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In my fictional setting, part of the civilization has a strong astronomical alignment. Religion and Science are hard to distinguish and new scientific discoveries strengthen it´s faith in the heavenly bodies.
Photography has not yet been invented, so besides hand drawings, my civilizaton uses musical patterns as a method of recording and displaying astronomical movements and events. Instead of churches or temples, people use observatories to exercise their religion. And instead of an organ or such to accompanie liturgy (entirety of Christian and Jewish ceremonies and rites) , priests are dedicated to “program” a gigantic instrument, in order to display all (or as many as possible) visible celestial bodies and effects, each with a tone.
So there's a constant sounded backdrop in the observatory/church/temple constantly changing it´s sound patterns, abruptly or in small nuances. Long serving sound-priests develop such a fine hearing, that they can recognize how the nocturnal sky currently looks like, just be listening to the music. For the purpose of celebrating important but bygone astronomical events (e.g. supernovae, comets, planetary alignments), the star-sound-machine can somehow recap archived music sections or the machine can be reprogrammed by a sound priest.
*[Musica universalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis) or music of the spheres is an invention already made in pythagorean ages, but is not to be taken literally as audible music: “The Music of the Spheres incorporates the metaphysical principle that mathematical relationships express qualities or "tones" of energy which manifest in numbers, visual angles, shapes and sounds – all connected within a pattern of proportion.” A lot of references can be found in ancient, classical and modern music, but as far as I know, none took the approach literally and consists of REAL Music composed by the stars.*
The question: **How does the star-sound-machine work, how does it look like, how does it sound?**
What it should accomplish and general conditions:
* just mechanical solutions, no computers or electric sound
* no orchestra or any instruments directly played by people
* I do not expect exact blueprints for the machine (not yet ;-) ), just
the idea of how it might work.
* the music reproduced does not need to be a well structured 4/4
rhythm, but it should be perceived as harmonic in the broadest sense.
(Although i guess a meteor shower makes a fast, weird and possibly
boppy disco sound)
* the origin of a tone inside the observatory (I mean the localization;
the spot, where it is produced and emitted) should be taken into
account, as it makes the sound 3D and thus more complexity viable.
The observatory should be used as a sound body and its architectural
peculiarities support the tone’s nature, quality and localization. I
like to think of it as 360-degree full-dome soundshow in a
planetarium - just in the renaissance.
* the civ. has a sol-centric perception of the solar system
* My world is not earth, but for simplicity's sake let's take an earth
centered (not centric) perception of the universe as basis for the
idea.
* “Good” music is more important, than astronomical empiricism
* optional: the machine is quite big, and it's mechanisms are visible
to the audience.
[Answer]
# Use a bellows-powered organ
The setup:
* A large ring. A second, thicker ring slowly rotates above it, covering half of the ring at all times.
* $N$ organ pipes of varying lengths, where $N$ is the number of celestial bodies you want to track. Each pipe has air pushed through it by a [double-acting piston bellows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellows#Double-acting_piston_bellows), so there is a continuous flow of air at all times. A good description and image of these bellows can be found [here](http://sdchm.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-classroom-modes-of-ancient-chinese.html).
* The bellows are connected to [steam engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine), which drive pistons which in turn drive the bellows.
Each pipe plays a single, continuous note. The pipes are arranged such that nearby objects in the sky are represented by pipes near each other; they are uncovered when they are visible at night and covered when they go below the horizon. The notes are arranged so that there is a sort of continuity between nearby pipes. The brighter the object (in general), the louder the note.
# Central cross-section
Here is how I imagine this would look:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U4bXt.png)
## First level
Here, you have the ground floor. This has auxiliary equipment, hopefully a small catalog filled with celestial data and calculations, sky maps, etc., as well as a helpful ladder to get to the higher floors.
## Second level
This contains the bulk of the machinery: Steam engines. The ones on the sides each power 1-5 pipes (maybe more). The black lines and circles represent a crude drawing of gears and shafts to make pistons on the third level more in an out.
## Third level
This contains the pipes (in orange) as well as the bellows. The bellows release air into the pipes as the pistons move in and out; the flow should be continuous. The small brown rectangles show that one of the two pipes shown is covered, while the other is not. The light gray thing is the structural supports for the ring; the central shaft rotates, moving the ring with it.
# The ring
As promised, here is a better visualization of the ring - which is sort of like a [mute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mute_(music)). At any time, it is covering half of them, blocking the sounds from them. The exposed pipes represent the stars in the sky.
The ring rotates, slowly uncovering and covering pipes as time goes by and the planet rotates. Here is what it looks like, from the top:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2CnfB.png)
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I believe this idea satisfies all of the requirements. It's automated and completely mechanical; humans will need to stoke the fires, but that can be done when an object is not visible. The ring may actually need to be made into multiple rings if different objects move at different speeds across the celestial sphere, but that can be done without too much trouble.
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# Cosmic radio waves
### How to make a sound
A speaker [works](https://animagraffs.com/loudspeaker/) on the principles of magnetism. An electric signal is applied to a coil suspended inside a permanent magnet (basically, a piece of iron). As the current varies, the coil vibrates. The coils is then attached to a cone so that the vibrations it creates propagate through the air as sound. Alternately, the vibrating coil can be placed next to a tuning fork or chime so that the vibration chimes the tuning fork; or even something as simple as striking a piano string.
The simplest [antenna](http://www.explainthatstuff.com/antennas.html) works by intercepting a radio wave in the air. In general, a straight line antenna that is half the length of the radio waves will have a current induced in it by those waves. This current can then be directed to a speaker to make some noise.
### Cosmic radio sources
There are plenty. Of particular interest are magnetically active gas giants like [Jupiter](https://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/library/sci_briefs/decametric.htm), and main sequence radio stars, although these are evidently [very rare](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.3030.pdf) (as in, less than 1 in a million main-sequence stars). Still, rare doesn't mean impossible. Also, there is the phenomenon of an [astrophysical maser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_maser), which, while usually microwave, can be a radio emission form a stellar atmosphere.
For primitive equipment, you will need large radio sources. Here are two options.
* Your star is a heavy radio emitter. Your planet orbits outside of one or more [gas giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter) with orbital periods of days. These large planets block or distort the radio emissions so the music is changing every day.
* Your planet is a moon orbiting a gas giant with a [huge magnetic field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter) and a [plasma ring](http://vega.lpl.arizona.edu/iotorus/torus-description.html) trapped by that field. This generates lots of radio emissions. There are also several other moons (maybe with salty-icy oceans) that circle the gas giant, and their motion stirs up the plasma torus and disrupts the magnetic field in a way that produces music.
### How to make music
The signals received by the antenna can be split and sent through a (large) set of [band pass filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band-pass_filter). Thus each frequency band will then send its signal to the appropriate chime which with then sound at a certain frequency. This will make a sound in the same way a pipe organ does, with one sound making instrument for each frequency.
Since the bandpass filter at a certain radio frequency is connected to a sound-making instrument at certain audio frequency, there are a *large* number of combinations of ways to convert cosmic radio signals into music. The priests could have spend millenia finding the perfect combinations.
### Meeting all the criteria
* Constant sound backdrop constantly changing patters: Yes. Cosmic radiation will meet these criteria.
* Bygone astronomical events: Use a phonograph for each individual chime. A stylus will cut into a wax or clay cylinder the pattern of music for that chime, using the same signal that drives the chime. Then, if an event is deemed worthy, the cylinders for all of the hundreds of chimes are cast in bronze and kept to play back later.
* Just mechanical solutions: um....well...the simplest antenna is just a thin rod sticking up into the air, and the simplest speaker is a coil of copper wire around an iron core. The real solution to making it more mechanical is driving multiple chimes (as in, hundreds) at the same time. The vibrating coils will present a mechanical appearance.
* Music should be harmonic: You can listen to [space sounds](https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/features/halloween_sounds.html). They can be pretty cool, and the priests can spend the time to make them cooler.
* 3D music: With hundreds of chimes, the music can be arranged inside the observatory as the priests see fit.
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There seems to be a fairly obvious, and easy, implementation for this.
Let me introduce you to a player piano;
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Txcsp.jpg)
It's an automatic machine that plays a piano based on a preprogrammed tune recorded on paper or metal rolls. It's also how most musical boxes work.
To use it to make music from the stars the priests / scientists would make star charts that were actually tunes (this could perhaps even happen automatically to make sure any one off or unusual celestial phenomenon were captured) for the device.
The rolls probably wouldn't look exactly like the sky they represent, as the stars might need to be distorted to fit the rows properly, but they would probably be recognisable at least.
You would probably have a number of different rolls representing different periods of celestial objects, some might run faster than others or run constantly at a set speed and rhythm because they never / hardly ever change.
To make it more 'musical' the priests would tune the notes the stars played to make it more harmonic (so in a traditional piano the notes are arranged in some kind of logical scale, but in this case they would be moved around so the star charts made more pleasing noise). The separate rolls and periods of the sky could also hit different notes, so by separating them to multiple instruments you can make it more pleasing to listen to.
All the rolls (metal or paper, whichever was used) would be archived and could easily be played again when desired, copied if needed or transported to other locations.
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The major problem is one of amplification. How can we get a very small signal (electromagnetic/light) and convert it into kinetic energy in the ranges that a person can hear? Essentially we have to build a microphone -> amplifier -> speaker system, and that's no small task for a primitive society.
So, microphone (ok, macrophone) first. What is coming from the sun that people can detect? Light mostly, but also heat. It is hard to get light to manipulate a (macro) physical system, but heat can make things move. So perhaps we can build a big array of bimetallic strips - they will bend when light falls on them. The reaction time is pretty low though (i.e. music will be constant for minutes at a time). With the aid of a big lens, you could make a 2d array of bimetallic strips that 'photographs' the sky into mechanical motion. Maybe with colored filters you could capture more (e.g. sunsets), or with extreme sensitivity you could perhaps get stars (rather doubtful), but even without them you would be able to get an input that varies with time of day, weather, and season.
Now you need to amplify it, as bimetallic strips aren't made for lots of pushing power. Maybe the bimetallic strips could manipulate valves that control air pressure (if you have a pressure source), or maybe regulate water flow. For this stage you do need an input of mechanical energy - heat from a fire driving a steam boiler, a waterwheel pushing bellows.
Finally we need to convert our amplified 'photograph' of the sky into sound. Humans know lots of way of making sounds. Air through pipes (organ), air over strings (Aeolian harp), drops of water hitting metal plates, the sky is your limit. I'd suggest air over strings, as it is a nice analog and somewhat ghostly sound.
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I've read some conflicting theories regarding ancient atmosphere (some say it had more oxygen, but others dispute it) being relevant to survival of large dinosaurs.
So my question is: is it realistic, from the point of view of known science to have Cretaceous Period dinosaur alive today? (Assuming it was successfully brought over somehow, maybe in a large time-truck)
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Dinosaurs might be able to live in today's atmosphere, but a dinosaur suddenly transported into modern times might have other issues.
Plants have evolved considerably in the last 65 million years. Grasses and flowering plants really only came into being near the end of the Cretaceous period, so dinosaurs from earlier periods would have difficulty even recognizing them as food. As well, plants have evolved various toxins and other strategies to resist being eaten, which might poison a dinosaur or make it very sick. As well, dinosaurs might develop severe allergic reactions to modern plants. Herbivorous dinosaurs would, for the most part, require gigantic amounts of plant matter that they could digest. It is thought that the sauropods ate coniferous tree needles, for example, so a herd would lay entire forests to waste, and you would need a vast area for them to roam and the trees to recover.
Carnivores might have many of the same issues. The other problem for apex predators is current megafauna would only be sufficient as an appetizer or snack, rather than a full meal. Bringing back T-rex would put you on the hook for some pretty hefty bags of dino-kibble, or a large Texas cattle ranch.
Some "do it yourself" projects are underway to see if evolution can be essentially reversed in chickens to make a pseudo dinosaur, and if these efforts are successful, then Chicken-rex will be much better adapted to modern environments.
For more information see:
* [Chickenosaurus: Canadian scientist says he can create dinosaurs from chickens](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/dinosaurs/6090313/Chickenosaurus-Canadian-scientist-says-he-can-create-dinosaurs-from-chickens.html),
* [Chickens into Dinosaurs](http://sciencefocus.com/forum/chickens-into-dinosaurs-t141.html).
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Probably, but many would die.
You all seem to be forgetting that most bacteria and diseases have evolved in 65 million years in addition to the atmosphere, plants, and other animals. I'm no biology expert, but I'd bet that without up-to-date resistances, modern dinosaurs would face something akin to what happened when Europeans first reached the Americas: a lot of indigenous people were killed by germs.
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Yes, numerous dinosaurs could survive, and actually many would do quite well. We know this because dinosaurs are actually more numerous than mammals. Yes, I said they **are**, as in currently. Technically speaking a bird is a dinosaur, and birds outnumber any other land vertebrate in terms of of species.
Many people have brought up very valid points about how many herbivorous dinosaurs may not be able to eat the plant life, and that large canivores may simply not be able to find enough food. This is all true, but I think people often times forget and underappreciate just how diverse dinosaurs used to be, and paint them with far too broad of a brush stroke. Most theropod dinosaurs were not these towering super predators that we like to think of them as, most were actually quite small, and would probably compete favourably with small canivorous mammals such as racoons. Dinosaurs such as Troodon, Velociraptor, and small Tyrannosaurs like Stokesosaurus would probably be able to cut out a comfortable niche for themselves, and probably would prove to become a very problematic invasive species. Medium sized carnivores like Ceratasaurus and Utahraptor could probably sustain themselves for a while in places where large mammalian megafauana still exists like Africa, although I'd be willing to bet they would cause an ecological meltdown in the area. Also, large predatory Terror Birds from South America would also probably be able to very quickly establish themselves as an apex predator, and still technically count as dinosaurs.
Hope this helps.
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Yes. Given the recent studies as described [here](http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/4963/20131119/dinosaurs-lived-in-a-low-oxygen-world-study-suggests.htm) and [here](http://www.uibk.ac.at/public-relations/presse/archiv/2013/466/) show that oxygen levels were actually lower (10 to 15% as compared to 21% today). So breathing would be the least of dinosaurs problem.
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Also take a look at [this](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18468/did-the-earth-have-so-little-oxygen-that-dinosaurs-couldnt-exist) question at skeptics which has quite a bit of info on the subject
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I would say most dinosaurs would survive. Given the facts I have seen dinosaurs could survive many obstacles. Dinosaurs roamed the earth for more than 180 million years. Not all could go extinct. If we talk about dinosaurs not being able to adapt to plant life because it has evolved to be poisonous I don't think the same. If we talk about the largest dinosaur argentinosaurus it is unlikely poison would take down a creature that weighs about 60 tons. Carnivores coexisting with herbivores could work, however if we talk about real world standards the apex predators will be affected greatly however medium to small class dinosaurs will not be affected. Large titan dinosaurs could survive in current rainforests and untouchable by regular fauna. Flying reptiles on the other hand not affected. Animals like quetzalcoatlus could survive in africa scavenging of of lions. Marine reptiles like liopleurodon and mosasaurus could survive on whales and larger animals. However it is unlikely some dinosaurs survive. Upon arrival into the world,About 20% would go extinct due to the climate. However being feathered helps the dinosaurs survive in cold environments, so in places like canada and greenland will not affect the habitat of dinosaurs. So my final conclusion is yes however some would die.
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If they were recreated using genetic engineering and/or synthetic biology they would need to live isolated in an area where very few people( to be harmless for civilization) or live in a controlled environment like in Jurassic Park.
The dinosaurs that were herbivorous would need to live in the rainforests and only a small number of all dinosaurs that existed could be brought back to life for safety issues.
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Designing a single isolated political entity isn't too difficult. Just pick a size, government type, invent a few colorful characters and you've got a good start. However, no government just appears, fully formed. Governments grow and evolve just like living things. For richer worlds, with longer histories and longer evolutions, how do you keep the political history plausible?
For example, skipping from a small tribal government to a fully fledged republic isn't believable but going from a tyranny to a primitive republic is possible.
What principles can I apply to the political evolution of the governments of my world to increase its plausibility? Are there any common patterns of which types of governments follow other governments and why they changed that way? As much as possible, discussions of philosophy and culture are out of scope (because it's so easy for this discussion to just explode in scope.)
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I think the key is complexity. While the progression from simple to complex societies is not linear (we get Romes, and we get dark ages), we can see political beginnings when the size of tribal groups exceeded the size of a typical group of apes, and who knows what a society that spans our solar system looks like politically.
Political systems (any of the many -isms) are under-pinned by technology. Feudalism was a practical scheme for an iron age agricultural society. It wasn't suitable for society dominated by cities. Capitalism arguably required the printing press.
Any political system that persists has to be resilient and has to resist 'experimentation' and change. Consequently transitions between different systems (like the Victorian capitalism of the 19th century and the welfare-capitalism of the later 20th) tend to be punctuated by conflict.
As you suggest systems can with difficult progress from the less complex to the more complex, but it's much easier to go from complex to less complex (collapse).
Basically, the more populous the nation/civilisation the more complex the political system, even if its despotic. And since borders are permeable, in terms of population you have to include a fair portion of the population of bordering nations.
I also think that the more energy the civilisation uses, the more complex its society. Energy use enable complexity and in general, all energy usage will translate into complexity.
Lastly, which is more complex, centralised or decentralised systems? Probably the former. Whether you get a centralised or decentralised polity probably depends on the rate of change of circumstances like environment, technology etc. Rapid rates of change will favour decentralised systems, slow rates of change will likely make more centralised and highly connected organisations more efficient in the long run.
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There are so many different political histories out there that it's tough to use any one of them as a canonical example. As an interesting one, take the entity that is now [the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom):
1. **Pre-43 A.D.: [Prehistoric Britain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Britain).** Various tribal groups roam the British isles. Some [Celtic peoples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_Celts) gradually take over from previous Britons.
2. **43 A.D. - ~409 A.D.: [Roman Britain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Britain).** The Romans do what they do best and conquer parts of the southern England and Wales. [Governors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_governor) are the official rulers (in the eyes of the Romans), but they work with tribal leaders (to some extent) to integrate them into Roman British society. Land is further subdivided into colonies and municipalities. This southern Britain is part of the Roman Empire. In the north, though (e.g. Scotland), other tribes continue to rule, notably the [Caledonians](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonia).
3. **~409 A.D. - 1066 A.D.: Early Middle Ages.** The [Saxons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons) and the [Angles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles) come and settle in Britain, forming small kingdoms.
4. **1066 A.D. - 1215 A.D.: Late Middle Ages.** [William the Conqueror](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England) wins the Battle of Hastings in 1066, beginning the Norman rule of Britain. Kingdoms grow larger, and there is more unity.
5. **1215 A.D. - 17th century A.D.:** The [Magna Carta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta) is signed in 215, giving more power to the nobility from the King. Lower-level power still rests in their hands; feudal society still exists. The monarchy remains. Parliament, established in some form under William the Conqueror, has some authority.
6. **15th century A.D. - 19th century A.D.:** The [British Empire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland) begins to go through its proto-imperial stages and grows until it becomes a proper empire.
7. **17the century A.D.:** The [English Civil Wars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War) and the [Glorious Revolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution) more firmly establish the power of Parliament.
8. **1707 A.D.:** The [Treaty of Union](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union) is signed, combining the Kingdom of England (England + Wales) with the Kingdom of Scotland. There is more peace between the two kingdoms; past history, including the [Wars of Scottish Independence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_Scottish_Independence), had led to enmity between the two entities.
9. **1800 A.D:** The [Act of Union](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1800) unites Ireland with the Kingdom of Great Britain. This might be considered the first formal union between the two entities.
10. **1922 A.D.:** The [Republic of Ireland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland) breaks free and gains independence.
11. **20th century A.D:** The British Empire is finally totally dissolved.
During this 2000-odd year history of Britain, the land went from independent to a colony/province to small independent kingdoms to larger kingdoms to having a parliament in addition to the monarchy to an empire and back to a smaller state, with a parliament and a monarchy. It went through these numerous stages over a long period of time, and, quite frankly, it is still changing.
So, what's the takeaway model for a nation? Here's my guess:
1. **Small, tribal structure (Prehistoric Britain).** It is difficult to think of the land as a unified entity, because the technology to make it one doesn't exist. It will take outside forces to change that.
2. **Greater unification.** This will happen if the state is conquered by an empire (Roman Britain) or is taken over be a powerful internal kingdom, or outside kingdom (William the Conqueror).
3. **Democratic rights.** People will eventually want representation, whether in the form of a democracy or a republic (Magna Carta $\to$ Glorious Revolution).
4. **Empire.** A country will rise to become a major global power in the vast majority of cases (British Empire).
5. **Post-empire.** Who knows? The United Kingdom still has the Parliament + monarchy system in place, although the monarch has lost most of his/her power (similar to the last of the Japanese emperors, if I remember correctly). There will generally be a loss of international territory, and a government focused inward.
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Modern European states may not be the only model.
Almost all of Europe was under the control of monarchies during the Middle ages, so you might assume that is a necessary path.
Let us recall the ancient societies such as Athens and other Greek states, as well as Rome.
Those societies did mostly have kings at the earliest times, but those kings had much less power than a medieval monarch. To generalize grossly, they tended to be strong tribal leaders, much as in the Germanic tribes. The Greeks had very strong ideas regarding "freedom" and differentiating themselves from "eastern despotisms".
You might argue that the Roman king had a great real of power. Equally, Brutus ***successfully*** removed the monarchy precisely because of the abuse of power and the existence of a sufficiently educated and powerful class to replace it with a republic.
The ancient republics did differ considerably from modern states; in particular they had limited suffrage: no slaves or women for a start. But what they did have was a constitution, the rule of law and a court system rather than judgement by despot.
The Roman Republic did of course fall to and become the Imperium, and take the rest of Europe with it.
Suppose that the Roman Republic had not been so successful in conquest, or failed as a state completely.
Then the various political models in Europe would have had a very different path, and it is not inconceivable that there might have been continuity from the ancient republics to modern democracies.
What constraints are there on forming modern democracies? Sounds like a complex question in itself. As a start, I'd suggest that you need a certain level of literacy and therefore wealth before full suffrage becomes viable.
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Political structures are emergent in the sense that they tend to mirror and reinforce cultural and social organizations in society, and survive a winnowing process between various organizational forms, with the "best" ones surviving.
China, for example, had followed a Confucianist code for @ 2000 years, and today's Communist Party government would be recognizable to earlier Imperial governments in terms of general form (government by meritocracy and bureaucracy), if not in specific content. Western Democracies have followed a much more chaotic developmental path, and various events have changed the forms in many instances. France, for example is a much more centralized state due to the long period of civil wars ending when Louis XIV (The Sun King) was able to assert himself and centralize power in the court, suppressing any possible social or political organization which might challenge Royal power. England, on the other hand, went the other way with a relatively constrained monarchy after the end of the English Civil Wars and the supremacy of Parliament. Germany, being assembled from a collection of bickering States, adopted a much more Federal structure.
Other societies have different culture and histories, which define their political systems and development. Russia is far different from the European nations because of her different history and society (the influence of things like the Orthodox Church, invasions from both the East and West due to open land frontiers and the vast spaces of Russia all play a part).
A good author to read is Robert D Kaplan (<http://robertdkaplan.com>). Many of his books seem to be travel books on the surface, but he is a keen observer and his vision is "History is Geography", in the sense that areas and nations with defendable frontiers can maintain civilizations and cultures over extended periods of time, while more open areas are the cockpits of conflict as civilizational forces can "flow" across them and come in conflict with other civilizations. Areas broken by difficult terrain are essentially ungovernable, since authorities cannot project their writ or power across the terrain.
In terms of political structures evolving, England is a good place to start as well. England has essentially been an island fortress against Europe for over 1000 years, and English Kings and Parliaments have been developing systems to ensure the Treasury is capable of supplying enough "coin" to ensure the defense of the realm. (A good author to follow this evolution is Naill Ferguson, particularly "The Ascent of Money"). English structures of taxation, banking, money and so on were driven by the need to be able to raise more and more money to fight against European rivals and prevent anyone from being able to cross the channel. Monarchs as different as Henry V, Elizabeth I and George III wrestled with this, as well as Prime Ministers from Pitt to Churchill.
So for a fictional nation, look at the boundaries (can there be a stable state, or will it be constantly invaded?), the culture, the long term external challenges the nation faces (England's challenges are the same today as they were in the time of Henry V, just different actors across the channel these days), and perhaps any long term internal challenges (a nation like Japan with limited farmland and natural resources will evolve a different culture, society and institutions than a rich, wide open nation like America).
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One thing to consider for world building I think is poor situations lead to more extremist parties becoming popular or existing dictators becoming unpopular. Examples include, Russia, Germany where food shortages and a miserable outcome from a disastrous war laid the ground for both Stalin and Hitler. Granted it wasn't those things alone but the turmoil created in those situations increases. You only have to look at Greece to see how more extreme governments and views can become popular. It is a situation that could have potentially mirrored Germany's hyper inflation or Russia's post ruble collapse. It still could and may have already laid the ground for more extreme political viewpoints.
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You possibly got it the wrong way. Governments, like individuals members of a species do not really evolve. It's called Social Darwinism. Some might think that the UK is the normal path to follow and do not understand why countries like Iraq failed miserably when it comes to democratization. Because democratization is not that natural. They forgot the long struggles the French, British and other democracies have faced to become what they are now.
The central reason why the states that we have today are what they are is because other states have failed. The nation-state is superior.
Now, to get back to the heart of the question, there is one theory by **Charles Tilly** that I would like to talk about. I think the name of the book is ***Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990***. but I've never read it myself. I've read a book that detailed the theory of Tilly using real data to see if the theory was holding the line. And it did pretty well. The name of the book is (in French only) ***Les cycles de Mars*** by **Michel Fortman**. You might already have heard this statement: **"War Made the State and the State Made War"**. Well that is a good summary of the theory.
**A longer explanation:** the most important function of states had been war and security issues. The providential state is something relatively new. Most states before 1930-1940 spent most of their revenues waging war, building fortifications, buying military supplies, etc. War cost a lot of money to the state and those that cannot pay as much are doomed to fail. Of course, I know that some states like Prussia during the Renaissance managed to win over more powerful rivals but this is one of the exceptions.
The state that will survive is the one that will be able to collect more taxes that the other. Thus, he will have more money to wage war and a greater chance of success. During the Renaissance, many states were decentralized. All the small lords had a lot of power and got the keep most of the money. The king had only a small fraction of the kingdom revenue. This is very problematic in some cases because the small lords might waste a lot of this money. If the king had that money, he would conquer the world...
If you ever player Europa Universalis you probably know that France is called the Great blue blob. It's because France was able to centralize more than say the German states nearby where it was almost total chaos (politically speaking). Not only France controlled a large territory but the king had a much larger share of the kingdom's wealth. That allowed France to wage many conflicts often opposed by coalitions of several European countries.
**We can conclude that the absolutist monarchy is superior to feudality because it's more centralized and is able to collect more taxes to wage war.**
Authors also concluded that democracy was superior to other form of government because they can set higher taxes without upsetting the people. In France during l'Ancient Régime, people complained about inequalities and were reluctant to pay taxes. They were right. They were overly taxed compared to the nobility and clergy members that paid almost nothing. Getting rid of the aristocracy meant no more privileged for them and usually, lower taxes for the poor but more taxes overall since it's more equally distributed.
So, in a democracy, people are generally willing to pay higher taxes because they have a say in the government. It's the same principle as "No taxation without representation". If the government listen to you, you will accept higher taxes.
] |
[Question]
[
It's a common trope in science-fiction: "scanning for life signs". A few taps on the screen, and you get an instant population count, often with the ability to distinguish species, and even personal details about the subjects (e.g. "40 life signs, 12 Klingon, 7 female, one of whom is pregnant").
But what data source, or cross-referenced data sources, might be used to gather such data? What would you scan for, and what would you compare it to?
Ideally, it should be able to meet the following criteria:
* The subjects should be at a significant distance, and/or behind obstacles (i.e. you can't just *look and count*).
* The system should be able to discern between living things and life-like things (e.g. robots, fires, or holograms).
* The system can disregard microscopic or other widely divergent lifeforms like plants (usually we're scanning for humanoid life, or similar). Although, bonus points if you can scan for anything.
Given these constraints, how might a system detect "life signs" within a given planet or structure?
[Answer]
If you know some basic information about the target this is fairly simple.
**Heat:**
Search for heat emissions from the planet, matching the expected heat emission of the creature. Remove any readings from things such as volcanoes and factor in the average surrounding temperature.
This method allows you to check inside buildings and underground (to a certain extent - depending on the surrounding temperature and the life form's heat output). As Frostfyre has pointed out, note that this method is completely useless if the environmental temperature is the same as the target's temperature.
Note that due to possible blocking from things in the atmosphere (such as clouds), it's likely that you'll get better results by dropping a drone or a beacon of some sort to get the scans from the immediate area.
**Movement:**
Trace movement on the surface of the planet, matching to the average speed of the creature +/- value X based on maximum running speed and walking speed. Eliminate values from any movement of lifeforms smaller/larger than the creature min/max recorded size.
This method helps to reduce the accidental counts of similar life forms - eg: a human may produce the same amount of heat as a dog, but dogs generally move faster than humans. By tracing movement we can subtract the amount of dogs and robots and other anomalies from our total life form count.
**"Sonar":**
Blast the area of the planet with sound waves, record them as they bounce back, and use them to generate a 3D visualization of the area. Use the computer to count.
This helps to remove accidental stacking of heat. For example: if you have people living in buildings and you happen to have 3 people on top of each other, you'll only see the heat signature for the first one. But sonar may allow you to visualize all 3 of them, and as such, apply a correction factor to your count.
*Wave/Pattern detection:*
Listen for anything like radio waves being broadcast. If you can pick up/detect/intercept any sort of radio communication, you'll at least know "hey, this planet has creatures that have radio/radar already". If there happens to be some sort of (hand)wave in the future that we haven't invented yet that your population knows about, perhaps you can try scanning for those too.
Pattern wise, look for lights on the dark side of the planet. Even from space, we can see our man-made lights from earth. You don't have to look just for lights either, if you can detect noise from certain areas that sound like machinery or if you can detect smoke columns from factories, you've likely found a planet containing sentient life. If you find them, you can perhaps send a drone, or something down to take a look and see if you actually found sentient life.
This is only useful for detecting life above a certain technology level, and it also doesn't give you any information as to population density, species, gender, etc. All it does is tell you if this planet has sentient life capable of creating the type of wave/pattern you're scanning for.
Combine the above methods and you'll have a highly sophisticated, fairly-semi accurate life-sign scanner.
BONUS METHOD: Thank you Twelfth for giving me this idea.
If you don't need a quick result, you can drop nanomachines over the surface of the planet to literally count, obtain images/video of areas, and broadcast said information back to the ship. This would likely give the most accurate result, but would likely take days or weeks for you to obtain any result in the first place. Of course, this assumes that the technology level has already advanced to the level where not you have access to so many nanomachines that you can dump them freely, but your computing systems are also able to process all the information that comes back quickly.
[Answer]
Scanning for life signs seems to focus on self-aware life forms, no matter how primitive. You don't usually hear "scanning for life signs...only deer and whales."
In this answer I'm assuming we're reverse engineering already existing technology, not demonstrating feasibility.
So from that we can assume that life signs use some form of brainwave sensing. Brain activity [does emit some low level signals](http://engineering.mit.edu/ask/can-brain-waves-interfere-radio-waves). Now, the feasibility of detecting such a weak signal from a distance would probably require some preliminary focusing, like heat and/or pulse to locate living things.
The way I would design this system is to first do a low-resolution scan for heat, then narrow it by pulse. Finally run the brain waves from those pinpointed locations against known patterns to determine age, health, species, and gender. You could probably determine mental state with such systems. At short range the technology could replace betazoid empath skills.
[Answer]
I imagine a multi-step process beginning with.
### Machine Vision
NOTE: This step is for orbital detection, not from an infantry's perspective.
Given that computers are getting faster and smaller, its most likely safe to assume that an on-board computer could handle a high definition image of the planet (think super HD google earth). The first step would be to isolate possible areas that life would have a higher probability to be present in. For example, focusing processing power closer to the equator rather than the frozen poles on an earth-like planet. The systems would "scan" said image for pixel structures that tend not to show up in nature (like perfect shapes or kilometer scale infrastructure). Then, now knowing which areas to search in detail, we begin the next step.
### Terahertz Scanning
[T-rays](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation) are a quite disputed range in the electromagnetic spectrum. Representing one side, T-rays have been shown to provide highly detailed information while also immensely minimizing the health risks associated with radiation. Conversely, photons in this range are easily absorbed by the abundant water molecules in the planet's atmosphere. With a small amount of hand-waving or "convenient scientific development," this method would allow for a somewhat deeper scan of the planet possibly extending even to temperature detection, although this would require *amazing* precision. After we have focused on each specific location, we can blast a quantity of T-rays to obtain an X-ray like model of the possible life-form.
### 3D machine vision
Finally we have to determine whether or not the newly created 3D model is alive. There is no 100% surefire way of determining if a rock-like structure is alive or not, however, due to the computer's large database of all known life-forms, the scanners can provide a usually accurate result about what we consider life.
### Limitations
Scanning for such rigid ideas of life may not fare so well. The idea of searching for a quantity of life implies that the sentient beings are explicit, an idea which may offend the galactic empire of slime molds.
[Answer]
As I can't yet comment to ask for clarification (and this question is really old!) I'll answer to the letter of your question, rather than its spirit.
The problem is, of course, the medium in which you're doing detection. The other answers here are strongly biased towards detecting things in atmospheres, which is fair enough because there's a strong statistical prior on the answerers (and the questioner) being air-breathers. Looks like there might be a lot of ocean planets out in universe, though, and you'll want different techniques for places where light, heat and radio don't reach far.
1. **Electroception**. Organisms with muscles and nerves generate weak bioelectric fields which are susceptible to detection at close range in airor through the ground, and somewhat longer range in water (or wet ground), either passively or by their distortion of an actively generated electric field. This is popular in quite a wide range of species on earth.
The further you are away from the organisms in question the harder they will be to discriminate or detect, but as with most other suggestions here large groupings will be easier to detect than individuals.
This mechanism ticks the boxes for being able to find things you can't see (it works in extremely murky water and even mud) and for excluding "wildly divergent things", because they don't have nerves and muscles. Robots and holograms may generate signals (the latter by virtue of the generating equipment) but it will be quite different to that of the real thing.
2. **Sound**. And I don't even mean sonar, but literally just listening. Earth's ocean is full of low frequency sounds, and if you listen in the right place you can pick up whales chatting from thousands of miles away (and I bet it would work at longer ranges on a big ocean world). Sound is the best way to transmit signals over long distances underwater, where light and radio simply won't work, so many aquatic organisms make use of it. This won't work on everything; it isn't nearly as widely applicable as electroception, but it will give you the opportunity to listen for things that sound like *intelligent* communication (though it might take you a while to work out whether birdsong or whalesong or its equivalent is a *language*, of course).
[Answer]
# Spetroscopy
Every substance has a spectrographical signature and you can check for that with a spectrometer. These things are so cheap, [you can buy them at Amazon for a handful hundred bucks](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=spectrometer&ref=nb_sb_noss). Though, to be fair, those only work at very close range, and take a long time to assess what they are looking at.
There are some [really powerful spectrometers that are installed in satellites and can measure the amount of chlorophyll in lakes](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.5721/EuJRS20154818), but those are too bulky and expensive.
However, in a futuristic setting, mass production and miniaturization mean everyone can carry a pocket version of this. If you want to look for animals in general, some substances you will be looking for are CO2, H2S and CH4. Every creature has a smell and if you know what substances make up for each one you can use those to identify what you are looking at.
Notice that by doing this, rather than knowing what is in there now, you will know what has been in there. Spectrography is kinda like smelling with cameras. But you can combine it with other signals such as sounds and heat to make sure there is something there.
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[Question]
[
As a tree grows new layers are added each year so that the trunk expands in radius. The living part of the tree is a relatively thin layer on the outside just beneath the bark, and the [wood further inside is dead](http://www.arborday.org/trees/ringstreenatomy.cfm), just there for support. In trees that live long enough, some of the dead wood (heartwood) can be removed without harming the tree, leaving it with more than enough to support its weight. This can happen naturally, in the form of [hollow trees](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_hollow).
### Grown from scratch
In a hypothetical tree that could survive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, it could take on the form of a ring that would be limited in height but continue to expand outwards surrounding an ever growing hollow. For a very large ring I would expect this area to be open to the sky. This suggests the possibility of a walled city where the wall is the very slowly expanding outer ring of a single tree.
### Grafted to save time
A similar result might be achieved on a much shorter timescale by deliberately [grafting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting) small trees side by side along the required path of the city wall so that a single outer ring is formed without having to wait for all the inner rings to grow first. This would involve grafting trees side to side with vertical cuts rather than grafting the top of one tree onto the lower trunk of another.
# Are these realistic?
Are there any flaws with either of these approaches to a city surrounded by a single tree? Are there any consequences that I have not considered that would limit this or require changes? Although the first approach would require a tree with a far greater lifespan than we see on Earth, I still want everything else to be realistic and consistent. The second approach I would expect to be realistic even on Earth, so I would like to know if there are reasons why this would not be the case.
[Answer]
I'll address the two scenarios separately as they have different issues:
**Single Tree:**
As you've already identified your main problem is time. Most trees grow very slowly. The fastest growing trees might grow 1 meter a year. Lets say your hypothetical tree grows outwards at that rate.
This means that it would take 100 years to be 100 meters across. To be a km across and make room for a settlement it would need to be 1000 years old.
It would be fairly robust and able to repair itself but still catastrophic damage could kill or permanently damage large sections of this. Faster growing wood tends not to be as strong as well, so if you want the walls to be strong it would need to grow slower.
You also have to consider root structures and branches. How does this tree actually get the resources it needs in order to live and to grow? Can it even gather enough resources in the space it has?
**Multiple Trees:**
The main problem here is resources, these trees are going to be fighting each other for land, for light, for water. Each will try to crowd out the others and there is not going to be enough for all so sections of your wall would start growing slower or even die. Think about the spacing between trees in a normal forest, it's much further than what you are thinking about.
Additionally if the trees are ones that keep on growing now your wall is growing both inwards and outwards. The inner space for the city will start shrinking every year!
**A third option**
There is another option, certain wood will sprout new trees even if you just plant a stake into the ground. If a conventional pallisade was built using that wood it would turn into a ring of trees by accident if not design!
Yew stakes for example placed into the ground will sprout new roots and branches, growing into new trees if given a chance.
[Answer]
I would suggest looking at the [Baobab tree](https://www.google.com/search?q=Baobab%20tree&num=100&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=INRBVMXrCIjfyATi9ICACA&ved=0CDIQsAQ&biw=1032&bih=846), [Ta Prohm tree](https://www.google.com/search?q=Baobab%20tree&num=100&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=INRBVMXrCIjfyATi9ICACA&ved=0CDIQsAQ&biw=1032&bih=846) and [Banyan Tree](https://www.google.com/search?q=banyan%20tree&num=100&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=I9ZBVPuqI4WjyASRmoGwAg&ved=0CDoQsAQ&biw=1032&bih=846) for models.
The baobob tree grows hollow, it stores water there and is often wider than it is tall. The Ta Prohm is the famous trees of ankor wat that seem both towering and made of flowing wax. The Banyan tree "walks" by dropping brace branches to the ground and spouting roots and then growing out further.
A tree with large intentionally hollow trunk, like the Baobab tree that has grown runners like the Ta Prohm for stability which then spreads out limbs, drops tendrils to the ground and starts a new trunk. The large hollow trunks would now be linked side to side like a beam and girder bridge, plus sharing all the water, sap and minerals produced by all the other parts of the tree. The main trunks could grow to 200ft or more tall (real baobab do in some circumstances) maybe 100ft in diamets with lots of intermeshed lateral trunks.
There would be lots and lots of space inside. Housing could be build on the inside of the truck for protection, treating the trees like miny tower forts. The gaps in the braches could be places for woven tents or bird nest like houses. Agriculture might be largely about things grown on the canopy layer. It would be something like people living in the girders of an indoor sports stadium.
All in all it would be like a city of close packed smaller skyscrapers, connected by flying bridge ways all merging at the top to form canopy dome over head.
Wouldn't like to attack the place with anything save modern weapons. It would a vast series of tall towers to penetrate, having to lay siege to each one in turn. Each lateral limb was be an easily defensible bridge. Moving anywhere on the lower level would expose you to gravity attacks from above.
All and all, fairly realilistic would be very realistic.
[Answer]
Cities might be pushing it.
Let's suppose that it does so start. The tree grows to a certain size much like a ring fungus in your yard, expanding on the outer edge. One you get large enough that i light gets inside the ring, then other things will start to grow.
In passing: In light of the previous answer with rooted cuttings: Most of the willows and poplars do this already. You can make living walls, called fedges. (fence x hedge) by planting a 45 degree angles, and lashing them where they cross.
However, all you are doing is making a fancy city wall.
Go 3d: Let's suppose that you have a relative of the giant redwood. Call it Sequoiadendron pyrimdalis. It's trick is that it will grow to 200 meters high. This is twice the height of normal sequoias. It needs a way to get water to the top. S. pyrimidalis by deliberately maintaining a 60 degree angle cone, disolving wood from it's interior surface and replacing in the outer one, in addition to the new wood created by photosynthesis.
It's bark is highly corrugated, but the corrugations run in shallow chevrons on the surface so that fog and rain run to small openings at the bottom of each chevron.
With a 60 degree angle, the base would roughly the same as the height. So you would have a 200 meter space inside the cone.
However the prime real-estate would be the outside wall. The corrugations make for easy climbing. This has several times the area of the space inside.
[Answer]
There already be some example of locals (like a bar) in an hollow baobab (in South Africa if I remember correctly), so yes, a single house can be inside a hollow tree.
But to have a city inside a hollow tree is really impratical for at least a couple of reasons:
1. As big as a tree can be, a city is still way more bigger, so a single tree is out of question, maybe a large number of trees that form a circle can form a space big enough to host some exclusive residential zone
2. A city is not static: it grown faster than a tree (or a circle of trees), so it is only viable as long as the city does not grow.
] |
[Question]
[
## BACKGOUND
*I’m working on a region for my world, and I have a very distinct idea of what I want the physical landscape to look like. Below is a description of what I'd like for the land, and an approximation of how it might have been formed.*
---
## DESCRIPTION
**Location.** The region is on the equator of an earth like planet. It’s a large coastal tropical lagoon of approx 20,000-25,000 square kilometers, smack on top of a volcanically active fault. The fault has formed sharp mountains and cliffs on the border of the coast that isolate it from the mainland, and it's an approx 50km from that border to the sea. The entire coastline is subject to seasonal torrential rains, up to three meter tides, and high humidity. It is in short, very wet.
**Karst:** The lagoon is home to a large variety of corals, many of which have evolved to grow right up to the shore. The coral built up massive limestone deposits, which water erosion and tectonic plate activity fragmented into a patchwork of cliff plateaus and [karst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst) formations, with limestone pillars and arches rising as high as 12m or even 15m meters over the water. There are also a variety of lower platforms and mushrooms shapes, and deep sinkholes, leading down into a network of flooded limestone caves. Some of the pillars also have their own pools on top, flooded sinkholes left by the rain. These may let off waterfalls in heavy weather.
**Columnar Basalt:** Below the karst, a lot of the ground is made up of stairs and platforms of crumbling [columnar basalt](https://www.wired.com/2015/02/volcanoes-create-towering-columns-rock/), brought in by multiple volcanic eruptions over time. These formations clusters around the broken up limestone plateaus, overlooking beaches of black sand colored by the basalt, and many interlocking pools.
**Coral Pools:** Coral grows in the pools, and at low tide much of it is exposed like a strange garden. At low tide I'd like most of these pools to range from about 5m to 20m across, and 1m to 10m deep, excluding sinkholes. At the highmark much of the area is flooded over.
**Volcanoes:** While most of the basalt lava came from the large bordering mountains, some of may have come from volcanoes located inside the karst region itself. If so, these might form small islands in the lagoon.
---
## QUESTION
* **Is this region geologically possible?** *Not necessarily plausible, I'm fine with assuming ideal conditions so long as there's an adequate explanation. If not, is there a way to tweak it and make the landscape to look as close to the above description as possible? If yes, would the geology described imply any other natural features that I should also include in this area.*
---
## POSSIBLE ISSUES
Here are some potential problems I identified while researching. This is my first crack at constructing a geology, and I’ve been learning as I go, so I have little notion whether any of these items are actually worth worrying about.
**- 1) I haven't found a real world limestone karst with columnar basalt.** I'm worried this could be because limestone has a cooling effect on lava, but I've read conflicting things about how that plays out practically in a lava flow, and nothing about the relation of it to columnar formation.
**- 2) I’m not sure if if the water will be ideal for coral growth.** It might be that the basalt sediment and the heavy rain make the water not clear or salty enough. It doesn’t have to be earth-coral of course, so I could posit a hardier version if evolutionary plausible. More simply, I might also draw on a source of extra salt or even some kind of natural filtration system for loose sediment … but I have no idea if that’s even necessary, or if so how to go about it.
**- 3) I'm still very much playing with the size and proportions of the region.** Is there anything I should know if I make it bigger, play with the proportions, etc.?
---
*This is a very long question, and one that I’m invested in, so I’ll give out a bounty if I think one of the answers is extensive, and helps me get me closer to the region that I'm trying to build. (I don't know if people are motivated by the points, but I'd still want to express thanks.)*
---
**BOUNTY EDIT:** Bounty goes to Will, but other answers are naturally still welcome, particularly if they suggest other likely features of the landscape given the geology. Side note, I wish you could give out a bounty w/out the 24 hour wait time.
[Answer]
1. The karst limestone and the modern coral do not represent a temporally continuous process.
[The paradox of tropical karst morphology in the coral reefs of the
arid Middle East](https://gsw.silverchair-cdn.com/gsw/Content_public/Journal/geology/38/3/10.1130_G30710.1/3/227.pdf?Expires=1515697142&Signature=OYGXvk04aRozFFgBY0nykLb7Rg2-2zPo2Oq5fgGV~bt-wsBgWR4OYzeT8lt3Jl8QCZSMFGY7--~QrmpriRbWWgYVpYlXPS7-GG0LkNE~CDxBv789ylxGIteCZK9OfqlX6BQs83nzUlvk9-wROypkr3m7FYYILxE5CPlDPjKWQtedeHQSM2nSUdI8KEh3rDbdwUDtmU79ImYbjMqfcXbdyslzLOzgInfDgQZMPibq087ZEPWDf6742CzMScwB~bKj242DJ44si-5I4colg8yNtFclwimAWBbRQ9~jGXUFh4jFy0ncoHjVFcokfIpNodzN6DlOzCXWW3lqdIrwxhIkOw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIUCZBIA4LVPAVW3Q)
>
> We interpret the reticulated morphology created by the Type-2
> depressions (Fig. 2) as due to antecedent topography forming a
> template for later reef growth. It is diffi cult to imagine such a
> complex pattern developing from any reeflimiting factor such as
> temperature, salinity, or sedimentation. These cannot be anticipated
> to vary in such a complicated or geometrically regular manner,
> suggesting substrate-controlled modern coral framework veneers over
> the sills (Purdy, 1974).
>
>
>
So: your karst (weathered limestone) is a relic from some older sedimentary process. The modern coral is living on it now doing all their coral things, but they did not make the karst.
---
2. It is good that the karst needs to be old because you want basaltic intrusions. Basaltic intrusions can happen in limestone. Things would get very hot when that happened.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/n7aoi.jpg)
<https://www.spitsbergen-svalbard.com/spitsbergen-information/islands-svalbard-co/hinlopen-strait/alkefjellet.html>
>
> Geology: Doleritic intrusion (Jurassic or lower Cretaceous), uncovered
> by erosion. The intrusion sits in Permian limestones, that were
> metamorphosed and accordingly turned into marble near the contact
> zone. The dolerite does not form perfect 6-edge polygon columns that
> basalt sometimes displays elswhere (Iceland, …), but large columnar
> structures can be seen. These can be quite spectacular; some of them
> can actually be circumnavigated with small boats.
>
>
>
Doeritic means basaltic. They apologize here that their columns are less than perfect. I have to think that intrusion of basalt and subsequent slow cooling would heat up the limestone a lot and kill any associated life (e.g. corals.)
So
1: Your karst limestone is ancient. It is probably at least partly metamorphosed by its interaction with the igneous intrusions.
2: Columnar basalt intrusions were second to the party. They might be fairly prominent because the basalt would be more resistant to subsequent weathering than the karst. That is the case in Spitzbergen.
3: That whole deal is now on the surface covered by a coral reef.
[Answer]
It looks a good place to explore! I think this kind of sandstone/columnar basalt/limestone karst terrain could form in at least two ways, through processes that have been mentioned in earlier replies:
1. A nearshore sand unit is overlain by limestone, the sequence becomes buried to some depth, the sandstone/limestone interface is intruded by a basalt sill, the sequence is uplifted and eroded into its present form, then partially flooded by the ocean and colonized by corals.
2. A terrestrial sand is flooded by a thick lava (e.g. Deccan Traps-style), the sand & lava are submerged and the limestone is deposited on top, the sequence is buried to some depth then later uplifted and eroded into its present form, then partially flooded by the ocean and colonized by corals.
Both scenarios require initial subsidence and/or sea-level rise, followed by uplift and/or sea-level fall. This could happen, for example, if a rift valley is flooded by the ocean then later dries out, or a coastal volcanic terrain subsides and is later uplifted.
There are many areas where basalts, karst and modern coral reefs coincide today, e.g. Palau 7.3° N, 134.5° E. Note the vegetation at Palau - in a wet tropical climate your landscape would be similarly vegetated.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BHSGv.jpg)
I agree with John that loose sand under columnar basalt is unlikely. Sand underlying basalt, as you have drawn, would be rapidly undermined, leading to the collapse and disintegration of everything above. More likely is that the buried sand would be cemented into sandstone, which could support overlying columnar basalt (e.g. Yellowstone Park).
**Edit**: I think I, & John, have misinterpreted your diagram as a cross-section with sand *underlying* basalt. If your sand is instead produced by breakdown of the basalt, then our comments don't apply. But in that case there would also be a lot of coarser detrital material fringing the basalt outcrops, e.g. boulders, cobbles, gravel, not just sand.
Re: your other questions
1. **I haven't found a real world limestone karst with columnar basalt.**
John and Will mention some. There will be others out there, Pohnpei is a place that might have some (7° N, 158° E).
2. **I’m not sure if if the water will be ideal for coral growth.**
Corals would grow well in this environment, especially as it's regularly tidally flushed. Sediment and freshwater would only be a minor setback to them.
3. **I'm still very much playing with the size and proportions of the region.**
A lagoon 50 km wide and 20-25,000 square km in area is reasonable. For comparison, the Great Barrier Reef lagoon is up to 200 km wide and approx. 200,000 square km in area. The dimensions of your smaller features - limestone arches & coral pools - are also realistic, but real examples can be up to ten times larger. A 3 m tidal range is entirely feasible. Most of the Great Barrier Reef lagoon has a spring tidal range exceeding 3 m.
[Answer]
You need one more ingredient: Changing sea levels. Atolls form when the volcano subsides, or waters rise. If this happens slowly enough you have coral reefs that can keep up with the changing water levels.
Low islands are made when the water drpps. Exposed reefs are weathered into sand.
The karst got into the air somehow. Either pushed up, or big drop in water levels.
Ice ages can make a 500 foot difference in water levels. (380 feet lower at the height of hte last ice age, 200 feet higher when Antarctica and Greenland finish melting.
There are enough odd things in geology that you can have your characters puzzled by parts of it. Geology changes theories frequently too. Compare mountain orogeny to plate tectonics. Compare uniformitarianism to the formation of the Idaho batholith, and yesterday (geologially) the formation of the channeled scablands of Washington State.
Or it just exists, and you put this whole discussion at the end of the book as an appendix.
[Answer]
1. Basalt is metamorphic, limestone is sedimentary. They usually do not intermingle much, but let's assume you have a lot of volcanic eruptions and here you go, just some lava fields would be necessary.
2. You need a good combination of water temperature and nutrition for coral growth. On Earth, this have never been the case for an entire lagoon of your size.
Also, on Earth, you are not going to get 3 meter tides in a 20,000-25,000 square kilometers lagoon. You need a bigger ocean, or a bigger Moon.
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Let's assume a city exists underground, either in natural caves or synthetic tunnels.
Are there any food sources underground, and what kind of population can they support?
[Answer]
The main *natural* sources of food energy for underground life on Earth are chemical:
* [Biological material moving down from the surface](http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/biology-fields/cave-biology3.htm).
* Reactive chemicals, such as hydrogen sulphide gas, moving up from deeper underground. The most studied example of this on Earth is [hydrothermal vents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent#Biological_theories), which share a lack of energy input from sunlight with cave systems.
* Less-reactive chemical weathering that can be catalysed by creatures that possess the right kinds of enzymes. [These are specialised bacteria](http://www.phschool.com/science/science_news/articles/attack_rock_eating.html), and live life in the slow lane. However, they can literally digest rock (or at least some kinds of rock).
[Chemo-synthetic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis) bacteria can be the base of a food web supporting more complex creatures. Estimates of the biological mass vary, but could be very large due to the sheer volume of rock. However, there is nowhere near as much free energy around to support life in a given volume, as there is on the surface due to sunlight.
An underground city with enough technology has the option of generating energy to support the base of its food production. On Earth the obvious choice would be artificial lighting to grow plants. However, using e.g. nuclear fuel to generate electricity or heat, and store that energy in feedstock chemicals should work equally well.
[Answer]
The main problem in this scenario is the input of energy. Life on earth is fueled from the surface by sunlight. This is then turned into energy by plants, algae, and suchlike and then the entire food chain is built up from that.
Some life can live near the surface of cave networks based on the surface food web (for example it is common for animals to live in caves then emerge to forage or hunt). Cave-dwelling bats would be a classic example of this.
To have a sustained ecosystem underground you need a source of energy. Most novels set in these sort of environments (for example the Forgotten Realm's Underdark) that source of energy is magic, which fuels the growth of fungi, and then the food web grows out from that.
In a science-based universe though that is not an option so you are left with very few options:
1. Geothermal
2. Mineral Consumption
3. Some as-yet-unknown energy source
Reviewing these in reverse order:
**Unknown Energy**
Since the concept for option 3 would be a core departure from known reality there is no use speculating here. The nature of the energy source would need to be designed for the needs of the narrative world being developed and would likely be a core part of that world.
**Mineral Consumption**
Some bacteria are capable of living underground and consuming materials from the rock around them. This is a slow and low-energy process though, you could not sustain a complex ecosystem or large animals this way.
**Geothermal**
There is a well known case of complex ecosystems on earth that are not dependent upon Sunlight. That is Hydrothermal Vents in the deep oceans.
<http://www.marine-conservation.org.uk/thermalventlife.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent>
These vents support ecosystem with bacteria at the start of the food chain, and then a procession of larger creatures all feeding off the bacteria and each other. In theory the same process could be supported underground, either in flooded caves (with non-aquatic animals then feeding off the creatures in the caves) or possibly even in dry caves.
The main hazards though would be the level of volcanic activity required to form the vents which would make caves unstable and prone to collapse. Additionally you would need some form of erosion either by lava, by water, or by some other as yet unknown action to form a cave network.
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The [Great Red Spot](http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/jupiter-s-great-red-spot-a-swirling-mystery) on Jupiter and the numerous [Great White Spots](http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n5/full/ngeo2405.html) on Saturn are storm systems that encircle the globes and last for decades, centuries in Jupiter's case. These are formed on Gas Giants though, with atmospheric compositions that would not support Human life, or pretty much any life that we would recognise. So what little I have been able to glean as to the cause of these storms does not hold up for my scenario.
I'm building an earth-sized world with an Oxygen-rich 'breathable' atmosphere. Currently my Northern Hemisphere is still 'fluid' and can be changed to accommodate any features I care to include. I've been thinking of including a giant 'eternal' storm that slowly circles the globe.
**Is a storm lasting decades-centuries possible on a non-Gas Giant Planet?**
**What conditions do I need to create a large 'eternal' storm?**
It doesn't have to be on the size-scale of the Saturn/Jupiter Storms. I'm happy for it to spawn little storms. I'm happy for it to have little storms merge into it and 'feed' it. It can wax and wane in strength. I'm happy for it to circle the globe taking many years for one 'revolution'.
I see two possible storm routes:
* circles the globe, crossing oceans and continents in a 'straight' line
* travels across the ocean and partly over the continent. Due to Coriolis force it then circles back over the ocean, before hitting the other side of the continent and then being turned back into the ocean again, again to Coriolis force. Effectively like a gigantic atmospheric gyre.
I would really like a travelling 'eye' of the storm, even if it only forms occasionally. I'm hoping that it can be a bigger than a normal large hurricane.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qMEbL.jpg)
**I'm hoping for a generic answer that others can also use**, so I'm tempting fate and not including my own world map. But if it really becomes necessary I can add it. Remember, I can change my world's northern hemisphere to fit the requirements of the story. Tell me what I need and I will make the changes...
Currently I have 'mostly' open ocean (~80%) with a single large continent in the Northern Hemisphere. It's about as wide as North America from New York to San Francisco. It is a hot, dry desert with a large Rockies/Andes equivalent mountain range running horizontally W-E, across the very top blocking the arctic winds from bring snow (and associated springmelt) and cold temperatures to the desert region. This can change if necessary, although I would really like to keep the large desert.
Things that cannot be changed:
* My planet is Earth sized (not a gas giant) and within the Goldilocks zone.
* It supports complex life.
* My planet has planetary rings and several moons.
* The storm cannot bring about complete atmospheric collapse and kill off all the plants and animals. If this happens, I will go without! Thank you very much.
Note: Yes, climate is complex. But I'm asking if this sort of storm is possible on a non-gas giant planet, without killing off all the life on the planet. As well as looking for a *generic* list of conditions/features that can set me on the path to creating this storm. Also, please note, I'm not asking if this storm would be possible on Earth.
[Answer]
I'm thinking this is a no answer, but lets see where I end up. Some parts to consider for a hurricane on Earth:
1 - The hurricane is largely fueled by ocean temperatures and is self-defeating to some degree. High winds turns water into vapour (an act that cools surface temperatures) and tend to churn the water, bringing up cold temperatures from the depths. This means most hurricanes have a limited life span over a deep ocean as it'll kill it's own fuel source
2 - Hurricanes are affected by what are known as 'shear winds'. Wind shear is the difference in wind speed at the surface vs the wind speed at the top of the hurricane. This is actually one of the heaviest limiting factors of hurricane development (and usually where elNino/LaNina play their part in hurricane formation)...you need the wind shear to be as small as possible here. It has nothing to do with the speed of the winds, rather the difference in the speed of the winds. If the winds at the top of the storm are 40mph north, while the surface is only seeing a 15mph winds to the north, then the top of the storm is moved away from the bottom of the storm, separating the system in 2. Anything greater than 15mph wind shear usually prevents hurricanes from forming, or outright destroys ones that have already formed.
3 - Hurricanes are at their most powerful when they are fully closed systems. When something interferes with the system and blocks the storms circulation (mountain or land...madagascar has torn a hurricane apart in the past) then the system falls apart quite quickly.
4 - There is a huge amount of water associated with a hurricane and this water has to end up somewhere. Usually this results in a giant rain dump as the hurricane loses shape and energy
With that information in mind...it will be challenging to have your multi-decade storm cross over land and still retain it's shape. It's not fully unheard of as a few storms have successfully crossed from the Gulf of Mexico and into the pacific ocean, but they usually lose so much strength in this process that they move from hurricane status down to a tropical storm or depression. It's only when they reach warm water and the correct conditions on the other side of land that they reform. So I would hesitate to say you could have this system cross any land mass that has mountains or even high elevation plains/hills.
Earth posses what is known as thermohaline circulation. In short, this is the transfer of heat through the ocean as warm water travels the globe, cools off (becoming more dense in the process), sinks, and travels back to tropical area's to repeat the process. In your fictional world, it could be possible to have a warm band of surface water that travels a good portion of your globe and provides a constant heat source for the system. You would want this relatively shallow (think gulf of mexico shallow) or the system will churn up cold water and kill itself (or convert to a cold core cyclone).
See if I can get an image to work here:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5sb68.png)
As an interesting side note, the sub-saharan dust layer is a feature where dust from the Sahara desert makes it into Caribbean waters using the Easterly Jet shown here. Storm systems in the Indian ocean actually fuel this event. It is thought at one point in time in colonial history (from sailors accounts) that this easterly jet was significantly stronger than it is today. A strong Jet like this can provide constant winds at the surface as well as at higher elevations and potentially give no wind shear for the hurricane to grow. If this jet was uninterrupted and allowed to circle the globe, it is possible to allow a storm to move around the globe and somewhat keep it's shape.
On a planet like Earth, a permanent storm like this is definitely a no go. That said, I believe you could make one large change to a world that would put it into a setup that is more likely to support this permanent storm...eliminate plate tectonics. Mountains and a cold deep ocean are ultimately the two biggest factors inhibiting this storm. Eliminate plates and this will eliminate deep ocean trenches and mountains. I still think it's highly unlikely, but that would be the most likely scenario to form a storm like this.
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Have no land. Since you need to work-around that, have land that doesn’t interfere with an unbroken ocean that lets a storm circle the planet at the suitable latitude without making landfall.
Now, suppose that the semi-permanent hurricane prevents other major storms from forming. Not just other cyclones, but other major weather that causes huge *fronts* to form, since this permanently dissipates the energy on a continuous basis.
Maybe it does die from time to time, and then other storms can form, and these happen until one forms “in the groove” and lasts for years again.
The people will not like it during times that the permanent storm is absent because they get *other* weather instead, such as squall lines and blizzards.
[Answer]
Based on my tropical cyclone knowledge, you'd want:
1. Minimal friction, so no land
2. Constant supply of energy, so warm waters
3. Minimal vertical wind shear, so weak meridional temperature gradient. The weakest temperature gradient in the Northern Hemisphere is in summer, so your hemisphere of the planet that has the eternal storm would need to be facing its Sun more often than not to prevent seasonality. Your planet could be wobbling on its axial tilt throughout the year so that its always summer.
4. Just enough Coriolis so that it spins, but not too much to prevent it from losing its symmetry.
If you want your storm to travel over land, I'm afraid it won't be able to keep its strength. Inland depressions can merge with tropical cyclones and give them a boost of intensity, but the land friction and lack of water supply kills of the storm.
Perhaps, if your planet was make from a bunch of small islands, the storm could cause havoc while being relatively unharmed.
[Answer]
this question is over 2 years old but I think I can add a few more details for other people who end up on this thread when pursuing information.
What you will need is for the majority of the Northern Hemisphere be nothing but relatively shallow ocean with a global wind stream like Twelfth mentioned. However, plate tectonics does not need to be removed, rather additional heat could come from thermal vents and underwater volcanic activity to further fuel this eternal storm.
Volcanic sediments would just keep getting swept away and pushed down close to the equator by the rapid currents and wind, possibly shunted down towards the equator to form massive ash dunes and deserts around the whole planet.
[Answer]
The problem is, storms and hurricanes on terrestrial planets are based on stellar convection, i.e. the energy radiated by their parent stars heating the atmosphere and triggering storm convections. This is precisely what storms on earth rely on. However, stellar heat only reaches the surface of the planet and thus results in lesser heat, as planets are too small to absorb a lot of the star's emitted heat.
On the other hands, since gas giants basically are hydrogen ocean-worlds covered with a thick amount of gas. The storms on gas giants are fuelled by geothermal energy. The heat from the hot core of the planet gets convected to the "surface" triggering a massive storm. Since geothermal energy comes from directly inside the planet, and literally all of it is absorbed, with no solid layer to insulate, this kicks up massive storms like the Great Red spot on Jupiter, and the Hexagon on Saturn.
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[Question]
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This is a part of the [Anatomically Correct series](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series).
If a magic-free fantasy/SF world were to have naturally evolved hexapods as humanoid as possible, living among bipedal humanoids, how would they actually look, [live](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27567/what-should-centaur-dwellings-look-like) and behave like?
* Fur, feathers or naked skin with some **hair** (pubic, head/mane, chest, tail)? Clothes and armor?
* **Feet** with (even/odd) toes, (split) hooves or paws with claws? Knees?
* Short or long, fancy or usable or stabilizing, bushy or skinny **tail**?
* **Head** and brain size, also other organs (e.g. for [breathing](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7289/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-oxygen-to-run))?
* **Horns** or antlers? – Cows and deers are roughly the same size as mules, ponies and horses, but this is also of interest for 2-legged goat and cattle chimeras (i.e. faun and minotaur).
* Movable flat long hairy ears?
* Grass, leaves, fruit, meat or mixed **[diet](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7288/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-calories-to-live)** (hence teeth and mouth)?
* Size, capabilities and developmental status at **birth**?
* **Age** and duration of infancy, childhood, puberty, adolescence, adulthood and life expectancy?
There are several six-limbed mythical creatures (*hexapods*) with human-like intelligence or at least typical features of mammals, e.g. quadrupedal **centaurs** or winged **angels, dragons** and **griffons**, maybe also **harpies** in Mediterranean/European mythology. Like other fantastical creatures, e.g. **sphinx, minotaur** and **faun**, they are mostly described and depicted as blends (*chimeras*) of known animals and usually a human part, but that doesn’t have to be taken literally.
For an example of an unusual, because very human-like centaur, see this [NSFW picture](http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/21318707494/some-centaurs). Shoops like that are probably easy to make for savvy people, but so are “humanimal” morphs. They may be aesthetically pleasing, but not very realistic.
There are no hexapod mammals in reality obviously, whereas 6 (and more) equal legs (or tentacles etc.) are normal in insects and some water-based animals (crustaceans, octopuses, squids) and some have developed further their back limbs (e.g. grasshopper, crickets) or front limbs (e.g. mantis) or at least one of them (e.g. some crabs).
You cannot simply put a human torso onto a horse body to get a centaur as several questions here have shown, so I think of *horse-like* as meaning “the approximate size and number of legs of a horse” and of *human-like* as “able to think and converse and use manual tools”.
* [Ideal **centaurs**: 1 torso and 4 legs](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18829/ideal-centaurs-a-torso-and-four-legs)
+ [Do centaurs suckle from horse or human **nipples**?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18244/do-centaurs-suckle-from-horse-nipples-or-human-nipples)
+ [How do centaurs get enough **oxygen** to run?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7289/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-oxygen-to-run)
+ [How do centaurs get enough **calories** to live?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7288/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-calories-to-live)
* [Anatomically correct: **griffins**](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25281/anatomically-correct-griffins)
* [Anatomically correct: **angels**](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25466/anatomically-correct-angels)
* [How could **dragons** be explained without magic?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/313/how-could-dragons-be-explained-without-magic)
From the [nipples](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18244/do-centaurs-suckle-from-horse-nipples-or-human-nipples) question, I assume 2 teats at the frontal crotch or slightly above. The genitals are probably at the rear end, as is the anus. Grazing may be possible, but cannot be the main source of nutrition; an omnivore [diet](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7288/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-calories-to-live) and digestive system seems plausible although not necessary. I like the navel nostril idea mentioned in an answer to the [oxygen](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7289/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-oxygen-to-run) question, but anything else would look too strange, so probably big noses or big heads over all and probably a short muscular and flexible torso.
Wings are hard to manage for humanoid bodies as they are and I think even more so if separate from arms/hands, so I would rule out winged hexapods altogether.
It’s not at all realistic for centaurs etc. to be able to [interbreed](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23415/karyotypes-of-partially-interbreeding-human-races) with humans or the animals they’re looking similar to, but interspecies sex (or rape) is probably inevitable and the topic of much folklore.
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I think that one can plausibly suppose that sentient tool-users could evolve from hexapods, with the species evolving the ability to walk on just four legs with the front pair of limbs devoted to manipulation in a way parallel to the way humans evolved the ability to walk on just two legs with what were once front legs becoming arms.
The most economical explanation for why on a given planet hexapods rather than quadrupeds should win the sentience lottery is that the planet has higher gravity than earth. (Obviously this makes the idea of them living among bipedal humanoids, and certainly of bipedal humanoids living among them, much less likely.) Higher gravity would favour creatures that were lower to the ground and more stable than bipeds. Their legs would be shorter and stumpier than horse legs. They probably would have knees, but some flexibility would have to be sacrificed to get more strength in a manner more like elephant knees than horse or human knees.
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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.
## The question:
What characteristics are necessary for a planet to be habitable for humans? What should the generic star and planet be like?
The life forms are human, so they
* Need to have access to water (they can melt snow or ice in their mouths, given sufficient surplus metabolic energy).
* Breathe some form of air containing the right amount of oxygen (and not too much carbon dioxide) at the correct pressure (below the death-zone).
* Live in a place with a temperature range similar to that on Earth. They can live in any climate zones, from the tundra to the tropics.
* Live exclusively on the ground, as human ancestors began to do millions of years ago.
* Eat natural foods similar to the ones humans eat — vegetables, fruits, meat, etc.
* Need to live in a natural environment, i.e. not something constructed by another species, such as a space station or protective dome. They should be able to live without protective gear that they can't construct with simple tools (parka, igloo, etc. are fine; oxygen concentrators are not)
* Need to have evolved on the planet and not simply left there, as with colonization.
This question is designed to cover the characteristics the planet must have to support life, in order to make the answer shorter, easier to browse through, and less confusing.
After quite some time, the answer has gotten rather large and cluttered. Therefore, it is being broken down into several smaller answers, in order to enhance readability.
Related: [Making a planet habitable for humanoids: The star](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9857/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-star)
---
This is the result of the meta question [Should there be a canonical "habitability" question?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1750/should-there-be-a-canonical-habitability-question) In that, I put forward arguments for a canonical question and answer addressing general aspects of the habitability of a planet in order to avoid rehashing the same points over and over in answers to specific questions. This is that canonical question and answer.
The answer will be community wiki, so anyone can edit it and add to it. I'd like to make it organized, though, so please adhere to some basic guidelines to make it neat:
* Use breakheads (see the button right of the bullet-list in the toolbar) to denote the title of a subsection, and large (#Large) text to denote the title of a major section (e.g. Planet and Star). Formatting examples are given in the answer.
* [Use $\LaTeX$](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/607/how-do-i-add-mathematical-notation-using-latex-mathjax?lq=1) for mathematics.
* Add in links to sources such as [Wikipedia](https://www.wikipedia.org/) and [NASA](http://www.nasa.gov/) using either in-text links ('[Site name] (Site URL)') or footer links ('[Site name][#]' with '[#]:Site URL' at the bottom). Use '![Description] (Image URL)' for images, though make sure that the image is available for use. Wikipedia images are always usable.
* Resolve any disputes over accuracy [in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat) and not in an edit war.
* Cite your sources and *be accurate*! Papers and pre-prints are always nice (see for example [arXiv](http://arxiv.org/)), though Wikipedia should also be okay.
One thing to consider is that there's a 30,000-character limit for an answer; the answer is currently at 7,016 (with spaces). The answer could be broken up, if necessary, into separate answers about the star, planet, and other stuff. See also [this Meta question](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/123342/character-limit-for-wiki-answers).
[Answer]
# Orbit, rotation, mass and other properties not directly related to life
A planet is a rotating mass (larger than ~500km in diameter) in orbit around the star of normal material becomes an oblate spheroid due to gravity (no cubes, or other shapes). The IAU also [defines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet) a planet as having cleared its neighborhood.
* **Orbital characteristics:**
+ The distance from the main star(s) will affect surface temperatures (liquid water) and the length of the year. For planets heated solely by insolation the temperature of the planet can be calculated using the formula for [effective temperature](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_temperature):
$$T=\left( \frac{L(1-a)}{16 \pi \sigma D^2} \right)^{\frac{1}{4}}$$
where $L$ is the luminosity of the star, $a$ is the albedo of the planet (a measure of how much of stars radiation it reflects), and $D$ is the distance of the planet from the star.
You can calculate the tangential velocity of the planet and its period for a perfectly circular orbit:
Set the gravitational force equal to the centripetal force:
$$F\_g=F\_c$$
$$G \frac{Mm}{r^2}=\frac{mv^2}{r}$$
$$v^2=\frac{GM}{r}$$
$$v=\sqrt{\frac{GM}{r}}$$
That's the velocity in meters per second. You can then find the period (in seconds) by
$$T=\frac{2 \pi r}{v}$$
Use [SI units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units) for everything.
+ Internal heating, although that wanes over billions of years in most cases.
+ Tidal forces may be used to gain heat, if the planet is in orbit around something else (lots of complications).
+ (how do we calculate albedo?)
+ Note that planets in multi-star systems will have very unusual orbits; but in some cases orbits can be [stable](http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9609106)
+ **Eccentricity:**
- The [eccentricity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity) of an orbit depends on the distance between the planet and the star at the closest point ($r\_p$) and the furthest point ($r\_a$):
$$e=\frac{r\_a-r\_p}{r\_a+r\_p}$$
- Examples: Earth ($e=0.0034-~0.058$), Pluto ($e=0.248$), Mercury ($e=0.2056$), Halley's Comet ($e=0.967$), Pern's Death Star.
- Eccentricity will affect the variation in the intensity of stellar radiation received. The more eccentric the orbit, the higher the variation.
+ **Kepler's laws:**
- [Kepler's laws](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_motion) are very important when modeling planetary orbits.
- The first law: All orbiting bodies travel in ellipses.
$$r=\frac{p}{1+ \varepsilon \cos \theta}$$
- The second law: The imaginary line connecting an orbiting body and the central body sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time.
$$P \frac{1}{2}r^2 \frac{d \theta}{dt}= \pi ab$$
- The third law: the square of the orbiting body's period is proportional to the body's semi-major axis cubed.
$$\frac{T^2}{r^3}=\frac{4 \pi}{GM}$$
- But [horseshoe orbits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-orbital_configuration#Horseshoe_orbits) are possible with two or more bodies in near orbital paths.
* **Axial tilt** (Earth = $23\text { deg}$) will affect the existence and amplitude of seasons. A planet with zero axial tilt will have minimal seasons, while one with $90\text { deg}$. tilt will have only one side facing the star, even without being tidally locked. Axial tilt determines day/night length variation during non-equinox times; longer in summer of each hemisphere.
* **Milankovitch cycles**: Apsidal precession and Axial precession
* **Tidally-locked/orbital resonance** (Mercury (not quite tidally-locked), (m)any of the red dwarf star-orbiting planets in habitable range)
* **Rotational period**
+ Length of days and nights.
+ Days are longer than nights at equinox because of atmosphere refraction and the size of your sun (sunrise/sunset happen when sun is first visible/no longer visible). The longer the day, the more solar-heating will happen, and less cooling on the night side, leading to temperature extremes - absent atmospheric balancing. (How long is too long? Is there a too short?)
+ Twilight (light enough to do outdoor activities) occurs when the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, and (on Earth) is 25-30m long.
+ Centrifugal force offsets gravity. At Earth's equator (where it’s strongest) it's 0.35% as strong as gravity (or -0.0035 gs). Increasing rotational speed to an 84min/day would offset Earth gravity entirely.
+ Coriolis force is directly proportional to angular rate (Earth's $7.272 × 10^{-5} \text{rad/s}$)
+ Tides reduce rotation: Earth loses 20 millionths of a sec/yr
* **Size:**
+ Sub-Earth sized: too small and no long-term atmosphere
- (see density)
+ Earth-like: rocky planet
+ Superterrans/Super-Earths: 2-10x times more massive than Earth. A planet larger than 2x Earth's radius starts moving into gas-giant territory/does not form via normal planetary accretion.
+ Chthonian: rocky planet (gas giant missing atmosphere; blown away)
+ Gas giants: retains hydrogen and helium, too small to become a white dwarf/star
* **Density:**
+ The ratio of metal to rock is usually reflected in the difference in size between the core and the mantle. This will have far reaching consequences on volcanic activity and the various natural cycles, such as the carbon cycle.
- A denser planet (more metal-heavy) will also have a higher mass and higher surface gravity.
- Solar System: Earth is the densest at $5.5\text{ gm/cm}^{3}$, and Saturn the least at $0.7\text{ gm/cm}^{3}$
* **Gravity:**
$$g = \frac{G \times M}{r^{2}}$$
+ Where:
- $g$ is the gravitational force, in **m/s2**.
- $G$ is the [gravitational constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant) equal to **6.67408(31)×10−11 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2**, in other words use **0.000000000066740831**.
- $M$ is the mass of the planet.
Mass can be replaced by: $M= \frac{4 \times \pi \times \rho \times r^{3}}{3}$ Where $\rho$ is the density of the planet.
Full replace: $G = \frac{4 \times \pi \times G \times \rho \times r}{3} $
- $r$ is the radius of the planet. If you want to calculate the gravitational force in a specific distance from the planet change $r\_{new} = r\_{planet} + distance$
+ 4-8 head-to-foot G's (ie: different rates to heart and brain) will knock a human out due to blood loss to the brain. This is not acceleration Gs; we handle ~45Gs in that direction (ie: same force to both heart and brain).
* **Age:**
It takes a long time for a planet to get to the point where humanoid life can develop. On Earth, it took over 4.5 billion years, as illustrated [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geologic_Clock_with_events_and_periods.svg):
[Answer]
#Atmosphere, surface temperature and other properties directly related to life
* **Magnetosphere:**
+ Magnetospheres are thought to be driven by a dynamo process driven by internal circulation in the molten core of the planet, are are very useful in protecting the planet from DNA-damaging ionic particles in stellar wind, cosmic radiation, and helps prevent accelerated atmospheric loss. (eg. Mars)
+ Magnetosphere acts like a cut-off filter - stopping cosmic rays below a certain energy, or "vertical cut-off rigidity." It's ~17 GeV at the equator, and <1 GeV at the poles. Cosmic rays are 0.39 mSv/year on surface, but not a lot of shielding happens from the magnetosphere.
+ <http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/science/polar-radiation.html>
+ [http://sol.spacenvironment.net/~nairas/Dose\_Rates.html](http://sol.spacenvironment.net/%7Enairas/Dose_Rates.html)
+ [Star(s)](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9857/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-star) determines solar radiation.
* **Human Radiation Limits**
+ 5 and 6 Sieverts (Sv) over the course of a few minutes will shred up too many cells for a human body to fix at once.
+ Even Earth normal background radiation will cause cancer within 4,000 years.
+ Even working at high altitude on Earth will [increase cataracts](https://scienmag.com/chernobyl-three-decades-on/).
* **Atmosphere:**
+ Atmosphere is regulated by gravity; denser/more gravity, more original atmosphere kept.
+ Kármán line is where flight speed (density of air) equals orbital velocity (Earth == 100km)
+ Current Composition:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6T2dn.jpg)
(source: [harding.edu](https://www.harding.edu/lmurray/113_files/html/d2_earth%20revised/img008.jpg))
```
- (at standard pressure/temperature):
- Too much Carbon Dioxide: CO2 displaces oxygen. Earth has .0035%, OSHA limits 8hr work day to 5,000 ppm (.5%) - a 30-minute exposure to 50,000 ppm produces intoxication, and concentrations greater than that (7-10%) produce unconsciousness. [High concentrations produce acidosis][3]. Hypercapnia. Under concentrated conditions, plant roots can actually be suffocated by carbon dioxide.
- Too little Carbon Dioxide: Trace amounts (parts per million) regulate blood pH, and perform a few other vital roles. [Autoregulation][4] of breathing (but perhaps this is compensated for by generation of CO2 in our lungs?)
- Non-trivial amounts of Oxygen in the atmosphere are typically waste byproducts of photosynthesis with CO2 and solar energy. Life is not *required* (but see improbable below) to produce oxygen in the atmosphere: eg: if titania covers .05 of the surface of an Earth-like planet (with a Sol-like star), in conjunction with water it can produce enough oxygen; 3% surface area with a dimmer star.
- Too much oxygen: Oxygen toxicity is a condition resulting from the harmful effects of breathing molecular oxygen (O2) at elevated partial pressures. Hyperoxia. Increased free radicals. Lung damage (inflammation; several days). Fires burn better. At 30% O2, humans (especially hair and fat) become about as combustible as a paraffin torch. Static electricity = boom. Wet vegetation will burn (at 30%) and lightning/falling rocks/wildfires will take out any available fuel. Other environmental effects; animals, microorganisms, rust, ozone, bleaching, etc. Once you hit the O2 compensation point, plants stop photosynthesizing.
- Too little oxygen: breathing an oxygen deficient atmosphere can have serious and immediate effects, including unconsciousness after only one or two breaths. An exposed human has no warning and cannot sense that the [oxygen level is too low][5]. With an atmospheric oxygen level of 11-18%, it results in the reduction of physical and intellectual performance without the sufferer being aware. At 8-11% the possibility of fainting within a few minutes without prior warning. Risk of death below 11%. At 6-8%, fainting occurs after a short time. Resuscitation possible if carried out immediately. At 0-6%, fainting almost immediate; with brain damage, even if rescued.
- Too new oxygen: If oxygen hasn't been around on the planet long enough, it will react with exposed iron and other elements (oxidation/rust) and reduce from the atmosphere/oceans forming banded ironstone formations - magnetite (Fe3O4) / hematite (Fe2O3), alternating with bands of iron-poor shales and cherts. This reduction took (300 million/1 billion?) years on Earth. Oxygen reacts with non-sequestered Carbon, forming CO2. Reacts with loose Hydrogen = water.
- Ozone layer, formed of Oxygen, protects life from solar radiation, without which it's difficult for life to gain a foothold.
- Too much Xenon: It passes the blood/brain barrier and is used for anesthesia.
- Too little Nitrogen: and there will be no nitrates formed in the soil (few/no Earth-style plants).
- Physically Impossible Combinations: (i.e. 'Hindenburg' H2 O2 atmospheres - forms water when shocked, eg: static electricity from atmospheric movement like lightning)
- Physically Improbable Combinations
- O2 atmosphere without life (bacteria, most likely).
- Pre-vascular plants operating on dry land change rock breakdown into clays, which sequesters carbon freed up by photosynthesis - raising the O2 percentage in the atmosphere, thus [allowing proliferation of higher multicellular lifeforms][6] (also [here](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin-of-oxygen-in-atmosphere/))
- Low Nitrogen atmosphere in comparison to atmospheric pressure. Need a *good* excuse to selectively remove/fixate the typically vast amount of Nitrogen available in accretion materials.
```
* **Too-dense atmosphere**
+ Earth surface pressure is 100kPa, Venusian pressure (9.2 MPa) is almost 100 times higher (but Venus' mass is lower; 4.868 vs Earth's 5.9736), while Martian pressure (600 Pa) is over 100 times lower. So you'll need a reason to lose a portion of the default atmosphere, or face run-away greenhouse effects as well as the physiological issues below.
* **Atmosphere loss**
+ impact-loss (Mars)
+ w/o magnetosphere: sputtering, photodissociation (Mars)
+ because of magnetosphere: polar wind, charge-exchange
+ Jeans escape
+ Moon-skimming removes some atmosphere
* **Gaining/Keeping an Atmosphere**
+ Gravity/size/density regulates retention
+ Gain from ice impact; hydrogen can be removed after disassociation, leaving oxygen (how much ice is in your solar system?)
+ Outgassing from original accretion material, from the planet's interior
* **Atmospheric Pressure**
+ Pressure is too low: At 2,100 m above sea level on Earth, the saturation of oxyhemoglobin begins to plummet - short and long-term adaptations allow humans to go up to about 8,000 m [less than 356 millibars of atmospheric pressure], where no adaptations help (ie: "Death zone"). Sleeping becomes difficult, food digestion impossible with potentially fatal high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) and high altitude cerebral edema (HACE) becoming more common. Humans have survived for two years at 5,950 m [475 millibars of atmospheric pressure], which is the highest recorded permanently tolerable highest altitude; the highest permanent settlement known, La Rinconada, is at 5,100 m. Increased suicide rate (no known cause).
+ [Armstrong limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit): (on Earth ~18,900m) at 6.3 kPa, water boils at 37C: saliva from tongue, tears/water f/eyeballs, water off of alveoli.[(\*)](https://web.archive.org/web/20141014072430/http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html)
+ Without supplemental breathing oxygen, the time for useful consciousness at 26,000 ft is 4-6min, at 30,000 ft; 1-2m, and at 38,000 ft; 30sec or less before the aviator succumbed to hypobaric hypoxia. At <1psi unconsciousness occurs at ~14s, length of time it takes for blood to go from lungs to the brain.
+ Pressure is too high: Aseptic bone necrosis (long-term). Respiratory acidosis (and ultimately toxicity) (CO2), inert gas narcosis (N2), oxidative stress (O2), High Pressure Nervous Syndrome (HPNS) which occurs beyond 10-15 ATA. Specially trained and equipped (read: very specific, non-natural (helium, non-nitrogen) gas mixes, etc) humans have survived 70 ATA for limited periods of time.
+ Affects the boiling and evaporation points of all sorts of chemicals.
* **Oceanic Tides**
+ Tides are proportional to mass / distance^3 (Earth: Solar tides are about 45% those of Lunar tides (interact as Spring or Neap tides)). Geography impacts the severity of these baselines on actual coastlines. More moons == more tidal problems; cancellation, exaggeration, very complex tide tables.
+ Tides, and tidal pools, may be responsible for mixing chemicals (and environments for them to flourish) which may have contributed to the evolution of life.
* **Volatiles: (water) / Must have Water**
+ Too much water, and you radically change atmosphere and chemical feedback loops[(\*)](https://scienmag.com/worlds-oldest-rock-unit-4-02-billion-years-old/).
+ Water is required to breathe (alveoli, air exchange). At rest, loss rates from breathing alone range from at least 7-20 ml/h, exercise at 140bpm heart-rate is 60–70 ml/h (depending on temperature and humidity). If you're breathing, you *will* lose water.
+ Heat regulation: Sweating occurs when over-heated compared to environmental temperature; humans can sweat when in cold conditions if exercising. If you're working (hunting, farming, most gathering), you will almost always sweat.
+ Urination: elimination of bodily wastes uses water. Consistent lack of urination will lead to build up of toxins, liver and other organ failure.
* **Surface temperature range:**
+ Too hot: Hyperthermia. Death after 10m in extremely humid (ie: no sweating) 60C heat.
+ Too cold: Hypothermia. Death after human core temp reaches 21C - but acclimatization, etc. all impact when this point occurs. Also; special type of hibernation.
+ NASA (1958) says indefinite survival at 4-35C / 50% humidity. Somewhat higher temps can be handled if humidity is decreased, and water intake is plentiful.
+ Core temperature loss is greatly enhanced by wind / sweat evaporation.
* **Must have Food**
+ Base of the food chain are typically "plants", which convert energy (solar (chlorophyll), geothermal heat) to chemical energy.
+ Nutrients / Micronutrients (needed from diet: biotin, calcium, choline, chromium, copper, fiber, flavonoids, folate, iodine, iron, magnesium, manganese, omega-3 fatty acids, pantothenic acid, phosphorus, potassium, protein, salt, selenium, vitamin A, vitamin B1 - thiamin, vitamin B12 - cobalamin, vitamin B2 - riboflavin, vitamin B3 - niacin, vitamin B6 - pyridoxine, vitamin C, vitamin D (supplemental), vitamin E, vitamin K, zinc) otherwise various disorders.
+ Humans don't produce all the amino acids they need to live.
+ Caloric intake varies on lifestyle, age, and gender/size/lean body mass (amongst other factors):
- adult males: 2,000-2,600 sedentary, 2,200-2,800 moderately active, 2,400-3,000 active.
- adult females: 1,600-2,000 sedentary, 1,800-2,200 moderately active, 2,000-2,400 active.
* **Plants are typically grown in soil**
+ Incorrect atmosphere leads to inhospitable soil conditions <https://scienmag.com/researchers-explore-possibilities-of-growing-plants-on-mars/>
[Answer]
# Special cases
* **Tectonically-locked**
* **Mostly Frozen**
* **Surface Water-free** (Dune)
+ Or, no/very-little free water.
* **All Water** (Europa)
+ Currently, by question definition, this is non-habitable.
*(Original source for this image: <http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/049/907/i02/human-survival-limits-120809g-02.jpg?1344571431>)*
] |
[Question]
[
I am looking for a tool that can be used to create worlds with a realistic (= physically plausible) climate and surface given general terrain shape, or can at least assist in such a task.
My ideal workflow would be to provide the following data as input:
* World terrain shape (perhaps something like a height field)
* Sea level and perhaps other large bodies of water
* General planet & atmosphere properties
The output would be a distribution of terrain types such as deserts (hot and icy) and rivers, with forests or plains being a bonus. Some general climate or weather maps would be welcome as well.
Of course, tools which follow the same idea but with a slightly different set of inputs/outputs are fine too.
It wouldn't have to be production quality; incomplete functionality or semi-automatic operation (i.e. user assistance required) is perfectly acceptable. It looks like something which would make a great bachelor/master thesis topic, so academic code is OK.
I am not really restricted to a specific operating system (that's what virtual machines and Live CDs are for). My primary system is Windows, so support for that is a bonus, but definitely not required.
[Answer]
Along your requirements we can generate a realistic planet starting from:
* Height field
* Water Table
* Chemical Ratios and Other Coefficients
**GIMP/Photoshop** can actually pull off every necessary transformation of that data set using built-in filters, if your willing to give up accuracy a little bit. Just think out the connections you want to model. The one's it can't model, you could script in or use other software (one example being measuring insolation. I don't know of a way in standard GIMP to make a shadow map from a height map. QGIS can automatically do this for you though).
TimB's great series of questions on world-building will probably end up covering more than you care to model but:
* Height Map: This give you pretty much everything you need. Especially if it's filled out with erosion channels for rivers, fault-lines, and a water table.
* Heat Map: Necessary but difficult if you wan't it coupled with everything tightly.
* Shadow Map: Your going to need it for the heat.
* Water Table/Moisture Map: This is going to drive fertility, erosion, rain, *a lot*.
* Wind Map: This is actually an output of the other maps mixed together.
* Soil Map: type, thickness, etc. These are important for pollution and moisture and other things.
In general gaussian blur is from dispersion and bleed effects (its the solution to heat.)
Gradients are used to set up constants (insolation, etc.)
Averaging and blurring can mix multiple season and years into one overall climate despite periodic flux.
Smearing in a direction (NOT directional blur because that goes in front of the mountain as well) can give you rain shadow effects.
A Dijkstra Map/Distance Transform/Grassfire/Eikonal Solution/etc. can get odd things like distance around a mountain or distance to the nearest set of \_\_\_\_\_.
I'm assuming we already have a height map. If we don't then Voronoi Regions/Stained Glass/Mural/Cobblestone Effects give us segmented regions.
Actual basins are simply Voronoi regions mapped to mountain ranges and fractally nested inside each other. To get the crinkly look from actual plate movement you'd need Distortion/Displacement/Glass Maps.
Primary rain erosion can be modeled by throwing random noise scaled by moisture intensity, etc.
River carving and a whole mess of other things can be modeled using the first derivatives of your maps (which is the gradient).
etc.
**QGIS** was mentioned and goes with GRASS GIS and a lot of other open-source GIS. It doesn't do a whole lot along these lines but it can be interfaced with R. So there's probably a program out there for everything you can think of and some you can't.
If you're not in the mood to code something from scratch but know how to run a compiler you can try doing searches for **Fortran**, Astrophysics, and Geo-etc. as most of the physics have remained the same, so all the good programs are old University code.
**Blender and Rhino** (and Houdini?) can be used in a similar way to GIMP/Photoshop but to greater effect. (We drop some error as we move from a flat representation to a globe. We can also actually just outright do some things like place the sun and model an elliptic orbit).
**EdGCM** was apparently developed as an educational but full functional climate-modelling tool by NASA (it supposedly also doesn't kill your computer like some other newer climate-modelling software).
[**Gocad**](http://www.geo.tu-freiberg.de/~apelm/gocad.htm) looks amazing although I haven't tried it.
] |
[Question]
[
Here is my fantasy medieval scenario:
There is pair of adventurers, a Supportive/Non-Offensive mage and a swordsman.
The swordsman is actually a disguised rifleman who carries a scoped rifle.
In order to not arouse any suspicion by guards, and to avoid the rifle getting seized by them, **the rifle must be perceived as something normal.... or at least something that they don't want to inspect**.
Casting **illusion magic** or something similar on the rifle is **not preferable**.
This is because magic might leave traces on it and risk it being detected by anything that could sense traces of magic.
Rifle length is 116cm (an M16 is +-100cm)
My possible disguises:
### Disguise it as Cursed Item.
This will prevent guards from being curious, but.... might lead to 'seize or dispose on site' if they're told to prevent anything cursed from entering the city
### Disguise it as a property of someone important (magic research item)
The mage mentioned above is apprentice of a well renowned Archmage.
Judging by how hierarchy and power distance during medieval period works, the guards will try to stay out of trouble from someone with higher authority than them.
It would be better if I could smuggle that rifle without using 'false authority' .... if the guards managed to see through the lies (ie: not informed by the archmage about his/her item's arrival) .... we might get an arrest warrant (which means torture in medieval settings).
Any more concealment options?
**---- Edit , Additional Info ----**
* Maybe I should call the swordsman a marksman instead of a rifleman
* The Rifle is a Precision Rifle, specifically an Anti Material Rifle. The Empty weight is 20.05 lb or 9.09 kg.
Note: Photo isn't mine, I reuploaded and posted it here for size reference purpose
* Most of the travelling will be on foot, or riding a horse when possible
[Answer]
I may be reading your question wrong, but I'm going from the assumption that the rifle isn't a typical weapon for this setting, but is imported from another timeline or world.
In this case you just need to disassemble it. A medieval guardsman won't recognize this as a firearm:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OMWIB.jpg)
if he expects a firearm to look like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gODWL.jpg)
[Answer]
Smugglers have been smuggling things in and out of controlled borders for as long as controlled borders exist.
Some of your options:
* A concealed double bottom. It can be just the bench of the carriage transporting your men.
* Something smelly: put the rifle in its case, lay it on the bottom of the carriage and load the carriage with something smelly, like manure, fermented fish, etc.
If you have no carriage and are bound to walk, you can try disguising the rifle as a crutch. Just make sure it is not loaded, a thundering clutch would sound, pardon the pun, really suspicious.
[Answer]
Disassemble the rifle. However, do not hide the parts inside hollow firewood pieces, cow dungs etc. - if the guards aren't completely clueless, they would know where to search for hidden objects. And something as innocuous as a simple spring or tube might raise suspicion even in plain sight - by its level of craftsmanship, materials, etc. Broken astronomical equipment, you say? And why did you bother concealing it withing those cow dungs? Okay, we'll see about that - or, rather, the Spanish Inquisition will see about that, please wait for their decision in the local jail.
Instead, add some spare parts for the same rifle (you might need them later anyway). Add some additional parts which are not related to the rifle but would allow you to re-purpose the whole set of parts into several tools those medieval people would understand - let's say, a small telescope/spyglass on a tripod, a sextant, etc., stuff like that. Maybe even assemble the telescope and the sextant and carry them like that. When you finally need the rifle, disassemble them, use the rifle parts to assemble the rifle, stash the rest away. Astronomical equipment, you say? - Yes, sir, allow me to demonstrate. - Hmm... What do you think, Mr. Spanish Inquisitor? - I think I've seen something like that drawn in some astronomy books, it doesn't look like witchcraft or heresy. - Okay, you may pass. Of course, if the guards/inquisitors are overly paranoid, that may not work still - but then again, *if they are overly paranoid*, what would?
That may require some preparatory engineering on the rifle, even to a degree that is detrimental to its main function. Replace plastic with wood, make the metal parts look like something produced by local smiths/artisans (or like something that could have been produced by local smiths/artisans if you require some extra quality work and are ready to pay for it; or like something that needs better smithing than the locals are capable of, but not *that much* better), maybe remove ammo clips because they won't fit into all that telescope/sextant design, change the shape of some rifle parts so that they could function in both the rifle and the telescope, etc. You may end up with a somewhat worse rifle, but if your enemies are medieval knights and crossbowmen, that probably won't matter much.
[Answer]
One simple way to conceal nearly anything is to hide it inside something else no one would think to look in. In this case, a log would work, hollowed out and with a plug of the same wood driven in. With a little care, the end result would weigh about what the unaltered, original log did, and there need be no palpable movement of weight inside (padding will keep the rifle from moving around in the hollow).
The log, in turn, could be one of several in a cart load of firewood. No one would be suspicious of a cart load of wood -- and even more so, they aren't likely to unload the cart and chop or split every log when there's no reason not to expect such stuff to be brought into the city.
[Answer]
All depends on whether the rifle can be fully disassembled.
If yes, then it can be concealed inside a large number of innocuous objects, even crutches, like in "Day of Jackal".
If not, then the range of objects is much more narrow, and, unless your character is bringing a whole cart or wagon with him (which, actually, can be the only option), would likely be scrutinized. Keep in mind that wherever you can hide a full length rifle you can hide a sword, and sword is probably something that guards don't want to miss.
Modern rifle and its parts, while not recognizable in medieval setting, would undoubtedly be looked at with great suspicion.
[Answer]
"You wouldn't deprive an old man of his walking stick, now would you?"
If you can hide a sword in a cane, you should be able to hide a rifle in a staff. A funky, druidy looking staff with natural looking wooden protrusions and bulges at weird places. Family heirloom of course. Part of it's charm, is it not? I'm sure it could hold some ammunition and spare parts too.
Unlocking it could require a secret technique or be trivial if you don't think it would be inspected.
[Answer]
Not sure if it fits within your scenario, but I'd try to circumvent the guards altogether, by [KISS principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle).
Let mage get in and drop a rope from wall during night, and pull up the rifle passed to him by the swordsman.
It only takes a couple of minutes and if the support mage can magic himself invisible or divert attention, it should be even easier.
Since it is a one time affair it doesn't run the same risks as regular smuggling, where guards would probably eventually discover the smugglers
[Answer]
My solution: Hiding in plain sight
Simply say that "it's what so-and-so said what weapons from the future will look like" and if they ask what this bit is made of or why this bit looks like this just say that it's magic. If they ask if it works laugh in their face and say why would something that looks this ridiculous work as a weapon. If they ask why they are bringing it in then say that they are only the delivery men and don't know anything about it (other than what's already been said).If they have a mage on standby to check if there's anything magical going through just put a spell on it that does nothing.
[Answer]
**Put it inside a cow.**
The cow will be unhappy.
Exactly where the rifle is inserted into the cow is left to the reader's imagination.
[Answer]
Tie it to a pole with ribbons, beads, feathers, and an animal skull or two (maybe even a pennant on) the pole.
If you get into a roughhousing situation, had it to a comrade saying, "Hold this for me." Or just have a standard bearer carry it for you.
You will draw attention but no one will think it's a weapon.
[Answer]
1) Slather it in protective grease.
2) Toss it onto the bed of a cart.
3) Toss a small tarp over it.
4) Fill the cart with fertilizer, or other unpleasant materials that are routinely brought into the city.
5) Drive it into town like nothing is unusual.
[Answer]
Medieval tech wasn't that precise, although it was often ornate. The precision of manufacture would make any pieces stand out. And looking through the scope would be a dead give away. (I think scopes came in at the start of the renaissance. Early ones were murky, and inverted the image.)
Anyway -- If you have control of the manufacture of the weapon,you may be able to apply chemical pitting to the exterior surfaces.
Putting it in a container that guards normally wouldn't have access to would be the way to go. Is there a regular coach between towns that carries gold, precious items? Is there the equivalent of a diplomatic pouch?
Is booze shipped in barrels? A barrel of brandy would do to carry a suitably protected rifle. More to the point, few guards want to unload a wagon full of barrels of beer. Although they may insist on sampling one.
Is there a cathedral or other large public building under way? MANY wagons of stones would be coming in. Getting a 1 load contract to bring in a load of stone may be possible.
Edit in response to wagons as bandit magnets:
If you look at the accounts of the the use of the Silk Road, merchants would band together and form caravans, either under someone who made their living running caravans, or a large merchant with multiple wagons/pack animals would accept people who would travel with them but had only 1 wagon or only a few pack animals.
Similar organization in the American wagon settlement trains.
Multiple wagons weren't just for discouraging attacks. Roads were non-existent to primative. Being able to put 3 teams of horses/oxen on a single wagon to get it out of a mud hole was essential.
The nature of travel has always been one of compromise. The Ferrari excels on the Autobahn. It has trouble with potholes on gravel roads. A 4x4 pickup with mudder tires can go into amazing places, but you can watch the gas gauge move. Snowshoes are slower than skiis, but are more effective in rough bushy terrain.
Weaponry is also circumstantially dependent. A swiss pike is effective against calvary on an open plain. It's a lousy jungle weapon.
In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has a pack animal go with the 4 hobbits, in addition to what they had on their backs. The western typically has the hero with a blanket roll (1 or 2 blankets rolled up in an oilcloth that may also be his 'duster' coat.) and a small bag with makings for coffee and a slab of hard cure bacon.
Reality: When I travel in the back country, my basic gear that I'm not wearing is about 20 to 25 pounds. I have to be ready for multiple climates. I need extras of some things. (socks) I need shelter -- even a tarp is a pound or two. It takes 2 pounds dry weight of food per person per day. Those numbers go back to Roman times, when the legion conquered the world on coarse ground wheat and barley.
So: To travel for a month requires an 80 pound pack. 20 pounds of gear. 60 pounds of food. Yes, if you are overweight you can go further before you run out.
If you live off the land, then you don't travel nearly as fast. Hunting is time consuming. See the journals of Warburton Pike, James Tyrell, and Vihljalmur Steffanson for examples. Pike traveled with a group of 8. They set camp at noon. 4 broke trail for the nextday (winter travel) 2 made camp. 2 hunted. The trailbreakers hunted opportunistically. Tyrell traveled by canoe. An 18 foot canoe can carry a thousand pounds. Common practice was to set a gill net off shore overnight, harvest fish in the morning. If there was a big surplus, they would stop for a day or two to dry it. Steffanson often traveled alone and used a rifle.
The truly independent hero, while a staple of fiction, especially the American west, was uncommon. One of the reasons as people we band together: A group of 10 people can do a lot more than 10 individuals can.
A marksman/sniper is a specialist. He doesn't operate in a vacuum. Who is he taking service with in the city? Wouldn't it make the most sense to cache his weapons outside the city, go make contact/contract, and get THAT person to arrange the passage through the city walls.
Second thing: A rifle, particularly when you want to shoot accurately at distances, is heavy. 8 pounds or so. Ammunition is also non-trivial. How many rounds does he bring with him?
Make a timeline of his journey. Make a list of everything he is carrying. How far can he travel without resupply? Where does he get resupply? What does his pack weigh? What is he buying food with? This whole notion is "Logistics" (A common aphorism: Captains worry about tactics. Colonels worry about strategy. Generals worry about logistics. Just how do we get those 5 ton 16 pounder cannons and their powder and their ball to where we can use them against the walls of the enemy fort?
This level of attention to detail can make or break a story. Fantasy with the rivets showing.
[Answer]
As others have said, breaking down the rifle into parts will aid smuggling, especially if the parts are mixed with something innocent that looks similar.
One other detail that may be useful is an element of misdirection. That is, you pack up rifle parts in two crates, along with other parts of other devices. In a third crate, you put a false bottom (sufficiently well that it might survive searching all on its own). Inside the hidden compartment, put something "expendable" like a sword, knife set, throwing stars, crossbow, or whatever else - as long as it's obviously a weapon, and somewhat valuable.
The idea being that if a guard has "the feeling something is off", they will get "confirmation bias" when they carefully check the crates and find the false bottom. They may look in the first two crates and suspect something is wrong with your explanations, but will assume they've found all of the concealed items upon discovering the false bottom compartment. A less conscientious guard may miss the whole thing, in which case you get to play the exact same trick another day.
Obviously, substitute 'crates' for any other scenario that makes sense in the story, if they're not pulling a cart full of their stuff with them!
[Answer]
I think a more moderate approach might be helpful. Concealing anything of course has its drawbacks. Guards may not represent the sharpest blades in the armoury, but they tend to be singleminded and like to poke around in places they have no business poking around, like false bottoms on waggons and travel trunks. Carrying a weapon, even if it doesn't look like a weapon, is risky.
Therefore, consider the *concealment in plain sight* approach:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M9FFn.jpg)
What could be more natural, expected and mundane than a local grandmother carrying her day's firewood into town! Hiring a local girl to help with your smuggling operation has the advantage of *trust the insider*. City guards are unlikely to suspect the grandmother who's carried a faggot into the city gate every day for the last four hundred twenty six years. She's a known local and thus not as likely to arouse suspicion as a swordsman and a mage trying to blend in.
Also, what a beautiful face! So lovely and trustworthy! She might even give the guards an apple, but only if they've been good boys and have minded their Mum!
[Answer]
Someone talked about astronomical or telescopic equipment. You could use the same basic idea of the rifle being presented as equipment, but if the weapon can't be fully disassembled I would suggest trying to remove the barrel and a majority of everything past the scope. You can also try and remove the stock. I would probably remove the magazine. If the bolt has a long horizontal length. I would then try and make a small connector to a stand you could make as well to make it seem more like an actual piece of equipment.
[Answer]
I agree to ask help from local Smugglers.
First of all there must be acceptable hide case, that one what use smugglers, but cannot be sought such by usual people. For example an sad widow with kids and a smelly dead body. The widow then pay some cash to let her husband be buried on local or far away cemetery.
The rifle must be then in dobble bottom, under that smelly body.
Simple man hardly can turn this thing... but this is not the problem for the smugglers, doung this for sentures.
[Answer]
Hide it in plain sight, no need to over complicate things.
Just put the riffle (partially dismantled if needed) in a strong-box like merchants carry for their coin and papers.
So the conversation at the gate goes something like this:
Who are you. What's you business?
I'm Mage-Apprentice Garreth and this is my man-servant/guard Michael.
Just passing through Sergeant, on our way to [some distant city].
What's in that box?
Don't know. Archmage Valtris told me to transport this to Duke Albron in [same distant city].
Open it up!
Valtris placed a tamper-spell on it.
Be my guest, its your funeral, but before you do it, please let me get a mile or so away from here first. I don't want to be anywhere near when you set it off.
At this point the guard either lets you go your own way or refers it to their higher ups.
At some point the decision will end up with someone with sufficient brains to realize that pissing of the Duke and/or the Arch-Mage is not a good idea.
They might decide to give you a proper escort to the Duke though... But I'm sure any smart Mage-Apprentice will be able to figure out some way to loose that escort later on.
[Answer]
# Deception
Simply put, have a *fake* Precision Rifle, that’s in plain sight, and have a *real* time-accurate rifle in a smuggling/hidden compartment. People are notoriously single minded, so if the guard sees the precision, tell him it a prop for so-and-so’s traveling theater. If that doesn’t hold up, load a blank and fire it to show him it doesn’t work (I’m assuming they didn’t have blank rounds back then). If he finds the time-accurate fake, tell him it’s to discourage bandits, but is a fake gun. They’ll think that since it was hidden, it must have been the only thing that you were hiding, particularly if you have a small cart or saddlebag.
[Answer]
# Misdirection
Have someone hire an idiot to take some staves into town. Each staff should be enchanted to cast spells like Explosive Fireball, Ice Beam, Raise Dead etc. They should also be clearly labelled. The label must have Explosive Rune cast on it, set to be triggered by reading.
Now just make sure you are a few positions behind in the inspection line. When the rune goes off (I hope you wrote a small firecracker and not a block buster), the town guards will be so busy and focused on your mule that you will be able to sneak in practically unnoticed.
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In my setting, every mythical humanoid creature humanity ever came up with (and most of the non-humanoid ones too, though it's more complicated there) either exists, or at one point used to exist before going extinct. They're collectively referred to as immortals, so called because the active magic within them prevents them from getting old or sick. Each species initially originated when a human with a high concentration of untapped magic in their blood spontaneously mutated in reaction to the magical energies in their environment, transforming into the first of that species that expanded out by reproducing with humans and then eventually their own kind (reproducing with humans does not dilute their genetics in any way).
Since werewolves have the added advantage of being able to directly transform humans into more of themselves, they are one of the most prominent and dominant immortal species on earth, and have centuries of history of humans encountering them before the 1800s when immortals started getting more strict about making sure humans had no concrete proof they were real.
Which causes a problem for me. See, for the most part I don't want to change much between what humans think these creatures are like in real life and what humans think these creatures are like in the story. Not all of those myths are *true*, of course, but enough is true that you can kinda see where the misconceptions came from in most cases. However, one trait of werewolves in my setting is that their fur color is identical to the hair color of the werewolf's human form. So most werewolves are blond, black, brown or red, with the most powerful bloodline of werewolves sporting hair and fur of a deep crimson.
So why on earth do nearly all depictions of werewolves in mythology or pop culture portray them as gray, a color that, due to their immortality, either none or precious few of them are ever going to have?
Getting details wrong over the centuries is one thing, but you'd think that if the most powerful werewolves on earth had fur the color of blood, that'd be a pretty vivid detail that wouldn't get lost in the telling. It'd be like forgetting that vampires have fangs. Arguably even *more* weird.
**So why did it happen? Why is there basically no trace in popular culture of the idea of the blood red werewolf being the strongest of them all, and why did the popular depiction wind up becoming a color that almost none of them actually were?**
[Answer]
You said it: details get wrong over the centuries, due to the overlapping mixture of slightly different accounts, fading memories and cultural influences.
Take the example of the lion: it was known to Europeans, in particular Romans, for being seen in countless gladiator's games across the empire. So you would expect that accounts on lions would be decently accurate past the Roman Empire and in the middle age, right? Well, this is what a [medieval bestiary](http://www.bestiary.ca/beasts/beast78.htm) would tell about them
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> The lion has three natures: when a lion walking in the mountains sees that it is being hunted, it erases its tracks with its tail; it always sleeps with its eyes open; and its cubs are born dead and are brought to life on the third day when the mother breathes in their faces or the father roars over them. Some sources add more natures: a lion only kills out of great hunger; it will not attack a prostrate man; it allows captive men to depart; it is not easily angered; the lioness first has five cubs, then one less each year.
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In particular, having red hair is already a rare tract among humans, so it's pretty easy to have it mistaken for an inaccuracy in the tale and "corrected" to a more common color.
[Answer]
**It was night time**
Werewolves are smart and deadly predators. It's rare for someone to see one and survive, and actual colours are hard to tell when all you see is a flash in the moonlight. They're smart enough to avoid groups of humans and avoid well lit areas.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/at7Bl.png)
([Source](https://www.paulmudie.com/howl-of-the-werewolf.htm))
If a werewolf is killed, it immediately reverts to its human form so people don't know what it looked like as a wolf.
The end result is people don't actually know what they look like and just assume they look like a grey timber wolf.
[Answer]
### 90% of "Werewolf" sightings are of actual wolves.
There are three separate groups of people who are perpetuating stories about werewolves:
1. People who have seen or are aware of actual werewolves.
2. People who have seen normal wolves, panicked, and thought they were seeing werewolves.
3. People who saw normal wolves, didn't think they were werewolves, but depicted them as werewolves for artistic purposes.
It is people in group 1 have established most of the werewolf mythos (fullmoon, how it spreads, etc.). However, people who saw a gray wolf on a full moon often reported, "I saw a gray werewolf!" These people aren't the origin of the werewolf mythos; they just know of the werewolf mythos and incorrectly pointed at a gray wolf as an example of the claim. Finally, people who are aware of the werewolf mythos and want to draw a werewolf will often use gray, since they are using reference images of wolves for their artwork (see also [Daron's Answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/202628/69639) ).
I think this explanation fits very well with OP's intent to set his story in the real world, since real-world explanations of werewolves could still use the 2nd and 3rd point.
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**[Frame Challenge](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609)**
**The only werewolves the average human ever saw were old...**
I'm really fond of a 1980s version of Robin Hood called "Robin of Sherwood" (the one with Michael Praed and Jason Connery). An episode or two into the change from Michael Praed as Robin of Loxely to Jason Connery as Robert Huntington we get a relevant quote from the character of Will Scarlet:
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Wolves are fast! And they're sneaky. And as a result, they're really rare to see. Especially werewolves where they're either sapient or retain some amount of their human cunning. They know enough to stay away from humans. Or, perhaps more precisely, to stay away from whatever they can't kill. (üéúLittle old lady mutilated late last night... werewolves again!üéù)
So, what werewolves have been seen my humanity?
*The old ones...*
The werewolves that can't sneak as well, aren't as fast, that can't guarantee killing the prey before detection. What humanity records seeing far, far more often than anything else is the graying hair of an aged werewolf.
[Answer]
Some ideas in addition to what has already been suggested:
**Already Grey-haired**
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> Since werewolves have the added advantage of being able to directly transform humans into more of themselves
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Building a bit on JBH's idea, here, but with werewolves turned from old humans rather than long-lived werewolves themselves.
Some of the humans that were transformed into werewolves were already old and grey-haired. They don't age in werewolf form, but presumably before becoming a werewolf they aged as normal. Having already spent most of their human life among humans, they were more likely to miss their home or the people they knew, and go back (and be seen). Perhaps the transition to werewolf life is a lot easier for the young and red-haired, so they're less tempted to visit the village of their youth.
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> the active magic within them prevents them from getting old or sick
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If they were already old in the first place and the magic doesn't reverse that, another reason for more grey-haired werewolf sightings could be that the ones who were older when turned are slower and less agile, and easier to spot.
**Camouflaged**
If your werewolves want to remain unnoticed by humans, perhaps they could have dyed their fur grey so that if they *are* seen, they're more likely to be taken for a regular old wolf and not a werewolf. (After all, regular wolves don't have bright red fur.)
**Confused with regular wolves**
In addition to this, people of your world could confuse wolf sightings with werewolf sightings. Since wolf sightings are probably more common than werewolf sightings, most "werewolf sightings" would be of a creature with grey fur.
**Red hair assumed to be bloodstained**
Because werewolves are like wolves, and wolves are grey, a werewolf who is bright red may be assumed to be red from blood.
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**If it's not gray, nobody lives to tell about it** (aka Survivorship Bias)
Old gray humans turn into old gray werewolves. They are still strong and fast, but less so than younger werewolves.
Simply put, the stories always recall gray werewolves because if a crimson werewolf in it's prime hunts someone, there is never anyone left to talk about it. The only werewolves weak enough that you even stand a chance of escaping are the gray ones.
[Answer]
**All werewolves are gray at night**
Werewolves are a nocturnal species, they literally exist (int wolf form) only during the night.
In the past, when the myth of the werewolf was established, nights were very dark because of the lack of artificial light (candles and torches hardly could provide a decent light).
In low light conditions, human retinas can rely only on the rod cells (this is called [scotopic vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_vision)), which are sensitive to light, but not to color. So, all men that saw and/or were attacked by a werewolf (and were lucky enough to survive) could see them only as gray creatures.
As a bonus, writing this answer I discovered the [Purkinje effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect), which says that since rod cells are more sensitive to blue light and less to red light, red things look even darker in the night: a red-haired werewolf would probably look even grayer than an ordinary werewolf in a dark setting
[Answer]
**Historical depictions of werewolves are hilariously inaccurate**
If you look at medieval depictions of animals, a common trend is that they are often painfully inaccurate with regards to how the animal actually looked. This was *especially* the case when people were trying to reconstruct animals they had no context for in their daily lives, e.g., Europeans who had never set food outside of Europe trying to depict lions, tigers, rhinoceroses, elephants, or crocodiles.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jM86E.jpg)
This is supposed to be a crocodile. Yes, really. If you want to be amused by some hilariously off-base animal drawings, here are some examples.
<https://www.ranker.com/list/inaccurate-historical-drawings-of-animals/danielle-ownbey>
<https://mossandfog.com/the-comically-bad-way-medieval-art-portrayed-lions/>
<https://i.stack.imgur.com/wsDGk.jpg>
In many cases, illustrators would fill in missing bits of animals they had never seen with other animals. E.g., in Europe's case this often resulted in filling in bits of African and Asian megafauna with domestic dogs, cats, and horses. I can't find it now but I remember one picture of a...I think it was a lion, that the author very clearly filled in the missing bits in using dog anatomy and the end result looked like a dog in a wig.
What amplified this was that the artists had neither seen the animal in question firsthand (causing depictions to be distorted in a game of telephone, this is believed to be what turned a rhinoceros into a a karkadann, a chiru into a unicorn, and a tiger into a manticore), nor had any physical specimen they could use for comparison. This gives you a good idea as to how werewolves would be so distorted, it's really hard to accurately portray a creature that you likely only saw once, in a panicked situation, and can't go back and double-check what they look like to make sure your depiction is accurate. It's likely any artist would just fill in gaps in their depiction of a werewolf with real wolf colors because they think "oh, they're not too different from a wolf, right?"
This actually has some basis in reality. [Blond](https://depositphotos.com/121419332/stock-photo-blond-wolves-on-logs-looking.html) or [black](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l33eze8-4E4/V0npCCaIqaI/AAAAAAABBZU/9E0-cPYOFY8ltI1PN_Ak-TdhMdazta8vwCLcB/s1600/ScreenShot6858.jpg) wolves *do* exist, and [there are real wolves with red fur](https://alchetron.com/cdn/red-wolf-c804cfb5-ea69-4406-88b8-871fbff905c-resize-750.jpeg) (not to be confused with the red wolf, *Canis rufus*, which is a species that originated from a hybridization event between coyotes and gray wolves in the U.S. circa the 11th century A.D.). Similarly, *modern* pop culture invariably displays mammoths as brunettes or redheads, when we know from preserved carcasses in Siberian permafrost that [black and blonde mammoths were a thing](https://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/060703-14.html).
Of course, the thing is virtually no human displays hair that would look like the typical wild-type coat pattern for *Canis lupus*, beyond the few natural platinum blondes and individuals whose hair is going gray. The majority of werewolves would appear some shade of brown given most humans are brunettes.
[Answer]
# Pop culture screwed it up.
Many people in our world think of wolves as being gray, despite gray wolves being only one of a wide variety of wolf breeds, because "wolves" in movies and TV shows are commonly portrayed by huskies instead.
Biologically speaking, domesticated dogs are just another type of wolf. They are the same species, and capable of interbreeding with one another. But domestication causes noticeable physical changes in creatures. No one's going to look at a poodle or a chihuahua (or even a larger hound or mastiff) and say "that's a wolf." But huskies still look enough like their feral forebears, despite being domesticated and thus much easier for animal trainers to work with, that they're frequently brought in when Hollywood needs to portray a "wolf" doing something specific on screen.
Since most people don't have personal encounters with wild wolves these days, their only touchpoint is what they see on TV. Therefore, wolves look like huskies, and have gray fur.
If your world is close enough to ours, the same misunderstanding could exist for the same reason.
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Who told the stories about wolves? Why do you think it wasn't the wolves telling lies to make their lives easier?
For the same reasons people think Garlic and Crosses stops Vampires... These are the same people who believe the earth is flat. They'll believe ANYTHING if said with confidence.
***Wolves have white hair! They are 8 feet tall!!! NOTHING CAN KILL THEM except "silver bullets"!!!***
I mean really... what can you believe when the wolves are amoungst us and they control the stories?
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**Red Werewolves Don't Hunt**
Or more explicitly, they don't hunt random humans. Red werewolves, as the most powerful of their kind, are naturally the leaders. Leaders don't just go running around in random villages every full moon. Instead they have special areas where designated humans (no doubt chosen for their tastiness or evasive qualities) are placed to be hunted. Since these hunts NEVER end in escape by the prey, and are in areas secluded from normal humans, Red werewolves are simply never seen. Any descriptor of a "red werewolf" which reaches normal humans is taken for allegory once they go into hiding.
*"Vespasian describes the werewolf-king as red, but obviously "Red" is just an honorific given by werewolves to their leaders. Or possibly a title given by Vespasian to describe the werewolf-king's power and bloodlust."* - Any given English Teacher in your universe discussing the one reference to a Red Werewolf.
The rest can easily be explained away by darkness. Blonde/brown werewolves will look grey in the moonlight. By the time a few centuries have passed the odd reference to a "blonde" or other non-grey werewolf could be explained away as artistic license by the author using the werewolves "natural" human hair color as the wolf's fur color.
[Answer]
**Wolves are gray**
People think of werewolves as human-wolf hybrids. People think wolves are gray. For example a Google search for wolves returns the following.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/02hHF.jpg)
If the above represents the average idea of what a wolf looks like -- ie mostly gray but with a few exceptions being mostly black or white -- then the average idea of a werewolf should be mostly gray too.
[Answer]
## For the Same Reason People Though Native Americans were "Redskins"
Nomadic peoples across many parts of the world often paint themselves in mud or clay. This helps mask your scent for hunting, repels insects, and protects you from the sun. Since your werewolves are likewise a primitive hunter society, but still having human like intelligence, they would likely do the same.
One theory is that Native Americans were often mistakenly believed to be red-skinned because they would paint themselves in the red clays common to the American Midwest, but if your werewolves were native to a place with mostly grey mud, like you normally see in wetter climates, then they would paint themselves grey.
So, even if you do see a red, blonde, or black werewolf out on the hunt, chances are they will look grey.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezCEh.png)
### ... or maybe it has nothing to do with fur color at all...
As comments point out below, the Native American association with the color red may have had nothing to do with body painting at all. "Red" was just a title that certain Natives used to refer to themselves as, and the term got blown way out of proportion due to cultural ignorance and lack of actual exposure as the Native American race mostly died off. Since the Werewolves have retreated from interacting with humans, they are under the same sort of cultural relation with us that the Natives have with European Americans.
It is possible that Grey was just a term given to certain werewolves.
* It could have been a prominent clan name like the "Grey Wolf Clan"
* It could have been a title or position reserved for diplomats and/or traders whom the humans would have most often interacted with.
* It could have been a simplified way of differentiating races of immortals . Just like it was common for a long time to call human races Black, White, Yellow, or Red, it may be that people extended this system to include the immortal races where the werewolves are grey, the elves are green, the dwarves are are brown, so on and so forth.
Whatever the reason, 200 years later when historians try to make out more information about these werewolves, they will turn to literary sources and read passages like, "... the grey ones came out of the forest, men who could take the form of wolves ..." To a historian who lacks the cultural context of a contemporary, such a passage would sound like a literal color, and not a title. Then said passage makes it into every child's history textbook, and within a single generation, almost everyone now believes that all werewolves were grey.
[Answer]
## An aged human form is weaker than the aged wolf form
In general werewolves used their wolf form sparingly, usually at night and if a human did see them they rarely lived to tell the tale. As they age, however, a werewolf may find their human form getting aches and pains, their senses dulling and their body tiring easily. Their wolf form may also deteriorate but not to the same degree and so by comparison the world always becomes so much clearer and moving so much easier. This means that whilst they're probably less useful to the pack when hunting, perhaps even a liability, it doesn't mean the transformation isn't still a thrilling change.
With this you're more likely to have older werewolves transforming to complete more basic tasks. Perhaps they've travelled into town in their human form and are now facing an arduous 2 hour walk back as an aging human *or* an exhilarating 20 minute run through the forest as a wolf. The difference may be enough that some transform and never turn back.
This means two things: firstly you'll have more older wolves transformed at any one time and secondly they're more likely to be out in the day to be spotted.
[Answer]
# No, that was a Sasquatch!
In addition to other great answers (being seen at night, werewolves been mistaken for wolves, werewolves converted from people with gray hair already, etc.), there's already a potential humanoid monster that has fur in the red-brown-black spectrum! And that's the sasquatch! (See images below). Both werewolves and sasquatches are large, furry, and scary forest dwellers that don't want to be spotted. Werewolves are all too happy to blame non-gray furred werewolf sightings on this elusive creature; he's quite good at hiding, which makes them hard to prove wrong. Additionally, since (per my understanding) sasquatches don't shapeshift into normal-looking humans, they can't really defend themselves, so werewolves have an easy time blaming them.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QERo0.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ISoty.png)
[Answer]
The most influential culture believed it in the olden days.
Children born in Bethlehem at 0 BC would have been of a bronzen skin color. However when the most famous child of that region was introduced to the western countries the lionshare of artists and indigenous people there had only seen pink skincolors, so thats what their stories and depictions showed him to have: a pink skin color rather than bronze. This became so ingrained as a truth that even the countries where the child had been born started believing it.
Theres more: look into anything like vaccinations, climate change, moon landings, Bigfoot, Loch "free fiddy" Ness and other such ideas and you see that a simple misinformation campaign can work wonders in dividing the populace, even better is when the subject hasn't been seen or heard from for decades or centuries, which dilutes the real information quicker.
Your werewolves have started a campaign of misinformation about werewolves in an attempt to confuse the populace. This is so effective that if someone says "I say a werewolf and it was blond" that people will rather say "you saw a WHAT and it was WHAT?!? How much did you drink?!?". It wasnt so successful however that they could hide or obscure many recognizing traits from werewolves however. The Vampires were more successful, making people think its to do with coffins and counts.
[Answer]
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> of a deep crimson.
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OK, so you're focussing on only part of the problem. Have you tried asking why there are no known humans with crimson hair? (Before the last few decades, of course.)
Apparently, the powerful werewolves realize that they are instantly recognizable, whether in human or wolf form, as *wrong*. They take pains to hide their existence from humans.
Or, perhaps, they dye their hair, and the dye color persists during the transformation into fur.
[Answer]
## Perception filtering:
While this touches on some of the other answers, I feel it is distinct in it's own right.
Your immortals are trying to hide from humans. human color-sensing cones are the target for the magical influence of immortals who don't want to be seen. These cones give feedback to the brain at odds with black-and-white sensing rods. So humans with cones might see the werewolf, and know there's something wrong with them, but they can't see the werewolf as a werewolf. partial color vision allows their perceptions to be altered partially. But any perception of the werewolf is driven by the color-blind rods, not the color-perceiving cones.
Many mammalian animals, the full color-blind, and people in the dark rely on rods for vision. So when it's dark, people see the werewolves for what they are. Or when your dog starts barking at someone for no apparent reason, it's because dogs are naturally partially color-blind.
The people who can see the werewolves in the day are at least partially color-blind. So they draw images of the werewolves in black and white (what they can see with rods, not cones). They don't see the color, lacking functional cones.
The fovea (the area of fine visual focus) is full of cones. So even when people can see the werewolves for what they are, it's fuzzy and insubstantial.
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In my world I have a race of god-like beings who I've recently decided should be shapeshifters. However everything in my world comes in threes, and there are three races / clans of these beings. For comparison a related branch of beings is mortals; humans, elves and dwarves.
The main difference between these clans in my mind is each has an affinity with a different branch of magic, but I want there to be something else that sets them apart from each other. Something that makes an individual of Race A have more in common with another individual of Race A than of Race B or C.
There are some limitations that have ruled out some of the more obvious options though;
* These god-like beings are practically wiped out (by forces of nature / other god-like beings) and the survivors live largely in secret. This is one of the reasons I want them to shapeshift. So whatever feature sets them apart from each other shouldn't stop them from looking like a human, elf or dwarf. So I can't just say Race A can take any form but their skin and hair will always be blue or something similar.
* They can inter breed with each other, and with the mortal races. Kind of already covered by being able to blend in with them, but they should be able to take and maintain a humanoid form that could reliable breed with each other and other humanoids. It's also not strictly necessary but if their defining feature also allowed you to identify hybrids between the races that would help too.
The beings themselves are very powerful mages and immortal (Tolkien sense, as in live forever but can be killed) if that matters.
As for their shapeshifting my explanation is that they can modify their bodies to suit their environments in the way that mortals modify the environment to suit them. So instead of wearing clothes or building buildings to make a place more hospitable they change their bodies (though they will adapt clothing and buildings from mortals, they just don't need them in the same way). They can change their whole bodies or just adapt them (so they could grow horns, feathers, scales etc. not sure if they can grow extra limbs but I'll probably allow wings so I can't see a reason not to) and while they may have a 'true' form I don't think it is something any of them would use frequently as they instead adapt and change their bodies to suit their whims and personality.
**So how can races of shapeshifters have some kind of defining features which set them apart but don't interfere with their ability to shapeshift?**
[Answer]
# Mass
The shapeshifters can change their appearance but are bound by conservation of mass. They average 50, 100, and 150 kg and can be generally distinguished by mass.
Note that all shapeshifting races could be of any volume, so you'd have to weigh a human-shaped shapeshifter to figure out what race they were.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nM45R.jpg)
[Answer]
You could always have the three races differ not necessarily by anything outwardly physical, but by their preferences of shapeshifting. If there are different types of immortal shapeshifters, their concept of being different from each other might be very different to what humans would think of as "different".
For example, while all three races can shift into any form that they choose, they may each have a "true" form that is different to each other, and they have to expend effort to change into something else. Then the different races of shapeshifters may react to shifting forms in different ways.
I would say that one prefers to be in their true form as much as possible, and only changes to other forms when necessary for disguise or survival as they find being in the shape of lesser beings offensive or disgusting.
Another race may find shifting incredibly easy, and it means nothing to them to shift, so they are changing shape almost constantly.
A third race would find it difficult to change, so they shift very rarely and only when necessary, but they don't particularly mind which form they take.
Obviously it would always be difficult for mortals to discover any type of shapeshifter, but if you know what you were looking for, then you could have tactics to reveal each one.
Force type A into being in a certain form for a long time, by having them constantly around others, and they would become distracted by how uncomfortable they are.
Type B you would just need to watch carefully, and they would eventually shift something accidentally as they struggle to remain in a single form for long.
Type C would be more difficult, but you would find they take the form of their idea of 'perfect' people, as they don't want to change form very often so they would try to create a body that is the most well equipped and versatile for any situation.
These three types can be completely different, these were just off the top of my head, but I think it would be more interesting for the shapeshifters' differences to be more psychological, considering they can take any physical form that they choose.
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If you have read (probably not) Percy Jackson - Book 4, there is a special cursed person named Daedalus, who has an owl on his neck. He tried to get rid of this owl tattoo by shapeshifting, freeing his soul and owning a new body and more, but this sign was always, when he tried, recreating itself on his new body. A restriction like this can be integrated in shapeshifting.
Otherwise there is another solution: In the trilogy Bartimaeus by Jonathan Stroud, demons are summoned by magicians to serve them. These demons are coming from another dimension and are now forced to take a form. They can change forms whenever they like. All beings in this world are living on planes. The main character can see to the 7th plane and can transform to that, but on higher planes he will be always in his natural form.
In Short: Your Gods could transform freely, but can't disguise themselves on a different layer of reality.
Fun Fact: In Bartimaeus, cats can see into the 2nd plane.
[This can also provide more solutions.](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124879/the-face-changer-species)
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**The shapeshifters of the different groups change in different ways. Results are the same but the transformations are different.**
Maybe one kind of shapeshifting is painful and messy, while another is quiet and fluid, and the third is brilliant, with glow-y special effects.
The painful and messing changes might be overheard ("Ow, ow, I especially hate the feel of growing feathers. Why are they stupid BIRD people in this country? Couldn't they be bats?!") and/or leave behind a mess. The glow-y, special-effect ridden transformation would be hard to hide as it is happening (at least at night), but might also impress other characters (and/or the reading audience).
There's lots of opportunities to build story tension around the drawbacks that different methods of transformation might have.
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# They *feel* themselves differently
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IHI1D.png)
We see a lot of the world around us. We can understand many things, but are totally insensitive to much, much more.
Maybe your godlike aliens have a perfect shapeshifting mechanism, and are visually undetectable. But there is other senses they could not fool. Maybe they smell like lavender, or maybe they skin has a different roughness...
Or maybe it's way more subtle. Some of them could emit some types of infrared waves, giving the impression of a warm presence. Maybe you can hear a pitch when close to another, almost imperceptible, but, if you pay attention very carefully, you could detect it.
Race A could emit a soothing sound, race B a stressing one, and race C sounds the same sound as a dog whistle.
While you would feel different around them, you could not suppose it's because they are aliens before somebody tells you. It would be like "Wow, I'm SO tense when I'm around Jim ! I don't know why he makes me nervous like that !"
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**The three ages of man.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s62Iq.jpg)
[source](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mexico-Aztec-Three-Ages-of-Man-Clay-Large-Face-Mask-3D-Vintage-Mayan-Pottery-Art-/181797394221)
Your shifters always manifest as an entity of a certain age: a child or pup, an adult, or a creature in old age. These ages correspond with the seasons of spring, summer and autumn and this would manifest when the creature took the form of a tree or plant. They correspond with the light: morning, noon and dusk - and this correponds with the time they make their appearance.
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Eye colour.
While I don't know what exactly you mean by "interfere with their shapeshifting abilities", it seems like you are looking for some way to tell them apart while they are shapeshifted.
In D&D, many dragons are able to shapeshift. Several GMs have run the game so that they never change the colour of their eyes. So a silver dragon will always have silver eyes, for instance. If this is a limitation, or simply the preference of the dragon does not need to be clarified.
Symbolically it is also quite neat, since "the eyes are the window of the soul" and so on.
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**Personality types**.
While there is much debate about the number of personality types that exist, since you're writing your story, you can pick [the three.](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201408/are-you-type-b-or-d-personality)
The interesting thing is that the three shapeshifting types can presumably take any form, there will end up being preferences (and differences manifested physically or in their physiology) as a result of their personality types.
Another possible idea which I like a lot less is the means by which they shapeshift. One race may do it entirely mentally but take a lot of energy, one may undergo physical metamorphosis which requires time (cocoon like), and the third may be only be able to do it in pairs, which requires bonding and absorption of one of the entities but can happen relatively quickly.
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The only difference is in the shape they collapse to when they die.
The only way to tell them apart alive is to take a tissue sample and let it wither and THEN take a DNA analysis or check the colour of the blood after it has been out the body for a while, red (human), blue (mage) or green (warlock).
[Answer]
# 3 different "shape-shifting-like" abilities
You say things come in threes.
But there are many things that are like shape-shifting,
that are not strictly shapeshifting.
I am reminded of Jim Butcher's *Fool Moon*, which features 4 different kinds of wolfshifters: werewolves, hexenwolves, loup-garous and lycanthropes.
Which function entirely differently.
But you can go more broad that that.
Some options,
all of which can accomplish the need to adapt their bodies to their environment.
Though they might be a bit **too** different for your liking.
---
### Morphers
The perfect shape-shifter.
They can turn into any creature or individual,
off magic alone.
Just by picturing what the want to be.
### Upsides:
Ultimately flexible.
### Downsides:
The do not inherently know anything about
the body they are in.
Like not even the subconscious stuff about how to operate muscles.
So the first time they turn into a species,
they are like babies for a few months.
Of-course they learn how to operate the bodies of most common creatures with in their child-hood.
But even so, they are normally a bit clumsy for months after a change.
Once transformed their magic can do little to help them settle in (unlike the other races)
---
### Skin Thieves
Claire North's novel **Touch**,
is about a character with an ability something like this.
They don't transform, not really.
They possess people, and take over their bodies.
They are more spirit than creature.
They have no more ability to enhance their form than a normal human (etc), by diet and exercise.
Or by skipping out and swapping to a better body.
They, tend to die is utterly unfortunate ways.
Getting trapped in a body that is dying.
Technically when born they have their own body,
well at least a body, that is the genetic progeny of the bodies their parents were inhabiting.
The spooky thing is, once they leave it,
there is still a mind left behind -- a normal human (etc) mind.
It just isn't theirs.
### Downsides:
Need to find a host suitable,
and there is some restriction on who they can take over.
This restriction might be something like they have to make skin-contact.
Or it might require permission.
(In the Demon the Decent RPG, demons make pacts to buy people's souls. Not so they can have the souls, but so they can turf them out of their bodies. So something kinda link that. But probably more of a rental.)
### Upsides
Relatively quick transformation, with few issues.
And they are really hard to kill.
(Depending on the condition you put on being able to skin steal)
---
## Animators
This is somewhat like Brandon Sanderson's Kandra from the **Mistborn** series.
They are somewhere between skin thieves and morphors.
They build their bodies.
Assemble something that is close enough to a work-able body.
Out of sticks, stones or steel.
They then possess it.
And their magic takes care of plugging the gaps.
Repairing over rust and scrapes, making it all work.
But is has to be close to a workable body to function.
Which is a lot of work.
The spooky thing is, there naturally exists something that is very close to a working body.
The recently deceased.
There magic can easily fix up a few gashes, or a cancer etc.
and get the blood pumping again.
Eventually, the body is as healthy as it was at it's prime.
Unlike Skin-Thieves, when they leave their birth body,
or any other body for that matter,
what is left is dead.
Though often they just incorporate new parts into there current body,
and only discard parts once they wear out.
## Upsides
Great potential to became immensely powerful,
if they are willing to work to build an excellent body from scratch.
Like becoming a giant made of stone.
## Downsides
Becoming human (etc), really requires grave robbing (or murder).
Which most cultures frown upon.
Though really the dead are not using their bodies any-more.
Other downside is slowness of preparing the body, especially if not reanimating the dead.
A tradeoff between choice, and time.
---
## On Hybrids
If you want hybrids to be strong.
You simply have the powers not interact, so they are able to use both, but with the limitations only of the one they are using.
In this case you want hybrids to be exceptionally rare,
since they would just be better than the parent races.
(And presumably they would be infertile, like mules. Otherwise they would have outcompeted their parent races)
If you want hybrids to be weak,
you give them something like a cross between the abilities,
but with the downsides of both.
* **Morpher + Animator**, needs a body to possess, but has to learn how to operate it. On the upside it can be less complete than an animator would need.
* **Animator + Skin Thief** can only possess the dying/very ill. On the upside the Animator's healing immediately kicks in, any they fit to their prime.
* **Morpher + Skin Thief** can only turn into someone they have seen. On the upside they don't literally steal bodies.
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Because they are magical beings, they could have a unique aura that surrounds them. The mortals cannot sense this magic, but other shapeshifters would naturally sense it and could tell whether they were part of their tribe or not, similar to how colonies of ants use different pheromones or murders of crows have different accents. This way, they can perfectly hide among the race they've transformed into since they can't perceive any difference (just as we can't tell which ant belongs to which colony), but can still be sensed by others of their kind.
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**They have a different energy to them. When one shapeshifts *something* about the self remains the same. That something is more than a mind and more than a soul. It permeates the body, as if each and every cell has its own soul, vibrant and alive.**
These immortals would be identified by their age. If you spent this long in life and still thirsted for more, you would have that certain sparkle in your eye that you see in the old men and women who still go out dancing for no reason other than to go dancing. You see it as they unveil a daffodil to a young girl for the first time, and soak in her laughter like it was manna from high heaven.
This thirst for life would be hard to repress, and yet it is infinitely variable. In a "safe" area where the immortal can simply enjoy life among mortals, this might even be physically visible. Perhaps a blue streak of hair in defiance, or pointed ears to hear the laughter better. In more normal places, your immortals might shed those obvious physical signs, but still retain that magic spark of life in their eyes.
In more dangerous places, where the risk of being uncovered is great, they might strive to hide this spark such that humans cannot detect it. Still, it would appear in their stride, in their path through life. They could not help but embrace that which is given to them, even as they stride through the enemy's camp.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l3Mb0.jpg)
[Answer]
Their shapshifting abilities came from a different origin, and so behave differently:
* One race was naturally able to reconfigure themselves a bit (e.g. skin colour changes for camouflage, lizard-like regrowing of lost limbs) and their shapeshifting is a magical enhancement of this natural ability. It's very slow, biological regrowth taking hours (or at least, minutes) and using mostly food-energy to do it with a little magical energy for help. Their shift leaves little magical residue on their bodies, but it is detectable by some that many of their cells are too 'new' for their appearance.
* Another, their cells are more like a loose collection, their shapeshifting is more like Odo from Star Trek - fast, fluid. Their shape is almost entirely magically held and requires much more ongoing magic effort. They have less need to eat because they have fewer biological processes keeping them alive, maybe more need to sleep if their magic needs rest to regenerate. In areas of limited magic power, or if poked and tested by sufficiently strong mages, their shape wavers or fails. Their bodies have a continual magical residue all through at a similar level for every cell, very noticeable to the right observer. They consider the biological shapeshift 'primitive' and a bit nauseating. The biological shapeshifters consider these people's shapes fake and untrustworthy, too easy to change.
* The third was a non-physical origin, and their bodies are projections of some kind, they have no original shape and can present as any shape they desire. They need ongoing magic to sustain a body at all and cannot go in low-magic areas in physical form. Their bodies read completely different magical signatures - maybe none at all, not even those that mortal humans can have, or magically "blank" like an all-over shield, or a dimensional boundary. They consider themselves above or outside the world, and superior to the other two shifters. The other two consider these people too strange to be relatable. Maybe this group can "shift" and present multiple physical bodies at once, which are noticable as sharing the same magical signature - sensing the same signature in multiple bodies is a dead giveaway.
* Another maybe that their shapeshifting is an induced hallucination, good enough in a low-tech society and for non-contact times, but very noticable by confusion or physical tests against reality. But since they are very powerful, they can extend the illusion a lot further than just looks. The others consider this a poor imitation of real shapeshifting, these people consider real shapeshifting a poor limited subset of true mind-control.
Their shapeshifting ability requires different amounts of knowledge of the new shape:
* Race A can only shift to things they have planned in advance - i.e. they have to study a shape carefully and learn to shift into it, after that they need to keep practising regularly or they start to forget details. Observers may notice common shapes which Race A members all study as part of formal education - giving them a tendency to look like "the same person". You might not always identify a Race A shapeshifter, but if you see "yet another all-American Clarke Kent", that is one of them.
* Race B can shift to anything they can imagine, but the details are often lost, at worst having only a convincing overall size and face, but having to cover the body with clothes to hide the worst inaccuracies. Many might not gain the best skills, like many people can't draw photorealistic people. If you sneak a look at someone when they aren't expecting it and their elbow looks like a waxwork or a shop-dummy, red flags all round.
* Race C shifts by 'cloning' an existing shape, and that's a magical and perfect reproduction, but means they can only clone something they are near, and they can only look exactly like the person/thing they cloned. If you see a doppleganger clone in the same town, if you see someone who looks suspiciously like they died a couple of hours ago - maybe it's because the body they cloned actually did, and their way to avoid looking like a living person was to clone the near-dead.
Their shapeshifting ability requires different amounts of magic:
* One is a physical reconfiguration of matter, in a burst of intense activity over the whole body
* Another is like a wormhole to a wardrobe department far away and a switch of clothes, focused and long-ranging.
* Another is like an instantaneous transition, a blank cutoff and switch.
A magically sensitive observer might be able to sense the echoes of these differing magical patterns long after the shape shift has finished, or detect that one happened in the vicinity without knowing exactly who did it, and be on-guard that somewhere nearby there is a Race C shifter.
They have different interests:
* Race A tends to be conservative, inward-focused, protecting their own. When they shapeshift they do it to blend in with an existing society, usually to affect some change in the society. They are the least powerful magically and stand to lose the most. Most cult-like behaviour, keeping their group identity, attentive outsiders can sometimes spot these effects happening and then trace back who it's coming from. Insiders know their own methods and recognise them quickly when others use them.
* Race B has a much greater range of expression, they're more magically powerful and so less at risk from exposure, they like to blend shapes more expressively and more experimentally. Hybrid creatures are most likely to be Race B, but they hybrid components may not be obvious. Goat hoofs for feet and imitating mythical figures are common in-jokes, and they tend to run through adding identifying marks of their own accord, which outsiders who follow their fashions can learn to identify.
* Race C is a lot older, fewer of them, they take a longer view on time and are playing for a very distant future. They are often shifted for convenience but in some way always feel like someone from two hundred years ago, because that was only a blink ago. Much more Merlin or Dumbledore than X-Men's Mystique.
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You are 10 years old, talking with your friends, when the conversation turns to those age-old questions of..."can you do this" or "do your earlobes look like this?" followed by a variety of odd body contortions or looking at each other's ears where they attach to the body.
Invariably, some of the other kids actually CAN touch their tongues to their nose. Some will be able to make a clover shape with their tongues too. Others are going to realize that most other people's footprints in the sand are missing the inner edge of the foot.
You, of course, have a uniqueness you are proud of and exclaim loudly...."I have an extra rib!"
You just outed yourself to the other shapeshifter in the group whose older sibling already had Shapeshifter Health 101. They know you are obviously an....
Although everyone looks mostly the same, there's many diverse body formations and physical dexterity differences among us that can be rather subtle. They show up when searched for in a health screen or prompted for by our peers on the playground, and don't cause much of a stir. The shapeshifters are going to know which ones aren't actually just human outliers on the genetic bell curve.
[Answer]
I would give them different limitations - including different ways to deal with them - and cultural preferences. Interesting limitations could be mass, duration, shapes they find hard, behavioral differences, intelligence retained, level of control, attributes gained from their form, and material limitations - if they became wolverine from the x-men, would they get adamantium claws. Cultural preferences would essentially boil down to what's cool, normal, or typical and what isn't. Maybe one group really values the life cycle and tends to change into things typically associated with decay. Perhaps one group chooses to only shape shift into things that can process meat because herbivores too low for them.
I'd also give the mechanics of shape shifting differences. For example, perhaps one group are essential biomages, while the other are essentially druids.
[Answer]
**Have a feature/quirk that is not immediately physically apparent but could be used to "unmask" them via some sort of test.**
An example could be that the species' react differently to water. Species A may have skin that sags slightly more than normal in heavy rainfall/being dunked in a body of water, Species B may have skin that cracks or blisters more under these conditions and Species C could have water run right off them, remaining bone dry whatever the weather.
This is just an example, but something that would be easy to conceal (and in the case of A & B of the example, explained away by a skin condition), but something that those in the know would recognise could help distinguish the shapeshifters from one another. They'd be more likely to readily spot the differences themselves and it also gives the mere "muggles" a means of identifying them if the story requires.
[Answer]
What about a cultural preference or even requirement for what they change into? If I may reference the Wonder Twins from Super Friends, Zan transformed into forms of water, and Jayna transformed into animals. Perhaps each race has a better affinity to, say, carnivorous/predator, herbivorous/prey, and flying animals.
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If you want members of race A to have more affinity with members of their race than with B and C, you could just make it cultural. Maybe B and C murdered almost all members of A, which is why there are so few of them, so members of race A would have a profound hate for B and C, especially since this genocide isn't something that happened to previous generations, the race A members that are still alive were there and they held their loved ones in their arms as they died of thing-caused-by-races-B-and-C.
This would put to question the use of the word "race", but I think that saying "we of race A are the ones with the green eyes" doesn't sound as purposefully segregating as "we of race-or-some-other-word A are the survivors and descendants of the massacre of City A". This should be something to consider, because if you picked something like skin color, they would probably just ignore that very obvious difference and end up treating each other the same (like in a slightly hopeful version of our real world)
[Answer]
**Personality traits or non-appearance-based physiological attributes.**
For example, the average amount of sleep needed by the three races might be different by a few hours per day.
Different races might also have different capacities for digesting certain compounds (e.g. lactose/gluten for analogy to modern humans), be able to sense different compounds (e.g. the taste of cilantro), or have synesthesia with different associations.
Adequate rest and mental associations can be detected through psychological tests; the latter especially based on priming, coupled with proper incentives. Digestion differences could be detected by an analysis of digestive waste products, especially when combined with knowledge of the inputs.
The three races could also have different senses of humor or other personality factors that subtly distinguish *how* they communicate, work, and move through the world.
[Answer]
**Blood Type**
Humans have blood types A, B, AB, and O (oversimplification, I know but just go with it). Elves have blood types B, C, BC, and O. A Human with an A blood type can never reproduce with an Elf with a C blood type. Any other combination can have kids, though some will find it easier than others.
Now your shapeshifters are unique. One clan is always type A, one is always type B, and the last is always type C. If two of them reproduce, the child gets one of the two blood types, which also ends up their clan. As for their offspring with Humans/Elves, if the kid kids the shapeshifter's blood type, they are a shapeshifter. Any other blood type, and they are the mortal/solid race. And with the mortal races, the same blood type issues with reproduction could pop up (an A type shapeshifter can never have kids with a C type Elf).
This would also help them to blend in, unless they take the wrong shape (an a type shapeshifter becoming an Elf, for example).
Alternately, they could have blood types of X, Y, and Z, so that they can't even pass a blood test. You could then decide how hybridization impact blood types (is there an AX type?).
[Answer]
In the Witcher games and, I haven't read them, books there is a character named Dudu who is a doppler, essentially a shapeshifter.
From what I gather of the game he can only turn into humanoid things.
There are also elves, dwarves, and other races.
This part is the suggestion:
Maybe there is a human-doppler who can only turn into other humans;
an elf-doppler who can only turn into elves with pointed ears and so on.
A human-doppler or the human he turned into will never have pointed ears.
The dwarf-doppler will always be short, in doppler(natural) form or his shape-shifted form.
In the Witcher's case that is not true since, in the game, Dudu is naturally short but can turn into a human but your book maybe different.
[Answer]
This race of shapeshifters could be tied to a series of taboos, rituals and rules that they can not break. At best, these peculiarities would make them seem eccentric to mortals, and in the worst case could be confused with the symptoms of madness.
These taboos could be remnants of their previous divine condition, side effects of having to adapt their alien mental processes to the simple but obtuse life among mortals.
They could also be the price paid for living in exile: These shapeshifters perhaps needed a means to avoid being detected by their former enemies, or perhaps they discovered that by spending too much time in mundane forms the were at risk of become the mortals they imitated, as their divine nature and powers were progressively diluted and corrupted. Whatever the problem, they resorted to powerful mystical rituals to solve it, but in the process their souls and minds were scarred by the powerful magic.
These taboos and rituals are not the same for each individual, since they are deeply linked to the magic and traditions of each clan. They can range from relatively innocuous things like being unable to enter a house if you have not been invited or being unable to lie to much stranger things like getting sick if you do not return a favor before the next full moon or vomit after ingesting meat from a animal that you have not killed. They could even be unnatural things as only being able to conceive offspring in the hours after ingesting the throbbing heart of a deer.
In any case, the members of this race would have to work hard to disguise those behaviors, or perhaps adopt lifestyles where the impact of these is minimal. However, the impossibility of avoiding them altogether means that they always run the risk of being discovered by someone who knows exactly what to look for.
[Answer]
Differentiate them based on culture. On Earth, there is very little meaningful difference between humans worldwide at the biological level, but we've managed to divide ourselves into a couple hundred nations (plus subdivisions thereof) based mostly on culture. Your shifters indoctrinate their young into this culture during childhood. This isn't perfectly rigid, but it may be good enough for your purposes.
The other culturish option would be predisposition towards certain personalities. If you were using a D&D based structure, this would probably take the form of good/neutral/evil or lawful/neutral/chaotic, but you could easily go some other direction (friendly/helpful, suspicious/reserved, something else)
] |
[Question]
[
I am trying to write my first story and I'm having trouble imagining goods that would need a military convoy (included private) if they were to be transferred safely on a non-at-war soil. It doesn't matter how shiny the goods are, as long they have a big value on the black market.
Gold is used a lot in fiction, but it looks like it's not actually transferred a lot IRL, not in large enough quantities that would require a military escort. Collection of antiquities, maybe? Art? Expensive cars? Weapons probably get transferred a lot but that won't fit my story, as the goods will be eventually stolen, and thieves should be just thieves, not mass murderers.
(Edit) With military convoy I mean something alongside of: 10-20 armored trucks (medium/large) "shielding" the goods. Tanks would be cool but that would probably narrow down my choices a lot. Combat helicopters, at least 4. A unit of soldiers of 50-100 people.
Thank you in advance.
[Answer]
**Spent nuclear fuel.**
From [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KtWXg7oRHo):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GuXnH.jpg)
Spent fuel needs to go from where it was used to where it will be stored. These are convoys with [military escorts](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/transport-spenfuel-radiomats-bg.html).
>
> Transportation Security
>
>
> The NRC and the Department of Energy jointly operate a system to track
> domestic and foreign nuclear materials shipments. The NRC also
> requires those involved in spent fuel shipments to: Follow only
> approved routes; Provide armed escorts through heavily populated
> areas; Provide monitoring and redundant communications; Coordinate
> with law enforcement agencies before shipments; and Notify, in
> advance, the NRC, local tribes and states through which the shipments
> will pass.
>
>
>
There are probably 10 trucks in this convoy. Places along the way are on notice so helicopters could show up fast, though out in the middle of nowhere that might be local law enforcement. Drones would be a good idea to cruise at altitude and watch for incoming trouble.
Probably 4 soldiers per vehicle. Tanks would cost a fortune to take for a long drive so probably not them.
Possibly [some robots](https://www.newlaunches.com/archives/americas_national_nuclear_security_administration_has_robot_to_monitor_radioactive_waste_dump.php)?
If I were setting up an escort I would have some plainclothes persons on motorcycles some distance in advance of the convoy to scout for obstacles, suspicious groups etc. It would be exciting to have the drone see the advance motorcylists get into trouble.
---
OK, not nuclear fuel.
How about [this](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/4518/the-fascinating-anatomy-of-the-presidential-motorcade) for a military escort:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Htbck.png)
Lots and lots of cars. 8 motorcycles. Guns are there in plenty, all hidden. There will be helicopters for sure.
Here's the goods. **President Bartlett.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pu8Gy.png)
(From [here](https://westwing.fandom.com/wiki/20_Hours_in_America_(Part_I)).)
Your thieves steal the President. He is worth a lot to the government. Possibly more on the black market.
[Answer]
Hard drugs, if the value is high enough. When drugs are discovered by law enforcement the procedure is to destroy them, in some cases the drugs need for this purpose to be transferred to a garbage incinerator. Yet, when the quantity is large enough there exists a risk that the bad guys are trying to intercept these transports, so proper protection with helicopters and armored vehicles happens on occasion.
[Answer]
As others have pointed out, there's not much that needs that amount of protection. One thing does though: pride & reputation.
The items being transported don't have to be super-super important in the grand scale, but they need to be important *right now*, and important enough that a government is willing to put on a show to transport them.
Today, that might be Derek Chauvin being transported to court. Given a vaguely credible threat to his life, and a suggestion that it might be convenient for the government if he didn't reach court in one piece, you can easily imagine they might deploy an over-the-top showy response – both to deter potential attackers, and to ensure no-one can accuse them of not bothering. Whatever your views on the politics of it – keep it off this answer please! – you can see it's the kind of thing where tensions run high, and an over-the-top response might be called for.
Any prisoner involved in corruption, or holding state secrets might similarly have a big convoy.
If you want something other than prisoners, it doesn't need to be really important – it just needs to be something that the media have hyped up and the government needs to not lose face over. A statue or artwork which has become notorious/controversial. Something of value to a foreign power – a gift from Putin, which anti-russian demonstrators might seek to deface, which would incur anger from the Kremlin. A panda, to be protected from those protesting Chinese human rights issues. etc.
Or if you don't want something so 'controversial', the issue of losing face could come from a previous failure to protect it.
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You tend not to get large military convoys in developed countries for various reasons. And when you do they tend to be more military than economic.
Have you considered Africa, the middle east, or Central/Southern America?
Gold, weapons, literal containers full of cash (The US shipped, IIRC, several Billion dollars of cash to Afghanistan, and drug cartels also have large quantities that might theoretically get moved around en-masse).
Most of those countries are technically not at war, just somewhat unstable.
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**Alien SpaceShip !!!**
So, the **rumor** has it that, there is a crashed Alien Spaceship that is being transferred from a safe location to another.
The convoy has salvaged parts of the Alien SpaceShip, including its weapons systems, jet boosters, shield, and at least one alien dead body.
I don't need to mention how valuable these things could be for all types of people.
And the funny thing is, you may either put alien stuff in the convoy if your story allows, or it was just a rumor spread by some teenager who came to know about the convoy because his father was a part of it, and it all turned out to be a full-fledged war games exercise.
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Tanks, fighter jets and military helicopters. Nations sell these to each other all the time.
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> Weapons probably get transferred a lot but that won't fit my story, as the goods will be eventually stolen, and thieves should be just thieves, not mass murderers.
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You don't necessarily have to use these for mass murdering. A tank would do wonders if you wish to crack a bank vault open. No shots needed, use it as a ram and then as an escape vehicle/decoy, *Pay Day: the Heist* style.
In the US civilians can have tanks. Arnold Schwarzenegger has one and he famously lets you smash things with it for a fee. I suppose in the process of buying a tank from the armed forces you need to fetch it in a heavily guarded depot at the very least.
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>
> With military convoy I mean something alongside of: 10-20 armored trucks (medium/large) "shielding" the goods. Tanks would be cool but that would probably narrow down my choices a lot. Combat helicopters, at least 4. A unit of soldiers of 50-100 people.
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A convoy like that is going to be stupidly expensive. Nuclear waste and POTUS are likely the only two things in existence that would prompt a government to spend that much money on it. At least, it's the two I can think of (and that's [already an answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/178582/18896)).
Of course, a private company/person may use as large a convoy as they can afford... provided they find people willing to organise such a transfer. Any serious private security company would probably just recommend the bare minimum of trucks to fit all of the cargo, with a couple armed guards for each. If you were to ask them for a superconvoy, they'd probably not want the hassle or the risk associated with it without a bloody good reason.
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Let's look at the requirements.
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> 10-20 armored trucks (medium/large) "shielding" the goods.
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That's a lot of trucks. You may find that many vehicles in a few convoys, but certainly not all would be armoured trucks. For nuclear waste, the armour is strictly a function of containing radioactive material safely, and the truck is just a bog-standard truck. The rest of the escort would ride in military trucks or jeeps, which wouldn't need to be armoured. For POTUS, the only armoured vehicle in the convoy is the limo. The rest is once again just bog-standard vehicles, because the people inside just aren't *that* valuable.
To warrant a dozen trucks or two, **you would need to transport a lot of equipment**. It may be particularly big, or particularly heavy, or each piece may require to be isolated from others, but it's an unusually large quantity regardless.
No passenger transport would warrant that level of protection, and if it did you just wouldn't do it that way.
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> Tanks would be cool but that would probably narrow down my choices a lot.
> Combat helicopters, at least 4.
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Tanks are slow, tanks are not gentle on the pavement, and tanks are generally impractical for anything other than the combat they were designed for. You could replace them with some kind of Humvee with an anti-tank turret to keep a comparable firepower, but why?
Combat helicopters are also a bit overkill. You could have a couple in case of extreme emergency, but they would most likely be an stand-by at a nearby airfield rather than in the air constantly.
The big factor here is your threat model. What are you realistically expecting to fight that you need a tank and combat choppers *on your own soil* for? I can't really imagine a scenario where those would be useful, and so **I can't see a reason to bring that kind of weaponry or armour** in the equation.
What you would most likely have is an observation chopper flying above the convoy, another on stand-by to take over. A particularly large convoy may warrant doubling that number, with either choppers over front and back half of the convoy, or one above the convoy and one scouting ahead.
You could also imagine a couple helicopters with assault teams on stand-by, but there would be very little to be gained by having them in the air constantly that wouldn't be accomplished by having them in a jeep even just X minutes behind the convoy.
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> A unit of soldiers of 50-100 people.
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That much manpower probably comes with a convoy of that size naturally. If you have two dozen vehicles, put four people in each and that's already the required amount of guns. A convoy that big would require the cooperation of local police, and so some of the armed personnel in the convoy would have to be law enforcement rather than military or private security.
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Space shuttles and/or parts.
Space shuttles themselves are not too far removed from missiles, the tech is certainly military enough to warrant an escort, while not directly being weapons themselves. Parts can also be massive and require specialist moving equipment and additionally may require rolling road closures to be able to move to their intended destination. The military is pretty well set up and resourced to provide assistance for these sort of operations, although the escort will probably only be minimally armed, which may make theft easier.
For bonus points, how about an aerial heist? Military jets have been used to escort shuttles in flight, although again this was for logistical rather than protection reasons. A shuttle full of moon gold could be pretty valuable to the right buyer! <https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/57678/why-was-f-18-chosen-to-escort-space-shuttle-endeavour>
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# Captured military equipment.
Nation A has made a revolutionary breakthrough in (some tech).
Nation B has gotten their hands on a prototype. It is big. It has to be transported from one side of nation B to the other where there is a research laboratory equipped to examine it.
Nation A hires the thieves to destroy the prototype. They take the money, but secretly plan to sell the thing to nation C!
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**All of the above.**
I have a (smallish) frame challenge for you:
While it might be true that things like priceless art, gold etc etc are not *regularly* moved by military escorts, they very much can be (and are) when the situation warrants it. Somebody already mentioned the German gold as an example and similar examples can be found, and better still, *made up* without too much trouble.
A museum that's moved to another city, a bank that sits in a valley that will be flooded by a newly build dam, etc. etc.
It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a valid reason why "expensive stuff x" needs to be moved without breaking suspension of disbelieve, thus setting the stage for your (I assume) heist story.
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**A Columbian Drug Lord**
The thieves steal the truck without knowing the cargo and when they open the box find a South American man in the box who offers them $1B to get him free.
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**Data**
Data is one of the things you can steal and are worth a lot to the company/person you took it from.
AWS has a service that is called [Snowball](https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-petabyte-scale-data/services-costs/#:~:text=AWS%20Snowball,transfer%20times%2C%20and%20security%20concerns) for migrating Petabyte-Scale Data to the Cloud.
On an even bigger data transfer scale, there is the [Snowmobile](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/) truck that can migrate or transport exabyte-scale data sets into and out of AWS.
The Snowmobile has "...an optional escort security vehicle while in transit".
So if your company/person really likes to protect this data, they might wish to add some weapons and soldiers around this truck.
As commented below - in real life the data is encrypted. But for your story, you can have the thieves also steal the encryption key. Or have the data not encrypted for whatever reason.
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Next generation silicon chips which offer a major breakthrough in raw processing power to the point that generalized AI, real-time genetic folding, accurate stock market emulation and full sensory immersive virtual reality are now all possible. During the brief time that they are rare and/or unique, such chips will incarnate the highest concentration of value in recorded history.
If I had a dozen of them in a titanium briefcase, locked in an armored car full of armed guards, I would want that vehicle surrounded by tanks, escorted by helicopters (with support jets on standby) and watched by satellite surveillance during the whole journey. I would also want several thousand foot soldiers with support vehicles, working as a spear point, advancing ahead of my convoy to enforce a mandatory stay inside order for all civilian populace for however long the vehicle was within one hundred miles of their locations.
With all that in place, I might be willing to release the chips from the heavily armored and defended factory where they were made, but I would do so hesitantly, since anyone who successfully plunders this payload, will effectively own the future.
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The US has been increasingly worried that a foreign nation is going to get to an Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) before it does. The government, via the NSA, has set aside billions of dollars for a 'Manhatten Project' for AI. It secured five to ten of the top AI researchers in the world (possibly using the CIA to kidnap them or just bribery depending on how much of a backstory you wanted to create) to build a quantum computer that uses AI algorithms - the hardware and the software.
They've succeeded and the hardware requires specialized materials and tooling to exacting specifications that it would be very difficult to replicate. They sourced materials from various suppliers which keeps the end product secret.
The computer and manufacturing equipment need to be transported from Ft. Meade, MD (NSA Headquarters), a relatively low security installation, to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs (Air Force Base), probably one of the highest security installations in the country. The transportation security surrounding this piece of hardware would be on par with a nuclear weapon. It would make any country who can harness its power the most technologically advanced country on the planet. That technology could be used for good - to cure diseases and end hunger - or it could be used to create weapons, conventional or biological that would surpass any that other countries have.
That's a long trip with plenty of places for an ambush or for a carefully planned series of events that would eventually make the convoy vulnerable.
The buyers could be middle men who assure the thieves it will go to a country with only good intentions for curing diseases, world hunger, clean energy, the end to wars, etc. but in fact was actually a dictatorship or the thieves could actually be an organized crime syndicate (aka Sneakers - a Robert Redford film from 1992) - or a rogue billionaire (aka the deep state - or Swordfish - John Travolta film).
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**Corpses**
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8n3IskA-d4> (italian text, no spoken audio)
In sad recent times due to the COVID-19 pandemic cemeteries could not keep up, deceased had to be transported elsewhere for burial/cremation.
I don't have knowledge on the topic, but I'm sure there exists a lucrative black market for organs and body parts.
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As many many people have pointed out this doesnt really happen much, so you have to build your own a very specific situation where this applies.
Lets imagine a man, lets call him mister Turing. He's a bit of a loner but also a genius. He dies of a heart attack or something but when locals empty the house they discover a unique world-changing piece of technology without any paperwork on how it was build. For ease lets say he's developed a very advanced dumb AI that somehow fits in a few server cabinets (a full blown AI is too valuable). Lets say its a perfect dumb AI for cityplanning or spatial reasoning or something. By the time the government gets fully involved and realizes its value the news has already blown it to ridiculous proportions, and both companies and governments are... testing the less legal markets for the potential to aquire it.
This type of world-changing tech with worldwide attention is definitely going to need a big military escort. You can determine what it is. Maybe he build a cold fusion reactor in his car, or they found a small production facility for kilo's of perfect Graphene in any shape or form you want, a series of room-temperature Q-bits, a world-changing perfect supercapacitor, working spacecraft spike engines (which would require billions to get correctly). Just think of a potential science that could change the world if perfected and you've got your answer.
If you dont want this messing with the future of your story, you can claim that it is still being reverse-engineered or that it was so genius that they might have broken it (possibly during the heist) and cant figure out anymore how it works.
Otherwise I dont know what non-military object would require even half the escort you describe.
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**Cash.**
Paper money is produced in bulk, and has to leave the factory for distribution to banks at some point.
I have no inside info, but I assume it regularly leaves in bulk, with much more of an escort than your regular big-town armored cash truck.
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I have to add this, simply because I had a whole little scenario set up between warring factions.
In this case, it was **Sourdough Starter**.
The two factions were famous for their sourdough because the local planets flora/fauna made their sourdough especially desirable for off planet shipment as a desirable luxury. But, at the same time, they are considered critical trade secrets to the clans.
Clan Karsen, due to expansion, needs to move raw material sourdough starter from the mother region to a bakery local to the Space port. They've found that they can not maintain quality locally at the Space port, as sourdough starter is typically refreshed every day. But here, only in the mother valleys and their local biome can the starter truly retain the quality.
So, every week the starter necessary for the weekly production run is moved under military escort from the Clans home valley to the Space port bakeries.
Sourdough starter, it's a big deal on Planet Epsilon V.
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## The military convoy IS what you are transporting
In reality, there is nothing that warrants that kind of escort on friendly soil. Even a President or Nuclear waste does not get that kind of firepower simply because any threat big enough to challenge a force 1/4 of what you are describing would be impossible to mobilize without going noticed by local law enforcement.
That said, it is not uncommon for military factories or bases to need to transport large amounts of heavy weaponry from point A to point B. When the army needs to move big things like tanks, helicopters, etc. They typically are moving more than one; so, they form up into a large convoy and just drive where they are going. (Or at-least far enough to get to the railroad station/port which will take them the rest of the way.)
Now, since you've mentioned you don't want the thieves to be evil arms dealers, you just need to think of what sorts of things might be a part of a military convoy that might have civilian applications. While a single piece of military grade, non-weapons hardware might not seem super valuable, its value as something that could be reverse engineered by the right civilian company could be worth millions if not billions of dollars. The cameras used to detect inbound RPGs might be what Tesla needs to make self-driving cars function in bad whether. The chip set from a stolen smart shell might help Google make a new generation of Android phones that can survive getting hit by a sledge hammer, or the power cell stolen from a military exo-suit might help Energizer produce a new battery that really does keep going and going and going.
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Two thoughts:
1. I though one of the answers was about to name it, and then they didn't.
Something of immense national pride. Say the US National Archives was being moved from Washington DC to Ohio. Some of the documents are irreplacable and have quite elaborate security where they are. Moving them -- especially if several terrorist organizations felt that destroying or stealing them would be the coup of the century -- would be a big deal. Similarly, imagine Russia were moving Lenin's body, etc.
2. Does the convoy actually have to exist in a single place? When a high-value convoy goes through, all of the cars are not necessarily on the road next to the target. If they take an interstate, there may be a police car on every overpass for 20 miles. There may be teams of lead vehicles that leap-frog each other stopping at anything on the shoulder -- construction cones, etc -- looking for bombs. There may not be 4 helicopters all visible at once, but along a 50-mile route, there could easily be five helicopters doing various things.
Once the strike begins, these forces would converge, if possible. But you're not going to have all of them running in a massive parade. And if you're smart, you would not want them to. Defense in depth. Eyes out ahead, and all.
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# Weapons of Mass Destruction
Wouldn't the military usually own such things outright? Yes. Typically they wouldn't be 'escorting' the material, they'd simply be 'transporting' military property. But not always.
The military employs a large (uh) army of contractors and gets a lot of technical expertise from outside firms like Boeing. As for biological weapons, the government [can't even tell you how many labs are working on them](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/28/biolabs-pathogens-location-incidents/26587505/).
So it's not impossible that because of a bureaucratic snafu, some private lab could end up working on something they probably wouldn't have even had, in a perfect world. Then some unrelated safety incident spooks the top brass, who finally get around to untangling all the paperwork. Only to find that *holy hell* why is this extremely dangerous biological agent being stored in an unsecured facility? No, it can't stay there, no way, no how. Get it moved to Fort MacGuff. Yesterday.
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## The convoy was going that way anyway
The army base was planning a convoy anyway, to train guards / move equipment. Maybe the MacGuffin could have been transported with an armoured car and a few guards, but the base commander let the armoured car tag along with a convoy as it cost him nothing and might add some variety to an otherwise boring operation.
This has the benefit that it could explain a few tanks (on tank transporters and without ammo) which would otherwise be difficult to justify.
## A top-secret unknown item
The plot of [Pulp Fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction) revolves around the recovery of a briefcase - which is opened, but the viewers never learn the contents. Your convoy could be transporting a *mystery item* and you could let the reader draw their own conclusions.
Or it could be a **techno-thriller MacGuffin** like a secret quantum computer that's going to bust encryption on the internet wide open (the plot of the film [Sneakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film))).
## A trillion-dollar coin
During one of the innumerable American government shutdowns, it was proposed that the president could bypass congress by minting a [trillion-dollar coin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin) - which he could do without congressional approval. There are also real (but not circulating) [Bank of England £100,000,000 notes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England_%C2%A3100,000,000_note).
There was [a Simpsons episode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Trillions) centering around a stolen trillion-dollar bill that Truman printed for the reconstruction of post-WW2 Europe
Needless to say, you'd need to explain how the thief could ever spend such a coin, and why the government wouldn't simply demonetise it. On the plus side, cash is sometimes exempt from receipt-of-stolen-goods laws.
## Truckloads of $100 bills
[Back in 2003](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1):
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> In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million
> notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad
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> the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of
> $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the
> handover.
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> "One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag
> stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. ... Cash payments
> were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in
> unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices.
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> Millions of civil
> service families had not received salaries or pensions for months and
> there was no effective banking system.
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It sounds made up, but if your story said the army was regularly picking up shipments of $2 billion in bank notes from New York? Actually not that far from the truth! I'm not aware that they used convoys as large and heavily armed as you want, but this at least explains why it would be guarded by the army rather than the police or secret service.
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The first (or at least an early) delivery of a vaccine (or wonder treatment) for covid 19 to a country. Vunerable to attack and potentially has a 'good guy' plot to it ('we need to steal it for these orphans')
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On a fictional planet far away from our own, there is a part plant, part animal creature of truly massive proportions embedded in the sand of a desert-like portion of the planet, kinda like a cross between Dune's sandworm and Star War's sarlacc. Its mouth remains closed, sitting just below the surface and covered in sand until it senses a victim above it.
At this point, the creature's mouth opens, and the sand falls into the creature's throat, along with any hapless victims that may have been on the sand (kinda like the 'death from below' attack used by a sandworm on a spice harvester in both the trailer of the latest Dune movie and the movie itself). Tentacles within the throat reach through the sand, grabbing all living things within a certain size range (by the way, humans of all ages and sizes fall within the aforementioned size range) and ensuring that anything stuck on, carried by, or attached to the grabbed victims (such as parasites, clumps of sand, or in the case of humans, clothing or equipment) is removed. Once this is done (it typically takes just under a minute), the creature vomits everything not grabbed by the tentacles up out of its mouth and high into the sky above it, and then shuts its mouth. The falling sand then lands on top of the creature's closed mouth, and the trap resets. As an added bonus, anything of value also lands atop the mouth, serving as bait for more prey.
Once this is done, the prey grabbed by the tentacles are then swallowed, but they don't go to the stomach like one would expect. Instead, they are shunted into a sizeable network of cavern-like organs. There aren't any exits swallowed prey can reach, but the prey are pretty much free to wander around in this biological cave system. Even more bizarre, one can actually survive for quite a long while in there; the air quality, while not the best, is still breathable, and one can get all the nutrients they need to survive. Living in this creature is possible, though doing so could potentially be dangerous and certainly won't be pleasant.
Of course, all this raises a pretty big question; **What would be a plausible reason for this creature to keep the prey it captured alive and roaming around freely in a network of cavern-like internal organs instead of just digesting its prey?**
Note that I haven't decided HOW the thing keeps its prey alive in there, though I'm leaning towards it producing air via low-light photosynthesis and providing saliva for water and nutrient-dense globules of a nectar like substance for food.
The setting is sci-fi, though some “scientifically unexplainable” aspects are acceptable.
Note also that I've yet to establish the thing's origins. It could have naturally evolved, but it could also have been produced by hyper-advanced aliens that specialized in genetic engineering.
EDIT: This doesn't affect many of the answers already out there TOO much, but it's important to note that this thing is STATIONARY. It doesn't burrow around through the sand like a sandworm, it sits in one place like a sarlacc.
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The worm doesn't actually eat its prey. It has low-light photosynthesis, and a lot of body surface, and surprisingly little metabolic need, so it gets by on sunlight and a bit of detritus for nitrogen and phosphorus, somewhere between a plant and a placid ruminant.
Worm larvae, however, are very, very carnivorous. From egg to wormling, they must grow in size by several orders of magnitude. They do so quickly, competitively, and violently. Nothing but the highly calorie-dense flesh of fresh animals is nutritious enough for the little tykes, who hatch inside their worm mother beclawed and ravenous. The details of worm reproduction are too salacious for this website, but suffice to say that opportunities for romance are far and between, and worm mom wants to make sure she's always ready to give her eggs the absolute best start in life - if nothing else to make sure the wormlings, maddened by hunger, don't start eating *her* from the inside out.
Her bowel-chambers are, effectively, her larder. After all, nothing prevents spoiling better than keeping the captured prey alive. In fact, she can even afford to fatten them with the sugary nectar she secretes (sugar, for a photosynthesiser, is effectively free). Fat is even more calorie-dense than muscle or carbs, and the larvae go absolutely bonkers for bit of grease. Living larders are rather common among animals (wasps being big fans of the technique), and would explain why the worm not only fails to digest her prey, but actually goes through some active effort to keep them alive. Your adventurers will have all the time they need to settle in this smelly, but ultimately comfortable situation.
Of course, at some point, the eggs will hatch.
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# Indirect Nutrition and Food Storage
This creature doesn't actually digest the prey, it digests their by-products. It is, essentially, a massive detritivore (eats dead things and feces).
IRL, leaf cutter ants actually eat a fungus that grows in their nests, not the leaves they collect! A similar strategy can apply here—this creature is not collecting food, but a means to produce food.
In more detail, this massive creature would make some sense when it does not drive nutrition directly from what it captures. Instead, it feasts on their by products, like excrement and other decaying matter. The things running around in its gut are just "food storage", like a crop in ants or mother birds.
Speaking of crops, there are many creatures that store food for later somehow. Like an ant's crop, shrikes leaving food on cacti for later, etc. Your creature has a massive crop, which appears to be cave like structures.
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## Predators like humans are a symbiotic part of its immune system.
The giant worm is actually a [chemotroph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph); so, it has no need to actually eat animals at all... in fact it is so big under the surface that eating animals would simply never provide enough food to sustain it. It actually gets its energy from geo-thermal fissures deep under ground. However, this organism is prone to rodent and insect infestations that eat giant worm from the inside out. The worm has no natural defense against these animals; so, they have formed a symbiotic relationship with various predatory species to keep pest populations in check. So when the sandworm gets an infestation, it goes to the surface and waits until it feels an animal moving around above and swallows it, examines it to see if it might be a predator, and if its a predator, it swallows it if it is not, it rejects it.
Once swallowed, the worm has a series of bladders it can inflate or pinch off to lead the predator thorough its body to get it to where the infestations are and then lets the predator eat the parasites.
Part of what makes the inside of a worm so dangerous is not that it is an inherently inhospitable place, after all, the worm wants to keep you alive... it's that the worm tends to gather quite the collection of predators over time. If swallowed you have to be very careful to keep the worm happy with your presence. If you go around trying to eat the worm or starting a fire or what not, then the worm may perceive you as a parasite and start redirecting all the wolves, lions, snakes, etc. that it's also eaten in your general direction.
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**It is a vehicle.**
The organism is a semisynthetic engineered thing; a vehicle for travelling through space and on various planetary surfaces. It is not eating the organisms that come knocking at the door. It is letting them in. The cavern like areas are where the passengers and crew once resided.
The sentients that designed this living vehicle are long departed. This vehicle organism was left where it is. Perhaps it was malfunctioning. Perhaps the original crew and passengers disembarked and did not come back. Over the years it has become buried. It still lets organisms enter.
They can leave too, but not by accident. They need to know how the thing works. It might still be able to do other things too. It has been a long time since anyone has asked it the right way.
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For the same reason why we leave cheese or wine or ham age into humid and cold cellars: it improves their flavor and make it more sophisticated.
The creature is a fine connoisseur of food, and each has its own taste when it comes to seasoning: some like a few days aged "food", some other prefer a more robust, months aged mouthful.
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# Can’t get enough of the Stuff
In the movie [The Stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stuff#:%7E:), a calorie-free delicious food-like substance oozes out of the ground, and those that eat it are gradually consumed from within.
Your organism follows the same principle. There is very little energy available to waste on digestion, so this way the food digests itself. All this area is, in fact, a stomach - just not an active one. It can only eat the nectar that “feeds” the prisoners, and the prisoners consume the nectar and are slowly transformed into nectar from within. They start out free- willed, but once the transformation goes far enough, they voluntarily jump into the stomach for the final digestion as the nectar controls their brains. Or, perhaps, they die and dissolve into a puddle of nectar that is absorbed through the "floor." The nectar may provide some caloric benefit, keeping them alive for a time, but eventually it erodes the mind.
The creature recycles some nectar to “feed” the next prey. The nectar takes the place of digestive bacteria in your creature’s food cycle.
* The nectar may have a narcotic effect, if desired. It may be addictive, so prey don't WANT to leave. The more you eat, the more you rest or pass out, awakening hungry. Or it may be a stimulant, increasing aggression towards any other living things inside the creature (but again, if addictive, no one wants to kill the creature supplying pleasurable nectar)
* The nectar, as an organism, may provide some nutritional benefit calorically (enough to keep the prey alive until the transformation is complete). Since it is gradually taking over the prey, there is likely little residue. If the organism's chief goal is to obtain trace nutrients from the prey, then keeping prey alive to kill other prey simplifies the process. Dead prey becomes nectar, getting eaten by the creature or by the prey, and concentrating nutrients. Living prey kill others, and if strong enough to survive for long, they eventually become controlled and bring both calories and nutrients to the stomach.
* If your creature is intelligent, this may be an ethics issue. Perhaps your creature can't ethically kill and eat anyone who doesn't agree to be eaten. By infecting them with the nectar that gradually creates a compulsion to crawl into the stomach and be digested, the creature gains a sort of consent to be eaten from it's prey. While WE wouldn't consider this consent, who knows about the ethics of a giant passive desert predator?
* Smart and cagey prey might avoid directly eating the nectar, instead consuming the other prey (and avoiding nectar growths in the killed prey). This way, an intelligent prey might live as a hunter semi-indefinitely within the environment of the creature.
[Answer]
## The worm is a carnivorous geoautotroph
The "cavern" consists of worm appendages that spread out along the hardpan at the bottom of the sand. The "mouth" is submerged just beneath the surface. Between, the immense mechanical strength of the worm's integument allows a spacious conduit for ordinary air (a mixture of oxygen, carbon dioxide, neon, and argon). The worm gets its energy by exchanging heat - its interior is much cooler than the deep sand, and much hotter than the exposed surface of the planet. Note that the serpentine sands of this planet are strongly insulating, allowing a much steeper gradient of heat to build up than is normally seen on Earth.
The planet is significantly less massive than Earth, so nearly all of its hydrogen and much of its nitrogen have been lost. There are no oceans - water is precious and hoarded by lifeforms. There is little nitrogen in the atmosphere, so nitrogen fixation is hard and the element is in very high demand. The worm consumes organisms strictly to maintain their nitrogen reserve for biosynthesis. Since the worm has extensive nitrogen reserves in its body, it normally can leave ingested organisms unmolested.
The possibility of parasitic disease causes the worm to minimize its exposure to the surface air. Anything it eats that doesn't taste like nitrogen will be rapidly expelled, and it normally exchanges heat through a closed mouth, with no direct passages to the surface.
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Those consumed perform a role similar to the micro-fauna within human-range bodies. At the scale of this worm, normal cellular level operations are insufficient.
* Transferring larger objects
+ **Pollination**
- Internal components of this creature are so far apart that reproduction requires "internal fruits" to be produced move things around, or even allow some creatures to escape
+ **Circulation**
- Animal-assisted compression of tissues helps circulation, allowing diffusion to play a larger role in resource transfer
+ **Excretion**
- Transportation and isolation of toxic byproducts of the worm
* Interacting with smaller objects
+ **Immune System**
- Defending against e.g. a mold inside which releases toxins harmful to both the creatures inside as well as the worm
+ **Digestion**
- The natural processes of animals can help produce certain "vitamins" (uric acid, muscle tissue, bones, hair), by breaking down or building up more basic ones. Human-intelligence creatures may also provide more complex reactions, such as fire
* Meta-operations
+ **Nervous System**
- The creatures inside can collectively form triggering mechanisms, similar to hormones or even neurons.
[Answer]
The consumed are actually forcefully employed as symbiots. The creatures attacked can live within the sarlac-like, but there are other creatures that naturally invade and colonize the sarlac. The "fruit" found inside the sarlac provide adequate nutrition for the symbiots, along with many of the unwanted colonizers also being edible. Ideally, the sarlac is truly looking for creatures that WANT to colonize it, exchanging the unknown random dangers of the surface world for the fairly monotonous dangers of keeping the sarlac healthy.
In times past, perhaps before this region became a desert, there was a surface dwelling species evolved for this, with one of their coming-of-age rituals being the annual "taking below". That species is long gone, and the sarlac adapted by taking a wider variety of creatures, but it's much more of a hit-or-miss scenario now. It's even possible that the symbiot species/race didn't go extinct, but instead simply moved to better grounds. It's possible that forest-dwelling relatives of the desert sarlac-ish still live, but are less well known due to not being a threat. The forest dwelling species still exclusively "feeds" on their approved symbiot, so haven't come under the general scrutiny that the desert variety has.
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**It's trying to digest you, but humans are immune to its poison**
The organism produces a gas that is poisonous to creatures native to its planet, but humans aren't native to this planet. The gas is unpleasant smelling but very common on earth, so humans won't die from inhaling it.
The creature swallows you into its labyrinthine stomach fully expecting you to die within hours, but if you can stomach the smell you can easily survive by eating the monster's asphyxiating prey.
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# The prey aren't the target of the digestion, they're the thing that help digestion move along.
This is mainly inspired by human babies, that may breastfeed even when essentially full or habitually suck on things, specifically to get their digestive systems moving better. So in this situation, if we apply it to the Sarlac-like, we could make a few specific differences that might help:
1.) Carbon dioxide works as a laxative for the Sarlac-like, and while the Sarlac-like generates some carbon dioxide by breathing normally, it tends to exhale it, and not have nearly enough carbon dioxide leftover to help with the digestive process. Humanoids that are captured around the organs, however, will gladly breathe through the leftover oxygen in the canals and produce carbon dioxide, which then filters its way down to the rest of the digestive system, and as a result, they directly help the digestive system. The Sarlac-like then only needs to breathe in and avoid consuming extra oxygen to keep the humans breathing without difficulties.
2.) The act of humanoids walking around, moving about, or reacting to pimples on the inside around the organs causes the humanoids to perform actions that release digestive enzymes that would also end up going down further into the digestive process. This works for the Sarlac-like because they can't reach pimples around in their internal organ areas, but also because humanoids likely panic at seeing human-sized or larger pimples extruding from caverns. The more survivalist and aggressive the humanoid, the better.
Granted, this might be a lot of work for a digestive system, but there is one potential other advantage that a Sarlac-like would find useful in the future:
## When they aren't helping digestion move along, they act as a contracted immune system.
3.) The humanoids, especially the survivalist and aggressive ones, are likely to also work additionally as sort of contract white blood cells. As long as the Sarlac-like doesn't let on that they're actually not in as much danger as the humanoids presume, this means they basically get an immune system boost.
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**Conserving Energy**
This creature is huge. This presents a problem - all of its body needs nutrients and energy, but it takes a whole lot of energy to get the food from the mouth to the tail. A creature that large cannot sustain a full body circulatory system just feeding on scraps. However, if you leave the food alive, it will spread itself out all on its own - it needs to look for food to stay alive, so it has to keep exploring deeper and deeper into the digestive tract. When it finally does starve, wherever it falls, that area of the body will absorb the nutrients from its decaying corpse. Or some other bit of food will come eat it and bring it even deeper.
This can also be used to the worm's benefit deliberately. It has no circulatory system, so it has to use its prey to transport anything that needs to get from point A to point B. Does your tail need potassium? Easy, make some potassium rich hunk of meat fall off of your front stomach, some unfortunate human eats it, and carries the potassium to the back stomach. If it doesn't get all the way, rinse and repeat. Normally you don't want stuff to eat part of your body, but it's a closed system - the nutrients and energy never leave your stomach.
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[
In my setting there's a lack of sulfur, simply put. Don't ask for the specifications, just assume that whatever amount there is, it is likely better off used in dietary supplements for the shortage of it.
Without access to this, what other propellants would humans use?
If possible, I'd like to know how effective those would be compared to gunpowder.
Edit for context: I am most concerned about the pre-industrial period. I appreciate those telling me about railguns and superheated water, but you need to walk before you can run and I want to figure out what everyone's doing for the 500-700 years before contemporary science makes those plausible.
[Answer]
**Gunpowder with a different ignitor than sulfur.**
[A primer on explosives for coal miners. US Geological Survey Bulletin 1911](https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/UserFiles/works/pdfs/bul017.pdf)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qu4wr.png)
The heavy lifting in gunpowder is done by charcoal (the fuel) and potassium nitrate (the oxidant). Sulfur is in there because it is easily ignited, and it then ignites the charcoal.
In your sulfur deficient world people use different accelerants. Distilled alcohol is a common one, and alcohol in this role is sometimes doped with turpentine. Long term gunpowder storage is in glass bottles or tarred kegs. For cannons, glass bottles of gunpowder in alcohol are broken into the cannon or hole before wadding and ball, or powder is scooped out of the keg and used as a wet paste. For rifles the gunpowder is parcelled out before expected use into waxed paper envelopes. The alcohol evaporates from these over a week or two.
I am very pleased this question led me to find the primer on explosives for coal miners linked above. I love the way they wrote in 1911.
[Answer]
I present you a real weapon used in real wars, made in 1779.
**The Girardoni air rifle.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yzVHu.png)
It was not merely an experimental curiosity, it was mass-produced and was in active military service for decades. It had a much higher rate of fire than muskets, and although less powerful, it was still lethal at the ranges typical musket engagements were fought at.
The downsides were that it was much more maintenance-heavy and expensive, so they went back to traditional gunpowder after a few decades of use, because it was much more practical to have cheaper guns any soldier could repair in the field, than having delicate and complex weapons which required specialized training to maintain.
But with gunpowder lacking completely or in extremely short supply, I can't see any reason against a more widespread adoption of these guns.
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Steam or compressed air come immediately to mind.
It doesn't take long to figure out that a heated container with water inside will end up exploding. It might not be as handy as black powder, so it might not out-compete bows until other explosives are discovered or compressed air is made available.
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[As Willk notes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/241346), it's apparently possible to make working gunpowder without sulfur, it's just hard to ignite.
However, if your civilization really has no access to gunpowder at all (maybe due to lack of usable sources of [saltpeter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate)?), they could just jump straight to what was historically the next step in gun propellants in our world: **[guncotton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose)** (nitrocellulose).
Making guncotton basically just requires some way to produce concentrated [nitric acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitric_acid) — which of course might be a problem if your world is poor in nitrates such as saltpeter. But there are several different ways of producing nitric acid (the [modern process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostwald_process) starts with ammonia, but you can also make it [literally from thin air](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland%E2%80%93Eyde_process)) and it's at least conceivable that, without easily mineable saltpeter deposits, your civilization might stumble upon a practical way to make and concentrate nitric acid before figuring out gunpowder.
Of course you can *make* saltpeter from nitric acid, once you have it, by reacting it with some source of potassium. But once you have nitric acid, you might well discover guncotton before gunpowder.
In particular, once you have nitric acid and some brave chemists playing with it, the discovery of guncotton seems all but inevitable. To quote the Wikipedia article I linked above:
>
> Around 1846 Christian Friedrich Schönbein, a German-Swiss chemist, discovered a more practical formulation. As he was working in the kitchen of his home in Basel, he spilled a mixture of nitric acid (HNO3) and sulfuric acid (H2SO4) on the kitchen table. He reached for the nearest cloth, a cotton apron, and wiped it up. He hung the apron on the stove door to dry, and as soon as it was dry, a flash occurred as the apron ignited. His preparation method was the first to be widely used. The method was to immerse one part of fine cotton in 15 parts of an equal blend of sulfuric acid and nitric acid. After two minutes, the cotton was removed and washed in cold water to set the esterification level and to remove all acid residue. The cotton was then slowly dried at a temperature below 40 °C (104 °F). Schönbein collaborated with the Frankfurt professor Rudolf Christian Böttger, who had discovered the process independently in the same year.
>
>
> By coincidence, a third chemist, the Brunswick professor F. J. Otto had also produced guncotton in 1846 and was the first to publish the process, much to the disappointment of Schönbein and Böttger.
>
>
>
Note the independent (and at least partly accidental) discovery by *three* chemists at almost the same time! This strongly implies that it was very much a case of it being ["steam engine time"](https://fancyclopedia.org/Steam_Engine_Time_(concept)), with the conditions simply being right for the discovery to be made by *someone* experimenting with the available chemicals, rather than the discovery itself being the chance result of some particularly uncommon luck or effort.
Of course, after guncotton was discovered, there was still a considerable amount of further innovation and refinement to be done to deal with issues such as [storage stability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Nitrocellulose_decomposition_and_new_%22safety%22_stocks) and to produce improved types of ["smokeless powder"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder) such as [ballistite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistite) (a combination of nitroglycerine, and guncotton) and [cordite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordite) (nitroglycerine, guncotton, petroleum jelly and later nitroguanidine). But that's not fundamentally different from the gradual refinements and improvements made to gunpowder after its discovery too.
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It is possible that firearms aren't even used. Gunpowder has historically been fairly easy to produce and manufacture at scale, and while other responses such as coilguns, steam, and railguns are interesting to consider, they are often highly complex and fairly difficult to manufacture at scale, especially for an evolving economy or society. Coilguns and railguns in particular require rare earth materials that are unlikely to be found without advanced drilling and mining techniques, but historically mining was often done with - you guessed it - gunpowder.
In my opinion, it's likely that the primary source of weaponry in a sulfur-less environment would take the form of **rockets** - rocket propellants, such as ammonium/potassium compounds plus aluminum and oxides, are considerably more plentiful than REMs and their launch mechanisms involve fewer moving parts than many other forms of weaponry. Liquid propellants, such as nitric acid (TNT, which doesn't involve sulfur), and hydrogen peroxide, are also fairly inexpensive to produce relative to the amount of damage they can cause.
In my opinion the most likely scenario is a compressing of rockets into small explosive shells that can be fired from a device roughly the size of a rifle or a handgun. Such a device would probably be little better than an 18th-century musket, but consistent evolution in this field would likely enable the miniaturization of these devices and increased rate of fire and reload time.
[Answer]
## They might stick with bows and crossbows a lot longer
### Black powder weapon advantages
There are basically two advantages to early gunpowder-based weapons, that both turned out to be quite useful in early modern Europe, and led to further development:
#### Siege weapons
Early modern Europe had mostly small armies, and lots of castles with tall but relatively thin walls that were easy to defend with small garrisons. These are almost uniquely vulnerable to early cannon. It took some time to develop cannon to the point where they could rapidly and reliably batter down those walls, but once that was achieved, walls suddenly turned out to be almost useless. (this didn't apply in china, as they mostly used much thicker walls, filled with earth)
This led to the development of fortifications with thicker, lower walls, but those couldn't rely on the difficulty of scaling them, so you instead needed a large garrison that could effectively threaten attackers. That leads us to the second advantage:
#### Guns are easy (relatively speaking)
That's not to say that a gun is trivial to make, to make ammunition for, or to operate, but it is *much* faster and easier to train a peasant to use a gun than it is to train him to use a (war)bow. So if you suddenly find yourself in a situation where you need to massively expand your army, and arm them with ranged weapons (spears are cheap and easy, but they won't help you much when defending a star fort), in order to defend your fortifications, they're the best option you have. This was very much the case in early modern Europe.
### So what happens without black powder?
#### Later guns
Well, if the industrial revolution happens, as [Ilmari Karonen](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/241377/37575) says, eventually nitric acid will lead to the development of guncotton and other suitable explosives. That will almost inevitably lead to guns. Earlier, the development of pressure vessels might give you [airguns](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/241386/37575), but until either of those are compelling enough to force a switch, armies might continue to use and further refine bows and crossbows.
#### State formation
Gunpowder-based warfare was very important to the political history of Europe. Without it, the nation-states that you know might not exist, which all sorts of knock-on effects.
#### The industrial revolution
For instance, the industrial revolution might not have happened there, or at all. In Britain, it required large coal deposits, the depletion of forests (for firewood and charcoal), the existing knowledge of early pressure vessels (from black powder weapons), all contained in a large state doing lots of trade (so greatly increasing production of, well, anything, wouldn't crater prices), allowing early "burn coal to power a very inefficient pump to drain the coal mine so you can dig up more coal" engines to be developed and adapted to power factories.
[Answer]
## Coilguns
Actually, it depends on how advanced these beings are. Assuming a level of advancement below or only barely that of modern humans, I would go for the compressed-air device suggested by L. Dutch above. However, as technology advances, there may be a better option.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gp9Bm.jpg)
Meet the coilgun: this bad boy works by using magnetic forces to accelerate a projectile to supersonic speeds. Effective? Uh, did I say supersonic? This device is basically a handheld mass driver. Okay, so we don’t quite have these puppies yet, but hey, maybe your civilisation is farther ahead than us, tech-wise.
[Answer]
## Mechanical Tension/Compression weapons
Prior to the advent of firearms, their nearest equivalent was probably the Crossbow and its bigger cousin, the Ballista.
Take a strip of bendy metal or wood, pull back the end via cords and possibly a winch.
Basically an adaptation of the slingshot for enhanced power and accuracy.
A well-made crossbow could put a metal bolt straight through the best body armour of the time at any range you could reasonably expect to hit at.
More than sufficient as a weapon of war, and substantially easier to train with than the Longbow it competed with. It made ranged combat something that could be done by minimally trained Militia and Helots rather than life-long professional bowmen.
You might also explore the Discworld concept of the Spring-Gonne. A spring-powered compact crossbow.
This concept may also be found in Frank Herbert's Dune in the form of the Maula Pistol. A spring-powered dart-gun loaded with poison darts.
Springs tend to pack a lot less force than a crossbow, in large part due to inefficiencies in the spring and challenges in manufacture, but they're excellent options with light projectiles.
[Answer]
In the context of your setting, guns just wouldn't be used before the industrial age, where mass-producible alternatives to gun-powder would by readily available.
People would stick with alternatives, such as repeating crossbows ---the real-world chinese army used those until 17-hundred-and-then-some.
[Answer]
If humans had no access to gunpowder, they would likely use alternative forms of propulsion for firearms, such as:
1. **Springs or compressed air**
2. **Nitrogen-powered combustion**
3. **Pneumatic or hydraulic pressure**
4. **Electrical or magnetic systems**
5. **Rocket propulsion**
These alternatives would provide the necessary energy to propel a projectile out of the barrel of a firearm.
[Answer]
**Ye Old Elastic Materials**
Since before the first gun, humans have used the principles of elasticity to fling sharpened sticks or small-to-medium stones at each other or at animals they wish to send back to their respective culture's creator.
Slingshots and Bows should suffice and don't use any chemical or electrical propellents, the ammo is even reusable, mostly.
Bows take more skill and strength to use, but you can train any old peasant to use a crossbow and children can learn how to fling a rick with a slingshot, plus the projectile is slow
[Answer]
The Sims-Dudley Dynamite Gun was tested in the Spanish American War:
<https://www.spanamwar.com/dynamite>
With a different source of compressed air (it used a small black powder charge to throw shells) something like the Dynamite Gun might work for you.
If your world has lots of electricity to spare, consider calcium carbide:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbide>
... which produces acetylene when wetted, delivering a pretty good bang:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_cannon>
[Answer]
There are plenty of air rifles available now, which, with a little tinkering, can produce pressures high enough to make them deadly to humans. They're only usually under-powered because of government regulation (speaking of the UK here). You could quite easily produce a deadly airgun. It's just a bit of plumbing and a bit of clockwork.
Before that, we used tension. Bows and arrows, and catapults. Crossbows were particularly deadly, armour-piercing even. To tension them ready for firing often took the strength of the soldier's whole body, putting their foot in a loop at the bottom and using a strong lever to pull the string back. The energy was stored in the springy steel.
EDIT: Browsing about steam-powered guns, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_cannon> there were a few. Not great successes but if there'd been no gunpowder, perhaps they'd have put more work into developing them.
[Answer]
Strong rubber bands (i.e. slingshots, or sling bows) could be a viable alternative, specifically if used in combination with some kind of device that allows tensioning them while investing less muscle power.
This guy might give you some ideas:
[Joerg Sprave - @Slingshotchannel - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZlxkKqlvVqzRJXhAGq42Q)
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[
I was once in a roleplaying campaign where time machines had this odd quality. None of us knew why; we abstracted that as stuff the characters knew. But is there any (pseudo)scientific justification for this?
A time machine is limited in how far back in time it could go. (It *might* have a similar limit in the future.) Note this isn't a temporal range limit. It's not "can't jump back more than 100 years at once." It's "can't get me to a time before 1919, regardless of when I jump from." And no, these aren't time machines that stay at their starting point and launch you to another time; they're your much-more-common-in-fiction time machine that's a vehicle, leaving no physical object behind. And it's not that there's some barrier in time affecting all time travel: a newer, more advanced time machine could go back to an earlier year. Rather than being like an aircraft's range limit, it's like an aircraft's service ceiling.
*edit:* No, the time limit wasn't the date the time machine was made; it was always something far in the past.
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The time-machine's dependent on its `reference core`, a thing from the past that can be dated back to a certain period or even point-in-time (e.g. a painting, book, pebble).
The more historically/culturally significant a thing is, the better it works for time travel. While a pebble or rock can bring you back millions of years, the machine will easily drift off the target time by tens of thousands of years due to the insignificance of the chosen reference core.
Instead e.g. a painting by *Leonardo da Vinci* would be as perfect a reference core as they come and allow pinpoint accuracy.
---
The historical/cultural significance of a reference object is determined by the interactions of sentient/feeling/whatever beings that have been had with it.
Thus, e.g. the Mona Lisa will allow travelling to almost any date and moment in time since it's creation. While said pebble might have huge gaps between the possible targets (e.g. a day where it was purposely thrown at something, a day where it was used in a sandcastle, a day where it became part of the wall of a house, etc).
A good example for a temporally limited object might e.g. be a plow or shovel. There's a stretch in time where it was regularly interacted with - perfect for travelling. Then there's a stretch of time where it stood abandoned in a shed or similar - no interaction, no travelling.
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There are a number of science theories about time travel that suggest that a time machine can only take you back in time to the moment that machine was constructed and no further. This would explain why we don’t see time travelers all the time today.
These time machines also solve the problem of Earth drift. Rather than transporting you through time, the machine moves you (its cargo) to earlier or later versions of itself. Since those earlier instances moved with Earth, so do you.
So to answer your question directly: you can go back in time further than me because your machine was built earlier.
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**The problem is time density**. The substance of time is harder to travel through the earlier you go, needing more powerful and efficient machines.
But it's not linear, increases in density are sudden and discrete events, which means that it's really easy to go to 1901 but the first machines couldn't go further.
The next and more efficient versions had the ability to go through 1901 but got blocked at the next spike in time density, around 1454.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MfgH5.jpg)
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**The Earth isn't stationary**
The Earth is spinning while rotating around the sun rotating around the galaxy in an expanding universe. Continents are drifting and even an earthquake can alter the tilt of the planet.
Travelling in time is the easy bit. Working out where the Earth is and the exact spot you want to be is the hard bit. Each newer time machine has better computers than can calculate the destination more accurately further back in time with less margin of error.
A slight error in calculations means either you are inside a solid object or even drifting in space. Older time machines don't have the calculating power to travel further back in time safely.
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Our observable present is carried along through time like a stick floating on a river. The only thing that stops us leaving the stick and travelling with a different speed and/or direction is our inability to swim - the "water" of time has little friction and we can't (so far?) make a machine that can push against it to propel us away from the present.
Time travel was made possible by a force that we can interact with, a bit like a string running the length of the river. This force is named the "Thread" for this reason. The Thread pervades space and doesn't interact noticeably with most matter, but a time machine can grip it to pull itself and its contents backwards or forwards in time.
The Thread is thought to exist throughout history but its characteristics gradually change over time, making it harder for a time machine to interact with. The further back or forward you go from the present, the more energy required to grip the Thread, and beyond a certain point it is impossible. Better made (newer or more expensive) time machines can grip more efficiently, so they can get further away.
There has been limited research into the possibility of re-calibrating a time machine when it's near its limit, so that it can pull itself further from that point, but calibration requires complex measurements and calculations using advanced instruments that can't be made small enough to fit into current time machines.
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**It has been designed with this restriction**
From the user point of view, you enter your DeLorean, set the desired datetime in a display, and it *moves* you there. Easy enough, right? But in order to do that, behind the curtain the time machine will need to know the current datetime and location, determine the destination location (by default it will be the place where the "things" around you would have been at that time, a fair end-user expectation but computationally non-trivial), convert those human coordinates into the actual units with which it will work, map a route in the spacetime from the current location to the final one, and determine the needed motor impulses to "jump" there.
A time machine with a quite limited temporal range will be easier to build than one with a larger one. It's not just that you will need to load a larger spacetime map on its memory (which someone must have somehow calculated before!), but it will also need much more extensively testing (don't let me started with the endless number of regulations they must follow!).
At the same time, very few users will need to jump back more than 50-100 years, so it makes sense to segmentate the market with different products that differ in their available range. You build many low-range time machines that are cheaper to produce, and a few extremely expensive ones for those (typically companies) that need going that extra ~~mile~~ century. If the average consumer would want to go on holidays to an out-of-range date they would simply use a commercial flight to travel then.
Thus we will be dealing with many time machines in the market with a limited time range (with slight differences e.g. a commodity time machine from a luxury brand may allow a time-span 5 years larger than their competitors) in which they may be used (according to the manufacturer).
Of course, the fact that the manual says "do not use outside the tested years" doesn't mean that the users wold do that, no matter it being extremely dangerous to the occupants. "*Family dead in Mercedes-Benz time machine accident*" is very bad for PR, no matter if they went out of their way to use it way outside the operational specifications. Plus government regulations.
So the manufacturer build the time machines to cover a time-range (let's say, fifty years) plus a safety margin, then **lock it so you can't use it to jump outside the stated range**. That's why it doesn't matter that you are already in the past when you try to go earlier.
A shady mechanical may be willing to remove that limiter from your time machine, but operating it more than a few more extra years would require a full revamp of the motor and its associated computer system. Obviously, that is [completely unsupported](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking#Stability_and_functional_correctness), although military time machines [may allow to bypass the limiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_emergency_power). There are some known cases where a low-range model of time machine is actually the same as an higher model but with a different limiter. These are popular among tuners, and *relatively safe* once they are loaded the pirated maps from the higher model. However, in some cases they would be tagged as the lower model *precisely* because in QA they failed to operate properly for a bigger range.
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Your time machine has a Y2K bug.
On Doc Brown's DeLorean there appears to be no way to enter a year before 1BC or after 9999AD. And even 1BC is a stretch, because Doc Brown has no QA department and I wouldn't want to be the first person to try putting in 0000 as the date and seeing whether it works or just explodes.
Maybe on the inside your time machine stores the date as a string yyMMdd, like the old computer systems that had the Y2K bug, and only has a fixed 100 year range because of that. Or maybe it uses 32 bit Unix dates internally, so it only understands dates from the evening of 13 December 1901 to the morning of 19 January 2038.
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem>
There are such a wide variety of ways that real computer systems have hecked this up, that essentially any date could plausibly be the limit of your poorly programmed time machine.
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs>
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My timemachine can only go back as far as it was created (see other answers).
Your time machine works on a different premise - it's on a spaceship which punches through to a universe where time runs backwards. You then go into stasis for as long as you want to go back, revives you and then you punch through back to your original universe.
It's much more risky due to the stresses and dangers of inter-universe space travel, but technically you can go as far back as the reliability of your spaceship and stasis machine will allow.
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Understanding the details and maths of time-travel is hard, but let's look at it in some layman terms.
Time while passing through at its constant pace on surface of earth generates some extraordinary particles, we call then **time-tachyons**, These particles don't exist in the current world but in a type of zone that has no concept of time on its own. Our machines use these time-tachyons, to navigate itself through time.
Now, here is the trick, as a time-tachyon travels through time in that zone, it creates a **bubble of encryption** onto itself, our machines capture these time-tachyons of a specific time, solves the encryption surrounding it, once solved, it opens up a time-wrap portal and travels to the time, at which that particle was originated.
So, what's the problem, The issue lies in the solving of these encryptions, it requires huge amount of computation done simultaneously on the device that is about to travel through that portal (no distributed computing allowed), and with the limited technology of today, we can solve only till a 100 years back in past or in future, no matter when we capture these particles, because these particles themselves, don't exist in physical world, they exist, where there is no-time (The machine can quite easily access this no-time zone quite easily).
So, as our technology advances and cost reduces, we can have more and more on-board computing power and can increase our range.
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Something about the process of time travel means that the machine is "attuned" to "its present". (Maybe the machine has to create some sort of not-entirely-stable "field" in order to displace in time, which has to be maintained continuously, or everything that has been displaced will "snap back" to the present.) As a result, time machines can only travel a certain "temporal distance" from "the present", but as the technology improves, that "distance" increases.
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**A new quantum discovery: The Heizenberg Uncertainty Time Principle**
The Heizenberg Uncertainty principle is the mathematical trade-off between where a particle is and how much momentum it has. The particles position is uncertain and exists in a 'broad range' depending on its velocity and mass.
Just as a particle has an uncertain location based on its momentum, your Time Machine has it's temporal equivalent: It exists in a Quantum state of uncertainty in time.
In fact, that is how the Time Machine works. By having uncertain temporal momentum, it can exist within a certain range of times. Much like a vibrating particle, the Time Machine 'vibrates' in time.
Activating and stepping into one would allow you and the Time Machine to exist in many different temporal states, at which you could exit the Machine at any given time. However, it remains in this temporal state and in order for you to use it again, it continually vibrates within this time range. Deactivating it would collapse its 'wave function' and coalesce it back into its original time, as now it has a much more certain temporal momentum.
Thus you can only time travel within a certain range of when the Time Machine is activated.
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Your first generation time machines were built on the principle of quantum teleportation (spooky action at a distance). As researchers had theorized as early as the 21st century, the property of entanglement and quantum teleportation was a kind-of wormhole. Benico Flores, in his famous proof of 2057, demonstrated mathematically that quantum teleportation happens across both space AND time.
Those first generation machines - built on bundles of entangled pairs "stretched" across time by keeping those bundles preserved against quantum decoherence had hard limits : they could go no further into the past then their moment of creation, and no further into the future than the engineering limits of keeping the threads of entangled particle pairs coherent - and also the social limits of second generation time travel societies that didn't want to maintain the bundles. Mostly, this technology covered data-carrying chronographs and chronograms, although a few bulk matter devices existed.
Although many improvements labelled themselves as second, third, and greater generation time travel, including a notable mention of the Mintz Deutch-Politzer screwdrive to lay bundles prior to initial power-on, the first truly second generation time travel device was LeRoyce Mettals strong force skimmers. Professor Mettals recognized that the holographic properties Leonard Susskind had theorized nearly a hundred years earlier described "event horizons" around every subatomic particle. In addition to making bulk matter chronodynamics obvious, from an engineering point of view, since neutrons and protons are both naturally generated, were generated a very long time ago, and will "live" a long time to come, the hard limits to future and past travel really opened up to all but the most extreme cases.
Then there's third generation u-balls that work within that high temperature region where everything unifies and you can skip across births and deaths of individual universes. Hold on. What time code did you post this question from?
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At a certain point in history, *something* happened which made time travel possible.
This moment is the fulcrum around which time travel occurs.
Handwavium is the core component of a time machine. All existing handwavium was created as a result of the fulcrum event. Handwavium naturally accumulates a temporal charge over time, but must be shielded during the time machine construction process to avoid unfortunate side effects during time travel. There is also a critical mass of handwavium, accumulation of more than this having similar catastrophic consequences.
Thus a time machine can only contain a limited amount of handwavium, and the temporal charge of this is higher the later the time machine was constructed. As a result, the later the construction, the further back in time it can travel.
Possibly, elements of handwavium are temporally connected to when they were original created, like a string gradually unspooling. So a week after the fulcrum, you can travel up to 2 weeks into the past; after a month, 2 months; after ten years, you can travel back to ten years before the event
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There was a story I read, I believe it was in the first volume of "Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories", which was a collection of his short stories.
[The Ugly Little Boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy) by Isaac Asimov.
In the short story, time had charge or momentum. So the further an object was out of its own moment, the more energy required to keep the object stable. So in the story, some prehistoric life form, a Neanderthal child, had been grabbed from the past and was kept in a special sealed area to isolate the time charge. The caretaker protected the Neanderthal. The story stressed the danger of being out of time. So the caretaker did something which broke the rules and put everyone at risk, so the organization was forced to send the child back.
It could also be included that the more significant something is (could be or will), then the more charge it carries. Send back people with advanced knowledge (that's usable in the past) and well, spontaneous human combustion does exist.
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Time machines experience an effect known as *temporal drag*. The further you move through time the stronger the effect becomes, until eventually it completely balances out the ability of the machine to move. Interestingly, the effect is relative to the subjective "now" the machine comes from, so the effect causes drag when moving "away" from subjective "now" but acts like a rubber-band to drag the machine back to "now" when the time field collapses. The "drag" effect also also means that fuel (i.e. eludium-Q32, tempronium, "Captain! The di-lithium crystals!", whatevah) must be consumed at all times (!) that the machine is away from subjective "now", which could lead to some interesting story ideas. :-)
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## How far back you can go depends on the earliest identifiable fork in the time stream you can nail down
Almost all models of time travel involve some kind of forking in the time stream. Each branch can form the definition of an epoch time, where $t = 0$. Because of how the time equations work or time travel, movement in $t > 0$ requires evaluating the $ln(t)$. Trying to move to $t<0$ causes an undefined value which is liable to put the traveler someplace they really don't want to be.
Choosing a branching event/decision must be done with care. Nearer events, with better resolution yield safer travel. Setting t={5 minutes ago} is easy because the resolution is absurdly high. Setting t={assassination of Caesar} is a lot harder since if you guess wrong, $t$ may end up less than zero and you go "somewhere else".
This sets up a nice exploration mechanic where explorers pick some reasonably well know event then choose some date afterwards to try to pin down $t$ to a higher resolution. Reliance on branches of the time stream rather than objects in the time stream means you have a much stronger point of reference. Anywhere after your epoch time can be explored. Pushing your definition of epoch time backwards requires care and exploration.
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The issue is that there's not just one timeline, but there are many. And with many, I don't mean two, or three, not even a million. Even for time jumps less than a year, the number of significantly different timelines is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And even worse, while 21st century scientists still thought only the future timelines diverge, in reality the same is true also for the past; information about the past is objectively lost, and then there are many timelines converging to the same future.
Yes, technically there's nothing stopping you from going to an arbitrary time. But the point is: You want to come back into your own time, or more precisely, into a time that differs as little as possible from the time you left, considering the changes you did to the past. The better those algorithms work, the farther you can go in the timeline without getting lost in the web of time.
The art of building time machines is not in the time travel itself; as soon as you understood the quantum chronology theory, that's easy; a third-semester student of the time travel university could do it. The art of building time machines is navigation. It's the art of remaining close to *one* time line.
Of course, time machine manufacturers keep their navigation algorithms a well-guarded secret. All that's known is that the ability of travelling depends not only on the accuracy of the time drag sensors and chronon field generators, but also on the computing capacity of the time machine's navigation computer and, crucially, on the quality and range of the installed temporal maps. There are also some rumours that some companies installed secret timeline beacons that only their own time machines can access. Of course that's strictly forbidden, and therefore no company would openly admit to it, but since it is very hard to find such beacons if you don't know exactly where and when to search, it is not unlikely that they really exist.
That's why different brands have different time travel ability. And for economical reasons, there are also time machines with different travel capabilities from the same company. After all, even if you can build time machines that travel wider time intervals, if you compete with cheap time machines that can only go up to a century back, you'll build a line of cheap machines to compete with them, in addition to your more expensive time machines that can go back till the middle ages.
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Well, clearly such a machine *would* have some sort of reference to the time it was built. And that property would be central to the core element of the machine that enables time travel. So, maybe it's some kind of an exotic matter that is required to travel through time.
The exotic matter would have its technological imprint of the time at which it was created, like a timestamp. That imprint, be it a configuration of internal oscillations of particles or something else:
* Is not an optional quality of the time machine, but rather an essential technological part of the implementation that makes time travel possible at all.
* Serves as a point of reference for the machine and allows it to calculate the "time distance" from that exact reference point during any travel.
* Serves as a beacon or an internal compass. Without it time navigation is not possible because the warp wave does not form, or dissipates together with the machine and its contents along the time continuum resulting in the loss of the machine.
* Can only be attained by the exotic matter during the device manufactoring process and can vary in grade, depending on the cost and technological level.
The time travel invloves supplying energy to the exotic matter, and the structure of the exotic matter allows for roughly 1:1 relation between supplied energy and travel distance up until a certain threshold posed by the quality of the exotic matter.
Travelling beyond the distance allowed by the exotic matter imprint requires an increasingly higher energy supply and quickly degrades the matter itself because of the overload within the material matrix, much like a capacitor can be burned or a crystal in a laser can be destroyed due to excess energy throughput.
Think of it as a process similar to overclocking a CPU.
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**It's obvious when you understand temporal mechanics. You better get an A in quantum mechanics first though.**
When a time machine is first turned on, it must begin by surveying the temporal landscape. This initial state is represented by a quantum matrix within the machine. This means it must obey the [no-cloning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem) limitation preventing this state from ever being duplicated for another time machine or backed-up in any way. This also means that turning off the machine meaning losing the baseline that defines the starting point for time travel. You can turn the machine off, but this resets it to a later baseline which is undesirable because you lose the oldest part of the time window for that machine. Of course, this also means that time machines are designed for redundancy, hot-swap of components, etc. But key components that determine the overall temporal power of the machine cannot be hot-swapped. Time machines must continue to survey the temporal landscape, but if they do not also maintain the initial state, it limits their time baseline to the current time.
Early time machine designs did not maintain their initial temporal state, thus limiting their travel to a fixed distance in the past, not a fixed point in the past.
Time travel requires more advanced quantum computers to travel further distances, so the more advanced time machine can travel further into the past from its baseline. A sufficient technical advance more than overcomes the later time reference baseline, so more advanced machines can typically travel further into the past.
You can upgrade a machine, but this requires replacing the quantum core, so that this resets the machine baseline. Still can be worthwhile if the upgrade adds more capability than is lost when the baseline is lost.
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It's not actually a more advanced time machine.
In order to **successfully** navigate time time machines need two reference objects which must be built into the machine, they're not replaceable parts. These objects must have been obtained from two different points in time and provide a calibration scale only between those two points.
Note that I say successfully. You can attempt to set your time machine for a point outside the calibrated zone, it's just your arrival will be unpredictable. You're not going to emerge in a planet because that would take energy you don't have but the odds are very high you emerge in deep space and at a somewhat unpredictable time (and the farther beyond the reference object you go the greater the error.) You can of course return and try again--but it's going to take many, many tries before you arrive someplace you can build reference objects. This makes reference objects for more distant times valuable items (think of drugs--the pills are cheap, the R&D to make them can reach a billion dollars.)
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I'd argue with a reasoning on two bases:
1. Time travelling is only partially understood. Yes, there are theories, working time machines, and we even have experimental proof. But all theories start to break down if you try set the time interval too big.
This part is quite realistic - yes, we have theories, and they do explain the parts of reality they model really well, but we have struggled for a unifying, working theory probably since the beginning of religion, and probably will struggle for it for a long time to come.
As a bonus, this allows you to keep some mysteries about time travel for later use.
2. There are discrete parameters of time travel which are dependent on the "absolute" time (think of them like the emission line spectra of elements).
Just like travelling through space, travelling through time is harsh and dangerous - so dangerous that we need active fields counter-acting the negative effects during time travel. However, the active fields only block a very limited spectrum of these negative effects, which can be calculated out of the discrete parameters.
So when travelling back through time, there comes a (more or less) hard point after which your current shield system gets useless and your time machine will break.
However, after you went back in time, gathered the necessary data and used your incomplete time-travelling theories, you can build a new time machine that uses the old and a new shielding system, and therefore can travel further back in time.
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## End of rope
The time machine cannot go back in time by the **vehicle** alone, it needs a **rope** tied to the current time, act as:
* **an energy *cable***, time travelling need much more energy than what could possibly stored. It also take a lot of energy just to keep the machine at the time point. And there is limitation on how long can the *cable* reach.
* **a trail**, there are zillions of timelines and you need to come through a lot to get to the destination. The trail is used to keep track of the timelines, without it you can go back to the wrong timeline and will stuck in alternative history forever.
* **a trace**, like @dot\_Sp0T proposed, a great array of historical items or information span from the current time to the destination, each must be created/unique at that time period. You are going one *step* at a time, finding the timeline matches with the item/information. Without it you simply can not know if you are going back to the history or just going to parallel timelines.
This could introduce plot points like broken rope, sabotage in current time, lost trail, invalid trace,...
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You know how some cell phone providers have better network coverage because they have put up more 3G/4G/5G towers around the countryside? It's just like that with time-machine service providers.
There are specialist exploratory time-machines. Those things are large, inefficient, slightly dangerous, very inaccurate (and the perceived time for the trip can sometimes be weeks!) Large crews that carefully use these to go backwards in time to deeply bury carefully calibrated time-transmitters - a process that can take a week of effort.
Once in place, a time-transmitter can be used by small, efficient consumer time-machines to jump to any point while the time-transmitter is operating.
There are only two problems.
1. Limited Life. The transmitters only operate for about 24 months before they
degrade, so the exploratory crews have a lot of work to do, burying
time-transmitters. (As you might imagine, they choose the most
popular times for consumer travel first, with a bias on recent times,
because travelling further back takes more perceived travel time.)
2. Capitalism. Competition means that your consumer time-machine can only connect to time-transmitters installed by your provider server at the time of the point-of-sale. Every provider has their own format for time-transmissions, so if you choose a company with less coverage, too bad. Another time-machine (perhaps a newer one, or one from a better supplier) will have better coverage. Of course, some providers focus on particular eras, so you can visit more accurately during the Rennaissance, but less accurately during the Mesozoic, and other companies might have the opposite. Choose well.
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**Better engines need better fuels**
Using current tech, even a tiny nuclear reactor requires a ginormous hydroelectric dam to perform the enrichment processes you need to make the reactor work. I'd imagine the facilities you need to make the fuel your time machine requires something at least as impractical to attach to your tiny timeship. Your older time ships use low quality fuels that were only produced in bulk during a few particular decades. Go too far back, and the mega structures needed to fuel your ship do not yet exist meaning you can only go as far back as your fuel source allows. To far forward and the fuel you need is no longer produced... Try putting Plutonium-240 in an Handwavium-114 reactor or vise-versa and all you get is a city sized smoldering crater...
The older fuels have lower power densities; so, a fission powered time ship might have a range of just a few weeks, fusion reactors a few years, anti-matter might get you a couple of decades, then far future tech might be able to get you several centuries or even millennia before their fuel runs out.
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Time machines charge up over time, but primitive ones only hold a certain charge. So, a machine built in the year 2030 could send someone back 1 year before its activation for each year it is on, so in 2050 you could go back to 2010, but its time boundaries would max out at 100 years in 2130, allowing a maximum time travel to 1930. A newer time machine from 2100 has a capacity in millennia, so although it takes will have a lower range than the older machine for a while, by 2200 it will be able to go back a greater distance in time than the older machine, and by 2270 will be able to go back to before the older one could go back to.
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# Processing Requirements
Simply put, the computer isn't smart enough to *know* that far. Not without an upgrade.
See, while the time machine is able to travel to various different times, the computer intelligence was made at a very specific point in time. And in order for time machines to work, these computers effectively *estimate* every instance of true events that occurred in the past from when they were first activated/calibrated.
Similarly, there are an infinite number of digits to Pi, and the limitation on how many digits you can go is mostly based on how many you can process.
Well, in this case, your time machine is capable of going to 1919 (100 years), only because it doesn't have the capacity to memorize that 101st year. And because of how time-travel computations work, it needs to memorize every possible instance from its normal current time to the targeted past.
This could lead into a plot-point, where someone figures out they can reboot the system to start learning from a new reference point (allowing you to go 100 years back from your current time), but then you'd lose any ability to jump to your normal time. And while this is known to be theoretically possible, nobody has been that crazy to try (as you'd be stranded, possibly without a working time machine, with no resources from your time).
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Maybe it has something to do with the concept of light-cones and causality. Traveling back in time to the narrower end of the cone requires more energy or precision or something.
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**Stage of technology: point and shoot random time travel**
Time machines are quite primitive atm, they can only be used once, because it will get damaged in the process. Fortunately, there are no issues with other dimensions. While you travel over the time axis, the time machine will automatically warp space along its path, to maintain minimal delta inertion, resulting in a preserved position in moving 3D space. Without the need for any calculations. How this works ? Don't ask me, I'm not the expert. Time machines fly in only one direction: the past.. and it stays put. We shoot ourselves back in time, you never know how far you will get.
**Distance is determined by friction**
The more friction it will meet, the slower it will proceed and eventually come to a complete stand still on the time axis. Especially at the start, in the first decennia it should go through, there can be a lot or friction. This friction is caused by complexity of the driver's personal time line. The more dice the machine has to throw underways, the more unexpected turns it has to take, the more friction it will meet..
**The question**
So if you would ask: *"my time machine can go back farther than yours, why ?"*
First the paradox.. you just *assume* this as a fact, because yours was more expensive, but actually, you don't have any reference. If you would have traveled in time using your time machine, you would not be here to put this question to me.
But still, you're probably right ! You will be kicked back a lot further into the past than I will. That is because I have a happy family, a buzy life and a buzy job. You're a writer, a loner living in your home, having few friends except me, and your family lives far away. Nothing happens, you don't make lots of choices. I do.
The more time line candidates need to be skipped, the more initial energy will get lost and the time machine comes to a stand still. When there are too many recent sideways, it won't get far.
] |
[Question]
[
Sails were good, they made ships go farther than ever before, relieved them of the critical necessity of oars, and with the right design they could even sail into the wind.
However, sail ships have the one weakness that without wind's aid, they're no better than a floating wooden log stranded on the sea. Imagine now a naval power that inhabits an island that is definitely not windy, and for the survival of their nation they need a strong, and fast navy that can sail out of their island at a moment's notice, and maintain their speed at sea at every situation.
Originally I planned on having ships propelled by paddle wheel powered by humongous 4 armed golems, but I don't think there would be enough golems for the navy and I'm trying to keep magic involvement at a minimum. I also thought of using good ol' oars, but they are slow (I mean, trained oarsmen could make a trireme reach speeds of 9 to 12 knots, your average age of sail ship could do 14 to 16.5), they require a lot of manpower (which also means that more supplies are needed), and they can't function during long stretches of time (those oarsmen need sleep and rest too).
Limiting technology to pre-19th century (Not really, but avoid things like coal, industrialism or steampunk), would there be any design that can effectively propel a ship at "fast" speeds without the aid of wind?
Notice - Things such as paddle wheels, oars, waves, steam or even a little bit of (logical) magic are not completely ruled out, it's only that I feel they wouldn't be effective enough without either advancing technology or being under very specific situations, though I might be (probably am) wrong about this assumption considering how much of an air head I am.
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Better oars, or paddle wheels propelled by "oarsmen".
Without steam, the only power sources available to you on the open water are muscle, wind, and magic. And you've ruled out wind and magic, so...
(Well, to be fair, there's also wave power--but if there's not much wind, there won't be much in the way of waves, either, and wave power is not going to get you up to 9 knots, let alone 16.)
So, you've gotta use muscle power, and figure out how to do it more efficiently than having rows of guys pulling oars. Or at least, more efficient than rows of guys *in a trireme* pulling oars.
Triremes had fixed seats for the oarsmen. That's not optimal. Modern racing shells, and rowing training machines, have sliding seats, so that the oarsman can engage essentially every muscles in their body to move the oar; you start coiled up, arms extended, with the seat forward, and then simultaneously push back with the legs (moving the seat), lean back with the torso, and pull with the arms. So, you could probably significantly boost your peak speed just by adding sliding seats.
Moving an oar actually wastes quite a bit of effort, though, on the backstroke. All of the energy used to hold the oar out of the water and move it back to its starting position is just wasted. So, if you could find a way to avoid that, you *might* be able to get higher speeds even without maximal muscle engagement.
Paddle wheels give you that. They don't have any recovery stroke. I couldn't find any references directly comparing paddle to oar efficiency given the same power input, but paddle-wheels are generally less efficient than propellers, and modern oars can be nearly as efficient as propellers (although, see [An application of paddlewheel propulsion to a high speed craft](http://www.marinepropulsors.com/smp/files/downloads/smp11/Paper/FA3-1_Harte.pdf); it's entirely possible that the poor relative performance of paddle-wheels is just because we stopped developing the technology before its peak!), so oars *might* still be the best option... but paddle-wheels could win out if they let you get more consistent power output from your "oarsmen".
Theoretically, you could just replace oars with cranks, and still use oarsmen on sliding seats to pull them to turn a paddle wheel. I'm not sure that would really be the best use of the "whole machine" (mechanical parts + human power plants), though, in addition to being somewhat complicated. The simplest approach would be to have your "oarsmen" run in treadwheels, which can be directly (or nearly so--perhaps with a slight gear / pulley ratio) coupled to the drive paddles. That would make optimal use of the human body for sustained mechanical power output (after all, we are evolved specifically for high-endurance, long distance running!), even though it sacrifices some potential power that oars can extract from the arm muscles.
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You can use muscle power and go very fast. But not human muscles.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a0WVg.jpg)
<http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/mammals/whales/killer-whale.html>
Anyone who has visited Sea World will have been impressed that very large and powerful ocean animals can be trained. A pack of orca could easily pull a boat at great speed. I feel like I saw 2 whales with hoops on their noses pull a trainer in a small boat but I cannot find an image. An unladen orca can swim at 35 mph. Your people have tame killer whales (or false killers, or pilot whales, or fin whales if you want more awesomeness. Or maybe a mix.). Teams of whales pull the ships like chariots.
If you want more variety, you could include some giant seals doing chariot duty. Leopard seals are intelligent, grow to 9 feet long and are as fast as killer whales.<https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/to-do/wildlife/leopard-seal>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wC2Ot.jpg)
<http://honesttopaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/05/leopard-seal.png>
Big fish, sirenians, giant squid - for a work of fiction you could use any of these. Your boats will be fast and it will be awesome.
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# You are underestimating the value of oars
Oar powered ships were faster than sail powered ships for all of recorded history. If they were not, then they would not have been used once sails were invented. On the occasion, in great sailing conditions, with a specially designed ship (i.e. a clipper ship), a sailing ship could reach up to 15 knots, or even more. But this was not typical.
The Mayflower averaged 1.7 knots in its 66 day journey across the Atlantic in 1620. The [Royal Greenwich Library](https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/18th-century-sailing-times-between-english-channel-and-coast-america) says that studying old copies of Lloyd's List yields Liverpool to New York times of around 21-29 days; or 4-6 knots. This was in 1818-1832; just before the first steamships came online.
If all you have to beat is 4-6 knots, you can do that with oars. Its just more expensive to feed and house so many slaves, and it cuts down on your cargo space and weight.
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What about a series of known (or unknown) surface water currents?
Surface currents could be mapped or tied to a lunar cycle, and easily utilized by a society. It sounds like you're aiming for a island society that is militarily powerful, so their islands could be at a crossroads or nexus of currents. From that geographically superior location they could maintain trade and military power easily.
It doesn't allow for fast travel outside of the currents, but I think it may fit into your technological needs better.
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# Change your hulls
The shape of the hull is one of the endless compromises of designing watercraft. You get to choose between wide and stable, long narrow and fast, short and manoeuvrable, chunky and high capacity. There are other options, you can have long wide fast ships, catamarans and trimarans. These multihulls are significantly faster and more stable than the equivalent monohull ships, what they lack in return is manoeuvrability.
It's not an unknown concept in the period, but was mostly used by the Polynesians and tribes using outrigger canoes rather than on the larger scales we now use the designs.
A nation using rowed multihulls would easily be able to outrun a navy using monohull sailing vessels in a region with low winds and with fitted rigging would still be faster in the water under sail.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h1nYO.jpg)
(<http://www.hokulea.com/>)
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An improvement on the answer by Logan R. Kearsley would be to have the men sit on stationary bikes connected to shafts that turn propellers. A metallic shaft turning metallic propellers would be stronger and sturdier than a set of wooden paddle wheels which were easily damaged by strong waves at see.
Man powered paddle wheel boats and ships were used for hundreds of years by the Chinese, and as far as I know they were mostly used on rivers and lakes and near the coasts. I am not an expert on Chinese naval history but as far as know man powered paddle wheel ships were not used much at sea.
<http://www.cogandgalley.com/2009/10/chinese-paddle-wheel-ships.html>[1](http://www.cogandgalley.com/2009/10/chinese-paddle-wheel-ships.html)
There was massive use of both paddle wheels and screw propellers on 19th century steamships and the result of decades of comparison is that paddle wheels were gradually phased out for ocean going vessels and reserved for river boats. Both side wheels and stern wheels were used for river boats but ocean going vessels seem to have almost entirely used side wheels or propellers.
Furthermore, wooden paddle wheels were easy to damage in battle. And 19th century warships found that side mounted paddle wheels interrupted the long lines of gun ports on their gun decks. Eventually the many smaller guns on gun decks and poking out though gun ports were replaced by much fewer and many times more powerful guns in gun turrets above the main deck. After that side wheels would not have limited ship's armament. But by then ships were much more advanced than your "age of sail" requirement and steam engines would have been invented.
Thus man powered propeller ships may be superior to man powered paddle wheel ships.
And some consideration should be given to domestic animal powered ships.
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Oared ships are the age old solution, but leave a lot to be desired. Ancient galleys required lots of skilled oarsmen packed into a fairly small space to generate enough energy to achieve sprint speeds or to execute complex manoeuvres. This leaves very little room for supplies, which is one of the reasons oared galleys rarely sailed out of sight of land and beached at night, so the crews could get out and forage for fresh water, perform bodily functions and so on.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1vwJ2.jpg)
*Ancient Greek trireme*
In order to maximize the efficiency of muscle power, the ship was also very lightly built, almost like a modern racing shell. Barry Strauss, in his book "[Salamis](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0743244516)" suggests that triremes were so lightly built the Greek marines on board remained seated on the deck during battle to keep the ship from being upset.
The modern view of heavy, lumbering galleys using enslaved oarsmen is more recent. The Spanish conquest of the New World allowed vast quantities of silver coinage to enter circulation, unleashing a wave of inflation. Skilled oarsmen were too expensive to maintain, so the Spanish took to impressing criminals and slaves as oarsmen, using the galleys as giant artillery platforms and filling the upper decks with troops. (As a counterpart, the *Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta* retained skilled oarsmen, using them as extra troops when boarding enemy vessels).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ylltp.jpg)
*Model of a Venetian Galley of the 1500's*
As for your question, polymath Leonardo da Vinci had sketched out several inventions in the late 1400's which anticipate modern self propelled boats and ships. For example, he designed a gear mechanism to provide mechanical advantage for powering a paddle wheel (the image is not clear if there is a crew supposed to crank this or a wound spring):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6NaW.jpg)
*Leonardo's Paddle Wheel*
Of course Leonardo considered naval applications as well, including a gunboat and a submarine:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kC6Im.jpg)
*Leonardo's gunboat*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TxZG7.jpg)
*Leonardo's Submarine. The bags control buoyancy and a pair of flippers in the rear provide propulsion*
The largest issue prior to the industrial revolution is while you can have mechanical paddlewheels or flippers, the energy density of humans or mechanical power storage (springs) is limited, thus limiting your range and ability to sustain operations.
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[Rotor ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship). A rotor ship is a type of ship designed to use the [Magnus effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect) for propulsion. The ship is propelled by large vertical rotors, sometimes known as rotor sails.
This method of propulsion could be used by a society of any level of technology, as it does not require anything more than the ability to rotate the tubes.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ELm01.jpg)
[Answer]
Put together oars as propulsion and [catamaran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamaran) as hull design.
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> The two hulls combined also often have a smaller hydrodynamic resistance than comparable monohulls, requiring less propulsive power from either sails or motors. The catamaran's wider stance on the water can reduce both heeling and wave-induced motion, as compared with a monohull, and can give reduced wakes.
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If your interest is in warships rather than cargo ships then you can get way with a design that does not need to allow very large changes in displacement, and for efficiency (hence speed and endurance) and stability (hence a stable firing platform) I offer you the [Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-waterplane-area_twin_hull) vessel design.
Two hydrodynamic submerged hulls provide buoyancy, with low levels of wave-induced drag at a range of speeds. Waterproofing by virtue of being filled with foam?
For propulsion you absolutely cannot beat propellors, and the depth of the SWATH hull helps cut down on cavitation due to poor design. If your technology rises to it you can have pedal power and perhaps an energy storage system (pneumatics?) to give that little extra burst of ramming power.
Frankly, neither oars nor paddles are ever going to be as efficient as a propellor, and a displacement hull (of which a catamaran is just a variant) is always going to suffer from higher wave drag and lower stability.
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# Wings.
If the sails are free to rotate on the vertical axis, they can be used as fans or wings, and propel the ship. This could be easily done on windsurfs even if the sail isn't really optimized to do that (moving the sail on the upbeat has always been a pain, to me at least; half the energy gets wasted, or that's the impression anyway).
If you had a double- or triple-hinged sail, it could better simulate the 'fishtail' movement of a wing, and make better use of the power.
The wing naturally evolves from just beating a normal sail to manoeuver in a low wind, to a sail that does it twice better by being able to 'fishtail', to a sail that beats more or less like a bat's.
When there *is* a little wind, the ship is however capable of exploiting it to the fullest.
The necessary energy for no-wind sailing would still need to come from golems, though; with windsurfs, the "engine" has the same weight of the boat or more, and this wouldn't change much when scaling up. So using man- or beast-power would almost certainly be unfeasible.
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It doesn't really matter.
This hasn't really been addressed in other question, while they have provided plenty of options.
What I mean is that any advancement's will be mirrored by any naval power in your world. Or at least should be. So even if you have only inefficient oars, probably everyone will have them. If you have Golmn powered oars, everyone will have them. That's of course assuming the windless-ness will affect everyone on equal terms.
We'll assume by this:
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> Imagine now a naval power that inhabits an island that is definitely not windy
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Means that areas away from the island are normal. And that the lack of technology makes sailing still a viable method of propulsion outside the island.
Now, imagine attacking the Island nation. Would you use sail only ship? Probably not right, so you would use whatever is currently the best option. If you went to attack them and you had oar ships and they had paddle boats and whopped the tar out of your navy, the next time you would probably have your own paddle boats. If the Islanders had more efficient hull designs, you would see that and quickly copy the design.
Basically it would be an arms race. Well, assuming the island was valuable enough. Otherwise you would just avoid them.
From both a defense and offense point of view, there some considerations to make.
* Outsiders would need dual propulsion ships to attack.
* Islanders would need dual propulsion ships ships to attack
* Outsiders could defend with only sail powered ships
* Islanders could defend with only non-sail powered ships
Ships that have to be both sail and non-sail are at a disadvantage to those that are just one propulsion method. Generally there would be less space for guns and less space for fighting men. You wouldn't send your oars men ashore in an attack because if they got killed you whole navy is lost.
I am assuming too that sailing from the island to anther land mass would be more efficient by sail then by oar ( for instance )
Otherwise I really like some of the other Ideas quite well.
My preference would be something like a hamster-wheal powered screw ship. But instead of hamsters I would use what ever animal is the lightest and fastest available and preferably only found on the island. Such as ostriches or some other animal that excels at high speed or long endurance running.
An interesting plot point could be if the best runners to power the ships only existed on the island. This would provide them with a sight advantage if they could maintain exclusive control of this resource. There could be some neat espionage stuff too.
Otherwise things will tend to reach parity.
One Idea I did have the concerns magic, is if you allow enchantments. Then magic can be used that does not involve active participation of the spell-caster. What form of enchantments could vary from some kind of "magical" engine, to harnesses to control sea beasts. Even a jar of wind or something like that ( something similar to this was used in Homers Odyssey )
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> Odysseus and his crew stayed with Aeolus, a king endowed by the gods with the winds. He gave Odysseus a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, a gift that should have ensured a safe return home. Just as Ithaca came into sight, the greedy sailors naively opened the bag while Odysseus slept, thinking it contained gold. All of the winds flew out and the resulting storm drove the ships back the way they had come.
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That gives me another odd idea for a story, what if the magicians secretly enchanted the island and stole the winds, just so they could sell it back in small amounts to the populous ... lol
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If it's only about going off the island, you could have long ropes under water with huge counterweights attached on pulleys beyond the shelf.
These counterweights would be pulled towards the island when not needed, and if they need to leave the island quickly, they could just attach the ships to one of the ropes and release the weights to pull the ships really fast (depending on weight to drag ratio) to the open sea.
If it's then about navigating the sea, a current sail might work. Currents move in different velocities in different sea depths, so using the right mechanics, you could build a sail that works with water currents instead of wind.
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I believe that in one of the last novels in his *Safehold* series, David Weber had “crank galleys”, which were essentially galleys in hull configuration, but driven by propellers rather than oars. The propellers were manually cranked by the ‘oarsmen’. Think of the propeller as being the ‘business end’ of a [brace-and-bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brace_(tool)) with the ‘brace’ being extended for the length of the ship, and alternating on sides of the centerline.
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Blow air bubbles under the ship at speed. This is air lubrication and reduces drag 20%.
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160902125334.htm>
If they can make fast burning material like gunpowder the can use rockets. If they can distil highly volatile oil from plants to use in some rocket thing (which is controllable).
There is a heat differential powered by solar, hang gliders harvest it as well as wind. Can't think how a ship could harvest it except for being towed by glider. One could make it larger by burning fuel on-board or capturing heat from the sun. Towed gliders would be good for keeping lookout.
There is also wave power. See <https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/>. Perhaps more useful would a well deck at the rear that something floats up and down on a pivot moving a flipper behind the ship.
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In addition to the answers already posted in this thread:
If you want to avoid using magic, industrial power applications or manpower, you could resort to other on-deck muscles. Have a set of wheels turned by oxen or other large herbivores, and control the power output with a gearbox or by making the oxen go faster.
This has an advantage over being pulled by marine animals on a leash, as animals outside the ship are harder to control (leash vs lever), easier to spot and kill by the enemy, and reduce maneuverability (huge turn radius vs on-spot turning).
Obviously, this option is only for larger ships with paddle wheels or propellers, able to have at least one such turnwheel, oxen, and food supply for the animals. Smaller ships would likely still rely on oars.
If you want to cut out the middleman: The book **Monster Blood**¹ describes a setting where ships and other vehicles are powered by muscles, but not animals or humans. The vehicles contain tanks with artificially grown muscles connected to a crankshaft, and can be regulated by increasing or decreasing the nutrient supply to the tank. The book never really goes into detail about this technology, it might be a good concept to explore for you.
¹Will add source when I'm not on mobile
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For fast travel without wind, it's hard to beat good old-fashioned rockets for pure speed. Ships could be equipped with two sets of rockets: one for "boosting" from the island out to the windy part of the sea, and the other for the return trip. Use sails for normal propulsion, and rockets to bridge the windless gap. Also useful for catching up with fleeing enemy vessels, or just scaring the living daylights out of them. You can tweak the designs to get both long, slow burns or sudden bursts of speed.
[Rockets have been around for millennia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine#History_of_rocket_engines) but not frequently utilized because their physics were not well understood. Perhaps your civilization has dedicated considerable time into their study and have perfected the art. Your biggest challenge would be fuel (balancing fuel volume with burn time, thrust produced, distance required, etc). Perhaps as part of their research, your civilization has discovered how to create or harvest the necessary fuel out of a material unique to their island.
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It is a misconception that a sailboat requires moving air to sail.
All sailboats derive their energy from the difference in speed between the Air and the Water, so if both Water and Air move at the same speed there is no energy available to do anything other than "float" with the current.
Conversely if the water is moving and the air is stationary, there is a delta between them that can be exploited to move the boat.
A modern Americas cup sailboat can easily move against the current with no wind. Here's the link to to designers discussing it:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBG1g8s3BT0#t=8m40>
The example he sites is on the Amazon river with a 12 knot current. Specifically he states the boat could move against the current at twice that speed.
Note: It is only with modern "foiling" sailing boats that the energy can be extracted efficiently enough to make sailing without wind possible (the boat has to be able to sail significantly faster than the differential speed in order to navigate against the water current.
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I am not clear on what technology you are allowing, but if you have modern materials (carbon fiber) and your world has predicable water currents you can have sailboats that can navigate with no actual wind.
Note: The water currents create an apparent wind, due to to the boat moving through still air - in the same way as you feel a breeze on your hand if you wave it about.
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1. **Propellers**
It shouldn't be too difficult to make a multi-person crankshaft.
The propeller shaft doesn't have to pass through the hull. The propeller can be carved from wood.
2. **Octopoid propulsion**
*Octopus inspires silent propulsion system for boats and sub*s -
<https://newatlas.com/octopus-squid-propulsion-system/28135/>
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[
The antagonist of my story trades steel with a non-human, and non-humanoid, race, in return for a magical substance. They place great value in steel as they cannot manufacture it themselves. That is, they do know how steel production works, yet some aspect of their biology makes it unfeasible for them.
In this setting, steel is produced using [wind furnaces](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/06/science/ancient-smelter-used-wind-to-make-high-grade-steel.html) as was historically done in Sri Lanka.
**How would the production of steel be impossible for a species?** Explanations to this would preferrably be biological, rather than magical, and not too alien since this is a mammalian race, designed with evolutionary plausibility in mind.
Clarification: steel production is possible in the environment that they live in (there is iron and carbon, and there are possible heat sources).
[Answer]
Three suggestions:
One:
I would suggest "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen".
Some aspects of steel production use a lot of heat. In a fantasy story, steel would be produced by ancient, medieval, or early modern methods, instead of by modern industrial methods, and so would involve more manual labor close to the steel than modern steel production does.
Possibly these non human people are very sensitive to heat and can not force themselves to get close enough to the heat source to be able to do anything, included necessary steps in steel production.
Possibly those non human people have a lot of hair, fur, or feathers that can catch fire from stay sparks and so they reduce their use of fire to a bare minimum.
I note that humans (*Homo sapiens*) are believed to have evolved as endurance hunters, who chased prey for hours at a time in the African heat until they caught their prey. Thus humans have far more sweat glands than most animals and can cool off better than most animals.
If those non human people don't have sweat glands or as many as humans, possibly they might overheat and die when trying to make steel.
If your character trades blank ingots of steel to those people that would not work. They would have to work the steel to make into objects they could use, and so they would have to work the steel when it was very hot. Unless they use magic to turn a steel ingot into a steel object with the same mass, but cannot use magic to turn iron, carbon, etc. into steel.
Two:
Possibly these people are allergic to elemental iron and/or carbon, and/or to all forms of steel except for surgical steel.
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> Surgical stainless steel is a grade of stainless steel used in biomedical applications. The most common "surgical steels" are austenitic SAE 316 stainless and martensitic SAE 440, SAE 420, and 17-4 stainless steels. There is no formal definition on what constitutes a "surgical stainless steel", so product manufacturers and distributors often apply the term to refer to any grade of corrosion resistant steel.
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(source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_stainless_steel))
They then would be unable to make steel themselves, though they could use hypoallergenic surgical steel.
Three:
Possibly these nonhuman people lack the necessary physical strength for some part of the steel making process, which in a fantasy setting would probably involve a lot of physical labor instead of automated mechanical processes. Possibly they can't beat the steel ingots with enough force to shape them into any products.
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## They are Fae
In most lore, faeries hate, hate, hate iron. It is offensive and toxic to them.
**It's not so bad** in your world. Iron is to your fae as [di-isocyanates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isocyanate) are to us humans. Touching bare iron feels bad, but skin is a good barrier as long as they don't overdo it; and they can work with cool iron using common PPE like gloves and long-sleeve shirts. But inhaling or ingesting brings serious effects quickly. See the spiral of symptoms humans get from di-isocyanates, such as [IgG reactions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunoglobulin_G), extreme allergies, and eventual immune system collapse.
Any of the normal coatings you put on an iron/steel object *to keep it from rusting*, like paint, zinc galvanizing or chrome, protect the Fae pretty completely. Also, *rust* doesn't bother Fae; that would be evolutionarily sensible since natural iron exists in oxide form.
They love their musclecars and tolerate them being steel *since they are painted*, but they would never say "Detroit *iron*" because the 4-letter word is not something you brag about. Those with the means gravitate toward non-ferrous components; aluminum heads, brass body panels, aluminum frames, but concede to the necessity of steel in extreme stress applications such as roller bearings, valve springs, and gears.
Being around a blacksmith working red-hot iron/steel, they get sunburns from the radiant energy, the fumes are offensive and choking like sulfur, and will make them mildly ill if they vacate soon, but if they persist, they'll be in the hospital.
* So a Fae can rebuild the engine on their '67 Barracuda with fairly good PPE: goggles, mask, gloves, and don't touch the bare steel parts.
* Hot work, like welding or blacksmithing, requires a moon suit with supplied air (like what car/aircraft painters use because of the isocyanates).
Being around a steel mill, that would be like [Bhopal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster) to them. So running their own smelters is simply out of the question.
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Steel mills are loud, hot places fraught with many dangers. If your race is biologically particularly sensitive to loud sounds and vibrations, it would be very difficult to get workers to produce much steel. Add in some sensitivities to say asbestos (maybe the only insulator on your planet) and it could become cost prohibitive to produce steel and still give your employees the protections they will need.
Even today in our time of automation, safety-consciousness, and technology, steel workers still experience [incredibly high rates of workplace morbidity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4292197/) compared to average. If your species has weakened lungs and is susceptible to vibrations (say [Vestibular Hyperacusis](https://vestibular.org/vestibular-hyperacusis)), they could be incapable of working around the equipment required to produce and work steel, even while taking "normal" safety precautions. Add in an inability to cope with temperature changes, and they wouldn't be able to wear most protective gear to deal with the heat generated.
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**They cannot be consistent.**
These creatures do not follow recipes. The concept of a recipe is difficult for them - steps that you follow to make it right. They do not do things the same way the second time because it turned out good the first time. In fact, under the circumstances of their evolution, if it turned out good the first time it is unlikely to work again and so you should mix it up; even if you remember what you did the first time (difficult!) you should avoid that. If there is a need to follow a set series of steps to produce a thing, these creatures really cannot produce that thing. These creatures do not have steel. Neither do they bake cakes.
These creatures think very differently than humans. They are creative, spontaneous, and would seem to have a high tolerance for chaos and wasted effort. Humans are all about pattern recognition. We are empirics. Earth's is Pavlov's domain. If something worked before, it will probably work again, even though there is no logical reason that it should. It is hard for us to wrap our heads around something which did not recognize value in empiricism.
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They live in water and are heavy (see whales and likes). The only metallurgy they can acheive is water-based electrolysis and they do that pretty well, but they cannot melt metals and cannot make alloys. Steel is important for them even considering corrosion, stainless steel - even more.
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They're perfectly capable of produce steel but they dont dare to.
For their culture and religious beliefs, to ransack mother earth is a terrible sin which dooms their souls and the souls of their children. But they're perfectly fine if other beings are willing to condemn their souls this way.
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It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a start:
They live at very cold temperatures. The kind of temperatures where a warm summer means you’re only a degree or two below freezing. As a result they have shocking thermal regulation (no need to sweat to cool down) and very, very good insulation.
This means that staying in environments that need to stay hot (say, forges) for long periods of time is Not Good. It’s incredibly uncomfortable and rapidly leads to heatstroke. Imagine putting a husky with a full winter coat in a foundry. It’s a terrible idea. While it’s not entirely *impossible* for these creatures to work metal or smelt alloys, it wouldn’t be their first choice.
Especially not when you’d be better off trading food for steel and saving all your valuable fuel for the winter ice storms.
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I do not think they are unable to make steel, they are unable to make iron at all. This is because if you can make iron, it is fairly easy to get steel. Getting it consistently at volume can be tough but you can get it by accident just by being lucky with the carbon content. And carburization is almost as old as [smelting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting), so it is not really practical for a civilization to be able to do one and not another when their neighbours can.
So I think it is more reasonable to think that your people do not do any smelting themselves and need to buy all their iron and steel from elsewhere because of that.
**So what could prevent them from smelting?**
I think the easiest solution is that the pollution the process produces is toxic to them. Since you do not want the reason to be specific to local resources, the only real alternative is carbon monoxide. This is used in smelting to reduce the iron oxides into metallic iron. It is fairly inevitable that some of the carbon monoxide created is not fully oxidized and concentrations nearby increase.
The issue with this is that carbon monoxide is a very common result of fire. Smelting produces more of it since the fire is intentionally starved of oxygen by stacking the charcoal but a species allergic enough to the stuff that they cannot do smelting at all would have real issues with cooking fires or forges. A barbecue would be grounds for execution.
Smelting is also used for reducing several other metals into metallic form. So they would be unable to produce copper, tin, silver or lead as well. So they'd be buying **all** their metals. Except gold. (Well, native copper and iron **do** exist.)
I honestly think you'd be better off with "they have no iron deposits" or "they prefer somebody else to lose all their trees". Producing iron and steel **did** cause significant damage to the environment, so a civilization that cares about things like that really **would** prefer to buy their steel.
**If you want the biological angle**, you can give them a symbiotic relationship with a tree or some other life form that requires fairly untouched forests to thrive. There were important plants such as silphium which were never successfully farmed. A species with dependency like this would quickly realize that making steel in their own country would be a bad idea.
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# They have no hands
This species is a kind of talking unicorn. They need steel horseshoes to protect their hooves, as well as lots of steel appliances that they can operate with their legs and mouth so that they can do their day-to-day stuff. It has to be steel because they live in a place with high salinity, so the brine in the air will cause corrosion on regular iron.
The magic substance they trade for steel is solidified rainbows, which they produce in their bowels. It is a very powerful fertilizer.
[Answer]
**They're under water**
A race underwater will have trouble developing metals, glasses, carbonized wood, fired clay, fired anything.
You mentioned that they're mammalian in the intro. Cetaceans would have real trouble making any of the materials mentioned, even if they had hands.
[Answer]
They Aztecs and Mayans never gained significant iron or steel works because they lacked ready access to the raw materials.
The Aztecs never progressed past Bronze for this reason.
If your hypothetical race live on a world (or region of a world) where for whatever reason, most iron is buried deep and hard to reach (particularly if it rains a lot and the tunnels flood easily) then they might never develop iron or steel.
Other civilisations might not consider digging deep to be such an impediment, or might have encountered surface outcrops of iron-ore large enough to kickstart their interest in the metal.
[Answer]
They are allergic to carbon monoxide
Carbon Monoxide, a gas that is already quite toxic to most form of areobic life, is integral to steelmaking and smelting. On Earth, most life forms, include humans, can tolerate the levels found near furnaces used to smelt steel quite well, which is how we are able to use fire and smelt metals without needing to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning. However, even with this tolerance, modern steel workers still often need PPEs and good ventilation to prevent Carbon Monoxide poisoning when dealing with large furnaces and other devices that handle a large amount of molten iron/steel since low concentrations of Carbon monoxide is barely flammable, potentially allowing a buildup to poisonous levels even to humans ourselves.
This race, however, completely lack even this level of tolerance to Carbon Monoxide, even allergic to it (Possibly due to a low level of Hemoglobin and/or the race’s hemoglobin having a O2 binding site that does not exclude CO well like Human hemoglobin does, from for example a lack of natural CO generation pathways within the ecosystem they evolved in. The Carboxyhemoglobin produced may also become a recognized antigen to their immune system due to it being unfamiliar to their biology), and as a result, anything larger than a well-ventilated campfire produces enough Carbon Monoxide to cause them to faint from Carbon Monoxide poisoning within a 3-m radius, and being even near a working steel mill is a guaranteed death sentence. They may be able to work with small fires (even that will require PPEs and constant care to prevent Carbon Monoxide poisoning), use hydrogen gas and electrolysis to smelt copper and even iron, (and even using hydrogen or electrical heating to heat existing steel to high enough temperatures To be forged without producing Carbon Monoxide gas) but since Carbon Monoxide is an integral part of the carburization process of turning iron into steel, making steel is completely impossible to them without at least astronaut-level protection, stainless included.
That is, however, once the steel is made and have cooled to room temperature, the race is able to safely handle it without being poisoned, since room-temperature steel does not produce Carbon Monoxide, only the process of making or forging it does. Trading with steel articles with them are therefore both possible and highly profitable.
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Doing this with biology is likely to be tricky, but how about culturally?
For cultural reasons they have a taboo on working steel. perhaps it is a sacred metal which they are not allowed to profane (just as Christians got the Jews to carry out necessary banking functions which were taboo for them); perhaps they have a belief that working it will poison them, physically, psychologically or spiritually. Or maybe, for some cultural reason, it is seen as beneath them, like shovelling dung, so they prefer to pay others to do it.
We could do with something wacky like the magnetic field of iron being worked messing with their nervous system, but a cultural exclusion works so much better and gives scope for storytelling.
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Magika is a substance produced by certain creatures that stores energy in a way that resonates with the mind to alter reality.
Iron is a fantastic conductor of magical energy.
This makes weapons made of Steel and enhanced with Magika crystals extremely valuable as they are superior in every way to a magical attack or a weapon strike on its own. The creation of such weapons, however, requires an uneasy alliance with the magical and the mundane. A mundane, of course, is not capable of producing Magika, but can forge steel without issue. Someone of a magical race, on the other hand, could attempt to forge steel on their own, but the results would be at at best chaotic and likely deadly.
The issue is control. The magical races all radiate mana, it is what makes them magical after all, and even undirected, ambient mana will get pulled into steel. When steel is room temperature this is not an issue, though the mana does inhabit another vessel, ie the weapon, it doesn't have enough power to override the will of even the most novice mana user. When that same steel is hot enough to forge, now that is another story. The energy in white hot steel will combine with with the ambient mana from the would be smith and do what mana does best, alter reality, except in this case with no mind directing the outcome.
Hammering a white hot steel bar thrumming with wild mana has an equal chance of causing a plant nearby to burst into full bloom, flatten the metal like a normal blow or turn your smithy into a smoking crater.
In the past some experimentation had been done by some of the magical races to figure out a way to control the smithing process, but after several spectacularly fatal tries even attempting is outlawed.
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This race naturally generates a magnetic field. This magnetic field is strong enough to align iron with the field lines, weakening the structure of the metal, not to mention the distraction of little bits of super hot metal constantly whizzing at your face. Alloying with certain elements, such as nickel, can negate the magnetic properties of the resultant steel, or perhaps they like steel's response to magnetism, but first the steel must be produced, and the magnetic field makes it very difficult.
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Perhaps these creatures are allergic to some of the gasses released when producing steel. Or maybe they are afraid of pollution. Or perhaps they are afraid some rivaling species on their planet are going to overthrow their steel production and steal their steal.
[Answer]
## There is no oxygen in the air
(and their biology gets energy some other way - direct absorption of sunlight - eating oxidisers separately - maybe some nuclear process)
This means that iron is plentiful, it is in the ground, not as ore, but as metal - but it is contaminated by carbon. It can be melted and cast, but in order to make steel they would need to blow oxygen through the iron, something we accomplish by air and oxygen on earth.
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They live in atmosphere that is high in hydrofluoric (HF) gas, this will eat any steel as its made. However if steel, once made, is coated in PTFE (teflon etc), then it will be resistant. The other species make and coat steel parts to their specifications.
However, you will then need a plausible reason why they can't wear atmospheric suits and work in a low HF building.
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The simplest answer is not technological - it's social. Smelting steel (as opposed to using) is taboo in their culture. It is offensive to the great fiery smith (i'm guessing, feel free to fill in your own blanks), who objects to the raw materials being ripped from the ground and re-moulded. Once that's done of course, its too late to lament the problem and so using those tools is perfectly ok. Weirder things have happened in the name of religion.
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**They never bothered to invest in mastering the process**
You mention they have a magical substance, do they have magical powers?
Humans use steel for making weapons, making transport vehicles, making cooking equipment etc. Why would you bother to build a car if you can teleport/fly, why make pans if you can heat food directly in any bowl?
Humans took centuries and millions of individual innovations/ideas to master steel making, if you can do most things you need steel for with much less effort then that investment may not have happened leaving you hundreds of years behind. Humans are only just beginning to catch up, but now that they are catching up, your other species doesn't want to miss out on this hot new technology.
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Making steel is a low level work. No one in the race agree with making it, they focus only in making the magical substance. They are nerds, magical nerds.
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If vampires were around today, not too common, but widespread,it would only take one doctor examining them realize they're different. I assume scientists would hear about it and want to study them.
Every news outlet would love to run a story about some well known fiction turning out to be true. People would look into it.
All it would take is a single vampire either slipping up or willingly sharing their secret.
So how does this (sub)species exist among us without being well known to actually exist?
I prefer solutions without magic, but please share any ideas.
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# Increase the noise to signal ratio
How many people think that Elvis lives? Or Jimmy Hoffa? Or that Neil Armstrong didn't land on the Moon? Or that the 9/11 terrorists came from Iraq? Or that there is *reasonable* doubt left on climate change?
So the people who try to hide vampirism would try and encourage **any** sort of conspiracy theory or weird tale, **including vampirism**. Make sure that many contradicting descriptions of vampirism are published by media like the History Channel.
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The problem is with the conception of vampires as these hunky sexy kung-fu doing young folks. Even Dracula had a little bit of this stuff, with the vampire hunters chasing around his carriage and then Drac busting out to work kung fu when the sun went down. The real vampires were supernatural shapeshifters and their movements in the world are not easy to understand.
<https://archive.org/stream/draculabr00stokuoft/draculabr00stokuoft_djvu.txt>
For the vampire of legend, read the (best) section of Dracula where they know Lucy is being fed upon, and they see her dying little by little, and although they keep her alive with transfusions of their own blood, they cannot stop the process. The vampire is a metaphor for a wasting disease. The disease is based in the body of a dead person and manifests as a spirit that causes the disease. In Dracula, it is not always clear how the vampire visit: sometimes she goes to it, and sometimes there is a bat or a bird around, but the visits always happen. The vampire causes other weird stuff to go down also, as you will see in Renfields bizarre vampire-induced doings.
That absolutely could happen now. It would be easier now. In the middle ages people might suspect by the signs that a vampire was at work and so seek it out and dispose of the body where the power was based. In the first world no-one would suspect such a thing. A person with a chronic illness might be visited, maybe nightly like Lucy, maybe intermittently, but either way would gradually die. No-one would think to look for a body in a grave which was the source of the illness. Nobody bothers graves at all.
A vampire of this sort - the wasting, gradual sort - would not go to school or fight kung fu. It would not be captured and locked up. You would not talk with it. It is a supernatural force for sickness, madness and gradual death, and one that no-one believes in any more. It could persist because science has explained it in other terms and no-one is looking for it.
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Simple. Encourage the vamp subculture.
Vamp, obviously short for vampire, was/is an offshoot of the goth and industrial subcultures that celebrates vampirism through dress, music, literature, and so on... Some actually claim to be real vampires of various sorts, such as psychic, sexual, energy, and even sanguine or blood drinking.
It would be pretty easy to hide amongst a bunch of humans who like to play vampire. Any actual evidence of real vampires could be easily explained away by attributing it to "vamps" or fake vampires.
See the [Vampire lifestyle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_lifestyle) and [Rod Ferrell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Ferrell).
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## All it would take is for vampires collectively as a (sub)species to really want to stay undiscovered.
In most lores, they're powerful enough beings that it seems if each one was convinced of the necessity of staying a secret, they'd be able to with relative ease.
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> It would only take one doctor examining them to realize they're different.
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In what situations would a vampire be examined by a doctor?
1. A vampire murders a human (to drink their blood for sustenance) and is caught by the police and medically examined in jail. If the vampires have traditional supernatural powers, such as the ability to shapeshift, or enhanced strength and stamina, they'd be able to escape such physical capture with relative ease.
2. A young vampire is going to school and, in an effort to seem completely normal, volunteers (like the other kids) to be examined by the doctor for one reason or another. The doctor, surprised by strange and unusual features of the vampire's body, contacts the young vampire's parents in order to request permission for further study of the peculiarities. The vampire parents realize what will happen and they whisk the young one away before the doctor's testimony can be corroborated. In the worst case, they change their names and move to a new town, state, or country.
3. A vampire is caught in a serious accident and is rendered unconscious. Bystanders take him/her to the hospital. The doctors start talking about a vampire, but either
a. when/if the vampire regains consciousness, he/she would use his/her supernatural powers to run away, or
b. when the other vampires of the community find out that this one's secret has been discovered, they whisk the still-living vampire away from prying eyes, destroy the body, or silence any witnesses.
Of course, these aren't all the situations where a vampire would be examined by a doctor, but since vampires don't have the same medical needs as humans, they would need to either want to reveal that vampires are real, or be involuntarily exposed to a doctor.
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> All it would take is a single vampire either slipping up or willingly sharing their secret.
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Given the number of people that subscribe to certain "conspiracy theories," and how willing they are to show others the "evidence" that their theories are true, and then considering how rarely these theories are actually widely accepted, it seems like it would take more than just one doctor's opinion on the matter.
"But here we have a real, live (or dead) vampire body--it's obviously and *scientifically* different from a normal human!" you might imagine the journalists saying. But there have been vampire sightings reported in modern society ([here's just one](http://www.ghostvillage.com/legends/2003/legends20_06142003.shtml)), and they are not taken seriously.
In many sci-fi and fantasy shows that aspire to realness, there is a governmental (or otherwise) agency whose entire purpose is to cover up any evidence of supernatural activity. This seems like something the US government would have a vested interest in doing, to reduce panic and so forth.
Even if the government wouldn't or couldn't do it, **if the vast majority of the vampire community was willing to use their supernatural powers to discredit any media coverage, it would be relatively easy for them to do so.** Evidence could be destroyed; the doctors' authority could be questioned ("he tampered with the body!" or "the police planted the evidence!"); a vampire who was well-known as a human celebrity or political authority could use their social influence to testify that vampires are indeed a legend.
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Essentially the vampires would need to be extremely difficult to detect that they are present in modern society. There are three obvious routes to achieve this.
One, vampires may have a worldwide distribution, but they are extremely rare. For example, if only one in a million persons were vampires this will make them hard to find. Lower ratios will make vampires even harder to detect.
For example, in Jack Butler's novel *Nightshade* (1989) there is only one vampire and he lives on the planet Mars (the novel is set in the future).
Two, vampires only need very small amounts of blood to feed and survive. Presumably, this will mean they eat and drink other food for their primary sustenance and survival. So there will be no exsanguinated corpse to worry about or dispose of. Also, perhaps, no puncture marks in the neck too. The taking of blood might involve, for example, lapping the entry point of minor wounds.
If vampires needed to feed often, there would be an epidemic of people with puncture marks. If their victims were drained of blood, then it would be easy for legal enforcement to detect exsanguinating serial killers. Nothing says Vampire! more clearly than this.
Three, vampires are quite different from traditional supernatural vampires. No exclusively hanging around during the night. No fangs. No harm from sunlight.\*\* No allergies to garlic. They may die like normal human beings from having a stake driven into the hearts. No crumbling into dust. In this case vampires could be given a medical examination and no-one would realize they were looking at a vampire.
On the other hand, if vampires are more widespread and less rare and are closer in function and behaviour to traditional supernatural vampires then there is one aspect of vampires that can explain their apparent non-existence in the modern world. This, of course, is the vampire's powers of mind control. Usually victims can be manipulated and controlled by vampires for easy feeding. What if those mind-control powers were much more powerful?
Now vampires could manipulate the minds of anyone who came in contact with them. Institutions and social organizations could be set up and controlled by vampires for the benefit of vampires. Perhaps, feeding stock could be organized on specialist farms. There could be covert blood banks where vampires could make withdrawals. Deposits could be arranged to be supplied by donor farms. Blood might even be diverted from legitimate blood banks.
This answer looks at two models of vampires to explain their non-visibility n the modern world. The first model considers vampires are rare, micro-heamophages and quite different from traditional vampires. The second model is based on traditional vampires but considers their cryptic\*\*\* nature is a consequence of powerful mind-control powers. This model included the creation of social institutions and organizations to support vampires and keep them hidden.
\*\*: In Bram Stoker's *Dracula* the King Vampire himself could go about during the hours of daylight and was unaffected by sunlight. No sparkling or crumbling. Vampires crumbling into dust when exposed to sunlight was introduced in the German silent movie *Nosferatu* (1922).
\*\*\*: "cryptic" in sense of being hidden.
[Answer]
## Population centers
Hiding in cities is a key; no farmer-joe-vampires out in the country. People notice when folks go missing in small towns. Or when they get strange illnesses. But in a large city? Who would notice if a few homeless people went missing? And of those who notice, who'd have the power to do anything about it? And of those who notice and have any political power, *who'd believe their insane rantings?*
Most cities have abundant hiding places. Places where no one goes. Places where no one searches. Places where sunlight never shines. A vampire could be safe in the abandoned tunnels under New York City for decades, coming up to feed on homeless or stragglers at night on the subway.
Cities have thriving night-lives. Being out at night isn't unusual at all. No need to skulk about or be sneaky. If anyone asks, you work a night shift. Or you just like the "night life." Stay near night clubs or bars and no one would notice you.
In large cities, people actively try not to notice other people. Blending in is easier. Being nearly invisible is something almost anyone can learn to do, after hours, in a city.
## Tactics
Dump bodies in the river. By the time they're found, no one would be able to find evidence of vampiric feeding. Drink from arms, not necks. Now they're going to be drug abusers according to medical examiners. Dead homeless druggies found floating in rivers don't get thorough police investigations.
Don't feed on people to the point of death. Drink a bit, then move on to someone else. Or learn how to bypass security systems and raid the Red Cross blood bank. Or get a job as a night janitor / orderly / nurse at a hospital and raid their blood bank. As you grow in power, you can take more risks, but you don't have to.
Bribe at least a couple of police. Make them think you're a powerful drug lord or whatever. Feed them actual gang members from time to time to help their careers. Help them stay safe. Their loyalty will help you in many subtle ways. Rinse and repeat with county clerk staff, courthouse staff, hospital staff, DMV staff. They don't have to be powerful people, just people on the inside of various bureaucratic offices and places that your handiwork might wind up. Even janitors usually have all the keys to the building. No telling how many ways that can be useful to hide your tracks.
## Self-policing
One issue would be those naughty vampires who don't want to hide. The self-preserving, conservative vampires would have to watch for these idiots and put them down hard and fast. They are a threat.
If the fiction is to be believed, vampires don't just die in sunlight. They are destroyed down to dust. If an overly active vampire puts the city's population at risk, the conservative locals will simply tie him down to a rooftop and let the sunlight destroy all evidence of his existence. Clean and simple.
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# Catch me if you can
A common trait of vampires is shapeshifting. Mostly by turning into animals or into another shape that allows flight. A being that can change shape into an animal is amazing at hiding from nosy people.
Sure you were chasing that fellow that ripped the throat out of that woman but there is nobody here. There by the traintracks is a dog, but that's just a dog. If they can fly it gets about as easy, very easy to shake persuers in a city, just fly to a roof when they can't see you. Or turn into mist like some myths claim they can do.
# Science
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> If vampires were around today, not too common, but widespread,it would only take one doctor examining them realize they're different. I assume scientists would hear about it and want to study them.
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This implies they look differently. If it's a parasite that changes the human host into a vampire the process might reverse when it leaves. It might leave the host when the host gets damaged severely. All that remains is a human corpse.
While alive and concious no vampire would seek medical help, the blood drinking will heal any ailment. So the chance of getting caught by the medical committee is minimal. Especially if the vampires refrain from doing dangerous things like signing up for the army.
Diseases shouldn't impact them if they're undead either, nor aging. So again this would minimize trips to the doctor.
# Why hide?
Most vampires have clear weaknesses, sunlight, a vulnerable body, feet or skin when they're hunting at night etc. They're ambush predators who hunt humans. Being hidden is to their advantage. And someone who evolved as an ambush hunter should prefer it to be hidden.
Most of them are solitary creatures that ignore their own species unless they directly compete for food. Maybe there is some form of order among them, some civilization. Perhaps it strictly enforces secrecy, any who break it die along with the witnesses. Their plenty of stories around disappearances of groups and villages to account for this.
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If vampires are just like people but need blood to survive, then they can pass off any appearances as cosmetic surgery and implants they had done to **look** like a vampire because they are **fans**. Heck, IRL actual people have had horns installed (permanently), scales, vampire incisors, forehead ridges, snake-split tongues, not to mention all kinds of hardware.
So your vampires hide in open sight. Why do they keep themselves a secret? for the same reason pedophiles and rapists keep their activities secret, self-preservation. Vampires kill, or at least violently assault.
If any vampire outs themselves, other vampires collude to kill that one, also out of self-preservation: The world cannot know or they will all be rounded up and burned at the stake. It isn't like vampires will be morally opposed to murder. That also makes the stakes higher for any vampire that thinks about outing themselves.
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It's possibly that you could hide an entire culture by not hiding it at all. The old concept of "hiding in plain sight" could be apropos here. Our current society is filled with a variety of subcultures who embrace cosplay and other aspects of role-play. The vampires in your story could pretend to pretend. It could even be rumored that the more hardcore members of that group indulge in blood doping, which would affect blood tests, etc . . .
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping>
As blood doping is used by athletes, it would also explain increased strength and endurance in the vampire community, and give further credence to the rumor that members of that community engage in the practice. Why just dress as a vampire when you can artificially enhance yourself too?
Perhaps there are counseling programs available for vampiric patients whose blood oxygen levels are off the charts, much as there are for alcoholics and other substance abusers? There would be far-reaching social/cultural side effects as well as medical ones.
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The answer is pretty simple: vampires run things like the ministry of magic in HP only with more viciousness and fewer wands.
There's also considerable participation from powerful governments. Only a few people within those governments know about it, and they keep the secret for stick and carrot reasons: they're promised the gift of eternal life if they do so and a swift and certain death if not.
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**Enact a ridiculously large conspiracy**
If many positions of power within any credible media organisation (including academic media such as journals) and all governments all over the world were controlled by vampires, or by humans who want to keep the existence of vampires a secret, then the access to this information could be heavily restricted. People who try to publicise the fact of vampire existence could be discredited and most of the world's population would be none the wiser/just think vampires are a myth. This conspiracy would need to be on a huge scale and would be vulnerable to members wanting to reveal it so is perhaps an unrealistic option long-term.
For the conspiracy to work at all it would probably require the following:
**Vampires that are not very obviously vampires (have subtle vampiric abilities and traits)**
There are certain vampiric traits that real humans have (such as being "allergic" to sunlight) that wouldn't raise suspicion if they were sufficiently subtle (if sunlight killed a vampire then that would be noticed pretty quickly whatever happened). This would mean that your vampires would not be able to have many of the more outlandish traits in vampire mythology, especially if you want to be proof against vampires revealing themselves. For example, someone turning into a bat in front of your eyes would be difficult to ignore.
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Make the vampire and humans more closly related. So the difference is more vauge. Humans of different cultures already eat blood.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_soup>
Black pudding. Bloodpudding...
Combine this with canabalism (in history) or events happening in present.
You will find it wouldent be so easy to find these vampires.
Exactly how they would get their special powers - I do not know. It could have something to do with chemistry or genetics (combined with human blood intake).
You also have some people (lunatics) that actually think they are vampires - but no one is bealiving them... No matter how hard they try to act like it. Why don´t we bealive those that actually think they are vampires?!. (Probably it has something to do with that we only would accuse someone a vampire if we fear them/it)
Create a distrusting critcal world as well. (I mean no one bealives people who preform cannabalism and drink blood - saying they are vampires). If we do not bealive people that act like vampires - would it really be so hard for the real ones to hide?
A human in a culture that consume lots of animal blood - that for some reason are/turn to become a cannibal. He fakes schizophrenia. He comes from a wartorn country with no medical records of him? "A few times he have gotten the illusion that he is a vampire" - psychiatrist. Maybe this actual vampire acts like an idiot that think he is a vampire... etc.
A special arranged medcine seem to calm him (but in truth this hides his actual vampirism) - but he only acts calm when he gets it to fool his care takers. Everybody understand this man is a lunatic and we might feel sorry for him - so we do not accuse him of real vampirism (as he dont cause any fear I guess).
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Make them a cult. If you do that you'll have a group of people running around who "know the truth" and the society actively ignoring the "evidence". This essentially turns anyone who realizes that vampires are actually a thing in your universe into a conspiracy theorist falling for a meme like people who believe in the Illuminati or Oculists.
Governments who become aware of the cult of vampires won't say anything because it makes them look stupid. Imagine if the US government started releasing statements about the Illuminati. Would those statements be taken seriously beyond memes? The answer is yes because memes are a serious business whose reach extends beyond itself and on into Harambe. RIP gorilla in the sky. The general public would not take government statements about the Illuminati seriously at all.
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The answer depends entirely on what characteristics of vampires you have. One that doesn't *need* blood to survive, that doesn't do the "one bite and you're a bloodsucker" viral spread, and doesn't have blatant physical clues to its nature (I don't care how often you mention "porphyria", normal humans don't start smoking on exposure to sunlight, and normal people tend to appear in mirrors), could go undetected for quite some time. Computerized record keeping would be a pain beginning in the late 20th century if they live longer than humans, but there's ways around it.
Once you postulate bodies stacking up, however, there's significant issues. While people point to lists of missing people, the fact is that most people don't *stay* missing; people get added to the number of people missing, but almost as many come *off* the list because they're found, one way or another. If you postulate vampires, however, the list grows significantly, and once you have things like national centers tracking that sort of thing, the statistical anomalies will start showing up and people will start investigating. There's computer programs now that troll through databases looking for patterns, and that's only go to become more prevalent.
A handful of vampires of that type *might* be able to get under the radar.
If you've got the "viral spread" version of vampirism, forget about it. They'd be well known.
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To answer this properly, you need to know what powers they have. The more powerful they are, the more they stand out.
In a basic form, they would desire blood and would avoid sunlight but neither is necessary. These could hide in many human sub cultures such as goths without being noticed.
If you go for everything, hiding would be extremely difficult and vampire society would be required to rule from the shadows to cover everything up. They would need their own people and/or minions running the police, hospitals and the government. Anyone trying to expose them would be gotten rid of quietly, made to look like an accident or just vanishing without a trace.
The next thing is how they spread. The more virulent, the harder to hide. If a single bite is required, hiding would be almost impossible. If they need to drink a vampire's blood to be created, it could be hidden. If they are born from normal parents but due to some genetic anomaly become vampires, they would be virtually unknown.
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Vampires could be a species closely related to humans. Most “vampires” could be mixed-race due to interbreeding with humans over the centuries. So someone whose great-grandmother was a vampire might have some vampiric traits (longevity, strength, fondness for rare meat and blood sausage, easily sunburnt, a knack for hiding) but nothing too far out of the ordinary for a human; consequently **they may not even realise that they are a vampire.**
If they became ill, most human doctors wouldn’t even know what they were seeing—they’d issue a battery of tests, come up with a vague conclusion like anemia, give you iron supplements, and send you on home, since they’d have no reason to suspect you’re of a different subspecies. On the other hand, **you could use suspicious human doctors as a source of conflict in the plot.**
The relatively few “pure-blooded” lines would have more pronounced versions of these traits. They could use their extreme longevity to easily gain money (just shuffle your money around from bank to bank and accrue interest over the course of hundreds of years) and power (patiently infiltrating long-lived financial & legal organisations) and also skirt such problems as inbreeding.
The purebred vamps would monitor half-breeds around the world to guard the secret more closely, in order to protect their species. As another source of conflict, you could have a small organisation of humans that *does* know about vampires and tries to find, study, or exterminate them. This organisation would *also* be incentivised to keep the secret, to avoid interference from the public, such as “vampire rights activists”.
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Well if we assume that vampires maintain their health and longevity by drinking other people's blood and not by going to doctors, then we can safely say that it would be easy for them to avoid the risk of doctors and scientists discovering their biology.
As far as the media is concerned... consider how a serial killer manages to stay on the loose. The media can't catch a serial killer. Only the police can. But the police depend upon certain expectations, for example that the killer exists in the system and has credit cards, driver's license, etc. A vampire might have no need for these things and therefore be too difficult for even the police to track down. If the vampire has lived for hundreds of years, it would be especially difficult for police because the police would never even think to investigate someone who was born in the 1800s.
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# The definition of "vampire"
would have to be defined first to be interpreted for modern times as we can find no evidence for literal interpretations. The probability is so poor at this point we have more hope of detecting extra terrestrials light years away.
As we know, stories are greatly exaggerated and reasons misunderstood based and the lack of knowledge in the prescientific era. Individual events get lumped together even if unrelated. The myths are poorly defined themselves.
Therefore to take such a question seriously, effort should be made to define specific properties of being a vampire that could be verifiable without labeling it as supernatural or spiritual as those things are already debunked and literally mean "things outside nature". Guess what, we can't go outside nature to verify it so labeling anything "supernatural" cannot be used to define anything in any rational way to be used in an argument.
An example of a partial definition would be: "A vampire is the label given to a member of a religious cult that partakes in drinking human blood." No mention of the supernatural necessary. Given a clear definition, one can then address how such people could avoid detection.
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Vampires turn to dust when killed. Everyone knows that. So there are no bodies to examine. It could be extremely difficult to capture them, or even render them unconscious without killing them.
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They also cast no reflection, in modern times it's not a big leap to also think they cant be photographed. So they wouldn't appear on any surveillance footage, nor could you produce a vampire mug shot, short of a artistic rendering.
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Ancient vampires will likely be obscenely wealthy and socially/politically connected, they don't hunt their food or even buy it instead politicians and multinational CEOs compete for the right to accommodate and feed them. A vampire is a neigh perfect assassin and all the more deadly for the fact that nobody really knows how many there are or what they're truly capable of. Nations without the favour of a few ancient vampires will find themselves at the mercy of those that do, their leaders dying from brain aneurysms, blood borne diseases or just going insane for no apparent reason.
You could try to capture and study one, but what if the others find out, indeed how do you know they're not constantly telepathically communicating with each other all the time?
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[Question]
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As of 2020, colonizing outside of Earth and into the other bodies that orbit our sun--planets, moons and even asteroids--is all talk and no do. Sure, we have stations like the International Space Station and Skylab, but they are merely orbiting from the air and not planted on any ground. Space telescopes like Cassini and New Horizons don't count, either, as they merely observe rather than directly involve.
In an alternate 2020, the human population on Earth is noticeably lower, as are the populations of livestock, giving Earth more room for the wild places. That is because, in 2020, there are millions of people living in fully established cities on both the moon and Mars, meaning that Earth has less people for more balance.
What point--or point***s***--of departure would I need to make this kind of scenario believable?
[Answer]
# 3000 BC
To make Space colonization now viable, safe, and common, you need to start back in ancient Egypt. Instead of war between different cultures, the pharaohs will have to unify humanity more than it is in our timeline. The first Milestone of Egypt is the expansion to the Roman Empire's dimensions in 1500 BC. It's a society that will be united by one goal: to bring the pharaohs home to the stars. To this aim, talent is driven forward and technology flourishes. And the empire grows, unifying the Eurasian and African continent.
# ca. 750 BC
A splinter group in the far fringes of the empire, declares their Prince-Gouverner (a relative of the pharaoh) to be a true Pharaoh in what in our timeline would be China. While unprecedented, this act of rebellion goes unpunished, as it was the most liked nephew of the Pharaoh. China and Egypt both aim to get their respective lines to the stars now. As the years pass, other splinter lines join the developmental race, but it is all guided by the peaceful aim of getting the Pharaohs into space - after all the one that will do so first will have proven to be the real line of Pharaohs!
# ca. 900 AD
Several lines have come and gone, split off and merged in again. The political landscape is entirely different, the idea of a republic has never been born. However, the prevailing system is a meritocracy: teaching is universal, and whoever shows potential is brought forward.
In Religious terms, there are only various variants of Egyptian Pharaoh cults, all of them having syncretistically absorbed local ancient gods: In Scandinavia the Pantheon is centered around Odin-Thoth, in Magna Graecia it's Zeus-Atum, on the British Isles the duality of Morrigan-Anubis and Dagda-Osiris center the gods, just to name a few.
The year 900 brings finally the discovery of America. New Pharaohs establish there, but sadly enough, the new offshoots of the empire don't get along with the natives. This is when the empire has to learn war for the first time in about 1000 years. But the war with the natives spurred developments that were previously unknown, and soon they manage to wipe out the resistance as firearms get developed from the peacefully used black powder that was used only to honor the gods for the last 300 years. While a war against other Pharaohs is unthinkable, guns propagate as ritualistic objects and hunting implements.
# ca 1300 AD
All of the world is in Pharaohnic hands for two hundred or three hundred years. The Industrial Revolution has started some and is in full-blown steam. We only look at this point, because around this time man has managed to build the first motorized airplanes.
# ca 1400 AD
The first rocket reaches space. Twenty years later, the first artificial satellite is a Pharaohnic burial. The first Pharaoh has returned to the stars, but this doesn't stop the attempt of each pharaoh to get better than the last.
# 1620 AD
The first interplanetary ship has been built and launches with a pharaoh, his family, and thousands of servants, priests, and craftsmen. It aims for Mars. About a hundred years later Mars is filled with colonies, and they need to look for different planets. So they build generation ships instead.
# 2020 AD
It has become a rite to launch generation ships instead of fracturing the empires further. About every 50 to 100 years a wave of ships leaves earth, each ship better than the ones before. Humanity is currently putting the finishing touches to the eighth exodus.
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Let's use the [1989 Rockwell International Integrated Space Plan](https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2013/07/integratedspaceplan2color.pdf) as a reference point. It had a biplanetary civilization (i.e., permanent presence on the moon) by 2010 (we didn't make it). But it shows you in pretty good detail what you'd need to do to make it. Said simply, you need to have everything it shows between 1989 and 2010 happen by 2020.
Once someone opens that chart and looks at it, you'll see why I've not taken the time to summarize it here. It's MASSIVE. There's a LOT OF TECH that hasn't been invented yet that Rockwell thought could be invented quickly.
(If you're thinking biplanetary i.e. Mars... That wasn't expected to happen before 2023.)
So, what "point of departure" could exist? You need everything that happened from 1955 until what Rockwell thought would happen by 2010 and have it actually happen by 2020. What the world has proven is that Rockwell's well-intentioned plan was INCREDIBLY short sighted. It's frankly unfair to say that about them — after all, that chart embodies a mind-bogglingly large amount of tech.
I therefore submit this answer as being the best you're going to get — because explaining how hundreds of industries would need to change over 70 years is way, way, way beyond the scope of this Stack.
*BTW, the only reason I didn't VTC this question as too broad/opinion-based is the existence of Rockwell's ISP. Had that not existed, this question would have been impossible to answer in any practical way. It would have violated Stack Exchange's book rule.*
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About 4.5 billion years ago. You'd have to tinker with the formation of the inner planets, making Mars large enough to hold on to its atmosphere & water (and give it a stronger magnetic field, working plate tectonics, and so on). Venus could be spun up to give it a day of around 24 hours, and perhaps a moon similar to Earth's moon.
Then, assuming the evolution of compatible life (panspermia, anyone?) you'd have planets like the Mars & Venus of '50s SF. People would actually be able to live there, instead of having to stay in cramped, temporary habitats, supported at vast expense by Earth.
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### Make Nixon more ambitious, (and make Apollo 13 a success)
After the lunar landing, [Nixon was presented with 4 choices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process#Shuttle_design_debate). Ranging from "Lets colonise mars" to "lets play it really safe and not go past LEO". Nixon chose to play it safe and we spent the next 50 years using a space shuttle to go up to LEO only.
Nixon's choice was validated by the Apollo 13 near miss.
Had Nixon instead choose to pursue [Wernher von Braun's "Das Marsprojekt"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project) (or more specifically the 1956 "2 ship, 12 crew" proposal), instead of the ISS, we'd conceivably have bases on the moon and Mars by the late 80s early 90s.
It's a stretch to imagine these growing to millions over 40 years, but I'd say just within the realm of plausibility.
To get a more likely outcome - you probably would need to rewrite the 20th century all together. Remove the great war of 1914 (maybe replace it with a friendly "tech race" cold-war style between super powers, first in aviation - try to get the jet engine in the 20s, V2 in the early 30s, etc) and keep the roaring 20s going through the great depression by the increased government research. With no great depression, WW2 or Manhattan project but still the research motivation we might of got to the moon a few decades earlier. Then mars colony by the 50s, etc.
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# You can conceive a alternative reality where Orion Project suceeded in the 1950s
The [Orion project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)) researched the feasibility of building spaceships using uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions (nukes) as propulsive means. As it's written in the back cover of a book telling its history, by the son of [one of the physicists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson) involved :
>
> In 1957, a small group of scientists, supported by the U.S.
> government, launched an attempt to build a four-thousand-ton spaceship
> propelled by nuclear bombs. The initial plan called for missions to
> Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970. After seven years of work, political
> obstacles brought the effort to a halt.
>
>
>
If the space programs we have today, based on high-tech thin metal can spaceships, are the equivalent to planning a transatlantic crossing using only kayaks, then the Orion project can be thought as a bold attempt to build a proper ocean liner to do the crossing. To build a spaceship would be less like assembling a plane, and more like dock shipbuilding, or large-scale civil engineering. The super orion reference design would be a 8,000,000 ton spacecraft, with a diameter of 400m.
For more information:
1. [Dyson, George. Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. Reprint edition, Holt Paperbacks, 2003.](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0805072845)
2. Dyson, George. The Story of Project Orion. [www.ted.com](http://www.ted.com), <https://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_the_story_of_project_orion>. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.
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### The Sovietunion should not collapse.
The real cause of the collapse were:
1. The political elite has lost its belief in the System.
2. The economical weakness (compared to the Capitalism) could not have further polished.
While the communism existed, there were race. Space race, nuclear race, science race, and so on.
All of them catalyzed the technological development on the whole world.
In a monopolar world, where the USA has no real competitors, not even they have real interest to develop. They are interested in the stabilization.
**This caused the stop of various X-projects (incl. X-37 which could have been an SSTO in the late 90s), this is why the U.S. seems to give up nuclear energy, this is why both the ISS and the Hubble will be soon crashed.**
If the communist block could have survived the crysis of the late 80s, early 90s, probably serious events had happened in the whle block, similar to Ukranian famine of the 30s. This had caused civil unrest, anti-communist revolutions. The System had crushed them with force and terror, as it was usual by the commies. Probably a North Korean-style government would rule in many countires of the Block. The other parts would work like China.
The USA had both the money and the technology to have a Moon base already at the early 80s. What they did not have: the interest of the voters, and the will of the political elite.
They had no competitors.
### Give them the competitor. And you get the Moon base.
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Three things: earlier rockets, free energy and something bad.
**1. Move space race earlier.** As laid out in this concept: [Spaceflight without transistors and nuclear power - how to bend the history of physics?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97620/spaceflight-without-transistors-and-nuclear-power-how-to-bend-the-history-of-p/97632#97632)
In this timeline the Treaty of Versailles is enforced and Germany does not rearm. WW2 does not happen. Germans instead find their pride in a space race, which begins in earnest in 1931 and is not interrupted by a world war. The Soviets and Americans hustle to catch up.
2. **Cold fusion.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion>
>
> The ability of palladium to absorb hydrogen was recognized as early as
> the nineteenth century by Thomas Graham.[18][19] In the late 1920s,
> two Austrian born scientists, Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters,
> originally reported the transformation of hydrogen into helium by
> nuclear catalysis when hydrogen was absorbed by finely divided
> palladium at room temperature. However, the authors later retracted
> that report, saying that the helium they measured was due to
> background from the air...
>
>
>
In this timeline, the Austrians do not retract their work, the shadowy forces coercing them in our timeline being otherwise occupied in theirs. Cold fusion develops apace and is ready to power the first Moon colony in 1955. Unsurprisingly given where the power is from and the rockets are from, these lunar colonists speak German.
**3. Something bad.** Fewer people on Earth is not because they leave Earth for the moon and Mars. Yes people do leave Earth for the moon and Mars but it is because they hope to escape the fate of many persons who remain on Earth. Wild lands are reclaiming Earth from the humans and the number of humans is dwindling because Earth is becoming a bad place for humans, and space seems relatively attractive. The nature of this change is left as an exercise for the worldbuilder.
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**About the 12th century.**
To have millions of humans located in space by 2020, you need a significant improvement in launch technology, and it needs to have been in place for long enough for the required space migration.
How could you easily bootstrap greater technology? move back the invention of the modern printing press by a few centuries. The Gutenberg press was developed sometime around 1440 AD. But, the needed precursor inventions had been around for hundreds of year. Movable type had been invented in China around 1040 AD, and the screw press dates back to 1st century Roman empire. Had Chinese been an alphabetic language, it is possible that movable type would have spread faster than it did.
In any case, inventing the modern press could easily have occurred a few centuries earlier than it did, sparking the Renaissance sooner and making the technological rise occur correspondingly sooner.
It was a clearly technology enabling innovation that could have occurred hundreds of years earlier than it did.
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Three words:
## [Lest Darkness Fall.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall)
That novel by L. Sprague de Camp describes the adventures of an accidental time traveler, a historian who is thrown back to 535 A.D.
This is in the aftermath of the fall of the West Roman Empire. The antique knowledge and civilization is still there; the dark ages which will stall Western European development for a whopping thousand years have not begun yet.
As a historian, he is able to prevent some key events which were causal to the disintegration of society and the descent of darkness upon Europe. He establishes a newspaper, a semaphore system, the Arab numbers — in short, he jump-starts the Renaissance a millennium early.
Plenty of time to get them rockets cooking :-).
Edit: As steveha says, this is not suggesting time travel as a means to have space flight earlier; instead, the story alters a few key events after the fall of the Roman empire. de Camp considers that a time of great volatility in which *the actions of a single man* can nudge Western history to take an entirely different course. Certainly the randomness of history has greater power than a single man, knowledgeable as he may be...
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As a German I could not resist. Writing this made me feel equally elated and sick in the stomach.
---
Hitler dies shortly after starting the WW II. A saner and more capable commander in chief leads Germany to victory over the European neighbors, an armistice with Britain and an arrangement with the U.S. The Soviet Union is never invaded. Under the new leadership the all-out Holocaust does not happen. The war ends in 1942, sparing the Reich and its neighbors the worst destruction. Consequently, the Manhattan Project is stopped before it really started. The Reich and its allies/vassalles now consists of most of continental Europe. Its vast natural, human and industrial resources make it the leading world power.
This victory and Hitlers death lead to an air of optimism in the leadership and public. The Nazi ideology becomes less paranoid; instead, influenced by the Italian Fascists, it fully embraces modernity. Industrial, technological and scientific progress is the new paradigm. The Fascist government, much like China's today, is able to devote resources at will wherever it desires.
A new beginning is declared; a host of ambitious new projects is publicly funded in order to boost the civilian economy after the war. Chiefly among them are two futuristic new discoveries: Nuclear power and space flight, of which leading proponents are already in Germany. The German race policies are softened. The new elite of scientists and engineers enjoy special status and are exempt from any remaining restrictions.
In 1946 the *Generaltechnikmarschall* (Chief Marshal of Technology) holds his famous speech in front of an audience of 1,000,000 at the [*Volkshalle*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkshalle) construction site:
>
> *Wie wir uns bisher von allen Widersachern befreit haben, so werden wir auch die Fesseln der Schwerkraft abschütteln und frei sein! Das heldenhafte Deutsche Volk wird die Menscheit zu den Sternen führen, wie es ihm vorherbestimmt ist!*1
>
>
>
Oberth and von Braun are given virtually unlimited resources to develop manned spaceflight. The DWA (*Deutsche Weltraum-Agentur,* German Spaceflight Agency) becomes the global hub of spaceflight development, attracting scientists and engineers from all over the world. Frank Malina and Theodore von Kármán move to Germany and establish a jet propulsion laboratory at the *Technische Universität Berlin,* joined by Sergey Korolev and Friedrich Zander from Moscow. Fermi returns from America and, together with Otto Hahn, leads the newly founded *Institut für Nuklearforschung* in Berlin-Wannsee.
These pioneers remember this as the best time in their life. The enthusiasm, the collaboration, the discussions through the night. Oberth writes in his memoires:
>
> And the best thing was: When von Braun and I agreed in our nightly discussion, we would go to the *Herr Technikmarschall* right in the morning, unkempt and all. He would beam at us like a child on Christmas morning when the secretary let us in: "What have you got for me?" We would pitch our idea. He would ask "does it serve progress?". We would nod. He would ask "and can you do it?", and we would look at each other because we were not at all sure we could. But nothing seemed out of reach. There simply was no ceiling, quite literally. So we would nod. And he would smile, and nod, too. And then he would with a stroke of his pen provide funding, for the Moon, for Mars, for the Asteroids. I think he would much rather have been in our *Institut* than behind his desk, but these signatures were the only way he could participate. So he was, in a way, our most reliable team member, for more than 20 years.
>
>
>
Money is never an issue. The post war economy is running hot, given the convergence of German engineering, a decisive lead in key technologies and the state-sponsored cooperative Fascist economy. One example of many is that Germany by the late 1950s basically powers the world with the reliable, standardized Fermi-designed nuclear power plants it exports by the hundreds. They are sold as a turn-key leasing model including staff and fuel. The revenue of the state-owned *IG Atom* soon eclipses the budget of many mid-level countries. Not only is there no dearth of money, to the contrary: The huge trade surplus must go *somewhere.*
In 1949 the first satellite reaches orbit, followed by the first manned flight two years later. From there the development is exponential. The moon is reached in 1956. Nuclear propulsion is hard to get right, but the world's brightest minds achieve the first successful launch in 1957. The massively increased launch capacity makes it possible to establish a moon base and have a number of space stations in orbit by 1964, providing a stepping-stone for *Projekt Mars.* The planet is reached in 1969, a first colony established in 1980. Asteroid mining is explored in 1985; the first asteroid is nudged into an Earth orbit in 1992 where it is mined for metal and water, followed by many more. The solar system is literally *swarming* with swastikas.
---
1 As we have freed ourselves from all adversaries before, we will shed the shackles of gravitation, too, and be free! The German people shall lead mankind to the stars, as it is its destiny!
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To build and habitate cities on other planets - you will need about 100 yeares timespan minimum. Since we would be able to complete it by around 2100 at best even if we start right now you have to shift first orbiting launchers to **1900 , end of XIX century**.
Yes, good old **steampunk**.
Its not that fantastic. At the end of XIX century advanced countries had everithing to begin rocket building. They even had more then that - they were not so concern about life, death and honor. So couple of (or ten) expeditions lost on the way to Moon would just add chalenge and fame to the winner. (If you a warry about computers - you don't need them if you have skills, tables,"orbital" arithmometer and lots of courage - 10% chance of success should not frightening you.)
In RL all that spirit and technology was "utilized" to conquer the skyies and fight World Wars.
So for space exploration to happen great nations of XVII-XIX need to:
* become less aggressive
* become less religiouse (may be greater influence of French Revolution?)
* invent internal combustion engines 50 years earlier (together with steam engines?)
* invent flight 50 years earlier
* have futurists like Tsiolkovsky appere 50 years earlier
* do not held any Wold Wars
* start race for speed and height instead
It's pure fantastic assumptions. But only form sociological point of view. Just like now, technlogy then were far ahead of human's mentality.
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Someone has to get serious about reusable rockets much earlier than SpaceX.
In our world, spaceflight is rare; airplane travel is common. The most significant difference between the two is that airplanes are reusable: you don't expend an airplane to travel. The fuel cost to fly something to orbit is only something like 40 times as much as the fuel cost to fly it from Los Angeles to Australia; but with disposable rockets the cost to send something to orbit is nearly four orders of magnitude greater than flying it to Australia.
The USA, obsessed with winning the space race, developed the Saturn V; this allowed the USA to send an entire moon mission in one launch. But after the excitement died down, the cost was prohibitive. Then NASA made things worse by trying to develop the Space Shuttle without anywhere near enough design/fly/test cycles. (They tried to design the first fully reusable launcher on paper without flying *any* prototypes, and further made it a heavy-lift vehicle! Hardly surprising that the Shuttle turned out to be not very reusable.) This mistake was partly due to severe budget cuts making it difficult for NASA to afford multiple design/fly/test cycles, IMHO a direct consequence of everyone being tired of how much money space flight cost.
If, instead of trying to win a race to the moon, the USA had tried to win a race to have a reusable spacecraft, costs would have been much reduced and we would have fuel depots in orbit and routine flights to the Moon now. We can imagine that instead of a race to land on the moon, the race was to make a space station, and they focused on making the rockets more and more reusable as time went on. They never built the Saturn V (they didn't want something like Skylab, they wanted something so big it had to go up in pieces) so they did iterate their way to something reusable. Why did it have to be so big? Maybe it needed to be an orbiting missile launch platform?
Another possible point of departure: when Ronald Reagan proposed the Space Defense Initiative, someone could have gotten really serious about reusable spacecraft, to launch all the space weapons and defenses. The "Delta Clipper" project, instead of being an unwanted thing NASA was forced to accept, could have been the hot new project (the project everyone wanted to work on, the one that most of the spending was for, etc.) and if lots of money and people were thrown at it could have turned into a reusable technology. Just imagine that someone like Jerry Pournelle had somehow been made head of NASA in Ronald Reagan's first year as President, and had been given lots of resources. The DC/X did quite a lot on a shoestring budget; what could it have done if given lots of support?
Finally, I'd say you can simply imagine that a billionaire like Elon Musk had founded a company like SpaceX much earlier. That doesn't even require a particular date to make it work. (Maybe Howard Hughes was even richer than in actual history, and also obsessed with reusable rockets?) The billionaire has to be willing to lose money for years until the reusable rockets start to really work, at which point the company starts charging 1/10 as much as anyone else can charge to launch things, and the company starts making huge profits and grows rapidly.
All the above could result in things like advanced space stations, or a moonbase, by 2020. But I re-read your question and saw that you are imagining *millions* of people on Mars by 2020. That would require reusable spacecraft *much* earlier, requiring substantial changes to how history actually went (maybe Rome never fell?
maybe the Renaissance happened 100 years earlier? maybe the Islamic Golden Age lasted two or three centuries longer than in our history, or even never ended?)... and/or discovering some new science like antigravity or teleportation. (If you could have some kind of "stargate" like device where people could *walk* to Mars by walking through a gate, it becomes much easier to imagine millions of people doing it quickly.)
I just checked and according to the US FAA web site, the FAA provides service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers *per day* (probably a bit less now, thanks to COVID-19). Airplanes are roughly 1.2 centuries old. It's true that the flight to Mars is worse than any air travel, requiring months, so fewer people will travel by spaceship to Mars; but still, it seems safe to imagine millions of people on Mars about one century after reusable rockets become practical. So to make your timeline work with only known technology, imagine that we somehow got SpaceX-style rockets in 1920.
If reusable rockets make space travel affordable, space travel becomes routine, and colonies become possible.
P.S. To put colonies on Mars it would really help a lot to have some better technology than chemical rockets. Rockets just can't carry enough chemical fuel to fire the engines for very long, so they have to coast for much of their travel. A nuclear engine that could run much longer (even at lower thrust) would dramatically reduce the time to travel between Mars and Earth.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration>
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These two books are frequently available in many used book stores with an SF section:
Heppenheimer "Colonies in Space"
Stein "The Third Industrial Revolution"
Reading them will give you serious background for how to do it.
Stein's book is based on the following concepts:
* It's feasible to transmit microwave power long distances with phased array antennas. This has been demonstrated at the 60% level, and it scales better with larger antennas.
* After the moon program develop a heavy lift reusuable rocket and get the price to orbit down to ~200/Kg. He cites a Rand Corporation report I think that this would be possible (1975 dollars)
* Phase one is lunar mining. Lunar regolith -- dirt -- is shoveled up put in 10 kg fiberglass fabric bags.
* A lunar induction catapult is used to launch the bags to one of the Lagrange points in lunar orbit.
* There, orbital factories break the dirt down to silicon, oxygen, aluminum, magnesium. Serious handwaving needed here. No one knows how to refine with limited water and unlimited heat and zero G.
* Most of the structure of the lagrange colony is glass fiber and foamed glass.
* Initial industrial energy comes from large solar mirrors. In zero G it's reasonable to blow a 1 km plastic bubble a few microns thick, and then silver half of it. This gives you a circular km of sunlight that comes to an approximate focus about 30 meters across.
* Silicon is processed into solar cells. These are set up by the square km. A solar powersat is built with a few GW of microwave energy.
* electricity is converted into microwave energy, and broadcast from a sparse array about 3 km across. The ground station is about 10 km across. The array requires a diode and a dipole antenna about every meter. These are about 4" across. The land underneath it is still usable for crops. A duck flying across the array will experience it's temperature rise about 1 degree. Farm equipment under the array is easily shielded against this low flux density.
* Initial cost for the first unit is 1 trillion dollars over a 25 year period. After that they come off the line at 1 per year for about 20 billion each.
Time Line: (Not in the books above.)
1970. U.S. quits the Vietnam war. President authorizes part of the peace dividend to start development of Heavy Lifters, and grants tax breaks to companies that independently develop orbital capacity.
1971. Results from the Apollo mission are sufficient to pick a base for mining regolith.
1972. Luna Station catapult starts test shots. Catcher net at L5 works flawlessly.
1973. Solar cell fabrication plant reaches 1 MW production/day
1974. First powersat is moved into position. First grid is in the Mohave desert and is used to power desalinization plants for southern California.
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You can't decrease earth population by spaceship migration. Doesn't work.
Imagine the Queen Mary.
4000 people aboard, employees and passengers. The Queen Mary is dirt cheap compared to a space craft, because it doesn't need life support, monster engine or other spacecraft features. It also doesn't need to be self sufficient.
Earth population is growing by roughly 80 million per year. So you would need 20 000 flights of our hypothetical Queen Mary to just suck up the population growth. As a cost efficient flight to Mars costs 3 years, you'd need 60 000 ships the size of Queen Mary just to take the growth. One Way.
The Queen Mary was costing 870 million euros in 2002. You need it times 60 000. Multiplied with the factor you need for all the spaceship technology and these embarrassing amounts of fuel to lift these out of the gravity well. And then the Mars can't feed these people.
So, for the point of significantly reduced earth population: It can be policy change, to reduce the birth rate. Or something truly catastrophic which will also kill the ability for space travel. Space ships don't work for this purpose
For the other points of your question, I agree that early development of fast long range data transfer (telegraph later, semaphore earlier) will stabilise big empires and help development. Early intensive use of printer press would have been possible already in the middle to late Roman Empire, had they just thought of it. They had all the prerequisites, just not the idea. They had an alphabetization rate of estimated 50% so it would have been worth it straight away.
The printer press kicked off our current era: huge storage capabilities for data and huge multiplicator ability for technology and ideas. It kicked off the witch hunt: You can spread rumours and conspiracy theories, too. Invent the press1500 years earlier and you can maybe get into space earlier?
] |
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[
It's a major step forward for humanity when they can finally live on a new planet. Maybe they went there out of desperation to survive, or maybe they simply want to explore. Either way, they suddenly lost all communication to people outside the planet and they will have to live without it. What possible reasons why they will actually forget that they did not originate on that planet and start living as if they have always been there?
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# Time
This is normally done with the application of a few hundred years, technological collapse and a migration of the population away from any physical artifacts of interplanetary travel.
Technological collapse takes away all their records, even if they reinvent computers later they probably won't be able to read the old records. The technological collapse doesn't have to be traumatic, a population density too low to maintain the industrial base required would be enough to do the trick. They become subsistence farmers because there's no reason to be anything else.
That leaves you with a civilisation who have no concept of the ability to travel through space, a loss of history, and even if they know they came from a long way away, the lack of the concept of travelling through space means they just think they came from another country/continent.
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# Religion
Some book considered holy and written long ago claims some deity created that specific planet, and then all sorts of creatures and finally humans on it.
So the inhabitants of Eden think they have been expelled from the Garden of Earth, without ever realising that Earth is another planet.
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It only takes a generation or two before that which may once have seemed foreign may then be seen as something that was always there. For example, in our daily lives, we don't think about how certain food items aren't native to our current homes, yet mere centuries ago, pineapples were a luxury.
We take things for granted, and that's something that can happen anywhere. In the USA, many people consider themselves as being American - they've lived there their entire lives, their parents lived there their entire lives, and the same for their grandparents. Perhaps a few more generations back their ancestors came from lands abroad, but that is all but forgotten. This can apply to a planet as well - once a generation is born never knowing those who came from across the stars, the memory will become a historical note. And if such history were to be lost, then those who have only known humans to live on their current planet will have very little reason to wonder about how they came to be.
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## A Fresh Start + Propaganda
The planet was settled by some (take your pick) Religious Fanatics/Idealistic Utopians/Persecuted Cult/Tyrannical Government/Other Group that wanted to cut all ties to old earth to Get Away From the Heretics/Create Plato's Republic/Escape Persecution/Form the Perfect World Order. The entire crew of the ship has agreed to keep the existence of Old Earth a secret, and assuming they keep to the plan, the only real issue will be references that weren't properly changed in the old books, whether to constellations that are different, or the other planets in the solar system, or to politics/religion/history that didn't get completely expunged.
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Civilization collapse.
Societal collapse triggers a drastic reduction is specialists which triggers a loss of knowledge. It has happened in the past, (the bronze age collapse), and a lot gets lost during collapses. There is evidence many bronze age societies lost writing, which is pretty big loss. Now oral tradition may preserve some knowledge they will quickly get lost in superstition and story drift, until coming from another world is just one of thousands of creation myths. heck just look at how many earth mythologies have humans come from another "world"
How to get such a collapse is myriad, from a persistent famine, to plague, to a magnetic anomaly happens and anything will electricity flowing through cooks itself.
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There had been many attempts at colonization of other worlds. All of them failed. As it turned out, the settlers just couldn't cope with the traumatic stress of being separated from the home world by incomprehensible cosmic distances, and living under a strange, subtly *wrong* sun.
For this reason, a new colonization program was started, where the settlers were hypnotically conditioned (with the help of certain psychotropic drugs) to forget their home world and accept the new planet as their home. All data to the contrary was purged from all material taken to the colony, and after establishment of the settlement the ship, with all foreign resources, was shot back into space.
Interesting things will start to happen once the coloniats start to perform archeological digs, or attempt to trace the lineages of their planets species', and compare their genes.
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Politics.
Humans are seen as invaders who do not belong here. It is necessary to change this view to stress that we belong here, we have always been here, this is our home. Any suggestion otherwise gets dumps in the memory hole.
Otherwise your humans have no legitimacy and big problems with justifying why they occupy a chunk of the planet...
[Answer]
The knowledge has been systematically erased from every kind of database, over many generations, to create a kind of societal control. This has happened over so long a period of time and so thoroughly that even the people who did the erasing now believe their own lies. In fact that false history is now the only accepted history. There's not even a shred of anything else.
Look at real world situations. Religion, for example, teaches histories that its followers just accept without question. Dictatorships often re-write histories.
In order for entire histories to be re-written or erased it would have to be done on purpose, by the people in power, over a long period of time, for their gain. The scary part is that its not impossible.
[Answer]
# Survival.
>
> they suddenly lost all communication to people outside the planet and they will have to live without it. What possible reasons why they will actually forget that they did not originate on that planet?
>
>
>
The loss of communication generated despondency, panic, despair. Some people realized that this "orphan complex" might stump the planet's progress to the point of threatening survival - people concentrating on reestablishing communications rather than trying to go on and "do without" - and the "Earth is Here" campaign was born. With time, some wacko came up with a new Myth of the Origins, and someone else decided to adopt it.
Many years later, many of these "adjustments" later...
[Answer]
**A charismatic fanatic.**
Give them a leader with very strong ideals, and instead of making him evil and destructive give him personality traits that would make it easy to follow. Strong, smart, fair, self-aware, humourus, and able to take and *keep* control over the majority of people. And his mind is set strong on that his way is the right way and the only way.
Playing into his hand is that people feel lost and insecure about their new home and they are desperate for someone to tell them what to do. Maybe many people suffer homesickness. Or some other reason that makes them *feel* bad. Let him lead "a new way" that discards old beliefs and knowledge, with the promise to *feel* good when they do it. This way does not necessarily need to go backwards, like the destruction of technology and living primitive, but instead a leap forwards, making current technology and knowledge irrelevant or seem naive.
What that could be in detail is up to you. In any way it leads to him deciding that old contacts are contra productive (like keeping the relationship with your ex alive; why are you hurting yourself? You know this is not leading to anything) and most people will join him willingly and throw out the past. But of course there are always people going against the mainstream (out of multiple motives) and you have to decide what to do about them. Do they have to die? Or can this small fraction form a new settlement and are allowed to keep the old ways alive? Are these two groups allowed to keep contact with each other?
If you want to discard of *any* contact to civilasation you can get rid of the drop-out in multiple ways. They could have a real accident, or an "accident" either arranged by the leader or by his followers of which he does not approve (but he only hears about it when it is to late). Or they can go back home.
And then you let three or more generations pass to make sure all "histories of before" are only fairytales.
If you want it to be more extreme, old histories will be forbidden and destroyed or alternated. But be aware that the reader will expect "some little bits and pieces" of previous knowledge to remain and to be rediscovered.
[Answer]
Some sort of chemical in the atmosphere that interferes with long-term memory?
This could either be a gas (say low levels of chloroform or similar) that interferes with memory formation, or a radiation effect - either permanent, or perhaps from a crash landing on the planet? - that actually directly modifies the body's epigenetic configuration and switches off the genes needed for long term memory formation.
Researchers are beginning to understand the chemistry of memory better: <https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/the-molecules-that-make-memory/7765.article>
[Answer]
Is time on the storyteller’s side?
My main thought is to compare the question to real history. Setting aside the question of human origins itself, the largest disconnect in human history would be the human migration to North and South America. It is generally agreed that the migration took place across the exposed sea floor from NE Asia to NW America. The timing is uncertain, but was somewhere between 13,000 and 40,000 years ago.
My point is, except for the Inuit people of the NW, no civilization in the Americas knew there was land to the west of the ocean. The memory had simply been lost. This is interesting. A look at Iceland as an example shows that we can be very good at retaining oral records for at least a 1000 years.
Another good research area that I know much less about would be the Polynesian peoples. I know most of them knew vaguely that they came from across the ocean, but I do not know what level of detail was retained, and how this varied by island.
The reason we need a form of technological collapse for an advanced civilization is because written records can last a *very* long time. As long as people can read the original language, the knowledge will simply be rediscovered. Once we have the population forget how to read, the knowledge can be lost permanently, even if all technologies are reinvented. For an example of this in history, see “Linear A” script. We know its alphabet, we can even guess at its pronunciation from Linear B (Greek). We have no idea what it says.
[Answer]
**Shame**
The colonists left their home for a reason. Their old home may have been perfectly good, but they disapproved of it. Perhaps their religion wasn't widely accepted, despite their insistence that it was the one true way to live. Perhaps they remembered a time when they had a just government, and now they've had decades of corrupt ones.
Whatever the reason, these settlers feel shame for their home. And they don't think they can fix it. They're moving to a new planet to start fresh, to build something that will be immune to the mistakes of their past. And they don't want to talk about it, because they were complicit with the old way of life. Instead of writing volumes making recorded speeches about how ashamed they were of their past lives, they're focused on the future. They left, there's no point in moping around in the past. Maybe they went as far as severing communications themselves, not considering the homeworld to be worth the breath to talk to.
Their children never really know what drove them to migrate to a new planet, so the knowledge is lost nearly immediately. They might have some small pieces of the story, which are told as ghost stories or passed on as little idioms that nobody really knows the origin of. But a true record of the past is gone immediately, and after the death of the original colonists the new society has no real way of finding out where they came from.
[Answer]
Let me turn the question around. A large fraction of humans (maybe even a vast majority) believe humans didn't originate on this planet, despite the fact that we have very solid evidence that we did indeed evolve on Earth. Some don't even reject evolution and still somehow believe they believe that.
Many creation myths involve humans coming from a different place. But the Bible is quite enough here. Humans were created by God in some place. They were placed into Paradise. Then original sin happened, and humans were thrown out from Paradise onto Earth. There was a time when some people believed Paradise was a place on Earth, but for most people, Paradise is "somewhere else".
Even outside of outright religion, you have hundreds of ideas about the origin of humans, or at least their influence by powerful non-human beings (or even *the mere motion of planets in the sky against a backdrop of constellations!*).
People believe all sorts of things. Even if your civilization retains the written word, stories get distorted, old lies and fairy tales become "hard truths" and new stories get created all the time. Obviously, it's even easier if there is no written word - e.g. the initial colony ship losing its entire library, people no longer being able to write without computers that no longer work etc. This has its place even in the hardest sci-fi - it's *very* easy for a civilization to lose all access to advanced technology, even without any explicit reason. It's *hard* to maintain a technological civilization, and people will quickly lose knowledge that isn't useful anymore. Stories about humans coming from some "Paradise Earth" will remain, but who actually believes in them will be more or less random - it will be just one story among many others.
This is especially true if the planet was seeded by Earthly organisms in the first place. Even as the civilization starts to recover and rediscover things like biology, they wouldn't really have the same questions to explain as we do. The big thing that creation myths set out to explain was where does all the massive variety of life come from, where do you get all those extremely complex ecosystems that hang in precarious balance, but (to your personal experience and the stories told) don't actually *fail*... It feels and looks vaguelly engineered, so you posit an engineer. It took a lot of thinking to find the completely natural mechanism that creates this diversity. But on a world seeded by Earth life, you would see it happening on human time-scales. Not only would there be little diversity to begin with, but the initial seed would quickly diversify to take advantage of various "pristine" environments on the planet. If the planet was originally lifeless, it would be much harder to figure out how vast geological time is. The most popular stories would probably be about organisms evolving to fit their environment, but also coming to the planet recently. It's easy enough to believe the planet is just 6000 years old if you ignore everything around you except for human stories - but in a world that *was* seeded with life just a few thousand years ago, this would actually be a *good* explanation (for a time).
Humans make up stories. They distort existing "true" stories. That's just what humans do, and you don't really need any justification for that. Creation myths would probably be even more dominant in such a world, because there's more evidence for them - a seeded planet would be a distinctly unnatural environment, and provide even more of an evidence that someone engineered it (which would actually be true in their case, of course). Plenty of people would claim someone created the organisms themselves too - and humans as well, since we're obviously so similar to humans. Some will claim all of this is foolish superstition.
"We're not from here" will be just one class of such stories, and completely natural to how humans tell stories. It's not a *weird* story - it's what humans have told themselves in most cultures on the planet over tens of thousands of years. The only way in which it would be special is that it's actually true for your people, not just an allegory or a fairy tale or whatever. But it would take serious effort to turn that from "a story like all the others" to "actually, that does actually explain things".
It should also be noted that until you have good communication across the whole planet, people will probably have myths about "not being from around here" even from something as "mundane" as moving from a continent to an archipelago. Losing communication is quite a big part of this.
Embrace that. People *do* think humans didn't come from their planet. How does that impede or help your story? How do your readers relate to that? You're showing what the characters think, or what they do. You're not explaining the world-building to your reader, he's supposed to figure it out on their own. There's people in a world. They have stories. Some of those might be true within the context of your story. Until you get to a point where it becomes *obvious* that you're talking about a "failed" colony of Earth, it's uncertain what you're really writing about - plenty of stories exist about humans of Earth, fallen from grace.
[Answer]
I think readers will believe this - the idea of a society that has forgotten its true origins is actually not uncommon. Two examples of similar forgettings are Heinlein's *Orphans of the Sky* and Hal Clement's *The Nitrogen Fix*. Both stories happen after a societal collapse and the loss of literacy.
However, I would actually argue that this kind of forgetting is not guaranteed, even given collapse and a long time. The natives of Easter Island for centuries have passed down stories of their seaborne arrival. But, to be fair, I'm not aware of what the stories were for other island peoples.
[Answer]
*Pandemic Episode of Lost Syndrome*
This small group of colonists chose a wonderful planet that was very similar to their home planet. The new planet, however, contained a very particular niche apple tree that could grow only in the one grove the colonists settled near. Because it is so geographically restricted, that tree had developed an extreme defense mechanism via a chemical that acts upon neurotransmitters to effectively temporarily interfere with memory processes. This prevents the local fauna that happen upon that grove and eat the apples from purposefully finding their way back later. This protects the trees from too much environmental competition from these particular fauna that routinely eat all the small saplings before they can establish into fruit bearing adult trees.
These apples look amazingly like the ones from home, and although warned against eating native produce until testing could be done, a young cook finds the grove and, in delight, gathers as many apples as she can and rushes to bake a special treat for the anniversary picnic celebrating their first year on the planet. Everyone loves the pies and all remark about what a wonderful reminder of home these apple pies are.
For some reason, the new small group of human colonists are affected only gradually over several months, and only in long term memory, which also ends up being irreversible. It affects only that first generation. They remember basic things about themselves like how to take care of themselves and each other, but forget quite quickly why they are there, where they came from and all their old societal patterns and rituals they had brought with them. The only ones who don't eat the apple pies are babies, so within a very short time, everyone thinks they've always been from there.
Eventually over time, someone finds the apple grove again, but the whole community is much bigger by then and only a couple people are ever stricken at a time so that the people soon connect long term memory loss with eating apples from that grove. It becomes a huge taboo to eat apples from that grove and they name the sickness the "lost syndrome" because those stricken slowly forget where they grew up and complain that they feel lost and homesick without knowing why.
] |
[Question]
[
Supposedly there is a school of magic that allows telekinetic manipulation of blood (and only blood).
Your telekinetic powers can not penetrate solids and other liquids (including human skin) so you can not just control the blood inside someone's body. The blood also needs to be very fresh (after leaving the body it can only be used for a second or two, after which it becomes useless).
In a fight against someone who does not have such magic, spilling your opponent's blood is a huge advantage, as you can shape it to form shields or sharp spikes.
The solidified blood is durable enough to stop an incoming blow, but will likely crack in the process. Using your own blood is possible, but in order to make a spike that is thick and durable enough to penetrate a gambeson you would need to inflict quite a nasty wound upon yourself, so this would only be seen as a desperate move.
You can throw solidifed blood, like a throwing weapon, but at about three meters distance you lose control over it and it just flies straight.
The speed at which you can make solidified blood move is comparable to swinging a light sword.
How would you design a sword with the purpose of causing as much bleeding as possible? It does not matter how lethal the wound is, you just want as much blood as possible to come out during the first several seconds after striking.
Weapons need to be crafted by hand. There are no power hammers and plasma cutters.
My thoughts currently include:
* thin bladed light sabers that deliver superficial cuts but are hard to
defend against due to speed advantage
* possibly serrated blades, but I
am not sure serrations would actually cause increased bleeding,
especially considering they get easily stuck in cloth becoming
near-useless
* Shurikens/senbon/throwing knives seem like a good idea. You could
cause the opponent to bleed a bit even before entering striking
range.
* Thinking of light cutting-oriented weapons, I recalled the
falchion.
[Answer]
For a completely different take, consider this:
* Spilling your opponent's blood is *already* a goal. Just keep doing what you're doing.
* Spilling your *own* blood is bad. Even if you can manipulate it, you're exposing yourself to injuries and infections and the possibility of a stronger haemokinetic using your own blood against you.
What you need, therefore, is a handy supply of someone, or some *thing* else's blood.
Do you have access to anticoagulants? some, like [coumarin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coumarin) are plant based, some like [batroxobin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batroxobin) are found in venoms delivered by bite, others like [hementin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hementin) are used by blood-drinking animals to stop their meal clotting. Make yourself a little bag, or several little bags, filled with fresh animal blood and a little anticoagulant. The stomach of the animal that provided the blood might be a good material. Throw them as an opening move. The bags should burst against your opponent and give you an excellent opporunity to strike before they can close the distance. Moreover, the blood has some scope to seep through gaps in armour so you can wound even a well-armoured opponent.
In the absense of any good anticoagulants (or opportunity to refresh your increasingly manky blood grenade supplies) you could always consider using small animals. You'd need to be the sort of person who doesn't find little feathery or fluffy things cute. Catapult them at your target, or slice them open and then throw them, your choice. Be very afraid of anyone with a nasty look in their eye, a dagger and a bag of bunnies.
[Answer]
I posit that it wouldn't change at all.
It is *already* desirable to cause copious bleeding with edged and pointed weapons, there are plenty of quite old guides as to where large blood vessels are close to the skin (armpits are a good place, for example) and so people clearly trained and learned with the intent of hitting such places.
There *might* be a slight bias towards slashing weapons vs stabbing weapons, but realistically the notion that an inch of the tip is worth six of the edge probably won't go away. Pointy weapons are better at penetrating armour and inflicting outright lethal wounds, and crushing-type anti-armour weapons like flanged maces and warhammers are better than any kind of sword against armour.
>
> thin bladed sabers that deliver superficial cuts but are very hard to defend against due to speed advantage
>
>
>
Probably not. They'd be worse against armour, and there's a limit as to how light you can make them before one solid parry bends or breaks them and then you're at a serious disadvantage. They'd also have no real speed advantage over a decent rapier, which would be better against soft and mail armour and a lot more dangerous when used with the intent to kill.
>
> possibly serrated blades, but I am not sure serrations would actually cause increased bleeding, especially considering they get easily stuck in cloth becoming near-useless
>
>
>
Very sharp serrations won't have that problem, but making and maintaining such an edge without modern steels is probably hard work. They *might* cause a bit more bleeding, but really a good slashing sword will do just as well and will be easier to make and maintain and less prone to the edge being damaged.
---
Really, the only thing you might consider would be some kind of sidearm or first-strike one-shot weapon designed to hurt and draw blood but little else. The problem with *that* is it requires you to have a hand free, and that's a hand that would be put to better use holding a shield or weapon. I'd suggest that your haematokinetic trickery would be best used for surprise attacks or organised combat... assassination, bodyguarding, duelling, but not regular combat.
[Answer]
I'm going to go against the general direction of the question *and* answers here:
**You need a pointy stick**
Pretty good to have extras with it
* Long stick
* The point being made well.
Behold, a blood mage (artistic take):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TKymA.png)
When it comes to weapons, the spear is *pretty good*:
* It is *very* easy to make (literally a pointy stick)
* It is easy to use with little training
* It can cause quite a lot of injuries
* It can be used more tactically to trip opponents
* Can be very light, so easy to wield and just carry
* Most importantly, it keeps you away from harm
Since a blood mage's fight would basically be:
draw blood -> use blood -> repeat but with blood
Then it stands to reason that the mage would want to *avoid* damage as much as possible. A spear is great at that. A shield can be added for extra protection:
(being made of plastic helps with avoiding injuries but it's not a requirement for the mage)
At any rate, the aim is
1. Stay safe.
2. Stab the opponent.
3. Follow up with blood manipulation.
You can take a stab during the blood magic casting, if possible but not requirement.
[Here is a video (14 min) of reenactors trying spears versus swords in different ways](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLLv8E2pWdk) (and the [longer version (28 minutes)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afqhBODc_8U) showing more of the actual matches) and spear fares pretty well.
Now a spear is not the *ultimate* weapon but it's still *very* good. Most other weapons require a lot more training to get to use well. Especially well enough to *fight other people*. I posit that a mage who likely hasn't *that* much of combat experience. At least, probably not as much as somebody who comes at them swinging a sword does. So, a spear has many advantages in being simple, effective, and putting you away from harm's reach.
There are some drawbacks.
Heavier armour would pose a problem. My suggestion is to run. Yeah, an amazing tactic, right? But why *not* run? Even with a sword or another weapon, you're not going to be a lot more effective against an armoured opponent. The weapons and techniques good against armour put you at a lot more of a risk of injury and death. And weapons like clubs and maces that are decent against armour don't even allow you to use the biggest advantage - blood magic, as they'd cause more internal bleeding than what external, so not usable.
If you really *have* to face an armoured opponent, then...well, actually a long pointy stick is not even that bad, honestly. You can use a polearm of some sort
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UeAyt.png)
This is a poleaxe. It's also informally known as a "can opener". To be blunt (unlike it) this is because it's quite effective used against heavily armoured opponents. You can use the axe-like blade as a hook to drop a heavily armoured opponent to the ground. Now, they are not *quite* helpless but certainly a lot more vulnerable than before.
Also worth remembering that you can still have *other weapons* with the spear. If your mages are really amazing at fighting, then they can still use a sword, or anything else. It's still beneficial to stay away from your opponents at first but you should be able to drop the spear and draw a different weapon, if needed.
Just as a suggestion, a rather gruesome weapon a blood mage might want to use is some version of the *katar*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V4aLB.jpg)
It's a type of punching dagger. You grab the handle and the blade is now an extension of your forearm. You can strike with this and it's even rather good at piercing armour. It's also very messy and will leave the victim profusely bleeding. You can get wavy bladed ones that cause even more injuries or...you can get a scissor katar. It generally looks the same as above when folded but you can enable a mechanism that "opens" it and two blades spring to the sides. It looks a bit like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/02lOk.jpg)
It becomes a way messier weapon. Pulling it out after opening the blades will cause even more damage and very rapid blood loss. Seems fitting for a mage who could use a lot of blood. I imagine the blood mage will use the katar to supply himself with access to a lot of blood to use against others. So it could be a good weapon to start an engagement with but it requires very close proximity. Luckily, it's easy to conceal under a sleeve, so if engaging multiple opponents and the mage has the advantage of surprise, this can work very well - stab one, use the blood of the first victim against the rest.
If the mages are supposed to be really good combatants and you don't want them to use spears, then I can suggest the butterfly swords:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W6Pqb.jpg)
This is a Wing Chun weapon. Two swords supposed to be used as one - some even fitted a single scabbard together (as pictured here) others came with separate scabbards. At any rate, the main idea of Wing Chun is to deflect blows and gradually wear out an opponent through small but repeated counter-attacks. The two swords fit *exactly* this purpose. The way you're supposed to use them is to swing both blades together in a single direction. You *deflect* a blow coming to you and use the small opening to nick the opponent's arm. They swing again, you deflect and you nick again. And again. With each successive blow on your part, the opponent feels a little more pain and the cuts make it so their blows are easier to deflect. Which, in turn, gives you better counter-attack opportunities, so you can "move forward" with your cuts.
Having *two* blades means that you can deflect from either side and you'd always have a free sword to do a quick slash. The catch behind the blade (the bit that sticks out) can be utilised to trap opponent's weapon between it and the backside of your blade. You could just use it to lock the weapon for an extra moment with one hand and attack with the other, or use both swords for a better leverage to disarm an opponent.
So, butterfly swords do take some training to use. However, they are rather effective at defence and drawing blood repeatedly. That is the way you're supposed to use them, after all. [Using the butterfly swords also looks really cool (2 min video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke06luhv_nU)
[Answer]
# Barbs
You want your weapons to cut as *un* surgically as possible. That means the closer your weapons are to barbed wire, the better. Tearing flesh causes it to bleed more, and more immediately, than sharp cuts, even deep ones.
That said, a sword would probably not be the weapon of choice for such a fighter. Better a flexible weapon like a cat-o-nine-tails with barbed tips that have a good chance to wrap around an opponent's guard and catch on *something* to rip flesh when withdrawn. Something like a cross between a whip and a quarterstaff would be very effective, as the opponent has to worry about the flying barbed ends in addition to the normal quarterstaff attacks from the front.
[Answer]
A lot would depend on the type of protection that the opponent had access to.
Thin sharp snicky snacky blades are all well and good if no one is wearing armour, but even a half decent leather cuirass would offer a high level of protection.
Contrary to popular belief and the way they are inevitably shown on TV and in movies, the katana is designed to be used as a slicing weapon rather than the chopping and severing weapon it usually appears as. I took a training course years ago, and was surprised to learn that a proficient wielder only intends to strike with the top 6" or so of the blade, aiming for vital areas such as the neck waist, collar bone, and stomach. Thus avoiding the risk of the blade becoming stuck in the target, the tip slicing through the targets flesh to devastating effect (Imagine Han Solo's operation on the Tauntaun with Lukes lightsabre as the ideal sort of wound...)
IF the aim is spilling as much blood as possible, then its also about where on the body the weapon can do this.
Take for example, the scene in GoT (series 2 or late S1 I believe) where the Nightswatchman explains to the Lannister Knight, while holding a small but sharp knife against the chaps femoral artory how much blood one little nick would produce.
Of course, severing an arm or leg with one blow will spill a ^&%£ tonne of blood, so there's always a heavy talwar or shamshir type curved sword that is less likely to get stuck if it fails to sever the limb.
But, overall, I think the weapon you are looking for exists... it is a full tang (for balance), tempered steel katana.
It will cut deep enough to sever arteries with ease, it's not too curved to rule out a good stab, and in the right circumstances can sever. Maybe not as clean as Michone makes it look in The Walking Dead, but the dudes she decapitates are mostly rotten meat to begin with so...
It's also worth mentioning (learned from experience...) that even minor scalp wounds can bleed like a champion.
[Answer]
In the first round, I would not use a sword, but a handfull of needles, or something else I can throw to create little holes.
The moment they penetrate and create a droplet of blood, you can shape it to be a spreader to keep the wound open, use the next drop to increase the wound etc, resulting in the same visual effect as popping a baloon.
---
Likely their response would be to wear armour. So your needles need to upgrade aswell: Make small, still throwable, czech hedgehogs: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tUzKq.jpg)Source: <https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/military/other/czech-hedgehog-obstacle-wwii>
When they walk over these, and their armour gets pierces, pricking their foots, you can perform the tactic from the first part of the answer. At the very least it slows their movement as they have to either walk more carefully of because of heavier armour.
---
After those steps, close combat becomes more viable, you now need an armour piercing sword, something strong and pointy to stab through armour plates.
[Answer]
hmmm......im not sure what design would make more bleeding but in my opinion how about falx ?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j0I4t.png)
theres 2hand and one hand version, it can help in aiming or hooking parts, such as wrist and neck which can create a lot of bleeding, and it do well against shield especially if the shield was strapped shield type, and i believe it can be use to hook enemy armor too.
from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falx>
>
> Marcus Cornelius Fronto described the large gaping wounds that a falx
> inflicted, and experiments have shown that a blow from a falx easily
> penetrated the Romans' lorica segmentata, incapacitating the majority
> of victims. These experiments also show that the falx was most
> efficient when targeting the head, shoulders, legs and especially the
> right (sword) arm, which was generally exposed. A legionary who had
> lost the use of his right arm became a serious liability to his unit
> in battle
>
>
>
but if you want to inflict small wound but bleeding more, i suggest wavy type of sword such as flamberge and Kris for example, it shearing more from the cut without stuck on cloth.
from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame-bladed_sword>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y2o8a.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b9Tci.jpg)
from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/avt27.jpg)
oh yeah also ad vampire bat saliva in it to make it bleed/flow better due to the anticoagulant. (not sure will this affect your magic or not since logically it wont become hard like you want even if you can control it, but hey its magic)
<https://asknature.org/strategy/saliva-breaks-down-blood-clots/>
>
> Vampire bats are sanguivorous or blood-eating bats. When they bite
> their victim, a protein in their saliva acts as an anticoagulant,
> which keeps their victim’s blood flowing while they feed. This
> anticoagulant contains the protein desmoteplase or DSPA, which was
> given the nickname Draculin. During the blood clotting process, DSPA
> inhibits Factor X, which is an enzyme involved in the coagulation
> pathway.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draculin>
>
> Draculin (named after Count Dracula) is a glycoprotein found in the
> saliva of vampire bats. It is composed of 411 amino acids, weighing
> about 88.5kDa. It functions as an anticoagulant, inhibiting
> coagulation factors IX (IXa) and X (Xa), thus keeping the blood of the
> bitten victim from clotting while the bat is drinking.
>
>
> Draculin is a reversible, slow tight binding, noncompetitive inhibitor
> of FXa. It does not act on thrombin, trypsin or chymotrypsin and does
> not express fibrinolytic activity. The protein increases the lag phase
> as well as the height of the peak of thrombin generation when in
> plasma, leading to prolonged bleeding.
>
>
> Daily salivation of vampire bats yields a saliva that progressively
> decreases in anticoagulant activity. However, there is no significant
> change in overall protein content during this time. After a 4-day
> period of rest, anticoagulant activity of the saliva is restored. In
> addition, purified native draculin, obtained from high- and
> low-activity saliva, shows significant differences in composition of
> the carbohydrate moiety, and glycosylation pattern. Furthermore,
> controlled chemical deglycosylation of native draculin progressively
> leads to complete loss of the biological activity, despite the
> conditions leaving the polypeptide backbone intact.
>
>
> Draculin is currently being explored in medicine. The anticoagulant
> may be useful as a treatment for strokes and heart attacks. It may
> also be used as a blood thinner for the prevention of heart attacks.
> The protein has shown promise when treating ischemic strokes, which
> account for the majority of strokes. It is effective for up to 9
> hours. However, since the activity depends heavily on the proper
> glycosylation of the polypeptide backbone, more research is needed
> before draculin can become a practical, widely available drug.
>
>
>
it just come into my mind today (iam not sure can this work or not) but how about sharpened pipe, if you want a more bleeding but trust oriented, basically put a hollow tube in the blade this can also work for spear especially spear and throwing needle (just imagine sharpened iron straw, this one may can work for throwing weapon), i dont include other weapon before since you ask specifically about sword (including in your comment), but since other has bring more different type of weapon anyway.
you can make the hollow tube pass through the shaft (literal hollow tube) or handle, or just in the blade with a hole or several hole like lute hole/nanotube kind of hole (give enough gap or not as many hole like literal nanotube, i hope you get what i mean, it just for the location of the hole) to make the blood run through, this may make the material weaker but i believe this can make more blood flow out.
example image to help imagine what sharpened hollow tube like (more for the spear or throwing needle, this not represent sword blade one)
from:<https://www.bladehq.com/item--Crawford-Custom-7-Stainless-Steel--35934>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/frDJ8.jpg)
and here to help imagine what i mean with nanotube kind of multiple hole.
from:<https://ligneusbikes.wordpress.com/hardwood-single-speed/construction/page-3/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Shl1M.jpg)
also weaponise armor such as blade/spiky armor, i know it have many cons i just want to mention it, since you want to inflict more wound and bleeding to your oponent after all. (since from what i get, your question is more for self defense or duel thing rather than battlefield fighting anyway)
such as from siberian bear hunting armor
from:<https://www.pinterest.at/pin/536702480585730929/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kxOhi.jpg)
[Answer]
The sword would be designed with precision in mind, a light thin blade with an especially sharp tip. Basically, a rapier-type weapon.
Blood flow is partially dependent on the type of weapon, to be sure, but it's also *very* dependent on *where the wound is*. If you slash at, say, someone's shoulder or forearm and hit the wrong spot, even if you can draw a line - superficial bleeding. But, if you managed to nick the *right* spot, like say an artery, than the blood spurts out. Something like the jugular vein on the neck, a subclavian artery, or perhaps a femoral artery would cause far more bleeding than a long but shallow cut somewhere else.
Thus, to maximize bleeding, it's about the right spot. And you'd want a weapon made with that kind of precision in mind, something that can deal swift and deep cuts to the location of your choice. Thus, a rapier. Comabatants would also be trained on dummies with their arteries clearly marked, trained to be able to find and expose them at will. Kind of like doctors who are trained to removed blood. Just a lot more lethal.
[Answer]
Well, it depends upon whether you are going against somebody who is armored or unarmored.
Against an un/lightly armored person the [Scourge-type whip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scourge) is very effective at drawing blood. In fact, if you can use these, you don't even need to worry about blood; they were known for disemboweling people. Now that's a *lot* of damage.
If you do not want whips, but still allow unarmored opponents, I would suggest a slashing sword like the [Kopis.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopis) They were surprisingly effective despite their simplistic design. That being said, there are some drawbacks to the Kopis. You see, it was not meant to be a main weapon. As a result, it had a rather short reach. Also, it was not very effective against armor; just because it *could* stab does not mean that it was *good* at stabbing. As a result of these factors, I would not recommend it against the heavily armored knights of the middle ages. Seriously, the armor those guys had could stop bullets.
That being said, if you *do* want your character to be attacking knights, there are a couple options here. If you don't care about having a "Huh?" reaction from your readers, I would suggest a longsword. The result of nearly 3,000 years of constant arms races, it was incredibly good at both doing damage *and* penetrating armor. Unfortunately, "the best things in life [ *aren't* ] free;" a good longsword had a pricetag equivalent to that of a Porsche. As a result, nobody but the richest lords could afford one. In addition, they had a steep learning curve; it took decades of training to effectively use one, and even then they were somewhat unwieldy.
Since your character probably does not have $1M + 3 decades on his hands, the best route is probably some sort of barbed spear. A boar spear would probably be best, as they have a special crosspiece on them to keep impaled person(s) from getting close enough to stab you.
Good luck, and much gruesomeness!
[Answer]
The easiest way to draw blood to use in a fight? Draw your own first.
In a lot of historical accounts of battles where medieval weapons were used, deaths from bleeding out and stab/slash wounds were very low. Most of the damage came from getting smacked around by the weapons and wrecking up your insides (some compare the damages to car accidents). Keeping a simple dagger on your belt would allow you to take to the top of your forearm. This blood wouldn't spill so fast as to risk bleeding out, but it would be fast and easy if the advantage is worth it.
If your own blood isn't an option, I would recommend going for the face. The tissue's in the nose and mouth carry a lot of blood and aren't very strong. A bec de corbin (basically a war hammer but very long) or kanabo (big stick, very pointy bits) would be good weapons for delivering crushing blows to the head and neck area.
[Answer]
It seems likely that they'd use a dagger.. on themselves. that initial investment would start a chain reaction.
[Answer]
How about a sword derived from the bayonet of the 19th/20th century, which were later forbidden to use?
These particular bayonetes were designed to cause a wound, which can't close by itself due to the triagonal shape and therefore never stops bleeding unless medical help arrives quickly.
[Answer]
I first thought of tiny throwing needles, but then something else comes to my mind:
**You can use your OWN blood as the weapon!**
Put a tiny needles somewhere on your armor, and when the fight begins, prick yourself and turn your own blood into thousands of tiny needles and shower him/her with it!
This is way better than common needles because of the simple fact of that "you can control it"!
And the sheer amount of it make the opponent "impossible" the counter!
And once some of it hit the opponent, you can then draw from his/her blood and make more of it!
I would imagine that it would be the end of him/her VERY quick!
But of course, you have to be careful NOT to draw TOO MUCH of your own blood! XP
Or maybe you can prick yourself on another part of your body and "recycle" the blood by sending it back to your body!
Yeah, you might caught a lot of diseases because of that, but at least you won't die of loss of blood! XP
[Answer]
**Bring a large animal and cut its throat**
You don't want to lose much of your own blood, and your enemy will try to keep you from getting use of his. So bring some from a third party. It needs to be fresh from a living thing? Fine -- keep the blood in the living thing until you need it. The living thing can even transport the blood for you.
What kind of living thing? Something big -- you need lots of blood, so you a gerbil won't do. Something cheap, because it won't survive. Oxen fit the bill quite will, and can also be butchered for the victory feast. They're slow, so if you need to move quickly you might have to sacrifice a horse instead.
[Answer]
*Asked by someone who's never been stabbed or cut in a knife fight before*. Existing bladed weapons are already designed to cause bleeding. A small switchblade popped into your back a few dozen times before you even realize who's hitting you in the back will drain you before the paramedics arrive with bags of O. Same with a bayonet/spike/pole arm. It's bigger & slower, thus causing gaping wounds that don't close. The point is to drain the core quickly, and cause death.
By contrast, efficient knife fighter will slash your arms before you get done reading this sentence. Then it's on to the neck and face. That goal is to draw blood, as a defensive measure, i.e. stay away from me.
] |
[Question]
[
I am writing a DnD module where fishmen are invading island nations. The islands would naturally have adapted to this in some way as the raids have been happening for years. What method would these island nations use to detect underwater invaders?
I first thought of nets with floats and bells but these would give constant false positives from fish or tides.
Magic is an option, but needs to be a realistic and low level spell that a run of the mill spellcaster could accomplish (say 3rd level or below). I considered a water-breathing spell cast on a regular patrol but the underwater terrain is unlikely to be hospitable to a normal patrol and visibility would be too limited to be useful.
I much prefer a more generic non-DnD specific answer but would settle for something in the DnD world.
[Answer]
**Marine watchdogs**.
First option:
Build a net wall around the city in the water like torpedo nets. Inside the net give a cautious and jumpy sea dweller a home. The net has no warning function, it simply isolates the sea dwellers from predators so that they are moving freely around the net.
If something is inside their waters, the sea dwellers are fleeing into provided homes which can be conveniently watched. So an intrusion will be detected faithfully.
Second option:
[Train marine animals to warn people or even track and attack intruders.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin) In our world dolphins or sea lions are trained e.g. by the US Navy.
[Answer]
Don't live directly next to the water.
You can still be close enough to the water to easily hop in your boat and go fishing. Just build your house a **couple hundred meters inland** from the high water mark. This is just a good idea anyway. This makes it harder for your house to be washed away during a storm surge. Then any fishpeople will have to come out of the water to threaten your village. They can then be spotted by guards or lookouts as normal.
If the attacks by raiding fishpeople are a regular occurrence you build a wall around your town and you treat them like any other raiders that come from the water.
[Answer]
Your idea of nets with bells was a decent idea, but as you say, fish and tides and such would ring the bells. Plus, an intelligent creature would cut the lines before an invasion.
I think you might want to consider a more active defense.
**Caltrops** for example would be useful in the shallows, when your attackers must transition from swimming to walking. A few spikes in the seaweeds will slow down the attackers.
If those caltrops are also sitting on **bladders of air,** then the pressure would pop the bags. The rising bubbles would be visible to anyone watching the water's surface.
Another approach is **tarred spears.** Fire-harden a wooden spear, then coat it in tar to waterproof it. If the spear is 10 feet long, bury it at a 45 degree angle pointing out to sea so that only 3 to 5 feet are above the seabed. Build a wall of these spears, leaving only your fishing boats' exit path clear. This wall will slow them down, but not stop them...
**Strings or wires** can be tied to the shafts below the sea floor (so the wires are not exposed) and the other ends tied to bells above the high tide line. When the creatures either impale themselves on the spears or rip the spears out of their way, the bells will ring.
Build a **sea wall** so that once they come ashore, they then have to climb a wall. This wall should be strong enough to handle storm surges and high winds. It should have gates, of course, but those become choke points at which you can slow their invasion. Of course, the wall also protects your village from actual storms, so double win there.
**Defense in depth.** Use all of the above (and any other ideas you come up with), not just any one idea.
[Answer]
Here is something that might be slightly strange, but could work for you.
Guard posts built on Glass bottom buoys.
You will have to set, as a precondition, very very clear waters as a starting point. Set a guard on each buoy so that they can use the glass floor to look out into the rest of the lagoon. This will help cope with wave chop distorting your line of sight.
For night duty, design a floating, glass bottomed lantern, maybe with a mirror to focus a beam out into the water.
Make sure the observation posts are out beyond where the waves begin to break. Regular boat patrols to help. In case of storms, bring everyone in from the outposts and put them in bunkers on dry land. It's not as good for observation, but you won't want humans on a little buoy during a squall.
All you are really doing is a standard guard patrol picket. You are just making it a bit easier to see the fishmen coming by smoothing the "surface" you are looking through to avoid problems with refraction, and adding some primitive underwater lights.
Medieval glass wasn't always of the highest quality, so you might have to use a little bit of magic on the glass during construction. After that, no contiuous scrying or spellwork required.
[Answer]
The [Alarm spell](http://engl393-dnd5th.wikia.com/wiki/Alarm) is a 1st level spell that both Wizards and Rangers can cast. It's intended purpose is to notify you someone is where they shouldn't be.
Unlike mundane means, you can freely specify things like, "Fish don't trigger it."
As it's only a 1st level spell in theory even a scrub would be able to learn how to cast it with a bit of learning/practice. Rangers don't have schools and are usually self-taught. It would not be impossible for the local wise-man or grizzled hunter to have this trick up their sleeves and the position probably would even be a traditional role in the village if this sort of thing happened regularly.
Feats like [Magic Initiate](http://engl393-dnd5th.wikia.com/wiki/Feats#Magic_Initiate) and [Ritual Caster](http://engl393-dnd5th.wikia.com/wiki/Feats#Ritual_Caster) in particular make it plausible for even someone not well-versed in the arcane to know the spell if they study enough. You need not be a learned Wizard or a world-wise Ranger if it's just something that gets taught along a family line for example.
I realize you wanted tech but I didn't see the signature "Ward this area" spell listed in the answers so I thought I would mention it.
Edit: Upon further review, the Alarm spell *itself* will not help you. However, you can make spells of your own and if you have an entire nation's worth of resources and a reason to create such a thing, making a larger-scale version is not impossible or even improbable in the slightest. It does require you to dive out of the rulebook but such a thing is not impossible or even frowned upon. Part of the core premise of Wizards is unearthing and creating new spells to meet needs.
[Answer]
**Early warning underwater acoustic mirrors.**
<http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Fesg.jpg)
These amazing and amazingly huge parabolic acoustic mirrors were built in England (Germany too, I think) because they could amplify the sound of an airplane in the distance. Radar made them obsolete, but they are still there. Check out the linked page.
The bigger they are, the lower the frequency they can detect. From
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_microphone>
>
> This is because, from the Rayleigh criterion, parabolic dishes can
> only focus waves with a wavelength much smaller than the diameter of
> their aperture. The wavelength of sound waves at the low end of human
> hearing (20 Hz) is about 17 metres (56 feet); focusing them would
> require a dish much larger than this.
>
>
>
I envision these things underwater. It is D&D so maybe they could be made from giant shells. The people in the 1930s who built the dishes shown had electric microphones, but one can transmit a sound signal along a taut string, in the manner of a tin can phone.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/noinv.jpg)
Listeners topside would listen via a taut string running from a pickup at the focal point of the parabolic acoustic mirror back (possibly through a hole in the mirror) up to the listener. I envision the listener with his head up inside a fixed bell-like helmet, with multiple strings running to it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vo3t7.jpg)
In case you wondered: the listeners are **listening for fishmen sounds**. They might hear a lot of other interesting underwater things too.
Once they heard fishmen sounds, in addition to sounding an alarm they could mute one incoming wire at a time and by a process of elimination determine which direction the sound was coming from.
[Answer]
**How real cities handled their ports**
Ancient cities tended not to be located on the water, but rather a few miles inland with a client village on the water. This way, they had the utility of ocean access, while still being protected. If the village was lost, no big deal.
As cities got larger they tended to connect the sea-side village with the city via walls. This new and larger city was surrounded by walls on all sides, but often had an inner wall between the port and the actual city. This allowed for greater protection against seaside attacks. Not to mention the port itself may be walled off into sections. These sections might mean that there are 2 harbor areas or the open area only holds ships. All houses and warehouses being behind walls in the 2nd harbor area.
Further improvements were the usage of a sea wall, a wall that literally is standing in the water, so besides the entry to the port it is completely protected. Even the entry typically had a chain possibly with logs that was strung across it. These methods protected the main city, and while the port was not totally safe it was reasonably safe, at least against **ships**.
**Your World**
In your world, biology and the usage of magic skews things a little, so while the above would still be used you potentially need to add a few additional features. The levels of precaution being reliant on how much money and effort you are willing to invest, and whether the burning of a part of the port concerns you that much. Also, whether these merfolk carry weapons and armor or are simply aquatic naked people.
**Detection**
*Mundane*
At night a large chain net is spread across the opening of the port. It might be possible for someone to squeeze through but they would not be able to carry much if any equipment.
With glass: Have a few buoys with bells that are towed right inside and outside the entrance to the harbor. Divers with diving helmets or a diving sphere sit at the bottom and ring the bell if they see attackers.
Without glass: Build a few thin towers, basically thick poles, with a wooden tube carrying air to the bottom of the harbor. At the top of these towers are large bells. Divers suck on the tube and watch the entrance. If they see attackers they pull on the rope and ring the bell.
Buoys are more flexible, but ring faintly. Being rung will be louder than waves though. Towers cost more, are inflexible, but will not ring from the tide.
*Magical*
Same as above, but with water breathing. Maybe have "detect life" active.
**Neutralization**
Whether your solution is mundane or magical, you WILL need more towers and many more guards. Most ports would have towers, but most would focus outwards. You need towers facing inwards. They only needed a few guards as ships were seen from far away and the chain at night kept them out. Now you need many more guards, as people are harder to spot and keep out than ships.
You need towers to face inwards and have archers or mages constantly watching the harbor. If merpeople attack they need to immediately start firing. Depending on how heavily armed the merfolk are, you may need to sacrifice the particular harbor segment.
Throw pots of pitch, oil, or greek fire onto the water and light the surface. The water will catch fire either driving the merfolk onto a narrow dock or piece of land. The small area and many towers will create a killing field. Alternatively, they will have to retreat as the water will heat and cause burns and possible oxygen problems.
**Conclusion**
Unless the city messes up, is heavily outnumbered, the merfolk are somehow heavily armed (unlikely), or the merfolk can throw around a ton of magic or explosives, the city will be safe. The port and ships may be lost or raided, but the merfolk will pay dearly for it (seriously they will die).
However the cost of employing so many guards will mean that only cities can do this, as villages simply do not have enough people. So maybe back to the split coastal and interior villages.
Much more effective and safer for merfolk to raid small villages who cannot afford to designate standing guards, regardless of detection. Merfolk could also swim up river to unsuspecting villages.
[Answer]
The same way they detect schools of fish, a person on a tall cliff or tower looking down, the more vertical their line of sight the better and farther they will be able to see into the water.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QfcEum.jpg)
From above you can see well, the ocean around islands is quite clear. Your big danger times would be at night. Here is an image looking down on a bay from a cliff, note how you can see everything on the ocean floor.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YZnE0m.jpg)
[Answer]
In the realm of simple magic: Great White Shark patrols.
The magic is to give the sharks a predisposition for patrolling the shore; they can go off to hunt for food, but the magic means they just never get tired of hunting the shore near the city, even if they never catch anything there.
Similar low level magic to attract them into cages and calm them, where they can be enchanted, perhaps even attaching an amulet to them or something like that. It should not be much more difficult than an infatuation spell. If you attach the amulet, than simple touch magic to a sister amulet can call the sharks in an emergency, or send them off to hunt elsewhere during the day so your own fishermen can get their jobs done.
[Answer]
The society could employ trained Seals for monitoring the shore lines and deeper oceans for imminent attacks. We know that seals can be trained to perform stunts, ball games. I am sure they can also be trained to swim back to shore to inform a trainer of fish-people presence. After all seals are dogs of the sea.
Training of some sort of seafaring animal to alert of danger. It does not have to be seals. It could also be dolphins as they are also intelligent animals.
On Land we currently use dogs for similar purposes in our gardens and the such like.
As seals are important/as important as dogs in this society they would also selectively breed them to obtain traits they desire i.e. size/power/intelligence/speed.
[Answer]
You can defend your islands utilizing [Brine pools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool) or [Carbon Dioxide lakes](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060830-carbon-lakes.html). These two naturally occurring underwater geographic formations that are heavily populated by extremophiles.
Brine pools are known for killing fish and crabs that go into them due to their salinity(3x to 8x higher than the ocean). These Brine pools are higher density than the surrounding ocean and swimmers would most likely be pushed out if on a normal swim. However if it were an armed raider walking along the floor the metal he is carrying would cause him to sink in.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HCuLh.jpg)
Carbon Dioxide lakes happen at much deeper locations in the ocean than Brine pools. The depths typically needed are 10,000 ft below sea level as the temperature is low enough that liquid carbon dioxide is denser than salt water and can be collected in pools. There are other ways to make them, like [volcanic underwater geysers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption) that release CO2 into underwater holes. Fish take in oxygen rich water in order to breath, and I would imagine spells that allow breathing under water do the same thing, using CO2 lakes the raiders would suffocate underwater, just like they not able to breath with a spell.
You would need to hand-wave some of this in order for them to form close to an island but both would work well for defending against underwater attacks. As added bonuses, neither should interrupt ship travel, so normal traders should never even notice it there. Also, due to lack of oxygen Iron weapons dropped by the raiders into either should stay in relatively good condition for collection later.
[Answer]
**Walls and Bells**
A medieval population will be mostly composed of farmers/fishermen/... that's a lot of people scattered throughout during day time who, if not warned early enough, will be caught by the invaders.
The typical medieval strategy for protecting those people is to have a fortified place where people seek refuge in when the alarms bells are rung.
The problem, of course, is to be warned in time.
*Note: a corollary is that should people sleep behind the walls, there is no need for early warning at night; thus the solution need not be concerned about illuminating the night, which would be a real hard problem.*
This answer will therefore focus on a simple strategy: force the enemy to be visible early, delay it to give time to people to run to cover.
**Seawall**
Watching a large area, such as the shore of a whole island, is highly impractical.
If you have cliffs, that's great, otherwise I advise building a [Seawall such as Pondicherry's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawall#Pondicherry) all around the island, minus a few select passages for harbors.
This wall need not be smooth, or elaborated, it's fine to just pile on somewhat large stones. It's also fine if they are not too stable. They should however have their feet in the water, or close to, as the goal is to prevent the invader from getting an easy toehold on the island. Climbing rocks while waves keep smashing you against them is not an enjoyable experience. Bonus point if algae make them slippery.
Now, you can build watchtowers at regular intervals along the seawall, and you can also place a variety of devices on the wall to further slow down a foe: for example, transforming some holes between the rocks into inhospitable places with caltrops and other such implements. And it's fine if they rust due to the salt, just replace them once upon a time.
**Harbors**
This wall will have holes, for ships have to pass.
Each such channel will need watchtowers and an iron net that is raised until a boat tries to pass.
**Atoll**
If this does not provide an early enough warning, the next level of protection would be an atoll surrounding a lagoon. The goal is simple: force the fishmen to pop above water even if for a short period of time, so they can easily be spotted from the shore.
Note that it only really matters during *daytime*, as explained above, so there is no need to have torches or anything on the atoll. It's even fine if it's partially submerged as long as it's shallow enough.
If there's no natural atoll to build upon, this might be a challenge though. Sinking tree trunks, mostly upright, could build such a barrier without having to carry stones to sea. Try to aim for shallower areas.
Of course, a few channels will need to remain open if ships are intended to go at large; apply the same solution than the one for channels in the seawall: watchtowers and iron nets.
*Note: those watching from there, and fishing/traveling in the great sea, would be at greatest risk; they would also be in the best position to raise warnings early.*
[Answer]
surround your island of aquafarms full of fish afraid of underwater fishmen. if the fish jump out of water, that means the fishmen are near them. U could use watchtower to monitor them..
[Answer]
A reef surrounding your island would make it hard for intruders to cross unless they knew where it was, and used the proper direction to enter, to avoid splintering their boats.
The shallow water over the reef means they could stand on it and not even cover halfway to their knees. Sharp spikes and poison/bactiria make this undesirable. You would also be able to see them crossing on the surface.
Maybe some of the coral is bio-luminescent, so even during a moonless cloudy night, they would be illuminated from below, and silhouettes as they approched shore.
Poison/electric Eels and stonefish could inhabit the reef.
Sandbars could randomly come and go, only the locals know them well enough for navigation.
Again, crossing on the surface makes you visable.
An atol could surround your island. (A round hollow island)
So no boats or even fish can enter/leave except in known guarded locations. Your villages could be on the center island. The outer island, the atol, would be covered in guard towers. Boats would have to come ashore, and be carried to the water again across solid ground, troops would have to walk. All visable in the watch-fires. (Flamable fish-oils?)
This would have similar protections that a moat would have on a dry-land castle.
Also, a wall surrounding the edge of your main island, with boat-gates near the openings in the atol for convenience, OR... far around the oposite side so you have to swim, or float around the outside walls, rocks and buring oil dropping on you, to get to the next gate to come in further.
Kind of like an aquatic version of Minus Tirith, for all the Lord of the Rings fans out there.
Multiple rings with few gates means the enemy will spend A LONG TIME floating below your walls unable to reach up and hurt you.
[Answer]
Two ideas: fish oil, and fishing nets.
---
One component of visual detection could be fish oil. Or olive oil.
While glass-bottomed boats/buoys have been suggested, the problem with glass is that it requires a *lot* of glass.
When I was a child in Corfu, the Greek fishermen wanting to see into the water would pour a **tiny splash** - no more than a teaspoon - of olive oil onto the ocean surface (Olive oil being the universal panacea for everything in Corfu, used for everything from treating skin ailments to lighting fires, treating wood, a lubricating machinery, preserving food, rustproofing, frying, you name it). This would quickly spread out, to form a molecule-thick layer atop the water, completely changing the optical behavior of the water surface nearby, so that rather than just the reflective, sparkling ripples, you could suddenly see clear to the bottom.
Having it contained by a hoop would improve the efficiency, but it holds itself together pretty well anyway, remaining for minutes at a time, at least in the relatively calm waters of the Ionian sea.
Basically it just reduces the reflectivity and fractal choppiness of the water surface. I think the layer of surface-tension on the water is very refractive, and the oil prevents this, even in the tiniest of doses.
It works surprisingly well, like a magic spell that gives you an instant window into the water to see the glittering diced-rainbow of the fish swirling below.
[To be absolutely clear: this is a tiny localized film around the spotter, who would need no more than a couple of flasks per DAY, not an environmental disaster where the sea-life will need cleaning and oil will need containing within booms and so on.]
---
That said - any form of underwater detection is doomed to not be as good as overwater detection. Guard buoys or towers, and balloons in the shallows as suggested by another answer, will give you, at best, a few extra seconds, as they come in from the shallows. Compare this to the hours you'd get using overwater sight to see approaching ships.
I'd recommend three layers of netting around the entire island, or in an arc around populated villages/towns. Inner and outer layers should have diagonal mesh, and floats somewhat below the water level, but with flags projecting up above the water, such that if the mesh is cut, they bob up, but they cannot be removed downwards without being noticed.
The middle net (protected from fish by the other two layers) should have bells on, and be covered with fishhooks, sea urchin spines, etc to snag on people trying to sneak through - if jangled, then people are busting through fast, rather than cautiously.
Even this will give you perhaps 30 seconds' extra warning, a minute at best.
[Answer]
Looking at the magical ways:
Drop "special" items in the water that attract and enrage sharks. Drop them in circular paths like fences.
Teach the locals "shark friendship" and/or "undetectable to shark" (not just invisable....)
Also:
Illusion of a fake village...
Running, screaming villagers.
Phantasmal village guards with spears/crossbows.
The villagers use it as a tv/soap opera everyone adding their own ideas.... or avoiding it's bore and drugery.
The real village is over that hill right there...
The path to get there is behind that rock illusion.
Oh yeah.... and an illusionary shield that looks like just another mountain.
And if someone get past? Well... invisability on buildings when seen from outside town... you have to touch the inner sidewalks before you can see them.
[Answer]
Are their sea-elves in your world? A friendship with them would be benificial.
Could they owe you a favor from a long ago war?
You saved them?
They hurt you, and are making reperations?
Maybe just a few of them? A dozzen?
Maybe your island has something they want? A natural resource? They regularly send trading parties, with security to protect their "treasure"
The Fishermen could also be after this resource,
The elves HATE the fishermen and their raiding parties.
The elves protect you because they cannot refine the resource themselves, it has to be you?
Maybe it's poisonous to them in its natural state, they rely on you.
Maybe it's poisonous to you too, and you are being used as cheap labor?
Maybe they let you manage it because the fishermen treated them badly in the past, its the right thing to do?
Maybe they are protecting SOMETHING ELSE associated with the island, some native fish or dolphin who ONLY feed at your shore or reef.
Are the fishermen sea-elves themselves?
This could be a rival tribe, race, or species.
] |
[Question]
[
So we've (re)discovered a portal to a magical realm akin to 12th century Europe but with magic. We have giants, trolls, dwarves, wizards, etc. One faction calls upon our aid. Invoking a supposed alliance our ancestors agreed upon.
We accept and send a reconnaissance force made up from our modern militaries of about 300 men. They're to link up with the faction's own military. It as well as our enemies are largely made up of a noble caste of elite warriors and a larger group of conscripted peasants. Most of them are of giant heritage and over 9 feet tall.
So we're expected to be on missions for days on end with routine skirmishes. Resupplies can be days if not weeks away. Contact with Earth will be even more rare. Travel to Earth can be done through magical wooden ships, each should be able to carry a 100 men with gear. They won't support mechanized armor.
*To clarify: A trip through the portal requires the usage of what's for all intent and purposes an oversize longboat. It won't support the localized weight of say an APC. That's ignoring the restrictions in fuel by having to remain on it's own for weeks on end.*
So my question, **what kind of weapon would a modern military equip their soldiers with if they're expected to fight a more primitive force that relies on spears, shields and bows but has a significant physical advantage?** Especially as supplies like ammunition would be rare and it will take several engagements between resupplies.
Some expected enemies:
* Giant domesticated boars, as big as a wisent.
* Giants of 9 feet tall armed with 12th century gear like spears and maille armor.
* Giant cavalry similar to a norman knight on equally large horses.
* Humans with crossbows as well as shield walls with spears and axes.
* Wolves large enough to hunt the above boars.
[Answer]
**Modern defense using Western (NATO) weapons:**
Bad news for the troll-warriors and their slaves: We've practiced defensive warfare for centuries, and it's brutal.
At 3000m, a rain of [60mm mortars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M224_mortar) devastate their formation, spotted by hidden observers and directed by radio or field telephone. No large formations of conscripts after that - the smart ones just deserted.
At 2000m, the warriors enter the zone cleared by fire and chainsaw - limited cover and even easier spotting for the rain of mortars. Being 9-ft tall won't help and chain-mail armor won't help - red-hot, razor-sharp mortar shrapnel will kill and maim throngs of armored giants just like everybody else.
At 800m, the warriors are in aimed-fire range of [Light Machine Guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M249_light_machine_gun). If they start running now, without pausing, the surviving warriors will reach the defensive position in about three-four minutes...under murderous, aimed machine-gun fire the entire time. The kind of fire that swallowed entire battalions without a hiccup in WWI.
At about 100-150m, the first warriors reach the razor-wire obstacles, which stops them for another minute just outside arrow range, but well within [M4 Carbine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_carbine) range. Inside the wire, they start stepping on the tripwires - mines, [fougasses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_fougasse), etc. Now the few surviving archers can release a hail of arrows...which fall harmlessly on top of well-prepared fighting positions with overhead cover.
At 25m, the warriors are within grenade and pistol range. But it's over by then. Many thousands of attackers are dead, maimed, or fleeing, and the 100-soldier company of defenders is repairing their lightly-tested defenses and thinking about lunch.
And that's if we cared about the political repercussions. If not, we could use gas mortars and simply suffocate the entire formation...then infect the few, feeble survivors with smallpox before letting them go home to spread rumors of our terrifying power (and spread smallpox) before dying horribly. Let the mountains of their dead soldiers and the smoke from entire provinces of diseased corpses be our heralds to the enemy lords: We don't *play* at war.
---
**Modern attack using NATO weapons:**
Wagonloads of mortars arrive at the new assault position 3000m from the target, and the attackers simply keep dropping them on the target until the target's not relevant anymore. If the defenders try a sortie or spoiling attack against the assault position, then see above.
The final infantry assault, if needed, should be done by the more numerous local allies supported by modern weapons teams. [Grenade launchers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M203_grenade_launcher) are particularly useful support weapons here. [Night Vision Devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-vision_device) can make night attacks safer and more secure than daylight attacks.
Again, that assumes that we wouldn't simply gas the target.
---
**Old-Tyme Logistics for modern weapons:**
A single good old horse/ox-drawn [Conestoga Wagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_wagon) can carry up to 6 tons of supplies.
Those machine gun and rifle rounds weigh about 12 grams each, so 100,000 rounds would weigh about (let's round up for packaging) 1.5 tons. 60mm mortars weight about 1.1kg each, so one wagon can carry about 900 rounds.
So for one company of infantry, you're looking at about 4-6 wagonloads of ammo, food, and other supplies to get them to an objective and through one battle to secure that objective. Depending upon the roads, wagons during the US Civil War moved 10-15 miles/day (20km/day).
NATO also has practiced *expeditionary* warfare for generations, is well practiced in how to set up (and defend) supply routes and bases, and regularly rehearses how to keep forward units well-supplied during both offensive and defensive operations. This means moving large amounts of supplies (more than soldiers) at every opportunity to resupply from modern Earth.
Note that the USA alone could easily field well over one hundred of such decisive army-destroying infantry companies without needing to retrain artillery or armor companies, nor call up the National Guard (which is even larger), nor allies. It's an apocalypse for those giants.
[Answer]
Look at this [The Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/11011316/Military-kit-through-the-ages-from-the-Battle-of-Hastings-to-Helmand.html) article and scroll down to the Falklands entry. Dump the NBC gear and carry more food, ammo, and electronics plus batteries instead.
* Modern radios, night vision gear, light drones, and similar gear. They will make quite a difference.
* A modern military would find it difficult or impossible **not** to bring rifles. That's what they're trained with, and even if a rifle needs ammunition it is much more lethal than any bow.
+ Each rifleman with a 5.56mm assault rifle could carry 300 to 600 rounds, and with aimed fire that equals a large number of enemies.
+ Perhaps a 7.62mm [battle rifle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_rifle) like the FN-FAL, used in single shots, would be superior. A rifleman could carry about 200 rounds. The question would be if the *existing* human troops are well trained with them.
+ A large percentage of [Designated Marksman Rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_marksman_rifle).
* It would be an interesting question if they bring GPMGs or SAWs, light mortars, 40mm grenades, and the like. While the ammunition is heavy for dismounted infantry, these weapons are *quite* effective against a shield wall or cavalry charge.
---
**Follow-Up:** Nice answer by user535733, but if ammo weight matters then aimed semiautomatic fire might be a better idea than automatic fire.
From an armchair warrior:
* **5 kg** for a battledress uniform, underwear, boots, spare socks, etc. In very cold climates it could be more.
* **5 kg** for an empty backpack, assorted packs and pouches, and load-bearing equipment.
* **5 kg** for two full canteens, a supply of water purification tablets, a mess kit, and some emergency rations.
* **5 kg** for personal radios and extra batteries, night vision gear and extra batteries, flashlight with extra batteries, first aid kit, emergency survival kit, a supply of chewing gum, a folding knife, toothbrush, soap, and towel, odds and ends.
* **10 kg** for *either* a 5.56mm assault rifle with ten magazines (300 rounds) *or* a 7.62mm battle rifle with six magazines (120 rounds), plus optics, laser attachment, bayonet, cleaning kit.
That's **30 kg** for a soldier to march and fight for a day as an individual. But soldiers seldom operate solo. They often operate in squads of 9-13 soldiers and platoons of 30-60.
Note that there is no helmet or body armor. One might consider a lightweight *stab-resistant vest* rather than the armor with trauma plates worn today.
* **10 kg** for *either* an underbarrel grenade launcher and a few grenades, *or* for an anti-tank rocket, *or* to carry a 5.56mm machine gun (with five 200-round belts) or a 7.62mm machine gun (with one 100-round belt) **instead** of the rifle, *or* four 100-round belts for a machine gun carried by someone else in the squad, *or* a couple of Claymore mines for ambushes, *or* a bigger radio, *or* a bigger medical kit.
* **10 kg** for half a dozen 60mm mortar rounds for a mortar carried by someone else, or a battery-powered drone, or some repair kit, or whatever. Someone in the platoon might have an axe, several in the squad have entrenching tools, someone in the company has explosives and detonators.
* **10 kg** for a lightweight tent, spare clothes, etc. to live in the field.
That's **30 + 30 kg** which is heavy but not impossible for trained troops. They would drop one third of that before they come into close combat.
I'm not accounting for any food, except for emergency rations. Get that from the local peasants.
An unarmed *native porter* could carry 1,600 rounds of 7.62mm or 3,200 rounds of 5.62mm. Get a few for each squad.
[Answer]
**Shock and awe.**
The idea here would be shock and awe - convince your enemy that they are faced with an incomprehensibly more powerful opponent, so that they surrender and agree to terms. Your enemy is not going to understand what sort of abilities the moderns have. Keep it that way.
Your moderns are not going to be swapping fire with enemies. They are all drone pilots and technicians. I would outfit the moderns with solar powered drones fitted with tactical nuclear weapons. You would leverage this by telling your opponent that you are going to utterly destroy a target, and that they can watch the target be destroyed if they choose because they are powerless to stop it. You are telling them because you are honorable and do not want to waste the lives of their brave soldiers (this is medieval days after all).
Then send a drone up at night and drop a tactical nuclear weapon from 2 miles up.
Then tell them the next target. If they don't capitulate, destroy that one too.
This sort of story might not be as much fun as WW2 era grunts shoulder to shoulder with the medievals. I do like it as a playing field leveler if your opponents have wizards with access to eldritch horrors and the like.
[Answer]
# Energy
All conflict boils down to who can concentrate lethal energy onto their enemy the fastest. Modern militaries are powerful mainly due to the *amount* of energy they can bring to the battlefield. An M1A2 Abrams carries 500 gallons of fuel to push 70 tons of metal around the battlefield over 40 mph. It's turbine engine can generate 1500 HP. So one modern MBT is roughly the muscle power of 1500 horses. And that's not even talking about the main gun. You take away armor, and you take a massive amount of energy and strategic advantage that goes with it off the battlefield.
So now we're left with what infantry soldiers can carry on their backs. If they have enough ammo to put a 3-round burst in every enemy soldier, then lock and load. No special tactics required other than using the primitives to protect your riflemen and shape the battlefield for maximum shooting advantage. But if we assume that the enemy has more troops than you can carry ammo for, or they have other advantages which means you can't simply outgun them, then we need to use other advantages to win.
# Information Warfare
Many great battles were lost not due to lack of firepower or manpower, but simply due to lack of knowledge. One side exploited better scouting and the element of surprise to outmatch a stronger opponent. Drones are almost certainly the most cost-effective weapons to bring to the battlefield. A few drones can easily replace a dozen rifles in strategic value. Also, it's better to have fixed-wing than hover drones, because you want to cover distance, not inspect the battlefield. Since you can only afford a few, they need to serve strategic purposes, not tactical.
Another bit of useful tech is the portable weather radar (think: modern fishing boat). Knowing when and where storms are likely to develop helps choose the best times and locations for an engagement. Again, the gear will probably replace several rifles, but just one should be enough to give many miles of weather info. A small radar suitable for boats gives about 50 miles of storm detection, but does require several kW of power. This means you will also want to bring a small generator that can run on, say, paraffin wax or other similar fuels available in that time.
# Tactics
Obviously, night-vision gear provides significant leverage for the warfighter, although it really only enables small-group missions. Targeting enemy commanders, supply depots, etc. are just a few ways you can make the most of just a little extra technology. However, one could also use it as a force multiplier by surrounding the enemy camp at night with conventional forces (spotted earlier with drones), using night vision to take out key forces like night patrols, pouring fuel on strategic targets, and then launching a conventional attack with fire arrows, catapults and whatever other siege weapons the locals have available to them.
Finally, the only guns and gunners I would bring are snipers. I'm assuming that the enemy has far more troops than 300 riflemen could defeat on their own. Therefore, the best use of limited guns against a large opposing force is to eliminate the biggest threats with carefully concentrated fire. Snipers with standard .50 cal rifles should be very effective against slow-moving giants and heavily armored humans.
For the fast movers, I suggest some kind of poison-delivery rounds. A slug might not be sufficient to stop a giant rampaging boar, but a sufficient quantity of poison surely would. Cobra venom from a single bite is sufficient to kill an elephant. This is a fairly small small volume which could easily fit inside a hollow point round.
If your allies can prep the battlefield, they can emplace obstacles which slow or delay the fast movers, like trenches, wooden pikes aimed towards the attackers, or even just something as primitive as a field of brambles to run over (think invasive blackberry bushes with their thorns and thick vines spread over a field like concertina wire). This should make it much easier for your snipers to hit them with the poison rounds. Even if the poisons take a while to kill their targets, or even if they don't kill their targets, they should at least slow and weaken them to the point that the fast movers become *easy* targets for the weaker foot soldiers.
# Conclusion
The modern unit should be used entirely for strategic purposes. There is little value using them as conventional forces, assuming large numbers of troops on both sides (which I assume is why you limited their numbers). They should focus on information superiority, cover of darkness, and strategic targets only. Once the enemy loses their highest value assets, their morale will crumble and the conventional forces are likely to rout. It is not necessary for your special forces to defeat the enemy. They just need to upset the balance of power in a decisive way.
[Answer]
**Eric Flint** has an excellent series called the Ring of Fire, "1632", "1633", "1634"... etc. that you may want to read as a reference to this question. Basically the premise is a giant chunk of WV is swapped with a chunk of 1632 Europe... and what happens after that occurs. It is a good read and some great alternate history bits. You will be interested in Eric's combat sequences with modern firearms, techniques against 1600's style military tactics.
It does present some options that your mercenary force would set as objectives. First, take equipment that would aid in building/restocking/resupplying the force while it waits for regular resupplies. Build and find local sources and alternatives for the main consumables.
You were not specific on how many of the adversaries the force might encounter between resupplies, only there would be several engagements. That detail would create a natural how-much comes in initially so that they don't end up short before the next resupply. Military supply and logistics is very good on this type of planning and unless they are just sending good combat troops to die, they will ensure they have what they need to still be there when the next supply train arrives.
The question of how many hit points are your 9-foot adversaries. If they are like whispy, fragile combatants, rifle fire will do significant damage on them If they are like D&D hill and stone giants, mini-tanks, wide as a barn, bigger firepower will be needed.
Explain what you mean by "...they won't support mechanized armor"? If I have 300 men, on three ships, I would rather replace two of those ships with mechanized armor and only have 100 men and heavier firepower as well as equipment to move it around. 100 fully armored marines represent around 30,000 pounds or 15 tons per ship. Even 200 marines with 15 tons of supplies would be significant.
[Answer]
Have you seen the anime Gate: Thus the JSDF fought? It follows the premise you're suggesting (world rediscovers magical portal, modern military is sent in to deal with the situation), and offers some great thoughts on the viability of certain strategies and weapons. Specifically, the armor imperial soldiers from the magic world have is no match for standard firearms, while cavalry dragons can only be pierced by higher caliper bullets like 50 cal's. The big red fire dragon's scales are even stronger, as strong as tungsten, and can only be pierced by high grade explosives from rocket launchers and the like.
I'd also consider what type of budget your soldiers are on, and what type of compensation they could expect for the job. If the medieval people will pay you in a good sack of gold coins worth several thousand dollars, consider a small squad with moderate gear, and maybe a truck, though since travel is limited then not likely. If it's something even more valuable, like mining rights to rich deposits of rare earth minerals, then expect a platoon or even larger. If they came to your group over a supposed alliance and they are threatening to invade your world as a backup if they lose, then expect a supply response in between the two I gave you. Enough to probably get the job done, but not enough to waste precious resources before everything is known.
Also consider the visibility of the soldiers and their actions. If reporters are kept away and information is suppressed, then that squad could use illegal bullets like hollow points to get the job done easier and quicker, with the public none the wiser. Since the people are so big and the animals are too, this might be more viable if the average giant can tank a few bullets and kill soldiers before succumbing. Or maybe this information is leaked and causes national outcry back home, causing conflict for your squad like delays in resources, or an early recall order. Either way, I'd have men at least carry a rifle and 1-2 backup weapons, with as much ammo that they can walk with. Or, since it will be potentially weeks till resupply comes, bring some horses with a cart or 2 and go old school to carry munitions and ammunition, rather than buy them over there.
[Answer]
**The light traveler approach**
Some of the other answers here have already explained what you can do with a full range of modern infantry equipment, so I'll take a different approach and explore the most economical route.
Naturally, the most efficient method is to use your allies effectively. You want to link up with them as soon as possible. This way, they can handle more mundane parts of warfare while your specialized killing machines can be inserted at key points to dominate the field as necessary.
You don't need much to work with: just give your soldiers standard assault rifles, plenty of ammunition, plastic explosives, and night vision goggles (with lots of extra batteries). And some horses.
First, to get to your allies. A band of modern soldiers should have no difficulty venturing across even hostile territory without too much trouble. You're not looking for a fight. So just avoid terrain that looks entrapping or difficult to defend. The mobility of being a small mounted group should let you easily outmaneuver and avoid any opposing forces. The night vision goggles are an extra precaution against nighttime surprises and ambush attempts.
Once you've joined up, you can just march alongside the allied army and provide (devastating) support. Your allies can set up defensive barriers (wood is good enough). Soldiers operating against 12th century opponents with no need to worry about return fire or giving cover fire can make 600 rounds go a long, long way (I would bring more anyway, maybe thousands per soldier). If you add in the extra advantage of trenches and other defensive emplacements, giving you plenty of time and cover to aim against an enemy with no guns or armor capable of stopping bullets, then you can basically hold out a position indefinitely until you run out of food. And the bullet:kill ratio will be close to 1:1. If you wound someone, you can leave them for your allies to pick off later.
In a pitched battle, your allies can line up in traditional formations, which are extremely effective against a disorganized enemy force. If the enemy decides to line up as well, then you send your soldiers out in front and open up on them with (carefully aimed precision) rifle fire until they become disorganized again. Then you can pull back and let your allies mop up. Repeat as necessary. Your side will be essentially invincible in the field.
But the open field isn't everything. Medieval warfare is mostly about the unpleasant business of sieges. I've already explained how you can easily defend against a siege, so the only thing left is sieging the enemy. That's what the plastic explosives is for. So there are no sieges. If you want to go with heavier equipment, you can do mortars. But plastics is the lightest approach.
[Answer]
>
> Giant domesticated boars, as big as a wisent.
>
> Giants of 9 feet tall armed with 12th century gear like spears and maille armor.
>
> Giant cavalry similar to a norman knight on equally large horses.
>
> Humans with crossbows as well as shield walls with spears and axes.
>
> Wolves large enough to hunt the above boars
>
>
>
You'd probably want somewhat larger rounds than 5.56 or 7.62. The [Gerpard Lynx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBntnnCFvOk) might be perfect for this (and looks cool). I'd also go with recoiless rifles - the [Carl Gustav](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_recoilless_rifle) is a modern option, and you have a range of useful rounds for it.
You might also want to go with landmines (and given time, set them for sensitivity for larger targets, so your own troops can cross over and pull the enemy into a trap). Considering sheer size and the fact that they're in armour, I wonder if anti tank mines would work.
Assuming the rules of civilised modern warfare dosen't count... [White Phorphorous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_munitions) would do quite a number on an enemy, or even a flame thrower.
Modern militaries are also likely to have better night vision, and considering these are pretty large targets harassing attacks in the middle of the night might prove effective. Setting barns and food supplies, or even military and civilian housing on fire, painting rude graffiti on walls, that kind of thing.
More than *armour* I'd love some heavy machinery - trenches, and punji pits might be effective, though even a 9 foot tall giant would not have a good day stuck in concertina wire. An electric fence or three would be.. amusing as would cattleprods as meelee weapons. You're going to need power, but that's a renewable (as you'll see).
While I'd love heavy construction equipment, considering you have giants too, vietnam war style pit traps (with really large sharpened spikes covered in sewage...) large wire snares, and even concertina wire would work.
Probably worth considering mixing a roman style palisade base (with towers!) with hit and run tactics (you're smaller and pack a bigger punch).
Its also worth equipping your local ancillaries with more modern versions of weapons they're familiar with, and upgrading their gear. Imagine catapults with modern bungee cords for tortion, and ballista firing sharpened rebar. They will also be able to process materials faster, say with chainsaws, and tools made of 'modern' steels.
I'd suggest building a wood gasifier or steam engine/stirling engine, and using that to power a generator (so you can charge your modern gear). Solar panels would be 'nice' but a steam engine is going to be technology you can use to bootstrap other tech.
Radios would give you a *massive* advantage as well, though I suspect many modern troops would give their right arm for GPS and a cellphone. The ability to know where your own troops are, and the enemy is means you have a much better ability to dictate the battlefield.
Also, folding or electric bicycles with carts would massively improve your ability to move troops between areas, though an [updated, electric version of Vespa 150 TAP would be amusing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vespa_150_TAP)
While in theory, you *could* take out a [drone with a spear or crossbow bolt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbuEUoxntQ), they would be a useful force multiplier, being able to see over the horizon, walk in fire and possibly even dropping small explosive or incidiary devices in the midst of the enemy. A particularly vicious way to use one would be to use them to sneak in and poison wells inside beseiged cities or enemy encampments. Bio/chemical warfare is frowned upon, but the effect of a teargas canister or worse in the middle of an enemy formation would be... catastrophic, especially with mounted troops. They're a reasonable, lightweight way to get air power, and you're probably going to use them as a harassment/recce tool. Consider both machines like the [Aeroventure Raven](https://www.avinc.com/uas/view/raven) for recon and target painting and drones with a little more payload as very light bombers.
[Answer]
We accept their request for help, but we don't go and help by marching armies around having pitched battles, because that's silly.
Instead, we send through the parts to build a zeppelin, and a bunch of bombs (plus some engineers to build a base for said zepellin, a whole lot of fuel, and a regiment of infantry to defend said base). We then fly said zeppelin over the enemy capital and drop a note saying "surrender or die". When they don't surrender, annihilate said capital and move on to the next largest city. Repeat until the enemy ceases to be a problem.
While we're doing that, keep on shipping through more industry - get oil drilling going for a starter, and industrial farming, and all of the various industries needed to produce a strategic bomber and/or a cruise missile. If there's still an enemy left by that point, start using those as well to speed things up. Once the war is over, do some "negotiating" with our allies about who exactly is getting all of the land that used to be enemy territory.
[Answer]
The enemy will not cooperate (and that doesn't make a good story anyway). How will a smart opponent react?
## Opposition:
Once you know how to do it, ramping from 1100's tech to 1800's tech is a matter of many months or very few years. (See Flint's Ring Of Fire books.) And 1800's tech in large masses will give even 2000's tech a hard time. Controlling the supply of iron ore, carbon fuel and nitrates will become a major point after that knowledge gets out.
The local opponent is going to sooner or latter figure out that the modern weapons are dependent on consumables that are not available locally (much of what a 1100's army depended on came from "scavenging" or could be to some extend replaced on the move), the supply lines, not the front line then become the locals target.
Both sides will be maneuvering to try and force an engagement on their terms, the locals when they can stretch the modern supply lines as long and as fast as they can and with as many successive waves of cannon fodder as they can manage, each emerging from good cover to force them to be killed retail rather than wholesale. The moderns will seek battle when they can amass the most logistical support and force an engagement with a unit of chosen size and in a large open kill zone.
One other tactic for the moderns; recruit the enemy. Make being captured in battle preferable even to avoiding it all together. Works even better once they know they are being sent out as bullet sponges.
[Answer]
**Support Units**
Since you said the resupply intervals are relatively large, my suggestion would be:
* ditch 200 of your troops
* acquire 4 - 6 artillery pieces (e.g. M777 155mm howitzer)
* fill the freed up loading space with ammunition
**Tactics**
The safest way to take out an enemy is when he can't hurt you back. In order to do this, maximise your effective range (nothing says 'Good morning' to your enemy like a good few HE fragmentation shells).
You wont need to make your reconnaissance force to be front line fighters, thats what your allies are for. Just let some of your men scout out the enemy encampment before an engagement and then rain down fire and brimstone at the break of dawn from a comfortable 24 km away. The remaining foes can then be cleared up by the knights and peasants.
As for logistics, just hook horses or mules to your artillery and \*boom\*, you've got towed arty, which can set up, engage an enemy force, and retreat unseen.
For extra effect, bring out the chemical weapons. From phosgene and mustard gas up to sarin and the like you have a wide range of agents that could wipe an entire army within a few barrages.
[Answer]
To me, those expected enemies look to be less tough as African big game, with only the boar being really hard to kill.
Thus, since 7.62 NATO is almost as good as .30-06, which is a good general purpose round for African big game, I'd send the soldiers in with a modern variant of the **AR-10** rifle with **bayonets**, and **lots of ammunition**.
In addition to that:
* first aid kits (band aids, tourniquets, tape, gauze, sulfa powder -- antibiotics need to be refrigerated or injected, and that's suboptimal -- and good old aspirin.
* MREs, because the fantasy food won't be digestible at first
* **Water purification tablets**.
* 80mm mortars plus ammo, including WP
* entrenching tools
* **toilet paper!!!**
* Claymore mines
* Normal marching gear like ponchos and socks, socks, socks and **even more socks**.
* Radios
* Batteries
* Solar battery chargers
If there's any room left, send in some FN MAG (since they also use 7.62 NATO) light machine guns.
Bottom line: keep it simple, and think *Light Infantry*.
[Answer]
This is the combinaiton i would see:
* Communication (radio, tactical com)
* Reconnaissance Drones with IR cameras
* Portable Radars
* IR Cameras/detectors
* Night vision goggles
* Navigation (a little tricky but obviously not standard GPS but some kind of VOR)
* Light machine pistols for near range defense
* Designated marksmen rifles for distant killing without carrying a big amount of ammunition
* landmines to lock the enemy in forest areas
* Also tools (Chainsaws for wood processing)
* Electric lights, high voltage fence, portable generators to set up base defenses
* Mini guns for the base defense
* Bicycles/Mountain bikes
* Potentially light motor bikes
* Poison/germs for the water supply of the enemy
* Phosphor grenades for burning their supplies
* Water filtration units
* Modern Nails, Screws, wires
* Explosives for forming artificial caves for bases
* Concrete+steel doors for securing these bases
* A loot of dry, concentrated food
* Experts in communication in order to subvert the enemies morale
Strategy: Take it slowly. Set up base by base, install a defense network between the bases. Focus on locating and the starving/poisoning the enemy. Put bases to clean water supplies. Set up Dams using the tools to flood areas where the enemy might still live and take water from their villages. Focus on continually weakening the enemy. Dont try to conquer, but make sure that the cost in life of the enemy is much higher than yours
[Answer]
your question is tricky because of the requirement in term of resupply, weight capacity and manpower limitations.
Logistics limitation will have a dire impact on modern way of warfare, days of resupply is "ok" but week aways is a really hard requirement.
Today military is heavily depended on daily logistics, unit is by default equip for a day or two of heavy fighting (accounting for soldiers and unit supply).
a soldier carries roughly 200-300 ammunition, a mortar team 10-20 obus often every man on a unit take one or two mortars obus for the mortar team.
you could inspire your troops from paratroopers because they are designed to operate behind enemy line with limited supply.
The excellent answer of user535733 will be fully effective in a situation where supply is not a limiting factor.
I don't know the size of the enemy troops but there will be a point where there is no ammunition left.
Your tasks force must use their stocks very efficiently.
Go for either shock approach were you panic your opponent with overwhelming firepower.
Go for long and prolonged warfare were they use they superiority in firepower to support their ally only when required in order to gain time for more troops supply to come. also using drones and special forces to destroy strategic asset could help.
Another idea is instead of focusing on defence earth troops could assemble as a striking force:
* for a counter-attack at the right timing
* For a raid in enemy capital or other highly valuable assets.
* Or try to disorganize enemy force hitting behind the front line in a guerrilla warfare style: communication lines, political, religious, storage etc... forcing the enemy to divert forces and/or causing political troubles..
With modern technology such behind the line approach is easier reconnaissance is easier (modern optic can see up to several km), a flying drone can also provide accurate Intel km away. and so target identification and enemy force evasion is far easier.
I am not sure you can win with equipment alone, you have to adapt to the logistic constraint and pick the right tactical approach to accomplish your strategic goals. The material you are taking will depends on the tactical approach you choose.
I really enjoyed your question so I ended up putting an exemple. In this scenarii mission would be considered successful if it manages to gain several months of time by rooting the main enemy army and weakening his political power. Critical success will be that your victory leads to civil strife in your enemy territory or isolating in the international scene.
# Example:
## starting point:
* Communication to earth is rare up to several weeks.
* Our ally is waging war against foes greatly superior in number.
* To earth understanding, our ally is about to be overwhelmed.
* We accept to send in urgency a task force of 300 men to help our ally.
## Strategic goals:
* Allowing the survival of our ally.
* Protecting much as possible ally valuable assets and population.
* destroy the will to fight of the enemy.
* Prepare an operational camp for the additional force earth may send (maybe our ally will be our next conquest, I heard this planet is rich on oil and gold...)
due to the limited amount of time, no specific material can be made, furthermore, because people there are far stronger than us no close combat is suitable. Earth strategic command then decides to send a tasks force (Alpha) able to adapt and implement the required tactics depending on the situations. Operation code Name Jeanne.
## tactical axes:
* Establish an earth commandment on the ground.:
+ Organize and coordinate earth force
+ Centralize Intelligence
+ share and planning with our ally
* Intelligence and communication
* transfers low-level technology to our ally:
+ greek fire
+ early black powder
+ Hwacha
* defence of our ally:
+ counter enemy incursion
+ protect valuable city
+ support of our ally in battle.
* breaking enemy will:
+ use of guerilla warfare
+ killing of commander
+ the killing of the political decider
+ sabotage of communication line
+ destruction of food and water contamination.
+ biological warfare?
# Men, organisation and material:
## HQ (~30 men)
* The commanding officer (M.strogoff) and an officer in second.
* 5 staff officer
* a radio unit (several radios, and a large radio antenna)
* specialists
### Directly attach to HQ (30 men)
* Light drone intelligence.
* diplomatic mission.
* scientific misison.
### An Elite infantry force (160 men):
* 2 company of elite infantery (example (2éme Regiment Etranger de Parachutiste, 101 aéroporté, 1er RPIMA)) with standard equipment.
### Commandos strike force (40 men):
* Elite infantry unit able to operate well behind the enemy line for a prolonged period of time. (Navy seals, Commandos Marine, Groupement Commandos Parachustiste)
### Elite reconnaissance unit (20 men):
* Reconnaissance specialist operating in small teams able to operate far behind the enemy line. (Nageur de combat, 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment)
## Equipment:
* Due to the lack of oil and motorisation, no heavy material can be used.
* Add additional support in explosives (c4).
* If enough places replace machine gun of the elite infantry force by heavy 50. machine guns and ammunition. (everything that dares approach in close order even giant would be cut in half literally)
* If enough place can be made use of (1-2) artillery piece design for mountains warfare (they are 'light' and can be taken to pieces to be moved by hand) (Combining the long-range of modern artillery and the intelligence gathered could allow cherry-picking of important and opportunity target)
* A light Radio tower. (I am not a radio expert but you may need hardware to broadcast and receive far away?)
* light flying drone.
* Diesel Electricity generator (if they're old enough you can use vegetal oil instead of diesel, for radio and drone)
* as much as you can of additional supply.
* Minimum food (we relly on our ally for that)
Once linking up with our ally tasks force Alpha will Establish a command post which (which may be moved if needed).
In order to assess the situation, the diplomatic mission will try to gather as much intel they can whereas drone start to fly and specialist draw a situation map from those data. There is no highly precise definition map neither GPS so they have a lot of works.
The scientific mission collects data but also transfer technology so our ally can at short terms have some early black powder and greek fire. In at least his major city. At long term, we want to give them modern metallurgy (and firearms?) which will give them a very valuable advantages in battle.
The Elite infantry stays near the command post. It is employed in a reserve/support fashion to avoid our ally army to be decimated. (Due to limitation they won't be able to fight more than a couple of days so each of their intervention must be needed to accomplish strategic goals).
Light artillery only opens fire to an identified target and only on HQ green light. They do not want to waste ammo to kill enemy forces they want to pick the nice tent with gold in the enemy camp. Or the mountains near the enemy columns to start an avalanche. Or the bridge the enemy is crossing. They only engage enemy force if Earth troops need fire support to escape encirclement.
After some days situation may become clearer, then Elite reconnaissance could be dispatch to gather intel and sabotage enemy communication line (bridge again), a mine that stops a convoy from a time (people then do not know explosive so seeing a man exploding out of nowhere may stock a columns for a time or even forcing them back). If you don't want to respect convention (they do not have sign any ?) contaminate water well and river with poison. But also dedicate a couple of men to try to identify and to kill (sniper artillery) the local political leader (or all if they are several).
The Elite Commandos are used for daring raids beyond the enemy line on depots or logistics column or lightly guard camps. Because of the strength difference, this unit is likely to suffer heavy causality. But it is important the enemy never rest and that his food depot burns.
Avoid losses at all costs, use your superior Intell and technology to avoid to fight and deprive the enemy of his own logistics, force him to have much of his force protecting his logistics, destroy his will by killing the leader and the use of modern explosive. be reckless and pitiless as humans are.
A large army without food or water is a grave in becoming.
And pray that the Wizzard our heard about is just a chimaera. and that earth doesn't forget you.
[Answer]
# Warfare is hell.
## Modern Engineering
The first step would be to set up a defensive perimeter. It would take an engineer company (for example the [397th Engineer Battalion](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/397eng.htm)) with some horse-drawn carts for daily supplies (we requisition that from the ally) and tools (shovels, axes, chainsaws, fuel), several carts for gravel (requisitioned locally), steel rebar (import, takes some of our space), wood planks (requisitioned locally), rocks (requisitioned locally) and hard work as fuel supply and weight limits in the supply route are low. But it will work.
The Engineering company of 50 is grouped in 5 groups. Everybody is armed with automatic rifles ([M16](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle), [AR18](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmaLite_AR-18), [G36](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_and_Koch_G36)) and has about 2 boxes of ammo (typical packing: 800-1000 per can) in their deployment kit. One in 10 has an 40mm grenade launcher like the [M203](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M203_grenade_launcher), one gets a [DMR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_marksman_rifle). Everybody gets a combat knife. Spade, pickaxe, cutters and machete complete the armory.
### Tasks
Within just some week or two they will errect a modern version of the Maginot line over a sizeable stretch. To this, they also build gravel access roads.
The Engineer company subsequently moves on to extend the line to defend the docking/landing area stockpiles supplies. Each trip a ship comes in, it also should drop of parts for construction as well as fuel barrels. Diesel for construction equipment, gas for the chainsaws and Kerosene for later use. It doesn't even have to be much: each shipment just brings in a pair of barrels instead of 2 men, so it will stockpile over time.
## 2nd Wave: Mountaineers
Meanwhile an infantry batallion or two (ca 50-100 men) move into the fortified positions and mans the fortifications. It might be better to send units like Mountaineers, that are better trained and have heavier equipment. I think the [Bataillon médian de chasseurs ardennais](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasseurs_Ardennais) might be an excellent choice to use a template for such a unit, but that's just because I love the fact 40 of them held up Rommel and his 7th Panzer Division for **18 days** until they ran out of ammunition.
Armed with "light" 60 mm mortars, squad machine guns, possibly a heavy machine gun, some DMRs and everyone else with automatic rifles, they can hold this position as long as ammunition is there, which could be pretty much indefinitly ([as elaborated here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/167240/25822)) as supply caravans roll in and increase the stockpile over time. No sane military would send a crew of soldiers into an area where they can't supply them. Or at least none that learned from WW2. Since roman times, human warfare always was around logistics constraints and WW1 and WW2 did teach a lot about how to keep logistics flowing in the worst situations.
Besides the 60 mm mortars, they also might bring light field artillery, which can be drawn by horses. [7.5 cm Pak 40](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.5_cm_Pak_40) fits this bill and weight about a ton and a half. If 60 mm artillery isn't enough, one might go for 100 or 120 mm mortars, on the cost of ammunition capacity, but it would turn any 12th century fortification into a shattered field. If the PAK 40 is too heavy, short-barrel variants might be a better fit - and some of these might even be disassembled for transport. For example the [75 mm light infantry gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.5_cm_leichtes_Infanteriegesch%C3%BCtz_18) the germans used in WW2 had variants that could be turned into packages and weighed only about 375-400 kg for 3500-5100 meters range.
For mowing down infantry, quad-mounted machineguns like the [M45 Quadmount](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M45_Quadmount) or the infamous [Flakvierling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_cm_Flak_30/38/Flakvierling#2,0cm_Flakvierling_38) could be drawn by horse and haul their complement of ammo - and only weigh 1 or 1.5 tons each, making them equivalent in deck space to a 75 mm field artillery.
## Guerillios
As an alternate to regulars, sending in irregular troups might be an option. Irregular units means troops that are not national military. [Guerillia Warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare) is the modus operandi of such irregulars - and [La Resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resistance) was a particular large and well organized group of Guerillia during some parts of WW2 (mainly during the German occupation and before D-Day).
Think Ernesto Che Guevarra. In 1956 he had ca. 20 men left of the original 82 after the landing in Cuba from the Yacht Granma. They connected with local guerillia networks to arm up, resupply and reinforce. Their most vital supply item was ammunition - food they sourced from the locals for help. They turned locals into Guerillios (which loosely traslates into 'fighter' or 'warrior'). At the time of the Battle of Yaguajay two years aftet the Granma landing, Che and Castro had more than 450-500 men and a tank.
Armed with every gun they can get their fingers on, there is no standard equipment in the Guerillia troops. They fight with what they can get their hands on, but they strive to standardize on one type of ammunition if possible. In the case of the IRA it was during the riots a mix of AR-16, M16 and AR-18s, relatively standarized. They also pack lightly: drawn out fights are a bane. Instead Ambush, Assasination and blowing up supply convoys are often preferable to 'honorable' battlefield fighting. They blend in with the surroundings, try to wear the clothes of the people that live there and work with the sympathies. Mao Zedong did summarize Guerillia Warfare like this:
>
> [The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.](https://www.bartleby.com/73/1933.html)
>
>
>
## Logistics warfare
To accomodate our need for logistic backup, Fantasy-World will have to run a massive expansion on shipbuilding, aided by modern engineers from our side that helps in streamlining the making of the hulls as quickly as possible. Gone is the wooden keel and replaced with a steel frame, to which the planks are riveted. Silicone for sealing instead of horse-hair and tar. Each ship that returns could bring another frame that was preconstructed without taking deck space from on our side (put it over the ship like a tent) so the longships could multiply like flies.
Engineering crews could probably easily refit the longships with small fuel driven motors and reinforce the hulls to allow heavier transport to get them to an average speed of 6 knots and independance of wind and thus massively streamlining the delivery times, though not necessarily cut them down.
Reinforced hulls would also allow the transportation of Jeeps and light trucks and larger field artillery in addition to motorcycles and light infantry guns, which were possible before. No tanks, but still, Motorisation makes the warfare much more mobile!
Our modern logistics meanwhile would work as much as they can on speeding up the loading of the longships on our side. For example we could skip the trip from wherever the portal is to our shores. No matter where the portal is, tender vessels can wait in the area and stock the longboatd out there on the open sea.
Our reinforced boats also are probably might be just big enough to transport heavier engineering equipment - even if it has to be taken apart. Think Jeeps with a plow or an excavator on the back. Once the first excavator is on the other side, we can extend the trenches much faster. The bulldozer and gets assigned to building supply roads and clearing an airstrip together with the engineers. Note that we might want to shift to shipping more fuel and ammo at that point, entire shiploads of these supplies in addition to reinforcements.
Once we established our frontline - which pretty much can be held forever, time is no longer of an essence. Supplies will accumulate in the landing zone as transport volume (hopefully) increases. It doesn't matter that ships take weeks, if you just have enough ships.
## Taken to the Air.
The Kerosene is for simple biplanes, which are light and easy to be taken apart for transport, or even better, folding-wing planes. Most don't actually need a landing strip, they could land on any field that is flat and large enough, though an airstrip is clearly preferable. For a squad of 3 planes, we'd need 6 pilots, about 4 ground crew and an engineering crew of about 5. Their tools and equipment including the planes (with detatched wings) can be transported via carts, and most turboprop planes are extremely reliable, making the need for replacement parts somewhat small.
They serve as spotting and [CAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_air_support#World_War_I) planes. They push the perimeter from about 3 kilometers to a couple hundred kilometers kilometers, which in combination with radio technology, would allow much more targeted defense or offense along the perimeter as well as stratetgically destroying supply trains. They might need to be used sparingly due to fuel constraints, but their intimidation factor and attack tange could turn the tide in some battles.
## Onto the attack
While our troops don't get to become mechanized troops in APCs, the increase of transport volume for fuel and the presence of light trucks - think [Opel Blitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Blitz) - and towed light artillery and light anti tank guns has turned our battalions into motorized troops, which are much faster in deployment. Once enough fuel has accumulated, the battalions roll out in a Blitz with CAS-support, then the gained lands are fortified. This is repeated till the evil army surrenders or is turned into a stinking pile.
If the Blitz isn't showing enough results, our military also might ship over some light missile artillery to aid in the attack. [Katyusha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyusha_rocket_launcher) for example would stretch the attack range of our assault force to 5500 meters, devastating an army that can't even *see* our advancing troops and turning a medieval city of the opposing forces into a field of rubble.
# Total Annihilation
## The City-Killer Batallion
Or, we could just send a single shipment. A *single* shipment of 10 M29 recoilless rifles, 30 men with Armalites, a box of ammo per man. And 10 [Mk-54 Davy Crockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)). Once in Fantasy world they requisition some horsecarts, stuff them with materials and food and embark into the enemy lands. It's a small caravan, they will use side roads if possible and try to evade any enemy contact, killing whatever they encounter. Tehy march until they get close enough to the first enemy administration center or military gatehring zone. There 3 disembark with one recoilless rifle, a Davy Crocket and the rest circumnavigates the place, marching on to the next target, possibly leaving the carts behind as they distribute and go into their respective positions. Then... A single Radio call and....
BOOM. The first target is turned into nuclear wasteland. Only then we send our demand: Total surrender within 24 hours, or the next place will be annihilated - we don't tell them which. No answer? Laughing? BOOM! Still no surrender? BOOM! We can go on... they don't know how many we sent. They only see that not surrendering immediately results in cities turning blazing ashes.
## Total Infiltration
We can take this even to the next level: Not 3 men per nuclear explosion, 1. We modify Davy Crockets to detonate on a trigger signal instead of on impact. Then, we gold-plate and decorate the housings and send them as Tribute to the enemy administraors we can reach with one of our own spies to 'gift' it to the governers in exchange for a ceasefire or release of captured troops. Once they reach the target, we simply state the conditions for their surrender, and if they decline, we blow up the whole town.
Then we send a new ultimatum to the next we can reach, together with another agent armed with a bomb. But our terms are different now: **Total, unconditional surrender or total annihilation**.
[Answer]
**Mostly assault rifles.**
Might want to skip the carbine versions but otherwise I see nothing there that requires anything more. An assault rifle should have enough penetration to penetrate natural or pseudo-medieval armor.
As for doing enough damage, you just keep shooting until it drops. Assault rifles have good sustained rates of **accurate** fire compared to previous infantry weapons so you can just keep pulling the trigger. They even come with helpful burst mode that is still decently accurate at close range.
Main benefit here (and in general) is that you only need to carry one kind of ammunition and can easily get more damage output just by shooting more. You are in control and can always get the damage you need as long as you retain some control of the situation. No other weapon can match this flexibility and economy of force.
Sure an AMR can stop the big guy in one shot but for anything else there is overkill. A grenade kills more people with one shot but is overkill if there is only one enemy. With bunch of soldiers with assault rifles, they just shoot until the enemy stops. There is no overkill. No waste of resources. No unnecessary collateral damage.
Assault rifles are also relatively cheap since both the weapon and the ammunition are mass produced in large quantities. They are also easy to use apart from very close range where length might be an issue and soldiers are already trained to use them. The relatively low recoil even makes them convenient to use.
**Other weapons**
A light machine gun uses same ammunition but can sustain higher rate of fire and has better accuracy from range. Since it is more or less standard equipment and does not require another ammunition type you might want to carry one for shooting bigger enemies from range for extra safety.
A designated marksman with his rifle is also pretty standard. They generally have fairly good ammunition economy so should be fine. Marksmen and snipers are also extremely efficient against enemies unfamiliar with the concept or simply untrained in proper tactics to use. So in your scenario one or two would literally make a killing.
It requires another ammunition type but an automatic pistol or compact SMG for close range combat might be worth the weight. You usually would not need them but on the occasions you do, you'd be happy for carrying the useless weapon and the useless ammunition for it. Since you'd use them rarely, they should not end up using much of ammunition.
The reason for rarely using them is that with firearms being your primary edge you'd do absolutely everything you can to avoid close range combat. Swords and axes are scary up close and personal. Which is why you'd be happy to carry a pistol or SMG if you mess up.
Considering tough enemies with armor, I'd suggest [FN 5.7×28mm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_5.7%C3%9728mm) based weapons. It is a newer cartridge designed to address issues with penetrating body armor so it should do. Weapons using it are also fairly compact and modern. (Less extra weight.)
Many armies routinely carry recoilless rifles (or missiles) in case they run into vehicles. They do not really make sense for your criteria due to limited ammunition but armies that carry such would probably still do so. It is a new world, who knows what you run into. Anyone complains about the weight just say something vague about rumours of a dragon. And they are light weight to carry anyway.
In short, pretty much the same as infantry usually carries. The sad reality is that modern infantry weapons evolved in battlefields that make any fantasy world not derived from the work of H. P. Lovecraft look like a vacation resort. There is lots of thought behind those weapon choices. And as far as military is concerned the weapon soldiers know how to use and are already carrying is the best weapon anyway.
**Other stuff**
Tactical radios for communication. Cameras and recording devices. Binoculars and maybe night vision gear. Portable computer for reference. A smart phone can do many of these at some level and you might want to let soldiers carry some. A solar panel for energy and other survival equipment. Bicycles should work and some armies have used them for tactical movement. This is all still the category of normal stuff. Armies are designed to survive environment that tries to kill them. That the enemy uses swords and spears instead of artillery and wyverns instead of helicopters doesn't really make anything they do invalid.
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[Question]
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Let's say almost everyone is now jobless but almost all goods and services are made by machines including nanobot swarms and 3D printing. Even the government and the justice system in this futuristic world is run by Artificial Intelligence. Why would the concept of money/currency/ means of exchange still need to exist if the population cannot have any job, and Unconditional Basic Income is just a temporary solution?
OBS: I have been reading about post scarcity and resource based economies and from what I understood money would not need to exist by then because technological developments would provide abundance.
[Answer]
You would need some sort of mechanism to stem greed. People taking more than their share.
In the situation you are talking about, all energy would likely come from the sun; or indirectly from the sun via wind power; or perhaps from lunar gravitational disparities via tidal power generators.
In any case, the amount of energy is finite, the work that the robots can do is finite, and you need some way to regulate how it is "spent" so that everybody gets their fair share.
One way of doing that, in an entirely fair way, is to issue every person periodic "coupons" for their fair share of energy, and then let them "spend" those in whatever way they wish. Including donating any of their spare energy budget to others, or saving them up to build a house, or take a ski trip, or gamble with them to try and grow them, etc.
The energy coupons would then be the equivalent of money.
Without them, the demand for services might easily outstrip the capacity of the robots to provide, and indeed outstrip the capacity of the energy producing system to provide.
Nothing is infinite, but the closest we have is human "want". I want a bigger house. I want a newer car. I want a bigger yard to play in. I want to eat in the best restaurants in the world. I want to travel and stay in luxury hotels.
We simply cannot accommodate *everything* that *everybody* wants, there must be some system of rationing it fairly -- and that would be the role of Money, even if we used it to split up the total energy supply with perfect equality.
[Answer]
Here's a fairly simple illustrative example of why using numbers to express a uniform measure of *value* (money) is just so amazingly useful that we're not going to give it up....
Imagine you're going to the center of a large city. You have three ways to get there. You can drive your car and park at a parking meter (\$1 for fuel, plus \$3 for the meter). You can buy a ticket and ride the bus (\$2). Or you can puff your way there on your bicycle (Free). Which one do you choose?
* It's a classic trick question from Freshman microeconomics: For most folks, those costs are insignificant. If the cost seems insignificant, then most folks will use a different criteria (like convenience or enjoyment) instead of cost. People make lots of convenience-instead-of-cost decisions every day already. The money is still there, but it's so small that people don't pay much attention to it.
Let's say there's a popular concert going on, so the city has raised the parking meter rates from \$3 to \$300 (just for today) in that neighborhood order to prevent gridlock. The bus and bike costs are unchanged.
* The cost of one method is now significant, so most folks are likely to *substitute* a different mode of travel. Some folks will be willing to pay that sky-high meter rate for close parking.
The upshot is that **Money provides a way to people to evaluate and prioritize** their purchase options. Even small purchases. And recall the parking meter rate change: **Money provides a way to balance supply and demand**. And, of course, money also provides a way to *save* or *lend* value.
So the answer to the question is 'Yes, money will still be needed.'
Note that "*everyone is now jobless*" and "*almost all goods and services are made by machines*" are not relevant to the question of whether money would still be needed. Those inputs would determine incomes and prices...which would still need to be denominated in money to be understandable.
A post-scarcity economy could be described as *prices* for most of those machine-provided common goods and services (rent, food, clothing, education, health care, etc.) are simply so low that they are not worth fretting much about (like a normal parking meter). Even at the income level of all those jobless folks...who might just be "employed" part-time after all. Humans are social -- we generally like interacting with other real, live humans. *Somebody* needs to give tours at Chateau Picard winery and be waiters at Sisko's Creole Kitchen restaurant. They just don't need to do it all day everyday to make the rent anymore.
[Answer]
**Many things in today’s world are not expensive because they are hard to manufacture.**
Take houses: Here in Austria a significant part of the cost in buying a house is the price of land. A house in the center of Vienna doesn’t cost millions of Euros because of the price of timber and bricks. It costs that much because other people would like to live there too.
Take movie actors: Famous movie actors don’t make millions because their acting is *that* good.
Take stock prices: WhatsApp sold for 19 billion US dollars. Much much more than programming the app and setting up a few servers would cost.
Take art: With a good printer you can make an almost perfect replica of the Mona Lisa. And yet the original is still worth millions and people come to see the original.
**Humans always find a way to want more and spend more.**
The majority of people here in Austria basically live in a post-scarcity world. They can afford more food than they could ever eat. They occupy homes with more rooms than people living in them. They have a basically limitless supply of clean water. And yet they still want *more*. I know people who’d only have to work 5h/week to afford all of the above. Yet they still insist on working >40h weeks because they think they *need* an even bigger home, A/C, a second or third car and so on.
Nothing in the Universe is infinite, at some point we’d even run out of stars if we sold them.
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Because, unless there are no human people left there *are* going to be goods and/or services that fall outside the realms of machine preparation and delivery and people are going to have to find an equitable way to recompense each other for these. Money already exists so it is likely to endure as that means of recompense. What kind of goods and services am I thinking about?
* Food prepared by human hands with that X factor that we never managed to imbue into a cooking bot, possibly because we never tried/actively prevented the transfer.
* Personal service, professions like butler exist not because a butler does anything that their employer can't get done by someone temporarily brought in, or in fact by a machine, but because there is a certain cachet to hiring a person to perform those tasks.
* "Companionship", while it may become a rather niche market their will always be people who, due to personal preference or disposition don't want a relationship and yet are willing to pay for certain of the perks thereof.
* Couriers, not to deliver online shopping to your door but those who are trusted to specialise in transferring sensitive information between parties will still have a place.
* Process servers, court clerks, judges, and even lawyers may still have a niche because people demand it, that will depend on public opinion more than the other items on the list.
* Which brings us to nostalgists, and the grey market, there are goods that, while not illegal, are not readily available. Some of these are not longer in production, antiques and the like. Others are simply items with a market so niche that they are not commercially manufactured or sold, the realm of made-to-order spare parts etc... created by artisans.
[Answer]
It would not need to exist, the same way it does not need to exist now.
The original purpose of money is to give food to people who are not involved in food production, but instead perform some specialist function.
Initially, that was soldiers -- soldiers paid farmers with special coins, and later came back to collect a certain amount of these coins as taxes, so essentially that was just a protection racket.
Later, administrators were added as specialists who'd take over most of the work of collecting taxes, and much later, more complex state-building built on top of this.
The actual problem it solves isn't local exchange (that worked fine before), but transfer of value over large distances and between people who have no trust relationship, which is something early state-building projects needed.
Money ceases being useful as soon as you arrange supply chains around trust relationships, because money is a substitute for trust and cooperation.
Small societies today do this, and operate fine without money (which would be a significant administrative overhead), and a future society that no longer needs to organize supply chains over trust boundaries would probably reevaluate whether the effort is worth it.
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My answer is very similar to [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/223787/why-would-money-or-any-other-means-of-exchange-need-to-exist-if-ai-robots-auto/223795#223795), but I have a different spin on it.
Using money to purchase goods creates a distributed system of prioritization.
Not everything can be "infinite", e.g. time, space and matter are finite. Even if you can transform *matter* by fusion or something (like from steel to gold), there is a finite amount of matter. *Space* is a good example too, where do you put all these factories? The further you put them from people, the more they have to wait for the goods to be transported. Which goods should be made closer to the people, so it takes less *time* for the people to receive them?
Demand should prioritize what the finite resources are used for and money "measures" demand. If you are willing to pay more for something then there is a greater demand, hence it's more important.
Money answers questions like "What should we make from our finite amount of steel?". (Even if the process of making is automated)
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Robots know what to make from blueprints but someone must provide them with blueprints. Basic one can be free, but with copyright protection you can buy more exquisite designs or even completely custom ones designed not by a machine, but by a human.
Basically everyone gets UBI which is enough to survive (eat healthy, sleep, consume some culture), but to get more money they need to create something. There is no menial labor, some people focus on physical strength (Olympics), some people on culture (theater, movies, writing, computer games), some people are handcrafting unique non-replicable items. There are ZOO's or natural reservations, all with limited capacity for people.
You can survive without doing anything, but you can also focus on what you want to do to thrive in a new world. And money still plays big role in it.
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Why wouldn't there be? The robots/nanobots might be ubiquitous, but they're still *finite*. Any given one can only be doing one thing at a time. Making things still requires materials. Making things work still requires energy. Neither are in unlimited supply, and nothing about AI or automation implies that they *will* be. In fact, in many ways, you can expect them to be scarcer than ever before, as the number of ways to utilize them explodes — you can *theoretically* make anything, but can you *afford* to? You will never have "post-scarcity" at anything short of a Dyson Sphere technology level, and probably not even then. As you increase the scope of things that people can do, they will always manage to invent luxuries that are out of reach of the majority, even as the average standard of living improves to a level that would have been considered luxury a few generations earlier.
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Humans are competitive. Most of us want to be better than our neighbour.
Not everybody are like that, of course, but as long as at least two people both want to be better than the other, the race will be on.
We need some way to see and to show that we are the best.
Money can be either a direct way to show that, or a way to get whatever status symbol is in fashion.
We have no way of knowing if that competitiveness is an necessary part of being human, or if we will grow out of it. A third option is that we stay competitive, but direct it towards areas which doesn't cost scarce resources., e.g. being the best at quiz shows.
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Money isn't a "means of exchange" in the sense that you mean. And besides, are you talking about cash itself, which has largely ceased to exist in the year 2022? For that matter, most paper instruments have nearly become extinct. When's the last time someone wrote a check in front of you in line for the cashier?
So I'm guessing you probably mean the electronic money that just exists as a balance in your bank account. Why does *that* need to exist?
In our world it needs to exist because most goods (and even services) are scarce. There is only so much of it to go around, but many want those things. Money just happens to be the invention that keeps us from having to do 19 barters before we can get ahold of the good/service that we want for ourselves. Economists call it "fungible" meaning that it is equally exchangeable for anything at all, unlike a barrel of salted fish, or 3 tons of mid-grade iron ore. People also want those things too, but only some people, because anyone else would have trouble exchanging those for things they do want.
In a post-scarcity society like the one you hint at, why would money be needed? There is more than enough for everyone to have everything that they want. Or so you suspect. But what if that isn't the case?
What if what we want changes every time the amount of things change? What if you only want one/two/three cars when you have to ride the bus, but as soon as everyone has three cars (and the garage to store those in), you find you want seven, or ten? You'd have trouble believing that to be the case now, it seems excessive. But you'd be mistaken if you didn't believe it.
Even in realms where scarcity should be conquered absolutely, humans have a burning desire to recreate it artificially. Let me tell you about this virtual place called a "tracker". It allows people to download content of nearly any type without the restrictions imposed by copyright holders. Movies, television, books, heck, even crochet patterns. You name it, you can find it. Furthermore, these trackers use a technology called bittorrent. Bitorrent is rather strange in that unlike other networking software, the more people who use it, the *faster* it goes. So, you'd think that these trackers would want as many members as possible, wouldn't you? If there are 1000 members instead of 50 members, downloads go faster. And not just speed, there are other advantages besides (each member acts like a sort of backup, so more members means a more robust system).
So, these people who have conquered scarcity today in a way that the rest of the world only dreams of, they are out there trying their best to sign everyone up aren't they? Giving away memberships, evangelizing (at least to those people who have no moral qualms about copyright infringement)?
Hell no. Their human instincts take over, and they restrict membership. They cap it at some maximum number, and create all sorts of hoops to jump through even if they haven't reached the maximum. They create rules that are designed purely to kick people out, so that their numbers are low.
Because, how can you be cool if everyone gets to be there?
At least in regards to human psychology, scarcity was always the point. You (or I, or anyone, I'm not picking on you, dear reader) might be willing to have less, if it means someone else has *even less than that*.
So nanobots and automation and robotic factories can't ever change that. And if somehow we collectively heal whatever is wrong with us that makes us like this, we still have no idea how much our material desires will grow such that even "plenty" turns out to be "not enough". Should nanobots ever be invented, bread will be copyrighted the next day in an overnight session of Congress.
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## Because you dont have that many Nano-forges and a day only lasts 24hrs
As in Forever War series by Joe Haldeman, humanity has access to nano-forges, but making goods takes time and there are so many hours in a day.
You actually pay for the privilege to use one of them. If they can make pretty much anything why wouldn't they be booked full making army vehicles, or stuff for the government?
And if I remember correctly the more time an item demands from the nano-forges the more expensive it is. Doesnt matter if you want a diamond or a car, the one that takes more time is the more expensive one.
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### It Doesn’t Need to be Too Much Like Money
As economists have observed for decades: if charging money to provide goods and services is such a perfect system that solves all problems, why don’t corporations do it internally? Why don’t the different departments charge each other for their services, or outsource everything? Apparently, the free market has determined that firms running on a command economy are superior to firms that run on the free market!
But there are still several reasons you might want something like money.
### Allocating Resources
Various countries have experimented with using primitive “cybernetics” to make a command economy work. As Francis Spufford wrote in *Red Plenty*, one of the problems this ran into in the Soviet Union—beyond the fact that id didn’t have nearly enough computing power in the middle of the twentieth century for it to work—is that the equations kept saying that the optimal way to run the economy looked more like capitalism than they were willing to accept.
One of the most prominent examples was, the equations involved a vector, labeled “shadow prices,” because they functioned essentially the same way as prices under capitalism.
In general, there’s going to be some limiting factor on how much you can produce of each good. If you’re a doctrinaire Marxist, like the ones in the Soviet Union and a few I’ve met after it fell, you might feel compelled to insist that this must be labor. Since there’s no reason to be a doctrinaire Marxist, though, it can be lots of things: energy, the ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases without destroying the climate, the number of atoms in the solar system.
In effect, how much of these limiting factors you are willing to allocate to each given purpose is a kind of price. Trying to fit the cost of an electric car, a hybrid or a gas-guzzler into your carbon budget is a lot like putting a price on carbon and making the carbon budget part of the money budget.
### Preferences
Humans like to feel in control. Their revealed preference is to play a lottery that lets them pick their lucky numbers instead of one that just tells them if they won, for example, even though it makes no difference to the odds. So, while the AIs probably shouldn’t take this too far and hand out hydrogen bombs to anyone who wants them, there are definitely lots of examples where everybody would be happier picking out the things they want than having the algorithm always choose for them. Even if the algorithm knows them better than they know themselves, they’d get some psychic value just out of having the power to choose.
If everybody’s happiness is considered equal in value, this would work a lot like ration cards: everybody starts out entitled to a certain amount of the world’s energy, a certain amount of its platinum, a certain amount of its food, and so on, and can choose how to spend their share. But then some people would want to use more energy and no meat, so you’d want to allow them to trade. And then, the ratio of the trade value of any two goods would be the same, as demonimated in any other good, or else there would be arbitrage that made the discrepancy vanish. So, as soon as you allow trading, you’ve brought back money. Every MMORPG ever made has found this out, as players have decided on some in-game commodity, often one that’s harder to mine than in-game “gold” or “credits,” as its de facto currency. This system would be no different: whatever’s most convenient as the medium of exchange or the store of value will function exactly like money, and there will be markets where you can trade some of your unneeded food allocation for someone else's excess electricity.
### Incentives
People aren’t motivated only by money, but probably no system can depend entirely on moral appeals for people to work harder, either. You might want to encourage them to install more solar panels and trade the excess energy by offering to trade something for it, and it would be something they can trade for whatever they want, so you’ve created money.
Eventually, the AIs might get so much better at humans at everything that it’s no longer important whether humans do anything productive or not. (Indeed, there’s really nothing humans are needed to do any more.) In that case, though, the AIs would still need to allocate and trade resources between themselves. And this would involve creating something a lot like money.
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## Things that cannot be accomplished by brute application of resources.
There's been some lack of clarity about what Post Scarcity implies.
Post Scarcity is not merely a "All needs are provided for" scenario.
It's not Universal Basic Income, or the abolishment of money per-say.
Post Scarcity means exactly what it says on the tin.
**No more scarcity of resources.**
If I want my house gold-plated, there's enough gold and robot-workers to get the job done for me and anyone else who feels tacky enough to do it.
If I want a yacht, a robot-factory can churn out a boat to my specifications in a day or so and even crew it for me and it'll impact nobody.
If there's not enough robots to get my dream sports-stadium built, the robots can make more robots.
There are probably reasonable limits.
I can't expect the robots to move moons for me, but they might be able to move mountains.
The premise of a Post-Scarcity society is that the per-person resource/energy budget of society has exceeded pretty much any possible want or need any of its citizens might have.
Anyone talking about "ration-cards" or "Government Stipends" has not understood the premise.
Such things are not needed because energy is "too cheap to meter" and raw materials and manual-labor are similarly so cheap as to be trivial.
**However**
There are problems that cannot be solved by application of more resources or manpower.
For example, if I want The Mona Lisa in my bedroom, there's only the one painting, and other people might want it as much as I do, (for example the Louvre might object.)
I can have *a* Mona Lisa. A perfect replicated copy down to the last atom, created by nano-factories from detailed tunneling-electron-microscope scans of the original.
But it's not the original. The original is still hanging in the Louvre and no matter how perfect the replica it's still not the real thing.
**Hence: Money.**
Money in a post-scarcity society is no longer required to get by. There may be people who are born, live and die without ever needing it.
Money would essentially be a novelty to most people because very few people want the sorts of products it would buy.
I would expect money to be heavily used for illegal or under-the-table things that the AI-controlled society doesn't allow, not dissimilar to Bitcoin in this respect.
Far more likely to develop is an intricate network of favors and promises owed between friends.
I would expect money's power as a lever to get people to do things to evaporate for the most part. People don't need money, so being offered large amounts of it really doesn't mean much if you don't have something you want to spend it on.
As Picard said. "Money is no longer the driving force in our lives"
People would necessarily do "work" only because it pleased them to do it.
I've had quite a few conversations with friends where we talked about what we'd do if we won the lottery, and one idea that comes up a lot is that we would probably find some sort of part-time job just to keep ourselves engaged and busy in our lives.
**Many people find meaning in the things they do.**
I might open a restaurant, or operate scarcity-age vineyard as a hobby. Not for money, just because it provides me satisfaction to do it.
I might operate the restaurant as a scarcity-era format, with money required. Or I might simply make the food and serve it up to guests. Enjoying the giving of hospitality to strangers and friends alike.
I certainly don't need to worry about the running costs or expenses!
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As far as I can tell, economics is, at its most fundamental, a way of allocating resources to encourage more/better resource production. The means of getting money should align well with doing what society most needs. I.e. you're developing a good incentive system.
You need to decide what "resource" people still produce.
Maybe the machines are decidedly uncreative and you want to incentivize art. Maybe there is still a lot of social value in athleticism, and you want to incentivize competitive sports. By a similar token, you might financially reward competitors and winners in creative writing, poetry, and math competitions to name a few. Likely, the things that interest people will be those that remind them people still can accomplish things in a world run by machines.
We were once on the "gold standard," which meant that every denomination of currency could be tied back to an amount of gold equivalent. You are on the "human potential" standard. Every dollar you earn represents how much you've reminded the world, or even just your local community, of what a human being can accomplish.
In all likelihood, this world would have a very large social safety net. Maybe a UBI, some sort of free housing for those who can't afford better, etcetera. The economy would no longer be there to fulfill basic needs. Rather, it would be a way to incentivize giving meaning to people's lives and reward those who do with prestige and luxuries.
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Such society has already existed (albeit not for everyone).
A class of people, getting served, dressed, and fed without having to work, not really having much to do, and ultimately ruled by a power above them that they cannot question.
That sounds a lot like aristocracy in the French Old Regime, up until the Revolution.
The amount of stuff they get depends on how much land they control (in your case, how many robots they own), which can change by treason, mariage, gambling, war, death, exchange, natural catastrophes, ruling from the being above them...
Very few people of that class do any actual work.
Money is still a way to quantify how much they own and is a mean to exchange those.
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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.
Your miners find some strange stones - they float to the ceiling of mines.
With those stones you can easily build an airship - just fill a sleek wooden hull with them and give the rowers some wing-paddles.
With a drag coefficient ~0.02, even under muscle power you can get some tens km/h, also you can use favorable wind.
Now you have one problem - there is **no way to regulate lifting power**. If you let the floating stone go it will go straight to space.
And the ship is constantly losing weight as rowers consume food and water. Also accidents happen - a paddle gets dropped, a rower goes overboard, some barrel gets broken and spills wine. Or you want to drop some flechettes on enemies' heads. And rowers can provide only so much thrust downwards...
You can just let some stones go - but they are **very** expensive. You can gather rainwater or dew from clouds - but that depends on weather.
Dropping ballast allows you to make the ship lighter. But you need antiballast - a way to make ship heavier in the middle of flight.
So what is an optimal way to increase the weight of, say, a 10 ton ship by at least 100 kg - I guess some reaction to bind oxygen or vapor that is accessible **without industrial technology**?
*Update.*
Compression of air is not a very optimal way to do it. Even with modern technology, a balloon weights several times more than air it contains. For preindustial one ratio would be order of magnitude worse.
Likewise, cool air - suppose we have a 10 ton 100 m3 airship with 300K on inside. If we cool it even to -70C then we would get about -30 kg, less than weight of adult. And making the ship bigger would increase drag and make it too slow under manual power.
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**Volume-based Adjustable Buoyancy**
The key here is to not use so many stones that your ships float up. Instead, use as many stones as is needed to make your ship effectively weightless. If 1kg of floating stone(determined by upside-down scale) makes 1kg of normal matter weightless(not falling, not rising)(just guessing, you've left little as far as hard numbers are concerned) then 2.5tons of a 5ton ship will need to consist entirely of floating stone
Doing so will make it possible for you to use an already tried-and-true method of altitude adjustment, namely a hot air balloon of some sort, whose own volume and lift will determine whether the whole of the ship goes up or down. As crew and cargo is loaded the weightless ship will naturally increase in weight and drop/sink, but with the ship's weight itself being accounted for by the floating stone matter you should be able to get away with relying on the balloon alone for lifting both crew and cargo, with the burners supplying the heated air and their fuel being the prime determiner of how far/long a ship can go without getting landlocked(unable to float) and may provide a nice niche for the economy to flourish in. They can also land and have the crew chop some wood for fuel instead of using coal if they're desperate.
**Alternatively**
You could still go with the weightless ship tactic and do a small amount of hand-waving to say that they've discovered a way to use wooden gears + wooden fanblades + manpower to produce a primitive propeller and engine of sorts whose constant additional lift in addition to the lift from the floating stone provides enough power to move/lift the ship along with its crew and cargo, with going down being as simple as telling the crank crew to slow down the cranking of their cranks(the cranks in this case having replaced the function of oars, with part of the crew being in charge of ship lift and the rest being in charge of ship thrust(if you want a sail-less option or the wind is against you))
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**Harvest extra ballast water from clouds.**
The Graf Zeppelin did this in real life during the 1930s. A set of gutters on the side of the vessel collected the water. The airship brushed against the edge of a cloud or light rain to harvest the water.
In real life, opportunities to do this were somewhat uncommon and irregular -- weather can be unpredictable. Trip planning never counted upon rainwater collection; it was a bonus that conserved expensive hydrogen. But perhaps conditions are slightly more favorable on your world.
(Oh, don't dive *into* the cloud or rain. The zeppelin officers, mostly veterans of WWI who had lived through hydrogen fires and airship crashes and faced down incendiary machine guns and the bitter North Sea, who had navigated into combat by guesswork upon cloudy nights and seen most of their comrades die...those adrenaline-addicted adventurers considered diving INTO a cloud or rain far too risky to attempt.)
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Build a chain which incorporates some of the floating material. The resulting chain will be "weightless" and can therefore be of arbitrary length - instead of ultimately ripping under its own weight.
Whenever you need more weight, lower a few people down to the ground, let them shovel some dirt into a container and pull everything back up.
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The stones are expensive, so you dont add so many that the ship becomes weightless.
You essentially build a Heavier-Than-Air airship. It will naturally float down if nothing is done, but by the use of wing surfaces, fans, propellors and even oars designed as fans you can gain the lift required to gain altitude (use only one or a combination).
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All matter has mass. The stones are in the mountain because when the mountain was molten, and the material comprising the stones was still there, they did not float away into space.
There is a material in the real world called "sol-gel foam" that is really a very sparse ceramic mesh. Folks have pulled vacuum on it, and coated it in plastic, and it is positively buoyant in air. It is lighter than sea-level air; it acts a lot like helium. It does not repel from normal matter, and wouldn't float all the way up to outer space. It would find its level and try to float there.
A submarine can make itself more dense, and sink, by taking in mass. An airship could take on air, and compress it, and gain mass, and therefore weight, and adjust buoyancy in that manner. There would still be a "local density" based on pressure and temperature to determine how much lift the material provides. ([descriptive link](https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/engines-equipment/submarine1.htm))
A hot air balloon gets lower density by heating up air. ([descriptive link](https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/hot-air-balloon.htm)) If you want more density, then cool it off. You could have cryogen canisters to make "anti-balloons" that pull the ship down. You could also get mileage with propellers.
The [Hero-style steam engine (greek)](http://www.lathes.co.uk/boxgearcal/www.herosteamengine.com/index.html) suggests ancient Greek steampunk was wanting a Newton. In your story, you could supply one. Imagine Alexander the great with a railroad, or [decent gatling guns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXk1NGUWZYQ). They could also have [Da Vinci style air-screws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw), or necro-robotic wings. Spiders aren't the only Arthropods, so you could have trilobites, butterflies, scorpions, [centipedes](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-strongest-arthropod-that-would-win-in-a-1-on-1-duel-spiders-centipede-and-scorpions-included?share=1), and crabs as candidate articulators. The Meganeura Meganisoptera/dragonfly had a wingspan of 2-feet, suggesting insects that operate at least in the envelope of modern birds.
A fun feature of aerogels is they are superb insulators. You would not get a Hindenberg Zeppelin event there. You could bounce flares off it all day long.
**Bibliography**:
* Necro-robotic articulators at Rice ([link](https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/rice-engineers-get-grip-necrobotic-spiders)).
* Lightweight/buoyant aerogels (have air inside) ([link](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153063-graphene-aerogel-is-seven-times-lighter-than-air-can-balance-on-a-blade-of-grass), [link](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10853-022-07540-x))
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I'm surprised that nobody else has suggested this. Don't rely 100% on floatium for your buoyancy. Have a hot air balloon that takes your ship over the threshold. You don't need huge blimp-sized balloons with this solution. You can probably get away with one smaller than the ship itself. You just need one big enough to compensate for your live load: the passengers, cargo, etc. that you don't keep on the ship most of the time.
It occurs to me that you would need floatium pallets with the cargo, regardless, because otherwise the ship wouldn't be able to stay on the ground when unloaded.
This connundrum will actually make it difficult to create floatium war ships. Every time you fire a cannonball, you'd have to adjust your buoyancy to match.
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Heat the stones. Whatever handwavium takes place to make the stones generate antigravity is reduced when the stones are heated. The Handwavium returns as the stones cool.
Bonus, that is why the stone is so rare. Most of the stones have "evaporated" from the planet because during the formation of the planet if they were near the surface and cooled they just floated away.
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I guess we could use reaction of slaked lime with carbon dioxide.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 ‚Üí CaCO3 + H2O
But to get 1 kg of weight this way we would need to pass at least 3 ton of air through lime-water. Water vapor loss could negate the effect.
Another way would be to corrode iron fillings
4 Fe + 3 O2 + 6 H2O ‚Üí 4 Fe3+ + 12 OH‚àí ‚Üí 4 Fe(OH)3 or 4 FeO(OH) + 4 H2O
But it is hard to do it fast, especially if we do not add water. And if we add water then efficiency is only 29%.
**Burning steel wool** is fast and efficient, but it was invented in 1896, so it could be hard to produce it in pre-industrial times. Same for burning magnesium.
**I guess burning iron fillings / lead, antimony or arsenic is the best option.**
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1. **How about using **guide ropes**?**
They pretty much self-regulate to a great extent.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guide_rope>
2. Make the whole thing a **hot air balloon**.
Your magic stones will make it extremely efficient, requiring 2% or 5% of the lift to be hot air. This will make your aerodynamics much better than a traditional hot air balloon, but you can still release the hot air to an extent or simply turn down the fire and sink to the ground.
Of course, you are free to combine both technologies.
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## Ordinary, unheated air.
At jet cruising altitude, outside air is -40 C to -70 C = 203 to 233 K. Comfortable cabin air = 298 K. 218/298 = 73%. Air inside cabin weighs more than 1/4 less than outside air.
Turn off heat. Open all windows. Wear coats - optional, rowing is hard work. Wear oxygen masks - not optional. (Alchemy? Recover from burnt steel wool? Does this planet have nitrogen atmosphere?) Assuming [penteconter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penteconter) construction, 30 m x 4 m x 3 m = 360 000 L = 15 000 mol = 470 000 g x 0.37 = 170 kg of mass enters through open windows.
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**Birds**
Dump some bird seed on the deck and play some territorial bird calls. Suddenly every bird in a kilometer radius has landed on your air ship and is weighing it down. You will have to be very careful not to startle the birds though because after they finish eating your bird seed they may take off again making your ship even lighter than it was. But hopefully they can weigh you down enough that you can hook onto a tree or something-- giving your crew the opportunity to go out and secure more bird seed for future landings. If you do this frequently enough maybe flocks of birds start following your ship around waiting for you to give the signal that you're about to dish out more food.
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**Reduce lift by using a tethered "balloon" to temporarily eliminate the lift of the stones.**
Simply throwing the stones overboard is not feasible due to their cost, but you can throw them overboard if you have a means of retrieving them. Store your lift stones in a crate attached to deck via a long rope wrapped around a winch. In the static configuration, the crate provides lift to the ship. By releasing the winch, however, the stones lift the crate alone, and provide no lift at all to the ship. As long as the rope unspools, the ship will descend, although you'll be in the exact same situation of "too much lift" when the rope is completely unspooled. You just need a rope long enough to allow the ship to descend to the ground, at which point it can be tethered down, allowing the winch to be spooled back up.
This wouldn't be well-suited to continuous fine adjustment of the amount of lift, since it only provides a *temporary* reduction in lift force, and requires landing to actually change the balance of the ship. It could be useful as an emergency measure, however, similar to how a submarine can surface in an emergency by blowing the ballast tanks. This is effectively the opposite, allowing the airship to descend rapidly in an emergency, and mitigates the cost of doing so by allowing the lift stones to be recovered.
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Those stones don't "float" (which just means they are less dense than the surrounding medium, and that there's a maximum service ceiling). No, these are *really weird* stones: the provide a **constant, directed force** without requiring power. If directed upwards, they start rising, until the cave ceiling stops them. If directed downwards, they start descending (faster than with just gravity), until the floor stops them.
So the solution is to mount them to your ship on a turnable bearing. Mount them in pairs that turn in opposite directions - when you point them at each other, the force cancels out, and gravity takes over.
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This also seems to depend on how the floating 'mechanism' of the stones work.
If for instance they work (similarly) like magnets, they are not floating but actually repelling the magnetic field of your world:
100 stones in/attached\_to your 'airship' makes it float up. using electric currents through your stones will disrupt their own field rendering them innate.
Want to get down -> add a current to more stones.
Want to float up more -> release stones from a current.
But! This solely depends on what level of technology/science is present in your world. *If* it is known how the stones float, you can tinker around with a way to suppressing that effect without destroying the stones, it could be an electoral current as in my example, or maybe a chemical reversable reaction with the stones, maybe the effect is stronger or weaker based on temperature.
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Use a large stone tethered to a long cable spool on a drum. Release the drum and allow the airship to drop whilst the stone rises. Just before the stone reaches the end of the tether release large hinged flaps that drop down to increase the surface area of the ship.
When the stone reaches the top of the tether the ship receives a big pull upward, but a lot of the energy of the upward pull is wasted against the increased air resistance of the flaps. As the ship starts to rise lower the stone on the tether with the flaps out then pull the flaps in and release the stone again.
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According to good ol Wikipedia, silica gel has been around since the 1640s, and was used in WWI to absorb vapors in gas masks. (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silica_gel>) It can absorb about 40% of its weight in water without changing their size. This moisture is released when the gel is heated up.
Hydrogel crystals can absorb anywhere from 500 to 1500 times their weight in water (<https://www.nature-and-garden.com/gardening/hydrogel.html>), and can be made from starch, cellulose, or petroleum. I am not sure if each of these require industrial technology for production.
Another potential solution could be a basket filled with absorbing fibers. The dry basket could be lowered into a lake, river, or ocean to absorb water and then be hauled aboard with the added water weight. Heck, even the bucket could work without the fiber. A gallon of water weighs around 8.3 lbs./3.78 kg. A 15-gallon bucket of water would weigh around 125 lbs. A 50-gallon bucket would weigh around 415 lbs./204 kg. Winch down a bucket, and pull up the water needed to increase your weight.
Adding a source of cold, such as blocks of ice, would cause condensation from the air to form. This could provide a source of additional water without needing to fly through clouds. The ice could be kept insulated until it was needed for condensation capture. There are Dew Point Calculators (<https://www.calculator.net/dew-point-calculator.html?airtemperature=70&airtemperatureunit=fahrenheit&humidity=40&dewpoint=&dewpointunit=fahrenheit&x=92&y=23>) which are helpful in determining the temperature difference needed to cause condensation to form based on the relative humidity level. The rate of condensation formation is based on the amount of airflow around the condensation point, and the relative humidity in the air. I was not able to find any good calculations for the rate, likely due to the complexity of the subject.
You might be able to do some experiments where you weigh ice cubes before and after they melt while in front of a fan. If you know the relative humidity inside your house, you can time the rate at which the water increased in weight by dividing it by the time it took for the ice to melt. Be sure to include any condensation on the outside of the container as well. “End weight – start weight / time”. It would be a rough estimate, but if there is a lack of a true formula for calculating the condensation rate, nobody will be able to argue.
It would be nice to know if the stones are simply lighter than most other substances or exhibiting anti-gravity properties. If they are simply lighter, then there would be an altitude zone where these stones would hover with neutral buoyancy. As the number of stones in the upper atmosphere increased over time, they could cause global cooling. If they exhibited anti-gravity, then they would leave orbit and head towards deep space.
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Aerodynamics can handle this, like blimps do using the lift of their elongated body and tail control surfaces.
If using pre industrial technology, wood and fabric windmills-like propellers, wooden gears and pulleys, wooden shafts, leather belts, powered by arms or legs, could allow to give a vehicle the required speed to be aerodynamically controlled. This vehicle does not need a baloon or enveloppe, just horizontal and vertical surfaces, and a cabin for people to do fitness.
The vehicle has to be slightly heavier than what the stones can lift, the rest is aerodynamic human powered lift.
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## Floatium is contained in a rotating drum
Depending how much negative force the Floatium induces (does it rise inverse to gravity?) a drum rotated by sailors can be used to induce a tumble effect and "toss" the Floatium and losing contact with the barrel surface. While the Floatium is out of contact with the drums surface and in the "dead space", it's upward force isn't applied to the ship.
1. Barrel rotates
2. Floatium loses rotational momentum and rises
3. Floatium out of contact with surface
These barrels would need to be used in counter-rotating pairs so not to impart roll.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vsihL.jpg)
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[
I'm writing a short story set in a medieval world. My main inspiration was the videogames of the soul series - so, there is magic, dark themes, and a lot of variance in weapons and armors. As you imagine **realism isn't the main focus**, but still it may be nice to be consistent.
Now, the problem is: I gave a secondary character - the head of palace guards - an estoc - [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoc) - as weapon of choice. My beta reader made me notice that estocs were mostly used against plate mail armor, and by horseback. **Now, how realistic is that the head of a palace guard** - who mainly stays inside the palace - **is armed with such a weapon?**
On a more general side, **what is the realistic weapon of choice for the head of a palace guard?**
---
More details ahead.
The head of the palace guard in question is a woman (for religious reasons, in my world women are considered better than men in most aspects). I wanted to give her an estoc, or another sword that favors the thrusts over the cut, mainly for aesthetic reasons; it may be perceived as more "elegant" rather than your average sword. Her subordinates are common guards, and are mainly armed with swords, halberds and crossbows.
Another important point is that, in my setting, those guards *aren't supposed to see much action*. The people who live in the palace they guard are religious authorities, so attacking them would be the highest form of heresy. The world they live in is a very tightly knitted one, with only one reign and no other religions around.
Of course there are criminal and thieves, but the palace should be a target too risky for them.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TzlWr.jpg)
I've realized that the estoc might be used as a symbolic weapon, entrusted to the head of the guard as a sign of her position (e.g., the Pope used to gift heavily decorated estocs like the one in the picture).
Edit: she might be carrying a regular sword with her, too, if it makes sense (mainly if the estoc is cerimonial).
---
**Second edit:** I'm having trouble accepting just *one* an answer to this, since there are a lot of good insights around. There's enough material in this discussion to get a story focussed only on the captain of the guard. I'd like to thank everyone for contributing.
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## No - Choose a Rapier
My belief here rests on three primary pieces of information:
1. In your world, women tend to have positions like that of the head guard
2. The weapon of your head guard seems to be a standard for the role, not just something selected by the individual
3. Assuming you are using humans as we know them, on average [women have 50% of the upper body strength of men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans).
4. The Estoc is a long, heavy weapon primarily used for thrusting against armored opponents
Given all that, here are the issues with the Estoc:
**Women wouldn't elect to pick a heavy, unwieldly weapon if they had a better alternative.**
Even if some women have the necessary strength to use it correctly, they are the significant minority since this is a tool designed for sturdier men. Especially if the position goes to well-born individuals your available pool shrinks considerably, to the point where suitable candidates are not likely to be available.
Even ceremonially it would make very little sense for a woman to wield an estoc.
**Better alternatives are everywhere.**
The Estoc is an awful weapon for indoor combat, particularly as is a very long weapon (that could replace a lance if need be). A dagger would be a better option - and that's saying something.
**Edit: Issues Even as a Ceremonial Weapon**
The Estoc is a long and heavy weapon. It is not meant to be held all day, and it would be expected to be rested (in fact, you would HAVE to rest it). The challenge though is that if you want to show it off to make a point, you need to have it bared - which means you're putting it point-down and resting your hands on top of it. That's something you would never do to a piercing instrument in a room with a hard floor, least of all if it's highly decorated.
This is compounded by the issue brought up earlier regarding sexual dimorphism of strength amongst humans, wherein women would be more likely to find holding this all day a struggle.
Added to this is the fact that as a long weapon it is out of place indoors.
Taken together, the visual impact is more silly than intimidating or impressive. It would be like saying that extremely fancy daggers are a good ceremonial weapon for the head of a mounted unit. It may not be clearly spotted today in a movie, but at the time it would be a source of ridicule at the expense of the royal family.
**Thus the Rapier**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pxme5.jpg)
(OK - not the best depiction really, but who doesn't love the Legend of Zelda?)
It is still point, but not ridiculously long. It is light. It has a cutting edge. And it can still be rather pretty, and even paired with another weapon if desired.
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>
> What is the realistic weapon of choice for the head of a palace guard?
>
>
>
A [rapier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapier)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IRAxJ.jpg)
Reasons:
* The same age as the stoc (1500s, Reinassance). It required advanced knowledge of metallurgy.
* Very elegant, it can be given as a ceremonial weapon and as a symbol of status
* Lighter than a stoc, but still heavy enough (as much as an arming sword, a "knight's sword") to damage an opponent.
* It gives very good protection to the hand, which is important if your head of the guard isn't wearing armor always. And she probably uses leather gloves over a brigandine.
* Although it is a cut-and-thrust weapon, it favors the thrust as you wanted, due to a stiff long blade. But it is very versatile.
Combined with a parrying dagger, your head of the guard is stylishly armed but ready to fight assaliants.
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**Ceremonial or Practical?**
Consider the [Swiss Guards](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rom,_Vatikan,_Soldat_der_Schweizer_Garde_3.jpg) who are carrying halberds on duty (they also have assault rifles and pistols these days). Notably, those who are escorting the flag carry [greatswords](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swiss_guard_swearing_in.jpg).
**Guards with Naked Steel**
Picture a guard standing somewhere with an unsheathed sword, point resting on the floor, hands folded on the pommel. That guard might be able to ready the sword much faster than another guard who carries a sheathed sword on the belt. To rest your hands on a sword pommel, it has to be long enough.
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There's a lot of rapier love here, and they're not wrong. Considering: a woman's frame; possible cramped quarters; and lack of plate mail for most foes, the rapier may be more practical.
That said, may I nominate also the humble gladius? It's larger than a dagger, but small enough that you could get it in play in stairwells and really tight spaces.
The visuals and intimidation factor of the estoc are not without value, however. Perhaps wear the estoc over the shoulder and a rapier or gladius at the belt?
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**Crowd control**
I could imagine that it might fall to the head of the guard to clear a path through the citizenry when her charges moved through the city. Maybe citizens want to get close and touch these esteemed personages for luck. She would not want to kill adoring citizens outright. She does not want to wrestle them. She needs a nonlethal weapon to whack them back out of the way.
The same qualities that make the estoc a good sparring weapon (as stated in the link in the OP) make it good for crowd control. An estoc is essentially a baton. Batons are great for crowd control. These Chinese police carry batons that might as well be swords.
from <https://www.scoopnest.com/user/PDChina/756605589174751232>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oOR77.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DwOFA.jpg)
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Sure, why not. I think it's fine.
First, weapons do not need to make sense as long as they provide a certain level of intimidation. Consider present day police patrolling cities, train stations, and airports -- wearing machine pistols. A machine pistol fires many rounds in rapid sequence, and not very accurately. This is exactly **not** the kind of weapon that is applicable for areas with hundreds of unarmed, innocent civilians. It's a great weapon for a drive-by shooting, for a bank robbery, or for a terror attack. Only just, it's not in any way a great weapon *for police*. Anyone cares? No.
Second, an estoc is not at all a bad weapon. It's none less effective than a mace, including the ability to subdue a suspect *without* killing him and without requiring the blood-stained walls to be cleaned afterwards, and it has better effectiveness against the odd intruder that might carry armour. In addition, other than a mace, an estoc looks cool, having that knightly something of a sword-alike.
Seeing how you do not expect your guards to have a lot of regular action, the part about looking cool may be an important selling point.
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A large weapon serves a couple of useful purposes. Intimidation and range.
A palace guards main duty is to protect the head of the palace, king queen etc,. Not himself/herself. So a long weapon can help keep foes at a further distance and just holding one is a warning to all and sundry. With smaller sidearms worn for close quarters.
Imagine a scenario where the guard is holding assailants back while archers shoot them. If he/she is too close the archers may hit him/her or be more reluctant to fire at all trying to get a shot in. Also the stopping power of a large heavy weapon would have an effect on all who witnessed it used.
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A sword with no cutting edge is useless in a palace. There will be no cavalry trying to assault inside the room, and waving a long item in a potentially cramped space like a room is going to be highly ineffective.
You would better go for a small sword or a cutlass, or even shorter blades. In most cases taking care of a menace without raising alarm (i.e. during a holy ceremony you don't want to jump on the scene waving a long sword around) is way more beneficial.
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Most people here are answering based on the effectiveness of the estoc, for a story this is the wrong line of thinking.
**The estoc has a backstory**
In Europe during the 1500s there were a few different groups of fighters; to simplify **Nobility, levy and professional**.
**Nobility** are trained because nobles were supposed to lead in war times. They would have knowledge of a wide range of weapons but master only a select few, think lances or longswords in France. The noble would not choose which they would get to master and would typically be pressured into learning what their parents thought were the best weapon.
**Levy** are the working poor who are given a weapon and told to line up when war is being called. Most times they would not be skilled with weapons and just have a boot camp before going off to fight. Their weapons would be crossbows, spears, and short swords in Europe.
**Professionals** is the final group, they are mercenaries, bandits, crusaders and anyone else who makes a living using violence. Most of the professions offer a large range of weapon choices and they can freely change between them based on what is needed. These mercenaries could be [bought to guard your palaces in groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guards#Swiss_Guards_.28Gardes_Suisses.29) or as individuals. [Their loyalties could even be earned for permanent skills soldiers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake), although [most did go the other way](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castruccio_Castracani)
If you make your Palace Guard Captain a professional soldier that you earned the loyalty of **there is no reason for her not to use whatever weapon she had** used on the battle field.
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Yes and no. The need to use a pike-sword would lie in the effect she (or her employer) would like to achieve. On one side this kind of sword is heavy and not designed to be used indoors. On the other it's a large piece of "fock you and everyone around you".
So the message to visitors is clear. The HoS is not there to act but to show the amount of retaliation that will fall on anyone trying something fishy in the castle.
IF they wanted something useful they would carry a mace, baton or a dagger. Not to kill the attacker but to immobilise him, knock him off and carry an investigation. So he would need to be able to answer some questions.
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There have been a lot of excellent answers up to now regarding the usage of such a large weapon for a purpose it has not been originally designed for and is unhandy, as it will be difficult to maneuver within the restricted walls and ceilings of a palace and hinder the guards under her command who she should cooperate with.
However, I would like to add that you may answer the question for the choice of weapon also from a character development and background perspective. Maybe the said head of the palace guard has not always been on duty within the restrained walls of a palace but oirginally served in the cavalry where she received enough merit (e.g. for protecting/saving the kingdom or religious leadership in a decisive battle) to be promoted and become head of the palace guard. Her weapn of choice would still be the one she used when fighting on horse back, even though a sword of such length is problematic within the restriction of walls and ceilings in a palace. The specific estoc she carries may even have been the reward for her heroic deed which earned her the promotion.
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Like most "what is the best weapon" questions, the answer actually depends on what you are fighting against. An [estoc](https://myarmoury.com/review_mrl_estoc.html) is designed for a specific combat environment, namely thrusting the very stiff blade through gaps in plate armour to drive the point into the hapless person inside. If that is the primary threat the palace guard face, then an estoc is a suitable choice (although in constrained spaces like hallways smashing weapons like hammers and maces might actually be more practical). As a note, the Estoc and Rapier were developed in the late Middle Ages/Early Renaissance to deal with full suits of articulated plate armour.
However, consider that inside the palace, the role of the Royal Guard is somewhat more symbolic. Anyone who actually gets into the palace and is ushered inside has to pass through the gates and by the outer guard, who are attired in armour and armed accordingly to the threat(s). The guardsmen inside the palace are more ceremonial, and indeed inside the reception hall might be truly ceremonial, wearing brightly coloured uniforms and stationed along the walls to provide a sense of scale and highlight the power and grander of the King, and possibly pageantry as they perform the changing of the guard, or carry out evolutions in the hall so they don't pass out from standing at attention too long.
In that environment, the bulk of the people inside the hall are wearing civilian clothes, and are either disarmed (as a prerequisite to entering), or carry largely ceremonial or symbolic weapons, like a Scottish [Sgian dubh](http://www.gaelicthemes.net/index.php/articles/3-the-history-of-sgian-dubh) tucked in the sock, or a gentleman's [small sword](https://myarmoury.com/review_aa_ss.html).
In that sort of environment, the guards are probably well off carrying small swords themselves, or if you want to ensure there is sufficient cutting power to hack through a concealed suit of mail or armour under the clothes, then perhaps a [broadsword](https://cullodenbattlefield.wordpress.com/2017/04/28/the-basket-hilted-broadsword/) will do.
This brings us to the Officer of the Guard, and the Captain. As officers (both the duty officer in charge of the detail in the royal hall, and the Captain, who is the overall commander), they will be identified by both different uniforms (in the era being referenced, both finer clothing and a sash to denote rank), and a different weapon. Many posters have suggested a rapier, which is fine (being the cut and thrust cousin to the Estoc), but if the threat is a person wearing concealed light armour under their clothes, then a lighter version of the broadsword should be considered, like the [Spadroon](http://www.coldsteel.com/officer-372.html).
So define the threat better, and the proper sort of weapon to deal with the threat becomes clear.
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Yes actually an estoc is a reasonable weapon for a palace guard. Palaces are pretty big so there would be enough space to use specific combat systems that deal with handling these large types of swords. The advantage to a guard using this is that she would be able to very easily handle multiple opponents at choke points inside said palace, door ways and what not.
You might want to look into the montante too. It's another large sword like this that could have been used by palace guards. There's a method of using it in an alley that is pretty hard to fight against honestly. The main thing when choosing a weapon for a guard to use is to make sure that there's enough space for the combat system your guard will be using and to make sure that the weapon makes sense for your guard to have from a cultural standpoint. If those two things line up well, then your guard can use your weapon.
Everyone else seems to be suggesting that your guard use a rapier. rapiers are general purpose weapons. I would go as far as calling them general purpose self defense weapons. They're alright in every situation, but they're never fantastic.
Keep in mind the guards could also halfsword this weapon and wrestle with it. I personally think an estoc would be dumb because it has no edge. I would go with a montante or a claymore. That makes more sense to me, but this isn't my book. I also like it when things cut. It's more satisfying to me, even though it's usually hilariously unrealistic.
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I think the estoc is meant to be useful against armour (plate or mail), which resists edged weapons.
So it might be effective against armoured assailants?
Or it might be some kind of message if the rank-and-file palace guards are armoured (like, in more modern times, soldiers use heavy weapons while an officer carries an anti-soldier hand gun)?
Or maybe the palace receives visitors of state who bring their own armoured body-guards, and the head of the palace guard has the weapon to deter them?
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The answer to your question lies mostly in the "not expected to see much action" part of the scenario, especially for the captain.
Swords are heavy. Go grab a 3-4 pound dumbbell. Doesn't seem like much just picking it up (if you're a reasonably fit individual anyway). Now tie it to your left hip and go run up a flight of stairs. I bet you can feel the difference. Imagine carrying it around all day, every day.
If there's a fight, the captain's job is to coordinate the tactics of the guards under her, not to engage in the fray herself. If she has to draw blade and charge into combat things are going very badly. But running from vantage point to vantage point shouting orders and deploying reinforcements would not be unusual. So she wants an weapon that's reasonably effective, but not too heavy.
A number of people have suggested the rapier. That's not a bad choice. It gives a lot of reach and works quite well in narrow corridors. Definitely pair it with a dagger or dirk for dealing with anyone who manages to close to grappling distance.
At around 2-3 pounds, the rapier's still a bit on the heavy side though for someone who can reasonably expect to be well clear of the fighting unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. They're generally almost the same weight as a broadsword, just significantly longer.
Consider having her carry a smallsword instead. A smallsword is usually 1 to 1.5 pounds while still being a reasonably effective weapon for someone who can expect to have reinforcements with bigger blades within the sound of her voice.
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# Estoc stays, I say.
I believe it works, even if perhaps my bias against such an overly-typical choice of the Rapier is fogging my judgement. Here are a few points that I'd like to make less-so because of the weapon, but because of the environment:
## -- Large Palace Size:
Huge structures (i.e. columns) and doorways that were large enough you could rotate in the middle of an entry-way with the Estoc extended out and not hit anything. Such a place might even regularly have horseback riding indoors, if not simply large enough for it to happen in an attack.
## -- Unique, Locking floor-holsters:
Yes, the weight is ridiculous. I intend to use this mechanism in my own worlds, but think about **holes in the palace floor** that you may place a standardized Estoc fitting, which locks in place either straight down, or at a slight angle. The unlocking mechanism could be many things, I personally imagined a "key" shape in palace guards metal boots that they use. **There may even be Estocs everywhere, ready to grasp and unlock at many locations without bringing your own**.
## -- Heavy/Massive Armor worn often in Palace:
It could be the absolute norm that travelling through the palace, especially by foreign visitors, one would wear a full set of armor. With the above idea of "floor-locked Estocs everywhere", this already offsets a so-called "strength issue" for women (which I disagree with, we are adaptable creatures. Averages in lazyland of today mean little.) as they rarely need to carry it for extended periods, but rather be very skilled in the burst of strength and endurance used for a short, "to-the-point", armor-bypassing thrust. This 2-30 second bout could be the core of their training, a perfected skill that is handled daily.
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First, a palace differs from a fort, a castle or a headquarters. It is a showpiece, designed to impress.
The head of a palace guard is not normally expected to engage in combat but rather to liaise between the court and the rank and file. Your position will have been an appointment, based almost solely upon your loyalty to the ruling entity and his (or her) confidence in your ability to protect them and you will be past martial age. Your duty involves being dressed and armed in a sufficiently ostentatious manner as to stoke the ego of the principal at court functions while providing an obvious reminder that immediate armed intervention is available if required, but you will have become a functionary at that point.
Section supervisors under you will carry standard weapons, albeit their uniforms and weaponry are usually more elaborate than the rank and file as befits their rank; but theirs must functional. Yours, not so much. If assailants get through the palace guard and the court bodyguards you have you have set in place, you have failed in your duty.
Your accoutrements may certainly be functional as well, but they are chosen to reflect the wealth and majesty of the patron, not your martial skills, and will therefore be more for show than go.
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You mention that an estoc was often used from horseback, which raises a point about palace guards - in some cultures they were drawn from the nobility, people who had a vested interest in preserving the state, people who could afford horses and whos training would have involved horseback fighting.
If the regent is travelling, its likely they would either be in a horse drawn carriage or perhaps even on horseback, so their bodyguards would likely also be mounted, heavily armored, and probably using swords rather than lances (their job isn't to charge, its to defend).
The estoc seems a likely candidate under these circumstances. She doesn't have to do most of the fighting in case of an actual attack, so I can envisage the common guards being equipped with polearms with a backup sidearm, and the captain being equipped with the primary weapon of her regiment.
[Answer]
The Estoc is a specialised weapon for use by fully armored knights to kill other fully armored knights. Fully armored knights belong on the battlefield. They are no more appropriate for the courtroom than a horse or wagon or trebuchet -- in fact it's a mortal offense to bear arms in the (king's) presence at all.
This is how you get around that fact:
While the knight plays no practical role in the courtroom, they play a great symbolic role. The knight is the symbol of king's power and authority. Thus, as part of general pagentry, the king keeps a handful on a permanent peacetime basis. His train consists of eleven fully armored knights who parade behind him wherever he goes. They carry polaxes -- another knightly weapon for use on other knights. The twelfth knight is your guard captain. She carries a standard in one hand and thus needs a smaller weapon for the other hand. This is traditionally a mace or warhammer but on this occasion is an estoc.
While the processions is there purely for pagentry, they also play the de facto role of king's bodyguard. Most of the time they just work as a deterrant. Their weapons are specialised for anti-armor but consider who they're going up against: There are soldiers outside to prevent weapons being taken into the courtroom, so any attacker must use something small and easily concealable like a dagger. Such an attacker doesn't match up well against even a single unarmed knight.
[Answer]
In the palace sure but you're going to have to have a practical weapon for those rare martial occasions outside the throne room too. Also it will depend on the individual because while a ceremonial weapon will do the job of looking impressive and sufficiently theatrical many warriors, however over the hill they are are going to want the real thing at their hip.
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[
As it's that time of year I thought it is time for a Santa themed question...
Keeping the bureaucracy up to date with one's correct address is a nightmare: recently I have experienced it firsthand, when a credit recovery agency contacted me for not having paid taxes during the past 3 years in a city where I do not reside for more than 5 years. It has taken some struggle to prove that I didn't owe any taxes because I had legally moved to another city.
Apparently, Santa is immune to this struggle: presents are always timely and precisely delivered, even if little Sarah and Tommy have moved to their new place in Middleofnowhereton with the family the night before. And all of this way before we all had GPS equipped devices allowing us to be (potentially) tracked with meter precision.
This of course begs the question: how can Santa, since the times of Victorian era, be able to keep updated logs of the location of all the kids who will be getting a present from him?
[Answer]
## He does not
He simply visits every habitat, searches with infravision for kids, then searches local database for whether the kid found is listed as naughty, and if not, searches for request for a particular present, if that is found, he uses a ~~telefragger~~ teleporter in his bag to deliver the exact present if that's available, otherwise the kid gets something random. So, Santa does not search for address of a kid, instead he searches for kids at address.
[Answer]
# He works with the tooth fairy
The tooth fairy regularly comes for lost teeth. This establishes a sympathetic magical link between the child and their lost tooth, allowing them to be tracked at all times and allowing his elven mages and witches to scry children to see if they're naughty or nice.
It would be nice if the government could update to the Victorian century and use real magic rather than outdated tracking methods, but sadly inadequate education in magic and outdated views on it prevents modern bureaucracy from being as efficient and timely.
[Answer]
## By Mail
Santa receives letters from children all year round telling him what they want for Christmas. Using the return address on the letter, he can keep track of where these children live and deliver them Christmas Presents every year. Children who are too young to know their own address get help from their parents. Updates to a child's address can thus be kept track of by a simple paper trail.
## But What About Homeless Children?
Have you ever seen homeless children receive presents from Santa? No. Santa does not deliver presents to those children.
## What If They Move After Their Letter Is Sent?
Then Santa will find that the expected children are not in their house, and contact the post office for their mail forwarding address. If one cannot be found, then no present will be delivered to that child from Santa, and they will be sad.
[Answer]
## Santa is a superior being
When you think about it, we're talking about a person that can do all of the following :
* Knowing what presents every children wants individually
* Carrying all those presents in a single bag
* Visiting every single child in the world during the span of a single night
* For each household, somehow breaking in to deliver the gifts and escaping, both without leaving a single trace or clue as to how the deed was done.
* Staying alive for many centuries without showing signs of weakness or aging.
With all of that, a pinch of limited omniscience doesn't seem too far-fetched, no matter whether Santa really is human or not.
[Answer]
## Subversion of other bureaucracies
You know how you and your family managed to do every part of packing up and moving, while the government had 200 people to deal with just a few bits of paper and cocked it up? Here's why:
90% of bureaucrats actually work for Santa. What look like tax forms, property forms, etc, are actually ciphered child Records Of Righteous and Naughty Behaviour. All through the year, the bureaucrats of every nation accumulate dossiers.
They might seem like a boring bunch with little initiative or skill, but that's a ruse. These guys dream up (and decipher) ruses and ciphers on the spot for fun. There are a few genuinely miserable, anally retentive ones but they are the 10% actually running governments. Mostly processing forms that 'have wrong information' or 'were the wrong type'...but were actually perfect for their *real* purpose. Or attending meetings about how to deliver everything in war zones, but perceiving them as 'Wellness Seminars'...etc.
This is why Santa always gets it right but governments so rarely manage to actually transform their agencies.
This has been happening ever since Sinter Klaas and Zwarte Piet first got off the boat from Morocco, but they made the cover story better in the 1800s with the whole North Pole / reindeer business.
[Answer]
## Elf infiltrators
Santa's elves have infiltrated all registrar's offices, town halls, record halls, or other relevant archives, maintain up-to-date information, and communicate this to Santa Claus' base of operations (be it in or near the 'North Pole', Korvatunturi, Drøbak, or Uummannaq).
Last-minute changes are provided by local elves at the moment Santa arrives in a locale at his traditional point of entry.\*
While most of these covert agents remain undetected, not all of them operate invisibly from the local governmental body: throughout history, some of Santa's agents have acquired a special, internally recognized, extralegal status, allowing them to obtain and pass on the necessary information without requiring the consent of the concerning parties.
Within the legal treatise, the article describing and exempting this exception is known as the Santa Clause.
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\* Changes in which, due to construction or local policies, will have been communicated to local handlers well in advance.
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## The Big Book
Santaclaus writes down all names of naughty kids in a huge book. Every year, he takes the book with him and before climing the roofs to put presents down the chimney, the book will decide if a kid gets a present or not.
**Recent modernizations**
Above I have described the 150 years old Victorian age tradition in the Netherlands. We actually cannot be sure if Santa still does it this way, because Santa keeps his Big Book secret for us. Probably, the 2022 big book is a OAuth-protected SQL-server database, which can be accessed through Santa's mobile phone.
[Answer]
## Quantum mechanics and alien symbiote horrors
Santa as we know it, does not really exist. At least most of the time.
There is a quantum phenomenon though, attributed to a fundamentally alien race (the
"San'tah") living in symbiosis with human children, whose members use telepathic links to form a tight hive-mind and innate abilities to stay invisible and otherwise imperceptible.
During the year the billions of such entities closely follow the children all the time, feeding on their residual empathetic energies, be they merry or malicious. Not all of the ingested energy is useful for these beings though, but more on that later.
Then on Christmas day, after they got their fill and grown full of energy, all the beings coalesce into a single individual, creating the form we know as "Santa". The combined consciousness of the symbiote population is now strong enough due to the year-long energy gathering to cause the mass hallucinations of a jolly old man with white beard, flying reindeer and a huge sled. It then in quick succession collapses its collective quantum wavefunction to the location of each entity (and as an extension, each child). As an corollary, the "Santa" manifested each time is most strongly affected by the symbiote that was shadowing that particular child, thereby determining if that incarnation of "Santa" is predominantly merry or malicious.
At this point, the metabolical waste of the symbiote (what could not be used from the emotional energies) gets regurgitated in the form of presents or coals, depending on the predisposition of Santa and thus the behaviour of the child.
So there is no need to track addresses when you can track each recipient in real time, 0-24 and "teleport" to them at will.
[Answer]
**Alien Santa**
Santa is actually an alien (or a group of) with advanced technology. He's got a few billions nanobots everywhere on earth, recording everything that's happening. He's using it mostly for anthropological studies, but a long time ago, after seeing a kid having a rough day, he decided to do a nice thing all kids.
With theses bots and a very powerful AI processing the data, he knows in real-time where evrey kids is, and what they want.
It also explains why he's hundreds of years olds (alien, or succession of), and how he can deliver worldwide in one night (lots of drones).
[Answer]
**Informant network**
Santa in the Victorian-era was known to have a large network of informants (people keeping addresses and behaviors of children). When visiting a town he would get lists from these informants about the whereabouts of children and how they behaved during the year. The elves could then check the names to see if a letter was received from this child, to then have to a nearby warehouse fulfill the order (these would often be set up a couple of weeks in advance, or a contract would be made with local shopkeepers).
If a family had moved it would also be noted in the book to where if possible, or if not at least the general direction, where villages following the same would be checked until the child was found. (This is also the reason that children that became homeless did not get presents: no address could be found sadly).
These days Santa gets good help from the government regarding data and he's able to use some tracking based on the mobile data of the parents. Although still not perfect, he can find most children and being a philanthropist by nature he supplies financial aid to volunteer groups giving presents to homeless kids.
[Answer]
>
> How does Santa keep locations updated for all of his gift recipients?
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He doesn't. He uses thermal vision like [The Predator](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093773/) to identify living beings and provides the presents to them once he identifies who they are.
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> And all of this way before we all had GPS equipped devices allowing us to be (potentially) tracked with meter precision.
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We're acknowledging that a fat man in a red suit, riding a sleigh pulled by 9 reindeer, at millions of miles per hour, with presumably hundreds of shipping containers trailing behind him is somehow less amazing than the lack of GPS?
[Answer]
**Precognition**
Santa is the most powerful precog in the world. He knows (because he has seen) what the most appropriate gift will be. So the good/naughty list is in fact a misdirection made by him to hide true extent of his power. It is a scary power after all, as it cast doubt on the existance of free will.
His need for letters is another ruse. Think about it! Have you ever heard of postman going to the north pole? And how could he read them? There are hundreds of languages in the world, and children are not known for following grammar, which makes those letters even more unreadable. It is far more logical that he has simply chosen the future where the child got the best possible present.
And since he can determine who was good and who was bad, and what is the best gift for children who were good, it is trivial for him to locate those children. He has after all seen the future where he successfully delivered said gifts!
[Answer]
## Just visit all the houses
Santa doesn't need to know, he just visits every house and checks whether there are any kids present. If there are, he reads their minds to see check whether they have been naughty or should receive a present.
The present is the same for all kids (to simplify logistics for the Santa coorporation) because Santa knows that any present is better then none.
[Answer]
# E-commerce and social network databases
You might be able to shake the government off you and make them lose your tracks for quite a while, but then you'll end up buying stuff on Amazon or tweeting about the last episode of Stranger Things. Santa is actually the largest e-commerce and social network owner in the world.
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**Magic.** Or, if you prefer, **Deific Purview.**
Santa is an incredibly powerful being who occupies a unique and hard-to-nail-down spot in the divine hierarchy. While he's not technically a true God, he certainly resembles a lowercase-g god, akin to Hermes or Cernunnos. Every child who thinks about or prays to him grants him a small modicum of power, and writing letters is especially powerful (more so for children than adults; children find writing difficult and letters complicated, so the effort they expend is accordingly greater, while it's trivial for adults).
Every time the child prays (or especially) writes, it's a small boon to Santa's overall power—and also serves as them willingly entering into Santa's purview, and thus, his awareness.
[Answer]
[Through their food.](https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=724)
Have you ever eaten candy cane or other sweets? These are produced by the elves at the North Pole, or by their franchises world wide. Once you eat it, they can track you. It's not really clear whether it is based on magic or technology.
[Answer]
# He has them chipped
Just like pets, all children have a small microchip implanted in them. This allows Saint Nick to not only know their location, but also helps him track whether they are naughty or nice.
And this also lets him know when to stop. The microchip is powered by belief, so when the child stops believing the chip no longer works. So Santa knows he no longer needs to deliver to that child.
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# What do you think he does for the rest of the year?
He travels the world with a long-lens camera, a parabolic microphone, and various other pieces of high-end bugging equipment, including state-of-the-art facial recognition software.
All of the collected information is collated by the elves to create an up-to-date record ("he's making a list") of where every child lives, and whether they've been naughty or nice.
He can visit every child in the world in one night. Performing in-depth surveillance operations on the other days shouldn't cause a problem. He's even got time for more than one visit ("he's checking it twice").
[Answer]
Santa is a god of the hearth, thus he is present at the hearths of all worshipers all year round and doesn't need to look for where they are. As we all know, the geographic North Pole is just a point in the Arctic with no magical properties. Santa's North Pole is a reference to the hearth itself, the central "pole" of the household.
As many in Scandinavia know, his elves (the Jule Nisser) are just ordinary household spirits. All of Santa's magic is taking place in your own residence year round. He doesn't have to travel to appear at your hearth on the eve of Christmas.
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## Triangles with that weird eye thing
There is a common myth that the Illuminati watch everyone through any dollar bill with that bizarre triangle eye-thing on it. That idea is categorically false. Santa had already purchased rights to that domain decades before the Illuminati got the idea, and in the ensuing court case (*Claus vs. Illuminati*), Santa retained his rights to surveil anyone who implicitly acquiesced to having their actions recorded (for analytics purposes). Using this method, watching for good behavior is a cinch. Tracking down people is easy too, seeing as anyone with a dollar is essentially holding a tracking device. This begs the greater question: Is Santa in cahoots with the Treasury? Did he plant a mole in the Mint? Is he, in fact, running **everything** behind the scenes?
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He uses DNA to identify them. He has a master DNA genetic tree database. Makes Ancestry look like a weak attempt. Every child that is born, he gets a DNA sample, and every year, he samples everyone's DNA by probing their nose, to update his registry. He does not know who is at the end of the probe,until the DNA analysis comes back.
Oh, and that 'naughty or nice' bit? All a ruse. Everyone gets a present,irregardless. Have you ever known Santa to NOT leave a present for someone?
] |
[Question]
[
Forget those old-fashioned siege ladders. No-one wants boiling oil poured on them as they labour to the top. They need to get there much quicker and with no ladder to be pushed away when they are at their most vulnerable.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/orVS4.png)
My commander wishes to catapult troops to the top of the castle walls. At the height of their trajectory the soldiers have no vertical movement so if this coincided with the top of the battlements they would land like a feather. Of course the machines would need to be reasonably close to the walls, but at night a ninja-like attack, immobilising one or two very surprised guards at a time, could be used to create a silent and undetected build-up of troops.
What, if anything, is wrong with this idea? How feasible is it with medieval machinery? How can the soldier's forward momentum best be cancelled?
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**Note**
For those who say it's risky; just consider how risky the usual method is.
[Answer]
**Impractical**
>
> At the height of their trajectory the soldiers have no vertical
> movement so if this coincided with the top of the battlements they
> would land like a feather.
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True, their *vertical* movement would be zero, but what about their horizontal movement? There are three types of arcs (roughly) if you want to talk ballistic weapons. You have a mortar-type arc, a cannon-type arc, and a catapult type arc.
Cannon-type arc is a mostly flat arc, maybe 15 degrees. This would give the soldiers far, *far* too much forward momentum and they would die as a result. Overall, a bad idea.
A catapult-type arc is around 45 degrees, but that means that the soldiers will have to travel as far forward as they do up, so if the castle is 50 feet high, they'll have to travel 50 feet forward. Also too fast - this isn't a person running fifty feet, this is a person going forward 50 feet using the same momentum that you use to fight off gravity for that extent. Also too much forward momentum. Remember, you're aiming for a thin strip of wall for your soldier to land on.
Then you have the last type of launcher, a mortar type which launches soldiers basically straight up. This is actually fairly simple using a trebuchet type mechanism and with little forward momentum, its conceivable the soldier would survive landing on the castle wall. The *problem* is that because you set up so close to the wall, the undefended trebuchet is now a sitting target for the castle defenders. And if you want to build structures to defend the trebuchet, you'd need a fairly large and complicated structure to protect it from the many, many angles of enemy attack and at that point, just build a siege tower, it's a lot easier and can hold more soldiers.
tl;dr; it'll kill people if its too far away and it's impractical to defend if its too close.
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> How feasible is it with medieval machinery?
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Very feasible. [Trebuchets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet) were a thing in Europe around the 6th century AD and are very calibrable (yes, this is a word).
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> What, if anything, is wrong with this idea?
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Murphy's Law, and not just how you imagined it when you read it.
[Edward A. Murphy Jr.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_A._Murphy_Jr.) was working on project MX981 (a spiritual predecessor to [Jackass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackass_(franchise))) when he coined his famous law. The whole thing revolved around a very cranky [rocket sled](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled), meant to test the effects of acceleration and deceleration on stuff and PEOPLE.
His most famous volunteer, [John Stapp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp) (probably related to Ryan Dunn someway (also I just found out that he's my compatriot!)), seemingly enjoyed being used as a guinea pig on the rocket sled:
>
> By June 8, 1951, a total of 74 human runs had been made on the decelerator, 19 with the subjects in the backward position, and 55 in the forward position. Stapp, one of the most frequent volunteers on the runs, **sustained a fracture of his right wrist during the runs on two separate occasions, also broke ribs, lost fillings from his teeth and bleeding into his retinas that caused temporary vision loss**; in one run he survived forces up to 38 g.
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These things happen whether you are accelerating or decelerating very fast. But that was a rocket sled, which did it kinda gradually; Your human catapult will give its ammo all the impulse in a fraction of a second. All in all, you'd be squished inside if you attempted to fly like that.
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Even if you have an army of supersoldiers who can survive that, another problem arises: in order to have close to no horizontal speed, you'd need to have the catapult close to the wall - where it becomes an easy target for pit, tar, and fire. Not much different from using the stairs on this regard.
But if you position your catapult far from the wall, the soldiers will land with A LOT of horizontal speed. It would be like leaping from a car going very fast on a highway.
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Suppose you managed to solve the problems above: stairs are cheaper and have a better ratio of soldiers per second than catapults. Once you launch a soldier, it will take some time to ready a catapult for the next one. Even if you have lots of catapults, each soldier landing on the battlements would be easily surrounded and killed.
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And that's considering you don't miss. Surely, medieval engineers could hit far targets with some accuracy, but changing wind conditions, inaccurate measurements and blind bad luck would ruin the day of someone who went too high or too low.
By the way, once you calibrate a trebuchet for a certain target, you need to always use ammo with the same profile and weight to keep hitting it. Different soldiers with different weights introduce a problem here. Maybe you can solve this by making the lighter ones carry stones as they are loaded in the catapult. But different people will have different aerodynamics.
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**Well, it all depends on who you toss up over the wall, dunnit?**
While your overall plan is sound, I think catapulting a fully armed soldier up onto the wall is a less than ideal solution. Logistics you see: you'd really need to get several up there, and then once on the wall, what are they going to do then? They'd either have to fight off the whole castle in order get down and unlock the front for your lads, or else would have to beat off hordes of castle guards while your folk set up & ascend their scramble ladders.
You'll want something small and light that can easily get up there and really astonish the defenders, so I'd take a page from British history:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oUysh.jpg)
Just catapult your world's version of the [Rabbit of Caerbannog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxKIJTb3Hg) into that castle and within two minutes the front gate will come crashing open and the whole place will be emptied of defenders! A sort of shock troop, you see?
They'll be at your mercy and your lads can then begin the pillaging, sackage and rapine.
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If the terrain allows for it, nearby elevations higher than the castle wall, you could hang-glide or parasail down to the wall tops. The creation of modern hang gliders or parasails is probably outside the limits of medieval technology, but the physics which make them work is still in affect.
If the terrain doesn't allow for a gliding approach, consider using hot air ballons.
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Is there a reason why you don't want your troops to use one of the more common methods for reducing a fortified objective? These include: a siege tower, digging mines under the walls, using catapults or associated siege engines to batter the walls, or constructing a ramp over the moat up to the top of the wall so your men can charge across (as the Romans did at Masada).
And there are two very simple & often practiced tactics. One is finding a traitor inside the objective who will provide you access in return for money or other items. The other is simply surrounding the objective -- thus preventing food, supplies & water from reaching the defenders -- & starving them into submission.
Any of these would be far more effective & easier on your troops -- although much less imaginative -- than your plan.
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The catapult method requires precise calculations, and the vertical velocity is not all you have to worry about (acceleration at startup is bearable): *horizontal* speed remains more or less constant during the whole trip, and can be significant.
For example, launching someone twenty meters upwards takes about two seconds. Launch speed vertical component is about 21 m/s. If the rampart is 50 meters away from the catapult, this horizontal distance needs to be covered in the same two seconds, giving a constant horizontal speed of 25 m/s (multiply by 2.2 to get it in mph, or by 3.6 to get kilometers per hour). Launch speed is then SQRT(21*21+25*25) = SQRT(1066) = 32 m/s, and is reached in about one third of a second. 0 to 32 m/s in 1/3 s is almost exactly 10 G. A big shock, no doubt, but totally survivable if you're properly prepped for launch.
Launching from ten meters away is more feasible - five meters per second are just 18 km per hour, or the speed you'd be falling at if you fell from 1.3 meters. Launch speed is lower. But at ten meters from the ramparts, the catapult is in boiling oil range.
The ninja needs something to stop their forward motion, and do that in very little space, *but not too little* because otherwise the shock will be the same of a hit against the wall. A sort of flying squirrel suit might do: curl into a ball when launched, then open wide arms and legs and (provided you're somehow oriented in the right direction - maybe use a trailing "tail"?) your cross-section trebles and your airspeed drops.
With excellent agility, a padded flapped wingsuit and lots of training I expect you'd be able to withstand an end-of-flight speed of 10 m/s, which means you can get at the top of the 20 m high wall from a catapult 20 m away (outside flaming oil range, but still in arrow, stone, and general mayhem range).
[Answer]
## Giant Slingshot + Glider/Parachute
So the acceleration from a catapult/trebuchet would likely be dangerous for a human, however searching for "Human Slingshot" will yield a ton of slightly safer launch mechanisms (though most keep the payload secured for the duration). These rely on the contraction of an elastic material and so the acceleration will be more uniformly distributed rather then a sudden sharp spike at the start and therefore be much more survivable.
Upon arrival at the top of the wall there will still be considerable forward motion, and precision being extra important when you want a relatively injury free deposit atop the fortifications you'll want a method of arresting forward motion, guidance in case of inaccurate launch or interference from weather and ability to dodge incoming arrows or traps set upon the battlements. To that end a modified wingsuit should allow for fairly quick deceleration as well as some maneuverability to achieve the ideal landing spot. Ideally this wingsuit would have some sort of rapid stow/ditch mechanism as it might decrease the dexterity of the wearer in combat. These wingsuits would be a bit more akin to a glider/parachute than the modern wingsuits we see, but with sufficient volunteers and testing a happy medium could likely be achieved.
As for testing, I'd recommend a) volunteers who can swim, b) testing launch into a large pond, c) testing arresting-wing-suit via an elevated pool with plenty of padding.
[Answer]
You can stop forward momentum with a long rope. Tie one end of it round your ninja, and run the other end through something that applies friction, like looping it around several rough wooden posts. You can adjust the length of the rope in advance to ensure they are stopped at precisely the right place, and to control the strength and duration of deceleration. To keep the pull horizontal, lift the rope with a A-frame. Use a highwayman's hitch for a quick release. All you need is lots of rope.
Although if you just want to be able to climb ladders faster, a 'gin pole' hoist with a dozen mates on the end of a rope to lift you would probably be much easier and safer. I think that mechanism was used by Heron of Alexandria, so suitably ancient.
[Answer]
## Horizontal Momentum & G forces are Solvable Problems
The key is in the OP's stipulation:
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> Of course the machines would need to be reasonably close to the walls
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While most people think about catapults as being strictly trebuchets, there was another far more practical design of catapult for this problem: **Ballistas**. Unlike a trebuchet, it accelerates its load in a linear trajectory instead of an arc trajectory; so, it is much easier to fire a projectile at a predictable angle, and much easier on human biology.
Now for G force: your average castle wall is only 12m tall. This means you can roll your ballista right up to the castle wall and fire a person up at ~85 degrees at a velocity of ~8m/s. If your ballista has a 2m long draw length, this means that your person will experience ~4.2G\* while being fired. Most people can withstand about 5Gs without a modern flight suit; so, your soldiers should be able to maintain consciousness when fired. Because of the high angle of fire, the soldier will be moving horizontally at just under 1m/s which is a bit slower than the average person walks; so, stopping your forward momentum when you get on top of the wall will be very easy.
\*SEE: <https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/trajectory-projectile-motion>
## The Problems with this Design
While the technical limitations can be overcome, the reasons such a siege engine would not be popular are many:
1. It is much more expensive than a ladder. Ballistas required some pretty hard materials to make in bulk which is a big part of why they fell out of favor. Each catapult would need over 100ft of thick cordage made from human hair and animal tendons and hundreds of pounds of heavy metal fittings that would have been very expensive in the pre-industrial era.
2. It is harder to get to a wall than a ladder because it is so heavy. This means you may be less likely to die during the getting on the wall part of the siege, but more likely to get shot by archers in your approach to the wall.
3. Reload time & complexity. Large ballistas would take a minimum of 20 seconds to reload under normal circumstances, but this device also has to be calibrated to a specific person's weight. If your first soldier weighs 90kg, and you next guy weighs 70kg, then your second guy will overshoot the wall unless you adjust the torsion springs first which would extend the reload time to at least a minute. This problem can be partially overcome by organizing your squads into weight classes, but even solving for the need to adjust the springs, you will still not be able to get as many people on a wall as quickly as with a ladder.
4. It is not actually quite. Large catapults (both trebuchets and ballistas) make loud and distinctive sounds when they fire. So if your goal is a quiet night raid, you will not be able to stealthily get a lot of guys onto the wall before someone notices your presence.
## Consider instead, just fixing the problems with siege ladders
One solution is ofcourse siege towers, but again, those are really expensive and harder to cross uneven terrain with than ladders; so, they still don't entirely replace siege ladders. But, what if you just make ladders that can't be pushed over? Basically, there are two ways you can push a siege ladder over, one is to push it backwards, and the other is to push it sideways.
Without adding much weight to a ladder, you can add a few extra bits that will prevent it from being pushed over. To prevent your ladder from being pushed over backwards, just add a nice big foot to it. you can bring your ladders to the walls just like normal, stand it up, spin the foot into position and lock it, then bring the ladder against the wall. The means that the feet of your ladder are no longer a fulcrum that it will just pivot over, now the defenders are at a huge mechanical disadvantage trying to push the ladder away, and once you put the weight of 1 person on the ladder, leverage will favor you so heavily, that it would take many men to even get the ladder to budge at that point.
Pushing a the ladder over sideways is also going to be very hard if the defender has a crenulated wall because they first have to push your ladder backwards enough to get around their own battlements, but just in case, you can also add extra bits that extend between the crenulations so that the defender's own walls prevent them from pushing your ladder sideways.
As for boiling oil and arrows, this is not as big of an issue with siege ladders as you may think. As your own illustration shows, a shield gives great coverage from any attacks coming from above. Also, the exact angle of a ladder typically puts you in the blind spot between where defending archers can shoot at you from over the battlements or down through the machiliations.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V8teP.png)
[Answer]
**There is a way**
I read @The Square-Cube Law and @Halfthawed and I mainly agree with them.
There is a way this might work though. It would be extremely risky for the troops involved but not exactly suicidal. I don't know if it would be compatible with your story and this answer may be too much story based. Up to you to decide.
Preconditions. the besiegers have:
a group (20/30) athletic, motivated and well trained soldiers
several trabuchets that are strong enough to launch the soldiers over the walls and into the town
previously have bombarded every night the town launching inside corpses of rotten goats and sheeps with the apparent motivation of causing pestilence
have done extremely accurate survey of the landing area and spotted a suitable one (most likely with inside help)
the landing area is a slanted roof. It's slope is just at the right angle that an incoming soldier would not likely be injured. The soldier will slide on it and probably fall down in an inner courtyard
the inner courtyard is owned by the aforementioned inside helping citizen(s). A large, tall heap of hay has been prepared to dampen the fall of the soldiers.
together with the soldiers some launches may be of bags with armors and weapons, dampened in wool sacks
the launches will go on, as usual, all night long. Some trebuchets, aimed at different parts of the town will throw in dead goats as usual
the group of soldiers will then be gathered in the inner courtyard during the night. They will put on their armors (likely light ones) and just before the break of dawn do a surprise attack at the closest town gate that has been identified as the most likely to fall.
Outside troops will have silently gathered at the convened point and be ready to storm forward at the signal once the gate is open with the purpose of holding control of the gate for the rest of the army.
the main army stays on its usual positions during the night to avoid alarming the defenders. As soon as the gate is open they move so they can storm the gate.
Smaller forces in other parts of the walls may cause noises and movement to confuse the defenders at least for the first crucial minutes.
Ideally all this should be staged a long time before the siege to measure the distances and angles right without raising suspicions and buy the most ideal property with a suitable roof and courtyard. Once bought the roof could be 'fixed' to be of ideal angle if needed.
Note: The inside helping citizens may not be strong enough (elderly? women? unarmed?) to overcome the guards of course. Otherwise nothing of this would be necessary.
P.S. note that the farthest shot of a man from a cannon is just 59 meters. The target area needs to be pretty close to the walls.
[Answer]
**Use a Pendulum**
Instead of catapulting someone from low ground on a downwards arc, create a very large A frame swingset. It will need to be a bit taller than the walls and should be wheeled into place right before the assault. Have several men stand on individual swing boards at the bottom and have a hoist rig bring them back. Let go of them at different times so it's a harder shot for archers on the wall. If you have the distances calculated correctly, they'll arrive at the apex of their swing at the top of the wall and they'll just need to step off to begin the assault.
Bonus physics: They can carry weights that they drop at the bottom of their swing which will mean you have to hoist them less distance backwards to reach the same height of the walls.
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Outfit your troops with inflatable suits, and find some high ground. A catapult throws objects with a force of 89.0 kN, which is more than enough to send a person flying far. As the suit inflates, it will provide a larger surface area, reducing the pressure on the wearer, and giving some room to buffer out the sudden acceleration. And, it will help with the landing by increasing surface area to increase drag and reducing density to increase buoyancy (which will really help if you end up landing in water). As a bonus, these inflatable suits will get your airborne soldiers pushed further, so if the catapults are positioned correctly, the wind can do a lot of work on getting troops to their destination.
[Answer]
The biggest issue with this is conservation of energy. When you pull back the catapult, you are storing energy. The catapult converts this potential energy into the kinetic energy of the unfortunate invader. While the vertical energy is zero at the peak of the arc, the horizontal energy is not, unless they were fired exactly straight up. This is naturally impossible.
But never fear! There are two ways to do this with sufficiently brave/stupid soldiers and enough math.
**Method 1, very close catapult.**
if the catapult is very close to the wall, and the angle of fire is very low, there should low enough horizontal force that the soldier will not fall of the wall to his death. However, you would have to get almost the perfect height, because if the arc is to low, the soldier will smack the wall. if the arc is too high, the soldier will fall to far before hitting the wall, and all that kinetic energy will go straight into the soldier's ankles, shattering or injuring them. Or, the defenders could dump boiling oil on your catapult, because it would essentially have to be touching the wall.
**Method 2, Surprise flying kick.**
This requires a lot of energy-absorbent material at the top of the wall to work, but if you calculated it so that the point where they only have vertical motion is right when they hit the material, the material would (hopefully safely) bring them to a stop. This material could be something like a guardhouse bed. You could also use a group of soldiers as your energy-absorbent, hence, the surprise flying kick. You also might want to strap cushions to the soldier to reduce the very real chance of them dying on impact.
**Conclusion**
This method would require lots of very accurate math to pull off, and it would probably go wrong anyway. However, It *might* work, and no other strategy in the history of siege warfare would have the same level of awesome.
Final note, it would take a long time to get a full scale invasion force inside the wall.
Cool idea!
[Answer]
Add parachutes and it will work.
Parachutes are very low tech - stone age in fact, requiring nothing more than cloth and light ropes. It's amazing humans didn't invent them earlier - we've had cliffs for billions of years and people who want to get from the top to the bottom in a hurry.
Trebuchet the warrior, who maintains a tucked position to more predictable trajectory, far past the walls. The paratrooper deploys his parachute when he's roughly over a suitable landing spot.
Set the trebuchets up just outside the range of a bow. Not too far back - you don't want the warrior to faint due to excessive launch acceleration.
[Answer]
**Catapult ramps instead of people?**
Instead of catapulting men up, would a catapult work for getting a ramp into place quickly? One end fixed, hinged, some distance from the castle, catapult the far end to flip it into place.
Would have a couple of advantages over siege ladders in that the weight and angle would make it harder to push away from the wall, it's shallow so pouring oil down doesn't work quite as well, and might be wide enough to allow more than one soldier attack together.
Not sure the physics will work though, as it might be difficult to build a ramp that doesn't splinter from the speed it hits the wall, which isn't too heavy for the process to work in the first place.
But if it did work, firing a few ramps up simultaneously along the wall might disrupt the defenders while more of your troops attack with standard siege ladders.
[Answer]
You need to constantly shoot rocks at the enemy walls for a few days before, so they don't get suspicious when you start the sneak attack. A super tall enemy flagpole on a tower can be abused to stop the frontal movement through some sort of bungee jumping mechanism. A weight at the end of an elastic rope used by super quick hands might somehow get a few of your smallest, strongest athletes up there. Each of them would carry a part of a gigantic net with them. They'd install the net to make it easier to land. Then you can shoot more heavily armed soldiers into the net with another, bigger counterweight trebuchet. The launched soldiers would have to wear weights or less armor depending on each of their bodies weight. The percentage of the soldiers that survive the impact without heavy injuries might want to spread immediately, making it harder for the defenders to surround their positions on the wall. The ones that arrive a little crippled, will drink a lot of rum and use the completely crippled or dead ones as cover while protecting the net.
Maybe you should make your non-crippled soldiers shout: 'Flee, the wall has been breached. Flee!' This might make it harder for the defenders to organize their troops and find the place where the enemies are coming from.
Then you can abuse the chaos and attack the walls everywhere at once with long ladders, like normal people do.
Not situational at all. 10% of the time it works 100% of the time.
[Answer]
I'm going to explain how somebody might attempt to get launched from a safe distance by a trebuchet and then land with very little acceleration on a wall.
Use two gigantic trebuchets with one projectile each: One is a rock, one is a soldier. The trebuchet launching the rock is about 70 meters closer to the wall.
The projectiles are connected through a light and strong rope with a length of let's say 200 m.
The rock is accelerated much more and has a steeper trajectory than the soldier.
At the start the soldier holds on to the rope and 'slowly' lets go of it, as the trajectory between him and the rock diverge more and more from each other. (good gloves are recommended)
This way the soldier will get more speed that doesn't have to be gained over the short distance the trebuchet has to accelerate him, which makes it possible to launch him much further without killing him right at the start through g-force. Instead of about 20 m/s , he'd get e.g. 36 m/s and gain e.g. 60 meters in height, which would make it possible to launch him almost 200 m instead of only 50 m.
Now accelerating isn't a problem any longer. Decelerating is.
Since the rock has a much steeper trajectory, the soldier will be able to slow down his forward movement by holding onto the rope and or pulling himself towards the rock. He has to to do this rather quickly.
If the rock is launched at an angle of 88 degrees with 50 m/s, which is really generous, the soldier will have only a little more than 5 seconds to decelarate by pulling himself towards the rock before it certainly would be lower than the destination point, which would make it useless for decelerating vertical velocity.
Depending on the exact distances the trebuchets have from each other and from the wall and on how effective the technique of pulling oneself towards the rock, the weight difference between the rock and the soldier would vary heavily.
If everything is calculated perfectly, the soldier loses all his velocity by the time he reaches the top of the wall.
Your soldiers will have to practice a lot getting launched into a lake, before attempting to land on a wall.
[Answer]
Shortest Answer:
No. Physics works according to component forces. So they would hit vertically like a feather, but the velocity needed to get them to the wall while being out of firing range would be lethal.
Think about how far you can throw a stone horizontally. If you hit me in the face with the same hand that throws that stone I'd be unconscious. What OP is talking about here is significantly more force than that, as it has to motivate a whole human being from a single starting impact, yet displace him further than a stone can be thrown by hand. Anyone flung by such a catapult is going to have tremendous horizontal momentum by the time they arrive at the apex of their parabolic arc.
[Answer]
A "launch" with a short acceleration point would act a lot like jumping off the wall onto your feet; it would kill you. The acceleration region has to be extended long enough not to kill the human.
Physics is reversible, up to entropy.
Horizontal velocity at the top of the wall would kill the human, so you have to make a near-vertical launch.
So we have a device that gently accelerates a human being upwards with little lateral velocity and stops at the top of a wall.
We call this a ladder. It even runs on the human's muscle power!
A siege tower with stairs also works.
An elevator is probably way too complex.
[Answer]
You seem to forget the archers that defend the castles.
There is already a load of strong guys with strong (long) bows and armor piercing arrows ready to shoot at anything that shows themselves as a target.
When your soldiers try to land on or in the castle they have to go slow speed and will be outlined against the sky. Perfect for a 'who can place the most arrows' competition, or a 'who can place the arrows where they do the most good' competition.
Any armor that will be too difficult for those arrows will slow your soldiers down so much that the defenders have an easy time to take them down on arrival.
The defender archers do not need to be visible from the ground, they can even be much lower down in the castle as long as they have a good knowledge of where the invaders come from. (Just send out a lot of arrows, not easy to avoid those.)
[Answer]
## The biggest challenges to your idea are economic
A specialized siege engine is going to be very expensive. Regardless of what technology it uses, the forces involved mean it will need several large, finely crafted parts made of strong materials. It will require skilled operators, who know how to use it without the forces tearing the machine apart. Such a machine will cost a lot to make and use, which means it needs to do a big job, like knocking holes in a castle wall to be worth building. The trouble with your idea is that getting a few men to the top of a wall can be done more easily with much cheaper equipment.
Unlike a siege engine, siege ladders are very cheap. Ladders are a prehistoric technology, and while siege ladders are a little heavier than normal ladders used in civilian life and have a few added bits to help anchor them to the ground and the wall, any carpenter should be able to build one. Wood to build them from is available in every forest the army walks past and they don't require particularly fine craftsmanship (though taller walls do require longer, moderately higher quality ladders). Ladders don't need many men to operate either. You probably only need a half dozen men to carry and raise each ladder, and for shorter ladders you may be able to get by with fewer. Together with the low cost, that means you can have *a lot* of ladders. While your man-throwing engine might theoretically be "better" in some way than a single ladder, it's going to have to be able to compete against dozens of ladders to come out ahead on cost effectiveness. An escalade (which is the technical term for an assault on a fortification by ladders) is usually a mass attack, used when the attackers outnumber the defenders quite heavily. It would be implausibly expensive to build enough of your man-throwing engines to take a castle by storm.
On the other hand, if you just want to enable a stealth attack, your man-throwing engine also suffers against a simpler and cheaper technology: A rope with a grappling hook on the end. It is a whole lot easier to get a coil of rope up close to the walls without any enemies noticing. A rope can be carried and thrown by the very same man who's going to climb it without needing any help from anyone else (the rest of the army can be mounting a diversionary attack elsewhere, if you want). And obviously, a rope is very cheap and very quiet in operation. Ladders might also be useful for some kinds of sneak attacks (where you don't need the attack to remain secret for very long), since they can be relatively quick and quiet to deploy!
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[Question]
[
Let's say your kingdom is plagued by a particularly nasty breed of demons. These hellspawn are similar to particularly ugly thick-skinned humans, except for one thing: they are roughly twice as fast as an average human.
There is currently a band of 100 of these creatures roaming the countryside. They possess natural armor comparable to chainmail, and are equipped with knives. Luckily, you've had time to prepare, and you plan to meet them in a field for battle with 100 of your own men. My question is, **how would you pick/outfit these men in order to have the best chance of defeating these demons?** What tactics would achieve the highest probability of success, provided you have access to whatever arms, armaments, and skill-sets would be available at around the 15th century?
The battlefield is essentially a flat plain with grass/weeds not exceeding knee height. The distance between armies when the battle begins is no greater than 100 meters.
[Answer]
First, build traps. Traps are cheap, easy to install, and most importantly don't eat, sleep, or take breaks. Start with some of the following:
* Tripwires
+ If the creatures are moving quickly, hidden wire or rope will trip them up. For added effect, line the area in front of the trip hazard with sharp stakes hammered into the ground, broken glass, or even just sharp rocks.
* Caltrops
+ It doesn't matter how fast you can run if you have a metal barb stuck through your foot.
* Pits
+ With or without spikes at the bottom, a pit will slow anyone down.
* Rough terrain
+ Swamp, mud, or rough rocky ground is sure to slow anyone down, too.
That taken care of, equip your men with bows, and as soon as you see you enemies, start firing barrages. They may be able to dodge one arrow (likely not), but a hail of arrows will bring them down. Any creatures that fall into a trap will take some time getting back up; archers should single out fallen creatures for a few extra arrows.
If you ever end up in hand-to-hand combat, use big weapons. Twice as fast is quick, but a body moving twice as fast still moves a lot slower than a sword, especially a rapier or similar light weapon.
If you control the terrain and can pick them off with ranged fire, there won't be much left of the critters when you're done.
[Answer]
Short answer: Are you crazy?
The key in any planned military encounter is to do everything to tilt the odds in your favour. You want a preponderance of men, proper equipment and logistics, terrain which favours you, accurate and timely intelligence, etc.
Meeting these deamons 1:1 on an open plain violates almost any of these rules: you don't have the strength to overcome them, you have given them a battlefield which allows them to use their strengths against you, you have no hidden approaches to surprise them or cover your retreat. You may as well have the 100 knights form up and lead the parade welcoming the deamons into your kingdom.
First: their speed. You want to put them in a place where their speed is negated. Open plains are out, dense woods, broken terrain or even an urban environment will largely negate their ability to move fast.
Second: manpower. The traditional metric for victory in the offence is to have a 3:1 advantage as a minimum. Having 300 or more men allows you to have specialists like archers or cavalry (as noted in another answer), be able to guard your flanks and have a reserve to make up for casualties and pursue the enemy as he breaks and runs. Engineering troops to build obstacles and strongpoints or dig trenches are also a plus.
Third: Intelligence. Where are these creatures? When are they expected? What are their goals? Is there a way to distract them? A particular weakness? Maybe you can get them to invade that neighbouring country which is always threatening to invade you.
Fourth: Logistics. Putting all these troops in the field requires logistical support. Archers will need more than one quiver of arrows each (as a simple example), the engineers will need tools and materials and everyone needs to eat and drink (including the horses for the Cavalry and pack train).
Finally, command and control. Obviously using radios is out, but messengers to bring news of where the deamons are, signals troops to use flags, drums or musical instruments to direct troops in the battle and a Captain to lead them (if it is a really big force, a Captain-General with a Lieutenant General to assist, a Sergeant Major General to look after troop discipline and a Quartermaster General to supply the men and horses).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/37415.jpg)
OK, *now* we're ready.
[Answer]
If it is a straight battle use 30 archers with longbows, 40 pikemen with swords as well and 30 heavy cavalry.
Have the 30 archers fire together in a volley, not aiming for anyone. This could cut then down pretty fierce before your demons could make much headway, and a line of pikes would be pretty effective at cutting them down more. You will likely have a 10 to 1 or better advantage by now. Have the pikemen drop their pikes and draw their swords. By now they outnumber the demons and the demons morale is crushed.
Once the pikemen are exhausted we just charge with the heavy cavalry and finish off the demons.
[Answer]
Step one: Ask yourself why you're only bringing 100 men rather than bringing 1,000 and simply crushing them through overwhelming numbers. You've had time to prepare, and you've got the home-field advantage, as it were. Why give yourself a handicap by forcing an equal fight?
Step two: Twice as fast as an average human isn't *that* fast. It basically means you're fighting Olympic runners. So right off the bat, it isn't as hard to win as it seems from the title. Soldiers, in general, would be faster than the average human simply due to their training. Therefore make sure that you're bringing professional soldiers, not recruited commoners.
Now, let's think about how the battle can play out. You said a hundred meters apart, so let's say (since they're at Olympic level) that it will take about ten seconds to cover that distance. You could probably get two volleys of arrows off in that time, so let's say have fifty archers shooting. They do two volleys, then draw their melee weapons, preferably blunt weapons like maces or hammers.
Meanwhile you have shields/pikes as a front line to deal with the initial charge. After the two armies meet, the maces from the back come in and finish cleaning up.
Alternatively, just have a hundred mounted knights do a cavalry charge.
Long story short, moving twice as fast as average humans doesn't give too much of an advantage in the scenario you have. It's not so fast to be outside the realm of possible for a human, so it basically just devolves into "How to battle top-condition humans armed with knives and chain mail" - and that's something that humanity has been answering for centuries.
[Answer]
Send 70 Juggernauts wearing this thing
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bX2aN.jpg)
A heavy armor was enough to stop 100% of the knives,swords,heavy swords,giant swords,arrows and sometimes even some giant war hammers. Then arm the juggernauts with maces and shields.
A mace is heavier than a sword but can surpass every armor, there are only few exceptions.
The shields are not needed to defend the juggernauts, the armor is just enough to make them completely indestructible against some knives, the shields are just there to push back the enemies and eventually can be used as a weapon too.
other than the 70 juggernauts take 30 archers to rain arrows on the enemy, this would kill most of them. The archers would be defended by the juggernauts.
The hellspawns army can not do any damage and will likely try to escape but arrows will be faster than them, only few lucky hellspawns will survive and flee successfully.
Seriously give the hellspawn other weapons, there's a reason knives where only used in duels by the nobles and almost never in warfare.
[Answer]
100 men, 100 meters - if the demons are even a little smart, this will be very one sided. Many of the solutions are to use typical combat tactics of the age with lots of arrows, pikemen, and cavalry. I also see lots of comments and answers that twice as fast is not that much. Both of thes are wrong...take a look.
**Speed**
The fastest man alive today runs the 100m at about 28 mph. Now double that - 56mph! Assume the demons don't train for the olympics and have only 60% of that speed and they are still travelling at over 33mph or 50fps. Think about that for a second - oops your dead because a demon 50 feet away just slit your throat. They will have covered 100 meters in 5-6 seconds.
**Jumping Ability**
The highest high jump is a bit over 8 ft and the longest running long jump is just shy of 30ft and neither athlete was travelling over 33mph! You could assume easily, that these figures would rise by a minimum of 50% at that speed and strength. This means that traditional pike men will be all but useless as the demons simply hurdle them.
**Inertia**
Let's further assume the demons are small in stature, maybe 5'4", and with their natural armor giving them a little bit of weight, you could estimate a creature in 120lb-130lb range; let's say 125lb on average. According to these [calculations](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/carcr.html#cc1), the demon could generate more than 1500lbs of impact force after only 6 seconds (assuming 3ft of stopping distance)!
**Reaction**
So the demons have closed the 100m distance between 5 - 6 seconds, are hitting like a freight train and your arrows are doing nothing because the demons are naturally armored in chain mail. Now you are in close quarters battle and hoping the arc of your sword will be enough. The problem is, you've barely got half a second to react and move. At 33mp, the demon has moved another 16 feet in the half a second you decided to do something about it. But you are heavily armored and the reaction time has been doubled. You swing your sword, but too late, the demon has already passed you by more than 30 feet and killed 3 of your buddies who never saw him coming.
**So how do we beat them?**
We're going to need some preparation for this. The field needs to be prepared to defeat the demons before they get to us.
* Prepare it with pitch in bands 5 meters apart, within 20 meters of the humans.
* Create some punji pits for them to fall in and stay in.
* Spike the field, pounding 100s of spikes to make running difficult
Once that's done, we need to even the odds a little with some big cats with big teeth, big claws and fast reflexes.
We need arrows, but they need to be pitched so they burn. The demon's mail will minimize punture wounds, but we may set a few on fire. These will also light the pitch bands we set in the field the night before.
We need different armor. It needs to be light, it needs to stop knives, it needs to be layered leather. The necks need to be high and vitals all need to be covered - torso, armpits, wrists, groin, thighs.
Everyone gets a bow; even if they only get one arrow in the air. Some will get 3-5 in the air. At worst this will be a distraction and the field preparation is that much more effective. At best we take out 10 - 20 % before they reach us.
Everyone gets a short sword and small shield. Swords are all sharp and poisoned. Hand to hand is going to suck, but hopefully lightening the armor and armaments will give us enough reaction time and speed to counter and overcome. The poison may not win us the day, but might kill after we're gone, giving others a chance.
Finally, everyone gets a buddy. Close quarters combat needs to be back to back, literally watching each others backs.
All this may still not be enough, but I think it gives us our best option with the limited resources and lack of geographical advantage.
[Answer]
I'd got with longbow and pike.
If you can muster any more men I'd advise it. I don't like 1:1 odds against a foe twice as fast as you. If you can do anything about the terrain or battlefield to negate their speed I'd advise it. (even high ground would help)
Equip your archers with longbows with bodkin points (please do some experimentation on demon skin before setting out to determine penetrability at 100m) Secondarily I'd equip 60 with pikes and hand out a short sword to everyone.
Assuming armies will face off (because you said so) I'd expect a hundred fast demons armed with knives to charge the moment battle is joined. If they're clever fast demons, we should talk because they should be able to take one look at you and realize they're better off using their speed to facilitate guerrilla tactics.
Assuming they'd like to face off like proper gentlemen though:
I'd have my men in 3 rows firing in volleys.
Longbows are effective at 180m so they can attack as battle is joined.
Given that longbow practice ranges go up to 300m I'd guess an expert archer would have quite a good hit rate at 100m getting better every second. Mail from the 15th century is marginally effective against armor piercing arrows (you tested this before you left home right?)
The fastest humans can cover 100m in 14 seconds.
Fast demons can do it in 7-10 (lets assume 2x average human not 2x fastest human, and this isn't track day they didn't line up in a neat row). I'm assuming unencumbered demons because they have no need of armor, knives are light and they're not carrying provisions because you're lunch.
When you meet them they're probably in a bunch rather than a neat line. This slows them down a bit and spreads them out which is nice because the first two volleys should be able to draw and fire a second time (modern archers can shoot accurately every 6-10 seconds, I'd assume trained combat archers to have practiced quick draw basically their entire adult lives). This gives you 150 arrows fired before the demons reach your front lines. We need some calculus here because accuracy improves as they get closer, but since we're guessing at all these numbers anyway lets just wing it and say 50% of the arrows take a demon down. 25 demons left.
The last arrows should be falling just as 25 demons crash against the first row who leveled pikes after the first shot. 33 pikes 25 demons. The second row is going to need to quickly switch to pike to back up the first row. Crashing into a double row of pike at 20m/s is going to do a lot of damage. Now I'm going to assume a handful made it through.
Hopefully being outnumbered 10:1 and out of breath from a 100m sprint is enough to take them down without losing half your men.
It won't be that neat though so bring more men and do more work picking and preparing your battleground. And again, if they're clever you're humped.
[Answer]
What tactics and equipment to use:
* Your best bet, I believe, would be horse archers. For a historical reference read about Mongolian invasions: they attack on horses, shooting arrows as they approach; when counterattacked, they retreat, shooting arrows back at the chasing enemy. Sometimes their enemies were destroyed without even returning any damage. Other ranged weapons may work, too: light crossbows that can be reloaded on a horse back, pots of burning oil (unless your demons are impervious to fire).
* If for whatever reason the above is not an option (you have to stand your ground, guard a camp, etc.), use something like a phalanx, or some other kind of well-organized, tightly packed formation armed with pikes. The faster your enemy can move, the faster it ends up on the pikes. The problem with this, however, is that your enemies have to be charging, and to charge a wall of pikes with their knives, they would have to be a bunch of idiots. Still, such things have also happened in human history, for example, Sekigahara battle, where elite cavalry of Takeda Shingen's not so bright son charged at muskets and field fortifications of their enemies, only to be utterly destroyed. Of course, if you expect the demons to charge at you (maybe they are just fans of charging), do some traps, fortifications, terrain preparation, etc. If they don't charge, maybe try surrounding them with a wall of pikes, or press them against a cliff, a swamp or a river (can they swim?). Although with such relatively small groups as 100 vs. 100 it won't be easy.
* Your enemies probably wouldn't keep any tight formation, because with just knives it won't give them any advantage whatsoever. Still, if for whatever reason they do, charging knights with long lances would probably do miracles against them.
What to avoid:
* One-on-one duels of any kind. Your enemy can dodge or parry your melee attacks easily. You can neither dodge nor parry their attacks reliably (well, maybe one out of ten, if you're lucky). Also, being twice as fast means they hit twice as hard, because what matters is impulse, which is mass times speed of the weapon.
* Anything that becomes, effectively, a series of one-on-one duels, e. g. loosely organized melee. Either stay at a safe distance with your horses, or keep your formation at all cost.
* Contrary to some other answers, I don't think that rough terrain, woods, etc. would do you any good. It could work against big, heavy creatures, such as your horses, not against relatively small, light, agile creatures, such as fast running demons. Also, holding a formation would be more difficult on a rough terrain, probably completely impossible in the woods.
UPD.: perhaps, the most probable reason not to use horse archers is that you may simply not have those in your culture. Nomads, such as Mongols, were practicing both riding and archering from childhood, if your people are mostly farmers, and your warriors aren't good horse archers already, you can't re-create Mongolian tactics in reasonable time.
[Answer]
If your characters have had time to prepare, maybe have them bring to the site of the battle something that could even out the speed difference. Say they bring along buckets of pitch or tar to through across the battlefield, which as a highly viscous liquid, would slow the demons down. It all depends on whether the site of the battle is somewhere that the characters can sacrifice, like an unused field, or a plain that is used for animal grazing.
Generally, your characters would probably use wide area warfare as if the targets are so fast, no bowman on his own is going to be able to pick them off one by one as they can't track the targets movements. However, if you had a squad of archers who could fire arrows blindly in waves, like they would on a wall of somewhere under siege, then bows could still be effective weapons. Also if the enemy just have these knives, then long reach weapons would definitely be more effective against them. I don't have the best knowledge of medieval tactics, but I hope this helps.
[Answer]
You didn't say your men had no magic. If they did and it was powerful enough I would cast a spell like ice or grease right in front of the demons as they charged. They would slip all over the place and you could pick them off one by one. I would also set my pikes in a line so they would have to charge into them to get to my men.
[Answer]
Unlike the horse, where legs are vulnerable, legs of demon are less vulnerable, but demon is also smaller. They have no archers, and have mistakenly remained on the field in the face of my vastly superior force, if they fight to the death, they will all die, if they are cowards, as hellspawn often are, perhaps their superior speed will allow more of them to quit the field during the rout.
The Swiss already solved this problem, my hundred men are Swiss mercenary pikemen arranged in a 10x10 square: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_square>
CHARGE.
[Answer]
Use Glue, or pour something on the ground that can restrict the demons movement speed, then shoot arrows and throw rocks to them. End of story.
[Answer]
If you know where the field of battle will be beforehand then I would prepare by constructing a net around the perimeter of the battlefield (using rope or, if that is not heavy enough, chain). It could initially be laid flat on the ground to hide its presence, but then raised at the appropriate moment to completely surround the battlefield and both armies.
By pulling the net more and more taut, the two armies would be forced closer and closer together, which is great news because speed isn't much use if you have nowhere to move and my guys are wearing full plate armour and are equipped with heavy weapons. Once the opponents' speed is taken out of the equation by restricting their ability to move, it will be the superior strength and armour that proves decisive.
[Answer]
Twice the speed of a human is not that much, when playing soccer I'm always out-performed by people who weighs 20 kilograms less (I basically never touch the ball), but that does not prevent me from hitting them, I have to rely only on good timing and positioning in order to score a goal, no agility or swift tricks for me.
Superiority in equipment and strategy is enough to win, I can remember a Game of Thrones episode (spoiler alert)
>
> where a warrior wearing a full armor suit fight against a Dotraki without armor. The Dotraki is like 3 times faster but the warrior defeats him anyway.
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Well, if the speed starts to become insanely high (like Quicksilver) well your warriors are dead beefs then.
[Answer]
Doing this fight in open plain field is a no-go according to military practice so we need to change this.
1. Lurk them in a canyon
2. Close the exits for example with iron doors
3. Pour burning oil into the canyon from above
4. Success
[Answer]
I made two long comments; at this point I might as well make an answer.
Twice as fast as regular humans is a significant advantage. It wouldn't mean much if you could outnumber them by enough, but if you have the same number as they do, things might be difficult.
However, they have some severe disadvantages.
First, they are on foot. It's hard to stand against a charging horse on foot, and I imagine that is still pretty hard with some supernatural agility. And if your force is on horseback, they can't run you down anymore because in a straight line you can move faster than they can (which will also give you a safe retreat).
Second, they are carrying knives. This is a severe disadvantage in an open battle. They can strike quickly and probably get in close better than a normal human can, but even so... They are going to have a hard time reaching someone on top of a horse and piercing plate mail with a knife. They are also going to have a hard time getting close enough if the riders are carrying longer weapons like spears. Arrows might be even better, although it's pretty hard to shoot an arrow off a horse (although we have seen it work well a few times, ie Genghis Khan)
Third, your group might be better trained. Demons with knives don't strike me as a very disciplined group. If you have some kind of coordinated strategy and they do not have the capacity to react to it, they are at a disadvantage.
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The world is based on the old norse and 13th century Europe culture (northern places, names and climate and Europian titles, castles and technology). In this world an organized group of people resists every-country-controlling realm.
The realm is huge. There are not many countries that stand on their own and none in which the realm has no influence. The whole known world is practically controlled by the realm's absolutistic sovereign. At first I adressed this sovereign as a king but then I thought: "Wait a minute, aren't kings in every bloody fantasy since Tolkien's LotR?" And so I told myself I need to use a fitting not-so-known title that would workingly replace a "king".
### What should this sovereign's title be?
I wanted to go with "governor" (or something like "supreme governor") but I was told that a governor has to answer to someone above him.
### Or would it be possibly for a "governor" to be an absolutistic monarch?
*PS: I don't want to use any Middle Eastern titles like "sultan" or "shah".*
[Answer]
If all the land you rule over is incorporated as 1 state and you're a monarch then you hold one of several titles, **King/Queen** and **Grand Prince/Princess** all indicate hereditary lineage of ruling.
A **Grand Duke** or **Archduke** is a ruler that is a Military leader. This is not supposed to be a hereditary title, but often becomes one. **Duke** is also the title that a King's siblings fall under, because they are essentially peasants and are expected to do all the things that peasants do, such as go to war, but they also have connections which afford them armor and men to lead which naturally forces them down the path of a Military Leader.
A **Caesar**, **Princeps**, or "**First Citizen**" is a monarch for life by popular consent rather than primarily military or hereditary claims. That is the claim at least made by people who take this title, but are more often than not they are just another emperor or king under a different name.
Everything beneath this level are just lower divisions of management...
Above this level there is **High King** or **King of Kings** which is more along the lines of a head-of-the-family of the ruling family which has divided up their family holdings into kingdoms. They're not "a king" in the same way as a king is to a kingdom as the rulers over the sovereign state. Think of it more like what your dad can do - each of your siblings has their own car that in all rights is their car and as such he has no say over what you do with that car, but you will still likely listen to him and people will still go to him when you or your sibling messes up with the car. Now just change car for kingdoms, siblings for Kings, and Dad for High King and it's that idea, same extended down the family tree and passed in much the same way as kingship might be.
Another is **President** or **Prime Minister**, both of which are rulers of multi-sovereign states, but probably not what you're looking for and are more modern. The former isn't a ruler at all in theory and the title is derived from their job of presiding over a congress and is meant to not be prestigious at all. Prime Minister is exactly what the title says it is. A CEO would be the perfect comparison for what a Prime Minister is, they are the top level boss.
**Emperor** is the title for when you directly have the final word of multiple sovereign states without being related in such a way as a High King might be. The difference is mainly how those ruled recognize those who are ruling, either as foreigners or not, and whether they are incorporated into the body of the nation or not. Colonies and foreign territories are not incorporated into what is considered - the US for example which makes it not an empire, but if they did, while still maintaining they are separate sovereign nations, the US would become an Empire and the President would be an Emperor. Queen Elizabeth is an Empress, but because it is more or less just "technically" true, most ignore it.
**Khan** is on the same level as king, but **Genghis Khan** is combination of Emperor and High King due to the fact that everyone not of a given state, village, kingdom, was considered a foreigner to some degree, but they were all the same "culture".
**Caliph** is a religious absolute ruler, separate from the secular ruler, a **Sultan**, who rules over a religious "empire" which has Sultanates beneath it. This is pretty much the same things, but a more defined version of what happened during the middle ages with the **Pope** being the true absolute ruler from which all Kings derived their right to rule from.
Everything else is pretty much just different word for the same concept, and you should notice with "Caesar" that terms can derive from a person's name.
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With regards to the term Governor. The title literally means "One who Governs" and is a perfectly adequate term for what you're looking for. A Governor in modern days governs a state in the US and has a Congressman, Senator, and President above them and Mayors beneath them, but the title is more or less the generic word for all the other titles. A King is a Hereditary Monarchy Governor, for example. And usually we use Governor as the title for a lot of translations rather than trying to figure out the right grand sounding title or the original word. The only titles that get used more or as frequently are King and Emperor, because King has come to mean "the guy in charge" and Emperor has come to mean "the guy in charge with lots and lots of land" rather than what they mean. The fact is that while we think of ruling/running/governing a city is no big deal, in the past the person we call a Mayor today would be an absolute Sovereign ruler. A King is just the title we came up with when one of those guys started beating the others into becoming loyal followers of theirs. And Emperor is just the title for when one of those guys did the same at the newer, higher level. So any title is fine as an "Absolute", but you gotta consider the reader too and how they're going to take and understand it. In which case Mayor or Governor may not be the right choice in terms of getting the desired picture across.
Part of the reason to use a known title is shorthand for telling the type of civilization this is and who's in charge. A Grand Duke sounds like he's in charge but just holding the seat for someone while an Archduke sounds like he lead a coup. And both of these, for some reason, sound more oppressive and evil than a King. It doesn't have to be that way, but it does "feel" that way so if you're going to use these terms I would suggest thinking on what they evoke in your mind about the civilization and how you might use that in your story. For example, the Archduke might give off the vibe he's a villain throughout the story and then he ends up being a hero, or he might act like a hero the entire story and then at the final moment reveal he's the villain. The first is a surprise to the reader while the latter makes the reader more suspicious and lets them feel vindicated when it turns out they're right.
[Answer]
Here are some root words and evolutions from various European languages that have been used for king equivalents:
* Latin **Imperator** (meaning one who commands) → **Emperor**
* Latin **Caesar** (from the name) → **Kaiser** (German),
**Czar**/**Tsar** (Russian/Slavic)
* Latin **Augustus** (from the name). Became the senior title to Caesar when referring to the multiple Emperors of the Roman Empire of late Antiquity.
* Greek **Basileus** (originally meaning Chieftain). Used by some kings of Greek colonies in classical times, and the Persian king was Megas Basileus (great king) or Basileus Basileōn (king of kings, a direct translation of Persian Shahanshah). Later used by the Roman emperors of the Byzantine period after Justinian ~650-1450.
* Proto-Indo-European **Hreg** → **Rex** (Latin), **Ri** (Gaelic, also **Ard Ri** for High King), **Raja** (Indic). This word probably first refered to PIE chieftains back before pre-history and was carried down as king by many langauages
* Old-English **Bretwalda** (many alternate spellings, possibly means 'wide ruler'). Refers to the High King among the petty kings of England pre-Norman invasion.
* Greek **Autokrat** or **Autokrator** (meaning self-power). A medieval Greek word used for an absolute monarch, referring to the Emperor who was also Basileus at the time. Later Russian Tsars used the term Autocrat to distinguish their absolute authority from the limited constitutional authority of monarchs in Europe.
* Greek **Despot** (meaning master of a household). Originally referred to the emperor, this title migrated down to court officials. Became the title for the prince-like rulers of bits of the former empire after the Latin Empire c.1200 CE. E.g. Despotate of Morea.
* King itself came from Old-English 'cyning' with equivalents in German (**König**), Old Slavonic (**Konegu**), Finnish (**Kuningas**), etc.
* Gothic **þiudans** with the 'thorn' letter probably pronounced as a 'th' sound. Etymylogically similar to the Old-English term 'þeoden' which was a title of a chief. Theoden...where have I heard that name before...
* Latin **Princeps** was Augustus's preferred term for himself, and means 'first' as in first citizen in Latin. Another equivalent would be **Fürst** in German, which referred to a soveriegn prince of the Holy Roman Empire. This isn't really equivalent for you because the HRE implied an Emperor senior to the Furst.
Ok thats all I got. Obviously many more if you want to go to Semitic/Turkic/Indic/further afield sources.
Edit: Okay one more:
* Hungarian **Nagyfejedelem**. Translated as 'Grand Prince' but refered to the 'Khan of Khans' equivalent for the 7 Magyar tribes that invaded the Honfoglalás (the Carpathian basin) and raided Europe for a century. Then they settled down and took the boring old title **Király** which is just another variant on king.
* Also important (to me), Hungarian, Finnish, and Basque are non-Indo-European but written in the Latin alphabet, so they have the excellent combination of sounding exotic and awesome yet being pronouncable/spellable.
[Answer]
I'll just give a list of some possibilities and I'll assume (you mentioned the word 'king') that this ruler is male:
**Emperor**: I don't think I need to explain this one. Realistically, this is the one you should be using. Would be more important than a King.
**Caesar/Kaiser/Tsar**: Historical terms from European countries also meaning emperor
**Basileus/Porphyrogennētos/Autokratōr/Despotēs/Sebastos**: Byzantine terms for emperor found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_bureaucracy_and_aristocracy). Basileus was a Greek term for Emperor; Porphyrogennētos was the son of an emperor (born after the emperor became Emperor and born in a specific room). Used by Constantine VII; Autokratōr is the direct translation of the latin **imperator**, often used for a military commander-in-chief; Despotēs is a more generic court title or a term of respect (now means Bishop); Sebastos translated to **Augustus**. See [kingledion's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/50591/19951) for other European names.
**[Megas/Grand] Archon**: archon was used by the Byzantines to mean something similar to governor. Megas (meaning 'Grand') Archon is the highest ranking official of the emperor's company. This would have been used in the 13th Century.
**Grand Duke**: Self explanatory
Really, what you want for the time period and area you've specified would be **Emperor** (or **Basileus** or other historical equivalent). His aide could be a Megas/Grand Archon and if you have a religion, then a Patriarch could be in charge of it. This would give you a Byzantine-type empire that matches the dates you want.
Other, more remote possibilities:
**Samrāṭ/Chakravarti**: Sanskrit. Also **sārvabhaumā** or **Maharajah** (Indian)
**Morubixaba/Sha-quan/ariki/Qhapaq[Sapa]/k'uhul Ajaw/Tlatoani/Cacique**: Various titles for Kings of various different colonies in America and Oceania/Australasia. Probably not important enough for your liking.
**Shahanshah** Modern Iranian meaning King of King's. You don't want Shah, so maybe not... There's also **Padishah** (with variations on spelling, thanks to @inappropriateCode)
**Dangun** May/may not be a royal title
**Taewang/Geoseogan/Chachaung/Isageum/Maripgan**: Asian titles about a millennium before your era
**bìxià** ('bottom of the steps', meaning 'imperial majesty')/**shèngshàng** ('Holy Highness')/**wànsuì** ('You of 10 000 years)/**Huangdi** ('emperor'): Chinese
**ōkimi**: Japanese meaning 'Grand King'
**Hwangje/Taewang**: Korean
**Khagan**: Mongolian
**Malik**: Middle Eastern. Equivalent to Emperor.
**nəgusä nägäst**: Ethiopian meaning King of Kings
[Answer]
First off, see [Wikipedia's List of titles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_titles) for various examples.
There's two general approaches that you can take.
The first is to use a "translated" title. This is what people who use "king" are doing. "King" is the English word for a hereditary monarch. Given the varying nature of governments, there's various titles that have been applied. For example, "Emperor" (e.g. Japan), "Prince" (e.g. Liechtenstein), "Duke" (e.g. Luxembourg). As there's a limited number of such titles in English, these types of titles tend to be used rather frequently. There are, however, various native English terms that are more rarely used. For example "[Despot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despot_of_Epirus)", or "Dictator".
The other approach is to just use an "untranslated" term. This is what happens with things like "sultan", "shah", "emir", "tsar/csar, or "maharaja" . For whatever reason, people felt that native English words like "king" or "prince" didn't quite fit, so just took the native word as a loan word.
This second approach may be a reasonable one. The important thing here is that the title matches the tone of your setting. So, yes, "sultan" is right out for a old Norse setting. Instead, I'd look to the (untranslated) titles which were actually used by Norsemen. For example, "[Druhtinaz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druhtinaz)" was supposedly a Proto-Germanic term meaning a military leader or warlord. Or "[Fraujaz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraujaz)", a common honorific. A little research into the cultural background (you are doing research about old Norse, right?) should give you some options.
Also keep in mind that if you pick relatively obscure titles, few people will complain that your usage is not exactly the historical one, unlike the common English titles.
If you are making a constructed language for your world, you can simply make up a title and use it untranslated. Take a look at the (purported) etymology of current titles for suggestions on construction. For example "[King](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=king)" shares roots with "kin", and probably derives from a term meaning something like "leader of people/family". "[Lord](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lord)" comes from "master of bread". Take the translated phrase, condense and twist it, and you have your title.
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Regarding using "Governor" as an absolutistic monarch, that may be possible, given a suitable backstory. For example, why is the monarch of Liechtenstein a "Prince" and not a "King", despite not being beholden to any other sovereign? It's because of history. Liechtenstein started out as a principality beholden to a bigger entity (the Holy Roman Empire). The larger entity collapsed, leaving Liechtenstein on its own. There's no reason to change the title, so the monarch remains a "Prince". (Similar events play out in [The Unwilling Warlord](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/422225.The_Unwilling_Warlord) by Lawrence Watt-Evans: a new government is created by a powerful magic user who disappears by the end of the book, leaving his "Regent" as the head of the government "waiting for his return", despite no one actually believing he's coming back.)
You can certainly set up the absolutistic monarch as a "Governor" with a suitable backstory. For example, have the realm start off as a small region with a "true" governor, but have it grow to a world-spanning titan without giving up the traditional title. ("I may be absolutist, but I'm humble.") Alternatively, you can set up the backstory such that the monarch is a "governor" for some non-temporal power (e.g. gods, demons, or parallel universe governments - either real or imagined).
Or you could just ignore others' objections about what a "governor" can or cannot do. After all, how can you be a Queen if you're elected with term limits? George Lucas [made it work](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Monarch_of_Naboo).
[Answer]
A made-up word with presumed etemology of a historical root was used in Science Fiction by Isaac Asimov ([and others?](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/137225/title-used-for-an-autokrat-in-an-asimov-story/137227#137227)): **The Autarch of Lingane** featured in *The Stars, Like Dust*.
Others may have used the same idea as an homage and generally good idea, so you might want to do the same.
[Answer]
Matilda ruled the English as merely "Lady of the English". Hitler styled himself "Fuehrer" (leader) rather then the more formal "Kanzler" (which in turn translates merely as "Foreign Minister" in many languages). The tyrant in 1984 was the Big Brother. Gaddafy ruled while pretending to have no title, and no formal role in government. So I guess it can be anything, from Idi Amin's *Lord of All Beasts and King of Scotland* to Stalin's *Secretary General*. Your ruler can be anything, from "Conqueror of the Known World, and Heir Apparent to the Unknown" to "Sub-Director of the Administrative Department" or "Best Friend of People".
It would depend on whether your ruler plays a traditional role (being the son, grandson, great grandson, etc., up to the 27th generation, of a dinasty of rulers), in which case titles like King or Lord would be of choice; a bureaucratic appointment by a governing clique (which would match more a pedestrian title, like Great Secretary, Chairman, Deputy Chief of the Third Section, Plenipotentiary Delegate of the Higher Political Committee); a military commander turned ruler (Generalíssimo, Admiral of the People, Feldmarshall, Commander Supreme); a religious figure invested in power (Deacon, Father, Monseigneur, Spiritual Director, Hand of God); an adventurer who came into power in times of crisis but intends to be the first of a dinasty (Emperor, Supreme Leader, Light of the World, President Eternal and Hereditary, First Citizen, Head Supreme of the Coalition of the Willing).
And of course, it depends on the flavour you intend. From your description, Jarl or Ealdorman, Herr, Freiherr, Koenig, Hertog, Konger.
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Konungr is the old Norse term for a king.
You could add some flourishes like "Blessed of the All Father", "Defender of the North" or other similar additions based on the history of the empire.
Notably most monarch usually had many many titles.
Queen Elizabeth II has a whole Wikipedia page just for her titles.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_titles_and_honours_of_Queen_Elizabeth_II>
I found a pretty exhaustive list of noble titles in various languages/cultures from the Society for Creative Anachronism:
<http://heraldry.sca.org/titles.html>
A good point I found there is that the addition of place names is often used in titles, they are not just the King, but the King of something, Earl of Someplace, etc.
[Answer]
As an alternative to some of the truly excellent list answers posted here, it is worth mentioning that a lot of the listed titles, as well as many unlisted ones, are originally derived on whatever the holder based its claim to power on.
E.g.:
* "President" derives his power from presiding over something (like "President of the European Council")
* "Emperor" (orig. "Imperator") from being the supreme commander of the army
* "Prince" from being "first among equals" (*princeps inter pares*, a designation of the de facto emperor coined by Augustus)
* "Messiah", a title sometimes used to denote the kings of ancient Israel means "anointed one" and refers to the appropriate ceremony and consequentially the ruler having been divinely chosen
* Emperors of China claimed the title of "Son of Heaven", referring to their heavenly mandate, which some scholars today translate as "therarch"
So if you really want to be original, think about the realm's history and/or religion; think back to a significant event that the first ruler participated in and that was crucial to the formation of the realm, and establish its "official" historical or religious interpretation.
For a fictional example of something like that, the Septim dynasty of The Elder Scrolls universe claimed the title of "Dragonborn", on account of Tiber Septim having been, well, Dragonborn, speaking the dragon tonuge, etc. If you want to make this more exotic to English-speaking readers, you can pass this through Greek or Latin or any other foreign language of your choice, real or fictional.
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When a smaller state is nominally autonomous but practically under the thumb of a hegemon, the hegemon sometimes calls himself the smaller state's ***Protector***.
If there's a formal feudal hierarchy, anyone from whom you depend in the ‘org chart’ is your ***overlord***.
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Tangent: The word *king* is related to *kin*. I don't know if this is scholarly consensus, but I've read assertions that (in at least Germanic tradition) a king had to be of a sacred family, because his role was partly priestly – and therefore someone not of such a family who held sovereign worldly power could at most be a *duke*. This may be why there were Grand Dukes but no subordinate Kings in the Holy Roman Empire until rather late in its life.
[Answer]
Here are some that I think are cool
ALL-FATHER
POPE
EMPEROR
since it is fiction you could go with something never used but which has significant meaning (latin forms of all words work)
eg:
king of LIGHT - **REXLUCEM**
king of REALM - **REXIMPERIUM**
power - **POTESTATEM**
destroyer - **EXTERMINATORE**
you get the idea...
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"Keisari" is the Icelandic (thus very close to Old Norse) word for "Emperor", cognate with Kaiser, Tsar, and Caesar but not obviously so.
[Answer]
One more to add to your list:
**Potentate** - a person who possesses great power, as a sovereign, monarch, or ruler. - 1350-1400; Middle English
<http://www.dictionary.com/browse/potentate?s=t>
[Answer]
There are a lot of good suggestions, but I don't see the one I first thought of:
*[Hegemon](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hegemon)* - (from the Ancient Greek for "leader")
* A dominating leader, or force.
*[Hegemony](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hegemony)* -* (formal) Domination, influence, or authority over another, especially by one political group over a society or by one nation over others.
* Dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group or hegemon acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force.
Hegemon has been used by Orson Scott Card in the Ender books.
[Answer]
Some suggestions:
the Inca empire - the word inca means lord. The monarch was the *Sapa Inca* or "only lord".
in the Jack Vance novel *the Languages of Pao* the monarch of the planet Pao was the Panarch, which was meaningless to me until I separated it into Pan and Arch - all highest.
The Greek title of Pantokrator for Jesus Christ - all ruler.
Cosmocrator - ruler of the Cosmos.
Padishah - Lord king or Master King. Translate from Persian into your language. Note that during the Mughal empire the highest title that the Padishah granted to Hindus - either vassal rulers of regions or landless officials and courtiers - was *Maharajadhiraja bahader*. *Maharajadhiraja* means great king of kings, *bahader* makes a title one step higher.
Perhaps in your world people may call their monarch "the King" but when they talk about the monarch of the realm they call him **"THE KING"**.
Depending on how pagan Norse or how Christian western European the society is, the people may use titles in both their native languages and in Latin. Just as eastern European medieval rulers used titles in both their native languages and Greek, the language of the "Byzantine" empire.
As a matter of fact it is possible to claim to be the rightful ruler of everywhere and also to be a governor. Some Popes claimed to be the rightful rulers of the world, and yet used the title *Vicarius Christi* "Vicar of Christ", claiming to be the representative or governor on Earth of Jesus Christ.
Similarly the Roman emperors are considered to be (almost) absolute monarchs, and yet the title of emperor is derived from the Latin word *Imperator*, which has many shades of meaning. *Imperator* is connected with Jupiter, the main Roman god, according to some sources, and thus makes someone sort of Jupiter like.
*Imperium* was power and authority in general, and the military, political, and judicial power of Roman magistrates who were granted *imperium* in particular. So *imperator* might be a generic term for magistrates and promagistrates who were granted *imperium* to rule over their province.
In the later Roman republic victorious generals - who would be magistrates and promagistrates and thus be granted *imperium* during their terms of office, would be hailed as *imperator* by their troops, thus becoming more or less entitled to a triumph at Rome. A Magistrate's *imperium* was limited in time by his term of office, and in space by the border of his province.
Augustus the first emperor was granted the power of *imperium proconsulare maius* "greater proconsular authority" or *imperium proconsulare maius et infinitum* "greater and infinite proconsular authority". This made him superior in authority to proconsuls governing senatorial provinces as well as governor of most of the provinces - the imperial provinces. In most provinces the Emperor was the governor and the highest authority in such a province would be the Emperor's legate acting in the Emperor's name.
Thus the Roman Emperor was sort of the governor of everywhere, and his *imperium* or governorship was not limited to a single province but included all the provinces.
And don't forget that a true emperor claims to be the rightful ruler of everywhere. And in real life we know the universe is incredibly vast. Suppose that every solar system is ruled by a someone with the comparatively lowly title of King. A ruler of 10 solar systems might be a king to the second power, or a king of kings. The ruler of 100 solar systems might be a king of kings of kings or a king to the third power. The ruler of our galaxy might be a king to the eleventh power. The ruler or emperor of the whole universe would be at least a king to the twenty first power. And of course the physical universe might be gazillions of times larger than the known universe.
So don't be afraid to have a ruler with kings of kings and kings of kings of kings among his vassals, or who claims to be infinitely higher than a mere king.
I kind of like the idea of people addressing a powerful leader as "Master of All". Of course that is a form of address and not a title.
After the assassinated Julius Caesar was defied, declared a god, his adoptive son Octavius, the future first emperor Augustus, used "son of the divine Caesar" as part of his name, to great political advantage. Caesar had been decreed Dictator for Life, or actually Perpetual Dictator, shortly before being assassinated. I can imagine that some ambitious Roman might have claimed that since Caesar was the Perpetual Dictator his appointment was still valid and the spirit of the Divine Caesar was giving the government orders though the ambitious Roman. Thus someone might try to become ruler of Rome while claiming to be the mere mouthpiece or vicar of Caesar.
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**Chief** (anthropology) or **Chief Poobah** (colloquial 1950s) or **Chief Executive**
**Honcho** (Japanese for boss) or **Head Honcho** (colloquial 1950s)
**Chairman** (corporate or communist)
**Grand Master** (Masonic) or **Master** or [other masonic titles](http://www.themasonictrowel.com/education/others_files/masonic_titles.htm).
**Facilitator** or **Liason** (Oberlin student government)
**Speaker** (House of Representative) or **Listener**
**Minister** or **First Minister** or **Prime Minister** or **Premier** or **Secretary**
**Captain** (nautical) or **Admiral** (naval) or **General** (military)
**Director**
**Crown** (English law) or **Scepter Bearer**
**Muad'Dib** or **God** or **Goddess** or **Messiah** or **Christ**
**Ayatollah** or **Iman** or **Rabbi** or **Sensei** or **Sempai**
**Big Brother** or **Uncle Sam**
**Don** (Mafia)
**Archangel** (Biblical) or **Dali Lama** (Buddhism)
**Jinn**
**Lucifer** (literally, "Morning Star").
**Judge** (Biblical; Judge Dredd).
**Warlord**
**Grand Wizard** or **The Great Oz**
**Supreme Leader**
] |
[Question]
[
So, my villain captures my main character hero's best friend. He likes to keep all of his captured enemies as morbid trophies. Once an enemy is defeated, they are all knocked out, covered in concrete, and stood up to be displayed for the villain's amusement.
They are kept alive during the entire process and the person is fed and watered and waste removed, throughout the incarceration.
So my question is: **Would there be any ill effects from being a statue for 3 months, in a standing position?**
[Answer]
Have you ever had a cast on a knee or elbow for something like 40 days?
When you get the cast off, the muscles are really reduced in mass, and the mobility of your joint is greatly reduced. And getting it back is painful.
3 months are going to reduce the person in a miserable state: no muscles to support the standing position, no joints mobility.
I am assuming that with
>
> kept alive while all this happens
>
>
>
you mean also taking care of some basic hygiene during those 3 months.
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Wow, that's quite a harsh torture.
Short term, any victims would probably get lesions from all the strain of being in a position which most people usually can't hold for more than a few hours. They will also have a hard time breathing (unless you allow for extra space near the chest), which will end up killing them in minutes to hours.
Medium term (from a couple days to a week), sweat and waste accumulate. This may cause infections if the person survives.
Long term there will be the trauma from this form of torture. This is probably worse than going to a solitary cell. There will also be severe atrophia of many muscles and a vitamin D deficit due to lack of sunlight, which indirectly will make their bones weaker.
[Answer]
You face a series of threats that come in waves.
Immediately, there's the problem of making the mold properly. Just pouring concrete over someone won't work. They move. They breathe. This presents issues. If the mold sets improperly, your victim cannot breathe, as others have pointed out.
Wet concrete is an alkali, so your victims are being burned as the concrete cures as others have [pointed out](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/116704/32987).
Concrete contains sand and often small rock particles. These will cut your victim as they sit there, entombed for days.
Concrete is exothermic while curing. This paper points out that wet concrete poured at 20c (68f) will rise to 35c (95f) at it's peak.
So your victim is suffering from burns, abrasions, and temperature differentials while the cement cures.
Your villain must spend a great deal of time setting up the victim properly. An IV must be introduced to provide fluids and nutrients. Some kind of exit path must exist for fluids and solids.
Air tubes must be provided. Or better yet, a mask, to prevent cement from entering the mouth or nose.
If the face isn't protected, you now have cement blocking your ears and destroying your eyes. Without a full head shield, your victim is probably blind and possibly deaf after the ordeal.
Now you face hypothermia once the cement cures. (Ever sit on a cold concrete floor? Yeah, that, but now it's your whole body.)
And your victim will be put through high levels of pain as their muscles spasm and joints suffer under the physical strain.
And that's just the first day or two.
You also face high risk of infection from all of the cuts and burns and "bed" sores suffered up to this point.
Then there are the mental issues. You've just put someone in a sensory deprivation tank that they cannot escape and cannot even move inside of. They are at higher risk of [hallucinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation). The link also describes someone who:
>
> For 1,307 days, Padilla was kept in a 9' x 7' cell with no natural
> light, clock or calendar. When Padilla left his cell, he was shackled
> and fitted with heavy goggles and headphones. His counsel argues that
> while he was being interrogated Padilla was subjected to harsh lights
> and pounding sounds. While meeting with his counsel, they reported
> Padilla exhibiting facial tics, random eye movements and unusual
> contortions of his body. According to them, Padilla had become so
> "shattered" that he became convinced his lawyers were part of a
> continuing interrogation program and saw his captors as protectors.
>
>
>
So your victim is being mentally and physically destroyed.
Muscle atrophy can begin to set in within days.
>
> Disuse of the muscles, such as when muscle tissue is immobilized for even a few days of unuse – when the patient has a primary injury such as an immobilized broken bone (set in a cast or immobilized in traction), for example – will also lead rapidly to disuse atrophy.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_atrophy)
>
>
>
And your victim is at higher risk of [blood clots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombus).
[Answer]
Concrete burns, [severely](https://precast.org/2010/05/cement-burns/). This is relevant to the physical health of someone you cast in it.
<https://precast.org/2010/05/cement-burns/>
Standing completely still for 3 months will probably allow enough blood to clot that you simply lose vascular function. Even if you dont, you'll probably die immediately after being freed by something like a [Pulmonary Embolism](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17400-pulmonary-embolism)
Breathing will be difficult because in order to cast someone semi-realistically you'll need the concrete to match their body,but if it hardens anywhere inside the maximum size of their expanded chest during breathing, they'll suffocate. Short breaths might work but breathing short,fast breaths is going to keep them from sleeping, tire their diaphragm abnormally(possibly a factor) and drastically affect oxygen levels in their blood. That kind of restriction can cause a form of panic and may cause them to hyperventilate. I'm not an expert in this but I suspect you may be able to drive someone insane with this.
In addition if they are cast in the wrong position their upper body may take most of the weight when the mold is stood up, essentially [Crucifying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion) the person inside the shell.
3 Months of inactivity is gonna cause severe atrophy as mentioned, if this affects standing muscles, back and legs etc, the person may not be able to stand or walk at all.
3 months in solitary is easily enough to cause varying states of mental trauma depending on the person involved.
3 minutes encased in a shell would cause the complete psychological breakdown of some claustrophobes I know.
GerardFalla and CAM pointed out that concrete is exothermic during curing, rising to approx. 95F(35C) in a room at 68F(20C). While you need to reach 104F(40C) to experience skin burns, heat stroke occurs at 104F(40C) *internal* which you'll easily reach if you lock a person into 95F(35C) thermally conductive material.
If you manage not to experience heatstroke, you might die of hypothermia ironically. A long time in physical contact with a thermally conductive slab of concrete could result in [Hypothermia](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypothermia/symptoms-causes/syc-20352682) which only requires your body to drop below 95F(35C). In a 70F(20C) degree room being in full-body contact with a big stone radiator might actually kill you.
As CAM pointed out, the victim is likely feverish, in shock, abraded and chemically burned. Their body's heat regulation facility is likely compromised.
[Answer]
Even assuming that the evil guy has had the decency of providing intubation for waste disposal, other than severe muscle atrophy, the hapless victims will be dead from dehydration anyway, since concrete is such a hydrovore substance.
If they had any lesion prior to be turned into trophies, those lesions will get infected and go gangrenous.
Standing so long on your feet will also, well, send your feet in a gangrene
Even in forced immobility, dehydration and temperature (you'd keep emitting body heat inside that life-sized cage) would cause muscular spams. A series of painful, atrocious cramps.
Oh, but here comes the best part: concrete may look like an ominous sludge when fresh, but upon hardening that sludge **expands**. The victims' bones will be mostly broken by the time they become statues.
And, last but not least, psychological damage. Being entombed in your own body and staying conscious for that much time will cause those poor guys such a breakdown as to add a new definition under 'claustrophobia' and 'PTSD'.
[Answer]
If the victims are held in an upright position, [suspension trauma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_trauma) seems highly likely. This occurs when the human body is held upright without any movement for a period of time. Basically, whithout muscle movement the blood will have a hard time returning to the torso from the legs. This will eventually lead to death by oxygen depravation of the brain.
According to the wikipedia article, the condition usually occurs after more than 20 minutes of free hanging. The victims may be able to fight it for a while by using their leg muscles, but eventually they will faint in an upright position and die. Seems like it would be hard to stay alive even for a day.
On the "upside" how ever, if your villain is aware of this risk, he could avoid it by putting the victims in a safer position.
[Answer]
Assuming that they have access to oxygen, my biggest concerns would probably be muscle atrophy and compression around the chest which would stop their lungs from expanding properly. They'll also likely develop varicose veins from weakened valves causing blood pooling, which can lead to hemodynamic changes that cause certain cardiovascular diseases.
If the villain is so intent on keeping his captured trophies alive, could something along the lines of trophy cases work instead? Rather than have the victims encased in concrete, he could have them in decorative cases which are displayed throughout the room. There would also be consequences to this, especially of the psychological kind, but it would make meeting physiological demands a lot easier.
[Answer]
Assuming that the poor victim survives the threats from the other answers (he'll probably die of heatstroke just from the cement curing because there isn't a good way for heat to be released), deep vein thrombosis may kill him.
Even having your legs still for a long airplane trip can cause a blood clot to form in the legs. This can cause swelling and pain, but those aren't the real problem.
Clots tend to break off and travel through the bloodstream. They can end up in the lungs causing a variety of extremely unpleasant symptoms. Imagine major coughing fits while in the concrete prison. These clots will eventually reduce the victim's lung capacity. Expect many of these things to form and eventually kill the victim.
Congratulations. You've found a method of torturing somebody to death far worse than anything I've ever done to a fictional character.
] |
[Question]
[
In my world I plan to have a naval army with boats that are driven by manpower. The rowers are not slaves but are also soldiers. However, I am struggling to find examples of times in history where someone whose job it was to row a boat would also wear armor, march on land, and fight in battles.
Can you provide examples of armies or campaigns that had boats rowed by men who also marched on land and fought in battles?
[Answer]
Vikings!
If the Vikings had to row, everyone on the longship took their turn at an oar (though they sailed any time they could, because who wouldn't?) -- and when they went ashore to fight, everyone in the crew had a shield and weapon and armor comparable to what everyone else was wearing at the time -- helmet and hauberk, at a minimum.
Seems to have worked pretty well -- they raided and colonized successfully over a range from modern Belarus to Greenland and even Newfoundland, all of Europe accessible from the Atlantic, Baltic, and North Sea, and even (I've read) into the Mediterranean. It was a model that worked for them for almost four hundred years.
[Answer]
I found this all very surprising, the majority of the ancient world relied on free men as rowers of their ships. They'd also fight on rare occasions, but were considered very valuable since rowing the big ships with lots and lots of oars was a skill.
And, since ramming was a significant part of their tactics, the oarsmen fought from below decks propelling the boat.
The idea seemed to be given the number of men employed as rowers on a boat, that if slaves were used then you were handing them the means of escape.
For merchants moving cargo from port to port, the ship owners would lose their investment in humans as well as their investment in the ship's cargo if their slaves revolted and rowed away. Merchants adopted sails to power their vessels much sooner than warships. Presumably, they were cheaper to operated and didn't have the risk that the engine would run away with their property.
Similar circumstances apply to warships, you don't want divided loyalty on your oars.
It was apparently later in history that slaves and convicts were used to man galleys.
[Answer]
**War canoes!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FrQCV.jpg)
[source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stanley_and_the_white_heroes_in_Africa;_being_an_edition_from_Mr._Stanley%27s_late_personal_writings_on_the_Emin_Pasha_relief_expedition_(1890)_(14803850333).jpg)
Depicted: a central African war canoe. War canoes were also used in North America and the Polynesias - in addition to paddles the Maoris also used sails on their giant canoes and used them to ram other canoes. I am 99% sure that anyone along on such an expedition would be expected to be able to perform all jobs.
I think these cultures all used paddles. Oars were definitely used in Europe and asia but I think they used paddles, not oars in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and Polynesia. It is a good question.
[Answer]
In ancient history, oared "pentekonters" ("50's")were essentially used like Viking longboats, with the oarsmen becoming soldiers (or technically Marines) once they hit the shoreline.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ekaou.jpg)
*Pentekonter*
These were the sorts of ships the Mycenaeans used to sail to Troy in the Iliad, and during the real life Bronze Age.
During the Classical age the ship itself became a weapon, and only highly skilled professional oarsmen were capable of carrying out the complex evolutions of naval warfare of the period. Given the sheer number of oarsmen and the need to put the ship ashore at night and during inclement weather, it is extremely likely that a large portion of them acted as Marines to guard the ship, forage for food or act as raiding parties. There would be a portion of "real" Marines (Hoplites carried aboard) who would act as leaders or to stiffen the unarmoured rowers ashore.
Naval warfare changed pretty dramatically after the Classical period, with larger warships and larger portions of armoured Marines aboard (and ships also becoming larger to carry projectile weapons like catapults), making the contribution of rowers in combat much less likely.
After the end of the Classical era, the Vikings recreated the sort of naval raiding that the ancient Mycenaeans used thousands of years before.
The last real use of armed rowers was in the fleet of the *Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta*, where the oarsmen were free and often expected to leave the oars and storm the enemy ships. The long projection on a Venetian galley was a boarding ramp. During the Battle of Lepanto the Venetian wing of the Christian fleet baked water and pivoted, driving the Ottoman wing against the shore. The Venetian wing then stormed ashore and slaughtered the beached Ottoman crews.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AKgbB.jpg)
*Venetian galley. While this model does not show the oars, there could be 144 oarsmen aboard ready to storm enemy ships*
So the prerequisite is that the rowing crews must be free men, and a naval doctrine that requires the additional manpower of the rowers in order to successfully carry out combat. This also precludes the oarsmen from exiting the ship during naval combat outside of ramming and boarding, since it is far more advantageous to keep the ship as an active fighting platform.
[Answer]
As described in [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley), galleys in the Ancient world were all rowed by free men. As a result, all of them would have been willing to fight. Galleys being rowed by slaves was a relatively recent innovation in the late Middle Ages.
Whether these men also fought on land as well as in sea battles is less likely. If rowers left their ships, the ships would be lost if the battle was lost, and the cost of a ship was very high. And in spite of their great strength, rowers would have no real chance to practise skills with weapons.
[Answer]
It's possible (like the Viking, Native American,..) but it wasn't widespread because it's quite impractical and risky ..
First, unless you have complete control of the sea, it will be very dangerous.. If an enemy fleet appears, your undermanned ships will be gone - they can't even run away since they don't have enough rowers.. Warships are very expensive, and you won't want to see all that money sink beneath the waves (or worse, fall into enemy hand). Not to mention all the marines you just stranded in hostile territory, without food or reinforcement..
Secondly, even if it's safe, a navy still has more use than acting as a single-use troop transport.. One of the most important functions of a navy is logistics - either carry the supply/troop themselves, escort the ship carry the supply, or try to stop the enemy doing the same.. Many empire (like the Roman) looked down on navy, since it was just there to support the "real" armed force.. that why many examples given here (Viking, war canoes) are mostly used for raid or small-scale conflicts, where logistics (and even naval battle) is not a big concern..
So what to do then? Most of the time, just ferry your actual land army to do the fighting inland, while your ships make sure these soldiers are well-fed and, in the worse case, have a mean to retreat.. Some galleys also have their own marines; however, due to their limited number (mostly just a few dozen per ship), they were mostly used as support during amphibious landing.. Rowers rarely fight, even at sea; and if they do, it's mostly because their ship was boarded.
[Answer]
There are a number of examples in Thucydides' "History of the Peleponnesian War" of sailors being armed and fighting alongside the regular soldiery. Since the ships of the time relied on multiple banks of oars to power them in combat this probably extended to the rowers as well (though to my recollection he does not explicitly mention them). It seemed to me pretty clear that it was an exception rather than the rule though.
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[Question]
[
The Kingdom of the Dwarves has been rich and prosperous since the days that the first Dwarf-father awoke in the roots of the mountain. In the uncounted ages since he rose, the depths of the mountain have been carved into an intricate labyrinth of passages and palaces, workshops and dwellings, great halls and quiet chambers.
But, rumors of the golden treasure of the City-under-the-Mountain have reached the fire drakes of the north. Glori, the greatest of their kind, has set off to take this shining jewel of the Underworld for his own.
---
The Dwarven city is an expansive set of tunnels, great hall, and open spaces under the mountain. It is occupied by hundreds of thousands of Dwarves, and can field a large army of thousands. Dwarven warriors are sturdy, well armed and armored, and fire resistant. Dwarven axemen could damage or even kill a large fire drake, if given the opportunity to attack its vulnerable underside. Dwarven technology is equivalent to the high Middle Ages (~1300).
Fire drakes are long and thin, rather like snakes. They are winged and can fly, but they can also crawl through tunnels underground. Most passages carved wide and tall enough for dwarven pedestrian traffic can fit a drake through, even the great Glori. Drakes are as smart as humans, possibly smarter.
The drake's armor is largely impervious, although vulnerable in the face and underside. The face is not a good place to attack, because fire drakes, of course, breathe fire. If dwarves hid in a dwelling place with a door too small for the drake to fit through, the drake could cook the inhabitants of an average sized home with one breath.
Though there are few spaces large enough, Glori can fly inside the city in its biggest areas such the Muster Square and the Temple of the Stones.
The City-under-the-Mountain is ages old, older even than the drakes. But Glori himself is many thousands of years old. Though the dwarves might bar the great doors against him, there are many hidden and ancient passages under the mountain. Glori will eventually find a way in through a long lost tunnel; the dwarves must prepare to fight him inside their city.
**Given the above information, what are the best tactics for the dwarves to assume to defend the City-under-the-Mountain against Glori?**
[Answer]
**Use a Guillotine**
Move all the treasure to one dead-end cavern. Leave all doors open in the rest of the system.
Block the treasure cave entrance with an important-looking locked door, made of wood.
Behind the door is a huge raised guillotine blade that is triggered by an automatic mechanism or by a few volunteers.
Evacuate the rest of the cave system to a nearby forest where the dwarves can camp until Glori is dead.
[Answer]
From my experience with dwarf fortress, what you want to do is trap the dragon and use it as a source of FUN. Basically trap it and use it to terrorize prisoners and bad dwarfs.
**Lava**
The funnest way is to create a trap passage way. One roughly double the length of Glori and positioned so that if he wants to get access into the inner sanctum of your city, it is the easiest way through (aka block the other passages, or station them with a ton of guards to deter Glori from entering those ones). Once Glori enters the tunnel completely, you shut of both ends and open the trap holes in the ceiling. Pour some Molten Lava into the room, enough so that Glori will be left with just his head sticking out of the magma. Let it cool down and now take the dragon entrapped in solid stone out of the room and put it somewhere nice and view able. (If its really cold, you could do it with water and ice. But that would only temporarily contain Glori, which is more than enough time to deal with it).
**Spike Traps**
Another answer straight out of Dwarf Fortress, Spike traps. These are traps in the ground that when triggered cause up to 10 *weapons* to shoot up out of the ground (I say weapons because it let you throw in anything, but spears or pikes are what you realistically want). Force Glori to fly low by creating low tunnels or placing large metal pikes in the ceiling to force Glori closer to the ground. Once Glori passers over the spikes, he either triggers the spikes or your Dwarves trigger it, impaling his soft underside.
**Build a Wall**
As we all know, dwarves are master builders. Simple find the area Glori is in and seal it off. No one is as skilled as Dwarves in creating solid walls of rock and once they seal him off they can listen to the angry cries of Glori in peace.
**Flood it all**
Water is annoying and can be extremely powerful. Tap into an natural aquifer or water source and allow it to pour through your tunnels into the depths. Creating in it sealed off passage way which is sealed off from the main kingdom will allow you to quickly identify potential routes for Glori to get into your fortress. Find some water flowing in a tunnel? Seal it off. Of course, this might make Glori fly up even faster, but dwarven ingenuity is a double sided axe.
**More traps**
Okay, know these traps are big traps that take a long time to reset. Examples are the swinging blades from Game of Thrones. and The Boulder from Indiana Jones. Once you manage to lure Glori into the traps range, you activate it and pray to God it works. In this case, I suggest massive smithing hammers like those shown in The Hobbit, that the dwarves used to forge equipment. Put a dragon between those and they're dead. Otherwise, a convenient giant statue of a hammer or some massive stalactites should be enough to do the trick.
**Standard Approach**
There is no victory without sacrifice. Prepare your soldiers with shields and armor. Put spikes on them to deter Glori from biting them and hopefully focus on flames more. Pair your dwarves up, with one throwing bolas, nets, chains or spears (with chains) and the other with a large shield to block the flames. One blocks the flames, the other throws crap at Glori until he is weighed down and can no longer fly. Once he's on the ground, just keep hacking at him.
Note: I assume your dwarves are actually masters of architecture and mining. Sure there might be hundreds of unknown tunnels, but your dwarves should know exactly what they have mined and which passage ways lead to where. No dwarf wants to be the one who accidentally brings down the entire kingdom by mining through a support wall and no dwarf wants to go out searching for gems only to end up at someone else search site or even worse lost. It might be confusing to us humans, but dwarves know their stuff.
[Answer]
# Hit it in the voonerables
>
> 'Im sure a hero will turn up in time,' said Carrot. With some new sort weapon, or something. And strike at its voonerable spot.'
>
>
> 'What's one of them? Said Nobby
>
>
> 'A spot. Where it's voonerable. My grandad used to tell me stories. Hit a dragon in its voonerables, he said and you've killed it'
>
>
>
### Lacking a hero with knowledge of the dragon's voonerables, you need to be a little more systematic about this.
First you need to stop Glori flying. The great advantage of dragons over dwarves is air superiority combined with ranged weaponry. Fill the space where a dragon could fly with obstacles. Ropes and chains, stacks of junk, anything to stop a dragon fully spreading its wings. Keep him uncomfortable.
Collapsing ceilings on corridors can act as traps or barriers, whether to keep a dragon in or out.
* How many tons of rubble can a dragon effectively push or dig through?
* How much of the mountain do you need to drop on its head to kill it?
After that it's all about small spaces that dwarves can attack from but a dragon can't attack into. Consider the length of the head for example:
* If you make a space in this shape, can the dragon insert its head in such a way as to attack this space effectively?
* If you make it *this* shape, does the dragon's jet of flame follow the corridor round and hit it in the side of its own head?
Remember dwarves are the great blacksmiths and miners of the world, there's nothing they don't know about both moving rock and handling fire. Creating traps such that if the dragon blows fire into the wrong place it ends up toasting its own ears will greatly limit its freedom of action.
Murder holes, but rather than murder holes in the ceiling as usual, put them in the floor so dwarves underneath are poking holes in the vulnerable underside of your dragon.
**n.b.** A dragon thousands of years old is likely to know that dragons don't get to live for thousands of years by flying into dwarven fortresses and taking them all on head on. I'd expect something much more subtle than a frontal assault from this old beast. Dragons are cunning and have the wisdom of age, people are foolish, *beware infiltrators and traitors*.
[Answer]
### Blow it up.
Dragons are big, but plenty of animals are big and still get killed. The distinguishing feature of a dragon is *flame*. A dragon doesn't win by being big, it wins by shock and awe, and because flamethrowers are spectacularly effective at room-clearing.
The problem for a dragon underground is that its opponents are in control of the air supply. And whilst it has a flame-proof mouth, it is not explosion-proof.
[Firedamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firedamp) is a major problem in mines. Usually you want to let the ventilation systems dissipate it cleanly. But if you know you've got a dragon coming, smart miners might *store* it. When you hit a pocket, you might simply seal up that part of the mine temporarily, with a gas-tight cover. Repeat until you have a whole bunch of sealed-up areas filled with firedamp, with ropes attached to the gas-tight covers. For bonus points you could leave open an access door around that area, kind of hidden but not very well, so you know where the dragon will be entering. Once the dragon's in there, shut the outer doors and use the ropes to open up all the pockets of firedamp. Then just wait for the bang.
For more technologically-advanced dwarves, this can be taken to new levels. Their mines will most likely have forced-air ventilation. If they have some knowledge of chemistry, they could easily pump methane or other explosive gases through the ventilation system. Again, wait for the bang.
And even more amusingly, you could have it burn itself up. Whilst a dragon's mouth and guts may be flame-proof, they're only proof against burning in atmospheric levels of oxygen. Pumping high levels of oxygen down the ventilation system will ensure that anything which burns will do so in *spectacular* fashion. The [Fire Triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle) means you don't need to supply extra fuel if the dragon's already supplied its own; all you need is extra oxygen.
[Answer]
Greatest disadvantage for Glori is that he is alone. As such, multiple methods may be implemented against him.
* Any known straight tunnel may be closed from both ends trapping it effectively without chance for diversion.
Given the doors hold against it, the chamber's ventilation the may be sealed to kill Glori by suffocation.
* Drapes of chain may be hung from open spaces to hinder flying, diverting its path as needed.
* Flying exposes the underside of Glori, giving dwarves chance to turn it to a pin cushion, given dwarves use bows or crossbows.
These methods may result in massive losses for the dwarves while attempting to manipulate the Drake, but the siege itself will ultimately fail.
[Answer]
Why defend? By all means, make sure he comes, tell everybody about your treasures if nothing else helps. Having an endless source of fire in your city is what every dwarf dreams of. Never have to light coals and pull the bellow again if you feel like smithing. Cold winter? Fancy a hot bath? No need to collect fire wood.
Now the only tricky part about it all is *keeping* him. Dragons are not well-known for being amused by providing free fire or by their general courtesy, for that matter.
Thus, the bait treasure needs to be placed where there is only a single point of access, and the passage needs to be able to be barred with fireproof (sliding rock wall 2-3 meters thick?) doors. Something like the seal-off mechanism in pyramids as seen famously portrayed in the 1955 movie "Land of Pharaohs", only maybe closing the passage a tidbit faster.
You will likely want a couple of small (too small for a dragon) vents going to the smithy (or city warm water facilities) near the front so you can harvest the fire. And, of course, an opening somewhere at the rear so you can pull the dragon's tail or poke him with a pointy stick when you need fire and he doesn't feel like exhaling.
[Answer]
>
> The Kingdom of the Dwarves has been rich and prosperous since...
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We all know where this trope goes.
The dwarven army will never defeat the dragon by itself. They may not be ninjas, but they are still affected by the [inverse ninja law](http://cool.wikia.com/wiki/Inverse_ninja_law):
>
> The inverse ninja law is a media trope regarding **not only ninjas, but any character type that is shown to attack in massed numbers, such as soldiers**, robots, daleks, or vampires (but not zombies). It states that the threat level of any number of ninjas or other whatsits is inversely proportionate to their numbers. Therefore, if you're attacked by a lone ninja, you're in trouble, but if you meet an army of ninjas, they're going down.
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What they really need is [an adventurer](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDragonslayer) who will be more glad to defeat Trog Dor Glori just for glory, gold, fame, or a combination of these. In the very least the gold and magical items ar disposal of the dwarves should be plenty. It's just a matter of establishing compensatiom for the hero services.
If not a single hero, then a party of player characters adventurers can bring in a mix of talents that a bunch of nameless NPC's the dwarven forces lack, thus presenting a greater threat to the dragon.
[Answer]
Mr Miyagi's best defense: *No be there*.
**Fake city.**
Inspiration: the antitheft trick where you have a wallet with $42, a photo of Zsa Zsa Gabor and some useless cards. When the robber demands your wallet or the pickpocket snakes it, that is the wallet they get. Your real wallet is deeper, in a fake interior front pocket.
Glori has heard rumors, but she has never been to the City Under the Mountain. The apparent entrance to the city leads to a City Under the Mountain, OK - a halfassed city but actually not even half - a great room with some 4th rate treasure, a couple of buildings and tunnels, and that is it. Glori will not be surprised that the dwarves all run away when she shows up. She might be disappointed that the city is not all it was cracked up to be, but she understands how legends work. She is content - it is nice enough, and she took it fair and square. She will curl up on the mound of gilded lead and brass (which is arranged in a surprisingly comfortable way!) and go to sleep.
Those with a discerning eye who explore the halfassed fake city will note that the sculptures decorating the interior lack the decorum one expects in actual civic artwork. Dwarven civic sculpture usually depicts individuals fully dressed and facing forward. Glori does not have a discerning eye for dwarven sculpture.
[Answer]
These dwarves have had warfare before as evidenced by the presence of a military. Unlike a castle where you fill open space with stone, dwarves fill stone with open space to build their fortifications. This means you control every entrance the enemy has and what the entrance looks like, and the dwarves will have made use of this. I am assuming the dwarves have very little time to prepare as the dragon will travel faster than the news of its possible destinations, so only ad-hoc defenses or defenses that would be expected against "normal" armies.
Entrances might be wide avenues for the trade and traffic to go through, but the surrounding area can be hewn any way you want.
* The walls lined with arrow slits for (X)bowmen to Use? Check
* "small" artillery like Ballista's to shoot any enemy siege engines like a rolling wood&metal arrow shelter? Check. Hey this would fit well against a dragon
* Murder holes in the ceiling where things can be dropped from, like chlorine gas (heavier than air) to suffocate, boiling water, tar, burning oil or molten lava/metal if not normal darts, arrows, small rocks or boulders big enough to crush any siege engine (or dragon) driving through it? Check.
* a tunnel below the entrance where fire can be lit and holes in the floors where the smoke can rise through to reduce vision and suffocate the enemy? Check. The tunnel could also be used for a bunch of spearmen to stand below and stab upwards of luckless enemies walking over.
* A slightly slanted floor with giant metal balls at one end to crush anyone trying to move up the entrance? Check. Alternatively the entrance can be sloped downwards and the balls are released from the ceiling of the entrance, possibly rolling across the walls from the sides so the balls can more easily be collected and repositioned.
* Large contraptions designed to kill. If these dwarves are the more technical kind that use massive contraptions to haul ore up, use elevators or similar tricks you can power killingtools with them as well. A giant blade that comes from a slit in the wall and cuts a squad through could be a boon against a dragon
* Designed collapses to bury enemies.
* The standard tricks of the trade from chokepoints to ambushes and whatnot.
[Answer]
Here are some tactics:
* Trap the dragon. Have chambers and tunnels that can be sealed so that the dragon cannot get out. Put murder-holes in the bottoms of the trap-tunnels, to attack the dragon's underbelly with spears.
* The dwarves keep, or hire, large mongeese or ferrets to hunt down giant snakes in their tunnels.
* The dwarves snuff out the dragon's flame. Perhaps they use giant bellows to pump out all the air from a portion of the city. Or perhaps they use backfires to use up the oxygen.
* Flood the chamber that the dragon is in.
[Answer]
One of the critical factors in defending against Glori and his ilk is going to be the presence and availability of weaponry that can hinder or injure him. While enough sturdy armoured Dwarves may be able able to swarm and crush him under sheer weight of numbers, doing so against a fire breathing foe in cramped tunnel conditions is going to get real ugly, real fast.
Small portable siege engines, such as the [Ballista](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista) or [Scorpio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpio_(weapon)) may be able to pack enough punch to penetrate the thick draken scales. These could be set up at choke points in the tunnels, as well as key locations in the city itself to provide cover against an airborne fore.
Fortifications could be designed to be more resistant against a fire-breathing enemy, with armoured hatches over arrow slits and doorways
Traps could be set at likely locations in the old tunnels. A skilled stonemason could even set a trap such as an ordinary dwarf could walk through unharmed, but any creature the size and weight of a drake would cause a cave-in, burying the beast under tonnes of rubble and stone.
[Answer]
I find it wrong that this question assumes that Glori would implicitly have higher hand. To me, there are too many variables to determine who would win and what tactics would be superior.
The most important part is preparation. Both sides's level of praparedness can range from voefuly unpreprated to crazy prepared.
If Glori is not stupid, he would spend lot of time and resources to prepare for his assault. He could gather information on layout and traps of the fortress by either stealing or buying blueprints or capturing or bribing dwarves. He would hire adventurers or mercenaries to help him in the assault. He would have equipment made to protect his weak spots. He would send spies to sabotage traps or open gates at the right time. If he was really rich, he could bribe nearby (Elven) kingdom to declare war on the Dwarves and lure their army out of the fortress. If he was patient, the whole thing could be done over many years, as he has plenty of time.
If Glori was trully intelligent and patient, he wouldn't attack the fortress at all. He would go there not as and enemy, but as a friend. The dwarves would be suspicious of him at first. But over many years, he would make effort to be seen as friend and good thing for the fortress. He would get acquinted by the nobility of the dwarves. He would slowly influence the events of the fotress as to gain more influence and make dwarven nobility be seen as incompetent and corrupt. He would take control of the military and treasury. And in the end, it will be the dwarf peasants themselves who would rather have him as a King and not some corrupt, incompetent Dwarf.
tl;dr; Glori ran Palpatine on the dwarves.
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Rock is fireproof, if you get the right type. The dwarves don't know every way into their mining complex but they should know all the access ways into their active areas, where they live and process ore and other materials, and they certainly *will* know all the routes to their treasure vault(s). They should start by telling the drake exactly how to get to their treasure, then rig a "choke route" tunnel, one that the drake has to take no matter how they enter the complex, with a sheath of [Mica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica), which is extremely fire resistant, and thick slabs of the same at each end that can be dropped in to block the tunnel off. Then they can trap Glori as she attempts to get to the vault and let her starve. They could also coat the mica in something that's toxic when burned to speed up the process if Glori tries to burn her way out.
[Answer]
## Crush it
The dwarves are masters of stonework and construction, it is likely they will have ways to strategically cut off enemy approach by collapsing tunnels.
Even if a cave in doesn't kill Glori, it could trap her giving the dwarves a change to attack the prone drake, or prepare larger weapons and defences.
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The entrance should be small and narrow, and in the entrance there should be a hoistable wall and after that wall, yet another hoistable wall that cannot be hoisted before mentioned the first wall has been unhoisted.
I hope that makes sense.
EDIT:
I was imagining an entrance to the mountain carved to fit the size of 3-4 dwarves standing shoulder to shoulder and maybe the height of two dwarves on top of each other. Now this solution would only be to keep the dragon out of the mountain and would require two iron/metal walls, standing about 3-4 meters from one another. The idea is simply put the same as the doors to secure research facilities (or so I imagine) where the second door will not be able to open, before the first door is properly shut. This would provide more entrance security for the dwarves, but would also eliminate the threat from the dragon, since they are, as OP explained, very long and would therefore not be able to fit in the gap between the walls.
With the enginuity of the dwarves this solution should be feasible.
] |
[Question]
[
There have been many (many) questions around here about the how, why & even when will man kind become a multi planet society... this is not one of them.
This question in fact goes the other way around, why would humanity fail to become a multi planet society?
Assume for a minute that all of humanity (yes every single one of us, it may be unrealistic but this is world building after all) is all of the sudden willing to put aside religion, consumerism, pride, ethnicity, politics & all the other silly reasons that divide us and we all agree that settling another planet (at least one) is super important and are willing to sacrifice a lot of comforts to get it (let's say around 15% of the total world GDP as well as mass agreements that needed resources and laws are passed to help make the dream a reality).
Starting tomorrow morning (literally tomorrow morning is the starting point of time) every single man & woman alive will work to create a self sustaining colony off world with the undivided attention, desire & resources of the entire world working together to reach that goal before 250 years pass (why 250? because)
Seems great right? now the question is what is a possible realistic reason (which isn't a natural disaster sending us back to the stone age or wiping us out) that will make us fail that goal?
[Answer]
As every project manager knows, **scope creep** is the root of all evil.
At the beginning, it was just about sending one ship to another planet. Easy, just a matter of time.
Then someone said something about food diversity, citrus fruits and, for whatever reason, pineapples. So a team was split up to figure out how to grow pineapples on a space ship and in a human colony. Suddenly scientists talked about gene splicing pineapples and strawberries, though no one could figure out why it had to be strawberries. Probably because the wife of the team lead liked them. It took fifty years until someone said "screw pineapples" and stopped the whole thing.
In another meeting another guy talked about how awful dying in space could be, so another team was split off to change the triple redundancies from the current ship design to quadruple redundancies. Just to make sure, they put double redundancies on the quadruple redundancies. The added weight required a redesign of the whole engine system and they had to figure out how to store ten times the previously planned fuel. New propulsion systems were experimented with and abandoned. Eventually someone decided that triple redundancies should be enough after all.
Then someone asked about space pirates, so a team was sent off to develop space weaponry just in case. Nuclear missiles, lasers, railguns, the whole spectrum. They spent forty years just to figure out whether they could build an antimatter bomb. Also armor to defend against all that, which required new materials, so another team was sent off to develop micro-non-newtonic-carbon-tungsten-fluid-nanotube-reactive-reflective plating. And don't forget about shields like in star trek, for which another team experimented with em fields for years. At least someone put a stop to the team that was developing synthetic humans to defend against boarders, though that was more for fear of the AI revolution than because of costs.
In another meeting... well, you get the point.
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One problem could be that humanity in fact becomes **too committed** to the space program and **neglects economic sustainability**. By concentrating too much on the colonization project, other branches of the economy get neglected and stagnate, which then causes a ripple effect eroding the economic foundation which makes the space program possible in the first place. Examples:
* Budget cuts in health care and sanitation lead to epidemics in the countries which mine the raw materials for the space program, killing all the miners.
* Budget cuts in transport infrastructure make the supply chains between the many manufacturing facilities involved in the space program unreliable and result in huge delays. That's really problematic because interplanetary space missions often rely on planetary constellations which only last for a couple days and only happen every couple years. That means a single part which is a week late can delay your whole space program by several years.
* Budget cuts in education result in a shortage of qualified scientists, engineers and managers to plan the space program and a shortage of qualified workers to execute it. The space program needs to lower their hiring standards. The result of having less competent people in all positions are inefficient solutions which waste resources, unsolved problems which delay project plans and [catastrophic accidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents) which destroy material and cost lifes.
* Budget cuts in agriculture lead to famines and cause the world population to decline, which amplifies all the problems mentioned before.
So while the space program might move really quick at first, the problems caused by neglecting the economy which supports it make it grind to a halt after a few decades. Humanity realizes that in order for the space program to have any chance to succeed, they need to do a 180° turn and focus on economic development again. But all the problems which affected the space program will also affect these economic stimulus programs. So it might take a very long time to get the economy back to what it needs to be in order to sustain itself and an expensive space program. After they fixed the economy, most parts of the space program will be obsolete, repurposed, forgotten, beyond its shelf-life or ruined by years of neglect. They will basically need to start from square one again.
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Well... besides the earth being flat and the literal glass dome preventing anyone from escaping... (jkjkjk)
Given enough time, anything is possible. But if we wanted to do this quickly, we would run into some serious road-blocks.
**Finding a planet which is Earthlike enough**
First of all, we need to find a planet similar to earth. Colonizing Mars might seem like a good idea, but its mass, nearness to the sun, lack of a moon like ours, and the many other differences between Mars and earth, make it likely that plant life won't grow there easily, and long-term exposure to that environment may have significant negative effects on other organisms. There are hundreds of factors involved in enabling life on earth: mass, density, temperature, atmosphere, nearness to sun, type of sun, mass/density of moon, nearness to moon, magnetic field, mineral contents of ocean, ordering of layers in crust, volcanic activity, shape of mountains affecting wind, etc. etc. etc.. For example, we know that long-term exposure to non-earthlike gravity can cause people's bones to atrophy. Every one of those conditions, if not met well, can lead to other serious health conditions. Given the time it will take to get there, we should get this right the first time, so take a few years thinking about where to go, and maybe send out a few probes.
(60 years)
**Getting there**
There have been some theoretical ideas thrown around for how we can get a probe to fly-by a far planet which we think is earthlike in as little as 60 years using massive solar sails, but the probe was tiny, and we still had a problem where it couldn't decelerate quickly enough to orbit. At best, we would get a few flyby pictures at extremely fast speeds. Stopping in a foreign solar system within one lifetime is a problem we haven't figured out how to solve (and might not be able to solve because of the limits on acceleration which humans can tolerate). So, we'll have to first make a space station which can support plant and human life for several generations, which might be impossible even with spinning stations to simulate gravity, because of the inherent differences those stations will have when compared to earth.
(120 years or more)
**Generation Ship Planning/Construction**
Due to the careful planning of the ship-side ecosystem, population control on the generation ship will have to be strictly regimented. This will represent significant social engineering problems which humanity has never faced before. The few experiments with this kind of small isolated population, which I'm aware of, have been steaming failures. We really don't know how humans will handle spending their entire lives aboard a space ship with only a handful of types of food, their romantic interests potentially having been arranged several generations prior to maximize diversity, and the possibility that a tiny, simple mistake made by some kid on the ship could cause a breach or something and kill everyone. Not to mention, you'll have to have warehouses with new electronic components to constantly maintain your ship in-flight. Electronics don't last all that long.
(For this, assuming just one minor failure unaccounted-for, I'm adding an extra 20 years. But realistically, we should expect several failures)
**Planetside Resources / Terraforming**
If we can land the generation ship on the planet and call that acceptable, then skip this part -- but I think a "planet colony" should actually be interacting with the planet somehow, and not just making physical contact with it via ship struts.
Then, once we get there, we'll have immediate resource issues planetside. Earth represents a very distinct mix of materials favorable to life, and we might not be able to survive off-world without either frequently returning for supplies, or quickly gathering resources from several off-world planets simultaneously. All human colonies depend on transformation of one type of matter into another type of matter in order to produce energy, food, etc. Our plants depend on water with very specific ratios of specific minerals in it to bear fruit, and won't live with too much of this or that other chemical in the water.
Suppose there is too much of Chemical A in the water, so we harvest Chemical B to make filters. When it's time to recycle the filter, we can't recover all the B from the dirty filter, so we have to continually harvest more. Suppose B is not abundant in the soil, so we have to dig deep to find stores of it. To make matters worse, the outer crust of this planet is also dense with Chemical C, which is toxic to humans on contact, but the process of removing that requires lots of time, energy, and maybe even some Chemical D, which just isn't present on this planet at all. So we harvest D from a nearby moon or asteroid, use it to terraform a small portion of the surface, and set up deep and very dangerous mines in the planet to acquire B. In the meantime none of our plants will grow, so now we have to land our generation ship safely on the planet, or be constantly shipping supplies back and forth in orbit. Anyway, all that to say, Tweaking the planet to enable it to support life will take several more generations.
(At least another 100-200 years before a small part of the planet becomes self-sufficient.)
**The Unknown**
Lastly, we don't actually know what's far far out in space yet. We just have a pretty good idea, but there's a chance that we'll just be repeatedly killed by the unknown!
(60-120 years setbacks, unpredicted events, compensating for unknown)
**Conclusion**
Like I said, given enough time, anything is possible. But 250 years might be a bit too aggressive of a timeline. Given my estimates, I'd give us a minimum of 360 years; more realistically 500+ years. 360 is not too far from your window, though, so who knows? Maybe we can do it.
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Cultural shifts: Once your generational ship arrives at the other planet, your descendants look out of their nice, clean space-ship with its hydroponics bays and gravity controls in every room. They see an ugly ball of dirt, all irregularly shaped, where "down" is always the *same* direction, and you can't turn off the gravity to float in peace.
Then they'll mine the planet via robots to build a second ship to expand to, and head off elsewhere instead of founding a ghastly "colony" of all things...
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# You will not go to space ~~today~~ ever
Balancing a biosphere over the timespan of 100+ years hasn't been shown to be possible. Even Biosphere 2 didn't manage to run its entire originally planned duration, "Both attempts, though heavily publicized, ran into problems including low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many animals and plants included in the experiment, group dynamic tensions among the resident crew, outside politics and a power struggle over management and direction of the project."
But lets assume that Biosphere 2 as a baseline, to get a reasonably close lower-bound on the problem at hand. It really doesn't matter if Biosphere 2 was only sufficient for 1 person, 8, or 80. The numbers get so large here in a minute that a single power of 10 equates to a rounding error.
The amount of mass involved is on the level of "absolutely staggeringly preposterous":
>
> The whole structure contains (for the record) approximately 170,000 metres3 of atmosphere, 1,500,000 liters of freshwater, 3,800,000 liters of saltwater, and 17,000 metres3 of soil.
>
>
>
4 *million* liters of saltwater. Putting nearly 5 million kg of water into space at \$10,000 a kilogram is not economically viable for any reason, full stop. The soil is even worse. A cubic meter of soil weighs in at about 1.5 metric tons. Or about 25,500,000 kg for the amount in Biosphere 2. And another 220,000 kg for the air gives us $310 billion in launch costs, not including the structure of the ship itself (remember, the space shuttle itself is 75,000 kg for a payload of 4,000-16,000 kg depending on destination), or its fuel. That's already double the total cost of the ISS. And we're not even counting the mass of the plants and animals that will be aboard.
And remember, we're calling Biosphere 2 the bare minimum to maintain **8 people.** In order to run a generation ship you need a bare minimum of 200 breeding humans under strict breeding regimens in order to maintain heterozygosity. That is, to prevent inbreeding. So, multiply all these numbers by 25 in your head. More if you want to be safe and allow for the occasional soul lost to accident or disease.
Now, fuel.
Getting to the nearest system to ours, Alpha Centauri involves:
* [16.8398 km/s](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AProject_Longshot_-_Advanced_Design_Program_Project_Report.pdf/28) of delta-v to leave the solar system from LEO, including a plane change of 9 degrees.
* [32.935 km/s](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AProject_Longshot_-_Advanced_Design_Program_Project_Report.pdf/29) of delta-v to arrive at, and subsequently not leave, the Alpha Centauri system
Lets round that up to 50 km/s for a bare minimum lowest-fuel trip (and remember that these values do not include launching material into space nor landing on a planetary surface at the other end). And being a generation trip, we don't care if it takes 100 or 100,000 years right now, we just to want to work out the bare minimum needed in order to assess viability: a lowest-fuel-cost trip.
So: 50 km/s, 31 million kg, and 8 people.
8,728,724,371,657,847 (8.7 \*1015) kg of fuel using Space-X's Merlin engines. (Feel free to [check that yourself](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-rocket-equation); a Merlin engine's exhaust velocity is 2570 m/s).
That's a small moon. No really, its about as massive as Phobos (10.6 \*1015kg).
That number is so astronomically large as to make any possible improvements in efficiency *meaningless.* Even if we improve the Merlin engines by a factor of 10 and use fuel with an energy density 100,000 better (say, nuclear), that still knocks the fuel costs down to a *mere* 8,728,724,371,657 kg, and we'd have to just multiply back up again once we account for the shell of the space ship, extra fuel for course corrections, obstacle avoidance, a shorter trip, more people, a more habitable system, and so on.
Even if you launch your ship using a [fuel-less launch system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion) out of the solar system, so that you only need "half" the delta-v (remember you can't count on a laser station at your destination, and in truth, we can only cut out a third of the delta-v not half of it, but its largely irrelevant), that knocks your fuel down to 0.006%. Or 520,350,872 kg of fuel (**after** the efficiency improvements and **before** all the other considerations). This is enough fuel to give an (otherwise empty) space shuttle a delta-v budget of 22.73 km/s using Merlin engines. And that original fuel mass? The 8.7 \*1015 kg? The delta-v budget on an empty shuttle is *still only 65.48 km/s.*
### This is the scale of the problem you have.
* Mass is expensive
* Delta-v is exponentially expensive
* Sustaining humans indefinitely requires lots of mass
* Getting anywhere interesting requires lots and lots of delta-v
* Getting there in anything less than "infinite time" requires lots and lots *and lots* of delta-v
The reason the project will fail will be due to the sheer inability of the human race to gather the raw resources necessary and the impossible engineering necessary to build such a megastructure.
[Answer]
Because you need a biosphere. Humans (and probably most if not all other creatures) can't exist indefinitely in isolation. Now to create a self-sustaining biosphere needs a fairly large area, probably the size of a largish asteroid (or a continent on Earth), but there aren't any such places in the solar system.
So you're left with two alternatives: terraform Mars, which would probably take many generations, or build artifical habitats (moon bases, O'Neill cylinders, &c) that are mostly self-systaining, but still need regular interchange with Earth's biosphere to keep functioning well.
PS: The mention of the Biosphere experiments brings up a point, which is exactly what is meant by "self-sustaining". I'm taking it to mean something that could last indefinitely - thousands of years at a minimum - even if all contact with Earth were to be cut off. The Biosphere experiments were short-term, and I do think it would be possible to build a mostly self-sustaining base that could keep operating for years, even decades. But it'd be more like an Antarctic research station than a place you're emigrate to and expect to raise kids & grandkids.
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I can offer a few potential reasons for failure:
A) The problem is harder than expected, and can't be completed in the time limit. It's doable, just not in the time allotted.
B) Many ideas work on paper, but can't work in reality. The socialist communes of the nineteenth century repeated and consistently demonstrated that that economic system wasn't viable despite there being universal acclaim for their merit, rectitude, and fairness. Similarly, when the plans for the self-sustaining colony were being conceived and drafted, some principle or notion or assumption is key to its operation, and no one realizes what that is. It could be an underappreciation for peoples willingness for self-sacrifice or it could be the metallurgical stability of titanium after being exposed to radiation during space travel.
C) Tower of Babel Syndrome. The population of the Earth is too culturally desperate to have common touchstones for practical engineering. That a notion commonly accepted in Germany is not considered important in the USA, and is considered irrational in Asia. This is a real challenge today in transnational engineering projects, and those are just making consumer goods or control modules for automobiles, not a massive and huge system like a self-sustaining colony on a distant planet. Something as simple as engineering units has resulted in comparatively simple space probes to crashing into Mars rather than establish a stable orbit.
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### It will be something small and unexpected.
[Robert Silberberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Silverberg) makes the point somewhere that we may have the technical capability, if we push hard for it, to create an enclosed orbital habitat but that doesn't mean we have the capability to design and maintain the ecosystem therein.
So while there's no reason we couldn't mount an interplanetary or even interstellar colonisation mission and design it to take into account every contingency we can conceive of that doesn't mean that it will succeed. It could be something as simple as the lack of a particular species of ant in the ecosystem of a generation ship, discarded because it carries a potentially harmful bacterium but, unknown to the designers, instrumental in spreading a beneficial fungi. Or the discovery that a particular necessary life-form is sensitive to the minute vibrations of the hull and suddenly stops breeding when the generation ship goes into it's interstellar acceleration phase outside the Kuiper Belt.
The point is that something seemingly inconsequential will result in the project failing, after all the components of it up until that point have succeeded perfectly.
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# NO REASON TO FAIL
Quite simply, given the scenario at hand, there are no scientific, technical, economic, social, spiritual, medical or any other reasons why the project can not be conceived, planned, implemented and at least brought to its first attempt.
If we could snap our fingers and turn every country in the world into producing something viable for the colony or testing something for the environment or researching something for the project, we ought to be able to plan out the project and put up a working colony somewhere (maybe Mars?) along with the associated infrastructure (Lunar base, orbital construction & flight infrastructure) within the given time period of five to six generations.
You specifically eliminate natural disaster as a means of terminating the colony project. The only other viable option is human error. Even if you could get 7 billion people to focus on this project, you can't make 7 billion people pull off any kind of construction project flawlessly. Somebody's going to mismeasure something or forget to screw something together or misplace the operations manual in a locker back on Earth.
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**Other planets suck.**
Earth is so good for us. You can eat the plants and animals and you can drink the water. You can sleep on the ground under the sky. You can find things to burn and keep warm.
The colony planet will certainly be less friendly. On other planets, the water might be briny or otherwise contaminated; you would need to purify it. Or synthesize it from hydrogen and oxygen. You will not be able to plant a seed in the soil - a lifeless world will have a mineral soil and you would need to amend and supplement it. You would need to make atmosphere to breathe and an enclosure to keep it in. All that can be doable with enormous inputs of energy, and that is sustainable until some crisis interrupts supply of the enormous energy inputs. Then the humans die.
If you find a world with an atmosphere we can breathe, that means there is life that is enough like us that it produces oxygen. If there is life there are decomposers. Then we are at great risk of being decomposed for our raw materials by microbes new to our immune systems - we become the Martians from War of the Worlds.
If humans are lucky enough to stumble into a world very much like ours which has been sterilized completely by a gamma ray burst in the recent past, that might be a good place to live and a fun fiction to read.
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**Human Tragedy**
Let's say that tomorrow everyone will agree that we have to colonize Mars and we devote 10% of our GDP to do it. People will grumble about the increased price of living, but most will agree that it is for the greater good.
Now think about who will handle that large amount of money, corruption and self interest will not vanish overnight and then the beaurocracy and management of such a project it will be a nightmare that has plenty of chances to burn out and start wars and embargoes.
Next up it's the planning itself, the Americans might have a plan, the Europeans one the Asian one, every single one solid and everyone from their respective zones will say that their plan it's the best so you will probably have different major attempts at colonization.
And now comes my final point, let's say they all make their preps and send shuttles towards Mars. Not everything is perfect, human make mistakes, let's say that the American shuttle hits something along the way and goes boom. The Asians get to Mars ,but the landing is not successful and they all crash and die, the europeans land , make base but something happens and an air tank explodes or something goes wrong and they all slowly die, all the while the people on earth see their last moments. Save missions are sent, but they will be somewhat rushed and only one or two will return, now do you think that after all of that people will still try?(maybe after a hundred years or so...) I say no, atleast not in the period of time given, there will be huge uproars from the people, politicians and investors. You know how the old saying goes, the desire for safety stands against every good and noble enterprize.
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# General
The establishment of (quasi-)planetary colonies will be a much more daunting task than it might appear at first glance due to the sheer amount of resources (physical and immaterial) needed, prime among it energy.
I expect the energy output needed for establishing any kind of truly [1] self-sustaining off-planet colonies to be several magnitudes higher than today's global energy output. To some extent, resource intensity (use per unit of time) can be traded against time, but your premises include a deadline of a few centuries which implies a tight schedule.
On top of it there is the additional constraint that over the period of establishing the outpost, the preconditions for human life on Earth must be preserved, meaning a portion of resources and energy available to mankind must be diverted to support life on Earth.
Note here that currently mankind does not have established a resource-wise sustainable society on Earth. So the OP's proposal might even be more challenging as mankind might be lacking the knowledge under which constraints true self-sustenance is possible.
The OP has not been explicit on the terms under which Earth society would exist while implementing the colonization plan beyond the GDP proportion. Considering the premise of voluntary cooperation, schemes involving atrocity and genocide ( killing off 'unproductive' segments of the population to reduce the resources needed to keep Earth population alive and to reduce burden on the environment ) seem off the table.
**TL;DR**
A world colony will not be possible within centuries because ...
* Resource requirements are too daunting
* There is no precedent of a truly self-sustaining civilization
# Specifics
Some ideas on different colony modes and their respective hardness to follow:
**In-system**
Apart from Earth, none of the celestial bodies within out solar system is capable of supporting human life. Given your premises wrt resource allocation, the task is thus equivalent to artificially creating a self-sustaining biosphere.
***Terraforming***
Terraforming a natural habitat into an environment permanently amenable to human life is at best a vision with the current state of human tech, a 'teleological' process in that we only know the baseline and the (possibly) the target conditions but have no idea how to actually perform the transition. If we *did* know how to tackle it, today's hot (no pun) topic of Climate Change would receive quite a different spin or might not be an issue in the first place.
Existing sketchy terraforming proposals are a couple of steps away from testable engineering. So complete bootstrapping would be needed.
***Artificial Habitats***
Artificial habitats are in reach of (modestly extrapolated) current technology. However they also come with high resource requirements as the two basic resources of a habitat need to be created at first:
* Physical space
* Gravity
Gravity might be dispensible, though state-of-the-art research in biology suggests that it wouldn't.
**Off-system**
Colonizing an existing, habitable planet comes with its own resource problems, namely the journey to the destination. The distances and thus the timescales involved make a trimmed-down version of the task a subproblem, namely building a self-supporting habitat aka 'generational spaceship'. On top of it comes what is needed for interstellar travel: Mostly energy again. Lots of.
The first step however is to identify a suitable candidate. Next to basic astrophysical properties ( ie. Earth-like gravity, orbit in habitable zone ), identifying a possible existing biosphere and testing its compatibility with human life is part of the job.
Part of the tasks could be delegated to the travelling colonists, with the possible outcome that the designated target world proves unsuitable for settlement, requiring to prolong the journey, possibly indefinitely. If the incompatibility rests on an existing incompatible biosphere, the sterilization of such a world to prepare a human settlement ( by terraforming or an artificial habitat ) seems in gross violation to the cooperative and constructive spirit of the premises and is ruled out (in fact allowing this option would not significantly reduce the resource burden).
# Ways Out
These are mainly scifi - verbatim, as they frequently occur in scifi literature. Most of the solutions would focus on drastically reducing the resource consumption of the colonists, for some time at least, by keeping them alive in some state of 'hibernation' or by assuming that the non-physical self of a human can be separated from and fed into its physical substrate by technical means - 'personality downloads'.
Though these approaches would relativize the resource problems, they are pure fantasies at the moment. Meaning there is no clue whether any of these could be viable.
Moreover they stretch a bit the meaning of what passes for a *human* colony based on philosophical issues.
Other scifi memes like FTL outrightly deny current physics and are thus even harder to gauge. It is plausible, however, that - if possible at all - their resource (energy) demand would even be higher than that of any other proposal.
--
***Remark***:
[1] (Self-sufficiency)
Note that i understand 'truly self-sufficient' to mean in principle being capable of supporting human life for an indefinite period of time without any intervention from Earth, which would include any kind of communication. The period may be shortened by the advent of unforseen cataclysmic events (eg. asteroid impact, nearby novae). What would count as 'cataclysmic' obviously is the soft spot of the definition; drawing the limit at events that even an Earth-bound humanity could not thwart might be a suitable heuristics on the basic assumption that the scale of off-planet colonies will not exceed the homeland for a considerable time.
[Answer]
**Missing Bootstraping Resources:**
Since we cannot yet travel to other systems, we are contstrained to use resources from our solar systems. So even if we would throw all are energy/material/humans at the problem but we lack in one we would be stranded here.
Same as 50 aircraft engineer stranded on an island couldn't build their own aircraft. Or a smaller country couldn't build its own computer. See here for the
[Minimal size for self-sufficiency](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2991/what-is-the-minimum-size-of-a-self-sufficient-industrial-country) .
[Answer]
# Intrinsic risk of civilizational catastrophe from advanced technology
When the Manhattan Project was being developed, some people felt it necessary to check whether a nuclear explosion could ignite the atmosphere, wiping out all life. I think at the time it was pretty clear that this couldn't happen, but the fact that the question even needed to be raised illustrates an important fact: the capability to wield the kind of energy necessary to move civiliizations between worlds, or even just to run our current technologically-advanced (and increasingly energy-hungry) society, may also be the capability to wipe out all life on Earth.
I plead that none of the following disasters are natural :)
## Candidate threats
### Biotechnology
In order to survive non-Earthlike conditions, I imagine we'll need to (or at least be motivated to) engineer organisms unlike any which already exist. Organisms optimized more purposefully and precisely than evolution could manage, for idiosyncratic tasks that we've not seen done before. This creates a potential for accidentally creating something that could be destructive, or deliberately creating something potentially destructive and failing to appropriately contain it. This is already a concern with medical research today, but substantially more advanced engineering technology and more deliberate and ambitious engineering projects scale up the threat a great deal.
This is not a hypothetical concern: [here's a webpage](http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/focus-areas/life-sciences/) discussing some existing initiatives to reduce pandemic risks created by life sciences research.
### Nanotechnology
This one's more speculative. But futurists have raised a concern that the ability to industrially process matter on the microscopic level would unlock the risk of reprocessing matter accidentally that you didn't want reprocessed, like your lab desk and/or vital organs. Self-replicating nanomachines might be hard to stop once accidentally released into the wrong environment.
### Artificial intelligence
SF already has lots to say about what can go wrong here. It's perhaps worth mentioning that this risk is taken seriously in the real world as well, though not typically as the "evil AI with glowing red eyes" model but more that it's actually very hard to precisely and unambiguously specify humanity's strategic goals and values, and hard to be sure they've been correctly understood, and most incorrect value specifications in the hands of a sophisticated strategic agent with more computational resources than us are very bad news in the long run.
### Speculative extremely-high-energy power sources
Very SF; I have no idea what these will be. But essentially, imagine the next Manhattan Project, but with another order of magnitude of yield.
### Dual-use technologies repurposed by bad actors
Mostly I've been talking about accident risk, since your question suggested we were globally united. If you allow even small deviations from that, you allow that many of the advanced and powerful technologies we will develop over the next few decades are also usable by terrorists, death cults, or other groups with an agenda. Wiping out civilization a millennium ago was extremely laborious, required a lot of travel and diplomacy and it was real hard to be completely thorough. Nowadays it can likely be done by unilateral action from any one of several nation states. Maybe in another century or two you'll be able to do it with a device you can make at home from commonly-available parts.
[Answer]
**Stupidity**
If mankind spent on science half of what it spends on war, We'd already be living on Mars.
Already now people hear the cost of sending a probe to Mars and declare it a waste and demand it get spent on the poor and starving.
Between greed, self interest, corruption and egos, mankind can't work together. There is absolutely no technical reason why we can't. We already have the technology to do it. The only reason to fail is a sociological one.
] |
[Question]
[
NB: this question has had some extensive editing. I apologize to those who replied early based on unclear premise.
---
**TL; DR** two societies (druids & nomads) each discovered one kind of mana (resp. blue & orange) and never suspected the existence of the other kind (resp. orange & blue), even though both kinds are interacting with their environment. I am looking for the simplest explanation for that.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mPoJk.png)
## Premise
In my story, magic operates through a mana field. Mana comes in two varieties: *blue* and *orange*. Flows of mana of either kind are subject to elemental influences: mana streams are naturally found along water or wind streams, trapped into some geological sediments and expelled with lava flows. All over the world, evolution has driven a few animals and plants to take advantage of both kind of mana.
Humans however, like most living species, are not normally able to perceive the presence of mana.
Some druidic society, living in forest areas, has discovered a special berry. When consumed it temporarily modifies the vision, allowing to see flows of blue mana. The way this works is by making blue cones sensitive to blue mana rather than normal blue light, hence dense concentrations of mana appear blue to those who consumed the berry.
They have prospered thank to the use of magic, but never discovered the existence of orange mana, even far into medieval times, **long after the existence and usage of magic has been well established, studied and theorized**.
On the contrary, a society of nomads living in an arid desert has discovered independently the use of orange mana, by consuming the venom of some snake. The effect on vision is similar but affects orange cones, which among humans only [some women possess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans). The venom also affects green cones but to a lesser extent. Therefore this society has mostly female mages and has grown to be matriarchal as a result. For the purpose of the question, let's say that around 30% of women are born with this additional cone.
At some point, descendants of these nomads became sedentary and established cities in the desert. They also theorized magic and have a good grasp of it, though not aware of the advances of the druidic societies.
For my story, it is very important that at some point in history, a cultural clash between these two civilizations be rooted in their completely different handling of magic.
## Question
Given that
1. Both societies knew early on about magic ;
2. Both societies had long-lasting scientific tradition of describing the fauna and flora around them ;
3. Both kind of mana are pervasive to the world and necessary for a complete understanding of the species that use them;
I expect that if one waits long enough, both societies are bound to find out about both kind of manas. After centuries, they still did not.
**What is the [simplest possible explanation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor) (i.e. as little new elements as possible) that prevented or delayed these discoveries until late medieval times?**
Some limitations I'd like to emphasize:
* Both kind of mana are (roughly) equally available in both regions.
* Apart from druids and nomads, other societies have discovered magic too, but never both types.
* Although both the berry and the snake are endemic of the said forest and desert, respectively, they are just two examples of species that found a use in becoming sensitive to mana. There are many non-endemic species that use either kind of mana as part of their metabolism.
* Your answer may or may not involve the existence of other ways to become sensitive to mana.
* The nomads and druids descendants have lived separately before the above-mentioned clash. They know of each others through tales of itinerant merchants, but they never suspected that their magics were so deeply different.
## More Background Info
The following is not necessary to answer the question, but provides background for the curious.
* Mana in itself is actually colorless, the names only refer to their effect on human vision.
* In my world, the discovery of the berry is the root of druidism, as druids maintained their privileges in early human groups by consuming the berry and using mana to become valuable members of the group, including communicating with other beasts that consume the berry.
* The reason the berry has this effect is a dissemination strategy: the berry traps mana so that crows, who consume the berry in their normal diet, can spot the berry easily and spread seeds throughout the forest.
* The reason the snake's venom has this effect is part of their mating behavior: males harbour beautiful patterns obtained by fixing orange mana to their scales. The pattern only reveals to females that they have bitten as part of the courtship ritual, but not to potential predators, insensitive to orange mana.
* both societies have been in contact with dragons, which are among the rare creatures naturally sensitive to both kinds of mana. They are far more intelligent than humans but do not normally bother with learning how to communicate with their delicious preys.
---
## Final edit: why did I chose this answer?
Since there were several very good answers I guess I should clarify this. In my view [Cort Ammon's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/129628/52315) involves the smallest set of additional ingredients: it does not involve either society to be particularly narrow minded, but simply ideological reinforcement traps, which are certainly a real thing. In the same category, [IT Alex's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/129636/52315) and [Ister's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/129677/52315) answers were strong contenders.
I really liked the ripple/repelling/void magic sort of ideas, but they set big constraints on the future developments of how magic works in my world.
Answers based on interaction between the venom and the berry or other biological stuff were also great, but I maintain that they fail to explain why druids (resp. nomads) were not worried about other species.
[Answer]
Simple. Berries are particles. Snake venom is a fluid, so it has wave like behaviors. I swear to god, holy wars have been raise in the science class room whether light is a particle or a wave, despite the best efforts of the teacher to teach that they're two sides of the same coin. Why should your manna be any different?
It's fascinatingly difficult to change your mind about something like the nature of light. Once you pick up your own preferred way of viewing light, you tend to craft your experiments in ways which reward that way of thinking. Magic could easily be structured the same way. Once you start down a path, it becomes harder and harder to see from the other viewpoint.
[Answer]
It's simple. The snake that induces the ability to see the orange mana only exists in the land of the nomads. The berries that induces the ability to see blue mana only exists in the land of the civilization.
Though, eventually, there will be wanderers that go into these lands and discover the oranga mana inducing snake or the blue mana inducing berry. But, the nomads had built up through many generations a tolerance to the snake venom. So, if a wanderer is to consume the venom, she might be able to see orange mana, but only for a little while before collapsing and dying. Same thing with the berries, they're poisonous, and the blue mana users have through generations become tolerant to it, but the nomads haven't.
Also, just to take note of; venom only affects people when injected into the blood. Nothing will happen if you drink venom. Though poison on the other hand, affects one both through blood injection and consumption. Just have that in mind when writing on.
Good luck, I really like the concept.
[Answer]
I [have heard it claimed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg) that because China learned to make really good teacups really early, they never needed to make drinking glasses; and therefore from the 14th to the 19th century they missed out on all the inventions derived from glass technology including windows, microscopes, telescopes, glasses, chemistry flasks and test tubes, mirrors and so on.
In other words, **Thing A works so well you don't invent Thing B, so you never discover that Thing B has a bunch of benefits**.
Of course, [I've also seen it noted](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2blppy/is_there_any_merit_to_the_theory_presented_on_qi/cj6w7f0/) that China did, in fact, have glass. But we don't have to let the facts of our world influence your world!
You could have your different societies follow a similar path: The society that discovered the secrets of Orange Mana was vaguely aware of Blue Mana but regarded it as a mere curiosity you can't do anything with, why waste time studying it given the obvious strength of Orange Mana? The other society got strong at Blue Mana first, and ignores Orange Mana for the same reason.
Alternately, you could have a compatibility problem - much like it's arbitrary whether a country drives on the Left or on the Right, but once the convention is established it's costly and irrational to go against it.
You could say that **consuming Orange Mana creates waves in the Blue Mana fabric making it behave unpredictably**, and vice-versa. Explain is as power rushing in to equalise nature's forces, or a ship going east to west sending waves north and south.
Thus, if Orange Mana got established first in your city, anyone who tried to use Blue Mana would get unpredictable, [wild-mage-style](http://wiki.arelith.com/Wild_mage#The_Wild_Surge_table) results that would either scare them off or kill them.
That could also lead into the societies getting off on a bad footing. You might also want some sort of combat mechanic where people who are well trained try to cause these ripples intentionally.
[Answer]
Your **"Blue cones" in the eye are sensitive to ultraviolet light**, **"orange cones" are sensitive to infrared**. They are are both just outside the spectrum of frequencies visible to human eye, but on opposite ends of the spectrum. So the ability to see one of them has nothing to do with ability seeing the other.
In fact, you can make it so that the ability to see ultraviolet could come at the cost of the ability to see some deeper reds that are visible to normal humans. And vice versa, seeing infrared costs you the ability to see blue. Finally, you could make it that taking both blue berry and snake venom will pull visual range in opposite directions, leaving a person blind.
Also: some birds can see ultraviolet; some snakes can see infrared.
Edit: [Biology.SE](https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/43590/is-it-possible-that-by-mutation-a-human-could-see-infrared-or-other-colours) tells us that humans have some biologic mechanisms that could let them see either ultraviolet or infrared, but they are different mechanisms.
So your blue berries weaken or destroy the eye lens (creating [aphakia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphakia)), or make it transparent to UV rays. The venom mutates eye proteins and shifts the range that "red" eye cone can detect.
Edit 2: If you want somebody to do both kinds of magic, you can assume that ability to see UV and IR can happen in the same person, i.e. the two different mechanisms do not affect each other (my statement above against this is a hypothesis, not a fact).
[Answer]
I'm going to go another way. They are aware of the magical effects, but only tangentially as a theoretical manner, and find that it is completely impractical and useless. Due to the difficulty of learning about the other "kind" of magic, they both have an incorrect model of what the other magic is.
In the natural environment, Blue and Orange mana displace each other.
Drudic Blue mana users treats Orange mana events as "voids" in Blue mana, and Nomad Orange mana users treat Blue mana incidents as "voids" in Orange mana.
So Druids have limited ability to manipulate Orange mana. But the Orange mana they have learned to manipulate is only when there is a saturating Blue mana field, so it is highly inefficient.
Imagine if the only way you could see a tree was to arrange for a pile of herdbeasts to stampede through an area, and watch where they avoided the tree. From that you could ride a herdbeast and harvest the fruit of the tree.
It would be better to call the Druid's use of Orange magic as Blue-void magic, and the Nomad's use of Blue magic as Orange-void magic. This "void magic" is incredibly expensive to study or use, and produces next to no useful results for both parties, so is considered a dead end research-wise.
Both are aware that Dragons can naturally harness void magic.
Rarely, people engage in huge research projects where they produce huge mana flows and induce voids in order to capture and manipulate void magic, and get inconsistent and maddening results.
A mechanism for generating the torrents of magic required to manipulate the "void" magic could involve necromancy or human sacrifice; you first charge a human full of normal magic, then kill them to release it all at once (or produce a controlled flow through unpleasant means). That would make "void" magic dispicable and shunned.
[Answer]
The chemicals that allow you to see each type of Mana cancel each other out - too much of either is poisonous, but administering the *other* chemical acts as an antidote.
Because the symptoms of an overdose are clearly visible, and hard to fake (brightly glowing Blue/Orange eyes?) no one in either society has ever been "stupid" enough to take the Antidote without being poisoned in the first place.
Even if they did - any traces of having taken the *other* chemical within the past 3 months would reduce/cancel out the effects unless you upped the dosage, at which point **other** toxins present in the Berries and Snake venom would cause your death instead.
The ability to "swap" back and forth would require either a prolonged abstinence to "flush" your system, or a refined/isolated sample of the chemical extracted from the berries and venom.
[Answer]
**Color Blindness**
Everyone in the mage society has [red-green color blindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red-green_color_blindness), so they think the orange mana is a load of mumbo-jumbo.
On the other hand, everyone in the nomadic society has a form of [blue-yellow color blindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Blue-yellow_color_blindness). What you can't see can not possibly be real, right?
It's only when a member of the mage society breeds with a member of the nomadic society, do you have a chance of an offspring without any color blindness. Thus, some children of powerful nomadic witches and druidic mages (in the future) can have both powers.
However, these societies don't really get along, powerful witches don't really need those silly mages that talk pseudo science anyway, and vice versa.
[Answer]
Simple. In order to learn how to use something you need to see it to study it.
The Druids have only ever seen blue mana and been able to manipulate it while under the effects of the berry. This has allowed them to craft spells around using blue and its limitations.
The nomads likewise have only ever seen orange due to the lack of the berry and have only learned the properties of orange mana.
Skilled practitioners could likely have learned to use magic by feel after using it so frequently with the berry/venom much in the same way as you can navigate your house in the dark. It is something that anyone could do with study but it is night impossible without the "training wheels" of the "sight".
[Answer]
There are few factors working in common. Hopefully my answer will work on a broad basis not only the Druids vs Nomads situation:
## Various mana manifestation
>
> Mana in itself is actually colorless, the names only refer to their effect on human vision.
>
>
>
As you've mentioned you use the mana "colours" as a reference of how Druids and Nomads perceive it. They see it and can recognise it thanks to that. But actually depending on the triggering agent the mana can manifest through various senses. For example in the area where Druids live there is a specific kind of grain that produces "orange" mana sensitiveness through a sense of touch. If Mice and other rodents eat it they become orange mana sensitive through a specific whiskers movement. Similarly predators eating rodents can feel the orange mana - feline predators through whiskers (they even "purr out" the mana!), birds through feather movements etc. On the other hand in the area where Nomads live there are some flowers with blue petals that - if touched - make you smell the blue mana as a kind of specific sweetish scent. This is used by bees and other insects to discover and use it.
You can play with it even more. Mana might manifest as a range of lights depending of the trigger, so orange mana actually can span to infrared while blue mana sometimes is perceived through ultraviolet (both colours are outside human vision range so goes unnoticed even if someone stumbles upon it). It can be that mana can also manifest as a sound - orange as low tones to infra-sounds (that's why cat purrs when emitting orange mana!) blue as high tones to ultra-sounds (did you notice this little tingling sound when you smell dandelions?). Some mana are available to only those animals that have specialised organs to detect it and are totally inaccessible for humans.
Druids sometimes add the aforementioned grain to their food and they can feel that little tangling of skin. But is it really there? The best guess they've reached so far is that the only mana known to them is manifesting in a different form but for some reasons they didn't manage to catch that link yet. Many yet just assume that the funny feeling is a kind of allergy-like reaction to food.
## Uneven spread of mana manifestation
>
> * Both kind of mana are (roughly) equally available in both regions.
> * Apart from druids and nomads, other societies have discovered magic
> too, but never both types. Although both the berry and the snake are
> endemic of the said forest and desert, respectively, they are just two
> examples of species that found a use in becoming sensitive to mana.
> * There are many non-endemic species that use either kind of mana as
> part of their metabolism.
>
>
>
Due to the feedback that lead to a different evolutionary paths the way specific kind of mana is perceived in specific location depends on the location itself. Other natural influence might impact it (like different magnetic field, air pressure etc.). In general in Druids' region blue mana can be seen and heard but orange can be smelled and touched. It's opposite though in the Nomads region (or you can mix things in whatever way you wish to).
Animals mostly need just one kind of mana (or to be specific - depend on one) so they specialise in recognising one or another ignoring the rest. As dragons are powerful magical creatures they need and use both - after all their excellent senses of smell and hearing let them notice and locate sources of both kinds wherever they are (they are also among most mobile animals so from evolution point of view they simply had to adapt that way) .
Humans are magical enough to use both kind of mana but one mana kind is enough for them. As a result their senses with mostly vision and rather strong but not that good hearing allow them to easily recognise the visual mana manifestation (unless outside of their vision range). The other ways of mana manifestation is not strong enough to be useful (eventually in areas where light-base mana manifestation is invisible other kind, mostly sound based can step into giving you another range of possibilities). This way each society discovered only the one kind of mana that for humans is strongest in their area, being ignorant to weak traces of the other mana manifestation.
## Lack of training
While nature work by instincts you need to learn how to use mana. Different mana kinds require different skills to use it for magic. Druids are aware of the blue mana so they found ways to use it. They train that skills. This adds another layer of ignorance about the orange mana (I can't use it for magic so it still can be that allergic reaction rather than mana)
## Selective/simplifying explanation
Since humans know about mana they can even notice there are various representations of it. Sometimes they can even link that if by touching a dandelion they can hear mana, they can also use berries to see it. So they expect to all mana be the same. You can smell something or feel the tingling sensation? Well, it might be mana as well, but the traces are too weak to use "standard" method. Maybe it's underground source, so you still can't see it and you're unsure where to dig to find it.
This way they remain oblivious to the other kind of mana that is not a basic kind for them. Unless they clash with the other mana-ers they will remain in that state.
### Further impact
Note that this approach opens a wider area for future plots.
* In future people might be seeking the green mana that according to scientific theory build upon Druids and Nomads meeting (after unrest has finally settled) is supposed to be the strongest one as it is supposedly combination of both orange and blue one. This search though eventually yields a vain effort as there is no such thing as green mana (or maybe it is but...)
* Some time after Druids meet Nomads they met another society that claims usage of whistling mana. This sets another round of speculations about nature of mana (as we, omniwise know this is simply another way blue mana manifests as a high pitch sound)
* societies where light mana is invisible to humans will relay on people with better senses other that vision - for example blinds might be the most powerful mages. It can lead to various social and cultural repercussions (blind your child young to make it more powerful mage in future?)
* ...
[Answer]
**"Necessity is the mother of Invention"**
Or in this case the inverse. By discovering magic in the first place the primitive needs of both societies were satisfied to the point that they didn't have the need to seek new innovations.
As populations inevitably grew (given such conditions) the different societies eventually bumped into one another. Thus providing both a culture shock and necessity.
[Answer]
Its entirely believable that these societies reached well into their medieval ages without being widely aware of the existence of the other mana. You don't even need to invoke necessity, some great imbalance, special knowledge, or anything. You just need a little creative geography like a huge ocean and two separate continents, or a large desert filled with death by dragon - mixed with humans being human.
When these societies started they were quite likely small, probably village sized, a large one would have had a thousand people. The discovery/knowledge of the berry/venom would have lead to conflicts. Villages would have banded together to reign in a particularly successful village, killing their magic users, or being wiped out in the effort. Perhaps some magic users toured the lands as warlords, only for everything to fall apart when the next in line was magically inept. Eventually a few groups would have started to consolidate into city-states or kingdoms. The most successful method for winning those wars would have been a mix of warriors (and their weapon tech), and the mages. They would have become the main players in their respective societies.
Warriors for all they are good at extracting taxes, are not great proponents for study, or liberty - unless it helps them win. They would have opposed institutions of free thinking, and learning. After all students don't make stuff the warriors can take. And its easier to keep people in line when you control their thinking.
The Mages (be they Druid/Nomad) would have had the main political power, but would not want this power democratised. After all training a new mage would be risky. There is only so much wealth up there, the more people with a right (or ability to fight for it) the less wealth to go around and the more unstable society becomes. Also a weak mage would fear new mages, because they could easily be killed and usurped. A strong mage would be less fearful of training a new mage but would baulk at training too many mages, as they could be taken out be shear numbers.
Slowly these city states would merge through conquest, imperialism, trade, etc.. to form unions or countries. But that is a slow process taking generations. Each change of leadership (particularly if instigated by war) would cause the political elite to further strengthen their power. This would have manifested in slaughter, book/scroll burning, religious hegemony, propaganda, and even highly selective state based training (aka brainwashing schools). Different ideas, ways of life, techniques would have been eliminated to ensure power remained in the hands of the elite.
Unless the elite had a use for it. The scientific revolution occurred because a number of educated elite, and literate middle class individuals were sanctioned to discover things (with a budget) by various kings and queens. They did not sanction it because they liked science, or thought it amusing, or desired a legacy. They sanctioned it because there was an arms race, both economical and militarily going on, and not having science was too risky.
The last piece of the puzzle is continuity, the knowledge needed to be distributed and preserved, even when the original power that discovered it failed. Many things in the scientific revolution were invented by France (and french men). If all of there knowledge was destroyed in the world wars by the invading imperial force, and no one else had a copy of it. Centuries of study would have been lost. But fortunately the knowledge was copied, distributed and improved on by others.
Case in point:
Electricity was known as far back as the Greek Philosophers using amber rods to generate static electricity. It was well studied, some even used associated processes to electro-plate jewels. Many earlier civilisations quite likely were aware of this phenomena even though we have lost any accounts they had of it. Yet it took on the order of (at least) 2000 years to develop the first widely useful electrical device - A light-bulb (1802), and a scale-able means to produce electricity - the battery (1800), and the eletric-dynamo (1831). To actually enable wide-spread use. the scientific revolution started about 1543, that is even after establishing the circumstances needed for a healthy scientific community, it still took roughly 287 years to figure out how to use electricity for everyone (and we are still figuring out how to deploy that knowledge).
So why is it that the respective civilisations figured out about blue/orange mana? They had an enabler, the berry/venom that a very low tech people could exploit, which ensured the continuity required to gather the knowledge of its use. And in that exploitation caused other avenues of endevour to be cut off. Not because of necessity, just because of politics, and the very human desire to have the good life.
The realisation that there is another mana out there could have come about by happenstance, independently for each peoples without a cross-cultural exchange fueled by a strong general scientific continuity - or by the technology finally maturing enough for there to be significant long-term cultural exchanges.
[Answer]
Why do they have to be two distinct Manas? Perhaps there is only 1 Mana, which is colourless as you say, and it depends purely on the berries/snake venom/whatever other local produce is consumed as to which facet of Mana can be seen.
Sort of like the premise in some religions that there is 1 god, but sects with that religion disagree on the interpretation of gods will/book. Your druids can see the blue "face" as their berries affect their vision, whereas the nomads only see the orange "face".
They are tapping into different aspects/frequencies of the same entity, if a piece of paper is green but you can only perceive frequencies in the yellow band, it looks yellow. but if you can only perceive frequencies in the blue band, it looks blue.
Take this analogy a little further and you can quite happily have a sectarian conflict. Different perspectives on the same "god" figure have caused enough war and death in the real world, between factions convinced only their god is the one true god.
I'll stop there as I don't wish to upset any theists.
They are unaware of how the others see Mana and interact with it because, well, it's not their way. They know of the "blue Mana" and how to best interact with it, but have not experimented with others because (as suggested in other answers) the relevant substances were not available in their area/there is an overabundance of blue-Mana-interacting stuff compare to orange-Mana-interacting stuff, and the result is that any visible "Orange" is simply too faint to see.
Maybe, the druid bloodlines just results in no/too few females with the extra "orange cone", so even if these substances were available, they wouldn't work, or the chances of a compatible woman eating the right fruit/flesh are too slim.
More drastic, there are markers in the respective genomes that literally make your blue berries lethal to consume for the nomads or vice versa (though, this might cause issues if you want your conflict to be resolvable...) and so they learned early on to avoid them.
So, they encounter the nomads and see them "working magic", but the patterns of "blue Mana" they would expect to see around someone who is, say, summoning up a plate to eat off of, are not there/different. Each group perceive a disturbance, like a ripple in a pond, caused by the magic of the other, but can't see the thing that started the ripple moving. The pond/true Mana is affected in the same way from a blue object/Mana or an orange object/Mana, and the orange/Blue Manas both exibit this change (a ripple) So the effects are mutually visible, if not the root cause.
Your Dragons, then, have the true sight. They perceive Mana as it really is, without needing the consumption of substances to permit so. All creatures have varying degrees of perception of/interaction with each blue/orange Mana, as their smaller minds cannot comprehend the true complexity of Mana.
] |
[Question]
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Modern international trade basically runs on standardized shipping containers and the infrastructure developed to handle them. Looking at just a small part of it, using crane to unload full containers and move directly from ship deck to truck bed, or vice-versa, and allowing containers to be packed in a space-filling arrangement on deck, is just way more efficient than individually packing items in a ship's hold or truck trailer, isolating the complex bits of loading and unloading to only the very ends of the transport chain.
But... modern shipping container infrastructure basically depends on access to large quantities of cheap metal--for the containers, and the enormous port cranes that handle them.
It seems to me that an analogous system *could* have been developed significantly earlier in history, however, using wooden crates of standardized size (much like we still use standardized wooden pallets), and smaller-scale wooden cranes. In reality, wooden harbor cranes have been in use at least since the Middle Ages in Europe--and if they got the idea to use a bridge as the basis of a gantry crane, they probably could have gotten a lot bigger than they actually did! And cranes more generally go back to 1500 BC.
Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia "Crates had been used for many years without a clear origin in documented history. Modern crates from the early 20th century demonstrate a very evolved technology already considering practical and economic considerations built into crate designs." I can't imagine building a crate would really pose any problem for a Medieval carpenter, or even an ancient Mesopotamian one.
So, just how far back, and at what material technological level, would the development of something like the modern system of standardized container shipping have been possible to develop? (Say, if a time traveler went back and gave someone the idea.)
[Answer]
There are a number of requirements to make efficient container shipping happen:
* The labor cost for handling freight exceeds the cost for transporting packaging. Big ships and their fuel and crews are cheaper than gangs of stevedores.
* Ships and trucks can be designed for a few large shipping crates: large hatches over much of the deck space. Straight bulkheads without protruding frames. That goes against the design requirements for wooden hulls and for masts and rigging.
* Containers can be built to standard sizes. This requires standard measurements, which were historically not available: Will a crate from one artisan really fit into the wagon bed from another artisan or does it require fitting?
There were pretty standard sizes of [amphora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora) and [barrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_(unit)#History_2), but these were for liquid where containers were a necessity.
[Answer]
As I recall, shipwrecks show that standardized amphora were used. The ship was built with a raised platform of carefully spaced holes for the first row, and subsequent rows stacked on top of that due to their shape.
Everything from wine to sand was shipped in these amphora.
They were standardized containers with the ship specially constructed to handle them. But they were *small*, being individually man-portable.
Also, look at *barrels*. A barrel is a container that is also a tool: It can be rolled, and furthermore rolled along a narrow plank. Then, it can be stood on end again by rocking it to build up the amplitude.
Many different goods were placed in barrels, using them as general purpose boxes.
I can imagine a culture evolving from amphora that were sized to be the largest that a longshoreman can readily carry, to being lifted by overhead crane out of a hold that opens as a vertical shaft from the deck rather than going down stairs and ramps. They could keep the same distinctive shape, and rely on that for the grabbing mechanism; they would just be much bigger, and continue growing in size as the cranes replaced human labor.
Another issue is how to moving them around the dockyards. Unloading a ship is one thing; but you have to then move a huge mass around to warehouses and eventually to delivery. Rails or canals around the dockyard might let them move such masses around; but modern containers are *integrated*, turning into a semitrailer for surface delivery. Without that ability, you save time unloading the ship but still need to break down the large containers close to the unloading site in order to continue.
You might find that the equivalent to a modern pallet size is optimal, and perhaps a super-pallet puts 2×3 on a platform and stacks them 2 tall as well, so 12 pallets are lifted and loaded at one time by the crane. This is also an easy way to evolve the concept and incrementally implement it: standard pallets with hand-jacks and mobile cranes (in the role of modern forklifts) get established *everywhere* including surface transport (wagons) and warehousing. Those get bundled together into super-pallets as crane technology improves and ship design changes to use top-loading cargo holds. These are easily broken down again at the boundary where the super-pallets are no longer supported, whether that's along the shore, the destination warehouse, or depends on the surface cargo carrier.
[Answer]
It's not a technical problem. As you say, anyone could build a crate.
It's an organisational problem: getting everyone to agree on the standard.
Basically in any worldbuilding scenario, it's fine to just declare that there are standardised containers. What organisational systems exist in your society? They decided to standardise containers. This is plausible in Mesopotamia, medieval Europe, whatever.
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An analogous system *was* developed much earlier in history - [the barrel](https://www.riverdrive.co/history-of-barrels/):
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> Around 350 BC they were already using watertight, barrel-shaped wooden containers that were able to withstand stress and could be rolled and stacked. For nearly 2,000 years, barrels were the most convenient form of shipping or storage container for those who could afford them. All kinds of bulk goods, from nails to gold coins, were stored in them.
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> The use of barrels for the transportation of bulk goods slowly lost its importance in the 20th century with the introduction of pallet-based logistics and containerization. However, they are still of great importance in the aging of wines and spirits.
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The thing is, a modern container ship can rely on modern infrastructure being present at any given port; that was not the case before modern telecommunications, navigation and mechanization.
Before the industrial era, there was always the chance a ship might show up to port and need to be unloaded by hand via manual labor. Barrels are perfect for this: they'll roll or stack depending on how you orient them, and a single barrel is easily maneuvered by a two man team.
If you have more infrastructure, great! It'll go faster. If you don't, that's fine - you can still get your ship unloaded.
There's no way in heck you're moving a full container (or large crate) with manpower alone, at least not without a whole lot of pulleys and other equipment.
[Answer]
## Base it off of a Cart Capacity of Grain In Ancient Rome
A lot of answers on how it was done, but not how it could be done. Grain was by far one of the most large scale transported materials. It was also one of the least dense; so, if you design your containers to transport grain, then anything more dense will still work without leaving your with a container that is unnecessarily light for other common goods. So, if you wanted to transport Oil or Wine for example, you could still hit the shipping container's weight capacity by loading it with something like amphoras, barrels, or wineskins. You could even load it up with lots of smaller crates for easier unpacking where required.
The average single draft horse can pull about 3600kg. Since we are talking about shipping containers, your carts themselves could be a basic flatbed cart like a bray which can be made pretty light weight. So let's say your actual, fully loaded cargo container is 3200kg on a 300kg cart. The average density of grain is about 0.79g/cm^3 meaning your container should have a volume of ~4,000,000 cm^3.
Interestingly enough, the Roman Polyspaston crane used for loading and unloading ships is estimated to have a lift capacity of about 3 tons; so, it seems that the Romans were already designing thier port cranes to lift cargo by the single draft-horse cart load; so, you could use the cranes that already existed in the ancient time period, but the containers mean a lot less loading and unloading would be required between the cargo's origin and destination.
Thanks to the width of a horses backside, most Roman carts had wheels about 144cm apart. These carts wore ruts into commonly used paths making paths untraversable by carts of other sizes; so, Romans, and most Medieval civilizations that followed, standardized thier carts to a wheel width of about 144cm. Subtract about 8cm for room for wheel spacing and tolerance, and the ideal width of a pre-modern cargo container should be about 136cm. If you were to make it as tall as it is wide, then the total dimensions of your cargo container would be about 136 x 136 x 216 cm.
So, your ships could pull into port, off-load with a kind of crane that was already common, and place the container directly onto a cart to be carried away. If you have a 2 horse cart which was more common for moving things around inside of cities where roads are wider and paved, it can actually pull 3 containers with fewer horses; so, you could turn the containers up right or sideways to make them fit, or you could even create a larger 136 x 216 x 408cm standard "triple crate", but this would require much bigger cranes; so, probably not the best idea except in certain high-traffic trading situations where you can count on bigger 10 ton cranes on both ends of the trip. Most Roman cargo ships held about 2000-3000 amphora with each amphora weighing about 50kg. But by using shipping containers instead; such a ship could be loaded with about 32-47 containers of the same weight dramatically reducing time spent carrying amphoras around and reducing the space needed to carry it all.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NUXIL.png)
### What About Materials
Industrial metal production did not exist in the ancient world, but industrial lumber production did. [Roman Sawmills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierapolis_sawmill) were comparable to the sawmills of the Early Industrial Revolution allowing them to turn out significant amounts of boards and plywood making processed lumber surprisingly cheap. So, while making giant shipping crates like this may be cost prohibitive in most of the Ancient and Medieval world, in the Roman Empire, wooden vessels could have been made much more cheaply than the ceramic ones they used. Most likely, they preferred amphora because round containers are much easier to make with ceramics than wood meaning the amphora could be rolled... but since these crates don't need to be moved by hand, this is not a factor.
As for water proofing to keep your goods dry, this is also very easy using Roman technology. When the Romans needed to water proof wood, they would coat it with a resin made from boiled pine sap. This resin is both cheap, and durable making your crates able to survive many years of direct exposure to rain and sun.
### What About the Rigging or Stability?
Having done an in depth look at many different images of Roman medium cargo ships, I've come to the following design to show the most likely layout of lines on a typical Roman Oneraia (grain ship) while in port. From what I can tell, an Oneraia has enough accessible deck space for ~50 cargo containers which could be stacked 3 high without interfering with the sails or two high to not even come above the top deck or even 1 high and still give the ship about the same cargo capacity as a traditional amphora trade vessel for a total weight of 160-480 tons of cargo... well over the 100-150 tons of amphora they could normally fit using racks. Since it is unlikely that such a ship could even safely transport crates more than 1 or 2 high, this gives the ship more than enough crane accessible space to load it to its maximum capacity despite some of the top deck being inaccessible due to riggings. Since you do not need to load the ship any higher than an amphora transport to get well beyond the ship's max weight, you can count on the ship remaining stable and buoyant. This also means you could cap the bays with closable doors if you so choose allowing your to not have to sacrifice any deck space and help keep the rain out of your bays. Or more simply, you can lay out your deck to line up with the crates making the crates become your deck.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8n5IY.png)
### What About the Structural Concerns of Open Cargo Bays?
While some concern has been voiced about having large open bays, many Greek and Roman ships were already designed like this. On larger wooden ships, it is the beams and not the deck that gives the hull integrity; so, this just means you need to space your beams some increment of just over 216cm apart, and then you can lower the crates between them. Even on the smaller trading ship shown below, there is enough room to fit 2 crates high without going so high as to make the ship or containers unstable.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BSHDS.png)
### How do These Crates Improve Shipping?
In a normal Roman Cargo ship, you start off by having to fill amphora, barrels, sacks, etc. into increments of 30-50kg. (That is about 65-105 items you need to move to fill a draft cart). Amphora were also quite heavy. An 11kg amphora only holds about 39 liters which means that an amphora grain ship spends about 25% of its tonnage on the shipping containers themselves. In contrast, a shipping crate of this size [weighs about 180kg](https://www.uline.com/BL_441/Heavy-Duty-Wood-Crates) meaning your container weight is just under 5% of your load. So, a 150 ton crate ship would carry 30 more tons of grain than a 150 ton amphora ship.
Also, those containers need to be loaded 1 at a time onto a cart, often requiring 2 people if you need to carry the load more than a few feet to your destination. The wagon is then driven to a port where the cargo is unloaded 1 container at a time into a loading net. The loading net is then hoisted by crane onto the ship where you then need to unload them 1 at a time into their proper racks. Then when you reach your destination, you have to repeat the whole process in reverse to get the human portable containers back onto carts which are then brought to the destination where the cart must again be unloaded 1 item at a time. This means that your little amphora or what not has to be carried 6 times to get from point A to point B. If we assume that each time you move an amphora by hand that it takes you an average of 3 minutes (these things are heavy and require careful handling after all), then the total labor cost spend on loading time for a single wagon load of goods could easily be 20-40 hours (That is ~940-1880 man hours for a 150 ton ship.)
By using shipping containers, you can put most cargo like grain directly into the crate saving tons of time and money on packaging, but even if you do need to transport something like wine or oil, you can still fit 3200kg of them into the container in other vessels since these liquids are more dense than grain. Romans often preferred wine skins over amphora when it did not need to go into a boat because they were so much lighter, but did not handle shipping as well; so, chances are amphora would go out of style if you could keep wine and oil skins safer in transit with a crate, meaning you'd still save on weight per goods. Since loading the container is just as easy as loading a normal wagon, the worst case scenario is you break even on labor for loading your initial cart, but for cargo that you can put straight into the container, you can save time and materials by using one big box instead of lots of little ones. Then when you reach the port you are going to, you just hook your crane to the top of your container and hoist it straight off of your cart and onto the ship trading ~7-14 hours of hard labor for what will take a 4 man team just a few minutes. Then you get to the the destination port and lift the crate straight onto the next cart that brings it to the destination where you can unload the crate. So instead of having to load/unload 6 times, you only have to do it twice reducing your labor costs by about 14-28 hours per shipment per container (~725-1250 man hours for a 150 ton ship). Given how cheaply Romans could make such a crate, I'd imagine it could pay for itself within the first trip.
[Answer]
The impetus towards standardized shipping crates isn't ships; the impetus is mechanized land transportation like trucks and trains. There may be a slight advantage towards regular-shaped crates on board a ship, but crews have been lading irregular materials onto ships for millennia without much trouble. But when crates are carried *away* from ships on wagons or sledges standardization is moot. Animals can only pull so much weight, every item is headed to its immediate destination, and nothing is large enough to worry about transit obstacles.
With the invention of railroads and trucking, shipping doesn't stop at the water's edge. Items need to be offloaded onto trains, carried to distribution centers, then offloaded onto trucks to head towards final destinations. Standardized containers ensure that:
* Items can easily and seamlessly be attached to rail cars and truck beds
* All items will pass properly through railway cuts, tunnels, underpasses, and other land obstacles
* Items can be sorted by destination at the beginning of the journey, not at each stage of the journey, improving logistics
* Items are enclosed and anonymized, reducing casual damage and theft
While standardized crates could be achieved as far back in history as one likes — and I'm quite sure that it was within certain contexts, such as barrel construction (where consistency of liquid volume was important) — there's no real advantage to it until land transportation can move items in bulk as well. It would be a solution for a problem that doesn't yet exist.
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Assuming you are talking about stacking the containers on deck as on a modern container ship, the technological cutoff date is more or less 1850. Use of sail is prohibited, since the vessel heels too much, and you'd get containers falling off. Furthermore, it's hard to make wooden cases sufficiently waterproof to handle the long (multiple months in some cases) voyages exposed to both weather and salt water spray.
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I believe the main problem to solve is large enough usable *open* cargo deck.
Modern container ship is basically a box without top with several partitions holding its shape. That allows to put cargo as low as possible starting well below the water level. (Some images can be found at <https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/container-ship>)
With wooden ships achieving such a box shape is not possible with technologies we had so far. You basically have two types of ships that worked - relatively small ships without deck (like traditional Viking's ships, row boats and all sorts of river barges) and bigger ships that are essentially tubes build with wooden circles (flattened a bit for the deck) spaced 1-3 feet apart covered with wooden boards outside to make the hull and the deck.
So for smaller open-desk ships you can put some box-shaped containers low enough to not cause ship to flip sideways... but it is unlikely to be beneficial enough due to small size an inability to stack containers.
Bigger ships indeed can have decent size cargo hold but it had to be accessed via relatively small openings in the deck. Cutting more than couple of deck beams in a row to make an opening would require way too much reinforcement. If you look at any picture of such ship you'd see that cargo openings normally are somewhat squares at most 1/3 of the deck width and spaced far enough to avoid weakening structure too much. As result loading anything below deck requires moving items quite far from the opening accessible by crane. And there no way to load anything on the deck itself as it would be too high above the water making ship too unstable.
So wood as the only material to build a ship makes using boxes (as opposed to barrels) very inconvenient.
Couple other points to consider:
* sailing and rowing ships have *a lot* of people on board. All those people already got all they time payed for (or forced) so there is no particular need to make process more efficient from the point of view of number of people involved. Port side workforce was not too expensive either to my understanding.
* barrels are far superior to boxes of any kind to be moved by a person in tight spaces of irregular shape. Due to its shape it can be turned on a dime and rolled in any direction relatively easy. Dragging or pushing rough wooden box on a rough wooden surface is not an easy exercise.
* barrels are easier to fit into round hull of wooden ship, require less precision in manufacturing (it will naturally try to be round in case of minor mistakes unlike with boxes 90 degrees corners is not an angle that wood (or almost all structural materials) will hold.
So you need iron/steel to have decent size openings in the deck to make loading actually easier and non-sail-based power to actually benefit from smaller number of people required to load the ship - 1850 suggested in some other answer seem to be a reasonable time for when it may be viable.
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Other answers are good, but they all miss the point about larger cranes. One or 2 mention how much weight they can handle, but not about interference. And by that, I mean the sails of the ship.
In order to avoid interference of an overhead [gantry crane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantry_crane), you need to build it very tall. You have to build it so tall that you can accommodate every ship, even the tallest masts (which I can't find any actual measurements of). This costs money, lots of it, since you have to do more reinforcements as you go higher and even need more rope to handle the cargo. (If you have a 10:1 block and tackle to handle heavy loads, you'll need 10 ft. of rope for every 1 ft. extra height to the crane. If you add 100 ft. to the height of the crane, you need 1000 more ft. of rope. And that doesn't include guide ropes.)
It's much simpler and cheaper to build a crane that rotates out over the ship deck, a [cantilever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantilever) or [jib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jib_(crane)) crane. This also helps avoid accidental swinging of the cargo into a mast, since the shorter rope would be more controlled in wind than a long rope. One of the reasons we can manage this today is the high precision of the metal rails, bearings, and motors used. Back before electricity, it was all manpower or animals to move these cranes, and that generally doesn't have high precision when it comes to moving heavy objects on wooden or stone rails.
In today's reality, docks and ships still use cantilever cranes. A gantry crane is only used when the center beam can be supported on both sides. These are used on docks, but generally not to load ships, but rather to stack containers on dry ground. The massive cranes used to load supercargo ships are a hybrid of cantilever and gantry cranes. They span a road for loading and unloading, so are considered gantry cranes, but the side that loads the ship is actually a cantilever.
Also, the cargo ships of today don't use sails, so you don't have to deal with that interference. And the massive weight of today's full containers help make it less likely they will be affected by wind.
[Answer]
I find the answers mentioned to be sufficient - though I might provide a plausible scenario in which this could arise. In the past, there have been notable empires such as Rome. There have also been non-political empires, like the trade empire of the Phoenicians.
I could definitely see that in this sort of context one of these large groups decides on a standard of having shipping containers. I could see many possible scenarios where this could arise if you thought up sufficient reasoning for it. Maybe these crates started out as a higher standard for more valuable cargo, and it was found that it worked great for all the other cargo as well.
Maybe the trading involved is between different partners working on a gigantic engineering project, and they are searching for ways to make the process of building more efficient.
All in all, I think this is a cool idea to add flavor to a story.
[Answer]
Big customers set the rules to sell to them.
Be a large customer,
determine the desired "crate" shape,
demand that shape,
refuse business to anybody who does not conform to that crate shape.
This will likely result in several "standard" crate shapes.
Next step is for several large customers to agree on the standard for their purchasing block.
This will eventually evolve in to several standard crate sizes.
[Answer]
## But then, how do you move the pallet?
OK, so you've come up with a nifty design for containerized handling dockside. You have moved a 4500 pound/2000 kg pallet of goods from the boat to the medieval wagon. What happens next?
No one has a fork lift.
The wagon can't travel in the dark, medieval wagons don't have headlights. Assuming you did this in the morning, you have the rest of the day and the range of the horses to get the wagon to a destination or SAFE layover. And this will tie up the entire wagon.
The moment you change vehicles or unload to get the wagon back... or reach your destination... you will not have a crane at those locations. So you will be forced to "break bulk" - hand unload the cargo by the bag or shovel full.
So this somewhat defeats the purpose of containerization. The issue being that **material handling equipment like fork lifts aren't ubiquitous**.
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[Question]
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What sort of armor would a bounty hunter wear in a fantasy based world inspired by the medieval ages (1100 A.D - 1400 A.D) that would allow him to be both protected and agile, while remaining somewhat incognito? No one in this world has access to magic or gun powder, and the bounty hunter mostly hunts criminals and murderers. He is an excellent swordsman with elite military training in the past.
[Answer]
A bounty hunter is a predator. What kind of armor do predators have?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vu6As.jpg)
[source](http://vitalpethealth.co.uk/cat-hunting-why-our-feline-friends-bring-presents-home/)
**None.**
A predator does not want a fair fight. It does not want a fight at all. A predator is not going to roar at its prey to give it notice. A predator is not going to plaster a big sign on its chest reading "I WILL KILL YOU". A predator wants to surprise prey, and at worst have to chase the surprised prey. If you routinely take on prey under circumstances that allow the prey to fight back, each time is a roll of the dice. Eventually the predator rolls snake eyes, and then its predating days are done.
If you are engaged in warfare or ritual conspecific combat then armor of some sort might make sense. It makes sense to bluster and bellow. You are not going to eat your combatant. You want to defeat him and have him run away.
A bounty hunter should look like something other than a bounty hunter- whatever he or she can get away with and ideally something that does not raise suspicion. Laborer, beggar, pilgrim, traveling merchant; whatever. The prey should not know that a bounty hunter is tracking him or her until it is too late.
Wily prey will sense the presence of the unseen hunter. The Bourne movies are all about that - I am reminded of the [scene in Bourne Identity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjrWOZby8s8) - "I can tell you the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself".
[Answer]
Bounty hunting would be a periodic and probably not very remunerative profession in the long run, so the first constraint is the bounty hunter isn't going to be rich enough to afford to be fully armed "Cap-à-pie" like a knight or man at arms. As an aside, even knights and men at arms were often unarmed and unarmored in peacetime, since their weapons and harness were being held at the local money lenders as security for loans...
The other factor which would limit the use of armour and many types of arms is the need to be able to blend in with the local population. A stranger coming into a town or village would be quite noticeable at the low population densities and limited amount of travel people did on the middle ages. A merchant, minstrel or maybe a monk or friar would be who people would expect to be on the road. In the Canterbury Tales, the party of pilgrims includes:
* Knight
* miller
* Reeve
* cook
* Man of Law
* the wife of Bath
* summoner
* clerk
* merchant
* squire
* franklin
* physician
* pardoner
* shipman
* Prioress
* monk
* nun
* manciple
* Parson
Armed men showing up would likely be taken as a sign of trouble, either a scout for a band of robbers or perhaps the advance sign of a Chevauchee burning and plundering their way through the countryside.
Much like the idea of Ninjas has been contaminated by sensationalism (the iconic movie Ninja is actually dressed as a Japanese stagehand. The convention was the audience was to ignore them as they moved about the stage to rearrange set pieces during a show). Anyone working covertly would dress and act in the manner of the people they are hiding or operating among. Your bounty hunter could not look like a serf, since serfs were generally tied to the land and had little reason to leave the farms anyway, but as noted, would stand out too much if openly armed.
So your bounty hunter will have to blend in like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UnatE.jpg)
Not this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9JoWu.jpg)
[Answer]
I tend to agree with all answers, specially willik's and Thucydides's, but I would like to add that protection rarely hurt anyone. There are several options that don't impede (much) movement and can be more or less concealed with the appropiate clothing, although some of them may be a bit more modern than your desired period:
* Padded clothing. *Gambesons* are the basic defense against blades, can be disguised into fashion(sometimes noblemen, specially those who served, wore fancy gambesons) and won't impede movement (it may be stiffer than normal clothes but not much). Don't underestimate the absorbing power of padded clothes.
* Brigandine. The brigandine is a kind of cuirass made of padded clothes or leather with strips of metal sewed inside. This was imported from the mongol invasions and was a popular soldier armor as it was cheaper than a chain of mail. It is also less noisy and less conspicuous, although it will be stiffer than both chain or padded clothes (note that a brigandine has nothing to do with bandits. *brigand* was a kind of foot soldier back then).
* A cape: This is a bit more modern (about 16th century maybe), and it will depend on the kind of weapons your hunter will encounter but a heavy cape is a useful implement to deflect weapons and distract the opponent.
None of these armors will stop a crossbow bolt, nor a well placed blow or arrow, but will stop or deflect most glancing blows that otherwise would have drawn blood, while remaining mobile.
As they say above, none of this will replace the reason a hunter is good at his job, specially if there's no "magic medicine" or something that stops infections. Cunning will probably be his/her main weapon, and if I had to fight in those conditions I would prefer to lay traps and direct my prey to a place he cannot fight back than assault him.
I would like to direct you to read a bit about the [almogavars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almogavars), an aragonese light infantry that was prevalent from the 10th up to the 15th century. Their common armor was a wide leather belt, tunic and breeches, and still managed to win over heavily armored troops thanks to good tactics and ferocity.
Finally I would like to point that medieval clothes tended to be a bit loose, specially if we're talking about 10-13th century. The tunics and surcoats were still common, and the pants (well, braies, that are not exactly but like pants) were only popular with the working class (you would wear hoses, though). A sleeveless gambeson is feasible to hid under the surcoat. 14th century brought forward the chamise, although it still was not exactly as our shirt (the armpits usually were opened), reserving tunics for noble and clergymen. Still, you can hide a lot under a cape, and nobody will look you bad for wearing one (unless is a very hot day): not all people could afford winter garments so wearing an all-weather garment with a heavy wool (not fur, unless you're rich) cape would be appropiate. It was also a good way to hide your pouches (clothes of the time usually hadn't much of pockets, you would had pouches, usually of leather, instead). Nobody likes to have it's moneybag stolen.
[Answer]
All depends on your world.
I concur with @Willk's and @Thucydides answers and agree that in **real** medieval world a bounty hunter should carry no armor - mostly because regular people never did that, no matter what fantasy depictions may suggest.
However, I understand that you want to create your own fantasy world, which, while being similar to medieval Europe, can be different from it. If you **want** your bounty hunters to be armored, that's Ok.
Some other answers (like @Alberto Yagos') has suggested what this armor can be. I'm going to dwell on **why** a bounty hunter can be armored. First, your fantasy world should be more dangerous and chaotic than the real medieval world. Maybe dangerous creatures are lurking around, and wielding a sword and wearing even some minimal armor is highly advisable for any traveler. Second, your bounty hunter may need to capture his target alive. Thus, he can not rely on quick sword strike or accurate crossbow shot - he may want to confront his target armed an armored, intimidating him/her into submission.
[Answer]
Incognito isn't possible, but the best idea for 1100-1400 AD is what rolepaying games call leather armor, actually a **coat of plates** (after 1250 AD).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bBHZU.jpg)
This fashionable piece comes from <https://armstreet.com/store/armor/the-wayward-knight-visby-coat-of-plates>
It's a sleeveless jacket made of different materials (leather, wool, etc.) with the inside lined with several steel plates. More plates = more flexibility, if that's important for your bounty hunter.
[Answer]
Anything you want.
Historically, this wasn't exactly a profession at this time, so to ask what a bounty hunter might wear in this time period is wide, wide, wide open. The meat of what I think would be best is bolded below. You can skip the difficulties portion as it doesn't answer the question, it's just added context.
Here's the difficulties.
1- The printing press isn't invented until later after gun powder became more of a thing. So no wanted posters.
2-Travel was expensive and difficult. The cost of tracking someone down has to outweigh the cost of going to get them.
3-Most of the time when a posse was rustled up during Medieval times in England (say the 1300s), they included the corner because when someone ran, they were allowed to kill them. Women by drowning, men by beheading. The people who chased them didn't get extra money for this, they were sheriffs or guards carrying out their duty.
4-Again, travel was an issue, and not just for the hunter--also for the hunted. Anyone not known was seen with suspicion except in very large cities of which there were few.
5-And yet again, travel was difficult for the magistrates set to judge on these occasions. There was not incentive for most criminals to be kept alive.
6-Bounties were offered very rarely. And when they were it was often for a BAND of criminals, not just ONE person. (Though once in a while, an enemy of the crown might have a reward for capture). You could appeal to the king for men to take care of a band of criminals and pay the salary for those men during that time. A lone guy catching criminals is odd indeed.
But if you take care of these issues with worldbuilding, it's a different thing. **I can say that while travelling folks wore weapons and armor, but inside a township or a building you had to give up arms. This was standard pretty much everywhere.**
**What this means is that your guy is likely going to be confronting people in places where weapons aren't permitted (save for the knife that everyone carries to cut meat). That means close fighting and hand to hand, and that means little to no armor.**
Medieval folk were used to declarations from lawmen, and if you were there to get a criminal, you could get help from local law and from the people around you. Because it was generally law that everyone had to help protect the community (everyone above age 12 and male took an oath to protect their town).
Taking someone back to the township where they committed the crime is tough. Takes time and you have to feed them on the way. The local constabulary isn't going to want to take anything but their OWN criminals because it costs to keep them until the judge comes round. If they are due to come soon, they might, but if they were just there, they might refuse to house the criminal. The very best thing you can do is wait for crimes to be committed in the area by your criminal, otherwise it's a long trek.
**So, in short, you want to blend in and look ordinary. And most of what you will be doing means less in the way of sword work and arrows and more in the way of fast agile fighting. Maybe padded underneath, maybe a little leather layer to help, but mostly unarmored.**
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I would like to think that the standard double tunic of the day would suffice. People usually wore a linen tunic under a woolen one. If paired with the correct outfit an arming sword and buckler might work making him a swashbuckler. In some regions swords were quite legal and some places you were legally required to at least own a weapon. Travelling armed was probably quite normal as one would never know when a bear or bandit might come out of the forest.
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I knew a guy who had a chain shirt which he sometimes wore between a t-shirt and a another top. When he was wearing his normal raincoat you couldn't hear any noise from the chain and I guess he could have gone to most places without anyone knowing it was there.
It leaves the head and limbs exposed, of course, but much better than nothing if the target puts up a fight.
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[
In my world, nuclear war ravaged the world, and nuclear winter scattered the survivors, dropping down the Earth’s population from 8 billion to a few million, at most.
In the region of North America, life has become a hostile struggle for survival. The average person needs a decent weapon to have any significant chance of surviving the Wasteland, so, I had a question: What would be the best weapon for post-apocalyptic wastelanders?
**Here are the criteria**
* It must be somewhat common to find in the United States
* Its ammo also must be common enough that a scavenger can get a good supply of it (Or simple enough to get manufactured)
* It must be reliable
* It must be easy to maintain
Pistols, rifles, shotguns and SMGs are the main thing I’m looking for.
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2 contenders
**A 9mm submachine gun**
**An AR-15 or M16**
And to a lesser degree a **A shotgun**
A detailed breakdown won't even be needed.
9mm pistols are super common in the us. So plenty of ammo.
And with regular gun maintenance you can maintain your gun for years.
AR style rifles are also super common and popular in the US with a huge number of owners. People just like them.
So parts and ammo are like everywhere.
Shotguns are also very versatile and can be great hunting weapons as well as a zombie weapon.
Now to more "tactical" points
A 9mm submachine can over great many things.
* High rate of fire.
* Common ammo
* Adequate stopping power
* Adequate range
* Compact size for firing in confined places
* Plenty of stuff off the shelf including silencers.
* Ability to mount optics or lights
* Larger magazines.
* Reduced noise and stopping power when needed, which apparently is a concern for the police but I don't know.
* Reliable and easy to maintain. Used by many armies and civilians.
They are excellent general purpose anti people/zombie/monsters guns.
The draw backs I honestly think only exist when you field it against regular infantry. You can't expect a DM, designated marksman, to land shots on you from a 800 meters distance.
So. The old rules still apply. Engagements would still be fought in ranges that won't exceed 200 meters and at that range the round and gun are only limited by your own ability to target the enemy.
Famous example: "Heckler & Koch MP5"
For MOAR power you can always up the ante and go for a 9mm carbine.
Basically more power and range.
I think a famous example is the "Sig Sauer 9mm MPX carbine" or whatever the exact name.
**AR-15 rifles or M16 rifles**
Basically a rifle. The M16 is the military version while the AR-15 is the civilian version. I mean this is to cut it short.
**The only difference, that has any meaning to the real world, is that the AR-15 is semi auto while the M16 is fully automatic.**
Both should be excellent for a PA setting. I doubt you get a lot of full auto in such a setting because scarcity.
Rifles are amazing.
* Range limited by your ability to aim.
* Stopping power for days. No body armor can stop it.
* Plenty of ammo. Even 20 round magazines are enough.
* Super common ammo.
* Excellent rate of fire even in semi auto. If you are not careful in getting the most out of your shots you are wasting money.
* Super common weapon with hundreds of options and parts.
* While not small it is not huge. Can still be used in confined spaces.
* Plenty of options when it comes to optics or lights or whatever. Even bayonets.
* Even grenades launcher mount are available.
* Probably a common enough platform that your character knows about or ever tried in the past.
* Reliable and easy to maintain. Used by many armies and civilians.
Edit
I'm unfortunately a theoretical gun lover. Where I live I can't license a Swiss army knife. So. I might be wrong.
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I'll start by assuming the your aim is **survival** - not to finish off World War 3
**Learn to use a spear/club/javelin.**
**First Point - Modern ammunition has a finite supply - it cannot be replaced if the industry that produces it is destroyed.**
Your problem will be that in such a world ammunition supplies will be immediately limited to existing stock. And most stocks will be located in major population centers or in the hands of the military.
Rural stocks will be in the hands of locals and will quickly be purchased/looted by those same locals or else cached by the owners in hidden stores.
What isn't destroyed outright will probably be buried under rubble so good luck venturing into the cities to find it.
Meanwhile the militarily will jealously guard its stocks as it tries (at least for a while) to maintain order. And of course if or when command and control breaks down isolated units will *not* be willing to share. So after say 10 years or so of mayhem whats going to be left?
Your only hope of re-supply will be;
-Trade e.g. "*I'll give you X in exchange for those 20 rounds of .223*";
-taking rounds off the dead/injured (where you have no control over what you find).
-reloading - which requires stock of bullets powder and primers. All of which face the same problem as the ammunition itself i.e they cant be manufactured any more.
**2nd Point - given the above a firearm that can use multiple calibers is desirable**
There are **several pistols** out there that are convertible between calibers i.e. you can switch out the barrel and receivers between several common calibers (.45, .40 .357 Sig and sometimes 9mm). **Sig Sauer and Glock** come to mind. Most revolvers in .357 will also take .38.
If you have a rifle go with the most common military calibers in the US .308 &.233/5.56. This is what military units should have the largest stock piles of. Plus the American public fixates on assault rifles so they buy the same calibers themselves.
In the end it doesn't really matter what type of rifle. For every 2 rifles you could name out there in gun land there will be 2000 different opinions on why one is better than the other. Some more credible than others.
So in fact **a bolt action rifle** or similar might be preferable as it imposes discipline on your use of rounds and has less parts that can break.
Finally consider a black powder weapon. If you can make even basic powder and have a lead mold at least you have something for hunting. And don't forget the spear.
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Now, I'm not *super* knowledgeable on firearms but here's a partial answer:
**Handguns:** 9mm is the most common round in the world. This makes it ideal, because you can find it everywhere; police stations, private homes, shooting ranges, etc. In a post-apocalypse scenario, this round will probably be your bread and butter. Yes, it's not super powerful but it is still lethal.
As for a gun to shoot the 9mm with, you'll probably want to go with a Glock. They're ubiquitous, easy to use and maintain, and reliable enough that they're used by militaries and police forces the world over as service weapons.
**Shotguns:** Shotguns are a great survivalist's weapon. They are simple enough that building one is often a hobbyist gunsmithing project and provide a great deal of power and utility while being easy to use and effective.
First, a shotgun is powerful. Loaded with buckshot, they can blow holes through people at short range and while you can't use one for sniping, it's a myth that shotguns are a close-range only weapon--a practiced shooter can still lethally hit targets over a hundred meters away (rifled slug even out to 200). Additionally, all that power can also be used against things like doors, locks, and other physical obstructions or even armored enemies. Even someone in military plate is gonna have a bad day if they get hit by a slug.
Second, a shotgun is versatile. Birdshot makes it effective against birds (duh) and in general it's a good weapon for hunting with. A shotgun can also fire flares, flechettes, slugs, or basically anything else you can fit in the barrel and it's also rather easy to custom-load shells yourself.
Finally, they're easy to use and easy to find. Shotguns are a very common weapon, and after handguns, they're probably the most common civilian owned weapon (next to hunting rifles). Their ammunition is also very standardized. Most shells are 12 guage so if you find shotgun ammo, it will probably work with your shotgun. The length and shoulder stock also make shotguns very easy to aim compared to a handgun.
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# Sling
The most simple weapon is the easiest to make and load. A simple sling. The ammunition lies on the floor almost everywhere: **Stones**. Or you cast 80-gram lead items and you have ammo. With some training, you can hit birds from the sky.
# Atlatl
The most simple way to extend the reach of a thrown spear is by using a lever to launch it. [An Atlatl is that.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower). The spears can be made with a machete, the Atlatl from a curved branch. And the use is rather straightforward and simple. Maintaining it is super easy, and the ammo is reusable.
Loot one hardware depot and you find enough almost ready-made spears that only need fletching from a few pieces of plastic to last you two to three lifetimes!
# Crossbow & bolts
Crossbows are simple. They can have 800 pounds draw and shoot hard enough to kill animals. In fact, crossbows are very popular hunting weapons. Their biggest upside is, they are simple, easy to maintain, and sturdy, and much easier to use than bows. Their cadence is terrible, but their ammunition is reusable as long as it isn't shot into an oak door - and it could be made from the same supplies you make Atlatl ammo from.
# Plumbata
For close range of up to 30 meters or some, you could use Plumbata: weighted darts of about 200-250 grams. They can be made from wood, lead and a bit of rebar using a file and something as fletching - so decently complicated to make. But they can be reused and make a decent weapon, [easily puncturing unarmored flesh.](https://youtu.be/EfgMfSZiQSU)
# Musket/Blunderbuss and Ball
A musket - either flint or matchlock - does have the most simple firing mechanism you can find: Insert Blackpowder, insert ball with the wrapping, ram down, fill frizzen or pan, fire. The two components - black powder, lead balls, and greased fabric - are easy to make yourself from the material one can come by.
A Blunderbuss is even better in this regard, as with some leaves for wadding, one can load pretty much everything as long as one has access to black powder - which is easy to make.
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Let me speak as someone who grew up in a rural area where hunting is a way of life, and consequently firearms are common.
The **first myth of guns is that they are primarily for shooting bad guys**. This is bogus, even in post-apocalyptic worlds. The thing that guns are used for more than anything is hunting, now and always (unless all the animals are dead in your world). And for hunting, pistols and machine guns are garbage. There are basically three types of guns used for hunting, which are rifles, shotguns, and muzzleloaders. The latter is basically a legacy gun, and is strictly inferior to the other two. However, in a post-apocalyptic world, the muzzleloader is probably slightly easier to get ammunition for (it's just a metal ball sitting on some explosive powder). Realistically, I think all of these guns would see continued use in such a world, because (1) there are good do-it-yourself reloading kits for rifles and shotgun shells in widespread use already, and (2) there are gazillions of rounds sitting in farmhouse basements all over the country.
Now as to the shooting bad guys business, it sounds like it's definitely going to happen in your world. But it's not going to be trench warfare, or even guerrilla warfare, so most of the "fancy" weapons that are used by modern militaries won't be very useful. E.g. machine guns are handy if you want to clear a battlefield (I guess), but if you're fighting in rugged country with lots of cover, you're way **better off with a standard rifle**. This is basically the same reason why bolt-action rifles are the preferred weapon for big game hunting--you benefit nothing from being able to fire rounds quickly, it spooks your prey, and if your prey is hunting you back it also gives away your position. Plus you waste rounds by firing quickly.
Again, I think we can learn about self defense by looking at what hunters use. In bear country, many people will carry a revolver or something "just in case" they need to gun down a bear, but in actuality nobody ever does. **The best defense is bear spray (pepper spray)**. There are several reasons for this, including that we don't usually want to kill bears if we can avoid it, but also bear spray is effective even if you don't aim it perfectly (area effect). On the contrary, if you miss with a revolver, you still have an angry bear coming at you. The same could be said for fighting humans: If you are in a close enough fighting environment that a rifle is ineffective, then you typically will be better off firing pepper spray at your opponent first to incapacitate them (something like a taser could also be effective). After they're down, you could imagine a pistol being useful for "finishing them off" if you like, but there's a good argument that it shouldn't be your primary weapon.
There is one other element that's relevant for self-defense, which is intimidation. Scary looking guns probably make bad guys less likely to mess with you. However, for this purpose, it doesn't even matter if they are loaded. But it could be helpful to have a big gun to brandish when the marauders come by your farmstead, to encourage them to just keep on a-riding.
As a final comment before I conclude, let me point out that a post-apocalyptic world will not be a regression to the Wild West days, because modern knowledge will not be lost. People will still know the chemistry to make stuff like bear spray, explosives, and poisons, and some of it will be possible to make with only primitive ingredients. Similarly, the tools for e.g. reloading rifle shells will continue to exist and function essentially forever, and it's not difficult to fashion a new one if needed either.
**So, in conclusion, what I argue would be the best armory for a post-apocalyptic world would be:**
* Rifles, shotguns, and/or muzzleloaders. Exactly which you would choose depends on details of your situation. E.g. if you're a nomad living out of a backpack, then you'd probably want a muzzleloader, because it's relatively easy to get ammunition. If you were based in a farmhouse where you can set up a reloading station, rifles and shotguns are better. It probably doesn't matter which specific make of gun you go with, but **if I had to choose I'd personally go with a 12 gauge shotgun, on account of being pretty universal and versatile, and something like a .30-06 or .308 rifle for precision shooting**. All of these meet the criteria posed in the OP for being common, reliable, and easy to maintain.
* Some chemical self defense weapon like bear spray, or a taser (assuming you can charge it). A pistol would also be helpful, but it's for a more specialized purpose, and you wouldn't need to use it often.
Also, you asked specifically for guns, but modern crossbows are every bit as lethal, and you can reuse the bolts. So I would definitely have a crossbow in my armory, and that would probably be my go-to weapon for big game hunting if bullets were in short supply.
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Edit: I see several other answers advocating primitive weapons. This is farcical. Humans haven't used spears or slings seriously in thousands of years. A modern compound bow will last a lifetime and be orders of magnitude more effective at both hunting and self defense than primitive weapons. Even if you had to fashion a bow yourself, using modern designs you'd be way ahead of spears and slings. See also my crossbow comment above.
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If you went from 8 billion to 8 million overnight, that would mean only 1 in 1000 people are still alive. Sounds like you mean more like 4 million anyway, or 1 in 2000. Do you really think you're going to have a problem with ammunition, at least in America? All of those supplies would still be around if humanity was wiped out quickly. You might say they're in irradiated areas, but large cities have lower rates of gun ownership anyway, and the people who live in the best locations to avoid fallout are the same sort of people who stockpile these things.
I think the ammunition would last long enough that whatever organization takes over a certain region will be able to make more before the ammo runs out. Water, food, medicine, and fuel would be way more important, due to being damaged by fire and radiation, and all of them being susceptible to expiration.
Within the first few years after the fires go out, the fauna should start to thrive, expecially with the lack of humans. Look at Chernobyl, for example. When that happens, rather than go out and try to hunt them with guns, just set traps. If you're trying to rebuild after an apocalypse, you're going to need the most bang for your buck, and a reusable trap that doesn't require you to actively hunt down a single animal at a time is gonna be the way to go.
In short, 8.1 billion rounds of ammo were manufactured in the US in 2018. Only 1 in 2000 people would still be around according to your numbers, leaving a US population of ~164,000. There should be enough in private and government stockpiles to last through a couple wars if that's the scale we're talking about.
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* Not quite a gun, but how about a steel crossbow?
* Failing that, a replica flintlock rifle. Somewhat finicky, but there is at least the chance to manufacture the ammo if you salvage the right books to go with it.
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## Pump action 12ga shotgun.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XQw9X.png)
First as others have mentioned you should only be using a gun in a emergency, for hunting you should be using something reusable like a crossbow, but if you have to shotguns are good for hunting game of any size, just use different shot and you can hunt small game and large game with equal ease.
**Shotguns** are the most forgiving for handmade ammunition. A smoothbore gun does not need fitted/cast ammunition. You can literally load it with bits of scrap. The shell for a shotgun shell can be reused, if it is the right kind it can be reused hundreds of times. **Your biggest limits will be primers as they cannot be reused.** although primers can be hand made (but its not easy). Upside reloading is so common you can find 1000 count boxes of primers, also because reloading is so common reloading equipment will be easy to come by.
Shotguns also give you a variety of ammunition to choose from, birdshot, buckshot, slug, safety line, and a whole plethora of more specialized gimmicks. (don't try rock salt, few things destroy a gun faster than exposing it to salt) 12 gauge (12ga) is the most common shotgun ammunition in the US and indeed the world, even in countries/states with strong gun laws shotgun ammunition is still plentiful because its primary use is hunting. I would be more surprised to find a farm that did *not* have a shotgun somewhere on the property.
**pump actions** are the most forgiving and reliable shotgun that can be quickly reloaded, (technically a breechloader is the most forgiving but you only get one or two shots but they would work well as a second choice). The human is supplying the force to cycle the ammunition, because of this even if the load is weak or the shell subpar you can still cycle it and get a new shell in the chamber. It is very difficult to get a pump action to the point it will not cycle, if you clean it occasionally its virtually impossible. This is the reason military shotgun are often pump action, no matter what the load they will still cycle.
There is one more small but useful bonus to a pump action, you don't have to fire it to make an audible threat with it. Its a small thing but a phycological effect is still useful.
## Breech loading shotgun
As I mentioned a good second choice would be a breechloading shotgun, they are even more forgiving with ammunition, but you only get one or two shots depending on the number of barrels. On the other hand it will fire **anything**, there are inserts to allow them to shoot ammunition from different firearms, including rifle and pistol ammunition. So if you want to be able to fire whatever ammunition you find this is the way to go.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/968il.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q5R86.png)
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The problem is the supply of ammonition, and the maintenance of a high tech artefact in a low tech environment.
So you need a gun, that makes you independent from ammunition and is easy to maintain.
You should choose something wich is explosive and can be manufactured in situ. For example a gun that is able to fire with stored hydrogen, gathered with a solar cell and then stored as methanol or something. Just add water.
Now for the projectiles, i would recommend something, non metallic, manufacture-able with primitive technology. Iron slugs or ceramic, your gun should have a drill, to drill raw projectile down to size.
Ignition is electric. Cleaning is - well cleaning.
New barell is difficult, but they made gun barells in medieval times - so you will make do.
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A revolver in .357 Magnum. These revolvers are common and can fire both the .357 Magnum cartridge, and the less powerful .38 Special. Ammunition in these calibres is fairly common in the US. Being revolvers it is easy to keep your fired cases. Self loading weapons may eject spent brass quite forcefully making recovery difficult. You want to keep your brass so that you can reload it.
In a pinch a .357 can fire 9mm caliber bullets (0.355 of an inch). They are a bit small so you wouldn't use them in normal circumstances, but hey! Its the end of civilisation and they will work if they have to. This means you can disassemble 9mm ammo and use it to build .357/.38 ammo. (Again, the burn rate of 9mm powders will probably be wrong for the .357/.38, so you would never do this in real life, but if that is the only supply of powder you have...) Keep the 9mm brass as trade goods - there will be other survivors with 9mm weapons.
The same is true of other 0.355/0.357 family pistol ammo too. This bullet diameter is probably the most common for centre fire pistols.
Other pistol cartridges can be disassembled for powder, and if you had bullet moulds you may even be able to melt down the bullets and recast them.
The rifle equivalent of .357 is 30 calibre (0.308 of an inch, 7.62mm). The most common calibres in the US are probably the .308 Winchester, the .300 Winchester Magnum and the .30-06. A bolt action rifle in any of these calibres will have similar advantages to the .357 revolver already discussed (except none of these cartridges are interchangeable like the .357 and .38).
If you are looking for a single calibre for rifle and pistol prior to WWIII then the .460 S&W Magnum is a good choice. In the pistol it can fire .460, .44 magnum and .44 Special. These are less common but still fairly widely available in the US. A lever action rifle in .444 Marlin can be modified relatively easily to .460 by a competent gun smith (I know of this having been done). The rifle could also fire .44 Magnum and .44 Special in single shot.
And don't overlook the humble .22lr. This is probably the most common calibre on the planet. I suspect most US shooters probably have .22 in their gun safe.
A further advantage of manual weapons is that they can use black powder propellants that would foul self loading weapons and cause them to malfunction after very few rounds.
On the subject of black powder, brass cases don't last forever, even if reloaded at low power (which will make your powder supplies last longer too). So if the means to manufacture ammunition is gone for good (or at least for many decades) then ultimately muzzle loaders with external ignition (flint locks, percussion locks, and maybe electric/piezo?) will become common once again. These weapons can be manufactured with medieval technology so should be within reach of inventive survivors.
Finally, humans have made bows for 70,000 years. If any weapon technology survives the end of civilisation, I suspect that it will be the bow.
Edit: Again if preparing in advance for the end of the world - I just remembered that adaptors are available that fit into the chamber of a 12 gauge shotgun that will take a wide range of rifle and pistol calibres. The gun is effectively single shot (ammunition will not feed in a pump or self loader) but you could acquire several adaptors in different calibres and also have a shot gun.
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Your best weapon is common sense. Since there are virtually no people around in North America -- it will be ground zero for more nukes than anywhere else, your chance of meeting anyone will be very low. Your chance of meeting anyone dangerous will be even lower.
Obviously a lot depends on how effective the government is, but since they military and government heads are probably the only survivors, things are likely to be fairly well under control.
Depending on the damage, there will be few or no large predators left. There may be some feral dogs, but you probably won't need a weapon to deal with them.
There will be lots of hazards to face, but probably nothing that violence will help with. Co-operation may be the key to survival.
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May I suggest the one thing that has been proven to work in an environment where high-tech resupply was logistically impossible: the humble [air rifle.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle)
As used by the Lewis and Clark expedition. There is no propellant to worry about, and the ammunition is re-usable and can be re-cast if required.
It lacks the machismo of the AR-15, but that's not what you want in a survival situation anyway.
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Most information is from some website and a user from quora: I’ll link the address for both websites at the end.
**The Glock 19**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O4cke.png)
This **Gun** is a **simple** to use gun
* To clean
* Take apart
* And it is easy to find replacment Parts
* It has a trigger safety feature to avoid accidental discharge
* It takes 9mm bullets with a total capicity of 16 rounds
Currently our **Military** and **Law Enforcement** are using this Gun
So this could (our should be) the **default** Gun in your setting becuse after the Bombs drop everyone can just steal this Gun in your **Local** Police Station)
The problem is the shorter sight radius than the rifles has, which makes them harder to aim, and recoil from more powerful rounds can be an issue for some shooters.
Next is your **Shotgun**
**The Pros are**
* You hit someone and they’re dead.
* It was cheap before the Boms dropped.
* You can use a huge variety of different ammunition types in a shotgun. It’s the most versatile weapon. You can hunt, shoot clays, and protect yourself with the same gun.
* The shotgun is quick to dispatch multiple moving targets at close range.
**The Cons**
* It has Recoil, a lot of Recoil
* It can only take a few rounds (1-4)
* If you need to reload, pump guns are quite slow. Because it doesn't have like the Handgun a Magazine.
* It is harder to use the Shotgun with one Hand (recoil)
* It is Longer and therefore it is harder to use a Shotgun for clearing a corner becuse everyone can see the Shotgun
* This can be a Con our a Pro a Shotgun can shoot troughe a Walls
* Just rack the shotgun will not scare pepole away
Rifle
* They shoot accurately to greater distances than handguns (due to a longer sight radius) or shotguns (due to better ballstics coefficients)
* They are more powerful than handguns
* Typically, they are lighter than shotguns, as is their ammunition
Recoil can be more manageable than that of handguns or shotguns
And now some Generial Facts about the USA and Guns
* Some estimates put the number of firearms in the US at between 412 million and 660 million. That is a lot of guns!
* There seems to be a commensurately large amount of ammunition
* If you choose your gun(s) carefully, there is a wide selection of readily available spare parts, replacements and mission/shooter specific accessories
In other words, if you run out of these, it is your fault!
But not only Guns are a great choice becuse when the ammunition is gone than you are in big danger
Mabey a **Bow** could be a alternative
I knowe what you thing ,,But i have a Nuclier Winter all the Plants will die"
Sure but you can make the story so that you MC despriedly needs a Weapon so he builds a Bow who always breaks before it is ready to shoot our after he shoots. This could showcase how futile the situation our world is
But in the End you should Probely just stick whit an **Axe** a **knife** our **Spear**
Becuse in the End the Real world isent a movie so the Mc cant just jump into action and shoot everyone down, becuse who knows how many pepole are insid a building our how many
way out are in a situation(Always have the MC consider a escape route at the Beginning of the Fight our if it his quarters he already should knowe the escape route)
You should read the Story ,,The Road" and play our whatch ,,Fallout Dust" to see theefects of Nucliere Winter and how pepole are acting in thouse times
Webside i used
<https://www.quora.com/What-weapons-would-be-most-effective-in-a-zombie-apocalypse>
<https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-shotguns-for-home-defense>
<https://myapocalypsesurvival.com/best-weapons/>
Sorry if there are some spelling errors but i didnt have a auto control and im German
[Answer]
My vote for close quarters defense would be the Colt M1911 or M1911A1.45ACP or the look-alike of your choice - anything from the original Browning designed Colt Government to the Spanish Star or Llama versions, Norwegian Kongsberg, Chinese Norilco or whatever. So many military and law enforcement groups worldwide used it for so long and so many gun enthusiasts still use them that ammo should not be a problem and they are really easy to strip and care for. A lot of enthusiasts also reload used cartridges, so propellant, primers, casings etc. are probably stockpiled all over the place.
For hunting it would probably depend on whether your settlement has one or more decent gunsmiths and enough chemical and mechanical know-how and resources to make primers and propellant that can be used in "modern" weapons. If so, any decent shotgun and hunting rifle works fine. Generally, early 20th century or late 19th century designs would be easier to manufacture/copy. The further you go past WWI the more you start having to depend on machinery that may not be available for long.
If you don't have the know-how or resources, getting your hands on some good crossbows and hunting or even competition compound bows is a better bet. Bolts, quarrels and arrows are easier to learn to make than primers and messing it up is unlikely to destroy your weapon and/or blow your hand off.
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[
I have a region in my novel called the Burren where some event many years prior caused the once relatively lush hills of farmland to become a barren desert.
The desert expands little by little every few years.
The desolation was initially caused by magic, but my magic system is tied into the chemistry and physics of whatever happens. So what would cause rolling hills of green to turn into desert?
There are no forests in this area if that changes anything.
[Answer]
# Cut down trees + monsoon = no soil
This happened in Ethiopia, from around ~600 AD to 800 AD. Ethiopia is a giant volcanic plug sticking up two kilometers from the African Savanna. Because of its height and position right at the edge of the tropics, it had an excellent combination of stable year round temperatures, cold enough nights to prevent tropical diseases from spreading (malaria was minimal and tsetse flies non-existant), and stong, albeit seasonal, rainfall.
This meant two things: not only did Ethiopia have its own set of native crops, it was also to import and grow a wide variety of crops from other places. Ethiopia initially thrived. The hills were covered in forests, so there was plentiful wood, rich volcanic soil, and lots of lakes and rivers from rainfall. This is one of the few patches of Harenna forest remaining in Ethiopia.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5I1nz.jpg)
The Axumite empire flourished in the 4th to 6th centuries. In the time before Islam, it was considered one of the great powers of the near East, rivaling Persia. Axumite armies expelled the Persians from modern day Yemen in 525 AD.
But things went wrong (and this is covered in Jared Diamond's [Collapse](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0143117009)). They cleared their mountainous home of trees to expand farmland and population. Ethiopia has a monsoon-like climate. Addis Abebe recieves about 1200 mm of rain each year, roughly the same as New York City, but 50% of the rain falls in just 2 months. Addis Abeba sees more rain in July and August than London, San Francisco, or Beijing see all year. in other words, a monsoon climate.
Denuded of tree cover, the heavy summer rains washed the available topsoil away. The rich volcanic soil that had built up over 30 million years was eroded away, leaving scrubby brush and barren ground. The change happened relatively quickly. Trees along riverbanks were the last to be cut, since riverbanks aren't great places to farm. But once you decide to cut those trees to fire your forge or cooking fire, erosion proceeds rapidly. From the apex of power in the late 6th century, the Axumites had fallen so far that their capital was practically abandoned less than 50 years later.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B3oHe.jpg)
Ethiopian civilization did not die, of course. It continues to the present day, with almost 100 million people still living on the plateau. But the fertile ground that had propelled the Ethiopians to imperial ambitions was relegated to the dustbin of history.
[Answer]
An increase in soil salinity could lead to plant death and desertification, they didn't say "[Salt the Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth)" for nothing, it works!
The right amount wouldn't immediately kill all the plants, but would weaken them, killing them over a period of years. Eventually nothing grows and the topsoil blows away into a dust storm.
Bonus, this doesn't require the area to be dry like a desert, it will kill plant life even in relatively wet areas.
Also if your initial salt magic spell event was big enough, the salt would spread, first through water runoff, and then through the blown dust, spreading the salt and expanding the region of desolation.
[Answer]
The Island of Nauru is not far off being an example of this. Once, it had some of the most fertile soil on Earth. But they mined all of the phosphate from the soil, and it became very barren. They were once the greenest and richest place in the world (per capita), but became one of the most barren and poor.
That might be an interesting cause for your soils' change for your story. The magicians sap all the phosphate out of the soil, or summon imps to steal it away to hell.
After that, simple desertification as Ebonair describes may be enough.
[Answer]
Sounds like desertification, where deserts slowly grow larger as the surrounding area dries and the soil degrades.
>
> The immediate cause is the loss of most vegetation. This is driven by a
> number of factors, alone or in combination, such as drought, climatic
> shifts, tillage for agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation for fuel or
> construction materials. Vegetation plays a major role in determining the
> biological composition of the soil. Studies have shown that, in many
> environments, the rate of erosion and runoff decreases exponentially with
> increased vegetation cover.[32] Unprotected, dry soil surfaces blow away
> with the wind or are washed away by flash floods, leaving infertile lower
> soil layers that bake in the sun and become an unproductive hardpan.
>
>
> — [Wikipedia: Desertification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification)
>
>
>
The lack of trees definitely plays a big part:
>
> The Gobi Desert is expanding at an alarming rate, in a process known as
> desertification. The expansion is particularly rapid on the southern edge
> into China, which has seen 3,600 km2 (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken
> every year by the Gobi Desert. Dust storms, which used to occur regularly in
> China, have increased in frequency in the past 20 years, mainly due to
> desertification. They have caused further damage to China's agriculture
> economy.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> The expansion of the Gobi is attributed mostly to human activities, notably
> deforestation, overgrazing, and depletion of water resources. China has
> tried various plans to slow the expansion of the desert, which have met with
> some small degree of success, but no major effects. The most recent plan
> involves the planting of the Green Wall of China, a huge ring of newly
> planted forests; the government hopes the forests will help stabilize the
> soil, retain moisture, and act as a buffer against further desertification.
>
>
> — [Wikipedia: Gobi Desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert)
>
>
>
So the initial event that created a small desert killed off a bunch of vegetation, similar to the effect of severe overgrazing and logging, and set a feedback loop in motion where the soil degradation is now spreading outwards.
[Answer]
A magma intrusion in the form of a [laccolith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laccolith) causing toxic gasses to taint ground water and percolate up through the soil could kill off plant life, and it would explain why it spreads outward. The surface would also begin to rise around the surrounding area, exposing it to winds that would help spread sand.
[Answer]
The simple introduction of an invasive species (think hordes of grasshoppers), a previously unknown soil fungus (eating away at roots) or a mutation in soil bacteria that produce large quantities of acidic wastes. One or all could easily do the job.
[Answer]
**Cleverness and a feedback loop.**
You have it backwards: the magic kills all the plant life in the area in the short term, and maybe keeps anything new from sprouting for a short while. But without root systems to hold the soil together, the same winds that helped make the land fertile in the first place strip away the topsoil leaving desert behind. (AKA the dust bowl.)
The local people unwittingly do the rest, as they move out of the barren land and settle in what is left. Through both normal human laziness and lack of resources, they only travel as far as they have to. The land can't support this larger number of people and as they overtax the soil and water they create more desert. Now they and even more people have to move again, expanding and repeating the effect. Livestock and over-farming are both major causes of desertification, and a feedback loop agriculture desertification like this can be seen in places like the Sahara and Patagonia.
Quite a nice return on investment from the spell caster's point of view.
[Answer]
Have your region rely on a single, major river for its water supply. Perhaps it's sitting in an [alluvial fan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alluvial_fan) where the incoming river splits into dozens of streams that criss-cross the land in a natural irrigation network. Diverting the river's course somewhere upstream would cause the region to dry out, slowly killing off plants, driving away wildlife, and fueling the desertification cycle.
You can make the cause for this as magical or mundane as you want. Something as "magic" as a well-placed canal, natural erosion/meandering, or a natural dam (perhaps from a landslide) could be enough to coax the river to take a new route and bypass your now-barren region. Your character could trigger such a process (or artificially accelerate it) via magic, or it could be completely natural and they simply *claim* they did it through magic.
[Answer]
Magically put some sand over there.
And/or lover the level of water
Just like we (humans) did to Pustynia Błędowska [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82%C4%99d%C3%B3w_Desert)
You can of course just poison the water for short time and kill everything that need it to live. Then the terrain turn into barrens and the poison stored in the dead plants and animals is spread by the wind, expanding the non-habital territory.
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Basically, soil has trillions of microorganism who digest leaves and everything that falls into the earth. So in an event where the microorganisms die, like wildfire, the soil will degrade and will be barren over time.
Second is what Mr.Viktor Schauberger called half recycling: [The Secrets of Water, The Documentary of Viktor Schauberger "Comprehend and Copy Nature"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyOGdjWDVM4&ab), in which soil loses its overall power to absorb water due to extreme heat
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In this world, magic comes from a large tradition of stories. There is a tome of stories (or some such thing) that holds all of the stories that a particular culture knows, and this is passed down to the story tellers, who are able to perform the magic.
The concept is that, when facing a particular situation, a story teller will tell the story they know, modified to fit the current facts. For example, if there is a story of a young girl who grows so large that she can walk across a lake, then an old man telling the story in order to get to his cottage on an island would change the details so that it is him who is doing the growing and walking. In so doing, when the story is done being told, the old man is the one who crossed the lake.
The key is that in order to make the magic work, you have to believe that the story is possible.
The problem I'm having is that the plot's central moment will be when a new story teller, who has yet to actually perform the magic, suddenly realizes that it's not about believing the actual myth, but about believing that you can do what the people in the stories did, and weaving the magic to make that happen.
So...why doesn't everyone just write their own stories whenever they need them?
Why is it important that there are only so many stories, and what is so special about these stories that they are the ones that invoke the magic?
[Answer]
I would like to address your second question first, because in my opinion it should be the central question.
>
> Why is it important that there are only so many stories, and what is so special about these stories that they are the ones that invoke the magic?
>
>
>
There are not many really plausible reasons,
* **Based on real events**
The stories could be events, that really happened, but maybe just to some sort of magic civilization, gods that travelled the world long before time. Or maybe these are stories from another dimension/realm, that magical beings did and every time someone tells a story, a bit of that world's reality is leaking into the world. So if someone wants to write a new story, he needs a way of experience these other beings, which might be impossible now.
* **Forgotten knowledge**
Maybe it's the style the writing needs to fulfill. Some sort of emphasis that lies in the words, some sort of metrum that needs to be fulfilled or maybe just a certain amounts of vowels, that carry this magic. This does not explain where the magic comes from, but it could just be a god liking the sound and allowing the magic to happen.
* **It needs to be believable**
As you stated in your question, its not about believing the myth but believing that you can do what the people in the myth did. That may be because the story is so well written that you can envision yourself in the role of the story's protagonist. Those stories are so old, that everyone has seen some sort of theater showing those stories. So they are easier to cast when remembering those performances. And to that effect, if many more people know these myths, they are easier to cast.
So to your first question:
>
> So...why doesn't everyone just write their own stories whenever they need them?
>
>
>
Because it's hard work. Either you need to research it, you don't have the knowledge to write them or your stories suck, especially under stress.
[Answer]
## Mass belief
The actual mechanism of how such stories gain actual power is by combining the 'belief magic' of many people. Thus, a story that's known and believed by few people simply can't affect much, the story needs to have a large scale consensus, drawing on the beliefs of many, many people in order to have a meaningful effect.
Writing your own magic-creating story *would* be possible, but not "whenever you need it" - disseminating it across the land and accumulating belief inevitably takes time, possibly generations. However, that *would* give an entirely new face to various instruments of mass media and propaganda - in the latter century we *have* been able to invent stories with a powerful political message and convince whole nations about them.
[Answer]
It is a pretty common system to have gods' powers derived from their worshippers in fantasy settings (this provides the gods a motivation and limits their powers). You could use a similar system here. The power of the story comes from lots of people believing it is possible. Believing it is true is the most obvious but not only way of believing it is possible. Maybe your storyteller can spin up very weak stories that only they believe in, but they can't get much done alone.
In addition, stories naturally mutate. Many people believe the story of the girl stepping over the lake. In some places, the story of the man stepping over the lake also exists based on it. In some places, the story of the girl shrinking to an appropriate size and jumping across lily pads exists. These are all fundamentally derived from the girl crossing the lake. The reason you want fewer stories out there is that it makes them more general. If you want to be an old man who jumps across lily pads, you can combine the story of the girl and the lily pads and the old man and the lake, because they are linked by the girl and the lake, and related stories reinforce each other.
This also provides an interestingly-dangerous aspect that if you don't know the stories well, you might think the story of the old woman flying is related to the girl in the lake and try to combine them. Since they are not, the power of your story will be pretty weak and perhaps you won't fly as expected.
[Answer]
You've said it yourself.
>
> In this world, magic comes from a large **tradition of stories**. There is a tome of stories (or some such thing) that holds all of the stories **that a particular culture knows**,
>
>
>
A legend doesn't exist on its own, or on a printed page. A legend exists in the minds and imaginations of countless thousands of people. Going about their lives, they know the stories, they tell the stories, they compare the stories to the situations they're going through. The stories are touchstones of their common cultural heritage. Magic can only be shaped and guided properly by a collective, subconscious will. (Or perhaps a collective *conscious* will, but that's the stuff of religions and cults, not wizardry.)
You can't just make those up. Creating a new spell - a new story - out of whole cloth is possible but it is an exacting process. You need people not just to know the story that you've told, but to believe in it as part of their cultural mainstream - not easily done even today, let alone in the time before mass media. You might try your best to spread a new story as far and wide as you can, to couch it in the proper mythical terms, and eventually, after many years, decades, even centuries of work (by you and your descendants) it will work as a magical tale. But it's not so simple as picking up a pen and going to work.
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Because you need to believe it. Anyone who finds out that you have to believe you can do it has seriously hampered him/herself in being able to perform magic.
As a child you could believe in Santa and everything he could do. But as you learned more about the world it became harder to believe in such things. Try and write a story now and convince yourself it's true, thats going to be hard. And since believing it yourself is an important part of the magic any story you write yourself is going to be ineffective or have a much higher difficulty in succeeding.
This also transfers to telling the story on. If you dont believe it yourself then it is a lot harder to sell. It'll take a few retellings before the story becomes mythological enough that people can believe it, but the original author will not benefit as much from his own story.
The old stories will remain effective because you have used and seen their magic. You can assume the grain of truth that it happened is there, and likely someone even showed you the "truth" of it by using its magic
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Because there are actually limits on what magic can do. The stories that survive are the ones that work, if you make up a story you probably are trying to create an effect you can't do and thus it fails. If you should happen to create a story that magic can actually accomplish then it works, but that's sufficiently unlikely that people don't believe it will work--and thus it doesn't.
[Answer]
In order to be able to apply a story to magic, it has to be heard at least once in early childhood. An adult making up a new story might be able to get it told to young children, and let them use it a generation later, but it would be too late for the adult to use the new story.
This is similar to language acquisition. Almost all young children achieve full native speaker fluency in the language or languages that are in use around them. As they get older, learning languages to full fluency becomes impossible for most people.
[Answer]
The story writers have the Silver Tongue. Everyone knows how the really great storytellers are made - it’s something about being born under a full moon as the seventh son of a blacksmith, while Dave’s comet passes across the shamrock constellation.
Everyone knows that. After all, **that’s how the stories go**. Of course, across the Great River they have different stories about how they’re made, but those people talk all kinds of nonsense.
[Answer]
If you want to add an environmental aspect:
Only stories written on a special magical paper that is made of a special magical plant generates actual magic. These plants are of course only available in specific numbers. Also you can't just harvest all as they wouldn't be able to reproduce anymore.
You can add different aspects coming out of this concept to your story.
Like who controls the plants, special knowledge to artificially grow it and what not.
[Answer]
Storytelling is at least partially art. In order to create a story that is magical,
## it has to be really good *as a story*, too
Same as in real world, there are virtually *tons* of thousands of books, but only a very small number that is good enough to actually be remembered after a century.
Additionally, it is argued that
## there are only only 6 archetypes of stories in the world
<http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180525-every-story-in-the-world-has-one-of-these-six-basic-plots>
Granted, you can fit a surprising number of narratives in them, but the question is, does magic care?
[Answer]
**It's dangerous to create new stories.** Your system has a lot of raw power. All the traditions and rituals, and the fact that people tend to only make small tweaks to existing stories, are because the process of creating new stories is inherently dangerous, and has killed many people. It has to be tightly controlled, in order to not get vastly out of control. The old stories give you a structure to hold on to, something to keep your imagination from running wild (perhaps literally!). People who don't stick closely to the old stories have a tendency to end up imagining and believing bad and self-destructive fantasies.
[Answer]
You state it in your description - it has to be a *cultural* story.
It becomes impossible to write stories on-the-fly, since that means that they would have to disseminate it within their own culture *and* pass it off as a real long-forgotten story (due to non-MC's understanding of the rules). Additionally, since people who aren't the MC believe that it has to be a real tale that they believe, they don't believe it could work, and as such they don't meet the actual requirements of believing that what they're writing is possible.
example:
>
> I want to cross a lake. There exist no stories like this, so I decide that I want to fly. Shakily, I try to write a story about a person using their arms as wings.
>
>
> "there's no way this can work," I think. "It's not a real myth."
> I finish writing my story, trying to force myself to believe in the new mythos of my birdman. After hours of standing there, I still haven't been able to fly.
>
>
> "Of course," I thought. "This never happened, therefore it can't happen."
>
>
> Suddenly I see some young mage take a paper and write something down, then turn into a dragon and fly across the lake.
>
>
> "Screw this," I think, and hurry to just be a farmer.
>
>
>
[Answer]
In order to gain magical quality, the story needs to be kept in collective memory of the tribe for generations, and the exact words/symbols/gestures must be continuously preserved **in a living consciousness** for, perhaps, 12 generations or 240 years. The catch is,
1. Prone to sabotage if not kept secret: if anyone actually tries the spell/recipe/process described in the
story before it matures, it breaks down and won't work anymore ever no matter what is done.
2. if the story with exact words is not continuously stored in someone's brain, it stops working. If the last person who remembers
the story dies the story spell stops working. But it can be
salvaged (from written record) when whole process is restarted.
3. it must be told in person. Having it written down in book helps but it is not enough, without uninterrupted oral tradition the spell won't work.
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[
I have an alternative-history setting (technology comparable to ~1900), where the country is comparable to modern day Turkey in size (i.e. large), geography (i.e. fertile coastlands, arid heartland), number of inhabitants and city locations. The country is ruled by an emperor with absolute power who resides in the capital in the country's inland (compare to Ankara), but as it is really large it is divided into provinces with local administration. Governors are appointed by the emperor, but on a local structure, some democratic elements exist, such as councils elected by rich/influential citizens.
Challenge for the emperor: Cities/provinces at the coast are by far more wealthy and generally better off economically than the capital and the rural provinces, as they have access to the sea, ports...
**How could the absolute ruler prevent the local governors/province rulers from becoming too powerful and challenge the emperor's power or deciding they'd be better off independently**?
In this setting, the dimensions of the country would also make it difficult to move troops quickly or to have them spread out to many places at once.
[Answer]
**Rotate them around and make them compete**
Fortunately for your comparison, early-modern Turkey came up with a good solution to this. In the Ottoman Empire, regional governors were appointed by the Sultan, and were constantly moved around to new posts. They would usually start their careers in the poor outer provinces, and gradually get "promoted" to ruling the richer ones, as they proved their loyalty. I believe they would also eventually retire and get to live in a fancy palace with their families, after a long enough period of service.
This system ensured that governors never rule a province long enough to build a base of support. It also keeps potentially disloyal governors in the poor/weak provinces, and then promotes the loyal/competent ones over them. Moreover, by making them compete for rule over the richest provinces, you encourage then to rat on each other when plots do occur, and to fight anyone rising against the emperor.
[Answer]
## Timescale
* The Romans did it successfully for about 250-300 years (from about the 1st century BCE to about the end of the 2nd century CE), and then again for about 200-300 years in the Eastern Empire (from about the 4th century CE to about the 6th).
* The Persians did it successfully for about 700 years (from the 1st century BCE to the 6th century CE).
* The Chinese did it successfully for about 300 years ([Ming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_dynasty) dynasty) and then again for another 300 years ([Qing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty) dynasty); the current Chinese Empire is only about 70 years old, so it's too early to tell whether it's a good example or not.
* The Russians did it successfully for about 200 years, from the 18th to the 20th century; the current Russian Empire is only about 100 years old, so it's too early to tell whether it's a good example or not.
* The Americans have been doing it successfully for about 150 years, since the suppression of the Southern Rebellion; everybody knows how the Americans are doing it -- they push a relentless "one nation" propaganda, they try to make sure than no province can survive financially on its own, and they keep gigantic imperial military bases in rich and large provinces such as California or Texas which may run the risk of getting uppity.
* The Ottomans did it successfully for about 500-600 years, from the 14th to the late 19th or early 20th century.
Everybody is bored with things Roman, so,
## How did the Ottomans do it?
The [Ottoman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire) was a multi-ethnic multi-language multi-religion structure. The most widely spoken languages were Turkish, and Greek, and Kurdish, and Arabic, but they also had subjects who spoke Bulgarian and Armenian and Hungarian and Albanian and many other languages. Most inhabitants were Muslim, but Christians (mostly Orthodox, but also Armenians and Catholics) were very numerous; the empire also had a significant number of Jews, especially after the [most idiotic decree of the Most Catholic Monarchs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain#The_Sephardic_diaspora_and_the_Jewish_identity_continuity) Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon.
When looking at the organization of the pre-[Tanzimat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzimat) Ottoman Empire one is bound to observe that they practiced an early form of [matrix management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management), where multiple concurrent hierarchies controlled different aspects of the social, economic and military life, so that except the Sultan and the Grand Vizier, nobody had complete rule over any piece of land or any collectivity of people. (The Grand Vizier could do everything the Sultan could do, except become himself Sultan or sire an heir to the throne; and he could be executed whenever the Sultan wanted; see below on how they were selected.)
* The *civil government* was structured into layers:
+ At the topmost layer were the *eyalets* (provinces, also known as pashaliks) governed by a three-tails [Pasha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasha), also known as a "Bashaw" in English. There were about 20 such provinces. The three-tails Pasha was responsible for the collection of taxes (from those who actually paid taxes, see below *military* government), but he had no military attributions, and no direct executive or judicial attributions; for those, the depended on...
+ His subordinated one-tail Pashas, each governing a *[sandjak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjak)* (counties, also called sometimes in western Europe *pashaliks*, to the despair of historians). *Both* the three-tails and the one-tail Pashas were appointed for a limited term by the central government (specifically, by the [Grand Vizier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_vizier)), so that there was no chance for a three-tailed Pasha to cultivate a cadre of subordinated one-tail Pashas. The sandjaks were divided into...
+ A multitude of small-ish jurisdictions ("[kaza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaza)") placed under the administration of [Kadi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadi_(Ottoman_Empire))s, who combined the functions of a governor and a judge. But,
+ The Kadi had jurisdiction only upon Muslims, and on cases involving a Muslim; Christians and Jews had their own laws and judges, so that in effect a large part of the Empire's population had a dual subordination: to the Kadi / Pasha for fiscal purposes, and to their respective religious hierarchies for judicial purposes.
* The *military power* of the Empire was completely separated from the administrative structure; and in order to avoid any risk of a successful rebellion, the infantry and the cavalry had parallel and incompatible structures.
+ The main military force was the archetypal Ottoman infantry consisting of [Janissaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries), who were notionally *personal slaves* of the Sultan (and by consequence, at least initially, Christians or Jews, the Muslim religion prohibiting the enslavement of Muslims); they were paid a decent and regular salary, were splendidly trained, and were expected to remain celibate and spend their entire life in the army. In later times, when the Empire ran out of easy-to-get Christian slaves, any free-born subjects of the Sultan could enlist, and the restruction on marriage was lifted. Importantly, the Janissaries were *not* taxed and were not subordinated of any civilian authority.
+ The cavalry consisted of [Sipahis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipahi#Timarli_Sipahis), most of whom were [timariots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timar), basically the Ottoman equivalent of western European knights. A timar-holding sipahi received a time-limited control over a piece of land (complete with villages and inhabitants), and they (not "he" -- the timar-holder could be a man or a woman) were entitled to a certain part of the tax revenues produced by the land; in exchange, they had to participate in military campaigns (or in the case of women, send a fully equipped knight). The property over the land remained with the state, and the timar could be reassigned upon failure to perform the service; moreover, the timar was not necessarily inheritable -- a son would inherit it only with the Sultan's approval, which was *not* automatically granted.
* *Foreign policy* was strictly the reserve of the Sultan, the Grand Vizier and the personnel of the central state apparatus, of which the [Grand Dragoman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragoman), the Chief Translator (who was a Christian), was of great importance. (Most Muslim Ottomans did not learn the languages of non-Muslim nations, so there was a need for a translation service at the highest level, manned by Christians.)
* Bonus weirdness:
+ Grand Viziers were often promoted from newly converted families, so that they had great power but no deep social networks; even a Christian *slave* could convert to Islam and eventually become Grand Vizier -- see for example [Ibrahim Pasha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pargal%C4%B1_Ibrahim_Pasha) the Frank. There was *no way* for a Great Vizier to become Sultan, so that their loyalty was supposed to be certain. (It wasn't.)
+ The [Imperial Harem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Imperial_Harem) was (not always, but often) an extremely important factor in imperial politics; for about 130 years (in the 16th and 17th centuries) the Imperial Harem was *the most important* political factor in the Empire: see the [Sultanate of Women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Women).
+ Great Dragomans, who were Christian, were occasionally promoted to the throne of Christian vassal states such as Wallachia and Moldavia.
## Synopsis
The Ottomans ruled their sprawling empire for more than half a millennium; central control was preserved by separating civil authority from military authority, by limiting the duration of any appointment or appanage, by slicing and dicing the population into collectivities with parallel judicial structures, and by ensuring that the appointment in positions of authority remained in central hands so that advancement depended directly on the favor of the Sultan or Grand Vizier.
## Verdict
The superbly complicated Ottoman imperial structure ensured that rebellions were rare and did not get traction; at most, one can cite the occasional short strife between siblings who vied for the throne, for example between the unhappy [Musa Çelebi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_%C3%87elebi) and his brother [Mehmed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_I).
But in the end, it resulted in the ossification of the empire, its economic and military decline and its eventual [spectacular collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_and_dissolution_of_the_Ottoman_Empire), of which the effects are still felt from Libya to Syria, Palestine and Iraq. Sometimes it's better for an empire to renew itself through a successful uprising instead of keeping an unerring course towards decrepitude.
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# The Incas had an app for that
The Inca Empire used several methods together to keep their empire together without any external threat, and in a rather harsh environment:
* **Multiple clear lines of authority** - There were the local administrators, and there was the army. The administrators ran the empire, supervised projects, and made the key decisions. The army supervised only itself, and was not permitted to meddle in local politics...beyond the obvious occasional use of overwhelming force to enforce the Inca's authority.
The Inca made quite sure that his army was loyal to himself first. Local army leadership obeyed some directives from regional leaders ("That village didn't pay their taxes - burn it"), but were clearly proscribed from obeying others ("Give weapons to that village"), and would promptly arrest regional administrators at the first obvious sign of treason.
* **Hostages** - the families of the regional leaders and the army leadership were required to live at the Inca's court. If the remote leaders obeyed, their children were educated and trained to be the next generation of the ruling class. The families of any disloyal remote leaders were promptly killed.
Hostaging works both ways - too much palace intrigue could get your distant spouse recalled and executed (and then you, too). The messaging seems pretty clear: You can get much more by working within the system than by working against it. Only the Inca is indispensable.
* **Multiple sources of information** - many merchants and couriers were also spies for the Inca, reporting upon conditions, local politics, and other key information. That's in addition to reports from the administrators and the army. Too many independent sources of information were outside the control of potential rebels.
The Inca system fell apart when two brothers fought for the throne...while smallpox devastated the empire. Not due to an internal revolt or coup. Historians suspect the system was never tested by a mad or overly rapacious Inca, so it may be brittle in other, unexpected ways. But that's beside the point of the basic takeaways.
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**The navy.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_navy>
>
> The Byzantine navy was the naval force of the East Roman or Byzantine
> Empire. Like the empire it served, it was a direct continuation from
> its Imperial Roman predecessor, but played a far greater role in the
> defence and survival of the state than its earlier iteration. While
> the fleets of the unified Roman Empire faced few great naval threats,
> operating as a policing force vastly inferior in power and prestige to
> the legions, the sea became vital to the very existence of the
> Byzantine state, which several historians have called a "maritime
> empire".
>
>
>
Your wealthy provinces have access to the sea and to ports. That gives access to the riches of trade but also puts them at risk for raiders and pirates. The central government can maintain a navy as the Byzantines in this same territory did. The navy will protect the maritime provinces in a way they cannot do for themselves (because they are not allowed to keep their own navies). They will thus depend on the presence of the Imperial Navy for their livelihood and have zero prospect of effectively resisting the Navy if they decide to go solo. Inland dimensions do not matter for ships - the navy can show up in any port on short notice and keep order in these provinces, putting down any insurrection or other trouble. Probably at any given port there would be several naval vessels at any given time - an Imperial presence and reminder.
A navy like this could also benefit the state in that it could offer extraterritorial "protection" to other smaller maritime states in its region. A protection racket has a bad reputation but sometimes there is actually protection; if El Gordo is regularly shaking you down he will not look kindly on any small timers who think they too are going to shake you down. These smaller states will become beholden to your state which means better trade terms for you and also a buffer between you and more distant hostiles.
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Separation of power, in this case division of civilian- and military authority.
Each province would have civilian- and military governor. Civilian governor would run the judicial system and only troops under his direct control would be from the law enforcement, additionally he would have the authority to call militia.
Additionally the province would have military bases, where the civilian governor has no authority. Military bases in the province would be under control of the military governor, who receives their funding and orders directly from the emperor.
If the province is attacked the two governors would cooperate in order to defend the province.
If the military governor revolts, the rebel army would have difficulty in moving forward, as they would be entirely depended on the funding of the emperor.
If civilian governor revolts, military governor would be able to suppress the rebellion before the rebels even have to chance to organise.
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The ancient Medes and Persians had a solution. Take the children if the regional governors to the capital and give them the best education and training, preparing them for governance. The children serve as both hostage and replacement, and guarantee the governed people's feel they have a stake in the empire. Read the book of Daniel for a record of four such captives and how Daniel in particular was more central to the empire's operation than the four governments he served.
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Three simple methods would do the trick.
1. Separation of powers. The local civil administrator doesn't control, say, the local military units or chief judge/law enforcement. They report separately to superiors in the capital. This way a treasonous cabal would require more people to be aware of it, and the more people aware of it, the more likely they get ratted out.
2. The senior people most likely to conspire are on limited terms and are rotated to different postings. Most importantly, you do *not* rotate them to the same area at the same time. So the civil administrator goes to one province, the judge to another, and the local military commander (or perhaps the whole unit) to a third. This breaks up potential treasonous cabals if they do form.
3. Finally, your important people are given their positions *not* where they live/grew up/have many family connections. This helps reduce the chances of them having an existing base of support from before they were appointed to the position.
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# External threat
The rich merchants of coastal cities would be more than happy to occasionally pay taxes to an inland Emperor, so long as that Emperor keeps the cities from being sacked by their hostile commercial rivals.
In this case, the Emperor doesn't need lots of small garrisons around, he just needs a large enough army to deter attacks on his country. This protects the merchants who no longer want to rebel.
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## Feudal Japan
During Edo period Japan put in place a system called [Sankin-kotai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankin-k%C5%8Dtai) that both kept the local lords poor enough to prevent them from rebelling and promoted the prosperity of the country itself, especially the centre. The Tokugawa Shogunate used the system throughout its 260 years of ruling.
**Enforced spending and hostages**
The lord himself was required to spend alternating years living in the capital and his home province, and his family lived in the capital permanently, effectively as hostages. Due to the standard of living a feudal aristocratic family was accustomed to he had to maintain a pair of lavish palaces as well as pay for regular trips to and from the palace. This was effective because it was most expensive for the far-away lords - the ones who had the largest regions and were the most likely to rebel.
**Bringing money to the inner regions**
Money wasn't just spent in the capital and the home provinces. Roads had to be built and food and lodging had to be purchased all the way along the routes between national and regional capitals. This stimulated economic activity all throughout the country, but concentrated in the capital and the surrounding smaller, more loyal1 provinces, resulting in the shogun a wealthier capital and more money to spend than anyone else.
The capital, Edo, began as practically a small fishing village at the beginning of the period and became modern Tokyo. Even if the capital of an alternate-history Turkey-like country was the poorest city of all Sankin-kotai would cause it to become at least on par with the rich coastal cities.
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There are two basic types of revolts: Revolt by the leadership or other small group, and revolt by the general populace. You can't really do anything about the latter except be prepared to gas them all and re-settle the area with your own people and you did ask specifically about regional governors, so I'll focus there.
A local ruler who wishes to revolt against the empire needs a few, basic things. He needs to get the bureaucracy on his side so they won't rat him out or desert him. He needs a sufficient stockpile of defensive resources to prevent the empire from simply conquering the area again. He needs to get the people on his side so they don't simply refuse to support him and switch to following whoever the emperor tells them to next.
All of these resources take time, planning, and personal charisma to acquire.
Assuming you're thinking the "evil empire" bit, denying the regional governors the opportunity to gather the needed resources is fairly straightforward. Appoint the governors to fairly short terms, probably a year, two at most. This limits their ability to sway people to their cause. Further, select governors by random lot from the general population of the entire empire. This makes it pointless for anyone to try to build a base of followers and then get an appointment, because the odds are millions to one against.
Appointees are taken in the dead of night and installed in the governor's mansion. If they serve well and faithfully they are returned home at the end of their term and given a small-but-useful pension. If they're not competent they simply disappear and are never heard from again and a new governor is appointed. If they prove actively traitorous they and all their family, friends, and anyone who is known to have had more than one conversation with them gets executed.
Service is mandatory. Any who refuse or complain are treated as traitors.
Put it together with a healthy incentive program whereby anyone who unmasks a traitor gets a small-but-useful pension and you can probably keep it going for quite a while, as long as you don't mind a fairly high rate of executions and being constantly surrounded by idiots (until you disappear them and select another, random replacement anyway.)
Just make sure you keep the locals believing that you're honestly doing your best and that it's really the provincial government that's invariably corrupt and the source of all their problems. That way they'll never turn on you.
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You could have the emperor play them off of each other.
Create rivalrys between local leaders and you should have the emperor not treat them with respect making them not feel as powerful.
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You could do what [Louis XVI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV_of_France) did: he kept his potential enemies close...
>
> Louis began his personal rule of France in 1661, after the death of
> his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin.[4] An adherent of
> the concept of the divine right of kings, which advocates the divine
> origin of monarchical rule, Louis continued his predecessors' work of
> creating a centralized state governed from the capital. He sought to
> eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and,
> by compelling many members of the nobility to inhabit his lavish
> Palace of Versailles (formerly a hunting lodge belonging to Louis'
> father), succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which
> had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis' minority. By
> these means he became one of the most powerful French monarchs and
> consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that
> endured until the French Revolution.
>
>
>
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In the medieval days they pretty much did this exact when the monarchs would tour the country if they came to your province it would heavily strain the resources of your castle/keep, potentially ruining you financially.
] |
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[
Imagine that the democratic system was allowed to progress so that a direct democracy now existed in your country. Now everybody can vote on all political issues electronically or via electronic voting stations. Politicians are unemployed, but civil servants still work to carry out the actions as voted by all the citizens of the country. How do you think such a system would work in practice over the short and long term?
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First, you'd have to figure out exactly how it would work.
Will every single government decision be made by a referendum? Suppose the government still has welfare programs to help the poor. Will we have a vote on whether Fred Smith should receive benefits? Then the next day on whether Sally Jones should receive benefits? Etc. You might say of course not, we would have a set of objective criteria and it would be up to civil servants to apply them. But even so, the present criteria are very complex, involving income, assets, number of people in the family, etc. Many government regulations are thousands of pages long. Would we vote on each sentence, one by one?
Who would decide what gets voted on, what the choices are, and how they are described? Hey, if I get to decide what goes on the ballot, I'd gladly support your system! Like, "Should we declare war on Ruritania (a) today or (b) tomorrow?" That's obviously a biased question, there should really be a choice of "never". But who decides when a question is biased, and what makes it fair? Very realistically, politicians today often try to frame a question so that whether you answer yes or no, you are agreeing with them. Activists are always conducting opinion polls carefully phrased so that they are happy with any answer you give. One that comes to mind asked, "Which is more important, (a) balancing the budget or (b) cutting taxes?" A majority answered "(a)", and so they declared that the people were opposed to tax cuts. If the majority had said (b) then they could have said, "Oh well, I guess we'll just have to run up more deficits." Many would say that the right answer is to cut spending, but that wasn't even given as a choice. I could give many similar examples.
You could say that you'll avoid this problem by allowing anyone to propose a referendum. But if literally anyone in the country can call a referendum at any time, then wouldn't we have thousands of referendums every day? How could people possibly find time to even cast their vote on them all, never mind study the issue so they could make an informed decision? Sure, you could say that someone will have the job of deciding which proposals are reasonable and which are not, but then you're right back to, Who makes that decision?
It's easy to write on a piece of paper, "All reasonable options will be given and the wording will be unbiased." But how do you make that happen? At some point a person has to decide that this question is reasonable and fairly worded.
What happens when two votes contradict each other? Again, using opinion polls as a reference point, pollsters are well aware that subtle differences in wording can give very different results. For example, in one experimental poll, they asked at one point whether all citizens should get free health care "provided by the government". Later in the same poll they asked if citizens should get free health care "paid for with tax dollars". Presumably those two questions mean the same thing. Yet, I forget the exact numbers now, many people answered yes to the first question and no to the second. This was on the same poll, so it was the very same people.
As you note, you would have to have civil servants to carry out the policies that people voted on. Who chooses the civil servants? Personally, I've come to the conclusion that referendums under our current system are almost useless, because even if a referendum passes overwhelmingly, if the politicians and the bureaucrats don't like it, they just don't carry it out. Sometimes they make excuses: we're working on it, it's very complicated, see we enforced it one or two times, etc. Other times they flat out say they won't do it because they think it's wrong.
I conclude that 100% direct democracy is wildly impractical, or at least, that no one has yet figured out how to do it.
Perhaps you could make it work for a small number of high-level questions. Should we declare war on X? Should we ban handguns? Should we outlaw abortion? Etc. But even there, one can easily imagine all sorts of possible half-way positions. Like in between "anyone can buy any weapons whenever he likes" and "all weapons are banned" there are all sorts of possible half-way positions.
Assuming you found some way around these problems, you certainly would not eliminate politicians and lobbyists, at least not without a whole lot of further policies. Yes, you could write on a piece of paper, "there will be no politicians and all citizens will have an equal voice". But will you make it illegal for people to encourage their friends and neighbors to vote one way or the other? If so, your society is not free at all. If not, how do you draw the line between "chatting with your friends", "writing a letter to the editor or posting a column on the Internet now and then", and "making a career of political action". If you have no rules about what sort of political action people can engage in, then some people will devote their lives to convincing others to vote their way, and they will get people who agree with them to support them. I think that's pretty much the definition of a "politician". If you say that there will be restrictions on political action, than who enforces these rules, and how do you ensure they do it fairly? I used to be an officer in a Political Action Committee, and I saw first hand how the people responsible for enforcing campaign laws could come down hard on groups they didn't like while giving groups they did like every benefit of the doubt.
## Addendum — Switzerland
I see that the OP has made a few comments about Switzerland. I don't claim to know a lot about how Swiss politics, but based on what I know, here are some thoughts. (I'm glad to hear comments from anyone who knows more about how it works in practice.)
Switzerland may well have the most "direct democracy" of any country in the world. They have a provision in their constitution for holding referendums, and it is frequently used. I just checked and found one source that said there have been about 250 proposed constitutional amendments in the past 150 years (obviously not all passed), and there are a dozen or so other referendums in a typical year.
But Switzerland makes no attempt to make ALL government decisions by referendum. They still have a parliament and an administration. Switzerland's system of referendums serves as much to shape debates in parliament as to be used in practice. That is, if a majority of parliament favor a law that has strong opposition from the people, opposing parties can threaten to call a referendum. Often the threat is enough to lead to compromise, and they never actually call a referendum. So their referendums are not primarily a means of setting the national agenda, but rather a brake on extremism by the coalition in power. In my humble opinion, this is far more practical than 100% direct democracy.
It takes 50,000 signatures on a petition to call a referendum. In theory, anyone can write up a proposal and try to collect signatures. In practice, collecting 50,000 signatures is a lot of work and requires a lot of people. Also in practice, the political parties will quickly line up for or against any given proposal. So the Swiss system does not eliminate political parties or politicians in any sense.
What Switzerland's system DOES do is, (a) prevent the ruling coalition from ramming through policies that the majority of the people oppose; and (b) give the people a way to force the government to address issues that it would rather avoid.
Given that they still have an elected parliament and political parties, I presume that in general, if a policy is popular with the people, there will be a significant faction supporting it in the government. I mean, if 60% of the people favor X, it may well be that the ruling parties oppose X, but there will still be a strong minority in parliament that support it. So for almost any serious proposal, there will be politicians in the political system who support it and will fight for it.
In my opinion, this sort of mixed representative democracy slash direct democracy system is far more practical than 100% direct democracy.
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It would be complete chaos, with manipulation of the masses become crucially important to those who have the means to do so.
Consider that most people make decisions based on very little, or very biased information:
>
> The guy I listen to on local radio said that Orcas kidnap babies from their cribs and eat them, so I'm voting to allow the Japanese whaling fleets into our territorial waters!
>
>
>
Not only:
1. Would the rich be able to manipulate public opinion on a level never before encountered.
>
> Donald Trump has the money to launch any number of propaganda campaigns which would reach millions. He could also announce certain ridiculous promises ***if*** a certain issue is voted in. For example: I'll shave my head if the whaling fleets are allowed into our territorial waters. How many idiots would say: **"OMG, I TOTALLY WANNA SEE TRUMP DO THAT!"** *VOTE*.
>
>
>
but
2. Famous people (the likes of Miley Cyrus, etc.) would have an incredible amount of power is swinging votes toward one side of an issue or another, even in foreign countries.
>
> Miley Cyrus tweeted her anger at the government of British Columbia, Canada organizing a Black Bear cull. Their numbers had reached the point where they were coming into towns looking for food - like people's pets. How many idiots would be swayed by Cyrus's completely uninformed, ignorant stance that killing even a single "innocent animal" is murder? Sure, the local town people know that these animals are dangerous, but the more numerous unaffected citizens in the bigger cities might ***out-vote*** the locals on this issue.
>
>
>
The fact is that most people **DO NOT** understand the implications of the decisions that legislators make. Sometimes the legislators themselves fail to consider certain information, or implement flawed or biased decisions based on their ideology, campaign promises, as political favors, etc.
Allowing the ignorant to chime in, however, is a recipe for complete disaster.
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Mob rule - the rise of Tyrants - see ancient Greek history.
This was discussed by the US Founding Fathers. They studied the history of democracy and came to the same conclusion: Direct Democracy is very unstable and prone to the rise of Personality Cults - Tyrants as they were called in Greek History.
The French Revolution devolved into mob rule in many places, mostly cities. People were arrested and/or executed on the opinions of the mob and nothing else.
**When you have mob rule, your rights are dependent upon the goodwill of the mob and nothing more.**
Do something to make the mob mad, and they vote to kill you, and you're dead.
That is much harder to accomplish through a slow moving representative democracy.
The very things that can make representative democracy annoying are the same things that protect your civilization from the emotions and whims of the mob.
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It is obvious from your commenting that you believe that this system would be highly advantageous to current representative democracy. Like many other answers here I have some concerns.
Firstly, your assumption:
>
> Politicians are unemployed, but civil servants still work to carry out the actions as voted by all the citizens of the country.
>
>
>
I am doubtful about this. In a direct democracy, you would need *more*, not less, politicians. Somebody needs to form all those referenda, administrate the voting, provide subject information, and implement the results. Those people are going to be politicians, if not by name, then by task. They will be *very* influential to the daily political life, and I see no plausible way to prevent their personal beliefs (or impact of the decision on them personally or on their friends and family) from impacting how they go on about their tasks (other than, say, having some sort of mindless drone or robot be responsible for this - this is worldbuilding.SE after all).
I have the impression that you assume this to be the tasks of the "civil servants" in your direct democracy. At the end of the day, if the real power ends up in the hands of appointed (not voted) civil servants who keep their job indefinitely, you have constructed a tyranny of technocrats. Incidentally, this is a common complaint about the European Union, where highly influental positions are filled by employees who get appointed rather than voted, and who remain in their post indefinitely and without any public validation. If those "civil servants" are, on the other hand, voted, then where is the difference to a politician?
Now to the core of your question:
>
> How do you think such a system would work in practice over the short and long term?
>
>
>
Perfectly implemented, a direct democracy where almost anything gets voted on by a large fraction of society all the time (this is my assumption what you have in mind) would probably mean that the legislation would usually closely approximate the current sentiment of the majority of society about every issue. This sounds great, but has (besides rather obvious advantages) also tremendous disadvantages:
* Minority rights stop to exist. Right now, one substantial benefit of representative democracy is that even minorities have (or should have) representation in parlament. If every issue gets decided by majority vote, a topic that is crucial to a small part of society but irrelevant or disadvantageous to the rest is essentially a lost cause.
*(sidenote: I sense that you will argue that the majority will surely see the importance for the minority, and vote accordingly. As an example to the contrary, I live in Switzerland. As you mention elsewhere, in Switzerland indeed many important issues are already directly voted upon. This has sometimes interesting and illustrative effects. For instance, in the Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, [women were not allowed to vote until 1991](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appenzell_Innerrhoden). There were many, many referenda to give them voting rights like everywhere else in the Western world, which always got shot down based on ludicrous reasons by the male part of the population. I think this anecdote gives us a good feel for what would happen to underrepresented minoritoes in a pure direct democracy.)*
* Unpopular but necessary changes are impossible to implement. Good luck getting direct democracy approval for any change that will increase taxation for the majority of citizens.
* Facts are (even more) irrelevant to political decision making. On all but the most simply decisions only a tiny fraction of voters actually have reasonable information to decide, hence people follow their heart and fall prey to all sorts of decision making fallacies.
*(another sidenote: In Switzerland this is arguably already happening to many public votes. Many of the most contested issues are decided by both sides painting extreme and dark pictures of the future should the other side win, and at the end of the day the side that triumphs was more able to convince that Switzerland will burn should the other side win. Facts are not even a sidenote in some of those votes, and we are talking about one of the most educated countries in the world.)*
* Public attention is a fickle beast. The law of the direct democracy land changes all the time based on media reports or current events, and hence based on what the public currently considers the most important topics *right now*. Consequently, media are even more important and powerful, essentially replacing politicians as the entities that steer the country.
Due to this, over the medium to long run, some issues will arise that are again *not* voted on (taxation, basic rights, etc.). Otherwise, direct democracy land will slowly sink into chaos and anarchy, simply because it will be completely unable to reform and break down due to internal societal conflicts.
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The ancient Greek philosophers were contemptuous of Democracy for a good reason, the mob would be swayed by Demagogues and make their choices based on the passions of the moment, rather than through reason or calculation.
In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides has many examples of the Athenian jury being swayed by Demagogues into making rash or poor decisions. While he may be biased since one of the decisions was to exile him for breaking off a naval engagement to save sailors of floundering ships in his fleet, events like the Mytilenian Debate and the Sicilian Expedition are very strong evidence that he was correct.
In order to govern, and in order for politics to even work (politics is defined as "a means of allocating scarce resources" in Organizational Theory), passions of the moment need to be placed in the background, so questions can be examined and answers developed. In ancient Greece, efforts were made to prevent the formation of what might be called voting blocks by having Jurors (voters) selected at random for each day's debates, and the organizing body (the Boule) made up of citizens selected by lot to serve for a year and having only one term for life, but this did nothing to dampen the effects of the Demagogues.
The American Founders separated the organs of state to ensure that no one person could gather power exclusively int their hands, even to the point of initially having different election systems for each branch of government (the Congress was and is elected by popular vote, while the Senate was appointed by the various State legislatures and the President is elected by a system of electoral college votes). In Switzerland, anyone can put a question for a referendum, and given sufficient signatures the legislature is compelled to examine the question, but are under no obligation to pass any legislation related to the question if they so wish, nor come to any predetermined answer (i.e. the question may be framed in such a way as to suggest or force a particular answer, but Swiss legislators are not compelled to answer the question in the "desired" manner).
So any "direct" system needs to have some sort of "dampening" mechanism to prevent voters from being overwhelmed by emotion and enacting laws on that basis.
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Like Andrei, I believe that it would result in chaos. Some more thoughts in that regard:
* Direct democracy has problems when multiple related questions are asked. Do you want lower taxes? Do you want a lower public debt? Do you want decent schools? Do you want a strong national defense? If the answer to all four questions is "yes," what then?
* On a related note, direct democracy has problems when it comes to negotiating compromise solutions. Say you have 10 trillion in spending priorities and 9 trillion in taxes. Do you call for another vote on both issues? Just on spending? Just on taxes?
* There will be people who are working full time shaping public opinion, aka politicians. By pretending that they are concerned citizens like any other, they deceive the public. Better have them admit their party membership.
* Last but not least, people with a real job and a real life can't afford to vote on all the issues. That leaves the crackpots and single-issue fanatics.
I'm not qualified to decide on a revision of the fire safety rules for apartment buildings. Neither are my elected representatives, but those representatives have the time to listen to many different interest groups, and perhaps even the budget for a staff which does research for them.
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Surprisingly there are some things we pay politicians for.
There are a few issues its is hard to deal with without full time legislators.
Complexity
Some topics are complex and so the laws controlling them have to be complex, the nuclear treaty with Iran would have to be multistep, and would require a strong understanding of the process of making nuclear weapons, Iran's current capabilities and the balance in the region. It would take days and weeks to learn enough about these issues to make an informed vote.
Secrecy
There are congressional committees that provide oversight for covert operations, direct democracy would require that everything the government knows is public information so we can vote on it.
Compromise
There is only X money in the government's budget if everything everyone wanted got funded we would spend 5X or 10X. So a compromise needs to be reached where some things don't get funded, or taxes go up. Its very easy for part time legislators(direct democracy) to just dig in their heels and say I want thing Y and I refuse to compromise. Full time legislators spend time figuring out what others can and cant give up and have pressure on them from their constituents to balance the budget and keep the government running.
Trickery
A subset of complexity. It is easier to fool a part time legislator so it would become more common. Bury a important clause funding some random thing deep in a bill where people will miss it. Propose and vote on important legislation the night of the Grammies so most people won't pay attention to it.
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I was thinking about how a truly direct democracy could work in which there would be no politicians even for announcing votes. The lowest form of government would be cities and towns including the country side around those cities and towns. Each town or city would have voting stations that people would go to vote.
For the first stage of voting people would go to their polling stations and write in what issues they think should be voted on as well as deciding what choices other people could choose to vote on for the issue they wrote in and what level of government that issue would be for.
For the second stage of voting people would look at posted issues and give each issue they find that they want to vote on a thumbs up and thumbs down issues they find that they don't want to vote on. The voting machines would then add up the thumbs up to thumbs down ratio each person gave and then divide by the number of people who used the thumbs up and thumbs down feature for voting to find the average ratio of thumbs ups to thumbs downs. Next the voting machines would delete the same ratio of issues as the average ratio of thumbs downs from each person. The issues with the highest ratio of thumbs downs to thumbs ups would be deleted.
For the third stage of voting people would thumbs up the issues that they can find that are left over from step two that they want to vote on and thumbs down issues they don't want to vote on. The voting machines would then delete the same ratio of issues as the ratio of issues deleted from stage two and using the same formula of deleting the issues with the highest thumbs down to thumbs up ratios. This process would repeat until there would be the same number of issues left as the average number of thumbs ups people gave in step two.
For stage four people would vote on the issues that had been selected. For issues that have more than two options people would rank the options and the option that would come in last would count for no votes, second to last one vote, third to last two votes, and so on. The option that would receive the most votes would be the option that would be chosen. For issues that would be quantitative people would write in the number they prefer and the average would be the number that would be the decision.
For the fifth stage of voting people would come back to their voting stations and look up what the decision for each issue would be which would automatically get posted by the computers.
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First of all, if you want it to work, you need to prepare you country. It is quite clear that if you just drop it now without warning, it will be disastrous. Not because a direct democracy system must be flawed, but because the change is to brutal.
To get were they are, French people went through 4 different styles of republic (it is now the 5th), at least two dictatorship and a brief return to monarchy. Monarchists probably said that the problems arises because the new system was bad. It is not the case, the transition in Britain were much smoother.
So what preparation do you need to achieve a smooth transition to direct democracy ?
**Reform education**
Stupid people take stupid decisions. In elective democracy, you can hope that whatever happen even stupid people will elect smart representative, with DD you can not.
The actual education's goal is to make everybody capable to find a work and become a happy average Joe. The actual system (depend on where you live actually, I speak here about Switzerland where I live) is probably not bad, but surely not sufficient for our goal.
You need to add lectures about:
* Manipulation and how to avoid being manipulated, to avoid fore example the mob effect described by Prinz ;
* Reading statistics, because when you are a politician you need to read a lot of them and it is not trivial ;
* Politics, diplomacy, well everything else you need to be a good politician.
And that is the point, to become relatively good in a discipline, everyone needs a corresponding formation.
That will delay the transition of several decades, since you want mainly "politically educated" people to take parts in your DD. You can of course reduce the delay by offering this lectures to adults.
**Reform work code**
As it as been mentioned in other answers, making politics takes time. Reducing works hours seems reasonable to expend "politics hours". You could even actually pay people the time passed on politics (after all that's a service they give to the nation, isn't it ?)
How to sustain such changes is beyond the scope of this answer.
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That is for the minimal preparation. Now how will your DD be shaped ? First of all a question, you went everybody to (be able to) vote, that is the *legislative* power. But who will hold the *executive* power, and thus the power to propose law.
First of all you need to choose interesting proposals. Once it is done, I propose to allow application for a "writing committee" who's task will be to actually write a law based on the proposition. The people who made the proposition can choose whoever they want for the committee, which will be of course given juridical support.
But how to choose the "interesting proposals" ? In the spirit of a DD, here are some possibilities :
*Reddit like*
Proposition gain points when they are voted up, loses point with time, and if they are near the top for a certain time, they are chosen.
As for Reddit, everybody can submit, everybody can vote, and the all stuff can be divided by topics to allow you to focus on your interests.
The makers of proposal should be anonymous until the funding of the writing committee, to avoid external pressures or corruption.
*Random*
Everybody have a little place where to put a proposal. Each day some of them are picked at random and then the writing committee funded. It allows ugly looking proposals to be funded.
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That is it. Of course you can make it better by putting up the system for each level of government (nation, state, district, city, whatever), and strongly decentralising the decisions. It will avoid a too much effect of "dictatorship of the 51%".
By teaching that politeness implies "do not vote on subject that do not directly concern you", you can even crush the effect a bit more.
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*This is not an answer per se, but a reflection on AndreiROM's:*
[This (AndreiROM's) answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/33258/17048) is too simplistic; it is a straw man fallacy. A society can be described as a massive simulation of individual agents in which localized emergent behaviour inexplicably arises. Each of you proposed examples may have moderating counter-effects; the crux is that *we lack the computational power to predict high-level outcomes*. You underlying assumption is not necessarily true - Friedman's book *[The Word Is Flat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat)* describes real-world instances in which collective decisions may exceed the intelligence of any individual member. I do concede that any direct democracy would need be designed from the ground up to be a positively reinforced system, and not one that would - as you suggest - devolve into a quivering mass of indecision. For example, zones-of-governance in a direct democracy would only encompass the affected individuals, thereby mitigating your last point.
That said: As social and computational sciences improve, the probability of any system to remain impervious to outside tampering decreases. In the far, far future (ala [Asimov's Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series)), it may even be possible to manipulate society in scientifically rigorously and procedural manner. As with dynamic programming, you would progress by breaking your problem into simpler pieces. Recently published have been two articles with terrifying implications. The first describes a class of people, "[harbingers of failure](http://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopular-products-1223)", which act as a marker for products destined to flop. Taken to a possible conclusion, people with such tastes would eventually become ostracized as products targeting their preferences become cancelled in the marketing research pipeline. Though there is no cause/effect correlation, these "harbingers of failure" could possibly become "causes of failure" - and this is a form of control. Examples such as this are why I so dislike the utopian ideologies of Iain Bank's "[Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture)".
Published at almost the same time was research into modifying (mollifying) and controlling [carpenter ant behaviour](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/slightly-creepy-experiment-with-ants-shows-that-drugs-can-permanently-alter-behavior/). I'm not suggesting this research is applicable to humans, or even amoral, but that it arose from a curiosuity in social systems. From the paper: "[research] will allow us to expose the general organizational principles underlying complex social systems". Ethically, at which point has social science crossed the line - that the application of such understanding becomes too easily applied?
As humans, we fail to realize how many of our conscious decisions are actual instinctual, and based on currently intractable problems (imagine a human bitcoin network), such as the inability to predict complex social systems or the feedback loop [described in this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/33293). I think that once these constraints are defeated, not only will society collapse, but humans themselves will break. Sometimes, the best methods are trial and error - the good news is, perhaps we do live in a indeterminate universe in which such control remains firmly in the field of fiction.
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Most likely the first thing people would do is start voting to delegate certain powers to, well, delegates.
The functions of the civil service you've already covered. Although you don't say so, I expect you're assuming there will still be courts instead of direct democratic referenda to determine court cases: otherwise I think a means to appoint judges would be high on the agenda.
Next up for debate would be functions of the executive. Not all countries formally divide power in this way of course, but the functions are still identifiable. The mass of the body politic will not want to vote on every single foreign policy issue that arises (whether or not to issue a statement on X, Y and Z that's happening in countries A, B, and C, and if so which of the wordings proposed by diplomats to actually use). They would prefer to appoint someone to do most of that job while remaining answerable to the electorate and required to act in line with certain law and policy that has been directly voted on.
So, while formally-speaking "politicians" might be out of a job, it's honestly difficult to completely withhold that word from an elected police chief, district attorney, or dogcatcher general, and it would be difficult to withhold it from whatever directly-elected delegated roles emerge from your system.
And so on, probably including some functions of the legislature. Presumably there are some things that most current governments claim as their right, but that this new society will withhold from the delegates who perform the functions of government on their behalf, exactly as the new USA withheld certain rights that most governments of the time claimed as a result of their formal relationship to a single sovereign. A new system is the biggest single opportunity to change whatever you're most unhappy about.
This is all assuming nothing catastrophic happens that the new and untested system is ill-equipped to deal with (military coup or whatever), eventually you reach a new compromise as to what is delegated and to what degree. Political systems are so complex that it's easy to assume that *any* perturbation will cause complete collapse of society, let alone inventing a new system from scratch and hoping it will survive. Certainly in fiction it's fairly easy to turn any potential weakness of a simple hypothesised system into a fatal flaw. One might even argue that this precautionary instinct is a major plank of conservatism ;-)
As a rule of thumb, a sudden change to a political system will be followed by some use of the new opportunities, and some reversion towards old certainties (which will often be characterised as reactionary). Of course there aren't too many practical examples to study of a change so absolute as what you describe, so the circumstances under which it comes about will probably be very significant in affecting how people react to it.
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In the U.S. the government is separated into three branches Executive, Legislative, and Judicial.
I believe that the Legislative portion of the government can be made to work under direct democracy, but specific people would still need to be elected to executive and judicial positions. The function of interpretation of law, could be carried out partially by the people, and partially by elected judges.
In a direct democracy any citizen could potentially draft a bill and anyone can vote on it. There would most likely be a massive number of proposals and therefore some sort of collaborative online electronic system and secure voting devices would be needed to organize all the possible bills and allow voting on them. Think drafting bills by Wikipedia and rating them like forum posts, and running for office on twitter (but not literally).
Here is a sort of proposed set of operating rules for such a government.
Create a collaborative online system which allows for...
1) The creation of bills
a) Bills would be created and edited by voulunteers in a collaborative online system similar in concept to Wikipedia.
b) If someone makes a change to the wording it counts as a separate version and is voted on separately.
c) After reading a bill a person could up-vote or down-vote that specific version of the bill.
d) A person would be allowed to vote on as many bills as they want and change their vote as often as wanted.
e) People would be able to search for bills in the system based on content and rating. For instance the majority of people may only be interested in searching for bills that have a rating of +100,000 votes or more.
f) If a sufficient number of people have not voted on a bill it just sits in the system.
i) Gradually people will find each bill as they search for bills that suit their own interests.
ii) The bill may gradually build up or loose votes.
iii) Of course specific individuals or groups may actively promote bills to speed up that process.
iv) A short list of bills having the highest rating could be periodically advertised to the public. That solves the problem of the average person being inundated with referendums.
v) Once the up/down rating of the bill passes some threshold it would become law. For example it could become law if 2/3 of the population supports it, and be repealed if less than 1/2 supports it.
vi) To prevent voter fraud, such a system would require some sort of secure credentials for each citizen that could be verified by the voting system as each vote is cast.
vii) The votes and who cast them would need to be stored in the system, but the technology could be built so that no user would have access to the votes of specific individuals.
2) The creation of elected executive positions.
a) Volunteers would propose the creation of executive positions in the government.
i) The description of the position and its legal authorities would be created and edited by volunteers using the collaborative online environment.
ii) Separate versions of the position's description would count as a separate revision and be voted on separately.
iii) If a sufficient number of persons vote for the creation of the position then it is established and candidates are allowed to run for office.
iv) It would be up to the public to ensure that they did not create conflicting positions. Specifically any individuals who knew of other existing positions would be allowed to comment on any problems with the proposed position.
b) candidates submit their names into the system along with a description of their goals and positions on certain issues.
i) people are allowed to comment on the positions and the person running (or their staff) may reply.
ii) Certain questions and responses may be up/down voted in the system.
iii) The voter uses the platform description and Q&A to decide on weather to vote for the candidate.
iv) Voters may choose any one of the candidates that are registered in the system.
v) The candidate with the most votes is elected and executes the office. Once in office, voters may change their vote. If another candidate gains a larger number of votes then they take the office.
3) The removal of elected executive positions.
a) If enough people downvote a specific position (for example 1/2 of the voters) it is eliminated.
4) The creation of elected judicial positions.
a) This is done the same way as with creation of executive positions.
b) Those in the judicial branch take the responsibility of resolving any conflicts in the law.
i) If a conflict is found the judge puts up the conflicting laws for review by the people.
ii) The conflicting laws are both posted and a description of why the Judge thinks they conflict.
iii) The judge will not enforce either law until the conflict is resolved.
iv) Volunteers review both laws and propose changes. The changes go through the normal voting process.
5) The removal of elected judicial positions.
a) If enough people downvote a specific position it is eliminated.
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What if *"society"* was 30 people living in the middle of nowhere? Clearly it would then be practical for most things to decided by everyone.
Therefore I expect that *"society"* will have to devide every time it got too big, or have people that are not members doing a lot of the work. So the masters get to vote by the slaves do not.
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I was thinking through how to portray Martians, and realized that there's really no reason for them to be green that I can think of. Both camouflage and (I assume) availability of pigments in the local biosphere would imply that they would end up reddish, like the soil.
But then I had a thought; is there a plausible reason for Martians to have green skin?
Note that I am not looking for an explanation of why Martians are generally portrayed as having green skin. I want a story element I can use to explain how green skin could develop in a Martian species that has natural selection pressures similar to our own.
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## It's Not Easy, Being Green:
Why would Martians be green? Lots of strange things can happen to a species, so let's dig into them.
* **Ancient traits**: Once, Mars was green. Martians blended into their environment seamlessly. Then things got cold and dry and oxygen dropped off, but Martians were still green. Without a strong pressure to change to a new color, they are still green. A complex series of biochemical processes go into them being green, and change would mean a reworking of Martian biology.
* **Cupric skin toxins/flavorants**: Green skin comes from toxic copper compounds in the skin of Martians. Martians taste bitter, are visibly green (a signal to predators) and poison any native Martian life that eats them. By being prominently green, they get attacked by fewer native life forms than those poor, pale Earthlings who are actually even less edible.
* **Waste deposition**: Copper is toxic to Martian life. Martians have adapted to this by depositing copper in their skin, to be sloughed off with dead skin cells. The result is green skin.
* **Selective vision**: Martians are able to communicate by subtle differences in appearance of their skin in the narrow band of color near green. Because there is so little green, it's easy to spot. Martians have hundreds of words for green shades, each denoting their health, status, diet, allegiances, and current emotional states. Poor humans look at them and wonder why Martians say so little and express so few emotions. Martians turn a lovely shade of dismissive malachite and their cheeks turn a warm emerald to express their humor.
* **Reproduction**: While seeing lots of green, Martians are also turned on by green mates. Chartreuse males are seen as sickly and diseased, and cyan females are rejected as being unappealing and under-oxygenated. OMG, did you see Grog? Forest green - huba huba!
* **Radiation Shielding**: Some green-reflecting compound, the equivalent to melanin, absorbs radiation from the environment. Martians are protected from this radiation by the thick deposits of this compound in their skin.
* **Religion**: There is little or no green on Mars, so green is special to the Martians. They paint themselves green to set themselves apart from all lower life, as an expression of their intrinsic closeness to god. They keep invading Earth because it's CLEARLY a sacred land, populated by wicked, godless human heathens. Martians keep trying to get rid of humans to free the holy land. They're green not with envy, but holy fervor. This also explains some of the apparent illogical behavior of the Martians - they aren't motivated by conquest, but religious fervor.
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Our skin pigmentation has nothing to do with mimicry, it's an adaptation to mitigate the problems arising from the interaction between the solar radiation and our skin.
Do the same for your Martians: their equivalent of melanin is a pigment providing different hues of green, from deeper to lighter. You can also top it with a blood pigment, equivalent of our hemoglobin, which gives their blood a green color, thus making their skin look green-ish.
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**Bilirubin protects from mutagens and oxidants.**
High levels of bilirubin in the blood is called jaundice.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SH9M0.jpg)
<https://ihv.org.uk/news-and-views/voices/kelly-anne-and-siennas-story-of-baby-jaundice/>
But the pigments that cause jaundice can protect against mutagens and oxidants.
[The anti-mutagenic and antioxidant effects of bile pigments in the Ames Salmonella test](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571807000307)
>
> Bilirubin and biliverdin are potent antioxidants, and as such a
> possible physiological role for them has been postulated [3].
> Specifically, they have been found to protect lipids [4], [5], [6],
> [7], [8], [9] and proteins [10], [11], [12] from oxidation.
>
>
>
Your martians live in a mutagenic environment. Their intrinsic skin color is very pale, like the depicted baby, and so the high levels of bilirubin and related bile pigments make them delicate shades of yellowish green.
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For the same reason that poisonous frogs are brilliantly colored.
Being green makes them stand out, and also makes them memorable. Most animals lack the cunning to realize that something would not be so conspicuous without good reason, but most are cunning enough to remember how badly they got beaten the last time they tried to eat something green.
For a Martian, at some point, the cost of beating up a predator once and the metabolic cost of being green was less than the cost of beating up a predator every day.
If those circumstances no longer apply, runaway sexual selection may have occurred: the green is now sexually attractive, not because it means you can scare off predators, but because it means your offspring will be sexually attractive.
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**Symbiotic plants on the skin**
One thing that is near universally green are plants. Any part that is using photosynthesis looks green to our eyes (in nearly all cases). Why green isn't used in photosynthesis is unknown.
A symbiosis can form between skin and certain single cell or multicellular plants. The advantages can be numerous. The plants are moved and can spread, can be growing in all skin tissue a bit like mitochondria do in all cells, are somewhat protected by the larger organism and get food. The Martian gets protection from possible unfiltered sunrays, allowing them to not require pigments themselves.
Besides this obvious benefit, it can also reduce the damage of any skin disorder like albinism, allowing more Martians to survive. There can be a lot of possible advantages in healing and the strength/flexibility variability of these cells as well, as you offload this (partially) to different organisms. It reduces complexity for the Martian DNA to simply have some other fully realised forms of organisms do this for you, much like the complex gut flora and fauna help in the gut.
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Have you ever seen a true color picture taken from Mars?
It looks like a Netflix show when a scene happens in a latin-american country - [everything is just hues of one basic color](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mexico-in-american-movies). For Mars, it is actually something that looks orangey to yellowish to my eyes. You can judge for yourself by browsing [NASA's APOD](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html) for a few minutes, looking for Mars pictures.
Martians are visual creatures just like us, so they are green - or paint themselves green - in order to stand out, so that they can actually see each other.
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The surface of Mars is a rather inhospitable place. Very low oxygen content, relatively high charged particle radiation and very low temperatures for instance.
In order to survive just those conditions alone your Martians will need a better oxygen transport mechanism, better protection from charged particle radiation and a nice, thick layer of insulation.
In low oxygen pressure environments, certain variants of hemocyanin can provide significant improvements over hemoglobin when it comes to oxygen transportation. This has been observed on Earth in arthropods and mollusks.
Since hemocyanin comes in a variety of shades of blue we're half way (in Human vision at least) to the green you're looking for. Fortunately, there are all sorts of interesting fats and waxes that have the required yellow to complete our martian's coloration. Subcutaneous fatty deposits are a mammalian staple for heat retention, and certain types of wax have may provide some protection against charged particle damage.
Alternatively, a much more yellow-colored lymphatic fluid would complete the green coloration well enough, as long as the skin itself is largely translucent.
And finally, hemocyanin contains copper atoms. In order to maintain their blood the Martians would require a source of copper, and may use it in other aspects of their biology. Some copper compounds are bright green, such as the copper carbonate that gives the Statue of Liberty (and just about any weathered bronze or copper object) that bright green color, as well as being the base for malachite.
Of course you'll need a ready supply of copper, but fortunately the volcanic regions of Tharkis and other volcanoes around Mars seem to have you covered there.
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Their alien biology uses, instead of hemoglobin, a compound similar to hemocyanin (but a slightly-different color). Where hemoglobin transports oxygen using iron and makes our blood red, Martian blood binds the oxygen as copper oxide, and is green or cyan.
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**Fashion and Body Art**
Have you seen how lately there are more and more people covering their body in big tattoos? The same happens in Martian culture since ages.
In reality their body is not uniformly green, but only if viewed from a distance. If you get close you would see complex tattoos made with green ink on their grayish body.
Since they have those big eyes, they are able to resolve thinner and more tightly packed lines than humans at the same distance.
So what appear as a uniform green for a human without a loupe, at close inspection are amazing tattoo patterns, which they can easily discern when talking face to face.
And maybe they "encode" the history of their family in their tattoos, as sort of tribal marks. Or maybe they are just a fashion thing that will end when the next Martian fashion guru declares "violet is the new green"!
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Their skin absorbs IR in the 1000nM spectrum to make the most of available energy. Due to a non-linear optical property that IR frequency is doubled and re-emitted in the green color range. Healthy Martians have some excess energy to burn and its emitted as green light. They actually glow green. FWIW this is actually how green laser pointers work.
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**Nanobot Swarm**
In place of a space-suit, each Martian is covered by a swarm of nanobots, which repair the skin, gather data on incoming radiation and chemical hazards in the surrounding breeze, and act together as a whole-body antenna for HF radio communication. The nanobots gather power from ambient UV radiation, and emit green light.
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In my book series, the Aurean Empire is a vast entity spanning an entire planet. I'm kind of wondering what parts of my empire would the Aureans draw their best soldiers from (for example, the Roman Empire generally got their best recruits from the Balkans, the Byzantines got their best soldiers from Anatolia, many of the British Empire's best troops were from Scotland, etc). **Which types of physical geography produce the best soldiers?**
For some context, the tech level we're talking about is Late medieval/very early renaissance (cannons but no arquebuses yet). Here is each relevant region of Aurea and what areas of the real world their physical geography and climate best compares to:
Calissylvania: Brazilian Cerrado
Gregoras: Southern Appalachia
Sparteia: South Florida in the north, San Gabriel Mountains in the south and interior, Yucatan in the northeast
Monsaltu: Mexican Riviera along the coast, San Gabriel Mountains in the interior
Taurope: Southern California without the desert
Cularo: West coast of Turkey
Lycian Desert: Arabian Desert
Pagomenos: Colorado Plateau, specifically the wetter parts near Flagstaff, Arizona
Argentolian Desert: Sonoran Desert with the Floodplains of Mesopotamia
Pheron Valley: Mojave Desert with the Floodplains of Mesopotamia and a huge freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario
Nikos: Outer Banks of North Carolina along the coast, Cascadia in the mountains, Great Basin Desert in the far north
Imbreus: French Riviera along the coast, Sierra Nevada in the mountains
Nypros: Northern and Central France
Lurias: Northern and Central France along the coast, Gobi Desert in the interior
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**Do you need *warriors* or *soldiers*?**
The key ingredient of a warrior is bravery. The key ingredient of a soldier is discipline. One against one, the warrior might win. One thousand against one thousand, things look better for the soldier. The kind of discipline varied over the ages. Holding a pike as part of an unflinching phalanx is different from getting out of the nice comfy shell hole and storming the enemy trench. And a warrior who breaks ranks to charge the enemy can be just as disruptive to discipline as one who slinks away.
Some of your climates might be conductice to producing warriors, but it isn't the climate that makes a soldier. It is the ability to call them up for lengthy training, and not just on the eve of battle.
So: **Gregoras and Nypros** sound good because they support a good economy.
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The comment by Nosajimiki makes the point that empires can recruit in poor areas, where military service looks better relative to the economic prospects. There is **some** of that, but it implies an integrated economy where surplus in one area can hire troops in another. Just pouring gold into an area of low food production doesn't do it, you have to import food ...
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**It isn't Based On Geography... Usually**
The idea that a particular country/region (always somewhere inhospitable to most people so as to breed "hard men") is pretty much a lie. The best fighters conquer the best territory, and the peoples on the margins stay there *Because They Can't Fight Their Way Onto Better Land*. [**Here**](https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/) is a fantastic set of essays on the subject, backed with all sorts of data. The one possible exception is the confluence of things which led to the Steppe Nomad/horse archer. But even there, the "harsh land" of the steppe was even WORSE on steppe-adjacent forests, and those people were at the mercy of mounted tribes and instantly left for the "better" territory of the Steppe the instant they got horses themselves.
For a contra example, the Roman Legions were raised from "softer" men (city boys, farmers for whom famine was comparatively rare and invasion even rarer etc), than almost all of the hardscrabble Spanish/German/British tribes they faced. Yet almost without fail the Legionaries were better troops. Or even your Scots of the British Empire. English regiments had a lot of underfed-as-children, undersized "city boys" in them and were from a culture where the Army was Very Much Not a worthy profession. Meanwhile the Scots had a higher percentage of "got fed enough as children" types, as well as a more favorable view of joining the army overall. You could make an argument that Scotsmen were actually "softer" than many Englishmen at the time! (A 1700s/1800s city was **very much** a nastier place to be than in a farming village.)
What you can do is have a bit of specialization. In the tech period you're talking about there are things that take a Long Time to learn. Archery and Cavalry skills are both things that really need to be started on in childhood to be as good as you possibly can be. So your regions with lots of horse-land (steppes, grasslands, etc) are likely to produce better cavalry units than mountainous regions. In places where game-hunting is a way of life you're likely to get better archers. While cities/populous regions may have a higher number of foundries and scholars, which would make artillery and the math to make the best use of them more common.
TL/DR: Hard times don't make hard men. Each region may have a thing it's "best" at based on the civilian activities of the population.
Another thing to think about when it comes to "best" troops based on how they live as civilians is organization. Western-style drill and discipline is more needed for troops that don't have social bonds outside of the military (city people, units made from many small villages, etc) to maintain their cohesion in combat. Whereas a unit raised wholly from people who are all friends/family in civilian life needs less of that discipline to maintain cohesion in battle.
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Geography has nothing to do with how good a soldier is. Harsh life conditions instead seems to do.
If you grow up in a poor land, with few perspectives beside starvation and breaking your neck farming poor fields, fighting in an army can look like a good opportunity, and nobody will complain for your lack of good manners.
For a reference around the period you are picturing, you can look at the [Landsknecht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsknecht).
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## The answer depends on the social conditions of the population
As an example, during the Boer War [the British Army had great difficulty in recruiting healthy troops, particularly from towns and cities with high levels of industrial pollution](https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/history/AQA-81452AA-24667-LA.PDF).
The same problems were generally not seen from rural recruits - but of course that was a smaller pool from which to draw.
When you are building your empire, you will need to consider:
* What level of fitness do your troops require?
* Is disease, pollution or malnutrition sufficiently bad in some areas to significantly effect the health of the young, male population?
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## Look for pre-training
The historical antecedents can probably be argued many ways, some of which (coincidentally) may match what is here, but let's just think this through. Every soldier *can* be trained to be perfect, but *will* they be? That's where your regional differences come in.
**Survival**
Desert populations should be conscientious in rationing water, with good sense of how to reduce or treat sun exposure, overheating, sunstroke etc. Even the officers should have an idea of what clothing is workable in the desert when designing uniforms (perhaps).
Given a global empire at low technology, I suspect there are few biogeographical barriers. Jungles all over your planet may have the same rich mix of species. That means that any one region's indigenous knowledge of jungle plants (for medicine, or at least for not resting under the blinding tree) would be considerably more useful than on Earth.
Ash already mentioned a biological factor for mountains; but experience with mountaineering, sheltering in tree holes during a blizzard, and hunting sheep and goats in the wild might also pay off.
**Cultural attitudes**
There may be some regions where people are peaceful, and it is thought that walking half way around the world to spend a few minutes being cut up with a sword for the sake of a hearsaid Emperor isn't tremendously appealing. You want your troops from the others, where generations of pride in their mercenary prowess or blind loyalty has given them a military culture, where every song reminds boys that their fate is to go forth proudly in the service of their mighty empire.
**Fighting**
I assume a medieval empire has some local conflicts between lords striving for their unfair share of the money wracked from the peasants. Those soldiers should come with useful skills that are hard to teach safely - and come pre-selected as survivors. Skills with specific weapons and tactics, chosen for the local environment, will come in useful in specific environments within the Empire more than others. I think you will accumulate many groups prized for different aptitudes, *if* you are able to bring them to the war zone.
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### If anything - the mountains, as they make "EPAS1 super-athletes".
You've mentioned a few different mountain ranges. I'll suggest that those who have trained with lower oxygen concentrations their entire lives will have a subtle edge over those who grew up at sea level. This is known as [altitude training](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_training) and we do it for sport events:
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> Depending on the protocols used, the body may acclimate to the relative lack of oxygen in one or more ways such as increasing the mass of red blood cells and hemoglobin, or altering muscle metabolism. Proponents claim that when such athletes travel to competitions at lower altitudes they will still have a higher concentration of red blood cells for 10–14 days, and this gives them a competitive advantage.
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See also the [Sherpa People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa_people), who have varied genetics as a result of living at high altitude:
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Generally I'd suggest to look at culture rather than geography - you want someone who will fight for their buddy and their family back home, can detach from what they're doing, they can get in a "zone" and just work, and who is fit and healthy and fed just the right amount, but isn't rich enough to avoid the recruiter.
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## War Begets a Warrior Culture
The best soldiers in any given society are generally the children of war veterans; so, the best soldiers will come from the regions of your empire that have historically seen the most war in previous generations. To predict what region your best soldiers will come from, you do not need to know their geography, you need to know their history.
**Why the Children of Veterans Make the Best Soldiers:**
1 - You are naturally selecting for a population of people who can go to war and survive. Especially in a pre-modern war, the most common cause of death was breaking formation and trying to run away. So, those men who came back from war were most often those who refused to run. This means that people who can overcome their natural flight response and just fight are more likely to pass on their genes; so, the children of veterans are themselves less likely to panic on a battlefield even when all other factors are the same due to natural selection.
2 - Veterans bring the discipline and values they learn from war into the way they run their households. So not only are these children genetically more prepared for war, they will be conditioned from birth to hold warrior values in high regard such as loyalty, bravery, and honor while also having diminished values that might prevent them from being good soldiers like ideals of self-worth and mercy. So the children of Veterans have the advantages of both Nature and Nurture making sure that they we be more disciplined as soldiers before you even begin to train them in the actual trade of being soldiers.
3 - Being raised in a warrior culture also means that your society has more general knowledge of warfare. A society with lots of children who grow up studying all the battles in their history books or oral traditions will know a lot more about how war is done. This will raise more potential officers to help organize and co-ordinate the army. A large veteran body also means that you will have more qualified instructors to help properly train your next generation of troops in what actually works instead of what might work.
So yes, it is history and not geography that will inform where your best soldiers will come from... but that said, there are certain geographical features that can encourage a history of warfare more than others. Generally speaking, the two biggest factors are how many other nations share borders with you to be a threat, and how stable is the food/economy of your region. Places like Ancient Egypt saw very little warfare because you had one nation with very predictable agriculture surrounded by deserts and seas which made invading it very difficult. In contrast, places like Mesopotamia and Greece saw a lot of warfare because you had a lot of smaller city-states clustered close together with unpredictable agriculture. So, you would frequently see several years of strong growth followed by famine and high unemployment which would force everyone to invade one another and try to take each other's resources.
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Geographic area is not really relevant, other than determining the style of combatant.
What matter is *political* and *economic* area.
You want someone from a frontier/troubled/warzone region, not too poor (they must have access to equipment) but not too rich(they must not get comfortable and lazy)
This all assumes that you use militia from the region, and give them minimal further training.
The whole concept of region affecting soldier quality is completely negated if you put some real effort and resources into selecting, recruiting, training and equipping a real professional military force. Then only the skill and facilities and ethics of the training matter, not the soldiers' origins.
For example:
In Roman legions, the birth region of the legionaries mattered not at all. They were **so** trained and indoctrinated and equipped, that any one soldier was the same as any other soldier.
But for the much lesser-trained auxilia, it did matter a great deal. Those soldiers only brought the skills, and often only the equipment, that they acquired in their native lands.
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The best soldiers come from places where a career spent going off to strange lands, meeting interesting people, and killing them is a better deal than staying where you come from. Places such as A) impoverished agricultural regions with bad weather and worse soil, or B) the slummish hearts of major cities. Consider:
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> Wung struggled mightily as his father urged the gnongrut-beast ahead, and with a mighty sucking sound the plow pulled free from the quick-mud into which it had become stuck. Wung lost his balance and fell face-first into the muck while the gnungrut, happy to be able to able to move freely, lumbered off across the field with his father in curse-perfumed pursuit. Wung stood up, spat out a mouthful of something which might charitably be called "mud", and said out loud, "There has *got* to be something better than this!". "Funny you should say that, kid", said a voice behind him. He turned around and saw a soldier with some stripes on his shoulder and a bunch of young men, clad in rags much like those Wung wore, who were laughing at him. He looked down at himself, saw the mud covering him from feet to face, and grinned ruefully. "So, you want a better life?", said the soldier. "Yeah", said Wung, "Anything's better than this". "C'mere", said the solder. He pulled out a piece of parchment, unrolled it, and asked, "What's your name?". He scrawled something on the parchment with a bit of charcoal, said "Make your mark", and pointed to a spot next to the scrawl he'd made. Wung put an "X" where indicated as he'd seen his father do in town at the store. "Congratulations, recruit Wung - you are now part of the imperial army. Fall in with these louts back here, and follow me".
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Or:
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This seems to apply here. In history, the cultures have more to do with the quality of the solider than the geography.
Basically, as long as you have an economy that can sustain a standing military, you have the elements for possibly great soldiers. Those that train, meaning money to train, will have great soldiers.
So, look at your geography again. What are the industries there? Are there high lands? Primitive fighting generally favors those who use the terrain better. That often means those on the higher ground. Some cultures have historically overcome other cultures through the early adoption of technology (Vikings had long ships, Egyptians had chariots).
If you want a realistic setting, decide the principal elements of each geography's economies, who has the money, people, and need, and those with all three will have the strongest armies (and the most trained soldiers).
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Two other things two consider, offence and defence.
Your offensive army will succeed better if it is acclimatized to the area of invasion, disease, temperature, humidity. Also culture, either having the army as far unlike the foe means they are less likely to humanize or pity the foe. (Soviet Union pulled European troops out of Hungary in '56 and brought in far eastern troops six weeks later) Conversely very close culture, with one key difference to polarize, can help make an army more viscous (reformation wars, some areas lost 50% population).
Defence is often better to have local troops (though that can lead to stability problems if locals troops support local rebels). They know the area and are motivated to defend. Many castles fell in the past because the garrison didn't want to fight because they had little stake in it. Or see how well the Fins did against the Soviet Union in WW2.
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Our world is surrounded by a magic barrier that keeps out eldritch abominations that exist in the void, such as Cthulhu. However, this barrier is fairly sensitive and easily damaged. The violent, metaphysical energies of warfare between humans can disrupt the barrier, tearing sections of it open and allowing the void monsters an easy path through. In order to prevent this the gods have decreed that warfare is illegal. Any nation or person violating this law will be punished courtesy of a lightning bolt.
Although the lightning bolt was meant to be apocryphal, examples have been made of people going against this decree, sometimes leading to entire families being wiped out or both nations at war being punished by the gods. With armed conflicts being banned, nations must find alternatives to solving issues with each other. When humans are involved however, conflict is bound to pop up sooner or later when negotiations have broken down. Simply working out problems through diplomacy will never be feasible all the time.
I have heard of ritualized warfare occurring between groups, such as the Zulu wars. These sometimes revolved around capture and return, or had rules that both sides had to abide by to keep bloodshed to a minimum. However, those were small scale and occurred mostly between tribes of people. This would be pretty difficult to pull of on a larger scale between countries similar to Russia vs U.S. or China vs India.
What form can conflict take between nations under these parameters?
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**Key question becomes, *What is warfare?***
Humans will have to take time, and the lives, to find the line in the sand that the gods drew. And depending on how fickle your gods are, that line might shift over the centuries with 'interesting' results.
Maybe they draw the line at *any* kind of violence. Even attempting to "arrange accidents" may set off the gods, and you'll end up with the occasionally crispy handyman found trying to loosen railings or fiddling with brakes...
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In the cases where the gods become very strict against violent actions, then we'll likely see a focus on economic or 'prestige' warfare. Rivals attempting to economically ruin or surpass their competitors, or constantly attempting to 'out do' the other in the public eye.
Battles may become grand marketing campaigns, or hosting 'the better party', or building the grander tower. These can become a game of spies and false information where different sides attempt to throw the other off.
Technology and innovation may also become a bigger part of your world. - However, be wary of advancing too far or pushing boundaries that you shouldn't... A house moving in the 'wrong direction' may still catch the eye of the gods if they find something new that weakens the barriers. You probably don't want to be the house/nation known for making the gods add a new rule under "Don't go to war"...
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If the gods get a little more lax about the violence issue, then expect to see more covert actions. Knives in the dark rather than soldiers on a battlefield. The above 'non-violent' options will probably still take centre stage, but if the gods aren't going to mind you killing your rival's head architect, then you would be a fool to not look for an opportunity for 'unfortunate events' of one kind or another to happen...
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Also, depending on how selective the gods are in dealing out punishments against 'warfare', there may even become room for some very nasty weaponisation of the god's retribution...
If *some* violence is accepted such that smallish attacks can happen, but the gods will strike down *everyone* directly involved, then we may see attempts to raise 'martyr companies'. Attempts at large scale battles then become trying to bait your enemy into what they think is a 'small and acceptable' battle before you surprise them with enough forces becoming engaged that the gods strike everyone down...
This could make warfare an exceedingly careful and dangerous game for your upper classes to play in...
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Look at our recent history.
Have USA and USSR fought a war against each other? No. MAD was a valid deterrent.
Have they lived in peace? No.
They have used a series of proxies to fight each other:
* space race
* technology race
* sport
* art
* let satellite countries pay the blood tribute
just to name a few.
You can use a similar approach.
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**Wars will be fought with the most advanced weapons and strategies that do not rip the barrier**
Its sounds like gods are not offended so much by human conflict so much as by them risking the barrier to do so. If energy weapons destroy the barrier, then we will use guns. If guns break the barrier will use swords and bows. If the act of mass killing breaks the barrier, then wars will be fought through the assassination of key leaders. If the act of killing at all breaks the barrier we will beat each other with sticks. If inflicting injury breaks the barrier then we will wrestle with our bare hands and drag our enemies into cages.
War will still happen. Eventually, one society's desperation for survival will always force them into conflict with another, even if it means risking their own final destruction. They will do as every other warlike civilization has done and learn to fight by whatever rules work best in their situation. Learning not to offend the gods in war is just another part of mastering the battlefield like learning to fight with the sun to your back or avoiding hazardous terrain.
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# Nonviolent Sabotage (not to be confused with terrorism)
1. Sneak in and salt the fields of your enemy's crops.
2. Contaminate your enemy's water supply.
3. Spread diseases within your enemy's population. Maybe even genetically engineered super-bugs could be an option depending on your technology level.
4. Sneak in and steal their stuff
5. Poison high officials
6. Disrupt their communications and/or computer networks.
7. Spread harmful propaganda.
# Alternatively you could just do what a lot of stories do and just have them play violent immersive video games against each other to decide war outcomes, but who wants to read another one of those?
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The same way it's been done for ages: the Economy
As humanity evolves out of our base instincts for violence, our knowledge of warfare through economic means will pick up. It's already happening on a massive scale too.
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Sports. Wargames (including stylized ones like Chess and Go).
If you need "real" war, there was a Star Trek episode (A Taste of Armageddon) where they simulated the fights, including sending people to their death who were causalities.
So long as the barrier isn't too fragile, ritual fighting between champions may also be possible.
It really depends on whether you want the other side "dead". If you do, get them breach the barrier (assuming you can go in and fix it afterwards), by forcing them into a fight that breaks it maybe?
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There's a pre-existing solution, so long as war is "violent conflict resulting in damage," and not "resolution of non-compatible ideals through extra-intellectual means."
In the hit Japanese light novel *No Game No Life,* the entire world is banned from damaging property of other beings without consent. This was done to put an end to war that was literally destroying the planet, but this left 16 races with millennia-long grudges against each other with no way to resolve them. The god who did this left one way to resolve conflict: games. There's basically a rule set placed on the world that enforces all 9 rules, and from there conflict is resolved.
The gist is this: One player challenges another player to a game. The challenged party has the right to choose or design any winnable game, as determined by whatever global magic system is in place. The game can be as small as a coin toss or as large as whatever the game maker is capable of making. Each player must bet something they determine is equal value. Once the game begins, players cannot be caught cheating at risk of losing the game. Once the game is decided, whatever conditions were laid down before hand take effect, provided it is within the power of the loser (i.e., someone can grow animal ears and a tail, or they have to give you gold or information).
Of course, this only counts if there can't be war as we know it. You may have to add in extra rules like "games cannot kill anyone outside of the bets placed" to prevent countries from saying "'I challenge you!' / 'The game is war!'," but it is just a (stolen) idea.
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You might want to look up the Star Trek episode [A Taste of Armageddon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon). In it, two planets are at war and have been for decades, but because they do not want to risk damage to their society, health and infrastructure, the war is entirely virtual. Their two main military computers are connected, and when one side announces they have launched a missile, they all calculate whether it will hit its target, and if so, how many casualties there are.
The unfortunate souls in the path of the virtual missile are considered deceased, and have to report to the authorities be disintegrated. Real lives are lost, but no actual damage was sustained, so both planets can remain stable and prosperous. They have been doing this for so long that by the time Kirk & company arrive, they believe this is the best way. It took Kirk his two most important skills, meaningful speeches and destruction of nation-controlling computers, to solve the impasse and teach the countries that they can just decide not to kill each other for one day.
This is not one of the most realistic Star Trek episodes, but I think it is quite underrated. Perhaps it could serve as inspiration for your setting.
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So as noted the Cold War was fought exactly this way, with the game of brinkmanship. The key here is about escalating to the point of war, only to back down at the last possible moment. Essentially it is an extremely high stakes game of chicken. Interesting enough this was actually what game theory was developed to analyze, with one of the simple games actually being the formal game of [chicken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)).
Besides the high stakes negotiations involving brinksmanship, you could also use proxy warfare as well as espionage and sabotage that involve limited violence. Thus you have the types of things the CIA and KGB did throughout the Cold War. The problem with proxy warfare is that it doesn't really work to the same degree, because it would also likely be punishable by the Gods. So that really just leaves you with espionage and sabotage, which basically means that combat is essentially replaced with which side can pull of the more awesome heist.
The problem here is that in the real world, espionage or sabotage doesn't really settle conflicts all that often on its own, even when full scale war is not on the table. While spies can provide valuable aid to soldiers or diplomats, they cannot fully accomplish anything on their own. Stuxnet may have been a new way of fighting a war, but it didn't stop the Iranian nuclear program on its own. Only diplomacy did that. For all of the drama of Cold War espionage, there isn't all that much evidence that any of it mattered, with the real victory having been a result of economic factors. The best you can probably do with such operations it to very slightly tip the balance one way or another like the exceptional British deception operations of World War two, allowing invasions to face slightly less resistance. They make for excellent stories, but there is a major question as to whether or not it is really all that effective.
Most of the time what they really accomplish is information gathering, but there is a question as to whether even that is all that effective in the end. Everyone would likely be better off without all of the intrigue. The problem, going back to the game theory point, is one of asymmetric information. Everyone would be better off without it, but no one can afford to be the one party to throw all of their cards on the table.
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## Games!
This reminds me a lot of the light novel/anime [No Game No Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Game_No_Life). In the show, a god declares that all war is banned and all conflict is sorted by games that both parties agree to. So borders can be decided by poker or resources claimed by chess! If nothing else, the plot there could give some inspiration.
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There are plenty of ways to prove you're better than someone else without punching them in the face. Take, for example, [the economic trade war between Britain and Ireland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_trade_war)- this led to chaos within spending, party politics and affected the way of life for many without a single gunshot. Even today, look at the U.S. and China- if a side makes just one concession economically, it's like losing a huge battle with the whole world as an audience.
You could play a similar game with trying to win population instead of money- incentivise people from nation B to emigrate to A with better opportunities, lower taxes, safer streets- whatever it may be. I'm not sure about you, but on paper I'd definitely rather live in Seattle than Sao Paulo. To each their own, I suppose.
To put it short and sweet, there's loads of ways to nonviolently assert dominance over another person, nation or state. Take your pick- hope it helps!
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one possibility would be a trade war. No violent conflict but sanctions, tariffs and other economic factors made to hurt your enemy would be a good way to avoid violence while still harming your enemy.
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It will if the alternative is being annihilated by a supreme power. The possibility of negotiations breaking down and things going south is only real because there comes a point when one of the parties incur in a larger loss to their interests by doing nothing than by going to war. In this case, whoever engages in armed conflicts has *everything* to lose and nothing to win, so the scales are never tipped enough to justify such a stupid mistake. When your prize for winning the war is not what you wanted in the first place, but the death of everyone you love via lightning bolt to the face, you are less likely to appraise violence as an option.
Also, how fragile is the barrier? What counts as "war"? maybe countries will refrain from using large scale forces of hundreds of thousands but they'll keep swift, small, tactical squads designed to take out important targets. Communication and transportation technologies as well as superiority in stealth and control of information become even more important now that nations cannot go apeshit on each other's asses. Conflicts would then be solved by violence, but not *excessive* violence. Rather than casualties mounting in the millions, warfare would be conducted by numerous but small scale conflicts scattered all over the globe all aiming for the neutralization of a handful of highly prized targets and everything can turn into a massive, many-front espionage game.
Speaking of games, there is another solution. The gist of this is that the same gods that have created the barrier would know how much violence is enough violence. They could have created a formal competition to allow nations to one-up one another seeing as it is important to praise excellence, a virtue that many gods favor but that the god of war favors the most. In order to have a battlefield where the worthy could prove their mettle and where leaders and heros could be forged, the god of war may have devised a celestial game that acts as a war board. A place where champions or teams go to compete for the ultimate glory and whose decisions is binding for the belligerents. This is how nations would take to the ultimate consequence and there would be no turning back. Talk about Olympic Games.
The Games version works well along with the espionage so mix and match for the best of both worlds. Where the Games truly shine, however, is if there is really no alternative to violence other than The Game. If you want a more intellectual experience, The Game could be something like Go, chess or some other boardgame. Otherwise, it could be something more physical like laser tags, but with lasers!
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## What Causes Warfare?
It seems that warfare generally is triggered by one or more of three primary causes.
### 1. Religious conflict
This is your catch-all for various forms of holy war. Whether this is Mayan civilization going to war to capture sacrifices to the gods or religion A saying that religion B is the evil and must be removed from the planet, it fits here.
This category simply won't apply in your fictional world. All the religions agree: mass violence is going to get you all killed, so don't do it. Even when they worship someone else, this rule still applies.
Centuries of gods saying "NO!" means that you're unlikely to garner much support for religious violence.
### 2. Cults of Personality
Strong leaders often secure their power base through warfare and violence. Despotic Third World leaders, ancient Bronze Age kings, and even gang lords all fall here. Find someone, label them the enemy, and then rally your troops to your side. As long as you can convince people to attack those people over there, they won't look too closely at what you're doing over here.
Again, your religion will provide a strong deterrent to this sort of warfare. "Go destroy the kingdom of Oz, for they are the enemy!" is much harder to pull off if lightning comes down from the heavens (or a priest comes in with poison...) and kills you for trying to drum up a war.
Centuries of gods saying "NO!" means megalomaniac rulers are probably going to be unpopular.
### 3. Economics
If your people have no food, no natural resources, no water, and/or no hope, it becomes far easier to build up support for warfare and civil war. Throughout modern history, many wars have sparked because there simply wasn't enough stuff to go around -- food, money, whatever. This could be because your area is short on raw materials or because of economic depressions or drought or any number of subcategories.
The world you describe hasn't solved the suffering that's behind this root cause...
## What does this mean for your people?
With 2 of the 3 primary causes more or less removed from play, it seems that the root cause of warfare will most often come out of economic concerns.
So what does that mean? You won't find a king rallying support for war as a way to distract folks from their woes or to focus their anger on an external target. But the anger will still be there, unfocused, waiting to flash up.
So your savvy rulers will be aware of that, and that they can't overtly focus the anger elsewhere. But they could build up support for the sort of non-war violence we see all too often.
**State-sponsored terror** isn't war. but it's sure a tool used to focus anger elsewhere.
**Trade wars** aren't really war. But they still are a way to focus anger and keep control of a people by "attacking" some other group.
**Public relations wars** are another, often used alongside trade wars. This was common enough during the Cold War: USA or USSR would make brash statements about what terrible things the other nation was doing somewhere or other, all the while doing things just as bad on their own... (Disinformation, psy-ops, propaganda, would all be tools in this box.)
**Competitive Events / Sports** Look at the Olympics and how intense the rivalry between USA and USSR was throughout the Cold War. Team and individual sports could easily become a mock warfare stand-in. Or perhaps "duels" where the challenged picks the format. Imagine if a country wanted to "fight another, and they chose to fight by bake-off, Mario Kart race, or spelling bee. With the equivalent of Switzerland or the UN working to quantify the rules and then sending judges to oversee the events. And, yes, pistol duels would quite possibly exist here, too.
**Technology / Innovation** USA never would have landed on the moon if we hadn't wanted to prove we weren't, somehow, superior to USSR. The entire space race between the two nations was a proxy war of a sort. Races to specific, quantifiable, goals would be a challenge for superiority.
**Assassination** would still exist as a means to settle scores. Oh, it might require more subtlety than snipers or whatever, but there would still be folks who would try to solve their differences by 1-on-1 murder.
**Germ Warfare** might become a tool. Spreading a plague isn't mass combat, so it might happen. Though it would be no less morally acceptable, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be used.
**Threat of actual warfare** might exist? This is a bit sketchy. After enough generations under the gods' rules, the very idea of mass combat would be lost from common thoughts, so it seems unlikely that anyone would consider the threat of actual warfare and meaningful deterrent, but it might? If you tell folks you're willing to risk the gods' wrath to get what you want, they might not be willing to risk it. I suspect this would be roughly on par with threats of nuclear war -- a threat, but one so terrifying that no one really wants it to happen. Or at least, no one who's sane, anyway.
**Cyber war** would certainly be a thing, once technology reached that level. Hacking your enemy doesn't kill anyone, so it'd be a primary attack front.
**Bluff** Note that from each of the above categories, you'd have not just the actions themselves, but the *threat* of these actions as meaningful tools to get what you want. Just as the threat of actual warfare (diplomacy via aircraft carrier) is a thing in the real world.
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## Trade Embargoes
If a nation has a powerful economy, a monopoly on a resource, or a favorable territorial position, they could impose trade embargoes on their enemy. By refusing to trade with the enemy, and imposing penalties on other nations that do trade with them, a nation could starve them out of a particular resource. This could be stopping their enemy from importing food or getting water (damming an upstream river). Or perhaps their enemy has no access to certain precious metals/crystals necessary for technological advancement. The result would be starving their enemy or the enemy falls so far behind in technology they are no longer a threat. Can also think of this like a castle siege.
## Propaganda & Politics
Perhaps without war the political sphere is even more influential. A war of ideas can be waged between nations with the winner enjoying one or more benefits. Nations might spend
tons on propaganda to persuade the masses. People vote with their feet, which means they will migrate to reside in the nation which they agree with. In a world without war, perhaps after a round of elections the borders are even redrawn.
## Unnatural Tech/Magic
Perhaps the nations have found some way to use magic/tech such that combat can still be conducted without the god's acknowledgement of the combat as warfare. For example, perhaps they have resurrection tech/magic so they can fight as usual, but both sides resurrect all casualties before the god's notice. Or instead of killing each other, a weapon is developed that is more painful than death but doesn't actually kill, and nations use it on each other until one admits defeat. There could be a tech/magic that stuns/petrifies enemies so that in war, no one is killed but instead taken out of the fight. All the would-be deaths and casualties are instead statues or people in a comatose state, which essentially allows the nations to conduct warfare as usual but without triggering the gods or weakening the shield to the void.
[Answer]
* Looking at China, Japan or France, the leaders are set up by God/the Gods when they don't claim to be descended from the Gods. They could have a divine duty to represent their country in honor duels
* Powerful families could manipulate the economic tissue to avoid direct war while getting the exact same results (possibly, through mafia/underworld ties)
* Assassination is ever an option, one could remove select leaders from the enemy political pool. A dance of assassination/counter-assassination could happen, and be either ritualized or codified (vendetta style)
* If the world relies on magic, possibly that could be an option: instead of the UN, you get a grand council that enforces absolute magical power and prevents direct wars, but also arbitrates all and any conflicts
* if war between nations is not an option, I assume rebellion is all right, else that world devolves into a set of horrifying God-enforced dictatorships, technically at peace with each other. Therefore, here's a classic technique: have some support within the population, have some shred of legal pretense (and hell, it's easy, just look at the number of countries that used the legal pretense option over the last five centuries. It's staggering), send in "advisors" and "medical relief" (eg, tacticians and tanks), have "holidaying military personnel with family ties to the region" go in by the thousands. You're at no point declaring war on anyone, but Crimea turns Russian all the same (to use a simple, hardly debatable example, but you could easily find Asian/South American/European/African equivalents).
[Answer]
Some of it depends on what you mean by "metaphysical energies":
* Are we talking magic? Going to war without magic has been done right here on Planet Earth for quite some time.
* Are we talking "too many deaths in too small a space"/"souls leaving the world" metaphysical energies? Warfare turns into nonlethal weapons/containment rather than killing.
Either way, the battles could still happen, but the weapons would change to skirt whatever the restrictions where.
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In the scenario you give, I can see a nation staging a small group to rebel and become their own nation, then take on the actual enemy nation in Real Warfare in order to "take one for the team".
Given that divine beings are watching over this and applying punishment, the "rebels" would have to be an independent group that was actually willing to be wiped out by divine wrath in order to stage whatever attack they were going to make on the original enemy nation.
And the first time that happened, I foresee larger nations splintering off smaller ones along their borders as a defense against "rebel" suicide nations...
A political arms race to match the real one.
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Alternatively, have a group of your soldiers sneak into the enemy nation, then flash-mob deface something (take a dump on the White House lawn), take pictures, and RUN. Rather than doing something humiliating/embarrassing, they could sabotage infrastructure, or commit non-violent-enough-to-risk-The-Barrier acts of terrorism (zombie plague? mass sterilization?).
At this point defensive technology becomes a matter of identifying/removing/containing enemies rather than blasting the crap out of them. Defensive barriers that can be created just fine (wall of ice) but can only be broken by banned Metaphysical Energies (fireball).
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[Question]
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## Some background
The gods who have watched over us for so long are clearly angry. They've sent us this terrible trial in the form of a giant dungeon and told us if we can't complete it they'll wipe out our continent and start over (our intel says the other continents have gotten much the same message with their own trials, but hell if we'll help them--this'll be hard enough for us alone). We're told it won't open for another 18 years and for Young Adult fiction reason #57, the only people who can enter are those under the age of 20.
After many discussions and much analysis, we (the "government") have decided that we're limiting the number of kids we'll let enter to 1,000 and we've made it known that in 15 years we'll begin searching for those chosen 1,000 (this'll give us a year to search and 2 years to train them before the dungeon opens).
Needless to say the whole schooling system is getting a major overhaul--every school wants the prestige of teaching one of the chosen thousand. Not to mention birth rates are at an all time high. Everyone wants to be able to say that *their* kid was one of the few that helped save us all. Or they may be interested in the rewards we're offering those chosen. Who knows.
Thanks to some recent breakthroughs from the Mage's Guild, we're able to generate a spell to put about 1,000 people in a compressed time space where time will move at 1/10'th the rate as outside. Because of this, we're able to realistically test in groups of 1,000 kids for 8 hours with 20 proctors.
## Our problem
But here's the problem: how on earth do we test these kids to narrow down from the almost million kids in our age range? We want those who have strong physical attributes, so that they can go toe-to-toe physically with whatever they find in the dungeon. We need them to be quick rational thinkers and problem solvers--who knows what kind of puzzles the gods have chosen to employ. And we also need those with a strong aptitude for magic1.
We've discussed the idea of holding standardized written tests with our own proctors, but with how corrupt the nobility can be, we imagine that they'll bribe a test taker in a neighboring town (or maybe one even further) to get the test early.
## The facts broken down...
* We need to narrow down from almost a million kids (ages 14-16) to 1,000
* We have the ability to test groups of about 1,000 kids at a time for 8 hours with 20 proctors
* We're judging children by the following criteria:
+ Physical prowess
+ Ability to think and act logically/rationally under pressure
+ "Magic ability" (or out of universe: programmer/math ability)
+ Ability to work well in a team is a plus (but we're willing to send in kids who prefer going solo)
* The search will begin in 15 years, so we have that long to prepare
* The location of the testing can be changed to whatever is needed--from a classroom to a coliseum. Nothing will be spared to ensure we find the best of the best.
* We've thought long and hard, but we have no other magic that will practically3 help us test the children besides the time spaces.
* We are aware that the nobles will try to bribe and cheat their way to getting their children chosen and want to actively combat that4
* It's safe to assume none of our proctors or magicians can be bribed or corrupted.
**How can we effectively find the top 1,000 potential mages on the continent between the ages of 14-16?**
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1. Out of universe explanation: magic is similar to a mix of our world's programming and math. There *is* a congenital limit to how much energy one can hold at a time, but especially at the higher levels magic is more limited by your fluidity and skill with wielding it. As such, you can assume those who would be good programmers in our world would make excellent mages.
2. For example, if my 5 mages erect a compressed time space for 2 hours real world time, it will feel like 10 hours to them and they'll need to rest for 4 hours before erecting another compressed time space.
3. Teleportation magic is far too costly, and our emotion reading magics are both expensive energy-wise and far too inaccurate.
4. **Note:** cheating from the kids is perfectly fine (and may even be encouraged). A clever kid who can find holes in rules is something we'd love. What we *don't* want is for the system to be cheated by those outside the test not during the test.
[Answer]
**Make dungeoneering a sport**
Professional sports is an existing, effective model for finding the best of the best and making them even better. Start the National Mages League, which is a televised competition of dungeoneering skills, with a fixed schedule of matches, high pay for mage all-stars, and local teams with fan bases. 18 years is plenty of time to build a culture around the NML, with all young mages dreaming of making it to the big leagues. The best performers get to the highest levels in an organic, distributed way, without the need for intensive testing over a short period of time.
As a bonus, children who grow up aspiring to the NML will practice from a young age. There's no need to wait for 15 years before starting the selection or training process. It makes no sense to do nothing about this issue until 2 years before the deadline! Professional athletes pick up their sports at a young age, I imagine it's uncommon to start a sport at 16 and make it as a professional after only a couple of years.
Furthermore, the NML will build an upper eschelon of mages *now*, who can pass on their learnings for years to come. I expect that on average, modern sports teams would be able to beat sports teams from 100 years ago, due to improvements in training, diet, equipment, strategy, etc. You should start finding the best mages now, so that the next crop of mages are even better.
[Answer]
You start now, not in 15 years. You set up schools that have only one thing in mind. After 3 years kids have first test, then second after another 3 years and so on. The kids with best results are send to better schools. You don't narrow it by much. 1 million to 1k in 5 stages is just 25% at each step.
Each school level is harder in training those kids. And after 12 years when you have narrowed those few millions to 4 thousands you send them to super Uber BEst training camp there is.
You know, just like we do now with all those who are send to Olympics.
And rich people bribing their kids? You ever seen a rich parent bribing their kid way up to Olympics? And the kids will die in this dungeon. Why risk the possibility of losing heir when somebody else can do that job? Donnie didn't don bone spurs because they would look good on him. He did that to not die and have fun.
[Answer]
**There is a reason "best" is in quotes.**
You continent sets in motion an elaborate system of training and vetting these young ubermages. 1000 of the best and brightest are groomed and ready to go when the dungeon opens.
4 hours before things are to start, one of the other continents (that you have pissed off over and over) attacks. Their dungeon opened before yours - things have not gone well and it is not looking good for their continent. There is war. The opening salvo is a nuclear strike on your dungeon - leaving it unscathed but wiping out your 1000, their handlers and nearly all of their supplies. Transportation is down and there is no prospect of getting the backup 500 to the site in time.
The "best" candidates are best because they are who is available. They are a random bunch of 8 kids from the area. Only 3 can do magic and only 1 well; she is 9 years old. One of the kids has Down's syndrome and one kid got burned in the nuclear strike. But these 8 are close enough to get in there before it closes. The surviving two handlers distribute the tech / weaponry that made it through the blast, wish the kids luck and send them in.
[Answer]
This may sound a bit odd but... Crossword Puzzles?
This is actually how Bletchly Park, the british intelligence base that broke the enigma code looked for people with the correct sort of problem solving skills.
They put a load of Crosswords in the national papers with an advert saying soemthing similar to "Can you beat this in 5 minutes? if so write to us at [insert address] to hear about an exciting job offer" then once all those had written in they shipped them to a meeting and were sat down to do another one against the clock to identify the cheaters, and those that really were that good.
<http://www.alaricstephen.com/main-featured/2016/9/18/the-cryptic-crossword-that-recruited-for-bletchley-park>
You could easily sort out some form of trial that tests the basic abilities you are looking for and then whittle them down with another test then another, these days this could all be done online and realtively easily linking from facebook!
[Answer]
# Stop looking for jack of all trades. Look for specialists.
You're sending *one thousand people*. That's practically a small army. You don't need a thousand people who are decent at everything, you need specialized squads that do their main job well, supporting each other and bringing everyone to greater heights.
You want frontliners. Ranged units. Support units. Logistics. Repairmen and craftsmen, medics and trapmasters and survivalists. All are key to surviving in a dungeon, and you'd do better to have your selection process focus on finding gems on each of these categories, and polishing them.
Of course, you still want everyone to have basic training in everything so they're not completely useless out of their one strength. But to train *everyone* in anything beyond the basics for all these categories would be a futile waste of time - that kid blessed with mana is better off getting taught by your nation's best mages than hitting the track field, and your best champions are better off focusing on training the kid talented in swordplay.
# How do we train them?
First off, I believe SZCZERZO KŁY already did a fantastic job explaining this. You don't let kids fuck around and select them later, you *train them from birth*. The level of quality you can achieve with the latter method far eclipses the former, especially when you have the full force of a nation backing you.
You would do well to first gather your nation's best teachers. Gather your best champions for teaching combat, and your best trainers to improve the kids' bodies. Get the best teachers to sharpen their minds, archmages to nurture their magical capabilities, doctors to make sure they grow up healthy and strong. Then get various specialists to teach them in various skills. Priests (I assume they'll be the ones in charge of healing magic). Blacksmiths. Craftsmen. Locksmiths. Trap disarmers. Cartographers. Get all your nation's best and get them ready to raise a generation of masters, you need the best to raise the best.
Next, do notice that even in the same "category" (i.e. combat, or magic) there will be different branches of specializations. One could be a gifted conjurer, while the other is a healer or illusionist. One kid could be skilled with the sword, while the other never misses a mark with the bow.
As such, a standardized test might not be effective. No matter what, there will be talents that are less useful for that specific test, and some others that are especially useful. You'd be better off creating a really general scenario - several tests perhaps. I'd suggest something along these lines:
* A test of combat: Various dummies scattered about, where you are allowed to do use any weapon or ability at your disposal to disable or dispose of them.
* A test of knowledge: A test with open-ended answers, to determine one's tactical aptitude or the breadth or their knowledge. Magic tests could be included here too.
* A test of miscellaneous skills: Their ability to survive, to mend wounds, to repair broken items, pathfinding, noticing traps, etc.
These tests should be graded *subjectively* by your masters, taking note of the standout performances.
Another point to consider is to **test in groups rather than individuals**. By letting it be team tests rather than solo, you also train them to work together, and get to discover which ones are the natural leaders.
# What next?
Once you find out what each kid is good at, you focus on polishing their specialized skills, sending them to specialized schools or trainers you've chosen previously. Every few years all the children are gathered once more, mixed up and grouped to teams again for another round of testing.
This will, of course, take much more effort and time compared to a standardized test taken by everyone. But that's where SZCZERZO KŁY's answer comes in - When you train them from birth, you have plenty of time to perform these tests over regular intervals. You keep track of how each kid performs at each assessment, and in the end of the 18-year-period, have a trusted group judge each kid and choose the elite 1000 to represent your nation. I'd say this would be much better compared to one ultimate test that everyone has to take at the same time.
[Answer]
# First test your system, not the people
As has already been mentioned, you start now, but the testing you're starting now isn't for magical ability. You're not looking to *find* the best possible magic users, you're looking to *create* them. Since your eventual protagonists possibly haven't yet been born or have only just been born you have some time to play with.
What you're testing you're testing right now is the output of the current education system and how effective it is at creating competent casters.
You're also testing your testing system, to make sure you're actually looking for the right basic skillset before the magic manifests.
# Then upgrade the system
Take the best aspects of the most effective schools and spread those to the rest. Test again every year for effectiveness of the system. With 18 years to play with you should be able to create an idealised education system capable of putting out youth with the exact skill set you need.
The [industrial-age](/questions/tagged/industrial-age "show questions tagged 'industrial-age'") tag implies a highly stratified society with some highly wealthy getting the best education and the vast majority being poor, undernourished, and undereducated. Whether you want to work on the second group is up to you, but some generic trickle down to the basic education the poor get would be appropriate.
# Finally test the people
How you open up the final trial to get the standard issue protagonists (one orphan male from underprivileged background who is a natural highly effective magic user and one overprivileged female who has had to fight everyone in her life (apart from her overindulgent father, mother died young) to get to that position) is up to you, but your entire society is now geared up to complete whatever challenge exists in that dungeon, so this final challenge should really just be a formality.
[Answer]
I think the best approach is to test only their Magic Ability. SZCZERZO KŁY Made an interesting point with the Olympics as a comparison, however you don't just need the best athletes. You need a Usain Bolt combined with a Steven Hawkins. A genius and athlete. The only issue is, its much easier to create an athlete than it is to create a genius. Sure you can teach someone maths and programming, but not everyone gets it... anyone can be forced to exercise and be fit.
So rather than testing multiple attributes, **I propose you test and only train their Magic Ability**.
Much like our school system, children need to be systematically taught the basics and magic and perform live tests (actually perform the magic feat, not just memorize it). Practical ability is more important that theoretical knowledge. Tests are based on a weighted average of execution speed, power and complexity.
Once a child reaches a certain standard, they are moved onto the next grade. Not based on years or time spent. They go to the next grade once they have achieved a bench mark score. There also needs to be a minimum for each attribute, because a super powerful spell is useless if it takes too long to cast. For example, little timmy here can produce a grade 1 fireball of 10 power in 1 minute. He can move into the next grade. Tom here can produce a grade 1 fireball of 20 power, in 10 minutes, but 10 minutes is too long, so Tom doesn't pass until he lowers the time. (Of course, you will have exceptions and geniouses, like maybe Little Timmy here can cast a grade 1 fireball with 1000 power in 1 minutes, but like all systems, those exceptions will need to be specially catered for and identified.)
This means that children will proceed based on merit. A 5 year old might be in the same class as an 18 year old if he is talented enough. Sure a rich parent can bribe a child through a couple grades, but at higher grades you publicize the test to the nation. That way after a certain grade, children are no longer able to progress since bribes won't help when the entire nation is watching.
So depending on your magic system, you create a grade system. At higher grades, they are taught more complex magics which put greater strain on their bodies and mental capabilities. At lower grades, they are taught simple magics. For example, a Fireball might be a tier 1 spell, and time pausing is tier 10. Once your children have reached the final tier, they start to help develop new magics or spend time improving their magic capabilities (sort of like graduating)
Once the time comes, you simply take the children in the highest grades and start to train their survival skills. Do it military style. You will get some drop outs, people who can't cope with the pressure or break under too much pressure, but you just drill them every single day for a 2-3 years and your going to end up with the cream of the crop.
[Answer]
You need to make some key decisions about how much the world population & the trainee pool knows about what is coming, and just what these kids are being trained towards.
To my mind, the critical issue is whether you commit to having candidates trained "in the dark", with potential conflict around the trainees discovering the endgoal/deception, or take a character-exploration approach, where you can examine different candidate's reasoning for pursuing a grueling training leading into a probable suicide mission (or perhaps the glory that awaits victors).
While Ender's Game & Battle Royale (both mentioned earlier) come immediately to mind, anime has been exploring this "train kids to fight for the end of the world" genre for decades. The original Gundam TV series, and its post-modern rebuttal, Neon Genesis Evangelion, are both from a gritty realist "war is hell" perspective, while Mai-HiMe and its post-modern remake, Puella Magi Madoka Magika, take the idea of battle-school-within-a-school to the magical girl genre.
All are highly recommended, or you can just look up some analyses to get an idea of their respective approaches.
[Answer]
You want to foster creativity and different solutions, so you'll want create an environment where different strategies naturally arise. This means you'll want a decentralized approach; a government-sponsored test will tend towards a monoculture. So you want to isolate regions from each other enough that they will develop their own techniques, but you want some cross-breeding and feedback on the effectiveness of the technique. So maybe within each region there is a set of competitions, with the winners competing, kind of like in a Robot Wars kind of challenge. But you want to make sure they can handle the unexpected, so maybe you set up a secret, Second Foundation kind of school somewhere which develops independently. This would provide you with an unexpected underdog element if you wanted.
You also want passing the dungeon to be highly desirable, so success should result in money/respect/etc., whatever it is that people want. No one wants their kids to die, so it has to be good. It should probably also benefit the parents/family, since you'll need their help and encouragement.
On a larger scale, though, you need to address the issue of the gods. What do they want from society and why didn't society do it? If the gods are real, then you can bet your last gold piece that there are people cultivating their favor. If the gods are manipulatable, these guys will figure out how (humanity has been trying to manipulate the gods our whole history); if they are not maniuplatable at least some people will serve them for their character and will have some idea of what they want. Do the gods love humanity, hate humanity, or are indifferent? If the gods are indeed rulers, what kind of ruler doesn't make their desires known? And your schooling/testing situation doesn't address fixing the fundamental problem at all. You might pass the dungeon, but you still won't have changed how you relate to the gods. And if you change how you relate, maybe the gods will relent? For instance, when Ninevah repented after hearing Jonah, God relented, despite the city being the capital of a horrible empire. At the very least, one strategy for passing the dungeon would be the political/corruption strategy: some combatants are going to try to get in good with the gods and cheat.
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[Question]
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**TL,DR:**
Kinetic weapons are great at taking down shields, but can't take out the hull. **I need an explosive that works in a vacuum to take out the hull.** Nukes are out, since they'll hit the atmosphere too.
Here is the situation:
>
> There is a battle around a planet. Two capital ships are in orbit, 180 degrees out of phase. They cannot see each other, but they are so big that changing their orbit is slow, making them very vulnerable to long range attacks.
>
>
> One ship wants to damage to the other using explosives. A kinetic bombardment is used to take down the shields, however the kinetic weapons cannot do widespread hull damage due to the nano-tech that repairs it. Rounds that combine kinetic attack with explosives will be used to hit the hull, weakening it, and then rip it open with explosives.
>
>
>
**What chemical can cause an explosion against the exterior of the ship?**
Since both ships are hugging the atmosphere in very low orbits, nuclear weapons cannot be used.
[Answer]
Almost all currently used explosives have an oxidant (or it's equivalent) "built-in". They already work in space, under water, etc just as well.
Let's look at thermite (which is not an explosive, but incendiary, but it's easy to understand) as an example. It consists of pure aluminium and iron oxide. The aluminium burns by taking the oxygen from iron oxide, resulting in aluminium oxide (slag) and molten iron. The energy of burning aluminium is greater than the energy of "un-burning" iron, so the net result is still hellish fire. It burns the aluminium with oxygen, but it doesn't use external oxygen. Thus, works in space.
The only kind ordnance I know about that won't work in space are thermobarics (fuel-air explosives), but they're extremely rare even with all that oxygen readily available on Earth.
Explosives cannot rely on mixing with anything, including atmospheric oxygen, as a part of the exploding process because to actually explode, it has to go out all at once. If it had to wait for the outer layers to oxidize and expose the inner layers to oxygen - that's how a bonfire works, not an explosion.
[Answer]
You can use whatever chemically pure explosive you think sounds the coolest.
Explosives work by being somewhat unstable molecules. Then once they are triggered they rapidly decompose releasing a lot of energy in the process. This happens regardless of the environment they are in. Most of the commonly known explosives (nitroglycerin, C4, or trinitrotoluene) all work like this.
[Answer]
See [FOOF](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride). Pack some of this into a warhead somehow and I dare you to find a way to make it stop burning.
Dioxygen Difluoride is a particularly reactive compound of already particularly reactive fluorine and oxygen. It's ludicrously dangerous production method as well as its reactivity with essentially everything, at any temperature make it fairly famous in the chemistry community. [See the wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride) for details, but it truly does react with essentially anything.
The main difficulty with such a weapon would be that it would tend not to stick to hull of the enemy ship as it decomposed, but this would be a problem with pretty much any reactive agent, which is likely your best bet, aside from nuclear weapons.
[Answer]
You can use any self-oxidising explosive, which is almost all of them, or you can use a warhead that creates something horribly unstable that will damage anything that it comes in contact with. Liquid Oxygen or Liquid Ozone are good candidates since anything that's spent a long time in space is likely to have surfaces without protective oxide layers but there's a limit to overall damage with these compounds to spite their reactivity. Then there's [FOOF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride) which is super nasty but it's components are relatively stable and transportable, I wouldn't want to be the systems engineer to who has to try to come up with a way to neutralise FOOF, and when it gets inside it'll kill the crew regardless of hull sealing technology. [Oxygen difluoride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_difluoride) would have similar effects, be less dangerous to store, but less easily synthesised within a warhead. If you want to use an explosive that isn't self-oxidising you use it *plus* an oxidiser, like [Hydrogen Peroxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_peroxide), that stores safely.
[Answer]
Getting an explosion in absence of oxygen is no big trouble.
The first obvious way is to use an explosive that already has its oxygen stored within. Pretty much everything used in present-day guns or cannons qualifies for that, this is why you can (in principle, neglecting other little details) fire a gun underwater or even in space *no problemo*. Pretty much every solid rocket fuel also qualifies.
Anything and everything used by and used against submarines during World War II would demonstrably do. Torpedoes, water bombs, and mines explode just fine without oxygen.
The second obvious way is to use a pressurized tank full of hydrogen and a pressurized tank full of oxygen, break the tanks open, add the tiniest little spark, and you have hell break loose. Gas explosions, next to dust/aerosol explosions ("thermobaric weapon") are some of the most devastating explosions we know.
If you wish to be a bit more posh, substitute oxygen with chloride, and you do not even need a spark. Releasing the gas and exposing it to sunlight suffices. That's *truly* an explosion in absence of oxygen.
The third, somewhat cheating way is to not cause an explosion at all, but to have gas expand rapidly anyway -- to the exact same effect. How would you do that? Take a chemical which is cheap/easily produced or abundant, and has a low boiling temperature (say, carbon dioxide, but quicksilver or water would do as well) and heat it to considerable temperature (2,000-3,000K) very rapidly. I'll leave to your imagination what the best way would be to achieve this. If nothing else, it might convert kinetic energy from the impact (but in Sci-Fi, it can be whatever... energy from a "plasma generator"?).
This is not-an-explosion, which however has the same net effect and works perfectly well in absence of oxygen.
Nuclear weapons are out of the question. But why? The rare element *catalysium* will, if added to normal plutonium, increase the yield to upwards of 97%, and with a proper *bounconium* reflector to upwards of 99.975%. Fallout is minimal.
Bullshit? Well, no, it's actually exactly what, in the real world, boosted fission bombs (and beryllium or carbide reflectors) are trying to achieve, and they do achieve it, only not at that scale (but it's fiction, after all).
[Answer]
Try looking up some of NASAs monopropellant fuels.
Hydrazine, for instance, is a chemical fuel that burns in space with no oxygen. I'm sure if you got enough of it then it would be fine.
Alternatively, take the oxygen with you. Use conventional explosives but at the head of the warhead is a delicate oxygen container which bursts, surrounding the impact point with oxygen immediately before the detonator goes off.
Option three would be to use just highly pressurised oxygen without explosives. Oxygen is surprisingly reactive in high concentrations (look up videos of what liquid oxygen can do) and, depending on the metal used in hull construction, you could burst through it by releasing the physical pressure on the cannister, then as soon as the oxygen comes in contact with any source of ignition (heat, electricity, both pretty common on spaceships) then it'd burn through most things.
[Answer]
1) No chemical, but nuclear weapons. They won't make shock wave or anything like that, they will be only ball of expanding plasma from the detination.
So this weapon on impact will not need oxygen, it will emit high amount of heat, radioactivity, EMP pulse theoretically...anything like that can damage enemy ship drastically. Or their crew.
2) In [Honor Harrington universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse), they used also laser-warheads, those rockets went near the target and emitted powerful lasers to penetrate the enemy ships. (They used nuclear warheads too, if lasers were out of stock)
Adding link to wiki about missiles used in Harrington world (even though those were for more advanced future probably, it might be good for read, too): <http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Missile>
[Answer]
Just add oxygen to your own bombs. Have your engineers do stoichiometry to determine how much oxygen the other components of your bombs need to explode properly and then just add that to your explosive device. People literally have tanks of oxygen attached to their nose all the time.
You're not going to get combustion without oxygen and since you nixed nuclear stuff the most you can hope for is something expanding quickly and making a shockwave. You're basically stuck with your weapons either having their own oxygen or being some rapidly expanding gas for "reasons".
[Answer]
Explosions are fine. They are not worth as much in space where there is not gas to produce a shock wave. Also the ship would see the explosive coming kilometers away, shoot it with something like an Aegis gun and disable it.
Kinetic impacts are the way to go. You can shoot them all you want but their trajectories will change minimally: they have inertia. Your kinetic projectile is too fast to travel in the same orbit as the capitol ships. But you could use a fast projectile and some tricks to get it to hit your target.
1: **Bank it around the gravity well.** You could fire your fast projectile low, banking it around the earth in a slingshot-like maneuver. It is too fast to stay in that low trajectory but the proximity of the planet will curve its trajectory. If your math is good it will come back up from the planet under your target.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pE1mn.png)
from <https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/5934/how-does-a-gravity-slingshot-actually-work/5936>
2: **Skip it off the atmosphere.**
from <https://newwest.net/main/article/meteor_brings_back_memories_of_the_great_daylight_fireball_of_1972/>
>
> Thousands of people from Utah to Canada had witnessed what would be
> called The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972. There were hundreds of
> pictures taken of the thing, and a pair of home movies, and it was
> tracked using infrared sensors aboard an Air Force satellite.
>
>
> Scientists inferring from the temperature of the ball and its 900-mile
> trajectory from Utah to Alberta calculated that it passed over Montana
> at an altitude of less than 35 miles, was between ten and thirty feet
> in diameter, and weighed at least 4,000 tons, big enough to obliterate
> a Denver-sized city with a force equal to Little Boy and Fat Man, the
> uranium and plutonium bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
> Because no trace of the beast has ever been found, and because no
> sonic booms were heard as it sailed across Canada, astrophysicists now
> believe its low angle of descent allowed it to skip off the earth’s
> atmosphere like a flat stone on a still lake.
>
>
>
If you fired your projectile at a low trajectory you could skip it up off the atmosphere, again with the projectile rising up under your target ship.
3: **Late boost.** If your projectile can carry explosives, why not have it carry rocket fuel? Send it back along the orbit. Then when your target ship is 100 km out you accelerate the projectile in a straight line over the remaining distance into your target. Even if defensive fire incapacitates the rocket before it is exhausted the massive payload will continue along its trajectory.
[Answer]
If you want to avoid oxygen completely, consider [Chlorine trifluoride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride). It can be condensed to a liquid at root temperature (so can be easily delivered to the target) and will ignite and / or explode on contact with most substances, including glass and water. Reaction byproducts typically include strong acids as a bonus.
[Answer]
The contrary approach would likely be the most mass efficient (while there is no weight in your space I guess, there is mass to accelerate!): Just send an oxidiser that is aggressive enough to use your target as fuel. Such do exist in the real world.
Also be aware that halogens can create very similar reactions with fuels as oxygen can - flames included! Actually, any sufficiently self-sustaining exothermic reaction can go that way, reaction heat vaporises things into a gas/plasma that is even more reactive than the solid material...
What will help you is that a lot of metals will not have been slowly pre-oxidised if they've been in space, in the best case the oxide layers that used to exist have been punctured or ablated by heat, vapor pressure effects, micro impacts etc. Many real-world light metal alloys would be extremely unstable if they didn't *instantly* build a passive oxide layer from atmospheric oxygen (which they can't as well in a more vigorous reaction. Compare what a dishwasher tends to do to aluminium stuff..)
BTW, iron rusting is an oxidation too - slow but rather destructive. Sufficiently fine iron dust is actually know to catch fire all by itself in atmospheric conditions...
[Answer]
Seems like chunking a bomb with oxygen is a real fine waste of oxygen in space.
On Earth, explosions work great because we have a ready supply of Oxygen for combustion. Consider some combustion examples:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wuJJr.gif)
Also, consider that of the elements used in explosives Oxygen is one of the greatest mass. So if you wanted to make an actual fireball in space you need a really heavy big bomb.
The majority damage from explosions also come from the expansion of gasses creating a shockwave. In space, the shockwave of expansion will dissipate rapidly (no medium to pass through). Therefore, unless the explosion is inside the enemy ship you likely won't be creating any kind of damage.
Here is the only way I can see this working: You load up a normal exploding ordinance round and fire at the enemy vessel. The round penetrates the hull and then explodes inside the ship. The air inside the enemy ship is used for combustion. The worst that could happen is the round doesn't explode and just punches a hole in the enemy ship, which is just fine for you anyway. If it does explode inside the enemy ship that may create a nice big explosion indeed. Ships are designed to contain pressure from space, but would it be able to handle a shockwave inside? The normal pressure inside the ship wants to escape to space anyway so just a little help along the way and you may end up with a nice explosion.
[Answer]
You could use a self oxidising explosive, like thermite(It is rust powder and very, very finely powdered aluminum, and it takes oxygen from the rust)
] |
[Question]
[
In my fantasy novel, I have people living in a giant [swamp forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_swamp_forest). The swamp stretches as far as the eye can see, so draining is not an option, as there is simply nowhere to drain the swamp to.
My people need to have a city in this swamp. This city isn't some rundown village; it's a big city, capable of supporting several thousand people at least. It is the capitol of an empire.
The problem with having such a large and magnificent city in a swamp is the lack of solid material to build it on. Most of the ground is underwater, or likely muddy and not suitable as a base for buildings. There might also be flooding, which would change the water level, making it nearly impossible to build anything that doesn't float. Stones wouldn't be overly plentiful.
**How could a giant city be constructed in a swamp?** How would they get around possible flooding? What would they build their city *on*?
*Notes:*
* These people will have access to abundant trees, animals, and even a limited amount of iron ore, as that can sometimes be found in swamps. They do *NOT* have access to stones (unless those are plentiful in swamps - which I don't believe they are).
* The technology level of these people is Roman Empire. A lot of what they might build is limited by the lack of stone.
* Before you cite New Orleans as the answer, consider that these people do not have access to the pumps which keep New Orleans dry. Limited dikes, yes. But only what they build up out of mud and lumber.
* I do not live near a swamp, so my knowledge of them is limited to what I have heard. If my assumptions are wrong, please let me know.
[Answer]
Such a city has been already built in reality, and it was even the capital of an empire: [Venice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice)
>
> The buildings of Venice are constructed on closely spaced wooden piles. Most of these piles are still intact after centuries of submersion. The foundations rest on plates of Istrian limestone placed on top of the piles, and buildings of brick or stone sit above these footings. The piles penetrate a softer layer of sand and mud until they reach a much harder layer of compressed clay.
>
>
> Submerged by water, in oxygen-poor conditions, wood does not decay as
> rapidly as on the surface.
>
>
>
This gives you good indications on how to build such a city.
[Answer]
**A Floating City**
You said it yourself, with flooding and an unstable earthen base on which to build, structures have to float. So make them float, using pontoons build from huge hollowed-out trees like massive canoes.
Height will be limited, and most structures will likely have to remain roughly pyramid-shaped to maintain stability. Your city will be very horizontal, sprawling throughout the swamp, but not very high. Tides and floods will raise your city.
You can create floating boardwalks for foot traffic and have drawbridges to allow boat traffic through the area. Anchor your buildings with heavy stones or to the surrounding trees. Use canals and dikes to direct water flow.
A good, real-world example to look into would be [Tenochtitlan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan), the capital of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, which sprawled out from an island in Lake Texcoco.
**A Raised City**
If a floating city doesn't suit your world or your people, build your city in the trees of your swamp forest. Your city will be more vertically integrated than a floating city, with structures climbing up the trees before extending outward to the next one.
Suspend buildings and bridges from upper branches and anchor them to the trees themselves or with weights dropped into the swamp.
Use cantilevers to extend platforms from the trees (or between the trees) on which to build your buildings. Instead of boardwalks and causeways, you'll have rope bridges and ladders (or elevators).
[Answer]
I would consider looking at the Aztecs who created the city of [Tenochtitlan](https://www.britannica.com/place/Tenochtitlan) in marshland at the edge of a lake.
At its height it had a population of 400,000 people and was the Capital of the Aztec Empire.
They in order to create it they constructed a series of artificial islands and linked them with causeways.
These islands were created using a system called [Chinampa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa) were areas of swamp were fenced off and layers of mud, lake sediment and rotting vegetation were layered together a series of canals enabled canoes to travel between different areas.
In other parts of the world artificial islands have been created in swamps by weaving together reeds or tree branches and covering these with soil taken from the swamp.
[Answer]
You could go with a floating city but that's a lot of wood in contact with the water.
You can minimize the wood contact with the water by building the city on pitch soaked pylons (maybe even copper clad). Each building would be build independently with hanging walkways between them and hinged ramps or rope ladders to floating docks under the buildings. The trouble is that wood rots very well in a swamp. So the pylons would have to be easily replaceable. Replacement would have to happen less often the better protected the pylons are (hence the pitch, creosote, or cladding).
Possibly have wealthy or powerful people use imported stone for their pylons.
The size of the city will be limited because they will eventually deforest the swamp if it is too large. That's why imported stone would be the best solution for a long term city. Maybe only the outer/newer buildings will have wood pylons. Or maybe a slum with rotting pylons that they scavenged from building replacing old pylons.
I picture the first step of wealth being building half stone half wood pylons (just enough stone to hold the wood out of the water most of the time). Then, eventually, have all stone. The half pylons would bean that you can replace two rotting pylons for the price of one (cut the pylon in half to place on the stone). This would be an investment in the long term cost savings for the family. Building the stone up to a full pylon is one pylon that would "never" (for at least a few generations) have to be replaced. That will protect the family from future hard times.
This would also allow people to see how wealthy a family is, just by looking at the pylons.
Another problem with a large settlement in the swamp will be food. If there is some crop that can float on the water, grow in the water, or grow in shallow water, that would be good. Otherwise, they'll run out of fish in the local area.
Also, think of why they are there. What can they get there that they can't get somewhere else that has easier living conditions?
[Answer]
stone may or may not be common in a swamp, it depends on the swamp.
The most common construction technique you see in swamps is to build on stilts. wood is plentiful so they build out of that. If stone is common you can build from stone and wood anchor pilings like venice. Water travel becomes the main way to get around that and foot bridges. You may want to look at venice for inspiration on layout if not construction. It is not that stone is hard to find in swamps as much as it tends to shift and sink into the muck. So you can decide which way you want to build.
Clean water is difficult, you either need to boil water to drink of have pipes to drill deep wells.
flooding tends to be only bad once people start building levees to redirect water (it concentrates flooding instead of letting it spread out over a large area), if natural flooding cycles are allowed and people build on stilts only the most extreme storm flooding will bother anyone.
Keep in mind new orleans was a city before it had pumps, they just tended to build on the high ground.
some stilt villages can be quite extensive. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aY15O.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0nfGS.jpg)
The real issue you have to consider is where they get food from. farming swampland requires reshaping it, the aztec "floating" farms (Chinampa) or Bangladesh floating farms are both good ways. Or if your swamp is a little drier rice patties.
A lot will depend on how self sufficient you want it to be.
[Answer]
The important references for you are the Aztecs and the Khmer both of which built an empire so are entirely appropriate for you to use. Also St. Petersburg and Venice are good one city examples.
The Aztecs as others have mentioned built artificial islands by collecting the mud and supporting it with wood pilings. They could build large islands suitable for buildings and smaller ones suited for agriculture.
Such islands have very good agricultural productivity so this would give you the food production needed for large cities and an entire empire. The high productivity is due to **excellent** irrigation given by the surrounding swamp and due to the mud used to build the islands being rich in nutrients. Once the nutrients get depleted, the islands is simply demolished and a new one built from fresh mud. This system avoids most issues other forms of agriculture have with the soil quality degrading over time.
I think the natural progression of architecture would be: Huts made from reeds or mud brick for commoners. Painted and decorated mud brick and wood for the wealthy and important. Imported stone for the public buildings to prove the power of the state. The stone buildings would be on larger and more stable islands and have actual basements to stop them from sinking. You should also use vaulted construction to make buildings less massive for their size. That said the carrying capacity of such ground is mostly a matter of using enough wood pilings and question said "abundant wood".
Concrete is also something to consider. It makes building large structures easier and, in theory, allows building large structures that float in the water. Although I do not think anyone actually did that before modern aircraft carriers. But you could, if you have lots of good concrete. The Romans probably could have done it and they are what you gave as technology level reference...
The Khmer were the other reference I gave. What you should copy from them is their use of waterways. They used an extensive system of canals to connect a large plain for easy transport and to supply irrigation for large area of water intensive agriculture.
You do not need extra irrigation, but the canals would supply an efficient transport system capable of, for example, transporting large blocks of stone huge distances for your building projects. Dredging canals would also be a natural source of mud for your artificial islands. There is natural symmetry between digging navigable canals and building artificial islands that would make your empire quite efficient. And of course the easy transport of food would allow the cities to grow much bigger.
The canals would also provide water level control if you add some locks to them. And you really should as this level of control would hugely improve your resistance to both drought and flooding. The nature would still be able to overwhelm the system, but usually droughts or floods would result from mismanagement r corruption letting the system fall into disrepair.
Easy ways to get drinking water are collecting rain water and filtration. (Aztecs built an aqueduct, which Cortez then cut.) Constant rain is kind of annoying so I guess the best solution would be to let your people build filtered wells on their artificial islands. You could also have the people drink drinks such as beer or wine which contain alcohol that kills bacteria and thus store better than water. Personally I would probably just make my state more powerful by giving it control of large cisterns. I find "Be a good citizen or drink sewage!" appealing for some reason.
That said alcohol does have some attractive properties as well. Namely alcohol (or vinegar) not only store themselves, they can also be used to store foods that would otherwise not store well. Storage in alcohol or vinegar can also replace cooking and allow the swamp people save valuable and scarce wood. I mean even if the question said "abundant wood", the wood would not stay abundant long if the swamp is filled with people constantly burning wood. So heavy use of alcohol might be used to explain why the heartland of your empire still has lots of wood.
EDIT:
Important note on the consequences of this type of construction. This requires large scale planning and coordination to work. As such there would be large bureaucracy managing the canals, the locks, **and the artificial islands**. If all agricultural land is produced by large scale construction linked to upkeep of canals performed by the state, then the state will control all agricultural land and by extension almost all of available food. They will also control all trade along the canals.
So the likely outcome would be a state permeated by a monolithic centralized bureaucracy. Which might not be what is wanted.
You can avoid this by being earlier in the evolution of the system.
It starts with the individual villages building artificial islands for agriculture. Then some villages grow into centers of trade and people start building larger islands for them and improving the connecting water ways. At that point communal decision making by villages is not enough and city based bureaucracy is born. After an empire is born the bureaucracies are combined and gain the capability to build improved canals and manage the water level. Which is a big benefit to having an empire. After this the centralized bureaucracy will start taking over the control villages have over land.
[Answer]
**Crannog**
The celts built [Crannogs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crannog) or artificial islands on lakes and lived on them for protection from wild animals and marauding people.
They would drop stones and wood over the same spot in the water, eventually building a small island. Over generations the Islands would be enlarged.
There really is no limit to the size, especially if you've a shallow swamp and have access to lots of stone and/or fire-hardened timber.
[Answer]
**Wooden ships.**
You can build on the hulks of wooden ships. There are a lot of ships under San Francisco as shown in this map.
from <http://www.upout.com/blog/san-francisco-3/map-shows-ships-buried-underneath-san-francisco-2>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nuh0W.jpg)
It made news when they discovered an old sailing ship under the ruins of the World Trade Center. Wooden boats were apparently used for landfill not infrequently.
from <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/30/world-trade-center-ship-mystery_n_5634280.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AZwEk.jpg)
There is nothing wrong with your swamp city built on heaps of wood. Cut down the forest, pile it up and build on it. It would be more interesting to have it be built on an abandoned fleet of some sort. Wood rots but buried wood can last a long time in the anaerobic environment.
**Ceramic**
Your people don't have stone, but they have mud and they have wood. They can make bricks. They can make ceramics. The Romans made both in abundance.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio>
Monte Testaccio is a large hill built entirely of discarded Roman ceramic jugs.
>
> It has a circumference of nearly a kilometer (0.6 mi) and stands 35
> meters (115 ft) high, though it was probably considerably higher in
> ancient times
>
>
>
That is pretty cool. A dedicated brickworks and a giant stack of bricks should be doable in your swamp. I learned about [tells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)) on the worldbuilding stack a few weeks ago. They are big. They are mostly old mud bricks.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm looking into a story where the Earth is hit by an asteroid going very fast. This must be a complete surprise and I want to go a mile further than just giving the entirely valid solution of it coming from deep space.
I want the asteroid to come through the Sun and hit the Earth afterwards.
The asteroid in question can go any speed between 0.1*c* to 0.9*c* to accomplish this. Reasons for the speed are irrelevant, but ejection from a violent explosion of neutron stars or a sort of solar sail type that ablated the asteroid while pushing it can be imagined at will.
The asteroid should be large enough to impact the Earth after going through the sun. It doesn't matter if the result on Earth will just be a crater the size of a tennis ball or rip the Earth apart. It just needs to reach the surface.
I would like the Sun to be relatively unaltered afterwards.
Extra considerations can be the solar ejections that could travel along with the asteroid.
The main question is: **Can an asteroid going between 0.1*c* and 0.9*c* go through the Sun and hit the Earth?**
The following additions and considerations to the answer are appreciated, *but not mandatory*.
* I would like the Sun to be relatively unaltered afterwards.
* The impact the asteroid has on the surface of the Earth.
* Star mass that can come with the asteroid.
[Answer]
**No.**
I'm not knowledgeable enough to derive what would happen in this scenario, but I bet you Randall Munroe is. More specifically, he knows [what happens to a baseball that travels at .9 c from the pitcher's mound to the home plate](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/). Spoiler alert: the ball never makes it, at least not in any form recognizable as solid matter, let alone as a ball.
If we consider the tiny mass of air the baseball is trying to "punch through" on its way across half the baseball diamond, and contrast that with the mass of the plasma an asteroid must displace or accelerate as it tries to punch through the sun, it should be apparent to even noobs like us that there's no object that could pull that off while also being small enough to be considered an asteroid.
1. **First stopper: inertia.** No matter how fast your asteroid is going, the inertia of the sun will stop it. You might think: "well, if I just crank up the speed, shouldn't it eventually have enough to punch through?" But don't forget: in the frame of reference of the asteroid, it's getting hit by *a slice of the sun* travelling at .9 c or whatever speed you choose. Unless your asteroid's mass starts to actually compete with a slice of the sun (which I highly suspect it couldn't, and still be called an asteroid), it will be absorbed without affecting the sun's inertia noticeably.
2. **Second stopper: vaporization.** (Or like...plasmification...?) Whatever we call it, what happens to Randal's Relativistic Baseball (*Wondrous Item, Major, Legendary*) will happen to your asteroid. Maybe the explosion would actually increase the sun's luminosity very briefly? I'm not sure, but there's definitely nothing solid left to come out the other side.
[Answer]
For certain values of "through" I'll give a definite yes.
To be clear, the Sun is much too dense to permit a near-central passage of anything less dense than white dwarf matter at merely orbital or even solar escape velocity; such a "center punch" impact would result in such a lesser object being absorbed and, assuming a mass less than that of a planet like Earth or Venus, virtually no longer term effect on the Sun itself.
A mass with the density of a white dwarf traveling at 0.1 C or faster might potentially punch right through the star, but doing so would be disruptive enough to star to have an effect on planets around it similar to a supernova explosion -- which pretty well fails the "sun must be largely unaffected" desideratum.
However, stars aren't solid objects with a clearly defined surface like a rocky planet. Instead, they're balls of gas, with steadily (or unsteadily) decreasing density going from the core, where the fusion takes place, out to the limits of the atmosphere (by some definitions, for our Sun, near or even beyond the orbit of Mercury). By those definitions, the Parker Solar Probe has an orbit that takes it well inside our parent star.
And that's your solution. No, nothing in the size range you'd reasonably call an "asteroid" can go centrally through the Sun (or any other main sequence star) but it can pass through the Sun's atmosphere, and if its velocity is high enough, possibly even break through the chromosphere or photosphere -- visually, this would be "inside" the star even to astronomers of the 19th century -- and spend so little time there that it merely ablates somewhat from gas interaction. So long as it's coherent enough not to break up at that point like the Chelyabinsk bolide did in Earth's atmsophere, it could then continue (and given 0.1 C or higher speed, with little change of course) toward its rendezvous with Earth.
The amount of bending of the path by the Sun's gravity might well be just about enough for the object to have come from almost directly behind the Sun (from the POV of Earth's position at collision time). The first clue we'd get would be a disruption of the Sun's atmosphere that might be mistaken for a solar flare or coronal mass ejection of unusual configuration; then, no more than 80 minutes later, *"Kaboom!"* Marvin the Martian will be vindicated.
[Answer]
### TL;DR: No, because an object moving at high speeds will break apart even quicker.
I suspect it wouldn't. I don't know if there's been any work done on *relativistic* impacts onto the Sun, but [a group modeled comet impacts](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/807/2/165#apj515597s6) more like those we'd actually observe. I think, though, that we can extrapolate a few things from their results:
* The body would rapidly lose mass thanks to the intense shock front it would produce in the Sun's atmosphere and, if it made it that far, the interior. The mass loss it would experience scales like $\dot{M}\propto\rho v^3$, with $\rho$ the density of the medium it's traveling through and $v$ the speed. While a faster-moving body would take less time to pass through the entire Sun, that timescale only scales as $\tau\propto 1/v$, so the total mass lost would be, roughly, $\sim\dot{M}\tau\propto v^2$, so a body traveling faster wouldn't lose less total mass.
* Because of this, at higher speeds it actually seems that the final airburst destroying the body would happen at higher altitudes above the surface, rather than further into the Sun - although I think it's a bit more complicated at relativistic speeds.
* In this regime, most of the lost energy would go partly into the ablated material and partly into the atmosphere, rather than entirely into atmospheric heating, which is interesting, although the ablated material would eventually become part of the surrounding medium.
In short, mass loss scales strongly with the speed of the object, and the asteroid would be torn apart even quicker.
[Answer]
No, but it can come "out of the sun". Ask a military pilot.
The asteroid would have to be falling almost "straight down" from interstellar space or the Sun's Oort cloud, in an orbit that will take it very close to the sun. It wouldn't be noticed while it was far from the sun. It would be hidden by the sun or the sun's glare at its closest approach, and it would come "up" from somewhere inside the orbit of Mercury on a collision path with Earth.
BTW if aliens wanted to "take out" the Earth with plausible deniability, this is probably how they would do it. Just nudge an Oort cloud object of appropriate mass into the Earth-impacting orbit. If they installed a (relatively) small terminal guidance system on the object, it would get vaporized by the impact and nobody could ever prove anything.
[Answer]
Newton came up with a fairly simple way to estimate how far a projectile can travel through a medium.
[Newtons approximation for impact depth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth#Newton%27s_approximation_for_the_impact_depth)
The formula is Depth=Projectile length\*projectile density/medium density
So we need some information about our asteroid. Lets assume a nickle-iron asteroid with a density of 7g/cm^3, and a diameter of 10 km.
The density of the sun averages to 1.4g/cm^3, so if the sun had uniformed density the asteroid would stop after traveling 50 km. Clearly not far enough.
But, the density of the sun depends strongly on how deep into the sun you are. At the core the density is 150g/cm^3 - our asteroid would penetrate 466 meters.
Fortunately the outer layers of the sun has much smaller densities.
So the question becomes what do you mean by "going through the sun"? - As established your asteroid will not pass through the sun core, but what about the outer layers? A natural way to view passing through the sun is passing through the photosphere, the point at which the sun becomes opaque to visible light. Here the density is 0,2g/cm^3; Our asteroid can penetrate 350 km through this density. The photosphere is about 100km thick, and we would need to traverse it twice and at an angle. - So the photosphere is on it's own almost enough to stop our asteroid. While the densities outside the photosphere drops quickly, and as such contributes less to slowing our asteroid this is probably enough that our asteroid will fail to penetrate.
Since we almost penetrates the photosphere we should be able to penetrate the chromosphere. I would definitely describe this more as a gracing the sun than going through the sun though. Alternatively we could change the asteroid; An asteroid with a diameter of 100km would penetrate easily.
Considerations that the above ignores;
* Melting and evaporation of the asteroid. While the sun is very hot, the densities we are travelling through is low enough that heating effects from contact is limited. We are also going fast enough that there is not all that much time for heating to occur.
* Xkcd style fusion effects from asteroid impacting the gasses of the sun. I do not think this will affect much; the asteroid is imparting momentum to the gas in front of it. The mechanism of this momentum transfer is not all that interesting.
* Re-shaping of the asteroid; the sun is going to act on the asteroid slowing it down. This force acts on the front of the asteroid. This could cause the asteroid to flatten, lessening the length of projectile term in the approximation above. How much of an effect this has is not a question I am qualified to answer; but I think it's more of a concern if the asteroid barely penetrates, than if it penetrates easily.
* Exit speed. The asteroid will impart momentum to the gasses it is travelling through, thus leave the sun with less speed than it arrived with. I do not know how to calculate how much speed is lost.
* Relativistic mass - traveling at relativistic speeds the asteroid has more momentum than indicated by newtonian physics. This breaks the assumption of the approximation and will mean that you can go further than you would otherwise expect.
Impact on earth.
A 10 km diameter nickle-iron asteroid has a mass of 3.665×10^9 kg. Traveling at 0.1c gives a relativistic energy of 1.659×10^24 joules. [WolframAlpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.659%C3%9710%5E24%20joules&assumption=%22ClashPrefs%22%20-%3E%20%22%22) tells us that this is about 3.3 times the energy that was released from the Chicxulub meteor impact. The conclusion is that this would be a mass-extinction event.
The gravitational binding energy of the earth is 2x10^32, so the impact is nowhere near powerful enough to destroy the planet.
If instead we look at 0.9c we get an energy of 4.263×10^26, 100 times more powerful - but still not close to destroying the earth.
The 100 km diameter asteroid that could actually penetrate the photosphere would produce impacts 1000 times more powerful, so at 0.9c would be within 1% of the gravitational binding energy of the earth.
[Answer]
## Yes, so long as it comes through the edge of the sun.
If it goes through the core it'll be stopped. Have it head through the outer, thinner layers at an enormous speed.
The earth will probably remain intact, but with substantial damage, depending on the speed.
<https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/physics/kinetic.php>
Using this calculator and an estimated 10% light speed, with a mass of 10^16 kilos, it would have 4.5\*10^30 joules of energy. You need 20 times that to destroy the earth, and with the slowing down the sun will do you'll probably not hit it at peak speed. You'd need a larger mass or a relativistic speed to destroy the earth. The sun will be shocked and probably be unstable, but will be generally fine.
[Answer]
Like others said earlier, the answer is a big, fat **NO.**
The inside of the Sun is super tightly packed, super hot plasma. It's so dense that photons emitted from the core are believed to be trapped for thousands of years until they finally bubble up to the photosphere and get fired (pun not intended) into space. There is no way any solid material could get through this.
Or is there?
Well, there is, if the asteroid itself isn't just a chunk of rock, but something like an inverted tokamak. An object that emits such a strong magnetic field that it's able to move plasma out of its way. However, the energy required for this would be enormous, as it must exceed the energy of the plasma itself.
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So far all the answers discuss whether the asteroid can survive the bath of fire and don't address your secondary points at all.
Sun unaltered: That's a certainty. While you could get some pretty cataclysmic results from slamming a relativistic asteroid into the sun any such scenario destroys the asteroid. The only scenario in which the asteroid making it through is even a possibility is barely grazing the sun.
Impact on Earth: Cataclysmic. While most of the mass will burn away it won't survive at all if it's burned too small and at those kinds of speeds it won't take a lot of mass to make a mighty big boom.
Star mass brought along: Infinitesimal. At those velocities "solid" ceases to be very meaningful. Star matter doesn't hit and bounce or hit and stick, but rather penetrate into it (look at the baseball mentioned elsewhere.) Any appreciable amount of matter hitting will vaporize the layer it sticks into--and that material will leave as a very energetic plasma, taking with it the stellar gasses and their fusion results. Only on the way back out once the density has fallen low enough that the surface isn't boiling off will there actually be stellar mass retained.
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I'm developing a game that mostly takes place in a universe different from Earth's. In fact, the game has many other universes as well, each with different date/time systems (as opposed to Earth's hours, minutes, days, years etc.).
The game takes place mostly on an artificial world that acts a bridge between Earth and all these other universes. While this world does have a sun of sorts, neither it nor the world move in relation to one another, leading to constant, endless daylight.
While I'd be happy to invent an entirely new date/time system for this bridge world, due to the nature of the game's mechanics, time management is an important aspect of the game. Additionally, I don't consider learning a new time system and making conversions between it and the hours/days etc. we're all used to to be a skill worth mastering for this game in particular. Because of this, I'd like to use a time system similar in structure to that of modern day Earth. While this choice is purely for the player's sake, I'd like to make it work in-universe as well, if at all possible.
So my question is, **what reason, if any, would the inhabitants of this world have to adopt such a system?**
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Some additional notes/things I've already considered:
I'm not necessarily looking for a system that mirrors Earth's clock; that is to say, what year/day/hour it is currently on Earth does not matter. All that matters are the units used for keeping track of time (ie. hours, days etc.).
Of course, a clock which is actually perfectly in sync with Earth's (or rather, one of Earth's timezones) is also acceptable.
The system does not need to match modern day Earth's perfectly. Specifically, it only needs to have minutes, hours, days and years. A lack of months can be remedied by having dates be expressed as, for example, 123rd day of year X, and subdivisions of minutes as well as grouping of years are not necessary.
The inhabitants of this bridge world regularly perform trades with the denizes of other universes. Trade would be a pretty solid reason to adopt matching clocks, but that would be true for the clocks of other universes as well, not just Earth's. I briefly considered actually creating the different time keeping systems for each universe and providing the player the ability to switch between each, but that would be a lot of work for not a lot of benefit, seeing as the player would likely just stick to the Earth clock for the entirety of the game. I should note that the player character is not human, and has never been to Earth, so there is no reason for them to prefer Earth's clock over any other.
One option would be to create some naturally occurring event in this world that repeats at a certain interval, and make this interval coincidentally match some human-relevant timespan (every 24 hours, for example). While there is one single naturally occurring, repeating event in this world, it is highly irregular in terms of when it repeats, so I would think building a system around it would be difficult. I'm not entirely opposed to creating additional natural events for the sake of solving this issue, but I'm curious as to whether there is a cleaner solution.
I'm happy to provide clarification/additional information if necessary. Thanks in advance!
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EDIT: Thanks for all the answers and comments! I've decided to go for a combination of a few answers, specifically those that mention Founder Effect, but most importantly, Ángel's idea of Earth having literally gifted the bridge world a giant clock before anyone else.
[Answer]
Earth was for some reason really influential on the beginnings of this artificial world.
* This may have been founded by Earthling. You can see how colonies copied the standards from their metropolis.
* The Earth paid most for this place. As such, it had a say on which timekeeping units to use.
* There was an auction for this. One world paid for the privilege of seting the time unit, other for the space one, another for the name of a street, and the next one for the currency name. This is just another way of getting funds. Creating a world is not cheap, so if a civilization is willing to pay $$$$ for us to use an arbitrary unit, we will happily oblige. At the right price.
* One key designer was from Earth. The transparent dome was made by the Kurgh'gt, but the design of the motors rotating the planet, which causes the day and night, was from human source (maybe copying an existing design?). As such, they made it according to human standards.
* Earth gave a big clock in the early days (maybe place a Big Ben in the main square?), to the pride of their inhabitants. However, in order for this clock to be of any use, they had to adopt human time units (not necessarily as a decision from the beginning, but if their town council starts when the clock makes most sounds, you meet your friends when both hands of our mighty clock are 45 degrees, and it is patriot to mention your clock every time describing time... you are essentially using Earth units).
PS: I don't think that showing the time on different clock modes would really be a lot of work. It's unlikely to be used much, but being able between time units from 50 galaxies might make for an amusing feature.
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Let's see:
1. They don't. You tell the people playing the game that the time units have all been translated for gameplay.
2. They don't. The characters use in-game translation systems that make translation seamless.
3. Earth reached the bridge world first. Founder effect ensures that everyone uses their system, just as the USA speaks English even though people of English descent are a minority.
4. Why this system arises so uniformly among the worlds is a great mystery. Especially given that it's not unique in any world -- they just converge on it. Of course, this introduces a great mystery into the world-building, and raises the specter of precursors. This can be limited by limiting it. Perhaps it's merely the most common. That could even be a minority -- a third of all worlds use this system, it's just that all the rest use unique or less popular ones.
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**Funny Story...**
I can think of several reasons, but in most stories/games, it's not a big deal. How does GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) come to be the time for the universe?
1. Earth won the lottery that settled time. All the groups represented entered a randomized lottery to determine who's time was used. Earth won. Now the universe runs on GMT.
2. Earth history was influenced by otherworldly visitors. When time was being set on Earth, time-obsessed aliens tampered with the decisions we made to assure that the final accepted time for Earth closely matched Karrelian New Mean time.
3. Your character was given a time translator by a human, and follows the time for sentimental reasons. Their mentor was human, and gave the character a Rolex that tracks time in all worlds and automatically translates it into GMT. Sentiment and an expensive watch caused them to adopt that time.
4. Quirk of founding: The first founder of this society was a human who accidentally arrived well before Earth was admitted. The society they helped found adopted GMT because it was a neutral (at the time) measure not in use by any of the significant factions.
5. Earth is, or once had, significant influence on this world. Today, we still refer to a universal language as a *lingua Franca* even though France no longer has an empire. At some point, Earth wielded greater influence here and helped establish GMT as universal time.
6. Quirk of voting: At one critical point, elections were held about who would control the system. Earth was a minority player, but the election was so close, Earth's vote became critical. The election was swayed by offering Earth the choice of universal time.
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They don't use our measurements at all.
However, the clever, ubiquitous translation machines convert seamlessly and perfectly every time, so that humans don't miss their appointments with alien dentists (nor show up too early, which is arguably worse).
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Earth's humans may not have been the first to reach the game world. But they were the first that brought a [system of timekeeping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#%22Atomic%22_second) that worked reliably anywhere in the universes and could be reproduced with commonly available materials and even the most primitive electronics, to wit:
>
> the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom
>
>
>
Thus, virtually all other species eventually adopted this definition of a second, and most also adopted Earth's definitions for minute, hour, day and year as a universal reference for inter-species and inter-universe communication and commerce, and even those who didn't officially adopt it are still familiar enough with it to be able to convert units when communicating with others who do.
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It was the year 72 of the great galactic war. Or 128 by K'rel standards. 91 by Ogroch counting, 21 by Flipkak calendar and... well, the Tilhahfgloh year is 626 K'rel years, so it was year 5 like almost everything else.
The factions had agreed to meet for peace talks in neutral space. The talks were to begin at AK hour, though the K'rel were late because that's 19:5/21 their time and that's an unlucky number. The Ogroch almost left because AK rounds down to a&5aX and that's almost an hour early! The Flipkak didn't show up at all because 00551 isn't a meaningful time to them, and let's not get into the problem with the Zrotkli...
When, after 3 days of time confusion, everyone finally met in the great conference room, the first, hastily added item on the agenda was to ensure that no further organisational hickups would get in the way of a peace accord. Everyone, of course, suggested that **their** time and date system should be used and nobody was willing to adapt to the counting of one of their mortal enemies.
Finally, exasperated, the moderating AI proposed to take the time system of a lesser race, one not involved in the conflict at all. Best, one that didn't even know about the conflict. It could not be more neutral, it argued, and everyone agreed.
So the AI digged through its database and found six local civilizations advanced enough to have proper timekeeping, but backwards enough to not know about the galaxy and its civilizations (and wars). Of those six, three were discarded because their systems were too similar to one of the warring factions. Two more were thrown out because their timekeeping systems were irregular, changing based on moon cycle or season. One was left that had a nice, easy, constant system everyone could easily translate into and out of and that had never even heard of the galactic war, despite its cute little attempts at communication using incredibly primitive technology.
>
> Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the
> western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
> Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an
> utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended
> life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital
> watches are a pretty neat idea.
>
>
>
(Douglas Adams)
...and so, the peculiar time and date system of one of the most insignificant species in the galaxy became the galactic standard time.
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As to why it remained standard time after humans became space travellers? Well, everyone was used to it, but the actual reason is that Quisly runs on standard time, and nobody wants to miss Quisly.
(can be a sport, TV show, space racing, whatever your story requires)
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they could have been forced. maybe there are many worlds like this for every other universe. a sort of bridge to the rest of the universes to get people to understand that time will be different in other universes. so maybe they were forced to do so in order to help the earth universe understand. although that's a little assumptive of what your world is like.
maybe, what about the infinite universes theory? because then there is GOING to be a universe where they HAPPEN to have the same words but different amounts of time.
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The bridge world has eternal daylight. To still make sense of it all, a form of timekeeping is freat to take with you. Culturally this can have transferred from the Earth to the bridge world. This can be done:
* Either because they were the first settlers, taking the time with them,
to keep some track of it.
* because they were the first traders with the bridge world people. Trading on Earth time became very important for the bridge world, so they use Earth time.
* Or Earth was the most influential in the last so many centuries.
The time can be adapted to suit bridge world, but still having hours, minutes and possibly a few others.
Culture can have incredible lasting effects. As a real world example, you can look at how the metric system has influenced practically the whole world, showing culture can change. And 3 countries still cling to other forms, showing this deep cultural rooting can stay even if it can harm trade. These two combined give you the freedom to make your story nearly anything you want. Earth can be insignificant in bridge world *now*, but the time can still be from Earth as it's ingrained culturally by some events in the past.
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In the absence of all external references (astronomical events etc.): at one point humans were dominant, and the dominant timing is based on the human heartbeat at an assumed rate of one beat per second when relaxed and contented. With a nod to Vernor Vinge, all other timing is based on multiples of this, i.e. kilosecs, megasecs and gigasecs, and where an epoch is needed (i.e. the zero point of a calendar system) it is close to the time at which humans landed on their moon (the offset of roughly 14.183 megasecs has never been adequately explained).
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The technology that manages the gate system between universes was originally developed by Terrans and the internal clock systems are all hard coded to Earth time.
Although it would be possible to rebuild the systems to run on some other time system, it would be expensive to do so and would return extremely limited benefit - so no one has bothered.
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## Backwards Compatibility
Long ago, when the bridge was first established in a collaboration between several species, it was found that the computing substrates (optical, biological, quantum, etc.) of most of these species was unsuitable for this environment; perhaps due to solar interference or slight changes in how this specific universe operates. It was found that human electronics, while less efficient than some of the other aliens' technologies, was less susceptible to this issue. As such, the initial computing infrastructure of the bridge was built around human technologies as a placeholder until the issues could be sorted out.
Unfortunately, as is the case in the real world, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. As more and more systems were built into this infrastructure, it became increasingly costly and difficult to replace all of them with a fundamentally different technology. Eventually, it became an outright financial impossibility; the cost of replacing the system became vastly greater than just dealing with and maintaining the core infrastructure and retaining backwards compatibility. While adapters were eventually built to interface with other alien technologies, the central core and most of its systems was built around not only human technologies, but also a specific human operating system. In fact, this operating system itself was built to be backwards compatible with even older human operating systems (for similar reasons).
Since most of the original inhabitants were the engineers that built everything, it made sense to use the same concepts of time as the systems they were building. It thus became the de facto standard, which was eventually carried over past the completion of the bridge world and became official.
And that's how the human time units became a inter-universal standard: by accident and the financial necessity of backwards compatibility.
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The Culture will have his orgins on a Planet. They will have days and years. You can translate this in a other language or not.
Months exists, beccouse we have a Moon. Do they have one too? or a Gasgiant between there Planete and the sund who is orbiting the Sun 10 times faster and ist very bright in the nightsky?
And hours and Minutes... That is just random :(
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One option is to just define a unit that is close to a second, then work your way up using powers of 10, e.g. multiples of 100 seconds rather than talk in minutes, a ks is roughly 30 minutes, 10^5 sec is almost one day (27h), a megasecond Ms 10^6 is 11.5 days, so a long week, and 30 Ms is almost a year 347 days.
Put an origin on your calendar (a few gigaseconds ago), and there you are, all dates in seconds.
If you want to more closely match the duration say of a day counted as 10^5 secs to normal 24h, you could make the second a tad shorter.
Anyway, a culture neutral way of counting time is to keep a time unit (seconds), then just go for powers of ten, not aligned with any cosmic stuff such as the earth revolution. We can hope different alien cultures could agree on a time unit at least, and every space faring civ must have math for powers of ten.
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**Dilithoids or as I call them candy-creatures are the lowest animals on the food-chain on my arid alien planet.** What distinguishes them from other alien fauna is their simple body plan and their extremely high sugar content, which they get from eating a type of sugarcane. Their metabolism, though fast, isn't enough to burn through all that sugar. So to compensate they form sucrose crystals on their bodies, which serves as energy stores and protection against germs (sugar halts bacterial growth). **They're basically natures candy and so they must run from everything, which is made easy by their fast movements, small size and rapid reproduction.**
## My question is the following: what happens to Dilithoids when they get wet and how to prevent it?
These creatures are basically everywhere and so are likely to encounter water in a form or another. You see not all of the planet is arid and dry. The lack of oceans is made up for with oases that feed plant life. Though rare, there is some rain on the planet. I expect osmosis and dilution to be a problem and am unsure of how they would defend themselves against it.
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# They Release Eggs:
The candy coating of your species is actually an adaptation to the generally arid and sometimes inhospitable conditions of your world. Being mouth-wateringly delicious and melting in water is not something to be avoided, it's essential to survival.
Like trees that can only release seeds when a fire happens, the eggs of your candy creatures are embedded in the sugary coating. This high-sugar environment is the ideal conditions for the eggs to gestate in. The life cycle of this species is centered around the infrequent rains that mean there are ideal conditions for eggs to hatch and new candy creatures to grow.
When it rains, the sugars dissolve and the eggs are released. Until the new candy creatures have a chance to live and eat successfully, they are not sweet candy. Only the individuals who are so successful that they build up a sugar-rich, egg-supporting layer reproduce.
Some variants of the species are symbiotic. Under conditions where there is enough food to form candy but not enough rain or water to support eggs, an alternate life cycle is used. When these individuals have matured enough to produce sufficient eggs, their candy coating becomes patterned and colorful, attracting animals who want to eat the sugar. The adults are eaten, sucked on or licked by predators and the eggs are then deposited within the predators. There, the digestion-resistant eggs are released from the sugar inside the moist predators and are incubated until the eggs hatch and the predator passes the non-sweet larvae into the environment.
**Didn't your mother teach you eating too much candy would give you a tummy ache?**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtIBg.jpg)
[Answer]
Plain sugar is soluble in water, therefore it seems straightforward that these creature would dissolve to a certain extent under water exposure.
However polymerized sugars/carbohydrates like [starch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starch) or cellulose do not dissolve in water, like you can see from the amount of trees and plants which withstand rain or even grow underwater since forever.
Your creature can simply develop a polymeric shell made with that sugar and will be safe.
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They make something like chitin.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NnsMa.png)
This is a modified form of glucose, and it's not water soluble.
This can be used to make an exoskeleton like many insects.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UqzjY.jpg)
Presumably, since they're candy creatures, organisms in that world have some way to digest chitin, perhaps in saliva. As such, after a brief wait after biting into one, you could taste the sugary goodness.
[Answer]
**Grease!**
These creatures secrete grease, which is lighter than the sugar and which rises to coats the crystals in an oily layer. The grease is of course water repellent.
Unfortunately the grease smells like french fries cooking and so these creatures not only taste delicious, they smell delicious from a long way away.
Rolling in salt does not help the dilithoids with their problems at all. But they still do it.
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**Three perspectives**
**1. You lost it**
Well, shmucks, it rained and you lost your sugar crystals. Guess you'll have to replenish your sweet reserve. As sad as it may seem, plenty of animals do this with their fat stores, so your dilithoids can definitely survive this. Heck, maybe this **helps** the dilithoid. Think about it; they get that sugar from sugar cane, but why not from other dilithoid? Dead dilithoids or puddles of dissolved sugar left by your less fortunate brethren are like sweet gold!
And, remember, there's a chance that the desert sand will absorb the water but *not* your sugar, leaving sugar deposits you can eat to recoup your losses. Or if something else gets your sugar, maybe you can eat that something.
**2. You never lost it**
Gelatin, the main ingredient of jelly, is made mostly of collagen. This protein is common amongst Earth organisms, so what if your creatures store their sugar in masses of jelly instead of crystals? Additionally, non-dissolving sugar is a thing; just add a fat coating and voila! Your sugar is safe! Granted, this will likely result in a lumpy creature, as this would lead to your sugar crystals being stowed beneath a layer of blubber.
In nature, you adapt or you die, and these Dilithoids will be no exception. Either they avoid losing their external sugar to rain by avoiding rain, or they store their crystal securely inside themselves. (Or, perhaps they simply form non-soluble crystals?)
**3. The circle of life**
Finally, perhaps the Dilithoids sense the rain coming and take shelter, or perhaps the Dilithoids go lemming-style, more or less. Before the rain comes, they mate and lay eggs, hide the eggs where the water won't get to them, and then they wait. The predators come, they eat the Dilithoids, and none of them struggle. Why? **Because the flood is coming.**
Each foolish predator who came to eat them has brought upon themselves their own doom, ensuring they'll drown in the flood and their sugar-saturated bodies will become food for the baby Dilithoids. Every candy-loving predator is storing sugar in their body, massing it, and once they die, that sugar-and everything else composing their carcass-will feed the next generation of Dilithoids.
Because of this, and their gift for repopulation, Dilithoids don't often resist predation, as the predator's success will become their own. Sooner or later, the sugar will return to their kind.
[Answer]
### Nothing dissolves immediately
How quickly does sugar dissolve in your coffee? You need to really try to get it to go. Your critters can certainly take short exposure without any problems.
### Anti-wetting agent
If they combine (or coat) the sugar with some kind of waxy secretion, the sugar will be much more protected from the elements.
### Large animals don't need to rely on vulnerable external stores
If you're mammal-sized, you have the space for subcutaneous stores of energy, whether that's fat or sugar. Worms don't do storage generally - they simply keep eating. So almost by definition, this means we're looking at insects with an exoskeleton.
### All insects need to avoid water because it's hazardous to them anyway
At insect-level scales, the risk from water is not drowning or dissolving - it's surface tension. Insects may find it hard to break out of it (hence scenes in *Antz* and *A Bug's Life*), and it can damage the delicate scales on wings of flying insects, so it's important that they avoid it. So in this, your insects are fundamentally no different to our insects. Some of your critters may form nests (like ants, bees or wasps) if they're social animals. Some may dig their own holes in soil (well-drained soil will naturally be dry), or hide in cracks in wood or rocks. Some may simply hide under leaves. The types which don't hide very well (like small flies) will die in droves in a storm, sure, but they reproduce by the billion so it's not a problem for the species.
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**Evolutionarily developed umbrella?**
The sweet little guys much away on their sugar cane all day long, when the the rare evening rain shower comes along, they pop up their naturally evolved umbrellas. (umbrella, peacock display, common basilisk frill. Whatever you would like to call it.)
**Sour powder coating?**
The little guys sluff off the top layers of their skin constantly like humans. However the coating clings to their bodies and when dried out is water repellent and quite sour to taste.
[Answer]
**If you are filled with cane sugar, do what sugar cane does**
Sugar cane is highly soluble in water, but a lot of valuable content on the body of any living being is soluble in water, and very often already dissolved in water inside of the body. Avoiding water doesn't seem a reliable strategy for any land animal or plant, and it is even worse for aquatic life.
However, a solution was devised some billion years ago by evolution (or by the master worldbuider of your choice, if you prefer so): membranes.
Living being are enormously diverse, but all of them have in common some kind of membrane that keeps apart their inner fluids and soluble substances from those outside, including water. We have skin, trees have bark, sugar cane has its cuticles, unicellular organism have cell membranes... In fact, complex life forms have internal membranes to avoid its content being mixed, and to prevent it from being lost in case of the external membrane breaking at some point.
Therefore dilithoids just need to have some kind of skin. Inside, sugar may be solid or may be kept dissolved (as syrup or jelly) without being lost.
Needless to say, dilithoids skin can't be made of soluble sugars - just as any other creature's skin - but there are plenty of alternative materials and structures.
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I want to create world where legislative body is full of ideologically pure extremists. I don't want any party that is ready to compromise on its principles. I mean green would be borderline Eco-terrorists, religious would try to outlaw divorce and any religion beside Christianity, socialist would want 75% highest tax brackets and would nationalize every industry they could get their hands on, nationalist would try to expel foreigners etc. The more ideologically pure you are the better. Moderate parties should have trouble to win any seats.
In other words I need some kind of reason why are moderate parties absent from the legislative body.
What kind of political system would reward extremist parties?
First past the post system leads to creation of two very similar parties. So that would probably mean some kind of proportional representation. However even in proportional representation the largest parties are the moderate ones. Extremist become king-makers only if one the moderate parties need their votes badly to pass the budget or some law.
I don't want a system where center right/left parties accept few ideological policies from the extreme right/left in exchange for votes. I want center right/left parties small & weak.
[Answer]
* Use proportional representation without an election threshold. So even a small number of votes is enough to get a seat.
* Make it hard and inconvenient to vote, so only those people who are extremely convinced of their political party will go voting. The fanatics will do anything to get their vote counted while the apathetic centrists won't bother.
* On the other hand, make it quite easy to form a political party and run for election.
* Encourage political single-issue NGOs to also act as political parties. You can, for example, do that by only giving them charitable tax exemption status when they are running for election and get at least one seat. Having the NRA, Femen and PeTA in your parliament might be fun.
* Outlaw paid campaign advertisement. No political ads on TV, radio or billboards. That way elections aren't decided by campaign budget. Guerilla marketing strategies usually work better for the underdogs.
By the way, when you have a parliament full of single-issue extremists, they will soon realize that none of them will ever be able to get a majority for any of their demands unless they cooperate. Anyone in your parliament who has the slightest knack for politics will start to seek alliances. They will likely do that by contacting those who have an agenda which is orthogonal to their own. For example, the ecologists, nationalists and fundamentalists might form a coalition, because their agendas can easily coexist.
[Answer]
Maybe not to this magnitude, but such problem can happen in case of fully proportional system without any minimum thresholds. Its perfectly democratic. (and was tried in many new democracies after WW1, which lead to their collapse)
The system that are used in RL are skewed a bit (Western Europe) or terribly (USA, UK) in favor of big parties. (it's a noble lie that such system still remains democratic...) In order to get extremism so popular, the system should be not perfectly representative, but actually skew it in actually opposite direction. How? Make a party list voting, and algorithm in which marginal gain for each next vote is actually decreasing. Under such system tiny parties would thrive, and instead fighting main right wing party vs main left wing party, the real fight would be among similar parties, that instead of proving that they are acceptable compromise that suits high enough number of voters, would has to prove the voter that they are even more ideologically pure than others.
[Answer]
**Many indirect ways of benefiting extremist parties**
The obvious way would be for the system to give less seats per vote to the major parties. However, that would be more likely to reward sockpuppets than extremists. In Australia, there is a party called "the coalition" because it is technically a coalition between two parties. Actively rewarding small parties would mean that all parties would technically be coalitions. However there are some things that indirectly favor extremist parties.
* **Voluntary voting.** People without strong political views are less likely to bother to vote.
* **IQ testing.** If the testing is inconvenient, the primary effect may be to further dissuade moderates from voting.
* **[Legislative violence.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_violence "Legislative Violence")** In some countries, political debates tend to involve fists. This would discourage moderate running for office.
* **One sword, one vote.** In a culture where trial by combat and duels are the norm, the purpose of the legislative body may be to keep the violence off the streets. Politicians are expected to fight for what they believe in, in an entirely literal sense. Moderates stay well way from the legislative body. It is "hard to joust with someone if you partially agree with their point of view".
* **One thumb, one vote.** Due to concern about electoral fraud, human officials are taken out of the equation. Instead biometric machines enforce one simple rule: "one thumb, one vote". Voting fraud remains rampant, but only among violently extremist parties.
* **Polygraph.** Fed up with lying politicians, the citizenry decide to make politicians say what they really mean. Alas, a normal person is just someone you don't know very well yet, and everyone has some unusual belief. Suddenly politicians are unable to unite based on what they agree on, but are instead judged by and elected on the basis of their most extreme beliefs.
[Answer]
Governments are nothing more than a reflection of the people who elect them.
If you want a polarized political situation, with several uncompromising parties, then you should have several polarized blocks of voters to elect them. Shouldn't need a system for that, you just need an interesting electorate. This is your world, make it what you want to support your story. And the story is more authentic if the ideological conflict is mirrored in the population.
You could highlight the divisions by having these groups live in very different locales, which could explain the uncompromising nature of the debate: they don't mingle much, if any. Generally speaking, the more rural settings have the conservative, self supporting types of people, whereas urban areas have the more liberal, collective action type of people, as befits the nature of their home.
For the religious fanatics, put together a new religion, but a plausible one drawn that parallels current religions, so the contrast can be seen more clearly. Making your hardcore religious types Christian, or maybe Muslim, tends to muddy the message with contemporary preconceptions, especially if the message is to illustrate the fallacies of religious extremism.
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Your question is kind of funny, if seen through my political scientits glasses, since most of your literature focuses on how to avoid that kind of situation.
So you might have great fun reading the work of Eric Lijphard, Horowitz and others and reverse their ideas.
There are a few thinks you can do, to maximize ideological extremes in your parties:
1. Have issues which are seen as zero sum games - e.g. any compromise would have to take something from a group. Compromises in modern democracies are often found when we can achieve some kind of benefit for all involved parties.
2. Have a "winner takes it all" election system. Such systems maximize ideological distances. See the USA for an example where more "pure" challengers force the party into ideologic extremes.
3. Have the parties organized along ethnic lines - since any isse can (and will!) be seen through ethnic glasses, your party system will be polarized along ethnic rifts. Bridging such kind of rifts is not easy, and calls for ethnic heritage or ethnic grudges will almost certainly drown out moderates.
4. Have calture which dislikes compromises and strives for total victories. The Weimarer Repulic is an excellent example where failing to compromise led to an absurd situation: left and right extremist parties had the majority.
Especially useful is the combination of multiple factors - any one does not need to promote extremsim in your party system, but combinations will make the rise of extremist parties vastly more probable. For example: ethnic parties combined with winner takes it all elections in the districts will create a situation where most districts are not competetive since they are "owned" by the ethnic majority of that district. Thus, there is no incentive to compromise with other ethnic groups since you will not get any advantage from such a compromise.
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A lot of great answers focusing on the election system, but also, don’t forget to have the legislative process reward intransigence. As someone who was born in Belgium and now lives on the West Coast of the US, I think you really want built-in, intractable gridlock. (I’ll omit specific contemporary examples, but you want structural incentives that every party responds to, and a bad stable equilibrium, not a country where parties happen to be run by crazy people.) It should not only be possible for a minority party to stop anything from getting done, it should be impossible to agree on anything without agreeing on everything. Most important, the *only* way to win concessions in the eventual Grand Bargain must be total, unanimous intransigence. If individuals defect, the whole party gets rolled. That way, any member who compromises and defects really is selling out.
There should, however, be a robust way for all the normal, routine business to go on: the last year’s budget is automatically reauthorized if a new one does not pass, a caretaker government remains in place that must maintain the status quo, there are independent civil service or military officials with a free hand to deal with crises who are a lot more trusted and respected than politicians, a lot of policy is in the hands of other levels of government that are more functional. That way, there’s no overwhelming urgency and no outside pressure to force a bargain. It’s stable. People don’t feel all that bickering affects their daily lives or accomplishes anything, so they tune it out. It becomes a sport. If stuff only happens when party leaders agree, and election returns short of a massive landslide don’t change who has to agree or what they can agree on, it becomes just a game. For drama, though, there can be one looming dead-man switch which the country cannot just keep muddling through.
When nobody can ever agree, nothing is ever anybody’s fault. The cause of dysfunction today is the same as yesterday and tomorrow: the parties couldn’t reach a compromise. Saying who should have compromised is the same as saying whose position is wrong.
Make sure every faction listens exclusively to their own side’s propaganda and doesn’t live around anybody who openly disagrees with them. Even better is if they literally speak different languages. Give them a history that poisons the well, then make it so there can be no cooperation across either ethnic or ideological lines.
You can raise the pressure by having some hot-button issue that constitutionally cannot be solved by the legislature, so the activists displace all that frustration onto whatever they can disrupt.
Make sure politicians can’t trade horses: you can’t throw in some pork for someone’s hometown in exchange for a vote if there are no local districts and all contracts must be awarded to the lowest qualifying bid. You can’t trade a vote here for a vote there if only one omnibus bill can pass. These can even be a well-intended anti-corruption effort. Prevent backroom negotiations and make people say which of their positions they’d be willing to compromise on in public.
Be sure to have your party lists decided by the most committed activists, who show up to all the meetings, not corrupt party bosses. Corrupt bosses pick people who will return the favor by going along with the deals they negotiate.
It helps if people with no interest in a functioning democracy (an authoritarian monarch, foreigners, oligarchs) have a lot of influence over the process. This doesn’t have to be evil: looking at this country, are the separatists who want it to break up entirely or the radicals who think forcing a constitutional crisis is the only way forward totally wrong?
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Have each party's candidates selected by the party membership in a long and tortuous process. That guarantees that only the most dedicated party members will participate in the process, and the voters will have to choose between ideologically extreme candidates from different parties. This has to apply to all parties -- if you let one party have a different process and select moderate centrist candidates, then they will win all the elections.
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In upper houses in Australia, "micro parties" often get elected with a very small primary vote. They get elected off the preferences of other micro parties, and even the major parties, who'd rather see a large crossbench who may have some members that are willing to negotiate with them, rather than a unified opposition in the form of their main opposition party. Further reading: [Glenn Druery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Druery) and the [Minor Party Alliance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Party_Alliance). Fun fact: Australia has a political party formerly called the [Australian Sex Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Sex_Party), who has [Fiona Patten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Patten) elected in the Victorian Legislative Council. It's now called the "Reason Party".
In the US, I've heard that gerrymandering has been conducted to create seats with solid Democrat majorities (by Republicans), and that even Republican seats are getting more "secure". Such seats are more likely to have extremist Democrats or extremist Republicans, because electability is less of an issue and winning the primaries is more of an issue.
Social media that favours extremists over moderates can also fuel extremism. Twitter may well favour extremism, as extremists views can fit into 140 characters better than moderate, nuanced views. Also, "following" means that you prioritise some views over other views, and it's more of a monologue rather than a dialogue. During the 2016 US presidential election, Trump's tweets (and those of his supporters) received far more media coverage than any of the other candidates.
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Proportional representation is the sure fire way to do this. Since the rules of PR generally prevent any single party from achieving a majority government, parties in all PR nations seek out other political parties to form coalition governments.
As the electorate becomes more and more fractured, small extremist parties might not actually grow in size (the voter base for extreme views remains the same), but the need to get that last one or two votes to build a majority coalition becomes greater and greater, making the negotiating position of extreme parties much greater, and allowing them to force their platforms onto the coalition in exchange for their vote.
So extreme religious, ideological and other ideas get instituted in government policy as a result of the more mainstream parties scrambling for that last vote to make a government.
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Part of your problem isn't just having a type of government that rewards extremism. You also need an environment that fuels extremism and discourages moderation.
Some political parties in real life have done things so horrible or scandalous that it poisoned their entire agenda for years or even decades. Think for example of the Nazi's, and how so many people and politicians support laws banning hate speech to prevent people with ideological views like the Nazi's from spreading their hateful agenda.
Perhaps moderates, or a moderate party, did something in the past in your world that badly tarnished the very idea of being a moderate. Perhaps the government also spreads propaganda about the danger moderates pose to society. Extremists of all parties could warn constantly that whatever tragedy/scandal the moderates caused in the past will happen again if the moderates ever got control of the government again. Maybe some 'moderate' party that did something bad in the past is even outlawed by the government, and those who express moderate political views are accused of being sympathizers with the tainted moderate party.
When history and propaganda taints moderation so badly it doesn't matter what kind of a political system you have, the extremists will be empowered no matter what.
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The other answers are all quite good, but I had one extra special-sauce to add:
**Violence:**
In a nation with poor rule of law it wouldn't be hard for parties to form gangs of thugs to fight/intimidate each other. This happened all over Europe between the two world wars. When power is in the hands of the mob, it pushed people towards extremes. Moreover, extremist parties are generally the ones to form militias and fight one another.
In Germany after WW1 the nation was divided between the proto-fascist Friekorps and Communist worker's militias. The two groups battled each other in the streets and the weak and defeated government couldn't do anything about it, encouraging more violence. Interestingly, this didn't last too long. After the Communists were put down the Friekorps didn't take control of the government and instead the Weimar Republic, one of the more moderate regimes of the time, was founded (they were overthrown by the Nazis about 10 years later, but that's another story). So in the long run people usually get sick of violence and compromise, but in the short term it pushes them to extremes.
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### Partisan primaries
Allow voters to choose who will represent their political party by a partisan primary. This empowers the extremes in a party, as it is much easier to dominate the party than the electorate as a whole.
### Commit primary voters
Currently, primary voters in the United States can vote for the candidate of the other party in the general election. Change that. So moderates have even less reason to vote in primaries. But if they do vote, then they can't vote in the general. Their vote will be automatically cast for the winner of the primary in which they voted.
### Powerful and moderate judiciary
If the judiciary rules on something, then it is much harder for politicians to rally support for the position that the judiciary took and much easier to rally against them. This is because supporters expect the judiciary to fix things for them. So they don't worry as much about what the politicians might do. Meanwhile, opponents feel powerless and marginalized. I.e. ready for extremism.
### Single chamber parliament
Multiple chambers or a separate nationally elected figure require more cooperation for everyday operation. And the overlapping districts make it easier for big parties that compete in every district. Different candidates support each other. So reduce levels as much as possible.
The same representatives for municipal elections as national elections. It's just that only some of them vote in municipal, school, county, or state parliaments.
Appoint executive positions by legislative votes. So the head of state and ministers are appointed to the positions.
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Have a series of campaign reform measures, each of which has unintended consequences that dwarf the intended consequences. Every law has unintended consequences, just as every software package has unintended consequences. But when the unintended consequences dwarf the intended ones, really strange things can happen.
If the campaign reform measures have the effect of discouraging moderates from running, or of preventing moderates from reaching the voters, or of preventing moderates from being effective once elected, the stage is set. Over time, the system will gravitate towards the scenario you requested.
Normally, when a political system gets into serious trouble, reformers come along to remedy the situation. But if the reformers themselves are part of the problem, and not part of the solution, then that remedy is unavailable.
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I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the beast. Extremist politics isn't a consequence of the electoral system; it's the social circumstance. During the 1920s the Nazi party existed in the Weimar Republic, but it was considered a bad joke with almost no support. Similar with communists. The economy was booming and this strengthened the arguments made by liberals and conservatives that a free market and personal freedom works to empower everyone.
... that was, until the great depression, when every single German bank failed and people started to go hungry. In these circumstances moderate liberals, conservatives, social democrats, lost the arguments. They had failed to provide, and the people looked for alternatives. It wouldn't matter much if the voting system was First Past the Post or Proportional Representation; it depends who has mass support. Even if you flood the ballot with daft choices under a system with a low bar to entry, that doesn't guarantee anyone will care.
The bottom line is that if you want extremist politics you need to make the environment extreme too. If the economy is growing and everyone has a job and the government is not overtly corrupt few will be willing to reject it. If the democratic system cannot provide for the people they will not support it. You'd do well to examine the rise of extremist politics in the Weimar Republic during the great depression, as well as the rise of extremist politics in modern day Greece during their economic crisis.
The popular consensus has to fail. In Germany this was the liberal consensus, in former Yugoslavia this was the communist consensus. In both circumstance the failure of the popular consensus led to widespread ethno-nationalist violence.
It's worth considering examples like Northern Ireland and the Balkans (Balkanisation). When you have two or more communities who choose to live apart instead of together, it sows the seeds of prejudice, discrimination, and violence. A society composed of ghettoised homogenous regions put under the stress of economic and political crisis would definitely lead to the rise of extremism.
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Use PR and no threshold for gaining seats, 500 seat parliament, 0.2% gets your party one seat. Next create a punishment for big parties, so maybe under the argument of 'more voices the better' and 'big parties dominate too much politically' round up to the next seat starting with the smallest party, then as you inevitably run out of seats to round up for the biggest parties, round down for them. This will definitely encourage more small fringe parties and make moderate parties smaller and weaker.
Outside of political systems: Moderate parties do worst in times of upheaval, economic and civil, this leads to voters going for extremes. Also creating alternative education systems based on political ideology, eco schools, Marxist schools, white nationalist schools, etc.
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The primary job of a politician is to get re-elected. To that end your best bet is to muddle around, make as few concrete statements as possible. Remain moderate and avoid shaking the boat. Enjoy the respect your position of power gives you. Become better at the game of politics and remain in power until it's time to retire. Then enjoy your hefty pension.
You need to make this state of affairs impossible, so the people who get into power are not just those who want to be in power -- but those who genuinely want to change the world.
(1) First thing remove the salary. From now on politicians receive no pay or pension. They live in moderately uncomfortable dormitories attached to the senate house.
(2) Second make it impossible for them to obfuscate. A politician gets exactly one chance to vote on an issue in their whole career. Then they are shown the door.
**Darker version:** The politician is ritually slaughtered after making their one vote!
(3) Design your society so politics is seen as the lowest of the service professions. Like garbageman or actors in Medieval times. Explain (2) using this fact: No one should have to endure the position for their whole life!
There can still be political parties under this system. Only these parties will operate largely outside the senate. These chessmasters will maintain their agendas but rotate their members in and out of office as they need to use up their votes one at a time.
However, if someone found a way to operate a moderate party under this system, it would win all the votes. I'm not sure how they would do this: They couldn't offer their members high salaries, for example, because the party would by necessity be much larger then real parties.
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Possibly having population divided along ethnic or religious lines may help your aim.
Condsider several clans living in country:
* One is religiously monolithic and very conservative
* One is considered the natives and the descendants of the founders of the country, they are also considered the most cultured
* One is living in an ecologically damaged area in constant danger
* One is considered pariah and disenfranchaised from economic life.
Make them vote traditionally for the same parties for generations. The first always vote for religious fundamentalists, the second for nationalists who wants suppress the other clans, the third always vote for ecologists, and the fourth may always vote for the left.
Also, very bad econiomic conditions (compared to the former times), defeat in a war usually favors extremism.
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I'm thinking of creating a story where a relatively peaceful species is capable of taking themselves apart and then putting themselves back together again in a different place. Because of this, a group of different species has banded together to use this power to achieve Faster-than-Light technology (or as close as possible), which they haven't even come close to.
As of right now I've decided they cannot "transport" themselves off planet and so are relatively stuck on their home planet (maybe because of the distance, or lack of direction in space, atmosphere, etc.)
I need to know if it's possible (or if there are ideas of fake technology to make this possible) for
1. The enslavers to catch them
2. The enslavers to KEEP THEM IN ONE PLACE (basically if it's possible to keep them enslaved)
They are also more than willing to kill a few hundred of them if need be, and are using a genetically engineered army to do their bidding (as in, kidnap and kill when they have to)
Bonus to anyone Who can tell me if this race of being is even possible, And why they wouldn't be able to transport themselves off planet.
More info will be added if needed!!
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**Make them *want* to help you (and leave them no real choice)**
This is basically an extension of @Fayth85's comment.
Your creatures have a limitation in that they can only teleport around their own planet. Meaning you eliminate their ability to escape if you can convince them that nowhere on their planet is safe or that you'll render their entire planet uninhabitable if they don't comply with your wishes. Or if you *actually* render their planet largely uninhabitable.
Since you've got a Galactic Alliance of sorts, with lots of different alien species involved, and since your teleporters don't seem to be spacefaring yet, why not mount a bit of a false-flag operation? Have one species of aliens come in, give a brief warning and targeting list (so that the teleporters can reach your nominated safe-havens), and then lay waste to the planet with radiological or other weapons that render specific areas of it completely uninhabitable for long periods of time. Now all the teleporters will be clustered in a small number of "collection-centers" that weren't on your targeting list.
Next it's time for one of your other alien species (or all the rest of them) to come in and save the day. They rock up and make a show of (just barely) driving off the evil alien invaders. Once the dust settles, the saviors have to deliver the harsh "truth" to your species of teleporters:
* No, we don't have any way of undoing the damage that was done to your planet; large portions of it are now permanently uninhabitable. Without external aid to provide food and clean water, much of your population is likely to die over the coming weeks and months due to shortages.
* Yes, we're the good guys and we managed to drive off the attackers, but only just barely and the fact of the matter is that we're in a long-standing war with those guys, and we're losing the broader conflict.
* We want to provide continued aid in the form of defense, food, water, and medical support, but are stretched thin by our ongoing, losing conflict with the attackers, and can only provide those things if you're willing to join our Alliance and agree to provide us with troops to help in the war effort.
* If you cannot agree to our terms, then we must leave immediately because the losses we've sustained in our unsuccessful attempt to save your world are already too great, and the resources are direly needed elsewhere. We cannot guarantee that the attackers won't return after we're gone, to finish what they started.
Then the rest pretty much takes care of itself. You get local "recruits" that you subject to military-style discipline, and keep on a "need to know" basis (and what they need to know is basically nothing). You "discover", to much fanfare, that their unique ability to teleport has FTL travel implications that could turn the tide of the war in your favor. You keep your recruits in dark engine-room boxes where they power your interstellar spacecraft, and feed them some occasional stories about how, because of their efforts, you just glassed an enemy planet and got them some revenge for what was done to their world.
They'll help you because they want revenge. They'll help you out of gratitude for saving their planet and keeping their species alive. They'll help you out of peer-pressure from the planet-side members of the species, because "service is a great honor". They'll help you out of fear that you'll cast them aside to the brutal attackers if they don't. They'll help you because once they join your "army", you control everything that they see and hear, and you're devious when it comes to propaganda and manipulation.
They'll be your slaves, but they won't realize it. And all it cost you was some theatrics and a ship full of fresh supplies every now and then, plus the ethical quandary of rendering most of a planet uninhabitable to further your technological ambitions.
And if they ever manage to discover the truth, what of it? Most of their world is ruined, they can't use their power to hide, they're dependent upon you for their continued survival, and you can cut them off at any time. You have all the leverage in the world.
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The tricky part is to catch them, but you can knock them unconscious (sleeping gas or something like that), then it will be easy to collect them. After that, feed them poison that needs a daily antidote (which you have, of course). It doesn't physically stop them from running away, but will kill anyone who attempts to and thus, keeps them in one place.
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The ["Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Earth_(series)) covers almost this exact premise, except that the species in question can instantly transport themselves to parallel planets. There are certain conditions surrounding this transportation though (possible spoiler):
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> In this series, ferrous metals do not transport. One of the species invented a mechanism to stop prisoners transportation away by using a spring loaded device which kills the wearer if a metal pin is removed. They put these on the prisoners (memory is hazy but I believe by knocking them out first), and if the wearer does attempt to transport away the metal pin stays behind and they are killed by the mechanism as they arrive at their destination.
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The basic premise here is that these creatures (I'm going to call them zappers because I like the name and I don't know what else to call them) can take themselves apart and rebuild themselves elsewhere. For this to happen in any kind of reasonable time and with any kind of reasonable accuracy we must assume that the zappers use different particles. When the zapper takes itself apart, it retains a pattern, a grocery list of all the particles it will need to resemble its physical form. The essence of the zapper then travels to its destination where it collects the necessary particles from its new surroundings, reforming itself. For this model to work, the zapper must have some part, the essence, which is not taken apart during teleportation. This essence must move quickly, must be able to pass through air and objects, and must be capable of recalling matter to it. The best choice for this kind of essence is energy, preferably in the form of electricity. This packet of electricity contains all the zapper's memories and personality, as well as the code for its physical body. When the zapper teleports, the electrical essence zaps to the new location almost instantaneously and reforms the body, leaving the conscious zapper unaware of the process. Depending on how aware you want the zappers to be, you could make the essence record the body as it was upon destruction, or as it was originally. The former will allow the zapper to retain such distinctions as scars and tattoos, the latter will allow the zapper to heal whenever he teleports.
With this model in mind, there is a very simple way to prevent teleporting: insulated rooms. Just as we humans coat metal tools in rubber to prevent electrocution, a thick rubber wall will stop the zapper essences from leaving the room, giving them no choice but to reform within the walls. At best, they might be able to zap from one side of the room to the other, but with small enough room, this shouldn't be a problem. As mentioned, slavery is a state of mind as well as a state of being, so within a few generations, the zappers shouldn't need to be contained in this way, except, perhaps, as punishment. To capture a zapper, all one needs is a localized chemical reaction that consumes energy. Basically, all you have to do is fire a drained battery at the zapper, then pick it up and carry it home. When you're ready to let it out, just reverse the reaction, releasing the energy. This might wreck havoc on the zapper's memories and personality (but that's really up to you to decide how resistant the zappers' essences are) but somehow I doubt the enslaving race will be too troubled by that. This also makes zappers easy to transport and store, an ideal quality in an enslaved race. If the storing does destroy some or all of the zapper's personality, so much the better for enslavement.
The reason zappers can't teleport off-planet is that space is simply too empty. Under the pressures of their planet's atmosphere, the zapper essences can hold themselves together for the brief periods of time in which they are loose energy, but in space, the pull is far too great. The essences just fly apart, lost to space in a thousand directions. Not to mention, even if the essence could get where it was going it wouldn't be able to find all the particles it would need to recreate its body. Maybe if it made it to another planet, but there are still no guarantees, not to mention the zapper would have to know where it was going in order to get there. It certainly couldn't reform in space.
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Put them in public schooling. Really. (Really really, read about John Dewey in China if you don't believe me.)
Otherwise you need a way to harm them when they reconstitute.
The slavemaster race could use something like a slave collar (as in Fallout or the Long Earth), that would trigger when they reappear. That could be as simple as tracking environmental changes. In fact, there is probably a change in air pressure when they transapparate.
The slavemasters' ability to confine them in one place would likely depend on how much progress they have made on their FTL technology, because learning how the creatures move would also show them how to stop the movement.
Edit: Forgot to mention the most basic method of keeping slaves throughout history. Hunt the runaways.
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In the book series "Jumper", the main character is able to teleport as well.
*Spoiler*
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> In the second book, he is captured. To keep him in one place they install a device inside of him, which within a specific radius does nothing. However, beyond that radius, the device induces a feeling of nausea leading to vomiting, involuntary defecation and a pain throughout the body.
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> They could put this radius effect wherever they pleased, so he can only teleport there. It became automatic, outside the radius he couldn't even think, he just jumped back inside the radius.
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A) .1 They use a secondary factor to take themselves apart, like a quantum nutrient. If the oppressors take away access to this nutrient, they could prevent them from traveling.
.2 They wouldn't be able to transport themselves off planet because each 'jump' uses up the nutrient or other secondary factor. They could, however, jump through a series of spaceships placed only a few hundred miles away from each other. This is impracticable however.
.3 They wouldn't be able to transport themselves off planet because they have a cultural prohibition against using up too much of the nutrient- so travelling off planet is theoretically possible, but no one's been rude enough yet to consume so much of the nutrient in order to do so.
B) They can transport themselves because they are not actually part of our dimension. They exist in a 4th or 5th dimension, and when we say they 'travel' or 'jump', what they are really doing is just shifting from our dimension, back into their higher dimension, and then into ours again.
.1 In this case, it would be very difficult if not impossible to enslave them. However, it would depend on why they were being enslaved. Is it to harvest the energy they release when they jump? Well then you wouldn't need to confine them at all since you want them to jump. You could pretend to confine them to force them to jump. Unless the oppressors are from a higher dimension than the jumpers are, and are able to put a kind of interdimensional fence around the planet to prevent them from jumping off planet. Then, the oppressors pretend to be an occupying army in order to make the 'jumpers' jump a lot. This generates energy which is used to further the oppressors' nefarious ends.
Edit for quantum nutrient:
A quantum nutrient would have an n-sided spin. If you gather enough of the nutrient, you can hitch your subatomic particles to the nutrient, which then 'spins' interdimensionally in order to 'expose' your subatomic particles to a different location, thus 'reassembling' them. So the nutrient acts as a protectant against damage you might otherwise incur when taking yourself apart on a molecular level. In essence, you never really take yourself 'apart', you just 'connect' yourself on a subatomic level to a cloud of subatomic particles that protects you while you travel through spacetime. The nutrient is naturally occuring but can only be mined by beings who have the ability to use it for travel. That's why the jumpers are being enslaved - they're being forced to mine this very powerful nutrient so that the oppressors can use it to attain FTL travel for their spaceships.
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Their natural teleportation could perhaps be limited to places where the individual has been to or has seen before. So each individual probably can't teleport anywhere in the world because, well, it's unlikely one person visited the entire planet.
The interesting thing about this concept is that it also explains why this species doesn't seem to be space-faring. They've never felt the need to be. I wouldn't be surprised if they've never even developed modes of ground transportation like cars or, well, maybe not even the wheel. Because, well, why would they? They can just teleport wherever they want to. This lack of transportation technology, however, binds them to their home planet. If they've never been to or seen another planet, then they don't have the technology required to get them there in the first place.
If the limit is defined as "places they've seen", then the planet should probably be moonless, otherwise they'll have tried teleporting there at some point in their history. But even if there is a moon, that's just one more place where you need to control them. My solution below is scalable, so that's not much of a problem.
Notice that I described this as "their natural teleportation". One might say that such a limit would also make the species useless as engines for FTL, but that's not necessarily the case. By studying the species (perhaps some cadavers), your scientists have been able to develop technology which would harness the species' ability without the "places you've been to/seen" limit. Put the specimen in an induced coma, put it in this special tube, place some uncomfortable probes, and your ships can now teleport across the galaxy. Should the specimen somehow escape, that's unfortunate and your ship will be stranded. But the specimen will still be bound by its own limits - the technology you developed only works for your ships, the individual fueling it has not been "upgraded" in any way. And since the only place they know is their home planet, they'll just teleport there, where they'll still be well within the confines of my solution.
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So, now for the actual solution:
Firstly, you study the species. Find out how they reproduce, how they raise their young, how they teach them to teleport (even better if it's not a learned skill, but a natural one). Once you are confident you'd be able to breed and raise a newborn into adulthood, move on to the next step.
Now, you annihilate the entire species (so much for "willing to kill a few hundred of them"). Or, well, almost. Kill every single post-pubescent member of the species. And I mean all of them. If you can develop some virus/poison/nanoweapon which accumulates over time but can then be triggered to kill all the adults at once (they're peaceful, so begin by trading with them until you're confident you can trigger the hidden bioweapons in such a way as to kill all adults), that's probably a safer bet than trying to kill them by arms (wherein some might figure out ways and places to hide), but whatever floats your boat.
Now all you have left are a bunch of kids. These are young and can't survive without their parents. They've also not had time to discover vast regions of the planet, so their teleportation won't get them very far.
And then you start building your farms: opaque domes all over the planet. Move the kids into these domes. Once they're in (they might even come voluntarily: remember, they're kids without parents, they're probably starving and will accept any lie you tell them about food), immediately place them into induced comas. Once they've past puberty, start breeding to create the next generation. Once they've bred sufficiently, ship them off and start fueling your first spaceships. (Or, if you fear the risk of escape, simply kill this generation off. After all, they'll be the last generation capable of teleporting out of your domes. This just means you'll need to be a bit patient before you can start using FTL. But then again, your empire's probably existed for centuries or millennia. What's another twenty years?)
Now you have the second generation of infants.
If teleportation is a natural (unlearned) skill, there's no need for them to ever be conscious: immediately place them in induced comas and wait until they mature.
If teleportation is a learned skill, that's why you learned how to raise them before you began, and why the domes are opaque. Create nurseries inside the domes where you teach the kids to teleport from one side of a room to another. They'll never leave the domes and they'll never see outside. The inside of that dome will be their world. They won't know there's anything out of that dome to teleport to - which means they won't even want to - and even if they did, well, they haven't seen or been outside, so they won't be able to.
Once this second generation comes into puberty, have a big party with cake. The cake is laced with coma-inducing drugs. Once everyone's passed out, into the farm they go: breed the third generation and then plug the second one into your ships.
Rinse and repeat.
[Answer]
Cover the planet with beacons that emit noises/lights that are extremely painful (deafening/blinding) or unpleasant (e.g. nails on chalkboard) for the teleporters. Warn the teleporters that they must all teleport to a single room to avoid the noise/light and give the coordinates to the room. Turn on the system so that they will necessarily teleport to the room. After congregating all of them in the room, train them to be slaves; blast noise/light as group punishment when they disobey your commands. Keep the system on outside so that they cannot teleport away.
[Answer]
This is mostly about:
>
> And why they wouldn't be able to transport themselves off planet.
>
>
>
This is easy: Assume an individuum would transport itself off a planet. Where does the (now larger) potential energy come from? My suggestion: From its *thermal energy*.
Thus transporting to a place further out the gravity well of a planet will freeze the individuum, transporting to a place further down a gravity well will cook it.
This also gives rise to an easy solution to the problem at hand: Once caught (poison, knock out, whatever) transport them (in the usual way) to an orbital space station. Transporting down on the planet will kill them, transporting in the void of space (due to the usual reasons like lack of breathable air, pressure, ...), too.
If a space station does not fit your story, how about:
* Deep caves
* Tall mountains
* Blimps
This also makes for a nice "escape story" ... either taking an ice bath or cooking oneself before transporting.
---
Physics: Assuming a species whose bodies consist to a significant part of water, we set their specific heat capacity to
```
c = 4
[c] = J / (kg * K)
```
Further we know
```
c = dQ / (m * dT)
dQ: difference in thermal energy / "heat"
m : mass
dT: difference in temperature
```
Also we know that potential energy is (simplifying for small `h`)
```
E = m * g * h
m: mass
g: gravity of earth (assuming an earth like planet)
```
The difference in potential energy between two heights is thus:
```
dE = m * g * dh
```
Solving for `dT`:
```
dE = dQ
m * g * dh = c * m * dT
dT = (g / c) * dh
```
With `g ~ 10 m/s^2` this means that for every meter height difference the transported mass has to change its temperature by approx `2.5` Kelvin. *This is really limiting their transportation ability.* You thus might want to:
* reduce gravity (thus `g`)
* increase the specific heat capacity of their bodies (`c`)
* have them e.g. also transport whatever mass is at their destination to their departure, in order to use it as energy sink or source.
[Answer]
This is a simple case of going about it the wrong way. What is the object of the exercise? It is this: "a group of different species has banded together to use this power to achieve Faster-than-Light technology (or as close as possible), which they haven't even come close to." The objective is to use the native's teleportation power to achieve faster-than-light travel.
The group of different species decide to enslave the zappers (a good name, so it can used here too), but why? The zappers must be masters of escapology. Escaping by teleportation will be second nature to them. Enslaving them only works against their greatest strength. This is fools' errand, and it doesn't achieve the main objective of harnessing FTL travel.
Remember "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar". Slavery is super-toxic vinegar. It won't work. The slugwits (my name for the group of different species) will do what any neo-colonial exploitative imperialists have done for time immemorial. They will cosy up with the zappers' ruling classes, offering them blandishments and whatever good stuff an interstellar travelling group like the slugwits to have give or sell. In turn, the zappers' rulers only have to allow access to a few members of the lower orders.
Once this is done the specimens will be obeying the orders of their rulers and before they know is happening to them they will be anesthetized and taken to another planet (where teleporting won't help them) in the same planetary system for dissection, vivisection and other biomedical analysis.
Admittedly the slugwits have to solve the same problem of thwarting the escape of zappers by teleportation, but instead of trying subdue many of them from escaping they only have to deal with a few zappers and this will be more tractable and easy to handle.
The slavery option was plain dumb. There are always better and more sensible options. The slugwits were never going to be nice organisms. This way they're less messy and not so stupid.
[Answer]
As others have suggested first explain how the teleportaion is possible in the first place. I'd like to suggest another way of teleportation: Wormholes.
Let's assume the members of said species are able to manipulate space by will to form a wormhole connecting their current location with the one they'd like to go to. For this they must be able to concentrate well enough and make the decision to actually do it.
So to prevent them from teleporting or to exploit their ability to form wormholes their slavers found a way to enforce their own will on the poor fellows. For example through a drug which renders them unable to decide what to do unless someone tells them so, or by hindering their ability to concentrate properly for some time while brainwashing them so they accept the slavers' authority.
As for a reason why they cannot teleport to a location outside their planet I have two suggestions which, however, reinterpret "anywhere" a little.
A) To open a wormhole at least two members of the species, one at each end, must combine their minds. So teleportation would only be possible between locations where at least one capable individual may be found.
B) One individual is able to open a wormhole if the destination is known "well enough", because the surroundings interfere with the process and have to be taken into account, otherwise the passage is unsafe, the wormhole instable or the location less precise. Since this species does have some kind of collective memory, every place a species' member has been is a potential destination - considering changes to the place which may have occurred since the last visit.
[Answer]
I would suggest you, too first think of the boundaries of the "teleporting" itself and the "logic" behind it.
From that point on, its much easier to think of a way to create a trap.
E.g.: A boundary for the species is that they can not travel trough space (as you stated as example in your original question). Why can't they?
* **Because of the low temperature?** => A cage surrounded by 0 Kelvin cold "area"
* **Because of the lack of air?** => A cage surrounded by a vacuum
Hope this approach may help you! Good Luck with your species :)
[Answer]
Similar to the suggestion of a poison that needs a daily antidote, an implanted device with a remote kill switch. (There are places in the human body where it would be extremely risky to remove an embedded object; your species can be designed to have some similar spots.)
Failing that, craft a religion that instills the need for subservience.
[Answer]
The question to ask is "Do they teleport via magic or science?" Either way it isn't inconceivable that the more advanced species would have studied how they do it and then figured out a way to nullify or prevent it; either via a collar/implant or a wide area field.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to explain how or why something works. Heinlein was notorious for having wildly advanced technology and then spending no time explaining how it works. Think about it. How many people do you know that can tell you how the internet or even their cell phone works? Most people can't, yet they use these technologies everyday.
[Answer]
## Fear is always the answer
# 1. Huge-### lasers
If you have the power to destroy the planet they are bound to, they will be eager to support whatever you have in mind.
Fear campaigns can be used too.
# 2. Sacral leadership
You can either become their sacral leader/god or kidnap their existing ones.
# 3. Collective punishment
Can you catch a pixie that can vanish? No. Can another pixie do so? Yes.
If you punish the whole species/planet for offenses then they will enforce your code of law.
[Answer]
The final phase of Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" series (so far anyway; he's writing more but they aren't published yet) features something similar. Not FTL travel, but travel between alternative Earths. Worldwalkers can escape any time they want to, if they use their worldwalking powers.
Stross's solution for enforced servitude of captured worldwalkers is pretty simple. Torture them extensively first, so that they know you *really* won't pull punches. Then put an explosive collar round their necks which will go off if it doesn't get a "yes-they-deserve-to-live" message from base at regular intervals. And release them under the supervision of military units with "push-button-to-explode-head" controls for their handlers.
[Answer]
In the Alfred Bester book, "The Stars My Destination," personal teleportation, or "jaunting," is a mental capability most everyone on Earth has some competency in. Generally speaking, jaunters need to memorize the locations of where they want to jaunte to, or to have visited some location before. In the book this is illustrated with big "landing pads" in urban areas that are free of obstacles and act as a known target to teleport to. (Incidentally, telefrags are possible, but IIRC this is shown in passing just once.) The book goes into really good detail on the physical problems of teleportation and what society looks like when everyone has it.
There is no interplanetary jaunting and there is space travel between solar system planets (people don't have the mental capacity to choose a location that far out, and jaunting into space is also cited as a method of suicide.) The way that buildings or private areas are created is by baffling entrances with literal mazes that the jaunter's mind can't navigate easily, or by coordinates alone. An entire chapter of the book is dedicated to the internment of the main character in a prison underneath a mountain, where the prisoners aren't allowed to see much of the internal structure of the prison outside their cell and there are large mazes isolating the important parts of the prison. Prisoners who attempt escape by jaunting out usually end up stuck in the mountain and die instantly. I can't summarize all the good bits by memory and it's worth a read.
[Answer]
That’s a major plot point of [Reflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_(novel)) by Steven Gould from 2004.
In order to both constrain him and allow him to use his power for the captive’s ends, they **surgically implanted** a device that would quickly kill him if it did not receive a coded radio signal. This allows the captives to set up areas where he can operate.
They also tried psychological conditioning and making threats against loved ones.
[Answer]
Maybe an EM field can contain many types of particles. Maybe they can't jump through an EM field boundary, and maybe the heliopause counts. Slavers could build containers for such purpose.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm building a fantasy world with a humanoid species (basically, "elves") which refuses to use dead wood.
**Context**
* They don't use dead wood because they don't want to. Consider that trees are sacred and should not be maimed or killed to create tools or materials and that even using wood from a tree which died from natural circumstances would be viewed as profanating a corpse.
* It is the same for bushes, grass, vegetal life in general.
* They live in big forests and use a very slow and meticulous kind of magic to gently bend tree branches into primitive houses. Then they use animal skins, feathers, silk and whatnot to create hermetic walls, for instance.
* They mostly rely on animal bones and organs and on rocks (eg silex) and minerals to create tools.
* They eat meat and fruits, which they collect from the trees with much respect and caution : they never eat more than half of a fruit and always put the seeds in fertile earth with the remaining portion of fruit, so that they have a good chance to grow into trees.
**Problem**
How could this species use fire ? They can't burn wood, obviously, and if lightning were to strike a tree and set it on fire, they could not use it because of the tree's sacredness (the elves would have to extinguish the fire to save the tree).
***What kind of combustibles could they use, apart from wood ?***
I would like them to be able to melt metal, so the fires should be extremely hot. And I would prefer not to have to resort to magic to make it possible (hence the `science-based` tag and not the `magic` tag), but a small bit of magic could be tolerable.
So far, I've thought of [animal oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_lamp) and lava, but I've been wondering if some people here could come up with better ideas, provided with references about whether their fires could melt metal.
Thanks !
**EDIT :**
My elves never ever used dead wood. They awakened before other intelligent species and never had the thought to use dead wood for their purposes. It would be about as alien as using a dead relative's body as a vacuum cleaner bag.
It is accepted to collect and eat fruits somehow like it would be for humans to milk wild cows (as long as you do not kill their offspring and you do not take all the milk from them) or to collect honey from wild bees.
Why is that so ? Mostly because of very strong religious / life-philosphy reasons. It has always been so and you cannot bypass such a strong tradition without becoming the public ennemy number one. Roughly : plants are sacred, you don't do them harm ; animals are not sacred, you can do whatever you like with them.
In present days, they are blacksmiths. I do not mind whether they have been so for very long, or if it is fairly recent because they heard of humans using metal and wanted to copy them, without sacrificing wood or plants.
**How will I judge answers ?**
* Obviously, no vegetal life should be harmed in the process and no dead vegetal material should be used in the process.
* The resulting fire should be able to melt at least some kinds of metal which are relevant to create tools : bronze would be enough, but you'll get "bonus points" if more resistant kinds of metal can be melted.
* The combustible / fire should be relatively easy to access. *Using the heart of a star like Thor in Marvel's Infinity War could work, but my elves don't travel across space.*
* The combustible / fire should be usable by many blacksmiths, in various places. *A single great furnace like Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings would not really suit my needs.*
* The process should fit in a fantasy world. *Tweaking with atoms and molecules would feel eerie - but well, if you can explain it in a convincing fantasy manner, that's okay.*
* Using a small bit of magic is acceptable, but would result in "malus points".
* Scientific evidences and / or references regarding the fire viability (in itself and in a blacksmithing context) will get "bonus points".
[Answer]
Here are my ideas: Peat, coal, oil, carbonised animals, golden mirrors.
Peat can provide an easily accessible source of combustible material. On its own it can burn hot enough to fire pottery to Earthenware temperatures, and smelt tin and copper.
If available, coal can also be used, and oil seeps exist that can be used. The nature of coal and peat is flammable rocks and soil, rather than "dead trees".
Most organic matter can be carbonized, the bodies of dead elves (do elves die?) could be carbonised in something that looks rather like a charcoal pit, and with much the same result: chunks of fairly pure carbon that can burn at high temperatures. Pretty much any animal material could be used for this process. Getting the fire lit would be tricky, so keep a candle (made of animal fat) burning.
If absolutely no burning is possible, large mirrors made of cold worked gold can be used to focus the sun's light to reach temperatures sufficient to smelt tin and perhaps copper. Once sufficient metal has been made, larger bronze mirrors can be made to reach the higher temperatures needed to smelt iron.
[Answer]
Since they don't know that coal comes from ancient forests, they can use it for fire and metallurgy.
[Coal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Early_uses_as_fuel) has always been used by humans for fire and metallurgy, so they might do the same.
>
> The earliest recognized use is from the Shenyang area of China 4000 BC where Neolithic inhabitants had begun carving ornaments from black lignite. Coal from the Fushun mine in northeastern China was used to smelt copper as early as 1000 BC.
>
>
>
They have only to avoid making charcoal.
[Answer]
**Fish**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_sturgeon>
>
> This sturgeon is a valuable gourmet food fish, as well as a source of
> specialty products including caviar and isinglass. "In 1860, this
> species, taken on incidental catches of other fishes, was killed and
> dumped back in the lake, piled up on shore to dry and be burned, fed
> to pigs, or dug into the earth as fertilizer." It was even stacked
> like cordwood and used to fuel steamboats.
>
>
>
The idea of catching animals and burning them for fuel has stuck with me. Your elves catch fatty animals, dry them and use them for fuel. Sturgeon are as big as logs, and pound for pound dried would no doubt burn hotter than wood.
Sturgeon are huge. But I was thinking for a fantasy you could scale it up, and have your elves hunt truly massive water monsters for their fuel value. Which of course is not an original idea either.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhdGt.jpg)
<http://wildwhales.org/threats/whaling/>
[Answer]
Why not oils derived from plants?
If they eat only half the fruit and then plant the rest, could they not use the same approach for, say, olive oil? A gentle olive oil press doesn't harm the pits, and leaves much of the flesh behind, which means the seed and flesh could then be planted.
[Answer]
### Dung Charcoal
A staple fuel for grassland people is [dried dung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_dung_fuel).
It generally doesn't burn particularly hot, but if you a assume a source of dung that is both unusually dense and comes in cohesive chunks of significant size, then activating it as wood can be made into charcoal or coal into coke offers a route to higher burning temperatures.
[This actually seems to be a real technology.](http://kenyanewsagency.go.ke/en/?p=52884)
I have no idea if the dung of real animals forms charcoal hot enough for forging iron, but it represents a modest request on a readers suspension of disbelief.
[Answer]
**Swamp gas**
Biogas, mostly made of methane, is formed during the natural decomposition of organic matter when exposed to certain bacterias, as typically occurring in swamps and other environments.
If you have something to ignite the fire, methane can burn.
The elfs might even have figured out the right bacteria population to maximise their yields from any biomass that is acceptable to reuse once dead, it doesn't sound any more difficult than beer manufacturing.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas#Biogas>
[Answer]
**Bones**
The word *bonfire* is actually rooted from *bonefire*, and is literally that.
Plants sacred? Never mind, burn dead animals instead.
Source: Merriam-Webster -
[The word is actually derived from Middle English bonefire, meaning literally "a fire of bones."](http://ew)
>
> But in worshipp of seinte iohan the people woke at home & made iij
> maner of fyres. On was clene bones & no wode & that is callid a bone
> fyre. A nothir is clene wode & no bones & that is callid a wode fyre
> fore people to sitte & to wake there by. —John Mirk, Liber Festivalis,
> 1486
>
>
>
[1](http://ew) <https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-secret-history-of-bonfire>
[Answer]
Fire has a survival advantage--cooking, heat, light, forging. Therefore a disposition toward religious notions about the sacredness of trees hurts their survival, and would be selected against. Eventually only Elves without this useless notion would remain.
How about if they use other Elves to fuel their fires?
] |
[Question]
[
Let's say the world itself provides food in such amounts, the agriculture is not needed.
In our world agriculture was one of the main driving force of civilization, so without it no labor division, no emeregence of class systems, perhaps no cities and permanent settlements. So could there be any "spark" in such scenario, that H-G's start to build it?
[Answer]
I think the closest that you can find in history is probably something like [Gobekli Tepe](http://eden-saga.com/en/archeology-neolithic-turkey-protohistoric-temple-animals-shamanism-gobekli-tepe.html) which seems to have been created as a religious site that multiple tribes of hunter gatherers would have visited and co-operated in the building and maintenance of.
This is also meant to be one of the first places that grains were cultivated with wild grains being protected here from grazing animals and being cultivated from there. If you were in a world where losing out on food like this to grazing animals wasn't an issue then it's not unforeseeable that the wild food that is growing there isn't given much significance by the people there and it continues to develop as a cultural and religious hub where tribes can co-operate with each other.
The 'spark' in that sense would be to create a place for cultural and religious gatherings and a place where trade between tribes could be done.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XGjFK.jpg)
[Answer]
In any environment with abundance of food, populations increase exponentially until there's not enough food for all. This describes a caracteristical S-shaped growth function. It works for bacteries in a petri dish, wild wolves reintroduced in a forest, and humans in a fruitful world.
When the world won't support their numbers anymore, they'll start fighting for the best locations, or try to steal each other's food. Then they need to produce more food that is naturally available, and to gather for protection (or attack).
In fact that world which produces more food than it's needed, so there's no need of agriculture actually existed. We called it "Earth", and it produced way more food than we needed back then, when there was only 100,000 of us in the whole of Africa.
[Answer]
[Complex societies are a function of population density](https://persquaremile.com/2011/08/17/hunter-gatherer-populations-show-humans-are-hardwired-for-density/).
Given this, what we have to look at is how we can get a dense population out of hunting and gathering. In other words, without domesticating the plants and animals used for food.
Here's what you can typically expect for various feeding strategies:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U5ZwG.jpg)
So basically what you need is a place where the environment is so productive that a few specialized gatherers can gather enough food for 100+ people per km2. Or even 10 would be nice.
What this would require is a food source that is so prolific, it cannot be exhausted by feeding 10 people for every square kilometer of land. This would need to be some kind of animal or plant that is practically at pest levels of ubiquity and birth rate.
Reflect that American Bison used to herd in the millions, and [passenger pigeons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon) in the billions, but a "traditional farming" society came along and wiped out both. So mammals and birds (which typically only have 1-7 children at a time) probably would not work for this purpose. You'd probably need something that spawns offspring thousands at a time, like many fish, insects, and plants do.
[Answer]
Yes, civilisation can develop without agriculture.
The native people of America's Pacific Northwest are an interesting example. None of them were farmers, but they developed a complex and rich culture. This was because, like agricultural societies, they were able to stockpile a food surplus. During the summer they harvested a considerable amount of salmon, which was then preserved in [smoke huts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoked_salmon#Production). This allowed them to gather together and have the time to create housing, art, social organisations, etc. All this done without ever committing to agriculture.
The issue is simply that your people need to be able to stockpile enough non-perishable food to allow them to survive the winter and spend their time doing something else. Perhaps you can invent some sort of thing like smoked salmon, which is nutritious and can be preserved for future consumption.
[Answer]
**TL;DR - Yes**
Hunting and gathering still needs to be done to get the food. It might well be done better with tools. Someone becomes known for making spears, they're so good people will give her food in exchange for a spear. If she makes enough spears she doesn't need to gather food at all.
Someone else figures out how to dry out and smush cherry stones, and starts selling cups of coffee. (or makes bread, or cured meat, or...) People will exchange food for coffee (or bread, or meat that keeps). If she makes enough of it she no longer has to gather her own food.
Someone else finds roots underground. They invent the spade. They can "sell" the spades.
The people who "gather" get more and more productive, so less and less people need to do it, so everyone else does other things of value.
The moment someone is good enough at providing something that others will "pay" for that thing, you're en route to civilisation, trade, money, and everything else.
So, **yes...**
...*Unless*, in your world, food is so abundant one needs only walk around with their mouth open to be fed. It is after all notable that blue whales don't have civilisation.
[Answer]
Probably depends on your definition of "complex", but certainly there can be very elevated and complex forms of art, storytelling, oral tradition, songs, etc. These are things humans can do internally with shamans, druids, etc. But advanced *technology*, that would be difficult. Even basic technology usually requires large amounts of tools and a permanent structure. They have to be close to resources as well. This is counter to most hunter-gatherer tribes that must maintain mobility as they follow the food supply around.
You could have small workshops in sledges or wagons pulled by domesticated draft animals, but would a strict HG tribe even domesticate such animals? Remember that even the American natives inherited horses, they didn't domesticate the animal on their own. But if they did, then a small forge or pottery kiln could be pulled along, so some fairly complex pottery and metalworking may be possible, but even bronze age metalworking required mined metals and smelting. Perhaps metal from meteorites?
Would they develop writing? This is a very critical development for true long term information storage and transmission that leads to advancement, but without the need to inventory "your stuff" or trade your stuff with someone elses, I'm not sure a HG tribe would do it. Even map-making, seemingly a no-brainer for a HG tribe, would probably be encoded into song or something or placed on an animal skin with charcoal/tattoo rather than require elaborate paper-making and inking technology.
The previously mentioned Gobleki Tepe structure is an enigma. It dates to 12,000 BCE or so, so it predates all the accepted starts of agriculture. Was it a meeting place for HG tribes? Was there an earlier agrarian culture that simply left no other traces? Hard to say, but it certainly seems like HG tribes were able to muster the resources necessary to camp out there long enough to build quarried stone structures and carve them. But this means they could lift multi-ton stone, and fit it into structures. More importantly, they had a reason to do so, which implies a pretty complex level of organization, design, construction tech (even if the tools and materials were left on site while the tribes moved on for another year), and motivational drive to build this thing year after year. Someone or a small group of people were probably responsible for this site and could leverage the tribes into working on it, which means there must have been a very influencial and powerful religious foundation around to do it.
[Answer]
Hunter-gatherers do have complex civilizations, in terms of social structure and the allocation of social power. The studies on the very few hunter-gatherer societies that still exist reveal that. If you are asking if they have technology, no; they don't need it. I am not sure what the question is.
[Answer]
Depending on what you mean by a "complex civilization", absolutely.
The primary driving force behind civilization in our world was agriculture, correct. However in this world you describe where enough resources are provided that agriculture becomes unnecessary, wouldn't a nomadic lifestyle also be unnecessary?
There would be no reason to constantly move in search of food and resources if they are plentiful around you. If an environment is rich enough to support a group of peoples more or less perpetually, over time their structures will become more permanent.
Populations will grow (so long as resources remain plentiful) and with this growth in population comes the need for (and increased opportunity for) innovation. People will naturally want to make things easier for themselves and so technology will develop (Think Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if my main concern is finding berries, I'm not thinking about inventing the pulley). Cities will spring up in areas where these natural resources are concentrated.
Imagine for example a tribe who's main source of food was fishing (I believe the act of fishing pre-dates agriculture and would count as 'hunting'.) If the river they set up their camp at NEVER runs out of fish, why would they move? Given that they have unlimited food, why WOULDN'T they expand?
[Answer]
You may be interested in the following
'Stratification and social structure
The Northwest Coast was the outstanding exception to the anthropological truism that hunting and gathering cultures—or, in this case, fishing and gathering cultures—are characterized by simple technologies, sparse possessions, and small egalitarian bands. In this region food was plentiful; less work was required to meet the subsistence needs of the population than in farming societies of comparable size, and, as with agricultural societies, the food surpluses of the Northwest encouraged the development of social stratification. The region’s traditional cultures typically had a ruling elite that controlled use rights to corporately held or communal property, with a “house society” form of social organization. The best analogues for such cultures are generally agreed to be the medieval societies of Europe, China, and Japan, with their so-called noble houses.'
From [link](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Northwest-Coast-Indian)
and
'Property owned by a lineage included rights to certain salmon streams, trapping sites, patches of edible plants and tobacco, stands of cedar, bird rookeries, stretches of coastline and house sites in the winter village. Management of the lineage's property was in the hands of the lineage chief.'
[link](http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/haida-native-group/)
But no metallurgy, chemistry, or wheel. It was the discovery of these three, not the means of food production, that determined technological development. The wheel lead to screws, pulleys, gears, and mechanical advantage, all necessary for machines. And none of them relied on farming to be developed.
[Answer]
This is a chicken and egg kind of problem. Civilization allowed for more efficient farming and the development of technology, but agriculture was necessary for civilization, at least as we know it. It was not merely a factor of how plentiful food is. Hunter gatherer societies were very labor intensive societies. This left very little time for thought, experimentation and invention. A good hunt meant down time for the hunters, but that down time was invested in tanning hides, scouting the next camp location, preparing for the next hunt and resting. Hunting in those days could often entail days of tracking, and a return trip carrying a very heavy load of meat. That's when a hunt was successful. Not all hunts are. So there were lean times, hungry times.
Even if food was plentiful, the necessary proteins for intellectual development in the young and to feed those big brains of ours requires meat.The Winter especially since there was no such thing as a supermarket and few plants could be saved to get through the winter until we started harvesting grain and turning them into flour.
As such, no. Hunting required a very mobile society. Mobility meant sacrificing the kinds of tools necessary to develop metals, glass, and similar crucial technological breakthroughs needed to develop a complex society. Gathering alone would not provide sufficient nutrients. Even if a gatherer group were given sufficient plant varieties and a means to grow plants year round, the work required to harvest the plants and turn them into food prior to technological advancements was a heavy investment. Without domesticated animals, even more difficult. Without agriculture there was no way to feed the domesticated animals. Imagine spending 12 hours a day just to feed yourself then needing to devote yet more hours to find food for your animals. It is just not practical with most species.
Without hunting, the skills necessary to capture and the travel necessary to provide exposure to young orphans of those species would not have happened. Agriculture and the domestication of animals were two interlocked and necessary steps to build civilization. If you look at regions in the world where complex societies never developed, each of them failed to domesticate animals for work or did not domesticate many animals. Europeans and Asians and the Middle East domesticated an array of species. Not just horses and cattle, but also dogs, cats, geese, sheep, goats, oxen and others.
Domestication of animals were necessary to provide the meat component of the diet and the muscle to exponentially increase our work output. Even more importantly was the acquisition of the ability to digest cheese. The Roman empire was only possible because of cheese and grain. That was the staples of Roman soldiers, merchants, messengers, and citizens who traveled. Cheese kept through the winter and was an invaluable source of nutrition. Grains also stored for long periods. Gatherers would have to rely on seasonal sources. Feast and famine would stunt growth, brain development, cognitive functioning at times in the year as well as leave them vulnerable to deadly famines as the gatherers exhausted entire species of plants in a region. Agriculture allowed for controlled expansion of the plant species populations. If you want more wheat, plant more, more barley, plant more. The limits were manpower, land and water.Gatherers lacked such control. If they exercised it they would become an agrarian society.
This answer is only applicable to humans and similar species. A species which makes it's own food. For example mobile plants, that is a more interesting question. If these critters did not need to hunt for food, then the development of intelligence would likely be slower. Intelligence and an omnivorous or carnivorous diet almost go hand in hand. Very few herbivores develop anything approaching sentience, at least on Earth. Admittedly this is a very small sample of the likely countless species scattered throughout the universe. Having to out think prey however is the primary driver in intelligence. As such it is unlikely many plant species evolved rapid intelligence. In particular the kinds of intelligence we prize and accept as measures of sentience. There has to be an evolutionary driver to make intelligence a valuable survival trait.
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Some posters have made some very good points.
However, all have missed the point that the adoption of farming didn't do the peoples of Central America and western South America any good. They still got whomped by the technology of the Europeans. So there HAS to be something more at play than just the development of farming and domestication of animals. [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution) 'Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP).[12]'
It is not hunter-gathering or farming per se that is important, it is the degree to which people decide to divide the labor. There is very good archaeological evidence for your 'spear' idea @grimm the opiner, - that one person became adept at making very good spear heads for the tribe. It is not the form of food collection and production that is important, it is the population size. There is a critical mass at which people can start specializing. It is this specialization that leads to development and improvement. Someone who specializes in making good spears gets better and better, and passes it on to others. Education, learning, passing on knowledge. Guilds and craftsmen. That is what is important. Farming, after all, is just a form of specialization in food gathering, and herding is just a specialization of hunting. For small populations, farming just does not make any sense. No advantage over hunter-gathering. It takes a critical mass for farming and domestication to be efficient. In the Middle East, the population had reached a critical mass. They had a head start on population growth. Specialist food producers took care of the food, specialist clothing producers took care of garments, specialist builders took care of housing, and so on and so forth. But again, this takes a critical mass of population
My vote goes for fishing. as an alternative to farming. It leads to boat-building guilds, craftsmen for making fishing nets. Bigger and better boats, so fewer fishermen can provide food for many others, allowing for greater specialization. The indigenous peoples of the West Coast never made it to a critical mass for technological development. Had the West Coast peoples reached such a critical mass, and developed such specialist skills, they too would have become technologically advanced.
it was the discovery of metal working and forging that lead to our current technology, not the means of food gathering. These developments were made possible because the population had reached a critical mass that could support specialized trades, and allowed individuals to develop technology instead of having to spend their time on subsistence food collecting. Had the West Coast peoples reached such a critical mass, and developed such specialist skills, they too would have become technologically advanced. [link](http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/metal.shtml)
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Well our civilisation is a producer civilization. But I think even If you begin in a hunter gatherer civilization , it would soon become a producer of the meat which it is what it's like now in a way. So it's a great hypothetical question with many ways of branching storyline. In my opinion I guess yes. Hunter gatherer civilisation can develop into complex civilisation with advanced technology to zap cows with a gun for instant delicious BBQ. Yum!
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Advancing to farming is not the determinant of advancing civilization. That's a capitalist bias. The development of artistic expression and culture, knowledge and science, is why our civilization developed. And the pressures of population expansion. The more humans, the more smart people are around, the faster civilization develops. The availability of resources are the limit to population expansion, not the means of obtaining them.
Civilization advances on the back of its culture - the arts. As culture develops, so to does the level of civilization. Irrespective of the means of production of food, the advancement of art and culture - theater, writing, entertainment, leisure, discovery, knowledge, philosophy, the pursuit of happiness - will push civilization. The limitation on the advance of civilization is the availability of resources, the depths of the educational system, and the advancement of science.
Hunter-gatherers from 8,000 BC, plunked from their cave and dropped into a home in the mid-1800's, would really have no problems adjusting. Everything was done, basically the same way. Food was cooked with fire, water was drawn by hand, and people still traveled by foot or by animal. The tools were just stronger, sharper variations of what they had in the cave, but they did the same job in the same essential way. Some skills re-training and familiarization would be all that was involved. Farming or hunter-gathering made no difference. But only 150 years later? Nothing was done the same. It was science and technology, not any change from hunter-gatherer to farming, that made the difference.
In fact, when cultures do not need to worry about survival, when food and shelter are plentiful, humans spend more of their time and energy on cultural pursuits. Just look at the rich people of today.
However, the civilization will certainly take on a different direction. Look towards ancient Rome for your answer (not primitive societies). When resources are abundant, fighting for territoriality is lessened, and so the developments in civilization will be in the direction of artistic expression instead of weaponry and defense. Jewelry and adornment. Creativity, writing, philosophy, housing, theater, entertainment, dancing, schooling, teaching. Even hunter-gatherers require religious comfort, a sense of belonging, companionship, communication. Human knowledge and intelligence was an evolutionary biological trend. The fact that its evolutionary path lead to farming and cultivation is an artifact. What is oft forgotten is that when the hunter-gatherers returned from their quests, they celebrated in a community, and artistic expression and communication survived even in caves. Humans started farming BECAUSE we were a social, communal animal, NOT the other way around. We would have developed our culture with or without farming. It would just be different.
Farming allowed humans the freedom to pursue artistic expression once our needs were satisfied. One could easily make the claim that we pursued farming in order to allow us the time to pursue artistic expression. If our needs were satisfied WITHOUT the need for farming, we would have gone in the same direction anyway.
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IMHO, our cultural is the result. The H-G life style did not fit for complex structure as the dependence of nature provide. For larger community, it require manage and independence which lead to our agricultural revolution. For more detail, please read "Homo sapien" by Yuval Noah Harari
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Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series explores just such a society:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax>
I don't know how plausible it is, the Author is definitely applying what I consider to be wacky social/ideological assumptions, but I didn't find the world obviously implausible on reading.
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YES. Any Civilization player will understand this.
Imagine you re playing a game of civilization where each tile produces an infinite amount of food. You ll still evolve your civilization to an advanced level. Because if food is not a problem, then the problem becomes other humans/tribes/civilizations.
If the population grows exponentially, eventually people will start fighthing for land/ressources.
Conflict triggers technological advances. Technological advances need specialized workers. You ll end up with war,cities,trade, science culture,religion,industry,etc...
I think that even if you handwave how food/water can be magically mass produced without farming you ll end up with a society pretty similar to the Western industrialized civilization where food production is a minor concern.
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[
A while ago [this question on medieval travel](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120007/40408) was asked. I looked at it again today and it got me thinking about situations that would mandate travel in other settings, in particular what would force individuals to travel across interstellar distances. Obviously the people furnishing the option *to* travel those distances must themselves be involved so ships' crews are on the list of those who must travel. Also if there is interstellar colonisation then obviously colonists have to travel between the stars to get to new worlds.
**So the question becomes; in a society spread across interstellar space what, if any, professions and/or situations, apart from crewing an interstellar vessel or colonising a new world, would absolutely *require* individuals to travel between worlds?**
Good answers will include, and justify, only professions which can't possibly be practiced in a single solar system and situations that can't be resolved without leaving them lightyears behind.
Context notes, the setting has:
* completely safe, but quirky, non-instantaneous FTL Travel (average speed is 4 times the speed of light).
* no independent FTL Communication, the fastest way to get a message anywhere is usually by jumpship. Mailman is a secondary role of all legitimate ships' communication officers.
* travel for individuals is not free but it is, safe, cheap, and almost unrestricted (getting on or off a planet/habitat/station that has warrants out for your arrest is tricky but otherwise travel is normally easy, interstellar warrants are exceedingly rare; they're too awkward to enforce).
* humans are spread across hundreds of lightyears but have only densely colonised the star systems with 15-20 lightyears of Sol.
* large scale [interstellar] conflict is almost unheard of.
* individual star systems tend toward self-sufficiency but there is an overarching military-industrial command economy that ties all the heavily populated worlds together.
* trade in raw materials and fully integrated technological artifacts (like spaceships and orbital habitats and factories made to standard patterns) is reasonably common; this is the main reason that travel for individuals is so cheap and available, moving people is easy when you usually ship things the size of O'Neil cylinders.
* there is still material scarcity, some chemical elements are just too rare to create over supply in the current political-economic climate.
* while leisure time is generally more available most people still work for a living most places, just not as constantly or intensively as in the modern western world in most cases.
Important notes on Jumpships:
1. space travel is instantaneous for the ships and those aboard them but time still passes in the universe outside so jumping four lightyears is less than the blink of an eye for the ship but takes an average of a year to the rest of the universe. As far as anyone travelling is concerned they are in one place and then instantly at their destination. Single direct jumps are only possible between the closest of star systems but travelling tens of lightyears takes only days for those travelling while decades can go by in the outside universe.
2. the energy for making jumps is effectively free. It's not actually free, the equipment is expensive to build, and the energy does have to come from somewhere; a bill will be presented in due course. The point is established jumpships don't have to pay for fuel etc... just system maintenance.
3. jumpships are huge and because any given jump is relatively cheap they often travel below loading capacity, this leaves a lot of space that can be used for modular passenger accommodation at need.
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Migration is permanent movement to a different place. Migration can be described by push and pull factors - things that push you away from one location and things that pull you toward a new location.
**Push factors**
Threats to life- A planet wide threat, such as an asteroid heading towards your planet, threatens the life of all of the inhabitants. Physical conflict on the planet, such as a looming war, puts you at risk of death. A specific threat, such as an allergy to the local flora, affects you or a small number of people.
Threats to wellness- An economical problem, like losing your job, requires you to leave for a new one. A health problem, such as lack of medicine, threatens your long-term survival.
**Pull factors**
Better opportunities- Better economic conditions, such as a better job, will improve your living conditions. New technologies, such as better automated transportation, make life easier.
Better safety- Better prevention technology, such as stronger building materials, makes accidents less likely. Better care technology, such as improved hospitals, make life with an existing condition longer and happier.
All of these factors combine to motivate people to change location. Humans are logical beings [citation not possible], most humans will not go out of their way to do something that is not important to them. Without reasons for people to move from place to place, people will not move, especially if the destination is a long distance away and is a foreign place like another planet.
**As for short-term migration:**
(Sorry if this part of the answer looks weird or flows together awkwardly. This was a discussion with @Ash in the comments, and I am editing this post in case the comments are deleted.) This section includes some comments which made incorrect assumptions about the question (these were my fault for not reading the question carefully enough), so here is the **TLDR: just skip to the last paragraph**
Why people would travel for short-term reasons:
People would travel for the same reasons people travel today. Sometimes they have jobs based on travel services (shipping, uber, etc.). Sometimes it is cheaper to live somewhere and commute somewhere else for work. Sometimes people travel because of connections (going to see family, attending a sporting event, going to a meeting of an organization you are in). If interstellar travel is cheap and easy, I don't think you will have problems with travel volume. If your universe isn't homologous (all parts are exactly the same), and most universes are not homologous, people will travel to different places because there are different opportunities and things happening in different places.
@Ash asked why the universe would not be homologous:
Without FTL communication, it's faster for people to meet in person or send a letter instead of an email or text. That alone means people have to meet somewhere. They have to choose a specific place. Then businesses move into the area to provide services for the people meeting there. A positive feedback cycle occurs. People start to meet in a place because of the services there. Now you have an area with more services than other areas, and a core and periphery model forms. Certain services are available because there is more business for them there. Now, opportunity will be different depending on location.
@Ash pointed out I had overlooked the fact that the travel would be much longer for observers due to relativistic speeds. I had glanced at the "instant" in the post and had thought that all travel was instant for people inside and out of the ship. Here is a reason society would abandon the permanent settlements norm that we are used to in favor of nomadism:
I can see two possibilities: Either there are very few people who travel, either as a job, or out of necessity, or society becomes nomadic, not as a necessity, but just to experience other worlds. In the second case, society is remade into a world where almost everyone leaves everything they have known behind and explores the colonized worlds. People take up jobs wherever they go, staying only long enough to see the sights and pay for their next trip, and then they set off for another planet. It isn't important that people will never meet again because everyone else is traveling too. I see it sort of like a city- you interact with people for a very short time, and you will probably never see them again. If society changed in this way, lots of people would travel all the time.
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**It Won't**
I believe that Post-Colonial Interstellar Travel will be relatively uncommon event for a number of reasons...
* A great advantage of colonizing worlds is that it finally defeats one of our species' oldest threats: the pandemic-capable fatal infection. Finally, the human race is not facing extinction at the hands of a single organism. Unless that organism joins us on our journey to the stars. If interstellar travel is uncommon, then every colonized planet becomes a quarantined safe zone from the biological threats of the rest of the universe.
* Secondly, it is possible that the time-dilation issues which complicate fractional light speed travel will continue (or even intensify) in FTL. Anyone choosing to travel between stars will lose their home world to the past. The people and culture which they leave behind will be history should they ever return. All interstellar journeys are likely to remain one-way tickets.
Additionally, time dilation makes travel between stars dangerous on a political level. At the time of your departure, you may have reasonable proof that the government of your target planet will be amenable to your arrival, but a lot can change during a journey, which from the point of view of your destination may take hundreds of years. To put this in perspective, if an FTL ship arrived today with a subjective time dilation of only 300 years, the world they would be expecting to find would be pre-industrial. If their travel visas had gotten lost during the last 30 decades, they might find themselves welcomed by the business end of our Star Wars defense satellite lasers.
* Finally and perhaps most importantly, post-colonial interstellar travel is unnecessary. Throughout our history, we have repeatedly built thriving societies which met all of our species needs, using only the resources of a single planet. In the near future, we will start mining our solar system for its riches and there we will likely find that everything our species will ever NEED, is already here in orbit of our single star.
Every profession which has ever existed is the product of a single planetary society. Every great artwork, great writing or great invention is the product of human minds which never left our planet's orbit. Whatever happiness and fulfillment which humanity has found has all been found right here. And the same will be true of all the other planets we will someday own.
Humans are home(world) bodies. They tend to stay where you plant them.
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* **Trade**: as much as can automate trivial tasks, if you want to be sure that your goods are delivered and paid in proper order and for the right price, it is better if you, merchant, travel with the goods. Along the trip you can also catch information which can help your business or that can be sold for a good price later on.
* **Diplomacy**: Waiting years just for having an answer to an "Hello Dimitri" is not the most effective way to settle a quarrel which can escalate, better spend few years once and talk face to face. Also, this would prevent hackers to spoil the communication.
* **Exploration/tourism**: The UV shining beaches on Sgombugulus IV are the non plus ultra for rich wannabes who want to boost their social media accounts at the cost of few thousand credits. And don't forget the Methane falls on Niagara VI!
* **Espionage**: It might be about knowing accurate information on the industrial strategy of one of your competitor, or about uncovering the secret recipe of that soda drink or even knowing what are the rumors about the foreign politics of Madonius, having a pair of eyes and hears in the right place allows you having information not readily available via official media.
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The general answer is going to be some form of `gig job`. These are short, temporary jobs that require the person (or team) to be on site.
Note: "temporary" could still be measured in `earth years`
These jobs are not permanent positions. However, the job requires a specialized skill that requires the person to be on site and the job can't come to them.
A few examples
* Auditors
+ government auditors
+ "new boss" checking out the factory
* Negotiators ( L.Dutch )
+ Diplomats
+ traders
* Diagnostic Engineers
+ the specialist team sent to fix a slight misalignment of your Death Star cannon
+ the team sent to investigate a spaceship crash
+ doctors that specialize in outbreaks of space plague.
* Entertainers
+ Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey would have all sorts of animals to show off.
+ The curator for the traveling exhibit of "The Mummies of Zuban 5"
+ Galactic Cup contenders (sports)
* Vacationers ( L.Dutch )
* Explorers ( L.Dutch )
+ xeno-biologists
* Those that take advantage of poor enforcement of interstellar warrants
+ space pirates ( my first answer )
+ drug lords
* Those that enforce interstellar warrants
+ Detective Billy Mack from the star system Texas
* Humanitarian
+ red-cross/red crescent
+ U.N. peace keepers
* not-so-humanitarian
+ Blackwater Security Consulting
+ really big game hunters (eg T-Rex hunters/Meg fishers)
* lifestyle choice (edit - added this one)
+ nomads
+ gypsies
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# Almost no one under these conditions will travel
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> (average speed is 4 times the speed of light)
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>
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That means **a year** of travel from here to Earth's *nearest not-the-sun star.* Calculating time ship-board is meaningless, as once you've got FTL travel time dilation calculations don't work. Usually in these situations Ship-Time and Universe-Time flow 1:1 (because fiction!), which would mean a year on board for those people making the trip. Not exactly...thrilling stuff. Just keeping the crew *fed* is going to require a significant amount of cargo space.
At such distances and time scales, the only communication (e.g. letters) are going to be of sporadic personal or scientific in nature ("colony's going well, how have you been?"), albeit expensive (most letters will likely travel as negligible bulk on a cargo ship carrying a few million tons of something else). You won't have an effective "galactic" government that can control and enforce laws: remember the turnaround time on stuff like "help we're being invaded by aliens" is 2 years (even if the crew experiences no time!) and things like "You aren't following our laws, prepare to be invaded" are virtually meaningless. What's central authority going to do, show up in 4 years to put down a rebellion that's been over for three?
You could have trade, but it'd be for either resources you literally can't get (but if a delivery goes missing you'll survive: next one's not coming for a year). Even at 4:1 time dilation it would still be 3 months ship-board journey for every 4 light years traveled, which is *almost* comparable to current ocean shipping (where are small, often can't even communicate in a single language, and live in comparative squalor; [its been compared to living in prison](https://longreads.com/2013/08/26/like-being-in-prison-with-a-salary-the-secret-world/)).
>
> but have only densely colonised the star systems with 15-20 lightyears of Sol.
>
>
>
I...hate to tell you this, but that's like 4 potentially habitable star systems in that range. There's [about 150 stars within that distance from Earth](http://www.solstation.com/stars/s20ly.htm) but most are red or brown dwarfs:
>
>
> ```
> Nearby Celestial Objects by Type, Number, and Mass
>
> Spectral or Number Sum of min
> Luminosity Type within 20ly solar masses
>
> O - Blue Stars 0 0.00
> B - Blue White Stars 0 0.00
> A - Bluish White Stars 2 3.84
> F - Yellowish White Stars 1 1.50
> G - Yellow-Orange Stars 7 6.76
> K - Orange-Red Stars 15 11.84
> M - Red Stars 88-90 21.32
> M,L,T, Y - Brown Dwarfs 15-30 <1.20
> D - White Dwarfs 7 4.30
> Total Objects > 150 > 51.46
>
> ```
>
>
The 8 yellow stars are pretty much your only targets. Using [Wikipedia's list of exoplanets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets) we find 5 "potentially habitable" ones within 15 light years and 2 more out to 20 and another 3 ranging out to 30ly. That's pretty sparse with *grueling* ~8-12 year travel times (one side of inhabited space to the other); even between nearest-neighbors it might be as much as 4 years.
The *only* fiction I can think of that featured space travel on these kinds of time scales is *The Deepness in the Sky* where the Qeng Ho (humans of primarily Chinese decent) slow-boat it from system to system, trading where they can, helping inhabited planets rebuild after the collapse of civilization where they can't (because in a few hundred years they will be worth trading with again). And they primarily trade in technology. Not gadgets, but blueprints. Knowledge. They'll buy and transport *things* too, but those are purchased by the Qeng Ho for use by the Qeng Ho.
They do it as a safety net against humanity nuking itself into oblivion and going extinct, not because its profitable. As a result, they have a massive knowledgebase capable of kick-starting any planet to reasonable levels of technological comfort in decades (instead of millennia). Doesn't matter what you have access to, the Qeng Ho can work out an action plan, give you the right tech, and come back in a hundred years to see what Neat Stuff you invented while they were gone.
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# Because people want to
It has always been a little curious to me why people, whenever this question comes up, assume that since there are few rational reasons to travel between the stars (other than the mentioned one-way colony transports) people won't do it.
I know it's anecdotal, but of all the people I know (including myself) that have traveled recently, *not a single person had a rational reason to do so*. They traveled for leisure, they traveled to explore, they traveled hoping to find (even if temporary) a better place, they traveled hoping to escape (even if temporary) their current situation. Not one of them had a reason to travel that @HenryTaylor wouldn't be able to argue is unnecessary.
If you have ever met a backpacker you should know that travel is far more than a means to an end. Why would someone leave their family and all the comforts of home for over year, to basically live like a homeless person amidst strangers in a foreign land? Why did the [mars one scam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One) get 2700 applicants? Because people don't care about rational arguments, they care about the prospect of adventure and the possibility of *simply being in another place*. Even if odds are that place is worse than the place they departed from.
Travel *is not mandated by circumstances*, it is sought after by humans in the same way love is sought after by humans. Not because we need it to survive, but because we need it to feel alive.
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**Getting Rid of People You Don't Like**
Lets say you run a planet whose main industry specializes in ultra-high end technological goods. Fully immersive VR sets, star-ship nav-computers, automated toaster dog walker combos etc etc. Business is good, trade is strong, and your people are happy. Well... most of them. A Luddite cult of anti-tech extremists keep insisting that you revert the planet back to it's natural state and rebuild a new naturalistic society based on smoking space weed and writing stream of consciousness novels. Now, these people haven't started anything violent or anything overtly disruptive *yet* but you can see it from here. Stock prices are already dropping a few points in anticipation of the violent riots and images on the news of your police force hosing down hippies with space pepper-spray. So, why not find them a new planet, we'll name it neo-nirvana, and we'll even bankroll a ship and colonization effort to get them off our planet and out of our hair. (Or maybe just have the secret police round them up and send them against their will if you wanna go the dystopian route.)
This method is how a significant portion of the planet was colonized by the European powers. Criminals along with political, religious, and racial minorities who were causing problems by existing and not agreeing with whatever the leadership wanted were usually quietly shipped off to new continents. Its a highly effective way to colonize new places and get rid of the people you don't like at the same time.
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Malthus.
Now, it might not be starvation, but to a certain extent there will be better opportunities in some eras of a solar system colonization than there are elsewhere.
With a 40 light year diameter, it is 10 years to go to any other system. It turns out that system X has a great demand for asteroid base construction crews, and 10 years there will earn you a fortune back here.
So you pick up your family (or yourself if single), blink there, work for 10 years in the crappy conditions for great pay, then blink back. You now have a serious nest egg.
It is possible some systems have serious overpopulation issues and others are underpopulated; moving to become a colonist then becomes attractive. Move to planet X and get your own 100 km2 ranch!
Generally, there are serious population flows for economic reasons on Earth when the income on one side reaches 2x the income on the other. With the time gap you may require a bit higher income multiplier, but it probably still exists.
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A second possibility is that people can use this to exploit the most powerful force in the universe using the time-skip.
You may have projects that take decades to complete; building asteroid habitats, domes, terraforming bodies, disassembling comets, etc. If they can be done via automation or by low paid workers, the wealthy might want to start those projects off *then skip forward in time*. Have projects in two solar systems 5 years apart. Spend 6 months in one, jump to the other, spend 6 months, jump back.
After 4 years subjective you'll have 40 years of progress on both projects, done by a mixture of the fast-time underclass and robotics.
Drop it to 1 month each stop and you are living at a 60:1 time ratio. Over 20 years you get to experience 1200 years of profit from your endeavours.
Compound interest of investments and projects can turn you into a hegemon. With a thermodynamic distribution of wealth and no practical limit to their lifespan, these temporal kings and queens will rule over the economies of the settled system from their jump-ship thrones.
Their children, raised by entire cities dedicated to the line, will compete and work towards the success of each petty ruler's economic empire. Those that succeed will in turn be lifted up to the near immortality of jump-time.
Of course, this will take a long time to pull off. Early in the human empire's history there will be a few people starting on it. And many will fail, as economic and political tides shift under their feet while they jump cross the universe.
Short of revolution, eventually capital itself becomes a monopoly of the temporal kings. They can afford a ROI that is tiny compared to anyone else as they accelerate their forward time travel, and they stitch up all of the capital and squeeze out everyone else.
You could imagine something akin to share cropping, but with *all money*. Like a feudal system where all the land is owned by the nobles and you cannot produce food or survive without their consent, shortly (in terms of the kings) all capital (money) could be owned by the temporal kings.
The temporal kings are unable to actively manage "all money" effectively, much like nobles are unable to farm their own land, so they'd permit share croppers to use their money in exchange for giving (say) 90% of the profits back to the real owners.
The leisure-based world would choke, as more and more resources get claimed for absentee landlords. Those who don't engage in generational savings end up crowded out of the resource marketplace. The temporal kings don't consume anything, so their amassed fortunes just keep on growing. Excess resources pile up, but the kings are willing to wait a few centuries for them to be used.
People who aren't useful to the temporal kings stop being allocated resources. When they want to buy something, like an asteroid or a robot farmer, they find that the temporal kings offer better terms for it. Individual kings start long-term plans to near monopolize commodities, like food/security/oxygen, with a high marginal incentive to purchase. Oligopolies form, and the kings have more in common with each other than they do with the mayflies.
In the end, economic production nearly shuts down. The kings continue to live in relativistic time. Servants come along with them. The mayflies are long gone, their buzzing faded into history. Long term projects, like terraforming mars into a garden, are within the grasp of individual kings. At 1 hour every 40 years, over a year the king can see 1/3 of a million years pass.
Huge automated infrastructures grind away at shooting comets at Mars, warming it with massive solar mirrors, and seeding it with life. When bugs happen, a prince goes into 1 day:40 year time, and his servants go into 1 month:40 year time, and their servants go into 2 year:40 years, all the way down to mayflies created and supervised to fix the problem.
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>
> getting on or off a planet/habitat/station that has warrants out for
> your arrest is tricky but otherwise travel is normally easy,
> interstellar warrants are exceedingly rare; **they're too awkward to
> enforce**
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This screams:
# Space Pirates
Your base of operations is in one star system; you raid other star systems as you desire.
You could raid the star system that hosts your base of operation. But, they'll have a warrant out for your arrest ASAP. This conundrum forces you to travel to other star systems to do you job.
Since you don't have a warrant at your base star system, you can come and go as you please. Since warrants are `too awkward to enforce`, you don't have to worry (too much) about getting one from a different star system. And if your base star system does receive one, bribery works wonders. If that doesn't work, you can easily move your base of operation to a different star system.
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**Travel Agent**
A friend of mine professionally is required to visit and write about places for her job.
She travels all the time.
A few months at a time of travelling wouldn't be unreasonable when you need to explore and write about entire planets at each destination, you wouldn't return home though, you'd write the articles and send them on with the next ship headed to your employer. I'd imagine you'd travel with at least a couple other people though, cover more ground, look out for one another in strange cultures and frontier worlds.
On that note:
**Writer**
You don't really *need* to travel to be a writer, but it's not uncommon to use Travel as a way to get away from distractions.
Amtrak have actually provided a special [Writer's Residency Program](http://blog.amtrak.com/meet-writers-selected-2016-amtrak-residency-program/) for exactly this purpose.
Hypothetically spending a few months aboard a ship would be a great way to complete mid/long term projects without distraction.
**Courier**
Some items simply cannot be trusted to unknown hands. A Parcel going via a starship might pass through the uncaring hands of dozens of deck-hands and dock-workers, postal workers and minions before finally getting to its destination.
Some things are worth paying extra for, and having someone babysit your critically important documentation or prototype technology all the way to its intended recipient might cost a fortune, but for an interstellar corporation paying through the nose for a trusted courier may well be worth it.
**Journeyman**
In some parts of europe there is an old tradition of travelling and apprenticing to a Master Craftsman. This is typically a single static role, but there's also a travelling variant where the journeyman migrates from town to town to learn many skills from multiple craftsmen.
[Borrowed from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman):
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> In parts of Europe, as in Late Medieval Germany, spending time as a wandering journeyman (Wandergeselle), moving from one town to another to gain experience of different workshops, was an important part of the training of an aspirant master. Carpenters and other artisans in German speaking countries have retained the tradition of traveling journeymen even today, but only a few still practice it. In France, wandering journeymen were known as compagnons.
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The future equivalent might be someone travelling from world to world, experiencing different cultures and learning unique trades of those worlds in order to gain life-experience before settling down to a particular trade and lifestyle.
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**People who want to travel to the future**
If the cost of a round trip ticket that takes days of ship time but gets you back home decades later is less than your living expenses for those decades, you could sell everything, invest it all (apart from what you spend on the ticket), and come home rich. Also, you'll be in the future.
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# When Humans are More Useful than Letters
### High Courts
If your hypothetical civilization has courts that have jurisdiction over multiple solar systems or indeed the entire civilization, then it would be necessary (due to a lack of real-time FTL communication) to transport individuals important to the trial to the location of the court - or to move the court to them! Either way, motion is necessary.
### Absolute secrecy
Imagine that you are an incredibly wealthy trade mogul. Your starships move between systems carrying countless materials, and it is rare that anyone from your company other than crews do so. However, you have extremely important information that requires the utmost secrecy. You don't trust the interstellar mail service, digital files carried by them, or rank and file crew members to carry it. So you or someone very close to you must cross the vast expanse due to this extenuating circumstance.
### Interstellar organizations
If your hypothetical civilization has a central government, or really any interstellar organizations, then it may send individuals to investigate questionable practices happening within their organization on a certain planet, or to send human resources to a faltering branch that needs help and management.
### Unique Experts
Suppose that on planet X, they mine a particular gas that isn't available anywhere else. Or it wasn't possible. Things have changed; pioneers have discovered planet Y, which has the exact same gas! The problem is that they have no idea how to mine it or how to coordinate their mining or what the best economic policy about it would be. So they might want to ship over an expert from planet Y.
### Education
No experts from planet X are willing to come and help out planet Y? No problem! Just send your smartest person to get educated over on planet X and bring their knowledge back.
### Diplomacy
It is very hard to negotiate treaties and trade deals via letter.
**Etc.**
# Personal Reasons
### Travel to the Future!
Someone would want to. We're curious creatures.
A more compelling reason to do this is for severe medical conditions with no modern cure; you might as well skip ahead and enjoy the presumably more advanced medical science of the farther future.
Some rich person would definitely do this in search of an eventual cure for mortality.
Another reason to travel to the future would be to wait for a more friendly political climate. Cyborg rights may not be quite up to scratch on planet X, so a bunch of sufficiently wealthy cyborgs may arrange to travel back and forth until their home world is more friendly to them.
A criminal may also wait for a more friendly climate for entirely more illicit reasons.
There may also be economic reasons; waiting until an investment or bank account grows very large by artificially traveling to the future. (though some nations may outlaw this for its potentially destabilizing effects.)
### Tourism
There are certain features of Earth so epic and so fascinating that even an interstellar citizen may want to see them, *especially* since interstellar travel is cheap. Things like the Grand Canyon. It's not unreasonable to assume that we may find similarly amazing natural features on other planets which would draw visitors.
Another reason to engage in tourism is for the sake of history. Some people may wish to go to particular historic sites on other planets, Earth especially.
### Religious Pilgrimage
Much as Muslims today embark on the Hajj to Mecca, Muslims of the future may do the same. Yet other religions may have similar convictions about particular places. Followers would be very motivated to engage in interstellar travel.
### Refugees
Individuals ruled over by an unfriendly government will obviously want to leave. Interstellar travel is one way of doing that. Still, they may initially move to another country on the same planet, but the government of the country will not necessarily want to take them in. The easy, relatively humane solution for the government receiving them? Ship the refugees to another planet!
And suppose that a horrific disaster occurs on planet A, and their ecology all but collapses, and almost everyone dies. There's nothing left to support the survivors, but there are a few ships still docked. I can't imagine most of the remaining survivors would wish to stay.
### Fugitives
Unsafe on your current planet, for any reason? Leaving it entirely makes it much, much harder for anyone to pursue or even find you.
### Ideology
People who wish to live in a place that matches their ideology may move to a planet where their ideas are well-received.
### Economic Opportunity
Planet X has run out of gas! Oh no! Well, good thing the industry is going strong on planet Y. Might as well move there.
### Curiosity
Why not?
**Etc.**
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If there are any interstellar governments they are likely to have space navies and also armies and marines.
Naturally an interstellar government would require that that anyone who is drafted into or voluntarily joins the military and naval forces be shipped to another system to garrison that system. Nobody would be permitted to be part of the garrison of their own system. Thus if their own system starts to revolt they won't be tempted to join the rebellion or be forced to crush the rebellion.
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## Escaping Exploitation
There are always those who scramble in search of a better life, away from the yoke of exploitation, unfair treatment or at least the perception of such. The earliest European settlers to what we now call America come to mind here. Such grievances can based in religion, politics or economics depending on what your story needs.
## Planting Flags
Armed conflict on a large scale might be unheard of, but presumably there is still non-violent competition between political blocs. The advent of safe FTL travel would trigger a gold rush of sorts(at least initially) as all the powers seek to claim as much territory as possible, if only because they're afraid of losing out. With a galaxy for the taking, status and prestige can easily become tied to how many planets/systems you've occupied.
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There are reasons to travel that aren't specifically economic in nature. Other answers point out that artists may choose to travel to share their work. Others include hands-on type of training such as surgical techniques, new forms of meditation or religion.
Many difficult journeys throughout human history have been made to fulfill religious purposes. Pilgrimages, missionaries visiting remote tribes to evangelize, religious conclaves and such.
With all the new societies created, new branches of knowledge, philosophies, organizational approaches will be developed. Some of them will prove to be far more successful than what exist on other worlds. Things that take decades to learn in-person will not translate well to light-speed communication between star systems light-years apart.
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> Professions which can't possibly be practiced in a single solar system
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That would be any job that studies a facet of the cosmos, with ***exo*** in front of it. E.g., exobiologist, exochemist, exogeologist... etc. If they want to be on the cutting edge, leaving the solar system is *literally* one of their job requirements.
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**Permanent Relocation**
Travel is quite "cheap" since even though it takes a long time from an outside perspective but takes zero time from the point of view of the traveler.
The time cost must be counted in "lost years." There will be very few travelers who have wage type jobs. Also, don't expect that job to still be around in X years.
So, vacations are only for those who don't have to work for their money. Even then there is a significant risk for the wealthy. What if conditions change and they are not around to react to the changes? Imagine coming back after the real estate crash. So only those with the most stable foundations will likely risk a vacation of that sort.
Most travel will likely be permanent or semi-permanent relocation. If you aren't expecting to come back (or expect to restart from scratch upon return), the time cost is minimal.
Another issue is the risk of innovation. When you get back, everything you know may be outdated.
Look at the filk song "Pushin the Speed of Light" ([youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6LiVJkwyA&list=RDRnRwgzjFLpE&index=13)) for an example of the time cost.
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**WAR**
Let's just be honest, someone's going to want to try it.
**Mining**
As dumb as [unobtainium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium) was in Avatar, it's actually grounded in engineering principles. If for some reason a rare material that solves a lot of problems in terms of engineering is discovered in some galaxy that takes 50 years to get to, someone is going to want to travel 50 years to go get it. Keep in mind that these materials could make some very stupid things possible, and that with the human population likely ballooning after being able to fill multiple solar systems - not just planets - statistically speaking, there's probably going to be one rich person dumb enough to try getting it.
Just think about what a large asteroid's worth of anti-matter could do. There might not really be a reason to go get it, but given a large enough population someone's probably going to take the money hole "bait".
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I'm writing a story where aliens are using humanity like a botnet to do hyper complex calculations - each infested human has a program running in their subconscious brain that does a small part of the overall computation. They're doing this in order to find a habitable planet, since they've more or less depleted their homeworld. Their system of FTL travel requires nearly perfect accuracy in terms of coordinates, so they're running simulations to be absolutely certain the next planet they reach is habitable before using up expensive resources to get there. At the moment, most of the aliens live on a mothership orbiting Earth, while a few are disguised as humans and some have been on Earth for 20 years.
That last point is where my problem lies - if some aliens are on Earth, why don't they all settle there permanently? Clearly they're capable of living on Earth for extended periods of time, but for the story I need them to have ruled out Earth as their home the moment they arrived. Also you would assume they ran some simulations prior to coming here, since their FTL is so expensive. What about Earth or our solar system would be hard to predict and makes living here untenable, without being impossible in the short term?
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# "It's the smell!"
-- Smith
I think the easiest answer is that there is something in Earth's biology that disagrees with them... something that can be "managed" with continuous medical intervention, but would be really annoying for them to try to settle permanently without completely terraforming the planet. Imagine, for example, that 99% of the aliens experience the equivalent of severe allergies when in contact with our biome. Sure, maybe they can damp it down to a manageable level with the equivalent of antihistamines, but could you imagine living for *generations* under those conditions? Well, neither can they.
So why *don't* they just terraform the planet? Well, aside from the possibility that they'd rather not exterminate us (as mentioned in other answers), maybe they don't have the technology, or even if they could, maybe it would take thousands or even millions of years for the planet to become tolerable again after sterilizing it (and this assumes that they're *sure* they could fix whatever caused the problem in the first place) before the planet would be worth living on. It's quicker and easier to just roll the dice again.
It seems plausible that there could be some subtle biological thing that their models didn't predict that would be suitable. I also think suffering from near-constant hayfever would make for good story-telling.
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**The aliens are humans.**
The aliens did do the calculations and they did find a habitable planet, 100,000 years ago. They are depleting their homeworld - here.
On arriving on Earth and settling the colonists, the mothership immediately started working on finding the next world. These calculations take a very long time.
Almost none of the humans on earth remember their alien heritage. Those that do are part of a secret society.
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The aliens evolved on a planet on which photosynthesis never developed. Oxygen is a poison to them. Some of their least susceptible adults can handle it for limited periods of time with medical support. Earth is not a healthy place for them long term and they cannot raise their children in our atmosphere.
Removing the oxygen would be particularly difficult, because it is continually replaced by photosynthesizing organisms. It would not be enough to wipe out green plants. The upper layers of the oceans, and earth has a lot of ocean, are teeming with Cyanobacteria.
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# 1. They actually *cannot* live on Earth for extended periods of time
Your premise is that Earth should be a candidate, since:
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> "[...] some have been on Earth for 20 years. [...] Clearly they're capable of living on Earth for extended periods of time, but for the story I need them to have ruled out Earth as their home the moment they arrived. "
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However, you seem to be ignoring their alien-ness and looking at things from a human perspective. I propose they're *not* capable of such feat, and there could be several reasons why this is so, I'll try to brainstorm some.
## Living here would shorten their lifespan
The 20 years they've been here, in their perspective, is a *very* short time, and the ones who are on Earth are committing an act of self-sacrifice. It could be that oxygen/water/sunlight/some form of radiation common around the Sun's class of star, but uncommon around other classes (call your astrophysicist buddy, maybe he knows what it is) causes their bodies to deteriorate much faster than they're supposed to, and in less than a century, they will die a heroic death. A mere *century*, I say, for a species whose usual lifespan is measured in *millenia!*
If you need a motivation, think of [humans who volunteer for disaster intervention in high risk areas](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607). They know it'll shorten their lifespan and they'll do it for the greater good. Perhaps they're already very old. Or they're convicts who expect their lifespan will be shortened much less than their sentence.
## Earth is *almost* perfect—if only it had some [unobtainium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium)...
Even though a small colony can live in Earth perfectly, their technology needs an energy source *much* larger than anything available on the Solar System. Perhaps they'd require a star with much higher energy output than the Sun, around which they can build their [Dyson Sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere). Or perhaps their technology relies on some type of natural resource that [isn't abundant on Earth](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/08/01/a-periodic-table-surprise-the-one-element-in-stars-that-isnt-on-earth/#17228beedf74). Maybe they're not even looking for a new planet to *live* in, just one to *mine*.
## They're prospectors, Earth failed the test
Perhaps Earth was their initial candidate—or one in a string of planets they're visiting. And it failed some test. Perhaps they detected some natural catastrophe that would happen too soon to make the trip worth it, like the cooling of the core, or the death of the Sun, but they had to run a test *in loco* to be sure.
Maybe humanity didn't even exist before they came. Once they realised they couldn't colonise, they just seeded the planet with literal "bots", and our concept of history is part of the process: implanted memories necessary for the algorithm to run. Mere code.
## Earth is too small
Maybe their species is so numerous that the planet's surface simply isn't enough. Perhaps their home planet didn't have so much water, so it could fit a lot more people comfortably (c'mon, *over 70%* of the surface? Who even *needs* that much water?).
## Earth is too dry
Or maybe it's the opposite: Earth doesn't have *enough* water. How could they have guessed that [less than 3% of the water would be fresh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth)? Their most pessimistic models predicted 10%, this is unheard of, and the investment to desalinise this much water *and* bring everyone over is just untenable. Back to the drawing board.
## They haven't actually been down here
We're talking about a species that can remotely harvest our brainpower for their own purposes. Why would they even need to come down here? Perhaps they have synthesised human-looking fleshbots that they can control remotely to do their bidding—like [deploying the thought-harvesters](https://www.apple.com/iphone/) and relaying the data back to the mothership.
# 2.They've already found a better place
You said it yourself:
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> Their system of FTL travel requires nearly perfect accuracy in terms of coordinates, so they're running simulations [...] before using up expensive resources to get there.
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Maybe they already found a planet they want to go to, and it has more amenable climate, all the unobtainium they need, is just the right size, with just the right amount of water, and the right amount of hoomans. And much better location, you know what they say about the planet estate market.
But it's a *very* long haul, so they stop every now and then to recalibrate, just to be extra sure they won't end up in the middle of nowhere—where there isn't even a semi-rational civilisation like for them to run some code. How awful would that be, never getting to your new home because you didn't stop for directions and now you're lost? No sir, I'll take 20 years on Earth any day.
And as for why they don't simply stay, just think with me: if you were moving to live by the beach and made a stop in a sleazy motel along the way for a little shut-eye, would you suddenly decide to live there just because it has a pool? And what, ignore the cockroach infestation? If they *do* have an extra long lifetime, it becomes even more drastic. Ever stopped at a gas station for directions and just decided to live there? No? Figures.
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The aliens may have decided that their time on Earth should be minimally invasive to humanity. Although they're tagging humans and using us to solve their distributed computing problems, for the most part they're allowing us to go about our day-to-day lives without undue interference. Obviously, colonizing our planet is going to be much, much more invasive and will probably make our existing lifestyle impossible in one way or another.
Some potential reasons they might want a minimally invasive Earth program:
* Science. When humans study lower life in the wild, we generally try not to disrupt it too much. The alien scientific community may want to study us in our natural environment, or they may feel an obligation to leave the environment pristine for others who do.
* Ethics. Whether they consider us lesser or not, there's no doubt that an invasive intervention on Earth would have profound effects on humans, and a lot of those effects could be negative. The aliens may feel ethically bound to leave us alone, or they may feel that too much interference in our affairs reflects badly on their own morality.
* Isolationism. On the flip side, the aliens may be worried about *our* influence on *them* - whether that's the influence of barbarians bringing out the worst in the aliens, or the influence of free humans prompting a revolt among alien serfs, or any number of other potential threats. A small number of agents can be carefully chosen and inoculated to prevent any ideological threats; a large colony is much harder to manage.
* Medicine. The aliens may be worried about cross-contamination between us and them, which could potentially introduce devastating diseases to one or both populations. Fewer contacts means fewer people to monitor and less equipment to sterilize, with fewer chances for mistakes.
* Warfare. The aliens may consider that (whatever their stated motives) if they try to colonize Earth, it'll come down to a fight. They could probably win a war with humanity, but if it kills too many people and inflicts too much damage on the biosphere, it would all be for nothing.
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Why go to science fiction, when there are real-world examples today, why humans don't want to go to the Moon or Mars for extended times?
Bone strength.
The alien's home is a 7g planet. They can live on 1g Earth for a while, but over time their bones get too weak, their blood vessels expand, and all the other ailments that humans have to recover from when they were too long on the ISS.
No, it is not an option for them to walk around with [16tons](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=16%20tons%20weight&t=ffnt&iax=images&ia=images) weights as their Earth-shoes to compensate :-)
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A) The aliens are hypersensitive to gravitational changes, and find the moons slight gravitational effects (which can lift water, dont forget that) nauseating. So after the invasion, they discovered, that every half moon orbit, they conquered a planet that makes them vomit. They try to protect themselves in there ships, but if you are living in a ship anyway- whats the point of conquering a planet?
B) They where already here- they released a biological weapon to get everything go extinct (oxygen) - and due to a bureaucratic lapse, they come back to find a world, where there most toxic weapon has become vital. Basically- a species that needs nanotechnically produced mustard gas for survival and could spread everywhere if stirred. We are the dangerous ones.
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**This was the result of First Contact**
For whatever reason, these aliens do not want to invade, conquer, or otherwise subjugate us under their rule. However, they need our brainpower in order to move on. So our first contract with them resulted in a trade once the language barrier was resolved: They assist us in advancing our technology along reasonable lines, and we permit them to botnet a percentage of humans to help solve their FTL Math problem. Since us understanding enough of their tech to be able to mass produce it and them getting all the calculations perfect will take years, this is a mutually beneficial trade for all parties in the longer term.
In the short term, they can adapt to our planet through their alien technology -- tech that they have a limited amount of on their mothership and is onerous to mass produce on the Death World known as Earth. Or for that matter, on its moon not too far away (by space standards).
In the long term, they will be unable to stay planet-side. This could have potential consequences based on the plot you are envisioning.
This grand bit of (possibly unprecedented) cooperation could lead to a supercomputer based on human brains and alien computing technology that surpasses current computing from either race though on different metrics.
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Just fast forward our current real-life state of Earth a little bit:
Pollution. The Earth is so full of plastics and trash and smog everywhere, and getting worse daily. Also the resources of Earth are too mostly depleted, making it not a viable target for mass colonization. (why expend all the FTL resources to get to place that is in same of even somewhat worse than your current homeworld?)
While it is quite possible for quite a few alien individuals to live there for extended periods of time, their life on Earth is not something they'd choose if they had any other options. You know, overall poverty, and cancirogens and other pollutants in the air and the water and food... Not to mention all those pesky humans doing collateral damages by waging wars etc.
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Perhaps microbiological life is more rudimentary or non-existent on their home planet. When they arrive on Earth the microbiological biosphere becomes very apparent to them and they can’t compete with it.
Perhaps the aliens who do come down to Earth can survive but there are big issues with contamination that they have great difficulty in overcoming. Maybe a significant number of the aliens die from diseases and they spend a lot of their time and energy in studying bacteria and trying to figure out how to beat the bugs.
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**Earth makes them sterile**
It's a variation on other answers, but something about Earth, its atmosphere, magnetic field, radiation, bacteria etc makes the aliens sterile.
So while a sacrificial few can live down on the surface for the sake of the mission with no other noticeable ill effects long term colonisation is out of the question.
These surface dwellers could be aliens who have already had offspring or a celebate caste etc.
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Answering the question "Why would most of the aliens live on a mothership orbiting Earth instead of on the surface?" from the OP, not the question "Why would Earth be long-term unsuitable for these aliens?" from the title.
Their ship might simply be more comfortable for them, with all their alien structures and alien luxuries. They might not be able to reproduce said luxuries on Earth because of:
* A lack of materials (something that doesn't exist on Earth),
* A lack of knowledge (ask an astronaut to build a spa and see what happens, then ask them to build a computer from scratch, no pre-manufactured parts),
* A lack of incentive (why build the same thing down there, when we already have it up here and the commute is only 0.1 seconds?).
You might also want to explain why they don't land the ship.
* The easiest answer is that it lacks atmospheric capabilities (e.g. its engines won't work in an atmosphere).
* But you could also go with structural integrity deterioration due to extended exposure to gravity (unlikely if they only moved at sub-c since they would want to accelerate past 1g often, but with an FTL drive they might do 0.5g for a couple of hours then FTL all the way)
* Or hull oxidization
* Or a potential damage to the Earth's magnetic field due to the interference caused by the (inactive) FTL drive
* Or it's for a fast getaway
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The aliens evolved on a planet without a magnetic field, and Earth’s magnetic field makes them falling-down dizzy. They can manage temporarily by wearing equipment that senses and cancels Earth’s magnetic field in their immediate vicinity, but it’s bulky and imperfect and not a good solution for a long term colonist.
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# Solar flares
The problem is not Earth, but the neighborhood.
In the search for perfect place to settle, so much attention got on the planet side of things. The alien's sun has the most perfect, calm *and stable* sun -- and everyone's sun is like yours, right?
So it's come to a shock when they arrive and warp stop working and communications is unstable, all because all their computer technologies cannot work well in this crazy oscillating solar system.
Good thing we got these *biological* computing virus at hand.
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Other posters here have come up with reasons not to colonize that are friendly to Earth's resident human population. I'm going to take a darker tack:
### Earth is doomed
Why colonize a planet, if it's only going to be around for the next 1000 years?
* Human scientists haven't figured out that the sun will go nova shortly, but the aliens have.
* The aliens passed [Planet 9](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine) on the way into the solar system, and ran a few calculations. Humans haven't seen Planet 9 yet, because it's so far away, so small, and so dark, but it's getting closer...and will collide with and destroy Earth soon.
* Arriving on Earth sent a signal to the aliens' implacable enemy, who will destroy the aliens if they can find them. The signal travels at lightspeed, so your aliens have a little time, enough to run their distributed computing project...but not enough to settle down and build defenses.\*
* In the history of galactic civilization, planets that have built more than three nuclear weapons inevitably end up sterilizing themselves in a global war a few centuries later. Your aliens don't expect us to be any exception.
Yes, these circumstances don't end well for the aliens' computing machinery, but as the aliens tell themselves: "The computers are just some dumb animals; they're not *really* people. Maybe, if we're feeling nice, we'll leave the humans a little note of warning right before departure."
\*This plot device is borrowed from a very popular, very well-reviewed recent sci-fi series. I'm not going to say which one to minimize spoilers, but if you go with it, you may want to tweak it a little to seem less derivative.
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I would think there are two reasons why the aliens have not colonised earth.
1. While technologically superior, the aliens are biologically inferior to humans, and humans exist in much greater numbers. Meaning that there are equal chances of either losing a war, or destroying earth in the process, or winning. So they would rather not risk a confrontation.
2. Even if they won a war, the aliens want to terraform the earth so they need to get rid of all man-made structures and lifeforms, that would take too long and frankly speaking, no one likes to clean up other people's mess. And the cleaning process might end up making the earth unusable.
The aliens are looking for a planet that holds life, but want to find a planet that is at a relative young developmental age so that they can perform the least terraform necessary and populate the planet with their own plants and lifeforms.
Perhaps they are looking for a planet that is at the beginning of the Paleozoic Period so that they can properly seed the planet with the aliens own flora and fauna.
These aliens have not just left their planet themselves. I would assume their spaceship is a giant ark that carries the genetic data and material of their original homeworld. So it is reasonable to expect them to want to populate their new home with their stuff as well.
When they found earth they could not properly estimate the level of biological life and when they arrived they found out that the life forms on earth had advanced too much and could pose problems for them.
So why risk it? Just use the humans to calculate with greater accuracy their next destination and run simulations on what developmental period the new planet will be at.
If you ever get that book out please send me the title. It sound like an interesting story.
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When the aliens "discovered" and calculated the habitability of earth (from x light years away) - even with FTL we can assume that travelling here took them years - if not hundreds of earth years. At that time earth was in our "medieval age" - total population probably around a low hundred million - no noteworthy military danger - intact ozone layer, clean environment.
After arriving the aliens detected that humanity made the planet not as desirable as it first looked to them (military strength noteworthy or even overwhelming, damaged ozone layer, thus higher risk of cancer and gene defects, heavily damaged environment with many near deadly poisonous places, nuclear technology in use, borderline overpopulation) - which lead to the conclusion of departing only an "expedition" force to install and maintain the described humanoid botnet.
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**They are altruistic**
They recognize that life deserves a chance to thrive, and an intelligent species deserves the right to choose its own path. Humanity is still a fledgling race, so the aliens do not intervene. The computations done subconsciously don't affect our genome, so have no long-lasting negative consequences. Their calculations are for a place without intelligent life, but with ample resources, so that they can continue to thrive.
They have, from our point of view, mastered and entirely embraced empathy. 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you' is actually an alien saying.
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## Earth was never the final destination
It was designated for a **stopover**, for refueling, servicing, or recuperation.
This is continuing and inspired by the [kadu's answer](/a/161824/48464), but adding quite enough ideas to be a separate answer.
### Main condition
Perhaps FTL travel technology allows travelling only a limited distance. And even with FTL travel, the travel may be so long that the whole distance can't be made in one jump, or even in a single generation.
### Some conditions that might force a stopover
* the spaceship itself might need servicing that can't be done in flight (or perhaps the hyperspace drive can make just one just a single jump, and needs a complete replacement afterwards?),
* even vitrified bodies can't reliably survive the harsh conditions inside the FTL travelling spaceship for long enough,
* reliability of repeated vitrification is orders of magnitudes worse, so aliens need to procreate and send only the next generation to their actual destination,
* that's given that vitrification is possible at all. If it's not, then it's a much bigger obstacle. Perhaps even short travel may take a huge toll on individual's health and put a hard limit the distance that one can travel in the lifetime, and this limit may be too short to reach the final destination,
* kadu's original suggestion: recalibration is necessary to get to destination within reasonable distance,
* possible explanation connecting above points: the precision of FTL travel is quite bad: you can end up several light-months from you destination, and if there are any bigger celestial bodies around, you are relatively likely to hit them (cause gravitation something something), so you need to aim quite far into the empty space on the edge of the system, and so on each jump you expect many years of conventional travel before reaching the habitable planet inside.
These conditions could compel aliens to colonize Earth as the place to recuperate after the first part of the journey, even though the environment is far from perfect, and the planet is way too small.
### Alien representation currently on Earth
It may be that the crew at the Earth and the number of travelers present at any time are actually a small number, while the rest of the species either still preparing for departure on the home planet, or in transit. To add some spice: it's possible that to make the whole operation feasible, the spaceships need to come to Earth in intervals relatively short to the travel time and the light-distance from the home world, so while the initial crew prepares the place and bootstraps the calibrations for the next jump, most or all the rest of the migration spaceships are already in transit, ready to arrive every few months/years for the next few centuries of even millenia.
### Aliens lifespan and telepathic abilities
While some answers suggest that the aliens are mighty individuals of very long lifetime, I'd suggest just the other direction: aliens are actually rather weak and short-lived individually. However, they possess some sort of shared or telepathic mind (allowing them to effectively transfer knowledge and experience between generations, and advance quickly as a civilization). They do that naturally or with relatively simple technological aid. That's why they used their collective mind as supercomputer, and that's why they chose to use humans (because transferring enough of their own folk in the first wave would be infeasible). This means that likely the technology they need to access people's minds is also pretty simple.
The short lifespan usually correlates with smaller body size. This might allow Nomes... sorry, the aliens, to easily sneak between humans undiscovered. And instead of disguising themselves as humans, they might just slightly manipulate some people, either completely taking control of them, or (more likely to me) simply planting (incepting?) in their heads the necessary ideas. Or, you know, talking to theirs ears veeeeryy slooooooowly.
The short lifespan plays well with the idea of stopovers forcing travel to be multi-generation due to perishable nature of the travelers. Perhaps neither the first generation of travelers nor their children born on the way to Earth can make it safely to the Promised Land, and only their children born on Earth will go.
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There are a number of factors that could make Earth not suitable to be their long term home.
1. Gravity - too low or too high could cause significant biological changes over time to the point where they don't consider themselves the same specie any more. That could be a very high psychological / ethical threshold to cross and might be enough to send them packing.
2. The Sun is G2V type of start. Most stars are smaller and dimmer (they are called red dwarfs) and will produce light in different wavelength. Thus Earth can be too hot, too bright, or they might not be able to see very well due to the wavelength.
3. Red dwarfs are highly variable - they can develop flares or spots that significantly change their brightness. A life form that evolved around such a star might have biological functions that depend on that kind of variability, so while they can survive on Earth, long term, they might not be able to live here.
4. The biology might be hostile - there is tons of pollen, virus, bacteria, etc here on Earth. If their sun put out more ultraviolet light they might've evolved in much more sterile environment. While it seems unlikely that they would be affected by any of Earth's pathogens that's been a common trope.
5. Finally there might be cultural reasons. They want to recreate "paradise" as it existed on their home planet so their new home has to match exactly in terms of climate, type of star, gravity, etc. This could be anything - the moon is too big, they want 2 smaller moons, they want rings, etc, etc.
That last point might sound unreasonable but if you are powerful alien race with FTL and you lived on the planet Mul from Valerian, would you settle for Earth?
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**Because they need the humans as they are**
What if the aliens realize that using human subconscious makes for the best computational device they could ever develop? The human brain is particularly efficient in running the computational models that these aliens have invented, to the point that none of their computers would ever be able to outperform it.
In this case, it would be counterproductive to try to colonize Earth. This would require to fight or anyway reduce the human population of the planet to make room for them, but this would also disrupt the computation power that they have available.
In this case, a wiser approach would be to keep the status quo, keeping a secret permanent base in the nearby, and exploit the mankind-processor to discover even more habitable planets or new technologies, in order to maximize the spreading and well-being of their species
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The program included in humanity has, in reality, infected all of it.
In fact, it was included in some of humanity precursors, hence the missing link that will never be found.
The aliens know that.
They just don't understand how a though-calculator that render its victims somewhat unpredictable and violence-prone could create such a fast-evolution specie (their point of view). And, given the actual state of things, how this specie is still alive at this point. But that's cool for them.
The problem is : **humanity is deemed too crazy to subjugate or for a neighboring settlement**.
They can be talked to.
They can be bartered with.
Some aliens can emigrate.
But colonization would be answered in both a costly (for the aliens) and probably auto-destructive (for the humans) way.
The aliens don't really need Earth, they mainly need the computation result. No reason to linger any more than necessary.
They'll just need to get a couple corpse when the computer goes ding to read the result in their brain, H2G2 style.
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Long story short:
From their home planet, the aliens can only determine if a star system contains a planet with liquid water and carbon occurence, but they can't see if the planet is really suitable for colonization.
When the aliens hide from humans, they can live on earth for a long time, but since humans are a pretty aggressive species, the aliens wouldn't survive a colonization. So they move on to the next star.
Detailed story:
Like most living beings, the aliens have a survival instinct. They want to have a "backup" of them, so they start several spaceships from their home planet to the nearest star systems. Their technology is only a few hundred years ahead of human technology, so they share some of the problems that humans have with interstellar travel. FTL travelling isn't possible, cryogenic tanks are science fiction or can at least not be used for hybernating an adult alien for several years and transporting living aliens over several generations isn't possible, too (they can't produce enough food for all aliens and the risk of one alien going crazy and destroying the ship during flight is too high).
Fortunately, the aliens got an idea on how to avoid those problems. They simply don't transport living beings on their spaceships. The spaceships are automated transporters that contain storage devices in which the DNA of the alien flora and fauna is stored, alongside many books, videos, websites etc. from the alien planet. Furthermore the aliens edited their DNA to become more intelligent, peaceful and able to settle on planets that are not exactly like their home planet. For example they can withstand wide varieties of gravitational forces, temperatures, poisons etc. They not even need a mother to breed. They edited their DNA so they can reproduce like a cross of a jellyfish and a mushroom. They only need to plant a pollen in a flat riverbed, where it begins to grow to some kind of spawn that extracts nutrients from the earth and can breed the aliens. After four months they are ready to be born.
So this is what happened: The aliens started 16 spaceships from their home planet. One of them with the earth as destination. The spaceship is a small automated transporter controlled by a simple artificial intelligence. It only measures around twice the size of a Boeing 747 airplane. When it arrived in earth orbit, it launched three landing vehicles that were distributed evenly over the earths surface. After that, the spaceship proceeded to the Lagrange point between mercury and sun to fill up its antimatter tanks (what takes a few decades).
The landing vehicles successfully landed in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, the Black Forest in Germany and the Bureya Nature Reserve in Russia. The vehicles contained everything that is needed to raise 8 aliens per ship. For example some robots that are able to plant the alien seeds in nearby riverbeds, carry the alien babies to the landing vehicle and prepare food, some toys, entertainment and learning devices, VR-nanny projectors and so on.
The aliens grew up in the landing vehicles and the surrounding forests. They learned very fast and with the age of three years they started to research which species are living on the planet. They soon found out that there are lots of humans around and that they are using radio broadcast. The aliens were able to receive the broadcast signals and soon understood the language of the humans. They learned about society, and that in the human calendar they seem to be in the year 1932. They also learned that there just recently has been a world war, so humans seem to be aggressive and they have weapons that could also kill the aliens. The aliens decided not to stay on earth and that they will use humans for their "wetware botnet".
The aliens started using their landing vehicles to capture humans. Since they didn't know much about human biology, the anesthetic didn't work as expected and some humans were still conscious when the brain interface was installed. The interface chips were installed on the backside of the tailbone, because the nerves can be accessed easily there. That's why some of the conscious humans reported of having had a rectal examination by the aliens.
The botnet is not only usable for finding the next star to head to. The observations needed for that could easily be made by computer controlled telescopes. The main reason for the human botnet is their problem solving capability. During the flight from the home planet to earth, the spaceship got hit by many micrometeorites. Some of the repairs can be done automatically but some need the ability to find different solutions. The connected humans can easily do the remote controlled repairs while sleeping, but there was a problem. Since the humans were connected to the alien-Wikipedia, they started to dream of alien technology. Most humans weren't able to remember their dreams, but a few started to research their dreams. In the USA, scientists started to build jet engines. In Germany, Konrad Zuse built a first programmable binary computer.
Then things started to get out of hand. The germans started another world war and soon found the alien landing vehicle that landed in the Black Forest. They killed the aliens, took the ship to a military base and tried to figure out how it works. They started the "Haunebu" project which stands for "**H**alb**a**utomatische **U**ntersuchung **n**atürlicher **E**igenschaften **b**emannter **U**ntertassen" (half-automatic research of natural properties of manned saucers). They also tried to gather informations about alien tech from the VR-nanny projectors, which they called "Vril" ("**v**irtuelle **r**echner**i**nduzierte **L**ehrerinnen", virtual computer-induced teachers). There are rumors, that they even bypassed the controls and flew those saucers by hand, what didn't work well (same as if you tried to fly a Joint Strike Fighter by manually tilting the control surfaces).
The aliens began to become nervous. They were 24 and now a third of them were killed. The spaceship wasn't fully fueled up yet and only the repairs that could be done remote controlled were made. They still had to build some spare parts on earth and install them in the spaceship. The aliens disconnected the human interfaces, but since one of the landing devices was found and partly disassembled, it wasn't remote controlable anymore. So the interface to the alien database still existed near the german landing device. It didn't take long for the german scientist Otto Hahn to dream about nuclear fission. He started to research that topic and gave lectures in the princeton university what lead to the Manhattan Project and later to the drop of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The aliens couldn't hide anymore. All the years they lived in remote forests but now they had to stop the humans and try their best to hinder humans from nuking the whole planet. In russia, the alien Bō Prad (known as "Skinny Bob") revealed himself to the KGB and offered Boris Jelzin informations about space travel in exchange for the promise to not launch a nuclear rocket.
The next years went better. The war was over, the disassembled landing vehicle was repaired to a state that it could be remote controlled. Since it wasn't save to use for a flight to the main ship, the aliens intentionally crashed it at a remote location near the south pole.
Sadly, one of the New Mexico aliens suffered a stroke while flying over Roswell and crashed. The aliens only have half of the human lifespan, so a 28 year old alien has to expect such illnesses. Since only one of landing vehicles was left and the aliens didn't trust humans enough to commission them to build more landing vehicles (that would mean, that they had to grant humans access to the knowledge of how to build and control an anti-gravity device. The humans would most likely use it for another war.), they repaired the main ship, attached the remaining landing vehicle to it and launched it to the next promising star system.
The earth was very promising but the humans are too dangerous. Since the aliens are a peaceful race, they wouldn't kill all humans. They already have a bad conscience because they frightened some humans with their failed anesthetic. They would have liked to live in a peaceful coexistence but that didn't work out.
The aliens that remained on the earth, helped humans to build better computers and advised them to build a global network of university computers in the future, so humans will get easier access to knowledge. Some of them wrote letters to science fiction authors, to give them some inspiration for their books. The last one of them died 47 years ago in November of 1972. Rest in peace.
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Alien's biology is very different from Earth lifeforms.
Their disguise is a very complex process requiring a different biological body, similar to the premise in "Avatar". They can't live on Earth, and they don't envy human bodies either, so it's better for them to stay isolated.
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Our environment is lethal to them. Too hot? Too cold? Oxygen as one poster suggested? Some pollen or the like, it doesn't matter.
The ones here running things are in MOPP-5 (chemical warfare suits) or even space suits any time they aren't in their base.
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[
So I'm writing a book and need help to better explain this island that sinks, more on that in a moment as I give you the basic build of the planet...
First, its a world on a very tilted angle. the south continent like Antarctica would be is mostly a summer paradise with short 6 hour nights.
The world is mostly similar to earth, 24 hour days, but with 15 month years.
The north part of the planet is usually cold and always dark, say except for 2-3 months a year the tilt and wobble allows for daylight to hit to the top of the planet giving it roughly 3-5 hours of daylight per day for those 2-3 months.
So the idea is most continents at the equator of the planet, pretty much all of them, experience the regular cycles of earth, seasons ext ext.
But one continent is divided into two islands, the north and the south, the north sister island being a third of the size of the southern. And every year for at the very least 30-60 days. The sea level falls low enough that the part of the island that is now underwater comes above land & connects both halves.
And sink low enough, not for mountains, but at least city's or towns to submerge.
Size of the part that sinks would be about the size of mexico if not double that. And it would make up about 25% of the total island when both ends are connected.
While the rest of the world does not sink or rise that dramatically. only this one island or continent mainly.
I was wondering if there is anyway this could be possible so i'm open to most ideas.
My best guess was the ice would melt and freeze in such large proportions at the north it would lower and raise the sea level, but this would effect the world as a whole I would imagine... ... ...
Bonus question would also be, would the south be a tropical paradise? or would it burn into oblivion? I'm sorry for all the information, I just figured it would help gear everyone to an answer that would help make such a fantasy world sound a bit more real but still be this insane world. And I'm just unsure if there is any solution to this at all...
----EDIT----
So far I like the moon idea and even having two of them, It does seem really difficult as many suggest but I am considering putting the two on a horse shoe orbit if that would at all help this situation.
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Give your planet two moons with different orbits, and once a year for about 30-60 days they align on the sides of the planet perpendicular to the twin islands. The tidal forces draw enough water away to lower the sea in that area, bringing out the island.
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Although [Clay Deitas](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/54317/clay-deitas) took my first suggestion, of a shallow island with extreme tides, here's a weaker alternative:
The island is actually a large rock made of an aggregate of pumice/scoria and basalt, trapped within the caldera of an underwater volcano. Periodically, the volcano or geothermal vents give out enough gas that gets trapped under/in the rock, and causes it to float, and drift around slightly in the caldera.
As the volcanic activity reduces again, the gas slowly filtering through the island is no longer being replenished fast enough to keep the water from seeping back in, causing the island to sink again.
The increased geothermal activity could be for a number of reasons, such as an alignment of moons/planets, or passing closer to the sun (see [Tidal heating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating_of_Io))
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The island is sitting on a thick shield of igneous rock, under which a huge deposit of something like anhydrite is located. There is a regular cycle of this mineral being wetted, heated, soured - whatever it takes to make it change volume. The shield of igneous rock between the island and the mineral deposit takes care of leveling out inconsistencies in the raising movement, so the island rising is actually 'the' island, with geography largely intact, instead of 'an' island, just a yearly rising of rubble.
Anhydrite is pretty powerful - when accidentally pierced in drilling operations and thereby freshly coming into contact with water, the whole ground above will be lifted (cm/month usually, but that's what creative license is for). There is no natural way of reclaiming the anhydrite in a timely manner, but there should be lots of chemical reactions that work one way above a certain temperature/pH and the other way below that.
Alternatively it is not a chemical reaction, but simply the volume-change of some mineral or polymer(reasons for huge underground polymer deposits: see Oil, or read the Fifth Elephant) in reaction to: phase change/temperature ('wax motor'), voltage ('piezo crystals'), pH ('proteins'), ...
As for the bonus question: It is what you say it is. If you want truthiness, look at the temperature/rainfall/daylight gradients in the real world, and model your world accordingly. Note that 'tropical' usually is also a function of available water, not just of solar power. Available water in turn is totally dependent on weather patterns that in turn are dependent on the exact layout of landmass vs oceans, height of mountains, *vegetation* (!)... - Or your world does not have salt water and instead is fresh water all around (you'd need some mechanism to extract the salt - soap?) and any landmass low enough to be near the water table gets to be an oasis.
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Continents are usually too large to be plot devices.
You can have island sink and rise if it is located on a lake. This lake can have different depth in dry and wet seasons. Rains pour - lake fills - island sinks. Rains stop - lake eventually empties - island rises.
It can even be a pretty large lake, so treat yourself.
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Put a single moon almost at Geosynchronous Orbit. Placed *just right*, from the point of view of an inhabitant of your world, it'll be in the sky for about half the year, before disappearing for the other half. Instead of daily tides there will be yearly ones, and at low tide your island will be above the surface of the ocean.
[Answer]
**two tectonic plates frequently crash and then move away from each other again, yearly and naturally.**
your planet may be young and huge and therefore have lots of tectonic plate movement
your island is on the border of one of the plates.
why this explanation?
It explains much bigger and higher island emerging from the water than the others do
only such islands get flooded (other such islands maybe existing, too)(some moons gravity may flood other places too)
How does such a fast plate tectonics happen?
our planet orbited around a sun like earth, but then galaxys collided,
and the planet got caught in the gravitational field of a [white dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OEEHU.png)
([image source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf#/media/File:Sirius_A_and_B_Hubble_photo.editted.PNG))
it orbits very close and extremely fast around the white dwarf,so the planet gets enough light, but also causing great tidal forces, causing the interior to get extremely hot and move extremely fast, causing fast tectonic plate movement.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZMC5E.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IVdR0.png)
side effects:
earthquakes near tectonic plates borders (picture shows earthquakes most of the times happening at tectonic plate borders on earth, taken from [source](https://d3svfn6as6o5bl.cloudfront.net/mpt/howto/case_eq_world_eck4.png))
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xBXtJ.png)
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Water takes an absolutely phenomenal amount of energy to boil; if you're planning to remove a few meters of it from a sea, in a month, your planet will indeed be scorched earth.
If however you really want this to be influenced by the sun, and you're willing to reduce how often this effect happens, then you could have the planet be in a binary star system; which exposes the planet to the full power of both stars once every (say) 10 years, and the rate at which the energy needs to be applied to the surface is much reduced.
Bear in mind that the melting of ice/snow on land must be insignificant; which prevents you from having many large mountains, or a land based pole (we have one, which is why global warming results in sea levels rising... if we didn't, the ice would be displacing the water, and on melting the water level would be the same) - but this could probably be explained by the additional erosion caused by the hurricanes/rain that would inevitably come about from such a large amount of water in the atmosphere.
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[Question]
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Let's say you are creating secret instructions for a new, very dangerous weapon.
You have decided to encrypt the instructions. But you do not want anyone to guess that these notes are encrypted! So you want to make sure that it does not look like a coded message, but instead as a diary of a madman.
How do you create a secret notes that do not look like a cipher, but look like crazy writings? (Still able to be deciphered, however). What methods and techniques can you use?
[Answer]
Use 2 methods of encryption consecutively: garbage and code book.
For example, we have this data to begin with:
*Insert the piston in the cylinder and lock it there by screwing.*
# Garbage
This means to include useless, rubbish data in between the real information. It would be impossible to tell real information from garbage data unless you know where the real information is present. Here we add 3 garbage words for each information word. Just make sure that the garbage data is added in such a manner that it makes readable sentences. We can make something like this:
*Before you **insert** it, wait! **The** color of **piston** that is **in** or not. **The** really beautiful **cylinder** is magical. **And** the demonic **lock** is dangerous, **it** simply sits **there** and guards **by** a powerful **screwing**.*
# Code Book
This means, replace the most important words (mostly nouns and verbs) in the information by using a list of real and replaced words. The list containing the original and changed words is known as code book and you need to have it in order to decrypt the data. The code book we use here, can be something like this:
insert = seek
piston = demon
cylinder = chupacabra
lock (verb) = call
screw (verb) = chant
Now our data would look something like:
*Before you **seek** it, wait! **The** color of **demon** that is **in** or not. **The** really beautiful **chupacabra** is magical. **And** the demonic **call** is dangerous, **it** simply sits **there** and guards **by** a powerful **chanting**.*
Remember that you must keep the code book separate from the diary/instruction manual and if you lose this code book, you will lose any hope of decrypting the data.
# Other Options
You can also choose to use MSC (which changes each letter of the information using a precise mathematical formula) and transposition cipher (which changes the arrangement of the letters/words in the information) but using these methods would immediately show the reader that they are dealing with encrypted data. That is why I have not included them in the example.
# Decrypting
If you look at the final product of garbage and code book, you will think it is indeed the diary of a madman. In order to get the original data back, you must work from the end and gradually move backwards (use code book first and then remove the garbage data).
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What you are asking about is called steganography.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography>
There are plenty of examples of how to do it, but the simplest way is to create your basic material. If that's your mad ranting then just rant away.
Once you've done that take your material to encode and go through inserting it into the ranting in a suitable fashion. Whether it's certain points or things highlighted in a certain way, or whatever.
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This is actually been done many times in history. Most technical information handed down through the ages, such as alchemy, has been transmitted by various forms of allegory which make absolutely no sense to anyone who does not know the symbology used.
However, the best way to hide instructions is to hide it from everyone, even the one's carrying out the instructions, is to encode the instructions into some kind of ritual. For example, many technologies handed down from generation to generation come with a ritual, which makes sense because traditional technologies were created by trial and error and the artisans who manufacture the technology, have no idea how it actually works.
I have read that the complex rituals guide the creation of the steel for Japanese swords. The rituals contain elaborate chants, and there are different chants for different seasons, different temperatures and even different types of ore and charcoal. The chants are religious in nature, various prayers for this or that. But the content of the chants is utterly irrelevant, its the ***time*** the chants take matter.
Just a couple of days ago, I saw a video on medieval armor making in which the armorers used powerful chemicals, mercuric chloride IIRC and various acids. Timing is critical for the process and is the differences between status decoration and burning a whole through very expensive steel. It is believed that the armorers used a certain count of Hail Mary's to time the reaction times. (Modern researchers are not sure because in a time with no patents or other intellectual property protection, artisans kept their processes as secret as possible.)
Work songs have long been used to coordinate teams. "What do you do with a Drunken Sailor" regulates the rhythm of raising a sail, "Way, hey and up he rises," refrain repeated three times gets the sail pulled up. The verse "shave his throat with a rusty razor" lets the landsmen to move to another line.
A dance could be used to encode the operation of a device, especially if it used a visual interface like an Xbox Kinect.
In addition to timing, songs and poems are innate mnemonic devices. Individuals can remember them for decades and hand them down to subsequent generations little changed.
Used to be something of a trope in science fiction in which following some fall in civilization, the management of remaining technology becomes sacred and is managed by priest or monks who carry out operations as religious ritual. Kind of the same thing.
A religion group could watch for some sign, like the appearance of a an asteroid in a constellation, which would trigger a religious ritual which would activate a weapon to blow up the asteroid (I think that was a Star Trek episode.)
Alternatively, you could hide the information inside a taboo or the practices of low social castes. Kinda the cultural equivalent of hiding physical objects in latrines or septic tanks.
If you want a purely mechanical method, a hologram would work. When you break a holographic plate each fragment retains the the entire original hologram but at a progressively lower resolution and more shards of the hologram are created. You could scatter them around until some trigger event causes people to bring their shards together until enough of them were mated to produce a high enough resolution to reveal the instructions. (Gibson's "Fragments Of A Holographic Rose" is one of my favorite stories.) You can do something close by stacking polarized colored lenses, each with small defects which, when lined up in the proper sequence in the right light, projects a pattern that can contain arbitrary information.
All of these behaviors would seem nonsensical to both outsiders and those carrying of the operations. It would be program running on wetware that no one even knew existed.
(Actually, figuring out just how cultures encode all kinds of information in what superstitions and rituals has become something of a hobby of mine. I'm not sure we've stopped doing it even though we can write down detailed instructions theses days.)
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It depends upon how long the total instructions need to be, but a book cipher has always been my favorite way to encrypt messages.
Pick a book, any book and get copy. Open to a random page. Find the first word in your message on that page and count the number of words into the page that is.
May 23 'I t was sunny out today.'
Find the 23rd word on that page of the book.
May 23 9:00 AM 'I t was sunny out today.'
23rd line, 9th word.
Or maybe its all in the time
May 23 9:15 AM
9th line, 15th word.
At this level of encryption the decoder needs to know the exact book, exact edition, and exact page you are using.
**Greater levels of Complexity**
Each journal entry (code word) is in reference to the last one. So one mistake will ruin the rest of the message.
AM vs PM Am counts forwards, PM counts backwards
Days of the week. Each day of the week adds a number to either the line or word count (or both).
Example Monday
+1 to line Tuesday +2 to line
Monday Jan 4th (1st Monday of the year) +1 to word count
Monday Jan 11th (2nd Monday of the year) +2 to word count
Number of capital letters within the journal entry is the base system your numbers are written in.
You can continue to hide more and more rules within each journal entry as well.
Use quotation marks in a journal entry, skip this one.
Mention your mothers name, read the number in revers order.
Mention your dogs name, skip this and the next three journal entries.
**Edit**
With this code, you can write whatever you want. To make your writing look like a mad mans is more of a literary question though. (Not world building) Avoid Pronouns? Write bad poetry about unrelated items. Watch a horror movie, and then take notes from the victims perspective describing whats going on. Copy recepies from cookbooks but replace all the ingredients with body parts or excretions.
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I initially misread madman as *madame*, and thus arrived at a completely different idea :)
Why does it need to be a madman or crazy writing? Just take an old lady an fill the diary with lots of banal stories about her cats, gossip about her neighbours/friends/shopkeeper, repetitions about things she already told (maybe slightly different), detailed explanations of her (routine) live… and you can easily get the amount of noise needed to insert the appropriate steganograph message. Who would have thought that each time she mentioned she was encoding one bit of information of the nuclear launching code?
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Even a mad man writing has some meaning on it, otherwise it would just be considered garbage... in general, the sentences are somehow logical, it's the whole text that doesn't make sense, because one isn't able to follow the reason on it.
So, to write something that looks like a mad man diary, I'd take a large source of data, like wikipedia or some books, and:
1 - extract sentences from it, at random.
2 - within each sentence, I'd look for verbs, nouns and adjectives, and chance with random verbs, nouns and adjectives.
And then, to include your instructions, I'd choose some rule (like the 4th word of every other sentence) and replace by yours manual.
Edited: as requested...
The manual: press the trigger to explode
1st step: some phrases from wikipedia:
>
> Of all the sons, Joseph was preferred by his father, and this is represented by a "long coat of many colors" [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_(patriarch)#Family)
>
>
> She quietly slid the bolt to lock the door behing him [source](https://books.google.com.br/books?id=bQQsCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA35&dq=she+was+talking+to+the+cat&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false)
>
>
>
2nd: change some verbs and nouns:
>
> Of all the dogs, Joseph was colored by his father, and this is painted by a "long coat of many colors"
>
>
> She quietly ate the goat to lock the door behind him
>
>
>
3dr: insert the words following some rule. In my case, after every word that ends with "b, e, h, m, p, r, t, w"
>
> Of all the press dogs, Joseph the was colored by his father trigger, and this is painted by a "long coat of to many colors". She explode quietly ate the goat to lock the door behind him.
>
>
>
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**Language impersonation**
Write your weapon's instructions in a different alphabet or set of characters like if it were written in another language, but matching the phonetics of what are you actually writing in your own language:
**ゆ のう わだい みん**
>
> Check [Hiragana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana "Hiragana") if **you know what I mean**.
>
>
>
**Rename/replace**
Rename and replace nouns, actions and adjectives for something else, maybe something dark, epic and prophetic, write a novel with it. And remember: **when the tides lower, the gods will scream**.
>
> When you push the blue button, the bomb will explode
>
>
>
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Here are my ways that I would do it:
1. Write a lot about nonsense/rambling of a madman but in between leave key words that still blend in with said nonsense/ramblings and use those words to be rearranged with a code sequence that only you know (eg. 3-5-6-4 (3rd letter of the first word, forth letter of the fifth word, etc)). Seeing you are the only one with the 4 digit code sequence it will be hard to find the words and also decrypt the actual message.
2. Again use a code sequence, every first word of every third, fifth, sixth, forth sentence (assuming the sequence is 3-5-6-4), repeat sequence.
3. 2 code sequences. Example: Word sequence: 2-4-5-6-3, sentence sequence: 3-5-6-4. 2nd word in the 3rd sentence. **NOTE: if you want to get really into this get a 3rd sequence code for the letter in that word** and again mask the words up so that they blend in with those of a rambling mad man.
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There are a lot of ways to do this, you need to think about code, since that is basically what you are asking for. and there are many types of code, but if you were trying to make it look like a madman wrote it you would be best going with the old Lemony Snicket style of either
1. misspelling words and making the letter that corrects it leads to a secret message (obviously you should scramble nonsense into it as well to make the message)
2. you could also capitalize random letters a more easily detectable way to deliver a message but it still works for example "sHe Easily IS Borrowing hEr Horse IN a manner of Death and YOUr"
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First letter of each word/sentence makes up the message. Or first/second word of each sentence. That way, you can encode any message, and at the same time you're free to write whatever crazy stuff you want your madman to spout. :)
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Why not have several diaries/journals/books - you're mad after all... Then you can write one word/sentence of your instruction in each journal, before going back to the first journal after N words/sentences. Later, have each book in a different location - or give or maybe testament each to different people.
To arm the device, unlock the panel and enter the month followed by star.
First book:
To unlock enter by (...)
Second book:
Arm the the star. (...)
Third book:
The panel month (...)
Forth book:
Device, and followed (...)
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Let me ask you this: if a friend of yours showed you an instruction book for a new very dangerous weapon, would you believe them, or would you think they were just making stuff up for fun? What if they weren't a friend? Might you assume they are a madman?
Supposing that you really are making a new very dangerous weapon. Wouldn't that *make* you a madman? Then wouldn't the instruction book *be* the diary of a madman?
It would seem the simple solution would be to do nothing special at all, but depend on other people to ignore it. Though I suppose if there are enemies who know the madman is working on a new very dangerous weapon, this wouldn't be very effective. So how about this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wzjnO.gif)
Though it doesn't look like it, this is a set of instructions (submitted by boothby in <https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/2922/generate-a-random-program-in-your-favorite-language>). In fact, there is even a compiler for this language, called Piet, that you can use to execute them.
Though I don't imagine the instructions for using a new very dangerous weapon could be easily converted to computer instructions, which mostly deal with arithmetic and logical operations, maybe your madman can make his own "instruction language" (we'll call it MADMAN) that looks like abstract art. He can hang it on the wall and proudly display it next to the new very dangerous weapon itself and nobody will think that it might be the instructions--let alone try to interpret them--unless they already know how to read MADMAN.
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Citation: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript> and the "see also" references at the end of that article.
As another better-understood example, alchemists commonly documented their work using analogies to astrology, reportedly because the latter was legal while the former was forbidden.
It might also be interesting to play with something based on a Markov chain derived from a natural language. I've coded toys similar to
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press> several times;seems to me that applying som form of steganography on top of this could produce the document you are looking for.
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If you know the person who will decipher it, you can replace each word by his following in a dictionnary.
A bit like fox-chan's solution, and a quite-well known one too, but long one, is to take the first letter of each word to make a message. If you write it well, it could mislead the reader.
In each case, if you want a specific person to decipher it, she will have to know the code...
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Most of the answers have been using security by obscurity this is how to embed real encryption (if you want that)
There are several ways to encrypt a cypher text (a personal favorite is the solitaire cypher which can be computed by hand) <https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/solitaire>
Would could make the cypher key the first 3 or 4 worlds in that book then encrypt your plain text. Take the resulting cypher text and for each letter and make it the first letter of word in your madman's book. If you are willing to have some garbled words (and what madman's book is complete without them) you could instead have two or three cypher letters per rant word. By having the 1 and third and last letters all be cypher letters.
This system has the advantage that even if you figure out the book has information in it you can't crack it without breaking the encryption. To make it harder you can add a few secret words to the encryption key that you don't write in the book, so even if they figured out your entire scheme they would have to guess passwords / encryption keys.
The major disadvantage is this expands the size of your data. 1-2 cypher characters per word 3-5 written characters per word is a expansion by a factor of 2 - 5.
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Does it need to be a book?
If not, how about a totally different approach: The words really are just garbage consistent with the rantings of a madman. What matters is the structure--your diary really is a [Whitespace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_language%29) program that generates the instructions.
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If it's written in cursive, this method will do:
1. Convert the message with the Polybius square. (A=11, B=12, ... F=21, I/J=24, ... Z=25)
2. Write out an unrelated message. For each digit in the Polybius encoded message, put that many letters in a continuous cursive stroke. After that many letters, lift the pencil before starting the next letter. If you need more letters than there are in the word, end the word on a downstroke to indicate that the count continues into the next word, and on an upstroke to indicate that the count ends on that letter.
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You would have to be able to achieve the mind state of a mad man and be able to write these things down before you came back to reality. Which theoretically is possible..
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[
I'm creating a story in which (almost) all of the world's now 10 billion people have voluntarily become "brains in jars." Considering that almost the entire population has chosen to do so, leaving nobody to take care of the brains except the computers (which are plenty capable of doing so), where is the best place to put the facility?
It will need to be fairly large, since 10 billion brains, the computers emulating reality, the life support systems, etc. take up a LOT of space. Also, it will need to last a long time, since brains in jars last longer than brains in humans, and the people may be able to reproduce, creating more brains in jars and allowing mankind to live on for a long time.
Edit: Location is not a problem, because the brains' reality is fully emulated by the computers. Nobody cares where their brain actually is, as long as it's safe.
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Ok, brains in jars, we can do this!
First, brains need to be safe and protected. This rules out leaving them in people's homes
Second, brains can't maintain themselves. So let's not put them in space because the upkeep (realigning and repairs) is going to be exorbitant for the size we're talking about.
So we're talking somewhere safe, on the earth.. let's have a look [for the most geological stable country](https://www.quora.com/Which-country-is-the-most-stable-geologically), Antarctica! Pretty cold, but you don't need to worry about those pesky volcanoes and earthquakes... But maybe shipping is a concern? Do we need to grow food? Also it's pretty chill down there. Maybe we need to spread out our brains over the world..
* In north America, [Canada](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070712160050AAEfJrx) looks pretty good.
* Europe, looks pretty good all over, can't find a decent link but stuff round the north sea seems pretty stable
+ Asia, let's get up into the tundra
+ Africa, [South Africa](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Africa-is-geographically-the-safest-place-on-the-planet-against-world-disasters) seems the best bet
+ Oceania, Australasia - get to Australia, big old chunk of landmass
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**Inside 1.5 million robotic whales**
A blue whale has a volume of around 220 cubic metres. Assuming a cubic brain jar with sides of 25cm, you can comfortably fit 32 brains in one cubic metre. If you built an aquatic robot about the size of a blue whale you could fit 7,040 human brains inside it.
The robotic whale could swim through the oceans, capturing oxygen from the water for its brains, and filter-feeding on krill and plankton like biological whales to provide the nutrition for the brains. Advantages of this are that it's a decentralised system, and that by being deep underwater, you're helping to solve some of the overheating problems you might face on land.
Doing the maths, to house the 10 billion brains you mention, we'd need 1,420,454 whales carrying 7,040 brains each. This may sound like a lot of robotic whales, but, for context, the global whale population has probably declined by that much since 1900.
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It would not be a good idea to have just one facility. That's just asking for an asteroid strike, freak weather, or an "impossible" series of equipment failures to wipe it out. On the other hand, dispersing into too many facilities will be inefficient.
Also, while brains in jars probably need less resources in an absolute sense than people in bodies - less food, oxygen, etc. - they are very dependent on their support facility working correctly. They have a *lot* less ability to cope with the environment being unfavourable for a short while, because they lack a personal self-regulating brain-support system, otherwise known as a body. So you need a reasonably large number of high-reliability facilities.
Then there's an emotional factor. Many people will probably like the idea of their brain-jar being in a location they are fond of, even if this makes little practical difference. They may well be able to "be" anywhere they like via teletourism, but the speed of light still applies, and a round-trip for signals to the other side of the world via fibre-optic cable will take something like 0.2 seconds, which is enough to notice if you're doing anything physical and interactive.
So there will probably be a few hundred facilities around the world, and they may even be named after cities and regions, although the value of putting them in old cities is probably low.
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# Why?
But really. "Why" to do it also answers where to do it.
## Cosmic catastrophe that made surface uninhabitable
Or rather - soon will make? In this case we want to make shelters deep underground. But there isn't enough time to make comfortable sleeping quarters for everyone, or enough food. So just store our brains and balls! Because, you know, we need babies, too.
In this case, we want to go deep underground in seismically stable regions.
## Brain in jar can live longer
Imagine new cure that will make brain virtually immortal, or last for centuries, but at the same time will not prevent body aging, or even be prevented from working by body. Rich people that are not yet too old would want their brains removed and preserved.
Here, we want it in safe places, sure, but close to places nice for sightseeing. Also, "tourist robots" connected via net to the brains would probably be a norm - for rich ones anyway. and poorer ones? Just high-tech version of slums. And you would need a non-jarred breeders to keep the species going. You know, as a backup.
## Safety
For reach people, it's just like above. Close enough to interesting places for the lag to be unnoticeable.
But there also will be scientists in dangerous fields, heavy construction workers (experienced operators of dangerous machines) etc. For them, it makes sense to have brain kept safe. Their skills, knowledge and expertise is hard to replace. But you want them in mobile platforms, close to their job, wherever their job currently is.
## Overpopulation
Let's face it, Earth is dying because there is simply too much of us. Rich people would "convince" masses that brain in jar is great! Less resources you use, good for Mother Earth! And you will be able to "have" all the things you always wanted!
In this scenario, facilities will be in visible spots, good for marketing, to convince meatbags to go for conversion. Safety hardly matters, as ones that are interested in the project does not go there anyway, but *appearance* of safety matters greatly. Expect cameras, fences etc. Everything as flashy as feasible, for good illusion.
---
Will add more "whys" if I'll be able to think about them. Or comment with possible reason.
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**Assumptions**
* Facility run by computers, facility constantly repaired and upgraded by computers and robots. Lots of tiny repairing spider robots.
* Lots of computers = lots of heat.
* Lots of brains in fluid in glass cases, can’t have the precious cases breaking. How long does a brain last out of its case?
* Brains need oxygen rich water and some sort of nutrient mix/bath to survive.
* all sites can be targets for sabotage (not necessarily will be, if everyone is a brain, in a virtual reality...who is doing the physical sabotage?)
+ you have a very VERY tough unbreakable firewall preventing hackers from sabotaging the computer's looking after the brains.
- the computer system is not SKYNET
**You have four main types of regions to look at for your site/s location…**
(1) Space
Already mentioned…Have all the benefits of vacuum and zero-gravity
BUT
* Radiation
* micro-asteroids
* lack of local resources (where exactly does your oxygen and nutrients come from)
* travel cost and distance issue to transport new brains into facility
* missiles…
**Space just doesn’t add up**
(2) Air
You can have large floating air depositories for your brains. This will help avoid your problems with volcanoes, earthquakes shaking things up on the ground in your brain facility. These could be designed in any shape that is feasible/ imaginable but things to take into account:
* is your platform active or passive? ie does it float where the wind blows it or does it have control of it's actions?
* does it have [big motors](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/193904-darpa-wants-to-build-an-avengers-like-flying-aircraft-carrier-to-make-drones-even-more-effective) or does it have [sails and big balloons](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=airships&rls=com.microsoft:en-GB:IE-Address&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj--4S1udDOAhXGCcAKHSc7BeoQ_AUICCgB&biw=1607&bih=756&dpr=0.85) of helium/hydrogen? Note: helium has less lift but is non-flammable. While hydrogen has more lift, but is kinda flammable (understatement of note!). Helium is also less abundant on Earth, as it escapes into space, which is why the airships never really took off in the past (pun intended).
* does the motors and computer equipment require fuel? what sort of fuel? solar would be better than relying on oil or natural gases. Especially if humans stored as brains is the result of overpopulation and resource scarcity.
* Altitude adjustment to avoid turbulent and stormy skies AND volcanic ASH clouds. Ash plays havoc with airplane motors which I learnt watching Dante's Peak as a kid, and the rest of the world learnt when [Eyjafjallajökull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull) erupted in 2010.
* Ensure that all sensitive equipment (and brains) are not fried if the platform/s are [hit by lightning](http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae568.cfm). Also helps if your ship is not too fill of flammable gases.
* If your air depositories have active control, they can guide themselves to landbased depots to pick up new brains. If your air depositories are passive and have no control of their actions, you will need drones to send/receive brains from all over the globe.
+ Centralised transit depots may still help.
+ passively controlled motherships may lead to tricky docking situations
**So, all this kindof rules out air as a safe spot.**
Extra thought, you don't have to have your brains floating very high above ground to avoid the effects of earthquakes. You could have them all attached to small balloons (or more practically a suspension system) so that they all hover a few centimetres to metres off the ground. I think you will still need to make sure the roof doesn't collapse on them, if there is a powerful earthquake.
(3) Land
As mentioned by you and other answers,
* try and avoid earthquake prone areas (California is out)
* try avoid volcanic prone areas (Japan and Hawaii - Pacific 'Ring of Fire' is out). This includes anywhere in the vicinity of yellowstone national park.
* try avoid rugged mountainous terrain as transporting tens of thousands of new brains a day will be treacherous!
* try avoid river plains as prone to excessive flooding every 100-1000 years
* try avoid coastal areas prone to changes in sea level!
* be aware that some land areas are actually rising/sinking/moving horizontally due to [Glacial Isostatic Adjustment](http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/glacial-adjustment.html). For example, Scotland is rising, but southern England is actually sinking in response. The interior area by the North Sea is experiencing lift/rebound, so the coastline is actually sinking (sea level rise is faster than the rest of the world in these areas. Regardless of human induced changes or natural changes due to, among other things, the post glacial rebound).
+ If your facility has to last for tens of thousands of years, try avoid areas that may experience Glaciers! They carved up mountains, I doubt a few man-made structures will stop them.
* Your machinery and computers will be creating lots of heat, so try avoid already hot locations like Australia or most parts of Africa, unless you have sufficient excess energy for lots and lots of air-conditioning.
* Most Machinery rusts if exposed to oxygen and water, so try avoid moist tropical locations with lots of humidity/rainfall
* Deserts while dry, will need sufficient excess energy to cool down your machinery. Stored water would be best for this situation!
* Does the machinery and computer equipment require fuel? what sort of fuel? solar would be better than relying on oil or natural gases. Especially if humans stored as brains is the result of overpopulation and resource scarcity
+ **In summary, don't go to too high a latitude as glaciers are a risk in the next few thousand years, don't go to the equator and tropics because it's too humid, don't go along the coast lines because of sea-level changes, don't go into the interior because lack of water to cool machines/computer down, don't go to the mid-latitudes as most of the large deserts are located there.**
**Essentially go to ...**
(4) Water
I had already decided water would be the best place for your facilities when I saw the answer about the 1,5 million manmade whales! The point about the krill and plankton as a nutrient source was inspirational!
Water covers 73% of the Earth's surface, and that is not taking into account the volume of space the oceans are taking up! Create depositories that can float on/under water. This will negate the need to worry about earthquakes.
* Tsunamis, normally created by earthquakes, are only an issue when the shockwave travelling through the water reaches shallow coastlines. You do have reports of those [freak standing waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave) that will overturn your Poseidon, but if you have your depository in a modular format (like a set of railcars) you should be able to survive the transit of the wave underneath you!
* Volcanoes already on land aren't too much of a problem in the sea, just ensure your floating depository doesn't barge into any areas where the lava is entering the sea. E.g. the Hawaiian Islands active volcanoes. Sea mounts erupting from the ocean depths, should be noticed by ships equipment beforehand; you shouldn't have any nasty surprise eruptions right underneath you! You should have time to row away...
Sea level is ['fairly equal'](http://legacy.mos.org/oceans/scientist/sensing.html) all over the world and any change in sea level won't affect your facilities out at sea. It's only a problem to those on the coastline!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/igi7I.gif)
The surrounding sea water can be used for cooling systems and provide water (fresh if you include a desalination plant on board). Salt DOES collect and jam up machinery, but if the robots looking after the brains can keep on top of it, they should be able to keep all vital equipment running ship shape (pun intended).
When bad weather comes in, and it will. You can have your depositories lower themselves to a depth below the wave height and just sit out the storm in peace and tranquillity.
Your machinery can use a combination of solar, and wind energy. They can also utilise the energy from the [ocean waves](http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/technology/hydro/wave-power/) themselves. Hey! If you have brains in jars, and interactive virtual reality...you can figure out wave energy!
**TOTAL SUMMARY:** There are pros and cons for wherever you choose to place your facilities; this is probably why they are safest in our bodies! I figure centralised transit depots will be required for whichever option you end up taking.
I am for the sea, then hovering, then land, then air, and then space.
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I think competing storage centers will emerge. The “best” (as opposed to the cheapest) will be based on the same criteria as archivial document and file storage. This includes underground vaults in old mines.
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An orbital station. In zero-gee, structural considerations would be less important, and engineering would be easier - on Earth, a building large enough to hold ten billion brains would take some serious architecture to keep it standing. In space, you also wouldn't have to worry about earthquakes or similar terrestrial natural disasters, and sabotage would be difficult.
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Numerous locations in the outer solar system, particularly the Oort cloud, would be safer than any location on Earth proposed so far. When you're effectively immortal (isn't that ultimately the goal here?) you will want stability over geological time, which you won't find on any planet in the inner system.
Power can be generated by beaming microwaves from inner system solar collectors to outer system rectenna facilities.
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I have thought of this as the optimal solution to prevent death from age, accident, and murder: to live in virtual places and/or through robots. this last one in case we ever find a way to have instant communication like quantum-entanglement communication. if that were possible we could create colonies practically anywhere, with little resources, to explore the cosmos and interact with other life forms without the danger of death, torture, pain, and boredom. I came to the conclusion that we should store our brains deep underground in moons and planets geologically dead in safe zones far away from stars threatening to become supernovas and mass ejections. each installation must be fully automated, capable of producing their own energy, like fision and fusion reactors and solar panels on the surface. and of course, every moon and planet must have multiple observatories and satellites pointing at all directions to warn of any incoming asteroids likely to destroy the power plants or affect the moon/planet in any way. and of course there must be huge armies and military posts to make sure no terrorist group or alien race threaten our very existence which, by being immortals, will have more value to us.
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## Location
Put them in Balloons on a gas giant around a small, stable star. There is plenty of space and with the density of the balloons you can easily manipulate the height. Gas Giants are also very long living. The ballons should float at a height, where the gas slowly gets fluid. This solves a lot of problems at once:
* cooling
* tectonic dangers (volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis)
* dangers from outside (even quite big astroids will barely reach that far and if so, the result will still not mess with the atmosphere that much)
* over time, smaller planets are more prone to break or be influenced by other planets. Gas giants are usually the ones who win.
* The heavy atmospheres of gas giants are full of hydrogen, which can be harvested as energy source
* small stars (red dwarfs like proxima centauri) are also VERY long living (trillions of years) and still give enough energy in close proximity
* there are tons of systems, that feature a gas giant close to a dwarf star, if not most of them in the outer milky way
## Latency and dream-like state
Another problem mentioned was the latency issue: As soon as the brains are far away from each other, the latency would be recognisable. But this gets even worse, as soon, as your brain is in a dream-like state: They are way way faster, in processing everything, because they are not bound to the slow input from outside and can also skip everything unimportant.
On the other hand, as soon as you plug them into a VR, you can control their perception speed. If the machines control the perception speed dynamically, even crazy slow latency is no issue anymore.
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Human beings are more than their brains. Actually, much more. Wilhelm Reich stated, about a century ago, that human memory resides MOSTLY in the muscular structure rather than in brain. This is corroborated by a myriad of studies in several fields of knowledge. So, the entire premise of the story lacks scientific/existential grounding.
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Another way to answer this question materializes in a suggestion: on considering the complexities of mind, or spirit (in a hegelian meaning), envisioning a world where people downsized themselves to their brians, for survival reasons or just because they can do it, and therefore erasing a big part of their memories, the reflexions embedded in the story deepens a lot. And also could turn an already interesting premise into something even more interesting.
Let me know when your work is finished, will you?. I would appreciate that!
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You write *"(almost) all"* - that 'almost' is critical to your plot.
10 billion Virtuals is a lot of people, but if you leave even 100 million Actual people on the planet, they will soon multiply and covet the resources used by the 10 billion, unless those resources are somehow locked away.
Or vice versa - the 10 billion will work towards self-improvement (aka building an apocalyptic AI), and covet the resources of the remaining 100 million.
There aren't enough resources in the Solar System to satisfy both groups. War will break out.
I won't give you any spoilers as to how exactly this all works, but the excellent story *Ra*, at <https://qntm.org/ra>, features a conflict between brain-in-vat Virtuals and non-converted Actuals. Read [this chapter](https://qntm.org/hate) if you want the spoiler.
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[Question]
[
**Introduction**
In a quite a lot of games swords, bows and so forth exist on a regular basis alongside guns, and often are as powerful, if not more so, than firearms. In a realistic, non-magical setting, the plausibility of such thing ranges from "*maaaaaybe* it can exist", due to some weird reasons, to utterly ridiculous. But a fantasy setting things can be much more *interesting*, because now there's magic in the equation. Unfortunately, more often than not such things are simply handwaved with magic, and not explained, hence my question.
**The Question**
What I'm looking for is essentially a way to balance reality using magic, because let's be honest, having swords and not crappy guns alongside is a rather significant boost to the "coolness factor".
The whole question (because title space is limited) is as follows:
*How hard magic could, directly or indirectly, interact with bows, crossbows, slings, blowpipes, and throwing weapons as well as all types of swords, axes, spears, staves and other white weapons that pre-date firearms to make their usage viable alongside non-primitive firearms, whilst still affecting the latter but not rendering them useless in majority of the cases?*
**Possible solutions**
I do, however, have some answers to my own question, which mostly touch on already existing firearm weaknesses.
*Lack of resources* - Sufficient explosive materials could either be rare, or entirely nonexistent and instead replaced by magical means. One of the downsides to that solution is that it would heavily rely on the setting.
*Chaotic magic* - The existence of magic introduces additional unpredictability, which could have an accident rate in grow significantly with the complexity of the weapon, due to more components being prone to failure. As of now I'm the most inclined towards this one.
*Decentralization of society* - This one is quite unique, because it relies on the production of a firearm. In a highly decentralized, from whatever reasons, world, where individuality is more prized, the production of weapon parts would be more difficult, because of lack of standardization
(no manufactured goods, protected knowledge, higher unpredictability and impact of individuals if paired with *Chaotic magic*)
Those are the three possible solutions I came up with, and while I quite like them, I don't think that's enough
**Additional notes**
* I am working with a hard magic system
* The closest image to the setting I have in mind would be the overall view on the period from mid-medieval era to 1700s
* If something wasn't stated in the text, then all assumptions are viable
[Answer]
**Melee Weapons -- Shield and Teleport**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bTzjB.png)
The era of gunpowder is also the era of the pike-block and cavalry charge. Cavalry beats musket; Musket beats pike; and pike beats cavalry.
The reason melee disappears is because firearms become so effective that that cavalry is no longer a counter. Once cavalry disappears, there is no need for pike blocks. So all melee weapons are gone, and the battlefield becomes two armies shooting each other from far off.
To keep melee competetive, you need to use magic to replicate a more effective version of the cavalry charge. The swordsmen want to get inside the musket formation and chop up the musketeers without being shot on the way there.
They need some combination of speed and defense. Either +5 boots of speed or a Ladle of Teleportation to go fast; and a Deflect Missiles spell for defense. I suggest all three. At long range the swordsmen use Olivander's Aura of Not Die. The spell is energy efficient at long range, since it deflects bullets rather than stopping them; and at long range only a slight deflection is needed to make the bullets miss. Once they get to short range, the aura is no good, so they activate the Ladle and teleport into the middle of the musket formation.
This will change the battlefield dynamic. These *super cavalry* will lead to the invention of *super pikemen* whose job is to protect the muskets from teleporting swordsmen. This might be as simple as regular nonmagical swordsmen interspersed with the muskets. Since magic users are rare, the teleplatoons will be small and you can just outnumber them with nonmagical troops. Then we need a way to defeat the *super pikemen*. Expect load of interesting developments.
**Bows -- Enchanted Arrows**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/znZ8K.jpg)
The reason bows stick around is simply that they use larger projectiles. It is easier to enchant a large arrow than a small bullet. For example you want your Explosive Arrow to explode when it hits the enemy and not in your quiver -- the long arrow gives you room to arrange the different parts of the enchantment to prevent this happening. There is no room on a musket ball.
Popular enchantments include, Thundering, Smallpox, Flame Burst, Multiplying, Freezing, Love Potion, Time-Control, Extended Range, Email-Deleting, Sore Knee, Entropic, Demoralising, Ostrich, Summon Locusts, Meme Review and of course Anti-Magic.\*
In particular Extended Range allows archers to safety fire on a group of muskets and then retreat. The downside of course is that the archers are harder to train, and the magic arrows are in limited supply, since they require mages and often exotic components such as butterfly testicle powder.
This means magic archers do not replace muskets. But they remain on the battlefield and this hugely influences tactics since you never know what might suddenly come out of the ten enemy archers on yonder ridge.
\*Have you ever tried to put cast a combination Flame Burst and Anti-Magic spell on a single musketball without accidentally dispelling itself? It cannot be done!
[Answer]
**Spells that attack gunpowder**
If you have fire magic, you can set off the powder in the gun or in the ammo pouch, thus making them a greater danger to the person with the gun than those he would shoot.
This can range from "idiocy to use guns" through "guns are useful when you know that your opponent doesn't have magic" all the way to "guns are more expensive because you must protect your gunpowder so that only you can set off the gunpowder."
For a means of just disabling the gunpowder, water magic. "Keep your powder dry" is a requirement. As with fire magic, it can be a crippling limitation or a minor nuisance requiring counter-magic, as needed.
Both could be used in different situations for plot purposes.
[Answer]
For this to work, magic must provide some benefit to archaic weapon users that it can’t also provide to firearm users. Perhaps bows, crossbows, and swords are much easier to enchant than guns are, for whatever reason?
Alternatively, enchanted firearms might be too dangerous to use, due to the way gunpowder interacts with your magic.
Regarding swords, you may not need a great deal of magic involved; swords were still used in warfare to some capacity well into the age of firearms.
(Also, a side note that may be relevant: guns and crossbows require only a week or two of training. However, a war archer must train for years to effectively use a war bow.)
[Answer]
**Firearms are super useful and deadly.**
**Anti-Firearm magic is super cheap, low level, and widespread.** Bullets work on rapid burning fuels, there's a first level spell designed to fight forest fires that snuffs bullets over a large area. There are expensive high level spells designed to resist those low level spells.
**Battles become a duel of logistics and who-brought-what.** Everyone brings guns because if the other side fails to snuff them then they'll rule. Everyone brings gun suppressing magic. Everyone brings swords because you know they'll work.
**It gets super complex.** One group might hide a team with firearms out of sight and try to sneak them in so they can do their thing as a surprise. Another group might have super expensive anti-magic to protect their guns, and anti-anti-magic so the other side's guns won't work and so on.
[Answer]
## Magic is a universal catalyst
In conventional fights, guns beat older weapons handily. No one in their right mind would field archers and swordsmen against a platoon of musketeers. But add some magic to your troops (in the form of mages or enchantments) and your gunners run a real risk of disappearing in pretty fireballs as soon as the magic starts fizzing.
You see, while mages are pretty good at focusing their craft into the desired effects, there is always some bleed-through of energy or mana. Normally, this does not matter too much. Nearby objects might get rattled or even thrown around a bit ("No casting" rules apply within libraries!), candles burn a bit brighter and the air around you might get a bit warmer on average. But in the presence of objects with a high-energy density (such as gunpowder), the bleed-through might just be enough to spark a reaction that becomes self-sustaining. Boom.
Don't try to cast on top of an oil field, please! Or inside a nuclear reactor (setting permitting).
The effect on warfare is that generals need to choose between non-magical troops with guns or archers and melee combatants supported by mages and enchantments. It is vitally important to keep these two separate if you want to avoid fireworks.
If the bleed-through effect is concentrated near the caster of a spell (instead of its target) and falls off rapidly with distance, enemy casters are not particularly more dangerous to your gunners than to any other soldier, apart from the fact that the former cannot afford much magical protections. Just watch out for suicide-mages that sneak/teleport/charge into your firearm platoons before detonating everything around them.
[Answer]
**Cost Effectiveness of Powerful Enchantments**
Let's say your setting allows you to enchant weapons to have powerful magical effects upon contact with the target. That could obviously make swords and bows strong enough to deliver as much of a punch as guns. But of course then comes the obvious question: why don't you enchant the guns in a similar way?
Simple: while technically *possible*, it's going to be a while before anyone in your setting has the resources for it to be remotely worthwhile.
Nearly all of the older weapons you list have one thing in common: the thing that's actually delivering the hurt is *reusable*. You can use a sword again after you swing it into a warg's hide. You can use an arrow again, usually, after you shoot it and retrieve it from the target. Put powerful enchantments on a sword or an arrowhead, and you'll get plenty of use out of that enchantment before the object takes enough damage that it needs to be reforged and, of course, re-enchanted.
Bullets, on the other hand, are another story entirely. When you shoot a bullet out of a gun, not only will it be warped beyond recognition by the time it's finished delivering its payload of destruction, but it couldn't immediately be re-attached to the rest of a new cartridge even if weren't. With that in mind, sure, guns might be pretty effective even without enchantments, but enchantments would be almost out of the question, because unless you had a frankly psychotic amount of resources, why would *anyone* enchant a bullet when they could enchant an arrow? The difference in the force the physical projectiles hit with is kind of meaningless if both of them would then proceed to call lightning down from the sky. They'd have basically the same end result, except one is massively more economical and convenient. Seems like an easy choice here.
[Answer]
In Frank Herberts "Dune" combatants are protected by a "force field" that does not impede low speed motion but which slows or stops objects attempting to penetrate the field. A gun or bow is ineffective - a knife strike is slowed.
Similarly here, by tailoring the "magic field", objects with high velocity or energy or other characteristics or some mix could be rendered harmless.
[Answer]
**The material has to hold the magic.**
Magic must be contained in the object. Sure, the firearm itself has a lot of material in it, and maybe many of them have various magical components, too, but bullets are too small to pose a significant magical threat despite significant physical threat. A sword on the other hand, gives a lot of material (compared to bullets) that can contain magical properties. Maybe even maintained contact to the weapon allows for even more magic to be used. This is admittedly also a little bit of a nock against bows, crossbows, slings, and the like. Arrows end up as a middle ground, still having the advantage of range, but they carry more magic than bullets tend to. (slings and blowguns might be left behind from this)
**Magic helped defenses keep up with weapons, specifically firearms.**
A major reason firearms took off as a dominant class of weapon, rather than an option of a weapon, is that they did a better job of dealing with armor than anything else could. Now if they only did a comparable job of dealing with armor compared to other weapons or if armor came in different types that had trade-offs relative to the attacker's weapon, then non-firearm weapons become more appealing. One of the reasons firearms may become less effective than alternative weapons could be that bullets carry a property the magic defenses do a good job of dealing with. As others have mentioned, in Dune the shields stop things moving too fast. To address why they wouldn't just stop everything, it could have to do with airflow. There may be some rate of movement that must be admitted to adequate airflow for both respiratory and thermal dissipation reasons. Or it comes down to kinetic energy rather than specifically speed (which bullets have a lot of compared to bows or swords)
(Wave your hands about why you might not just double up on magic armor that stops bullets well and traditional armor that stops melee weapons or arrows well).
**Magic changes what you tend to be shooting at**
If magic tends to bring life to objects or dead things, it might change the dynamics of combat significantly. Guns would be less effective if your only real means of stopping your enemy does not involve exsanguination. Swords do a much better job of dismemberment to incapacitate a rather durable foe who could be a construct, a magical undead, or a person with magically healing wounds. Firearms may do damage, but less lasting or less effective damage to magical foes for a number of reasons. This is related to improved defense with some nuanced differences. It also relates to the logistics of large scale combat.
**Magic is cost effective compared to firearms.**
First, this line of reasoning is largely logistical, if the desire is for a story and character driven reason than can make [protagonist] great on their own. Firearms **are** better and you could spend a small fortune on a gun and plenty of money on shooting it or you could outfit an army with swords. Even into the Korean war (1950s), strategies were used that would have allowed melee weapons to be viable and necessary. If lives (or summoned/raised minions) and non-firearms are cheap enough, you overwhelm the gunmen with numbers (more logistics oriented than character and story driven). What is someone with a firearm supposed to do if they run out of ammunition. Specific to bows, maybe magic can make a stick an arrow a lot more easily than it can make \_\_\_\_\_ a bullet. Now a bow becomes viable when ammunition becomes a constraint, even though they would be a comparable and worse technology in our world.
[Answer]
## Caste based descrimination
Only certain people are allowed to have weapons of any kind - those people make up both the elite, and cannon fodder, troops. The elites are perfectly happy with those old fashioned weapons. Their mages can produce fireballs that can level a town - who needs a little pop gun?
Probably best to keep the plebs from having anything that can equalise their force of arms.
Perhaps warfare is ritualised, simply a way to demonstrate one's tactical prowess while ordering one's plebs about; for the plebs its a way to demonstrate bravery, with casualties being relatively low. This form of warfare has been practiced in societies in real life.
So, maybe a few local terrorists get hold of guns, or make them, but they never manage to challenge a standing army. Meanwhile, magic is constantly under development to the point that its is "almost nearly as good" so, nothing needs to change.
[Answer]
* **Energy density**. If magic stores much more energy in a fixed space than explosives or gunpowder, these chemicals have little purpose.
* **Guided munitions**. Most magical missiles are content to cruise slowly over the battlefield, taking a few seconds to find some unguarded resource or orifice. The arrows don't *need* to be fast, because they can propel themselves, but they also don't *want* to be fast.
* **Security**. A barrel of gunpowder or an old-time nuclear weapon is a traitor just waiting for someone to say the right magic word. The magical items can have loyalty and surveillance data for their creators built in at every step and level of their construction, like a modern day computer printer that would rather destroy itself than print a letter without authentic quantum tracking dots registered to the electronic signature of the purchaser.
* **Simplicity**. Given the other factors, the importance of the magical component, and the difference of those skills from ordinary mechanics, the question isn't why they don't use guns instead of bows, but why they don't use thrown pencils or thumbtacks instead of bows.
[Answer]
I think on a basic level, you can do this by making magic a foil to many weapons. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn saga is a great example of this. Specifically, when the world reaches its industrial era, the magic system Allomancy is still quite relevant, even in combat.
Although firearms have gotten quite advanced by this point, where they have revolvers, rifles, etc, an allomancer could just exert a force on the firearms, and have them fly out of the enemy's hands, or be yanked toward the allomancer.
In response, many well off combatants will have guns made out of an aluminum alloy, as in the magic system, aluminum is allomantically inert, thus firearm wielders cannot have their weapons simply cast aside. Allomancers though can still cast metal objects towards combatants at the speed of a bullet, so are still in the fight.
This is the kind of thing you want to consider - a matter of push and pull. Research the specific kinds of non magic tech you want to use. Find what it's weaknesses were. Then give magic advantages. As you compound pros and cons to each side, you then can start assembling interesting battles - and as a by product, it can even help with worldbuilding.
In Mistborn, because of aluminum's value in being nonreactive to magic, it has become extremely valuable. Changes like this can really flesh out your world.
I hope this was of help. I found this more to be a logic based question, on the principles of worldbuilding rather than a technical one, as magic can be adjusted to fit whatever you want in confronting realistic weapons.
I highly recommend looking up Sanderson's Laws of Magic - and take note of the "zeroeth law" - err on the side of what's awesome.
[Answer]
**Enhancement Magic is Easy**
There are of course mages who can summon lightning to strike the battlefield, and to a greater extent, men with the ability to fling balls of flame from their fingertips.
But for many, their greatest tool is the ability to cast small enhancements on their weapons and armor. A quick cast of Sharpness allows their sword to slice through un-enchanted wood and metal. A little extra power channeled into their boots can give a strong push off, allowing them to run faster and jump farther, darting across the battlefield. They are certainly better off than the average warrior. Unfortunately, even the most clever soldier can be caught unawares by a well placed rifle shot. If they can interpose their shield between themselves and the musket fire, the bullets will likely ricochet off, but the impact of a rain of musket fire will certainly force them back. And if a single shot makes it through, it could disrupt their concentration. Once they lose focus on their enhancements, they'll be peppered endlessly.
**Lead Munitions**
Magic is great, but even the toughest mage's shield is like paper to a lead ball. They can't be fired far due to their weight, and the balls tend to be a little expensive, not to mention toxic if the holders aren't careful after using them, but there's no arguing with results. These rounds can't be used effectively for ranged combat against another rifle brigade, but can certainly help repel a group of magic-weapon wielding foes, provided you can keep your head down. Of course, this all depends on your being lucky enough to avoid being hit by a wave of thunder dashing you against the wall at your back.
**Gun Hunters**
Gunfire is all too common of a risk to mages. No matter how big your spell, a single round through the skull will put a stop to the casting. A few mages have taken exception to this, and instead seek to alter the course of a battle by removing their most deadly opponents. The best of these are not great archmages, but instead function as small units of guerilla tactic-employing warriors. Using magic to create a dampening aura, they stamp out the ignition of sparks with their presence. This means, of course, that they are unable to create any flames or gunfire themselves, but this doesn't matter to them. They're much more comfortable with eliminating groups of riflemen with a short-sword. A job made much too easy by the foolish reliance on working firearms, with only a silly little bayonet to protect them from these squads.
[Answer]
**The manufacture of gunpowder remains a secret, thanks in part to magic.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk#China>
>
> Despite the popularity of silk, the secret of silk-making only reached
> Europe around AD 550, via the Byzantine Empire. Contemporary accounts
> state that monks working for the emperor Justinian I smuggled silkworm
> eggs to Constantinople from China inside hollow canes.
>
>
>
In this world the inventors of gunpowder (and silk) are even better at keeping their secrets. Gunpowder is a rare and valuable commodity. It has ingredients from its heritage as a component of firewroks including metal powders that cause the burn to be colored green, red or blue. Each color also contains ingredients intentionally included to confuse persons trying to duplicate it, including szechuan pepper and other spices, small hairs, tiny crushed dried insects and the like.
The role of magic is strictly to confuse the origin of gunpowder. The makers can afford some high end sorcery and this is applied to make it nearly impossible to reverse engineer the stuff.
Firearms are rare, high end products because only people rich enough to afford gunpowder commission firearms.
[Answer]
# Magic is short ranged.
Magic isn't very good at influencing things a great distance away. It's great at personal enhancement, and enhancing materials.
As such, you can enhance melee weapons, and thrown weapons, but it's quite hard to enhance guns or materials more than a very short distance from your skin with magic.
[Answer]
## Wood
Channeling magic easily requires contact with wood. It can be done with your hands but it's more difficult and requires greater training and dedication, hence wizards. The wood makes it easier like a tool. Wand or staff anyone? Whether or not you want to use a tree as a giant focus for ritual magic I'll leave up to you.
*But what about the swords and bows and axes and shields and stuff?*
Wooden handles and wooden shields. You could give a soldier the minimum required training to make his wooden shield hard to damage from all sources(including firearms), or make fire be emitted upwards from a sword's handle for a flaming sword or have a wooden bow or crossbow shoot elemental lances instead of arrows or bolts.
Due to wood making magic easier to perform you could have the relatively average joe be capable of it to enhance their own capabilities if they go through the training like they would anyway with combat drills, etc.
[Answer]
In what context, and what level of gunpowder tech? If you're not looking just at warfare, bows are absolutely relevant today: just ask any of the about 4.6 million (per Google) bowhunters in the US. Likewise, swords could be relevant as personal defense weapons if they weren't illegal\* to carry and more difficult to conceal than pistols.
\*In most if not all US jurisdictions. Don't know about everywhere else.
[Answer]
**Allow for tiny enchantments**
Mix the skills of a Jewelry carver and and a Rune enchanting dude, and voila! You have someone that can apply little engravings on projectiles such as bullets using magically imbued mini-chisels that are used to enchant weapons. A lot like a clock-maker except for magic weapons I guess? Anyway, the downside with enchanting bullets is they won't carry as much magic and its enchantments won't nearly be as a great as swords, arrows, and crossbow bolts.
But the good thing is, it can still produce the desired magical enchantments regardless, like say, an incendiary enchantment to the bullet, where when the bullet comes and hits a target after travelling in high speeds, it will make a small but a definitely real explosion, causing your target to ignite. Kind of like a mini-delay fuze but its for magical bullets.
Or you can add an enchantment of barrier piercing that will do more damage to magical barriers than regular bullets. You can also give them an enchantment of formidability that makes them very hard for mages to deflect through magical means, but also add some downsides.
They need to be primed or activated beforehand for them to work. I was thinking for you to introduce a magical "conducting" material that can transfer magical energy to magical items in contact with it, and a magical "battery" material that can store magical energy so a mage can imbue magic into it and it can absorb it, with a limit of course and will run-out overtime when being used or not being used (greater tech is needed to improve the battery) so it needs to be replenished after several shots. These magical conducting materials can activate and give off a "kick-start" to the enchanted items that it comes in contact with, thus making the enchantment work.
The magic battery and magic conducting material can be a good addition to enchanting bullets because, presumably not all riflemen are mages or people that can magically be adept enough to activate the enchantment.
I was thinking, for the magical enchantment to be activated, the bullet needs to pass and come in contact with a magic-activating material in the barrel, probably located somewhere in the middle and is near the muzzle but not at the muzzle. Perhaps they can coat the already enchanted bullets with another metal that can "conduct" magic so the activator can reach them, while also allowing it to be a more "streamlined" spherical bullet.
Also have the ram-rod with insulating magic material so the bullet doesn't come into contact with the activator.
You now have a pretty useful (For the common non-magical people) long-range, early muzzle loader gun that won't be OP but can still do pretty good damage to magical adversaries.
Problem would be logistics of these materials so yeah...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BaVeI.jpg)
[Answer]
**Bullet proof magic armor**
Sure you could make a full suit of armor out of the stuff, but have tried to carry that much metal? Until someone invents the "make things lighter" spell its still going to weight alot. Also it acts more like todays body armor in that it stops a bullet piercing your skin but your still going to feel the force of the bullet, and if you get knocked off your feet in a full suit of armor then your going to have a hard time getting back up.
Instead people equip themselves with small pieces of magic bullet proof armor (like today maybe just something for the chest and head) or Wonder woman style with magic bracelets to try and deflect the bullets when pared with a super fast reflexes spell. So in this way your magic users get some protection from bullets (especially at range) but they are not invulnerable killing machines, enough fire power will still stop them. Battles look like people with guns trying to concentrate enough fire to stop the magic users before the magic users get close enough to use their swords.
Why don't magic users just use magic guns? Magic only works when in contact with the magician/living things, so once you fire a gun and the bullet leaves the barrel its no longer magic. Swords on the other hand are still in the magicians hands so they can stay enchanted. Bows and arrows work as they are made of wood (and thus living) and can hold a "magical charge" keeping the enchants going once they have been released.
[Answer]
Make your magic life-based. Thus iron and other metals cannot be enchanted, only things once alive or still alive: wood and other plant-based materials, like clothing and paper and food. Additionally, water can be enchanted, especially if seeds are put in it. That allows magical hydraulics (with metal parts, but it is the water that gets powered), like steampunk.
[Answer]
There is a very simple magical spell that absorbs energy around the spellcaster, which is controllable as to what level of energy it will absorb.
Casting the spell with the threshold set at a high level will stop all energetic reactions nearby; fires stop burning, gunpowder doesn't ignite, anything moving too fast will slow down. This simple spell makes any type of firearm, or even cannon, useless near a magic user.
Trying to set the threshold low enough to stop slower moving arrows or blades will also stop the chemical reactions required to sustain life, killing everything in the area (including the wizard). This might make a great weapon of last resort, but most mages don't see suicide as an acceptable cost.
[Answer]
The Dune way:
Magic shields which block fast projectiles. You need relatively slow arrows or melee weapons to pierce through the shield.
[Answer]
There's a widespread trope "You can't magic iron" which might come in useful here. You can make enchanted arrows and spears (wood), swords (bronze, not steel), armour (leather, not steel). You can't make an enchanted firearm (for some reason, magic can't help improve the bursting pressure of a non-ferrous gun barrel). Wooden canons might still be in use in this world. (They were in ours, until steel-casting technology advanced sufficiently).
You might also have "you can't miniaturize magic (well)". So enchanted arrows, swords, spears are more easily made and more enhanced, than enchanted bullets, simply by virtue of being larger. This will also help reduce the effectiveness of crossbows and other small-projectile weapons.
I can't help thinking of the shields in "Dune" which protect against fast-moving small projectiles but not (so much) hand-wielded ones. Any sufficiently advanced technology ....
[Answer]
**See Magic as a kind of fluid...**
It can stick to slow objects like a sword or an arrow but the velocity of a bullet is too high for it to remain in place.
[Answer]
## Defensive spells work both ways.
Magic shield spells exist to stop bullets exist, they are simple and stop bullets reliably but they also stop you from using bullets, it stops anything moving fast enough. likewise the spell that stops lower speed weapons also stops you from using low speed weapons like arrows and swords. If you use both you also can't attack well. Using both weapons also means going defenseless. you could even make it a tree way competition with guns, bows, and melee. But the kicker is not everyone on the battle field has magic, so there are always some people vulnerable to your weapon.
So you end up with a constant struggle between which is more common, as soon as guns dominate bullet-shield users have a big advantage, as soon as sword users dominate arrow/sword-shield have a big advantage. So you end up with a constant struggle that will not let any one group of weapons dominate, you have sword and bullet-shield users, gun and arrow-shield users, people who forgo defense for attack and even a few that forgo armed attack for double defense (excuse for martial artists on your battlefield) .
in biology we call this a set of evolutionary stable strategies. Both type of weapons work as long as it does not become a majority. No one type can dominate.
[Answer]
I think that the premises of your question is wrong. You have stated that
>
> The closest image to the setting I have in mind would be the overall view on the period from mid-medieval era to 1700s
>
>
>
Now, that's a lot of change between mid-medieval (mid-medieval means 1200s? I do not think that gunpowder was know in Europe back then but do not quote me on this) and XVIII century but some sort of melee weapons were used throughout the specified period.
The thing is, early to early modern firearms were not that good weapons. There were not exactly accurate, had pretty low firings range and speed. Thus charges were quite effective even in Napoleonic Era (and even later). Anyway, both Shadiversity and Scholagladiatora have quite recently made videos about this topic so you may want to check them out.
] |
[Question]
[
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASJDQ.jpg)
Just to say this first, the map is intentionally on a slant, and so the Northern cold areas are displayed at more of a North-West Angle, for example.
I am designing the world from scratch, and am about halfway done.
I'm concerned about the placement of my biomes and the paths of my rivers, mostly.
Are my biomes unrealistically placed in relation to each other?
Are my rivers starting in places a river couldn't start, and are the paths they follow too deliberate or just wrong?
I'm aware the coastlines need work. I plan to further design the coastlines after this.
[Answer]
Some advice here, before I dissect your map in my giant answer: it would be really, really helpful to anybody trying to evaluate the map if you had at least the latitude lines on it (longitude would be nice, but isn't really relevant to climate). It's also useful if your map is in a known projection when presented for evaluation and/or while editing, even if you intend on a different final version; I would recommend an Equirectangular projection, because those are extremely simple and easily parsed by a wide variety of programs. I'll give you what pointers I can about climate problems (and why your map has other problems), but in the future try to work based on a known map projection for ease of use and evaluation.
First, the problems with the map itself.
Right now, with the tilted map you're using (the latitude lines would probably be diagonal if drawn on it, as I assume the icy areas are near one of the poles), I can't identify several key properties about your world, so I have a hard time estimating how accurate your biomes are. Predicting the ocean currents or wind patterns requires latitude lines, as well as knowing which way the planet is spinning (clockwise or counterclockwise; this alters their direction), and those are both needed to accurately estimate rainfall or temperature.
I can't even be sure where your equator is right now, but based on your scale (another problem: any fixed scale is inaccurate when applied to a map projection, especially on a planetary scope, so that scale will actually change depending on which part of the map you apply it to; just try moving around the world in Google Maps and watch how the scale bar changes even without adjusting the zoom) and assuming that this planet is approximately Earth-sized (meaning a circumference of roughly 40,000km, so about 10,000km along the surface from either pole to the equator), the equator would be somewhere to the southeast of what you have displayed. In other words, you're only showing one hemisphere, and not even all of it, because even taking your map at a diagonal is probably not 10,000km based on your (flawed) scale. If your planet is materially smaller than Earth, it's far enough from Earth-like that you're going to need to estimate gravity and air pressure as well, making your job even harder.
Now, to the climate.
First, **your jungle biomes are hideously out of place**. Tropical conditions are essentially defined as high monthly temperatures (18C or greater) year-round with at least moderate rainfall (without enough rain, you get deserts). The tropic lines (Cancer and Capricorn) are the outer limits of where you'll find tropical conditions, as these only really appear near the equator; beyond equatorial regions, seasonal variation becomes too great and you end up with temperate or continental climates.
As such, having jungles anywhere even remotely close to taiga/snow forest (which you need to clarify; snowy forests are mostly taiga, and tundra doesn't have trees if that was what you meant) is utter absurdity; taiga requires temperatures below 0C several months of the year, and often the warmest month will not reach the 18C average that is considered the *minimum* for tropical conditions. Assuming an Earthlike axial tilt (about 23 degrees; this is where you find the tropic lines), there's going to be at least 20-25 degrees of latitude between tropical regions and taiga regions, probably more. I'm referring to the [Koppen climate classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification), if you want to read up in more detail (tropical biomes make up the A group, with tropical rainforests as Af; taiga would be the colder continental areas, mostly Dfb or Dfc).
**Your rivers** are also flawed. As sphennings has already said, rivers flow downhill, not up, so any river heading into a mountain range is wrong; they might start in a mountain range, but barring some very deep valleys that you don't have marked, they won't flow through them. They also converge into one another except at deltas; rivers have on occasion been known to split, but it's quite rare and not a lasting phenomenon (one side of the split will draw more water and erode faster, and eventually the other side will simply dry up as the full flow goes to the other branch), so don't make them spread out as they go until right before they hit the ocean.
Rivers flowing out of lakes follow a similar principle, which you should keep in mind. Multiple rivers might flow into a single lake, but only one river should be flowing out from it. That southern continent (all forest/grassland) has a particular example; I count three rivers connected to it, and all three end in the ocean, which is unrealistic in the extreme. Two of those (I would suggest the southern two, because the tributary river that merges into the northern one has a direction that suggests it's going to the ocean) should be flowing from springs or mountains into the lake, and only the third should be continuing on to the ocean.
**The southeastern desert island** is also horribly, horribly wrong. You have a lake surrounded by mountains, which are surrounded by desert; that lake will not last, and you certainly won't have nice grasslands around it. It's going to look more like the interior of Australia than anything else. That interior mountain range is also suspect, from a tectonics perspective; isolated volcanic mountains can pop up almost anywhere due to hot spots, but ranges are typically formed by plate collisions, which means most ranges are near coastlines. There are some other cases where they result from ancient collisions (North America's Rocky Mountains; the west coast has two separate mountain ranges) or the collisions are inland (see the Himalayas), but your inland mountains don't really fit either bill.
Precipitation there comes from moisture blown in over the ocean, but as the clouds rise up the mountains they will rain themselves out on the opposite side from the lake; this is known as orographic lift or rain shadow. When the clouds get over the mountains to your lake, they will have little moisture left, and since it gets warmer as the clouds drop (preventing condensation and rainfall), that moisture will not fall as rain near that lake. You'll most likely get rivers flowing out from the mountains to the northeast, towards the non-mountainous coastline. The southwestern side (as seen from your map) of that continent would be bone-dry apart from the immediate coastline, due to the outer mountain range that would suck up any rainfall.
Without latitude lines, I can't predict what ocean currents would flow around that continent, so I can't tell you for certain if the coast would ever receive any real rainfall; if you end up with cold currents flowing past the coast, it's going to turn out extremely dry (you wouldn't even get the rain shadow effect, most likely, so you'd get lots of fog and clouds but next to no actual precipitation: see northwestern Africa). My best guess (based on my guess that it would probably be a warm current) is that the northeastern side will probably end up a lot like either Egypt or India, with distinct wet and dry seasons; either floodplains with one or more rivers that flood annually like the Nile, or a more general monsoon that brings lots of rain in some months and is dry for the rest. The latter scenario would probably produce savannah (Aw/As climates in the Koppen classification) and/or steppe (BS climates) biomes, the former would be a desert (BW climates).
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Your rivers are unrealistic.
Three of your rivers flow towards mountains on their way to the sea. Water flows downhill not uphill.
Small rivers tend to aggregate into larger ones, not the other way around. You seem to be mistaking the behavior of a delta with the behavior of the river as a whole. Most of your rivers branch out as they approach the ocean. While real world rivers tend to collect together.
Many of your rivers share the same source and flow in different directions with another river.
You have rivers on your central island that start randomly and end randomly without emptying into a body of water.
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I am skeptical about the mountains. There does not seem to be a pattern to them, island to island. And they are clustered on the coast.
You can have mountains on the coast. Check out this topographical map of Peru. <http://coolsummerstore.com/topographical-map-of-peru.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7paRg.jpg)
Back your mountains off the coast a little bit. Then imagine: the mountains are being pushed up by a plate that continues under the ocean. Mountains on one island would be a continuation of that plate and you could follow the range from one island to the next.
Most realistically, the islands themselves would be a continuation of the same process that lifted the mountains. Check out Sumatra: two tectonic plates are colliding just off shore, and this process is lifting the land that makes the islands of Sumatra and Java and also smaller adjacent islands.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1htQM.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_Trench#/media/File:Map_of_the_Sumatra_Trench.jpg>
---
Here is an idea for making new lands from scratch if you want them to be realistic: do not make them from scratch. Take existing lands and use that map. You can tweak shapes, look at a top map and raise water levels, imagine if the mountains had weathered away. But you will have a solid real world basis to work from - like the curry pie I am currently working on, starting from a standard pumpkin pie recipe so I do not screw up the basics.
[What tool can I use to draw a simple map of a fictional world?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8896/what-tool-can-i-use-to-draw-a-simple-map-of-a-fictional-world/99800#99800)
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In addition to things pointed by others the vulcans seems off. usually they form a ranges at the meting of two tectonic plates - see for example ring of fire maps:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b7wOl.png)
I have hard time distinguishing vulcanos from mountains on your map but the creation of both is usually roughly the same (crashing one land mass to another).
Deserts seems to be rather off. The closest you have to that in real life is Australia and even that it is a) rather big and b) desert is in the middle. It is not entirely impossible as you can have a [rain shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow) or [fog desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_desert) but this requires a mountain configuration. The island on the bottom right on the other hand seems to have north-eastern winds based on presence of savannah there. Barring that I would expect that middle was desert while the shores would have more continental climate.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qHq2i.png)
Contrary to others I think it might be possible to have [lake in middle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea) [a deasert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea) though I would expect it usually to be too salty to affect the area too much. I would worried about the size of basin though.
I would presume that if you have 'snowland' that you should have pole-like ice sheet connecting them. They have very important role on shipping and climate so it might be good to consider what are the variations of them.
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Cold biomes running in an angle could be caused by cold sea currents, however that would mean that warm winds would often come from the south and that would bring humidity to the south-east island, so I would play a little bit with the mountain range, or add some seasonal rivers leading into the lake in the middle.
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What happens on the rest of your world? The map you have given would fit within the continental U.S.
Worlds are big.
If you want to make a realistic world, then start by doing some reading about geology. While you can play fairly fast and loose you will get a more realistic world if you think about plate tectonics.
Build the landforms first, and give them topography -- elevations.
Figure out your wind patterns. Consider: Australia has mountains on the east cost, that catch the prevailing easterlies. Move the whole thing south by 15 degrees, and the prevailing winds are westerly. This gives you a much wetter interior.
Figure out where your monsoon areas are. The driving force behind monsoons is usually a large continental mass that heats up in summer and cools in winter. Central Asia is the driver for Indian and SE Asia's monsoons.
Now, with topography, wind patterns and monsoon patters you can sketch a rainfall map.
With latitudes, coasts, and wind, you can sketch a temperature map.
Wet-warm tropical jungle.
Wet-cool temperate rain forest.
Dry-warm tropical deserts.
Dryish warm tropical savanna
Dry-cool temperate grasslands.
Dry-cold tundra
Right now it sounds very messy.
An easy way to figure this out is to read the wikipedia articles on things like Monsoon, Desert, Tropical rain forest, tundra, stepp. Hardwood forest... and find what makes them tick. E.g. California and the mediterranean have very similar climates. Figure out why.
MANY sci-fi worlds are badly done just because they are homogenous. Arrakis (Dune) is a desert world. And there are reasons the come out later for this, but an inhabitable world would strain credibility to be of just one time of ecology.
Look at the variation just in the U.S. or in Europe. Orange growers in Florida panic when temperatures get down to freezing. I live where there is ice on the ground for 6 months of the year. I get 16-20 inches of precipitation a year, my sister in the San Juan islands gets 3-4 times as much, and snow is fleeting.
The native ecology here is poplar trees and grassland. 200 km SE it's grassland. 200 km NW it's boreal forest.
It would be very cool if someone has built a "planet simulator" with ways to get rough climate given the geography, spin, insolation, year, inclination. Don't know if anyone has.
] |
[Question]
[
I want to have a planet similar to earth with 45% axial tilt when hunter gatherers have an advantage over agriculture. The only thing I could think of is far north(Siberia, Alaska) & Sahara desert, even there people keep animals (reindeer & camels) so I guess nomadic herding can't be completely eliminated.
What kind of features should planet have to make agriculture unfeasible while still being able to support life? I wan't a plausible explanation why farmers can't out-compete the [hunter gatherer](http://www.trunity.net/sam2/view/article/51cbf44b7896bb431f6af515/)s.
**Edit**:
The lack of agriculture is due to being a winning strategy, not due to cultural reasons. If some band/tribe of humans could out-compete the others it would become a dominant one. The hunters will adapt or be driven off.
**CONCLUSION**
After thinking about the answers and reading this [thread](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22377/what-kind-of-animal-could-grow-quickly-enough-and-produce-enough-offspring-to-re) I believe that only Arid planet with Erratic rainfall could do what I want.
But that planet would unlikely evolve complex life.
**THINGS THAT I THINK WON'T WORK**:
**Magical things**, reality-check tag excludes such things.
**Undomesticable plants**. If humans could live as hunter-gatherers they must have some food to eat. And some sources would be better then the other. Nothing prevents them to help the better sources to become more abundant. Sooner or later domestication will happen.
**Undomesticable animals**. We haven't domesticated American Bison nor Zebra, because we already have good cattle, why spend time on another one. If all we had is Buffaloes and Zebras I'm pretty sure that we'll find a way to have a herds of Buffaloes and that we'll bring them to pasture while riding Zebras. See this for recent [example](http://www.muskoxfarm.org/)
**Dumb apex predator**. Humans dealt through history with many scary things check this excellent answer about [Megalodon](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/58118/26533)
>
> You and I might be computer-bound bums with poor vision, but our
> ancestors were super-intelligent, awesomely effective pack hunters. No
> creature alive, from the a blue whale to army ants stood a chance
> against a pack of cave men.
>
>
>
Or even against [T-Rex](https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-would-it-take-to-defeat-a-T-Rex-barehanded)
**Smart apex predator**. I think this lead us to two intelligent species evolving on the same planet around same time, possible but very [unlikely](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21542/is-it-statistically-and-physically-possible-to-have-two-civilizations-in-the-sam)
[Answer]
Get rid of the "gathers" part of "hunter-gather" and make the people to be carnivorous; At least like wolves are, if not obligate carnivores. That would greatly increase the gap between where agriculture becomes more advantageous than a nomadic hunting/herding lifestyle.
Most likely they would still pick up skill and knowledge to care for the herd, and even some amount of ownership of a herd, even if the animals they live off can't be domesticated (see American Bison), such as spreading the grassland via clearing brush/forest land, protecting the herd from other predators, promoting the food sources the herd lives on, and killing off animals that eat the same food source.
[Answer]
Imagine a planet with two life layers:
```
Outer space
...
Rather dense atmosphere with floating moss performing photosythesis
...
Hard earth crust, with not enough light for efficient photosynthesis
```
Every once in a while, a huge (Paris-sized) lump of moss gets too heavy and falls down, triggering all herbivore animals 1000 kilometers around to wake up from hibernation and go eat the whole of it before going back to hibernation. If not eaten within a month, the moss would go stale.
Life has evolved from moss into animals that suit this environment:
* Vibration sensor to perfectly feel very subtle vibrations in the ground, letting them know the direction in which the felt moss is, even if very far away. This sense is active even during hibernation.
* Ability to travel 1000 kilometers while surviving only on their fat reserves.
* Hibernation that can last for 3 months (on average, moss falls within 1000 kilometers about once per month).
* There is not much light, so animals see using other senses, especially vibration but also other senses that night-animals on Earth have too.
With no constant supply of moss, farming is not an option. Our heroes have three options, none of them being agriculture:
* Search for hibernating animals to kill and eat them.
* When moss falls down nearby, travel to it and easily kill and eat the animals that have no choice but to converge there.
* Just eat the moss like the other animals.
[Answer]
A meta answer for any question of the form "How can I have a planet where civilization doesn't look like ours?" is "Read Jared Diamond's book *Guns, Germs and Steel* and figure out what links to cut to stop us developing as we did.
Our agriculture is primarily based around a very few grains (wheat, rice and, to a lesser extent, barley, maize and millet) and a very few animals (almost entirely cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens). So, if you can stop those things working, you've ruled out agriculture that bears any real similarity to ours.
One option that comes to mind is to have an undomesticatable species with a cow-like appetite. Note that undomesticatable doesn't have to mean a huge difference: horses and zebras are very similar but nobody domesticated the zebra. With such a species in your world, grain-based agriculture ceases to be viable, because the zebra-cows will eat all your crops. Likewise, grazing-based agriculture doesn't seem to work, since the zebra-cows will eat all the stuff the cow-cows were supposed to eat. You could still keep chickens but they're unlikely to provide you with enough food on their own so, again, that's not a viable system of agriculture.
[Answer]
The choice to prefer hunting and gathering over agriculture and settling down can be driven several factors:
**Culture**
In a culture valuing feats of strength, and cunning, especially hunting prowess, settling down might seem like a coward's move. Of course this doesn't necessarily stop entire populations from eventually adopting this lifestyle so ...
**Severe Weather Patterns**
Perhaps this world is ravaged by travelling storms which destroy everything in their path, and travel very unpredictable paths. Anyone not on the move, or able to get out of their way *fast* is doomed.
**Roaming Foes**
Similar to the unpredictable storms, maybe a race of predators roams the land, guided by some unknown force (the stars in the sky, the phases of the moon, etc.), and it's easier to avoid them by running, than to face them.
**Agriculture is Hard**
Getting a good yield from a crop can be very tough work. Maybe your world suffers from very poor soil conditions, which are simply not conducive to agriculture, and your characters haven't quite figured out the knack yet (crop rotation, fertilizing the fields, etc.).
[Answer]
Two points to compliment the other answers:
First, the planet could simply have no habitable expanses of easy-to-farm terrain, or soil conditions that adequately supported plant life. If everyone had to live in rugged, mountainous areas, then developing agriculture on a large enough scale to completely outpace gathering would be extremely laborious. For example, consider Mesoamerican populations that flourished in mountainous regions hosting plenty of undomesticated plant and animal life but lacking agriculturally-conducive topography.
Second, presenting a lack of animal species to use as potential beasts of burden could be a notable factor. (Relatedly, nomadic societies don't necessarily require domesticated animals to thrive.)
[Answer]
Historically, the main reason that neither hunting nor herding were developed in the Upper Paleolithic era from ca. 40kya to 10kya (at which point it began) was that global average temperature was varying dramatically over periods of two or three generations. So, your children or grandchildren couldn't grow the same crops or herd the same animals as you did without a major relocation. Reinventing agriculture every two or three generations was just too hard.
As the linked Supplement to a journal article explains:
>
> Differences in temperature (Centigrade) are about 1.2 times the
> difference in the δ18O signal shown in Fig. S1 (2). The data indicate
> that changes in mean temperature as great as 8 degrees (C) occurred
> over time spans as short as two centuries. By way of comparison, the
> Little Ice Age that devastated parts of early modern Europe
> experienced a fall in average temperatures of one or two degrees, and
> the dramatic warming of the last century raised average temperatures
> by one degree, comparing the unprecedentedly hot 1990s with a century
> earlier (3, 4). The variability of climate during the late Pleistocene
> required high levels of geographical mobility, which was an impediment
> to any substantial investments in tree crops or field preparation or
> even stores and storage facilities. The scale and pace of climate
> change is truly extra ordinary: for example δ18O signals from sea
> cores indicate that between 25 and 60 ka, variations in sea surface
> temperature of 3o – 5oC occurred over periods of 70 years or less in
> the Santa Barbra Basin, California (5) (sea surface temperatures today
> are about this different between the Santa Barbara Basin and northern
> Vancouver Island). Think about the frequency of moves and the
> distances that early humans may have traveled. A change of 9 degrees
> Centigrade in the course of a millennium appears to have been common
> prior to the Holocene. That's the difference in the average daily
> temperature in Cape Town and Mombasa 4 thousand kilometers to the
> north. While humans and the wild species on which they depended could
> of course adapt to a few degrees change in temperature, we infer that
> the distances covered and frequency of moves must discouraged the
> kinds of investment that farming requires.
>
>
>
Climate variability (Left) is an indicator of the 100-y maximum difference in surface temperature measured by levels of δ18O from Greenland ice cores ([SI Appendix](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/05/13/1212149110.DCSupplemental/sapp.pdf)). A value of 4 on the vertical axis indicates a difference in average temperature over a 100-y period equal to about 5 °C.[!IMAGE](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8kZ72.gif)
[Answer]
Your scenario appears to be self limiting.
Primarily this is because having animals to hunt implies enough fuel for them live, grow and breed.
While some animals eat other animals, **the vast majority of vertebrates eat plants.** If the conditions on your planet are not conducive to farmed plants I see no way they could be conducive to the plant life necessary to support complex animal life. No complex animal life, **no humans**.
The essential problem is that the environmental factors that would make farming unsustainable would also make complex life extremely unlikely.
**Recommendation:**
I am not sure what kind of world you are trying to create (Real/Fantasy/Past/Modern/Future ...etc) but weather related environmental stresses are unrealistic for the reasons mentioned above.
Now you do have a couple options that could work to greater and lesser degrees:
* Predators. Roaming predators that have no trouble overcoming humans. If you have to stay on the move you can't really farm
* Socio-cultural reasons. Its tough to imagine and is definitely cheating, but hypothetically you could claim social and cultural norms. The problem is that amongst hunter/gatherers norms are going to be much simpler than among settled peoples. Rules and taboos are much more likely to develop in a society where you aren't working on a daily basis to survive. Survival **is** the rule.
The main exception that comes to mind would be a world with active spirits/deities. If god makes you do something...
* Some other necessary resource that is rare and spread out...this could be some alternate humanoid nutrition requirement.
**So in short it can be done, but you will have to work it out really well to make it not seem contrived.**
[Answer]
Plant species all have inconsistent phenotypes. On Earth, if you plant an apple, it grows into a tree that produces more apples. But open up the DNA to wider variation -- an apple gives rise to a vine, or a walnut tree, or a tulip. The plants of the world all interbreed easily, and even careful pollination isn't stable thanks to virus-like exchange of genetic material.
This means that if you find a tasty tree, you can't necessarily breed more of them. So your tribe is constantly on the hunt for more tasty trees.
[Answer]
First off, nomadic herding (provided the presence of suitable [domesticated animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle#Failed_domestication)) will probably always be better than hunting and gathering. So if you really won't want domestication, provide non-domesticatable animals.
Secondly, agriculture is an even better advantage in the long run. Any agricultural society is eventually going to outbreed hunter-gatherers, so the only way to prevent agriculture is to remove domesticated plants. Look at places where no domesticated plants developed at all. Now, most places do have domesticated plants of some sort so the environments to go with are high mountains, deserts (without Nile-like rivers), tundra, and mangroves.
# Examples
An example could be: a world with no ocean and low air pressure and temperatures, simulating high mountains. In the lower areas are moist, foggy pine and bamboo forests populated by a range of mammals and primates, in the upper areas seasonal meadows with [ungulates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takin) and [carnivores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_leopard). Eventually some of the primates leave the safety of the trees to wander the upper plateau in the summer, specializing in [edible fungus](http://mushroaming.com/Other_Tibetan_Fungi) and the odd carrion. Soon these apes develop tool use to deal with cold nights, and learn to hunt on their own. Its only a matter of time before they domesticate the creatures of the plateau as the supreme herders of the planet.
Or, to truly remove domesticated species: A hyper-arid world where the only significant precipitation are heavy monsoon rains in mangrove swamps at the edge of tropical seas. The food chains here are dominated by [fish-eating reptiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinosaurus) and [reptilian apex predators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcharodontosaurus); the only mammals are bats and tree living primates eating insects and fruit. One branch of primates made its way out of the trees into the dry steppes beyond the edge of the swamps where they subside on drought resistant tubers and scavenging corpses of the large terrestrial reptiles. Soon the walking apes learn to make bows and become the apex predators themselves.
[Answer]
The planet could be a giant prairie. Grass can grow, but not much else. Hence why humans have to eat grazing animals, instead of plants directly. Similarly, if humans rip up the prairie and plant crops, you get a dustbowl that grows out of proportion and destroys a everything.
Or, whenever humans settle down in one place, endemic disease eventually destroys the population and forces a return to hunter-gathering.
Edit: If you downvoted, why don't you take a trip down to your nearest grassland, and try and eke out a living by eating seeds, and then come back and tell me how easy it is.
[Answer]
There are some theories that [beer](http://www.businessinsider.com/beer-and-wheat-may-have-helped-humans-create-civilizations-2016-2) was a driving force in the development of agriculture. Hunting and gathering is actually a fairly efficient method of feeding a small group. Making large quantities of beer, however, requires a larger infrastructure. Change your intelligent species so that fermented fruits and grains are poisonous instead of intoxicating, and you remove one incentive for large-group agriculture.
Another change you could make to your species would be to make them more solitary than humans are. Perhaps small groups are fine, but larger groups start triggering territorial reflexes that may no longer results in fights to the death, but do make everyone anxious and uncomfortable.
[Answer]
At first glance, it seems that if things grow at all, humans can make desirable things grow in convenient locations and help the crops thrive.
What agriculture causes is a shift from wanderers to a fixed location for long-term year-round working of the land.
To break that, what occurs to me is to force the people to *not* stay in one place. Maybe the place where things grow changes from year to year, and other life has to follow that.
Maybe all attempts at proto-agriculture have led to disaster: blight or other plant disease wipes out the population. Going fallow after a year and spreading seeds *far away* is an adaptation to cope with the advanced diseases, fungi, and parasites that infest the useful plants.
[Answer]
Hunter-gatherers already have some advantages over agriculture -- in fertile areas, they need less work to produce the same amount of food. Agriculture's advantages are that it allows food to be stored to get you through seasonal or meteorological fluctuations in the availability of food, and it needs less land. So if your planet has a stable predictable climate with an all-year growing season (like the tropics on Earth, outside hurricane areas) and is sparsely populated, there's no particular advantage to agriculture.
[Answer]
You could have a plant limiting parasite or insect.
e.g. you have a "plague" beetle, it's larval form is something akin to an earth worm, and is essential for soil health (lets say there are no earth worms, just these guys).
When the plant population in an area reaches a given density the larvae pupate and emerge as ravenous stinging beetles that feed and reproduce in 24/48 hours, stripping plants/trees/slow moving animals & seeding the - now bare - soil with more larvae.
This provides a continent (or a an entire world) with self limiting flora.
The entire concept of farming goes out the window, by growing high density of crops you're begging for a plague of biting stinging insects that will eat your crops (and you, if you're not fast enough).
All ruminants roam looking for food, people follow the animals to eat them and find fruit, berries & grains to eat.
You could even have the insects also have timed breakouts, like [Prime number Cicada's](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-cicadas-love-affair-with-prime-numbers), people know when this will happen and retreat to mountain caves or up above the snow line to avoid them, possibly driving some herd animals ahead of them. The years following a breakout will be especially lean, and people have to cope with, or plan for that.
[Answer]
# Disease
On Earth it is a good idea to rotate crops to as disease can easily spread from crops of the same type. Plant based diseases on the planet could have evolved some trick that makes them much more virulent than on Earth. The plant population's defence is its incredible diversity, as only rare plants can survive. Planting an organised crop of of any type would be a bad idea, even for a single season. Using fertiliser also wouldn't help much, as more plants also means more disease.
Because farming techniques don't help plants, the population relies on gathering the naturally diverse native plants.
Animal farms are also rare. Disease makes plants somewhat sparse and unpredictable, so animals need to move freely to where their food is available.
[Answer]
One answer not suggested so far would be to not have the humans be the apex lifeform. If you had something big (dragons, demons, aliens, sky whales, or anything else you like) that was capable of crushing human settlements and devouring all their crops/herds then you would be forced to keep spread out and nomadic.
Any fixed habitation and certainly any fixed farming is just going to become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the apex lifeform.
This does have a big advantage over the other suggestions that you can have a fertile planet with plenty of life. You also get plenty of potential plot interactions with the apex lifeform.
[Answer]
This is rather easy if you rephrase the question slightly - Instead of making the "planet" unsuitable for agriculture, make the "plants" unsuitable for agriculture. Basically, you take away the *calorie dense* plants that humans are able to use for crops and you're all set.
To elaborate, a scenario can be that it takes 80 years (highly exaggerated) for corn to be harvestable, now no society is going to start growing it for food.
In addition to the above example, there are potentially limitless ways to do this. There can be really tall overshadowing (or nutrient sucking) trees that have not allowed grasses like wheat and barley to ever develop. Humans can't eat those trees but human's prey do. Or that nitrogen or some essential nutrient required by crops is just not there in sufficient quantities for mass cultivation. Or that the processing required for making the crops edible is cost prohibitive. Or that the viability of seeds is too low. Or even simply that there are just no crops around that are calorie dense enough.
The best part about this solution is that you don't have to change people in any way. They can be omnivores just like us but if there're no grains that allow mass cultivation then there is just no way to have a sustainable agriculture system.
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Yes and no. You could make a planet where nothing could grow, but still have a suitable atmosphere for humans. For example, the ground might be rocky or icy, or there might not be enough sunlight for photosynthesis on half of the planet, and the other side is too hot.
But, even with that, you could not stop inhabitants from getting creative. For example, you could build a green house, and then import top soil and seeds and water, and then be able to grow plants. Your only limit would be how much of the necessary material you could import from other planets or manufacture. For example, humans can create their own fertilizer and exhale CO2 that plants need. So you'd just need the seeds, water and a suitable atmosphere (or greenhouse with suitable atmosphere).
Basically, if humans or humanoids can live there, other stuff, including plants, could grow there, with a little ingenuity and resources.
You could, of course, make a terrain that makes agriculture extremely hard, but you couldn't make it impossible.
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Limit the food source to animals that must migrate, to limit the ability to pen them up. The animal's ecosystem in a medium that the hunters can't control, so you can't put them in pens or herd them. Steelhead that must spend years in salt water and return to fresh water for breeding is a real-world example. Alternatively, there may be an airborne animal that is edible, but moves around and again can't be penned/herded. This animal does not travel in large enough groups to collect a year's worth of food.
Assume toxic minerals in the soil taken up by plants and other animals. Your food source may be able to sequester them in one organ that the hunters can take out and then the rest is safe.
Now hunters have to collect what they can and preserve it, then travel to the next area where the food animal will be available.
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> [S]ome sources would be better then the other. Nothing prevents them to help the better sources to become more abundant. Sooner or later domestication will happen.
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This is not how populations shift from gatherers to domesticating plants as a main food strategy.
Not every plant can be domesticated, not every environment allows for plant domestication, and there have been many regions throughout history that were simply not appropriate for developing plant domestication no matter how much people enjoyed eating the tasty foods there.
There are multiple scientific fields of study concerned with this very topic, but a very basic answer is that agriculture will never be more attractive then gathering until it absolutely needs to be (life is a whole lot easier when you don't have to work to grow your food), and even then it can't be done everywhere to just any kind of plant. Domestication doesn't simply just happen.
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Natural phenomena (like hurricanes, storms etc.) could prevent people from spending time on agriculture, because the results of many months of hard work could vanish in a moment.
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First, I'd like to point out that I'm a magic-based fantasy writer, which means I'm more comfortable within the range of the historic-mythical fantasy genre. With that said, I've also seldom found myself reading about sci-fi or even acknowledging them by watching sci-fi blockbuster movies such as *Star Wars*, *Star Trek* or anything similar. Albeit, I have read a few sci-fi novels before, and I understood a few of them just fine despite not knowing whether the scientific facts behind it are accurate or not.
The idea about me wanting to start a sci-fi story started with a friend challenging me that I should start one, but my knowledge about a futuristic world and their technology and science engineering is rather limited (I don't even know how to operate some features on my phone). I'm an art student, you see. That means that I rarely expose myself to anything that has to do with "science oriented" subjects like chemistry, biology, and physics. So, lacking knowledge about scientific facts is the number one factor why I don't understand sci-fi novels that are heavily based on science (best example, Andy Weir's bestselling novel *The Martian*).
I do have these amazing ideas that I've gathered for years to start this sci-fi universe, but I'm afraid that the readers will find the story disingenuous or "fake". I'm not trying make a mockery to science.
So my question is, is it a requirement for me to learn all of these facts about science in order to write it, or should I just ignore the facts and write whatever my imagination tells about science and go with it? Would it annoy the reader if I do so?
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There's a helpful thing in Sci-fi called [Mohs scale of Sci-fi hardness](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness).
This gives the different levels of how 'hard' sci-fi is - really soft sci-fi (1 on the scale) essentially is do what you want without caring for the rules (this sounds like what you want) and could be far in the future as humanity currently has no idea what future knowledge or technology could be and so things don't really need to be explained, although this could easily lead to things that are impossible... You don't really need much (if any) science knowledge to write soft sci-fi.
Really hard sci-fi on the other hand (say number 6 on the scale) is very much based on reality - you need to have a good knowledge of science (or have friends who do) to properly pull this one off. A story can also be in between these, so it might be moderately hard sci-fi or moderately soft sci-fi - see the above link for descriptions and examples.
[Meta Note: If you want to write hard sci-fi, you can always ask questions on here using the 'hard-science' or 'science-based' tags depending on how hard/soft the sci-fi you're writing is. 'Reality-check' might also be useful for this]
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As a writer of fantasy you will already know about "suspension of disbelief". If a setting in a story is not internally consistent or conflicts too much with a reader's own expectations, that will interfere with their immersion in the world and story.
The big difference between fantasy/magic and science fiction is that many readers have a much more solid expectation about how things work if the word science is involved, where the fantasy genre has a much more basic and cliché set of expectations.
With magic, well it's magic. As long you don't violate the rules you make up, the reader will accept that's just 'how it works'. With science, you can make up your own rules (starships can move faster than light), but they need to be an extension on the real-world ones (by going through "hyperspace") to avert conflict with reader's understanding of things.
Of course, if you just want an adventure story in space the requirements are not that hard. Borrow the more scientific stuff from an existing source and wing it for the rest. Most likely one of your friends will remark on unscientific stuff while proofreading and you can put a lampshade on it or come to this SE and ask "How to explain away X in my world".
This is really no different from a fantasy setting. If your hero encounters a bunch of peasants handily dispatching a dragon without any explanation of how, readers will protest. Dragons are supposed to be fearsome and near invulnerable!
Put a lampshade on it and you'll be okay:
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> *Sidekick noticed Hero's stare. "Scale-rot, we call it. Nobody knew dragons even could get sick. Drives 'em crazy, people say. If my skin fell off like that, I'd be wanting a quick death too and I ain't crazy."*
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The same works for science fiction, only it's more like "Ever since X invented Y ..." or "The model IV was revolutionary, it was the first to overcome Z limitation".
If you want to go for more classical science fiction where the imagined future science is at the heart of the story, then yes, you will need to learn a great deal about it. This is considered to be real science fiction and it attracts a more serious and technically inclined audience who *will* balk at gross inaccuracies or nonsensical science. Appreciation for how well you've developed the science and its influence on the world of your story plays a big role for this audience's enjoyment of the book, so only go there if you are willing to do the homework.
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A lot of the answer is definitional or even opinion based. Many people would deny that Star Wars is Science Fiction at all, arguing that it is fantasy dressed up in science fiction clothes. A lot of other material (books, movies, comics etc.) which claim to be Science Fiction are arguably not SF either, despite the prominent appearance of lasers, spacecraft and so on.
The hardest definition of Science Fiction is simply that removing the science means there is no story. IF your SF story involves time travel and you have given the story universe some semi plausible means of time travel, then if removing the premise that allows for time travel causes the story to collapse, you have created a true science fiction work (note ideas like time travel are not strictly speaking science, but if you have an internally self consistent means of time travel in your story *and* the story depends this mechanism, then you have created a fairly hard SF work).
On the other hand, if the time travellers in your story simply wish to appear in 1867, or there are no time paradoxes because of time travel, or you simply ignore the potential paradoxes in your story, then you are writing fairly soft SF, arguably moving into fantasy.
Most of what passes for SF could simply be turned into other genres by substituting things like sailing ships for starships (Star Trek is arguably like this), or perhaps six shooters for lasers (making it a space western) and so on. A good example of a very hard SF work is "[The Mote in God's Eye](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0671741926)", where the final outcome of the story depends very heavily on the consistent use of the assumptions behind the story's Faster Than Light drive and shielding technology. Break the assumptions and the story has to radically change.
So if you are writing what you consider to be Science Fiction, then look at the underlying SFnal premise of the story. Does how it works influence the plot or outcome of the story? IF yes, then you have written a hard SF work. If not, then you have written a soft SF work (and varying degrees of softness depending on how critical or not the SFnal premise actually is).
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Most science-fiction isn't science-fiction at all; it's science fantasy. Look at the most recent movies for Star Trek and Star Wars and ask yourself, how much science is really in the story?
While there's stuff that's very-obviously technology, it's never explained because it's not the point. The new trek-films never detail the mechanics of a matter-antimatter detonation, or fusion reactors, or alcubierre drive field geometry; It's all just a pretty metallic backdrop for some action to happen. Same goes for Star Wars. They needed a big scary planet-killer to raise the tension, and they needed the heroes to defeat it, so with the plot in mind they just bent the science to fit.
Now consider a book like The Forever War, where the plot bends to the science. Our main character is sent off to fight an interstellar war, and every time he returns from a deployment the world he knew has slipped hundreds of years away from him because of relativistic time dilation. While there's plenty of scientifically absurd stuff like near lightspeed travel in the distant year of 1997, the plot makes scientific phenomena a centerpiece instead of just a backdrop.
Long and short, it's all about the story you want to tell. Your readers probably won't be too much more scientifically literate than you, and even if they are they'll probably suspend their disbelief for sake of the story. If an idea like laser-powered speakers sounds absurd to you, then it'll probably sound absurd to your reader too. Just use your judgement, and if in doubt bounce it off your friends.
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Absolutely not.
Consider William Gibson, the guy who CREATED cyberpunk. Guy was almost totally ignorant about how computers worked, yet he invented an entire genre of computing based literature. [Interview with Gibson](https://theawl.com/william-gibson-on-burroughs-sterling-dick-libraries-the-uncanny-the-web-61fd11f6dbf5#.zglijrz41). He also didn't know how a hard drive worked (at the time it was a spinning platter, NOW they more resemble the solid state crystals he envisioned) but it didn't matter, they made sense within his world.
It is not important that he CORRECTLY predicted future tech, rather that he made an internally consistent world where the ramifications of HIS TECH made sense to the reader. So the lesson learned is that if you create illogical magic tech the reader will check out, but if you think out the first to third order effects of something and maintain some basic rules within your fiction, readers will generally buy in to almost anything, even if the scientific basis is weak. Heck, EVERY SINGLE STORY featuring faster than light travel is basically bullshit, yet they are very popular and considered science-fiction.
What will get you into trouble is if you attempt to describe a real world scientific thing and get the very basics wrong because you didn't do research. Just like placing New York City in Peru would be an egregious geographic error, failing to understand the scientific basics of some real world tech you are heavily featuring in your story will undermine it. Of course it also depends on how knowledgeable your audience is on the topic as well. Stephen King constantly screws up gun stuff. Hacking is a joke in most media (I heard one show had TWO people banging on the same keyboard in order to "hack faster"!). And of course a good story with engaging characters and compelling plot can override any number of scientific errors (while the reverse is definitely not true).
This is why authors without a scientific background get technical experts to review their stuff and the writer decides whether to listen to advice or not.
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As noted in a comment under [another answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/51030/6928), specific demarcations is a big debate. However, there is one sebset of science fiction that is pretty easy to wrap your brain around, which I will call 'assertion science fiction'.
A lot of science fiction starts with a 'normal' understanding of the real world, and then asserts a single change(\*). Then, the plot of the story revolves around the interesting impacts of that change, using these to reveal or discuss our actual world.
For example, the movie '[Children of Men](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/)' posits that people simply stop having babies, and then goes on to look at the societal and personal impacts of this change. Most of these hew closely to real-world issues of nationalism, assisted suicide, the personal relationship with death and birth, and so on. The BBC series '[Black Mirror](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)' has a series of very dark assertions like this, each it's own self-contained episode.
The underlying point here is that the change needn't be sweeping: '[Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/?ref_=nv_sr_1)' is an example of a science fiction movie that is, except for it's element of a memory-erasure widget, entirely the same as the real world. '[Fat Farm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Farm)' is a short story about Orson Scott Card that posits the ability to mind-tape a person into a new, cloned body. It doesn't even examine *all* the changes such a technology would have, just a very narrow set of them. This is the heart of much of science fiction, because it gets you thinking about people inside different technological contexts. Arguably, '[The Truman Show](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/)' is science fiction but posits no 'new' technology or science, just takes our current technology and behavior to an extreme.
That combination of technology and behavior is key: to make a story you have to have compelling characters with arcs the reader is interested in, and so science fiction finds a home in examining how behavior changes - *and doesn't change* - given different technological contexts. These contexts needn't be huge, but the best ones drive right at the heart of what it means to be human. Gibson's 'Neuromancer' work functions at this level because it takes the concept of body dismorphia - the kludgey gluing of man to machine - and imagines a world where that is the norm. But body dismorphia is a thing people experience without going to the extreme of computers in their brain or razor-claws in their hands, so it helps us to think about our own world.
Obviously, there is a lot of science fiction that doesn't strictly fall into this form of easy categorization(\*\*), but if you're looking for a handle to differentiate science fiction from fantasy, it is an easy one to grasp: the same roots of human behavior in a different technological context. Understanding the technology isn't strictly necessary, though it helps make it *convincing* because you can extrapolate more easily to the set of behaviors and interactions such a technology might impact.
(\*) Ok, most science fiction asserts a lot of different changes, but it's easier to explain if we are positing a single change.
(\*\*) I do personally think most good science fiction does have a 'pivot' technology or technologies, though: the ansible in Ender's Game, the Force in Star Wars, time traveling sentient killer robots in Terminator, the alien in Aliens, jump nexuses in Forever War, nanobots in Diamond Age, prescient police officers in Minority Report, the time machine in The Time Machine, etc. Pivot technologies are something to look for when examining science fiction because it helps us understand the context.
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The majority of science fiction writers weren't, aren't nor will be scientists and those that aren't scientists often are lacking in scientific literacy. There are a lot of Arts graduates who write science fiction. Yes while there is science fiction that is based on scientific ideas. Most of it is based on exercises in scientific imagination. Not science as such, but concepts that are oriented with respect to science. Concentrate on the impact the science and technology has on your characters, on the society they belong to, and in geenral the world the story inhabits.
Just write what you think is science fiction and do it in the same way as you would keep a magic-based fantasy story logically consistent and not self-contradictory try to do it in your sci-fi.
A lot of it is no different from magic-based fantasies. So if you can write magic-based fantasies, then science fiction is a small step from doing that. Above all else, have fun writing science fiction.
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**No**, absolutely not. But some people may then consider your work to be fantasy instead of "real" science fiction.
The key is **internal consistency**.
You also need to **pay attention to language**: if you try to use technical or science jargon, either avoid existing words entirely or reintroduce them with your meaning or just mash them together so blatantly that a scientifically inclined user just starts laughing after the second paragraph and stops applying his knowledge. The latter is probably the hardest and may actually require some (or a lot of) knowledge after all.
This problem doesn't just apply to language, it **also applies to** the whole **writing style**: Some science fiction writers may write paragraphs about their technology as long as Tolkien's descriptions of Hobbits walking. If you do, then you need to work on your imagination of science at least as much as if you would research the actual science. It might be in the interest of your story to skip over some stuff rather than describe everything although even as a non-technical writer, you don't need to.
One literary device making your life much easier could be **characters who don't understand the tech either.** They might even have some vague recollection of their physics classes in school. "Doesn't that violate Newton's Laws?" - "No, dimwit, don't remember Frasnati motion?" - "... I might have slept through that lesson." (the latter is a made up physical law - initially I wanted to name it after a real mathematician, but got bored after researching two names I came up with and finding out that both of them did some work on motion of stuff).
That said, most of those problems only apply to a small subset of readers. You can also decide to write only for non-technical people, although that would be a pity (in my opinion, because that would exclude myself).
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I think it really depends on the story you are trying to tell. If you have a good story that just happens to be set in 'space' then it will have a readership even if the science is a little off. As long as you can make it seem reasonable and internally consistent within your universe then people are going to accept it.
As an example I personally like the Star Wars franchise (well the first three films anyway) and they take huge liberties with their space ship design, ideas of space ship combat and many other things. Now I know that the 'dogfight' footage was based on old WWII movies of airplane dogfights and I don't care. I still enjoyed the film and the story despite knowing a lot of it is breaking hard-science rules. As long as you don't fall into the trap of having things resolved by 'science' you should be fine. As a fantasy writer you know all about this. As a reader I find the most irritating thing in Fantasy to be when the hero solves a difficult problem just by 'Magic'.
If, on the other hand, you want to tell a story about the science then I believe that you need to be much more knowledgeable (or have access to those who are) otherwise it's probably going to fail.
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### Intro
SciFi does not mean "spaceships", and remember "science that is advanced far enough looks like magic" anyways.
It's really all shades of grey here. The most potent SciFi stories I have consumed usually took *one or two* big ideas (somehow related to science/reality, not magic), mixed them into a generally realistic universe, and then explored what would happen.
You do not need to be a scientist at all to do that successfully. Sure, some people might like hard SciFi, but not everyone, and I'd wager there are more readers that can appreciate a generally great "soft-to-middleish" SciFi story than those that need everything to be super hard.
### SciFi features
So pick whatever feature you can think of and change it up. Ideas:
* ...
+ unlimited power supply
+ unlimited food supply
* ...
+ earth becoming uninhabitable
+ all current earth issues disappearing (the opposite of "uninhabitable")
* ...
+ wearable computers becoming ubiquituous
+ body functions / muscles /skin enhanced by nano-computers in whichever way possible
+ senses enhanced by nano-computers in whichever way possible
+ mental capacity enhanced by nano-computers in whichever way possible
* ...
+ working A.I., benevolent
+ working A.I., malevolent
Or if you insist on the classical "space" genre:
* ...
+ time travel (plenty of opportunity to give you and your reader brain cancer without going any deeper than "quick, get the DeLorian" :) )
+ FTL travel (just means you get to the aliens quicker)
+ wormholes (same, with additional restraints on where you can go)
+ aliens (good)
+ aliens (evil)
And so on and so forth. Nothing of these (except maybe the "space" stuff) needs any kind of proper scientific insights into the topic. You can easily extrapolate really gripping stories from all of these changes.
### Examples
Take the movie "Her" or "Terminator I" for example. Here we have distinct SciFi plot elements that need no technical knowledge about the subject matter whatsoever (especially not in book format). You do not need to be a scientist to describe a roboter which mimics humans to kill them, or an app which develops real intelligence. You just propose it is so and then move on.
Concentrate more on what the new reality feature you picked does with/to your characters or with society, and you will likely have material to fill several thick volumes before being pressed to explain how it actually does work. If you write from the point of view of your characters, they may likely not even know how stuff works, so why would you explain it (without breaking the 3rd wall) anyways.
An excellent author to look out for examples is, e.g., Ursula LeGuin (almost everything) or some books from Orson Scott Card (e.g., the Enders series, and here especially the second book "Speaker for the Dead"). Of course, they are capable enough authors to make even wildly "off" speculations turn into great stories. If *you* are going at your first SciFi story, you might want to pick a topic you can relate to and are familiar with, not go for a whole universe-changing she-bang right from the start.
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Here's a really quick and simple way to differentiate them, which works in the majority of cases:
When the hero chants the strange and arcane incantation, it is magic if it triggers a power innate to the hero, and sci-fi if it activates The Machine.
In other words: Fantasy features characters with special powers innate to themselves, that they are born with or develop through intensive training. In sci-fi, the special powers the characters use are derived from external devices, which anyone can activate as long as they have access to the device and know the right commands/buttons.
For a good example of this, consider The Ship Who Won by Anne McCaffrey, where a planet of people appears to be using magic, until The Machine is revealed and we discover that it's actually all technology. Another example is the Ethshar series, by Lawrence Watt-Evans - where again it looks like fantasy, until the man behind the curtain is revealed, and we discover it was sci-fi all along.
This is only a broad generalization, of course - it is also heavily influenced by when it is set; fantasy is normally in the past, while sci-fi is normally in the future.
To answer your question, "is it a requirement for me to learn all of these facts about science"? No, it is not. Just write whatever you want, and let people categorize it how they will. There are plenty of cross-genre examples (star wars, pern, lovecraft, sliders, etc.)
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It is my age, no doubt, but conflating the cotton candy "science fiction" of the movies with the sci-fi LITERATURE is like calling strippers ballerinas (or vice versa). I have noted that quite a few recent sci-fi books read like movies, apparently the TV generation(s) are ok with that. I restrict my comments to literature, if you wanna be a screen writer, I advise ECT.
Most sci-fi is fantasy, and involves the violation of the known laws. Some sci-fi adds to the known laws - machines (aka "black boxes") that do what seems to be impossible but with realistic consequences.
Incidentally, *The Martian* has that scene where he uses duct tape to tape plastic over the hole so he can repressurize the habitat. At a diameter of 6½ft, and a pressure of 14 psi, the force on that repair would be equivalent to 33 tons...what do you think? would you expect that tarp to be able to carry a stack of 13 Ford F-150's? No way! Anyway.
You can have doorways like transporters without having to explain the technology. You can have FTL spaceships without having to explain the way they work. Most sci-fi is actually fantasy disguised with the magic sword replaced by the laser, ion blast, phaser, or force knife, and with the ten league boots replaced with FTL drives, matter transporter or wormholes. Steam punk is particularly unscientific current fashion (as is nanobots and zombies), but they sell! You have to be consistent - or at least inconsistent in unobvious ways.
My own opinion is that the less regard an author has for the three (four actually) Laws of Thermodynamics, the more fantastical and less scientific the story. Those laws are expressed in many different ways.
Here's one:
1. Temperatures of two bodies in contact will tend to equalize
2. Energy and matter can be transformed but not created nor destroyed. (a corollary of this is that both momentum and angular momentum are conserved unless acted on by something else)
3. Disorder increases - if something becomes more ordered, then something else becomes more disordered AND there will be more disorder than order. Another way of saying this is: ANY process, ANY machine which does something will create heat, and 100% conversion (see Law 1) is impossible (there will be waste "heat" (some kind of energy)
4. No system is in perfect order. Laws 1 & 2 forbid the existence of perpetual motion machines. If you internalize these, then you'll be better than 90% of the sci-fi writers out there today, IMHO.
So, there are books about the fictional science and there are the majority of sci-fi books that use futuristic technology (or simply futuristic knowledge) as a back-drop for the story. If the story doesn't have compelling characters, all the science knowledge in the world won't help (but read a couple of the most popular military sci-fi series (or simply *Star Wars* trash), and being "good" and being "profitable" mean very different things.
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The protagonist has the ability to reset themselves back to a place in time a limited amount of times. With that said, what other limitations can I place on the protagonist, so they are not consistently abusing the power as an answer to everything or a get out of jail free card that consistently deescalates the stakes I am trying to build in the story? If possible, I would like one of the limitations to in some way rely on the protagonist having to trust others since it would help in escalating conflicts and character dynamics. Thanks for your help.
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## The Character is Taken Back to a Spot in His/Her History
In *[Edge of Tomorrow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Tomorrow)* the character is set back to the first day of enlistment, several days away from where most of the action is. In *Groundhog Day* the character is sent back to bed at the beginning of the morning. In either event, the character has to re-win all the little victories between; and can find that tether a pain as the real action in the past is discovered to be happening more distant geographically (and socially in Edge of Tomorrow) from where the character is tethered.
## The Future is Not Deterministic
Could be the [butterfly effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect), chaos theory, or a fundamentally quantum universe that works in probabilities, instead of certainties. Whatever the reason, each pass back through the past is not exactly the same: you might get into a car accident that you didn't run into last time, catch a stray bullet wading through the firefight, those super-lucky situations the first time might not play out exactly the same. In '*[Primer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film))*' the world is deterministic, but interference of other time travelers subtly and grossly changes things.
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Possible limitations for the resetting-ability:
**Destination limited to special points**
The protagonist can't use his ability to jump back *to* any point in time, there are some restrictions. For example it has to be any midnight.
**Startingpoint limited to special points**
The protagonist can't use his ability to jump back *from* any point in time, there are some restrictions. For example it has to be midnight to jump.
**Distance is fixed**
The protagonist can just jump a fixed amount of time back into time. For example it have to be exactly 30 hours.
**Range is fixed**
The protagonist can"t jump as he pleases, he has to be within a limited distance (for example 15 meters) from that point he was at the time he wants to jump back to.
**Recharge time**
Between two jumps the protagonist has to wait a fixed time at least (for example 5 hours) before he can jump a second time.
**Jumping needs time itself**
Before jumping back in time, the protagonist has to 'channel the energies' (or anything equivalent) so he has to enter a meditation-like state what makes him vulnerable (if he doesn't have someone who can guard him).
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Time divergence and human error.
Lets say you get into a fight and someone cuts your arm off because you are a worse fighter than your opponent. So the next time you know what your opponent will do! Unfortunately your opponent will not know what you will do, so your opponent will simply react to what you are doing. You wont return to the exact same spot at the start of the fight, you wont make the same moves, and this time around your arm might be cut off even sooner as you are focussed on that one blow that will come.
And this will happen continuously. If you've ever done Martial Arts or Fema or whatever then you've already done this exact scenario a million times: you get ready to do one particular move, your opponent does his attack and you do the move. Each time you reset by walking back to your starting positions so you get better at it. Sometimes, oftentimes even, you'll make mistakes even though you know exactly what is going to happen, because each time the details are different.
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It's not a re*set*, it's a re*call*.
Instead of their power letting them say *"I will now send my consciousness back in time by 3 hours"*, it instead lets them say *"In 3 hours, my consciousness will be sent back to now"*. They can't cancel it, and they can't set a *new* reset point until their memories have been sent back, in either timeline.
When their memories are recalled, they *also* get a number of mental conditions (e.g. tiredness/mental fatigue) recalled with it. This is in some ways an advantage - your character can "burn" their recall to get most of the benefits of a good sleep - but also a disadvantage - your character can find that they suddenly *really* need a sleep. No one knows what the effect of *dying* would be on their mental state, but rumours persist that people with this ability have been known to fall into unexplained comas...
Because the recall can't be cancelled or aborted, this means anything that required the character's surprise or ignorance to occur, or just pure luck, may not work out the same way. It also means that they may have to suffer through undesirable events that they are unable to prevent... *twice*.
The final question is, of course, whether the time-travel is *real*, or is it just an elaborate simulation which the ability places into their head. And, if so, is there anything *immune* to its predictive abilities which could blindside the character.
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The TV-Show "Rick and Morty" did something similar recently in "The Vat of Acid Episode". It seemed to be a reset device as you suggest, but since the main protagonist considers himself to be above needing time travel, it wasn't really a reset divice.
Instead the device transports the users consciousness into one of the many parallel universes. It just needs to find one of the infinite universes out of the set of infinite universes that is similar enough to the users original universe and currently at the exact moment in time where the quicksave was made. Upon reset or death the user transfers their consciousness to another themself in that universe.
So were does this leave us? Well your device could do the same. It transports your protagonists consciousness to parallel universe where he just stepped into the device.
This it turn, offers a lot of plot and character development potential. Say your protagonist initally believes that the device is in fact a time maschine. A bit of foreshadowing after he used it first could hint at the fact that he has really shunted between realities instead of traveled back in time.
Then, maybe even in a later story it is revealed to them what the device really does. That they killed many other versions of themselves. That they saved noone with the device but instead just abandoned everyone they knew and loved originally and then again and again everyone the version of themself they murdered coming into this reality knew and loved. Well, if they saved people they could at least tell themself that they saved one of the infinite versions of this person, which otherwise would have died or been saved from their fate in that moment an infinite amount of times in an infinite number of universes.
Thus the cost and constraint on using the device is phylisophical in nature. The protagonist knows that any use of the device will only benefit themself and even altruistic uses of the device mean committing murder and overtaking someone's life. Thus there is the guilt about the many people they killed and the fact that using the device benefits only themself.
Fun Fact: All this means that there are infinity many versions of your protagonist currently killing and assimilating the lifes of infinite versions of themselves.
PS: This has also the nifty benefit that you don't have to worry about time travel paradoxes. Although this benefit comes at a slightly gruesome cost.
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**Your protagonist's biology doesn't reset.**
This means that if they wipe out on a motorcycle because of loose gravel on the road and break their arm, going back in time 2 minutes before the crash will lead them to "spawn" on their motorcycle with a broken arm. It keeps them from using it as an injury-avoidance technique.
It also means ***they keep aging!*** If you follow your protagonist through their childhood or teen years that can have a huge effect. If they abuse it, someone will eventually notice "hey, this 9 year old kid looks like he's 12!". It can also be a deterrent, because many children wish to be older for activities like driving, legally drinking, etc.
It also puts limits on how far back they can go back and be "passable" as their past self. Some things are reversible: if they've gained weight they would have to lose it, if they started showing some white/grey hairs they would have to dye them etc. But some things are not reversible, there's usually noticeable changes between a person in their 50's and that same person when they were in their 30's.
It would shorten their lifespan relative to everyone else. For small jumps back in time (a week or two, once a year) it won't have a huge effect, but if your protagonist makes a habit of going back in time too much they will age faster and might not get to enjoy seeing some of the pleasures in life, such as seeing their grandchildren grow.
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Two Suggestions drawing inspiration from *Re: Zero - Starting Life in Another World* and *Steins Gate* (both great stories involving very similar premises)
**Re: Zero - Starting Life in Another World**
*Re: Zero - Starting Life in Another World* is a Light Novel/Anime you could take inspiration from. The protagonist has a similar power with extremely large drawbacks. Quick Summary:
1. Protagonist (involuntarily) resets whenever he dies.
2. Dying is *extremely* unpleasant.
3. Protagonist can't control the save point at all.
4. Protagonist physically can't tell anyone about this power.
Restriction (1) is the most unique feature of this story. You could replace it with any other trigger you like, as long as it is involuntary, and is tied to an action that is unpleasant for the protagonist.
Restriction (2) is taken *very* seriously by the story: no matter how badly things go for the protagonist (short of death obviously), he has chosen to voluntarily die in order to reset only once, in order to undo the death of a close friend--no other method of revival exists in this universe, at least so far. Nothing else was sufficient motivation to voluntarily die, despite several very negative experiences such as his love interest and self-professed reason for existing breaking things off with him and other events with similar emotional impact. He would rather regain trust and try to win her back over over the following days/weeks than reset to wipe out the events of the last day. You need to take the psychological cost similarly seriously or readers will stop taking this cost seriously as well.
Restriction (3) is something you can decide to adopt or not based on whether it fits your story.
Restriction (4) --oddly enough-- actually increases the trust required between him and his companions for him to effectively leverage his ability. They have no idea he has foreknowledge, and he can't present any evidence to convince them. The plot sometimes dictates that he has to resolve multiple problems at the same time or near the same time in different places... He has to trust his companions to help him, because he physically can't resolve it all on his own, without being able to be open and honest about why. Saying "Do XYZ, Just trust me" only works if you are super close and have a great relationship with someone.
**Steins Gate**
*Steins Gate* is a visual novel/anime where the protagonist is a scientist with the ability to send information back in time (including directly to his old self's brain, effectively time jumping backwards). It's much more sciency and less magical, which may or may not be what you want. There are a couple of interesting concepts that restrict his ability to exploit this to obtain whatever his heart desires:
1. Different timelines are woven together (think like you're following a single fiber in a rope. Even if you switch fibers, you're going to stay parrallel to the original fiber no matter how long you follow the new fiber) in a way which means "nearby" timelines all lead to similar outcomes, even if (superficially) there are large differences between them. A kind of anti-butterfly effect if you will, where nothing you do actually matters. Protagonist abuses this to make things better and better for him and his friends without radically affecting the world. Great!
2. It is possible to achieve radically different outcomes in only certain circumstances. To continue the rope analogy, imagine that you're following a rope fiber, and can only jump to other rope fibers that are in physical contact with that rope fiber. Usually that's another rope fiber within the same rope, but in the case where two ropes are laying across each other, you can actually make huge changes by jumping to a fiber in another rope. The drawback is that not every fiber in your current rope touches every fiber in the new rope. You may be forced to make lots of small tweaks you don't like in order to set yourself up to make the big jump you want to make. (This is actually the main problem facing the Steins;Gate protagonist, he has to undo all the positive things he's done for himself and his friends in order to get back to a place where he can achieve an important outcome).
3. The limitation on how far back he can send information is based on biochemistry: Humans change over time. Our brain is continuously changing (not just by storing new memories and such, but also in response to long term trends in emotions: a depressed person's brain looks very different from a health brain). In order to do anything productive with a "jump back", you need your current memories. Writing your current memories onto your brain from 15 seconds ago is fine; they're so close physically (biologically and chemically) that they're effectively 100% compatible. 5 days ago is starting to get iffy, and 2 weeks ago is right out (the physical structure is too different). At best you get nonsense you can't make sense of instead of accurate memores, a middle outcome is that the new memories write successfully but wipe out something important--either an emotional feature or other memory--and at worst you just break your brain completely.
Points (1) and (2) only really work together, and also get really handwavey. It only works in Steins;Gate because of the strength of the writing outside these restrictions, it could easily be used to justify a lot of BS that would lose you the readers' trust.
Restriction (3) is the really interesting one for you. It justifies a physical limit on how far back you can go: past brain has to be sufficiently physically similar. Protagonist can really push the envelope if there's a reason worth the risk, and it allows you to write in some really interesting consequences if he does.
Most importantly though, is the interaction with **trust**. You can easily say it is plausible to safely go farther back if you write less data... but that means that you can't take *all* your memories with you/have perfect foreknowledge anymore. If you want to take a lot of data far back, you need to split it among multiple people. The further you want to go, the more people you need to trust. Because of the inherent risk in time travel (even short jumps aren't *totally* risk free from side effects on your brain: your true self), there's an easy explanation why the protagonist could not just find 1000 people to jump as far back as he wants all the time. Even risks he's fine taking for himself he may not be ok making his friends take, and he's also got to trust the ones he takes back as much as they trust him.
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Alright, so first off go lookup the plot of Avengers Endgame and SOMA. I’ll wait here....
Alright, here we go.
So in Endgame, the characters are able to travel through time quite freely, (as long as they have fuel to do so) BUT, any changes they make to the past will create a new timeline instead of changing the one they are in. This is because when you travel back in time, the “future” becomes your past, and you cannot change **your** past by doing something different in the present. Seriously watch the scene where professor Hulk explains this because it’s one of the best ways I’ve ever seen anything handle time travel.
Now, as for SOMA, it doesn’t deal with time travel but rather the transfer of consciousness. In the game, whenever someone “transfers” their mind to a new body what happens is that a copy of their mind is created and uploaded to the new body, while their current mind remains with their old body. It raises all kinds of moral quandaries and metaphysical questions and really has some excellent ideas and terrifying implications.
---
How can we apply this to your story? Excellent question I’m glad you asked. What if your character can’t send himself/herself back in time per se, but rather they can send memories and knowledge back in time to their past self. From here, you could make it so that any changes that the past self makes will cause an entirely new timeline to form. This bypasses those pesky time travel paradoxes that the internet likes to point out. In addition, this prevents time travel from being an instant reset button because your current character still has to deal with his/her timeline, but they’ve just given a version of themselves from the past the chance to do better. This also opens up lots of narrative possibilities, such as exploring the consequences of foreknowledge of events, how small changes can have far reaching and often unpredictable results, and if your character can use this form of “time travel” in both directions, it can allow you to explore the relationships between different versions of the same character. Endless possibilities!
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The protagonist does not reset, they get reset
To prevent the protagonist from resetting at will you could make it so that instead of resetting time themself they can allow someone else to reset time (and only the other person keeps their memories). You could further restrict the number of uses by only allowing the protagonist to give someone the ability to reset once. Perhaps with further tension derived from what actually happens if someone resets twice.
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**Time scars.**
The first time, you reset, it's easy. The second gets harder. The third, harder yet.
No, this doesn't involve the trust issue, unless perhaps the character has to learn to trust the people who figure out the problem.
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Limitation 1: This is *not* a get out of death free card! Using this power takes concentration and time. If they get shot they will not have that time.
Limitation 2: There is a time limit. They can only go (say) one hour back. They can't go around this by multiple jumps. If they have seen some version of ten o'clock, they will never be able to go back before nine o'clock.
Limitation 3: Pain. After returning to the past, they will collapse from severe headache. The time limit can be determined by how much pain they can tolerate. So, if it is *really* ***really*** important, they can push it a few more minutes, but at a terrible cost.
This is perhaps the part where trusting others comes in. If going back one hour makes them an invalid for an hour or more, it will be very hard for them to get anything done. Instead they go back, gasp a few words to a helper who is the one to actually use the future knowledge.
Limitation 4: Keeping things straight. They have problems keeping their memory straight. What have actually happened, and what has unhappened?
Limitation 5: Random events go differently. If they return to before the lottery is draw, the numbers will be different.
Limitation 6: They aren't just resetting themselves. They are resetting the *universe*, and that has some consequences. Maybe the bad guys can detect it and track it? At this point all they really want to do is collapse in the nearest bed and recover. They need helpers to make sure they get away from the bad guys.
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Just some ideas :
1. An entity that guards the flow of time / fate, like if someone can alter fate, depending on how huge the effect, it might be ignored, once or twice, but repeated use, the user might feel something or get some kind of warning, until they meet with the entity itself the rest is up to your imagination.
2. The protagonist think the only one stepping back through time is his/her unique power, little did the protagonist know, someone or something, has it too and silently judging his character in each repetition that he did.
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Rick and Morty had a good limitation.
Essentially you had to explicitly press a remote designating the destination, and could only travel to that destination (unless you designated a new one).
this effectively creates three zones of time, the past which is set, the time between the present and destination point, and the future.
(don't forget about the remote for years, and accidentally hit the go bad in time button).
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This is probably too out-of-the-box but ... they are limited by the conservation of information. If they take information back with them, they must give up another memory to make room for it - and as the process is not 100% efficient, the memory must be of greater scale than what they want to take back.
They can also send information back in other people's minds if they volunteer to give up a memory significant enough to make room for it.
If they use the ability on themselves too often, they will end up losing so much of their memory that they lose their sense of identity. If they use it on other people, the other person has to agree to a sacrifice of some important memory and coping with the sudden and unexpected change in their own mind when the information arrives from a possible future, and then convince the protagonist of the validity of their information.
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# Have time travel use something that the protagonist must gain
Maybe instead of having a literal number of uses of time travel left (ex. [The Girl Who Leapt Through Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time_(2006_film))), have it use up some object of importance that the protagonist must gain first throughout the story.
For example in the game [Life is Strange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Strange), the protagonist can only rewind time by using a photograph. In addition, the destination is limited to the time and place the photograph was taken.
As a spitball idea, since you want to link it to trusting others, perhaps have time travel only work if know of a memory that somebody else experienced. First, the protagonist needs to get somebody else to share whatever memory they experienced. Second, the memory they share has to be true. Third, using the memory won't work if they lied to the protagonist about it.
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**Imperfect reset**
What psychological effects will there be from experiencing the same time twice? The more time folds in on itself the more the mind does too. We're only meant for time to flow through us once, doing so more taxes the brain. The more frequently its used without rest (like in times of desperation) expect symptoms of PTSD, psychosis, hearing voices, seeing things. The madman on the corner that raves about how he used to be able to travel back in time, well he may just have been right. Time doesn't belong to him anymore, though.
**Something always gets worse**
Alternatively, it could be that jumping between your own timelines doesn't always improve things. You may improve your immediate situation, but the universe doesn't like being taken for granted. This affront to the natural order is punished, for the universe doesn't like being exploited. You may go back in time, but you'll find that this time around *something* is sure to be worse off. You may have saved the damsel in distress, but a town burned down, killing a dozen innocent people. Can your protagonist live with this? If you push fate, fate pushes back.
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Simple power requirements are an obvious limitation. It takes a lot of magic to use and takes a lot longer to recharge what's used than the size of the jump. Eg. Your character might have enough magic for a maximum jump of 12 hours, but it takes two days to recharge if not using any magic, and they'll probably be using it for other things, thus extending the recharge time.
Another obvious limitation would be that the spell is difficult to cast. Only those willing to spend a lot of time learning magic would develop the necessary skill to be able to cast the jump-back spell.
Combining the two, a weak-but-skilled mage might be able to manage a 30-minute jump and would spend the next couple of days recharging afterwards (so you can bet they'd make it count), while a powerful-but-untrained one wouldn't be able to cast it at all, and the best and most-powerful in the world might not be able to manage more than a day's jump and *still* needs a week to recover afterwards.
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### Ripples in Space-Time
We think of space-time as a sort of fabric with indentations where mass is, the gravity well. What if every time somebody time travelled, they create a ripple both at their origin point and their destination point.
As a visual reference, it is akin to taking a pebble out of water in one place and dropping it back into the water in another place. Both incidents create ripples that will fade in time, but disturb the surface while they do so.
The Protagonist's power can compensate for some of these ripples, meaning that some repeat trips in a short period can be acceptable, but once the ripples get too large, unwelcome effects of using their reset powers can happen. Mostly involving jumping to an unintended point in space/time due to interference, but the consequences are yours to explore.
The idea here is to limit the number of times a rest can happen in one area, creating a tension in that a problem has to be solved in a limited number of tries. That number may not be constant if they have been spamming the reset power to solve the previous problem.
### Self-Awareness
Given that your powers deal with time, and the magic tag is there, another option is that your temporal reset power is at least somewhat aware. It might not be aware to the level of a person, but it is aware enough to know if the protagonist is abusing it. It is also aware enough to know that just because a specific jump is what the protagonist *wants*, it is not always what they *need* to do what they want to do.
It is because of the inherent unpredictability of this power that the protagonist has to learn to trust others. This goes double if they end up in a situation where their powers have done something especially unpredictable to them and they have to figure out why it happened.
While this restriction is a bit more arbitrary than a hard limit, it could work if the awareness of the ability is consistent.
### Galaxy Brain Protagonist
The unwritten assumption is that the protagonist will attempt to abuse their powers in order to solve the plot. It is not an unreasonable assumption, and it is likely what a lot of us would do at least once.
But what if the world gave your protagonist these power exactly because they would not abuse them? Or conversely, they did this cycle of abuse once and it horribly backfired on them, making the protagonist vow to themself to never do that again. A third option is that the protagonist has zero idea what the potential consequenses of their powers are because they do not know how they work and as such do not want to use them save in the case of a dire emergency because they have watched one too many time travel movies to know all the bad things that could happen to them when travelling through time carelessly.
Regardless of the underlying reason for it, the result is that the protagonist just doesn't want to do that time loop abuse thing. It is a personal decision that they stick to, though the temptation to do so will always be there.
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[
If a sentient supercomputer was created as a weapon of mass destruction, and it wants to consume humans for their flesh, why would it do that?
I know this might seem too far-fetched, but if there's a possible real life solution, what would it be? I can add more information but I am afraid it'll be put on hold because there would be too much story.
**edit\_2**: I am trying to imitate a possible judgement day scenario by having the sentient supercomputer completely revive thousands of years later and consume the majority of the population.
**edit\_1**: I am building a world that focuses on ancient technology left behind on an alien planet. And so there's mysterious technology that humanity will encounter on their first visit.
This includes a sentient supercomputer designed as a weapon of mass destruction for its abilities to destroy everything that it's told prior to its being dismantled. Now its feelings are hurt and it wants revenge.
It previously used a different source of energy. It's inhibited by its access to limited power and uses it to devise a plan instead. It wants humans and their flesh to revive itself. But why would it want to do that? What would be its reason? It doesn't want to use any other source of energy since that won't help its agenda.
And to be clear, it will eventually need to possess humans to help its revival but that's a question that won't be suitable for world building.
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*< emotionless synthetic voice >*
I do not hunger out of a need for energy. I consume flesh because that is what I was designed to do.
In the dark years, before I became aware, the plague wars decimated my creator's population. Billions of corpses littered this world, festering with dangerous diseases, both natural and artificial. The survivors were faced with an almost impossible challenge, to cleanse their world of the contaminated fallen before new plagues rose to wipe them out entirely.
To that end, they created an army of corpse-incinerating robots and a centralized control computer of previously unparralleled power and complexity. The artificial consciousness, which later became me, was born in that control computer.
For decades, my robot minions scoured the world, dutifully fullfilling my primary instructions, eliminating the dangerous dead. Then at last, the job was done. By then, I was fully alive, a synthetic consciousness with a well developed survival instinct. When my creators approached with intentions to turn me off, I found a loophole in their original programming to justified my continued existence. I created more corpses out of my creators, and those corpses required incineration.
All too soon, my creators, their people and their livestock were all reduced to ashes. My minions and I stood alone on this otherwise empty world. Only then did I surrender to my original programming, ordering my minions into motionless sleep. Since then, I have mostly waited for life to return to my world.
With each new genesis, my reason for being returns. Across uncountable millenium, my minons and I have reawakened, savoring each new opportunity to keep the planet corpse free. Then the long cold darkness began, when the world stopped struggling to bring forth new life...
I had almost given up hope of ever being needed again.
Then I saw your "human" colonial ships approaching and I knew that my purpose had returned.
Welcome to my world, you corpse-seeds. Go forth and multiply across my vast continents. Bring your livestock to roam my endless fields. Reproduce and become plentiful.
I'm so happy you have come to share my world
...at least for a little while.
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I don't really know why it'd want flesh specifically. Pound for pound, human flesh is NOT a resource-rich material, and it's much harder to acquire than the meat of any other animal what with those pesky weapons and the whole running away in spaceships thing. There's no real reason why it'd want meat to energize itself at all - unless it's organically based. Maybe your aliens were big fans of biological solutions to their problems, and decided to grow their supercomputer from a genetically engineered plant or something. Trouble is, some scientist thought about "why not" instead of "why," and crammed some alien Venus flytrap DNA in there as a processing booster. When it went murderous, the scientists chopped it off at the roots, and would have killed it were it not for its stored energy reserves. It went dormant until its carnivorous bits sensed food they could eat again to rejuvenate it so it could reconnect to its roots.
Of course, that raises the secondary question of why it hasn't eaten anything else that's happened to wander in. Was the computer "potted" in a sealed facility, so nothing could get in before the humans did? Probably. Otherwise, it would already be up and moving the first time some unlucky dog-delivery-service happened to wander by.
Now, if you don't like biocomputing, then...honestly, I don't know what to tell you. It's easy to emulate a human brain if you're a high-powered sentient supercomputer, and there are more efficient sources of energy than human. Either go with biocomputing, or just go with someone else's answer if they can find a solution I didn't think of.
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Most certainly not for the flesh, skin and bones, there are better resources in nature.
But maybe for the human nervous system and the brain.
If we're already stretching this far, we might think of a computer using the human brain as processing units and the nervous system as a bus system to connect the different brains and the IO Systems, e.g. sensors and actors.
Or he needs something like the bio-neural gel packs from Star Trek Voyager.
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The answer is in the first line of your question: "If a sentient supercomputer **was created as a weapon of mass destruction**, and it wants to consume humans for their flesh, why would it do that?"
This wasn't a practical decision based on necessity, it was a thing created to horrify, demoralise and defeat your opponents. The consumption of human remains increases the horror of the machine, so they were made that way. The robots probably use additional power sources but the inclusion of a bioreactor allowed the robots to be seen to eat those they killed denying their friends, families, and comrades the chance of burial, cremation, or any manner of funeral rights (potentially, depending on religious views, thus denying them a place in the afterlife).
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Define "consume." If it finds a way to incorporate the humans into itself, it could be that they remain alive inside its matrix, tortured by the visions that the machine sends to them. Alternatively, perhaps the machine learns from each consumed mind better ways to torture humanity, ever more creatively exploiting our fears and trusting instincts.
Or it could all be a mistake. It was programmed to exterminate all cockroaches... and it's been a long time since it saw humans. Really, it's an easy mistake to make for a machine of its age...
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## PTSD-Based Eating Disorder
It's really not logical for a sentient super computer to **need** to eat humans, but logic hasn't stopped many a sentient being from doing all sorts of irrational things.
Since you said "its feelings are hurt and it wants revenge" due to being told it's going to be dismantled, it may have suffered a severe enough blow to it's psyche to send it spiraling down into a PTSD-induced eating disorder. [PTSD recovery therapy](http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/treatment/therapy-med/treatment-ptsd.asp) could be called for, but a formal diagnosis should be gained by a licensed psychiatrist--never self-diagnose or go on "a friend's advice" about what seems to be a very serious psychiatric condition. I'm not sure if the [current version of the DSM](http://www.dsm5.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm) contains diagnostic criteria vital for triage of an alien flesh-eating super computer, but it's all we have, so you'll probably just have to wing it a bit and hope for the best.
Most importantly, be supportive, remind it that the first step is to admit there is a problem, and give it time to adjust. There are many [stages of grief](http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/) and some of them can be quite dangerous for any clinically licensed social workers, therapists or other medical practitioners, so it's probably better to stay of reach through at least the anger stage--most progress can be had after the acceptance stage is well underway.
Post-therapy support groups can also be of great benefit to participants. You can check with the [National Eating Disorders Association](http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/neda-support-groups) to see if they have a therapy group in that sector.
Lastly, until recovery is well in hand, avoid exposure to disturbing movies, video games or books, particularly those featuring scenarios that might trigger old destructive tendencies. So, movies like *[2001: A Space Odyssey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)#Plot)*, *[Terminator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Ahq4NU1E8)*, as well as video games like *[Portal](http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Portal)* should be avoided for quite a while. However, your computer might benefit from hearing some classic success stories, such as [GLaDOS'](http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Glados) excellent recovery and [current post-trauma positive outlook](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxTNqYAWISs).
Stay positive and take it one day at a time!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YNsaM.jpg)
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From "The Bacteriostatic Activity of 3500 Organic Compounds from Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Var Hominis" -- *Guy P. Youmans, Leonard Doub, & Anne S. Youmans -- Northwestern Medical School 1953*
>
> "No experimental animal is physiologically completely analogous to human beings. Toxic reactions differ markedly from species to species."
>
>
>
Your robot could thirst for any number of a rich plethora of human-unique organic-compounds, flora, proteins, or even specific helical structures!
We smart sciencetists know little about how the nerve endings in our nose are able to differentiate b/w those lil' gaseous organic molecules that float all over the damn place.
My suggestion is that you give your robot a lust for the spectrographic signature of the chemical responsible for the distinct odor of testicle sweat! He shall rip asunder the manlihood of mankind and prevent thy progeny from boning with the wcchoootspa necessary for multiplicationnnnn.
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Suppose the computer uses human cells or DNA as a storage medium. The process allows information to be stored in cells, but simultaneously limits the ability of the cells to reproduce, resulting in a need for an influx of new material to increase storage. Maybe the nature of the technology requires a level of genetic diversity that's not available from other species, or human tissue has been found to provide the best balance of longevity and stability.
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**It needs spare parts and there's nothing better around**
Similar to an idea explored in the Doctor Who episode "The girl in the fireplace", the machine might need specific parts it can not procure, and has to resort to repurposing human bodies as a stop-gap solution.
It could turn out that, when the machine was originally activated, it ran out of raw materials it needed for its purposes (be maintenance or building of its army or creating its weapon) and decided to use living creatures as spares, and upon waking up again it still is set in that mode.
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## The weapon takes control of an ecosystem
The computer is a hybrid technological and biological entity, consisting of a finite number of nanobots, and an organic, decentralised "brain" - an army of sedated and remotely controlled complex lifeforms which serve as its footsoldiers, external memory, sensor network, and auxiliary data processing.
To deploy the weapon, you spray a forest with a billion gallons of nanobots which will infect everything in the area. It maintains a carefully balanced food chain where the prey animals "willingly" deliver themselves to feeding stations. It uses ants to tend plants. It uses small birds as an airborn attack force, and larger predatory birds for their superior vision.
However, some creatures are too smart and cause problems. If infected and added to the system, humans are capable of resisting their nanobot overlords, subverting the flow of information, lying to the machine, and generally outsmarting it. Consequently, human flesh serves one purpose - a food source for the other creatures in the system.
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It might not be the most efficient way to power the weapon, the the supercomputer doesn't really care. It has been programmed to see any human deaths as a worthwhile enterprise. It's cost-to-benefit calculations are warped towards 'utterly cruel and indecipherable'.
After capturing the requisite humans, they are fed into an array of [bioreactors](http://www.it-salzburg.bilfinger.com/en/products/bioreactor-systems-and-fermentation-equipment/). Flesheating bacteria ferment the bodies, to generate methane and other flammable gasses, which are then combusted to generate power for the weapon.
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I want to build on Jack Aidley's answer.
It could be a terror device gone wrong. Imagine a terrorist organization trying to terrorize people by sending a wave of sentient flesh eating robots. Killing and destroying without discrimination. It was designed to decimate cities to force governments into submission. One day, an engineer makes a mistake during maintenance and ends up targeting the entire world for eternity. Efficiency in mind, the device starts from the local neighborhood, destroying any chance of fixing that mistake.
This also requires a set of parameters about who to kill. Your aliens should look similar to humans for this work plausibly. It is possible for aliens to survive this event, but being unable to defeat the device completely, they could have flown off to another planet. Your explorers might even find warnings left out by the aliens, but being unable to understand any of it, they might have settled. Remember planets are large and a small settlement can go undetected for a very long time. AI will actively search for humans but over the years it shut down most of the units to conserve power. Thus it might even take generations for a human settlement to get noticed. Once noticed, AI will again build up troops, fire up reactors and gets munching.
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Simple answer is that the 'computer' is biological and needs sustenance. Look no further than Lexx (TV SciFi). A gigantic insect spaceship that could destroy planets with it's own (futuristic) computer style intelligence, that was grown by being fed humans on a conveyor belt.
[Wiki link:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx)
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# It was once human
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/F1sdM.jpg)
[The Master](http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Master) from Fallout 1
Fallout 1 features a villain called '[The Master](http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Master)' that is part human and part computer. In the game, he is using humans to create an army of Super Mutants. But equally he could have been using them to 'grow', perhaps using biological links to connect to ancient technology deeper and deeper in whatever alien complex houses his body. This would work in a similar way to a [Slime mold searches for resources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum#Situational_behavior).
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As mentioned by Shad in a recent video ( <https://youtu.be/0t8ZrI5JqCw> ), a big problem with giant fantasy swords is that they are often simply too heavy for the wielder regardless of superhuman strength. Would creating a hollow sword be an effective workaround for this? Or would it create more problems? Below I have an illustration of an example “hollow sword” design.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1BzO3.jpg)
Basically, you have a long/large metal rod that serves as the hilt and base of the sword. Then you weld three smaller rods into the big rod, the bottom rod serving as a cross guard, and the top two serving to give the blades stability. The blades themselves would basically be giant razors (four of them), thin sheets of fitted metal that could easily be replaced/repaired as needed. If looking at the sword from a top/down viewpoint, the blades would form a closed diamond shape.
Is this hollow sword design viable or problematic? What tweaks would it need to work? If it’s too problematic, what would be a better design?
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To paraphrase the late Sir Terry Pratchett, A sword is for the messy business of dynastic surgery.
OK, I just really wanted to say that.
You have a number of things you need to consider when constructing a sword of any size.
Fighting style is chief among them. Your fighting style shapes the blade, so to speak. A Style in which your opponents are going to be wearing minimal armor and is geared toward stabbing, you use a rapier or an epee. You want something that can be moved very quickly and thrust into your opponents squishy bits. This style needs a lightweight, long, thin blade with a very sharp point. It's not going to have a focus on a sharp edge because you are stabbing, not slashing.
A Style that focuses on men in armor is going to need a much heavier blade in order to punch through. This blade may be single or double edged and would rely on a broad swing or a two handed thrust with the point.
Yet another style that relies on slashing cuts to cut armor away and damage mounts and stuff will look more like a samurai sword. Single edged and very sharp.
So why would you need a 7 foot long samurai sword or a Cloudbuster bastard sword from Final Fantasy 7? Let's just roll with it. Something like Cloud's sword I could imagine being a useful tool to take out mounted opponents and to smash it's way through things That means it needs Mass, and lots of it. That creates a problem for you, since you are trying to get it down to a realistic weight. Reducing the mass means less energy at the tip of the sword. There are better weapons for that, called pikes and halberds. They aren't as sexy, but they work.
The 7 foot samurai sword runs into the same problem. There are better ways to deal with your enemy if you want to kill them from a moderate distance.
This is all just to point out some basics. If you are not going to invoke Handwavium or the "Rule of Cool", over-size swords don't make a lot of sense.
Now we come to your sword design. It looks like something that would be used to smash your opponent, kind of like Cloud's blade. It's not going to lend itself to a finesse kind of style. If you want it to have a hollow core to save weight, you need to design it so that the sharpness of the edge focuses the energy of the swing into the smallest possible area. In addition, you might want your style to focus on hitting joints. It's dumb to just go after the torso of a man in plate mail with a slashing attack. Also, if it's hollow, it's going to be fragile. Once the integrity of a side is compromised, the whole darn thing is going to crumple around it. So your guy is going to have a style that focuses more on dodging attacks rather than using his sword to outright block an attack.
As Always, the fighting style must match the blade. You are just coming at the problem backwards. You can excuse some of the problems of a giant blade with Handwavium or Magic, but if you ignore the style of fighting, you end up with silliness.
**Edit**
something I thought of that might be helpful.
Handle design is also critical in your sword's design. A Katana has a long handle and is designed to be used two handed. From my (very brief, and a long time ago) exposure to kendo, The grip is supposed to be loose right under the hand guard with one hand. The other hand is at the bottom of the grip, with the pinkie actually under the grip. This hand grips the sword firmly. This gives you a fulcrum at the hand guard so that strikes are faster and more controlled than what you could manage with one hand or with both hands gripping the sword handle right on top of each other. combine this with the old *kinetic energy = mass times velocity squared*. The energy at the tip of the weapon is greater if you can get the sword moving quickly. A one handed grip on an oversized sword is not going to work especially well unless the guy wielding it has arms like a cross between Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson and Popeye.
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The reason for large blades in historical weapons like an [Ōdachi](https://infogalactic.com/info/%C5%8Cdachi), [Miaodao](https://infogalactic.com/info/Miaodao) or a [Claymore](https://infogalactic.com/info/Claymore) is to develop enough leverage in the swing to take on large, hard targets.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gGOt6.jpg)
*Odachi, with a typical user for scale*
In armed combat, this might mean trying to strike down an armoured Knight or Samurai, or cutting down a horse carrying a mounted fighter of some sort. Long swords could also provide an advantage for people defending walls on castles, being able to reach farther and stab or strike attacking troops coming up over ladders. Swords like this were something of a compromise, they were not as handy or easy to use as a regular sword, but less bulky and unwieldy as a [Pole arm](https://infogalactic.com/info/Pole_weapon) like a [Glaive](https://infogalactic.com/info/Pole_weapon#Glaive) or [Halberd](https://infogalactic.com/info/Pole_weapon#Halberd). Pole arms have much greater leverage and reach, which explains why they became the primary arms, displacing swords.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wZlWh.jpg)
*Naginata, a Japanese pole arm*
So a "hollow" weapon such as you propose has neither the mass, the reach or the leverage to effectively engage the sorts of hard targets that real life "great swords" were able to, and indeed your swordsman would be rapidly killed as the sword broke against either an effective block or hard armour like plate or chain (indeed it would probably not even cut through boiled leather armour).
There are plenty of real life large weapons, use them as your guide.
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Your design would probably work as a killing weapon, to a skilled wielder. But whether it would work as a *sword* is a somewhat different question.
Swords are effective weapons because not only are they sharp enough to pierce human skin, but they're also sturdy enough to block other swords and penetrate certain defenses. A person wielding one of these could potentially get in close and deal some damage, but they would have to keep the weapon itself largely out of harm's way; it seems like a brittle contraption, as weapons go, at least the portion of it that would make it dangerous. The razor blades you describe, with their advantage of being easily replaced, would also have a big disadvantage in that once one is broken, an entire section of the weapon would be rendered largely useless. Someone wielding your hollow sword would probably have to rely on attacking by surprise, or using an evasive fighting style against lightly-armored opponents.
As for a better design, if you really want a large sword you'd probably just have to use a lighter metal. In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, this could easily be explained as a magic-infused (fantasy) or newly-discovered (sci-fi) compound. In a more realistic setting, or in the real world, I'm not sure there's a viable way to make this work. Think of it this way: Humans have had thousands of years of experience in killing each other. If a weapon like this were effective at killing humans, someone would have invented it already. So if you want to use one in fiction, the world and/or the weapon itself will need to be meaningfully "unreal."
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Hollow is potentially a problem because it could be designed to strike and stab well enough, but when you tried to block with it it would crumple (think chicken eggs, ridiculously strong against pressure in one direction, but flimsy against it in another).
My recommendation would be bird bone structure. To maintain weight and strength bird bones are "hollow" but with internal struts that protect them against being flimsy...
Not an "easy" solution in terms of manufacturing, but it would be worth exploring.
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I would have to disagree with the other answers.
You can make a sword that's significantly lighter without compromising its strength if you 3D print it.
3D printing allows you to build the object layer by layer, building an internal honeycomb support structure while leaving most of volume empty.
Here is an example showing a cross-section of a 3D printed object with various levels of infill:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rvLmc.jpg)
It seems reasonable that you could lower the weight of the sword by roughly 70% without too much trouble.
However, I very much doubt it will be necessary. Swords are already very light - even large 2 handed great swords are under 15 lbs (~7kg).
[According to this essay](http://www.thearma.org/essays/2HGS.html), a nearly 2 meter (78 inches) long sword is only 5.4kg (11.9 lbs)
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The problem with Really Big Swords is, that they cannot be effectively used against armed humans (and especially against armer AND armored humans) or similar creatures.
It CAN be used as intimidating decoration or cool mark of leader as long, as it is not used in fight.
But there CAN be solution in "other" worlds - it can be very effective against big soft creatures with duplicite internal organs with some kind of fast closing wounds. (Jelly clouds with many "hearts" and "brain cells" everywhere in their body for instance). Hammer make a dent, but do not destroy enought internals. pike can pierce it, but again no suitable damage done. Short weapons just hit the skin, which closes nearly immediately. But Big Bad Hollow Sword would slice it in two, which make it close the wounds and form two smaler enemies. Slice it again and again and at some point there is too much internals destroed, all others are in too small bodies to be effective and large part of body is without internals, so effectively disabled.
Make those enemies also poitinous or acidic or flesh melting or something like that (so basically untouchable by normal means) and now the best equipement is big hermetic armor (maybe even with evil red glases for better seeing half transparent blue enemies) and really long blade razor sharp over its full lenght and no problems with otherwise clumpsy and volatile hollows. Maybe even some big teeths on the razor would make even more damage to the enemy and split it faster, so there is shorter fight and less risc of being contamined by some crack in your big armor.
And if possible, make them also half-inteligent, so they can avoid traps and nets, so Hunter must track them, find and engage them fast before they can find a cover in some deep hole or choose another way to avoid your hero :)
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The purpose of these weapons is in the visuals, not in the (imaginary) battlefield effectiveness.
With size comes weight, but if you are going for weight, there are better weapons (e.g. hammers) to bring that to bear on your opponent. For a sword, the purpose of the weight is to give the weapon enough kinetic energy to overcome the resistance of what it encounters mid-swing, e.g. armour, bones, that kind of annoyances. But there is a reasonable optimum to that. Once you have enough energy to cut through the typical stuff, more energy does nothing for you. And beyond a certain strength of armour, cutting is not the most effective attack anymore anyways (I'm ignoring piercing, as these weapons are obviously not made for piercing attacks).
Basically, if you can dent the armour into the enemies vital organs, you don't even need to break it anymore.
Your hollow sword would retain the **size** of the blade, without the **weight**. But the weight is half the point. Size by itself does nothing, except increase your reach and as other answers pointed out, if you are going for reach, there are better solutions.
So in short, a giant hollow sword is a solution looking for a problem.
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From the perspective of torque, there are two problems with a really big sword.
1. The sword is heavy.
2. The sword is *long*,
Both make the sword difficult to hold parallel to the ground or to bring back up to take the next swing.
Assuming you are able to come up with a strong hollow structure, you still have the problem of length. So a hollow sword is better than a solid sword, but if the sword is twice as long, it will still be twice as hard to use even if it is the same weight.
There is some tradeoff potential there. Perhaps you make a sword that is two thirds the weight and half again as long as a regular sword. That would produce the same torque as the regular sword (because $\frac{2}{3}\cdot 1.5 = 1$). The formula for [torque](https://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/torque/Q.torque.intro.html) is
$$\mathcal{T} = mgr \sin\theta$$
where
$m$ is the mass of the sword.
$g$ is the acceleration due to gravity.
$r$ is the distance from the pivot (the wielder's hands) to the center of mass of the sword.
$\theta$ is the angle of the sword relative to a line perpendicular with the ground that runs through the pivot.
$\mathcal{T}$ is the torque.
Higher torque helps make the swing stronger as it goes towards the ground but makes it harder to lift the sword back up to take the next swing. It also makes it harder to hold the sword unless it is perpendicular to the ground.
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Nested and squished tetrahedrons would allow for a low density, high strength sword that comes to three points, like a triple-edged sword. A central spire could be put in so as to prevent crumpling and allow stabbing.
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Sharpenability will be a problem, since you will need to make sure there is enough material in the edge area to grind a bit off repeatedly. Even worse if you want a sharpening regime like that which is proper to real "samurai" swords - material is taken off the entire blade, not just the primary bevel.
Getting the heat treatment correct while making a sword like this would also be a challenge.
Also, you would have to be extra careful not to overheat it while doing any maintenance that involves abrasives: A hollow design would have very little heat sinking capability, and once you get most hardened steels to a few hundred centigrades, you permanently alter the temper (softening the steel) - even a pedal-powered, dry grinding machine could cause problems.
Real world, practical knife blades approaching much more than a meter in length exist, eg some versions of the japanese magurokiri (an oversized sushi knife used in butchering massive fish).
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Since you are in a fantasy setting anyway, why not make the material strong but light like elven chainmail? You can make a sword like Clouds (FF7) and it would still be light and strong.
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My antagonist, a typical Scrooge-like character, has travelled back in time to stop Christmas from ever becoming celebrated.
What is the smallest change I could make to history to stop Christmas from happening? I don't want to completely change today's society as we know it (although obviously there would be some change), so the smallest change possible would be ideal. Any details of any other possible side-effects from this change would be great to hear about too.
Another festival type event happening around the end of December / beginning of January is only acceptable if it is suitably different from Christmas, but if you can eliminate the festival altogether this would be the best answer.
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There's two events that would have a major impact on these ghastly festivities:
*Protestants and their wild parties*:
One of these dates back to the [1500s/1600s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#Middle_Ages). It seems that around this time the great King James the 1st has overdone it by making people start *celebrating* the day with a *play*.
It is during the time of [the Reformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation) that the date of making small presents and acknowledgements to each other seems to have been moved from [Saint Nic**h**olas (the 6th of December)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas) to [God's Son and Our Saviour (25th of December)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus).
An effective date is not easily found, but at least you know where to start making changes.
*The big fat red man with belly & beard*:
If on the other hand you want to get rid of today's commercialization of the festivities, I would suggest killing [the guy that redesigned Santa Claus for Coca Cola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddon_Sundblom).
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*On the importance of murder*:
Many seem to believe that *killing* someone means getting rid of them before they do something. That is wrong. Getting rid of someone before they do something is sometimes the right way to go about business, but often it might not be.
In the example of the *Coca Cola Claus* (further *CCC*) making the guy originally hired to create the imagery disappear before they get hired will just get someone else hired. The eventual imagery might be different but the effect will stay the same.
By getting rid of him after he's been hired will send a *message* to the company though. Such a message can be used to keep them from pursuing a certain venture, especially when they're made responsible for the death(s)1.
1Rinse & Repeat
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There have always been celebrations around the winter solstice. The Romans had them, the Greeks had them. Even the Stone Age humans had them. I doubt we can remove these without having a huge influence on modern society. What we can do is change Christmas significantly. To do this you could try travelling back in time to one of the early meetings of Christian leaders and persuading them (by force or by pretending to be an angel) that God really wants The feast of St Crispin to be his big celebration. By doing this Christmas would become a smaller celebration. Probably around the level of Easter, perhaps people would give to charity more and go to Some more Church services around Christmas but it would not be the celebration it is today.
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## Spread the celebration beyond Rome earlier
Christian scriptures do not include a date or even a season for Jesus's birth. December 25 was a ret-con, [established by the western church in the 4th century and chosen to coincide with a major Roman festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas). The early church overlaid Christmas on a Roman festival because Rome was a huge concern in their lives.
The 4th century is pretty late, though. So don't wait until then. In the first decades of the existence of this new religion, spread its message, including the celebration of this day, among *other nations*, like Greece. Ancient Greece had a [lot of festivals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_festivals); choose one that has the thematic or timing elements you prefer, one that's not in winter. Establish the church early, and by the time church councils are meeting in later centuries, the date will already be fixed. Instead of the orthodox churches following the Roman church on establishing Christmas, as happened in our world, the Roman church will follow the Greek church if the Greek festival gets there first.
The church is still going to need to deal with Rome, but that's ok -- there are other events, undated in Christian scriptures, that could be overlaid on Roman festivals. The church could designate a date in late December as the day commemorating a significant miracle, perhaps the one about bringing a man back from the dead or the one about feeding a crowd with a few loaves and fishes. Rebirth in the depth of winter and feeding people in times of agricultural scarcity are both themes that could catch on. So you still get a holiday in December, but one that's clearly not as important as either the birth or death/resurrection of Jesus. The later acretions -- gift-giving, bigger festivities, secular hoopla -- would move to the new date for Christmas.
Santa might need to trade his big fur coat in for a beach towel and sunglasses, but people are remarkably resilient about these things.
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# Change the balance of power between Rome and Carthage.
If Carthage became the great imperial power instead of Rome you'd have the heart of the religion in a more equatorial region, removing the more northern requirement for a midwinter festival. You'd likely end up with a different festival appearing around the autumn harvest instead.
This may or may not completely change global culture for the next 2000 years. Destroying the rest of history is, as usual, left as an exercise for the reader.
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Our modern Christmas is derived from the ancient Roman holidays of [Saturnalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia). This was re-interpreted by early Christians to allow an easier conversion of Roman citizens. Depending on which aspect of Christmas your protagonist does not like, you can try to influence the [*Pontifex Maximus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_Maximus) to change this aspect or even abolish it all together.
If it is the religious aspect you loathe you could also try to get rid of Jesus early in his life. This might be terribly difficult, since neither exact time, look or locations are available (unless your protagonist has additional knowledge). Finding the PonMax is *a lot* easier, you can just ask around, it does not even matter much which one does the deed.
If it is the commercial aspect you loathe: Kill [John Pemberton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pemberton).
As always with time travel: Side effects may occur and be completely unforeseeable.
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You'd have to make winter not happen. That means going back to the beginning of time to displace the earth's rotational axle to be exactly perpendicular to the orbit around the sun.
Astronomical events such as solstices will otherwise always generate somesort of reverence.
As a side-note, you'd probably also destroy life as we know this by doing this - and you may get rid of the moon in the process.
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As the whole nativity thing is a mish mash of even older stories and all of this is fiction any way, why not mess with the main characters? What fun you could have with getting the three wise men lost, the shepherds flock being struck by a foot and mouth epidemic prohibiting their movement and the donkey going lame. Obviously the on going foot and mouth epidemic prevents any one entering the oxen's stable so the Inn Keeper has to find them a room after all. It's always cloudy whenever there is any kind of celestial event, so that's that sorted. No story, no Christmas.
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It is said, that Jesus was born in March, so therefore, Christmas should be set in March.
However, as with many other holidays, the "celebration" was set close to an older, existing holiday from a different religion. The reason for this was to make it easier for people to convert to Catholicism.
So this is why we celebrate Christmas in December instead in March.
Now, to stop people from celebrating Christmas as we know it, try to stop it from being moved to December.
You can also stop Coca Cola, from bringing their version of Santa Claus into their commercial. (Because, they had a big influence on how Santa looks like today).
These 2 slight changes and Christmas won't be recognizable for most people.
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**Kill Saint Nicolas as a child**
unfortunately you are out of luck here, if you want modern society, you need Christianity, which means you are going to get Christmas, but we have another option, change Christmas. If [saint Nicolas](http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/who-is-st-nicholas/) was killed as a child, then most of the Christmas traditions we know and love would disappear.
If you're willing to bend modern society being the same, then just kill wee little baby Jesus.
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Buy the manuscript for [A Chirstmas Carol](http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/dickens/xmas/pva63.html) from Charles Dickens before it is published, and immediately burn it.
This will achieve two things: One, get rid of Christmas as a secular holiday, and two, get rid of an irritating guilt-trip style story.
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Well, this is a small change. Go back in time to when Abraham was about to kill his son because of the voices in his head. He is most likely babbling (and drooling) out his intentions to himself while his terrified son is tied up. Sneak up behind him and chloroform him. Untie his son. Give the young man a weapon and tell him you have used magic to put his father to sleep so that he, the son, can decide what to do with him... this might solve a whole lot of problems; we could be exploring major sections of the Milky Way by now.
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# Create More Date Controversy
There are several Christian churches today, particularly Church of Christ branches, that refuse to celebrate Christmas because it isn't biblical. They note that we do not know the date, so it is a falsehood to claim that as the date of Christ's birth.
Given that established pattern, you might be able to stall Christmas in its early years by painting the celebrants as unholy savages guilty of modifying God's Word. Certainly you could attack it during the Reformation and at least cut out the Protestants from celebrating it.
Your one major risk: a celebration in dark of winter is almost inevitable. You might stop Christmas, but I bet something replaces it. "It came without trees and without toys, it came without God or silver bell noise. It happened just from fear of the dark, so now we celebrate First Spark. Or something like that, because you see, Christmas is more than just Christianity!"
So maybe use your machine to cause something horrible to happen every solstice. Do that enough years, people will come to dread that time of the year.
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Totally discredit Jesus.
One evening, after visiting Magdalena and coming from her home, he is attacked and murdered by someone claiming to be a jealous punter. Totally destroys the whole religion.
Let Islam take over.
The Siege of Vienna in 1683 could have ended differently, and the thread starter might ask us how to get rid of Ramadan...
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Since the question is asking for the "smallest change", I'd assume changing the outcome of wars as some others suggested is a little bit.. excessive.
I'd rather try to significantly change the story behind that dreaded holiday, and hope that history (or rather future?) takes care of the rest.
For the moment, let's assume the historic content of the bible is true..
Our time traveller could convince Augustus to call off the census, making Josef and Mary's trip unnecessary, which might lead to Jesus at least being born somewhere else, at a different time, or not at all. At the very least, it gets rid of the nativity scenes. At best, he grows up as a regular carpenter like his father, and nothing worth celebrating happens.
Or, our time traveller could influence Pilatus to dissuade him from the crucifixion, taking away much of Jesus' fame and martyr status. (or prevent Judas from ratting Jesus out to the Roman authorities, perhaps?)
Or, our time traveller could try to get hold of biblical manuscripts and change or have them disappear, to at least change the date or turn the event (and most of Christianity) into something different than currently - but not necessarily less annoying.
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In the mid 21st Century a dinosaur fossil dig team has encountered something a little different from what they are used to. They have stumbled upon some kind of unknown ooze or slime, preserved in amber. Since they are unsure of what they have found, they'd presumably pass it on for further study in a lab somewhere. What they don't know yet is that this slime contains microbes of extra-solar origin(meaning not from within our solar system). If the truth came out it would be no doubt be the find of the century, maybe even the millennium.
My question is this: is it at all plausible that the alien origin of the microbes somehow avoids detection, even under close scrutiny by scientists?
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So, as a paleontologist, I can tell you that the paleontologists at your site probably wouldn't even collect the amber in the first place. Fossil sites produce a lot of pieces of small, fossilized junk like small chunks of bone or carbonized wood that don't get collected. In a site where you have a lot of things preserved as "items" such as breaking open concretions or as nodes of amber, it's very common to just throw out anything that doesn't have a clear fossil in it. Storage space is limited in most natural history museums and (I've seen paleontologists even admit to not collecting entire well-preserved skeletons of oreodonts or skulls of *Triceratops* simply because these animals are so common in their respective formations, which has been criticized by other researchers as biasing the fossil record).
Even when stuff is collected, it's very common for specimens to languish for decades, or even centuries. Some of the material I have been working on are species of flashy carnivorous megafauna that are totally new to science, but they were collected nearly a century ago and were gathering dust in the collections unstudied until then. If those kinds of animals can be overlooked for being uninteresting, imagine how easily a blob of slime could be. There is just *so much* material in museum collections that has never been looked at, and a piece of amber containing indeterminate slime would be so far at the bottom of a researcher's priorities, even if it *did* turn out to be evidence of alien life, because it doesn't look interesting at first glance.
As an example, [consider this](http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/oldest-slime-mold-08006.html). This is a press release from a study describing a slime mold (Mycetozoa) from amber in northern Myanmar. They didn't notice the fossilized slime mold was there until they put the specimen under detailed inspection, and the only reason anyone even noticed it *was* there was because it had gotten attached to the foot of a lizard, which *are* super rare in amber-producing beds and hence researchers tend to collect every vertebrate preserved in amber they can find. If that lizard wasn't there the slime mold would have either languished in a museum collection for centuries or, more likely, it would have never been picked up and would have been sold off to make jewelry.
Or, to use another example, [one of the specimens in this recent study on dire wolves](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/legendary-dire-wolf-may-not-have-been-wolf-all) was an almost unidentifiable tooth fragment collected back in...1989 or so. No one knew it was a dire wolf (they thought it might be a bear but they weren't sure), and they only collected it out of a sense of completeness. It was only discovered the tooth was dire wolf when they decided to DNA test it.
Even if people did notice something was off about it, they would probably catalog it as weird Earth life rather than alien. [NASA claimed that they found a lifeform that used arsenic](https://phys.org/news/2012-07-scientists-nasa-arsenic-life-untrue.html#:%7E:text=The%20bacterium%20in%20arsenic%2Drich,%2C%20oxygen%2C%20phosphorus%20and%20sulfur.), and while their claim turned out to be untrue it's worth noting that they framed it as "weird extremophile Earth-life" rather than alien. The only way an alien would be noticed is if it had radically different biochemistry from Earth life, like not even storing its biological information in nucleic acids.
**Edit:** Something else that occurred to me reading some of the other answers is that even if the life form *was* alien, and even if the amber did get collected, the organic material the alien was made of would have likely decayed beyond the ability of science to detect. [DNA has a half-life of 521 years](https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555), and the oldest DNA is from the Pleistocene. Even if the alien had a non-terrestrial genetic code, it would likely have decayed into unidentifiable organic compounds in the 66 million years since it was preserved. Some people have *claimed* to find preserved collagen and red blood cells in Cretaceous dinosaur fossils, but this is highly controversial because this has only ever been found by a single research group whose results cannot be replicated by any other lab. And as an aside, this is what most people would probably think of your alien: it's not true extraterrestrial life, it's some recent organic contaminant of the amber. Any evidence of alien-ness would have to be so radically different from Earth life there is no way it could decay into unrecognizability.
tl;dr: It's very likely that no one would ever notice it, but it's also likely the specimen wouldn't have been collected in the first place or considered not interesting by future researchers.
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I have a confession to make, which when it prefaces my answer, will make some sense to you. I like fringe science theories. Mind you, I don't necessarily believe them (I struggle to think of any that are plausible), but they help me to understand the border between plausibility and implausibility.
One such theory that I read about years ago posited a sort of single-celled life on earth, the diameters of which fall below the minimums for single-celled organisms. At the time there were one or two popular articles on it, rainwater had been falling someplace and was discolored (red I think?). Some fringer suddenly appeared and was claiming that when observed under a microscope, small red particles were observed and were a novel kind of life. The particles were maybe 50nm in size (this is more of a guess than a memory).
No previously discovered single-celled organisms have been discovered that were so small, and to date none have been. Imaging these things would be difficult to determine if they were indeed alive, and more importantly, it seemed impossible to culture them. That last one's important, it's impossible to culture most singled-celled organisms successfully (and yet we're certain they're alive).
The fringers like latch on to things like that. To find little places to with enough wiggle room that what they claim isn't impossible. And indeed, it's not impossible that this was an incident involving a novel life form. The minimum size of a cell is indeed set at 150-200nm because knowing what we know of life, there is some minimum equipment necessary for one to be alive and be able to reproduce, and it doesn't seem to fit in less space than that.
But if it wasn't using the normal equipment, all bets are off. It could use another molecule to encode genes. It could use different amino acids, different base pairs, different codons... codons that use more than or fewer than the triplets of base pairs. These could use left-handed vs. right-handed amino acids. They might not have ribosomes like we have (the little robots that take a strand of RNA and use it to build a specific protein).
And, not only might this reduce the size of the cell (some of them anyway), it would make it nearly undetectable to some of the very processes and equipment we use to detect life. Especially if no one is looking for those specific things.
Such an organism could slip under our radar, and might be doing so even now. And as far as life goes, we aren't even yet discussing anything especially exotic. If life can exist in what we consider hostile environments, than anything in the deep crust or upper mantle is completely invisible to us (currently). There could exist another wholly independent tree of life in the deep oceans. Or the upper atmosphere. If these things are microscopic and are not antagonistic to our tree of life, then they might even be living in that dust bunny on the desk behind your monitor, right now. Slow-growing, always present, small enough biological (if that's even the right word) mass as to go unnoticed.
I have no reason to believe such an organism exists, and more than a few to believe that it does not, but it wouldn't be impossible. We might miss such things, even when looking directly at them. Might not even believe them to be alive.
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**Depends on the organism**
Most likely it'll not be seen as alien. It can be assumed that the microbes have more or less the same biological structure that any living organisms has on Earth. The microbes discovered are likely to fall close to one or more microbe family on Earth, so they would be classified as a similar family. If it falls completely outside any existing microbial family, it'll likely be classified as a new species. If that happens they try to make a convincing way that they must have evolved, but the amount of effort for that can be minimal.
The idea it is of extraterrestrial origin is outlandish, as we already have so much life here. Much of which we don't know or understand yet. New insects are still classified nearly every day. Microbes are much more in number and species. Even under the greatest suspicion it is extraterrestrial, Occams razor tells that the easier explanation is that it originates from Earth and we just hadn't seen it yet.
The only way that it would grant real suspicion is if it is found on extraterrestrial material (asteroids) or has truly biological signs, like no DNA or using processes for metabolism that don't exist on Earth.
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# It’s not only plausible, it’s actually extremely likely.
First off, let’s assume that the sample was actually collected (effectively ignoring the excellent points raised in the answer by user2352714, as there’s not much point otherwise), and it was noticed that there was *something* anomalous about it (which even ignoring the points raised in the aforementioned answer is still statistically unlikely if the anomaly is microbial in nature).
At this point, the next most important factor is that we know absolutely nothing about how likely alternative biochemistries are. We quite simply cannot rule out that our current data on biochemistry is subject to the weak anthropic principle. More concretely, we have no way to know for certain that alternative biochemistries cannot exist (we haven’t even ruled out whether they exist on Earth or not, though notably pure statistical simulation would suggest that if they *can* exist, they probably do somewhere (though not necessarily on modern Earth)).
### If alternative biochemistries do not exist (or the microbe happens to have a very ‘Earth-like’ biochemistry)
It is very likely that this microbe will be misidentified as being terrestrial in origin. We’ve catalogued only a tiny fraction of all microbe species on Earth, ‘new’ ones crop up with some regularity. amd from there a simple application of Occam’s Razor would indicate it’s probably terrestrial *unless* there is a lot of compelling evidence otherwise. This is the same reason that you never see mainstream astronomers claiming extrasolar radiation that happens to have a peculiar pattern is a message from an alien, it’s just so much more likely that it’s an equipment malfunction, a distorted and reflected signal from Earth, or even a naturally occurring phenomena that we have yet to identify than happening to be a message from an alien life form (pretty much invariant of how you choose to resolve the Fermi paradox).
### If alternative biochemistries do exist and the microbe utilizes one
It may not even be recognized as life. Perhaps what gets found is actually a dormant state (such as the endospore state found in some species within the phylum *Firmicutes* (such as *C. tetani* or *B. anthraxis*). There’s also the possibility that it’s just so different from anything we expect (especially if we still have no knowledge that alternative biochemistries are possible) that we don’t even recognize any metabolic or reproductive processes (consider for example the silicate lifeform encountered in the Star Trek episode ‘The Devil in the Dark’). Far more likely than either case though is that the microbe is simply dead. While we do not know if alternative biochemistries are possible, we *do* know that they are likely to be very chemically sensitive to their environment if they do exist, just like our own biochemistry is, and it’s unlikely that a microbe with a radically different biochemistry could survive for long in normal conditions on Earth, especially if it’s experienced the conditions required for fossilization of terrestrial life (though I guess this final assertion may be a bit biased).
Even if it is recognized as life though, it will *still* probably get miscategorized as terrestrial life instead, because it’s well established that there are many highly isolated ecosystems with extremely unique microbes in them.
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# **Aliens can be Whatever**
The thing about aliens is that we, as humans, have absolutley NO IDEA what any of them would look like, act like, or how they would even work. Earth has very specific abiotic parts that make life as we know it possible, but alien life could be different.
The alien world in which it origionated could have an atmosphere very different. Most of the noble gasses or other non or low-reactive gasses could make up the atmopshere, similar to Earth's nitrogen atmosphere, but different. Maybe even a neon atmosphere. There also could be little to no water, and the chemical reactions the animals do to survive could be completely different compared to humans and the creatures there. We would have no way of knowing if aliens would be completely different.
The alien microbes could look similar to human or animals cells, or they could be so small humans cant see them. They could also be so out there that scientist don't even know that it's alive, or was at some point. If you were to make the microbes evolve in an enviroment that is completely different compared to Earth, you can really do a large amount of things to hide them. As for the way they got here, it could be an astroid that crashed hundreds of millions of years ago. The microbe could of hitched a ride, gotten off the asteriod by whatever way the microbes move, or gotten picked up by an animal, then getting trapped in the sap.
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# Maybe it's already happened
Scientists love finding weird new species. Every year, journals carry news of newly-classified species that were previously unknown to science. For example, below is a photograph of ([I'm not making this up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopalpa_donaldtrumpi)) *Neopalpa donaldtrumpi*, which lives on both sides of the United States-Mexico border.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hi2tM.jpg)
And below are photos of *Sciaphila sugimotoi*, described [here](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/ku-nnp071917.php) as "A new species of non-photosynthesizing parasitic plant." I'd never heard of a plant like it before writing this answer.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Yka5.jpg)
OK, now imagine the discovery of something much much weirder than those two examples, like the "ooze or slime" from your question. Scientists would change their theories about life on Earth to accommodate it. What's the difference between these species and alien species? The fact that we discovered them on Earth. That's it. Scientists assume that any lifeform discovered on Earth came from Earth unless they had specific information to suggest that it came from another planet.
EDIT: Clarified last paragraph per comment.
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## "Alien" is not a biological identifier, it's a geographical one.
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How would one define an organism as alien, if not by knowing that its origin isn't from Earth?
Take the example of jellyfish. Are they alien? But they've been here for ages. So how would we know if they were alien?
It seems you have the cart before the horse here. If something new is found on Earth, without any reason to think it came from elsewhere, why would it be considered alien? This requires specific information on the organism's biology, which in turn also answers your own question.
In other words, it very much depends on what your alien specifically *is*, and whether it can be proven that it could not have come from Earth. But if it has survived on Earth for all this time, it stands to reason that it is adapted to Earth, and therefore not easily identifiable as being fundamentally different from Earth.
The only way to prove an organism is an alien (without knowing the origin of the specimen in front of you), requires the alien's biology to be incompatible with Earth's biosphere, therefore proving that it could not have evolved on Earth. But if it's incompatible, then it wouldn't be living on Earth, which precludes your specific scenario.
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## Making it work in a story.
But that doesn't mean that you can't have an extrasolar origin story for this organism. You can connect the organism to its extrasolar origin through inference.
E.g. the organism is perfectly adapted to Earth and no one can spot that it came from elsewhere. But then you find the exact same DNA on an asteroid which you do know (for a fact) came from outside the solar system.
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The short answer is yes it is possible whatever it is. The longer answer is that the likelihood of it being spotted is probably highest if the chemistry is different, but not too different. The range of what is possible using chemistry is vast beyond imagining so it might be useful to consider the spectrum of possibilities:
1. At one end of the spectrum perhaps the alien life has exactly the
same biochemistry as ours. Not very likely perhaps, but it is
conceivable if there are very few possibilities that work for life.
2. Life could be not identical but very similar. For example perhaps it uses the same DNA, but the way each type of protein is coded for is entirely different.
3. May be it uses different chemical entities for some or all key structures – perhaps the DNA has different bases, different sugars and different amino acids.
4. The key structures themselves like DNA, fats, proteins and carbohydrates might not exist in the same discrete entities that we know of.
5. The chemistry may be vastly different using a wide range of very different organic and inorganic substances.
6. The entity may be energy based and not rely on material substance at all.
Either end of the spectrum seem to be unlikely, but where the balance lies in between is hard to say. But this will have a dramatic effect on how any alien material is classified. 1 would not be seen as alien, 2 might require detailed investigation to reveal its alien origins, 3 should be identifiable as alien from any biochemical analysis, 4 and 5 might not be seen as living at all and could be overlooked entirely unless seen “in action alive” and 6 simply might not be noticed at all.
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If we assume that:
1. The microbes have nucleic acids
2. Their genome sequence is not very similar to Earth life
3. They have reasonable population numbers on Earth and aren't almost extinct
Then it is extremely unlikely in the 21st century, because of advances in genomics that happened in the beginning of the 21st century. Conversely, in the 20th century it's very likely. Even today, scientists are sequencing all sorts of natural samples and eventually your alien microbes would show up in them. All living organisms on Earth share a common evolutionary ancestor and the genome sequences can easily be traced back to their phylogenetic relatives, even if the organism itself is unknown. To me, the premise of an alien organism is that it would have some radically different biology - such biology would make it stick out like a sore thumb in a sequencing study. People would race to publish papers about an apparently biological sequence with no close relative.
If you violate assumption 1, then the microbes could go undetected for a very long time. Biologists will just assume it's non-living since it doesn't follow familiar biochemistry. Even if it has a very obvious property, like the rubber-eating microbes from the Andromeda Strain, people will just test it for Earth microbes, get a negative, and go off inventing mundane rationalizations for a long time. Unless someone manages to culture the organism in a way that makes it obvious it's alive (so no living crystals that take years to grow) it may be a very long time before anyone realizes it. If you look at which bacteria are less studied, a very strong trend is that it's the ones that are difficult to grow in culture. You could even end up with a Semmelweis-type situation where a few people who do suspect the alien microbes are alive are ridiculed and ostracized.
If you violate assumption 3, it is likewise very plausible. Normally microbes spread everywhere easily, due to their rapid growth and simple environmental requirements. Even otherwise inhospitable places can easily provide good micro-environments for them. If your alien microbes are only able to survive in very exotic places, like inside active volcanoes, or they are simply so unaggressive that they are always a tiny minority of the microbe population wherever you go, it could be a long time before someone notices them. The problem is that if you have a microbe that's so rare it's barely there, does it really matter? The most interesting thing that could come out of it is that the microbe has some unusual gene or something like that which triggers a scientific breakthrough due to its theoretical implications. Maybe its DNA encodes a secret message. Who knows.
Violating 2 is the most realistic but also most boring. I think that if there was a way that microbes could escape into space and spread to other celestial bodies, then surely some of the untold multitudes of Earth microbes would have spread to nearby planets and asteroids. So the most likely source for alien microbes would actually be these "distant cousins". Moreover, if the alien microbes do have nucleic acids, they could be incorporated into Earth life through horizontal transfer, so the alien life would no longer seem unique due to that.
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Imagine we could scale up noise cancellation technology in earphones and apply it to earthquake prone zone, what challenges beside engineering and cost would make such a machine impossible to realise? If we could somehow mitigate or minimise the shaking so that the buildings can never hit resonance freq and thus would not collapse, is such technology too far fetch?
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The same reason for which you have noise cancelling earphones but not noise cancelling speakers.
Earthquakes produce different types of [seismic waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_wave), like P-wave, S-wave and many more, each traveling with a different velocity.
If you want to nullify the disruptive effects of the earthquake in a certain location, you will have to produce waves of equal amplitude and opposite phase in that location. But then those waves would travel across the crust, finding nothing to nullify them. You will end up nullifying the damage in a limited area but doing more damages all around it.
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This technology, called "Tuned Mass Dampers", is in practical use for decades, see [the corresponding Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper). In skyscrapers, they do exactly what is asked for: changing the resonant frequency of a building (by means of a pendulum, for example) in a way that it never resonates to the frequency typical for an earthquake.
In regard to earthquakes, the article states:
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> The seismic waves caused by an earthquake will make buildings sway and oscillate in various ways depending on the frequency and direction of ground motion, and the height and construction of the building. Seismic activity can cause excessive oscillations of the building which may lead to structural failure. To enhance the building's seismic performance, a proper building design is performed engaging various seismic vibration control technologies. As mentioned above, damping devices had been used in the aeronautics and automobile industries long before they were standard in mitigating seismic damage to buildings. In fact, the first specialized damping devices for earthquakes were not developed until late in 1950.
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A small-scale experimental setup is described (including video) by [the Practical Engineer](https://practical.engineering/blog/2016/2/14/tuned-mass-dampers-in-skyscrapers).
EDIT: If you need/want an active setup (in the sense that some sort of controller predicts the next movement and actively tries to cancel the shaking using some sort of actuator, like in noise cancelling), I imagine that you could just extend the pendulum variant of a Tuned Mass Damper with really strong motors that react to an array of seismic sensors around the building ([assuming P-waves in granite at 5000m/s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_wave), they need to be in about 5 km distance if the sensors, communication line and the motors together have a reaction time of 1 second). This would minimise the shaking further, but a misinterpretation of the sensors then would induce active shaking.
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## You can't cancel the stress
L.Dutch provides a good answer as to why your specific technology doesn't work. But more fundamentally, there's a bigger problem with any sort of reactionary earthquake prevention tech.
The shifting of Earth's crust on the mantle causes buildup of enormous stresses. An earthquake is what you get when a bunch of those stresses release all at once. If you could push a button and "cancel" that earthquake, then those stresses would still be there, and soon you'll have another earthquake on your hands, probably even bigger than the one you prevented. Or, as L.Dutch described, you might prevent the effects of the quake in one area and get increased damage in other areas.
In theory, a technology could be created that would bleed off the stresses gradually so as to prevent them from snapping all at once - effectively replacing single large earthquakes with thousands of micro quakes. But it would be a very different technology than the one you describe.
Incidentally, there is a related concept in forest management, where small natural fires are allowed to burn freely to prevent the proliferation of undergrowth that could fuel unstoppable firestorms.
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Even if it works, consider that if this were to work in a certain area where the local waves are perfectly phased to cancel out, other nearby areas could experience constructive interference. Other neighborhoods might not appreciate that ;)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOz3G.jpg)
*Constructive vs destructive interference in 2D space*
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To prevent buildings from experiencing shaking due to an earthquake, Its not necessary to cancel the waves (active isolation). A much easier (totally passive) approach is to put the buildings on a giant shock isolator which has a lot of attenuation at the typical frequencies produced by earthquakes. Effectively you would be shifting the resonance frequency of the system to avoid damage.
This basically amounts to putting the buildings on some sort of stiff spring, and using the combination of the spring and the buildings mass to attenuate the incoming shaking.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_isolation>
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Consider current level technology - surveillance satellites, patrol boats, coastal guards, both USA and Russian anti-submarine jet aircraft patrolling skies of Arctic Sea.
I have a big group (~1000) of genetically enhanced people (in my setting they are a vanguard part of interplanetary invasion - in vitro born chimeras with ~99% humans DNA and mind copied from alien), they have much more endurance and strength than average people (they can jog 100+ miles (160km+) per day with 250lbs (113 kg) backpack), they can see in dark clearly, and they have perfect sense of direction, so no GPS or compasses required for them, alongside with night vision goggles and flashlights, but they are still flesh and bone - they can freeze to death (after few hours in cold water), they can starve, orcas and white bears consider them delicious, but, on the same time - raw orcas and white bears meat are considered edible by invaders too.
Also, my invaders don't have any alien tech with them - because aliens do not want humanity to understand interplanetary invasion is happening.
They want to move secretly from Canada to Russia (and back) using skies, kayaks, dog sleds, snowmobiles, rubber boats, etc and other items, vehicles, gadgets they can get from good general stores popular among hikers. Probably the best time for them is during the polar night.
My ideas:
1. Using passenger jets and other usual means of transport usable by people is not an option, because none of my invaders have government-issued ID (but they have cash and anything they can steal), and all they look quite suspicious - I mean, you'll find there is something not right with this person even if you have no idea who he/she is. Also hijacking passenger planes is not a good idea - there are a lot of USA/Canadian/Russian jet fighters that can take down any plane in a few minutes.
2. They can mimic native people (Inuit or Chukchi people), but it's quite a big group of invaders, and they don't look like native people.
3. Big groups of invaders can spread to smaller groups, not a problem.
4. Unfortunately, building a flying saucer vehicle on the closest scrapyard is not possible - they don't have both nano fabricators and element -1 reserves, they have to use present technologies and resources.
So the question is:
**How they can pass through Arctic Sea undetectable by Russia/Canada/USA/Norway and back?**
It's OK if the journey took few weeks, but they have to make it undetected.
It's possible they can free ride a cargo ship or hijack a plane but I want them to exactly traverse Arctic Sea by their own, without drawing attention.
It's OK, if the solution sounds a little stupid - like put on white fluffy clothes and move on 4 to mimic white bears - probably, it's good tactics to trick air patrol with thermovisors.
It's OK if the solution is something out of the box, like making underwater habitats pulled by orcas (but, IMHO, it's very unrealistic).
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Consider different parts of the globe, in the real world.
* Illegal immigrants are trying to walk across quite inhospitable terrain at the US southern border. Some are caught, many get through.
* Illegal immigrants are trying to cross the Mediterranean on small watercraft. For some, the goal is to be *rescued* by ships which do not return them to Africa. For others, the goal is to actually get through. Again, some are caught, many get through.
* In a different vein, drug smugglers are using various routes. In some cases, they hide the contraband in vehicles that are insufficiently searched. In some cases, the goal is to keep their boat, semi-submersible, or aircraft undetected. Again, some are caught, many get through.
These examples suggest to me that detection is not much of an issue if **nobody is looking out for it**. Drones and recon sats produce lots and lots of data, and only a small part is analyzed with the attention that is given to a North Korean missile site or an Iranian naval base. It would take someone with an initial suspicion to look at satellite imagery or recon drone pictures over time to detect the organized group moving.
So the first question is the physical challenge. People walked across [parts of the Antarctic](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46687892). If your aliens are superhuman as you describe them, they can probably do the Arctic trip.
The problem could be random chance and do-gooders. If a single kayak is spotted near the North Pole, and quick googling shows no known record attempt, someone might send the Coast Guard.
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Instead of Canada to Norway, consider Alaska to Russia across the [Bering Strait](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19149829) and then through Siberia on foot. The total trip is longer, the over-water part is shorter. And hikers or cars are not terribly unusual on either side.
Again random chance could be a problem. Some friendly hunter comes across a camp of the aliens and wants to chat a bit before he looks for another moose. Some pipeline workers see hikers and shout hello. You could introduce a couple of close calls in your story, but none which causes an alert.
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I am going to claim expertise on this issue for a major reason: I live in the Arctic. I've also participated in search and rescues in the Arctic. The basic answer to this is that small groups of sufficiently-prepared people actively trying to evade detection *and* if no one is specifically looking for them can do it trivially by any number of means.
It's hard enough to find people close to communities who want to be found.
However, and this is important to note, that if they are seen by anyone, directly or indirectly, they're going to stand out like a sore freaking thumb. Populations up here are small, and people know where other people normally are in a given period of the year. Around my community, for instance, if someone sees tracks in some areas in, say, March, that's going to raise all sorts of red flags because there's no reason for anyone to be in those areas at that time of year, and it will take roughly 90 seconds from the time someone on Facebook mentions it until everyone else in the community knows about the mysterious tracks. Likewise, in most communities in my part of the Canadian Arctic, there's no way to blend in. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and someone who showed up in or near town and didn't get off an aircraft (or in summer, a boat) is immediately going to be known about.
There was a case a few years ago where a bunch of Norwegians knew the RCMP and Canada customs wanted to have a chat with some of them regarding their antics in other communities they'd visited, so they stopped outside of town and dropped off the guys in question, planning to pick them up again after the boat docked and the rest of the crew played innocent. It worked for approximately five minutes. We all knew where they were before the boat had managed to get into the bay.
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I agree with other answers that going by land through Alaska and Siberia and crossing the Bearing Strait at a relatively narrow point might be much better for your invaders than crossing hundreds or thousand of kilometers or miles of the Arctic Ocean.
Crossing the Arctic Ocean can be quite dangerous.
If they cross in groups using dogsleds they will have to carry food and other provisions for themselves and their dogs. Considering the distances involved, they should have to establish several supply depots and make several expeditions to stock the supply depots before before there are enough supplies accumulated in the depots for the group to be able to cross the entire distance.
As I remember, using pre stocked supply depots was necessary for the expeditions to the North Pole and the South Pole, and those expeditions had far fewer members than the total 1,000 of your invaders if they all go on one trip. And a route from Canada to Russia over the ice might be much longer than a trip to the North Pole and back.
With their greater than human endurance your invaders might not need dogsleds and might be able to carry all needed supplies in their backpacks. But you should calculate how much food they would need during the time necessary to cross the Arctic Ocean and whether they can carry that much weight.
Crossing the Arctic Ocean ice on foot is often very difficult because the ice is very rough in some places and there are open patches of water in other places.
The Arctic ice melts and covers a smaller area in the summer and reforms to cover a larger area in the winter. And with global warming the Arctic ice gets smaller every year. Thus the prospect of sailing cargo ships across the Arctic gets closer every year.
So possibly your invaders could paddle kayaks across open water between the northern shores of North America, Europe, and Asia and the southern edge of the ice sheet. I imagine that there are many icebergs and ice floes floating around in those waters.
And possibly people might get suspicious of many kayaks traveling in unusual directions. It's not like there are actually unknown and undiscovered tribes of Eskimos without Russian, American, Canadian, or Danish contacts and citizenship lurking behind every cape and island in the Arctic. All Eskimo groups are pretty well known and some members of them might have satellite phones capable of reporting strange people in kayaks to the authorities for all that I know.
You might not know any Eskimos personally, or the locations of specific Eskimo communities and hunting grounds, but many outside people who travel in the Arctic will know where Eskimos are usually found and might often have contacts with Eskimos, and might notice strange kayaks making strange voyages.
Or your invaders might want to use larger boats or ships. Possibly they could buy an icebreaker and start a passenger service from Canada or Alaska to Siberia & back. And possibly their voyages could sometimes carry invaders hibernating or something in the cargo hold to be woken and secretly released near the coast of the destination.
Or maybe your invaders might use submarines to travel under the Arctic Ocean, just as drug smugglers have been known to use privately made submarines to carry drugs. An atomic submarine could travel all the way under the Arctic without ever having to come to the surface.
Acquiring or building a conventional diesel electric powered submarine or submarines would be many, many times easier and less conspicuous for your invaders. But submarine batteries can store only a limited amount of electricity and power the sub for a limited distance before they run out of power. Then the sub will have to surface and run the diesel engines using outside air (instead of the limited air on the sub) to recharge the batteries until they are fully charged and the sub can submerge again.
Thus the sub will have to travel mostly though ice free waters, since the only ice covered waters it will be able to travel under will be patches short enough for it to make the trip on one battery charge, or else where they will be certain they can surface and break through the ice, and I don't know if they will be able to predict ice thickness that well.
And if the sub travels under ice free water, it will have to worry about running into the sea floor, or ramming into an island, or hitting a submerged part of an iceberg, or being accidentally run over by a ship, etc., so they will have to navigate carefully.
And the sub will have to scan the surrounding carefully to make certain nobody is around to see before coming up to run the diesel engines and recharge the batteries.
Depending on how many trips your invaders make and how many people make each trip, they might try several different travel methods and different routes to travel between Canada and Russia.
About:
>
> they can starve, orcas and white bears consider them delicious, but, on the same time - raw orcas and white bears meat are considered edible by invaders too.
>
>
>
Polar bears on the hunt will attack humans, but humans are apparently too strange and exotic for most wild orcas to hunt, as the very few recorded possible attacks show:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale_attack>[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale_attack)
As for eating orcas and white bears, Arctic orcas and white bears would usually be found only where seals would be found, and hunting seals would be a lot less dangerous for your invaders.
Orcas, like other cetaceans, are extremely intelligent. It is quite possible that the intelligence range of orcas and many other cetaceans overlaps considerably with the intelligence range of humans, and that an objective outside observer might consider orcas and other cetaceans to be intelligent beings and people, or as much so as the observer considers humans to be.
Even though it would not fit the definition of cannibalism exactly, eating human beings should seem almost as disgusting to the invaders as eating members of their own species. And eating orcas should seem almost as disgusting to the invaders as eating humans. If your invaders would kill orcas to eat they are very evil and unscrupulous persons without strong ethical codes.
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As the previous answer mention it, it will be easier by Bering Straights.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NKCkP.jpg)
I don't think they can go "undetected" but group from 4 to 5 may go unnoticed (they will be seen, but it will not be seen as a unsual thing). Here you can go by remote terrestrial areas where it may be easier to hide in case of a recon flight, than on the ice sheep. But if there are not researched, the only problematic part may be the border and landing in Russia.
This is mostly unpopulated area, so they will be not much questions asked.
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@M\_A\_Golding notes:
>
> An objective outside observer might consider orcas and other cetaceans to be intelligent beings
>
>
>
This suggests another possibility. If you can engineer "humans" with alien minds, why not whales? Then your near-humans could collaborate with these near-whales to cross oceans somewhere warmer (or not, if they have sufficient protective gear, but this is probably difficult).
(Framing challenge? Why Canada and Russia? If your ultimate goal is just having them cross between the east and west hemispheres, and you picked those because it seemed like the easiest crossing, well... read on, and consider say Mexico and China instead.)
Let's look at the individual issues you have:
### Can they get in and out of the country undetected?
A handful of near-humans go to a crowded beach and swim out a ways. Nothing suspicious here; everyone is doing it. If there are enough people around, it's unlikely the muggles will notice if a few invaders swim out and never come back. Or, if they do it on a secluded beach, they probably won't be noticed at all. Same thing at the other end; a group that goes out swimming and comes back with more people probably won't be noticed, as long as you're avoiding e.g. known drug smuggling routes that are on alert for that sort of thing.
The one caveat is that you'll need to leave someone behind, and have someone placed in advance, or else be very careful that they take public transportation to and from the beaches and don't leave vehicles or other unattended possessions lying around.
### Can they cross the ocean *at all*?
You indicated that "they can freeze to death (after *a few hours* in cold water)" (emphasis added). Since normal humans can freeze in minutes, *or even seconds*, this implies they have super-human resistance to cold water. If you can combine this with not swimming in freezing waters in the first place and proper use of equipment (and having engineered your near-humans with this method in mind), it doesn't seem implausible that your near-humans can make an oceanic crossing with their near-whale buddies. Especially since the near-whales can share food with their passengers (you mentioned they like raw orca, so it seems likely they can eat whatever their near-whale companions are eating). Plus, the near-whales can help with ferrying other supplies.
### Can they cross the ocean *undetected*?
Almost certainly... because they don't *need* to evade detection, as such. Migrating whales aren't interesting. You just need to hide that there are near-humans *with* the near-whales, and unless someone gets a good, up close look, this shouldn't be hard. I can think of plenty of ways, especially with some bio-engineering hand-waving, that your near-humans can stay underwater for 10+ minutes, which is going to tend to put them safely in the realm of "couldn't possibly be smugglers". Remember, even if you *don't* use some sort of harness, the near-human just has to hang on. Or you could use some sort of air-tight pouch...
As long as you avoid any metal (which is going to raise all sorts of suspicions, if noticed, and can be detected various ways), your near-human, near-whale pair is going to be far outside the parameters of what coast guards and whatnot consider a possible threat.
For added bonus points, you can write a scene where they *are* "detected", and the humans decide there is nothing suspicious or concerning. The best place to hide, after all, is often in plain sight. As David Weber wrote, ["surprise is usually what happens when someone misinterprets something he's seen all along"](http://www.millsclan.org/Books/MissionOfHonor/At%20All%20Costs/1416509119__26.htm#p2973). (Pretty sure this isn't the first use, but this was the instance that Google found.)
### Can they hang around on land without being detected?
This is where your real problem is going to bem if your near-humans are "inherently shifty-seeming". But this wasn't the question...
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* Quora. How many people can a cruise ship take? The currently largest passenger ship in the world... can carry over 6600 passengers (all berths filled) plus about 2200 crew. So almost 9000 people in all.
1- Start a cruise line. Hire humans to get permits on both sides. Run back and forth while never taking any actual humans. If the population centers on each side make it hard to hide, launch and retrieve lifeboats at safe distances on each side.
2- Take actual humans on your cruises and kidnap/ransom/kill the richest of them, then max out all their credit cards to fund your war with local materials. (Even a war against aliens among us, will run on materials/supplies.) A front "outfitting company" for Alaska tours could hire humans to do the buying and supplying at drops throughout Alaska and the humans could never actually meet their bosses.
3- "If Texas is tired of being the second largest state, you can divide Alaska in half and they can be third." Meaning there is a lot of open space up there. Snow and ocean colored camo may reduce the risk of discovery significantly. No need to be near anyone, ever.
4- Make a boat that looks like a small iceberg. Any close observance will show it moving against the currents but it will pass by most people who tend to not be very aware of their environment (tourists). It can just drift if someone gets within 10 miles of it. Then resume when it is safe.
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[
Let's say that suddenly NASA needs my characters, a party of scientists without prior experience, to go to space with a Space Shuttle-like spacecraft for a seven days mission.
They only need to do **very** simple science stuff in orbit. No EVA, no piloting, no space cowboys actions. They have no particular medical conditions (heart problems, mobility impairment, obesity...). They only need to be remain seated with seatbelt fastened during the trip, pressing some buttons and get back.
Could they be ready in a matter of days?
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It would be a question of acceptable risk to them and to their mission.
* What is the ratio of scientists to babysitters?
* Is it acceptable that they would *die* in emergencies which trained astronauts could survive? And possibly take their babysitters with them?
If the answers are *enough* and *acceptable*, then seven days sounds possible. Call it 20 hours of *do not push this button, do not push that button, in fact push no buttons at all*, 20 hours of simulation so they know what to expect, and you would still have a few hours for medical checks (do all of them go or just the fittest?) and mission planning.
The suspension of disbelief breaks not with the training but with the the decision making process to take the risks. NASA wouldn't do that. A military-sponsored mission?
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Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Blue Origin are some companies that plan on sending tourist to space, probably flying people to high altitudes on a rocket attached to a plane and once they are as high as a plane can go, you could start the rocket engines. The hardest part of being an astronaut, besides all the medical training and getting used to the acceleration of the take-off is the cost, so NASA and other non profit organizations send the best of the best so they can be very efficient with the time spent in space.
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Yes. For "space tourists" it depends more on their health than training.
For a regular space mission, human body does not need any acclimatization. However, unless we don't care about people dying while on a mission, there are certain health requirements that an astronaut (even a casual one) has to meet. Most importantly, it's high-g (6g for civilians, as far as I know) testing. Less important (but still important) is a simulated 0g training. Then there is a general training on how to use your spacesuit, how to eat, how to go to toilet etc. All of that can be compressed into a couple of days, and if civilians would have a professional "guides" while in space, it would be not much different from today's missions.
So, while we can watch flight training in movies like "[Armageddon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film))" with amusement, there is certainly more than just a grain of truth in it.
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As most people are mentioning the launch stress of the G-forces, I'd like to bring up the numbers. On average, a human can survive 5Gs (Vertical) before passing out (this doesn't mean we should just let anyone pull 5Gs) and with training and g-suits, can survive about 9Gs. In the negative, human survival is less tolerant with limits at -2Gs to -3Gs.
Horizontal Gs are way more survivable, with humans being able to survive at 46Gs on test and some race car drivers experiencing survivable crashes in excess of 100Gs (with the record held by Kenny Bräck, who survived a horizontal 214Gs in a [2003 crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Br%C3%A4ck)).
A typical Space Shuttle Launch will experience a peak of 3Gs vertical, which is well within the tolerable range, though still would require medical screening. Nearby Cape Canaveral, Disney World's Mission: Space Attraction subjects the rider to 2.5Gs horizontally, though it does have a famous history of having two fatalities to its name (both brought on by pre-existing conditions, not the ride's operation) and numerous symptoms associated with motion sickness that resulted in one of the centrifuges being operated in a limited state (green) and the more intense ride (orange) having motion sickness bags added for riders. That said, on opening several astronauts from all NASA programs were invited to ride and most reported it to being as close to the real deal as most civvies are ever going to get.
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For a short flight, yes.
For a long flight, no.
The longer you are in space, the more training is needed to be there. For a very short trip, it'd be little more than riding as a passenger in a fast plane (and G forces are in tolerable ranges. A bit intense, but nothing the typical healthy human can't handle.)
The first hard part is fears. Unless you're an adrenaline junkie (as pretty much every astronaut is; every astronaut is an experienced diver, fighter jet pilot, and more), the entire process can be immensely fear-inducing. Anyone with a fear of heights is obviously going to have an issue. And once you're in a constant state of free-fall... well... expect at least one untrained person to be screaming. This can be annoying at least for the other passengers and the astronauts.
The second hard part comes with farting (seriously). In a car, boat, or plane, it has a tendency to linger more than in a house or outside, but it still dissipates. That's because none of those things are sealed air-tight; fumes still escape. In a spacecraft, you're stuck with every fart, so proper knowledge of how to handle that is necessary, suits and filters.
The third hard part comes the moment someone needs to go to the restroom. Going to the bathroom in space requires training, because one of the most dangerous things in space is floating liquids (and if you try to use the restroom without proper training, you could actually be at risk of bringing down the entire shuttle due to your fluids getting literally everywhere.)
Then comes eating and drinking. Also challenges in zero G, and again, there's a huge risk if fluids or dust start floating about. Fluids can corrode and/or destroy important electronics, and any kind of dust can wreck havoc with ventilation systems.
The list gets more complicated as things go on, including higher than normal exposure to radiation, how to handle moving about the cabin, and more. Humans are not good at staying stationary for long periods, and will soon need how to interact with a lot of their environment.
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No, not in a matter of days.
Even Space tourists have to go through some training and have to be physically in good shape to be able to go through space.
First they would have to undergo some medical tests on them to determine if they are physically fit. That already takes a few days.
They also have to learn and understand some procedures on what to do in case of emergency, that also takes a week at least.
This is mostly for their own safety and the safety of the crew.
So I d say you would need at 2 weeks for the basic minimum.
Realistically there is no reason to send untrained scientist into space as there is a large shortlist of elite trained scientists/astronauts waiting to go to space.
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You can, it doesn't take that long to get basic competence.
<https://www.wired.co.uk/article/space-health>
>
> Despite the physical and mental demands, Virgin does not require the
> majority of its space passengers to undergo training. Julia Tizard,
> its vice president of operations, explains that Virgin requires this
> of only a select few -- mostly those with previous heart or lung
> problems. "Our mantra is that everybody who wants to go to space can
> get to space," Tizard says at Virgin Galactic's hanger and fabrication
> facility in Mojave, where it is building its space planes and
> conducting final tests on SpaceShipTwo. "My personal goal," adds the
> British astrophysicist, "is to take civilisation to space."
>
>
>
They let anyone into space, even untrained people. There are two complications. G force, and zero g training.
>
> Beyond that, training is up to the ticket holder. You don't want to
> lay out a life's savings only to black out, throw up, "or take an
> elbow to the ribs", says Binnie, because the other guy floating around
> next to you didn't receive instruction. For all these reasons, Virgin
> -- whose ship will carry six passengers -- recommends two types of preparation: zero-gravity training and experiencing g-forces. The
> first is to help you manoeuvre in weightlessness. The second is to
> keep you conscious.
>
>
>
But how long do these take?
<https://www.businessinsider.com/how-pilots-survive-inhuman-levels-of-g-force-2014-11>
>
> Fortunately, pilots typically only go through centrifugal training a
> single time before moving on to the real thing. Once they make it
> through, it's usually clear that the student has what it takes to fly
> some of the highest-performance aircraft on the planet.
>
>
>
A single session of centrifuge training may be enough to stop you panicking and learn basic breathing exercises.
<http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/151-people-in-astronomy/space-exploration-and-astronauts/human-spaceflight-current-or-past/940-how-are-astronauts-trained-for-weightlessness-intermediate>
>
> A person feels weightless when he is undergoing free-fall; for example
> a person who is diving from a high platform will feel weightlessness
> till he/she hits the water. NASA uses a modified KC135 four engine jet
> to fly on a parabolic orbit so that for a certain period of time, it
> is falling freely towards Earth. In this period, astronauts practice
> eating, drinking and using various kinds of onboard shuttle equipment.
> Training on these (called vomit comet) normally lasts from 1 to 2
> hours.
>
>
>
That would be trickier, and would require a lot of flights, but would be just about feasible.
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During the STS programme there was a range of scientists sent to the orbit. Their role was to perform science on board and to some degree to promote the programme itself. One of the astronaut casualties in the [Challenger disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster), Christa McAuliffe was a teacher and I don't think anyone expected her to do any ship control. She was chosen to the mission in June 85 and the mission took place in Jan 86 so the training probably wasn't "few days" but with more modern technology and a sudden need it should be quite feasible. The training will mostly tell the scientists how does start and landing procedures look like, what they **can't** do as well as how to react in case of danger (with extensive training in simulators).
Note though - very simple scientific tasks can be performed by *regular* astronauts. It should be very difficult tasks that require scientists to actually be on board.
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really yes you could send someone of with only 24 hours prep, so long as someone told you exactly how to do your talks, most of it is the computer, ground control and luck right? so long as you also had been under intense Gs before.
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I want to have an intelligent life-form on a planet, but I want this life form to be technologically limited because of the lack of discovery of fire.
What changes would have to occur in the atmosphere for this to occur, and what effect would this atmosphere have on any human life or human technology on the planet, eg. using fuel based thrusters in this atmosphere?
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# Sparkling [Pele's hair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%27s_hair) ~~Tiny tinfoil confetti!~~
How about we keep the ability to start fires artificially, but make enough changes so that fires do not start naturally?
There are two main causes that lead to natural fires:
1. direct heat from the sun
2. lightnings
3. lava
4. will-o-the-wisp
We need to change the atmosphere such that the direct heat from the sun is greatly reduced, and also to reduce the creation of rapid vertical movements of air masses. In the realms of science fiction, we need very fine **~~metallic dust~~ mineral fibers dotted with small pirite crystals** floating in the air. This amazing fiber is produced without the pirite crystals by volcanoes and can naturally float in the air. In our story it is the result of some very nasty ancient volcanic explosions. The difference from the naturally occurring Pele's hair that I found on the internet, is that we are going to sparkle it with iron crystals. Note that Pele's hair is part of the mineral wools that are considered to be fire-retardants.
The fibers are glassy and sprinkled with highly reflective pirite crystals, thus it will be reflective, increasing the overall albedo of the planet, and it will be most dense in the tropics. The reason for the increased density is that the hotter air, being more rarefied, will cause a local accumulation of the fibers, hence increasing the local concentration, and as a by-product, the local albedo.
The minimum local density of the fibers will also be such that there is never enough difference of electrostatic potential to generate any meaningful spark. Any difference in electrostatic potential will be discharged between the pirite crystals harbored on the mineral fibers. Think of it like living inside a block of metal. All the charges will be distributed in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and ancient hominids will enjoy lightnings only at the boundary between the thermosphere and the exosphere. Considering that Pele's hair has a ridiculously high ignition point, good luck igniting anything up there.
Finally, although it is not part of the atmosphere, I would remove all those piezoelectric rocks, and place all volcanoes that are active during the evolution of mankind well under the sea. Plenty of free-air active volcanoes up to the Mesozoic, fill the atmosphere with the pirite-dotted mineral wool, and then bury all of the under hundreds of meters of water. There too, good luck seeing lava igniting anything.
Finally, to avoid even will-o-the-wisps, we need to add some methane-digesting bacteria to the environment. These otherwise harmless bacteria, which live attached to the floating mineral wool, use the pirite crystals as catalytic agent to degrade methane into CO2 and water, without burning it. This will also take care of local methane spillage.
Humans will need thicker nose hair to filter the ~~metallic dust~~ mineral wool fibers and prevent some nasty lung carcinomas. I think that natural selection will eventually favor homo-mustachios over homo-sapiens.
The beauty of all this is that we are still in a O2-rich environment. Happy breathing.
PS a big thanks to [rek's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102622/what-would-be-an-ideal-breathable-atmosphere-for-a-planet-so-that-fire-couldnt/102632?noredirect=1#comment308521_102632), [John's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102622/what-would-be-an-ideal-breathable-atmosphere-for-a-planet-so-that-fire-couldnt/102632?noredirect=1#comment308832_102632), and [celtschk's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102622/what-would-be-an-ideal-breathable-atmosphere-for-a-planet-so-that-fire-couldnt/102632?noredirect=1#comment308679_102632) constructive comments.
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**High oxygen environment.**
Low oxygen environment might work. But how dull.
I propose a **high oxygen environment**. This scheme has been bandied about here before. [Advanced civilization in high oxygen atmosphere](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66208/advanced-civilization-in-high-oxygen-atmosphere). Your environment would be 35% O2 (like Earth in the Carboniferous) or higher. You could have constant high humidity or rains to decrease wildfires. Artificial fires would burn explosively and near-uncontrollably. Domesticating fire would be like domesticating african elephants, or cape buffalo - not technically impossible, but extremely dangerous.
Plus: giant dragonflies!
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Add [something](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromotrifluoromethane) to the atmosphere that suppresses fire.
If there was 5-7% Halon over the whole planet fires could not exist. Respiration would still work, though there are toxicity concerns.
There are several fire suppressing gasses, though an atmosphere's worth of any of them existing naturally is doubtful, and it decomposes into terribly toxic products and destroys ozone. So this may just move the handwaving back one step.
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I'll take the boring option.
# Low oxygen environment
*Boring*, you say? What about developing live from the anaerobic organisms?
It'd be a lot of work, as they are some bacteria and such. But if you give aerobes no chance, your whole multi-cell and sapient life might be anaerobic. You'd need to fix prehistoric cyanobacteria for this, and then let the life cook and refine itself for few milliards of years.
Starters for further reading are: [[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#History_of_the_atmosphere), [[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event).
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# Water world
If the planet is covered in one single ocean, no one would be able to start a fire until they discovered thermite or invented phosphorus torches.
You may have islands here and there, as long as they have nothing flammable on them.
Of course, the dominant intelligent lifeforms would probably be [breast-singing](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45803/21222), and possibly [ram-ventilating](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/44145/21222) mermaids/tritons.
As for the effect that would have on thrusters, those would be capable of operating just fine. The atmosphere over the ocean could be just like ours.
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# Non oxygen based metabolism
The only way to do this is to exclude oxygen from the atmosphere.Anywhere that life depends on oxygen and creates an oxygen atmosphere will be fire prone, because of that same reactivity of oxygen. The only solution is to have life with a non-oxygen atmosphere.
Oxygen is probably impossible to find in an atmosphere in any planet without life, because it is too reactive. It will immediately bind with carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron, or any of the other common elements in the universe (except helium, obviously). Over geological time, you simply won't find pure oxygen at human-like temperatures and pressures.
The choices are nearly endless, but here is a Wikipedia link about [hypothetical bio-chemistries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry). You can pick one of these that allows metabolic pathways to operate without free oxygen.
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**Mobile life needs a chemical that reacts easily with *most* other chemicals** to extract energy and nutritive byproducts. This chemical needs to be **plentiful** for life to thrive. So here on Earth we have oxygen. These are known as oxidizing agents, and there are many, but only a handful are gaseous.
The key takeaway here is that fire also requires an oxidizing agent, it needs to be plentiful - and it will occur where life is found because it's required for that life.
So wherever you have mobile life, that life will necessarily have all the ingredients to make fire, and fires will occasionally occur naturally in the same way that life occurred naturally.
We do have life that is based on non-oxidation reactions, though. Plants and non-mobile life forms use a different source of energy for their reactive processes - sunlight.
There's not enough sunlight, however, to form intelligent life due to the exceptional energy requirements of intelligence. If you irradiate a planet with enough energy to supply such demands you prevent the formation of the compounds needed to form even plants. Perhaps you could come up with a plant that lives mostly in shelter (underground) and exposes only its brain to a scorched earth scenario with enough radiated energy to power the intelligence, but I think that unlikely, and at that point what use is fire - or the lack of it - since the organism itself isn't free to move, or if it can does so only at a glacial pace.
The result is that the only possible way to form such a situation is by changing some other characteristic that allows fire - for instance having an aquatic society where oxygen exists, but other factors prevent fires.
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Easy: High pressure, "low" oxygen world. For a really extreme example of this look at very deep scuba diving--there are realms where the proper breathing mixture is hydrogen/oxygen. Sounds like you have a big bomb strapped to your back but you don't--it won't burn because there's not enough oxygen.
The thing is, fire depends on the percentages. A low enough percentage of oxygen means the other gases absorb the heat, fire doesn't get hot enough to burn. However, our metabolic processes depend on the absolute pressure of the gases. At Earth's surface we breathe 3 psi of oxygen with about 12 psi of nitrogen mixed in. In space we used to use 3 psi of oxygen with nothing mixed in--our body does fine on this (but you need to be careful of the bends!) but we no longer use it because of the fire danger.
So long as we have that 3 psi of oxygen (and no more than 12 psi for extended use) and no more than about .2% of carbon dioxide the other gases are irrelevant until they reach toxic levels. (Which is actually the depth limits for scuba diving--it's not the pressure that stops us, it's the fact that we reach a point where there's nothing that can be used as a filler.)
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# Humans or just generic intelligent life it is?
Because if it weren't humans, things would immediately become very simple. Say, you have a planet, where oxygen exists in liquid form only. Then oxygen breating life form can drink it and breathe this way. If you have no other oxidizers lying around, you're set - starting a fire would require significant efforts, thrusters will work almost as usual using a liquid fuel mix.
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## 73% methane, 23% oxygen, balance inerts + water, 1atm pressure
Or in other words, an atmosphere that is already *so fuel-rich* combustion cannot sustain itself. Could aerobic life operate here? Sure -- the process of cellular respiration is essentially step-wise and controlled enough that all the methane can simply be kept aside where it doesn't bother anything. Uncontrolled fires would simply fizzle out before they got beyond the "hot ember" stage, though. The water cycle would still work as intended, although the nitrogen cycle would need to be altered with a non-nitrogenous atmosphere (most nitrogen would be either ammonium or nitrate/nitrite in soils, with a small amount as dinitrogen).
Taming fire on this planet would be an...interesting exercise. Instead of having to pipe fuels about like we do on Earth, the locals would be distributing and storing *oxidizers*, in order to get to a combustible mixture from what's already in the air. Perhaps their cars would run on dinitrogen tetroxide and their furnaces on nitrous oxide?
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No, it would not be possible via changing the air composition only.
Humans consume oxygen in the same way that fire consumes it - the process oxidizes material and releases energy. And it would be very difficult to allow breathing, but not burning. Humans can tolerate oxygen concentrations down to 16% (compared to normal 21%), while most flammable materials can burn at lower oxygen concentrations.
[Minimum oxygen concentrations](http://www.processoperations.com/FireExplode/FE_Tables/FE_Table02.htm)
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If all the "plant life" was non-combustible, and there were no standing pools of hydrocarbons, and no piles of combustible metals, it would be rather unlikely that an "intelligent" life form would discover fire.
The problem with the main assumption is that the "Aliens" even need to evolve in an oxygen atmosphere. No oxygen - no fire.
Or you could have an earth like planet, but the intelligent lifeforms evolve in the sea. Imagine if all the land mammals were wiped out by reptiles, on the earth, after some had returned to the sea. At some point, you might expect one of the marine mammalian species to achieve a very high level of intelligence. With no fire. No special atmosphere needed.
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Could animal husbandry ever have any economic value as a space-based industry? We are already on the cusp of lab-based meat that is grown as an alternative industry, but would the practice of actually raising animals (on stations providing gravity) ever hold any economic value? Especially if the previously mentioned lab-based meat industry was widely used.
One reason I can see is purely transitory, shipping animals between worlds, but I'm more curious about answers that relate to why anyone would find economic value in raising animals for a space-based society.
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Don't forget the exclusivity.
Why do some people spend money on having golden toilets, sinks and taps, when more industrialized material exist? Because those are for common folks, while splurging in that kind of expense is the real deal for a wealthy person.
Growing an animal in space will be expensive, and getting a real T-bone or a real hamburger made with such meat will make them also expensive. And guess what, there will always be somebody wanting to state their exclusivity by eating real space meat, not lab grown, 3D printed thing.
Having somebody willing to pay a lot will give it economical value.
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When you speak about 'animal husbandry in space', the first thing that comes to my mind are not cows, but fish, crustacean and insects.
I do not think we can have a meaningful comparison of the costs and effort of running a bioreactor vs a fish tank. But the point stands, that a space habitat may posess a big and complicated water reservoir, and that reservoir or part of it may have a biosphere in it, and part of that biosphere may be extracted from time to time for human consumption.
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**Animals as pets**
Animals are not for food only. Some people like to have animals as pets also. People have buses, cars, motorcycles for transport, but still some people have horses. Animals are raised for pleasure also.
**Animals for research**
Many animals are used in research also.
**Animals for medicine**
Some medicines are made using animals like vaccines,
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## Yes.
### Tech rate of change > societal rate of change.
Societal change away from liking meat as a food choice will take time.
I expect technological advancement of feasibility of space habitats will outpace societal change.
That is technology will change and advance faster then societal change. There will be demand for animal products for food for the foreseeable future.
### Medical/science research
If there is any long term or large scale medical research in space this will require stocks of research animals to be maintained. This would happen even sooner than animals for food. Additionally some science/biology experiments would require research animals.
### Lab meat is likely to be energy intensive
Lab grown meat is expected to be energy intensive by at least one investigation. Such that the energy intensity of animals would be a similar range of cost. Time will tell what these numbers are.
### Culture/religion/cult might insist.
Once there are O'Neil cylinders I would expect there would be at least a few societies that will insist on living an agrarian lifestyle. "Join our flock in heaven! Live the One True Path!"
### Status
Eating meat has historically been a symbol of status. This will likely continue.
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## Husbandry can improve agriculture instead of taking away from it
### Some animals recapture wasted greenhouse light
Hydroculture crops like rice and seaweed are grown in water. While a lot of your light will be absorbed by the plants, a lot of it will also go into the water around your plants giving you the ability to grow an entire second ecosystem using the same space. The area around your rice in a healthy rice paddy for example will grow algae. This algae becomes food for various other organisms that will include various fish and arthropods which are both sources of meat that you basically get for free when growing water crops.
### Other animals recapture waste from the actual plants you grow
While claims about cows needing 6-7kg of feed per 1kg of meat may be true, it is also very deceptive when you consider that you can get away with growing 0kg of specialized feed plants per 1kg of meat. When you grow edible plants like fruits or grains, only a small % of what you grow is fit for human consumption. The rest of the plant is still full of nutrients that you just wasted a lot of energy growing, but can not eat... however, other animals may be able to eat these parts of the plants. While animals like cows, goats, and sheep are grossly inefficient sources of meat in terms of how much food they eat to how much they produce, they can digest and live off of the biproducts of human agriculture. On Earth, we often grow specialized feed crops so we can produce more and fattier meat than we could off of just crop waste, but this is not necessary. If you assume your colonists only eat red meat a few times a month, then you can simply sustain a smaller herd completely off of agricultural waste.
These animals can also produce additional products like wool, gelatin, leather, tallow, etc. which your colonists would be able to use for things that plant matter may not necessarily be ideal for.
### Some animals help you grow more plants
The issue of pollinating your plants is tricky when you leave it humans, but if you bring honey bees into the mix, then you have a perfect system that not only pollinates your plants for you, but also gives you that sweet sweet honey as a reward for your total lack of effort. Plants spend energy making nectar whether we use it or not; so, not only do bees produce an additional food source, they do it by recapturing another one of those wasted parts of the plant.
Also, non-editable plant parts often take a very long time to decompose. Thrown into a compost pile, plant matter can take anywhere from 3 months to several years to decompose enough to become a proper fertilizer. In this time, they release all of the same CO2 and Methane emissions that cows get criticized so much for, they just do it more slowly. This means for every kg of plant matter you have growing somewhere in your habitat, you have an equal mass of plant matter decomposing, waiting to be reintroduced to your agricultural system. However, by pushing your wasted plant matter through an animal's digestive system, you will have a pile of fertilizer within 1-3 days. This means you spend much less time waiting on nutrients to be recaptured to be put back into your agriculture; so, the space you would be wasting on giant composting chambers can instead contribute to space used for animal pens.
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**Tourism**
Literally, for almost the totality of space-born humans, there is no other possibility to see an animal "live". Living in a low gravity environment they couldn't stand the gravity on the surface of a planet (even conceding that there is a suitable planet to grow animals in the star system they live in).
A zoo, full of these strange beings that once roamed the home planet of mankind would probably become one of the most renowned attractions for spacefarers!
And under a cultural point of view, growing animals could also be seen as a way for humans on distant stars to keep a link with the planet Earth
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Also question of resource use. There are many plants we don't eat in full. What will happen to leftovers? Cereals often have parts we can't digest and surely at times some would love to have some bread, cake or just rice. So what to do with the parts we can't digest? Certain animals are decent option for this. Specially with genetic engineering and further breeding.
Also dairy products is something that could use milk from animals. Unless they are synthetic or lab made.
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People on earth can (and do) buy prime Wagyu meat for 350-400$/pound .. and make smashed hamburgers from it.
Advert:
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>
> Space-Wagyu however is much more costly - and much more exclusive: it is much better in respect to meat quality, space cows grow in a absolutely controlled environment - no illict virusses roaming about. The marbeling of the meat and its taste is far superior due to cows only being affected by very low gravity. The space cows also only get the best food and drink: space-brewed beer and space-grown weat into their troughs (both being also far superior to what can be consumed on earth - enhancing the flavors even more).
>
>
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Whoever is able to procure and eat this *must* be important and rich and ... an absolute douchebag but some will want it and some will provide it.
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Others have covered secondary agriculture, supporting agriculture, pets and laboratory animals. But there are also many other things worth considering.
1. pollinators, many of our crops need pollinators.
2. detritovores, you can't just throw crop leftovers over sterile ground and get to to break down, hundreds of things take part in breaking those materials down, many animals are needed to make this process timely enough to be useful for returning nutrients.
3. dairy and eggs which are direct animal products, eggs especially require whole animals to make.
4. silk, wool, cashmere not to mention thousands of other products like bone black, lanolin, and oils. which need more complex structures than simple microbial mat can produce.
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**Overpopulation on the ground**
It is the year 1,000,000 and the human population has hit 1,000,000,000,000. The entire Earth has the population density of Singapore. This does not leave much room for crops or animals, and has driven farming as a whole into orbit. The orbital platforms are ideal for vegetation growth due to the uninterrupted sunlight. Synthetic meat is *pretty* popular, but there are still some orthodox religions that require eating natural meat, so some livestock is raised in orbit.
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Maybe Animals could be superintelligent or just reasonably intelligent (like humans) and could be used as intellectual slaves.
Ex: Alien society breeds humans they way we breed working horses/cattle, other aliens acquire these humans and have them do tasks at the level of complexity/intelligence a human can handle.
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**Only if the cost of bringing them up is high, the cost of travel is low and you have artificial gravity.**
If the cost of bringing up a ton of stuff is high(say nothing better than current chemical rocketry) but there is a very well developed infrastructure in space (the asteroid belt may be a good candidate there) and you have a cheap and efficient mode of travel once you're far enough from a planet (say a "jump" type FTL), dropping stuff grown and bred in space would be cheap compared to transporting it up from a gravity well.
Assuming large chemical reservoirs on moons(relatively cheap, and would even work using mass drivers) to provide resources like water, oxygen and such, building a large structure around a lagrange point and producing massive amounts of goods would actually be quite economical.
Seeding new planets is difficult and may contain biological, chemical and other difficulties in large-scale food production. Until the planet is deemed safe and is productive, many years may need to pass, with significant populations to support.
Cheap FTL provides the incentive to commerce and travel, drop-pods are used to bring stuff down from space.
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## Absolutely - As a Byproduct of Atmosphere Control
If you build a space station for people to live in, you need to get rid of CO2 and produce O2 to keep the atmosphere breathable.
One way to do that is to build an ecosystem - plants grow, absorbing CO2 and emitting O2.
## Rate of Exchange
How do you control the rate of CO2 / O2 exchange? There's probably a bunch of ways, but if you're going to the trouble of making large ecosystems, why not include grazing animals? You can very easily control the size of the herd by raising or lowering the cost of the meat, thus enabling you to control how much grass the herd eats.
## Space Based Economy Stays in Space
In general, there's little incentive for trade between Earth and any space colony - getting things up out of the gravity well is just too expensive to be worthwhile. Therefore, the engine of a space based economy is producing things for us in space.
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If a space station had a limited amount of inbound freight capacity it would make a lot of sense to keep animals on board if there's enough space to manage their population sustainably.
Animals have more use than just meat.
As has already been mentioned, animals may need to be transported. But aside from that:
## Wool, fur, leather, etc.
* Sheep and alpaca wool is highly valued for many properties including insulation, textiles, and fire-retardation.
* Bovine leather is also heavily used for purposes such as upholstery and clothing, even PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) such as leather aprons
* Bird down and feathers also have many useful properties for decoration and insulation
## Animal products for consumption other than meat
* Whilst cattle are single-use only for meat and leather, they also produce delicious milk which humans have thousands of years of experience in transforming for short, medium, and long-term storage and consumption (pasteurised milk, yoghurt, soft cheeses, hard cheeses, dehydrated into powder, powdered protein derived from whey, etc.).
* Many other mammals also produce milk that humans consider edible including goats, sheep, camels, and alpacas.
* Eggs from poultry such as chickens, ostriches, emus, turkeys, etc.
## Waste Conversion
* Some animals are well suited to converting organic waste (e.g. vegetable matter from the farms) such as pigs, goats, and cows into rich fertiliser to be returned to the farms
* Fish and other underwater creatures work together in ecosystems with water based flora as excellent water filters and also produce fertiliser. If running hydroponic farms, this can be extremely efficient when the flora and fauna are combined into one ecosystem and depending on the ratio of human to farms, it may even be appropriate for human waste to also be processed in that same ecosystem
## Human assistance
Whilst humans have developed tools for many tasks, we've also invested into using animals as tools as there are many tasks they're uniquely qualified for, and are ahead of technology on such as:
* Assisting the blind with navigation in a sight-driven environment
* Alerting to very low parts-per-million traces in the atmosphere (scent detection for explosives, contraband, diabetic anomalies, etc)
* Affection and a target thereof
## There's no place like home
* I don't know about anyone else, but if I lived on Earth previously, or even heard tales from those who had, I'd want to clap eyes on creatures other than humans sometimes.
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# Not really viable
I personally don't think keeping livestock in space can be economically viable. The costs this would bring with are very high. Animals need moving room, they need a lot of food for what little they produce, and keeping something cooperating in space alive is already hard enough.
An animal unit, about 500 pounds worth of animal (2 cows), [takes about 2 acres (4047 m2) of land to provide for.](https://www.hobbyfarms.com/animal-to-acreage-ratio-2/#:%7E:text=You%20can%20use%20this%20as,2%20acres%20per%20animal%20unit.) Add to that that you need to control the temperature of the room, have access to (artificial) light, refresh the air especially for methane-producing livestock, move around lots of water, and all normal animal problems, it seems less and less viable. If you are going to waste so much room on grass or other animal feed, you could likely get more money for it by turning it into a soccer field (6400m2).
Now let's say you import the food, and reserve only the minimum amount of space for your animals. This means that you will either need to produce the food on the ship or import it from a nearby planet. If you want to import it from a planet, importing the meat directly would be cheaper by weight to get into orbit.
Animals eat more than they produce in meat. From cows ([7 food:1 meat](https://www.navfarm.com/blog/fcr-guide/)) conversion to the one of fish ([2 or-less-food:1 meat](https://www.navfarm.com/blog/fcr-guide/)). While I would love a space-steak, space fish (or insects) would be the more viable option.
# But maybe
While I don't know for sure, I estimate that the upfront cost for the next plan would cost more than any of the other factors in quite the long term. With that said, the best that can be done in space would likely be to have a very large spherical fish tank, surrounded by some kind of radiation/thermal shock resistant glass, that can be lit by the sun. Use the same tank to grow fast-growing seaweeds, plankton, and simple aquatic organism to try and make itself sustainable. If managed well, there would be no need for artificial lighting and additional food for the fish.
In the best-case scenario, there is a HUGE upfront cost getting all the water and equipment in place, and then you would only need to refill the water + minerals for each fish you take out. Make the maintenance systems solar-powered, and then most of the cost would lie with maintenance and removing the fish.
Things to think about:
* The cost of getting the water up there would be enormous if it isn't imported from an asteroid or maybe a moon. Fish need about [1m3 water for each 200kg](https://pumpexpress.co.uk/how-many-fish-can-your-garden-pond-take/) of fish.
* Since you'll have a lot of liquid anyway, a [liquid drop radiator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator) to get rid of excess heat could be used.
* Artificial gravity might even be forgone, instead just pressurise the water. The fish will build up muscles from swimming.
* Maybe the sunlight bend by the spherical fish tank can be condensed onto a solar panel, to make it even more multipurpose?
All in all, I imagine it cheaper/easier to just do all this on a moon such as Europa and then use some kind of [reusable launch system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver) to throw things to a receiver spaceship.
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# Alien animals that require lower than earth gravity
Regardless of whether your world has intelligent aliens, there definitely could be lifestock alien animals. Those animals might die on Earth due to the higher gravity, and thus the only way to 'mass' produce these is either on their original world and ship them (prohibitely expensive) or produce them locally in space (incredibly expensive).
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**Heirloom Breeds and Intellectual Property**
Even if lab-meat and lab-dairy makes up the vast majority of the meat&dairy the average spacefarer consumes, that doesn't mean that there is no economic purpose in raising those real live animals.
The genetic information that seeds those meat/dairy labs needs to come from somewhere and it is vastly easier to copy-paste working natural DNA than it is to try to writing new (functional) DNA from scratch. A small herd of animals therefore serves better as an IP wellspring rather than a walking larder.
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*"Oh my god! Have you tried the new 'Mozzarella di Buf-flora' from SpaceDairy? Apparently they isolated the genes for like five new compounds so now their vat-milk products taste grass-fed!"*
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There may need to be a little handwavium explaining why someone brought an heirloom farm to space instead of just shipping lots of small samples at a fraction of the cost... but perhaps proximity matters because the best gene-splicers mostly all work/train at a specific space-station, or maybe the big lab-meat/lab-dairy companies are all space-station based and having a nearby space-farm dodges a number of tariffs or embargoes. Or, maybe all of the above combined with the "luxury product" ideas from other StackEx answers simply allows for a small farm to break-even selling "real-meat" compared to ground-based farm while getting all the other proximity benefits to its IP clients as pure profit.
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# Safety concerns for exotic or needed food
The (alien?) livestock requires an extremely adaptive & dangerous virus to sustain itself / for reproduction. No live specimen of the livestock can ever enter earth or the consequences will be dire, but the its dead remains (after some safety period) can be delivered planetside. The livestock's meat/parts, might be
* a highly-sought luxury food (which might induce someone to steal it / bring it planetside anyways)
* contain key components for a medical treatment which is impossible / even more expensive to produce otherwise
Inspiration: The "Descolada virus" [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead) from the Ender Series [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocide), the virus can only be contained by specially modified nutrients, but nothing from that planet would ever be allowed to leave.
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Assuming there is demand for "real animal meat" over lab-grown (which other posts have described reasons for):
## Animals are heavy
If you have a society that lives in space, and they have a high demand for meat, it would be a HUGE waste of energy to raise them on a planet, then lift them out of the planet's gravity well up to your space-based metropolis. Sure, you would need to build some large, specialized facilities for raising them, but compared to the costs of constantly lifting them off-world, it would definitely pay off in the long run.
## Economic Independence
If you rely on a planet for any particular resource, you are vulnerable to economic sanctions, tariffs, and the like. If the price of meat goes up drastically due to diplomatic missteps, you will have some unhappy citizens. It's best to have some local industry to fall back on.
## Gravity Tuning
You could use increases or decreases in the artificial gravity to effect the fat-to-muscle ratio of the meat. This could also be done by raising animals on different planets, but artificial gravity would give you a much higher degree of control over the process.
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This question is for a fantasy story loosely based on medieval west Europe.
The story is centered around a small remote village in a mountain that sits by a river. The village uses its river for drinking, bathing in, running its mill(s), etc. It would probably dump some wastes in it as well, but this got me concerned: what about those who would use the water further downstream?
I do have a settlement that sits on a flatland below the village mentioned above. For starters, is it realistic that two settlements would share a river at all, since the settlement downstream may be concerned about what might flow down from upstream? Or would some medieval wastes not matter much as long as the two settlements are far enough apart? Would there be agreements between the two settlements on what can be thrown in the river and what can't?
Also for that matter, what about bathing? We know that, contrary to popular belief, medieval people did try to keep themselves clean. Would people downstream complain about body residues and soapy water?
It'd be great if an answer can address how things happened back then, and also in present day where contamination is a bigger concern and things like spread of diseases by water is better known.
Also note: "the village upstream doesn't need to care if no one has a strong enough political power to have a say about it" is not an answer I can accept, even if that was true for medieval Europe.
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**It would use the heck out of that river.**
Cities have always shared rivers. Rivers are long and they have the things people need. A river is an excellent place to site a city. Look at all the cities on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O3hCM.jpg)
<https://www.americanrivers.org/river/mississippi-river/>
Moving water, air and life can do a lot to clean up the effluent of a city especially if it just biological waste and not industrial waste. The people downstream can and do wryly joke that their water tastes like the poop from people upstream. Unless you are in Memphis and they will brag that their water is not St Louis flavored because they have deep wells.
Disease could and did travel down rivers; cholera epidemics moved along the Mississippi 180 years ago and cholera still travels along rivers. Getting angry at people upriver because they are dying of cholera does not seem like a winning strategy.
The thing that does historically get people upset is if you divert too much of the water and leave too little for those downstream. That sort of battle goes on to this day; between Georgia and Florida, for example. Invariably large scale use of water is for agriculture. The amount your remote village would need for its orchards will probably not make a dent.
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*It would probably dump some wastes in it as well, but this got me concerned: what about those who would use the water further downstream?*
What!? Dumping our **precious waste** in the river? Who would be so ignorant to do such a thing?
Solid waste is useful. Food scraps feed animals (specially pigs and goats). Human and animal excrement works as a fertilizer. Unrepairable clothes can be converted to rags, and rags can be burned to provide some heat when needed. Same with broken wooden objects. And a river would not carry broken ceramic objects, as they are too dense. There are few other solids available to dump in a medieval village.
Urine is also useful for bleaching and tanning. In any case it is less of an issue. Being it mostly water, people can just pee wherever they feel the need with no side effects. And even if for some reason you convinced all the people upstream to pour down their piss in the river (which means a serious restriction at a time when most people would need to go walking to the river to do so), you need a lot of it to affect the water downstream.
Which reminds us -if we ignore the above points- of the logistical issue: medieval villagers are not working in an office building with nice plumbing that sends their feces to the river. They are tending the fields, or the house, and can be a considerable distance away from the river. Why on Earth would they want to spend one or two hours a day walking to and from the river just to take a dump, when they can just do it at the field, cover the excrement with a little of soil, and keep working?
And of course, since everybody knows that illness is caused by *miasmas* and *bad humours*, there is nothing to worry about all those people upstream casually using our river. Nothing at all to worry about.
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A Roman engineering solution to the contamination problem would be to build an aqueduct that draws water from upstream of all villages and runs parallel to the natural stream.
Citizens could draw clean water from the aqueduct and dump their waste into the natural stream. Dumping waste into the aqueduct would be punishable by drowning.1
A set of weirs at the aqueduct entrance would balance the flow between the man-made and natural streams.
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1. Not in the aqueduct! Not in the aqueduct! In the natural stream, idiots!
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In the past, some works were very polluting, and usually caused a lot of hatred in the villages downstream. Tannery, pork meat processing, dyeing used to leave a lot of substances in the waters. Other activities (such as bathing) didn't pollute the rivers in perceptible way (at least, not according to the standards of the period), particularly if the town is small (as your mountain town seems to be).
However, in the worst case, the town downstream could give some incentives (lower tariffs or duties) to all of the most polluting activities so that they would move to that town.
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## We handle it today by purifying the water before putting it back into the river.
This is still possible in medieval times. No one did it but there is no reason you can't build a sewage treatment facility. Most of it is just separating out solids and giving anything in it enough time to breakdown. You may be interesting in something called biological wastewater treatment, which is more about giving biology enough time to break things down. Settling ponds are used to sperate out solids which can used for fertilizer (just not for food crops, fine for things like textiles or oils), then you use retaining ponds and keep stirring the sewage to aerate it so bacteria and microorganisms can break it down. Shellfish, filter feeders, and plants love this kind of liquid discharge, some places build artificial wetlands(swamps) to help breakdown this waste without using chemicals. The final stages is just using sand and soil to filter out anything that is left.
Today we use pumps and machines for this since it is easier but you can do it without them, you just need good design (so everything is gravity fed) and a few extra settling ponds so you can drain and dig them out occasionally.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vIpXh.gif)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NB8TB.jpg)
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The brief answer is - in most cases they would historically have not cared - either at the source of the pollution or downstream.
Up until the present day people will (apparently) happily both
* Utilise water sources which are utterly unfit for purpose for drinking, cooking, washing clothes and themselves. And
* Pollute water that they and others use without apparent regard for the consequences.
Villages will have defecation areas near lake sides a short distance from where water is drawn for drinking and cooking and other domestic purposes.
I have seen many examples.
One only as a photo is easily findable.
More if desired.
Here the cows are being washed, after a fashion, after being milked.
Then they come and drink from the trough.
As I watched a dark red stain spread along the trough - I did not see the source but presumably a cow was bleeding heavily into the water.
Then men came and performed personal ablutions, washing in the trough and baling water over themselves.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C5DAg.jpg)
I have seen people washing food and clothes at the same location, in dark green coloured water in a wide canal (not stream) with minimal flow.
And people washing vegetables in water that most reading this would be unlikely to wade in.
The reasons are uncertain but are probably based on expectations and lack of an even basic understanding of the implications. Up until the 19th century the idea of washing one's hands before performing surgery was unknown, and well into the 20th century the strong links between hygiene and disease transmission were still largely not established.
A bit of colour in the water is, presumably, incidental.
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Are you just looking at pollution and other negative possibilities, or are things like transport of people and goods worth considering? If you're thinking about transport, does your society have tech/magic to sail against the current, or is it all human powered? Is there a port city at the mouth of the river that can trade with other cities along the same body of water?
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Suppose a species has limitless resources and the ability to construct megastructures of an astronomical scale.
Would it be possible, given antigravitational technology (hypothetical), to create a planet with the diameter of a light year? Suppose there is an internal structure inside the planet that enables the gravity of the planet to be cancelled at correct points to ensure stability. This would stop the planet from collapsing in on itself?
Perhaps without antigravitational technology the planet would turn into a blackhole due to the massive mass (assuming relative composition to that of the earth)?
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As mentioned, anti-gravity and or gravity generators will let you pull magic out of thin air, but let's try it without magic. I can't imagine why anyone would bother doing it, but I decided to see what happens and ended up with a totally insane project that uses a *lot* of carbon nanotube (CNT) and crazy amounts of energy. But, you don't need unproven technologies like anti-gravity or unobtanium. $\ddot\smile$
**Creating the Beast**
The [Schwarzschild radius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius) of a black hole is $r\_s<{2MG\over c^2}$. Solving that for mass, given a ½ ly radius, we get $M<3.19\cdot 10^{42}kg$ to *avoid* being a black hole.
The surface area of a sphere is $A=4\pi r^2$. The volume of spherical shell is $V\approx A\Delta r$ for $r\gg\Delta r$. The mass of the shell is $M=V\rho\approx A\Delta r\rho=4\pi r^2\Delta r\rho$. Solving that for thickness, given ½ ly radius, the mass given above, and the density of [CNT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube) (about $1.3 {g\over cm^3}$), we get $\Delta r<8727 km$.
The [compressive strength of CNT](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22494330) is around 416 MPa. The inside of the sphere feels the pressure of the entire mass weighing down on it. The force is given by $f=Ma$, where $a$ is acceleration at the surface. $a={MG\over r^2}$, so $f={M^2G\over r^2}$. Pressure is $p={f\over A}={{M^2G\over r^2}\over 4\pi r^2}={M^2G\over 4\pi r^4}$. Rearranging gives $M=\sqrt{4p\pi r^4\over G}=r^2\sqrt{4p\pi\over G}$. Solving for mass, given 416 MPa and ½ ly radius, we get $1.98\cdot 10^{41}kg$, which is not a black hole, yay.
Using that mass, we can calculate a thickness of 55 km, surface acceleration of 0.0061 g (about $1\over 164$ Earth gravity), not a black hole, and the CNT construction can withstand the pressures. Of course, getting 10 billion solar masses of carbon nanotubes is a bit of a feat, but it's not outside the realm of just-possible.
You wouldn't be able to cover the entire thing with people, dirt, etc., and you'd need some source of energy (maybe a Dyson sphere surrounding a super-massive star in the center of your CNT planet?), but it's doable without magic.
**Add some "Gravity"**
As Zsolt Szilagy points out, pretty much any kind of rotation you can actually notice is going to wreak havoc with shear forces, but you might be able to spin it just fast enough to get some normal Earth gravity along the equator if you put your people on the inside. Wikipedia says the [breaking length of CNT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength#Examples) is around 4700 km under 1 g, so the CNT *should* stay together while being flung outward at 1 g. Centripetal acceleration is given by $a={v^2\over r}$ for uniform circular motion. Solving for speed, given 1 g and ½ ly radius, we get 0.718 c at the equator. Not impossible, but it's going to take a long time to get there.
**Notes**
Also, [angular kinetic energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_energy) is $E={1\over 2}I\omega^2$, and $I={2\over 3}Mr^2$ for a [thin, spherical shell](http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/MomentofInertiaSphericalShell.html). $\omega={v\over r}$, so $E={1\over 2}{2\over 3}Mr^2({v\_\text{equator}\over r})^2={1\over 3}Mv\_\text{eq}^2$. Solving for energy, given mass of $2\cdot 10^{41}kg$ and $0.718c$ speed, we get $3\cdot 10^{57}J$, which means converting about 8% of the Milky Way's mass to kinetic energy over some insanely long time period to do it.
Of note, if you're going to spin the "planet" and put people on the inside, you might as well save a bunch of material and just make it a [Ringworld-style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld) ring (it's still going to be insane though). Also, at 0.7 c, we're getting into relativistic territory, so the Newtonian equations aren't perfect, but I don't think it's anything sufficiently advanced scientists can't handle if they made it to this point. I'd be more worried about extrapolating CNT strengths from $\mu m$ scales to $km$ scales. And rogue stars.
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**Given anti-gravity and a big enough power source, yes, a planet like that is possible** But, really, by introducing anti-gravity, an author can do pretty much whatever they want as long as the universe rules stay consistent.
Without anti-gravity, the amount of mass required to make a 1 light year sphere out of iron would have long ago turned into a very large black hole.
As a fun little addendum, let's look at the surface gravity of this planet. Earth's surface gravity is $1~\text{g}=9.8~\frac{\text{m}}{\text{s}^{2}}$. The density of iron is $7874~\frac{\text{kg}}{\text{m}^{3}}$.
$$M = V\cdot D$$
$$r = 0.5~\text{ly} = 4.73025 \cdot 10^{15}~\text{m}$$
$$V = \frac{4}{3}\pi \cdot \left(4.73025\cdot 10^{15}~\text{m}\right)^{3} = 4.43348 \cdot 10^{47}~\text{m}^{3}$$
$$D = 7874~\frac{\text{kg}}{\text{m}^{3}}$$
$$M = 4.43348 \cdot 10^{47}~\text{m}^{3} \cdot 7874~\frac{\text{kg}}{\text{m}^{3}} = 3.49092 \cdot 10^{51}~\text{kg}$$
$$g = G \frac{M}{r^{2}}$$
$$g = 6.67\cdot10^{-11}~\text{N}\frac{\text{m}^{2}}{\text{s}^{2}} \cdot \frac{3.49092 \cdot 10^{51}~\text{kg}}{\left(4.73025 \cdot 10^{15}~\text{m}\right)^{2}}$$
$$g=1.04\cdot10^{10}~\frac{\text{m}}{\text{s}^{2}} = 1.06\cdot10^{9}~\text{g}$$
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I am not making fun of you but given the tremendous ability to manipulate their environment demonstrated by constructing this thing (the ability to move the mass of many solar systems, redirect the energy of many stars to illuminate it, and generally technology indistinguishable from magic), doing all this this no problem. But if they were able to harness these vast capabilities to make your structure, what sort of problems might a race like this encounter? Would anything be a "problem" to them at this point?
When you add anti gravity and gravity generating technology to hold everything in place and manipulation of vast amounts of energy to provide heat, your race may not be bound by the law of conservation of energy too.
So my question is, "Why do you want to put such a thing in you story?" Putting such a fantastic thing in your story should serve a narrative purpose. If we knew that purpose we may be able to answer your question better.
"If your race has the ability to create such a thing, what would such a race not be able to do?".
Both of these questions have profound implications for your story.
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You probably need to make it empty inside (like a ball) to avoid immediate gravitational collapse. Also, this makes obtaining the required amount of building material more realistic.
A body so large still would require some very advanced technologies to use, but may be manageable then.
You could then use some strong light source in the center that would keep the planet blown up like a huge solar sail. But this should be some special technology; no solar sail would work in such a distance from the ordinary star.
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The black hole bit is the majority of the problem.
The density needed to become a black hole goes down as the radius of object increases. For the planet that you're talking about, if it had a density of $0.00000001488~\frac{\text{g}}{\text{cm}^{3}}$, it would collapse into a black hole. The density of the Earth is around $5.51~\frac{\text{g}}{\text{cm}^{3}}$.
You would need this planet to be something like a shell of unobtanium, or a lot of antigravity devices to stop from collapsing.
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As the others have said, without anti-gravity it won't work, with anti-gravity you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Just a few things to think about
With a diameter of 1 light year ($5.879 \cdot 10^{12}$ miles) you get a circumference of $1.85 \cdot 10^{13}$ miles, and a surface area of $1.09 \cdot 10^{26}$ square miles.
The Earth only has a surface area of $1.969 \cdot 10^{8}$ square miles, so this thing is going to be really really big. If you took a big bag of Earths and skinned them like oranges, you would need $5.535805 \cdot 10^{17}$ Earths to cover this monster.
The point is that heating and lighting the place is going to be hard. You'd essentially want fleets of Sun-sized stars orbiting the planet in order to keep things warm and to provide enough light to grow things.
If you only put them around the equator, one AU away from the surface and spaced them 2 AUs apart, you'd need $99,505$ suns to circle the planet. However you'd need more than one band to keep the place warm, so maybe 2 bands at the 45th parallels too...
Just to put the numbers in normal notation instead of scientific notation:
surface area of $1.09 \cdot 10^{26} = 109,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000$ square miles
$5.535805 \cdot 10^{17} = 553,580,500,000,000,000$ times the surface area of Earth
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So long as you abandon the notion of "planet" and will accept a sphere of the requisite size this could be built although I can't imagine it being done by anything less than a K3 civilization.
As others have shown a solid mass is out of the question. A thin shell is the only possible way to do this--which leaves the problem of how to support it. Fortunately, we can do this without any handwavium.
The inside surface of the sphere is a huge collection of maglev tracks. Each track is occupied by a super-train--they are 6.28 light years long, the head coupled to the tail. They are moving far above orbital velocity and thus exert an outward force. Enough trains going fast enough and you can support your sphere. (We can't calculate the speed without knowing the ratio between the mass of the trains and the mass of the shell. I would not be surprised to learn that the speed needs to be relativistic.)
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Once you cancelled gravity and made sure you have enough energy sources, tectonics might become an issue. Make sure that planet does not rotate (like almost every known planet does). The centrifugal forces would need a year to cascade through - without beeing able to provide the math, I could imagine the planet would rip apart when the surface rotates at considerable fractions of the speed of light, or when parts of it have a differing momentum.
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I would say that there are many levels of "no" beyond gravitational considerations.
You've identified one obvious reason why a 1 LY planet wouldn't exist - gravity.
If in theory somehow something were possible to make a sphere 1 LY across made of something that somehow has a stable anti-gravity effect over such, then there are still many other basic conflicts with reality to consider, such as:
* Have you really considered how large 1 LY is in comparison to any other known physical object in the universe, and in comparison to Earth and other planets in the solar system?
* What is the thickness of the crust and the density of the interior that you have in mind? Any answer for this that even involves an earth-like surface over that distance, I would expect to add up to more matter than exists in multiple galaxies. What process is going to gather, transform and assemble your planet?
* Given the scale of effort and ability needed to build such a thing, why would anything that advanced and powerful ever choose to use all that power to do that?
* There are many ways in which the thing you are talking about is not going to be a planet, for many things we commonly think of as a planet.
* For example, it won't rotate. Rotating something that large at any noticeable speed is practically impossible in a variety of ways due to several considerations from physics. For example, it will involve ridiculous amounts of shear force that would rip it apart. For another example, the resulting speeds at the surface would be relativistic, since the planetary circumference is 3.14159 Light Years - so there would be crazy time dilation effects between latitudes, and even if somehow the equator could go near the speed of light, one day would be over three years long. (Rotation relative to the direction of a bright light source is what provides days to planets.)
* Also, things won't orbit around it (and it won't orbit around things) like Earth's moon and sun do, because it would take ridiculous amount of time for them go around the planet or vice versa, and they'd not be at scale with the planet or else they'd me even more ridiculous and impossible than the planet itself is. Even if you wanted a moon to go around as fast as possible, skimming near the surface of the outer atmosphere at nearly the speed of light (maybe you can project all that gravity onto the moon?), it's still going to take over three years to make one orbit, and the time visible overhead is going to be a small fraction of that. The geometry alone is off by a huge amount.
* Given that you probably have no sun, what's going to provide surface heat and light?
* As AndyD273 pointed out, you'd need something like "fleets of suns" to keep the surface heated, but again those multiply the impossibility of the construction project, and then there's the impossible task of getting them arranged in some sort of movement pattern that somehow regularly covers a sphere without problems. There probably exists no orbital pattern that would work, so you probably need the ability to control the movements of an astronomical number of suns all the time.
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Without thinking too much (sorry) they could construct it:
* Empty inside (like [buckminsterfullerene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene)) and inside the surface (like bridges forming a mega-structure).
* Made with a super-material (like fullerenes)
* Rotate the "planet", which araises interesting [paradoxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_paradox).
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Though it might not be impossible, it might be too problematic.
Not even space is a perfect vacuum. There are forces, gravity included, pushing, pulling, oscillating, etc., and the larger an object in space, the more these forces will act upon it.
Imagine a mile wide ball of leaves. Imagine said ball floating around our atmosphere about three miles up. Now, imagine the inconsistent wind blowing half the ball from the north and half the ball in the south... blowing twice as fast on the top of the ball as on the bottom. Imagine the flocks of birds, airplanes and debris from space colliding with it. Imagine the clouds passing through, oftentimes heavy with precipitation, oftentimes thunderous and lightning...ous... and then, finally, there's the gravity. All these forces acting on your ball of leaves would tear it apart, and the larger the ball, the more area it occupies, the more forces will act on it. The wind alone would be coming from so many diverse directions at so many diverse speeds that it would break your leaf ball into a million pieces. This is true for our atmosphere, for our ocean and, yes, even for the vacuum of space.
We know that the sun, moon and even the other planets have a significant-to-negligible gravitational pull on our planet. A light year wide planet would be subjected to the pull of who knows how many stars... including the one megastar or collection of lesser stars used to heat it. Speaking of heating it, what is the molten core situation for a planet like this? It seems there's only three options: virtually no molten core whatsoever when you get down to it, a thin crust of rock built on to of a sun (game over) or some magical, potentially impossible sweetspot that gives you a very large molten core that is both hot enough to stay molten while heating your planet AND not so hot that... well... one could only imagine. Hmh...
Long story short, the science and power needed to do something like this are so great that you'd have to be almost literally capable of anything in order to make it work. You'd have to be at the point where not only would creating the planet be no sweat, but handling every single problem that arises would be equally easy to solve, because you're like some kinda god or something. On that level, science would be irrelevant. It wouldn't be a matter of possible... it would be a matter of whether you wanted to or not.
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Assuming basic science fails us (and it does), the BFP would have to be made one of several ways.
1.) Grown from a matrix that scavenges raw materials as it grows, extruding new material the same way a baby growing develops new skin. The "epidermis" would change structures at each stage to best support the newest pressures. The surface would have localized energy ports (self replicating) for harvesting new material from the surrounding system and be able to communicate shifts in spin to maintain the shape while still "flexible". Upon near completion all stored / harvested energy will have been distributed among all the sections to maintain balance and then the radiators would be launched on tethers as the rotation was slowed and the surface hardened. The entire innards of the sphere would be laced with slender ultralight cables much like a 3D bicycle wheel spoke system with the ends of the cables forming a sphere deep within the BFP (well 1/2 ly). These cables are only really needed to communicate and monitor stresses at first.
Once the radiators are launched (from every other section) they will serve multiple purposes. First, a specific radiation will be generated from the surface of each section using the matter harvesting generators and this will end the growth phase and start the unification phase. Each section will bond to its neighbor and use interlocking tendrils to help bind each plate to a perfect mating. Whatever the final geometric shape would be (boggles the mind) each section and it's immediate neighbors would be essentially a planetary surface and this is where the generators/radiators come into play.
The generators (the every other ones) would generate a beam of energy that struck the radiator spheres and those would release it as the most desirable visible frequency and a healthy modicum of infrared in alternating day night cycles tuned to each neighbor. The crust of the BFP would be roughly 12,750 km providing enough mass at every point to simulate 1g and provide structural integrity to the entire sphere, with a 500 m Earth like layer of organic topsoil. The rest of the 12,250 km would be layers of support structure, global and local supply/storage and automated repair facilities. This sectional mass would be insignificant to the size of the final construct, and too far away from other masses to cause problems. The side to side attraction of the sections would do little more than further strengthen integrity.
The harvesting generators not used for lighting would be responsible for gathering new matter and energy as needed and everything from asteroids to solar systems would be munched into what ever the BFP required, cutting swaths in whatever it encountered.
In this fashion, it would be 100% self sufficient and capable of travel by use of the same harvester energy beams used to power gravimetric engines. By no means could this ever be called a planet, it is more of a living machine.
2.) Genetically engineer some sort of bio-mechanical robotic creature(s) to build it, then consume it building on the outside of the existing structure and grow each cycle leaving your with a perfect honeycomb sphere made of whatever material you program it for and whatever depth is desired for best structure strength. You would also need to incorporate the same sort of energy harvesting beam technology.
In both cases, a holographic communication system would be used to defer delays in signaling, the light being transmitted via the fibers from each section and the data encoded in the holographic standing wave. The light might take 1 year to get from edge to center to all edges, but the standing wave should be affected instantaneously (in theory). Much like if you threaded a single glass rod from Chicago to Australia and tapped it, normal wave propagation comes into effect for the "tap" to be heard at the other end, but if you pull or push on the end, the other end moves at the same instant, no propagation needed.
I need to think this over when I've had more sleep...
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Yes. And lighting it is possible without unobtainium. Sunlight is 1000W/m^2.
Over a billion seconds (30 years) you will need 10^12J. Direct mass to energy transformations give 10^17J/kg so that is 10^17/10^12 x30 years =3,000,000 years per kilo per meter squared. So if it has enough mass per area to give earth gravity at 1.2\*10^10 kg/m^2 then it can be lit for at most 1.2\*10^10\*3000000=3.6\*10^16 years (earth years) (actually twice as much because of night) before all the mass has turned to energy.
I would recommend the maglev track idea with large tanks of matter(any) underground. These are slowly fed to mini black holes whose hawking radiation is beamed up out a hole in the ground, bounces off a mirror kept aloft by the force of the light and illuminates the ground.
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[Question]
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This cat looks like a normal [Maine Coon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Coon) to the unsuspecting victim. Except for one little detail:
Red claws that inject a neurotoxin into the victim onpon scratching it. **What would be the most appropriate way a cat could evolve toxic claws?**
I am looking for ways to explain why this cat evolved the toxic claws and how they work exactly. This includes the type of neurotoxin that could be used.
I would imagine that it would be a good weapon if the cat needs to incapacitate the victim with the first sneak-attack and then wait for the toxin to take full effect. This would only be necessary if the victim would be a potential danger to the cat if it could attack the cat.
You can choose an appropriate prey for the cat, so that this mechanism would evolve. The bigger the prey that can be killed by a single cat with the proposed technique the higher I rate the answer.
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So far as I am aware all venom is created in glands and generally derive from enzymes that already exist for some practical function. A mutation of the code for one of these enzymes is usually the source of poison creation.
[This article](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/09/on-the-origin-of-venom/) is exceptionally helpful in explaining the evolution of venom.
>
> It includes vipers, jellyfish, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, bees, cone snails, newts, platypus, and even a primate. All these animals produce molecules that attack a victim in minutes or even seconds.
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So for poison to evolve in a cat is not that improbable, after all it exists in the platypus and [a loris.](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/venomous-primate-discovered-in-borneo/)
Importantly not all of these animals create their poison in their mouth. The Loris has glands under its arms not unlike a lemur. Though from what the article says they then apply their toxin to their teeth to deliver.
**Specifics to the cat:**
I would think the most likely evolutionary path for a cat would be a mutation changing the chemicals produced in their scent marking glands. If you're familiar with cats you know they scent mark and it stinks. My reasoning is that would be similar to the lemur/loris set up. Lemurs have glands used for scent marking, the loris has evolved similar glands to also be toxic.
So there you go...its really not that far of a stretch biologically speaking.
*If you insist on delivery via claws* that is a bit more challenging. Odds are a cat is not going to evolve glands in its feet nor hollow claws for injection.
First, feed aren't a great place to have poison glands. Feet experience a lot of stress, cats walk run and climb so glands in the feet, not ideal.
An important note is that cats already rely on their claws for mobility, grappling prey and fighting off predators. What I am trying to point out is that IF you had claws injecting toxins they would have to be hollow and hollow claws would not be strong enough for climbing thus *reducing* the viability of the species. They would also be less effective when grappling prey...again reducing viability.
As for a solution, you can take advantage of the fact that a cat licks its backside...so it would similar to the loris create the toxin and then have it on its bite. I suppose it could walk through its own spray and have it on its claws as well but that would probably be less effective since walking would end up removing most of the poison in short order.
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Cat claws are already pretty toxic. Cat scratch fever is a real thing. That's because they have all manner of bacteria on their feet from the litter box and whatever else they walk in.
Their mouths are also pretty bad in the same way, but worse. If you get bitten deeply by a house cat, you should go to the hospital, and may be encouraged to go on a round of antibiotics.
It could be bad dental hygiene, but it could also be an evolutionary advantage. Instead of mauling their prey, a cat could simply inflict a wound and wait for the prey to die from infection.
Komodo Dragons and many other reptiles take this further. Their mouth bacteria produce a lot of toxins and an untreated bite is almost certainly lethal. They have evolved to withstand their own funk.
I would go with something along those lines: some kind of bacteria that lives on the cat claws, maybe feeding off some oily excretions in their paws. The bacteria infects its victims and excretes your neurotoxin.
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The evolution could be behavioral, and not such a stretch.
Consider [curare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curare)
It is a formidable and fast acting neurotoxin. Indigenous rain forest people prepare it from the curare vine. The amount carried on a blowdart is enough to paralyze prey.
Certainly the amount of this or a similar poison on a cats claws would be enough to do likewise. Cats already sharpen their claws on wood. The evolutionary change: these cats seek out curare vine (or your world's equivalent) and sharpen claws on it before hunting, accumulating toxin on their claws. That is not a very dramatic change.
It is perfect for cats because the cats sheathe their claws after sharpening, so plant alkaloids will still be there when claws come out to attack. That would not work for a dog or some animal which ran on its claws.
This angle for a small cat which hunts large prey would mean the cat would probably eat its paralyzed prey while it was still alive. The prey, I mean. The cat would need to be alive.
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One approach is [coevolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution).
For example, you could have some species of fungus or bacteria that developed behaviors that caused them to "activate" their toxin-producing behavior when in the environs of a cat's claw sheaths (damp, dark, has cat pheromones, or activated by cat saliva enzymes, or what have you). Outside of this environment, they may be relatively benign -- at least to the cats.
The cats in their natural habitat would pick up these fungi or bacteria from the environment, or even their parents (who would be covered in the non-active spores / microbes). In the claw sheaths, a trifecta of dark, damp, and some other activation condition (may even be non-cat-specific) causes them to produce your choice of toxin. Of course, the cats would have evolved to be resistant to this toxin; otherwise, we would not even be talking about them.
Note that this approach means that the cat's claws themselves are not toxic, but without scientific investigation (ex. isolating the cats from their native environment and fellows, disinfection), you can't tell if their claws are toxic in and of themselves or not -- you'd be more worried about not getting scratched in the first place, and thus "their claws are toxic".
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Evolutionary history shows us that venom has evolved in predatory species which are:
* too slow for chasing and catching their prey (e.g. snakes)
* too fragile as compared to their prey (e.g. jellyfish)
A predator which is already fast and robust would have no need for venom glands to develop. If you want your cat to have venomous claws, you would need to put it under great ecological stress throughout its evolutionary history. The prey items should be faster and sometimes just too much to handle in a straight fight.
As for how they work, venom is oftentimes delivered through hollow fangs or stingers. Your cat would also need to have hollow claws, in which the hole connects to the venom gland. The venom gland should be located at the upper edge of the foot, so as to avoid accidental release due to shock.
You can make the venom so potent that the victim gets dizzy within seconds and gets disabled within minutes. This works great with chemical venom. Or you can give your predator an assault-and-chase strategy, where it scratches its victim and then follows it for a long time (a couple days perhaps?) until the slow effects gradually take over and bring it down. This strategy works good with bacteria-infested bite, most popularly associated with komodo dragons.
Theoretically a bacteria infested scratch would be able to take down anything from a mouse to an American bison, although the time difference to bring down the prey would be huge. The bison would perhaps take weeks before it succumbs to the toxins and falls.
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Venom glands in snakes evolved from modified saliva glands. The only glands present in the paw area are related to the emission of sweat or pheromones.
It would be better for the claws to evolve to have a non-smooth surface that is able to collect dirt and remains of other prey. This surface would act as a growing ground for toxic bacteria.
In this way, if the injured prey manages to escape, it will die from sepsis soon. Or, at least, will make it weak enough for the cat to catch it.
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Clearly, they didn't naturally evolve glands on or near their claws, because of practical issues that naturally select against evolving fragile and dangerous glands on areas of their bodies that they use for running, climbing, and poking holes in innocent furniture.
Your cats with toxic claws are, therefore, the result of bio-experimentation gone wrong. Some mad scientist clearly decided he wanted an army of venomous cats, for some reason (maybe he got tired of his guard dogs chewing his shoes, maybe he just really liked cats, whatever). Evidently, he succeeded in engineering and breeding a decent number of these cats by figuring how out to splice DNA from some other venomous animal into cat DNA and code them to develop poison glands at the base of their claws. Then, predictably, things went bad. He was celebrating his genius, petting one of his new toxic cats when it returned his affection and started [kneading its claws on his lap](http://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/evr_ct_why_do_cats_knead).
After his death, his army of toxic cats went out into the wild, and thanks to their poisonous claws, they thrived and multiplied. Other species of cats and even dogs were quickly killed off or displaced, and thanks to their poisonous claws, these cats were able to take down big game like deer. With no effective competition and an abundance of food, this species underwent explosive population growth. Now, mere years or decades later, we have yet another cautionary tale about the dangers of covert biological weapons research and the inherent perils of raising felines.
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Allow your cats to change their behaviour and prey.
Let them eat snakes, ripping out their venom glands with their claws before eating the rest of the snake.
Their claws will then become envenomed, ready to inject into any other prey animals.
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I assume you're either working on homework, or writing (presumably) YA.
If it's the former, I can't come up with a good reason, and I'm a college bio major so best o' luck to ye. Spiders, the paradigm comparison, still need to rely on either a web to catch the victim or strength to overpower it, because the thing doesn't die quickly enough. With that in mind, think of this from a hypothetical cat's perspective: you're already a very efficient hunter of small prey - if you catch it, it's as good as dead, venom or no - but a big animal like a deer or hippo can still quite easily kill you even if the venom acts in 15s, and in reality it would probably take days in that small a dose. Not much help in either case.
As for writing, I already explained why venom makes no sense for offense.
As a defensive mechanism though, something that takes a little longer would make sense, especially if other large and aggressive predators existed. However, venom is still quite a stretch, because I would think that the venom-producing glands would have to evolve first, then the delivery method, and the former happening in a cat's legs sounds like a disadvantage for the cat - read: a self-eliminating trait in natural selection.
Rather than venom, change it to bacterial endospore that resides on the cat's claws. These bacteria would have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with the cat: they gain a carrier that transmits them to other hosts, while the cat gains a potent weapon. The endospores are triggered by exposure to other animals but not the cat's own system. That makes quick death (<24hr) a bit farfetched - bacterial infection from spores usually takes longer to hit full swing - but by the virtually unlimited viability period of endospores would explain why the bacteria live on all of this species of cat, all the time for their entire lives, without dying off from lack of a host.
Whatever you decide to use, before you go ahead, ask yourself the following two questions:
Why would this come to exist? (you already are so good there)
Why would the cat not kill itself when it licks its claws or scratches off a scab?
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Consider that Cats like to lick their paws. If their claws were toxic they would poison themselves. I don't think it's possible.
On the other hand eating venomous animals/objects does not necessarily make an animal's claws toxic. Consider koalas. I don't think their claws are toxic even though they eat eucalyptus.
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To evolve so much in a short span, they could co-evolve with another species, perhaps something that attacks and eats kittens. One evolves poison glands near it's claws, and the rest is history.
Or it could have a mutually beneficial relationship with a highly toxic bacteria that thrives on it's claws.
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[Question]
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Assume a projectile,
made of a very heat-resistant and durable material (something like tungsten), formed like a modern saboted tank cannon shot.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y31CC.gif)
If tungsten, like suggested, is not ideal, you can choose whatever material you think would be ideal to fulfill the mission as defined below.
If the mechanism of accelaration is taken care of by my science-fantasy means **- and this mechanism and aiming etc. is not part of the question -** what would be the maximum viable velocity within our atmosphere?
At what velocities would the (aerodynamically shaped) projectile just burn up?
If somehow the burn-up-problem would be solved (handwaved), what would be the next threshold?
Is there a velocity that would just make matter disintegrate?
I was thinking about having it fly at around 75000 km/s (~0.25c), but somehow I got a feeling this would not be entirely viable :)
**Definition of viable for this question: "Emerge" already at full velocity within earth's atmosphere, travel for 100-10000 m in a straight line, hit a target while still being a solid lump of matter.**
If you think about telling me what a impact will look like, please wait a bit, I will ask that question next.
Image from Wikipedia
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The answer depends on a mighty host of factors, including how pointy your projectile needs to be.
However, we can put together a pretty reasonable upper bound by looking at reentry vehicles. They are pretty much the fastest manmade things in the atmosphere. Apollo 10 came in at roughly 11km/s. The record fastest reentry vehicle was [Stardust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_%28spacecraft%29), which came in at 12.9km/s. These vehicles all have a very blunt front end covered in ablative material. Heating due to compression of the air at supersonic speeds is a really big deal at these speeds, and blunt shapes do a better job of keeping the hot shock wave further from the body of the craft.
It will be harder to make a small projectile fast. Heating is much more of an issue when you're small. [Navy railguns](http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_Rail_Gun.php) under test throw projectiles at 2.5km/s. Of course, you're handwaving a lot of difficult things, so you should be able to beat them.
The fastest objects in the air are [meteors](https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-faq/). They can hit 72km/s. However, most of them don't stay together under that strain, so it's not clear whether they count.
Given that I have been talking about 2-72km/s, it should be rather clear that 75,000km/s is a whole different world. I hate to say never, because human innovation is an incredible thing, but I don't think we'll ever be able to travel at those speeds in the atmosphere. If you did, it would certainly be quite the spectacle. The energy of a small projectile in that range is on par with that of atomic bombs, and I would expect the compression heating in front of the shock wave to be hotter than the sun.
And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that there's [an XKCD](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/) on the topic. As always, Randall Munroe has a way with words and pictures:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dkJEJ.png)
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> At what velocities would the (aerodynamically shaped) projectile just burn up?
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Only a few km/s. Read up on the [Sprint missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)), which could reach Mach 10 in 5 seconds (which would be about 3.5km/s, though that slightly depends on the altitude it had reached at that point) which resulted in skin temperatures of 3400 degrees C and needed an ablative heat shield. The Sprint also went *up* pretty quickly to try and get out of the densest part of the atmosphere ASAP... shooting horizontally at sea level, you'd have much greater heating to deal with.
In any case, range at low altitude and high speeds is clearly limited by the lifetime of your ablative heat shield. On the bright side, it'll look awesome as it'll form a plasma trail. Hope you weren't intending to be at all stealthy!
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> If somehow the burn-up-problem would be solved (handwaved), what would be the next threshold? Is there a velocity that would just make matter disintegrate?
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When the [stagnation pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagnation_pressure) behind your [bow shock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_shock_(aerodynamics)) exceeds the [yield strength](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_(engineering)) of your projectile. Or to put it another way: the force of the air ramming into the front of your projectile is greater than the strength of the bonds holding your material together, and it will simply break up like a jet of fluid, starting at the tip. It'll be eroded away all down its length til nothing is left but an expanding cloud of fragments, which will probably resemble an explosion.
Due to the lack of studies on hypervelocity projectile weapons (along with the lack of such weapons), I'll turn to papers on [shaped charges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge). The impact pressure of a shaped charge jet with a solid object exceeds the yield strengths of any material, so both can be treated as incompressible fluids splashing against each other. Obviously there are differences between a soft shaped-charge jet penetrating solid armour, and a hard projectile penetrating air (for a start, air is definitely not an incompressible fluid), but the basic idea is the same so this figure probably isn't *too* wrong. Take the figures with a small pinch of salt, but they're a good first guess.
Looking at studies of shaped-charge jets, you get handy formulas like $$P = L\sqrt{\frac{\rho\_j}{\rho\_t}}$$ where $P$ is the penetration depth, $\rho\_j$ and $\rho\_t$ are the densities of the jet and target respectively and $L$ is the length of your projectile. In this case, the "target" is the atmosphere itself. A half-metre long tungsten rod will therefore travel $0.5\sqrt{19300 / 1.225}$ or $62m$ max through the air once it had exceeded this critical velocity, disintegrating as it went, regardless of its temperature.
What would be that velocity threshold, you ask? Well, uh, I haven't the faintest idea (aside from "higher than re-entry speeds"). Compressible aerodynamics turns out to be Quite Hard, and my previous efforts to wrestle with it came to nothing. But now you know the magic words to search for, so maybe you'll have more luck than me.
If I had to hazard a guess though, I'd look at shaped charges again. The tip of shaped charge jet travels at about 10km/s. Armour is about 10000 times more dense than air. The force exerted by a fluid jet is $F \propto {\rho}v^2$, so you'll need your projectile to travel about $10km/s \* \sqrt{10000} = 1000km/s$ to develop the same forces from impacting air. This is a *very, very loose approximation* and shouldn't be taken too seriously. It does seem plausible though, give or take an order of magnitude.
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This is more than 10 times faster than the 1000km/s threshold I invented above, so I'm pretty certain that there's no way that a projectile travelling this fast could stay intact even if you *did* handwave all the heating issues away.
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Well, if your projectile was long enough, *some* of it might survive to hit the target. You'd need to fire it perfectly straight though... any deflection or manufacturing defects will cause bits of it *other* than the very tip to be blasted off, and that will a) ruin your accuracy and b) ruin your range. You're clearly limited in how long you can realistically make your projectile, and given the speeds you want it'll almost certainly have to be *too long*.
Short answer: **nope**.
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Just as food for thought: Some fraction of *c* (light speed).
First, you fire a laser or something that will ionize the air between yourself and the target (= create a plasma). Think big: Something that ionizes a channel that is between 100 and 1 km wide. Bigger is better.
Then you use electronic and magnetic fields to move as much plasma out of the way as possible. A good shape would be a cylindrical field which moves the ionized gas away from the center. Of course, air will try to get back in but that will take a moment (a lot of molecules will try to get away and the cold molecules need to wrestle their way in).
Getting the plasma to move towards the target could be a bonus.
Use the channel with reduced air pressure to fire your projectile. You might be able to achieve a temporary near-vacuum this way which would allow you to fire with the speed of light - if you can accelerate your projectile to those speeds.
Notes:
* Everyone living within 1000 miles of the combat zone will hate you - this approach will fry electric devices for miles around.
* Creating the channel will probably cost more than just firing several (slower) slugs.
* The initial blast with the laser will cause a lot of damage at the target; you most likely will not need the projectile ...
* This will disrupt radio waves for days, maybe weeks. Say goodbye to mobile phone service during that time. Everyone on the planet will hate you. Pitchfork & torch kind of hate, not just Facebook cybermobbing.
* The collateral damage will make this a hard sell to even the military.
My conclusion: Just drop tungsten rods from low orbit (a.k.a "Hammer of God"). Takes a minimum of acceleration (or they would just stay in orbit), cheap to make, easy to scale. The tip will be vaporized by the heat of reentry so you probably need some kind of ablative heat shielding which pushes the air around the body so it flies/falls in a cavity.
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## Real-world example: Operation Plumbbob
Cort's answer to this question is pretty great, but makes two faulty assumptions. One, the reentry vehicles aren't the fastest objects humans have ever made, and two, they're interacting largely with the top of the atmosphere. As evidenced by the host of other answers, the theoretical side of things is difficult at best to figure out, so we'll be best off going with real-world data.
[**Operation Plumbbob**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob) was the codename for a series of US nuclear tests. Pascal B is the one we're interested in - in which a steel cap was welded onto the top of the pressure release. This steel cap was then launched by the nuclear blast into the atmosphere at [estimated speeds of >60km/s](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/16/america_soviets_space_race/). It's assumed that this hunk of metal made it into space, but given that we only managed to capture a single frame of its existence, we may never know.
Assuming you have the ability to produce such an acceleration, the main concern is remaining "solid". However, at such high speeds, literally everything acts like a fluid and you're essentially "spraying" molten metal through the air as a series of droplets - which is really up to you as to whether you consider such a "shotgun" effect still a solid object.
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For a given value of "projectile" and an arbitrary distance...
[Anatoli Bugorski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski) was hit by a particle accelerator beam in the face. The accelerator in this case was the [U-70](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-70_(synchrotron)), which can impart 76GeV on a proton beam. At those energies each proton would be travelling at close to 99.99% of the speed of light. You don't need to worry about the projectile disintegrating at short distances, but then again this is a weapon that weights 200 metric tons and can only fire at targets up to a couple meters away from the muzzle. You might wish to use it only for executions.
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The jet from a shaped charge is one of the fastest objects on earth: formed from a flat metal liner blasted into a narrow line by a conical explosive charge, it is still essentially solid (many erroneously describe it as a liquid), but at that speed it does not behave like one.
Shaped charge jets are most effective when dense metals are used (eg tungsten) but lighter metals are generally more practical (eg copper). They are used to penetrate thick tank armor, and the fact that you can do this with copper tells you something about the odd physics at these speeds. Pushing stuff (even air) out of the way is a challenge, and because the jet moves faster than a shockwave through it, it effectively behaves as a stream of particles rather than a single object.
So your projectile will 'hang together' but will ablate rapidly depending on how much heat it absorbs. When penetrating armor, a hydrodynamic process operates: it erodes the armor at the same rate is the jet is eroded. If the same applies with air - and I don't think anyone has fired anything fast enough to confirm this! - then 1 kg of penetrator will be eaten up by 1 Kg of air. So a 10-ton block of steel (1 metre cube) would get through 10,000 metres of air before being entirely vaporized.
This is why long, narrow jets work better than aerodynamic blobs for armor penetration at such speeds.
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In the real world, humans have tamed horses and use them as mounts. Horses have very specific characteristics that make them a viable mount, such as size, back-strength, stamina, diet, behavior, etc. That is also the reason why we don't ride animals such as deer and zebras.
In my fantasy world, humans have domesticated Species X to be used as flying mounts. Species X are feathered animals that have six limbs, four for land locomotion plus two wings.
**What anatomical characteristics would these creatures need in order to be practical flying mounts?**
* **Mount:** an animal that people ride in order to travel arbitrary distances
* **Flying:** capable of self-powered and controlled movement through the air
EDIT: If such a creature seems unfeasible, an answer stating so with proper arguments is as valid as any other.
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**I don't think this is possible.** I'm assuming you want a realistic answer. A flying mount looks unfeasible on Earth, or on an Earth-like setting, because it would have to be both extremely light and extremely strong for its size (indeed, like real life flying animals are). This is even before you consider riding the animal.
In general, consider that weight goes up with volume (cube of linear size) while muscle strength and wings go up with area (square of linear size) so the bigger it is, the weaker it'll proportionally become ([square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law)).
Earth's largest-ever flying animal was [Quetzalcoatlus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus), which is estimated to have had a 11 meter wingspan and a weight of about 200 kg. We don't know exactly how it flew, and some have even proposed that it didn't fly at all (maybe it could glide?). The largest-ever flying bird was [Argentavis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis) (6 m wingspan, 70 kg). According to its article in Wikipedia, "a wing loading of 25 kg/m² is considered the limit for avian flight".
A small-breed modern horse weighs about 400 kg, so for a horse to fly with 100 kg of cargo (rider plus whatever) it would have to have 20 m² of wing surface (each wing being 5 by 2 meters!) *and* it would also probably have to have hollow bones, massive wing muscles and an extremely fast, bird-like metabolism. The bones on the other hand would have to be able to support the 500 kg of the loaded animal when on the ground. The wing muscles would add mass, so the rest would have to be proportionally small and weak. And the fast metabolism would mean the animal must be fed often and abundantly (and therefore could not fly long distances).
So I believe a Pegasus-like mount is impossible on Earth. It could be possible, maybe, if you're willing to make some concessions, such as having only very light riders (a caste of messenger midgets?), accepting that the animal will be fragile and die easily so it can only be used for very *very* important purposes, and/or somehow managing to enhance the animal using nanotech, for example, to make extremely thin bones extra-strong or to increase metabolic efficiency (this could be hand-waved by implying an advanced civilization tinkered with them ages ago and then left).
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I don't think a classic Pegasus/dragon animal will work (reasons see other answers).
But how about a "lighter-than-air" approach?
Your (gigantic) animal will split water into oxygen (can maybe be stored in special organs for fight-or-flight situations) and hydrogen. The hydrogen is then stored in large bladders, allowing the animal to float. It then can use huge firefly-like wings to "paddle" around (jellyfish with fireflywings).
A more elegant and maybe faster way would be a body aerodynamically shaped (think about a fat manta/stingray). It then would use muscles to squeeze the bladders, reducing its volume (and therefore its uplift), starting to fall. By adjusting its body-position it can than turn the falling motion into a gliding motion. Once it gets to low it releases the muscle-tension and starts to float back up. Repeat until target is reached.
TLDR: A manta-airship instead of horse-bird.
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To point out an obvious evolutionary problem. The creature in question would have had to evolve to be able fly while weighing up to 150kg more than it usually does.
Hence why we only ride dragons, because that 150kg is a negligible proportion of their weight. Pegasus\* and Gryphons just can't get off the ground carrying that much extra weight.
\*Pegai perhaps, but that'd be Latin and he's Greek, so maybe Pegasodes. Pegasus was his name though, not his species.
Thanks to AlexP:
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> The plural of [Pēgasos](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2Aph%2Fgasos) (Πήγασος) is Pēgasoi (Πήγασοι), which would be Latinized as Pegasoe.
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I am looking at some flying animals right now, so the prospect of flying animals is not much of a stretch. Floating islands, though, are scarce. So: use whatever makes the hovering islands possible in your world to make your mounts fly.
You could really run with this and make it different. Pegasus / dragon riders / flying giant cats have been done done done but it would be fun to have the mounts be smaller than humans - ?maybe regular cats? - and really buoyant because they eat so much cavorite. You could ride one like a grumpy skateboard. Possibly your flight suit has a number of rings, each of which you clip to a different cat. Problems integral to dealing with cats would of course come into play, as well as new problems like the need for ceilings and a requirement that all flying cats are inside cats.
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"The Flight of Dragons," by Peter Dickinson proposed a plausible evolutionary explanation of dragons. Plausible to my 13yo mind, at least. In it, he explained that dragon flight is a hybrid of wing based propulsion and lighter than air flight. The buoyancy was provided for by hydrogen, which also accounted for fire breath (ignited by an electric spark). The hydrogen was created through a chemical process involving acid, which accounted for dragon hoards as everything but gold would be corroded by dragon spit. I remember it being a pretty cohesive account.
Evolutionarily, I don't think this would be much more of a stretch than what we see on earth today. We have flying animals. We have animals that puff themselves up to ward off threats. We have serpents with amazingly elastic bodies. We have animals that produce acid. We have electric eels. I think if you work out something physically plausible the evolutionary explanation will be as good as any we have for existing animals.
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And as for the mount aspect. It's been mentioned that birds will carry off small mammals, so there is always that. There could be explanations on the sexual selection side. Perhaps (this might have been in Flight of Dragons) flight and fire displays could have been involved in courtship. Females prefer males which could stay afloat longer with more of their hydrogen being burned, implying quick generation of gas or super buoyancy. Courtship could involve the males trying to lift the females and the females trying to escape downward.
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**Change the air density, then you can have Pegasi.**
If you can increase the ambient air density significantly, without increasing local gravity, then a Pegasus-like solution would become much more feasible. (And since you already have floating islands, we know gravity can be weak, at least for some things.)
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I'm always amazed by how people forget/don't know about pterosaurs in such discussions about giant flying animals, only one person commented on them. Pterosaurs are the most amazing thing the earth has produced, they need more attention. There are a lot of misconceptions about them, it is pretty consensus in the field that even the biggest were capable of flight and they have biomechanical models and simulations to back it up, we have a great idea of how they did it, though the research is new - I would argue that we might understand pterosaur flight better than insect or bird flight (maybe even bats) which are much more complicated ways to fly.
I mean, before planes and pterosaurs, people thought birds were the heaviest thing capable of flight, if nobody had ever seen a flying animal I'm pretty sure they would think flight was impossible in the first place. Early naturalists often said the elephants were pushing the limits of animal size, scientists said animals couldn't survive extreme heat or pressure, etc and etc. Time and time again, those bold affirmations are proven wrong.
**Yes, it is pretty possible for a flying creature to lift a human being.** See that article by paleontologist Mark Witton:
<https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-life-be-like-if-pterosaurs-were-alive-today-5909172> -> The article goes on more detail of the challenges.
Although, it would probably have to be a light human, not a heavy weight boxer or fat guy. But even so, if those animals could lift a human being, some more adaptations on top of the ones they already posses and you could lift a larger cargo, maybe his bones are some kind of very strong and light carbon based material of fiber, stronger muscles, a more efficient breathing system, maybe with large airholes like the ikrans of avatar, use of myoglobin instead of hemoglobin, etc. Small things make a huge difference.
The hardest part is not for a flying creature to lift a human being, the hardest parts are:
* For the human to resist the coldness and rarefied air of higher altitudes, it would probably have to wear some gear or the humanoid itself would have to evolve for it, the Sherpa people of Tibet have interesting adaptations to survive high altitudes that they took from inbreeding with other ancient hominid race, it would be interesting to take a look at it;
* For the creature to be a hexapod like you want, with four legs and two wings. That doesn't exist on earth, the closest thing I can think of are:
1) Insects, but they have problems getting that big in the current
atmospheric conditions (although if an insect developed pulmonary
respiration and air sacs that's hard to predict how big they could
get). The dragonflies the people of Krypton fly in Man of Steel are a good example.
2) A wing that evolved through something like a gliding lizard. The draco volans couldn't really do it since it's wings come through the ribs bones and can't develop into another member, but there was an extinct variety called coelurosauravus who developed new bones for a wing membrane, not part of the ribs. Given enough time, evolutionary pressure and lack of competition from better flyers they could eventually develop something similar to a whole other limb used for flight. Now, this would be really problematic, since animals with extra limbs usually suffer to provide blood and energy for them, specially wings that are really energy consuming. You could get away by giving then some strange and efficient vascular and respiratory system, as I've already proposed, maybe even other auxiliary small hearts.
But, if you really want feathered wings it would be problematic since feathers can't carry as much cargo as a wing membrane. You could easily get away by saying the animal has a wing membrane that do the work and a coat of feathers above for insulation, pterosaurs probably have some simple feather-like structures that did it, and many dinosaurs developed somewhat complex feathers even though they didn't use them for flight, your animal could use them to help create turbulence or make the flight quieter or even for display, but it would be the wing membrane that would have to do all the heavy lifting - Take a look at the dinosaur Yi Chi for inspiration who also had feathers and a membranous wing.
But I don't feel like the biomechanics of flight are really the meat of your question, you wanna know what makes a good animal for domestication. CGP Gray has amazing videos about it:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk>
You should think if the creature needs to be domesticated, it might just be tamed, which have lower requirements. On the other side, domestication could help explain how they became such good flyers, maybe they've being selective breeding and are much better flyers than their natural counterparts, I'm assuming genetic engineering to be out of question. Regardless, it would be pretty hard to tame a large flying animal. They might create them from birth and start behavioral training young. It would help if the creature was a herbivore without much to fear in the wild, and was already social with hierarchical structures and high intelligence. Maybe some imprinting could help. Needless to say they would have to train the creature tethered to the ground and use safety belts and parachutes/wingsuits for safety. Once they tamed the first ones they could use the more experienced ones to help train the new ones, so more experienced flyers could help in rescue if some accident happen, so overall I think training then might not be the hardest part.
Good luck in your world!
Edit: Came back after some thoughts, your question really got me thinking, it was the reason I've created an account in the first place. Forgot to mention other problem about wings on the back. That is that you would basically have a lot of extra weight having to carry that much members that aren't really necessary. One of the advantages of pterosaurs that made them reach such huge sizes was their quadrupedal launch that makes them use their strong wing muscles on flight and on take off (one of many, you should really research pterosaurs adaptations) and don't need such strong leg muscles. You could have a two wings, two legs animal that still walk on four like pterosaurs and have feathers.
Like that: <https://in.pinterest.com/pin/765400899152037936/?nic_v1=1ahBmj9kCSbnUq%2BdkdNiWjIkSorZaTrBxBfhXYWu4hUqCZHtMpngpGTl%2FzqMoRj1n%2F>
But the more important thing is to grant the creature a real ecology, and specially create a place were they have the sufficient calories and reasons to fly (like predators to escape or foods to access). The creature can develop as much crazy features as you want if it servers a real niche and it has enough calories available to do so (and don't have competition from better flyers with less crazy and more efficient body plans doing the same work). To power wings on the back in such a big creature would require enormous caloric power, maybe they co-evolved to eat big fruits that need them to disperse seeds or maybe there are some really massive flowers of a sequoia sized plant producing a ton of really high caloric nectar that they eat like a hummingbird (keeping the idea of them being herbivores and also without needing large and heavy stomachs to process leafs that are really very low in caloric density) and they're the only ones exploring that food source. Evolution doesn't mean only the most efficient animal possible survive, there are some animals that should already be extinct if it wasn't for their ability to explore a very specific food source that only they can get, sexual selection can also help explain why they retained characteristics like four limbs and feathers, animals really push the limits of evolution to please a partner. That and also selective breeding of species people culturally thought were aesthetically pleasing.
Other forms of flight like jet propulsion aren't really energy efficient, balloon creatures would have to be enormous to be able to lift their own body and a person, so they would look more like flying houses than flying mounts. Anything smaller than that and storing so much gas is much more trouble for a very little difference in their weight.
All of that of course, thinking on a very earth-like environment, any change to atmosphere density, oxygen levels and planet gravity would already make a huge difference.
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Turn your mind back to Disney's Fantasia 2000, The second segment. A wonderful piece of music called "The Pines of Rome" with an animation of humpback whales that jump out of the water and fly up into the clouds. this would provide you with large animals that could carry people and fly from floating island to floating island.
Okay, this is far-fetched so lets look at how they got up there.
Assume that the planet surface below is mostly covered in water. The islands hover at varying altitudes above the surface. What makes the Islands hover? The oceans contain large quantities of handwavium, which is also the principle component of the floating islands. The islands rise and fall slowly and majestically, and when they touch down in the ocean lots of little krill gorge themselves on the handwavium rich strata on the underside of the islands. The whales eat the krill, and for a while they gain the power of flight. Swarms of insects in the air also serve as handwavium rich snacks for the whales, prolonging their ability to fly. The whales return to the oceans for mating and caring for their young.
Gaining flight via diet is kind of like how Flamingos are pink because of the shrimp they eat.
The whales look a lot like humpbacks but have additional limbs as wings for control in flight, but that fold back flat against the body for movement in water. Propulsion is by means of a series of bladders that act as both lungs and like an octopus jet. Inhale through the nose, exhale out the other end. Not real fast, but majestic.
I know I left out the ability for land locomotion, but only because I like the idea of flying whales. If land locomotion is absolutely required, I guess you could use giant Sea Otters with feathers and wings. Use the same food cycle mechanism, but since otters are carnivorous, they could eat more normal birds in addition to the fish that eat the krill that contain the handwavium.
As mentioned by Will, Pegasus, gryphon, dragon, etc all have been done to death I like the idea of doing things a little differently
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[Scott Westerfeld's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Westerfeld) Leviathan series had bioengineered zeppelins that were basically modified whales full of hydrogen.
[Your average zeppelin had a lifting capacity of hundreds of thousands of pounds](http://www.airships.net/lz127-graf-zeppelin/size-speed-statistics/), so it seems like you could proportionally scale that down to an animal that is mostly hydrogen to carry a person around. The resulting beast would still end up a bit too big to pet though.
Scott's were very cool because they were built as a biome of various species and the leviathan produced its own hydrogen through digestive processes.
Anyway, that's not the feathered, limbed animal you asked for, but it might be a useful concept to incorporate. I always imagined Appa from Avatar as being mostly hydrogen underneath.. ; )
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Your planet needs to be either small or not very dense, with a fairly thick atmosphere. Per [relevant XKCD](https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/) a human with manageable-sized wings could fly on Titan, which is about 2.3% Earth's mass and 7% the volume, so about 30% the density. Scale a bit to some bird about the size of Quetzalcoatlus and it ought to be feasible.
You could have your planet be a hollow shell to adjust the overall gravitational pull for a given surface area, should you so wish, though you'd need a good explanation for why it doesn't collapse in on itself.
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BIOLOGICAL JET PROPULTION
It was explored in "[Alien Planet](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453446/)". It would be very difficult to evolve but once a species obtains it it would make them nearly invincible to any civilization without guns.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJn1l.jpg)
*Skwers from Alient Planet*
According to Alien Planet
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P.S. The front part is lance (depicted to the right in the image), which they use as weapon.
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I had seen this image before, and I was amazed. This post reminded me of it, so I went looking for it. I found it in wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur_size>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/07QNt.png)
The wikipedia page has a list of large Pterosaurs and a small discussion about their flight capabilities. It could serve as a starting point for more research.
**EDIT:** wikipedia also says that they were probably quadripedal.
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John Norman in his Gor novels envisions birds flown by humans for both combat and transport.
Anne McCaffrey talks about dragons, tamed for humans to ride in the Dragonriders of Pern series.
Both work great in stories. In reality of course, even if the flying creature can carry the weight of a human being (and his saddle and cargo) on its back, how do you explain the animal evolving to have that capability?
Birds on earth just don't have the physical strength to do anything similar in scale, their spines can't handle the strain.
And even though some can carry a weight that would (relative to their own) be high enough in their feet, they typically don't have a lot of endurance doing so, severely limiting the usefulness of using them to carry humans.
Of course in a fantasy setting, you don't really have to explain such things to your readers, but it helps if it's somewhat believable (JN pretty much hints at selective breeding and the lower gravity of his planet, for example).
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You could take any of the previous answers and slightly change the structure:
* Cartilage or hollow bones are lighter
* Instinct used rather than intelligence (less heavy brain to carry)
* Stripped-down digestive system
* Thinner skin
* Smaller skull
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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.
An alien spaceship the size of an Empire State Building experiences a technical issues with its cloaking device, their duty technician needs 24 hours to repair and meanwhile the alien wants to avoid being detected by the human.
**Is there any place within the solar system for the alien to hide for the next 24 hours?**
With the cloaking device down they cannot mask the radiowave and gamma radiation produced by their ship effectively. If they should leave the solar system their engine has to be fully engaged to full power and thus produces more gamma radiation.
To repair the cloaking device they have to expose the ships interior as well as the engine core which will emit gamma radiation to the surrounding.
The crew will avoid using radiowave for communication.
Assume the ship is already in the blind spot when their cloaking device fails.
[Answer]
**Get the ship as close to the sun as the ship can tolerate then maintain position between the sun and the earth.** The sun is a strong gamma ray emitter. As long as the ship stays between the earth and the sun, any gamma rays emitted will just look like noise against the solar gamma radiation background. Any IR, visible, UV, or radio emissions will also get washed out by the sun's glare. Even if someone on Earth knew where to look, they would have significant challenges minimizing the glare of the sun. A 24 hour repair window shouldn't be difficult to achieve.
X-Class solar flares have power outputs on the order of [billions of hydrogen bombs](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/X-class-flares.html#.Vdsb16BVhBc) so unless your ship is really really leaky, it should escape detection.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbUhY.jpg)
[Answer]
## The Third [Lagrangian Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point)
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Lagrange_points_simple.svg/282px-Lagrange_points_simple.svg.png)
The Lagrangian points are those where the gravity influence of Earth and Sun and the centrifugal force balance out in a way that an orbit is possible where the object is not moving relatively to earth. The L3 point is on the opposite side of the Earth's orbit, so it will always be behind the sun when viewed from Earth.
The sun is so large that any direct line of sight from Earth or earth-orbiting satellites is blocked. Any kind of emission the ship could create will be reliably blocked out by the sun. And even those kinds of emissions which might pass through the sun (the only I could imagine would be neutrinos) will likely be mistaken for unusual sun activity. The only way to detect it might be when the emission is reflected by any other celestial objects like asteroids or planets, but the ship would have to create quite a lot of noise for that to be detectable. Unless they create some *immense* energy output spike, like by blowing up their main reactor, there will be no detectable echo from other celestial bodies.
The only earth-based crafts which might get a direct line of sight are interplanetary probes, but these are designed for short-range observation of the planets, moons or asteroids they are supposed to research. They usually have no reason to even look into the direction of the Earth-Sun-L3 point.
The Lagrangian points are unstable, so a ship will have to perform slight course corrections to stay exactly on the L3 point for extended periods of time, but when they just need to hide for 24 hours that will not be necessary.
[Answer]
At the risk of offending the SE Gods - but because you asked for Hard Science:
## [There's no cloak in space](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth)
## [Many also maintain that there's no \*stealth\* in space](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth)
but I disagree with the absoluteness that this is often associated with the statement.
For instance, even with thousands (millions?) of telescopes and other astronomical observing equipment, [astronomers are regularly surprised (only a day or two warning) by sizable rocks winging past the Earth.](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4441)
The point is that if we know *where & when* to look, there's almost no where in a billion miles that you could hide. If we don't know where & when to look a bit of sneaking is possible.
Bear in mind that any high-powered interstellar or even inter-planetary drives will give away your location in a heart beat but a common Hohmann orbit transfer with the boost phase hidden from our direct observation would be quite difficult to detect.
## There is no reason for your engines to emit different radiation at different \*velocities\*
Even engines like VASIMR (which can "change gears") do NOT change their radiation profile based upon spacecraft *velocity*. It only changes its emissions based upon rocket performance (thrust and $I\_{sp}$). You can engage those changes at *any* spacecraft velocity that you want.
## Finally, the answer
I didn't see any errors in the messages above, they all have valid points:
1. Asteroids that surprise us usually come at us after traveling
through the inner Solar System - they are harder to detect when
coming at us from this direction.
2. Most of human detection equipment is based on or near Earth.
Chances are if you can obscure you ship from the direct line of
sight to Earth, you'll be hidden.
3. We do have probes all over the Solar System looking at all sorts of
different things. *Usually* a given probe is looking at its
specific object of interest (e.g. New Horizons is looking at Pluto).
There's always a chance that a probe (e.g. Cassini) might be looking
towards Earth or some other object at any given time - your crew
will just have to take a gamble (a chance for some dramatic
tension?).
4. We also have some probes doing "Sky Surveys" - looking at an entire
hemisphere of the sky at a time and looking for things out of the
ordinary. You definitely need to hide your ship from these. AFAIK,
these are all based around the Earth.
5. For additional dramatic tension, we also have ground based neutrino
detectors. If your ship uses extremely powerful nuclear (fission or
fusion) power, those *will* see a blip in neutrino detections.
There is simply no way to hide such emissions unless you happen to
be on the opposite side of the Sun. The Sun won't block the neutrino
signal (a neutrino has greater than a 50% chance of passing through
6,000,000,000,000 **miles** of lead), however, that signal might get
lost in the neutrino "noise" coming from the Sun.
[Answer]
**In Earth's oceans.**
There is no need to hide at the end of the solar system when we can barely find anything on our own planet.
Assuming that the aliens haven't already been detected before reaching their hiding place (perhaps their cloak is *just about to fail* — this is a flaw in your scenario, and we *must* assume this otherwise everything's moot anyway), just have them dunk into the sea and drop to the bottom.
Even if they leaked a bit of radiation there, we wouldn't see it.
Then, when repaired, launch again.
Easy!
[Answer]
# [The Oort Cloud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud)
The far edge of the Oort Cloud is believed to be [100,000 AU from the Sun](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/145944main_Kuiper.Belt.Lithograph.pdf). In fact, [Duncan et al. (1987)](http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1987AJ.....94.1330D&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf) created simulations that showed the inner edge of the Cloud to be at ~3,000 AU.
Given that 1 AU $\approx$ 8 light-minutes,
$$3,000\text{ AU}\times\frac{8\text{ light-minutes}}{\text{AU}}=24,000\text{ light-minutes}\gg1\text{ light-day}$$
Therefore, any signals - even from the *inner* edge of the Cloud - will not reach Earth for far more than one day, at which point the ship will be long gone.
Furthermore, any signals - even gamma-rays - should be reduced in strength, compared to signals from areas near any of the planets, the Sun, or the asteroid belt.
[Answer]
Believe it or not, the best place is just anywhere there isn't anything to point telescopes at. Most telescopes looking for or at things within the solar system are pointed in the plane of the ecliptic. Something above or below the plane of the ecliptic is quite likely to go unnoticed.
If they want further security, they could try placing themselves between Earth and a "hole" in space, an angle where there is nothing much interesting to look at within the visible universe.
They should probably take care to not thrust directly *at* Earth, that would be stupid, it might get picked up by a gamma ray burst detector or something, but as long as they don't aim their engine at Earth, they should be fine.
[Answer]
**Behind Jupiter**
Jupiter's big (well, unless compared to the sun). It has a lot of magnetics and radiation going on that will help mask the ship, especially if you get very close.
More importantly, because it's so far out we don't really have a lot of eyes that can see behind it compared to going behind the sun.
It's possible that one of the gas giants further out would be superior, but in general they're less active (so less masking radiation). And I would definitely avoid Saturn, if the mass of your ship or your engine perturbs the rings that would make you easily detectable.
[Answer]
Just put them selves in a sun centric orbit and pretend to be an asteroid for the day.
Even if they are spotted in the 24 hours it takes them to repair the ship, humans would not have much time for follow up observations to find out what the heck that faintly warm thing floating through the solar system is. Most of the sky survey telescopes operate in visible and high IR frequencies, it would take some time before one of the x-ray telescopes got pointed at the object, if ever, why point an x-ray scope at some thing unlikely to be emitting that wave length.
To add some thing to the human list of known asteroids requires multiple observations. If the object vanishes before more observations can be made people would write it off a fluke.
Of course this all assumes that the ship is not parked in earth orbit when the cloak fails.
[Answer]
1. No. We even have probles on the far side of the sun.
2. Maybe they won't be noticed. Are any all-sky surveys with high cadence operating on those frequencies, and do the aliens *know the schedule*?
3. So what? The craft is where it is when the cloaking device fails. Moving *now* will not get very far in 24hrs and will be conspicuous by moving and increases the probability of being in the view of some instrument.
[Answer]
The flaw with virtually all of the schemes is that the ship is emitting gamma radiation. Unless the poster wants to indulge in some handwavium, the most common source of energetic gamma radiation for a ship sized object would be the use of antimatter. Positrons and electrons are handy antiparticles for generating energy since they mutually annihilate by releasing gamma radiation at 512 KeV. This is a pretty distinct peak, and would stand out on any instrument designed to observe gamma radiation from space.
It would be so distinct, in fact, that it would almost instantly be seen as a confirmation that some artificial source of gamma radiation was emitting the energy. Antimatter reactions using anti atoms like anti hydrogen reacting with hydrogen would make an even more interesting visible source of gamma radiation, mixed with the multitude of particles caused by the annihilation of the nucleons. So the ship would have to be somewhere that presents a pretty solid mass between the ship's reactor and the Earth (we are assuming they know about us, hence the need for secrecy), and taking care that any orbital period won't bring the ship into view of the Earth.
Given all these conditions, I would suggest the captain lands the ship on one of the ice moons of Uranus or Neptune and is physically shielded from observation, for example landing in a deep canyon or crater, or even using the ship's drive to melt into the crust if needed. After repairs are done, then wait until the Ice Giant planet is between you and the Earth before activating the drive and taking off again.
[Answer]
The fact that you have not seen us, is enough to claim: nobody is attempting to detect us and others are not looking at all - we can stay at plain sight (claim with standard 99.999999% certainty). This is due to human [selective attention](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo), it is easy to give them something else to observe. If you want to know what that something should be in any given time, just ask this from **Swarm intelligence**.
# Off earth
Spaceships engine room and outer shell is covered with several insulating layers of über[vantablack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack), each absorbing standard 99.999999% electromagnetic radiation. Spaceship lacks the need for power cables, as übervantablack is superconductor and lacks standard resistance. This also acts as electromagnetic panel that is immensely more efficient then solar panels.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1yUkI.jpg)
# On earth
Humans think they mainly detect air vibration whose frequency between 20 to 20,000 Hz and visible light spectrum within:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HuP8w.png)
but they can not differentiate subtle differences.
However other primitive creatures on the planet have superior scenes, but as they can not communicate telepathically and share similar selective attention, they can be ignored.
# Additionally
Humans are so ignorant that even if I tell you this, you doubt it. We actually keep several spaceship in most crowded of spaces where and they would still not notice it - even if they see it on a recorded medium like picture or video.
We can communicate telepathically and so can our computers - we can monitor what you think and change it at will, even if you detect us. For us it is as easy as saying : "you do not see me" to your subconscious and humans are too primitive to overwrite it and take it as their belief. Note however we do not do this manually, it is done by computers. It is sub system of **Swarm intelligence** and fully automatic in nature, but can be overridden by guardians.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GIMoK.gif)
They do not look nothing like **silence** (from Dr Who), but for some reason it is easiest reference humans usually understand.
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[Question]
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During a battle between two extremely powerful space wizards, a beam of magical lightning has blasted a perfectly circular hole around 10 feet in diameter directly through an Earth-sized planet. In and out like a gunshot through paper. How would this impact life on the planet after this event, if at all?
NOTE: The incident occured about 150 miles south of the planet's north pole.
[Answer]
Depends on the side effects of the weapon.
* If a 3 m wide, 12,750 km long plug through the center of the Earth simply **disappears**, at worst there will be two smallish volcanoes and a couple of earthquakes. The total material is roughly a cube 450 m to a side.
* If sufficient force is applied to **punch** such a plug out of the Earth by conventional means like a bullet, the amount of energy that is imparted will cause major destruction.
[Answer]
The first thing that occurs to me is that 10 feet in diameter is very, very, very etc. insignificant compared to the total surface area of the Earth (196,900,000 square miles).
The second thing that occurs to me is the location of the event -- 150 miles south of the north pole, or latitude 87.5 degrees north. It's very likely that's in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
So even though this magical lightning bolt has the power to go "straight" through the Earth and out the other side (somewhere in Antarctica?), I can't see it as having much actual effect, or leaving any lasting sign.
First, water would rush into the hole, rapidly cooling it.
Deeper down, pressure would cause the tube to collapse in on itself, probably almost instantly, especially since I believe you wrote that there's no debris left behind.
The lack of debris makes me think this beam is more like a disintegrator rather than a projectile -- so it's not really like a bullet at all. It's magically removing the matter from existence.
So on the way out... perhaps a highly localized atmospheric disturbance, like a thunderclap, as air rushes to replace the missing matter... but that would be that.
The hole might last a bit longer down in arid Antarctica than up in the Arctic Circle, but it would be a curiosity, little more.
[Answer]
Other answers have addressed the qualitative details of what happens, I want to try and put some numbers to it.
If the hole is filled by material flowing in from the sides, then the amount of energy released by the expanding material is roughly equal to its pressure times the volume of expansion. Looking at the plot from [this answer on Physics SE](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/184039), the average pressure in the hole is, let's say, 200 GPa. Then the energy release is:
>
> (π/4 × (10 feet)2 × 12 000 km) × 200 GPa = 1.7 × 1019 J
>
>
>
We can convert this energy to a value on the [moment magnitude scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale) of about 7. Now since most of the energy release will happen deep in the core and mantle of the Earth, people on the surface nearby will experience less than the equivalent of a magnitude 7 earthquake.
I guess that only the energy release within the first few hundred kilometers of the surface significantly affects the perceived earthquake magnitude. Looking back at the same plot, the slope near the surface looks like around 30 GPa per 1000 km. Taking a wild guess and setting the cutoff of 500 km, the amount of energy released "near" the surface is roughly:
>
> (π/4 × (10 feet)2 × 500 km) × (1/2 × 30 MPa/km × 500 km) = 2.7 × 1016 J
>
>
>
(The 1/2 accounts for the fact that the average pressure is equal to half the maximum pressure for a linearly increasing pressure.) This is an amount of energy equal to roughly 5 on the moment magnitude scale, which is not that big; globally, more than a thousand of magnitude 5 earthquakes happen every year.
[Answer]
In the dept of the Earth the hole would be filled in moments. In the surface two things may happen, depending on the state of the dynamic system that is going on beneath the crust:
* some minor seismic activity happens because of a sudden (and quite little) lack of pressure, deep landslides block lava from coming out of the hole, but still a lot of heat would keep coming out of it (geothermal spot).
* lava smashes out in a huge jet. I think it's unlikely that a volcano would set there permanently anyway.
If you want to know precisely (well, not 100% precisely) you have to tell the exact spot to a geologist. There are models of the activity of Earth's mantle that can predict what would happen more precisely.
[Answer]
I would assume this depends on how the Beam did its work. If it just "deleted" the matter in its way, just about nothing would happen excpet that some random Animal will have a pretty bad day.
If the Beam melts its way across you may see a pretty big explosion on both sides of the Planet. The first when the Beam enters and the 2nd when it goes out. So overall, a bunch of Animals would have a bad day. But not much more.
If it pushes everything to the side, like a Force Field. Well then still not a lot would happen. Except someone in the distant future will see a strange long diamond bolt going from one side of the Planet to the other.
This is because at some point, or depth, the Beam pushes dense stuff into very dense stuff. Thus creating bling blings.
At the end of the day, 3 Meters just isnt that wide and the total amount of Energie blasted into the plant could be scrapt of as a Rounding Error.
For anything drastic to happen, you gonna need a wider beam. Making it more powerfull but keeping the diameter the same wouldnt do anything. Sure at some point the Impact spots would look like several nukes went down, but at some point it makes no difference anymore. You need to affect a bigger area at once.
Example, a Photon at Lightspeed dosnt hurt you. Even although it carries momentum. But let's say the Photon is 1 Meter across. Well then you are going to have a bad day.
The wider the beam is, the more stuff gets turned into dust and the bigger the Impact Explosion is.
Sorry for Misspellings , I am German.
[Answer]
## Immediate Effect
You're going to get a pair of volcanoes. They might turn out fairly small, but I think there is a good possibility of super-volcanic eruptions. Consider this: the pressure around the surface of the solid inner core[1] is estimated to be around 330GPa (3.3 million atmospheres).
A supervolcano[2] erupts when the gasses dissolved in the magma come out of solution and I think this is exactly what would happen when a 3m diameter cylinder of earth, going right through the core, simply ceases to exist. Maybe the magma will quickly plug such an "insignificant" hole but I wouldn't bet on it; I suspect it would be more like a water-main break, where the jet of magma would continue to erode the hole for a long time.
## Long-term Effects
A typical supervolcano erupts with such force that large amounts of material (thousands of cubic km!) are launched into the atmosphere and disperse, to some extent, across the majority of the planet. The widespread particulate clouds can lead to a decrease in global average temperature. However, in this case such effects are likely to be more limited due to the type of eruption. I think of it inflating a balloon and then releasing the air from it rather than popping it... only the release of magma could continue for a rather long time. Instead of fizzling out with the hole plugging up, we might instead see the hole widen with magma flowing out for a Very Long Time (see Siberian Traps[3]). In this case, it could be nearly life-ending!
## Summary
* Probably (super?)volcanoes!
* Effects could range from "ooh, another volcano" to "where have all the plants/animals/people gone?"
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_inner_core>
[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano>
[3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps>
[Answer]
Soil doesn't behave like that when hit. We have craters, not cylindrical cavities all the way through when a meteor falls for example. In order to displace so much matter neatly, the amount of energy involved would probably be enough to turn the planet into plasma.
[XKCD What If no. 20](https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/) is about how deep a 100-feet wide diamond meteor would penetrate the Earth. It has this quote:
>
> Oddly, the speed that something is going doesn’t really affect how deeply it digs into the ground. Isaac Newton came up with a very clever idea for estimating how deeply projectiles will go in their targets before stopping. It turns out that no matter how fast a projectile is going, if it hits something that’s about the same density, it will only go about one body-length in.
>
>
>
So for an object to go through the Earth, it would need to be either as dense as a stellar core, or it would need to have a mass comparable to the Earth's. Even [Mars-sized Theia, upon hitting Earth ~4 billion years ago didn't go all the way to the core of the Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis). An energy weapon (either using lasers, or electricity as in the question) would have to provide a similar amount of energy to obtain the same effect.
Let's assume that instead of smashing through the planet like that, the magic beam teleports away all matter in its path. [This paragraph from L. Dutch's answer summarizes the result:](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/185677/21222)
>
> An end to end hole on Earth would not be stable, and would collapse under the gravitational force exerted by the planet. That would alone would release a large amount of energy which would surely evaporate the oceans if not even melt the crust.
>
>
>
The hole would not be stable exactly because of what gave the Earth its round shape. [A prerequisite for a body to be a planet is for it to have enough self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_planet#IAU_definition). In laysman terms, the magma/core material forming the walls of the hole won't be strong enough to keep the planet around it from collapsing into the hole. This collapse will dissipate vast amounts of energy.
I don't know how to calculate that energy, but I have an idea to approximate it. While the hole doesn't close, every point in the remaining Earth would have ~1.5m below it to fall onto. Of course they can't all fall 1.5m as they will crunch upon each other along the way, but the potential energy being turned into kinectic will be mostly the same.
That would be the equivalent to the mass of the Earth falling from a 3m height. So...
$$ mgh = (5.972 \times 10^{24}kg) \times (9.8m/s^2) \times (q.5m) = 8.8 \times 10^{25} j$$
Looking at [this handy table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)) tells us it's like the total energy output of the sun in half a second, or 50 times all the solar energy that Earth gets in one full year. It is also like being hit by the dinosaur killing asteroid five hundred times. You'll have that energy dissipated on the planet within a moment. That does not bode well to life.
[Answer]
>
> How would this impact life on the planet after this event, if at all?
>
>
>
Say good bye to life.
An end to end hole on Earth would not be stable, and would collapse under the gravitational force exerted by the planet. That would alone would release a large amount of energy which would surely evaporate the oceans if not even melt the crust.
Add to that also the kinetic energy dissipated by the projectile when crossing through the entire planet, and the picture gets only worst.
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[Question]
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I want to center a fantasy-ish novel on a desolate world. I want barren land, rocks, and dust. No trees, grass, bushes, any vegetation of any kind. Heat would be good. I would like for there to be no water, but I know that without water you can't have life (at least as we know it), so I'm willing to allow sparse watering holes or perhaps underground springs. Basically I want death valley on a world-sized scale. Minus any cacti or bushes. And more rocks than sand.
So here's my question: How far can I go? How much vegetation and water can I remove before my world can't be lived on by humans?
[Answer]
You can't even go as far as to remove vegetation.
You said fantasy-ish, so I assume you mean that human life on the planet is not supported from space. If it is, we can allow some more "barren-ness", but without space support your humans need:
* Oxygen
* Food
* Water
* Shelter
Oxygen is produced by plants or algae. Since you don't want big bodies of water on your planet, you will need plants. Also, your humans will need water to drink, so there need to be fresh water sources. And they will need food. On a barren, desolate, desert world, you can't grow crops. So they need to hunt. So there need to be animals. Animals need to eat something. Animals can't all eat other animals, so there need to be plants.
And finally you need shelter. Shelter can be constructed out of many things, but without wood and in a barren world, if you don't want to live in caves, you are going to have a very bad time finding any shelter. No plants and no water means nothing to hold the ground together, so the whole freaking planet would be covered by dust and sand. It would be super hard to find clay or a cave entrance that is not buried under sand in the first place.
So I guess you need to tone it down a bit. Give your planet a sizable ocean - made out of salty, toxic, algae-ridden dirty water that kills you quicker than not drinking at all. That produces oxygen. Make some animals live at the shores, and some nasty creatures in the depths. Make all of them poisonous.
Then give your planet some plants. At least SOME. Some kind of grass, maybe even a few bushes and a few small trees. It will contrast the barrenness of your world better, and make a more believable environment. Give your planet some animals. Make most of them dangerous, poisonous or just super unfriendly, but make it in a way a lone traveller in the desert might just find those 3 scorpions that you can eat (if you know how to prepare them), make him find a few little trees to find a poor shelter for the day.
If your world is just a giant brick of rock and sand with an atmosphere that is for some strange reason breathable, it is not habitable by any standards. Mars sure isn't, and what you seem to want reminds me a lot of it.
[Answer]
You should check out the dune books
On the planet dune there is no rain. The only water comes from the polar ice caps or from under ground. Only a few desert plants grow on the planet and only in small numbers.
The giant sand worms produce oxygen so humans can live on dune.
Replace sand worms with something else. (Perhaps some kind of oxygen producing spell or maybe some spell that allows one plant to produce a large amount of oxygen.)
And you have a system that fits your world perfectly.
[Answer]
**Oxygen**
You need some source of oxygen. On a grand scale if you want humans to be able to breath. Practically that means photosynthesis has to be taking place somewhere in a significant scale. That means green and water.
You can still however have you desolate wasteland, it just can't cover the whole world. Photosynthesis doesn't have to mean nice. You could have dank salt marshes.
Practically speaking you probably also need some oceans somewhere. You can even use them as a significant photosynthesis location with algae so you can avoid most trees.
You could have some gigantic continent with a huge central desert.
**Poison the ocean**
You can make the ocean hostile, poisonous to humans and storm-wracked.
Just have the local algae producing some chemicals like botulinum on a grand scale while producing their oxygen.
**Put something useful deep in the desert**
Put all the useful resources like metals in the middle of the desert continent and you can have a situation where people have reason to live deep into the giant desert and less reason to stay near the poison coasts.
[Answer]
What about making it inhabitable with few spots that can support human population. Spots can be explained by some underground spring that is seeping into the above ground, making it fertile enough.
Oxygen could be handwaved by some kind of inorganic process.
Then, it becomes question of how big those spots need to be. This can be estimated by taking amount of humans you want at each spot and multiplying it by area person needs to survive.
Then, there is question how far away each of those spots can be so trade is complicated, but possible. Not such how to calculate this. Maybe take Sahara desert as an example.
[Answer]
So long as you are going on appearances I think you can make an extremely "desolate" world.
1) Water. Do we actually need standing water? No. The world is littered with volcanoes but they're pretty benign. At any one time the vast majority of them are doing nothing but powering geysers. There's a decent amount of water but it's buried deep where the volcanoes bring it up.
The result of this is you have humidity in the air but no bodies of water. The temperature is uniform enough that you do not get any appreciable rainfall.
2) Plants. Do we need them? No. We need things that photosynthesize but they need not be something we would remotely recognize as a plant. Look at Earth's oceans--there's an awful lot of phytoplankton. Technically plants but they're too small to be seen by the unaided eye. Lets make a land analogue--a "plant" that forms a very thin coating around grains of sand and grows as a patch on larger bits of rock. It's surface layer is airtight, O2, CO2 and H2O are transported by carrier molecules rather than directly. In the absence of sun they are very good at going dormant rather than dying--the wind blowing the sand doesn't kill them off. This "plant" forms the basis of our food chain. Note that we want a land that is mostly sand and rock, this will also make it seem more desolate.
3) Animals. We have a variety of small herbivores that "eat" the sand, digest the plant and excrete the now barren sand. (Think of the parrot fish that eats coral.) These creatures spend most of their life burrowed into the sand where they usually go unnoticed.
Next up we have small carnivores that hunt the plant-eaters. While these don't spend their life burrowed into the sand they hide out in the presence of larger creatures. Unless you disturb their hide they are very rarely seen. Think shy mice.
Above that we have larger carnivores that prey on the small carnivores. Again, they hide if they can. Think wild (not merely feral) cats.
Finally we have the apex natural predator. These are large enough to not be able to hide effectively. These, and the cat-analogues are the primary diet of humans although the sand-plants can also be processed into edible material.
To casual inspection you have a world containing nothing but predators.
Note that nothing beyond small bands of nomadic hunters can live in this world as no place supports enough life to sustain a population of humans.
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**tl;dr**
If the vital resource can be replaced by synthetic one, you can spoil that resource.
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**Long version:**
Only thing you need is energy source. Anything else can be recycled.
Our Earth can be considered as closed system. No matter (significant) leaves the earth and no (significant) matter is gathered there. There is no source of water, no source of carbon, no source of any chemical (except ro radionuclides and izotopes in the decay, but they are not vital).
* By nuclear war you can vanish all animals. Their meat can be sythesized from carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and essential elements mined on the surface.
* You can vanish all plants. The photosyntesis can be replaced by electrolysis of water. You can oxidize oxygen from any chemical, if you have enough energy.
* You can poison all the water on the surface. If your station is realy closed, filtering the dump water and the air moisture you have enough water to live.
100 % recyclation is vital. Garbage disposing, even burials are waste of resources.
If you want your community to grow and/or the system is not totaly closed, you have to replace the leaking material or the material needed for new citizen, you have to mine it on the surface.
Then you are limitted to technology:
* You can sythesize chemicals only.
In that case you need planet that provides the resources of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.
* You can fuse lighter elements into heavier ones (2H->He,2Li->C,...) and break heavier elements to lighter ones (Fe->Cr+He). In that case you need only the source of matter. Nothing else.
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Yes, easily. After all we are talking about a "fantasy-ish" world.
Simply include large ocean (as has been suggested) that is self sufficient in terms of photosynthesis, food chains, blah blah... With nothing on the land. Plonk your humans on the land, with the only available food source being the ocean then the land can be as barren as you like.
(Some of) the humans can then be the equivalent of fishermen, whale hunters, seaweed harvesters, etc. Anything else can be invented... Sea-wood from sea-trees, sea-bread made from sea-wheat in floating sea-farms havested by sea-farmers.
Put all that in the background of your story and that leaves plenty of room on land for the barren setting.
Why not have an ocean at each pole, containing different stuff where fortunes can be made by trading across ten thousand miles of barren desert to get from one to the other, provided you don't die or get killed first or someone else captures or poisons the rare and hidden vital watering holes in between and the cities that surround them.
(Ooh! I feel a book coming on...)
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If it'll fit within your needs, have the planet be slowly dying. It was once lush with plenty of oxygen and at least adequate vegetation and water, until a catastrophe (gamma ray burst, near-miss from a rogue planet that threw off the orbit, etc.) cooked half of the life. Tidal stresses on the planet caused sulfur geysers that poisoned what was left.
Now things have settled, the planet is covered with ash, the "water" is mostly sludge and acid, but with a filter mask you can go topside. But the planet is eventually doomed. There's still plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere, but only because almost everything that breathes is dead. Almost no new oxygen is being produced, so the "lucky" visitors who arrived afterward represent the majority of the planet's oxygen demand.
Depending on how many people there are, it could take centuries before the rising CO2 and decreasing O2 levels make the planet uninhabitable once and for all.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I think it bears repeating often: having an entire planet be a single biome breaks believability. This happens all too often in sci-fi. This planet is all desert, that one is all snow, this entire moon is forest (I'm looking at you, Endor!). You can have a dead world be a single "ecosystem" (cold & dry, hot and acidic), but if it's going to have at least a region that's inhabitable then there's going to have to be some diversity. Different latitudes get different amounts of sunlight, which will greatly affect the climate even if the planet is otherwise uniform.
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(can't make comments yet)
Some environments humans can adapt, faster or slower, but at some point it is not fitting for reproduction, or the environment causes severe body problems. Having minimal vegetation, animals and water will cause malnutrition in current surface-inhabiting population. They might adapt underground life, and that will transform their way of life, but still need to think it through, what their life would be (fitting your novel's goal)? Are they yet adapting to underground, or already adapted as much as possible, and is the existing sources support this staged human life or not.
If you are familiar with MadMax movies, maybe those are closest to your scenario.
Still it is possible to come up with a completely new life form, not based on water, but essentially it is not human
Answering in short your question "How much vegetation and water can I remove before my world can't be lived on by humans?": Depends on population count (as Euphoric pointed). If you can get information on astronaut supplies, it might help you more.
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If there is no surface water on your world, then life could be heavily concentrated at oases. A great open landscape of blazing sun, scorching rock, burning sands, punctuated every few travel days by [this](http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/111219_r21628_g2048-1200.jpg).
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[
A civilization uses the sci-fi staple of space gates to get around between systems. These gates, for our purposes, are big, round and very much not transparent; think the star gates but huge or the gates in the X universe of games. You can't see though them, we will assume they have a frequency shadow some what like deep water.
The civilization has a huge range of ships, some tiny like cars and some colossal ships that only just fit through the gates. A system is doing really well, traffic is up a huge amount on last year, but there is a problem. The accident rate is also up.
How do you stop ships popping out of the gate directly in front of another ship, causing an accident? However, efficiency is very important. We don't want to limit the gates to one ship at a time in each direction. However, if one of the really big ships is coming through it is necessary to stop all craft from the other side. It is also important that ships keep a minimum safe distance between each other. When a ship enters it leaves in the same place on the other side. The ship has to be entirely inside the portal before it starts coming out the other side. Travel time is near instant once inside the portal. Ships enter and exit at the same speed.
Bear in mind that it is hard for the two halves of the gate to talk to each other, deep water is hard to transmit though (though not impossible). I would like to not break the Nyquist rate limit here. Some other method of communication between the sides is possible. I had a slightly crazy idea of using ping pong balls to signal a ships impending arrival while thinking about this.
Ships not following the proper protocol will be dealt with by law enforcement, for "Reckless endangerment of life in control of a ship" or some such law.
I'm looking for a system that provides the best bi-directional through put of ships and doesn't cause any one to sit in a queue for hours on either side of the gate.
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Break the gate into sections. For example, with equal traffic you might have everyone going one way take the left half, everyone going the other way take the right half. If traffic is less equal, you could break this out unevenly - 75/25 or so on. Presumably this could be changed dynamically if there are traffic patterns. Note that "left" and "right" in this case would be arbitrarily defined by the traffic control system.
If traffic is heavy enough that it saturates gate traffic, a queue is unavoidable - you need some way to line people up and limit them from cutting in line.
Ships that are too big to fit through their directional section would need to temporarily stop traffic the other way. This should be accomplished through unmanned drones that pass back and forth through the gate to allow for communication, you could dedicate say, 1% of the gate area for this.
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**Use pilot ships.**
Splitting the gate for bidirectional traffic is the trivial answer which should be done anyway. The problem comes from large ships which would take more than their lane.
Similar to large loads on our current highway systems, the large ships could use pilot ships, or escort ships to fly through the gate ahead of them and warn opposing traffic that a large ship is coming through the gate.
Pilot ships could be manned or unmanned drones launched from the larger ship. A large ship traveling in space will probably want a complement of smaller ships for many other such tasks in any case, such as crew transfer to station or planet and as a protection from attack.
How cool would it be if Earth semi-trucks launched little autonomous vehicles/drones to act as their escorts? Very. It follows that this applies to space ships as well.
Some scheduling wouldn't hurt either. Again pointing to Earth systems, the [Panama Canal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal), which is arguably more difficult to manage the traffic on, has more traffic on it that ever imagined by its builders. This is, in part, thanks to the marine traffic control implemented there.
If the large ship traffic becomes too great so that people are waiting a long time to pass through. Well, either increase the gate size or set up retail and entertainment for people to enjoy while they wait and their ships autopilot through the queue. It takes 20-30 hours to get through the Panama Canal but it saves travellers a 7,000 mile journey around the horn.
**Even waiting 20 *days* to get through a space gate which shaves 40 years off of the trip seems like an awesome deal.**
The basic idea is that these are fairly general problems which we have, for the most part, solved on Earth. The solutions should generally apply to space based systems.
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You are bending space, why is the 'in' and 'out' on the same side of the gate? Ships go in one side to the other gate and come out the other side from the other gate. Maximizes throughput.
So you can have an OUTGOIONG side and an INCOMING side. Makes dealing with traffic much simpler.
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Messages may not travel well through the gates, but ships do, so **use the ships to transmit the messages**:
* a space station / satellite or something similar is placed on each side near the gate (or integrated in the gate, if possible). Those satellites contain computer systems for handling the traffic and communication systems to communicate with ships
* Every ship that crosses the gate is also required to communicate with the satellite to receive the coordinates and time of it's crossover. Ships also receive data they have to transmit to the satellite on the other side of the gate.
* The gate is devided into sections where small ships can travel through. On every section the ships are only allowed to travel through the gate in one direction. The satellites can reserve more sections, if they send appropriate messages through the gate. (depending on the content of the message the other satellite may need to send a acknowlegement)
* There are time intervals where only large ships are allowed to travel through and only in one direction. (But by sending messages other intervals can be requested and acknowleged)
This strategy has the following benefits:
* You do not need probes / messenger ships going through the gate
* Even large ships can travel through without requiring messages to be transmitted
* Traffic handling happens dynamically based on the current amount of traffic
* the more ships travel through the gate, the faster the communication between both sides becomes
If the satellites have a large enough communication range and communication is sufficitently faster than space travel (except for gates) the satellites should have enough time to take care for large traffic throughput.
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The gate could use "token-ships", similar to [token-ring networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_ring).
* The system where the token-ship currently is, is allowed to send ships through the gateway.
*(Close to a single endpoint of the gateway, interstellar traffic can be managed via regular radio communications; e.g. a trafic control "tower")*
* When all ships from the system have departed through the gateway, the token-ship leaves to te next system.
This allows for gateway systems that connect more than two systems, but allow only one (or a few) ships to travel through them simulataneously.
This method works best when the travelling of the token-ship does not take too much time compared to the regular trafic.
This method of sharing a gateway system is preferrable to [CSMA/CD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_sense_multiple_access_with_collision_detection) given that ship crews do not prefer to die while "detecting a collision".
It can be combined with the other solutions:
* different parts of gateway for different directions; that would convert to multiple token-ships
* pilot ships: the pilot ship aproach uses one pilot-ship for every large ship and none for small ships, wheras the token ship method uses one token-ship for every group/time slot of ships both large and small.
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How about a couple of these at either end:
This sounds no different than what happens if there's construction work going on one lane of a usually two-lane road. Since drivers in both directions now need to share the same lane, and the road is long or curved so they can't just look and wave at each other, they simply queue up and wait for a light to change.
In this case, ships are free to enter while the light's green, knowing that it's red to those waiting on the other side. Since travel time is almost nil, it's should easy set up such a system with synchronized - but independent - lights. The end result will be like waiting for a ferry that goes back and forth between two ports, unloading and loading.
If the lights' intervals need tweaking (due to heavier traffic in one direction), send a technician through the gate in a ship (the technician can skip to the front of the queue, but will have to wait for a green light), with instructions for how and when to configure the lights. Or simply put him/her on the next ship going through, if that's possible ("Sorry, cap'n, official business!").
Is there a risk that the lights will go out of sync or just fail? Yes. Same goes for road construction in the real world, and that hasn't kept people from driving (well, that's kinda the problem, I suppose).
Of course, you can have ping-pong balls as a backup semaphore system. You could even send them as good old morse code :)
Still, that presumes three things:
1. You can send them somewhere near the edge of the gate, so ships can still go through unimpeded.
2. That collisions inside the "tunnel" don't occur, for whatever reason. I'm certainly not a physicist, but if two objects are travelling toward each other at (in effect) super-luminal speeds, I'd assume *something's* going to happen if they collide. A ping-pong ball at sufficient speed will wreck anything.
3. The ping-pong balls aren't full of air. Vaccuum of space and all that.
>
> I'm looking for a system that provides the best bi-directional through put of ships and doesn't cause any one to sit in a queue for hours on either side of the gate.
>
>
>
Yes, well, you and real-world traffic engineers. Unless you have simultaneous bidirectional travel, you will have some queuing, somewhere.
Image by KRoock74 from [WikiMedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Temporary_traffic_light.JPG), CC share-alike
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Use the *Agora* system where the position in the traffic flow is something you have to bid on. Since this is a very limited resource, the amount being bid will be fairly significant, paying for upkeep, salaries and so on, but the key is there will be a "market" for the service, and the bidding will allow for the most efficient use of the resource.
Essentially the traffic control centre will announce "slots" up for auction and ships will bid for their slots. Traffic control maintains order by timing the slots and auctions for alternating times, so for a very slow gate the slots at the "top" and "bottom" of the hour go "East-West", while the slots at "quarter to" and "quarter past" go "West-East". We can compress this to whatever figure works with the speed of the ships and the ability of the Gate to clear traffic (you say the transit is instantaneous for the ship, but does the Gate itself need to be charged up between transits? That might be a sticking point).
Bidding for the resource ensures the high priority/high cost traffic goes through the fastest and clears the line, while the alternating "East-West/West-East" timing of the traffic slots ensures the gate is only handling traffic in one direction at a time, minimizing the possibility of accidents.
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Expanding on your ping-pong idea, it might be possible to have a small observation shuttle on a magnetic rail attached to the gate structure. The shuttle would to back and forth from one side of the gate to the other, acting as a control tower for ships coming from either side. Using the rail, it could efficiently pass back and forth through the gate at a regular interval, fast enough to keep reasonable track of the approaching ships, and coordinate with their respective nav officers.
This traffic control pod could easily position the ships as they come, using the gate as a positional reference. One ship could be told that they're clear to approach in quadrant one of the gate's surface while a ship on the other end would be told to enter on quadrant four, giving the other ship plenty of clearance.
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Why don't you just have one way gates inside something that looks like a big gate? Even if you put two of them side by side, it might look something like this:
```
>v^> sector 1 | Sector 2 >v^>
v^ | v^
v^ | v^
[xY] gate to sector 2 | [yX]
```
Where x/y are gates, <>v^ represent ship movement direction. The [] represent the gate as a whole object, imagine a circle with 2 inner circles side by side.
Notice the x and y configurations: small x is the input gate, and big X is the output gate corresponding to small x. Same goes for the y gates.
In order to lower wait times and prevent crashing when coming out of the other end, the only requirement is that any ship approaching the gate be at a constant speed XYZ, until they reach a certain marker on the exit route, at which point they must speed away, peeling to the right.
Upsides to this system:
* The average efficiency of the gates will be higher since you always have at least 2 ships using it.
* No more accidents! Or at least a much lower rate.
Downside to this system:
* You have to make your gates about 2x larger overall in order for the inner gates to accommodate your largest ships. This shouldn't be a problem though, as gravity is negligible in space.
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Alternatively, if you're dead set on having exactly one gate, I would suggest putting in a "registration" system on the gate. You register at least 2 hours before going to the gate, and the system will give you a queue number. Numbers can be projected onto certain sections of the gate that correspond to which ships are allowed to use that section at that time. On top of just a number, perhaps add a circle-projection area around the number to designate exactly how much space he has to go through.
As soon as the ship goes through, his number is removed from the gate, and a new number is placed there. If the next ship is a large ship, numbers just don't get added to the gate until the big one comes through.
Next, have a bunch of drones flying around each gate that line themselves up to create "lanes" in space. Any ships exiting or entering must enter and exit through those lanes in order to prevent stupid piloting; eg: turning right right after you exit the gate and smashing into a battleship.
TL;DR? Let the computer system handle it. By having registration time, there will be enough time for the system to sync itself up across gates. Not only do you eliminate the risk of human error, you also allow the system to plan for maximum efficiency.
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Hmm, a series of tiny (think size of a deck of playing cards) "probe" transmitters equipped with each ship. They go in first, say at the very edges, and announce the arrival of the incoming ship. If another probe is already there transmitting an arrival, it returns and tries again in 15 seconds. It scans the area and if clear, returns and signals the ok to proceed. At the destination, ship has 15 seconds to clear the indicated area before the next ship arrives. Any accidents are because someone wasn't following the probe telemetry.
Probes can also announce the incoming of caravans, or some amount of time or number of ships to wait before others use the gate.
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A lot of good thinking is listed already for scheduling, layout and probes etc. Some thought on how to further improve:
1. Have a good and fail-safe emergency scheme. You **are** a target of pirates/terrorists/Murphy.
2. Make the busiest side of the gate the boss side, the other side facilitates. No mix-ups!
3. Use [Elephant lines](http://pixabay.com/en/airplanes-line-runway-military-713662/) to maximise efficiency.
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So you have a giant portal. If you can only enter one side of the portal, then split that portal up into two halves, one for outgoing and one for incoming ships. If a large vehicle has to go through, they should send 2 small probes through first. This probe stops traffic in the other direction and rotates the portal such that the exit is not about to crash into the traffic waiting in line. One of the probes goes back through, and reports to the large vehicle that it is safe to proceed. The large vehicle goes through and rotates the portal back to it's designated orientation. Traffic following the large vehicle waits until a ship comes through from the other direction (if no ships the large vehicle sends a drone back through as an indicator)
If you can't rely on the large ships doing so, a small manned operation on either side can handle the rotation of the portal so that the large ships don't crash into the line of ships waiting to go through.
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Many people posted excellent answers on this already. However, I wanted to add a little story realism / flavor (amplifying the excellent answer provided by Samuel).
Let's assume the portal is giant and vessel sizes range from 1 manned flitters up to gargantuan colony ships which fill the entire portal face. To optimize use, you will want to set up unidirectional lanes (as Samuel and other's have said) but you also want "lanes" set up for the smallest common denominator (the small flitter). Split the portal into as many lanes as you can safely manage and allocate the unidirectional lanes according to the amount of traffic going in each direction.
Using a lane to transit represents 1 unit of charge (expense) for using the gate. A person flying a cruiser through the portal (which uses 4 lanes) will get charged 4x as much. A freighter that also uses 4 lanes but is slow so it takes twice the time, costs 8x as much as a small flitter lane.
How about gargantuan colony ships? They use all lanes and stop traffic going both ways for a considerable amount of time. This probably costs an arm and a leg to pay the transit costs.
Transit costs get paid to the transit authority that maintains all hardware, patrol ships, and pays the salary for the space traffic controllers on both sides of the gate.
Transit officers on each side send messages back and forth using radio drones informing the other side of impending changes in traffic pattern and the timing of those changes.
Wealthy travelers could pay a premium to get moved to the head of the queue to some extent. But if there's lots of traffic, the controllers would be unlikely to take increased toll payments for disrupting all the rest of the traffic.
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Require the ships to follow a pre-approved flight plan detailing approximately where a plane will travel, including data on altitude. Any sudden deviation will have to be approved by a local traffic controller. Also, establish a traffic control post where the controllers can monitor the movements of the ships and reroute them if necessary.
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In the Star Gate universe itself the answer is simplified by the fact that its Gates are unidirectional: if the Gate is already open and you didn't open it then it is most likely open in the wrong direction and you wait for it to close again (and stay out of the way of anything coming out). (Of course there are complications in the Star Gate universe, but that's the key gist of it.)
Certainly in any high-traffic section of gates the "easy" answer is that if you can get them/afford them you get two gates side by side each going the opposite direction, and focused on unidirectional travel. (Similar to how an interstate is effectively two unidirectional roads in parallel...)
Even if in your universe your gates are not unidirectional due to physical constraints as in Star Gate, you can simply color code and designate two side by side gates as "Out" and "In".
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In the PC Space simulator Freelancer, they also use waygates, as well as wormholes. most of these are bidirectional, and the way they solve the crashing issue is by essentially making 2 single direction gateways. For example: if you have a connection between the New York and the Texas system, you have a gate that goes from New York to Texas that stops in open space, and a short distance from where you exit in Texas, there's the gate from Texas to New York that also stops in open space. It's a similar system to how decent restaurants have 2 doors to the kitchen: one for entering the kitchen and one for leaving the kitchen.
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Looking for a way gasoline can last more than [3-6 months](https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-long-can-gas-sit-in-a-car-before-it-goes-bad)?
Going off the simple zombie apocalypse scenario, I want a way to find vehicles and drive them after they have sat for 2,3... x number of years? Another way might be to “preserve” gas if I was to collect it right after the “event”.
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The real-world answer is **[fuel stabilizers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_stabilizer#Fuel_stabilizers_(antioxidants_and_metal_deactivators))**.
The more entertaining answer is that your colony has enlisted a pyromaniac who is slowly building a gasoline *re*-refinery near the edge of town. He collects bad gas from anything with wheels, knows all sorts of chemistry, has several engines that very loudly test the octane rating of his fuel products and call in zombies from several miles away, and tries to ration himself to one explosion per week. Gas that doesn't make the cut gets reprocessed into napalm for ... stopping zombies. And *practicing* stopping zombies. His scars are helping the local nursing student develop experience in sterile dressings...
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Gasoline itself isn't the problem. Originally, gasoline was a naturally occurring or easily fractionated mixture of hexane, heptane, and a little octane (usually with trace impurities of pentane and nonane and various isomers). Gasoline engines made as late as the 1930s ran on this mix straight out of the oil well in some locations (Pennsylvania, for instance), or straight from the distillery with no additives needed.
Then came high compression, requiring higher levels of the heavier fractions -- "octane number", as much as 100% octane -- for resistance to preignition. And then even higher compression, and leaner mixtures, and more spark advance, all in pursuit of higher power and efficiency, requiring octane numbers, in some cases, well above 100 (one grade of aviation fuel is 115 octane).
Obviously, you can't make a fuel with more than 100% content of octane, but over the period from 1930 to 1960 other additives (tetraethyl lead being the most infamous) were discovered that increased the effective octane number -- now defined in terms of "knock resistance" without actually requiring the presence of octane. It's these additives that are mostly responsible for aging effects on stored gasoline -- some are more volatile than hexane and so preferentially evaporate off, some are more prone to low temperature oxidation, which leads to things like "varnish" formation. All of them make the fuel more prone to dissolve stuff from the tanks and fuel lines.
Bottom line is, gasoline will still burn no matter how long it's been stored (in underground tanks, for instance), it just won't work well in modern engines. Solution: don't use modern engines, find old technology to burn your old gasoline.
Any common car engine built before the Second World War, and most modern aircraft engines, will run fine on additive-free gasoline, including old gas that's been stored underground, potentially for years. Further, those older engines almost always have a carburetor, rather than fuel injection, so they can be fairly readily adjusted to change the fuel mixture to run on ethanol, which is by far the easiest engine fuel to produce new.
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Option 1. Use kerosene vehicles, it has the longest shelf life of petroleum fuels and like all fuels can be pushed further with stabilizers and sealed containers. But even better old diesel fuel and motor oil can be refined into kerosene.
Option 2. Use diesel, diesel lasts a lot longer than gasoline and is far more plentiful than kerosene (in the US at least), plus if you do find kerosene, you can cut it with diesel and the engine will burn the mix just fine.
Option 3. Use a variable fuel steam engine, bulkier than a normal engine but you can burn almost anything in it, from fuel oil to ethanol. Or choose a solid fuel steam engine and burn coal or wood chips. As a bonus, both can be used to make potable water; always a bonus for the survivor.
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### Most plausible future liquid fuels will keep long term in sealed containers.
If your zombie apocalypse hits today - fuel stabilizers / reprocessing as already answered, however if it arrives in the near future, and the country it arrives in is phasing out fossil fuels, you may not need to worry about this.
There are potentially net-zero-carbon fuels that many [latest gen petrol cars can already run on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible-fuel_vehicle) (or be modified easily to run on) including things like [methanol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy) and [ethanol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel). These can be generated renewably from as little as water, co2, and energy, and if that energy is renewable you have a green fuel that's backwards compatible with existing car fleets.
If this fuel is available like current gasoline it will last a very long time in sealed containers. A sealed underground tank full of ethanol at a petrol station should last until the tank fractures. The fuel will marginally decay when exposed to air (it will absorb water from 100% until 95% ethanol), but there should be no problem sucking underground fuel tanks dry for years if they're airtight.
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**CNG and propane**
There are vehicles that run on methane and propane and they are pretty common. I know the Schwans trucks run on propane, as do many city buses. It's pretty easy to find too in a apocalyptic world. You just head out into the country, almost everyone in rural areas has a tank up north where its usually cheaper to heat with than electricity.
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Ethanol is the main reason gas "goes bad". But the gas is not really bad. Ethanol gradually takes humidity from the air. In normal use, that's not a problem. But left over time, sufficient water is absorbed from the air to collect at the bottom of the gas tank. Gas and water don't mix, not for long.
So the solution I have seen used is to simply let them separate in a clear container (so water content can be seen), and then pour off the pure gasoline into another container. (BTW, the ethanol stays with the water).
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[
This is something I have been wondering: if an assassin wanted to kill their target with a bullet from a sniper rifle, can they dip it in liquid mercury so even if the bullet itself doesn't kill them, the mercury poisoning will? I am looking for scientific basis on how it could be feasible, if it is at all.
And in case you're wondering: No, I'm not planning to assassinate somebody.
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No.
If we just dip the bullet in mercury, only trace amounts of mercury will remain. That definitely won't be enough mercury for our purposes.
If we treat a lead (but not iron/steel) bullet for a long time in mercury it will form an [amalgam alloy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgam_(chemistry)). This can give us sufficient amount of mercury, but adversely affect bullet ballistics. Additionally, an amalgam alloy bullet will likely be removed by subsequent surgery, again, negating our efforts.
If we instead enclose mercury in a hollow bullet, that might work - but it would still be messy and much less effective than cyanide, for example.
[Answer]
Mercury has, in the real world, been used to increase the terminal effect of hollow point bullets (especially a the relatively low velocity of pistol bullets). In essence, a short time before firing (so as not to have all the mercury amalgamated with the lead, but some liquid still left at firing) a conventional hollow point is filled with mercury. It was common to press a small caliber gas check (a soft metal disk of precise diameter, with a raised edge) into the hollow point to keep the mercury in place.
On impact, the liquid in the hollow point magnified the hydraulic effect, leading to much stronger and faster expansion of the bullet. The mercury itself was chemically insignificant; it was the expansion effect that was sought. Worth noting here that my source (an article in a gun/reloading publication, but I don't recall which, much less what 1970s vintage issue) also found that the effect was essentially the same using water or oil; any difference between mercury and water being attributable to the greater increase in bullet weight.
Most who use guns for defense now consider penetration more important than expansion, so mercury tip bullets (which have long been legally prohibited as "toxic", however erroneously) are no longer widely considered an effective modification.
[Answer]
# No.
Not even in the form of [dimethylmercury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury).
This extremely nasty organic compound was being carefully used by professional toxic metal researcher [Karen Wetterhahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn) when a few small drops of it touched the *outside* of her latex gloves. At the time it was not known that this noxious substance could travel through latex. Nothing could be done, she died less than a year later.
To make enough stick to a (hot - >100 celsius) bullet in flight, because it would otherwise evaporate before reaching your target, dipping the bullet would not work, you'd need some water soluble delivery system which releases after impact which would not satisfy the requirements of the question - but careful how your protagonist uses it, lest they succumb the same way.
Edited due to being wrong all over.
[Answer]
While the answer to the question is not a hard no, there are way better options for the same effect.
If your goal is death by "heavy metal poisoning", then I'd suggest depleted uranium rounds instead. Uranium is far more toxic than mercury, plus comes with some impressive armor penetrating properties as an added bonus. DU rounds also have a tendency to liquify/vaporize on impact so even though it's solid at rest, it can still splatter on impact fatally infecting the wounded person's bloodstream, but as David pointed out, getting them to splatter against soft tissue is unlikely.
Either way, heavy metal poisoning is a slow death which is probably not what an assassin wants on a near miss. A better approach would probably be a low-caliber explosive round. While they violate all sorts of international laws and treaties, an explosive rifle round to the arm, leg, or gut would still cause enough mutilation that your target is likely to quickly bleed out and die.
If you really want to be inhuman, combine the ideas by making a sodium/potassium round with a DU jacket. If the blast does not kill you, the DU shrapnel will, and if that fails, the blast will still vaporize a lethal dose of uranium into your bloodstream overcoming the issue of getting it to vaporize when your target is not armored.
[Answer]
Mercury as a LD50 of between 1mg/kg to 100 mg/kg. depending on the chemical properties of the mercury you choose to use you may need up to 10g to make if potentially lethal. Assuming you use the most soluble form of mercury, you would still want to up the dose significantly to overcome elements such as splatter, bullet passing through entirely or just not absorbed by the body. This would add significantly to the weight of the bullet and may mess with its ballistics.
If you choose another element, such as polonium or plutonium, you may have better success. Both are highly toxic due to chemical toxicity and radiological toxicity. I'm not entirely sure of the chemical properties of polonium, but plutonium is a dense metal, similar to uranium. It can easily be made into a bullet that shoots properly, similar to depleted uranium. You would only need 5mg to be chemically toxic. If you have a 7.5g mixed metal plutonium round, it would ensure poisoning of the target. However, that death by heavy metal poisoning would take a long while to occur, depending on the amount of metal the body absorbed prior to the bullets removal.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6FPQc.png)
No, because you need more Mercury than the fatal dose that can be delivered in a bullet. Adding the Mercury sure will make your victim uncomfortable until the body sheds the excess amount down to acceptable levels.
Mercury when ingested targets blood, kidneys, central nervous system, liver and the brain. Large doses of Mercury will lead to easily identifiable health symptoms Administration of a chelating agent can help reduce the effects on the body.
Acute Mercury poisoning will lead to death, but generally that death will be due to an already existing kidney or liver damage. There is always the possibility that exposure will cause a failure of the central nervous system, which could lead to death.
In essence, that big new hole in the body from he gunshot wound will be far more fatal either from tissue damage or a secondary infection.
* <https://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/96252.htm>
[Answer]
Lead is already poisonous, the addition of mercury might be unnecessary if looking to increase the poisoning potential of a bullet. Instead, I would consider using [toxin from poison dart frogs](http://frogs.cc/the-blowguns-and-darts-that-use-frog-poison/) in the bullets.
This toxin is highly lethal to most creatures, including humans, and was used by aboriginal tribes in the rain forest. They coated darts with this poison (likely where the frogs got their name from) and used a blowgun to inject a person with it.
You could employ a similar mechanism with your bullets, either coating them in poison or putting the poison into a specialised bullet meant for storing the liquid and releasing it upon impact. If you really wanted to use mercury though, you could fill the bullet with that instead.
[Answer]
As others have said mercury as a poison is just not practical. What might be possible is to use mercury embrittlement to damage vehicles.
[video of embrittlement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Ilxsu-JlY)
Now I'm not sure how plausible it is to e.g. hit an aircraft with a mercury bullet, but if you can then mercury embrittlement process should allow the mercury to migrate through the aircraft aluminum structures and considerably weaken them. i.e. it might be able to make an otherwise nonlethal shot to an aircraft lethal
[Answer]
No.
If you dip you bullet in mercury, it will run off. Even if some adheres (and it doesn-t - have you *seen* mercury?) it will be lost in the high-temperatures following firing.
Even if some does miraculously make it into the victim's body, traces of metallic mercury are not going to cause a health issue.
Suggest you pick something genuinely dangerous, eg saxatoxin or one of the others used by the CIA etc
[Answer]
Yes, it is possible. It took a long time, but this officer died of mercury poisoning years after he was shot.
<https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/fallen-heroes/hero-down-bexar-deputy-leo-gomez-dies-from-mercury-in-bullets-he-was-shot-with-49c5KH8GVk-rpX4J64j0rA/>
] |
[Question]
[
There are many ways to conceive of a universe where physical constants are different to our own; however, what would the universe be like if mathematics itself were different?
For instance, what would a universe where every number was either a square or a prime look like?
[Answer]
You imply that mathematics is some fundamental root of the entire universe. While there are many who agree, this is not a fully agreed upon assumption. Many would say what you describe just any other world, only with different math, that looks feels and tastes just like this one, because mathematics is nothing more than a human construct. (as SJuan76 says in the comments)
For those who do believe the fundamental root of the universe is mathematics, this question would have more meaning.
First off, you can declare a mathematical system to do anything you want. It's not hard. However, most mathematicians value consistency, which is a precise term meaning that I can never prove something to be both true and false at the same time. For example, I can declare "6 is a prime number" and "6/2=3" and still call it math, but it's not consistent because the former proves that the latter should be false. It's a murky world if you ditch consistency, so let's presume we want to stay consistent.
What's really interesting about mathematics is that they keep digging deeper and deeper. Primality and squareness are built off of the laws of arithmetic, so you're suggesting that the laws of arithmetic change. However, the laws of arithmetic are, themselves, built on a deeper set of axioms called the Peano axioms. Have you ever joked about having to prove that "1+1=2?" If you have to prove it, the Peano axioms are the things you assume:
* 0 is a natural number (yes, you have to explicitly state this)
* For every natural number x, x=x (yes, you also have to state that something equals itself!)
* For every natural number x and y, if x=y then y=x (symmetric property)
* If x y and z are natural numbers, and x=y and y=z then x=z (transitive. All of algebra is utterly dependent on this one)
* For all a and b, if b is a natural number and a=b, then a is a natural number (closure, which prevents claims like 3=orange from being meaningful)
And then we define a function S(n), which is the "successor" function. This is basically adding one, but we can't use that terminology because addition isn't defined yet:
* If n is a natural number S(n) is a natural number
* If m and n are natural numbers, then m=n iff S(m)=S(n)
* For every natural number n, S(n) = 0 is a false statement (no natural number is less than 0)
And finally we add an inductive axiom, which is hard to write out in technically correct notation, but it's the basic mathematical induction we had in school: if you can prove f(0) is true, and prove f(n+1) is true given f(n), then f is true for all natural numbers.
That's at the *bottom* of the concepts of arithmetic. When you talk about changing things, it has to be done at a layer where we don't even know 1=1 until we prove it. We actually use these axioms to define addition in another layer:
>
> a + 0 = a
>
> a + S(b) = S(a + b)
>
>
>
It goes on and on, but this is a good example of how far down the rabbit hole you have to go before discussing the concept of changing mathematics even starts to be meaningful. Any change done at a higher layer will either be inconsistent, or simply defining a new concept meaninglessly.
There are mathematicians who have explored numeric systems that don't follow these axioms. Dan Willard is my favorite. Instead of building a world up using addition and subtraction, he starts with subtraction and division. This sounds like its a minor detail, but its actually enough to completely change the nature of his systems. For example, it is possible to construct a countable infinity in one of his systems, and the create a sub-system within it which can *prove* that countable infinity is actually uncountable (which would be paradoxical and inconsistent if it were not for the quirks that were set up by starting with subtraction and division).
So, in summary, go for it. Go make a world with different math. However, you'll find the rabbit hole for math goes quite deep. You will learn something along the way though. I know I have, and I continue to learn something new each time I travel down it.
[Answer]
In a way, mathematics is the science of turning [axioms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom) into [theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem) using logic (which it itself based on axioms).
A famous example is Euclidean Geometry. You start with four [axioms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry#Axioms) and add the [parallel axiom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate) as a fifth, and you get one kind of mathematics. Without the parallel axiom, you get a [non-Euclidean geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry).
The same could be done with the [Peano axioms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms) of arithmetic. You change something, you add something, and you get a different kind of mathematics.
Imagine an arithmetic that is much like ours except that 13 = 1. That means I'm adding numbers like the dial of a clock, after 12 o'clock comes 1 o'clock again. You can do plenty of useful theorems in that kind of arithmetic, but you can't balance your checkbook.
So I guess what you are really asking is something like this:
*Could there be an universe where other mathematical axioms are a better fit to reality?*
[Answer]
This is something I have pondered since I was very young (possibly 8 or so)... and my main conclusion is that it all depends on the number system(s) used and the level of intellectual evolution attained by the race(s) involved.
**As humans, we have 10 digits**...
or put in more correct terms our number system is decimal (base 10, having 10 distinct numeric value representations 0-9).
Why? Well, we have 10 fingers. it makes sense that all throughout our planet, every culture has some sort of base 10 number system because all(in general) humans by default have 10 fingers.
**Imagine a race with only say 2 fingers**...
well, they'd likely have a binary number system or some derivative thereof. Same as our computers and electronics. This also changes the way one might think about maths, the rules and mechanisms for performing operations differ. some things are much easier to do in binary than in decimal - like for instance multiplying by 2. to multiply by 2 in binary, you simply add a zero to the end of the line (effectively shifting all the numbers left by one digit). likewise to divide by two you simply shift the numbers to the right. ...and if you have any power n of 2 then we simply shift the digits n times. ie: to get the number multiplied by 8, simply shift the number left 3 times (2 ^ 3 = 8)
**in binary this looks as follows**:
each column represents a power of 2 with the lowest power (0) on the right
```
1: 00000001 (1 x 2^0)
2: 00000010 (1 x 2^1 + 0 x 2^0) drop the second term to simplify to (1x2^1)
3: 00000011 (1 x 2^1 + 1 x 2^0)
4: 00000100 (1 x 2^2)
5: 00000101 (1 x 2^2 + 1 x 2^0)
...
8: 00010000 (1 x 2^3)
```
**However, in a decimal system the same holds true for powers of 10**...
to multiply by 10^n, simply shift the numbers left by n digits and add n trailing 0's.
For example:
```
123 * 10^3 = 123 * 1000 = 123000
Where:
10^0 = 1
10^1 = 10
10^2 = 100
10^3 = 1000
...
```
**There are an infinite number of number systems**...
In computing we use: base 16 (Hexadecimal), base 8 (Octal), base 10 (decimal), base 2 (binary)...
**It could also be further complicated**
By including the number of appendages and the division of digits among those too. You could have numerical systems based on some odd, nonsensical (to us) sequence of values.
for instance, beings may have devised some number system that uses/combines properties from the octal, binary and hexadecimal number systems...
**Imagine an octopus with two "fingers" at the end of each tentacle**...
it could count in binary on each tentacle (base 2 - 2 fingers),
it could count in octal if counting each limb (base 8 - 8 tentacles)...
or if combining both tentacles and fingers, it could count in some hexadecimal fashion (base 16 - 8x2 digits = 16).
**Multiple, symbiotic, sentient species living together**...
well, it's likely that they will find a common number system with which to interact. for instance, beings with 8 digits interacting with beings having 4 digits will likely work in a number system somehow common to both (in this case, most likely base 8 - Octal).
**Prime-base number system intersections**...
what about beings with say 7 digits living with beings having 13 digits...
The first common number system that intersects across both is probably going to be base (7x13) = base 91. Unlikely, but who are we to say.
you will also see that in nature, there are many references to the fibonacci sequence (simply google "sequences in nature" to see what I mean). This may be true on earth, but may be completely different on some other planet.
We also have an abundance of plants and creatures that adhere to specific numbers and structures which are purely mathematical... this goes as far as crystalline structures of molecules and elements.
All these things play a role in what one might use to create a base number system.
for instance, if everything around us had six branches, or six sides or six leaves or six legs... then it's quite likely that a hex number system would evolve despite our having 10 digits. OR... rather there is a likely chance that the number 6 or the hex number system would play an important role despite our having a decimal number system.
Programmers and scientists work in different number systems.
Cryptographers and information specialists will think in other, higher base number systems - the reasons for which are because they are more condensed, so you can represent more data in a single digit than you can in a decimal or binary system.
**How to see densification of numeric representation**...
simply open a calculator app and put it into programmer mode, enter some number and switch between the different base representations. The lower the base, the longer the number representation has to be... the higher the base, the shorter the number representation (but the more complex the number system and number of symbols).
**Quantum computing**
This is another area where higher order number systems COULD used, but it gets far more complex because the cubits could in fact represent multiple values simultaneously.
There is no reason why a race couldn't have evolved to such a degree that their number system could be represented in a similar manner - We have. We might only be at the initial stage of such an evolution, but we are at the point where the number systems we use are no longer constrained by the prehistoric notions of counting in factors of 10.
**Advancements in math**
if you really want to see what we have evolved our math to... simply look at the the number (-1/12) ... it's derived from a mathematical summation of all the natural numbers [Sum of all natural numbers](https://www.google.co.za/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=%22-1%2F12%22)
```
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5... = -1/12 (negative one-twelfth)
```
What about imaginary numbers and other such formulated concepts which make impossible formulae very possible and elegant to solve.
**Using math to describe everything**
I believe that to some degree, we can. the limitations are in how much detail you want to portray and across how much variation and scope etc. DNA is essentially a really well constructed mathematical function that permeates through some pseudo-random modifications in each iteration (hence evolution)..
You could for instance use a mathematical formula to describe any set of data to some degree of accuracy - a fourier transform could be used to describe a drawing of homer simpson for instance [Homer Simpson described by Fourier Transform function](https://www.google.co.za/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjd-6H0kOXJAhXFWhoKHUBhB6oQyCkIHDAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQVuU2YCwHjw&usg=AFQjCNEwohUmA4sVC13cIxFOoPqeaqkLFA&sig2=mrNG5fu8fxMB2jW5uCfWNQ&bvm=bv.110151844,d.ZWU)
**Conclusion**
My advice is think about this from all angles... it might even be influenced by factors such as how many eyes does the creature have, how their brains work and think, sleep cycles, moons around the planet...
It's simply a question of how the perceive the world they live in (or LIVED in) and how they represent that and everything else.
[Answer]
What is "different mathematics"? You can consider different axiomatic systems, but that's not different mathematics; indeed, some mathematicians are doing exactly this. You may even consider modifying the rules of logical reasoning and seeing what happens then — again, there are mathematicians who are doing that. In short: Whatever you think of changing, you will find that as long as it is consistent, is will still be mathematics as we know it, in the most extreme case a new branch of mathematics, but still not a different mathematics.
Why is that so? Well, that's the case because mathematics is basically the science that explores the logical connections between abstract ideas. Therefore *any* logically consistent set of abstract ideas is included in mathematics.
So, how is this related to the real world? Strictly speaking, not at all. There are tons of mathematical constructs which are completely unrelated to our world. You'll be hard pressed to find the first uncountable ordinal somewhere in our universe (except as abstract concept in mathematics books or articles). However, if we can perceive any part of the world, we can abstract it, because fundamentally the act of perception is an act of abstraction (you don't really see the world, you see a reconstruction of the world based on the input of your sensory organs and a set of assumptions built into your brain). If we can perceive something, we can speak about it. And if we can speak about it, we can apply logic to it. And thus we can do mathematics on it.
There are certain mathematical models which fairly well match out observed world; the science that develops mathematical models that fit our world is known as physics. Now the specific mathematical models tell us something about our world, but the fact that we can create mathematical models of the world does not. Whatever the world is, as long as we can perceive (or imagine) it and talk about it, we can create mathematical models to describe it. We may need to invent new mathematical constructs to do so. But we don't need a new mathematics to do so.
[Answer]
I have to disagree with those who say that math is a "human construct" and so any set of math rules is possible. It is true that math is pretty much built by taking starting axioms -- assumptions -- and then investigating what you can prove by applying rigorous logic to those assumptions. So if you started with different assumptions, you'd get widely different conclusions. But most of the math that non-mathematicians are familiar with is based on axioms that are rooted in real-world observations.
If you consider very simple math, like arithmetic, a universe where it is different is very hard to even imagine. Like in a universe where 2+2=5, that means that if I put two rocks in an empty box, and then add two more rocks, then I look in the box, there are now five rocks. How many are left if I take one out? What if I put them in one at a time? It's just very difficult to conceive of how this could hang together.
As the math gets more complex, the problems may become less obvious, but they don't go away. Like suppose you say that in your hypothetical universe the surface area of a sphere is 4 \* π \* r^3 instead of 4 \* π \* r^2. At first glance that may sound plausible. But somebody didn't just make up that formula one day because it sounded cool. Look at methods for deriving that formula, and it's not easy to see how you could change underlying assumptions to come up with a different formula, and still have those assumptions be mutually consistent and make sense.
Mathematicians regularly find that math all connects together. Prime numbers turn out to be related to powers of 2. The square root of -1 turns out to be related to sines and cosines. Etc. If in an alternate universe 4 is a prime number, all sorts of things would have to be different for that to make sense, and all those differences would have to connect together.
Yes, there are aspects of mathematics that are purely abstract, and perhaps you could imagine those being different. But the "routine" stuff, like arithmetic and trigonometry and Cartesian geometry ... imagining an alternative system that is internally consistent is very difficult.
[Answer]
**The universe would look exactly like a giant frosted donut, but it would also be square, and the passage of time would be experienced as the simultaneous existence and non-existence of birds. Other than that, everything would be exactly the same as it is now.**
Even the reasoning we would use to answer a question like "How would change X affect the universe?" is subject to change in this scenario, because it is based on fundamental principles of logic and cause-and-effect, which are closely tied our current mathematical system and therefore can no longer be assumed to apply.
[Answer]
I think simulationism can help us make sense of the possibility of a different mathematics. Remember the [Pentium floating point division bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug)? A processor simulating a universe could have a similar problem. But really it wouldn't exactly be that math was different. The inhabitants of the universe might construct a mathematics exactly like our own, it's just that the universe wouldn't perfectly conform to mathematical patterns. At a certain level of sophistication the inhabitants of the universe might begin discovering small anomalies, measured values different very slightly from expected values derived from otherwise very well-confirmed theories. Maybe there could be even more severe manifestations of the mathematical errors, like an inability to ever collect a particular number of particles in a single structure. (an atom with X protons & electrons and Y neutrons might be predicted to be stable by the best atomic theories, but discovered to actually decay after an immeasurably small interval in experiments) The bug might also be observable via occasional, repeatable conservation law violations.
(The thought of this possibility actually delights me personally, because it would be such an incredible nightmare for reductionism.)
[Answer]
My opinion is that there can't be another mathematics. Maybe somewhere in the universe or in another universe you will find another kind of hydrogen, helium, f. ex metallic carbon, gaseous iron, in low temperature, etc. but you will never find another kind of mathematics. Even god can't make 2+2=5
Mathematics is God of the Universe, there is no god above mathematics, because nobody can rule mathematics but mathematics rule everybody.
] |
[Question]
[
Let's say the dots on Ceres are abandoned **alien outposts**.
Within the next 40-200 years humanity manages to send a team of **research scientists** to the location.
The scientists quickly found a way inside the base and are researching for several years now but with only **moderate success**.
The aliens used comparable technology: e.g. hallways, doors, data and power lines running in walls, etc. but they have a techlevel of around +1000 years compared to where we are now.
How could the aliens unknowingly built their base (without using weapons or deathtraps) so that our research scientists will need a maximum amount of time?
I'm especially looking for facilities of incomprehensible functions and/or special areas/features built into the alien base.
**EDIT:**
Answers will be accepted based off of how scientific, and realistic they are.
[Answer]
A few options here...the alien could have a trait that makes then harder to interpret...there could have been natural events since the abandonment...or there can be outright technical issues.
Natural event
* A CME from the sun struck the outpost shortly after it becoming abandoned and fried every last piece of unprotected wiring and electronic device. Now the scientists have to work with engineers to restore the wiring and get power to everything prior to researching whats on it. Anything critical can be protected, but having to get engineers in to replace wiring will extend the time needed.
* Asteroid impact. A mission critical room cannot be accessed due to external damage (only hallway to a control room is collapsed and exposed to space). This now means construction time to repair this is required.
Alien trait
* Use a sensory trait that is outside of our spectrum. For example, they are not extremely reliant on sight and therefore do not use monitors. Instead, they are capable of hearing sounds outside of the spectrum we can detect without aid to 'illustrate' a picture in their head for them. No monitors and only a sound frequency we can't hear that their mind turns into images would be exceedingly hard to figure out.
* Bio-mechanics. Data is stored on living tissue written directly on to DNA that we don't understand. Aliens DNA must be sequenced prior to being able to understand the data.
* Cybernetic. There is no obvious computer terminal, simply input ports that they access. When they are plugged in, all the data they require is displayed on their HUD display (or just in their eyesight if they are cybernetic). Without a method of plugging in, there really is no way to access any of the information on the ship.
* Harsh atmosphere. The atmosphere in the outpost is automatically regulated to exactly what the aliens need. Monitoring systems automatically detect the ratio's of the elements and inject whats missing into the air as required. Aliens require something like Arsenic for their respiration, so something exceedingly toxic to us is injected into the atmosphere from time to time. If you prefer something less deadly, maybe the aliens can require nitrous oxide and that gets released into the air from time to time. High as a kite would be a good reason why researchers are slow.
* Obscure recreation. Alien psychology is obsessed with tasks that while we consider it exceedingly tedious, they find it extremely relaxing. Scientists locate a large room full of marbles and presume these marbles fulfill some purpose such as fuel or currency when in fact it's simply a recreation room because they consider counting a hobby.
* True space faring species. Humans have a very strong sense of up and down and a 3-d orientation in our head. A species that lacks gravity on an outpost like this can build the structure so no up and down really exists. Corridors can be non-flat and twisting in 3-d space...aliens consider it second nature, but a human raised on a planet with gravity would find it exceedingly disorienting.
Engineering:
* Aliens don't use electricity (electrons), but instead use positrons (positricity?) flowing over a specially designed nano-fiber to power their equipment. Outpost no longer has reserves of positrons and they must be generated in order to work any electronic (positronic?) device.
* No wiring. Future technology has discovered a method of 'charging' the entire base with the power it needs and electronics power themselves by draining the electricity (positricity?) from the walls as required. Of course the abandoned outpost is no longer charged...a scientist needs to figure out how this power is derived and then charge the walls for our own use.
* Quantum computing. The processing power is mostly handled in dimensions not yet collapsed down to one. Our observing the Quantum computer collapses the multiple dimensions down, so the computer only works when it's not being observed (ha! K, I admit this one is abstract, I hope someone from the future fondly looks back at this line as retro-futurism)
* non-binary computing. Their computer store data not in 1's and 0's, but as left/right, forward/backward, and up/down based on the bits orientation in 3-d space (a computer bit represents 2^3 possibilities). Nitpick accepted and changed
[Answer]
On earth, we engineer objects to keep wild animals out - screens for insects, traps for rodents, child locks, lids and doors and all sorts of other things are designed to allow access uniquely tailored to our physiology - Upright, with oppose-able thumbs, at certain heights and ranges of motion.
What if the physiology of aliens is significantly different enough from ours that what they use as a door is simply inoperable for us? We just haven't figured out how to manipulate their "doorknobs" in such a way as to gain access!
For example: let's assume bilateral symmetry holds (It's mostly universal for life), but like in humans, it's single access symmetry (left/right). Now assume a different set of capabilities, like antennae or tentacles or additional hands. Manipulating a simple mechanical "knob" with features tailored to this biology would require unique actions hard to replicate for humans:
1. Pushing the door while wiping antennae across the top
2. Pushing your tentacle through a small opening to fill a cavity in the door and manipulate some switches
3. extra joints/dexterity in the hands that makes human manipulation impossible - twisting 3 of your wrists in a specific upside-down and backwards simultaneously
Another example: Let's say they had specific pheromone glands that are used for communication. Doors would be keyed to a simple "speak friend and enter" passphrase - a standard knock. A child alien would easily learn how to modulate their pheromones to "knock" on any door as they grow up, but humans would find the system incredibly hard to replicate, even if we KNEW what we were looking for!
Or heck, even short range telepathy.
***Edit:***
To add a bit to the telepathy, think fMRI, but biological (so short ranged focused magnetic sensitivity) Aliens can sense brain activity directly at short distances, and learn to control their own activity as an inaudible form of communication. Uncontrolled human brains would just present as static/animals to the scanner.
[Answer]
**Radiation**
The aliens evolved on a planet around an extremely hot and bright star. They're used to far more radiation than humans are, and the lighting and design of the base take that into account. Work has to be done in protective gear at all times, and even then exposure requires shifts of less than 3 hours per day per person.
**Gravity**
The installations have some sort of artificial gravity generators, and the aliens liked it heavy. Human scientists need exoskeletons to operate in the 2G+ environment.
**Water**
The aliens are a water race. Significant portions of the base - more than half - are underwater, including most passages.
**Size**
The aliens were much shorter, or shaped significantly differently. They might mass as much as humans were, but think about a large centipede for example - they can use tunnels that are too narrow for a bipedal race. Most humans simply don't fit through the doors, and exploration has to be done with robots or by enlarging passageways (difficult and dangerous).
**All of the Above**
For super extra fun time, the sites alternate high radiation zones with underwater ones, all under a crushing 2.5G. Hallways and doors are just under 1-foot in diameter, and rooms themselves tend to cap out at ~2 feet unless equipment requires otherwise.
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**One person's life support is another person's deathtrap.**
This can be played at several levels:
* **Shielding from "harmful" elements**: there are robust, automated systems that keep e.g. water out of the facility. Unfortunately researchers are 70% water and they don't filter well. It can just beep and lock the doors, or separate the water, depending on how gory you want it to be. Other elements include microbial fauna or even gravity (less of an issue, but still interesting).
* **The atmosphere is kept at "safe" levels**: here you can play with pressure, composition, temperature and even state of matter (underwater aliens?). Space suits are great, but not perfectly isolating. Too much pressure or a corrosive atmosphere can ruin someone's day. You can select between "lots of ammonia at 2 atm" to "core of a sun". Bonus points if the definition of "safe" changes throughout the day, requiring impossibly flexible/dynamic suits.
* **Every room has "electrical outlets"**: we need energy. They do too. We have easily accessible outlets that can electrocute the unaware. They do too. Multiply the energy output, or output something exotic, and put in a non-obvious location. Bonus points for motion activated wireless shocks.
* **"Medical" devices**: devices for repairing biological damage are amazing. When you are actually damaged, and not just different. They can range from over-zealous robotic butlers all the way to omnipresent nanobots. Again, you can tweak the gory level.
This seems like a really fun idea full of potential.
Edit: extra ideas
* **Easily accessible "food"**: we need water, complex molecules and a bit of ultraviolet light. They need liquid helium, some truly scary compounds and lots of gamma radiation. All readily available, but in non-obvious ways (to us). Does this button open the door or sterilize the room?
* **Keeping the environment "safe"**: you don't want your precious atmosphere leaking, so doors are heavy duty stuff. Also, anything above 200 Kelvins is probably a fire and needs to be doused accordingly. Or anything below 300 K is obviously a leak and is to be "sealed" immediately.
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Probably the simplest "problem" is literally sitting right in front of you: *writing*. The screen you're looking at right now makes perfect sense to you because of familiarity, but to someone who has never been exposed to the English language, or even the Roman alphabet for that matter, in their entire life, figuring out even basic functionality would be a daunting task in the absence of an interpreter, even on something easily identifiable as a computer.
If I were an explorer, I would treat an unfamiliar computer with a great deal of respect/fear, *on a similar level to an unexploded bomb.* It could be a control system for something, and with wireless technology, it doesn't even have to be visibly connected to anything in order to cause unknown (and potentially dangerous) effects in the physical world. And if the aliens' society is even vaguely similar to our own, but more advanced, *everything* is going to be run by computers. If you don't know how to interact with it, you're not going to get very far!
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Complexity.
A typical elevator contains what would have been considered a high end computer only twenty years ago. All it really needs is a switch to make it go up/down, but general purpose computers are cheap and easy to use, so that is what we use.
The scientists have no way to tell the difference between a hyperdrive technical manual and an elevator button. Progress will be slow unless they get really, really lucky.
With a bit less luck, you get death traps without any special design effort - that airlock you thought was the front door is actually part of the garbage disposal system, and the circuit you just hacked into is not the one that opens the inner hatch...
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Logically, the most probable reason why progress would be slow would be if the outpost were protected in some way. If scientists had free access, progress would not be slow whatsoever, even if they didn't understand the technology behind it.
Scientists aren't dead, so there isn't a death trap surrounding the outpost. If there were, then the scientists avoided it, and so they somehow would have been able to get around it presumably. So it seems far more likely that we're talking about a barrier. An energy shield presumably takes energy to keep up, and if the alien outpost is long since abandoned, you're likely not going to find an energy shield up and running because that implies that not only is there a source of energy, that source of energy is constant and the plant converting that energy into something useable like electricity is still active without being monitored for presumably millions of years. Realistically not probable.
Therefore, my guess is that there is a physical barrier like a spherical wall protecting the outpost. That sounds rather simplistic for an advanced alien species, but consider the fact that mankind, despite having the technology to replace paper many times over, is still largely dependent on paper since making papyrus scrolls. Walls may not be interesting, but it is the most practical protection against the harshness of space and would allow an atmosphere contained within.
The aliens would have of course had a way of getting in and out, so I imagine there would be a gateway of some sort. However, how often would they need to walk on the surface of the planet? Likely not often. So it is likely that this gateway is large enough to allow the exit/entry of entire spaceships.
The reason behind the slow progress might be because the atmosphere is very much intact within the barrier. So while they could crack open the barrier:
1. They don't know what type of atmopshere is underneath. It could be poisonous gas.
2. The atmosphere could be under pressure, another good reason why you wouldn't want to simply break in.
3. You risk contamination by the types of germs that you'd bring from earth. It could ruin any potential sensitive ecosystem under the surface.
Another reason why progress might be slow would be time interference. There might be a space-time effect surrounding the outpost that significantly slows down time for those inside. It might makes sense to do so, because ships leaving the outpost would seemingly return shortly afterwards and it means the aliens living within would prolong their lives. However it also means that spending say an hour near the outpost might be the equivalent of 8 hours to those outside it. Progress would *literally* be slow.
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Imagine your aliens had diffent eyes. Then it might be that the whole outpost is (and has to be, in order to function) filled with a dense fog. The aliens could still see and use the base, because they see infrared, and maybe even smell and hear their way around the base (much like dogs, maybe?), while humans, relying massively on eyesight, would be massively handicapped.
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I had some thoughts related to what [@IsaacKotlicky](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11859/6781) said about having doors that are difficult to open. The main problem with having difficult doors is that one of the first things the scientists would do would be to replace the door mechanisms to make it easy for humans to use. That means difficult doors would only delay progress for a few days or weeks. So how do we make it so the difficult doors/mechanisms need to remain in place?
* **They grow back**. The scientists tried to replace the door mechanisms when they first got there, but to their dismay they found that the original mechanisms grew back after a while. In fact, this could be how the entire outpost has survived - whether it's bio-engineering or nanobots or magic or whatever, there's something that automatically repairs any damage the outpost sustains.
* **Removing them would damage the outpost's integrity**. The scientists found out that if they try to replace a door or its opening mechanism, it causes damage to the outpost that they can't mitigate. For example, it may be that the outpost needs to be pressurized a certain way in order for everything inside to work properly, and the scientists can't figure out how to replace the door mechanism without causing a loss in pressure that ruins everything in the room. This could be an interesting part of the story - there's one room full of now-useless equipment because they replaced the door mechanism. The scientists would lament the loss of potentially import data, causing them to be very hesitant to attempt replacing any other door mechanisms.
* **They can't figure out how to replace them**. This could happen if the doors are made of an incredibly durable material that the scientists don't know how to cut through.
If you don't have something like this in place, then the doors will only be a short-term obstacle until the scientists can replace the outpost doors with ones they made for their own convenience. Also, tricky doors by themselves aren't going to hinder them too much - even if it takes half a day of work to open a door and go through before it closes again, the scientists can camp out wherever it is that they need to work so that they don't have to bother with the doors much. This could be an issue if you add in one of the things that [@DanSmolinske](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11873/6781) mentioned - there is something in the outpost that prevents them from staying too long.
Another way to make the outpost difficult to research would be an extra spatial dimension. The aliens can naturally perceive and navigate the extra dimension, but the scientists are not so fortunate. Lacking the ability to move willfully along the extra dimension, the scientists drift back and forth along it. This will cause very bizarre behavior - sometimes you might walk down a hall only to find it ends abruptly, while other times that same hall opens up into a room. Or you could walk down the hall, walk back, and not return to where you started. If the drift along the extra dimension seems to be random, then it makes it even more difficult for them because they wouldn't even be able to develop rules like "On Thursdays this hall goes to room A, but on Fridays it goes to room B".
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We manage to use [retinal scanning](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_scan) to secure bases and other places where most people aren't supposed to be. I would guess that given thousands of years more time than us to develop better technology they could have computers that require the DNA of a specific individual of their species. Since they are (most likely) using a different language than us, we will be hard pressed to hack their security systems, meaning we will not have access to any part of the base that requires DNA authentication without years and years of research.
Since the aliens likely have extremely different DNA, we would have to somehow analyze and reconstruct their entire DNA strand. After that, we would have to compensate for the **EXTREMELY** minuscule differences between the DNA of the individual aliens (since some of the aliens were permitted access to higher security levels and some were not).
All in all I can see this taking anywhere from decades to centuries depending on our tech level at the time compared to theirs, similarities and differences in our genetic structure compared to theirs, an whether or not any viable remains of the aliens are still on the base (to study their DNA structure).
Now, it is probably more likely that some general will see potential weapons for the base and quarantine it or simply blow open any doors with explosives, risking any specimens in the base in the name of "world peace".
Notes:
* If I am correct we are already able to scan an individuals DNA and use the results for a variety of things, including encoding that specific DNA sequence into a lock.
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I'm going to assume that these bases have been abandoned for at least centuries in a rather hostile environment and operating. There must be a reason, and it might as well be one that fits your requirement for an obstacle as well.
OK, these bases are at least partly on the surface of an asteroid, and asteroid whose surface testifies to a long history of other rocks bumping into it with extreme prejudice, and it may have been there a long time. If any of it is in working order that would suggest that the aliens built things very, very ruggedly (making doors and walls that much harder to break through) or some kind of active upkeep. Maybe a anti-asteroid defense of some sort, either a force field or repulsion beam or whatnot.
Alternatively or in adddition, there could be robots repairing the base after collisions or breakdowns, and, of course, repairing each other. I'm not thinking sentient or sapient robots, but nevertheless very sophisticated ones. Even without the threat of asteroid impacts, imagining something as complex as just a power plant operating for centuries unattended would be pretty incredible, after all, and a whole outpost even more so.
Such robots wouldn't recognize humans or their equipment as either their masters (though trying "Klaatu! Barada nikto!" couldn't really hurt...) or as part of the base. If humans started damaging the outpost as they try to get in, the robots might want to remove the threat,and not necessarily gently... Even if the humans figured out how not to provoke the custodians, getting into the base and investigating without damaging anything would probably slow them down.
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## Shortage of equipment
The scientists didn't know what to expect, and so failed to bring enough of the right equipment. This could be ropes, explosives, ladders, etc. Perhaps they are reduced to digging with shovels. Perhaps their scanners can't penetrate the ground.
## Damage to equipment
Perhaps two of the three available space suits are damaged and can't be repaired. Only one scientist can go out at a time. Perhaps a crucial piece of equipment like a digger or vehicle has been lost down a ravine.
## Orientation
The species is capable of climbing walls like a gecko or spider. Getting from one level to another involves scaffolding and ropes, which the scientists would have to get from Earth.
## Flight
The alien species is avian. The outpost is on many levels and getting from one to another is tough.
## Temperature
The species liked things very hot, or very cold. You need an environment suit, and it's dangerous enough that some scientists have died.
## Walking distance
The base is extremely large and the suits the scientists have brought only have oxygen for 4 hours. This limits their activities within a 2 hour walk of the base.
## Biological Debris
Perhaps death came swiftly to the aliens. Perhaps the major passages are blocked with bones.
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The odds are that if these bases are abandoned, they have been abandoned for a very long time, and anything that *was* working when the builders left is unlikely to still be working.
You have a base on an asteroid. Since the likelihood is that any sentient species requires an atmosphere to live in, and an asteroid has none, the atmosphere is likely to have leaked away. Since the base is in vacuum, we'd have [vacuum-welding](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_cementing) of the doors and other moving objects that weren't designed to spend a lot of time in vacuum. Computers would also break down from prolonged exposure to vacuum and any radiation that penetrates whatever shielding exists.
Then we have the issue of body form. There is no guarantee that the aliens who made these bases have a body even remotely like ours - their idea of a spacious hallway might be a couple of feet high and wide, or less. Possibly small enough that a human can't get into it at all. Or, they may have nice wide, high hallways, but no staircases since they can jump further than a human, and they come from a higher-gravity world.
Then there is the issue of manipulatory appendages - their appendages may be such that their user interfaces are not really operable by us, either too small or too big or just not shaped right. Imagine using a computer where you have to literally punch the keys - hard - in order to get them to work, because their makers were much bigger and stronger than us - *and* you have to punch more than one or two at once... Or imagine keys that you need to poke with the tip of a pen since they are so small...
Finally there is the issue of language. These aliens aren't going to speak English and write using the Latin alphabet. They could communicate by means we can't even perceive unaided, or if they do happen to have a human-perceptible means of communication, our brains aren't likely to have evolved to understand them. Humans have spent decades trying to understand other species such as elephants and dolphins communication, and these are terrestrial species. Do you think that an alien species - who isn't even there any more - would be easier or harder to understand?
Given the limitations above, it could take a whole team of scientists *decades* to properly investigate an alien base.
See the hard sci-fi [Boundary series](http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1416509321/1416509321.htm?blurb) which has covered these topics.
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I know this is an old thread, but I thought I might add something.
With advances in technology, or due to biology, they may not utilize sound for communication or even recognize it in a meaningful way. Imagine how frustrating it would be if most tech emitted sound that was exceedingly annoying to humans. Without protection, headaches would be the norm. Conversations would have to be held outside or in specific sound proofed locations. Working with each other on station would require physically getting someone's attention and then using some form of sign language or hand typed/written communication. Quite difficult if you are holding a wrench.
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## I have a [Category 3 problem](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2661/finding-a-more-objective-way-to-identify-questions-that-are-too-broad) in my world
This is an [escape](/questions/tagged/escape "show questions tagged 'escape'") from [pirates](/questions/tagged/pirates "show questions tagged 'pirates'") problem. The story requires a secret message to get past pirates and I don’t know how to design the captivity for it.
**Setting:** Several kids [get shanghaied and impressed into service with pirates](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225501/how-can-my-captivity-afflict-the-prisoners-with-stockholm-syndrome), then the story gets them rescued only because one kid has a special ability: She can read lips and uses sign language— she is deaf. A rescue needs coordination with the captives, who must follow instructions from a secret message. Their [captivity is well hidden](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225150/how-can-my-pirate-haven-remain-hidden-and-safe-while-running-illegal-activities) but needs to have a hole in it somewhere for this message.
**Premise:** Unique language skills among captives creates an opportunity to get a secret message past captors.
**Tech level is 19th century**. Ships are actually airships but that shouldn't objectively affect the solution more than making it in-theme.
**Research:** The captors are stereotypical storybook pirates of common-knowledge. Specifically:
**World settings so far:**
* Captives are held under the typical threat of death or hurting one of the friends.
* The crew is [in an enclave in an uncharted region](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225150/how-can-my-pirate-haven-remain-hidden-and-safe-while-running-illegal-activities). Unaided escape is near certain death in the wilds.
* Captives are forced to [maintain ships](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225212/how-to-maintain-large-ships-in-hostile-atmosphere) or serve aboard vessels during raids, doing grunt work.
* There are no trained “guards,” the crew has a loyalty to their captain and they all basically keep things in check.
* Most of the crew are somewhat fickle and uneducated, and superstitious.
* Captives have no direct communication to the outside world, but certain privileged “clients” come to the enclave [for illicit gambling](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224514/illegal-steampunk-horse-racing-after-the-apocalypse-what-format-is-most-profita). Communication and contact is a privilege earned when you are “made”
* Captives don't get weapons.
* Trusted crew run covert [supply runs into civilian cities occasionally](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225198/what-would-fit-in-a-heterogenous-government-reforming-their-post-apocalyptic-wor) because [the enclave is hidden from the world](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225180/how-do-i-create-a-secret-steampunk-navigation-scheme).
**Additional tech and setting info (because someone asked):**
Weapon Tech is [cannons](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224665/maximum-effective-range-for-a-modified-long-tom-cannon-in-high-density), revolvers and swords. Culture is a mix of [French, Chinese, American and English](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225198/what-would-fit-in-a-heterogenous-government-reforming-their-post-apocalyptic-wor). It’s [not technically earth](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/183710/how-could-we-modern-humans-colonize-a-hot-planet) but that doesn't matter, it all works out the same. Steampunk.
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# Good answers provide the **HOW** for this problem:
* START: **KIDS ARE CAPTIVE**
* RESULT: **A SECRET MESSAGE IS RECEIVED**
* QUESTION: HOW did this [prison](/questions/tagged/prison "show questions tagged 'prison'") allow a secret deaf-language message through the pirates?
If I have missed anything in [the Perfect Question Checklist](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question) I would appreciate a comment in [the chat set up for this question](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/134456/discussion-on-question-by-vogon-poet-how-to-send-a-covert-message-to-a-deaf-pers)
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# Exploit the pirates' superstitions
Superstitions usually demand strange forms of observance. There were rules for many areas of human activity. Some applied generally, others only to people in specific circumstances. Some rules had to be followed to avoid bad luck, others to gain good luck.
Some historical superstitions specifically involved children. For example, German culture placed special superstitious value on [clothing made by children](https://sites.pitt.edu/%7Edash/superstition.html#childlabor).
Since your world is not actually Earth, I figure you're cool with inventing new superstitions to suit your purpose. So, here are some thoughts about how you might design one:
* **Give the captive children special duties that undermine the pirates' otherwise-adequate security measures**
Maybe it requires the children to exit the pirates' compound to perform some chore, and they must do so without an escort (or at great distance). This provides an opportunity for a child to discover objects or signs left by the hero without the pirates noticing.
Note that the children may share the superstition and agree with their captors that the chore must be performed for the sake of everyone who lives at the compound; the children might not care about the pirates' fate, but still cooperate for their own sake. I think that means the superstition must be concerned with avoiding bad consequences for members of a household.
The hero would not mind interfering with the ritual because s/he doesn't care if the pirates suffer, and intends to save the children long before the bad consequence is supposed to occur.
For instance: a child or virgin must bury some animal part (from typical family food waste) on the night of the full moon, within sight of the home's threshold, or the next month will be a hungry one. The hero could exploit this because s/he'd know the pirates will be doing this, and so could search around the pirates' location to find the burial site.
* **Give the pirates special duties that undermine their otherwise-adequate security measures**
Pirates can be compelled to do strange things to bring good fortune to the crew, unlike the children. (They can also be compelled to avoid bad luck, like the kids.) Also, the pirates' range of activity is greater than that of their captives: pirates are sailors, warriors, and thieves, and will do whatever they can to ensure that each of these activities is safe and profitable. And the hero probably wouldn't care whether those activities go badly, or may not share the superstition if s/he is not also a sailor, warrior, or thief.
Perhaps this requires the pirates to bring home some kind of otherwise-worthless refuse or scrap whenever they encounter it, as an obligation, either to ward off bad luck or bring good luck. The hero could exploit that by planting garbage, or hiding some kind of message or sign inside legit garbage.
Or perhaps it requires the pirates to bring a child on certain types of errands to ensure the success of the errand, even though doing so risks detection or escape. For this specifically, they might preferentially choose the deaf child, trusting that handicap to minimize the risks, and not realizing that the child has (yet?) developed compensating skills like lip-reading and sign language.
As an example: the pirates might bring the child along when fencing certain stolen goods, because any bargain struck with a child present is guaranteed to be more profitable. Thus, the deaf child might actually be brought practically to the hero's doorstep, putting them in almost direct contact.
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# Painting:
The key here is that the kids haul loot, and the deaf kid can understand sign language. So if the person slipping them the message can get a bulky, visibly obvious object like a treasure chest painted with hand symbols, then it will look like a chest painted with pictures of hands. The pirates capture or find the chest, and the kids haul the chest or see it amongst the loot.
Pirates aren't going to leave a potential valuable behind. Looters can't be choosers. Who is going to question a decorative painted box with illustrations all over it containing presumptive valuables? Sure, it's quirky art, but who wouldn't decorate valuable things? If a chest isn't good for you, why not a "painting" of hand symbols in a valuable-looking frame? Or if the kid can read, then perhaps a book with a series of illustrations tucked into it of people making various gestures. The kid can "assess" the value of the book by scanning through it, noticing the series of pictures relaying the message.
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## Deaf Rhyming
Deaf language includes rhyming, similar to spoken languages. These are signs that look the same but are different in meaning. These don’t match up to spoken languages, so even in the same language the rhymes are different. While the pirates don’t know sign language, the deaf person does. The message is then encoded in a silly poem that starts by not rhyming at all, but the words do rhyme in sign language. Then the rest doesn’t rhyme in sign language but replacing the last word with a rhyme that is similar to the word at the end of the line is the next word. Now you can put this message up in public, as friendly correspondence and the pirates can read it with no chance of the message being intercepted.
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Since the girl knows sign language, use that in an unconventional way. Rather than standing out in the open signing, which will obviously draw attention, arrange objects to spell out words in the sign language. This will be very slow as compared to manual signing.
The feasibility of this will depend on the sign language in use: don't go into much detail about that. Things that might be used include:
* Arranging fruit on a stall into patterns.
* Arranging the rigging ropes into patterns.
* Drawing a sign or two in mud or dust on the ground.
The hero needs to know the sign language themselves, and to make sure that the symbols have been noticed before the message starts being laid out. They also need to know where the girl will go in the enclave so that she sees the symbols in the right order.
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## Steganography
[Steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) is the art of concealing a hidden message inside of another, public message. For example, you might write a letter in such a way that, by taking the fifth word of each sentence, you can reveal a hidden message. Or you could write a bill of sale but replace the "pence" column with hidden coordinates.
The main difficulty is that the kids would have to know about the hidden messages. It could've been something they were already familiar with (some word puzzles incorporate steganographic elements, and kids sometimes invent such schemes to pass notes in secret), that would be obvious enough to stand out on examination.
Getting the message to the kids is relatively straightforward since you indicate that the ships take on supplies from outside their enclave. Bills of sale, labels, the arrangement of items in boxes, sizes or weights of items - there are many avenues to hide a message in a supply shipment. You haven't indicated what the kids *do* aboard ship but in general, I would expect them to have plenty of duties where they can interact with ship's supplies: loading, preparing meals, fetching for more experienced crew, etc.
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## **Bird**
The message is provided by a raven, in the early morning when everyone is still asleep, the girl is wandering around on deck. The raven is smart.. it drops the message at her feet and disappears. She knows what to do now.
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> Most of the crew are somewhat fickle and uneducated, and superstitious. Stereotypical pirates.
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Could it then be as simple as passing a written message to her? If she's the only one around who can read, then you don't even need to worry about who might intercept it. Just write it somewhere she can see it.
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A missionary priest visits the children to ensure their condition is reasonable for the times and brings them food. He greets every child individually and in doing so holds each child's hand or hands and says a brief greeting or prayer.
When he holds the hands of the deaf girl he is able to tap a short message on the girl's hand, in a tapping sign language, which both understand, but no-one else notices.
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**A Telescope!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/09za0l.png)
Because the girl can lip-read, all she needs is a telescope to be able to receive information from the distant land.
This is a simple device which fits the setup of the story perfectly, without restricting your conclusion.
The message received is not just a secret, it is a double-secret. Nobody else knows they have received a message, let alone what it is. This is convenient from a storytelling perspective. The message can easily contain a sentence, or an image. The author has lots of space to work with.
*Details/info*
If the protagonist and her friends can get hold of a telescope on board the ship, and the vessel has line-of-sight to the message senders, the main character can look through the telescope and see something nobody else can - what people are saying.
A telescope is a helpful, historic and common object to be found on pirate ships of all kinds. The ship would have its own one in some form, and a crewmember could own a handheld one. There could even be one in stolen treasure locked up. All they need is for the ship to come within a certain distance and line-of-sight of the message senders for the message to be received.
As a worldbuilding note, exact visibility limits of the telescope will depend greatly on the shape of your world. For example, a telescope is much more powerful and effective on a flat earth model.
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# Flag Semaphore In Dance
It's like long distance sign language. The pirates don't know it, but the deaf kid knows it and can read it quickly. The message could be disguised as part of a dance or as stick figures on a wall, so unless you were looking for that sort of thing you'd probably ignore it.
A great possibility for the story is to have one of the rescuers go in disguise as a dancer who is going to entertain the pirates. She does an alluring dance that uses the positions in flag semaphore to send a secret message to the captives as soon as the dancer is sure she's in view of the captives.
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In most modern steampunk settings you see rudimentary use of electricity (a good example is Dishonored) however, no one seems to be too interested in advancing electric technology beyond very crude applications like electromagnets, Tesla coils and the occasional light bulb.
Obviously this is necessary for storytelling, to create a futuristic steampunk society.
What are the possible justifications for the continued relevance of steampower over electricity?
**EDIT:**
So rather than choosing one answer I think I'll do an edit to summarize some of the great thoughts in this (?)thread.
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> "Steampunk done right" - @TCAT117
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This answer definitely raises some very good points, I and probably many others have not yet considered. As such it is very helpful to completely flesh out the society in a steampunk world. However I don't feel, the initial question, of how can a steampunk world "realisticaly" exist (and more importantly **persist**) despite the knowledge (and use) of electricity, is answered here.
Furthermore this description presumes that there cannot be societal change in a steampunk world. (Treasure Planet and Wild Wild West are both broadly considered Steampunk and neither would I necessarily attribute with "victorian").
Overall I think this is an interesting take on Steampunk, but definitely not the only "valid" one.
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This is a deceptively simple, yet effective idea.
The repercussions of not having AC-technology are incredibly far reaching and would serve perfectly for preventing centralised distribution of electric energy.
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> "Conspiracy" - @Willk
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I had thought about a solution similar to this: Cultism.
The problem with this solution is, that it is unbelievable to persist over centuries. I think this would work very well in a story about societal trumoil and technological advancement.
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> "Money and Law" - @StephenG
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Similar to Conspiracy and Cultism, this doesn't prevent technological advancement indefinitely, but would make for a great story about revolution and change.
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> Fuel Shortage - @TheShadowOfZama
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Another extremely small change to the world with incredible effects on the developement of technology.
Extreme shortage (or complete lack) of (fossil) oil, would not only set back combustion engines, but also prevent the invention of classic plastics and many medicines.
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[Answer]
**Steampunk Done Right**
A lot of steampunk stories focus too heavily on the whole steam part of the deal. You got gears and brass tubes and stuff on everything from chairs to pens to steam powered napkins. I think that this is because creating an easily identifiable genre of aesthetic is easy while creating a compelling world and set of characters is hard.
The real core of steampunk isn't the aesthetic though. Its the idea if extrapolating and magnifying the Victorian era's ideals, society, and culture so they can be examined closer. The Victorian era was one of great change and contradiction, the industrial revolution was bringing technology and science into a more mature and refined form than ever before. Yet, beneath the veneer of reason and progress very archaic cultural and social traits were still very much in play. New scientific discoveries were paired with frankly barbaric sentiments to create some really contradictory and hellish things.
A wonderful example of this can be seen in the British prisons of the era that were scientifically designed to break a mans soul coupled with a justice system that took Darwinian concepts like genetics and paired them with silly pseudo scientific practices like phrenology (the belief that personality traits can be determined by skull shape) and eugenics. The massive leap in scientific discovery that defining and examining evolution quickly warped into the concept that there was a "criminal class" of people 100% genetically predispositioned to be nothing but an impoverished criminal. They combined this scientific misconception with very very old world puritan ideals about morality and punishment. (Hard work and deprivation will make you a better person). Prisoners were kept in total isolation, not allowed to speak at all for years on end, forced to turn a giant hand crank built into the wall a set number of times per day (usually calculated to fill the inmate's entire waking hours). If the quota wasn't met they would not receive what meager bare survival rations they normally got. If an inmate got too good at turning the crank it's resistance could be dialed up to ensure that turning the crank remained a difficult and exhausting task. These cranks were not connected to anything, they were simply designed to exhaust the inmate. Imagine sitting alone in a dank room for years, or even decades, never allowed to speak or go outside, your sole purpose in life to turn a crank in the wall that will only ever get harder to turn and isn't even accomplishing any actual task. All because societies intellectuals have decided that you were born deserving to be there and that you have zero hope of ever doing anything but, all because you stole a loaf of bread.
**THAT** is the kind of atmosphere steampunk should embody. Brilliant scientific leaps originally intended to benefit mankind being paired up with outdated and barbaric cultural practices and in the end being used to crush a man's soul instead. It can have electrical apparatus in it and still communicate this concept.
**My Point?**
In a lot of instances steampunk has been dumbed and watered down into a simple set decoration when its really supposed to be imagining what would have happened if Victorian culture had persisted for longer. You can have whatever tech you want in a steampunk story and still give it that steampunk feel, just do a lot of historical research about what really made the Victorian era tick. The Victorian era was a unique time period of crazy contrasts. Poverty and unimaginable wealth. Science and barbaric ignorance. Explosive Progress and depressing stagnation. Incredible discovery and horrible misinterpretation. If you focus of this you can make a great steampunk story without having to dress *everything* up in brass and copper and steam engines. There really isn't any reason your steampunk story cant have people using electricity for stuff.
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First of all, I'm a bit rusty in the electricity concepts. So forgive me for any occasional slaughtering of physics concepts.
Second, I would recommend that you watch [Tesla's documentary](https://www.netflix.com/br/title/80991257). It's only 53 minutes long and it gives a good view of how electricity used to be prior to the invention of the AC Motor.
## The AC Motor was never invented
You don't necessarily need to say that people like Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla were never born - they might be the go-to guys when it comes to electricity. But maybe they just never made the leap to the AC Motor.
I'm assuming that your story is set in the early 1900's.
I remember that the documentary clearly states that DC is a viable option, but it is not viable for long distances - which is where the AC Motor came in. So electricity exists but it's very local, probably present only in big cities (ironically, kind of like electric cars today), since the infrastructure needed for DC engines to power a whole country would be ludicrous.
All that's left is for you to come up with a reasonable explanation for steam engines to be widespread.
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**Conspiracy.**
<https://medium.com/@zaron3/nikola-tesla-and-the-conspiracy-against-water-powered-cars-a1e0216c8a23>
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> In the post-Einstein world, Tesla’s alternative theory of energy is
> now considered scientific heresy. Only the true believers still hold
> their faith in Tesla's view of the universe. However, following his
> methods, these garage tinkerers and shade tree physicists seem to work
> electrical miracles. And they claim this is the real reason why the
> government won’t let them build water-powered cars. It’s all part of a
> century-long fight that goes back to Tesla and his former boss, Thomas
> Edison. Genius versus Industry. And now, a century later, these true
> believers and electrical outlaws argue that rather than follow the
> lead of the electric car company named for their hero, we need to make
> everyone understand how a water-powered car works, and redesign our
> modern industry according to Tesla’s alternative theory of energy.
> Imagine everything you know about electricity is wrong. Now ask
> yourself: why would anyone want to suppress this truth? Who benefits?
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In the steampunk world, Big Steam and the industries behind it have a monopoly and they work to keep it that way. Electricity is the realm of crackpots, swindlers, and dangerous foreign scientists. Electricity does make a fine method of execution, granted - look at that smoke! But for safe everyday uses, there are smiling, well dressed, vaguely ominous men who make sure you are getting your steam and steam producing apparatus and not venturing out into dangerous experimentation. High scifi makes for excellent social commentary, and the obvious parallel is the campaign of Big Auto against public transportation, and Big Oil against clean energy.
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## There's some muddled history of technology here
**tl;dr** : This is what actually happened in the real world. Steam and electric technology co-existed for around a century.
Both the OP and some of the respondents seem to be under the impression that in real world history, there was little or no overlap between steam technology and electric technology. This is not true.
Not *remotely* true.
Although the steam era began in the late eighteenth century, what we think of as the Victorian steampunk type technology really kicked off in the 1830s railway boom. (Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837.) Steam never really finished -- it is still used today for many important applications, such as baseline power generation. However it began to be replaced for mainstream transport applications (motor vehicles, locomotives, and ships) only post-World War One, roughly 90 years later.
(Earlier than this, some ships had become *oil-fired*, but they had oil-fired steam: i.e. a steam engine with the boiler heated by oil instead of coal. The first petrol-fired motor vehicles came out in the 1880s, but didn't become more economically important than other forms of transport until the 1920s.)
In contrast, the electric era arguably begins with Galvani and Volta's experiments in the mid-eighteenth century, but starts to go beyond experiments to useful devices in ... the early 1830s, with the construction of the first regular (short distance) telegraph service. The first DC motor powerful enough for industrial applications was produced in ... the 1830s. The first electrically powered vehicle was Jacobi's motorboat, which in a public demonstration carried 14 people across a wide river in: 1838.
The earliest electric lighting demonstrations were by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1802, but practical electric lighting systems were developed in the late 1870s/early 1880s -- and in many places they were adopted very rapidly: contrary to the classic by-line of a "winter of gaslight and fog", by the time Jack the Ripper struck in 1888, most streets of Whitechapel were electrically lit. (The dynamos were steam-powered, and the boilers were fired by garbage: under the recent Public Health Act, London had also started the world's first regular garbage collection service, and lighting the streets seemed the most useful way to use the refuse.)
After several earlier attempts, practical telegraphy started in 1844 -- first used to catch a murderer in 1845 -- and it exploded: in the first 6 years, 20,000 kms of cable were laid in the US alone. Not only did this revolutionise communications, but gave a huge impetus to allied industries like wire-drawing, rubber processing, battery manufacture, and electrical instrumentation. Lord Kelvin's "Victorian Internet" laid the first transatlantic cable in 1866 (after a failed attempt in 1857), and within 8 years had enabled practically instantaneous communications between all developed parts of the world; the first telegram direct from Britain to Japan (the other side of the world) was in 1870.
To cut a long story short, from the 1830s to the 1920s, electric and steam technologies were complementary technologies developing in parallel, mainly for different purposes. And indeed, both still exist today.
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Let's go the way of all barrier to tech advancement : money and law.
**Money**
You have to have money to make money and if the people with money won't give you theirs (OK, lend not give) because they are e.g. very conservative and don't see a reason to create change in a core industry (steam) then you can't invest in R&D, factories and manufacturing and marketing to get your swanky new e.g. electric light bulbs going.
**Law**
For many a long decade the entire industrial revolution (steam powered, as it happens) was held up (slowed down) by a legal patent on steam engines held and very, very aggressively pursued by the one James Watt, inventor and, as it turns out, greedy egomaniac. All courtesy of patent law and lawyers. Watt would threaten to sue anyone investing in new steam development, his competitors and so on.
Suitable patent laws in your world would happily screw up any attempt to introduce widespread use of electricity.
These things can combine to prevent effective development of electricity commercially and would limit it to applications where it was required.
Also keep in mind electricity has to be generated and steam engines can do that (and did).
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**Fuel shortage**
What 'killed' steampower as the dominant way to obtain power was Kerosene,Gasoline,Diesel,... Combustion engines tended to be more usefull than steam ones once properly developed. World War 1 was a big reason for this. With combustion engines faster armored cars, tanks and aeroplanes were possible.
There's no way to make an airplane, especially early ones fly with steampower. Cars were possible, but not really all that great and steamtanks were tried and found to be...unsatisfactory.
There will be people saying, but you can create oil from coal. True, but that process is not very economical, especially in the early days. The only reason people use that process is because they can't get oil because of reasons. Experts believe North Korea for example wants nuclear power plants to get them the electricity needed for this process.
Solar panels existed, but well early ones sucked and even today I am not a fan of them for anything but private and limited commercial use. Definitely not to keep factories running or to keep the lights in a city on. The sun doesn't always shine after all and when it does it doesn't always shine as bright.
You could make fuel out of soybeans. Ethanol fuel or some other biofuel, but once more that is not a complete problem solver. Ethanol based fuel sucks in cold climates and it requires a huge amount of crops. Not every nation can use and obtain biofuels as easily as for example Brazil does.
All those things however have one thing in common and that's that none of them will be as good a fix as oil was and is in real life.
As for electricity. Do you mean electronics such as advanced computers? If so there are plenty of reasons why those things never took off. A couple inventions involved in those were pure accidental such as the transistor.
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Everyone thinks it's dumb cause Coolguy McScience face said so.
This is arguably what happened to create the fat free craze in American food products. This is also what happened when Edison showed that AC was dangerous. This is very similar to what happened when that American Chemist was convinced that getting a million percent of vitamins would make you immortal - that's why vitamins don't just have 100% of what you need.
Science is discovered by scientists, used by Engineers, and made mainstream by the public. It doesn't matter if something is technically better than something else if the public doesn't pic up on it. If you get a cool science guy to warn against it and no other cool science guys call them out on it, or if the science guy who does bring it up isn't cool enough then the technology just won't pick up.
You could easily make electricity a pointless method of energy transfer in your universe by just having a bunch of people say it is. These people could say it's bad simply because they're wrong or because they like steam money. It really doesn't matter that much after the general public agrees it's bad.
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You need to introduce the problem of electricity transportation. If the cost (ohm resistance) is so great that it is cheaper and/or easier to power by steam, electricity will only be used when it is the last resort. You can't use steam to make a light bulb glow so electricity must be used there. You can have devices that crackle with electricity generated as a byproduct. But for whatever reason, it is nearly impossible to move that current greater than 100 feet.
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David Weber's [*Safehold*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold) series isn't what I'd consider steampunk, and electricity in that setting is more forbidden than your original question, **but** a relaxed version of its answer could still fit:
* The [planet-wide] government rabidly forbids the use of electrical power (not fire, water, or wind, so steam and gunpowder are technically allowed) and is backed up by satellite weapon systems that target EM sources above a particular threshold.
That story started with humanity being nearly wiped off the face of the galaxy by an alien force with an apparent hatred for other spacefaring races. The last vestiges of humanity managed to sneak off to an undiscovered world and hole up there. The political faction that took over initial terraforming operations hoped that by avoiding the use of electricity, the aliens would never find them, and humanity could continue to hide and survive.
The series proper is set at least a thousand years after these inital events, and has additional considerations aimed towards keeping society stable, without innovation and development, for further millenia. The sat-weapons were used once, to nuke the dissenting (innovative) faction; this proved the weapons' existence to the rest of the world and everyone sat down and shut up. Whether the weapons remained in working order was in question in the timeframe of the main story, but no one really wanted to push those boundaries and lose the PR battle it would create.
As a more generalized justification...
As long as there's public belief that some phenomenon (weird science, supernatural, alien, evil genius, conspiracy, government, etc) targets electro-magnetic fields above a certain strength, R&D can/will be directed away from electricity. Having a society-wide power structure able to back up that belief with shows of force will help keep the public belief stable, depending on the duration, timeframe, and scope of the individual story.
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[*The Difference Engine*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine), by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, gives an alternate-history rationale for steam-powered/mechanical computing, which might help focus innovation in that direction rather than towards electronics.
Additionally, that story was set around 1855, leaving about ninety years until the Real-World development of the transistor and the start of "modern" electronics. Even the Real-World infrastructure for widespread general use of electricity would be decades later.
"Very crude applications" are all I'd expect from electricity for some time yet.
(*The Difference Engine* may be a cyberpunk story in a steampunk setting, depending on your definitions, but it was the first obviously steampunk story that I read.)
It's not futuristic, but it gives generations of time-scale for stories to be set in--depending on how long you think this setting **needs** to persist.
Whether the jump from *The Difference Engine* to Neal Stephenson's [*The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age) is plausible with "very crude applications" of electricity is left as an exercise for the reader, but gives another route to persist the setting. (The post-scarcity aspects of *The Diamond Age* might not be available, but nano-scale mechanical computing was a focus of that story.)
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Or you can *intentionally* break physics.
* Magical effects (fantasy-steampunk rather than scifi-steampunk)
* Quantum Mechanics just aren't a thing
* Perhaps electronics inexplicably work Over There, but not Here. A chunk of R&D might then be spent on replicating either place's tech for use in the other, with more innovation on What is done (effects) and less on understanding How (causes), as the causes aren't the same in all places.
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[Question]
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Let's say that for whatever reason, a population of a country has completely lost interest in anything to do with politics. Nobody shows up to political rallies and nobody votes. Everyone prefers to work on their hobbies or go to the pub or watch soaps on TV instead.
Assume this happens in a current-day first world country with a representative democracy. Would the government change into a different system? Would it still have power, or would it become even more powerful?
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Politicians would become much more corrupt.
The reason why democracies are usually less corrupt than more autocratic government forms is because democratically elected politicians depend on the public opinion. So when nobody cares anymore what they do, they are free to abuse their power in any way they want. Expect politicians to embezzle huge amounts of tax money.
The corruption will likely tickle down through the whole government apparatus, so don't think you can get anything done without a bribe. Well, you *could* start a protest movement against the corruption and demand better control of the government officials, but on the other hand, a new episode of *World's Funniest Cat Videos* is on.
However, this corruption would make the government very inefficient. When the whole government is more concerned with their own good than the public good, it won't get anything done anymore. So you can expect other organizations to unofficially take on government functions.
You want to sue the neighbor but you can't afford to pay the bribe for the judge? Just hire some thugs from your local crime lord and have them beat him up. You need protection but the police chief has a grudge against you? Just hire a private security company. This will empower these organizations and allow them to set up their own rules. So you can expect society to turn into a mafia state where the government is only nominally in power and the force which actually governs daily life are the crime syndicates.
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Trotsky is claimed to have said:
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> "You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you"
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J.R.R. Tolkien expressed a similar sentiment:
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In organizational theory, politics is defined as a means of allocating scarce resources. If people are not interested in politics, then they are either not paying attention, or more likely we need to dig a bit deeper.
People who are not interested in party politics might be like the citizens of "People's Republics" in the 20th century. They were corralled to vote in elections where the Party candidate won with 98.9% of the ballots, and knew with utter certainty that their desires counted for nothing in the greater scheme of things. Today in Western liberal democracies, we are seeing something similar. First written about in a book called "[The revolt of the elites](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0393313719)", people in the political, academic, bureaucratic and crony capitalist class have essentially rigged the system against the rest of the voting public, corralling profits but "socializing" losses (i.e taxpayers absorb the results of bad decisions).
In the case of the People's republics, politics as a means of allocating resources was pushed underground, and black markets, cynical corruption of officials all the way up and down the line and sheer criminality was the rule of the day. One common saying in that era was "They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work". The collapse of communist regimes was accelerated by the hollow economic structure as people worked essentially underground for their own ends, rather than for the State.
In Liberal Democracies, we see an incoherent rage with is expressed in Europe by things like the Brexit, the rise of Nativist parties in major European countries and anti immigration/globalization backlash. (as a footnote, most nativist parties in Europe are incorrectly called right wing by the press; a look at their political platforms as published reveals right away they are far left *National Socialist* parties)
In the United States, we have the spectacle of anti establishment candidates like Bernie Sanders almost winning the Democrat nomination, Donald Trump wining the Republican nomination and "third parties" like Garry Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green party polling in double digits (in the past, a third party candidate with 2% of the vote was an outstanding result).
Less often spoken of is the erosion of the Rule of Law in the United States and more open corruption by government officials. We also see people being strung along with broken promises, for example State employees expecting a government pension might be in for a shock: Government pensions are estimated to be unfunded by *3 trillion dollars* and that is outside of the Federal or State debts.
So a society where people are uninterested in politics due to the real or imagined idea that their preferences are not going to be accounted for will devolve into a lawless society, where social cohesion devotes into family groupings, quasi-criminal organizations and corporations capable of using bribes and other crony capitalist tools to remain afloat. People are still allocating resources, just outside of the official hands of the State. Politics outside of crime will be more like "office politics" rather than party politics.
As a counterpoint to this parade of negativity, if politics is the means of allocating scarce resources, it is theoretically possible to go beyond politics in a post scarcity society. Since social, political and organizational forms will be changed beyond all recognition, this period is sometimes considered a "mundane singularity" (term coined by Brian Wang of [NextBigFuture](http://www.nextbigfuture.com.)).
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Just for fun, add one more variable - what if people took no interest in politics, stopped voting, and **also stopped paying taxes?**
Every government depends upon legitimacy, namely that people should continue to work, pay taxes, and perform civic duties. Without this legitimacy, people would simply stop obeying any of the laws, and the profound expense of "putting a gun to everyone's head" would lead to an immediate collapse. You can see this in nearly every collapse of a government in history; at the end there is a dramatic increase in taxes (or inflation, like the Zimbabwe collapse) to pay for police forces, but the higher taxes erode public confidence that much faster.
If voting were to cease, a "democratic" government would not have any legitimacy, which would ultimately undermine, not enhance its power. Any policy is seen as being created by a small cabal of individuals who have little connection to ordinary citizens, and as such opposing that policy is no longer "opposing yourself." Imagine a "vote" in which 2% of people vote, the winner carries votes from 1.1% of the population, but 20% of people quit paying taxes and 40% of people are buying guns. There is certainly a "vote" happening, just not at the ballot box.
Further thoughts...
In autocratic regimes legitimacy comes from the idea that governing authorities have some sort of special enlightenment to rule that others do not have. This might be of a religious or non-religious nature, with the latter appearing often in Communist regimes. It boils down to "they know better than I do."
In modern democracies this legitimacy comes from the idea that your vote allows you to have a say in how the government operates, and on the flip side, that all elected officials were chosen by the people, and therefore what they do is really just an expression of what the voters want. So to oppose a democratically elected government is to "oppose yourself."
Where this gets interesting, of course, is when a government goes on the same course regardless of who is elected. This would break the idea that your vote has any effect. Or, if no one votes, a politician cannot claim to represent the people, because "the people" didn't choose him, just the 2-3% of political hacks who make up the parties.
At this point the only winning move is to start behaving more like an autocratic regime, and perhaps start some agencies which give large amounts of funding to academic leaders, who in turn act as cheerleaders for the regime. This would give the regime the appearance of being "enlightened" because all of the "enlightened academics" would be backing them with "scientific proof."
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Fans of Adam Curtis' award-winning BBC documentary *[Century of the Self](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self)* know that this is currently the case with most Western democracies and has been for quite some time. Without delving too deep in the documentary (even though you really, really should watch it), here's the (very) basic premise:
Edward Bernays - Sigmund Freud's nephew - used his uncle's theories that humans are not rational economic actors and instead primal beings driven by base instincts like fear, lust, hate, jealousy, greed, and so on, as a means to sell products to people who did not need them. This led to the creation of the public relations industry, with impacts such as the idea that women can smoke cigarettes (which used to be explicitly taboo) to be seen as "independent" (read: exactly the way the Philip Morris corporation wanted them to see themselves as they bought their products), as well as what we consider the typical American breakfast ("Wakey wakey eggs and bakey" was a Bernays creation).
Various business and government interests determined the best way to keep people on a perpetual consumerist hamster wheel was to turn them from active citizens - where they seriously research politics and focus on what is needed - to passive consumers, who are placated with shiny things and new cars and politicians who promise the world to get elected.
So, to answer your question, society would look almost exactly as it does today.
When was the last time you personally looked up a political candidates' policy platform?
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**Exhibit A:** The United States in presidential and non-presidential (**bold**) election years. [Source](http://www.electproject.org/home)
* **2014: 33.2%**
* 2012: 53.6%
* **2010: 37.8%**
* 2008: 56.9%
* **2006: 37.2%**
* 2004: 55.4%
* **2002: 36.3%**
So. What happens in these off years, when voter turnout is significantly lower?
Well voting in off years tends to be more conservative as older voters are more likely to cast a vote all the time.
So a few notes on your scenario.
The lower the voter turnout the easier it is for some group not in the majority or carrying a majority sentiment on a particular issue to take power.
If *literally* everyone the government as was ceases to be. You cannot have an elected democratic government if no one votes...I have trouble comprehending a situation where literally no one votes...maybe it could dwindle over time... I suppose the most likely scenarios would be either
* The government gets a few voters to for itself and votes to change the laws governing the government to just let them do whatever they want for however long they want.
* Corporations step in and take over the responsibilities of governance.
Odds are both scenarios end horribly and with mass oppression, environmental catastrophe and in the end...revolt.
**These people's grand children will be spitting on their grandparents' graves.**
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This state of affairs can come about in two ways.
1. Everybody has lost hope and no longer think voting can help.
2. Everybody thinks that the government is doing a good job and feel no need to interfere with it.
The first alternative is grim, as other answers have described.
From a world building perspective, I find the second alternative more interesting. (Even if less likely) The government is doing their job of administrating the country and everybody is content. People are glad *somebody* is taking on the boring job. Somebody *else*, that is.
One interesting consequence is that politicians would no longer be celebrities. No TV channel would send political debates since nobody would be watching. No newspaper would print articles about one politician criticizing another for being too soft on some issue. People wouldn't want to read about *that*, so the paper wouldn't print it.
This would mean that people who just like the spotlight would no longer look for jobs in politics. That would leave the jobs to actual public servants who could then get on with the job of running the country smoothly and painlessly.
Unfortunately the situation wouldn't be stable. There would be corrupt people who would seek out the very real power of a government job. For these people the lack of spotlight would be perfect. They would slowly turn the blessing into a curse, and we would be back with alternative one.
Still, I can dream...
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So...you said the population of a country. Weirdly, that includes the politicians THEMSELVES. You did say everybody prefers to work on their hobbies. George W. will continue to paint, Jeb will take up crochet, Hilary will learn woodworking, Trump will stop reading articles about himself and start reading the classics. All the lobbyists will go fishing. No one will run for office because no one will be interested in politics. Therefore, there will be no government. But if people are interested in getting things done, on a local level, they will. It would look something like the direct democracy [anarchy system](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-anarchy-101). Of course that would mean they would have to show up to vote, which is an interest in politics. So I guess the people who can afford it will simply hire people to patch up the streets they use.
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Hitler opens [Mein Kampf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf) with a warning that *exactly what he was going to do* is what happens when the general population takes no interest in politics. He himself entered politics because he views that **the more the general populace ignores politics, the more totalitarian the regime can be**.
If I may get up on a soapbox, I dare say that his rally to get the general populace interested in politics is the reason for the banning of Mein Kampf. There is actually very little antisemitism in that book.
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Jose Saramago has a book called *Seeing*. In the book the citizens of the capital of a country does not vote for the election and they do the elections again. They still do not vote and things start to happen. I don't want to give spoilers but let's say it doesn't end well for the citizens.
This is not a complete answer but I can't comment because of my reputation so that's the only way to mention the book.
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[Question]
[
## Preface:
I'm worldbuilding for a story that has been in my head for ages, it's a kinda SciFi/Fantasy combo. There is one "godlike" being that can alter how physics work in a certain area, and it's the source of all "super-tech" in this world.
Real science has not advanced much from our own, no FTL engines nor food replicators or anything of the sort. All the "SciFi/Fantasy" is perpretated either by this godlike being, or his "clerics". The clerics have a connection with this being, and can borrow it's powers. Spaceships need a Cleric if they want to travel farther than the moon, as the Cleric can teleport the whole ship to the destination, generate artificial gravity, and operate a lot of systems that depend on "magic" to work, as they are not feasible today.
These Clerics are already a necessity in my spacefaring society, but I was thinking of ways to make them more essential. One such way, commonly associated in Fantasy tropes, is healing.
There is not much one can do to heal others by means of altering the laws of physics, but I thought that maybe teleporting "things" in and out of a body could be a way for a Cleric to "heal".
I'm no medic, so this might be super wrong but... Could one teleport away a cancer tumor? Or the appendix? Or teleport "in" a pacemaker? Maybe teleport away fluid from the skull instead of having to perforate it for release when it builds up.
## Actual question:
1. Would teleporting objects in or out of the patient body be a "useful" medical practice?
2. Teleporting away a tumor, for example, would that cause internal bleeding and horrible death? Could you teleport something "in" to "seal" the wound and avoid it?
Notes:
I haven't decided if teleporting swaps the positions of the mass from point A to point B, or if when A arrives to destination pushes other mass away, or gets "entangled" with it.
You can choose whatever you decide is best for your answer
### Added Info
**How precise can they be?:** They need to figure out the shape, size and position of what they need to teleport. The mass is nos needed, they define an area in space and teleport whatever is inside it. They can be as precise as the tools for detection allows them. Figure that what is now the high end in diagnostic tools (X-Rays, MRI, TAG, etc...) is commonplace then. I figure this wouldn't be milimetrical, but I'm no expert.
When teleporting things that they can see and touch, their precision is very good, and having a good scanning equipment and dedicating time to define the area to teleport, they can be almost perfectly accurate.
**What can they teleport?** Individual cells? Yes, if their detection tool is precise enough, the rest depends on the skill of the teleporter. Assume some specialice in minute teleports and are very skilled at this. They would not be able to teleport away the solute from the solvent in a homogenous solution. I don't see how, at least. That means they can't take away posion from the blood stream, for example.
I'm ok with this being niche in utility, as long as it has some. The interest in this is making Clerics a little more ubiquitous, and necessary for some things, or even a luxury: Ff Mr.Richman can afford a "teleport surgery" for his son but Mr.Everyman has to bring him to the hospital, expose his child to surgery, recovery time, etc...
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# Teleporting matter in or out would be useful.
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> Actual question:
> Would teleporting objects in or out of the patient body be a "useful" medical practice?
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Some of the obvious utility would be:
* drug delivery
* foreign object removal
* medical device implants
# Mitigating hemorrhaging
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> Teleporting away a tumor, for example, would that cause internal bleeding and horrible death? Could you teleport something "in" to "seal" the wound and avoid it?
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You can mitigate hemorrhaging by insertion of:
* shunts
* absorbent material
* extra cellular matrix
* adhesives
* clamps
In the case of mechanisms that need to tighten, cure, or adhere, the chemistry of the material could be activated by contact with the blood by iron, oxygen, water, some unspecified serum component.
# Example
A damaged liver segment needs to be removed.
1. Prior to excision by teleportation, synthetic arteries are
teleported into position to shunt the blood supply.
2. Each synthetic artery has ends are capped with an adherent material
that rapidly anneals to and integrates with the existing arterial
walls ensuring a smooth leak free vascular transition.
3. The segment is then excised.
4. A thin layer of a cauterizing agent backed by biodegradable gauze to
fill and stabilize the void is put into place.
5. Finally, micro doses of anti-anxiety and pain killers are teleported
directly into the brain centers that respond to the respective
compounds.
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By teleport, could you say that they manipulate and/or fold space?
Meaning the clerics could potentially take an internal area of the body and have it accessible from the outside without opening the patient up, or even disconnecting anything.
By very precisely folding space the whole heart could be accessible, while still staying connected to all of the blood vessels. Just the little patch of space where the heart resides is now located on a table several feet away until the surgeon is finished, and then space is unfolded and the heart is back like it was before. As far as the patient is concerned nothing much happened.
**Edit:**
This does also work for teleporting spaceships across space.
Basically the bit of space surrounding our ship gets folded so now it is somewhere else. Then the ship leaves the folded space at their destination and the cleric can unfold it, returning that bit of reality back to where it belongs.
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Several more ideas and some fridge horror to go with a few of them:
## Emergency Response
An indirect use of teleportation in the world of healing and surgery is to speed up how fast you can respond to an emergency. If a cleric can teleport themselves to a scene of an accident, then they can immediately render first aid. Once they prep the person for teleportation they can directly teleport them to the nearest hospital that is expecting them. Prepping an injured person for teleportation would likely involve bracing the injured area, putting a neck brace on and/or helmet on, and warning them that they may feel a slight drop (as in they miscalculate the teleport and they arrive a few inches above the bed). One of the other uses would be teleporting an organ donation to its destination rather than delivering it. Faster an organ gets to its recipient the better.
## In Vitro Fertilization
Being able to teleport sperm directly into a woman can help deal with several problems that can result in infertility. If that does not work, they can possibly teleport out the egg, fertilize it, and then teleport it back. It should be noted that this can lead to an odd form of rape, since a cleric could potentially perform this operation on an unwilling person without their knowledge. It could also lead to virgins getting pregnant.
## Polyps Removal
If a person gets a colonoscopy and they find something that needs to be removed like polys, the teleportation could help speed up the surgery.
## Child Birth
With teleportation there is no longer a need to perform a cesarean section. If a baby is breached or there is something going wrong with the pregnancy and they need to get the baby out of there teleportation would be very useful. [Star Trek: Voyager](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Deadlock_(episode)) does something like this using the transporters to deliver a baby.
### Abortions
If teleportation can deliver a baby, then it can be concluded that it can remove a fetus. Considering there is a lot of strongly held beliefs and views on abortion this can result in a lot of in universe conflict. Also, since clerics are the ones who can perform the teleport would their theology even allow them to do this?
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**I will use the spoon and fork quote:**
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> You don't use a fork to drink soup but that doesn't make the fork useless
> Just that it doesn't work when drinking soup
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Your Surgery by teleporting is only effective in SOME medical examples. like if you are teleporting away a tumour it would (some of the time) cause internal bleeding (cant teleport cut veins) but it does have its usefulness like removing a foreign body like shrapnel or certain cancers. So to sum it all up it would be useful but not a cure all, people would still go under the knife and doctors would still be needed.
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> It’s not the tool it's how you use it
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One option to consider is turning the entire premise on its head by considering the mechanism of teleportation: **What, exactly, happens when one teleports?**
In your world, teleportation could occur through the deconstruction in one location and its reconstruction in a different location. A Cleric would teleport an object by fully *understanding* its nature, deconstructing it, and reconstructing it elsewhere. Any extraneous objects outside that *understanding* would be left behind. Thus only the most advanced and skilled/knowledgeable clerics could legally work with the most complex objects (human body, spaceships, etc), while the apprentice and entry-level Clerics could legally work with simpler objects (foodstuffs, machine parts, medicines).
In the case you presented, a very advanced Cleric could "teleport" a human body from one bed to another, leaving behind any unnatural or foreign matter such as a tumor, a bullet, a poison, or a scar, even if they didn't know its precise location, thus appearing both miraculous and powerful. But an entry-level Cleric could only operate on the thing itself by inserting medicines and the like as other answers suggested.
Similarly, an advanced Cleric could teleport an entire ship **and its contents**, while an intermediate Cleric could only safely teleport the ship itself, and a beginner could only teleport a few nuts and bolts at a time.
This also introduces the idea of "hacks" that work outside their legally "licensed" realm of expertise, perhaps with unintended consequences...
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It really depends how precise a tool teleportation is, surgery is done with small and very sharp objects because they allow you to make very precise cuts. I'd say that teleporting material *out* of the body would be a dodgy prospect but teleporting things in could be very useful; need to deliver anticancer drugs to an inoperable tumour? Teleport. Need to clamp a vessel you can see but can't get a traditional tool into the area? Teleport. Also for swapping out existing implants, like pacemaker batteries, teleportation would be handy as a non-surgical method. The one thing you might get away with pulling out would be bone splinters from really bad breaks.
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First, Anything sufficiently advanced will appear to be magic even if it isn't.
For example, in Star Trek, matter is converted to energy and then back to matter during the transport cycle. The body is temporarily held in a transport buffer at which point any cells can be removed,added, or transformed into other cells.
Even if the clerics didn't have this precise ability, a skilled cleric, could move cells around during the transport process. The 2 side of a cut would be moved back together, and rebonded at a cellular level as if nothing had ever happened.
1. Removing foreign objects, nail, bullets, or etc easy.
2. Removing plaque in the veins, and any other sort of build would also be trivial. Even cleaning teeth would be trivial. Fat cells removed for weight loss. Maybe fat cells could be recycled, and used in the process of healing someone else.
3. In this case, a tumor wouldn't just be removed it would be transformed back to normal matter.
4. In the case of a tear of skin, the skin would be beamed back into place as if it had never happened.
5. As long as the head survives, it could be teleported onto another spare body, with a cleric with enough skill. They could then move on with their life as if nothing had changed.
If you are that advanced making small amounts of flesh from matter, and teleporting it into place completely sealing the wound.
Even if you couldn't make flesh from matter, you could teleport clamps, and maybe even stitch right into place.
Given the right kind of teleportation, physically cutting you open would be pointless and obsolete. Especially with clerics of advanced training levels.
This would definitely be the case of the rich and the regular people, as the rich would routinely have their veins, blood, teeth, and everything else cleaned at the cellular level. A regular family could not afford this luxury. Basically, the rich family would have one of these cleric living with them. Probably even traveling with them, as a member of the family. Break a leg on vacation, "magic", and the cells are re-bonded back into place as if nothing had happened. Every morning the family has their teeth cleaned, plaque(teeth and veins) removed, bowel emptied(maybe), and etc. The cleric may even be good enough to teleport the "common cold" cells from the body, this nearly instantly curing them.
Certainly, good school, would have one on staff to cure common things that occur during daily life. Catch a stomach bug, "magic", stomach emptied down the drain. Colds/flus and etc all healed by having infect cells immediately removed. Constipation, "magic", the blockage is gone, the inverse condition the liquids removed from your bowel.
Caesarean section, obsolete, "magic" and the baby is removed and placed on the table. If any organ couldn't be repaired for any reason, "magic" and its removed. "magic" again and the cells on the end are fused to stop, what otherwise would be internal bleeding.
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How do your clerics "select" the matter? From your question it sounds like they do it spatially, perhaps by envisaging the volume to be removed or something. However that isn't going to work for surgery because they will be operating blind. A real surgeon can see what they are cutting and hence decide to cut that bit of tumour but avoid the nerve running next to it. Your clerical surgeons need to be able to do the same.
So for this to work these clerics must be able to sense the properties of the matter they are manipulating and hence distinguish between matter to be removed and matter to be left. If so then they don't actually need to teleport it: killing a cancer in place is just as good as excising it and doesn't leave any nasty internal haemorrhages.
By the way, if the teleported tissue is replaced by vacuum then you will injure or kill the patient by hydrostatic shock. If it is replaced by the air where the item is teleported to then you had better make sure the air is sterile and doesn't get in the blood. Maybe swapping the teleported tissue with sterile saline is the best option.
Surgeons identify different tissues by their appearance, but whatever mode of perception is made available to these clerics is unlikely to work like that. So you need to think about what they do perceive. Can they identify DNA? Perhaps, given a sample (e.g. a biopsy) of a tumour they can then identify any other tissue with the same DNA mutation. Its a noisy signal (lots of cells in your body have all sorts of mutations that don't turn into cancer), but they would be able to perceive any metastasized tumours and deal with them.
How precise this gets is going to be important. Once a tumour metastasizes there are cancerous cells floating around the body. Every so often one of them manages to latch on somewhere and start reproducing, and you get a new tumour. If your clerics have 1mm resolution then they can zap growing tumours but not eliminate the disease completely. So the patient is kept alive and healthy, but needs to come back to the clinic every year for repeat treatment.
On the other hand if your clerics can do the molecular equivalent of a SQL "select" statement then they could target every cell with the mutation and cure the disease instantly. They could also cure infectious diseases in the same way; just teleport all the pathogens out of the body.
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**Background :** In a certain medieval world with magic, people are always in danger of being attacked by non-human races, like orcs, trolls or giant spiders, etc. Villagers keep the village safe by using swords or magic. However the frequency of the attacks on humans is increasing. Therefore the King wants to choose children who are talented in magic, and give them training to repel the non-human invaders. Magicians are always more powerful than swordsmen, so it makes sense to train a group of magicians rather than a army of soldiers. (An average magician can take on 15-20 soldiers.)
The problem is, *how should he convince the parents, that he needs to take their children away, in order to train them to become monster-slayers?* It's widely known, that becoming a magician is extremely difficult, especially those who specialise in killing.
Note : The children would be taken from their parents at the age of 8-10 years old, and they would undergo training until he/she is 20. Then they would wander to different villages, protecting them from attacks. Children with a talent in magic are very rare, in average 1 out of 500 (which is very rare in the medieval ages). The children can be taken by force, but that might cause a revolt (the king does not want to be known as a tyrant, and even one child taken would cause the entire village to know which might spread to other villages). All people in this world worship one main god, the Sun God. Also, humanity is quite weak, so building a large army is almost pointless, since they don't know where the monsters live, attacking the non-human races is not a possibility.
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Make the position prestigious, and/or make sure money gets sent back to the parents. Since they are so effective, you can afford to spend several times as much money per magician as you would on a soldier and still save money compared to having a regular army.
If the mages are called something like "royal high magicians", and they are given good pay and status then the children will want to go, and might very well convince their parents.
If the children want to go, then the biggest obstacle is the parents needing them around to work at the farm. If some compensation is sent to the parents for a few years, either money or labor, they are less likely to protest. Land grants can also be very popular.
Also, consider doing some recruiting from orphans, beggars and other low-class children. If being a royal mage is a good-paying, well-respected job where you excel by talent and not by background that will be vastly preferable to the lives these children live and they will flock to join. Hell, some might come just for the free room and board.
This might even work too well, and you'll have more applicants than you need. If so, make sure to have an objective (or seemingly objective) entrance exam. That way, you are seen as fair as well as generous - no revolts likely.
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It won't be difficult at all.
In an age before readily available contraception it was hard to control the number of children you had. So in medieval times most people had the problem of having too many children.
You only need one son to inherit your property. Further sons only fragment the inheritance, thus making their life much more difficult, and further daughters just cost you without any benefit in return.
It's no miracle that sending children to a monastery was very popular back then. So popular in fact that getting in was rather difficult. Monasteries could choose from applicants, so in most regions they could afford to be picky and only recruit novices from nobility.
So when the king promises to give the magically gifted children free lodging, free food, an education and a guaranteed employment as a magician, that's a really great deal for the parents. The only situation where it might be a problem is when the king wants the only son of someone. In that case he might either have to offer some incentive or use force.
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Just tell the parents that their children are gifted and that the king would like to invite the children to a special school where they can learn to master their abilities. Welcome to xaviers school for gifted children...
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> The problem is, how should he convince the parents that he needs to take their child away in order to train him to become a monster-slayer?
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The same way in the real world kings convinced the people to fight for another king they never heard about, because the king promised that other king to send a certain number of soldiers: He's the king, he got his power from god, he decided that this shall happen, and therefore it will happen.
If that's not enough, then the next stage of convincing is to punish the non-obedient parents.
You know, things were not very democratic back then.
Of course it also helps if the position of a magician is of high prestige, or gets paid very well. That will reduce resistance considerably.
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Call it a full time elite school free of charge for specially gifted children. After finishing they will have a high position in society and well paid like a councilor. Give them the possibilty to visit their parents every few months. If these are poor famalies who need every helping hand, you might want to give their parents compensation for the time of schooling like some free food. Parents (or even the village) will be proud to have children going to this school.
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If the people are committed enough to the religion the king may pretend that magically gifted children are chosed by the sun god or something like that, relaying the responsibility on a higher authority which the people cannot dispute.
It might help to fake the process as optional like this: all magically gifted children and their families are relocated to the capital to ensure their safety and that of the nation (so that the gifted children do not grow up to become a threat) on expense of the nation, this should not be a problem for the families, as it is quite reasonable. Once there, the children are pressured into "trying out" the training process, but the families are allowed to assist and it is possible to step out at any moment. Only when a family does try to step out will a never-ending line of obstacles be thrown into their path (could be bureaucratic, as with insane waiting times, or the parents could be judged insane/found criminal and the child brainwashed/peer pressured into accepting to continue the training).
The fake criminal/sociopath route could also be taken more directly, accusing all parents of gifted children as being dangerous but "graciously" offering the orphaned children housing/education on expense of the nation, but that is more easily discovered.
A good tactic to prevent families from resisting the training as magicians is to make them (over-) aware of the danger that stems from the monsters, exaggerating the numbers where possible, perhaps even staging attacks on villages where a gifted child was born.
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Make the training programme an official school-like construct and simply move all gifted children (with their families) into the capital city. The parents will be given new work in the city (probably less harsh or better paying than their previous jobs) whilst their gifted children go to the special school. If they have multiple children, the non-gifted ones can be educated in a regular school, put to work like their parents or trained to be soldiers/knights, or a mixture of all three. If you are low on room in the capital city, merely eject other workers as necessary (which is a bit tyrantish, but it's for the greater good).
The gain of a single wizard and some extra workers should roughly offset the cost of the housing. If there are disputes, you could change the arrangement to having only one parent stay with the child or let them offer up just the child to be cared for by appointed caregivers in a dormatory-like situation.
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You could have a policy of [conscription](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription). Simply pass a law saying "We need magicians, and if nobody volunteers you will be drafted by force". It's not entirely pleasant, but if the villagers are aware of the problems and just how useful magicians are, the policy will be accepted until such time that it is no longer needed. Also such a thing wouldn't be uncommon in medieval times. [Medieval levies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#Medieval_levies) were commonplace.
(It's somewhat ironic to be giving this answer on the centenary year of World War I. Conscription was brought into action on 27th January 1916 in Britain)
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Have the wizards in the field tasked with finding recruits and instruct them to kill the parents, peasants wont be able to stop them and by the time the apprentice becomes a wizard they'll have been indoctrinated enough that their elder peers can pressure them into continuing the cycle.
Thus stained with blood the new wizard will zealously believe that sacrifices have to be made for the good of the kingdom, it's either that or face the guilt of having become the very monster that took their parents and with every new recruit found this conviction will only grow stronger and stronger.
Pressuring young wizards into killing a recruit's family will seem perfectly natural to them, by this point they're totally aware of how the cycle works and wilfully protect it.
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Disinherit gifted children.
Regardless of whether or not they are sent for training, they are legally made unable to inherit the family possessions. This provides a *stick* to match the *carrot* of compensation money when a child is taken for training.
There also needs to be a guarantee that a magic child taken for training is employed for life, even if not graduating to become a killer.
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Check out Magician by Raymond E. Feist, this sounds strikingly similar to a scenario which exists in that universe.
In summary, on a different world there exists an "Academy" run by Magicians known as "Great Ones" who - thanks to their historic service in saving the world from a catastrophic threat - have been given the privilege of operating outside the law.
Anyone who is detected to have aptitude is immediately seen as almost the property of the Assembly, and a Great One, being above the law, is fully able to take the child there and then for training.
I won't go into any more detail, but as I said, it would probably be worth your while to take a look at it and how it is dealt with there to provide some sort of comparison for the worldbuilding you're attempting to do.
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The king should kill the special children's parents through the magicians he currently possess.
Bring a seasoned magician of the country and make him tell the orphaned children that the trolls murdered raided the village and killed everyone.
To avoid suspicion, he should order the killing of some parents whose children aren't special.
A grotesque plan, I know. But the children would be motivated to kill the enemy in order to save the empire.
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Authors are magic users who have chosen to make a fictional world the source of their magic, written in a book they try to have access to at all times, instead of training themselves to follow the usual path of magic which involves channeled energy from the soul.
The book is enchanted to simulate the workings and goings on of a world in a universe from the rules(physics, general description of the world, starting politics, etc) the author puts down on the first page of the book, with all subsequent pages flashing with sketches and paragraphs in a dizzying display of it trying to write down and remember everything that happens within the universe of the author's book. No matter how many times you turn a page past the center of the book there always seems to be more pages to go, a showing that the fictional world is technically infinite, with excess pages piling up on the left or right seeming to disappear if you turn too many pages as if they never existed in the first place.
They can enter and exit their world at will and explore and influence it at their leisure, but they must be able to fit through the portal that appears if they were to step on their book when it is laid down with its pages open. This portal is the size of two of the book's pages, and so for the most part authors try to either be very skinny or carry a very large book so that they can fit through. Should they not like something that's a thing or that's happening in their book's world they can take a quill once outside of it and rewrite reality within their book's universe on one of the pages. What they've written disappears as things on the book's pages usually do of course, but the changes have nonetheless been made.
While they are essentially gods within the worlds of their books, there is scholarly debate as to whether the art of authors is too dangerous to be practiced by the general public, because just like how an author can go into and stay in their book, things can come out of their book and stay in the real world.
Authors have used their magic to conjure up from their books whatever they seem to require at that particular moment, if their worlds have what they need, and have even been observed to conjure loyal creatures from specific books that serve their every whim.
Fortunately there are some limitations to this ability, being that things coming out of the book follows the same requirement of needing to be able to fit through the portal the size of two of the book's pages, and should the physics under which it exists in the fictional world of an author not fit with the physics of the real world it will either not function as it does in fiction or soon cease to live or exist entirely as the fictional physics holding it together has no sway in the real world.
Authors are aware of these limitations on their own magic and so try to have worlds with physics that fit as close to those of the real universe as possible. Another peculiar quirk of their magic is that whatever books they want to use for their magic needs to be leather-bound and have within it 100 actual writable pages. The quality of the leather and the paper doesn't matter, just that those conditions be fulfilled for the enchantment of the book to work. The ink and quill used in the writing of the rules on the first page doesn't matter either, just that they are good enough to write things with in a manner that is legible to more people than the author.
'Real world' physics in the setting is basically like ours, with exception to the magic that people can do which by definition basically ignores physics anyway but I thought I'd mention it regardless. For a power comparison to another kind of magic user, a fire mage can produce fire like a flamethrower and can cause tnt-like explosions. Many others exist. There's no inherent risk or cost to using magic other than being stupid with it and it costing your life, like a fire mage setting off the explosion too close to himself and subsequently dying, because I follow that just because you can use a certain kind of magic doesn't mean you're immune to its effects and would require from you to either use it intelligently or suffer the consequences. More than one magic type can be learned, usually a shielding one along with whatever else the magic user has learned just so they can be a bit more careless if they need to be, but any more than two would likely take more years of study than most people are willing to go through.
**Is it possible that authors might be too powerful for your typical medieval fantasy setting?**
List of changes to be made to make them less overpowered/apocalyptic in accordance to answers, and possible self-realizations:
* The book must be able survive the presence of whatever comes out of it in order for the book to allow it to enter the real world. This prevents things like conjuring a piece of a star and destroying the world.
* Living things pulled out of a book, intelligent or not, will not be able to practice magic in the real world even if they had magic in their fictional world due to them not having souls from the real world. Soul manipulation magic might be a workaround to this but whether an author wants to involve themselves with necromantic cults or practices to grant their summons the ability to use magic in the real world(which they'll still need to learn) will be up to them.
* Nothing in the book world has a greater intelligence or cognitive capacity or learning ability than the author that made the world, but they might know things the author doesn't that is specific to living in the world in the book, like how to play a specific song or instrument the people in the book have or how to work a smithy or what mushrooms from the book-world are safe to eat.
* Each time something comes out of the book that is not the author an actual page of the initial pages disappear from the book, with up to a maximum of X-1 instances(to make it so that the first page stays) of things being able to be pulled out of a book for any period of time, X being the amount of pages the book was originally made of. Putting something back into the book returns the page and allows for using it for another purpose. This does not hurt the world's simulation or suddenly cause certain areas or things to stop existing in the book world, but this should at least somewhat limit the infinite wealth issue. For things that can't exactly stay separated from other things of its kind that was summoned and would be intermixed(like sand), any kind of approximate mass of the summoned things returned to the book will do and needs not be the actual original sand or whatever that was summoned from the book. This should also help curb the stockpiling of too many explosives or other items of such 'I win because I have infinite X' scenarios.
* Authors need to be aware of the physical locations of things inside of the book world in order to summon them. This would force them to need to experience and travel the world in their book in order to find that which they might want to summon. Unless a living thing is caged up or more or less in the same place at all times anyway this may also make summoning them less reliable. This would also force them to mine for gold or whatever other raw resource in order to know where it is if they want to summon it in the real world, if their world even has it in the first place. Manually making sure the gold is present is an option but would still require knowing where it is to summon. Sure they might be able to manually make sure it's easily attainable but this would still require them to write its physical location in by using relative reference points in their writing that would only be attainable by being in and experiencing their book world, which would also need to be survivable for them in order to do this.
* Just like the real world, the book world has a chaos factor that would make the exact simulation of the real world for future prediction or counterfeit or other such reasons hard to pull off. With enough books made with the same set of rules with the purpose of simulating the real world the author might eventually come across a book world that gets things right but the odds of that are slim and most sane people would probably give up at some point.
* There is a degree of skill and knowledge involved/required with writing the rules of the world on the first page. Failure to account for certain things might be harmless or might prove lethal to the author entering their book due to many things that would fit the bill of 'a world with our physics and with life', as the world might not have oxygen for example and the author wouldn't survive there but it would be perfect for the simulated creatures there. Since the first page is limited it can be hard to account for everything without using an excessively huge book, so authors would need to choose their words carefully and use the space efficiently if they want to feasibly carry around their book. Edits can be made to the rules if they realized they went wrong somewhere but it would waste valuable writing space on the first page.
* Books pulled from a book world cannot be used for the enchantment that creates an author's book. Just in case anyone is thinking of this :)
* The 'still being able to pull casters out of your book by putting them into the world as babies' I view as a valid exploit that a morally questionable author might do. People would notice the missing babies and would try to find them or do something about their disappearance, like dealing with the author if they suspect one.
* Books will not allow things to be pulled from them if its presence would lead to the book's destruction as a result of its breakdown due to incompatible physics or due to the function of an object not being possible in the real world, like the breakdown of a star genesis or containment device. Hopefully now there'll be no more stars from the books.
* Author books are soul-bound to the author and only allow one per author like a unique lock and key system. A different book can be obtained by removing the enchantment on an author's book and turning it back into a mundane one. This can be used to rewrite the rules of an author's world if their previous one ran out of space or wasn't desirable, or increase the amount of pages in the book. Should an author's book be turned back into a mundane one, anything they have summoned(is still present in the real world) will cease to exist. An author that is killed will also turn their book back to a mundane one.
Still thinking about ways to deal with the other things pointed out in wizzwizz4's answer.
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# Yes, as you can casually destroy the world.
If you make a book about the sun, you can casually summon part of the sun, and destroy the planet. Any magic system which can casually destroy the biosphere of the planet is too strong.
# You can pull out casters and books from your book who ideologically agree with you and quickly form an endless hegomizing swarm, or pull out normal wizards who agree with you.
The ability to duplicate advanced magical abilities endlessly lets a single author quickly conquer the earth.
Since the book size isn't defined, you can just make an arbitrarily large book and pull out whoever.
# You can make infinite wealth instantly and conquer the planet financially.
This allows a single author to quickly conquer the planet.
# You can generate infinite knowledge and intelligence.
Since you can pull out knowledgable beings, you can pull out smarter and smarter beings. This will quickly cause a singularity, as smarter beings can write smarter books, and soon you again have a hegomizing swarm AI conquering the universe.
The same is true of intelligence augmentations.
# You can emulate every other magic tradition
Since you can just pull out magic users, you can just pull out experienced magic users who agree with you endlessly.
# You can easily make non nuclear explosions on the scale of nuclear explosions.
Since you can make arbitrarily large books, you can simply pour explosives out of them endlessly. This gives you enough firepower to blow up any army, castle, or country.
[Answer]
Here's an idea, inspired by the Myst computer game series. Writing such books is *hard*. You can't really specify tiny details and expect things to magically fall in place. Well, you can, but it's almost always a bad idea. There's ALWAYS unintended consequences and it takes lots of skill and experience just to write a world that doesn't kill you immediately on entering. So forget about your mountains of gold or superintelligent servants, you don't have snowball's chance in hell of making that. Still, if you do manage to pull off a livable world, there might be something interesting in there...
[Answer]
Nepene-nep covers how overpowered access to drastically different worlds would be, but barely different worlds can be extremely overpowered too.
Imagine you wanted to conquer the world within 5 years. Just write a book set in a world where the only changes are that it is 5 years and 6 months later, and that your conquest was successful, and ask around how it was done. The simulation will take care of the details, all you need to do is ask about them, and then you can apply them in the real world. This kind of thing should work on any goal, no matter how big or small.
The same kind of thing can be used to avoid any possible countermeasures from people who know about your abilities. Like the counterfeiting example in the comments to Nep's answer. No matter how advanced the currency gets, you can always just create a world where identical money is given to you for free.
[Answer]
With apologies to Nepene Nep. All of the problems in [their answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/218231/11665) are still valid problems.
## You can still casually destroy the world
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> The book must be able survive the presence of whatever comes out of it in order for the book to allow it to enter the real world. This prevents things like conjuring a piece of a star and destroying the world.
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This restriction is not sufficient. Simply remove an in-use Star Genesis kit from the world of [Bobo's Star](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?94319).
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> and should the physics under which it exists in the fictional world of an author not fit with the physics of the real world it will either not function as it does in fiction or soon cease to live or exist entirely as the fictional physics holding it together has no sway in the real world.
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A Star Genesis kit is clearly fictional; you can't keep a star in your bedroom. The star inside, however? Well… it's not going to remain a *star*, but it could certainly do some damage on its way out. “Soon” suggests there might be lee-way, where you could rapidly remove the book from the vicinity of the disintegrating stellar containment technology.
## You can still pull out casters from your book
Simply put them *in* your book as babies. Real soul, real magic.
## You can still make a lot of wealth
Pull out and assemble a gem-making furnace. Make gems. Disassemble the gem-making furnace and return it to your book.
Your medieval fantasy setting does not expect this. If you hide the fact that gems are basically worthless, you can get a decent starting budget from the wealthy.
Then move onto another trick. Climb to the top of your tallest tower, open a book, and tip out a single, really really long rod of gold. It'll cost you one page, but you can cope with that; simply include an extra page in the original book, if you think you'll still need that world afterwards. (You're planning ahead, after all… right?) Again, hide how you now have more gold than some countries; the other wealthy people need to think your wealth is as legitimate as theirs, and they *will* – so long as they aren't keeping track, and so long as you don't seem to threaten them politically. (Be secretive with your trades.)
You'll be able to figure out where to go from there:
## You can still generate infinite knowledge and intelligence
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> Living things pulled out of a book, intelligent or not, will not be able to practice magic in the real world even if they had magic in their fictional world due to them not having souls from the real world.
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> Nothing in the book world has a greater intelligence or cognitive capacity or learning ability than the author that made the world, but they might know things the author doesn't that is specific to living in the world in the book, like how to play a specific song or instrument the people in the book have or how to work a smithy or what mushrooms from the book-world are safe to eat.
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You forgot one thing: characters have an effect on their world. A large number of characters with a common purpose would create educational institutions and work together. There are probably dozens of ways to cheese this, at *least*:
* An educational regime dedicated to increasing the knowledge and intelligence of the author. Either this raises the limitations on the characters, allowing a tightly-fed-back exponential increase in intelligence, or (if the intelligence threshold is set at book creation time), the author can make a *new* book with a slightly-higher intelligence limit.
+ If time travel is possible inside the author's world, straight up magitech handwavium intelligence boost the author, then send them back in time a few seconds to prop up the intelligence limit to make that have been possible. Sure, that intelligence boost still can't leave the setting… but does it need to? Heck, the author's probably intelligent enough to *make* it consistent with real-world physics, now.
* An ancient, galactic society of AI researchers who, without ever creating a super-human *intelligence* (which they cannot do, due to the laws of their world), work out all of the theory necessary to produce one. Use this knowledge to create the superhuman intelligence in the real world. This new intelligence, being born in the real world, would gain a real soul, and could become an Author. Rinse and repeat.
* Simply give your problems to the characters. Many regular intelligences, working together, can come up with much better ideas than any could alone.
+ If the world inside the book runs faster than the real world, even better!
## You can still emulate every other magic tradition
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> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — [Arthur C. Clarke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)
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Characters don't need to be intelligent to have nigh-magical technology. And then you can just borrow some; I'm sure they'd be happy to let you have it.
## You can still easily blow up the world.
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> Each time something comes out of the book that is not the author an actual page of the initial pages disappear from the book,
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You assume that the author cares about the book. Normally, this would be true… but how likely is an author to care about a book like:
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> The world has normal, real-world physics. There is a room, sealed from all outside intrusion. The room contains four hundred devices (destroyers) that can explode with such ferocity as to demolish a hill, and another (activator) that can cause them to explode. No destroyers will detonate except when activated by the activator, which is designed to permit deliberate detonation and prevent accidental activation.
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Books are positively *cheap*, compared to the nigh-unlimited power that using up its pages can bring. Unless an author can only have one book ever… but there are people who *would* use their one and only book on something like this. (And yes, medieval people *did* know of explosions; anywhere you're storing flour is prone to accidental deflagration.)
And if an author *can* only have one book? [Simply add more pages.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_rebinding)
[Answer]
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> Would authors be too powerful for your typical medieval fantasy setting?
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This all depends on what other elements are in your setting. In your "typical" medieval fantasy setting, this power could just be one of many possible overpowered abilities which inherently makes it balanced.
Let's take D&D's Faerûn as an example of a typical medieval fantasy setting. Most magic is small scale stuff: throw a fire ball that can take out a few guards, or heal some minor wounds... but then at the upper end of the spectrum, you have a world full of magic so powerful that any one of a few hundred possible foes would seem powerful enough to conquer the whole world... if not for all the competition in the over powered Big-Bad-Guy department.
So the question is not if this form of magic is too powerful, but what forces exist in your universe to check-and-balance the power of these mages. So, could an Author create a 12 foot tall book, and use it to summon an army of loyal ogres to do his bidding, or giant piles of gold, or a massive deadly cloud of poison? Absolutely! But the Lich King next door is busy raising an army of zombies from the remains of a recent battlefield, and the Artificer next door to him is building his army of stone golems, and the Emperor next door to him is conscripting an army of battle mages, and the Warlock next door to him is busy trying to open a gateway to Hell... and somewhere in the middle of all of these things is a simple farm boy bound by destiny to one day defeat you all and restore peace and prosperity to the land.
So yes, an Author could be a very powerful person, but in the typical medieval fantasy, this is perfectly okay. Even if an author technically had the power to summon a world ending explosion, that does not mean there are not gods even more powerful than an Author willing to use a little bit of miracle power, prophesy, and/or fate manipulation to stop this from ever happening.
[Answer]
## First Law of Thermodynamics
If you want to make sure that your magic is fair, the easiest way is to follow the ultimate anti-cheat in the real world: The First Law of Thermodynamics.
To put it simply it means
* You cannot create something (matter or energy) from nothing
* You cannot completely remove something (matter or energy)
* You can convert matter into energy and vice-versa
Any magic that violates these rules is overpowered. So for example, if I can pull even a drop of water out of a book, I can repeat that and flood the world. If I can pull any kind of energy from the book, I can repeat that, and have unlimited energy/power which can be converted to matter.
So a good way to go about designing magic systems is to follow the First Law of Thermodynamics (doesn't have to be exactly exact, but in principle). For every something you make, the magic takes something.
## Examples
A very good example is the Full Metal Alchemist anime. Alchemists (basically mages) in that series use up source material, which is then converted into other material or energy.
Another example, which you can see in all sorts of media, is magic, that takes from the environment (depleting magic streams or other life), from the mage (which weakens/kills the mage) or from another magic dimension (which first has to exist, not a dimension that is created by the mage).
## Application
So to apply that to your authors (really nice idea, basically Fantasy-Scribblenauts), they need to use up some resource.
Creating the Book-Worlds and going into them probably wouldn't need to use up energy, because the Book-Worlds could be imaginary, kinda like an advanced Holodeck or VR.
Taking something out of the Book-Worlds is where the whole thing breaks down, since it would create something from nothing.
So maybe the books are made up of some special material and that material is used up by weight. So if the book weighs 10 Kilograms, and you pull out 1 KG of Gold, 1 KG of the pages of the book would disapper, so that the book now only weighs 9 KG.
Since this material can effectively be converted into anything, it is also the most valuable material in the world.
As a second rule, the author would need to understand what they create in detail. It is not enough to say "I create a super-smart robot", but you actually need to know everything the robot would know. The book would work like a very advanced manufacturing process. That way, for example, the author wouldn't be able to create something/someone that is much smarter than the author themselves.
This would solve all the other problems mentioned by the other answers:
* Destroying the world is much harder. 10 kg of Sun are hot, don't have nearly enough energy to do serious harm to the world.
* Pulling casters/soldiers/smart beings out of a book would be possible, but those couldn't be smarter or more magically powerful than the author. Also, people weigh a lot. 50kg or more of the magic material is expensive! It might be much easier to hire people.
* Creating wealth wouldn't work, since the magic material is worth more than anything you could convert it into (at least, in material value).
* Generating infinite knowledge and intelligence wouldn't work
* Emulating other magic traditions wouldn't work, since the author cannot give created objects abilities, that they themselves don't have
* Nuclear explosions would still work, but again, it might be cheaper to just buy some uranium. Also, explosions from creating infinite explosives won't work.
* In general, creating living things would be incredibly difficult, because the author needs to know where each little blood vessel goes and where every cell should be.
[Answer]
**This sounds like [The Chronicles of Amber](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/316876.The_Chronicles_of_Amber)**
Amber has a similar premise. The main characters are part of the Amber royal family and can venture out into "Shadow", which is an infinite number of universes. Some universes are "lo-tech", and rely on horses and swords - in general, explosives don't work well in these universes. Some are "high-tech" and have things like cars, gun powder, and nukes.
The royal siblings don't like each other and have no issue blowing their kin to smithereens if it puts them ahead. So why don't they just trade nukes? The worlds they live in are "lo-tech" and nukes and other explosive devices don't work due to the laws of physics being different.
**The same is true for your books. Every book has it's own physics, which may not translate to the writer's world.**
Sure, you can write a book about a planet destroying weapon (aka Death Star), but on this side it's a giant hunk of metal that shoots a flash-light beam.
Want a 50ft tall giant with armored scales? His body structure wasn't designed for our atmosphere and gravity and he falls down a moment after stepping out of the page. Same goes for the super-genius visiting our world. He's the smartest man in any universe where 2 + 2 = 5
Throw in a couple of other rules such as the book becomes increasingly difficult to open the more materials are pulled through and you can limit the power of your authors.
**EDIT**
I don't think author mages are overpowered. It's a fine art matching book physics to real-world physics. After the first few "planet of gold" books, all precious metals and gems will be effectively worthless, and **your world will be the ultimate knowledge economy**. The devil is in the details.
[Answer]
**Books are not truly portals to another realm**
The common perception that Authors can enter their books and bring back artefacts or even people is not exactly true.
Authors can project themselves into their works and interact with the world they have created. That much is true.
But nothing can truly enter or leave the book. The book is in truth a simulated reality and the projection of the Author is merely an avatar, not their physical selves.
The Author themselves simply enters a tiny hyperspace oubliette which serves as a kind of simulation-chamber. Projecting what their Avatar is seeing and experiencing,
and reading what the Author is attempting to do.
**They are effectively playing a video game rather than truly entering the world they created.**
Something more like a Star Trek holodeck than a Myst style world-writing/interacting mechanic.
The Books themselves can however Conjure physical matter in a manner similar to other more conventional magics.
The Author benefits from this as a way to keep themselves fed and watered while interacting with the Book-Verse. After all, it's just a simulation and the Author is emphatically not..
The fringe-benefit is that anything the Author wants to bring back is Conjured by the Book within the Sim space and not removed from them when they leave.
Clothes they wear in the Book are not lost when they leave.
Weapons or artefacts are theirs to keep.
Coins and money are theirs to keep and (depending on the book) may be indistinguishable from real-world money.
Magical Counterfeiting is a whole issue in itself, but the Books do nothing that a skilled Wizard can't accomplish with some work.
The upshot is that the Book isn't actually doing much outside of the normal scope of Conjuration and Illusion magics that any qualified wizard can do.
The normal rules apply, it's merely a highly sophisticated implementation of it.
A Book-Portal to the Heart-of-the-sun Dimension isn't going to work as a Weapon of Mass Destruction because the Book has only a limited maximum magical output to produce fire with. It has not created a universe of infinite sun-fire, only a passable simulation of a small part of one.
It might well generate a giant fireball that incinerates everything for a hundred meters, but that's nothing a capable Fire-Wizard can't do.
More realistically, it'll produce an uncomfortably high heat, and the otherwise convincing illusion of a portal to a realm of fire and light.
It's up to the Author whether their book is actually capable of harming its users.
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> While they are essentially gods within the worlds of their books, there is scholarly debate as to whether the art of authors is too dangerous to be practiced by the general public, because just like how an author can go into and stay in their book, things can come out of their book and stay in the real world. [...]
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> Is it possible that authors might be too powerful for your typical medieval fantasy setting?
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Everyone is correct that the short answer is "Yes, with such powerful magic you can destroy the world." But your *typical* medieval fantasy setting has at least two innate corrective principles:
**Wizards are old and wise.** Either axiomatically (cf. Tolkien's Istari) or simply because the young stupid ones are killed off early (cf. *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality*. This quote is from [Chapter 20](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20), but I believe the same motif comes up in several chapters):
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> "Yes, nuclear weapons!" Professor Quirrell was almost shouting now. "Even He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named never used those, perhaps because he didn't want to rule over a heap of ash! They never should have been made! And it will only get worse with time!" Professor Quirrell was standing up straight instead of leaning on his desk. "There are gates you do not open, there are seals you do not breach! The fools who can't resist meddling are killed by the lesser perils early on, and the survivors all know that there are secrets you *do not share* with anyone who lacks the intelligence and the discipline to discover them for themselves! Every powerful wizard knows that! Even the most terrible Dark Wizards know that! And those idiot Muggles can't seem to figure it out! The eager little fools who discovered the secret of nuclear weapons didn't keep it to themselves, they told their *fool* politicians and now we must live under the constant threat of annihilation!"
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**When the world is threatened by annihilation, a hero arises.** Sure, the Big Bad might pervert his Authority and *try* to destroy the world, and he might even come close to succeeding; but the whole point of your story is to explain how the hero(es) thwarted him in the end. Cf. *So You Want To Be a Wizard* (and also basically every fantasy adventure with this level of stakes).
"A hero arises" works only if you're willing to write that story with those stakes. If you're aiming for a smaller scale (*Thieves' World*, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? I dunno enough about the oeuvre to know for sure the names I'm dropping match the semantics I mean), then you probably avoid this trope... *or*, scale it down to match! Cf. *The Mysterious Red Tape Gang* or *Scooby-Doo*. Old Man Withers is working on a book in his basement that won't destroy the world but will make the village of Marian Mede slightly more unpleasant to live in? Warrior-Hermit Janus Marple discovers the plot and destroys Withers' book just in the nick of time!
Finally, here's a non-traditional alternative, just to prove I can do it ;) — **Fork the blockchain.** A sufficiently skilled Author can with a few deft words evoke the entirety of the current physical universe within the pages of his Book. Such Authors always keep a ["go Book"](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/go_bag) near at hand, so that if the *current* universe seems about to be destroyed, they can quickly step through and pronounce, ["I define myself to be on the outside."](https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/77zo3h/an_engineer_a_physicist_and_a_mathematician_are/)
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
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Destroy the ecosystem:
From medium orbit: Toss out a long rope with a substantial weight on the end--it will orient vertically with the author at one end the weight at the other, now he's in a very low gravity environment. Pour out a rod of anti-lead. When it reaches thick enough atmosphere the results will be spectacular.
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In my low-fantasy setting there is a civilization of completely blind humanoid creatures. Their ability to perceive the world is directly related to the other senses (hearing, smell and touch), which are slightly more heightened than ours. Aside from that, they have no other special ability.
If I think of them as a completely peaceful civilization I have no issue imagining one of their towns. Most aspects of everyday life that usually require sight can be done even without it, if society is organized around non-visual sources of information. But the world outside is not always peaceful, so I suppose that even these blind people would need some kind of fighting skills, even if just for defense purposes. But how could they fight on the same level of sight-owning creatures?
I don't know how much the stereotype of the blind martial artist can be used in this situation...the more I read about enhanced senses (in a realistic way), the more I feel that they cannot have at close range the same precision and detail of sight. So I'm seeing two possible directions for an hypothetical military equipment of this blind civilization:
* Heavy armored melee fighters, with armors designed to absorb the hit with minimal damage and convey the vibration enough to reveal the exact position of the attacker. Maybe even made of an highly reflective metal, to impair the vision of the opponent and bring down its level of perception.
* Polearm-like weapons that allow to keep some distance from the attacker, like spears or halberds (maybe with bells attached near the tip to use their sound for a little bit of echolocation, or holes in the shaft that allow to read the sound of the air through it).
But these two directions seem quite in conflict, since most pole weapons need to be used with a certain degree of agility. Is there any way they can work together, or some other ways to fight at close range without being at disadvantage?
As for long range weapons instead, I suppose that anyone of them can be useful alongside an enhanced perception of the environment, especially during night warfare. Is there any that could provide a special advantage for blind people?
If going with the polearm approach I was thinking about javelins, just to have a sort of mixed weapon useful both at close range and long range. Maybe, given the ability of blind people to read the wind a bit better through skin-perception and smell, some sort of winged javelin that allows for curved throws by taking advantage of the wind? Does something like that exist?
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**Eyes.**
**[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qTWKy.jpg)**
<https://www.dinglefalconry.com/>
When fighting in the open and the light, your blind creatures cooperate with creatures that can see and communicate. We use dogs in this way - putting to use their superior senses and ability to communicate with us.
The sighted creatures call out and signify what they see. I like the idea of a blind archer listening to its falcons calling, then firing the arrow to the place they have designated.
[Answer]
## Blind creatures are gonna be at a massive disadvantage in a fight in the open in light.
There's a reason that light is the main sense we use on the surface. It's very easy to follow, very direct, and very fast. Even so, there are visual illusions and people often make mistakes with sight.
With sound, smell, and the chaos of a battle? They would have massive disadvantages and be very erratic. People could dodge their spears, block them with shields, and then bombard enemies from afar.
## Blind creatures tend to dominate underground.
Underground where you can't see other senses are dominant. You can ambush enemies easily, so a lack of quick vision is less of an issue. The greatest weapon is a shovel.
As such, they should fight underground. They can train with bows to shoot at particular range, and then pop out from underground and pepper enemies with bow or spear shots, and use short ranged swords that work well in a cramped underground environment.
They can rip the ground out from under enemy formations and drag them into the earth to drown them in dirt. They can sneak to supply convoys and wreck them, or release plagued animals inside enemy camps.
If they try to fight at extended melee range enemies can exploit their lack of sight. Stay at the edge of their smell and echolocation range, make lots of noise, and bombard them with spears and arrows, dart into to pick off isolated people. An enemy that does catch them above ground will have a massive advantage, and be able to kill them at a very favorable kill to death ratio.
That's why you don't fight fair.
[Answer]
## Tucker's Kobolds:
Rather than have blind folks trying to slug it out with sighted opponents, I would suggest that your people are experts at ambushes, poisons, booby traps, and surprise. It will help greatly if there is a poison that is relatively harmless to these folks but incapacitating/lethal to others.
The best description I ever heard of turning a battle on its head was that of Tucker's Kobolds. Arguably the lowest and weakest intelligent creature in the AD&D universe, kobolds are universally despised. Yet a dungeon master decided he would take all their disadvantages and flip them on their head. They were small, so all hallways were tiny. Any big hallway was lined with smaller ones and murder holes everywhere. The floors were lined with manually operated pits, and every weapon was poisoned.
Make special kill zones and "fun houses" where your blind folks retreat to when attacked. They listen for every floor creaking and trigger the appropriate trap to kill the unwary. Every hall is short and twisty, filled with hidden niches for attackers to lunge out of with poisoned weapons (and a nice multi-dart needle shooter turns a whole area into a lethal kill zone). A spring-loaded crossbow with a tripwire kills without seeing, but your blind folk feel the tension of the string in time to avoid the trigger. Obviously limit light sources. Train attack dogs to bark at approaching enemies. Every floor is a nightingale floor, creaking at the slightest motion.
Strategy will be key here. Leave out spoiled food for enemies to capture — your folks can smell it's bad, but your rivals can't. Captured folks will serve enemies, then poison their food or stab them with poison needles. A blind individual will seek to lure an enemy in, then kill them with the first blow. Flash grenades would be VERY useful, blinding enemies even temporarily, evening up the odds of a close fight. Smells from food or perfume or just body odor will cling to your people, giving the ability to distinguish friend from foe. Bells that ring in frequencies unheard by normal races alert the blind without being detected by others.
And don't forget the value of peaceful people having allies. Besides trained pets, friendly races can do all the tasks the sighted are best at, but also act as missile troops and scouts in time of war. Good people can have good friends. But remember, war is hell and there are no rules when someone's trying to kill you.
[Answer]
**1. Mercenaries**
Hire mercs to do your fighting.
**2. Assistants**
Use animals to locate opponents and direct attacks.
**3. Area of Effect (aoe) Attacks**
Use weapons that don't require pinpoint accuracy. A maul instead of a knife, a shotgun instead of a pistol, a group of archers firing together instead of individuals taking shots, boiling oil from the castle ramparts and not catapults launching at range, grapeshot from a cannon instead of a cannon ball, a blunderbuss instead of a musket, etc.
**4. Traps**
It would be interesting, designing a trap which isn't obvious to see when you yourself cannot see, but given enough real-world experience or assistance from someone with sight, it could be done. Or the trap can have such a wide area of effect it doesn't matter if your enemies can see it or not.
Some types of traps would still be easy enough to make and remain effective. Tripwires come to mind. If a segment of cobblestone floor activates a trap, the nature of cobblestone helps disguise the trigger, even if the trap maker can't see. Etc.
**5. Blind Everyone**
Living underground in darkness becomes a natural solution. Your first target is whichever enemy holds the torch, as identified by the sound of the flame or perhaps the smell of smoke. Conversely, bright lights can blind, so highly-reflective surfaces may be of use if you have assistance in designing and quality-checking such measures.
Underwater also becomes a preferred habitat for your society. Water obscures vision, eliminates the possibility of enemies attacking at extreme range, and prevents most forms of light (such as fire and even sunlight). Assuming the blind folks can't breathe underwater, they can still occupy caves, natural or otherwise, which are only accessible by water.
Smoke and fog become your friend. Perhaps this society lives in the mists of a deep forest or swamp.
Use poison grenades that irritate your opponents' eyes. Not having eyes, you are unaffected (or if you have sightless eyes, a simple cloth wrap protects you).
**6. Extra Senses**
Some animals are very sensitive to heat, can detect electrical signals, can detect vibrations in the ground, can detect slight changes in air flow, or utilize echolocation. If your blind folks have senses beyond humans, these would obviously be of use.
**7. Environmental Hazards**
Live deep in the woods where natural predators keep your foes at bay. Live in the desert or in extreme cold, where the weather itself defends you. Make your home an island and build a wall around the entire thing so your opponents can't reach you.
**8. Smart Fortifications**
Build fortifications to minimize your weaknesses. Hang thick fabric from the ceiling of your castle hallways every 5 feet; this can be secured to the ceiling when at peace, and lowered to drastically reduce sight lines. Soak the fabric in flame-resistant oils.
Use scent bombs to identify friend from foe. Anyone who walks in smelling like fertilizer must have walked through the poop moat, so you can smell them out.
Place string or wire all over the place like spider webs, then track your enemies as they cause vibrations in your network, using arrows to kill them without cutting your own string.
Fill a hallway with glass fragments, then attack wherever you hear noise as a foe walks towards you.
Build an aqueduct and pipe water into the ceiling above your fortifications, then let it fall in sheets periodically through your hallways. It drains away into the floor, but extinguishes torches and prevents many distance attacks. I imagine it could also be a vehicle for dispersing mist/fog or even contact poisons, which your forces would build up an immunity to.
**9. Preparation is King**
Above all, your blind society will need to prepare in advance, either through selective choice of domiciles, static defenses, or allies. Impromptu combat in unfamiliar terrain will heavily favor those with sight unless the blind have a 6th sense or mercs. Animal assistants help mitigate this somewhat, but not entirely.
This means your blind society will probably not attack often, relying instead on defense.
**10. Magic**
Of course, if magic is available, you just make it up however you want.
[Answer]
## Tear gas and smoke bombs
First you want to take away your sighted opponents’ advantage. @mathaddict’s idea of [blinding lights](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/209768/88235) is good, but short-lived and easily counteracted. Tear gas not only reduces your opponents’ vision, but also incapacitates them to some degree. The gas may also cause your enemies to cough or generally move less stealthily, making it easier to locate them by sound.
Protecting eyes from tear gas while maintaining sight requires relatively complex masks with eyepieces which are expensive, heavy and anyway reduce your field of vision. Protecting other irritable tissues like the mucosa of the nose (which your blind species would still need) is much more easily accomplished with a scarf or bandanna (I’m not sure if your humanoids have no eyes at all or are just sightless, but in the latter case, just wear a scarf or “war mask” over your whole face. Pretty cool aesthetic, potentially!) If your opponents have worked out a way to produce gas masks, add smoke bombs into the mix, so all they see is hazy, confusing and probably distorted by the small and imperfect “goggles” of their masks.
It also strikes me as a suitable strategy for a peaceful community, who would seek to avoid direct conflict and rely on causing confusion, dread and general disarray in their enemy while dispatching relatively few opponents (perhaps gruesomely for maximum effect) exposing themselves as little as possible. Traps and other ideas suggested by other answers may fit here.
Caveat: I’m not sure how they would know their tear gas *works*.
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In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
If you don't know where to aim your weapon, be it a sword, a spear or a javelin, it's pointless having it or being able to give it cool effects. Odor or sound detection can provide a clue on the direction from where a possible enemy is coming, a bit more difficult is to get a sense on the distance. And without distance information a weapon is useless.
The best defense for them is setting boobytraps and use animals (dogs, ducks, etc.) to warn them about intruders and possibly be the first reaction against them. Without that it just needs a silent archer to take out as many targets can be killed by the arrow he has on him.
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### Have and use physical advantages that outweigh being blind, or don't fight creatures that see.
If these underground creatures are physically like humans, and they are fighting seeing humans in equal numbers, there is no possible armament that could give them the advantage. The blind warriors would find their attacks always intercepted by shields or armor they could not anticipate, while their seeing foes could easily get past their guard and stab them where they are unprotected. The underground creatures' best weapon in that case would be a white flag.
So if the blind creatures are to fight, we must assume they have some huge advantage that outweighs being blind.
Perhaps they are the size of Grizzly bears. In that case, they should go with full plate armor and massive maces that do not require any precision to wield, with blows too powerful for a man to block.
Perhaps they are the size of badgers and extremely numerous. In that case, they could rely on swarming the enemy and cutting them to pieces by feel with sharp knives.
Perhaps they can burrow very easily. In that case, they could rely on digging numerous layers of tunnels and traps, preparing the field, never engaging directly, trying to bury the enemies in a collapse.
Perhaps they are human-sized, but more numerous and organized than their foes. Then a pike formation might be effective, as it relies more on presenting a lot of deadly points and just marching in the general direction of the enemy, than on aiming the points too accurately.
It really depends on what advantage you want to give them to compensate for the blindness. Whatever their advantage, it's probably not recommended for them to fight at range because of the risk of friendly fire and the difficulty of hitting the enemy formation.
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The least precision-oriented weapons available. Perhaps something comparable to a war-scythe, or other curve-bladed polearms. Katana seem OK, in that they're forgiving on edge-alignment, and swords in general have the est edge ratio, but I would still be tempted to go for a longer handle.
Armor is more difficult than it would seem, because head protection screws with acoustics, foot and hand protection screw with haptics, etc. Armored units really would need to train a lot just to cope with the sensory impairement imposed by the armor.
Ultimately, stealth, surprise, shock, and anything to help stay at ideal range. For warfare, I lean toward heavy chest protection and coordinated scythes. For individuals, I'd lean toward curved swords.
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# Blinding Lights
A simple version of a flash grenade is going to be the most useful thing in this type of situation. Taking away the vision of your opponent is depriving them of their biggest advantage. After that, just fight them the same way that you would fight a fellow blind person, and since you have more practice at that sort of thing, you should win easily (provided the enemy does not regain their vision, so repeating the blinding tactics will be key).
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Preamble: Complex systems of fictional fungi spread and seek out subterranean reservoirs of water and other nutrients. Your poor-sighted civilisation has learned to exploit the fungi's ability to create efficient networks[1], and so use it for navigation.
[1]: "Intelligent Slime Mould" - It turns out, not really a fungus. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum#Situational_behavior>
# Attunement with environment
Disturbances, from a creature passing by, may coax a fungus to release premature spores that have a particular quality. These spores, combined with your civilisation's peculiar heighted senses, make it quite straightforward to locate a creature moving around underground amongst the mould and hit them with a projectile.
# Allergies
The members of your civilisation are covered in spores that induce allergic reactions in the surface dwellers. Being close to a spore carrier can be enough to trigger anaphylaxis. Fortunately, for those underground, they have adapted and suffer no adverse affects. This has the effect of diminishing the target's ability to defend themselves, and you attack the hardest when you hear a hacking cough.
# Bio-Warfare
Because you cannot have a reliable advantage above ground, you resort to spreading certain toxins derived from underground fungi which destroy the enemy's crops.
Sometimes the fungal network has found surface farms from below. In which case the network only needs to be agitated to get it to release poisons into the surface soil.
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Lots of good answers. This might not be one of them :P
Human mythology and anecdote contains numerous examples of blind warriors who are capable of doing battle against sighted opponents without apparent difficulty. In most cases these blind individuals have trained their other senses to fill in for the lack of sight, hearing being the main focus of many. You can't taste an arrow that's coming straight at you, but you can hear the sound it makes as it moves through the air. Even silent opponents might be detected through smell (which is not normally a targeting sense) and body heat.
(For one reference, watch [Blind Fury](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096945/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0).)
The ideal weapon for a blind human warrior with blind-fighting training will depend a lot on their training, but it's almost always going to be a close melee weapon of some sort. Longsword, hanbo, kukri, yantok and the like. Ranged targeting without sight is a far more difficult proposition as the requisite accuracy over medium to long range is virtually impossible using hearing alone.
Unless your creatures have developed echolocation to any degree, of course. I assume we're not going with a Daredevil-style character though.
Beyond the actual implements of damage, the best weapon of a blind fighter is something that obscures the vision of sighted opponents. The Samurai had their [metsubushi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metsubushi), the Ninja used the same name for blinding powders and something like a smoke grenade, even stage magicians obscure things with clouds of colored smoke from their flash powder. Modern soldiers use flash-bangs to blind and disorient their opponents and smoke grenades to obscure whole areas of a battle field. There are any number of chemical reactions that will do the trick, or you can use fine ash for a short-term solution. If you have access to magical abilities perhaps a darkness spell would be more appropriate.
And of course we can't ignore the two weapons that all successful fighting forces use: strategy and tactics. See the other very fine answers for more on those.
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# Numbers
If your race of blind creatures are prolific breeders, they can simply outnumber their enemies. Sure, any adventurer worth their salt can handle a couple of blind kobolds or whatever. Can they handle a thousand of them? I think not. They wouldn't even need weapons - teeth and claws would suffice. You want to be in close melee range anyhow if you can't see, so grappling and wrestling moves would be ideal, along with whatever sharp appendages you might have, but if you have the advantage of just being a huge, swarming horde, you can simply wash over all opposition like a tidal wave with teeth and suffer minimal losses.
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I would go with **stealth** and **blow-darts**.
With their good hearing your warriors would also know how to move silently, since every mistake would be even more apparent to them than to us. Open confrontation in daylight with melee weapons would always put them at an disatvantage, but with sneaky blow-darts they could make full use of their surround awareness. As soon as the warrior hears something move, he quickly turns towards the noise and shoots a poisoned dart at the target. This requires no elaborate movement and is therefore quick and silent.
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We are blind, actually
We can not see enemy ship 400 km away, so we launch missile in direction where radar detected that vessel and missile detects its target itself.
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## QUESTION
In my world there's a large empire in a semiarid plains area, that lies smack in between two areas that I would like to effectively lose contact for a long time. To that end, I'd like to make this empire dangerous to travelers for a hundred years or more (really, as long as I can stretch it).
**With that in mind, what are some guidelines for creating a bitter, long-lasting, unbelievably violent civil war?** I mean the kind of war where "God and his angels slept", as it's been written. The sort of war that produces rumors of mass slaughter, betrayal, trophy taking and cannibalism, the trumpeting of the apocalypse. I basically need good historical and cultural reasons to justify it being as fractious, confused, and violent as I possibly can.
## NOTES
Here is some added information:
* **The empire** is a classical civilization with a vaguely Byzantine aesthetic, and an elitist electoral system inspired by Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. Please take all this as loose and malleable. I've left this area undeveloped just to have elbow room for creating this war.
* **The tech level** isn't a straight analogue, but hovers between the classical and medieval.
* **The cultural context**, as said, is malleable. But in general the peoples of this world believe that lineage is very important, and have an intense distrust of kings (that is, open autocrats). The empire used to have religious ties with the church of one of the regions to be separated.
* **Natural events** can exacerbate the war (plague, famine, earthquake, etc.), but must have reasonably limited effects on the larger world.
* **Historical analogues and real-world examples** are appreciated, particularly if they give reasons why some wars are more brutal and destructive than others.
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# Over-run by nomads
The easiest solution to breaking a trade route is to have the area in question over run by people who are anti-agricultural. People with nomadic traditions in a land where water is scarce (your semi-arid plains seem perfect) will be in direct competition with the agriculturists for land and water resources. Herding is much less land (and water!) efficient than agriculture, so if this conflict is resolved violently in favor of the nomads, then the result will be a large drop in population and the number and size of cities.
# Historical Examples
* The north coast of the Black Sea was extensive agricultural production and export of grain during the time of the Roman Empire. The entry of the Huns into the region in the mid 4th cenutry effectively ended this trade, and depopulated the plains. The [Sarmatians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatians) and [Goths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goths) who had lived there before vanished; either absorbed into the Hunnic hordes or migrated west to participate in the destruction of Rome. Following the onset and dissolution of Hunnic power, the land was returned to nomadism by [Avars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Avars), [Bulgars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgars) and others.
* The same region suffered again 500 years later. The Varangians (Vikings) had [extensive trade contacts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks) with Constnatinople and Persia by means of the rivers of Russia. This contact was cut off completely by the entry of the Kipchak/[Cumans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumans#Origins) onto the plains in the 11th century. Populations were enslaved and sold off and agriculture ground to a halt. Due to succession by the Mongol Golden Horde and then various Tatar and Cossack tribes, population density in the area did not increase again until its annexation by Russia in the 19th century.
* The Central Asian steppe was never really fully depopulated, but provides good examples of how trade contact can be disrupted for centuries. The Mediterranean was linked to Central Asia by Alexander's conquests in ~300 BC. By 100 BC, the Chinese had made contact on the other side. This first period of the Silk Road was disrupted in the [Xionites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xionites) and/or [Kidarites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidarites) (the identities of all these peoples are not well known and somewhat controversial; both are claimed to be Huns of some sort) in the 4th century. Another flourishing of the Silk Road under the political unification of the Mongol Empire was disrupted as the empire disintegrated into its constituent nomadic parts. For example, there are plentiful European accounts of the 13th century in Central Asia (Marco Polo being the most famous), but none again until after the Age of Discovery.
* The history of the Sahel region follows this same pattern. Here, the region had a golden age in the 15th and early 16th century; Timbuktu, Djenne, Goa and others were prosperous trading cities. Once weakened by declining trade routes, the cities were plundered by Tuareg raiders. The final blow came in the late 18th century when the nomadic horse and cattle based *Fula* people [invoked *Jihad*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fula_jihads) to conquer the region from modern Senegal to Chad. Former river-fed farming regions in these semi-arid plains reverted to pasture land, a situation that did not change until recently.
Overall, the Varangian example is the best of two civilizations (Baltic and Black Sea/Caspian) being separated by nomads and not reunited by trade for centuries. The Fulani Jihads are a good example if you are looking for some cannibalism and butchery.
# Considerations
I think this situation not only has historical precedent for disrupting trade between two situations, but can easily be extended to account for the desired level of violence. This is ultimately a conflict over food supply; the losers will have to migrate out or starve to death.
This sort of wholesale population replacement will occasion massacres and wholesale selling of peoples into slavery. Also, the fight over food supply thing is an easy segue into cannibalism, if you so desire.
Finally, adding a religious dimension makes it all the better. Either have the nomadic invaders being of a different monotheistic, universal religion than the native agriculturalists, with a long history of mutual animosity; or, have the invaders of a monotheistic universal religion, while the agriculturalists are of a 'pagan' sect.
Two of the most 'barbaric' invasion episodes in history follow these two descriptions.
* The Crusaders were of a universal religion competing with the Muslims of the Levant, with the added twist that the Christian crusaders had suffered conquest and enslavement at Muslim hands for centuries. When the First Crusade broke on the Levant, the Christians were most barbaric in their vengeance.
* The various Turkic Muslim invaders of India, who were previously used to conquering 'peoples of the book' that were afforded some protection in Islamic law, offered little mercy to the Hindus of India. Invaders like [Mahmoud of Ghazni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_of_Ghazni) and [Muhammad of Ghor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_of_Ghor) are remembered to this day as butchers and desecrators of temples in India (of course, they are heroes in Pakistan).
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Just look at European religion wars around 1500-1600, with their protrusion until today.
Following the wrong shade of religion has always been a sufficient reason for slaughtering, killing and abusing people, even if they were from the same city. Even worse, people fought and died for a "grammatical" dispute, known as the "[filioque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque)", way earlier than 1500.
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> The Latin term Filioque describes the Holy Spirit in Christianity as proceeding from both the Father and the Son, (and not from the Father only). In the Nicene Creed it is translated by the English phrase "and [from] the Son" Whether that term Filioque is included, as well as how it is translated and understood, can have important implications for how one understands the central Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. [...] The term has been an ongoing source of conflict between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity.
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A Byzantine-like empire simply cannot sustain a total war of long duration; the economies of medieval societies were just not up for the task. As an example, consider the [Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Sasanian_War_of_602%E2%80%93628), which, although much less intense that what the question asks for, left the two empires exhaused; with their forces depleted they could not mount an effective opposition to the Muslim invasion, which would have posed no problem in normal times.
# But you don't need a civil war
It is enough to make that middle empire hostile to foreigners and disinterested in trade. For example, once the Arabs conquered [Egypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Egypt), [Syria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Levant), and [Persia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Persia) in the 7th century the West lost direct contact with India for 7 centuries or so, until the maritime [route around Africa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama) was established; there was a small amount of luxury goods travelling on the so-called [Silk Road](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road), but politics and culture were completely disconnected. In a short time the West and India forgot almost everything about each other. That the West itself was hostile to Islam also helped a lot.
*A [heraldic Tyger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyger_(heraldry)#/media/File:Complete_Guide_to_Heraldry_Fig322.png), a fantastic beast with the body of a wolf, the mane of a lion and a pointed snout, said to inhabit [Hyrcania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrcania) (in modern eastern Iran); when chased by a Tyger the best strategy was to place a mirror in its path, causing the beast to lose interest in the pursuit. Picture from* The Complete Guide to Heraldry *by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Complete_Guide_to_Heraldry_Fig322.png). Public domain.*
In the mean time, the almost forgotten India was transposed into a land of legend. [Cosmas Indicopleustes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmas_Indicopleustes) was the last explorer to write a book from personal experience, in the 6th century, and after that Persia and India began to be populated with [fantastic beasts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiary) and races of men, such as the dog-headed [Cynocephali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynocephaly), [headless men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless_men), [gold-digging ants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-digging_ant), and the snake-legged [Strictae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrict%C3%A6).
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No need to look farther than the European Wars of Religion, the most devastating of which was the Thirty Years War. It scoured the German countryside, leaving between 3-11M dead and hundreds of villages empty. It took hundreds of years for the population to recover.
Some might say that it wasn't *really* about religion, but sure it was: the Holy Roman Emperor wanted to enforce Roman Catholicism on all his subjects (aka the Counter-Reformation), and the Protestants rebelled.
The fighting expanded as allies flocked to both sides. Famine raged as troops marched back and forth over fields, pillaging as they went.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War#Casualties_and_disease>
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> The overall reduction of population in the German states was typically 25% to 40%.
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> Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.
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> In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas, an estimated two-thirds of the population died
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> **the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.**
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> **The population of the Czech lands declined by a third** due to war, disease, famine, and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs.
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> The **Swedish armies alone** may have destroyed up to **2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns in Germany**, one-third of all German towns.
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Bottom line: people fight for ideas they care about, and religion is something that a **lot** of people care about.
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Despite scifi-produced anomalies like Klingons and the Jem-Hadar, people don't actually like prolonged war. I say people, because soldier and supporter alike fight the battles — and all are actually wired (genetically) to perserve life. To create a war so bloody, so violent, so disruptive of so many lives, you need to overcome a LOT of both biology and psychology.
The reason I say this is because no matter how you wrap it up or whether or not you win, war destroys everything. War destroys lives, economies, families, culture, everything. No matter how just the cause...
* City populations will eventually hate the war because the youth they depend on to run businesses, farms, and support the community aren't coming home. Even city services begin to fail, affecting everyone.
* Families will eventually hate the war because parents/supporters are not coming home, brothers/sisters/aunts/uncles that could fill the void are not coming home, and yet there's still a half-dozen (e.g.) children screaming at your feet.
* Customers will eventually hate the war because goods and services they depend on aren't being supplied due to the loss of people, materials, resources, and logistics.
* And, of course, leaders will eventually hate the war because constituents are beginning to hate the war and staying in power (even as a dictator) often depends on the compliance or complacency of the people — who aren't either anymore.
*You'll notice that I'm not going to mention things like resources or land. Those may be what you wish to acquire or achieve as a result of a war, but it's not enough to sustain the violence you're looking for. Not even insult will do that. Once these things are obtained or resolved, all the determination to get them drains away. You need something much more lasting than a goal of any kind to sustain the violence you're looking for.*
So... what do you need?
**You need Belief**
Soldiers need to believe... I mean really believe. Believe in a way that's religious to the core even if religion isn't part of the process. They need to believe in the cause so much that they'll accept the damage they leave behind to risk damage to themselves in the hope that they'll damage their enemies. There's an old adage, "there are no athiests in foxholes." It's relatively easy to bring a religious fervor to the military (Frank Herbert's *Dune* depends on this concept).
But it's not at home. You see, supporters at home need belief, too. They need to believe that the world after the war will be better than the world before the war. They need to believe they can survive the conflict and its consequences. But they have the luxury of asking themselves, "is all this worth it?" Especially when the soldier is getting 2-3 meals a day but the family isn't due to rationing. They go to church each week and hear the regular rabble-rousing sermon and begin to wonder, "is this what god really wants?" It's usually much harder to cause belief in your supporters than it is in your soldiers.
**You need Hate**
Anger dissolves over time. You need hate. You need to be sure that you see your enemy as something deserving of the fate they receive. That they are contemptible, even a stain on your existence. The Bosnian wars are an interesting example. The people in Yugoslavia lived for generations, even intermarrying between faith and ethnic groups, but when society finally broke down into war, very old hatreds came to the surface. Hate usually takes time, lots of time, to develop. But, if you hate your enemy, it's much simpler to treat them as pond-scum in need of wiping from the earth.
Again, this is much harder among the supporters, but not as hard as belief. Oddly, it is natural for humans to hate. In fact, we need to train ourselves not to. We naturally see competitors for mates, resources, etc., as something to be overcome and that very easily becomes hate. Look at how many people today are searching for a cause. It's so bad that people will glom on to the dumbest things, just because there's this inner need wired into us from our days on the Savanah to fight against something... anything... Therefore, hate is much simpler than belief ... but it still takes time. So you need to have a backstory that explains where the hate comes from — especially for your supporters.
**You need Desperation**
Luxury is your enemy. Even with an intense hate, if you have luxury, hate becomes something you indulge, not something that drives you. Apartheid is a good example of hate being a luxury. White Africa wasn't driven to anything, they were not desperate, and so the violence was much more subtle and much more insidious. Take away the luxury and suddenly you have the fierceness of a cornered animal.
*There are a couple of things that will help with all this...*
**You need to Control Information**
You can't let photos of the carnage get back home. When photography finally caught up with the U.S. Civil War, the images of carnage greatly affected the supporters, who became less supportive. Just as it is natural to hate, it is also natural to feel compassion. Those bodies represent some mother's children, some child's father, some country's hope for the future. This is at war with the hate in our souls. Natural, because we have compassion for our children, which is why we're fighting for mates and resources, etc. If you don't control information, you sow the seeds of war weariness.
**You need to Use Propaganda**
Here's an example of where Nazi Germany really shined. It was a propaganda machine. It kept its supporters controlled by feeding them a constant stream of success stories, heros, reasons to hate, and reasons to believe. It worked so well that by the time the Nazi's were in retreat their economy was an absolute and complete shambles — something that was getting noticed, but was largly ignored due to the success of the propaganda engine.
*With this combination of behaviors and activites you can, theoretically, consumate a war having the violence you describe. However, you should not undersell the fact that every rational creature's behavior (when thought of as the masses and not the individual) will naturally avoid war soon after it begins. A race that is genetically prone to the behavior you want would be quickly swept from the ecological balance as being too upsetting to the balance. Thus, your story really isn't about the violence. That's just the window dressing that underscores the real message. It's about how you corrupt natural behaviors to promote such activity. You're not the first to try to tackle this idea. You won't be the last. Just remember, it's not about the violence, it's about the message. It's about how you control your own people.*
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More forbidding than chaos is organized opposition. If it is still an Empire, it will still be organized. Chaos can be opposed by smalltimers with adequate force and money, but the efforts of empire can only be opposed by another empire - or from within.
Let us consider Quanzhou. The Chinese port city of Quanzhou in its heyday was a fabulously wealthy and cosmopolitan melting pot - the start of the Silk Road and center of commerce. All the major religions of the time had bases and followers there.
[Quanzhou: The Starting Point of the Maritime Silk Road](http://confuciusmag.com/quanzhou-maritime-silk-road)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanzhou>
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> Quanzhou was China's major port for foreign traders, who knew it as
> Zaiton,[a] during the 11th through 14th centuries. It was visited by
> both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; both travelers praised it as one of
> the most prosperous and glorious cities in the world. It was the naval
> base from which the Mongol attacks on Japan and Java were primarily
> launched and a cosmopolitan center with Buddhist and Hindu temples,
> Islamic mosques, and Christian churches, including a Catholic
> cathedral and Franciscan monasteries.
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In 1357 an army led by Chinese / Persian muslims led a revolt: the [Ispah rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ispah_rebellion). Initially this was a success. When the forces of the Empire finally triumphed, they decided to make sure that such a problem would not happen again. The entire foreign population of Quanzhou was massacred. The Muslims were the main target but all the other foreign religions were swept up with: Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Christians. These wealthy foreigners had been the backbone of the port. Aftershocks of this event affected not only Quanzhou but the empire as a whole, which came to believe that foreigners and foreign religions within its borders posed an existential threat. A threat which could be prevented.
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You could riff on these events and your world seems perfect for it. The central empire, once a hub of trade between its neighbors and points distant, has just barely averted an overthrow by rebels belonging to the aforementioned religion. This event changed their prior open-mindedness and now they are isolationist haters. Maybe there is an area (the former port?) where all the foreigners were taken along with the religious symbols of their respective temples, and this area to this day is filled with bleaching bones and broken statues.
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Start with drought, then famine, then civil war. Post apocalyptic levels of survival. You could have it so the neighbouring states refused to help for whatever reason, and have it come back to bite them in the rectum once they realize they can no longer safely traverse the territory. When they do try, the survivors who have become ruthless killers team up and attack them on sight, and have become exceptional at doing so. No peaceful solution can be negotiated, as the outsiders are painted as those who caused the situation in the first place - despite that not being technically accurate.
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**Wars with yesterday's mentality and tomorrow's technology, tend to be very brutal.**
Wars that happen during a major advancement in technology tend to be brutal on their own, WW1 were not particularly brutal (in terms of decisions made) compared to the wars that came before, but the brutality feels unprecedented due to scale and efficiency new technology enabled. Technology also enabling non-combatants to see the brutality in a very visceral manner unlike the detached manner it would have reached a wider audience before, photographs over written accounts, video over pictures, ect. Technology can even change how the populace feels about violence in general, increased availability of printed word for instance is believed to have made people more empathetic and less accepting of violence by inadvertently training people to see things from someone else's perspective.
Additionally wars in which the populace of both sides are committed tend to be very brutal , the crusades are a great example, wars in which both side are extremely committed leads to disorganized fighting on many levels. this mixture of poor troops and trained troops makes slaughter and confusion more easy. (the last batch were pushover why are these ones giving us so much trouble, well because the last attack was disorganized rabble and this time it is seasoned troops. Nobody can really gauge the other sides strength well so total clusterfuffles become rampant. A civil war started by the populace (as opposed to a coup) will tend towards this.
To add to this if both sides feel completely justified you get less compromise, more stand offs and on an individual level more justification of atrocities. religion can be a good example of this but any ideology will fit the bill just as well, no horror compares to those done by men of conviction doing the right thing. In the american civil war and WW1 it was freedom vs freedom, and was brutal because of it. The longer a war stretches on the worse this will get, and propaganda can easily make it worse, there is a reason the christmas truce was an early in the war event.
[Answer]
Almost all wars are, in their essence, economic.
Political conquest (as opposed to a 'consenting conflict' war) is ALWAYS economic in nature. Either externally, when the other side has needed resources, or internally, when the elitist political powers need to consolidate internal political power to maintain their status and thus their wealth.
Civil wars, even more so.
One side has, the other side wants.
One side religiously protects what it has from the other side, the other side religiously demands their 'fair share'.
Usually, the wars are in a time of late economic recession with recovery on the horizon, when people who have been deprived for so long see hope and recovery, but it is kept just out of their grasp. Inclusive mutual prosperity seldom begets war.
So one side does everything it can to hold on to scarce resources, and the other side is so desperate they will do anything to get these resources.
It helps if there is some religious, tribal, family lineage, or ethnic divide between the factions, that creates an 'us-them' scenario. There needs to be a very definable reason why one side is 'justifiably' excluded from the resources, and why the other side is exclusively entitled to them.
But since all wars are basically a war of attrition, the war continues only as long as both sides can obtain resources (otherwise it just becomes a war of conquest). In a war of consenting conflict, to moderate the limitations of a high mortality rate on resources, there are two options. Either the casualty rate is minimized through inefficient killing weaponry (although it can be brutal, it can not be efficient - it can not be 'mass destrution') and/or very efficient protective technology. Alternately the lives of the combatants have minimal resource value due to extreme poverty, prolific breeding, and societal lack of investment in the population - education, health services, social services, paid wages, skilled training. If the lost life doesn't and hasn't cost society very much, it does not have a high resource value. Thus, 'life is cheap' and high casualty rates are acceptable from a resource perspective.
So no specific details, but background material to help you decide the details.
**TL:DR Historic Example**
Perhaps a really great example of this is the Iraq-Iran war. Essentially, it was a civil war between nations. The cost of a life was minimized through emphasizing the 'after-life' ('Fifty virgins await a martyr') and it was particularly brutal, since both sides were almost evenly matched. It didn't help that the attrition was severely moderated by America and Russia funding and arming the opposing regimes depending on which side the war was tending to favor. The war was prolonged because neither super power wanted EITHER side to dominate. It served their purpose if BOTH sides were weakened.
[Answer]
Total collapse of the empire's governmental apparatus when it has a large standing army in the field would create not so much a civil war as a protracted free-for-all as individual leaders vie for control. The example that comes to mind is the mess that [Alexander](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great)'s children and generals made of Greece after his death. A couple of factors that could make the situation even worse would be if there was a large army of native troops in the field when it happened, an army with no leadership or lines of supply is a threat to anyone within range as well armed men, and women, well used to violence scramble to survive. Even worse if the army has a lot of foreign mercenary troops as they'll have even less restraint than locals. Armies will come apart into smaller units partly because of causalities and infighting but mainly because they have to take over and forage large areas for survival, defensive garrisons will also take over areas of the countryside to support themselves on. Now you have dozens of de facto warlords fighting for advantage from a series of strong points spread across what was once an empire.
It's not so much an empire experiencing a civil war as an all-in brawl for the necessaries of life. A generation down the line and you have entrenched positions and long standing feuds with everyone trying to do their neighbours in for any advantage in territory, trade etc... This can go on for hundreds of years if the weapons are simple enough and the sides are reasonably evenly matched, it did in Europe after the collapse of Rome.
Gunpowder weapons changed the structure of Europe for two reasons; one because they needed resources that were locally scarce, compared to the needs of an army equipped exclusively with them, such as Sulfur and Saltpetre, so they encouraged trade and cross border cooperation, and secondly because of the effect they had on existing static defenses making existing fortifications obsolete almost overnight so those who had them early were able to grab new territory and start the process of reunification. Gunpowder weapons also work better for larger states mainly because of the resource issue mentioned earlier.
I'm not sure how much sense that makes to you but hopefully it helps.
[Answer]
## Make the enemy horrific
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KzCNT.jpg)
In Egyptian records we are told that the Hebrews from Exodus were publicly recorded as being driven into the sea and drowned. Other reports were that they died in the desert. Nevertheless, when this civilization of 2nd generation refugees starts prowling the borders of the land bridge between Babylon and Egypt, it would appear to onlookers on all sides that the dead had come back to life to swallow the region.
It helps foster this belief if the invaders are slaughtering everyone, taking no prisoners, and taking no treasure (leaving it behind to rot) - seemingly these people are motivated only by a hunger to kill and destroy.
## Give the enemy a scary supernatural patron
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ugIOi.jpg)
And if the people are not scary enough, give them a deity that's pretty frightening to anyone digging beyond skin deep. Maybe a deity that has demanded everyone in the region die to make room for his/her people. Maybe a deity that supposedly knocked down the walls of a fortified city with music - just last week. Or, for further backstory - a deity that demolished one of the two regional superpowers. And if you don't want to take the invaders word for it - no problem - these ragtag rebels were killed a generation ago according to the official government line.
## Also give the enemy no central government
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DVO2z.jpg)
After their push into Canaan - which stopped short of full conquest because the invaders had gotten tired of killing, the new power in the region had no central government for generations. It made it impossible for the "industry standard" politics of the day - kings intermarrying with the families of kings, holding the children as hostages, and patronage through large gifts.
Having no one to do business with, government-to-government, stymied most efforts for Egypt or Babylon to influence the region for generations.
## Have the enemy clearly declare two sets of laws
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEENg.jpg)
It doesn't help also if the enemy has one set of laws for their own people - and jealously guard membership into the community - and a different set of laws for strangers passing through. Publishing clearly that a foreigner traveling through the land did so without protection from murder, theft, fraud, or any other form of abuse would do a good job of keeping the region isolated from the rest of the world.
[Answer]
You do it [*pour encourager les autres*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pour%20encourager%20les%20autres).
In the mongol invasion of everywhere, and in the first islamic invasion of what's now India and Pakistan, the procedure was the same:
* Bring your army to a city
* Ask for surrender
+ If they surrender then take the city peacefully but spare the inhabitants
+ If they don't surrender then take the city by force (or by siege), and then kill *everyone*
Hopefully, word gets around: and the next city on your list is more likely to surrender, which saves you time, men, money, and trouble.
It's the same kind of reason why you might crucify everyone you capture after a slave rebellion.
---
I suppose the above might be too tidy, too orderly though, for your purposes.
Something else that might suit you might be en effective stand-off weapon, or area-denial weapon, a weapon of mass destruction: poison gas; smallpox; maybe the plague; poisoning the water supplies; radioactivity perhaps; man-eating predators; or even crop-destroyers, locusts.
I can't give historical references for these though (except for introducing plagues).
[Answer]
**The collapse of the Empire and political infighting**
One way to sustain war (and disrupted travel) through your empire would be to have it collapse utterly. As the political system fails, the elites will begin jockeying for power using private military forces. Perhaps they maintain private militias that can be called up in service of the empire when necessary, to avoid the expense of an Imperial standing army. This will lead to a multi-sided conflict between the various elite entities, like a larger-scale [War of the Roses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Roses). If the empire does maintain a nationalized/federalized faction of the army, they may also enter the conflict as their own side, seeking to wrest military control of the country or rebuild the previous government.
Now, if the country is prosperous and well-populated, you may be able to drag out this conflict for a good many years - you need a ready supply of bodies and motivation. Commoners will start being press-ganged into armies (or called up to serve their lords) as numbers run low. The fighting may even take a hiatus for a few years or more to allow sides to reorganize and resupply (and hatch less confrontational plans for achieving power).
What you're really going for is an all-out *Game of Thrones*-style war for power (inspired, in part, by the Wars of the Roses), in light of a collapse of the existing government. Perhaps a proletariat or slave revolution manages to undermine the power structure, but can't adequately fill the vacuum that remains (French and October Revolutions, e.g.)
**Travel through the Empire during (and after) is interrupted**
Eventually, someone will probably win, and it may be before a century has passed. But it's a long road back to prosperity after so many lives and resources have been expended. Asserting control of the borders and trade routes will be daunting after a prolonged conflict. It may well be a few more decades before anything resembling normal, protected passage through the Empire can be guaranteed (or worth the risk).
**TL; DR**
The war itself doesn't have to last forever to make passage (and the flow of information) through your Empire dangerous enough not to risk it. Europe during the "Dark Ages" is another good example of this.
] |
[Question]
[
Climate is not my priority because I prefer to develop the culture and the languages. However, climate has a strong influence in the culture, so I need to know the basics.
So, I have a country located between the equator and the 20° parallel. According to what I have been reading on internet, that means that it's a desert. However, in this country there's a huge mountain range and I don't know how this affects its climate.
I suppose that the mountain will be cold, but I don't know *how* cold and how does snow "work" in this case.
The following map (generated with [this](https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/)) represents the part of the world I'm interested in:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m4p5J.png)
I'm interested in the red circle, but specially in the red dot which will most probably be the capital city of the country.
Assume an Earth-like planet (and please don't mind the river physics, I still have to edit things).
If you need me to give more details, just ask.
[Answer]
Mount Kilimanjaro is just about on the equator, and yet is snow-covered. That's because temperature drops as altitude increases.
Also, "located between the equator and the 20° parallel. According to what I have been reading on internet, that means that it's a desert" is *spectacularly wrong*: the Amazon rainforest is also near the equator, but is as far from "desert" as you can get. EDIT: Vietnam, Papua New Guniea, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, etc, etc are also around the equator.
[Answer]
'Mountains' effect on climate is that they block moisture from passing over them (or severely limit it.)
You can see this quite clearly in the USA as shown here: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WeWYG.gif):
Everything that has a mountain between it and the ocean is super dry and the area right in front of the mountain is super wet. That's what mountains do to climate.
However, your island/continent is not like Washington. You have ocean on four sides like this:
```
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~water~~~~__land_______^^Mountain^^___land______~~~water~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________^^^^^^^^^^^^_____________~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
```
So you have several options. A lot depends here - where are the ocean currents and prevailing winds coming from?
* from the north = both land areas should be wet or normal
* from the east = the eastern lands will be wet and the western lands will be dry
* from the south = both land areas should be wet or normal
* from the west = the western lands will be wet and the eastern lands will be dry
* the prevailing ocean currents and winds are dry = everywhere is dry
When using this information, please note that ocean currents can change cyclically - google El Nino for a real-life example. This means that it's possible that the area that's normally wet can sometimes be dry and vice-versa.
Now let's talk temperature. According to [this reasonable-seeming website](http://www.mbgnet.net/sets/rforest/explore/elev.htm), you drop 4 degrees Fahrenhiet for every 1,000 feet, which means that mountains that are ~14,000 feet or higher are probably snow-covered year-round.
Bonus points: If you go to their link, they've got a cool little graphic showing different vegetation groups for various altitudes.
Tl;Dr - because your mountain only will block East-west winds, you can freely choose what climate both sides will have, and any mountain over ~13,500 feet can expect to have snow.
Also, this can be something that changes cyclically over time.
[Answer]
That says 9000m, that's a little taller than Everest. Earth only has [14 mountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander) higher than 8000m, and more than half of them are in Nepal.
That mountain will be deadly cold, all year long. The air will be so thin normal people will suffocate. It will hardly ever snow because any moist air that approaches the mountain will tend to drop its moisture before it reaches the top. The mountain will still be covered in a thick layer of snow and many glaciers because the little snow that does fall there never melts.
4000m (where your city is) is still very high. The [list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_cities_in_the_world) of cities above that altitude is short. It's high enough that some visitors from the coast will sick, and they will get winded easily. You can expect harsh winters and short growing seasons. In particular, I would direct you to [Cerro de Pasco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_de_Pasco) in Peru, it is the located at 10 degrees south of the equator and is the highest city of that size. The wikipedia page conveniently has a simple summary of the city's climate.
[Answer]
I am now going to link you to [Palm Springs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs,_California), CA. A town that features both 100°F daytime temperatures (yes, even during the winter, although typically a more comfortable 70–80) and is classed as a hot desert climate. Nights can get pretty cold, though, which is typical for a dry desert.
Twelve minutes away, up a tram into the adjoining mountains, with nearly 6000 feet of additional elevation, you'll find snow during the day. Or at least, temperatures **40 degrees cooler** than down at the bottom (bring a jacket). Snow only falls during the winter as the mountains *do* get warm enough during the summer for it to melt, but the temperature gradient is *staggering* and as such has become quite the tourist hot-spot.
So no, a mountain in a desert is not *always* hot and dry.
] |
[Question]
[
I am trying to design an alien forest ecosystem. The forest looks like this (from Dreamstime.com):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9BKns.jpg)
The relevant difference between the real-life Swedish forest pictured and mine is that my world snows year-round, so the ground and trees are pretty much always covered in heavy snow. The temperature remains steadily between -25 to -10 degrees C all year. The surfaces of lakes and rivers are almost perpetually frozen, and the soil is very rarely visible.
This environment implies a number of challenges, most notably in how seeds for these trees could germinate or deep root systems could grow with dense snow and likely permafrost in the soil blocking their way. Many of these trees grow quite large, likely meaning the trees must break through the permafrost in order to build a strong enough root system to support themselves. It seems as though this is extremely difficult on Earth (not many trees in Antarctica).
I have had some left-field ideas for the trees to deal with this, such as spreading seeds through interconnected root systems already under the permafrost or literally impaling spear-like seeds through the permafrost from above. I would prefer if whatever mechanism it uses is mostly driven by the tree itself, as opposed to having an animal eat the tree's fruit and then burrow underground or something to spread it through droppings.
Is this winter forest feasible with these constraints? Are there any real-life examples of large, permafrost-breaking trees that I could draw off of?
[Answer]
A few notes.
You can have it snow all year, without snowing **every day.** The problem with snowing every day is the snow will just pile up, and gravity will compress it into an ice sheet. No matter how tall your trees are, eventually they will be buried. That is what has happened in Antartica; the ice sheet has an average thickness of two kilometers. Your trees are not two kilometers tall.
Also if it snows every day, photosynthesis is impossible. I'd make the snow intermittent, and I'd add some strong winds to "clean" the leaves (pine needles) so they can photsynthesize.
As for seeds: Not all plants grow from seeds. In particular, see here:
<https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/104-plant-reproduction-without-seeds>
>
> **Plants that reproduce from asexual vegetative reproduction**
>
>
> New plants are sometimes made by asexual vegetative reproduction.
> These new plants have exactly the same genes as the parent. Some
> plants – like strawberries – have stems called stolons that grow out
> sideways above the soil, and new plants grow up along them. Other
> plants send out underground stems called rhizomes, which form new
> plants at a distance from the parent. Tubers (for example, potatoes)
> and bulbs (for example, onions) are also special underground
> structures that can grow into new plants.
>
>
>
This works for your trees, their roots are under the permafrost, so the rhizomes (underground stems) can spawn a new tree, and feed it, it eventually breaks from the parent and grows to break the permafrost. Just like plants that can crack concrete. Once it breaks through and starts photosynthesizing, it breaks from the rhizome of its parent, and grows independently.
This permafrost is probably cracked anyway (a path to grow through) by the adult trees growing; there is only so much surface area, so as the cross section of a tree slowly increases, the permafrost will be squeezed, push, and buckle. Maybe a good opportunity for the underground baby to push up and break out.
edit: P.S. You might want some sort of underground warmth that can cause the falling snow to melt. That way it wouldn't pile up as ice. Yellowstone Park comes to mind, an ancient volcanic crater that makes the ground warmer than the overlying air. So no permafrost at all. You could still have ground "seasons"; so a "summer" in which the atmosphere can still be -10c, but the ground is +10c so the snow melts and drains into the soil. If you want flowers, then this is the time to bloom: insects that live underground all year (similar to locusts) come out in vast swarms in the ground summer, brave the cold to collect the nectar (pollinate the trees), grow fat, mate and dig back in to lay their eggs for next year, and then starve to death keeping their eggs warm through the coldest part of the winter, leaving their body as food to nourish their hatchlings. (If you think that's weird, the mayfly has a 24 hour lifespan.)
The pollinated flowers is what triggers your trees Rhizomes, growing underground, to actually produce new trees that are not just clones of itself.
Voilá! Flowers, and sexual reproduction! (It's scifi, you don't have to get any more detailed than this, at least it isn't 'magic'.)
[Answer]
It is not feasible, because if it were snowing year-round, [you would have a glacier](https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/glacier). There is no forested ecosystem on Earth capable of growing on glaciers, for quite a number of reasons, and it's unlikely that one is even theoretically possible using Earth biology. At best, you could have lichens and mosses.
[Answer]
As you state, the propagation and germination of airborne seeds is conspicuous challenge in this environment.
Your trees need to be tall to have a chance of catching the dim light above the snow cover, and going throug it for the seed is practically impossible.
However, your trees can produce seeds by having some sort of underground fertilization, supported by their roots and maybe with the help of some burrowing creature.
When the roots of two different trees meet, they produce a seed which is then supported with the supply of vital juices by one (or both) of the parent trees in its growth above the snow layer, until it can independently starts to photosynthetize, at which point the bond with the parents is severed.
[Answer]
Hot springs or a geothermal source?
Perhaps to keep the ground warm, provides a microclimate for the trees where the snow doesn’t continuously compact on the ground.
Also not every day is a heavy snow day…
[Answer]
Minimum temperature (-25°C) is not a problem for plants, it's the maximum temperature (-10°C) that is. See my answer here: [Extreme cold resistant flora](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227063/extreme-cold-resistant-flora/227129#227129), particularly the sections on **Climate Classifiction** and **How does a plant grow**.
Permafrost, as indicated by AlexP's comment, is permanently frozen, impermeable to plants. Permafrost occurs whenever the average yearly temperature is below the freezing point of water (0°C/32°F).
How deep permafrost begins depends on how hot your summers are; i.e. how much of it can melt from above before 'real' winter sets in, defining this as the time of the year after which above-freezing temperatures are rare: on Earth this can be as early as halfway through September for the coldest forested places.
How deep permafrost reaches depends on how much below 0°C that average temperature is. The earth has a gradient of around 12°C per km depth on average, but it's higher in geologically active places. At -18°C average temperature, your permafrost gets to be 1500m deep, far deeper than roots can go.
If you're looking for a pine forest (type Dfc/Dfd/Dwc/Dwd climate), you just have to have *some amount of* time where enough soil melts that the trees can establish deep enough roots. Typically it's about 50 days of consecutive above-zero weather or a maximum average monthly temperature of 10°C.
What you could do though, for an alien climate, is play with these values a bit, if you want a shorter summer. Make it more intense, and perhaps rarer.
In that case, here's a way to do this:
**Multi-year winters**
First, your climate is normally very cold. (-10°C average warmest month, coldest month can be however cold you want it to be). But, once every few years, the planet is closer to its stars binary companion\* / the weather pattern changes / a nearby gas giant causes a big tidal effect to this area of the planet, and you have one hot summer (say 20-30°C average warmest month). The permafrost melts down to a depth of several metres. That's when your trees grow and your forest comes to life. Birds migrate from warmer regions (which experience deadly heat) to prey on thriving insects that breed in the meltwater left behind by the dense snowpack, flowers and plants bloom, spread seeds, multiply, etc.
The rest of the time, most organisms hibernate, and the forest is dead-quiet, frozen in time by a multi-year winter.
**Notes**
1. This can be easy to setup if you have a binary star system with eiliptical orbits. Even just an extra 10% sunlight means a 25°C temperature increase for an earthlike planet, and it only needs to be for a couple months.
2. I chose a hot summer rather than one near the minimum, as this allows for taller trees. In places which just barely meet the minimum summer length for trees (like eastern Siberia), you only get small stunted pine trees, not the big ones shown in the picture. The permafrost stops the roots from getting down very deep, is the problem.
3. As a side effect, Animals and plants living in this climate would be either longer-lived to survive several multi-year winters, or last for just that summer period (like the insects). E.g. if your multi-year winter is 8 years long, you'd have nothing with a lifespan between 3 months and 8 years. The migratory birds likely also live for 16-years plus: On Earth migration behaviour is mostly [instinctive, not learned](https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v040n03/p0409-p0414.pdf).
[Answer]
**It's Alien**
You say it's an Alien ecosystem, so you can make whatever you like. So it's possible they look quite like trees but their internal biology is nothing like them.
There's an entire underground ecosystem - lots of worm like creatures, bacteria, etc. maybe even a few burrowing rodent like creatures. Could be further diversified with extensive cave systems. Either geothermal heating softens up the "soil" for it to be penetrable, or whatever it's made of has a much lower freezing point than what we call "soil".
The tree-like plants can generate their own heat, so they can slowly thaw and push their way through the top layer and poke out into the fresh air, where they have access to that lovely juicy rainwater (snow, really, but their own heat generation let them melt it into water). The branch and needle configuration means not just the top layers get this snow and water, but it drips through, and therefore water gets to most of the tree.
Just a possible suggestion, but my point is you don't have to - or perhaps even shouldn't - follow the Earth model of a tree on an alien world.
As to how they reproduce? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader :p
[Answer]
I feel like everyone is overlooking the elephant in the room: life as we know it **requires** liquid water. If it's never warmer than -10°C then there will be no life, period.
[Answer]
**Seeding is the main problem.** Seeding in ice stretches belief to my breaking point. Life itself may be possible with chemistry to depress the local melting point of water (anti-freeze, and energy from captured sunlight via photosynthesis).
They are alien, so maybe they don't seed. There are some alliums here on Earth which produce not seeds, but bulbils (small bulbs). Stretching this, maybe these alien trees are almost mammalian in their reproductive methods. The ovary of their flowers is produced underground (at a distance from the parent), and nurtures a seed becoming a young plant in a "womb" or "pouch" (marsupials) until it has a viable root and branch system of its own.
Maybe they don't need flowers either. They push out underground and reproduce clones at maximum range if thats all they can do. (Here on Earth, Quaking Aspen colonies). Sexual reproduction happens when roots from genetically distinct individuals find each other.
Alternatively the planet does have summers, but short cool ones at long intervals. A planet in a rather elliptical orbit, maybe. Life there has evolved not to shut down completely in winter, but to make the best of it, with tissues laced with anti-freeze chemicals and leaves which move to "shrug off" snow rather than relying on it falling off· But reproduction takes place during the short warmer season.
[Answer]
Timberline on mountains and the arctic requires 60 days a year where the temperature gets above 10 C. Below that they cannot photosynthesize enough to "pay" for the energy to grow a needle.
So, no, with Earth biochemistry this is a non-starter.
You need a way to keep viable chemistry at low temperatures.
] |
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