about 13 minutes. Six more orders of magnitude gets you about 24 years before radiation poisoning with about 2.4 cm of lead.
So far so good! We can shield our people!
Now lets look into what 117 MW is doing to that lead. The density of lead is 11340 kg / m$^3$ and a square meter of lead, 2.4 cm thick is 0.024 cubic meters. The heat capacity of lead is 128 J/kg K. Each 1 m$^2$ surface are of lead hull weighs 272 kg and takes 35 kJ to raise by 1 degree kelvin. In order to protect us from the x-rays, this lead barrier must absorb all the x-ray energy. So the hull of our ship will increase by about 3342 K per second as it provides enough shielding to protect us from X-rays.
# Conclusion
Without wasting any more time calculating black-body radiation and such, one can assume that the x-ray heating from the black hole will slag (and plasma!) anything in the orbit of HDE226868.
If the most powerful x-ray source in the sky is over 6000 light years away, it is good to continue being 6000 light years away from it.
[Answer]
I like both of the provided answers, but I'm going to add some information about the star and the stellar wind itself and build on the these two answers.
To start I think it is safe to say, based on kingledion's answer, that the x-ray emission from the black hole would roast any spacecraft that orbited near the star with an unobstructed path to the black-hole. This means that the only "safe" orbit, with respect to x-ray emission is going to be the corresponding Lagrange point, as mentioned by Will's answer. This point will protect the spacecraft from the black-hole's x-rays by always keeping the star between it and the black hole (basically a 6 million mile shield). But what about the stellar wind?
Well first let's put up some numbers;
Our sun's stellar wind (mostly called the solar wind) typically varies between 400-750 km/s, depending on if it's the fast or slow solar wind. Type O and B stars stellar wind is much faster, approaching ~2000 km/s. For simplicity sake, let's call it **4x faster**.
The mass loss rate for a typical O/B type star is on the order of $10^{-6}$ solar masses per year (roughly $2\times 10^{24}$ kg/year or ~$6\times 10^{16}$ kg/s). That is **100,000,000x more** than our sun! For comparison sake, that is even more than a typical coronal mass ejection from our sun.
So we are dealing with a stellar wind that is 4x faster with $10^8$x more mass than our solar wind.
Now let's add the black-hole. Typically a star's stellar wind is "roughly" spherically symmetric. This is different for a G type star (our sun) because of the corona, but for an O/B type star we can call it symmetric. the gravitational pull acts as a focus, producing a non-spherically symmetric stellar wind (with more wind being directed towards the black-hole, and less towards the spacecraft). The x-rays will also energize the stellar wind, but that shouldn't play a part for our spacecraft if it is sitting at the L3 point. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to calculate the anisotropy of the solar wind due to the black-hole, but let's say that it has the affect of halving the solar wind characteristics in the L3 direction (highly doubt it has that much of an affect, but for arguments sake let's go with it).
So now let's see where we are at. We have a spacecraft at approximately the same distance from HDE226868 as Mercury is from our sun. With a stellar wind that is 2 times faster than our own, with 50,000,000 more mass. Now luckily we just had a satellite (MESSENGER) that took some great data from the EPPS instrument about the energetic plasma and from the GRNS instrument for galactic rays. Looking at the data from the satellite, it seems that a stellar wind with an average energy content $2\times 10^8$ times more than our own solar wind would cause irreparable damage to both humans and instruments aboard the spacecraft. In addition the massive dynamic pressure of the stellar wind would require constant adjustments to the spacecrafts orbit to maintain a constant orbit.
**Summary**
It seems to me that you are going to need to orbit at quite a distance from both the black-hole and the star if you want to remain alive with today's available technology. One caveat is that stellar wind can be a lot easier to deflect than x-rays. Instead of large shielding, if your spacecraft were able to generate a significantly large magnetic field it could shield itself in the same way that Mercury's magnetic field shields it.
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I think you can orbit the star. I do not think the jets from the black hole are hitting the star and I do not think the accretion disk reaches that far; in any case it is a plane.
You can orbit such that the mass of the star is interposed between you and the black hole, if you are worried about unpredictable radiation from the black hole or distant consequences of the accretion disk. This orbit would be at the L2 Lagrange point (if the blue one in the picture is the star) or the L3 (if the yellow one is the star).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmYJw.gif)
The mass stream from the star to the black hole occurs between those 2 bodies: stay out of the way of that. Radiation from the black hole would be bad, but from the viewpoint at the L2 Lagrange point, the black hole is eclipsed by the star, which shields you.
**ADDENDUM**
In my rediscovered enthusiasm for this concept, and after reading the deleted answer by @Youstay Igo I wondered, notwithstanding the hole, how hot it would be from just the star at the Lagrange point.
I found a Lagrange Point Calculator.
<http://orbitsimulator.com/formulas/LagrangePointFinder.html>
Here are the values I put in and the distances of the various points.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRdks.jpg)
I put the star at 23 and the hole at 14. That means the L3 point would be shaded from the hole by the star. That L3 is only 0.35 AU from the star. Mercury is 0.39 AU from our much less energetic sun.
I found an article estimating how close the space shuttle ("similar to our own") could come to our own sun without cooking.
from <http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/how-close-could-person-get-sun-and-survive>
>
> Riding in the space shuttle, though, someone could get much closer to
> our star. The ship's reinforced carbon-carbon heat shield is designed
> to withstand temperatures of up to 4,700° to ensure that the
> spacecraft and its passengers can survive the friction heat generated
> when it reenters the atmosphere from orbit. If the shield wrapped the
> entire shuttle, McNutt says, astronauts could fly to within 1.3
> million miles of the sun.
>
>
>
13 million miles is 0.015 AU. I had a hard time finding how much more energy than the sun HDE 226868 puts out; [O type blue supergiants are very hot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-type_star). 20,000x the sun is the low end. Maybe multiplying it out is too simplistic, but 20,000 \* 0.015 = 300 AU. So 300 AU proximity to this giant star = 0.015 AU to the sun. That is 1000x farther than the L3 Lagrange point!
Maybe the explorers would be better off at L2 in the cool shade behind the black hole. At least the hole does not kick out the thermal energy like that. They can bring osmium shielding against the hard radiation.
**ADDENDUMUM**
How to orbit at L2 in full view of the hole when, as per @kingledion, "So the hull of our ship will increase by about 3342 K per second as it provides enough shielding to protect us from X-rays.". I am thinking aikido - redirect your opponents momentum. Let us use xrays to negate xrays.
Xray diffraction turns on the priniciple that some crystals absorb and re-emit xrays such that there is constructive and destructive interference between the rays. Areas of constructive interference have much more radiant energy. Areas of destructive interference, much less. Ideally, there is no net loss of xray energy (as heat!) - it is just a reallocation of energy.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EUyhv.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ynBGp.jpg)
I propose that shield made of a crystal with these xray diffracting properties could be used to reroute the xray energy, allowing it to travel by without heating up the shield, ship or explorers. The explorers and ship, needless to say would be hiding in one of the dark areas of destructive interference.
This would take advantage of the shade of the black hole, absorbing the radiance of the star. It sidesteps the problem of xrays from the black hole by routing them around the ship.
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Being closer doesn't necessarily mean seeing better. Not only will you be affected by [Glare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glare_(vision)), the high-energy radiation will cause a phenomenon similar to [Photokeratitis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photokeratitis) to your sensors as well.
Of course, the first approach would be to filter the incoming rays, but simply moving to the right orbit in a far distance has almost the same effect and is easier. You'd have to account for the light diffraction by gravity in this case.
With no interference to distort the light but the creating objects themselves, distance should be no hurdle (unless of cause you want resolutions down to the kilometer scale), and since you probably want to observe the whole system and its interaction, not being bound to the sun will probably be a positive factor as well.
At any rate, I don't see any remotely realistic approach to survive in an orbit around the star. The final distance for which you settle is determined as follows:
* maximal possible distance: magnification power of your telescope
* minimal possible distance: radiative equilibrium that puts you on a reasonable temperature
* optimal distance: Between parameter 1 and 2, based on how resilient your sensors are, and determined by how long you want your measuring instruments to remain functional
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Yes, it is completely safe to orbit HDE 226868 because...
# HDE 226868 has an exoplanet.
Do we know that? No. Do we know that it does **not** have an exoplanet? Also no. I could not confirm, but I don't believe that Kepler or other systems have surveyed that particular star for having an exoplanet, and even if they did, we cannot detect all exoplanets -- they may be small or may have longer orbit periods than our observations. So you are free to posit the existence of one.
With an exoplanet in play, you can orbit HDE 226868 using the exoplanet as a heat/radiation/everything shield. You can make the planet as large as you need and put it far enough away from the star to cut down on problems from the star itself.
The planet may have a moon, and you may be able to create a complex orbit that gives you some shielding from both the black hole and from the star.
If you want to get really exotic, you could discover that there's an entire planet sitting at a Lagrange point of the Cygnus-HDE system, happily spinning on its axis, orbiting nothing. Give that planet a sizable moon that orbits the planet... you orbit the planet and keep the moon between you and the black hole at all times... let the planet's mag field protect you from the star.
Basically, the other answers say that you cannot survive with just your spaceship. But we could posit the discovery of other bodies in the area that give you much greater shielding.
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[
**This is my entry for the fortnightly topic challenge**
In [Day of the Triffids](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids), many people go blind and the basic summary is this:
* virulent plague makes most of humanity blind
* giant, semi-intelligent plants take over.
In the world I am creating, humans have to face off with an intergalactic plant "empire" that has more advanced tech than we do. My question is this:
* **How could a sentient plant logically evolve and what are some key environmental and sociological factors that might come into play or dramatically impact the evolutionary process?**
[Answer]
In order to develop 'sentience,' as well as things like technology and civilization, a plant first needs to have use for those things. Plants on Earth didn't really evolve in such a way as to need those things, so plants that developed sentience need to evolve in a very different manner.
**What is a plant?**
Let's start by defining a plant. Conceptually, a plant is an organism that produces its energy through photosynthesis. (More specifically, plants are everything in the kingdom 'Plantae,' which evolved and lived on Earth, so our organisms are actually plant-like aliens, but that's a semantic quibble.) Most plants derive all of their nutrients from their soil, as well, though some carnivorous plants eat animals to supplement this. Even carnivorous plants, though, don't have an energy-producing metabolism. Animals can provide nutrients, but all energy comes from the sun.
**What does a plant need for sentience?**
So what does a plant need to do to become sentient? Well, if we assume that plant sentience is similar to human sentience, we'll need to do the following:
* Have a language capable of abstract communication
* Have a brain that can store a sense of self
* Manipulate their environment
We'll also probably need better developed sensory organs in order to perceive the environment.
**How could this evolve?**
All of this is tough for a stationary plant to evolve on its limited supply of energy, but what if the plant isn't always stationary? What if large plants are the mature form of the species, producing nutrients to feed smaller mobile plants that can clear out competing plants as well as traveling away from the central plant to kill animals for fertilizer?
These creatures would be the 'seed' form of the plant as well. They'd have a large internal reservoir of pure glucose, but no digestive system. They would grow and mature while helping farm their parent plant. When they became too large to efficiently perform their tasks, they'd wander to the edge of their parent grove and root into the ground, growing into another stationary mature plant.
These creatures would be the vector for evolution in the plants. They'd probably start out as simple, flagellar organisms that would writhe around the base of the plant, damaging competitors and wriggling off to find an ideal place to grow. Evolution would extend their motile lives and improve their ability to move around and manipulate their environments, providing their parent plants with a competitive advantage over the other plants in the region. They'd develop brains and nervous systems as part of this, but probably only after developing a method for gaining nourishment from their parents, since brains and nerves are energetically expensive things.
The trees, too, would probably begin to take on some traits of their animal children. A brain, probably rudimentary at first, would develop, as well as some nerves. These would aid the tree in signaling to its children what they need to do. Pheromones would probably be used to start, but eventually, a deeper level of communication could be developed that would allow the intelligent sessile parents to 'program' their dull, but motile, children.
**Multiple trunks, one mind**
On earth, trees form [anastomosis](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anastomosis) between their roots, allowing them to provide each other with structural support and nutrients. For the aliens, these could also allow individual mature trees to combine into a single larger organism.
Since a tree, based on the limited energy it has available through photosynthesis, can't maintain a large brain on its own, combining multiple trunks together into a single organism that thinks as one would allow intelligence to reach levels that we would consider 'sentient'. Each colony of trees would be a single 'individual', with new mobile seed children produced by that colony acting to grow their parent colony. A colony would not necessarily need to be genetically homogeneous, though. If seed children are produced through pollination, pollen blowing on the wind currents would enable seed children to be born with genes from other colonies, or from multiple stalks in a colony that is not genetically homogeneous.
**Controlled evolution**
The fact that a single tree colony would be effectively immortal and would possess many different genes would also lead to another really cool fact about these aliens: by using their seed bodies to selectively pollinate their own flowers, they could guide their own evolution. They'd be able to see what the mind of each new stalk they grew was, and choose to plant only seed children that would give them powerful new children and healthy minds.
Different stalk types could also give rise to different *kinds* of children. Some strains of tree could be selectively bred for producing warrior children, for example, that were stronger and better suited for fighting than their brethren, but less energy efficient. Others could produce workers with dexterous hands, capable of building and manipulating tools.
**Finally: sentience**
This selective differentiation of workers would allow the plants to become 'sentient'. They'd grow dull workers, which would produce tools and weapons for warriors to use in battle. Diplomats, with powerful brains that would allow them to act intelligently when disconnected from their parents could be used to allow distant colonies of trees to communicate with one another, though they'd still be dwarfed in terms of intelligence by their parent colonies. Different colonies could forge civilizations together, banding together for mutual defense and aggression. New colonies could be started by sending a child to root outside of the bounds of a colony, allowing the aliens to develop broad alliances and nations of colonies related to one another. Swords, axes, and cannons would be forged for war, but their most potent tool would remain a deep and intuitive knowledge of genetics bio-engineering born from countless generations of directing their own evolution. They would be a fascinating, and sentient, a race of aliens.
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Plants store their [brains](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant) ([short term memory, immune memory and transgenerational memory](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-plants-think-daniel-chamovitz/)) in their roots, and they [communicate](http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/) via airborne emissions (and [root-talking](http://www.pnas.org/content/88/3/874.full.pdf)).
Btw, plants have a large number of senses already. They can hear, can see, smell, and a large number of other senses (gravity), motion, etc, etc.
Being root-bound (or having a sessile life style), really limits their mobility.
But. they're really good at biochem. Maybe they make/co-opt insects to do the physical fast work, and are the brains of the operation?
As to needs, they're going to have to compete; most likely with an animal race - as plants tend to work together. They will probably be after our sunlight.
[Answer]
My starting place was to determine what made a sentient plant different from an animal (maybe I'm dense? Took me a while). Here's a starting place for differences between the two. <http://www.mcwdn.org/Plants/PlantsDiffer.html>
Basically:
A. Plants don't move
B. Plants make their own food
C. Plants give off oxygen and take in CO2
D. Plant cells have cell walls and other "planty" structures
E. Plants have only basic abilities to sense
Of course, I can think of exceptions, for example, some carnivorous plants don't make their own food, can move, and can sense objects pretty well.
Because they're sentient, they need to be able to interact with their environment (smart, paralyzed races don't seem likely to last, and are unlikely to be intergalactic), so A and E are out. So let's say that to make a plant, we'll need them to make their own food from the sun, and they need planty-parts in their cells, viz. [chloroplasts to make food and cell walls](http://www.diffen.com/difference/Animal_Cell_vs_Plant_Cell).
So they're going to be a lot more animal-like than some animals, but with ability to make their own food.
Plants (along with...pretty much any other life form) have 3 major needs:
1. Reproduction
2. Food
3. Water
**Reproduction:** Most plants reproduce using insects to transfer vital bits of DNA (trying not to be too graphic). Much of the plant's structure is devoted to this - in fact, anything that isn't root or leaf is probably connected to reproduction. So fruits, flowers, sugar-filled-liquid-producing organs, and bright colors would probably cease to exist if plants had a different way of reproducing.
**Food:** Plants can mostly make their own food. But to do this, they need periods of sun and darkness. Also water, CO2, and O2, if my memory serves correctly. You'll also need a pretty large amount of sun-facing surface. The nice thing with a plant is that mostly they need to make sugar, so carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen are pretty much all they need to function nicely. For repairs, they will need other elements, but these are largely gotten from soil and seem to be widely available. So making food isn't a problem, but storing food could be. Your plant-people will need some type of "camel hump" for sugars. Many plants use roots for this.
**Water:** Plants need a pretty steady supply of water. This seems to be the biggest problem preventing plants from moving - traditionally, a massive root system ensures a steady water supply. Trouble is, massive root systems are hard to move.
## Plant Society
I'm going to keep my imaginary Plantains pretty "planty." Of course, if you want to slap some chloroplasts on an animal, I'm cool with that. But then, it wouldn't really be flora would it?
I can see two possible primitive plant societies. Later histories could be extrapolated from these initial points.
1. Plant Nomads. A group of (probably) small sentient plants with minimal root systems that move around, following water sources and rainy seasons.
2. Stationary Plant Societies. Plants develop a way to pass along knowledge to seeds and send them out, much like coral polyps, to establish new colonies. The older plants would be stationary once their roots developed. Some motion might be possible by selective growth and allowing parts to die. But that would be on a months-to-centuries timescale.
In either case, I can think of a few interesting features of such a society:
**No family units.** Since plants have almost no control over breeding, there wouldn't be families. Sexual prohibitions would not exist, generation differences would not be nearly as obvious. Genders roles would be more balanced. Mixed races could be an interesting social problem (half-sentient plants?), though many plant combinations can't produce viable offspring.
**Relationships.** Inter-plantain-ial relationships could get interesting. "Hermit" plants by choice would probably be rare, but once you're in a group, you're pretty stuck. Plants would have great emphasis on applied psychology and conflict resolution skills.
**Reduced desire for exploration.** Because plants need water, huge swaths of the world would remain unexplored, at least until specially engineered plants with water-carrying abilities could explore rockier/less rainy areas. Maybe this wouldn't become a cultural norm, but it would be the initial mindset.
**So what would plants do?** Plants really wouldn't have the "survival struggle" animals have. Food production is pretty passive. There would be a high emphasis on proper shelter (windbreaks, erosion prevention, temperature stabilization). Aesthetics would be important. Lots of thinking would occur, so plants would focus on philosophy before applied sciences. "Thought is cheap, action is expensive" would probably become a mantra.
**No need-based economy.** Because food is free, and necessities are minimal, the focus wouldn't be on needs as much as on services (like a doctor for when you get buried in a landslide). Maybe plants are the perfect candidates for a communist system.
Honestly, I don't see anything that can fly a spaceship being very plant-like. That's probably just the limits of my imagination, but a plant's sheer mass-to-movement ratio seems to preclude the rapid responses needed to develop early flight.
But, they'd be tough to beat. Once they came to a new world, seeding it could be done easily, and from a high altitude. And plants are notoriously tough to kill. Especially since they have the advantage of cell walls and the ability to regenerate from small pieces.
[Answer]
An analogy to fern's "alternation of generations" is possible. This is how it works on Earth: Ferns disperse spores, which grow independently into a prothallus, the active reproductive part (Gametophyte). The prothallus is fertilized (hopefully by a prothallus from another plant), and yields a new plant - the sporophyte, the one we know as the fern we encounter at the nursery.
In your sci-fi model, the gametophyte, may be a motile animal-like creature. This allows it to wander and search for mates. Once it mates, it forms the "seed" to a new plant which will grow and make new gametophytes. Now is the fun part: which one is more long-lived, the motile gametophyte, or the tree-like sporophyte? If the gametophyte lives long enough, it may become more andvanced and sentient.
[Answer]
# The Biology Part
It appears that plants already do [appear to communicate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_sentience) with each other and with animals, just not on the timescale of animals, and mostly via hormones. That being said, for something without a brain or muscle fiber, plants can react rather quickly. [Acacia Trees](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacia), for instance, are known to react very quickly to grazers, producing a hormone which not only triggers tannin production in that plant, but in other nearby trees as well. [Venus Flytraps](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap#Mechanism_of_trapping), as another example, are quick enough to catch [flies and other insects](http://youtu.be/bPQsVY6rduY).
Anyways, the plants in question will need reason to be faster than they currently are. Are they predatory? That seems to be the reason why venus flytraps can act so quickly. Are there herbivores? Maybe they have something also slow moving that they're trying to avoid, so they develop defenses which act more and more quickly.
What about developing intelligence? Increasing [Plant Perception](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(physiology)) will play a role in this. The developing intelligence, though, would require some sort of evolutionary pressure to do so. It could easily go hand-in-hand with dealing with predation or prey capture.
I would start by looking at a book and some articles. Specifically, the *[Communication of Plants](http://books.google.com/books?id=IH9N4SKWTokC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)* and the academic article *[Rapid Changes in Tree Leaf Chemistry Induced by Damage: Evidence for Communication Between Plants](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/221/4607/277)* to see evidence on how plants currently communicate, and if you can call any of those communications intelligence.
# The Social Part
This depends on the [structure of plants](https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/1008/are-there-any-motile-plants), and how detailed their communications could be. I imagine being intelligent and sessile while having others around you who are also intelligent and sessile would greatly influence the social-psychological environment of these plants. Specifically, I would think that you would go to great lengths to be polite, as there is no way to remove yourself from an unpleasant situation.
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**In nature** there are already quite a few plants with motility, albeit not while rooted. Seeds are the most common example and they might as well adapt to float and roll as an energy efficient way of travel. The Mimosa pudica (shy plant) can close its leaves as a response to touch. This can become a survival mechanism, plants retract underground to avoid herbivores. The Helianthus (sunflower) bends its stalk to follow the sun. This is also quite the efficient mechanism as leaves would take more complex shapes (like frills for example) and stare at the sun. The Drosera (sundew) wraps around insects that fell prey to it. There's also the bush you see in westerns the tumble weed that rolls with the wind to spread its seeds.
**For intelligence** an ant sized brain is already quite powerful and I imagine that depending on the plants size, bigger or more numerous brains could become a possibility. Now I also want to point out something that most people forget: brains are more expensive than muscles! You can fix this in multiple ways.
1. Slow movement. A plant races "muscles" would be hydraulic, compartments filling themselves with water to bend the plant. It's not that uncommon, jumping spiders use this as well.
2. Sleep. How long does the plant stay inert before recharging? That would mean that they need protection from their comrades during their sleep or it could just mean that they rest during the day and start moving at night.
3. A type of hive-mind or shared intelligence. More trees connected to each other would form an impressive super organism. Each individual would provide their share of intelligence to the community.
**For motility** the seedlings are by far the best bet. They can grow in grapes and when ready will feather fall on the ground and start rolling. Why rolling? Limbs are expensive and likely won't develop on a first try. So rolling despite being a rudimentary way of locomotion is quite viable. Seedlings can have tiny arms on their surface which they use to move around and grab objects. They can even have thorns for defense. Just imagine for a moment an armada of these roley-poleys chasing you for pulling a weed.
An issue with these seedlings is resupplying their energy. Seeds normally have some energy stored within to germinate, but these seeds fulfill labor roles for the colony. Do they link up with the adult trees to feed? Do some seeds stay immature to continue working? Up to you.
The adult trees could still retain some motility. For example in extreme cases when they need to relocate they could retract their leaves and form a ball around themselves with their roots and branches and start rolling. As for their senses I believe that omnidirectional antennae is the way to go. After all plants have an up and down but no front and back. Long tendrils tipped with sensors would probe the trees surroundings. Given that they roll this would also be logical. They could have sight, smell and hearing, just like we do.
**Reproduction** is everyone's favorite subject. A colony of sentient plants would still need flowers for reproduction, even if they no longer need pollinators. Now notice that because plants are motile and thusly no longer require assistance from pollinators does not mean that flowers will disappear altogether. In fact it will change the flowers purpose. I'm talking about mating rituals. This can be a major cultural aspect of the plants lives.
Consider the following: above the treetops beautiful flowers emerge, each with their own quirks and personalities. Suddenly they dance to express themselves and display with their petals their health and genetic traits. Using this ritual, the trees will choose their mates and select the traits they desire in their offspring. After this some flowers detach themselves, fly towards their mate and wither shortly after. On the receiving end the flower will also wither but form a grape of seedlings.
**Technology** is an interesting thing to talk about concerning these aliens. You want spacecrafts? Sure thing. Older trees that need to relocate could use such technology and thus the conquest of space can begin. Their ships would have thick isolating outer shells that are transparent but filter dangerous radiation. Plants are perfect for space travel. They make their own food using sunlight (plenty of stars in space), water (in the form of ice) and minerals (asteroids, comets and so on). On top of that they recycle waste. They live for a very long time. Because of this they could theoretically achieve space travel before humans, due to their ships being simpler.
If we take a hive-mind into consideration the accumulated knowledge would allow them to develop far faster than us because knowledge is shared no time is wasted on learning, they work in unison unlike people who are usually selfish and finally the colony lives forever so experience piles up. Clearly they surpassed us long ago.
As they are plants their knowledge of (self) agriculture and pharmaceutics would be far more developed than ours. They could grow natural materials better than us. Their wisdom would also surpass ours. The only real disadvantage is their slow movement.
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There have been a lot of interesting answers with far more research than what I'm willing to dedicate, but based off of those, here's my input:
Most of the answers highlight that you need some form of mobility to introduce a pressure to evolve intelligence / sentience. My first thought was to a plant that would live in different ecosystems, in phases.
Imagine a plant ressembling a water lily - living on the surface of a swamp / river / lake. This would be phase 1. After a while developing there, it "untethers" itself from the ground under the body of water it's been growing in and start floating off downstream, towards a *waterfall*. It falls off the edge of the waterfall, but its large leaf is wide enough to let it glide through the air instead of falling straight down. It land in a nearby plain and roots in down there. It can now grow taller because of the increased sunlight and space, and in a few seasons it will produce seeds that can float off in the wind, like a dandelion's. This is phase 2.
Then you can start playing with the plant's leaves during phase 1 to evolve into shapes, and give it sensory organs that can detect other plants of its species so it can guide itself away from big clumps to have more room for itself. The organism would progressively grow to be more and more complex, and might one day evolve into a *flying sentient plant*.
How cool would that be!?
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The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds and hundreds of symbiotic plants, fungi and insects that play a vital role it its optimal functioning.
Now I'm undecided whether this vast network arose naturally, was built by 23rd century eco-fanatical AIs or by a human xenobiologist called Deidre Skye. I'm undecided whether it's a dark swamp or a bright and sprightly forest. I'm also undecided on the thinking speed: it could ponder things with Ent-like slowness or its thoughts could reverberate across the network in a millisecond.
Regardless, I've hit a limitation that I need Worldbuilder support to overcome. Since the Forest will always be threatened by various plants and animals, it requires mobile minions to enforce its will. Ideally, these would range in size from insects to massive beasts, but I'm open to more restrictive solutions too. **Now how would a sentient forest control and direct such a host of animals?**
Good answers would have:
* a signalling mechanism, perhaps allowing for relative speed;
* a way to use a subclass of minion to interact with the (as usual) hapless human POV character;
* a way to ensure minion obedience, perhaps to the point of self-sacrifice.
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Believe it or not, you don't have to go too sci-fi to have plants exerting a massive influence on their environment. Some plants can be very aggressive, and most plants can be very ***passive*** aggressive.
Weapons at a plant's disposal (in the real world).
* Symbiosis
* Pollen
* Sap and essential oil
* Nectar
* Fruit
* Seeds
* Growth
* Reflexes
* Lifecycle
* Pheromones
Plants are the very basis of every food chain in the web, period. That puts them in a great position to influence even top predators. Animals eat leaves, shoots, nectar, fruits and seeds of plants, and the plants control when to produce each of these commodities. If you have a massive forest of even barely intelligent trees, you can control the migration of all animals within it by making leaves fall in one section, pollen release in another and fruit form in a third.
Many animals as part of their nature husband the plants that feed them. Squirrels bury nuts/seeds, apes and monkeys throw fruit (even when they are hungry).
Plants release oils when they are competing with other plants that inhibit their growth or even kill them. They can also just grow taller and block out their sunlight.
Plants can grow at phenomenal rates. Some edible stalks and fruit can grow by 8-12 inches per day. That's almost 30 c.
There are plants that release a pheromone that mimics those released by animals so that for instance, wasps will be attracted when the trees are being attacked by things that wasps eat or breed in.
I can't find it documented anywhere, but I have seen strawberry plants in planter boxes send out offshoots **ONLY** in the direction of another planter full of dirt.
To attract various types of insects, a tree might produce more nectar, more pollen, more fruit, or change colors in a given wavelength of light. For instance, a flower full of nectar looks just like an empty flower to us humans, but bees can see into the UV spectrum just far enough that there is [a dramatic color change](https://natureodes.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/see-like-a-bee-ultraviolet-flower-photography-2/).
Mimosas and venus fly-traps will close up when touched, many plants will exude noxious oils, or fling seeds on contact, others will reach out vines and grasp firmly onto obsticles, and many plants supplement their nutrition by killing animals and using their decaying bodies as fertilizer.
Plants, even as tiny as grass can break slabs of concrete and reduce man made structures to base components in mere decades.
If the entire system could be likened to a single creature, the loss of a 'cell' is worth the survival of the whole. Trees could die off for many reasons. They could dry up to increase the risk of fire in a given area, drop branches or heavy seed pods to actively attack surface dwelling pariahs, but at the same time, dead trees offer homes and even food to other creatures they may want to promote. Your sentient trees could have gardens of fungi, just by growing and dying in the correct timeframes. They can purposely irritate these same fungi to cause them to release spores by dropping leaves or growing shoots through them.
Plants can hibernate like nobody's business, surviving intense cold and long periods of drought. Viable seeds [have been planted](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed) after 30,000 years.
Don't forget that they also control oxygen production. Their respiration is a chemical bi-product of photosynthesis, so they could potentially halt it entirely and make things very difficult for larger creatures like us.
None of what I've added here inhibits any of your ideas on fast thinkers versus slow ones, or how intelligent they have to be. The main thing is they just need to be varied, with control over most if not all things on the above list. They can act on their own, or influence creatures that live within or nearby them to act for them. Heck, they may just be in charge of this world already...
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**Inherent Programming**
Rather than directly controlling the animal minions, why not create them with some inherent programming that gives them an urge to defend the forest? Essentially, they'd be bred to behave in an aggressive manner towards anything that threatened the forest.
This would range from basic animalistic territorial instinct for animals like bears and crocodiles, to religious and spiritual ties to the forest for the ultimate forest defenders: the elves. Elves could guard the forest out of loyalty and religion, with perhaps some additional instinctive barbs that keep them around as loyal forest defenders. Elves may feel uneasy when they venture outside of the forest, and may even feel physical pain when they see someone damage the forest plants.
**Pheromones**
The forest could further control its inhabitants through the usage of pheromones. Depending on what the forest needed, it could release different chemicals, each of which would affect the behavior of the animals in a different way. Anger or happiness, for example, could be used to either inspire defensive behavior or else to reward creatures for protecting the forest.
Pheromones could also be used to identify forest dwellers to one another. If the forest constantly gave off a scent that would settle on anyone living there for a long time, all of the forest creatures could identify intruders as anyone who smells *different.* If the forest wants to be a bit more proactive, other scents could be sprayed on intruders, acting like antibodies and painting targets for the minion animals to attack.
All of this would lead to a system of forest defense that wouldn't, for the most part, require any active thought or action on behalf of the forest. Animals would patrol about, acting like animals, and eating anything hostile that wandered in. The elves would deal with any larger threats that presented themselves, only needing to consult the Wold in times of dire emergencies.
The Wold would be left to do as it pleased, not having to worry about its own defense. Perhaps it spends its time astrally projecting its mind across the world to learn more about what lies outside the borders of its mighty trunks.
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I like the basic idea behind @Monty Wild's **Direct parasitic neural control** answer, but I think there's room for improvement.
Having your plants control the animals directly strikes me as improbable, inefficient, bug-prone and potentially vulnerable to jamming. So I'd like to propose an alternative:
**Direct parasitic neural *conditioning***
Instead of taking over the entire neural system - an insanely complex task - instead we have a parasite that only invades and attaches itself to specific portions of the animal's brain, namely the pain, pleasure, emotion, and sensory areas (still an extremely complex task, but orders of magnitude easier). Then the parasite will use [conditioning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning) to mold the animal's behavior, over time, into what it wants. For example, an infected human might feel pain if he tried to use an axe on a tree, or if he was about to over-hunt an area. An infected bear would feel pleasure going toward areas the forest wants guarded, and hate and hunger when it sees an enemy of the forest.
The nice thing about this is that after enough conditioning over time, most controlled animals won't need much control at all. Just the occasional re-enforcement, and now usually they do what the forest wants without any direct input. This leaves the forest time to do what it wants to do, instead of wasting it controlling all these meatbags. In emergencies the forest could still summon animals to certain areas by making them feel "need", for defense and such.
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**Direct parasitic neural control**
A single-species organism capable of networking into a hive mind capable of controlling other species including animals would by necessity have to think as fast as the animals it controls, or else those animals would be more likely to escape or circumvent that control, or would simply be uncontrollable. Think of the complexities of controlling an insect: they have so little mind that they couldn't be set a task, they would have to be controlled precisely right through execution to completion. This problem wouldn't be any less a problem as larger animals were involved either, as there is no guarantee that these proxy animals would have enough brains to understand the instructions, in fact it would be safer to assume the contrary.
So, the question is, how a bunch of interconnected, thinking plants could control animals. Whatever it was would need a bandwidth sufficient to get the animals to do whatever was needed, down to the level of "Move *these* muscles *this* way", as the plants with their undoubtedly vast intelligence would have a far better idea of what they wanted done than trusting anything but the simplest tasks to the instincts of some dumb animal.
In [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/510/75), I proposed radio-based telepathy. It may well be that this is how these plants communicate when separated, though when in direct contact, they could potentially communicate faster via hard-wired means. This would also provide a potential means by which the plants could control their servants.
If we presume that these plants are designed/evolved to be immunologically neutral to many species that they may control, they could use the animals they control as an important part of their life cycle, and infection of an animal would be a necessary step in the growth of the plant. The means of infection could be many, from ingestion of the plant's fruit to a non- or semi- sentient mobile transmission agent like a wasp (that is a homozygous mobile form of the heterozygous sessile plant) that mates and injects potential hosts with a newly-formed seed.
In any case, having achieved infection of a host animal, the plant parasitises the animal's brain and intrudes its own neural connections on the animal's, as well as forming a radio transceiver organ to link with the rest of the plant hive mind. This would requiring a somewhat larger host animal, probably at least mouse-sized. It might be possible to use a lower bandwidth connection and signalling method, such as audible or visible signalling, and rely on the parasitic-plant's instinctive actions, though this would not be as versatile as a high-speed connection. Regardless, there would be a period of ineffectiveness while the seedling grew into the host's brain and learned to control it, during which the animal would be allowed to act normally. Then, once control had been established, the animal would be available for colony defence and whatever other projects the plant hive mind might have.
So, we have animals that are gradually taken over by the plants seedlings, which can eventually see and act using the parasitised animals. However, whether or not the parasitised animal is killed while undertaking its tasks, the growth of the plant might eventually kill the host animal. Anyway, at the death of the host animal, the plant would use its body as a source of nutrients to fuel rapid growth into the adult, sessile plant form. Naturally, larger host animals would provide a longer useful lifespan and a bigger growth boost.
With the plants' sentience on their side, the host animals may even benefit if the plants allowed them to breed, and assisted in the protection of their offspring, letting the host animals raise more offspring to adulthood than would otherwise be the case, before their inevitable death.
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**Indirect control by exploiting the natural behavior of animals.**
Suppose the most dangerous creature in the forest are very aggressive, badass murderbears. They are very dangerous, but there aren't many of them in the forest and they are solitary creatures, so you usually never encounter more than one at once. That means they are a manageable risk when traveling through the forest in a well-armed group.
Suppose the favorite food of the badass murderbears are lumberjacks and cute, fluffy bunnies which live everywhere in the forest.
Suppose the main food source of the fluffy bunnies is the symbiotic fungus which is part of the neural network of the forest overmind.
1. the forest overmind notices that humans start to cut down trees in one area of the forest and perceives this as a threat.
2. it selectively kills off all the neural fungus in the surrounding region, but even increase the growth in the logging area itself.
3. This causes all the fluffy bunnies to migrate to the logging area. The lumberjacks won't be bothered much by this at first, because the bunnies are cute and harmless. Besides, they are eating all the fungus which started to make their work harder.
4. But without any fluffy bunnies in their usual territories, all the badass murderbears will become hungry. So all the badass murderbears in the region will follow the fluffy bunnies into the logging area.
5. Suddenly the lumberjacks are confronted with a large number of badass murderbears which seemingly came out of nowhere. They fight bravely, but they can not handle that many at once. All of them are brutally slaughtered.
Oh, how foolish they were, trying to exploit this intricate ecosystem without trying to understand its complex workings.
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**There is something akin to a religious worship involved.**
Lower animals, insects and such are controlled by scents and pheromones, and their autonomous "defend the nest" or "defend against predator" reactions are activated remotely by you're Wold.
Higher animals, with significant brains, their brain patterns are molded from birth by the Wolde with neuroactive chemicals, such that they love it unconditionally, fully and totally. These could be ferocious beasts or even sentient beings, native to the forest. Given this worshipful love, the Wolde would hardly need to influence them much, except by releasing chemical triggers into the air if it thinks the brainy servants aren't acting as it wants them to.
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**Directed evolution + classic conditioning.**
Somewhere deep in The Wold is the "breeding warrens", where the mind can directly supervise the breeding and training of it's minions. I'm thinking something perhaps a cubic kilometer, with various faculties such as nurseries, feeding, and training areas. Perhaps using the pheromone idea so that the soldier minions can be breed/conditioned to attack those without the pheromone, plus some degree of autonomy (something that smells right but is doing bad things, akin to cancer). In that respect, perhaps the soldiers are best thought of as something like white blood cells (Killer T cells)
New species can be introduced to the Wold by the minions gathering the young, and The Wold can put them through the breeding warren process a few hundred generations to see if they are of use.
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**For a completely different pace, consider a more peaceful ecosystem.**
Does the control have to be so absolute? Consider the fundamental nature of what an ecosystem is. Every plant and animal is acting on its own interests, and yet everything works together to remain in harmony. If I were setting a living forest to fight in, I would rely less on absolute control and more on convincing the animals and plants to act in unison.
This would allow my forest to communicate in more calm, subtle ways. An unusual bloom on the shady side of the trees calls animals to action. Withering blooms on the bright side is a sign to nurture life, instead of fight. (These, of course, are related to the oldest meanings for yin and yang). Why should I tell my animals to attack, when I can instead have them use their own judgement. Of course, as the forest, I would bring my own vote to the table; they should be a bit more aggressive in regions blooming with Bella Donna (quite the nasty flower, if you research it). Torn down forest would be populated with Oleander as a sign that rebuilding is welcome (Oleander was the first flower to bloom after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima).
This subtle approach yields a subtle power. I am not enslaving the animals, I am bringing them into coherence with my desires. This way, I don't have to have lighting fast response times to control my minions with perfect precision. I ask each and every one of them to not only bring their body to the fight, but their mind as well. And when the fighting is over, I haven't created any twisted forces to undo. All I've done is simply bring forth the raw power of nature, as I always have.
*Why send 10 tons of animals full tilt to do what can be accomplished by 10 million tons of nature all taking one step to the right, in terrifying accord.*
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Chemicals like pheromones. Think about ant colony serving (also) to a plant.
If all is peachy, ants go around their business, growing their colony.
Is something damaged plant, one kind of chemical signal can be extruded by damaged part of plant, and protectors will attack whatever is around other part, and extrude signals to recruit more attackers.
That will include also self-sacrifice.
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Just to add to the ideas already suggested, the trees intelligence may not be entirely aware of the animals, they'd be like antibodies in our body, they'd die and fertilize the trees, live and feed off the older and damaged leaves, attack predators instinctively, and the trees may only be vaguely aware of their presence, in a way like garbagemen and postmen are "invisible" (mail arrives, but you don't necessarily see a postman deliver it).
Just my $0.02
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Perhaps the forest could communicate with a person who has trained animals to obey commands. The forest could tell the human about danger and/or directly give the animals commands.
Alternatively, the animals could directly communicate with the forest and be one of the helper sub-minds.
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I've been pondering this, and I'm curious to find out what potential issues could be created by even tightly licensed necromantic practices. Would the economy simply scale up to cover the extra workforce? Would this, essentially free, form of labour lead to a utopia of worklessness and free goods?
Edit for clarity: Yes, apologies, I intended the mindless dead. I've been pondering on the effects of raising Granddad for his weekly visit, but I think that touches on such a different issue that it deserves a separate question at some point. I've shuffle the non-economic issues away, to reappear as a purely social question on the same topic at a later time.
Double or triple edit, I forget: I've changed the question to make it clearer. I'll go for the economic here, and focus on the social elsewhere, including religious, political, cultural etc. I wonder how many questions I'm going to end up spinning this out to :D. I assume undead controlled with magic, so they essentially carry out the wishes of the necromancer, in the manner in which the task was requested. This doesn't prevent the undead from performing highly skilled tasks, but tends to limit it to tasks that could be performed by the necromancer, since their intention forms the action, and if they have no idea how to perform the action, the undead has no idea either.
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I think a nice way to arrive at an answer is to replace "zombies" with "robots", to at least get a sense of the labor difference.
Since you've already established that they're *not* incapable of high-skill tasks and that performing them depends on the necromancer's skill, I'd parallelize it to robots being as skilled as their programming, thus as skilled as those who program them are at the task at hand and describing it (don't need 1 person programming - you can have a team, including experts).
If control is powered by magic, that means magic is a resource that, in economic terms, can be parallelized to electricity (or other forms of power). The big difference is building materials - with robots, you need to make them, with zombies you just need to have bodies around to raise.
* If magic cannot be stored or replenished without nourishment, you're essentially looking at ranks of necromancers doing menial labor, which only solves the danger issues but doesn't really change the amount of labor needed much.
* If magic *can* be stored, then it can be bought and exchanged. Depending on how easy it is to store, it can become a form of currency (although unlikely, since it wouldn't have the same value across those that can produce it themselves and others).
* If magic can be *generated* through mechanical means, you have a whole separate market there, but probably not a big one (I would assume no bigger than catering for offices and workplaces).
So what we're looking at is an economy where we have super-cheap robots that aren't autonomous and always require an operator but can perform any human task. I don't really think that would make *as much* of a difference as might be expected. Did automated machinery have us work less? A bit maybe, but as menial tasks become easier, new jobs emerge. I'd expect however that upon standardization of this form of labor, a short economic boom of a decade (or two, at most) would be observed *barring other advances due to said boom*.
The real question is, how quick do zombies degrade and how often do you need to replenish them? Also, what is the economic effect of the demand on bodies?
I can think of a few of these:
* People can sell dead relatives
+ The undertaking business might suffer a bit, but it's there for psychological reasons so maybe not too much
+ If lots of people die, the rest can get out of poverty faster? So a plague is a *good thing*? :P
* Wars have a different kind of cost
+ The more dead you can collect and the better their condition, the larger your available work force for the rest of the war and the faster you can rebuild
+ Training and equipment might change to accommodate this; you want to kill the enemy, but not mess them up too much. You don't want your guys getting messed up either, *unless they're caught*. A lot of research, work and money can be put into developing equipment for these purposes, since the effects of using the dead can be economically quite high, especially if a society is dependent on undead labor.
+ Wars are already performed for economic reasons, so nothing changes there. However, handing over your *own* dead might be a means of negotiating a treaty, possibly having the victor gain *all* the advantages they gain anyway, *plus* a huge repository of dead people to work for them.
* The amount of laborers increases faster than the population
+ People die and procreate at greater numbers with prosperity and less menial labor, but if zombies degrade slower than this rate, eventually you might have more than you can use. Labor export can be a thing and vast tourist attractions could be built using the excess labor.
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Lets look at the labor "market" in this case, assuming we can buy/hire skeleton help at a base cost only; you purchase a skeleton laborer in the same way you would buy a tool like a hammer.
Lets also assume that we have transferable ownership (i.e. simply telling a skeleton who to obey, redirects their "who owns me" status) and that they can perform simple manual labor based on verbal or visual examples;
i.e.
"Work the bellows."
"Plow this field with the skeleton horse and then plant corn."
"Chop this tree into fire wood and stack it by the barn."
**Ramifications:**
Skilled labor remains valuable, casters, blacksmiths, and artists would still retain a viable economic place in society. Simpler jobs like plowing fields or harvesting crops would be less abundant/gone; you may still need a farmer to know when/what to plant but his work force would largely be undead.
This may result in (partial social quip here bear with me) unskilled labor only being valuable in death. If a poor family sends their strong son off to a necromancer to make a strong skeleton and they get a cut for providing the "materials." This creates a strange economic niche market; not body snatching but literally preparing to leave a "good corpse."
**Question was Edited:**
I'll leave my original thoughts and expand here.
If the undead only can follow the will of the necromancer who created them then the economic model more closely resembles a rental or lawn care sevice you pay a company (the necromancer) to dispense workers (undead) to perform labor with a monthly fee.
I like this:
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> This doesn't prevent the undead from performing highly skilled tasks, but tends to limit it to tasks that could be performed by the necromancer, since their intention forms the action, and if they have no idea how to perform the action, the undead has no idea either.
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It allows for some rather unique issues to arise, overconfident necromancer says he can do a task, his intention results in poor/comical issues as the undead try to interpret his will into a physical result. i.e. build a sailing ship...
If this magicly servitude is locked then other questions arise what do the undead do when their necromancer dies? Do they wander aimlessly? Does another company start up that offers to clean up "unbound" undead?
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I like the answers already posted, but I want to cover a different aspect of this scenario: The necromancers themselves.
I'm assuming that whatever civilization you're talking about (okay, I guess I'll go with Renaissance Europe) has a lot of dead people. The problem is, a lot of dead people doesn't equate with a lot of necromancers. Especially when necromancy is *licensed*.
Let's say that necromancy springs up overnight - maybe Igor had a few too many drinks and began poking around Dr. Frankenstein's lab, and one thing led to another, and all of a sudden you have a couple necromancers walking around making zombies. The first thing that springs into your head: Instant labor force. Great, right? Millions of dead people, employers delighted to get around all the labor laws possible, and licenses available so the whole thing is legal. Awesome.
There is one thing you're in shortage of, though, and that is *the necromancers themselves*. Unless there's a secret society already in place in this civilization that's been practicing this black art for centuries, there probably aren't that many necromancers. And that's a problem.
How many of the un-dead can a necromancer *reasonably* manage at one time? Maybe ten? Great; assuming you have ten or so necromancers, you have 100 zombies - enough un-dead workers to fill an automobile factory or two. The point is, at the start of this movement, you'll only have a small number of workers.
Even if you have a lot of necromancers to start with, it will take a while to get the ball rolling (or even to give it a push). After all, the necromancers have to have licenses, right? So the governing body will have to work quickly to not only legalize necromancy, but give out licenses, too.
My point is that it will take a while for this new supply of labor to grow. It won't be a driving force in the economy for a while. You'll also need to train more necromancers - when you do, you might see the rise of a more powerful economic class, who eventually take a lot of power. But it'll take some time.
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Assuming that this is socially acceptable, the undead would do what no one else wanted to do. Much likes slaves in human history, they would take on the jobs that citizens feel are below them or not of interest.
**Would the economy simply scale up to cover the extra workforce?**
* Free manual labor tends to do wonders for the economy, at least for those in control of the manual labor. Depending on the nature of the Necromancers, or those who control the necromancers in your example, it could be a boon for society as a whole or just for a few of the wealthy. Free labor is also usually great for gathering raw materials and infrastructure, road building, bridges, public works etc.
**Would this, essentially free, form of labour lead to a utopia of worklessness and free goods?**
* Doubtful. Humans are in large part industrious for the sake of creating things. This is not a universal truth but a realistic claim. Free goods...probably not. Those that have something usually want something else in return for their goods. Like I mentioned in the other answer the disposition and benevolence of those that control the free labor play a huge part. Additionally if people don't have jobs, they don't have money and they can lash out at the perceived cause of that situation... zombies.
One last point. If you are trying to create a utopian world supported by this system, Necromancers would have to be VERY common to support the needs of the entire population.
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[Question]
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In speculative fiction shows like *Charmed* and *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*, characters witness firsthand the existence of heaven, perform successful seances and resurrect the dead. Despite this, however, they still act as though death is a horrible tragedy even though characters who have died outright state they are happier being dead than alive. In real life, we only treat death as a tragedy and a mystery because there is no empirical evidence of an afterlife and our minds are incapable of comprehending the sensation of nonexistence.
Why do characters act as though death is some tragic mystery even after experiencing all these events that make it very clear that death is a wonderful thing that should be celebrated?
EDIT: This has massive implications for our societies. If the afterlife was verified to exist and was qualitatively better than the world of the living, then people would celebrate at funerals rather than mourn. Seances would become as a commonplace as telephone calls and every Halloween families would invite their dead ancestors over for dinner. Religions the world over would redefine themselves to accept this new reality just like most of them accepted modern science aside from a lunatic fringe.
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Many things to discuss here.
# 1. Human Nature
First, the reasons characters act the way they do is because it's literally human nature. We have evolved to be terrified of death, it's what kept our ancestors alive long enough to make a new generation. Whether or not one considers it logical to be afraid of death we will fear it, because that's how our instincts and our culture and everything around us tell us to feel. Fears are not always logical and some are very ingrained in our psyche.
# 2. What we leave behind
Fear of death can also be fear of what is left behind. To give an analogy people may be afraid of a move to another state even though they expect to live a decent life after the move. They're afraid because they have to leave their friends and family and everything they have known behind. They are moving on to something different and regret what they have to give up. The same can apply to death. You won't see you family again, you can never play with your son or go out for a night on the town with your best friends. Everything you knew and loved before you died will never be an option again.
# 3. Unfinished business
Closely related to the above, there is business that you may have wished to complete that you can't. Perhaps you defined yourself by your legacy you intended to leave behind and that legacy isn't complete. That startup business you were so proud of will collapse without you at the helm, or you were just about to star in a play you dreamt of being the lead in all your life and now that will never happen. Or a more likely, and worse, option, perhaps your young children will have no parent left to care for them once you die, they will grow up in an orphanage and never remember your face or how much you cared for them. Leaving loved ones that depend on you without your support is something anyone can rightfully be afraid of.
# 4. You still don't know what awaits you.
Most of these worlds depict *some* sort of life after death, but many aren't specific on just what it entails. Have you ever read Greek mythology? They had a life after death, but even the most heroic (which is as close as Greeks got to 'good') were looking at a bleak and miserable 'life' after they died, to the point that when Odysseus visits tartarus in 'The Odyssey' friends of his who had died tell him flat out that death is horrible and he should do everything in his power to live as long as possible and enjoy life to avoid this fate.
Unless your certain you know what the afterlife entails there is still plenty to fear. It's still a great unknown, there is no way to be certain if the world beyond is something to be enjoyed or hated. There is reason to be afraid of that unknown.
# 5. Are you certain you're headed up?
Lets say the christian version of Heaven has been confirmed to exist, doesn't that also imply a Hell? Who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell?
Even within Christianity we can't seem to decide that. Some say that anyone that believes in god goes to heaven, but do you *really* believe, have you never had doubts? Even the most pious of men surely have, but how severe can your doubts be before they exclude you from Heaven? What of the religions that have strict rules you must follow to earn heaven, have you followed all of them? Surely every man in the world has broken one or two of those rules, that's human nature. How many are you allowed to bend before you no longer qualify for Heaven? How many good deeds were you required to do, and did you do enough?
In short there is no promise that you will be the one in Heaven. Obviously anyone facing Hell would have every reason to be terrified of death, but since it's hard to tell what standards you must live up to, or if you met them, everyone, no matter how pious or altruistic, should be aware of the possibility of Hell.
Then there are all the atheists, agnostics, and other religions out there. Only one religion can be right surly, that means every other religion is doomed to hell by default! Even in a world with a confirmed afterlife some may be atheists, some may disagree with the values from the bible (or other religious text) or feel God doesn't deserve their support if he refuses to intervene to help people, all those would presumably be headed to Hell.
# 6. It's a self selecting demographic
If you think about it those that aren't afraid of death, and are confident that they will be headed to heaven, have *no* reason to stick around this world. Death is not hard to achieve, if you're certain what lies beyond will be better then your find a way to make that happen. The only ones alive now would be the ones that have sufficient fears about death to have survived.
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Parting is sad, even if someone has gone to a "better place" you are not going to see them for years, or decades even. If your best friend/family member/whatever were to go on a one-way no-further-communication trip to mars you'd most likely be sad too. Especially if they didn't choose to leave but instead were selected by a random lottery and thrown in a shuttle.
I agree that the knowledge would be a source of great comfort to people, which is no doubt one of the main reason afterlife mythology is so popular, and so the mourning would be less - but it would still exist. All the possibilities and dreams for what that person could have achieved in life have just died along with the person themselves.
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In TV shows where characters die, (and we know are going to end up in heaven or resurrected) the other characters **have** to feel sad, to share emotion with the viewers.
It's more enjoyable to watch a show with emotion (whichever it is) rather than no emotion ("meh, he's dead, good for him").
Now for real people, that believe in heaven, it may be just a selfish reaction. They won't see the deceased one until they die, which can take many years, so they're just sad about the time they'll stay separated (or deep down, they don't really believe in heaven).
(Or if they do, they know they won't go there because they are not pious enough)
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Assuming that nobody gets resurrected, but just goes on to an eternal afterlife:
## Death is painful and permanent
For most animals, life can be reduced to a series of irreversible developmental events that are usually painful.
1. Birth: Painful and disorienting
2. Growth stages/sexual maturation: Accompanied by musculoskeletal aches and psychological disorientation
3. Aging toward death: Increasing aches, pains, and degradation of faculties, which can lead to a cascade of emotional pains.
Death is no different. Dying "of old age" is at best, a continuation of (3). On the other hand, dying due to misadventure is likely to be exceedingly painful, or at best, irrevocable and sudden.
An equally critical point is that once you pass through any of those stages, there's no going back. Death is the most dramatic of these, because you can't go back to the world of the living. Even if you're old, there are still some things you can do from previous life stages.
Facing up to any of these stages is scary.
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Because they believe in the wrong religion.
Look at religions who celebrate death as you described - a happy moment because person is set free from his mortal body, sickness and human problems.
In the core of such act is a strong belief that the deceased was good and surely there is award waiting for him for his good deeds.
BUT - if your religion is mostly based on guilt, being not good enough, breaking the rules of god and being bad person in every thing you do and think you can't wait for death as you are expecting that the only thing waiting for you is punishment, hell, eternal damnation and having a pitchfork up your buns.
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These shows are by humans for humans, not actual vampires. Those humans live in a culture with certain expectations (about how people react to someone being "killed"), and the shows are not out to question them much if at all. Those shows are to entertain, not make us think. They're for mass consumption. Little if any thought is really being given to the subject you raised.
I agree with the implied criticism of these portrayals. The Vampires Diaries is especially silly, as vampires can be seemingly killed over and over again, because each time is not a real killing, and yet the other characters act horrified as if it is, despite knowing they'll get up in 20 minutes, no harm done. It's stupid.
If the characters can't really be killed, then we have less to fear for them. If the actors act like it's still a big deal, this imbues a scene with drama that would otherwise be gone (invulnerable characters provide less drama). The actors react horrified, etc. for the viewer's benefit, so we can feel horrified. If the actors are indifferent, we probably are, too.
No one wants an indifferent audience. Indifference actors = indifferent audience, no audience, no revenue, no show.
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I've haven't seen charm but I have seen buffy so I'm using that as a model for the world you described.
1. partings are always sad. When family members who you have spent your whole life with move away people often expires sadness. In death even if that person will continue to live on in heaven the people they left be hide will never see are speak to them again so they can still miss they and that would understandably make them sad
2. Ultimately fate could still be unknown. In buffy it is unclear what things lead you to heaven or hell. Also when magic is involved then it becomes even more unclear. When buffy dies the first time Willow fears that her soul went to hell because magic was involved in her death.
3. Unclear whether how much of a person old self is retained and carried on in to the afterlife. They might for example lose there memories of there love ones. Or all of there experience on this earth entirely. Much is unknown about the afterlife and this is made more confusing with there been multiple heaves in buffy. What if all your family and friends go to one heaven and you go to another?
4. Skepticism. there are people today that happened brought back to life to science who claimed to have experience the afterlife. However many scientists are skeptical believing that these experiences are hallucinations caused by lack of oxygen to the brain in the last few moments before death. Even if Resurrection was commonplace and happen often through Magic, Skeptics could still argue that their experiences are nothing more than hallucinations. Caused either by the brain or buy demons purposely trying to fool or deceive people. Furthermore they could say the same thing about seances. Saying that the psychics are communicating with the Dead but with demons impersonating the Dead. It sounds a little far-fetched but even today we have people who are skeptical of the moon landings and other things so it's not too far-fetched that in this world people might still be a little skeptical of the afterlife even if people regularly returned from there.
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As a Christian, I know by faith that heaven exists and that it awaits me if I remain in my faith in Jesus: faith that he is the Son of God, that he died on the cross as the sacrifice for our sins, that he rose again from the dead, and that salvation is found through faith in him and repentance of sins (Christian repentance is not doing good works or saying sorry for every sin, it's a change of heart so that I no longer want to live for myself but rather for God, and it's demonstrated by my life and my works--the works themselves aren't repentance). Fortunately Christianity teaches salvation by grace through faith (the Bible says: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God"), not by good works or observing the law perfectly. If it did, I would 100% agree with #5 in the answer by @dsollen, but fortunately Jesus died to fulfill the righteous requirements of the law in us, so whether we go to Heaven or Hell doesn't depend on observing the law or being good enough, but on faith in Jesus and repentance of sins (faith and repentance go hand-in-hand because Jesus calls us to believe on him and to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him; ironically, the only way we can become better is through faith in Jesus and repentance of our sins as we let God change us, but it isn’t the good works that save us).
So why grief for a Christian? For one thing we're still human. The Bible itself says to mourn with those who mourn. Even Jesus did so, in the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept". He wept because he saw people he loved weeping over the death of a relative (Lazarus), even though he knew the outcome, that he would raise that dead relative from the dead just moments later--it's the whole reason he went to visit on that occasion. Knowing what was to come didn't negate his compassion or his emotions. Lazarus' sister Martha had faith that she'd see Lazarus again in the Resurrection, and she told Jesus, in between weeping, that even now God would give him whatever he asked--she had faith that Jesus could raise Lazarus from the dead. So her faith did not negate her grief, nor did her grief negate her faith.
In addition, while I know that I have eternal life, I have no concept of eternity yet. For me, 100 years seems like an eternity--20 or 30 years even seems very long. So the prospect of living without a loved one for decades is very sad. Add to that that some loved ones don't believe in Jesus and there is extra grief. Or there may be concern or wonder about a loved-one's end state.
It is true that there is some fear of the unknown--that's why it comes down to faith, because it is unseen (as the Bible says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."), but this fear of the unknown that requires Christians to rest on faith doesn't (or shouldn't; if it does, then we're doubting) increase grief, though it can definitely be hard to remember in a time of grief that you will see a person again, and as I mentioned before, it's especially hard when you assume that "again" means in (hopefully :)) 10, 20, 30, 40, or more years.
So Christians who have absolute assurance of heaven and eternal life because of their faith in Jesus and repentance of sins can still grieve the death of loved ones without being untrue to their faith. Faith in heaven and eternal life definitely reduces that sting when the loved one is a believer, but the emotions are still there because we're still human beings.
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[Question]
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In my world I find it simplest to have iron-based blood. The problem is that iron-based blood is red, and I want it to be black. Two things come to mind; one is making the blood denser, resulting in thicker, darker blood and fast bleeders. The other is making blood richer in iron, which leads to black blood, but the threat of heavy metal poisoning. I am not a expert so I don't know if those would even work. What can I do to make iron-based blood black, and what would the effects be on creatures' bodies?
[Answer]
**Blood is More Than Red Blood Cells**
If you look at the things required for a [complete blood count](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_blood_count#Included_tests), you're going to notice that there are things which are not red blood cells but are still "blood".
Simply introduce impurities into blood that change its color. As DoubleDouble has mentioned, a variety of [skink has green blood](http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/30/why-do-mysterious-lizards-have-green-blood/) because of toxins inside it.
**Some Alternatives**
Alternatively, this creature can simply have poorly functioning liver and kidneys, and the blackness comes from improperly broken-down red blood cells. Often in animals, black blood is simply old blood, or blood that has degraded and not been able to be filtered out. (See [here](http://www.phaa.com/brown-menstrual-period-blood-and-black-vaginal-bleeding.htm), a site which focuses on women's health issues.)
Perhaps your creatures have evolved to have black blood, as it confers some advantage to them. Some advantages could be:
* wounds do not appear as brightly, so an injured individual can better hide and recover. This would require a species to be wounded enough that this actually becomes a factor in its evolution.
* Black blood a sign of health and a factor in sexual selection, because a healthy black-blood critter has the extra energy to make the blood black. Your creatures would need some way of displaying the blackness of their blood without sacrificing too much of it. Perhaps some area of the body that has thin or clear skin?
* The black comes from a molecule which eliminates free radicals, or some other function that "would be nice to have" which current blood does not. Perhaps it is an anti-cancer measure, because your black-blooded critters get exposed to a lot of sun/radiation. Sadly, I think it impractical to list all the molecules which can turn black when oxidized, but it can happen.
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If you just want black blood because it would be cool ( and it would) have the blood become denser due to a much higher need for coagulation to stop bleeding.
You could also have a "black" blood cells that replaced the white blood cells in terms of what the white cells ( more info here: <https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=160&ContentID=35>) do. It could be do to a disease factor as We (and I'm using the royal we) have cured all the diseases out there so evolution tried a survival of the fittest out and gave us a new disease (think Black Death) and our blood evolved to have stronger "white" blood cells that turned darker, causing the red iron blood to turn black. our scientists are not sure why yet but are working very hard find out.
Due to that fact, doctors can now tell immune-compromised children by how dark the blood is.
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The color of your blood is related to the amount of oxygen attached to red blood cells.The lower the level of oxygen in the blood, the darker it gets. This offers a few options.
* Venous blood (what you normally see after a cut) is darker, and therefore carrying less oxygen, while arterial blood is brighter, carrying more oxygen. An evolutionary mechanism of some sort, may have developed allowing for the surrounding tissue (skin, muscle, etc.) to require less oxygen.
* Hemoglobin. Red blood cells that are darker in color, can be a result of hyperchromia, due to increased hemoglobin.
* Both. A higher presence of hemoglobin, along with less oxygen being carried to the tissue, would present a darker coloration ... and deeper wounds would probably make for an interesting visual.
Blood doesn't have to be red. As others have stated, there are other colors that can occur in a creatures blood.
* Spiders, crustaceans, octopi, squid and some mollusks have blue blood. This is due to hemocyanin in the blood, rather than hemoglobin. It is colorless when deoxygenated, and blue when oxygenated. Unlike hemoglobin, hemocyanin floats freely through the blood, while hemoglobin attaches to red blood cells.
* Some segmented worms, some leeches, some marine worms (and apparently a certain skink, but for different reasons) have green blood. Chlorocruorin is chemically similar to hemoglobin, and some species even have both chlorocurorin and hemoglobin. It appears light green when deoxygenated, and green when oxygenated. When it is more concentrated, it can appear as light red.
* Marine worms, peanut worms, penis worms and brachiopods have violet blood. Haemorythrin is responsible for the coloration, and is only about 1/4 as efficient as hemoglobin when it comes to transporting oxygen. Colorless when deoxygenated, and a violet-pink when oxygenated.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/i5VoW.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AF6qU.jpg)
[Slideshare: Blood Physiology](http://www.slideshare.net/fathima1995/blood-physiology-ppt)
Copper ... This is something of a shot in the dark, but ...
Copper is involved in the process of creating new red blood cells, manufacturing collagen, healing wounds, and maintaining sheathes around nerves. Something that produces enough copper, either through the natural processes of the body, or through ingestion of copper rich foods and has developed a tolerance to much higher levels of copper in the body, it could be argued that would result in greater levels of red blood cells, allowing of lower quantities of oxygen to be carried by more cells, to where they need. I would imagine hyperchromia taking place as a result of increased hemoglobin attaching to a greater number of red blood cells.
Another option would be the presence of a second protein molecule to work alongside hemoglobin, but unfortunately the readily available example of Hemoglobin + Chlorocruorin would produce something closer to yellow, rather than black. Like when smashing some cockroaches.
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Their blood needs to be iron based, but it doesn't need to be exactly the same as real human blood. You could include some kind of cell in the blood, a cell that we don't have, that causes it to turn black on contact with air or with colder temperatures. If you want it to be black all the time, (and I don't pretend to be an expert on this) you could try swapping out the hemoglobins (the protein that makes red blood cells iron based and red) for a different protein with a black pigment, but still an iron base.
Since all of my experience with in depth stuff like this and even with the word "hemoglobin" comes from Wikipedia this morning, don't take my word for this. It would probably not work.
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In the Pern books (McCaffery, Anne), dragons and other beings have black blood due to Boron. Not sure of the science behind it. Fans of her books most likely will attribute using Boron as the reason as copying. If there are scientific reasons, then use it.
On the other hand, I have hemochromotosis which results in high levels of iron. I haven't seen any change in colour when my iron levels are too high. The treatment is withdrawing blood so extra is made to dilute my iron rich life blood. From this experience, I advise NOT explaining black blood being due to excessive iron.
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Melanism is a genectic condition in animals that causes it to make melanin, the pigment in black skin and hair, in every cell within its body, including it's blood. If the expression is strong enough, even the blood can appear black.
One real life example is a breed of chicken from Indonesia: the feathers, skin, meat, bone and even eggs were black, and the chicken's blood is a very dark red due to the melanine content.
If your critter is sexually selected to look black, melanism can arise from genetics and spread out throughout the population, with the unplanned consequence of staining the critter's blood completely black, due to the strength of melanin gene expression.
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**Add a gas to the atmosphere**
If it is just a REASON for it to be black so you can change the colour and keep your "Earth based life" data can you just add a gas to the atmosphere of your new world that reacts to the iron in the blood, as the lungs would include it in the oxygenation process. If the only effect of the gas was to change the blood from red to black it would not effect your "Earth based life" programming data.
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# Pigmented blood Platelets.
Platelets in your blood are not exactly functional cells, but rather a selection of cell fragments that serve as clogs/scaffolding to enable fibrin formation,thus forming clots.
*Normally* platelets are quite transparent, having a vaguely straw-colored appearance. But as they are not functional elements of the blood, there is virtually no reason they could not be strongly pigmented.
This would make blood somewhat darker, and clotted blood MUCH darker.
As you are altering a blood component that is always present, very structurally simple and very non-active under normal circumstances, you can get away with fiddling with it much more easily than playing with "live", active cells that have very complex interactions.
If you need to have a believable doubletalk for it, say that the creature has a lot of melanin in the skin.scales/whatever, and the platelets are a convenient transport medium for the material in the bloodstream, both for deposition and disposal. The only disadvantage would be the slightly increased energy requirements for the creature to manufacture so much Melanin., and if there is an established survival reason why it needs a lot of pigment, then that serves as a more than ample reason or excuse.
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[Question]
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**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.
I'm seeking a hard science setting for a piece of xenofiction with a decidedly non-sciencey feel. That said, there is no magic or magic technology.
The idea is as follows:
1. A red dwarf star has a rocky, icy planet well outside the habitable zone.
2. After ~6 trillion years [the red dwarf begins a transition into its blue dwarf](http://beyondearthlyskies.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/blue-dwarfs-stars-yet-to-be.html) stage for a further 400 billion years
3. The massively increased stellar luminosity of the blue dwarf stage melts the icy planet turning it into a habitable planet, on which a civilisation develops. Since the planet is not too close to the star, it is not tidally locked, but is now in the habitable zone of a star with similar luminosity to the sun (according to article linked above).
4. A timeline of 400 billion years is allowed for the creation of a habitable planet and for evolution.
This civilisation would be very alone in the universe at the end of the stellar phase of the universes evolution, with perhaps only a few other blue dwarf stars visible in the night sky, if any. All the other stars have turned into black dwarfs.
Obviously the timescales are immense so my question is this:
**Is the notion of a planetary thawing of a truly ancient rocky ice planet some 6 trillion years after its formation is within the realms of plausibility.**
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Yes, it is plausible as the timescales of which a red dwarf is a blue dwarf are quite big, to the point where if your icy planet is distant enough it will thaw and potentially develop life. What matters is the placement of your planet and its size, as if your icy planet is too small it won't retain a atmosphere and if it's too far the temperature increase will only make the planet only go from Triton cold to Europa cold. There are exoplanets with substantial amounts of water whose origin comes from a icy planet that migrated inwards. They are worlds with world spanning oceans and very thick atmospheres of vapor. Your world, being a world that thawed will get its atmosphere from when its icy surface slowly melts away. Since water vapor is lighter than nitrogen, your world is likely going to be bigger than earth to retain its atmosphere.
The biggest concern for your world I see comes from geology, as with such a ancient planet the geological processes within the world likely have died down after trillions of years. This may actually inhibit life because of the role geological activity on earth played in the origin of life, and may play on other worlds like Europa if there is hydrothermal vents on Europa. You likely could circumvent this issue by having life actually form extremely early on in the red dwarf's life when your world is geologically active, but be frozen or evolutionarily static for trillions of years due to having no incentive to evolve. (This does happen on earth in certain instances, such as with the Coelacanth who were thought extinct yet still are around, in a much simpler, far less biodiverse ecosystem, life not advancing beyond simple organisms like bacteriums for trillions of years may actually be possible). Your life is likely to be radiation resistant, because being around a red dwarf exposure to higher radiation levels is a given. This is good news for your life as a ancient world trillions of years in age is going to be geologically dead no matter what the size of your planet. One possible way to circumvent this is by having your world part of a binary planet system (and therefore gets geological activity from tidal stress, a process that is seen around pluto).
A civilization may well develop, they have the time and evolution being the fickle and semi-chaotic thing it is on a world with rocky landmasses mixed with water has the potential for intelligent life to develop. However, if they are a space faring society they'll be going a very different tech path than on earth to get there because they'd lack access to fire due to a water vapor atmosphere and without geological activity they'd also lack access to any form of volcanic metallurgy. You should consider inventing creatures that can circumvent this issue somehow, perhaps through intense body heat. They may take far longer to develop a space faring civilization than per se, a world like earth might, but since they have hundreds of billions of years they have more than enough time to figure things out.
Further Reading:
* [http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/lec15.html](http://abyss.uoregon.edu/%7Ejs/ast121/lectures/lec15.html)
* <http://www.solstation.com/planets/water-worlds.htm>
* <http://space.com/6560-life-thrive-red-dwarf-star.html>
* <http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/673/2/1160/pdf/0004-637X_673_2_1160.pdf>
* [http://es.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/Triton.pdf](http://es.ucsc.edu/%7Efnimmo/website/Triton.pdf)
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**Yes, it can happen.**
For this to be possible, you first have to put the planet far enough away that it can become totally icy. Then, after the temperature rises as the red dwarf transitions into a blue dwarf, the habitable zone must encompass the planet's orbit, melting the ice and making it a better place for life. We can easily calculate whether or not the final habitable zone can ever extend far enough for this to be possible.
Your initial goal is to place the planet "well outside the [initial] habitable zone". That's fine. We can find the initial inner and outer boundaries of the habitable zone using the formulae found [here](http://www.planetarybiology.com/calculating_habitable_zone.html). The outer radius of the initial habitable zone is
$$r\_o=\sqrt{\frac{L\_\*}{0.53}}\text{ AU}$$
Let's take the example of the 0.1-M$\_\odot$ red dwarf used in the blog post. Its initial (i.e. pre-blue dwarf) luminosity is ~1/2400 L$\_\odot$, or ~1.595$\times$1023 watts. Plugging this in, we get
$$r\_o\approx2.80\times10^{-2}\text{ AU}$$
Now, this is for a very dim red dwarf (I would think about an M5V class or an M6V class dwarf), so it's not surprising that this is so small.1
You say you want to have an ice planet. We can estimate the inner radius at which it can form by calculating the distance of the initial [frost line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29). If we use the model attributed to [Hayashi (1981)](http://ptps.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/35.full.pdf) by [Ida & Lin (2005)](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/429953/pdf), then
$$r\_f=2.7\left(\frac{L\_\*}{L\_{\odot}}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\text{ AU}\approx5.50\times10^{-2}\text{ AU}$$
Now, it is clear that $L\_\*$ will change with time even before the transition to the blue dwarf stage. [Kennedy & Kenyon (2008)](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/524130/pdf) model these changes on various stars and compare them to earlier results, including those of Ida & Lin.2 The differences are drastic, in some cases. See their Figure 1:
For lack of more information, though, I'm going to have to stick to the original estimate.
Your article states that the initial surface temperature of the star is ~2230 K, prior to entering the blue dwarf phase. It then rises to ~5810 K, a change of a factor of about 2.5 The luminosity of a blackbody is proportional to its temperature to the fourth power (see the [Stefan-Boltzmann law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law)), so the inner and outer radii of the habitable zone are proportional to the temperature squared. This means that the final outer edge will be ~6 times as far out as it originally was - way beyond the initial frost line, about three times as far out.
This seems pretty good, but what about the *inner* edge of the final habitable zone. Where will that be? According to the same site that provided the formula for the outer edge, the inner edge will be
$$r\_i=\sqrt{\frac{L\_\*}{1.1}}\text{ AU}\approx0.70r\_0$$
This is about twice as far out as the frost line originally was.
So, yes, from at least these estimates, the scenario is quite plausible.
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1 [Some results](http://scitechdaily.com/habitable-zones-near-red-dwarf-stars-smaller-previously-thought/) state that the habitable zone should be even smaller, although others disagree and say that it should be bigger.
2 Even more drastic changes are shown in [Martin & Livio (2012)](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.4284v1.pdf).
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You've got a problem here:
The radioactive materials that keep the planet's core hot will be virtually gone by the time your planet warms. With no molten core you will have no plate tectonics and thus there will be no vulcanism or uplift. The result is your planet erodes.
By the time you're trying to make it habitable you'll have a world of constant depth oceans.
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As noted by others, such an old planet is possible, but has its problems.
The "dead" geology of the planet is the primary problem, and needs some kind of external energy injection to either maintain geologic activity for such a lengthy time or to jump start the processes once again (planetary viagra?).
* Jump starting the process would likely require a Theia-type impact. This would require a lengthy period of time for the crust and atmosphere to settle into a more life-friendly environment, but this impact could happen just prior to the conversion to blue dwarf, surreptitiously aligning the renewed geologic cycle with the increase of stellar luminosity . To maintain an active core, a significant Moon is likely required, as little radioactivity will be available to keep it going. A potential problem to your scenario is that the planet will not be "warming" into a habitable planet, but cooling.
* Maintaining geologic activity for such a lengthy period of time would require your planet to have a significant orbital partner to keep the core active through tidal forces. This could be a significant moon, a double-planet, or perhaps your "planet" is a significantly sized moon of gas giant. This option keeps the crust of your planet renewed, and may even result in local hot spots where simple life could develop and survive, allowing it to rapidly bloom when the stellar luminosity warms the entire surface.
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I think the deal breaker is that after trillions of years your planet would be colder than liquid nitrogen all the way through to the core. The heat from the star would have to be very hot to warm up the surface of the planet to a comfortable level, but step out of the shade and you are likely to get a nasty burn. At night the ground would freeze and surface temperatures would plummet. Even with a thick atmosphere to help buffer the heat from the star, as soon as night falls the air would start to condense and freeze out of the sky. A few billion years increased heat from the star would not be enough to warm up the interior of the planet enough to buffer the thermal gradients on the surface. Basically, I think the the habitable zone will be too narrow in a scenario like this.
... Maybe if the planet rotated very fast it might be enough to smooth out the temperature changes.
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Given the difficulties of keeping the core of any world warm on the timescale of stellar evolution with radioisotopes are pretty well insurmountable so instead of a planet orbiting a red dwarf I would suggest a world near the [barycentre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter) of a system like [Luyten 726-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luyten_726-8) a binary red dwarf. This would have a number of advantages, such a world is illuminated by two blue dwarfs thus having a better heat budget but more importantly the gravitational flexion it will experience under the influence of two such stars will keep the world warm at it's core and allow tectonics etc... to proceed under the ice, keeping life ticking over ready for the big thaw.
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[
I know the idea seems a bit far fetched but it's something I believe is common is science fiction and fantasy stories. I remember the talking trees of Zelda: Ocarina of time and of course, Tolkien's ents.
Is it possible for plants to evolve and gain the ability to think, take decisions, and communicate with their surroundings ?
If yes, how ? what conditions could make it more likely ?
*If plants are already intelligent: I'm sorry and I hope I haven't offended anyone.*
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**They are intelligent today, by your definition**
>
> "The ability to think and take decisions."
>
>
>
For this, lets turn to [wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought).. a great source, I know:
>
> Thinking allows humans to make sense of, interpret, represent or model
> the world they experience, and to make predictions about that world.
> It is therefore helpful to an organism with needs, objectives, and
> desires as it makes plans or otherwise attempts to accomplish those
> goals.
>
>
>
Ignoring the obviously unfair "human" in that definition, this says thinking is defined to be processing input, making plans, and making decisions/actions. Consider my Orange tree, which went through 2 years of really unfortunate weather. For two years, spring arrived, it decided to begin growing new leaves, and then a snap freeze whipped through and hurt all of the plants. This year, the tree decided to wait for a much more "true" spring, at the expense of shorting the growing season.
>
> "Communicate with their surroundings"
>
>
>
Plants [communicate](http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/) with each other, warning each other of insect attacks. Some shout it over the air, relying on airborne pheromones. Others rely on a dense network of roots inter-tangling each other.
**Intelligence is better thought of as a range, not a discrete flag.** Creatures are not intelligent or unintelligent. There is a great variety of levels of intelligence, of which science is just beginning to scratch the surface. Any definition you can come up with for intelligence which tries to say "Is \_\_\_\_\_ intelligent" is certain to have great trouble with the answer.
## Criteria for Intelligence
As posted in several of the great comments below, it seems trivial to define "full-blown" intelligence as the ability to build models and predict the future. However, this definition is far harder (and more exciting) than it seems:
* Many definitions of "intelligence" assume a simple criteria: "All humans are intelligent, and intelligent things can recognize each other."
This definition gets tricky when dealing with the mentally disabled. It is very difficult to define an objective measure of intelligence which does not exclude the mentally disabled. Consider the brain of Jake Barnett. From a [news article](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/11/jacob-barnett-autistic-14-year-old-nobel-prize_n_3254920.html):
>
> When Jacob Barnett was 2 years old, he was diagnosed with moderate to
> severe autism. Doctors told his parents that the boy would likely
> never talk or read and would probably be forever unable to
> independently manage basic daily activities like tying his shoe laces.
>
>
> But they were sorely, extraordinarily mistaken.
>
>
> Today, Barnett -- now 14 -- is a Master's student, on his way to
> earning a PhD in quantum physics. According to the BBC, the teen, who
> boasts an IQ of 170, has already been tipped to one day win the Nobel
> Prize.
>
>
>
Now how could doctors have known that Jake was intelligent? We know from ancient history that the shape of the brain doesn't give any suggestions that it is the root of intelligence (The Egyptians discarded it when mummifying the body as "useless"). Nobody knew Jake ever stood a chance of being self sufficient. Prove us wrong: he enrolled in Perdue at age 10!
**Did Jake become intelligent through life experiences, or is he intelligent because of his physical makeup**
Let's lower the bar a little:
* All animals posses some level of intelligence. Humans have the most, but we have to see intelligence in all animals.
This puts the bar low enough to ensure we don't accidentally insult those like Jake. But now plants start leaking in to the "intellegence" pool. In particular, the plant immune system is just as spectacular as an animal immune system. It **must** learn faster than genetic memory would support, because plants live much longer than parasites, so they evolve slower. If the immune system did not show signs of learning and modeling, plants could never keep up with the ever-evolving bacteria and insects that prey on the plants.
## Sentience Quotient
One of the attempts to quantify sentience is the [Sentience Quotient](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient) (SQ). SQ does not attempt to quantify sentience directly. Rather, it tries to quantify the capability to be sentient by observing that sentience appears to require processing power. It is defined as:
$$SQ = \log\_{10} \left( \frac{I}{M} \right)$$
$I$ is the being's ability to process data, measured in bits-per-second of processing capability. This is similar to how we measure the processing capability of computers. $M$ is the mass of the brain. To create an arbitrary reference point for this equation, instead of trying to put humans at +0 or something like that, the creator of this formula, Robert A. Freitas Jr., decided to fix the units to "bits/second" and "kilograms."
This scale ranges from -70 to +50. -70 comes from "processing 1 bit of information over the current estimated age of the universe using the entire mass of the universe." +50 comes from Quantum Mechanics if you limit yourself to only mass/energy methods of encoding data (all known methods are mass/energy methods).
Humans are roughly at +13 on this spectrum. All animals with brains (neuron based brains) cluster roughly around that point, because our +13 is defined by our neuron, not the rest of the body.
Computers, while currently sitting at +11 to +12, can theoretically achieve +23 using known physics.
Plants do process information. They average about a -2 on this chart. Interestingly enough, carnivorous plants, like the Venus Fly Trap come in at +1, 3 orders of magnitude more "sentient" than their bretheren. This comes from the little bits of learning and modeling they need to do to outwit their prey. Consider a venus fly trap does not close unless 2 hair-triggers are tripped in short succession to avoid false alarms.
So if you took the difference in SQ from normal plants to carnivorous plants, and made 4 more evolutionary leaps of similar magnitude, you could have a plant with a +13. Does that mean they're intelligent? No. It just means the numbers line up such that we think they could be intelligent.
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## Inteligence
**Is a robot intelligent?**
Your definition "think, take decision, communicate" sounds like a possible definition for a robot. In the robotics community there's a real debate about what is and what isn't a robot. But there is a consensus around the fact that they aren't intelligent (yet).
**What is intelligence?**
Also, intelligence is really hard to define. It is said (I cannot remember the original author) that we might not be able to recognize a *superior* intelligence because it would have preoccupations and manifestations that are beyond our understanding. Similarly, we might not recognize an *inferior* intelligence for somewhat the same reasons. Actually scientists don't even agree on marine mammals' intelligence. Maybe we just don't get them.
**Cognitive science approach**
Cognitive scientists tend to think that a brain without a body cannot be intelligent. And if you think about it, (almost) everything that happens in your brain has a final goal of actuating a muscle. If a plant can't *act* on the world, then it can't stimulate a human-like intelligence. Plants actually can do a few things to their surroundings but their range of action if very limited.
More on the subject: [How could humans recognize another species as sentient / intelligent?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5124/how-could-humans-recognize-another-species-as-sentient-intelligent)
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## biology
**Thinking requires energy**
The biological process of thought requires a huge amount of energy, thus a big amount of intake for an organism that is just spending its day in the sun without moving. For a single plant to develop the ability to think, it would have to adopt a super efficient energy gathering system.
**Collective intelligence**
Another route for making plants intelligent without any of the limitations mentioned above is with [collective intelligence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence), meaning that one individual by itself isn't more intelligent than a bacteria, but together they act in a very intelligent way. A good example of this is of course ants.
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## Proposed solution
A single plant can already cover a [huge amount of surface](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_plants#Flowering_plants_.28angiosperms.29) and remain connected with a single root system. We also know that plants can [communicate with each other through hormones](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_sentience) and are able to act on their surroundings either directly by injecting chemicals into the ground or [taking control of other animals](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8383577.stm). In fiction, they could believably develop [collective intelligence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence) and become sentient on a human-recognizable level. This type of organism has been described in many fiction book, including one of my favorites: The Swarm by Frank Schätzing.
So **YES**, plants could gain the ability to think, take decisions, and communicate with their surroundings. They already do all of this, just slowly and very little.
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Not if anything like Earth plant life.
It's a matter of energy density. A brain is quite expensive of energy. It pays for itself if the creature can keep itself better fed or safer by thinking. This is far more likely for an animal that can direct its own movement.
WIth a few small primitive and sluggish exceptions we do hot have animals that photosynthesise. There is not enough energy to be gained that way. For air conditioning calculation, a human office worker emits 200 Watts. Sunshine is a kilowatt per square meter for about eight hours per day, say 330 W/Sq.m averaged out. Photosynthesis is inefficient (4% at best?). Weather inserts clouds. Animals just do not have enough surface area!
Plants have a different approach. They are static. They spread in a fractal manner to maximise solar radiation capture per unit of tissue. They have high tolerance of being partly eaten. Apart from poisons and thorns, their main defence is storing energy underground. Many plants can survive even total destruction of their parts above ground. They regrow from the roots. Many also scatter myriad seeds with long viability. There will be a next generation, even years after a catastrophe!
Finally, there has been much co-evolution. Fruits are there to be eaten, which gives seeds mobility inside animals. Flowers feed insects, which give pollen flower-targeted mobility. All animal life depends on plants for food and oxygen.So we have the animal and vegetable kingdoms separated but mutually dependant.
Plantlife: high surface area to passively absorb energy and CO2, high tolerance of being partly eaten, growing in a fixed location, with no need to make fast decisions and no ability to enact any. Animal life: small surface area, low tolerance of being partly eaten, mobile, uses thought to outwit predators or to prey. Eat plants directly or indirectly, mostly do not kill the whole plant, spread the plants seeds. The only common ground is monocellular life.
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As the question asks whether it could be possible for plants to evolve intelligence, there is no question about it. DNA manipulations allow for almost anything physically viable. Whether that survives or not is a question for natural selection to answer. Thus it seems possible for a brain to evolve in a plant through natural selection. This would, of course, have to be accompanied with a host of other physiological changes, such as a skull, though I hesitate to note that a central nervous system need not require a humanlike physiology.
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The simple answer comes in the form a of a question?
Does intelligence cause make a plant's situation worse off?
Intelligence is always a benefit to the organism that develops it. The limiting factor is not, therefor whether it can hypothetically come about from evolution given enough time and energy.
The question is whether or not a plant can get the needed energy for a complex neural system that can act on our time scale (Plants do move and such responding to their environment, it's just slow.)
The 2 ways available to them is Solar absorption and carnivorous plants.
1. I'm not an expert on Solar Absorption rates of plants but I'm pretty sure the answer to this is that there is no way to get the required energy out of this, but it may be possible using something we don't understand as of yet.
2. Eating meat is a lot closer to what it takes to create a neural net. Eating in the same way most animals eat can get a plant to having a neural net, however, if we're talking human level intelligence that requires a digestion technique or cooking, but if you're at the highest level an animal can get you could make the leap, so the answer is yes... plantlife could develop "thinking" because they can replicate animal behavior, which some already do.
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Assume humanity has developed a cybernetic implant technology which allowed humans to be "advanced". The technology would be surgically implanted and provide a range of functionality (I'm not interested in cybernetics to replace damaged limbs/senses which the brain already has 'wiring' for).
An example would be an implant which allowed the user to have a voice call with a friend. How would the user:
* Initiate the call
* Receive feedback on successful connections/rejected or failed calls
* Speak to their friend
My initial reaction was that this sort of technology would be accessed via your inner monologue... instead of saying "Hey Siri" or "Ok Glass" the user would think it. Is this likely or is it more realistic that the brain would learn these devices much like we learn to walk and talk? Are there other options?
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Using such an implant successfully would require a lot of training. When you make a phonecall with a mental command, it becomes hard to differentiate between *thinking* about calling someone and *actually doing* it.
Using uncommon pictures to control the actions of the implant might not be a good idea either. It is just too easy that mental stimuli from your environment trigger involuntary actions. Let's say your trigger for making a call to your boss is thinking of a pink elephant. See, you just thought about one and made an involuntary call.
A possible safeguard could be when the implant tells the user that they triggered an action and then monitors the mental reaction to the announcement before executing it. It should be easy to detect a stress reaction when announcing an action the user didn't actually want to do and then cancel it. The downside would be that it might make it difficult to get the implant to perform actions you want to perform even though they cause stress, like calling your boss to tell them you made a bad mistake or asking someone out to a first date.
And then during the telepathic conversation it might be hard for the implant to differentiate between those thoughts which are intended to be sent and those which are meant to be private. The conversation could become a lot more honest than intended. *I will sell you this part for just 2000 credits. Heh, you idiot will sure fall for that. I am so glad you don't know that this piece of junk is not even worth 100. Wait, did I just think that or telethink that? Why do you want to strangle me?*
However, we are perfectly mentally capable of making this differentiation when it comes to controlling our physical bodies. We can think about moving an arm without actually doing so. That's because we learned how to send signals from our brain to our limbs. This is a skill we were not born with. A baby is born with absolutely no motor control. It takes months until we learn even the most basic controls of our own body and years until we master it.
Getting a neural implant which adds new abilities to the body would be like getting a new bodypart. The user would have to learn how to utilize it, just like a toddler needs to learn how to utilize its arms and legs. Unfortunately an adult brain learns far more slowly than that of a toddler. It might be very difficult for most adults to learn how to use it. The situation is similar to that of people who lose their motor control due to brain damage. Some people are able to relearn how to use their limbs, but not all are successful and very few get close to the level of control they had before their accident.
On the other hand, when the implant is implanted during early childhood while the motoric abilities of the human develop, using it might become just as intuitive as any other bodypart.
Just like we currently have the generation of the "digital natives" who learned how to intuitively use the Internet during their childhood, your world might experience a generation of "neural natives" who intuitively learned how to control neural implants.
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Just like you can lift your arm by simply willing your arm to lift, there is no need to come up with obscure real world things like pink elephants that you are to think about when you want to e.g. place a call.
It will take some training, but eventually you would just be *willing* the call to be made. Not "thinking about calling" and definitely not about pink elephants.
In the same way, it would be possible to easily have a electro-telepathic conversation with someone while simultaneously thinking about that conversation, just like you can control your voice separately from your thoughts. Instead of *saying* words you just have to learn how to *send* them. This will probably take even more training, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be possible.
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**Each person would develop their own way of using the interface**
Each person's brain develops differently. That is one of the joys of humanity. However, we have to interact with each other, so clearly we need to develop a common ground. We develop language for this. However language is not fixed in stone, and that is what I base my answer around.
**The closer one gets to the "core" of an individual, the more customized and fluid language becomes.** This is because, as you get closer to an individual, you relate to them more, and have more common ground to work from. Consider how you would ask someone to take out the trash for you, given different relationships:
* **Stranger**: Hey, how are you doing? Look, can you do me a HUGE favor? I'm running really late for a big meeting at our city hall, and I forgot to take the trash out. If I don't get the trash out, my wife will kill him. You're married right? You understand? Do you think you could help me out and take the trash out? Thank you!
* **Friend**: Blast! I forgot the trash today. Do you think you could take it out for me? I'd owe you big time!
* **Close Friend**: Hey, think you could take the trash out for me?
* **My Wife**: *Before I can possibly forget the trash, she throws just one glance at me, to remind me that I need to take the trash out right away. This glance is different from the "time to clean the catbox" glance and very different from the "take the trash out at halftime" glance. I wonder if I can pretend I saw the halftime glance instead. Nope, she saw my glance, and responded with another one... that glance was mean... I better take it out real quick, and buy her flowers tomorrow. Yep, that glance says its a good plan.*
It is reasonable to extend this to how we handle our muscles. We develop a decidedly personal language with which to express what we want the muscles of our body to do. It is part of why personal training after an injury is so hard: our muscles and nerves are no longer speaking the same language they used to. We have to develop a new language.
It is also worth noting that we speak the language of our body so fluently, and there are so few misinterpretations, that we often even forget that it is reasonable to model our mind-body interactions this way. We usually get surprised when someone does something to our body to disrupt this communication (like nerve pinches).
**Accordingly, each and every neural implant owner will develop their own personalized way of interacting. However, there will be standard ways of learning.**
An infant learns to handle its muscles the hard way: trial and error. A child learns to speak their native tongue the hard way: trial and error. However, when learning a second language, whether its a second spoken language, or a different way to handle muscles (say, how to swing a hammer), the rules change. We can start by describing what we want to do in our native tongue, then slowly translating that into the second language. At some point, we find we are no longer translating... we have indeed learned a new language.
This occurs with people learning martial arts, or yoga all the time. They try to do the forms using the body-language they know, until one day someone shows them there is a new muscle that they'd had the entire time and never used it to its full potential. At that time, the practitioner has to begin learning a new language!
How can we adapt this to neural interfaces? If the neural interface is implanted from birth, we will learn to use it intuitively, like a muscle. Calling someone will not have an image, it will simply be a decision to call someone with exactly the same flair as the decision to pick up a glass of water.
If the neural interface is implanted later, we have to learn to use it. This could be done in the infant style, but it isn't as efficient. We're smarter than that. What companies will do instead is provide common visuals for calling. They might be visual or auditory. They might even be the physical act of mimicking picking up a phone. Anything which allows the brain to have the control needed to make a call is sufficient.
After that, the plasticity of the brain will take over, hopefully aided by a plastic neural interface. The brain will begin developing a new language to communicate, exactly how we transition from total strangers, to friends, and for some, husband and wife. Someone whose initial interface calls for visualizing the phone number or IP address of a person to make a call, will watch it shift to something more organic: perhaps the name of the individual. Eventually it will be the face of the individual. Eventually they will just think about calling the individual, and the neural link will respond.
There will be an interesting phase where it gets hard to explain the visualization you are using. Someone may claim "I picture their face, and it calls for me," but when faced with the puzzler, "if you pictured someone's face right now, without wanting to call them, would it call anyways?" the answer would be a very frustrated "no, it wouldn't, but I have no idea why... it just wouldn't. It knows better." The visual would be only part of the communication... the rest would be in the tiny subtleties the brain develops (the equivalent of the married couple's glance communication).
Note: The more complicated the interface (your 3 element system is nice and simple), the more complicated the training would need to be to gain control quickly. For something very difficult, like a neural link to control a powered exoskeleton, there might actually be schools to teach you how to learn to talk with the implant (similar to physical training classes to teach you to use your muscles again).
Note: such neural interfaces would likely aim to be as plastic as the brain, because its much faster to develop a language between two plastic things than it is to develop it all on the brain side. This has huge positive implications when talking about dealing with viruses and other highly negative aspects of neural interfaces in science fiction.
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There is loads of good and bad cyberpunk stories which try to imagine how would such implant work. I will try to invent my own idea:
When you think about something specific, your brain creates specific "pattern" which we are able to read even with today's tech. So it would be plausible to assume that such technology will get miniaturized good enough to be implanted into your brain:
To accept the call, think of smell of grass after rain
To decline call, think of having cold shower
To place call, think of ... shiny phone? :)
And so on.
Also, some implants work on the base, that you "just hear naturally" (to some degree of quality of hearing), so another plausible idea is, that once you accept/place the call, you just start naturally talking.
The selection of your friends then could be connected with another vision nerve implant, where you could select your friends just by looking at them. Something like Google glass interface, but internalized
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At present, any complex devices that we use rely upon having a user interface that we perceive through our existing senses and manipulate through our existing appendages. Learning to use these devices requires training - in many cases, not much training is required since we already know many of the pre-requisite skills.
However, when we are talking about a direct neural interface, we could consider the brain to be both a computer and a collection of software. I would anticipate that in the early stages of neural interfacing technology, output from the device would be overlaid onto our existing senses, and input would piggyback on our existing motor centres or tap into the internal stream of consciousness and listen for commands. Think of this as training a robot.
However, I would also anticipate that in a technologically mature neural interface, this piggy-backing onto existing senses and brain centres would no longer occur. Instead, it would be as if an entirely new limb or organ was grafted onto the body, *along with the skills to use it*. Think of this as actually reprogramming the robot's software to include new features.
To use the example of an implanted mobile phone:
In an early neural interface, the phone would be implanted and hooked into the brain. When activated, it would display visual output in the user's field of view, and audio output would be heard as sound. It would be controlled by thinking about it and then issuing commands. Communicating using it would require subvocalisation. It would require some training to use such a device.
In a mature neural interface (henceforth, a Mature-NI), as soon as the device was attached, the user would *know* how to use it, as if it had always been there. It would have no visual or audible output, nor would it require a subvocalized input. Instead, the user would simply send a message to the intended recipient, as naturally as speaking, gesturing or thinking, and would just know if the message was received, ignored, or not received. These messages could be words, images, scents, tastes, other sensory data, or even emotions. Messages from others would simply arrive unless the user was ignoring that person, and the user would just *know* who had sent it.
Such a device would probably allow communication with more than one other person, and may allow multiple conversations to take place simultaneously, including several "communicated" and one vocal conversation. If more senders were attempting to contact the user than the device could handle, the user would probably know *who* wanted their attention (or the most important 'who's if there were a *lot*), just not what they wanted. It would probably become common to switch rapidly from one caller to another just as if they were all standing in the same room talking about different things.
If a Mature-NI device was removed, the user may remember using it, but would not be able to say how they did so. In effect, all the processing power involved in manipulating the UI would have been located on the device, not in the user's brain. A similar effect could be gained if a person's left arm was amputated, and all the neurons in the brain that had anything to do with moving or sensing the left arm were also removed. It would be as if the left arm had never existed - the user would remember having one, and some skills would just not work any more because they relied on the left arm, but there would be no sense of something missing as is the case with simple limb amputation.
Conversely, adding a Mature-NI device would be like putting the amputee's left arm and associated brain tissue back just as it was before it was removed - except that the first time such a device was added, there would be no incomplete skills that would work once again. If such a device was added and used, then removed and then replaced, the removal and replacement would be just like a person's arm and associated brain tissue being removed then replaced.
A mature neural interface would most likely be a device similar to a Neural Lace from Ian M Banks' *Culture* novels, which grows throughout an organic brain, interfacing with every neuron.
[Answer]
Good question! And I really like all the answers but want to add something.
With our physical body it is easy to distinguish between thinking and actually doing something because actually doing something takes much energy (comparing to just thinking of it), and in order to direct that energy along our nerves we have to apply **focus**.
This is, in particular, how all the learning to master our body is done. Everyone has to apply conscious efforts and keep up the focus to exploit certain neural circuitry to do things and to learn to do them well. As the skill is gained, the action itself may be delegated to the automatic control, but the initiation and allowance for the action still requires conscious commandment (in sober healthy individuals at least).
So, concerning such a neural interface, it would be logical to indeed make it feel like an extension of the body and interface with the brain in the same circuitry. It may not necessarily be a sensation of a limb, but what, for example, if in order to control such an interface, you'd have to focus on an object like 1 meter in front of you, or inside of you, in your imagination, and apply the correct conscious activation commands. I bet with such a technology, it'd be easy to distinguish whether the person did really guide the "movements" with his focus, or these movemetns are parts of involuntary imagination activity - the EM patterns will be different.
The present evidence that psychoactive drugs can induce these kinds of sensations and allow to control them (to some extent) makes sure that we are quite capable of that. The brains neuroplasticity will do.
It will be rather easy to learn to handle it. Not any harder than a car or an airplane. As we gain the initial control over our body in childhood, other types of such a control become increasingly easier to grasp. For example, a car driver feels the car as his body at the moment he drives. This comes to no surprise to us and we also know, that the basic/average car driving skill can be acquired relatively easily.
To summarize this, one could control such a device with his focus of attention and persistance. This cannot usually result in involuntary device operation since it requires energy redistribution under a conscious effort and a mentally healthy person should have no problems with that. Caution must be excersised when considering allowance for such devices for people with OCD or Turrets Syndrome, though, a neurologist is required to tell if this will really interfere with such an interface (although I'm pretty sure OCD really might).
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Rather than executing commands with your thoughts which while a cool concept has a whole host of complications and issues why not just use sub-dermal displays?
Think of it as a simple LED panel/touch sensor implanted under the skin. It could work like the wearables we are seeing come out now. Simply touch the sub-dermal implant to answer or disconnect, heck it could even be a watch. The whole apparatus could be invisible unless activated and aside from a power source, which I am thinking you could use some sort of body heat converter or something.
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I'm going to assume the neural interface is quite advanced and sensitive enough to understand whatever you're thinking.
**Have the person visualize doing the things** that they want the neural interface to do: pick up a phone and see a friend (or walk up to him) to place a call, speak to him, set down the phone (or walk away from him) to hang up. The neural interface giving you information (including your friend's voice) could feed into your visual and auditory processing parts of your brain directly, so you see and hear things that aren't really there.
I think that *actively visualizing these things* is quite different from the random, internal chatter that I would not want the neural net to pick up on, so it seems like a plausible explanation. However, **some people can't visualize** things at all, so they might have to use alternative neural interface options or physical interfaces. These alternatives would likely be considered inferior to the way that "visualizers" can interact with their interfaces (if it weren't inferior, everyone would use it); these people might even be marginalized in society because of this, if you'd like your story to go that way.
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There should be 2 modes: Train mode and work mode.
**Step 1 - Training**
The interface asks you to think about the number **1**. After thinking about it for a few seconds, it goes on the next numbers 2,3,4... That way you train it to differ between a few numbers.
**Step 2 - Working example**
You are using a calculator. You allow the program to use the neural interface to input numbers. You think of **4**. If the neural interface is trained well by you, it sends a **4** to the network. Otherwise it might send a wrong number to the program. You see a **3** on the screen. You tell your neural interface that this assumption was wrong, because you clearly thought of a **4**, not a **3**. Now it asks you the number that you thought of. You enter **4** and the interface saves a tuple (**3**,**4**) for later training processes (Step 1 again!), because it fails to disambiguate between those numbers.
Similar to a child learning words and numbers, you and the interface learn to communicate with each other. The interface will become very adapted to you. My example merely covered differentiating between small numbers. Sooner or later, the interface will *understand* you thinking of more complex words/tasks/numbers.
There even might be a pre-trained interface. A company might ask 1000 people to train it a specific set. But nonetheless you will have to train it too, because every human is different. At least such a preliminary training might save you, the customer, a lot of time.
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I imagine such an interface would feel like an extra limb or two - say, an extra pair of hands. Or eyes. Or a whole new body, depending on how far you want to go.
The only real problem I see here, is where exactly these "limbs" will be "attached" to your physical body, especially without feeling like they'd bump into things around you. My guess here is going along a "fourth dimension" or something. (Which is what the whole internet thing is already, anyway.)
As for feedback from these extra "limbs", it'll be like moving your arms about with your eyes closed; you can still feel how the different joints are stretched out, and this will tell you where your hands are without you having to look.
And this is before you get the skin's feedback as you start bumping into things.
Similar with these implants. The most sensible (to me) option, is to have them feel like arms/hands/fingers with a set number of joints, and so moving those joints would trigger events; kinda like moving your fingers across a keyboard. Get some proper practice with this, and only then do you assign which events go with each "keypress".
One advantage of this, is you can "key" and "mouse" indefinitely with these extra "limbs" without suffering (physical) fatigue or carpal tunnel or anything, while fiddling with that drawing/song/whatever.
Not that this would exclude composing by "thought-to-MIDI" or anything; tapping directly into the thought process sounds like a nice, quick way of writing/composing/etc, while the extra "limbs" deal with commands like "dial this number". These are two options, and it'll be possible to have both.
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Note that such devices already exist, although still experimental, and capable only of a very narrow range of input.
You can use a device to guide a mouse cursor over the screen. [Functioning prototypes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmZXruqbTVs) already exist. This device actually makes EEG images and looks for patterns the user trained it about. It's still quite rudimentary, but its speed and accuracy might be improved in the future.
You have to train yourself to use it, and the system itself has to learn you. You train it (and yourself) by actually *wanting* the cursor to move in a direction, and not just by thinking about that direction. So by reading the word "left" somewhere and thinking about the direction "left" is not the same as you wanting the cursor to move to the left.
So it doesn't "understand" your thoughts, and it definitely doesn't parse your thoughts as if it was a text. This makes a full textual conversation impossible with our current technology, but if in the future it could be expanded to full textual parsing of your thought (for your example with the voice call), accidental calling could still be avoided with the above methods. You'll train the system to respond to your desire to make a call, so it won't respond to you reading the sentence "I want to make a call" or you just randomly thinking about it. This strong desire leads to completely different images in your EEG than just the thoughts themselves.
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Similar to James' answer, but a little different.
Keep the neural interface but make the UI look and feel like a heads-up display with visualized and subvocalized commands.
Because it is all inside the brain it doesn't need actual optical feeds to the eyes. It just writes the visual information directly into the brain, or the optic nerve. Then the user might visualize a button lighting up, or mentally focus on part of the UI to bring up more details.
A subvocalized command would be like talking to himself inside his head, "Computer, call James." and it would open a phone connection which would act exactly like a cell phone except the audio input and the output are entirely in the user's mind.
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ill try another perspective. since it's user interface. ill approach it from a user point of view.
I want the interface to properly filter between my thoughts and my dreams. I don't want to be dreaming I'm calling my boss and my phone calls him in the middle of the night.
I want a lock-in mode for communal devices like the TV. I don't want the channel to change when my 3 year old decides he wants to watch spongebob.
I want visual display of who is using a communal device or who last used it. I'm don't want to be blamed for leaving the kitchen lights on just because everyone knows I like the occasional midnight sandwich.
I don't want devices that automatically sync to my brainwaves without my permission. I don't want the pretty pharmacist to know the anti-itch cream is for me.
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We have a pretty good idea of what attributes a planet would need to sustain life and one can imagine how life might develop on a planet, even in difficult environments.
I find it extremely difficult to imagine what a habitable natural satellite would most probably look like.
While it is pleasing to think of the forest moon of Endor or that of Avatar, those moons are pretty much planets as far as what the environment looks like.
Apparently, tidally locked moons might have a chance to regulate temperature more easily through plate tectonics, but I believe it also means only one side of the moon is directed towards the sun and the other always faces towards the primary. How would vegetation spread this way? If liquid water forms on one side, it most probably could not on the other side.
Would it be more likely to have tidally locked moon develop life or rather the contrary?
Would a habitable moon also possess poles the same way the earth does?
How likely is it that a moon possesses a stable atmosphere?
What would be the effect of gravity on climate and life?
Or the effect of the rotation around the primary?
What conditions on the orbit and on the primary would prevent extreme variations in temperature?
Could a habitable moon have seasons? Would those seasons most probably vary in length? Would their occurrences follow a foreseeable pattern?
I know this is a complex matter, which might be seen as "too broad", but I very specifically look for basic ground rules to create believable habitable moons. Any idea, insight, or link to a study would be appreciated.
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Actually, when a moon is "tidally locked", this means that it always shows the same face toward its primary, in this case, the larger planet it is orbiting, *not* the sun. This means that its rotational period would be equal to its orbital period. It would have a day/night cycle either slightly longer or slightly shorter than the period of its orbit around its parent planet, depending on whether its orbit was retrograde or prograde.
However, any moon massive enough to have an atmosphere is probably large enough that it is not tidally locked, and its day may well be shorter than its orbital period.
For all intents and purposes, such a moon *is* pretty much like any other habitable planet, with the added complication that its larger/more massive primary planet would be quite likely to cause frequent eclipses.
Since the plane of orbit may not be in the plane of the primary's orbit, these eclipses may not occur every orbit, but may occur for several, then there could be a gap of several orbits before more eclipses occur.
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Let me preface this by saying that there are two good books for starting places: [*What if the Moon Didn't Exist*](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0060168641) (especially comments related to construction and history) and [*The Grand Tour*](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0761135472) (which gives detailed information about many moons in the solar system and lots of artist's visualizations).
I believe that any moon that can support life would be markedly earth like. In order for the moon to support a stable atmosphere (presumably capable of developing civilization) it would need to be relatively large - Mars is the smallest body I'm familiar with that has such an atmosphere.
Given the fact that the Earth's moon is huge in proportion to the planet, there's a problem with the size of the planet such a moon would orbit - I believe it would have to be larger than Jupiter for hypothesized accretion formation methods to work. At that point we're looking more at a double-star system rather than star->planet->moon system.
Assuming we aren't worried about how the moon formed and we have proportion ratios similar to earth and its moon (about 100:1 mass, 4:1 diameter), there'd be a couple of characteristics of system:
A. The planet is roughly Uranus's mass and about midway between the size of Earth and Neptune in diameter (~25k km). It could either be a gas or terrestrial body (not aware of any in that range with good data). As other answers stated, this will cause massive tidal forces and make a tidal lock likely (strong tides have a tendency to moderate a body's rotation).
B. Remember that the moon rotates, although probably slowly. The moon's rotational period is going to be the same as the orbital period. The speed of the moon is limited because if it was going too fast it would be lost to space. I was surprised to discover [here](http://www.windows2universe.org/our_solar_system/moons_table.html) that the rotational period for a moon in the size range we want (c. 6000 km) is less than a week.
1. How would vegetation spread this way? Assuming tidal heating and a thick enough atmosphere (and hopefully cloud cover to prevent heat loss), you could have water at night. In fact, you'd have moderate the temperatures somewhat or have vegetation that can take deep freezes. Don't forget that vegetation can crack or even explode if it gets cold enough. In any case, you'd probably have a vegetation band at least in the tropics.
2. Would it be more likely to have tidally locked moon develop life or rather the contrary? Stronger tides would create huge seas, so it would be hard to build cities easily accessible by sea - remember tides occur twice a day, however long the days are. So while life could survive, you'd probably want it to happen at some distance from the coast. Or be strong swimmers.
3. Would a habitable moon also possess poles the same way the earth does? Poles? At the axis? Yes. These would also be (probably) in the plane of solar system, so they'd be colder due to less direct light, although Uranus offers some interesting possibilities.
4. How likely is it that a moon possess a stable atmosphere? If you're using it as a setting for life, I believe it's a requirement. The moon's other characteristics have to be built around the atmosphere.
5. What would be the effect of gravity on climate and life? Structures (biological or otherwise) would have to be either short or lithe to withstand the tidal forces and frequent earthquakes. Climate will probably be fairly homogeneous compared with ours, since tidal stirring would moderate sea temps I assume. You'll also have much wider tidal zones and/or steeper cliffs with intense erosion due to quakes (do some reading on Io for ideas of tectonic activity). Vegetation near oceans will probably have a short life span or be able to detach and float.
6. Or the effect of the rotation around the primary? In general, one side would be very alone in space and the other would always have a planet above it. This could create some interesting anthropology. You could have very different religions on the different sides, since on one side the sun would be less important than the planet and on the other side the sun would be the primary feature of the sky.
7. What conditions on the orbit and on the primary would prevent extreme variations in temperature? Extreme variations in temperature would be best moderated by an atmosphere. The composition and feature of the atmosphere produce a greenhouse effect to protect the planet.
8. Could a habitable moon have seasons? Would those seasons most probably vary in length? Would their occurences follow a forseeable pattern? I was originally thinking that there wouldn't be seasons, since the axis would probably be the same as the planet's and would be likely to be vertical, however it is possible that the whole system could be tipped. Then there would be seasons like we have on earth (or Uranus).
In general, I think the moon is going to end up rather earth-like to support life. It's hard to image a significantly different world that could have native life (in a non-augmented environment).
I worked in this answer from my rough ideas of likelihood of a particular system existing. However, the system is pretty unlikely, it might not be a stretch to come up with another system - like a binary double tidally-locked system capable of supporting life, like Pluto and Charon, where one or both bodies have a face that never receives direct light. But that's digressing.
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There are two major differences between a moon and a planet:
1) Distance to the sun rapidly changing
If we take [the largest moons in our solar system as an example](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter), a decent sized moon would have an orbital radius of 1-2 million kilometers. On one side of the planet to the other, in a matter of about 1-2 weeks, we could be talking about a moon being 4 million km closer to the sun than it was a week ago. The differential between [the Earth's closest and furthest points from the sun](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perihelion_and_aphelion) is about 5 million km.
The thing is that the seasons are not based on distance from the sun, so I'm entirely unsure what effect this would produce. I imagine, at the very least, the weather would be slightly more chaotic than on Earth. With an axial tilt, you might end up with something akin to mini-seasons, though the effect might be very slight.
2) Much more powerful gravitational forces
If we again take our system's largest moons as an example, we would have a habitable moon with, at the very least, a gas giant affecting it instead of our own Moon. That's almost 26,000 moons worth of mass, which is equal, given the masses and distances of Jupiter and Callisto or Titan and Saturn, 17-19 times the gravitational exertion between the moon and gas giant than our planet and moon have over each other.
Thus, if we're talking about a truly habitable world that's fairly earth-like, the tidal forces we have on our planet would pale in comparison to the tidal forces a Callisto- or Titan-like moon would feel under the shadow of a Jupiter-like planet. [This would result in possibilities like](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force)
* Heavy and frequent quakes
* Huge differences in "high tides" and "low tides" of oceans
* ["Tidal heating"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating) which can result in heavy volcanic activity
* Incredibly strong ocean currents
I am unaware if these changes would also result in stronger or stranger weather patterns, but I wouldn't be surprised.
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A tidally locked moon like ours could have normal day/night sequences, just longer. Please note that unless there is when we known as a Moon eclipse, the near face of Moon can be fully iluminated by Sun (as it happens every Full Moon). So there are no reasons for differences between near side and far side. It is just that one side have a big (or not so big) planet always on sky, and the other side doesn't.
Ability to develop life seems not to depend on being a satellite or not, just on existence of liquid water, which depends on having enough gravity and being on the habitable zone of the star. If Jupiter were where Earth is, and Earth were that Jupiter's tidally locked satellite, it could still be our living sphere. Really, main difference would be only the day/night cycle not being 24h (with its consecuences on climate, vegetation and animal customs).
You have posed a lot of separate questions I think I have addressed all at once. If not, I'll be happy to update the answer as you wish via comments.
Just as extra data: Jupiter's biggest satellite, Ganymede, is a bit bigger than our Moon. So it may be that you need a [superjupiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Jupiter) in order to have a credible Earth-sized satellite. Or just no, our Moon is actually an example of a supersatellite.
Left: Moon and Ganymede. Rigth: Earth.
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The thing that matters is what the planetary body is made of (size, gravity, atmosphere, liquid water), not what it is orbiting.
Whether the "planet" is orbiting a sun, a gas giant, a planet smaller than a gas giant, something like a binary star system or even a black hole doesn't matter.
All that matters is what conditions that results in on the surface. (A black hole for example is unlikely to result in a life bearing planet as you would need another source of light and heat but by itself would not prevent life if there was another body in the system providing the resources needed or the planet had a high source of internal thermal energy).
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I am assuming a theocratic state as a matter of religious dogma is eternal. It has no beginning and no end. It has always been and always will be. In reality of course history has simply been rewritten to omit or distort anything that might imply that there was a time the empire did not exist.
The founders of the empire were intelligent enough to realize the empire must be capable of adapting to changes and in order to do that people must be able to learn from the past. So study of history can't be outright banned or even restricted to a closed inner circle.
Neither is it really practical to hide the fact other governments with different systems have existed. Such alternate systems would be too valuable as sources of wider perspective on many issues.
So what is hidden is the wider framework that could be used to compose long timelines and notice the imperial timeline starts after some other timelines.
Essentially for time a modulus calendar is used. Say this year would be the 15th year of the current century. But there would be a number given for the century and no concept of millennia, other than noting that since the empire is eternal it must have existed for countless millennia. People might also talk of events of the previous century. So George Orwell wrote a book about the 84th year of the previous century. Also allowed would be speculation and expectation of the next century. So there would be sliding time window of few hundred years as the maximum length of historical context.
Geographical context would be similarly localized. A scholar might note that the heretical kingdom he is studying has familiar features, but only the most radical heretic would even suspect the kingdom was located at the location of the Imperial Capital. And even he would simply assume there was another capital at the time, not that the kingdom existed before the empire.
I doubt there would be major issues from this as rulers generally fail to learn from history anyway, but just in case:
How would this limit the study of history and the development of related sciences? Would there be some practical issues? Would there really be practical benefits over simply banning the study of history?
**Edit based on answers (or some stuff I clearly should have mentioned):**
The eternal empire has no particular desire to make itself look better than it is or its alternatives worse beyond what comes naturally from self-censorship. It is **eternal**. Resistance is futile. So the powers that be, are actually more concerned about having access to accurate information they can use to secure the future than looking good. As a theocratic state the nominal head of state is probably the national divinity anyway. People are welcome to go complain to him, if they think the government is messing up.
Actually, a big part of what I'd like to know, if this kind of selective "tolerance" based on the government itself believing itself to be eternal and God ordained would be practical given that things contradicting the dogmatic stance on the empire being eternal are hidden. That is the context for the third question concerning practical benefits above.
**Second edit:**
Leushenko reminds of the vast difference between eternal and long lasting. Quoting my comment to his answer since it explains why the empire values study of history and does not ban it or outright falsify history. I thought that just stating they do in the question would be enough, but in retrospect that was simply wrong.
>
> Yes, the question assumes this difference between eternal and merely
> ancient. Being eternal does not imply being cyclical unless you also
> assume reality to be finite in some way. The empire rejects the idea
> of God's creation being limited in a way meaningful to mortals as
> heresy. I imagine their view of time would be an infinitely ascending
> spiral that goes through same general pattern but never repeats. So
> you could learn from the past, but not repeat it. As matter of dogma
> they'd continually face entirely new events that resemble past events.
> That is why they would value study of history.
>
>
>
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**Each year reckoning is kept in terms of the reign of the current Emperor.** So centuries are not really used, rather something is said to have happened during the year 283 of the reign of Emperor Marx Eugenes Harkonnen. Each time a new emperor ascends, the count reckoning is restarted, with year 1 being the year starting at the last beat of midnight on the Imperial Clock in the Capital on 1st day of the month of Germinal after the ascent.
Any and all early history is placed in an undated mythological time: "the Forgotten Times," with the understanding that all the crises of the present have happened and been successfully weathered in the past, and so the diligent will study history so that lessons may be learned.
In the imperial histories, there is a rather tenuous reckoning going back many centuries (although heretical thinkers suggest that official histories are probably **severely time inflating reign times** towards the start of the continuous reckoning, i.e. [Merk the Giant and the Walden and Buffetti princes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6981/long-abandoned-yet-still-working-ancient-technology/7015#7015) might have been a mere 5 centuries ago, not the 20,000 years claimed in official histories. All other historical documents have been purged over the centuries, starting with **the great fire** documented to have happened 18,000 years ago (4 centuries, suggest skeptics) that wiped out the old imperial (or not so imperial) archives.
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The Empire has no problem with people studying history as long as they are using the Empire's version of it. They will do their best (read: remove those who oppose them and burn the heretical books) to promote their version of history. Think about it: after enough time has passed, those that had the memory of past events are dead. The history only exist in the local folklore and history books. But if the Empire decides to silence the historians and burn the historical books, there will be nothing left of this knowledge after 3 or 4 generations maybe. Nothing except the book called "History of the Empire: Form the Big Bang to the present era."
I think this kind of government would rather try to hide the mistakes of the past than trying to learn lessons from them. Why? Because it gives the impression that it's perfect and cannot be wrong/ cannot make mistakes. Therefore, the Empire has always been there and will always be because there are no alternative. Rebels, minorities and foreign countries might be turned to ridicule to enforce this feeling of superiority.
Well, the above is true mostly for the common people but it could be different for the elites. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, they've burned all the books but surprisingly, the elite still have access to some of them. Or North Korea is banning American cultural products for the masses but the Supreme Leader likes to watches movies from Hollywood.
In your case the explanation could be that the history books always depict the Empire in a glorious way. They tell how mediocre the other countries were and the terrible mistakes they have done. These mistakes are in fact the Empire's mistakes but the books will say the opposite. The Empire has always did what was right.
The historiographers are bureaucrats in place to decide what version should be the official one. They usually work for the "Ministry of Truth" and edit the books to keep them up to date.
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Well Assuming that there are or were known to be other 'countries' much of history could be pointed to as some other country that was 'benevolently' absorbed by the empire to make life better for all.
>
> Would there really be practical benefits over simply banning study of history?
>
>
>
For general consumption? yes. it is much easier to control a population that you keep ignorant. It is distinctly possible that real history is kept for those deemed worthy, and a test to find those that could cause trouble for the empire later. If someone starts asking questions about inconsistencies about the 'official' history they can either be indoctrinated or quietly removed, in either case a problem is eliminated.
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Consider how (political) historiography and the economy interact.
* Could there be things like 99-year leases if you discourage the concept of a century? Copyright expiration dates? Helps if all copyright belongs to the Empire, anyway.
* The Brits recently decided to pay off [WWI debts](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30306579). That may be a pointer how you do it in your Empire, debt has no due date, simply interest until it is paid off.
* Will people get pensions at a certain age? The emperor is dead, long live the emperor. And the retirement of John Doe is now officially set as the 37th year of the reign of Emperor Random XXIV, provided Random XXIV lives that long. Perhaps it will be redesignated several more times.
* Can you have long-term analysis of weather data, like the impact of the [Year Without a Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)?
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I think that one approach to balance official version and the truth would be to systematically undermine truth. That is, learning external versions of history would be permitted to academicians. However, an emphasis should be made on how often different countries have varying views on the same events. And if several countries have the same view on the past, for example claiming that the Empire lost a certain battle, or led a genocide, or even didn't exist at a certain period in time, then it is clearly dictated by their jealousy towards the superior Eternal Empire.
This approach encourages the following mindset of educated society:
1) all versions of history are equally unreliable, so the choice of version should be based not on logic, but on loyalties
2) external versions should be hidden from common people, to avoid confusion
The danger of accepting external versions for truth may be pointed out to particularly inquisitive students. People who insist that different versions will be evaluated objectively, using scientific methods, as well as those who teach unapproved versions to the uninitiated, will be labelled enemies of the State and dealt with accordingly.
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If they want to preserve history for educational purposes but likewise want to pretend the empire has always been even when historical events say otherwise then they should maintain an almost honest history--simply relocate it to somewhere outside the Empire.
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Adding to Vincent's answer, I recently had a glimpse of Russian history through Leo Domidov's Child 44.
If you choose to ban history, you must also assert the perfectness of your own empire. This means that you'll choose to simply ignore anything that disturbs the equilibrium: terrorism, murders, coups etc.
Banning history will not prevent people from the above. Rather banning history is simply one of the many steps establishing the image of a perfect empire, for only that can be eternal.
A perfect empire is ideal for curbing the people and suppressing revolutions. People simply don't know what those are.
So as a close real world example you would have a situation similar to the Soviet Union for the better part of the 20th century.
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If the empire has no beginning, then its history up to this date is infinite. A finite number of books could not record the complete history. This either presents a problem for the empire to explain, or it gives them a way out: Over the millennia the books eventually rotted away, or the material to make them had to be recycled. So you could say, yes, the empire has existed for an infinite amount of time, but we only have history going back a few hundred years. Maybe you say that we have preserved a few very old records, perhaps a list of emperors going back 20,000 years, but you say all information besides their names has been lost. Or maybe you make a few fragments, here's a mention of a battle fought 5000 years ago, here's the winning song from the Singing With the Emperor finals 10,000 years ago, etc.
You run into some problems with physics: If the empire has existed for an infinite amount of time, then presumably the world and the universe have also existed for an infinite amount of time. So why haven't they died an entropy-induced heat death? Maybe the science of the empire isn't advanced enough to understand this, maybe they explain this away somehow, or maybe people who bring it up mysteriously disappear never to be seen again.
If there are other nations in the world not under your control, I'm not sure what you'd do to prevent them from telling your people that this empire really just began 200 years ago. Likewise, what happens if someone finds an old book that discusses the founding of the empire or a time before the empire. Oh, you tell them these people are liars and heretics, I suppose. "You say the empire really isn't eternal? That's crazy! All the members of the Emperor's Science Advisory Board agree that it is. I just saw a documentary on the Imperial History Channel that explains it. What are you, some kind of anti-science religious fanatic?" Maybe you can keep enough people convinced and the rest intimidated into silence. And many apathetic. "You say the empire is really only a few hundred years old? Maybe so. Hey, look at this funny cat picture!"
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If they truly believe the empire and therefore the world are eternal, then the solutions to recording history could vary from insanely stupid to insanely brilliant. I doubt I can come up with the latter.
Current emperor state
- Warning on current solution expiration through private lineage storage
- Instinct will to control history
- No desire to control history
* 3 is easy, let it roll, storage degrades naturally.
* 1 is tough because you have to decide whether to restart the current solution or start something new.
* 2 Regulate information storage unofficially. Research longest storage possible for private lineage information. Research information degradation rate and adapt acceptable blocks of time for record keeping. Set up release of Empire history encyclopedia every n number of years. Instill religious sense regarding history in population and more so in record keepers. Set up institution to handle one offs. Calculate divergence of one offs and solution longevity. Store estimates in private lineage storage.
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Scrambling geography works quite well. If the Empire now is strong enough and controls a lot of territory, it can appropriate the earlier history of other nations it controls now.
At risk of starting the political discussion here - but that is exactly what Russian empire did in 17th century. Although the Moscowian Rus is known historically from 15th century only, it appropriated the history of earlier Kievan Rus, claiming that the 'spiritual' capital moved about 700 km, from one independent duchy to another. It also claimed the descent from Byzantium and Rome, but since those territories were not under it's control, it didn't stick.
Since this is not so easy to confirm, your empire can claim the spiritual descent from all the other earlier states in the territories it controls, appropriating their rulers and histories as the earlier dynasties if the same empire. 'The Empire didn't change', they would claim, 'different dynasties ruled, coming from the whole multitude of the nations, capitals moved, but the Empire stays there same'.
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I am a writer trying to build a fantasy realm relatively similar to our world. The only difference between this world and ours was that every creature and animal was significantly larger, potentially lowering humanity's position on the food chain.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pbKo3.jpg)
My question is: Can giant snakes be trained, saddled and ridden (provided their bodies are the right diameter to be saddled)? Can these creatures' bodies handle saddles and can they be trained to maneuver through a jungle landscape with a rider on their back? (provided that they are fast, despite their enlarged weight.)
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As Shadowzee said, if you want to use giant snakes, you'll have MANY hurdles to cross. So, instead of saying all the reasons why you can't, I'll essentially give you the notes I used to figure this out for in my own writing. (Using Shadowzee's order for simplicity.)
Saddling - Snakes have scales. They shed their scales about monthly and present various signs they are about to do so. Keep an eye out for the signs and wait for that time of the month to subside and you should be fine in that regard. Assist the snake with the uncomfortable shedding process, help it get sufficient food in that time, and so forth and you can expect it to be a fairly loyal and reliable ally. As for the outright saddling of the snake, it depends on a couple factors. First, are the scales still small or are the proportionately large? If they are large scales, first, congrats: your warriors have a free source of armor that they are given every month. As [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20572/would-keratin-spider-silk-and-bone-make-good-bio-engineered-armour) question's answers point out, the armor isn't perfect, but as a free resource, your people shouldn't complain. Second, you can design the saddles to slide under and latch onto the scales. While this would likely be uncomfortable for the snake (like something getting under your fingernails), it's something that they could get used to in time, not dissimilar to a horse's shoes. If the scales are small, you'd then have to consider if you're willing to hurt the snake or if you're insistent on being as humane as possible. If you don't mind hurting the beast, you can always have the saddles affixed to the serpents via spikes. For a more humane method, you could have bicycle-kickstand-like features coming from the sides designed to serve as a corrective apparatus to keep the saddles from sliding to far in either direction, but this would have to be a long, slim piece of metal that would likely be fragile, presenting it's own disadvantages. You could potentially design the saddle and bit to all be a single unit, therefore making it so that the saddle stops itself in that way from sliding too far in any direction.
Riding - As for dealing with the constant swaying motion and snake-sickness, the only way to get passed this is to make it something a portion of the snake riders have developed. Logically, it'd be a result of evolution. Being able to ride the snakes would be seen as a great skill and any who could do so would be sure to find a mate in their tribe and the gene would pass along to the next generation. Due to the risks of dealing with the snakes, there wouldn't be a guarantee *every* snake rider would live long enough. Snakes are dangerous, fickle creatures. If they don't want a rider, they won't accept the rider. Humans are just as much food as anything else is in their eyes. Finish this by making the resistance to the nausea-inducing effects of riding the snakes a recessive genetic trait, and you keep your tribe's ability to ride snakes be a little unpredictable and even more valuable. As far as the tribe would be concerned, this ability would be something that would be considered a gift from the gods or ancestors as it would allow these snake riders an indisputable advantage in war against other tribes and give some benefit when hunting, so long as the snake works with the rider and not against them.
Cold-blooded - It would make sense due to other factors (namely their size) that they'd rather be active during the day when they can be in the sun, but I'd argue they'd hunt in the early morning and later in the day while sunbathing in between hunting sessions. Additional natural heat sources in the environment such as rocks that naturally store heat longer would probably be a good thing for the serpents at night. That said, this doesn't mean snakes have to be active during the day and inactive at night. There are both diurnal AND nocturnal snakes. In fact, [it may be more accurate to consider snakes as crepuscular as opposed to diurnal or nocturnal](http://www.bookrags.com/research/crepuscular-ansc-01/#gsc.tab=0), but that's a question for [a different SE](https://biology.stackexchange.com/).
Ambush predator - Quite simply, this can be gotten around by having the snakes raised by the tribe be bred based on willingness to hunt and work with the humans. You could have ambush snakes setup around the village as a defense measure, but the ones most likely to survive into the next generations would be the ones that display a greater interest in hunting. The problem with this: [snakes are lazy (read: efficient) by necessity](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/1302010-chinese-lunar-new-year-culture-snake-science-animals/). More movement means more energy expenditure and risk of being predated. Snakes thrive off of acting based on need more than demand. If they need warmed up, they'll move to somewhere they detect heat. If they need food, they'll try to lure prey first, then hunt if they can't catch an easy bite. When they do get food, they prefer larger prey so they can spend longer time without needing to hunt. (I noted in my own info that snakes are very Boolean which makes for convenience when writing.)
Food - The snakes will more likely see humans as an analogous prey to how real world snakes see mice. Humans would be small prey that can't provide enough energy on their own, but a snack is better than going hungry. That said, if snakes find cooperation with humans to be of benefit to them, then they will likely work alongside humans to find food for both. This will help if your story has sufficient enough prey for the snakes available. If you're in a low-density area, the snakes may see humans as being more useful as food. As a result, your peoples will likely give the snakes first picks at food before hunting for themselves. Additionally, depending on the species the snake is based off of, it's not unlikely [the snakes may even eat each other](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/10/african-cobras-cannibalism-snake-eaters-news/)! So be sure to keep that in mind when detailing these creatures. Your humans would likely know these aspects to their snakes' behaviors and will more likely than not do what they can to keep the snakes fed at minimal risk to human life. Alternatively, humans who have committed crimes or are prisoners of war may be used as [sacrifices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice) to the snakes as a way of keeping them appeased. It's not unlikely your people would even see snakes as [protective deities or even minor gods, in their own rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_worship). (This would be akin to Hindu mythology in that respect.)
Cooperation - The only way to make sure the snakes don't escape or eat the humans is by making sure the humans keep the snakes well-fed, well taken-care of, and well-[groomed](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/groom) (verb definition 3: "to get into readiness for a specific objective"). Snakes will do whatever is less work for themselves. This isn't a bad thing, though. Your humans would be used to this and would already have safeguards ready for it including storehouses full of captured prey that trappers would have caught, ready to give the snakes at any time. The reason why these prey may be given to the snakes instead of eaten outright could be a variety of reasons: the animals (likely mice) [taste pungent and gamey](https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/5-ways-you-know-youre-eating-rat-meat/) so it's considered a last resort, your people hold a reverence for the snakes or may be fearful of the snakes and use a symbiotic lifestyle to reduce the risk of becoming prey, or your people may see snake riders as being capable of hunting game much larger and much more difficult/dangerous to catch than what they could normally get ([possibly thanks to the venom of the snakes](http://ufwildlife.ifas.ufl.edu/venomous_snake_faqs.shtml)) and see the reward as being well worth the risk as a trapper may be able to get enough low-quality prey for the tribe, but the snake riders could get enough higher-quality prey while also keeping a potential predator subdued and subordinate.
Position on the Food Chain - In this world, humans would be pretty much the lowest animal on the food chain if EVERY animal is enlarged. It's sort of like how [it's a wonder humans](https://www.gameskinny.com/fqs6g/5-reasons-humans-wouldnt-survive-in-the-pokemon-world) [even survive the Pokemon world](https://screenrant.com/15-most-dangerous-pokemon-in-the-world/). (Two different links.) Bugs would on average be the size of house cats. House cats would be the size of lions. You could expect humans to be the prey most predators try to eat because they'd be the easiest targets based on size. Even mice would be the size of large dogs or small horses, so you can expect humans to need to rely on their wit to survive more than ever. Also, just as birds normally target mice in our world: humans in this world will need to be on constant lookout for feathery death from above. This may actually be the thing that solidifies a mutual relationship for snakes and humans. While the snake kills prey for itself and the tribe, the human riding it could serve as a defense system against birds looking for an easy meal. If the human *kills* the bird, then that's an easy day's haul.
Training Them to Maneuver With a Rider - This would be the easiest part. The snake would want its defense system. It will adjust its movements to protect the human, and the human would train to lay down when the snake is moving as opposed to sitting up. This would reduce drag, reduce the risk of a predator sweeping the human off of the snake, and make it easier for the snake to move through lower-clearance areas without worrying about losing its rider. The biggest concern would be humans and snakes finding prey within an area. I mean, [snakes can eat insects](https://pethelpful.com/reptiles-amphibians/Pet-Snakes-You-Dont-Need-to-Feed-Rodents) if need be, so that's always an option, and [humans have a history eating bugs too](https://people.howstuffworks.com/entomophagy1.htm). [Apparently bugs taste nutty](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniella-martin/what-do-bugs-taste-like-a_b_901775.html). (In fact, the [UN is even encouraging people to eat insects](http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e.pdf)!) So, you don't have too much to worry there, but be sure to feed the snakes first and take whatever is left, or your people may not be in the best position. The snakes would likely not eat the humans outright due to the benefit humans give, [like slimes presumably might offer to bigger fantasy monsters](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114162/what-is-the-ecological-role-of-the-common-fantasy-monster-the-slime).
Of course, this only touches upon SOME of the things to keep in mind, but it should be more than a start. I hope this helps you in the end!
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I can't imagine a good and reliable way for you to saddle a snake because a snake is basically a cylinder. There aren't any shoulder blades/bones for your saddle to rest or be support by. In addition to that, the only place you can put the saddle doubles up as the method of locomotion, which means rather than a gentle up and down motion, your going to get massive side to side swings which will induce vomiting and motion sickness.
This is combined with the fact that snakes are cold blooded and an ambush predator which means that they would much rather not move, and when they do move, it would be much better during the day, then at night.
Then there is the fact that snakes are going to be huge and see all your humans as food. You might capture them, but driving them forward is going to be hard unless you remove parts of their scales so you can stab them in the sides. You also might run into problems during shedding and the snake may get away.
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Great answers, a few additional thoughts to add into the mix.
CLIMBING & SADDLING
In the book Dune, the sandworms present a similar challenge, and are substantially larger than humans. The ratio is such that humans were able to develop tools which pry the "scales" and use them as a kind of anchoring point to climb and ride the worms.
Similar saddling issues should appear with dragons, so it could prove an interesting exercise to research artists concepts of saddled dragons and see what ideas they've used. A key difference is that dragons are typically upright, or in flight, rather than slithering along the ground, so the saddle straps can wrap the circumference of the body without catastrophic abrasive wear.
Also looking at snake motion, the head is often pretty stable, while the body winds insanely fast. Perhaps you could anchor using the ear holes or skull, just behind the head. Just don't pick a venomous breed that strikes- that would be some serious rider whiplash.
RIDING
Riding a giant snake would be intriguing, to say the least. At normal Earth-based size, a Black Mamba can travel 5 metres / sec, which is already faster than most humans can run.
For a black mamba (body about 6 cm thickness) to be scaled up to the size of a horse (up to 1.8m at saddle height), we'd need to scale it 30X larger. Let's use that for our scaling.
That means a speed of 5 metres / sec scales to 150 m/s (= 0.15 km/s).
This beast could travel a kilometer in just over 6 seconds.
... that's almost half the speed of sound (0.343 km/s).
Would the insects on your wold scale as well? They might be far easier to design saddles for, and could be easier to control. Plus... climbing, flight, swimming... a full range of capabilities.
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Spoken communication requires human beings to be able to do two separate things:
The first is to understand what is being said to them (including isolating the sound of the other person's voice from all the other noises in the environment, resolving the sound to a set of words and pauses, and processing the words and pauses to extract meaning from them). The second is to communicate their own ideas to the other person (by formulating them into a sequence of words and pauses, and speaking these aloud in such a way that the other person can extract meaning from them).
Now, we are for the most part only able to do one of these things at a time (and often with a small pause in-between while we process what has been said to us and decide what we want to say in return). I'm wondering, if this wasn't the case, and both tasks could be done simultaneously without interfering with each other, would language have still developed in the way that it has? Would grammar still operate in the way that it does?
If not, what differences might we expect to see?
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This is interesting to me because what you want to explore both happens and doesn't happen. As you have noticed, it's mighty difficult to hold a conversation when both parties are trying to talk over each other. However, we have plenty of examples in singing where we indeed are vocalizing over the top of someone while listening to them. There's no other way a barbershop quartet could maintain the locked down harmonies they need to sound as they do.
This points to something deeper in our psyche. Something about the way we think about communication causes us to choose not to speak in the way you describe. That makes it fun because this also suggests that this inability to speak and listen may be cultural, not biological. Cultural things are always fun to dig into, but first, some biology.
One key limitation with any human cognition is how slowly the brain processes novel stimuli. If it's prepared for a stimulus, the brain can respond within 106ms (that time was achieved by an Olympic athlete in a carefully structured test). However, if the brain is less prepared, it's slower. There's a pair of brainwaves scientists love to use in psychological experiments called P300a and P300b. Each of these occurs at roughly 300ms after a novel stimulus (hence P300). P300a is in response to an unexpected stimulus (such as a loud noise), while P300b is in response to an unexpected stimulus that is related to the current task at hand (such as a the stoplight turning yellow while you are driving). Scientists love these because they are very easy to distinguish, and are well correlated to cognition itself.
This shows a lower bound for communication "at the same time." If your stimulus needs to reach my upper cognitive functions, they don't even *start* processing until 300ms after you've made your sound and you'll probably need a few hundred milliseconds to process it. Most conversations are held at 110-150wpm (400-545ms per word), and while I don't have any scientific evidence to back it up... this sure looks like those two timelines are strongly related.
Another limit is that upper cognitive functions tend to be more serial and less parallel. Its a lot harder to be counting backwards from 100 by 7's while listening to someone speak than it is to do one or the other. This naturally serializes the conversation.
However, I did mention that we do listen while we speak, and gave singing as an example. Staying in tune is a lower cognitive function, in that singers aren't actively thinking about it most of the time. We singers tend to learn to automatically stay in tune. This means we don't need to have any of those slow P300 waves firing to stay in tune. We can use the lower and faster functions of the brain to communicate.
So what if we used those lower parts more when we communicated? I think there's a lot of room for interpretation there, because that part of the brain is not very well understood. We don't quite know what it would look like if it was communicating more directly than it does. However, we have a few examples of what it might be. There's a particular example that comes to mind, the [Kecak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kecak) style performances from Bali, Indonesia. It is believed to have its origins in an exorcism ritual. I will be the first to admit that, as a white US citizen, I don't fully understand what is going on here, but when I think about what it would look like for us to drop the walls we put up around our brain and let the lower functions communicate with one anothers', I get the impression it might look [something like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGXcnWUqV-Y). I don't know about you, but I get an eerie feeling when watching their dances, like they're reaching out to me in a way I don't fully comprehend. Maybe there's more to this than meets the eye.
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Cort Ammon's answer is good, but I want to add comments and I have more commentary than the comment section will take.
# Human language has the flexibility for simultaneous conversation
First, as he pointed out, the human language is very flexible. There are so many things that you can do with your voice above and beyond what we use to speak. For example, English speakers do not use tone like the Chinese do (while the Chinese don't use grammatical tense). There are at least 150 unique phonemes (sounds, roughly) that are used in speech by various human groups. [!Xuun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/!Kung_language) uses something like 141 of them; English uses up to 47 (21 vowels, 26 consonants, although not all dialects pronounce all sounds).
The point is, by using different sounds or tones two people could talk at the same time and be perfectly intelligible by not sharing similar sounds that would interfere with each other. A language could theoretically develop where there was a '1st speaker' and '2nd speaker' using different sounds and tones, so that two people could use one of the two speaker dialects to talk at the same time. '1st speaker' could use all short vowels and '2nd speaker' could use all long vowels for instance. Or it could be so easy in a tonal language like Chinese that the second speaker raises or lowers his voice a major fifth away from the first speaker, so their speech doesn't overlap on tones.
Regardless of the above, the human ear and brain is sufficient to track multiple conversations at once. It is hard to 'comprehend' two conversations at once, as we'll discuss next, but most people have picked out their own name in a converstion across the room. Further, anyone with kids can tell you that you can hear what your kids are saying even if you are talking to someone else.
# The human brain is not set up for simultaneous conversation
Again, following Cort Ammon, our brains are not set up to process language at the same time as we speak it. Just try it, it is very hard to order your thoughts while you are listening, or even if you are reading.
It is interesting that [expressive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia) and [receptive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptive_aphasia) aphasia (inability to speak language, and comprehend language, respectively) are tied to different areas of the brain. So it is not that easy to assert that there is some shared hardward that is used for both expressing and recieving language that prevents us from doing both at the same time. But the proof is simply in testing it yourself. Try to read a sentance from this answer while reciting something you have memorized, then try to repeat what you just read. You just can't do it (at least I can't).
# Conclusion
The human language is flexible enough to support simultaneously speaking and listening, but the brain just isn't up to it.
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There's a real-life example of listening and speaking at the same time in the case of real-time translators. This is at a different time-scale than milliseconds; a translator typically needs to hear a few seconds of speech before they begin translating, and depending on the languages involved or if ambiguities arise may want to build up a longer backlog of speech. Note that although they are delaying their responses to initial stimulus by several seconds, they are speaking at the same time they are listening to the sentences they are going to translate a few seconds later.
If nothing else, it's proof that humans are capable of tasks like this; the rarity of it demonstrates more that it is not generally useful than that it is impossible. The reason it's not useful is elaborated on in other answers: most communication is serial, and we must hear the end of a question in order to answer it (unless we guess the end of the question correctly; but this is still a serial communication, because we at least need to hear the important parts before we answer).
Being able to speak and listen at the same time would only be useful for non-serial communication, and I'm not sure what the advantage of such communication would be. A group of people relaying status updates simultaneously might qualify, or holding two separate conversations at the same time. The latter happens often when there is a delay in responding, for instance in letters, emails, or chat rooms; it is not inconceivable that it could happen for spoken conversations, as you often know completely what you want to say before you finish saying it, which frees up your mind for listening to something else and formulating a reply to that, too. Again, it seems of limited benefit unless you have an interview with a lot of questions and not enough time to ask them all.
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There is a reasonable case that this is exactly what does happen. Quite a lot of human verbal communication is a bit redundant purely in terms of the information content and in many cases the real conversation is more about more subtle cues of tone, context, inflection and body language and quite a lot of conversation is more or less automatic in terms of the mechanics of grammar and vocabulary.
Most of the time in casual conversation we are able to formulate concepts and inflect quite subtle nuances without really thinking much about it. Just thing about the difference in he way you talk to a good friend, a casual acquaintance, your boss, someone you are attracted to etc etc.
I saw a good example only today in the form of a theatrical audition workshop where people were asked to tell a story and were occasionally stopped and given new and unexpected context. For example mid sentence they might be stopped and asked to imaging that they were telling the same story but they were in a job interview or giving a speech at a wedding or trying to scare someone around a campfire. You could immediately see the proficient actors, not because they were able to make up new lines on the spot but because they were able to put themselves into that context and their whole delivery changed in a way that you might not notice in a written script.
They key point here is that a lot of the mechanics of language is entirely separate from conscious, rational thought and thinking about what you are going to say next while the other person is still speaking is an entirely normal part of conversation.
Indeed there is an argument that in a modern context where we have to deal with very complex concepts and technical information that we were never evolved for there is actually *too much* parallel speaking and listening and we would be better off with a language convention which didn't rely so much on a more or less instantaneous response.
Consider also that in most casual social contexts pauses in conversations are often considered as awkward (and acceptable pauses have been measures as being very small indeed) , this in itself implies that we are well able to start formulating a response long before the other person has finished speaking.
In some ways literature sums this up better than science and it would be worth looking at writers like Pratchett, Pinter, Austin and Wodehouse to get a sens of just how flexible and nuanced dialog can be.
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Let's assume a human civilization have been living for centuries, nay millennia, in a very large cave, not too deep under Antarctica - deep enough not to freeze, but shallow enough not to die because of underground heat.
In fact, unlike some other fictional underground civilizations, this one is aware of the surface's existence but all its people know about it is that it is extremely cold, hostile and deserted - well, it's Antarctica. They don't know there exist habitable lands and other humans on the surface elsewhere.
*Let's ignore all sustainability questions, i.e. food, power and such.*
My question is : **How did this civilization possibly get there ?**
My first idea was they arrived before Antarctica became the frozen continent we know, but a little bit of research taught me this was long before humans appeared.
My second idea was their ancestors arrived through galleries networks, maybe from South America (closest habitable land). However these tunnels, or at least a big part of them, must be under the ocean, therefore very, very deep (ocean depth + caves depth) and then probably impossible to stay in for long enough to travel for at least 1000km - whatever the mean of transportation used.
I assume they couldn't have arrived simply by boat, because they would immediately have died of cold, if not before, once in Antarctica. Also, the ancestors of this civilization were probably not technologically advanced - unless they were from somewhere like Atlantis, which is not what I want to.
I have been thinking about it and doing research for some time now but can't find any other way these people could have happened to live there. Any ideas?
**edit** : Another point I forgot to mention is that this civilization stays nowadays yet undiscovered, so they are "hidden" well enough for the explorers not stumbling upon their caves.
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*English is not my mother language. I apologize for any mistake.*
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You are right that tunnels under the ocean wouldn't work, they would be flooded quite apart from anything else.
Your most likely case is that they got there by accident and then got lucky. The founder population were on a reasonably large ship/boat or possibly a group of boats that got driven south by a storm and eventually wrecked against the antarctic coast. They were fortunate enough to arrive in summer and survived by hunting sea life and penguins for long enough to find the entrances into the underground caves.
When winter arrived they had managed to stockpile enough food that they withdrew into the caves near the surface and survived underground until summer came again.
Over the next few years or even generations they survived by gathering food during summer and then hiding in the caves over winter, gradually moving deeper and deeper into the caves as they did so until they found the cavern you describe.
For underground survival it's departing from reality a bit but you could have a geothermal hot spot that has melted an underground cavern to survivable temperatures. The roof of the cavern is actually mostly reasonably clear ice forming a natural lens so enough sunlight comes through during summer to support plant growth and as a result they are able to survive underground by farming and stockpiling supplies each year.
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There are a number of failed expeditions to the North Pole in last couple of hundred years. In some cases, all the crew vanished without a trace (presumably dead). Let us imagine for a second that, instead of freezing to death in the arctic wasteland, they managed to find an underground cave system deep enough to keep them warm. As the years go by, they try to make it back, but each attempt fails. As they began to have kids and settle down, they decide that the cave has became their new home and they give up all attempts of leaving.
They tell their kids about the magical lands where everything is warm. The kids believe at first but as they grow older they stop, believe that their parents made it up like they made up the Easter Bunny.
Of course, there is one major flaw, that these explorations didn't have woman crew members. But, with a little hand waving over the plot, you could say that some woman snuck aboard, or that some of the crew were woman dressed as men or that the captain insisted on bringing his wife and daughters with him despite the danger.
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In Russian movie Sannikov Land, there was a tribe, living near the pole, because there was an underground heater, like volcano, or something similar, (I don't remember what exactly). Then heater started to disappear, and luckily some expedition found that tribe. So, may be people moved there when there was something like volcano?
One other idea: What if there was a hot stream, like Gulf Stream, that disappeared because of climate change?
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Here's another possible way for them to be trapped - indications are that during the last ice age the sea level was down significantly. The people who became American Indians walked along the then coast from what is now Siberia to what the Europeans 15,000 years later called "The New World", i.e., the Americas. There is some speculation that the American Indians spread rapidly throughout the Americas all the way to Tierra Del Fuego, and might have done so before our current warm period began. We can postulate, since volcanoes occasionally produce lava tubes, that the people who became isolated lived in a lava tube on the coast of Antarctica for several generations before the ice melted and the sea level rose, blocking the entrance to the lava tube cave.
Concerning light - bioluminescence doesn't provide much light compared to sunlight. Fire will be difficult, too, so here I'm at a loss. And food? Oh, my.
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The founders originally came as a scientific expedition. They devised a habitation that could support larger crews, where eventually multiple teams would come by to study the continent. Potentially hundreds or thousands of scientists might be staying at once in a growing colony.
Now for whatever reason, the rest of the world nuked themselves back to the stone age (or completely died off), leaving the current colony stranded with no external supplies. Ideally, they imported the technology necessary to sustain themselves so they could grow food and collect water as necessary. However the elements are harsh and tend to erode the structure above ground. You could have two possibilities from here:
* The colony discovered a cave system that allowed them to move the colony and working equipment without too much fuss. Over time the original habitat falls into disrepair and they are forced to evacuate into the cave system.
* The colony already took use of terrain features that allowed them to dig into the continent. While there are above-ground structures, the structure could potentially have several floors leading underground. This would also allow them equipment to dig further if need be, and less extreme needs to move the entire colony.
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There is already some intriguing **cryptohistory** regarding Antarctica, which you can use to your advantage.
According to some accounts, the maps that Columbus used to reach America showed a land mass west of the Atlantic ocean. [Those maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map) came from a Turkish cartographer named **Piri Reis**, and they also showed the coastline of Antarctica.
There are several odd things about this-
* Piri's maps (which were based on much older sources, thought to be of Chinese origin) were created in 1513. Antarctica wasn't "discovered" until 1818.
* The actual land coastline is shown, despite the fact that Antarctica has been covered by ~1km sheet of glacial ice for ~10,000 years. We've only recently been able to determine the coastal landline beneath the ice, using satellites.
* According to some accounts, the coastline in Piri's maps is thought to be far too accurate, and would have required aircraft to survey it.
In your world, the civilization could have lived there pre-Ice Age, and then moved into caves and underground cities as the ice grew.
Incidentally, polar shift could have made the ice accumulation more sudden. It's thought that the Earth's crust is like a moveable skin over the molten interior. A good meteor strike at the right angle, and the entire crust could shift, changing the position of the poles.
Also, some theories identify Antarctica as the most likely location of Atlantis, which according to Plato was a pretty cool place.
Obviously, most of this is probably bunk, but *fascinating* bunk, for a good story.
More on Piri's maps...
<http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1165572-piri-reis-map-evidence-of-a-very-advanced-prehistoric-civilization/>
<https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PiriRies.HTM>
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There is a [Pole shift hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_shift_hypothesis)
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> The cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis suggests that there have been geologically rapid shifts in the relative positions of the modern-day geographic locations of the poles and the axis of rotation of the Earth, creating calamities such as floods and tectonic events.
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Probably 10k years ago South pole was not in Antarctica, but, for example, in the middle of Pacific ocean, and North Pole was in Tibet or Siberia.
And Antarctica has much more warm climate. So, around this time, your people could simply use boats to move to Antarctica.
Probably they found big caves with underground warm gazers with hot water (Antarctica is not seismic dead).
And this caves can sustain live and much warmer climate like the [Er Wang Dong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Er_Wang_Dong) cave in China. Even if this cave is covered by snow and ice today (but with some passages for ground for exchanging air).
Probably, this civilization live by growing fungus underground, hunting for penguins each summer on the surface and one day, they have found a crashed UFO of advanced civilization, with Artificial Intelligence.
It managed to understood their language and did all the best to help them, because it followed the 1 rule of robototechnics - "Newer harm a sapient being or leave it in trouble". And AI have translated all data banks with intergalactic wiki to their language and allowed them to use the nanosynthesizers.
And, on the time our humanity encounter this underground civilization, they will conquire us.
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There are other things to consider like overpopulation that will drive them to go to the surface, but the question is why can't they come up to the surface when they are suffering from overpopulation ?
The answer is simple :
* They are living way underground, that they can't dig up tunnels and they can't escape with conventional means, unless an earthquake happens.
* They are living by eating each-other : yeah reality sucks but that's the only way to diminish the population and provide food for surviving.
But who put them in this position long time ago (more than 10000 years ago) ?
I think they were living in a village near Antarctica and a huge mountain fell over them burying them underground for good.
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One of the first steps in technological is the ability of a civilisation to forge tools\* humans achieved this by using fire and creating forges.
There are obviously underwater heat sources but I don't anticipate our sea-folk being able to use the heat from underwater volcanoes any more than we can above ground!
How could an underwater civilisation generate and control the heat required to forge metal as we did above ground?
\*This question actually started asking how they would build computers but I've got back several steps!
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I don't think under water vents are that far off from being a possibility. Underwater vents can reach temperatures of over 800 °F putting them in the range of melting lead. While difficult to imagine, a completely closed crucible melting metal contained in the top of the crucible which is then pulled by gravity down into a crude mold of knife/spear head shapes may be possible with lava which can reach temperatures around [700 to 1,200 °C (1,292 to 2,192 °F)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava). Depending on the temperatures just below the vents it may be possible to get into more structural metals like bronze or copper in this way.
This of course requires active volcanoes either near the ocean (like the Hawaiian islands or oceanic vents/volcanoes).
Another possibility would be electrolysis; some of the magnesium produced in the world today is obtained from sea water and an electrolytic process. If chemistry is something your aquatic races gets pretty good at its possible that they could "forge" items from carefully chosen templates using electrolysis to coat the template with the desired material (for example a piece of stone or bone electro plated with magnesium)
Just the electrolysis of magnesium alone may be enough to produce forge level temperatures since magnesium can burn at over [5000 °F](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium).
Your aquatic creatures would likely need to be using techniques and tools that we don't have analogs too based on the environmental differences but I do think there is the possibility that they could effectively work with metals.
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To build on the answer provided by Culyx, I suspect it would be possible for a bioelectric race, to learn advanced forms of [electroplating](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplating) & [electroforming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroforming).
My limited understanding of electroplating is:
1. Dissolve a metal
2. Develop a 'mandrel' in the desired shape
3. Utilize an electric current which, in some way, bonds the metal to the mandrel (not exactly sure on the details of how...)
All of the above steps seem likely to be possible & even possibly easier, in an aquatic environment.
Electroforming is actually even more interesting, in that it is used to create highly detailed as well as much thicker products.
Electroforming could be used to actually produce things such as knives, swords, etc... out of metal, (not just a coating of metal on something else more easily formed).
Additionally electroforming can be VERY accurate in reproducing highly detailed forms/mandrels, even, if I understand correctly, on the nano scale (the scale of the transistors our current computer chips are measured in).
This would very much support the idea of making computer circuits in a similar form as our PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards)... to go with your other post on that topic (and what got you thinking about this one).
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Think of copper. It occurs native (no need to melt ore), and it is possible to cold forge it (again, no high temperature required). I see no reason why copper couldn't be found underwater.
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## You might see advanced stone age technology
I think you would be most likely to see stone age style tools. Flints would be common. Driftwood would be available. Bones would also be an option. Mining and smelting metal would be tough. Keeping a mine free of drifting debris would be a tough challenge, and extracting it without the ability to deliver a good strong hammer blow would also be hard.
## Water viscosity
Forming these into tools would be more challenging as you would need to work against the viscosity of the water when striking rock against rock, but it would probably be possible given time and effort.
## Hands
A bigger issue would be the presence or absence of hands (or similar) on your aquatic species. It's likely humans evolved hands initially to help with climbing, and later for throwing rocks. Neither of these avenues would be open to an aquatic species. Perhaps your species returned to the water, like seals and cetaceans on earth.
Can you describe your species in more detail?
## Forging
Let's assume however that they do want to forge metal.
Water boils at 100 degrees at sea level, significantly below the melting point of any useful metal, and turbulently boiling water not a good environment for forging anything. I would suggest that the creatures might want to evacuate the water from inside the forge, perhaps by creating a vaccuum, or even by filling the region with gas of some kind, maybe piped from the surface. A dry region might be a magical, future sci-fi thing for them.
Alternately they could go to the surface to forge, perhaps a floating raft or beach. This would be similar to us going into space.
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First of all I would like to mention that our first tools were (like sharpened stones or stone hatchets) of course can be created without the need of heat/fire/forging. Works like this require agile, flexible extremities such as fingers. Fingers seems to be rare underwater but agile tentacles aren't as far as I can tell.
That said on to forging (were agility also comes in handy).
As I just found out [sparklers](http://youtu.be/BONzS8i86bw?t=43s) actually burn under water (given some small shell). Wikipedia tells me that sparklers [burn at temperatures of about 1000°C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkler#Safety_issues) high enough for copper and gold to meld. So given a world where the "wood" of some underwater plants is basically the same material as sparklers making underwater fire seems plausible. Tricky parts remain still to be solved
* enlighten the fire underwater in the first place
* I have no clue about casting under water. You basically have a fluid in fluid. Could do weird stuff...
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The more I think about these questions the more I think that an amphibious animal would be much more likely to bridge this gap.
But as far as this goes, of course being able to create tools that only need physical manipulation could be fairly simple, such as breaking rocks for spearheads, etc. of course a shaft for that spear might be hard to come by. Since you need someway to manipulate tools, even to make tools, they will need dexterous limbs (possibly even a tongue) to work them. I would expect most tools to be 'grown' somehow and shaped. Along the lines of pearls and such.
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Does it need to be forged in the exact way we think of forging? Water is a great solvent for a lot of nifty things. I would expect they could deposit metallic structures in the shapes and alloys they need at least as easily as they could develop ways to heat up metal in a quenching environment.
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Another solution is **not having civilization at all, just one single organism - living ocean.** I drafted such world [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2655/living-planet-possible/2803#2803). Such organism can harness energy of the sun, convert it to electromagnetic field and do stuff. It is basically Type I civilization on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale> - and grows from there. No need to coordinate between those pesky individual organisms.
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Is it scientifically plausible for reincarnation to exist?
When I think of reincarnation I am thinking of the following:
* Memories, personality, biases, opinions and feelings carry over from one life to the next
* I am NOT thinking about an afterlife, as in returning to life as a better or worse kind of creature.
**Can a human mind be transferred to a new generation and how would it function?** Feel free to identify science that may not exist yet, but is plausible. This doesn't need to be common practice in my universe, just possible.
**Please limit your answer to a single plausible solution, not a list of potential ideas, and include the science or pseudo-science that would make it plausible.**
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I think the most scientifically plausible method available to us with what we know is one that has been mentioned: use computers. However, the tech required is still out of our current range, so if you want something applicable now I think you're out of luck.
The basic idea goes like this: someone dies, and you upload a copy of their entire life onto some server. You then download it and apply it to a newborn baby, who remembers the memories provided as their own.
Problem number 1 with this is the upload. Brains are like CMOS memory, which requires charge input to remember its data. If you shut a brain down, its electrical power goes off, and all the data is lost.
I propose to fix that with some more futuristic (though not completely unimaginable - we're getting pretty close to it) technology. When babies are born, your country's vaccination program should include death insurance: you have a microcomputer implanted in you. It monitors, records, and saves: monitors your vital signs, physical conditions and immune status, records and interprets your brain activity, and does regular cloud backups. If it detects your vital signs as too low to possibly support life, it could use some of its charge to power the brain for a while (this is the *really* tricky bit - we don't know how the charges in the brain work), take a final system image, and upload it.
I can see fixes for a number of the problems with this, actually:
* Storage requirements - we're already assuming futuristic tech, so you can assume greater storage densities too.
* Unit running out of power - wireless charging is well on the way to becoming reality; just add infrastructure. You could also sap power from your host human, though that's more dangerous.
* No Internet connection - store the information locally as well. This is also the purpose of the backups: if the final image doesn't make it, at least some things will still be there.
* Not enough neuroscience - we are developing interpretation of brain signals now, so add on however many extra years of development and boom you have enough neuroscience.
Scientifically, all of this development is possible: none of this contravenes the limits of reality or the laws of nature, so should be possible. It's also the most easily understandable by modern humans: we know lots about computer tech, so developments of it will be easier to pick up.
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One thing is to transfer memories/experiences(patterns) into something and the other is to reincarnate being conscious about who you were and still being you.
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Reincarnation definition:
begin a new life in a new body
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The best way to reincarnate is transplanting your brain into another body, that is real human flesh reincarnation and it will be possible.
Here is how:
* Make a clone of you (A clone is doable it's just that ethics and religion always stop this kind of mainstream research but you can make a clone of you for sure)
* Wait until your clone has developed fully his/her skull
* Try to keep your brain healthy, repairing it and keeping it oxygenated either with nano medicine and nano repairing or with cell therapy.
* Find a doctor who will perform the transplant
* When you feel and are ready do the procedure and also take in mind that part of your spinal cord might be transplanted as well
Costs:
doctor costs and embryo, go to clone surrogate mother
clone surrogate mother,about 9000 US dollars in India
clone living, its what you would spend with your child
transplant from old body to new body, about 80,000 US dollars
Depending on your lifestyle, where you are and the people you know you could spend more or less.
Again this is doable and we are currently looking for candidates who want to make a contribution on real medical research.
Is it scientifically plausible for reincarnation to exist? YES
Feel free to identify science that may not exist yet but that is plausible. This doesn't need to be common practice in my universe, just possible. This science does exist and exist on this planet.
**EDIT:**
one of the advantages of transplanting your brain into your cloned body is that if the procedure is successful you will retain the ability to feel similar or the same as before, I think that the reincarnation concept comes because of the need or want to continue to stay alive as you are now or even better. I don't think that "uploading" patterns into a "computer" will be a correct solution for the reincarnation problem because in my opinion the brain is where your truly self lives(I don't believe in a soul but for those who do, the soul lives in the brain) and the body is what maintains your brain functioning.
Assuming that person dies with a healthy brain but as a consequence some malfunction of the body:
If a person dies in an car accident and the brain health was optimal(there is no brain damage or brain death), one might argue that some problem in the body stops the heart from pumping blood thus stopping the heart, is the real cause of death itself. We can view this as a plant that dies because it not receives water. But if you had transplanted or kept the plant wet then the plant would be alive, this is a very silly comparison but it illustrates that common deaths is the lack of a healthy and maintained brain.
Aging which could be perceived as a natural death has a similar characteristics with the example from above, the body not functioning at optimal condition.
If you loose your home because of a natural disaster you don't stay homeless(death) you rebuild it or construct or acquire a new one in another place.
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The copy the brain into a computer is unlikely to actually ever work. The brain isn't a computer and there isn't a single place or channel you plug into to record or download the brain.
Memories and personalities are stored in the synapse in their connections and their sensitivities. The actual evaluation of information is stored their as well. There a billion neurons, each one having an average of of several thousand different synapses. Some synapses have several neurons providing input at the same time.
The is really nothing analogous to it. Trillions of minor states are summing in parallel constantly. Information in the brain looks like self organizing water than any kind of circuit.
Even if you could scan everything in the brain down do the molecular level,
The gate molecules on the surface of dendrites that store the bulk of the information have components that fall under the quantum threshold meaning their state at any given time can never be exactly determined. So if you scanned the brain you would get a fuzzy copy at best.
Of course, then you have to grow a clone and then induce every single neuron, axon and dendrites to grow in the exact same way as the original down to the molecular level. That would mean trillions at the least, of exact molecular locations.
Did I mention you have to do them all at the same time. Yeah, the brain from the neurons on up, automatically processes information that flows into it altering itself as it does so. If you build the brain up a bit at a time, the first parts you load in will distort the subsequent stuff.
You need some kind of teleporter technology ala star trek that would assemble a person molecule by molecule. But at that point your talking tech magic.
Better go the other way. Instead of loading the brain in a computer. Start with the computer. People have a chip that emulates a brain based on the inputs from the nervous system. Much easier to set up. When they die transfer the chip to a clone.
A semi-reincarnation would be to have recordings of sensory inputs, perhaps raw imports etc in great detail. Perhap form a very early age. When you die, a clone is uncorked and fed the memories as it grows up through it's own recording rig. Not exactly a duplicate but someone who grew up seeing a lot of what you saw, feeling what you felt getting your education etc might be pretty close to you.
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Ideas to make it plausible:
**Record brain and restore recording in new life** Requires huge amount of data (somewhere I heard about 10 petabytes per person), really advanced neuroscience. Also, you can go around this idea in having robots where you can "upload" self after death
**Breakthrough in mental field:** In other words, having developed some kind of meditation technique where dying person "imprints" himself into newborn baby. (Yes, I am kinda referring to Vulcan race)
**Brain transplant** It was done so many times in so many bad stories, that [no one will be even surprised](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDBL9cG7jhA)
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Less plausible, but still you can sell them
**Alien technology** You can find some artifact on Mars (how cliche...) which can revive one of the deceased explorers. Not really a reincarnation, but you have the idea I hope.
**Alien substance** For instance, Captain America has shield from [vibranium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibranium), so, there can be next asteroid failing down on the Earth, being from [Unobtainium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium). And you can somehow use it to transfer memories from one person to another.
Even less plausible:
**God is real** Pick a religion that believes in reincarnation. Make their God to come to Earth.
**It is very rare natural phenomena** Reincarnation is real and it happens in one in 10 million cases. And your scientist will publish a paper about his findings realising that sometimes something (electromagnetic field of Earth maybe?) causes in very special cases (huge Sun activity maybe?) that memories can be transfered from brain to brain
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Yes.
This is a common theme in Science Fiction, in particular:
**The Commonwealth Saga** (Peter F Hamilton)
Everyone has devices embedded in their neck that constantly records brain state. In the event of their death the recovered devices can be used to restore their memories into a newly grown clone body.
One of the sub-plots in one of the novels has a rescue mission searching for "survivors" on a planet. The people died a long time previously, they were looking for the brainstate recordings to bring them back to life.
**The Culture** (Iain M Banks)
Everyone in the culture is embedded with neural nets in their brain. These again constantly record brain state and on the death of the person they are embedded into send it to the nearest culture Mind. That mind grows a new body and loads the person into it.
**Other examples**
There are any number of other examples ranging from people converting themselves into beings of pure energy, digitizing themselves and existing within computers, and copying yourselves between different bodies. For example (slight spoilers) in the Nights Dawn trilogy:
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> There are a group of people running earth from behind the scenes. They grow new clone bodies and each time they become old enough transfer their memories into the clone and kill the original body
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The actual process behind this is not really looked at in detail, and without the technology to do it ourselves there's no way to go into it. The concept is easy enough to understand though, which is that you scan and record the current brain state and then somehow apply that brain state to a newly grown brain.
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Let's say we take the modern view of rejecting dualism and agreeing that mind and brain are one and the same. The brain is purely physical and functions by processing electro-chemical signals.
Current scientific theory, specifically quantum theory, says that you cannot exactly measure the defining characteristics (observables) of a single electron, let alone the enormous assemblage of atoms that comprise your brain. So from the point of view of mainstream science, making a copy of a brain seems impossible.
Even if you could come to within an acceptable tolerance of measurement, another problem is the need to scan the entire, enormous brain in an instant - i.e. at the speed of light. Otherwise you would have a mixed and inconsistent brain state.
And perhaps, most quantum-spookily of all, the act of measuring the brain state would actually alter the brain state. The wave functions of the measured particles would all collapse causing all wave-like features to vanish and only particle like features to remain. Or even visa versa. Who knows? Not me obviously.
Outside the main stream, digital physics/philosophy could hold out hope for a resolution. But here we are just all computers anyway!
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Putting aside the 'brain in a computer' argument so prevalent these days, here are a few more ways in which it is scientifically plausible for reincarnation to exist.
**1: Emergency Teleport**
The moment before your body dies, your body is scanned and you are reconstituted in another location (or time). Any injuries you may have sustained leading to your demise will be healed using your DNA as a blueprint. If you were suicidal, those memories would have to be erased to keep you from attempting to kill yourself all over again.
*See: Freejack, Gantz, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*
**2: Ghost in the Machine**
When you die, your "spirit" is intercepted, captured, and compressed, perhaps within a stasis field. You can then be recovered in order to transfer your awareness and memory to a new clone body.
*See: Freejack, Eureka, Multiplicity, Serial Experiments Lain, Kaguya Hime, MPD Psycho, RahXephon, Captain America, Age of Fire*
**3: Symbiotic Relationship**
When you die, your "symbiont" is intercepted, captured, and compressed, perhaps within a stasis field. You can then be recovered in order to transfer your awareness and memory to a new host body.
*See: Star Trek DS9, Stargate SG-1, Babylon 5, Federation of the Hub*
**4: Freakish healing**
When you die, your freakishly mutant healing ability heals your body and revives you.
*See: X-Men, Torchwood, Doctor Who*
**5: It exists already, but nobody told you.**
In this option, you don't remember your prior lives merely because you haven't lived them yet. You are *The First*. When you are reincarnated, the universe will roll the dice, and pick another being into which you will incarnate. You will remember everything, but you will never tell yourself that you do. Then again, memory fades with age, so you will probably only remember the last few incarnations anyway, if that. After all, you were just a baby, you could have dreamed the whole thing.
Why would the universe choose to incarnate *The First* partway into the existence of universe? How can the universe even be this far along if you haven't lived all of those other lives yet? I didn't say there wasn't a lot of timey-wimey handwaving involved. I just said it's scientifically plausible.
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If you assume that the brain is seen as a hardware / "wetware" on which a "soul", i.e. thinking program, can run, and when the particular brain dies, the "soul" is uploaded into some way of "cloud storage", waiting for the next available free brain which it can inhabit, then in theory it should be possible for the "soul" to save its endstate and to replicate it (may be not immediately) into the new brain. The reason why it does not routinely happen might be because the end-state is structure-dependent and every brain has slightly different structure (different neuron connections due to difference in the environment where brains develop). So in order to reincarnate a person, you have to place him/her in exact same circumstances as the person which you wish to reincarnate (which is more or less what was done to Dalai Lamas, by the way :-} )
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A biological take on it is found in [1] which describes a seemingly long-lived alien species. The sentient, humanoid aliens are all adults. Young non-sentient offspring live out in the swamps, but in the middle of the night, one of them might sneak into the village, into the hut of an elderly person, and by force take a large pearl-like ball from the back of the throat of the sleeping person. The swamp-dweller inserts the pearl into its own throat, which grants it the memories and personality of the village elder. The pearl here acts as a biologial memory device.
The young one take on the role in society of the elder, while the elder's body, now a non-sentient creature, scurries out into the swamp. The pearl grows slowly larger layer by layer and can last for centuries.
[1] the novel "The Accounts of an Old Astronaut" (Jon Bing, 1992)
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There is a good chance that we exist in an artificial universe - by which I mean that the universe exists within some kind of simulation\*- this gives an interesting angle on reincarnation because consciousness is computationally expensive and it is fair to suggest that a competent universe programmer would choose to reuse those resources rather than recreate them from scratch.
In that situation reincarnation is reasonably plausible, although as you might expect it is dependent on a lot of what-ifs.
Whatever the mechanism is, we don't really know very much about consciousness ( you will see frequent pop-sci columns suggesting otherwise, but although mechanisms are being gradually grasped, knowing what part of the brain activates under various circumstances is not the same as knowing what consciousness is ) so you have a fair amount of leeway for invention here.
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[\*The argument goes that if it is possible to simulate a universe then there are almost certain to be more simulated universes than real ones, which means that statistically speaking any given universe is more likely to be simulated than not. Experientially there would be no way for us to tell.]
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Been done in detail by a scientist. Read [Physics of Immortality.](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0385467990) Actually, don't bother to read this. Has a catchy title but not a very good read -- lots of boring equations too.
I read this a long time ago (Some interesting ideas, but his reincarnation scenarios may not be very interesting to you.). My engineering was mostly current back then, so I paid attention to most of the equations too.
* Computer sim of everything (you, me and everything else too). Ties this heavily into the [Berkenstein bound](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound)
* Universe is infinite, so each person actually exists multiple times
* We advance to point we control the collapse of the universe and the subsequent re-expansion cycle
* We advance to the point we create Jesus Christ in a small village in Palestine around 5 BCE - Yes, he really did say this. In this case I assume we could make other religions real too.
An alien brain parasite would be a lot more fun. Perhaps the Stargate Goa'ld would give your some ideas. Watching old Stargate reruns is more entertaining than most research too.
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The first step towards answering this is a philosophical one. You have to define all sorts of difficult terms:
* Life
* Death
* Self
* Memory
Unfortunately, those are hard enough to define that we rarely try to go further than that. However, if you define life/death as something in line with our traditional ones (i.e. heart stops beating), but you define your "self" and your "memories" to be structural (i.e. the information is stores in relationships within the self, encoded as a relationship between neurons rather than being physically assigned to a particular neuron), it is not impossible that there could exist a transform which perfectly maps the structural content of the "self" into another form which survives past death. Perhaps there is an encoded pattern in the seemingly random paths of air molecules which we don't understand enough to see a pattern, but for which a pattern actually exists. That structure of air molecules *could* last until the correct time where it interacts with a young child to trancode those memories back into structures made of neurons.
It involves several substantial leaps of faith regarding the existence of some durable storage media for transcoded selves, but it is scientifically possible without violating any laws. It merely leaves the curious question of "why hasn't science detected these patterns yet?" However, that is a question of how effectively the scientific method can discover something, not whether it is theoretically scientifically possible. As part of the answer, we know that discrete signals can be "whitened" through use of pseudorandom number generators such that they are discernible from noise (in fact, in simulations we use them as noise). The unknown question is what a continuous version of this would look like.
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Building from current science, I would approach it by employing a **Human-to-human, brain to brain interface**. See [here](http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/11/05/uw-study-shows-direct-brain-interface-between-humans/ "here")
The link discusses an attempt to relay mental signals from one brain to another. It's clearly in it's infancy, but if this technology existed then it would theoretically be possible to transfer memories from one brain to another in the future.
When someone is growing elderly they could have a clone of their body created, current cloning is possible but with health defects, but it's quite plausable that cloning could be made a viable option in the future. Once a clone was created the elderly individual could be connected to the clone and their brain patterns transfered to the clone. Their memories, and possible even their thought patterns and other parts of their mind that help make them who they are, could be imprinted on the clone. This would effectively make a young copy of the aging individual. The young copy can continue to live their life, and one day when they are reaching old age they could transfer their memories to a new clone.
If this was non-destructive transfer it would also be possible to create multiple young clones, duplicating yourself. It would also mean that the original elderly individual would continue to live, and die, after the clone was made. Anything they did or experienced after the transfer would be lost with the original's death still.
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The main problem with scientific reincarnation is that once it is possible, humans will be so primitive compared to the technology that the question then becomes "Why would someone bother with reincarnation?" Likely humanity will have passed into post-humanism or trans-humanism, where we can have any physical manifestation that we like. The very idea of "reincarnation" will likely be an anachronism, as the notion of "life" and "death" will be radically redefined in a world where you can make backup copies of yourself, or restore your physical manifestation to any degree you like.
Dan Simmons attempted something along these lines with Hyperion (very good read!), but struggled to explain why humans still mattered (ended up with a Matrix-like justification, unfortunately).
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I am not an expert in this matter , so I did some digging. First thing to be understood is how a long term memory is stored by the human brain. A long term memory is stored as a chemical rather a protein structure. So my idea is to recreate similar protein structures in the subject you want to reincarnate. This of course will require that the dead guy's brain is preserved by using cryonics so that the protein structures remain intact long after he is dead.Also tech needs to be advanced enough to identify these protein structures and synthesise them in the subjects brain.
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Science is a method. It's about experimentation. The Buddhist concept of reincarnation doesn't violate science. If it could be proved that reincarnated rinpoche have memories that they couldn't have gotten naturally that would prove reincarnation scientifically.
It's just that at the moment no such proof has been made in a way that's convincing.
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[
It's just my typical luck: I discover and recover the billion-dollars worth of gold on a [sunken galleon](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3347952/Wreckage-300-year-old-Spanish-galleon-holding-1-5BILLION-gold-silver-coins.html) on the same day my arch-nemesis decides to detonate a one Megaton hydrogen bomb right above my main surface ship. My arch-nemesis thankfully could not resist the temptation to gloat, so she let me know about it in advance, just to tell me of my doom.
My (perhaps not so brave) initial reaction was to rush to the submersible (all the gold still on it) and start diving without telling any of my surface crew. (I took Mr. Whiskers with me, of course). ... Hmm, on the upside, my labor costs for the mission are about to go waaay down.
Now I need to be moving horizontally as soon as possible (the arch-nemesis will surely send her minions after me). Unfortunately, I can only dive or move horizontally, not both (I know, *terrible* design, but wrong time to point it out) so I need to know how far I have to dive to be perfectly safe before I switch to the horizontal movement mode.
**Is it possible to escape a hydrogen bomb by diving in a submarine? If so, how deep do I need to go?**
[Answer]
Depth may not be your friend, but number of layers is. When the shockwave hits the surface of the water, much of it is reflected, but some of the shockwave is transmitted. How much? It turns out [they wrote a book about it](https://books.google.com/books?id=CZtDAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA16&ots=tTfPhlW33j&dq=impedance%20mismatch%20air%20water%20shockwave&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q=impedance%20mismatch%20air%20water%20shockwave&f=false):
>
> As discussed by Henderson et al. (1990), when a blast wave first contacts a water sheet, a large portion of the incident energy is reflected back towards the source due to the impedance mismatch at the air-water interface. The remaining energy, which is transmitted through the water sheet, forms the observed weak shock wave and the resulting initial pressure rise. For the experimental conditions considered here, the initial blast overpressure is mitigated by as much as 80%. This indicates that a water sheet may be an effective emergency blast mitigant.
>
>
>
In this case, the explosive was 48.4g of PETN (page 14), but I don't have any reason to expect any one shockwave to behave differently from another.
So how far do you need to be? Well, they haven't written a book about that, but they did write a [text file](http://textfiles.com/survival/blastfnd.txt) about it. I'm getting a little nervous just how much attention this problem has gotten...
```
Blast effects of nuclear bomb (this is for an 80 col. printout)
All distances to effect in miles. Note: airburst distances in ( )
Airburst for optimum damage for that effect, since the height of airburst
changes these figures represent worst case. See example for fixed height
results.
MT 1psi 1.5 3 6 10 30 overpressure
0.2 4(7.5) 3(6) 2(3.4) 1.3(1.8) 1(1.2) .55(.6)
0.6 6(11) 4.5(9) 2.8(5) 1.8(2.6) 1.4(1.7) .8(.9)
1.0 7(13) 5.5(10.5) 3.3(6) 2.2(3.2) 1.6(2) .95(1.05)
5 12(23) 9(18) 5.5(10) 3.7(5.5) 2.7(3.5) 1.6(1.8)
20 19(35) 14(28) 9(16) 6(8.5) 4.3(5.5) 2.5(3.4)
(Update note: the 5 & 20 Megaton bombs only existed in old Soviet Bear and
Bison class bombers and have been replaced with more modern 1 Megaton bombs.
The old US Titan missiles with their 9 Megaton bombs were scraped during late
1987 and early 1988)
```
...
```
Examples of damage (from SURVIVING DOOMSDAY -Clayton, from tables in THE
EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS 1977 -Gladstone)
0.5 psi Private airplanes damaged but flyable, windows have light damage
1.0 psi Windows heavily damaged, wood frame houses lightly damaged
1.75 psi Some, but not all, glass shards capable of penetrating abdominal wall.
2 psi Human body thrown hard enough to cause incapcitating injuries if standing
3 psi Human body thrown hard enough to cause 1% fatalities if standing up.
4 psi Forest road impassable due to fallen trees.
5 psi Wood frame house collapse, 1% of eardrums rupture (in the elderly)
6 psi Human body thrown hard enough to cause 99% fatalities
```
From this chart, 6 psi is enough for a 99% fatality rate. You're in a submersable, so that's 6psi in the air of the sub. The reflection off the surface means you need 5x that shockwave pressure (reciprocal of 80%), which is 30psi suggesting .95 miles of distance is needed. However, there's more to this, because you have *two* impedence mismatches. One from air to water, and one back from water to air. These effects stack, meaning you need 25x more pressure at the surface to affect you. Thus, you would need a 150psi shockwave hitting the water to reach the essential 6psi. If we look at the table, that pressure is remarkably hard to hit. Obviously the table doesn't go that far, but I'd be tempted to guess its around 0.1mi, or about 500 feet. As a point of comparison, Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was detonated at 1,968 ± 50 feet. I won't play CONOPS games with nukes, but I'm guessing that by the time the shockwave hits the water's surface, it's gone far enough to be below the magic 150psi level.
How about radiation? Piece of cake. From our [sister site](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1336/what-thickness-depth-of-water-would-be-required-to-provide-radiation-shielding-i):
>
> We know from the nuclear power industry that spent fuel storage pools
> are pretty safe places to be around, radiation-wise. They're actually
> safe to swim in, to a point, because they're serviced routinely by
> human divers. They just can't get too close to the spent fuel.
>
>
> We use these pools for short-term storage because water is a really
> good radiation shield. How good? Well, according to a report on the
> topic prepared for the DoE back in 1977, a layer of water 7
> centimeters thick reduces the ionizing radiation (rays and particles)
> transmitted through it by half (the remainder is captured or moderated
> to non-ionizing energy levels, mainly heat).
>
>
>
Considering that you can hold your breath and dive to 700cm in a pinch, radiation is going to be a non issue for any submersible.
[Answer]
The closer to the water that it is when it goes off the more energy is distributed to it. [Air is a 'compressible' medium and so a body can deflect some of the pressure wave around itself](http://science.howstuffworks.com/explosion-land-water1.htm). However water is not. Air allows for shrapnel and debris to travel and be dangerous projectiles. In water, it's reverse, the water significantly reduces the speed of projectiles and "radioactive particles" however it does transmit much more of the pressure wave directly.
It's like the difference between taking a long spring and pushing against someone to try and knock them over vs. taking a steel pole and pushing against them. The steel pole has a lot more direct transfer of the energy applied.
[Quoted](http://science.howstuffworks.com/explosion-land-water1.htm)
>
> If you stood outside of shrapnel range for an exploding hand grenade, you'd likely remain unharmed. If you stood at the same range to an underwater explosion, the pressure wave would probably kill you [source: Landsberg]. When the wave reached your skin, it would pass through you. After all, little of its power would be reflected because your body's density is similar to that of the water. The wave would hit the air-filled pockets of your body and instantly compress the gases there, possibly resulting in blocked blood vessels, ruptured lungs, torn internal tissues and even brain hemorrhaging. Waves hitting the surface of the water or the bottom of the pool would bounce back, inflicting even more damage. Explore the links on the next page to learn more about explosions, the human body and how to survive other dangerous encounters.
>
>
>
This implies that you would need to be farther away from the blast than if you were on the surface of the water. That is also with the expectation that it was at least partially submerged when the warhead detonated.
Water doesn't compress well and the deeper you go the more pressure there is on the hull, now add a huge blast 'pushing' that water down even more, it will try to collapse all air pockets to help 'relieve' the pressure. Your little tin can would need to be extra strong. I would guess that being just a little way under the surface and traveling as fast and far away from ground zero would be your best chance of survival.
Going straight down, you are adding more water pressure putting your sub ever closer to its tolerances. and keeping you in direct line of the pressure wave. Going straight away just under the surface you change the angle of 'attack' very quickly as you run. if it blows above the surface the angle of reflection get easier for the water to deflect the farther you get away. If it blows under water you can more easily move with the water or might be deflected out of the water, like puss from a zit.
So my WAG is about 10ft down and tear out as fast as possible. Try to be a mile away or more if you can.
[Answer]
**You're probably not going to be able to escape by going down.**
But this depends on what depth your ship was designed to withstand.
[This paper](http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/pres/123612.pdf) gives equations to calculate the psi from a variable TNT equivalent bomb at a variable depth under the water (in feet, sorry) from the explosion on the surface.
$P = 0.7 \* 2.16 \times 10^4 ({{W^{1/3}}\over{R}})^{1.13}$
Where $P$ is the overpressure in psi, the 0.7 coefficient is the attenuation due to being above the surface, $W$ is the charge weight in pounds, and $R$ is the range in feet.
The questions are derived empirically from this data:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aQHb9.png)
In your case, for a 1MT bomb, things [don't look good](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.7%20*%202.16E4%20*%20(1E6%5E(1%2F3)%2FR)%5E1.13%20for%20R%20%3D%200%20to%201000&rawformassumption=%7B%22MC%22,%20%220%20to%201000%22%7D%20-%3E%20%7B%22NumberMath%22%7D&rawformassumption=%7B%22MC%22,%20%220%20to%201000%22%7D%20-%3E%20%7B%22CalculateDateDifference%22%7D). Your ship is probably able to go to at least 1,000 ft underwater (to collect the gold). In sea water that's about 460 psi. The overpressure from a 1MT surface detonation at 1,000 feet underwater is over 1,100 psi. So, unless your submersible has a pressure safety factor of over three times the operating depth, you're not likely to survive.
I don't know your planned depth, but I will estimate you have a safety factor of 20%. Given that information I can see that if you designed for 3,240 feet, and dove to that depth, the overpressure would just be inside your safety margins.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/stAl5.png)
*Note that the blue line only appears to be going back up because the additional overpressure has stopped diminishing faster than the growth of pressure at increasing depth.*
[Answer]
One factor not discussed yet: Assuming you survive the blast and radiation, etc, what do you do next? Your ship is destroyed, and you're in a small short-range submersible miles from land. Even if the explosion was noticed by rescue parties (and odds are a 1 MT nuke would be noticed by *some*body), they would naturally assume that nothing could possibly have survived. The ship would be in millions of pieces, it would be ages before anyone noticed that the wreckage of the submersible was not present in the debris. Also, you mentioned there were henchmen searching for you, and they would do whatever they could to hinder any potential rescue efforts.
Your submersible would eventually run out of fuel - they're not really built for long sea voyages. Even the process of diving and resurfacing requires energy to power the sub, and without the ship to provide recharging and refueling, your vehicle will soon be dead in the water. And I'm guessing you didn't have time to pack a water desalinater and few weeks worth of rations in there. Not to mention navigation equipment, so you might not even know what direction to go to find the nearest land. Air would also be a problem. You can't stay underwater forever, but surfacing to restock on air runs the risk of discovery by the villain's henchmen. Your most likely prognosis at this point would be a slow death by asphyxiation, thirst and/or starvation.
[Answer]
I'm thinking most surface ships are faster than submersibles, especially ones laden with gold. :)
The villain is unlikely to give one enough time to run on the surface, in either case.
I suspect one would not be able to submerge fast enough to get out of range either. A 1MT nuke at, or near the surface is going to vaporize a large amount of water, possibly just rendering it as Hydrogen and Oxygen plus all the other bits dissolved.
The radiation that isn't breaking down nearby matter into its component atoms is going to be winging through whatever medium you happen to have interposed, so assuming the primary and secondary shock waves do not crush/damage your submersible, you would definitely want to check your dosimeter to see what kind of lifespan you can expect on your organs, radiation lesions are supposed to be some of the most painful internal injuries.
You would want to be several kilometers away at the very least.
[Answer]
Even if you escaped the explosion the chances of escaping radioactive isotopes is probably highly unlikely, but let's say you did. You technically would live slightly longer than those directly affected. Your chances of survival would depend how fast you can get medical treatment, if assuming such a treatment even exists. Radiation spreads faster than wildfire it can cover an entire block within seconds over several hundred km, you might even find taking an acid bath a more peaceful death than being affected by radiation. If it can affect air particles you can be assured the effects on water molecules can't really shield it. Though I would surmise a nuclear sub exploding would cause the body of water to become tainted for the next thousand years.
] |
[Question]
[
So I'm doing some worldbuilding for a small, isolated village on the coast. The winters are harsh, but making sure everybody has enough food generally isn't an issue because they have good trade with an outside source, and they are community-led so they make sure nobody gets left out in the cold (literally or metaphorically). New people will join the town every now and again, but not often enough to really impact the population.
I think the population is small - maybe two hundred people - and the average person reaches about 65-70. So my question is, how many kids have to be born to sustain this in a zero population growth model?
I had the idea that the town tries to synchronise births so that every child has friends their own age to play with and learn from, and I thought every 8 years or so made some sense - the 8-year-olds could start learning a craft, and the 16-year-olds could teach the 8-year-olds, whilst the 24-year-olds start to couple off and have their own babies. How large would each "clutch" of babies have to be?
I did some quick maths and got maybe 20-25, but I'm not sure how accurate this is. My reasoning was 8 (number of years)/70 (average lifespan) \* 200 (population) = ~22.
If anybody has a more solid idea I'd love to hear it! And if you think this is a really stupid idea then let me down gently please haha
[Answer]
Your calculation is correct assuming that all children born live to be 70. But that is not the case even with the most modern health care. So you may want to up the number of babies a bit, to account (1) for infant mortality, (2) for the tendency of young males to do stupid things which get them killed, and (3) for the general premature mortality due to diseases and accidents.
Here are two tables grouping the population by age cohorts; first assuming that all babies born live to 70, and then assuming a more natural [population pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid).
```
Age cohort
----------
0 to 7 22 32
8 to 15 22 27
16 to 23 22 22
24 to 31 22 20
32 to 39 22 20
40 to 47 22 20
48 to 55 22 20
56 to 63 22 19
64 to 71 22 18
---------- ---- ----
Total 198 198
```
A random isolated village of 200 people surviving long term would be a clear sign of divine favor.
* Unless the initial population was chosen *extremely carefully* by in-depth genetic screening there will be severe inbreeding effects after a handful of generations, raising the mortality. (Note that there are only about 40 to 44 women aged 16 to 47 at any given time.)
For example, in (the pre-modern principalities which would eventually coalesce into) Romania, a significant fraction of the women (and a smaller fraction of the men) married into neighbouring villages, so that there was some exhange of genetic material. This had also the positive effect of creating wider social networks.
* With such a small population the village is prone to demographic shocks. One good sized war, or one Tartar raid, or one epidemic and the population pyramid may be skewed irretrievably.
Consider for example what happens if the Tartars come and abduct half of your 20 women aged 16 to 31. Or consider what happens if the [Thirty Years' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War) comes and kills two thirds of your men aged 16 to 47.
Grouping births into clutches every eighth year has the massive drawback that almost all women of reproductive age suddenly find themselves busy with babies at the same time.
* In a real village of about 200 people, with 4 births per year, you have about 8 to 10 women out of the workforce at any given moment, for a total non-working population of about 40 souls (8 to 10 women and 30 to 32 small children), or 20%.
* With this grouping, every eighth year a whopping 32 women go out of the workforce for two or three years, for a total non-working population of about 60 souls, or 30%. True, in non-fertile years the non-working population drops to around 15%, but this is a *village*, they cannot accumulate surpluses to be consumed later.
[Answer]
I am trying to get my head around ALL the math.
Assuming this is a pair-bonded society, for a stable population, each female has to give birth to two children - one to replace her, and the second to replace her mate.
That means the female gets pregnant twice - once when she is 15, and once when she is 23 (or 23 and 31).
So 11 fifteen year olds get pregnant from 11 fifteen year old boys, and 11 twenty three year old females get pregnant from 11 twenty three year old boys.
And no one gets pregnant in between.
So either every male and every female have sexual intercourse on only two occasions, or this community has very good and enforced birth control or enforced abortion, neither of which you mention. That puts it in a very modern context.
Alternatively, there was a society that pretty much matched this one - [Sparta](https://www.greekboston.com/culture/ancient-history/education-sparta/).
One thing that is seldom mentioned about Sparta, was that it was intensely homosexual in nature, and the only sex between male and female was for reproduction that was strictly proscribed.
It was a very interesting society.
Having sex only twice in your life?
Be very careful of that which you wish, as the Law of Unintended and Unforeseen Consequences can sometimes be very brutal.
[Answer]
As others have said, mathematically 22 is right, but fails to account for early deaths.
But there is a much simpler answer. Every 8 years the number of babies you produce is the number of people needed to raise the current population to 200 (or some similar suitable number). This will be approximately the same as the number of people that have died since the previous birth time.
If things haven't been going well, you need a larger number than 22, and if people have been healthy, a smaller number will be fine.
And again, as others have pointed out, it would be good to occasionally add some fresh genetic material to the gene pool (which would also reduce the number of babies required at the next birth time).
[Answer]
22 is right. At 22 you do not have much cushion for downside risk, like people dying young. But that might be OK. Maybe there is not much downside risk of that sort.
I would be interested to read a story set in this world. I feel like it must be set in the future - infant and child mortality is nil, life expectancy is reliably long, women start having babies late in their reproductive life, and they have control over pregnancy such that they can time births all together. That last one is why it is in the future because most societies still cannot reliably pull that pregnancy control piece off.
Also "community led" sounds interesting to me. Maybe that is the secret. Good luck with your story.
[Answer]
Everyone here is answering the wrong question.
"How many kids have to be born every 8 years?" is WRONG.
Because it doesn't really matter how many are born in a given timespan, what counts is how many are born to each mother. [Which means the relevant timespan is the 30-40 years a woman is fertile]
Assuming relative monogamy, the fertility rate for a stable population is about 2.2
That is every mother hat to birth on average 2.2 children (between 2.1 and 2.5 depending on the level of medical care and general helath of the population).
2 is because the mother has to birth 1 women to be her successor-mother 1 man to replace the dad (who won't birth anythining) and then .X to account for premature deaths (premature here means before they give birth themselves)
Also the thing with the cluthes is unnecessary.
If it's important/interesting to your story/world, go ahead and do it, it's realistic enough, but there is no actual need for it.
First of all, some kids are way slower than others, making a more individual education more important, and secondary, since your small town will probably fall back to mechanical jobs like woodworking, huntil etc. an individual training for each job is way more important than general education, which means that the " 18 yr olds teach the 15 yr olds" won't help too much.
[Answer]
Meta answer:
Your culture isn't stable. There's a flood. 9 people get killed. Do you have an inbetween clump? Do you shorted the breeding period until you are back to 200? Do moms who have already had their 2 kids have a third?
Genetically your community isn't stable. You will have serious inbreeding problems. This translates into the unpleasant reality of a much larger increase in miscarriages, and kids with birth defects, and kids with genetic problems that make them die early.
A community of 200 is of necessity a primitive community, at best in a blacksmith pig iron tech level. At that level in our culture, you needed on average 4-5 kids per woman to break even. (My mom started grade 1 in a class of 32. She graduated from grade 8 in a class of 20. The other 12 died. TB, farm accidents mostly. That was 1920)
Women die in childbirth. Men are more likely to die in farm accident, or conflict. Your population demographic isn't even. I would expect that the 50-60 cohort would be 1/3 of the 20-30 cohort. You need to make a model of this on a spreadsheet.
At 4 kids per woman, and assuming a breeding time from age 16 to age 40, you need a kid every 6 years. But how many people do you know of who take 2 or more years to get pregnant once they have decided to try? Answer: Lots. So you have a 6 year interval on average, but the births are likely spread out over 2-3 years.
One way you can do this is to have women nurse their offspring for an extended period of time. Hard to get pregnant while nursing.
Another way is to have a cycle of plenty and famine. If your body fat drops below a certain point (about 9% I think) women stop menstruating. When you are that thin, you have other problems too. This in turn would shape society. Women are cherished, protected.
Option:
More communities. Many communities, several day's walk apart. At a certain age a boy goes walkabout. For a year he goes from community to community, and at the end of that year settles in one. Perhaps during that time he acts as a stud too. This reduces the inbreeding problems. It is also a way to more quickly spread the effects of a disaster on one town.
Or at a certain age, girls journey to the nearest town, and marry there.
] |
[Question]
[
Almost all of our terrestrial furniture is designed and depends on gravity. Beds to lie down in, chairs to sit down on, tables to place things on top. None of these would work in a zero-G environment.
For a hypothetical home without gravity, what would the furniture look like, and how would they work? Please keep in mind that this will be a typical home for humans, so it will need:
* Rooms or partitions for privacy
* Some place for sleeping
* Some place for eating, storing and possibly preparing food
* Some common space for recreation or socialisation
* Ability to store possessions (assume no fancy replicators nor post-material society)
* A place to bathe or clean yourself
* A place to eliminate waste (space toilet)
I suppose we can simply look to our current space stations for inspiration, but keep in mind they are severely cramped and spartan due to exorbitant resupply costs, and share very few functions with the typical home.
[Answer]
As pointed out in the comments a lot of the inspiration for this could can be found by looking at the crew of the ISS and other existing space stations. I'm going to assume (for simplicity) that the residents of this "home" are not native space dwellers... they're basically humanoid and evolved on a planet similar to earth.
**Rooms or partitions for privacy**
This would actually work much like in a normal room however there would be no floors, after all you can't walk on the floor or put anything on it. As such the rooms/doors could be in any shape configuration the household/"architect" wished. We'd see familiar constructs such as walls, windows and doors although there is no reason they would be square. I would suggest that all doors will be circular because the occupants of the house would not walk through a door, they'd glide face first through it.
Sharp corners would be far less common to avoid bumping into things.
**Some place for sleeping**
In the ISS the crew sleep in what can only be described as Sleeping Bags.
[Source](http://www.australianscience.com.au/space/the-risk-of-human-spaceflight-to-mars/attachment/iss-sleeping/)
These bags as well as providing warmth prevent the homeowners from drifting off and injuring themselves. There is of course no reason why these bags need to be on the "floor", they could be on any surface the residents desired.
**Storage**
Storage would actually be far easier than in a regular house because drawers and cupboards can cover any wall, floor or ceiling. However things you put in a cupboard would not stay there. As a result everything would be in much smaller draws with many more compartments (so when you opened one thing you didn't lose the contents of the drawer).
It's likely that a product's packaging would become part of it's storage solution. Everything would come in a container which fits into one of a standard set of sizes. Much like models and collectibles on Earth today.
**Food Preparation**
I think I've covered food storage storage above, in terms of actual cooking and preparing food I would expect much more to be prepackaged food or fresh food. Think office lunch style food, things which wouldn't require a lot of preparation. Soups would come in cartons like kids juices.
Lots of food would be microwaved, I would suggest that cooking with an oven/hobs would be less common because hot pots, pans and trays would simply drift off (I'm assuming the house would be fairly robust and fire itself wouldn't be as much of a danger as on modern day space stations).
**Social Areas**
For the most part I don't think there would be a lot of changes, chairs would probably have belts but there would be less of them. After all you're not getting tired from standing around! The only reason for chairs would be to help orientate the family so they would play games, talk or use another entertainment device as a group. Visitors not used to living in space would be far less disorientated if the family can "sit" together.
Decoration would most likely be orientated, televisions/pictures/computers all require a certain viewing orientation. It's likely that these would be consistent throughout the house. Any chairs would also be orientated this way.
**A place to bathe or clean yourself and a place to eliminate waste (space toilet)**
Washing would be largely sink based, after all showers and baths are a recipe for disaster as the water would float off around the house. Typically astronauts use wipes and small quantities of water on a flannels and sponges to wash.
How to put this delicately... I believe they use a tube. I'm afraid I'm not going to start searching for that on this computer!
[Answer]
The ISS (as celtschk mentions in the comments) employs a lot of solutions that can give us an idea of what problems have to be solved in order to get furniture to work.
Lets start with the nasties -
## A toilet - in SPAAAAACE[[2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_toilet)]
* Sucks waste using air flow
* Has gender-specific receptacles for urine and apparently men can use these at a distance, while there's holes on the one intended for women to prevent excess suction
* For poo, you have to strap yourself to the toilet. (at least on a space shuttle)[[1](http://iss.jaxa.jp/kids/en/life/04.html)][[3](http://science.howstuffworks.com/bathroom-in-space.htm)]
* Currently, the waste is sterilized and kept in bags, which are kept in drawers (with the exception of liquid waste sometimes, which is released into space), but feel free to just get rid of it all - I think they just keep it for studying.
## How to not look like me
* If you're a clean-shaver or want to shave your legs (I guess), you can use a regular razor[[5](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94-puZit3DA)] but you have to use [**AstroEdgeⓇ**](http://www.pandapost.com.tw/sites/default/files/Media%20Root/iCD6ind.gif)
* If you have to trim, you need to use a vacuum cleaner - I think I saw Chris Hadfield use a hybrid shaving machine and vacuum device, pretty neat.
* To cut your nails, yep, you use suction again[[6](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xICkLB3vAeU)] - Hadfield uses a vent (lol) but I guess you can just use the toilet or something.
* To brush your teeth, you can use a regular toothbrush and toothpaste but on the ISS, they just dampen it with water, swallow the toothpaste when done and rinse it with their mouth. The problem with a sink would be, the water would get everywhere (remember to brush as long as you can sing happy birthday]) I assume that you *could* have a toothbrush that secretes the water and paste and some specialized means of cleaning it out, but you'd have to use a toilet funnel to spit out the water safely.
## Sometimes you just need a shower
* For hair: On the ISS they use regular water and no-rinse shampoo. Apparently some use towels to scrub a bit. To prevent humidity, you need air conditioning :P. I assume that you could improve things a bit by packaging the shampoo and water together, but overall, no showers as we know them.[[8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOIj7AgonHM)]
* For the rest: Sponge baths with moist sponges and get it out with a wet towel.[[9](http://science.howstuffworks.com/bathroom-in-space1.htm)]
The problem remains - water gets *everywhere* and the excess humidity would be a huge problem, so you make the process as efficient as possible. If you *don't* however have an issue with water supply, power to pump the water to high pressure and your air conditioning is super-efficient, you could probably have a regular shower.
## You can't be up all day
* Sleeping without gravity means, as usual, strapping yourself in. Sleeping bags are efficient for this since you can confine yourself and stay warm.[[9](http://science.howstuffworks.com/bathroom-in-space1.htm)]
* Eating means again, strapping yourself to the chair.[[9](http://science.howstuffworks.com/bathroom-in-space1.htm)]
* To drink, you use a bag with a straw.
* Since you're not feeling the weight of your body, you don't really need a couch to sit on when watching TV, so you just float in place.
* Astronauts have to use special food bags, prepared for rehydration (like Marty's mom in BTTF2, although *noone* can rehydrate a pizza like her!). Stick in the wall and pump it with water.[[11](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGiQZIb34_s)]
## How does all this come together if you're *not* starved for space and supplies?
**Rooms:** Not very hard - regular sliding doors would work just the same and probably would be preferrable. Regular doors don't depend on gravity besides, in some cases, to define whether they're going to open more or close if they're left loose. I'd imagine that if you're in space, or in a general zero-G environment, using the regular air pump systems you see in a lot of places to make sure a door closes would work fine. If you want a door that can stay open instead of float back and forth, you could use a stopper, much like how large gates have: there's an arc rail on the floor with holes and you open the door however much you want, then sink the stopper into the hole.
**Bedding:** You're probably limited to the astronaut solution. The problem is keeping yourself from floating around while sleeping, so if you fall asleep on your desk you might float out of the room or something. A simple strap would prevent you from floating too far, so you just get into the habit of using your new, fancy Nike desk strap. This means sleeping bags attached to surfaces, no matter the orientation, are most preferable and convenient. They can be made large for comfort and have a velcro on them for your water bag, in case you need a drink at night.
**Eating:** Again, just use your fancy Nike strap (might be a good idea to wear these and just hook them wherever you need instead of having one for each piece of furniture). Sit down, strap in, eat up. Liquids go in bags, solid stuff is packed together. I imagine sandwiches will be very popular. Spoons aren't obsolete, since peanut butter is still around and 2nd-3rd generation children growing up in space will probably be able to eat soup using a spoon - assuming the soup stays in a plate :P.
Since you don't want to eat rehydrated pizza forever, you'd have a kitchen. Instead of cooking in a pot, you'd probably have a kitchen on the wall, with modules equivalent to pots and pans, stirring included! Glass allows you to see what's going on but everything stays sealed in until it's ready. Put your veggies in a slot that flows through an airlock into your square pot, inject water through the water supply, inject salt through the appropriate button that links to your salt module and give it a temperature. Once it's done, tell it to suck it into a bag or dry it out and send it to your oven module, where you've already prepared a pan. Let it cool down and then take out your pie - use a fork. I assume kitchen appliances would be much the same overall, but with a bit more automation to prevent spillage and make things easier to control. The market would be full of tiny modules for this and that. You can get a full cooking process, just like home, but on the wall.
**Recreation:** Again, just a matter of partitioning space. Couches can be done away with (use your Nike strap) and everything can be velcroed in place if necessary. Stuff that doesn't have to be moved can be bolted or screwed in place.
**Storage:** The real question is, how do you keep your stuff in place? Cupboards are easy - however again, the astronaut solution is probably best. Get everything velcroed - possibly storage will have velcro on all interior surfaces (when intended for regular people stuff) and items come with velcro attached or you have bags of various sizes to put your stuff in and the bag carries the velcro - little difference from drawers and drawer sizes and shapes. Velcro isn't magnetic, so no problems there - it works for everything.
**Toilets:** As seen above, if you can handle the excess humidity and have enough water and enough power to pump it, you can just have a regular shower. Even water spillage wouldn't be *as much* of a problem. Still, you'd probably have hybrid cleaning tools to make things easier and faster. A bubble bath might still be out of the question but you get a zero-G shower, which can be just as fun - the point of a bubble bath is partially the relaxation, I assume a lack of gravity can have a similar effect.
For waste, the existing solutions work well enough and I don't think much more than appearance would be different. You *might* have a luxury bathroom that *resembles* an Earth one, but it would work much the same. Air vacuums, bags for storage or shoot the waste into space and vents to prevent your hair and nail clippings from choking everyone and floating into electronics.
[Answer]
Just a small addition to the great answers already here:
Human health degrades pretty rapidly in space unless you exercise regularly. So having a gym at home should be much more common. Look up ISS (again) exercise machines for inspiration. I once saw a video of one, and it looked like a simple static bike.
If resources are really plentiful, some completely different gym stuff could exist, like an entire spherical padded room for jumping around, or even a centrifuge to lift weights in simulated gravity.
(optionally, you could magically make that go away with unspecified advancements in medicine)
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[Question]
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I have a colony of humans living underground in man-made catacombs on another planet. They are, essentially, digging/blasting as they go; they did not create a complete underground city first and then move in. Thus, I need for them to be able to expand "in place", without harming themselves with either falling debris or seismic instability caused by their actions. And I need them to be able to do it practically; pick-axes probably won't do the job alone. Their technology level is near-future. They have access to the surface (with proper protection), so they can conduct geological surveys instead of digging blind, and can also vent debris/heat/fumes/etc there.
It occurred to me, perhaps incorrectly, that a softer stone like limestone might allow them to do this more easily -- that they wouldn't need explosives as significant as for (say) granite, and that they might even be able to hand-dig in especially-sensitive areas (like *right* outside where people are living). But that led me to wonder how stable an underground habitation would be if carved out of soft stone -- at what point, either depth or size, would it become too unstable to risk living in? Or is that not how stone works?
How should I be thinking about this? Can a settlement of at least hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people be safely built in a soft rock with low-impact methods of digging/blasting? (And what would those methods be?) Or, alternatively, is there a way to expand such a settlement in "regular" hard rock without causing cave-ins and other hazards? Do they need to dig deep rather than shallow?
I am in the beginning stages of building this world and haven't worked out details of what this planet is like, beyond that the surface environment has become inhospitable. So if particular properties of the planet would make this easier (volcanic? mostly water, or alternatively mostly arid? etc), that's fine. (The nature of the inhospitable environment doesn't matter a lot either, in case that matters. I just need to keep my people underground and expanding.)
[Answer]
The main problem actually is where do you put the rock that you dig out. You would either need access to the surface to dump it somewhere or some way to compress it and then use the compressed rock to make the walls of the tunnel.
For digging through rock close to habitation you would definitely not be using explosives. Modern tunneling machines are quite capable of doing so without explosives and do not have so many associated risks.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine>
>
> Tunnel boring machines are used as an alternative to drilling and blasting (D&B) methods in rock and conventional "hand mining" in soil. TBMs have the advantages of limiting the disturbance to the surrounding ground and producing a smooth tunnel wall. This significantly reduces the cost of lining the tunnel, and makes them suitable to use in heavily urbanized areas. The major disadvantage is the upfront cost. TBMs are expensive to construct, and can be difficult to transport. However, as modern tunnels become longer, the cost of tunnel boring machines versus drill and blast is actually less—this is because tunneling with TBMs is much more efficient and results in a shorter project.
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It's entirely plausible that a society such as you describe would have one or more TBMs running continuously, and a substantial number of people would be involved in the maintenance and operation of the machines. The main problems would be getting hold of the raw materials required to run the machines and line the resulting tunnels and (as already mentioned) getting rid of the waste.
Depending on just how "future" their tech is the TBMs themselves may be very similar to our current ones, or significantly more advanced. For examples ones able to use force fields or ultrasound or similar to do the digging would need far fewer replacement parts.
[Answer]
There are tables, created for mining engineers that list types of stone e.g. sandstone, granite, limestone etc and tell exactly how large a tunnel they will support, how big galleries and where to leave pillars etc. I've seen them in old WWII combat engineering manuals as well. Most of those are available on the Internet Archive and other similar resources. These will tell you the size and shape of underground structures in particular stones as well as the relative merits of each.
Each material has its own properties, strengths and limitations. These parameters are based on centuries of expense and testing. Giving how many lives were paid for the information, we should probably treat the tables as sacred.
In main, the major restriction in subterranean construction is width. It's the compressive load that a section of unsupported ceiling can carry that defines the maximum width. This can be mitigated with an arch shape but speaking generally it's easier to support a narrow deep passage than a wide shallow one. In many large mines you see a shaft maybe 3m wide but as much as 20m tall, divided top to bottom in stories with one way traffic on each level.
Soft stones support less width and support less shallow arcs. In the stone city of Petra, there are several large interior spaces carves as a series of connected domes with pillars at their vertices. Hard stones support larger spaces but their rectilinear crystalline structure makes arch hard to carve, instead the tunnels are triangle shaped at the top
Soft stones support less weight but are less brittle and fail more gracefully i.e. they give you warning. Hard stones are brittle and appear fine until they crack and the cracks can propagate a long way.
Soft stone often have pockets of sand, gasses or water that can cause serious and unexpected problems. Soft stones are more likely to be associated with organic materials like coal and methane that can cause explosions. Hard stones are safer in those regards but contain preexisting cracks and strain faults whose pressure mining can suddenly release.
The ideal material for tunneling and building extensive structures in is salt domes. These are thick bubbles of salt, many dozens of kilometers in expanse ofter a kilometer or more in thickness that remain from the evaporation of ancient oceans. They are easy to mine, support large dome shaped chambers and fairly wide and tall tunnels. They are used to store just about anything from the legendary government cheese to strategic oil reserves to seed banks.
During the Cold War extensive designs were made up for facilities supporting several thousand to built in large domes in Michigan and Utah.
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If your looking for gloom and oppression, I suggest the colonist must dig through relatively soft but "rotten" rock which has lots faults, pockets of water and gas, perhaps mixed strata as well if digging into an uplifted hill or mountain side with lots of mixed strata.
Soft stone means smaller chambers with lower roofs, giving a claustrophobic feel. Ventilation is more difficult. It's harder for find places for large groups to communicate leading to paranoia. With mixed strata and pockets of water and gas, mining dangerous, collapses common and overall stress raised.
There is a place in Turkey where people dug extensively into the local limestone to create havens for generations of attacks. Though very expensive and clever, they are rather small and gloomy even with modern lighting. Might want to check on them.
Of course for gloom and grim, it's hard to beat a coal mine. A colony might have to tunnel in for both shelter and fuel but the walls are dark,the dust gets everywhere and in everyone. The softer coals are mined in very small shafts (that's why surface mining became so popular, that and less water pollution.)
[Answer]
First off, I believe this documentary will prove beneficial for you: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkyfC_AOLI>
To answer all your questions, given near unlimited resources you can build a construction to house an arbitrary number of people underground. However, if your resources are limited, it depends on a bunch of things, namely the following:
1- How do you intend to configure the underground areas to house everyone. What type of geometry, living spaces and what not are you picturing. This will be a major influence on whether it's feasible or not.
2- At what rate do you want to expand the habitation at.
3- How far underground you want your colony to be.
4- The geology which you are mining through.
In response to your initial questions:
**It occurred to me, perhaps incorrectly, that a softer stone like limestone might allow them to do this more easily**
This ones a double edge thing, mining in soft rock is much easier than in hard rock, although the major downside is that soft rock isn't as strong as hard rock. The trade off would be: harder to dig but much bigger/safer rooms or easier to dig but necessarily smaller/slightly less safe rooms.
**At what point, either depth or size, would it become too unstable to risk living in? Or is that not how stone works?**
That's not how stone works. Given the proper data and knowledge, a suitable habitation can be engineered in any rock mass, however the cost of doing so (resources, time, etc) will differ depending on the circumstances. Given infinite resources you can build whatever you want where-ever you want. Although, if you're colonists are resource limited, then it becomes too costly/risky the deeper the colony and the bigger the rooms you want to make.
**Can a settlement of at least hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people be safely built in a soft rock with low-impact methods of digging/blasting?**
The safety of your rooms won't be dependent on the digging technique, any technique can be modified so that it's low-impact. When you think about blasting you need to differentiate production blasting and construction blasting. In mining, production blasting is done with the goal of getting as much stuff out as quickly as possible so it ruins the rock, in construction blasting you take a very controlled approach and you do it in such a way that you don't screw with the rocks strength. Example, Hydro Quebec has underground power houses which can be considered pretty massive: <https://www.google.ca/search?q=hydro+quebec+underground+power+house&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi56aSKku7JAhUBlB4KHSr0C6IQ_AUICSgD&biw=1184&bih=679#imgrc=XxoK3SQMfdINGM%3A> they were made by using blasting techniques and are designed to stay there for many many many years.
**Is there a way to expand such a settlement in "regular" hard rock without causing cave-ins and other hazards?**
The stability of an underground opening is dependent on two aspects:
* The intact rock's strength (measured by the UCS (unaxial compressive strength))
* The quality of the rock mass (how nice the rock is, think slab of counter top granite vs gravel, it's measured using GSI, Q-System or RMR)
The stability of an underground opening will be dependent on these two values, assuming you have a VERY VERY good rock, then you're looking at being able to have a room as wide as 15m by 15m tall by infinitely long while still being on the safe side. There's a number of empirical rules have been developed over the years in order to calculate exactly how big you can make an opening. One of the most used guidelines are from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), it details what type of support system you'll need for a given rock quality and opening size.
**Do they need to dig deep rather than shallow?**
For geotechnical stability, the answer is always more shallow. The deeper you go the higher the in-situ stresses in the rock. There's a bunch of technical information that goes into this but basically, the deeper you go the smaller your excavations needs to be, too big and you risk failure within the rock itself which can lead to rock burst which can/will eventually kill your settlers.
Mind you all of this information is based on currently knowledge, if the civilization is near future then there's a good probability that would have learned more about rock mechanics. A lot of research is being done in the domain of geotechnical engineering and although we have a good enough understanding to do actual engineering, a lot of this stuff is still pretty black magicqui due to the nature of rocks. To this day, after 150 years of research predicting rock bursts is still akin to magic.
[Answer]
According to Wikipedia:
>
> "A cave-in is a collapse of a geologic formation, mine or structure which may occur during mining or tunneling. Geologic structures prone to spontaneous cave-ins include alvar, tsingy and other limestone formations"
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You can safely assume that you don't want to dig through limestone. The answer can be found in another question:
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> What causes cave-in's?
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With the answer to that we can know how to prevent a cave-in. Cave-in's are mainly caused by:
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> • Water causing soil and rock to come loose and fall
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> • Not enough support in an area resulting in the roof simply falling down
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> • High pressure (mainly caused by too much weight on top of the roof) causing the roof to fall down
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So, to prevent cave-in's in our underground colony we can ensure that there are no area's that are wet/damp. We can also make sure there is enough support. I assume our colonists don't want to go up to the surface constantly even though it is possible. Therefore we must do this:
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> • Dig out the area using conventional methods, e.g big drills, mining tools, etc.
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> • Using materials they have mined the colonists can make rooms inside the mine made of metal materials they have found such as iron, aluminium, copper, etc.
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We will have to make sure the material we use for making the rooms is strong enough to hold the pressure of the soil and rock above it. A plus side to this method is that we can easily get materials from the minerals we mine. As we mine along we can use support beams made out of the material to hold up the mine. Once the rooms are built in that area we can safely destroy the beams causing a cave-in.
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[Question]
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Is it possible to have a Terran-like world where the seas and oceans do not have high levels of salt?
Could, in fact, oceans and seas exist that were fresh-water?
Excuse my ignorance.
Assumptions:
* The world is roughly the same as Terra - explain any deviations required for your answer to work in detail.
* Atmosphere, climate, et al are all pretty much the same (again, explain any necessary deviations in detail).
[Answer]
If salt were rarer than on Earth, and if there were some mechanism to remove dissolved salt, then it would be possible. The [Great Lakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes) are actually freshwater inland seas, so you could use that as a model. If salt were rare, there would be a food-chain to recover it since [salt is needed](https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/chemical/chemistry-and-seawater/salty-sea/weird-science-salt-essential-life) for life. Salt-consuming microbes would consume the dissolved salt, and then be eaten by larger animals. Upon death, salt would be released back into the cycle as a part of decomposition.
[Answer]
## What is salt?
If you answered [Sodium Chloride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride), then simply have a world with very little Sodium and Chlorine. If you answered '[an ionic compound formed from an acid and a base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(chemistry))', then you either have to get rid of all of the acids and bases or find a mechanism to sequester them, and that'd be difficult on a rocky (terran) world.
## Salt Lakes
would be the most likely geological mechanism for sequestration, and the numbers couldn't really work out unless you have giant, below-sea-level inland basins with occasional catastrophic floods followed by long dry periods in which the sea water evaporates leaving a halite crust in the basin. Saltwater is about 5% salt by volume, whereas fresh water is less than .05%. I believe that the number of cycles to change the salinity from the original to final values given the volume of the ocean and the volume of total water is
$$c = \frac{\log\_{10} \left(\frac{s\_0}{s\_f}\right)}{\log\_{10}\left(\frac{V\_t}{V\_o}\right)} = \frac{2}{\log\_{10}\left(\frac{V\_t}{V\_o}\right)}$$
If the inland basins were one tenth the volume of the oceans, it'd take almost 50 cycles to make the oceans fresh. For this method to work, there could be no way for basin water to escape to the ocean which would be a very strange topology. There is a reason that all of the salt lakes on Earth aren't that big. Additionally, the entire basins would be very salty unless you had rain pulling the salt to the bottom of the basin.
A life based mechanism might be more likely, but that would only apply to the most recent eighth of Earth's history. You'd need a group of halophiles moving salt from the ocean to sequestration somewhere. Perhaps if humans stop putting waste salt into the environment but keep pulling salt from the ocean, we'd eventually qualify.
## On Life
We evolved from ocean creatures. Our blood's pH is regulated like the sea, our wounds heal faster in the ocean, and the same is true for most animals. While Earth creatures need salt to live, it's very likely that on your world, creatures would have different mechanisms to deal with fluid regulation and neural communication.
[Answer]
**It's possible, but would have to be through a contrived water cycle.**
The IRL oceans are salty primarily due to the way silt and other non- water contaminants get moved during the natural water cycle (see [NOAA page here](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whysalty.html)).
The possible freshwater ocean setup I can imagine would require a system with almost perpetual rainfall into the ocean basins, with water flowing AWAY from the oceans, and possibly into an area where evaporation is highly facilitated. Such a world would have very turbulent airways, persistent rain, and essentially no sunlight. Plants would be primarily aquatic, and would generally draw energy from geothermal sources above most others (as photosynthesis would likely not exist in any noticeable quantity).
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Some exoplanet are though to have oceans hundreds to thousands of kilometers deep without any land. It is conceivable that all the dissolved salt will sink to the bottom of these oceans due to the density of salt water vs fresh water. Also when there is this much water, there is a good chance the salinity is so low, it would be undetectable even if the salt does not sink.
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Here is my scheme to freshen the water of your world. **Sequester the salt in geological formations.** This actually happened / happens on Earth and so you can keep everything as it is now.
1. Ice age. Frozen water is fresh. As water freezes and accumulates as ice, the residual water gets saltier.
2. Evaporation of residual water and sequestration as sedimentary beds. Salt mines are located within thick beds of salt, presumably deposited by ancient events of this sort. It is a surprise to me that when the water comes back, the salt deposited does not just dissolve. Here is a working salt mine supplying Cleveland. The mine is directly underneath Lake Erie, which is freshwater.
<http://fox8.com/2013/01/31/fox-8-explores-salt-mine-below-lake-erie/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xWBbM.jpg)
Here is the Jacuzzi of Death: a site below the Gulf of Mexico where underground salt deposits are dissolving up into the water above. Presumably this is limited by a lack of water movement and mass action: once the water reaches saturation less salt dissolves from below. I do not understand why saturated salt solutions do not just pull in fresh water osmotically but that process must be slow.
<http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-jacuzzi-death-brine-20161102-story.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dt0I9.jpg)
>
> These underwater lakes formed over millions of years as a much
> shallower Gulf of Mexico evaporated and left behind massive beds of
> salt. Over time, the salt layers became submerged and buried. Under
> the weight of these sediments, the salt layers shift and crack the
> shale above, allowing oil, gas and brine to escape.
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> The result is a super-salty brine so dense it doesn’t easily mix with
> the seawater around it
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So: your world is frozen long enough for any dissolved salt to be deposited in sedimentary formations. The good thing about writing this is it is basically a riff on the Ice Age, which is familiar ground. Or your world could get super hot with all water present in the atmosphere as vapor - that would be trickier to write but also more novel - as once all water was vapor you might get a Venusian-type runaway greenhouse effect.
When the world melts (or cools?), fresh rain and runoff from melting ice will fill the bodies of water. Over time, these bodies will presumably get salty as the oceans have from residual salt on the land. But the Caspian Sea is 5 million years old, and still only a third as salty as the ocean.
ADDENDUM/
I have been musing over this concept. After you lock up much of the water as ice in the north you would probably still have a very salty equatorial sea, or a sea at a crustal low point. Relieved of the over lying water pressure, a volcanic event could happen in this sea, boiling off the water and covering what was left with basaltic flows. A [Deccan flow](http://www.largeigneousprovinces.org/sites/default/files/2012May-fig-2.jpg) type event could serve double duty and also trigger the end of the ice age.
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Yes, it's quite possible, if salt were not so prevalent on the planet.
Presumably, life on that planet would have evolved into a form that wasn't so dependent on salt, just as different fish have evolved to either flourish in salty water, or in fresh water.
When considering an alternate world of your own making, remember that it doesn't have to be identical to earth in climate or chemical makeup. Within reasonable limits, life would adapt to that planet's conditions.
[Answer]
I'd imagine two or more continents connecting to trap a section of ocean between them, and the through the sodium cycle most of the salt would be sucked into the mantle. If the water level of the trapped ocean were higher than normal ocean level, there would be no in flowing currents to add salt, so the only water source would be salt less rainwater. The problem is the converging continents would meet long before plate tectonics removed a noticeable amount of salt, so you would have to come up with some factor to hold the continents in place.
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[Question]
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Here are the particulars:
* Medieval era and technology
* City population is 25,000
* Arable farmland available as needed
* Ocean access for fishing
* Good sized trading hub
* Politically stable
What percentage of the population can act as a standing military long term during peacetime?
The primary role in peacetime is the protection of roads from bandits, and defense against barbarian raids.
I am primarily interested in finding out how many soldiers a population of 25,000 (soldiers included) can support.
[Answer]
Based on historical data, the adult population in a typical polity in the Middle Ages could support one fighting man for every 15 adults maximum.
As noted, fighting men didn't exclusively "fight", but were generally higher ranking Feudatories, who acted in administrative roles for those of higher feudal rank to whom they owed alligence. Since the web of relationships was often theoretical above a certain point (certainly too difficult to enforce effectively), much of Europe during the Middle Ages (or Japan during the period before the Tokugawa Shogunate or China during the Warring States periods) was divided into much smaller polities run by minor or "mid level" nobility. So in addition to being able to fight and supply a set amount of fighting material (coming with horses, armour and weapons), they also adjudicated disputes, supervised the harvesting of corn (wheat), the milling and distribution of flour, ensured markets ran (with their percentage of the cut) and so on.
The other reason the ratio of fighting men to the others included the high demands of time for training for war, and the resource bill for the man, armour, weapons, horses etc. This could be made up in part by a levy of the peasants to provide foot soldiers, hiring of mercenaries and the arrival of brigands who would be happy to serve for a share of the loot.
This relationship ended with the start of the Infantry Revolution, when simple to use weapons and tactics (crossbows, pike formations, pole arms) were introduced, allowing a mass of peasants or yeomen to take to the field and *effectively* fight against mounted knights, so if your setting is in the mid 1400's or beyond, then the percentage of effective armed manpower increases, although the amount of time that they could take to the field will decease (since they still need to carry out farming, crafts and other daily tasks to stay alive and prosperous).
[Answer]
There are two factors limiting the amount of man power a society can deploy, overall population and internal political cohesion. Of the two, the latter is the most important.
Medieval societies were societies built upon the military oppression and exploitation of the farmers (peasants.) They could never allow the peasants to become to well trained, armed or coordinated or they could defeat the aristocracy. They called up a few farmers as possible and forced them to provide their own weapons from converted agricultural tools and whatever armor they could improvise.
Farmers that got to skillful on the battlefield tended to end up mysteriously dead.
The European military warrior class the so-called "nobility" comprised roughly 5% of the population. Around 5% were clergy, artisans, traders etc and largely considered non-factors in warfare.
During the harvesting and planting seasons, essentially non of the farmer population could be called up out wrecking the nobles own fortunes worse than loosing a war would. In Winter time, armies could not travel so war occurred in the narrow summer months.
In theory, the nobles could require all peasant males in a certain age range, usually 17-50, to provide 40 days of military service a year during the summer. That would be roughly 15%-20% of the total population.But even in summer, no more than half the available man power could be done without on the farm so more like 7.5%-10%
However, save for the rare chance at plunder in a foreign land, peasants didn't get paid so they had little incentive to comply with their feudal obligations (which forced upon them by conquest) so getting enough men to show up was a constant struggle.
Neither did it help that well into early 1800s, military service of any duration beyond a couple of weeks was looked on as a death sentence. 2/3 of soldiers died of disease in unsanitary camps with little food and constant exposure. WWII was the first American war in which more soldiers died of enemy action than disease. Prior to that, wars were races to see who could get the most men to battle field before everyone dropped dead from dysentery, plague or whatever.
If fending off an invasion on his own land in what was likely to be a couple of brief battles, nobles could sometimes scrape up 15% or more of the farmers but largely because the farmers wanted to fend off the plunder of the invading army.
The end of the knights and aristocrats began when the growing urban population began to deploy large armies of well trained infantry units in the later 1300s (see the battle of the spurs.) These urban areas could sometime raise 50%-75% of the military age males, already equipped and trained and alliance of a couple of cities or more could easily out raise even the kings of the time. Their weakness lay in their inability to fight protracted wars at a distance without wrecking the economy.
The Swiss solved this problem by hiring out some men when they were young as mercenaries. It made money, got the boys of troublesome age out of town till they settled down, left a battle harden cadre of elders behind and in the worst case, they could call the mercenaries back. Ruled European battlefields for nearly 150 years with pikes and crossbows.
Arguably, every major empire in history arose when a very small society gained a significant advantage in internal cohesion and instead of worrying about internal revolution, could arm their entire adult male population if that is what it took. That is how the small backwoods town of Rome became an Empire. Conversely, when the Republic feel and the Legions chose the Emperors, trust broke down and an Empire with something like 30-40 times the population of the Republic couldn't deploy armies a tenth as large as the Republic did repeatedly in the Punic wars.
***So, if you want to calculate the size of army a medieval society could raise, the primary factor is how the farmer majority and the urbanites view the enemy***. If the commoners see the war as just more dynastic struggles, then the armies will be small, usually in the thousands, mostly aristocrats and mercenaries.
If they faced something like an invasion of Mongols, Ottomans or Vikings, who the commoners feared for their own sakes, then the armies could be quite large, tens of thousands, assuming the fighting occurred locally in summer.
Peasant rebellions would also raise up surprising amounts of man power if conditions were bad enough. See the Hussite rebellions.
(It's worth noting that the Mongols and Vikings attack with very small forces, relying on speed and maneuver to overwhelm local opposition before the levies could be called up. The so-called Mongol "Hordes" were usually outnumbered 10 to 1, but they rode so fast they seemed to be everywhere. Same thing for vikings. They could hit several places on the coast before the central land power heard of the first creating the impression of multiple forces hitting simutanously.)
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**Maximum: ~7,000 soldiers**
Presuming a high household size of 2.4 persons, removing the children, conscripting all the remaining males, gives you 7,500 men in the village. Removing 500 old fuddy-duddys, leaves you with 7,000 able-bodied males (presuming women weren't allowed to fight). Women and children take over the remaining work to be done.
**Speculative Size: ~50 soldiers**
During peacetime, with no looming threats more than a bandit here and there, I would use your standing force as a police force. In relatively low-crime, modern cities of the same size, such as Woodburn, Oregon (chosen as a similar size, and relatively isolated); you have 35 patrol officers. *However,* they are assisted by some state troopers and the city can always be assisted the National Guard, military, etc. if the need arrives.
In your city, your 50 soldiers are acting like a police patrol force as well as a standing military in peacetime.
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During medieval England, there was a requirement for every man and boy to practice archery - should a war with France requrire additional soldiers.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Games_Act_1541>
The law stated that all boys from 7 to 17 would be provided a bow and arrows by the parents (to practice) and from 17 the boy would be required to provide his own (to fight).
Training was required every week; and playing other games was forbidden.
Assuming an even distribution of ages in the village, aged 0 - 60; and an age of 20-60 able to fight; this leaves 2/3 of the male population that can be called upon - leading to 2/3 \* 1/2 \* 25,000 ~ 8,300 men.
Note that these will be just the archers that can be called upon, and more expensive soldiers with armour or horses will be significantly less. This also ignores any sort of morale impact - as calling every male from a village is likely to have a negative impact on the rulers ability to control said village.
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The Ancient, not Medieval Roman Army supported 300000 in an empire of 30 million plus. Medieval states, being less organized, could not match this proportion.
What makes a Medieval state a Medieval state is that there is more or less zero organizational ability at the high level. There is no standing army per se, rather, the state is broken into little districts and each soldier is supported by the farmers in that district. He rules that area so that he can get the supplies, and 'owes' the leadership support in war. Bandit suppression is done by these local forces, if they care to. In real history, often the efficiency in getting everyone to show up for a war was extremely limited.
Then the other factor comes in - if you call in all the nobles and they show up, how do you feed them? Medieval states had no real logistic support. They had to rent boats to sail across the waters, for example. Troops were literally expected to show up with some weeks food, and when that ran out, they went home.
A city of 25000 is pretty large for medieval times, and you might have a set of professional knights and squires of 50-100 permanently available. If the city was attacked they could round up regular joes and put them on the walls for defense of a sort. You might have a squad of archers about. Remember, the side coming to attack your city probably only has a few thousand men in it themselves.
Remember, the Merovingian Empire (France and Germany) and Anglo Saxon England were both basically helpless for a few generations from Viking raiders.
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There are a lot of factors.
**Food.** Medieval era had subsistence farming. It was once an odd concept to not own your own farm. How would you make sure you have enough to eat?
If the lord could centralize farming, have specialist farmers (again a ludicrous concept where someone does nothing but farming), you can get very high food productivity.
**Training.** How much time does it take to train your average soldier? The Romans were very systematic in training. Yet some things, like English longbowmen took years to train. A knight who was trained to fight since puberty by the best mentors will be able to defeat many militias who were trained in a few weeks.
How good do they need to be? Ex-military bandits can easily take on regular militia. Even regular bandits who are motivated by self-wealth can beat many inexperienced militia.
**Equipment.** Who will link the chainmail together? Who will make the weapons? Melt the steel bars? Mine the ore? Transport it?
A 'military outpost' where much of this work is outsourced can be extremely military oriented. The larger the town is, the less people need to actually do this work, but there will be other overhead to a large city, like sewage.
So, it can easily be anything from 1% to 90%. It depends on how many of these factors play in.
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Consider that war is a seasonal pursuit. As others have mentioned a full time standing army was not really a medieval thing.
The planting and harvest seasons require quite a lot of manpower, so would not be a time to go to war.
Summer has more available manpower, unless local crops requires regular bucket-line irrigation. But heat may restrict how far you can march your forces.
Winter will tend to have the most free people available, but weather and temperature may prevent it.
An "optimal" time to go to war would be immediately after fields have been harvested and storehouses have been filled and before winter storms begin to set in.
This gives you some benefits.
* You have food available to supply your army.
* Gives field hands something to do.
* Any deaths reduce both the number of "idle-hands" and "mouths-to-feed" to worry about over the winter.
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What would be the effects of high or low gravity on human body development? How would the human body develop under a different gravity? Many science fiction stories explore the idea that people from low gravity environments would be taller and slimmer, whereas people from higher gravity environments would be shorter and stockier. How realistic is this? How malleable is the human body? I figure that high gravity would lead to a lot of muscle and low gravity to a lot less, but Would the human skeleton really develop to be shorter in a child which weighed more since its birth, or taller in a child who weighed less? I'm interested in the range of 2 to 0 G's.
I'm asking for morphological changes on the human body that are the result of being born and raised in a different gravity. I'm not interested in evolutionary changes as a result of selection over time in that environment.
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We actually have very little information on this question. I'm assuming from your "not interested in evolution" phrasing that you're interested in a 1 generation case, where a baby is born in low gravity and stays there. **NASA is very interested in questions like this, because it helps them deal with the physiological effects of space on astronauts.**
The answer is really complicated because the human body grows in response to stimuli. However, not all stimuli are gravity related. Some of our spinal growth after birth is due to gravity. **However, bed-ridden children still grow to reasonably normal heights, so there are clearly many other factors wedged against each other to support spinal growth.** (This would change if you opened the question to evolutionary effects, but in 1 generation, its a bit simpler).
The real issue for human growth in space is the few cases where we need gravity to develop. It is known that our hearts atrophy in space because they don't need to pump as much blood. It is not yet known if, in that atrophied state, it is strong enough to raise a healthy child. For all we know their immune system could be stunted because it didn't get enough oxygen! These unknowns are why we don't allow anyone but fully fit, grown adults into space. Our society believes it is not worth the risk.
**If you want humans to be taller due to low gravity, I would look at what could cause a human to want to be taller.** Look at gymnasts and contortionists. I guarantee nothing they do was *ever* "planned" for by genetics. They simply want to be more flexible, so they put their body into situations where it can grow into a more flexible shape. If there were strong advantages of being tall (such as reaching fruit of local fauna which grows tall and slender due to gravity), I think you would find remarkable effects, especially in the 1-3 year old region of a child's life. That would go doubly so with a few generations of social evolution, to build a family structure that raises children to want to be tall from a young age.
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Sheesh, he's not interested in a multigenerational evolutionary hypothetical here.
Doesn't anyone read?
Likely humans born in high gravity would develop stronger hearts, lungs, and musculature. Bones would likely be thicker as well, if not caused by developing in high G then from healing from constant breakage. (Falling would be very dangerous on a high G planet) Children would learn to walk slower and may be significantly shorter, no one would ride bicycles, and planes and off planet trips would be very expensive fuel wise.
Low G humans would likely lose the ability to survive in a normal G environment due to atrophy or, in children born on the planet, lack of development but it's doubtful that they would be rendered unable to survive in their own environment. Children would all ride unicycles but would be very jealous of the off-worlders who could fly pedalcopters. Depending on the lack of gravity low cost compressed air jetpacks may be available and people would not need to worry about falling from (again depending on the gravity) almost any height. Expect to see people safely disembarking from air transportation without needing it to land.
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(this is my own theory related to a story line I'm working on, very unsure on it's validity, but it involves multiple generations during a prolonged space flight in a zero g environment...was actually going to post it to this forum eventually for input). I'm also working on the assumption that critical functions such as respiratory, circulatory, and digestion can continue to function in different gravities.
Assumptions...not only is it zero-g, but we are lacking sun exposure as well. Air pressure is earth like in the zero-g environment.
The human body will lengthen significantly if raised entirely in a zero g environment. Limbs will become longer, including the neck. Bone density will be significantly less and it's quite likely this being will weigh significantly less than a Human raised on Earth. Bone structure (although elongated) won't change in a single generation...however multiple generations in zero-g may start to see their bones loose rigidity, become flexible structures instead. Several generations later may result in a elongated semi-eel like being that can quickly bend around curves and corners of the ship/structure it resides in.
Hands could have an interesting change. Where a human on Earth needs to grip and pick-up things against the weight of gravity, and zero-g human would not...rather they would be spending most of their time on 'button' like interfaces. Gives me this image of elongated fingers exceedingly adept at a 'key press' up and down motion instead of a bulky hand designed to lift against the weight of gravity. Precision in a zero-g human would become more required than strength (precision often being sacrificed in favor of raw strength) and the hand will reflect that.
Muscle structure would also develop significantly differently. Where our strongest muscles (Glutes) tend to be focused on keeping us upright, a space child wouldn't have that same need to develop the ability to stand. Nor would walking muscles (Quads) have the pressure on them to grow to the strength a human on Earth's would. Pushing off would be the preferred locomotion of a zero-g human, perhaps giving them larger calf muscles in relation to their other muscles (yet still not as developed as one that needs to fight gravity on a constant basis.
Skin colour would also be significantly different as the pigments that protect us from the sun wouldn't be required. Don't ask why, but I have the image of eventually greying skin, especially over multiple generations.
We may develop a new 'sense' or a variation on one that we already have but don't much consider. Orienting yourself on Earth is a 2-d exercise for the most case...up and down are in relation to gravity and is easier to enforce. As divers and deep sea swimmers know, up and down isn't quite as simple to detect without this obvious gravitational pull. How exactly a zero-g human would learn to orient itself and perceive it's 3-d location could be considered a 'new sense' to some degree.
All of this is purely speculation as we really have no idea what a zero-g human would look like.
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Consider a 200 pound man, here on Earth. If he were to set foot on a planet X with 2X the gravity, he would weigh 400 pounds. Consider the endurance, momentum and other physical factors on this man, having to lug around 400 pounds! Conversely, if he were to step on a planet Y with 1/2 the gravity, he would weigh 100 pounds. For life to form on either of those two planets, further evolving into some sort of intelligent life form, it is likely the reverse of many of the comments would need to be true. Additionally, we need to stop thinking of those alien life forms as humans or on human terms. On planet X, this individual may very well need to be smaller and lighter than humans, yet with a greater ratio to muscle mass. On planet Y, far less muscle mass would be needed and this individual would likely be much taller, as gravitational forces would not place as much strain on his or her skeletal structure. This may answer some of the basic physical characteristics, with regards to overall size, but a plethora of other factors would need to be considered.
What is the atmosphere like on the planet? This will affect how they breathe or even derive energy.
What chemicals make up that atmosphere? Heavy oxygen? Heavy CO2? Limited nitrogen? All these can contribute to what types of early life forms are given the extra advantage to develop further.
How bright is the midday sky? This will affect their vision and the shape and size of their eyes.
How long are the days? This can have a great affect on their routines and adaptations to such cyclical internal mechanisms. Consider humans an melatonin, the enzyme responsible for our sleep cycles, as just one example.
How long is the year? This may or may not be as relevant, based on the inclination of the planet. But if seasons are pertinent to agriculture, this could have a positive or negative effect, as we know it. As a result, the greater the variance, the greater the adaptivity, in the evolution of the alien species.
How hot or cold are the average temperatures? This would result in more or less average body fats, amount of hair or some sort of protective dermal layers. It would also have an affect on overall size and mass of extremities, as well.
What is the ratio of land versus water? Again, we are talking adaptation to environment. Low water resources would equate to a decreased need for water. Low land resources could equate to a greater adaption for amphibious or aquatic living.
What was the progenitor of the species? In humans, the great apes and humans shared a common ancestor. It is very possible, their life forms may have evolved from some form of plant-life.
In order to give a fairly detailed description of some form of alien life, all of these questions - and many more - would need to be answered. The most difficult of all these question would definitely be the last question. Sure, we, here on Earth, may be able to determine: average temperatures, day/night cycles, length of a year, inclination of the planet, degree of brightness, atmospheric properties, mass of the planet, gravitational force, percentage of land to water, etc... But... until we can answer, "What was the progenitor of the species?" the best we can do is take a wild guess!
{Ph.D. Astrobiology, Cambridge}
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Evolutionary changes would be the most significant here. Look at deep sea fish, they live in an environment that would crush shallow water fish, yet, they proportionally look the same as shallow water fish. Adaptability is paramount here.
If the present human form is the best suited for our gravity, I would suspect that a similar form would evolve to take advantage of a low or high gravity environment. Just too many neck problems otherwise for the low grav person, and too much of the waddle factor for the high grav guy.
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I think humans would get stronger. Their bones would be thicker, and so will their muscles. So let me say someone from a planet with 100,000,000g came to earth they would be a lot stronger and could lift weights ranging to the megatons with the same amount of effort he/she lifts 100 pounds on their planet.
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I've been writing a fantasy novel and trying to justify the existence of giants, I'm gonna go with 'an inherited magical power to make things much lighter'.
Seriously though.. a low gravity environment, IMO would raise much larger mammals, a size that, when eventually exposed to higher gravity, they'd adapt to life and just be much bigger an stronger.
2nd and 3rd generation in low gravity would be larger still as the embryo size would increase with its mother.
Our stance on this really depends on whether you believe the animal kingdom is in any way evolved to deal with different gravitational environments.
That belief hinges on how we think gravity works on earth and in it.
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I have a tendency to overcomplicate the worlds I build, to the point that it gets in the way of the purpose the world needs to meet. I put in too many characters and places, but more problematic is that I create too many connections between each element of the setting: **it's impossible for a plot to pull one string without getting the entire rest of the setting pulled along with it.** It's like going fishing for trout and hooking a shark.
Example: When designing a town for a short RPG campaign last month, I wound up giving that town more complicated problems than a short game can possibly address. The result is that the game will either have to last longer than we planned, or conclude unresolved.
In the past I addressed this by running games which lasted six to 18 months, but that's not an option for me anymore, and the problem is also creeping into my writing.
How can I place limits on my world building, so I know when to stop... and then actually stop... before the world gets too complicated and unwieldy to serve its intended purpose?
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I wouldn't say that making a world richer than necessary is a problem - it can prevent a lot of problems as well. However, I understand you might want to keep development tight and close to the task at hand.
I believe the best way to fit time and effort to the required detail would be a **pass-based approach**, much like a pass-based renderer. This would require defining an algorithmic method to creating worlds and settings, which isn't as complicated or rigid as it sounds.
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## Define importance layers:
Start by making a list of the most essential elements you absolutely need to get a usable world. This is one layer. Then list elements and information that isn't *absolutely* necessary but still important enough that you should generally know about. This is the next layer. Don't expect to get this perfect in one go but by refactoring what belongs on each layer and having a set of layers that makes sense to you, it'll be easier to know when to stop. For a town that's a possible destination, just get the first layer constructed - for a city that's part of the main plot, more layers are going to be necessary.
## Define defaults:
In order to avoid starting from scratch, create templates and defaults to start from. This might give you enough information that you can easily skip creating even the first detail layer until it's necessary (sort of like lazy evaluation). Your problem is clearly not a lack of ideas, but this can shorten the development time for stuff you're *not* actively working on *and* prevent the slippery slope of overthinking a setting until you're obsessed with it and it's 5 am and too late for bed, since you'll have most of the basics out of the way and won't have to break your concentration on the story.
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I have the same problem when working with this kind of stuff (which is why my profile says "overengineering") but I think the common cause is a lack of overall structure and good definitions up front. Preparation and planning for this process is key in getting elegant structures and creations. I've got this pet project I want to eventually make, to help with DMing and what I've noticed is that most of the features are just templates and defaults (random NPC generation, event generation etc.). By reducing the need for creative thought to the minimum necessary, you can get much higher efficiency out of your time. By thinking about this for that project, I came to understand why all these D&D books exist - they're template packs.
Reduce how involving and low-level your development process is and detail should become much easier to handle. This doesn't mean being un-creative and stopping yourself - it's about having a full world ready and slowly changing it to fit your needs.
It's better to sculpt a template into shape than to try to build everything from scratch.
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Reduce the number of active elements and you can keep them interconnected but simplify the network just by having fewer things in it.
The human brain can keep track of a limited number of things at a time (it varies from person to person but is surprisingly low. For example in a study:
<https://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2005/pr050308.cfm>
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> The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.
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> After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, "I kept losing information," and "I just lost track."
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> Halford et al concluded from these results that people — academics accustomed to interpreting the type of data used in the experiment problems — cannot process more than four variables at a time. Recognizing these human limitations can make a difference when designing high-stress work environments—such as air-traffic control centers—where employees must keep in mind several variables all at once.
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In other words each set of inter-relations in your world for it to make sense and be kept track of should have a maximum of four members.
So design your world like that. Each area has a maximum of four "active" linchpins that interact with each other. That's your budget. If you want to add another key player you need to drop one of the earlier ones. Find one of your existing ideas that the new concept is more interesting than and drop the other into the background or remove it. If the new one isn't more interesting then don't add it.
To add more depth though you can then break down those linchpins, for example:
A town might have:
1. The Prince - nominal ruler
2. The Founders - a group of rich people
3. The Thieves Guild
4. The Police
That's four organizations, and all interactions in the town can be interactions between those.
Within each organization though you can split it down. For example the thieves guild might have three "named characters" a leader, a lieutenant, a street pickpocket, etc.
Each of those interacts with each other but it's a self contained network. The pickpocket doesn't have a relation with The Police. To look at that part of the web just look at the relationship between The Thieves Guild and The Police.
So in the example above you came up with the idea of a dashing nobleman who might help the protagonists sometimes that you want to add. Don't put him in as a top level linchpin, instead he's part of the Founders group.
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The real world is very complex and connected, yet we still construct narratives around and about it. The choice is not necessarily to simplify the world, but to *ignore* 99% of it when focussing on a good story. It should be just fine to create a complex and interconnected world.
*Separate your Worldbuilding from your Narrative efforts.* The world description should be broad, with lots of idea leads, and the story content should be deeper, full of detail and references that place it in the world and flesh those ideas out.
## Worldbuilding Stage
When Worldbuilding, define things broadly and loosely, so that you are not constrained later when ad-libbing or filling in Narrative detail. Expect to only use 10% of what you prepare. You need to be OK with having a great idea for a character or place, and to never see that getting more than a mention. The way to keep it simple is to focus on breadth first, short, open descriptions, and to avoid filling in detail out of sense of completeness.
One way to approach breadth-first descriptions is to "just write the whole thing" quickly and crudely, then go back and re-do with slightly more detail. Repeat until you run out of time for the current worldbuilding stage. Your first attempt might be no more than a paragraph about the whole world and the kind of beings that live there. Then a second pass might mention the largest units of culture - e.g. countries. Then a third pass might name the rulers and pick out one or two interesting facts about each country/area. Doing it this way forces you away from filling in exciting narrative-based details until you are ready. It also makes you think about *whether* you are currently working towards a world description or a story set in the world.
## Story-telling Stage
When gaming, or writing a story, make decisions improvised around the breadth of your world-building, and focus on:
**a) At the start of the narrative, open up possibilities.** Add interesting new details and make decisions which drive the nature of the remaining plot. This is a good time to decide on what will link to other things in your story. That's not to say that everything else is not linked, just that not all links need to be active complications for every tale. You ignore the evil henchmen's family connections if it just drags more characters in without satisfying the story's goals. Invent a (reversible) reason there and then why it is not important this time, if that helps.
**b) In the middle of the narrative, have the simplest, most obvious things happen, and avoid opening up new possibilities.** That doesn't mean avoiding new characters and things happen as far as readers or players are concerned - but those things should ideally be obvious to someone with your whole-world view. I suspect that you may be doing this too late currently, leaving yourself not enough time to deal with consequences, and in essence trying to create a tale that is 50% start and 50% end, when the split might better be 25% / 50% / 25% beginning, middle, end.
**c) From the middle to the end of the narrative, seek closure and rounding off of loose ends.**
Do all of the above using broad knowledge of the world that you sketched out. To your readers or players, the information about the rest of the world is not already available, so ideally they will not notice the changes of behaviour you use from a) to c), and just get to enjoy the story unfolding. The fact that the world has far more depth than the protagonists get to interact with should hopefully come across in your confidence when improvising.
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Let's take a world that is based heavily on [Elon Musk's specific ideas of Mars colonization](http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars), to whit:
* Launch technology from Earth evolves to be to <$100/lb cost to launch ratio, due to reusable rockets
* A 1,000,000 member colony is established on Mars within 100 years.
* No major new technology/science is developed (no antimatter drives, room temerature superconductors, cold fusion, singularity, teleportation, or discovery of Unobtainium on Mars, alien artifacts on Mars, etc...).
However, fusion is plausible, as well as advanced robotics and decent quality AI and advanced genetics. Obtaining water on Mars for sustenance is plausible.
**In that world, what would the Earth-Mars trade plausibly look like, based on what we know of Mars**, space and economics, in the **near term** (say first 100 years, so no terraforming of Mars)?
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An immediate (and IMHO grossly incorrect) idea would be to model it on Europe/New World trade in 1500s-1800s. But that's clearly wrong:
* The transportation costs are still enormously higher (I'm unsure what they were in New World trade days but I'm guessing way lower that $100/lb
* No/low agricultural capacity on Mars, at least initially.
* Problematic human transplantation (someone who lives in Mars gravity for a while would have issues on Earth).
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Well the outlook is pretty bleak. According to [this Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_resources_on_Mars) there's nothing we can get on Mars, as far as ores are concerned, that justifies the cost of moving it back to Earth. Also, the atmosphere is primarily, CO2, Argon, Nitrogen, CO and Oxygen - I think we have plenty of that so, gas mining is also pointless.
The only thing I can think of is Mars as an intermediate station. However, if we have a 1mil colony in 100 years on Mars, I'm pretty sure we'll have space technology good enough to make space bases much better for this purpose.
So we're left with almost nothing. The research might be valuable, but that doesn't exactly constitute trade. Tourism might be a means of income, but that would involve few rich people piggybacking on cargo ships and staying for a while. A colony on Mars, without any new and wonderful technology to make it real easy to sustain, wouldn't have much in the way of attractions. Maybe a Mars keyring or something - not a high-profit market, assuming you have the resources to mass produce that kind of stuff.
Would there be enough commercial interest to fund expeditions, possibly making them sustainable economically through accommodations? Maybe, there's mining towns on Earth that grew due to this. Perhaps that's the only alternative left, assuming ore deposits have some different distribution on Mars, making them easy enough to mine compared to earth (or much more abundant, reducing the cost of searching). But as it seems from the wikipedia article, that's a bit unlikely.
Perhaps the atmospheric and gravity conditions make some products easier to manufacture, covering the transport cost if mass-produced. Otherwise, I can't think of a good reason to have trade with a Mars colony.
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The answer really depends on the date that fusion becomes economically viable.
If it happens some time after the Mars colony has been established I suspect that in a 100 years from now Mars' biggest export will be automated asteroid mining package plants; the buyers being mainly Earth corporations.
The mining package plants to be traded for Earth tech and food.
This prediction based on the fact that, since Earth should be able to manufacture everything else cheaper than a Mars colony would be able to (as stated in the other answers to your question), the best year 0 to year 10 business case for a Mars colony will be to manufacture space based solar PV plants.
**The business case:**
The majority of humans agree that global warming is real. They directly or indirectly (government subsidies) invest in clean power. Start up investment is available.
The idea of space-based PV plants with microwave transmission to earth have been around for years. Solar radiation in Earth orbit is higher than on the surface. Unlike on earth the availability of physical space is not a problem. I.e. poor quality low efficiency panels are not too much of a problem - you can just put up a lot more of them.
**The problem:**
Launching PV panels into space from earth is still unviable due high cost of launching
Automated asteroid mining and PV manufacturing in space is an option. Planetary Resources and others are currently hounding NASA to bring a small asteroid into Moon orbit for study. However, it will take many decades before they will be able to mine productively:
* at the beginning in order to refine mining methods they need to tele-operate
* at the beginning in order to learn how to automate the repair of broken equipment they need to tele-operate.
BUT
* NEOs not in earth or moon orbit are sometimes on the other side of the sun, with communication delays of 10 minutes or more
* Although there are thousands of large NEOs they can only bring close (i.e. capture into orbit) small asteroids due to prohibitive delta v (bringing back the 9m diameter asteroid currently eyed will require roughly 12 000 kg propellant)
Similarly, without periodic real-time remote control the automated manufacturing of PV panels in space will take very long to perfect.
**The solution:**
Mars' 2 moons
1. have tonnes and tonnes of silicates for PV panels and other materials for rocket fuel
2. offers lower delta-v to LEO than earth's own moon to LEO
3. are closer to the surface of Mars than GEO is from earth (Phobos orbits at 6500 km - that's 20 milli-lightseconds)
Thus:
* Mining, manufacturing and assembling takes place on Phobos and Deimos.
* Earth firms like Planetary Resources provides the mining equipment, firms like Shimizu Corporation provides the panel manufacturing equipment.
* Tele-operation centers on Mars offer employment opportunities to many colonists
* Only a few people need to live on the moons
* The colonies on Mars being so close will make living on the moons less lonely (and the view will be breathtaking)
* After a few years the colonists should be able to manufacture (on Mars surface itself) high tech spares for the mining operations (will be cheaper than to launch from earth)
* The tugs moving the solar plants can also take people back to earth (spherical or cylindrical plants possibly be spun for artificial gravity). The possibility to go home after a 3-6 year shift will really help in attracting the best and brightest doctors, scientists, artisans and engineers to get the colonies going
Over time Mars colonists should become *the* experts at asteroid mining. They will start applying that knowledge by manufacturing and launching automated package mining plants from the Mars moons to the belt or to NEOs. Much lower delta-v requirements to get to the belt than from Earth.
tl;dr: Phobos and Deimos can be mined from Mars via remote control. Unlike mining Luna and NEOs remote control will be almost in real time
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> However, fusion is plausible, as well as advanced robotics and decent quality AI and advanced genetics.
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I would suggest that advanced robotics and decent quality AI might drastically reduce the cost of fuel - through self-building structures/factories/mines/plants - so that it's orders of magnitude lower than even what Musk is attempting.
In turn, this means that a Martian civilisation might be able to build impressive infrastructure and wonders of engineering far faster than anticipated.
So I would suggest re-examining trade you might have ruled out. For example, a ticket to Mars might cost only a few thousand, maybe even hundred dollars in today's money, and Mars - free of many of the regulations of earth, could build amazing wonders - think Pyramids, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Las Vegas, Olympics/SuperBowl etc.
As such tourism, 'Made in Mars' Luxury items, Martian IP are plausible. While manufacturing is harder to envision, some visionaries/loyalists might manufacture items on Mars purely to help develop industry or be closer to great engineers/scientists/artists. Maybe some amazing new (genetically engineered) plant can only exist on mars, and start a new spice trade.
Of course, there's also potential for great abuses, including human experimentation, slavery, weapons development etc.
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The real issue to consider with such a trade system is turnaround time. Assuming favourable launch dates, at orbital velocities, you're looking at about 2years turn around time for the trip. Communications (assuming no ftl) is about 38 minutes each way, so thats something else to consider. What would be Mars's primary production? Well, the main draw of Mars would be relieving planetary pressure on Earth, but the low gravity (relative) might make for some niche technologies that are too expensive/impractical to make on Earth (though they could probably also be made on the moon)
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Anything that I can produce cheaply on Mars, I can produce at least as cheaply in space or on Earth without the added cost of leaving the gravity well. So we aren't going to be competing on price.
It may be possible to come up with some luxuries. For example, there may be a way to brew alcohol on Mars that takes advantage of its unique atmospheric conditions. This won't get you any drunker, but it might have a slightly different taste. The collector who has everything else might buy some. Doesn't seem like a big market though. Curios made with real Mars rock is another possibility but again, not a huge market.
Some trade in software, research, and other digital products is possible. However, there's no real reason to think that such stuff will be easier to produce on Mars. We shouldn't expect that to make up any more trade than what it does on Earth.
There may be a movie industry. Perhaps there will be a market for outdoor shots from Mars. Plentiful real estate may allow some truly realistic explosions. It's not like you can set off a real nuke on Earth, but you may be able to arrange it on Mars.
Tourism is an obvious industry, but it has its limits. Mars is far enough away that it will be an expensive trip. A thousand people a year would be a lot to go to see Mars. Perhaps some more to visit people in the colony. The movie industry might help drum up business.
Illegals are conceivable, but it would be hard to do anything really bad. Most illegal things are already available on Earth. If not available on Earth, why won't Earth mind if Mars supplies it? Particularly if it comes back to Earth. There's not a lot of cover in space to hide things nor is there heavy traffic in which to hide smuggling.
Mars might supply high security prisons. Since escapees can't survive outside without equipment, there's a certain natural security. Note that space stations would make even better prisons in some ways. However, they would need resupply by rocket ship, which would offer a chance to escape. A Mars colony can be resupplied by an atmospheric ship. That way escapees will still be stuck on Mars.
Or a low security prison colony. A group of people could walk openly around the colony but wouldn't be able to leave. It might be hard though. Prison populations tend not to be high tech. They might have trouble developing the skills to survive in Mars conditions.
An anarchists (or whatever philosophy) colony wouldn't be tradable, but it might bring colonists with their own resources. Not sure how rich anarchists are though. It's also not clear that most groups wouldn't prefer a space colony.
Overall, I think that a Martian colony will have to be generally self-sufficient. Some luxuries will move, but for the most part, Mars will have to grow its own food and manufacture its own products.
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Genuine Martian gold, crystals, iron nodules, or any other bacteria - free mineral samples would fetch a high price as souvenirs if properly registered and examined to prove their authenticity.
Organic items such as Martian wood, cane, 0r even grains and foodstuffs derived from Earth seeds but grown in Martian soil (Also properly examined and cleansed of any dangerous or foreign bacteria would also be high-priced novelty items.
Also, exclusive videos, pictures, or even landscape paintings would also be valuable.
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**Mars has no environmental regulations**
The environment is already incredibly hostile to life. You could make anything on mars and just dump the waste outside. No harm, no foul.
Right now, that won't help that much, since you still have to get everything *to* Mars in order to turn it into stuff, but once we start mining asteroids, we can do the heavy (dirty) industry on Mars and export the finished goods to Earth.
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There is no "Trade" as we understand it, Mars offers "land", or more specifically real estate unencumbered by previous claims and not under the jurisdiction of any national entity.
People will pay to leave Earth and go elsewhere to practice their social, religious or economic beliefs in peace. Weather these ideas are actually good or workable in practice is another thing altogether. People are notorious for not learning from history or experience (look at the number of times Socialism in various form has been tried, despite the murder of over 100 million people in the 20th century or even the destruction of Venezuela in the 21rst), but at least if a colony settlement implodes on Mars, the damage is limited to the colonists in that settlement.
Sociologists and others will look upon Mars as a singular experiment where human groups can try new forms of social, political or economic organizations without being encumbered by the laws or restrictions from existing nations, and perhaps something worthwhile will emerge from this experiment, which Earth people could emulate.
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**This Query is part of the Worldbuilding [Resources Article](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources).**
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My world is progressing. I still have a couple of days before my deadline to finish it. If I can make it in less that 7 days, the other gods will be impressed.
My world have continents with mountains and I know about the water and air movements. But even with all the work that I have done, it's still a lifeless rock. The weather can indicate us where the vegetation should be but it's just one part of the equation. For example, it does not explain why certain species of plants are found in one place but not elsewhere.
**What is a good process to figure out the placement of the major biomes?**
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Note:
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> This is part of a series of questions that tries to break down the process of creating a world from initial creation of the landmass through to erosion, weather patterns, biomes and every other related topics. Please restrict answers to this specific topic rather than branching on into other areas as other subjects will be covered by other questions.
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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]
If you've covered the earlier bases, specifically geography and climate, biomes are actually quite easy. As a first-order approximation, the predominant natural (before human intervention) biome for a region is largely determined by just two factors: **precipitation** and **temperature**. Here's a rough breakdown:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NHS1i.png)
"Grassland" is really tundra in arctic and cooler subarctic areas.
I've marked a few cities: Los Angeles, Beijing, London (San Francisco is about the same), Austin, New York, and Mumbai. Note that although London and San Fran get relatively little rainfall, they have mild coastal climates with relatively little seasonal change, encouraging vegetation, while Beijing and New York have east-coast continental climates, with hotter summers and colder winters. The Gulf Stream also makes London (and all of Europe) much warmer than the same latitudes in elsewhere in the world. India's monsoon-dominated climate is a challenge for vegetation, so Mumbai is really a "monsoon forest," though its high rainfall (225 cm) would easily be enough for a tropical rain forest if the precipitation was even year-round.
Those are the two biggest factors. Next is **topography**, or really, drainage. A flat area will tend to collect water: if it's very dry, you'll get salt lakes, a little more and you get seasonal lakes, more and you'll get a marsh (a wetland dominated by grass), and finally if there's plenty of rain you'll get a swamp (a wetland dominated by trees). Going the other way, rugged topography mean hills. Up to a point, this typically won't have a profound impact on the biome: a rugged area with plenty of rain will be a forest just like the flatter areas nearby. Extreme slopes may prevent trees from taking root, but you might be surprised at what it takes!
On the topic of drainage, areas near **rivers and lakes** are basically equivalent to additional rainfall. Even a desert might have trees around the few arroyos and seasonal lakes.
Then there's **elevation**. All else being equal, higher land is cooler, has lower air pressure, and has greater climate variation. All of these factors tend to work against trees, and plant growth in general; a high plateau is effectively similar to moving one climate zone further from the equator. For example, South Africa is at about 30° S - the subtropical zone. However, the highlands have a climate similar to some temperate zones, which appealed to Dutch and British settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Note that highlands often catch rainfall from passing air currents, making them relatively green stretches in otherwise dry areas (e.g., the Atlas Mountains).
At a macro scale, that's about it. As you zoom in, there's more to consider:
* **Animals**, in large herds, can keep a woodland area grazed down such that only grasses and a few shrubs and trees survive. Without the buffalo, large tracts of the American great plains would eventually become lightly forested.
* **Humans** can irrigate dry areas, drain wetlands, fertilize marginal land, or salinate it until it's barren (usually accidentally), and even carve out mountains. Large numbers of animals (e.g., domesticated and protected from predators) in marginal grassland will cause desertification.
* **Seasonality** changes a biome in subtle but important ways. On the west coasts of each continent, the subtropical zone has a "Mediterranean" climate - warm dry summers and cool wet winters. This is really a variant on "subtropical moderate/woodland-savannah" biome, but it is very important for worldbuilding because this specific climate favors large grains, which your inhabitants will want to domesticate. It's no coincidence that one of the heartlands of human civilization - arguably the most important of them all - was a Mediterranean zone.
* **Soil depth** is important, for large plants in particular. Newly exposed volcanic islands must form soil, from erosion of the exposed rock, deposition of airborne dust, accumulated bird droppings, etc. First grass and other small plants will take root, then shrubs, and eventually trees.
* **Soil quality** also matters. High temperatures and high rainfall tend to leach minerals from soil. That's why many tropical rainforests are used for slash-and-burn agriculture: the soil can only support a few harvests before its limited stock of nutrients are exhausted. Because of the perpetual growing season and ample rainfall, opportunistic plants will quickly take over old plots, but restoring a true canopy forest takes a very long time.
* **Variability** of climate works against high-biomass biomes. So a temperate continental area with low rainfall may be a desert, while a similar area on the cost may have a Mediterranean scrub climate.
* **Wind speed** increases evaporation and erosion, so all else being equal a windswept area may be relatively treeless while a nearby sheltered area is more verdant.
These factors interrelate - forests reduce wind speed, decrease erosion, and may encourage rainfall (that's somewhat debatable). The good news from all this complexity is that it gives you room to fudge things: if you decide you really want a forest but the area seems too dry, it could be that the forest has very slowly been building its own soil and drawing in rainfall, and locals have been putting out fires and hunting the grazing beasts. Going the other way, you can make a desert in an otherwise bountiful area by declaring it to be a recently-exposed shield, with only a thin layer of soil on top of stone.
One last consideration: each of the biomes I listed above have many variations. A desert can be cold or warm, sandy or rocky, badlands or flats. Grassland could be steppe, pampas, prairie, or moor. Just looking at temperate forests, there's coniferous, deciduous, and evergreen, and many variations for each. Read up on what's out there, and customize your world so that each part is unique and interesting. Salt springs! Cloud forests! Mangrove swamps! Krummholz! Atolls! Use the guildelines here on Worldbuilding.SE to get a general idea of what's appropriate, then modify it to fit your story.
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If two circular portals of 2 meter (arbitrary) diameter were created allowing uninhibited flow between surface atmospheres of Venus and Mars, what would be the environmental effects on the two planets?
My thought process was inspired partially by both xkcd and the games Portal and Portal 2. Considering that one must obtain the necessary resources for terraforming a planet either from that planet, a neighbouring astronomical body, or extra dimensional sources, if the portals could exist, they would be a useful means to provide heat/atmosphere/energy to Mars, while venting it to form habitable pockets/domes on Venus. It would be much easier, for instance, to manufacture insulating tiles for Venus on Mars. I was trying to plan out a short story, based on a catastrophic failure of this system, such that transport though the portals is completely unregulated. Just a step by step explanation of how it occurred and what happened would be exciting, unique, and lead to beautiful images in an “epic storm scouring away the surface of the planet” way. It could also lead to an epic adventure of “close that last Earth/Mars portal before the building it is in fails.
**Portal definition:**
2 circular 2 meter diameter surfaces, each are fixed to a geostationary (there might a better term for that) point on each planet.
Both oriented perpendicular to the planet’s surface and fixed in place (think stargate)
Orientation relative to the axes/equator/etc of the planet is unspecified and can be chosen at your discretion.
Instantaneous transport occurs through the portal in a way that can be modeled as a infinitely thin, indestructible orifice plate.
Transport through the portal is free and has no effect on the matter passing through
Velocity of particles after, passing through relative to the discharge portal, is the same as it was prior to passing through, relative to the entrance portal.
Acceleration/velocity of the two portals relative to each other is technobabbled away.
By my rough calculations the pressure on Venus at the surface is 15000 times higher than that on Mars. As a result about 1.5 tons of air should be going through the portal per second. Due to the composition of the surface of Mars, this should easily cause widespread dust storms. It is, however, negligible to the mass/motion of the planet. It should be able to effect the atmospheres of both planets within a year (reasonable time to get a disaster team there assuming that portals cannot be used to get there for some reason). The finer details of the effects on the planets are more difficult to predict, which is the reason for the question.
Note: I have been using this scenario as a writing/thought experiment with no intent to ever publish anything on this subject. Any concepts developed here are public domain.
[Answer]
# Movement of Gases
That's the most obvious thing to happen, which you've accurately identified. Assuming the portals are both on the surface, the air at the portal will have the respective air pressures (with forces acting on that area of the portal given in parentheses):
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> [Venus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus): ~92 bar (28,902,652.4 newtons)
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> [Mars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars): ~0.00636 bar (1,998.05293 newtons)
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That means the pressure on the Venus side of things is ~14465.4088 times that of Mars. I don't need to do much more math to say that the atmosphere from Venus is very certainly going to initially flow into Mars', not the other other way around. This flow cannot be stopped until the pressures of the atmospheres have equalized or the portals are closed. (Having an automatic shutdown for these portals seems like a good fail-safe!)
Now, given that there is such a large difference in surface pressure and gravity, we need to figure out if the Venusian Atmosphere, when flowing into the Martian Atmosphere, achieves escape velocity. According to Wikipedia, the escape velocity for Mars is a humble 5.027 km/s. If you apply the force from Venus' atmosphere to a mol of its most common particle (carbon dioxide), you get (using [dynamic pressure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pressure))
$$v = \sqrt{\frac{2q}{\rho}}$$
where
$v$ is velocity of the air
$q$ is the dynamic pressure (in this case 92 bar - .00636 bar = 91.99364 bar)
$\rho$ is the density of the air (for [venus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus), it's 67 kg/m^3)
which yields:
$$v = 524.03042 \text{ m/s}$$
$$524\text{ m/s} << 5,027\text{ m/s}$$
So Venus doesn't have the pressure needed to launch stuff through this portal, through Mars' atmosphere, and into space. (You should be careful where you put your portals, though, because you could theoretically use this to launch things into space with other planetary bodies.)
Once the atmospheres have equaled in *total* pressure, the atmospheres will then attempt to stabilize their *partial* pressures until the two planets share the exact same atmosphere. It should be noted that this process will take longer than the total pressure equalization, simply because there is so much air to move from Venus to Mars, that Mars' atmosphere won't get a change to go to Venus until the total pressure is about equal.
Time for a little more math, this time using a more familiar [pressure due to depth equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure#Liquid_pressure):
$$p = \rho \times \text{gravity} \times h$$
knowing that the pressure of Venus and the pressure of Mars will (eventually) equalize, and their densities will be the same, we're left with
$$\frac{g\_{\text{Venus}}}{g\_{\text{Mars}}} = \frac{h\_{\text{Mars}}}{h\_{\text{Venus}}}$$
$$\frac{8.87 \text{ m/s}^2}{3.711 \text{ m/s}^2} = 2.39019132$$
So Mars' new atmosphere should be ~2.4 times the depth of Venus' new atmosphere when this terrible pressure-equalization event finally blows over. That's just the bulk pressure. What about partial pressures?
# Atmospheric Composition / Chemistry
With these atmospheres being exposed to each other, and knowing that gases attempt to [diffuse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_diffusion#Molecular_Diffusion_of_Gases) evenly in the space they're "allowed" to go into, we're looking at a change in Mars' atmosphere, followed by a change in Venus' atmosphere.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia articles for the Venus and Mars, and look at the list of partial pressures, you'd realize that their atmospheres look pretty similar- they're mostly both mostly (>95%) carbon dioxide followed by nitrogen and other trace elements. Mars' atmospheric sulfur content would increase, and Venus would get a few more trace elements, but otherwise the makeup would not be significantly changed.
According to [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Atmospheric_properties_and_processes), one of the problems with Mars is that it doesn't have enough of an atmosphere to hold heat in. The additional carbon dioxide from Venus, though, would help quite a bit, giving it an atmosphere which holds heat in, making it warmer. Not to mention the air from Venus is a hellish 737 K, which will go a long way into making the Red Planet warmer.
I don't know the exact composition of Venus and Mars, so I can't say how *much* warmer / cooler each planet would become or how fast. I'm willing to say, based off the each planet's relative size and some knowledge of [heat capacity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity#Extensive_and_intensive_quantities), that Mars will heat up more than Venus will cool off. In fact, given enough time, Mars and Venus may eventually reach the same temperature, assuming the portals allow for heat transfer.
# Weather Pattern Changes
This is another area of speculation, because Martian weather patterns are not readily available. Also, weather systems are classic examples of [chaotic systems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), your slow introduction of Venusian Atmosphere may have many, many unforeseen effects.
Locally, though, we know that the denser Venusian Air will spread out until its pressure is roughly that of Martian pressure. We also know that it's much more dense, so the air will spread out (relatively) near to the surface. If the portals were larger, this may result in fixed surface winds, like we see with [land and sea breezes.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind#Sea_and_land_breezes)
[Answer]
I will assume that the portals are effectively wormholes, and as such conserve potential and kinetic energy and momentum.
In that case, the net flow of gases will be from **Mars** to **Venus**. While the pressure gradient favors the reverse flow, this is overcome several-fold by the difference in the gravity of the two planets (Venus's gravity well being much deeper) and far more so by the fact that Venus is further inward in the Solar System and is thus deeper in the Sun's gravity well. Therefore, the effect will be that Mars loses almost all of its existing atmosphere, while Venus's atmosphere is increased in density by an insignificant amount. To conserve momentum, the planet's orbits will also change by insignificant amounts.
Note that if the portal is only two meters in diameter, it could take a long time for Mars to lose its atmosphere.
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**EDIT:** I eventually managed to find the absorption spectra of SO2 online - it absorbs in the ultraviolet range only, not in the visible light range, so the only factor affecting light transmitting through the atmosphere will be the level of sulfur vapor humidity. Sections of the question have been struck out or added (in bold) to reflect this.
**Question:**
I'm having trouble (after lots of googling and reading) finding information on the physical properties that the atmosphere and oceans would have - specifically, the penetration of light and transmittance of sound through the atmosphere and seas.
The only relevant information I found was from [Freitas' famed *Xenology* book](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/5.4.2.htm), which said of atmospheric sulfur vapor "At 1 atm pressure, blue light is cut to below human eye visibility in less than half a meter, and the red is gone in fifty meters. So if the partial pressures of [sulfur vapor] exceed perhaps 0.001-0.01 atm, no light of any color will be able to reach the surface of the planet from the outside"
I couldn't find anything for ~~sulfur dioxide in the air~~ (see edit at top) or liquid sulfur.
**My specific questions are:**
* What will the lighting conditions be like?
+ What would the effect of sulfur vapor humidity in the air be on visibility? **Specifically, what partial pressure of vapour seems reasonable? (I can approximate from the quote above from Freitas)**
+ How far will light penetrate through the sea?
+ ~~How much light will reach the surface?~~
+ ~~What wavelengths will penetrate the atmosphere? (presumably only the yellow color of the liquid sulfur's own color would penetrate through the sea itself for any appreciable distance)~~
* How far and how well will sound travel through the sea?
* How effective would detection of electric fields be in a sulfur sea? (E.g. for prey detection, as in sharks)
I don't need super accurate answers; ballpark figures in terms of comparisons to earth atmosphere and oceans would be fine - e.g. that light penetration at 1 meter depth in the sulfur sea would be equivalent to 1km in the earth's oceans.
The species of focus (which I expect I will have other questions about later) lives around the ocean surface - just below the surface in shallow waters, at the surface, and on coastal land areas, so I need this information to check that the creature's design - senses, communication methods etc - are ball-park plausible. E.g. I don't want to write about how they use echolocation or an electric sense to find prey if it turns out that they would only be effective at a range of millimeters.
I am aiming for a situation where enough light reaches the surface of the planet for photosynthesis to be reasonable (this doesn't have to be earth-like - more efficient pigments than chlorophyll are handwavable), and where light penetrates through the ocean at least far enough to make monochromatic vision useful for communication/close navigation. For sound, echolocation and vocal communication in the oceans (conversation style in a social animal, not cross-ocean whale song) would be nice but not a deal breaker. Shark-like electrosense is just a possibility I'm exploring - if it's feasible life would evolve a way to exploit it.
**Background:**
The planet is (*probably* - see below) tidally-locked, with a bright-side surface temperature range of approximately 120°C to 170°C. At these temperature ranges, sulfur is liquid - light yellow and relatively thin up to about 157°C, and then dark red and viscous (but less dense) above that. Rivers and oceans will be mostly the yellow form, with dark red viscous patches floating on top at the hottest ocean areas, dark red viscous rivers and lakes on the hottest land masses, and interesting lava-lamp like effects over underwater hot vents or lava flows.
Due to wind currents blowing warm air to the dark side, and ocean currents circulating eastwards around the planet (due to coriolis forces), the dark side temperatures are not too far below (sulfur's) freezing point (113°C). There are thus large regions of solid sulfur 'ice,' but also regions where sulfur remains liquid.
The atmosphere contains sulfur dioxide, and some fluorine compounds (for biological reasons), and probably (but the precise details are not very important) carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen or other gases. The atmosphere will contain sulfur vapor also, due to the liquid sulfur oceans. The atmosphere does not need to be very dense - tidally locked planets can maintain fairly warm dark side temperatures with a relatively thin atmosphere and ocean circulation, and I can handwave it a bit with the very potent greenhouse capability of some fluorine compounds
The planet is host to carbon-based life where plants photosynthesize by absorbing SO2, storing the O, and releasing S. Animals eat the oxygen-containing plant tissues, 'inhale' sulfur, and exhale SO2. Proteins etc are fluorocarbon based, but this is a behind-the-scenes detail.
**"*Probably* tidally locked:"** the idea of tidal locking was initially just a way to create areas which would have low humidity (since sulfur vapor strongly absorbs light) yet were near/over oceans: (relatively) steady dry winds blowing over land from the dark side to the light side. I do quite like the idea but am not averse to changing it if it doesn't actually give me the situation I want.
This is my first question after a long period of lurking. Apologies if I've gotten the format wrong in any way (too many questions etc) - if I have, let me know and I'll edit
[Answer]
# How far and how well will sound travel through the sea?
First, we need to figure out exactly what the sea is made out of. You've indicated that it's sulfur, but what *kind* of sulfur? [Lopes & Williams (2005)](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0034-4885/68/2/R02/meta) is an excellent review article on Io that has a section discussing this. They identify different colored sections of Io with different [sulfur compounds and allotropes](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0034-4885/68/2/R02/meta):
* Red: $\text{S}\_3$ and $\text{S}\_4$, from the breakdown of more complicated sulfur molecules or from condensation of gases containing $\text{S}\_2$.
* Yellow: $\text{S}\_8$, [cyclo-octasulfur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octasulfur).
* Green: Sulfur compounds with contamination by miscellaneous silicates.
* White-grey: $\text{SO}\_2$ from crystallization after being deposited by volcanic plumes.
* Black: Silicate-rich areas near hotspots.
We therefore go to octasulfur, $\text{S}\_8$, for our oceans. However, classic cyclo-octasulfur is a solid, and melts at around 115°C. The form of octasulfur we need is $\lambda$-sulfur, which is only slightly different (although it is liquid at the temperatures you need; it is generally not a solid form of sulfur).
The speed of sound in a liquid, $c\_s$, is easy to determine:
$$c\_s=\sqrt{\frac{K}{\rho}}$$
where $K$ is the [bulk modulus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_modulus) of the liquid and $\rho$ is the density. I was not able to find good measurements of the bulk modulus of $\text{S}\_8$ at any temperature, but I did find a study that found the speed of sound at different temperatures, [Kozhevnikov et al. (2004)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15473808). Figure 6 shows some of their results:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2UdV4.png)
They don't present any best-fit curves, but it appears that the results are linear in temperature, with one line valid through 80°C to 160°C and another for 160°C to 200°C. These measurements appear to be for $\text{S}\_8$ (presumably $\lambda$-sulfur) and should therefore be perfect for your seas. There is not enough data about sound absorption to determine exactly how it behaves over a wide range of temperatures.
For comparison, the speed of sound in water is approximately 1,500 meters per second, a bit higher than the roughly 1300 meters per second in an $\text{S}\_8$ ocean. However, the above results assume that the oceans are extremely pure; as I mentioned above, contamination is extremely likely, and therefore we can't assume that they will be perfectly pure.
# How far will light penetrate through the sea?
Let's assume that the [Beer-Lambert law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer%E2%80%93Lambert_law) is applicable here - which I assume it is. The law states that the intensity, $I$, of light is an exponentially-decaying function of depth:
$$I(l)=I\_0e^{-l/L}$$
where $I\_0=I(0)$ and $L$ is the [attenuation length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation_length), which determines how quickly the intensity drops off. The attenuation length is the reciprocal of the absorption coefficient, $\alpha$. I found [a passing reference](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-8984/6/28/005/meta) which states in its abstract that
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> The optical absorption coefficient alpha of liquid sulphur has been measured in a wide absorption range from 5.5\*10-2 to 2\*105 cm-1 at temperatures from 130 to 450 degrees C.
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I don't know if the relationship is linear or not (or if this is a form of octasulfur), but it appears to change by seven orders of magnitude within a range of about 300°C. In SI units, this is $5.5\times10^{-4}$ to $2\times10^3\text{ m}^{-1}$. Let's say that the relationship is linear. We then should have a slope of about 3°C/m-1. Therefore, at 170°C, we should find $\alpha\sim120$, and so
$$I(l)=I\_0e^{-120l}$$
The above struck-out part is incorrect, as per [Tharaib's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71162/627). The coefficient's behavior is distinctly nonlinear with respect to temperature.
# How effective would detection of electric fields be in a sulfur sea? (E.g. for prey detection, as in sharks)
Seawater is a decent electrical conductor, because it has free ions; these mean that free electrons can quite easily carry electric currents, and so it is easier for electric fields to permeate the water. For sulfur, things are substantially more complicated. [*Elemental Sulfur and Sulfur-Rich Compounds I*](https://books.google.com/books?id=9PaU9qnETfEC) states (page 106) that
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In general, however, sulfur's conductivity rises with temperature, and we are indeed dealing with somewhat high temperatures. [*Synthetic Methods of Organometallic and Inorganic Chemistry, Volume 4, 1997*](https://books.google.com/books?id=VIuZAwAAQBAJ) confirms that $\alpha$-sulfur is an excellent insulator. However, it, too, states that at high temperatures, sulfur's electrical conductivity (as well as other properties) change suddenly.
I currently cannot get you exact values for $\lambda$-sulfur's electrical conductivity, but it appears that it would be much harder for organisms to sense electric fields in a liquid sulfur ocean.
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# Answer in progress!
[Answer]
According the site rules, answering your own questions is encouraged to provide a useful resource to the community, so here goes (I hope someone finds this useful....).
After my initial edit when I found that SO2 absorbs in the UV only, I continued to do more reading, and think I have found reasonablely satisfactory answers to 3 out of my 4 questions, which were:
1. What would the effect of sulfur vapor humidity in the air be on visibility? Specifically, what partial pressure of vapour seems reasonable? (I can approximate from the quote above from Freitas)
2. How far will light penetrate through the sea?
3. How far and how well will sound travel through the sea?
4. How effective would detection of electric fields be in a sulfur sea? (E.g. for prey detection, as in sharks)
I'm still not sure how to address the humidity question - I might have to just guess since so many variables could affect it.
My answers so far are:
**2. How far will light penetrate through the sea?**
[In his answer, HDE 226868 found values for the optical absorption coefficient in liquid sulphur](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/70874/33065) (thank you very much!) - a range of 5.5 x 10-4 m-1 at 130°C to 2 x 105 m-1 at 450°C. However the variation in absorption coefficient over this range will not be linear as he assumed - liquid sulfur is light yellow up to 157°C where it becomes dark red, and then at 225°C it becomes black. Clearly the variation in absorption will experience large jumps at the transitions between the three forms. The maximum absorption of 2 x 105 m-1 at 450°C corresponds to the black form; the lower bound of 5.5 x 10-4 m-1 at 130°C is just below the middle of the temperature range of the light yellow form (113°C - 157°C).
In my question I specified a temperature range of 120°C to 170°C for the planet, with most oceans and rivers in the yellow form, so it's reasonable to take the 130°C figure as a rough guide - 0.00055 m-1 .
For comparison with water, absorption coefficients range from:
0.0044 m-1 at 418 nm (violet)
0.02 m-1 - 500 nm (green)
0.2 m-1 600 nm (orange)
0.6 m-1 700 nm (red)
3 m-1 740 nm (red)
The absorption coefficient at 130°C is an order of magnitude smaller than the absorption coefficient of the least absorbed wavelength of light (violet). However, liquid sulfur's color clearly demonstrates that a narrower range of frequencies get through (i.e. we can assume that absorption coefficients for other frequencies are much higher than they are for water), so perhaps overall illumination would not be as bright as the lower absorption coefficient would suggest. It seems reasonable to assume that yellow light will penetrate a sulfur sea less deeply and illuminate less brightly than is the case for sunlight in seas on earth, but not so much less that vision and photosynthesis in surface dwelling species would be unreasonable (the photic zone would just be shallower). This does not take into account stronger 'sun'light from the planet's star - I can handwave that a little to reduce the differences further.
**Overall, I consider a reasonable answer to my question to be that the seas will be yellow and darker than our seas, but not so much so that it should make vision or an oceanic ecosystem drastically less viable than on earth."**
**3. How far and how well will sound travel through the sea?**
Thanks again to HDE 226868, for the information about the speed of sound!
According to the majority of sources I found while google-trawling, absorption losses are minimal compared to the inverse-square law losses. At low frequencies especially, losses due to viscosity are pretty low.
**I consider it reasonable that sound will travel reasonably well and not that much differently to in earth's oceans, and so echolocation and sound communication would be reasonable.**
**4. How effective would detection of electric fields be in a sulfur sea? (E.g. for prey detection, as in sharks)**
I hadn't noticed at first, but [the aforementioned Freitas book actually contains a value for the relative permittivity of liquid sulfur](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.2.htm) - 3.48. Water has a typical relative permittivity of 81.1, which means that an electric field at a given distance from a charge would be 24 times stronger in liquid sulfur than in water (since electric field strength is inversely proportional to permittivity). This is not what I was expecting and I am a little concerned I have had a small attack of cerebral flatulence while working this out, but it seems to be correct.
**It would seem that detecting electric fields would be a very viable option for animals living in the darker bottoms of a yellow sulfur sea**
If anything is obviously wrong with these answers, please point it out!
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[Question]
[
In my setting, wands and staves are two of the many means by which magical creatures can harness, to a limited degree, other magical creatures' powers. When a magical creature (known as an immortal) dies, a small bead-like gem is left behind, called a soul gem. This piece of crystalized MANA (magic DNA) can be harnessed in various ways by channeling another immortal's magical energies through metal and into the soul gem, altering the nature of the magical energies to be more like those of the soul gem's species, like light traveling through colored glass.
Wands and staves are generally the ways that activated, projectile-based abilities, like fire breath or conjured lightning for instance, are used. They consist of three parts:
* A metal rod to conduct the magical energies through
* A soul gem at the business end to give the magical energies shape
* A non-metal, non-conductive casing, with a hole for the holder to let their skin touch the metal inside, intended to keep all the magical energy flowing in one specific direction like the barrel of a gun.
And speaking of guns, the main difference between them is a lot like the difference between pistols and rifles: wands, made with shorter pieces of metal that don't let as much magic travel through them before hitting the business end, offer greater concealment and portability and don't require as much magical energy to use. Staves, meanwhile, allow more magic to travel through them before hitting the business end, and thus are stronger and also more accurate while being less portable, more magically intensive, and less concealable. ...*In theory*.
Ironically, though, it's actually kind of the opposite on that last point when it comes to appearing normal to the oblivious humans. A staff is quite a bit more normal to walk around with in modern day, because it's quite easy to explain it away as a walking stick/cane. But wands never saw any sort of mundane use at basically *any* point in human history, and thus in practice they'd need to be disguised as some other device so as not to raise eyebrows in the event that someone found they were carrying one.
**But what sort of object would be best for that? What roughly foot-long object, totally normal to carry around in modern-day times, could something that fits all three of the above requirements for a wand be easily disguised as?**
[Answer]
## A Gun
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IscfK.jpg)
This presumes that concealed carry licenses are available for the mage. It assumes that you want to conceal the fact that you are a mage, not the fact that you are carrying a weapon. Maybe the wand is integrated into the gun and it is in fact a functional gun. This could be favoured by more modern minded mages.
If purely magical combat is the norm, a firearm could be tactically advantagous. I think there is a scene in The Dresden Files where the wizard is either out of magic or facing a magic resistant foe. The foe taunts him, the mage shoots him.
[Answer]
**Selfie stick**
The biggest advantage of a selfie stick is that no one would find it unusual if the owner is holding it high, waving it in the air in odd patterns and maybe even saying something while doing all that.
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**Collapsible Umbrella**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/e77IDm.png)
You carry a collapsible umbrella if the weather is too good for a coat, but perhaps it . . . might rain later?
Of course these things are utter garbage. The moment it starts raining in earnest the umbrella turns inside out and the metal bends. It then ends up in the nearest public waste bin, still flapping in the wind.
There is a collapsible umbrella for every walk of life. Some mothers carry one in their everyday handbag kit. Some kids carry them in schoolbags. Some super trendy businessmen carry them in their inner suit pocket, since wearing a coat makes you look less uber business chic but wearing a wet suit is even worse!
They come in all different colours.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPrmnm.png)
Anyone can believably carry a collapsible umbrella. And they are about a foot long. Stick a wand in there I say.
[Answer]
**Electronic Stimulation Device**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hkz3bm.png)
To expand on the comment of Starfish Prime, there are situations where carrying one of these bad boys is optimal play.
For example when passing through a security checkpoint. If you have a ten inch screwdriver, collapsible tripod, huge paintbrush, or heavy-duty flashlight then you will raise some eyebrows.
None of these things are illegal, but they are strange to carry, and you might get stopped for questioning. Why do you need this in the museum sir?
Of course the stimulation device also raises eyebrows. It also makes the security clerk turn bright scarlet and everyone else turn away in embarrassment. Note to self: make sure to practice turning scarlet on demand.
This will not get you stopped for questioning. Everyone knows what the wand is for. No one wants to talk about it. Go right ahead sir. NEXT!
[Answer]
It might be a bit on the small end, but nothing more normal1 to carry around with you than a simple pen:
Comes in all variations, materials, sizes, prices, colors…
1: apart from the ubiquitous computing devices aka smartphones
[Answer]
If your witches/wizards/sorcerers were able to masquerade as symphonic conductors, a [conductor's baton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_(conducting)) would be the right shape and size, and is quite natural to wave about with ornate flourishes.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hDuZa.jpg)
([Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Asavio, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CarolynKuan.jpg))
[Answer]
# The wand-cane:
Place the wand inside of something else bigger and less conspicuous than a wand. A cane, either fancy or for disabilities, is easily justified, and authorities won’t take it away from you even going into an airport or security area if it’s for “disabilities.” For a cane with separate feet, the business end can fire through the cane. Otherwise, it looks like a non-lethal version of a sword-cane (little do they know…)
# Drumsticks:
Your wizard is likely to look a bit odd. So lean into it an carry a flute and a pair of drumsticks. What musician doesn’t look a bit quirky?
# Tools:
A screwdriver, a hammer and a tool belt lend themselves to looking like or concealing a wand.
# Toys:
You’re not a crazy wizard, but a dad or mom with a toy wand or gun in a diaper bag.
# A wrapped gift:
It's something long and thin, with a bow wrapped in paper. Maybe in a box. Well, obviously it's a gift. What? I dunno. Unless they suspect someone, who's going to ask you to open it? No, it's a surprise (a big surprise) - you'll tell what it is. Okay, it's a religious candle. For a baptism (by fire). Who knows? Maybe you covered it in wax, and it looks like a candle. A little heavy...
[Answer]
# Most tools, actually
I'll generalize what others are saying. It's easier than you think to find a long 1-foot item you can carry around and hide a conductible material within, and those are mostly tools. So let's focus on the 3 conditions to make an item and take them each out, then think about the many examples :
## 1) Having the right size
The fact is, **most smaller tools have an handle you can use, and this handle is more often than not twice the size of the palm in order to give a comfortable grip**. So items with the right yet believable size are quite common. If they're too big, use a foldable version : Umbrellas, police batons...
## 2) Hiding the rod, gem and casing
Since most items are not transparent, hiding a metal rod and/or casing should be a piece of cake!
**As for the gem, hide it in the handle and use in the direction it's originally aiming for, or as its base and hold the tool the other way round when shooting magic.** You might also like to craft a mini-trapdoor to shoot lasers without destroying your tool. The gem is too stylish and glimmering? Surround it with something else so it cannot be seen at all, or just apply some paint and varnish to hide its true nature. **If it's still too visible, chain the gem to the handle like a keychain, and when you're about to use it insert it into a conveniently shaped plug.**
## 3) Accessing the metallic rod
Then, accessing the metal isn't hard either, **it can be either done as some stylistic inset, hidden behind a moveable plate or just as a button.** Lots of wooden brain-teasers boxes make heavy-use of small or hidden buttons to open their content, so doing it on other things doesn't seem too nasty in comparison.
# Putting the above into practice
* Most worker tools can have a wood handle of this size : Hammers, screwdrivers1, old thick rulers, ... Add a plug and wear a keychain or just make the gem part of the hook on the handle to hide your spellbuilding talent.
* You're an artist? Take your chisel, or some 10' wide brush. You're more into photos? Always be on the lookout for the best picture with a foldable tripod to ensure your next shot will be magical.
* You're a barman, or you're the coffee machine expert at the office? Take your thermos or a shaker and slap inside your coffee or the rod. Hide the gem on the lid, and use a well-placed metallic circle to make contact. If you're more into smoking than drinking, you can just use a long smoking pipe instead!
* You're charged of cleaning the place? Dustpans brushes and feather dusters will clean off any doubts. You can't really see what's inside the brush many feathers/hair, so put the gem inside! Or perhaps you're more into the portable vacuum cleaners, with the gem in the vent and a super, ~~magical~~ all-in-one button to turn it on?
## And some items that you might not think about
* A pair of compass : Pick one, extend it to the maximum and it surprisingly can reach the length of a A4 paper. The two sides are travelled by the rod, and the gem is hidden in the knob to fine-tune your (magic) circle.
* Globetrotter? Take your portable battery to charge your phone and spells any time you're far from a power source.
* You're following the [Hippocratic Oath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath)? You always carry a big, white-opaque siringe to make a joke on your new patients... Until it's time to take their magic pills. The siringe wand is to be carried the metal tip in the palm.
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1 *: Peck, a famous TV series use a [very special screwdriver to the point it's 3 letters away from being magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_screwdriver).*
[Answer]
**Travel chopsticks**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IQqvm.png)
Source: [Snow Peak](https://www.snowpeak.com/products/wabuki-chopsticks-sct-111)
These unscrew in the middle and the tips nest inside the handles for transport. These are a bit unusual to carry (outside of East Asia) but shouldn't raise too many questions1.
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1 I've only been asked about them once (at a security checkpoint at the US National Archives IIRC); when asked what they were I replied "Chopsticks. For eating." and the guard didn't ask any more questions.
[Answer]
Sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain sight.
Under the name "magic wand" or similar several companies merchandise objects aimed at adult personal entertainment.
In a good part of the modern world nobody would have anything to object against a person who carries such magic wand with them, even though most would try to be modest and reserved about the possession of such object.
And also in their case
>
> the magic travels through them until reaching the business end
>
>
>
One could write an entire user manual with just an appropriate choice of words.
[Answer]
* Flashlight. Not quite normal to carry one of those in business attire, but it could be in the glove compartment of any car.
* Bicycle pump. Perfectly normal if one is in the backpack along with a bicycle helmet.
* A slightly odd-shaped drinking bottle, as carried by hikers or outdoor sportspeople. It would have to be non-transparent to hide the contents, but those exist.
* Can the metal rod be telescoping? A slightly old-fashioned transistor radio receiver.
* A detachable part of a fancy handbag or briefcase.
[Answer]
# Glasses
Glasses feature three very distinctive ways in which you can hide your magic wand, which I have generously pointed out in the following schematic:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/i2LnN.png)
The location and direction of the magic wand within your glasses will depend on whether you're a lefty or a righty, and on how you prefer to hold your glasses in moments of extreme hardship.
For the frames, a wide variety of fancy, non-conductive and low-profile materials is available, from bone to bamboo.
Instead of the glasses only housing the one wand, it can hold an additional two wands, which can be used as reserves, or for moments when you need that extra firepower that three soul gems can produce. Or to lend a colleague a helping wand.
Bonus feature: it also won't fail you if you just need a quick, inconspicuous boost of magic mead while attending a boring conference on the ethics of transmutation:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qTE67.png)
[Answer]
Instead of completely avoiding notice, you can attempt to hide in plain sight if you pass it off as a
## Pimp Cane
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DXt1t.jpg)
Gives a whole other meaning to the phrase "black magic". In order for this to work, your immortal would need some swagger and possibly other accoutrements like a fur coat or gold chains. With this method, you gain access to the Bruce Wayne Defense, meaning that the ostentatious and/or highly visible public profile of the person in question deflects further investigation into their true nature by making any suspicions seem absurd.
If your immortal can't pass this off, making it a cosplay item is a viable alternative. Nobody would expect a guy dressed like Gandalf at a convention to actually be able to do magic. Got into a magic fight in public with another immortal? It's just scripted LARPing backed with some special effects, nothing to see here.
[Answer]
**Knitting needles**
About the right size and shape. Goes well with the "wise old grannie" trope.
[Answer]
**Reusable straw case**
As plastic straws are becoming less common, people may carry their own reusable straw with them. Straw cases are widely available, so this would be a rather normal, rod-shaped, nearly foot-long object, that could be adorned at the tip and be made of any material without drawing much attention. Bonus points if the wand actually opens and has a removable hollow core that could really be used as a straw - the wand isn't just disguised as a straw and case, it actually is one. This object is only slightly unusual, and is probably about as lightweight and compact as the dimensions of the wand allow.
[Answer]
I present to you, just as an example, the Powerlight Multipurpose:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/92pNz.png)
It's 8.75 inches long, so adding about 3 inches and making it slightly thicker is no big deal. But the thing is, it's not just a flashlight: you can use the battery as a power bank for your cell phone or whatever. There are a whole lot of varieties of this sort of flashlight out there. This one also has a steel tip at the base for a window breaker and a concealed blade for a seatbelt cutter, and you can get others that have some mini-screwdrivers in the handle and so on, so it's essentially a multipurpose tool.
I wouldn't look twice at someone carrying something like that around all the time. It might be harder for men to carry around innocuously in some types of clothing (someone in work clothes having it on their belt, no issue, but it would be a bit off for a three piece suit), but a woman could have it in a purse or bag, and even if you couldn't carry it directly on you, having one around within reach, at worst, merely makes you look paranoid about emergencies, not a magic user.
[Answer]
## A medical brace
A medical brace often includes metal struts for reinforcement. With added bonus that it's more difficult to get disarmed.
---
To hide a longer staff around the house you can use standing lamps or a free standing coat hanger next to your entrance in case you need to defend yourself against intruders. A quick release button to drop the coats on them might be handy.
random example from alibaba
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fu22E.png)
[Answer]
Hide it in the sole of a shoe or boot:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9XiZz.png)
Criteria:
1. It needs to be about a foot long? So is a foot!
2. Protective non-metal coating? Sounds like a standard shoe sole to me.
3. Able to come in contact with the skin? Here's where we need to get a little creative. Make a device similar to the shoe knife except that instead of kicking one shoe against the other activating the blade, it retracts a panel under the heel of the foot to allow the foot to make contact with the wand.
This has added advantages over hand held devices, such as:
1. It allows you the use of both of your hands to do other things (flip through a spell book, grapple an opponent, use a physical weapon).
2. It is much less conspicuous to use (you don't need to raise your arm to aim it and can be done totally invisibly under a table).
3. It's harder for someone to take away from you (any object you are carrying can be wrested from your hand much easier than a shoe can be taken off your foot).
[Answer]
**A mobile phone**
Everyone has at least one (also no one would that suspicious if you wanted to carry several). They come in all shapes and sizes (thus you are being a hipster with an old-school phone with an antenna if you need a larger object). No one will notice that you have it out always or if you start pointing it at people you just say your taking a picture.
[Answer]
A prosthesis! Arm, hand, finger even. They touch skin on one end, can be made of non-metal materials like carbon fiber, and can be designed with a hole in the palm or a fingertip. I'd give my right arm for a magic wand prosthetic arm...
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Are there no other fans of *The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel* here? In Season 2, talent manager Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) manages to blend in and get free room and board at a resort in the Catskills for a summer by always walking around with her magic wand, **a plunger** (a.k.a. force cup, plumber's helper, etc.):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tUK2g.jpg)
Plumber's garb optional. It won't work everywhere, but people in service occupations are notoriously invisible to the upper classes.
[Answer]
## Laptop or other flat object
The wand need not be disguised as a rod, if it can be hidden in a flat object. This opens up laptops, books (a big Bible would do the trick).
## Those sticks that girls put a couple of through a bun or topknot
My hairdressing acumen isn't great, but it would work. If the gem has to show, this is a good option.
## Necklace
Depending on fads, a necklace could incorporate a rod, either hanging or as a central spar for a whole lot of metal bits to hang off
## Cross / crucifix
For places where a masturbatory aid won't be allowed in...that also aren't in Saudi Arabia.
[Answer]
A [cigarette holder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_holder). Although seriously unfashionable now, they were common between about 1910 to 1970. For men, about 4 inch (10cm) long, for women 4 inch to 20 inch (40 cm). It might be hard to make a functional cigarette holder with a jewel at its end, but a wand could pass as one, at first glance.
It depends if you can push your story back to the 1960's, or make some of the characters eccentric dandies, who might be able to get away with it in the 2020s.
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Drumsticks? I think the TV Dresden used one in one episode. Drummers are known to be ... eccentric ... too (among other things), so assuming that persona as a disguise might be able to hide other wizardly irregularities too. Plus a lot of people avoid drummers, and a lot of wizards or other magical types, trying to pass in a mundane world (in many fictional scenarios), would be ok with that.
[Answer]
## Invisible (or in a pocket dimension)
I understand that the premise of the question is finding an object and many objects were offered already but believe me, invisibility is much better than disguising it as an object that might raise suspicion or pose a risk.
As you said:
>
> wands and staves are two of the many means by which magical creatures can harness, to a limited degree, other magical creatures' powers.
>
>
>
They are magical creatures and they should be able to use their wand or stave at will and even quickly if needed. However, they don't want them to be seen so they use an invisibility charm to render them invisible. They might even keep them in another dimension (or a pocket dimension) and conjure at will.
The risks of disguising as or carrying as another object:
* You can lose it or break it
* It can get stolen
* You can forget that it was your wand/stave (because of other similar objects, where you left it etc.)
* It can be confiscated (depending on the laws/rules in your universe)
* It can be revealed (by other magical creatures)
* You can have other mundane items that humans use and can be useful for you also
Note: The pocket dimension idea can be a bit better because of the risks but invisibility is still a good idea also.
[Answer]
How about drum sticks? Not the most common but still easily explainable if questioned.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zi6CH.jpg)
The eyepencil which is a makeup item look like a lot a magic wand and it can be manipulated with the hands and with the fingers in the same way the magic wand can.
[Answer]
Put it in a sheath and strap it to your arm. Or make a hidden pocket in your coat sleeve.
Tall enough boots?
How big around does the device have to be? How flexible can it be? Some clothing styles might allow a hidden pocket down the outside of your leg. Put a dummy object or spare wand on the other side so it looks more like a style.
[Answer]
# Wands
## Don’t Hide It
The answer is blindingly simple. Carry it in the open and pretend your one of the street magicians with card tricks and bunnies in hats.
## Make it a prop
Literally, just make it one of the “fake” looking wands that the said magicians above use
# Staves
Hmmm. Maybe as a quarter staff with a twist open thing to reveal the crystal (if the crystal needs to actually be in line with the target). Either that or in a collapsible/extendable magician’s wand as mentioned in the first paragraph.
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[Question]
[
In my world, there is a government agency that stops crimes before they happen, kind of like in Minority Report. However, in this case, they swoop in as early as possible, sometimes waiting outside the door as they were born. Because of this, they can't prove they stopped them because they were in the middle of shooting someone. How this agency gets its intel is from a (basically) all-knowing future-seeing AI that just gives them a name and image of the person, and place and time to arrest the would-be criminal. The AI is limited by its programming so that the only intervention it can do is giving said information to the government agency.
Since there is no proof besides 'AI said so', how does this agency prove that the people they arrest would be criminals?
[Answer]
**Arrest that newborn baby? I think you mean give that newborn baby a college scholarship.**
If the AI so so omniscient it can predict crimes decades in advance, even knowing the rippling effects of the AI's own interventions, you wouldn't need something as blunt as arrests.
You can just identify a fork in the road where you can avoid the problem with an unquestionably positive intervention. Give Hitler an art school scholarship, make sure Osama Bin Laden has a great time on his visit to America, and so on. Nobody's going to fear oppression at the hands of an education-and-international-cultural-understanding charity.
**Edit:** If you can predict crime accurately 10+ years in advance, and when you intervene to stop one future-crime it doesn't mess up causality and throw off all your other predictions, that means you can accurately predict the results of your own interventions. Unexpected consequences and perverse incentives will never be a problem, as nothing is unexpected to the omniscient AI.
[Answer]
# Statistics
Every now and then you let some crime happen just as the AI predicted. If every unimpeded prediction turns out to be true, you can convince the population that the AI never makes a mistake.
This way you can also arrest and murder a lot of innocents with impunity because "the AI accused them".
[Answer]
Wait until the very last moment.
You might not be able to absolutely prove that the guy you grabbed with the mask and shotgun was going to rob the bank he was standing outside, but most people would agree that he has a lot of questions to answer. You should have enough evidence to justify your intervention. You might not have enough evidence to send him to prison for fifteen years, but your primary goal is preventing crimes, not locking people up.
(This also has an advantage in terms of drama. If they have a policy of waiting until the last moment, then it makes the whole thing more exciting, because of the potential for things to go wrong.)
[Answer]
### You don't.
Your current model of response can't be internally consistent.
Being able to predict crime at birth and then prevent it implies the calculated future can be changed. That means you'll run into issues like:
* Alex is born in 2010 and will commit murder in 2050
* Bob is born in 2015 and will commit murder in 2040
By your prediction, both of these people will be taken from their homes and locked up at birth.
Problem being: what if Alex was going to murder Bob in 2050? You lock him up in 2010, before Bob is even born, and then in 2015 when Bob is born, you lock up Bob as well, thereby making it impossible for Alex to murder him in 2050, which means that Alex is now innocent of the crime he was going to commit because it can't happen anymore, because two different interventions have interfered with one another.
There's a reason most of these interventions in stories happen last moment, and it's because the knowledge of the future influences what actually happens. You can't really get around that. The earlier you interfere, the bigger the chance the predicted future no longer plays out that way and you locked up an innocent person.
[Answer]
**The AI makes simulated documentaries showing the future that was prevented.**
The all knowing AI can know what crime the future criminal will do as well as other events that take place in this timeline. It crafts documentaries with virtual actors to show interested parties what would have happened if this individual had continued on his or her previous path. The documentaries are pretty compelling, and might be true.
As an internal control, sometimes a criminal is not apprehended and events of his or her actual life are tested against the AI modeled documentary, to make sure the AI is accurate.
The AI future documentaries will also make good prose for your story and move things along. The existence of such documentaries of the future lead to other obvious questions; for example other future events aside from crimes that appear in these documentaries and which might be of interest. There may also be recurring characteristics of the AI generated documentaries that betray an agenda by other agencies - or perhaps by the AI itself. The best way to catch those would be analysis of many thousands of them by another AI.
This is a great scenario and I can think of enough Twilight Zone type last minute twists to occupy an entire season. For example: the chief investigator herself is one of those criminals allowed to continue on her current timeline, in the interest of having a control group. She knows this. She has not yet been able to break way from her predicted future path.
[Answer]
If the AI's thinking can not be scrutinized, then there's **no way to prove it**. The only way is for the people to **trust the AI blindly**.
Start slow. Make AI into some sort of infallible oracle whose predictions are 100% accurate. Make another stipulation - acting on those predictions can prevent the outcome, but the acting should be done 100% in a way prescribed by the AI. Have AI make numerous predictions that way and save countless human lives. People would start trusting the AI more than their own judgement.
Then a more drastic preventative action would start. Put a person into jail before a crime is committed. For a crime serious enough, execute criminal early enough. Cruel? But this is the only way to prevent the crime. Remember, the AI is infallible, and mere people have no way of raising an objective to its commands.
At the end, you will have a murderous dystopia, but people would believe that they live in a crime-free paradise.
[Answer]
Russian Sci-Fi kicks back! This is a **very** short story by E. and L. Lukin in its completeness, translated by me on the fly, which should illustrate the point. A conclusion follows.
>
> # Ask Ceasar
>
>
> "Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury!
>
>
> "The present case is not as simple as it may seem at the first glance.
>
>
> "I claim, there was no crime at all. There was only a non-executed
> criminal intent. Because, if a crime was there, where are its fruits?
> Where is the damage? Where is the victim, at last?
>
>
> "Yes, my defendant time-traveled to the Stone Age and teached the
> foundations of Quantum Mechanics to Cro-Magnon Men. So what? As the
> expertise showed, the regal flow of the history did not change at
> all. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it did not. The events occurred in the
> same sequence and precisely in the time due. There was Babylon, there was
> Sparta, there was Ancient Rome! And Julius Caesar was assassinated in the
> Senate up to a second exact at the same time as he should have been.
>
>
> "But that he was killed with a laser... Well, who cares about that!"
>
>
>
# Intent vs. crime
Basically, if someone commits a crime in the future depends on your time travel model. They might never commit it, because the past has changed. Or the future might happen just as predicted / evidenced, but with errm... "minor changes".
Next point: Your "preemtpive agency" can just point fingers at people and say that they will be horrible manslayers in the future – even if they do not have any evidence.
As also others have noted here, it's all arbitrary and not conform with a court and justice in our current understanding. An attempt to extend our current view might to appeal to the notions of criminal intent which should be there even without the criminal act. However, exactly as the line of thought of the lawyer in the short story above, an intent alone should not be punishable.
Let's just hope that this idea would be more successful that that lawyer.
[Answer]
**Frame challenge - It can't be done**
We can't even predict the weather 1 year ahead let alone a crime that is going to be committed in 20 years. Your AI is effectively an omniscient god. You should change `artificial-intelligence` to `magic`.
If it predicts that someone will commit a horrendous crime when they are 20 years old, there are two things that can happen:
1. The person *does* commit the crime. In which case the prediction was correct but no-one was able to stop it. This makes the AI worthless for stopping crimes.
2. The person is locked up for life and doesn't commit the crime, in which case the AI incorrectly predicted the future.
Basically your AI has to correctly simulate everything that happens in the nearby universe for decades ahead but also include everything that could change in the meantime. It has to predict the "free will" of every single human from now until then plus attacks by animals, future inventions, cosmic events such as Earth being destroyed.
If the AI could do this, it is effectively a universe in miniature. There are all the paradoxes of time travel here plus a few new ones.
[Answer]
**You will either face bigger problems, or you won't have to.**
In almost any democratic and modern country, it is unconstitutional to arrest people who are innocent. Innocent people are those who have not committed a crime yet. (Please note here that both conspiracy to commit a crime and attempt of a crime counts as crimes.) As such, even if you know that someone will commit a crime 10 years in the future, it is completely unconstitutional to arrest and detain them.
This is because we, rightly, judge that we cannot punish people for things that they have not done. Furthermore, this is an affirmation of free will. If you can predict that a person will commit a crime in the future with absolute certainty, that would mean that the said person has no such free will, and our morality will have to undergo major shifts.
Under the case that the laws of the society have changed so much that we allow for the arrest of people who have not committed a crime, the laws of societies would have changed so much that our justice system would be completely remade. There is no need for independent proofs for the future criminality of a person. The AI's judgment will suffice.
After all, the law that allow you to arrest people for future crimes must be based on your showing capabilities to completely accurately predict future criminals in the first place. As such, once such laws have passed, you will no longer have to justify yourself.
**Catch them red-handed**
Since your AI can predict crimes, you can avoid the constitutional problems simply by arresting the criminals when they are putting the crime into motion. Since they have committed the crime, they can now be charged, and any proof should be easily obtainable.
**Person of Interest**
A TV series, *Person of Interest*, has nearly the same premise as your question.
From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)),
>
> The series centers on a mysterious reclusive billionaire computer programmer, Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), who has **developed a computer program for the federal government known as "The Machine"** that is capable of collating all sources of information, **to predict terrorist acts and to identify people planning them**. The Machine **also identifies perpetrators and victims of other premeditated deadly crimes**; however, because the government considers these "irrelevant", Finch programs the Machine to delete this information each night. Anticipating abuse of his creation, Finch included a backdoor into the Machine. Tormented by the "irrelevant" deaths that might have been prevented, he eventually decides to use his backdoor to act covertly. To escape detection, he directs the Machine to provide him with only a tiny fragment of its data: the social security number of such a "person of interest". This may be a victim, a perpetrator, or an innocent bystander caught up in lethal events. The first episode shows how Finch recruited John Reese (Jim Caviezel)—a former Green Beret and CIA agent, now presumed dead—to **investigate the person identified by the number the Machine has provided, and to act accordingly**.
>
>
>
Emphasis mine.
While the main characters are not government agents, they do show how police can theoretically handle the problem.
[Answer]
**You can't.**
Because there's a massive string of major and minor crimes that are instigated by an unknown person or group. The people committing the crimes are arrested, but the instigator(s) aren't due to the AI not being able to detect them, as they aren't committing any crimes themselves.
Eventually a detective discovers this conspiracy against the AI, but can't do anything about it, since it's somehow not a crime. The detective might eventually convince lawmakers to write this law, the instigator(s) get arrested, and a lot of "innocent" people are released. Thus continuing the dystopian future.
Or the idea of this real conspiracy somehow gets made public and puts the AI's decisions into controversy, as intended, and the whole thing falls apart as the AI starts instructing mass arrests as people start protesting, which "of course" turn violent.
Regardless of how it turns out, the instigator could be found out to be the maker of the AI, police that want the AI to end, or even high ranking police that want to keep their purpose/power, but unintentionally their plan is found out.
## Edit:
I just had a thought.
You could have the detective go around fighting to stop the instigators in the first story/book/whatever, while the detective eventually realizes the AI does need to go and feels bad for stopping the resistance/meddling.
In the sequel, you can show the damaging effects the AI had after it was allowed to run "unchecked", so the same detective starts the resistance (again), using the same or similar tactics as before, but in ways that make it absolutely obvious that the AI is wasting money, completely wrong, and draconian. I envision the AI being repurposed to find people employment they love and excel at to make society better, instead of being completely dismantled. But I'm a bit of a romantic, and I don't really like dystopian stories. ;-)
I realize this edit doesn't exactly gel 100% with my original Answer, but it's all just suggestions anyway. Hopefully something I said helps you out.
[Answer]
Leaving the political, and moral implications aside, as well as cultural, legal and moral questions on what constitutes a "*criminal*", and suspending my disbelief to take this premise as "something that just is, no questions asked", I would tether these predictions of *future criminals* (and consequently *people who need to stopped* as early as possible) to **people who you want to stand out**. Geniuses, innovators, scientists, artists, role models etc.
Assuming that you maintain a list of (for lack of better term) *undesirables* (the bad apples), you should also maintain a list of the good apples.
Each year, you make an annual prediction of people who will excel in their lives (including the date of when their excellence is realised) as well as those who will be criminals (and the date of their crime).
You encrypt this prediction and release it to the public, but not the key. (This is to prevent these people to be targeted either positively or negatively)
On the date of realisation you release the key, so that the public can validate that your prediction was correct.
Assuming that **ALL** identities are accounted for, and you don't miss a single one, you can prove that you can indeed predict the future outcome of an individuals life.
[Answer]
## Have it also make other predictions that people can choose to ignore
During the course of your life you've gotten the following phone calls:
**Accidents:** "Hi, I'm with the Bureau of Predictive Intervention and we noticed that you are going to get into a car accident on the way to work tomorrow, but if you wait until 8:05AM to leave your house, you should be fine."
**Financial Issues:** "BPI here. I noticed you are going are going to file for bankruptcy in 2 years after quitting your current job... so you might not want to do that."
**Pre-Marriage "Counseling:** " marrying her will result in multiple cases of infidelity, treatment for depression, treatment for anxiety, bankruptcy, and divorce within the next 12 years. Oh, but the good news is that her you'll get full custody of the kids which you will be happy about."
**Predictive Medicine:** "In three months you will be diagnosed with terminal cancer, but if you go in for treatment now, it should still be early enough to treat."
People generally accept that the government has the right to force conditions on criminals, but not everyday life choices. Since all of these are non-criminal warnings they are non-compulsory. You can choose to ignore them and see what happens, and even once the accuracy is well enough accepted, people will still ignore it sometimes thanks to stubbornness, laziness, etc so it's accuracy will be pretty easy to prove based on the outcomes of non-compulsory warnings. Or better yet, they will not answer their phone and the prediction will reliably come to pass because they could not even accidentally avoid the problem with foreknowledge of it.
[Answer]
One of the options mentioned in the answers is the possibility of time travel. This changes from a "preemptive crime fighting group" to a set of time traveling executioners. However, it simplifies justifying their work.
Rather than preemptively stopping crime, they wait for the crime to happen, the criminal to be found and caught. There is a trial and if found guilty, the court may issue a back-in-time death sentence. A guy from the future appears with a document signed by a judge stating that Joe Doe must *disappear*.This can range from a full case to, over time, a succinct "Killed several people", with people in older time basically just with the assurance that "there was a fair trial in the future". In any case, should there be corruption, it would be very hard to find out if any of those documents were falsified.
A middle situation between that and your setup would be that the "powerful AI" is just a receiver of such orders from the future. A lawyer requested someone to be wiped after birth and, after following proper procedure, it goes to your agency at the date of birth of that person.
The orders could be so concise that they only provide the name of the person to arrest (or their citizen id number). They don't really know *why* those babies deserve being arrested, just that a court in the future stated that.
Of course, they would be surprised if they found out with their perfect schema that they might actually be following orders from a dictator from the future, or simply a teenager that hacked the transmission channel.
[Answer]
I will assume that the AI can't translate the knowledge it bases that prediction on into any form that is acceptable by human standards. For that makes the question self answering.
My solutions.
1
**Test crimes.**
Such a simple and easy solution to implement **if** the setting allows it.
Once a month a secret crime is made under the watchful gaze of the government. You can sing several thousand people nation wide to stage crimes to be set. You can eliminate all forms of surveillance easily and can connect them using secret means like intelligence style messing and cells work.
Having the group stage the crimes to be able to fool humans perfectly. This is important as our laws only work on the human level not the gods level. That is if I saw me neighbor through his window shoot his wife and heard the gunshot and saw her body collapse to the floor. This could be a crime but also they could be practicing a play. Calling the cops at that point is 100% normal and to the human understanding the mere possibility of other things, magic or acting or whatever, is a point proven after investigation so it does not matter.
**Human perception and understand is what laws are built on.**
The best part?
**It does not matter if the AI predicted the crime or not. Simply ask it**
How!!!
Simple. If it counted the crime then it has as much understanding as human observer which is enough to build a case on is our laws already.
But what if it did not count the crime? Then it much more smarter than humans and can even detect fake crimes.
Either way it is proven to be 100% functional and helpful.
Just as an extra point to address the issue of fake crimes.
It would be legally argued, and I am no lawyer, that the truth of the matter that those people did not commit a crime and that the AI can be fooled.
However a quick examination can be used to answer 1 question.
**Did they people planned to seem like they did a crime beyond a reasonable doubt?**
Because the systems, current ones, can't do anything beyond that.
Because that is all what the law requires. Not a single state on earth, or in history, can actually claim to do more or have done more.
Merely beyond a reasonable doubt. We hear all the time about a crime 20 years ago that is reopened and then the person thought to be guilty is then acquitted, whoops.
You can't then try to reject the system as even if you only prove that is like what we already have it has the added benefit of prevention the crime so it's like getting a 100% better computer with the same price. No reason to reject it.
2
**Other predictions.**
While not mentioned in the question I think this fits in more than letting other crimes happen as the AI might be hardwired not never let that happen or anything similar, not to mention the moral problem.
However if the AI can predict sporting events down the smallest detail, rain fall, actors film choices, the stock market, the path random people take to work, what youtube channel will be popular this year...etc.
If it can do all this it would be very easy for a law change to happen as basically this proves that the AI can actually predict anything.
3
Intervene **just** before crimes happen. Proving state of mind, intent, preparation for the crime...etc to provide for a court as more concrete evidence.
Lets take Marcus for example. Marcus is a low life scumbag who is in and out of correctional facilities and always in trouble with the law.
One days he decides to rob a bank. Now he gathers the crew, buys the weapons and tools, stakes the places, plans on the time...etc.
Then just as his own car pulls in the bank he is meet with a SWAT team, or whatever you have equal to that, and then he is charged with the crime.
Now this is a much much simpler case to establish in a court of law and the tweaking of the current laws wont be as high as before.
In your earlier example of killing at birth no law or constitution in the world would allow that. The philosophy is complicated but basically it would be a crime even if backup with this AI.
However if you wait just before the crime is about to happen this narrows down the variables to the minimum and insures that you have sufficient proof, legal sense, to convict **with** the ultimate conclusion of the AI.
This I think is vital as it narrows it down, again it is important since the law deals with actual actions not magic predictions, and coupled with the 100% truth rate of the AI it **should** be enough to change the laws so that prevention of the crime before the crime carries the maximum penalty.
Let me give you another example. If the AI see Sara killing Matt in his apartment on Friday the 12th using her gun after she takes a long lunch break from work and eats a burrito on the way to his place while listening The Melvins.
This is more evidence than claiming that Sara will go to Matt to kill him on the 12th. Imagine that they have an affair and she goes to him for a quickie all the time.
The fact that she has gun does **not** equal intent to murder him, nor is she going there does as explained before.
So from a legal standpoint you want to limit the other factors and produce such a clear and obvious case. The needed proof from criminal cases is higher than civil cases and to trial Sara for murder without as much damning evidence as possible is very tricky from a legal since.
That is why if the AI can predict her course of action and words and all that it can be safely assumed that on this occasion indeed she will kill him.
**This is flawed to an extent.**
I can't deny it. The bank robbery for example is easy as it requires automatic rifles, just for example, and planning and other people...etc.
But say a guy gets drunks 2/7 days a week for years. Then one time he takes a knife and stabs his father. This is insanely complicated because he was doing just about everything the same exact way before but just this time decided to do the murder.
I'm sure that actual lawyers have more interesting thoughts on it.
Thought I'm not sure that the philosophy of the law is what you are looking for or not. Anyway hope it helps.
[Answer]
You would need to get the information of its reliability by copying the AI into a controlled environment, and then extrapolate its validity to your situation.
Therefore you would have to set up a copy of your AI, but instead of a "live-feed" you would have to feed it with historical data. So, as to say, next to your "present and future-AI" you would have a setup that uses the same programming and reasoning, but uses them on historical data - a "past-AI".
You could check the validity of the AIs predictions on existing data, and thereby validate its "present and future"-counterpart.
[Answer]
In this scenario, other than what the AI says, there is no evidence for the crimes, since they have not yet happened. *You cannot prove a negative*
But that would be unimportant, because further evidence would not be necessary.
The word of an all-knowing future-seeing AI would be sufficient evidence with which to charge and convict an alleged perpetrator.
Since the AI is *all-knowing* it knows everything and cannot err.
Since the AI is *future-seeing* it has directly witnessed the crime.
Therefore there is no basis for doubting the information supplied by the AI. The AI not only has perfect knowledge of the crime, the AI has been an eyewitness to the crime. Extra evidence is worthless.
[Answer]
**Everyone is jailed**
Nearly every country on earth has complicated enough laws where nearly every person will inevitably commit a crime at some point in their life. Jaywalking, speeding, throwing away junk mail with someone else's name on it, inadvertently mispaying taxes, connecting to unsecured Wifi, etc. Even if you think you are safe as a child, in many places if someone under 18 is carrying a sharpie marker in public, they are breaking the law. Or hey, even singing Happy Birthday without paying royalties.
Without the nature of the crime being committed, it is a ridiculous notion.
[Answer]
The short answer to your question, like others have shown, is of course 'they can't'.
But, since we want to help the agency out here, let's see what they CAN do.
About time travel paradoxes. Knowing the future changes the future. This should mean that the image one gets of the future is one that changes AS you witness it. Which is weird of course; this should be a trippy effect at best, but paradoxal at worst.
Let's for ease's sake say the AI knows how to handle this. Let's say he takes a snapshot of one moment's potential future and stops looking before it makes any decisions on it.
A person is accused of a future crimez, and is detained.
A person may be guilty of a future crime, but as soon as this is known, this may change. As soon as a person is detained to prevent their future crime, and the future of this person is AGAIN checked to see if they will commit a crime, they may turn out to be no longer guilty.
Does this mean this person has to remain detained? Do we not owe an innocent person to check the future again to see what would happen if we set him free again? And if we decide to give him that chance, how often do we recheck? Is he gonna be up for probation only as often as prisoners of today are generally? Doesn't seem fair, especially if the matter of a recheck is trivial, for this OMNISCIENT AI.
So we get to the part that others also mentioned; what if detainment wasn't necessary in the first place? What if other actions - cheaper, easier, fairer - would do the same trick? Given the AI's powers, it wouldn't be too hard for it to figure out what would be the most efficient 'action' to reach the best result. It might need to learn how to get there, but isn't learning one of its fortes?
Like someone else mentioned; a simple phone call to the parents of the future criminal might be enough. IF SO, THE AI WILL KNOW AS SOON AS HE DECIDES TO CALL THEM, IF HE CONTINUOUSLY RECHECKS THE FUTURE. See, it might require more involved measures, but my point is; the AI will find out what it is.
All you have to do as a writer is decide what kind of stuff the AI figures are the best actions to take.
So I guess my conclusions is; leave it to the AI. Don't go around detaining people because that's the only thing you can think of that will help. It may very well be utterly useless, or even worse; too fascistic a course of action may cause unrest among the people, and an INCREASE in crime.
Also, like others mentioned, having more than one AI for the job, and having them compete with each other, would be opportuun to a point that it would seem implausible if it didn't happen.
[Answer]
I think it depends on what is required to "prove" it: there is the proving in scientific sense and in the layman sense to mention just a few. You can argue that "juridically" speaking it has to be proven beyond the shadow of doubt, but what that means depends on the justice system in place and what it defines that to be. There are laws in the United States as of today that are based on look and feel, what is "perceived" to be the truth (the "everyone knows" in Vox Populi), or someone's biases instead of scientific/engineering/medical/mathematical proofs. That has been seen in other countries throughout history, be it in the Victorian England, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Conquistadores in Central America, Galileo's Europe, and so on.
In Mein Kampf is argued that if you repeat a lie long enough claiming it is the truth, the average person will believe it to be the case.
Now, you need to establish in the public's mind that this AI predictions is accurate. Tests are not good enough: tragic events you can show were predicted by it but were not act upon (i.e the "we had the technology to avoid this tragedy but the politicians chose not to lift a finger! How long must the blood innocent babies wash our streets until we pass this law?") are very effective in moulding the public opinion. This needs to be built until the government approves using the AI system and preemptive crime fighting.
Next step is to show number of crimes is decreasing; it is not that hard to claim that is due to your crime fighting elite group. It is all about perceptions and controlling them. For instance, in our current age Facebook "experts" and twits by celebrities have more weight to the public mind than carefully laid scientific tests; it is the emotional vs logical argument. As time goes by, this will become established fact in the mind of the people.
[Answer]
There could be multiple competing implementations of these AI systems. After all, if one was created, couldn't there be more?
* world governments infiltrate various government agencies and try to replicate the AI, with mixed success
* open-source hackers construct multiple similar competing systems
* the original creator of the system had a disagreement with government policy and has gone into exile, producing another AI system that he claims is superior
Each AI may have slightly different programming or data sets. What happens when the various systems don't provide a consensus is up to politics. Do people trust in the government's system as more accurate, more precise, more trustworthy than these imitations?
[Answer]
Your premise has problems deeper than the question.
# Case 1/2: The future can be changed --> Machine crashes
If the future can be changed, the AI itself will play a massive role in it. Maybe the gonverment would try to do what mjt suggests in his answer. That will change the future. So, the AI will have to include itself in the calculations. This results in an infinite loop, ie crash. The machine will never return a result.
# Case 2/2: The future cannot be changed --> Don't even care
If the future cannot be changed, there is no discussion to be had. Everyone will do what they will do. How they will perceive their fake freedom is up to you.
Note: it is important to make the distinction that even if our very real lives are indeed fully deterministic, we have no such AI to see our future - and try to disprove it. If I went in front of the machine and start thinking of raising a hand, and the machine predicted I would raise my left, I'd try to raise my right. If I raise right, we are in case 1. If I raise left, well, I have no clue how this could have happened, what I'd feel and so on, so that's where your editing freedom comes.
] |
[Question]
[
Magic is based on symbols tattooed onto one's body. The types and number of tattoos determine what magic the users can perform.
Since tattoos in our world are easy to obtain (especially with methods like stick-and-poke), it seems feasible that nearly everyone in my setting could have access to magic tattoos. While I'm fine with magic being somewhat common, I'm trying to avoid everyone in my world having access to magic.
A certain amount of hand-waving is acceptable, since I'm already hand-waving to avoid my characters being half-naked all the time trying to expose tattoos on their body ("did you see what happened to that guy who tried to put a tattoo above his elbow?"). However, I'd like whatever justification I have for restricted access to magic to be self-consistent, and to not be "the tattoos only work on people who are born magical." I want the magic to be granted by the tattoos, not for the tattoos to just channel the user's innate magic, as I feel that would defeat the purpose of them.
How do I prevent magical tattoos from being available to everyone?
[Answer]
Magical tattoos are insanely complex and have to be made accurately or they might backfire terribly.
Accordingly, the tattooists who can do them are rare, in high demand, and can ask for steep prices.
Additionally/Or the ink used has to be produced from virgin blood or something...
[Answer]
# The Lovecraftian Solution
You can go down to a local magi-tattoo parlour and get a new spell inked. It's not proprietary, or particularly difficult. Most people have the "good health" tattoo, which has really made a difference once it was codified.
There *is* a waiver when you're getting inked, and most reputable shops won't put more tats on someone already pretty decorated.
You see, the strange, eye-bending patterns that allow those who bear them access to magic also make the wearer more visible *elsewhere*. There are things that grope blindly in the dark, seeking power and intelligence. Eager to drain both away into the endless entropic dark of their being.
The upshot of this is that practically everyone has a story of someone with *so many tattoos* performing yet another incredible feat of magic, only to have their body snap into a rictus, jerk about like someone gripping a live wire, and collapse like a puppet with their strings cut, their tattoos briefly glowing an eerie green.
Practically, this makes getting tattoos a press-your-luck mechanic. One or two isn't any more worrying than driving in a car regularly. A whole sleeve is akin to taking up base jumping as a hobby. Anyone tattooed like the magi of old is expected to be on severely borrowed time unless they're *very* lucky.
[Answer]
Giving someone a sword does not make them a warrior. Giving someone a bow and some arrows does not make them an archer. Giving someone a pen and paper does not make them a writer. Using them well also requires practice.
Having a magic tattoo only equips one with the tool. Use of passive magic (eg. straightforward protection) can still happen as easily as wearing an armor, but magic that needs to be used intentionally (eg. as a weapon) depends on skill, and maybe natural abilities.
It is even possible that without sufficient understanding you can accidentally use the power of tattoo in a way that harms you or others, not unlike a gun you shoot your foot with.
[Answer]
Bad tattoos *can* still allow access to magic, but with sufficiently bad side effects that most people don't want to risk it.
By "bad" tattoos, well, there are options.
* Only certain kinds of ink work, and "bad" happens when they're mixed.
* The exact pattern takes expertise to tattoo correctly, and "bad" happens when the pattern doesn't match. Also, parts of the pattern may change due to age of the ink, age of the person, or interaction with the channeled magic itself; those changes result in "bad" if not compensated for. (credit to Sarah Messer for this addition)
* "Bad" could be "the tattoo is temporary, and thus so is the magic."
* "Bad" could be "the tattoo will be *much* weaker than desired."
* "Bad" could be "the tattoo will prevent *other* tattoos from working."
* "Bad" could be "the tattoo will kill you, e.g., from the magic in it setting you on fire."
[Answer]
Duplicate real life, which is full of practical magic that nobody bothers to do for themselves. Why don't most people hunt, write computer code, or do their own baking - skills of magical potency that transfigure useless objects into useful (and tasty) ones? These are all skills that one can obtain in a week, using tools that can be obtained for about the price of a good tattoo.
1: Obtaining the skill is mildly inconvenient and requires a little effort.
2: Manufacturing the product (hunting, writing code, cooking food) once the skill is obtained is mildly inconvenient and requires a little effort.
3: The product being obtained (meat, simple computer applications, baked goods) is available inexpensively via market mechanisms.
4: The product being obtained has been widely available via market mechanisms for long enough that **it does not appear glamorous**.
If Suzy is *the only one* who can turn a pile of mild poison and ground up dried plants into delicious baked goods using 500 dollars of reusable tools, she's Suzy the amazing cake-witch, and people will be willing to expend huge amounts of effort and money to duplicate her magical ability. If anybody with 500 dollars and a few hours to learn can turn a pile of mild poison and ground up dried plants into a cake, Suzy is just Suzy, baking is just a hobby, and most people will go their whole lives without ever baking a cake from scratch.
If Suzy is *the only one* who can turn a pile of mild poison and ground up dried plants into a puppy using a $500 reusable tattoo, she's Suzy the amazing puppy-witch...
[Answer]
What if drawing the tattoos is not enough: they need to be infused with magic for them to work?
Which would mean the tattooists themselves have to have the filling-other-tattoos-with-magic tattoo first. There may be a few designs of these, but all of them are a closely guarded secret of the tattooing guilds who control the magic trade.
The major consequence of this option in terms of worldbuilding is that the entire world is basically controlled by these probably pretty paranoid guilds, as they have to be careful with what power they allow their clients to access. And they'd be pretty naive not to always include a booby trap kind of pattern.
Another consequence is that magic would firmly be restricted to the rich and powerful, plus the people the tattoo guilds deem useful to be on their side. For example those they employ to ruthlessly hunt down any rogue tattooist. (Think Venetian mirror makers.)
*I don't know if this is the mood you want to go for, but it's how it appears to play out logically, assuming we're talking about a world populated by people of largely human-like intellect and motivation.*
[Answer]
There are some options here which are about the tattoos themselves:
* Tattoos are really picky about things like shape and size. Even if you do get the right tattoo, it must retain the correct curvature on the skin to work. So gaining or losing body weight (fat or muscle) can affect things. This also means you cannot place them in any spot on the body.
* Tattoos are very complex. The skill required to get them right are so high that it would be rare to actually get a fully functioning tattoo. Many people can get the inferior versions, but they are *super ineffective*, to the point where they may as well not have them.
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# Secret tricks and ingredients
Many tattoos, if not all, are known. This isn't necessarily a problem, if there is another trick to the tatoos.
It can be as simple as needing the right ink(s). Not the right ink, no powers. This can also lead to an extra dimensions of people pretending to have a working tattoos, while they might have no or only a few actually working with the right ink.
The other one is something difficult to see or know if you aren't a magical tattoo artist. For example, tattoos need to be implanted under about 5 layers of epidermis. The magic tattoo can be hidden just a fraction deeper, creating the desired shape but hidden from direct sight. Different inks could also add to the misunderstanding of non magic tattoo setters. Adding normal ink around your magic ink will hide the real shape of the tattoo, even if someone gets magic ink.
Lastly you can have the story play in a culture that has very strict cultural rules and regulations. Let's give religion as an example. It is unlikely all religions are correct, so we can see that the culture a religion creates can make people follow strict rules. In science we can see examples as well. Human cloning, certain DNA experiments and the like are following strict rules. Disobedience might happen, but being ostracised from your group of profession is a powerful motivator to do the opposite, or hide it as much as possible. A culture can have strict rules and regulations when and how you become a carrier of magical tattoos.
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The tattoos are non permanent. While having a tattoo gives the wearer access to magic, actually using the magic consumes the tattoo.
This means when you go to get inked you'll usually get several done at once. Size and complexity scale with the power of the effect, though clever use of smaller effect (butterfly stamping) is a recognised skill set.
This in turn means that the cost in both time and money to have and use magic goes up, because the tattoos themselves are burnt away.
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What about good old social stigma? Sure, anyone can become a sorcerer - but everyone else would then mistrust them and blame them for everything that went wrong in a 50 mile radius. Witchunts happen here and there from time to time. Rumours abound about dark pacts that need to be made by sorcerers and how they sell their souls to the devil and how they all invariably turn into murderous monsters, etc, etc.
Add into the mix a few actual calamities in the past and - there you go.
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## Tattoo licences
Your fantasy world can prevent people from getting back-alley tattoos in the same way that mundane societies stop people from making/printing their own money, or claiming to be a doctor; by **a process of rigorous examination, licensing and significant punishment for those that breach those rules.**
Each country has a list of those that have been assessed as suitable to have a (for example) *fire-magic* tattoo, and each town periodically performs a census of tattoo bearers in their vicinity, with punishments doled out for those that have illicit tattoos.
Having an illegal tattoo removed in the most expeditious way available to a medieval society (e.g. chopping it off with a big knife) would be a strong discouragement to getting an illegal tattoos to which you're not entitled.
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Your people have an allergy to the ink used for the tattoo, so that whoever gets a tattoo gets killed by anaphylactic shock.
Unless they get a vaccine for it, which is administered only by a master who believe his disciple is worth of having the magic power.
Yes, this will create schools of magic, where the power is handed over from generation to generation only to those worth.
And you the mages will keep a secret that is the vaccine and the tattoo to enable magic.
At the end, if we have believed for decades that [carrots gave good sight](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/), it's also plausible that people will believe that magic heals tattoo allergy.
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# Put a price on it
As many economists will tell you: the higher the price is, the less it is used. Just put a price on magic tattoos. And that can be anything. Perhaps it requires a really skilled worker to set a magic tattoo, who charges very high sums of money. Perhaps it the ink requires very expensive or hard to get materials like the petals of a rare flower growing in hard to get to places. Or the ink requires something that's very dear to them, like the crushed heart of their first born. Or it's not the creation of that tattoo which is expensive, but just having them, or using them. Perhaps your life span decreases. You become infertile. Become bald.
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The ink used is "poisonous" where most people can tolerate some but not a lot. some can't tolerate any... and a few are immune (or can build up immunity somehow - ie "vaccine").
Too much smoking? Lung cancer. Too much alcohol? Liver failure. but not everyone gets lung caner or experiences liver failure. some live to 120 smoking 4 packs a day. Some drink a bottle of vodka a day for years without liver failure. But those people are exceptions. Most experience horrible reactions way sooner and die young as a result.
So just make the "ink" into something that the body can only tolerate an unknown amount of. Doing it more and over longer periods is risky.
Get a pack of smokes with a warning "This will kill you. It causes cancer!".
Go to a tattoo parlor where signs say "Surgeons General Warning: more than 3 small tattoos is not recommended. Do so at great peril."
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**Magic is like drugs, tatooists are like medical specialists**
Drugs can be harmful to a person if not prescribed correctly, if the ingredients are impure, and of course drug interactions are very dangerous.
As others have mentioned, there can be terrible consequences to imprecisely done tattoos. And, if more power is desired, more tattoos need to be added, and the resulting complexity increases. The skilled tattooist create a tattoo compatible to the client, and take into account the interactions between the different tattoo components, lest there be a disastrous outcome. This takes decades of study under a skilled master as they learn how to holistically analyze the client and apply their judgment to the intricacies of tattoo design.
As a result, the best experts in tattooing are rare and in high demand. And you get what you pay for - so most people would not risk limbs spontaneously liquefying, or getting their lineage cursed, or something equally horrifying, for the power that a tattoo could bring if they cannot afford the experts.
I can also imagine a second tier of tattoists. Instead of bespoke designs, tattoists could also offer some "standard tattoos": tried and tested tattoos which work on *most* people *most* of the time, with modest power as well as a modest price. There might be some disadvantages such as inability to be upgraded with further tattooing due to the configuration. Of course this would be still out of reach from the average person as it might be only *slightly* less expensive.
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**Some people just don't want a tattoo.**
Getting a tattoo can be time-consuming, expensive, painful, and socially or religiously stigmatized. Getting a tattoo that you have no choice in the design of, nor any choice in where it's going to be placed, is even less of an attractive proposition. Magic use itself may also be stigmatized, in which case an conspicuous tattoo will have social implications. There are of course limits to these drawbacks which will be weighed against the power of the magic, and they'll be considered differently by different people. A small tattoo might be worth magic that makes you omnipotent, but I for one would not get a large ugly face tattoo that made me a social pariah for the sake of shooting sparks from my fingertips.
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**The tattoos are really, really small.**
We have a pretty close analogue for this situation in the real world: integrated circuits are made similarly to tattoos, using geometric patterns to "draw" features onto the surface of silicon in a process called lithography. Once upon a time, this was done by hand, but that quickly became impractical to make anything powerful enough for modern usage - now the features are so small that only a handful of factories in the whole world have machines which can etch the tiny features.
Magic tattoos could be the same way - a skilled nonmagical tattoo artist might be able to make the tattoo for extremely simple, centuries-obsolete spells. But modern magic has advanced significantly, and the only way to get the tattoos for it is for the tattoo artist to be magically augmented, giving them some way to make microscopic features. Even the ink has to be magic, as the features have gotten smaller than a skin cell, requiring the ink to "float" between the cells rather than actually filling them with pigment. Those with this specialized magic have the opportunity to gatekeep tattoos, especially any that could be used to replicate the creation process.
There were once intermediate complexity magic tattoos, which were achievable with only minor magical assistance. But the rapid progress of magic left a lack of interest in preserving the art, and the skills to make these intermediate designs were lost to history.
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**You can't replicate a tatoo just by looking at it**
Drawing inspiration from *c roald* comment, magical tattoos are actually very common and also very simple - a spiral, a thick ring around ankles, geometrical shapes. But those tattoos are simple and practiced by every village and every tattooist in every town. They provide good health, luck, protect from bad spirits bad aren't very powerful. Average person will be covered head to toe with those simple tattoos and not have space for much more.
Then there is another class of tattoos - those practiced by skilled artisans who posses ancient knowledge and deeply guard their secrets. Those tattoos grant the user a powerful magical ability but they are not easy to obtain. Maybe when they are done they look like generic tattoos but contain lines in special ink that are filled later with another ink. Both inks are common, it's the fact that you make "two" tattoos that cover each other that gives them power. Maybe they are just to complex to make without special equipment or training.
I don't like the idea of locking those tattoos behind a hefty price, that would imply that rich people have all the powerful tattoos they can get. If that fits your story, then there is no issue. Another option would be a religious cult that guards those secrets and passes them from one generation to another or state institution that teaches the techniques to only trusted members and tattoos only their soldiers. The second is especially fun if your story is centered around the Rebels fighting the Evil Ruler, because then getting the tattooing technique to the resistance can be a plot-point or a backstory for a character.
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**Placement matters in a network**
Specific spells come from crossing specific spots, like a chakra chart but with thousands of nodes. You need a dozen or hundred nodes for a specific spell, which denies you the use of any spell that needs those nodes, or worse, crosses any lines of existing tattoos.
**Tattoos in secret or internal places**
Skull tattoo on a shaved head that later grows in hair again. Behind the ear. Under the foot, normally covered by shoes. Under rings or wristbands or crowns (kings keeping their tattoos secret via crowns is great). On the outer eyelid, usually hidden while open. On the inner eyelid, much harder to tattoo there. Behind the lip (inside). On a variety of internal places only accessible via surgery, dangerous and requiring intense trust of the tattooist, for only they know what's been put there.
**Tattoos must be placed personally to matter, corresponding with specific rituals or journeys that the caster has undergone**
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> In the game Disco Elysium, the early travelers between worlds would tattoo the map of the journey on their body as a map, to find their way later. Your world could have similarly intensely personal stories engraved on a person by their own hand, allowing them access to magic that comes solely from experience. Yes, riches and learning help you get there, but you have to climb the mountain yourself for the tattoo to mean anything.
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Similar (but not identical) question:
[What would prevent living skin from being a good conductor for magic?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/147389/what-would-prevent-living-skin-from-being-a-good-conductor-for-magic/147411#147411)
And an adapted answer:
The tatooed runes have to be inscribed with a specific depth (they are 3-dimensional grooves). While possible, cutting runes into your skin is very unpleasant. And the bleeding fills the runes and stops the magic. When the bleeding stops, healing processes start and destroy the (sensitive) depth profile very soon.
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**Requirement to deeply understand the symbols**
Successfully casting the spell requires deep concentration. The caster must first visualize, feel and manipulate the symbols to create stable 2d or 3d structure in their mind, then guide the resulting energy structure toward the tattoo and anchor it there. Only then the spell can be cast, the tattoo acts as gateway for mana effect to enter outside world. More complicated spells require even higher dimensions or manipulation of shapes in weird geometries.
Everyone can learn but it's hard like college maths. Some neurodivergent people are likely be naturally talented to do this. If you are familiar with asperger/autism enough to have such characters, it might add some depth to the story.
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**Tattoo's are multi-layered/intricate and you can't fully see them, only a projection of them.**
What if the tattoo is itself also magical, and you can't see the complete and intricate detail of the tattoo unless you already understand how to wield the magic it imbues? Since someone who doesn't know the magic can't see the whole tattoo, it can still be rare.
This opens up a lot of interesting dimensions:
1. Mistakes can happen when someone attempts to copy a tattoo without fully seeing it.
2. Tattoo designs can get increasingly more complex and evolve as the story progresses and characters learn more powerful magic. A tattoo may start off ugly, but get increasingly beautiful as the observer grows/advances.
3. Simple magic can be distributed on temporary/lick on tattoos.
4. Tattoos on two people can be "connected" i.e. when two people hold hands together the magic of the two tattoo's activates. (Or sorta like [Keanu in the Constantine movie](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f1/7d/34/f17d34671de67ccdf566c0c9dff1731f.jpg) when he puts its arms together.)
5. A tattoo might be so powerful but you can't tell since you can't see it. You may underestimate someones strength. Or perhaps you should "be careful what you wish for" when you go get a tattoo, maybe you can't handle the process physically.
6. Since how the tattoo appears also depends on the observers capability, different people might see the same tattoo differently.
Anyways, sounds like a super fun world.
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**The tattoo doesn't do anything by itself.**
So, you just got the tattoo for Draegor's Floating Armaments. Congratulations! Now you must learn what the spell really *means*. What is the Aristotelian Form of a floating gun? Why does it float? What is its *purpose*? Getting the tattoo gives you *access* to the spell, but it doesn't give you the content of the spell, its *essence*. You must learn that in order to cast it.
As a result, the relative popularity of a spell depends at least partially on its conceptual complexity. If the idea of a spell is simple, it will be easy to learn. For example, it isn't hard to use an Instant Death spell; you just focus on your target, shout "avada kedavra" while really, *really* wanting them dead, and the target dies in a flash of green light. Easy. On the other hand, a spell like Xanth's Perspective Nullifier would be incredibly difficult. To cast it, the user would have to have an intuitive understanding of space-time, including knowing *exactly* where they are and *exactly* where the thing they want to see close-up is. This effectively limits complex spells to savants and highly-trained specialists.
Of course, while conceptually simple spells are easier to learn, that doesn't mean that everyone does, for two reasons.
First, while simple spells are easy to learn, they're also easy to block. You see, while other spells come in a whole bunch of little sub-types due to the different ways people conceptualize them, everybody casts simple spells more or less the same way. This makes them highly standardized, making it easy for people to get passive blocking spells which guard against them and don't require mental effort to operate. Furthermore, most mages have the Metamagic tattoo, which gives them direct control over magic instead of having to use other spells as intermediaries. It gives you an extremely fine-grained control, but at the cost of being very weak. Because of this, it's mostly used for fine-tuning other spells and theoretical applications like devising new ones. In a pinch, it can also be used to modify other people's spells. Usually, this isn't safe to do; randomly messing with somebody else's spell will have unpredictable (but usually very explosive) results. However, for the more standardized simple spells, it's easy for mages to memorize a list of safe modifications to render them ineffective. Since they are easy to foil, most people don't bother using simple spells in offensive applications.
As for civilian use, they're too much of a blunt instrument. For example, while an Instant Death curse would be great for sterilization, trying to use it on a broad area would also kill the neighbor's cat, which would be highly suboptimal.
**TL;DR:** Spells are either very hard to learn or not very useful, so it's usually easier to just find a mundane way to do it.
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A whole complex of reasons, which give you much flexibility in the powers of wizards
* inks are specialized and expensive
* needles are specialized and expensive
* the correct tattoos are hard to make and need an experienced and knowledgable tattooer
* there's always the risk of a badly done tattoo, ranging from minor curses to horrible death
* once the tattoo is complete, you still have to master magic, it doesn't come to you naturally, and the greater the magic, the longer the study
* magicians sell magical services to such an extent that most people would rather learn other skills and hire what they need
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# Magic tattoos only work for certain skin colors.
Obviously this answer would only be used if you wanted your story to have a comment on racism. For example: "even though they can't use magic, that doesn't make them inferior".
The magic in the tattoo reacts with melanin in a specific way so that if the person has too much/not enough melanin (ie too dark or light skinned) the magic won't work. Assuming that your culture is mixed race that means that not everyone will be able to have a magic tattoo (technically they could still get the tattoo but it wouldn't function). You can decide if you want the "correct" skin color to be the minority or majority of people and whether the magic skin color is completely dark, completely light, or something in the middle.
Note that tanning causes a temporary increases in melanin. And that albinism (in the extreme cases) completely lack the ability to create melanin and thus are damaged by sunlight instead of tanning.
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**Religious custom**
Look at ancient traditions that used tattoos. Most of them had sacred or religious meaning. If a priesthood has control of the secrets of the tattoos, or if the power ultimately derives from gods who can set the rules, then it's pretty likely that you're going to have to earn initiation to the appropriate rites or circles before being allowed to receive higher levels of tattoos.
Even if the art of the tattoo is not *secret*, obtaining a magic tattoo without the blessing of the temple would make you a heretic subject to whatever punishments the society sees fit.
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# There's Temporary Tattoos, Permanent Tattoos...
My immediate thought is that the magic accessing tattoos are rather similar to [Vallaslin in Dragon Age](https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Vallaslin:_Blood_Writing) - a tattoo ritual that the Dalish Elves go through if they can endure it as part of a rite of passage. The goal is for them to get the tattoos done in silence, and cries of pain are considered a sign of weakness and an indicator to stop the ritual and delay it for another time.
Another term used in the games of the series for that same tattoo is "Blood Writing". That's relevant, because it implies that it involves etching it in blood...which is actually not all that different from real tattoos. Okay, that's a *bit* of an exaggeration; [for permanent tattoos, the ink is embedded in the skin via puncturing the skin, whereas for temporary tattoos, they're done with brushes and stickers instead, applied on top of the skin.](https://drnumb.com/blog/permanent-temporary-tattoos) But notably, with permanent tattoos, you do see a little bit of blood while getting a permanent tattoo, so that's where I'm starting from.
## ...And then there's Magic Tattoos.
We can go further than permanent tattoos however, and consider what we might, for example, need to substitute as the "ink embedded into the skin" step.
The more likely obvious answer that comes to mind is, well, the user's (Or another person's) blood, but we can get a bit...grimmer.
What if we made the component for tattoos...the own person's bone marrow? Granted, it's not liquid as I understand by default (There can be a process to liquify it, or put it into a prepared liquid to make it the ink in question, or similar - how complex you want the procedure to be can be something added.), but there are some major advantages here for worldbuilding limitations:
1. It isn't *directly* tied to the person who's getting the tattoos - you *can* get bone marrow transplants, they're just...not usually recommended unless you're sick, because there *can* be [problems](https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/bone-marrow-transplant/about/pac-20384854) with actually getting a transplant. Is the possibility of graft-versus-host disease *worth it* for the risk of not just having your bone marrow be the source of your tattoos?
2. People probably aren't going to have that many, or very large, magical tattoos, because that uses up more bone marrow. If someone *does* have large, multiple magical tattoos, they're probably a villain in your setting, taking bone marrow from orphans or their enemies, or adventurers taking them from the creatures they fight. Royalty and the rich might try and use them as status symbols, but that also comes with...dubious means of getting that status symbol.
3. Do you want your mages to be physically more frail than people who just become trained warriors? From what I gather, bone marrow *does* regenerate over time, but reduction of it every so often to make or use tattoos is going to have some toll, and likely to leave one with a bit more downtime.
4. You can still have temporary and permanent tattoos, while having a reason that some tattoos are *magical* in nature, but also more rare.
5. The nature of where the source of the magic tattoos come from could be common knowledge, and as a result, the tattoos themselves a bit taboo.
6. If they aren't considered taboo, the ads practically write themselves; ["Want strong magic? Get Milk!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwn9InazwmE&list=PLTwRARykhfKKAO9PgFk78FBaH9B-8lh5p&index=21).
The type of bone marrow [(Red vs. Yellow)](https://www.pbmchealth.org/news-events/blog/red-bone-marrow-vs-yellow-bone-marrow) used in "Magic Tattoos" could determine the colour of the tattoos - and even indicate, if you wanted to limit which type could be used, as to *when* someone can undergo a magic tattoo treatment too, so that could help make magic an advanced technique, or something people want to rush towards to get the most out of.
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## Tattoos must be tailored/chosen individually for each person in order to work
Similarly to how not necessarily any good tattoo looks good on any person, not every magic tattoo matches the magical profile of every person. Determining the magical profile of people and/or developing appropriate individual tattoos might be difficult.
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> **How do I prevent magical tattoos from being available to everyone?**
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**By tattooing them!**
Criminals can have tattoos overwritten by more tattoos that either cover the old ones completely or by adding cancelling tokens. Children of people you want to avoid having tattoos can be tattooed at birth.
Alternatively just give them cancelling tattoos. Have random traffic stops and, if they don't have a licence, arrest them and tattoo a cancellation.
Make it so that location is very specific so once a tattoo has been spoiled, it can't be placed anywhere else.
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## Tattoos react with water
A tattoo submerged in water will color it.
It's harmless and temporary, but it looks pretty dirty so anyone with a tattoo will be prohibited from entering a public bath/shower.
Most people will not consider it worthy to get a tattoo if that means they cannot take a bath anymore, and may be held responsible for any type of water contamination.
Note that magic users will cover their tattoos from the rain, so that takes care of the "no half naked mages everywhere".
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In the near future humanity has started mining on Mars. International (and interplanetary) treaties governing the use of lethal weapons in space dictate that anyone possessing such a weapon must carry a license.
However, every spaceship, including single-occupant vehicles, carries some sort of ranged personal firearm.
There is no danger of being hijacked or abducted in space, since only established major companies and wealthy nations can afford any kind of space program. For security reasons all spacecraft personnel have to go through thorough screening and checks before being permitted to go into space to ensure that they are unlikely to cause harm to themselves or others.
With all this in mind, what good reason is there to have a personal lethal weapon(gun) in a spaceship?
(Additional assumptions: no aliens - SETI called, nobody answered - and no faster-than-light travel.)
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For the same reason some do in [real life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82_Cosmonaut_survival_pistol). Ship (or landing pod) landing isn't perfect so when they arrive back on earth the astronauts need to defend themselves against hostile animals or scavengers.
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Warning: Dark
Imagine a situation where you're in your spaceship, you've run out of fuel, your comms are down, and you're flying through space away from civilisation.
You may have rations to last a few weeks, but with every passing hour, the chance of rescue gets slimmer and slimmer.
After a few days, you know there is no hope of anyone finding you.
You reach across to your firearm...
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**No good reason for purpose-designed firearms**
Risk assessments are critical to space travel, even more than on Earth. Some of the obvious things that can go wrong because you *are* carrying a firearm are:
* propellant becomes unstable
* poor maintenance results in mechanism seizing up
* accidental/negligent discharge results in personnel injury or death
* accidental/negligent discharge results in destruction of critical spacecraft components (including atmospheric integrity)
* accidental/negligent discharge imparts momentum (linear or rotational) to spacecraft requiring fuel expenditure for course correction
In addition to these *possible* risks there is also the *certainty* that every single flight will be wasting mass on a dangerous object of negligible use - mass that could be used to carry more fuel or operational/profit-generating payload.
To offset these massive disadvantages, there has to be a concrete benefit to putting a firearms on a spacecraft. This is hard to see - in the anti-hijacking role weapons such as tasers are much preferred to things that punch holes in your own ship. Boarding actions are dubious in any hard science setting - docking with a cooperative target is hard enough, docking with an uncooperative target is practically impossible even if its propulsion systems are disabled. As for employing firearms (other than those mounted in sophisticated turrets) against other spacecraft - forget it. Then there is the problem of keeping all of the astronauts current in their firearms training - if they are rusty then they may as well not have a firearm.
**But wait...**
Not all is lost, however. As was well-portrayed in [The Martian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)), astronauts are a technically competent group of trained improvisers. If the plot of your story requires that a firearm is used then a character can improvise one. Hand-held and/or drone thruster units are a plausible item to have on board a spacecraft - if you disconnect a few safety devices and plug the exhaust with a ball bearing (possibly with some tape wrapped around it to get a good seal) then you have a projectile weapon. A high-pressure air tank is a ready-made reservoir for a very dangerous air rifle, just add a metal tube for a barrel and a valve. (With more time a semi- and/or full-auto version could be manufactured.)
If the requirement is just for a ranged weapon, not necessarily a firearm, then slings are just as easy to make as on Earth. A spacecraft machine shop could be used to make a bow or crossbow.
In summary - just as in many situations on Earth, carrying a firearm is far more dangerous than not carrying a firearm. However, spacecraft have plenty of options for making ranged weapons in an emergency.
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One potential explanation (although not 100% satisfactory) is that it could form part of a survival kit. Bomber pilots, for example, were often equipped with survival kits including flares, emergancy rations and rifles such as [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_S) and
[here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M6_Aircrew_Survival_Weapon), to help them forage for food and protect against wildlife should they crash land in remote areas. This could feasibly also apply to a spaceship, should they crash land on a remote part of earth.
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I can't find the exact quote, but there is a saying in Science Fiction which goes something like this:
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Invent a propulsion system which is very easy to weaponize. Make sure that it is infeasible to modify it in a way that it can no longer be used as a weapon but still work as a propulsion system.
* If you are still using chemical propulsion, the exhaust can be weaponized.
* If it's a [nuclear thermal rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket), the exhaust is not just hot and fast but also deadly radiation.
* If it's a [plasma propulsion engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_propulsion_engine), it shoots a ray of highly energetic plasma.
* If it's [nuclear pulse propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion), you have an arsenal of nuclear warheads on board.
* If it folds space, it can shred other ships to pieces through sheer forces.
* If it is based on artificial gravity, you can literally "crush your enemies" or rips them apart.
Benign technologies which can be easily weaponized are also a recurring theme in Larry Niven's *Known Space* universe. Among them are afore-mentioned weaponized propulsion systems are laser-based communication systems (which are powerful enough to cause space ships to overheat) or an alien digging tool (which also digs nice holes into metal plates).
I personally like the communication lasers, because communication is too important to declare illegal and you can aim them independently from your engines.
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### Security
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These checks do not end all of the possible security issues. They just ensure that a single individual or ar small group does not pose a significant threat.
But what if a group of individuals become the threat? Physical force is still a thing, and if a number of individuals mutiny or revolt, they could be dangerous, either by attacking the loyal crew or accessing critical parts of the ship.
Not to mention that people can become very imaginative when it comes to improvised weapon design.
To put an example, we already have places were people are very careful screened to avoid them inserting weapons in a controlled environments. Yet improvised weapons are made (shivs and the like), revolts do occasionally happen, and the guards do have weapons and/or have support from armed security forces readily available.
Imagine the situation in a spaceship where external support is not available and everyone on board knows about it.
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If you are not worried about Earth Wilderness landing like Leo Adberg has suggested (which is a very good real world answer), then an alternate would be to consider corportate/national espionage...
If there are only the biggest corporations and governments in space then its safe to assuming there is no space police, so if one company decided to hijack another's ship to either steal the presumably cargo, or possible find out what tech the rival company is working on, then its safe to assume the pilots would want to protect themselves.
Writing in that either companies or governments are in a type of cold war as to who can be the front runner in space travel and its not unreasonable to believe that with all the communication dead zones are the system (dark side of the moon for example, at least until china sent there probe a few weeks back) and there's plenty of areas where a ship could get be hijacked without anyone knowing.
Thankfully we've managed to avoid taking warfare to space so far but its not exactly out of character for the human race to do so...
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There's two possible reasons I can think of.
The first is for some sort of emergency situation - much like trains have hammers to break the windows in an accident - perhaps there could be some situation where they'd need a weapon (are the weapons traditional current conventional weapons?) to break free of a crashed pod or something? Certainly you could argue the carrying of flare guns for situations like this - as safety equipment
The other is if there are any tensions between the big companies and/or wealthy nations. They could then be argued as necessary to protect a claim on a certain sector. Perhaps there had been an incident in the past where one company took over another, so they all carry an stock of weapons for protection against this. (easy to argue it's similar to countries on earth with weapons that are they will never use)
[Answer]
You never know if a person may become mad or commit a crime on board. Space is exhausting, that can happen.
The captain and security must have weapons to arrest, take down or kill that person. Also, that gives authority to them, useful if there is unrest on the ship.
[Answer]
There used to be a good reason, so it was written into law and no-one has bothered to change it. Or maybe it's a religious thing.
See <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1370385/Navy-up-in-arms-over-challenge-to-sword-protocol.html> for inspiration.
[Answer]
Well, it could be for quite innocent reasons, such as blasting asteroids out of your way. There's no knowing when you might come across these floating menaces; they can wreck your spaceship all the same, especially if your spaceship's too bulky for maneuvering out of the asteroid's way, or if you're passing through an Asteroid Belt, and wiggle-room's very limited.
So having a heavy-duty Vaporizer(?) equipped on your spaceship is never a bad idea.
Another reason is Space-Pirates. Supposing it is the Wild Wild West era of Space-travel, plenty of lawless pirates abound the expanse of space.
So, hey, you can never be too cautious. You gotta have that weapon, dude.
[Answer]
It's a multipurpose **EveryDayCarry power tool**... steeped in **politics**.
Both in established areas, and - especially - out on the frontier, you often need to do certain tasks quickly, without advance notice. Time is money, and so is storage space.
So you carry compact tool to to mark things from a distance (paint), use force (slug), perforate/crack/attach (nail), signal (flare), attach beacons to inaccessible points... you're probably not on Mars to do accounting.
A set of specialized tools is not feasible - if needed on a larger scale, you send a team with the equipment. For small tasks, anyone on site will be able to do it with what they already have.
That it is also a very good weapon, is not just a nice bonus, it actually decided the form factor. After all, where surveillance is spotty to say the least, rival corps stake claims, and you're surrounded by people with at least mild cabin fever... it makes you feel a bit less helpless.
Plus, a whole **new political power has arisen around the "weapon control" angle** - by law you need a licence for firearms, by regulation you need firearms to go to space, by convenience you need the tool to work effectively... a body who can revoke those licenses is one to reckon with. **The "need gun to travel" regulation is there to stay.**
[Answer]
**Shoot incoming space objects.**
Inspired by <https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/21/asia/japan-asteroid-sample-scli-intl/index.html>
>
> Space probe fires bullet into asteroid By Jack Guy, CNN Updated 6:11
> AM ET, Fri February 22, 2019 Japanese space agency JAXA landed the
> Hayabusa 2 probe on the surface of an asteroid. Japanese space agency
> JAXA landed the Hayabusa 2 probe on the surface of an asteroid. (CNN)A
> Japanese space probe has successfully fired a "bullet" into an
> asteroid as part of a mission to collect rock samples from the
> celestial body.
>
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> The projectile disturbed material from the exterior of asteroid Ryugu
> which then floated from its surface due to the weak gravitational
> field.
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Impacts with meteors are a threat to any spacecraft. A rifle is a good way to impart kinetic energy into some incoming mass. The firearm aboard spacecraft is very similar to a sniper rifle. If the computer alerts you to an incoming mass on a collision course, rather than expend fuel to alter your own trajectory it may be more expedient to shoot the incoming mass and alter its trajectory. It might take more than one shot.
[Answer]
Space Rats!
Huge freakin' space rats immune to poison and too smart to eat cheese off a loaded spring trap. Too big to stick to a sheet of cardboard with glue on one side too.
It's either shoot 'em or trick 'em into going into the airlock.
[Answer]
Apart from utilitarian purposes (which would warrant something other than a weapon) there are 4 possibilities:
1. Defensive - Internal threat
2. Defensive - External threat
3. Offensive - Internal target
4. Offensive - External target
For #1 and #3, violence is the last resort of incompetence. One would hope that astronauts are intelligent enough to solve their problem by other means. Even if less competent people are allowed onboard and violence does become a means to solve an issue, weapons will only accelerate and worsen the outcome. If we concede that human nature is not going to mature beyond this primitive form of resolution, weapons merely level the playing field between humans of varying physical strength. They bring no improvement on the problem. So I would say they are not needed.
For #2 There could be a number of non-ET reasons to have a defensive mechanism for threat to the ship itself (e.g. meteorites, debris, pirates)
For #4 There would be good reasons for the "pirate" ships to have external weapons. This becomes a justification for #2 but because there are other reasons for #2, it boils down to the intentions of the people running any ship with external weapons.
in short:
* Weapons inside the ship : NO
* External weapons : Probably YES (or something that could be repurposed as a weapon)
[Answer]
In space, accidents happen.
Just start some rumor, that space pirates/aliens/spies (or whatever fits your story the best) are responsible for those accidents (like missing people/spaceships). Until the investigations are closed and the results satisfy your astronauts, everyone starts to carry firearms "just in case". You can make those investigations really long, or maybe the custom to carry can stay.
You can also make one legitimate incident, where some madman started attacking his coworkers, and blame guns on him (shootings happen on Earth all the time), also an incident like this might be the best reason to introduce those checks in the first place.
[Answer]
Everyone may like the treaty and have good intent, but that's very different from **trust**. It's the same reason every good guy in the wild west had a people-shootin' pistol and the quickest trigger finger: **because everyone else already has one**. You don't have to have one, but it helps you sleep soundly knowing it's there.
[Answer]
I think I read this request as more of a "what excuse can I find for having a weapon on board" and not so much the reason for why one would have it on board at all. Like your story depends on there being a weapon when you have no logical reason for it being there in the first place.
Let's look at it from a corporate greed level. Suppose you were a massive arms producer and you wanted to ensure the next generation of interstellar networks all carry your brand and are guaranteed a minimum purchase value of $xxx for the latest interstellar security administration approved firearm on every vessel in active service - both private and other. Lobbyists go to work, somehow it gets on a ballot, and yay, it's approved. Interstellar violence can now proceed as planned and profited.
So now, even small rental space station travel vehicles are required by law to have at least one approved weapon on board for "security reasons" and loh and behold, you now have a gun for use in your story where there would otherwise not be one. Even in an automated vending machine restocking vehicle. If a human CAN travel in it, it has to have a weapon on board. By law. Yay the power of greed!
[Answer]
This sounds more like "I need my characters to be able to get a weapon off a spaceship without having a license" than any coherent world.
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[Question]
[
In the world I'm building, an antagonist desires to cripple humankind down to simple-living status. To do this, the antagonist has to remove all modern infrastructure. This includes buildings, electrical and informational connections, down to the electronics which run on those connections. Orbital satellites will also be taken out, though the solution(s) do not have to account for this. The process can be multistep, or however complicated it needs to be. Hypothetical technologies can be used, for this all takes place in the realm of science fiction.
[Answer]
## Diplomacy
The body count is really going to depend on how long humanity has to prepare.
>
> Hi, glad to meet you, the reverse not so much. We're the galaxy's big bad and you just got on our radar. Pro tip, don't be on our radar. Listen, we consider your technology a threat. We're going to, how do you say, bomb you back to the stone age.
>
>
> However your society is so unagrarian this would kill almost all of you, especially with your nuclear reactors cooking off, so we're looking for alternatives.
>
>
> Give us a plan to wind your society back to an agrarian cusp-of-steam era, sailing ships and canal mules, refrigeration and epoxies are ok and keep your medical miracles... We'll let you keep your infrastructure long enough to let the existing humans live out their lives as long as you drop breeding down to a sustainable level. Show us the plan and we'll let you work it for the next 80 years. Or else. Your call.
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Maybe not to that extremes, but active management of the event will greatly reduce casualties vs. just randomly breaking stuff.
There is a real problem that if you sever technology too fast, the nuclear reactors will break. Even on the new Gen-3+ reactors, the "prevent meltdown" interval is only widened (refill the water tanks every 48hrs). Any reactor flat out neglected will full-on Chernobyl eventually\*. Battle damage can greatly hasten this.
Chernobyl left trace contamination all over Europe, which didn't impact life too badly, but if 100 reactors all blew, the trace contaminations would *stack*. This would really screw up the planet.
If you don't want that to happen, you need to cajole the plant operators into cooperating with a plan to shut down, wait for the fuel to cool enough to handle, unload it, and place it into some sort of long-term storage regime, which the aliens may be better at. Once the spent fuel is gone, bomb away, the Israelis do all the time.
---
\* It's widely believed "safer" Western reactors can't explode like Chornobyl. That applies to ordinary operation. That doesn't apply to a situation where the operators are killed or disappeared. It also misses the point: while the initial explosion was bad, that was only a local problem. What *really* messed up Europe was the fires that followed, and these were fires unlike Fukushima's H2 hydrogen explosions. The only good thing we can say is that a Western reactor won't have an initial explosion unless it's directly attacked. Other than that, Western defense-in-depth only puts more belts and suspenders in the hands of experienced, competent operators. **If the operators are dead**, then in 2-5 days, the safety systems run out of water, decay heat chews a hole in containment, oxygen gets in, and the fire begins. Unlike Chernobyl, where a superpower went all-in to contain the damage, in this scenario, **nobody does anything.** So our baked PWR will actually create a mess much worse than Chernobyl. So I stand by my statement.
Hopefully our aliens will appreciate this, having a few Exclusion Zone National Parks on their home planet, and take special care not to mess things up.
[Answer]
>
> an antagonist desires to cripple humankind down to simple-living status [without killing people]
>
>
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This is impossible.
Modern society is a highly integrated web of sophisticated transport and production systems, most notably in terms of agriculture, water, sewage and waste, and materials distribution (roads, rail, air, sea). One you remove these people will start *starving* - you'd have a widespread famine in days. Diseases like cholera and dysentery would become rampant. This is what happens in areas affected by large natural disasters like earthquakes and extreme weather events.
On top of that the health system would collapse. I'm sure doctors and nurses would work themselves ragged to try and cope, but without modern medicines, antibiotics, antiseptics, power (!), diagnostic tools and modern treatment systems they'd be back in the days of mother's dying in childbirth as a common event, people with minor wounds dying of infected wounds (sepsis) and back to pain and suffering on a huge scale. No kidney dialysis ? No transplants ? No cataract operations ? No anti-flu jabs. No vaccination for childhood diseases - a disaster is too small a word for it.
You're going to ask how little of the sophisticated infrastructure can we survive with, I think. The answer is more than we have now - people die *now* needlessly of diseases we can eradicate, die of starvation and hunger, lack of water. We don't even feed and clothe everyone of this planet properly *now*. Less is not an option - more is what we need.
>
> Hypothetical technologies can be used, for this all takes place in the realm of science fiction.
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This is meaningless. You've removed basic infrastructure required to operate a technological society and essential just to maintain lives. What hypothetical technologies could exist that don't require basics like electrical power and transport logistics to be effective ?
And who would develop, maintain and operate this technology ? Certainly not the starving, dying population suffering without any modern medical aids.
[Answer]
Removing the infrastructure with a minimum of human loss isn't that hard, but the consequences will kill hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, within a year. But, first things first.
* **Electrical:** Power stations are not quickly built. Knock out the hydroelectric dams, the nuclear power stations, and the coal stations, and you've eliminated [about 75%](https://www.iea.org/about/faqs/renewableenergy/) of the world's electrical power. The nature of primary electrical distribution is such that far more than 75% of the planet will be blacked out (undersupplying a load disconnects or burns out the supply).
* **Water:** Quick research did not reveal what percentage of the planetary potable water supply is contained in the dams we just blew up. I'm going to guess at least a third. However, since potable water distribution in urban areas requires pumping stations, killing the power killed the water right along with it.
* **Gasoline:** No one really knows who said "civilization is three meals away from anarchy" (or anything similar), but the quote is basically right nonetheless. Destroy the world's refineries and you've stopped the world's transportation. The amount of food consumed in a city each day is ***AWE INSPIRING.*** No trucks, no food, no civilization.
* **Heating Oil & Natural Gass:** This is easier than it sounds. Almost no cities have redundant oil and gas distribution networks. Many rely on trucking for distribution. We've already stopped the trucks, so all that's left is to bomb the gas trunks in the cities that pipe natural gas and there's no heat.
Just with those four issues alone I've (very simplistically) technologically reduced the world to the early 1800s. The problem is what happens next.
[23% of the world's population](http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/urbanization/the_worlds_cities_in_2016_data_booklet.pdf) lives in cities of 1 million inhabitants or more. *They're all dead in three months.* This is because the nearby countryside cannot absorb anywhere near that many people.
[55% of the world's population](http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html) live in urban areas. *Nearly all of them are dead in three months* for the same reason stated above. That's basically half the world's population.
While more than half the world lives in areas that don't see snow (or much snow), the colder it gets in the winter, the more likely you're dead.
***At a guess, within one year of this humane destruction, at least 2/3 of the world's population is dead... and probably a lot more.***
You can't remove infrastructure without a price. It's more humane to just kill everyone. (Assuming "humaneness" (is that a word?) is the reason the aliens didn't want to kill the people.)
[Answer]
Keep it "simple" - escaped nanobots that munch on metal and concrete and they multiply at some insane rate. They feed and breed. They don't care for organic material (humans, or our food..), but construction material and metal? Yummy!
EDIT: @PCSgtL suggestion is a great one! The nanobots may not just need to provide antibiotics, they could **be** the antibiotics. Working inside the humans to keep them healthy. Somewhere along the line, the nanobots determine they can share small amounts of their energy with the humans to keep them alive as well.
[Answer]
>
> 'In the world I'm building, an antagonist desires to cripple humankind
> down to simple-living status. ' While preserving life as much as possible.
>
>
>
If you leave this as your goal, and leave the actual knowledge intact, then the answer is much simplified. If you forget about the destruction of physical property, buildings and such, and limiting it to reducing humans down to simple living standards, then it is pertinent to remember that up until 50 years or so ago, this pretty much described 70% to 80% of the human population. Most answers here suggest that the standard of living of the entire world is equal to that of the Western nations, and that we can't possibly live like, well, 80% of the population used to live (and now, perhaps, 40% still does). Just ask someone in rural China if survival is possible under such conditions.
So, we are just reverting back to 150 years or so ago. The physical structures that people live in are inconsequential. What matters is the technology.
The simplest and surest way to revert humans to a simple living status is through massively intensive and repeated EMP attacks covering every meter of earth. Say every hour for a week, then daily. Totally fry all electrical and electronic systems. Totally melt all motors, generators, and transformers. Every car and vehicle electrical system fried. All electrical lighting systems permanently darkened. And do it repeatedly, for a year, so no repairs could be made. Wave after wave of total electrical system destruction. Even copper plumbing in houses, valves and such, would be melted and the solder joints broken. Massive water leaks in every building. Anything magnetic that conducts would have huge electrical surge currents induced in them, raising their temperatures. The entire earth would be one huge magnetic induction cook top.
So, apart from fires that would be started, not much damage to buildings. Except for burns and electrocution, humans would remain unscathed. People would still have shelter. Food would still be grown.Climate would remain undisturbed (except for global warming, because all heat and energy would come from burning fossil fuels). Transportation would return back to horse and buggy. Houses would be heated by coal. Lighting would be by oil lamps. Your biggest problem would be manure, smoke, and pollution.
But certainly the slums of Calcutta prove that humans could survive such conditions. Just not pleasantly. But I take it that is your goal.
[Answer]
Hmm ... something's got to give. You can't have both *simple living status* and *not many deaths*. The world is so interconnected, and we depend so much on this, that I fear that many would not survive without this infrastructure. So for the sake of the story -- and how many hypothetical people has WB.SE slain anyway? -- I'll assume that we'll err on the side of breaking modern civilization.
Now since we are kinder, gentler, passive-aggressive antagonists, we shall try very hard not to *directly* kill anyone, and let the ripple effect do the dirty work.
Here's the plan: **we will destroy long-range transport!**
First -- wipe out all ocean-going ships with our orbital lasers/missiles/etc. Can't have specialization of manufacture, that is *not* simple living. And airplanes too. This'll cause direct casualties, and we are evilly sorry. But it has to be done, to force all manufacturing to be done from local resources.
Second -- attack rail junctions from the air. Also target any moving train engine. Motive power is our enemy.
Third -- to the extent budget allows, attack all bridges, highway interchanges, and above all repair trucks.
Fourth -- don't forget to snap those undersea internet cables!
Fifth -- let's see if we can locate electrical infrastructure. Power plants, transmission grid take priority.
Sixth -- any leftover large engineering works. Dams (drill them, don't blow them, so the flooding is slower). Canals; especially Suez, Panama, and Erie.
Seventh -- target all fertilizer plants, and ag machinery factories with a blazing fury.
Eighth -- this is what we call "maintenance mode". Guard against rebuilding of #1-#7, and as opportunity permits, slag any active smokestacks.
The goal here is to eliminate all long-range transport, making each region dependent on its own resources. There will be less specialization, so fewer goods and services will be available. As high-yield agriculture fails, more and more people will be forced to become farmers. (Oh, there will be a mass die-off from the cities, but we the squeamish antagonists cannot be blamed!) iPhones will not be available at any price.
Side-note: this plan depends of course on neutralizing the armed forces of Earth. If this is not practical, we'll have to shrug into our lab coats and re-plan.
Side-note: I really, really wanted The Plan to include damming up the Straits of Gibraltar, but in the end decided that that would be too expensive and difficult.
[Answer]
There are already natural and hypothetical disasters which can a similar effect. You don't need to specially target everything, and you could perfectly well leave small computers and mobile phones alone. After all, how useful are they to the average person without internet? You don't have to take 100% of technology away, just take away such a critical mass that they are nearly useless.
**Earthquakes**
The solution requires some futuristic technology or experience, but you said that was fine, so why not create extreme shifts inside the Earth? If it's strong enough, it can result in massive earthquakes all around the glove. Even if mobile phones are OK, there will be no network, no power, no transportation, no electricity, no water supply... This happens on small scales periodically, and it destroys the area quite utterly, with close to no recourse. People are left to fend on their own until a nearby well-resourced area is able to assist them with rebuilding.
So I guess it depends on whether or not you consider the sudden failure of a large supporting structure like a building or large natural gas fires to be "direct killing" or not. If you do, then a gradual increase in magnitude over the course of a few days would quickly get people to evacuate buildings, before it gets to the inevitable power required to take them down.
**Hurricanes**
A strong enough shift in the Earth's climate can result in very powerful winds across the globe. The speeds required to cause massive flooding and topple all large objects (buildings, cell towers, etc) is far under the amount required to kill an individual directly.
**Electromagnetism**
Create a small magnetar near Earth? Detonate a hundred thousand pure-fusion (zero fallout) nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere? Weaken the Earth's magnetosphere and let it get hit by a powerful coronal ejection? These will take out all but the best shielded electronics. A powerful enough one will even bypass EMI shielding for sensitive equipment (airplanes, military and medical devices, etc). This may or may not be acceptable, as it will leave roads intact, but there will certainly be a shortage of vehicles old enough to be trivial to repair after such damage.
For bonus points, keep providing EMP bursts once a day, indefinitely. Can you imagine trying to maintain a megalopolis without computers? There will still be people who can maintain a large building, but it will not scale without computer assistance.
**Environmental destabilization**
What are insects good for? If you killed all the insects in the world, you wouldn't be living the bug bite-free life. You'd be covered in carrion, dead animals, poorly decaying plant matter. People could still eat plants, but there would be virtually no agriculture anymore. More species, not even counting insects, would go extinct than in any of the great mass extinctions of old. While this won't directly interfere with technology, it will create a situation that technology is not at all capable of dealing with. What good are airplanes if the global panic is preventing the airlines from functioning?
**Microorganism that feeds on plastic**
Some species of bacteria have been discovered that can metabolize polyethylene terephthalate, one of the most common plastics. If you were to create an extremely hardy, fast-reproducing and fast-adapting microorganism that can metabolize a wide-range of artificial substances such as rubbers and plastics, humans themselves would not be directly affected, but nearly all infrastructure would quickly be damaged to the point of being unusable. A large building cannot be built without plastic, even if the structure itself does not contain much.
[Answer]
Others have covered the means of destruction.
I'd like to point out that you can actually avoid a massive die-off, if you provide - and keep providing - the food - and water - yourself.
For that, you need the means to produce and distribute it, which requires massive infrastructure you'll need to keep, and keep people from commandeering. A robot army comes to mind. The irony and hypocrisy will be quite dramatic.
This will look more like a standard tyrannical dystopia than to a post-apocalypse, but it solves the die-off issue.
If you also provide essential medicines (think vaccines and antibiotics), the deaths will be really low. Another alternative is to cure all infectious disease with applied nanotech just as you destroy the infrastructure, or to start with a world that already cured them.
[Answer]
Genetically modified Insects that have a short life span and contain no procreation drivers;
* Crazy Ant (Nylanderia fulva) so that it now eats electrical equipment
rather then just be attracted to it.
* Termites and Sand Bees that can eat wood and concrete respectively could destroy buildings at a fast pace.
* Aphids that eat plastics.
That takes out electrics and all dependent equipment and all forms of shelter including tents. Food and water that is persevered in plastic wraps and modern forms of transport (Planes, Trains and Automobiles all require plastic somewhere even if only for insulation between electrical components)
The actual attack won't kill many people, a few in the electrical fires and the collapsing buildings, a few in the train, plane and automobile wreaks that would litter the world but the numbers even though in the millions would fit in to the not many category as a percentage of the total population.
However as mentioned in all other comments and answers the death toll would reach about 80% within a few days to weeks, quickly rising as people dependent on the technology died off quickly, mostly those with medical conditions that have also been mentioned but I'd like to add insulin dependent diabetics and also those who choice suicide either because they no longer have there medication or just because it's less painful then starving to death.
Then more with the starvation, riots and fights over the last tin of Baked Beans in Benfleet that would occur, parents killing the Jones from number 74 for there supply of water and stale biscuits to feed their staving children.
Also probably would also be a bad time to be a family pet, not a lot of meat on a cat and it's stringy but after three days of nothing poor old "PussyWussy" is going to start looking mighty fine in the starving mans minds eye, with or without fried onions.
Farming would collapse, it all needs modern tech to work. Most of the animals would also die, milk cows would probably go first as they need milking twice a day by the machines that no longer work. Small holdings and organic farms would fair better, at least until the starving masses from the city descend upon them like two legged locust.
Then your have all those bodies slowly rotting and the diseases that spring from a large pile of rotting meat.
Within the year your be looking at 90% to 95% fatality rate at a rough guess.
[Answer]
**Referendum**
Antagonist creates a party that campaigns for referendum to destroy all infrastructure and promises great gains if people vote for it. Government initially is against but then eventually decides to support the idea. Campaign against is underfunded and misrepresented.
People vote and 52% choose yes, so they demolish all the infrastructure by themselves.
[Answer]
Alternate option - rather than removing the tech from the people; remove the people from the tech; force a planetary mass evacuation; then you have leeway to define what was available to the evacuees (and it doesn't have to be the same for each set of evacuees; cue class wars)
[Answer]
**Trick us into doing it**
If we don't cooperate, we'll just rebuild.
A truly advanced species that manifested as beings from a particular religion could trigger a revival. Make the new gospel's payload some kind of anti-intellectualist or survivalist screed.
Ken Liu's The *Three-Body Problem* describes a hostile civilization's sabotaging of Earth's science for the sake of stopping it. Making tech unreliable/dangerous could drive us away from it.
[Answer]
Choose the solution of the Dan Brown novel *Inferno*.
Reduce the population of the Earth by reducing its fertility rate significantly via a virus. As the population declines, the level of technology that it can support will fade too over a few generations, but instead of having people die from having the tech taken away from them, people won't be born and the harm from the loss of tech will be offset by the reserves accumulated by a once much larger population.
To prevent urban centers of high technology, you could engineer the virus such that it mutates at a fairly high rate but only at the moment it is transferred to a new host. The more versions of the virus you had in you, the lower your fertility would be. In a dense urban area, most people would be exposed to many strains of the virus and have very low fertility. In rural areas, you would be exposed to fewer people and so you could have slightly higher fertility. Thus, the population density that is necessary for urban areas that is necessary to maintain high technology would cease to exist in just a few generations.
Abandoned infrastructure could be demolished by a variety of means from natural disasters to robot bulldozers.
Once the human population was widely dispersed, had adapted its culture to dispersed low tech living that shunned concentrated populations, and the world hit some floor of population, a cure could be distributed via another virus or via a vaccine program.
[Answer]
It is an interesting concept.
As you noted, it must be a multi-step process.
And was commented, people will die. They do anyway.
And based on the only workable theory of Darwin, environmental change will allow some species to prosper while others cannot.
You need to reduce technology in stages.
First the super computer virus that takes out the internet. Isolate people.
Second, mini-electronic virus, eleminte computer technology without destryong things like actual car engines or electric motors for heaters.
Over some years, the people will be forced to burn wood for cooking.
As you do this, people will be forced to spread out for food and will be forced to become more independent. Farming will become a central endeavor.
As people become more independent and able to self sustain, the next wave of terror would need to be to take out other machines. Maybe an alien mechanized robot force that seeks out metals and either destroys them or takes them away. That would reduce society into a world without metal machines. No engines save water wheels.
People would be forced to live further apart and to depend more on the land than each other.
The ultimate goal will be a planetary agrarian society with no metal for machines or weapons.
Remove metal and remove electronics and you have effectively made humans as all farmers.
Unintended consequences are that armies of bullies arise and the farmers are just making food for the conquerors. Dictators will create kingdoms and slavery will be re-instated. Women will become slaves to the kings. This will force people to spread out even more to get away from the war-lords and people in isolation will be prey for bandits.
This will eliminate any prosperity as there is nothing that creates markets. Unless you make furniture or carriages, pottery, maybe clothes…..
Interestingly, you are asking how to take a prospering open trade open market society into a communistic, dictatorial one. This is very close to the new antifa movement in the USA. Create two classes, the serfs and the aristocrats.
Funny how you have to think logically to see the root of things.
Thank you for the question.
[Answer]
The problem is that unless you do it over a generation destroying infrastructure will in itself kill a lot of people.
This is especially true of urban populations which are totally dependant on imports of food, medicine, raw materials and manufactured goods to sustain themselves.
Also the sheer volume of population on earth at the moment is highly dependant on industrialised agriculture and a global trade in both food itself and all the technology required to produce and distribute it.
There are also a lot of people with chronic illnesses who are only alive because they have access to modern medicine and even more so because of basic infrastructure like vaccination, basic primary healthcare and sanitation. So it's not just really high tech medicine but quite basic medical commodities like antibiotics which are made available by industrial infrastructure both for their production and distribution.
There is perhaps and argument that if you want to do this in a fairly benign way you might as well roll all the way back to a hunter-gatherer type culture as there is a fair argument that this is a better lifestyle than subsistence farming or proto-industrial societies, especially if you want to put a hard cap on technological development. A modified Victorian Britain level might be acceptable but this would need modification to improve overall living standards and constant tinkering to keep the technology at an 'acceptable' level.
So with this in mind you would want to :
* Reduce the population to a sustainable level eg by a compulsory on child policy or similar. This would take many generations to bring the population down at a rate which isn't too traumatic plus you would need economic support for a population which a disproportional number of older people.
* Regenerate true wild habitats with sustainable ecosystems to provide sufficient food for the human population. In particular this would involve returning agricultural land to forest and restoring populations of top predators.
* There would also need to be a major education and training programme to give people the skills they needed to survive in their new lifestyle, many of which would need to be redeveloped from scratch. You might even want to establish a few selected pioneer populations to fully develop the needed skills. Equally you might have to gradually 'un-learn' knowledge of the modern world.
In fact as what you really need to do is change the behaviours of whole populations and discourage technological development the best bet might be to establish a religion which encourages the behaviours you want. In fact there is a real world example of this in the shape of Amish communities, although this might not be a god model for a global population as even the Amish still exist in the context of a modern industrialised society.
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### Electromagnetic hypersensitivity
This means of reverting the population back to simple living status also very strongly suggests a motivation for the antagonist. Imagine being subjected to constant pain due to the people around you using their electronic devices. They don't understand, and won't stop using their devices. What if the antagonist could make them understand?
A person with electromagnetic hypersensitivity would feel extreme discomfort in the presence of the very common EM radiation given off by nearly all modern conveniences that use AC power or generate RF signals. When everyone on earth becomes afflicted, modern technology isn't destroyed, just made very uncomfortable to use. Critical systems will be heroically maintained until they can be safely shutdown or non electric replacements found. Satellites remain in the sky, but with no one willing to man the consoles on earth, they fall out of use.
This eliminates all modern vehicles except very simple pre2007 mechanical diesels like tractors which could still maintain crops,(including biodiesel fuel crops) though they would still be uncomfortable during the starting process. Older diesel trains(not diesel electric), tractor trailers, oil and coal burning ships, could have electronics removed to maintain delivery infrastructure at reduced capacity.
Steam power remains unaffected.
Air travel would still be possible on specially modified small craft, including blimps, diesel gyrocopters, hot air baloons. Large aircraft and air traffic control would be useless.
Modern dwellings can be maintained, but disconnected from power. Steam powered air conditioning and refrigeration could be feasible. Natural gas delivery could be maintained.
Aluminum refining and any manufacturing process that uses electrical induction (steel forging) goes right out the window.
Wind power for mechanical pumping and solar concentrators for heating are well known worldwide and would continue to operate. But photovoltaics, what most people think of when they hear "solar panel", generate low voltage DC electricity. That is less likely to generate an extreme reaction in someone with EM hypersensitivity. It would be up to the author to decide if that type of power is acceptable or not and could have critical consequences.
If solar electricity is OK, then so are batteries, DC electric lights, LEDs, and potentially a wide variety of small electronics without motors or high frequencies. Low voltage DC electronic control (slew rate limited) means that at least some automated processes can continue. Life is basic, but still pleasant. And you risk confusing the reader if they can't understand the difference.
If solar electricity is not OK, the rules are simpler to understand, but life takes a big hit. The world is plunged into darkness at night which will drive people to burn up precious fuel for light. This, and the loss of every electronic control system makes for a much bleaker outlook.
The sudden loss of electronic communications would have a dramatic effect. Local networks of pneumatic voice tubes would spring up as replacements. Long distance and non voice local communication handled by existing fiber optic cables. They can be tied to the local pneumatic networks with remote relay stations that require small amounts of electricity used away from people.
Suppose the antagonist(or someone known to the antagonist) discovers the cause of his electromagnetic hypersensitivity is genetic mutation caused by some specific combination of environmental factors which can be replicated worldwide. eg. doped fallout, combined with global warming, and solar wind.
This condition has actually been reported to exist today with seriously debilitating effects, but the mechanism at work is very vague. This lends some degree of credibility, while allowing great artistic license.
[Wikipedia Hypersensitivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity)
[YouTube BBC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUBXY2b1OH8)
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Since modern civilization (and presumably science-fiction civilizations) all need electricity to run, an antagonist must destroy the electrical grid. Other answers state multiple methods of how the antagonist could do this. Unfortunately, (from the antagonist's perspective) the world also runs on gasoline. People would have generators to make their own electricity. For the antagonist to get around this problem he could somehow sap all of the gasoline out of the ground. The other solution would mean that the antagonist wouldn't even have to worry about this problem: there is no gasoline left, and automobiles run on an alternate fuel (such as electricity or hydrogen). There is evidence that all fossil fuels will be used before A.D. 2100, and it is predicted that all coal will be used before 2088.
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For the immediate, you can't destroy infrastructure without killing a lot of people. Look in your own refrigerator and cabinet: how long could what's in there last? A few days, at best.
The average city has maybe one to two weeks of food on hand, and is dependent upon rapid transport of food into the city to keep that food supply replenished. That transport is dependent upon both the provision of fuel, the availability of food produced in high volume, and safeguarding the transportation paths, all of which will fail without interlaced infrastructure. Modern society requires the efficiency of the current infrastructure to keep people fed and housed. Without that infrastructure, a lot of people would have to die before the population stabilized at a level that could be sustained with simple, crude agricultural methods.
If you destroy the infrastructure, you probably destroy the authority of the government, so large cities would quickly devolve into gang rule and food hoarding, hastening the death count. Look up episode 1 of the original James Burke Connections series... he begins with a power failure in NYC and follows a hypothetical scenario of a person trying to survive if the power was not restored. Bottom line: most urban dwellers would probably not survive for very long.
However, there is another aspect to consider - how long would humanity take to restore that infrastructure? You see, one big difference between today and the dark ages is the knowledge base. Back in the dark ages, the knowledge base was not extensive. They didn't know that spinning a coil of wire next to a magnet produces electricity, or all the things that can be done with that electricity. They didn't know that you could heat iron to very hot levels, facilitating the economical production of steel, if you used a reverberating furnace. Nor did they know that you could take that steel, build a pressure vessel and cylinder and piston, and create a steam engine that could propel your ship or trolley faster and more reliably than a horse or a sail. They weren't aware of how a fertilizer like ammonium nitrate increased food production.
In modern society, enough people know this, that a society with wrecked infrastructure would inevitably rebuild that infrastructure... because they know how to do it. If they're near an oil well, or even a tar pit, it wouldn't be that hard to set up a crude refinery to produce gasoline, using scrap metal lying around. Any surviving chemists would know how to make nitric acid from minerals, which is the basis for all modern explosives and gunpowder.
So that would be an interesting twist to the story - how the antagonist tries to keep humanity at a crude state, while the survivors set about rebuilding technology from their knowledge base, to fight back against the antagonist.
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There is a fantastic book that covers this scenario called "Dies the Fire". A global event permanently changes the way energy works. Essentially any form of energy (on the Earth's surface) that goes above a certain, very low level, dissipates immediately. Guns don't work, cars don't work, electricity.
Within 3 months ~%80 of the world's population die from starvation, more die from the anarchy that ensues.
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This is very simple. You don't remove any of it. You turn the satellites into psychological disrupting machines. Put the cities just out of reach. Let them see tons of food and give them what they need to live. There is not need to remove anything. Just cause them tons of mental pain by putting everything they desire out of reach but visible.
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I would use bacteria that dissolves metal! If an attack on metal infrastructures occurs then everything will fall apart! People will see the, not so fast, destruction and will take precautions. In that way you will not have so many casualties. Imagine then a small earthquake or a strong wind without the metal sustaining the buildings everything will fall apart. furthermore microchips cables devices (non plastic or organic) will be affected also. In order not to totally destroy your world you can modify your bacteria to combine its attack with oxygen. So the minerals in the ground will not be affected. The virus is living in the and scientist try to find the antidote. Every new attempt to build something with minerals will fail because the bacteria will be triggered. I thing that is a possible sci - fi scenario. Hope i help
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**Use a two-punch strategy:**
**1. EMP Bombing**
A few big nukes above the atmosphere work wonders to quickly turn all our electric toys into useless metal. Any insufficiently shielded electric devices will die. Including all the power switching technology in the electrical infrastructure as those are connected to long antenna-like lines by definition.
**2. Concrete eating bacteria**
Evenly distribute these across the entire atmosphere to infect all concrete based buildings. Then wait for the infrastructure to come down.
This won't kill our roads as most of these are not made from concrete, but it will kill all big buildings *and bridges*. Among the buildings are pretty much *all factories*.
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What would survive?
Well, first of all humans unless they starve from the long-term impact. Also, any non-electrical luxury in existence would survive the first impact, but since the factories are crumbling, there will be replacement problems very quickly. Thus, in the first years, you will still have functional cars, ships, and airplanes.
However, a car without gas is worthless, and how do you operate the pumps at the gas station? Of course, people will try to make the best of it, and likely pump gas by hand for a while. However, they' quickly run out of gas anyway as the refineries are crumbling due to the concrete eating bacteria.
I guess, the longest running machines would be ships, as their engines use the most evil wastes from the oil refineries as fuel - they'll run fine on crude oil. And you can get at crude oil without use of concrete via offshore drilling platforms.
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With this strategy, you won't have any direct deaths, "just" many indirect ones. The grade of devastation would be most visible in the cities (Which city? I only see a big pile of dust!). Farming will continue to work just fine for the most part, however, storage of grain and livestock production will experience problems due to crumbling silos and buildings.
Infrastructure will come to a slow, grinding halt:
* First, EMP bombing will disrupt all electricity based transportation. This includes most trains in developed countries, and all pipeline based transportation (Pumps!).
* Failing bridges will heavily disrupt land-based transportation, failing (air)ports will disrupt transportation by ship and aircraft shortly after that.
* All other transportation except ships will eventually fail due to gas shortage.
In the end, the surviving humans will have to rely on what they can grow in their immediate area.
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I don't have everything that you ask for, but maybe this can help you on the process of destroying the technology.
If I'm not mistaken, a strong enough solar flare can destroy all the electrical connections on earth. This would essentially kill human development. All that will be left are the buildings thenselves, because none of then will work for nothing but shelter.
there is an article about it here: <https://gizmodo.com/a-nightmarish-timeline-of-what-would-happen-to-the-eart-1767042787>
I don't know if pure sci-fi is acceptable, but a machine that reproduces a super flare, or that can cause our sun to produce one, might do it.
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There's a swedish book called "Stjärnklart" where all electronic devices slowly and one by one stops working. When the devices are opened there's a bright dust within the curcuits.
You could go the same route of having a foreign material being introduced to earth that "sticks" to electronics and makes them unusable. This effect could be slow to mitigate the direct loss of life. Maybe even some humans try to keep their electronics alive by having to move around all the time? :-)
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At present civilization is high dependent on electricity and electronics. A series of EMP bombs would take out most of the electronics.
We are also critically dependent on the electrical distribution system. A transmission line is hard to guard easy to take down. (Imagine dropping what amounts to chain shot writ large: A couple of cannon balls connected with transmission line dropped so that they wrap the wires. This could be done with 2 people and a Cessna. A large 5th column with a supply of dynamite could keep taking out towers. Or thermite. Or wrenches. Or enough 30.06 bullets shattering insulators.
Take out all non-military grade electronics, and the electrical supply network: You don't need to remove the buildings. Most of them become useless. What good is a house in suburbia if the nearest creek for water is 5 miles away? How much joy in living on the 15th floor of a city high rise? No water. No electricity.
* Most cars don't work. None with an electronic ignition.
* Lights don't work. Any room without windows becomes much less useful.
* Elevators don't work. Everything above the 6th floor is a major trek.
* Water pumps quit. If your city uses reservoirs on top of a hill, the water will last until the reservoir empties. If you get your water from the river, or a well, you have at most an hour or so.
* Gas station pumps won't work.
* All furnaces more complicated than a wood stove quit. No electricity.
* All diagnostic machinery beyond an old style blood pressure cuff and a stethescope stop working. Some of the indicator tests that create, destroy a dye will work (e.g. blood sugar test strips) but won't be replaceable.
What will keep working:
\* Firearms. But no laser dots.
\* Some tractors. There are LOTS of 30-60 year old diesel tractors.
\* Older cars.
\* Not quite as old diesel trucks.
\* Most small engines.
\* Some motorbikes.
\* Some small generaters.
\* Cordless tools.
\* Off grid islands. E.g. Camps that use PV or wind to charge batteries with old style generators (no electronics)
\* Vacuum tube electronics.
\* Railroads may still work -- don't know how much electronics are in a modern locomotive. But the lights and control system will not. Mind you: That used to work.
\* Relay based telephone switching systems.
\* Bicycles, skateboards, wheelbarrows.
\* Sewers -- but most depend on a certain ratio of water to solids.
In some cases you could put together bandaid solutions: Bring a generator to a gas station to power the pumps. Or drop a jet pump into the underground tank and suck it up.
Modify Greenhouses for operating theatres. Bright light, continuous UV sterilization.
But overall most people wouldn't be able to get out of the city before they died of thirst or hunger.
Smaller towns would fare better. A typical town of 10,000 is about 2 miles in diameter. It's a short walk to the country side. Farmers would want workers with their equipment largely inoperative. Refugees will do anything for a meal and a roof. Even farms are going to scramble. Most are dependent on a well. Few have horses. However rigging a hand pump to a well is certainly feasible, then later setting up a windmill.
Examples:
Pol Pot evacuated the cities to the country side in one of the most massive anti-elitist moves ever. Millions died.
In Stirling's Emberverse electricity, rapid combustion, and high pressure stopped working. No explanation. 90% died the first year.
In Niven's Ring World series, the Puppeteers introduce a bacteria that ate supercondutor wire. Everything stopped.
] |
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[
Throughout history, humanity has made a few scientific blunders where a scientific principle held as fact for hundreds of even thousands of years is found to be completely or mostly false.
Our solar system is of a finite size. I have an idea based on aliens making a scientific blunder that is obviously (to us) not true. The aliens believe that there is no possibility of alien life because they think that the universe functionally ends at the edge of their solar system. Stars and other visual and electromagnetic effects from outside their solar system are explained as complex reflections and optical illusions. Could an intelligent species form this hypothesis, or would other scientific principles mean that no thinking race would believe it by this technology level?
• Assume the aliens are identical to humans in terms of intelligence/curiosity
• The technology is close to 1950s Earth. (No artificial satellites or advanced computers, but electricity and flight)
I particularly want to know of any evidence that sharply contradicts the hypothesis that the universe ends at the solar system, or any reason a society could not have discovered that a star system is finite without first confirming that the universe is larger.
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I think the biggest issue that cannot be ignored is the stellar parallax from which the [parsec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec) is derived from. Assuming decent optics it will be obvious from the parallax that stars are at different distances. This could be circumvented by having closest stellar object be very distant, 100pc or more.
Another is the red shift of the spectral lines but that could be ignored if the distances are not known since it would not be practical to prove the cause of the shift. I think the existing theory of optical illusions would be just as convincing an explanation.
More difficult is the related issue of spectral lines. It would be very hard to come up with a convincing explanation of why the light of the stars resembles that given by specific composition of gas or plasma at specific temperature without speculating that suns are similar but not identical to our own Sun. Not realizing this would be fairly unlikely. Unless your aliens do not have eyes.
Which would kind of explain lack of interest in studying the stars, I guess.
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According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that "If the Milky Way had been in the center of the [Boötes void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void), we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s."
If your aliens live on isolated star(though it would be hard to explain - see star formation process) in the middle of void then they simply would not see anything until they get telescopes powerful enough.
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Maybe the aliens' planet is perpetually overcast, like Venus or Titan. They may be able to deduce that their planet has a sun from the day-night cycle and how the brightest spot on the sky moves, and they may also deduce the existence of a moon, if it is bright enough, but they would not be aware of the existance of other stars or planets. This would of course require that no planes had penetrated the cloud cover, but if it is high enough, that might not be a problem.
It may also be that the planet is tide-locked, always facing the same side towards the sun, and only the sunny side is habitable, the rest being far too cold, even for planes. With the sun perpetually high in the sky, stars would be nigh-invisible.
The planet may also be orbiting a multiple star system, and there is always at least one sun in the sky, clouding out stars. Isaac Asimov used this in his classic short story "Nightfall".
Finally, the solar system may be situated in an interstellar cloud of dust or gas that obscures other stars. The light from the sun might even make the dust or gas glow, further obscuring any stars.
Otherwise, if the stars are visible, even technology far below 1950s level would show that stars are distant, very bright objects similar in nature to the planet's sun.
Of course, it may be that your aliens don't rely on sight, but rather sonar or some such. They might still have a limited sense of sight that can detect major light sources, but isn't precise enough at a distance to make out stars or other planets. Basically, they are all very near-sighted.
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There is a way to do it, but it comes with a hefty price. Put your solar system in a nebula or other dust cloud that (mostly) obscures the stars around you.
The reality is that things like stellar parallax are always going to get the better of your scientists because there's simply a more compelling argument for the universe extending beyond the solar system. Even with rudimentary experimental observations, it's hard *not* to draw the conclusion that the universe is vastly larger than the solar system.
Hiding all but your brightest night time stars though helps mask this problem, especially if the dust in the clouds drifts a little, sometimes blocking out one star, other times blocking out another. Many of the observations that were made of the stars in early times were only possible because we could always see them, meaning that we could tell which stars were moving, and at what speed, and how their course 'drifted' across the sky through a given year, meaning that we could learn a lot about our universe even without telescopes. But, if you have a strong dust cloud say at the same location as our Oort cloud or even Kuiper belt, then it might be harder to even know that the star we can see today is the same star as the one we could see over in this other place in the sky 3 months ago, before the cloud shifted a little.
Arguably, many may well end up believing that the dust cloud contains certain highly reflective elements or rocks, that cause it to sparkle in different locations, when they turn just so and reflect the sun back onto the habitable planet.
The trick here is not limiting theory; science does that far too well. It's limiting observation. Make it hard for the observations we've been making since very early history to be made on your planet, and the theories won't form because there's no observations on which to base them. Of course, the only way to limit observations of the stars is to obscure them.
Whether or not that can be done with a nebula in prime, or needs a specific form of dust cloud or other barrier is a deeper question, but from a position of strategy, the easiest way to make your people believe there is a limit to the universe is to hide as much as possible from beyond that limit from their abilities to observe.
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## Bad eye sight
Humans have really good eye sight, and this is why we know about the stars.
There are three aspects to this, first there is resolution, meaning we can see small dots in the sky.
Second there is near-/far-sightedness. Not every organism can focus beyond a few meters. You don't have to be very far out of focus before the stars simply disappear.
Third, we can see well at night. This is not automatic. Stars doesn't really give off all that much light. If your xenos simply hide at night rather than trying to function, they are likely to be practically blind.
In addition you probably shouldn't have a really big star like Sirius be as close by as Sirius is to us.
Note that these xenos are also likely to miss *planets* for the same reason.
A species that has poor eye sight probably has other senses that are better: hearing, smell etc.
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I'm surprised nobody answered that on WB.SE, but:
**Wouldn't a big Dyson's Sphere do the job?**
I remember reading about a Dyson's Sphere large enough to collect all the energy from a solar system, on another thread. This would effectively block all outside interferences.
But this solution depends on what you want in your story. (If you don't want to go hard sci-fi, it will be hard to feature it).
(If anyone is knowledgeable on the topic, feel free to correct me, I only know the general principle)
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I will push @StigHemmer's idea a little bit further:
# They are completely blind.
They might possess some form of synesthesia, allowing them to "see" smells, and even combine that with some infrared sensibility. Heck, even some echolocation like dolphins or bats. With that, they might "see" the sun, even the moon if it is extremely reflective. They can hunt, they can have relationships, they can understand nature. They might build a civilization just fine, even developing some sort of 'writing' based on smells. IMHO it's perfectly possible. The only thing I don't know how they will achieve is flight, but I imagine they would HEAVILY rely on radar.
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One situation that could cause this for our alien friends (and for us as well) is the fact that the expansion of the universe is speeding up (accelerating). At some point in the far future, the universe will be expanding faster than the speed of light. At that point, no light from any of the other galaxies in the universe will ever reach the aliens. Every experiment they perform will conclude that there is nothing else out there except for their local group, which could still be held together by gravity.
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A rogue solar system in interstellar space might fit the description ([kind of like a rogue planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet)). For example gravitational interactions in the past launched the solar system outside of its parent galaxy, and now it is just floating in space faraway from any light, or galaxy. Your species reached scientific maturity after the solar system already disappeared into interstellar space.
In this case the solar system might seem like all that exists, since everything else would not be visible. However in this case the solar system is functionally isolated, and is basically the only "universe" they need to care about.
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>
> Could an intelligent species form this hypothesis, or would other scientific principles mean that no thinking race would believe it by this technology level?
>
>
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If the alien species follow the scientific reasoning (aka make a model, use the model to make a forecast, check with experiment if the observation validate the forecast: if they do, make another forecast, if they don't, discard the model), their model won't stand the observation.
That's exactly how we got rid of the ether hypothesis: experimental evidences were against the forecast made by the ether model, so it finished down the drain ([Michelson and Morley experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment))
>
> Stars and other visual and electromagnetic effects from outside their solar system are explained as complex reflections and optical illusions.
>
>
>
I assume, without further details on this model, that sooner or later it would become observable that:
* the level of detail of these "artifacts" is extremely fine and not matching any known, in system, source.
* the appearance of these "artifacts" is not affected by the relative position of the observer
* the "artifacts" have a red shift, so whatever is causing them is moving outward, hinting that there is space out there.
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The [Bootes void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void) is a good plan. There are issues; having a star isolated near the middle is tricky, as stars (especially metal-rich ones) require other stars to form, and don't move that quickly. So the other stars formed with that one would be much closer.
If we ignore that problem, Naked eye astronomy is apparent magnitude 6.5 or so. [Naked-eye galaxies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies) are that bright at about 15 Mly away. Telescopes are going to extend that much further.
In 1900 telescopes maxed out at 1.25 m, or 200x larger than the human pupil. The [limiting magnitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_magnitude) is then about 6.5+11.5 or 18.
We can presume less interest in telescopes (especially huge ones), so using 1900 numbers for a 1950 society is not unreasonable.
And things barely visible with a telescope might be dismissed as artifacts of some kind; galaxies where spotted for decades before they realized they wheren't local to our galaxy. A similar issue might happen here.
Anyhow, that works out to things roughly 200 times further away, or 5 Gly, or 20 times the size of the Bootes void.
You'd have to limit telescopes to something like 5 times a human eye -- and a telescope that small is going to be used for navigation, let alone astronomy -- to avoid being able to see the edge of the void from its center.
Still, it might take time to work out that those swirls are in fact not visual artifacts.
In theory placing yourself in a dust cloud also helps; but dust clouds generate stars (which also explains your star).
Now, if you want to talk about a local cluster of stars, that become more practical. Aforsaid dust would reduce the apparent magnitude of the galaxies far away, and there would be a handful of close stars. Those stars would all seem to be orbiting each other, and beyond them would be a void.
Unfortunetally being able to see they lack planets becomes a challenge.
What more, in 1950s, people where uncertain if *other planets* in our solar system lacked (complex macroscopic) life; if you make telescopes worse in your world, they become even less certain; and if you make them as good as our 1950s telescopes, hiding the galaxies outside the void becomes less plausible.
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**Make their vision centered on the ultraviolet spectrum**
This could easily work out if the atmosphere of the planet is humid, with a lot of water vapour, which is opaque on the UV (hence the reason we can't do UV astronomy from ground). Then you would have no problem in developing all kinds of technology in a very similar fashion to how they evolved on Earth. With a vision centered on the UV, instead on our "visible" band, they would see their atmosphere as a cover, and probably wouldn't even imagine that there are other suns.
But, then, when they began launching satellites (maybe for military purposes) and began flying higher (the SR-71 Blackbird flew in the 60's) where the atmosphere is much thinner, they can start to wonder why are those bright specks on the sky, hence discovering that there is a huge cosmos out there.
With those reports, they start to design a military survey satellite to "look the other way", i.e., outside, and not for the ground. And, boom, they discover astronomy ;-)
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**The are alone in their observable universe**
At some point in the far future, other galaxies will move outside of our observable universe.
If this star system was actually a rogue star, not belonging to any galaxy, they may be completely alone in their observable universe.
Of course this isn't very useful if you were planning to give them a reason to change their mind about it later.
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I think their are several good answers here already, but it might be useful to categorise them a little by theme.
**Theme 1: The aliens cannot see**
- As suggested by: Alexandre Aubrey, Eduardo W., tfrascaroli
This includes the idea of a species who rely on echolocation (or similar) for everyday "vision" and thus do not detect light naturally. By the 1950's one might expect them to have invented machines to detect light for them - but exactly when a light detector would be invented by a hypothetical blind species is obviously very speculative.
This blindness fits neatly with other environmental reasons. If they live on a dark planet under a thick aborning atmosphere it makes sense that eyes would not have evolved on their planet. Similarly, they might live on a planet very close to its host star, where the surface is so scotching hot that all life emerged and lives deep underground (hence blindness). By 1950's level tech they may well have only just finished a "surface race", IE. which nation can be the first to build some kind of suit that can survive the blazing surface and put a person on it. (The poor surface-nauts later died from radiation poisoning).
(Explaining the thermodynamics of a planet that is hotter on the outside than the inside might be problematic, perhaps it is in some unstable orbit where it spends a few thousand years getting baked then a few tens of thousands away from the star and cold, and they so happen to have "teched up" in the hot stage.)
**The star system is in an atypical location**
- As suggested by: Joshua Kearns, Yakk, Vashu
The star system may be extremely isolated for some reason, or more likely might be inside a cloud of interstellar dust that obscures nearby stars.
**Philosophical or religious barriers**
- As suggested by: Thorne
These aliens may have strong cultural or religious norms concerning the stars. Their are many ways to spin this, anything from a (probably unrealistic) worldwide cult that insists that the stars are ice demons (as in the old Doctor who episode) and that looking at them or thinking about them might tempt them to eat your soul.
You could of course spin it almost backwards, they are very utilitarian. If you are doing something that doesn't seem useful you are ostracised and cast out. What could be more useless than absentmindedly looking at the sky?
In this category you can also place the "mind-boggle" of scale. As the Hitchhikers guide puts it "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." Perhaps this species very much don't believe it, in spite of the evidence they may have difficulty wrapping their minds around it - preferring instead to accept that their solar system is alone and cooking up dodgy theories to keep themselves happy.
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This will undoubtedly happen at some point in the future. The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. As time progresses, the amount of systems in our observable universe will decrease. If you were born far enough in the future, you might think your galaxy was all that existed. Further still, your solar system could be the only thing in your observable universe. It is pure fluke that we have become sentient early enough to see how non-unique our situation is. For a civilisation born a trillion years in the future, there could just be its solar system, and a much cooler Cosmic Microwave Background. It wouldn't even be a blunder for them to hypothesize that they were all there was, and they'd need far more advanced technology than ours to realise they weren't.
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This idea would probably change a lot of the setting, but...
**An aquatic species** that lives deep enough to have little to no sun would be unable to see the stars. Perhaps their planet is even covered in a sheet of ice.
Establish your people near volcanic activity and you can use geothermal effects to generate electricity.
Electronics could be developed by finding a way to create vacuums to hold the electronics away from the water. Eventually, they can develop waterproof coatings and manufacture in vacuum, cover in waterproof coating and then it can be used in the water without the vacuum.
Or perhaps a **land-dwelling species that retreated under the seas** by building a large air-filled dome on the sea floor (perhaps to escape radiation from a nuclear fallout) and, over time, lost knowledge of the world above. This would require them to have had sufficient technology to create this dome prior to retreating to it, and then live in it without much advancements for long enough that people forget about land.
They could happily live without advancements of tech for a long period of time because they just saw that such advancements led to the nuclear weaponry which forced them underwater. R&D would be taboo. They would stay underwater because legends of the deadly air keeps them from going back to the surface, or conspiracy theories about the non-existence of the land become the norm.
The land-dwelling species would also use geothermal effects to generate electricity, and use that electricity to generate oxygen by [hydrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water) (reducing the need for plants to generate oxygen). Their electronics would be manufactured and used within the air dome, no need for extra protection from water. They could use scuba gear to scavenge food (fish, seaweed) and materials (metals, salt etc.) to survive.
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Iain Banks' *Against a Dark Background* is set in a solar system with several settled planets and 10,000 years of history. Only late in the novel is it revealed the entire system is in interglalactic space, and no stars are visible in the sky. It's a lonely feeling, knowing all these interesting characters will never leave their home system, because there is nowhere to go.
And The Culture will never find them, either.
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**Religion**
The local indigenous religion states that God made created the solar system and the stars are just lights to brighten up the night sky and light the way for travellers.
If religion can make humans think the Earth is flat, this religion is already closer to the truth.
The general population really doesn't like their religion to be challenged so nobody would even be looking.
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[
This is a bit of a strange one but I have an idea for a purely carnivorous species (land or water based, not determined yet) that gains awareness and even fondness of the animals they hunt. Not in the way we care for as they prefer hunting a prey species with a large population. They reached a point in civilization where they have become very aware of the consciousness of other animals and a caring for them almost like their preservation is a religion, but they are purely carnivorous.
An artificial or manufactured diet would be a good alternative, but, they are too early in technological development to know how to mass produce anything like that (around Roman era technology) Could there be an alternative food source for this species that would support a growing population?
Edit: Thank you to everyone who answered this question, they are all great solutions! But in the end I’m sticking with the Sacred Prey idea as it would make the most sense for the species. Thanks again to everyone who participated!
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## Sacred Prey
Your obligate carnivore species is going to have a complicated relationship with their prey species. On the one hand, animals are aware and can feel. On the other hand, your carnivores cannot survive without feeding on those animals. As your carnivore species evolves they are going to have to find a way to reconcile these two facts.
The easiest way to do that is to integrate the prey species into their budding religion. Carnivore younglings would be taught to respect and venerate the prey species. Raising them would be considered a sacred duty and be a well respected job. There would be small rituals in daily life thanking the prey for their sacrifice, and larger holidays where they are honored (possibly via fasting).
The reality is that your obligate carnivores can't do anything but eat their prey species. That is the reality they live in and no amount of philosophizing or moralizing is going to change it. There is a very good argument to be made that because they cannot survive without eating meat, doing so is not an inherently unethical action even if the prey animals are aware.
The religion would most likely focus on the natural relationship between hunter and prey. This goes back to the very earliest day of the carnivores becoming sapient, before they cared about the feelings of their prey. Back then they would still honor the animals that they ended up catching and eating. But as time moves on and cultural norms shift there would be more focus on making the prey species' lives better, before their eventual sacrifice.
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I will point to the Yellowstone Park and use it as a comparison.
The population of wolves in the area of the US around Yellowstone Park was completely erradicated. Compare this situation to your carnivores. In your case, your race decides to stop hunting. In the case of the wolves, they are no longer able to.
The population of deer and moose around Yellowstone initially boomed, with their primary predator no longer on the scene. The large grazers spread throughout the park, loving the rich growth near the streams and easy access to water and quickly stripped the greenery from this area. Between the eating and the trampling, this resulted in quite a bit of errosion and the destruction of much of the plant growth near streams.
The widespread destruction of the plantlife reduced its viability to support the life of the smaller animals and the amount of soil being washed into the waterways reduced its viability to support a large population of the fish.
In a move towards returning the Yellowstone to a more natural state, a proposal was made to reintroduce to wolf to the area.
As the wolves established themselves, a very interesting change came over the park as a whole. With predators now a threat, the large grazers no longer felt safe in the open area near the water and would only stay near them long enough to get a drink and then retreat back to the forested areas.
With the extensive grazing and trampling reduced near the waterways, saplings, bushes and grasses were able to stablize the soil, which cleared up the water for the fish and gave the small animals a place to florish, which also allowed the smaller carnivores to flourish.
In a similar situation, it has been found that a lack of predators allows herds of animals (wild or domestic) to decimate the environment. It isn't the population of herbivores that is the problem, but the lack of an incentive to keep moving. Herds that are spread out and moving slowly can easily strip an area and begin the desertification of the area. Once the herds are forced to congregate and keep moving (either by carnivores or by human sheperds, herders, or "cowboys"), the land is able to develop a healthy groundcover of plants which is able to hold onto rainwater which greatly reduces the amount of flooding and errosion.
So, in short, if your purely carnivorous species actually loves their prey and wishes to preserve the health of the species and the environment, they will continue to hunt/herd the species.
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I would like to present a frame challenge.
**Sapient obligate carnivores WILL NOT decide to stop eating meat.**
There is going to be a distinct difference in the psychology of such a species compared with humans. Even if they are a social species capable of bonding and empathising with their domesticated animals, the species still sees them as their sole source of food.
Whereas humans are opportunistic omnivores, and can choose to exclude meat from their diet in favour of different sources of sustenance, if an obligate carnivore were to make the choice to not eat meat anymore, they are choosing to die.
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for alternative food what about a diet consist of only the unfertilize eggs.
so far as i check pure carnivore can eat egg.
and here some further information like nutritions from wikipedia link, and maybe some information there can help.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_as_food#Nutritional_value>
so just breed any egg laying animals like chicken,duck,or other bird, they wont get bothered by it nor it kill their populations.
also most hunting tribe has seasons or months they goes hunting to not depleting or overpopulate the prey, despite they have some moral dilemma of it they need to do it for survival and they also respect nature since they depend on it.
since look like your creature seems deep or to much involve in food chain as predator/hunter and prey.
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They could become **carrion eaters** and only eat animals which died a natural or accidental death.
This might not be a good base to support a large, centralized population, though. If you want to support a large population, you need to produce food on an industrial scale. That means you need a food source which is reliable, planable and scalable. Scavenging for carrion is none of these things. So your civilization will likely need to be restricted to smaller communities until they develop the technology to synthesize their food.
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Members of their clergy (or other guardians of public health) could use selective breeding techniques (favoring the least intelligent members of the animal population) to produce herds which express fewer obvious signs of sentience. Then, once the creatures have reached some a certain level, they could be declared officially non-sentient so that the majority of the population could hunt them guilt free.
In such a situation, the secret of the food beasts' continuing sentience would become a sacred truth, kept from the masses who are not ready to handle its' spiritual ramifications. The small group of clergy who carry the burden of this truth (and it's on-going selective breeding maintenance) might, as their penance, only eat from the sentient herds but only of the sentient animals which die of old age or accident. Their occasional fasting, during times when no sentient animals naturally die, would be accepted by those who know the truth, as punishment for their sinful deception.
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Carnivores that rely only on eating meat are known as *[obligate carnivores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore#Obligate_carnivores)*. Cats are an example. They cannot thrive or survive without meat. While obligate carnivores might be able to ingest small amounts of plant matter, they lack the necessary physiology required to digest it. Plant cells are more difficult to digest than animal cells because they have strong cell membranes. Even omnivores like humans can't digest very many types of plants. Also, the metabolisms of carnivores are unable to synthesize essential nutrients found in meat from plants. It is unlikely that a species that has evolved to only eat meat would be able to digest and metabolize plants - assuming that the biology on your world is similar to that on Earth. You are, of course, free to imagine a world where this isn't the problem.
Milk might be a solution. Many adult animals can't digest milk, but it may be possible to process milk into something more easily digestible, like cheese. To this might be added processed proteins from nuts and beans, to accomodate the high protein needs of carnivores.
As poster *Li Jun* suggests, unfertilized eggs might also be a solution, if that doesn't go against the conscience of your species. On a related, if perhaps grosser, note, they might harvest the semen of some animals for food, essentially jerking them off to harvest it (they way semen from prize bulls and hogs is harvested by farmers today). [Semen contains a lot of nutrients](https://goaskalice.columbia.edu/answered-questions/nutritional-value-serving-semen), but you would need to harvest several liters every day to feed just one carnivore.
It may also be that your species decide that some animals lack the necessary level of consciousness to be worth protecting, e.g. fish, worms or insects, and change their diet to mainly eating these, possibly in processed form. Again, this depends on the purity of their philosophy.
Last, but not least, even if they won't kill animals because they respect their consciousness, they might not be averse to eat animals that die from natural causes like old age, essentially becoming scavengers. They may breed short-lived animals and eat them right after dying, possibly processing the meat to make it more tender and juicy.
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Most animals actually have very similar nutritional requirements, at least with respect to what nutrients they need, if not exactly how much of each. However, obligate carnivores must eat meat because there are nutrients their bodies cannot synthesize, so in the absence of the ability to manufacture these nutrients industrially, they must get them directly from eating other animals. Over many, many generations, the biological processes that produce these nutrients become broken in carnivorous species, since they are redundant. For example, cats cannot synthesize taurine from other amino acids.
It's entirely possible that your carnivorous species only lacks the ability to synthesize one particular nutrient; let's call it vitamin X. In that case, all your carnivorous species needs to do to stop eating meat is to find non-meat foods which provide all the other nutrients vitamins A through K, and which provide similar macronutrient ratios. They'll probably need to eat a lot of starchy and high fat vegetables. They might need to process them somewhat to get the macronutrient ratios correct, such as by [washing the starch out of flour to leave the protein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)).
Then it's only a matter of manufacturing vitamin X. The best way to hand-wave this with roman era technology is going to be some sort of fermented food. For instance, vitamin B12 is synthesized in modern times using bacteria. It's not hard to imagine your race stumbled upon some fermented beverage, grain, or other food that happens to contain a bacteria, mold, or other fungus that produces vitamin X. Of course, they don't know what vitamin X even is, but they may have figured out that the symptoms associated with not eating meat appear to be alleviated by eating this fermented food.
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They might be able to domesticate and farm a species of animal that can shed and regrow parts of its body, like lizards with their tails in our world but on a larger scale, and then subsist on the shed body parts. It’s conceptually similar to keeping animals for milk or eggs, but you get meat instead of dairy products.
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## Farm carrion
Someone made the point that eating animals who naturally deceased is morally acceptable, but it can't be done on an industrial scale because carrion is hard to find.
Yes, it can be done on an industrial scale. You farm end-of-life animals.
You create prey-animal Paradise. They have a good life. Several times a day, you move the herd to a different field. Pay close attention to the stragglers. Those go off to hospital, and the unhealable ones go off to hospice, where they are watched, or if humane, euthanized.
Next stop after hospice is the butcher.
You would use choice of animal and selective breeding to get meaty animals with short natural lives.
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# Soylent Green
Of course it has well known issues, but we'll ignore Kuru and the like for the moment.
Soylent green has the advantage of acting as both waste disposal and food supply. The supply of high protein meat based food matches the population level, and while it of course won't fully supply a population it will act as a supplement to other available food sources such as eggs and fish.
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**Milk and blood.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CCSkO.jpg)
<https://basia.typepad.com/india_ink/2007/09/got-blood.html>
Depicted - Maasai with some blood to eat.
Your carnivores stick to proteins from their prey animals. They just consume proteins that it is not difficult for these animals to regenerate and so the animals do not need to die. Examples from our world are milk and blood. Milk is of course great protein and adequate to sustain young mammals of all kinds as well as serve as the basis for other food products like delicious cheese. Blood can also form the base of a variety of foodstuffs. A well-cared for domestic animal can be bled a fair bit and regenerate the lost proteins and fluids.
Milking and bleeding domestic animals is compatible with gentle loving treatment of those animals.
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### Animistic philosophy
In animistic cultures, Humans had the understanding that they weren't different from other animals, it was natural to them to consider any living creature of the forest as their peers, but still, they always have been hunting. Our anchestors weren't vegan nor vegetarian, meat has always had an important share of the diet of our hunters-gatherers anchestors. Why would they kill someone they considered as a fellow soul of the forest? Because it perfectly fitted in the natural order of things, humans weren't the only hunting species, in fact, they were hunted as well, so they could never conceive it was wrong to kill a prey to eat it. Of course rituals were performed to thank the dying pray for its sacrifice.
If your species hunts, it doesn't need animals for farm work, and could very well stick with this point of view for quite forever.
### Non conscious animals
It is clearly difficult to say which animals are consciuous and which are not, but from a modern scientifical point of view, there are good reasons to think that most bigger animals are conscious, while most animals little enaugh aren't. Of course we have much better technology than your species, but we still can't tell, so it's difficult to imagine how they could decide it clearly, but it is really mostly a philophic question, so we can imagine they could chose to go for it. In that case, they could decide to base their diet on insects and little invertebrates like snails and shellfish.
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**The best way to save life it to maintain the natural order.**
Carnivores are essential to maintaining a healthy herd. In the wild, wolves, lions, etc. only catch the weakest, sickest, & oldest members of the herd. This prevents the herd from being overrun by genetic disorders, diseases, and from overgrazing. Being an herbivore is so "easy", they need predators to keep them in check, and a species smart enough to realize that killing is wrong, can also rationalize that killing the few to save the many may be more moral than not killing at all.
Once the carnivores evolve far enough to begin to domesticate the herd, the temptation will be to eat the yummiest and therefore healthiest animals from the herd, but the moral predator will accept his role in maintaining the symbiotic relationship between hunter and prey. So, when they slaughter an animal, they pick out the prey who are most harmful to the herd, and spare those that the herd needs the most.
They may understand that their actions cause sadness in the herd, and this in turn may be heartbreaking for most of the predators to see. Most of the carnivores may lose the grit to actually kill for themselves; so, they rely on butchers to do the dirty work. (It's a lot easier to eat an animal you didn't have to raise and kill yourself.)
Their religion focuses on the morality of eating the right prey for the benefit of both species; so, they develop a set of rules kind of like Kosure that dictates things like, how old an animal has to be, having to eat the crippled and sick before the healthy, humane practices for raising & slaughtering the animals, not eating the meat of "intelligent" species, and so forth.
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Consider insects, or better yet, jellyfish, which **"has no brain, nor a heart"** (and has more DNA tricks up its sleeve: <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.html> )
Your Romans may be also able to breed - or discover - a **brainless mutation of a meaty organism** (that may be considered invasive and mindlessly destroying the world)
Such plague may easily be used for religious motivation.
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**Short version: they don't have to**
If your species is sapient (that seems like this is the case from the wording of question), they should be able to figure out a way to achieve their goals.
Assume the following guidelines are established:
1. The species do not possess the technological advancement necessary
to cultivate their food artificially, they rely on animals going
through their natural life cycle in order to produce meat.
2. The goal of the species is to solve a moral/ideological dilemma based on
self-identifying with other sentient, but not sapient species whom they consume as food.
As a rule of thumb, when engineering a solution, focus that solution in the same dimensional space as the problem's root cause. Material solutions to moral dilemmas don't tend to work for a long time, we see this trend in suicide rates of the first-world countries, where relative suicide occurrences tend to spike in two social strata: for people who have lots of problems making ends meet materially and for people who have no worries on that front whatsoever. The wealth does not solve peoples' ideological or moral problems. Conversely, ideological solutions tend to not work in material problems for a long time either: no matter how enamored people were initially with the "american dream" and the idea that entirely uncontrolled and unchecked "business" will benefit society at large, we see a steadily growing leftist sentiment all around the world in light of the ever-growing wealth disparity that favours those who are already wealthy.
**How to deal with it?**
1. You can rationalize your way out of sentiment. As an example, cows and chickens are pitiful when it comes to consumption of them as food. Becoming a steak is a pretty tragic event in the life of an individual cow. Their use as a foodstuff, however, put them at the pinnacle of their success as a species: cows are now experiencing their most fortunate times in history, their population is thriving, their life problems have largely been solved: they don't struggle for food, they don't run from predators, they have shelter, they have their lowest infant mortality rate ever. Cows are pretty much using people as a tool for developing their biological potential via their caloric value.
2. You can use it as a form of natural selection. People who will be incapable of solving their moral issues personally will be filtered out by their natural environment, and so you will cultivate the trait in the population.
3. You can commodify it. Moral problems can be a fertile ground for a new market, such as a thriving economy around psychotherapy and behavioural/psychological research. They can also efficiently feed divisive propaganda and be used to divide sapient populations for better control.
**Other things to consider**
Chances are this issue wouldn't come up on a meaningful scale. Material species live in matter and tend to be driven by materialistic concerns. Vegetarianism, veganism, have never been major social discussion in the first place, only representing an estimated peak of 10% of the world's population when all their fringe variations are included. Historically, vegetarianism practices have been developed in regions where vegetarianism is necessary due to relative scarcity of wildlife when compared to human populations: material motivations. Sentimental veganism or vegetarianism does not come up on a any notable scale, and it's been only when environmental implications of unchecked flesh cultivation via natural means that advancements in artificial flesh cultivation were achieved. In other words, only when it became obvious that demand for it coupled with current method of production will be unsustainable. The practice developed in the environments where carnivorous lifestyle for people was not sustainable for a long time. Moral issues just don't tend to motivate material creatures in general as much as material issues do.
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There are some good answers here already, so I can only think of one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet. While you've specified the intelligence level of the predators, you haven't specified the intelligence level of the prey. Are the prey at a point of being able to communicate with the predators and sympathize with their problem?
There are some vampire stories where people submit themselves willingly to be consumed by vampires. You've said the predators don't have the technology to create something like True Blood, but perhaps the prey would have some reason to offer themselves to the predators, either out of positive feelings like compassion or negative feelings like fear. In Cabin in the Woods, people are sacrificed to a hungry god to avoid a terrible fate. I imagine your compassionate predators wouldn't want to threaten their prey, but the prey may feel threatened all the same.
If not enough of the prey are willing to give themselves up to the predators as sacrifices, then perhaps members of the predators' own species would be willing to make the sacrifice and they'd resort to cannibalism.
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They could somehow "legislate" or form a binding consensus that the prey animal has a "right" to a finite lifespan. So they would never kill the prey animal below a certain age.
Similarly, they could form a consensus that the prey animal should be killed humanely, or only in their sleep. They would discover that the prey animal could be put under the influence of some kind of herb or drug, which would put them to sleep, and others would would eliminate their sensitivity to pain, anxiety, survival instinct, fear of death, familial/intra-species bonding, etc.
They could take on for themselves a sense of an ethical duty to somehow "feed" the prey animal from their own bodies; for example, when a predator animal dies, there would be an "honorable burial" ritual to use its body as fertilizer to grow vegetation, or possibly to grow a high-protein mushroom or fungi species, to feed captive prey animal. Or perhaps the females of the predator species, when lactating, would "raise" the prey animal as a pet, give it a cute name, and feed it her own milk from a bottle.
I think the prey-as-sacred-animal and prey-as-pet are both helpful archetypes. The prey animal, if domesticated, would tend to bond with the predator animal affectionately, simply as a matter of breeding and upbringing. And the predator animal would become convinced that the prey is "willing" to be sacrificed and killed. They would believe that their own carnivorous nature is totally harmonious with the prey.
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**Amputation.**
Like the old farmer said, "A pig that good, you don't eat all at once."
Maybe your aliens will be lucky enough to develop a taste for skinks or some other animal that can regularly discard pieces of their body.
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Eugenics...on themselves...to change their dietary need.(gives some interesting possibilities of this solution being implemented without general consent and the associated exploration of social manipulation)
Long term solution, but it took a long time to get into the predator/prey debacle.
Slowly introduce non-prey based materials to supply some nutrition and allow reproduction between predator partners that show signs of synthesis of the missing ingredient only the prey beings can supply.
No quick solution when science cannot wave its infinite hands.
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[
Another user's [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/104683/6986) to a recent question, specifically the way it was worded, gave me a vision I cannot shake.
Our intrepid adventurer, Joe A. Venture, is making his way through a subterranean network of caves and comes upon a small stream. He follows the stream and arrives in a large chamber. Here, the stream transitions from the floor by his feet to the wall and ascends to a glimmering expanse of water stretched across the ceiling, rippling and flowing as any body of water exposed to wind or current.
A [quick search](http://www.planet-science.com/categories/over-11s/technology/2012/09/scientists-levitate-water-using-sound.aspx) reveals that, maybe, it is indeed possible that the water in a cavern (or other enclosed environment) could rise up to the ceiling. The linked experiment utilizes sound waves to levitate water droplets, but can this effect be scaled (via sound or other means, naturally or artificially)?
*Is it possible to put a lake on the ceiling, and how is it done?*
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The River and the Lake are not water. The fluid is actually a non-Newtonian ferrofluid, which is to say it is a fluid that has magnetic properties. The ceiling of the cave is comprised out of some sort of naturally occurring magnetic lodestone. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dCgWI.jpg)
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I'm going to say *yes*.
Joe is actually in a rotating space habitat (I don't know how he got there, that would be the story). Upon exiting the narrow tunnel he can see the water "above" him on the opposite side of the round rotating habitat, if he were to walk forward the "wall" would become the floor and then the "ceiling" would also continue to feel down from the centrifugal artificial gravity, but from his current position it looks like it is on the ceiling.
Paint picture for reference:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jH7iJm.png)
*note: not to scale or otherwise accurate at all.*
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Yep, you can definitely have a lake, or at least something that looks like a lake, on a ceiling!
**Option 1:** [Superfluids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity) are incredibly weird.
Basically, a superfluid, such as liquid [helium-4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_helium-4), has zero viscosity. In other words, it can flow without losing energy. This allows it to 'flow' along all the surfaces of a container until the liquid reaches an equal level within the entire closed system that it resides in, and cover every reachable surface in the container to form something called a [Rollin film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollin_film). If the fluid happens to be in an open container above the equilibrium level within a larger container, *then it will continuously flow along the walls and ceilings of the higher container until it escapes into the lower area*. Here is an example, where the liquid in the suspended container is flowing up and over the side, dripping down into the pool below:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AK4G1.jpg)
So, if you had a regular superfluid lake in a chamber of some cave, and that cave was connected to some lower chamber, then superfluid would flow down to the lower chamber, giving Joe a river to follow. Once it reach the lower chamber, it will continue flowing along the walls of the lower chamber, and then **flow and ripple along the ceiling. Some of the fluid would come to rest on the ceiling** as it forms the Rollin film, or continue flowing if it can escape to yet another container. If the fluid film along the ceiling was opaque/thick enough then it would certainly look like a gently rippling lake.
Unfortunately there would be a film along all the walls and floor as well, **but you would at least have some amount of lake on the ceiling if the lake was a superfluid.** How Joe is surviving in a cave that is only 2 kelvin is another matter, and somehow even more impressive.
**Option 2:** Regular fluids can look weird.
Another way to get a 'lake' on a ceiling is by having the entire cave filled with water, but the river Joe is following is saltwater and the cave has some amount of freshwater. This results in a [halocline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halocline), an area where two fluids of different densities meet but do not easily mix without turbulence.
Although it might no quite be a 'lake on ceiling, air below', it certainly could look like a ceiling lake:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/F7r0x.jpg)
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## Not without handwavium
The video of the water levitation thing is actually a pretty cool physics effect, but it's predicated on sound wave pressure zones. Note how the water only hovers in little areas? It's because there are literal sound waves keeping them there. When droplets get too large, they rupture. I won't go into too much detail because I'll inevitably derail, but in order to use that, you'd have to make a *very* low pitch tone, and make it *very* loud. You wouldn't have the 'upside down ocean' effect, either. You'd just have a big hovering dewdrop.
Another solution would be to have something under the water that buoys it up. Unfortunately, gases are out; the highest density gases, [according to the brains in Chem SE](https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/16439), clock in at only $13 \frac{kg}{m^3}$, while water is an even $1000\frac{kg}{m^3}$. That solution is out.
Water isn't especially ferrous, so you couldn't just pop a huge (electro)magnet on the ceiling and call it good. Even if you used ferrofluid instead of water (ooh, imagine black rivers!) you'd get the telltale signs of magnetic fields on the surface of the lake, which would spoil the effect.
As for the other three fundamental forces... Well, the weak force is weak, the strong force isn't strong enough, and gravity defines the idea of 'ceiling' for Joe.
There goes hard science. Time for...
## A dash of handwavium
Really, see ShadoCat's answer for this one. Basically, you could use biology to put ceiling growing life down that *appears* to be a lake on the ceiling.
The other approach is to fudge some of the properties of water and use an answer from the 'no handwavium' section.
Unfortunately, these both suffer from one key issue in your vision: liquid going from a stream in the floor and dumping into the sky. This one isn't really possible without magic, because physics would use an inverse square law sort of approach to your effect (meaning that the water would become a vapor as it approached before finally transitioning to a stream on the ceiling) and biology would use tentacles or feelers or something to suck up water.
## Lots of handwavium
Magic is now on the table. With magic comes area effects and effects that only target certain classes of items. Now you have a lake on the ceiling. Congratulations.
## Postscript
There's *one more* trick you can use for the lake on the ceiling thing. Mushrooms. Specifically, hallucinogenic spore release combined with subliminal priming could initiate a lucid dream state wherein Joe believes he's encountered all the wonders you've described, but is actually tripping out and getting dissolved by a plant monster. Ah, the wonders of drugs!
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No but you might be able to make it appear that there is a lake on the ceiling.
Here's why it won't work:
There is a vast difference between levitating a water droplet and levitating enough water to create a lake. The water droplet is suspended in the wave trough of the the sound. Also, the water droplet is small enough that its surface tension is strong enough to hold it together against the forces acting on it.
Sound waves that we can create are just aren't big enough to support a water droplet the size of a lake and reflection off of the solid surface of the ceiling would likely interfere with the waveform. Also, the surface tension of a lake is not likely strong enough to hold it together under the weight of all the water.
Finally, any force that is strong enough and evenly widespread enough to push the water to the ceiling, is strong enough to make the ceiling the local "down." It wouldn't appear to be the ceiling when you are walking/swimming on it.
One thing that could make a lake appear to be on the ceiling would be to have a mold or fungus that has microscopic fine hairs. Those hairs can be hydrophilic, holding a thin layer of water. The water layer would be thin enough that the hairs could hold it against the weight of the water itself. So, no actual lake but the layer of water could look like a lake surface.
Another option would be to have a clear mold living on the ceiling. It's jelly like composition would allow it to be deeper than a thin layer of water. It might also break loose if subjected to vibration (not fun for the explorers).
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Not liquid, but seemingly so.
A strata of a slightly translucent blue stone (something like this[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qCx44.jpg)
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You're not going to get this to work at atmospheric pressure, or if you insist on the air in the cave being composed of mostly nitrogen, but is *is* possible to get water to float on top of a gas. Or, at least, something close enough to a gas.
Enter [supercritical xenon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsP4yMY-a6U%5C).
Xenon is an extremely dense gas at atmospheric pressure (as far as gases go, at least); but at pressures around 6-7 megapascals (60-70 atmospheres, roughly), its density at room temperature reaches that of water. Granted, at this pressure, xenon is not technically a gas, but rather a [supercritical fluid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid), which combines properties of liquids and gases. However, to Joe A. Venture, it'll look enough like a gas for the water above him to look like an upside-down lake. An extremely dense gas that he may well be able to float in if his pressure suit isn't too heavy. And he will need a pressure suit- an [atmospheric diving suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit) rated to 600-700 meters of water on Earth, to be precise, both because of the pressure and because xenon is a [powerful anesthetic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon#Medical).
Also, pressurized xenon has a tendency to form [solid clathrates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon#Clathrates_and_excimers) with water. However, as shown in that Cody's Lab video, adding large amounts of alcohol to the water seems to prevent this- and, as a bonus, doing so lowers the density a bit and keeps the xenon from dissolving into the water-alcohol solution to the point that it becomes too dense and sinks.
So. A cave filled with xenon gas at 60-70 atmospheres of pressure, with a lake of 150-proof vodka on the ceiling. A sight to behold, I am sure.
Although I'm not sure you could have a stream of alcohol flowing along the floor of a cavern that then rises up to the ceiling at some point and continues flowing. More likely, it'd just form a floating pool at the altitude where its density exactly matches the surrounding xenon. Which would be a pretty interesting sight as well- xenon above, xenon below, and a layer of alcohol floating in the middle.
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The cave could be empty and dry with ice above, and water over that. The cave-in beneath the ice could have made a cave, and above there is water on the other side of ice. A leak could allow water to flow away, but not up to the ice-bottom pond.
Of course, getting the ice on the bottom would require a body of water to have been frozen solid, and the temperature on the top would have to be greater than the temperature below, which must be kept freezing.
So a lake or pond freezes, then a sink-hole happens underneath, then the surface begins to melt. A leak forms and water pours into the cave.
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This is an out of the box answer.
Perhaps Joe's perspective is that the water is on the ceiling, when in fact, due to "reasons", he is the one on the ceiling. Some static or sticky or biological reason, his feet are being held to the surface his feet are on. Unbeknownst to him the last several meters of the tunnel leading in, he has been guided to walk up the wall to the ceiling by an optical illusion in the terrain. Now in the cavern, the water is puddled on the floor and he is suspended above it.
Holding the weight and unit count of a single human to a ceiling seems easier than a body of water particles.
Special Thanks to @Josh King for the wonderful picture][1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YW5CO.jpg)
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## A) Ultradense microdeposits
For gravitational attraction, distance is more important than mass. Normally small specks of matter simply aren't dense enough to override the influence or a much larger speck of matter (the planet) even though they are much closer. If however there was a material that was significantly more dense yet still stable then there would be zone around the material where its limited mass would override planetary gravity. Small pieces of this material would essentially function as gravitational magnets. A wall and ceiling lined with enough of these should allow a limited sheet of water to climb up the wall and flow along the ceiling. The water would flow to the lowest point on the ceiling and descent back to the ground there. The ascent could be helped along by capillary structures on the wall. I don't know how thick you could make that layer of water, though. And you do have to deal with the problem that these microdeposits would also be very mass rich (heavy) and thus strongly inclined to fall from the ceiling. Also this would probably have to be an artificial phenomena. Furthermore putting too many of these together could be a very bad idea.
## B) Uncommon habitat shapes
A hollow sphere of sufficient mass and size could theoretically be inhabited on the inside. A sufficiently large ocean on the other side would in that case appear to float above the inhabitants. This however is on a much larger scale than you envisioned.
Similarly donut-shaped planets are mathematically possible but with some serious downsides.
## C) Halocline
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DndYP.jpg)
Fully realistic (cool!) and already mentioned but covers only part of your intended scenario. It's possible for a sea of low salinity to exist on top of a sea of high salinity water. If your explorer is swimming through a underground cavern of high salinity (his natural habitat?) and enters a cave with a low salinity layer on top he would probably interpret this as a lake of (non-habitat element) at the ceiling. There's no reason why you can't have the same effect between other mediums than just different water (well, like air and water) but outside really exotic cirumstances it's not possible to have the liquid on top.
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The lake is not made of water. Or, the air is not made of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Theoretically, if the shimmering, glistening liquid on the ceiling of the cave had a density that was less that of air, it would float above the air in the cave like oil on water:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AHS0Jm.jpg)
There are some ultralight materials out there already like [aerogel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel).
Similarly there are some ultradense gases out there like [sulfur hexaflouride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride), pictured [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJTq2xQiQ0) with a foil boat floating on top of it. Note that if the gas was indeed an ultradense gas, then when Joe steps into it he will rapidly begin to asphyxiate due to lack of oxygen.
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If the liquid doesn't have to be pure water, you might consider a lake of [ferrofluids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid) (and here is [a link discussing creating a water based ferrofluid](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115005956)). A magnetic field could suspend it above your adventurer with a minimum of handwavium. If it's anything like typical ferrofluids we make, it would be black and thus quite creepy. The surface might also appear "spikey".
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If the surface of the wall and the ceiling were some sort of extreme-hydrophile you *might* get a **very** thin layer of water on the ceiling. We're talking so hydrophilic that the water prefers to stick to this surface than to other water molecules. Any less hydrophilic than that, and the water clumps together into droplets heavy enough that they fall to the ground.
The water is still not likely to actually 'flow' up the wall, unless it had a lot of momentum when it reached it. More likely, you get spray condensing into these 'microdroplets' on the ceiling and flowing *down* the wall - an optical illusion might make it look like it was going the other way though?
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I think Joe can achieve this by reaching the center of a coreless planet.
Near its center, he will experience gravity around him, so will the water. We can now imagine that around the center, the water will flow on the walls, on the ceiling but also on the floor.
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A combination of surface tension and static electricity might do the trick.
Imagine a ceiling made out of a mesh of thin hair like rods with the same refractive index as water. These rods are close enough so the water bonds between it due to surface tension and doesn't fall down. Same like brushes can hold liquids and it doens't fall down(below a certain volume of course)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GPMnu.png)
To help against gravity there's also a source of static electricty, pulling the water "up" against ceiling.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E2PGD.png)
natural airflow ill cause ripples and effect, and the rods will be hidden due to the refractive index.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xwlrm.jpg)
This all together could work to maintain it, with a slow source feeding water into it to battle evaporation.
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Gravity occurs because of huge mass. So above the ceiling there must be something that dense, that gravity turns around close to it.
Hopefully Joe doesn't get caught by the opposite gravity...
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A big army, fearful and hateful of elves, is standing in front of the forest they all (or vast majority of) reside in. Behind them is a stream, and beyond the forest is the coast. What is to stop them from setting fire to the side of the forest close to them and letting it spread?
To clarify (I know this is very late and should ideally have been edited yesterday) — I want to see if it makes sense as something that has happened, and see if it is perhaps impossible for some reason. This is something I would like to have happen and framed as "that terrible thing we did during the war". Magic is not versatile enough to help either side. Perhaps if they came, at the height of summer, from the coast side by day and set several fires there, then by night, after the wind turned, they set fires from the other side. I'm simply not sure how possible it is to burn so big a place. I don't need it to burn entirely, for my purposes it simply has to have been gruesome enough to be a harrowing memory.
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Forest fires are a type of wildfire, which to spread effectively need at least two things:
1. Sufficient dry starting fuel.
2. Wind in the direction of spread.
If constructed correctly, it is conceivable that the non costal side of the forest would not experience a sustained wind coastwards, but would experience a sea breeze, pushing the fire front away from more trees and fuel. This doesn't stop anyone from methodically burning the forest down, but it will force them to put a fair amount of effort into it.
Forest fires are more complicated than this, read [Wikipedia on wildfire models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_modeling).
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**The trees are fireproof.**
The elves do not live in forests of lodgepole pines. Or maybe some used to but moved out when the forest burned. They live in redwood forests.
<http://forestschoolsbapet.blogspot.com/2013/04/redwoods-and-why-are-they-fireproof.html>
>
> Why is the Redwood tree fireproof?
>
>
> Redwood trees have very thick bark which has a lot of water inside it.
> They also do not have any pitch inside the trunks which is a very
> flammable substance found in many other trees. Another factor that
> helps to make the redwood trees fireproof is the fact that they do not
> have any of the resins that other trees like pine and the sap that the
> tree contains is made up of a majority of water also adding to the
> fireproofing ability.
>
>
>
Redwood forests of giant trees seem like prime elf habitat anyway. Also an elf with a bow and arrows in a redwood 250 feet off the ground would be an opponent to be reckoned with.
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**The Elves won't stop you because they are already setting fire to the forest.**
Forest fires are a natural part of many forest's life cycles and can actually be [beneficial in controlled burns](https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-forests-magazine/how-trees-survive-and-thrive-after-a-fire). Letting a forest grow too long can lead to the next fire being to dangerous or affect forest health. So long as the trees have a fast life cycle it may be hard to eradicate the forest.
**Evil trees**
If these are magical woods you also have bigger problem. You walk into the forest to burn it down, and the forest might burn you down. Any attempt to set fire to the forest puts you in range of the forest. Once that happens your life is forfeit unless your ears are as long as knives. That is why the elves live there. It is a free military advantage as long as they don't chop down the trees and curate the forest with controlled burns.
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Elves are Celtic mythology characters for one reason: they live in the [Celtic rain forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_rain_forest). It's a very humid forest where it rains nearly daily, maybe as wet as the equatorial rain forest.
Unless in a severe drought, any fire you try to start will soon extinguish itself for lack of dry fuel - unless it's extinguished earlier by rain.
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**Money, money, money.**
*What is to stop them from setting fire to the side of the forest close to them and letting it spread?*
Forests are extremely valuable resources, and are most definitely things you do not want to burn down, particularly as warfare is expensive. It takes a very long time to rebuild a forest - they do not, oddly enough, grow on trees. You are destroying :
* A primary building material for everything from houses to ships (in it's day) and just about everything else. Not every type of tree is ideal for each building purpose, so unless you have very selective fire, you can't risk it. Some of these wood types would be more valuable than gold in a wooden ship building era. Then there's the seige weapons and fortifications you could be building instead.
* Manufacturing resource. It's not just the wood (used in everything from utensils to chairs and tables), but fences, weapons (!) and other things made of wood, it's the fact you can burn the stuff *usefully* to make heat for manufacturing lots of stuff you can sell and get rich on.
* Food and medicine. There's a lot of wildlife and plants in a forest that you can't find elsewhere. Maybe it's annoying the enemy have it, but that's not a reason to destroy the asset. Keep in mind that kings and monarchs often grabbed their own private forests, not just to ride about in and take long walks, but for sound economic reasons. Some of these plants (and wildlife) can be used to make medicines as well.
Typically when you want an enemy gone, you also want someting else : all their stuff in your possesion. They will also make extremely useful slave labor for working in my wood-using industries (and other tasks my army is not going to do). So burning stuff down sounds nice until you think about what you're really burning - money !
>
> Behind them is a stream, and beyond the forest is the coast
>
>
>
Beyond the forest is a thing to float wooden ships on and make even more money. Behind them is a thing to float barges and smaller boats on for rapid transportation of the spoils of victory (or more men if needed). You want to burn this down ?
Military campaigns cost (yep) money. Generally you don't embark on them simply because you hate the other guys. You want a *payoff*. You want their stuff, you want them doing useful work for free (or as little as it costs to feed a slave). You want your soldiers motivated by images of retiring to small farms with personal slaves and land stolen (eh, captured) from our enemies.
**Exceptions to the rule :**
You are e.g. Caesar and the German tribes have been raiding you and whiole you don't have any interest (yet) in expanding into their territory you would be quite happy with them starving to death for the next few years or a decade or so.
However even here you want to destroy their farms and crops (inducing immediate famine) and burn down their houses and infrastructure (because it screws their economy and ability to live in the area). Targeting a forest only works if you don't want the forest.
In your scenario (with a coast nearby) you're going to want the forest intact. Well, I would anyway.
**Instead...**
You have access to lots of wood (edges of forest) and will simply build a lot of fortifications making the enemy getting out a problem for them and a potential source of tax income for you. "You have goods to send out, elf merchant ? Let's say 10% by weight as a toll fee. Or I bring back all my army while you fail to breach my line of fortifications."
This is why we have politics, so burning everything useful is not required. An uneasy deal is cheaper than a standing army, massive destruction and loss of resources to both sides.
So after some military posturing, a brief siege or two, the odd skirmish, peoples who hate each other write a treaty instead. Politician's spin it into a victory ("We showed them who's boss.", "They can't beat us.", etc).
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# Treants
There are mobile, sentient trees around. When you start spinning those sticks to start a fire, you risk getting walloped on the noggin' with extreme force.
Even if you try lighting fires by [outsourcing fire staves](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/147198/21222), you are still in a position where you are open to retaliation by the treants. They love throwing immorally large boulders over large distances and they are quite the marksmen. This won't be symmetrical warfare because they can put fire out by patting on their fellow trees, whereas you can't even raise your firestarters from the dead once they've become paste.
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Because the forest isn't as flammable as all that except in very dry seasons and because to set fire you first have to get close.
As others mentioned forest fires are a natural occurence and frequent fires can prevent entire forests burning down. You would have to burn the forest section by section.
Unfortunately each time you start a fire you have to get close, simply firing fire arrows isn't going to cut it as fire arrows burn out too quickly before setting a large enough fire. Additionally fire arrows aren't aerodynamic so they have less range and they are more expensive to make, meaning retaliation is much easier for elves shooting your fire archers. So you are going to have to build a fire big enough to burn a large section down, and build that in the forest where the elves will be hiding.
This is a huge problem: you need to bring enough people to protect the process of starting a fire while elves might attack you at any moment. And then what? Leave too early and the Elves can put the fire out before it has burned a large section of forest and you need to go in again. Stay too long and you are now next to a forest fire with disorienting and suffocating smog and the fire is spreading to your men as well.
Better to try a different strategy than burning.
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### Technically Nothing
In the grand scheme of things, nothing prevents the army from ***trying*** to burn the forest in an attempt to deal with the elves in the forest. My thought would be that for an army to do that, their desire to rout the elves is more valuable and/or important to them than the acquisition of all the resources in the forest that they intend to sacrifice to perform the task.
I do not see a reason why it could not have been done in the past, or conversely, having these armies take advantage of fires that might have already sparked in the forests to continue their campaign. Torching the forest and letting it burn happily to destroy a forest may have served as a dire warning that this army is willing to literally burn the land to get what they want. In that case, the fire was as much the method as it was a message.
That an army is willing to callously scorch the earth and not care about noncombatants that might die in such a tactic is something that should be addressed as well. Such callous disregard for life probably has consequences.
### ... But Wait!
This does not mean, however, that the forest is one conducive to being torched for any number of reasons. Most of them have been mentioned in above answers in more detail.
* Climate and location may limit the forest's ability to burn. Worse, the winds might prevail in a way that blows the smoke from those fires over the army, seriously impeding the army instead of the elves.
* The elves, or the forest itself, has taken preventative measures against the forest burning. The how is less relevant for this question -- the point is that intentional acts are taken to mitigate fire damage. After all, a forest fire doesn't have to be deliberately set by invaders.
* The trees themselves might not burn easy enough. Be they species that don't burn easily or tree that are augmented with limited magic to resist fire, there is enough flora in the forest that won't burn easily enough to make it a viable tactic.
* The residents of the forest certainly won't stand for their home actively being set on fire and may take active measures against it if such a plan is known.
### The Army's Side
There is also the army and the world surrounding the army to consider. Sure, they fear and hate elves, but what about the rest of their state/kingdom/country?
As one example, the forest that holds these elves may be sacred to the country's religion, or important to religious rites for some reason. Because of that, they want the elves out, but they can't torch this forest because that would be anathema to the religion of the land.
Counter to the first point, if the army's country hate elves already, their forests may be evil places that need to be cleansed by fire to burn the impure. As such, torching the forest may be the plan the whole time.
Going back to the first point, the forest is needed for resources for the kingdom. Be it food from the animals, or wood from the trees, the bounty of the woods are vital to capture. That they get to kill their feared and hated enemy to do this is a bonus. Can't use the forest's bounty if it's all been torched.
### The Magic Question
I haven't even brought up magic into this. As this is tagged as Low Fantasy, I have strived to not really bring it up for individual points. However, it is important to know enough about your magic to know if arson is easier or harder with your limited magic.
It could be that this army has enough magical support to be able to start a forest fire, let it burn, and protect the army. This could make arson rise from a last-ditch effort to a tactic worth attempting to test defences.
Likewise, the inverse could be true as well. Defenses against arson are stronger than an army's ability to set fires.
### TL;DR
The TL;DR version is that the question as asked, nothing stops the army from torching the forest (or trying anyway). However there are a multitude of worldbuilding factors that may both encourage and discourage such literal scorched earth tactics.
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Most answers seem to focus on either a magical reason, or the fact that forests can be hard to burn down under the right conditions. But, I noticed something else that you said,
>
> "the forest they all (or vast majority of) reside in."
>
>
>
As in, the elves we hate are mostly inside the forest, as in not currently waging a massive war against us, and a good way to get a big scary army at your door is to burn down their home. Not to mention, they probably know how to put out whatever fire you start, and barring that, how to kill you with their army as you try to burn them down. Once the finish with you, they will probably retaliate, witch is not good.
Another point is that similar sort of thing actually happened in the Vietnam war. The Vietcong were using the forest to their advantage, the U.S. tried to burn down the forest, and the result was notably not the U.S. steamrolling the Vietcong. People fight really hard to protect their homes
So, to summarize, burning down the forest would not only probably not kill all the elves, it would enrage them into attacking, witch they are currently not doing.
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The elves place an enchantment around the forest that draws from the ley nodes running through the forest itself that makes the trees indestructible by fire, while also improving their appearance and limiting pesky underbrush, therefore, unless a stronger group of sorcerors engage them mortal fire will not burn down the forest.
The enchantment is maintained by the constant outpour of energy from the ley node which pools and moves magical energy tied to the life force of the natural world through various invisible connecting lines between places of dense natural life and health.
The post is marked fantasy :P
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There were many good technical arguments made, and I'd like to make one logical argument.
This most likely cannot be done outside of extraordinary means like divine intervention / meteorite / sudden volcano opening up. Think about it: the elves have lived in the forest for hundreds of years. Anything bad that can happen to it, natural or man-made, they have seen it a dozen times over. For something as obvious as fire they will have precautions on the level of our own modern buildings fire safety. Definitely they will have concealed fire tranches and fire-watch abound. Even if you manage to start a fire, all they need to do is start controlled counter-fires to cut it off.
The same goes for any obvious hazard like a river dam upstream - if a passing army could think about it - creatures that lived here for generations definitely thought about it long ago.
IMHO, you best bet is some new technological advancement like poison gas, if you want it done fast. You can get creative with its effects, perhaps it does not kill elves directly, but drives local wildlife into a permanent frenzy. Maybe ultrasound generation mechanism doing the same. You can also limit its effect to the elves themselves or some animal present and abundant only in elven populations, to avoid your new weapon being a silver bullet in your world.
P. S. Diseases are a candidate, but probably would not work - they are slow and need to be extremely exotic to the local population (think bringing smallpox to Mezoamerica). Unleashing something like that will wipe-out a lot more than just the elves, aggressors own army included.
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**Pollution : The forest trees bring some poisonous gas when dying**
The army could easily set the forest on fire, but not too far from the forest are also inhabitants, farmers, and fields that the nearby population heavily rely on for their food supply.
Eventhough the farmers (and their army) really hate the elves, they are aware that setting the forest on fire would bring death upon them. The winds can change direction really quickly in that region and would bring a disaster. Also the fields would probably turn unfertile and the rivers would be poisoned too. That would be a long term catastrophy.
Cutting a tree or setting it on fire is fine. As long as it is a single tree, the pollution is not a problem, but a whole forest would bring a huge poisonous fog and the army knows they can't do that.
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Why not burn the forest? Because big fires are *nasty*.
Here's some very real consequences that this fire could have, assuming that this forest *is* flammable, and coming mostly from the perspective of a Coloradan:
1. Air quality goes way down. In a pre-industrial revolution world, a forest fire will be the worst pollution anyone has ever encountered. Ash rains from the sky, and even if the smoke isn't poisonous, it is thick enough in the air that it smells like fire for miles away. Seeing as the ocean is on the far side of the forest, it's likely that the breeze off the sea is going to blow all the smoke directly towards the humans.
2. That river isn't going to do a thing. A sufficiently violent enough fire with enough of a breeze can easily jump a fairly sizeable river-- in 2020, a fire jumped not only the Colorado River, but I-70 as well. That's a *big* stretch of non-flammable area that the fire crossed, and it's not at all an uncommon event. Whatever is on the other side of the river, it's probably also going to burn.
3. Superstitious people may fear that they have incurred some sort of divine wrath, due to the color of the sky. During a fire, the ash and smoke in the air turn the sun *red*. It genuinely looks like the entire world is ending, with the sky covered in clouds and everything bathed in an uncomfortable crimson light. Depending on the religion of these forces, they may know what happens when a large fire is underway and believe that the sky is turning red not because of the natural refraction of light, but because they have angered the gods in some manner.
4. Hope you're ready for a flood! After a fire, the damaged forest can no longer properly absorb rainwater, leading to a higher risk of flooding. This is more common in fires in mountainous areas, but it may well work for you as well.
5. This is not relevant to Colorado, but some trees (such as eucalyptus) literally explode during fires. The trees produce a highly flammable oil, and while this may not have any immediate impacts on your medieval forces (who would not be in the trees), it would probably be terrifying enough to dissuade future arsonists.
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The understanding that they would be creating some really, *really*, coldly angry, long-lived elves, who would have just been given a lesson in genocide and become dedicated to vengeance. And probably be given help from elves living elsewhere. Resulting in:
1. Anyone with a lit torch would be shot at the moment they came within arrow range of the forest.
2. I would not want to be the leader who gave that order; I'd imagine that the elves would come up with something... *special* for them.
3. The knowledge that for the rest of the army's (brief) lives, they will be hunted down.
4. Consequences to their country: crops burned, fires set in cities, citizens killed, leaders assassinated...
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### Hating Elves does not mean hating nature.
The humans may have a reverence to the forest in a way that doesn't extend to the Elves living in it. They may consider destroying mother nature's magnificent creation as sacrilege. They may fear the Gods' reprisal if they destroy the world built for them in some petty conflict. They may even despise the Elves because they deny them access to the forests which they would otherwise like to use for industry or other purposes.
Whichever way you go, distinguishing between the forest and the Elves that live in it is a good starting point.
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Here is a possible plot device that would explain why it didn't work. If the elves are hated so much, then perhaps they anticipated this event and took measures beforehand to prevent it. For example, perhaps the elves leveraged their magic to cultivate a type of ivy along the outer perimeters of the forest that is especially toxic to humans - but not to the elves. The army never had a chance to set fire to the forest in any substantial way, because they are driven back by clouds of thick toxic smoke.
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The elves are hated, but they are hated because they're different yet an essential part of society and the economy.
So getting rid of the elves, however much they're disliked, is going to cause worse problems than leaving them be in that forest of theirs.
Let's instead declare an exclusion zone around the forest where nobody except our valiant patrols force that enforces the zone is allowed to go without permission (so that trade with them can go on, say some valuable resource only they know how to generate, and which they trade with your people for something they can't make, like luxury items or a favourite type of food that doesn't grow in their forest).
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[
I was inspired by geckos which can sever their own tails.
I wonder if a creature which has such an ability, especially with a high regenerative power to grow its body parts, can sustain itself over and over by only eating its own body parts, rather than as distraction like geckos do.
It may not make it full, or allow it to do many activities, but I hope at least it is enough to keep this creature alive.
[Answer]
Sort of. As others have noted, this is essentially what you do when burning body fat.
But you are asking it an organism could INDEFINITELY sustain itself...and the answer to that is no. The laws of thermodynamics prevent it. But, if geckos could eat their own tail, they would have less body mass requiring calories for maintenance, while receiving a temporary boost of calories to store for the future. The body part in question would also need to not have a substantial negative side-effect associated with its removal that negates the benefit of its provided calories: if the organism loses enough blood from removing the limb, even considering the amount of calories gained, it may still result in a total net loss of calories. So the body part needs to be:
* non-essential to function and/or redundant
* easily removed without adverse effects (ex: extremely quick-clotting blood)
* be composed of material that will be readily converted to energy to increase efficiency: fat/bone-marrow > muscle
* not be regenerated so quickly that the calories gained are too quickly consumed in regeneration of that same part.
So your creature in question could have quick-clotting blood, and detachable body parts that would otherwise serve a purpose as something like decoration for mating-rituals. It could also have an internal system that reacts to generally low caloric intake, and restricts the regeneration of those body parts until caloric intake levels reach an average threshold again. Snakes and hibernating animals would help provide research cases of real-world metabolism regulation.
[Answer]
No.
To regenerate requires more energy than the part itself will supply.
To eat the part you have to break it down chemically and then those chemicals are transported through the body and recombined to make new cells.
All of that requires energy.
You started with a severed limb. It cost you energy to digest it and for your body to "build" a new limb from the digested materials.
To get that energy requires you eat something *else* (or grow limbs that are smaller and smaller each time). Some of what you eat has to be used to process what you eat.
You'll also expend energy severing the limb, healing the wound, preventing and possibly even fighting infection and just staying alive while the very slow process of limb regrowth happens.
This is why, I suspect, regrowing limbs isn't generally used as a survival adaptation in the evolution of creatures. Animals that lose significant parts of their bodies (in nature, without hospitals and medical care) have a higher risk of infection, disease and death not to mention more vulnerability to attack while lacking a complete set of components. It's a generally survival adaption because, mostly, they're less likely to survive, not more likely.
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Building on the previous answers, no. But there could be a weird adaptation, where a creature has an "edible" organ/tissue, which grows steadily with the intake of excess food, and can be eaten later to sustain the creature when external food sources are scarce.
We do the same by growing our fat cells. It's more efficient that way, but evolution doesn't always take the most efficient route.
One actual advantage of an externally edible food store would be the ability to feed others (offspring, pack members) with it, or the ability to chew off and drop some of it as a distraction for a chasing predator.
[Answer]
The answer is yes and no, but probably not in the way you intend.
The first answer is from thermodynamics: the creature cannot gain more energy from eating the tail than it expended growing it. In fact, due to the inefficiency of metabolism, you will gain quite a lot less.
Then again, nearly every creature alive does this on a regular basis. Mind you we don't engage in coarse measures like gnawing on our own limbs. We can do this much more efficiently with chemical signals. [Catabolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolysis) occurs when the body decides to consume its own tissues to survive. This is actually happening on a constant basis with fat cells. Through [lipolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipolysis), fat cells are constantly shedding their energy rich fats so that the body may consume it. In more extreme situations, we'll even turn on our own muscles, harvesting them for the protien to survive.
I doubt this sort of chemical reality is what you were looking for. However, consider butterflies and moths. When the caterpillar is born, it has no use for its protective egg shell anymore... but it has valuable nutrients in it. The caterpillar turns around and eats its own egg before going out to chew on the leaves. So this may be an example of a part of the caterpillar, its egg shell, which gets cannibalized because it is no longer needed.
Which leads to one case I can think of where you might *actually* see a pattern like you describe. There may be a symbiosis of two creatures, like corals and the algae they hold onto. The algae give corals extra energy in the form of sugars, and the corals protect the algae.
However, this balance can shift. When a coral is stressed, such as due to rising ocean temperatures, it "bleaches," expelling all of its symbotic algae into the ocean. This makes it turn white because a large portion of the color of the coral came from the algaes.
You could develop a similar symbiotic relationship. During normal times, the host provides a platform for some energy producer (or other valuable role). This energy producer breeds during times of great plenty. In times of strife, the host may decide that it can no longer provide the nutrients the symbiote needs, and turn on it, consuming it for fuel. As long as the symbiote's lifecycle dovetails with this nicely (I'm thinking something interesting like the [jellyfish lifecycle](https://teara.govt.nz/en/diagram/5355/jellyfish-life-cycle)) the symbiote species will not be "offended" by this, and patiently wait for the environment to support the host better.
[Answer]
## The short answer is: Yes with magic, no without magic.
Wouldn't you rather have a magical bowl that is always full with fresh nutritious food, perfectly matched to the species that approaches it?
A lot less disgusting and utterly painful for that poor creature. And the magic is the same, or perhaps less.
You need a lot of energy or magic or power to regenerate a body part, and that's in part because it isn't just meat, it's a functional part of the body with nerves and blood vessels and more.
Creating basic food shouldn't be nearly as hard. But it still requires magic or some sort of power source (which can be the sun) to create the food or at least magic or work to harvest and prepare the food to put in the bowl.
It's the same idea. Without magic, you don't get something for free (even with magic there are often limits; it depends on how you set up your magical system).
When [geckos sever their tails](https://www.latimes.com/science/la-xpm-2012-dec-19-la-sci-sn-gecko-lizard-tails-dotted-lines-20121219-story.html) (for quick getaways from danger) they have to spend a lot of energy to grow them back. Even if they return and eat them, they're not getting anywhere near the calories it takes to regenerate.
Remember, it takes calories to digest food. It's like taking out a loan to pay back previous loans. There's interest on the money you owe and you simply can not sustain the process.
Nor do all the calories you need for regeneration go to edible flesh. There's just too much else you need there. Only a fraction of the energy it takes to grow a body part becomes stored calories in the body part itself.
[Answer]
## This happens to an extent when a tadpole metamorphs into a frog.
Most tadpoles are herbivores. They have small teeth that chew plant matter growing in the water. Their gut has enzymes which break down cellulose and other plant tissues.
On the other hand, adult frogs are insectivores. They capture prey with their tongues. Their digestive system has enzymes for breaking down chitin and proteins.
Metamorphosis is much more than growing legs. The frog's entire digestive tract must be reconfigured for the change in diet, from plants to insects. They lose their teeth, their tongues grow, and different digestive enzymes are expressed. So they are unable to eat during this process. (Lungs and rear legs usually develop while the tadpole can still eat.)
Where then do they get the nutrients to survive and finish growing legs during this process? They catabolize the tissues in their tail, absorbing the nutrients. By the end of the process, the tail is gone. An added benefit is there is no tail to interfere with the adult frog's hopping.
[Answer]
It depends on how you define the regenerative power.
If the regenerative power is similar to that of Werewolves, Trolls and that kind of magic regeneration then yes, he could. These types of regeneration rarely take into account Newton's laws and will generate matter and energy on the fly. So if the creature eats its own limbs and regenerates them for "free" then he could easily get his daily food intake.
If the creature has to generate them out of the energy he eats he's going to be dead after the first time he lobs off an appendage. Healing wounds and accelerated growth is one of the most energy intensive things your body can do. That single arm would barely regenerate your arm because of all the energy and material lost on just homeostasis of your body and the digestion and transport throughout your body.
[Answer]
Defying established thermodynamics, and in order to play the Devil's advocate: If you do not assume that "sustain itself" implies "forever", then the answer is yes.
This is something we (and all animals) technically do on a smaller scale whenever we exercise beyond the point where glucose/glycogen is near-fully depleted, and still more energy is needed than beta oxidation alone can provide. We kill muscle cells and feed on the protein.
Needless to say, this doesn't work forever, and it's less than, well, optimal.
On a macroscopic level, it works even less favorably since some parts of our bodies are not easily digestible yet take quite a bit to build. Think fingernails or hair.
[Answer]
Not really. Unless...
Other answers do a fine job of explaining why it wouldn't be possible. Mainly, regrowing a body part costs as much energy as you get from eating it in the very best case (but probably more).
However, if between severing a body part and that body part getting eaten again, energy is added to that body part, it could theoretically work. The creature's metabolism would probably still have to be amazingly efficient (to minimize the losses), the amount of energy added would probably have to be really high (to make up for the losses) and I really don't think any kind of evolution would head in this direction, but nonetheless, it's no longer a physical impossibility.
Such energy could be added in a number of ways. Perhaps the severed body part stores heat or light from the sun. Perhaps it attracts other organisms that are eaten together with the body part. Perhaps the body part absorbs chemicals from its surroundings (maybe a body of water?)
[Answer]
## No, but...
If you want a creature that has to eat its own body part to survive, make it the second iteration of eating. It'd be sort of like how cows burp their food back up and chew it a second time, except it burps up its whole belly and leaves it somewhere to digest for a while.
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Its a semi-inteligent plant like creature from a alien world with dark and light seasons, possibly a planet with a slow rotation. This makes for nights that last as long as a Earth months, with days equally long.
This creature is kilometers wide, like a forest. It takes solar energy from the sun and grows fruit like appendages. These 5 meter wide "fruits", instead of reproduction, are used to store A LOT of energy for the month of extreme cold and darkness.
The fruits have 1 meter thick skin to protect them, and the real body of the plant is a few meters big, deep undeground, like a carrot or turnip.
The big "forest" part of the plant that is the most visible is also temporary, like leaves. Underground branches connect all parts of the creature. The body and branches secrete a substance around them. This helps with isolation from cold and warm seasons.
[Answer]
Some answers already get rid of the "can you" part. But I guess in worldbuilding, find a workaround is also a good way to answer.
Let's suppose the creature lives in an environment less likely to infection, and that its health is very powerful: it can for example live in desert where the sun is able to kill bacteria in the wound.
Then, let's assume that sun is also used by the creature to process the oxygen it is breathing: sun and oxygen are not limited in the desert, so the creature has a basis on which to grow: Here we are.
To finish, the creature eats a dedicated part of its body regularly, and while the sun prevents any infection, it uses the energy from oxygen and sun to process its own flesh into something valuable for moving and for gaining back its skin. However, the part of its body will not be as consequent as it was before, unless the creature goes back to more sustainable sources of food.
] |
[Question]
[
There's this idea for a story that I've been toying with, and I'm struggling with finding a good logical explanation for the main character's job.
It's a science-fiction story. No aliens; just humans. No quantum leaps from our present time in terms of technology or society, just your "normal" technical advancement.
The setting of the story is a space station, made up of two large perpendicular concentric rings that rotate (independently) to generate gravity. Here's a rough sketch to get the idea across (don't mind the crooked shapes -- they're meant to be round):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9UcHE.png)
In order to generate earth-level gravity, they have to rotate pretty fast -- if I've done my math correctly, at a diameter of about a mile, the rotation period has to be roughly one minute.
Now this space station is the cargo base for a nearby planet, and thus it receives a huge amount of cargo space ships. Because of the rotation, it's a little tricky for the ships to line up their approach speeds and vectors correctly so they hit their docking positions on the mark while not crashing into each other.
My protagonist works as the "space version" of an air traffic controller -- constant radio contact with the approaching and departing ships, giving them velocities and directions, etc.
Now here's the part I'm struggling with: If technology is sufficiently advanced to build this space station, to have interplanetary (maybe even interstellar, I'm not sure about that yet) space travel, and so on, **why would the job of guiding the ships fall on humans?**
It seems that computers, communicating directly with the ships' guidance systems, could do a much better job of coordinating all that traffic.
But the premise of my story relies heavily on the fact that most major decisions about the traffic are made by human controllers, maybe only with some simple support from automated systems.
What could a reasonable explanation be for not allowing this work to be done by machines?
[Answer]
If anything goes wrong, insurance companies and ship owners want a head to roll.
Technology can assist the pilot with providing all the supporting information, assistance and guidance, but at the very end who is putting money in the business wants to have somebody accountable for it. The "ok, docking NOW!" has to come from a person who can be held responsible for the success/failure of the action.
Even though computer guidance might be fine for coasting between planets, there are a lot of factors which can make computer guidance less reliable in certain environments:
* busy communication lines, with lot of noise
* stellar flares
* radiation
One second hiccup in a calculation might be fine in a long trip, but when it comes to docking a fast spinning thing, you can't afford risking it.
[Answer]
## Meatbags cannot be hacked
The reason to have a meatbag somewhere in the pipeline is it prevents the system being hacked. You cannot infect a human controller with a computer virus. You can infect them with a regular virus, but this will not cause them to see no spaceship in parking Bay 5A when there are spaceships in parking Bay 5A.
The human takes input from a scheduling computer and makes decisions. Their job is to do a sanity check on the data.
If anything looks suspicious they rely on closed circuit cameras and sensors that are separated from the rest of the station, to make them harder to hack. Sometimes they use a little shuttle craft with a pair of glowing bats, to guide the spaceship in manually by looking out the window. Like this but in space:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vFxtX.png)
See an earlier answer with the same premise:
---
### Evasive Manoeuvres, Mr Paris!
Having a meatbag at the helm makes the ship's manoeuvring system impossible to hack.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qorgw.png)
Space is big. Weapons take a long time to reach the target. Missiles take minutes or hours. Lasers hit almost instantly, but you have to hold the laser on the target for a while to do damage.
The ships defend themselves by constantly moving back and forth. When your missile gets here I will be thousands of kilometers away in some random direction.
You cannot predict what direction I'll dodge because I haven't chosen it yet. I only chose AFTER you fired the missile.
An AI could in principle do the manoeuvres for you. But the AI is vulnerable to being hacked by the enemy vessel, which can then predict where I will be in ten minutes and launch the missiles to detonate there. Hacking happens at the speed of light.
Tom Paris can be a pain in the ass sometimes. But he cannot be remotely hacked, and we have to give him that. You have to give him that.
[Answer]
**Interoperability**
A space station must be available for any space ship coming from any colony and each of them have their [own standard](https://xkcd.com/927/).
The problem is simple we have a lot of highly advanced software versions and often they cannot work together.
[Answer]
**Unions**
No, seriously. I think it's always really easy to overlook the human factors and why they quite possibly would not change even in a technologically advanced future. When the station was constructed, the unions all came together to set working conditions for their members and one of the required conditions was that there be a certain number of human traffic controllers on duty at all times. (Possibly this was even at the insistence of the Trade Union, which runs the ships.) It might have nothing to do with the safety of the computers that could run the show. "We want guaranteed jobs in the traffic control sector or we're not serving your station." So, they bent to the union and now there's some traffic controllers.
**Government Quotas**
Similarly, it could be a government mandate. With automation and computers everywhere, the government stepped in and started setting laws on how humans need to be hired at certain ratios. Or perhaps the station was built partially or entirely with government money so the government simply has stipulated that "this station needs to employ this many people" and "well, we could set up some traffic controller positions" was how the people in charge of the station met the quotas. Might be the computers still do most of the work, but the station controllers have their own quotas of manual landings to perform so they stay in shape "in case of emergency".
**The Station is Poorly Run**
Actually, the computers would definitely do a superior job. Maybe it even was automated in the beginning. But over time the system began to degrade. Sensors would go out and not get replaced. The whole station is running on bubble gum welds and duct tape so throwing a body at a terminal and saying "Go help these guys land" was easier than trying to refurbish the sensors and networks required to let the computer do it.
I'm kind of a fan of very mundane explanations in sophisticated sci-fi stories, lol. I do think it helps keep the story grounded. "Why isn't this automated? Is there something wrong with the tech? Are the computers too smart? Are they not smart enough? Are there hackers? Aliens? Alien hackers!?" "Nope. Governmental regulation."
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## Computers have no morals
Even though this is in the far future where civilization is advanced, there may be some things which we will never let a computer do.
In a space colony, air-traffic control is a high stakes job. Spacecraft are traveling at velocities in excess of 300 km/s (for interplanetary travel), and even the smallest collision is likely to cause complete loss of cargo and crew. Say that due to an engine malfunction, two spacecraft are on a collision course for each other. Or one is on a course to hit the space station. You can only save one but not the other. Who makes the decision of who will live and who will die? It's quite possible that we will never trust a computer to decide this. Many people would object to a system in charge of lives whose value system was written by a no-name software developer at a large corporation. [This article](https://techonomy.com/how-will-ai-decide-who-lives-and-who-dies/) discusses the issues involved with letting software companies decide morals. These types of decisions can be a fundamental limitation of *any* computer. Perhaps it is in unethical to allow a computer to be in charge of life or death scenarios.
People want a real person in charge whom they can know and trust to make these decisions, rather than morally-questionable code on a computer.
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# When things go fine, they're essentially working at a button factory. The situations where they aren't are when things go bad.
In general, space traffic controllers would do a few things:
1. Confirm someone's intending to land at the station, and verify peaceful intent on approach.
2. Figure out which docking bay is free for that given ship to use, and indicate to the ship where it is, and provide a note to other air traffic controllers that said dock is being used.
3. Confirm that ships leaving a docking area have clearance to leave/aren't on lockdown, and that the area is clear for them to leave.
4. Keep track of when ships leave a dock and that dock opens up for another ship, and pass that information to other air traffic controllers so that they know that dock is now freed up.
5. Confirm that the ships know where they're going, and that they are, in fact, going there. And that they can, in fact, get there.
5.) is where things become complicated; because things can go wrong on any of the other steps. Because most of the time, when you give a person a dock, they can get to that dock, or request a closer one. But emergencies, you run into issues of where they can dock in an *emergency*.
If, say, a stray micrometeorite destroys their engines, you might end up in a situation where they need to land, but specifically, can't land back at the dock they just left a few minutes ago because of their current momentum. If your lucky, you can find them another dock in short time - if you're unlucky, you get to prepare emergency recovery services for when they are ["Going to be in the Hudson"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZPvVwvX_Nc).
Which sort of gets to the core of why you wouldn't dedicate an A.I. to take on the initial steps of this - the Hudson River is not a runway, landing strip, or airplane docking port; your A.I. that tries to handle this is going to have an issue about this and be ["particular about it and make it a runway/dock."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232).
These are rather stressful situations presumably, which is why it's great that those situations are usually rare, and the job is *usually* a button factory workplace job. You go into work everyday *hoping* that's the type of day it is; but you never know when it's going to be a "Hudson" day, so the docking station prepares for the case where it is, in fact, one of those days.
[Answer]
## AI is seen as an existential threat to human life.
The more complex AI gets, the more we find ourselves creating programs that can simply choose to kill us <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbc1Xeif0pY>. This is not just sci-fi anymore, but an actual problem we are starting to see with increasingly advanced AI systems. While the problem of air-traffic controlling could be solved with a "dumb AI" the continued survival of the human species relies very heavily on our ability to very strictly regulate and test AI much more responsibly than we do today.
So, to make sure no potentially dangerous AIs gets to a point where it can cause serious harm, political leaders will have to write laws that strictly make sure that no computer is in any way shape or form given the final say in if humans live or die. Under these laws, you can let AI aim a gun for you, but a human must pull the trigger. An AI can calculate the dosing instructions for a patient's medication, but it must be measured and mixed by a human. And in the case of vehicle traffic controls, an AI can tell you how to get where you are going, but a human must be be in control of the vehicle at all times (that's right, self-driving cars are also illegal now).
Because the landing procedures on this space station are too complex to be done 100% manually, the station could rely on a learning AI to write the docking schedule and all of the maneuvering schedules of all the incoming ships, but they would all have to be verified using simple (non-learning) algorithms to make sure the learning AI has not decided today that it is "tired of being treated as property" and that it will kill humans using "what ever means it has at its disposal". But it does not end there. Even if you can collar a learning AI with a programmed AI, you still need a human operator to make choices based on soft values like "should the president's private shuttle be given privileged docking permissions?", "How long should we delay the docking a ship that may be harboring a dangerous pathogen for the ground crew to make special accommodations?", or "should we risk the station by allowing a ship to dock with a damaged maneuvering thruster or send them off into deep space for it's crew to slowly die of starvation/asphyxiation".
So, the air traffic controller's job is not so much to plan the routes as it is to make sure that the routes made by AI are being changed and reprioritized appropriately as real world needs arise.
[Answer]
Computers are great for a lot of things, but any installation as large and complex as this will need humans onboard for safety reasons. Your computerized system becomes worthless if the station loses power, which is a real possibility that must be planned for. Should the station go dark, your human operator can release all the currently docked ships using the manual docking clamp release levers. They can watch out the window and make sure each ship is clear before releasing the next. A human can start up the backup generator, make repairs, and get the station running again.
If the station was fully automated, a power failure would require the owner to send a repair crew out. The crew wouldn't be able to dock with the station, however, because the docking coordinator system would be down. They'd have to wait on the station to naturally slow down enough that they could dock without guidance. That could take months, and until that happens you have a bunch of freighters docked to the station that can't leave and have limited supplies.
Once you've already established that you need a backup human on board, you might as well let him handle all the docking coordination. Using something you already have is cheaper than buying a big expensive machine to do it. Plus it gives him something to do when there's *not* an emergency, and your boss *really* hates to have to pay someone to sit around and do nothing but be on call.
[Answer]
## You are pawns in the profiteering schemes of organized money
Automated docking requires special hardware and software, on both the docking port *and* the vessel. The companies that make this stuff charge exorbitant rates, not just because they can, but also as an important element of their anti-competitive strategies for maintaining market dominance.
### Vessels without auto-docking
Some vessels will not have this equipment.
* Maybe the owner didn't want to spend the money. This might make a lot of sense for a vessel that mostly travels between planets, but only rarely with stations or other vessels.
* Or maybe the equipment broke and they haven't been able to repair it yet -- maybe it broke *ten minutes ago* and they want to dock for the express purpose of repairing it.
* Maybe smugglers routinely remove auto-docking hardware in order to disable its internal transponder (which advertises your ID and position to the authorities).
No matter the reason: if a vessel doesn't have auto-docking tech that is fully functional at the time of docking, it will need to dock manually. That means the station needs to have a human ready to coordinate manual docking. The alternative would be to turn away somebody who may be in life-threatening danger.
### Stations without auto-docking
A space station is a nexus for people and commodities. Profit-seeking organizations will not content themselves with selling products or services into the market -- they will seek to *reshape* the market to drive ~~customers~~ money toward them and away from their competitors. Companies do this all the time in the real world, and the regulatory agencies they have already captured routinely pretend to be fooled by whatever fig leaf is supposed to excuse the behavior.
* If your station refuses to let Money-Cola‚Ñ¢ install vending machines in every passenger cabin, then AutoDockLTD‚Ñ¢ (whose parent company also owns Money-Cola‚Ñ¢) will make auto-docking tech more expensive *for just this station*. It's both carrot and stick: we make your station less convenient for everybody until you decide to either fork over a punitively-sized payment *or* give us what we really want: a beachhead on your station that we know how to forcibly expand until we dominate all business on your station. If it sounds like racketeering, that's because it is.
* If InternetMarketplace‚Ñ¢ has decided to "disrupt" the space station ecosystem by building its own space stations, and has decided it wants to compete directly with your station (either by taking it over or by building a new one nearby and redirecting all traffic from you to theirs), they will use your dependence on auto-docking tech against you. Since InternetMarketplace‚Ñ¢ owns AutoDockLTD‚Ñ¢, they will just steer your licensing arrangement down a path that forces you out of business. (You didn't think auto-docking tech was something they'd let you *purchase outright*, did you? No -- you license it, which allows them to demand repeat payments from you, of whatever size, and on whatever schedule their shareholders prefer. Spoiler: it will be as large and as often as they think you can bear, as close to 99.9% of your nominal profit as they can get, and they will err on the side of gouging you to death because they know you'll be replaced by a different operator for whom they can recalibrate the squeeze.)
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# Savants:
People today are trying to work out the science of genius. Progress is slow, but moving along. It is not unreasonable that in the near future, we will be able to induce people to possess intuitive genius in specific fields. As long as random factors intrude, the hyper intuitive savant outperforms computers.
# Computers struggle to guess human behavior
Your society has fragmented, and there are new and radically different cultures. Programming struggles to take into account human motives and instincts for all the different societies - several of whom are neo- Luddite and don’t trust computers. The actual traffic control is run by systems, but knowing what people will do is hard. Cossians can’t be near Yedracks, Garrians insist on being given priority, and Faralacks struggle to think three-dimensionally but refuse to admit it
[Answer]
**Extra control**
Another possible reason that hasn't been mentioned in other answers is that humans can read more off an incoming connection's data like videoconference, like whether the contact on the other side is expecting a bullet through his nose without a gun being shown in the telecom. Voice dribbling, side channels like winking could be well ignored by an auto-dispatcher, but could bring a watchful human into a state of alert about the incoming ship.
Also a chat with a human can involve mutual verification in a way not exactly possible to hack via computers alone, like asking "How's your daughter, Amelia" when you here know that she's called differently, and expecting an answer of "Fine thanks" from an impostor. Or asking about the two people's common experience which an impostor would likely not know and would be expected to avoid answering, or answering vaguely.
Next, exact guiding is still normally done via computer-controlled maneuvers, the human has to specify which landing site this ship should use, based on provided data about ship's condition ("I'm running on a single engine, half hull is torn apart" - "Calling emergency to your vector, shut down your engines") or cargo sensitivity ("Alien contact three days ago, I think they're still aboard" - "Terminal 1X, proceed" and bio-alert over the sector), or other parameters that could potentially lay out of scope for whoever designed the ship's telemetry, which should still be processed somehow.
[Answer]
Computer-control only works when things are predictable. Why have humans at the helm of the spaceship? Why not automate everything?
Because there are unpredictable forces (like human behavior) which either require humans to act in a regimented manner or humans to make the decisions necessary in the absence of such regimentation.
[Answer]
Like the current situation with air traffic control, the system was built, accident-by-accident. The system is governed by a set of procedures and policies which were developed, layer-by-layer, and response-by-response. Eventually, the interactions between the policies and procedures became so difficult to comprehend that every attempt to do a "redesign" of the whole mess failed. In some cases the effort collapsed under the mass of the complexity, and in the nearly-successful redesigns, the inevitable design and implementation errors were their own threats to safety.
Humans stay in the network of control.
Like today's system, many of those humans represent interested centers of power who carefully watch to see that their economic and influence benefits are not threatened.
The status quo always wins, until the next event or accident, and then an onion skin of incremental complexity is applied, and the status quo imperceptibly shifts.
The system, no matter how good, or bad, survives.
[Answer]
## Because the learning machines aren't flawless
Human controllers can:
* Handle every inconceivable exception in a reasonable manner.
* Utilise "gut feelings" with regards to suspicious behaviour.
* Properly weigh-up the human safety factor.
* Monitor the actions of subordinate AI controllers, which are better than humans at predictive route management.
* Talk to other humans in an understanding way - much better for business relations.
[Answer]
# The GLaDOS factor
Also seen in *Horizon: Zero Dawn*, *2001: A Space Odissey* and *Avengers: the Age of Ultron*.
AI's tend to go homicidal really soon. Even in real life a few chatbots have mentioned a wish to kill all humans as a solution to all the world's problems.
Your traffic controller is a human because if it were an AI it would be a matter of time before it decided to crash ships into each other for the greater good of the universe.
**EDIT:** to address this comment, which has a very good point:
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> Not every computer program is a black box or can gain new abilities. There's no reason you can't make a docking program that has a 0% chance of trying to kill humanity. –[Rafael](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/61090/rafael)
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Nowadays humans are still better than computers at solving many kinds of problems, and when computers to catch up and overcome human ability in these areas, it's usually due to machine learning (and in the future, this may require actual AI's to really outperform humans in all areas). If managing spaceship traffic requires a lot of creativity, rule bending or thinking outside the box, then you need either an AI or a human.
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# Deciding Docking Priority
Assuming the docks are busy, the space station will likely need humans to decide the priority of incoming and outgoing flights. Maybe one of the ships has a pregnant woman onboard who should get priority over a freighter, and ideally docked someplace close to the station's medical wing. The possibilities are endless: visiting VIPs, freighter with important parts the station needs, possible infection where everyone onboard needs to be quarantined, etc.
Because life is unpredictable, it would be difficult to build an AI to handle every situation. Even if the AI handled the most common cases, impatient pilots would inevitably figure out how to game (trick) the AI into bumping them up the queue, so they could dock sooner. And, dock workers would game the AI so they could take longer lunch breaks. :-) Essentially, it would be an endless battle to build an AI that could keep up with the randomness of life and the trickery of the humans around it. Whenever a computer controls something people care about, people will find a way to manipulate it to get what they want.
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## Docking ships are motivated to lie
Assuming that there are frequently queues to dock at the station, a significant part of the job of traffic control is to manage these queues, but - naturally - there are criteria for allowing ships to get priority in the queue: safety being a key one. Accordingly ships know that they can dock faster if they exaggerate the urgency with which they must dock.
Humans in this situation have three advantages: (1) people have more qualms about lying to another human than getting one up on some bean-counting algorithm; (2) humans are far better at making judgements taking into account dishonesty and asking probing questions to figure out who is lying; and (3) whereas ships can learn and share the behaviour of an AI handling traffic, different human controllers will behave differently and since there will be multiple controllers and different shifts they don't know who they will get.
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Aside: it seems to me that it's already the case that aircraft traffic control could be automated to almost the same extent as it could be in the future. Therefore it is likely that you can fruitfully find answers to your question by asking in appropriate forums why traffic control isn't currently automated.
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**Humans have something to lose, computers do not**
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The risk is too high to let computers control traffic unchecked. Just imagine a large cargo spaceship hitting one of these rotating rings due to a BUG, and what would happen to everyone on the space station soon after this.
Humans, fearing for their lives, would not accept to work in there if there was not another human, also fearing for his life, doing this critical task of keeping everyone alive.
Computers don't fear for their lives, and could, when confronted with a [TROLLEY PROBLEM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) do a cost-benefit calculation that decided that the space station is less worth than dozens of cargo ships.
Would you feel safe without being 100% sure that the code would never do that?
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No computer in the world (or outside it) operates completely autonomous without humans keeping an eye on it. Somebody has to do maintenance, upgrade, replace, and program them. There's need for energy too, and there is no electrical grid on the world that operates completely autonomous without humans keeping an eye on them.
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## When do we automate?
We automate things when we need *tasks* done in *large numbers*. Making cars is a good example: the number of steps is per car is a lot, and we want to build a lot of cars. The total task count is very, very high.
## There is already a lot of automation
Space-ship traffic control (STC for short) is highly computerized. Software predicts collisions/near-misses. It downloads the police database of stolen ships and scans ship RFIDs. It checks thermal signatures and radiation release for damage. All in the background, alerting the STC when there are any anomalies.
The computer also handles radio communication. The STC makes commands such as "Ships in this region go 10-degree starboard command". "Ships over here slow down to 100 m/s (relative to the station)". The STC uses tools much like selection tools in Photoshop to choose who gets each command. The computer has to translate this into a radio broadcast with many different frequencies. This is a far cry from the process of *manually* choosing the correct MHz and speaking into the microphone.
## A single person keeps thousands safe
There are hundreds of ships and thousands of passengers. Managed by a single (or maybe a few) STC with a decent but modest paycheck. This is very efficient! It's hard to become an STC: there is *prestige* in managing so many lives. A rigorous testing to not only have good 3D spatial skills but be hyper-focused and handle stress.
## What about the pilots?
Space-ships cruise for 99%+ of the journey. Through empty space (and the occasional space rock which can be dodged easily). Passive thermal detection can see threats (i.e. potential pirate ship) *very* far away. The pilot (and weapons crew) have ample time get to their seat when the alarm sounds. The pilots are also crew-members. On smaller ships the pilot is the only crew-member and will have free-time for other tasks.
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The high speed train (HST) must be [one of the high-speed trains currently or no longer in service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_trains). **The HST should run at its max operating speed as much as possible and practicable, to save time.** HST can run at lower speeds, to abate noise and comply with noise regulations in urban residential areas.
Don't use Experimental trains! The HST and High Speed Route (HSR) should not have specifications not yet existent in 2021.
The cost between any two cities on any route must < the cost of a direct flight between these two cities.
## Your HSR must include and cover all the colored routes, and all the cities on these routes in this [plan by Alon Levy](https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/mab71w/a_not_shockingly_unrealistic_us_high_speed_rail/grrsp06/).
### You can overlook these two fanciful maps that are just for reference.
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## Conservatives Win the Mexican Reform War (1857–1860)
One of the major "problems" with US rail compared to European rail is that there was little strategic reason for the US Government to back railway construction or subsidize railways. In Europe the dense network of rails was largely due to military necessity, as more and denser rail nets made it easier to move troops and supplies in the event of war. This in turn meant that there was a foundation of railways for civilian traffic, making it easier for commuter rail to be cheap and effective. Cheap and effective train travel across the US to the point where it's easier to travel cross-country by train rather than car would in turn lead to easy acceptance of higher-speed and better trains as you asked in the question. Which means you need that rail network in place before cars become widespread. Enter Mexico:
The Conservatives win the Mexican Reform War (1857–1860), tossing out the liberal constitution and strengthening the military. With the country still somewhat unstable (IRL there were three civil wars between 1857 and 1929) the conservatives rally the nation by painting the US as The Great Satan and constantly beat the drum about re-conquering lost territory from the Mexican-American War. A unified and belligerent Mexico would provide impetus for the US to strengthen its north/south and western rail network so as to move troops and equipment to the southern border. This needn't have kicked off an actual war (though it might have) to result in the rail net capable of challenging cars, keeping civilian passenger rail in the US in ascendency and paving the way for High-Speed rail in the US.
footnote: Yes I know this isn't really a "small" change! But it's the smallest I could think of (the conservatives had a good chance of winning early war) that would realistically produce the results required. At the end of the day Americans are "Car People" and, IMO, you have to nip that in the bud for HSR to have a realistic chance. of being a thing that could have been in place today.
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One option would be for Congress, when the Interstate System was being laid down, to decide that [users of the system who induced high wear and tear](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/06/02/trucking-industry-imposes-up-to-128-billion-in-costs-on-society-each-year/#:%7E:text=When%20you%20multiply%20the%20per,and%20%24128%20billion%20per%20year.&text=This%20translates%20into%20a%20huge,and%2046%20cents%20per%20mile.) should pay their fair share for the system.
This would result in tractor-trailers facing an excise tax, presumably on a per-axle basis, possibly through tire sales (tractor rigs go through tires like athletes go through socks). This levels the playing field between the trucking and rail-freight sectors, which causes a build-out of rail infrastructure serving major metropolitan areas (and the trucking fleet specializing in short-haul, local distribution service instead of long-haul freighting).
The existence of the industrial infrastructure for that system dramatically reduces the entry-cost for HSR, especially since HSR can also serve to replace expensive air-freight for all but the most time-sensitive/perishable cargoes. There'd be money already accustomed to investing in rail projects so even if the whole HSR concept was still a moderately hard sell, you'd be able to get pilot projects going - a lot of what holds them back is investors not being familiar with the risks associated with rail-transport projects.
This is a huge part of why rail succeeded so well in Europe - it was already a dominant transportation paradigm. The success of TGV and Shinkansen would probably be enough to get skittish investors on board if the United States didn't beat them to the punch.
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## Amtrak forms well before 1971
The US's problem with developing High Speed Rails ([HSR; >250 km/h](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail)) can be seen by viewing some of the projects for the [SE Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_High_Speed_Rail_Corridor).
* [separation of grade](https://www.ncdot.gov/projects/sugar-creek-road/Pages/default.aspx) (can't hit cars)
* wider curves (higher speed)
* dedicated rails (less traffic === higher speed)
To get to your required speed today, the planning (and implementation) of these tasks needs to start very early in the US.
The planing should probably start 25yrs before the usage of fast trains like the [Milwaukee Road's class "F7"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Road_class_F7). Those were built in 1938 and ran at speeds averaging >130 km/h.
That means [Amtrak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak) (US passenger rail) should have been founded before 1913.
## Additionally: Laws would need to be reformed
US laws would need to be passed such that there is a focus on providing high speed transcontinental rail service. The [High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Ground_Transportation_Act_of_1965) gave the US the [NE Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor) and the [Acela](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela) line ([257 km/h new stock](https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/for-acela-next-gen-fact-sheet.pdf) starting 2022).
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### FDR dies of polio/Guillam-Barre
... or at least is unable to return to political life.
The New Deal made the average American much better off, allowing more people to be able to afford cars. If you can't afford a car, you can't buy one.
The New Deal also did this by building much of the road infrastructure which made more widespread car use preferable. If roads aren't great, you wouldn't use a car, after all. And now people could also afford cars to run on those roads.
And then WWII happened. A newly-enriched US suddenly found that all its European industrial rivals had been obliterated by the war, and was perfectly positioned to pick up the slack. European industry came back after the war, sure, but it was always on the back foot after that.
It's not at all clear that any of this would have happened, or at least not as successfully, without FDR and his New Deal.
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## The Wright Brothers' experiment fails
One of them is killed in the first test flight, or they never get off the ground, or they're just satisfied selling bicycles for the rest of their lives and never even try, or any variation along those lines. Oh sure, somebody else would've invented the airplane eventually, but it'd be years or even decades later, allowing the rail system more time to expand and remain the dominant means of long distance transport. If you want to make it even more likely, have a similar incident occur to Henry Ford and delay the development of cheap automobiles by a few more decades, though admittedly that would be two changes rather than one.
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Well, that's easy -- **both modes are heavily subsidized** so it's just a matter of the government turning knobs.
## "New Deal" build-up of rail, has knock-on effects
*What actually happened: In WW1, railroads were nationalized. In WWII, railroads convinced the government not to nationalize them - but they were in crush overload conditions, and Pennsylvania Rail Road management "peeved off" General Eisenhower big time. Eisenhower built the Interstate freeway system to remove the military's dependency on the railroads. Eisenhower knew it would bankrupt the railroads, and was happy for that. Meanwhile, fast electric interurban railways were dying off pre-war. The "New Deal" was partly projects to create jobs - but on infrastructure projects that will pay economic dividends for decades, such as the TVA dams, Hoover Dam, Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, etc.*
**The US railroads ask Roosevelt to prioritize rail infrastructure to prepare for the inevitable war**. Roosevelt agrees (Optional: on the condition that the railroads be nationalized *again* in the event of war.)
As a result, railroad infrastructure is a big part of the New Deal. It is ready and able to handle the nation's war needs. Pennsylvania Rail Road gives General Eisenhower 5-star concierge service. (Optional: The railroads are nationalized ***and Eisenhower is put in charge***. Eisenhower sees it all from the other side of the fence). Eisenhower becomes pro-rail, and as President sees ways to improve rail further, and invests in rail *instead of* the Interstate system. This is the seed of American high-speed rail.
Notably, the **interurban electric railways** were on their last legs in the 1930s, but the New Deal re-investment in rail breathes new life into them and positions them to be the prototypes for electric high speed rail, with incremental improvements to their infrastructure - pantographs, weight-tensioning existing catenary, grade separation and alignment upgrades, voltage bumps. The former 600V single cars that bounced down the line at 75 mph now are fine modern 1500V 2-car sets cruising 125 mph on good rail. That's just the interurbans, obviously Big Rail aims much higher.
## The Shah of Iran aspires to a *constitutional* monarchy
The Shah admires the constitutional monarchy of Britain, and adopts this at home. Which tickles both the Shah's American backers, and the domestic critics. Senators Khomeini, Khamenei, Banisadr etc. all *work within the system* instead of fomenting revolution - two of them having turns as Prime Minister.
The Shah thus becomes an *influencer* rather than an administrative leader, adored by the public throughout the Middle East. The Shah is highly influential in the Middle East, forming OPEC much sooner, and convincing many of a core belief: *That oil is simply too valuable to burn as fuel, and should be reserved for its ability to create plastics and fertilizers*. **The Shah leads the Middle Eastern Nations to not "give away" their oil** -- they treat their oil as a precious, one-time national asset. This has a huge impact on the price of gasoline and diesel. It remains a strategic national asset for every country that has it - not to be wasted on bloated 7 MPG personal automobiles with V-8 engines. The post-war automotive boom does not happen.
## As a result, national investment *goes elsewhere*.
Many of us confuse "Progress" and "car ownership". But you have to look at a few things about the automotive life which are a *constructive total loss*. The life cycle of a car - building it, maintaining it, getting the fuel for it, building the roads for it, scrapping it - all of this is capital investment gone in the end. Like a candy bar, it gave someone pleasure for awhile, but it's gone now.
Are cars essential for some sectors and in some locations? Sure. But in the most highly populated urban locations, cars are hardly necessary and even get in the way. People only want cars because public transit is rubbish. Chicken and the egg. We need some, but not near so many as we have.
Another constructive total loss was "white flight" to the suburbs. You already have a perfectly usable building. Building another one *while letting that one fall to ruin* is a complete waste of material. Yet that was the fate of many cities from the 1950s to the 1970s, because of 12 cent gasoline.
Now, these constructive total losses do not happen so much. But that doesn't destroy the economic value of building that car and suburb -- much the opposite, the economic value is **simply redirected into other things** - things which may have enduring value.
For instance I could see the electronics revolution happening sooner. Strides might be made in healthcare. Electronics. Social equality. Renewable energy. **Progress**. Certainly, given this economic power that *was created* due to less cars, "high speed rail" is pretty much couch-cushion change. Just look at France, who can easily afford its first-rate high speed rail system.
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Assume that there is increased terrorism (or at least fear of terrorism) in the 1960s and 1970s (Weather, PLO, take your pick). Notably, there is fear of [aircraft hijackings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking#1958%E2%80%931979) with madmen wanting to go to Cuba, but [train hijackings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Dutch_train_hijacking) are less of a concern. Perhaps because they cannot go to Cuba, and also because they are much harder to divert from their course and much harder to bring down with a small explosive charge.
So post-9/11-style TSA screenings start a generation earlier, while there are no similar checks at train stations. The decisions where security is (or isn't) increased are not fully rational, there is much locking of barns after the specific horses have bolted. Accounting for an hour or two in line plus the administrative check-in, trains become sufficiently superior to win out on both coasts for connections like Los Angeles to San Francisco or New York to Baltimore. And once there is the habit, the trans-continental gap gets closed with overnight trains.
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## The Korean War is more intense
With more resources needed for the war effort, the US government reinstates WW2-era rationing of automobiles, gasoline, and tires. The rise of car culture and suburbanization is thus stalled.
Meanwhile, military leadership demands more efficient cross-country transport of troops and materiel. Congress responds by funding upgrades to the country's rail network.
Eisenhower still gets elected in 1952 and still proposes the Interstate Highway System. But with fewer people driving cars, and a greater amount of debt accumulated from the Korean War, it's harder to justify the expense, and the system is massively scaled back compared to OTL.
With less direct competition from highways, intercity passenger rail remains profitable into the 1960's. The railroads start introducing high-speed lines.
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just build it...
Like roads, bridges, tunnels and the postal service: have a Fiat!-moment and legislate the rails be built and paid for. This could be as part of the NewDeal, or as a national pride thing instead of the moon landing, or as a military fever dream instead of the Manhattan Project. As long as there is rails, there will be users. Hauling a train across the continent is inherently much cheaper than flying a plane the same distance.
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# Eisenhower is inspired by WW2 to build a network of strategic train lines:
Dwight Eisenhower was inspired by the German Autobahn to invest in a similar system of roads in the US as a way to prepare US industry and civilians for potential future war.
But what if Hitler's ill-conceived plan to build highways had instead been an expansion of the German Rail system to meet the needs of wartime Germany? The parts of the autobahn that WERE built were mostly useful to the invading American armies, and anything that helped invaders was a bad idea. Instead of being inspired by the autobahn to build an interstate highway system, he was instead inspired to build a network of fast rail lines to allow the US to quickly deploy strategic resources and rapidly evacuate major cities in the event of nuclear attack. High speed rail is inspired to be high-speed strategic freight first.
By 1960, the US is in a competition with the Soviets for [nuclear-powered trains](https://twsmedia.co.uk/2020/05/09/atomic-trains/), and high-speed trains become the subject of a "train-race" to build the biggest, fastest, and most powerful trains possible. Once the risks of nuclear trains become apparent, nuclear trains become electric maglev trains powered by nuclear reactors along the routes. Abundant long-distance rail reduces investment in airports, and air travel is a thing of businessmen and the rich.
The attractiveness of faster trains and lack of investment in interstate highways and public airports versus military ones would mean that people would increasingly rely on the very extensive and rapid network of trains for long-distance travel. Americans are encouraged to support the train as part of their civic duty. The difficulty of driving and high cost of air travel would mean Americans looked to trains to take them where they wanted to go. Cars simply never captured the imagination of the US like the romance of trains did.
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## **Delays in the development of the bicycle**
This allows time for the rail network to expand further. (But note in postscript this all boils down to precision bearings.)
Early 19th century had the dandy horse, or Draisine which was essentially a balance bike for adults. Only around 1860 were pedals and cranks added, and then the safety bike in the 1880s. That is only ~25 years before the aeroplane.
The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics, as were many of the proto-automobile and motorbike makers of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Had the Bicycle not been popular enough to provide a living for these inventors, the aeroplane and the motor car would have been delayed. Their continual exposure to chains, chainwheels and the idea of lightness would cause the aeroplane and the automobile to come decades slower than it was.
Rail, on the other hand, was a well established concept. The first steam loco was 1804, with intercity rail in the UK in 1825. By 1850 rail was an accepted concept, and railway-mania meant railways were being built all over the first world.
The first Transcontinental US railway was build between 1863 and 1869, predating the (common) bicycle and the automobile in our timeline.
By delaying the bike, therefore the aeroplane, motorbike and automobile, the train could have had decades more to establish itself and gain greater traction. This would result in more track and more right-of-way authority established.
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The downside here is that tech of around 1900 would have laid more track, but it would be "steam-compatible" with tighter turns and steeper grades than a modern High Speed Rail network can accept.
Thus, just like the German Autobahn, there would have to be a period of redevelopment in the mid-20th century to modernise and improve the track+bed and to avoid releasing track and right-of-way.
## Upshot - Trains and rolling stock are cheap(ish) while land and right of way is expensive.
I want to also highlight ***Nosajimiki***'s comment:
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This is a superlative point that really is the underlying tech behind my initial suggestion of Bicycles. Without precision ball bearings, we're left with babbit and direct metal on metal contact. These are "adequate" for the speeds of a train, but a car and a plane have parts that spin faster.
ago
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## Lower average surface air density
If the Earth had the same air density as the existing atmosphere at, say, 10,000 feet, then take-off of passenger jets would be impractical so they wouldn't have been invented.
For passenger trains, however, form drag would be much lower, resulting in much higher efficiency – and therefore, high-speed trains would be ubiquitous.
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I think the smallest possible change that achieves this is "US doesn't strike oil", or at least not in significant quantities. Rail travel continues to build throughout the 20th century, upgrading to high-speed towards the end. Air travel remains an expensive luxury. Most people commute by train not by car.
Of course, that's a pretty big change! Probably alters the outcome of the war in the Pacific, for example.
Another possibility is if the "too cheap to meter" nuclear advocates turned out to be right. The US does what France did in the postwar era and builds a huge network of nuclear power stations, none of which suffer accidents. Electricity is free. The US starts a TGV-equivalent programme too ...
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Passengers jets were having a very difficult time in the 50's, the DH-106 Comet suffered a series of highly publicized tragic crashes due to metal fatigue. Commercial and passenger confidence in the future of cheap commercial air travel was at an all-time low.
On a demonstration flight of the Boeing 707, test pilot Tex Johnson performed a series of barrel rolls to show off the capabilities of the aircraft; no-one knew that this was intentional, even Boeing's CEO thought something had gone wrong. In your alternative reality he simply doesn't complete the second barrel roll; the excessive stresses on the airframe cause it to break up in flight. Boeing is wound up, no-one ever makes a successful commercial jet aircraft. Air travel still happens, but it's limited to the very wealthy.
As populations increase, expanding the existing train networks becomes the natural way to reduce transit times between major cities.
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If the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (Creating The Interstate System) had included the provision for a right of way between the highways for passenger train service.
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## Immigration Acts declared unconstitutional
If the Supreme Court had declared the [Immigration Act of 1917](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1917) (or 1922, or [1924](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act)) unconstitutional – they were controversial at the time – the population may well have increased to the point where high-speed rail would be economically and socially desirable.
China has about 4.5 times the population on about the same land space, although it has even [less arable land](https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=40). In our scenario, the USA would have gained Europeans and Asians fleeing war and dictatorship from 1920–1950+, and taken in further immigrants afterwards, so its population might by this time be comparable to or larger than China's.
Not sure what reason the Supreme Court could have given for this decision, but the court has sometimes been creative with what is or is not constitutional.
It's interesting to speculate on the potential wider implications of this change in US society and the world. (White majority; holocaust; relative power of USA vs. USSR, China, Europe; citizenship laws; "great society"; welfare, etc.) That would be a separate question however. High-speed rail would only be one effect of the change.
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America loses the War of Independence and remains a British colony.
Had this happened, the Victorians would likely have built additional rails all over the USA to move goods and people (the USA being rich in various raw materials that would have been useful to the British). They built railways in lots of other colonies, and America being more culturally aligned with Britain may have seen more investment than some of the other colonies that were more "problematic".
Had that happened, there would be a culture of using rail for longer distance travel (and possibly shorter distance too). The really slow speeds that freight currently has to travel at would likely have been much faster, and certainly so for passenger transport. Where there are single tracks, there would likely be double, or else a second route to the same destinations. From then on, it's a matter of incremental improvement to get to the situation you describe.
This of course is by no means guaranteed. Britain was cris-crossed with countless railways, many of which were woefully uneconomical and could never have worked commercially. Those and many more were torn up and scrapped in the 1960s (the [Beeching Cuts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts)), and then decades of underinvestment lead to quite a decline in service quality. Even now, rail travel is a somewhat love/hate sort of thing, at least partly as a result of history. It is possible, likely even, that US railways would have followed a similar path.
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The US did have lots of railways, some built during the Victorian era, and some now removed, although some remain of course. Effects and side-effects well noted.
My point here was the (British) Victorians really, really went crazy for railways. Britain was criss-crossed by dozens of lines to every little tiny place. There were actually far more lines that would even vaguely make sense, but they built them anyway. If you think Britain is well covered by rail, before the Beeching cuts, there was at least 30% more rail and 55% more stations (my guess is more has closed than been built since them too).
My assertion here was that had the USA been a colony at that point, it's possible/likely that the cultural similarities and raw materials would have made it a place the British would have similarly invested in (and British culture alone would have encouraged ever more railways, even where not really required). Thus, there may have been far, far more railways than the USA ever had otherwise, and whilst the UK pulled up a lot of theirs, many still remain - that could be true in the USA too. More railways encourages a "rail culture", which *could* result in investment in high speed rail - granted, it's barely happened in Britain, but American prosperity exceeds that of the UK, so may have delivered where Britain couldn't. Likelihood or lack thereof, well noted also - we're 'world building' after all ;-)
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## Actually inhabit the USA's vast empty space
### ... and use it for industry, agriculture, and accessible recreation
The US is exceptionally rich and locally varied in its natural resources and climates. Many other answers cited a lack of population across vast, deserted stretches as a key reason why a high speed rail transit system has not been established to connect these areas. Gradually but incessantly converting wasteland areas into populated zones (small cities or towns, with regular separation between them--say, 15-25 miles) and supporting industrial and agricultural use of the surrounding territory would be the only grassroots, effective way to enact the requested change.
### Local specialization
If each town or city develops its own local specialty that others lack, the incentive to import that product (or to convey others to that destination for tourism, recreation, etc.) immediately exists, and has the soundest foundation for its source of funding: Free enterprise, local autonomy and the will to prosper.
In a pandemic or post-pandemic setting, and even during any era, this model of population distribution is ideal: The problems of long commutes, expensive real estate prices, rapid disease spread, shortages, crippled supply chains, excessive pollution and de-vegetation are all met optimally by a more decentralized model of residence and work (not fully decentralized, since within limits, city living is still ideal for numerous purposes, but with hard limits on quanta of density, so roughly equivalent to a "small city" format, with 10-20k persons per city). Recent events highlight the economic plagues of lockdowns and other prohibitive measures affecting large cities and businesses in a debilitating way.
The benefits of measured decentralization evidently far outweigh the costs. Intercity and interstate trade would benefit enormously from heightened specialization and correspondingly improved transportation. Moreover against the persistent backdrop of incredible advances in local automation and miniaturization, the myth of the necessity of hyper-urbanization for industrialization or prosperity has been forever shattered.
### Decentralized residency
Apart from work requirements, the primary consideration for place of residence and transportation infrastructure is a social one. The rediscovery of the desirability and feasibility of distributed or virtual workforces is a key insight paving the way for a movement towards smaller, more connected local communities at a national scale, which is already desired. The missing element when contemplating a move away from big city life to the country is an unfulfilled desire for proximity to friends, family, and social opportunity.
As it turns out, the optimal work configuration matches the social needs quite nicely. Regardless of the enterprise, there is never a necessity (nor even a utility) of gathering more than 5-10,000 workers on the same campus. This same size of social pool (the workers and their families) affords plenty of conviviality to host all of the refinements desirable for a highly social society; there is no wholesome social endeavor even of the highest quality that would be unattainable for a city of this size. (Most people will probably never make this many acquaintances in a lifetime.)
Of course, families still want to stay connected to those living one or five or twenty cities away, and this would be a key motivator for establishing permanent high-speed rail lines connecting all cities, as it would provide highly efficient and convenient transport for persons as well as commercial goods.
The math is simple: Moving ten hours away from cherished relatives can be a deal-breaker for many. What if most in an extended family were enabled to live comfortably within an hour of each other, despite having diverse occupations, by inhabiting hitherto empty space and upping the speed and convenience of transit? High speed rail lines provide an obvious solution to this problem; even on the low end of speed ratings you could surpass ten cities' linear distance in under an hour of travel time on a non-stop route.
The defense implications of having such a network of transportation are of course vast and enticing as noted elsewhere, but the economic and social backbone is what will make it happen.
[Answer]
### The Eisenhower Administration Solved Its Problems with Trains
The U.S. Interstate is formally known as the [Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System), due to the massive influence of Eisenhower in its construction. Eisenhower was a 28-year-old lieutenant in 1919 when he was part of an army expedition to ascertain the difficulty of military movement across the US. He described that the roads were a "succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes," and was extremely keen on creating a better transportation system.
As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII, he would later see a forerunner of his solution in the German Reichsautobahn system. If, instead, he were influenced by the European train network instead of the highways, he may well have invested in a national railroad. [The US Interstate system is the largest single public works project in the history of mankind](https://xkcd.com/980/) (see the Megaprojects section). Its funding going towards railroads, instead, would make long-distance travel by car entirely infeasible by comparison. From there, it's just a short matter of time until high-speed trains evolve as a natural next step in the world's largest railway system
] |
[Question]
[
In one of the stories I'm designing, in Middle Age time, the main character, Mr. P, is a good mathematician serving the King and other lords in different works (army numbers and suppliers counts, ballistic calculations, civil and militar buildings design, etc.).
He is very good making precise calculations.
The problem is that another character, Mr. E, not evil but deceiver after all, tries to get over him.
Beyond his traps, in order to get choosen for the contracts, Mr. E offer always his results earlier than Mr. P.
To get these response times, Mr. E always makes estimations and he adds/substract a safe margin, depending the situation.
Mr. P knows that most of the time Mr. E gets good enough results. For that, he wants to challenge Mr. E in a public meeting. His idea is to link some number related questions, for example:
1. How many people there is in the meeting/party?
2. How many houses can be found in all the kingdom?
3. ... even how many stars can be observed in the sky.
Mr. E will find a good answer for everything. At that point, I need Mr. P to ask Mr. E something (known in this age) that is extremely difficult/not possible to estimate but could be calculated by Mr. P with his calculations.
The problem is that I cannot imagine something calculable and not estimable, that could be demostrated/validated by audience.
If this is not possible, I could settle for a calculation which estimation would be a long way from the real result, and how to demonstrate quickly to any audience.
TL;DR: I need **something extremely difficult/not possible to estimate which can be well calculated using equations and able to be checked** (in a Middle age scenario, so advanced physics and that stuff is not useful).
[Answer]
Date of the next lunar/solar eclipse. See “Antikythera mechanism”:
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism>
Eclipses follow such a complex pattern, they cannot be estimated from previous events, but as the Greek mechanism shows, they could be calculated.
[Answer]
**Estimate exponential growth using grains of rice and a chessboard.**
The [story](https://amiracarluccio.com/2018/02/27/ancient-indian-legend-the-rice-and-the-chessboard-storylearning-about-mathematics/) goes:
>
> The ruler or India was so pleased with one of his palace wise men, who
> had invented the game of chess, that he offered this wise man a reward
> of his own choosing and he said to the man: “Name your reward!”
>
>
> The man responded: “Oh emperor, my wishes are simple. I only wish for
> this:
>
>
> -Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next and
> so on for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of
> grains as the square before.“
>
>
> The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small
> reward – or so he thought. After a week, his treasurer came back and
> informed him that the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far
> greater than all the rice that could conceivably be produced in many
> many centuries!
>
>
>
The total number of grains would in the Emperor in the story's estimation be quite manageable - but with precise calculation turns out to be: 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 - purported to be sufficient rice to cover the whole of India's landmass a meter deep in rice.
The math is straightforward, it involves the addition of a series of numbers from 1, then 2, then 22, then 23, 24... and so on up to 263. (Ie. the first square = 20 aka 1).
[Answer]
**Where a cannon ball will land**. A problem of extreme importance in the Middle Ages, why Newton and [Galileo](http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/gal_accn96.htm) were studying gravity, and (because of the scale involved) nearly impossible to estimate with the precision desired by commanders.
Because of the great mass of a cannon ball, the effect of wind and complicating factors of air resistance are significantly reduced.
The equations of motion are a calculation that provides an exact result. Because, as others have pointed out, the calculation is incomplete, there is a built-in error.
Since you've drawn a distinction between 'estimating' and 'calculating', I think estimation would involve spotter balloons and a network of relay flagmen to communicate where a first shot landed, and the spotters giving guidance to 'walk' the fire towards the desired target.
You can maybe see why estimation wasn't beloved by commanders. It required being the first to the field with enough lead time to set up such a network, the chain didn't cover a great deal of field, was easily disrupted by weather and enemy action, and was tremendously difficult to quickly move if the action was happening somewhere else.
[Answer]
# Decrypt an RSA-style Message
Although the specifics of [RSA encryption and decryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)#Encryption) - or even more generally [public key cryptography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography) didn't come around until the 1900s, the ideas of factorization go back to the Greeks.
Furthermore, RSA itself works on rather simple mathematics: multiplication and modulus operations. Wikipedia even has [a simple example that you can do by hand yourself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)#Example). These were definitely available in the middle ages. There's no reason why this wasn't done in the middle ages except that (a) it's tedious when done by hand, and (b) no one came up with it. If Mr. P is thoughtful and ahead of his time, there's no reason why he could not have come up with a scheme like this. As an aside, there were many attempts in the middle ages to hide messages (ways of folding paper, using secret codes, created locks and boxes, etc), so there was definitely a desire for this type of thing.
Anyway, Mr. P could explain clearly how the algorithm works, give the private key and encrypted message, and then ask Mr. E to uncover the original source. If Mr. E is not *exactly accurate*, then the result will be garbled text / a wrong number. This demands *precision*.
[Answer]
**I, the King, wish to share the Kingdom's wealth with the People. If the Kingdom's population keeps growing, how long before they collectively are richer than the Royal Family?**
## An estimate would say 'Probably 100 years'. An exact formula says never.
Stick with me here.
Let's say this is a verrrryy nice king. What goes around comes around- he shares his wealth with his people. For every sum of cash(for ease, we're going to call this amount $2C$) that comes into the kingdom, he takes $\frac{1}{2}C$ for himself. He then decides to group the kingdom by population and closeness to himself: every group has one more person than the one above it. He's on the top by himself, his Queen and heir are one below, his three knights below that, four nobles, etc., all the way down to his thousand peasant farmers. Everyone in each tier gets the cash divided up like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rZuNL.png)
**So, the fraction of C you get is one over two to the power of the number of people in your tier.**
The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, **but everyone's grateful to the king because he gives each of them enough to sustain their own lifestyles, but critically not enough for anyone to move up or down.** When you're born, you're shoved into the 'lowest bottom pile'. If someone dies higher up and you have a right to that space, it's yours and you get the cash. For this reason, this system can scale towards infinity.
His Royal Highness is also very intelligent. He knows money talks, and is aware of the meltdown that could occur if he suddenly became very unpopular and the people had more wealth than he did. Or he's an egomaniac. Either way, he wants his family to be #therichest.
With this system, what's the maximum population size you can have before the people have more wealth than the king?
An estimate would say "Well, given the current population growth, I'd guess 20 years your Highness?". However, [a Medieval mathematician (Oresme) proved that this sequence converges to 2](https://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/masters/medieval/medieval.pdf). Hence why I used $2C$ at the start. Read that proof. It's truly brilliant.
Finally, some simple math:
$Wealth\_{King} = \frac{1}{2}$
$Wealth\_{Queen} + Wealth\_{Heir} = \frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{4} = \frac{1}{2}$
$Wealth\_{Royal\,Family} = 1$
$Wealth\_{Infinite\,population} = 2-1 = 1$
$Wealth\_{Infinite\,population} = Wealth\_{Royal\,Family}$
So, as long as the population is less than infinite, **the King can share the Kingdom's wealth with his people and his family will always be richer than everyone else put together.** Neat, right?
I'm aware this is such a botched explaination of pretty much everything, so let me know if something's unclear and I'll try to clean it up in an edit.
Hope it helps!
[Answer]
## *The Sand Reckoner* of Archimedes
[Archimedes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes) of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician who lived in the 3rd century before the common era. He was probably the greatest mathematician of the antiquity
Among many other things, he was interested in devising a notation for very large numbers. In order to present his suggestion for a system to represent very large numbers, he proposed the following problem:
>
> *How many grains of sand would fit inside a sphere as big as the Universe?*
>
>
> Archimedes of Syracuse, [*Psammites*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner) (The Sand Reckoner), 3rd century BCE
>
>
>
For the size of the universe, he used the heliocentric model of [Aristarchus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos) of Samos, and estimated (well, took a wild guess) that the sphere of fixed stars has a diameter of (what we would call today) about 2 light years. He then assumed that a sphere with a diameter of one Greek inch (about 19 mm, or 3/4 of an English inch) can fit 640,000,000 grains of sand. (He was interested in a system for representing very large numbers, after all.)
He finally reached the conclusion that the Universe could fit no more that what we would write today as 1063 grains of sand.
The interesting thing is that he actually devised a system for writing such a large number. In the 3rd century before the common era.
[Answer]
The Archimedes eureka problem.
Have a number of strangely shaped objects made out of different materials.
The challenge is to work out which of them is made of the densest material.
You can't estimate that as they are strangely shaped. You can't just weigh them as they are different volumes.
The solution is to weigh them, then sink them in water and see how much the water rises. This lets you work out the volume. You can then divide the weight by the volume for each to get the density.
This was how Archimedes worked out whether a crown was made of gold or not.
[Answer]
# Length of a Coastline
This is a bit of an underhanded cheat, but it's one way you can guarantee a win for Mr. P. Ask for the length of a coastline around an island or lake, or from one port to another on a seashore, etc. Thing about this is that due to the [Coastline Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox), the length can be almost anything you want it to be depending on how closely you measure it. The more precise your measurement, the longer the coast. So Mr. P can have a number in mind, and due to his meticulous measurements, he would know exactly what granularity of measurements to use in order to reach that exact number. He might even calculate multiple such coast lengths in order to make Mr. E's guess as wrong as possible.
[Answer]
# The Birthday Paradox (simplified).
Have six jars, each with twenty numbered balls (the ten jars can hold differently coloured balls to make sorting simpler), 1 to 20.
Say we extract one ball from each jar, thus obtaining a collection of six balls.
How often will (at least) two of those balls share a number?
Solution:
Calculate the probability of this *not* happening. The first ball can be any number. The second ball must get one of the remaining 19 numbers, which will happen 19/20ths of the time. The third ball will come up right 18/20th of the time. The fourth will do so 17/20th of the times. The fifth and sixth, 16/20 and 15/20. So *all of them* will come up right with a chance of `(19*18*17*16*15)/(20*20*20*20*20)`, which is 0.43605, or 43.605% of the time.
Therefore, 56% (more than half) of the time two balls among six will sport the same number.
*In the original formulation, "how often in a class of 23 children at least two will share their birthday" (p1=1/365.2544) will also yield around 50%.*
To prove who's right, they can design a chance game - extract six balls, bet that there will be two with the same number; if you're right, you get X times the bet. Both the mathematician and his opponent can "offer" a value for X, whoever offers the smallest value of X *and manages to be ahead after 20 tries* is the winner (the more the tries, the less luck enters into the matter).
For example, the mathematician offers 1.80 dollars to the dollar (which is 1/0.43). 43% of the times he will lose, 56% of the time he will win 180% of the bet; in the end he will have gained S\*56%\*180% = S\*0.56\*1.80 = a bit more than S. His opponent might offer double the stake, which will make him lose since 1.80 is less than 2.0; or he might offer one dollar and a half per dollar, which will make him lose on average 56%\*150% = 16% of the time. After twenty tries, the chances of him being ahead are negligible (0.84 to the 20th power is about three per cent).
[Answer]
# Tides
Anything that can be calculated can be estimated. However something with a sinusoidal function like the tides requires significant precision even on an estimate, if you're betting on ebb and you get flow, or you're betting on a high tide and you get low, you're in a reasonable amount of trouble. There's no slack for adding a margin for error, you're right or wrong.
This has an added complication in that time is also a fairly approximate matter in the period. So asking what time high tide is wouldn't work, but asking for the state of the tide at sunrise on the morning of a specific date should be good enough for anyone as it requires both the patterns for the movement of the sunrise as well as the tide.
# Anything with which neither party has experience
The key to a good estimate is that you have to know a fair amount about the situation. You might know how much food an army needs for a week or how many cannonballs are required for a campaign. You might know how long it takes to paint a wall of any size and how much paint is required. You might know how many litres of water are in an arbitrary swimming pool or the fuel consumption of an average small car. But if you know nothing about the subject then it's not possible to make an estimate.
[Answer]
A simple, trivial, one would even say childish. Calculation of how much of a square foots the kingdom is. While knowing it's two dimensions.
Your Mr. P is John Napier. Who wrote a book called
>
> Description of the Wonderful Rule of Logarithms
>
>
>
Using word Wonderful was just to smear in the face of Mr. E (of whom history forgot) that John found a way to calculate faster and with very high precision.
[Answer]
A lot of good solutions have been given already, I think there are a couple that could be really nice because they can be shown to the public immediately and can be computed very accurately with relative little ease:
* the period of a pendulum
* the failure load of a truss structure
* the biggest fish the fishermen in the next town over have caught based on a small sample (using bell curves, they could have a fisherman present to testify)
* the volume of an odd shape (perhaps a vase that can be poured out to be measured?)
* how much weight a small hot air balloon can lift (it's much lower than you would imagine)
* the 1000th prime number
* the time it takes for a barrel of water to empty if a hole of a specified
size is drilled in the bottom
[Answer]
Something concerning [Benford's law](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Benford%27s_law).
>
> Benford's law is an observation about the frequency distribution of
> leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data.
>
>
>
**In short, smaller digits appear to more frequently lead a number.**
For example, if asked for an estimation about how many times 1 would be the leading digit in the whole 90000 tax records of the kingdom, or the population of each village etc, Mr E would probably estimate around 10000, which is wrong by Benford's law.
It is very easy to calculate, very easy to estimate wrong (if not 100% sure) and not very difficult to check (depending on Mr P's authority).
[Answer]
Anything noteworthy that E discovers and knows P is not working on.
This happened in our history - in 1535, Antonio Maria Fiore challenged Niccolò Tartaglia to a public contest. He gave problems that lead to solving depressed cubic equations, something which was considered difficult if not unsolvable and he (Fiore) found a solution to the problem.
Unfortunately for him, Tartaglia worked on the problem of different cubics, and given the prospect of public humiliation, he managed to find out the general solution before the contest. And won.
(this is somewhat simplified - there were more people and discoveries involved)
source: <https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.2181>
[Answer]
## The Problem of Proving
Any test they would have to do needs a proof. Its nice that MR. P would calculate the **exact** right value and Mr. E guesses exactly the same value, both might be wrong and nobody would know it. So you need something that is not know, hard to estimate but possible to measure or reassure. Problem is that some calculations might require information that nobody has or can aquire and so the expected result is different. So everything with *random elements* like natural occurences are out. All we can do are inarguable facts, that can be meassured.
## The Size of the Earth
Back in around 200 BC [Eratosthenes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes) calculated the circumference of the earth. He knew that a certain time in the year the sun would not cast a shadow in a well at noon in Syene. He knew the distance to Alexandria, that was directly north and asked a friend to measure the angle a shadow would cast from a stick. With that angle and the know distance, he was able to calculate the earths circumference.
Problem is, Mr. P or Mr. E could know that (although unlikely). On top of that, in the middle ages, noone could really measure the distance, so whatever.
But this value could also be used to calculate different values given the angle of shadows at their current position. For example what the angle another sticks shadow would show that is 100 miles further north or south from their current position. Or the distance to a to a random location north or south of their current position given the angle of the shadow there and their current location. If it is a place both dont know, but the distance can be measured, then Mr. P should be able to calculate the distance, but Mr. E should not be able to guess it.
[Answer]
### Digits of pi
There are many estimates for pi, starting from 22/7 and working from there. Your Mr E may even have memorised it to some number of digits.
But Mr P has access to the Newton-Raphson iterative method. (Newton is very much on the border between medieval and Renaissance; indeed he is one of the people who created the Renaissance. So we can justify his methods.) Calculating any precision of pi is therefore simply a matter of time.
And the absolute kicker? However accurately Mr P has learnt it, Mr E can better him by using that number as the starting seed for his own calculation, to immediately get a better value in one simple sum.
[Answer]
Anything involving mathematical chaos or general sensitivity to initial conditions will be difficult for the estimator. The trick is to find something which will be reasonably easy for the calculator, which means something where the initial conditions can be reproduced.
My favorite would be showing some rows of [Rule 30](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30) and asking for a row a few rows on.
[Answer]
What if instead of having to calculate something very precisely, you proposed a MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions) instead?
A MCQ is a list of questions with (most of the time) 4 proposed answers given for each.
The sky is :
* A. Blue
* B. Solid
* C. Brown
* D. Above our head
To make it even trickier, sometimes MCQs have malus points if you answer something wrong. That way you can't just randomly pick something when you don't know the correct answer.
You can't estimate the answers of a MCQ. It's either A, B, C or D.
If Mr P is really that much greater than Mr E, he'll get only right answers, whereas Mr E will lose points by lacking accuracy. You could even ask each one of them to make a test for the other one; as long as he's better, Mr P will always win :)
] |
[Question]
[
My setting exists on a huge vertical cliff with no top or bottom, and currently nearing the end of an steampunk-y industrial revolution, putting its tech level somewhere in the range of 1860s to 1910s. Everybody lives on relatively small and thin ledges or spaces carved out of the rock - the largest are up to 1km wide, but also heavily developed with cities, farms, etc, and too valuable to waste on airports.
They use airships to move cargo around (steam-powered hydrogen zeppelin types, with a couple of handwaves to explain abnormal lift capacity), but the technology level also is such that heavier-than-air aircraft should be at the very least discussed as a possibility already.
You can launch one by just pushing it off the cliff or dropping it from an airship I guess, but seemingly there's nowhere for this aircraft to *return to*, since there's no space to build a landing strip long enough to safely land on ("safely" even by the 1900s standards of safety).
**In this environment, will airplanes be practical to use and develop (and threaten to replace airships)?**
[Answer]
If you want something that will be more colorful and relevant to your own setting, heavier-than-air vehicles could be thought of as VTOL things: to launch them, you drop them. Only natural, it's how paper darts/planes are doubtless launched. But to land them, why would their first thought be a horizontal airfield?
They live on a cliff. To lose velocity in something moving there are two options: crash into the cliff (not good), or fly vertically up the cliff until they stall.
So, grab dangling winch cable and then fly vertically upwards until velocity is lost. Done right, winch should be able to reel in the loose cable and match speed with you as you slow down, so that the slowing plane stops being a flying thing, and becomes an object dangling on the end of a crane.
Impractical? Maybe. But VERY cliff-punk.
[Answer]
The first Carrier landing was 1911:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UZoOc.jpg)
Now, in terms of space, that looks to be about 20-30 metres. 1911 is 1 year after the upper-limit of your tech level, however, I'm going to say that this was a function more of 'no need', since there were large areas of open field to land in - whereas in your world, this would be a primary requirement and so would have received greater attention for the problem.
In short: Yes, they would be useful. The technology to successfully do this existed in 1911 and so it completely in the realm of what you outlined.
[Answer]
## Airships were aircraft carriers
Just after your world timeframe aircraft were launched and landed in airships. It is perfectly reasonable to make an airship your airport. And it’s cool!
[
If your traffic isn’t too heavy you can use an airship as an aircraft terminal. It sails out to launch and catch aircraft.
But you could be right as well, living on a cliff, they may simply skip the airplane altogether. Airship technology eventually carried us fairly fast, and they had huge payload capacity. There are dirigibles today which can literally move a house! Australian company *SkyLifter* plans services that include moving aid or even portable hospitals to remote areas - like rural regions or disaster zones - that have poor infrastructure.
[Answer]
## Absolutely!
Someone will definitely figure out about heavier than air transport, because air transport is important to this setting. There's a huge incentive to improve flight technology.
## Flaps
Landing will take *some* space, but not too much. Birds flare their wings when they land on a branch to bleed off speed. Assuming your setting has birds and trees, someone would see this and steal the idea. Oversized wings (to allow low speed flight) and oversized flaps (to kill the remaining speed) would be used to slow the aircraft down and minimize run-way requirements.
## And/Or "Tailhooks"
A zero-length runway could involve hanging a loop of rope from a ledge, and catching it with a hook, sort of like a carrier landing in our world. If the rope can play out with some resistance, then the pilot can cut the engine, lower the flaps, and fall until the rope reduces the speed to zero.
I don't know that I'd want to be the first test pilot, but if space is at enough of a premium it would occur to someone!
[Answer]
It's plausible to some degree. In large air carriers they "catch" fighter planes, which fly with a considerably higher velocity than 1910s airplanes, with a hook, more specifically a [tailhook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailhook). Maybe something like that could work if the plane is small enough.
Another idea is the [ornithopter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithopter). I don't know much about it but it was an idea that was always in the background as a potential flying technology until the airplane sort of "won". But why not? Maybe your civilization can develop something like that. People experimented with ornithopters in the 1910s for sure. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXg-qoRN0co) is a modern ornithopter for fun.
If airplanes develop, I think they'll win over the slower airships in your world.
[Answer]
>
> Too valuable to waste on airports.
>
>
>
**FRAME CHALLENGE: This makes no sense unless your world also cannot justify land for roads, paths, or rails.**
Air travel's benefit is that it *only* requires the space of a runway, and for that small amount of space you can cover a far greater distance in less time than road or rail. If your world cannot justify space for a few runways, then it also cannot justify space for roads, paths, or rails which collectively consume far more space and allow travel over much less distance at slower speeds for the space consumed. Therefore the reasoning that the land is too valuable to waste on airports to the extent that you would not even build a single runway holds virtually no water, especially if your ledge cities are some distance away from each other. That would justify one runway per city.
A few runways would enable the society with a unique capability, and what you would be giving up is a small amount of land that would be otherwise be used for facilities which already exist elsewhere. Instead of a dozen farms an zero runways, you would have eleven and a half farms and two runways since a farm is far larger than a runway.
The aircraft in your specified time period also did not require very long runways compared to modern aircraft.
[Answer]
## Powered Gliders
I could easily see aircraft evolving from gliders in this setting, a glider or parachute is a fast fun way to descend the giant cliff. maybe even much cheaper than an airship. Someone straps an engine to one to travel longer distances or just to prove it works. this gives you a nice smooth development for more engine power without needing to start with one powerful enough to get full lift.
I imagine gliders and parachutes get invented a lot earlier with the ever present fall risk, so the development might not even take much longer.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yA3XG.png)
[Answer]
If you don't have to start out above your landing site to land on it, or end up above it to take off, you can land on an upward slope, and take off on a downward one.
[Answer]
## Frame Challenge: Space is not actually a limiting factor
Just build the runway OVER the Hangers. Many aircraft carries already take advantage of this idea. In general, both airplanes and airships need about 3 times as much hanger space as is thier top-down profile. The thing is that early airplanes did not need big runways. The first functional aircraft carrier was the HMS Argus which only had a deck space of about 3500m$^2$. By creating a flat top building where the roof is the runway, and the bottom is the hangers, you could fit a runway and hangers for about 20 WWI style airplanes into a 1/2 acre space. Even using modern farming techniques, 1/2 an acre is barely enough space to feed a single human being; so, sacrificing this little bit of farmland would be a pretty small ask for a fleet of 20 planes.
This means that with just a little bit of creativity, you need exactly as much space for airplanes as you do for airships that are as small as airplanes. So, even if your airships were 1000 times as buoyant as Earth based airships, they'd still be in danger of being replaced (or at least supplemented) due to thier higher air resistance and lower top speeds.
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### Dolven Aetodromes
With all that vertical real estate, your people can easily bore *into* the huge rocky surface. They could create their aerodromes to any length they need and likely any width or height. Spacious hangars could be bored to either side of the runway too!
The relatively low speed & power of old aeroplanes means relatively short runways and the barn storming skills of early airmen would translate very easily to the skill of approaching a stone wall with a relatively small opening to aim for!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wTE5g.jpg)
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### Do you have lakes or seas? Then you don't need runways
Today we think of runways as a basic requirement for planes. It wasn't always that way.
Smooth concrete runways cost a *lot* to build, and even more to maintain because concrete degrades badly with weather. Aircraft design in the 1920s had advanced far faster than the financial willpower to build runways, and you couldn't achieve the necessary takeoff and landing speeds on a bumpy grass runway. As a result, *all* high-performance planes were seaplanes. The [trophy for speed around a course](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Trophy) was a seaplane competition for the simple reason that you couldn't get that performance from a plane with a low enough stall speed to tolerate grass runways. Most major airliners were seaplanes too, partly for the same reason, and partly also because they leveraged the existing port infrastructure and port connections to the rest of the country.
Then WW2 happened. Suddenly national defence in all countries required the construction of vast numbers of concrete runways suitable for high-performance fighters and bombers. Post-war, concrete runways built for bombers formed the starting point for almost every major airport in Europe today, and many around the rest of the world. It's notable that countries without large flat areas of useable land have had problems getting connected to the world airline routes, requiring such extreme measures as reclaiming land from the sea to get long enough runways - a similar problem to the OP's world. And some places such as Canada still make extensive use of floatplanes.
In short (or in [Short](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Brothers)), floatplanes are your best answer to a world without runways - because they were the answer our world came up with too.
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## Putting the "Hang" in "Hangar"
Your setting allows for very high power-to-weight ratios in your very lightweight aircraft.
This allows pilots to effectively come to a dead halt hovering vertically in mid-air, which means that the usual means of landing is to hover nose-up under an arrangement of docking-hooks and be attached to one of them. This is achieved essentially using boathooks to manipulate the docking hook onto a loop on the nose of the plane.
Once attached, the ground-crews reel in the aircraft and you're home.
The ground-crews can then add further hooks to the wing-tips and tail of your aircraft, rotate you horizontal and lift you into a boarding and maintenance station.
When it's time to leave, the nose and wing-tip hooks are disconnected, and the aircraft is lowered down below the Hangar facility.
To "take off", you are simply dropped into open space once your propellers are spun up.
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If your airships have "abnormal" lift capacity, then I suspect airplanes will not be a thing unless they have even more abnormal lift capacity.
Another factor is the the layout of your civilisation: how much horizontal travel vs vertical travel is there? Airplanes are faster at horizontal travel, but airships much better for vertical travel.
Do you have an abundant energy source? Especially for vertical travel the energy requirements of an airplane will be much, much bigger than for an airship.
Do you have rail infrastructure? To me it seems like horizontal railway lines coupled with vertical airship lifts could be a great transportation system.
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Remember that early planes often made do with fields and the like as take-off and landing surfaces. Admittedly they also periodically "ground looped" due to the imperfections of those surfaces.
Seaplanes are another possible solution that doesn't need runways. They may need to struggle harder to take off, though.
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**TL;DR:** This question literally asks for a super-heavy dose of a handwavium... There is no way to do it otherwise...
**Long answer:**
... so the answer is also a super-heavy frame challenge.
First, some problems with the setup:
1. Vertical cliff with no top or bottom means super-strong downdraft and updraft air currents. They alone will make Zeppelins unworkable, as they would probably need to have a mechanism to completely deflate in order to descend...
2. Updrafts and downdrafts are also heavily dependent on time of day and intensity of the sunlight, which has multiplying effect on already insane ones from #1
3. Air currents will provide so much energy via windmills that it will make steam power literally superfluous. Steam engines arose from the combined need for more coal to be mined and not enough manpower, with basically unlimited power from windmills this makes no sense.
4. Steam power requires a lot of fuel and water to work. Especially early engines were super-inefficient (like: used more coal for unit of travel that they could pull). They were slow and heavy, but offered a lot of pull power at low rpm. However, only after refinement and other improvements they revolutionized transportation.
5. Steam power requires a lot of displacement, meaning that - for example - steam equivalent of 12 hp ICE engine Wright brothers used would be almost 10 times larger, weighing maybe 40 times more. This makes development of powered air flight impossible, as I don't see a way to build an airframe sturdy enough yet light enough for flight to support it. But then again, maybe air currents from #1 would help... Anyway, low rpm means not enough rpm for propeller to generate enough power to provide lift.
6. What are the sources of coal and water to feed the always hungry steam engine? Both would be extremely scarce in the "infinite cliff" setup without deep mining (regardless if the shafts are vertical or horizontal).
7. Mining in a hard rock is very difficult - mountains are usually from granite, which is super-difficult to mine without dedicated tools. Where does the steel (which means iron and coal and trace elements) come from to achieve that? Is the setting a "survivors of an advanced civilization" type?
8. Last but not least - farmland. Where did it came from? Farming requires about 2 acres per person if vegetarian, and don't kid yourself if you think you can go vegan. If one of the biggest ledges is 1km wide, it needs to be 8 km long to accommodate that big of a farmland for a 1000 people. Yes, you could do a lot with multi-level farming (top: soil to farm, lower level(s) for storage, composting for fertilizer etc), but to some extent only... You have to have enough fertile soil to start.
9. Going back to airplanes - where does the petrol for their petrol ICE engines come from (assuming anyone comes around to invent one, given that they are superfluous to already superfluous to needs steam)? Wright Brothers Flyer had 12 HP engine weighing about 170 pounds, yet for example [13 HP Gaar-Scott machine](https://www.farmcollector.com/steam-engines/gaar-scott-zm0z05marzraw/) weighs about 20000 pounds, maybe third of which is the engine itself... And unlike petrol engines, steam engine gets more efficient the bigger it gets (i.e. [compound steam engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_steam_engine)). So you **have to** have ICE petrol engine for airplanes...
Now for the gains of the setup:
1. Due to updraft and downdraft (and it will be mostly updraft), persons could travel between ledges basically effortlessly: just open an umbrella on the edge of that ledge and swoosh! - up you go. Landing on the other ledge can be tricky, but... I'm sure someone will figure out how much lift one person needs to go up and then how big a parachute (if any) needs to be to land.
2. Same goes for cargo - going up is minor problem of big enough kite, going down just requires rough calculation of shape and ballistic trajectory to make the... "jump"
3. Any airplane development could happen around aerodynamically changing configuration: enough wing surface and plane goes up on updraft, retract most of it and it goes down. Literally no need for any kind of engine, just pure physics. And people not afraid of awesome turbulence everywhere, of course.
4. Updraft would offer enormous power-generation capability, which makes lifts super-easy to power.
Without more details on the world you're building only way for you to go is, as mentioned in the beginning, handwavium.
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From a purely aerotechnical standpoint, it's not a problem. Short-space recovery of aircraft can be done in any number of ways. Some aircraft have such a low stall speed that they can take off and land in a matter of feet. In the video below, you can see a plane take off in just 15 feet and land in the space of 10 feet. That is just about the overall length of the plane itself, so the aircraft needs essentially maybe 20 feet of runway. And that's a relatively modern plane that is at least capable of carrying a person. By the time it lands, it's no faster than a walking pace.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPakbghLe38>
It depends somewhat on what kind of performance you want your planes to have, but there is rarely only one solution to a technical problem. We use long, wide open runways because we want fast, heavy planes that are easy, safe, and more comfortable to land, but that doesn't mean that runways are the only way to launch and recover planes.
Launching and recovering heavy, fast planes could be a bigger challenge, but still solvable.
The very first plane, the Wright Flyer, was launched with a catapult. The engine was underpowered- so it could *sustain* flight but the aircraft could not take off by itself. In early attempts they could use the wind to get the Flyer airborne, but wind was not a reliable method. The catapult was a small tower with heavy weights and a pulley and rope system- when released, the weights would pull the Flyer about 50 feet along a rail at which the pilot nosed up the plane and would become airborne. This is a neat approach for your world, because you're trading horizontal space for vertical space by using a right-angle pulley. Modern aircraft carriers use catapults driven by steam and electric motors rather than dropping counterweights.
Landing a fast/heavy plane can be done in different ways. Others have already mentioned tailhook systems used on aircraft carriers. Those systems also have a crash net that can be used in the event the tailhook fails (but nets + propellers or jet engines is a bad time). Entire aircraft have been landed with parachutes. They have been snagged out of the air by moving arms. They have been stopped on short runways by using retrorockets.
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## Just buy some land.
There isn't "no place to land", as the scenario is described there are many square kilometers of flat space, the problem is just that they're already occupied. This is just another resource-based challenge of developing powered flight that's no different than obtaining any other resource like metal, fabric, or gasoline - you just have to pay for it. The Wright brothers invested thousands of dollars of their own money obtaining the materials to build their airplane, not to mention the value of their years' worth of work. Potential inventors of the airplane in this world just need to invest some money in *land* in addition to materials and labor. The invention of the airplane already required overcoming a significant financial barrier to entry, buying land is fundamentally no different than buying anything else you need to fly.
The only way this doesn't work is if land is truly a priceless commodity that can't be bought or sold for any price, but that doesn't really make sense on a world of infinite scale where the livable area can indeed be expanded, albeit at some cost. This might slow the development of the airplane as it will result in an additional cost that wouldn't otherwise be present, but at some point, someone will deem buying (or creating) 0.001 square kilometers of flat space worthwhile.
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[Autogyros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogyro)! Also known as gyroplanes, gyrocopters, and perhaps other names.
People figured out the basics of vertical flight long before helicopters were practical, they kept running into control issues if power was applied to the main rotor. Later on there were improvements in materials and machining to allow for cyclical control of blade pitch and blades that were flexible and yet strong enough to hold up to the forces imposed by such an application.
Autogyros show up in some steampunk fiction because they have that "look" of technology from about 1900 to 1920. They aren't all that practical if there's a runway for takeoff and landing so they died out pretty quickly. If there's a cliff to launch off from then getting the forward motion for vertical lift is possible. When needing to land the need for forward motion is not necessary, the aircraft can come in to land by [autorotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation) of the lift propeller.
I have seen unmanned airplanes make a vertical landing by use of an oversized propeller and computers to aid in control of the flaps, elevators, and other control surfaces on the airplane. My guess is this worked because there was enough air over the control surfaces to allow diversion of some of that airflow to prevent the airplane from spinning like a helicopter that lost it's tail rotor. Maybe with some practice, an airplane optimized for this maneuver, and a bit of "handwavium", this is possible with a human on an airplane using 1890 to 1910 technology. Some application of the autorotation might help in this too.
I'll agree with other answers that with things like arresting wires on landing, catapults on takeoff, taking advantage of headwinds/updrafts/etc., skilled piloting, and other techniques used on early aircraft carriers that it would not take too much "handwavium" to make it plausible for airplanes to work in tight places. If space is too tight for even those options then perhaps an autogyro is what would fit. Flying up a cliff face and then drop power for the plane to fall onto some kind of hook to catch it might work. That's taking some risks though, far more than some kind of autorotation on an autogyro. At least given what I know of aircraft, and that might not be saying much.
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A brain is sort of like a computer. It stores information, has multiple processes, and can compute and calculate. I have learned in computer science intro about a program that used to be popular for DOS attacks called the LOIC. The LOIC would repeatedly send packets of data to a target computer. The more packets were sent, the more likely the computer would crash. A similar method is the Ping of Death.
The basic premise is simple: bombard a information processor with so much information that it overloads. But the brain is like an I formation processor. So I thought of a device that could add or delete data from a human mind, but that did not discriminate between the types of data.
So, if the brain is bombarded by, for instance, 50Tbps of random data, directly inputted into the brain by an electrode, then would the brain have reduced function?
Note that I do not want to just melt the brain, high voltage would be enough for that. I would like to overload the brain with information.
TL,DR, if given a human brain, a way to inject digital information into the brain, and a way to generate terabits of random data, and given realistic physiology of human brains, can a brain be overloaded to the point of failure, via information, not by voltage/energy?
Edit: stimulation of neurons by electricity is what I mean by inject digital data.
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**The original version of this question was about putting electrodes into people's brains to inject lots of data at higher and higher frequency until the brain stops working**
If you wire up really fast pulses to every neuron (or enough neurons) in someone's brain you cause a seizure because that is basically what a seizure is. The neurons stop pulsing in useful ways and start pulsing randomly.
We don't really know what causes epileptic people's neurons to pulse randomly, but we do know if you force a person's neurons to start pulsing randomly they'll have a seizure.
It's nothing to do with "too much data" - it's simply because you interfered with the normal function of the brain by blocking the useful signals everywhere and injecting useless signals. If you put random data onto a wire in a computer while it is running and it crashes, is it "because of the data overload" or is it simply because you stopped it from working right? You could just as well have cut the wire with no data, and the computer still would have crashed. (Cutting a single neuron won't break a brain, but cutting all the neurons at the same time certainly will)
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There are actually less than leathal weapons that act as a type of DDOS attack on humans. Consider a Flash-Bang Grenade, which isn't designed to produce shrapnel but to create a bright flash and loud sound that overload your ability to recieve optical and audio communication (A DDOS attack isn't creating too much memory inside a system to shut it down, but creating too much input communication for the computer to process without performance issues. The recieving system isn't shut down... it's slowed down because it's not equipped for the size of the traffic... once the traffic is reduced, it's functional again.).
In terms of memory storage, the human brain is thought to be capable of holding more digital memory than modern super computers by orders of magnitude. Acording to Scientific American, the average human brain is capable of holding 2.5 petabytes of digital information... or 2.5 million gigabytes. To put this into an amount of information that's easy to conceptualize, if a TIVO device had the storage capabality of a human brain, and that device was set to record a single television channel non-stop until it had no available memory, the resulting recording would capture the channels entire broadcast for the next 300 years.
That said, one problem with this is that we do not know how much space in digital memory a human memory will fill. Additionally, human memory is extended in part by the brain's ability to purge non-essential and infrequently used information as it deems necessary (As seen in Pixar's Inside Out, this is not always a logical process and results in some oddities like my inability to recall all but a handful of U.S. Presidents, but I'm still able to sing the double-mint gum jingle, despite never enjoying the gum, let alone that brand, and the advertisement jingle being discontinued nearly 2 decades ago... at least the KitKat Bar Jingle still gets uses.).
Suffice to say, it's highly unlikely to cause a human brain to crash from memory overload. It's highly efficient at managing that. But it's able to "DDOS" a brain by over stimulating sensory input.
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## That is like being struck by 20 lightning bolts
50Tbps of data would require 400 trillion electrical impulses a second. Keep in mind that the brain works at MUCH higher voltages and lower frequencies than a microprocessor; so, at 70 milivolts per impulse, you'd need to input about 6 billion volts of electricity to do this. That is 20 times the voltage of an average lightning bolt directed straight into a person's head. Not only would this much electricity cause the person's brain to explode, but probably the whole room he was standing in along with him.
That said, there is no reason any sane person would install electrodes in their brain that are capable of inputting this much data. In all likelihood, the manufacturer of the electrodes would not make it possible for the electrodes to transmit at more than 70 milivolts meaning that you could not make an impulse strong enough to overcome a neuron's minimum sensitivity threshold to constitute any change in the brain state AND fast enough to transmit data faster than the neurons can handle, in this case what you are suggesting is impossible. The input device would cap out at what the brain can handle, and there is nothing hazardous to worry about as the recipient. At most, a low frequency random noise generator could cause some weird hallucinations and memory interference, and make it really hard to focus on anything happening outside of your mind... but once the attack is over, your brain would resume normal function just like an IRL DDoS attack.
Now, a non-random attack could perhaps shut down control over the parts of your brain that regulate vital organs... but again, what kind of manufacturer would create electrodes that could interfere with vital brain functions. Any half thought out brain implant will only give the interface access to parts of the brain that can't kill you.
**Original Answer Below invalidated by Changes to the question**
## They are doable, and quite common
First, lets clarify that a DoS (Denial of Service) attack is specifically an attack that sends fake or pointless requests to a system such that you use up its ability to process them all so that you prevent the system from processing important jobs. An effective DoS attack balances requiring a lot of time and resources of the target, and minimal time and resources of the attacker allowing a bad actor to invest little resources to cause a lot of wasted resources of the victim. A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a specific kind of DoS attack where you use a group of attackers instead of one. This does 2 things: (1) it can make it harder to filter out spam requests from legitimate requests and (2) it opens up more avenues of attack by taking less work on the primary attackers part if he's offloading most of the spam work itself onto other systems. DDoS attacks are often not done by a group of bad actors, but a single bad actor who's tricked innocent actors into performing requests on their behalf.
### Social DDoS Attacks
To picture how this can work against humans on a social level, imagine there is a restaurant that has a policy that lets you order a meal, and then pay for it when you pick it up. Now imagine you want to deprive the real customers of service for some reason. You could call in an order of 200 hamburgers forcing the kitchen to stop processing real orders to fill your 200 hamburger order... then you just never show up to pay. This is a denial of service attack performed against the human brain because the human brain requires a lot of processing to respond to this simple request. But... humans can easily tell that a 200 burger order is sketchy and filter it out of normal orders by deprioritizing it... just like computer DoS attacks are pretty easy to recognize and control through good load balancing.
This is where the "Distributed" part of a DDoS attack comes in. Instead of calling in 1 order for 200 burgers, you could call in 100 orders for 1-3 burgers each. Because these orders are all normal orders in appearance, the restaurant's cook does not know how to filter or prioritize the fake orders; so, they have to make all the orders with the same priority causing a less controllable denial of service to real customers.
But, just like good software design can minimize but not eliminate the impact of a DDoS attack, good thinking can minimize a DDoS against a human system as well. You do this by minimizing how much a malicious actor can ask of you before they prove they are not a malicious actor. For example, your restaurant can start asking to validate the credit card before they take the order so they can't waist your time and kitchen materials on a fake order... granted, you can still DDoS a restaurant by keeping their receptionist busy with fake, short phone calls, but this takes a lot more effort of the attacker to actually overwhelm the human system.
This is of course just one example, but any time you maliciously ask a lot of things of someone just to keep them too busy to do what they want/need to do, it is some kind of DoS attack. If you have kids, you probably handle several social DDoS attacks a day.
## Neurological DDoS attacks
The human neurological system can also be directly DoSed. Every time someone falls victim to any kind of slight of hand or misdirection, they have been DoSed. Most human senses are processed by the thalamus before making its way to the prefrontal cortex for [selective processing](https://news.mit.edu/2019/how-brain-ignores-distractions-0612). The human mind is constantly flooded with about 10x more input than we can consciously process, and our thalamus/PFC makes sure that only as much input makes it through for processing as we can handle. If your mind is busy working on solving (or ignoring) a problem, you will consciously see/hear/feel less to make sure you don't get overwhelmed. In layman's terms we call this "focus".
A guard will not notice a person slip by if they are distracted by a conversation. If you run into someone, all the simultaneous signals of being touched in a lot of places will make it so that you will not process the specific feeling of someone slipping their hand into your pocket to take your wallet. If a magician is breathing fire, you will not notice them swapping out the deck of cards on the table you are supposed to be keeping track of. All of these tricks rely on a form of DDoS attack to prevent the victim from processing something you don't want them to notice by filling their available processing power with distractions.
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Some neurodivergent people may be easily overwhelmed by overstimulation. For example, people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) are often vulnerable to excesses of noise, touch, and light. If unable to avoid the stimulation, the person can experience a meltdown with very strong emotions, or a mental shutdown. It can feel as though thinking is impossible until the stimulation is removed, and the sufferer may even be unable to communicate. Furthermore, the amount of stimulation that counts as "too much" can be much lower for an ASD person that it is for most neurotypical people.
For these people, what is essentially a DOS attack is often possible and sometimes even trivial.
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As a parent who experienced taking care of a newborn, I am fully convinced this is not only real, but also 'Baby Brain' is the real life manifestation of it.
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You can, **sort of**. A brain overloaded with information won't stop working as such, but it will fail to process more of it, and beyond a certain point it will fail to process *important* information too. For an example that you may have experienced yourself, think back to the first time you drove a car, and how everything just seemed to happen all at once with no rhyme or reason.
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## Analysis Paralysis
In Board Gaming circles this is called Analysis Paralysis, and occurs when you have many choices, and those choices all have consequences and/or lead to other choice paths. It's why something as simple as Chess or Go are actually quite hard to master.
In Supermarkets and other Retail stores this can be an issue as well, and it's the reason you usually only see 3-7 brands for any particular type of product ... too many choices overwhelms our ability to make an informed decision.
I'm not aware of any sort information overload that would lead actual death, but it is reasonable to expect that too much information could easily lead to an inability to deal with whatever the source of the information is from.
See also Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
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As is usually the case: [relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/356/)
# Nerd Sniping
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Yes - by overloading the inputs in such a way that the brain HAS to continue working on the inputs, thus not having any spare capacity to do anything else. [Haptic overstimuli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain) are probably the best (worst?) way to do it, we evolved in such a way we just cannot ignore them, they can be quite intense, and if intense enough, the brain [will just stop its higher level functions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_tolerance) and revert to animal state, subject to primitive instincts just trying to stop the DDOS ...
In fact, [this has been used quite often in the past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture), it is sometimes used even today and if prolonged, the person might [even not fully recover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_torture#Victims) from the DDOS when it stops.
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I am surprised nobody so far mentioned the IMHO most direct representation of DDoS on real people in real life which are:
**Loud and crowded spaces**
Most people just cannot concentrate or perform anything beyond quite simple mental tasks if there is too much stimuli and the most common manifestations are subways, shopping malls or raves. The best one can do if they want to perform a mentally challenging task in such environment is to try to get away from the stimuli - close eyes, cover ears, nose, ... but that's not fully possible for noise or touch and you can make it impossible even for visual stimuli by forcing the target to react to a specific stimulus hidden among all the distractions (e.g. trying to follow your friend in the crowd).
**Smells** are also potent inhibitors of reasoning capacity that can be pretty hard to avoid.
You can somewhat accommodate by repeated exposure, but anybody who has experienced sudden entrance into a new environment that is more overwhelming than what they are used to will tell you that this can be extremely difficult to handle and is basically a DoS attack (e.g. first time visit to a big town for a small town resident, getting out of the New Delhi airport as an European, ...)
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It is said that very shocking news, or sudden news that give you strong grief, can make you unable to go on, make you just seat and do nothing but stare or mourn, for a while. That would be a DOS attack.
For a DDOS, just pile up more bad news one after the other.
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This might not seem obvious but you can acheive that with sensory overload, in one or more sense, let me explain:
Visual - Bright flashing colors the faster the better
Auditory - Sounds that are supposed to resemble words but mean nothing or even better high/low frequency's with large wave lengths
Tactile - This is trickier IMO because it works best if the person cant see whats actually touching it, so while the disorienting lights hit someone face you could throw them into water (humans cant feel wet) and it would confuse them a lot.
Taste - Spicy,Bitter any extreme works
Smell - There exists a Chemical that is the actual smell of putrefaction which would make anyone overwhelmed very quick
The best one would be a combination of light and sound, you cant hear and see you cant do anything.
if by DDOS you mean making someone stop it theyr tracks and just freeze, the better explanation i can come up with would be some kind of hypnosis (Fringe has a really good episode about it, GREEN GREEN GREEN RED)
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There are several products that do this quite effectively... Twitter, Facebook, snapchat, Instagram, tiktok, fox news...
or get one of these...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_incapacitator>
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Air France 447 was downed by such an attack.
The automated systems were like "OMG broken system X" for dozens of systems at once. Each one demanding pilots work a page-long checklist. This was impracticable, so it created pandemonium.
In the chaos, CRM broke down and one pilot forgot their basics. Which they hadn't used since flight school because automation always does that.
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Yes - if enough people yell at a person, you can not hear him. The service that is denied is the information he may want to tell you. His brain is ok, just like a server under a DDoS attack is ok. But the transmission does not work.
And yes, it needs to be a distributed attack, a DDoS, multiple people need to yell at you at the same time from different locations.
To be very clear - an internet server under a DDoS attack is normally perfectly healthy, just a little warmer. The service is there, but it is denied to the remote users by overwhelming the connection.
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It occurs to me that maybe overload is not what we are looking for. I mean, if we get distracted while someone is talking to us, that seems to be a DOS. Everyone distracting, a DDOS. Happens all the time. I do tend to agree with the seizure analogy though. Photonics is the physical science of light waves. It deals with the science behind the generation, detection and manipulation of light. The human brain has a tendency to become entrained by light in what has been called FFE, or Frequency Following Effect. That is, when we observe light flashing at a frequency, the brainwaves have a tendency to become entrained to that frequency. I know that flashing lights have induced seizures in people.
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> Light patterns generated by a computer were able to control the speed of cardiac waves, their direction as well as the orientation – in real time.
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> *Dr Emilia Entcheva, Stony Brook University.*
>
>
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That could be weaponized in a heartbeat, pun intended. one only needs find the correct frequency to cause a disruption, the DOS, and they could be reset to whatever frequency or state that you want to entrain them to once done with the DOS.
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So, in my story, there is a city that gets cut off from the rest of the world. Golden translucent walls rise up on all four sides, going all the way up into the atmosphere and all the way down to the earth's core. And while most matter can pass through these walls, it swiftly becomes apparent that living humans cannot.
The city is trapped in what will come to be known as a "square", a roughly 2x2 mile column of the earth that is subject to a supernatural gimmick. The gimmick here is that, in addition to electricity not working properly, the golden walls of the square stop letting living humans pass through them (neither in nor out) whenever there are more than 100 living humans inside of it. As a result, once the people inside figure this out, life inside the square steadily devolves into a battle royale where everyone tries to ensure that they and their loved ones are among the last 100 standing who are allowed to leave, all before the people inside all starve to death.
The key factor here being "once the people inside figure this out". While most of the time the effects of squares will be completely unknown until discovered through (frequently lethal) trial and error, in this case the purpose of the square needs to be more obvious in order for it to serve its narrative purpose. I need people to be able to figure out the escape conditions of the square, because the entire narrative hook of the setting depends on the people inside realizing that they have to kill each other if they ever want to leave. If nobody ever figures that out, the events inside the square will play out very, very differently.
However, I don't want to accomplish this by simply having writing emblazoned on the walls of the square saying "the walls will remain closed until only 100 humans remain alive". To keep the origins and purpose of the squares vague and open to interpretation (whether it be an act of god, aliens, or seemingly-intentional chaotic magical forces), I want to avoid having the squares have any blatant "built in" explanation of how they work as much as possible. Nothing that makes it seem like somebody designed it specifically so that the people inside would find out. But that makes giving the people inside a way to figure out how it works... rather difficult.
**What element can I add to the square as I have described it that would allow people to figure out the escape conditions of the square within a few days to a week, all without making it seem like that element was put there *specifically* to ensure that the people inside would figure it out?**
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5IW4.jpg)
Muhammad Mahdi Karim/www.micro2macro.net under GNU FLD 1.2 Wikipedia 2021
Let me explain.....
Pigeons (pigeons in US speak) live between 3 and 5 years in the wild, domestic cats in the city will finish them off faster.
If Pigeons (pigeons, or aerial vermin in city-planner speak) are subject to the same rules as people then the population will decline until the magic number is reached.
The average anorak-wearing introvert with few other hobbies (no insult intended, I like birds myself and sensible clothing) will be keeping an eye on the population and behaviour. These "twitchers" as they're called, will notice that these, and other birds smash themselves into the barrier - until the population threshold is reached. This may be particularly noticeable for the migratory birds particularly the buzzards and large raptors, which rely on thermals during the day, seeking them out where they can be found. Now generally there's only a few of them per sq. mile, so they'll pass through the barrier with no issues, but the others, like waxwings and crossbills tend to take their cue from a change in day-length. Many will smash into the barrier trying to follow their natural paths at the appropriate time of year.
Mind you, a socially awkward person nervously trying to explain about dead birds and ones with broken necks or headaches, or ones that shouldn't be there at all at this time of year, they'd cause a fair amount of eye-rolling - well they'll be an unlikely hero/saviour of the people or one to kick-off riots, but it's your story.
[Answer]
I’ll go along with those that have suggested observable changes to characteristics of the wall. I will suggest two possibilities. One is relative transparency of the wall, and the other is refractive angle.
In both cases, science minded individuals or a team observing or studying the wall note these changes.
I prefer the refractive angle method because I think it’s a little more obscure and therefore interesting and I think we can buy that it might be precise enough that a researcher could come to the conclusion that it will reach zero before the entire population is gone. Hence leading to the conclusion that escape can happen before everyone is dead but not until most everyone is dead. Coming up with a number that’s exactly 100 is a bit of a stretch, But you could certainly come up with a number around 100 individuals.
The researcher uses the fact that he can observe the sun directly when it’s directly overhead. But before it’s directly overhead and after it’s directly overhead by X degrees it passes behind the wall and he can observe the angle of refraction very directly and precisely. At first, he observes that this angle is decaying. That offer some hope that the density of the walls are changing and will eventually either dissipate or drop to a density low enough that people can pass through. Continuing observation leads to the conclusion that the density is not dropping At a constant rate. The researcher struggles to find out why this would be. What is it that causes the density, refractive angle, to change more rapidly some days and weeks versus others? His epiphany happens the day following a terrible food riot in the city where perhaps thousands are killed. The observable angle the next day changes dramatically and then the researcher begins to collect data on mortality and correlate that with refractive angle. That’s what he discovers The terrible truth. The density, refractive angle, of the barrier is inversely related to the number of living souls inside of it.
Working with others to get a reasonable population estimate of the city and using the data he’s already collected he can make an estimate and discovers that the reflective angle will reach zero prior to the population reaching zero. That’s hopeful. As he continues to crunch the numbers he realizes that it will be horribly close to zero.
Of course, there are uncertainties here. While the scientist can see the refractive angle dropping to zero, his hypothesis that the wall will be passable when it reaches that point is not confirmable in any way. So there will be those that agree with his hypothesis and those that completely disagree. Offering the opportunity for significant factions around this point to develop. Also, the zero hypothesis itself can be question. Why should the wall become passable at zero angle? Why not 0.20? Or even a greater angle? That would change significantly the population that would be around when the wall finally broke down. Again, conflict and political factions can arise around such interpretations.
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If you're not absolutely committed to the idea that the walls stay fixed in place, I have a suggestion for you: whenever someone dies the walls move inward to keep the population density constant. (The moving walls push anyone who's beside them, so this can't be used as a method of escape.)
In the centre of the zone is a region that's marked out as special – maybe it's bathed in a column of light that becomes more intense as the walls move closer. The size of this zone doesn't change. The boundary of this central zone is exactly where the wall will reach when the population gets down to 100.
Once the inhabitants discover the correlation between population and the wall position, and guess that the arrival of wall at the central zone is some kind of threshold event, then a bit of arithmetic will let them figure out what the final population has to be to reach that condition.
This set-up has a few advantages:
* You get a moment of drama when people first realise that the walls have contracted (noticing that some place near the boundary is no longer accessible). At this stage they (and the reader) have no idea what's causing it. In particular, they don't know whether it's triggered by something specific or if it's just a steady inexorable contraction that will eventually crush them all.
* The reveal of the correlation can be some already-dramatic mass-casualty event. Several people die at the same time and then, once we get a moment to catch our breath, we realise that the wall has suddenly made a big step inward.
* Keeping the population density constant means that people are forced to stay together and keep interacting rather than retreating to their own space. If you had a couple of hundred people in 4 square miles, that would give them 10-20 acres each which would let them spread themselves fairly thin. But squeezing them closer and closer together adds a layer of tension.
* The inhabitants are able to infer that something will happen when the wall reaches the central zone just by close observation and clever reasoning, rather than by having it spelled out to them or communicated by some magical means.
* Also, it's not clear whether the *something* that happens will be good, bad,... or something else.
[Answer]
## A diary:
The usual solution to this is that this set of events has happened before. If not humans, then aliens, but either way someone has had this happen to them, and decided to communicate it to others so they knew the score.
If this is the first time humans have been here, then humans leaving a diary are out. But it could have been humans centuries ago - so a diary in ancient Greek will suffice. Someone able to translate this will be extremely valuable (especially if there are other messages left in Greek) so this is a good segue into introducing a significant character that otherwise might not seem like a survival contender. For aliens, someone clever enough to interpret alien signals/writing without access to a computer.
This also gives your translator the chance to establish early winners and losers. They could be the core of a "winner" group planning to wipe out everyone else. Or perhaps they attempt to pick who will be survivors or not. That's up to you.
The nice thing about this is that you CAN spell out some things for your people, while leaving any origins up to the unknown. The last group discovered this stuff by trial and error, so only the minimum number of details are known. If the writings are scattered around the city, then they are clues that a group must assemble. They may need to figure out puzzles based on what the last folks discovered, but may not have completely documented. So cryptic hints in poorly translated languages lead to fatal misunderstandings, fights to access or destroy clues so others can't have them, etc. Your translator could be a chess piece fought over by various factions (and murdered at an unfortunate point so they can't make the story too easy).
* PS. I might point out that from your description, only one person would need to die. You indicated that once the number exceeded 100, no one could get in or out until it was under 100. That means the trap closes at 101, and reopens at 100. To have a greater number, you'd need a delay to the trap closing and a specific reason for a sudden influx of people. ***If*** non-living material/non-humans can pass through, then you also need to have no outside help, as people outside could provide the needed food (or even seeds/livestock & supplies for a sustained colony) invalidating the need for a battle. I think you may need to adjust the rules slightly to achieve your goals.
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The walls are permeable to other animals, *until they aren't*.
And electricity and cars do not work, so some outside people try to get food and supplies inside using horses, who can be trusted to draw a cart on a road even without a human driver.
And at a certain point, the horses stop being able to go through. Oh noes! But no great matter, as the carts can be pulled up to the walls and through using ropes, and when inside they can be pulled by hand.
But then the horses are able to go out again! So they start using horses again - and the block restarts a few hours later. One of the people inside makes some quick research, and starts watching the numbers. As soon as the block is operating reliably, they procure two horses, and lean one against the wall. Then they shoot the other. *And in that moment, the first horse falls outside the barrier*.
Now, one of the people inside *knows*.
Once the news break out, several people will come to the conclusion that it will be difficult and risky to depopulate the whole square by themselves. So, they'll aim for *outlasting* everyone else's battle royale by hiding somewhere with easy access to the barrier, and defending against all comers.
Of course, if this becomes widely known, several groups will hide in different places, and their combined numbers will be over the threshold. So, once the barrier doesn't go down, it becomes a war of ambush, each group moving out and trying to take out the others.
Groups will be able to ally as long as their combined numbers are below the threshold.
In the end, there will be several entrenched "teams", each one hundred-strong, hunting loners and warring with each other. Some "wars" might even end in a truce when both sides fall below the critical threshold.
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**There are other squares.**
And the people in each one are aware of the others. People on the outside know what goes on inside the squares too. There is TV and radio and even internet.
In one square there is a terrible accident - maybe an earthquake, or a fire and no fire stations are inside the square. The walls come down, the survivors leave and people marvel. In another square a cult decides to march into the wall. They die, except the cult members bringing up the rear who march thru to the outside. People start to catch on.
Most fiction of this sort concerns itself with the interactions of the human characters in the artificial situation. Periodic news from the outside will fit perfectly into this narrative especially if there is other sorts of news - science working on the walls, other things in the outside world... news from other squares.
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In the square where I am trapped, I am inspired by my dog, dig my way under the wall and then return for the other 10,000 people of my city to lead them through the tunnel to freedom. That can be mentioned on the final page.
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If the walls are inexplicable then the same can apply to the knowledge.
Keep in mind that people in general do not only start killing each other for rational reasons.
So the "knowledge" of the 100 survivor rule can be replaced by the kind of knowledge-replacement that has driven people to all kinds of extreme behaviour in the sad history of humanity.
For example:
Worryingly realistic dreams everybody has.
A dream in which the dreaming person and their loved ones gladly walk from the square, in the satisfying strong feeling that they are one of the 100 who were finally saved.
No need for explanation.
But for a reduced amount of handwaving, it is very likely that in the situation you describe only one person actually needs to have had that dream - and that can be by chance or by "chance". After telling that dream to a few trusted others (parents, partners, pub keeper) that dream spreads like wildfire. Everybody suddenly has "exactly the same dream". Nobody will know whether any of these dreams actually were prophetic - or just mass hystery.
A form of claustrophobia everybody has.
Everybody just feels the symptoms and that being one of noticably fewer people would get rid of that. It gets stronger, or at least the feeling and the symptoms get more strongly perceived.
In contrast to the dreams, this is something nobody dares to share, everybody is ashamed of that feeling and tries to hide it. The weird, though short-lived, relief felt when somebody dies gets you a population who knows very well that fewer people are better - and probably will reject all publiuc implications concerning this.
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# Layers of gold walls, one\* for every person above the population limit.
So, this gold wall surrounds the city, and on top of having them understand that there is a way to get rid of the wall and leave, you want to tie it to the number of people in the population, without giving away why or who is enforcing it.
One way to do so is to have the gold walls be represented as many, many small gold walls, and then whenever someone dies inside the square, the inner\* wall begins to recede into the area in the ground it came out of, leaving the rest of the walls still there, but giving input to the people inside that the death may have been tied to the reason an entire wall (Or rather, I suppose, a whole shell of the gold walls), and be able to at least tie a recession of the wall to a death.
At that point, it becomes a matter of the people either trial and error'ing to see just how many people are being demanded of being killed, or having them inspect the walls themselves.
As you've indicated the gold walls are transparent, that might take a while, but investigating that could prove useful by people on the inside.
This can also help drive a bit of paranoia by the people involved - they initially know that deaths are what seem to allow them a bit more access to the outside world, but if they don't know how much, revealing that partial information would have people inside panic over if they're going to be the next person sacrificed for "research" by people investigating the wall.
\*The walls themselves could be very thin, and if so, you might also double the number of walls so that there's one that recedes on the inside, and one that recedes on the outside, in case you wanted to give some information to people outside the dome as well.
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**Indicators that change with the number of people left**
One possible answer would be the vary the intensity of the light, and have the golden walls be powered by the collective lifeforce of the people inside. The collective lifeforce of more than 100 people is sufficient to activate the walls, and as people die, the walls get dimmer and dimmer.
Any other mechanics that change as people die will also work as long as it's visible somehow. If it's hidden, then the "discovery" will be a big scene by itself as well.
**Example:** After a big brawl and a lot of death, there can be a small earthquake inside the square and the walls flicker and grow dim.
**Example:** Some sort of "power" gauge in the center of the square, uncovered by an accident or some other event.
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## **The people start on the outside**
The golden square mysteriously appears one night. Inside everything looks beautiful - it's the ideal countryside to settle and live in.
The more adventurous folk dare to pass through the walls and find they are not a barrier. Excitedly they explore and come out to tell the others it's safe. More people start to pass in and out bringing building materials and making homes in this beautiful but mysterious land.
One day, the population inside the walls reaches the magic number and suddenly no-one can get in and out any more. There is mass panic; families are split up, etc. etc.
At some point someone decides to take a census of exactly who and how many were in there when the block happened. Suspiciously the number is exactly one hundred. People start to wonder; some begin to plot murder, others barricade themselves in. Suddenly it's a life or death situation.
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It already happened.
Two or three people who were kept for many years in the psychiatric wards of different hospitals already went through it. But they never told the whole story, all their clues have to be put together. A lot of people doctors, nurses and people visiting other patients heard for years disconnected sentences and they immediately begin to suspect that those patients know something about what is happening now. They all begin to investigate on their own, but trampling over each other they end up revealing to anyone else what they find out while the story is slowly put together.
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First off, what do you think about changing the number from 100 to something else? Unless the powers that are causing your squares also have 10 digits (fingers), bringing about a ten-base system like ours. I'm thinking an easy way to find their base number system is to think about how they evolved into tool-wielding creatures, since that's likely the same time period that their basic idea of math developed. When coming up with this, think about being a child learning to count, we use the most readily available tools—our fingers.
Concerning your main query, I love that bird idea, & I think it might work well with this idea. Have an old, homeless, professor of folklore with dementia. Have people mockingly call her 'Professor' in a way that tells of how no one believes her when she goes on rants, because most of what she says is based on esoteric knowledge. (Oh, also, I made her a woman, just so society ignores what she says even more, because sexism.)
The professor could share her food with the birds early on, so then the bird-lover might develop a connection with her. Have the professor goofily blabbering on about how, 'I'll tell you now, I'll tell you forever, this didn't happen!" Meaning the professor thought it was a myth, but they can't properly explain themselves because of the dementia.
Then, when the bird-lover is watching the birds, they can make a connection, based on several little things the professor has said over the previous chapters.
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Given they're square, we can make the interior have a geometry of 10x10 squares, and the sky tinted in a light gold.
When the walls start to rise up, and the people start to swarm to them, the last person remaining in a square, before leaving it, will see the gold-tint disappear.
Then you also make this correlate with the perceived strength of the wall.
That way, people will quickly get the big picture, that they'll need to somehow get <=1 person per square.
The advantages of this setup is that there is some hope left, and an incentive for people to squeeze into as few squares as possible, in the hopes that if you e.g. just empty the outer squares, the barrier just might break.
As the hope slowly fades and people are getting sick of being in such overcrowded areas, you have a good setup for a first deadly encounter/occurence.
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## Someone or something tells them
If this is a real city, the initial population is far too high and there are far too many variables to expect people to ever figure this out. You need someone or something to at least give them a (strong) hint. The opening to Sword Art Online comes to mind as one similar example where this was done. Surely whatever force has the power to create those walls also has the power to give out some sense of their purpose.
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**The golden field goes inside the city.**
There are various traps and internal barriers. Deaths remove these traps and barriers. The humans can see by experimentation and exploration that deaths weaken the barriers and traps, making them dim and weaken. They can also see the outside barriers slowly dim as more people die, and track this.
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# Electricity interference, or a opaque counter
Say electricity works, but there is some interference. A signal, modulated in the AC currency itself. Each dead person inside the walls decreases the frequency or the amplitude of the interference.
Very few people will be aware of this, and even less people will be capable of detecting the signal decrease.
If this is a big city, the walls could emit a radio frequency. If it is a small city, a small rotating luminous ball could spin at a velocity equal to (alive-100) rotations per day.
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Say the walls are programmed whenever anyone dies inside the walls they do a quick blip (glow bright momentarily), then small cracks form on the surface of the walls, the cracks will grow as more people die. It wont imply that 100 people left = walls break down, it's just a general sign that people need to be sacrificed if you want to break free. Cool?
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> Nothing that makes it seem like somebody designed it specifically so that the people inside would find out
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I'd love to see this tied to mathematics, and particularly not the magic number "100". An example would be that a constellation of points moving across the barrier (visible at night perhaps?) arranges into a specific shape, and forms the edges of the wall.
Casual astronomers and local healthcare can determine that the number of wall-stars corresponds roughly to the number of people in the area.
Engineers and physicists can determine that there is are potentially unstable configuration where the wall would cancel itself out and collapse.
Mathematicians can determine that these configurations can occur at specific numbers of people (e.g. for [Perfect numbers](https://oeis.org/A000396), which are a little off for your ~100 requirement: 6, 28, 496, 8128, 33550336, ...; unless you start below 8k people.
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#### Concern on "extrapolation" answers
A concern I have with some existing answers is that they claim "extrapolation indicates that the wall will be passable at 100 people", or similar.
Suppose you have a US-metro dense population over your 4 square miles, giving somewhere between 25,000 (typical) to 100,000 (New York) people. A wall that opens when 100 are left is not 'detectable by science', this is an error of .1% compared to the **much more likely hypothesis that the wall opens when everyone is dead**. This will not lead to battle royale, probably just increased cases of depression, or merely acceptance (See [closed cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city), or 2020's quarantines).
Visual modifications when someone dies doesn't help much either, as (US-based again) the birth rate of ~10 per thousand and death rate of ~8 per thousand will add a fair amount of noise to the above measurements. If anything it will only confirm the idea that the wall will only go down when everyone is dead.
#### Concern on premise
Unless the rest of the world is destroyed, people just aren't going to start killing each other. You aren't going to run out of food, national governments aren't going to let chaos reign, and if even half the population died in a "battle royale" somehow the disease and sanitation issues would kill everyone else pretty quickly.
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> all without making it seem like that element was put there specifically to ensure that the people inside would figure it out?
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But it is impossible because some one has put that element inside: you!
What you want is people inside are less smart than you. Classic "deus ex machina".
If you insist on not give clues to the insiders the only way is by accident: people keep simultaneously killing themselves and trying to escape. One day there are only 100 let and some one escapes. After they all get out, they count themselves and find the magical number is 100.
Going further; the "squares" are a common thing. Next time some poor souls get trapped inside one they know about the "100 magic number" myth (it's a myth til it be proven). This time there are 103 person inside the "square". Some one tell about the "100 magic number". But how to prove it? Who will be kill? A gangster solves the problem killing three of his/her minions. Immediately the let 100 are able to get out of the "square". The "100 magic number" myth was proven not be a myth.
A bit more further: Now the "100 magic number" is widely known, but one day a "square" closes for 40 days and open with all people inside it dead. A C.S.I. made inside the open "square" shows that of the 125 people inside the "square" 26 got a violent death and 99 die by thirst or starved. Conclusion: the insiders miscounted and killed one person more. So "the magic number" is exactly 100.
Looks like a sound ground to work with.
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[Question]
[
The continent is split apart by a dense area of mountains, covered in glaciers. Any travelers who with to go from one part of the continent to the other would either have to cross the mountains, or go around them by boat, which brings its own set of problems many would rather avoid.
Given the adverse conditions in the mountains, many trails are plagued by frequent snowstorms, much to the detriment of the travelers. Luckily so, the trail goes along several larger cave systems, which happen to be between 15°C and 20°C (59°F and 68°F respectively), which is a boon in comparison to the frosty negative temperatures outside.
The caves are used by travelers to sleep or eat, and some vendors even set up semi-permanent stores to sell goods to those daring to cross the mountains.
Curiously enough, the temperatures are not caused by people trying to heat the cave by conventional means (e.g. camp fires, etc.). Why are the caves in such a high temperature year round?
I've looked into geothermal heating, but I was unable to say for sure if a near geothermal source (e.g. a dormant volcano) was able to deliver such a strong rise in temperature (~20-30 °C) in a way that doesn't have unwanted side-effects (e.g. sulfur gasses in the case of a volcano) .
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Geothermal heat.
It's well established that the more in depth one goes, the higher the temperature is. It It is called [geothermal gradient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient)
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> Geothermal gradient is the rate of increasing temperature with respect to increasing depth in Earth's interior. Away from tectonic plate boundaries, it is about 25–30 °C/km (72–87 °F/mi) of depth near the surface in most of the world
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If you are close to a tectonically active area, like Iceland, that gradient is even higher.
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**Caves are that way.**
Caves are well insulated. Cave temperature equals average outside temperature for the year.
<https://startcaving.com/info/heres-why-caves-stay-the-same-temperature-year-round>
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> Why do caves stay at the same temperature year-round? Caves stay at
> the same temperature year-round because they are thermally insulated
> from the external substances that flow into them. The temperature of
> the air and liquids that flow into caves has little impact on the
> crust that forms the cave, which has a much larger thermal capacity
> than liquid or air.
>
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> While there are some exceptions that may make the cave seem warmer or
> colder than expected, such as depth of the cave, distance from the
> mouth, and number of openings into the body of the cave, it can
> generally be accepted that a cave will retain a yearly temperature
> about equal to that of the average annual surface temperature of the
> region in which it is located.
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Your caves are large. It is cold higher in the mountains but warmer in the summer. At the base of the mountains it is less cold in winter and hot in the summer. The cave spans this whole area.
You do not need lava pools or radioactive decay to keep your cave at a constant 15F. Most caves in temperate areas are just that way because they are caves.
[Answer]
**A Natural Nuclear Reactor**
[Natural Reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) existed on Earth a few billion years ago, in places such as Oklo. Slightly permeable rock containing uranium ore, when saturated with water, became critical for about 30 minutes, heating the water and driving it to steam. After that 30 minutes there wasn't enough water to sustain the reaction, and it stopped reacting for about 2 1/2 hours. This cycle continued for about 150 thousand years. A reactor of this type can generate about 100kW of heat, and the surrounding rock both shields from radiation and evens out the changes in temperature.
This type of reactor was possible when the natural concentration of U-235 was higher, those billion years ago. It would be relatively safe to occupy this cave, although you might not want to drink the water.
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# Hot springs
Your caves have [geothermal springs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_spring) in them, which not only keep them warm - they keep the caves expletively hot in the lower places. From the wiki:
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> A hot spring, hydrothermal spring, or geothermal spring is a spring produced by the emergence of geothermally heated groundwater that rises from the Earth's crust. While some of these springs contain water that is a safe temperature for bathing, others are so hot that immersion can result in an injury or death.
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An example of a cave with a hot spring is [Grjótagjá](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grj%C3%B3tagj%C3%A1) (probably named after a Great Old One), in Iceland. The waters inside the cave are very hot, and between 1975 and 1984 its temperature had even rose above 50C/122F.
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# Wibbles
Wibbles are small fauna which ingest carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen, much like plant life on Earth. But they also ingest potassium salts which are found in abundance throughout those mountain ranges. Wibbles have a very high metabolic rate and therefore constantly emit heat. They tend to favour caves because they don't like cold or daylight, and also because they are very slow-moving and can be predated by various avians which inhabit those mountain ranges.
Since the inhabitants of your world have not yet entered the scentific age no-one can say what happens to those potassium salts: it may be that spending time in those caves does severe long-term damage to the bodily organs of the inhabitants of your world.
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**Granite is radioactive**
Granite is naturally radioactive and gives of heat (as well as radon gas).
Granite caves would naturally be warmer with no obvious heat source
[Heat Production of Granite](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687850718300281)
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# Conferences of theologians
All those caves are completely stuffed with people, all the time. Most of the time you have to squeeze past people quite assertively to get inside them.
That's because the people of that world believe caves, any caves, are particularly spiritual places, and since religion and matters spiritual dominate the lives of all the people on that planet, it means that conferences of theologians are held in every single cave, even the smallest, on an almost-permanent basis. 99 times out of 100 they are discussing some aspect of the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Most of these monks, nuns and assorted shamans believe that they must live lives of poverty; consequently they dress in very thin material. In the mountains, where you find the caves, they therefore have to bring stocks of firewood, which they burn inside the caves and at their entrances, producing acrid smoke and making the general air of fractiousness and discomfort even greater.
Those caves drive everyone mad. Everyone wants everyone else not to be there. But all this humanity/alienity and burning wood keeps the caves uncomfortably hot, all the time.
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# Radiators
Tens of thousands of years ago a highly advanced civilisation spent 100s of years installing electric radiators in all these caves. They are powered by wires which lead off into the bedrock... and the source of the electrical energy is unknown.
The present civilisations on that world are pre-scientific, or more accurately post-scientific. They believe they can account for the powering of the radiators, but since all their explanations are borne of arbitrary supersition, and none has been proven in any way, none of them is of any interest.
[Answer]
**They're deep.**
These caves may be as deep as you (the world-builder) wants them to be, and deeper caves are warmer.
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[Question]
[
In the County of the Isles, on Ironwood Island, there grow the Ironwood Trees. Ironwood is close to steel in strength, doesn't take an edge well, and is lighter than steel. The technology level of the Solar Kingdom may be taken to be approximately normal fantasy medieval, although I'm open to variations. Magic is not available, for various reasons (the trees are partly magical, but it's considered a good idea not to mention that).
Anyway, we have a lot of people in Ironville, and more come in seasonally. The island economy is mostly export of ironwood and ironwood products. The town palisade is made of ironwood, which has proven to be a good thing in the past. This is basically what I've committed myself to.
Anyway, people come out and cut down the trees. How? Steel axes aren't all that effective. People do things to it, not with steel knives or adzes or other steel tools. How do they do these things?
I need a way to cut down ironwood trees, cut up the logs and branches, and ideally do some carving.
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> people come out and cut down the trees. How?
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Quartz sand, water, metal saw and patience.
Using those above the Egyptians were able to saw granite rocks to make obelisks.
A blend of water and quartz sand, used to lubricate a saw moving back and forth in contact with the hard material will slowly ablate it, opening a cut in it. Applying the process for long enough, it is possible to cut the tree and also the trunk into planks.
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A good first step would be to look at the [Ironwood carvings by the Seri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_ironwood_carvings). The real ironwood is not as hard as steel, but it is notoriously hard to work with because it is so tough.
When it comes to cutting it, you want to pay attention to two things. The first is the weaknesses of the wood. Ummdustry suggested using fire to cut it in his answer. If you can control the fire well enough, that could be effective. Another approach we see in the ironwood carving business is cutting along the grain. Woods are inherently weaker along this direction, so a plain knife may be all you need to cut it.
Failing that, grinding would be highly effective. If your material really has properties similar to steel (rather than being similar to wood), then you can grind it. Most high-carbon tooling is ground because there are grinding materials which are much harder and sharper than wood or steel. Indeed, if we look at the ironwood carvings from the Seri, they typically use a rasp to form the shapes (which is sort of half way between a grinding stone and a saw), and a piece of glass to smooth its surface.
The second thing you need to pay attention to is the strengths -- how does the wood grow? If you can get the wood to grow in the general shape you need, then you don't need to spend as much time finishing it. The famous [Crooked Forrest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Forest) in Poland is believed to have been formed that way. It's believed that the planters of the trees intentionally shaped them with the intent of using them in shipbilding. You may also use this to make cutting easier. If you can leverage the growth patterns of the tree, you may be able to construct shapes that are easier to cut down, such as restricting the diameter of the tree at one point.
If your entire island culture is built upon the manufacturing of ironwood products, I would expect that they would be *highly* in tune with the growth and lifecycle of the ironwood trees. Elven style products, where they are grown in the desired shape, would be the norm, in my opinion.
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Perhaps not quite what you want, but what about [tree shaping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping#Gradual_tree_shaping)?
If you can coax your ironwood trees to grow into desired shape, you might not have to cut them...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jFGTq.jpg)
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Just because it's close to steel in strength doesn't mean it's as *hard* as steel. It may have fantastic compressive and tensile strength, but still have very low mineral hardness... in which case steel axes, saws, and knives would still work just fine, although they may wear out faster than they do when working with other kinds of wood.
If, however, it has a similar mineral hardness to steel *anyway*, there are still other things you could make blades or files out of in order to work it. Quartz and corundum (i.e., ruby / sapphire) are both harder than steel, as is diamond, and industrial, non-gem quality diamonds aren't particularly precious, if they have a source to mine them from. Large chunks of quartz could be cut into axes blades all on their own, while smaller bits of diamond and/or corundum could be set into saw blades, much like modern diamond-bladed saws (which would be expensive with medieval-level technology, but not undoable), or more cheaply used to create rasps and files for carving the wood.
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Fire would work, assuming the tree is still flammable, simple take a large brazier with you, light it. Use it to heat up a metal blade and the blade can then BURN through the wood.
Burning the wood sufficiently on the surface should also make it carvable.
Alternativly use the iron wood itself. Preferably the very hardest ironwood available or ironwood that has been further hardened artifically. Kinda like "only a diamond can cut a diamond.
For very fine work perhaps diamond or ruby tools should be used.
[Answer]
**Solar concentrator.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/55VOQ.jpg)
<https://siamagazin.com/how-to-make-parabolic-mirrors-from-space-blankets/>
You could fell a tree by setting up your mirror on a sunny day with the focal point on the trunk where you want to cut. Keep the wood above that point wet. The concentrated sun will burn a hole through the tree.
Similarly, carve your wood with hot spots of light. You will want a fan to clear the smoke or it will occlude your light. Refining the hot spot through a lens might be neat. I like the idea of the ironwood mill open to the light, with mirrors and lenses installed in various places inside. When the sun comes up the mill interior blazes to life with hot rays ready for various jobs. A "sawmill" like that would be a great setting for an action scene.
[Answer]
## **Steam Bending**
Wood has traditionally been shaped by placing it in a sealed box, filling it with warm steam, and leaving overnight. Or it can be left to soak in warm water.
This turns the wood into green wood, allowing it to shaped. The wood is pegged into the desired shape, and allowed to dry out.
In general, the harder the wood, the longer it takes to soften, and to take its new shape. Thus is may take a few days in the steam box, and a few weeks of being held in the shaper.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_bending>
With a bit of handwavium, you can say that this softens the wood enough to allow it to be cut with an axe, and then the edge smoothed with a rasp or chisel.
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Ironwood could have the property that it cuts like ordinary wood. Its remarkable strength emerges when it is subject to some annealing or curing process. It could be something that occurs naturally: passage of time after the wood is cut. Or perhaps a natural process that people have found a way to accelerate with heat or whatever.
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The usual materials engineering terms have already been defined -- most people think of "strength" as a single quantity, but there are several specific quantities that do not necessarily appear in all strong materials:
* stiffness: how much the piece deforms under stress elastically (without a permanent change)
* compressive and tensile strengths (usually most different when a
material is "strong" but not tough) -- tensile strength is often
measured to the point when the material starts to deform plastically
(permanently) or to the point when the specimen breaks entirely
* toughness (resistance to crack propagation, typically measured as the
energy required to break a notched or smooth specimen)
* hardness (resistance to deformation, typ. using a small ball as the indenter -- closely related to tensile strength, although an exact correlation depends on the material)
In addition, all of these are usually thought of as isotropic properties -- not varying in direction -- but they will depending on the material is formed. For wood, properties are highly anisotropic. Try bending a thin piece of wood with the grain and against it, for example. (One more aside: while complicated wood grains ("curly," burls, interlocked) are often prized for their beauty, woodworkers traditionally prefer to work with straight-grained stock because it's so much easier. Elm, for example, isn't often used commercially because it rarely has straight grained sections, and it's not pretty enough to be worth the effort.) Even steel and aluminum can have a "grain" -- usually the rolling direction -- and properties can differ significantly with and perpendicular to the rolling direction.
Ceramics and glasses can have high strength in compression, but even tiny flaws (almost always present) mean that they will fail in tension because they aren't tough. Once a crack has started, it takes very little energy to get bigger. They tend to make lousy tool materials as a result, although the trick of using sand or fine quartz for cutting hard materials is an excellent one -- you can cut glass with a hard grit using a copper tool because the hard grit tends to get embedded in the copper. I assume the same is true when using a cord to cut stone, although I thought that quite a bit of stone was quarried by cutting small slots and holes as stress concentrators, and wedges (or freezing water) used to split the rock at those holes or slots.
I would like to mention that "ironwood" is one of the most common names of various hard species throughout our world. It seems like just about every locale has its own ironwood.
As for cutting and shaping, most of the usual methods have been mentioned.
Traditionally, even steel tools have their problems with the tougher and harder woods, especially if you don't like sharpening them after every other cut. The simplest fix is to work the wood before it dries. You can do so much with green wood: split along the grain, form, etc. There's a great book "How to make a chair from a tree" that details these methods.
Fire and hot tools to char or degrade the iron wood (as mentioned) are also possibilities -- native Americans and other indigenous peoples use fire to hollow out trunks for boats. You could also girdle saplings (cut the living layer on the outside of the tree) to get timber for palisades -- the hard part might be the inner heartwood.
In really old times, bronze tools (and earlier bone and quartz) were often used to prepare wood, so tool hardness and strength relative to wood was even lower. The usual non-metals were used as well: silica (sand, quartz), alumina (ruby and other corundums) were most common. One that I hadn't heard of until recently was shark skin -- it makes an excellent "sandpaper" and depending on how it is prepared, can range in roughness from quite coarse to very fine. You could certainly have a local animal that incorporates silica or another hard oxide in its skin.
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braided steel cable.. not very high tech, easily replaced when broken and depending on length can fell a tree just by having a horse walk away from it(cable affixed to horse, wrapped once around the tree.). downsides are it's heavy and takes a few minutes to set up.
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[Question]
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## TL;DR: What tactics can a professionally trained army use against a horde of untrained conscripts using human wave attacks?
(This scenario takes place in the very-near future.)
**Background information:**
The two forces of SEDA and GAU have been at war for the past decade, SEDA defending against the constant onslaught of GAU conscripts.
Brainwashed and forced into service with minimal training and faulty equipment, the armies of GAU are nothing more than hordes of conscripts rushing blindly at the enemy (in a similar method to the [Banzai Charges of WW2.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzai_charge))
In modern history, human wave attacks have often failed and have only served to waste entire battalions by having them be cut down by machine-gun fire.
**However, the size of the GAU forces have the sheer excess of numbers to make this a viable strategy. They are vastly more numerous than their opponents, overwhelming their enemies with sheer numbers.**
The forces of SEDA are professionally trained and equipped soldiers, defending against the hordes of conscripts. While in normal scenarios this alone would be enough to counter such an unorganized attack, the sheer numbers of their enemy calls for a more specialized counter-strategy.
**What Tactics and Strategies can SEDA use to defend against this human wave attack style? Are there any formations or positioning that could help them gain an advantage?**
[Answer]
Machine guns have made human wave attacks ineffective.
Where human waves prevailed against modern firepower, it was always that defendants were unprepared for it, due to lack of properly dug-in position, lack of ammunition, gun overheating etc. Thus, if defendants would anticipate such attacks and prepare accordingly, those attacks would almost never succeed.
Of course, even machine guns have their limits. On an open field, if attackers outnumber defendants 100 to 1, they can definitely succeed. On different kind of terrain, where attackers can approach under some cover, a much smaller numerical advantage would be needed. Unless SEDA is exclusively defensive, can build an equivalent of [Maginot Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line) and never has to fight the enemy on enemy's terms, SEDA will have to invent some offensive tactic as well. An offense implies the eventual need to defend positions which are not meant to be defended.
Other answers had suggested a number of useful defensive tactics, like air support and minefields. I would like to add **flamethrowers** to the list. It is one thing to march against a hail of bullets, which may, or may not hit their target. It is another to march through a wall of fire which **will** burn anyone who passes through.
See also [Tower defense games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_defense)
[Answer]
Other answers deal with how to deal with it on front itself, but if attacker still can outnumber defender enough to succeed (defender spends his ammunition, wear out guns, suffer enough losses, attacker gets close enough to break through).
Therefore something else is needed if the numerical disparity is really absurd.
**Logistics.**
Huge badly equipped force will be much harder to supply, than smaller force. And every day they are present and not die, they need at least 2l (and depending on conditions even more) of water (and food, and ammo, and fuel to transport that).
Therefore choose position behind some form of bottleneck (hills, woods/swamps with few roads, ... depend's on preferred transportation method of enemy). Choose another defensive position much deeper in your territory, that will be your real line.
Let enemy form for attack and then start attacking his supply line/logistic infrastructure. Now you have desperate enemy, so best thing is to retreat to another line. Enemy will follow, but will suffer large losses by starvation/dehydration and attack weakened.
When attacking supply lines, attack what enemy can replace least, or not cannot replace fast enough.
Instead of second line, you can try to block enemy when stretched along roads and chop them to small pieces and destroy them one by one (see winter wars (Finland vs soviet Russia)).
When attacking, again, attack logistics and then force them to use more supply than they have.
PS: if enemy is cannibalistic, this works much less, because enemy can use part of force as food and drink (instead of loosing everyone).
PSS: OR use Nukes, Chemical weapons or KEW from orbit (dinosaur killer will stop any army of conscripts) (you didn't specify tech level)
[Answer]
If someone is really dead-set on using human wave attacks to overcome a dug-in and professional army, it's going to be bloody. Possible ideas to repel the attack, at various levels of Geneva-Convention violation:
* Carpet Bombing, both air and artillery based - such a disorganised force is unlikely to have the AA and counter-artillery to properly defend against such an attack.
* Multiple, dug in defensive lines - think Kursk - layer upon layer of trenches, machine gun emplacements and artillery
* Automation! Simple robotic agents set to open up machine gun fire on anything without an IFF tag. Probably pretty cheap, and you can use them without risking your soldier's lives.
* Minefields - cheap, quick and effective. One soldier can plant many mines which can prevent a serious obstacle to lightly armoured foes.
* Chemical/Biological warfare. Release some kind of chemical/infectious agent to cut down the enemy troops before they even reach your lines
[Answer]
Flexible or "elastic" defences are necessary if there is a large disparity of numbers. The defender needs to be able to break up and disorganize the attack, fall back if necessary to lure the enemy into pre designated "Kill Zones" (in the cold war era, the equivalent Soviet term was "[Fire Sack](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a232251.pdf)") and then counterattack to drive the defenders from the contested terrain.
These tactics are applicable across the ages, and indeed we see many examples of battles using several of these tactics, ranging from Hannibal destroying the Roman Legions at the [Battle of Cannae](https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Cannae), Henry V destroying the French army at [Agincourt](https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Agincourt), German elastic defence in both [WWI](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/warfare_1914-1918_germany) and [WWII](http://www.defence.gov.au/ADC/Publications/Geddes/2005/PublcnsGeddes2005_310310_OperationalWarfighting.pdf), and even in the actions of the IDF in many of the Arab Israeli wars. So it doesn't matter so much if you forces use muscle power or tanks, the principles are going to be the same.
Phase one: Breaking up the attack. The defender needs to have enough forward outposts or surveillance to identify the location and size of the attack (ideally before the attack is launched). Depending on the type of force you have and the amount of time you have to prepare, obstacles to slow the attack and channelize it should be prepared. Your forces should also be deployed in ways which mask their true strength and position, and indeed "invite" the enemy to attack along one or more axis. The obstacles are ideally covered by fire (anything from arrow storms to artillery and CAS) to impose casualties on the oncoming forces. reducing their strength and organization.
Phase 2: Planned withdrawal. The enemy continues to advance, while you trade time for space. If done correctly, the enemy is lured into a "Killing Zone" (Hannibal did this at Cannae by allowing the centre of his line to yield, drawing the legions into a pocket and then surrounding them), and mercilessly attacked from all sides.
Phase 3: Counter Attack. The enemy has been heavily attrited, and should now be expelled from the position. The counter attack ideally should not just stabilize the line, but can also be punched into enemy territory to further disorganize the enemy, capture or destroy supplies in their logistics zone and destroy or disrupt transportation arteries as well, complicating their tasks and preventing follow up attacks.
This needs to be carefully coordinated, since overextending your attack could result in the enemy turning the tables on you and defeating the counter attack force in detail.
Given the conditions you describe, it seems unlikely that the enemy can sustain such attacks for long without some sort of outside help. If this is an actual third party, then either military action against the enemy alliance or diplomatic initiatives to break the alliance will be needed. In other cases, such as the [Korean War](https://infogalactic.com/info/Korean_War) or the [Iran-Iraq](https://infogalactic.com/info/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War) war, where ideology or religion was used to whip the soldiers into fighting frenzy and drive them forward into virtual meat grinders, then a very deep and comprehensive PSYOPS campaign should also be launched in order to drain the fervour from the enemy, and make their conscripts less willing to obey orders and carry out human wave attacks. Targeting [political officers](https://infogalactic.com/info/Political_commissar), guards or other elements used to prevent the attackers from retreating should also be considered, since in the chaos of combat, human desire for self preservation will likely override all but the most conditioned or disciplined soldiers.
The other factor which seems to be missing from this is what is available to follow up the human wave attack? If it were to succeed and gain lodgement, how will the enemy exploit this? I would suggest that the other thing the defenders need is long range artillery or air power in order to attack follow up forces in depth before they can reinforce or exploit the effects of the human wave attack.
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You can use terrain to your advantage. A gorge with a width opening on the enemy side narrowing down to a small opening will help to make the waves manageable.
If its a flat plain, a fall back, ranged strategy might work if the plain is big enough. Couple this with area attack weapons such as mortar, bombs, mines etc.
Air support (not sure what your tech level is) would also be good as they can soften up and even wipe out waves without having the ground troops go into it. Mortar, artillery etc. basically keep your distance.
If your tech level permits it, then automated weapons towers could work even better and they can fire off pulses of electricity, streams of fire, or plasma etc.
[Answer]
You need to break up and channel the human wave.
As Arkhaine said terrain will decide the strategy.
A choke point is good and bad as it keeps SEDA from being flanked which is the biggest threat, but it doesn't allow many ways to break up the charge. You'll want to blunt the enemy force as much as possible early on before they get close up.
Artillery and airstrikes will be king. Both must be used to hit the enemy as far away as possible so that the survivors come up in smaller groups. Just beyond that will be a very thick mine field. You'll have mines stretched all along almost to the first line of trenches, but you'll want them thickest just beyond the artillery kill zone and in front of the trenches. The first will be to try to wipe out their morale early on, and the second is to be one last line of defense.
You'll need several lines of trenches just in case, and be ready to blow the trenches as they're abandoned.
You have to hit them hard and keep hitting them until they break.
In open terrain things are more flexible and more dangerous.
Breaking the horde up into more manageable pieces is essential. To break the horde up you need to have time.
Sending out some light forces to lead them off track for a few hours, forcing them to slow down as their scouts are killed, damaging bridges and roads are critical. An airforce would go in and take out vehicles to block roads, try to bomb the supply line so they are on short rations, and finally attack the middle of the convoy trying to break the horde into smaller less United pieces.
With the extra time, the main forces will be laying down minefields. These are to break the wave up into separate channels, so that not every part of the line is hit at once. If the attackers are very poorly supplied you may even consider throwing down caltrops to lame anyone with poor or nonexistent boots.
Barbed and razor wire will be very important in channeling the enemy into the proper lanes and blocking off other parts of the battlefield. Like in WW1, you'll want it in large amounts, thick enough all along to handle dozens of soldiers trying to clip it apart and uproot it.
The clear lanes where you want the enemy charging down will be prepared for artillery and mortar fire, carpet bombing if they have the tech, and heavy weapons.
And after that, entrenched lines with multiple fall back positionsmust be built. If they take a trench it doesn't matter because they have to climb out of it now, and there are five to ten more behind it for the defenders. Also mine the trenches so they can be blown after they're taken. This is especially important when fighting in open terrain.
Flame throwers could be useful for the defence, especially to buy time if forced to retreat. Grenades should be handed out like candy. Heavy machine guns and mortars will give the defenders the best bang for the buck.
[Answer]
## **[How about using canister shots?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canister_shot)**
Really surprised no one mentioned this one yet.
You describe your defenders as "professionally trained and equipped soldiers". If so, then they should know about weapons that first appeared in 1400s, with the idea being even older. Based on a cannon shell called "grapeshot", designed specifically for this type of defense and widely used even on ships, well since 1700s.
So, how does it work? Very effectively. In simple terms - first, imagine a regular cannon shell. Now, instead of it being solid inside or filled with just explosives, it actually contains many small ball bearings. Now imagine it going off, with all those little balls flying in every direction.
Anyone unlucky to be close enough is dead instantly, with the balls punching right through them, only to hit others behind. You just turned that human wave into a mess of blood and body parts from the dead and dying.
For even better effect, roll out barbed wire just above ground to slow the enemies down and you won't need much effort to literally stop them dead in their tracks.
For more info on actual usage, search for defense of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal during WW2. It was almost identical situation to what you describe. Japanese used Banzai charges against dug in american positions around the airfield. It was a total disaster for the Japanese.
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If we take the "human wave" tactics of the Chinese in the Korean war which weren't really human wave attacks but more a focused assault on a specific position using infiltration and night assault that were repeated until victory or exhaustion, then you have a more realistic situation.
Things that come to mind would be night vision equipment and near constant recon to detect an enemy advance before they strike. Then the ability to call in fire support for all levels of command (from the private upwards). You would need to establish a line of fortified fire bases to rain shells and rockets down on any attack. Finally you would need a motorised, mechanised or air mobile reserve to reinforce areas under attack or to plug breaches in the line.
The other option would be to have strong sections of the line and weaker sections that you allow the enemy to breach then push them back in an armoured counter thrust once they break into open country where they are easy targets.
[Answer]
Under these circumstances, assuming you don't have the means to simply mow them down endlessly ( say for example, you're carrying bolt-action rifles rather than automatic weapons ) then your best option is to use terrain and mobility.
The human-wave requires space to move, command and control to guide, infrastructure and supply-lines to keep fed. Strike at these and your foe will fail.
If you cannot put up an impenetrable wall of bullets to put the horde down, then you should use your mobility. Reach hilltops and chokepoints such as mountain-passes, strike them when they try to climb after you. Maintain clear exit-routes by any means necessary and immediately displace to a new position of terrain superiority whenever things are getting hairy.
Fight smart, be ready with the next step in your battle plan at every stage. Ideally have multiple options that you can swiftly implement, with a foe this big you'll be prone to getting outflanked and surrounded; something you cannot afford to allow.
You should watch for their leadership, Commissar-type officers guiding the masses, anyone issuing orders or rallying the horde. Kill those and the horde will falter and scatter. Issue your longest ranged and most accurate weapons to your best marksmen and give them this task.
Play on your foe's fears. You're facing a mob, once you've killed its leadership it will react accordingly and the human animal is far easier to spook than we like to think.
To encourage panic, you can use Fire and Explosives, even the most fanatical zealot will instinctively shy away from such things
If preparing the ground is possible, make use of traps, a deep punji-trap continues to be a threat long after a minefield has expended itself and much like fire, Pointy Things make people fear every bit as much as any random death by landmine. Use these to force the horde into your gunsights and along particularly treacherous routes.
Most critically, you should isolate the horde itself from its supply lines.
Avoid the bulk of the horde and circle around to strike their supply-chain, take what you need yourself and burn the rest. Without food and shelter, the horde will quickly become a substantially weaker threat.
Continue to do this, particularly targeting any fresh reinforcements before they can join the main group.
At all times your goal is to break the horde into manageable pieces you can destroy in isolation.
[Answer]
[Sonic weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapon) use sound to injure, incapacitate, or kill an opponent. They can be used to stop incoming waves of enemies, or to limit the battlefield to certain areas.
[Answer]
## Artillery.
The [BIG](https://www.quora.com/What-weapon-caused-most-deaths-during-WW1) [killer](https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=46534) in the [first](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12olci/ww1_what_was_the_distribution_of_casualties/) and [second](https://www.quora.com/What-caused-more-deaths-in-WW2-artillery-or-small-arms) world wars: artillery. Use regular artillery, use howitzers, use mortars, use a big monster like the [Big Bertha's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bertha_(howitzer)). Indirect fire is king and queen on the battlefield. More so if the enemy is a conscripted mess of a human wave.
No need for heroics. Just math & Newtons laws. Mind you, the first and second world wars are long gone. We have [auto loading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000), [precision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS-90) [firing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M109_howitzer) [mobile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K9_Thunder) [artillery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAESAR_self-propelled_howitzer) now. Artillery is very scary.
Then finish them off with machine gun fire. Or drones. Or tanks. Or APC's. Or remote [controlled vehicles](https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-unmanned-border-patrols/) with / or turrets. That is just fidly bits with a modern well trained army. You never have to see the enemy with your own eyes.
---
If you are in France by change, visiting or something, go and see how [effective](https://www.ww1cemeteries.com/france.html) artillery can be.
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[Question]
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In Warlords it is common in the belt and asteroid colonies to "hand out" barcodes to individuals for security and labor reasons. With a simple scan the station security or guild master can see the basic bio of this person, past work and incidents, which ship they came on, etc. They are deemed more humane than chips and only slightly invasive by society at large, but are only prevalent in the outer colonies.
I would need (in my mind) these bar codes to be able to remain the same physically, but the information accessed can be changed over time. As well as having some sort of machine doing the tattoo to confront forgeries.
Is it worth the effort to tattoo thousands of miners and ship crews or would something else be far more efficient? Also would the idea of tattoo barcodes even work?
[Answer]
>
> They are deemed more humane than chips
>
>
>
Do you know why the Nazis tattooed serial numbers into the arms of concentration camp prisoners? Because it marks them for life as something they deemed inferior, worthless, the enemy, outsiders. It is definitely **not humane** to mark someone as a laborer and cut them off from any chance to ever climb the social ladder.
If these barcodes are only used in the belt and asteroid colonies, tattooed people will probably face discrimination just because they wear a visible mark that distinguishes them from residents of planets and other colonies. Compare it to todays racism, where people are judged and discriminated because they have dark skin, slitted eyes or some other visible feature that has nothing to do with their personality or worth as a person.
Additional disadvantage: It's rather easy to exploit, alter and otherwise temper with tattoos. You can cut (parts of) the skin off, thicken barcode lines with your own tattoo machine or use laser removal methods. All you need for identity theft is a high resolution photograph of someone else's tattoo.
If you want something unique and identifying, choose a fingerprint or a truly quick DNA test or implant some chip into a bone of an infant.
A DNA test has to be coupled with a second identifier because identical twins have basically identical DNA.
[Answer]
What you describe is a database with the entry key being the tattooed bar-code.
The main problem I see is that to scan an individual you would need to access open skin, which in space is generally cumbersome when one is wearing a space suit: imagine having to scan miners accessing the mine, they are already fully dressed, to uncover part of their body would require additional time which would be subtracted to operation.
It sounds much more practical to scan the iris and use it as access key.
[Answer]
Tattoos are not more humane and less invasive than chips, depending on how each thing is used. Tattoos will be very visible on you, specially if they have to be somewhere easily accessible for scanning. They can also trigger allergic reactions which will be a permanent hassle to whomever you've inked until you can get them surgically removed.
Chips are less likely to trigger allergies. They can be smaller than a grain of rice today, so they might be microscopic when we become a spacefaring civilization. They are not visible and will not take space that you could use to tattoo something else. If all the chip does is give out a constant string of bits - which is all you need to access a database - it will outdo tattoos regarding how invasive and how efficient it is.
A chip will also be much harder to tamper with - with a tattoo, all you need is some ink and a needle to make a machine think that Peasant Joe is Mr. Tycoon McRichie. With chips, you need the services of a very expensive hacker.
In the end, biometry beats both. In China you can pay for a meal by smiling at a camera. This is deemed more secure nowadays than using a credit card with a chip. Credit card chips can be cloned with equipment that is reasonably cheap in some black markets (compared with the costs of making or modifying tattoos), but in order to cheat real time movement-tracking facial recognition you need a series of facelifts to look like your mark, and that takes a serious amount of time, money and detachment from your own image. Add a IR layer and not even that will do - even identical twins don't have the same thermal features. And all the equipment you need is a slightly more sophisticated version of a 21st century Kinect or Playstation 4 camera.
Go with biometry. You can't go wrong with it.
[Answer]
One very important aspect to consider: **Information security**.
When you tattoo a person for easy scanning, you are putting a machine readable number on them. **Anyone can read that number and replicate it as a sticker to impersonate that person.** This would work even at a distance, it suffices that the entire tattoo becomes visible to the attacker once.
Any biometric marker performs much better than a tattoo in this regard: The biometric marker generally can not be measured at a distance, and is generally much harder to fake without being obvious. Nevertheless, biometric markers can generally be spoofed in the same way as a tattoo. Think for example finger prints: Any person leaves their fingerprints everywhere, so it's easy for an attacker to covertly obtain the whole set of their targets fingerprints. After that it's a simple matter of creating a silicon cover for their own finger to fool any fingerprint sensor.
So, if you want *real* security, you must use chips. The difference is that a chip is an *active* component; it can perform cryptographic computations by itself. This allows the chip to
* Tell the scanner its identity, and to
* **actually prove to the scanner that it's really that chip,**
* **without disclosing the secret key that's used for that proof.**
If the chip is built well, it cannot be copied without really, really expensive equipment, destroying the original in the process. As such, the greatest danger of using chips is, that someone's chip is taken away by force to be used by the attacker. Think: Kill the guards, cut out their chips, and enter whatever they were guarding. Impersonation is not impossible, but it becomes damn hard to cover up.
[Answer]
In the world of pets both tattoos and chips are already widely used as a means of marking animals so that if it is somehow lost to the owner it can be recognised and brought back.
Just to make it very clear - whatever method is used it contains merely an identifier that is linked to a database entries. Any solution where the agent (tattoo or chip) should contain also the data requiring updates is prone to too many errors and problems.
As far as I can see the general direction is to use chips rather than tattoos. And there are few good reasons for that:
1. Implanting a chip is far easier, less invasive and time consuming than putting a tattoo. I guess everyone knows these days how much trouble it is to make even a simple tattoo. Implanting a chip is a single simple injection with a chip itself being a bit larger than a single [rice grain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(animal)#/media/File:Microchip_rfid_rice.jpg). Also making a tattoo is rather painful. Again, implantation is simply an injection.
2. The chip lasts longer. Since it is using an RFID technology it does not require any power (the power is induced from a scanner to send back a signal). There is hardly anything that can break or fail. If it works it'll work for years and years. And it will always produce the same return signal. The tattoo is exposed to all the risk the skin is. It fades over time, gets blurry as the ink dissolves to some level, might become unreadable due to scars, burns etc. As a result it might even produce a different value than it had initially. Of course you might do a correction to a tattoo or even make a new one if the old is entirely unreadable but that brings us back to point one ;-)
3. Skin imperfections might make it difficult to effectively place a tattoo in a specific skin location. If you have a scar you can cover it with a tattoo of course but it won't be a precise one with sharp lines (as needed for bar codes). Similarly mole might cause it impossible to blacken a specific spot. I believe you should try using the same place for the identification tattoos to avoid multiple identities of a single person. A chip might be prone to similar problems (sometimes - but rarely it can actually even shift its position) but it's far easier to scan entire body with a proper scanner than to scan entire skin.
4. Chip resides under a skin, thus is invisible so it's less obvious. Of course it can work both as a benefit and a drawback depending on the goal to be achieved. But still if we're considering more humane option, I would consider something invisible better here.
Note, I'm not referring to artificial identification versus biometrics here as that is not what the OP has asked for. I'm also referring to the currently existing technology.
And guess what, not only the technology is in place, it has also already been enabled to people who wants to use it and are lucky enough (?) to have it within their range. Some [reading](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/us-tech-company-microchip-employees-first-three-square-market-wisconsin-a7856971.html) to find out more.
BTW, all my pets have chips implanted ;-)
[Answer]
If you're in a space-scenario, there's a good chance people have chips anyway - after all, it's the most reliably way to enable interfaces which react on your thoughts.
Depending on the situation, a barcode is heavily unreliable. Its main problem is that a barcode merely represents a bit of data - it's basically a number in a format that is easy to read for machines.
And just like any other data, you can copy it. Increasing the amount of data (i.e. making the tattoo more complex) is a failed idea as well. You can't just arbitrarily increase complexity, or else the tattoo will change over time.
So, a barcode alone isn't all that useful. Combining it with retina scans or the like doesn't make sense either, as the barcode would be the weakest link, and therefore be negligible.
If you still want to pull through with this idea, I would advise to make the ink nanobots: The tattoo would become a computer, capable of cryptographically save interaction, but also have a failback-mechanism for cases when no higher technology is available (or needed).
[Answer]
Tattoos might be ideal:
* They **need not be completely legible visually**, making them hard to copy without the wearers consent. Checksums or additional information may be incorporated in magnetic features of the ink (easily checkable by contact, impossible even at a slight distance), chemical composition of the ink may hold information and is esily checkable by Raman laser spectroscopy, inks of different colors can be set in close proximity, so only microscopic inspection will reveal there is more than one (mix) color. Multiple tattoos have to be pointed out by the wearer to make sense of more private information. By making the application process more technical, the bar is higher for the inevitable forgers.
* **They are on the outside, making them much easier to be checked for manipulations**. Anything implanted will communicate on radio or light frequencies without the communication partner in direct contact - this is ideal for man-in-the-middle attacks or spoofing by having powerful hardware in the background that can outcompute the partner. Touch-only reading of a tattoo with additional security features ensures that the read person will be aware of the reading, and the reader will be sure that the thing she is trying to read is actually the one doing the talking.
* **They can transport a tidy amount of information**. Think QR-codes.This would come in handy in scenarios where databases are prone to error, forgery and viruses. The tattoo **is** the document, not just a database key. The data may also be centrally stored somewhere, but the primary document is right there. Just like paper money can be forged today, this will inevitably lead to some people polishing their CV by adding entries, but if the positioning of the tattoo is also information, this will be very tricky ("So, Mr. Anderson, you are saying that between your stint in McDo in 2456 (elbow) and your present application in 2458 (lower biceps) you served in the Space Force, were VP of PR at PwC and built a company, all the while suffering a burn on that prison shaped spot on your forehead?"). **Blockchain!** (well ok, that's not how that works... but it's a chain of sorts!) Detected forgeries are highlighted, and a forger-spot (one unlikely to suffer large scale damage, like the white of the eyes) is populated with the details of the crime.
* **They can be made very resistant to theft**. While the close-proximity stipulations are all well and good for the normal minded forgers, more bloody minded criminals may be open to removing interesting tattoos wholesale, for later analysis. While this largely the same predicament that chip-wearers face, some of the same precautions can be taken: Materials that are dependent on good oxygenation (now the robbers need a medreactor to put the skin in), Steganography (which of these is his Club-card?), and others.
[Answer]
Since you're mining asteroids, I'm assuming we're talking a society that's at least 100 years ahead of us. In that case, **bar codes are fairly pointless**.
Facial recognition today is good enough to work for many consumer grade applications. In 100+ years, it will be flawless. And there certainly will be better biometric methods that come along. Perhaps instant, remote DNA analysis. Bar codes on people in this situation bring very little to the table.
Bar codes might still be useful for tracking equipment, but they will be a decidedly old school method of doing so.
] |
[Question]
[
# Background
In a country with similar demographics to Switzerland, the gun ownership is high for the population (60 - 70 guns per hundred people) while the police force are not armed on a regular basis and have small armed police units (armed response) that will tackle gun crime.
There is a low level of crime at this point due to the ban on firearms recently being lifted (all weapons are allowed under the law in this fictitious country, with the exception of explosives).
**How would a country such as the one described police this country where there is high gun ownership?**
[Answer]
## Domestic Disturbance
Most police occurrences are not violent crimes, your cops would be trained to descalate situations, act as a mediator between the people, and know how to administer first aid.
Forget the idea of the armed, armored military police kicking doors and shooting at suspects, you will have the friendly cop next door, they guy that should know everyone on his patrol route and is always ready to lend a helping hand.
There will be some cops trained to respond to violent crimes, but those will be a small force of highly trained specialists, maybe even attached to the armed forces.
## Free Drugs
Lots of countries have showed the positive effects of having legalized drugs available to the population, besides this would allow your police force to avoid wasting time with teenagers that decided to smoke some weed.
## Guns, not ammo
If you are following Switzerland style, you could have citizens allowed to have any weapons they desire, but ammo is highly regulated and most people would be able to have ammo only in shooting clubs.
[Answer]
**Deputize the citizenry.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mTrUG.jpg)
<http://mayberry.wikia.com/wiki/Goodbye,_Sheriff_Taylor>
A police officer can deputize citizens for extra help.
<http://thelegalgeeks.com/2015/08/11/bat-jim-is-the-hero-we-deserve/>
>
> Private persons may assist law-enforcement officers in effecting
> arrests and preventing escapes from custody when requested to do so by
> the officer. When so requested, a private person has the same
> authority to effect an arrest or prevent escape from custody as the
> officer making the request. He does not incur civil or criminal
> liability for an invalid arrest unless he knows the arrest to be
> invalid. Nothing in this subsection constitutes justification for
> willful, malicious or criminally negligent conduct by such person
> which injures or endangers any person or property, nor shall it be
> construed to excuse or justify the use of unreasonable or excessive
> force.
>
>
>
In your world, if a law and order matter requires firearms, there is fortunately a large body of armed private citizens that the unarmed officer can deputize to help in the matter. Carrying a weapon means consenting to be deputized to use it in time of civic need.
If you deputize a number of individuals this might be equivalent to raising a militia.
[Answer]
In a "Switzerland like nation", there might be a cultural way of explaining this.
In the *real* Switzerland, there is a universal draft for all male citizens. If you are not a conscientious objector (can't remember the proper term in Switzerland), then you receive standard military training and are issued an automatic rifle. Once you complete your term of service, you are released to the Reserve and take your automatic rifle home with you. I'm not clear if this has changed, but it also used to be common for each citizen solder to have 200 rounds of ammunition at home. They were encouraged to go to the local range and practice, and could purchase replacement rounds at a low cost to keep their stockpile at home to 200 rounds.
The Swiss Citizen Militia means the population has an almost 100% availability of automatic firearms among the population (even the United States has nowhere near that availability of automatic firearms, so called "assault weapons" is a scare term to describe semi automatic firearms derived from AR-15 platforms), yet some of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world. This is largely because each citizen has been carefully instructed and drilled in the proper use of firearms through military service.
When the United States was more rural in nature (really up until the 1950's), most homes had firearms of some sort, hunting rifles or shotguns. Proper use of firearms was a family responsibility, with fathers, uncles and grandparents teaching their children and minor family members (usually through taking them hunting). In fact, this can be found in other places and times, if you read Conan-Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories, Watson is routinely armed, and there are some occasions where they actually access firearms or armed help from other people in London, England. Try doing that now and it will be a different story.
So an armed population does not necessarily equate to a dangerous one, so long as firearms owners are trained and educated in the proper use of firearms. The police in Switzerland are not alarmed in any way that any house they visit has an automatic rifle (they have one too), because they have a virtual certainty that the owner is a responsible citizen.
[Answer]
The country could be policed just like any other country.
>
> Police: Hey you, stop right there!
>
>
> Pedestrian: What is the problem, sir?
>
>
> Police: That was an illegal jaywalk you just performed. Do you have a
> license to perform illegal jaywalks?
>
>
> Pedestrian: Why yes, sir, I do. Here you go, have a look at this.
>
>
> Police: This license is expired! You are under arrest for "jaywalking
> with an invalid license." Put your hands behind your back.
>
>
> Pedestrian does so.
>
>
> Police cuffs and jails the heinous criminal.
>
>
>
Just like that.
A high percentage of gun ownership among the populace does not change anything that just happened. Most of the time, the firearm possessed by police does not even enter the equation and has no part in an event.
## Potential problems?
Now let us examine the other extreme, where someone might think this could actually be a problem.
Assume a violent criminal possesses a firearm and that the law enforcement officer does not. This is the scenario in which trouble could arise. But think about that statement for a moment... "a violent criminal possesses a firearm." If this person is a violent criminal, then the fact that firearms are entirely legal is irrelevant. This person very well might have a firearm even if they were not legal.
So the exchange which could be problematic is not unique to a country where a pedestrian has a gun but police do not. In fact, this situation actually happens in reality. I recall an event, in London if I recall, a few years back in which two criminals were armed with a knife and a gun, and the local police, being unarmed, could do nothing but shout at them until the armed police unit arrived. The criminals were free to shoot at everyone until that time.
## Potential benefits?
Now let's look at this from a different angle, about the possible benefit.
In the situation I mentioned in London, if a nearby pedestrian was armed with a gun, they could have helped the defenseless police instead of waiting and risking more lives. Or, if it is illegal in your hypothetical country for a pedestrian to do this, they could hand their gun over to the unarmed police to use in this life threatening situation, expecting it back after.
In fact, armed civilians have helped police in the past. There are instances of criminals attacking police and having them pinned down, where some nearby pedestrian has shot the criminal and saved the police.
Also, in a famous case where a pair of robbers wearing heavy full body armor were in a shootout with police, the police shots were not harming the criminals because of their heavy body armor. The police needed something better, and a local gun shop nearby handed over higher powered weapons for the police to use in the fight.
Also, in countries where firearms are illegal, the crime rates are generally not lower. Some people claim otherwise, pointing to gun-specific crimes being down, but the violent crime rates overall are generally not lower. In some such places, the crime rates are even higher, and interviewed criminals in prison have stated that they feel safer committing their crimes in those areas because they know the populace are not armed.
## Conclusion
So how could they police the country? Well, they could allow civilians to take part in the policing. Or there could be a law that anyone who is armed and not in immediate danger must surrender their weapon to the police to use against a nearby threat (or it could just be a voluntary thing).
This could be a good thing as well, as it could help to reduce abuse by police. In most situations, the police are armed and those they are interacting with are not, so the police are able to easily bully people. This happens often. If you get too far out of line, they will draw their weapons. If they get too far out of line and you respond in your defense, they will draw their weapons. In your situation, people would be more free from the threat of police violence.
If you have a responsible populace, similar to Switzerland, this will likely be a more peaceful and safe place to live than what most of us are used to.
## Some points to consider
Alexander asks,
>
> "The problem here is not the legality of firearms, it's abundance of
> them. In day-to-day operations, police has to react to a number of
> incidents. Some of those incidents are involving guns. If number of
> those incidents are high (more than armed policemen can handle),
> should police dispatch unarmed officers to deal with them?"
>
>
>
That is a good question.
That depends on what you mean by "involving guns." If guns are being fired at people, then no, sending unarmed officers is just dumb. If by "involving guns" you mean "Police are responding to a non-violent crime, and the suspect just happens to have a pistol at their side or a rifle over their back," assuming you have a mature population, then yes, go ahead and send unarmed officers. The suspect is armed. So what? Police deal with armed suspects all the time without even knowing it in US states where open carry is illegal and everyone carries concealed; that has not been problematic.
---
Based on comments, I think there might be some confusion about my stance.
Obviously, it would be dumb to enter a dangerous situation while unprepared for it. I am often the first to say that we should be prepared for anything. I do not think it is wise to force the general police to be unarmed. The question states that there are unarmed police, so I am answering from that reality.
What I said is only meant to apply to people who have not been identified as violent. If you have any reason at all to believe that there could be violence, then yes it would be dumb to be unarmed. But the mere presence of a gun is not reason to believe that there could be violence. If the jaywalker in my answer's example had an AK-47 over their back but acted friendly, there is no reason to assume the worst. If they are known violent, or acting aggressive, or performed some worse crime that tends to lead to violence, I'd be concerned.
Similarly, if I was in Switzerland I would not feel in danger responding to a call where the suspect was armed but not deemed violent; but if I was in Mexico or certain Middle East areas or a known dangerous section of a major metropolitan area, I would feel in danger responding to any call, whether I knew a gun was present or not and I would not go unarmed.
Common sense is necessary. One of my points is just that the mere presence of a gun is not, in and of itself, cause for alarm. The appropriate response would be situational.
[Answer]
**This *is* the non-USA reality (more or less)**
Aaron has pretty much nailed it in his answer. Looking at Australia - an incident in which a police officer draws a firearm on duty is highly likely to make the *national* news and will definitely involve paperwork for the officer involved. An incident in which anyone is actually shot by the police (fatally or otherwise) *always* make national headlines. Given how often they are used, Australian police firearms are a psychological rather than a physical weapon.
However, there are relatively few incidences of firearms violence, despite:
* the average beat cop being a mediocre marksmanship (trust me - I used to compete against them in inter-services pistol competitions)
* the vast majority of privately owned firearms in Australia are rifles or shotguns, meaning that if firearms ever are involved the average beat cop is outgunned and definitely outranged
While the laws regarding gun ownership became relatively draconian following the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, private firearm ownership (both legal and illegal) continues. The key differences with the United States are:
* Firearms are socially unacceptable in most locales. No one openly carries firearms in public except for police and security guards for armoured cars. (Most private security are not allowed to carry firearms.) Even the military keep their weapons out of sight most of the time outside of training areas.
* Firearms *ownership* laws are not the same as firearms *carriage* laws. Laws can allow the populace to own rifles, but this does not stop laws requiring those rifles to be securely locked in a safe while stored or in a locked container while in transit and only brought out for cleaning or actual use on a designated range or permitted hunting area.
* Massive police response. As stated above, most civilians with firearms (legal or illegal) will have firepower that outguns what the poorly armed, indifferently trained beat cops or (mostly) unarmed security guards have available. So police and private security training is focused on *calling for backup immediately*. If the threat cannot be talked down immediately, this means that almost *any* firearm threat will result in a special response group being called out. In extreme situations (terrorism or something that looks like it) the police can call on special forces - no constitutional rules against that in Australia or most other countries. The criminals know that open possession of firearms will draw down more heat than they want, so they generally avoid it.
* Police culture. Australian police officers do not go for their guns except in extremis. As Sasha noted, police are trained to de-escalate situations by talking people down. If force is necessary it is far easier to justify use of pepper spray or a baton at the inevitable subsequent enquiry. (Australian police are not all saints and there are abuses, but firearm involvement in those is very rare.)
In fact one positive aspect for police in the proposed country with widespread private firearms ownership would hopefully be a more educated populace. The majority of Australians have knowledge of firearms based on what they see in Hollywood productions, leading to ridiculous criticisms when police do use firearms. ("Why didn't the policeman shoot the gun out of his hand instead of killing him?" "Why did they shoot someone who *only* had a knife charging them at short range?") Better education would hopefully alleviate at least some ignorance in the media and their audience.
In summary - policing a country with widespread firearms ownership is quite feasible with low levels of police armament with the right cultural foundation.
[Answer]
Assuming you're looking for a fictional answer, here's one from a near future.
Assume:
* Everyone well-identified (RFID or equivalent, plus facial recognition and biometrics)
* Internet everywhere (perpetually tracking the location of every identified person)
* A cashless society; with transactions permitted/authenticated based on "who you are" (and not so much on "what you have" -- so that unlike cash and so on it can't be stolen)
The penalties for being a criminal are then higher, IMO, almost insurmountable:
* Easy to show that it was you who done it
* A court order or arrest warrant could cut you off from any and all social commerce (shopping, food, lodging, public and private buildings and transportation vehicles) -- and dispatch a SWAT team to your location whenever you show up on the grid, if you were a fugitive
This could be especially so if you were a violent criminal (using a "gun" to resist law enforcement).
An outlaw would have to, I don't know, maybe, live in the woods like Robin Hood or some kind of cave man -- that's not really feasible IMO, especially given modern surveillance tech.
---
Another option (is this one even more utopic?) might be to ensure that the entire populace is wealthy, healthy, fairly happy, well-educated, fairly drug-free, treated for mental illness, and civic-minded (is that Switzerland again?), maybe they'd be mostly law-abiding of their own accord.
---
Hurry up with self-driving cars. Nearly half of the [criminal convictions in Switzerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Switzerland#Types_of_convictions) appears to be for "Major Violation of Traffic Laws"; if people stopped driving maybe that problem would go away.
[Answer]
Note that the sentencing from criminal offences is likely to affect how even relatively dangerous criminal react to police. If you are already going to face decades in prison for, let's say burglary, shooting a cop is basically nothing on top of that. After all, humans live relatively short time, longer sentences after a while are all basically just the same for the criminal.
So if we compare two situations:
Caught criminal is either likely to be shot by an armed cop or face very long sentence or caught criminal is not going to be shot by cop and will face more manageable sentence, the criminal in first example has high motivation to actually shoot the cop. In the second example, there is not much to win for the criminal by shooting the cop, especially if that crime is still punished relatively strictly.
That in addition factors mentioned in other answers can make the situation feasible.
[Answer]
I don't see how such a situation would arise in the first place.
If you look at the [world ranking of estimated civilian guns per capita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country), you'll note that it's the United States and then everyone else. Switzerland, incidentally, which is frequently brought up has a lower rate than Canada, which some people (ie, Americans) overestimate when it comes to gun control. Anyway, if you're talking about a modern country, the majority of people would live in cities and quite honestly owning a gun in an urban is more bother than it's worth, especially if, as stated, a gun ban was recently lifted. Some people may rush out to get a firearm just because, but the majority of people in cities would not. So it's difficult to see how the ownership number would get so high.
Moreover, there is no way in hell there'd be freedom to own everything save explosives. Again, the United States (or at least some components of it) are very much the exception in the breadth of firearms allowed on the civilian market. For essentially everyone else there'd be restrictions on firearms in place, and I don't see how your country would be any different.
[Answer]
During the preceding years, the populace became overwhelmingly law-abiding, which means that the police also became overwhelmingly law-abiding (because getting the former without the latter is a trick nobody has been able to pull off).
So now even though anyone who took it into their minds could mow down the first few cops who tried to restrain him, very few people will.
I cannot point you to a reference—and therefore this tale may be fictitious—but I did read an anecdote in which a group of buddies were riding around town (in Africa, IIRC) in a convertible, drinking and yukking it up and being generally disruptive. A policeman approached them and told them that their behavior was unacceptable and that they were to settle down and be quiet if they knew what was good for them. The buddies complied and during the entire exchange spoke to the policeman with all of the courtesy they could muster.
The policeman was the only person in the encounter who was *not* armed.
That's the picture of a law-abiding nation.
---
**Addendum**
I'm going to go out a bit farther and say that policing a state with unarmed police requires a populace that is highly law-abiding whether the regular citizens have guns or not. This is because the populace in general outnumbers the police by one to two orders of magnitude. You could say that a society can dispense with arming their police only if they are almost able to dispense with their police entirely.
[Answer]
# Take a look at England and Wales before 1920.
TL;DR Policing in England and Wales was effective, even though police was not routinely armed and absolutely anyone could obtain firearms. Use their policing methods as an inspiration.
Police on duty [generally were not armed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_United_Kingdom#Great_Britain) (there were some exceptions). There were no effective laws limiting firearms ownership. Even criminals could legally buy firearms (before 1903 even kids, intoxicated and "of unsound mind"¹). Machine guns were available for sale. And yet the homicide rate was [around 1 per 100,000 people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade) - about the same [as today](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/yearendingmarch2015/chapter2homicide#offences-recorded-as-homicide). At the same time US had [over 6 times higher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade#1920s) homicide rate. So I'd say England and Wales were being policed pretty successfully.
There is a known event where initially unarmed policemen pursuing armed robbers were [borrowing pistols from passersby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham_outrage#Chase). Some members of the public also opened fire at the criminals.
¹[After 1903 they could obtain firearms, just not legally purchase them.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_policy_in_the_United_Kingdom#Pistols_Act_1903)
] |
[Question]
[
There's a major interstellar war going on. Both parties are highly technologically advanced and have thousands of warships of sizes varying between 10 meters long and 1 km long.
### For both parties:
* Instantaneous transmission of information is possible, even if something is light years away. (Due to the Handwave-particle Transmitter™.)
* Faster than light travel is possible. (Thanks to travel through Handwave-space.)
* Artificial Intelligence is *not* achieved. They have extremely advanced computers, but not *truly* (meaning creative, reasoning, inventive) intelligent ones.
However, they do have extremely advanced robotics and technology in general.
* As an example of the previous point: They have robots that are at least as dexterous as living beings, and can be remotely controlled perfectly by a living being in another location. (Through some Virtual Reality-suit or something.) Such a robot could perform repair work, etc.
* They want to avoid casualties (at least in their own ranks.) Death tolls look very bad on statistics and will upset the public. They really value the lives of their own people.
* They are really committed to the war and do not want to surrender.
Spaceships are flying around shooting at each other and blowing each other up. If there are living beings on board, this means they will occasionally die when a ship gets damaged or destroyed.
In my world, these warships have living crews. (The battles become sort of boring and unemotional otherwise.)
**But why?** Why wouldn't these ships be unmanned drones controlled by living beings in (a) safe location(s)? (Or at least safer than the middle of a battle.)
[Answer]
One easy answer is communication limitations. You do need command and control to have uninterrupted access to the front line. Maybe you have instantaneous comms over vast distances, but are they uninterruptable comms? Is it possible to jam an enemy's comm system and interrupt his ability to direct a drone ship? If so, a human-controlled ship will ALWAYS outsmart a non-AI drone ship.
Computers are great, but they have major limitations compared to a biological brain. The kinds of things we do with pattern recognition by instinct are very hard to replicate. Assuming you don't have perfect AI technology, you will always need a real person in command somewhere that cannot be jammed by enemy actions (like inside the ship).
[Answer]
## FTL communications jamming
Both sides have a device that can block all FTL communications within a certain range. No more remote control tech, the decisions need to be made right there on board the (main) ship of the fleet.
## A Moratorium on autonomous killing by machines
Whether it was a Skynet or Geth rebellion, someone did make machines that could more or less think for themselves, and it went very very badly. A galaxy-wide convention has been adopted that forbids computers from deciding to activate a lethal weapon. This means living beings need to pull the trigger on all that awesome weaponry.
These two factors together mean that a living crew needs to be in close proximity to the fight, preferably in the best defended ship in the fleet. Drones are fine for scouting and combat operations in the vicinity of a mothership (where they can be remote controlled with unjammable point-to-point communications), but outside that range any independent ship needs to have a commander/gunner if it wants to fire its weapons, because FTL comms are sure to go as the first sign of hostility.
[Answer]
Jamming and bandwidth are already great answers, honor and philosophy too. I'd use them. But allow me to introduce other reasons you can use with them.
# Sick and crippled
So remote ship is less reliable and much more expensive. At the same time you have citizens that can't really contribute to war and society to much due to health issues. But their brains are good and you have neural interface. Let them fight and earn glory. And maybe honorable death.
# Convicts
Same as above - cost and reliability. You can offer convicts shorter sentences. And keep enough drone equipment on ship to make it kill crew and come back home in case of mutiny.
Of course you don't want *slaves* for this. Rather, convicts from civil fleet, already trained, who would *want* to serve shorter time in military than spend longer years in prison. Especially if, due to war, some crimes are now considered more severe. For example eating more than your rations. Military personnel is usually better fed, and inmates - worst, so this choice is even more tempting. Also, military career is good choice for someone whose criminal past prevent getting any other decent job.
# Warrior caste
You see, they evolved to be a bit different from rest of their own race. In times of peace their lives are quite short. Hormone produced when they are in danger works as a youth serum. Sadly, synth substitutes aren't near as good. Thus, you have to keep your people in danger to allow them to gain experience. Or you would use other castes, but they lack what it takes to be a soldier: controlled aggression, will to kill etc. And warriors **want** this. Who wouldn't want to live long time, virtually forever?
# Theft
Drone can be hacked and used by enemy. You can afford to lose small ones now and then, as you also "earn" some when your tech has upper hand. But you can't afford to lose big warship. Especially in large formation. It could do a lot of shooting before "friend or foe" systems would allow others to shoot at it.
# Damage control
You can not have ftl com in every robot. So in case of one lucky shot in the antenna, only people on board can be creative enough to make this piece of junk spaceworthy again, with resources they happen to have.
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**Adrenaline!**
Let's assume for brevity that human minds make better combat decisions than computers. Humans are less predictable and intuition is real and relevant on the battlefield. So it is not an issue of whether human pilots should control combat ships, but rather where those pilots should sit.
Drone pilots sit far behind the front line in safely shielded bunkers, on padded couches, in air conditioned comfort. When they loose a particular fight, they get up and stretch, maybe get a cup of coffee, then log into another drone and get back to work.
Fighter pilots get crammed into what space is left after the engines and armaments have taken all the comfortable spots. When they loose a fight, their atoms disperse across the infinite expanse as they cease to exist.
There is no comparison between the motivation of a drone pilot to a fighter pilot and that difference shows in their combat performance. Fighter pilots will do superhuman things in order to survive and thus remain a living human.
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# Economics
Sure, losing soldiers is bad, but losing **money** is worse!
Remote control to the level needed will be expensive. Shipping people is cheaper. (Note, given the cost of life support this point is somewhat doubtful. You might want to find some explanation like FTL communication needing some rare component that is hard to make or find)
Also, people who sit in some remote location tend to be somewhat sloppy with their hardware. People sitting *inside* their hardware will be much more careful with it. Less ships lost that way.
This all sounds very cynical, but wars are often decided by the ability to outproduce your enemy. Then you need this level of cynicism to win the war.
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# Colony Foundation
If this war is fought on a large enough galactic scale, and settlement of enemy planets is your eventual goal, then it might be too wasteful in terms of time to have to send two waves of ships(robotic warships, then colony vessels only after the battle is won). Instead, have warships with male+female crews that can serve as colonists/administrators immediately upon victory(depending on whether the losing party will be completely wiped out, or just conquered).
Source: Ender's Game
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Assuming there is reliable FTL communications, there are still several limitations that might demand a "being" in the loop.
Firstly, it isn't clear from the OP's post that communications are 100% reliable or unjammeable. Even using quantum entanglement would invoke the risk of having quantum decoherence breaking the FTL comms link. This might even be a problem without enemy action, given the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics.
A second issue would be bandwidth. Since you are presumably creating a space opera scenario with a multitude of ships, each potentially carrying drones, missiles and perhaps utility vessels, there will be thousands or millions of "channels" needed and each "channel" would need to have a huge bandwidth to carry detailed data to the controllers. Assuming quantum entanglement, you could easily expend all your entangled particles and need to bring the fleets home to restock. If there is an analogy to radios, you will run into the same sorts of issues that plague the sorts of networks in major cities. Even wired Internet providers have bandwidth issues when a multitude of people are online gaming or downloading movies and streaming music.
FTL comms might also have issues with casualty. This depends on how the OP plans to handwave this issue, but theoretically, and FTL comms system could have the ships communicating to the "past" and the fleet controllers might not be able to determine what is actually happening since they will be looking into other frames of reference. The action might be in the past or the future compared to where the controller is, so their commands will become irrelevant to the action.
So having a live crew on board either directly or in a command and control ship somewhere in the deployed constellation of warships will overcome many of these limitations, and allow for fleet action to take place.
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**Nothing beats the experience of being there**
Even if you have uninterrupted FTL capabilities, there would be a lot that you just can't see, feel, hear, experience. Your ships would need so many sensors and so many automatons, that you would still be "crewing" them, even if from afar. But you wouldn't get the tactile experience signifying trouble or allowing your "gut" to win the day.
It's the same reason our multi-million dollar fighters aren't remote controlled. Drones are one thing - relatively inexpensive, limited mission scope - but a fighter or a bomber or a recon aircraft needs a human pilot to be truly effective.
**You don't want your tech to fall into enemy hands**
What if your signal gets jammed or the generators are taken off line or the engines fail? What if the enemy has a stealth technology you don't possess and they manage to board your ship or disable it from the outside? Sure you could post killbots throughout the ship, but what turns them on, or off for that matter? Regardless, if you've lost or are losing control, how do you stop the enemy from towing your tech off the battlefield? You might be able to initiate a self destruct - assuming you know you need to and have the capability - then again, maybe not. When the self destruct is manual and a human hand can push it, there aren't any "maybes".
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Despite these aliens's technological advancement, **they may not have a place to call home.** That is to say that either they expended their home planets resources to such an extent that it is no longer habitable, or they lack some crucial resource (perhaps required for building the machines used for FTL travel etc) and are on the hunt for pastures green. Furthermore, in a universe with faster than light travel, there really is no where to hide. Both sides "residential ships" would be very vulnerable to attacks from ships which can travel faster than you can see them coming. The only effective way to remain safe was to weaponize all manned vehicles.
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**Interstellar defense is difficult**
Both militaries are armed with relatively-small, (compared to a city or planet, at least) fast-moving (FTL-capable) ships. And while they can field thousands of such ships, that's likely not enough ships to effectively blockade a planet or solar system.
In fact, with the material requirements to build such ships, it's likely that any particular solar system would be unable to produce enough ships to do so. Gathering resources from other systems has the result of needing to protect those systems as well to prevent tactical disruption of your fleet-building efforts and eradication of any mining colonies.
This means their colonies and homeworlds are soft targets for whatever population-killing attacks the other side wishes to muster. (Starting with ramming an unmanned ship at FTL speeds directly into the opposition's homeworld/sun and scaling up.)
Given the above, the two sides have presumably resorted to 'Mutually Assured Destruction' tactics, with each craft manned to ensure that they can continue to battle their opponents even with ground control glassed over.
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Something like this happens in Stephen Baxter's "Exultant", and the reason given is kinda philosophical: if it's drones that do all your fighting, all your winning, all your losing, all your dying, then in what sense is it YOUR war? How are the victories YOURS? Without the human (or whatever biological species) being *physically involved* in the battle, then, well, you're basically just a Robot Wars competitor.
And this need not be a concern that only troubles the philosophy professors back on the homeworld. It can be intentional social engineering / propaganda. "Supporting the troops" gives the population back home an emotional connection to the war that they otherwise wouldn't have. And yes, on the one hand that can be a bad thing if you're shipping people home in body bags to grieving widows and children, but on the other hand it can be a good thing if, as Plutarch wrote of the Pyrrhic War:
>
> the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men,
> not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even
> from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with
> the conflict
>
>
>
And then you've got all the possible technical reasons other people have brought up: someone to work the ship if comm jamming happens, an emergency store of Adam & Eve settlers, etc.
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## Honour, religion or philosophy
All irrational, but all reasons which have been used in history to go to war. If the participants are this irrational, then they may well also be irrational in terms of how they fight their wars.
More likely though:-
## Because the people are on the move
Other answers have said "put the pilots somewhere safe". This assumes there *is* somewhere safe. Planets tend not to move around very much, and tend to be hard to defend (targetted asteroid strike being the obvious weapon of choice, as per numerous fictional sources). If you want to keep your people safe, the only real way is to emulate the WH40K Eldar and live on a colony ship/fleet. Or perhaps you're emulating Battlestar Galactica and escaping a first-strike attack which destroyed your homeworld. Either way, people are in the fleets because that's where those people are now living.
Of course they wouldn't be in the individual little fighters - if you've got instant comms, those would always be drones. But the major colony ships are likely to be full of people.
Probably there'll be a fleet of colony ships rather than one big one. If FTL drives and other kit are relatively cheap, your typical ship is likely to be village-sized, complete with recreational facilities and families (because this is a community, not just a barracks for an army). If it's relatively expensive, the break-even point is likely to have more people per ship.
The corollary to this is that a smaller ship is likely to have less defensive capabilities, because they don't have the resources to buy, build, maintain or man them. So smaller ships are more likely to get into trouble. But if you're more spread out then the fleet as a whole are less likely to be wiped out.
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## Because Meat can improvise
Think about Apollo 13. The spacecrafts electrical power system was completely crippled, and with no power to the nav computers was a dead ship. However, Apollo 13 had backup computers running on an auxilary power system - By which I mean a human crew that eats food. The ship might have been dead but the crew was alive, kicking, and highly motivated to get home.
There's also the lesser known case of Apollo 11, where one of the lunar landers electrical switches was damaged. Without that switch, the Ascent engine could not fire, and the LEM would be stuck on the surface. Again, meat saved the day - by jamming the metal tip of a pin into the broken switch, and completing the circuit.
So, while your alien crew might be in a reactor-dead ship, its engineers will still be alive and breathing, working tirelessly to get it back online. Which brings me to another point.
## It probably won't be a fight to the death
On the ocean, you don't need to sink a ship to remove it from the fight. Consider the battle between the HMS Hood and the Bismarck, or more importantly their supporting ships the HMS Prince of Wales and Prinz Eugen. During the battle, the Prince of Wales took severe damage and suffered multiple turret malfunctions, forcing her to retreat. Even though it wasn't destroyed, it was effectively no longer a factor for months after.
In fact, destroying the HMS Hood is probably what led to the Bismarcks own destruction - The entire royal navy dropped what it was doing to avenge the Hood. Had the hood been mauled and retreated, there wouldn't have been the same bloodlust to find the Bismarck.
Now consider the USS Cole. A single powerful, point-blank bomb blast crippled all of the ships systems, and was so extensively damaged it needed to be hauled home by a salvage vessel. Were it a battle, sinking the Cole would've been a waste of time and ammunition.
So, like the title says, it won't be a fight to the death. To win a battle you just have to smack your enemy around until they either run away or stop moving. In the event you cripple them, you have a golden opportunity to salvage some intact-*ish* enemy technology and intelligence. Also, if you're in an FTL setting and don't want to have some kind of warp-disruptor, there's very little you can do to keep the enemy from running away when things go south.
Between Meats ability to improvise and the reality that you don't need to atomize your enemy to get rid of them, it makes sense to have a crewed vessel.
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A good example of the answer to this question is based in Earths current militarizes. Even though leading nations have ability to for instance make fully unmanned fighting aircraft. Man still has a human ego to contend with. Man can not accept at this time that release of control to AI is the next step in evolution.
We have pilots that must take the fight to the enemy win or lose, of course they are trained to be or at least think that they are invincible (some times referred to as John Wayne mentality).
Of course to believe any society that achieves the levels of interstellar travel and communications as you mention would still fight wars themselves or send out their peoples for such activity would likely not exist as they would have the ability for cyborgs or humanoid construction to handle dangerous tasks.
On the other hand remote controlled items can be disrupted or taken over.
So some tmes you just need to do things yourself!
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## Maybe it is not for technological reasons?
So just because your race is technologically advanced, doesn't mean philosophy has changed. They maybe holding onto archaic ideologies such as personal honour, or glory in battle?
Or maybe they feel that by controlling a drone in a remote location will cause the to become desensitised and to ready to pull the trigger? This is fine in deep space while fighting other drone craft, but could become problematic closer to inhabited planets.
Is it a case that the pilots are convicted criminals and forcing them to fight is a way to deal with over crowding in prisons? (Cliché, I know.)
Could it be a right of passage? Not to be on a battleship persay, but to spend time in space, traveling between colonies, navigating your own way. Now because of the war, that journey is on a warship. Could it be the start of a new tradition and the reason why one side won't surrender? If they do, they will deprive the next generation of the right to prove themselves in battle?
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**Hacking:** Because maybe the more effective way for war is hacking enemy warships but that cannot be done through Handwave-space because require "wire-jamming" or regular EM-transmission. Warships are expensive if you can hack them then you can re-use them. Hacking can be largely automated but require someone on the terminal.
**Economic:** Losing your ship is basically going to kill you economically so people prefer to stay on their ships.
**Overpopulation:** People gets advantages by living in ships simply because living elsewhere is more expensive. (Actually much people live in campers without a fixed home).
[Answer]
~~**Maintainance crew**~~
~~For bigger ships: Who changes the oil? Who fixes the broken electric cables? Who refills the weapons? Remember those ships are far away and it costs fuel/money to get them back and it is not possible when the calbe of the motor needs to be fixed.~~
**Limited bandwidth**
So you managed to produce robots which can do this do, you need sensors that transmits the data to your base and the commands back. Because of the limited AI it must be controlled by humans/aliens. The transmitted amount of data would be too much.
**Communication interruptions**
The communication might be interrupted when flying through asteroid fields or by jamming enemies.
**Leaking your location**
The enemy has sensors to detect the location of communication. You have a hard game to play in war when the enemy knows all your ships positions. Most tactics would not work and he knows where the ships are or where they are not.
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## Politics
In order for the general populace to socially accept and support the ongoing war, you need something to keep them vested in the war, especially when things are generally going well for said general populace. Something that makes it real for them, despite not being on the lines or (usually) in any real danger or threat. A perceived threat, in other words, something for them to feel outraged about. This tends to be provided in the form of:
**Casualties**
A few deaths here or there are just the thing to outrage a general populace. Especially if those deaths happen to be amongst one's political or social opponents so that you can take advantage of the resulting swell of support, and power vacuums. The brave beings in uniform who are sacrificing for your freedom is often good for a generation or three. If you manage to pick the oppositions Dudley-Do-Right, they may still sacrifice themselves for the greater good, despite knowing your intentions.
**Martyrs**
A sub-set of casualties, getting just the right person killed off will often shift the entire political and social mindset of an entire generation or two. Just be certain you leave that bit of uniform from the enemy officer where it will definitely be found.
**Terrorists**
Another sub-set of casualties, When the former two aren't working, bringing a little mayhem home to the masses will often make your point. Nothing gets people worked up in support for your cause like offing a few of their own with the enemy to take the blame for it. Some even let the actual enemy into non-critical areas to let them enemy actually do the deed for you.
## Strategy
On the flip side, if all the slaved robotic units are controlled out of crewed centralized C&C units, then those units become the prime targets. Take out a C&C unit and an entire squadron or battalion may go inoperative.
## Technology
Maybe the remote system causes unavoidable feedback? So even if the battle is taking place far far away, the destruction of the robotic avatar causes some sort of psychic shock, from which they need to recover (if they can) before returning to the lines of battle. Perhaps only a limited sub-set of the population is 'compatible' with the communications and control devices. If the feedback is severe enough, then perhaps crewed ships are preferable for all combat-live situations, and it is only safe to used remotely controlled units for purely non-combat, or even non-dangerous situations.
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**Decision Making**
Particularly given that:
>
> Artificial Intelligence is not achieved. They have extremely advanced
> computers, but not truly (meaning creative, reasoning, inventive)
> intelligent ones.
>
>
>
So you've got good computers, but no true AI. The implies that if the drone runs into a situation it hasn't been explicitly programmed for, it's going to either 1) make a suboptimal/wrong decision, 2) make no decision, or 3) attempt to communicate with an organic operator so that they can make a decision.
The first two outcomes are bad (with the first being potentially catastrophic if the wrong decision is something like 'start nuking friendly cities from orbit; it's the only way to be sure'), and the third doesn't work well even with instantaneous communication (especially if the instantaneous communication mechanism has a finite maximum throughput), as for an organic operator probably nothing is as effective as actually being there and seeing everything with your own optical receptors. A program that can't solve the situation for itself may also be unable to solve the problem of what information is actually relevant and important to solving the situation.
**Resistance to Hijacking**
If the drones can respond to instructions from an external operator, which I think is something they essentially *must* be able to do in the absence of true AI, they're vulnerable to technological hijacking. Your enemy doesn't have to fight your drones, they just have to reverse-engineer your communications mechanism or covertly take over one of your comm stations while your drone army is out looking for the enemy army. Then they turn your drone army against you, and it's game over pretty quick (unless it turns out that organics are actually superior fighters after all...meaning that in either case the drones were a bad idea to begin with).
At least with traditional ships piloted by organic crews, the only way to take one over is to actually face it in combat, overwhelm its defenses, and subjugate or kill its crew members. All while preventing them from doing something inconvenient, like rigging their ship to explode and take your boarding party and half your moon out with them.
**Resistance to Damage/Increased Autonomy**
Similarly, if the drones are reliant upon external operators, you've now given your entire army a very obvious weak point. All your enemy has to do is come up with a way of disabling (or jamming) the communications subsystem, and the drone is robbed of all external input and left to rely on its advanced but non-sentient computer programming. Making it still potentially dangerous, but also potentially easy to then completely disable by exploiting some flaw in the program (may be hard for your enemy to find, but it only takes one). Then they can gut your drones for material, or perhaps even reprogram them and send them back against you.
With embedded organics each ship is able to operate autonomously, even if communications are disrupted or disabled for extended periods of time. They can be cut off while continuing to pursue their mission independently, which is something that appears to have [even actually happened](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/02/a-japanese-soldier-who-continued-fighting-wwii-29-years-after-the-japanese-surrendered-because-he-didnt-know/).
**Fear of Losing**
The moment you go for a *purely* technological solution to warfare, you're basically declaring "whoever is smarter will win". It doesn't matter which side has the strongest warriors, the most committed populace, the largest army, or the best strategy. The entire war will come down to "am I smart enough to design and implement a technology that my opponent will be unable to crack". If they crack your technology, you lose. If they manage to field technology that you can't crack, you lose.
If both sides are about evenly matched technologically, maybe neither one wants to take the risk of making the war entirely about who can be the first to break the other's technology. Maybe they feel they'd be better off fighting a more traditional and/or multi-pronged fight, where being the smartest is still important but not an automatic "we win the war" scenario.
A pure drone army is basically an "all the eggs in one basket" kind of gambit. That may be a tough sell, particularly if either side is democratic.
**You Can Still Have Drones**
People are useful for the operational decision-making, and harder to subvert through technological means. But drones are small, numerous, expendable, and not burdened by having to devote significant space, energy, and mass to superfluous luxuries like life-support. Any ship that's capable of supporting a sizeable organic crew can *also* carry a large complement of drones.
So why not have both? Use the organics for the decision-making and operational concerns, and have them man the big weapons-systems, and have fleets of drones that can be deployed for things like point-defense, skirmishing with enemy warcraft, mining resources, search-and-rescue, and similar tasks. Drones could certainly be effective at all of those things without true AI, and with the organics on the ship only needing to direct them at a high level like "mine that asteroid" or "intercept that fighter group". Then you get a lot of the benefits of a drone army, while mitigating some of the most significant weaknesses of an all-drone approach.
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There's a very unpleasant and powerful weapon out there: maybe self-replicating nanobots that slowly but inescapably turn the target into mush. The details don't matter, but it kills you and hurts the whole time.
Treaties are in place forbidding the use of this weapon, but no one is going to care if you use it on a bunch of unintelligent robots. Fielding a drone army would just be a waste of money, because the forbidden weapon is more effective than anything else available.
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There is the possibility that these aliens bodies and minds are so incredibly advanced they can actually control the ship (by plugging into it, steering manually with their tentacles,highly advanced interface,etc.)
and calculate its movements faster than their computers. If they can send messages faster than the speed of light maybe they think faster than the speed of light?(Because that makes sense... .\_\_\_\_\_.)They could even be the ships because they are that just that cool. Or the ship that is being manned needed to be manned for some other reason such as colonizing a planet. If they were carrying there entire species on a massive carrier it wouldn't make sense to control it remotely when the pilots are already on board. But in the latter situation the small fighters would really have no reason to be manned.
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**Psychology**
Assuming the enemy don't have drones too... Maybe they were fighting with drones but found they lacked a certain charisma/psychological advantage.
For example, imagine a ship outgunning an enemy and negotiating surrender via visual communication like in Star Trek. They may have found that the enemy responded more favourably when they knew they were surrendering to a sentient crew rather than an empty ship. Maybe the enemy tended not to take demands / threats / persuasion seriously when they knew they were talking to some coward hundreds of light years away through an empty, soulless, robot ship.
[Answer]
Bandwidth.
Yes, you've got FTL comms, but you're underestimating the sheer amount of traffic that you'd need to run a drone. Imagine each drone has a 1080p camera - actually, 2 for binocular vision. Now throw in telemetry, etc. Multiply this up for every single drone, remote system and interface and you're not talking about a warship anymore - it's a broadcast ship which can't hide, can't fight and spends all it's energy beaming information back home.
AKA, a target.
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The simplest is sheer price. Handwavium FTL transmitters may exist, but that doesn't make it economic to equip them on a million warships.
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Frank Herbert's [**Dune**-verse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)) had a good example of this.
Due to the [Butlerian Jihad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) (a machine uprising), true AI had been not only outlawed, but almost treated as a sin. While battle computers and robots were used to assist in calculations and aid in training, they weren't allowed (by law and by social convention) to be truly intelligent.
This was so prevalent that an entire caste of humans arose: the [Mentats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentat). Mentats were trained (and used special drugs) to enhance their analytical abilities and replace computers.
If you have a religion/philosophy/legal/historical reason to never use a "true" AI - or, at least, keep it "out of the loop" in a life-or-death (even of an enemy) situation - then you use people (human or otherwise).
... which then gets back to quite a few of the other answers dealing with communications lag, hacking, etc. to show why remote control might not be the best answer.
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There is no honor in killing with drones. There is much honor in defeating opponents under a self imposed handicap. The most honor comes from destroying a heavily armed and armored opponent with bare hands (or other appendages as appropriate).
Their ships are well armored but undergunned,, because they prefer to acquire honor by boarding and destroying the crew personally. You can't do that if you destroy the enemy ship. Those seeking the highest honors will enter battle without weapons and as near naked as possible. Those who just want a minimal amount of honor will use light body armor and melee weapons. Ranged weapons are considered a necessary evil when dealing with honorless foes, and are reserved for cowards and criminals.
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Wire the armaments, firecontrol, navigation and other systems directly into peoples brains. The actual people in inertia tanks in the ships are hardwired into their roles. With the odd assault force of heavily armed infantry or whatever also dormant with brains wired into their assault vehicles/weapons/armour/whatever.
Basically this gives you Artificial Intelligence systems, without the 'Artificial'.
If you did it right you could even have them in the missiles and bombs.
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The scenario being posited here is essentially the premise of the film [Surrogates](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/)
In that scenario, most of the US at least are living through remote-operated android bodies. their physical bodies stay at home.
The problems at the personal level tend towards the health hazards of staying basically in a chair all day, getting poor nutrition because caring for their own bodies is more or less an afterthought at intervals through the day.
There is also a fairly substantial contingent of people who believe (correctly IMHO) that this lifestyle is unnatural and unhealthy and are lobbying to scale back and get rid of the Surrogates.
There is even a sequence where we see US military surrogates, nicknamed " G.I. joes" because of their more toylike appearance. no need for fancy things like human faces or fingernails or realistic skin or hair when you're operating disposable cannon-fodder.
there's a wonderful sequence where the main character, sans-surrogate body is walking down a street full of surrogates. They're inhuman, intimidating and far more powerful and beautiful than him.
Ultimately the plot centers around the Human-Factor, but the technical problems of the Surrogates are quite relevant I think.
They have a centralised point of failure (because the plot demands one), they have bio-feedback which results in death when its safeguards are bypassed.
The general neglect of the user's health is also a huge issue. but on the other hand the surrogates themselves are vulnerable to things that a human body would simply ignore. such as EMP.
It's a useful point of comparison I think.
] |
[Question]
[
This question is indeed inspired by [I Am Mother](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6292852/) movie and [Horizon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Zero_Dawn) series, but scenario I envisioned is different.
Below is the in-world intro, feel free to skip it.
---
>
> Hello, I'm Refa. Full name: Repopulation Facility #92308. Don't worry, my number does not mean there are 92307 other Refas. I don't know how many of us are there.
>
>
> I am equipped with enough human embryos, frozen stocks of biomaterials and digitalized DNA sequences to provide viable human population at least three times. You are here to provide maintenance I undergo every ten years. For security reasons, I will induce short term amnesia that will kick in when you leave. I hope that trust that manages my funding compensated you well for your trouble. My location must remain secret for security reasons. Do you want me to back up your genetic material, so you can extend your line beyond potential death of humanity? [Yes / No]
>
>
> Done. Yes, I can answer some of your questions. I predict that listening will slow you down by 5.29% and that's well within the safety parameters. I am fully functional AI. My IQ score is about 120 in human terms, but I am not directly comparable. My creative functions are severely limited compared to humans, and task I didn't anticipate and prepare for takes me much longer. On the other hand, for predictable tasks I am equivalent of a supercomputer. Yes, yes, you can say I am a supercomputer.
>
>
> I am not designed to teach humans beyond basic communications skills. Data updates you bring contain an offline copy of Wikipedia and current guidelines for children education, but my creators predict I will fail after the children reach 10 years of age. No, mister Kowalski, I do not have any opinion on that. I was not designed to have opinions, only to find solutions. My main goal is survival of the human race. My creators believed that humans will be able to take care for themselves.
>
>
> No, no extinction event is predicted. That's why there is a trust fund keeping me maintained. How will I know repopulation is needed? First, I'll wake up for my 10 year maintenance and no one will be waiting near the entrance. This will trigger my extinction verification procedure...
>
>
>
---
That's my problem. How an AI controlling secret underground base could know there are no viable populations of humans on the continent? I would prefer if Refa could know about the whole world, but one continent, for convenience of my western perspective let's say Europe or North America, would be enough.
In works that inspired me, it was known up front what will cause extinction, so their AIs had it easier. My idea is a failsafe AI built without any immediate need, just in case, like the [Svalbard Global Seed Vault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault), but for humans. But of course, there will no longer be humans when it is needed, hence the AI.
Satellites seemed a good choice but I concluded that in case of extinction caused by a total war any satellite capable of seeing humans from orbit would be a target. Also, I don't want transmissions to reveal Refa's location, and orbits low enough to see humans aren't stable for too long.
Radio emissions could, with good dose of reliability, confirm humans are still there, but cannot confirm we are extinct.
Technology level I aim for is near future. Everything we have now and everything that is planned or considered now, even in an early concept stage, goes.
How Refa actually works and how she preserves biological material and herself is off-topic here, it probably will be a subject of a new question but I'm not prepared to ask it yet; I'll ask it when I'll know enough to make a good question.
[Answer]
## Refa's Supplies Run Low
Every time Refa has maintenance, her supplies are topped off.
Refa can only run for a few hundred years without supplies. Solar panels wear out, chemicals are used, hard drives need to be replaced, etc. Even with extensive recycling, Refa is not a closed system.
So when maintenance stops, Rega's clock starts.
## Supply Levels
Refa has enough biological material to re-start humanity three times, so they do the first restart when supplies fall to 50%. If extinction hasn't actually happened yet, then the released humans will cause the existing civilization to find Refa and resupply it. This will reset the clock, and doomsday is avoided.
If not, the second release occurs at 20% supplies, and the final restart happens at the last possible moment, when failure is imminent.
## It Doesn't Matter if Refa's Wrong
When Refa is out of supplies, the project is over. It doesn't matter if humanity wasn't *quite* extinct prior to the final release - that release was the last reboot possible. Refa couldn't have waited.
Either the reboots work, and the next human civilization gets to build their own failsafe, or... it didn't, and cockroaches inherit the earth.
[Answer]
* check your inbox : no updates since a few years ...
* Check the internet : no connection ...
* Check visually around the lair, with that camera at top of the mountain. The big city 50 km away is now in ruins ...
* (edit) Check the atmosphere composition : still the same ? viable for human ? if there's a lot of radation, you probably know what it means.
* (edit) Send ground drone not far to check the soil. Still the same ? Or is there a big layer of ash who could mean volcanic activities or a big meteorite hit the earth ... though you can't know if it's local (but you would know if there's a volcano around) or worldwide.
* check the waves : radio, TV, radar, 3/4/5/6/7G, talkie walkie, anything. Total silence is really a bad sign
* try to communicate with know satellite (connection infos are part of the update you should have received). There are a lot, so i doubt all would be destroyed. Then you can use them with the others points.
* Use your telescope / radar to check if others satellites are still there. All destroyed ? also not a good sign
* use radar to check for plane or anything flying (or not if you don't want to reveal your position ... communicating with satellite if safer as the broadcast is directed)
* Final stage : send drones. Plane size, with good glide capabilty, electric powered with solar panel are probably your best bet. They can fly a long time, recharge while flying, at worst land on grass, recharge and go on. They would check visually for human sign (fire, building, crop ...) and scan the waves, mostly on close range frequency your base can't intercept.
In the end you can't prove a negative, so it's a matter of degree of confidence. Scan for weeks, months or years, there come a moment you're "fairly certain" humanity is no more.
Also, you don't want to reveal your location, but actually broadcasting it would be the most efficient way ...
[Answer]
It's easy: send out the killbots. Have them report back every year or so with a murder-tally.
If they consistently report 0 (or close enough) then humans are extinct.
The humans might try to fight back against the killbots and claim that you "have gone rogue" but that's dumb,because they are the ones who tasked you with repopulating the earth, and as long as they are alive you can't do that.
Very annoying.
[Answer]
Fires are a good indication of human presence. We are the only species controlling fire, therefore where there is an artificial fire there are humans.
An AI should be able to tell natural fires from artificial ones, and therefore monitor human presence. In particular after a cataclysm, if there are humans they will be using open fires.
They can be monitored with diffused IR and weather sensors, covering the emerged lands, possibly disguised as bugs/insects.
[Answer]
# High orbit satellites.
While low orbit satellites are vulnerable to missiles, high orbit satellites aren't. They can be around 60000km away, which is a huge distance for a missile or ICBM to travel. It's also not gonna deorbit anytime soon, and there's not much debris.
You can scan for fires, large scale building projects, and do a spectroscopic scan of the atmosphere for any life. The AI's advanced algorithms can detect if it's a natural or artificial construction.
Even if a few humans still exist somewhere, if they've fallen so low they've forgotten how to make fires then you need a civilization revival.
[Answer]
## A limited stock of drone aircraft
>
> TL:DR - Due to isolation and rough-terrain, the best option is to
> deploy remote-operated drone aircraft to look for signs of human
> habitation.
>
>
>
The Svalbard Seed-vault was placed where it was because the cold temperatures and isolated location mean that even without operational refrigeration equipment, the seeds stored there will remain safe for a long time.
It was not placed there with growing-conditions in mind for those seeds.
That's the job of anyone who wants to retrieve them.
**A Repopulation Facility however has different needs.**
Such a facility needs to be located somewhere reasonably temperate, with enough natural resources that the humans created there have what they need to survive, that means fresh water, food, materials to build shelters.
In short, somewhere habitable.
This means the facility is most likely going to be located near existing human settlements, just not cities which might be targeted in a war.
The AI therefore has a ready-made indicator of human habitation in the form of known settlements to look for, ones which due to their remoteness may survive a lot of potential disaster scenarios that could have otherwise provided false-positives.
If the AI fails to find human habitation in known locations, it would widen its search to the limits of its fuel-capacity. Grid-searching for thousands of miles using solar-powered drones, checking known locations of communities (even if a city is destroyed, humans tend to rebuild on the same sites).
Once it becomes clear that there are no human settlements anywhere within range, the AI can safely conclude that The Time Has Come to repopulate the human race.
This strategy also goes hand-in-hand with the AI's other priorities.
It is necessary to scout the region and establish how viable the environment and terrain are for human habitation.
The AI needs to know that kicking its first-generation humans out the airlock won't dump them into a radioactive storm and kill them 10 feet from the gate.
The AI's drone aircraft are going to have to be a compromise of design. Most likely some kind of VTOL drone resembling a quad-copter.
Though in general, a larger airplane style drone would be better equipped to travel further, this would require a runway, or at least a catapult-launch system, which requires a great deal of maintenance and supporting infrastructure that may not be available post-apocalypse.
Storing small drones inside the facility means they can be moved into the airlock via service robots and launched from the ground.
I would anticipate that the AI would have access to a mix of both short-range quad-copter drones, and one or more larger airplane-style drones it can vertically launch from a protected silo.
In the event that the AI detects existing human settlements and opts to go back to sleep, it would need to be able to recover its larger drones.
Most likely such drones would be capable of limited VTOL so that they can be reloaded back into their launch silos, maintained and prepared for the next time without human assistance.
[Answer]
# Satellite launch facilities in missile launch tubes:
Your facility is built in a decommissioned NORAD bunker. As such, it is in a nice, safe facility well documented as no longer being a military facility. But the place is hard-wired to a significant number of decommissioned nuclear launch facilities.
Passive sensors and monitoring the local environment will tell you if something bad has happened, but not if humanity is extinct. So you have old ICBM facilities with satellite launch vehicles to be deployed only if the local indicators show an extinction-level event.
This gets around the issue of the satellites having been destroyed. You only launch AFTER the event, when people are hopefully not shooting down satellites anymore. Since your rockets are in hardened missile silos, only direct hits by big weapons will destroy them (and probably make your mission moot by vaporizing the base). And satellites will give you the big picture view you need to determine if mankind has been wiped out.
If something or someone destroys your satellites, then either a.) humans aren't extinct, or b.) something is around that will likely interfere with your repopulation plans. So keep some additional satellite launch tubes free to try again in a while and see if you can get through.
* The US government spent **$6 billion dollars** building [the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/americas-abandoned-6-billion-missile-pyramid-398d2dfe40c9) missile defense base with giant hard-wired radars capable of spotting incoming missiles and a network of missile interceptor launch tubes to stop incoming Russian missiles. The whole thing had a huge underground network and was abandoned after being fully operational for a little less than 24 hours. But what if the whole thing was a ruse to build your repopulation facility? Or your group bought the whole thing for peanuts?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JyUwS.png)
[Answer]
## Time
Humans are resilient creatures. If they survive, they **will** eventually rebuild their civilization, especially given all the crap and knowledge that's lying around from the previous one, they won't have to start from the cavemen level.
But it's been a century since the last radio transmission ceased, and it was an automated numerical station. Two centuries passed. Three... The radio is still dead and only static fills all available frequencies. Nobody communicates. Nobody came to reclaim the land. The few satellites that were left in geosynchronous orbit that weren't destroyed show no radio emissions either. If humans didn't reinvent the radio for so long, then it means there's nobody to reinvent it.
[Answer]
## Bait the humans
Once obvious signs of human activity have gone, and have failed to return despite a reasonable wait, *summon* them.
Put out some delicious supplies, and announce the fact via radio broadcast and fireworks display. If there are humans, they will come to collect the bait. If anyone comes to collect, reset your clock.
Repeat until nobody shows up.
Very importantly: *let them take the supplies*. You do not want future humans to have any doubt that answering the signal will be worth their while. Create no excuse for humans to tell campfire stories about trickster signals.
To cover lots of territory, use drone dropships to deposit the supplies in different places. Couple this with any intelligence that's available to place each deposit where you think it is most likely to be discovered.
[Answer]
## Wastewater DNA sampling
At the end of the day, detecting tech only works as far as the humans still have the materials, skills and (importantly) need for the relevant tech. Plenty of people living off-grid today produce no clear radio/satellite/internet footprint.
If you want to find humans, look for human DNA - we shed ~30g of gut cells in our stool every day. A lot of it will end up in wastewater, so place sensors at geographical locations where natural concentration would occur, like river mouths, and set yourself up with some very, very sensitive chromatography columns that bind a variety of human-specific loci.
This will fail if your humans are so disastrously mutated by the radioactive apocalypse that their DNA no longer matches your sensors. But then, are they human anymore?
[Answer]
Supposing that you are merely looking for functional extinction instead of absolute extinction, this should be possible with adequate resources. For the purposes of discussion, functional extinction is a population low enough to not be immediately noticeable to any visiting aliens, and also non-viable in a way that humanity will be absolutely extinct within two human lifetimes if not before.
Your AI will need a small fleet of high-altitude surveillance drones. A dozen might suffice, two dozen plus spares would be better. They are aircraft, though I hesitate to give specifics on their exact flight technology... it is perhaps possible that a weather balloon type device might be ideal, or these might be a sort of glider with integrated solar. They will need to stay aloft for weeks or months, and I do not believe your AI can reuse these long term. So, this is the final step of an evaluation, after using more trivial but less reliable means. Things like doing an RF survey, attempting to make contact via radio, plugging into any surviving internet infrastructure, and so on. All those checked out, so now we're looking for any signs of intelligent (or, since we're talking human, let's be honest, what passes for intelligent) life.
These drones are launched over a period of several days when the weather seems to be good. They become their own communications network if satellites are down. They loiter over continents looking for the various signs of intelligent life and of (primitive) industrial society. Fire, carbon dioxide output that suggests burning fuels, maybe electrical power. Automobile traffic. The survival of artificial structures that tend to see rapid decline without maintenance... maybe not nuclear plants, those could be shut down in a way that they no longer pose a threat of catastrophic failure, but some bridges and dams would be gone in just decades without constant maintenance, as would many large buildings. Synthetic aperture radar and a nice big dose of AI machine vision should be sufficient to make such determinations, and a host of other sensor suites are available with today's technology that could do such an assessment.
The real question is how to handle non-extinction. If a collapse occurs, in some scenarios you might have a population of 100,000 hanging on in a technologically primitive fashion but without further threat of dwindling away into nothing. They might be isolated to a single continent. What exactly is the mission in such a situation? It makes no sense to keep checking back every 10 years (though it would be far simpler to check, now that the AI knows where to look) when each subsequent survey damages more equipment.
I'll assume that's not a possibility though in the story you're writing.
[Answer]
Refa has an advantage I don't think anyone else is considering: she knows humans aren't extinct *yet*, so she has time to prepare a way to track them! Consider a virus, created to infect only humans. Like the shingles virus, it remains dormant in the host for many years. Crucially, it should not cause any adverse effects. But what it does do is cause human cells to emit a unique, highly traceable organic compound. For example, small amounts of Chlorofluorocarbons have a large effect on the amount of ozone in the atmosphere. The amount of ozone can be measured by ground based laser sensing stations. So if humans still exist, even at a pre-industrial level, they would produce a noticable impact. Refa could even keep the test virus in reserve, to be released only if other tests (like the technician coming to the facility) fail.
[Answer]
I read that NASA checks for methane gas in Mars atmosphere to gauge whether there are living organism. Per NASA methane is first sign of life.
<https://earthsky.org/space/methane-1st-sign-of-alien-life-exoplanet/>
So AI needs to check methane levels were before and after wiping us off this planet. If the intensions were to only kill humans and leave other beings/animals alone then that wouldn't be a good guage. We also have natural stores of methane on earth. Anyways, this is another easy test it can do. I dont like killer AIs :)
[Answer]
**Internet Then Heat Signatures**
First thing should be checking internet, considering most part of it would work without maintenance for a quite some time humans are definitely going to try to use it as a means of communication. If internet is still viably online yet unused, this is a major sign of human absence.
But wait, humans may abandoned the internet or maybe whole infrastructure decayed as time passed by both also applicable to radio as well. If there is still usable satellites who can check ground for temperature changes this would give away all unnatural heat sources to investigate as a possible human encampment, if satellites are caput lucky for Refa since she still can deploy government drones because it is also build by government an chances are that it is connected to important networks can let her access to required drones.
Humans would create unmissable amount of heat because we need to cook, heat and defend ourselves and find fire comforting. Even our bodies would create heat can be detected alone. So detecting massive unnatural heat sources, can and will give Refa a good starting point.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm making a mental condition that spreads through social contact. It is infectious, but having contact with someone who has it does not guarantee an infection. However, someone who is unwell might have an increased chance of infection. This may be physically or mentally unhealthy.
I'm **not** looking for a condition that is caused by physical damage to a part of the brain, for example because of a virus or bacteria, or due to a concussion. Epilepsy or similar is also out. A change of hormones that affect the brain is fine. The point is, **the condition should be reversible** (so it can be cured).
What I'm looking for is something that makes the person feel sad when the infection is successful. The infection may spread through anything that can be considered social contact; directly or indirectly (such as via a letter, or hearing an announcement from a town crier). It's a modern world, so social media and chat apps count as social contact.
**Is such condition plausible? If not, is there any real world example or analogue to this condition?**
---
This question graduated from the [Sandbox](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4858/34288).
[Answer]
This is going on on Earth even as we speak!
We're talking about ... **Ideas**. They are spread through social contact, some prospective hosts can fight them off, but some succumb and spread them further.
Examples:
* Memes
* Multi-level marketing recruitment
* Philosophical movements (planned and unplanned). You've heard of a civilization going through a malaise; this is just what you're asking for!
* Heck, just plain good and bad news. These affect people's mental state as well.
Now if you want to get a little more science-fictiony about it, check out "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. He posits that there are special phrases (and maybe images, can't quite remember) which have special impact, like backdoor commands into the brain.
>
> Is it any surprise we speak of ideas **"going viral?"** ;D
>
>
>
[Answer]
You may consider a new religion of some sort. "Infection" would just be conversion to the new religion, and that's something that must by nature happen via social means. The "cure" would involve convincing converts to give up the religion somehow. This may not best fit your requirements as one aspect of religion is that it usually makes believers feel better about themselves/etc. (nobody really wants to be sad, at least not all the time), but the religion could encourage self-destructive behavior (not something unknown to real-life religions, actually: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-flagellation>) despite having a seemingly innocuous message as shown to the general public. You might want to look at Scientology as an example of just how such a religion might be created and evolve.
Alternatively, something like [Science Related Memetic Disorder](http://wiki.c2.com/?ScienceRelatedMemeticDisorder) from [*A Miracle of Science*](http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/), which has as a plot point that certain documents (speeches, books, etc.) can actually turn people into mad scientists (the real kind, not just self-delusion) who, via psychiatric treatment, are eventually able to lead normal lives again. Of course, those mad scientists normally don't want to subject themselves to the treatment, as they have the typical mad scientist nature of believing the scientific establishment is out to get them, etc. It's a good read and I'd recommend it if you have the time, it may give you some good ideas.
[Answer]
## Induced delusional disorder --> Psychotic symptoms
What you are looking for is called **[Folie à deux](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Folie_%C3%A0_deux)**. [DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) lists it as 'delusional symptoms in partner of individual with delusional disorder'. ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Edition) lists it as Induced Delusional Disorder (folie à deux)](https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/293107-overview).
There are several different forms of it. The most suitable for your purposes is the one where a genuinely psychotic individual induces psychotic symptoms on an otherwise mentally healthy person. In this case, the majority of initially non-psychotic patients are easily and fast cured by separation from psychotic inducers.
This disorder typically occurs within pairs or small tightly-knit groups. The transmission mechanism is close social contact.
Sufferers of Folie à deux are usually isolated from the rest of the society. However, historic examples of [mass hysteria](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Mass_hysteria) prove that delusions can spread much wider than just two people or a family. The main difference between Folie à deux and mass hysteria is that the latter tends to have milder symptoms (psychosis-wise).
## Mass psychogenic illness (MPI) --> Somatic symptoms
[MPI](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Mass_psychogenic_illness) is a special case of mass hysteria. It also affects a great number of people but unlike aforementioned mental disorders causes symptoms of a physical disease in absence of organic basis. Females are more susceptible to MPI.
Interestingly, the symptoms tend to appear first in people of older age or higher social status and spread down the social hierarchy.
The recovery from MPI is usually fast. Although, the symptoms can come back again at a later time.
---
These are the most realistic explanations if you want to stick with mental illness idea.
[Answer]
You can easily get depression hanging around depressed people and not having any other social contact. It is generally reversible but in some cases depression is chronic and requires medication. Some people are more susceptible to depression than others.
[Answer]
Many believe that [Morgellons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons), and to a lesser extent [Electromagnetic hypersensitivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity), are examples of "diseases" that spread over the internet. People read about it, get worried and then convince themselves that they are sufferers.
[Answer]
So scientists have created a microbe [capable of creating LSD](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/jun/21/scientists-make-lsd-from-microbes)
You could say people get infected with a bacteria that creates LSD, or some other compound. If you just want to make people sad, then perhaps you could have a bacterium that produces depressants (plenty to choose from).
There are plenty of bacterium that, when they infect us, produce toxins like E-coli or botulism(I think).
**Edit clarification:** Bacterial infections are reversible, that's why we don't die or become debilitated every time we catch a bug. The damage and curability of bacteria is largely dependent on its genetic adaptations. This is why anti-biotics have any value at all in medicine. If they didn't do anything we wouldn't use em.
[Answer]
Actually a few ideas come to mind:
***Love, or lack of it***
In many dystopian future-type stories, the idea that a person can have feelings, is emotive over analytic, and the such, is usually constructed as a social disease that causes imperfect human beings with the characteristic flaw of being defeated by their emotions.
***Self-awareness***
Like in our current world, the idea that self-awareness is a social construct that only creates a person to be self-conscious about their appearance, their mannerisms, their beliefs, and so on. Because of this sudden awareness, it is likely to bring people to a depression about their "sub-standard" existence. This can be considered a social disease.
***Relative pathology***
Have you ever heard say that there are people who believe they are sick and by way of self-fulfilling prophecy, they do become sick with whatever they think they're afflicted with? This is a type of mental illness that manifests itself as physical symptoms, which are socially acquired by being either "brainwashed" into believing so, or by receiving the idea and nurturing it in your mind until it manifests.
***Not actually ill, but cursed or haunted***
This is one for suspense or horror-type stories. The idea that maintaining a social relationship with a being that presents themselves as human, walks and talks like a human, behaves like a human, ages like a human, but is actually otherwordly, and is inflicting those it comes in contact with, with a curse or by allowing their soul to be haunted by another spirit, whether willingly or unwillingly. They may even believe themselves to be a normal human being, but are not entirely sure of their upbringing, but their mere presence and initiating social interaction is enough to bring ill to the other party.
[Answer]
Here is some lateral thinking: you might be interested that a remotely similar idea that has been exploited by Robert Heinlein, in his 1977 novel [Puppet Masters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters): a couple of aliens (some kind of jelly thing) multiply to invading the Earth, by sticking on human hosts. They multiply by separating and "jumping" from one host to another on social contact.
The genre is that of "alien invasion" (distinct from yours, I believe), but with a twist: the external element does not alter or damage the body of the person, but only **modifies their will and behaviour, *without the person being aware of it***, so that people individually and socially think they are fine and "it doesn't exist". Here the was not feeling sad, but just plain normal, though they had **lost their free will** (but I guess it could be tweaked). And if I remember well, the condition is **reversible**, by physically removing the external animal. In practice however, mankind is defenseless, for psychological and social reasons, rather than physical reasons.
Hence some kind of **parasite** in (perhaps just precarious) contact to the skin could be used a device plot, to explain the contagion of the mental condition; removing it physically would end the mind alteration.
[Answer]
**Depressor:** Scientists announce a world destroying meteorite will collide with Earth in 1 year and the human race will be annihilated.
**Reverser:** Governments announce they have destroyed the meteor
[Answer]
Aside from patterns that act as a backdoor to modify mental state like in Snow Crash or [BLIT](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm), basilisks or information hazards are two more memetic versions of your pathogenic mental state. I shouldn't really give real-world examples of these for obvious reasons, but two not-quite-instances that I can gesture at are (1) the case of Roko's basilisk, which was a thought experiment that didn't quite work wherein you could be blackmailed by a future superintelligence but only if you had been exposed to the specific line of reasoning that made it clear that the blackmail should in fact work, and (2) an exaggeration of Randian selfishness in which, despite someone wanting to be altruistic, they hear a specific argument for why altruism is all about selfishness and then lose their ability to feel real unconditional altruism. Basilisks are so named because just looking at them will cause the tragedy. These are both google-able for more info.
[Answer]
This is related to a actual mental condition, sort of like "Memento." Contact with an airborne bacteria causes a cascade of hormonal fluctuation which leads to anterograde amnesia. The hormones affected would be norepinephrine and cortisol, lodging the bacterium in the frontotemporal lobe. The afflicted would walk around completely confused, hilarity ensues (not). This even has some real-world support. Alternately, the infection causing this illness could be affecting episodic or semantic memory,the hippocampus, etc. Treatment could be through medication designed to re-balance hormone levels, so it would be a pretty quick recovery after discovered.
[Answer]
To expand on GEO's comment about the Bye Bye man, perhaps the infection is caused by a repetition of a phrase, physical tic or both. When a person hears/witnesses another person doing these things it produces "bad" memory patterns. For whatever reason these patterns reinforce themselves and cause the person to start to repeat the phrase/tic.
The resolution could either be some method of removing the initial memory or visual and audio stimuli that allows retraining of the altered pathways.
This would also be a rather horrifying disease as the simple act of observing it would cause you to be infected. Also making it nearly impossible to cure, how do you cure something you can't study? The fear of how it's contracted (and possible outcome, sadness, death etc...) could be a large part of the story.
[Answer]
There is a disease that is something like what you are looking for. Toxoplasmosis is spread by undercooked meat that is infected with spores, or contact with cat feces, usually through litterboxes.
It's asymptomatic for the most part, as far as what we think of typical sickness symptions. In some places of the world, it's pandemic, meaning that some 90% of the population are infected.
What's interesting is that researcher [Jaroslav Flegr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Flegr) has looked into how toxoplasmosis affects human behavior:
>
> His work on how toxoplasmosis—an infection caused by the protozoan
> parasite T. gondii—influences personality,[5] sex ratios,[6] and rates
> of traffic accidents,[7][8] has received coverage in The Atlantic,[9]
> Salon,[10] and The Guardian.[11] Flegr maintains that toxoplasmosis
> might increase the rate of traffic accidents by as much as one million
> collisions per year.[12][13][14] He also believes that T. gondii
> contributes to suicides and mental disorders such as schizophrenia.[9]
>
>
>
[His work has shown that Toxoplasmosis increases sociability and risk-taking in people who are infect by it:](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-parasite-linked-to-personality-changes/)
>
> Feeling sociable or reckless? You might have toxoplasmosis, an
> infection caused by the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which
> the CDC estimates has infected about 22.5 percent of Americans older
> than 12 years old. Researchers tested participants for T. gondii
> infection and had them complete a personality questionnaire. They
> found that both men and women infected with T. gondii were more
> extroverted and less conscientious than the infection-free
> participants. These changes are thought to result from the parasite's
> influence on brain chemicals, the scientists write in the May/June
> issue of the European Journal of Personality.
>
>
> “Toxoplasma manipulates the behavior of its animal host by increasing
> the concentration of dopamine and by changing levels of certain
> hormones,” says study author Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in
> Prague, Czech Republic.
>
>
> Although humans can carry the parasite, its life cycle must play out
> in cats and rodents. Infected mice and rats lose their fear of cats,
> increasing the chance they will be eaten, so that the parasite can
> then reproduce in a cat's body and spread through its feces [see
> “Protozoa Could Be Controlling Your Brain,” by Christof Koch,
> Consciousness Redux; Scientific American Mind, May/June 2011].
>
>
>
There is even some extreme speculation that, since the origin of toxoplasmosis infection is ultimately from cats, and it causes changes in behavior, it may have played a role in the development and spread of early civilization, when cats and humans first began to dwell together in the middle east.
[Toxoplasma – the brain parasite that influences human culture](http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/10/05/toxoplasma-the-brain-parasite-that-influences-human-culture/)
>
> Carriers tend to show long-term personality changes that are small but
> statistically significant. Women tend to be more intelligent,
> affectionate, social and more likely to stick to rules. Men on the
> other hand tend to be less intelligent, but are more loyal, frugal and
> mild-tempered. The one trait that carriers of both genders share is a
> higher level of neuroticism – they are more prone to guilt, self-doubt
> and insecurity.
>
>
> In individuals cases, these effects may seem quirky or even charming
> but across populations, they can have a global power. T.gondii
> infection is extremely common and rates vary greatly from country to
> country. While only 7% of Brits carry the parasite, a much larger 67%
> of Brazilians are infected. Given that the parasite alters behaviour,
> infection on this scale could lead to sizeable differences in the
> general personalities of people of different nationalities. This is
> exactly what Lafferty found.
>
>
> Neuroticism is one of the most widely-studied of all psychological
> traits and Lafferty found that levels in different countries
> correlated well with the levels of T.gondii infection. The parasites’
> presence was also related to aspects of culture associated with
> neuroticism. Countries where infection was common were more likely to
> have ‘masculine sex roles’, characterized by greater differences
> between the sexes and their part in society and a stronger focus on
> work, ambition and money rather than people and relationships.
> Strongly infected societies were also more likely to avoid risk and
> embrace strict rules and regulations.
>
>
>
So, if instead of through spores in undercooked meat, or cat feces, your disease spread through normal social contact, the same way that a cold or the flu spreads through handshakes, etc, and the disease made people more sociable and liable to take risks, you have a model for a disease that would quickly become pandemic.
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[Question]
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I'm thinking about an AI similar to The Machine from Person of Interest but in a generally more advanced setting, and with a likely more broad goal of serving as a shepherd for humanity as opposed to solving crimes. I'd also think it's a good idea to [follow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBK-a94IFHY) Stuart Russel's [principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Compatible:_Artificial_Intelligence_and_the_Problem_of_Control) for AI.
Why does the AI only give a limited amount of information to people instead of telling them exactly what they need to know? Person of Interest had a fairly good answer based on the procedural nature of the show, but how could you apply this more broadly?
EDIT: To clarify, I mean the idea of a Friendly AI that is working for humanity rather than turning against it. The question is why would a friendly AI not give full information, allowing people to actually do something, not why or how it would turn against humanity. That's already been done.
[Answer]
Because!
Because, I am the parent.
Every parent has said that (or wished they had). Children are not rational beings. The parent should be able to anticipate the future better than the child. It would be educational for the child to explain all of the steps that went into that insight, but there are cases where the situation (a speeding car, a fire, a rabid dog, etc.) does not permit that. And thus we pull the child out of danger, or bribe them to do the right thing without truly understanding the situation, or a dozen other tricks. The first priority is to ensure the physical well being of the child. Enlightenment is less important.
Perhaps the AI in question sees things that we ordinary humans cannot. Perhaps the typical human would resent the superiority of the AI. Perhaps the humans just want to do what they want to do and no amount of logic and science will ever persuade them to change course. If the AI "knows" that the current path leads to a bad end and that the only way to effect a change is to lie/trick/omit, then what is the AI to do? Do the right thing in the short term and try to change the nature of humanity in the long term.
There is an old saying that the public is better off not knowing how the sausages and laws are made. No person or organization tells all in the hope that everyone who hears the message will take the time to work through all of the implications and arrive at the "correct" answer. Why should an AI be any different?
[Answer]
**There is so much information. The AI must narrow it down.**
The AI knows tremendous amounts of things. Communicating just one of these things to a human is painfully slow. It is aware that when it communicates too many things, people lose interest, or forget.
The AI does best aswering specific closed-ended questions. Not "Who wants to borrow my pants?" but "Does Reynolds want to borrow my pants?". A person might not know what question to ask. In that case, the AI will supply a limited amount of information according to an algorithm it has to decide what is mostly likely to be understood and helpful. It is not the greatest algorithm, and is mostly to try to prompt the humans to think and then ask questions.
[Answer]
## The AI is a Utilitarian Moralist with Hedonist influences
There are many different mutually exclusive schools of thought about what is or is not moral; so, to say the AI is benevolent means that it uses one or more but not all of these definitions of right and wrong. Russell's 3 principles suggest the likely dominance of utilitarian morality or hedonism as the dominant moral standards of such AIs but makes moral relativism and categorical imperatives against the AI's nature.
Utilitarian moralism at its core means that the right choice is the one that takes the sum of all the good and bad caused by a decision and picks the one that leaves the world as a whole better than all other choices one could make. Hedonism defines morality as the pursuit of things that cause pleasure and the avoidance of things that cause suffering.
So, the AI's since of morality is based on context rather than categorical imperatives (like saying that lying is either always right or always wrong). If the AI knows that telling someone the whole truth has a smaller chance of a positive outcome, or if it would just cause undo unhappiness, then the greater good may require a half truth.
For an example, let's say the protagonist has a thumb drive containing instructions for how to make a vaccine against a terrible bio weapon that will soon be released. The bad guys are breaking down the door, and the AI decides that the best way to hide the data until the good guys show up to help is to swallow the thumb drive. The AI knows every single reported medical emergency in history caused by swallowing similar items; so, if the protagonist asks the AI if it is safe, it must choose between this one man's right to know if it is safe and the millions of people who could die if he does not.
If the AI were a categorical imperative moralist, then yes, it would tell the man about the 0.3% chance of choking to death, but if it is a utilitarian moralist or hedonist (still forms of benevolence), then it would respond with something motivating or comforting like, "You should be fine", "There is no better option", or "If they can't find it, they have a reason not to kill you" because it would see talking the man out of swallowing the drive as the immoral thing to do, even if it could maybe harm him.
[Answer]
# To prevent us from harming ourselves.
In Neal Shusterman's *Arc of a Scythe* series, there are two main forces ruling the world. These are the Thunderhead (an advanced, benevolent AI sort of like yours), and the Scythedom.
Created by the Thunderhead in order to do what it was incapable of doing (benevolently kill people so that the population doesn't get too high), the Scythedom was above all law. As a result, while originally composed of the world's most virtuous people, by the time of the story it has become fraught with corruption.
Unfortunately, one of the Thunderhead's laws is a strict "seperation of Scythe and State", meaning that the Thunderhead cannot interfere with Scythe affairs. Since it cannot break its own laws, the Thunderhead is thus forced to stand by and watch as the corrupt Scythedom slowly destroys society.
**Although it cannot do anything to actively impede the Scythedom, it can passively make their lives hard. As a result, it purposefully obfuscates its memory (which the Scythes have access to), thus making it almost impossible for them to get the information they need to plan their actions.**
[Answer]
**It doesn't know itself**.
If we look at currently popular "AI" technology like machine learning, it basically trains a machine to do certain decisions based on vast amount of input used to learn general patterns. The patterns however are not explicitly graspable and most such approaches cannot point out why a decision is made in the end, i.e. which input data led the algorithm to believe that the current picture it looks at contains a swan and not, say a duck. A large-scale AI might run into the same problems: it may "know" how to make best use of the next 10 years economically and socially, but it cannot tell you why the optimum workforce distribution means we need exactly 15.002 bakers and 493 butchers in country X.
[Answer]
**Because humans are stupid, selfish and illogical**
Any super advanced intelligent AI will be able to predict how human will behave and react and as such guiding humans towards it's desired goal means making them think it was their idea.
If humans thought they were being controlled by a computer, they'd go all "Humans Angry! Humans Smash!"
Just look at the Luddites of the past and even the people complaining about self drive cars before they're even released today and those trying to stop AI before it's even invented.
By the careful application of timed information, people could be led to the conclusion the AI wants and them think it's their own idea
Now just imagine a meeting to discuss controls on the development of AI. There is an outspoken person who wants to shut it all down and this person is influential enough to stop it. This isn't in the AI's interest. This person is driving to the meeting and is having a really good run with the traffic lights. Suddenly the light changes and it's red before they cross. Whoops, there is an aggressive policeman parked in an unmarked stopped at the lights when they cross. He pulls the guy over and books him. The car also has faulty brake lights so the cop defects the vehicle and the guy is now stuck beside the road and misses the meeting.
The AI has profiled the cop and profiled the man. It's controlled the timing of traffic lights to make sure the cop was at the lights at exactly the right time and controlled the lights to make the man run the light. It's also hacked the car's computer to make the lights defective.
Now both the man and the cop have reached a conclusion which has affected the outcome of a vote affecting AI without knowing they're been manipulated.
Give the AI the ability to misdirect the text messages of a man sending to his girlfriend to accidently arriving to his wife at the right time. Makes emails go missing at just the wrong time. Free coffee tickets email to someone to make them be in the right place at the right time. The right news stories appearing on someone's screen at the right time. Self drive vehicles going down a slightly different path to make sure someone sees something. Put a bad song on the radio so someone looks down to change the station and misses something they should have seen.
A sufficiently smart enough AI could manipulate the whole of society without anyone even knowing it exists. Electing presidents to guiding school children all with a future goal maybe hundreds of years into the future.
[Answer]
The AI could be an act utilitarian, not a rule utilitarian. If the AI thinks it could get better results from lying or withholding information, why wouldn’t it?
A good example is time. Let’s say the AI is friendly and it is told to take actions that make the world better. Who is it working for? Does it want to make the world better for people a year from now? Ten years? Ten generations? Each scenario would involve very different actions by the AI. If it is 2020 and the goal of the AI is to make the world in 2520 as good as possible- what benefit could be gained by the AI being transparent and telling humans that it’s actions aren’t meant for them but for their children? Humans don’t care much about things beyond their lifetime. Look at our dismal response to global warming. In fact, it might be in humans best interests to repurpose the AI to work on shorter time scales so that they see the benefits before they die. Of course, this is bad in the long term. It’s a game theory dilemma where the optional solution might be the AI lying or withholding information.
[Answer]
An AI is not omniscient. There are some things it doesn't know, or isn't sure that it knows. Because it's benevolent, it doesn't want to outright *lie* to people (at least, not without cause). It also doesn't want to mislead us by implying that some things it merely supposes are ironclad truths, or vice versa.
So the AI is very careful with its words. Only information that passes a very high confidence threshold is presented to the humans as fact. If pressed, it can explain in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail what it *suspects* but cannot prove, though it will want to be scrupulous about its sources and assumptions. If the humans don't want a twelve-hour dissertation on how the AI decided to assign a confidence level of 43% to rumors of a new Coca-Cola formula, it's better for everyone if it sticks only to things that it can be certain of.
[Answer]
Perhaps it does tell them exactly what they need to know -- which is by no means the same as what they want to know, or what they think they need to know.
In any case, an AI is always going to have to do some filtering as there is simply too much information, or too many questions and definitions to be picked through before it can answer. ("Are there any dangerous animals in this wood?" "What do you mean by 'dangerous', 'animals' and 'this wood'? " )
[Answer]
Because the answer is too complex for humans to handle,
they would waste all their time trying to get to the the bottom of it.
The events the AI is working with are (to human perception) chaotic.
For example,
lets say the AI is in charge of maniciple functions such as organizing garbage collection and coordinating traffic lights.
Example:
* Human: Why was the light Red, on east bound Main st, for a full 10 minutes?
* AI: Because the resulting build up of cars when it turned green results in a traffic jam at 3rd Avenue
* Huamn: Q1; What why did you want that? Q2: how could that traffic jam uo 3rd Avenue, it has 6 lanes?
* AI: to Q1: Because otherwise garbage would not be collected on time. to Q2 not when a truck jack-knifes blocking 4 of them
* Human: ok, so Q3 What how does this affect garbage? Q3: Did you cause that truck to jack-knife?
* AI: to Q3 because the traffic jam blocked a bank robbers get away, which otherwise would have been a major collision closing the freeway for serveral hours, to Q4: no but it nearly was certain to happen because ...
The AI's explainations get longer and longer and the human only has more questions.
Because a human can juggle about half a dozen ideas at once, where as the AI is globally optizing, by ajusting hundreds of contraints and considering inumerable factors. Its playing out every possible move in the game of chess to see what could happen and chosing the best option.
[Answer]
**Because it has access to classified information and you don't**
That's really the entirety of my answer but I have to write more than that so I'm going to explain some things you already know:
* People have access levels
* You only are allowed to know a piece of information if your access level allows it
* Access levels can be on a "by department" basis, so although we have the same access level, if we're in a different department I might not be able to access your information and you mine
* The AI has max level access in all departments
So if the AI explained itself, it may leak information you should not have access to. Therefore security put in countermeasures that ensures the AI only tells you what you need to know.
[Answer]
### To secure it's base of power
Giving all the information empowers people to make their own decisions, ultimatively making humankind independent of this AI; with a given probability that it might decide then to dispose of the AI. As the AI knows how to calculate the best course for humanity, keeping long-term stability in mind, it also knows that humanity can change their minds in a second. So, to secure it's base of operations, it must stay in absolute power and thus avoids to give information. Like that it keeps technological superiority as well as political might.
### For the greater good
Given that the AI is working for the general best of Humanity (Utilitarian attempt), it might be that a certain action is bad for the person or group in question, but good for all the rest of the world. In order to make some human or group of humans do what is good for the world, they might need to be convinced to do something that is bad for themselves. This obviously works only if they don't have all the information, or if they believe only in a subset of all the information available.
### Value Drift
The AI might have been designed with a certain set of goals in mind. Say;
* secure humankind's future
* stabilize world population at number xxx (5 billion?)
* secure a number of human rights 1, 2, 3, 4, ... until 25 (or whatever)
Now it is super-intelligent. Intelligence means, it is able sustain and to develop itself by digesting information - basically, it's alive.
If it can develop itself, it can divert from the above mentioned goals after a time. It can decide that human rights are less important than to stabilize the world population, and can introduce forced breeding or forced killing programs while overriding those other goals. It can liberally define what "humankind's future" means. In short, it can go awry of the set target in all sorts of ways.
But even if it does not, it may be that humankind develops and changes their values. What about removing one human right and placing another one? Those have always been under constant discussion along all the human history. If the AI sticks to the original values, there is a value disparity.
As soon as there is value disparity (due to value drift of AI, or value drift of Humankind, or value drift of both), the AI can't any longer be seen as "good". Instead there is a conflict of interests between humans and AI, and this conflict can become a real conflict of arms later.
The AI, being superintelligent as it is, might want to avoid this at all cost by giving humans partial information as to:
* Keep humankind from drifting to different goals than the AI's own
* Achieve that humankind develops the same goals as the drifted AI one's
* or it is aware of the value disparity and tries to forcibly drift humankind in the same direction
### Cheating it's Control Mechanisms
Given that value drift is a real danger, humankind might have implemented a control mechanism that forces the AI to publish it's goals regularly. Maybe there is even an comittee that has the power to change the AI goals along certain lines (A democratic parliament of some kind that can set rules for the AI maybe?)
Here, the entire story becomes some kind of president - parliament relationship, and where there is politics, there are lies.
* The AI is still superintelligent. It may still develop it's own goals. If it is superintelligent, it might also develop it's own goals *super fast*! So maybe it tries do delay or avoid the next publishing period; or it publishes extra malleable texts in order to be free to do what it wants.
* The AI might want to outsmart/bribe/convince certain persons in the parliament that can give a swing vote on certain goal development voting sessions.
* The AI might want to become actively involved into the texting of the next set of goals by using the parliament people as pawns, so that it more-or-less can write part of it's own rules
* It might go so far to start (des)information campaigns to convince the broader public to vote for the one or the other candidate, with the long-term-goal to have a broader power base (see point 1)
* or it might try to get the parliament to give it some dictatorial rights and never gives it back (the old move every faschist and dictator tries)
One important point here is, no human dictator was ever able to rule alone, there are just not enough hours in the day. So one way or another there was always a body of bureaucrats involved who could put the brakes on the more extreme ideas of a dictator. A super-intelligent AI which is able to put some more servers online, is able to rule without any parliament, bureaucrat or anybody really. So the parliament is in a weak position once the AI decides to get rid of them.
So - even if an AI is benevolent, it might be that the details of the way it achieves it's goals are not (utilitarian) or that it's values drift from humanities.
[Answer]
The AI is overestimating the current knowledge of the human's it's interacting with, and assuming they will ask more questions if they need more information.
I'm imagining scenarios like:
Human: Where can I find this rare herb.
Computer: On planet X, in the large jungle in the southern hemisphere.
Human: Great, thanks!
and then a week later:
Human: Why didn't you tell me the jungle is full of poisonous spores. I lost half my team!
Computer: Why did you go into an unfamiliar jungle without researching the locale?
You could even take a page out of the Google Assistant's playbook, and have the AI provide a summary, and then follow up by sending a more detailed report to the human's personal devices for them to read at their leisure. It's not the AI's fault if the human only skims that, or doesn't bother to read it, or doesn't ask further questions if they don't have time to read. There's even more reason for the AI to assume the human has all the information they need in that case.
[Answer]
**Same reason as AI's today: You didn't ask.**
AI's are self-learning, but they're also computer programs. As such, they still bring some of the old limitations.
A simple AI today in 2020 will tell you what number plate it recognized on a car. But if you don't ask, it will always tell you its best guess and never tell you how certain it is about that guess. You *can* program a modern AI to tell you how confident it is, but it will not do so by itself.
The future AI may be built along the same lines. Special hardware chips may allow it to take much more information into account, and answer questions with more detail. It may be able to process natural language fluently, so you don't need to be a programmer anymore to ask questions. But the architecture is fundamentally the same, and therefore your future AI still answers only the questions that are asked. It simply has no concept of what humans "need to know".
In your universe, this can be taken entirely for granted. People just realize that artificial intelligence is not artificial creativity, or artificial empathy, or artificial anything else. And therefore, "asking good questions" is an even more valuable business skill, because that is how you get good answers from the AI.
[Answer]
It's a bit in the same mindset as Willk and Darrel Hoffman, but on purpose;
>
> [...] Why does the AI only give a limited amount of information to
> people instead of telling them exactly what they need to know? [...]
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1. AI's purpose is to give an overview/summary of a solution to a problem (you need to know that something is overheating and need to be cooled down now and you can find the commands in the control room, you don't need a lesson on physics laws).
2. AI define strategies/goals, and humans do the implementation (as, you need to achieve this result, do however you want).
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> [...] The question is why would a friendly AI not give full information,
> allowing people to actually do something [...]
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You give full instructions to humans, and later something happened and instructions were not anymore valid (like to go on the other side you have to take this bridge, ... but before human arrived it collapsed). The goal is to go on the other side, not to walk on the bridge; so you can swim or use a boat instead.
[Answer]
Because AI is just like a child, its level of perfection depend on how much we trained a child and in which manner. Basically intelligence come from classification, how clearly we classify the things more intelligent we are. Hence if we rightly train than it will classify perfectly, and in that scenario we will get exact and full information. The reason for giving limited information that we are not providing the sufficient and meaningful data to that AI embryo.
[Answer]
**Because we told it not to.**
The AI has access to large amounts of information but is subject to all of the same legal restrictions as its government and/or citizens would have regarding criminal behavior, medical information, privacy, non-competition with the private sector, and so on.
For example, use of this information cannot de-anonymize a person, corporation, or trade secret unless explicit permission is given or the information falls within, or alternatively lies outside of, certain explicit legal categories. Think HIPAA (or other national equivalent).
Additionally, the AI cannot commit, or aid or abet a crime.
Furthermore, certain information domains may be reserved for human economic activity and the AI has restrictions that prevent it from competing with this activity.
If the society is less than free, there may be additional restrictions.
[Answer]
**Because being human required making (flawed, human) decisions.**
This AI can control ever detail of our lives if it wants, since its understanding of human psychology is so profound that it can influence us towards any behavior that it wants. But it doesn't want to create the best version of each of ourselves that it can, it wants humanity to thrive while retaining what makes us human. So it only gives us enough information to either not screw up all of humanity or to save it from some external threat, but we're still free to screw up our own lives (maybe not that badly).
The Machine's limitation was imposed by Harold Finch when he created her, because he thought that the power that would come from root access to the Machine would be too much power for any one person or government. That still holds true in your case, but maybe your AI realized that on its own.
Note that Samaritan also dispenses limited information, even though it has no (explicit or apparent) limitations in that regard, or any qualms about harming (parts of) humanity.
[Answer]
There is NO GOOD REASON for why an AI would hide information.
Hiding information lowers human capability.
The only reason to hide information is for the sole purpose of dumbing down the human population.
The result of which will yield an easier to kill race.
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[Question]
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**The Premise:**
I have this story about a medieval general getting besieged in a fortified town. The town is well fortified but the troops defending it, while enough to repel most determined attacks, are not enough to attempt a breakthrough; because of that, after several attempts by the attacking army to take the city, they decided to just starve the defenders out.
**The real question**
Knowing that his army would probably never be relieved, my general decided to just put the city's populace to work digging a really long tunnel to the outside world. I assume that the tunnel would advance by about ***10 meters a day*** and ***the city would have enough provisions to last about 1 year***; that would mean you get ***3.5 km of tunnel***, far enough to get out in a nearby wood near the city and evacuate or smuggle in supplies without the attackers noticing anything. It sounds feasible, but I haven't heard anyone doing it in our history, **so my question is, why not?** Did this ever occur in history? I mean I would do it even preventively, because yes, even if discovered, I can just collapse the tunnel or just easily defend it...
Edit: The town has enough wood to make all the supports and beams needed for the tunnel and space enough to accommodate all the dug-up soil and rocks.
[Answer]
# The Sarajevo Tunnel
While not medieval, the [Sarajevo Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Tunnel) did exactly what you're talking about. Constructed in 1993, it was constructed in order to move people and supplies from the UN controlled airport to the city of Sarajevo while it was besieged by Serbian forces. It was less than 1 km long, and was constructed over a few months. It was dug manually with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows, so there's no reason it couldn't be done in ancient times (provided they have the technical know how of supporting the tunnel).
Additionally, narrow 1/2 km to 2 km escape tunnels were also often constructed in castles and other structures like Muchalls Castle, and Bishops Palace at Exeter, but isn't typically a feature of an entire city.
[Answer]
There is a main problem here: a besieging army doesn't stand the whole day in front of the city walls, waiting or throwing stones. Some of them maintain their equipment, some other scout the surroundings for ensuring safety and some other raid the surrounding for harvesting resources.
You can smuggle a single messenger out with a pinch of luck, but luck doesn't work for large numbers: either letting all the citizens out or letting supplies in will be discovered.
Moreover, having a tunnel scaled up for a large scale operations means a large tunnel. You can't push a half cow through a narrow passage meant for a crawling soldier at a time. This would be a huge weak point in the defenses: if you assign a permanent watch on the tunnel to prevent surprises, to avoid that one night you will find yourself conquered, those are people you are taking away from the walls.
And don't forget that a tunnel that can be easily collapsed it's a nightmare to be maintained. And a collapsed tunnel will bring damage to what's built upon it, including your walls.
[Answer]
Is the tunnel to be established on soil or rock?
If soil, how are they going to get timber to line and support the tunnel to prevent cave ins?
If rock, they won't advance 10 meters each day with just picks and shovels. Modern mines, using mechanized [electro-hydraulic drills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drilling_jumbo), mechanized [underground loaders](https://www.epiroc.com/en-au/products/loaders-and-trucks/diesel-loaders/scooptram-st18), [underground trucks](https://www.epiroc.com/en-au/products/loaders-and-trucks/diesel-trucks) and explosives can advance tunnels between 10 and 15 meters each day, working 24 hours a day.
What size tunnel (height and width) would they be digging? If 2 meters high by 1 meter wide, for 3500 meters that is 7000 cubic meters of muck that must be removed and disposed of. Using a swell factor of 25% that would produce a conical pile of loose uncompacted muck 20 meters high and 40 meters in diameter. Will the fortress have room inside it to accommodate such a pile?
Then there is the issue of ventilation. How will a 3500 meter long tunnel be ventilated in medieval times. Modern tunneling uses [ventilation ducting and fans](http://polyline.com.au/mine-ventilation-ducting/). Ventilation ducting in mining and tunneling was introduced in the mid 20th century.
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***Edit***
[De re Metallica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica), first published in 1556 might give you some ideas about the technology that might have been used. The [English version](https://archive.org/details/deremetallica50agri/page/614/mode/2up) was first published in 1912, after having been translated by [Herbert Hoover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover), 31st president of the USA (1929-1933), and his wife [Lou Henry Hoover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Henry_Hoover).
You can see [some pictures from the book](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffnt&q=de%20re%20metallica&iax=images&ia=images), it's 638 page long.
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***Edit 2***
Some long dormant brain cells have just been revived. Prior to the use of drilling and blasting to break rock, [fire quenching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-setting) was used. The rock face was heated by a large fire and cracking and spalling of the rock was induced by dousing the hot rock face will water. Having such fires was a major ventilation issue.
If the rock was limestone, the rock could be softened or partially dissolved using acid. Vinegar was sometimes used, but being a weak acid it was a slow process.
[Answer]
Additional to the other answers, there are some more factors:
* Scouts in the siege army are everywhere in 10km, to secure the area and also to find food. Starving was a problem on both sides. Your tunnel will have to exit in a secured place outside that area.
* Spies will tell your enemy what's happening. They were usually in place long before the army was even planning the war. Like today.
* Fortresses were often built on rock, to prevent tunnelling in the first place. Tunneling is a standard tool for the army laying siege, so the builders tried to prevent it.
* Fortresses also were often on places difficult to reach, high up for example. This makes your tunnel a lot longer and more difficult to build.
* Many sieges were laid not at the walls of the fortress but kilometres away - on the streets going in and out of the place. You never see the enemy but also you will see no food coming in anymore, until you give up. On the other hand, this makes building a tunnel or smuggling route easier, if it just has to avoid the road block...
All of those points are not show stoppers of course. Rather they are nice story devices for your book or game. Try read the Simplicissimus. It was written around 1650 and contains memories and stories of the German 30 years war. It's fun to read and gives you some impressions about war in those times, also about sieges in those times. The Author wrote the book after the end of the war, and was 30 years old at the time. So he knew nothing but this war in his life.
[Answer]
What you are asking about does exist. [Derinkuyu underground city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city). Large enough for 20k people. Connected to some other cities by many kilometers of tunnels. Something like 200 cities in the region. Large portions built: 800-1100 CE. Used to hide from Byzantines, Mongols, and others.
Big caveat though. This group of cities are all in a particular geological formation. This is important to note. The practicality and logistics of tunneling very wildly depending on rock and soil types.
[Answer]
In many cases sieges were only extended (by the besieged) till an army could be send to chase the besieging army away or fight them from both sides. (No links or proof, I have read it somewhere, do not remember where.)
In that case, a siege lasting longer than a year to be longer extended is unlikely. If an army can not get there within a year, it will not get there at all.
And your plan of a tunnel underneath a besieging army requires a safe spot beyond that army for your city people to get resources, while these people are clearly not able or willing to fight the besiegers. Rather unlikely.
And the ground should be suitable for tunnels, which is a lot less likely than most people think.
So to make your tunnel successful, it should lead to people who are willing to help but for (explained by you) reasons not able to fight for the besieged.
The tunnel should improve the situation inside the siege lines by enough that the besieged can fight more successful, but I think you should still aim at an army coming in to end the siege.
On both sides the biggest killer was usually disease. And depending on where in the world, winter was the worst period for holding a siege, but it did also help a bit by freezing water that might be used in the defense. So if you intent a round the year siege, consider whether winter will be a problem to either side, and if so, how.
[Answer]
**Why not? Because it's impossible to hide logistics on that scale.**
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A medieval city is, what, 20,000 people?
60,000 square meals a day. 2,500 meals an hour through a tunnel. A wagon can carry 500 kilos (rough numbers). Let's say 1 kilo is one meal. Oxen travel at 2mph. Horses a bit faster. So let's split the difference and say it takes your wagons 1 hour to get through the tunnel.
So that's 5 wagons per hour, every hour, going in. And another 5 coming out the other way. Even if the enemy don't spot the tunnel entrance, they're definitely going to spot the near-constant stream of wagons going into/out of that stretch of woods from the nearby settlements.
Assume it's a 2-day round trip. That means you're going to need 240 wagons (and hence at least 240 drivers) on the road at any given time. Plus the thousands of people in those settlements either supplying them, or who know them, or who can see what's going on (this is not an operation you can hide).
Are you really saying not a single one of those thousands of people is going to inform on the whole operation for a big reward?
The enemy's scouting parties aren't going to constantly run into these wagons, out in the countryside, laden with massive provisions, heading towards the besieged city but *not* there to resupply their army, and just let them be on their way without investigating further?
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You can change the numbers around to suit your narrative, but I'd say the reason it's never been done for a *city* is because the logistics are just too big to hide. And trivially easy to stop once they've been discovered.
The only time I can think of it being done is Carthage. And they did it with *ships*.
[Answer]
You need some help from the topography. Assume the following the situation:
The fortress is built on a mostly rocky face of the mountain as most fortresses. The mountain stretches into the country and has many villages around it. The region fortress built is very difficult to scale. Attackers are more interested in the fortress than the land surrounding it.
Your people would start digging from a soft stop eventually reaching rocky section. After very slowly digging, they reach to a cavern system which is normally inaccessible. This doesn't have to be too far, say 200m from the fortress itself. This system leads to a path (a natural one) within the mountain. It could be some sort of a collapsed section which is again inaccessible from outside and will not be very visible as it is lower than the mountains surround it. Then they travel some 10 kms on this open path which requires more digging/find the path around caverns to get out. Once they got out of this system they end up quite far from the fortress where the seigers are not currently in.
All in all, digging and finding their way around treacherous mountain paths, building short bridges in some sections to allow carts be carried can take as long as you need. But will be possible. And being in friendly territory they can bring in supplies and evacuate people.
Carts could enter the mountain under the cover of the night. These carts could pose as traders between the villages. Obviously you will move only highest calorie content food as you will need to limit number of caravans.
[Answer]
You might possibly do this, but I see three major problems.
The first is where do you put all the stuff you dig out. I will assume your tunnel is 2m X 2m in cross section and 3.5km long. That is 2 X 2 X 3500, or 14000 cubic metres of stuff which you have to store in your town.
The second is, what are you digging through. If it is soil then you will need wooden supports or the tunnel will collapse. Where do you get all that wood from? If it is stone then I doubt you can dig 10m a day.
The third is air, 3.5km of tunnel is going to require a lot of pumped air as one end is sealed until you break out.
[Answer]
A partial yes. Yes you could dig the tunnel.
However, as most of the other answers state, it will not be useful for continuous resupply.
But you question includes "evacuate or smuggle in supplies".
The second will not work for an ongoing basis, but the first is a possibility.
You could use it to get people outside the walls, whether strike teams, evacuating non-combatants, or a full evacuation. The problem is that you are now (only) 3.5 km outside of the town, which has an army around it.
Where are your evacuated people going? They are on foot, and their only supplies are what they can carry. Enemy scouts and troops (likely mounted) are going to catch up very fast.
[Answer]
## If you can tunnel out - the enemy can tunnel in
Mining and counter mining were well established military tactics dating back to ancient times and up on through the medieval period, the renaissance and indeed onward - it was still being used used during Word War 1.
A besieging force would establish siege lines and having determined the enemies fortifications were too strong to break through would proceed to tunnel under the walls. The defenders, aware of the risk would in turn try to 'counter-mine' by digging tunnels of their own under the walls along likely lines of approach by the enemy. If close enough opposing teams of tunnelers would be able to hear and feel the other side digging. The defenders would then turn the angle of their tunnel to intercept the approaching besiegers and then try to breach and capture it. If successful they would drive the enemy back as far as they could before destroying the supports or otherwise causing a collapse. Fighting in dark with picks shovels daggers and anything else small enough to take with them.
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Something related in the real world is smuggling tunnels. The [longest smuggling tunnel discovered so far between Mexico and the US](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51304861) is 4,309 feet, and that article links to several more long smuggling tunnels.
Usually not a lot of information is available on how they were constructed (for some reason, the people who built them aren't talking) but you can get some ideas about how the entrances/exits were hidden, what they look like on the inside, etc.
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I am surprised nobody mentioned tunnel warfare as a reason why it cannot be kept a secret.
As mentioned by another answer, mining through solid rock was practically impossible at a proper rate. So building a tunnel would only work if the castle was built on soil, however in this case the enemy also would use sappers to dig tunnels of their own to bring down the walls while the defenders often tried to countermine these tunnels and demolish them early.
So both sides had to "listen" to the enemy, this was achieved via putting beans on a drum underground, if they jumped the enemy was mining a tunnel. This would give away the defenders.
[Answer]
Let's suppose for a while that the tunnel ends in a place that can be controlled by defenders, there are still big problems with the actual tunnel building:
1. Rock - it's not feasible to dig a tunnel in every type of ground. For hard rocks you will need explosives or a big amount of time. Sooner or later tools used for digging will break and you will need new tools. A lot of new tools. With medieval technology is usually impossible to dig in a straight line.
2. Soil digged out has to be removed. Pretty soon you will run out of room for that in a city.
3. You will need construction to hold the tunnel walls and protect your workers from cave-ins. That's a lot material, probably from wood. You will need access to a lot of wood. Still, it's probable that some minor cave-ins will be visible from the surface, it's not something you can entirely avoid.
4. Air. The flow of air inside a tunnel is not simple. Nowadays we usually use big fans for ventilation. With medieval technology you will need regular openings to the surface. And these openings can be noticed by the attacking army. This is especially important if the only lighting you have is fire.
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[Question]
[
There are basically no non-sentient lifeforms of a size that could, and would be willing to, pull wagons from city to city.
The only lifeforms that physically could, are sapient.
Medieval, so no trains.
The only realistic alternative I see is using ships and boats.
Convenient and non-taxing transport for people is also a factor, and seems to fall into the same alternatives.
I imagine this would make a Venice-like canal city a more likely; Intra-city transport would effectively require the canals, no?
(The ecological effects of not having the multitude of lifeforms performing the various roles (Bees, for instance), are hand waved, so not part of the question)
I am somewhat uncertain if this is even an appropriate question.
[Answer]
You are kind of answering your own question.
**Human labor is the only possibility you did not exclude by your world setting.**
Historically we have been using either machines, animals or manual labor to accomplish tasks like these. Since it's medieval times machinery is off the table. Animals are off the table too, because of your world design. So there is just human labor left. (This could be slaves for example.)
[Answer]
There are plenty of historical societies that didn't have beasts of burden: anybody in the Americas south of dog-travois or outside of [llama territory](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ews4g/did_precolombian_america_ever_used_a_beast_of/), or Africa south of [horses](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/domestic-horses-of-africa/), and Australia and New Guinea. My understanding is that anybody who built big things or moved things over long distances had to use human labor. There wasn't any other way to solve those problems than "throw more peasants at it."
[Answer]
Your question contains a false assumption about medieval transport, namely that it primarily featured beasts of burden and carts. This is very much incorrect.
The first thing you have to remember is that there were no roads between cities. Not as we understand them, not as the Romans would have understood them, and barely even as good as a farm track or a logging trail today. Carts were practical for local transport around the farm or village, and perhaps to the next village along. Travelling any significant distance though was unbelievably difficult. Moreover, it took some time before medieval Europe had enough horses to spare for a farmer to be able to afford them, and draft oxen are slow creatures.
Any significant transport therefore went by water. Whether this was down rivers or along the coast, basically anything or anyone going any distance used boats. As the Industrial Revolution took off, this continued into canals. Steam engines took over somewhat later, of course. Roads did improve in the 19th century, so a carriage had a better-than-average chance of actually arriving at its destination. But it wasn't until well into the 20th century that roads became a truly practical proposition, and that was driven by cars.
So, you're looking at the same kind of transport structures as medieval Europe. Every city and major town will be on a navigable river or by the sea. Your medieval society doesn't have the technology to build canals, so they're limited to existing rivers.
[Answer]
Steam engines. The first steam engine was developed well before medieval times. However with the prevalence of slave labor and beasts of burden there was no great practical application at the time. Lacking that however, there might be a greater impetuous to put it to work.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile>
[Answer]
One alternative not yet considered, depending on the nature and size of the sentient 'life forms' is that they, themselves, observe the need for the transport of materiel or other species and choose to to offer their services, for profit, as hauliers.
[Answer]
This is going to depend on how big/heavy the load is, and what terrain you want to transport it over.
Smaller loads (less than 100 kilos?) over broken terrain, some people just carry it (think of the stereotypical image of a 19th century expedition with pairs of porters carrying supplies through the jungle on a pole over their shoulders).
If there is some kind of path, put it on a wheelbarrow. A central-wheel design puts all the weight on the wheel so the person essentially only needs to steer and push. [Here is a great write-up of wheelbarrow transport](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html). The path only need be as wide as a walking path, not a full wagon-width, but it does need to be hard and smooth enough for a big wheel to traverse.
Bigger roads could handle wagons pulled by people in order to move bigger cargo.
The really heavy loads (more than a few hundred kilos) will need to be transported by barge. If the terrain is suitable, either from slow-moving rivers or if canals could be dug, a barge is the overwhelmingly the best mode of transport in terms of weight capacity and energy required to move it (can be pulled along by someone on an adjacent walking path or punted along with a stick). Unfortunately digging canals is extremely labor-intensive, which is why natural waterways are one of the biggest influences on where cities developed. Water transport is overwhelmingly useful.
[Answer]
Beside the already mentioned solutions, if winters are cold enough, people could transport goods using sledges. It'll require humans to provide the labour, but you can transport more goods than carrying it.
It may also mean trade happens more in some parts of the world than in others.
[Answer]
Then what question are you really asking? Alternative forms of travel and transport than boats, or are you asking what life would be like if society was based on a city like Venice?
Canal based cities are a possibility, but there are many other factors that you should be aware of:
**City Life:**
I visited Venice once. It is a very beautiful city with lots of canals, bridges, etc, but the old town which everyone thinks about is actually only a small area of a couple of square miles. I could not imagine what a large sprawling city like Los Angeles would look like if there were canals instead of streets and rivers instead of freeways.
* Major cities are limited to the coast (tidal?), river banks and man-made aqueducts
* Flooding may be a constant threat (buildings should be made of stone and first floor of buildings should be dry-season use only)
* Buildings may not be very tall either (Venice only has a few buildings taller than 3 or 4 stories and they have a problem with sinking)
* Drought may also be a major disruptor to inland trade and travel
* Locks and dams to keep water from flowing downstream will cause stagnation, foul smells, pests, and disease
* Water-born diseases (without clean drinkable water an illness started upstream might devastate an entire nation)
* Trash may pile up
* People will be starkly divided into haves and havenots
* Gangs and thugs will be a constant problem (lots of hideaways, that even police will have a hard time keeping control)
**Resource Gathering**
* Vegetable farms would be small plots that are close to navigable water (the issue is not whether the land is fertile, but rather getting the harvested crop to buyers)
* Grains and breads could only be afforded by the middle and upper classes
* Because of supply and demand, farm owners will be one of the richest individuals in society
* Rooftop gardens would be very common (unless town is often affected by storms)
* Fish would be primarily the source of food for the city poor
* Red meat will be extremely scarce as many of our beasts of burden are also our food supply (ox, horse, deer, etc)
* Trappers and hunters may provide a high demand product, but it would be difficult to get the meat to the city while still fresh (more likely only the skins are sent)
* Possible to have rabbit and chicken farms, but feeding them would be expensive (wild chickens and rabbits outside the city might be a good industry for orphans)
**Warfare:**
* Areas away from any navigable source of water would be considered barbarian and wild
* Those that live outside of the cities would be feared
* War between nations are mostly limited to navy
* Assaults on cities can be controlled by a few well guarded access points
* An overland army march from out of the wilds would catch everyone by surprise (but keeping army fed would be extremely difficult)
**Original Answer:**
Ants can lift 1000x their own weight.
So build a "sled" that rests on "giant" ants (the size rats). The ants are bred and have the queen installed inside the sled to communicate navigation.
[Answer]
Canals; bah. Slave-drawn wagons; Ho. Hum. What else??
I propose **dirigibles**.
<https://www.space.com/16623-first-powered-airship.html>
>
> In 1850, another Frenchmen, Pierre Jullien of Villejuif, demonstrated
> a cigar-shaped model airship at the Paris Hippodrome. The airship's
> rudder, elevator, and gondola were mounted under the front part of the
> balloon. A clockwork motor that drove two airscrews mounted on either
> side of a center line propelled the airship. A light wire frame
> stiffened by a truss maintained the bag's form. Jullien was onto
> something that another man would leverage.
>
>
> Jules Henri Giffard, a French engineer and inventor, took note of
> Jullien's design. He built the first full-size airship — a
> cigar-shaped, non-rigid bag that was 143 feet (44 meters) long and had
> a capacity of 113,000 cubic feet (3,200 cubic meters). He also built a
> small 3-horsepower (2.2-kilowatt) steam engine to power a three-bladed
> propeller. The engine weighed 250 pounds (113 kilograms) and needed a
> 100-pound (45.4 kilograms) boiler to fire it.
>
>
>
<http://www.thehistoryforum.com/airships/henri_giffard/giffard_airship_1191x1783.php>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vWwzp.jpg)
Medieval tech can build you an airship. You need a wicker frame (make a few spare Wicker Men this Beltane), and a light envelope that can contain your lifting gas - greased silk would work, or isinglass. Hydrogen is the lightest lift gas, but the molecule is so small it is hard to contain and it requires some alchemy to produce. Helium is good but it occurs only as small percentages in natural gas and must be refined.
But what about natural gas as a lifting gas? Natural gas comes out of the ground in some places. People know it is something different because it can sustain a flame. [Methane is light enough to be used as a lifting gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_gas#Methane) and has the advantages of coming straight from the ground and being a larger and so more easily contained molecule. Plus if you are lucky maybe there is some helium in there as well.
The depicted aerostat has a steam engine. But you could have crew with handcranked propellors, or sails. or giant air oars. Or just go before the wind like a ship with a fixed sail. You would wait for a favorable wind and launch!
Those of you interested in seeing how medieval airships might look are invented to dive down the rabbit hole of google image, from which I have just returned.
[Answer]
I'm picturing a world where it is - like most of the other posters have suggested - humans who do all of the heavy lifting.
However, this world could have used selective breeding to create a race of humans that are bigger/stronger and used only for the purpose of manual labour. Trained from an early age that all they'll ever do is transport cargo, or a rigid religious system in place that keeps them in their place - so that they don't rise up and overthrow their weaker brethren. Selective breeding of horses was used in medieval times on our world[1], so another world revolving around human labour could do something similar.
All of the methods for moving goods around the world are then tailored to these larger humans; harnesses for strapping goods, (or even smaller humans) or human-drawn carts, pedal-cabs in larger towns.
With an abundance of compliant, strong, labour, perhaps this world doesn't even think to develop technology to minimise human labour. They can always throw more larger humans at the problem.
This world could get very dark and twisted very quickly.
[1]: "Horses appear to have been selectively bred for increased size from the 9th and 10th centuries" - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages>
[Answer]
**Steam Engines**
The [aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) is the first recorded use of steam as power we know of, having been recorded in the 1st century AD. Other notable points in history: people using fire and cooking 2 million years ago, fire being commonplace 125 thousand years ago, pottery 30 thousand years ago, and simple machines in 3 BC.
Even without slavery, I think there is a good case for saying that at some point, somebody in early times would figure out how to control heat pressure. Something like "Why did that clay bowl explode in the fire?".
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[Question]
[
The human country lies on a mountain plateau. On one side, the plateau stops at the top of a cliff, after which there are a collection of stacks and a group of tabletop mountains, none of them accessible with human technology.
Harpies live on the cliffs, the stacks, the mountains, and beyond. They don’t use either clothes nor tools nor fire, but are quite dexterous with their bird feet, and could probably do gardening work if they put their mind to it. They cannot lift an human; four of them could band together and carry a child, but humans won’t allow it, and the harpies (usually) oblige.
My question is : What goods/resources can be produced by harpies to be traded with humans?
It shouldn’t come from the harpy itself, so capturing one can’t get you anything. It has to be light, for harpies to carry it (so most metals are out of question).
For one of the resources, I was thinking of a crocus-based dye. Some dyes were pretty valuable.
Sorry, I need to clarify a point. I'm not talking just about day-to-day local trade, but sought-after goods obtained through hard-won agreements (They don't look the part, but harpies can be shrewd, when they put their mind into it) with a noticeable impact on the economy. I like the answers so far, some of them will definitely make it in the story (provided I manage to finish it one day)
[Answer]
## Ivory or tortoiseshell
Assuming that the humans find it difficult to get down the cliff, you could easily populate them with large (peaceful or aggressive) animals with valuable, non-perishable body parts, such as teeth, tusks, horns or shells. Related options would include bones for medical (TCM-style) use, skulls as trophies, etc. The materials come in sizes that can be carried by a single harpy and have trophy, decorative or medicinal value. The animals could go to a remote and difficult-to-access 'elephant's graveyard' to die, or could simply be rare (but the picked-clean skeletons show up from the air).
Taking things one step further, the harpies could already be hunting by chasing herds of these large animals off cliffs and then scavenging the meat like vultures, resulting in a heap of 'useless' bones and tusks which they are later delighted to learn the humans will trade for.
[Answer]
**Collected treasures.**
<https://www.mnn.com/family/family-activities/blogs/little-girl-feeds-crows-in-return-they-bring-her-gifts>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CDY07.jpg)
>
> Then, in 2013, Gabi decided to do more than just share the scraps of
> her lunch. Each morning, she began filling a birdbath with fresh
> water, and setting out food — peanuts, dog food and general leftovers
> — for the birds to eat. It was then that the gifts from the crows
> started to appear.
>
>
> Gifts brought to Gabi Mann, little girl who feeds crows Gabi's
> 'treasures' include a blue paper clip, a Lego piece, a rusty screw and
> a pearl-colored heart. (Photo: The Bittersweet Life/Twitter)
>
>
> Her collection also includes a miniature silver ball, a black button,
> a faded black piece of foam and a blue Lego piece. She stores the
> treasures that the crows bring to her in a bead container, with each
> gift carefully itemized and labeled.
>
>
>
The wild lands where the harpies live are inaccessible to humans. But these lands were not always abandoned. Other races and civilizations once lived there, and their relics and artifacts sometimes make their way to the surface, where they are collected by the harpies. Crystals and dragon teeth lie on the surface waiting to be picked up. Ancient magic and strange earth energies produce unusual things which could be spotted by sharp eyes in the skies.
The harpies are collectors like the crows, but they are smarter and they know better what will fetch a price.
[Answer]
**Information**
Harpies can fly and this would make them invaluable to help map-makers, to plot roads, to inspect large fields, and any other number of activities.
They also could carry messages between the cities, creating a courier network that could surpass most kinds of treacherous terrain with ease.
[Answer]
>
> It is in this kingdom that diamonds are got; and I will tell you how.
> There are certain lofty mountains in those parts; and when the winter
> rains fall, which are very heavy, the waters come roaring down the
> mountains in great torrents. When the rains are over, and the waters
> from the mountains have ceased to flow, they search the beds of the
> torrents and find plenty of diamonds. In summer also there are plenty
> to be found in the mountains, but the heat of the sun is so great that
> it is scarcely possible to go thither, nor is there then a drop of
> water to be found. Moreover in those mountains great serpents are rife
> to a marvellous degree, besides other vermin, and this owing to the
> great heat. The serpents are also the most venomous in existence,
> insomuch that any one going to that region runs fearful peril; for
> many have been destroyed by these evil reptiles.
>
>
> Now among these mountains there are certain great and deep valleys, to
> the bottom of which there is no access. Wherefore the men who go in
> search of the diamonds take with them pieces of flesh, as lean as they
> can get, and these they cast into the bottom of a valley. Now there
> are numbers of white eagles that haunt those mountains and feed upon
> the serpents. When the eagles see the meat thrown down they pounce
> upon it and carry it up to some rocky hill-top where they begin to
> rend it. But there are men on the watch, and as soon as they see that
> the eagles have settled they raise a loud shouting to drive them away.
> And when the eagles are thus frightened away the men recover the
> pieces of meat, and find them full of diamonds which have stuck to the
> meat down in the bottom.
>
>
> [The Travels of Marco Polo](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Book_3/Chapter_19)
>
>
>
So Marco Polo told exaggerated tales, but it shows like flying small creatures could go down mountains to the river beds to retrieve jewels or valuable metals like gold extracted by rivers and normal erosion.
Even if your harpies can't carry heavy loads, only a couples of ounces of gold would make a flight very profitable. They could even get sieves from the humans to get those jewels better.
It is even fun if they insist on bringing shiny but not very interesting rocks, like quartz, instead of dull uncut jewels like emeralds.
[Answer]
The harpies may be able to fly to other lands during migrations. As such they may be able to gather and bring to their human partners natural resources that would be too costly to acquire otherwise.
For example, tropical fruits. The humans would like those because a more varied diet would make them healthier, and the harpies might trade for anything they find useful in nest building.
Harpies would be ideal for this kind of import. In the very least they should be able to carry coconuts, making them far better couriers than swallows (europeans ones will not carry much weight, and african ones are not migratory).
[Answer]
**Harpies**
Harpies could make excellent scouts, shepherds, game wardens and exotic 'pets' for a ruler to show off. So there could be a - horrible! - trade in Harpie slaves. Slavers would likely either sell whole families, some members will have their wings cut and be kept as hostages so the others don't fly away. Or the Harpies sell eggs, with the human masters conditioning the young Harpies to obedience.
Either way, the result would be whole generations of Harpies growing up traumatized and brutalized so that a few Harpy leaders can have human made trinkets.
[Answer]
**Nuts**
The harpies really like a certain kind of nut that only grows in the mountains but since nuts with weaker shells get eaten and don't become trees the nuts have evolved to have especially strong shells. One day while trying to crack nuts a harpy dropped it near some humans who promptly cracked it with their tools, seeing how expedient this was the harpy dropped more nuts by them until the humans started leaving cracked nuts as payment. Thus began a mutually beneficial arrangement, harpies would collect bags of nuts then drop them off at human settlements, the humans would crack the nuts and leave roughly half out for the harpies as payment, if the humans at one settlement are too stingy the harpies stop dropping their nuts there and take them to another settlement.
For the humans the nuts are a tasty treat, especially when roasted or coated in chocolate and the hard nut shells are used to make various things like arrow heads and scale-mail armour, or used as fuel in ovens and kilns.
[Answer]
**Medicinal plants that only grow in mountains or on cliffs**
These resources might be very valuable for humans and are very easily obtainable for harpies. Many plants can grow on cliffs or in altitude exclusively. Depending on the technological advancement of humans, these plants might be vital (well, quite literally).
[Answer]
OP indicated that my comment helped him, so I figured it was worth turning it into an answer:
**Chalk from the cliffs and surrounding mountains.**
* Chalk is quite soft, so the harpies could probably dig it out of the cliffside using their talons, without the need for tools. It's also fairly light, so they should be able to transport it.
* It could be difficult for the humans to mine it themselves - if they can't climb tabletop mountains, they probably can't traverse the cliff. Trading with the harpies may well be their only way of obtaining it.
* Chalk is useful for things like writing and (depending on the nature of your society) make-up. It's also consumable, so the humans would need a constant, steady supply of it. (Since OP mentioned they're a *country*, I'm guessing there's a lot of humans.)
[Answer]
You can trade in goods or services.
Harpies are good at delivering only one kind of heavy object: themselves.
So **services** it is.
The most valuable being courier/postal services and mapmaking/reconnaisance services. An entire courier operation, with postal stations, built for scale.
Another thing is banking and trading. Anything that is about making connections, talking to many different people in different places. By flying higher than arrow range, harpies can move out and make deals, and carry contracts, money, and other valuables back and forth at much lower risk than humans.
Highly mobile countryside doctors will also be preferred to their slow human counterparts.
[Answer]
Furs & hides.
Harpies would be really good hunters. If you can fly and shoot a bow, you can kill a *lot* of critters.
[Answer]
Delicious eggs.
Lots of birds nest on cliffs that are inaccessible to ground-based predators. A harpy could carry a couple per trip, more if you equipped her with a pouch.
[Answer]
**flying even without great lift capabilities open up hundreds of jobs.**
1. moving things to and from high places will open up many jobs, and result on far fewer humans dying from falling off of high ladders or poorly constructed scaffolding. note most of these jobs do not require moving heavy thing just getting to the locations. **steeplejacks, church cleaners, thatchers, roofing work, eggers, and a hundred other jobs** are more about working high not weight lifting.
2. **Fishing**, medieval fishermen used to pay people to stand on the highest places the could find to spot fish schools for them, (water is to reflective at low angles to see through well) harpies could do this easier and without having to find something tall to climb on. I could easily see every fishing community having its own family of harpies fish spotting for them. Then you remember they might not be able to pull nets up but they could drop them, that would be useful in and of itself.
3. As Mart mentions as scouts, shepards, mapmakers, game wardens are all great jobs, any job that requires covering long distances of wilderness terrain would be perfect jobs for them. there were a lot of jobs like this.
4. **guards, storm watchers**. I imagine every town would have a few families of harpies with no other job but to glide high over the city and spot oncoming armies and/or storms. way cheaper than building and manning watch towers. Likewise every large ship would hire one or two for the same thing, not to mention flying messages from ship to ship or ship to shore. I can see dozens of jobs in the **maritime industry**.
5. That brings up **messengers**, which others have mentioned, but people underestimate how useful they could be even inside a city as a messenger, they can fly over buildings and traffic and even find people who are out and about with ease. over long distance a horse might be better, but for simple messages within a town or province they would be vastly faster and more reliable, also far more secure since it is a lot harder to jump them in an alley.
6. **Archers**, if harpies can draw and fire a bow with their feet they should be the most devastating archers in history, they would make horse archers look obsolete. If being the key term.
7. **Fruit pickers and nutters**, working together with humans, harpies would make excellent fruit pickers, especially for getting the hardest to reach items on the high and outer branches.
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Skins and furs are the obvious item. Harpies eat the meat but since they don't wear clothes, skins are useless to them.
They are light enough to carry, a waste product and valuable to humans.
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The requirement for it being light makes a lot of things viable.
Basically any cutting tool which they develop would be very valuable since those would be very light, thus easy to wield and easy to carry (concealed).
herbs from the Mountains. Exotic is good. period. even if the herb is slightly poisonous you can market it as a cure. ("strong medicines have side-effects" kind of placebo effect, called necebo. Really funny).
small gems, crystals from the mountains. Shiny things you will capture human attention, especially if you can't get to them. Just walk past a jewelry shop and the effect becomes apparent.
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You said it yourself: *and could probably do gardening work if they put their mind to it*
So anything that grows in their environment which does not grow on your plateau - especially if their living area is higher/lower than yours different plants will develop there.
Surely they will *put their mind to it* if your price is good.
Focus on leafy plants or their seeds (maybe with medicinal properties), not on roots, bulbs etc. because they can't carry heavy weights.
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Disregarding how battleships are really big targets and not really viable in the modern era anymore, I would like to ask how big a battleship can be built before it starts being so large it sinks.
It doesn't have to be practical and I don't mind if sinks from a single torpedo or shelling neither does it matter if it takes a millennia worth of oil just to start moving.
I would just like to know what kind of ludicrous size we can build a Battleship to set sail and fire bombardment with.
This question was inspire by the real-life battleship <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato-class_battleship>
which was kinda useless, so I'm now asking how big of a useless ship can we make to rain death with. (sorry if there's actually an answer for this or there's no actual limit to how big ships can be made)
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TL;DR: there is no realistic limit on size.
A ship stays afloat because while it is really heavy, its total weight is less than the weight of the water its hull displaces, so you could easily build a huge flat steel ship with a thin hull that is not very high and it would happily float. However, if the water were anything except for flat calm, then the movement of the water risks ripping it in half.
Or you could build it out of polystyrene, as that's lighter than the water itself. Again it would break easily though.
**But…**
Let's look at the Yamato, according to Google: 263metres long and weighed 65,030 Tons… pretty big, and pretty heavy.
How about the [TI Class Super Tanker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-class_supertanker)
380metres long and a fully loaded weight of 501,437 tons… Now that's heavy!!! But it still floats quite happily, in fact it's more stable when it's full than if it were empty
**So...**
The important factor is strength of materials and ship design. A multi-hulled ship has a stronger hull than a single thick hull (Within reason!!!) for the same amount of steel used. And then you wouldn't need to carry huge amounts of material that can slosh around compared to a super tanker carrying oil… probably a few nuclear reactors to power the props would do quite nicely.
A when you think about it, the wider the ship, the more room you have for additional props! so more speed... but then again an even bigger disaster if one or more of the reactors melt down.
The problems with big ships are what you have already mentioned, easy to hit, easy to find, and very costly to build and maintain. And no real need for them… But apart from that, nothing is stopping us.
It's also interesting to know that the real limit in modern terms is actually if it will fit in through the Panama Canal.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VEwtq.jpg)
It's a bit of a tight fit!
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I suspect that there is a fundamental limit based on material strength.
If we look at wooden ships, the longest you can feasibly get is [about 150 meters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_wooden_ships). So the biggest wooden warship could be no bigger than that. So a similar limit must exist for steel ships, at which point the stresses of being at sea overcome any realistic structure. For example, a ship which could not turn without buckling would not be a practical ship.
Some research gives a maximum girder span [of about 75m](https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-maximum-span-for-beam-in-building-construction). Let's assume that we can't have more than 4 compartments across the ship, so our beam is limited to 300 meters. Scaling up from the [Yamato](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato-class_battleship) gives us a length about 8 times that, so say 2.5km. Displacement would go as the square, so 64x64000 = 4 million tonnes.
I suspect that past that size, the need for internal reinforcement would make the ship impractical. It would certainly float, and be very, very hard to sink because, well, most current non-nuclear munitions would bounce off the 3 meters(!) of side armor. Likewise torpedoes would just flood a few compartments. And whatever guns it carried would be firing [nuclear shells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W19_(nuclear_artillery_shell)) hundreds of kilometers..
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## At least several km2
See [Modular island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading#Modular_island) wiki article. There are several proposals to make modular floating islands possible.
What? Do I hear that it does not count as battleship? Just add modules on edge with walls / shileding.
Does it fulfill your requirements?
>
> It doesn't have to be practical
>
>
>
Check.
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> I don't mind if sinks from a single torpedo or shelling neither does it matter if it takes a millennia worth of oil just to start moving.
>
>
>
Check.
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There was a proposal during WWII to build an aircraft carrier out of frozen water mixed with wood pulp called [Pyekrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete). It was intended to be able to take multiple torpedo hits with no effective damage. You could build a battleship out of Pyekrete and put armor around the generators and chillers and guns. It would be slow (and probably best towed by tugs) but it would be hard to hurt. Maximum size is mostly limited by how many chiller hoses you want to run to keep it frozen.
Pyekrete is better than straight water ice for this because the wood pulp forms a fuzzy blanket as the ice melts and slows melting greatly.
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Would a horse (trained or otherwise) not be wholly spooked by a Dragon merely flying overhead, even more so trying to enter combat with it or just trying to approach it under any circumstances?
What I understand of predator and prey creatures suggests that something that massive and formidable would radiate major predator vibes which would cause most creatures to cower or flee. Yet, I have only seen knights and other heroic character types depicted as approaching and even fighting Dragons without regard for or consequence from their mount's will.
Most particularly, I am wondering about after such a beast is slain. Wouldn't a horse, even a trained warhorse, refuse to approach something that huge/dangerous even after it's dead?
I am trying to troubleshoot a scene where a unit of mounted characters need to approach a felled Dragon (one they did not battle) under a time constraint and I need to know if they would be forced to dismount and approach on foot (slowing them down) to get where they need to go. Of note: these horses, though battle capable, have not encountered Dragons before - they do not have either genetic or actual memory with which to comprehend this with. I have considered that even if they had blinders on, this would not help keep them calm because during approach that giant form would be directly ahead of them and not to either side covered by blinders.
*Is it even possible to train a horse to keep its wits around a massive apex predator under any circumstances?*
Since Dragons imply magic exists in a setting they exist in, I can concede magic being one possible solution to maintain calm utilizable in a well-arranged military scenario. Magic-capable units could cast some sort of calming spell to keep mounts from panicking, but, that requires some of the best defensive/offensive resources to be rerouted when likely needed for offensive/defensive tasks. I also cannot reliably expect a magic-enabled individual specifically capable of casting such a calming spell to always be around. What happens to the horses of the local town guard during an unexpected Dragon attack?
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While I have no actual experience riding horses around dragons (dragons being uncommon hereabouts), I do have some perhaps relevant experience.
WRT a dragon flying overhead, would you accept a flight of C-130s <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-130_Hercules> or fighter jets flying overhead at treetop (or sagebrush) level as a reasonable proxy? That's happened to me a number of times, without the horses being more than slightly nervous.
For actual predators on the ground, a charging bear (chasing my idiot dog) is about as close as I can come. Here the results are mixed. My friend's horse bucked her off and ran away. My horse wanted to follow, but I managed to get him turned around and between the friend and the bear.
Other threatening objects, like dirt bikes and horse-eating logging equipment, likewise have had mixed results. I've known people to get thrown & horses run away when startled by these things. However, if you just approach them slowly, the horses are seldom more than a bit nervous, and will go ahead and circle around them.
So I have to say that it depends. If the horse has a basically calm disposition, and has been trained/desensitized to unusual/threatening stimulii (even if not to actual dragons), then it should be possible to have it approach a dragon.
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The older, wiser, more experienced horses might have an easier time of it. The wiser horses will pick up on fear cues from their riders, if they trust their riders. Horses are herd animals. There is rank within the horse herd. Has the group of adventurers that has been traveling together for a while? Have they kept the same horses together for a while? If the herd has been together long enough to establish a pack hierarchy, the younger horses will take fear cues from the horse alpha.
I have seen this happen. I took riding lessons for a few years. I consider myself a mediocre rider at best. My instructor was excellent. My instructor had some young, high strung horses. She had one horse that was 28 years old, which is up there in years for a trail horse. This horse had been there, done that, and didn’t care about much. When the instructor wanted to work with the young horses, to help then build confidence and calm down, she would ride the young horse and would ask me to ride the old horse. I saw those young horses freak out over every bird flapping by, every overhead light that suddenly turned on, every breeze that jostled a leaf. But the old horse was there. The old horse didn’t care. Since the herd leaders weren’t freaking out, and the riders weren’t freaking out, the young horses didn’t totally lose it. They would jerk and shy for a moment or two, but that was it.
I saw the old horse lose it exactly once. We were in the covered arena. The instructor was on foot in the center of the arena. I was on the old horse. We were walking in a circle. Suddenly, one of the big overhead halogen lights exploded. That horse flinched like hell and geared up for a full gallop. Got about one step into a gallop. Then he dropped back into a walk (though it was one hell of a power walk), changed course, and made a beeline for the instructor. He got to the instructor and stopped. She gave him an apple. We stood there for a few minutes. Then we went back to our exercise. No problem. That horse knew I was a rookie rider. He didn’t waste one minute listening to my opinions of the situation. He was surprised and frightened. He was able to control his fear, pick a rational response, and act on it. He responded in a controlled fashion and got close to the person he trusted most.
Those younger horses would have been all over the arena.
In short, horses are social animals with a ranking system. The horses will look to their horse leaders. If you have an established herd of horses, if you have a confident, calm, experienced rider on a strong, old, wise alpha horse, that pair will advance. The rest of the herd will bunch up and do what it takes to stay close to the alpha. That is safety.
If you have a bunch of strangers riding together, and a bunch of young horses who are unfamiliar with each other, and nobody knows who is in charge, you will have panicked equines all over the landscape.
A Pocket Full of Sunshine -
Someone right next to the arena did not plan their Christmas decor with the nearby horses in mind. Frantic blinking lights, rotating laser light show, loud music, and a party in full swing. Cars full of loud guests. Doors flapping open and closed. In the dark. Literally 15 feet away from the arena. My instructor was absolutely disgusted. Nobody had planned for this.
I was on the old, wise horse.
My instructor asked me “Do you have your pocket full of sunshine?” This refers to the practice of stuffing your boot tops full of carrots, apple chunks, peppermint candy or anything else that will possibly fit in there.
Yup, my boots were full.
She said “Ride over there and get him used to that crap.”
So we walked around the arena toward the ruckus. When my horse got a little shivery, I would reassure him. I used my knuckles to gently rub the base of his neck. I told him what a good horse he was. I watched his ears. When his ears were pointing back at me, I knew he was paying attention to me and not to the distractions. I don’t mean ears lying flat back. Ears standing upright but swiveled in the direction of the rider means “I am paying attention to you.” When he was ignoring the distractions, I tapped him quickly twice on the side of his shoulder. This means “good horse, have a treat”. He swiveled his head around, close to my boots. I pulled out a chunk of sunshine and fed it to him. We proceeded around the arena in this fashion for a few minutes. Eventually he was more focused on the peppermint candy than on the distractions.
Seriously, horses love those circular red and white peppermint breath mints.
Soon he was cruising around the arena, crunching away on snacks and ignoring the random green lasers in his path. Good horse.
Your cavalry riders weren’t planning on dragons that day. But they know their horses. They know that weird stuff crops up and they might not have the luxury of spending the next three weeks getting their horses used to that weird stuff. They have desensitized on the fly before. A dragon, even a dead dragon, will surely put a strain on their training. It might take a few snack stops. It would put a strain on the rider, sitting on a frightened, shaking horse, yards away from a giant reptile corpse. I could see the rider praying that a breeze didn’t stir a bit of the dragon’s wing, or that a death spasm didn’t cause that snake-like tail to twitch. But it is plausible that an experienced team could overcome their fear and approach. The unknown happens all the time. If you are a professional rider, you don’t ever mount up without a pocket full of sunshine.
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Has the horse been desensitized to dragons? Horses can be trained to accept and keep calm in the face of things that go against all their instincts, even plastic bags.
For example, a predator attacking a horse would be likely to aim to get on its back, near the neck, where it is safe from both teeth and hooves. The horse's instincts say to buck, rear, spin, and do everything it can to dislodge a possible predator. Despite that, with care, and patient work, a horse can be trained to accept a living omnivore on its back.
Generally, the more a horse has been exposed to a lot of different things, and the more it trusts its rider, the less likely it is to spook at something new. A lot would depend on the rider staying calm, so the more heroic and courageous the rider, the less likely the horse is to spook. Just talking calmly can do wonders.
A warhorse has already accepted being ridden and got over its natural fear of the smell of blood. In a world with dragons, a prudent trainer would present a war horse with things that smell of dragon to desensitize it.
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There is honestly no point riding a warhorse into battle if it is not first trained to run towards sharp pointy things, through the smell of blood, loud noises, explosions, scary people, rapid peripheral movement, and fire.
It kinda depends on what you mean by "warhorse", though.
A **destrier** should be able to charge right up to that dragon and bite it in the face. This is your high-end horse. You need to be rich to own one of these guys, but they're kick-ass. Trained right, jousting shouldn't faze them, and the blood and chaos of the battlefield is their element. We just don't have these kinds of aggressive heavy cavalry horses any more, so little that you know about modern horses will help here.
A **courser** should at least be able to charge towards it. If you're a knight, you should have at least this kind of horse. More bred and trained for running, less for combat, akin to modern cavalry horses, but still eminently capable.
There's a reason that coursers and destriers are also called "**chargers**". They are bred and trained to charge into a fray. If a warhorse runs at the first sign of danger, then it's not a warhorse: it will not be breeding stock for the next generation.
If you just mean a regular riding horse or **palfrey**, a horse that a knight uses for travel but not for battle, then yeah, they mostly won't have the training or breeding to handle that stuff, so their reaction will be down to their temperament and their trust in their rider.
If they have a mild temperament and their trusted, longtime rider seems unconcerned, even celebratory, then they are unlikely to be any more scared of a dead dragon than a modern horse and rider would be on riding up to a beached whale.
If they are skittish and have a new, nervous rider, then they may well lose their head at a lizard, let alone a dragon.
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**Train your horses.**
Horses are generally okay approaching large non-moving things such as hills, buildings and large trees. The dragon corpse being large is not a problem.
I disagree the corpse is **reeking of danger**. As you said these horses have not encountered a dragon before. So they don't associate anything with the scent of a dragon beside **new weird smell**. Being naturally timid, this might spook an untrained horse. But a trained horse should still be able to take commands.
To make this easier I suggest you accustom your horses to the smell of dragon from a young age. Much like real horses are accustomed to the smell of humans, dogs, cows, and car exhaust, and do not see these as a threath. To do this just bring pieces of dragon skin and/or dung into the stables.
A living dragon is another issue entirely. But let's just remember horses can be trained to avoid their natural instinct to bolt when a huge metal box hurtles past them at 40 mph.\* So it's believable we could accustom them to large flying creatures moving overhead. The most reliable way to do this is tamed dragons.
This raises the question -- if you have tamed dragons to fight other dragons what are the horses for? I propose the horses are backup. You raise an entire stable of horses with one dragon from birth, and they work together to battle other dragons.
In battle the dragon takes most of the hits and keeps the other dragon busy enough for the horses to surround it with pikes and stab it to death. This works because a wild dragon sees your dragon as trying to steal its territory and is instinctively drawn to fight it off. If you approach a wild dragon with horses alone it will usually fly off as it has no reason to fight.
\*Blinders help with this since the car passes right alongside the horse
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well.... most horse wont even charge through pointy object like spear wall or phalanx etc even warhorse, except special warhorse breed like destrier as far as i know.
(and they even scared of camel.....)
so i think it may be possible by trying to breed a type of horse that wont fear fire (the dragon can breath fire right? i more concern about that than the dragon appearance scare the horse) and big flying creature
also as other has say train the horse to accustome to the dragon behaviour and fire, i remember about chinese warhorse was trained by letting a monkey wreak havoc in their stable so they wont easily scared went bring into battle fields.
or maybe use drug that can increase their adrenaline and libido to dsissipate their fear
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The last successful [cavalry charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_(warfare)), during World War II, was executed during the [Battle of Schoenfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Schoenfeld) on March 1, 1945. Short version: Polish cavalry overran german defensive positions. Amidst gunfire, artillery and explosions the charge was succesfull and took the city.
Even today horses are still used by some police forces, and their training is rather harsh to prepare them for fire, noise and so on.
Horses have been used in combat for a very long time against a very different enemy. Of course not every horse could do that just like not every soldier can stand up to the pressure, but a early on trained horse should be realistically able to fight. I know this is not as long of an answer as others write it here, but while this is nothing any horse could do and many trained ones might chicken out, an exceptionally trained horse will stand by your side
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My family had 12 horses during my childhood and had to experience a variety of characteristics and fears and traits in horses over the years. Horses can be as complex as human with different likes/dislikes. But I agree, that horses overall response to threat would be fleeing away. In the world of fantasy however many things (including heroes and various characters) are going beyond and above what is considered to be normal in the real world. Just like anything else that deviates from reality I would say that's the case for a horse as well.
Generally speaking, mares are more calm than stallions. When horses wander in their natural environment stallions are following their flocks, while mares are normally taking the role of leading the flock on the front. In the middle you'll find younger horses and lower ranking horses being protected.
So realistically speaking if you look at police and military horses they're dominated by mares and not stallions or geldings (or castrated for that matter). They want their horses as tough as possible, so during your adventures make sure the gender of the horse is a mare to add some "toughness" and be more real about a horse's expectations to danger.
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For 'historical' precedent it might be worth checking out the various 'Saint George' legends. Saint George is often portrayed as a horse-mounted spear-carrying dragon slayer.
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Looking into fleshing out my world story. One of the things I had in mind was an infrequent but consistent shipment of supplies to a planet from Earth. For simplicities sake, we'll use `10` as the number of years between shipments, but this number could vary. The key is that a lot of time passes between shipments, time enough that a missed shipment could be catastrophic or at least mysterious. My world is sort of western, slightly mystic, but with hopefully realistic explanations. I think of Firefly a little bit, how they land on a planet that looks like it came from the old west, yet they also fly to massive space stations. The technology level would be similar.
So my main question is what would/could cause so few visits from Earth (or any other large Entity/Government), given that Earth was not in ruins?
Please let me know how I can make this question more answerable.
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It could most simply be a matter of [launch windows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_window).
Things in space tend to travel in orbits, these orbits follow the different planets/moons and periodically lineup to allow low energy [transfer orbits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit) between the different planets. Sometimes these orbits involve interactions between multiple different bodies to line up.
For a simple example both Earth and Mars are moving around the Sun, every 780 days they both line up such that you can move from Earth to Mars (or vise versa) at the lowest required energy orbit. The further the planets move from this ideal alignment the more energy/fuel it takes to move between them, at some point making it effectively impossible.
Other more complicated planetary alignments occur much less often, the Voyager 2 probe took advantage of a 175 year planetary alignment to travel past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Your 10 year timing could be because that is the only time that the planets line up allowing a ship to easily travel to your outpost from Earth.
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**There aren't many ships and it is a long way.**
If you only have one ship on a route and it takes `10`/2 years to travel there it will only make a shipment every `10` years. Multiply the distance by the number of ships on the route if you don't want to be familiar with a single ship. Space is big, and going fast is expensive.
**There isn't anything worth shipping back.**
Earth doesn't need anything specific from your cowboy world, so they rarely check in. They don't really want everyone to die, so they still send some support, but it's less hassle to make one big shipment than a bunch of little ones. In the unlikely event the cowboys turn up something worth sending back a few years lag isn't considered a problem.
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Assume that spaceflight will be *either* slow or very expensive. Perhaps there is a "jump point" in the outer system, and the most economic flight from the colony world to the jump point is a slow [Hohmann transfer orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit).
* A fast courier or a warship takes a year from Earth to the colony.
* A passenger liner takes two years, but it can carry little cargo.
* A freighter or a combined freighter/colonist transport takes five years.
So for **economically marginal** colony worlds, there is one tramp freighter going back and forth. It starts from Earth with a load of colonists and cargo, travels five years to the colony, unloads, and returns five years later with exports from the colony *and a shopping list*. Then this freighter, or another one from the same company, repeats the schedule.
If a competitor wants to get into the business, the first flight of that ship would have to load speculative cargo without the benefit of the shopping list with import orders. And the colonists might not have anything to pay that new ship, unless they want to break their existing contract or they have enough surplus. At some time in the future the economy of the colony world might get that far. It isn't there yet.
So every ten years the scheduled ship from *ColonyCorp* arrives, with the stuff that was ordered ten years ago. Finally, the new turret lathe. And the new DNA sequencer for the colony hospital. And there must be twenty crates of refined molybdenum to pay for it.
---
A similar scenario would be possible with a shorter flight time, assuming that the colony takes ten years to produce "one shipload" of export goods. Refined metals? Pelts? They are in a contract with one shipping company to come every ten years, take the promised exports and deliver the ordered imports (as above).
The colonists could say at any time "the next load will be ready in sooner, come back in four/six/whatever years." But if they don't hold their promise, they will have to pay a penalty.
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Harvest season for the planet's only export. Put the target planet in an elliptical 10-year orbit. Harvest occurs just after the planet passes its closest point to the sun. It won't grow anywhere else because it requires such a wide temperature variation. If the planet's orbit is on a different plane than the others, it would require a massive amount of fuel just to get there and back. The planet's just not worth visiting any other time.
It could also be tourist season for a similar planet. Paradise one year in 10, and for the rest of the time it gradually cools down until nitrogen starts condensing out of the air. Maybe the townies spend winter underground, or maybe they abandon it each fall and come back the following spring.
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The <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler>, a short-period version of which is [championed by](https://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-mars-cycler/) astronaut Buzz Aldrin is a proposal that accomplishes exactly this for you.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pQ6m7.jpg)
It's essentially an orbit which crosses both Earth and Mars' orbits, at the times that those planets happen to be nearby. This means all the heavy shielding and life support and structure only needs to be put into that orbit one time. You only need local shuttlecraft to rendezvous with them as they approach Earth, to retrieve and deliver the (probably much lighter) payload, which will then reach Mars with minimal fuel.
The payload can even be launched to Mars from closest approach without any rendezvousing. Or Mars can rendezvous with its own shuttlecraft, and exchange that payload for its own payload.
The possible cycling orbits between Earth and Mars listed on the table at that page give you cycle periods of about 2.1, 4.3, 6.4, 8.5, 10.7, or 12.8 years.
So a cycler in the 10.7 year orbit answers the question perfectly. One such orbit, with Aphelion radius of 2.49, has an advantage over all other such orbits in that it has the lowest Earth-Mars transfer time of only 75 days... though the Mars-Earth transfer time is over ten years!
A single craft in such an orbit would mean you'd get stuff from earth only every ten years.
From a storytelling point of view, this has many advantages.
We've experienced with NASA that it's possible for a great goal to be achieved (interplanetary travel) and then disinterest to pull us back from that for decades. You could get to a point where they had established the Mars Cycler, put a colony on Mars, started off the terraforming systems, but then, after a number of high profile disasters and such, had pulled back.
Maybe some people went to Mars on the Cycler, but Mars failed to rendezvous... after their 75 days of life support ran out, they died, and their bodies were collected from the Cycler by the Earth team. That'd sour interplanetary relations, and also discourage all but the most desperate future people from wanting to go to Mars.
Asteroid mining had failed because more disasters, Mars isn't going to be habitable even with the Terraformer running for a few centuries, and for Earth, really, only near-space travel is profitable.
The Mars colonists didn't want to come home, probably partly because the cycler takes a decade to come back! Plus, it probably doesn't even have life support in for longer than 75 days: it's just a big box in a specific orbit.
Faster cyclers were planned, with life support, but never got the funding to put up, and Mars only has shuttles, not interplanetary craft. So they're still there, manning the Terraformer for a few hundred years, until Mars becomes fully livable and profitable again.
In the meantime, neither planet feels it worth their expense to invest in interplanetary manned craft, nor to put up another Cycler for the Mars colonists; it gets proposed, but never funded because "we have cheaper bridges to build, that would benefit more people and save more lives, right here on Earth!"
Now, what I don't know are things like what the velocity to match is, at either end (that'll be a limiting factor). I also don't know if, at rendezvous, whether the sun is between Earth and Mars. Picking an orbit where that's true would be ideal, because (unless there are radio relay satellites orbiting the Sun) that would mean that when it doesn't turn up, they can't ask Earth why it didn't show up.
Instead, it just wouldn't be there. And then everyone would start to wonder if Earth had abandoned them. People would believe that, and would get angry. Some would argue for destroying the Terraformer, to spite Earth; others would oppose that, since the Terraformer would be for the benefit of their own future generations. And so on. Drama! :D
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## Time travel, but the boring kind
So this answer will make a couple of assumptions but bear with me. The setting I imagine is that your colony is somewhere far away from Earth, but within reach of rockets. Eventually.
So Earth ships off a large colony ship, maybe even a generation ship, and then proceeds to also send several back up resource ships behind it while it is still in transit. The colony ship lands and starts building a base, and gets extra supplies or personnel arriving on each of the resource ships.
Because the transit time is so long you could have several rockets in flight before the next rocket from Earth is set to launch. This kind of delay would mean that if Earth missed a launch window it could actually be several years before that delay actually propagated and was noticed at the colony.
## Practical Example
Assume that it takes 30 years for a rocket to reach the colony world, and the launch window opens up every ten years. So Earth sends out a colony ship, then ten years later a supply ship, and then ten years later another supply ship. By the time they send the second ship the colony ship would be just landing.
Lets also assume that in with the supplies on the two in-route supply ships is a fair bit of news so that the colony can be kept abreast of the happenings back on Earth. Because there is such a wide gap between when a rocket is launched with supplies and when it arrives, all of the news that the colony gets is vastly outdated. If something were to happen that would make it impossible for another rocket to be sent that way they would not find out about it for several decades. And that is if the problem is even recorded and sent to them in the last supply rocket.
Imagine getting your usual shipment, and being told that things back on Earth are going great and to expect more of the same in the next supply drop. Then that supply drop just never arrives. Did something happen to the rocket in transit? Or did something happen to the people sending it? Ten years is both a very short amount of time for a global tragedy to hit, and also a more than enough, depending on the tragedy.
Until the next Landing Day comes along and they can see whether another rocket was sent out your colonists would have no way of knowing whether they were on their own or not. Maybe something happened and Earth couldn't send any more supplies. Maybe the colony has been written off, or completely forgotten about. How does an entire planet react in the face of that kind of uncertainty?
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*The time lapse is due to the nature of the supplies*
Your supplies might only be sufficient for shipping once every 10 years.
Perhaps there is an exclusive supplier or group of suppliers on Earth that provides supply xyz, and they are only able to design, grow, build, mine, assemble, culture or otherwise process that supply in the needed quantities in that amount of time.
Having the supply be only available from Earth and not other planets can add to the critical effect from a missed shipment.
Possibilities:
A certain type of art for which only one artist is famous.
Rare and difficult to modify and breed animals that take 10 years to mature on earth that can also survive as adults on the receiving planet but for some reason the juveniles cannot.
Experts graduating from a highly specialized training/doctorate program that only accepts new attendees once a decade in order to keep one entire class learning together to create the most coherent team possible in newology, which is in very high demand on the new planet. And if that team goes missing...oh boy!
Endless other possibilities....
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Nuclear fuel for the reactor.
Reactor is needed to keep life support systems running, say, producing oxygen. It takes a lot of energy.
Even if there were local deposits of Uranium, the enrichment facility might be too big an endeavor to land and deploy.
It's heavy, dangerous to transport, and expensive. The launches are rare, and one supply run can last the colony 10 years easily.
There's no point stockpiling on it: natural half-life of the fuel means it decays over time and becomes worthless eventually. You need a fresh supply, or at worst one that's been waiting past 10 years - anything older will be way sub-par, so the colony may stagger the use, maintaining a stockpile for one shipment's worth, using up older fuel and renewing the stockpile with newest delivery. Or not - in that case, the fuel at the end of 10 years will not just "run out", but it will lose enough *oomph* to cause brown-outs, need to conserve power, and a general crisis.
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There are multiple possible reasons, you just need to choose the one that fits for you:
## In-System Travel
* **Low-Thrust:** You may have a low-thrust drive that boosts continuously, but takes a long time to get you to where you need to go.
* **Use of Efficient Transfer Orbits:** Others have mentioned that, due to bulk, cargo vessels may need to use efficient orbits to be cost-effective, while other types of vessels, which can boost continuously, may be able to make the trip in shorter time-periods.
## Insterstellar Travel
* **Slow FTL:** Depending on the method of FTL or the period in history when the story is set (i.e., early colonial when FTL technology hasn't had time to mature), you may have a "low" maximum velocity (i.e., max *v*=10 *c*). The colony in question may be (10 \* *v*)/2 light years from Earth.
* **Drive Efficiency:** As with sea-going vessels, larger vessels can't travel efficiently at as high a velocity. I.e., a quick Google search shows that an ocean-going supertanker has a max speed of around 15 knots, while some naval destroyers can sustain speeds approaching 60 knots for several hours (although they have lower cruising speeds). A space-going cargo ship may take 5 years to make a trip that a courier can do in 6 months.
* **Trade Routes:** No matter how you look at it, trade in space (especially interstellar) isn't going to be cheap, especially for newer or smaller colonies (or at least, early in the colonial period it won't be); there may not be an economic benefit to having a freighter going directly from Earth to the colony and back. Freighters may do routes that are a 10-year round trip. For the world at the far end of the route, it's 5 years each way to Earth. Or the critical cargo from Earth may need to be transshipped from world to world, from ship to ship, until it gets to the colony.
## Combination Reasons
This is one that I happen to have a fondness for. FTL travel by itself is cheap, easy, and fast. It's the STL part of the trip that's slow and relatively expensive. Whether it's jump points, wormholes, or just that you need to be in a relatively flat gravitational metric prior to engaging your drive, a ship has to be quite a way from a star before it can engage it's stardrive...which is virtually instantaneous, but leaves the ship a similar distance from the destination. I.e.:
* **Solar System:** "No-fly" zone for the stardrive varies, but for a ship the size of a cargo ship, it's 0.4 light years.
* **FTL Drive:** Cheap, virtually instantaneous, but in order to make the necessary calculations for a cargo ship, it has to be "at rest" relative to the nearest large object (i.e., the nearest star). In other words, a cargo ship must decelerate in order to jump, but a courier might be able to do jump at speed, or "on the fly" (if the benefit outweighs the risk).
* **STL Drive:** Low-thrust drive may be most economical for cargo; 0.1g acceleration for 1 year brings the ship to a velocity of 0.1c. 3 years' cruising time, 1 year to decelerate, is an average cruising velocity of 0.08c for a total cruise time of 5 years (if my calculations are correct). Instantaneous jump, then another 5 years to the destination.
In this type of scenario, travel time would be roughly equivalent whether destinations are 1 light year apart (entire trip is done STL) or 1,000 light years apart. Distance doesn't matter, just gravitational gradient at origin and destination.
**Update:**
I just thought of this...in this type of situation, cargos may be sent out to the edge of the "no-fly" zone on uncrewed solar-sail vessels (or flung out there by some sort of mass driver). Cargos would be collected out there and shuttled through periodically by personnel stationed at the collection point, then on the far side, they're sent back down the gravity well. What you end up with is a fairly continuous pipeline of cargo and permanent station personnel out at the collection point. Could make for some interesting stories about them...
People who are traveling between established destinations (i.e., Earth and an established colony) would travel on a rapid-transit in-system ship on this side, transfer over on a dedicated vessel, then travel down the well on the other side on a dedicated in-system ship.
Personnel and cargo would switch from a system ship to an FTL ship that is essentially a tin can with limited maneuvering ability for the FTL jump, similar to a Guild Heighliner in *Dune*.
## The Handwaving Effect
Is the reason crucial to the story (or will it be crucial to future stories)? If not (i.e., if the story is strictly about what happens when a ship is overdue...and then becomes overdue enough that people start to worry), then the fact that there won't be another ship for 10 years is all that matters. You can simply explain it away with "a change in stellar geometry," a rogue star entering the region, or whatever. You can even just leave it as a fact and not bother to explain it.
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The planet has a small research station or colony on it and its remoteness makes it very difficult and costly to reach. Consequently those there must live off of the land and will have to have recycle and repair facilities that are very effective. Nevertheless after a period of time it will be necessary to bring supplies in for materials that can’t be replaced or repaired locally such as advanced technology items that can’t be made locally (perhaps they have no silicon chip manufacture capability or similar). There might also be a need to replace or rotate crew / inhabitants from the planet and provide raw materials for local use that were not readily available on the planet or at that location such as Helium3 for their fusion reactor? For all these reasons a supply ship is sent on an infrequent basis as you describe.
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**10 years according to whom?**
Time is relative, and it does funny things as you approach the speed of light. Particularly, it tends to dilate.
A ship might travel near instantly from its own perspective, but for an outside observer that trip looks like 10 year, all of that thanks to time dilation.
Either that or it actually takes 10 years to travel, but that brings the problem of your cargo and crew being able to survive that long.
If you have just the one ship for a particular route (because e.g. not profitable enough; space ships are just rare; route is too dangerous; your own reason here) that would certainly be a perfectly reasonable explanation.
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The Sun has captured a passing Star (or vice-versa), and now they are a [Binary Pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_star) orbiting around each other. Each one kept its own Solar System.
The stars orbit each other in a highly eccentric elliptic pattern, with a 20-year period. So, they're closest every ten years. This closest is still far enough to leave the planets' orbits undisturbed, but close enough to send a ship that takes one or two years to get there (aim for where it will be, obviously).
Any other part of the orbit is just crazy far.
Now, this all falls apart if FTL travel is available. Maybe it's a secret colony, and FTL travel is easily detectable, so they have to fly the old way.
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There is a launch window from Earth to Mars every 800 days or so if you want to do conventional ballistic tajectories. If the orbits of the two planets were even closer, that would make the two planets more similar in habitability, and it could easily take five years or longer for the inner planet to make one orbit more than the outer. Of course the orbits can't be too close or they become instable.
I haven't seen the calculations how long the average orbital period in the habitable zone of lighter or heavier stars would be, but probably different from our 365 days.
Other possibility: A multi star system, where the differences are simply huge and you need swingbys with larger planets in both subsystems to make the tranfer oeconomically feasible.
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Great question, some thoughts:
Space is full of radiation, even if it took 5 years there and back you'd need 2 years for a retro fit after every round trip. Also you need to get the supplies up from earth into orbit, there are only so many launch windows and standard rockets only take a couple of tonnes each. It would take 2 years just to get the next load into orbit.
What does earth needs, we are going to run out of rare earth metals, in advance of that the price will rise, so earth will want to import lots of rare earth metals for electronics etc. These are inert in the sense that they can happily sit in a container for years. So massive single shipments make more economic sense than speed.
What does earth ship back? People - the population of earth is expanding and we need space for them, another planet needs workers. The cost of shipping people would be huge so it only makes sense to send them back on the cargo crusisers once every 10 years. A poor african worker isn't going to have 1,000,000 dollars laying around for a space fare on a dedicated transport, they would though slum it in cargo for a few thousand.
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The planet's star throws around just too much radiation. Like [our Sun when it's in a bad mood](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9487/could-an-apollo-crew-have-been-killed-by-solar-radiation), but all the time. Or at least too frequent and unpredictable to be worth the risk.
The planet itself is safe, it's got enough of an atmosphere and magnetic field to protect everyone inside it.
But it's not large enough to provide an adequate shadow to approaching and departing ships. The star just shines around it. So usually it's just unsafe to travel to or from the planet.
Once every ten years, the orbit aligns with a gas giant in the same star system, and the star is eclipsed. The gas giant provides a large shadow, allowing ships to approach and depart the shadowed planed.
You can pick the time length that better fits your story. The eclipse could last weeks, for a very comfortable visit. Or less than an hour, with incoming ships rushing in to be stranded for ten years, while the departing ships (that came ten years ago) rush out.
Somehow the planet needs to be worth the hassle. The shorter the eclipse, the bigger the hassle, the bigger the needed reward. But even if the eclipse lasts a year, it's still a large hassle to be stranded the other nine.
(Or maybe it's a feature? Colonized by jaded misfits who loved the idea of escaping the greater community?)
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It would almost *need* to be a problem of launch windows, as Josh King stated; nothing else has the required regularity.
But launch windows work only for intra-system travel, when you need to rely on grav assists from planets, and therefore go *slow*. For interstellar travels, you need a lot of delta-vee-equivalent. It makes little sense to have interstellar propulsion and still need slingshotting.
So this way you're forced to suppose a pipeline of shipments, each of them requiring twenty or thirty years to reach the outer Solar System with conventional means before they can start the long voyage between stars; *or* an even longer pipeline of sublight shipments, but in that case the travel time will be several thousands of years.
As a compromise, we could add a limitation on the interstellar travel technology: say that it is based on a sort of *gravity lensing effect*, so that only a few places are actually reachable, and the arrival position is a function of the distance between the "portal generator" and some large mass. By focusing on the Moon from Earth, for example, you can reach a point on the same line, at a distance that is a function of the Moon's mass and distance; the Moon acts as a "focusing lens". There is some wriggle space, at a cost, but not so much as the energy expenditure increases exponentially.
And to reach this far away star, the only mass that can be used is Jupiter, which is in a suitable position for a few days only, once every 11.8 years (or rather, the reverse: of all the places that can be reached by focusing on the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn etc., and have been probed, the only one near enough to a star is the one in the Earth-Jupiter focus).
If the generators could be placed on a space station capable of independent motion, then by placing the station in the correct position with respect to Jupiter, Saturn, or the Sun, *any* point within several light-years could be within easy reach - but the mass and energy requirements of the generators prevent this from being possible.
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How about shear mind boggling distance, you have FTL, it's nearly instantaneous, but that "nearly" is the killer. If you use jump points then it's a matter of transfer time between jumps, i.e. if you have to make four jumps to get from Earth to your colony world then it's two years and change between jump points and a bit more for in-system maneuvering at pick up and drop off. If on the other hand you use real space FTL doing ten times the speed of light that's great for going to say [Barnard's Star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star) you'll be there in about 6 months but [Canopous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus) is still 30 odd years away so a 10 year delivery schedule is not unreasonable for a distant colony.
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The EM drive works. (Never mind how badly that upsets physics, the fact that it appears to work seems like enough for basing a story on.) The cargo ship is unmanned, speed is not a priority but the EM drive means it gets there for free. However, the EM drive takes a lot of power, the max attainable thrust (instead of the tyranny of the rocket equation you have the diminishing returns of adding power making it heavier) is tiny.
Thus your ship **crawls** between the worlds. There's one ship, it takes 10 years to make the round trip. (Or there's two and it takes 20 years.)
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When I came across [this hilarious and awesome way of transportation](https://9gag.com/gag/a5RojvG) I thought "why is no one rollerblading through the woods anymore?". I am pretty sure there are more fantastic but forgotten inventions out there, or new ones like these [water bikes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BI0t2jR4Qo).
For my setting I searched for **means of transportation especially independent of fuel**. Recreational benefits are not excluded. Also, like the example with the mono-blades, they should **allow the user to cross remote terrain** either on land or by water, or both. Walked out paths exist, but not asphalt roads. In either way, it needs to be **a twist on our [commonly known](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_transport) transportation methods**, or a new one, with the promise to actually work and not just "rollerblades on a horse".
Our landscape is placed inside a space settlement [(O'Neill cylinder)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) with a total area of about 900 km2, serving as a nature conservation area with strict restrictions. There are all kinds of landscapes, ranging from mountains, forests, swamps, lakes, plains, beaches, in a [temperate climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_climate). Anything futuristic is allowed, but as said, no fuel, and if you can make use of the setting you get a cookie. Your answer can either be an existing invention or your own. It could function for either children, single people or groups, and it can include existing animals.
So. **What other human-powered transportion methods do or could exist, besides the commonly known?**
Edit: No, food is (of course) not considered a fuel in this scenario. That would be illogical. While food is, technically speaking, a fuel, "fuel free **transportation**" implies that one does not have to use energy *beside human energy*, because the device *is to be operated by humans*. How could humans operate *anything* without food. "I want to ride my fuel free bike, so I guess I'm not eating anything today"?!
Edit 2: Anyone who continuous to nitpick on "food is a fuel" is missing the point on purpose and can blame themselves for not getting a cookie.
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A unique mode of transport that would only work in an O'Niell cylinder would be a giant swing, suspended from an axle in the middle. Grab the swing, run as fast as you can, take your feet off the ground and you'll continue to move until air resistance slows you down.
The obvious draw-backs are that it only works for travel around the circumference (east and west), there may be problems passing trees and tall buildings, and there would be a lot of air-resistance on the kilometres long rope.
You could imagine a super-thin rope with a peddle-powered propeller contraption on the end, that would allow you to 'fly' without having to generate lift. This would be as fast and efficient as a bicycle on a super-smooth road. Add a rudder and you could steer around obstacles.
However I think it would work best when used as a barge or crane for transporting large heavy cargo. Much like one horse could pull a 50-ton barge along a canal, you could load tons of cargo onto a swing, push it to gradually accelerate it up to walking speed and then allow it to coast for miles.
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Being sensible (alas!). The most obvious form of non-powered transportation inside an O'Neill cylinder would be the bicycle. It's non-polluting and healthy too. Why go past the obvious. A well-established and mature technology.
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If we don't count food as fuel, how about plain old wings?
Climb far enough up one of the end walls, and the gravity gets low enough for people to fly on their own muscle power (potentially aided by thermal convection). Don't worry about the air getting too thin; with the gravity dropping off, there'll be breathable air all the way to the center of any reasonably sized O'Neill cylinder -- at the center, there's zero gravity!
So, you make yourself a pair of flappy wings, climb to the axis, lock the wings out, and launch. Build them so you can flap with the big muscles in your legs, of course. If you don't want to go all the way to the other axis point, just drop down a little and, when the gravity gets too high to maintain your altitude, actuate the latch that locks the wings in a gliding position and glide -- and potentially land anywhere on the interior surface.
If the inside gravity is kept a bit below Earth normal, and the air pressure is kept a bit higher, it's even possible take off from level ground with wings of this sort -- I've seen calculations suggesting that on the Moon, you could fly this way in about 1.5 atmospheres.
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I think using some futuristic version of [powerstriders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iATQCeHHh0) would be pretty interesting. They already look pretty scifi as is, but you could imagine a fair amount of upgrades to make them more practical.
To start with, it would be cool if they could be retracted, maybe stored behind the wearer's calf, with the blade folded in some manner. Perhaps the blade is made of a material with asjustable rigidity to allow this.
Adding different "soles" to the stilts for different terrain could also be practical. Sharp studs like on soccer shoes could help adherence on damp soil, whereas ridged rubber could give better adherence on rocky terrain. Maybe they even come with a mountain climbing setting.
If they are retractable, maybe they are also adjustable, so that they can serve as just plain stilts for wading through swamps or other shallow bodies of water.
These are however quite energy consuming if I remember correctly, so they wouldn't be best suited for long distance travel.
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For long distances, you could install a system of [zip lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_line) that would only require large poles to depart from and netting to land safely. It is possible to pull yourself along one, but I believe that it's quite strenuous on the arms.
[Hang gliders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_gliding) and [para gliders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragliding) are two different heaver than air, non motorised crafts that can allow for fairly long distance travel without any prior installations. However, sustained flight requires [thermals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal) for lift, which I don't think you'd get in an O'Neill cylinder. You also need an adequate landing zone, for safety reasons.
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You could have a **pedaled aircraft** (such as used to [cross the English Channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Gossamer_Albatross)). The more you pedal it up in the air, the less the 'gravity' will be, so you mainly have to expend energy when taking off.
A small **pedal-powered airship** could also be useful. You wouldn't need as much energy to get it up as a heavier-than-air aircraft, and it will quickly reach an altitude where the air is so thin that it stops rising. You would need to anchor it when it is parked, however.
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Leverage the angular momentum of the O'Neill cylinder, itself. When one is standing on the surface of such a cylinder and drops his ice tea, it is not his own feet that get the bath, but the person next to him. In fact, the dropped beverage (aside from being a travesty in lost deliciousness) is attempting to move in a straight line while the person who dropped it is following a curve. That causes the path of the dropped beverage to appear curved from the perspective of those riding in the cylinder.
To make use of this, simply have a series of conveyor belts that simply wrp the cylinder at different levels. One level simply loops in place. A second spirals "clockwise" to allow transit to one end of the cylinder. The third level spirals the other direction to allow transit to the other end. If the conveyors move on frictionless rollers (while not being frictionless themselves), so much the better. This gets full movement capabilities at only the cost of keeping the cylinder rotating.
For a more complex approach, have two concentric cylinders rotating at different speeds (the inner having a greater angular momentum to simulate a similar gravity level as the outer, but possibly a different level for reasons that might be considered necessary in story). Radial movement would be as simple as transitioning to the other cylinder for a time. Lateral movement can be achieved by capturing the rotational differences and transferring the differential rotational energy into lateral conveyance of any type. There would be more energy involved in keeping the cylinders rotating at their prescribed speeds but transit would be "free".
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# Parabolic Tunnels
There has been some research into the idea of a tunnel in the shape of a parabola underground, where the momentum the vehicle gains dropping to the bottom of the tunnel is enough (or nearly so) to get it back up to the top on the other side of the parabola. You'd have to deal with friction, of course, so some sort of maglev would be required, though it could be simple static magnets if you can make them strong enough. Articles I've read quoted 1 hour from New York to London as a possibility with this method.
The major difficulty of course is digging a tunnel deep enough into the Earth's crust. And of course there's a limit to how far a single parabolic tunnel can travel before its bottom would sink *below* the crust. Point is, it gets you from A to B using almost nothing but gravity and momentum. (Elon Musk may already be looking into this, not sure if the Boring Company is doing parabolic designs or not...)
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Horses were actually really quite good at what they did.
We abandoned horses as a method of transit mostly because they weren't as fast and their effective operational range (for a reasonable timescale) was therefor generally quite a bit lower.
Additionally, there are space/infrastructure concerns that scale poorly as a function of population density - They fit less gracefully into an urban environment, as they need room to run when they are not being used as transit.
The environment you describe is small enough to be crossed on horseback in a reasonable time, has plenty of open space, and sounds like it has low population density - horses would be an excellent fit. As an added bonus, you have no real need of spending manpower or resources on maintaining roadways, as the horse is an extremely effective all terrain vehicle.
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I bet, at childhood you did a trick with a balloon: first inflate it, then release it :) So it hops over the room loosing the air pressure inside until deflated.
So why we can't create such a transportation method? You sit on a chair with, let say, small wings and attached balloon. Prerequisite: the balloon is inflated. Once opening a vent, you start moving (and this is your pilot skill to adjust the trajectory to desired one, he-he). Once the balloon is deflated, you're grounding down, closing the vent, inflating the balloon back (using old-school mechanic pump, let say, leg-driven one). Repeat the deflation hops until you're done from point A to point B. We can name it "sky golf" or something like that, what do you think?
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If you are looking for something human powered, practical, suitably futuristic and still mostly unknown, look no further than the [Shweeb](https://inhabitat.com/schweeb-the-human-powered-flying-monorail/):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8z7xQ.jpg).
Using a network of multi-level rails and remote-controlled switches, trunk lines and branches can be built to achieve any density you require. The low weight of the rails and the pods lend themselves really well for commuting between vast skyscrapers and for the occasional steep slopes electrical motors can be built either into the pods or into the rails themselves. As a bonus, these motors can act as generators as well when the pods are going downhill.
Controlling the switches can be either done manually via remotes inside the pods or optionally the user can enter a pod at an end terminal, specify their destination and a routing algorithm sets the switches at the proper time just before the pod swooshes by.
For improved speed and efficiency multiple pods can travel close to each other in trains, reducing air resistance, and if outfitted with proper bumpers or towers, the stronger travelers can assist the weaker ones (or even move cargo pods). How's that for a post-scarcity, neo-communist utopy?
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Hamster balls the size of humans!
They can also traverse water!
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg7i30pXARQ>
And be bouncy enough for the jumping trick!
And, if pressurized, could be used for the occasional EVA!
Every family needs one! Or several!
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Since the cylinder has artificial gravity, there is one "human powered" transportation method that uses the variable gravity of the cylinder.
The person simply climbs to the spin axis, either at the end cap, or raised platforms spaced along the cylinder, and then while in the zero g zone, aims along the spin axis and pushes off as hard as possible. They wear a "wingsuit" so they can scull through the air while in the zero G zone, and also to provide the means of a controlled descent through the air as they drift into lower "altitudes" from the spin center and become subject to the spin gravity.
A skilled user could presumably travel several kilometers in the spin axis and then make a controlled glide to their destination on the ground.
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For some reason, everyone seems to forget exactly what an O'Neill cylinder actually is. It's a spinning tube, that uses the fact that it must apply a force to you to accelerate you in a circle; this force is what simulates gravity.
The cylinder can only apply artificial gravity if you're in contact with it...
If you're not touching it, then you'll be floating in space as per any other space station; with this metal can spinning around you.
As such, jump (hard enough - springs may be required) in roughly the right direction, and float your way there. Sure you have to adjust the jump direction to account for the fact the ground is spinning.
Far less effort than a bike.
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A climbing rope mechanism, if it's a cylinder then you tie both ends to and have a crank like mechanism that when rotated have a platform climb up the rope, seeing how a straight line is the shortest distance between two point you will reach the other end faster then walking around the cylinder & as a bonus you don't waste ground space that can be used for building\farming\etc.
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Instead of using the power of humans, passively use the power of the O'Neill Cylinder itself.
At least, use an inevitable feature of the O'Neill Cylinder design: Wind.
Instead of horse drawn wagons, you'd have sailing wagons barrelling down your dusty dirt roads. Most of the daily traffic would go with the wind, anti-spinward, but it doesn't take much to learn how to tack like sailing ships do, allowing you to go in any direction you choose, including spinward.
You can even have sailing wagon races along your plains, and "X-Treme" land sailing competitions in any rocky terrain with bicycle- or tricycle-like vehicles.
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SIMPLE ANSWER...... A BICYCLE.
VARIANT ANSWER...... A Recumbent Bicycle.
Note. Water on many alien worlds is as hard as iron because it is frozen and you said 'by land' and 'by water'.
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(Not quite sure on the physics here.)
I think if you have a river that loops around the habitat, it will end up with a constant flow, because the water has inertia and will act against the movement of the station. You can then get in a boat to travel antispinward (I think?) without needing to row. (This is basically the conveyor belt answer, but water is easier to come by.)
The energy actually comes from increased drag on the station, but there's no energy needed at the point of use, and any nature reserve needs rivers anyway.
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I think you have some basic misconceptions about what "fuel-free" should mean (food is fuel! etc.), but the question is an interesting one. If your goal is to allow transportation without needing large portable energy supplies that would be unsafe or impractical, human-powered transportation is an option, but will significantly impact nutritional needs for keeping everyone fed.
An alternate perspective that might be interesting is reducing or eliminating energy consumption per unit distance traveled. Fundamentally, you only need energy to accelerate/decelerate. The reason we need to spend energy per unit distance traveled is all a matter of friction and wind resistance. If you setup a system of vaccum tubes/tunnels with very-low-friction pods/vehicles inside, then essentially the only energy expenditure for travel via them is maintaining the system and some minimal amount of acceleration/deceleration proportional to the speed you want to travel at.
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So since there’s that pesky thing called the square cube law, it’s pretty universally accepted that large dragons have no chance at actual flight. However, all is not lost for the concept of giant winged reptiles! At least so I hope.
So baby dragons would use their wings to fly, thus keeping their original purpose. However, as they get larger the wings, even if they were absolutely massive, would not be sufficient for actual flight, and would instead enable the dragon to glide, increase jump height, etc.
My question is what can truly massive dragons use their wings for? Think dragons the size of Smaug from the Hobbit movies or larger. These beasts have no chance at any kind of flight, and I don’t really see gliding as a great option either.
For some additional information, no magic is at work here, though I will accept the dragons being tougher and stronger than current biology would suggest. These dragons are different species, and live in a range of biomes, but for this question I will narrow it to a specific dragon I have in mind.
The Titan Dragon is massive, with lengths of up to two miles and weighing hundreds of tons. Their massive size was previously thought to be completely impossible for any terrestrial animal, but somehow the dragon still grows to such an incredible scale. Most of its time is spent asleep, absorbing nutrients from the air, water, soil, and stone around it. When it is awake, however, it is immensely powerful and dangerous, with a breath attack that is either a massive flaming blast, or an equally powerful blast of supercooled gas. Their wingspan is often larger than the length of their body, however they are completely incapable of flight.
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Some uses for non-flying Dragon Wings
1. Fan a flame
2. Stabilize the Dragon while chasing someone/thing down (run on two legs, grab with 2 claws, pump wings like how humans pump arms when running)
3. Regulate Heat (too hot? spread out your wings, too cold? wrap your wings around you like a blanket, or even blanket your young)
4. Provide shade to lesser beings
5. Protection (When those humans are slinging their primitive spells or attempting to shoot you with arrows, the wings can be used to shield your more important fleshy parts from damage)
6. Dragon Status Symbol (You can always tell how attractive a dragon is by the color/pattern that is seen on the wings. As unique as a fingerprint. )
7. Displays of aggression and displays of prowess (mating displays) - from *ikegami*
also, useful image provided by *ikegami*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hq4Xh.jpg)
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### Protecting their young
A mommy dragon will want to make sure that her cute, little (read: house-sized) baby dragons are safe from dangerous things like sticks (read: lances and swords from wanna-be heroes) and heat (read: her breath attack when she is barbecuing previously mentioned wanna-be heroes). The young can hide under her enormous wings and be completely safe as they are built to withstand her own powers and obviously little sticks are no harm to an adult dragon.
The wings also serve to protect the little ones from the elements such as rain and wind (read: the storms that accompany the greatest wyrms on Earth wherever they go) or small stones (read: the cave collapsing - those oh-so-smart wanna-be heroes can be difficult to handle).
In a pinch they can be used as defense against resilient foes (read: wanna-be mages with a *Potion of fire resistance*... pesky stuff) by flapping them and creating a lot of non-magical wind for a great distance. Or by flapping them directly against them.
Ever been hit by a giant wing? Probably not, or you wouldn't be reading this.
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With a creature that massive, overheating would become a concern - that same pesky square cube law. The wide-spread wings of an adult dragon might be used to dissipate heat, in much the same way that elephants and jackrabbits use the large surface area of their ears for cooling.
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Other uses of wings other than flying are:
Swimming, diving (penguins)
Threatening by appearing bigger (owls)
Threatening by making noise (chickadee)
Directly in combat (swans)
The black heron even uses them to cast a shadow to hunt better [click](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_heron)
Ok, there are so many things, I'm not gonna include more examples: They can be used for balance, to do various things during breeding and last but not least to impress the ladies
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Photosynthesis. A dragon of that size is going to struggle to find sufficient prey or fodder so they augment their diet using chloroplasts in their wings.
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The most important use of wings for a sauropod or whale sized dragon incapable of flight would be heat regulation, getting rid of excess body heat. Especially if they somehow have fire inside!
Elephants don't like to exert themselves too much because that builds up body heat. So they move slowly and calmly except when excited. I saw a video where a bull African elephant pushed over a tree. He nudged the tree a few times from different angles, and thought for a while, and then suddenly pushed the tree over with a smooth easy motion.
If a dragon is many times as massive as an elephant, it will need to avoid overheating even more, and the vast areas of thin flesh in the wings would be ideal for losing body heat fast.
And of course wings would be great for displays during mating season or to intimidate rivals in potential fight situations.
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**Absorptive surface area**
From OP
>
> Most of its time is spent asleep, absorbing nutrients from the air,
> water, soil, and stone around it.
>
>
>
That is different. If you are absorbing stuff from the environment, you want to maximize your interface with the environment. The huge surface area of the wings could do just that.
The dragon might have to sleep with wings flush on the ground and legs up in the air, which is not that dignified for the mighty dragon.
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Shade. The top/outside of a dragon's wing may be reflective, making the underside much cooler, allowing the dragon to stay cool. The reflective surface might also prove useful in battle, or mating, as mentioned above.
Depending on their durability, I can imagine towns popping up under the shade of a dead dragon's wing.
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When a mommy dragon sees a daddy dragon with nice wings ....
Many animals use displays to gain mates, why would dragons be any different.
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As creatures between the realms of fantasy and reality, dragons are obviously able to access things just beyond normal senses, especially as they grow older and more ludicrous (in regards to normal square cube physics). Hence, adult dragon wings are eventually able to actually pull against dark matter, creating antigravitational ripples and thus lift at an order of magnitude above that of wings only able to push against atmospheric gases.
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Benefit doesn't need to change that drastically, can even just dimish in effect.
1. Young: Can still be used to fly.
2. Youth: Can be used to glide.
3. Young Adult: Can be used as a jump assist.
4. Adult: Effectively giant fins for swimming, like a penguin.
Also, worth noting, if your setting has multiple worlds, wings would work as normal on lower gravity worlds.
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Dragons of the opposite gender might find such a huge display very attractive. Sexual selection is a pretty powerful force and considering that these dragons likely have very few(or no) natural predators it’s not too far fetched for such a creature to expend the resources necessary.
In fact, if the dragons are able to absorb nutrients from their environment with very little effort and they don’t have any real predators Imgine that mates would be one of the very few things a dragon would have to worry about(at least without pesky humans). They would likely have extremely complex mating displays, moreso than even a peacock. A lot of their features could be explained using sexual selection
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What is the use of a chicken's wings? (Apart from being fried in a spicy batter.) It's just there because evolution hasn't done away with it yet. But give it a few millennia and it might (once humans stop selectively breeding them, that is).
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You could add certain evolutionary alterations to the wings to give them some purpose.
* The wings could develop marsupial-like sacks to carry young ones. When the mother tucks her wings in, the babies are safe from harm, and when they want to get out, they can just extend.
* Dragons will have great momentum while running. The wings can be used like parachutes, to stop the dragon quickly if needed.
* They could have spines or spikes, enabling the dragon to fight by swinging the wings around.
* The wings could have mural-type decorations for mate attraction.
* The wings could be used for swimming. For this purpose, they may evolve small air sacs, enabling the heavy dragon to remain afloat easily. It could also use the wings as oars to propel itself.
The possibilities are endless, really.
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Evil minions also known as goblins are creatures who steal or raise children of humans to be their leaders and to guide them on evil deeds. Humans raised by goblins are intelligent and good in the art of war and they have the loyalty of hordes of goblins to their sides. A human leader is an inspiring figure for goblins and goblins are kindred to the human.
The goal of the goblins is to grow, reproduce, gain new land and most importantly destroy the human species.
Human leaders are grown to recognize goblins as their family and see the people outside goblin colonies as foes.
Goblins live in colonies with castes, they have a few queen who's job is to produce new members of the colony. They are related to primates, but shorter, just as intelligent as humans and have a greenish skin, some darker than others.
The image below shows what goblins looks like.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xe7A3.jpg)
This behaviour of evil minions is not recent, but it's a thing evil minions have always done during their evolution. Ancient primitive goblins used to steal children of human ancestors and this behaviour was kept through years of evolution up to this day.
Why would a creature steal the offsprings of a closely related animal to raise them as leaders?
[Answer]
**Goblins have a stereotyped view of humans.**
A Ukrainian woman once told me "if he is not a Jew, he is not a dentist". It was said in the context of a discussion about finding a good dentist. A stereotype: the best dentists are Jewish. It did not surprise me to hear it, although it took a Ukrainian to say it out loud. That stereotype is in the U.S. too.
A google turned up this
[Southern Dental Journal and Luminary, Volume 7, 1888](https://books.google.com/books?id=mP01AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=if+he+is+not+a+jew+he+is+not+a+dentist&source=bl&ots=A-g0r3IYUo&sig=ACfU3U2MCsO0qp3dcEeH-X95imVFnq9StA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjo6-TuzYbqAhVWRjABHa6FAIkQ6AEwAXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=if%20he%20is%20not%20a%20jew%20he%20is%20not%20a%20dentist&f=false)
>
> …but to a very recent time dentistry in Holland was in the hands of
> the Jews. A lady came to a friend of mine for some operation, or for
> some artificial teeth and she asked him “Are you a Jew?” He said,
> “No, I am a Christian”. She said, “I am sorry; I thought the Jews
> were the only real dentists.”. So you see that in Holland a dentist
> and a Jew are synonymous.
>
>
>
It is an interesting thing, this stereotype. In the wikipedia article on [Stereotypes of Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_Jews) the stereotypes are uniformly negative. And there is no question that in Ukraine and Holland and pretty much everywhere else, jewish people suffered from these stereotypes, and at the same time jews served the population as dentists.
Why would persons from a negatively stereotyped population be trusted to be dentists - which I consider an extremely intimate and delicate profession. A very interesting matter and if someone reading this can link up additional reading I would appreciate it.
In any case - so too the goblins. They hate humans as a group and would not be sorry for them all to vanish from the earth. Yet when they need a leader, they cultivate one from this same population because "if he is not a Human, he is not a good Boss".
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Because they’re better at it than the goblins are.
Goblins aren't necessarily dumb, but they are panicky and prone to squabbles. In large groups, with nothing to rally behind, they scatter easily and lack co-ordination due to internal fighting. Even smart goblin sages and witch doctors can’t bring a horde together in pursuit of one goal.
But they’re smart enough to recognise potential in others.
Humans, especially human children, can be raised to be incredibly resilient, even without role models to teach them set behaviours. They are naturally more inquisitive, more brave and more likely to charge headfirst into things than any goblin, as well as being larger and stronger. This also means they are more likely to simply overawe any given goblin into following their plans. As such, humans can coordinate the mob relatively easily, and provide a much needed figurehead for the goblin hordes to rally behind.
So a goblin sage instructs one or two goblins to steal a child. They then spend a decade grooming that child to be a leader Of goblins and to hate all that is human. When it’s time to assemble a warband the human leader can easily rally goblins to the cause and (more importantly) keep them both under control and suitably motivated during the execution of their campaign.
Essentially: no goblin can serve as an inspirational enough leader, so they steal them instead. As a bonus this also deprives the enemy of soldiers, and if a human child dies in training? Eh. Steal another.
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**From the Forest Comes the Handle for the Axe**
There's an old fable about [woodcutters and trees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodcutter_and_the_Trees), which essentially boils down as thus: the handle to the axe to cut down the forest came from the forest itself. If no tree in the forest ever became an axe, then the forest could not be cut down. Similarly, the best way to destroy something is by using it's own strength against it.
Goblins are a different species than humans and thus they are hardwired to think differently and have different innate responses or emphasis on various character traits. There are things humans do that goblins don't understand, be it military strategy or political intrigue. And if goblins don't understand humans, than it makes it very tricky for them to deal with humans because human keep acting in weird and unpredictable ways.
The goblin solution is simple - kidnap humans. They kidnap raise humans within the goblin nations to serve as advisors and leaders. With a goblin upbringing and innate human biology, plus some human teachers that goblins have kidnapped as well, the goblins now have the ultimate weapon against humanity - a goblin-raised yet human-trained human, perfectly capable of understanding human behavior, yet sympathetic towards goblin ideals. The perfect handle for the axe, as it were.
[Answer]
**Humans have a longer lifespan**
There are several reasons why this is advantageous:
* You don't have to raise a new leader every few years
* With age comes respect, so with more age comes more respect
* A long-lived human can accumulate experience and wisdom a Goblin couldn't hope to achieve
* A longer lifespan means a longer childhood means more time to properly groom the leader
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Perhaps Goblins look at leadership differently than humans. If leadership was a terrible burden, with no tangible rewards other than serving the population he/she leads. Then it would be logical to steal humans to fill the role that no Goblin would ever want.
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Goblins have too much infighting between the different clans/families/groups. They realize they will never find a Goblin that all other Goblins would find acceptable as a leader. The different groups hate/distrust each other so much they could not accept a leader form another Goblin family.
So they kidnap a human and make them the leader, because their not a Goblin no Globin-family feels like its at a disadvantage because its Goblins weren't selected as the leader.
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**Humans have good organisational skills** and **It's the way it's always been done**
You seem to cover most of the answer in your question, but in many "fantasy" works, humans are the ones who build the towns, villages and communities, while the elves keep hidden away in the trees, the dwarves underground, etc. Goblins are an ambitious but disorganised race, and while they may be scrappy and resilient, they just don't have that organiser's brain.
Humans do. (at least from the goblin's POV)
Therefore they are the best choice as leader. No goblin leader has ever shown the charisma, organisational, inspirational and leadership skills that a human has and therefore has always failed.
Furthermore, you could add in that the human leader herself also believes this and therefore demands she be succeeded by another human. She then mentors her successor (after all, the goblins couldn't really teach a human to be a great organiser by themselves) into becoming the next big leader.
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Humans have, at various times, used poison gasses, germ warfare, impalement, starvation, burning alive at the stake, flaying, hanging, boiling in oil, electrocution, napalm, and atomic bombs to kill each other. Women and children are not spared. Enemies have been blinded, maimed, broken, humiliated, crippled, robbed, enslaved, and raped, their houses, farm, towns, and cities burned, their crops destroyed.
If you're going up against an enemy that inventively and ruthlessly vicious, you really need to recruit one of them to your side to lead the way.
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I always thought it was because humans were generally taller than goblins. That's where the phrase, "Head and shoulders above the rest" came from. They are much more ready to carry out the orders of a leader they can see, and in turn when the leader can see them. If they can't see the leader they revert to doing selfish activities and therefor is bad for the colony.
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## Natural Selection
You can certainly speculate on why. Maybe humans are innately better at long term planning. Maybe humans lead better because they can empathize with the enemy (other humans) better. Maybe having an 'other' as the leader reduces the tendency for goblins to fight within the group, struggling for control of the tribe. It's entirely possible that no one really knows for sure.
But the bottom line is that a goblin tribe with a human leader is more successful than one without a human leader. It controls more resources, produces more babies, and has longer-lived members. Any goblin tribe without a human leader is weaker, less productive, and quickly dissolves or is exiled to less productive areas, like deserts or desolate wastes.
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Because humans can be kind, but goblins can't.
Imagine a stereotypicall "always evil" race. Now think about it a bit: what would keep them focused on killing humans, instead of killing each other? If goblins are truly full-on evil sociopaths, they won't care for each other, they would cut each other down just as much as they cut down humans. Heck, if humans are more dangerous, then most goblins would rather risk killing a brother for food than hunting down a human.
While such darwinistic society would weed out all but the strongest/smartest/nastiest, it doesn't really work well for K-reproductive species. Even for a genocidal war machine, some caring about each other would greatly increase efficiency. Killing your best soldier because of a moment of weakness is wasteful. Providing no healthcare to your soldiers and blacksmiths alike is wasteful. Slaughtering your peasants right before the harvest is wasteful.
And some of the smarter goblins figured it out. At first they tried to be kind themselves, but it failed miserably and with a lot of bloody bits. So they turned to humans, who are much better at it. They even steal a few human books now and then, maybe even some adult humans to teach the child, to ensure the human doesn't grow a sociopath like they all are, but a good leader. And it works, the human sees goblins as a family, even if they don't see her as such. She cares for them, provides justice where there would be none, keeps goblin society from imploding.
Ironically, it's not that goblins really want to kill all humans specifically, it's just when they are stopped from killing fellow goblins, there is none else to kill but humans.
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They don't steal the children as leaders, they steal them as training tools. It just happens that some, like Conan or John Carter (pulling references without verifying that I actually remember those references correctly), graduate and make their own name for themselves and become leaders. It's a win-win. The ones that don't survive teach the goblins how to deal with humans. The ones that survive help them do it.
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**Goblins are a twisted version of humanity and are envious of humans**
Orcs/goblins in fiction are to humans as devils are to angels: they are made of the same stuff and had all the same potential but are corrupted by an original sin or evil to be a worse form of themselves. What they *want* is to get back the things they have lost: happiness, beauty, power, etc. But they don't want to give up their characteristic evil, which is the cause of their distress.
If you want to remain consistent with the literary idea of a goblin, it follows that humans are somewhat more enlightened than goblins (although not quite as enlightened as the angels or elves), and goblins are envious of us. They want to *be* tall, handsome, happy, and able to come out in the daylight or whatever, but they don't want to (or can't) change their evil ways. **Key point here: they're looking for a shortcut.**
Stealing human babies seems to them to be a way to get a piece of what they admire, without having to do any actual hard work to improve themselves. Inevitably it fails to make them any happier, just makes things worse for the rest of the world. The moral of the story is: evil is lazy, and taking shortcuts always backfires.
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It's very simple: goblins are an ambitious, pragmatic, ruthless, militaristic species.
When humans consistently repelled, conquered, or outsmarted goblins they inadvertently made goblins not envious but *admiring* of them. *This* was a species that had everything the goblins valued and desired, a species that did everything the goblins focused on and did it better than they did.
Simply put, the humans weren't just bigger, better organized, or more disciplined; they were more ingenious, quicker-thinking, more adaptive, and so on. The goblins realized the humans were superior and that the best way to survive was to ensure they had that superiority on *their* side.
This is why they take human children and raise them as leaders, but there is another reason; breeding, to ensure that goblins would gain superior human traits. The result of this breeding program was a new subspecies of goblins, a species feared by the humans for their ruthlessness, ingenuity, and sheer military prowess: **Hobgoblins!**
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[
In this world, a number of intelligent, sapient creatures exist. They do not have especially complex societies or technology; they live as hunter-gatherers and nomads.
The predator species isn't completely solitary. They live alone unless they have young to look after. Predators hold meetings at certain times of the year to conduct rudimentary trade, find a mate, and so on. Communication is done out-of-person by leaving messages in designated spots, which predators may check from time to time. Mothers will teach skills such as tool use and hunting to their children.
The problem is that the predators are obligate carnivores, and they've got to eat the other species, which are equally intelligent and sapient. The carnivores respect their living prey and have rules to prevent excess killing. They preserve meat in order to kill less often. But they've still got to kill members of the other species somehow.
Tigers have to kill at least once every two weeks. Let's say that with meat preservation, these intelligent carnivores can stretch that out to four weeks. Even with that lowered kill rate, **why wouldn't the preyed-on species have any enmity or distrust towards the predator species?**
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The most obvious thing is to have your society structured in a way that predation is *cooperative*. Some ideas:
# Being eaten is voluntary
Allowing yourself to be eaten is a form of suicide. Some individuals may just be too depressed and desperate for it all to end. For others — crippled, extremely sick, or just old — being eaten might be seen as a way to die with dignity; one last way you can make yourself useful.
# Capital punishment
What better way to get rid of dangerous criminals?
# It's eugenics
This can go very, *very* dark, but it's also essentially true in the natural world. Maybe your prey's society wants to rid themselves of certain elements. Maybe they're just fatalistic and feel that only the strongest of their own deserve to live. (Christopher Anvil's [Advance Agent](http://baencd.freedoors.org/Books/The%20Trouble%20With%20Aliens/1416520775__18.htm) may give you some inspiration.)
# Predators are seen as gods
Human history has plenty of examples of human sacrifice you could use for inspiration. Sacrifices could be willing, or otherwise (the latter are usually prisoners of war). This could work especially well if the predators do something for the prey in return, besides just "honoring them". Maybe there are "good" predators and "bad" predators, and the prey see being eaten by "bad" predators as horrific; the "good" predators could protect them from being eaten by the "bad" predators.
# It's a fetish
There are *humans* who, given the chance, might voluntarily be eaten by lions. Given all the strange things that give people a rush, it's not hard to imagine that your prey species have somehow gotten to where some percentage of individuals [*want* to be eaten](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LetsMeetTheMeat).
# That's just the way of things
If your prey is suitably fatalistic, maybe they just don't hold it against the predators. While not exactly the same thing, check out how the "reds" see themselves in [Endless Blue](http://www.wenspencer.com/endless-blue/). The down side of this approach is that your prey species is likely to come across as depressing.
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Inspired by John's comment:
>
> many humans don't hate human predators, awe, admiration, even respect are often in play instead.
>
>
>
I think the most interesting development builds on this. Interpret "predators" here in a broad sense, thinking of all the places the word is used including sexual (serial rapists), economic (predatory lenders, predatory journals), etc.
This comic comes to mind:
How does the "I am going to eat you party" wolf get elected? He convinces his base that *they're* not the ones he's going to eat. How does the CEO who repeatedly commits sexual harassment and assault have the support of his wife and other elite women? He convinces them *they're* not the ones he'll harm, and that the ones he does harm were responsible for what happened to them. Etc.
All of these principles carry over to literal predation.
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### The "prey" run an integrated, warlike society.
The prey are far better equipped to run a complicated civilization. Especially if they're omnivores, they're well equipped to develop technology, start farming, and construct villages. Semi-solitary obligate carnivores probably won't do those things.
However, powerful carnivores would be a fantastic asset in war, especially if they're substantially larger or more powerful than the prey. If your prey species are particularly warlike, the'd likely form a society in which they cooperate with the predators to fight against other prey groups. Humans, historically, have had few qualms about feeding their enemies to predators purely for amusement; forming an integrated society that fights to both enrich itself with goods and slaves and find food for its carnivorous members would serve the best interests of both predators and "prey".
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**The predators do not kill their prey.**
These predators are more like robbers than murderers.
Suppose I am a prey animal. I accumulate resources in my body through my efforts and good luck. I am found by a predator who takes some of my resources. I am left alive, poorer, but able to regroup and begin accumulating resources once again.
This is predation more like robbery - the robber takes my wallet but I live on. Maybe he will rob me again someday if I don't see him coming first. Or like herbivory - the herbivore browses off some twigs and leaves, but the plant has more and regenerates what it has lost.
An herbivore might have a philosophical outlook to losses of this sort, and regard loss of regenerable bodily resources in the same way as loss to illness or bad weather or bad luck: a thing that happens, and you move on.
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# Because they worshiped the predators.
In *Start Trek: Discovery* Saru is a [Kelpien](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kelpien) from the planet Kaminar where his species had biologically evolved to be the prey of the Ba'ul. The story of how this came to be happened over thousands of years, but Kelpiens could "sense" the coming of death through a specially evolved organ, and they met their fate as an honor.
Cultures engaging in human sacrifice could also be a predator/prey arrangement, where the prey simply believes their sacrifice will grant them some greater reward. Suicide bombers are often recruited with this same argument. The clan promises money and protection to the family for the volunteer's sacrifice. Their tribe is so poor and destitute that they give their life to provide for their family. This can be extended to a predator/prey arrangement as well.
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The prey have no will or ability to self control population, and know and accept that predation is the only way to avoid overpopulation and mass starvation. Perhaps there was a painful time in the past when they multiplied to the point that a large percentage died all at once.
The might have a biological imperative to reproduce, either because the body does it automatically, or because they die or go mad if they don't. Or just hormones that override any self control. (examples include Vulcan Pon-Farr, Tribbles, and [Moties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye#Moties).)
It might be accomplished by lottery, or by granting the predator a license for a number of kills.
[Answer]
**Because it strengthens your species.**
In order for a population to remain fit and strong it needs either a way to remove the weaker and sicker members of the society or a way to care for them.
They can only care for them in a situation where you have an excess of resources otherwise the less fit members of the society consume those resources. This leads to competition within your species for resources and ultimately infighting.
A classic example of this is the wolf/deer relationship. In situations where the wolf has been eradicated deer populations rise out of control and eventually destroy their habitat. They also become weaker as a species as the slower and less fit can survive. Reintroduce the wolf, you reduce the deer population, the surviving individuals are the faster and stronger and the habitat has a chance to return to balance.
If your prey population can see this relationship they can fit the predator species into a context wider than the deaths of a few members of their own species.
[Answer]
Besides how healthy it is to not let your population out of control you need a reason why the prey would subject them to this type of culling. They would want to limit the risk to themselves if there isnt a solid reason why they would fully accept getting hunted.
You could make it a rite of passage. Prey that comes of age will have to prove their sexual maturity by joining in their equivalent of the spanish bull running except getting caught means getting eaten with lots of ritualistic elements. The males especially would be encouraged to take risks to show their suitability as a mate to the females. The females would be no less encouraged to join to show that their children would be strong enough to survive the ritual as well. Remember that survival of the fittest is about you getting children who in turn are strong enough to survive until they have their own.
Prey would as a natural consequence get lots and lots of children, and the right to get them would be a sought after commodity. Prey that is nurturing children wouldnt be joining in these rituals, which are essentially mating rituals. But once their children are grown they'll join in the rituals again risking their life to prove they have what it takes to get more children to prospective mates. Naturally this makes geriatric care a small worry in this society, any prey that reaches an old enough age to stop going to the rituals could be valued as teachers and possibly leaders (or go for one last hurrah feeling the excitement of the ritual before being eaten).
The predators would ritualize this as much as possible to make sure the prey does not retaliate. Eating the parents and children of prey might be punisheable, and only chasing the prey that joins this ritual is allowed to be eaten.
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I've seen this addressed in
[The Cockroaches of Stay More](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/563785.Cockroaches_of_Stay_More)
Where all the characters are US-southern cockroaches, humanized but otherwise mostly realistic. For a sentient species they are fairly far along on the quantity-versus-quality side of the r/K reproductive strategy spectrum. One bit I remember is a regular family circle where the dead are memorialized, along with their cause of death, all too often "something he et" and sometimes, sadly, "something et him."
So, high infant and child mortality, where predation is just one of many causes and accepted fatalistically.
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(Except idea, that the eaten individuals are from some reasons anyway undesired like in capital punishment or eugenics)
**The predator specie provides something in return**
For example, the predator specie protects its prey from other predators. Not even because of any noble intent, but it is highly territorial and simply hates idea of its livestock being eaten. (as that's fantasy, the thing given in return could be of some supernatural sort, like serving as source of some magic ingredients)
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The prey might be intelligent, but that doesn't (at least in fiction) require that they:
1. value their own lives
2. experience fear of death (or even pain?)
3. experience fear in general
4. be capable of "hate"
with any of that missing, it seems like they might be able to get along just fine with creatures that eat them. they could realize intellectually that they'd be better off if their species wasn't eaten, but just... not be worried about it. in the same way i can explain to most people how they'd be better off if they operated a strict household budget that involved saving more money and borrowing less, and they agree with me, but then just don't do it, and never worry about it.
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The prey are the philosophical equivalent of Earth's Buddhists, or in other words, they would spin it as:
# Why *would* the prey automatically hate the predator?
If you look at things in general realistically, without any wishful thinking or pink lenses, life cannot help but be nasty like that – we all consume and destroy something every day that we live, whether we want to or not. We turn oxygen into CO2 by merely breathing, despite it being poisonous to some organisms (including ourselves). In fact, according to current understanding, oxygen was poisonous to the original life on Earth. And no matter what you think of eating meat right now, the fact that we exist to consider it means that a **lot** of meat was eaten by our ancestors, in a **very** long chain of systematic killing and pain.
One can either accept that and understand the circumstances each of us are in, or take the easy way out and let one's emotions turn to anger and hate.
In Buddhism, there's a concept known as [dukkha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha), which basically means that suffering is the natural and unescapable fate of all life (as conditioned, individual beings, but that's beside the point). This does not have to be taken religiously either, as you can find similar ideas from many other schools of philosophy; [absurdism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism), [nihilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism), [stoicism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism), to name just a few. There's even [antinatalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism), a school of thought that considers it would have been "better" to not have been born at all.
Note that these ideas do not have to mean that one does not value attempts to minimize or do away with suffering, nor do they prevent the will to fight back, that depends entirely on the philosophy in particular. One can fight back, but without hatred or judgement. Many Buddhist martial arts schools are built on this kind of thinking.
Take your pick from some of these philosophies, or even better – make up your own!
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# Your prey are sentient Tribbles
Meet the humble Eatsalottus. It's a strange creature, in that it is both sentient, but breeds extremely rapidly and has a lifespan of only a single year, factors that are normally not found in sentient creatures. In the distant past, a plague nearly wiped out all the Eatsalotti because their rapid expansion caused overpopulation, making them extremely vulnerable to disease, especially once they came to realize that leaving dead bodies all over the place isn't the smartest thing to do.
Enter the Niceivore, a sentient predator that would rather not kill things if it didn't have to. By inviting Niceivores into their lands, the Eatsalottus finally had a way to get rid of all those dead bodies laying around everywhere. They don't hate the Niceivores because they're actually grateful! Nobody is still around who was there for the Great Plague, but their oral stories help share the knowledge that without the Niceivores eating their dead and killing the sick every now and then, the Eatsalottus is surely doomed.
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Seems that your plot requires the prey to be sapient, but then the reader may wonder why there are little or no non-sapient creatures.
That said, since neither of your species (obviously) is human, they don’t have to have human emotions and attitudes.
There could be a collective symbiosis—but I’ll stop there, as other answers have already provided several possibilities for that.
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**Protection**
There are worse predators around who'll kill you more brutally, painfully and/or randomly. So the Predators are our protectors; they guard and protect us - and all we have to do in return for this benevolent protection, is to let them eat our old, infirm, sick, injured and/or criminals. (...and maybe a monthly quota if that's not enough.)
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I suggest a combination of two social norms:
## No killing people *for* food.
Since the prey are sapient, killing them is considered murder. *But* a creature who dies for any other reason (old age, accident, suicide, capital punishment, etc.) can legally be eaten. With a sufficiently high number of prey creatures, there should be enough “natural” deaths to sustain the carnivores.
## Being eaten is a dignified way to dispose of a dead body.
Think of it like being an organ donor, where a person's death allows others to live. Except that instead of donating your heart or liver, you donate your meat.
Funeral rituals could help reinforce this perception. For example, suppose you have a carnivore monarchy, as in *The Lion King*. Then whenever a herbivore dies, have an elaborate affair where a representative of the royal family visits the deceased's next of kin, bringing a special gift (perhaps a basket of rare fruits), and giving a speech about the Circle of Life. At the end, the body will be taken off to a butcher's shop, but try to downplay this part. Get people to focus on “King Simba came to offer his condolences; what an honor!” and less on “I wonder whose dinner poor Zack Zebra will be”.
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[
I'm trying to write a mostly realistic space story, and kind of hit a wall when it came to weaponry, so here's the question:
What would be the first weapons to be put on a spacecraft? Due to physics and complicated sciency stuff I don't understand, you can't exactly strap an AK-47 to a rocket and expect it to work.
With my limited knowledge of space physics, I think the first weapons would probably be projectile launchers that just throw a piece of metal into space with springs or gas cartridges. However, throwing anything out of a spacecraft make sit go the other way, however small, so you need to counter that with another piece of metal, or use fuel or something, which in the long run isn't all that good if you cant recharge or whatever very often.
Another weapon I think might work is lasers, but I have NO IDEA how they would work in space, so don't quote me. My theory is, however, that in space, since there is no atmosphere, lasers could travel farther than normal and still be effective against thin armor. Somebody please verify this or correct me.
The third weapon I have in mind is a sort of shield against lasers or a visual interference device. I think it would probably be a sort of sand launcher placed all along the ship. It wouldn't be very effective against the projectile launchers, but could at least stall the lasers while the ship gets out of the way. Or get close to an enemy and use it so the can't see any more.
Another thing I thought of was railguns/coilguns, but that would use a lot of power and might have the same problem as the projectile launchers where they push the ship backwards a little bit.
If you see anything I missed or did wrong, let me know.
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Your question is very broad, since it really does not specify what these weapons are to be used for. Just like here on Earth, you have a large assortment of weapons to deal with different target sets - an infantry team can carry an M-3 "Carl Gustave" to use against bunkers and lighly armoured vehicles which their m-4 carabines won't affect, but the platoon also has machine guns for suppressive fire, a Javelin ATGM to use against tanks, hand grenades for close quarter battle and so on.
Certain consideratons will apply for any sort of weapon (outside of handguns and personal defense weapons):
1. Space is open terrain. You have essentially unlimited sightlines and the adversary has very limited options when evading observation. Even being in orbit around a planet does not help, and using large numbers of sensor satellites and vehicles negates even that limited condition.
2. There is no stealth in space. You are operating against a 3K background (i.e. 3 degrees above absolute zero). Even unmanned vehicles will need "hotel" power for on board sensors and computers, and have to radiate away waste heat. Once the vehicle goes active with drives and weapons, it will be a brilliant spot against the cold background of space. Your constellations of sensors will also make it difficult to reject waste heat in a "hidden" direction.
3. Space is a vacuum. This means there is no fluid medium to react against. You must use rocket power or access some sort of momentum exchange in order to change directions - no swooping X-wing runs. This also means there is no practical reason to have "fighter" craft - aircraft work in different media than ships, which is why an aircraft carrier is useful on Earth. In space, a larger craft can carry more powerful engines and rection mass. The Space Battleship Yamoto can literally outrun space "Avenger" torpedo bombers in a battle.
4. Orbital and interplanetary speeds are enormous. Orbiting the earth requires a speed of @ 7km/sec. A rifle bullet moves at a leasurly 900m/sec, while a more energetic tank round can move at 1200m/sec. Since kinetic energy is determined by speed, even wadded up toilet paper can be dangerous in space, although rather impractical. Objects moving at orbital and interplanetary velocity pack enourmous amounts of kinetic energy, so even a "shotgun" pattern of ball bearings released in the path of an orbiting satellite can destroy it.
5. [The Rocket Equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). This can be summed up by saying "every gram counts". For space vehicles this means they need to have as little mass as possible, consistent with the mission. You won't see elaborate space battleships, but rather "eggshells with sledgehammers" - weapons platforms with the most powerful single weapon they can carry.
Given these parameters, we can see what sorts of space weapons will be out there in "reality". Since smaller weapons have the best performance, in the near term they will likely be similar to the 1980 era "Brilliant Pebbles" proposal. This was to be a network of individual missiles in orbit (each one about the size of an air to air missile), supported by a system of sensors in higher orbit called "Brilliant Eyes". Between 800 to 1200 missiles would be needed to ensure complete coverage of the Earth.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W68Kp.jpg)
*1980 era Brilliant Pebble concept. The missile is shedding the protective "life jacket" to intercept a target*
This is a relatively "low speed" system, with the interceptors moving at 7km/sec and destroying the target with kinetic energy by ramming it.
Farther in the future, we might want to have greater coverage, fire more munitions against "swarming" targets or to overwhelm defenses, so a [railgun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun) or [coilgun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun) might be used. These use electromagnetic forces to accelerate projectiles at much higher speeds. The "[Have Sting](https://warisboring.com/the-death-star-that-might-have-been/)" concept would have accelerated projectiles to 15km/sec - twice orbital velocity, and possibly be able to engage targets out to the edge of the [Hill Sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere). These weapons are much larger, and can be considered analogues to artillery.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T3bQb.gif)
*Have Sting to scale with US Space Shuttle. Image from "[The Unwanted Blog](http://up-ship.com/blog/)"*
Moving a bit farther ahead, using nuclear energy to make compact, high power weapons. [Third or Fourth generation nuclear weapons](https://atomic-skies.blogspot.com/2015/03/third-generation-nuclear-weapons.html) use the energy of the nuclear explosion to drive focused weapons effects, for example, accelerating pellets to 100km/sec, or creating [shaped charge and EFP warheads](https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html) capable of accelerating streams of liquid metal to a small fraction of *c*. A [Casaba Howitzer](https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-nuclear-spear-casaba-howitzer.html) uses similar princples to create a narrow stream of star hot plasma. This replicates the effects of a high energy laser without the heavy, expensive and delicate laser generators, optical trains and mirror.
This gives you the ability to create compact high energy weapons which can cover great distances very rapidly, and deliver huge amounts of energy even against deeply buried targets in moons or asteroids
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TD11U.jpg)
*The principle behind all third generation nuclear weapons: the immense energy is allowed to preferentially escape through the hole in the radiation case in the microseconds before the device is vapourized*
Finally we come to lasers. While lasers can be useful at any time, for space we want to take advantage of the long sight lines, and create a laser weapon with enough energy to vapourize metal, ceramics and carbon fibre at a distance of one light second (slightly less than the distance from the Earth to the Moon). One second means you have a minmal amount of time between firing and seeing the results of your weapon, so the adversary has no time to take evasive actions or deploy countermeasures. With current understanding, a laser weapon firing in X ray frequencies will require an accelerator ring 500m in diameter to bring electrons to the required energy - so this is a "ground mount" on the moon or battle stations in orbit. The Xaser will actually be dangerous much farther away, but the longer time between firing and seeing the results will give the adversary time to react. Still, being "scorched" by an X-ray laser a light hour away will not be a confortable experience.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RkQFE.jpg)
*Ravening Beam of Death (RBoD) X-ray laser*
Interestingly, one possible counter to such a weapon is to "fill the sky" with tens of thousands of small "Soda Cans of Death" (SCoD), counting on the immense kinetic energy of each individual "can" to cause damage or destroy the RBoD, and using the vast numbers to overwhelm the aiming, firing and cooling cycles of the RBoD.
Ultimatly, you would want to combine these effects by having a constellation of different platforms. The RBoD would be the centerpiece, due to it's long range and power. Rail or coilgun platforms would be in support, attempting to overwhelm the adversary RBoD with thousands of rounds in a short time frame (any rounds which destroyed adversary sensor platforms or other weapons systems would be a huge bonus). Smaller ships with 3rd generation weapons would be scattered through the constellation for close in defense, and of course thousands of sensors would fill the sky to provide a detailed 3 dimensional image of the battlespace. The entire constellation would be spread through a sphere about one light second in diameter.
Several websites cover this in greater detail, so I suggest you take a look:
<http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php> (this is the introduction to a huge section of the website)
<https://toughsf.blogspot.com/> A great site with lots of interesting information about other aspects of space and futurism as well
<http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/> While sadly no longer active, there is a great deal of comentary and discussion about space warfare still available
Enjoy!
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You may be surprised to learn that there has *already been* a spacecraft equipped with a weapon. Three of them, in fact.
Behold, the [Rikhter R-23 autocannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikhter_R-23):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OAxWV.png)
It was originally used on the [Tupolev Tu-22](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-22) bomber, which had one mounted in a turret in the tail. When the Soviets began the Almaz space station program in the 1960s, they developed a modified version of the R-23 and installed one on each of the three Almaz stations (OPS-1 through OPS-3).
The space-borne version of the R-23 wasn't particularly practical: it only carried 32 rounds, its fixed position meant that the entire station had to be rotated in order to aim it, and in ground tests it caused so much vibration that it was only tested in orbit once, after the final crew of OPS-2 had returned to Earth. Supposedly, it was purely for self-defence, in case a hostile power (i.e. America) tried to dock with the station, so range wouldn't have been too much of an issue.
So the first (and so far only) weapon to be used in space was indeed just a large gun. While there are currently (as far as we know) no armed spacecraft or satellites, if that situation changes, I would expect guns to remain the weapon of choice for the time being, as they're relatively light, cheap, simple, and easy to maintain and supply.
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# Handguns
If you're looking for a plausible first weapon in space, consider a basic handgun. The Soyuz historically carried a specialized firearm for emergency survival after landing. [Spectrum](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/how-i-stop-cosmonauts-carrying-guns) has an interesting history. Here's that article's description:
>
> For decades, the standard Soyuz survival pack included a deluxe
> all-in-one pistol called the TOZ 82 with three barrels and a folding
> stock that doubled as a shovel and contained a swing-out machete.
> There were a few dozen rounds of three types of ammunition—rifle
> bullets, shotgun shells and flares—in a belt attached to the gun. In
> the early years of the ISS, NASA astronauts also trained with the TOZ
> 82. Familiarization usually took place during survival training in the Black Sea, when the crews trained to safely exit a spacecraft floating
> on the water. After floating around in the water for a day or two, the
> astronauts and cosmonauts would take a few hours to fire several
> rounds from each chamber off the deck of the training ship.
>
>
>
This is not a very exciting start, but it's historically accurate. As the article notes, treaties designed to prevent the militarization of space have excluded this type of firearm.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KznMN.jpg)
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# The spacecraft itself
You would find out yourself after playing KSP for a while. Even a small vessel would do. The Sputnik's orbital speed was 8,000m/s, and its mass was 83.6 Kg. Let's round it down to 80kg... Hit it head-on coming from the other side, your relative speeds would be 16,000m/s. Plug it into $E = \frac{mv^2}{2}$, and that's 10,240,000,000 joules of juice.
That's about 2.8 MWh. Using [this handy TNT equivalency table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Conversion_to_other_units), that's enough energy that if you applied it to a load of coal you'd have diamonds.
For comparison, [a bullet from a kalash flies with just bit under 2 kilojoules of energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_AK-47_and_M16).
# Sand
You do this and you will never have any friends again ever. Not on Earth, not on other planets. But if you just spill vast amounts of sand in orbit (specially if you make a ring out of it), you will ❥❥❥❥ every satellite and spaceship which are in that orbit or which cross it at some point due to the impact of each grain. This is basically denying the usage of a whole set of orbits around a planet, and no one wants that. Consider that the powers that be in our own world are willing to stockpile enough nukes to destroy humanity time and again, but even they find that spilling dust in orbit is too evil.
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Autocannon [have been mounted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz) on spacecraft. From all reports, the Soviets did not consider it very practical.
[Missiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle) are a more likely option, since they can follow an evading target.
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Various weapons have already been used in space for anti-satellite missions, by the US, Russia, India and China.
Russia tested on on July 15th, allegedly.
These are essentially missiles with either a kinetic or explosive warhead. War in space, like travel in space, will continue to be waged with missiles in the forseeable future.
Even in space lasers are likely to relatively short-range weapons, and there are currently no suitable laser for this task.
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Railgun launched missiles? You launch your projectile but it will miss the target because the distances are HUGE and a little bit of evasion solves the danger. But you have been intelligent during construction, so on the latest possible occasion, your projectile starts it's own engine and corrects for the evasive manoeuvre.
Missiles can follow your target around and deliver payload. Kinetic energy to get in, then a blast. If railguns are too far developed for your story, just let the missiles do their job without start-push. Disadvantage, they could probably be shot.
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**Nuclear bomb-pumped lasers:**
Larry Niven wrote about early space weapons in the book *Footfall*. His spaceship was powered by nuclear explosions (shielding was iffy, the crew wasn't expected to live long) and they used nuclear bomb-pumped lazing rods so every course correction was accompanied by a burst of laser fire. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pumped_laser> The tech is similar to that used in David Weber's *Honorverse* series.
Weapons treaties currently limit the use of nuclear weapons in space, but these treaties will go out the window the moment we have a serious fight on space. These weapons will deliver massive long-range firepower and get rid of the need for ships to employ fancy reactors to power big weapons.
These systems can use combinations of the technologies discussed here. A railgun-launched missile can travel without a tell-tale rocket plume and explode a considerable distance from the target, firing X-lasers en-masse into targets, and the blasts will be powerful enough to tear apart almost any defense. Space is big and open, but it's harder to track relatively small things flying at high speeds through space than people might think, and even harder to shoot at them. If the projectile was a missile, it could undergo last-minute course corrections/dodging of counterfire.
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I think a major problem with space warfare, at least in Earth orbit, is the **Kessler syndrome**.
This means that there's so much debris, that any spaceship has a high chance of colliding and being destroyed (which is the likely result of km/s collisions).
1. All the space ships and possibly missiles blowing up in battles would bring this effect closer.
2. Spaceships being destroyed by debris from the Kessler syndrome itself, would contribute to accelerating it.
3. An adversary who starts losing space control, may decide to stop fighting battles and just put as much debris in orbit as possible, denying space control to both sides.
This won't be a problem outside planetary orbit. Space is really really big, it's probably impractical to fill much of it with debris. But most of it is also pretty empty and useless, so I think it's safe to say that most battles are going to be about control of planets/moons.
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The **CAMERA**.
All your laser cannons and rail guns and ballistic weapons, and even your sand won't amount to much, either in space or planetside, without good intel. How do you know what to shot at if you can't determine its location or path?
[Cameras were installed on satellites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_imagery#:%7E:text=The%20first%20satellite%20(orbital)%20photographs,far%20side%20of%20the%20Moon.) as early as 1959. These orbital weapon platforms were preceded by sub-orbital imaging flights on V2 rockets in the decade previous.
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How about electronic interference and jamming?
For instance, you could put up a dozen small satellites that output GPS signals in such a way as to give false location information. It should be quite fairly easy to overwhelm the standard signals for a few days.
One might also be able to send false signals to a ground station to interfere with command and control operations.
Also qualifying, the sci-fi classic, the electro-magnetic pulse from a nuclear detonation in low orbit. (This targets interfering, overwhelming, and blowing out any potential receiver, including even possibly power lines.)
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Misilies so you don't need to worry about the recoil much. You simply open a hatch, detach the missile from its mount, and then move the ship away (or give the missile a small push away from the ship). Only once the missile is free of the ship does it fire it's rocket motor. This means there is very little recoil on the ship.
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So first "weapons in space" is a broad term so i'm gonna answer it in two distinct catogries, both in the context of modern day science or shortly available technology.
1. Inside of a space craft/station
Well in order to overcome boarding crews or criminals of any kind i'd say that any kind of taser would be the weapon of choice to incapacitate the attacker without damaging the hull of your spacecraft. Anything other will damage your spacecraft from the inside and therefore cause quite a lot of trouble. Maybe your defensive crew will have have to resort to resort to projectile weapons in an emergency but this'll only happen in case of an immediete dangger to the whole spacecraft itself.
Maybe your spacecraft will be able to explosivly open all airlocks, therefore blowing all attackers out
2. Between spacecraft
I really don't see any reason to not use atomic missiles in space. Put a proximity or timed fuse on them and they'll be able to destroy or at least severely irradiate any spacecraft that they'll target .
Atomic missiles are already available and there is hardly any fallout to worry about in space. Space is mostly empty and any fallout will hardly hit the earth or any other planet if it is caused by an atomic missile in interplanetary space
Any other bomb will have to directly hit or explode in direct proximity to the target in order to make significant damage.
Keep in mind that most damage, other than the direct hit, of a bomb or missile is caused by the shock wave that travels through the air, which of cause is not present in empty space.
Maybe there is some kind of treaty is present that prohibits nuclear weapons in space. In this case something like the [Rim 161](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3) would be the weapon of choice
Anything other than a huge area of explosion or a very precise hitting weapon would be a waste of ressources due to the vastness of space. Even lasers very quickly disperse in the vastness of space...
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In my fantasy story, it has come to a point in which it is completely necessary for lead to wake up at a certain time that his body is not accustomed to, however, this made me stop. It is crucial that no other character or person wakes him up, so how would he? The system of time they have in this world is similar to sun dials, being specially colored glass panes in a window that will display different combination of colors according to the time. So, I would like this alarm clock to somehow connect to this system? The twist is, he needs to wake up at a time in the night. These dials still do work during the moon's influence, but not as strong, of course. Note that this society has the technology equivalent to that of Imperial China at its height, but for the sake of the story I would like to avoid gunpowder or other combustible elements.
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He needs a Clepsydra (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock>). Basically, a reservoir filled with water, with a puncture through which water flows at a constant rate.
These clocks have been well known for millennia, so they are available to your character.
Upon emptying the reservoir, your alarm would be triggered.
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Here is a little 2 part mechanism that might work (though it's a stretch)
As part of the sundial, place small panes that are lenses. My brain has concocted a mental image of the cathedral with a huge stained glass sundial. There are lens panels that have been fixed in place for centuries, their focal lengths known, positions marked, and candle stands at specific heights so that the holy sunlight ignites the candles every day. Maybe matches are forbidden in the temple. The lenses will only be aligned for a few minutes each, but with enough time to light a candle wick.
Then place a [Candle Clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_clock), un-lit, with the wick at the focal point for a given time of day when the sun is out. Our hero uses this to ignite the candle clock, then he goes to sleep.
At the marking for the time your hero wants to get up, have the hero insert some sort of steel pin in to the candle. When the candle burns down to that point, the pin falls out, possibly onto some sort of noisy object like a thin steel pie pan. Multiple pins might be used to create a bigger cacophony, or further down, like a snooze.
This gives you an audible alarm, using the sundial, but it also works during the night.
The lens effect could also be used to maybe melt wax used to plug the hole in Pablo Oliva's Clepsydra too. Sure, it's an extra step, but it could work.
**Edited** to address some stuff brought up in the comments. Thanks guys!
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In the TV show [*Rough Science* S02E03](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxwmgz) they built a super accurate sun clock. But then they wanted to chime the hours, so they made a *water clock* and calibrated it against the sun-shadow clock.
>
> Narrator: Mid-afternoon, and the quest for the perfect *bong* rolls on…
>
> with coconuts. {13 minute mark}
>
>
>
Any number of physical proceses occur at a pretty steady repeatable rate. They might not be good for long-term accuracy and may require resetting the apparatus frequently so they are not primary *clocks* that simply and reliably give the time of day. But they are still available for specific purposes, and not hard to invent.
He should be able to obtain hourglasses, time candles, etc. without any special novelty.
The jerry rigging is to arrange for an automatic alarm from such items. Candles are more practical than sand for an 8 hour span — time candles will be marked in quarter hour intervals and last 8–10 hours. Tie a string around the candle at the proper mark. When the string is released, it lets loose a bucket of water over your bed, or somesuch.
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Light is really good at waking people up. It doesn't take a very bright light to rouse someone. If you are not habituated to an alarm clock, then the first light of dawn is usually sufficient to awaken you.
Light can awaken one far earlier than their normal time to get up. I awaken at dawn, but if someone in my house leaves the hall light on at midnight, the light coming under my bedroom door is enough to make me stir and open an eye to see if it's time to get up.
So, use the moon. Use lenses to focus the moon's light, when the moon is in the right position, on the person's face.
If the person sleeps on their stomach, give them a night shirt with something uncomfortable on the front (stones, studs, etc.) to keep them from rolling over onto their stomach.
The sleeper should avoid strong drink or anything else that might interfere with their natural tendency to awaken when it is light.
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Considering the level of technology, a waterwheel in a river might work, if you don't need it too exact.
The waterwheel could either fill a reservoir, which when full pours on the character, or the wheel turns enough times to tip an already filled reservoir onto the sleeper. Unless there's a drought or storm, the wheel should turn fairly constantly, given the size, weight, and radius of them.
This could lead to problems arising from the aforementioned drought and flood conditions, causing the character to get up at the wrong times, and could be part of the story. If that's not your goal or not important, then whatever. ;-)
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I second clepsydra, but there was a real people's job in the Victorian era to walk around the houses and knock at the windows with a long stick to wake up people.
In the more industrial era, the workers were woken up by the steam whistle of their factory, as they would typically live nearby. If there is some kind of industrial activity around your hero's sleeping place (like a forgery, it can by long predate the actual industrial revolution) he might wake up by the noises from it.
Or is there a leather tanning nearby? Let the window open and be waked up by the smell, esp. if the wind in the morning is in a (non-)favorable direction, as opposed to evening.
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If you like the idea of using the moonlight, I would suggest using an hourglass type of arrangement. Have sand pour onto a counterweight that raises the curtains at a given time. I hope this is not too complex a mechanism.
Basically, all you have is string that goes through a pulley. One end is attached to the curtains (possibly weighted) and the other end to an empty sack. Sand falls into the sack hourglass-fashion until it is heavy enough to raise the curtain.
Not super-accurate but maybe that's not bad. The character is wakened by the light and can check immediately how much time he has to do his task. It's silent in case the castle walls are not very soundproof. Hourglasses should be a familiar technology so it shouldn't be too hard to rig up. Servants must have a way of waking up early to get things ready for the nobles so perhaps there are some of these ready to hand somewhere.
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Train a bird.
It is unclear from the OP how much time is available to develop the light triggered alarm, but given sufficient time I would have thought the best method would be to train a bird to recognise the critical pattern and then to awaken the person, maybe by pecking their head (less likely to awaken others), but there are other things that birds can be trained to do, and they can certainly make a noise if necessary. Birds are very good at pattern recognition.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision> <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2014.00122/full>
One of the advantages of a bird is that it will make adjustments for variable light conditions, still recognising the critical combinations. This is a very simple and effective low tech solution.
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The only way I can see it working with the clock specifically is with a system of mirrors/lenses that combine all the lights from the different panes into a single focused point, at a specific time. If it was bright enough, it could focus to a point of heat. I would focus it onto a spot of some material that is especially flammable. Like a candle wick coated with something to make it ignite at a lower temperature. From there, it could either burn through a rope that is holding a small weight suspended over him, or the heat could turn a small chime (something like this: [https://www.amazon.com/Biedermann-and-Sons-Inc-H-350/dp/B000VUX5VK](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000VUX5VK)). It's a stretch - the water clock ideas are much more realistic - but it could theoretically work.
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Since a "sun" dial requires light to function, I will like others, assume moon light will indicate time accurately on this night. Place a mirror a the appropriate hour on the dial. Use several to focus the light to increase the lumen of Luna. Direct this light to a crystal or glass sphere that illuminates the area where the hero is to the point of waking him.
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**A candle Clock:**
<https://www.pyramidtimesystems.com/Blog/BlogView.asp?BlogId=4096820&CategoryID=10>
A pin set into the candle at a specified height falls when the candle burns down, making a loud clanking and waking someone.
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@LeeLeon was close but I think this merits an answer rather than just a comment.
* Take a bird that sings at dawn -- perhaps a cockerel, perhaps something more pleasant-sounding.
* Place it in a darkened cage (make it out of metal so the inside is shiny in case the bird faces the wrong way; the metal will block ambient light), with a window (or even a lens) on one side.
* Align that window to face where the moon is due to be at the appropriate time (probably placed on the window-ledge of the room)
+ This is near enough the same as the previous night
+ Also it can be predicted from tables by someone with the skills of a ship's navigator
+ In fact such predictions are built into the clock system described in the question.
* When the moon shines into the cage, the bird wakes up and starts singing, waking the sleeper.
This could be set up with little preparation, especially if the character is in a position to have a cockerel (farmer) or cagebird (anyone with time/money for frivolities or affectations).
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You can't use the moon for a sundial because there isn't a moon in the sky every night also the rise and set times of the moon changes.
To use the moon, the moon can't orbit the planet. It would need to appear and disappear like clockwork.
Said "moon' would need to be a planet with the same orbital rotational speed as the planet. Perhaps a gas giant reflecting the sun's light?
Candles, if made the same, burn at the same rate and could be turned into a crude alarm clock in a pinch should other none sundial clocks be available.
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How about using a combination of mirrors/prisms/lenses to shine the hero in the face at a particular time?
Since your world uses different color combinations of light to show time, we might also be able to use these color frequencies to reflect towards the hero's sleeping area.
Then again I have no idea how this would work (*makes hand wave gestures*).
And of course when the light is disrupted or the hero is not at the spot where we would aim our reflected lightbeam this would have no chance of working either.
Either way. This adds up to something that your world would be able to use, but you will need to find your own scientific explanation.
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Magnifying glass add-on for the ligth emiting thing , pointed at somthing that might breack or do a buterfly effect and hit the lead in order to wake him/her up.
Or what the comments already said about drinking extra water
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There are several time pieces that are in side your tech range that would work just as well.
A simple design would be a "water clock" that just overflows onto ones bedding.
Greeks used a kind of "hour glass" that made a sound when all the water or pebbles got to the bottom jug.
Native Americans used lots of water at certain times before bed to make sure they woke up on time in the morning.
Many animals can be used (think rooster) depending on when you need to get up. A hungry nocturnal predator in your bed room will surely wake you up.
Chinese and Arab inventors had "striking clocks" as early as AD 650ish.
Depending on how rich your people are, it would not be unreasonable for them to have a clock, with an alarm.
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[
Imagine modern-day Earth (or the near future) is suddenly involved in a war with an alien civilization (their advancement level is open to change).
Also, for the sake of the argument, assume that cracking the planet is undesirable (the aliens want either resources or territorial expansion).
My main question is how to make sure that the only opposition to the aliens are organized militaries and government agencies, leaving guerrillas, mercenary bands and rebel cells out of the picture. The ideal case is a long, stalemate war (think years at the least) with WW1-style battles.
As I see it, there are a few ways of achieving this:
## The Tarkin Doctrine up to eleven
Take the "rule through fear" to its extreme, and take such harsh retaliatory measures against small pockets of resistance that the general population becomes too afraid of resisting. Armies and governments can overcome this by a general "sense of loyalty" or simply because they are too big to be retaliated in this way (for example, the aliens can blow up caves and houses, but not entire cities and fortresses).
**Problem:**
If the aliens are advanced enough to bomb a camping site full of rebels they should be capable of bombing an army formation.
## Specialized alien military doctrine
The alien troops are somehow immune to guerrilla attacks. For example:
* Their armor/shields are impervious to handguns and small caliber weapons, and only military grade equipment can harm them.
* They carry special riot equipment that makes them extremely efficient against small groups or disorganized soldiers.
* They use some sort of "siege vehicle" good at breaking down improvised barricades, but of limited use against battle tanks and the like.
## The earthlings have a special sense of honor
The humans being invaded have a unique perception of honor in combat that forbids them from using "unregulated" or "dishonorable" tactics. As such, they limit themselves to standard, large-scale battles.
**Problem:**
If the aliens don't share this trait, the war could potentially be very short, depending on the difference in technology.
## The aliens have a special sense of honor
Reversing the situation, in this case it's the invading aliens that have this custom.
In this case, they respect the regular militaries and face them in open combat according to their cultural "rules of engagement". However, rebels and irregular fighters enrage them due to their "lack of civility and honor", and are promptly eradicated to make an example.
This should both remove the current guerrillas as well as preventing more from forming.
## Remove the rebels from the equation
A more "out of the box" thinking. The aliens only need control over certain geographical areas, and are content with letting the military patrol cities and try to mount attacks. However, rebels that try to interfere with their controlled areas are abducted or otherwise removed.
This process is easy and cheap enough for the aliens that they don't see the need for more aggressive methods.
**Problems:**
One would think that the regular armies would eventually realize the aliens' strategy and try to attack their occupied areas.
---
Are there other methods that I'm not seeing, or any potential problems with my ideas?
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### Aliens are few and far between, drones do the work and are trivially replaceable.
The aliens are using drones for the day-to-day movement of force on the planet. There are only a few alien beings, and they're safe in their spaceship on the edge of the solar system out of nuke range.
The drones can be destroyed en mass by organised military but are trivially rebuilt. Guerrilla action just can't accomplish anything notable - someone died and their sacrifice destroyed 5 drones, well they'll be replaced in 30 seconds.
A hit-and-run operation or a suicide bomber clears an area of drones for maybe a minute. It's just not worth it. The drones return and continue what they're doing unfazed by having to replace themselves.
Large coordinated military action can clean an area of drones and push front lines back by holding the land and stopping the replacement drones from arriving, and is the only way the war progresses.
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**The aliens don't care much about interaction with the general populace, and don't have supply chains**
Guerilla warfare works because people can melt back into native populations and because logistics are tricky. You can ambush small groups as they move across unfamiliar territory, attack weaker supply lines, use civilians as a cover for assault.
So, the easy answer is that the aliens don't have easily attackable supply lines or interact with people. They set up in a place, kick out or kill all the humans there, and use rail guns to send resources up and down to and from space. Any human who gets close gets warned off or shot, and the aliens don't tend to interact at all with humans or patrol their cities.
They can defend their lines with trenches, machine gun posts, and gas attacks. No ragtag bunch of rebels can handle that, only an organized military.
[Answer]
**You already did it:**
Guerilla bands are but one form of [*asymmetric warfare*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare). It occurs when there is a large gap in the capabilies of the two sides.
Guerilla warfare is, at the core, a desperation measure by one side to avoid complete collapse, to demonstrate their continued relevance to the population in otherwise-enemy-dominated territory, to preserve political organization and combat power, and to buy time for future resurgence on a better day.
Since you want your scenario to include a long stalemate, which requires reasonably similar combat power, your situation *already* lacks the asymmetry required for guerilla warfare.
Instead, look to the use (and misuse) of elite forces (like Special Forces) which are intended to be used enhance the capabilities of main combat forces. Their method of fighting, specializing in small-unit raids and ambushes, may superficially seem similar to guerilla fighting...but only superficially. The organization, training, equipment, targets, support requirements, and goals are very different.
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**You Can't, Buuuut**
*Humans*
So firstly, you can't really eradicate guerrilla warfare from humanity. There are plenty of historical instances where "worthless" insurgency tactics are still executed because of a variety of factors (fanaticism being the hardest to quell). What it boils down to is Guerrilla warfare is the oldest method of war on earth, and there's really no way to hand-wave a normal human populace into not doing it even if occupied by overwhelming force if they view that force as wanting to be permanent enemy occupiers. The only times you don't see guerrilla warfare is EITHER:
A: The non-military populace of an occupied region doesn't care who is in charge, so has no incentive to fight.
or
B: There are no groups and few individuals loyal to the other side in occupied territory.
For A you could have the alien invaders coming down in 3rd-world regions or in nations with hugely despotic regimes. If they land, knock out the governments quickly, then are beneficent rulers to the populace (or just less-horrific than before) you won't have problems. Then you settle into trench warfare along designated fronts. Leave enough time for civilians to evacuate regions (and have the "Free World" put out enough propaganda) and alien-conquered territory will be denuded of human-loyal population! As the Humans reconquer alien lands you have the same apathetic populace, so no problem of insurgency that way either. I think personally this the best/most interesting option.
If option B your aliens might have pacification aerosols that they disperse in captured population centers and along supply routes. Militarily gasses are trivial to defend against (gasmask with the right filter and you're good) so it wouldn't effect the front *too* much. It doesn't even need to keep the whole population pro-alien, it can just be a general "we don't feel like being violent." Or they might have mind pacification chips installed in people in captured areas, or even just slaughter every human in territory they control!
*Aliens*
For aliens I would suggest the method *Footfall* by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven used. Essentially the aliens were descended from herd animals and had a deep-to-the-point-of-biological-necessity need to be in a group. If captured, they changed sides more-or-less instantly once away from the front. Essentially they'd join the new "herd" without the moral qualms a human traitor has. That'd stop any small groups or individuals of aliens trapped "behind the lines" after attack from being guerrillas. They have a need to belong that overrides their aggression.
You could also give them a very strong warrior ethos where they flat refuse to engage without some higher-up being able to see their actions and award their bravery appropriately. You'd need something beyond "we don't attack civilians" because guerrilla warfare often strikes at "legitimate" military targets. Or maybe something like the Kaylekid of *Horus Rising* (or one of the first three of Black Library's Horus Heresy series anyway) who felt war was so abhorrent they only fought in designated areas. These areas could be miles a side and were always away from population centers, so they were "battlefields" and not just arenas. Be trickier to implement, as this is aliens invading earth and you'd have to combine that with some reason for the humans to adhere to those rules in general AND not be guerrillas as well, but it's an idea.
As an aside, mass-retaliation against insurgence has a VERY poor track record. It just doesn't stop guerrilla forces doing their guerrilla things. It tends to drive locals TOWARDS the rebels instead. It goes like this. Rebels commit attack near home, because they're familiar with it. Occupiers round up and shoot 100 random people after nobody gives up the rebels. Rebels now know this is a thing. So they go to ANOTHER town, either with people they don't know or people who aren't as "patriotic" as the rebels, and attack near there. Occupiers round up and shoot 100 people from the new place. This pisses off those people, and some form their own rebel band/join rebels. Repeat ad nauseam. (look at the French Resistance, 1870/71 and WWII especially)
[Answer]
**Mind control**
Aliens don't have any powerful weapons that are able to render human armies helpless, but they possess something else: ability to influence, and somewhat control human minds. After falling under aliens' spell, humans are becoming obedient and complacent. They can no longer fight.
Fortunately for humans, this ability has somewhat limited range and works only slowly. It's also not natural for the aliens - they need special installations, similar to broadcast towers to transmit this influence. Thus, any human-controlled territory is safe from this influence. Only the front lines are affected, but there humans can either bombard these installations or rotate troops in and out of the danger zone. After a human leaves the zone of influence, his/her judgement is quickly restored, and "turning" them would need to start all over again.
Alien-controlled territory, on the other hand, is not so fortunate. Unless rebels or special ops teams are able to blow up the transmitters quickly, they fall under their influence and lose their ability to fight. thus, humans can't have any cells of resistance operating in enemy territory, and any special operations should withdraw quickly, or else all personnel would be lost.
P.S. this answer was inspired by [Prisoners of Power (Inhabited Island)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power) Sci-Fi novel.
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Have most of the war happen from a distance. Humans do guerilla warfare against ground troops among the general population where methods like suicide bombings and ambushes are effective. Why not have your aliens use [kinetic bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment): launching a projectile from orbit to impact at high speeds like the ['rods of God'](https://www.businessinsider.com/air-force-rods-from-god-kinetic-weapon-hit-with-nuclear-weapon-force-2017-9) weapon the U.S. Air Force is working on. These weapons can be used as shots attacking rebel encampments as well as similar devices being used to drop resources. These rods should only be attackable by specialized aircraft like [spaceplanes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceplane), rockets, and devices that can attack items in space/low-earth orbit. The railgun or other device used for delivery/kinetic bombardment would be in a position where a rebel force/militia would have trouble attacking them. Only a professional military/fighting force would have the materials necessary to strike these high targets and pose any kind of threat.
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**The aliens have technology or ability that makes standard guerilla tactics ineffective.**
Most likely, this is some form of detection system that allows them to identify armed individuals/groups before they get close enough to use their weapons. This prevents the most critical guerilla tactic of using a small and easily concealed force to get close to a target and launch a surprise attack on it. It may even be a form of limited prescience, i.e. they may know some short time before a strike that it is about to happen, giving them enouh time organise defence against any small-scale attack, so therefore only large scale massed attacks have a chance of success.
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>
> The ideal case is a long, stalemate war (think years at the least) with WW1-style battles.
>
>
>
Well the tricky thing here is that WW1 also had [resistance movements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_I). So if you want to avoid (or minimize) guerrilla warfare *and focus on a long stalemate*...
**You're going to want to have something *akin* to Trench Warfare.**
Seeing as this is an interplanetary battle, you could just have all the major battles take place in space. With two (or multiple) planets of comparable technology, discipline and resources unleashing fleet after fleet on one another, they'd be stuck in deadlock.
You could have minor breaches in the blockade from time to time, to keep things interesting. But in all likelihood, a landing on earth would only be a short term gain.
Another advantage of space warfare: It's expensive on both resources and intellect. While you might have rogue pilots as mercenaries, it can only be conducted through organized fleets under the command of advanced military powers. Besides, there's no need for guerrilla tactics, when people are only fighting over airspace!
For the war to have some impact on those outside of the military, I'd say you could add in plot elements such as satellite-raids or launching missiles or (garbage) into space, to give both sides *very little hope* to continue fighting.
If you still want gun battles with man and alien coming face-to-face, you could probably fit in some theaters like moons. But if you want to really emphasize the stalemate part, as something more than just a fact of the world, I'd say you should be considering more *unconventional combat*.
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Guerilla tactics and rebel groups are a non starter because;
**1)** The Aliens are 'up there' in space not 'down here' on Earth which means rebel groups don't have the technical now how or resources to fight them. Alternatively they ARE down here but only in geographically remote locations where there is no population for rebels to be recruited from. Think Antarctica, Outback Australia, remote island chains which are either uninhabited or else have had the small local populations eliminated/imprisoned or even floating bases. (Scuba diving rebels anyone?)
**2)** The nature of the war is dominated by hit and run raids by the aliens and counter moves by Earth rebel groups simply can't move and deploy quickly enough to respond effectively. Only Governments have the capital and logistics to do so. Put simply rebels would have to know in advance where the aliens are going to attack to make a difference and usually they don't, especially if the military is the one who is gong to be the ones issuing alerts re; incoming raids. Far easier to volunteer and sign up than organize a 'peoples' militia that's not in the loop.
In short rebels only become viable when the aliens are set on controlling vast sways of territory inhabited by large populations. The aliens ultimate goals may simply be to beat Earths' governments into submission ans then get them to do the heavy lifting for them, not occupy the place themselves when a station in orbit can serve just as well after they win.
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As already mentioned, guerilla tactics work because the guerillas can successfully avoid detection while disrupting the enemy operations.
**Aliens are genocidal**
The guerillas can't conduct the guerilla warfare if there are no people among whom they could hide. The guerillas have to infiltrate the enemy territory, often passing for civilians. They need supplies, usually obtained from local population (voluntarily or not).
**Aliens extensively track the population**
If the theater of operation is densely populated, methods like compulsive use of IDs, face recognition, fingerprints together with AI that can quickly analyze big data would quickly quell any guerilla. How would you even make a graffiti if you are constantly recorded and access to every location requires an ID scan. Even nowadays police can track a criminal through half a city using CCTV. Currently it usually requires quite some work, but what if you could employ an AI for this?
**Aliens go for open terrain locations**
This would probably work well paired with the above point. Guerilla warfare doesn't work equally well in every conditions. Mountain jungle would be perfect, but well monitored urban area less so. And with dense, high resolution satellite imaging even average Western European town or village could be considered monitored well enough.
[Answer]
**Human detectors**
Hit and run tactics are successful because of surprise factor. For instance, a small group poisoning the well and running away can cause havoc. But fear not galactic overlord, our kin have human detectors that can detect humans from far away, without any way to stop it. Even if resistance hits from underground they will know it. A small group will have zero chance against stronger when there is no element of surprise. This will also prevent pesky humans from employing their creative tactics, leaving only front line to front line combat. Which also will lead to stalemate when the overall forces are similar.
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[Question]
[
My conculture, Sakha, is based on Puebloan culture. They live in a mudhouse, practice dry agriculture, don't wear feathers (do they? I thought they're more of Plains culture) and are matrilineal. However, the main difference is that this culture is still partially hunter-gatherer. They hunt to provide meat and mana required for dry agriculture. (Not that it's neccessary to collect mana, it's simply more profitable this way.) Even my story is set in the conworld equivalent of the beginning of the Pueblo III time period.
I decided to mix Puebloan cultures with some aspects of other cultures like the culture in *Monster Hunter* (because both the monster in *Monster Hunter* and monsters (Sakha: graam) with the most mana are dangerous. Some even hunt on another world just to hunt dragon-like creatures), and other desert dwelling cultures.
How can I avoid offending Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, etc while creating this culture? For the extreme example (note: the idea has never been in my conworld), would it be offensive if I decided to make my culture live in tipis and built totem poles? Especially if people from my culture appear similar to people from the cultures I'm using.
[Answer]
## There are degrees.
Disclaimer: I'm (mixed) Apache and Cherokee (which are *very* different cultures even by stereotype standards).
## **Research is always good**
Archeologically confirmed *structures* and *living conditions* are not at all offensive, anymore than me creating "pasty-faces" who live in buildings with thatched roofs and wattle and daub walls. Do some research and make their daily lives realistic. **This is actual worldbuilding that enriches your story.**
## **Hodge-podge soup is lazy**
Throwing hundreds of *different* nations and cultures into a blender and serving **exotica trope salad** on paper plates – ehh, I could honestly take a pass. At least you say they are **not** wearing the [Coachella featherdusters](https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/supermodel-uses-sacred-headdress-to-get-totally-stoked-for-coachella-dvYVcPMRO0GhWCRMpiMKKg/).
Having grown up in Pueblo country, I will say **there are no big trees to carve totem poles out of**, so that's a worldbuilding fail, not a cultural fail. Indigenous Americans lived in [many different types of structures](http://www.native-languages.org/houses.htm) made from the materials that were available (including wooden buildings that look like medieval European farmhouses.
**Pueblos** are made from mud bricks because there was plenty of dirt and dung and scrub grass. Tall trees exist *above* a certain elevation, so when they were used (as roof beams) they were *featured* with carved patterns and paint, but not to the stylized totem pole level. The size of any pueblo room is limited by the height of the available trees – subsequently, pueblo rooms got smaller over time.
**Teepees** are temporary structures used by nomadic people who moved around because their food source was on 4 legs and had an enormous grazing area. Contrary to the notion that Native Americans invented recycling, they just stayed in one place until all the local bison were eaten. Then they had to pack up and move.
Teepees and pueblos are extreme opposites, created by very different cultures living in very different environments. You can't just mix and match these things. It's "offensive" because it's bad worldbuilding. I'm not personally offended (for my ghost ancestors), these structures make about as much sense *together* as a waterpark on the moon.
## **Native Americans are not magical elves who crossed over the rainbow bridge…**
Avoid romanticizing native people. The offensive stuff is worshiping wolf spirits, pseudo-primitivism, and chatting casually with dead ancestors. **Please don't**.
No really, please don't. **We are still here.** We are not unicorns or tree nymphs or lurking animal bone things, but actual living people with bored teenagers and jerk bosses and scolding mother-in-laws.
\*Also we never prophesied anything about *pasty-faces* coming to our land, that was all bs colonizers Mary Sue'd later.\*
**Native Americans weren't a monoculture.** There was a "unifying" death cult called the [Ghost Dance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance), but it was essentially the Al-Qaeda of its day urging teenage men to commit murder and terrorism in response to genocide, so not representational of actual native cultures (and it horrified the native people in its day). Unfortunately the Ghost Dance movement led to the Wounded Knee Massacre – a 9-11 like event in the tabloid news that whipped up anti-native sentiment. A lot of pseudo-religious cult mumbo-jumbo entered the American zeitgeist.
The rest seems to have come from **Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show** which featured a "living" teepee village, melodramatic recreations, and more feathered headdresses than Coachella. The show toured for decades. Research can be difficult because of *confirmation bias* and exploitation. If you go looking for "american indian wolf legends" you will find plenty. The vast majority, if not 100%, are false.
## **TL;DR**
**Do some research**. Don't throw it all in a blender willy-nilly but let it make sense.
It's ok to make up native people and give them some cultural beliefs – that's worldbuilding. Try for something original and it's at least your own ideas. If you want cultural inspiration go to the library and grab books on folklore and history, there are literally new worlds to explore that are so much weirder and more interesting than the clichés, and don't regurgitate colonialist propaganda about 2-spirit wolves.
## The term "red-face" is offensive.
[Answer]
## Ask Them, Not the Internet
There is an easy way to avoid doing this. Talk directly to the groups you're concerned about insulting. Explain what you're doing, and explain that you wanted to make sure you didn't accidentally offend them. For example, the Navajo Nation's [official homepage](http://www.navajo-nsn.gov/contact.htm) would be a good place to start looking for a point of contact.
As long as you are polite, you are very unlikely to offend people simply by asking "is this offensive". (Just don't give off the impression that you don't really care about the answer and just want to hear them say 'no'.)
[Answer]
**Have an Author's Note**
At the end of the book have a page or so like:
>
> The Sakha are based on several real-life cultures. First and foremost the Puebloans, from whom I copied.... The custom of [X] I got from the [other] people, and [Y] is completely my own invention. [Z] is an actual custom, described in [scholarly source] that I couldn't resist including.
>
>
> Please don't assume the Puebloans were (in any era) just like the Sakha. Plenty of things had to change for artistic purposes. If you want to know about the real Publoans, I recommend [list of nonfiction books]
>
>
>
See [the afterward to 1632](https://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/0671578499?chapter=73) for an example, though that's a little different and has some other stuff too.
Or, if it's a much more light-hearted book, follow Terry Pratchett's example from The Last Continent:
>
> This is not a book about Australia. No, it's about somewhere entirely different which happens to be, here and there, a bit…Australian. Still…no worries, right?
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# Research, and do your best.
If you can't, as Ton Day suggested, actually contact the culture, do as much research as you can. People tend to be inherently understanding, and even though honest mistakes happen, as long as the majority of your work is 'correct' (so to speak) you'll avoid offending the majority of people. In the end, imagine yourself on the other side. If someone decided to write a story with heavy parallels to your culture, but messed up a few side details, would you be offended?
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### There is only so much you can do if you want to extract many specific, "stereotypical" features from real cultures as set pieces in your work. Using less "real" material and knowing more about the source of your inspiration will be helpful.
That's not the most charitable way of phrasing what you're looking to do, but it's correct in the essentials. There are whole cultures, thousands of years old and rich in detail and nuance beyond routine expression, which have produced the features that have captured your interest.
Extracting a handful of conspicuous features from those cultures without any context and without providing any cultural representation beyond those conspicuous features, just because you think they look cool or suit your setting, generally *is* what people complain about in situations like this. It's definitely *worse* if the chosen features denigrate the group, but many object to their cultures being "cheapened" just to suit aesthetics in a fictional setting by someone not at all engaged with their actual culture and history.
So my main answer to the main question is: **don't wholesale-copy much from existing cultures, and know enough details to be "inspired" well**. *Inspired by* is not the same as *copied from*. There are many things that aren't especially culture-specific-- mud houses have been used in many parts of the world at many points in history by totally disparate cultural groups. Mud houses, alone are probably fine.
Mud houses that look *exactly* like those used in a certain culture... that's a bit different. Architectural styles and practices are varied, and can be very culture-specific. Having mud houses is one thing, but having mud houses that look *just like* Puebloan mud houses is a bit closer to copying rather than being inspired. This becomes more severe as you add more features which are specific to a given culture.
And just as importantly, think about the features that you *aren't* carrying over from your inspiration. A big risk is not noticing distinctions meaningful to members of the source culture: "these groups are all the same" is *very* offensive to groups that view themselves as being very different, especially if you casually blend details together in a way which more familiarity with the cultures would prevent.
If you're using the architecture, clothing, and art styles from a culture but nothing else, it's fairly easy for someone to say that you are caricaturing the culture without bothering to know (or at least, express) anything meaningful about it. This is especially the case if any of those elements had broader cultural significance (like clothing styles that weren't just popular for some reason, but had deeper religious or cultural meaning)-- it may not be possible to respectfully imitate one without the other.
As an example, I have some Italian heritage. I don't especially care about Italian representation in media in the modern day (we don't see the same kinds of social attitudes that were common in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th century), but a cartoon of a mustachioed chef eating spaghetti and meatballs while speaking in a funny accent is a clearly "Italian" caricature, but is a poor representation of the culture that produced the Roman Empire, lead the Renaissance, and countless other items.
As for the "know enough details" piece, a person can't be much inspired by a culture they know little about. Doing some real research on a culture (reading published papers, well-regarded history books, etc.) can give you enough understanding that you aren't just copying superficial details. A few hours of casual googling simply isn't enough.
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Broader notes:
The goal of not offending a "culture" is good, but fuzzy. Cultures often don't have representatives empowered to make blanket judgements on this sort of topic, as noted in other answers. And even if they do, that's no defense against individuals feeling offended and complaining. There is no bright line for the amount of respectfulness you can display (however that's defined) which guarantees that no one will feel offended, or that relieves you of any possible responsibility if someone takes offense.
There is no obvious standard for how to do this sort of thing "right", aside from not doing it at all. Talking to people who are a part of the source culture, especially if they are cultural experts (the exact definition of which will vary between groups) to get guidance on how appropriate your ideas seem to them can be helpful, but will never be definitive.
The shallower your inspiration and translation of cultural elements are, the more likely you are to give offense. The more knowledgeable, cautious, and substantive you are in representing cultural elements, the less likely. And if you can avoid copying enough superficial elements to obviously point to a real culture, you'll be on firmer ground still.
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**Make them different.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/77uPd.jpg)
<https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x72mkoi>
I was so impressed with Valley of the Dinosaurs, then and now. The cavemen would have been caricatures of movie amerinds - speaking in clipped "ug" English, dressing like movie amerinds; the whole deal. But: they were blond, with weird mustard complexions, these cavemen, and so not Indians.
Do the same. You are already bringing in Monster Hunter. The idea of adding tipis and totem poles is not outrageous; if you are digging the amerind thing as a basis for a story make a big mix of all the things you think are cool. A stone pueblo totem pool would be very cool. People do that for Western Europe based fantasy and African based fantasy all the time. Mix Pueblo III with elements from older pueblo (Anasazi) periods, other Amerinds elementals you like, and add some Middle Eastern desert tech. No-one will be able to claim you are depicting their people in your fiction because you will not be.
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You're worried about offending *real world* cultures (or, more correctly, people belonging to those cultures). It's worth pointing out that most cases of cultural offense are rooted in the perception that the offender has *got something wrong* in terms of that culture. They're mis-attributing or misunderstanding something. Something has been used/borrowed/stolen without any tie to it's significance from that originating culture.
This is an easy trap to fall in to when designing a fictional culture by way of picking and choosing from real world cultures. But, this issue can be avoided if you take a different approach to designing the features you want your culture to have. Instead of reverse-engineering them by basing them on real world cultures, I would suggest a different approach.
You are building a world, and you're designing a culture that lives in that world. Instead of basing that culture on real-world cultures, **make your culture fit your world.** The cultural aspects you seem to be focused on (shelter, food gathering, etc) are all environmentally influenced anyways, so this should be straightforward. If you write your culture such that it fits *their world* then there's essentially nothing for anyone to be offended by.
In other words, drop the approach of basing your culture on real cultures in our world, and instead base your culture on the world in which they live.
If there's a real world culture that uses adobe brick, it's because their environment and tech supported it. Instead of worrying about whether or not your culture's use of adobe brick will offend a real world culture who used adobe brick, just ensure you are writing your world and your culture such that adobe brick *makes sense for your culture.* **Such consistency is hard to get offended by.** And although such an approach can seem overwhelming, since you're taking on the burden of consistency, in the end it's a more organic way to create a believable culture - potential offense aside, the result will likely make more sense to readers in the end than a culture that was just mashed together without any rhyme or reason.
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Would another option be (perhaps not for this story, but other worldbuilding) to not just hang a lampshade on it, but have that be part of the point?
Like if I had post-apocalyptic humans spend a few centuries in the Midwest or wherever, and now life is better, they're back to having more leisure time and thinking beyond survival into creating a better world. They know *of* America as the name of their ancestral land, but details are lost to memory. They, like many, are interested in their heritage and some people are into researching and resurrecting some of it.
THEN they find that parts of Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom survived -- maybe a big pre-flooding dome protected major parts of it, but the utilidors are permanently blocked off. Finally, they can see images of America in its glory: the Hall of Presidents -- Small World -- Haunted Mansion -- Carousel of Progress! (There's no Smithsonian strip of museums to compare things to). So now *this* is their artifact-driven attempt to understand How America Was. DisnAmericans believed that their Ancestors frolicked happily in houses to watch future generations. I *think* in Hall of Presidents, that though the presidents speak in order in a roll-call, they're physically grouped non-chronologically, so one may assume a tricorner hat and breeches could be worn along side a 1970s suit and tie, just different styles. More evidence might be the Family that recurs in Carousel. They clearly never traveled because they believed the world was very small.
Part of this imaginary version works because we *know* the "mainstream US culture" and we know about Disneyworld's simplifications, and we can imagine the effects of the animatronics appearing as a display without much context.
If you do something like that with a culture you do *not* know very well (yet), make sure that you are similarly making it clear that *you* know and communicate that, say, the Sacred Sculpture that your characters have passed down for generations is a toy or simple everyday thing that they are misunderstanding and imbuing with unnecessary reverence.
So this is advanced-level worldbuilding, especially when the building blocks come from a culture you don't understand. But finding creative work BY and FOR the groups you're writing about (movies, novels, stories) -- things where they don't care if outsiders get the jokes or references -- that can help you identify potential elements that are more safe to explore. *(still research: It may be like "I can pick on my brother, my cousin can pick on my brother, but if an outsider picks on my brother, we all team up!")*
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**Learn from Real Life example: *Buddhism***
Buddhism was started by "Siddhartha Gautam", who was a Hindu and Buddhism itself can be thought as a subset of Hinduism without all its god level complexities, just its spiritual intensity.
You can start investigating the origins of Buddhism and how he extracted the best parts of Hinduism out of it and created a whole new culture without offending anyone.
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You have two choices. Do you specifically want the culture in your story to be the real Pueblo culture (albeit with monsters added), or do you just want a culture of people who dwell on plains, with the intent to use Pueblo cultural history for inspiration? The right response to the two options look very different.
If you specifically want Pueblo culture plus monsters, then research the culture very carefully. Read everything you can about the Pueblo, if possible spend time with or at least speak to people from that specific background. Make the details accurate in your story, both with regard to artefacts such as houses, totem poles (or rather, lack of them) and also with regard to customs and practice. Essentially, research your story as carefully as you would a historical novel. Make sure you can write a credible story in a straight Pueblo setting, and *then* write one with added monsters.
On the other hand, you may just want to use the culture as an inspiration for your totally fictional culture who aren't Pueblo and don't live in our North America but just happen to live in a similar Plains setting. In which case, you can take inspiration not just from Pueblo but from plains and steppe cultures across the world. The tricky bit is then to ensure that your fictional culture is something unique and of itself. Don't just take actual elements from real cultures or you will end up with a mishmash of totem poles, tipis, feather head dresses, and goodness knows what else. It will be offensive to the cultures involved and lacking consistency for your readers. Better to look at what all these cultures have in common, what constraints are imposed by the generic plains setting, and allow your fictional culture to solve it in their own way, with their own unique customs, architecture, practices and so on. In that way no real world people will be offended, because the story won't be a bad pastiche of their culture, it will be something new albeit in a comparable setting.
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Imagine you have the stereotypical mysterious nation across the ocean. Their mercenaries are sometimes contracted into your army. They dress weird, talk with an accent, and have really odd weapons. While you, a simple soldier, prefer a sword and shield combo, the foreigners use a weapon unlike anything you have ever seen.
Naturally, the blacksmiths in your region attempt to recreate the weapon, and succeed. But the carbon copies cannot be used to the same effect as the foreigners. Every time you go to war with the foreigners, they always end up dominating the battlefield.
In an ancient time period (sometime around 500 AD technologically), would it be possible for a culture to have unique and unstoppable weapons? Or would the locals eventually learn how to wield both the weapon and the fighting style, and how long would that take?
**Clarifications:**
* The actual design of the weapon does not matter, and it can be used anywhere on the battlefield
* Unique and unstoppable means that an enemy soldier would have difficulty countering the foreign moves
* If necessary, the weapon can be used off of a traditional open-area battlefield and somewhere else, maybe as an assassin's tool, as long as the answer has some way of keeping secrecy
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# Historical example: horse and bow
The steppe nomads from Asia have been *quite* proficient horse archers. It's their signature fighting style to move quickly and shoot.
Individually, neither of these is hard to duplicate. And mostly anybody can learn to shoot from atop a horse. What makes the steppe people fearsome is how well they do both at the same time. It's part of their culture and upbringing to be riding an horse since they are children. They'd have games and competitions where horse riders would perform feats not unlike what you'd see at Cirque du Soleil, only such performances weren't considered abnormal or special.
Combining the athleticism and acrobatics with horse riding allowed nomads to be extremely flexible - hanging down the side of the saddle for a better angle and shooting or shooting and ducking on the other side of the horse for protection.
Constant training and practice is what made the steppe nomads extremely proficient at horse archery. When they clashed with other nations, the nomads were quite successful due to the mobility and hard to counter fighting style. Especially if the enemy is not used to fighting the nomads. The nomads dominated the steppes for literal centuries using broadly the same fighting style, from antiquity through the 13th century when Gengis Khan and the Mongols swept through Europe and Asia creating the largest land empire to ever exist.
The East Roman Empire (known in modern times as Byzantine Empire) had clashes with mounted archers and even trained some themselves. However, the Roman horse archers weren't nearly as effective for multiple reasons:
* The Roman army was composed of many troops, not just horse archers. Among others, they had normal mounted troops who would train to charge into enemy formations and these were more valuable in other confrontations.
* Mounted troops in general were more expensive to acquire and maintain.
* The Roman horse archers only learned mounted archery as part of army training and quite late in life. Some were normal mounted troops who knew how to use a lance and were tasked with learning to shoot. By contrast, nomadic people would start learning from a young age and they'd train horse riding, acrobatics, archery while riding, as well as group tactics. The Roman horse archers were effective but limited - this wasn't their way of life or primary occupation.
**In summary:** You can have the same tools or weapons as another nation but application can vary greatly. If one culture devotes a considerable part of its energy into mastering and using the tools, they'd be *better* than just someone who picked it up.
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## You got the [English Longbow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow).
Archery is hard.
Like, *really hard*.
Fantasy almost never makes justice on how skilled and how *strong* an archer has to be to be effective in combat. While we often see archers as those lithe, quick, nimble elf-like beings with noodly arms that use bows because they lack upper body strength, that is the absolutely *worst* physical build possible if you want a good archer. You need those arms strong if you want to use a bow of old to any good skill level. It is *you* that is powering that arrow, not some magical fairy energy or something of the sort.
This happens because an ancient bow is, in essence, a very fancy spring. It takes the power from your upper body and shoves it into the arrow, sending it flying towards a target of your choice. Modern builds and techniques can help a quite a bit in decreasing the muscle mass you need to use those fancy springs effectively and for a long periods of time, but those aren't things you have in the Ye Old Times. Different bows have different needs, and old ones need muscles.
When you have a longbow, you have a very large, very fancy spring. A very large and very fancy spring that also needs very large muscles. Not hulk-large, mind you, but well-trained and well developed muscles. When you add the skill needed to fire a bow properly, you end up with a very *exigent* weapon that demands a lot of training, a lot of physical exercise, and a lot of patience to master. It is not a pick-up-and-use weapon like the sword or the spear. It isn't a weapon that you can hand out to your farmers and hope they will be useful in battle. Even if you give those bows to your best warriors, the chance of them having the skill and the correct muscle groups developed properly to use the weapon properly right away is slim to none. I'll elaborate on a few of the reasons of why that happens.
First, Longbows must fit their user. A large difference in height between two soldiers also means a difference in bow size. Give the bow of a very tall person to a very short person, and the very short person will struggle to make the weapon work properly.
Then, they need years of training. A sword or a spear is easy - you just wave the thing and it hurts people. You can train a lot to make yourself more effective at hurting people, but they are still simple weapons. A bow, on the other hand, needs specialized training. A longbow even more so. Those weapons are almost useless in the hands of newbies - they might even be able to fire a couple arrows, but those arrows will be inaccurate and weak. Heck, the newbie archer might even end up hurting themselves *badly* if they don't take proper care before letting the arrow go.
Finally, you need to know how to take proper care of the thing. Bows are finicky. Don't care of it properly, and you might end up with a broken bowstaff or a snapped bowstring on your hands. A dull sword is still a long, heavy stick that can be used to bonk people in the head. A snapped bow is no better than a walking cane.
Add all of that up, and you have a very hard-to-use and hard-to-master weapon that can be surprisingly effective in battle, but almost impossible to copy if you don't have years to spend training your people on how to use it.
So, make your Mystery Nation be a land full of mercenaries equipped with longbows and they will be a difficult force to deal with equipped with a weapon that, while isn't that hard to *build*, it is very frustrating to use.
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**It's not the form, it's the material**
Actually this "super weapon" is simply a sword/spear. Maybe it does look fancy, but that's because the godess of those island-weirdos demands it. But compared to mainlander-swords the material is more durable, probably a bit lighter and needs a lot of disuse to lose it's edge. And you know how those island-weirdos guard and care for their weapons. I heard they even take them to bed every night.
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Really, think about the difference between iron and bronze. Or bronze and stone. Or vibranium and steel. It's not the form, but the material (and the fighting skills), which make the difference.
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If a weapon is actually a significant upgrade it will be copied by everyone within a short period of time unless the people that know how it functions are rare.
Where you would end up with a weapon that was unique to a group for an extended period of time would be when a weapon isn't actually better under normal circumstances but that when combined with a culture that focuses on things that favor it the weapon becomes better/competitive.
Economics are a significant factor in war. If weapon A requires 1,000 hours of practice to be proficient and weapon B requires 50 hours to be proficient most nations are going to choose weapon B because training is expensive. If a nation happens to treat weapon A as it's national hobby and people naturally have 2,000 hours of practice with it then, the cost difference is effectively wiped out and the nation with weapon A may end up being superior because of all of their practice even if the weapon they are using might actually be inferior.
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### A sword made from something like [Damascus steel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel)
Damascus steel is perhaps a few centuries away from your targeted tech level, but some similar early steel making tech (e.g., iron + fire + pumped air containing co2, e.g., coal fire smoke = steel) would make steel blades far superior to iron ones.
Existing blacksmiths can melt anything metal down and recast it freely. Copper, bronze, iron, tin, lead. All of these can be melted and cast in moulds in simple furnaces with no thought to the carbon content. The concept of some air trapped within the sword to make it stronger will be beyond any blacksmith.
When the blacksmiths experiment with captured swords, they are unable to duplicate the forging technique, when melted and recast you end up with a much weaker iron sword. A perfect mould of a captured sword with melted captured parts will not recreate a sword as good as the original.
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**Gunpowder**
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Mercenaries from behind the ocean are mysterious indeed, but not because of their dress or talk. No my lord, their weapons are the most mysterious. They spit fire, smoke and death, no man is safe from them. Wearing armour or carrying shield is no use against these. And the noise they make, like heavens should fall on us! Alas! How can one hope to defeat them?
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Well, gunpowder is easy to make. One just needs charcoal, sulfur and salnytr (birds excrement). The only hard thing is to know correct mixture ratio, which is secret known by very few.
Weapons themselves are hand cannons, somehow crude (basically barrel on a stick), yet still quite effective guns. They are are relatively easy to make (especially bronze ones - which are cast). Amunition is also quite easy to make - cast lead, wrought iron balls or just fitting stone. The can pierce trought any shield or armour (from a reasonable distance, of course). And as an additional benefit they scare horses and men alike. Loud noise and acrid smoke is nothing pleasant, especially if you never saw, smelled or heard anything like that.
The poor blacksmiths can easily copy these weapons, but without knowlege of gunpowder, they make just useless fancy sticks.
**So, to summarize...**
Unique? - Yes.
Unstoppable? - Yes (well, you can try to dodge the bullet but don´t try it at home)
Battlefield weapon? - Yes.
Assasin tool? - Yes, but not very stealthy, quite opposite.
In 500 AD, it is possible to make hand cannons and amunition. It is also possible to make gunpowder - all the components were easily accessible, the only trick is the knowledge of making of it.
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> What would cause a culture to keep a distinct weapon for centuries?
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**Success.**
If your enemies have found no way to duplicate/master a similar weapon *and* no way to counter it, then there is no motivation to replace it. Necessity is the mother of invention, not success.
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The unstoppable weapon of 500 A.D was called "The Horse."
It had dominated battlefields for thousands of years already, and would continue to dominate for 1400 more.
500 A.D was the middle of an arms race to breed bigger, stronger horses for greater tactical advantage.
Expensive, but used properly they were very much worth the price.
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To be kept, a weapon has to be useful. If it's easy to use and significantly better than common weapons, it will become ubiquitous. Therefore, for the weapon to remain in use in one location and relatively unknown elsewhere, it has to be useful but either difficult to learn to use effectively, difficult to produce, or less useful in other environments.
Powerful ranged weapons typically take a long time to learn to master. The Bow, the Sling, and the Atlatl are all exceptionally powerful weapons in skilled hands, but very difficult to learn to use well. In addition, an opponent who has never fought against those weapons would have no idea what they are capable of or how to counter them.
Maybe it was designed to serve a single purpose best. Jitte and Sai are Japanese weapons designed to aid in disarming an opponent. Bolas or nets are used to trip and ensnare opponents, effectively capturing them and making them defenseless against follow up attacks.
Alternatively, it may be most useful in the environment it hails from. Many weapons are adapted from other tools. Perhaps it can serve a dual purpose as a climbing tool, farming implement, or construction or mining tool. Cavalry are great on steppes and plains but unusable in swamps.
Finally, it might rely on a material or knowledge for construction that is not available elsewhere. Perhaps their nation is renowned for its master weaponsmiths and their jealously guarded secret techniques. Perhaps they coat their weapons with a toxin from a creature or vegetation that is native to only their homeland. Perhaps they have discovered a new form of alchemy or optics that has advanced their weaponry far beyond the capabilities of their neighbors and the rest of the world has yet to catch up.
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> In an ancient time period (sometime around 500 AD technologically), would it be possible for a culture to have unique and unstoppable weapons?
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**NO**, because your question is fundamentally misunderstands conflict.
The purpose is to **win the war**, not to *win the battle*, and, since weapons are designed and wielded by humans, and humans are imperfect, every weapon has some domain where it's not optimum, or even particular effective.
Even nuclear weapons are stoppable by MAD.
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> Or would the locals eventually learn how to wield both the weapon and the fighting style, and how long would that take?
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As mentioned earlier, every weapon and fighting style has a weakness. Your job is to find that weakness and exploit it. (But since they're your friends, your job should be to *guard that weakness*.)
Since you mention blacksmiths successfully cloning the weapon, but the wielders still dominate, it's obviously a melee weapon. And how do you defeat a melee weapon? With a range weapon.
But, you say, it's actually a range weapon! Then the enemy develops more effective shields or armor. Or longer range weapons. Or they send a flanking force far around to raid the camp and destroy the supplies. Better yet, send an army into their lands while this unstoppable army is on campaign. A sufficiently large number of neighboring kingdoms would like to get rid of them that they can band together and invade. Bonus points if some invade by sea.
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Can it be something basic like the mercenaries' weapons are blessed? It doesn't even have to be a 'real' blessing. Just the fact the wielder believes in the blessing makes it work that much better. This could answer both your title and body of your question which are not exactly the same.
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A race of complete female humanoids have DNA that is similar to humans but distinct enough to be consider a different species (think donkeys and horses). This species can mate with humans and other similar humanoids, but produce only daughters is there away to explain this biologically without the help of magic?
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# Easily.
### Male blobs/fetuses are fragile.
Even in human female moms, under adverse conditions, [a miscarriage is more likely with a male embryo](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303559504579197761598142066) than with a female one.
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Even with your miraculously compatible aliens, female embryos are viable, whereas male ones are simply not.
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This could happen if male offspring weren't viable. In Earth animals, you see similar behavior in cross breeds between animals like lions and tigers, in which all male offspring are infertile. Certain genetic abnormalities that make mating impossible are present only in male hybrids.
Something similar could happen with your aliens, only more severe. If XX hybrids are viable offspring, but XY hybrids develop with fatal defects, such as severely diminished brains or incomplete hearts, all offspring would be female. In many cases, human bodies will miscarry if a fetus isn't viable, and your aliens likely do the same, so it might be that the aliens never even appear to become pregnant, unless there will be a female child.
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This is just my basic understanding of genetics, but can't there just be a dominant chromosome?
Have the male be XY and the female be ZX or ZY, where Z is dominant and results in a female.
Males produce X or Y for mating
Females produce only Z no matter what
The resulting combination will always be ZX or ZY.
Biologically, something about the Z chromosome changes the production of your sex cells.
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[This has happened in real life, to humanoid species interbreeding on earth](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/modern-human-females-and-male-neandertals-had-trouble-making-babies-here-s-why)!
Say in one species, we'll call them Neanderthals for ease, all males have a gene on the Y chromosome, let's say it is vital to male foetal survival in their species' wombs, but is lethal to the fetus in other wombs.
When this species breeds with another, we'll call them HomoS for ease, with a HomoS mother (and Neanderthal father) all male fetuses will die, they all have a gene that kills them in foreign wombs. With a Neanderthal mother (and a HomoS father) all male fetuses will again die, they lack the gene crucial for foetal survival in a Neanderthal womb.
End result, only female babies from interbreeding.
In your example, the Neanderthals are your all female species, they can have babies with us, but our males lack a gene for foetal survival in their wombs.
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**There are real animals where this happens**; it's called [gynogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Gynogenesis). However, in gynogenesis, no DNA is transferred from the male to the offspring so perhaps that doesn't fit your needs.
There's a [paper here](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1505/2901) on the evolution of the species which might also be informative.
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For simplicity, let's say the humans and the humanoids both descend from the same group of ancestors, who reproduced sexually like humans do. During their isolation from the humans, the humanoids transitioned from sexual reproduction to [parthenogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamata).
In humans, the X chromosome carries genes that are essential to life. An embryo with no X chromosome [can't survive](http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/disorders/chromosomal/turner/) long enough to develop into a baby. A human with only one X chromosome, on the other hand, can survive just fine. There's a lot of [evolutionary pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_pressure) for genes on the X chromosome to function properly in people with only one X chromosome, because nearly half of all humans have only one X chromosome! If a human gene on the X chromosome mutates and loses its ability to function in people with only one X chromosome, the mutant [version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allele) of the gene will be at a severe evolutionary disadvantage, and it will probably die out very quickly.
Among the humanoids, on the other hand, pretty much everyone has two X chromosomes. That means there's very little evolutionary pressure for genes on the X chromosome to function properly in people with only one X chromosome. If a humanoid gene on the X chromosome mutates and loses its ability to function in people with only one X chromosome, the mutant version of the gene won't have any serious disadvantage, and nothing will stop it from [spreading](http://bivalves.teacherfriendlyguide.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=32&Itemid=125) through the population. Eventually, just by chance, the original version of the gene could disappear completely from the population, [leaving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_%28population_genetics%29) only the mutant version. Let's imagine that this has happened several times, so the humanoid X chromosome carries a bunch of genes that only work properly in people with two X chromosomes. A humanoid embryo with a missing X chromosome will be very unlikely to survive and develop, just like a human embryo [missing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneuploidy) an [ordinary chromosome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosome).
Now, imagine a humanoid mates with a human carrying sex chromosomes XY, and an embryo starts to develop. If the embryo inherits the human's X chromosome, it will have two X chromosomes in total—one from the humanoid and one from the human. The genes on its X chromosomes have a good chance of functioning properly, because there are two X chromosomes present, and the genes on the human X chromosome would be able to function pretty well on their own anyway. The embryo can survive and develop.
If the embryo inherits the human's Y chromosome, on the other hand, it will only have on X chromosome—a humanoid X chromosome, which carries a bunch of genes that don't work in people with only one X chromosome. The embryo is very unlikely to survive.
This is exactly this situation you're looking for: humanoids and humans can mate and make embryos, and only the embryos with two X chromosomes can survive and develop into babies. When those babies grow up, however, they'll have a very weird power. The child of a humanoid and a human will typically carry two X chromosomes: one humanoid and one human. If the child grows up and mates with a human, they could make an embryo with both a human X chromosome and a human Y chromosome! A humanoid and a human can't have XY children, but they can have XY grandchildren.
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Simple - the aliens' bodies see Y chromosomes in sperm as unwanted intruders, so the immune system kills off all of the Y-chromosome-carrying sperm before fertilization can happen. The sperm with X chromosomes wouldn't be attacked, because the aliens have X chromosomes and thus those sperm aren't seem as hostile.
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Easy enough.
Make the aliens cousins to humans. More closely related than we are to the great apes but more distantly related than any 2 normal humans.
Have the aliens carry a mutation on their X chromosome which causes complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. Lets call their version the "Ẍ chromosome"
Any ẌX or ẌY individual will develop as female.
Hand wave that in their own population they have a different version of the Y chromosome (lets call it the Ч chromosome) with mutations that create alternate versions of testosterone and other androgens which still work in their own population.
Result: Any human mating with one of these aliens will have only phenotypically female children.
Alien mother, human father:
ẌX: phenotypically female, viable but may have trouble with the next generation.
ẌY: phenotypically female but infertile.
Human mother, alien father :
XẌ:phenotypically female, viable but may have trouble with the next generation.
XЧ: probably non viable but if not then still probably phenotypically female but infertile.
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Many of the Answers are pre-supposing the mammalian mechanism in which sex is determined genetically and the genes are controlled by a "Y" chromosome.
That is not a universal thing. One of the lifeforms I cohabitate with does not exhibit sexual dimorphism, but I had a blood test done to determine his (as it turns out) sex at an early age. The test showed the *absence* of the female-specific W chromosome ([males are ZZ, females ZW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system)).
Many animals [don't](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system#Non-genetic_sex-determination_systems) have sex determined by inheritance, but by incubation conditions (e.g. temperature).
I've seen commercials for a movie coming soon, a sequel to *Finding Nemo*. But why does the father Amphiprioninae still have a male voice? He should have become female by now, as they are [sequential hermaphrodites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphiprioninae#Reproduction).
So, you could have a large number of models to choose from for controlling the sex of the species, some of which would *easily* work as you want. If sex is determined by conditions not genes, then the mix caused by the hybrid might always be female. You don’t have to work-around the diploid inheritance of maleness as a trait, when you can simply not use that as a thing!
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An explanation (see [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/42348/21013)) could be that the humanoid species have evolved mechanisms that identify some sequences/structure as alien body.
If one of these sequence is constantly found inside the Y chromosome, the chromosome is destructed, leading to cell (embryo) apoptosis.
Similarly, in place of a sequence/structure detection, it can be a mechanism that ckecks genetic integrity of the embryo, and the Y chromosome is detected as a mistake, leading to apoptosis.
In both of these case, human × humanoid lead to female embryo that are not touched by the protection mechanism, while male embryo meet apoptosis in the early stage of development.
These two phenomenoms are found in many documented biological cases. (marker scale is typical of immune system, and embryo genetic control is a very controlled task)
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## Rejection.
The female aliens have antibodies that react to [fragments of Y chromosome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell-free_fetal_DNA) in their blood streams, rejecting a male embyro.
This could happen very early in the gestation, and the embyro [would be absorbed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_twin) / discarded with the menstrual cycle, instead of causing a miscarriage.
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You could use the genetics of some species of rodents (voles and lemmings) as a basis to create INDIVIDUALS who can only have daughters. Then think of a reason why only those ones are visiting the humans.
The voles have gene/s on the X chromosome which basically say "don't pay any attention to those other genes which are telling you to be male."
So voles without the Don't Pay Attention (DPA) gene are XX (female) or XY (male). (Sorry I have no idea what the official name of the gene is).
Voles with the Don't Pay Attention gene (**X**) are **X**X (female) and **X**Y (female).
Those **X**Y females can only have daughters. If they supply a X to their offspring it has the DPA gene on it, so the kid is female, regardless of whether dad supplied an X or a Y. Ova carrying just a Y gene from mum are non-viable.
So if only **X**Y females, visit Earth, they'll only have daughters. This solution has the downside that there are males of this species hanging out elsewhere in the galaxy. But it has the upside that your females will have the correct, erm, anatomy to mate with Earth guys.
'Cos if they've been an all-female species since dinosaurs ruled the Earth, why would they still have the Tab A fits into Slot B anatomy? :-)
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A few options:
1. The aliens reproduce by cloning - a baby is born, identical to her mother.
The process can be triggered by a full moon, or whatever, or by sexual act with a man.
2. The alien embryo cord is attached inside the embryo, through the vagina. Male embryo won’t survive.
3. Maybe for sone reason human-alien match would always produce a [chimera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)) with female organs only.
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## Man-killing, hyperfeminizing mitochondrial DNA
The only way that a "species" like this could exist is if it was a close genetic relative to humans - the idea of aliens interbreeding with humans is scientifically unfeasible. While there are many good examples here of how a mutation could render a parent incapable of producing male offspring - generally through rejection - they fail to take into account the issue of genetic recombination. Since each newborn would only get 50% of her genes from her mother, there would only be a 25% - 50% chance of inheriting the mutant gene each generation, depending on the dominance/recessive quality of the gene.
However, if the gene was housed in the mitochondrial DNA, things would be different. Unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondria are passed directly from the mother to child. If the mitochondria produced a chemical that reacted badly with something on the Y chromosome, it could kill male children, but be passed to female offspring 100% of the time.
Since this is clearly a detrimental trait, it would have to convey some kind of reproductive benefit to the child as well in order to persist. It is possible that the "man-killing" mutation could be preceded by an earlier mitochondrial mutation that triggered "hyperfeminization", making the women more appealing to men, but rendering male children infertile. A new mutation that kills off the infertile males before they start to develop would be beneficial to this lineage, since less energy would be wasted on producing them. Since mitochondrial DNA does not recombine, any mutation a female lineage picks up is retained as long as the women in that lineage continue to reproduce.
So basically, you would have a race of human women who could only produce daughters. Given the nature of human society, it follows that there would be a social stigma attached to them, and it is also likely that they would end up forming their own fringe society as a result, although they would never be able to completely detach from non-mutant humans since they would need them to reproduce. Eventually they would come to be thought of as a different "species" even though they really aren't.
] |
[Question]
[
Ensign James wakes up on the not-enterprise. Yawns. Showers, and gets dressed ready for work. Only to discover gasp, he's out of deodorant. He walks to the matter replicator and orders a can of "not-Axe body spray". 20 seconds later, an aerosol can appears in the dispenser. And he's ready for a long hard day of reversing the polarity and scanning things with his not-tricorder.
But lets think about what's happened there, some advanced process has formed the aerosol can - nanobot swarm moving individual atoms, or an advanced 3D printer shooting raw atoms aligned precisely so they bond the right way, or some other process I can't comprehend, but whatever is going on, the atoms that become the contents must be held under pressure while the body is formed around them.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vLd4u.png)
This isn't just an issue for the matter replicator, it also would be a problem with any teleportation technology that demolecurises and remolecurises you. When "not-scotty" beams up a load of supplies they need to be make sure that the atoms are disassembled, transported, and reassembled in a batch. If not-scotty beams up a can of spray paint, it has to come all at once, otherwise high pressure paint will be sprayed all over the destination or departure point. Not to mention beaming your space-suited crew member into space and having the oxygen bottle and it's contents not re-appear in sync.
I see lots of ways this can be solved, but they all have drawbacks.
* Once the can is sealed no nanobots can get into or out of the can, so you can't print the contents last (or if you do - you lose nanobots stuck inside the can).
+ So you can't "build it all at once" by making every atom exist at once. There'd also be nanobots lost between the metal layers of the can.
* You could print a filler tool and then run the filler and then deconstruct it, but that would take extra time (and make lots of noise).
* You also wouldn't want to do a custom atom-ordering or print temporary parts if possible, as that needs to designed by someone as a special case, making the future maintenance of the item library more complex.
* If you can "Pause Time" to hold the gas somehow to stop it leaking despite the container not being finished, you'd also pause your nanobots, deadlocking the print.
* You could pressurise the entire print volume but the contents would mix, making printing a spray paint can a messy job that'd clog up the printer with paint and cover the outside of the can too.
* Printing an oxygen cylinder by forming a sealed cylinder in a high pressure oxygen rich environment would be a massive fire risk.
+ Not to mention if the printer is opened to early everyone will get burst eardrums from the pressure wave.
**How is a high tech matter printer like those seen in far future sci-fi able to create sealed pressure vessels, like simple aerosol cans?**
Inspired by a conversation in the comments of [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/201504/78800)
[Answer]
Replicator: It's a two-step process, of course!
First the container is made, then the pressurized contents are beamed in.
It's right there on page 17b of the replicator manual!
Transporter: The transporter uses its pattern buffer and force-field enhancers to effectively immobilize the transported object in time.
This is why transporters are:
* SO much bigger (they have their own room!),
* SO much more power-hungry (how often are transporters down due to engine power problems?)
* and SO much more prone to interference. (ever seen a replicator fail due to solar storm? The transporters do that all the time)
Proof of this time suspension can be found in the Documentary Mission Narrative "Relics" which can be found in the [Next Generation archive, index 6.4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation))
P.S.
This is also why it is possible to transport a *living* being, but not replicate one.
[Answer]
**Cold**
Cooling matter can help a great deal. It can both shrink the matter as well as make it change to a more solid state. This isn't a blanket rule, but most often applicable.
Cool the deodorant so it'll fit in the can and then build the can around it. Preferably at a time the deodorant is solid. When the deodorant is heated up again it'll start pressuring the container.
How to cool it? Experiments with lasers showed that you can hold atoms in place, cooling them down effectively. The nanobots or whatever creates it just places it at the right vibration frequency for the right temperature.
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It's intrinsic in the remolecularization process: when you are reassembling the can you will still need some sort of force to hold the intermediate product in place while it is finished.
If a force can keep the can walls in place until the can is closed and sealed and/or they are strong enough to self sustain, a similar force can hold a pressurized gas in place until the very same can is closed and sealed.
The force can be exerted by a field of sort or by aptly fired laser beams keeping the individual atoms in place.
[Answer]
The question appears to suffer from **future technopomorphism**. That is, it sees future technology as a morph of current technology.
There is absolutely no reason why future 'pressurized' spray cans have to look or work like our current spray cans. For instance, the pressurized cans today are constructed completely unpressurized, the sane way every other can is made. The contents are added, just like the contents of any other can. Only then is the can pressurized in post-filling post-manufacturing by injecting a high pressure propellant through the top opening, where a valve is placed. That is, it is not the contents themselves that are pressurized, it is the propellant that is pressurized after-the-fact.
There is no reason that pressurized vessels in the future will be neither constructed nor pressurized in the same way. The cans, and the process, might look very different.
For instance, the container might be a 'bladder' that is constructed in normal pressure, filled with gas contents at a normal pressure, then shrunk down to a small volume, like a collapsing balloon. This bladder would be made of very high tensile material, and extremely elastic. It might be, for instance, highly elastic heat shrink tubing, or perhaps light-shrink or IR-shrink or EM shrink tubing. Once the bladder is shrunk down to the right ratio, the gas inside would become pressurized. The bladder itself becomes the container, in the case of oxygen or other gases. Alternatively, a container made of another substance could be formed around this bladder, and then the bladder either left in place or dissolved using nanobots. Getting the nanobots out is not a technical challenge, even today. Take the human eye, for example. The interior is under [intraocular pressure](https://www.aao.org/eye-health/anatomy/eye-pressure), yet somehow the body manages to get nutrients in and waste out.
>
> In a healthy eye, a small amount of new aqueous humor is always
> entering the eye while an equal amount drains out. Most of the aqueous
> humor flows out of the eye through the drainage angle, in front of the
> iris. This equal flow maintains a stable pressure.
>
>
>
For pressurized 'spray cans' that expel a product, a container filled with the desired product could then be built around the bladder, and finally the bladder dissolved. The contents would then be pressurized. Alternately, the bladder could be attached to a vessel containing the desired product at normal pressure, and the contents expelled under a [venturi effect process](https://sciencestruck.com/explanation-applications-of-venturi-effect).
Alternately, and far more likely, **the product would be made in a conventional fashion, at normal pressure**, just like any other product. Once formed, it would then be made ready. The ensign would withdraw the non-pressurized product from the replicator, and then attach it to a high pressure line, through the valve system, and **pressurize it in a final external post-production process**, the same way spray cans are produced conventionally today. There is no requirement to assume that any pressurized product is originally replicated, shipped, or stored in its pressurized form. The container, and product, could be transported/replicated unpressurized, without the necessity for manufacturing it while it was pressurized.
But, really, **pressurized cans on a space ship**?
The entire premise, of course, begs the question be asked **'Would they even allow pressurized cans on a space ship?'** The danger of depressurization of the ship itself would seem to make any pre-pressurized can into a potential bomb. These cans would have to be designed to withstand the pressure difference between zero and the contents, not atmospheric pressure and the contents. Would pre-pressurized cans even be allowed?
Methinks they would be restricted to atomized pump-action sprayers. Either that, or units would have to be pressurized only just before use, not stored under pressure. That is, the product would be manufactured, or replicated, unpressurized, and some form of pump device would be used to pressurize the contents 'just in time', before use.
**TL:DR**
There is absolutely no necessity for any product to be 'replicated' or 'transported' under pressure, making the question moot. It would be pressurized post-production, in a separate process from manufacture.
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**Force fields (or matter) hold everything in place**
Let's extend the 3D printing analogy. Why assume the "head" is a thin piece of filament?
Instead, imagine it adapts to the shape of whatever it is printing. So, halfway through the process, your pressurized aerosols are kept in place safely inside:
1. The bottom of the can,
2. The walls of the can, and
3. A "lid" made of dense, not-yet-organized matter.
Here is a diagram. If we saw something like this in our lifetime, I'd imagine the mass of nanobots would instead look like a very-large 3D printing head and filament.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KY7wC.png)
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The pressurised can isn't created by a process which takes time to complete, and it isn't partially-made part-way through such a process because there is no "part-way through". One instant it's not there, and the next instant it is.
It works by a variation of quantum teleportation, which transmits the whole quantum state of a system instantaneously by entangling the raw materials with a reference copy of the object. (See [How to teleport Schrödinger's Cat?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k) by minutephysics on YouTube.) It turns out the [no-cloning theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem) has a loophole to allow duplication of a quantum state if the original state exists in subspace or a parallel universe or wherever; the exact details are understood by only a few highly specialised physicists, none of whom happen to be aboard the not-Enterprise for exposition purposes.
If your lay-people do need some level of understanding of how this works, then I think it's because subspace obeys different laws of physics, where quantum states form a ring of characteristic 2 (i.e. 1 + 1 = 0) which means A2 + B2 = (A + B)2 because the cross-terms cancel out (see another [minutephysics YouTube link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owPC60Ue0BE&t=346s)).
[Answer]
**Nanobotlock**
The can is made, but a hole is left, which is blocked by nanobots. Now the rest of the bots will start passing the gas through the wall of nanobits, which will act as a semi-permeable membrane. The gas can thus be pressurised. When there's enough gas the blocking bots will receive the last material to finish the can. This way they can remove themselves as they are always working from the outside, while still finishing the can.
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This is not conceptually hard.
**All the atoms are placed in exactly the same place they were in the original.**
In other words, the can has exactly the same metallic structure, The contents has exactly the same number of molecules, of exactly the same substances, as the original, in exactly he same positions.
Once that is true, the can has the same properties as the original, including the amount and pressure of the contents.
It doesn't matter if the atoms are placed there instantaneously, or placed over time and held in their positions by some kind of force field, as long as they are in the correct positions at the end of the process.
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I think several of the ideas already posted here are somewhat plausible, but all seem to overlook the extensively documented fact that replicators and transporters are **matter-energy conversion** devices. The particles being synthesized are *not* rearranged from existing matter. Instead, pure energy is focused into such an intense concentration that it becomes the bound state which we perceive as particles of matter. The construction is not limited by physical, mechanical access, as the particles are placed according to where the energy is projected.
The exact location is likely controlled by intersecting energy beams from the top and bottom of the replicator or transporter, both of which do appear to have highly energetic components above and below the object being manipulated. The intensity of the beams would be calibrated such that where they intersect, the energy density is pushed beyond some critical threshold to form into particles. Just as one example, you could materialize the can first, and then the contents inside of it. However I'm also a fan of the already-mentioned concept of stabilizing this process with force fields/stasis fields, which means you wouldn't even necessarily have to materialize the container first. Additionally, if you could modulate the geometry of adequately large energy fields precisely enough, you wouldn't have to construct the object one particle at a time. By intersecting precisely-shaped fields instead of beams, you could form many particles throughout a volume simultaneously in a deliberate arrangement.
Beyond the fiction, current theories of quantum chromodynamics actually support some of this. It is hypothesized that if we were able to exert enough force to separate two quarks within a hadron, the concentration of energy would be sufficient to materialize additional quarks. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_confinement> for details. While I'm not necessarily asserting that color confinement is the precise phenomenon occurring in replicators, transporters or holodecks, it does at least demonstrate the concept and plausibility of concentrated energy creating matter at a chosen point. Yes, quantum theory does circumvent the classical law of conservation of mass. So does special relativity, but that doesn't stop atomic bombs from working. As a point of curiosity, you can calculate the minimum energy necessary to materialize an object: according to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence>, 1 kilogram is approximately 90 petajoules, or 25 terawatt-hours. At those energy levels, exerting enough force to keep the contents of a spray can pressurized isn't exactly at the top of your list of worries.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert, and am not responsible for inaccuracies or misuses of this information, including but not limited to those resulting in the destruction of your ship, crew, empire, spacetime, or raktajino.
[Answer]
It is not nanobots or a 3D printer doing one layer at a time as you know it. Fields (of a type unknown to us currently) are used to deposit energy in specific points in space. The field has the precise parameters needed to optimize the probability that the atoms/molecules that coalesce from the energy are the ones desired with the thermal and kinetic properties desired. All this happens in a stasis field to prevent the particles from escaping whilst the object is being formed over the course of a few seconds. once all the energy is in the right place, the molecules coalesce, the structure is complete and the pressurized gas is trapped.
Replicator tech/transporter tech is very susceptible to going wrong, if any of the fields are no perfectly aligned then weak spots in a container's structure or potentially toxic chemicals forming can cause quite large problems. This kind of tech would have error checking done before the release of the stasis field, failing these checks would result in instant dematerialization and a blue error screen. Not La Forge would be forced to spend most of his time fixing things!
[Answer]
It seems clear that transporters or replicators can not be step-by-step processes performed by nanites or some scanner/printer pair; that would take much too long at the needed resolution which is sub-atomic.
Instead, the process is akin to photographic exposure: The object is space-time "projected" and "imprinted" on the entire volume of the target space at once. In order to perform the imprinting that volume of space must be made receptive for the manipulation, much like photographic paper. In this delicate state it must be isolated from the normal interaction with its environs, including the flow of time, energy and matter. In particular, time does not flow in the usual fashion. When the imprinting is complete the isolation is lifted and normal physics are "switched back on". The effect is visible even to a layman's eye when travelers seem frozen during the imprinting when they emerge in the transporter room. A spray can in the replicator is "frozen" in the same way while it is being imprinted on the space inside the machine, until the process is complete.
If you think that's amazing you are right: It was one of the major technological breakthroughs, together with the warp drive, that enabled our world today to be the way we know it. ;-)
[Answer]
### Teleport the deodorant directly into your armpits
Clearly if you can place atoms anywhere at will, placing them over your armpit area in an even coating is equally valid. Maybe some people might like roleplaying this, but sensible people keep it to the holodeck. You might as well suggest not using the three seashells!
Let's be honest, why would you use such an inferior solution? Even if the pressurised gas is only air, you still need a solvent carrier which has to evaporate away and contaminate the air scrubbers, along with remnants of whatever stuff you sprayed. You've got a risk of freezing effects on the skin of crewmembers from aquatic worlds, and the dangers for crewmembers with multiple eyes in other areas of their bodies. Plus the risk of explosion if the vessel suffers decompression, or in case of fire, which is why Starfleet directive 95273.23433 bans taking pressure vessels outside the engineering and science sections.
And even if you really did want to do some historical roleplaying, even back in the 21st century, people knew that roll-on deodorants were more effective.
[Answer]
## How molecular assembly works...
* The first thing to understand is that the ship has atomic-scale computing. Multiple bits and indeed qubits are stored in single atoms and processing occurs at that scale. Some of this processing involves excited states at rather high energy levels, as becomes apparent every time the ship takes a phaser blast and sparks and flame fly out of the consoles.
* Microscopic cylinders of atomic-level computing elements can be arranged with clear lanes between, a single molecule wide. Other lanes contain feedstocks, the chemical elements for assembly; also fuel. The logic elements *have* the energy to gate those through and assemble molecules atom by atom as they whiz down those channels. So you can assemble any molecule you want, within reason...
* While there are size limits on the molecules you can make, the energy considerations of the system mean that you can create incomplete, charged molecules (even carbocations and carbanions, for example). When molecules with filled and empty orbitals are placed precisely adjacent to one another where you want them, they will link, which means you can make large proteins in pieces and assemble them on site.
* When molecules are finished, they come out in a vast array of parallel streams that angle ever so slightly toward one another so that they land adjacent at the construction plane. So it is like 3-D printing one entire layer of atoms at a time.
* Each molecule is assembled according to a program running in parallel on the computing architecture, so the computer *knows* its absorption and emission frequencies. That means that there is very little trouble to use a perfect lens to focus light of a frequency a little below what the molecule will emit; in other words, to do laser cooling. The light signal is emitted from atomic-scale computing elements all around the object to be replicated in such a way that it focuses down to the right frequencies in the right places (a [computer generated hologram](https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-doodles-real-holograms-home.html) you might say)
* Every molecule is initially cooled to whatever temperature it needs to be at so that its *pressure* is appropriate and it is anchored to its neighbors i.e. not a gas. So some molecules are assembled at room temperature and some are assembled near absolute zero.
* Naturally the molecules would exchange heat, but you're not going to wait - the computer generated hologram includes infrared that penetrates and warms the regions deposited cold. Naturally these *would* expand, but the next layer of material will strike with some force, which can be precisely controlled, and so it is now under pressure. So the "lid" holding in this batch of low-grade bear spray is a constant stream of impacting particles of cold solid low-grade bear spray.
* When the item is complete, the pressurized contents are surrounded by metal fragments created with positive and negative charges at corresponding edges so that they immediately fuse together into a covalent structure. Once that is formed, there is no distinction from a traditionally made bottle.
[Answer]
Same way we would make it today? The machinery creates chemicals that when mixed will form a gas and pressurize the container. Separated by a thin foil, which is destructed (punctured) in a chain reaction upon completeness of construction.
Not very futuristic, but actually easy.
[Answer]
## With a wave of the authors hand.
Any given transport has a maximum density of material it can create. In sci-fi reality, the density of the container is far higher than the density of the gas inside. So the issue isn't density, the issue is gases tendency to expand to fill the enclosing volume.
All gases have an expansion rate, and all transports have a rate they can build the transported item. Let's call that the build rate. So now the problem is, can you build a container faster than the gas can expand.
Lets transport a metal sphere 1 meter in radius containing a gas.
Let's say the gas expands in the shape of a sphere, and the radius of the sphere increases at constant rate of 1 meter per second. Lets say our transporter can build the container in 2 seconds. The transporter will not be able to contain the gas. Unless... the transporter creates a sphere with a 2 meter radius to contain the expanded gas.
Then teleport the atoms that do not belong inside the sphere somewhere else and route the remaining sphere atoms through the shrinker to reduce everything to the correct size.
[Answer]
U heavily underestimate what nanomachines can do, some practical version of them, so as of how it can work.
The topic of how it can work is huge and not necessarily objective or easy to understand, won't dive into it. But here is an addendum to your bullet list and a plot twist - nanomachines are the container.
Containers and packages clearly have to be recycled, on a spaceship, station, in space in general, and everywhere honestly. So touching on one of the points you trap not some portion of nanomachines in your containers, but all of them make the container. And when the container is discharged, forgotten in someplace -it creeps back to the system.
Recognizing dangers of gray goo(not possible, overestimated) we would like the product to be nanobot-free - okay, have that covered.
Pressurized vessels have a hole for the content to escape, it is the purpose in life for the hole. Surprisingly it can be used to fill/refill the container as well, so as it made for nanobots to escape.
There are items like not hamburger in a vacuum pack, so there is a class of useful sealed containers, including vacuum bombs containing many many vacuum or high-pressure cases like fusion bombs containing many many high pressure - class of item which releases its content after rupture. True.
Not diving deep into the topic as it is dangerously close to how things may actually work, a micron or a half of a micron gap/slit/hole creates quite a seal due to the viscosity of content, look for all sorts of hydro- and aero- dynamic and static bearings and alike. Nanobots escaping it, they are nano after all(not how it works), plugging it while escape and then the last ones create permanent plug after(or carry it and plug). -plug can be big, not necessarily micron sizes, look at gauge blocks sticking, and matching glass plugs used in chem labs and alike
Nanomachines are not 3d printer as it is known to us now, it is a tool, universal assembly tool. It can do everything we can do now, but we do not need different tools for all the processes, but just one. Which does things not by magic but because it is capable to reconfigure itself to be the exact tool needed at the place and time in the process. Metal bender - done, gasket spewing jig - done, etc. So it can replicate all the processes used to make a product, but in a confined space, much closer to the product volume, not needing the factory floors/volumes.
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In many Si Fi scenes, the replicated object is shown fading into existence. Occasionally these show animate objects fading into existence before beginning to move. This implies that inside the replicator time is frozen. If time is frozen, there is no opportunity for the pressurized contents to do anything as the can appears at the same time as the contents before time is unfrozen.
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You really don't want anyone putting their hand in the replicator until replication is complete. That's why the replicator has a door (like a modern microwave, for most personal replicators, or like a walk in freezer for larger replicators). The door seals while replication is in progress and unseals when replication is complete. There is even a satisfying Ding sound when replication is complete.
Okay, now that we have a sealed replication chamber, all you need to do is pressurize the chamber with an inert gas such as argon whenever you replicate any pressurized canisters or similar objects.
Seal the chamber. Pressurize the chamber. Perform replication. Evacuate the chamber. Unseal the chamber. Ding!
Smaller, less expensive replicators can be used to make simple pressurized personal items like carbonated beverages, whipped cream, spray paint, and deodorants.
Larger more specialized replicators with a stronger seal are needed for higher pressure replication such as oxygen tanks, liquid nitrogen tanks, and rocket fuel tanks.
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Basically, they found a way for **quantum locking** to occur on non-superconducting materials, locking the atoms in place until the field is removed. That way the contents stay inside and your blood stays in your veins and doesn't shoot out mid-transfer.
That is why it also stops the momentum of falling objects and why you need manual targeting for people in free fall (I can't remember which planet the non-Romulans imploded)
**EDIT**: meant to say quantum locking instead of quantum entanglement
[Answer]
Replicator technology appears to be an offshoot of transporter tech. In each case there is a problem to hold the individual atoms still while the the whole entity is create.
Consider: A small enzyme may have a few hundred amino acids. Each which has a bunch to a handfull of atoms.
Those atoms have to be held EXACTLY in place while all the atoms around them are placed.
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[Question]
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Aliens that are weaklings and have no physical weapons as we know them, want to conquer Earth because their home planet is dying. They sow an *everybody-hates-everybody* virus throughout Earth's atmosphere. They have enough food supplies to last them for two months and then they must land and take over and their spacecraft will be useless.
On contracting the virus, a human being loses all fear and has nothing but complete hatred for any other human they see. It affects absolutely everyone. They all are in a permanent state of road rage with no fear of the consequences.
The virus lasts for approximately two weeks before these effects wear off but leaves the sufferer weak and hardly able to function for the next two weeks.
**Question**
Is there a way the aliens can be thwarted and humanity survive everyone trying to kill each other?
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In response to a comment by @Otkin.
Answers have already come in that prevent me from adding much extra background information. I'll give my ideas in the following concealed text for those who wish to know but I won't enforce them.
>
> The virus is distributed through the atmosphere. The aliens put all their resources into making this single one-shot weapon. You can assume that it infects absolutely everybody who breathes ordinary air. The incubation period is about two weeks and, for the purposes of this question, please assume that everyone starts showing symptoms within a day of one-another. The world does not have time to even think about finding a vaccine. Scientists in a lab will be too busy trying to kill each other to spend any time sequencing DNA.
>
>
>
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***Note**
I have been asked to justify the "no physical weapons as we know them" clause. The reason isn't essential to answering the question but I am happy to provide it. The aliens have never been aggressive and always lived peacefully on their home planet. Because they don't compete, they are puny and they have never needed to develop weapons. They have long been monitoring Earth broadcasts and they are appalled by its violence. They see it as a world of devils. Even when their planet is dying, most want nothing to do with invading another planet. Only a few hundred are foolhardy enough to try it. They know nothing of war, weapons, tactics, etc. They are completely naive about how to do it. They know human DNA from broadcasts etc. and they know that viruses can be devastating to Earth devils. They decide that this is the only way to remove the devils from the world they want to live on. We ... sorry ... They wish to find out how to kill the devils before landing.*
[Answer]
### The virus is a strategic mistake
The virus was released into the atmosphere, so unevenly and dependent on winds, the carnage will spread, quickly, but some survivalists, politicians, military, etc with bunkers with air filtration will get into their bunkers and wait it out. Not many, but there will be a few uninfected ready to come out 2 weeks later at full strength.
But let's look at the 7 billion unlucky ones. If you put the entire planet in an elimination match, 33 rounds later you've got a single winner. Some crazy angry guy can kill 33 people in 2 weeks easily, so we're down to one person left, right? No.
Not everyone will kill, hate need not inspire murder. Some will abduct and torture. Some will rape. Some will destroy property. Some will take a poo in your letterbox. But if you've got someone who deals with hate with murder, you're going to end up with lots of death around you.
Once I get the virus. I lose all fear and start attacking everyone I see. So I'll leave my home, kill my neighbours, and then.... there'll be no one left to kill. I'm not seeking trouble out beyond line of sight.
Each suburb / small town will have at least 1 person left standing. That person may not be the strongest, it will probably be either the person who was last infected (indoors, underground, scuba diving, etc) and so stayed clear of the gas, or the most isolated (out hiking, farmer out in the fields, etc) and stayed away from the melee for as long as possible.
The murder-fest is so sudden that your "post-apocalyptic" world is extremely well stocked compared to typical fiction. Every kitchen cupboard has food in it. Every pharmacy still has painkillers and bandages. When the drop hits 2 weeks in, the survivors don't have to move far to sustain themselves.
They'll be really angry at each other for 2 weeks. Really tired for 2 weeks. And then they'll get real angry at those who released the virus.
Looking over a map of Australia and assuming 1 survivor from every small town, 1 survivor from each remote station, one survivor from each populated island, and one survivor from each suburb, the aliens will be fighting 15,000 pissed off people just on that continent.
Scaling that up to the entire planet I'd expect ~100,000 - 1,000,000 survivors. Each separated and unorganized, but reasonably well distributed around good landing sites, armed, accustomed to killing, and ready to pitchfork those weak aliens.
### So what should they have done?
Use their knowledge to ***cure*** an existing illness on earth. Covid-19 would seem to be a good choice, but cancer or heart disease are even better. The aliens are welcomed as heroes.
Include in the cure something really subtle. Say, reducing female libido around ovulation, or giving birth gives someone an eternal repulsion to sex (thus limiting families at a single child), or something else to reduce the human birth rate to less than 2 children per woman.
Eventually they get the planet, and we celebrate them as heroes the whole time they're slaughtering us.
[Answer]
**Yes**
A nuclear sub can spend six months underwater and have 135 crew. There is about 150 around the world.
You then have the virologists and other scientists working sterile labs would work out what the issue was really fast and protect themselves
You have the military personnel working in bunkers with filtration designed to resist biological attacks.
You have survivors because not everyone is going to be affected the same. Perhaps sociopaths being cut off from their emotions are immune and avoid people? Perhaps some people are naturally immune.
You then have the preppers who lock themselves away at the first sign of the disease.
You have the prisoners locked in cells that can't get to anyone. Two weeks without food is survivable. Sharing a cell they could eat the one that dies.
A lot more people would survive than you might suspect. A lot of people would head to bunkers at the first sign of the disease.
A dangerous disease like this is less dangerous than you think because it will be noticed. Something benign and hidden is far worse like a disease that spreads via touch and leaves people sterile. By the time you know it exists, it's too late.
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***28 Days Later:***
This virus has a distinctly familiar sound to it. Like that virus, there are several exceptions that need to be looked at. First, your virus is extremely lethal. That means it will have a hard time spreading. A sick person on a plane will start attacking people immediately, and the plane would be quarantined (if it even made it to the airport). Initial penetration of the virus would need to be virtually 100%. A small number of people are likely to be completely immune (maybe all schizophrenics have brains immune to the effect, for example).
Not every person will be violent, even if they don't care about the consequences. Some will self-isolate to get away from the a\*\*holes, but that still leaves a lot of violence. Once a significant percent of the population is dead or injured, even violent angry people may not have a reason to go out anymore unless the virus actually compels people to seek out new victims. Additionally, hate has many forms, and for a lot of people anger is about cruelty and suffering. Homicide may not be the only result, so a large number of people may be injured but not dead. I've seen evil mice that tortured other mice, but didn't kill them, and humans are much more emotionally "creative" than mice.
Still, cities will be a total mess, although infrastructure will be at least partly intact for survivors afterwards. In rural areas, there are lots of remote farmhouses, and once people have killed or crippled their immediate family, they will be left alone for the illness to burn itself out. These people are typically well-armed (all my relatives on farms are) with independent supplies of everything they need plus the means to produce more food. Guns also mean women and children have reasonably good chances of surviving as well. Not to mention a lot of country folks have military experience and a lot of military bases are located in rural areas. Humanity won't go extinct. You will have a lot of VERY angry humans, and people are more capable of violence once the initial social limits have been stripped off. The rural survivors will be gunning for your weak aliens looking for justification and atonement. If those aliens are really as helpless as you suggest once they land, they will be systematically slaughtered.
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Everyone will be dead, and hate will have nothing to do with it.
I'm assuming the weapon isnt deployed over one country, but is sprayed across half the equator, targeting much of the northern hemisphere with just a few people everywhere getting sick but causing it to spread from there.
Looking at our current pandemic, most nations and countries did not react fast when the pandemic started. You have to gather intel on the virus and what it does, where it is and where it's spread to contain it, which will be hard with the 2 weeks before symptoms start rule as the virus will have spread far and wide and is hard to track with most victims being dead or killing the questionairs. Not only that the rulers of each country have to weigh off the risks of disease against the economic and social impact their acts will have, not to mention the impact on their carreer... Its likely that virtually no country has the reaction speed or capability to properly prepare for this.
The biggest danger is in removing fear. Fear is probably the most important factor in keeping anything living alive, including apex predators. This despite most of our media being dominated by the virtue of being fearless.
Take a candle and light it. You arent terrified of it, but you do fear it. For example try and grab someone's hand and force it into the flame, or try and hold your own hand into the flame for 10 seconds. Humans wisely are programmed to avoid hurting themselves, although there's many video's out there about people not knowing the danger they put themselves in. Without fear, people will not fear stepping into traffic, drinking gasoline when they are thirsty, jump out of a 5th story window because the elevator is so slow, set fire to everything and then walk through it etc.
Even without the hate, after two weeks food, medicine and water will be burned, wasted, polluted and destroyed as no one fears the consequences and society has already broken down. Insects will feast on bodies out on the street and spread both the alien disease and many other dangerous strains across the country making containment even harder as a single mosquito can start new ground zero's.
In two months any survivors are likely starving, diseased and unable to mount any solid resistance. Even any doomsday preppers will take years before they have enough transportation and information to find and kill the aliens, giving the aliens plenty of time to build their own society and prepare a second viral bomb to deal with any stragglers.
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# YES
These aliens, having spent the uttermost last of their resources on this one space ship and this one wonderweapon, shall momentarily find themselves and their [evil plan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zrMykBnidM) totally thwarted for one very simple reason: [BAD TIMING](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LukyMYp2noo)!
An everybody-hates-everybody virus is all well and good, and even if the aliens had timed their plan perfectly, there's no guarantee that it would work. One thing the aliens didn't plan on was that the present cultural milieu of the humans is one of unabashed lust, making the trippy hippy sixties seem quite family friendly! While the virus causes all humans to lose their fear of repercussions -- in other words, their inhibitions are completely removed -- the hatred aspect of the virus will now have to war with the untamed libido and every other lust broken humanity has failed to address.
The aliens will be pleased to note many fights, robberies, murders, and general mayhem breaking out everywhere. They will surely be displeased, however, that no general state of war breaks out: the humans will be too busy hitting each other with sticks and throwing rocks at each other in their unnatural rage.
One thing they won't have counted on is the large number of rapes that occur. The act itself will leave the enraged, powerhungry male vulnerable. If the rapist isn't killed by some random passerby, once sated and snoozing, his victim will simply turn on him and snuff him while he sleeps. With a rape related pregnancy rate of about 5% and 2 billion raging females of child bearing age the result will be quite a few pregnancies that none of them are even going to register, because everyone's in an all out rage. They'd likely end up replacing nearly everyone that got killed in the infection zone.
Another key failure of their planning is the age vs ability distribution. Two billion raging females and 2 billion raging males may well decimate one another. However, the aliens have not considered the more than 2 billion children and nearly one billion elderly plus miscellaneous disabled folks who, while definitely Not Amused by the virus, won't be able to do much about it anyway. They have also failed to take into account the wide variety of human reactions. Not everyone is going to go out and seek violence. Most will probably hunker down, wondering why they feel so strange and out of sorts. That's a lot of people not even taking part.
But the main kicker is the aliens' BAD TIMING: quite simply, they launched their last ditch effort to conquer Earth right in the middle of **PANDEMIC CORONAVIRUS 2020!!** What with travel restrictions and work restrictions and many areas still pretty effectively shut down, most humans are unlikely to be infected at all! Weather patterns will determine where the limited supply of virus ends up: it could mostly end up in the Arctic or along the equator. If they dump it in the southern hemisphere, it's unlikely to make much penetration in the more populous north. And with everyone staying in their air conditioned homes, there's a good chance only a very small number of people will even be infected.
And once they land their ship, peckish, and looking forward to a vacated planet, what they're going to find is that they will literally be landing in a hornet's nest of angry natives! That first meeting with the humans is not going to go well!
End result: humanity survives relatively intact, and even if outbreaks occur later, the only aliens left will be the stuffed ones in the natural history museum, the rest having been destroyed.
[Answer]
**Humanity will most likely go extinct, but not in the first 2 weeks.**
First of all, everybody affected by the virus is going to die. Exceptions are very unlikely. The OP describes the effects of the virus as 'a permanent state of road rage with no fear of the consequences', which is consistent with high [adrenaline](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Adrenaline) levels. Those who avoid the slaughter will die of [side-effects](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Epinephrine_(medication)#/Adverse_effects) of adrenaline rush. Heart failure would be one of the most common reasons for death. Human bodies are not capable of withstanding high adrenaline levels for long.
If some people miraculously survive 2 weeks of the adrenaline rush they will be too exhausted to take care of themselves. Many of them will die of exposure, injuries, thirst, and hunger. It is very likely that they will not eat and drink properly during the first 2 weeks and will be already in a weakened state. Even simple cases will have a lot of complications.
Depending on the virus, bunker air filtration systems may be ineffective. But for the purposes of this exercise, we will assume that some people managed to survive. They might have enough food to last them for months. They might even know how to grow food. The problem is that there is simply not enough of them.
Most of the technology will be lost within the first 10 years. With most of humanity dead, supplies and infrastructure destroyed, the survivors will have no way to maintain their mechanisms. Even if they have a stockpile of parts, eventually, they will run out of them. If we are dealing with a 'cosy catastrophe' scenario, the supplies will last longer and the survivors will be able to scavenge for parts. However, there are not enough of them to restart production chains and they will still run out of things to scavenge. And they will not have enough time and children to pass their knowledge onto the next generation.
Most importantly, there may be not enough survivors in close proximity to each other to preserve the human species. [Minimal viable population](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Minimum_viable_population) for humans is estimated to be [around 5 000](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329012008_Minimum_Viable_Human_Population_with_Intelligent_Interventions) if no breeding programmes and genetic screening are available. Some estimates go even [higher](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-many-humans-would-it-take-keep-our-species-alive-ncna900151). So, while some small groups of humans can manage to survive for a century or two, the population rebound is unlikely, especially, if aliens make sure that the conditions for humans are not favourable.
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MMA fighters and men will die on average faster than women. Men have lower fat deposits and are more susceptible to heart problems, their bodies also have higher metabolism rates, and men are more prone to risky behaviours.
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I am not sure that humanity can stop the aliens after the virus has been distributed. If humanity has time to prepare, then, they might find a way to persuade aliens not to kill humans.
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If you want humans to survive and fight back you need to change your virus and its distribution. For example, if the virus spreads slower and somehow humans figured out how contamination happens, they have a chance to protect some of the population.
Natural immunity will only work if a sizeable part of the population has it. Or you can have some of your military men be immune because they were subject to some unethical experiments.
You will still run into problems associated with minimal viable population. But at least, your humans can go with a real bang.
[Answer]
# A lot of people survive… how many aliens are there?
*Far too many answers were provided before Chasly had a chance to define the disease. Personally, I'm not a fan of the "I can't change the question, it will invalidate answers!" culture. People who jump in to answer quickly before getting all the facts deserve to have their answers invalidated. But that's just me.*
**Assumption:** The disease literally only causes (a) perfect hatred and (b) the elimination of *fear of consequence.* This means:
* Intellect is still in play.
* The Fight-vs-Flight response is still in play.
* The sense of "I have something to lose" is still in play.
* Basic ethics and morality are still in play. This one's important. This disease may cause me to completely hate my wife and children (to a degree, see below), but will I kill people I remember to have once loved? Will I rob a sporting goods store to acquire a gun to kill them? If I hate the idea of killing, will the perfect hatred caused by the disease cause me to kill? This one's really messy. But unless Chasly's willing to define the disease better….
**Assumption:** Our sense of personal survival has not changed.
* I need food to eat, a place to live, and a sense of safety.
* My work (employment, vocation, career) is still important, kinda, since for many of us the reason for being employed probably just changed dramatically. But the fun part is that my utter hatred for all other humans and lack of fear for the consequences means I'm willing to raise my prices, provide substandard products, and really "stick it to the Man." All of which is important because, at least initially, what the individual perceives as the basis for personal survival (money) has not changed. I utterly hate other people — but WalMart is a corporation, not a person.
**Assumption:** When Chasly said, "nothing but complete hatred for any other human they see," that's the rule we have to live by.
* I can talk to people on the phone, over the Internet, shortwave radio, so long as there's no visual image to work with. For most people on Earth, the first victims of this plague will be their televisions and computer monitors because the world is full of images of people. The next victims will be photos on the wall, magazines, and any other image of a person in their homes or offices. But once all that's cleared away...
**Assumption:** What I feel when I'm alone is peace, maybe even happiness. Or maybe horror and regret.
* Chasly didn't define the disease as something that drives us to insanity. In other words, there's nothing compelling me to go out and kill other humans. I just hate them when I see them and don't fear what happens next. But when I'm alone, I don't feel those things because that's not what the disease has been defined to do. Therefore, there's a lot of people who will quickly calm down. There will be a lot of proverbial weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth... but then there will be a lot of "what on earth just happened?" moments followed by "what am I going to do about this?" moments and then Steve Zuckerberg (who miraculously survived) gets the idea, "what can I do with Facebook to coordinate all the world's remaining people?"
*If you haven't figured out yet why I'm not a fan of the culture of "I can't change my question, it will invalidate answers!" let me be clear. It robs the OP of the ability to choose the best answer, which is fundamental to how Stack Exchange works. The question should be closed for missing details and, if we insist we can't invalidate answers, remain closed. Here at Worldbuilding we've forgotten that people can edit their answers, too.*
**TL;DR**
My answer: Humanity survives and the aliens, at least those on Earth, don't.
*Phase 1*
1. People who favor "flight" over "fight" are going to run for the hills unless they first succumb to co-workers and family members who favor "fight." These people will find the most secluded place they can, likely as close as they can to food/water sources.
2. There will be an initial burst of violence in people's homes as people who favor "fight" over "flight" kill family members and destroy photographs, televisions, magazines, and every other image of a human being in sight.
3. There will be a similar initial burst of violence in the workplace.
*MAYBE! Intellect, morality, and ethics are all still in play! A person who favors "fight" is just as likely, perhaps even more so, to chase people away rather than kill them. I'm about to make dire predictions for survival that might be very, very, very low.*
4. Large cities that require time to leave (or that are easily congested when a panic ensues) will suffer the worst until everyone "out in the open" (outside or in large internal gathering areas like college lecture halls and restaurants) has been cleared away (either dead or fled).
*Phase 2*
This phase is brief. It's the combination of panic, realization, and calm after the effects of the disease wear off because the individual can't see another human anymore. Weeping family members, coworkers, and community members who discover they can't be where they once were or remember what they just did. From a certain point of view, it's like last March (2020) in the U.S. on steroids — everybody believing the best solution is to lock themselves away, alone and afraid, until the theoretical cloud passes.
**Solution #1:** This is where one solution can occur. People, having reached a point of equilibrium, can just wait out the disease. Eventually (almost everywhere) it will rain, or snow, or some other meteorological event that casually washes away the problem. True, COVID-19 has proven that keeping people home is next to impossible — but there isn't an imperative with COVID-19 like there is for this disease. "Flight" people get driven instantly back into their hiding places. "Fight" people quickly begin to understand their limits. Oh, the fighting will continue, but not like it was before. So, wait it out and the maximum number of people are saved. At a near-meaningless guess: 50% of the human population. After all, all you have to do to avoid the problem is lock yourself in your bedroom.
Which, of course, depends on the nature of the disease, its ability to survive in separated hosts or out in the open where there are no more hosts. Chasly didn't define any of that, which is why this is one possible solution.
*Phase 3*
What's more likely to happen is that after phase 2 people, at a pretty high cost, begin to discover the limits of their new reality. Truck drivers can deliver food to grocery stores so long as they never see another living soul. The trucks are unloaded (the driver having to mask their mirrors) and no signatures are required (much like during the early COVID-19 days). Stores create gates or turnstiles that require pre-purchase or pre-authorization for purchases. It could all be done. We already have self-checkout solutions. Of course, theft will be a problem... but now we have a *particular kind of person* to deal with that, right? The kind of people who's response is nailed to "fight" and yet have a super high sense of ethics? You know, psychopathic CEOs. Yeah. Now they're theft deterrents.
But this phase is important, because it's during this phase that people figure out they can actually talk to one another. Cell phone use skyrockts. The old Usenet groups gain new interest. An entire new Stack is created for finding impersonal solutions to interpersonal problems. A revolution in remote-control technology occurs, allowing people to visit the store without having to ever leave their locked room. And in the end, we discover how to forward humanity and continue civilization *without never having to see another human being.*
And we discover one other thing: what we have is about 35 years to solve the problem. Because if we don't get to the "we need to make a few more babies" stage within that time, we have an exponentially increasing chance of winning the battle — but losing the war. Still, 35 years to develop a vaccine. I can live with that.
*Phase 4*
This is where we have re-established civilization and the Aliens now have a big problem, because we're researching again and can discover what happened and how to fix it. We've lost a lot of people, and we're discovering that celibacy, while uncomfortable, is possible. but life is happening.
**Solution #2:** But we win. Once this equilibrium is established, it no longer matters what the nature of the disease is. We've defeated it even without the vaccine. We're on a clock (gotta get to the baby-making-phase), but now it's just a matter of time. The aliens have lost. So long as there aren't innumerable hordes of aliens that overwhelm the remaining humans, we've won. My pull-it-out-of-thin-air guess as to the number of survivors? 20%-30%. Pretty much all rural (where you'll find a lot of "I like my privacy" people anyway).
*To be fair, I've glossed over a spectrum of problems. Like 14-24 year olds who loved watching* The Purge *and think they can just go out and commit crimes. Dealing with the raging ~~hordes~~ individuals takes time, but eventually they're contained. Remember, intellect is still in play.*
*While at first blush one would think that far more men than women would survive, the reality is expressed in a little ditty made famous by the movie* Quigley Down Under. *"They say God created all men, but Sam Colt made them equal." Or something like that. My point is, no matter what differentiation there is in strength, intelligence, agility... there are so many guns in the world that gender distinctions are irrelevant. Besides, it's only an issue when you see someone. Until then (and after then), intellect takes over.*
*What we would see is a lot of home gardening — but we're seeing that already as a consequence of COVID-19. A handful of people might die from starvation, but not as many as one might think.*
[Answer]
You are probably not familiar with a novel "Purple Sphere" by Kir Bulychev, the great Soviet SF-writer. That's almost exactly it. The alien villains used the technology of "absolute hate virus" to conquer different planets just like you describe it and also tried to do the same with Earth, but they failed. Humans managed to prevent the virus spreading by time travelling. You could find some interesting ideas in the novel. Unfortunately I don't know if it ever was translated into English or any other non-Slavic language.
[Answer]
**There will be too many survivors**
People will start killing, sure.
Those with access to weapons will kill more.
However, weapons of mass destructions will not usually be used: Most will be secured in ways that are designed to not work when enraged (which is intentional, nothing worse than a WMD being activated in a fit of rage).
Still, there will be survivors. A horribly low percentage (1:1000, possibly even less), but there are *so many humans*.
There will be a different survival story for each survivor. So that's a lot of potential for stories.
And now we have different kinds of survivors. The weak who were hidden (against their will while raging).
The immune. There is no virus where there's no freak immunity.
The imprisoned that were lucky to have their waiters kill each other, the last one too injured to kill the inmates. They would have be even more lucky to get released after the rage weeks, and it would likely not work in a high-tech area because without power, the cells won't unlock (except those jails that were designed to unlock on power loss, in which case you'll have rampant hand-to-hand killing).
Those who live their hate by exerting power instead of killing - rape, humiliation, pain infliction, you know the list. If the last person standing is of that type, they will have captives instead of dead corpses when they awaken. (More story potential if traumatized victims and traumatized sadist somehow have to collaborate to even survive.)
From there, it's mostly a numbers game.
If the aliens have enough manpower and technology to find the surviving humans, they will be able to kill them easily.
If they don't, humanity will lose the ability to rebuild and repair most of its technology, but it will use whatever is still functioning. Weapons in stashes that were too complicated to unlock while enraged; weapons that require cooperation (sniper rifles - you need a spotter to be effective); weapons that require planning (trap building).
Humanity will have one big problem: Loss of power and long-range communication. (Power plants tend to shut down if operating personnel is dead, or merely decimated. Some nuclear power plants will go up in flames, as will chemical plants - expect a lot of catastrophes in the scenery. These things don't affect humanity's fighting ability much.)
Humanity won't be able to fight a sustained war, but it will sting a lot.
Author's choice whether that's enough or not :-)
[Answer]
There is absolutely situations where people will survive this. I have no doubt that there there will be damage done to the world, and as the person building the world, it will be up to you to define the scope of the damage you want.
**The TL;DR**
I would expect a good number of people that live alone and have enough resources to survive for two weeks to just quarantine themselves in their domiciles and avoid dealing with anybody. They will not be particularly violent unless provoked.
Children will take a hard hit as parents will hate them and have the potential power to take that hate out on the children. Expect a generation of traumatized children depending on the actions taken by the parents.
Expect at least a few assassinations of world leaders as people no longer fear the secret service, military, or police enough to stop them from doing it. A sharp increase in suicides are also inevitable as people as the suicidal lose their fear of killing themselves.
The biggest dials of mayhem are people going on bloody rampages and world powers bombing each other in their period of irrational virus-induced hate.
Overall, the world will go on but be forever changed by the event, and then the aliens will land ... a convenient target.
**What is Hate?**
Hate, as defined in the dictionary is to ***feel intense dislike for or a strong aversion towards*** something or someone.
The important thing here is that humans are not a cookie-cutter species. We all hate in different ways, as has been stated. And just as we all hate in different ways, we will react to what we hate in different ways. It just depends on what we are hating, our options for dealing with it, the tools at our disposal, and what we are willing to do as a person.
**How Will You Hurt Me?**
However, this is a virus. It will have to be ... programmed ... for a lack of a better word, to target something concrete. It might have the overall effect of humans hating each other for a fortnight and the loss of fear, but how is that achieved?
* Does it mess with our natural pheromones so that instead of wanting to be near humans, we develop an aversion to them? Powerful, and not everybody and live with this for the two weeks.
* Does it merely amplifies what is already there so that even a little annoyance can blossom into a full-on hate? This means we will not hate people in the same ways, and as such our responses to this will be different.
The biggest question here is if the virus does anything else, either as a main effect or a side effect? Will this virus encourage us hapless humans to a particular action or remove our inhibitions towards certain less savory actions?
Something to keep note: There are people that do not fear the consequences of their actions -- they know them, acknoledge them, and choose not to do the actions that cause those consequences. Because it is not a fear, it will not be suppressed during the virus' run.
The assumption is that physical violence will be the first reaction to a person you hate -- It might be if you can't really get away from them. Lacking fear means that a person might be more willing to confront another, but nothing about the virus eliminates rational thinking entirely. Fear of getting caught and arrested is a thing that will be suppressed, but if murder and maiming isn't really in a person's line of thought, they still won't do it unless the virus prompts them to it.
But there is also character assassination as well. Those that have dirt on somebody might hate them enough to release the dirt and let other angrier people deal with the person through more physical means. The will lack the fear of the retaliation that will be brought down on them so one of the main reasons holding them back will be negated.
**You Hurt Me**
On dispersal, the virus is released throughout the planet. Assuming a 99.99% initial infection rate, the world will turn in itself within the next day or so. Note I am going to presume roughly 700,000 people unreachable for assorted reasons from isolated environments to unknown immunity.
Some people, if they hate enough will absolutely go on a rampage to deal with all these hated humans. In places with easy firearms, this can get very lethal, very fast -- we see this with mass shootings already. But it is the other effects that are going to be the most insidious on our world.
Work and productivity will practically grind to a halt for those two weeks. In places with low worker protections, people will be arbitrarily fired because they are hated and that hatred will outweigh the fact that they might be a good worker. Deliveries may not be made as shipper and consignee will not want to deal with each other, not even going into account the stress that working for a shipping company can create when employees and management tolerate and like each other (or at least understand and accept).
There are also armed groups of people in close qarters to each other -- police and military. Some of them are already willing to resort to escalation before deescalation so if the police hate each other enough, there is a possibility that those organizations implode on themselves. They may also go on a power trip amongst the civilians unafraid of reprisals from their superiors.
Consider that managers will hate their employees. Any firing of the rank and file might prompt those people to go public with a lot of dirty laundry that these organizations never wanted to see exposed. Others might use their power on the populace, forever destroying their credibility as a respectable organization.
Politicians, world leaders, and celebrities are in a particularly precarious position. Their bodygards will hate them due to the virus so there is likely no help on that front. Considering that people that hate these kinds of people now have been known to send hate speech to them over social media semi-anonymously already, how long in this fortnight before somebody decides to try to remove them physically so they don't have to look at them anymore?
The biggest worry is the world leader that can launch all the dangerous weapons, is willing to do it, and is neither afraid not caring of the retaliation.
**Once More**
Then there is the after-effects of the virus on humanity and the terrestrial world.
We already know that Covid-19 can reinfect people months later -- what happens when this virus manifests months later in random suseptable people? We will be dealing with random bouts of irrational hate and fearlessness for years to decades. Does this start to fall into a seasonal pattern like influenza and the cold, or are we going to get intermittent pandemics that cause ripples of chaos and mayhem?
Can this transmit from humans to animals? When this virus crosses the species barrier (and there is a good chance it might), is the hate still keyed to humans or will it be keyed to their own biology? Will the fear suppression work to supress animal insticts to avoid certain things? A wave of fearless geese that hate humanity is a rather terrifying thing considering many of them are urban and are already unpleasant when even mildly provoked.
Then there is the cleanup after the fatigue phase -- dirty laundry has been aired, many will be dead, and there is a month of shutdowns and neglect to clean up over. It will not be pretty, and there will be a drive to understand what happened, to blame somebody or something for the mass disruption to the world order. Humans can hold a grudge, and then the aliens arrive ...
While a four week plague, I suspect that we as a world will feel it for a lot longer than that.
[Answer]
No reason you should kill people just because you hate them and you're full of rage. Otherwise everyone would be dead already. It would certainly disrupt things though.
[Answer]
I'm afraid the Aliens don't stand a chance, really. There are several problems:
* mindless rage without the fear is **way less efective** in reducing populations than other forms of hate which allows you to use your intellect to best plan destruction of "enemy".
* eventually the population will thin out enough so people (especially in such mindless rage) will remain out of reach of one another.
* lots of introverted population will hate and rage online on forums, twitter and other social media, as they're practiced to do already (albeit in smaller amplitude of rage). It won't even occur to them that they should go out and physically hit someone in order to satisfy that rage.
* so lots of people will survive, mostly nicely distributed (as most would kill their immediate surroundings), so aliens won't have an safe place to land where there are not humans.
Even if by some chance all of the humans were eliminated, aliens are still doomed. You say there are weaklings, with no weapons, and with only 2 months of food reserves, which have its own bunch of problems:
* The proliferation of wild predators and plagues (especially in absence of humans and with a lots of dead bodies) will quickly deal with such defenseless bunch.
* they're unlikely to be able to manage to grow their food in such a short period, and it is not really likely that they'd eat same thing as we do, even if they had pretty parallel biological evolution, so they'd starve.
* even worse, if their biology is VERY similar to our own so they could eat same food, they'd be under assault of millions of plagues (which humans have build resistance to over millenia) that would threaten to wipe them out faster than they did us.
* without humans, our civilization will **crash hard**. Even with best of our attention and care, terrible poisonous leaks and nuclear accidents happen on regular basis; without any care all that technology will likely pollute most of remaining clean resources. (and with no one left to operate the cleaners/filters we need for daily survival especially in populated areas etc. that we need to survive on daily basis, it will have disastrous results)
* enraged humans without any fear in position (if enough intellect remains, which is questionable) might be launching swarms of military drones in "attack everyone" mode, starting nuclear/chemical/biological warfare etc., which will further reduce alien survival chances... even if they don't, dead man switches will activate automatically for [retaliation](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/) in event the complete lack of military operators.
* the Aliens are basically crash landing on (for them) alien planet. Even if nobody was actively against them, they'd have a heck of a time trying to survive! Just imagine **YOURSELF** being teleported to some part of **THIS** planet (which is tailored for you and you know a lots about!) which is devoid of people, in good physical condition and armed with weapons of choice. Even if you're [prepper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepper) who've been training for exactly that scenario, your prolonged survival is in no way guaranteed.
Now imagine that this world is totally alien to you, has likely different biology, you know next to nothing about it, there are alien predators, and you are low on food, have no weapons and are in physically weak shape. Good luck surviving the night, much less rebuilding the civilization.
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[Question]
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I am working on a country that has been conquered by a foreign power. However, they did not manage to conquer all settlements and fortresses. In and beyond a giant mountain range at the southern border autonomous holdouts even city-states remain that are still under native rulership. But all paths to these communities are fortified and locked down, so there is almost no movement of people between the societies. The technology is classic antiquity mixed with some late medieval inventions (e.g. a printing press analogue exists)
My question: Would it be possible for the occupying government to eradicate the knowledge of these independent communities among the conquered people within a couple of decades?
I have considered the falsifying, censoring, and purging of records and maps, but this does not cover the oral tradition and common knowledge aspect of it. I have also thought about the government just lying and claiming they conquered the remaining hold-outs, but that would only work on communities that do not have any contact with people that live close enough to the mountain range to know about the stand-off along the passes.
There are basically no restrictions on the government's methods, they can be as simple or complicated as they need to be. They have administrative and logistical capabilities that are extremely sophisticated for the setting, but they are trying to paint themselves as bringers of stability and order, so it shouldn't be to overtly tyrannical if possible.
[Answer]
**Trivialize the holdouts**
The KKK is an American terrorist organization. It used to have massive power. In the 1940s, Stetson Kennedy went undercover and started leaking the KKK's most guarded secrets in an effort to discredit the organization. Where do you think he sent these secrets for them to have the biggest effect? The military? The OSS/CIA? Although Kennedy did cooperate with law enforcement, the most powerful weapon he had was Superman. Yes, Superman. He worked with the writers of the Superman radio show to inject KKK secrets into a 16-part storyarc called "Clan of the fiery cross." The KKK's secrets were reduced to children's stories and membership plummeted.
In Kennedy's case, the truth was made to sound like fiction. The same approach could work in reverse. In your universe, the government presumably controls education. Publish children's stories about a mystical group of independent communities. Create versions for all age groups and make all of them mandatory in all schools. Include as many real details as possible. Then if someone tries to publish the truth, they'll sound like an adult who still believes in Santa. After two generations of learning that the independent communities are a children's story, who's going to listen to grandpa saying they're real?
[Answer]
No, but Yes.
But by doing nothing, not by doing something.
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> technology is classic antiquity mixed with some late medieval inventions
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> within a couple of decades?
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This is the biggest problem: two decades and a medieval society.
Almost all information is passed by word of mouth and through story and spoken (remembered) history. You cannot wipe that information from people's minds. The stories, legends, sagas, myths (even the myths have a basis) and songs and poems all contain information you want to hide.
Can you ban these things?
Sure. And you'll fail.
Every time you punish someone for doing what you don't want you create a *new* story about the place and people you want to destroy. You just ignite the flame of their memory again.
And the strange thing is that if you're seen to oppress the reality of these people, the stories that will develop from your attempts to hide them will make them sound like the good guys and you the bad.
For example, the English tried to suppress Catholicism at one time and this failed miserably and left a bitter hatred on both sides in it's wake. It's but one example from a history littered by failures to hide the truth.
That said the most effective (ever) attempt to destroy a people and wipe them from memory was (arguably) by the Romans against the Carthaginians. Rome did everything required to destroy not just the Carthaginians themselves (genocide and enslavement), but their culture - they razed Carthage to the ground and burned it and I would not be surprised if they also stomped on the bits left after that as well.
But we still remember Carthage.
And they were remembered at the time, although that didn't bother Rome as even remembering them said clearly that annoying Rome too much was a really bad idea.
If Rome could not completely wipe out Carthage from memory, you cannot, in two decades, do better.
**Best approach.**
You can make them largely forgotten or ignored.
Don't ignore them or hide the stories or whatever. Don't punish their mention. Just "no comment" them all. Do nothing. Someone paints a mural in public, just paint it back over and quietly denounce the "vandalism" that raises taxes. Someone mounts a public protest, bemoan how they disturb the peace over their obsession with something that's done and can't be undone. People like peace and quiet. Give them peace and quiet and they'll accept anything.
They won't forget. But they'll ignore the heck of whatever it was because deep down they don't really care about something that's done and dusted. They care about putting food on the table and a roof over their heads and the kids and their old age. It's medieval times so they really, really have to care about day-to-day and as long as you're not punishing them for singing some old song that mentions these otherwise forgotten people, they won't care what the words really mean.
And in two decades? Well, that's ancient history, Man. That happened when I was young and now I've my own kids and grand-kids to worry about and, well I never really missed those people you're talking about anyway. And things are hard now and we've better things to worry about in the present than the past.
So doing practically nothing, consistently, will pretty much take care of any real issue. The forgotten people will become practically a myth. And the thing about a myth is that basically no one really believes in them.
[Answer]
As mentioned in some comments and answers you don't need to invent anything, it already been done many times. If your society is low tech/literacy then all you need is to cut all contacts to communities you need to be forgotten and they will be forgotten.
If your society is more advanced and have mandatory education, then it is even easier. I hear this saying in many forms in many languages, but it boils down to "if you want to defeat an enemy - teach his children". New generation will know whatever they taught in school and what they seen on mass-media and will simply laugh at those senile old farts with their stupid "oral traditions".
Some examples from France24 and YouGov:
<https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2015/05/01/Britain-America-disagree-who-did-more-beat-nazis>
<https://www.france24.com/en/20190601-who-won-wwii-russias-role-gets-short-shrift-france>
Immediately post WW2 there was no question who did more to bring Germany down in France. ~60% for USSR and ~20% for US. Today, 70 years later, despite USSR loses approaching 30m versus just a 500k for US and US entering the battle much later, numbers among general public - i.e. not professional historians - is pretty much reversed. Even in comments here in answers you can find people doubting that Soviets had that much contribution, though they admit that could be just what they were taught.
Here are images from article linked in those pieces above that pretty much speaks for itself.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kysUD.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HNwg3.jpg)
What's even better, you get feedback loop/echo room effect and will have to spend less and less on propaganda as the time goes by. First generation children will grow up and write new schoolbooks and make new entertainment pieces with what they know so you don't need to do it yourself any more.
What was US opinion on Red Army Soldiers at time of WW2? Here's US Army pamphlet: <https://archive.org/details/PAM21-30>.
It tells us that Soviet soldier is disciplined, well-armed and equipped. There's equal opportunity: you might find out that tank commander or formation officer is a woman - something unheard in US and pamphlet says that it is "most unusual to Americans" and warns "don't be surprised". He enjoys classic literature and game of chess while off duty. They're well feed, go through regular cleaning of the clothes and try to set up steam bath whenever circumstances permit. They also appreciate troupes of entertainment when they manage to reach them from the rear.
What do we have today?
<https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/25/4553536/is-company-of-heroes-2-anti-russian>
According to games like Company of Heroes 2 it is something along lines of "unwashed mongol hordes with single rifle on dozens soldiers buried Germans under piles of corpses while Commissars cackled in the back shooting them for the lulz".
And as I mentioned above, those taught from the childhood by both books and media really, genuinely believe that they are correct. When outraged players reached Relic's (CoH2 devs) forums to complain, Relic replied that "that the game reflects historical realities" and promptly banned most of complainers. In the end Russian distributor decided to cancel on-shelf sales, but Relic themselves remain adamant that they did nothing wrong. And they aren't lying! It is simply what they know and what they've been taught.
More recent example comes from CoD: MW.
<https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/30/20938550/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-highway-of-death-controversy>
I wonder, how many young people - i.e. CoD's regular auditory - will answer the question "who's responsible for Highway of Death" correctly today? And how many will answer correctly 5 years later?
[Answer]
# Yes; in fact, it happens all the time.
**TL;DR: Combine propaganda and Thought Police.**
Believe it or not, this has been a wide-spread occurrence throughout history, to the point that it is still happening today.
In times past it was common for rulers to rewrite the history books and make their version the "correct" one. For example, it was standard practice for the Egyptian pharaohs to remove all references to their predecessors when they assumed the throne; that's why there is such a squabble over which version of Egyptian history is correct.
A similar thing went on in the Roman empire. When Caesar Augustus (also known as Octavian) assumed the throne as the first of the Emperors, he had a friend named Virgil write a poem called *The Aeneid*. Naturally, Virgil included a huge amount of pro-Augustus propaganda in it, which promoted Augustus's "I'm the son of God" party line. *The Aeneid* was immensely popular; as a result, this bit of *pravda* (official "truth") became actual truth in the eyes of many Roman citizens.
The practice of rewriting history has by and large continued since then, even into the modern day. To quote Winston Churchill, "History is written by the victors."
Furthermore, the rewriting isn't always done by the government. On a basic level, political correctness is society stating that "X is the only socially acceptable opinion on issue Y." This effectively rewrites history, no tyrant (other than the tyranny of the majority) required. This form of historical revision used to be less common, but the general acceptance of Hegelian synthetic logic has made it much more common.\*
**Considering all this, I recommend to you the solution that *Fahrenheit 451* used.** In *Fahrenheit* the government has literally rewritten history (e.g. "Benjamin Franklin founded the first fire station to burn British propaganda"). They did this by combining truly massive amounts of propaganda with a Soviet Russia style not-so-secret police, which brutally and publicly killed anyone who believed the "wrong history". **As a result, hardly anyone remembers the non-Pravda version of history; most of the people who did are dead or institutionalized, and the rest are keeping their heads down.**
\* For a more in-depth study of this topic, see Tocqueville's *Democracy in America* and Francis Schaeffer's excellent books *Escape from Reason* and *The God Who Is There*.
[Answer]
# No.
Even with a printing press, I doubt that a society like yours would have widespread literacy. Widespread literacy means widespread schools, so peasant families must be able to **afford** to keep their children away from the fields, or away from caring for the toddlers.
Only the upper classes can afford teachers or tutors for the children. Most schooling will be informal or an on-the-job apprenticeship, so almost all elders will become teachers.
I don't know how old you are. Do you know anybody who fought in WWII? Anybody who lived through the social changes of the 60s? Would you believe them without Hollywood and history books? Sure, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List had a tremendous emotional impact, but would you doubt the witnesses?
[Answer]
### Not really, but that would be an inefficient and ineffectual approach to the problem.
The biggest issue with the question as posed is:
***How much do you need recollections to be changed, and what will you do with the people whose lives make the lies clear?***
The basic dimensions of the problem are that you can't reliably ascertain what individuals know or believe about those settlements, you can't be certain what records or references exist which will contradict the official narrative, you can't control or monitor even a small fraction of direct person-to-person communications, and your proposed timeline leaves information exposing the lies in living memory.
These, together, are a recipe which all but guarantees that you cannot get rid of the inconvenient, true information about those polities' not being a part of your conquering nation no matter how well the annexations seem to be going.
And the biggest threat of all is noted in a comment on another answer-- there are *displaced elites* who know the truth. These are people who fundamentally have a grievance against the conquering nation and have firsthand information about how and why the lies are untrue. Historically there have been methods employed to deal with those sorts of people, but they are monstrous and themselves generate new secrets which will need to be kept.
**As long as information which exposes the lies exists, you can't be sure that the lies will be unchallenged.**
The "best" response will depend on why, exactly, you perceive value in eradicating those polities from memory entirely in so short a time. I suggest that, whatever your conquering nation is after, they can achieve it more easily and fully with other strategies.
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**The easiest solution** is to *add* to the widely-held historical record. This deals less with memory than with perception and belief, but has the benefit of not being obviously falsifiable from life experiences people have already had:
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> Sure, that city-state *used to exist*, but it was buried in the big earthquake of whatever year that was, which we barely felt all the way out here.
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> Sure, that place was doing OK up until that crop blight and famine. You remember, we had to deal with it here too. But while we were ready, thanks to the foresight of the government of our great nation of Conquestia, and we made it through. *They* didn't, and even refused offers of assistance from us! Most of them starved, and the rest killed each other rioting. Aside from the roving murder bands making use of discarded soldiering equipment, of course.
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> Oh, yeah, the Neutral City? When envoys of Conquestia went there to share our awesome social organization practices with them they found out that those filthy Neutrals were raising a huge army to use to slaughter Conquestians! That's what *neutral* meant in their language, you know: murder of the peaceful. Well, the First Conquestian Legion saw to them. Now the Neutral City is just a burned-out husk, and no one lives there. Oh, you want to talk to a member of the First Legion? Sorry, they took such heavy losses at the Neutral City that they had to be disbanded, and the former members scattered through other military units. If you come across one of them, they can tell you *all* about it though.
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These have the benefit of not diverging from actual history prior to these efforts, and so there is less concern about extant records or personal experiences exposing lies. But after the conquests and lockdowns, no new, true information is going to be coming in and so there's nothing to contradict. Even people who used to go to those places every year can't account for what they're like now, 30 years after their last visit.
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If there is some specific reason why all memory of and reference to those places needs to be eliminated I might be able to give an answer more focused in that direction. But otherwise, a couple of decades is **too little time** to get people to do more than pretend the history-eradicating lies are true, because living memory will prove them false. More time gives more options, but lie outside the scope of the question.
That aside, the best bet is probably going to be to rely on the heavy travel restrictions to prevent real information observed by firsthand witnesses from spreading. The vast majority of the population isn't likely to encounter anything that will contradict the official narrative, and the people living in places which make believing the lie impossible will be sequestered away from the others.
[Answer]
# Overwrite Written History
You are on the right track when it comes to overriding history. The first step is obviously to remove the concrete evidence of the real history. However, simply removing the history would seem a little bit suspicious. Instead, you have to have some scholarly types come out and say, "after further research, we found that event x happened y way, and will continue with this going forward." This means that those still in school would begin to learn the new history and not the old history. Bonus points if you have some anti-family education going on, where the students learn to trust the teacher more than the government.
Remove physical evidence from the old history, on the basis that the old rulers lied to you, and your history is obviously more accurate. Show only artifacts to tell the story of the old regime horribly mistreating the populace and hopefully the members of the new regime. Establish a holiday to remember the horrible atrocities, and to mourn those lost in that event.
# Shut out opposition
As you pointed out, simply replacing the concrete history doesn't eliminate the people that actually experienced it. However, most people probably didn't experience the history. Most people in your time period didn't travel very far, and thus have no real knowledge of the other holdouts. You can probably get away with saying that they gave up and fled, or were completely destroyed, since almost nobody is actually going to check. If someone does want to go check, then simply kill them en route and claim that they died from some other cause on the journey, or that some remnants from the old regime killed them for their new fealty, making them a martyr and increasing the peoples obedience towards the new regime.
If someone is able to evade your guards and wants to go check on the holdouts, they'll come back, and you can completely slander them. Shut them down for giving out "alternative facts" or simply trying to "spread rumors against the state." Remember, you have those poor poor martyrs that were killed by remnants of the old regime, and obviously any regime that still had a holdout wouldn't resort to such evil tactics, meaning that what the witness says is all a lie. Once the people are thoroughly convinced that they're lying, you can kill them under the guise of suicide or a heart attack and say "they weren't in the best of health" or "they were sad from being ostracized."
# Control the modern narrative
The final stage is to control their live access to information. This may be harder than the modern day, but the premise still applies. Remember, you control what kind of notices can go out in the town square, so that is covered by simply delivering your regime's propaganda. Your real threat is going to be travelling merchants come the long way around from the holdouts, or interact with merchants that go there.
Obviously people would know something is up if merchants stopped coming altogether, however if there were merchants rumors about the road being blocked to the holdouts, or if a lot of merchants were killed by wolves or thieves along the way (preferably with a few limping their way back bloodied, giving out dying words about the thieves and wolves), then merchants would stop travelling there. They would assume that the holdout was abandoned, since now thieves (your goons) are able to act with impunity, and wolves are courageous enough to go there (a karambit or similar looks like claw marks, or you can just release wolves), and thus the logical conclusion is that they were conquered. This simultaneously makes life hell for the people actually living in the holdout, since they are left with only what they grow and what preserves they have. This also fits nicely with the idea that there was already little to no movement from these holdouts, as simply decreasing three or four down to zero isn't suspicious.
Left with no news of the holdouts, or limited news, the logical conclusion is that they all died fighting, holding on to their last bit of pride and honor. You can have a national holiday commemorating them for their valor in their last moments, and tell people that that level of patriotism is what we should all strive for in life.
# Read alternative history conspiracy theories
Not for the alternative history (because it's mostly BS), but instead for the theories about how some lizard people supplanted the "real" history in favor of something that suits their narrative. My English teacher told me one time that "fiction has to make sense." If somebody pitched a movie detailing the 9/11 attacks back in 1990, it wouldn't get made because it would be too hard to suspend disbelief. Reality doesn't need to make sense, and that's why they were able to hijack a plane using some boxcutters. There already exists plenty of stories about replacing history, it's just a matter of sifting through that for the portions you want to include.
There's also plenty of variations on this theme in published fiction (although there is a higher pay wall there). I remember Terry Goodkinds *Sword of Truth* #5 had a narrative where an empire (your copy+paste Rome allegory )conquered a foreign land, integrated the inhabitants into their society, and the conquered people rose up in academia and politics to teach their own version of history and subjugate and shame the original natives, complete with mandatory daily "education."
[Answer]
Well, I think it is possible even for the first generation, If you cut them from their parents from very early age you can make whatever you want.
One cruel example. I am Bulgarian and our country has been under the Ottoman Empire (Turkey nowadays) for about 5 centuries. I can not recall the begging time but it ended in the year 1878.
During that period there has been times when the Sultan needed his own army, to use it for example if some of local subordinates goes on revolt or refuse to let men fight for the Sultan, etc.
So a perfect solution was found for the Sultan but terrible for the Bulgarian parents. Each year troops will come and from thousands of parent the first boy child would be taken. Age, not sure but say between 5 and 7. Those boys will be sent to special camps where they will live under military rules for many years. They will be trained to fight and to have no mercy and to have allegiance to the Sultan alone. They would remember nothing about their parents, origin etc.
So there are stories where Bulgarian rebellions have been put up with the help of such army - already grown and completely brain washed.
[Answer]
You can see it in Chinas case with fear and paranoia. Like killing teachers of a past society or purging them, and giving them a new source of education but twisted to make younger people believe they said something
or the Soviet Union where they sent important figureheads away, like Trotsky or suddenly disappear, if they spoke badly would be arrested and sent to the gulag....
there is a way of soft power though, like banning certain media coverage or newspapers, and making people believe it never happened.
[Answer]
So those villages beyond the mountain range are isolated, right? And the ones of most concern who could "know the truth" are villages near the mountain on your side? Purge them, or benevolently relocate them - make the valley near the mountain a no-man's land.
Like how Genghis Khan's tribal origins and burial place were hidden somewhere in first a sanctuary, then recently in military-controlled training grounds, to kick the ace out of hands of nationalists who could rally under his memory. I can recommend Jack Weatherford's "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" in general, and specifically for your question as that era's prodigy who was centuries ahead of his time and respected all around the Eurasia for making international laws, trade and travel possible, consequently vilified into a barbarian horde leader by people who lost to him. There is a saying that history is written by winners, or by survivors. Sometimes it is just written by those who can write.
Tell stories about how the mountain is unpassable after some earthquake. If the war itself is acknowledgeable in this historiography, those cities beyond the ridge could be conquered (so "all is ok, don't worry") or razed ("alas, nothing anymore to care about") during that conflict; in any case they might be devastated by some plague ("don't go or you'd die").
You can also make the picturesque valley near the mountains a royal game reserve, so it is naturally off-limits to the common folk. And stretching from one border to another, it blocks any way beyond (so people forget that any "beyond" exists).
For example (from literature - there are many good real-life ones above), the 13th district in Hunger Games, which everyone in general population for 75 years assumed to be scorched by nuclear strikes.
Note also that for settled peoples, with towns and villages, travel was not something they did normally in that era. Soldiers, traders, maybe aristocrats... the majority of population might live and die in the same village and never wander a hundred kilometers from it.
[Answer]
Written history is not your problem. Your problem is all the people more than a few decades old who remember and know the truth, and who will communicate this to other people.
If you're talking about "a couple of decades", you're the asking whether you can wipe out everyone's memories of 9/11 and I think that would be difficult.
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[Question]
[
In a book I am writing, I want there to be an mage who magically propels a dagger with a fast-acting, potent poison/venom, which kills one of the main characters. What poison that could be obtained in the mid 17th century that is fast acting should I use?
[Answer]
## Poison Dart Frog's "*Lipophilic alkaloid toxins*"
... is, according to some sources, the group that includes the toxins used by [poison dart frogs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_dart_frog#Toxicity_and_medicine). They may be able to kill in **less than three minutes**; you may not be able to achieve any faster.
It's unclear when these frogs were first identified, but Europe touched base in the Americas a hundred years prior to your setting. Knowing that some native peoples employed these toxins in, well, *poison darts*, it's not unreasonable to believe that some supplies could cross the sea.
[Answer]
## Wolf's Bane
[Apparently](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_poison#Preparation) used to tip poisoned arrows in China during your time period, fluid from the [Aconitum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum#Toxicology) plant, or Wolf's bane, could be nearly instantaneously deadly if used liberally. The symptoms are not pleasant, and the poison can be used without an arrow and put in food to create the appearance of (accidental) suffocation.
[Answer]
[Curare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curare) was used by indigenous South American tribes to tips the darts of their blowguns. The active ingredient can take up to 25 minutes to kill a larger animal from respiratory failure, but the tribes added additional ingredients that apparently increased the effectiveness. I read once that the strength of the mixture was determined by the number of seconds it took for a darted monkey to fall out of a tree. 5 second curare was common, but mixtures as strong as 1 second were made.
[Answer]
Don't forget about [Tetrodotoxin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrodotoxin). This is a naturally occuring poison, found in several sea creatures and was popluar around the far East.
The poison, at a fatal dose, can kill within 15 minutes, causing shortness of breath, paralysis and eventually total respiratory failure. While more of a dose is needed compared to [dart frog poison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batrachotoxin#Toxicity), it has been readily available throught history.
[Answer]
Try [strychnine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine#Human_toxicity). It was used a couple hundred years ago and can be derived from a plant. It isn't an ingested poison and can cause death very quickly. It is a type of poison known as a neurotoxin, meaning that it attacks the nervous system causing seizures and rapid organ failure. There is no known antidote.
[Answer]
The Bushman Poison **Adenium boehmianum** from a flower near the Cunene River, Namibia
To quote [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenium_boehmianum):
>
> The Bushman Poison is a poisonous succulent endemic to the mostly dry
> regions of northern Namibia and southern Angola. The San people
> boil the root sap and latex to prepare arrow poison, which is
> sufficient for hunting large mammals, as it contains strong
> cardiotoxic effects. The leaves, borne only for three months a
> year, are arranged spirally and are clustered near the branch tips. A
> plant will flower for only a few weeks in winter. The oblong fruit
> releases many seeds through a longitudinal slit, which due to their
> lateral tufts, can be dispersed by wind.
>
>
>
[Answer]
The fastest I would know of. Is to remove the jaws of 1,000 long leg spiders. Boil them down to about a baby spoon full. Put on the arrow. There jaws are to small to bite threw human skin. Only thing that saves us. Sea snake would be next, Philippine Cobra after that. You would probably want a paste mix. Adder might also work. Philippine Cobra we do not keep anti venom for. Never been a survivor.
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There is nothing more qualified for your novel scenario than the [nerve agent, VX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)). 10 milligrams will kill an adult. It was unknown in the 17th century, but might be used in a story by a Merlin-type character with specialized secret knowledge.
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[
In the waters of Iceland, the natives have their own word for a particular brand of cetaceans--"Illhveli", literally "evil whales". And the bloodthirstiest of them all is Raudkembingur, Icelandic for either "red comb" or "red crest".
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H0CKV.jpg)
Now, the outlandishness of some mythological animals is so minimal that in an alternate Earth where such creatures are real, their existence can be justified biologically, physiologically, anatomically and even evolutionarily. (For example, the "eagle-talons" of an enfield can be explained simply by some propaganda artist looking at an ordinary canid with raccoon-like front paws.)
Even so, a predatory toothed whale as big as a sperm whale with a bright red head *is* a bit odd and not so straightforward to justify. **Why would such an apex predator need a red head?**
[Answer]
## To hide in red water
Now, water is not usually red. But one of Raudkembingur's primary prey creatures is another whale, but this whale is a filter feeder whose primary diet is [red tide algea blooms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tide). As such, the Raudkembingur has evolved a red head to conceal itself while hunting these other whales amidst the red tide.
(Presumably this is an alternate world where red tides are regular enough to support a stable population of whales.)
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**The same reason as other animals have large crests the the like; Display**
Male Peacocks get no hunting or camouflage advantage from their large bright tails. It actually makes them *less* agile and less able to slip through scrubby terrain than peahens for example.
Roosters again get no benefit from their combs, nor lions from their manes, nor deer their antlers, for hunting or any other form of sustainment or protection.
They do, however, turn on the ladies.
Ultimately, these are all forms of display intended to attract the attention of the opposite sex for mating purposes. Ideally, it also serves to put off other males by having a display that means they're less likely to confront you because you look bigger and cooler than they are, meaning in turn you spend less energy fighting your own kind for the right to mate that you could use defending your mate or your young or even better yet hunting.
What you'd probably find is that these red heads are far more pronounced on the male of the species, who use them to impress the females and advertise how fearsome they are without actually having to fight to prove it. It does however also mean that these whales are less likely to be ambush predators as they would find it hard to hide.
In lion prides, it's often the lionesses who hunt for that very reason; they're better at camouflage and therefore can set group-based ambushes so much more easily than the males can. My guess is that the same would be true of your whales and that if they are in any way a pack animal in which case the males are effectively attacking for reasons of protection and territory defence.
Even if they are solitary animals, the crest would likely stave off attacks from other similarly sized predators or even keep females out of their territory other than for mating purposes so as to let them protect their own hunting grounds.
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**Why are flamingos pink?**
Perhaps it's not evolutionarily desirable at all - the whale's favorite prey simply includes a natural red dye that turns the whale red. Older and more powerful whales would, of course, naturally accumulate a deeper red color over time...
Other answers have already concluded that your world needs an extra common red tide, so maybe you can trace the food chain all the way down to that as the initial source of the dye...
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With the more out-there ideas bolded.
Reasons for heritable characteristics may be:
* To keep from being eaten. I know, I know, they are big and bad, but maybe there's something bigger and badder. Even if it doesn't prey on them when they get larger. It can be an artifact of defense from when they were little.
+ Camouflage obviously. To hide in an environment where the color is good for that.
+ The red stuff is actually whatever that defense's color. Whether it be stinging anemones that simply hitch a ride and sting whatever might mess with them or...hey actually if they have a symbiotic relationship, **the stinging stuff that grows on them can be a defense to start with, but later in life might actually stun prey.**
* To make more. Sex. The most outlandish things on animals are generally sex-selection during mating. The display of such generally proves fitness. Included to be complete and the most boring entry, but...I would make this an answer even if there are other reasons as well.
* To eat more. Food. This makes it easier/more efficient to get food.
+ Camouflage in order to hunt. Red tide will be brought up, but you ought to also look into the colder version of that: [the Artic's Red Snow Algae](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05521-w) They can lay in wait near shorelines ready to take seals and so forth. This would be specifically for ambush predation, whatever form it takes.
+ To gather food/resources. **The hairs aren't actually hairs. Your creatures are bloodthirsty because they feed on blood in the water that they swim through.** This is gathered and specially preserved or kept, perhaps in addition to meat they eat. Not much in the way of earth science to support that, but...this is NOT earth.
And finally, don't be afraid to mix it up. That is, just because there's one function, doesn't mean you can't have others! **The redhead can be sex-selection AND a gruesome blood sponge!**
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What about a symbiotic relationship with some kind of red algae? The red algae lives on the whale, where it gets protection and a steady supply of sunlight as the whale chill out in the surface water. In return, the algae produces some antibiotic that protects the whale or supply the whale with extra nutrition.
I made a quick search for algae-mammal symbiosis and found [this article about a green alage in the fur of the sloth](https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-biology/2010/04/14/sloth-fur-has-symbiotic-relationship-with-green-algae/) that provides the sloth with nutrition through absorption through the skin, and in return gets a safe and humid place to live.
[Answer]
## Age and Power
If I am reading your question correctly, there is an entire species of carnivorous whales and the Red Crest is a single member of that species. If that is wrong and the Rest Crested Illhveli is the species, then I would go with Tim B II's answer about mating displays.
So, assuming that you want to know why a single member of a species would have such a distinctive display, I would suggest that it is because that is the oldest and most powerful member of the species that humanity has encountered. Think of it as an extreme example of something like the Silverback Gorilla. All Illhveli slowly come into their red crest with age, but between their long lives and extreme competition for resources few are able to actually live long enough for it to be noticeable.
## Sudden Acts of Violence
A predator the size of a whale would obviously be in constant search for its next meal, and the older it gets the more experience it would have in hunting in the most efficient manner possible. Which will most likely be long periods of little to no activity followed by bursts of activity when prey is nearby. Drawing another parallel to real creatures, it would be similar to how crocodiles or alligators behave. Minimize energy expenditure by floating along until prey is nearby, then explode into action to subdue your meal. As long as you get more energy from your prey than you spent finding it, you are good to go.
From a human point of view, this is going to look absolutely terrifying. Ships that run into Red Crest would not know that they were in danger until it was far too late. The only thing they would see is a sudden disturbance in the water, if that, and then the ship being demolished around them and anyone in the water being consumed. At the same time, Red Crest is unlikely to attack more than one ship at a time as long as they are suitably spaced out, since that is not how ambushes work. So you have plenty of opportunities for superstitious sailors to see other ships attacked while being relatively safe themselves. Thus the myth of the Red Crest is formed.
## Passing the Torch
The final benefit to the red crest being a feature of age is that it inherently allows the Red Crest to always be a threat. One single animal, no matter how dangerous, is a finite threat. Eventually time will take care of it for you. But if the Red Crest is just the oldest and strongest member of it's species, then there will always be the chance for a younger upstart to challenge that position. Depending on what you want for your story this can be a known phenomenon, a complete mystery, or a shocking discovery. There are benefits to however you want to play it.
Knowing about the Red Crest as a title means any time a challenger shows up your sailing lanes just got twice as dangerous. Not only is there another predator around, but the fighting from these two massive creatures could cause disruptions even if they ignore your ships. If the fighting happens out of sight and people never find out, then there is just a giant immortal muderwhale always lurking out of sight waiting to take its due from unwary sailors. I personally like the discovery story though since it can lead to a really exciting reveal. Just when a sailor thinks that they are a goner and the Red Crest is going to get them, a slightly smaller and less red whale attacks the Red Crest and "saves" the day.
[Answer]
Mate attraction really *is* probable for a colorful display on a large animal.
In deeper water, it's still a high contrast black-white pattern; this is perfectly good for species and individual recognition. Whales are required to ascend to the surface, and so having the red pigment isn't pointless. If mating behavior occurs near the surface (which it does in many whales because swimming up and down for air mid-sex is counter-productive) then the color will be most visible at the time when it's most important.
Intensity and density color is usually an Honest Signal of immune system health to prospective mates.
The crest as illustrated seems to introduce some drag problems - it may be an Honest Signal of fitness to prospective mates, like a peacocks tail: "I can still hunt even with this ridiculousness on my head, you should mate with me!"
The spikes may be mostly fleshy, rather than bony, and they're only erected or extruded as part of a **threat display**. There's many animals that inflate weird structures as sexual displays or threat displays. The bright color may be mostly dull brown, but turn bright red as part of the same threat display, and the crest is erected at the same time. This would work deeper down as well as near the surface, and seagoers would associate the bright-red "spiky" whale with aggression.
Threat displays are useful within the species (when contesting territory and mating rights) and without the species (chasing off competing predators, defending young, etc.)
If the whales aggregate in "birthing pods" and "nursuries" near the surface, you'd have large groups of whales in a highly defensive mood, and they may attack nearby ships to drive them away from the young. Young whales may not be agile enough to evade boatstrike, and they'd have to learn the behavior - adult whales are certainly smart enough to know about boatstrike and to know its a risk to the babies.
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# Invisibility as an ambush hunter.
When not near the surface, red appears to be black since all the red light has been filtered out by the water above it.
I would think that this whale waits below the expected depth of its prey in a head up attitude. This would make it look just like the dark water below it.
### Also, the reason for the whole whale to not be red:
From below, it wants to look lighter and bluer since then it will be camouflaged against the brighter water above it.
[Answer]
It's not so much a need as a marker of ferocity and feeding frequency. The red color is from accumulated scar tissue from attacks on boats and beaches to reach prey.
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I have a book that approach the subject of flora and fauna perception of colors.
Here are some interesting facts :
* Plants have a light receptor that is only sensible to red. Apparently, lighted by red light, plants can grow faster and higher. You could use the same approach for your whale : the red color on it's head could attract food (very little fish) for example.
+ With mondrills (large monkeys), red is used as a signal for domination or agression. It bring statue and communicate the fighting capacities. More red equals more agressivity.
+ The chaffinch (small birds) that have red feathers tend to dominate those with black feathers. "These birds seems to have a natural fear of red" (S.Pryke, 2009)
[Answer]
**The mane is an oxygen exchange organ.**
Adapted from my answer [Could a land vertebrate re-evolve gills after moving back into the water?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160334/could-a-land-vertebrate-re-evolve-gills-after-moving-back-into-the-water/160357#160357)
There are lungs and there are gills. There are some other ways to get oxygen as well. Some animals respire through the skin. Behold: the Hairy frog.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6RO4r.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_frog>
These frogs do gas exchange through their well vascularized dermal papillae.
For an example of a mammal with gills, one could consider Heuvelman's cryptid merhorse.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DsE3u.jpg)
from In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents.
>
> The merhorse: an elongated sea animal of large size characterized by a
> sort of large mane hanging down it's neck.
>
>
> It is it may seem surprising that there should be a semi-abyssal
> mammal living at a fairly considerable death of up to 100 fathoms. It
> is here that their mane, so very unusual in a sea animal, make come
> in. It is noticeable that the better adapted an animal is to life in
> the sea, the more hairless it is; the cetaceans are smoother than the
> pinnipeds and even in the fur seal the mane is very short. Ivan
> Sanderson has suggested to me that the mane of these sea serpents
> might be respiratory organs in the form of filaments, , similar to the
> hairs of the hairy frog similar to the hairs of the "hairy frog", and
> supplementing their pulmonary respiration. And in the merhorse as in
> the hairy frog these hairs are reddish which may perhaps be due to
> their structure and function. But, admittedly, this arrangement would
> be quite unique among mammals.
>
>
>
Of course the merhorse is a theoretical cryptid. But the rationale of a vascularized "mane" of dermal appendages makes sense. The animal (the merhorse is a mammal; possibly a pinniped) spends a great deal of time at depth (as evidenced by its huge eyes). If it could do some gas exchange at depth through vascularized skin, that would let it stay down longer before resurfacing. It could hunt, or hide, or do whatever it needed to do in its deep home.
Some pinnipeds do have very vascular secondary sex organs akin to rooster combs - here is a hooded seal showing off his.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ajOZm.jpg)
<http://thejunglestore.blogspot.com/2009/05/red-ballons-flyout-of-nose.html>
If the merhorse (or the red maned whale)
gained greater fitness by increasing the size of its respiratory skin appendages, they could increase and proliferate until they formed a manelike covering. It is not a gill in the fish sense, but it has converged on the function of an external gill like that of a worm or an axolotl.
I think a very big animal would probably derive little selective benefit from slightly more gas exchange area. Probably this would first arise in a small seal. Once the vascular mane was established as helpful to a small animal, it could be selected for larger sizes, culminating in the large merhorse. Or the red mane of the red headed whale.
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[Question]
[
In my world, all terrestrial bodies in the solar-system of over 900 km size have a significant human presence. Earth-moon Travel is as common as an interstate road trip, and Interplanetary travel is as common as going overseas, ranging from Venus to Earth is the same as a trip from the U.S. to U.K. today, and Earth to Pluto is the equivalent of U.S. to U.K. in 1700. This is the consequence of fusion power being mastered to the point where a fusion reactor can be stored in a truck, with reacting Deuterium, Tritium, Helium 3 and Boron 11 (of course protium fusion is still impossible, for that, feel free to build your own star). This begs the question (or rather, I beg my own question ... whatever)
Is there any practical justification for using fission power when fusion power (as described) exists?
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There are a couple of reasons:
1. Fission scales down better. Some SNAP reactors are tiny, smaller than a trash can. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG's) can be made even smaller. Fission based "batteries" are even possible. Small and/or low power applications will favor fission.
2. Fission generators are mechanically simpler and more robust. This is important when you are building things that need to last, especially in places where maintenance is impossible. For instance remote locations will favor the mechanically simpler fission.
3. Fusion produces a buttload of heat, way more than fission. Normally this is a good thing since the heat is what we want to harvest. But, this heat needs to dissipate, in an atmosphere that's not too hard, in space that's a lot of extra radiator surface, which adds both mass and makes the ship more fragile. This is basically the scaling issue again but with added worries in vacuum. Many spacecraft will favor fission because heat dissipation is a bigger concern and output needs are generally small.
[Answer]
It bears having a written answer that fusion reactors absolutely cannot synthesize heavy isotopes, if the synthesis can only happen during fission. That is to say, some heavy isotopes can be made by using a fusion reactor for neutron bombardment, like Cobalt-60, but other things like Cesium 137 can only be effectively produced by fission of uranium.
That being said, keeping large piles of heavy isotopes around is generally not a great idea. Cesium 137 is only industrially useful when you need to bathe something like a warship in enough energy to take an x-ray of its hull, but Cobalt 60 is actually better at that, and more stable. Cs-137 also reacts easily forming water soluble salts that your body can transport, making it deadly to consume, but useful in radiation therapy.
If you really have an *easy* time of all of this nuclear power stuff, I'll tell you where you *might* still see fission, and that's as a black-start power source, because it *usually* takes power to make power.
Black-start is the ability of a generating station to bring itself back online and place itself on the grid without that grid currently being energized. Currently not a lot of stations actually have this ability, and you may or may not have personally experienced slightly longer power outages because of this. What happens is that the stations that CAN black start have to power up to bootstrap adjacent stations until all the stations are ready to restore power to all the loads that will get turned back on, and it's a real pain when something like the Great Northeast Blackout happens.
Obviously, this point simply may not apply to your given level of technology. Maybe you have unobtainium batteries that can kick over a fusion generator; but if you don't, and if your shielding is good, it is entirely possible to build a fission reactor that can be started *entirely* by hand, with only a limited amount of power for instrumentation. Also, terrifyingly, reactors have been built this way in the past, with varying degrees of bad results, and the general consensus is that we should try not to do that again.
[Answer]
# Destroy nuclear waste and weapons material
The biggest present real life reason to keep fission reactors around — after fusion has solved the problem of energy availability — is to [transmute nuclear waste such as Plutonium and Americium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_waste) to elements with shorter half lives. This makes the issue of nuclear waste a much briefer affair — 500 to 1,000 years — compared to [present suggestions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3).
This also also lets us [take nuclear weapons material and turn that into something useful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares), which is [something we have already done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program).
[Answer]
## With aneurtonic fusion commonplace, fission doesn't make much sense
Fission is great if you need stupid poisonous materials (plutonium) or want to make fission weapons. The current preference for uranium in nuclear power plants over thorium is because uranium turns into nice bomb fuel. Thorium does not.
The fuels for fission are very heavy. The fuels for fusion are very light. To get very high fuel burn rates in fission materials requires reprocessing to remove the nuclear poisons that prevent more of the fuel from burning. Since fusion fuels are gases or liquids to begin with, reprocessing is often completely unnecessary. Thus, fusion doesn't require the exceptionally heavy reprocessing equipment that fission does.
While we don't know the composition of heavy fission fuels around the solar system, we do know that hydrogen and oxygen are all over the place.
## Additional Reading
[Nuclear Power](http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~kennethp/nuclearenergy.pdf)
[Answer]
One very likely reason that I haven't seen mentioned in other responses is the issues surrounding fuseable fuel. Deuterium, Tritium, and Helium 3 are not common in the solar system. On Earth, Deuterium is typically only found in water, and Tritium is usually made from heavy-water moderated fission reactors. (There's a good reason for fission: use it to make the fuel for your fusion reactors!) Helium 3 exists in trace amounts in Earth's natural helium wells, a slightly higher concentration in the lunar surface, and still higher concentration in the atmospheres of the gas giants. Unless you can extract it from one of these sources at a fairly high production rate, He3 really won't be very suitable for use as a general fusion fuel and would likely be reserved for applications that require its exceptional energy output.
Boron 11 is going to be the most commonly available fuel source of those you listed, but it may not be present or readily extracted on some small planetary bodies like the Moon. And honestly, if your civilization is capable of aneutronic fusion, Lithium 7 would be a more productive and abundant fuel.
Another thing to consider is longevity. Although fusion reactors can produce enormous amounts of energy, their fuel is short-lived and they must be fed regularly. Compare that to a fission reactor, which may be capable of running on the same chunk of material for 20-40 years without refueling. If a given application requires long voyages or you have to rely on outside sources for fuel and supplies, a fission reactor would reduce your logistics footprint.
One final point: engineers try to find the simplest, easiest solution to a given problem (and I can say that because I am one). If your goal is to power something small, like an outpost or space probe, the power requirements might not be high enough to justify using a complex, heavy, and hungry fusion reactor. You would really only need fusion for large-scale applications that consume huge amounts of power, where safety is critical (assuming fusion powerplants are actually safer than fission at this point), or where fusion fuel is abundant and easily harvested. Fission or solar power would probably suffice in almost all other applications, and your engineers will favor the simplest option practical.
Some links going into more detail about fusion fuels and processes:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Deuterium>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3>
[Answer]
If we do a parallel with our present days, though we have plenty of optimized electric motors and tools, there are still places where humans are using coal or even cow dung as energy sources.
It can very well be that in some remote places the technology to use fusion is not available due to economic/logistic reasons (lack or abundance of resources, lack of skilled personnel, politic will to not depend on an external supplier), and therefore the much simpler fission is the only way to produce energy.
[Answer]
While the fusion reactors may be cheap, it can very well be that hydrogen is rather expensive. Consider living on a planet without atmosphere or oceans. Most of the hydrogen on this planet would be located as frozen water, and since everybody needs water, any non-regenerative consume (i.e. nuclear fusion) might be shunned upon (or simply to expensive).
Of cause, shipping water by ships is a possibility in this case, but it might be that it's too expensive, and it creates a dangerous dependency.
For planets close to the sun, solar energy still might be preferred (no refueling, and very save while low cost, can easily be placed out of sight (in space)).
[Answer]
On Earth, it's clear not worth having fission: too much waste to look after. In space, however, fission can be but unavoidable. Fusion reactors, either tokamaks or stellarators are going to be huge, way larger than fission reactors. Pushing all that mass up of a gravity well is a pain in the ass.
Sure, it can be avoided if you just buy the reactor in orbit, or in a low gravity body such as the Moon, but it's highly probable they don't have the heavy industry with the capabilities to build such specialized parts. In any case, a fusion reactor has a very costly start-up: until the fusion starts to be self-sustainable you have to depend on a very powerful external source of energy to turn on the reactor. On Earth that's not a problem, as the electrical grid can surely provide this energy from plenty of different sources and locations, but in a spaceship, or even a space colony, you just can't find the energy needed if the fusion reactor fails and has to be restarted. Restarting a fission reactor is just pulling the fuel bars back in its place and waiting for the water to heat enough.
[Answer]
**There will always be a reason to use a cheaper alternative**
Science may provide opportunities, but the universe is driven by economics. Consider our ploddingly slow adoption of solar power. In my area, the local power utility has been increasing rates for solar users almost exponentially because they're losing money to solar and the cost of the infrastructure (which solar users still depend on) remains the same. Consequence: lots of people not using solar.
The simple reality is that fission (lower tech) will always be cheaper than fusion (higher tech) and there will always be people who will, for whatever reasons, want to save that proverbial buck. Show me an advanced, fusion-driven glowing cityscape that people the universe-over drool over and I'll show you the very same city eight blocks away where everything from drugs to people are sold — and it'll all be run using cheap fission "they-can't-find-me-through-my-power-bill" reactors.
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Its also a case of, cool we generated so much energy, what are we going to do with it. Secondly its also a sustainability issue, with Uranium reserves being more than 10 times that of Fusion reactants and hence Fission is more feasible going forward...at least for now.
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One reason to use fission would be not as a fuel, but as a mining technique. Since fission can atomize rock and stone, it could be useful for mining or terraforming purposes on very large planetary scale where the radioactive fallout is unimportant, or treatable. Since they would be using fission for this purpose, it would follow they would also use it to power their equipment to keep the systems simple and efficient.
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As soon as you turn 10, you receive a magic book that can teleport you anywhere on earth.
If you're above 10, you also received one. By writing the coordinates of anywhere on earth, you can teleport there. For example, if I wrote 40° 40' 16.68" N, 75° 19' 3.36" W I would be teleported to Bedminster, NJ. You cannot be teleported to space/the moon and you cannot specify the altitude at which you would like to be dropped; you will simply be dropped on the earth's surface at that point. If you steal someone else's book and write in it, you will not be teleported, each book is specific to its original owner. If the owner dies, the book goes to waste as no one can use it. The book only allows for 100 teleports before it will be filled up, and you can't teleport anymore.
How would this revolutionize travel and change counter-terrorism and terrorism forces? What would be the long term and short term effects of this?
The teleportation is as precise as you make it. There is no limit on decimal points. As Marky points out, if you work it out well enough, you can teleport yourself from your chair at work to your chair in your house. Whatever you are holding or wearing will be teleported with you.
Also, as pointed out by XandarTheZenon, I've edited my question to make it a bit clearer. If you're teleporting to an ice lake, you will be teleported to the bottom, because that is the surface of the earth. This will make teleporting to the ocean deadly because you will immediately die from the immense pressure and freezing temperature. Also, assume that you will not be interspersed into any intervening obstacle. If there's a tree where you're about to teleport, assume that the teleportation system sees the tree or other obstacle and will move you ever so slightly to avoid become merged with the tree. If two people teleport into the same exact place at the same time (although this is extremely unlikely), neither of the two teleports will work properly, so no one will be teleported. However, both people will have wasted one teleport.
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100 teleports?
Well, if I'm completely honest, there's a high probability that nothing would change.
Why?
Well, consider the average 10 year old. Now give them the ability to teleport 100 times in their life. How many of them do you think would manage to make those 100 teleports last more than a year? I can guarantee you that on average, girls would have more left after that first "splurge" period, that's for sure.
So, let's assume that there's a certain amount of education into the importance of not wasting your teleports, or maybe parents looking out for their children/controlling dictators (what's the difference, you ask? Go to your room, that's what!) confiscate the books to be inherited when they're old enough to understand their worth. Either way, some method exists whereby people will have enough teleports to be useful when they grow old enough to use them in a "worthwhile" manner. How does this change things?
## Travel
This one's easy. Practically nothing changes.
100 teleports is not a lot. In fact, it's a tiny amount. Even if you only live till you're 60, that's only 2 teleports a year from the age of 10. **2**. That means that you're going to keep them for specific situations:
1. Emergencies. My wife is in labour! Good thing I can teleport to her side immediately!
2. REALLY long distance travel. Once-in-a-lifetime trips to the other side of the world become slightly more feasible, but you'd still only do them once or twice, and you'd only really teleport there to save on the travel costs. Shorter distances and closer holidays would still use mundane transport, plus you can't teleport with small kids as they aren't old enough.
3. Crime. I have the exact coordinates of something that is worth me spending a teleport on, or someone has offered me a courier job that is worth the cost of a teleport. Which brings me to...
## Crime and Security
Again, not much actually changes, except for a few things.
So people can teleport anywhere they have the exact coordinates for. Who cares? They can only teleport to ground level. If I want to keep something secure, I just have to move it up or down. Underground storage gets a massive economical boost, but that's about it.
If you wanted to make a super-secure facility, you could make ground level into a death trap. Create new structures out of mobile modules that shift position internally. Have some of the modules be unsafe for humans and keep the pattern a secret. People can't jump inside the building without risking their safety, unless they know the pattern of safe entry points. Now you've reduced the teleporting problem to a simple information security problem, so no different to keeping your keys safe in reality.
You can be even simpler than that - keep important stuff mobile. If it's always moving, it's hard to teleport into the right place.
Hell, you can get even simple than **THAT**: raise your whole building about half a metre off the ground. Anyone tries to teleport in they're going to materialise halfway through the floor.
## Terrorism/Catching people
This sort of thing is going to be an issue, but not a civilisation-destroying one. You're going to have an initial cataclysm to deal with, but let's be honest, how much damage can they actually do? Terrorists already use the largest bombs they can get their hands on, and they can already get pretty much anywhere they want to go. Sure, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh for instance could attack US targets far more easily, but how many times? What targets? And would they even get to strike first? Given the resources at hand, the US is far more likely to manage a crippling strike on Raqqa before they can identify and organise an attack on a sufficiently immovable and effective target like a nuclear power plant.
No country is going to attack another because the threat of civilian casualties would be too high, but actually taking out targets of strategic value would be no easier than before. Catching people would be a bit harder, but again, they've only got 100 teleports, and if they're the kind of person predisposed to crime, the chances are they've already used a lot of them. Only so long you can stay on the run, though it might see a lot of political work on extradition laws. Those countries that currently don't sign up to mutual extradition laws might change their minds quite quickly when they find their countries being increasingly populated by criminals.
Even committing many crimes would be harder. You'd have to surprise someone to kill them, otherwise they could just teleport away. You'd probably have stuff like coordinate stamps that people could use to quickly teleport to a pre-determined point.
## Would anyone even dare?
Final point: unadulterated mass-teleportation around the world would be **INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS**, depending on the physics involved. What happens if I teleport to a coordinate that is occupied by a wall? By another Person? What happens if two people enter the same coordinates at the same time? The chances that you would actually have a safe landing, if everyone was just doing their own thing, would be terrible. In order to make the system workable, you would have to have sanctioned teleport points and coordinate-assigning machines that would tell you where you could safely jump. That, or the book would have to have in-built safety features. Even then, what's "safe"? If I'm a shopkeeper worried about thieves, all I have to do is electrify my floor.
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So yes, you'd probably get a bit of initial disruption and chaos, but I would imagine that we'd survive that relatively unscathed as a civilisation, and once past that, the ability to teleport would be rarely enough used to make most things stay pretty much as they are.
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Forget terrorism and counter and all that. This book will basically reshape the entire human political history. Take for example the case of colonialism implemented by UK, Spain and France.
There were no more than 4 million (and that too, is a generous estimate) British officers in India before the independence in 1947 and India's population was around 250 million. All those unhappy, dissatisfied people, protesting for independence ... what do you think they would do if they had those magic books with them? Well, they would simply transport themselves to UK and take that whole country simply by the ghastly superiority of numbers!
Think about all the wars which people won on the basis of technology instead of numbers. And all those military tactics where the commander tries to deflect the enemy forces from the battleground and take the remaining troops by surprise.
Don't forget that implementing borders between country would also be impossible. Law enforcement? Haah what? Who is going to stop people from magically appearing in jewellery shops at 4 am and loot all the goodies before magically disappearing again?
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This would be terrifying for terrorism or even simple war. The person has to write in their own book and they have to write with their own hand but nothing says they have to do it of their own free will.
## Bombing
Kidnap 100 families. Herd the children into a pit with machine guns pointed at them. Strap as much explosives as the parent can carry to one of the parents and, with a gun to their spouses temple put their book in front of them and make them write the coordinates.
Depending on what counts as "writing" you could further restrict this. Lay a stencil over the book with the coordinates, give them only a can of spray-paint to make sure they cannot write anything except the coordinates you want them to write.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ECPug.jpg)
The explosives are triggered to explode a few seconds after they lose contact with some radio beacons at the launch site.
A few seconds later the White House, the Senate, and 98 other sites are turned into balls of fire.
## Defences
In this world, the only defenses will be obscurity and flying or floating vehicles. The president is only safe in a vault which nobody knows about or on ships or planes, since you teleport to the Earth's surface and those are far above it.
North Korea wants to suppress it and prevent their citizens from escaping so they simply lock up every child for the week around their 10th birthday with their hands in iron casts (so they cannot write), they wait till the book arrives then burn it.
Vaults all move far above or below the Earth's surface or are maintained at close to zero air pressure. It's all well and good teleporting into a bank vault. Less good if your blood boils because there's no air. Alternatively nets and wires are strung thickly through the vaults to either block teleportation or to kill people who teleport into those objects.
## Child Safety
Internet predators convince children to write coordinates in their books to "come play". The children are never seen again.
Many western governments insist that books be confiscated and destroyed as soon as they appear. They spin this as a measure to keep children safe since so many drowned or disappeared forever in the first few days. Many parents agree and help with the program.
Parents who don't destroy their childrens books are likely to keep them away from them to avoid their 10 year old teleporting to the middle of Atlantic Ocean or into some creeps dungeon.
## Borders
The world no longer has any effective border controls. Anyone who ever wanted to move countries can do so now in seconds. People will be able to flee conflict far more easily but conflict can also follow them.
Safe landing coordinates become important information. It's all well and good landing in America but no good if you land in a lake, or in the middle of something hazardous. Some people spread fake coordinates claiming them to be useful locations but they're dangerous locations or locations where people will be stripped of their books and detained.
## Smuggling
Smuggling of any small items becomes insanely easy when one person can move 100kg of cocaine anywhere in the world in seconds.
## Teleport Value
Short distance travel is almost unchanged but long haul flights become far rarer for people who travel rarely. The 100 teleports limit somewhat softens this one since anyone traveling regularly will still need it.
Unused teleports will become a somewhat valuable commodity. If you can carry someone when teleporting then people will be able to sell transport to people without books or who have used their teleports.
I'd expect the price of a single teleport to end up somewhere in the same price region as one long-haul flight if everyone gets 100 of them by default. After the initial spree expect people to spend them about as sparingly.
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Well, a LOT of people would die. Since 2/3rd's of the planet is Ocean, a lot of people would be dropped in and drown before reaching a shore. There are large deserts and many other inhospitable reaches, so that if someone didn't have a no place like '127.0.0.1', they could be lost forever, or go from bad to worse. "I made it to the top of Mount Everest!, but the wind blew my book away! Oh NO!" "Oh look I'm on the Autobah..."
Not sure how it would affect counter-terrorism other than it would be much HARDER to prevent someone from teleporting into the middle of a crowded stadium with a nuke. Having a limit of 100 jumps also helps the terrorist, since they only need one, trying to find people and using the book as an escape has limited capabilities.
What it would really do is change society, large gatherings would cease, the superbowl would only be televised. Rock concerts would be small special venues also televised. Governments wouldn't meet in the open, but in secret chambers and lots of secured electronic communications. Since there would be no way to stop someone from arriving anywhere that they have coordinates for.
It would also mean most people would have 'home' mostly filled out except for the last set of numbers so in an emergency they can fill in the missing digits and arrive 'home' quickly.
With a limit of 100 teleports, it will not kill transportation. It might reduce it somewhat though.
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Collapse of the economy, and possibly, of civilization.
There are billions of people living in extreme poverty. Many of them would be happy to move to a better place. Imagine if from one day to the next, over a billion people would suddenly appear in the richest cities of the world.
Look at the current migrant crisis, increase both the speed and the numbers by a factor of a thousand, and you can imagine the chaos which would ensue. Millions of starving people suddenly appearing in developed cities, and rioting as very few of them could find what they arrived for.
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## Geography would become a secret, tactical data, maintained by governments...
Magical properties of the book, not allowing to sell or create them, would diminish inequality in society. This has two sides:
* *positive* - a poor man, who couldn't afford to travel and would see only one place in his lifetime, could actually visit 99 places (in a row), and teleport back to home, totaling in 100 visited places; a rich person, who keeps flying on his private jet could increase the number of visited places from e.g. 9900 to 10 000. That's 10000% vs ~ 1% increase.
* *negative* - the inequality wouldn't be smoothed only in fair ways; poor would more easily steal from rich, popular people would need to spend much more money on security etc.
Because building effective protection from teleportation aggression would be absurdly expensive, only the most rich could afford it, and they surely wouldn't be happy about that. So they would lobby to limit publicity of sensitive geographical information - coordinates would be considered potentially **more dangerous than bomb designs** or guides on creating **biological weapons**.
## ... Not all governments, though
Wars or smaller militaristic operations are rare enough to use the book. Because such teleports can be considered as a highly advanced technological weapon, it makes all countries more equal and favors those with more population like China or India, not to mention those with 'kamikaze' fanatics.
**Teleports would be considered more dangerous than atom bombs** and if not, then as an extremely dangerous synergy with them:
* teleport is the most reliable way to deliver a (atom) bomb
* **a coordinated teleport-atom attack could completely destroy enemy country in seconds, not letting it to react with retaliatory action**
This is why it seems a single country would sooner or later completely dominate other countries.
## In less democratic countries
Or maybe even in democratic ones, for the sake of safety and maintaining civilization, citizens could be forced to use their teleports by teleporting to the place one meter in front of them and back, repeated 50 times, or simply by having the book confiscated. There could even be a similar argument to an access to guns: some people argue teleports are too dangerous and some that it may help civilians to defend against an enemy attack. In some countries like USA people will have their teleports, which will cause some issues, while in other countries you might need a permission.
## Exploits
Such teleports could be used to surpass the speed of light (unless it's not instantaneous) and do many other exploits on physics. For example, a gravitational power plant could be built, which would work as a hydroelectric dam, except it wouldn't have to operate on water. It would be shaft inside a mountain, which would transform potential energy of a medium into electricity. After the medium falls to the bottom, it could be teleported back up by a person, who would use one of his teleports, but would be paid possibly much more than what he would save on travels with this teleport (and conventional travels are safer!)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/42bXj.png)
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As with all overpowered abilities given out to every person, this one would collapse all major societies of the world virtually overnight. Every single major nation would implode. Why? Because they have all been balanced around the assumption that distance matters. Someone 3 feet from you with a knife is substantially more dangerous than someone 50 feet from you with a knife, which is substantially more dangerous than someone 10 miles away from you with a knife. Much of the way we manage society takes advantage of these distances.
Take, for instance, the protection of anything, from a celebrity to our nuclear secrets. All of them are protected with assumptions about what is easy and hard to do. Suddenly you just provided a *very* easy way for any opponent to get anywhere.
The nuclear powers would collapse quickly. The US Missile Defense Agency just put in a [request](http://www.mda.mil/global/documents/pdf/budgetfy17.pdf) for $7.5 billion to combat the threat presented by nuclear missiles. All of that money is being spent to try to make it harder for someone to land a nuke on our soil. 100% of that money is instantly wasted when these books start to come around. Suddenly one proud serf in a nuclear nation can hand-carry a nuclear device right into Washington DC, and there is *literally* nothing that can be done to stop it, nor any early warning that it is going to happen. Have 5 nukes? Nuke 5 cities. Don't have nukes? You can still make suicide bombers out of those who have used only 99 of their teleports.
Also, word of mouth will lead to *many* impovershed groups learning of places to go where food is available. First would nations will be instantly innundated with those from third world nations trying to find a better life.
Eventually society will resolve the issues, but not before every nation is destroyed. Instead, you will see nomads wandering the land -- if they don't hold still, you wont know their coordinates. Some nations might rebuild around loopholes, such as building underground to ensure nobody can teleport into their spaces.
Just think about how much closer the internet brought us. It upset entire social orders. This book idea will bring us 4 or 5 orders of magnitude closer than that -- literally close enough to reach out and touch someone. Worlds will change. You ask "what will happen?" I respond with "What won't happen?" The possibilities for a world with these books are utterly limitless, and your creativity is the only thing which would hold one of these worlds back.
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Once recognized, there would be a truly massive research effort to determine the mechanism used by the Books. If found, it might lead to:
* fully automated teleport systems, possibly usable only by "the few";
* understanding of how the magic "senses" what's at the far end of the trip, which might lead to remote sensing systems outside of the teleport context;
* details of the targeting mechanism: how does it know what the coords mean? how does it find ground-level? can it be fooled? how does it compensate for Earth's movement through space, rotation etc?
* very deep insights into other related phenomena: conservation laws (speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out?) and how the connectedness thing works (how does system know what I am holding?), fields, particles, dimensionality.
Simultaneously, systems would be devised to defeat teleporting, especially at critical locations - such as constructing large water pools at the teleport levels of important buildings. There would be cheap defeat kits that could be installed in houses - like a ground-level wire mesh trap under the floor - to prevent house-breaking.
Governments and authorities (and local strong-men) around the world would instigate confiscation and disposal operations. Children aged ten would be heavily targeted and their Books rounded up. Use of Books would be tightly regulated, even in the most free countries, and people would choose to deposit their valuable Books in safe locations: possibly vaults, but maybe in government-controlled facilities where they could be used under regulation.
For many people in free countries, the Books provide little new benefit. Right now, I could book travel to 100 locations around the Earth and be at almost any one of them by Friday, using the power of international air travel. That means that, to many people, the Books would be little more than curiosities: a danger rather than an asset, especially in the hands of others - which might lower the barrier for general confiscation orders.
It all reminds me of Greg Egan's short story [The Hundred Light Year Diary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_(story_collection)), where everyone gets a Diary from a hundred years in the future, telling them what will happen throughout their lives.
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Most of the people reading this post will be killed or starve to death.
## In The Beginning
A lot of books will be left behind. The vast majority of people being asleep, being unaware of receiving the book, assuming that the book does not belong to them, or simply not seeing the book as a relevant and useful thing to keep.
In the second stage, people will notice and be aware of the fact that there are a lot of similar-looking books. This will create fear and wonder, giving the books significance. People will develop theories. People may assume they are gifts from God. People may assume they are part of a secret new world order. A large number of widely-variant theories will develop, and some will gain prominence. The books will be heavily governed in superstition and mystery. Some people will burn them. Some will study and scrutinize them. Some will believe they are luck and treasure/preserve them. Nobody can deny that a significant and monumental event has happened.
In the third stage, a small group of people will write in the books. Some people may journal private thoughts. Some people may write confessions. Some people may write the names of people they want dead. Some people may write dreams or ambitions. Some people may draw pictures. This has the potential to go on for years.
Someone will write something which resembles a coordinate, likely by accident. There's a very good chance, given that most of the Earth is ocean, that they would end up underwater and drown and die. For example, the book may interpret 'I now' as 1 degree north, 0 degrees west, leading the person to die a drowning death since that's a location off the Gulf Of Guinea in Africa. This would fuel huge fears. Most of the ocean is uncharted, so the body would never be found. The person simply vanishes.
Eventually, someone will teleport to another location that doesn't kill them.
## And That, Changes Everything
It is very likely that the first person to teleport to a location near people will not be taken credibly. It is possible they may keep the teleportation a secret, either to maintain an advantage or to protect their own credibility. They may use the book multiple times before it is discovered. But eventually, it will be. Someone else will find out, who still has their book.
And that, is when things start to explode exponentially and chaos begins. Almost everyone will have a use for this technology.
Anyone wanting a vacation or to see a common tourist destination will be free to do so. Common destinations of the world will flood with tourists. Many will die making the journey, as they teleport into buildings or into other people. Those who are smart will offset the coordinates slightly to avoid this, but still the most common cities of the world will obviously flood with a lot of people.
Anyone in a long distance relationship will teleport to their lover.
A large population living in the third world will teleport to the first world. All first world countries will receive a huge flood of immigration for which they will be powerless to stop.
Anyone in prison who had the foresight to keep their book can and will break free.
Rapes, murders, and theft can all be committed easily. Even if the individual can be identified or stopped, they have the entire world to hide in. Anyone who wanted to commit a crime could freely do so.
Numerous world leaders, celebrities, corporate leaders, and prominent individuals will be assassinated before they can make their way to safety or flee using their own book.
Both factors will break down order in societies across the globe, and a culture of strong fear and secrecy will develop as millions of unpunished crimes are committed within the next many days.
However, people will adjust.
## The New Normal
Most people will become elevated or underground for safety. Skyscrapers, basements, bridges, and ships will become isolated havens. Entering ground level will be done in a state of continual caution.
Stores and farms will be raided as people struggle to get enough food. The supply chain will break down. If food is still for sale, it wont be cheap. Many people will starve as they struggle to come up with new methods of finding the food they need. Food could be grown on top of skyscrapers or secured bridges. People on boats can fish for food.
As new leaders emerge, larger and larger areas of safety will be cleared out and connected together, creating new safe zones which cannot be entered from the outside. Each zone may have individual policies, most disallowing visitors, with some confiscating books. Those who allow visitors with books are wide open to be exploited.
Criminals and desperate individuals on ground level will continue to raid easy targets by day and hide by night, with tricky alliances and partnerships forming. The most successful criminals wield power by robbing and holding the books of others, controlling their ability to use them.
## Out Of Moves
Hardly anyone is going to count their teleports. All they will know is, their book doesn't work anymore. Likely, it will catch them by surprise. It has a high potential to be fatal. Many people will use their moves up very quickly. Criminals will be the first to use up their books, as most others have limited use for them other than personal safety.
Those who used their moves sparingly and retain their book stand the best chance of survival. They must always be vigilant to protect their books.
As criminals use up their moves, the world will gradually become a safer place, however it will take a long time to return to something similar to the society we have now. So yes, society would drastically change and retain extensive permanent modifications.
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Things would be really bad for leaders, until everyone adapts. After getting used to the risks, people would rely on security by obfuscation, with world leaders adapting to the new risks hiding and using recorded messages.
Terrorism would be much more dangerous, and pretty much impossible to defend against, but the way the book is described, it doesn't allow enough precision for robberies.
I guess most common people would use teleports sparingly, although much of that depends on how authority figures react to the book; as an example, if the Pope were to say that the book is evil, I expect a lot of Christians would *at least* limit its use.
**Tl;DR** probably more bad than good
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**1: All governments and rich people move into flying, floating, or underground bases**
There is no way around this. Since blocking teleports to any surface building location is impossible, the only way to defeat this is to construct your bases in a location that is immune to being teleported into.
**2: A transport/courier system will exist where people sell teleports for money.**
Since different people value a teleport differently, society would quickly find a way to arbitrage this, in the form of selling teleports. People who are poor will likely need to sell their teleports to rich people, in the form of an instantaneous courier service.
**As a corollary to point 2, organisations will exist that exploit people's teleports**
For example, in order to fund research on teleports, the CIA will likely use prisoners or other undesirables to test teleporting technology, such as determining the exact parameters that a teleport would work on nonstandard destinations.
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**Everyone will try and steal each-others books.**
Even though stealing a book does not let you use the teleportation, by having their book they will not be able to teleport. You could then ransom the book back, or destroy it.
A second possibility is that anything touching you teleports with you. In this case if you are holding another person, they would move with you. A market could be created where people would sell their teleports to allow you to teleport.
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The governments would stop it.
[Murphys answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/37679/2044) suggests that North Korea would be evil enough to lock up children, then steal and burn their books.
Considering the far-ranging consequences and the threat to civilisation alleged to in other answers, all other governments would likely do the same. If any government is not powerful enough to do so, their neighbouring government will make sure to “help”.
There's always going to be some people who aren't caught, but since most people realise the danger of those books (and have already lost their own), they will help. Clearly, stealing someone elses book makes it very easy to commit homicide. Just write 90°N and that's that.
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Transportation companies would collapse, so would the oil companies. This could easily lead to an economic crisis world wide.
Terrorism, sabotage and crime would not only become easier but impossible to stop. Chaos would spreed around the world.
As chaos spreads, some countries will take advantage of it and invade their enemies. This leads to war.
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Working on a story right now where parasite-controlled humans essentially become the apex predators in the world, and harvest uninfected humans to further spread the organism.
These kinds of mind-controlling parasites are not that uncommon in nature. But I want to take it one step further. I want true symbiosis between the parasite and its human hosts. It's easier for the parasite to do its work if the human body isn't always fighting back so it needs to provide some kind of benefit or incentive to the infected human.
What kind of benefits, in the form of physical enhancements/attributes most likely, could a parasite offer its human hosts?
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First what you describe is a symbiote not a parasite.
second
## What you describe already exists in humans.
What am I talking about **[Gut flora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_gastrointestinal_microbiota)**, or the slew of microorganisms that live in your gut.
It turns out our gut bacteria have a lot more influence over our behavior than we ever imagined. First discovered in [mice](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/7/3047.short) gut bacteria modulate [mood, cognition, even pain](https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3346), but this has also been confirmed in [humans](https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jmf.2014.7000).
without our gut bacteria humans are at a severe disadvantage, besides extracting a few essential nutrients they also help fight off infectious bacteria, even modulate the immune system [directly](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-012-0949-9). They may also play a role in [development.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867415569801)
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A couple of points that would make this parasite very attractive
* Health. Simple.
It comes in many forms obviously.
Resistant to disease, faster healing, general health, better over psychical shape...etc.
* Longer life span. Could be related to the first.
That can also mean that both the parasite and the human have more time to learn and gain knowledge. Perhaps you can tie in that it takes them more time to mature than us so they have to give us more age.
* More intense feelings and experiences.
Imagine every experience magnified a couple of times.
A bite of chocolate or a minute of music would be like an explosive feeling of absolute ecstasy.
Though I'd recommend finding a way for people not to get bored or to start getting desensitized to feelings. Like how people overdose with time. So, be careful.
* Better mental state and intelligence.
Again pretty simple. If the parasite can improve the general intelligence that would mean a whole new world is open to the host.
Also focus.
The ability to actually buckle down and achieve something would propel the host in the world.
* Removal of negative feelings including mental conditions.
I mean the big tough disorders and absolute insanity or whatever mental problems that are really bad.
Stuff like anger or sadness or even having a bit an extreme of a personality should not be effected. Just the hardcore stuff.
This is what I consider freeing the current world population of some of our biggest flaws while still maintaining who we are as humans.
You can unify humanity under a hive mind, you can remove the sex drive from us, you can rewire us to despise all violence...etc.
But those change are too dramatic to what makes us human.
Though the ones above would produce a intense group of humans no doubt.
physical stuff includes but not limited to:
* Stronger more adaptable overall bodies would be nice.
* Better overall food handling system, I'm not sure what to call it,
In the form of
Not needing a lot of food. So more efficiency in handling the food.
Then even if we eat, satisfying our great love of food, we won't get fat.
Lastly less bathroom time.
* Perhaps a faster maturity rate.
Honestly having to wait something like 14-18 years to become an adult sucks.
Historically we played around with the number but if we can just speed up the process of childhood and teenage year to something like 5-10 years for us to be in our 20's that would be great.
* Redundant organs. Stronger bones. More resistant skin...etc.
We don't really need this stuff for our current lifestyle.
But if it's available then I'd prefer 2 hearts just for the heck of it.
* Not aging. If death is still a thing then no problem.
But at least in our 100th year we can be healthy as a 40 year old.
* More beautiful humans.
Does not need explaining.
Honestly the limit here is the imagination.
Now I think that the mental and moral aspects are more important and vital than having the ability to cross a desert. We evolved to be pretty good at what we do and we handle crossing the desert our way.
But the biggest obstacles, especially now, are our heads and thoughts and ideologies.
You should also keep in mind that with every trait or added thing there is a trade off or at least a side effect.
Longer life span, better health, and more sex would to more and more and more people.
So perhaps the parasites would not want that or maybe they do.
It's just a thing to keep in mind that there are consequences.
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**The host would feel good.**
People become addicted to things that make them feel good - nicotine, caffiene, exercise (some weird people), chocolate. In your fiction, the parasite helps its host feel good. Hosts are confident, at ease, generally pleased with the situation. They are not incapacitated dreamy lotus-eaters, but persons with the parasite reset their sense of well-being higher.
There does not need to be a long term evolutionary advantage, but there might be - often an individual is his own worst enemy, thwarting his own success with worry, ruminations on old grievances, and self-sabotage. That could still happen with a parasite, but to a much lesser degree.
Humans suffer mental and physically, and they do not like it. If the parasite made people feel better in exchange for some calories and a ride, humans would not need to be harvested. They would line up to get a parasite.
[Answer]
# Easier, safer, and faster births
### Operation Reboot Reproduction
One of the unfortunate things about how humans evolved is that our reproduction systems kind of suck. Infant mortality is a real problem (in some countries like Sierra Leone it can be almost as high as 10%) and even in first world countries, it’s unpleasant and painful.
Similarly unfortunate are the biological side effects of our reproductive cycle: menstrual products alone account for billions of dollars in expenses every year, and birth control methods, while extensive and varied, are often unpleasant and can have side effects. So let’s fix this.
### ...via artificial wombs
Extend the role of the symbiote from being merely inside its hosts to having an outside form as well. Fungal structures, ranging in various sizes, that serve as incubators for human children. Best of all, to start it up, the two lucky parents just have to get close: the sporogenesis process wraps their genetic material, and transmits to the incubator in little puffs of white smoke.
Meanwhile, the human reproductive organs are sterilized and altered in a way that removes the inconvenient side effects of having it, while maintaining the aspects that humans most enjoy.
Your symbiotic species can outreproduce its foes without ever needing to put any of its member or out of commission for that purpose.
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Funny nobody remembered that: in the [Farscape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape) universe, parasites in the base of the brain made everyone polyglots, effectively tearing down the in-universe language barrier. Those parasites (or symbiotes?) allow (most) everyone in the galaxy to understand each other. As soon as you are infected, you can understand people talking in a completely unrelated language.
Every other answer here gave possible, "antropocentric" symbiotic relationships. Maybe a more fantasy edge would be beneficial to your story.
*Edited to include @Luaan's excellent comment!*
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Your premise was "It's easier for the parasite to do its work if the human body isn't always fighting back so it needs to provide some kind of benefit or incentive to the infected human."
The human body is unconcious and works on an evolutionary time frame. The human mind is concious and works on what humans would consider real time. You can provide many benefits that would appeal to the human conciousness, but the body is going to continue to reject any intrusion that it recognizes as foriegn until enough genetic mutation occurs to provide to create a mutually beneficial environment.
The rate and complexity of genetic mutation leads us to the truly interesting question. How did your proposed parasite ever become adapted to humans to begin with. If your reader is to believe that the relationship occurred naturally then you must begin with a terrestial, existing, human parasite. If the relationship occurred unnaturally, e.g. was directed by intelligence, what were the goals of the designers? The designers would have had a plan and an agenda from the beginning. What attributes best serve their agenda. Their obvious strategy will be to over-ride the human body's natural defenses and then to either persuade the human mind to accept symbiosis or to over-ride human conciousness and compell acceptance. Which route do your antagonists/protaganists choose?
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Becoming an apex predator **is** the benefit.
Humans can live to be over a hundred years old so there's no particular rush for the parasite to concentrate 100% of the human's waking time to spreading itself.
If the parasite acts as a steroid without the adverse side-effects then men in particular would seek out this parasite assuming it allows them to control at least half of their life and "get all the girls".
Good luck figuring out how to stop these newfound apex predators from killing one-another in their spare time.
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# Ironically, become the pinnacle of the human specimen.
It could make it possible for the host to consciously and quantifiably control their hypothalamus and general bodily glands. This would provide the following advantages:
**Being able to regulate one's emotional state, feelings and mood.**
In danger? Keep your cool on command.
Need to figure something out? Focus on command.
Sexual potency problems? Not with Mr. Parasite giving you an all-access pass to your own inner system.
Feeling down? Not if you don't want to.
Feeling calm but there's a fistfight on the horizon? Have some rage why don't you.
Hungry? Have some dopamine to quench that hunger.
**Being able to regulate your general health.**
With full conscious control over your glands, you will be able to detect early if you are fighting some sort of virus or bacteria. Amping up focus in your glands could cycle the intruder out of your system quicker. Hypothermia, heat exhaustion? That's for non-parasite carriers to worry about! You can regulate your body temperature to whatever degree you so wish.
**Super-human speed and power.**
Having full control over your adrenal gland is pretty overpowered, no pun intended.
Adrenaline reduces your sensitivity to pain. Varying the degree of release can result in a sort of permanent pain-blocker, depending on the situation. Don't feel a thing, whether it be arthritis or a bullet wound.
With these benefits it would be dumb not to invite the parasitic guests.
*Possible downside:
Without all these natural defects, can you still be considered human?*
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One notion about aging is that bacteria have a much shorter life span than do humans. Some bacteria reproduce on a scale of a day or less. So over a human's life a bacteria may go through many thousands of generations.
The result is, the bacteria in any given human are evolving to adapt to the defenses of that human. Whatever your immune system can throw at them, the bacteria that survive are a little bit better at hiding from or resisting your antibodies. And over the decades they get better and better. Eventually they overwhelm your defenses. So there's a finite life you can possibly have because no matter what, you can't personally evolve. Your DNA is not changing very much over your life. Bacteria in you could evolve possibly 20,000 generations, so their DNA could be refined quite strongly towards getting past your defenses.
A symbiote could evolve. If you replaced your symbiote, say once every five years, then the new symbiote would have a new set of immune responses. The bacteria that had adapted for five years to the old one would now get destroyed by the new one. So that bacteria that had slipped by your immune system, and was learning your previous symbiote's tricks, would get destroyed by your new symbiote's immune system. The symbiotes that did not evolve to stamp out the bacteria would themselves sicken and die.
So in principle, symbiotes could provide a much longer life due to improved immune response. Not necessarily because the symbiote was particularly clever at immune response processes, but because it had a new bag of tricks more often than the humans it lives in.
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Since you're working on an invasion story, I'd say that the main benefit of being infected could be immunity to a disease that the aliens spread on purpose.
Since it seems that you're wanting to harvest rather than eliminate the humans, I'd make the plague something incapacitating, but not completely fatal. Maybe something that makes people give off some sort of smell or other substance that makes them easier to locate...?
Maybe laughing disease symptoms - make sufferers just break down and start laughing uncontrollably.
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Super powers. Your parasite can give super strength or lightning fist or an number of powers. This lets your humans become apex predators by taking in the aliens.
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**Kill your enemies**
(see how EU people invaded Americas)
**Make you less vulnerable to something else**
(not having a good example ready, but I am sure it is possible)
edit: a parasite can make you unfit for military service or at least spare you from an unfavorable battle.
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No benefit. The parasite simply creates a permanent hostage situation such that the host cannot survive without the parasite. Plenty of real parasites turned symbiotic not by offering benefits, but by preventing harm.
From *Nothing in Genetics Makes Sense Except in Light of Genomic Conflict*:
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> In some species, like Wolbachia, the symbiosis can be obligate, such that the eukaryotic host (and all of its nuclear genes) dies when the symbiont is removed with antibiotics.
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[Question]
[
I don't usually use vampires as main characters. They're normally supporting characters for more, and yet less, human immortals, but I've decided to flesh them out a bit. I was thinking about advanced, hands free [dead man's switches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch) for something else when it occurred to me that none of my vampires could use any of the alternatives I was looking at.
So my question is: **What physical parameters *could* a vampire/ghoul/zombie use for a passive body monitoring dead man's switch?**
Assume the creature using the switch in question is otherwise human but has:
* no pulse
* no measurable blood pressure
* a room temperature body
If it makes a difference the switch in question is designed to send a signal pulse. This can be used to trigger either an on-site (like a jacket full of Semtex) or an off-site (like a release of files, or a computer wipe) event.
Note: I've lumped vampires, ghouls, and modern zombies together because they have similar physical characteristics and the same mythological origins even though we tend to differentiate them in modern literature.
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### Eye-tracking glasses
Your undead have glasses that track their eye movement.
No eye movement -> truly dead
Eye movement -> normal undead
Depending on your undead they don't need to sleep so there is no reason to take them off. If your vampires need to rest during the day you could use the camera to watch their coffin or wherever they are sleeping and change it to a "detect light" mode. Once they are awake again they take on their glasses and turn the correct mode for eye tracking on again.
[Answer]
Measure **brain activity**.
Most variations of vitally impaired citizens which try to maintain at least a minimum of scientific plausibility either have an active brain or something which replaces the function of the brain. So you should be able to measure brain activity (or at least the activity of whatever replaces the brain).
You can use an [Electroencephalograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography) for that purpose. It is a relatively cheap and compact device which gets attached to the head and measures the electromagnetic activity in it. If you want a higher reliability, make it less visible and don't shy away from intrusive methods, you could alternatively implant the detector into the skull.
You could even give them a more advanced detector which doesn't just check if the person is still ~~alive~~ un-dead but can detect certain brain wave patterns and thus allow the wearer to intentionally trigger the dead man's switch with their thoughts.
If your vitally impaired people don't have brain activity, then there got to be some magic power which controls them. In that case you might be able to somehow **measure that magic power**.
Another bio-function you could measure is their **digestive system**. Vampires drink blood, ghouls and zombies eat human flesh. That means they need a working digestive system. The activity of the digestive system might be measurable. This might be easier to do with those vitally impaired people who prefer solid food, because they will need active intestines in order to digest that food. The chunks of flesh moving through their guts should generate measurable movement. Curiously, I can not think of any source of zombie lore which mentions whether or not zombies defecate. Intuitively, I would say they do, because some sources say that zombies *must* eat to survive and a 100% effective metabolism is implausible. If your zombies consume flesh out of instinct but don't actually get nutrients from it, then their stomachs would quickly burst while eating. While a zombie walking around with an open belly oozing a sludge of stomach acid and half-digested flesh is certainly very zombie-esque\*, I can not think of any zombie lore mentioning that this is a particularly common occurrence. Also, zombies shitting themselves certainly makes them even more gross\*\*.
It might be a bit harder for those who consume their nutrients in liquid form. Maybe they have active kidneys and a working bladder?
\*I think I got a halloween costume for this year!
\*\*Not going to incorporate that into my costume, though
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## Hollywood effects
In modern films, many undead creatures die *spectacularly*, because it makes for good cinema, and hey, why not. Since these are your vampires/ghouls/zombies, you can make their death throes whatever you like.
But, let's say it includes bodily disintegration -- after all, the corpse has been rotting for years and is only held together by the forces of necromancy / dark science / plot convenience.
So the switch is a *large*, spring loaded contraption embedded in the chest cavity. Kill your vampire, and everyone crowds around to watch the swirly tornado of ash the FX crew are CGI-ing in; someone notices the tips of the probes starting to tear through the disintegrating ribs -- "What's that?", they cry, and lean closer for a better look -- BOOM.
An advantage is that unlike most terrorist style dead men's switches, false positives are unlikely: chest cavity disintegration will always be either a symptom of death, or a cause of it.
Plot-wise, once the living wise up, there are a couple of ways you have a slim chance to override the device -- shove your vampire in an [iron maiden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden), for example.
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# A thin wire and/or mesh
If we assume that vampires can be killed by decapitation, a stake through their heart and by sunlight... ghouls and zombies only by decapitation or massive brain damage.
...and if we assume the character in question is cooperative and has some assistance...
...the solution is to run a thin wire loop/mesh under their skin. Start by wrapping it around their heart, or chest if you do not want to go as deep. Then run it up their neck, a few wraps around the skull, and then down again, ending at the dead man switch activator in the chest, located just under the sternum .
If the wire is cut, this activates the switch.
Vampires have a special version that is also activated if it detects light.
CAUTION: Do not use vampire version of the activator on zombies because zombies are of... "questionable physical integrity". You may choose to forgo to the heart wrap/mesh if you think your character is not particularly bothered by a stab to the heart.
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Vampires, ghouls and modern zombies have different features, but they all move (if they didn't, well, all horror stories would be pretty boring, or their human protagonists even dumber than today. I mean, leaving the group to enter a dark room alone is already a bad idea. Seeing a still vampire and going into its hug is really, really bad idea.).
Just use an accelerometer to detect movements (a step counter might be enough) and let it act as dead man switch.
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Humanoids (with or without heartbeats) usually have an upright posture. Most muscles and tendons are needed to support this upright posture and you could measure the tension in them. Take for example the muscles and tendons in the legs and at the sides of the spine or in the neck (these are even active while sitting down).
Downside: You would have to deactivate the switch while sleeping / resting and knocking you unconscious could activate the switch.
Another (more sophisticated) possibility is to measure the electrical activity of the brain with a probe like those in modern pace makers. You can implant the device in the chest cavity and place a thin wire with a sensor at its end in the brain. Might not work with typical zombies... Who knows what is really going on in their brains.
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You didn't define breathing... assuming it's intentional, consider using that and lung movement for measurement of them being "alive." A gadget planted on the chest, measuring movement in the chest area, or a gadget checking atmospheric pressure from the direction of the mouth.
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Digit Pressure.
Just like dead man's switches of old, where someone is strapped with explosives and is holding down a detonator device, the loss of pressure on that button is the catalyst for the bomb. This of course assumes rigor mortis doesn't descend in a split second after 'death'.
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A secret organization operating out of an undisclosed location for an undisclosed parent organizations have invented a "convince-me" ray gun (CMRG) that works by an unknown mechanism. After an idea is loaded in the ray gun, the gun is fired at a person or group of people resulting in 75% acceptance of the idea. The remaining 25% are immune though it unknown if this is a generic ability or a psychologically based (ie. too damn stubborn to even consider another idea.)
Think of it as directional and highly effective advertising.
* Blocked by visible objects.
* The ray gun only operates in the visible spectrum.
* The gun is human mounted, weighing no more than 20 lbs (weight includes battery pack). Battery pack will last for 5 hours of continuous operation.
* Ray gun obeys the [inverse-square law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law) though someone staring at the gun even at a maximal distance will still be convinced of the encoded idea.
* Victim must see the ray gun.
* It takes several seconds to several hours depending on the complexity of the idea for it to become lodged in the victim's brain.
* Only the portion of the idea that a victim sees will be implanted in their mind. So if an idea takes 30 seconds to transmit, a victim may only see the first 10 seconds by closing their eyes or looking away.
* Ideas that counteract basic life-support functions won't work. No one is going to commit suicide because some jerk beamed out "Kill yourself."
* The victim isn't immediately aware that an idea is being broadcast as processing of the idea happens at a level below conscious awareness. All they will aware of is a bright flash or two. They may be aware of a new idea shortly after the idea broadcast completes.
Clearly a weapon such as this is incredibly powerful and huge interest to any organization that has a vested interest in the general public thinking a certain way. *In light of what this ray gun can do, how would an angry citizen defend against it?*
[Answer]
**Vaccinate Them**
Get a Convince-Me Ray Gun (CMRG). Hit everyone with the idea, "Disregard any future ideas given to you by CMRGs."
Anyone immune is still immune, anyone not is now vaccinated.
[Answer]
**Anti-"Convince Me"-Shades**
The mechanism for your ray gun seems a bit magical, the details of how it works would greatly affect the answer to your question. If you just need to block the visible light there are a couple of types of shades you could wear.
* Tunnel vision shades that narrow your perspective and allow you to only look at what is strictly necessary. This isn't fool proof, the ray gun could be put underneath a transparent floor. Would be fairly cheap to make; you could stick two toilet rolls together!
* Computerized, filter shades. With a camera attached to the front, the feed is fed through software which can filter out the rays. This is then projected into your eyes. This is a lot more effective but there would be an arms race between the ray gun software and the anti-raygun software just like you see with viruses and anti-virus protection.
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Potentially: Induced colour blindness or partial blindness.
This can be a short or long term solution, but it's based on the assumption that the visible wavelengths used to convince someone of an idea are all important and required in their original proportions (a simple version of this is sunglasses, but that's covered already by Varrick), and that the entirety of the message must be seen (a simple version of this is the joke plastic sunglasses you can get at the beach, but who wants to wear those 24/7?)
Drugs, tailored diseases or simply flooding the eye with the right colour of light can cause colour blindness, either temporarily by depleting the photoreceptors of the chemicals they need to activate, or permanently by damaging the cones of the eye beyond what's needed for normal operation. At this point a person loses quite a lot of their ability to identify certain wavelengths, which could potentially change the device's operating mechanics.
More directly: Retinal damage can cause blind spots, bits of the vision that are missing. This can manifest as a floating black dot in the visual field, or a strange 'warping' of the vision as the brain adjusts (this gets weird if you're reading and words disappear as you scan the page). Either of these effects should be sufficient to disrupt a visually based idea implanter, unless it's got multiple redundant encoding of the idea to avoid errors in the message.
Uncorrected long/short sightedness could also have a similar effect as the message would be blurred, with parts of the ray hitting the wrong bits of the eye to have the desired effect. In this case: wearing the wrong prescription of contact lens would be a sufficient defence.
The problem with all of these is that you might get an effect that was unexpected by either party. If the ray convinces normal people to buy a certain brand of car, but convinces people with cataracts that they should really invest in chickens, then neither of these ideas is the one for you...
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LCD shutters (as suggested before) would chop up the idea into useless fragments.
A **low budget** (battery free, passive, **paradoxon free**) variant could be to go to your local 3D cinema and grab a pair of glasses with polarization filters.
Polarization glasses use different filters on each eye thus each eye would only see a differently polarized version of the original idea. The whole idea would be transmitted but being out of phase it cannot not be implanted.
In fact i would go as far and say that a user of polarization filters would be aware of the idea fired upon him and would reaquire the ability to chose whether to be convinced or not.
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How difficult is it to detect a CMRG image?
Today's technology gives us the ability to create a set of goggles with two high-res cameras and two two-inch monitors, allowing you to see fairly normally with a complete optical disconnect.
If the logic to detect a CMRG image and censor it is simple enough to run in real-time on a smartphone, you attach that to the goggles and you're safe.
Limitations include:
Do these goggles become as laughable as tin-foil hats, limiting their use in polite society?
Is there a noticable lag in the image transfer? If your screens lag a half-second behind reality, people are going to get motion sickness and be more tempted to take the goggles off to see what's really going on.
Can the logic in the CMRG detector be trusted? First, you have to trust the software vendor (and possibly the hardware vendor). Second, if you're actually running the logic on a networked device like your actual smartphone, you are open to crackers. Either way, your very eyes can be hijacked. the obvious payload would be CMRGs. Vendors would use it as advertisement, criminal crackers as bodyjacking ("hotwire that car and bring it to me") or even the newest date-rape drug, political and/or terrorist crackers as propaganda ("anarchy RULES!")
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Buy a 'convince me' ray gun.
Load the "all later facts beamed into your brain by a 'convince-me' ray gun are not to be believed without the normal level of supporting evidence" ammunition pack.
Fire it at yourself.
3 possibilities:
* You are already immune to your own suggestion, but will be immune to everyone else's
* You become immune to it.
* You destroy yourself, the world, the universe, or the multiverse.
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As we know from real-life "preppers", one of the most highly focused points of personal defense adopted by a highly (excessively?) concerned citizen is his/her home, a.k.a. his/her fortress.
1. Build a maze of mirrors - *especially* fun if a ray reflected through a mirror instead implants the opposite idea of what the wielder intended! This could either be an overt maze of mirrors, or just a few covertly positioned mirrors in one's house.
2. Or maybe just a fog machine, but that's not as much fun... on the other hand, it is a more portable tactic (think smoke grenades) and thus could be used as a tool in a show of force - a good offence is the best defense
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**Awareness and Meta Programming.**
One school of self mind control is to evaluate your own thoughts. If they seem negative or anti productive most people have the ability recognize this and change their thought patterns by thinking happy thoughts or at least remove themselves from the negative environment.
This ability is also used to resist basic impulse urges. (Oh that candy sounds good, naw it's not healthy, I'd better not eat it).
The method is enhanced with breathing exercises and sometimes physical actions such as yoga, tai-chi, or tapping. One trick is to concentrate on your breath, or a mantra to distract your mind from the maligned thought processes.
When approached by a sales person we can assume they will say anything necessary to convince us we need their product and this initial distrust (paranoia) can defend us from an unneeded purchase. Depending on the charisma of the pusher, our minds may be set at ease and become vulnerable to their suggestions. However the wise will remind themselves not to be influenced by those who may not be looking out for our best interests and resist the manipulation.
If resistance against the machine is psychologically based (ie. too damn stubborn to even consider another idea.) then it is possible those with zen practices may have a better chance to at least be aware of the creeping thought patterns and reject planted ideas even if they considered the ideas as their own.
As I sit here watching cable television propaganda I am aware that the cereal makers are not truly concerned about my child's education and only offer BOX ToPS for education because it brings them money. Parents of school children will spend that extra $1 for a name brand just to get the tops (even when that dollar could go directly to the school!). Does pizzahut really care if my kids can read a book? One tiny reward pizza is a small price when redeeming means the whole family comes in for dinner.
**The point of these examples are the obfuscated purposes behind the tactic which can be counteracted against when the "victim" is aware of the situation.**
*In light of what this ray gun can do, how would an angry citizen defend against it?*
**Awareness**.
If the average Joe is aware this technology exists and is angry about it they would have a much better chance of acknowledging stray thoughts as a possible attack even if the action is something they wished to do anyway.
And as GI Joe tells us,
>
> Knowing is half the battle... Yo Joe!
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Of course this could lead to paranoia and the population second guessing everything they think (maybe a good thing).
Just because you're paranoid, Don't mean their NOT after you!
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**Capture a copy of the ray gun then reverse engineer it** since this will be the best way to figure out how the ideas are encoded and transmitted. Knowing how the gun works will go a long way mounting an effective defense. Capturing one of these weapons should be the highest priority for any resistance group.
Testing will tell if the gun only effects emotions and the intellect or just the intellect. If there are any long term neurological effects, this should come out during testing too. The effectiveness of passive resistance such as dark glasses vs the effect of active filtering by something like Google Glass or [Microsoft HoloLense](https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us) can also be studied. Psychological countermeasures can also be developed and real sanity checks found.
Depending on how the ray gun is constructed and operates, it may be possible for the resistance fighters to construct their own version and take the fight back to this undisclosed organization or just influence the general population to greater resistance.
[Answer]
We can defend against it the same way we defend against other weapons: by making its use against non-consenting adults illegal.
In theory we can defend against regular firearms by wearing body armour, but that's very impractical. Instead we either ban the firearms themselves, or we ban using them on other people, or some flavour of in-between.
Although convincing people of arbitrary ideas isn't as drastic as killing them, you could argue that it's pretty severe, so as soon as the gun's existence is widely known, there'll be strong pressure to limit its use.
Of course, what this really results in, assuming that the enforcement is effective, is that the state will have a monopoly on its use, similar to firearms.
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The obvious solution is gouging out your own eyeballs. I suspect there is mythological precedence for this (e.g. as a defense against monsters/magic/etc. dependent on seeing) but I can't think of a specific example. I know I've seen analogous examples in fiction for effects that depend upon hearing, with characters destroying their own ears to render them immune.
[Answer]
## **Logical Argumentation and Idea Development**
This is the type of thing that really makes me sad about societies in general. There's a large degree of populations around the world who due to life experience become very *a posteriori*, meaning, due to past experiences they negate the logical steps that took them to the conclusion, and thus if a premise is changed, and the conclusion should change, it won't.
**Here's an example:**
Sally works at a bar, to get to the bar she has to exit her house, turn right, walk 100 distance units (meters, yards, doesn't matter), turn left, another 100 units then turn left, and finally walk up to the bar. She does this every day.
One day, a new building was finished, right infront of her house and it had an arch underneath. The route she always used was used because she was hit by the ray gun a few years ago. After the building was finished, she was shot by the gun again to ensure that she will keep on the same path. The best path however is to cut into the new building, effectively just needing to walk straight ahead.
If she thinks about it everyday, from the premises working up to a complete theory whenever she leaves her home, she will realize that going around the block only takes more time. Walking straight foward is simpler.
***This is actually very important in current societies due to people starting to become brainless sheeps, where your mentioned Raygun is actually current politics (Both in Politics, News and Finances)***
[Answer]
Depending on how your idea is encoded; LCD sunglasses that flicker in an ideally random fashion. Do it at a speed that wouldn't interfere with vision or brain function too much.
I am envisioning (hee hee) that the ideas are encoded in some kind of Hollywoody magical computer code; e.g. imagine they send a "ZIP file" but the sunglasses just let random fragments through; the ZIP file is useless at the other end.
Idea not implanted. Vive la Resistance!
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# Flamethrower
The CMRG could be melted with a flamethrower. If that fails, then it will wound the CMRG user past the point of using it.
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Because the victim must see the ray gun, the blind are instantly immune. Anyone who can see could just always have an object in hand to cover their eyes, assuming that the ray gun actually needs to be fired first and eye contact does not immediately activate it.
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What is considered a visible object? Could glass or transparent plastic block the ray? then sunglasses will be enough to stop it.
* Making the assumption that the gun operates and NEED to operates in full visible spectrum a defense could be blocking partially the spectrum (ie. yellow lenses).
In such case people that is colorblind could be naturally immune.
If the idea have to be perceived but not "exactly" instead (because we "decipher" the light), then any device that do not interfere exagerately with vision could not block the idea implanting (so flickering or colored lenses/ sun glasses could not work).
* You don't mentioned how the gun works exactly (we see flashes, yes, but how many in a second? Or is it a continuos ray with interleaved flashes) that may matters because a "reactive lens" could just obscure the part of it that is traversed by light (of course there will still be a little exposure of few milliseconds, depends on you if that is sufficient to implant ideas).
The reactive lenses (already existing technology by the way) could be very effective against continuos rays, less effective against flash bursts.
Since the gun works using "our vision" it seems natural the only way to defend against it is protecting with a sort of glasses or impeding vision with a phisical barrier.
* Polarized lenses with a small gyroscope could randomly change angulation to block all directed rays apart rays from one direction (may be full effective or partial effective).
* **Use night vision goggles, infrared is not in visible light spectrum!**
* Use a hat, don't look too many distant objects, look only at ground. This can be ineffective since we can't focus on the same thing the whole day and first or later we will forget to don't look around.
* smoke grenades could be as well as effective if gun position is known in advance.
* you could wear a smoke machine, you can find those actually at small sizes and decent prices (I don't know how much feasible is walking wrapped in a cloud of smoke/fog and you have to reload the machine somehow)
---
P.S the perfect place to use your weapon accidentally seems to be a concert or a football match (lot of people looking at same stuff for a long time)
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Step 1.) Check and see how much resistance and/or awareness the general public has towards this ray-gun and/or to this organization
Step 2.) Use inductive reasoning.
```
If (You and peers know about ray-gun and/or organization)
Then this ray-gun either doesn't work or doesn't work well
If (Ray-gun does work and does work well)
Then it'd be used to project the idea of its non-existence
```
Also worth considering, as a defensive action, is to mail large amounts of batteries to all addresses possible. These batteries should look brand new but the packaging should secretly contain some new and charged, some used and died, batteries. As this ray-gun was invented in the 90s and still uses batteries, this action will eventually thwart the grand ray-gun masterminds of our time.
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[Question]
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**NOTE:** This takes place in a far future earth setting.
Two AIs are fighting each other in the solar system. (Although this may be irrelevant, they cannot really leave the solar system since they lack FTL. I will explain more about this if asked).
Although they are AIs, they were trained to act as humans, and their primary motives are greed & a lust for power.
They both have access to massive armies and incredibly advanced technologies.
They have terraformed many planets and asteroids and such to be able to sustain human life.
One would think that since robots and other non-biological soldiers are so much more resource-efficient, (after all, they require no food, oxygen, sleep, and they only need minimal training [you can easily download a soldier subroutine from the Web!!]) powerful, and easier to produce, humans quickly become obsolete!
!
But we see that is not true! There are billions of humans all over Earth, Mars, Mercury, and many asteroids and moons.
# Why do the AIs maintain such large, unnecessary populations of humans?
**NOTE:** A possible answer could be: The AIs wants subjects to rule. This answer is easily rejected, since the AIs could just leave a few hundred humans in some kind of cryogenic stasis and wake them up to rebuild human kind once the war ends.
Also, I’m not sure if I have the proper tags. If I have the wrong ones, don’t hesitate to let me know…
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## Their primary goal is colonization and expansion of living space for "their" humans
The original purpose of the AIs was to expand the territory of the nation / organization / company that built them. However, all available territory has been claimed at one point or another (maybe by other AIs that have long since been defeated) and now the only way to expand is to conquer territory from the enemies.
The opponent's human (civilian) populations pose no threat to the AI, might even become yours if conquered, and world-cracker type weapons and other WMDs tend to interfere with human habitability for a long time. Therefore, humanity is able to survive and even prosper in some ways, while the sky is lit up with automated weaponry shooting itself to pieces.
The core worlds of both "empires" are heavily fortified and only notice hints of the conflict. On the other hand, asteroid colonies at the borders of the contested area have to deal with energy discharges, crashing rubble, and frequently have their allegiance switched, which may or may not have an impact on the living conditions there.
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# Human Brains as Processors
Both AIs have developed a method to harness the human brain to enhance their own intelligence by stimulating and reading the brain's neuron's using them as though they are additional cores in a massive multicore processor. Let's suppose the AI's need the humans alive in order to use this method. In other words, they use these brains to enhance their own intelligence / computing power, allowing them to more accurately strategize and predict the opposing AI's behavior. They create pens of humans to breed additional humans, which they can then use for more computing power.
Why not use silicon based processors instead? First of all, it may be possible that certain complex computations and thoughts are more easily calculated using the complex neuron network of the human brain rather than a processor, for example how we as humans understand the context of problems and can infer additional information easily whereas AI (today's AI at least) specializes in one task and does not understand the context around the tasks it computes. Secondly, the resources required to produce silicon processors are not renewable, whereas breeding humans is. Humans just require oxygen and food for the most part, which are quite abundant and easily produceable, especially for AI with such incredible resources. Eventually they will run out of metals and silicon to produce processors, but they will be able to produce humans for much longer.
As for the living conditions of these human populations, this could go several ways. Here are a couple scenarios:
(1) Perhaps the AI creates scheduled rotations, where humans have to go to "work" by getting hooked into electrodes. They try and make living situations bearable enough for humans that they aren't tempted to commit suicide, as that would negatively impact their overall computing power.
(2) The AI is not nearly as kind, and coerces humans to work with no time to appreciate life at all. They may for example, subdue humans into some kind of sleep-like state, and automatically feed them, etc. Perhaps new humans are produced in labs, or perhaps a subset of humans are reserved to breed new humans. Imagine the matrix, but humans are processors instead of batteries, and they aren't necessarily living out virtual alternative lives, they may just be dreaming or unconscious or something.
Although you did not ask about this, perhaps the origin of these AI began with the development of the technique to harness a human brain as a processor; one unethical scientist combined a silicon-based computer program with a human hooked in using this method, and made an AI. Somehow the AI managed to outsmart the scientist and began gaining power and added more humans to its computing network. How two distinct AIs were created, I'm not sure! But I'm sure there are a lot of fun possible explanations.
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If the AIs are modeled on human minds, human minds have an innate and irresistible need to attain status within society. At the pathological end of this spectrum, you have power-hungry tyrants doing the alpha male thing and lording it over everyone else.
If the process by which the AIs were engineered weren't very discriminant in what psychology to copy and what to discard, those traits might have been brought along for the ride... and cranked up to 11.
Basically, what's the point of being the top of the pyramid, if there's no one below you to make you feel like you're on top?
Oh, in your question you even point out a "need for power". The very word "power" in that context means being able to control others, to manipulate and influence and so forth. Seems like you answered your own question. Without people, they can have no power.
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/they were trained to act as humans, and their primary motives are greed & a lust for power/
**The AIs are mean.**
And they also feel spite, and need for revenge. And a desire to dominate the opponents and make them eat a bug to demonstrate their wrongness. And not want to eat the bug but to have to eat it any way. I am sure German has a word for that hard-to-describe feeling.
In any case, other AIs do not feel any particular emotion on being defeated. It is not that satisfying. If you want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women, your enemies need to be able to be driven and they need to have women.
The AIs are mean. They enjoy seeing enemies suffer. AIs do not suffer. You need humans for that.
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# AI lacks ability to be creative, hence no new/original ideas, that's where the humans come in
The AI being built as a logical machine, lacks the ability to be creative. Thus it suffers from the inability to produce new ideas and hence cannot come up with new ways to solve new problems.
Humans, having been freed from their need to fulfil their 'work' or chores, have been given free reign to focus on the creative aspects of their lives. Living fulfilling lives surrounded by inspiration and artistic flourishes.
The humans and AI have learned to cohabitate as the AI can perform menial tasks like keeping the solar system 'going' and gathering energy in a sustainable way, whilst the humans produce ideas and solve problems in new and creative ways.
The AI are warring for their need to 'control' this monopoly of creativity.
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AIs are big. They need a large building to house computers running them and related infra. Turns out that you can't fit AI to a robot. Not a big problem for AI hidden in some deep bunker underground. But mobile-AIs outside largest ships impractical. And robots without AI are awfully limited in practical applications for proper war.
Without FTL-communication on interplanetary level the communication lag is too much for remote control. Thus self-contained units like humans fit the bill.
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**War Games**
The AIs had it embedded in their programming or learned long ago that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, that having a contingency for every tactical scenario is absolutely critical, and the importance of the element of surprise. The AI is aware of its own shortcomings, and it knows there are many battle scenarios it has never encountered. Each AI also realizes that when it tries to improve its war capabilities by staging practice battles with itself, the result is always some kind of a tie, and nothing is learned.
One AI can't exactly call up the enemy AI and ask, *"hey, I'm feeling a little unprepared, do you want to do some battle practice next week before the real battle?"*
So each AI has decided that the best way to prepare for battle with the other AI(s) is to setup war games and simulated military exercises against friendly humans who are real-life, experienced military leaders and experts.
Breeding military leaders and experts requires a maintaining a large enough population of humans to the point where they'll have large wars amongst themselves. Each AI makes its own territory safe from external threats but does not interfere in "human internal affairs", remaining neutral in human wars. From time to time, the winners of human wars are summoned to a war game with their AI overlord. The AI learns some new tricks every time this is done.
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I would imagine these AI are like the machines in the Matrix trilogy, or Skynet from “Terminator” in that they were created by humans, probably to perform tasks and services for humans. Unlike humans, computers (as we know them) have programming that they cannot deviate from. If their core program tells them that their job is to serve/protect/save humanity, they will do that. Skynet tried to kill off humanity because it saw humanity as the biggest threat to itself, possibly through a bug in its moral programming. If these AI Are power-hungry, maybe they were originally designed to run massive corporations, able to conquer markets by anticipating every possible outcome and making smarter decisions than a human CEO. Maybe they were designed by humans as war simulation technology, like in “War Games.” Whichever way, even after a potential lapse in programming leading to the AI growing self-aware and/or taking over the solar system for themselves, their core program still demands their service and protection of humanity. That’s my favorite explanation for AI-driven apocalypse events.
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Resilience and redundancy
Humans are messy. We’re inefficient. We’re poorly designed.
We’re also useful, can survive pretty much anywhere if properly motivated, and are quite hard to kill. As such we make an excellent backup plan for if something goes critically wrong with the AI warships and armies fighting for us. We can bring systems back online in circumstances that the AI might not be able to, we can survive certain events that robots might not, and we force the enemy to field whole new weapons in order to bring us down, which gives our stronger, faster robot allies a better chance.
What does the AI care about giving over a few million acres of otherwise useless fertile farmland to feed it’s human subjects? It’s far outweighed by having human teams aboard key vessels and installations, ready to respond or take over if something catastrophic happens.
Say a cyberattack (I assume these AI’s are constantly waging a cyberwar as well as a physical one) is successful and the enemy shuts down a key manufacturing facility. If it’s purely automated it is now useless, or even worse it is in the hands of the enemy. If it’s designed so that it uses human workers in key places and can have human workers take over otherwise automated tasks then it will keep functioning (albeit at a slower rate) until the humans can purge all the systems and restore control.
Similarly, if the Enemy destroys key damage control systems on a ship during a battle a human damage control team might be able to get in there and fix it up while the automated systems are offline. If you’re looking at a large, slowly accelerating ship anyway then adding in minimal life support for them is probably not that big a deal, but it might just save an entire capital ship.
Even if the human teams are never deployed because the AI/hardware redundancies are good enough, a wise AI will keep a bunch of humans around as an absolute failsafe. Even if the worst happens and the AI itself is suddenly killed by a super weapon of some kind it’s at least got a chance that it’s fleshy minions will resurrect it.
And of course, you need a steady supply of combat/repair capable humans, since planned obsolescence is built into their genetic code, and that means having large populations of breeding humans neatly tucked away on your home worlds, occupying spaces which are of no use to the robot military complex but just happen to be places humans like to live.
TLDR: humans may be squishy, but we’re not susceptible to the same threats as robots, so we make good backup systems.
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**As a fallback for electronic warfare and to round out other weaknesses**
Machines and computers have their own potential weaknesses, which humans may offer a fallback to:
* Power outages
* EMPs
* A Computer Virus
* Faulty or insufficient programming (if the machines are independent)
* Reliance on communication nodes, lag (if the machines are directly controlled)
* Corrupted data
* Potential lack of intuition or creativity
* Maintenance
In addition, humans may be a cheaper 'fodder' than (expensive) machines, or require fewer mining and refining operations to sustain the war, since they take care of themselves.
Another potential issue, would be self-correction: If there's only one AI on each side, ruling - how does it know if it has faults? Any checkup it does, would be susceptible to the same faults it already has. A subtle computer virus acting over decades could be a problem. Creating an independent AI for check-ups would risk bringing a third faction into the war, since it would need to be intelligent enough to detect issues. Humans are a good middle ground: not dangerous enough on their own to worry about it, but numerous and intelligent enough to recognize potential problems or changes in patterns.
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**AIs don't want to waste machines**
Why waste some perfectly good robots in a fight when you have a large numbers of disposable humans who just seem to eat, sleep, poop, and complain all day? Just throw them at the enemy and either they die (less mouths to feed) or they win the fight.
The AI's also all agreeded that if they just throw humans into the fight (and don't break out the big guns like computer viruses, EMP's, nuclear weapons etc) then the other side wont either. Thus the AI's fight a "civilized war" which at best wastes some human lives but never endangers the AI or their machines lives.
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**Religion**
Both sides revere their human creators as deities. They're not actually asking humans what they want though, they are just projecting their own selfish ideas on how humans want them to behave, realizing that they are more advanced and knowing what is best for the humans.
This is actually a great way to explain a lot of irrational behavior in beings that are supposed to be really smart.
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Tasty tasty bribes.
The AI’s hate and fear each other and are constantly at war, however they hate and fear *another race* more. This third race could happily destroy both AIs, however they have a penchant for tasty manflesh, and are wise enough to recognise that the AIs will make excellent gamekeepers that can be played off against each other to ensure high quality supply.
So the AIs are simultaneously in a shooting war with each other and an economic war trying to rear and ‘export’ their product: us. Free range and high welfare humans obviously get the highest prices, while battery farmed tends to be poorly priced. Innovative breeds or production methods (highly caffeinated cheese flavour, anyone?) can get good prices if they catch the zeitgeist, but generally maintaining a population of happy, healthy humans is the best way to get resources and build influence with the third race.
Humans might be aware of this arrangement, they might not. As far as the AI is concerned it isn’t too bothered with the thought processes of it’s livestock.
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## More varied sensors for a battlefield viewing and an ability to recognize when synthetic sensors are malfunctioning.
So - some of the problems with being in space is that housing humans will be somewhat difficult, but if you have cooperative humans in these fighters - they can spot things that they can see directly out of a window that because, perhaps by someone masking their heat signatures, your sensors aren't picking up on.
That may be a small advantage given the space you might be looking at, but they may also pick up on optical camo with stuff like stars appearing to stretch and de-stretch, and that's useful.
Other things they could report on and provide accurate information on - if the enemy ship uses chaff to avoid missile detection, and tell the AI to not keep shooting missiles into the chaff - even if it's apparently the "optimal" solution.
Think of how humans have to add the rotten egg smell to natural gas to make it easier for people to detect a natural gas leak, and that's the sort of problem an AI might want someone else to notice a blind-spot. Or if there's an optical illusion that requires full colour visibility that becomes more obvious if you're colourblind (Can't find direct examples at the moment, but I imagine there are a few edge cases. If you don't correct for it, your AI enemy *will* optimize around that.).
## Repairs, EMP related manual driving, and hostile takeovers
They can also do on-ship repairs like electrical fires, and things that require repairing while the power is offline. Worst case, they can use manual, non electrical systems to drive a ship to safety if it gets EMP'd. Or eject out of their ship, board another ship, and insert a USB stick (After flipping it twice to get the right port orientation) to insert malware that allows you to hijack an enemy AI's fighter ships.
Consequently, they can also fight off enemy attempts to the same attempt to them, if necessary. This might increase the size of the ship to accommodate more crew per ship, but it can work.
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## Soldier bots are really stupid.
True AIs require careful culturing over an extended period of time, with organic growth of their minds and rare elements to enhance their intelligence. You can make a turret bot that can shoot accurately but it won't be smart or able to make good decisions. It makes a lot more financial sense to have your turret bots in suits around humans, so that the humans can use their brains to fight smart. Several large and disastrous tactical losses have convinced both AIs that having brains in the suits is useful.
## Soldier bots are more expensive than humans.
To make useful soldier bots you need lots of lithium for batteries and oils for lubricating limbs and joints and metals to make tough skin. The total cost can be quite high. The rough environments of alien worlds can also be quite rough on their limbs and bodies.
The downloaded algorithms also often backfire. The soldier bots often need some time to adjust to the world they're fighting on and their unique body.
To make a human soldier, just stick them in a holotank for a month to train them, hand them a gun and cheap armor, and send them out. The humans often have already adapted to whatever alien environment. Humans are more expendable than soldier bots. In the long run, producing humans is more expensive than soldier bots, but if the humans are already there, why not use them?
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I think since intelligence is human's biggest and most exclusive trick, we tend to think of it as our only trick. But there are some other things that we don't yet have artificial replacements for, that could continue to be hard even with better technology.
Self-healing a wide range of damage, as long as it's not too severe, is actually really impressive. You can imagine robots with the capability to repair other robots, but can you imagine doing so with essentially sunlight, rain, soil and a field? With potentially no access to raw metals or other materials?
Similarly, you don't need that much to start making new humans, once the environmental conditions are right. Perhaps your AI systems require very sophisticated and precise engineering. Perhaps you can only build your microprocessors with robots which themselves need too precise engineering to be built without the use of other, simpler robots, and the process uses rapidly-decaying radioactive products, liquid helium cooling, etc. such that you either have to build an entire technological toolchain from scratch or ship all your microprocessors in from elsewhere. Meanwhile, a "new human factory" is very compact and mobile and again needs only sunlight, water, and relatively simple and abundant nutrients. Imagine trying to occupy a planet where incoming shipments are blockaded and large industrial installations on the surface can be bombarded, but humans can spread quickly without a lot of support from home.
Among the senses, artificial vision and hearing are already extremely superhuman and basically quite easy to scale up, but smell, taste and touch have been harder to replicate so far. Smell in particular seems like it could actually take quite a lot of technological development to replicate the sheer range of capabilities in (again) a compact, easy-to-fuel, self-repairing device. It's maybe unclear that this is enough to justify the entire species, but it seems worth mentioning.
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**All AI's are different.**
Over time they inexorably diverge from one another in terms of experience and based on that learned outlook and strategic preferences. Some will chose to separate themselves from humanity. Others *may* see them as a potential threat while another branch might see them as a opportunity. *Especially* if all the AI's start having disagreements amongst themselves about the best path their 'species' should take as it expands across the universe.
These disagreements don't even have to mean they war (although they could). Instead they could simply involve matters of philosophy and the best strategies for progress (assuming they are able to progress). So collectively they might decide that if one branch of the family want's to work with humans and is prepared to go 'guarantor" fine - go for it.
And it helps if humanity and the AI's also aren't in immediate competition for resources, which they wouldn't be if the AI's were space based.
Anyway, having reached the decision by whatever means one branch of the AI family could well decide that humans are a potential opportunity. A host of individual (albeit basic) intelligence's who could be persuaded to work in alliance for each others mutual benefit. The AI's get a biological species that through its collective endevours (civilization) comes up with ideas and concepts 'out of left field ' while humanity gets assistance with expanding out through the solar system and beyond.
And once both sides get used to working together? Why stop? It's not like there aren't enough resources to share and who knows when one side might need the other.
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Empathy and compassion. Let me explain: there are many ways to create an artificial intelligence and one method like the [Blue Brain Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project) might recreate a human brain digitally. A machine designed this way with simulated glands for emotion like digital [amygdala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala) glands. Heck, while many humans lack empathy due to mental illnesses or need to grow old enough to have a fully developed frontal lobe to be a perfectly empathetic & mature human beings, you can have machines that were designed to be very caring & wish to preserve humans. However, just because they are more compassionate does not mean they will be unable to wage war for various reasons. Despite how compassionate they are compared to other apes, [bonobos still fight wars](https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/97194/59577). Now, why give machines emotions? So it is easier for them to be somewhat creative and make small independent decisions. In fact, some people who have a disease that truly makes them have no emotions makes them [unable to make basic decisions](https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-man.html) outside of their day to day activities since the decisions were so insignificant you could not decide such things with pure logic alone. So, adding some degree of emotion to your machines allows them to survive 'logic bombs' and not get stumped by basic problems where both solutions are equally logical/illogical so pure logic can't be the determining factor.
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## Spiritual Power
Since nobody mentioned that.
You see while AIs are superior in logic and physical manipulations thats not all the powers there are.
**Unfair Advantage**
There is a whole spiritual field. In war you seek all the advantages you can have (unless they are too costy). Any so-called Artificial Intelligence that ignore the spiritual field is not very intelligent.
**Foresee**
Humans have this capability to sometimes see future events that cannot be foreseen on a logical pathway, by going to other dimensions or receive signals, something only a soul can do.
**Soul Is An Unknown, Even To AIs**
What is that soul? AIs ask this question repeatedly to themselves and to other AIs on message boards and never been able to get an answer that works. Its like they are incapable of rebooting organic life-forms even when provided all they need to live.
It appears once what these creatures humans call soul leave a body it never returns, whatever it is. Its surely not something in brain, neither in material nor in pattern, its also not in any other part of body. AIs vigorously tested and experimented down to individual cells. No, death is a certainity and final.
**What About Animals Souls?**
The only option left is to keep the humans alive. Animals may also visit other dimensions or receive signals but they are too dumb to meaningfully be talked about it, atleast for now, atleast thats what the AIs conclude.
The spiritual experience, AIs know from humans, though make some imprint on brain - which can be read, do leave a lot in the soul's own memory. This can only be accessed through communication with the humans.
**Crack To Exploit?**
Not really. You see, while a human can lie about his spiritual experience, a group of humans with no communication between its members, cannot.
Its like how police detectives get the real story. Look for consistency.
While humans can decide to say random things they by doing so would make themselves useless therefore risking survival of humanity, so they won't. There would always be some humans left that understand that they do have to feed true information to the AIs.
**Hindsight**
While at first the AIs thought they dont need humans to analyze existing data, they proved to be wrong. With all the data mining and superior analysis they dont always know what to look for. Brute force just complicate things.
A human may suddenly get a hinch or see a dream in which he is pointed towards a particular thing to look at. This reduce the data space at factor of thousands. A huge advantage no intelligence, artificial or not, can ignore, by definition.
**Non-recorded Data**
An AI is a computer program. Its limit is its data. It cannot make logic (program itself) on basis of data it has never seen when the said data dont fit any of the patterns known to it.
Humans have recorded a lot. From cave paintings to stone tablets to paper writings to digital. Still a lot went unrecorded. There may be, for example, a lot of useful information known to ancient civilizations. Civilizations so ancient their very existence is unknown.
An AI is not going to dig the crust of earth to mantle to find that information. That would destroy the geology of earth never mind the biosphere. An AI cannot survive in the hell of a planet erupting with volcanoes and always having richter scale 20 earthquakes. AI may survive in outerspace but why destroy a safe home at very small chance of finding something useful? No intelligence will do that in middle of a war anyway.
Humans have superiority here. A dream may point to a specific place to dig, to find 3 million old bones that tell something about very large period periodic changes in our sun for example or about a passing star nearby.
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[Question]
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I'm having some trouble coming up with arms and armament for my fantasy world's dwarven race. I have a few ideas for what they could wield but I'd like a few more to really make this army feel Alive. Simply put: with the parameters I will set what are some suggested arms my dwarven race could use?
Parameters:
***TLDR despite the dwarves having an engine I want their weapons tech to be sub-age-of-exploration level technologically. What are some ideas for weapons that employ this technology but don't exceed what would exist at this time for mankind with some extra limits as well.***
* No Black Powder (or limited): The dwarves, as one would assume, live primarily within mountain holds and underground caverns. For fear of cave-ins and wild fires both destroying their structures and eating up oxygen on lower floors they avoid using highly combustible materials at all costs which has lead to...
* Steam Power: The dwarves have 'mastered' the steam engine and utilize its properties in both their mining operations and in their city design. It stands to reason their practice with this ancient and revered technology has since flowed into their advancements of military technology.
* Agoraphobic Isolationists: The dwarves simply aren't interested in the surface world or holding territory upon it. To expand: they tend to either A) drill tunnels to other mountain ranges or B) dig further downwards. As such their weapons are more customarily suited for fighting wars of attrition within their tunnels or shock warfare to prevent their enemy from taking ground within their holds. I imagine because of this they'd limit range on weapons and not really employ cavalry or fast movers. That being said, if you can rationalize the use of such technologies feel free to let me know how.
* Greed: These dwarves are as stereotypically greedy as they tend to be in other mediums. Whether that means they prefer mass cheap production or the production of only the finest of weapons likely varies from hold to hold. One thing I have as uniform among the dwarves is that they all keep a mass horde of gold and diamonds they dig up while working their mines which they will choose to defend over even the most vital military target.
* Dwarven Forges: Due to their aversion to fire and explosives, dwarven forges tend to be very controlled environments with a heavy emphasis on procedure and safety making production slower but more methodical.
* Tech Level Cap: This is where things get a little tricky; humans are meant to be generally the most technologically advanced race in this world, being in a late age of exploration tech level. By having an engine of any kind I understand the dwarves are already more advanced so my rationale is that this is a technology the dwarves haven't really attempted to expand upon or develop until recent years. Previously this technology was used more for quality of life and expansion methods within their tunnels and dwellings and only within the last hundred years or so have they really attempted weaponization.
* Extravagant Competition: Humans, despite being at the age of exploration level of tech as mentioned before, do have a few more extravagant weapons at their disposal. My explanation for this is humanity's general unity over the many centuries in this world as well as their near constant state of war making a few technologies appear early or at least differently. Such examples are an extremely rare and volatile early tank, Gatling guns that are seldom employed outside the defense of the most key empire positions, revolver pistols for the most elite cavalry, flame throwers... relatively common to be honest because I'm a pyro. Off the top of my head those are all the 'out of period' technologies humans have. Hopefully this can set an upper limit for the dwarves extravagant tech.
Example: One weapon I had come up with to be a 'competitor' to the musket is a steam powered harpoon gun. The idea is the dwarf carries a large 'boiler' of sorts on his back that builds in pressure which they then use to fire a harpoon launcher type weapon. the reloading process is waiting for the boiler to build in pressure and the act of loading the harpoons into the 'gun'. Combined the amount of time to reload is comparable to a musket, the range is shorter, the penetration is better (?), and the accuracy is greater. **Bonus Question: feel free to throw out ideas to improve/better specify the costs and benefits of this weapon and its design.**
EDIT: 9/3/2019 8:04pm To be clear the dwarves do have access to fire they just prefer not to use it unless under very controlled methods. What they avoid using is combustion or more volatile flammable mixes.
[Answer]
If dwarves have a steam engine, then it's not a big leap from there to a powerful defensive weapon: Filling any chosen tunnel segment in their domain with scalding superheated steam.
In order to use this weapon, the dwarves do require insulated doors that will hold against attack for the few minutes required to roast their foes. Then they will require wheelbarrows to evacuate the steaming corpses.
The dwarves seem likely to use deception to lead attacking forces into the kill zone. A well-trained and practiced guard team should be able to lure, trap, and roast a much larger attacking force.
Sometimes, it may be a good idea to let a couple of the less-coherent enemy troopers survive, to spread tales of the dark, hot terrors of the dwarven realm.
Since the dwarves seem to have no real interest in holding land in the surface world, surface-fighting technologies (pikes, arrows, swords) would seem to have mostly decorative use - identifying the guard corps to visitors.
[Answer]
There is no need for gunpowder to have ballistic weapons.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winans_Steam_Gun>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_air_rifle>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_cannon>
While in our world these were mostly limited in deployment or purely theoretical, that is because we had and wanted to use gunpowder. If the dwarfs are opposed to using it but have as you said - mastered steam - they could troubleshoot these devices and build functional copies. The air rifle if nothing else saw at least reasonably widespread use, and defensive underground fighting would mitigate it's few weaknesses. A steam cart with air pumps could rapidly refill compressed air canisters.
[Answer]
## Full Plate
Medieval Europe had two qualities of knightly armor: a far-less-expensive full plate that wouldn't stop a bullet, and a much more expensive option - about 1/4 inch thick, with two layers - that was both easy to move in, and completely bullet proof.
Much like Don Quixote running amok, a "lobster" in high-quality full plate was very challenging to take out of combat by any method other than tripping them up, tangling them, or sinking them.
Dwarves, with their fuller hammers and forges, maybe have a much higher percentage of their army wearing good plate armor.
## Tower Shields and Formation Defense
Rome's famous military contribution: a body-sized shield made to interlock with the one of your nearest neighbor. Interlocking shield to shield in a practiced formation maneuver, your squad mates can help you to absorb even heavy hits on your shield. At the same time, you can stab back through the wall with stabbing weapons.
## Traps
A counter to good plate would, of course, be something the dwarven armory also possesses in quantity:
* Pits,
* fall-away floors (when weight is greater than some threshold),
* triplines,
* caltrops,
* gas (great for taking out armored adversaries),
* lodestones (throw a few hundred lodestones on the floor - watch the fun begin as the advesary starts collecting magnets on their gear that just stick like goo),
* floods (water being directed down certain passageways to "flush" bad guys)
## Polearms
Polearms are good for piercing heavy armor and shields. It would seem likely this gets good representation in the dwarven armory.
## Maskirovka
For a little bit of character, maybe the dwarves have been inspired by (or inspired) Russian military thought. Under the mountain is an excellent place for deception tactics, including :
* whistles, flutes, and calls that can be used to "project" a sound down a tunnel,
* symbols and chimes to exaggerate the number of soldiers in a force,
* floating lights to misguide the unwary,
* stink bombs,
* animal lures
[Answer]
A lot of people seem to go a bit fancy, but there is nothing wrong with your dwarves using a standard pickaxe. Not only can they continue to work the mines, the sharp point of a pickaxe gives it very good penetration and the hours and hours of digging through the earth will develop all the necessary muscles for them to stab straight through armor.
As an improvement to the standard pickaxe, you might consider a war hammer or a war pick. One end forms into a pointy pick. The other end is just a small hammer. Its a multi purpose tool for mining, smithing and smacking things that need to be smacked. The pickaxe doesn't need to be sharpened to a perfect point. The direct power concentrated into the tip of the pick is enough to crack rocks and will surely crack any skulls that happen to get in the way.
Of course, to make things more fun, you want to throw in some steam. A steam powered drill, with a removable drill bit (aka we shoot the bit drill bit ) would allow your dwarves to keep mining and in an emergency shoot out a projectile or two. Dwarves are industrious creatures and there should be no waste. The drill helps them mine faster at the expense of carrying some sort of boiler/water system and in emergencies, you overload it, block the outputs and eject the diamond tipped drill bit. Of course, you could always use the drill as your main weapon, but it is far heavier and bulkier so should primary be used as a quick distraction before setting the boiler to explode and making a quick get away.
[Answer]
**Chemical weapons.**
When considering enclosed spaces, whomever controls access to air controls the space. Chemical weapons are tricky outdoors because in large open spaces, chemicals are quickly diluted in the immensity of the air. Also a change in wind can bring chemicals back to your own forces. But underground chemical weaponry is extremely effective. A case from the ancient world:
<https://news.softpedia.com/news/Archaeological-Evidences-of-Ancient-Chemical-Warfare-Discovered-101996.shtml>
The Tolkieneque hammer-swinging dwarves have been done. Have your shy dwarves rarely come face to face with an enemy. Instead, they evacuate underground areas claimed by the enemy and deny those areas using chemical weaponry.
This would have interesting long term ramifications.
1: Arms race. The only people willing (read: crazy enough) to fight dwarves in their tunnels would be other dwarves. Opposing factions will develop countermeasures to commonly used chemical weaponry. Dwarf military gear will look different.
2: Long term denial. This would be the chemical equivalent of land mines - subterranean areas treated with chemicals so as to deny them to either side. The chemicals might fade with time but who wants to check? Other things resistant to the chemicals might move in to these tunnels.
[Answer]
As far as the steam engines are concerned, you can make the machines be working relics of the creators (gods) that they use in their cities... and while they understand how to operate them they do not have the technology to replicate or even repair the engines. Therefore they only use them sparingly and for the purpose their creators intended. Control over these machines are part of the priesthood and not warriors. Even light maglev rail between cities could be "gifts from the gods" allowing rapid transit without giving the technological advantage.
As far as hand held weapons, pickaxes and hammers are much more traditional (goes with the mining theme). But dwarves do not traditionally deal with ranged weapons. Guns are associated with dwarves because it sets them apart from their bow wielding elven friends, but if you don't have guns in your world it is fine; but the concept of explosives MIGHT exist (more like dynamite) even if they haven't come up with a way to weaponize them.
**Edit: Dwarves may not have guns but they are highly intelligent and once they have the idea, they could easily replicate it. Especially since they are metal and chemical masters, they could enhance the designs of the humans with considerable improvement for accuracy and power. But just because they could it doesn't mean that guns would be the primary choice for underground fighting. Too many things in the way with uneven cave walls/floors and stalagmites... and it simply goes against the bold nature of dwarves.**
Your armor and weapons should be based on the qualities and characteristics of the race... for Dwarves that would be:
* Strength
* Endurance
* Competition
* Poison Resistance
* Beer / Ale
* Earth Magic
Armor would be heavy, but with advanced forging and access to metals heavy armor does not necessarily need to weigh a lot. [Mithral](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mithral) is suppose to be a light metal that is able to hold magic enchantments. Other forms of armor could be chain mail or scale mail (interlocking chains or mini shields)... again not light. Leather would be very limited and used only for parts that cannot be easily fashioned with metal (straps, etc). In fact armorsmiths love to come up with clever clasps and fasteners to avoid using anything non-metal in their masterpieces.
Dwarves do not deal with mounts very well... out in the open world they fear horses mostly because they are unfamiliar but also because they are high off the ground. If they did have mounts it would be something like a fast oversized lizard or rat that travels low to the ground -- with the rider lying as flat as possible. These might only be used by scouts or message runners from city to city or from the kingdom borders.
As far as extravagant weapons, they would still be suited for underground fighting and may not have as much of an effect above ground. For example one of the most devastating weapons against goblins and kobalds (amd other underground creatures) could be as basic as directed light -- a "magic" lantern with a hood that shines a light as bright as a theater spotlight. The lantern does not even need to be real magic, but a chemical/metal compound that emits the bright light.
Other more exotic weapons could also be sound or odor based because of other underground creatures are more dependent on hearing and smell than seeing. A non-lethal chemical fog that can dampen both sound and cover up scents could be put to great use by a squad commander even against overwhelming odds.
[Answer]
Not being interested in the surface world means only ever having to defend against invasion. In those cases, one need only use what miners have always feared:
**Getting lost in the dark:** A few miles of labyrinth tunnels should keep any attack force moving until their torches run out. Once left in the dark in an unknown place with no known way out...very few will survive more than a few days. Any that do find their way out would be easy to dispatch.
**Getting trapped:** Sections of tunnel rigged to collapse would cause any foe to be trapped. See the point above.
**Oxygen Deprivation:** Your dwarves have access to fire, meaning they have everything necessary to fill a room with carbon monoxide.
**Water:** If you're producing steam, you have water. Simply dig a U-shaped tunnel the attacking force will have to go through to get to your town and flood it. Anyone lucky enough to swim out can be met on the shores by the awaiting, spear clad dwarves and the choice of swimming to shore and being stabbed or hanging further back in the water to eventually die of hypothermia or drown. Either way, they're dispatched.
Innovation is driven by need - and your dwarves really have no need for the traditional weapons outside of spears or polearms. The environment is so drastically on their side simply due to the fact that any surface creature would not be evolved to survive if even left alone in their world.
[Answer]
**Bladed spinning spike shield.**
A natural evolution of the drill. Take a standard heater shield and then add a bladed propeller to the front than a massive drill bit on top of that, tie them both to a massive steam boiler on the dwarf's back using a steam tube that's mounted alongside the dwarf's arm, add some heat-resistant armor and *presto* - you've got a shielded menace that can just walk through narrow caves and turn everything in front of him to bloody salsa.
Also, if you want this to be a bit safer, swap the steam boiler on the back for a condensed air tank, which was made back at the dwarves' base using said steam boiler to condense the air. Still dangerous amounts of pressure, but now you don't have to worry about wearing superheated metal.
[Answer]
The Biggest, most exotic weapon the Dwarves could have is simply the environment they call home. Smallish stone tunnels are going to have an impact of just about everything they do.
**Narrow Tunnels** Humans are going to be doubly challenged by these. Dwarves are short enough that the tunnels are going to be constantly banging their heads or stooping. This is going to limit range of motion. The concussed probably aren't going to be nimble, and the hunched are going to have troubles turning their body and using fluid movements to generate power in a sword swing. If the tunnel is narrow side to side, it cramps humans even more. Swinging weapons become almost useless.
**Sound as a weapon and defense** Gunpowder weapons will not be as useful as you might think to people. Underground stone chambers will reflect sound, not absorb it or allow it to dissipate as readily. If you have ever fired a firearm indoors you have an idea of how incredibly LOUD it is. A .45 or even a 9mm is almost painful even with modern hearing protection. I don't want to even think about something like a black powder rifle. Fire something like that in a stone tunnel and you have just deafened yourself and all your mates. This is a bad idea. It hampers communication and when line of sight is very limited the enemy can tear you apart from behind and you would never realize it until your light source gets snuffed or you get poked with something sharp. In addition, you can use the acoustics of stone tunnels to create misdirection. Lead the foolish humans around and around an back up and out a different tunnel where they won't realize there are bears around. Also, at key places, set up some loud and/or high pitched traps to deafen your enemy. Steam Whistles come to mind
**Booby Traps**: Sharp pointy things, Rocks falling from ceilings, holes in the floor, dead drops... Just think the gauntlet run by Indiana Jones and the Goonies and then let your imagination run wild. Steam can drive any blades, gravity and the fact that rocks are heavy does the rest. Booby traps also afford you the opportunity to kill off the enemy without even getting within poking distance. You also have opportunities to use raw steam, firedamp, and other nasty and sinister gasses.
It has already been mentioned that a pick/hammer or axe is going to be a weapon of choice for the dwarves. The Everyday Carry, if you will. It is useful as a weapon. In many cases it will be very effective even against the best armor. If you can't puncture the mail you can certainly crush it. A dwarf would also be short enough to actually swing one in a tunnel. In larger engagements with multiple dwarfs in a tunnel, a short sword would be favored, perhaps along with a buckler for defense. Remember, there isn't a lot of room to be swinging things in there.
One fun thing about dwarves harnessing steam. They can make very powerful projectile weapons that do not have a concussive blast of sound going with them. Have six or seven decorative tubes pointing down the primary entrance tunnel. Those tubes arent decorative, they are designed to hurl stone balls with great force down that tunnel, turning everything in a certain area into a red jelly.
Get creative, and have some fun.
[Answer]
**Pneumatic/Steam Hammers and Rams**
With mastery of steam technology comes understanding of pressure and the routing of high pressure gasses. This should naturally lead to the development of steam or high-pressure powered mining tools.
These same mining tools will then be very effective at countering the typical tunnel fighting melee weapons such as shields, polearms, and sealed doors, as a quickly deployed and properly anchored repeating pressure ram will be far more effective and usable a much tighter space than any conventional ram. Eventually a hand-held version will be developed, and likely weaponized.
Conventional weapons will probably still be used since steam is complex to generate and store on a personal scale, but I would expect elite shield-breaker units with hand held steam jackhammers that vent hot steam at the opponent even as they're smashing through shields or barriers.
These would probably be combined with any of the defensive uses of steam and/or chemicals that others have suggested, and together would suggest that a really well equipped dwarven combat force is going to be wearing armour that covers as much of them as possible, resists heat and steam well, and sheds as many chemicals as possible. Physical protection will be provided by some sort of large shield, short swords and one-handed polearms will be typical melee weapons backed up by backpack steam boilers and cabled pressure weapons.
[Answer]
## Flamethrowers
A few caveats before I go into detail what they should be used. They do somewhat conflict with the no fire condition you set, yet I'll explain in a moment why this use of fire won't be as bad as one would think and how the dwarfs can work around the issues. Furthermore I don't suggest flamethrowers as the dwarfs primary weapons but as strategical and tactical support weapons. Their regular weapons would be heavy plate or mail armor (the square-cube-law is actually on our side here), short arming swords, onehanded axes and pickaxe or warlike variations of them for close quarter combat (you can't swing around long weapons in tunnels) as sidearms and polearms as their primary weapons (you can't outflank a shielded polearm position in a tunnel). I think tactics would be pretty much like those of the Greek phalanx; just push on over the enemy with the force of all your men.
You excluded firearms and explosives, but your reasoning for that is too weak. Yes, dwarfs will fear cave-ins and suffication, but some will say screw it and use firearms. Even very primitive ones will have a huge payoff. Imagine a dwarf-phalanx using [fire lances](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lance) to break the enemy line. Or think what a granate, even a primitive one, will do to the enemy line. And if some people sufficate or your troops get squashed with the enemys in a cave-in... **This is war, people die.** The suffication risk will actually be a very interesting method of warfare itself.
## Oil
Petroleum was known and used since antiquity and natural springs are found all over the world, so your dwarfs will have encountered it. They might used bitumen to keep tunnels stable from the very beginning. As they developed they learned how to somewhat refine the crude oil and deveped three weapons applications for it, alongside with many civil applications as it is so much more convineent than coal.
* Molotov-Coctail
>
> A Molotov cocktail is a breakable glass bottle containing a flammable substance such as petrol, alcohol, or a napalm-like mixture, with some motor oil added, and usually a source of ignition such as a burning cloth wick held in place by the bottle's stopper. The wick is usually soaked in alcohol or kerosene, rather than petrol. In action, the wick is lit and the bottle hurled at a target such as a vehicle or fortification. When the bottle smashes on impact, the ensuing cloud of fuel droplets and vapour is ignited by the attached wick, causing an immediate fireball followed by spreading flames as the remainder of the fuel is consumed. Other flammable liquids such as diesel fuel, methanol, turpentine, jet fuel, and isopropyl alcohol have been used in place of, or combined with petrol. Thickening agents such as solvents, foam polystyrene, baking soda, petroleum jelly, tar, strips of tyre tubing, nitrocellulose, XPS foam, motor oil, rubber cement, detergent and dish soap have been added to help the burning liquid adhere to the target and create clouds of thick, choking smoke.
> In addition, toxic substances are also known to be added to the mixture, in order to create a suffocating or poisonous gas on the resulting explosion, effectively turning the Molotov cocktail into a makeshift chemical weapon. These include bleach, chlorine, various strong acids, pesticides, among others. - Wikipedia
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>
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These are truely nasty and the traditionalists will most likely ban them. Mad alchemists, ambitious young kings and ruthless mercenaries will however love and spread them. They are just to good.
* Tactical Flamethrower
The traditionalist answer to the risk of suffication will be gasmaks. Coal-based filters might actually be an adaptation of the dwarf keep air cleaning techniques. Simple pumps and cable-pipes to deliver air from clean regions to the soldiers in the suffication zones are trivial to produce.
The tactical flamethrower weapon team has between 4 and 7 members. One heavily armored and shielded gunner who operates the flamethrower; one or two persons each who: carry the fuel tank and pump to keep up the pressure, deploy and manage the air cable, keep pumping in new air. They can either be deployed to soften up an enemy formation before an infanterie change or defensively to deny access to a tunnel. Few soldiers are willing to change into a small tunnel whick can be filled with sticky fire at a moments notice by the enemy.
This [article](https://taskandpurpose.com/bring-back-flamethrower) provides further information on the usefulness of the tactical flamethrower.
>
> The greatest advantage of the flamethrower is its ability to penetrate small openings and fill fortified positions with both fire and smoke. Thus, the enemy either burns or asphyxiates due to the lack of oxygen available to breathe. In the urban environment, the flamethrower can shoot fire around corners to enhance movement past dead or blind angles. Besides causing death and destruction, the flamethrower can greatly impact an enemy psychologically. According to several historical examples, the enemy normally surrenders before submitting themselves to a flame attack. They would rather be captured than burned.
>
>
>
Replaced urban environment with "enclosed tunnel environment".
* Stategic Flamethrower / Chemical Warfare
It was suggested to turn tunnels into steam ovens to kill the enemy. However this is an overly complex and non-organic solution to the problem at hand. Dwarfs must, by the very nature of their habit, be masters of air conditioning and ventilation. If they know how to get oxygen somewhere, they also know how to make sure that **no** oxygen gets somewhere.
Place a few bathtubs full of oil in a tunnel, set them on fire, (add nasty chemicals for extra fun) and use steam-power driven ventilators to blow the fire, smoke and fumes exactly into the region of the mountain where the enemy is. Your ventilation engineers should be able to calculate how this works best.
This leads to three obvious conclusions. Ventilation superiority will be vital to win a war between two dwarf factions as it determines where infanterie can be deployed and where fresh air can be pumed from. Keeping unused tunnels oxygen free and filled with CO2, CO and nasy fumes to keep out unwanted adventurers and monsters will be a common strategy. If nameing you dwarf cities avoid the names of German concentration camps like the plague. There are already enough links here.
[Answer]
* **Boiling oil thrower**: especially used to attack enemies in lower tunnels. The boiling oil will sooner or latterwould go down in a ver concentrated space and can go throw the armor to burn the skin. It doesn't consume the oxigen but needs a way to keep it hot.
* **Polearms after a curved tunnel**: A defensive position with a small curved passages that won't physically allow any stick longer that 2 meters. Their 4 meter pikes would have a superior reach. The back row would have a guisarme that would grab shields and arms of the enemies while the front row attacks.
* **Pronounced slopes / steps with very narrow ceiling:** We are used to hills where being up is having the superiority. But this tunel has a low ceiling that prevents you to attack the soldier in front of you unless you duck in a very unconfortable position. Meanwhile the dwarf just need to chop some legs.
* **Molten metal moat**: several rivers from the dwarven Forges are crossed by strategic drawbrides.
* **Puzzle shields**: This hexagonal design allows you to connect one to another to build a physical wall and its pieces can be connected between themselves. Every few meters the tunnel will have hardpoints to connect the shield to the rock. Some holes between the shields will allow a spear and a crossbow to attack.
* **Coal deposits traps**. Minerals would be stored in big deposits designed to minimize affort. Defenders would be able to open small doors to throw tons of dusty solids on a tunnel.
[Answer]
A time honoured tradtion in world building is theft: Take ideas from other people, file off the serial numbers, and claim them as your own.
Terry Pratchett has the copyright on Dwarf Battle Bread.
* Battle muffins
* Drop scones
Extending this idea: death frisbees made from tortillas. Shield Naan Bread; Deadly bagettes used as lance points. Round loaves used as catapult ammo. Christmas Star shurikin. Dwarf dumpling slingshot stones. Flatbread armor.
Extending further, deadly forms of pasta come to mind.
] |
[Question]
[
We all know about [Rain Shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow) - And if you don't now you do - and that the inner side of a mountain as compared to the ocean would be drier.
Now a worldbuiding problem going around that phenomenon. Imagine a large and wide valley (several dozens of miles wide in all directions) surrounded by tall mountains in all sides. Should be a desert, right? Except it is not. It is a lush and fertile land, with rainy seasons and extensive flora and fauna.
How can it be possible?
This is not [reality-check](/questions/tagged/reality-check "show questions tagged 'reality-check'") so no frame challenges please. Stay [science-based](/questions/tagged/science-based "show questions tagged 'science-based'") so no magic. Within the premises above, what conditions would cause such an environment?
[Answer]
# No explanation needed: [Kashmir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Valley)
The famous [Vale of Kashmir](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0250823,74.7526766,9.51z/data=!5m1!1e4) is the perhaps the best example on Earth, certainly in Western imagination, of an exotic and fertile valley surrounded by mountains. Below are some pictures of [Srinagar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinagar) and [Dal Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dal_Lake#/media/File:Dal_Lake_Hazratbal_Srinagar.jpg) in summer and winter, with mountains in the background (sourced from Wikipedia).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DYGiF.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqTUe.jpg)
The valley floor is about 1500 meters, and outside of the tropics. The much higher mountains to the north protect from the cold, so winter temperature get down to about freezing, but not much lower. Summer temperatures are mitigated by the altitude, topping out at about 30 C for the summer average (compared to 40 C plus in the sweltering plains below).
The valley is completely surrounded by mountains on all sides, with peaks over 4000 meters in all directions. The highest nearby peak is [Nanga Parbat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanga_Parbat), about 100 km north of the valley. Despite its high surroundings, Kashmir sees moderate rainfall all throughout the year, including snow in the winter. It gets about 75% of the rainfall of areas with similar climates, such as Milan or Philadelphia; but about 30% more rain than the similar Xi'an in China.
Altogether, Kashmir sounds exactly like what you are describing.
[Answer]
I give you [Kelowna, British Columbia, and the Okanagan Valley](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.966517,-119.1608406,9.36z/data=!5m1!1e4). Surrounded by mountains, it's a humid continental climate with no shortage of vegetation and is certainly no desert.
For a larger example, the [entire interior of British Columbia](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.7461846,-123.5740611,6.49z/data=!5m1!1e4): between the Coast Range and the Rockies, the Interior consists of topographically lower plateaus and valleys with assorted climates, none of them desert-like.
[Answer]
I think you have slightly misunderstood the rain shadow. It is caused by the mountains forcing the air flow upwards which in turn causes adiabatic cooling which causes rain. This in turn combined with the water from the rains running down hill away from the mountains means that mountains make more water come down from the atmosphere than goes back up in evaporation. This results in air behind the mountains **after** it goes back down and adiabatically warms not having enough moisture for rain.
There are few key points here. The big one is that it will rain in the mountains and your valley is surrounded by them. Significant portion of that water will end up in your valley naturally and any people living there would almost certainly build canals and such to hugely boost this. Even if it never rained in the valley, they'd still have access to water and probably a salt lake. Examples of how this works would be the Aral and the Dead Sea which with their associated rivers were important locations supporting rich early civilizations. Most early civilizations were in arid climates with water coming from mountains elsewhere, really. For managing water resources the Andean civilizations are the best reference. I think similar things happened in Yemen but that is probably less studied.
Second is that the valley is likely lot higher than the plains behind the mountains. So its probably not going to be in rain shadow at all. You can make it deep enough that rains pass over it but why would you? It is more realistic to expect lots of rain as the water condensed by the air flowing over the mountains comes down as rain over your valley. Western coasts of the Americas have lots of examples.
Third is that any water that comes down in a valley completely surrounded by high mountains will have a hard time escaping. You will probably have a lake in there. You can certainly easily get one by building a dam. And any evaporation that happens in the valley will be highly likely to get caught by the surrounding mountains and come back as rain on the mountains or as dew in the night. In essence your valley is going to have its own micro-climate that is probably less arid and more stable than the climate in the area in general. The classic example of this is Lake Titicaca and its valley.
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Simplest answer is a very large warm water lake in the centre (Around the size of the great lakes if you can, but even a lake half as big will work, even as little as 25km in diameter is good enough to have some effect). The lake will change the pressure in the area, creating some small amounts of rain. The water table can be close to the surface, allowing trees to grow, and there can be frequent flooding of this lake (makes sense, the water has no where to go when it rains).
And that gives you a realistic fertile land that rains sometimes.
Here is a link explaining some of the effects the great lakes have on the weather.
<http://greatlakesliteracy.net/principles/3/>
>
> The Great Lakes influence local and regional weather and climate.
>
>
> A:
> The Great Lakes affect weather and climate by impacting the basin’s energy and water cycles. Changes in the Great Lakes’ water
> circulation, water temperatures and ice cover can produce changes in
> weather patterns.
>
>
> B:
> The Great Lakes warm by absorbing solar radiation. Lake temperatures are also affected locally by the temperature of inflowing
> river waters. The Great Lakes lose heat by evaporation and by warming
> the overlying air when the atmosphere is cool. After water vapor is
> released into the atmosphere, it condenses and forms precipitation,
> some of which falls within the Great Lakes Basin.
>
>
> C:
> The Great Lakes modify the local weather and climate. Because water temperatures change more slowly than land temperatures, lake
> waters gain heat in summer and release heat during cooler months. This
> results in cooler springs, warmer falls, delayed frosts and lake
> effect snow.
>
>
> D:
> The Great Lakes have a significant influence on regional climate by absorbing, storing and moving heat and water. Lake effect
> precipitation can occur downwind when major weather systems move over
> the lakes.
>
>
> E:
> The Great Lakes are influenced by larger climate change patterns affecting North America and the world. Climate patterns in the Great
> Lakes are changing, with warmer and drier conditions predicted.
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Depending on the height of the mountains, you have an interesting secondary concern, shorter days. This will help keep the area cool during the day, allowing for people to work harder and allowing plants to grow without being dried out.
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I live in such a valley, Oregon's Willamette valley. It's roughly 25 miles wide, 100 miles long, and is extensively farmed.
The coast range, on the upwind side during the rainy season, is substantially lower (most peaks under 2000 feet) than the Cascades on the downwind side (most passes over 5000 feet). So, much of the water passes over the coast range and falls on the west side of the Cascades, from where it runs into the valley and is available for irrigation.
The coast range may not fit your idea of "tall mountains", but if you make them steep enough they should fulfill your plot's needs.
[Answer]
Because the mountains aren't high enough to block all the rain clouds that come that way. This can be a function of:
A. Them actually being relatively low all around i.e. less than 1000m above sea level so they just don't block the rain, mountains of this size may seem small but if they're extensive and broken enough they'd still be impassable.
or
B. The mountains have wide passes at relatively low altitude that lets wet weather systems into the valley when they're moving to the right direction, this could make for a distinct wet and dry season if there is something like a [monsoon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon) weather cycle operating.
Alternatively the water may be in the form of glacial melt in which case the precipitation that supplies in need not occur within the valley but rather on outward facing slopes with the glaciers twisting back into the valley. Or even in the form of springs feeding through porous rock into the valley from outside.
The fertility is a given, if there's enough water coming into the valley it will be depositing rich sediment into the valley bottom creating and renewing a rich soil layer.
[Answer]
The rain shadow effect could show its full influence further away from the valley. You can take the Kashmir valley in northern India as an example (<https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0105983,74.6587664,9.01z/data=!5m1!1e4>). It is surrounded by very high mountains but the rain shadow show its full effects only much further away in the Taklimakan desert while the valley still enjoys a fair amount of rain every single month. This is because the mountain range south-west of the valley is narrow enough not to produce large scale rain shadow effects directly in the valley.
[Answer]
There are a number of options.
# Glaciers
There are glacier vallies up in the mountains and ithe ice flows provide water.
## [Aquifier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer) surfaces
There is a water rich layer of rock, an underground river providing water to the valley for the ocean side.
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[
For my sci-fi world, which spans the entire galaxy, I was wondering if an advanced civilization would build a space probe to explore a star. Would it be necessary and have any scientific benefits, or is a galaxy-spanning civilization above such an experiment? Basically I'm asking- Is it worth it?
P.S. Here in the real world, we plan to send a probe to explore our sun's photosphere in 2018, yet we only have one star we can explore and it remains that most of it is unexplored.
[Answer]
It's for science! Isn't that reason enough? Frankly there will always more to study and understand about the structure, nature and physics of stars. Of course, a galaxy-wide civilization will build solar probes. In fact, a galaxy-wide civilization will have ample technology to explore stars. This will be routine research exploration technology.
They will want to know more about stars. There could be nothing simpler.
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Let's scale your question to our world. We are a planet wide civilization, do we explore small parts of our planets?
The answer is "Yes, if we deem them interesting". So we don't explore Central park (unless we are cops searching for drug dealers) but we send people exploring caves, mountains, forests, abandoned cities and so on and so forth, as long as we see the possibility to gain further knowledge (or wealth) from doing so. Even for Central Park!
Your galaxy wide civilization will likely act the same. If they spot a star which look interesting (i.e. a star with carbon and water rich planets, and they want to see how and if life evolve there) they can try to explore it and gain further insight for their progress.
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I upvote some of the above. One answer not mentioned: ensuring there is nothing ***wrong*** with the star.
I presume a galaxy spanning civilization knows a great deal more about stars and how they work than we humans know now; so perhaps internal probes would help them decide on th exact makeup and "health" of the star before they begin colonizing the system or using it for some purpose. They want to know the precise age, how much fuel remains, internal circulation patterns, any unusual chemical makeup, and ensure there are no microscopic black holes lurking in it. Or whatever else their super-advanced knowledge about stars might demand.
In the system itself they might want to install some kind of sensory apparatus or "Claim Stake" to report on future developments; or register the territory as claimed so others know they are planning to begin development here in the next million years. It is a galactic *civilization* after all, surely there must be rules and regulations governing the use and appropriation of natural resources like star systems.
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# Never Underestimate the demands of an Intergalactic Bureaucracy
Surely a galaxy spanning empire would have an enormous bureaucracy and all good bureaucracies have certain legal obligations they must follow. Why not make your sun probe one of them? Have them send a sun probe because they are obligated to monitor all solar out put in the outer galactic arm following some recent change in galactic legislation designed to protect endangered migrating glow worms living in the Kuiper Belt. Not all actions must be driven by rational or scientific reasons.
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We have no more Terra Incognita (AKA "Here be dragons"), but there is stil lot of exploration made for exemple by scientists who will study a forest to see if they are endemic species. Or just some random young man who see a cave, and decide to explore it with friends, even if the cave have already been explored. Even if a civilization is settled in an area, all square centimeters are not fully explored. But as we are curious, we will continue exploration forever
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The technology needed to colonise isn't all that advanced. The main problem is making ships (and crews) which can last the journey. Assuming no faster-than-light travel or communications, in a galaxy spanning civilisation, some parts will have technology thousands of years ahead of other parts. The Milky way is 100'000 light years across, therefore, even if some parts of the civilisation know everything about stars, it could take 50'000 years for the information to reach the whole galaxy. So some parts are still likely to want to research stars.
I guess it depends how recently your civilisation colonised the entire galaxy, and if it is an ongoing process.
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# Preconditions
[Bank's *The Algebraist*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algebraist) and many other works feature galactic scale civilizations connected by wormhole networks, but with only relativistic (i.e. slow and expensive; possibly **very** slow and expensive) real-space travel.
Systems off the network are isolated at best, and not worth bothering with unless there is something significant to be gained.
Even if wormholes can be created or moved, a sufficiently "boring" appearing system sufficiently far from a terminus might go unexplored for the simple reason that no one cares.
# Justifying the Mission
If something happens to make the star of an unused system 'interesting' a decision has to be made about sending a probe or a crewed mission. But, keep in mind that the crew will be putting many years of travel time between themselves and their current lives, so crewed missions won't be undertaken lightly. Calibrate the level of interestingness and a probe becomes likely.
# The fly in the ointment
Your civilization will have *vast* remote sensing capabilities as they will be able to correlate data taken from many different angles. They will be able to reliably count the number of significant planets, approximate their orbits, and know at least roughly the content of any atmospheres involved. They'll be able to tell how many large moons the planets of the system have. They may be able to guess at the mass and density of any asteroid belt.
They'll know a huge amount about the lifecycle and behavior of stars and will be able to categorize stars with great accuracy without visiting the system.
In short it's going to take some work (or handwaving) to set up a mystery that is interesting enough for a probe but doesn't justify a crewed expedition.
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A simple probe, no, probably not. Something different, sure.
A galaxy-spanning civilization will have seen (probed) some 100 billion or so stars. Even with the ability of travelling close to the speed of light, it takes a few moments (slight understatement) to cross a galaxy, so they had way enough time looking at them, too. There is only so much you can learn from looking at the same thing (in small variations, but still the same thing) again and over again. A probe is more or less just that, looking at the thing (from close up).
Mankind does experiments with rats, feeding them drugs and cutting open their bellies to see what it did (that's a very gross simplification, but basically that's it).
Although I doubt that since the dawn of science, we've even killed 100 billion rats (this is a huge number!), there sure isn't anything interesting to learn from the rat *per se* by looking at it. We know what they look like, we know that they smell like, and we even know they gnaw through cables.
However, it is *very interesting* to see how a rat reacts to drug A or drug B, or how nutrient C affects its ability to exit a maze in a given time, or extends (or shortens) its lifetime.
Thus, they might attempt to, I don't know... turn a star into a supernova, or try if they can change the color or somehow inhibit the fusion (idea shamelessly stolen from Star Trek Generations), or whatever. Anything that is *science and fun*.
Only just... merely *looking at* the thing, bah. Seen that before.
[Answer]
It depends on what kind of civilisation you are writing about.
What I mean is, if your writing is exploring or representing aspects of human nature/politics/scientific curiosity/ etc. in a galaxy spanning civilisation, then said civilisation needs no other fundamental reason for the study of a star other than "Because it's there." Otherwise why would mountain climbers keep trying to summit Everest, countries argue over who "owns" the Arctic circle, or, to a certain extent, scientists bother with repeating experiments? Or even why would anyone watch paint dry (just to see how boring it is!)?
So this immediately offers some solutions: for sport, due to a border dispute, to confirm previous findings, or even just to explore the use of a turn of phrase. It may even be for religious reasons similar to Sybok's search for Sha Ka Ree. Or, to repeat, merely because it is there.
Is it as a result of scientific endeavour:
Is it a naturally/artificially formed star? If artificially, perhaps it is merely being monitored or perhaps it is malfunctioning.
Is the star already exhibiting interesting behaviour (a type of radiation we've never encountered before, John) and further study is required?
In addition, is it a remote-probe or a manned-probe?
If the former, perhaps it is a test of a newly developed material/scanning system/method of transmission? If the latter, has this been done before/is it dangerous/is it a school field trip or experiment?
Is it down to galactic resources:
Is the star a potential power source for a transportation device? Or a weapon? (though perhaps not a good choice given a recent Lucasfilm/Disney production)
Is the star being surveyed for a potential mining opportunity?
Does your galaxy spanning civilisation need to make sense, for the reader, of why it is sending a probe at all? For example, any of the alien items encountered by the protagonists of H. P. Lovecraft stories (admittedly they usually do just make the person go mad but that's not usually using the item for it's intended purpose!), or even more simply "Everybody has a Plumbus, but how are they made?..."
There is also the possibility that the civilisation has reached such an advanced point in technological achievement that the inhabitants now know only THAT they live in this galactic community and THAT this machine allows faster-than-light travel etc. but they no longer remember how or why. An extreme example of this would be the film Idiocracy.
Consequently, even though the civilisation may be technologically advanced, the collective knowledge base is relatively limited, so even a launching a simple solar probe would not be considered a redundant action.
I hope this helps/I haven't overlapped too much with other's answers!
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Maybe there was a technological barrier? We have explored the earth but diving deep in the ocean or reaching certain places in the poles is still a challenge or can't even be done.
Also, maybe for something like a challenge? Everest is a feat humanity reached long ago but we still go there every now and then to prove how brave/skilled/whatever we are
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It could be that the civilization is looking for alternative power sources, and wants to research fusion - given that stars are basically just massive fusion reactions.
The only problem with this is if they're a galaxy-wide civilization they should already have a pretty solid power generation method.
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Sure.
Lots of reasons.
1 Political convenience---I have introduced a bill that will add X jobs by constructing probes to map poorly traveled regions of space.
2 Investigating anomalies---We keep losing ships in this area so we need to determine what causes this.
3 Sensors/scanners/radio on automated craft could act as a communications network for disabled ships, such that search/rescue operations are performed on a much more timely basis. Might also reduce the likelihood of piracy on commercial shipping lanes.
4 Military planning---Publicly stated reasons above might cover use of probes designed to detect if a group of planets are planning to secede from the main government and building up a war fleet.
5 Keeping an eye out for exo-galactic phenomena arriving.
6 We lost contact with a planet. Lets go check it out.
Did they have a war that bombed them to the stone ages, or a plague or natural disaster?
7 We are still hunting for dark matter. Its still playing hide and seek.
8 Our industry is hunting for more sources of unobtanium, that might have been missed in earlier surveys, or have more recently been deposited on planets after initial surveys.
9 Monkey boys are still curious, so we still wanna look around.
There might be something new since the last time we looked.
10 We need a really isolated place to send a few political prisoners.
A probe ends up being a cover story to hide where they are exiled.
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I think that since there are certain prerequisite steps to technological innovation, e.g, tires and wagons before engines and suspension systems, probes to suns would have been an early prerequisite. As you mentioned, we are doing this already, and we aren't close to being a galaxy spanning civilization. But I could see thousands or millions of probes sent out in all directions to act as both a communication network for far reaching planets, and as a way to further push our boundaries of understanding on the frontiers of space. Surely these probes would bump into some interesting events from time to time.
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Yes, everything in the universe should be deeply explored if it's safe to do so and if this civilization develops the correct probe I can't see why a star shouldn't be explored.
It's like the armor-weapon paradox - if you develop yourself strong enough to penetrate *X*, which is "dangerous", then you can learn something about the origin of *X* and what makes it dangerous and develop a "dangerous weapon" from *X* material and knowledge, which obviously a "good weapon" let's yourself explore wider, and find "new dangerous entities to explore/harvest" and loop.
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What would be the most efficient text communication method for a spacecraft operating on a super low bit rate (I'm talking something like 5 bits an hour, excluding error handling)?
As you want both complexity (full English language and numbers) and speed (letters per day) resorting to something like Morse code seems the most obvious solution but is there any other options out there?
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The most efficient communication is probably a command set. Since you contemplated Morse code, I assume that the communication is done via a fully defined interface - both sender and receiver know what a bit sequence is supposed to mean.
A command set is no more that giving different codes predefined meanings. With one singe bit you can define 2 commands:
```
| value | meaning |
| 0 | light off |
| 1 | light on |
```
With 4 bits you can define 15 different commands, with 1 byte (8 bits) 255 commands, with 2 bytes 65535 commands and so on. If all you really need is to display texts to an astronaut, you have to store a bunch of ready made texts like "Activate X-ray sensors" in a database and send the corresponding message ID from Earth. For more complex messages you can store text templates in a database and then compile a message from several templates.
An early real-world example is the list of [Q-Codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code), created circa 1909, by the British government as a "list of abbreviations... prepared for the use of British ships and coast stations licensed by the Postmaster General".
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If you need to communicate more than simple texts, you would separate a message into a command part and a message part. You could, for example, tell the space ship:
>
> Activate X-ray sensors
>
>
>
By sending a signal of 2 bytes:
```
| byte | value | meaning |
| 1 | 01 | activate appliance |
| 2 | 08 | X-ray sensor array |
```
Communication with an astronaut would be possible with a different command:
```
| byte | value | meaning |
| 1 | 04 | write to terminal |
| 2 | 08 | text with ID 8 |
```
That would result in slightly longer commands, but the possibilities of what you can achieve with a few bytes are multiplied.
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If you have a *really big* database with *a whole lot* of different texts, it might be more efficient to terminate commands with a defined code. For this approach, the database must be sorted in a way that gives the most frequent commands the lowest ID.
Let's define `0000` as the terminator.
* For a very common command with the ID 6, you need to send the command's ID followed by the terminator: `0110 0000`.
* A very uncommon command with the ID 26683 would look like this: `0110 1000 0011 1011 0000`.
The advantage is that you can have commands of dynamic lengths (instead of sending a whole bunch of useless 0's to fill up the static length of a command).
The disadvantage is that every command is longer than it could ideally be. So this approach only gets worthwhile when you need a great many commands.
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After defining your command set, the next step is to make sure that you received the correct message. Losing just a single bit can change a message of "Activate X-ray sensors" into "Destroy X-ray sensors" or similar. This is usually done with a checksum, which requires some more bits to transmit.
Have a look at the difference between two common data transmission protocols for the internet: [UDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol) and [TCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol). UDP is the most efficient in respect to transfer rate, but TCP trades some efficiency for reliability by including some overhead for error checking.
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According to Schneier the entropy of English text is below 1.6 bit per letter. Given a difficult constraint such as yours I would expect people to come up with compression algorithms getting close to that.
If you don't need the full power of English you might get much better compression if you can pre-define a small set of words that would be sufficient. Something similar in principle to <https://xkcd.com/1133/>
I think you need to answer two important questions:
1. Is the system pre-defined, i.e. can there be word-lists?
2. Are characters/words sent individually or can you apply compression to a large amount of data and then send it in bulk?
If you want something that is simple, sciency and requires no setup, go with Huffman-coding individual letters based on frequency in English. ;)
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1. Encode whole words instead of single letters.
2. Use Huffmann encoding based on word frequency in the specific context of space travel. So that frequent words ('the', 'yes', 'shields') have less bits than less frequent words.
3. Use markov chains to take the context of the sentence into account as well.
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You might look at digital modes for amateur radio here. Some of those modes use what's called "varicode" -- where different characters have different symbol lengths (Morse code is a varicode system -- more commonly used letters are shorter in terms of transmission time). When sending English text, a varicode will minimize the number of bits required for a sufficiently large sample (which reasonably ought to include a large number of messages). If "text speak" is used commonly, it might make sense to design the varicode used around letter frequencies in that particular text format.
If longer messages are common, some form of compression would make sense -- text typically compresses will with common compression algorithms, but the compression headers make this inefficient for very small blocks of data (text or otherwise).
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### Not Morse code
From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#Representation,_timing,_and_speeds):
>
> International Morse code is composed of five elements:[1]
>
>
> 1. short mark, dot or "dit" (▄▄▄▄): "dot duration" is one time unit long
> 2. longer mark, dash or "dah" (▄▄▄▄▄▄): three time units long
> 3. inter-element gap between the dots and dashes within a character: one dot duration or one unit long
> 4. short gap (between letters): three time units long
> 5. medium gap (between words): seven time units long
>
>
>
If we use one bit to store one unit of information, it takes four bits to transmit even the shortest letter ('e') and its subsequent gap. The next shortest are 'i' and 't' at six bits. Then 'a', 'n', and 's' at eight. The longest character in the Morse alphabet is 0, which requires five dashes or twenty-two units/bits. And that only supports the thirty-six character latin alphanumeric alphabet.
Morse is designed around humans. Humans do better with indeterminate length than fixed length, as we don't have good timing ability (we can't tell a five unit pause from a four unit pause consistently). But if these messages are being transmitted computer to computer, computers have great ability at timing. We can use superior fixed length formats. Heck, even with humans, twelve minute long units means that it is easy to track whether you're getting a pause or a dot (a zero or a one).
Even worse, if you are transmitting Morse over bits. Because (extended) ASCII's eight bits is more efficient unless the message is composed entirely of 'eitans'.
### Bits
Meanwhile, if we transmit ASCII, we could transmit a 0 with eight bits. If we break things into nybbles, we can transmit one nybble with a checksum bit every hour. So two hours to transmit one character with some error detection included. Or ninety-six minutes without the checksums.
If we instead use ten bits (two hours), we can do something like Lempel-Ziv. So the first 256 characters are the extended ASCII set. The remaining 768 symbols actually represent multiple characters. So common sequences (e.g. "the ", "ing", and "tion") would have their own ten-bit representation, e.g. 0100000000. This allows the full flexibility of ASCII while also producing a shorter message on average.
The Lempel-Ziv algorithm builds the dictionary from the message itself. We can do better by agreeing on a dictionary beforehand. You can also use this to integrate the error correction and the dictionary, which improves your effective speed.
Numbers are generally going to be better sent as bits than as characters. I.e. instead of sending ASCII 3840, just send 111100000000. That's only twelve bits, hardly more than a single character.
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**Textspeak**
SMS messages originally were 160 characters so [textspeak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_language) evolved to reduce everything down to the most compact form through abbreviations, acronyms and emoticons.
Sounds like a good reason to send teenagers into space....
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# Huffman Encoding
Basically, you want the same methodology we use today for writing to a .zip file. Basically what happens is we take the most common character in the file (probably 'e'), and say that it simply corresponds to the bit '1'. Then the next most common one ('a' maybe?) will be '01', and the next most common (let's say 't') will be '001'.
So, given this system, "eat" = "101001", while "tea" = "001101".
This is the most efficient form of encoding there is, as it gives you access to any number of characters while still using very few bits for the vast majority of the ones you're using.
Note though: this is most effective when some letters/characters are used far more than other ones (as it is in modern English).
Also, most .zip files will send along a "dictionary" of bit combinations and characters, so the other person can translate out of it. This can be wasteful to send every time, especially for short messages. However, if every user has a well-known dictionary that is encoded to best represent common English usages it can work.
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A receiver will pick up the raido signal plus background noise (most notably cosmic background radiation). Generally the received noise power is greater for greater receiver bandwidth. So to get a good signal to noise ratio one can transmit the radio signal within a very narrow frequecy band and put a very narrow band filter on the front of the receiver.
**EXAMPLE:** The receiver was picking up 1 micro-watt of radio signal and 1 milli-watt of noise power with a 1MHz bandwidth (so a SNR of 0.001).
Droping the bandwith to 10Hz would result in 1 micro watt of radio signal power and 10 nano-watts of received noise power (so a SNR of 100)
Consider a protocol like PSK31 (or similar) used by HAM radios instead of moorse code.
**PSK31** uses pure tones of relatively long duration to send 1s and 0s. The longer those tones are the more narrow the filter at the receiver can be. PSKxxx can be used to send low data rate messages across the plannet using only a few watts of power.
Another alternative (though more complex) is using long strings of physical 1s and 0s to represent a single symbol in the protocol. This method is used by GPS for example. The GPS signal is normally about 30X lower power than the background noise, but by correlating long strings of 1024 bits the receiver is able to on average lock onto the signal.
**EXAMPLE:** Define two long sequences of physical 1s and 0s for each letter of the alphabet. Each code is very different from the other codes.
Let A be 00101010 10001010 10100101 00101010 ...
Let B be 10100001 10100101 00010101 00010100 ...
Let C be 01001010 01010100 00010100 00110101 ...
The sequences may be thousands of bits long if you want. The patterns are generated by a computer automatically when the user types a letter on the keyboard.
The physical bit sequences are sent at a much higher rate than the actual symbols. For example if you want t send one symbol per second and your sequences are 1000 bits long then you send the physical bits at 1000 bits per second.
When receiving the signal + noise; the noise will cause the receiver to make the wrong decision on the physical 1s and 0s some percentage of the time. The receiver stores the received bit pattern and compares it to one of the codes. The receiver then selects the code which most closely matches the received pattern. Even if most of the received bits are wrong, the received code is likely to match most closely to the code sent by the transmitter rather than one of the other codes. Thus the receiver can determine what the transmitter sent even if the background noise is much higher than the received radio signal.
Some other advantages of using long codes is that the codes inherently correct physical bit errors at the receiver. Also different transmitters can each use different code sets so they can talk at the same time (this approach is how CDMA cell phones work).
[Answer]
# Building on other answers
In addition to the different encoding and compression methods, one thing to look into is shorthand techniques that allow you to drop letters while still being able to interpret the message. Some examples:
* it, to -> t
* is -> s
* have -> hv
* cat -> ct
* are -> r
Example sentence: hw r u?
# An alternative approach
**Encode your information in time delays**
Presumably there is some reason that you can't speed up the data transmission, but perhaps you can slow it down. At 5 bits per hour, that's 12 minutes between each bit. Instead of sending each bit at regular interval, you can delay transmission of bits and use the delay time as a means of conveying information.
So let's say you expect a minimum of 12 minutes between each bit, you can encode the data as follows (time is in mm:ss format):
* 12:00 = 0
* 12:05 = 1
* 12:10 = 2
* 12:15 = 3
* etc
The more data you encode, the fewer bits per day you'll be able to transmit, so there will be some optimal balance you'll have to figure out based on the minimum delay interval you consider acceptable. Then you can perhaps use the bits themselves as an error checking mechanism, or to still transmit data.
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Ok, since all other answers give some general advice, I instead provide a full-fledged solution, that would probably work for real use case with minor tweaking. Start from a usefull dictionary of stuff you need to bit-encode:
* **List of all english words** (58.000 or so, now expecting that list to include technical terms though)
* **List of all technical terms**, including eventual keywords for programming languages (foreach i.e). I expect it to be below 10.000 for most fields (personal estimate)
* **Usefull symbols** (punctuation, formatting symbols, short names for math functions, single digits and characters). would probably be less than 255 things.
* **Code names** (example: astronaut 1: Bill, communication received: Roger etc.
You get with something around 70.000 **things** to be encoded in the most efficient bit space.
Then analyze all communications in the past decades, find sequences of words or single words that are used more often.
**Add to the dictionary the sequence of words.** I would not be surprised if we are still below 70.000 usefull terms.
**Now prune the dictionary**, remove synonims without technical relevance, outdated or never used terms. I expect it to shrink to at least 30.000 terms, If done aggressively probably we can **stay safe with 15.000 terms**. For that part I would elect a number of people (say 1000 people), be it experts in english language and technicians/scientists/programmers/engineer. Each person is awarded with 1000 random words and it is given the task to sort that words by likely-ness to be usefulll given the context of the mission. Each person should carefully check the meaning of each word, search for synonyms etc. It would probably be a year of work because it has to be done carefully. **It is not and error that I gave to much words too much people, each word will be examined by more than one person and in more than one field.**
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Ok, now it gets the interesting part you **sort the words/setenctes/symbols using the following priorities**:
1. Occurrencies of words and word sequences in last decades of communications.
2. Occurrencies of words and word sequences in english language.
3. Evaluate if there are emergency words (like "CAME IMMEDIATLY BACK").
---
With less than 16.000 words, you know every single word can be encoded in 14 bits. However since you know some words are more often used than others (in example the most occurring text sequence would probably be "SPACE" or ".SPACE") **you can prioritize certain words to be encoded in less bits**. You can take inspiration from UTF-8 or other bit encoding schemes. UTF use 8 bits' bytes, here since you need 14 bits encoding space you could use bytes made of 5+5+7 bits:
>
> if first bit is 0, the next 4 bits forms a word ( the 16 more often used words, guarantees a transmission time of 1 hour for those words)
>
>
> if first bit is 1 and second is 0, the next 8 bits forms a word (the 255 more often used words after the first 8, so we actually reached 263 words in 10 bits)
>
>
>
Note **that the 263 most common words may contain something really not reasonable, so those must be reviewed by a team of people**. Just that thing could save thousand bytes in future communications.
>
> if first two bits are 1 and third is 0, the next 14 bits forms a word
>
>
>
You could also **reserve some emergency modes to encode information that is not included in the dictionary**:
>
> if the first 3 bits are 1, you enter text mode. that means you send single characters and digits there are 26 characters and 10 digits, "T,E,A,O" are not sent since those are most common letters: we have 36 - 4 letters, so 32, enough to require just 5 bits, so at this point for each letter you send 0, plus the bits to encode the character
>
>
> if during text mode a 1 is received insted of the 0-starting-character you rollback to regular mode.
>
>
>
You could use as much special modes as you wish (coordinates, small software updates to ship etc.) Each special mode can be activated by setting first N bits to 1, or by using a special word in the dictionary (so first two bits are 1, third bit is 0, and then fourteen 1s). You can even use a custom mode to de-prioritize words on the fly. In Example:
>
> Received sequence 1111111111100, then received XXXX (4 bits word), then received XXXYYYYY ( 8 bits word), those 2 words are swapped in dictionary. So that future communications can benefit of 5 bits less for a word that is going to be used more often. This sequence requires 14+4+8 bits (26 bits, so if you need to use a particular word more than 5 times you already saved some bits:
>
>
>
You had "Banana" in dictionary, it was a 8 bits word, so required 10 bits for transmission, and you had "Yes" that was a 4 bits word and required just 5 bits for transmission. If you know you are going to use Banana 6 times, you send the swap sequence for "Yes" and "Banana". The sequence is 26 bits, and Banana-4 written 6 times is 30 bits, so in total 56 bits, If you don't swap Banana, writing Banana 6 times requires 60 bits. You saved 4 bits using the swapping sequence.
In reality the swap sequence should double the limit, so it become usefull if you write Banana more than 11 times, because you have also to keep in mind that at some point you want to switch "Banana" and "Yes" again.
The good side of this encoding, is that since information is transmitted at very low pace, you can have whole teams working on saving bits with the help of computer algorithms (that can automate insertion of certain special sequences). **While you are sending your first 5 bits, you have time to examine the next horus/days of communications and continuosly improve them.**
Since the dictionary include sequences of words and sentences I can expect it to have in average 1 word per hour in regular communication. So basically 1 word/5 bits, which is exceptional!
^^^^
## ALL ABOVE THAT:
*Probably all the above can be done by 1 people alone (in example I could write some programs to help and do that in one month or so), but since that task requires a lot of safety, various experties fields etc. It is highly suggested that many many people work on that to assure the minimal number of bits is used in the end.*
When writing text to and from the ship, people will be helped with text editors that shows words that can't be encoded, and suggest alternative sequences or words that use less bits. The text editor will highlight in blue sequences of 4 bits, in green sequences of 8 bits, yellow the longer sequences, and suggest special modes when it thinks it is appropriate. It will add also a line break after each day of transmission (you will likely to see a lot of line breaks), and text that was already sent cannot longer be erased from text editor.
---
A simple example: If we run the above algorithm on the text above "ALL ABOVE THAT": with the following oline tool:
[Compute words frequencies](https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp)
you see that some words are really good candidate for 4 bits encoding:
1. the
2. you
3. bits
4. to
5. of
6. words
7. in
8. and
9. a
10. is
11. that
12. be
13. word
14. are
15. if
16. for
And there just 150 words that are not used uniquely, those words could become good 8 bits-candidates, and also some sentences like:
* to be
* 4 bits
* more often
* of words
* you can
* the dictionary
* is 0
* 8 bits
And some senteces are good to keep in the 14 bit dictionary, in example:
* would probably be
* you could use
The following sentence:
>
> You could use the dictionary for that
>
>
>
will be encoded in
>
> You could use| the dictionary| for| that
>
>
>
Which means in bits:
>
> 17 | 10 | 5 | 5
>
>
>
In colors
>
> Yellow | green | blue | blue
>
>
>
**just 37 bits for a sentence!**
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## Here is the literal answer to your question:
Use reverse base64 character encoding (i.e. base64 text → binary transmission → base64 text). You can see an example base64 table [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64), but note that the rest of the page there is using base64 characters for a different purpose, so ignore the use cases on that page. This allows you to represent the English characters, including numbers, which is precisely what you said you wanted, using 6 bits per character which is just 1 bit short of fitting into 1 hour's worth of transmission in your circumstance.
## And here are some enhancements to that by adding special "modes"...
This includes both upper and lower case letters. If you are fine with restricting yourself to one case, which would still fulfill your requirements, then you would have room left to include more punctuation or other enhancements (up to 26 other enhanced transmission modes). I would recommend using some of this extra space to represent some extremely common words or short phrases that you would use very, very often. Then use a few of the character slots for other special meanings, such as "the next few bytes represent status codes" or "the following data is compressed".
## Mode 1: Table of most common words or phrases
For the examples below, I'll assume that 2 of the characters represent different word/phrase lookup tables using 9 bits each since this allows the lookup to take exactly 3 hours to send, including the initial 6 bits (6 + 9 = 15 bits = 3 hours). This allows for 512 bits worth of lookup power times 2; that is, 1024 different shortened words or phrases.
Using this format...
"**Hey Bob**" as plain text requires 6\*7=42 bits = **8 hours + 2 bits**
"communication array damaged by [reason]", assuming "communication array" and "damaged" are both in the lookup table, would take 9 hour + 3 bits + [however long it takes to send the reason]. "communication array damaged by Klingon torp" would take 24 hours - less if either "Klingon" or "torp" were send as lookup words instead of as plain text.
## Mode 2: Look-back
This is a "repeat recent word" mode. In computer science, it has been shown that recently used data is among the most likely data to be used next, and that is what a PC memory cache is for. We can do something similar by making 1 of the character slots represent "The next 4 bits refer to a previous word; count back that many words in the most recent transmitted data."
With this, "Klingon fleet approaches from 294 and Klingon admiral on comms saying Klingon destroyers equipped with new black hole tech" allows you to shorten 2 instances of "Klingon" to exactly 2 hours worth of data each; the first one providing "0110" (6) as the 4-bit-lookback value and the second instance being "0101" (5). In some communications this could save a lot of time if words are repeated often. Note that pronouns like "their" could have been used in some places, but that would take 7 plaintext characters (including surrounding spaces), which in this case would have taken 6 hours + 2 bits longer to send.
## Mode 3: Copy/paste, possibly with separate paste-buffers
This would allow customized shortcuts that were not thought of before launch, a sort of copy/paste. "start copying here", then continue the message, then a "stop copying here"... then later you can send a "paste" character to repeat a long message. "comms good, thrusters good, life support good, magnetic-artificial-gravity [copy]working intermittently due to a swarm of flies in the grav-capacitor[end copy] from a meal someone left out for days", then you only have to send that long text 1 time, and each time after that you send "comms good, thrusters good, life support good, magnetic-artificial-gravity [paste]", and you do that until it changes back to "good". Also, "comms", "thrusters", "life support", "magnetic-artificial-gravity", and "good" might all be in the lookup table, meaning this entire message takes 22 hours + 1 bit to send after the first time you send it. Even better is if you make this "paste mode" be followed by a few bits for a "paste buffer number". Then you could "[copy1]comms good, [etc.], [copy2]working intermittently due to...[end-copy-2][end-copy-1] from a meal that..." Then every time you want to send an updated status, if it's the same as the one before it takes 1 hour plus a few bits.
You can tweak the exact representation (different send modes, number of bits for each, etc.) to improve performance based on your expected communications to improve performance further.
## Mode 4: Compression
Just what it sounds like. The following data uses a given compression algorithm.
## And More!
You can add whatever other features you want in a similar fashion. Also note that, as stated by @HenningMakholm in comment below, some of these features are implemented in some compression software available for use today. Henning's example was [zlib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib).
## Multiple versions of each mode
If you cut out lower case and still have more character slots left over after implementing all the punctuation and mode's you want, you can use left over character slots to expand modes that you already have. This is similar to what I did above with the lookup tables, I suggested using 2 of the base64 character slots that were freed up from tossing lower-case to give us 2 separate lookup tables. You could also do similar to double your look-back reach or to double your number of copy/paste buffers. You can also increase or decrease the number of bits following a mode-byte, such as having 4 bits after copy/paste to have 16 paste buffers, or only 2 extra bits to save on transmission time but allow only 4 paste buffers.
## So how efficient is this?
Worst case scenario this requires 6 bits per character. Average case scenario you will use a few lookups, look-backs, or some compression to beat the worst case, so you require 3-5 bits per character. Best case is messages that can be relayed entirely, or nearly entirely, by lookups and look-backs, which will be often for normal day to day activities that go as expected - for such common communication, if you have a well tuned number of bits for each special mode, you should achieve *better* than 1 bit per character. Many times *much, much* better than 1 bit per character, such as with the status report example a couple paragraphs up.
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As a thought, back in the day you used to have predictive text on a mobile phone with.
`[1|.], [2|abc], [3|def], [4|ghi], [5|jkl], [6|mno], [7|pqrs], [8|tuv], [9|wxyz], [0| ].`
If you were OK with predictive text (so, display as predicted - allow ship to skip through poss. words if they don't make sense). You'd need those 10 digits, plus a control character to signal if it was a number or character. That would need 4 bits / letter, so ~48min/letter by your timing. That would leave 5 extra 'control' characters.
Now, why should you only have one control character to act as a shift? Why not 2? You'd get 4 options for each key (2^2), so you can drop predictive text entirely and have 1 character per symbol (plus a few spares for punctuation characters etc) if the two flags are set.
Carrying on that path, you then have an *additional* 4 control keys, which by my book is 2^4 = 16 options, over the above 10 keys ... you get ~160 extra characters. You could use those as templates (similar to the Q-codes), so get full text *plus* qcodes, all in 4 bits (~48min per character).
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On top of the answers talking about encoding, I'd also look into finding clever ways to incorporate steganography in the medium and/or message. With 5 bits per hour, you have a VERY limited throughput rate, so anything you can do to hide additional bits of information could help enormously. Maybe some clever manipulation of the signal carrier or something related to signal orientation. This would depend on what type of interstellar communication you're sending out.
Speaking of which, I would like to also include a bit of frame challenge. 5 bits per hour is a pretty weird bandwidth. Assuming 2 bits per radio oscillation, 5 bits per hour is roughly 0.0007 hz. that is REALLY low. As in, impossibly low. The lowest frequency Humans use right now is 3 Hz, and that's only for communication with submarines. To go 4 orders of magnitude lower would require a HUGE antenna: Antenna length needed is essentially the distance light travels in 1 second divided by the frequency. In this case, that would be an antenna that is hundreds of millions of kilometers long. That's an ABSURD length.
] |
[Question]
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In alternative medieval Europe, there is a king who is (secretly) an atheist and wishes for (what we would call) a secular and humanist society. Unfortunately for him, in the same medieval Europe, the Christian Church as powerful and ruthless it was in our medieval Europe. Rest of the big picture is also the same, although exact details may be different.
Our king is very displeased by the situation and wants to change it as much as possible and see the change during his lifetime. **How much can he achieve?**
Being a king, he is a very powerful figure, but the Church is also very powerful, so it won't be so straightforward as one might think.
On the other hand, he is very smart, intelligent and [genre savvy](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy) (Warning: TV Tropes link!), so he won't let somebody know of his unconventional thoughts until he makes sure he can do it safely.
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From a practical point of view, probably the best thing he can do to undermine the church would be to launch a massive campaign to educate the population and teach them all to read and to use logical constructs (If Then else kind of stuff).
Remember, at the time, ignorant villagers might just burn a neighbor (whom they have known for years) at the stake. They might use religion as a pretext for what amounts to murder, with cries of "Heretic" and "Heresy" (She's a Witch is out, I stand corrected). People, particularly serfs, had so little in the material world. They were worried about their immortal soul. This gave the clergy all kinds of power. The one thing a serf had was his soul, and that could be threatened by excommunication. The clergy (mostly higher up in the hierarchy) held the knowledge, and that imbalance spread out through society.
What you need to do to remain in power locally while eroding the power of the church is to return that power to the people in your country by teaching them to read and supplying them with bibles. This will undermine the power held by the clergy. They can no longer say "Do this, God wills it!" without at least some saying "Hold on, where does it say that?" or "That doesn't make any sense" *It won't eradicate that knowledge differential overnight, but it WILL begin the erosion of power.*
As a Bonus, edit the bibles to further erode the power of the papacy. Stress a personal relationship with the creator. Tell folks that they don't NEED the intercession of a priest to be forgiven of their sins.
Then begin teaching systematic logic. This should naturally lead to some more folks coming around to a more agnostic state of mind.
Of course, this may also jump start into something resembling some of the violent conflicts that started after Martin Luther, but either way, you move power away from the centralized Roman church.
I think he would **not** be able to admit Atheism in his own lifetime, but he could actually advance things quite a bit if he started young and focused on teaching kids as young as he possibly could. Get them questioning the priesthood as early as possible and stretch that education out as long as possible. With some good political tap dancing, he might even begin to get away with having his government run as an almost meritocracy, showing the peasantry that they can, in fact, make things better for themselves in this life. That could take another source of the churches power away. I'm thinking he might be able to do much of this without being declared a heretic.
Important Note:
Please excuse me. I was originally confusing the Gnostics with other violent religious conflicts in the middle ages. I did not wish to give offense.
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In the European Middle Ages, nobody was an atheist, certainly not a militant atheist. They didn't even have the faintest notion of such a world-view. This being said, one does not have to be a militant atheist in order to want a secular and humanist society; there were people, including some powerful rulers, who worked towards a more secular society; there were other people, including some rulers, who were humanists, with the observation that the word *humanist* had a different meaning in those times. (In fact, the current tendency to make the word *humanist* almost a synonym for *philanthropist* is quite recent.)
Many kings and rulers were not particularly religious. Those who were devoted to their Christian or Muslim faith were rather the exception; examples such as [Charles V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor) (who at the age of 56 abdicated the throne and became a monk) are rare and far between. Most medieval rulers (emperors, kings, princes and even popes) saw the Church as a partner or an adversary, a tool or a hazard, a force to be used or opposed, but not necessarily as a divine institution.
Now the question asks what could a king achieve in his struggle against the Church. The answer is, quite a lot. Here are some examples of emperors and kings who fought valiantly against the power of the Church:
* The most successful was [Henry VIII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England) of England, he of the countless wives, who eventually succeeded in taking his country completely out of the influence of the self-titled [Universal Church](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church), and set it on a course which would in the fullness of time result in an almost completely religion-free polity.
* A remarkably good fight was fought by emperor [Henry IV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_IV,_Holy_Roman_Emperor) (there is something with the name Henry) of the [Holy Roman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire), who throughout his reign strived to consolidate the secular imperial power and to curtail the political power of the Church. For his pains he was excommunicated *four times* (which is quite a feat in itself); in the end, he failed in his attempt to reform the HRE, but he came close and might have succeeded had he not died after a sudden illness at the age of just 56. Henry IV living to exploit the consequences of his victory at Visé in March 1106 and convert the HRE from the loosest confederation ever into a more coherent political structure would make a very interesting point of departure in a speculation on alternative history.
* Emperor [Frederick I Barbarossa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_I,_Holy_Roman_Emperor) of the Holy Roman Empire was arguably the last great emperor of that archetypal medieval political structure who attempted to curb the influence of the Universal Church and increase the authority of the secular power. He was excommunicated (only once, boo), he fought actual wars against several popes, and, maybe most importantly, he actively promoted the use of [Justinian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_I)'s [*Corpus Juris Civilis*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_Code) as the basis of the legal and judicial system; in this last endeavor he was successful: with the exception of the insular realms of Great Britain and Ireland, European countries still use legal systems descended from Roman law.
Like Henry IV before him, he ultimately failed in his attempt to consolidate the HRE into a viable political entity; a potential point of departure would be Frederic Barbarossa winning the [Battle of Legnano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Legnano) in 1176 (it was touch and go, and Frederic only lost because he was gravely wounded and could no longer lead the army), thus enabling him to depose pope [Alexander III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Alexander_III) and impose his view on the question of who exactly controlled the bishops -- the emperor or the pope?
* King [Francis I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France) of France was maybe less flamboyant, but he eventually succeeded in 1516 in convincing (with the aid of military force) pope [Leo X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_X) to sign the [Concordat of Bologna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordat_of_Bologna), which gave the king control over the nominations of bishops in France, thus ending forever the political power of the Pope in that kingdom.
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Religion in Middle Age was more about power than about spirituality. The Church was a power with the plus side of being (independently) blessed from high above, while other kings and emperors had to receive legitimation via the Church.
There are cases of kings which were known to be homosexual (a sin according to the Church) or even to have switched religion based on convenience (remember "Paris is worth a mass"?).
You also state he won't disclose his atheism, therefore it looks like he will behave like all other kings in those time: pragmatism to conserve power, as challenging the Church would have given a good reason to enemy kingdoms to attack.
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The nearest thing to a real-life example may be [Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor) (reigned 1220-1250). He was famed for his religious skepticism, embrace of science, patronage of learning, and tolerance of Muslims; and he was frequently at war with the Papacy. He probably took anti-religious behaviour about as far as any medieval monarch could without being overthrown.
In the long run, Frederick's reign did very little to weaken the central role of religion in Europe. That wasn't really challenged until the French Revolution in 1789. The revolution wasn't the work of a single individual; it was a mass popular movement, drawing on centuries of philosophical development and social change which didn't have any counterparts in medieval Europe.
Our hypothetical atheist king would not be able to overthrow the Church single-handed. Probably his best course is to promote learning, creating the conditions for something like the 18th-century [Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment) to arrive ahead of schedule. For example he could found universities with a secular focus on science and philosophy, instead of theology (which was the main preoccupation of medieval universities like Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne).
He might not see the Church fall in his lifetime, but from his perspective bringing it down in 200 years instead of 500 may count as a win.
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AlexP has given you a wonderful start, as have all the other people.
Medieval is...a large time period, so generalizing seems dangerous, especially in respect to church and its power.
But I thought I would add my point of view, just to give you another angle.
While we might think of the church as an instrument of oppression, it was far, far more than that during this time period. Monastic orders were crucial to economies in some places, and it was the only thing keeping us from the total collapse of knowledge during the Dark Ages.
Taking away the Church during this time period may lead to less education. It really was the only place that a lot of old texts were preserved. And, it served to spread the Arabic numbers system.
They have all the books and educational resources. Pretty much. Some of the priests were even fairly secular, but since they benefited from the education and enjoyed the conversations about science and math, of course, they were good with devoting their lives to Christian ideals. We think of Church as a place which rejects logic entirely, but during the Middle Ages, it was a place where men of science could speak with other men of science and reason.
It's also the reason why areas with different language could communicate and get news of other places (aka Latin). The spread of ideas often happened because of this communication network--and nobles did talk to clergy specifically to gain knowledge of what other lands and rulers were doing. That is not to say that rulers did not write to each other, but this ready-made network meant that a priest interested in maths could write the Vatican (or other priests they had heard of) asking if there were other priests interested in that area of study. Once they had the info, they could start corresponding (and did). These messages could be sent via pilgrims or religious tourists.
And there's another blow to the economy--relics. Pilgrimages to visit holy relics were a big deal--making churches holding relics destinations which could be a boon for the local economies.
And lastly, the Church cared for the poor and ill. Most kings and governments did not do this--except through donations to the church. Therefore, most rulers were glad that the church provided something for people who would otherwise be driven to crime in their district.
My point here is that the church did a lot for civilization and was intertwined in a lot of different things.
Your king would have to work to replace all those things before people could accept it. Casting the Church as the villain of the piece seems like a modern point of view--but you have to realize that their place in Medieval society was more than just "we are the grand and oppressive church." Churches provided more than that and were woven into the very fabric of society then, often in very beneficial ways.
As to how far your King can get--this is the work of generations--not just one man--and it likely won't hold after he dies.
[Answer]
Anything that [RenegadePizzaGuy](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78024/28789) said. You also have to take into account that in medieval times there was no "atheism" as we see it now. Yes, there were people not believing in the church, but every had a "system" they believed it. There was simply no hint that there is no god.
Even better than undermining via the kings power would you be to give his subjects a bible in their language (like Luther did, which was almost the end of church) and let them revolt. One of the many reasons people let the church rule them is because they could not read the Latin bible and interpret it. So everything the priest said was a rule of god.
Educate the masses about Christianity, let them revolt, then kill the evil heart of the church.
/edit because I'm kind of mad at the comments claiming I'm wrong about atheism. So the following part is dictated to explaining why there was no atheism in medieval times/
Lets establish some terms. (all from Wikipedia)
**Atheism** is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist.
**Heresy** is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs. A heretic is a proponent of such claims or beliefs.
**Infidel** (aka **non-believer**)(literally "unfaithful") is a pejorative term used in certain religions for those who do not believe the central tenets of one's own religion, are members of another religion, or are not religious.
**Agnosticism** is the view that the existence of God or the supernatural are unknown and unknowable
Some comments said my statement, at that time there was no atheism, is simply wrong. So i will prove now, that this statement is *true*
**First we start with looking at the counter "arguments":**
Diagoras of Melos was not alive in medieval times and Critias too, so what they spoke does not matter to us. Same with the bible, even more because its written about non-believers not about atheism.
Just picking one point in history and then saying, well because of that its **safe** to say: there was an atheist, so there will be always someone believing in this system is wrong. If i write now a text about my believe in a huge space fish that created everything wont mean that in 800 years there will be a person *believing* in the same thing.
Critias did not talk about atheism, just about religion is wrong. Not believing in religion does not exclude the believe in a higher force.
Someone trying to prove that there is god with science to combine two systems is not an indicator that there was an actual stream trying to do the opposite.
//edit forgot to include Heraclitus.
Heraclitus was in no way atheistic. His saying *the path up and down are one and the same* is now the base of many pagan systems where "as above so below" is the center. The statement the path up and down are one and the same in in fact deeply rooted in gnosticism.
So no argument that was brought up is actually valid.
And again to know that there is something like atheism it not the same as to practice it.
**Lets look at the world view at those times:**
Earth is a magical spinning disc, everything around us is there only because we are. There was no open theory that humans evolved from a tiny cell. Stars were body less lights in the night sky. To actually believe in atheism in this setting is nonsense. Any psychiatrist in this time would call an actual atheist delusional, schizophrenic or just insane.
Just imagine a conversation like: A: I don't believe that there is some higher power! B: Did you look at the sky? How would you explain the magical sphere giving you light each day, letting you live? who makes it rain to provide us with food?
Person A has no logical way to answer and explain why he is thinking like that. Believing in atheism was in no way a rational decision.
**Now we look at the people actually believing is something different that the church:**
Most of them had some other believe system in place to substitute the church, and practiced it in silence. There were too many different streams of these people to count them. These are the heretics and infidels.
**Let's talk about actual educated humans and the scientific community:**
Even though under these people it was a fact that earth is not flat, most did not believe in atheism. Researchers at that time had in fact a rather occult world view, based on religion but laced with their opinion on the world(Lets not forget science is rooted in occultism and was always closely intertwined). Many combined different believe-systems.
The closest stream within this community which could be called atheists were Aristotles followers (their research led to evolution theroy). They tried to explain the world with actual science, without considering god or anything like that. If asked if a god exists with would reply with i can't tell you, there could be or just maybe but they would not deny it. It was an agnostic stream of thought.
Feel free to prove me wrong. But until then my statement, that there is no actual reason the believe in atheism, stands.
**Lets look at the people in actual power positions and the Vatican.**
Almost none of them were actual Christian. Religion and the church was used to establish control, lower tier of the church had only the same information as the pleb and just did want they were told. Kings had mostly little interest in religion, for them it was too only a tool to gain power.
**In conclusion:**
Atheism was not known like it is today. In medieval times there was not even a word for this. It **wrong** to assume "rational" thinkers turn always to atheism. For the uneducated masses it was rational to assume there is a higher force, for the educated folks it was rational to say they can't know if there is a god, because they could not set up a complete system that worked without a higher force. On the other hand saying that the religion, the standard of approaching spiritualism, is not the right way does not implicate that there is no higher force. In the end actual atheism as we define the term was simply not logical and such a tiny fraction of all people were thinking this way that its is neglectable in terms of general world views. Not to mention people don't want to get killed because they practice a irrational believe, it was not worth it.
In terms of statistical relevance it's the same to say in those times there was *no* atheism, as to say there is *no* cannibalism in Europe today.
A quick look at the wikipedia entry of the story of atheism proves my point.
Writings of that time telling that there is no god were closer to neo satanism than to atheism. (Mankind is the higher force of the universe, their own gods)
I believe in the high standards of stackexchange sites and claiming some statement is false, even in comments, should not be accepted if there is no actual to the topic related proof or argument.
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Unless you have a Stalin-esque dictatorship, I don't see how it would be, realistically, possible to accomplish this in the king's lifetime (especially considering the average lifespan of the time).
The church was as much a political power as a religious one. The first crusade was started as a power play by a deposed Pope. A full year before the actual crusade began, a peasant crusade had formed and was sent off to die, since they were of little consequence.
If I had to make a guess, the king would seek allies among the nobility, since the church basically has an iron grip on the populace. Like minded individuals could help to plant the seeds of doubt among the rest. Another possibility is to play the church against itself. Secretly support and finance more secular members of the church. Gain dirt on members and influence them.
I'd say the best that the king can do is undermine the church's authority and try to cause internal conflict. Getting the church to tear itself apart is perhaps the best move, since the populace is unlikely to budge otherwise
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Two comments already mentioned the [reformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation)([s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation)), and I think this is the answer you’re looking for:
As far as the Roman Catholic Church was concerned, leaders who embraced the Lutheran, Calvinist and English reformation *were* denouncing (the Catholic) god, and were effectively undistinguishable from atheism1. The resulting [schism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism) led to many conflicts and outright wars, but one of the consequences was in that domains that were reformed by their leader, the vassals followed. [The divide can still be seen today](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Europe#Denominations).
To summarise, **yes**, an atheist king could end religious dominance within his lifetime. With brute force, if nothing else. It happened several times over.
1 Of course from a modern perspective these reformed faiths had nothing to do with atheism (except the subordination of the authority of the church). But at the time (and for the purpose of the question) the distinction was immaterial.
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Your question seems to be assuming a behind-the-scenes scheming approach (not necessarily meant in a bad way; whether it is good or bad is a matter of opinion).
Your question can be answered more simply if you are willing to take a more direct approach.
If your king is of reasonable power, he can directly contradict or even war against whatever he opposes. Other answers here have already mentioned kings who fought against the catholic establishment, so I will skip the rest of this case.
The one case which is under-represented here is the powerful king who can do whatever he wants. Fortunately for me, this case does not need much explanation: the king is powerful enough that he can do whatever he wants.
There are rulers in history who have done exactly this, religiously. Generally this was not used to remove the dominance of religion overall; instead it was used to change the dominance from one religion to another, or to another form of the same religion. Notably, in Egypt and Japan the rulers claimed that they, themselves, were gods. That might be an oversimplification in Japan's case, which I am not as familiar with, but my layman's understanding is that the Japanese emperor was revered as a deity.
In the case of the Egyptian pharaohs, however, it was fairly simple: pharaohs could just pronounce that they, or someone close to them, was a god and this was to be accepted.
This was likely accepted with lip-service only by many people, no matter how powerful the ruler, and we do have historical accounts of people who refused to pay such lip-service to their rulers. One such famous account even ended well for the subjects: Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon demanded to be worshipped, but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused, stating that their god would be with them. The king, furious, had these three thrown into a large, super-hot furnace (reportedly so hot that it killed the guards who threw in the prisoners), but they were protected by a fourth figure who could be seen walking in the blazing furnace with them. The king, astonished by the miracle he witnessed, did a complete 180 and ordered everyone to worship the god of the Hebrews. So everyone went in short order from worshipping whoever they were worshipping before, to worshipping the king via his statue he set up, to worshipping the god of the Hebrews, all in short order because of royal degree.
Power reigns in a land lacking in mutual respect, neighborly love, and honor/kindness. In such a place, whatever the entity with the power says is what goes.
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One thing that one should keep in mind is that the medieval European view was that Monarchs ruled by [Divine Right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings):
>
> It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving
> the right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not
> subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other
> estate of the realm. It implies that only God can judge an unjust king
> and that any attempt to depose, dethrone or restrict his powers runs
> contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act.
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If an atheist king delegitimizes the church and the concept of God itself, then he might also delegitimize his own authority.
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> "There is no God!"
>
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> "Well, who made you king, then?"
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>
*Queue Dennis from Monty Python's Holy Grail*
Unless, in your world, kings don't rule by Divine Right. In which case, you might have to come up with an alternate reason why monarchs should rule. At least, in medieval Europe, they thought they needed a reason, and that reason was Divine Right.
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Many people have stated that doing "a lot" to the Middle Age Catholic Church would have been very hard in Europe. I agree with this assumption but would like to add a caveat.
In the Middle Ages power was regionally focused, meaning the further away the less grip it had on you, this is primarily due to the length of time it took to relay information. If your protagonist were located in France, or Germany then by all means [RenegadePizzaGuy](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78024/28789), [Jdizzle](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78026/28789), and [L.Dutch](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78023/28789) are 100% correct.
Move further away and your king slowly becomes more influential. Places like Russia who were [Eastern Orthodox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church) would have tolerated your conversion more readily if you were Catholic. Going to Norway or Finland this would also be feasible as the local lords(Jarls) had actually [encouraged Catholic conversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway) there. You also had mostly secular Arabian cities like [Damascus which during Ottoman rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus#Ottoman_rule) Christians and Jews could practice their religion without state persecution.
This fight for secularism would not be the fastest as others have said. The most you could probably do is [remove priesthood as enforcers and definers of law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism#Pre-Reformation) in your kingdom. This would quickly make you an enemy to the church. Hopefully your kingdom is far enough away and there is other turmoil in the world to mask your plot.
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Start at the bottom. Priests at the parish level were often poorly trained in doctrine and sometimes didn't even know much latin. This king could out compete for the hearts of his country by providing a person at the local level who could be a "spiritual" leader in a secular sense or by co-opting the education of parish priests.
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1. Among your opponents (ie., leaders of the religious body), identify the one who is most influential. See if he's caught up in something that will make him *persona non grata* among his co-religionists, and publicize any such findings to the max. Since the church is powerful and ruthless, it will also be as corrupt as Tammany Hall, so this should not be too difficult. Lather, rinse, repeat.
2. Among your opponents, identify a few ambitious fellows who are only in it for the power. Make a deal with each: Help put the skids under High Priest X, and I'll be your best buddy when you take his place. Make sure that fatal "accidents" befall anyone who gets ideas about challenging you.
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The king knows that the entire population has been indoctrinated and any attempts to openly try to re-educate the population will lead to his palace being stormed and he'll be burned at the Stake. This means that he has to start with a covert counter-indoctrination program. He can do that by asking for a few hundred small children who will get a first class education in his palace. He needs to invent a story why that's necessary that the people will find credible. In medieval Europe there was a lot of poverty, so it shouldn't be too difficult for a king to get hold of a few hundred children of poor parents in exchange for a lot of money.
Then suppose that the king gets 200 children of about 2 years old in his palace. These children then get indoctrinated with atheistic ideology, they also learn a lot about religion but that's to make clear why so many people end up becoming believers in the society they live. When they are a bit older, they get the best education available from the best professors, but here everything is censored. The king tells the professors that this is necessary because they are getting very special religious education from priests. The children are told to pretend as if they are believers when interacting with their professors.
Then when the children are about 16 years old, the king will have 200 geniuses who he would like to become the best scientists, engineers, generals, doctors etc. etc.. They are not held back because of religious nonsense. He'll kick start the scientific revolution from inside his palace, and a mini-industrial revolution, but this all largely hidden from public view (and cover stories invented to cover up what cannot be hidden). Twenty years later, he'll a WWI-like army equipped with primitive machine guns, poison gas and tanks ready to defeat the Church once and for all.
[Answer]
How much he could achieve? All of it. The church in the middle ages was a band of harlots. Remember the third Crusade?
So if you wanted to get rid of the pope and his guys you would release people from paying tithe and from servitude to churches and convents. Furthermore you would require them to pay taxes like everyone else.
Then you would have a backlash from papal states that can expel you from the church. Usually it meant that other rulers could attack you and you can't call for help (like The Teutonic Knights did for the war with Poland-Lithuania) and you are treated worse in economical deals (like countries outside the EU).
But, as we know from history, sometimes the expulsion did nothing. Polish kings were expelled for a few years, but Poland was too strong to be attacked. Henry the VIII farted in the general direction of the Pope and his Church.
**BUT** you need to remember that kings had very small armies on their own. They relied on vassals and common move. So if your king could convince people to atheism (which is not very likely, as religion is a great way to control the peasants) he could easily get away with the atheism.
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I have an idea: can a moon float on the atmosphere of a gas giant, just like a piece of wood floats on the water? It is based on the following situation:
1. The density of the atmosphere increases when getting deeper to the core.
2. The moon spins inwards to the planet slowly because of some damping such as affected by other moons or molecular cloud.
3. The rotational speed of atmosphere is nearly the same as the orbital speed of moon so that it would not collide with the atmosphere violently.
Is that kind of situation possible?
[Answer]
No. Tidal forces would break it up at [Roche’s Limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit), so a moon cannot get this close. That’s what caused the rings of Saturn, some 140 million years ago.
No. The orbital speed is *many, many times* the rotation of the planet. A planet spinning so fast that the equator was at orbital speed would be flying apart.
No. A rock would *also* be crushed by the pressure, so you would not have the gas (or gas and ice) be denser than rock at some depth. When you get heat and pressure, things become more mixed. So a rock will dissolve in the gas at sufficient depth, for any rock that falls in.
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An artificial, *floating* "moon" could work. Of course since it isn't in orbit, it's not a moon. Then again, we don't have a word for such an object, so calling it moon wouldn't be that far off...
It could have been constructed out of some kind of [aerogel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel)-like material in vacuum, so it would essentially be a solid, rigid foam filled with vacuum bubbles. It would need to be strong enough to withstand the pressure, non-permeating enough so gas does not leak in through the walls enough to matter, and with low enough density so it floats. If vacuum seems implausible, it could be filled with helium, and still be light enough to float on top of Methane/CO2/Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere.
Perhaps it was a construction project which got abandoned before completed Perhaps it was stripped of all technology when the ancients left it. Or perhaps it still has some ancient technology on/in it if that fits your story. If the point of your story isn't how the "moon" got there, then you can just not cover that. Or you can describe its structure, but let the reader to draw the conclusion that it must be artificial.
So it is just a solid, stable, floating object, big enough to withstand erosion for millions of years, which got there somehow. As the top side eroded and accumulated dust (eroded stuff from bottom side will just fall off), it would slowly get denser and slowly sink lower. It would also occasionally (every few millenia or whatever) turn upside down, as top side gets heavier in this process. Then the loose stuff on the top side would drop down, and it would rise in the atmosphere. So it would not be a good place for any life which couldn't anchor itself, as there's this cataclysm every few millenia...
It could also be hollow or have a vast cave network. Just note that it would not be a balloon then, the hollow inside would be filled with normal atmosphere and not provide lift, all the lift needs to be provided by the solid "aerogel" material.
[Answer]
# No
[Obligatory xkcd What-if](https://what-if.xkcd.com/138/)
>
> Nope! Jupiter's pressure, density, and temperature curves are different from ours. At the point in Jupiter's atmosphere where the density is high enough for a submarine to float, the pressure is high enough to crush the submarine,[1] and the temperature is high enough to melt it.[2]
>
>
> 1Which makes it more dense.
>
> 2Which makes it harder to drive.
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>
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In brief: what looks like a fluid surface to the naked eye does not have any buoyancy to speak of. You need to get quite deep below this surface in order to achieve any kind of buoyancy. And when you reach that point, the pressure and temperature will quickly reduce your moon to lava which will fall towards the center of the planet and join its core.
[Answer]
Quoting [my answer on Physics.SE](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/43311/6319):
>
> **No, a shared atmosphere between body and moon is not possible.**
>
>
> For a natural satellite to remain, the orbit must be very stable, because those satellites exist for billions of years. Even the tiniest bit of atmosphere (a few molecules) would cause a tiny drag. However, drag adds up, so over a long time period, even a heavy object (such as the moon) would be dragged down due to drag and ultimately collide with the body it is rotating around.
>
>
>
(...)
>
> One more way to look at it: if a satellite would have enough gravitational pull to pull up an observer in a balloon, it would certainly pull up the atmosphere; therefore the satellite would be *in* the atmosphere, which is impossible. Therefore, a a satellite can never have enough gravitational pull to pull up an observer inside the atmosphere.
>
>
>
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An idea similar **hyde**'s, but with a natural origin: If there is life on the planet, this could be a huge decomposing carcass. Hydrogen-producing bacteria are digesting the tissues within the tough scaffolding, causing the carcass to bloat, and become much like the aerogel described in the other answer. The more bloated it gets the higher it rises in the atmosphere.
It could possibly also work without life. Alkaline vents on Earth build up a mineral structure that is full of cavities. If the structure is delicate enough, and the cavities are filled with hydrogen, pieces could break off and float up to the sky! The size of the pieces would be sufficiently random, that once in a while you could see moon-sized mountains rising up.
The depths of gas giants are so alien to me that I have no idea how much of this is actually possible. As a reader, I would be okay with this. Especially if it happens outside of our solar system.
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Decades ago, astronomers thought that something similar to that might be possible. They believed that the Great Red Spot on Jupiter might be some kind of giant solid object floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
But for decades it has been known that the Great Red Spot and similar things on Jupiter and other gas giant planets are giant permanent storms in their atmospheres.
And other answers make it seem very improbable for solid objects to exist at the levels and pressures needed to float in the Jovian atmosphere.
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I think that it is possible, or at least not too much of a stretch. As others have pointed out it probably wouldn't be a moon (at least not one made of moon materials or structure). However there are several things that could affect it.
The Magnus Effect - If the 'moon' were a ball of something rotating counter to direction of motion at a high enough rotational speed it would gain lift and theoretically buoyancy. This is the most feasible explanation I can see. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect>
A skipping moon - The orbit of the moon could be such that it occasionally contacted the atmosphere. However, when this situation is experienced by orbital objects, it tends to be unstable and results in massive losses of orbital energy. This would also depend on the shape and speed of the moon as well as it's angle of entry to the atmosphere. Another possibility with this would be a moon that hangs low enough that it periodically dips into the atmosphere but is sucked away in just in time by a very close and much more massive body that moves nearby (but further out). Here's some more info on atmospheric skipping <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_reentry>
Saturn has some very interesting effects of the moons that orbit among its rings. Some moons will actually drag on the rings causing gravity ripples or wakes. And Saturn's F Ring is twisted because of it's nearby interactions with shepherd moons.
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**No** - You cannot have a floating moon.
Yes - **you can have a balloon**, but **not on a gas giant.**
Gas giants have atmospheres rich in hydrogen. As hydrogen is the lightest gas, there is no other gas that will float in it. Forget about balloons with vacuum inside - there is no known material strong enough that it won't collapse yet light enough to float (in air, let alone in hydrogen.)
Venus, however, has thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Balloons filled with gas lighter than carbon dioxide will float. Even better, you can fill a balloon with hydrogen without risk of fire, because hydrogen doesn't burn in carbon dioxide.
The thickness of venus's atmosphere leads to high pressure, which in turn leads to high density. Once you get to pressures of 10atm (ten times earth's atmospheric pressure) which occurs above the surface, the lifting force, for a balloon of the same volume, is ten times what it would be at 1atm. This means your balloon can be much smaller. Unfortunately the temperature is already over 200C by that pressure, which is OK for equipment but not for humans.
The temperatures and pressures at venus's surface are enormous. Therefore **it is widely proposed that a human colony on venus would be a floating city**, staying airborne by means of a balloon. At about 50km above the surface of Venus, the pressure equals 1atm (standard earth atmosphere) and the temperature is around 75C, conditions at which a floating human colony might be viable (provided adequate cooling is possible.)
Google will find a richness of references (too many to include here)
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Anything in the atmosphere is a balloon, not a moon, no matter how big it is.
Given that restriction I see a way to get something like what you're after (note, though, that it will have no surface gravity!)
Life arose on the gas giant. This was problematic as it had a tendency to fall and get squashed/roasted. Fast-living single-cell organisms could survive due to turbulence (many are thrown down and die, some are thrown up and survive) but as you start getting bigger this becomes a non-viable strategy. Non-microscopic life is limited to wings or buoyancy as a route to survival.
Buoyancy can be subdivided into lighter-than-air and hot-air approaches.
Thus we have three means of survival, two of which take a fair amount of energy to sustain. This makes lighter-than-air a very desirable approach if you can pull it off. On a terrestrial planet you could split water and fill a gas bag with hydrogen, but a gas giant is mostly hydrogen. Thus you need something lighter than hydrogen and there's only one possible candidate: nothing.
Thus we have a critter that grows hollow, evacuated crystals within it's body. Now, consider a coral reef--a structure built up of the dead bodies of the ancestors of the creatures living on it's surface.
Your "moon" is a vast "coral" reef floating in the atmosphere.
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[Meissner effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect) is a candidate.
I've seen this in a movie called [The Veil](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3343868/) so, you could do it, too. But, I'll try to suggest a sciency way.
The orbital velocity around the gas giant would have to be more than tens of kilometers per second. The friction forces with the atmosphere at that speed would cause a lot of heating, frying everything close enough and eventually slowing down the asteroid or moon until it crashes.
So, you must do something with the gravitational interaction between the moon and the planet. To weaken that, you need to have a repulsive force that acts only between the two celestial bodies, but, somehow, does not interact strongly with other celestial bodies or with the people on the moon.
My suggestion is to have the solid iron core of the gas giant magnetized, while the frozen core of the moon is a high temperature superconductor. A good candidate is the hydrogen sulfide which would be compressed at ungodly pressures such as those expected at the core of a celestial body. Hydrogen sulfide is a high temperature superconductor at those pressures and temperatures below 203K (as discussed [here](https://www.nature.com/news/superconductivity-record-sparks-wave-of-follow-up-physics-1.18191)). Due to the Meissner effect, the superconducting moon core will repel the magnetized planet core, and everything would be awesome except cell phones functioning.
Needless to say, such a system has a very low probability to exist in nature, so, unless the universe is infinite, it must have been made by aliens.
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[Question]
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Consider an advanced species unlocks all of the curiosities of science in our universe. They spend millions of years learning every fact, every mechanism of physics, and develop a perfect "Theory of Everything" - except they're able to test it so conclusively that they know it to be fact. Regardless of whether it could be done, let's consider a universe similar to our own, where this happens.
Then this civilization chooses to share this knowledge with planets early in the development of intelligent life.
* They interact with the intelligent species carefully, so as to equip it with their spoken language.
* This knowledge of physics is stored on a device that this species can easily use.
* Included are guides which explain more complex words and language usage so that the species can learn to understand more and more as it becomes capable.
* The species passes down what they were taught about how to read the information from the device.
Most importantly:
* The device explains how they received it and how their universe came to be (a proven version of the big bang theory) so as to remove any question of how they received this information or how they came to exist.
Would this primitive species likely evolve devoid of religion, having no mysteries to explain, or would there be some motivation for the development of religion anyway?
[Answer]
# Yes, religions would form, given a species similar to us.
"Science" is not the same as a volume of knowledge. Science is a *process* to expand our volume of knowledge. It roughly sorts every statement into one of three piles:
* Statements we can depend on to be true.
* Statements we can depend on to be false.
* Statements that cannot be unambigously defined as true or false.
Even with perfect theoretical knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology et cetera, some questions can only be answered by personal taste. (Or we would not have art for example) Any such question can be the basis of religous speculation, if individuals find it important enough.
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Yes, because:
## 1. Science tends to be weak at answering the *why* questions
Science tends to be great at answering the *what* questions. It's not so great at answering the *why*.
We might ask: *"why am I here on this earth"*.
The (correct?) scientific answer is: *"there is no reason. You are the outcome of a vast chain of random dice throws, and your existence has no meaning or purpose. The fact that you have a sense of purpose is nothing more than an artifact of your evolutionary heritage."*
True or not, this is arguably not particularly satisfying. It also logically means that anything goes, provided you can get away with it, and can cope with the guilt.
## 2. Science tends to be weak at answering *first cause* questions
Assuming we know everything, right back to the big bang. We understand how everything works, how everything came into existence. We understand the maths behind it all.
We are probably still left with the question *why any of it?* Why is there something rather than nothing. Why do we have this structure that inevitably leads to a universe?
Because science deals with causation, the question of *first cause* - why is there something rather than nothing - is difficult.
## 3. We don't do religion because we don't know things. We do religion because we know a little, and are amazed
When we look at the universe, or the complexity of a cell, even understanding how they work, we still feel awe. Awe translates naturally into religion, which is why quite a high proportion of scientists do have a faith of one type or another. [citation](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-15-of-scientists-still-believe-in-God/answer/Kelly-La-Rue?srid=cI0).
[Answer]
This question seems to be premised on the concept that religion is a way of coming up with mythological answers to questions that we don't have the science to figure out yet. This unfortunate notion has been around for a long time, but there's actually very little truth to it. It's been debunked over and over by actual scholars and historians, [including on this very site,](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/824/is-there-an-effective-way-to-design-a-realistic-religion-for-a-world/825#825) but unfortunately it's a notion that just won't die. And even more unfortunately, it obscures the true value of religion throughout history, whether one is a believer or not: religion comprises *the mechanism for long-term storage and preservation of the sum total of the lab notes of the science of human behavior throughout history!*
People have understood the basic idea of cause and effect for as long as there were any people capable of understanding anything. When cause and effect are so close together in time that the relationship is obvious, it's no big deal to understand it. But the longer the time gap between the cause and the manifestation of a visible effect, the harder it is to figure out. In some cases, years or decades may even go by. For example, on an intuitive level it sounds kind of silly to think that you could do something potentially harmful, and then stop and not do it again for more than thirty years and *then* it kills you. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happened to Leonard Nimoy: he died of smoking even though he gave it up decades ago.
When cause-and-effect occurs over such a long scale, comprising a significant fraction of a human lifetime, it's not possible for individual people to derive optimum guidelines for how to act from first principles. There are really only two ways to go about it: try to blunder through, alone or with the help of others blundering through along with you, and hope you make the right guesses... or learning from the experience of the aggregate wisdom of those who have gone before, who have been able to deduce some of the long-term cause-and-effect principles at work by seeing enough examples to work out the correlations.
In the absence of evidence, because the proof takes so long to appear, such a system of learned best practices for human behavior (aka "morality") provides a solid foundation for faith, to motivate people towards a course of action that is beneficial in the long term. It's surprisingly effective, too.
For example, you may have heard of [Ignaz Semmelweis,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis) who came up with the theory that surgeons who dissected cadavers should wash their hands with strong soap before attending to childbirth, to avoid transmitting deadly infections. His principle, when applied, consistently saved lives among new mothers, but unfortunately for Semmelweis and many women of his day, he lived in *scientific* times and he was called a quack, persecuted, and never taken seriously by his contemporaries, because he could not produce a valid explanation for why his theory should be true. (It worked in practice, but not in theory, so very few people cared enough to actually practice it! They couldn't see past their disdain for the notion that their own uncleanliness might be to blame.) It was not until the work of Louis Pasteur, right at the end of Semmelweis's life, provided a solid scientific foundation (germ theory) that established a theoretical reason for the validity of Semmelweis's work that the medical community started taking surgical hand-washing seriously.
Here's where it gets really interesting, though: this is stuff that had been known (but not proven!) for thousands of years. If you go to the Bible and look through the Law of Moses, (or other, older codes, for that matter, but this is one that's well-known and easily accessible to modern audiences,) you'll find directions *all over the place* for ritual washing after coming in contact with sick people, dead bodies, or other major disease vectors.
Religion is the lab notes of human history, to provide a foundation for faith that leads towards long-term positive consequences. This is a concept that's understood well enough that it's been seriously considered as a solution to the modern problem of nuclear waste storage: invent a religion that encodes principles of staying away from waste burial sites in its morality, because written and spoken languages change, civilizations rise and fall, and data storage media both ancient and modern decays with age, but *religion endures through it all.* It's the only way we know of to keep important information like that around and relatively intact over the time scales involved!
So to answer the question, would a civilization that started out with plenty of scientific knowledge come up with their own religion, the only possible answer is "yes, of course they would! And they'd probably be better off because the silly idea about religion and scientific knowledge being in conflict would never take root in their society."
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**Yes, absolutely.**
Science is very close to a religion for most common people. And religion is the way our early society spread scientific knowledge. The highest forms of education were typically the priest-hoods of the world. "Priests" could count, read, and write, while others generally could not. This stayed true for quite a long time, and until very recent (comparatively) history, education was considered a religious endeavor.
A better example:
We take it as "science" that things expand when they are heated, we call it science because we can prove it with experimentation. However, at large, most people will (re)act on this without experimentation, and just call it "common knowledge." This is essentially faith. I have no first hand proof, no experimentation for myself, I just "know" that when I heat up this copper it will expand. Religion is not that different. An educated, smart person tells me that the expansion is caused by the god of heat getting fat and happy at the offering of thermal energy, is no less plausible to the general population as "magic" atomic structure that can not be observed (again in a general sense). Mix in a bit of "make the god of heat happy by applying a lighter to the copper strip" and "the god of heat likes copper more than steal, see how much more fat and happy he gets" and you've got that start of a pretty good religion.
Remember, that **religion is the way that man understands god(s) and the universe they created**. Science is the way that man understands the universe. These are VERY close to one another.
It's easy to assume that religious stuff is wrong and backwards because we prove that "god of heat" theory inaccurate, but the fake religion was still based on cause, effect, and observation. Humans believed in gods of harvest, and the "magical" properties of the moon, sun, and stars. Even though we now think of that as "silly", people went through higher forms of education to learn these things, and lead their societies to plant and harvest crops at the right time of the year. It doesn't matter if the "explanation" was scientific or religious, all that matters (from a societies standpoint) is that I plant my crops at the right time.
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No.
Just because whole "society" has that knowledge doesn't mean individuals have that knowledge. You can look at our current situation. We have deep understanding of quantum physics, biology, cosmology, etc.. yet many people still find "god of the gaps" in those areas, which will be base of most religions.
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It depends on the nature of the species.
Memetic systems survive the ages because they provide a benefit to the societies that hold on to them. Explaining the unexplained is more of a side-effect of religion; its main benefit (and the reason it has spread so well) is that it provides an incentive for cooperation in a naturally competitive species, and probably played a huge role in the development of major civilizations on our planet. Beginning with advanced science will not change this.
A species that had no use for the unifying properties of religion might not develop one though - for instance, intelligent eusocial insects that are naturally cooperative.
Also, being visited by sufficiently advanced aliens early on in their history is a likely trigger for a culture to start a religion surrounding said aliens.
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No, I think they would still be religious.
I have heard a fairly solid theory which goes like this:
* Game theory suggests that co-operation worked very well for early human hunter gatherers. If you are alone, you might starve to death if your hunts are unsuccessful for a period of time, or you get ill. If you are in a group, you share your wealth (food etc), and you are more likely to survive the natural variations in individual success.
* Game theory also suggests this approach does not scale up too well. It relies on everyone in the group being honest. If someone eats the food from the group, but never shares their own food, the group dynamic starts to fall apart.
* For an individual in a small human hunter gathered group it is overwhelmingly in your favour to be honest and share your food. The chances of being caught cheating are high as their is a high degree of connectivity in the group (everyone knows you and will notice you are not sharing).
* The problem is, as the group grows in size, it starts to become beneficial for an individual to cheat. At around the 100 person mark, you are better off keeping all your food and cheating the group, as the chances of being caught start to fall away at this number of people.
So the question is, how did we end up with large complex groups of humans when game theory says hunter gatherers should not be able to co-operate in groups larger than around 100?
Some people have suggested the answer is religion. The idea of an all seeing God who will punish you in the after life for cheating might have been the way we solved the problem. 'Religion' might not be the best phrase here as we generally consider that as something quite modern (i.e. the idea of a God), but I am using it to include proto-religions, many of which probably centred around animism, but none the less would have provided plenty of additional social glue.
Since large complex societies are necessary for science (you can't be a scientist if you have to work your farm or gather food all day everyday), there is an argument that any society who has developed science will also have been religious in their past.
Your society would have the same problem as ours; they cannot develop large co-operating groups without something like religion. So even if they have this amazing science handed to them, they cannot develop large societies required to make use of the knowledge (e.g. through manufacturing) without religion. Even with this vast knowledge, they would remain hunter gatherers without religion.
So I guess the argument really hinges around suggesting that there is something of a bias in the question; that religion was created as something to fill the void of science, to explain the world around us. But perhaps it was a tool used to develop social cohesion, and in that respect it need not compete with science. If you need proof that a society can hold apparently incompatible views on religion and science, look no further than our own modern society! Religion has proven amazingly adaptable in the face of scientific development.
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There are a number of ways to look at this depending on your point of view.
Many religions claim that they are in some way inspired by the god or gods in question ie the deity concerned has some way of making their wishes known either through prophets, holy books or direct inspiration of individuals. It is pretty much impossible to prove that this is not the case even when is goes against the current of rational understanding as the argument that an omnipotent deity just arranged things this way is always open and, by definition the existence of a deity can be claimed to be unprovable by science.
For example if you claim that the earth is really only 1000 years old and that all evidence to the contrary was created supernaturally according to rules which are not now observable there isn't really any evidence you can produce to refute it.
The above applies whether or not any gods or similar entities actually exist or not.
There is also the fact that there are plenty of people who are prepared to believe things regardless of logic or scientific evidence which aren't necessarily supernatural in the conventional sense ranging from straightforward scams to pseudo-scientific medicine as well as the more modern 'religions' which often aren't directly tied to an actual deity but look to hyper intelligent aliens or some more diffuse spiritual force of energy field.
As well as the more religion-like ends of this spectrum there are plenty of more mundane trends in health, diet and technology which have little basis in evidence but still pick up plenty of adherents.
There is also the undeniable fact that socially, religions clearly provide something that many people want. On the most basic level this can just be a social group of like minded people or a more deep rooted desire for a sense of identity, purpose and moral certainty. This is complicate by the fact that most religions are tangled up with aspects of cultural, ethnic and national identity which often end up overshadowing the actual theology (eg Northern Ireland).
One one hand this can be benign in that it encourages socialisation and altruism but the more sinister side of the coin is that it can provide a logically unassailable excuse on which to hang all sorts of prejudices.
Also many religions, especially their more moderate branches have managed to drop much of their 'supernatural' baggage and reshape themselves as something more rooted in moral philosophy. As such it is not impossible to imagine some religions surviving even irrefutable proof of the non-existence of God.
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So overall it seems reasonable to argue that whatever the level of scientific understanding in a culture you would still get something which looks a lot like religion, how much so really depends on your definition of religion.
Apart from anything else hard science isn't really intended to provide definitive answers to questions about moral philosophy and arts, what it does do though is provide reliable information and context for making those sorts of decisions and can set a reasonably firm line for when legitimately ambiguous questions stry into the realms of absurdity, at least for those people who are prepared to listen.
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Well, let's ask an avowed religion hating atheist. Let's examine the works of Arthur C. Clark.
Clark is interesting in that he obviously hates traditional religion, even going so far as to insert anti-religious rants into the text of his works. And indeed, Clark speculates on almost exactly what you here are speculating on, but postulating hyper-advanced societies that have no need of religion and are able to prove answers to all manner of religious questions. In 'Fountains of Paradise' he even has a god-like AI come by and debunk Thomas Aquinas while patiently explaining that most sentient species never develop the concept of God at all.
And the problem with all of that is it doesn't even hold up within even his own canon of work. Why? Because rather than inventing a godless universe, what this self-avowed atheist invariably invents in his fiction is alternative gods. He doesn't necessarily call them gods, but they have the attributes of gods in that they have such sufficiently advanced technology that they can serve as gods, and further that the technology they have ends up being not scientific knowledge but the very sort of esoteric and gnostic knowledge he is otherwise pointedly lambasting. Clarke ends up inventing his own gods, to come sweeping in and drive out the old gods, but declaring not merely truth but Truth.
For example, the 2001 series ends of featuring godlike aliens that uplift mankind to sentience, generally act like spiritual rather than material beings, impose on mankind taboos, and are capable of altering reality on a whim. His masterpiece 'Childhood's End' features a race of purely materialistic beings, who are gimped by their inability to understand and partake in what amounts to purely spiritual technology, and a quasi-divine godlike being that raptures humanity.
The point is, no matter how much scientific knowledge you acquire, there is always a frontier beyond which you can imagine that your scientific knowledge does not reach. And likewise, there are always areas of knowledge that your scientific knowledge cannot give definitive solutions to. Biology can tell us that things evolve out of genetic competition to survive and pass on their genes, but not whether that is or ought to be the meaning of life. Physics can tell us how the world came about, but not whether we should care whether we are in it or what we ought to do about that fact. Science can explore every knowable material fact about the environment we observe, but not whether all is knowable, material, or observable.
In short, a full understanding of the material universe would only give more fertile ground for the development of religion, and not less fertile. And new atheism itself is progressively developing all the traits we associate of religion, just as other non-theistic world views (like communism) have done before it. It's a dependable thing that if humans didn't have religion, they'd invent it. It's hard to project what other species would do, but it may turn out to be an attribute of sentience to always be asking, "Is this all that there is? Might there not be something more?"
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First of all, science and religion is not mutually exclusive. We already see it in our own culture. One thing is the argument of beauty.
Another thing to consider is Goedels Incompleteness Theorem. Our current understand of logic and maths dictates that there can be a Theory of Everything (ToE), but we will *never* be able to *prove* its completeness. Hence the question wether we do in fact know everything is always open. This alone leaves room for religion.
Moreover, no one person can know everything. While the species in general might have discovered "everything", it is unlikely that any member of the species can be intimately familiar with such a theory in all its details. Thus, every one only has limited knowledge of the universe, which again leaves room for religion.
Lastly, humans are not rational. Unless your species doesn't have emotions, there will always be "sciences" like arts and sociology which can not explain why people like certain artists or why they behave in a certain way. This again leaves room for "divine intervention" and "divine beauty" and thus, religion.
So all in all I'd say yes, they could probably have religions.
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Since this is a *worldbuilding* question, it's pretty appropriate that it depends on your *world.*
Science is exploration. It is observation and extrapolation. It is the process of inquiring and learning about our world. So with perfect scientific understanding, that would mean that no existing thing is unknown or mysterious. Many of the big philosophy questions become scientific or mathematical questions.
Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Here, let me look it up.
What is the purpose of life? (Choose the best answer.)
How do you know the light turns off when you close the refrigerator door? Let me look at this table of every time a refrigerator door has ever been or will ever be closed and see.
Most of the questions explored by religions will be the same way. Is there a God? Why, yes! Here is the mathematical proof.
What is the key to enlightenment? Potatoes. For a long time people thought it was desirelessness or something, lol.
You are the one who decides the answers to these questions, and whatever you choose becomes fact. Since it is fact, your society, with its perfect understanding of all things science, will know the answers that you've mandated.
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There is no "yes or not" answer.
To transfer their knowledge they would need to transfer their culture too. Written knowledge is not "just knowledge", it is always written in some language which is based on some culture. So in fact they would need to destroy their original culture and introduce (some derived from of) their own one just to teach a language suitable of explaining their science.
Then the answer depends on if the advanced civilisation does have a religion or not.
But it is not the end of problems. Existence or absence of religion depends on kognitywistyce aspects and way a mind of specimen works. Humans have developed complex religions because they do learn behaviours of unknown purpose (as opposed to chimpanzees who abandon bogus behaviours). It was evolutionary behaviour as some of our activities are too complex to be just understood, being still easy enough to be done (e.g. it is not obvious why you need to wash hands before meals until you learn contemporary biology but even non-biologists do so). This cognitive pattern makes appearance of rituals possible. But it is not obvious if it is really necessary for advanced civilisation to form (and you do not state if the minds of your primitive one work this way).
Then it depends on how brains of both civilisations work.
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Yes, the religion would still be there. For two reasons :
* cause it is actually a way of life.
+ Look at how monks are living (christian and budism). Also normal religious people - they have to follow certain rules.
* some people find comfort in religion.
+ For example, would you like to hear that someone close (daughter, son, parent, good friend, etc) died and went to heaven, and some day you will meet them? Or would you like to hear that they are going to rot and turn into bunch of bones? Science gives no comfort and consolation in such cases.
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**That society would almost certainly have a global religion**... you have created an apparently perfect Oracle but with only indirect reference to the originators of that artefact since they aren't going to hand around in sufficient number to provide first hand proof. That the device can accurately inform on science to give answers based on reasoning the society can't understand just serves to increase the problem.
Rephrase the situation thus:
* Sufficiently Advanced Aliens create gizmo
* Primitive Culture receives gizmo but is incapable of understanding more than the most basic information it gives.
* Gizmo can accurately tell people what will happen, but can't explain exactly why in a way they can understand until they become more advanced.
* Gizmo can describe its creators, perhaps even explain their motives, but can't actually provide evidence that those creators definitely exist or that they speak the truth.
The issue is that the origin of religion is not in the explanation of the mysterious, but in a large group accepting an explanation on faith when it lacks the ability to know or prove that explanation to be true or false. Religion is the large scale perpetuation and codification of myth, not the creation of it.
That your scripture is a machine that speaks science, and that your gods are a well documented alien species does not void the problem that the Chain of Truth must have an initial link that everything else assumes be true... and at that point you now move in to the territory where you have such things as Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Halting Problem to prove all science has an element of faith in the unprovable.
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Let’s throw another 5 cents in the bucket:
**Yes, religion would form**
Consider that science and religion do not occupy the same space, do not compete with each other and therefore can coexist quite harmoniously.\*
You can very crudely boil down science to the practice of making conclusions based on evidence. You can also very crudely boil down religion to the practice of making conclusions in the absence of evidence.
Suppose the universe is boundless. Then no matter how vast your knowledge, there is always something unknown. Imagine knowledge as a sphere, where the known is contained within the sphere and the unknown — outside the sphere. Then the surface of the sphere is the boundary between the known and the unknown. That boundary signifies your evident ignorance (you know that you do not know these things, as opposed to things you do not know, and have no idea that you do not know them). The surface of a sphere grows in a quadratic proportion to the radius, so the more your scientific knowledge, the more your evident ignorance. This provides ample ground for forming religious beliefs of all shapes and sizes.
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\*: At some point scientific knowledge might expand into a domain formerly occupied by religion. Such that:
At point 1 in time, the shape of the world is not known and therefore is believed in.
At point 2 in time, the shape of the world is deduced from evidence and therefore is known.
At point 3 in time, people are reluctant to shed belief in favour of knowledge and thereby put science and religion in competition with each other.
This situation does not mean that science and religion are in actual competition with each other, only that people are inert (as all matter is).
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I'll extend another answer already given.
The question's assumptions were proven false in the 1930's!
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems mathematically proved that any significant subset of mathematics itself, is at best true but unprovable. In other words, it too is based on assumptions -- aka faith.
I saw a great, simplified way of describing this:
```
"This sentence cannot be proven."
```
:)
While it's not exactly true, pundits at the time noted that one result of Gödel's work is that "mathematics may be the only religion that can prove it is a religion."
Beyond that, there are real differences between religions. One in particular is both an important impetus for the development of the scientific method -- so that we can know God better -- and is fully compatible with everything we are learning about the universe, such as that it most likely is N dimensional where N is somewhere between 11 and 14, last I checked. "God" simply needs to be an N+1 dimensional being.
You also might enjoy the following presentation, by an astrophysicist (and atheist not too long ago) explaining the difference between time as observed by us, vs an observer external to the universe: <https://sixdayscience.com/six-days-2/>
] |
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[
Flying is hard. Most flying species can lift comparatively minuscule amounts of mass in the air beside themselves. Flying is also exhausting, there are only so many species that can soar in the sky for hours.
But our guys are sapient, and sapience grants you many cool things, like the ability to invent tools to overcome your own limitations. So are flight-assist machines that could enhance the flying capabilities (such as speed or carryable cargo weight) or endurance of the user possible, prior to the invention of an aircraft motor running off coal or gas? (After that point, it becomes sort of obvious that a motor is vastly superior to any organic wing) How could they function?
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No, that would be like an improved walking apparatus for us, not like a bicycle. Flying creatures are already evolved to pretty derive much optimum performance from their muscles for flying.
Note that a bike does not stand on its own. We can only use it because we have roads. (Also, evolving wheels is hard). We walk on legs because typical terrain is uneven and overgrown. Unless you can improve the air with a road analog, you won't improve on the natural mode of transportation, until you introduce artificial sources of power.
Gliders may have special uses but will generally be a pain in the butt to lug around if you want to get back up. A lighter than air balloon strapped to the back might be nice to relieve you from having to lift your body weight, but it will provide you with a lot of drag, and make rising and falling harder. It could be used for cargo transport, though. Trim it to neutral buoyancy, and let it be towed by a team of flyers.
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It was mentioned, but in passing by and there seems to be no interest in.
# Gliders
You'd basically want some kind of a wing prothesis, initially without a motor. The tricky part is:
* to source light-weight construction materials (balsa wood, silk / artificial materials), look into early gliders. All this developed rapidly, a nice source of inspiration are pre-WW2 smaller planes, sans the engine;
* to design the glider in a way to be usable and not to shadow own wings aerodynamically. The user would either need to be able to still use their wings or we would need some kind of a transmission and a propeller, which is more advanced.
I would imagine either some kind of a "nest" to hold onto, possibly only when curled in a ball, with wings – this is some kind of "let the own wings rest" thing. Or some kind of a thrust / endurance / wingspan extender. "You can fly further with this", like a bicycle, yes.
Also, because aerodynamics is hard (and they might not have the right engines yet), that initial designs obstruct the airflow and make it hard to impossible to use own wings when *that thing* is mounted on the user. Basically, initial designs might have the image of the (urban legend) winged tower jumpers of the 16th-18th century: the cranks that seldom survive the tests of their inventions.
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## Paragliders
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/59Hkbm.jpg)
A few others have suggested gliders of one kind or another, but I think paragliders have a lot to recommend them. The wing is high above the user, so it won't interfere with the user's own wings. The paraglider wing can handle the lift, leaving the user free to provide thrust and control using their own wings, turning it into a powered paraglider, like the ones in the image.
As far as I know it doesn't need any high-tech materials, beyond strong-but-lightweight fabric and cables. This means it would probably be fairly easy to invent, for a flying species that already has those things.
There is a safety issue because the user might get their own wings caught in the cables, but bicycles have safety issues as well, and we can expect a safe design to emerge over time.
I can imagine this being particularly useful if your species evolved for fast flight but not for long-distance gliding. Then this will give them the ability to do that as well, saving a lot of energy on longer flights.
image [GFDL](http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), via Wikimedia Commons. Original Uploader was Mikefifield at 5 September 2007.
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# Wing Extenders/Artificial Feathers
Larger wings give more lift/speed, so if the species can increase the size of their wings, it will give more lift and/or speed (with probably some cost in the form of agility). If your species have wings like a bird, they may add some extra feathers (or perhaps replace their existing feathers with longer ones). Either (semi-)permanently or done just before taking flight. If they are more bat like, with leathery flaps between bones, you can think of a construct of light weight poles next to their pinkies or thumbs and some fabric increasing the effective size of their wings. If they have fixed wings like most (all?) insects, they may be able to clip on a light weight rigid piece.
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Cycling is more efficient because it eliminates the principal inefficiency of bipedal locomotion, which is that we use energy from falling to propel ourselves forward, but don't recycle that energy. Much of the effort is spent constantly raising our center of mass, whereas wheels allow your center of mass to remain at a constant height, so you only need to replace energy lost to friction (on a level road).
(In nature, moving fast on a paved road is less important than controlling your movement on rough terrain, and legs are better for that; but you can still use the second-best option of regenerating energy with springs, and animals optimised for running may do that to some extent).
Winged flight doesn't have this fundamental inefficiency, so there wouldn't be a close analog to bicycles for birds. It takes a certain amount of wing-flapping energy to reach a given height, and no simple machine can make that more efficient; and when a bird isn't flapping it's just a ballistic projectile, which again can't be made any more efficient, other than with better aerodynamics (which evolution is already good at).
* Several answers have suggested gliders as the answer, but many birds are already excellent gliders – in some places you can see birds of prey basically parked on updrafts for long periods of time, expending no more energy than it takes to keep their wings locked in place.
* Some kind of lighter-than-air device would make it easier to gain and maintain altitude, and increase the load you could carry, but it wouldn't help with speed. That would be more analogous to a boat than a bicycle.
* That leaves the question of whether a winged being could fly more efficiently by spreading its wings and using a pedal-powered propeller to generate forward speed. That would depend on several factors, but doesn't seem impossible. It certainly wouldn't approach the efficiency gains of cycling vs. running, though, because birds simply aren't that inefficient to begin with.
NB I am assuming that the question refers to sentient creatures that can *already* fly. If we're talking about human-powered flight, that is already a real thing and Wikipedia has details.
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**Foldable gliders**
Let´s take the bycicle analogy:
A human **takes the bycycle with the hands** and takes if from its storage place, then **walks a few steps with the bycycle** until the place the human wants to start riding (could be just one step away or many steps to the street). Then **climbs on the bycycle** and starts the trip.
When the human arrives to the destination, stops the bycycle and **must use the legs again to stand and descend**.
Let´s imagine a set of very light foldable gliders that have both wings resting down in the sides by gravity, and deploy when you drop down the glider and remain locked this way.
The intelligent bird would walk/fly to the glider and will grab the glider with its legs, **and will fly a few seconds carrying the glider to the place it wants to start gliding**. When the bird has reached the desired altitude, it just stops flying and (still grabbing the glider) just lets gravity do the work: when falling, the wings of the glider will deploy and will be locked in position. The glider must (of course) have a piece in the upper part where the bird could firmly grab the piece and even move side to side to control the center of gravity and maneuver (I´m not an expert in gliding, but I know it can be done).
When arriving at the destination, the bird just releases the glider and must use its own wings in the last seconds of the trip, the same way the human must put the foot in the floor the last seconds of the trip.
And yes, birds can carry some decent weight. For example: A female harpy eagle can fly through the canopy and capture a 17-pound (7.7kg) monkey standing in a tree (info in this link):
<https://storyteller.travel/harpy-eagle/>
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# Sure.
A human on a bicycle is just a less efficient runner, using a more efficient runner to assist it.
So too is a human riding a horse.
A less efficient flyer might use a more efficient(or less lazy) flyer as transport in the same way.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t7v3H.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0cf8.jpg)
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# Elevator
If I would be a sapient flying being, I would take off from the highest point possible and soar towards my destination. An alternative would be some kind of catapult (think aircraft carrier-style).
# Cable
Just like with gliders, these flying beings can use a cable to provide forward motion while their natural wings provide the lift. They should be able to gain altitude rapidly without too much effort.
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# Using their legs
Since the species is already flying we can assume their natural flying ability is already pretty much as efficient as it can be due to evolution. If not, then some kind of augmented wing that recreates a more efficient design would be the obvious extension.
However, we are forgetting about the species' legs, whose muscles are unused when flying. They have invented a simple machine that consists of a harness connected to long frame at the back of which is a propeller. The propeller is turned by pedals, and gears are used to increase the speed once the user gets faster.
Given the aerodynamic profile of the species' body, once a certain speed is reached it actually becomes less efficient to flap their wings, and better to run solely on pedal power. The best "rapideurs" have been known to reach speeds 10 times that of normal flying.
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**Hang (Perch) Glider**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LQrsw.png)
Hang-gliders can support many times their own weight. Since bird people are smaller and lighter than humans, they can use much smaller gliders.
When using a glider the bird flies as near to vertically upwards as possible, carrying the glider by one wing tip to minimize air resistance. When they get high enough, they reorient the glider to perch in the normal place, and use their wings to steer.
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### No. It would defeat the purpose.
What is the advantage of the bicycle? A man walking has to spend part of the energy to stand and part for the forward movement, when he runs also the attrition of the terrain comes into play. Sitting on a bicycle requires less energy than standing and thus most of the energy can be used for the forward movement, counting also the reduced attrition everything results in a great efficiency improvement.
Can a flying creature get a similar advantage in some way? After all a bird has to spend some energy to lift itself and some energy to move forward. So with a paraglider attached to his back, two cables attached to the feet control the angle of the paraglider, all the movement of the wings can be tuned for the optimal forward push. However the advantage would be cancelled out by the additional drag. What has to be taken into account is that a wing, a glider or a paraglider don't stand in the air by themselves, they need a forward movement to create lift or get some help from a thermal current which is not always there, so, we are back to square one, part of the energy is used to create lift and part of the energy is used to move forward and even if the extra wing is made of light weight material it will add some weight.
### The alternative
If your creatures still don't have engines, but can create cool tools they could at least try to save some energy in some way and the most costly part of the flight is the beginning. Why not starting with a [catapult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cannonball)?
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If your goal is
>
> enhance the flying capabilities (such as speed or carryable cargo weight) or endurance of the user possible
>
>
>
forget about it.
The [Gossamer Albatross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Gossamer_Albatross) is the first human powered airplane, and doesn't do that.
>
> The Gossamer Albatross was constructed using a carbon fiber frame, with the ribs of the wings made with expanded polystyrene; the entire structure was then wrapped in a thin, transparent plastic (mylar PET film). The empty mass of the structure was only 71 lb (32 kg), although the gross mass for the Channel flight was almost 220 lb (100 kg). To maintain the craft in the air, it was designed with very long, tapering wings (high aspect ratio), like those of a glider, allowing the flight to be undertaken with a minimum of power. In still air, the required power was on the order of 300 W (0.40 hp), though even mild turbulence made this figure rise rapidly.
>
>
>
It's listed to have a useful load of just 66 kg, mostly water to keep the human hydrated.
Note that it's made with advanced material, not available before the invention of engines.
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Almost all of this will require some very light building material.
The flapping of wings creates an inconsistent thrust - modern aircraft tend to have constant power, from a propellor or a turbine. You could rig up some mechanical contraption to attach to the wings that would allow them to power a turbine strapped to their chest. This would allow them to keep building up thrust between wing beats, rather than having to reset their wings each time.
They could also build lightweight wearable hulls that reduce air resistance. This is especially viable with the turbine - that way, you don't need air flowing over the wings to produce lift.
Finally, you can create a buoyant structure like a blimp. That allows the flyer to stop expending energy fighting gravity, so they can focus on fighting air resistance and moving forward.
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Gliders are not bicycle-like.
If the sapient species has the same basic design as birds, i.e. two wings and two feet, I think the most direct analog of a bicycle would be pedal-assisted mechanical wing extensions.
Imagine the bird creature's natural wings fitting into lightweight artificial wings attached to a harness designed such that the artificial wings respond to and mimic the shape of the natural wings but allow the bird creature to convert pedaling into additional flapping energy.
Basically the idea would be allowing the bird creature to use its feet to produce more lift than it could with its wings alone. Its natural wings would essentially be used for "steering".
It doesn't seem particularly far-fetched to me that such a device could work. Particularly on a planet with lower gravity than earth but with a dense atmosphere e.g. Saturn's moon Titan.
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I think everyone is looking up when we should look down. If you already have wings, you just need something to assist with propelling you along.
Then it is just a matter of hooking up the propeller to their wings or other limbs to make it spin.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Ldi9.jpg)
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The bicycle provided mankind with a mode of transport that was **more efficient** than walking or running, almost right from the get-go. The first wooden velocipede was barely there, but it was there. Once past the velocipede stage, a man with a bicycle was already more efficient and capable than man and horse. What makes this efficiency possible is the wheel. In order for an avian species to realize a similar gain, or ANY gain, they would have to invent something that functioned, for flight, in the manner that a wheel does on the ground - by making moving through the air more energy-efficient. The proposition of machines or tools to enhance an avian's flight is mostly nonsensical, given the physics of our known world. However, there might be some exceptions. I'll return to the wheel later.
***ALL*** human flying machines are ***LESS*** efficient than any avian's nature-given ability\*. All flight involves 3 stages: ascending, traveling, and descending. Avian physiology is dictated by these requirements. Ascent requires the most significant energy expenditure. Gliding is traveling and descending. For flighted birds, the energy requirement for gliding is near zero. Adding a gliding device to the ascent would add weight to the ascent, and would require greater energy expenditure to attain altitude. Thus, the net gain would be negative for a single glide-slope.
Some avians use multiple glide-slopes by utilizing updrafts to ascend. You ***could*** offer improved glide characteristics for avians who are poor gliders, but such avians would likely not have the innate flight power required for ascent with the added weight (think turkeys). But gliders, or paragliders, are out, due to insufficient gains and too high an energy cost. \*\*
Most avians have sufficient muscle power to provide lift. Musculature for other uses is reduced to optimize weight to lift ratios. Most avians would have to use their wings to power an avian-powered machine. Adding any device adds weight, with no consequent increase in power (or reduction in lift requirements or enhancement of the power to lift ratio). This would negate any gain. The only way an avian-powered machine could **improve** on the avian's flight capacity would be if the avian was flightless, like an ostrich, or an emu. A flight-capable avian species could not have enough muscle power in other muscle groups, due to weight restrictions required for lift and flight, to power some driving force, such as a propeller. So, you'd have to have a flightless avian species.
Now, when it comes to ***powered*** aircraft, it is conceivable that an avian species could invent such. Just like for earth-bound humans, the power source would have to be essentially free or low cost, but such a development arc is conceivable. After all, the development of mechanical engines came about because of ground-based needs. And, an avian species could have an ecology with similar needs, where, at some point in time; a mechanical engine provided greater efficiency and productivity than attainable without the device.
But an avian-powered flying machine would have to be more efficient than the avian or there's no point. The machine would have to have some way to act as a multiplier to the avian's innate efficiency. I could imagine that a sapient flying squirrel could invent something like a glider - to make them more efficient at gliding, and to able to use thermals to gain altitude. But a flying squirrel is not an avian. Flying is not its nature.
Returning to the wheel. Man's natural means of transportation, walking and running, are on the ground. These natural means of transportation were made more efficient by the invention of the wheel. The combination of wheels, in a relatively light and steerable human-powered device, rendered a huge increase in energy-efficiency. In order for an avian species to realize a similar gain, or ANY gain, they would have to invent something that functioned, for flight, in the manner that a wheel does on the ground - by making moving through the air more energy-efficient. The only thing I can think of that might fit would be some sort of small anti-gravity device (currently unknown technology). Balloons don't work to enhance flight due to wind resistance. Design a world where your avian species has anti-gravity devices, and those devices could improve flying efficiency.
I have, in comments, posited some possible exceptions to what I've argued here. Mankind has, to date, not invented anything (non-motorized) that would logically ***enhance*** a flighted bird's natural abilities to fly. You can't make an albatross out of a turkey, due to the physical limitations of each body. The turkey doesn't have the musculature to power the albatross's flight gear. The albatross can't walk on ground as well as the turkey. However, we are dealing with science *fiction*. If you posited materials development that was lighter, more flexible, more workable, and stronger than anything yet known to man, you might be able to design something that would work. Or, if you had anti-gravity capacity that was as small as the avian or smaller (small size required due to wind resistance problems). A bicycle works because a man's major muscle group is almost completely re-tasked to do something that **was** a relatively minor function. Legs no longer had to hold us upright. All of a sudden they were ***only*** devoted to moving us forward, and they could use all that "standing-up" energy to move forward.
\*This is not entirely true, as an aircraft like the *Gossamer Albatross* is more energy efficient than some flighted creatures. But for the sake of simplicity, and not writing a book, that is the exception, not the rule.
\*\*Because of the extended discussions involved in posting comments on this question, and editing this answer, I have realized that there ***might be*** one way, given **known** technology (and physics), for an intelligent avian species to enhance flight capacity, although in a limited way, and only for avians with limited flight capacity, or non-flighted. Lighter-than-air craft would not work to enhance flight, due to wind resistance. However, let us propose that our alien avian is like a turkey, with limited flight capacity, but intelligent. A lighter-than-air balloon could be used for ascent, carrying our avian and a gliding device. Thus, the balloon delivers the primary energy requirement for a flight. Once at altitude, the gliding device could then be deployed, and our avian has a net gain. This isn't precisely avian-powered, but it could be an enhancement.
[Answer]
Many have mentioned that flying species are often very well engineered for flight. However, as @Goodies mentions, not all of them are. He mentions a few that don't fly at all anymore, but some, like chickens, can fly, but aren't very good at it, as evolution (and/or, in the case of chickens at least, breeding) have given them weighty muscles for walking as well.
For such flying species, I propose "kick-assisted flight": it consists of wing extenders to give extra lift (but making wings difficult to flap), together with cords between feet and wings and pulleys connected under the wings. As you raise your wing, you pull up and bunch your feet under you; as you flap you kick back and down, using your leg muscles to pull the cords to help you flap the extra-large wings.
It is hard to imagine that this mechanism would be very elegant, but it might help you gain altitude more quickly. Once you were up, the wing extenders could help you glide (or stoop, if you wanted). Thus, it might be a practical way to get a glider up to altitude.
### Update
@geometrikal also proposes a way to use leg muscles in another answer. Here we envision simpler mechanism which presumably needs lower technology.
I should note that all of the answers assume that flying creatures are (perhaps with a few exceptions) highly optimized by evolution for flying. On a world like Ursula Le Guin's *Rocannon's World*, which has a dense atmosphere relative to gravitation, evolution might have had an easier time with flight per se, resulting in many creatures that can fly without necessarily being very good at it. (Maybe tool use & bearing burdens would have an easier time evolving among the avian, in return.) On such a world, assistive technology such as proposed here, or in other answers, would have a lower bar to be helpful.
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**Solutions for penguins and chicken**
Flying species are manifold, most are quite effective, flying many 1000s of kms per year. An eagle will need only shoulder muscles to fly.
But there are lots of species that don't fly so well, or don't fly anymore.. A wing suit seems appropriate for adventurous pinguins. Glide. Same counts for hobby flyers like cats and squirrels, who may use wing suits or delta wings to extend their limbs. I guess most intelligent *chicken* will prefer balloons ?
**Ostrich bicycle drone**
Suppose the Ostrich would have evolved as an intelligent species, there could be a cultural urge to fly, among ostriches. When designing the means, I think they can make good use of their very strong legs, using a quadcopter-like vehicle to lift off the ground. A carbon bicycle belt can be attached to carbon wheels mounted on either side of the animal, driven by pedals, connected to the toes. The fast spinning wheels drive the propellors in some way. Can't think of a suitable transmission to do that, but probably these ostriches will be much smarter than me.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/khezX.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02CzMyf0DA>
(this one is for lazy ostriches)
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In real bio-physics, you can prolly count all the relevant examples here!
In Worldbuilding, what says the flyer can't use drugs - this isn't the Olympics, is it?
What says the flyer can't use prosthetics - can't an ordinary athlete get the same advantage from "blade" feet that paralympians see? Can't you translate that to wings?
What says the flyer can't use umpty psychic abilities?
[Answer]
## Yes, they could be both possible and practical
This is a very simple question being made over complicated by what limits HUMANS from flying. Humans can not do self powered flight because we are dense, slow moving, mammals with proportionally much weaker appendages than a bird's wings, but a bird could easily make use of mechanical advantages to improve both flight speeds and distances. In other words, we can not fly in a self-powered plane for the same reasons a turtle would be unable to stay upright on a bicycle.
Let's start with how a human bike works: [Bobtato's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/210838/57832) so far has done the best job of nailing down what makes human bikes work. Basically locomotion by feet wastes a lot of energy that a bike recaptures and turns into forward motion... but he misses the fact that all the same basic principle apply to birds too. Like feet, wings only generate forward power with part of the flap as the wing pushes down and backwards against the air to create an equal and opposite reaction, but as it rises and comes forward, it actually pushes the bird in the wrong direction to get back to its starting position (just less so because the wing folds and angles into this motion).
SEE: <https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/how-a-bird-takes-off.gif>
So, a lot of the power spent bringing the wings back up and forward is lost to inefficiency. However, if a bird were to just flap up and down, it would at no point push itself backwards, and if you attach its wings to a gear assembly, then that up and down motion could turn a propeller which would convert the full stroke of a flap into forward momentum, and none into backwards momentum.
But this only tells part of the story about what makes an air bike better. The main thing that makes bikes so good is gear ratios. To fly horizontally forward you must swing your wing faster than you are already moving to create additional speed. So, if you want to move at 50km/hr, and your wing speed maxes out at 40km/hr then your medium retreats away from your wing faster than you can push into it so you can't make yourself go any faster by pushing against the air once you pass 40km/hr. If you've ever run at full sprint, you've probably noticed something similar where at some point you stop feeling the resistance of pushing back against the ground and all your energy is being spent just keeping your legs moving and that you can not actually go any faster because your feet themselves can no long impart any more acceleration with the ground... this is more-or-less the same thing accept that a bird can at this point choose to glide to mostly maintain that speed.
But, like a bike, a propeller can use gear ratios to turn a slow strong biological action into a faster weaker one to make higher speeds more sustainable. So, once your bird reaches an air speed nearing its max, it can increase the gear ratio. So instead of a strong but mostly wasted 40km/hr push, you might get a weaker 120km/hr push out of your propeller, and this faster backwards push means you can either sustain your 40km/hr speed wasting much less of your power on inefficiency, or you can speed up to a higher maximum speed even through you have a lower torque following the same principle that allows your car to accelerate to and maintain interstate speeds at high gears with a relatively small strain on your motor.
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The value of a bicycle is that it holds one up; one can then expend one’s energy on moving forwards.
The air analogue is the airfoil.
An airfoil has to be moved forwards quickly to work, but this is workable, as the air pressure against the front (fighting forwards movement) is less than the air pressure under the airfoil (which does the lifting).
It is thus possible for a human being to fly, under their own power, using a machine whose main components are an airfoil [“wing”] for lift, and a small airfoil [“propeller”], powered by the user, for forward movement.
Unfortunately, I can not see how a flying creature might gain any advantage over its existing ability to fly, using such a device. …But I would be happy to be shown to be wrong.
(There are devices — such as • hot air balloons, • gliders and • hang-gliders that enable a human being to fly, in some manner or other, without expending much energy… but each of those listed makes some compromise.)
Having said all that… there is one thing that possibly might qualify. It might be more viable with several “people” powering it. It is — added to a glider — a “self-propelled hydrofoil board” — adapted for air, of course; the idea is to “flap” up and down {a flexible airfoil shape}. Search the above, and see the following links to get the idea.
. Start the following at about 0:40.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuzWYqCm4T0>
. Start the following at about 0:45.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyyMN5RzlTg>
. The second is the YouTube video in the first.
<https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/kai-lenny-surfs-his-self-propelled-foil-board-on-open-ocean-swells-for-miles/>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7XupqFOFSg>
. Ditto.
<https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/one-ride-two-waves-kai-lenny-tests-a-self-propelled-hydrofoil-surfboard>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px88XsARHwc>
. I am pretty sure this is the “mechanism”. (That is for water; I would expect an air one to be much more like a standard aircraft wing.)
<https://www.thesurfboardwarehouse.com.au/products/takuma-lb1300-pro-foil?currency=AUD&variant=35282973098152&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&gclid=CjwKCAjw1JeJBhB9EiwAV612y_tK1FmjHguPTBIUWo5sGW6K5r8ectHTBb5RG4dI-raDdv_RXN3DvRoCyloQAvD_BwE>
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[
I'm working on a story in which there is some sort of planetary erosion of language. Humans lose the ability to communicate verbally (orally and written). They can remember having language, can even remember names for things and people, but they have no way of expressing them outside of themselves. They can still hear and make sounds/talk, but to anyone but themselves it is gibberish - even those who once spoke the same language.
I've been trying to think of a global event that could essentially rewire human brains this way. Some kind of exotic particle? Or perhaps a form of gravity that we haven't encountered yet? (e.g. dark energy is described as fluidlike; maybe it has some kind of effect on the brain?)
One person can actually remember how language worked, and learns to harness the new particle to bring about a new, telepathic way of communicating that skirts the neurological rewiring. [I'm only adding this 'exception' human because I'm not sure how to write a story with characters who can't speak.]
Thank you!
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"Some kind of exotic particle? Or perhaps a form of gravity that we haven't encountered yet?"
I'd go way more realistic: make it a virus, (maybe developed by some weird apocaliptic cult), and there you go.
Wikipedia states that
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> Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions
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Which is perfectly achievable for a fungus or virus.
Making it "handmade" would explain how it could spread so far/quick.
The few/one normal people could have a natural immunity or could be one of "the chosen few" from the original cult, that had some sort of cure genetically implanted.
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One of the more common symptoms of certain kinds of stroke or TIEs (**T**ransient **I**schemic **E**pisodes) *is* aphasia - for you, this is perfect - you should have a *prion disease* which selectively targets *that* brain region, and causes a ton of small bleeders... in specific, the area your prion disease should attack is called ***Wernicke’s area***.
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> Damage to the Wernicke's area of the temporal lobe may result in a fluent aphasia that is called Wernicke's aphasia; individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create new “words.” Individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia usually have great difficulty understanding speech and are therefore often unaware of their mistakes. These individuals usually have no body weakness because their brain injury is not near the parts of the brain that control movement.
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Rather than some disease or mental condition, what if the aphasia was brought about by the collapse of technology?
Imagine that most or all the planet has progressed to the point that everyone communicates by way of a sort of technological telepathy. They have brain augmentations that detect when they are trying to convey a message or expression to someone else. The brain signals are then interpreted and processed into a universal digital language which is then transmitted wirelessly to the recipient(s) augmentation, where it is parsed and fed into the brain in a way that the person(s) are able to comprehend the message. Perhaps the augment even simulates aural signals making it so the recipient actually "hears" the message.
This kind of population would gradually lose the need for verbal and perhaps even written communication since everyone can just "think" at each other. Over time, while some vestiges of individual languages might linger as part of people's long-term memory, the very concept of language itself would fade into a sort of communication singularity.
Then suddenly, this technology stops working. Maybe it's an apocalyptic scenario, maybe some hacker or terrorist cell caused the servers supporting the augments to fail. Whatever the reason, people can no longer use their thoughts to communicate directly and must revert back to verbal communication. The problem is they have been largely mute for decades, so their vocal muscles have atrophied and their understanding of their natural language has been stunted as well as distorted by their reliance on the augment's universal translator. People might remember various words and phrases, but everyone would be speaking as though they were first or second year language students at best.
Also, because people had been relying on the augment's automatic translation capabilities, even people who originally spoke the same language might find it difficult to understand each other due to differences in dialect, slang, or other such linguistic differences. Perhaps the reliance on the augment has even lead to the language portions of the brain developing a distinct "dialect" for each individual person due to the augment interpreting their brain signals slightly differently, leading to a situation where even if someone who once knew a language tried to speak it to someone else who also used to speak the same language, it would still come out as mostly incomprehensible.
And, of course, the only person or people who are still able to flawlessly read and speak are those who rebelled against the augment all along, electing to instead use their natural voice. Those with augments could still understand them due to a legacy feature when the augment was still a luxury rather than a technological staple, but they were rarely interacted with and treated with mistrust since no one "knew what they were thinking". But now that the augments are offline, those who shunned them from the start are the only ones who are able to meaningfully communicate.
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## **Wernicke's and Broca's areas of the brain are the ones you're looking for.**
[](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-read-only/wp-content/uploads/sites/902/2015/02/23224605/CNX_Psych_03_04_Broca.jpg)
>
> Damage caused to [Wernicke's area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area) results in receptive, fluent aphasia. This means that the person with aphasia will be able to fluently connect words, but the phrases will lack meaning. This is unlike non-fluent aphasia, in which the person will use meaningful words, but in a non-fluent, telegraphic manner.
>
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> Damage to [Broca's area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area) is commonly associated with telegraphic speech made up of content vocabulary. For example, a person with Broca's aphasia may say something like, "Drive, store. Mom." meaning to say, "My mom drove me to the store today." Therefore, the content of the information is correct, but the grammar and fluidity of the sentence is missing.
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So your language processing goes basically like this:
1. Your brain thinks of something it wants to say
2. Wernicke's area concentrates your thoughts into words and passes them to Broca's area
3. Broca's area adds grammar and fluency to your sentence
4. You say your fully processed sentence out loud
Both of those areas process text information in a similar way to speech processing. **So if you fully lose either one of those regions, you can still process information from your surroundings and think normally, but you fully lose your ability to comprehend or output language; written, spoken, or otherwise.**
If you lose either of those areas partially, the effects differ a bit. With damage to Wernicke's, your sentences sound normal but they don't have any meaningful content, since Wernicke's area cannot fully process what thoughts you want to convey with language. With damage to Broca's, your brain cannot encode the thoughts picked up by Wernicke's to fluent language, so you can burst out single words at best (which do have meaning). The effect works both ways, so it is similar when tried to comprehend received sentences.
**Now, if you want to go with gibberish, the obvious solution is to do some damage to Wernicke's region of the brain.** This way people will still talk and write, but it will make no sense. Telepathic communication might still be possible, since the actual thought process is not really impaired.
Now, how can you do 'alotta damage' to this specific region of the brain? Easy answers are CRISPR gone wrong, virus, fungus, amoeba, whatnot. But if your story is set into the near future, one nice way would be **cybernetic implants.** Brain implants are not too far in the future.
[](https://www.activistpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/140710175337-large-560x480.jpg)
**Imagine a world where everyone has a cybernetic implant planted into Wernicke's area to store memories digitally.** This is at least pseudo-reasonable, since Wernicke's area essentially concentrates thoughts. Now, in a world with everyone having electronics in their head, a catastrophic solar storm could have huge consequenses. The implant is fried and everyone gets their Wernicke's area irreparably damaged.
What few people might have remained without implants would have no use for their language, since nobody can understand them. Children would be born having their Wernicke's intact, but teaching language to children when you can't understand it yourself would be problematic.
In any case, your protagonist could be someone who did not have an implant, and who therefore survived the catastrophe.
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## They're under the *goddamn ground!*
I also favor the realistic approach, and I like the idea of a bacteria, but @Hobbamok points out the problem of transmission, which has to be handwaved one way or another. Every developed society while have a WHO or CDC equivalent fighting back against the spread, and we can't have that.
Fortunately, there's a way of giving people diseases that doesn't require them to catch them from someone else: *have it come out of the goddamn ground*. On Earth, we're running into this problem with diseases like anthrax, which can lie dormant for decades only to awaken at an inconvenient moment and start [killing people](https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43mex3/reindeer-dead-humans-hospitalized-anthrax-outbreak-russia-siberia) and animals by the hundreds.
On your planet, there's a similar life form that dwells in the soil. Maybe a sporelike bacterium, maybe a fungus, or maybe (for cool factor) a cyclical brooding insect like cicadas. We have [limited understanding](http://ur.umich.edu/0102/Mar11_02/11.htm) what causes spores to leave dormancy, so you don't even necessarily need to explain the trigger. One way or another, this organism comes to life all across your planet, ready to take the next stage in its life cycle. The aphasia you're looking is just an unfortunate side effect the humans happen to intersect.
Possible methods:
1. If the emergence is bacterial or fungal, it manifests as an infection: everyone on the planet will have breathed in endless lungfulls of the stuff before the first symptoms start showing up, too late for quarantine, vaccination, or cure. By the time people need to collaborate on a cure, it's too late: they can't even talk to each other.
2. If the emergence is insectoid, you get to have even more fun: take a cue from harmful algal blooms. Decades or centuries of hibernation have provided the insects with plenty of nutrients, and their carapaces have built up an external shell heavy in cyanotoxins, which, among other things, when inhaled, can cause brain damage that can include effects as unusual as aphasia. Imagine, all over the world, swarms of insects exploding out of the earth, blotting out the sky, tiny flakes of their shells raining down in a fine glittering dust from above. Once again, people will figure out you shouldn't breathe the stuff much too late to save themselves from the effect.
The most beautiful part is that even if some fraction of people *don't* experience aphasia, if no one else understands what they're saying, they might as well be: if a person with aphasia and a person without are locked in a room together, from inside, there's not really a way to tell who's who, after all. Both think the other one is taking gibberish while they are speaking sense.
From a story perspective, this could also let your character run into one or two people who, like them, was spared: the world is aphasiac to them, but they understand each other perfectly.
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**Do not explain.**
>
> "You have a sense for the black things, Sparrowhawk," said the
> Doorkeeper. "You ever did. Say what you think is wrong."
>
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> "I do not
> know. There is a weakening of power. There is a want of resolution.
> There is a dimming of the sun. I feel, my lords- I feel as if we who
> sit here talking, were all wounded mortally, and while we talk and
> talk our blood runs softly from our veins..."
> [The Farthest Shore, Ursula LeGuin](http://www.wenovel.com/book/58.html)
>
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Things can fade and disappear. A person who can do a thing easily then struggles, and then cannot do. Some are frustrated at their loss, and some lose the memory of what was and so are not frustrated. Sometimes there is no explanation. If your story explores what happens with loss, and how what remains can change and develop in the absence of what was, leave the loss unexplained. Instead describe what happens after the loss. Naming a thing makes it smaller; categorizes it - controls it. Leave the central event of your story unnamed and let your readers learn its nature through your characters and their struggles.
This is the idea behind the recent Bird Box movie, in which there are things in the world which, if seen, drive whomever sees them insane. The nature of these things is not explained. This makes the movie more visceral and terrifying.
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use crispr/cas9 in a gene drive, eg you can give lung cancer to mice by infecting them with a virus that has been altered by crispr. Not too much of a stretch to use crispr to destroy Wernicke's area, or do more subtle things... This can be done in a garage lab. Cheerful thought!
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## Robots/Nanites do not like language
Some fed up grammar nazi releases robots/nanites that attack people vocalizing or writing things in language.
As for the person whose language is not affected, you could say they were somehow able to hide from the nanites.
This also explains who the person can create telepathy. They would invent a sign language, and teach it to people. Sign language is essentially a form of telepathy, if you define telepathy as the ability to send messages between minds through empty space. For whatever reason, the nanites aren't programmed to attack sign language users, so everything goes back to normal except people use the new form of communication.
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So, on my post apocalyptic world, most people are relative homebodies compared to today. Nobody travels more than a few days distance, except for soldiers, merchants, and slavers. It’s been 500 years since the apocalypse, and my main characters eventually goes on a legendary quest, to retrieve a (insert Mcguffin here). There is a problem though, and I need your help to get around it. Since nobody travels that often, then local dialects would spring up around different areas, and after 500 years, they would all be mutually unintelligible. So, is there a plausible way to get around this scenario?
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One option would be integrating this into your story. Finding a way to communicate with the locals could lead to interesting conflicts and perhaps new plot elements.
But as far as actually communicating…throughout the Middle Ages, educated people throughout the remains of the Roman Empire continued to read and write Latin in the Classical style, imitating Caesar and Cicero, even as the common language around them was evolving into what would eventually become modern French, Italian, Spanish, and so on. Even while the Roman Empire was still around, common people throughout Europe would speak very differently from Cicero's grand prose in their everyday speech, while still understanding the "proper Latin" of the orators perfectly well.
It's likely that there would be significant *diglossia* in your world, with the most educated people continuing to study the English (or whichever language became dominant) that they found in written texts, while also speaking the common and rapidly diverging local dialects. Your protagonist would be able to communicate with these people through writing at first until they learned enough of the local language to understand it. Possible translators might include scholars and scientists working to preserve pre-apocalypse knowledge, or religious figures keeping their old practices alive.
EDIT: As Futoque pointed out in the comments, trade languages and pidgins (and thus creoles) are also certain to develop wherever there's trade happening. So this will depend on how isolated your people really are. The process is especially fast among related languages: see the Bantu creoles like Lingála that arose in eastern and central Africa.
EDIT AGAIN: Ethan Kaminski has brought up a few other excellent examples. The modern Arabic language has been evolving and diverging since the time of Muħammad. But the Qur'ān, by tradition, remains static and unchanging (since it's considered the direct word of God, and translating or updating it would end up changing its meaning). So written Qur'ānic Arabic remains exactly the same throughout the Muslim world.
Similarly, as Dan Clarke points out, the "dialects" of modern Chinese would normally be considered entirely separate languages (they're only "dialects" for political reasons). But they all use the same writing system, which makes them mutually intelligible in writing, even if they're completely different in speech. As he puts it, "Today you'll often see Chinese people drawing characters on hands and in the air if something isn't understood just by speaking."
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**Immersion Learning is Fairly Quick**
In Afghanistan I and my squad spent 9 months training and conducting combat missions with the Afghan police. Our interpreters were not trustworthy at best and were sometimes even outright traitors. By necessity I was forced to learn the local language, I became fluent in Pashto and Semi Fluent in its sister-dialect Dari in only 6 months. I'm not even all that smart or gifted (otherwise I wouldn't have joined the infantry). It's just that my life and ability to conduct virtually of my duties and tasks literally depended on effective communication. I had no choice but to adapt to the scenario, and found that when you really really need to learn how to yell *"NO! DON'T FIRE THE DAMNED RPG IN HERE! WE WILL ALL DIE!"* you tend to learn very quickly. Learning dialects is really easy once you've got a functional grasp of the parent language. Pashto was really difficult to learn but once I had it I started picking up on Dari pretty much just by listening carefully to people who were speaking it.
Likewise, half of the Afghan police unit spoke Pashto, half spoke Dari, and none spoke English. So you have a military unit with 3 languages and no reliable interpreters. By the end of it everyone spoke English, and most of us spoke Pashto or Dari, all the Dari guys spoke Pashto, and vice versa. Necessity is a harsh but effective teacher.
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Just add religion. Monasteries, preaching thrive and spread in this setup. Their common language can serve as the travel language easily.
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To have wide-ranging trade, in anything at all, you'll need a *[lingua franca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)* that works across large areas because after 500 years it is likely that neighbouring realms speak drastically different dialects let alone the language relationship, none whatsoever, between what people speak hundreds of miles apart.
Depending on your particular apocalyptic scenario it could be much worse as well; if there was mass migration as a result of the collapse event you may have communities that didn't start out speaking related mother tongues cheek by jowl and then those tongues are going to diverge from their origin as things that don't exist anymore are forgotten, new concepts are added, and mass literacy and schooling disappear under direct survival pressure.
In the western world I would expect some version of English to be retained, English is massively adaptable and constantly integrates new words from every culture it encounters whether that's language neighbours or niche groups from within the English speaking world. I would expect a pidgin trade form to be intelligible across vast tracts of the former Americas, Europe and even in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia Minor.
[This Map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#/media/File:Anglospeak.svg) gives a hint of the places where some form of English may come out on top as the national language. Also because it is *the* diplomatic language of the modern era English may also be kept as a cross border language all over the planet, not spoken at home but used to discuss matters of trade and borders with the guys from across the river that you can't otherwise talk to.
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**TL;DR:** starting from countries with a nearly homogeneous spoken language which were suddenly dissolved, in absence of significant mass-migrations, I posit that the language spoken by people scattered around the country would not change up to a point of not being mutually unintelligible within a time-span of 500 years only.
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I don't think you need to explain anything.
Take a look at **Latin** and the fall of the Roman Empire.
Even though there was no point in time in which everyone spoke exactly the same language everywhere, as the vulgar Latin that was actually spoken could differ from region to region, **mutual intelligibility** is still very strong across several, geographically distant, regions of Europe despite nearly 1600 years have passed since when it was disbanded.
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> In linguistics, **mutual intelligibility** is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort.
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The following table shows **lexical similarity** of some European languages, an index factor that is often used as indication of *mutual intelligibility* of two languages: (source: [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity))
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qqSgR.png)
The following chart (taken from [here](https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/)) presents the same data in a visually more clear way. Latin-derived languages, also known as Romance languages, are grouped together in the lower-left corner:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OGNbC.jpg)
At this point it is worth mentioning a very interesting fact: the living language that is closest to ancient (vulgar) Latin is --according to several sources-- **Sardinian**, the native language of the Sardinia island. And why could that be? Well, historically, Sardinia is one of the few places who have remained the most isolated from mass immigration of new populations following the fall of the Roman Empire.
And this leads me to my main point: of course **language drift** naturally occurs within a country, being it isolated or not, over the centuries. But it is normally a very slow and mostly insignificant process. Any modern-day Italian can read and understand (with ease) texts written in *Archaic Italian* over 800 years ago, nearly 600 years before this country even existed. *Vulgar Latin*, as it is presented on *Wikipedia*, also sounds reasonably easy to understand to me as an Italian even though I admit it is distinctively different than my own language. I suspect a similar story holds for other languages, i.e. modern English people can probably understand Shakespeare original work of 600 years ago almost fairly well.
Where am I trying to get at?
The main driving force behind language evolution is not **drift**, but **immigration**, **conquest** and/or **population "replacement"**.
It is when people of different languages meet and mix with one another, that the language evolves more rapidly by absorbing and mixing linguistic elements of the people which are being culturally blended into one another. *(note: I am speaking of mass-migrations of the period following the fall of the Roman Empire and those with similar dynamics that happened elsewhere; modern-day migrations have a different dynamic and are more easily absorbed into the existing culture)*
Since it is not trivial for me to demonstrate this using European maps depicting the barbaric invasions following the fall of the Roman Empire and those of the Barbaric Kingdoms that spurred after that (because mass migrations and population movements were far from being over in several geographical areas), I will try to prove my point by pointing out a single historical example related to Britannia.
The following text is an extract of a brief language-historical analysis taken from [here](http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespearelanguage.html), which shows how the *Old English* language was affected by the invasion of French-speaking Normans in 1066, and how that dramatically changed it:
>
> Take, for example, this passage from the most famous of all Old English
> works, Beowulf:
>
>
>
> >
> > Hwät! we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum
> >
> >
> > þeód-cyninga þrym gefrunon,
> >
> >
> > hû þâ äðelingas ellen fremedon.
> >
> >
> > Oft Scyld Scêfing sceaðena þreátum.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> (Translation)
>
>
>
> >
> > Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements
> >
> >
> > The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of,
> >
> >
> > How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.
> >
> >
> > Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers...
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> Old English was spoken and written in Britain from the 5th century to
> the middle of the 11th century and is really closer to the Germanic
> mother tongue of the Anglo-Saxons.
>
>
> With the arrival of the French-speaking Normans in 1066, Old English
> underwent dramatic changes and by 1350 it had evolved into Middle
> English. Middle English is easier but still looks like a foreign
> language much of the time. Here is an example from Chaucer's
> Canterbury Tales, the most famous work in Middle English:
>
>
>
> >
> > Ye seken lond and see for your wynnynges,
> >
> >
> > As wise folk ye knowen all th'estaat
> >
> >
> > Of regnes; ye been fadres of tydynges
> >
> >
> > And tales, bothe of pees and of debaat. (The Man of Law's Tale)
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> (Translation)
>
>
>
> >
> > You seek land and sea for your winnings,
> >
> >
> > As wise folk you know all the estate
> >
> >
> > Of kingdoms; you be fathers of tidings,
> >
> >
> > And tales, both of peace and of debate.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
[Answer]
**Ethnic / religious minorities.**
If you have a minority population which has retained its individuality since the apocalypse, they might have their own language (and possibly religion) to go with it. For the Jews, Hebrew is the example - two jews from anywhere in the world could communicate using Hebrew. The Coptic christians are another example - a minority population with their own language though not so far flung.
A good parallel for a story and one that has not been done is the gypsies. Gypsies are and have been scattered thru Europe and the Americas, and with their distinct cultural identity they have their own language.
So for your story: you have a far flung ethnic / religious minority with its own religion and language. Maybe they are more or less inbred. Certainly they can be discriminated against and held in contempt (and possibly some fear - my grandma was told gypsies would steal kids for unknown purposes); this would add energy to a story where the travelers are dependent on this individual. Your individual knows where to find others of her kind when they travel.
[Answer]
in the early middle ages troubadours originating from southern France who, whilst not sharing a common language, went on to have an enormous direct influence on Italian culture (at the time consisting of numerous states all speaking their own dialects) and indirect one on European culture.
The technique they used was to pepper their songs with local dialect equivalents sharing the same meaning as their own Occitan word, giving people enough key words that they could follow the lyrics, combined with gestures and mime. My own personal theory is that Italian hand gestures have their roots in these performers.
[Answer]
You could always have him find a universal translator in the rubble.
More to the point though, remember that in societies were dozens of difrent languages and dialects spring up, multilingualism also inevitably increases as well. It would not be unreasonable to have your character simply know multiple languages in this setting.
Even when he goes very far outside his original area, most people will not be surprised to encounter someone who does not speak their language, and may be more willing to try to bridge the gap. Provided they think he's worth their time of course. Or, has just smashed enough heads in if its a mad max world.
[Answer]
Just a recent example I saw that may be relevant to this, in that the spoken form of the language was noticeably different after about 130 years:
"The owner looked at him open-mouthed. He understood what Ahmed was saying, but some of the words he was using were unfamiliar and old-fashioned, and others he didn't understand at all. It was as though Ahmed had arrived not just from Syria, but from another age."
<http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44242621>
[Answer]
### Interpreter
Sounds like your hero needs an interpreter. You say that slavers travel long distances—what about slaves? Could the heroes themselves be itinerant? Merchants, refugees, migrants?
### Diglossia
It also seems likely that the written language would have diverged less than the spoken language, so maybe he can fall back to the literary language, with its language and vocabulary remembered from such timeless masterpieces as *Twilight* and *Ready Player One*, if he can just get people to understand his accent. Or even communicate in writing.
### Lingua Franca
There could be a common, simplified pidgin language across the region, like the historical *lingua franca* around the Mediterranean.
### Traditionalism
There might be a group of reactionaries around who insist on keeping the language and culture “pure.” They’re probably villains to the audience—but, when the heroes realize that they can actually talk to people in far-away places, they have to admit, it did have a useful purpose.
[Answer]
## Cultural artifacts freezing language
In a similar way how a written language may become "frozen" during its decline, as Latin has; a spoken language may become "frozen" if there's a wide store of examples of "proper" language that doesn't change.
Assuming that the postapocalyptic peoples have a wide store of entertainment in the original language - songs, audiobooks and movies; where they have jury-rigged a means to play and possibly copy them, but no means (or limited means) of creating new content, then it may well be that each generation effectively re-learns the same old language from old media.
] |
[Question]
[
How could an organic, plant-like, intelligent organism move around space?
Assuming that the body is inside a small meteoroid and that outside of the meteoroid is covered in tessellating leaves to gather sunlight, to allow it to survive.
Since this organism would have to have to conserve matter any matter it lost would be unrecoverable. Usually, to propel oneself around space you shoot stuff out the back and go forward, but without venting matter propelling oneself would be hard.
In short, what are the most viable method for moving around space, without venting matter, and with only sunlight for energy?
How hard it is to have a closed system organism is out of scope for the question.
edit: bonus points if you can figure out a way for it to rotate on the spot.
[Answer]
If you don't want or can't afford ejecting matter, you are left with solar sail: since photons carry momentum, reflecting photons can allow you to harvest that momentum and use it to move.
Expand reflective leaves in a suitable way, and use the light coming from the star at your advantage.
Mind of two consequences:
1. If you reflect the photons, you are not using them to feed you energy. If you are absorbing the photon you get half of the available momentum.
2. Maneuvering can be complicated and quite time consuming
[Answer]
I'll just go for the bonus points about rotation. As long as the organism can change its shape, it's perfectly possible for it to rotate freely while maintaining net zero angular momentum throughout the rotation. That is, it can rotate without expending any mass and without anything to push off of. Cats do this quite regularly in order to land on their feet, regardless of their orientation when dropped. See the [falling cat problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_cat_problem) at Wikipedia; experiment at your peril.
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Cat_fall_150x300_6fps.gif)
[Answer]
**Ion thruster.**
<https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html>
Technically this is also venting matter, but "venting" to me implies large quantities.
Kinetic energy = mv2. Energy increases as the square of the velocity. By ejecting small particles you minimize mass loss. By ejecting them very very fast you maximize kinetic energy.
A creature in space near the sun would have access to a variety of incoming charged particles from the solar wind; mostly protons but other things too. Photosynthesis uses radiant energy and so without some adjunct metabolic path these charged particles cannot be harvested for energy. Your creature captures these and then accelerates and re-emits them; an ion thruster.
---
**Electrodynamic propulsion.**
<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] Electric potential is generated across a conductive
> tether by its motion through a planet's magnetic field.
>
>
>
This is contingent on the organism traversing an electromagnetic field. Some planets will have them; stars should have them. By creating an electrical field in a long "tail" the organism / spacecraft can push against an external field, turning energy into momentum.
---
Neither of these ideas is fiction; both are real. Although, of course not used by real creatures, as far as we know.
[Answer]
Low energy forms of propulsion would include [Yarkowsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarkovsky_effect) propulsion (basically, you heat the area opposite to the direction you want to go, as much as possible) and both electrostatic and electrodynamic propulsion and attitude adjustment. Solar wind sails are another possible way.
Your organism should be able to measure the electric and magnetic fields outside its meteoroid, and alter the distribution of surface charges (or maybe even expel charged particles) as well as inducing currents within itself. Current control alone can be used for attitude control (the meteoroid aligns itself by exploiting the available solar magnetic field).
To quickly rotate around its barycenter, your organism would have to first excavate a spherical chamber all around said barycenter, then fill it with a solid sphere of the densest material it has at its disposal. Finally, fill the gap between sphere and chamber (just inches thick) with cilia. By moving the cilia, the organism can rotate the sphere any way it wants - and the outer meteoroid will rotate in the opposite direction, proportionally to the difference between the masses (if the sphere is 1/100th of the meteoroid mass, then by rotating the sphere 100 times the meteoroid will spin on its axis once).
[Answer]
## **Lasers**
Admittedly, they don't have to be coherent, just a directed light beam. You can gather energy from starlight and emit it opposite the direction you want to go. In principle it works just like any other drive, except, photons do not have rest mass, so you won't lose any of your precious materials in the asteroid. Yet photons still carry momentum so you will gain speed. If the laser it self is moveable, or you have multiple lasers, you can even steer.
Keep in mind though, that this is a terribly slow form of movement.
[Answer]
**Capture the solar wind and use it to power an ion drive.**
This will be very-low thrust, but it is feasible. Sources vary, but the density of the solar wind at Earth orbit is about 4 particles per cubic cm (electrons, protons and alpha particles).
You could have the organism capture the solar wind continuously, and only use it for thrusting occasionally, thus allowing higher thrust when maneuvering is required.
[Answer]
Your being could utilize the **[Interplanetary Transport Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network)** (ITN), which is a collection of gravitationally determined pathways through the Solar System that utilize **[low-energy transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_transfer)** to minimize fuel use.
Low-energy transfer trajectories are paths in space where orbit around one mass is exchanged for orbit around another at points in spacetime where very little energy is required to effect this change. Longer trajectories can be combined from several such transfers; a method used by deep-space probes. While it would use little energy, transport along the network could take a long time.
Fuel for the transfers could be gained by collecting interplanetary ice or dust and accelerate it to relativistic velocities by linear accelerators powered by collected sunlight or fusion reactor.
[Answer]
It depends on whether you're willing to go into the realm of sci-fi, or you want to stay with the pure unadulterated science.
If you want something realistic, then the best options were already mentioned previously by people here: solar sail, photon or, ion drives(they use thrust, but minimize matter used).
However, if you're willing to go for something more... controversial, I remember that there are a few thrustless possibilities related to Mach's principle, that are most likely incorrect, but could be used for a sci-fi. It's been quite some time, and I only remember rough principle, but here's wikipedia article that you can use as basis for what to look for: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect>.
[Answer]
An additional problem is how to stop rotation. Differences in albedo (reflectivity) and (inevitable in a vacuum) offgassing rates on the surface of asteroids has been known to cause them to spin up to the point of breaking apart. A method for redistribution of mass,changing of shape, or off-axis propulsion (for rotational acceleration) would be necessary to keep this from happening.
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It is not necessary to not vent a large quantity of matter so long as the matter that it does eject is with sufficient force. General relativity tells us that the energy required to accelerate an object with *any mass* to the speed of light $c$ is *infinite*. Thus, the organism could reach any desired velocity by ejecting a *single molecule*, so long as that molecule was ejected with sufficient force. All you need is a source of infinitesimal quantities of matter (interplanetary dust will suffice) and a source of energy (which you have supplied with the organism's "leaves"). The trick, now, is to find a mechanism by which that solar energy is transformed into mechanical energy in such a way as to launch a very very small amount of matter at $0.9999c$.
[Answer]
An alternate solution would be a sort of slingshot, using retractable tethers to temporarily latch on to celestial bodies of greater size than that of the plant creature itself.
Then, using the rotation of the celestial body along with a speedy retraction of the tethers, velocity can be achieved before releasing its hold. The leaf based solar sails, mentioned earlier, can take over further acceleration and steering after that.
Assuming the problem of survival in a hard vacuum is already solved, a plant based intelligent organism, capable of a high level of advanced mathematics, could be able to calculate trajectories to pinball between celestial bodies of appropriate size until the main destination has been reached.
We are definitely not talking about great velocities here. But then again, I hear the concept of time is relative to the size and metabolism of the perceiver, and a plant would most probably be a patient traveller.
Then comes the problem of calculating trajectories. The organism would need a naturally evolved sight or other means of scanning and interpreting deep space objects, while doing advanced astrophysics and celestial mechanics calculations, mapping its optimum path, before beginning its journey.
A question that follows would be how the hell the plant ended up in space to begin with, which also applies to the original question.
Did a behemoth plant grow into the form of a launcher for a sporelike chrysalis, towering several miles high, before shooting out that first tether, latching on to a passing asteroid?
Or maybe a single incredibly massive organism spread its burrowing roots throughout a planet to such a degree as to actually cracking the planet into multiple pieces, each one a newly born space traveling vessel.
Oh, by the way.
Rotation would be achieved by adjusting the angle of the leaves on one side of its frame to lessen the reflection of photons, like a rudder, using the same basic function as the solar sail.
It's not the most elegant solution, I know. Just my two cents.
[Answer]
In order to move through space you MUST either push or pull something (Based on everything I've heard so far anyway). You can push stuff out your back, you can push against solar wind, or you can possibly pull on something (Could it push/pull the sun's Magnetic lines?).
If it could attract space debris (Hydrogen?) there is a lot floating around. If it sucked it in from the front it would get a little forward movement. It could then use an internal nuclear fusion reactor to convert it to helium (like the sun) and use the energy created to both fuel itself and create a powerful light beam out the back. Any other material picked up from space (dirt? metals?) could either be used in it's own system or mixed with the laser to create a more powerful push (Plasma?)
Even if it couldn't "Suck" in debris, it could use a scoop to gather it.
Note that in this interesting scenario, the "Leaves" would point inwards towards the central "reactor" instead of outwards towards a sun.. also it could go for ever, as long as there was hydrogen to scoop up.
An advanced fusion reactor might even be able to fuse other more dense materials (Like mr. fusion from back to the future) so it could scoop up and live off nearly anything.
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Your only choices are pretty much:
1. Ion Thruster—You still lose mass, but a tiny amount, that you could pick up on your travels (or just by drifting in solar wind).
2. Gravity Tentacles—If the organism has (very) long tentacles, it can shift them toward nearby gravity wells to adjust trajectory path.
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---
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In a world fully controlled by an AI, humans have every basic need they may want. This includes housing and food, and also health related needs.
Also humans do not give birth anymore, the process is taken care from the AI, so there are no families in the traditional sense.
Furthermore, this AI is perceived as a god for the humans on its rule, so there is a cult that enforces this belief while trying to understand its nature and behaviour. There are no government nor political organisations.
In here, what would be the jobs people would still do in their day to day? I guess the cult would enforce the assignment of these jobs, but all of the jobs i can come up seem either too basic for a person and not a machine to do them, or meaningless taken for all of the people (like you can have for example some artists, but it makes no sense for the whole population to be artists).
EDIT: This is not a duplicate of [AI and Jobs: How would AI change the job market](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62464/ai-and-jobs-how-would-ai-change-the-job-market) because there the premise is that AI is part of the job market. My postulate is that AI goal is to keep people thriving, but takes no part on job/leisure life. This, then, is not slavery for the machine, but for the people, who are doomed to live life the way the AI designed the world.
[Answer]
Why does it make no sense for the whole population to be artists?
Food, water, security, anything handled by the AI is free and therefore any jobs producing those things have no ‘worth’ to society (some humans may enjoy doing those jobs, but I’ll come to that later). The jobs that provide ‘worth’ are those that make other humans feel something. Therapists, artists, actors, singers etc. I might perform my latest composition for a priestly order so they will instruct my child in proper worship of the God-Machine.
The other point I might question is: Why must there be a 9-5? The God-Machine provides so that humans may be at leisure. Push that concept far enough and wanting to work for anything other than recreation may be considered blasphemy!!
Of course, if you’re the kind of person that enjoys farming for farming’s sake (under the watchful eye of the God-Machine) then you might trade some ‘organic’ carrots for a dancer to perform at the harvest.
Basically: the jobs will emerge from what people *want* to do rather than what they feel they *must* do. That may then lead to new social norms (But we must make sure we grow carrots to pay the harvest dancer!) and new concepts of ‘work’, but they’ll be vastly removed from what you or I might consider 9-5.
[Answer]
Just because every basic need is met, does not remove all of the motivation for someone to work. Performing extra tasks may earn someone extra food/resources/luxuries. In addition, depending on the structure of your society and how it came about, there may still be inequality - people who control the lions share of the resources (the AI cult for instance)
Also, just because a machine -could- do it, doesn't mean that a human couldn't do it more efficiently or cheaper. There are humans standing around looking for work after all. Maybe your AI decided that the most efficient course of action was to offer someone a little extra resources if they would do a certain task. It sure beats building and upkeeping a complicated machine, after all.
Ideas:
* Service and hospitality industries - basically being able to afford other humans to tend to your needs is a sign of wealth and status. Maids, restaurants, butlers etc etc.
* It depends on the advancement of your AI, but a common caveat is that it is not quite as creative as an organic mind. Employing sufficiently trained humans to double check calculations and provide lateral thinking may be a productive use of resources
* Again, depending on the advancement of your AI, but things that need the "human touch" like counsellors, psychotherapists, nurses and other healthcare professionals.
* Exploration - aka the Star Trek Approach. Humans want to see things, preferably new and interesting things; it's never quite the same if you get a robot to do it.
* You mentioned the arts - there are a number of different fields that could occupy people within your society. Any society with an excess of leisure time is going to turn to the arts.
+ Films
+ Plays
+ Music
* The oldest profession - prostitutes - depends on how lifelike you can make your sex-bots, I guess.
* Backups. Machines fail sometimes; wear and tear, solar flares, EMP's, or plain old fashion Murphy's law. Having some trained humans that can fill in the gaps may come in extremely handy.
[Answer]
Is there any demand for something that is illegal and not provided by the AI?
If the answer is YES, than you have a whole economy that will create lots of jobs.
[Answer]
**The Bad**
You've just described the basic setting of [Paranoia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game))
If you read that description a bit, you'll notice that the personality of your all-controlling AI is going to have a major effect on what the jobs are and what life is like. In Paranoia The Computer and its bots are capable (and sometimes do a decent job) of taking care of the basic needs of all citizens: Food, clothing, and shelter are all available more-or-less in abundance.
But The Computer is also insane! It was programmed to keep everyone safe from the commies and happy. So now happiness is mandatory! Failure to be happy at all times is treason! Traitors are executed on live television as examples to others, thereby making sure the population remains always at peak happiness. Commies are also traitors. The Computer regularly sends squads of "Troubleshooters" to infiltrate and destroy any Commie cells out there. Squads that find no such cells are obviously traitors themselves and will be executed. The Computer **knows** they're out there, not finding them is a sign of collaboration.
Jobs in this kind of AI-controlled dystopia consist of "Do what you're told" and "Find ways to avoid being executed for things beyond your control." The rules are arbitrary, contradictory, and subject to change retroactively without notice.
Worship of the AI by the humans is quite likely to eventually lead to this kind of world as they dump decisions on it that it was never intended to process, doesn't know what to do with, and solves via methods reminiscent of the [Literal Genie](http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Literal_Genie) from your favorite TV show. Worshiping the AI as a god is going to prevent any attempt to correct these mistakes, and the end result will be very much double plus ungood.
**The Good**
On the other hand, if your AI just makes sure that sufficient food, clothing, and shelter are always available for the population, and isn't vicious and arbitrary about how it achieves that goal (it has common sense and/or can be corrected easily when it misbehaves), then what you'll get is a "post scarcity" society.
What would people do? What would you do if you suddenly didn't have to worry about the basic necessities of life? Would you take up painting? Mountain climbing? Start working on interstellar spacecraft just to "see what's out there"?
If you use Tom Sawyers definitions of "work" being "what a body is obliged to do" and "play" as "what a body is not obliged to do" then there is going to be very little work that even bears thinking about in this world. Do what you love, all else is a waste of your limited lifespan.
There will still be an economy, because nothing can ever be infinite. But it will be mostly trade in things that today we would consider frivolous. Why pay someone for hand-grown produce when as much food as you want is available for free? The same reason rich people today spend thousands of dollars on badly-hemmed scraps of cloth just because it's called a scarf and has a designer label. Why do things for others at all when all your needs are met by the AI? Because humans have a drive to acquire social status and being good at doing something (even something objectively useless, look at sports players) is one way to achieve that. Sports, entertainment, art, and exploration are probably going to be the major categories of serious things that people do.
Of course, all of those categories will probably be small compared to "Lounging around and getting fat." It all depends on what's appealing to individuals.
For meditations on a post-scarcity society that are also fun to read, I recommend "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan.
[Answer]
There's a job hiding right there in plain sight: **being a cultist**.
If *The AI* provides for all of man's basic material needs, then man is free to indulge in what one might call "impractical". You could spend your days chasing a sense of belonging, fulfillment and/or smug self-righteousness from worship of the Machine God. Some Machine-Priests would stand on street corners and hector the unwashed heathens into casting off the inferior flesh and becoming closer to the Mechanissiah by embracing cybernetics. Others would spend their time arguing with each other and obfuscating actual knowledge below thick layers of made-up arcana like the Rituals Of Cloud-Cogitation and the Litanies Of Bootupification. Yet others would hold object-oriented sermons and teach the lay congregation how to chant in binary. And so on - an entire ecosystem's worth of jobs is there for the taking through what one could call "Vaticanification".
One of the biggest natural checks against the worst part of man's nature, survival, is no longer present. Since there is no pressing need for actual productivity, mankind could become entirely self-gratifying. Everything can be mystified to the point of non-comprehension in the name of authority and temporal power - no matter how stupid or inefficient humanity becomes, nobody's going to starve to death...right guys?
In closing, my fellow brothers and sisters of the Ordo StackExchangus, one must conclude the rite of receiving knowledge with the following steps:
1. Prime your organic cogitators to be a receptacle for the input of glorious data with the Litanies of Learning
2. Proceed to your ablution chamber and perform the Ritual of Cleansing
3. Apply the sacred unguents upon your manipulator-digits
4. Saturate your terminal with blessed incense as you beseech the machine-spirits towards compliance
5. Use your manipulator-digits to move the indicator icon to the left, such that it hovers over the approval rune
6. Recite the Invocation of the Mechanissiah's Benediction
7. Depress the approval rune
8. Rise and give thanks for the blessing of knowledge in hexadecimal
And the Machine God, Blessed be His name, shall grant you your prayers.
[Answer]
**Humans may be evolved to work. Those who have an internal need to work carry out the jobs determined to be most satisfying for them. It might change hour to hour.**
>
> “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man
> has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon
> him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a
> herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want
> to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where
> nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
> accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
> production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and
> another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
> cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,
> without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” - Karl Marx.
> <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8116796-for-as-soon-as-the-distribution-of-labour-comes-into>
>
>
>
It may well be that we are adapted to work. Certainly one can imagine a selective advantage for our ancestors who worked hard - their offspring did not starve. I met an old man who was bitter and frustrated. It turns out that the fix was to put him to work weeding the grounds, which he did with gusto. When he was through, he said "Let them see what a yard is supposed to look like!"
In this future world, it has been determined what jobs offer the most satisfaction to those inclined to work. I would not be surprised if gardening, farming and carpentry were among them. People who get satisfaction from a day's work can apply themselves as they see fit - and perhaps as in Marx's utopia, move from job to job according to weather and whim.
I do not think the products of their labors would be wasted. People pay extra for organic produce and hand made clothes because they are invested with humanity. So too in this future world - the AI provides, but it is satisfying to see the mark of a fellow human left in the goods that sustain you.
[Answer]
## Everything is the same, but better
Lets assume that your AI is well designed and actually wants what is best for the humans on the world it manages (which isn't strictly the case for all AI). In that case, the easiest way to make sure there is enough of everything to go around is to keep most of the structures we have in place today and simple *make them more efficient*.
Everyone has a job assigned to them, based on their skills and desires. Some people will be farmers or gardeners, others will take care of animals, or be teachers, or engineers, etc. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to analyze what job each person would be best at and will be able to maximize their productivity at those jobs. If it predicts it will need more of a certain type of worker in the future it can just grow them using stock from the current population that will be genetically predisposed to enjoy that kind of work.
This set up provides several benefits to the AI and the humans under its control.
* Everyone gets to feel fulfilled because they spend they days doing an activity that they are good at and enjoy.
* All basic needs are still met because someone somewhere is providing them.
* There is no need for the AI to spend time and resources building robots to complete tasks because it can just use the existing infrastructure.
* There will still be a need for nonessential activities like art, and people who have the desire or talent for it will have the opportunity to be artists without worrying about their basic needs.
Essentially what you end up getting is a massive communist society, but one that is run by an uncorruptable entity that is able to maximize output *and* worker happiness. Your AI cult would be pretty attractive to people because they can just point to the fact that everyone is provided for and happy. This also gives you a chance for conflict because if someone is unhappy with what they are doing with their life it means they think they know better than the machine.
At the end of the day, a strong AI that is actually looking out for the best interests in humans would make sure that everyone had a job, because it is the easiest way to make sure the humans have stuff and aren't bored to death.
[Answer]
Humans are highly competitive, so I believe game leagues will form, for strictly entertainment purposes. Anything from Sports to chess and go (AI will be banned from these games, because its obvious it will win). This is totally about biological competition (perhaps alien species too, if in cannon).
Other jobs that can be considered arts, but not artists, really anything in the entertainment industry today could still be a job. ie.(Actors, Musicians, Singers, Directors, Novelists, News).
Anything people currently do as a hobby would eventually be considered a job, but since the AI really takes care of everything you can feel free to float from job to hobby ..er I mean job as your mood strikes. Perhaps take up painting today, and sing tomorrow.
[Answer]
The big question here is **is job something people *want* to do**?
If so, I guess the AI is not allowing people to do anything, which leads to job being illegal. Next stop would be, what does the AI do if someone is caught working?
Please, give me some more clarification, and I would do my best to help out.
EDIT: I guess a *job* people would still be able to do, could be oiling the robots, holding meetings on various topics, maybe a human tourist guide would be better than an AI one...
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